to which a certain type of drag was nevertheless highlighted within these very same organizations. This reinterpretation of gay radicalism will give rise to a reevaluation of those organizations like the GAA that were often dismissed as “regressive,” “reformist,” or simply “naïve” for their willingness to engage the mass media and their refusal to abandon practices like camp and cross-dressing. In the end, I argue that it is perhaps more productive to view the practical and ideological divisions within the gay liberation movement not as a case of radicalism versus reformism but, much like the debates outlined in the first chapter, as a struggle over the relationship between politics and performance, “direct action” and aesthetics. In this sense I will, as historian John D’Emilio has urged, put “gay” back into the sixties.78 Unlike D’Emilio, however, who sees returning to the history of gay and lesbian activism as an opportunity to resuscitate a positive model for current political struggles, I will instead read gay liberation as one of a number of indicators that there was something quite queer, in the broadest possible sense, about a great deal of late-1960s activism.
My final case study in chapter 3 looks to the political career of “militant Negro” Eldridge Cleaver. Often seen as the personification of what Michelle Wallace so famously dismissed as “Black Macho,” Cleaver signifies to many the misguidedness of both the major figures of the Black Power movement and the white activists who seemed to accept him as the quintessence of personal and political authenticity.79 Critics have repeatedly rejected Cleaver’s political persona as regressive because of his tendency to enact the very stereotypes of hypermasculinity that had been used to oppress black men since the end of the Civil War. Cleaver spoke repeatedly of the equivalence between black liberation and the reclamation of black masculinity, and, conversely, the “counter-revolutionary” nature of same-sex desire. When confronted, for instance, by an “Infidel” who claimed that black men would always be subservient to white males because the “stem of the Body, the penis, must submit to the will of the Brain,” he responded not with a rational argument but an “erect . . . strong . . . resilient and firm” cock: “When I gave it that squeeze, a wave of strength surged through my body. I felt powerful, and I knew that I would make it if I never betrayed the law of my rod.”80 In response to this type of rhetoric, contemporary feminists accused Cleaver of being blind to the role women had played—and would continue to play—in any movement working toward the total transformation of society.81 More recently, Cleaver has come under fire from authors such as Kobena Mercer, Isaac Julien, Leerom Medovoi, and E. Patrick Johnson for his insistence on equating masculinity and heterosexuality.82 Medovoi, for example, explains that for Cleaver, “Black gay men, because they threatened the simple association of black masculinity with hypersexual virility,” had necessarily been “politically stigmatized as decadents, race traitors, or ‘false’ men.”83 In hopes of reopening the discussion of not only Cleaver but of Black Power politics more generally, this chapter reads Cleaver’s invocation of the “law of [his] rod” first in terms of the set of practices Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has labeled as “Signifyin(g),” and second in relation to the question of, as R. A. T. Judy puts it, “nigga authenticity.” Is it possible that Cleaver, who repeatedly lamented the black male’s social reduction to nothing more than brute physicality, was less interested in redeeming some essential black masculinity than in adopting the pose of “black macho”?84 To reassess the potential value of Cleaver’s political career, I argue, it is necessary to look closely at his enactment of a violent, hypersexualized version of black liberation, from his infamous critical attack on novelist James Baldwin in the essay “Notes on a Native Son” to his threat to kick California State superintendent of public instruction Max Rafferty’s ass. By placing Cleaver’s political actions and pronouncements within the history of the Black Power movement and alongside a close reading of the essays collected in Soul on Ice, I look to demonstrate that those actions that have for so long seemed only offensive may in the end have been rooted, at least in part, in a surprisingly subtle understanding of the politics of race, representation, and commodification.
Finally, in the short concluding afterword, I suggest the continued importance of aesthetic considerations to our analysis of contemporary politics. As so many retrospective texts and exhibitions have recently reminded us, the late 1960s occupy a special place in the American historical imaginary. The object of nostalgic reverence for many on the political left and of outright scorn for those on the right, talk of “the sixties” still has the power to provoke a heated reaction over forty years later. It is curious, therefore, to find that the events and ideologies of that decade are so often treated as all but settled in contemporary politics.85 The 1960s were, for example, the years in which modern imperialism offered one last great surge in Southeast Asia, and individuals, in response, attempted to suppress their differences and to identify with an allegedly revolutionary “class” that would end not only colonial aggression/oppression in the developing world but also poverty, discrimination, and exploitation in the United States and Western Europe. The decade effectively ended (or devolved, depending on one’s critical and political predilections) with the failure of both of these efforts. The United States suffered an embarrassing defeat in Vietnam, and various groups, insisting on the validity of differing subject positions, broke away from “the movement” to draw attention to individualized forms of oppression and liberation. After 1968, as we so often hear, the form of oppositional politics began to change dramatically.86 In this short concluding essay, therefore, I look to problematize this apparent closure. Considering the ways in which the political tactics of the late 1960s, far from simply disappearing, actually became something like the standard form for grassroots politics, I argue that the difficulties confronting contemporary “opposition” are not altogether different from those that gave birth to the ironic performances of that decade. From the more recent grassroots actions of groups and movements like the Yes Men and Billionaires for Bush, and, now, Occupy/Occupy Wall Street, the echoes of the put-ons I describe, and their sense of the aesthetics of politics more generally, can be heard throughout our own, supposedly distinct, era. The reframing of the late-1960s radical left I offer herein is an attempt to complicate our relationship to that period in American history and culture. What lessons could the Black Panthers, the Yippies, or the Gay Activists Alliance hold for groups currently working for equal rights, to end the war in Afghanistan, to combat global warming, or to deliver power to “the 99 percent”? Given these ongoing struggles and the (hardly coincidental) attention paid to the late 1960s in the last ten years, these questions seem perhaps more urgent than ever.
I am, of course, not the first or only one to believe that the time may be right for a reconsideration of the methods of late-1960s activism. Since the beginning of the Iraq war in 2003, or, rather, since the United States government’s explicit articulation of its intent to invade Afghanistan and then Iraq in 2001 and 2002, interest in the grassroots political tactics of that period has understandably surged. Yet even before these unilateral military actions were on the table, there was still a great deal of scholarly and popular interest in the relationship in that decade between grassroots politics and media representation. Todd Gitlin, Tom Wells, Doug Rossinow, Julie Stephens—a number of authors in the 1980s and ’90s returned to the question of activism and media coverage in an attempt to determine just what we might learn from the struggles, triumphs, and failures of “the sixties.”87 These reappraisals, and others, were part of what has been described as a larger shift in writing about 1960s grassroots politics, a move away from simplistic divisions between politics and culture toward a more nuanced understanding of the mutual influences of, say, the New Left and the counterculture.88 Much as these authors have made an effort to not simply dismiss culture in favor of “real” politics, however, their generosity appears not to extend to engagements with the mass media. The media’s commercial character, its propensity to turn all opposition into simple spectacle, they suggest, ultimately renders protest impotent. The mass media may have “made” the New Left, in Todd Gitlin’s phrasing, but the inevitable allure of fame that accompanied the media’s attention proved irresistible. For this reason, Gitlin and others conclude, media coverage and “real” opposition are best seen as mutually exclusive. Although willing, in other words, to acknowledge the cross-pollination of politics and culture, arguments such as these remain
