The Falling Dream: Unreason and Enchantment in the Gay Liberation Movement

Abstract

The Falling Dream: Unreason and Enchantment in the Gay Liberation Movement examines supernatural, paranormal, and other forms of “irrational” experience in 1970s queer politics. I argue that although this decade is often narrated as a period of activist decline, queer cultures saw a proliferation of inventive approaches to organizing during these years– these efforts, however, often elude conventional understandings of politics. I center activists who fought police brutality with magic, used psychic powers to free political prisoners, built coalitions with extraterrestrials, and pursued threshold states (achieved through mysticism, psychotropics, or psychosis) as resources for political insight. I argue that these seemingly disparate activist unorthodoxies shared a refusal of modernist regimes of secular rationality. Far from being merely idiosyncratic, I suggest that non-secular and anti-rationalist approaches helped expand possibilities for queer political thought and action during a time of national political retrenchment—I thus read unreason and enchantment as systemic queer responses to the early onset of neoliberal austerity. In centering deauthorized strategies for social change, this project brings to the forefront communities that had least access to mainstream reform structures, communities that have also often been peripheral to historiographies of gender and sexuality: queer people of color, transgender people, lesbian feminists, and poor, incarcerated, and disabled queer communities. This project, in other words, asserts the need to attend to the subaltern political methodologies that proceed from subaltern political movements. Additionally, I suggest that looking to madness and magic in progressive queer cultures directs scholars towards wholly different conceptions of what sexuality looks like under modernity. These cultures reject common scholarly understandings that modern sexuality is primarily an apparatus of subject formation, that scientific knowledge displaces religion as the privileged authority on sexual selfhood under modernity, that sexuality is specific to and constituted through its human social context, and that modern sexuality is something that is distinct to the human. To make these arguments, I bring literatures associated with the “ontological turn” of the humanities to bear the study of LGBT history, asking how the history of sexuality might look different if approached at a distance from more familiar Foucauldian frameworks.