GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

In the opening to "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?," Cathy Cohen describes reports of racism at what was then the nation's largest HIV/AIDS organization, the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC). She uses this example to frame two key contexts for her 1997 essay: the entrenched racism of many lesbian and gay institutions as well as the failed promises of so many anti-assimilationist queer alternatives. She then maps a new queer politics, one that troubles the default focus on a queer-versus-heterosexual dichotomy and is instead attuned to the stratifications of race, gender, and class and organized around a range of nonnormative kinship and gender roles, stigmatized pleasures, and criminalized practices—those of "punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens." The essay closes by pointing to the political possibilities of coalition, including the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP)'s participation in HIV/AIDS activism for needle exchange programs and within prisons.

Cohen's Black feminist left method of queer critique upended the assumptions of much of queer theory and politics at the time, in addition to other left social movement analysis and practice, and the essay's influence cannot be overstated. Cohen's take on three of the topical mainstays of queer theory—identity, normativity, and liberalism—is to trace their operation and mine their contradictions, offering queer not as an idealized position or a prescription but as a relation produced by the uneven and shifting dynamics of power. Her analysis of how sexual stigma adheres to nonnormative expressions of kinship, gender, and pleasure demonstrates the central function of queerness within the operation of racism and capitalism and the limited terms of political campaigns that organize around queer only as a placeholder either for lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT) identities in isolation or for antinormative expressions that subsume the recognition of power-over into ahistorical abstracted ideals.

One of my favorite moments of the essay is when, after Cohen (1997: 453) has already outlined in great detail the tensions in Black, left, feminist, and queer theorizing, she writes that she will turn to give "a little history" because "as a political scientist a little history is all that [she] can offer." The next section gives much more than a little history, as Cohen proceeds to detail how sex and gender [End Page 145] regulation have always been racialized, and racial subjugation articulated in sexual and gendered terms, in a history of "heterosexuals on the (out)side of heteronormativity" (ibid.: 452) that runs from the prohibition of marriage under slavery to antimiscegenation laws to debates about the so-called underclass.¹ As Cohen explains, her framework is informed by intellectual work that has too often been left outside the dominant canon of queer, especially that of Black feminism. Insofar that a "truly … transformative" queer politics has a history (in hitherto ignored intellectual pasts) and its future remains to be known (in titling the essay as a question about political "potential") (ibid.: 438), Cohen's look at heterosexuality outside heteronormativity has been crucial to new approaches to queer political history—be that in the adoption of a queer lens on the history of LGBT- or queer-identified activism, or the history of a range of political campaigns for and by the "non-normative and marginal" (ibid.).

This is the focus of the remainder of my brief comments: to show what Cohen's essay has offered, and continues to offer, to our understanding of the history and future of queer politics. Despite the tremendous influence of Cohen's vision on scholarship and activism of the past twenty years, many historians of LGBT politics have resisted the use of queer as an interdisciplinary and intersectional framework for analyzing power. But, as Cohen's essay shows, an expansive approach to the historical study of so-called punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens is essential to fully grasping both how the LGBT movement (in organizations like the GMHC) got to be the way she described it in 1997 and if promising coalitions of the time (such as those ACT UP participated in) ultimately realized their transformative potential. This method also further facilitates the broad genealogy of the queer politics Cohen envisioned in 1997, and that we see in 2019.

First, Cohen's insistence on looking at the regulation of kinship and the complexity of stigma and criminalization paved the way for scholars to understand how different historical and social movement forces shaped the normative form of LGBT politics as counter to issues associated with racialized and gendered poverty (Ellison 2015; Esparza 2017; Hanhardt 2013; Holmes 2011). That is, from the 1960s through the 1990s, the gay movement gained momentum as activists made claims to neighborhoods and demanded the decriminalization of homosexuality and its removal from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-II. But this was also the time that new policing, economic development, and social welfare policies increasingly targeted single-mother households and the street life of the poor, especially people of color and those labeled mentally ill, who were gay and straight, trans and not. One result was the consolidation of a homonormative [End Page 146] political agenda (Duggan 2003) at the very same time that LGBT- and queer-identified movements sought to expand their ranks.

Second, Cohen reminds us that our analysis of power shapes our interpretation of social movements, including how we find and define the very subjects and strategies of activism. The essay provides a framework for understanding the importance of the political activities of those outside the normative narrative for LGBT political history, including those whose lives have been structured as queer, be they political prisoners, single mothers receiving welfare, or those who move in and out of criminalized informal economies. To do so, she reminds readers that there are precedents for this model of analysis and strategy, especially in the Black feminist and LGBT writing and political organizing of the 1960s through 1990s that have too often been left out of the canon of LGBT and queer social movement history. There are many reasons for this exclusion within the historical literature: LGBT archives have been linked to social movements, and radical and marginalized groups tend not to donate their papers to archives that don't reflect their vision. And for many activists of the 1960s through 1990s, their work and their papers are still unfinished. In addition, historicizing coalition and participation in multiple campaigns, features of Black feminist and LGBT activism of the period, requires dispensing with the terms of movements that otherwise sort activism according to single issues, goals, or aspects of individuals' identities (Arondekar et al. 2015).

Cohen's essay provided a charge to think about the history of LGBT and queer politics differently, and such scholars as Jonathan Bailey (2017), Darius Bost (forthcoming), Treva Ellison (2015), Dayo Gore (2018), Emily Hobson (2016), Kwame Holmes (2011), Jennifer Jones (2014), Kimberly Springer (2005), and Emily Thuma (forthcoming) have responded with new histories of autonomous Black feminist and LGBT organizing, the LGBT and queer forces in Black political history, and multi-issue, multiracial, and coalitional organizing that undoes the false oppositions of queer versus heterosexual, and identity versus class, and that may or may not take on the monikers LGBT or queer. All of these studies reach outside the discipline of history, just as Cohen looked outside her discipline of political science to develop her theoretical framework. This interdisciplinary method often draws on Black feminist literary theory, seeks new terms within the words and experiences of Black women, and pulls apart dominant perspectives on the places of knowledge production and political practice. This includes Sarah Haley's (2016) history of Black women's challenges to Jim Crow modernity, Aimee Meredith Cox's (2015) ethnography of the performative and everyday choreography [End Page 147] of young Black women in Detroit, and C. Riley Snorton's (2017) rich archive for the linked trajectories of blackness and transness from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century.

Although today the uses of queer are often similar to its uses in 1997—as a shorthand for an expanding acronym; placeholder for identities outside these categories; marker of single-issue LGBT militancy; or intersectional analysis of power—the last approach has played a key role in the leadership, vision, and practices of a new generation of radical Black political organizing. In a recent interview, Cohen, in a nod to her earlier essay, describes activism within the Movement for Black Lives as "using a queer lens to challenge the static nature of categories and identities," and having the "possibility … to think about the ways in which different bodies are marginalized and made to be queer in the eyes of the state as well as in their own communities" (Cohen and Jackson 2016: 782). Nonetheless, even as some mainstream LGBT organizations recognize the LGBT- or queer-identified leadership of the founders of #BlackLivesMatter, that has not always translated into finding common ground in or building coalitions for goals such as ending order maintenance policing or heightened municipal ticketing, a dynamic that continues to parallel many disciplinary approaches to LGBT- and even queer-identified social movement history.

In 1997, queer theory and LGBT social movement history had a strained relationship (Duggan 1995), and in 2019 much has remained the same. But "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens" was a foundational text that opened a door for approaches to queer political history that value and learn from a Black feminist left theoretical genealogy and method. This has been realized in some LGBT- and queer-identified social movement history and in other studies of resistance led by the "non-normative and marginal" that often draw the past right up to the present and are found outside the guarded borders of the discipline of history and the canons and institutionalized locations of queer theory and politics. Cohen's essay inspired many—and certainly me—to read and engage differently and to commit to the details of politics and history, for a future, queer and otherwise.