Lavender and Red Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left [Paperback]

LGBT activism is often imagined as a self-contained struggle, inspired by but set apart from other social movements. Lavender and Red recounts a far different story: a history of queer radicals who understood their sexual liberation as intertwined with solidarity against imperialism, war, and racism. This politics was born in the late 1960s but survived well past Stonewall, propelling a gay and lesbian left that flourished through the end of the Cold War. The gay and lesbian left found its center in the San Francisco Bay Area, a place where sexual self-determination and revolutionary internationalism converged. Across the 1970s, its activists embraced socialist and women of color feminism and crafted queer opposition to militarism and the New Right. In the Reagan years, they challenged U.S. intervention in Central America, collaborated with their peers in Nicaragua, and mentored the first direct action against AIDS. Bringing together archival research, oral histories, and vibrant images, Emily K. Hobson rediscovers the radical queer past for a generation of activists today.

Emily K. Hobsonis Associate Professor of History and of Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno.

"Emily Hobson's illuminating book, Lavender and Red, transforms our understanding of queer history. Focusing on gay and lesbian internationalism and left solidarity politics in late Cold War San Francisco, she provides a deeply researched, surprising and compelling account of the ways a politics of affiliation can expand forms of organization, practices, vision and impact. The stories she tells offer us new historical narratives as resources for imagining new possible futures."—Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy

"Lavender and Red deftly tells the story of the other 'L' wordlӖ