Aditya Gandhi in Lux:
In 1970, Robin Morgan, one of the founders of New York Radical Women, wrote that women in the Gay Liberation Front had to “struggle continuously against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers.” Feminist groups had often had to step outside of the left to cultivate spaces without, or at least less shaped by, misogyny; the queer left was not proving exceptional. With the Gay Liberation Front and with other movements dominated by gay men, a familiar combination — offloaded work, stolen credit — was at play. The twentieth century offers instance after instance of a queer women’s group splintering from its respective gay rights movement, from France’s Gouines Rouges to New York City’s Lavender Menace and Lesbian Avengers. In the present century, the pattern has become so recognizable that lesbian and trans organizing often occurs separately from umbrella queer groups.
Occasionally, gay rights movements have attempted to speak out against the misogyny in their midst. Their gestures at allyship can be crooked: Take the Effeminists of the 1970s, an offshoot of the Gay Liberation Front whose embrace of feminism also included their own brand of proto-TERFism in their critique of transvestism. But not all anti-gay gay guys are alike. In 1973, the same year that the Effeminists were collaging feminism and transphobia in their Double-F magazine, a lone minet tried to take on the question of gay misogyny in his own manifesto. The result was The Screwball Asses, a punchy, twinky text that for years has borne the wrong author’s name on the cover — misattributed to a better-known gay guy who, ironically, is in the crosshairs for much of the book.
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