New Books In Critical Theory

In Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (University of California Press, 2016), Emily K. Hobson challenges conceptions of LGBTQ activism as single-issue analogous to but separate from other activist initiatives. Instead, Hobson uncovers the gay and lesbian left, whose activists saw sexual liberation as intertwined with challenging racism, militarism, and imperialism. She focuses on the gay and lesbian left in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracing the movement from 1968 through 1991. This community of struggle was separate from both separatist and liberal LGBTQ organizing. It grew out of late-1960s and early-1970s gay liberation, but solidified in the mid to late 1970s, usually seen as a period when gay activism turned to more reformist and single-issue frameworks. Geography, space and place are important to Hobson’s analysis. The Bay Area generated a lesbian and gay left partly because of newly politicized white queers proximity to Black liberationists, women of color fe