Box Turtle Bulletin

Victory – a flawed history of the quest for gay equality

If I were a heterosexual leftist New Yorker with little familiarity of gay culture, language, and history, I would delight in Linda Hirshman’s Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. But I’m not.

Many will find the book an enjoyable read. And reviewers who have at least some of those characteristics have written glowing reviews. For example, to Rich Benjamin, writing in the New York Times, it recalls the days when Angels in America had its first run and Amtrak lost his autographed copy of Paul Monette’s Borrowed Time.

But what makes Victory a pleasure to read is also what makes it a flawed history of the gay movement.

Hirshman tells the stories of activists and individuals who lived their lives and endured – or fought against – the oppressions that were imposed upon them. And in doing so she breathes life into dry facts and gives the reader – initially – a sense of connection to the action. However, she make the error that is a temptation with this writing style; she selects stories and anecdotes that tells the narrative that she wishes to have told, at the expense of diverse characters and often at the expense of reality.

For Hirshman, the fascinating issue is how this one subset of the Progressive Movement drew from its communist beginnings to overcome oppression and rejection. Unlike the feminist movement which was fractured by women who succumbed to the lure of conformity and the civil rights movement which could not solidify under a banner of radicalism, the gay community stayed united and committed to revolution and in the process won the freedom to hold their head high… and wear women’s clothing.

Because don’t we all?

And it is the oh-so-astonishing accomplishment of a man doing a drag number at a company dinner that is Exhibit A in just how far we’ve come. This opening tale cued me that the author might be out of her element.

But the stereotypes upon which Victory rests come from a different place than the usual ‘gays all want to be women’ that you get from homophobes. Gender noncomformity is transgressive, and a radical challenge to rigidity and thus all drag becomes gender-fuck. It’s a bold political statement.

And as gender revolutionaries, all gay men have a dress and a wig or two. Don’t you? Mine is, appropriately, a copy of Cher’s from her Half Breed days.

Unfortunately, the characters in Hirshman’s tales soon take on a feeling of uniformity and interchangeability. All activists are the children of the New Left. And every association with leftism – however tangential – merits mention while less revolutionary political perspectives are politely downplayed. It is true that some of the early influences on the gay movement came from liberal, leftist, and even communist inspiration and activism. But gay activist was not limited to those on the left, nor was there universal approval and acceptance from those whom Hirshman paints in glowing terms.

For example, Hirshman briefly mentions a half sentence version of the sad parting of ways when early gay leaders resigned from the Communist Party. ” Harry Hay divorced his wife and resigned from the Communist Party. It was 1952. He was at the top of his game.” But that is a version which doesn’t align with my understanding.

I lack the progressive perspective that allows Benjamin accept the glossing over of facts to rave about Hirshman’s dishing and camp. Because while my copy of Borrowed Time wasn’t autographed, I did meet the author. He introduced himself in the bathroom of a banquet room. At the dinner, in fact, that the 90s incarnation of the Communist Party threw to apologize for summarily tossing its gay members out on their ear.

But their sincere contrition has no place in the story Hirshman has to tell.

And even those who were clearly and strongly on the left are portrayed in a single faceted cartoon portrayal that put their personality and sacrifice secondary to Hirshman’s polemic. Her anti-war activist Morris Kight had little in common with the Morris I knew. And the Mattachine activist Dale Jennings of Victory is irreconcilable with the Jennings that, in 1991, objected to street protest.

And while some of Hirshman’s errors in perspective are forgivable – anecdotal information is limited to what those whom you seek out will tell you – some is so skewed as to seem intentionally fraudulent. In an act of baffling chutzpah, she recast the hero of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell as Senator Kirsten Gillibrand from New York while dismissing the real co-architect of repeal, Senator Sue Collins, as just one of Gillibrand’s “Republican gal pals”.

Perhaps had Hirshman ventured outside her circle – and fellow travelers – a better, more interesting and less monochromatic narrative might have emerged. Instead we have not only an ode to Progressivism (I’m being polite) but a New York-centric one at that. A book in which the Black Cat Riots merited half a sentence, California’s LIFE Lobby didn’t exist, AB101 is referenced only in passing (and not by name) without a mention that LA’s gay community shut down LAX.

Victory is a book in which Log Cabin Republicans are never explained and mentioned only when impossible to avoid. A book for which the United Church of Christ must be some small sect, perhaps in the flyover states. A book which relied heavily on family-edited diaries, political manifestos, and the memories of men in which – just like your memories and my own – they were the heroes.

I’m sad. I want to give this effort higher praise than I can. It achieves the difficult task of presenting a lot of information in a compact manner that still remains light and breezy. And though it weighs in at 348 pages, it is not a tome, required reading for the Very Serious.

I very much want to recommend this book as a history of the gay community – though not the history of the gay community. I want to pass it off as a beach book, one whose errors are minor and inconsequential. Sadly, I cannot.

Historical and factual errors were more than occasional. The lack of familiarity with gay language and culture alternated between comical and embarrassing.

But the true crime was Hirshman’s hijacking of a phenomenal tale of social progress, truly astonishing in its scope and timeline, and filled with a cast of diverse and complex individuals, to reshape it into a morality play with her political views as the hero.

A careful and skeptical reader may find it a springboard from which to seek out truer, fairer and more accurate information. There is honesty within the tale. Though skewed, it contains the kernels of very real perceptions of very real people about their very real lives. But unfortunately the end product presents only one perspective as relayed by a person lacking access to any contrasting or nuanced viewpoints – or even any idea that such views exist.

Hirshman landed on the Island of The Homosexuals, talked to a few of the natives that rushed to meet her boat and went away to write her Guide to the Island, With Commentary on its Inhabitants. And as so many books seeking to enlighten the people back home about a strange and fascinating people, it mostly just highlighted the ignorance of its author.