This week, I’m looking at four issues of the newsletter for the UK group “Lesbian And Gay Freedom Movement”, which is unfortunately very difficult to find more information on due to their pretty generic name. The content of the newsletters, however, is… definitely not generic!
QZAP holds four issues of the Lesbian And Gay Freedom Movement newsletter: #5 (Summer 1991), #6 (Summer 1992), #8 (Winter 1993), and #10 (Spring 1995). The newsletters came to QZAP via the Emma Centre, a Minneapolis infoshop that I wrote more about last week.
LGFM described themselves as “a movement to bring anarchist ideas and ideals to lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and to make sexuality and the overthrow of patriarchy major campaigning issues for all anarchists.”
The newsletter fought the respectability politics that had crept into lesbian and gay movements, criticizing a focus on legal rights rather than liberation.
In the early 90s, when these zines came out, the age of consent in England was 16 for heterosexual sex, and 21 for homosexual sex. The age of consent for gay sex was lowered to 18 in 1994, between issues #8 and #10 of this newsletter. The age of consent was only equalized across all combinations of genders in 2000. These newsletters reflect a time when debate was raging in the UK more broadly, and also within queer communities, about the role of the state in sexual ethics. As these newsletters show, queer sexual mores were a wide-open question, and some of the positions staked were pretty far outside of the current mainstream.
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In Issue #8 of the newsletter, LGFM listed the groups they supported as:
- “Oppressed sexualities including transexuals, girl/girl & boy/boy lovers, girl/woman & boy/man lovers, transvestites, S&Mers…
- Children in their fight for liberation and freedom to choose their own sexuality.
- Lesbians, gays, and bisexuals in prison, ‘care’, and psychiatric institutions.
- Isolated and lonely lesbians, gays and bisexuals, and those just ‘coming out’.”
In Issue #5, this list also includes “people with mental and physical disabilities, also those who are non-monogamous, like cottaging [cruising] or picking people up in public places, […] those of us who enjoy sex toys and pornography […] and sex with animals.” Issue #10 also includes fat people and “those who don’t define or identify themselves as anything” in the list of those whose sexual liberation they seek.
This makes me very very very very very uncomfortable! It is pretty intense to see some of your most deeply-held views (police abolition, bodily autonomy for sex between consenting adults, including people with disabilities, and including sex that includes power exchange) being placed alongside and in equivalence with… other stuff.
Let’s look more closely at what’s in these newsletters:
Issue #5 takes up the cause of Ben Wilson, who was incarcerated for “having sex with boyfriends under 16”, sentenced to life in prison, and chemically castrated with estrogen. There’s also a letter from “an inmate in [the] New York State Prison System who has run afoul of the age of consent”, defending “consensual intergenerational sexual relationship[s]”.
Issue #6 shares several stories of people prosecuted for sex with animals, arguing that it’s inconsistent for factory farming to be permitted and bestiality not. There’s also an interesting essay where a writer talks about their experiences coming into BDSM as someone who had never been able to orgasm before having experiences as a bondage bottom. It also argues that gays and lesbians should, instead of fighting for inclusion in institutions like police and the military, instead look towards their abolition.
Issue #8 focuses on SM, including a report from an SM pride march in London, but also includes an essay by a queer teenager opposing age of consent laws, arguing that “abuse can’t be stopped by the law, neither can protection be given; but control, guilt, and fear can and will occur.”
In Issue #10, there’s an article about the role of anarchist women in the Spanish Civil War, a report on the raid on a London fetish club, Whiplash, from someone who was present, remarks on Irish liberation, and a report from a squat in Ljubljana. This issue also reports critically on the age of consent for sex between men in the UK being lowered from 21 to 18, and on the decriminalization of sex in the military, arguing that there should be no legal age of consent, and no military. There’s also a cool story encouraging people not to let ableism inform their assumptions around who has sex, and with whom:
“I was at a feminist event with a woman and she was with someone in a wheelchair who couldn’t speak (except after orgasm) and couldn’t lift their arms. Communication was by use of a board with printed letters and words on it which was pointed to with tongue or nose.
Two feminists I knew who were giving the lecture at the event came up to us. I introduced them to my friend and the person with disabilities. The feminists ignored the wheelchair user and addressed my friend. They asked if she was the facilitator for the day for the user. She replied, “No! This is my lover”.
The feminists had immediately assumed that an ‘attractive’ woman with a physically challenged person must be a carer – not a friend or lover. I think we have a long way to go….before the disabled are thought of as equal and as sexual people.”
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In a choice between a politics of liberation and of respectability, I would align myself strongly with liberation. I do not believe the world is made safer by policing and incarceration, including with regards to situations where someone harms another person in a way that involves sex.
As someone who reads and talks and thinks a lot about queer history, this is not my first time running into these questions. Patrick Califia’s essay collection Public Sex is a fascinating collection of essays on sex, BDSM, leather culture, and censorship, from a writer who was at the centre of the 1970s-80s “lesbian sex wars”. Califia comes out swinging in favour of porn, weird sex, free expression, bi and trans inclusion, and an expansive big tent of queerness that refuses to exclude people based on the transgressiveness of their sexual interests, including sexual relationships between adults and minors. It’s a book I really recommend, both as a historical document and as a source of insight into the ongoing conflict between purity culture and freakiness that are still dividing queers to this day.
I feel like I’ve been ending each of these posts by saying, “Well, one thing I can say for certain is that I am grateful for archives.” But it’s always true. I’m not really sure what compels me to seek out the material in QZAP’s archive that most challenges me, but I really can’t seem to help it. I am sure they have many delightful light-hearted zines of which I agree with every word. But the ones that most draw me in are the ones that also most trouble me.
And one thing I am sure of in the case of every one of these zines, is that I am glad it’s archived. I want these materials to be available for people to struggle with. I don’t want archives to only be a home for work that I and nobody else object to. I want us to stay with the thorniest topics and the messiest and most troubling parts of our shared history.
Lee P is interning at QZAP in spring/summer 2024. Ze is a long-time zine maker, and hir current project is Sheer Spite Press, a small press and zine distro. Originally from unceded Algonquin land, Lee calls Tiohtià:ke // Mooniyang // Montreal home. Ze’s also a member of the organizing collective for Dick’s Lending Library, a community-run, local library of books by trans, non-binary, and Two-Spirit authors.
