{"id":2843,"date":"2019-07-02T06:27:04","date_gmt":"2019-07-02T12:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/?p=2843"},"modified":"2025-08-10T21:17:12","modified_gmt":"2025-08-11T03:17:12","slug":"stonewall-the-great-gay-migration-and-the-monumental-divide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qualityofmercy.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/02\/stonewall-the-great-gay-migration-and-the-monumental-divide\/","title":{"rendered":"Stonewall, the Great Gay Migration and the Monumental Divide"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last Wednesday I watched a somewhat slimmed-down version of the new documentary Lavender Scare<\/em>, based on the 2004 (!) book of the same name by David K. Johnson.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> In the film Meryl Streep’s narration explains how the influx of homosexuals from rural to urban regions began in the 1930s, the start of the Great Gay Migration<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Washington was a boom town. The government was creating thousands of new jobs to combat the Great Depression. Many of the young men and women who came for those jobs were homosexuals. They grabbed the chance to experience a new level of acceptance and friendship in a big city far from home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was reminded of a recent essay, “Forget Stonewall<\/a>,” in the May\/June edition of The Gay & Lesbian Review<\/em>, by Yasmin Nair who reminds readers that the source of that influx still exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The problem with this urbanization of lgbtq history isn\u2019t simply that it takes attention and resources away from non-urban areas, but that in further reifying the idea of the urban as essentially liberatory, it persuades onlookers of and participants in \u201cgay history\u201d moments that they are simply about gay and lesbian identity (the B, the T, and the Q are shunted aside) and that notion of identity is immersed purely in emotion these days, and of course that emotion is love\u2014the only thing that defines anything remotely queer. In the process, the larger public is persuaded to forget (if it ever knew) that gay and lesbian identity is in fact part of a larger framework of public life, surveillance, and the incursions of the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In other words, We\u2019ve given you queers permission to fuck who you want, so shut your\u2026 mm\u2026 cake holes. (Do read the entire essay.<\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>) And yes, Nair is a self-described “cofounder of the radical queer editorial collective Against Equality<\/a>.” Also from that essay:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea, too popular among historians and commentators and the public at large, that queer life is only truly queer once it escapes rural areas is part of a larger cultural perception that non-urban areas simply don\u2019t matter and don\u2019t deserve resources. We can consider the vibrancy of non-urban life without fetishizing it as more authentic (or more adorable<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the spirit of Nair’s argument, I thought I’d browse my bookmarks for short-form films that touch on that vibrancy. Even if many of them are framed as standard romances, the rural\/urban dissonance\u2014the monumental divide\u2014is front and center.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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