The Queerness of Everyday Life

LGBTQ activism in the twentieth-century United States has long been characterized by a tension between liberal and radical forms of politics. Should LGBTQ people respond to their exclusion from a heteronormative state and society by demanding formal equality and inclusion in existing structures? Or should they use their marginalized status as a basis from which to mount a radical critique of capitalism, the state, and the family? In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider suggests that this account of LGBTQ history offers a false opposition. Tracing the shifting meanings of queer domesticity over the course of the evolution of LGBTQ identity, community, and politics in the postwar United States, Vider shows that LGBTQ people have at times sought inclusion in normative ideals of what he terms domestic citizenship, and at times imagined the home as a site of radical resistance to such norms. But more often, he suggests, LGBTQ people have creatively remade ideals of domesticity to center alternative frameworks of gender, sexuality, the family, intimacy, and care.Vider traces this argument over the course of the period from 1945 to the present. His account offers an overarching narrative that runs from the cautious homophile politics of the 1950s through the radical challenges of 1970s gay liberation and the turn to collaboration with state actors and demands for legal recognition of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. But each chapter is also grounded in a specific archivally rooted case study that reveals quotidian practices of domesticity, care, and self-fashioning in intimate detail. For example, a chapter on "homosexual marriage" in the 1950s examines how gay and lesbian people sought to draw on postwar psychological discourses to position themselves as "well-adjusted" in their commitment to monogamy and domesticity, but it is also richly illustrated with photographs of ordinary gay and lesbian couples that testify to the family relationships they formed and the joy and intimacy of their everyday lives. A chapter on gay communes in the 1970s examines not only how these radical experiments sought to challenge normative ideas of domesticity but also how their visions ran up against practical limits. A chapter on the lesbian feminist architect Phyllis Birkby and her conception of women-identified architecture discusses workshops that Birkby ran in the 1970s to invite women to imagine their ideal living spaces, illustrating these women's expansive fantasies of communal lesbian separatist domesticity. A chapter that tells the story of the HIV/AIDS crisis through the New York City organization Gay Men's Health Crisis's "buddy program," consisting of volunteers who cared for people with AIDS, turns away from the more public and confrontational activism of organizations like ACT UP to recover the radical potential of intimate personal relationships of care.Though Vider puts his account into dialogue with the work of previous historians who have emphasized the role of the state in creating norms of domesticity and heterosexuality and who have traced social movement and activist histories, his is a story of queer everyday life: of LGBTQ people who had varied politics and who may not necessarily have considered themselves political (though some certainly did), but who sought to find places for themselves and their intimate relationships within day-to-day existence in the postwar United States. As with other histories of "everyday life," often Vider's account tends to focus on the middle class—though in the book's later chapters, both the one on AIDS caregiving and another chapter on LGBTQ youth homelessness and shelter activism, Vider shows how activists, caregivers, and mutual aid networks sought to leverage the state and social services to aid in their efforts to provide homes and networks of care for those most in need. In contrast to previous work on queer domesticities by scholars such as Heather Murray and Matt Cook that have drawn attention to the relationships between queer chosen families and families of origin, Vider's story remains largely internal to LGBTQ communities, focusing on how LGBTQ-identified people drew on and reinterpreted extant cultural scripts for understanding home and family—but at a remove from heteronormative society.In places, I might have liked to see Vider take slightly further his claims about how his evidence base might revise some of our large-scale narratives about postwar US history (and, more broadly, the history of postwar Western democracies). Do the glimpses he affords us behind the walls of the queer home change how we might tell familiar overarching stories about the rise and fall of a normative ideal of white, middle-class, suburban postwar domesticity and its relationship to capitalism and the state? Is a narrative of formal LGBTQ activism and community-making that runs through moderate homophile campaigning, radical liberationist activism, and the fight for state recognition in need of rethinking?Vider's clearest statement on these questions appears in an epilogue titled "The Futures of the Queer Home," which counterposes twenty-first-century Supreme Court victories for LGBTQ civil rights founded on the constitutional right to privacy against contemporary, much less high-profile campaigns for housing justice for LGBTQ elders, youth, people experiencing homelessness, and people with AIDS. Through this juxtaposition, Vider cautions us against assuming Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case that guaranteed the fundamental right to marry to same-sex couples, as a telos or "privacy" as the litmus test of queer belonging. Instead, he implies, the fight to make queer homes for queer people outside the romantic couple form continues, and queer activism can both advance radical visions for new ways of life and meet the practical needs of marginalized populations, without necessarily treating state recognition as its ultimate metric of success.