Stonewall and the Myth of Self-Deliverance

In yesterday's Times, by our upcoming author: [and here's his weekly Ethicist column in the Times Magazine]

We’re drawn to tales of fierce resistance by oppressed minorities. But those stories can blind us to how social progress happens.

By Kwame Anthony Appiah

Mr. Appiah is a philosophy professor.
June 22, 2019

Here’s one story about how a marginalized group won its rights. Early in the morning of June 28, 1969, the police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, but this time the patrons didn’t go quietly. A mutiny against police harassment erupted and spread; street rioters even set the bar on fire. Over the next four nights, there were demonstrations on the block. Sustained political mobilization followed. An act of resistance became a flash point in the struggle for L.G.B.T. dignity and equality. The fire set at Stonewall burns still.

That’s how justice is won, right? A subjugated group, taking its destiny into its hands, valiantly rebels against its oppressors.

But wait: England basically decriminalized homosexuality in 1967, fully 36 years before it was decriminalized in the United States in Lawrence v. Texas. And England never had a Stonewall. How did its big stride toward gay liberation take place?

Let’s try out a very different story. In 1967, a Welsh member of the House of Commons by the name of Leo Abse submitted a “private member’s bill” — a bill without party support — holding that what consenting adults of the same sex did in private wasn’t the law’s concern. Then he used every trick in the book to get it passed.

Mr. Abse was Jewish by heritage, Labour by party affiliation, Freudian by conviction and heterosexual by orientation — a happily married father of two. He had a weakness for gaudy shirts and curious jackets better suited to the Beatles in their “Sgt. Pepper” phase than to the House of Commons.

Yet he was remarkably deft at the cajoling, salesmanship and favor-trading that a private member’s bill required. The last member of Parliament who had tried to reform the law on sexual offenses lost his seat, and the Labour Party wouldn’t risk taking up the cause. (The prime minister, Harold Wilson, privately calculated that it could cost the party millions of votes.) Still, after filibusters and debate that stretched through most of the night of July 4, 1967, the Jewish Welshman finally got the bill through; it survived a fierce gantlet of opposition with a one-vote margin of support. For the first time in its history, as a result of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, England would officially condone homosexuality.

So how come you’ve never heard of Leo Abse?

For the sake of a “usable past” — a historical narrative that serves the political needs of the present — some people get the yellow-highlighter treatment; others get the Wite-Out. And the narrative we’ve come to cherish, when it comes to the rights of historically marginalized groups, is that of self-deliverance, in which the oppressed defy and ultimately defeat their oppressors. Indeed, we’ve come to distrust anything that looks like a politics of benevolence.

The narrative of self-deliverance has been immensely valuable, directing attention to overlooked forms of everyday political resistance among the relatively powerless. It’s important to know, say, how slave preachers in places like Jamaica and Barbados, as well as the American South, deployed biblical imagery of freedom to help create unrest and outright revolt. But as the archives of the past give way to the anthems of the present, the narrative of self-deliverance, which once enriched our understanding of liberation, has come instead to impoverish it.

Consider how abolition, the great moral crusade of the 19th century, is now taught in schools. The New York State Regents curriculum guide, which shapes public high school education in the state, refers to “people who took action to abolish slavery” and names four individuals, all but one of them people of color. A recent prizewinning academic history of abolition assures us that slave resistance “lay at the heart of the abolitionist movement.” And so white abolitionists, however consequential they actually were, have been made to take a few steps back.

The allure of self-deliverance has certainly influenced popular culture: In recent movies like “Django Unchained” and television shows like “Underground,” the slave is an avenger. (You can see something similar in the shift in how Holocaust resistance has been depicted in Hollywood, from “Schindler’s List,” in 1993, which was a drama of rescue — or what’s now reflexively denigrated as a “savior” narrative — to “Defiance,” in 2008, in which Jews pick up guns and save themselves.)

Alas, the yearning for heroism in these circumstances can imply, as its flip side, a sense of shame in “passivity.” But there is nothing shameful about being freed, and the simple truth is that slaves in the American South were in no position to throw off their shackles on their own. That task required the massed forces of an army. It required, too, the likes of James Ashley, a congressman from Ohio who introduced what became the 13th Amendment, devoted himself to its passage and so, in a very immediate way, ended slavery. The great Frederick Douglass, who could afford no delusions about self-deliverance, heralded James Ashley as “among the foremost of that brilliant galaxy of statesmen who reconstructed the Union on a basis of liberty.”

Only those who need no rescuing can pick and choose among their rescuers.

Which brings us back to Stonewall. These days, the episode looms so large that it has been likened to the storming of the Bastille; we furiously debate who threw the first fist, or brick, or bottle. But as the sociologists Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Suzanna M. Crage note in a study of what they call “the Stonewall myth,” Stonewall was hardly the first “gay riot.” What gives Stonewall its stature, they argue, is that “Stonewall activists were the first to claim to be the first.” Their point is that Stonewall isn’t commemorated because of its impact on the gay movement. Instead, it “made its impact on the gay movement through its commemoration.”

It mattered enormously, then, that the old-guard gay advocacy groups organized an annual Stonewall demonstration. It also mattered enormously that after the 1971 demonstration, the reporter Joseph Lelyveld published an account in The New York Times that was long, detailed and, read in its historical context, deeply sympathetic. Unblinkered journalists in the mainstream media were indispensable to the cause.

The story of gay rights is the story of gay activism — but it is not only that story. It’s the story, too, of black-robed heterosexuals like Margaret Marshall, who as the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court wrote a 2003 decision declaring that same-sex marriage was entitled to legal recognition. It’s the story of mainstream politicians like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who decided about a decade ago that he wanted New York to become the first large state to legislate marriage equality. Mr. Cuomo blamed the failure of a previous effort on infighting among the advocacy groups, and he called them to heel. Then — with the assistance of rich Wall Street donors — he engaged in the usual wheeling and dealing and arm-twisting to wrangle the bill through the Legislature. He signed it in 2011.

It’s an unglamorous tale, remote from the sweat and smoke and sirens of Stonewall. And yet a minority group like the L.G.B.T. population (which by most estimates accounts for a percentage of the population in the low single digits) isn’t a colony that can rise up and overthrow the forces of oppression on its own. It needs the help of other people who recognize the struggle for equality as a moral one, universally binding.

This is the reality that the narrative of self-deliverance obscures. Today, a new generation of political and social activists are inclined to speak of “allyship,” by which they typically mean an arrangement where prospective allies submit to the direction of the marginalized group, like deferential guests in someone else’s home. The vision here is remote from true coalition building, from a partnership of mutual respect, from a politics grounded in overlapping moral perceptions.

Leo Abse had a great deal of interest in getting things done; he had zero interest in allyship. “A member of Parliament must never become the marionette of any lobby,” he insisted. He knew that his sense of political possibility was more finely honed than that of most outside advocates.

When it came to social reform, in fact, Mr. Abse proved to be Britain’s most influential backbencher of the past century. Decriminalizing homosexual sex was far from his only cause. He was also a vigorous campaigner for the more humane treatment of prison inmates. He was a consistent opponent of anti-immigrant measures. In 1965, he helped push through a private member’s bill abolishing the death penalty. He also helped put together a private member’s bill that became the 1967 Family Planning Act, which made contraception and reproduction advice more widely available. When his Divorce Reform Act took effect in 1971, one party to a divorce no longer had to supply evidence of misconduct by the other. That same year, he managed to secure greater protections for married trans women.

Is it possible that he deserves more than the Wite-Out?

Leo Abse hardly acted alone, of course. In the House of Lords, the Earl of Arran, whose gay elder brother had committed suicide, previously sponsored a version of the Sexual Offences Act of 1967. The reforming recommendations of the so-called Wolfenden report, issued a decade earlier by an official committee, helped provide an air of authority. Mr. Abse also worked with the Homosexual Law Reform Society, whose founders and supporters included such (straight) dignitaries as the Labour party politician Clement Attlee, the sociologist Barbara Wootton and the philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Nor was Mr. Abse especially fastidious in his tactics; he often resorted to ruses and misdirection. He called in favors to get certain parliamentary opponents of his measure to stay away when the votes were taken. To the unenlightened souls who stuck around, he would say whatever he thought would soften their resistance, like a persistent salesman with a foot in your door. The reason he was so effective was precisely that he could be at once high-minded and underhanded.

Above all, Mr. Abse never let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The Sexual Offences Act, in its final form, was the best version he thought he could get passed. It was, he knew, far from ideal. It applied only to England and Wales, and only to people 21 or older. The Armed Services and the Merchant Navy secured exemptions.

Activists grumbled about the bill’s compromises. Fair enough. We would do well, however, to recall that at the time, sodomy could, in principle, be punished with life imprisonment. Gaining full legal equality in Britain was a longer process. But it was Mr. Abse’s bill that unlocked the closet door.

The brick, the bottle, the fist, the fire: Fierce resistance by the oppressed makes for a better story than the drudgery and temporizing of lawmaking and coalition building, and it may seem morally purer than being assisted by people whose work is propelled by their own sense of justice or compassion. These days, gratitude grates, and benevolence is viewed with beady eyes.

But self-reliance, whatever its value as a personal goal, is a lousy political ideal. What minorities need is not allyship but alliances — alliances cemented by a shared perception of the moral universe, with no group giving dictation to another.

Whether the Stonewall myth ultimately proves enabling or disabling will depend on whether it can accommodate the complex history of social progress. That history, honestly recounted, is filled with complication, defiance, compromise and, yes, even benevolence. We need to make peace with it. The most usable past of all may be the truth.