Stonewall 25: The Making of the Lesbian and Gay Community in Britain, edited by Emma Healey and Angela Mason. Virago 1994 £6.99 Reviewed by Peter Purton TWENTYFIVE years of the lesbian and gay communities in Britain following the explosion of the liberation movement after New York's Stonewall Riots is a great story. Everyone who has been part of that history could write their own version.
This collection of articles, unfortunately, fails to do juss tice to the story, and in its purA Time to Rage, Tommy Sheridan with Joan McAlpine, Polygon, £7.99 Reviewed by Roland Wood A WEEK OR SO after Tommy Sheridan polled 12,000 votes in the European elections a friend at BBC Glasgow gave me a copy of A Time To Rage.
My friend is life-long Labour suit of a single political strand ends up presenting a grossly distorted version.
Tedious though this was, it was the "politics" - both overt and hidden - which boiled the blood of a reviewer who has played a part in the struggle for nearly two decades.
Leave aside the slanderous errors - like Michael Mason's statement that the IMG denounced homosexuality as a "bourgeois deviation", when actually it was the first leftwing organisation to support lesbian and gay liberation (1972).
Missing side
What is missing is a whole side of the history. Some of the most spectacular gains for lesbian and gay equality have made in the labour movement.
The work of lesbian and gay groups in the Unions, which has been built on with the work of LCLGR in the Laand the subsequent success of non-payment (throughout Britain) which is the dominant strand.
In this respect Sheridan is reasonably objective and balanced, although it is noticeable how the debates inside the All-Britain Federation are often only referred to very obliquely; he clearly prefers to concentrate closer to home.
This is certainly an omission (possibly a diplomatic one) but not a great weakness. The universal lessons from the anti-poll tax struggle are not lost.
'Scottish turn'
Mass action key to lesbian and gay rights bour Party, is of fundamental significance to the future. It is ignored.
How does Stonewall Director Angela Mason (co-editor) think we got the votes of 210 Labour MPs for an equal age of consent a few months ago? Through constituents' letters in the weeks before, or through ten years of hard labour in the movement?
Coupled with this omission is the part played by the actions of masses. For the Stonewall Group's leaders, the mass demonstrations against Section 28 (for example) are walk-on parts for extras, to support the real work for equality, carried out by private meetings with the famous and powerful.
mass actions of the quarter-century in bringing about change, in influencing opinion, in raising consciousness and solidarity, is virtually written out of this history.
The omission is no accident. The undercurrent in the book is that the lesbian and gay future is FIGHT/o won by lobbying. It is biLESBIAN zarre that this argument GAY RIGHT is constructed under a title which celebrates a riot!
The whole tenor is one of achieving acceptance by integration into late twentieth century capitalist society, winning the votes of politicians for legal change, with the rest of the community kept waiting by their wordprocessors for the next letterwriting campaign.
Mass action But to end the oppression of lesbians and gay men requires fundamental social change, and to win that requires the participation of masses - of lesbians and gay men, and of the working class.
The strategy which underlies "Stonewall 25" is not new, even if it is more inclusive of lesbians and of black people than previous incarnations. Anyone following it is doomed to disappointment, as is anyone buying this book and hoping to read the inspiring story of lesbian and gay struggle in this land!