Review | Eros and Empire

A new book looks back at radical struggles which combine fighting for queer liberation with opposing imperialism, writes Colin Wilson.

Trans and other queer people are under attack around the world. In Britain, the Supreme Court has ruled that trans women aren’t women; under Trump, 850 anti-LGBT bills have been proposed this year so far, many targeting trans people; in Hungary, the government has banned Pride marches, and plans to use facial recognition to identify anyone who defies the ban. There’s an urgent need to understand how LGBTQ+ oppression operates, and what political strategies are most effective in opposing it. Alex Stoffel’s new book, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States, looks back at the history of radical LGBTQ+ organising in the US since Stonewall, and sets out some broader analysis of the interactions between capitalism, the state, the family and sexuality. It makes an important contribution to the discussions we currently need to have.

Three chapters of the book look back at radical currents within LGBTQ+ organising since the Stonewall rebellion, distinguishing them from moderate, assimilationist strategies. (If you find the introduction tough going, start here.) Stonewall itself was inseparable from the broader struggles of the late 1960s – as trans activist Sylvia Rivera put it, ‘all of us were working for so many movements at the time. Everyone was involved with the women’s movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement.’ Many of the people in the Stonewall that night in 1969 were people of colour, trans people and/or sex workers. They fought oppression and the cops as black people in cities across the US had been doing since the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles in 1965 – after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, uprisings took place in over 100 cities.

The movement that emerged from Stonewall, Stoffel documents, actively supported struggles for racial justice. One of the first actions of gay liberation in New York was to support a demo called by the Black Panthers, the revolutionary black organisation. In June 1970 marchers marking the first anniversary of Stonewall chose a route which passed by the Women’s House of Detention, where Panthers were held prisoner, chanting ‘Free Our Sisters! Free Ourselves!’ Groups like the Panthers were not just calling for black people to gain equality as US citizens. They understood themselves to be part of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles going on around the world – to oppose US imperialism in Vietnam and to align themselves with national liberation movements in what was then called the Third World, as in the name of the group Third World Gay Revolutionaries. The organisation established after Stonewall was called the Gay Liberation Front, echoing the National Liberation Fronts which fought the US in Vietnam and the French colonisers in Algeria.

Around six months after Stonewall, the movement split, with some activists leaving to form the Gay Activists Alliance or GAA. GAA continued with high-profile actions which were radical for this period, but the split reflected important political differences. GAA distanced themselves from the black revolutionaries and trans people who had been part of, or worked with, GLF. Rather than forming part of a global rebellion against US imperialism, GAA wanted the US state to grant queer people equality with straights. That strategy implied recognising the state as legitimate, and also implied what has since become common sense for many – that LGBTQ+ people are a fixed group resembling an ethnic minority, with our ‘gay villages’ and ‘gaybourhoods’ resembling ethnic enclaves like a Little Italy or a Chinatown. Prominent GLF members on the West Coast went further, proposing a gay ‘homeland’ or ‘colony’ in rural California, a politics all too close to Zionism which thankfully never came to anything.

This view of queer people as a fixed minority of citizens wasn’t shared by more radical activists. Authors such as Denis Altman used the term ‘gay’ to refer to sexual liberation rather than just same-sex acts or relationships. The Gay Revolution Party sought a world ‘in which all social and sensual relationships will be gay and in which homo- and heterosexuality will be incomprehensible terms.’ Gay was about ‘the subversion of the existing order of things’ and not just a ‘sexual orientation’.

Stoffel also describes the radical voices of black lesbian feminists from the 1970s, such as the members of the Combahee River Collective and the writer and poet Audre Lorde. Many women left gay liberation early on because they found it male-dominated, while many black feminists felt that women’s liberation didn’t address their concerns – feminists stressed that women could be more than suburban housewives, but black men were seldom paid enough to support a family, so black women had always had to do paid work rather than remain at home. White women’s struggles to control their bodies included getting access to contraception and abortion – black women faced eugenics and forced surgical sterilisation. Black women faced attacks from the state different from those made on white women – Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Moynihan, for example, wrote in report in 1965 claiming that black disadvantage was caused by the typically dysfunctional black family, a ‘tangle of pathologies’ in which women took on a deviant, matriarchal role. Some radical feminists echoed this racism against black women, such as the transphobic Mary Daly in her influential book Gyn/Ecology, which referred to non-European women only in terms of abusive practices like genital mutilation or foot-binding. 

Black feminists, like radical gay liberationists, saw liberation in an international context – Lorde developed links with South African, Australian and Māori women, and travelled to Grenada, where she saw imperialist violence at first hand when the US invaded in 1983. Women in this tradition rejected a strategy that centred on appealing to the state as a ‘good American’ – in the words of activist and author Pat Parker, ‘Good American equals Support Imperialism and war’.

Stoffel’s final example is that of radical AIDS activists in the 1980s and 90s. By 1991 around 100,000 people had died of the disease in the US. Federal, state and city governments frequently refused to take action which would have saved thousands of lives, such as distributing clean needles for injecting drug users, or making condoms available – instead, they argued for ‘saying no’ to drugs and abstaining from sex. Race was again an issue. AIDS is often thought of as a disease of gay men – implicitly, white gay men – but by 1985 most people with AIDS in New York City weren’t white, and by 1988 this was true of the US as a whole.

ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, developed branches in over 140 cities and fought for a better response to the disease. Most members were white and male, though many lesbians and straight women were also involved. Members often had previous experience as reproductive rights activists – including black feminists opposing sterilisation abuse – and in the women’s movement, the Panthers and the movement against the Vietnam War. Some member developed cosy relationships with the powers that be, but as with early gay liberation and black lesbian feminists, radicals saw their activism in the context of US imperialism – in New York, ACT UP stormed major news broadcasters during the 1991 Gulf War with banners reading ‘Money for AIDS, not for war’.

Radical ACT UP members rejected notions of respectable homosexuality – core members of Act Up NY founded APAL, the AIDS Prevention Action League, which organised educational sex parties involving ‘450 men of different races, shapes, ages and classes coming together in a model of supportive, safer public sex in the face of city harassment’. And ideas of gay men and lesbians as fixed minorities became less certain as intimacy, friendship and activism mixed. Marion Banzhaf recalled, ‘Adam Hassuk and I started fucking partly so I could learn how to do safer sex and practice, make my theory real… I didn’t think it made me not a lesbian any more because I was having sex with this man.’

As well as these histories, Stoffel provides a Marxist account of sexuality and desire, providing a useful guide to recent writing on these topics. A key issue here is the role of the state. The state enforces social norms, for example through the border regime or by criminalising queer or trans people – yet at the same time the state claims to be universal, impartial as regards class, race or sexuality. The 1950s US state persecuted queer people – but capitalism also created anonymous cities ruled by the free market where it was possible for queer populations to gather, and this contradiction created the context for Stonewall. Meanwhile, the state supported the creation of a suburban, heterosexual lifestyle to which consumerism – the car, the TV, the domestic appliances – was central, but from which racialised and queer people were excluded.

In response to this, radical gay liberation was not about liberating a repressed sexuality which had been inborn in each of us. It sought sensual pleasure in all areas of life, undermining distinctions such as those between female and male, or work and home. But, once those demands had been detached from political revolution, reduced to calls for personal liberation, they posed no threat to a neoliberalism which commodifies sexual pleasure, and can absorb sexualities which claim to be subversive.

The good news now is that, despite the attacks on queer people from the right, the post-war family is in decline, with ever-increasing numbers identifying as LGBTQ+, rising divorce rates, more people living singly, fewer people having children and more kinds of informal partnership. Another world is not only possible but developing, and this book can help us fight for it.

Alexander Stoffel, Eros and Empire: The Transnational Struggle for Sexual Freedom in the United States, Stanford University Press, 2025