ABSTRACT

“Sexual revolution” evokes images of sexual freedom, of sexuality released from societal expectations and sex acts as expressions of liberation; moments when sex is at the heart of social change with explicitly political intent. These were certainly aspects of the most profound sexual revolution of the twentieth century: the sexual revolution initiated in the 1960s and 1970s, within which both Gay Liberation and Radical Feminism were forged. Activists and counterculture liberationists theorized that sex was both a root cause of oppression and a vehicle to overthrow the old order. Their sexual revolution was imbued with the power to completely transform American society and simultaneously bring pleasure and fulfillment to the individual. Gay liberationists proclaimed:

We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature … 1

(Gay Liberation Front, Statement of Purpose, 1969) GLF activist, Allen Young elaborated:

The artificial categories “heterosexual” and “homosexual” have been laid on us by a sexist society … As gays, we demand an end to the gender programing which starts when we are born … The family … is the primary means by which this restricted sexuality is created and enforced … our understanding of sexism is premised on the idea that in a free society everyone will be gay.2

(1972) Women’s liberationist Anne Koedt explained the trappings of normative female sexuality:

Women have … been defined sexually in terms of what pleases men; our own biology has not been properly analyzed. Instead, we are fed the myth of the liberated woman and her vaginal orgasm – an orgasm which in fact does not exist.3

Anne Koedt The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, 1968 302When Gay liberationists sought to decouple sexual desire from gender performance, and embrace the polymorphous possibilities of human sexuality, they were peeling off layers of gendered scripts that had shaped the contours of normative desire since the late eighteenth century. When radical feminists centered their analysis of women’s oppression in the myth of the vaginal orgasm, which represented woman’s sexual subordination to man, their critique identified the centerpiece of women’s oppression in gendered sexualities first erected in the era immediately following the American Revolution.