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While lesbianism formed a central part of the development of second wave feminist politics and ideas, there was also an emerging sociology of homosexuality, which was influenced by feminist ideas, but developed in distinct ways because of its focus on sexuality per se, rather than gender. Moreover, as with their often uncertain position in women’s groups, lesbians often found the developing gay liberation groups male- dominated and insensitive to gender difference and inequality. Thus, much of the early sociology of homosexuality reflects concerns about male homosexuality or gay identity, and, as demonstrated above, much of the academic energy of lesbian analysis remained within and transformed radical feminism.

In his excellent summary, Seidman (1996) describes the sociology of sexuality as a history of homosexuality and, often, male homosexuality. He argues that the impact of sexology and Freudian ideas at the end of the nineteenth century served to justify the status quo of heterosexuality as a ‘natural’ and inevitable state of affairs. Although some lesbian and gay organizations existed around the mid- twentieth century, these were relatively small and often argued for reform on the basis of sexological and psychological models that located homosexuality as innate conditions. This essentialism did not provide a basis for arguing that homosexuality was valid, it merely supported the view that those suffering from it had no conscious control over it, and therefore should be helped rather than criminalized. However, just as feminists had begun to react to sexological/psychological essentialism and the overwhelmingly oppressive gender ideology in the post- war period, so too do we begin to see the emergence of a more radical homosexual politics and movement, the beginning of which is often pinpointed as a riot at the Stonewall bar in New York City, in June 1969 [9].

As with feminist politics, the particular historical circumstances of late 1960s radical politics provided a training ground and context for gay liberation. One British activist recalls:

GLF [the Gay Liberation Front] brought together politics which had been flowering in the social movements of the sixties and other political ideas which had lain dormant for many years. The immediate inspirations were the Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation Movements, combined with the style of the counter culture…. For lesbians and gay men as individuals it meant coming out and taking pride in being gay, making the personal political, and trying to live out our ideals. It meant too, challenging the roles of the heterosexual nuclear family and the ideal of monogamy. (Birch, 1988: 51–2)

In academic terms, this explosion of a new positive claim for gay identity inspired an emergent sociology of homosexuality, with newly out and confident lesbian and gay researchers turning their gaze to their own identities, drawing on existing sociological concepts and theories. In a significant article published in 1968, the British sociologist Mary McIntosh argued that homosexuality should be understood as a social role which served to normalize mainstream behaviour: ‘The creation of specialized, despised, and punished role of homosexual keeps the bulk of society pure in rather the same way that the similar treatment of some kinds of criminals helps keep the rest of society law- abiding’ (1996 [1968]: 35). McIntosh is drawing on a sociological perspective known as labelling theory, which had developed as a way of exploring how certain behaviours came to be labelled as deviant and how stigmatized deviant identities were constructed. In doing so, she demonstrated that the stigma attached to homosexuality arises from social control, rather than in response to some essential psychological, natural or moral deficiency.

Sociological studies of deviance, informed by a perspective known as symbolic interactionism, focused on the socially defined meanings of human actions negotiated through interaction with others. This emphasis was also apparent in John Gagnon and William Simon’s pioneering book on the social sources of human sexuality, Sexual Conduct, published in the USA in 1973. Having worked at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in the USA in the 1960s – which had already produced data that suggested human sexual orientation could be seen as a continuum – Gagnon and Simon produced a theory of ‘sexual scripts’, which turned attention to the ways in which sexual interactions were socially shaped, much as all other interaction, through a combination of learned behaviour and cultural codes (see Ch. 9.4) In doing so, they resolutely challenged the dominant psychological and biological essentialism of the time:

We have allowed the organs, orifices, and the gender of the actors to personify or embody or exhaust nearly all the meanings that exist in the sexual situation. Rarely do we turn from a consideration of the organs themselves to the sources of the meanings that are attached to them, the ways in which the physical activities of sex are learned, and the ways in which these activities are integrated into larger social scripts and social arrangements, where meaning and sexual behaviour come together to create sexual conduct. (Gagnon and Simon, 1974: 5)

Ken Plummer, a British sociologist, took up this perspective in his empirical study of homosexuality, Sexual Stigma (1975). Plummer argued that using a symbolic interactionist perspective allowed us to understand homosexuality as an identity that is created by the social and interactional reaction to it, and that these provide the ‘scripts’ – or cultural codes – through which individual homosexual identity is created, inhabited and regulated. Plummer characterized different stages in homosexual identity: sensitization, signification and coming out, each of which depends on the meanings available to make sense of individual feelings. In the first stage an internal sense of homosexual experience develops, usually in relation to feeling different from prevailing heterosexual gender expectations, and then a negotiation of those feelings occurs within the immediate cultural and interpersonal context with a final resolution of coming out – an acceptance and creation of a new identity or role as homosexual.

The achievement of labelling and interactionist perspectives has been to reject essentialist ideas by challenging the notion that homosexuality is simply a psychological flaw, and to redefine purportedly ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ sexual behaviour as socially defined and learned. These theorists began the process of bringing homosexuality into the realm of the sociological, by insisting on the importance of the social meanings of sexuality and sexual identities, exploring how those meanings are socially constructed and investigating the social purposes they serve. They also made us aware that sexual interaction is not simply a natural response, but is as cultural and social as any other behaviour. One of the criticisms levelled at these theories, however, is their lack of attention to the structural aspects of society with which particular cultural meanings are associated and, in particular, to material social conditions and inequalities. It is here that analyses of the capitalist socio- economic order could be seen as illuminating the structural underpinnings of traditional scripts of marriage, monogamy and domesticity and the newly emergent commercial sub- culture of gay bars and clubs in which positive gay scripts were being constructed.