Connecting with Our Narrative Power: The LGBT Movement

It is no secret we are in the midst of the most intense and sustained rollback of basic rights, protections, and access to care. Some of us are already burnt out and on the verge of despair, and others are joining the fight for the first time. The strategies of the authoritarian playbook should now be familiar to everyone working towards change. First, villainize communities with the most to lose. Second, create social conditions that are so chaotic and unpredictable that any public space – a school, a clinic, a citizenship hearing in an immigration court – feels unsafe. Third, reverse any step towards a fairer society, sending the message that any movement gain is quickly undone and, therefore, not worth pursuing.

The reality is: our movements have accomplished so much in the past forty years that it is often easy to overlook or forget the impact they have made. A movement wins when the values and beliefs that animate it become a part of everyday life; social change moves in proportion to narrative power. Learning our movement history is both a discipline and an organizing tactic. In this blog post, we will highlight one of our movements’ most enduring effects. But first, there are a few things we should remember:

1) The authoritarian’s greatest strength is our inability, refusal, or hesitance to organize and act. Political leaders have explicitly stated that they aimto disorient the public with an onslaught of policy decisions designed to create chaos and a relentless stream of mis- and disinformation that suppress action.

2) Crises present opportunities to leverage all the power we have across the systems and institutions that make up our civic life. To reshape civic life, we must organize everywhere – our faith communities, our workplaces, our schools, our senior homes, our parks and community centers.

3) Division is a narrative, not reality. We have been listening and learning to rural and urban organizers throughout the country who are building powerful multiracial coalitions across geography and difference to broaden access to education, healthcare, and public transportation.

Key Narrative Shifts from the LGBT Movement

To change a narrative is to redirect the public’s moral compass towards values, ways of relating, and ways of imagining our collective future. In the past forty years, the narratives underlying our most effective and enduring movements have allowed them to weather devastating legislative losses, policy changes, and attacks to their integrity and purpose.

Every authoritarian movement has made policing relationships, families, and gender expression a key piece of its worldview. The opposition we face today is no different. In spite of the relentless attacks to LGBT people and rollbacks of hard-won policy gains, the LGBT movement’s narrative power is evident in the public conversation. Here are some enduring narrative shifts instigated by nearly half a century of organizing:

• Relationships can be based on love, desire, and choice. Historically, US laws criminalized same-sex relationships and life. Same-sex couples could not dance in public. Bars were not permitted to serve queer people, and intimate relationships between consenting adults were illegal in many states until 2003, when Lawrence v. Texas was struck down. The shift from criminalization to relationship recognition and public space for queer expression has been one of the most significant social changes in the past fifty years.

• People who are not heterosexual or cisgender can lead healthy, fulfilling lives and have families, too. Prior to the removal of “homosexuality,” from the DSM, people who were not straight could be forcibly detained in mental health facilities, which subjected them to physical and psychological torture. “Compulsory heterosexuality” was not only a social mandate; a monogamous heterosexual relationship with children was widely viewed as a marker of psychological health. Today it is common knowledge that young queer people who face ostracization and stigma are at greater risk of mental health outcomes. Parents who reject or abandon their children solely because they are queer or trans are viewed with contempt, rather than sympathy. People who are in loving partnerships, regardless of gender expression or relationship configuration, is largely viewed as something to celebrate, affirm, or, at the very least, leave alone.

• Reproduction is not the only acceptable purpose for sexual relationships. Sexual relationships require consent and consent is the key to bodily autonomy. The feminist and LGBT movements emerged at a time when consent was rapidly dismissed as a factor in assessing situations of sexual or domestic violence. The concept that someone has no “right” to another person’s body, even if the person is their spouse, is a relatively recent concept. Similarly, the idea that the parameters for consent are individual, valid, and require respect is a direct consequence of the destigmatization of queer life, relationships, and expression.

• People have the right to make choices about their bodies and the right to access to medical information and choices about procedures and drugs. Prior to the advent of HIV/AIDS activism, people were often not told the nature or prognosis of their illnesses, let alone treatment options. The physician’s authority to make decisions on behalf of the patient, specifically women, was the foundation of sound medical practice. The era of HIV/AIDS activism ushered in the idea that healthcare providers must center the needs, voices, and experiences of the patient, constitutes a radical shift that remains until today, even with the assaults on public health. That each person has the right to accurate knowledge about their condition and prognosis and the right to make medical decisions that affect their future is a widely accepted view.

We offer this reflection on the achievements of the LGBT movement, not to deny or minimize the formidable challenges of the current moment, but to encourage all of us, who are fighting for a more just world, to think bigger, broader, and further into the future than we currently are. Our daily work of strategizing and fighting cannot let us lose sight of how far we have come.