UCLA Center for the Study of Women

This paper began as an investigation into a violent yet relatively obscure police raid on “Blues,” a gay bar in midtown Manhattan frequented by “black gays and transvestites” on September 29, 1982.1 I focus on the virtually-unstudied political thought and activism of two of the groups coordinating the response to the raid: Dykes Against Racism Everywhere (DARE) and the NY chapter of Black and White Men Together. Although LGBT historians have characterized the radical moment of gay liberation as decisively “over” by the mid 1970s, this assessment eclipses an extraordinary proliferation of queer of color activist, artistic, and social groups in the latter half of the decade.2 As such, the historiographical aspirations of this paper are twofold: First, I have attempted to heed Roderick Ferguson’s admonition that queer studies’ fixation on Foucault has “driven conversations about sexual formations… away from considerations of race” and elided women of color feminism as an alternative genealogy for theorizing racialized sexuality.3 Second, my project is conversation with an important and growing body of scholarship on what Lisa Duggan has termed “homonormativity.”