Why the U.S. lags Europe.

Capozzola, Christopher

The Unfinished Revolution: Social Movement Theory and the Gay and Lesbian Movement

by Stephen M. Engel

Cambridge University Press. 231 pages, $60. ($22. paper)

STEPHEN M. Engel presents us with a puzzle. Social movements in support of lesbian and gay rights formed earlier in the United States, have had larger budgets and membership rolls, and have been more innovative and influential in their strategies and tactics than movements in other countries. Yet, Engel points out, greater victories have been achieved in countries like Britain, which decriminalized homosexual relations in 1967 and recently opened the ranks of its military to openly lesbian and gay soldiers. Stephen Engel uses the U.S. and the UK to account for this divergence of political outcomes, and the solution to this tantalizing puzzle would surely shake up the worlds of political activism and academic social science. But despite its many fine insights, The Unfinished Revolution remains an unfinished explanation.

The Unfinished Revolution is remarkable for the elegance of its intellectual architecture. Engel takes readers though a comparative history of lesbian and gay movements in the U.S. and Britain. The movement culture that developed in the U.S. after Stonewall in 1969 drew from groundwork laid years before by groups like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis. AIDS derailed the movement, but also invigorated it and focused people's energies in new ways; the 1990's saw defensive action against right-wing attacks. In the UK, by contrast, there were few homophile organizations in the years after World War II, and the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalized male homosexuality, was a top-down solution meant to put an end to, rather than open up, gay activism. Lesbian and gay subcultures developed in Britain in the 1970's, but Engel argues that Britons did not achieve what he calls "cognitive liberation" until 1988, following the adoption of Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which told local g overnments that they "shall not intentionally promote homosexuality." So the paradox is that Americans fought more and longer and got less, while the British have achieved more with less, sometimes without even asking.

Engel gives two explanations for this puzzle, and the first--which focuses on the institutional structures in the two countries--is the better one. This is the book's sharpest and most significant contribution, although the insight will not astonish those who have kept their lecture notes from Comparative Politics 101. American politics is wildly diffuse, with multiple entry points across the legislative, executive, and judicial systems, and local, state, and national governments. This allows for experimentation and many victories, as residents of San Francisco and Vermont can tell you. But more important in Engel's account are the U.S. system's multiple veto points, where political initiatives can easily bog down or be killed. By contrast, British politics is highly centralized: the Prime Minister and the majority of Parliament are of the same party, the courts cannot overrule their work, and party discipline keeps the whole system rigidly in line. This led to remarkable victories for lesbian and gay Britons under Labour governments in the 1960's and the late 1990's. But hold off on buying that one-way ticket to London. In the 1980's, Margaret Thatcher and the Conservatives were no more sympathetic to gay rights than Reagan and Bush--and the country's centralized power structure left few alternatives. In sum, then, institutions don't quite determine the outcome, but they do matter. And nothing beats a centralized government system controlled by a party that's sympathetic to the gays.

Makes sense, right? If Engel had stopped there, he would have produced a long article worthy of a top journal in sociology or political science, where his elegant schematic diagrams would have earned many nods of approval. But what follows in the next section of The Unfinished Revolution is a rambling and intellectually sloppy chapter in which he seems determined to undo the reader's confidence in the model he just constructed. Wait, he says, what about culture? New social movements have not ignored the ways that media and social institutions exercise social power. In fact, many of the gains in gay and lesbian equality have come in the realm of popular culture. True enough, but this leads Engel into a dangerous thicket. He doesn't claim that the significance of culture disproves his political model, but rather that the model must be "augmented" with attention to culture. So he draws another diagram, but this time it has a great big circle around it with the word "culture" floating vaguely in the middle. Then come a handful of references to Dawson's Creek, some poorly selected data on national attitudes, and before you know it Engel has draped the whole thing in a gauzy postmodern agnosticism: "no one theory is able to elucidate all aspects of these events." You don't have to be a social scientist to know that something has just gone terribly wrong.

Engel is not the first scholar to grapple with the question of culture in contemporary social movements, and, given social scientists' unhealthy passion for parsimony, his skeptical conclusion that there are no easy answers is a bracing tonic. It will also make sense to activists in lesbian and gay movements on both sides of the Atlantic, who will continue to frustrate politicians and academics as they seek to make equality a reality in both the political and cultural realms.

Christopher Capozzola is an assistant professor of history at MIT.