Human Rights and the Normal Homosexual

The burgeoning historiography on human rights sometimes notes the significant bearing of transnational social movements in the 1970s on the increasing coherence and prominence of the term in that decade, but rarely examines the influence of transnational gay activism. In response, this paper considers some of the complications faced by 1970s gay activists in the West to making their sex lives and sexual identities part of a developing human rights agenda. It also thinks about the difficulties encountered by historians today in attempting to join dots between notions of sexuality and humanity in an era before Human Rights Watch became an established (though controversial) institutional locus of the “Gay International.” In particular, the paper asks whether—in the unfolding human rights context of the 1970s—the notion of the “normal homosexual” might have been a more radical tool for gay politics than it now appears by implying a basic (but unassumed) humanity, or whether it remained inherently reactionary, marginalizing, and (projected globally) imperialistic. As a way into this tricky territory, the paper tracks a longer trajectory of aspiring normality through the transnational homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s, examining its import to making rights claims with potential to transcend particular jurisdictions, while exploring the problems of invoking the normal across national contexts in the past and now.