Chapter 15 - Sexual Rights

Summary

Gay, lesbian, and trans rights movements had similar social, cultural, and political goals, the latter of which included changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm, goals which are sought both in the civil and political spheres. The AIDS epidemic in the 1980s marked a new era for gay political activism and the emergence of lesbian direct action groups, such as Lesbian Avengers (1992). In the UK, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986, which banned mention of homosexuality in schools, sharpened the need for political organising and resistance. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Gender Recognition Act (2004) in the UK restored some of the rights lost to trans people in the previous century. This chapter explores the relationship between late twentieth-century literature and sexual rights. It asks what a book can do to advance the political case for sexual rights, as well as showing how a book might provide a much-needed textual space for self-imagining and self-determination, for the sexual or gender minority subject literally written out of the socio-cultural and political mainstream.