Martyrdom and American Gay History: Secular Advocacy, Christian Ideas, and Gay Assimilation

Abstract

Martyrdom and American Gay History: Secular Advocacy, Christian Ideas, and Gay Assimilation" is an analysis of gay martyr discourses from the 1970s through 2014. In particular, the dissertation examines the archives, narrative representations, memorials, and media depictions of Harvey Milk, Matthew Shepard, Tyler Clementi, and AIDS. The project's primary focus is to investigate the role of religious rhetoric in facilitating American gay assimilation. Discourses of gay martyrdom reveal that secular gay advocates habitually employed Protestant Christian ideas in order to present gay Americans as similar to the dominant culture of straight Christians, a strategy that became increasingly prevalent by the end of the twentieth century after gays were blamed for spreading a national plague through sexual licentiousness. In turn, discourses of gay martyrdom expose the recurrence of Christian ideas in promoting, while concurrently foreclosing, the parameters of gay social inclusion. "Martyrdom and American Gay History" also questions the politics of martyrdom and analyzes why some deaths have been mourned as national tragedies. Milk, Shepard, and Clementi, the three most commonly-invoked gay martyrs, represent a narrow fraction of gay Americans that only includes white, middle-class, gay men. The dissertation demonstrates that discourses of gay martyrdom have promoted assimilation, not diverse sexual freedoms or capacious possibilities for queer lives. Ultimately, Protestant Christian dominance in the United States has been obfuscated whenever Christianity has been depicted primarily as an antigay monolith. Discourses of gay martyrdom reveal the role of Protestant Christian dominance in secular gay advocacy, and the ways in which Christian ideas have shaped and foreclosed possibilities for acceptable gay American citizens.