Friday, 6 December 2019 at 9:00 am – Friday, 6 December 2019 at 6:45 pm

Stonewall 50 Years On: Gay Liberation & Lesbian Feminism in Europe

Date: Friday 6 December 2019 - Please book before 1st December 2019

Time: 9am - 6.45pm

Location:

Room JD T0.03
John Dalton Building
Chester Street
Manchester
M1 5GD

Tickets: Free - Available on Eventbrite

2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in New York, which began in the early hours of Saturday, 28 June 1969, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street defended themselves against police oppression. The Stonewall riots are often credited as the spark that set the gay liberation movement alight, not just in the United States, but around the Western world.

This one-day conference rethinks the movements that the riots supposedly spawned in a European context. Gay liberation was never a one-way flow from across the Atlantic. While the Gay Liberation Front, set up in late 1969 in New York, was an important catalyst for similar groups in Europe, activist innovations crossed the Atlantic in the other direction too. Rather than walking fully formed off New York’s Christopher Street, the European gay liberation movements that sprang up in the early 1970s were influenced by national events, or groups elsewhere on the continent. In particular, gay liberation was enabled by the upheavals associated with “1968”, even as activists struggled with the sexual politics of the New Left. We hope that placing individuals and movements in a European context will help to situate properly a phenomenon that has always crossed national borders, whilst offering an antidote to the overwhelming dominance of the American movement in gay, lesbian and queer historiography.

Co-organised with Dr Craig Griffiths, Dr Rebecca Jennings (UCL) and Dr Dan Callwood. Supported by the Past and Present Society and by the Royal Historical Society. The conference is organised in cooperation between the Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage and the Raphael Samuel History Centre.

This conference is supported by the Youth, Gender and Sexuality group of the History Research Centre.

Conference Programme

9.00 – 9.15 Tea and Coffee

9.15 – 9.30 Welcome and introductory remarks

9.30 – 11.00 Panel One – Protest Repertoires

Of Stone Walls and Pink Pillars. Gay and Lesbian Liberation in the Low Countries
Wannes Dupont (Yale-NUS College, Singapore)

‘We couldn’t mobilize the same enthusiasm as 11 years ago…’: Transnational Consciousness, Pride, and the Legacies of Stonewall in Denmark
Andrew Shield (Leiden University)

The Changing Face of Pride Events: Interrogating Trends and Changes in the Organisation of Pride Events in Europe
Francesca Romana Ammaturo (University of Roehampton)

11.00 – 11.15 Tea and Coffee

11.15 – 12.45 Panel Two – Transatlantic Exchanges

‘What’s Going on in America?’ The Dutch Response to Anita Bryant
Ann Marie Wilson (Leiden University College)

Black Power, Gay Power, and Transatlantic Liberation
Christopher Ewing (Virginia Commonwealth University)

‘Acting Up against the AIDS State?’ – The Anti-AIDS Movements, Transnational Grassroots Activism, and the Legacy of Stonewall in 1980s and 1990s France and West Germany
Kevin-Niklas Breu (University of Bremen)

12.45 – 1.45 Lunch

1.45 – 3.15 Panel Three – Emotions, Intimacies, Faith

Gay liberation on the line: London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard, 1974-1990
Ralph Day (Birkbeck, University of London)

The Liberation of Gay Christians in Europe
Richard O’Leary (Queen’s University Belfast)

The Ambivalence of Feeling Backward: Lesbian Activists in the German Democratic Republic and their Politics of Memory
Maria Bühner (University of Leipzig)

3.15 – 3.30 Comfort break

3.30 – 4.30 Panel Four – Text and Action

‘Combat pour la libération de la femme’: A manifesto at the verge of 1960s universalism and 1970s particularism
Vojin Saša Vukadinović

National and transnational influences on Dutch radical lesbian and gay groups
Nina Littel (Leiden University)

4.30 – 5.00 Tea and Coffee

5.00 – 6.00 Roundtable

Lucy Robinson (University of Sussex)

Matt Cook (Birkbeck, University of London)

Rebecca Jennings (University College London)

Dan Callwood

Craig Griffiths (Manchester Metropolitan University)

6.00 – 6.45 Wine reception