Asexual/Aromantic Concerns, Gay Spaces: Anti-Amatonormativity and the United Kingdom Gay Liberation Front
I call the disproportionate focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value and the assumption that romantic love is a universal goal, ‘amatonormativity’: This consists in the assumptions that a central, exclusive amorous relationship for humans is normal, in that it is a universally shared goal, and that such a relationship is normative, in that it should be aimed at in preference to other relationship types. [1]
Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Brake coined the term amatonormativity to describe the phenomenon, detailed above, that has come to saturate modern society. It is present in interpersonal relationships, the media, and institutions ranging from organized religion to the government, and for the growing group of people who choose to remain single rather than pursuing romantic relationships and love, or engage with alternative relationship models, it can have significant social, financial, legal, and other consequences.
While amatonormativity is not an explicitly or exclusively queer concern, it is closely tied to heteronormativity. Linguistically, it is modeled on this term, but the two share other qualities: both manifest on structural and personal levels; both have ties to gender roles and performativity; and both afford privilege to ‘exclusive, dyadic relationships’, which Brake describes as an ultimately ‘heterosexual ideal’. [2] Scholars within queer studies agree with this understanding of the traditional monogamous couple as heteronormative. John D’Emilio argues that ‘gay men and lesbians exist on social terrain beyond the boundaries of the heterosexual nuclear family’, which has been privileged as a unit due to capitalism, and states that ‘support for issues that broaden the opportunities for living outside traditional heterosexual family units’ should be a focus of queer activism. [3] These scholars demonstrate that amatonormativity, and connected concepts, have been a concern for many queer theorists since the early days of queer studies. Amatonormativity is also an issue for many contemporary queer activists. However, the relevance of amatonormativity to queer activism is also sometimes questioned, often as part of a larger debate about whether asexual and aromantic people and concerns belong in queer communities. [4] Additionally, the majority of scholarship addressing amatonormativity is related to asexuality and aromanticism.
In this essay, I will argue that amatonormativity has actually been a concern for queer activists for many years, looking specifically at the context of postwar London and the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a gay liberation group active in London between 1970 and 1973. [5] I will first examine GLF in its capacity as an overall organization, discussing how the group’s manifesto demonstrates a belief in and commitment to opposing amatonormativity. Next, I will explore the queer squatting movement, a loosely organized network of people occupying empty and typically derelict houses that was often underscored by ties to GLF, examining writings that describe living arrangements that similarly display anti-amatonormativity. [6] Finally, I will briefly explore one reason that GLF and associated squatting collectives incorporated anti-amatonormativity: their connection to the women’s liberation movement.
GLF and the Manifesto
GLF as an organization was founded in 1970 by Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter, two radical activists who had observed the successes of GLF in the United States and decided to form a similar group in the United Kingdom. GLF flourished in London and was responsible for organizing high-profile protests and social events in support of queer liberation in the early 1970s. [7] The group had splintered by 1973, but members went on to organize with other groups that were important to the gay rights movement in later years. [8]
In 1971, GLF published the Gay Liberation Front Manifesto. This document, which explicitly addressed a queer audience, laid out the group’s goals and philosophy and explained how and why ‘straight society relegates us to the position and treatment of sub-humans’, as well as ‘how we can use our righteous anger to uproot the present oppressive system with its decaying and constricting ideology, and how we, together with other oppressed groups, can start to form a new order’. [9] The manifesto lists ten specific sites of queerphobia—the family, schools, the church, the media, words, employment, the law, physical violence, psychiatry, and self-oppression—and details how these structural forces contribute to the overall subjugation of queer people. It then argues that true liberation from these forces ‘means a revolutionary change in our whole society’ rather than the incremental reforms of the past, which had made a few gains that were seen as insufficient by GLF. [10]
The manifesto concludes with a description of the ‘practical steps gay liberation will take to make this revolution’ but also details a second, equally important aspect of the queer liberation movement: queer people living ‘a new, liberated life-style which will anticipate, as far as possible, the free society of the future’. The manifesto argues that such lifestyles were just as important to achieving queer liberation as other forms of activism. According to the manifesto, achieving such a lifestyle includes discarding practices that the manifesto argues are adopted from straight culture and thus too oppressive to continue. Importantly, one of the forces named here is ‘compulsive monogamy’. [12] In part, the section about compulsive monogamy reads:
‘We do not deny that it is as possible for gay couples as for some straight couples to live happily and constructively together. We question however as an ideal, the finding and settling down eternally with one “right” partner. This is the blueprint of the straight world which gay people have taken over [...] and though we don't lay down rules or tell gay people how they should behave in bed or in their relationships, we do want them to question society's blueprint for the couple. The blueprint says “we two against the world”, and that can be protective and comforting. But it can also be suffocating.’ [13]
Though the section does not provide a definition for compulsive monogamy, it outlines a phenomenon that aligns with amatonormativity. While not opposed to individual monogamous romantic relationships, it opposes the couple as a pervasive societal ideal or blueprint, as it restricts queer people to a single relationship based on a limited and limiting homonormative model. Compulsive monogamy can also lead to issues in that single relationship, including codependence, hostility, and emotional dishonesty, and it treats relationships as a finite resource and those who want more than one as greedy, when the manifesto states that in reality, a variety of relationships contribute to leading a more well-rounded life. [14] This description is aligned with Brake’s definition of amatonormativity.
The manifesto also states that compulsive monogamy is counterintuitive to queer liberation because it can cause couples to feel a misplaced sense of security in the narrow confines of a homonormative lifestyle, thus leading them away from queer activism. Additionally, the mindset of relationship scarcity brought on by compulsive monogamy can prevent queer people from connecting with each other, which is necessary to fight back against the many forms of queerphobia. As the manifesto states:
We need one another more than straight people do, because we are equals suffering under an insidious oppression from a society too primitive to come to terms with the freedom we represent. Singly, or isolated in couples, we are weak - the way society wants us to be. Society cannot put us down so easily if we fuse together. We have to get together, understand one another, live together. [15]
The manifesto declares that queer connection outside of the blueprints provided by straight society is crucial to the overall project of queer liberation and that amatonormativity damages solidarity within queer communities. While this is not covered in scholarly writing on amatonormativity, it takes the application of amatonormativity to the queer community a step forward, connecting it to the struggle for queer liberation and demonstrating that the two are at odds with each other.
Overall, the GLF Manifesto demonstrates that amatonormativity was considered a pressing concern by GLF, one of the most prominent queer activist groups of the postwar period. Though they use the term compulsive monogamy rather than amatonormativity, they explain how the concept is homonormative, outline the problems with allowing amatonormativity to continue, and connect it to the ongoing fight for queer rights to argue that it should be eliminated from queer culture. However, GLF’s anti-amatonormativity was not confined to the pages of the manifesto. In the next section, I will discuss how queer squatters, many of whom were GLF members, incorporated amatonormativity into their alternative lifestyles.
Queer Squatters
Many members of GLF lived out the values that the group espoused in GLF group living arrangements, including communal squatting collectives. During the years that GLF was active, there were many vacant properties in Brixton, Hackney, and other London neighborhoods, and these were used by squatters from many marginalized and activist groups, including gay men and lesbians, many of whom ‘were not provided for in standard council accommodation designed around the nuclear family’. [16] Their housing arrangements enabled these queer people to create communities that demonstrated ‘how it might be possible [...] to live differently’ than traditional nuclear family and coupled units. [17] Many of these squatters published information about their collectives in Come Together, the GLF newspaper, which was assembled by members who attended the GLF’s Media Workshop. I will look at two examples of queer squatters’ words published in Come Together: first, ‘Fuck the Family’, a piece written by a woman named Carolyn about the collective to which she belonged that was published in Issue 7, and secondly, ‘Happy Families’, an essay in Issue 15 that introduces the Notting Hill GLF Commune.
In ‘Fuck the Family,’ Carolyn outlines that she lives in a collective with five other queer people, which did not begin as a collective. She recalls, ‘we intended to live closely of course, but as we all soon realised this was not enough. After about a week we decided to share all our clothes; these were moved into one big cupboard. We pooled our money for food, Tampax, toilet rolls and cat food [...] soon it was possible not to feel that a particular article belonged to anyone’. [18] She is open about the struggles involved with living communally, and admits that they are still working on sharing domestic labor, but emphasizes the ‘rewarding things that have happened to us’: ‘firstly, that we have virtually done away with the concept of monogamy, and secondly we now feel that we are living our politics [...] Plenty of people in the movement nod and twitch their agreement of this, but still escape to their cosy couples, their flats and get no closer to it's destruction, but rather aid it's perpetuation’. [19] She also notes that the ‘collective strength’ provided by the collective living arrangement has empowered herself and the other members to become more active, confident, and visible in the queer liberation movement. She concludes, ‘an outward movement is what we are striving for. Couples in bed sits will always be vulnerable to society's hostility in a way that a collective will not’. [20]
The members of the Notting Hill commune describe a similar scenario. They set out to set up a shared living environment rather than developing into one like Carolyn and her collective, but much like the collective, the commune’s members focused on ‘coming into the commune and sharing everything, our material possessions of course, our ideas, our energy, our minds and our bodies’. [21] The commune describes some struggles to overcome class and age divisions that have led to conflict and mesh as a group, and they also attribute some interpersonal issues to monogamy. They believe that monogamy leads to competition, which is antithetical to love, and after recounting one particular disagreement over sexual relationships, they declare, ‘the experience showed us once again that monogamous relationships do not work, just as they have not done for any of us in the past’. [22] Rather than traditional romantic relationships, they emphasize the importance of love and solidarity, which they see as closely tied. Like Carolyn and her collective, the commune describes that the commune has allowed them to live their values and feel that it has been an overall rewarding experience. They reflect: “Awareness is not just an intellectual diversion on Friday nights, it requires every ounce of feeling there is for every minute of every week, month, year of life. We have found marvellous ways of opening up to our senses and keeping in touch with our feelings, the more we learn about each other in the commune, the higher we get’. [23] They emphasize that communal living has allowed them to extend their politics beyond weekly meetings and into the everyday.
Both of these groups formed living arrangements that countered amatonormativity, and their writing reveals that they were aware of and actively working against this force. Both pieces emphasize the elimination of monogamy. Both also illustrate the ways that amatonormativity is counterintuitive to queer liberation and alternatives contribute to it in three distinct ways. Firstly, Carolyn reflects on the collective strength that comes from a shared living arrangement, which has helped the members take on greater activist roles. Secondly, rather than these living arrangements providing the comfortable domesticity that leads couples to withdraw from activism, they instead allow their members to live out the values that they hold in every aspect of their lives. Instead of simply being conceptual or connected only to their actions with groups like GLF, they are connected to their personal lives and practices as well. Finally, rather than problems festering in these relationships, as the GLF Manifesto suggests will happen in amatonormative relationships, the members of these shared living arrangements demonstrate that they are comfortable with conflict and are working to address those that arise, as well as interrogating the underlying forces that lead to conflict.
Lastly, the collective and commune embody expanded ideas about care. These groups provide significant care to each other, from the practical (such as Carolyn and the members of her collective pooling money for household goods) to the emotional (like the increased emotional intelligence gained from being in community in the Notting Hill commune). This proposal is directly aligned with another portion of Brake’s argument, which proposes that marriage should not be considered the primary relationship of care in society. She explains that one of the many arguments in favor of marriage is that marriages are characterized as involving care, a combination of ‘emotion and action’ that ‘comingles caring about, taking a benign interest in someone, and caring for, acting to meet her needs and promote her well-being’. [24] Care can be a valuable, even radical act, but in an amatonormative society, ‘the caring that goes on within marriage and families is the only caring that truly counts’. [25] The privilege afforded to marriage over other relationships that involve care jeopardizes people’s ability to form and maintain these other caring relationships, and overlooks the fact that not all marriages do involve care. These groups demonstrate this value by expanding caring relationships beyond the boundaries of marriage and into their collective and commune, as well as by giving their arrangements visibility by writing in a venue like Come Together.
Countercultural Ties
Both GLF as an organization and, as a result, members of GLF who belonged to shared squats, had ties to other radical activist movements of the time period. GLF ‘attracted, amongst others, people with a background in resistance to the Vietnam war, black rights, women’s liberation, the underground press, [...] a wide variety of other leftist groups including Maoists, the drugs culture, transsexuals, and rent boys’, and members with ties to these groups carried those experiences to group living arrangements that they joined, often with links to GLF. [26] In particular, GLF was closely tied to women’s liberation. This is demonstrated in the Manifesto, which includes the importance of partnership with feminists to GLF: ‘we will work to form a strategic alliance with the women's liberation movement, aiming to develop our ideas and our practice in close inter-relation’. [27] The inclusion of women’s liberation, but not any other liberation movements, can be seen as an oversight; perhaps GLF did not prioritize racial, economic, and other types of justice enough. However, it can also be seen as an endorsement of GLF’s ‘anti-sexist and pro-feminist politics’. [28] The manifesto also directly connects these ties to women’s liberation with anti-amatonormativity, describing, ‘the abolition of the family and gender roles is also a necessary condition of women's liberation’. [29] While I am not arguing that women’s liberation or gay liberation necessarily originated anti-amatonormative ideas or practices, an exchange between the two movements is clear and important to discuss. Feminists and queer people demonstrated anti-amatonormativity in similar ways in their actions and writings.
Communal squatting was common for feminist women; it ‘provided the framework for an extensive network of women-only housing, together with social and political spaces’ where collectives of feminists supported each other’s political and practical needs, from domestic labor to consciousness-raising. [30] These arrangements demonstrate a rejection of the amatonormative couple and family models, particularly as many of these women had left behind hetero and amatonormative partnerships to join these collectives, as well as collective care that is anti-amatonormative in the same way as queer squatting communes. For example, one feminist squatter, who lived with a lesbian couple and their child, described that she ‘got very involved with that child’s life and became a kind of third mum to her’, which inspired her to do the same with other women’s children. [31] This care, which is freely shared, uncoupled from gender norms, and inspired by a shared solidarity and political alignment rather than obligation based on hetero- or amatonormativity, provides an important contrast to amatonormative models, which devalue any care that takes place outside of a marriage and associated nuclear family.
Writings from the women’s liberation movement also reflect anti-amatonormativity. For example, Spare Rib, a feminist magazine collectively produced by feminists between 1972 and 1993, [32] frequently published critiques of amatonormativity; issue 5 included an article titled ‘Family Everafter’, which asked, ‘Is [the nuclear family] the only and best way of organising the political centre of our lives?’ [33] Its author, Michelene Wandor, concludes that the answer is no, due to the many conflicts and problems that tend to occur within the nuclear family and the social coercion that leads most people to enter marriages. She states that there are many options for moving past amatonormativity, from truly egalitarian marriages to communal living arrangements, but emphasizes the importance of changing the status quo. While she acknowledges that change can be ‘traumatic and damaging,’ she continues that ‘it is important to realise that it is the extreme, violent isolation of the family unit which forces people to break out of it with violence so that its members can define for themselves their own lives, relationships, and identities’. [34] These threads of thought are evident in the reflections on shared living arrangements published in Come Together, who have reached the same conclusion about the unsustainability of amatonormative relationships and begun to experiment with alternatives. Additionally, this writing shares a focus on persevering through the difficulties of change in order to achieve radical change.
One crucial difference between this piece in Spare Rib and the writings from Come Together is that Wandor focuses on women's oppression through amatonormativity, writing that ‘I've said little about the ways in which men [...] are oppressed by the family’ because ‘men have some compensations’, including their jobs, defined social roles, and ‘established structures within which to make complaints and demands’. [35] This conflicts with the Come Together pieces, which do include men. Carolyn’s collective included one male member, while the Notting Hill commune consisted entirely of men, and the writers do not differentiate between men and women when discussing their groups’ desire to move beyond amatonormativity. It is treated as a shared concern and shared goal regardless of gender. This also differs from scholarly writing on amatonormativity. For example, Brake acknowledges that certain marginalized groups—including women—are the most impacted by the force of amatonormativity, it also has serious impacts on men: ‘usbands face social pressure to undertake an impersonally defined male provider role, and entry into marriage could be a point for defying these gender role expectations rather than simply internalizing them’. [36] For marginalized men, these effects can be even stronger. For example, Leonard Justin Clardy argues that for polyamorous African American men, amatonormativity is particularly strong and can cause increased isolation and limit agency. [37] It is also in conflict with many feminist practices, in which providing for children was an important part of feminist solidarity, as detailed above. Though these are significant omissions for Spare Rib, the publication still clearly demonstrates that the thread of amatonormativity is consistent between feminist groups and squatting collectives.
Conclusion
Amatonormativity has been a concern for queer activists since the beginning of the gay liberation movement. The Gay Liberation Front expressed its anti-amatonormativity in its manifesto, exposing amatonormativity as an import from straight culture and calling for the abolition of the couple and family norms. Collectives of squatters, many of whom were connected with GLF, lived out this value by practicing radical shared living arrangements and collective care. Anti-amatonormativity was also a shared value with the women’s liberation movement, who similarly called for the elimination of nuclear families and traditional couples and engaged in communal living. This shows that amatonormativity is not only a concern of theorists, or of modern-day asexual and aromantic activists; instead, it has been a thread through gay liberation from the roots of the movement.
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