Stephen Engel to Talk About LGBT’s “Fragmented Citizens.”

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Author talk for Gay History Month:  Fragmented Citizens: The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives,  Thursday, October 20 at 7:00 p.m. at the Buena Vista Branch of the Burbank Public Library.

This is the first year LGBT history has been included in the curriculum of California high schools.  The library wanted to do something that would support the Burbank Unified School District as they implement this new standard.

They are hosting a program that we hope will be useful in explaining to teachers, students, and parents in the district exactly what gay history is, one that explores how it is similar to other late 20th Century civil rights movements, and how it differs.

Stephen Engel
Stephen Engel

Too often thought of as only pride parades and same-sex marriage, gay history has been very much involved with the major changes that have occurred in American society and politics over the last half century.   They wanted to find a speaker that had a broad perspective and who could put gay history in that larger context for a Burbank audience.

In the spring, a book was published that does exactly that.  In Fragmented Citizens:  The Changing Landscape of Gay and Lesbian Lives, Stephen Engel takes a broad overview of the major events and turning points in gay history in America.

Engel’s concern is less with presenting a record of historical events and more with explaining why they happened the way they did, of illuminating the dynamic forces that shaped and drove change.  He is interested in explaining how gay identity was formulated, how gay people became criminalized by law and governing institutions, and in tracing the slow process of disassembly of those formulations and laws in recent years.

The prism through which Engel looks at gay history is that of full citizenship in a democracy, how laws and institutions define what citizenship is and include or exclude people in a society from full citizenship.

Following the twists and turns of gay history illuminates in a larger sense the structure, institutions, and mechanisms of American political development in general.  As Engel shows, the disassembly of legal prescriptions and institutional policies is, because of the way our system of government in America is constituted, necessarily complicated and piecemeal.

fragmented-citzensAs change unfolds, local laws may be at variance with state laws, but consistent with federal laws; federal laws may conflict with state laws; state courts may decide similar issues based on different legal criteria and interpretations; federal courts may decide similar cases applying referencing different Constitutional criteria and leave those disparities unresolved as matters of Constitutional law.

Federal, state, and local agencies that administer policy may make varying interpretations of what they should do in all of these cases.  Policies may vary even within a single branch or level of government.    This is what has happened.  It is what gay people have experienced in their lives.  All of this has resulted in what for a generation of gay people has been a feeling of uncertainty about their legal status, their identity and rights as citizens.  They are a class of “fragmented citizens.”

This is the context in which gay history has unfolded, the landscape in which the quest for gay civil rights has taken place, and it explains some of the feeling of confusion that exists at the moment.  Engel will tell you where he thinks that history is headed.

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