Introduction

Summary

The essential link between author and reader, no matter how great the time difference, is a common humanity, a common psychological makeup or generic consciousness, that grounds the intuitive ability to empathize with other persons.

David Couzens Hoy, The Critical Circle

I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group …; so long as we are divided because of our particular identities we cannot join together in effective political action.

Audre Lorde

Why this book?

It is a simple question, and often, simple questions have deceptively complex answers. My mentor on this project suggested that I should be able to summarize the objective and findings of this text in three sentences or less. Finally, somewhere nearing the end of this endeavor, I was able to convey what I had written. The following pages disclose a comparative study of the American and British gay and lesbian movements since the end of the Second World War. The aim is to discover in what ways these two social movements interact with governing structures, whether they be separation-of-powers or parliamentary-based, and how those systems influence the goals, strategies, and achievements of these movements. In so doing, I hoped to provide some useful insight into the evolution of social movement theory, its historical trends, and its future directions.

In essence the question boils down to two words: who wins? Are British queers in a better situation than American queers or vice versa? Through this work I attempted a strict social scientific undertaking, or so I had thought over three years ago when I began to research the project.