From the Closet to St. Mark’s Cathedral: Acts of Rage and Opacity within Queer Social Movements

Abstract

With every decade that society progresses, majority groups in the United States and internationally hail how much improvement has occurred for inclusion of minority groups into social, political and economic structures. However, despite these cries of progress, minority groups still suffer from normalized attitudes and expectations that push their experience and identities into the category of the abnormal, unnecessary or excessive. This thesis attempts to analyze the Co-cultural tactics utilized by queer movements during the early periods of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and situate that discussion within the broader context of a longer debate between strategies of rage and opacity for muted groups like queer individuals.