ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter focuses on the complex entwinement of sexual identity-politics and sexuality struggles for freedoms that emerged in the latter part of the twentieth century to the ongoing challenges, political movements and identity claims that minority sexual groups continue to experience in the early twenty-first century. The chapter primarily draws upon the experiences of sexual minorities in the United States and Western Europe due to the initial emergence of documented sexual politics within these locals. However, through the chapter’s approach it will become clear to the reader that claims around specific sexual identities, rights movements or historical events have to be understood through the specifity of geographical location, time, culture and the intersection of other identities present. This chapter will examine the important historical and intellectual developments which gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements gave birth to during the 1960s and 1970s. It will then move to discuss the advent of the HIV and AIDS crisis in the 1980s and the emergence of queer activism in the late 1980s and 1990s, in so doing the major claims and developments, and the contributions that queer political action provided in understandings of sexual identities, will be examined. The successes of the assimilationist agenda and normalising discourses in the late 1990s and early twenty-first century provide further analysis of current politicised claims and developments. Contributions made by the assimilationist agenda for understandings of ‘sexual citizenship’, particularly in the global north, will also be drawn upon. The main criticisms that can be framed around each of these key sexual minority movements will then be presented. In concluding, the chapter will offer an insight into future developments for sexual identities suggesting that citizenship rights struggles and gains in the global north, although potentially beneficial to many lesbians, gay men and heterosexuals, must not eclipse the material realities of those excluded from such ‘gains’ within the global north or the growing identity movements and right-wing backlash to lesbian and gay ‘rights’ and identities in the global south.
