ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 analyzes the most recent “moment” of the gay movement in the United States: one characterized by the increased corporatization of the mainstream movement and its support of a domesticated and consumerist gay identity. These features emerge with the rise of flexible capitalism and neoliberalism: a set of economic and political arrangements put in place by economic and political elites in response to a crisis of profitability beginning in the late 1970s and that took shape over a decade and a half. These features involved subcontracting, outsourcing, contract employment and the spread of those features to sectors of work occupied by the once-secure middle class; all of this as public supports for welfare continued to erode. These changes left the financial markets and/or the family as individuals’ only options for “managing risks.” These changes registered in the movement as a focus on the “couple” or “the family” as the object of its “equal rights” discourse. The chapter illustrates this focus through an analysis of the campaign for same sex marriage during this period. For those members of the professional middle class advantaged by but still anxious in this neoliberal era, the movement supported a focus on cultural and consumer visibility as the main demonstration of gay identity.
