Third World Liberation Versus Lesbianism: Sexuality, Feminism, and the Antiwar Movement

In the spring of 1971, hundreds of U.S. and Canadian female activists gathered in Vancouver and Toronto to attend the Indochinese Women’s Conferences.  Some North American anti-war protestors had previously traveled to Viet Nam.  However, the 1971 conferences represented the first opportunities for large numbers of American and Canadian women to meet with women from Southeast Asia who were engaged in anti-colonial struggles for national liberation.     
    Although the Canadian conferences held the promise of promoting a sense of global sisterhood, numerous conflicts emerged at the gathering along the lines of generational, political, racial, and national differences.  My presentation will focus on the tensions surrounding lesbianism.  The demand to raise awareness about lesbianism and heterosexism was peaking more broadly in the women’s movement in the early 1970s.  At the Indochinese Women’s Conferences, opponents of discussing lesbianism castigated this issue as a white western women’s issue and not relevant to either the Indochinese women or the women of color in North America.  This paper, which is based upon documentary research and oral histories, will examine how this conflict between third world liberation and lesbianism emerged and how organizers and attendees understood their sexuality in relation to their gender, racial, national, and political identities.  
    Scholars of the “Sixties” have tended to view the end of the decade as one of fragmentation and decline as a variety of identity-based movements based on race, gender, and sexuality emerged.  However, those who are more sympathetic to these late 1960s movements have pointed to the rich political fermentation and accomplishments of this era.  My presentation seeks to examine how female activists who were mobilized by a variety of social causes sought to fashion their personal and political identities as they engaged in a global antiwar movement.