One of the panels this week during the Conversations program at Art Basel in Miami Beach is titled “Stonewall at 50: What Now?” Moderated by Stuart Comer, chief curator of the Department of Media and Performance at The Museum of Modern Art, the panel will explore, among other issues, whether LGBTQIA+ culture has been “normalized,” and if so what that means for the community. The following conversation took place earlier this fall and included Comer and three of the artists appearing on the panel: AA Bronson, Carlos Motta and Sharmistha Ray. What appears below is only an excerpt from a longer, wider conversation, but it encapsulates well the intelligence and rich insights of the conversation’s panelists on this subject.

Edward Winkleman: So the first question for everyone is do you agree that, in a general sense, the LGBTQIA+ culture has been ‘normalized’ or ‘sanitized’?

AA Bronson: Are we talking only about the U.S.? That’s kind of what it sounds like here.

EW: I think whether or not we are is a great question.

Carlos Motta: We can’t speak of an LGBTQIA+ community and culture without making a distinction between the queer culture of the sexual and gender liberation movements that originated in Europe and the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s and the status of sexual and gender politics in the present. The LGBTQIA+ acronym is a very specific political construct that developed through carefully conceived strategies against normative legal standards and ongoing processes of discrimination against sexual and gender minorities. An important distinction to make is that LGBTQIA+ politics are a political project, and not only a happy rainbow of different cultural identities. In that sense, I think a moderate and systematic process toward the normalization of queer culture has taken place—with a legal aim in mind—which differs very much from the origins of the sexual and gender liberation movements, which used riots and resistance as forms of resistance, using critical opposition to claim space.

Sharmistha Ray: I think I would agree with a lot of what Carlos just said. I lived in India for 10 years. It was only after I left, last year, that homosexuality was decriminalized, and that’s very different from homosexuality being legalized. The criminality factor has been taken away, but that’s not the same as delivering social justice. At the same time, in America, there has been a normalization of queer identity particularly after same-sex marriage was legalized. I think that helped alleviate many of the taboos. Taboos, while giving us an edge and an element of danger, prevented us from experiencing safe and happy lives. It’s a double-edged sword. It goes back to what Carlos was talking about in terms of political versus social space. I think there has to be a distinction there. While queerness has separated out from LGBTQIA+ identities in the social space, there is still a very strong small antiestablishment culture, especially in queer academia. LGBTQIA+ still speaks to me in terms of a political identity, while queerness has really kind of established itself strongly and firmly as a social value. Historically and traditionally, queerness has also stood against patriarchy and heteronormativity to embrace alternative lifestyles. I would say a bit of that agency has been diluted by same-sex marriage.

Stuart Comer: I would just point out that it was the British who outlawed homosexuality in India.

SR: Yes, it was, it was a British penal code. That was eradicated in the 1960s in Britain, and then we only just got rid of it last year. It was very much a Victorian-era law. There’s a lot I can say, in terms of Indian culture, but I won’t get into it. But maybe the panel will be a place to talk about colonialism, as well. You know, it’s kind of repressed sexual identity.

SC: India is the largest democracy in the world. If we’re talking about to what degree visibility equals freedom or normalization, it’s important to address democracies and societies beyond the United States. So, it would be great to hear more from you about this at some point. I guess some of the questions I have revolve around a space in which now, on the one hand, emails I receive daily include the sender’s preferred pronouns in the email signature. To what extent that suggests an element of queer culture impacting mainstream work life… well, there’s that. The gay neighborhoods which had accumulated in every major city in the West effectively became commercial districts, helping to facilitate a commercial queer culture that has now proliferated online. It’s impacted apps, whether they’re cruising apps, or a number of online platforms where one can act out one’s queerness, but usually through patterns that have been organized around consumer behavior. That’s a form of normalization I think we should all be concerned about. At the same time, I think there are still radical forms of assembly, beyond just the clubs. I think several of us in this conversation have a connection to places like Fire Island, which are still testing grounds for how one might carve out a queer community that is not necessarily bound by rules that have been established through more formal legal or commercial procedures. I still feel like there are options. There is not one form or forum for being LGBTQIA+. Even if a fraction of the community has been normalized, I don’t think that that speaks for everyone.

CM: I’d like to back up for a moment and reconsider the idea of normalization. What I understand as ‘normalization’ is an idea that was, as far as I’m informed, introduced in the 1990s, by Gay Shame in San Francisco, an activist group that has continuously opposed all forms of co-optation of a queer ethos and culture through direct action and public shaming, very much in the spirit of the early sexual and gender liberation movements. And one of the things that has happened is that the term normalization has been emptied out of its original meaning. I agree with Stuart that there are very specific constituencies all around the world that continue to resist normalization, fighting back against the forms of oppression enacted by the big institutions of society, such as militarism and marriage, but the present-day LGBTQIA+ movements seem to be more concerned with constructing ‘respectable’ political subjects in a conventional and normative sense than in fighting to find a place for our differences.