The March on Washington is a time-honored tactic in the history of American social movements. Such marches bring national attention to the political issues affecting members of marginalized communities whose voices are largely ignored, particularly in national debates. They are a particularly powerful tactic because they are so difficult to organize. To be successful, a march on Washington demands the participation of many organizations and individuals, yet to attract widespread participation, organizers run the risk of diluting the movement's message.

This tension—between a movement's tactics and its collective identity—guides the analysis in Amin Ghaziani's The Dividends of Dissent. Ghaziani argues that we can observe the cultural production of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) movement's collective identity by watching activists as they navigate the conflicts associated with organizing four major marches on Washington. The main theoretical question he asks is how culture works. His goal is to develop what he describes as a “resinous cultural framework”: “culture works better when it or its elements (e.g., ideologies, values, symbols, or other packages of meaning) can attach to organizing tasks. These provide a metaphorical resin that can concretize culture” (p. 315). Thus, like many before him, the author argues that culture is a form of social practice emerging from practical tasks.

Ghaziani applies this framework to a study of infighting among the organizations and activists that planned four separate marches on Washington by members of the LGBT community. While the study of coalition building is familiar in the field of social movement research, those studies frequently emphasize the way that activists search for issues that can bring them together in united purpose. Ghaziani prefers to emphasize the fault lines that generate disagreement and conflict. But he also argues that such conflict is constructive. As activists argue about strategies and tactics, they are actually helping to develop the collective identity of the movement.

The author's analysis proceeds in two stages. First, he explores the sociocultural setting of each march along four dimensions. Two of those dimensions reflect external political and social conditions: the political and cultural status of members of the LGBT community and threats to that community posed by political figures and organizations opposed to LGBT rights. Two internal dimensions include what Ghaziani refers to as “community consciousness” and organizational development in the movement. By exploring these dimensions, he places each march in a particular sociopolitical context. Then he analyzes activists' efforts to organize each march in detail, documenting the arguments and conflicts among activists about six critical organizing tasks. For each march, the six arguments, which he characterizes as “cultural carriers” (p. 18), were about whether to march, when to march, the title or theme of the march, the speakers, the platform, and the organizing structure. According to Ghaziani, infighting about these organizing tasks became a vehicle for much broader debates about cultural identity and movement goals. He shows that arguments about representation on the organizing committee and about the platform for the marches, for example, reflected the challenges associated with making the LGBT movement more inclusive and continuing debates about the movement's goals.

By 1993, the LGBT movement had already sponsored two major marches on Washington, DC. In the course of the planning for those marches, activists confronted a series of disagreements about the meaning of gay identity. In 1979, gay and lesbian activists argued about incorporating issues important to lesbians in the agenda (p. 58). And in 1987 and 1993, racial and ethnic differences led to arguments about the representation of racial and ethnic minorities on organizing committees. During the 1993 march, for example, activists insisted on having the organizing committee reflect the racial and ethnic diversity of the LGBT community. After much debate about the best mechanism for ensuring such diversity, the organizing conference voted to require 50% of the planners to be activists of color—a decision that generated still more conflict throughout the community at large (pp. 170–173).

In 1993, the organizers also struggled over the inclusion of bisexual issues in the platform. Bisexual organizations had participated in the 1987 march, but had not assumed a major role in planning that march. But by 1993, bisexual activists had successfully campaigned to change the name of the march to include recognition of their role and assumed prominent positions among the speakers. But that inclusion did not happen easily; Ghaziani describes the many votes it took to arrive at last at the title of the march: “The 1993 National March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation” (pp. 174–176). And this name is abbreviated, omitting the interests of transsexuals; apparently, activists were prepared to stretch the boundaries of sexual identity, but not so far as to include transsexuals' rights.

According to Ghaziani, the title of the 1993 march also reflected deep divisions about what the goals of the movement should be. On the one hand, the growing visibility of members of the LGBT movement in mainstream American life led many movement leaders to seek equal rights, while other leaders thought of equal rights as being too constricting a platform. These more radical activists sought liberation from heterosexist norms, values, and institutions. This set up what Ghaziani characterizes as a conflict between mainstream activists and “the looney left” (pp. 180–184), which led to the withdrawal of the Log Cabin Republicans and a platform that extended far beyond the interests of the LGBT community.

The author argues that although painful at the time, these conflicts have been productive for the movement, as critical questions of identity emerge from these tactical disputes—dissent performs an important function by airing differences and forcing compromise. Yet, the value of dissent has its limits, and he demonstrates that the controversy surrounding the planning of the 2000 march resulted in an event that reflected a much narrower spectrum of the LGBT community. Emphasizing mainstream issues—such as marriage and political participation—the organizers of the 2000 march focused on equality, eschewing the more radical, liberatory claims of many aspects of the movement, leading to a backlash and a boycott of the march by many groups that had made it successful in previous years.

Dividends of Dissent is a thoroughgoing history of several pivotal moments in the life of the LGBT movement. The national marches on Washington brought national visibility to the movement and its constituencies, helping to generate an evolving political and cultural agenda. The book is most successful as a work of history, providing a vivid account of the internal debates and arguments that made these marches possible. Ghaziani does not shy away from the often painful history of infighting in the movement, making this a powerful reminder that conflict in a movement need not always be suppressed.