Gay and Lesbian Rights Movement. The movement to protect gay and lesbian
civil rights emerged in the wake of
World War II.Thousands of men and women who had thrived in the military's same‐sex worlds began understanding their sexual activities as central to their identities. They settled in the nation's cities, constructing social lives for themselves that dramatically expanded the previously small homosexual subcultures. Although in the past those subcultures—of private parties; select bars; and, for men, certain parks and bathhouses—were occasionally glimpsed and even celebrated by the larger public, from the mid‐1930s onward homosexuality and cross‐dressing were increasingly penalized. Bars were raided and patrons arrested, the
military instituted an elaborate homosexual‐exclusion process, and states vigorously enforced sex‐crime laws. The gay and lesbian civil rights movement was born of that simultaneous expansion and repression.
Its first phase, the homophile movement, started in 1950 when several homosexual men, most former communist and progressive activists, founded the Mattachine Society in
Los Angeles. Drawing on leftist theory, they created a network of discussion groups where men and women shared their experiences and constructed a common identity as an oppressed minority. Mattachine's membership peaked in the thousands with groups meeting across southern
California, and as far east as
Chicago and
New York City; other homophile groups soon appeared, including the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis. Members were generally middle‐class with integrationist goals: They encouraged homosexuals to conform to social standards and sought out experts to convince society that homosexuals were otherwise normal. While never numerous, these groups for two decades held annual conventions, circulated newsletters, and even successfully appealed to the U.S.
Supreme Court the right to mail their literature. During the 1960s, they became somewhat more visible, staging small pickets in front of the
White House and
Philadelphia's Independence Hall to protest dismissals of homosexual federal employees. In New York, they even successfully challenged antihomosexual liquor laws and police entrapment.
These more public actions foreshadowed the dramatic explosion of aggressive, visible activism that erupted in 1969, marking the beginning of gay liberation, the movement's second wave. Fifty homophile organizations that year had turned into eight hundred gay liberation groups by 1973, and thousands by 1979. Inspired by other rights movements and by the counterculture, gay liberationists demanded “gay power” and insisted that homosexuals “come out of the closet” by announcing their homosexuality to friends, families, and colleagues. Younger and often less socially established than their homophile predecessors, gay liberationists forcibly resisted sanctions against homosexuality. Most famously, on 27 June 1969, at New York's Stonewall Inn bar, patrons refused to disperse after a police raid and instead fought back; street rioting ensued. Joining groups like the Gay Activists Alliance and Gay Liberation Front, activists around the country interrupted city council meetings and psychiatric conferences, sat in at magazine offices and political campaign headquarters, and marched through the streets. Subsequently, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its disease list, countless editorial policies were modified, and several cities and Congress deliberated antidiscrimination legislation. Within the movement, often in reaction to its own sexism, strong lesbian‐centered organizations also developed.
These political achievements produced a sharp backlash. In 1977, singer and orange‐juice publicist Anita Bryant led a successful campaign in Florida to overturn Dade County's new gay‐rights legislation, and other cities followed. In 1978, Harvey Milk, a gay city supervisor in
San Francisco, was assassinated, and California voters debated whether to deny homosexuals employment as public school teachers. These reactions drew into the fold of gay activism a conservative constituency that fought the backlash, and in some cases, including California, defeated it with traditional political actions. Lobbying groups established a gay presence in government, working to elect openly gay politicians and forging formal relationships with various administrations.
Much of the energy that might have augmented those efforts in the 1980s was instead lost to fighting AIDS (
acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). Only late in the decade, after suffering from inadequate treatment and devastating governmental disregard, did gay men and women return to the streets. Often led by ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, they fought successfully for improved care. That fight galvanized them with an energy that translated into political influence and inspired a cohort of proudly “queer” activists. At century's end, as the movies and
television portrayed gay characters and hundreds of cities and eleven states had antidiscrimination statutes, activism dissipated. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, the federal government reaffirmed the ban on military service by homosexuals and defined marriage as exclusively heterosexual for benefits purposes; seventeen states continued to criminalize gay sex; and antigay violence increased, most visibly in the 1998 murder of college student Matthew Shepard in Laramie, Wyoming. Vital protections still required action.
The gay and lesbian rights movement made notable gains in the early twenty‐first century, though not without controversy. In 2003, reversing a position it had taken in 1986, the
Supreme Court struck down a Texas law barring consensual sexual relations between adults of the same sex. Also in 2003, the Episcopal Church's New Hampshire diocese consecrated an openly gay priest, Gene Robinson, as its bishop. This action caused profound repercussions among U.S. Episcopalians and Anglicans worldwide.
Gay marriage emerged as a subject of controversy in 2003 when the Massachusetts supreme judicial court ruled that nothing in Massachusetts law forbade same‐sex couples from marrying. Early in 2004, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, a supporter of gay rights, ordered the city clerk to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Thousands applied and city officials performed many marriages.
As the movement spread, conservatives reacted. In 2004 the Massachusetts legislature, meeting as a constitutional convention, amended the state constitution to bar gay marriage while permitting civil unions granting same‐sex couples “the same benefits, protections, rights, privileges, and obligations” as married couples. The amendment was slated to appear on the Massachusetts ballot in 2006 for approval or rejection. Meanwhile, the California supreme court, prodded by Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger, ordered an immediate end to same-sex marriages in San Francisco, and promised to hear arguments on the matter in the near future. In January 2004, President George W.
Bush, courting the religious Right, called for a constitutional amendment barring same‐sex marriage. As the controversy continued, many Americans endorsed the idea of civil unions granting same-sex couples all the legal rights and privileges of marriage‐an outcome unthinkable several decades earlier.
See also
Civil Rights Movement;
Sexual Harassment;
Sexual Morality and Sex Reform;
Sixties, The.
Bibliography
Leigh W. Rutledge , The Gay Decades: From Stonewall to the Present, 1992. Dudley Clendinen and and Adam Nagourney , Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, 1999
.
Daniel Hurewitz
; Updated by
Paul S. Boyer
