A Brief History of LGBT People in America
Despite the fact that humans have never limited their sexual pleasure to what we now call heterosexual intercourse, the history of LGBT people is relatively short. The genital anatomy of one's partners-or what Freud calls one's "object choice"-didn't become the definitive criterion for distinguishing LGB and heterosexual selves until the last third of the nineteenth century. During the 1860's and 70's European public administrators began noticing that some people were organizing their lives not around family, household, and reproduction but around various forms of sexual pleasure. This was probably a recent phenomenon made possible by the forces of capitalism, which tended to draw people off the land into cities away from their parishes and families and to reduce the importance of arranged marriage. Alarmed, officials began studying these populations, whom they characterized as sexual deviants and grouped according to the particular practices they engaged in. One such class of deviant came to be called "homosexuals."
LGBT people quickly became the target of medical, psychiatric, and legal intervention, and as early as the 1870's they came together in such places as Bavaria to fight criminalization of sodomy. Until the Nazis destroyed Magnus Hirschfeld's homosexual archives in Berlin and hundreds of thousands of homosexual people were sent to die in concentration camps, the LGBT movement in Germany was widespread and influential.
In the US the history of LGBT culture and politics is even shorter than it is in Europe. The largest and best known communities are in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and there are reasons for that. First, because of economic dislocations and farm crises in the first half of the 20th century, people migrated to large cities to find work. Once there, they were often forced to live outside traditional family structures, many in same sex settings such as military and industrial barracks, for prolonged periods. Those with LGBT inclinations found one another at the same time that they found the freedom to express themselves without ever-present familial and religious disapproval. For women in particular this was a new experience.
But in addition to economics changes, another extremely significant factor in the development of coastal LGBT enclaves was the ban on lesbians and gay men in the military. After World War II thousands of lesbians and gay men were dishonorably discharged from the armed services, and many were simply dumped in port cities. At times several hundred ex-service people were deposited in San Francisco per day. They couldn't go home in disgrace, so they stayed.
The first known LGBT political organization in the U.S. was the Mattachine Society, founded in November of 1950 in Los Angeles. This underground emancipation movement was the brainchild of Harry Hay, a young musicologist who had honed his organizing skills in the ranks of one of the most underground political movements in America in this century, the Communist Party. As Hay well knew, persecution of homosexuals was rampant. Police constantly entrapped and brutalized LGBT people. Public disclosure of an LGBT identity was enough to get most people fired from their jobs and ostracized from families and communities. By early 1953 under President Eisenhower lesbian or gay identity became by executive order a necessary and sufficient reason in itself to fire any federal employee from his or her job. Most defense industries and others with government contracts followed suit, and the U.S. Postal Service aided these industries by putting tracers on suspected lesbians' and gay mens' mail in order to gather enough evidence for dismissal and possibly arrest.
The Mattachine Society drew tremendous support after one of its founders, Dale Jennings, was arrested for "lewd and dissolute behavior" in February 1952. Jennings took the unheard course of acknowledging his gay identity in court while pleading innocent to the charges against him, thus forcing authorities to draw a distinction between being gay and being guilty of illegal activity. The jury was deadlocked and a retrial ordered, but the DA's office dropped all charges. Publicizing this victory wasn't easy, however. There was a news blackout; no press releases were accepted by any newspapers, magazines, or radio stations. The Mattachine Society was forced to circulate information solely through postings and flyers distributed in areas where LGBT people were believed to congregate. Nevertheless, the event drew tremendous, if quiet, support, and membership in the Mattachine Society grew by several thousand in succeeding weeks.
Fears generated by Joseph McCarthy's campaign to rid America of Communists eventually led to the neutralization of the Mattachine Society. By late 1954 it was the weak, fully public, assimilationist organization whose main purpose was to convince heterosexuals that lesbians and gay men presented no threat whatsoever to any of their values and were in fact exactly like them but for sexual preference. The lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco in 1955, didn't fare much better, although both groups managed to sustain publications with national circulation through the 1950's and 60's. By 1969 there were about fifty "homophile" organizations in the US, all fairly small.
The main reason for the lack of visibility in post-war America was persecution-religious persecution, discrimination in employment, violence, and police brutality. Non celibate LGBT people were condemned by and unwelcome in most mainstream religious organizations not only as leaders but even simply as members. This led the Reverend Troy Perry, a Baptist, to found the Metropolitan Community Church in 1968. Today the MCC is the largest LGBT religious organization in this country and by far the largest in the South.
Discrimination in employment probably ranked as the most threatening type of persecution LGBT people faced and still face-second only to physical assault in its violence but affecting far more people. Eisenhower's executive order stood from 1953 until 1993. There has never been any employment protection for LGBT people as there is now for heterosexual white women and heterosexual men and women who belong to racial and ethnic minorities. Employers routinely refuse to hire LGBT people regardless of their qualifications and fire any who manage to get hired while closeted.
Still, the ugliest of all forms of discrimination was and is undoubtedly gay bashing, especially when carried out by public officials. Police harassment and brutality have been constant features of LGBT life for decades. Indefinite detainment's, beatings, and public humiliations are only the tip of the iceberg. Transgendered people through the 1950s and 1960s suffered frequent rapes and sexual assaults committed by police officers, sometimes inside police precincts. And police were certainly no help when beatings, rapes, and lesser indignities were visited upon LGBT people by civilians.
It was in this atmosphere of terror and brutality that patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York's Greenwich Village resisted a police raid in 1969. The Stonewall Inn was a working class lesbian and gay bar frequented by transgendered people. Police raids were common then and ugly. On the night of June 29, 1969, police attempted to raid the bar as usual, but the regulars were fed up. As the officers entered the building, patrons barricaded them inside and held them there. Thus began three days of rioting. At one point it was estimated that the LGBT people held eight square blocks of the city. Word of the riots spread quickly through homophile organizations around the country. It was at that point that what had been since 1954 a rather quiet assimilationist movement became militant.
In December, 1973, this movement achieved a major victory when pressure groups succeeded in forcing the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. This change eliminated one of the reasons employers so often fire LGBT people and one of the reason judges so often awarded custody to heterosexual over LGBT parents-but only one.
Through the early 1970s LGBT communities pushed for anti- discrimination laws, and they were successful in a few cities. By 1977 California even had its first openly gay elected official; Harvey Milk was elected San Francisco City Supervisor from District 5. But it was also in 1977 that Anita Bryant began her anti-gay campaign in Dade County, Florida, which was calculated to repeal Miami's legal protections for lesbian and gay citizens. Throughout 1977 there were successful referenda to repeal gay rights laws across the country-in St. Paul, Wichita, and Eugene.
In 1978 California state senator John Briggs introduced a move to prohibit lesbians and gay men from teaching in California public schools. The initiative was defeated in November after a series of statewide debates between Briggs and Harvey Milk. It looked like gay rights would hold firm in California, but less than three weeks later Harvey Milk and pro-gay San Francisco mayor George Mascone lay dead, assassinated by former city supervisor Dan White. A jury subsequently gave White the lightest possible sentence on a charge of manslaughter. San Francisco's LGBT population rioted; but the heyday of pro-gay politics was over in that city, and anti-gay violence sky-rocketed.
Not long after, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control began to notice a number of immune-deficiency-related illnesses in the gay male populations of major cities. Public officials (who didn't know what caused the illnesses or exactly how they were spread) began closing down establishments where LGBT people gathered. Not surprisingly, LGBT people resisted these moves, seeing them as just another ploy on the part of politicians and police to destroy LGBT communities and to oppress individuals. Tensions between LGBT communities and various branches of government increased.
In 1986 in Bowers v. Hardwick the U.S. Supreme Court held that states have a right to criminalize even private and consensual sexual behavior. Specifically the court said Georgia had a right to punish Michael Hardwick for sodomy even though his act occurred in private. The police officer who over-heard and then witnessed Hardwick's act had entered the house in order to speak to one of Hardwick's housemates about a traffic violation. Officer Bowers placed Hardwick under arrest in his own bedroom.
The following year, 1987, the second March on Washington was held. It was one of the largest civil right demonstrations in this country's history, drawing more than 650,000. The next day 5,000 demonstrators converged on the Supreme Court steps, and an organization new even to most LGBT Americans, ACT-UP, made its first national appearance. LGBT politics, like LGBT lives, had changed dramatically since Harry Hay founded the Mattachine Society only thirty-seven years before.
Things have changed. The number of employers offering domestic partner health insurance benefits has increased 25 percent since 1999, and now includes more than 100 of the Fortune 500. Nevada became the eleventh state in the nation to prohibit job discrimination based on sexual orientation. Nevada joined California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin in protecting sexual orientation in the workplace. Two states - Minnesota and Iowa - the District of Columbia and 28 cities or counties protect transgendered or gender-different employees by law or executive order. Reform Judaism became the first major religious denomination to sanction same-sex unions and, on April 26, 2000, Vermont governor Howard Dean (D) signed a historic "civil union" bill that gives gay and lesbian couples the same rights and benefits afforded married couples under state law.
Other positive steps in the nineties included the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association's condemnation of "reparative" or "conversion" therapies as having deleterious effects, given that practitioners often mislead patients and are motivated by personal prejudices. Also, the Supreme Court ensured that Americans living with HIV will remain protected from discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, regardless of their stage of infection. Sydney Abbott, the plaintiff in this case, sued Dr. Randon Bragdon for violating the ADA by refusing to administer routine dental care to Ms. Abbott in his office. The ADA prohibits discrimination against disabled people in places of public accommodation, including dental and medical offices, as well as in employment and public services.
On the negative side, the witch-hunt against gay and lesbian service members reached an unprecedented level as the number of service members discharged increased 14% to 1,145 in 1998, according to Pentagon figures. The U.S. Supreme Court decided to allow the Boy Scouts of America to continue its ban on gay scouts while the Teletubbies T.V. character, Tinky Winky, was outed by former Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. Falwell justified his outing by claiming that Tinky Winky has the voice of a boy but carries a purse. "He is purple -- the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle -- the gay-pride symbol." Falwell argued that the "subtle depictions" are intentional and issued a statement that said, "As a Christian I feel that role modeling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children." The Human Rights Campaign assured parents that their children would not become gay due to the subversive effects of the color purple, triangles, and magic bags.
A study released in August by Dr. Karen Franklin, a forensic psychologist at the Washington Institute for Mental Illness Research and Training, suggests that harassment and hate crimes against gay students by their peers is commonplace. According to the study, nearly one-quarter of community college students who took part in this survey admitted to harassing people they thought were gay. Among men, 18 percent said they had physically assaulted or threatened someone they thought was gay or lesbian. And 32 percent admitted they were guilty of verbal harassment. Hate crimes based on sexual orientation have more than tripled since the FBI began collecting statistics in 1991. We have crimes such as the one committed by Ronald Edward Gay, who shot seven people in a gay bar because he was angry about jokes people made about his last name. Or the one committed by two men who took Billy Jack Gaither,39, to a remote location in Alabama, bludgeoned him to death, put his body on a stack of tires and set him on fire because he was gay. Or the murder of Matthew Shepard, 21, the gay University of Wyoming student who was savagely attacked, burned, and left to die for up to 18 hours tied to a wooden fence.
Adapted from Ladelle McWhorter, 1996.