History of Homosexuality in the United States
The history of homosexuality in the United States until the 20th century was a story of people who, in the face of the threat of criminal prosecution, social ostracism, and discrimination, were often only able to live out their sexual orientation in secret. Because of this concealment, for which the expression "in the closet" (German: in the wall closet ) has become common in the English language , historical research today is confronted with a mostly unsatisfactory source situation. The life of homosexual women is particularly poorly documented until the second half of the 20th century . There were subcultural niches in which homosexuals could develop their own lifestyle, as has been proven as early as the early 20th century.
As in many other countries, the cultural understanding of homosexuality in the USA has changed over the course of history from “ sin ” to “ crime ” and “ disease ” to “natural existence”. Since the American states each have their own criminal laws, the decriminalization of homosexual acts in the USA took many individual steps. In 1962, Illinois was the first state to abolish its law against sexual perversions (English sodomy ), which also included homosexuality. In other states, homosexual acts could be punished until 2003.
The adjustment of the legal situation lagged far behind the socio-cultural development. The equality of homosexuals was part and result of a general liberation of sexuality from cultural traditions, which in the 20th century lost more and more importance and gave way to the concept of sexual self-determination . In the United States, homosexual emancipation began during the Second World War. Important milestones were Alfred Kinsey's study The Sexual Behavior of Men (1948), the founding of the Mattachine Society (1950), the participation of later homosexual activists in the Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968), the Stonewall uprising (1969), the founding of Fighting organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front (1969), the removal of homosexuality from the list of diseases of the American Psychiatric Association (1973), the reorientation of the gay movement during the AIDS crisis (since 1981), the inclusion of minorities such as B. the transsexuals (since the 1990s) and in the 21st century the political struggle for same-sex marriage .
Homosexuality in Indian cultures
More than 130 different Native American peoples in North America had a special category for men who wore women's clothing, performed “women's work” such as basket weaving and pottery, had sexual intercourse with men, and took on a special spiritual function within the community. These so-called two spirits were not classified as homosexual, but assigned to a third or fourth gender, the specialty of which was that one and the same body had two souls. Christian missionaries and explorers such as Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca , Jacques Marquette , Pierre Liette and Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix were among the first whites to observe and describe Two-Spirits in the area of the later United States . Even ethnologically interested whites like the artist George Catlin , who observed, described and painted Two-Spirits in the 1830s, advocated their extermination. Although, in the context of the revival of Indian cultural assets, some members of Indian peoples still refer to themselves as two spirits today, this component of Indian culture has largely been lost with their submission by the Europeans.
Colonial times
From the beginning of the white colonization of North America until well into the 20th century, the perception of homosexuality was shaped by the biblical tradition, which inseparably linked the phenomenon with the sinfulness of Sodom and Gomorrah . The Puritans , in particular , who emigrated to New England in large numbers from 1620 on , abhorred sexual fornication (English sodomy ) and, along with bestiality (German: zoophilia ) , found it to be the worst of all sins .
"Sodomy" was a criminal offense in all British colonies that declared independence in 1776, except in Georgia , where there was no legal regulation for homosexual acts . In New York , New Jersey , Delaware , Maryland and North Carolina for a long time she was treated according to British Common Law , which criminalized all sexual acts that were not for the purpose of reproduction regardless of the sex of the perpetrator. In New Hampshire , Massachusetts , Rhode Iceland , Connecticut , Virginia and South Carolina were their own laws, the text of most of the Sodomieverbot the third book of Moses was ajar. In Pennsylvania the legal situation changed repeatedly; as long as the Quakers led the way in this colony (1681–1693), Pennsylvania was also the only colony in which homosexual male acts were not punishable by death. Except in Massachusetts, women were subject to the sodomy laws in the same way as men; However, criminal prosecutions for lesbian acts were extremely rare in colonial times. (See also: Chronology of Sodomy Laws in the United States .)
The first recorded case of a white man who was executed for “sodomy” in what would later become the US state, is that of the French translator Guillermo, who lost his life in 1566 in the New Spanish colony of Florida . The first known sodomy case in any of the British colonies was that of Richard Cornish, who was hanged in Virginia in 1625 after allegedly raping another man. In 1629 five young men entering the Massachusetts Bay Colony aboard the Talbot were charged with homosexual acts; the local authorities, not feeling up to the trial of such a terrible crime, sent the boys back to England for punishment. The first woman on the soil of the British colonies to answer for a lesbian relationship was a resident of the Massachusetts Bay Colony , Elizabeth Johnson , in 1648 . Until the end of the 19th century, only a few cases of sodomy were known, so that they were considered exceptional events with a high degree of rarity.
18th and 19th centuries
Liberalization of criminal law
After the United States declared independence in 1776, the founding states retained their colonial sodomy regulations, which usually provided for the death penalty for homosexual acts between men . Same-sex acts between women were generally just as punishable in most states, but until the end of the 20th century were only very rarely prosecuted and usually punished more leniently than corresponding acts between men. In the course of a general liberalization that had received stimuli from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution , Pennsylvania was the first of the then 13 US states in 1786 to abolish the death penalty for "sodomy". The death penalty was replaced by a 10-year prison sentence and the confiscation of all property. Other American states followed suit; in South Carolina , however, convicted “sodomites” could still be sentenced to death up until 1873.
Beginning psychiatization of homosexuality
The psychiatization of homosexuality, i. H. the view that homosexuality was a mental disorder reached its climax with the establishment of psychoanalysis (1896). However, their roots go back to the early 19th century. Sexual educational publications such as The Young Man's Guide (William Andrus Alcott, 1833) and Lecture to Young Men on Chastity (Sylvester Graham, 1834) revealed for the first time dramatic health consequences such as madness , St. Vitus's dance , epilepsy , idiocy , paralysis , Attributed to stroke , blindness , hypochondria, and consumption .
Tolerated borderline forms
In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the persecution of homosexuals was made more difficult by the emergence of the cult of friendship, which was also widespread in the USA . In the educated classes of the population, same-sex friendships often took on an exclusive and emotionally charged, sometimes erotic character. Nevertheless, they found social approval, since one - in the opinion of many recent literary historians wrongly - assumed that this did not lead to real sexual contact. Insightful documents can be found in the works and estates of the writers Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) and Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
A socio-cultural peculiarity of the 19th century was the so-called Boston Marriage (German: "Boston Marriage"), an emotionally intense and exclusive long-term friendship between two - often feminist - women who lived together in a common household and this way of life owed greater freedom for social or political engagement than if they had been subjected to the restrictions that were normal for wives at the time. The term can be applied, for example, to the writers Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields as well as to the women's rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Anna Howard Shaw . The fact that one woman preferred living with another woman to marriage with a man was accepted in Victorian times because it was believed that these women were not connected by erotic interests. Whether these women can be claimed as early lesbians is controversial in feminist research today.
1900-1940
Prosecution
As John Loughery has described, after the United States entered World War I (1917), the mass recruitment of American men led to an increase in incidents of homosexual acts. Extensive persecution of homosexual men occurred, for example, during the Newport Sex Scandal , which occurred in 1919 at the Navy base in Newport , Rhode Island. In the course of the investigation, several dozen civilians and military personnel were arrested there, including a military chaplain from the Episcopal Church .
The first organization
Henry Gerber founded the Society for Human Rights in Chicago at the end of 1924 . Although this organization presented itself pro forma as representing the interests of people with "mental anomalies", it was in fact the first gay rights organization in the United States. She also published the first gay magazine in the USA, which - based on the German model - Friendship and Freedom . Only a few months after its inception, the Society for Human Rights was dissolved by the Chicago police.
Early subcultural niches and meeting places
The industrialization had brought an increasing prosperity of the middle class in the 19th century, which led to a far-reaching change in ways of life. Homosexual men particularly benefited from this, because they could now easily leave their families of origin to form work and life communities with other men. With the Bowery , New York City already had a gay district in the 1890s. Bars like Columbia Hall , Manilla Hall , Little Bucks and Slide were favorite meeting places for male homosexuals, who were often referred to as fairies because of their extravagant fashionable appearance .
In the black New York borough of Harlem , which had been allowed to claim the rank of “cultural capital” of black America since the end of the First World War , there were bars in the 1920s where men could dance together and where drag balls were held. During this time, the Harlem Renaissance , which was characterized by liberality and openness, offered particularly favorable conditions for the development of a homosexual scene. Homosexual and bisexual artists such as Langston Hughes , Richard Bruce Nugent , Countee Cullen , Ma Rainey , Bessie Smith , Gladys Bentley , Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters developed a subculture that was not necessarily visible to the outside world, but was still flourishing.
Downtown Manhattan was home to a gay scene in Greenwich Village , where female and male cross-dressers could perform at masked balls, such as at Webster Hall . Homosexuals were also welcomed in private clubs such as Polly Holladay's . In the early 1930s, Times Square developed into a gay district in which homosexual men often lived together undisturbed in boarding houses . Relevant cruising areas included the harbor docks, where locals could come into contact with seafarers. Public toilets have been used to establish homosexual contacts since the turn of the 20th century. The first meeting places also appeared in other major American cities, for example in San Francisco , where the Black Cat Bar was opened in 1933 . To most Americans, these subcultures were largely invisible; However, as the historian George Chauncey has pointed out, there were more numerous and diverse homosexual social worlds in the first decades of the 20th century than in about the middle of the century. In general, homosexuals and bisexuals in the early 20th century were under less pressure than in later times to commit themselves to their sexual orientation and to admit that they were gay, and had more freedom to “commute” between different worlds.
Since the end of the 19th century, lesbian women were also able to follow their own lifestyles for the first time. Since the first women's colleges were founded in the USA , they have been able to study, and since studying and the resulting opportunity for independent gainful employment was often a decision against marriage for women, many of them formed work and life communities with other women, that went far beyond the course of study. In settlement houses , lesbians could live together undisturbed, often for their entire adult life. How many of the early female academics were lesbian is difficult to determine and is controversial in research. In any case, lesbians could find a social and cultural niche in organizations such as the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) or in the radical feminist club Heterodoxy , founded in Greenwich Village in 1912 . An early identification figure of the lesbian subculture was the writer Willa Cather (1873-1947), who lived with her partner in Greenwich Village for 40 years and in whose novels many interpreters believe to find homosexual subtext .
Some homosexual Americans still preferred living abroad. One of the most famous of them is the writer Gertrude Stein , who lived with her partner Alice B. Toklas in Paris for almost four decades . The openly bisexual dancer Isadora Duncan and the poet Natalie Clifford Barney , who was intimately connected with Renée Vivien , had lived there since the turn of the 19th century . The lesbian American sculptor Harriet Hosmer and the actress Charlotte Saunders Cushman lived in Rome in the mid-19th century , the latter together with her partner Matilda Hays.
Most American blacks and members of the lower class were unable to leave the country or follow their own homosexual lifestyles because they lived under subsistence economic conditions in which young people on the one hand could not do without the family network and on the other hand the families could not do without the cooperation of the boys. In particular, women, including lesbian women, could not afford to remain childless under such circumstances, since children were necessary for survival as workers. Subcultural homosexual niches could hardly emerge under such conditions and therefore initially remained a privilege of the better-off.
In the Great Depression was followed in the 1930s in many ways a renaissance of prudery. Even the gay public life has been pushed back. The New York theaters had been prevented by the Wales Theatrical Padlock Bill since 1927 from presenting homosexual and other content considered perverse. In an act of anticipatory self-censorship, the national film production industry submitted to the Production Code (also: Hays Code ) in 1934 , which stipulated which film content was morally acceptable to the cinema audience. Point 2–4 of the code - Sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden. (German: Sexual perversion or any conclusion to it is forbidden) - also excluded the representation of homosexual content. Since the press and radio also omitted the topic and - with the exception of medical specialist literature - books did not deal with homosexuality, one could grow up in the United States during the entire period before the Second World War without ever encountering any indication that there was such a thing as homosexuality at all.
However, even in the 1930s and early 1940s, homosexuals could still meet in cities like New York - provided they were upper class. Famous gay meeting places of this time were the Metropolitan Opera , the Sutton Theater and elegant bars like the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel and the bar in the Astor Hotel . There were similar places in other major American cities. In contrast to the meeting places of the less wealthy, these discreet places were largely protected from police raids . New York lesbians met at the Howdy Club in the 1930s and 1940s .
With Monty Woolley , Clifton Webb , William Haines and the Latin lover actor Cesar Romero , there were already a few film stars in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s who hardly made a secret of their homosexuality.
The second World War
One of the events that had the greatest influence on the emergence of a group identity among American homosexuals was the entry of the United States into World War II (1941). 13% of the American population joined the armed forces during the war . No other institution in the United States had ever produced a greater concentration of homosexual men, and the paradox of the situation was that while the military leadership sought to suppress and stigmatize homosexuality, the homosexuals themselves were overwhelmed by the impression of their own numbers. Since there were not enough female forces available to support the troops , the military management sponsored drag shows that were used by many homosexuals to establish and cultivate a gay culture in a covert way.
A thriving lesbian subculture emerged in the female organizations - such as the Women's Army Corps (WAC) and Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES) - which served 275,000 women during World War II. But the war conditions also helped the lesbian civilians in so far as, in these menless times, it hardly caused a stir when women went out with women.
Until the early 1940s, the American armed forces had only occasionally had to deal with homosexual incidents that could be countered by the means of military justice. When these cases increased during the Second World War, the military leadership made efforts for the first time to prevent homosexuals from entering the army through psychiatric tests. However, these measures proved to be unsuccessful, as neither the tests were reliable nor were the homosexual recruits interested in being retired with the stigma of homosexuality, which they would not have gotten rid of in civil life either. Of the 18 million men patterned, fewer than 5,000 were excluded from the armed forces for homosexuality. Many homosexuals also sought opportunities in the military to demonstrate that they did not conform to the cliché of effeminacy, and preferred to join particularly “masculine” organizations like the Marine Corps . The number of men and women who were discharged from the armed forces during the war because of their homosexuality (“blue discharge”) was almost 10,000. It was often difficult for those affected to return to civilian life, as they were not only involuntarily "outed" but also did not receive the social benefits to which discharged military members were normally entitled.
1945–1968
De-psychiatization of homosexuality
With the rise of psychoanalysis (from 1896), the view that homosexuality is a neurotic disorder also gained acceptance in American psychiatry . This opinion was also supported by institutions with humanitarian concerns such as the Quakers , who operated the so-called Quaker Emergency Service in the 1940s , whose readjustment centers, as rehabilitation facilities, were primarily tailored to male homosexuals. Until the end of the Second World War, the psychiatrists suspected the cause of homosexuality mostly to be a “hormonal imbalance”, which was often “treated” with medication. Other forms of treatment typical of the time, with which attempts were made to “cure” homosexuals, were traditional psychoanalysis , aversion therapy , shock treatment and lobotomy (the latter until 1951). Since the beginning of the 20th century, homosexual women and men were forcibly admitted to hospitals, and some sought psychological treatment of their own accord. Overall, homosexuality was considered a very rare phenomenon until World War II.
In 1941, the New York psychiatrist George Henry published his study Sex Variants, based on hundreds of interviews . The methodologically controversial study was the first in the USA to offer a representative cross-section of female and male homosexuality of the time.
In general, sexual morality was liberalized during this period. An important factor was the availability of antibiotics . Sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea became curable and fear of them no longer stood in the way of expansion of sexual permissiveness. While the Sexual Revolution could only begin for heterosexual Americans after the introduction of the birth control pill (1960), homosexuals had already enjoyed the same conditions since the 1930s.
Members of the American armed forces, if suspected of being homosexual, were still imprisoned in the early years of World War II. In 1944, the military command ordered that such people be forcibly hospitalized instead. This gave the military psychiatrists the opportunity to study homosexuals in numbers and representativeness that had never been seen before in the United States. A small number of psychiatrists - including Clements Fry and Edna Rostow - drew conclusions from these investigations that were no longer compatible with the popular doctrine that homosexuality is a disorder, but found little attention.
In 1948, Alfred Kinsey's study The Sexual Behavior of Men followed . This study, which is also based on interviews, caused a sensation because it confronted the American public for the first time with the fact that homosexuality and bisexuality were not “fringe group” phenomena, but rather affected the majority of the population to a greater or lesser extent. Kinsey's work made a considerable contribution to liberating the social discourse on sexuality from religious and moral interpretations and to making it scientific. The Kinsey Institute , founded by Kinsey in 1947 , later published many other important studies on homosexuality.
In 1951 Edward Sagarin's report, The Homosexual in America , published under the pseudonym Donald Webster Cory . The book, which was written from a homosexual, sympathetic point of view and found a wide readership, provided a comprehensive portrait of the male homosexual subculture.
In 1957, Evelyn Hooker published her widely acclaimed study The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual , which first demonstrated that homosexual men are no different from heterosexual men in terms of mental health . In 1965, Judd Marble's book Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality followed , the author of which argued that attitudes towards homosexuality were culturally determined. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) followed this view and decided on December 15, 1973 to remove homosexuality from their list of mental illnesses. Individual well-known psychiatrists such as Charles Socarides and Irving Bieber held on to their view that homosexuality was a neurotic disorder, however, until the end of the 20th century.
Gay culture in New York
During the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of military personnel on their way to or returning home from Europe streamed through New York. In the 1950s, there were more artists and iconoclasts of any sexual orientation here than in any other American city. Even before the war, New York's gay community was the largest in the country, but that rank continued to consolidate from 1940 onwards. Many homosexual returnees from the war settled in New York. New bars with homoerotic undertones emerged, including the bar in the Savoy-Plaza Hotel . In 1944, the drag ball held annually in Harlem since the early 1930s reached its peak. In 1945 the Veterans Benevolent Association (VBA) was established, an aid organization whose offers were addressed primarily to former soldiers who had been dishonorably discharged from the armed forces because of their homosexuality. After the war, the city's cultural life was also shaped by the poets of the Beat Generation , among whom there were a particularly large number of homosexuals. In Harlem, the Mount Morris Baths , one of the first unofficial gay bathhouses in New York, flourished since the 1950s . Bathhouses were discovered by homosexuals as meeting places to the same extent as they lost their original purpose, as more and more apartments were equipped with bathrooms. By the 1960s, the city had a thriving gay scene with more than 40 gay bars and clubs, as well as three or four lesbian bars. Bars played an even greater role in the development of a lesbian subculture than they did for homosexual men, since other meeting places were not available for lesbians.
Also during the Second World War, a homosexual intellectual scene emerged in New York, at the center of which was the art patron Lincoln Kirstein , in whose salon a . a. the writers WH Auden , Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler and the painter Paul Cadmus frequented. Homosexual nonconformists also lived in New York such as the poets Allen Ginsberg , John Ashbery , Frank O'Hara and Audre Lorde , the writers Gore Vidal, Truman Capote , Christopher Isherwood , WH Auden, William Inge , Arthur Laurents , Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams , the painters Jasper Johns , Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly , the photographer George Platt Lynes , the architect Philip Johnson , the dancer Rudolf Nurejew and the composers Leonard Bernstein , Ned Rorem , John Cage , Aaron Copland and Cole Porter . Most of these personalities, of course, preferred not to let their sexual orientation become public.
McCarthy era
In the McCarthy era , a hunt began in the USA on so-called “subversives” who, according to Joseph McCarthy and many other right-wingers, had infiltrated the American government at all levels in order to surrender the country to communism. The “subversives”, like other “fringe groups”, soon also included “homosexuals” across the board. McCarthy and Secretary of State John Peurifoy said there was a “homosexual underground” that encouraged “communist conspiracy”. This conspiracy theory was based on the rumor circulating in Washington that Hitler had drawn up a list of homosexual foreign - including American - politicians for blackmail purposes, which had fallen into the hands of the Stalinist Soviet Union in 1945 . The anti-gay campaign was planned by McCarthy's adviser Roy Cohn ; however, she was also supported by the Chairman of the National Committee of the Republican Party , Guy Gabrielson . The press coined the catchphrases “pervert peril” (German: perverse danger) and “lavender scare” (German: lavender-colored horror), and from the spring of 1950 onwards, nationwide investigations were carried out against homosexuals, which resulted in homosexual employees in large numbers from the civil service were fired. In 1954 the FBI began infiltrating and monitoring homosexual organizations.
One of the widely recognized critics of the defamation campaign was journalist Max Lerner , who wrote a series of articles on Washington Sex Story for the Washington Post in 1950 . The ban on homosexual employment in the public service remained in place until 1975. 1953 signed US President Dwight D. Eisenhower , the Executive Order no. 10450, inter alia, certain that the government could not employ homosexual staff in the interests of national security.
The greatest anti-homosexual hysteria in American history occurred in the fall of 1955 in Boise , Idaho, where after allegedly hundreds of boys were assaulted, the police questioned nearly 15,000 residents about possible members of an alleged homosexual perpetrator ring. The investigation revealed the names of hundreds of people suspected of being homosexual. Eventually 16 men were arrested, 9 of whom were convicted.
Homosexuals in the Civil Rights Movement (1955–1968)
As early as 1951, Edward Sagarin had established that homosexuals - like Jews and blacks - were one of the most important American minority problems of this time. Since homosexuality in the 1950s and early 1960s was much more taboo than the social disadvantage of blacks, and homosexuals only very rarely "came out" during this time, their rights were completely excluded from the agenda of civil rights campaigners. Activists like Jack Nichols and Franklin E. Kameny , in 1968 the slogan "Gay is good" (German: gay is good ) coined, attended civil rights demonstrations such as the March on Washington , although some, however, did not occur there as a representative of the homosexual movement.
One of the most prominent activists of the American civil rights movement was the openly bisexual writer James Baldwin , whose novels have repeatedly explored the special pressures that are placed on people who are black and bisexual. Another openly gay civil rights activist was Bayard Rustin , who served as an advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr. in the 1960s, but later became increasingly involved in promoting gay rights. The Civil Rights Movement later became the model for the homosexual emancipation movement.
Organization of the homosexual civil rights movement
Back in November 1950 in Los Angeles , Harry Hay founded the first homosexual organization in the United States that was to endure: the Mattachine Society . However, this establishment only became official in 1954 and under a different management team. The primary goal of the association, which soon established branches in other American cities and a magazine, the Mattachine Review (1955-1966), published, was to promote social recognition for homosexuals. Also in 1950 in Los Angeles, the Knights of the Clock was founded , an organization that supported same-sex couples of different skin color.
In 1952 a group of former members of the Mattachine Society founded ONE, Inc. , a gay rights organization also based in Los Angeles. ONE, Inc. published the very successful ONE Magazine from 1953 and founded the ONE Institute in 1956 , an educational institution that from 1957 offered events on the history of homosexuality. The One Institute, in turn, became the publisher of the nation's first academic journal on homosexuality, the One Institute Quarterly . ONE, Inc. merged with the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR) in 1996 .
In 1955, the first lesbian civil rights organization was founded in San Francisco. With the organization Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), which soon formed groups in other American cities and which published a magazine, The Ladder , from 1956 onwards, a social forum was to be created that, unlike lesbian bars, was legal and safe from raids .
In 1961, Kameny and Nichols founded the Mattachine Society of Washington , which, in contrast to the New York organization of the same name, sought political changes and began lobbying that primarily aimed to end the exclusion of homosexuals from the public service . In 1962, the Janus Society was founded in Philadelphia , which published the well-read and printed Drum Magazine . In 1963, some of the largest gay organizations merged into the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO).
On September 19, 1964, for the first time in American history, people took to the streets for gay rights; a group of about 10 protesters protested that day on Whitehall Street in New York City against discrimination against homosexuals in the army. Similar demonstrations took place in the capital Washington for the first time in the summer of 1965. The North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) was founded in 1966/67 , the first political umbrella organization of the homosexual movement, which had more than 6,000 members, but was dissolved again in 1970. The first American college to recognize a homosexual student association was New York's Columbia University in 1967 . In January 1967, several hundred people protested on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles against previous police raids in gay bars; it was the largest gay demonstration event to date. In Greenwich Village, New York, activist Craig Rodwell opened the country's first gay bookstore, the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop , that same year .
Gay culture outside of New York City
Homosexual subcultures had existed in many American cities, such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, since the late 19th century. San Francisco has received a particularly large influx of homosexuals since the Beat Generation poets moved there in the 1950s. The gay activist José Sarria ran there as early as 1961 for the office of city council. Life magazine declared the city to be the "gay capital of America" in 1964. In the same year, the Society of Individual Rights (SIR) was founded in San Francisco , which was more politically oriented than the Mattachine Society and thus served as a model for many organizations founded later.
As Brett Beemyn and a team of authors have shown, homosexual subcultures flourished not only in the supposedly progressive and liberal climate of large cities, but also in countless smaller places.
Religion and homosexuality
In the 1950s and 1960s, when religion in the United States generally lost its importance and the Puritan taboos in particular fell more and more, some religious communities began to rethink their positions on homosexuality. The Episcopal Diocese of New York supported the decriminalization of homosexual acts as early as 1964. Also in 1964, Reverend Ted McIlvenna and other clergymen in San Francisco founded the Council on Religion and the Homosexual , which had a great influence, especially on liberal heterosexuals, with its promotion of sympathy for homosexuals. In 1967 a meeting of representatives of the Episcopal Church decided that homosexuality should no longer be condemned. In 1968, the gay-borne Metropolitan Community Church was founded in Los Angeles , a free church that grew rapidly and is today the umbrella organization of an entire church network. Other religious communities such as the Roman Catholic Church and the conservative Protestant churches, which are often summarized under the name Evangelicals , hold on to their rejection of homosexuality to the present day.
The mainline Protestant churches that are members of the Churches Uniting in Christ organization are increasingly accepting homosexual couples and making blessing services possible . With the bishops Gene Robinson , Mary Douglas Glasspool and Guy Erwin , the first consecrations of openly homosexual bishops took place in these churches in recent years.
Within American Judaism , Reconstructionism and Reform Judaism were the currents that first opened up to homosexuals. With Beit Chaim , a homosexual Jewish congregation supported by gays and lesbians was founded for the first time in Los Angeles in 1972; a year later the Beit Simchat Torah Congregation came into being in New York City. In 1969 homosexual Catholics founded the organization DignityUSA ; IntegrityUSA ( Episcopal Church ) followed in 1974 and Affirmation: Gay & Lesbian Mormons ( Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ) in 1977 .
Homosexuality in the media
After AM Rosenthal became editor of the New York Times in 1963 , it became the first of the major American newspapers to publish extensive articles on homosexuality. Editorials such as Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern (December 17, 1963; German: Growing open homosexuality in the city arouses widespread concern ) were not necessarily homosexual-friendly, but ended the long suppression of the topic from public discourse and brought it nationwide Attention. Tennis champion William Tilden (1947) and Lyndon B. Johnson's campaign advisor Walter Jenkins (1964) were among the most prominent personalities whose - involuntary - coming-out made the headlines .
The abolition of the Hays Code in the 1960s also marked the end of the direct influence that the Catholic Church had exerted on the American film industry until then. Since the end of the 1950s, Hollywood films such as Suddenly Last Summer (1959), Infam (1961), Storm Over Washington (1962), Reflection in the Golden Eye , Dance of the Vampires (both 1967), Flesh (1968), and Die Vollrottel have been made (The Gay Deceivers) , Asphalt-Cowboy (both 1969) and Die Harten und die Zarten (1970), in which homosexuality was increasingly explicitly portrayed.
1969-1980
Stonewall Riot (1969)
Since the New York Alcohol Board often did not grant a license to serve alcohol to bars that were visited by homosexuals, but alcohol was still served in these bars, police raids repeatedly occurred in New York gay bars in the 1960s. On June 28, 1969, such a raid on the Stonewall Inn spontaneously resulted in a forcible eviction of the police and a siege lasting several days. Since homosexuals in the USA had never appeared through physical resistance until then, this incident was widely noticed in the gay public and not only led to a short-term solidarity, but also gave the cue for the emergence of the international gay pride campaign. In retrospect, many homosexual activists ascribed a mythical dimension to the Stonewall riots , which arose primarily from the need to give the gay emancipation struggle a symbolic prelude, comparable to the storming of the Bastille .
The raids by no means ended with the Stonewall uprising. On March 8, 1970, police arrested 167 guests at the Snake Pit , another gay bar in Greenwich Village. The incident mainly caused a sensation because one of the arrested people, a young Argentine, jumped out of a window of the police station for fear of losing his visa and was seriously injured.
General trends in gay and lesbian culture according to Stonewall
The Stonewall Rebellion owed part of its explosive power to the fact that it fell at a time that was already profoundly rich in social and cultural change. It was embedded in a general change in values and a liberalization of sexuality, which were also visible in the sexual revolution and in the hippie movement .
In large numbers, lesbians and gays left the rural areas and small towns in which they grew up and moved to cities like San Francisco, New York City, West Hollywood , Chicago, New Orleans , Atlanta, and Houston , which made a steep rise as centers of the open experienced homosexual culture. This soon disintegrated into many smaller subcultures, each with their own meeting points. At a time when the heterosexual world is adopting unisex fashion and androgynous models such as B. turning to David Bowie , however, the gay mission statement was also drastically "masculinized". In the early 1970s, the social type of the so-called Castro Street Clone , who wore leather boots, a tight Levi's 501, a leather jacket, and a mustache , and who regularly steeled his body in the gym, spread widely. The leather and Levi's scene was highly prominent , a fact that gay bar and club operators have been addressing by setting up darkrooms since the 1970s . In the last quarter of the 20th century , commercial facilities such as bars, cinemas and bathhouses increasingly took over the functions that cruising spots such as parks and public toilets had previously performed. In the course of the 1970s, a gay party scene also emerged, which came together at professionally organized dance events. These two-day circuit parties , which often had more than 10,000 participants, reached their peak in the 1990s.
The term "homosexual", which is burdened due to the history of psychiatry, has been rejected by gay activists since the 1970s, as has the euphemism "homophile"; Instead, the term gay (German: gay) , which had previously only been used by opponents of homosexuals, was reclaimed and - neutral in terms of value - incorporated again into the standard language.
The lesbian and gay movement since Stonewall
The events of the Stonewall era marked a turning point in homosexual history in the United States. In this way they formed the starting point for an accelerated networking and self-organization of the subculture, which had strengthened in its self-confidence and which also fundamentally changed in its political program. While the activists of the older generation, such as the representatives of the Mattachine Society , had primarily fought for greater acceptance of homosexuals, the generations that followed Stonewall demanded full social recognition and integration. A radical, utopian-oriented phase, which ebbed again in the early 1970s, was followed by an increasingly political and reform- oriented commitment, which focused on securing gay and lesbian citizenship and participation rights.
self-organisation
American homosexuals have been using the rainbow flag since 1969 , which was inspired by Judy Garland's song Over the Rainbow from the film The Wizard of Oz and which is a symbol on the one hand for lesbian and gay pride and on the other hand for the diversity of their way of life. The flag was given its final shape in 1978 by the artist Gilbert Baker , who lives in San Francisco .
The politicization that the gay community experienced during the Stonewall uprising went hand in hand with the emergence of organizations like the radical Gay Liberation Front (GLF), which was formed in New York City immediately after the uprising. Unlike the Mattachine Society , the GLF fought for a comprehensive social restructuring. On the first anniversary of the Stonewall events, the GLF organized the largest gay demonstration the country had seen until then: a gay and lesbian parade from Greenwich Village to Central Park with several thousand participants, which was also the first Gay Pride Parade . The methods of political struggle were extremely varied since the late 1960s and resourceful and included alongside demonstrations (picketings) , leafleting and boycott z. B. also gay-ins and kiss-ins . In 1969, GLF activist Don Jackson gained a lot of media attention when he tried to establish a gay colony in Alpine County , California , to be named Stonewall Nation .
In December 1969, the Gay Activist's Alliance (GAA) was formed, using the Greek lowercase lambda as its symbol . The GAA, which, in contrast to the GLF, had a tight internal organization, distanced itself from the willingness to use violence and the radical agenda of the GLF, but also chose militant means in its struggle for equal rights for homosexuals: the members of the GAA conducted this in order to gain media attention called zaps through, peaceful but uninvited public confrontations with politicians and television people, who were soon feared by them.
Since many cross-dressers and transsexuals saw their interests poorly represented in the Gay Liberation Front , they founded their own organization in 1970, the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR). In 1971, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund ( Lambda Legal for short ) was founded, a non-profit organization that attempted to bring selected legal cases through the courts in order to bring about decisions in the precedent -based American legal system, including one of them other homosexuals would benefit. In 1973, former members of the Gay Activist's Alliance founded the National Gay Task Force (NGTF) , which was soon renamed the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force , with the aim of enforcing homosexual equality through the means of the parliamentary system. In contrast to many other institutions that campaign for minority rights, these organizations were run by members who often had good incomes, so that considerable amounts of money were often available for lobbying and campaigning for their candidates, making them a powerful political force were.
As an alternative to the gay bars, whose audiences were often exploited with inflated drink prices, gay cafes opened in many large cities in the 1970s and operated as non-profit companies . In addition, many homosexual organizations set up community centers where dance and cultural events were offered.
In October 1979, gay activists first organized a national March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights , a demonstration event in the state capital with more than 100,000 participants. The Human Rights Campaign was founded in 1980 and is now the largest LGBT civil rights organization in the United States, lobbying Congress and promoting candidates who support LGBT issues.
Gay BDSM
After the Second World War, the American motorcyclist subculture in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago developed into the male homosexual leather scene , to which large parts of today's BDSM movement can be traced.
In 1972 Larry Townsend published a Leatherman's Handbook , which summarized the ideas of a leather movement that was later referred to as the Old Guard (German: "Alte Garde"). In the 1990s, as a reaction to the Old Guard , which was characterized by strict rules of conduct and roles and largely excluded lesbians and heterosexuals, a so-called New Guard leather movement emerged, which allowed a wider range of sexual forms of expression.
Developments in Lesbian Culture
The most influential American lesbian organization of the 1950s and 1960s, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), fell apart when its members quarreled in the 1970s over whether to support the gay rights movement or feminism .
Lesbian feminism
Many lesbians were under the impression that their interests were not adequately represented in the mixed-sex organizations. In April 1970 Rita Mae Brown and other women left the Gay Liberation Front and founded the short-lived Radicalesbians (also: Lavender Menace ), whose manifesto of women identified for the first time included the concept of lesbian feminism (also: political lesbianism ), which was influential for the women's movement. was formulated. In the late summer of 1970, the Gay Liberation Front Women emerged as a further spin-off . A group of women also left the Gay Activist's Alliance in 1971; they organized themselves as a Women's Subcommittee and in 1972 took on the name Lesbian Liberation Committee (LLC) .
The lesbian feminists were confronted with double oppression (through sexism and through homophobia ) and were convinced that their interests were diametrically opposed to those of men, including those of gay men. They defined lesbianism as a political creed and therefore came into bitter conflict with many heterosexual feminists. Nevertheless, a women's and lesbian culture emerged in the early 1970s, which deliberately distinguished itself from patriarchal and capitalist structures and which maintained an infrastructure of cafés, bookshops, restaurants, newspapers, banks, residential collectives and concert events. This women's community was conceived as autonomous, often even as separatist. Many lesbian women preferred this type of women's culture simply because they were less economically strong than the average for homosexual men.
While gay men preferred to live in the “liberated zones” of large American cities, in the 1970s lesbian feminists moved in large numbers to small college towns such as Ann Arbor , Northampton , Ithaca or Boulder or to rural regions where lesbian living and working communities were established which often had a strong separatist character. Z. B. The Furies Collective, founded in Washington, DC in 1971
A peculiarity of the lesbian-feminist cultural life that hardly found a counterpart in the gay community was the countless music events and open-air festivals that women came together for in the 1970s. 1976 z. B. the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival , which has been organized annually since then . Singer-songwriters whose songs expressed the lesbian attitude towards life of the time included Holly Near , Meg Christian , Maxine Feldman , Alix Dobkin and Cris Williamson .
Black lesbians
Lesbians with non-European ancestors did not find their special interests adequately represented in any of the associations that had emerged up to then and therefore founded their own organizations. As early as 1976, the Salsa Soul Sisters were founded in New York City , an organization for black lesbians that later assumed the name African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change . This was followed by the Lesbian and Gay Asian Alliance (1979), the Lesbianas Unidas (1983) and the United Lesbians of African Heritage (Uloah) (1989).
Lesbian BDSM
In June 1978 the group Samois , which appeared under the slogan The Leather Menace (German: "The Leather Threat"), was the first organization of feminist lesbians who campaigned politically for the interests of lesbian sadomasochists . Her handbook Coming to Power , published in 1981, campaigned for acceptance of BDSM among the lesbian public . From the beginning, however, the sadomasochists found themselves in a bitter dispute with many women from the camp of lesbian feminism, who considered BDSM - as well as violent pornography and the butch and femme role distribution in many lesbian relationships - to be a particularly misogynistic outgrowth of patriarchal rule . The debate about BDSM and pornography culminated in the so-called Feminist Sex Wars (German: feminist sex wars), in which samois were severely attacked by anti-porn groups such as Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) and Women Against Pornography . As an alternative to the sexuality model of the lesbian feminists, Pat Califia , Gayle Rubin and other sadomasochists developed the concept of sex-positive feminism , which assumed that sexual freedom only exists if every sexual form of expression can really be chosen.
Outing movement
Since the 1970s, many gay libbers (from Gay Liberation , German: gay liberation) represented the slogan "Out of the closets, Into the streets!" (German: Out of the closet, out on the street) and appealed on the one hand the notion that the personal is political and must be made visible, and on the other hand to new studies such as those by Martin S. Weinberg and Colin J. Williams ( Male Homosexuals , 1974), which have shown that homosexuals are coming out better off than men who keep their homosexuality a secret. In the homosexual community , however, there was also increasing pressure to admit to being exclusively gay or lesbian; People who identified themselves as bisexual ran the risk of being accused of homophobia. Cross-dressers, transsexuals and others who did not fit into the picture were also excluded.
Many gay libbers also advocated the "outing" of public figures who did not want to publicly admit their homosexuality themselves. When others viewed the practice as an improper invasion of privacy, a vigorous controversy arose within the gay public. A politico-tactical outing came about for the first time in 1989 when gay activists confronted the Republican Senator from Oregon , Mark Hatfield , during a public event with the statement that he was homosexual. It was later followed by celebrities such as NBC news correspondent Pete Williams , publisher Malcolm Forbes , actor Richard Chamberlain , pop singer Chastity Bono and Congressman Edward Schrock . The outing movement was also supported by investigative journalism from new gay magazines like OutWeek . In order to forestall a forthcoming outing , the governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey , announced his homosexuality to the media himself in 2004.
Many other well-known personalities "came out" of their own accord, including the former New York health department chief Howard Brown (1973), the popular American football player David Kopay (1977), the tennis player Martina Navrátilová (1980), the baseball player Glenn Burke (1982) and fundraising pioneer Marvin Liebman (1990). Coming Out Day has been celebrated in the USA every year since 1988 .
Politics and Jurisprudence
Support from mainstream politicians
In the early 1970s, the homosexual civil rights movement first found support from established politicians, including Edward I. Koch , Arthur Goldberg , Charles Goodell , Richard Ottinger , Robert Abrams and Bella Abzug . During this time, politicians realized for the first time that gay votes were a factor that could no longer be ignored in the future. However, these votes were actually decisive for the first time in 1992 when Bill Clinton ran for president ; after his election, Clinton called nearly 100 openly homosexuals into his government, including Robertahabenberg and AIDS-infected Bob Hattoy .
Repeal of the sodomy laws
Homosexual sexual practices such as anal and oral sex, traditionally referred to as "sodomy" in English legal language, were punishable in all American states until 1962 and were punishable by fines and often long sentences. Although these laws were primarily tailored to homosexuals, heterosexuals were basically subject to them as well. Illinois was the first American state to repeal its sodomy law in 1962. After the emergence of the gay rights movement, numerous other states followed in the 1970s: Connecticut (1971), Colorado , Oregon (1972), Delaware , Hawaii (1973), Massachusetts , Ohio (1974), New Hampshire , New Mexico , North Dakota (1975 ), California , Maine , Washington , West Virginia (1976), Indiana , South Dakota , Vermont , Wyoming (1977), Iowa , Nebraska (1978) and New Jersey (1979). It was almost always the legislature that abolished the sodomy law; only in Massachusetts was it repealed by a decision by the US Supreme Court .
Prosecution
Until the abolition of sodomy laws it was part of routine police homosexuals by provocateurs to lure public toilets and similar places in the case and on charges of lewdness (German: indecency) to be arrested. Occasionally, this humiliating practice has also affected well-known personalities such as B. the mathematician and later Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash Jr. , who was arrested in Santa Monica in 1965 . New York police stopped this practice, which peaked in the 1950s, under pressure from the Mattachine Society in 1966. In other states, entrapment in public toilets continued until the sodomy laws were repealed. Caused a stir z. B. the arrests of the politician Gaylord Parkinson (Republican) in San Diego (1974), the deputy mayor of Los Angeles, Maurice Weiner, in Los Angeles (1976), the Major General Edwin A. Walker in Dallas (1976), the congressman Jon Hinson in Washington, DC (1981) and the British pop singer George Michael in Los Angeles (1998). Congressman Robert Bauman was arrested in 1980 on contact with an underage rascal boy .
Other discriminatory laws and practices
The sodomy bans were by no means the only laws that discriminated against homosexuals in the United States. Countless federal, state, and local laws and regulations resulted in homosexuals being excluded from certain professions and military service, and unable to obtain the security clearance that is required for many professional activities in the United States. Homosexuals were at a disadvantage in labor and tenancy law and in purchasing insurance policies; the first American insurance company to treat same-sex couples as if they were married couples in life insurance was MetLife in 1976 . Same-sex couples often encountered difficulties when trying to be buried in a common grave. Even kisses, hugs and close dancing were mostly unthinkable in public. Many American cities had local ordinances banning public cross-dressing. Until 1990, the American immigration authority INS was also able to refuse entry to homosexual foreigners into the USA. Foreigners who wanted to move to their American partner in the USA also had difficulties.
Custody and adoption
Up until the 1970s, homosexuals whose partner was in need of care could generally not obtain the right to care for them. Nor were they allowed to adopt children or raise them as foster children ; Often they have even been deprived of their right to custody and access to their biological children. In June 1972, a San Jose court first upheld the lawsuit brought by a lesbian woman who claimed custody of her three children. In May 1974, in Philadelphia, a lesbian couple was first granted custody of a child who was not biologically related to either woman.
In the 1990s, in some states (e.g. New York, 1992), men also won the right to adopt the biological children of their partner for the first time (“second parent adoption”). As early as 1990, the Ohio Supreme Court allowed a gay man to adopt a severely disabled foster child. In October 1997, a court in New Jersey first granted a gay couple the right to jointly adopt a child who was not biologically related to either man ("joint adoption").
Homosexuals in political office
The first political office in the United States to make her homosexuality public was Nancy Wechsler, who was an elected member of Ann Arbor , Michigan City Council from 1972 to 1974 . Her successor in office, Kathy Kozachenko, was the first female politician to be elected to office as an avowed lesbian. Kozachenko was a member of Ann Arbor City Council from 1974 to 1976. Both politicians were members of the Human Rights Party .
Elaine Noble came out during her first term in the Massachusetts House of Representatives , which she started in 1974. She won re-election in 1976 but came under pressure after singer Anita Bryant began her anti-homosexual campaign in 1977 . Also in 1974, Allan Spear , a member of the Minnesota Senate, confessed his homosexuality; In 1976 he easily won his re-election.
One of the most famous openly gay politicians was Harvey Milk , who had been a councilor in San Francisco since 1977. Milk and Mayor George Moscone were shot dead by Dan White, a former city councilor, in November 1978. After White was found guilty of only manslaughter in the subsequent criminal proceedings , the so-called White Night Riots broke out in May 1979 , a violent uprising by part of the gay population of San Francisco.
In 1979, President Jimmy Carter appointed the lesbian politician Jill Schropp to the National Advisory Council on Women . In 1980 Melvin Boozer (1945-1987), a black gay activist from Washington, DC, was nominated for the office of US Vice President at the Democratic Party Congress in New York City; but he was defeated by the democratic candidate Walter Mondale . However, since the Republican Ronald Reagan became president in the subsequent elections , his follower George HW Bush occupied the office of vice president.
The highest political positions that openly homosexual politicians in the USA have ever achieved or held even after they came out were seats in the House of Representatives and in the Senate . Gerry Studds ( Democrats ) belonged to the "house" from 1973 to 1997; Barney Frank (Democrats) was a member from 1981 to 2013, Steve Gunderson (Republican) was a member of the House of Representatives from 1980 to 1996, and James Thomas Kolbe (Republican) was a member of the House of Representatives from 1985 to 2006. In 1960 the homosexual writer and activist Gore Vidal had applied for such a mandate without success. Since 2011, with David Cicilline , Mark Pocan , Sean Patrick Maloney , Jared Polis and Mark Takano, other openly gay MPs have been elected to the House of Representatives. In 2012, Tammy Baldwin became the first openly gay senator to join the United States Senate.
Homosexuality in the media
Press
Although there were no openly homosexual reporters in national American newspapers in the 1970s, articles on the subject continued to appear in the press that provided the public with a wealth of material for discussion, including: B. Joseph Epstein's controversial homo / hetero billing : The Struggle For Sexual Identity ( Harper’s , September 1970) and Merle Miller's essay What it Means to Be a Homosexual (New York Times Sunday Magazine, January 1971). With this release, Miller also became the first openly gay personality in the American mainstream press. Joe Nicholson of the New York Post followed in the late 1970s . In 1981, Randy Shilts became a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle ; Shilts is believed to be the first openly gay journalist from a mainstream American newspaper to write about gay topics.
The gay magazine The Advocate has been published in Los Angeles since 1967 and is now the longest uninterrupted LGBT magazine in the USA. Immediately after the Stonewall Uprising, the magazines Gay Sunshine (San Francisco), Fag Rag (Boston), Gay Insurgent (Philadelphia), Gay Power (New York) and Gay Liberator (Detroit) began. In the 1970s others followed, such as Gay Community News (GCN) (Boston), Christopher Street and The Lesbian Feminist (both in New York City), RFD (Liberty, Tennessee), The Amazon Quarterly (Oakland), The Furies (Washington , DC), Lesbian Tide (Los Angeles), Womanspirit (Wolf Creek), and Lavender Woman (Chicago). The Gay Liberation Front published a paper with the title Come Out! .
watch TV
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Homosexuality first became apparent on television in the late 1960s, including with the CBS documentary The Homosexuals . The film, which first aired in 1967, reached 40 million prime-time viewers, providing more Americans with information about homosexuality than any previous individual journalistic or artistic effort. From the same point in time on, Phil Donahue created media coverage for homosexuals by being the first television host to repeatedly invite them to his nationwide talk show (1967-1997). In 1972 ABC broadcast the television film That Certain Summer , which for the first time in this genre portrayed a homosexual sympathetically. In 1973, PBS broadcast the 12-hour documentary An American Family , which showed the everyday life of a young homosexual's family , on the main evening program . In October 1976, Blueboy Forum was the first regular gay program in American television history to go on air.
1981 came about with the comedy show Love, Sidney (with Tony Randall ) for the first time a fictional television series with a homosexual main character. At the same time, homosexual minor characters also appeared in the first American mainstream television series, such as The Denver Clan (1981-1999), Brothers & Sisters (1984-1999), Doctor Doctor (1989-1991) and Melrose Place (1992-1999 ). In the summer and fall of 1994, MTV aired its documentary series The Real World: San Francisco . At the same time, television series with openly homosexual main characters were produced for the first time, such as Ellen (1994–1998), Will & Grace (1998–2006), Normal, Ohio (2000–2001), Queer as Folk (2000–2005) and The L Word - Wenn Women love women (2004–2009).
Countermovement
The entry of lesbians and gays into the political discourse led to a polarization of American society in the 1970s. Homosexuality was only accepted by a minority; in opinion polls, 70% of those questioned rejected same-sex relationships.
1973 began a series of acts of violence against homosexual institutions. On July 27, 1973, the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco was burned. On June 24, 1973, 32 people were killed in an arson attack on the Upstairs Lounge gay bar in New Orleans . In October 1974, the Gay Activist's Alliance headquarters in New York City burned down . On December 11, 1977, the Castro Steam Baths in San Francisco were destroyed in an arson attack . The physical and verbal attacks on homosexual individuals, for whom the term gay bashing has become common in English, are countless . Homosexuals were repeatedly killed in such attacks; The 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard attracted international attention . As recently as 2005, the FBI reported that 14.2% of all hate crimes were directed against homosexuals.
Since the early 1970s, organizations and movements that oppose homosexuality for various reasons have gained popularity. In the ex-gay movement , many people - mostly close to evangelicalism - gathered who continued to regard homosexuality as an illness and rely on so-called reparative therapy or conversion therapy . Institutions that produced this movement include the faith community Love in Action (since 1973), the interdenominational Christian organization Exodus International (1976), the Homosexuals Anonymous , based on the model of Alcoholics Anonymous , the Catholic organization Courage International (both 1980) , Richard Cohen's International Healing Foundation (1990), the affiliates' organization PFOX (1998), the Jewish organization JONAH (1999; 2015) sentenced to high compensation payments to the victims of the “therapies” offered by the organization for fraudulent and immoral business practices and dissolved by order of the court ) and the non-denominational organization PeopleCanChange (2000).
In 1977 popular singer Anita Bryant began her campaign to overturn a ban on discrimination passed in Miami-Dade County , Florida . Bryant, who was convinced that homosexuality was sinful, also organized the nationally supported political group Save Our Children (German: Save Our Children), which committed itself to the fight against the alleged "recruitment" of children by homosexuals and thus to appealed to stereotypical fears that were widespread among heterosexuals. Was one of Bryant's supporters - in addition to the governor of Florida, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Miami and the President of B'nai B'rith in Miami Beach - and the fundamentalist - Baptist televangelist Jerry Falwell , the 1979, the Moral Majority founded an organization that should "declare war" on homosexuality. The chairman of Moral Majority in Santa Clara , California, Dean Wycoff , declared in 1982 that he supported the reintroduction of the death penalty for homosexuals. Similar anti-homosexual campaigns were also carried out by television preacher Pat Robertson and the founder of the American Family Association , Donald Wildmon . Both found a broad following among fundamentalist Christians; about 200,000 of them gathered in April 1980 for a demonstration held in Washington, DC under the title Washington for Jesus .
In the 1990s, anti-homosexual campaigns were also supported by mainstream conservative politicians. At their party conference in 1992, the Republicans decided on an anti-homosexual agenda, which they summarized together with other program items under the title Family Values . Patrick Buchanan , who ran for a Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and 1996, called for a “cultural war” against those who advocated gay and lesbian civil rights . President George HW Bush , Vice President Dan Quayle , Congressman Newt Gingrich, and other Republican leaders made similar positions in less harsh tones. US Senator Jesse Helms also appeared through anti-homosexual initiatives .
The opponents of homosexual emancipation have always included organizations of the White Supremacy movement such as the Ku Klux Klan .
1981-2000
AIDS
In 1981, many gays in the United States fell ill with a condition which in these cases was initially diagnosed as Kaposi's sarcoma . The US Center for Disease Control (CDC) introduced the designation gay cancer (German: gay cancer) and later gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) (German: gay-related immune deficiency ). It was not until 1982 that the term AIDS came into circulation. Because the disease was discovered among homosexual men, it was considered a homosexual disease until the late 1980s and was stigmatized as such . For some public figures - e.g. For example, the actor Rock Hudson , the entertainer Liberace , the football player Jerry Smith and the McCarthy advisor Roy Cohn - the discovery of the disease led to an involuntary coming-out. Some fundamentalist Christians such as Jerry Falwell called AIDS God's punishment for homosexuals (German: God's punishment for homosexuals). US President Ronald Reagan, whose reign coincided with a general shift to the right in politics and an increase in evangelical influence , did not begin to speak publicly about AIDS until 1987.
The US homosexual public reacted with a deep shock to the disease, which was soon followed by a solidarity movement. The aid organization Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) was founded in New York in August 1981 . Although the health authorities initially did not provide adequate education about the ways the disease was infected, homosexuals began to fundamentally change their sexual habits in 1983. The first safer sex information leaflet appeared in 1982 in San Francisco. Since the government and Congress initially made little money available for research into the disease, the medical researcher Mathilde Krim founded the AIDS Medical Foundation in 1983 , from which the American Foundation for AIDS Research emerged in 1985 , which was later developed by celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor , Barbra Streisand , Woody Allen and Warren Beatty was publicly endorsed.
In 1985, the People With AIDS Coalition (PWAC) was founded in New York City . In 1987 the activist group AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (Act Up) was formed , which among other things fought for an appropriate representation of the topic of AIDS in the media. Also in 1987, the NAMES Project Foundation began organizing the AIDS Memorial Quilt in San Francisco , with which thousands of Americans remembered their loved ones who had died of AIDS and which was nominated for the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize.
Many gay meeting places - especially bathhouses - closed in the course of the AIDS crisis; At the same time, however, a controversy arose as to whether these meeting places should not be maintained and used to disseminate information about the routes of infection by HIV and safer sex . At the same time, companies that offered phone sex experienced an upswing ; With the expansion of the World Wide Web , cybersex forums also gained increasing importance in the 1990s .
Beginning in 1996, the number of people who died of AIDS in the United States fell dramatically due to new drugs and agents, HAART therapy.
Politics and Jurisprudence
The abolition of the sodomy laws had stalled in the late 1970s. Although Alaska, New York and Pennsylvania also repealed their sodomy laws in 1980 and Wisconsin followed in 1983, in the populous states of New York and Pennsylvania, of all places, the repeal was not based on a legislative decision, but a court ruling.
In the mid-1980s, homosexual acts were still criminal in half of the states, and the AIDS crisis had so tied up the forces of homosexual activists that the decriminalization of homosexuality temporarily lost priority and was not pursued again until the early 1990s . The first state to repeal its sodomy law after the AIDS epidemic started was Kentucky in 1992 . Nevada followed in 1993, the District of Columbia in 1995 , Tennessee in 1996 , Montana in 1997 , Georgia and Rhode Island in 1998 , Maryland in 1999 , Arizona and Minnesota in 2001 , and Arkansas in 2002 . Due to a decision by the US Supreme Court ( Lawrence v. Texas ) on June 26, 2003, the sodomy laws of the remaining states also lost their legal effect: Alabama , Florida , Idaho , Kansas , Louisiana , Michigan , Mississippi , Missouri , North Carolina , Oklahoma , South Carolina , Texas , Utah, and Virginia . The ruling also meant that states could no longer set a specific age of consent for homosexual acts that was different from the age of consent for heterosexual acts.
In addition to the decriminalization of homosexual acts, the political organizations also fought against discrimination in various other areas of life. In 1984, the University of Berkeley, California, became the first US community to give homosexual city employees in partnership the same benefits as married couples. In 1986 an ordinance was passed in New York City that banned employers and landlords from discriminating against homosexuals. In 1992, similar state-level laws followed in California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Vermont, and Wisconsin.
Amendment 2 , adopted in Colorado in 1992, received a great deal of attention . That law stipulated that no laws or other regulations could be passed in Colorado by which persons could obtain minority protection, quota regulations , protection status or protection against discrimination based on their sexual orientation . Anti-discrimination regulations, such as those already in place in Aspen , Denver and Boulder , were voided by this law. The gay and lesbian public responded to the amendment by boycotting the state, which was not ended until the US Supreme Court repealed the controversial law in 1996.
Organizations
Many other LGBT organizations have sprung up in the United States since the 1980s. Since 1985 the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has been campaigning against defamatory portrayals of homosexuality in the media. In 1987 the International Foundation for Gender Education (ifge) was founded, which campaigns for the rights of transsexuals. In 1990, some former act-up activists formed the Queer Nation , a loose organization that used the slogan “We're here. We're queer. Get used to it “(German: We are here. We are queer. Get used to it) and tried to increase the visibility of homosexuals in everyday life with militant individual actions. The Lesbian Avengers have had a similar program since 1992 . Characteristic of the period since 1990 is the emergence of special organizations that took into account the interests of groups of people with increasingly specific identities. In the 21st century, these included transsexual organizations such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project , the Transgender Law Center (both 2002) and the National Center for Transgender Equality (2003).
Homosexual journalism
Randy Shilts wrote about AIDS in the 1980s ( And the Band Played On , Report, 1987). Since the 1980s, a plethora of new magazines addressed to homosexual readers emerged, such as Frontiers (1981), the lesbian magazine Curve (1991), Out (1992) and Instinct (1997).
Since the 1990s, in large parts of the homosexual public, the terms gay (German: gay) and lesbian (German: lesbian) have been pushed back in favor of the untranslatable term “ queer ”, which is broader than “gay” and also lesbians, bisexuals, transgender people , Transsexuals, intersexuals and people who deviate from heteronormativity in any other way .
Military service
From the 1940s until 1993, homosexuals were banned from serving in the country's armed forces . This made the military the last major employer in the United States that still explicitly discriminated against homosexuals. Activists like Leonard Matlovich had already fought in the 1970s to be allowed to join the armed forces as openly homosexuals. Since 1988, the Military Freedom Project of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force had also campaigned for this goal . After Bill Clinton had promised in the previous presidential election campaign that military service would also be available to homosexuals, after lengthy negotiations he agreed with the military leadership on the Don't ask, Don't tell directive (1993). After that, homosexuals were allowed to serve in the armed forces as long as they kept their sexual orientation hidden. In return, they were protected from reprisals and questions about their sexual orientation. Many gay activists who campaigned for freedom to be openly gay saw this compromise as a setback. In May 2010, the United States House of Representatives approved the repeal of the “Don't ask, don't tell” rule. As of September 20, 2011, gay soldiers can openly serve in the US military.
Same-sex civil partnership and marriage
Could be under the impression that the homosexual culture in the long term only with the model of stable partnerships thrive, homosexual most active began in the late 1980s, for the legally recognized partnership (domestic partnership) , the registered partnership ( civil union , registered partnership ) and the use same-sex marriage . Berkeley became the first American city in 1984 to allow same-sex couples to register. In the federal capital, Washington, domestic partnerships , in which same-sex couples enjoy similar rights to married couples, became legal in 1992. California (1999), Maine (2004), Washington State (2006) and Oregon (2008) followed later. The first state in which same-sex couples can enter into a civil union was Vermont. The states of Connecticut (2005), New Jersey (2006) and New Hampshire (2008) followed.
The champions of same-sex marriage had their first success when the Supreme Court of Hawaii in 1993 in the Baehr v. Lewin ruled that the refusal to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple constituted a case of gender discrimination under the Hawaii Constitution. In 1996, however, President Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act , which stipulated that neither the American federal government nor individual states need to recognize same-sex marriage that has been concluded in a single state or in another state. Hawaii also passed a Constitutional Amendmend 2 in 1998 , which prevented same-sex marriages in this state.
In the spring of 2004, the newly elected Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom , attracted international attention when he instructed the county clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex applicants. From February 12, about 4,000 same-sex couples married in San Francisco until March 11, 2004, when the California Supreme Court ruled that these marriages were not legally effective. The first state in which same-sex marriages can legally be entered into was Massachusetts on May 17, 2004, where the Supreme Judical Court in Goodridge v. The Department of Public Health had ruled that same-sex couples should not be deprived of the legal advantages enjoyed by married heterosexual couples.
In 2013, same-sex married couples were given equal status across tax legislation following the supreme court repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act at the federal level. In future, it will be permitted to submit a joint tax return and the same tax benefits will be granted.
present
The percentage of Americans who reject homosexuality has fallen noticeably since the Stonewall uprising. In 1970 it was 70%, in 2007 it was only 50% (compared to male homosexuality) and 48% (compared to female homosexuality). Around 38% of Americans today have a positive opinion of homosexuals. In many American cities, towns, and states, gays and lesbians enjoy extensive protection from discrimination, at least under the law. A large number of companies give homosexual employees in a stable partnership the same financial benefits that married couples receive. Same-sex couples are allowed to get married in more than half of the states, and a number of other states have laws that grant homosexual couples a legal status similar to that of married heterosexual couples under certain conditions. In some states, same-sex couples have the right to adopt children or raise children as foster children. Many federal parliaments are currently proposing legislation to further enshrine legal equality for homosexuals.
In June 2016, 49 people were killed in an attack in a gay bar in Florida.
Research institutions and research problems
The largest research library on the subject is the New York Public Library . Considerable document collections also have Bisexual Resource Center in Boston , the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York City, the library of Cornell University in Ithaca , New York, the Gerber / Hart Library in Chicago, the James C. Hormel Gay & Lesbian Center of San Francisco Public Library , the One National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, and the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood. After American universities such as Sacramento State University had set up their first LGBT study programs as early as 1972, the City University of New York established the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) as the first university research institute in the country to specialize in homosexual history, culture and politics. . In the early 21st century, many more universities - including z. As the Yale University , the Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva , New York, the University of Maryland , the Brown University , the University of Illinois at Chicago , the University of California, Berkeley , the San Francisco State University and San Francisco City College - the LGBT Studies course set up. At the University of California, Santa Barbara , the Michael D. Palm Center has existed since 2006 , a study and research facility that deals primarily with the sexual minorities in the American military.
Historians who want to research the history of homosexuals in the USA are - as in other countries - confronted with the particular problem that many sources and documents that could be used to reconstruct this history have been systematically destroyed: in part by Censors and other contemporary morals who thought they were fighting obscenity here , partly from relatives of the homosexual authors who tried to protect their reputation after the death of those affected. The suppression of research-relevant materials was not a phenomenon of the Victorian era, but extended well into the 20th century. For example, in the case of Horatio Alger (1832–1899), a prolific writer of popular youth novels, it was not until 1971 that documents were rediscovered showing that Alger had a homoerotic and pedophile background. In 1978 the South Caroliniana Library in Columbia , South Carolina , tried to prevent the historian Martin Duberman from publishing the love letters that the eminent Southern politician Thomas Jefferson Withers (1804-1866) had written to a man in 1826 . English professor Lillian Faderman was denied permission to include poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay in her 1994 anthology Chloe Plus Olivia , a collection of lesbian poetry .
Many homosexual authors used elaborate encryption systems when writing. For example, Countee Cullen , the leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote about his sexual relations in coded form in his letters, which he always signed with a pseudonym.
See also
- History of the Lesbian and Gay Movement
- Folsom Street Fair
- List of literary works with homosexual content
- Camp (art)
literature
General representations
- Brett Beemyn (Ed.): Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories , New York (Routledge), 1997. ISBN 0-415-91389-6
- Allida M. Black (Ed.): Modern American Queer History , Temple University Press, 2001. ISBN 1-56639-872-X
- Jonathan Katz: Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA A Documentary , Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976. ISBN 0-690-01164-4
- Molly McGarry, Fred Wasserman: Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America , New York (Penguin Studio), 1998. ISBN 0-670-86401-3
- Neil Miller : Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present , Advocate Books, 2005. ISBN 1-55583-870-7
- Neil Miller: In Search of Gay America. Women and Men in a Time of Change , New York, The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. ISBN 0-87113-304-0
- Henry L. Minton: Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America , University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN 0-226-53044-2
- Leila J. Rupp: A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America , University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN 0-226-73156-1
Lesbian story
- Lillian Faderman : Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in the Twentieth-Century America , New York (Columbia University Press), 1991. ISBN 0-14-017122-3
- Lillian Faderman: To Believe in Women. What Lesbians Have Done for America - History , Boston, New York (Houghton Mifflin Company) 1999. ISBN 0-395-85010-X
- Elizabeth Kennedy, Madeline Davis: Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community , Penguin , 1993. ISBN 0-14-023550-7
- Pat Califia : Sapphistry: The book of lesbian sexuality , Naiad Press, 1988, ISBN 0-941483-24-X
Individual periods of time
- Allan Bérubé : Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two , Free Press, 2000. ISBN 0-7432-1071-9
- Lester B. Brown (Ed.): Two Spirit People: American Indian Lesbian Women and Gay Men , Haworth Press, 1997. ISBN 0-7890-0003-2
- David Carter : Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution , St. Martin's Griffin, 2005. ISBN 0-312-34269-1
- George Chauncey : Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 , New York (Basic Books), 1994. ISBN 0-465-02621-4
- Robert J. Corber: Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity , Duke University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8223-1964-0
- Martin Duberman : Stonewall , Plume, 1994. ISBN 0-452-27206-8
- John D'Emilio : Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 , University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0-226-14267-1
- John G. Gerassi, Peter Boag: The Boys of Boise. Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City , University of Washington Press, Reprint 2001. ISBN 0-295-98167-9
- John Loughery: The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives & Gay Identities - A Twentieth-Century History , Henry Holt and Co., 1998. ISBN 0-8050-3896-5
- Randy Shilts : And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic , Stonewall Inn Editions, 2000. ISBN 0-312-24135-6
- Mark Thompson: Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate. History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement , New York (St. Martin's Press), 1995. ISBN 0-312-09536-8 (covering the period 1967–1992)
- Walter L. Williams: Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture , Beacon Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8070-4615-9
Individual cities and regions
- Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994 , University of Chicago Press, 2002. ISBN 0-226-02694-9
- John Howard: Men Like That: A Southern Queer History , University of Chicago Press, 2001. ISBN 0-226-35470-9
- Charles Kaiser: The Gay Metropolis: 1940-1996 , Boston, New York (Houghton Mifflin) 1997. ISBN 0-395-65781-4 . Lots of collection of individual episodes
History of the leather and BDSM scene
- Gayle Rubin : The Valley of the Kings: Leathermen in San Francisco, 1960–1990. , 1994, Dissertation Abstracts International, 56 (01A), 0249. (UMI No. 9513472).
- Gayle Rubin: The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather in San Francisco 1962–1996 , in James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy Peters (eds.): Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture , San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1998, ISBN 0-87286-335-2
- Gayle Rubin: From the Past: The Outcasts from the Newsletter of the Leather Archives & Museum No. April 4, 1998
- Gayle Rubin: Sites, Settlements, and Urban Sex: Archeology And The Study of Gay Leathermen in San Francisco 1955–1995 , in Robert Schmidt and Barbara Voss (Eds.): Archaeologies of Sexuality , London, Routledge, 2000, ISBN 0-415 -22365-2
- Larry Townsend : The Leatherman's Handbook: Silver Jubilee Edition , (expanded reprint), LT Publications 2000, ISBN 1-881684-19-9
Other special topics
- Byrne Fone : Homophobia: A History , New York (Picador), 2001. ISBN 0-312-42030-7
- Vito Russo : The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies , New York (Harper & Row), 1987. ISBN 0-06-096132-5
- Rodger Streitmatter: Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America , Boston (Faber and Faber), 1995. ISBN 0-571-19873-2
- Pat Califia: Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex (Essays), Cleis Press, 2001, ISBN 1-57344-132-5
- Eric Marcus : Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights. 1945–1990. An Oral History , New York, Harper Collins Publishers, 1992. ISBN 0-06-016708-4 (Collection of Biographies)
- Gayle Rubin: Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality . In: Henry Abelove u. a. (Ed.): The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, New York (Routledge). 1993. (First published in 1984), German: Sex Think. Comments on a radical theory of sexual politics in Thinking Queer. Against the Order of Sexuality (Queer Studies) , ed. by Andreas Kraß , Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2003, pp. 31–79, ISBN 3-518-12248-7
- Gayle Rubin: Studying Sexual Subcultures: the Ethnography of Gay Communities in Urban North America , in Ellen Lewin and William Leap (Eds.): Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology , Urbana (University of Illinois Press), 2002, ISBN 0-252-07076-3
- Stuart Timmons : The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement , Boston ( Alyson Books ), 1990. ISBN 1-55583-175-3
Documentaries on the topic (selection)
See also: List of films with homosexual content
- 1983 - Before Stonewall (John Scagliotti, Greta Schiller)
- 1992 - Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker (Richard Schmiechen)
- 1993 - Last Call at Maud's (Paris Poirier), through a lesbian bar in San Francisco that opened in 1966
- 1994 - Coming Out Under Fire (Arthur Dong), film about gay American soldiers in World War II
- 1999 - After Stonewall (John Scagliotti)
- 2005 - Gay Sex in the 70s (Joseph F. Lovett), about gay culture in New York before AIDS
- 2005 - Original Pride: The Satyrs Motorcycle Club (Scott Bloom), through a gay motorcycle club founded in 1954
Weblinks (English)
- Gay & Lesbian History in the US ( April 17, 2015 memento in the Internet Archive ), A Snapshot of the 20th Century
- People with a History An Online Guide to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Trans History
- Dear Friends: American Photographs of Male together, 1840–1918 ( Memento from June 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), information on an exhibition from 2001
- William N. Eskridge Jr .: Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet, 1946–1961 ( Memento August 5, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), (PDF; 754 kB), Florida State University Law Review Vol. 24, p. 703
- Coming Out In America - An Historical Perspective - Presentation
History of LGBT in individual cities:
- History of Homosexuality in New York City ( February 28, 2015 memento on Internet Archive )
- History of homosexuality in San Francisco ( April 28, 2015 memento in the Internet Archive )
- History of homosexuality in Los Angeles ( Memento from May 9, 2015 on the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ Native America: Berdaches ( Memento December 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive ; Timeline of Homosexual History ( Memento of November 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive ; Byrne Fone, Homophobia , pp. 322-324
- ^ Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis , p. 19; Fone, p. 327
- ↑ The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers: Virginia ( Memento October 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); The Sensibilities of Our Forefathers: Massachusetts ( August 11, 2007 memento on the Internet Archive ); Fone, p. 328; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 39
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, Becoming Visible, p. 32; Fone, p. 332; 1786: Pennsylvania Drops Death Penalty ; Buggery
- ↑ WM. A. Alcott, The Young Man's Guide
- ↑ Fone, pp. 333-341; Joachim Pfeiffer: Men's Friendships in 18th Century Literature. In: Freiburger Frauenstudien 6, 2000, pp. 193–210. ( at archive.org ( Memento from July 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ))
- ^ Boston Marriages ( Memento of March 12, 2005 in the Internet Archive ); Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women, p. 2
- ↑ John Loughery: The Other Side of Silence , opening chapter
- ↑ 1924: Gerber Starts Society for Human Rights
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 51, 60-63
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 60, 66; The Harlem Renaissance ( memento of March 25, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) on the Internet Archive
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 60-65, 102f; George Chauncey, Gay New York , pp. 131, 272-278
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 49-57; Settlement houses ; Heterodoxy : Telling the Truth at the White House ( MS Word ; 2.8 MB)
- ↑ Harriet Hosmer ( Memento from August 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 49-53
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 71f; Kaiser, p. 19
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 60, 72f; Kaiser, p. 14
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 25-30, 37; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 35
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 25–30; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 77
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 33-35; Kaiser, pp. 28–32
- ^ Quaker Emergency Services ; Kaiser, pp. 26, 56; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 42
- ↑ 1941: Henry Publishes Sex Variants
- ^ Kaiser, p. 119
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 48–50
- ↑ 1948: Kinsey Publishes Sexual Behavior in the Human Male ; Kaiser, p. 53; Kinsey Institute website
- ^ Edward Sagarin ( Memento June 6, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 163, 237f; Judd Marmor ( memento of September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); The APA decision December 1973
- ↑ Panelists Recount Events Leading to Deleting Homosexuality As a Psychiatric Disorder From DSM ( Memento from February 5, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 38-51, 88; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 60; VBA: Don't Worry, Honey, Your Roots Aren't Showing ( Memento June 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Last of the Great Bath Houses ; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 4, 77, 142; Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, Madeline D. Davis: "I could hardly wait to get back to that bar". Lesbian bar culture in Buffalo in the 1930s and 1940s , in: Brett Beemyn (Ed.): Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories , pp. 27–72
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 42f, 89, 120
- ^ Joseph McCarthy and McCarthyism ( Memento December 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive ; 1950: 'Lavender scare'!
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 69, 80; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 37f; Executive Order 10450
- ↑ OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS Idaho's Original Same-Sex Scandal
- ↑ John Gerassi: The boys of Boise: furor, vice, and folly in an American city . Macmillan, Boise, Idaho (United States) 1966, ISBN 978-0-295-98167-3 , pp. 328 .
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 140; Kaiser, pp. 140, 147
- ^ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 153
- ^ Mattachine Society ( Memento March 25, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive ; Knights of the Clock: Pre-Stonewall gay organizing
- ^ The Suppression of Lesbian and Gay History ; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 146
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 146f
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 140-148; Mid-1960s gay activists target US gov't ; Society of Janus: 25 Years September - 24 - 25, 1999 ( Memento from May 28, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 140-148; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 156; 1964 - first queer picket in NYC, about military ?; Demonstrations in Washington: Queer Heritage. A timeline ; Oscar Wilde's Last Stand
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 83; José Sarria ( Memento of December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive ); Society of Individual Rights
- ↑ Brett Beemyn: Creating a Place For Ourselves . Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories. Routledge, New York, NY 1997, ISBN 0-415-91389-6 , pp. 1 ff .
- ^ Kaiser, 28, 142f; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 153; Kathleen A. McAdams: The San Francisco Council on Religion and the Homosexual , Oasis / California, version dated December 14, 2007 at archive.org
- ^ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 218
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 52, 140, 156f, 270
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 143, 187
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 6, 17f, 33
- ↑ Back to Our Future?
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 19, 137f, 148-150, 209; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 84f
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 84f, 95, 101, 108; The Castro Clone
- ^ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 160
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 162, 199f
- ^ Kaiser, p. 216; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 163, 175; Donn Teal: The Gay Militants . How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969‒1971. St. Martins Press, 1995, ISBN 0-312-11279-3 . ; Don Jackson: Gay Mecca No. 1 ( Memento of December 7, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Carter, Jacob D .: The Alpine County Project Reconsidered (Master's Thesis), Boston 2015
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 167f, 175
- ^ Kaiser, p. 331; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 201f
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 87f
- ^ March on Washington: Mark Thompson: The Long Road to Freedom, p. 181
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 92; see. also the detailed description by Robert Bienvenu, The Development of Sadomasochism as a Cultural Style in the Twentieth-Century United States , 2003, online as PDF under Sadomasochism as a Cultural Style
- ↑ A very detailed description of the historical development of homosexuality in the United States, with particular emphasis on the leather scene, can be found under the timeline ( memento of April 22, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) of the Leather Archives and Museum .
- ↑ Old Guard, New Guard
- ↑ Radicalesbians ( Memento April 7, 2005 in the Internet Archive ); Gay Liberation Front Women: Queer Heritage. A Timeline , Manifest ( Memento September 5, 2006 on the Internet Archive ); McGarry / Wasserman, p. 169
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 89f, 180-182; Women, wimmin, womyn, womin, whippets - On Lesbian Separatism
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 187-190; The Furies ( Memento of February 3, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 194; Michigan Womyn's Music Festival ; Alix Dobkin ; Cris Williamson ( January 11, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Salsa Soul Sisters: Gay Events Timeline, 1970–1999 ( Memento of November 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive ); Women of Color Organize ; Latina / Latino Americans ( Memento from April 18, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 195; Sex positive feminism
- ↑ Thompson, p. 100
- ^ Outing ( Memento of June 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Kaiser, p. 212f; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 161, 249
- ^ Howard Brown ( April 19, 2007 memento in the Internet Archive ); Marvin Liebman, 73, dies; Conservative for Gay Rights Marvin Liebman
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 215-217, 220f, 330
- ↑ Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, New York (Touchstone), 1998, pp. 184-189; Kaiser, p. 145; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 103; Gaylord Parkinson: Nixon Man Charged (PDF; 4.1 MB), Thompson, p. 101; Edwin A. Walker: Countless Blessings , Thompson, p. 132; Maurice Weiner ( Memento of July 3, 2008 in the Internet Archive ), Thompson, p. 131; Jon Clifton Hinson ; George Michael's Tearoom Tale ; Robert Bauman: The Gay 80's in Review
- ↑ Michael A. Scaperlanda: Kulturkampf in the Backwaters: Homosexuality and Immigration Laws (PDF; 3.4 MB), WIDENER JOURNAL OF PUBLIC LAW, 2002, VOL 11; PART 3, pages 475-514; Thompson, pp. 131f, 214, 344
- ↑ Thompson, p. 278; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 32
- ↑ Irene D. Johnson, Pace Law Faculty Publications, 1-1-2009 A Suggested Solution to the Problem of Intestate Succession in Nontraditional Family Arrangements: Taking the “Adoption” (and the Inequity) Out of the Doctrine of “Equitable Adoption” ; Ohio: Legal protection for all the children ( MS Word ; 311 kB): New Jersey: Galluccio Family Homepage ; Adoption by lesbian, gay and bisexual parents: An overview of current law ( Memento from October 26, 2005 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF)
- ^ Resist Board and Staff - Nancy Wechsler ( Memento June 21, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), resistinc.org, June 21, 2007 version at archive.org
- ↑ Allan Spear ( Memento of February 2, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Jill Schropp: Democratic Party ( Memento of August 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Melvin Boozer
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 213, 222f, 226, 286; Sexual Snobbery: The Texture of Joseph Epstein ; Welcome to the Gay 90s
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 171, 192f; Sexuality Studies at UC Davis ( Memento June 29, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Kaiser, pp. 160f, 208; Tyra Banks, Suze Orman, and Phil Donahue Honored by GLAAD ; typepad.com
- ^ The Polls: Attitudes Towards Homosexuality
- ↑ Metropolitan Community Church ; New Orleans: 30 year anniversary of NOLA sniper ; GAA Headquarters: [1] ; Castro Steam Baths: Historical Calendar - December 11th ( February 22, 2014 memento on the Internet Archive ); gay bashing ; Hate Crime Statistics 2005 ( Memento of March 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Mark Joseph Stern: Consumer Fraud Lawsuit Forces Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy Group to Pay Victims and Disband . In: slate , December 21, 2015.
- ↑ Immoral Minority ; Anita Bryant ; Jerry Falwell: Vilification and Violence : Dean Wycoff: What Is the Political Program of the Creationist Movement? ( Memento of May 23, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive ; McGarry / Wasserman, p. 214 f.
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, 246 f .; Buchanan: Jesse Helms introduces anti-Gay bill ( Memento of August 3, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ The Ku Klux Klan Rebounds ( Memento from March 25, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Thompson, p. 343
- ↑ Times article Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals ( Memento of February 14, 2002 in the Internet Archive ); Kaiser, pp. 273-310
- ↑ Kaiser, pp. 273-310; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 224-230; The AIDS Epidemic ( Memento November 21, 2005 on the Internet Archive ) on the Internet Archive ; The earliest safer sex advice ( memento of January 9, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) in the Internet Archive ; amfAR ( Memento from March 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, 232; The PWAC legacy
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 109, 222
- ^ Sodomy Laws: Kansas ( February 9, 2009 memento in the Internet Archive ); Imprisoned Teen Challenges Kansas 'Romeo and Juliet' Law ( February 9, 2009 memento on the Internet Archive )
- ^ Events Measure Increased Visibility of Gays, Lesbians ( Memento June 16, 2011 in the Internet Archive ); Kaiser, p. 317; Gay rights timeline
- ↑ Targeting gays and lesbians: Ruling by the US Supreme Court in Romer v. Evans
- ↑ McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 250f-252; GLAAD ; ifge ; Lesbian Avengers
- ^ McGarry / Wasserman, p. 244
- ^ Leonard Matlovich ( Memento of April 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ); Task Force History ; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 33-36; Kaiser, p. 335
- ^ Advocate: Congress moves to end DADT ( Memento of May 30, 2010 in the Internet Archive ); "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" for military gays runs out Reuters, September 19, 2011
- ^ Kaiser, p. 340; McGarry / Wasserman, pp. 247-249; Domestic partnership
- ↑ Baehr v. Lewin ; Defense of Marriage Act ; Hawaii gives legislature power to ban same-sex marriage
- ↑ Sueddeutsche.de:Homo-Ehe in the USA, US government equates homosexual married couples with tax law
- ^ Opinion of Homosexuals ( Memento from March 31, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ ; Palm center ; LGBT Research Guide: Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections ( Memento of July 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive ); Sacramento State University: Gay Events Timeline ( November 29, 2008 memento on the Internet Archive ); University LGBT / Queer Programs
- ^ The Suppression of Lesbian and Gay History
