A brief history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements
Social movements, organizing around the acceptance and
rights of persons who might today identify as LGBT or queer, began as responses
to centuries of persecution by church, state, and medical authorities. Where
homosexual activity or deviance from established gender roles/dress was banned
by law or traditional custom, such condemnation might be communicated through
sensational public trials, exile, medical warnings, and language from the
pulpit. These paths of persecution entrenched homophobia for centuries—but also
alerted entire populations to the existence of difference.
Whether an individual recognized they, too, shared this
identity and were at risk, or dared to speak out for tolerance and change,
there were few organizations or resources before the scientific and political
revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Gradually, the growth of a public
media and ideals of human rights drew together activists from all walks of
life, who drew courage from sympathetic medical studies, banned literature,
emerging sex research, and a climate of greater democracy.
By the 20th century, a movement in recognition of gays and
lesbians was underway, abetted by the social climate of feminism and new
anthropologies of difference. However, throughout 150 years of homosexual
social movements (roughly from the 1870s to today), leaders and organizers
struggled to address the very different concerns and identity issues of gay
men, women identifying as lesbians, and others identifying as gender variant or
nonbinary. White, male, and Western activists whose groups and theories gained
leverage against homophobia did not necessarily represent the range of racial,
class, and national identities complicating a broader LGBT agenda. Women were
often left out altogether.
What is the prehistory of LGBT activism? Most historians
agree that there is evidence of homosexual activity and same-sex love, whether
such relationships were accepted or persecuted, in every documented culture. We
know that homosexuality existed in ancient Israel simply because it is
prohibited in the Bible, whereas it flourished between both men and women in
Ancient Greece. Substantial evidence also exists for individuals who lived at
least part of their lives as a different gender than assigned at birth. From
the lyrics of same-sex desire inscribed by Sappho in the seventh century BCE to
youths raised as the opposite sex in cultures ranging from Albania to
Afghanistan; from the “female husbands” of Kenya to the Native American
“Two-Spirit,” alternatives to the Western male-female and heterosexual binaries
thrived across millennia and culture.
These realities gradually became known to the West via
travelers’ diaries, the church records of missionaries, diplomats’ journals,
and in reports by medical anthropologists. Such eyewitness accounts in the era
before other media were of course riddled with the biases of the (often)
Western or White observer, and added to beliefs that homosexual practices were
other, foreign, savage, a medical issue, or evidence of a lower racial
hierarchy. The peaceful flowering of early trans or bisexual acceptance in
different indigenous civilizations met with opposition from European and
Christian colonizers.
In the age of European exploration and empire-building,
Native American, North African, and Pacific Islander cultures accepting of
“Two-Spirit” people or same-sex love shocked European invaders who objected to
any deviation from a limited understanding of “masculine” and “feminine” roles.
The European powers enforced their own criminal codes against what was called
sodomy in the New World: the first known case of homosexual activity receiving
a death sentence in North America occurred in 1566, when the Spanish executed a
Frenchman in Florida.
Against the emerging backdrop of national power and
Christian faith, what might have been learned about same-sex love or gender
identity was buried in scandal. Ironically, both wartime conflict between
emerging nations and the departure or deaths of male soldiers left women behind
to live together and fostered strong alliances between men as well. Same-sex
companionship thrived where it was frowned upon for unmarried, unrelated males
and females to mingle or socialize freely. Women’s relationships in particular
escaped scrutiny since there was no threat of pregnancy. Nonetheless, in much
of the world, female sexual activity and sensation were curtailed wherever
genital circumcision practices made clitoridectomy an ongoing custom.
Where European dress—a clear marker of gender—was enforced
by missionaries, we find another complicated history of both gender identity
and resistance. Biblical interpretation made it illegal for a woman to wear
pants or a man to adopt female dress, and sensationalized public trials warned
against “deviants” but also made such martyrs and heroes popular: Joan of Arc
is one example, and the chilling origins of the word “faggot” include a stick
of wood used in public burnings of gay men.
Despite the risks of defying severe legal codes,
cross-dressing flourished in early modern Europe and America. Women and girls,
economically oppressed by the sexism which kept them from jobs and
economic/education opportunities designated for men only, might pass as male in
order to gain access to coveted experiences or income. This was a choice made
by many women who were not necessarily transgender in identity. Women
“disguised” themselves as men, sometimes for extended periods of years, in
order to fight in the military (Deborah Sampson), to work as pirates (Mary Read
and Anne Bonney), attend medical school, etc. Both men and women who lived as a
different gender were often only discovered after their deaths, as the extreme
differences in male vs. female clothing and grooming in much of Western culture
made “passing” surprisingly easy in certain environments.
Moreover, roles in the arts where women were banned from
working required that men be recruited to play female roles, often creating a
high-status, competitive market for those we might today identify as trans
women, in venues from Shakespeare’s theatre to Japanese Kabuki to the Chinese
opera. This acceptance of performance artists, and the popularity of “drag”
humor cross-culturally, did not necessarily mark the start of transgender
advocacy, but made the arts an often accepting sanctuary for LGBT individuals
who built theatrical careers based around disguise and illusion.
The era of sexology studies is where we first see a small,
privileged cluster of medical authorities begin promoting a limited tolerance
of those born “invert.” In Western history, we find little formal study of what
was later called homosexuality before the 19th century, beyond medical texts
identifying women with large clitorises as “tribades” and severe punishment
codes for male homosexual acts.
Early efforts to understand the range of human sexual
behavior came from European doctors and scientists including Carl von Westphal
(1869), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1882) and Havelock Ellis (1897). Their
writings were sympathetic to the concept of a homosexual or bisexual
orientation occurring naturally in an identifiable segment of humankind, but
the writings of Krafft-Ebing and Ellis also labeled a “third sex” degenerate
and abnormal. Sigmund Freud, writing in the same era, did not consider
homosexuality an illness or a crime and believed bisexuality to be an innate
aspect beginning with undetermined gender development in the womb. Yet Freud
also felt that lesbian desires were an immaturity women could overcome through
heterosexual marriage and male dominance.
These writings gradually trickled down to a curious public
through magazines and presentations, reaching men and women desperate to learn
more about those like themselves, including some like English writer Radclyffe
Hall who willingly accepted the idea of being a “congenital invert.” German
researcher Magnus Hirschfeld went on to gather a broader range of information
by founding Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, Europe’s best library
archive of materials on gay cultural history. His efforts, and Germany’s more
liberal laws and thriving gay bar scene between the two World Wars, contrasted
with the backlash, in England, against gay and lesbian writers such as Oscar
Wilde and Radclyffe Hall. With the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich, however, the
former tolerance demonstrated by Germany’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee
vanished. Hirschfeld’s great library was destroyed and the books burnt by Nazis
on May 10, 1933.
In the United States, there were few attempts to create
advocacy groups supporting gay and lesbian relationships until after World War
II. However, prewar gay life flourished in urban centers such as New York’s
Greenwich Village and Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. The
blues music of African-American women showcased varieties of lesbian desire,
struggle, and humor; these performances, along with male and female drag stars,
introduced a gay underworld to straight patrons during Prohibition’s defiance
of race and sex codes in speakeasy clubs.
The disruptions of World War II allowed formerly isolated
gay men and women to meet as soldiers and war workers; and other volunteers
were uprooted from small towns and posted worldwide. Many minds were opened by
wartime, during which LGBT people were both tolerated in military service and
officially sentenced to death camps in the Holocaust. This increasing awareness
of an existing and vulnerable population, coupled with Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s investigation of homosexuals holding government jobs during the
early 1950s outraged writers and federal employees whose own lives were shown
to be second-class under the law, including Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings,
Allen Ginsberg, and Harry Hay.
Awareness of a burgeoning civil rights movement (Martin
Luther King’s key organizer Bayard Rustin was a gay man) led to the first
American-based political demands for fair treatment of gays and lesbians in
mental health, public policy, and employment. Studies such as Alfred Kinsey’s
1947 Kinsey Report suggested a far greater range of homosexual identities and
behaviors than previously understood, with Kinsey creating a “scale” or
spectrum ranging from complete heterosexual to complete homosexual.
The primary organization for gay men as an oppressed
cultural minority was the Mattachine Society, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay and
Chuck Rowland. Other important homophile organizations on the West Coast
included One, Inc., founded in 1952, and the first lesbian support network
Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955 by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. Through
meetings and publications, these groups offered information and outreach to
thousands.
These first organizations soon found support from prominent
sociologists and psychologists. In 1951, Donald Webster Cory published “The
Homosexual in America,” asserting that gay men and lesbians were a legitimate
minority group, and in 1953 Evelyn Hooker, PhD, won a grant from the National
Institute of Mental Health to study gay men. Her groundbreaking paper,
presented in 1956, demonstrated that gay men were as well-adjusted as
heterosexual men, often more so.
But it would not be until 1973 that the American Psychiatric
Association removed homosexuality as an “illness” classification in its
diagnostic manual. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, gay men and lesbians continued
to be at risk for psychiatric lockup as well as jail, losing jobs, and/or child
custody when courts and clinics defined gay love as sick, criminal, or immoral.
In 1965, as the civil rights movement won new legislation
outlawing racial discrimination, the first gay rights demonstrations took place
in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., led by longtime activists Frank Kameny
and Barbara Gittings. The turning point for gay liberation came on June 28,
1969, when patrons of the popular Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village
fought back against ongoing police raids of their neighborhood bar. Stonewall
is still considered a watershed moment of gay pride and has been commemorated
since the 1970s with “pride marches” held every June across the United States.
Recent scholarship has called for better acknowledgment of the roles that drag
performers, people of color, bisexuals, and transgender patrons played in the
Stonewall Riots.
The gay liberation movement of the 1970s saw myriad
political organizations spring up, often at odds with one another. Frustrated
with the male leadership of most gay liberation groups, lesbians influenced by
the feminist movement of the 1970s formed their own collectives, record labels,
music festivals, newspapers, bookstores, and publishing houses, and called for
lesbian rights in mainstream feminist groups like the National Organization for
Women. Gatherings such as women’s music concerts, bookstore readings, and
lesbian festivals well beyond the United States were extraordinarily successful
in organizing women to become activists; the feminist movement against domestic
violence also assisted women to leave abusive marriages, while retaining custody
of children became a paramount issue for lesbian mothers.
Expanding religious acceptance for gay men and women of
faith, the first out gay minister was ordained by the United Church of Christ
in 1972. Other gay and lesbian church and synagogue congregations soon
followed. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), formed in 1972,
offered family members greater support roles in the gay rights movement. And
political action exploded through the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the
Human Rights Campaign, the election of openly gay and lesbian representatives
like Elaine Noble and Barney Frank, and, in 1979, the first march on Washington
for gay rights.
The increasing expansion of a global LGBT rights movement
suffered a setback during the 1980s, as the gay male community was decimated by
the AIDS epidemic, demands for compassion and medical funding led to renewed
coalitions between men and women as well as angry street theatre by groups like
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and Queer Nation. Enormous marches on
Washington drew as many as one million gay rights supporters in 1987 and again
in 1993. Right-wing religious movements, spurred on by beliefs that AIDS was
God’s punishment, expanded via direct mail. A New Right coalition of political
lobby groups competed with national LGBT organizations in Washington, seeking
to create religious exemptions from any new LGBT rights protections.
In the same era, one wing of the political gay movement
called for an end to military expulsion of gay, lesbian, and bisexual soldiers,
with the high-profile case of Colonel Margarethe Cammermeyer publicized through
a made-for-television movie, “Serving in Silence.” In spite of the patriotism
and service of gay men and lesbians in uniform, the uncomfortable and unjust
compromise “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” emerged as an alternative to decades of
military witch hunts and dishonorable discharges. Yet more service members
ended up being discharged under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
During the last decade of the 20th century, millions of
Americans watched as actress Ellen DeGeneres came out on national television in
April 1997, heralding a new era of gay celebrity power and media
visibility—although not without risks. Celebrity performers, both gay and
heterosexual, continued to be among the most vocal activists calling for
tolerance and equal rights. With greater media attention to gay and lesbian
civil rights in the 1990s, trans and intersex voices began to gain space
through works such as Kate Boernstein’s “Gender Outlaw” (1994) and “My Gender
Workbook” (1998), Ann Fausto-Sterling’s “Myths of Gender” (1992) and Leslie
Feinberg’s “Transgender Warriors” (1998), enhancing shifts in women’s and
gender studies to become more inclusive of transgender and nonbinary identities.
As a result of hard work by countless organizations and
individuals, helped by internet and direct-mail campaign networking, the 21st
century heralded new legal gains for gay and lesbian couples. Same-sex civil
unions were recognized under Vermont law in 2000, and Massachusetts became the
first state to perform same-sex marriages in 2004; with the end of state sodomy
laws (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003), gay and lesbian Americans were finally free
from criminal classification. Gay marriage was first legal in the Netherlands,
Belgium, Spain, and Canada; but the recognition of gay marriage by church and
state continued to divide opinion worldwide. After the impressive gains for
LGBT rights in postapartheid South Africa, conservative evangelicals in the
U.S. began providing support and funding for homophobic campaigns overseas.
Uganda’s dramatic death penalty for gays and lesbians was perhaps the most
severe in Africa.
The first part of the 21st century saw new emphasis on
transgender activism and the increasing usage of terminology that questioned
binary gender identification. Images of trans women became more prevalent in
film and television, as did programming with same-sex couples raising children.
Transphobia, cissexism, and other language (such as “hir” and “them”) became
standardized, and film and television programming featured more openly trans
youth and adult characters. Tensions between lesbian and trans activists,
however, remained, with the long-running Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival
boycotted by national LGBT groups over the issue of trans inclusion; like many
woman-only events with a primarily lesbian base, Michfest had supported an
ideal of ingathering women and girls born female. The festival ended after its
40th anniversary in August 2015.
Internet activism burgeoned, while many of the public,
physical gathering spaces that once defined LGBT activism (bars, bookstores,
women’s music festivals) began to vanish, and the usage of “queer” replaced
lesbian identification for many younger women activists. Attention shifted to
global activism as U.S. gains were not matched by similar equal rights laws in
the 75 other countries where homosexuality remained illegal. As of 2016, LGBT
identification and activism was still punishable by death in 10 countries: Iran,
Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, and
Yemen; the plight of the LGBT community in Russia received intense focus during
the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, to which President Obama sent a contingent of
out LGBT athletes. Supportive remarks from the new Pope Francis (“Who am I to
judge?”) gave hope to LGBT Catholics worldwide.
Perhaps the greatest changes in the U.S. occurred between
spring 2015 and spring 2016: in late spring 2015 Alison Bechdel’s
lesbian-themed Broadway production Fun Home won several Tony awards, former
Olympic champion Bruce Jenner transitioned to Caitlyn Jenner, and then in June
of 2015, the Supreme Court decision recognized same-sex marriage (Obergefell v.
Hodges). By spring 2016 the Academy Awards recognized films with both lesbian
and transgender themes: Carol and The Danish Girl. And the Supreme Court had
avowed that a lesbian family adoption in one state had to be recognized in all
states.
However, the United States also saw intense racial profiling confrontations and tragedies in this same period, turning LGBT activism to “intersectionality,” or recognition of intersections issues of race, class, gender identity, and sexism. With the June 12, 2016, attacks on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, that intersectionality was made plain as straight allies held vigils grieving the loss of young Latino drag queens and lesbians of color; with unanswered questions about the killer’s possible identification with ISIS terrorism, other voices now call for alliances between the LGBT and Muslim communities, and the greater recognition of perspectives from those who are both Muslim and LGBT in the U.S. and beyond. The possible repression of identity which may have played a role in the killer’s choice of target has generated new attention to the price of homophobia—internalized, or culturally expressed—in and beyond the United States.
A brief
history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender social movements (apa.org)
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