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02 – Gay History in the United States
1441:
[x] “Around 1990, partly because of the AIDS epidemic, the issue of legal recognition of same-sex relationships became more salient to the public and more important to gay activists.” (Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
1441:
[3] “In 1960, every state criminalized even private, consensual sex between same-sex partners.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
1441:
[4] “The issue of homosexuality in federal government employment exploded in the early 1950s—the peak of McCarthyism. When a Truman administration official acknowledged during a congressional hearing that most of the ninety-one federal employees dismissed for moral turpitude were homosexuals, [5] Republicans charged that sexual perverts had infiltrated the administration and were possibly as dangerous as communists. In 1950, a Senate committee report warned that ‘one homosexual can pollute a Government office’ because homosexuals lacked emotional stability, were morally irresolute, and were vulnerable to influence by ‘gangs of blackmailers.’ The number of alleged homosexuals dismissed from civilian posts in the executive branch increased from five a month to more than sixty.
In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order listing sexual perversion as sufficient grounds for exclusion from federal employment. Challenges to dismissals on such grounds were litigated all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and failed. Well into the 1960s, the U.S. Civil Service Commission reaffirmed its policy of barring homosexuals from federal employment. In all, thousands of civilian federal employees were fired from their jobs or resigned because of alleged homosexuality. In 1952, Congress reenacted a ban on homosexual aliens entering the country.…
Homosexual acts were deemed unprofessional conduct sufficient to deny or revoke a license to practice medicine, law, or nursing. Universities sometimes expelled students for alleged homosexuality.…
The U.S. military, which had largely overlooked homosexuality in its ranks amid the manpower shortages of World War II, cracked down with a vengeance afterward. Even soldiers who had served with distinction were dismissed and thereby disqualified from ever again holding positions of trust with the U.S. government. Military discharges based on alleged homosexuality ballooned to two thousand a year in the early 1950s and three thousand a year in the early 1960s.…
[6] In the 1950s, the nation’s preeminent civil liberties organization, while conceding that laws aimed at suppressing homosexuality might be ‘unenlightened and savage,’ did not deem them to pose any civil liberties problem. An American Civil Liberties Union policy statement in 1957 referred to homosexuals as ‘socially heretical or deviant,’ pronounced laws punishing homosexual acts clearly constitutional, and expressed no objection to the government’s treating homosexuality as a risk factor for sensitive jobs.…
The first significant gay rights organizations were founded in the 1950s, that they operated under severe constraints, had few members, and exercised little influence.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[23] “One early accomplishment of gay liberation was pressuring the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. The American Psychological Association and the American Medical Association quickly followed suit.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[24] “That year [1980], for the first time ever, the Democratic Party’s platform included a gay-rights plank, which called for legislative and executive action to protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Eighty-six openly gay delegates attended the Democratic national convention that year—up from four in 1976.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[26] “The origins of the religious right in Florida are traceable to Anita Bryant’s crusade to overturn the gay rights ordinance enacted in Dade County, Florida (which includes the city of Miami). After an emotional, two-hour hearing in January 1977, the county commission approved an ordinance barring discrimination based on sexual orientation in housing, public accommodations, and employment. The leader of the opposition was singer Anita Bryant, a former runner-up for Miss America who was the spokesperson for Florida citrus growers, a fervent Southern Baptist, and a 37-year-old mother of four school-age children. Bryant argued that the ordinance ‘condones immorality and discriminates against my children’s rights to grow up in a healthy, decent community.’…
[28] Yet Bryant’s campaign was the first to rivet national attention on the emerging issue of gay rights. Even before the actual referendum vote in Dade County, Bryant was speaking on the topic all over the country, and she reported receiving more than 20,000 letters on the issue. Editorializing against Brian’s ‘absurd as well as benighted’ effort to portray homosexuals as committed to converting children, the New York Times observed that the South Florida referendum battle appeared ‘to have started a noisy national debate on a question that previously had been discussed mainly in muted tones.’”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[29] “In 1978, five municipalities repealed their gay-rights ordinances in referenda. No vote was close. Wichita voters repealed their ordinance by a margin of 83% to 17%, while voters in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Eugene, Oregon, repealed their respective ordinances by a margin of 63% to 37%. Only in Seattle did a gay rights ordinance survive a referendum battle.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[29] “In the 20 years after Anita Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, more than 60 jurisdictions held referenda on anti-gay-rights proposals; nearly 3/4 of the passed.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[31] “In the early 1980s, the NGTF [National Gay Task Force], then the largest gay-rights organization in the country, had 10,300 members and the meager annual budget of $338,000. The Moral Majority, its principal adversary, had a membership estimated at 4 million and an annual budget of $56 million.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[33] “Late in the [1980] presidential campaign, a group called Christians for Reagan ran television advertisements in several states attacking President Carter and the Democratic Party for their support of homosexual rights—the first such ad ever run in the presidential campaign.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[35] “The percentage of Americans who deemed homosexual sex always wrong increased from 73% in 1980 to 78% in 1987, and the percentage who opposed legalization of consensual same-sex sodomy rose from 39% in 1980 to 55% in 1986.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[35] “President Reagan did not publicly utter a word about AIDS until a friend of his, movie star Rock Hudson, became ill with the disease in 1985. Hudson’s illness finally began to draw public attention to the issue. Reagan gave his first speech on AIDS six years into the epidemic, by which time more than 20,000 people had died.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[43] “The year 1992 was the first in which the principal contestants for a major party’s presidential nomination aggressively courted gay and lesbian voters.”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
4441:
[86] “In the seventeen years between Bowers [1986] and Lawrence [2003], opinion polls showed that Americans had gone from opposing the legalization of homosexual relations by 55% to 33% to supporting legalization by 60% to 35%.…”
(Michael J. Klarman, From the Closet to the Altar: Courts, Backlash, and the Struggle for Same-Sex Marriage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013))
1973:
“[p. 3] [Michael] Quinn places the church’s transition to homophobia in the 1950s, when the federal government defined homosexuality as a matter of national security.…” (Douglas A. Winkler, “Lavender Sons of Zion: A History of Gay Men in Salt Lake City, 1950-79,” PhD Dissertation, University of Utah, May 2008)
2615:
“[p. 608] This Article is about the fear of the queer child. The simplest version of this fear is the claim that exposing children to homosexuality will ‘turn’ them into homosexuals, but the fear is more refined, varied, and capacious than this terminology suggests. It includes the fears that exposing children to homosexuality and gender variance will make them more likely to develop homosexual desires, engage in homosexual acts, form homosexual relationships, deviate from traditional gender norms, or identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. In one form or another, these are all fears of the queer child.…
The Article shows that although the fear of the queer child is thousands of years old, it has been subtly transformed in the last fifty years. For centuries, the fear had been articulated almost exclusively in terms of seduction—as the claim that children could be sexually initiated into queerness by engaging in [609] homosexual activity with adults.…
[639] The Backlash Begins
The modern LGBT movement is typically dated to the Stonewall riots of June 29, 1969, when gay and transgender bar patrons responded to a police raid by resisting arrest, sparking a series of public protests. In the wake of these demonstrations, the gay liberation movement rapidly organized and mobilized; within the next decade, the cause began to make remarkable gains. In 1972, East Lansing, Michigan passed the country’s first law prohibiting discrimination based on ‘affectional or sexual preference.’ In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of ‘homosexuality’ from the DSM, indicating that psychologists should no longer treat homosexuality as a mental disorder. In 1975, the U.S. Civil Service Commission adopted a policy prohibiting discrimination based on sexual preference. By 1977, sodomy laws had been repealed in nineteen states and anti-discrimination ordinances had been adopted in more than forty municipalities across the United States.…
[644] By the time Rehnquist’s dissent was published, Anita Bryant’s warnings about ‘homosexual recruitment’ were already national news. On January 18, 1977, Dade County, Florida had adopted a local ordinance prohibiting discrimination based on ‘sexual and affectional preference’ [645] in employment, housing, and public accommodations. In response, Bryant launched the ‘Save Our Children’ campaign, an organized effort to repeal the ordinance by popular referendum. In the annals of the LGBT movement, Bryant’s campaign stands out as the clearest example of how opponents have invoked the fear of the queer child to frame the country’s debates over LGBT rights. In addition, it marks the moment in which the opposition’s new fear of indoctrination was nationalized and popularized. In the years that followed, this rhetoric gradually displaced the fear of seduction as a primary justification for anti-LGBT policies.
The twin pillars of Bryant’s campaign were her repeated claims of ‘homosexual recruitment’ and her specific focus on the vulnerability of children to the influence of openly gay teachers. In the campaign’s opening press conference, Bryant held up a pamphlet on homosexuality that she claimed gay teachers had been distributing at local high schools.157 In a series of media appearances, she repeatedly argued that ‘because homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit.’158 Playing upon a national frenzy about ‘child pornography rings,’ the campaign produced a series of newspaper advertisements that sought to conflate homosexuality with pedophilia. In these ads, the campaign displayed slogans like, ‘Are Homosexuals Trying To Recruit Our Children?’ and ‘There Is No Human Right To Corrupt Our Children’ in bold print, above collages of old newspaper headlines in which men were accused of luring young boys into pornography and prostitution networks.…
[646] The Save Our Children campaign was astonishingly successful. Only six months after the county’s antidiscrimination ordinance was passed, it was repealed by voters in a two-to-one landslide. The next day, the Florida Legislature passed the country’s first law banning any ‘homosexual’ person from adopting a child.…
[647] Bryant’s campaign marked the beginning of a religious conservative backlash against the LGBT movement.…” (Clifford J. Rosky, “Fear of the Queer Child,” Buffalo Law Review 61(3):608-97, May 2013)
INTERVIEWS
Ryan: Until Stonewall, we didn’t have an organized LGBT community. We didn’t have social institutions. We didn’t have health institutions, recreational supports, faith-based settings that would welcome. There wasn’t the foundation of a civil society for LGBT people. There was nowhere for them to fit in. So LGBT people developed their own social institutions. Health clinics—Howard Brown, a large LGBT health clinic of the Fenway—those were all health setting that now get federal funds and have all kinds of resources and grants. But back then they were small clinics that started out in a gay part of town. So all of these social institutions were beginning to be built.…
They looked at the emergence of different identity constructs from the turn of the century, with the psychoanalytic invert who lived on the fringes and didn’t have anyplace to connect; to World War I, when you begin to have troop movements; World War II, where you begin to see the emergence of the gay bars and homosexual identity; Stonewall, where you saw the emergence of a modern gay identity and the emergence of social institutions; and then AIDS, which really created a whole new way for our community to self-actualize, to have language to discuss who we were in society at large, to be represented in the media, first in really negative ways, and then in more positive ways.…
We began to have a cross-discourse that didn’t ever exist before. Everything about gay people, all the novels were tragic, all the media representations were distorted, the messages to young people were, “Hide!” When I went back and read all the early research that was done on gay people and their experiences, it always talked about some people who knew who they were at young ages; but if you looked at the research done in the 70s and 80s, on average, young people were coming out, male or female, between 21 and 23. And then, there were people who never came out at all; but there were also people who hid. One of the most common representations of surviving in the world was “passing.” You would hide your identity, you would never discuss it, you would dress in certain ways, kids would pretend to be straight, and the language back then, if you were in the South and other places, was called “dropping pins.” That was a way of giving someone a cue to your identity without saying who you really were—maybe talking about passing a gay bar on the street, the name of it which nobody else would know, or some other kind of thing that would signal to somebody that you might be gay. But the sanctions for being gay were so extreme that nobody would come out.
(Caitlin Ryan, March 15, 2015)