Gay rights activists 1960s
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two decisions at the end of June favoring gay marriage. One ruling struck down federal restrictions in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of , the other cleared the way for gay marriages in California. With the rapid recent progress of the male lover rights movement, including changes in public attitudes, some see parallels with the earlier African-American civil rights movement. Is the comparison valid? What’s different this time? Illinois history professor Kevin Mumford specializes in the history of both movements, and is functional on a book about black gay history. He spoke with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.
You say that some gay rights advocates yearn to characterize recent events as the normal business of America doing civil rights – to notice continuity with the dark civil rights movement. But what’s flawed in that comparison?
First, it is effortless to forget the context and duration of the civil rights movement. After the Civil War, African-Americans had full citizenship, elected local and federal representatives, and then, through hostility and fraud, were stripped of voting rights. New civil rights activists struggled fo
Historical Essay
by Will Roscoe
Two Castro Couples -- Love, pleasant love.
Photo: Crawford Barton, Homosexual and Lesbian Historical Population of Northern California
| An intersectional gay rights movement came to light in the s when the gay community joined with the momentum of the civil rights movement, anti-war protestors, and feminists. This communal gay rights movement was prefaced by two events. Firstly, a much-debated “Homosexual Bill of Rights” was drafted and acted as a prototype for the gay civil rights agenda of the s. Secondly, the incumbent mayor Christopher was re-elected in by a landslide even after the opposing candidate ran a smear campaign criticizing the mayor of harboring “sexual deviates” in the city. There were many new political actions by the early lgbtq+ community, including the Tavern Guild, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Council on Religion and Homosexuality, that together helped curb rampant anti-gay police brutality. |
In the s, the gay movement absorbed the profound and successive influences of the civil rights, anti-war, feminist and counterculture movements. The broad vision of the early Mattachine was again taken up in civil righ
Written by: Jim Downs, Connecticut College
By the end of this section, you will:
- Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from to
After World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights. The feminist movement, the Black Control movement, the environmental movement, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement sought equality, rights, and empowerment in American population. Gay people organized to resist oppression and ask for just treatment, and they were especially galvanized after a New York Municipality police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a male lover bar, sparked riots in
Around the same day, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive study of human sexuality in the United States. Like Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published research on transgender psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science. He interviewed more than 8, men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, saying that it could not be confined to easy categories of homosexual and heterosexual. To evaluate
Barbara Gittings Helps Lead First 'Annual Reminder' Protests
Vice squads–police units devoted to “cleaning up” undesirable parts of urban life–routinely raided the bars frequented by Queer people. Laws against people of the same sex dancing together or wearing clothing made for the opposite sex were used as justification to arrest patrons. By the s in New York Municipality, the mafia owned many of these establishments and its members would bribe officers in order to avoid fines. Sometimes the arrangement meant that patrons would be forewarned of a pending raid in time to change their clothing and stop dancing. That wasn’t true during the early morning hours of June 28 , when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
When they arrived at Stonewall, the police locked the doors so that no one could escape as they conducted arrests. As certain patrons were released, they linked a large crowd that had been gathering outside the bar. Those chosen for arrest started resisting the police officers with the encouragement of the jeering crowd. Violence broke out and the crowd overwhelmed police, who were forced to call in reinforcements. The conflict lasted into the ne
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