The gay rights movement, also called the LGBT rights movement, is a social and political movement with the goal of achieving equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) persons.
- For the gay rights situation in specific countries, see Gay rights by country.
The movement today
The gay rights social movement comprises a collection of loosely aligned civil rights groups, human rights groups, support groups and political activists seeking acceptance, tolerance and equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, and related causes. Although it is typically referred to as the gay rights movement, members also promote the rights of groups of individuals who do not necessarily identify as being gay - see the article Homosexuality and Transgender.
These views are considered controversial by some, and the gay rights movement is opposed by a variety of individuals and groups including some religious and political (traditionally though not exclusively conservative) groups. Despite this controversy, many of these views have been taken up by mainstream professional organizations such as the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Medical Association. Anti-gay-rights activists (for example, NARTH), however, say that these mainstream institutions have succumbed to political pressure rather than relying on a rational examination of the facts. An example that is often cited is the controversy over the removal of homosexuality from the DSM. In 1973, homosexuality was removed and replaced with "Sexual Orientation Disturbance" in the DSM-II; this was changed to "Ego-Dystonic Homosexuality" in the DSM-III and was removed entirely from the DSM-IV.
Although it is difficult to generalize, given the wide range of opinions and beliefs within the gay rights movement, most proponents of gay rights agree that all people deserve equal rights, equal respect and parity in law, regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression, and that prejudice (homophobia, biphobia and transphobia) is dangerous, not just to gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender people, but to all members of society. It is also commonly argued that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate and cannot be consciously changed, and attempts to alter sexual orientation (see ex-gay, reparative therapy and gender identity) are generally opposed in principle.
→See The PFLAG website for more information on these beliefs.
History
Before 1860
In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, same-sex sexual behaviour and cross-dressing were widely considered to be socially unacceptable, and were serious crimes under sodomy and sumptuary laws. Any organised community or social life was underground and secret. Social reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England around 1785, at a time when the legal penalty for "buggery" was death by hanging.[1] However, he feared reprisal, and his powerful essay was not published until 1978. The emerging currents of secular humanist thought which had inspired Bentham also informed the French Revolution, and when the newly-formed National Constituent Assembly began drafting the policies and laws of the new republic in 1790, groups of militant 'sodomite-citizens' in Paris petitioned the Assemblée nationale, the governing body of the French Revolution, for freedom and recognition.[2] In 1791 France became the first nation to decriminalise homosexuality, probably thanks in part to the homosexual Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès who was one of the authors of the Napoleonic code.
In 1833, an anonymous English-language writer wrote a poetic defence of Captain Nicholas Nicholls, who had been sentenced to death in London for sodomy:
- Whence spring these inclinations, rank and strong?
- And harming no one, wherefore call them wrong?[3]
Three years later in Switzerland, Heinrich Hoessli published the first volume of Eros: Die Mannerliebe der Griechen ("Eros: The Male-love of the Greeks"), another defence of same-sex love.[4]
1860 - 1933
Modern historians usually look to German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs as the pioneer of the LGBT rights movement. Ulrichs came out publicly and began publishing books about same-sex love and gender variance in the 1860s, a few years before the term "homosexual" was first published in 1869. Ulrichs' Uranians were people with a range of gender expressions and same-sex desires; he considered himself "a female psyche in a male body".
From the 1870s, social reformers in other countries had began to take up the Uranian cause, but their identites were kept secret for fear of reprisal. A secret British society called "The Order of Chaeronea" campaigned for the legalisation of homosexuality, and counted playwright Oscar Wilde among its members in the last decades of the 19th century.[5] In the 1890s, English socialist poet Edward Carpenter and Scottish anarchist John Henry Mackay wrote in defense of same-sex love and androgyny; Carpenter and British homosexual rights advocate John Addington Symonds contributed to the development of Havelock Ellis's groundbreaking book Sexual Inversion, which called for tolerance towards "inverts" and was suppressed when first published in England.
In Europe and America, a broader movement of "free love" was also emerging from the 1890s among "first-wave" feminists and a minority of radicals of the Left. They challenged Victorian sexual morality and attacked the traditional institutions of family and marriage that were seen to enslave women. Advocates of "free love" such as the Russian bisexual anarchist Emma Goldman spoke in defence of same-sex love and against repressive laws until the 1920s.
In 1898, German doctor and writer Magnus Hirschfeld formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to campaign publicly against the notorious law "Paragraph 175", which made sex between men illegal. Adolf Brand later broke away from the group, disagreeing with Hirschfeld's medical view of the "intermediate sex", seeing male-male sex as merely an aspect of manly virility and male social bonding. Brand was the first to use "outing" as a political strategy, claming that German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow engaged in homosexual activity.
Anna Rüling, delivering a public speech in 1904 at the request of Hirschfeld, became the first female Uranian activist. Rüling, who also saw "men, women, and homosexuals" as three distinct genders, called for an alliance between the women's and sexual reform movements, but this speech is her only known contribution to the cause. Women only began to join the previously male-dominated sexual reform movement around 1910 when the German government tried to expand Paragraph 175 to outlaw sex between women. Heterosexual feminist leader Helene Stöcker became a prominent figure in the movement.
Hirschfeld, whose life was dedicated to social progress for homosexual and transgender people, formed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology) in 1919. The institute conducted an enormous amount of research, saw thousands of transgender and homosexual clients at consultations, and championed a broad range of sexual reforms including sex education, contraception and women's rights. However, the gains made in Germany would soon be drastically reversed with the rise of Nazism, and the institute and its library were destoyed in 1933.
In the United States, several secret or semi-secret groups were formed explicitly to advance the rights of homosexuals as early as the turn of the twentieth century, but little is known about them (Norton 2005). A better documented group is Henry Gerber’s Society for Human Rights formed in Chicago in 1924), which was quickly suppressed (Bullough 2005).
1950 - 1968
Cover of U.S. lesbian publication 'The Ladder' from October 1957. The motif of masks and unmasking was prevalent in the
homophile era, prefiguring the political strategy of
coming out and giving the
Mattachine Society its name.
Immediately following World War II, a number of homosexual rights groups came into being or were revived across the Western world, in Britain, France, Germany, Holland, the Scandinavian countries and the United States. These groups usually preferred the term homophile to "homosexual", emphasising love over sex. The homophile movement began in the late 1940s with groups in the Netherlands and Denmark, and continued throughout the 1950s and 1960s with groups in Sweden, Norway, the United States, France, Britiain and elsewhere. ONE, Inc., the first public homosexual organization in the U.S. (Percy & Glover 2005), was bankrolled by the wealthy transsexual man Reed Erickson. A U.S. transgender-rights journal, Transvestia: The Journal of the American Society for Equality in Dress, also published two issues in 1952.
The homophile movement was fairly conservative and it lobbied within established political systems for social acceptability. Any demonstrations were orderly and polite (Matzner 2004). By 1969, there were dozens of homophile organizations and publications in the U.S. (Percy 2005), and a national organization had been formed, but they were largely ignored by the media. A 1965 gay march held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, according to some historians, marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. Meanwhile in San Francisco in 1966, transgender street prostitutes in the poor neighborhood of Tenderloin rioted against police harassment at a popular all-night restaurant, Compton's Cafeteria.
1969 - 1986
The new social movements of the sixties, such as the Black Power and anti-Vietnam war movements in the U.S, the May 1968 insurrection in France, and Women's Liberation throughout the Western world, inspired some LGBT activists to become militant,[6] and the Gay Liberation Movement emerged towards the end of the decade. The English-speaking world marks the birth of the new radicalism at the Stonewall riots of 1969, when a group of transgender, lesbian and gay male patrons at a bar in New York resisted a police raid.[7]
Immediately after Stonewall, such groups as the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists' Alliance (GAA) were formed. Their use of the word "gay" represented a new unapologetic defiance — as an antonym for "straight" ('respectable sexual behaviour'), it encompassed a range of non-normative sexualities and gender expressions, such as transgender street prostitutes. According to Gay Lib writer Toby Marotta, "their Gay political outlooks were not homophile but liberationist."[8] "Out, loud and proud", they engaged in colorful street theater (Gallagher & Bull 1996). The GLF’s ‘A Gay Manifesto’ set out the aims for the fledgling gay liberation movement, and influential intellectual Paul Goodman published “The Politics of Being Queer” (1969). Chapters of the GLF were established across the US and in other parts of the Western world. The Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire was formed in 1971 by lesbians who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971. One of the values of the movement was gay pride. Organized by an early GLF leader Brenda Howard, the Stonewall riots were commemorated by annual marches that became known as Pride parades.
From the anarchistic Gay Liberation Movement of the early 1970s arose a more conservative and institutionalized "Gay Rights Movement". This represented a shift away from transgender issues, and butch bar dykes and flamboyant street queens came to be seen as negative stereotypes of lesbians and gays. Veteran activists such as Sylvia Rivera and Beth Elliot were sidelined or expelled because they were transsexual. During this period, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) was formed (1978), and it continues to campaign for lesbian and gay human rights with the United Nations and individual national governments.
Lesbian feminism, which was most influential from the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, encouraged women to direct their energies toward other women rather than men, and advocated lesbianism as the logical result of feminism. Many women of the Gay Liberation movement felt frustated at the domination of the movement by men and formed separate organisations; some who felt gender differences between men and women could not be resolved developed "lesbian separatism", influenced by writings such as Jill Johnston's 1973 book "Lesbian Nation". Disagreements between different political philosophies were, at times, extremely heated, and became known as the lesbian sex wars[9], clashing in particular over views on sadomasochism and transsexuality. The term "gay" came to be more strongly associated with homosexual males.
1987 - present
Some historians consider that a new epoch of the gay rights movement began in the 1980s with the advent of AIDS, which decimated the leadership and shifted the focus for many.[10] This era saw a resurgence of militancy with direct action groups like ACT UP (formed in 1987), and its offshoots Queer Nation (1990) and the Lesbian Avengers (1992). Some younger activists, seeing "gay and lesbian" as increasingly normative and politically conservative, began using the word queer as a defiant statement of all sexual minorities and gender variant people — just as the earlier liberationists had done with the word "gay". A less confrontational attempt to reunite the interests of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transpeople occurred with the term LGBT, which has now (as of 2006) become a commonplace descriptor of organisations that once described themselves as "gay rights" groups.
In the 1990s, organisations began to spring up in non-western countries, such as Progay Philippines, which was founded in 1993 and organised the first Gay Pride march in Asia on June 26, 1994. In many countries, LGBT organisations remain illegal (as of 2006) and transgender and homosexual activists face extreme opposition from the state.
The 1990s also saw a rapid expansion of transgender rights movements across the globe. Hijra activists campaigned for recognition as a third sex in India and Travesti-rights groups began to organise against police brutality across Latin America, while activists in the United States formed militant groups such as Transexual (sic) Menace. An important text was Leslie Feinberg's, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come", published in 1992.
See also
References
History
- ^ Offences Against One's Self, Jeremy Bentham, c1785 (full text online).
- ^ Blasius, Mark and Phelan, Shane (eds.), 1997. "We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics", New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415908590
- ^ ibid.
- ^ ibid.
- ^ McKenna, Neil (2003), "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography". (London: Century) ISBN 0712669868
- ^ Bullough, Vern, “When did the Gay Right Movement Begin?”, April 18, 2005. Accessed on December 30, 2005.<http://hnn.us/articles/11316.html>
- ^ Matzner, Andrew, “Stonewall Riots”, glbtq: An Enclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, & Queer Culture, Claude J. Summers, ed. 2004. Accessed on December 30, 2005.<http://www.glbtq.com/social-sciences/stonewall_riots.html>
- ^ Percy, William A. & William Edward Glover, “Before Stonewall by Glover & Percy”, November 5, 2005. Accessed on December 30, 2005. <http://williamapercy.com/pub-Comments-PercyGlover.htm>
- ^ Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality, Boston, p. 68
- ^ Lesbian Sex Wars article by Elise Chenier from GLBTQ encyclopedia.
External links
Further reading
