Gay rights movement
Gay rights movement, also called homosexual rights movement or gay liberation movement, civil rights movement that advocates equal rights for gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transsexuals; seeks to eliminate sodomy laws barring homosexual acts between consenting adults; and calls for an end to discrimination against gay men and lesbians in employment, credit lending, housing, public accommodations, and other areas of life.
Gay Rights Prior To The 20th Century
Religious admonitions against sexual relations between same-sex individuals (particularly men) long stigmatized such behaviour, but most legal codes in Europe were silent on the subject of homosexuality. The judicial systems of many predominantly Muslim countries invoked Islamic law (Sharīʿah) in a wide range of contexts, and many sexual or quasi-sexual acts including same-sex intimacy were criminalized in those countries with severe penalties, including execution.
Beginning in the 16th century, lawmakers in Britain began to categorize homosexual behaviour as criminal rather than simply immoral. In the 1530s, during the reign of Henry VIII, England passed the Buggery Act, which made sexual relations between men a criminal offense punishable by death. In Britain sodomy remained a capital offense punishable by hanging until 1861. Two decades later, in 1885, Parliament passed an amendment sponsored by Henry Du Pré Labouchere, which created the offense of “gross indecency” for same-sex male sexual relations, enabling any form of sexual behaviour between men to be prosecuted (lesbian sexual relations—because they were unimaginable by male legislators—were not subject to the law). Likewise, in Germany in the early 1870s, when the country was integratingthe civil codes of various disparate kingdoms, the final German penal code included Paragraph 175, which criminalized same-sex male relations with punishment including prison and a loss of civil rights.
The Beginning Of The Gay Rights Movement
Before the end of the 19th century there were scarcely any “movements” for gay rights. Indeed, in his 1890s poem “Two Loves,” Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, declared “I [homosexuality] am the love that dare not speak its name.” Homosexual men and women were given voice in 1897 with the founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee(Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee; WhK) in Berlin. Their first activity was a petition to call for the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Penal Code (submitted 1898, 1922, and 1925). The committee published emancipation literature, sponsored rallies, and campaigned for legal reform throughout Germany, as well as in The Netherlands and Austria, developing some 25 local chapters by 1922. Its founder was Magnus Hirschfeld, who in 1919 opened the Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft), which anticipated by decades other scientific centres (such as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, in the United States) that specialized in sex research. He also helped sponsor the World League of Sexual Reform, which was established in 1928 at a conference in Copenhagen. Despite Paragraph 175 and the failure of the WhK to win its repeal, homosexual men and women experienced a certain amount of freedom in Germany, particularly during the Weimar period, between the end of World War I and the Nazi seizure of power. In many larger German cities, gay nightlife became tolerated, and the number of gay publications increased; indeed, according to some historians, the number of gay bars and periodicals in Berlin in the 1920s exceeded that in New York City six decades later. Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power ended this relatively liberal period. He ordered the reinvigorated enforcement of Paragraph 175, and on May 6, 1933, German student athletes raided and ransacked Hirschfeld’s archives and burned the institute’s materials in a public square.
Outside Germany, other organizations were also created. For example, in 1914 the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded by Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellisfor both promotional and educational purposes, and in the United States in 1924 Henry Gerber, an immigrant from Germany, founded the Society for Human Rights, which was chartered by the state of Illinois.
Despite the formation of such groups, political activity by homosexuals was generally not very visible. Indeed, gays were often harassed by the police wherever they congregated. World War II and its aftermath began to change that. The war brought many young people to cities and brought visibility to the gay community. In the United States this greater visibility brought some backlash, particularly from the government and police; civil servants were often fired, the military attempted to purge its ranks of gay soldiers (a policy enacted during World War II), and police vice squads frequently raided gay bars and arrested their clientele. However, there was greater political activity as well, aimed in large measure at decriminalizing sodomy.
The Gay Rights Movement Since The Mid-20th Century
Beginning in the mid-20th century, an increasing number of organizations were formed. The Cultuur en Ontspannings Centrum (“Culture and Recreation Centre”), or COC, was founded in 1946 in Amsterdam. In the United States the first major male organization, founded in 1950–51 by Harry Hay in Los Angeles, was the Mattachine Society (its name reputedly derived from a medieval French society of masked players, the Société Mattachine, to represent the public “masking” of homosexuality), while the Daughters of Bilitis (named after the Sapphic love poems of Pierre Louÿs, Chansons de Bilitis), founded in 1955 by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin in San Francisco, was a leading group for women. In addition, the United States saw the publication of a national gay periodical, One, which in 1958 won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that enabled it to mail the magazine through the postal service. In Britain a commission chaired by Sir John Wolfenden issued a groundbreaking report (see Wolfenden Report) in 1957, which recommended that private homosexual liaisons between consenting adults be removed from the domain of criminal law; a decade later the recommendation was implemented by Parliament in the Sexual Offences Act, effectively decriminalizing homosexual relations for men age 21 or older (further legislation lowered the age of consent first to 18 [1994] and then to 16 [2001], the latter of which equalized the age of sexual consent for same-sex and opposite-sex partners).
The gay rights movement was beginning to win victories for legal reform, particularly in western Europe, but perhaps the single defining event of gay activism occurred in the United States. In the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, was raided by the police. Nearly 400 people joined a riot that lasted 45 minutes and resumed on succeeding nights. “Stonewall” came to be commemoratedannually in June with Gay Pride celebrations, not only in U.S. cities but also in several other countries (Gay Pride is also held at other times of the year in some countries).
In the 1970s and ’80s gay political organizations proliferated, particularly in the United States and Europe, and spread to other parts of the globe, though their relative size, strength, and success—and toleration by authorities—varied significantly. Groups such as the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, and ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) in the United States and Stonewall and Outrage! in the United Kingdom—and dozens and dozens of similar organizations in Europe and elsewhere—began agitating for legal and social reforms. In addition, the transnational International Lesbian and Gay Association was founded in Coventry, England, in 1978. Now headquartered in Brussels, it plays a significant role in coordinating international efforts to promote human rights and fight discriminationagainst lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons.
In the United States, gay activists won support from the Democratic Party in 1980, when the party added to its platform nondiscrimination clause a plank including sexual orientation. This support, along with campaigns by gay activists urging gay men and women to “come out of the closet” (indeed, in the late 1980s, National Coming Out Day was established and is now celebrated on October 11 in most countries), encouraged gay men and women to enter the political arena as candidates. The first openly gay government officials in the United States were Jerry DeGrieck and Nancy Wechsler, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. DeGrieck and Wechsler both were elected in 1972 and came out while serving on the city council; Wechsler was replaced on the council by Kathy Kozachenko, who ran openly as a lesbian, in 1974—thus becoming the first openly gay person to win office after first coming out. In 1977 American gay rights activist Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors; Milk was assassinated the following year. In 1983 Gerry Studds, a sitting representative from Massachusetts, became the first member of the United States Congress to announce his homosexuality. Barney Frank, also a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Massachusetts, also came out while serving in Congress in the 1980s; Frank was a powerful member of that body and within the Democratic Party into the 21st century. Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin, became the first openly gay politician to be elected to both the U.S. House of Representatives (1998) and the U.S. Senate (2012). In 2009 Annise Parker was elected mayor of Houston, America’s fourth largest city, making it the largest U.S. city to elect an openly gay politician as mayor.
Outside the United States, openly gay politicians also scored successes. In Canada in 1998 Glen Murray became the mayor of Winnipeg, Manitoba—the first openly gay politician to lead a large city. Large cities in Europe also were fertile grounds for success for openly gay politicians—for example, Bertrand Delanoë in Paris and Klaus Wowereit in Berlin, both elected mayor in 2001. At the local and national levels, the number of openly gay politicians increased dramatically during the 1990s and 2000s, and in 2009 Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir became prime minister of Iceland—the world’s first openly gay head of government. She was followed by Elio Di Rupo, who became prime minister of Belgium in 2011. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, openly gay politicians have had only limited success in winning office; notable elections to national legislatures include Patria Jiménez Flores in Mexico (1997), Mike Waters in South Africa (1999), and Clodovil Hernandez in Brazil (2006).
The issues that gay rights groups emphasized have varied since the 1970s by time and place, with different national organizations promoting policies specifically tailored to their country’s milieu. For example, whereas in some countries, particularly in Scandinavia, antisodomy statutes never existed or were struck down relatively early, in other countries the situation was more complex. In the United States, with its strong federal tradition, the battle for the repeal of sodomy laws initially was fought at the state level. In 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Georgia’s antisodomy law in Bowers v. Hardwick; 17 years later, however, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court reversed itself, effectively overturning the antisodomy law in Texas and in 12 other states.
Other issues of primary importance for the gay rights movement since the 1970s include combating the HIV/AIDS epidemic and promoting disease prevention and funding for research; lobbying government for nondiscriminatory policies in employment, housing, and other aspects of civil society; ending bans on military service for gay individuals; expanding hate crimes legislation to include protection for gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals; and securing marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples (see same-sex marriage).
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