Three years later in Switzerland, Heinrich Hoessli published the first volume of Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks" , another defence of same-sex love. In many ways, social attitudes to homosexuality became more hostile during the late Victorian era. In the Labouchere Amendment was included in the Criminal Law Amendment Act , which criminalized 'any act of gross indecency with another male person'; a charge that was successfully invoked to convict playwright Oscar Wilde in with the most severe sentence possible under the Act.
From the s, social reformers began to defend homosexuality, but due to the controversial nature of their advocacy, kept their identities secret. Oscar Wilde was taken by his boyish looks and persuaded him to shave off his moustache, and once kissed him passionately in the Travellers' Club. In , Ives created and founded the first homosexual rights group, the Order of Chaeronea. John Addington Symonds was a poet and an early advocate of male love. In , he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics , a work of what would later be called " gay history. Chaddock for introducing "homosexual" into the English language in , Symonds had already used the word in A Problem in Greek Ethics.
Symonds also translated classical poetry on homoerotic themes, and wrote poems drawing on ancient Greek imagery and language such as Eudiades , which has been called "the most famous of his homoerotic poems". By the end of his life, Symonds' homosexuality had become an open secret in Victorian literary and cultural circles. In particular, Symonds' memoirs, written over a four-year period, from to , form the earliest known self-conscious homosexual autobiography.
Another friend of Ives was the English socialist poet Edward Carpenter. Carpenter thought that homosexuality was an innate and natural human characteristic and that it should not be regarded as a sin or a criminal offence. In the s, Carpenter began a concerted effort to campaign against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation , possibly in response to the recent death of Symonds, whom he viewed as his campaigning inspiration.
Scottish anarchist John Henry Mackay also wrote in defense of same-sex love and androgyny. English sexologist Havelock Ellis wrote the first objective scientific study of homosexuality in , in which he treated it as a neutral sexual condition. Called Sexual Inversion it was first printed in German and then translated into English a year later.
In the book, Ellis argued that same-sex relationships could not be characterized as a pathology or a crime and that its importance rose above the arbitrary restrictions imposed by society. The book was so controversial at the time that one bookseller was charged in court for holding copies of the work. It is claimed that Ellis coined the term 'homosexual', but in fact he disliked the word due to its conflation of Greek and Latin. These early proponents of LGBT rights, such as Carpenter, were often aligned with a broader socio-political movement known as ' free love '; a critique of Victorian sexual morality and the traditional institutions of family and marriage that were seen to enslave women.
Some advocates of free love in the early 20th century, including Russian anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman , also spoke in defence of same-sex love and challenged repressive legislation. In he formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee campaign publicly against the notorious law " Paragraph ", 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.
The book Sind es Frauen? Women only began to join the previously male-dominated sexual reform movement around when the German government tried to expand Paragraph to outlaw sex between women. 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 destroyed in The Swiss journal Der Kreis was the only part of the movement to continue through the Nazi era. This step was part of a larger project of freeing sexual relationships and expanding women's rights — including legalising abortion, granting divorce on demand, equal rights for women, and attempts to socialise housework.
During Stalin's era, however, USSR reverted all these progressive measures — re-criminalizing homosexuality and imprisoning gay men and banning abortion. Its plot centers on Stephen Gordon, a woman who identifies herself as an invert after reading Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis , and lives within the homosexual subculture of Paris. The novel included a foreword by Havelock Ellis and was intended to be a call for tolerance for inverts by publicizing their disadvantages and accidents of being born inverted.
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 20th century, but little is known about them. 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, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and the United States.
These groups usually preferred the term homophile to homosexual , emphasizing love over sex. The homophile movement began in the late s with groups in the Netherlands and Denmark, and continued throughout the s and s with groups in Sweden, Norway, the United States, France , Britain and elsewhere. S, [30] was bankrolled by the wealthy transsexual man Reed Erickson. The homophile movement lobbied to establish a prominent influence in political systems of social acceptability.
Radicals of the s would later disparage the homophile groups for being assimilationist. Any demonstrations were orderly and polite. S, [32] and a national organization had been formed, but they were largely ignored by the media. A 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, the LGBT youth organization Vanguard was formed by Adrian Ravarour to demonstrate for equality, and Vanguard members protested for equal rights during the months of April—July , followed by the August Compton's riot, where transgender street prostitutes in the poor neighborhood of Tenderloin rioted against police harassment at a popular all-night restaurant, Gene Compton's Cafeteria.
The Wolfenden Report was published in Britain on 4 September after publicized convictions for homosexuality of well-known men, including Lord Montagu.
- Sexual Politics!
- The Politics of Authenticity: Civic Individualism and the Cultural Roots of Gay Normalization!
- JSTOR: Access Check!
- Introduction to Veterinary Anatomy and Physiology E-Book;
Disregarding the conventional ideas of the day, the committee recommended that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". All but James Adair were in favour of this and, contrary to some medical and psychiatric witnesses' evidence at that time, found that "homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects.
When passed, The Sexual Offences Act decriminalised homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private in England and Wales. Bisexual activism became more visible toward the end of the s in the United States. In bisexual activist Robert A. In Columbia University officially recognized this group, thus making them the first college in the United States to officially recognize a gay student group. Due to this, bisexuals began to be included in the facility's programs for the first time.
The American Psychiatric Association removed "homosexuality" from the diagnostics manual of mental illness in The new social movements of the sixties, such as the Black Power and anti-Vietnam war movements in the US, the May insurrection in France, and Women's Liberation throughout the Western world, inspired many LGBT activists to become more radical, [31] and the Gay Liberation movement emerged towards the end of the decade.
This new radicalism is often attributed to the Stonewall riots of , when a group of gay men, lesbians, and drag queens at a bar in New York resisted a police raid. 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 sought ultimately to free the bisexual potential in everyone, rendering obsolete the categories of homosexual and heterosexual.
Chapters of the GLF were established across the U. The Gay Liberation movement overall, like the gay community generally and historically, did not welcome transgender individuals. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. QLF was founded by Lee Brewster and Bunny Eisenhower to combat the erasure of drag and transgender visibility in the first LGBT pride march, demonstrating how quickly and fully the gay liberation movement excluded transgender activists despite their key role in the Stonewall Riots and previous LGBTQ activism.
TAO, founded by Angela K. Douglas in , was the first international grassroots transgender community organization, and is known for publishing the Moonshadow and Mirage newsletters. Donny the Punk and L. Craig Schoonmaker are credited with popularizing the word "Pride" to describe these festivities. One of the values of the movement was gay pride.
Los Angeles held a big parade on the first Gay Pride Day. Smaller demonstrations were held in San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter had seen the effect of the GLF in the United States and created a parallel movement based on revolutionary politics and alternative lifestyle. By , the UK GLF was recognized as a political movement in the national press, holding weekly meetings of to people. Groups of GLF members in drag invaded and spontaneously kissed each other; others released mice , sounded horns, and unveiled banners, and a contingent dressed as workmen obtained access to the basement and shut off the lights.
Easter saw the Gay Lib annual conference held in the Guild of Undergraduates Union students union building at the University of Birmingham. By , internal disagreements had led to the movement's splintering.
Homosexuality
The Leicester group founded by Jeff Martin was noted for its involvement in the setting up of the local "Gayline", which is still active today and has received funding from the National Lottery. They also carried out a high-profile campaign against the local paper, the Leicester Mercury , which refused to advertise Gayline's services at the time. From activists protested the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association in their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , and in it was replaced with a category of "sexual orientation disturbance" then "ego-dystonic homosexuality," which was also deleted, although "gender identity disorder" a term used for Gender dysphoria remains.
In , Sweden became the first country in the world to allow people who were transsexual by legislation to surgically change their sex and provide free hormone replacement therapy. Sweden also permitted the age of consent for same-sex partners to be at age 15, making it equal to heterosexual couples.
Bisexuals became more visible in the LGBT rights movement in the s. The Statement, which may have been "the first public declaration of the bisexual movement" and "was certainly the first statement on bisexuality issued by an American religious assembly," appeared in the Quaker Friends Journal and The Advocate in From the anarchist Gay Liberation movement of the early s arose a more reformist and single-issue Gay Rights movement, which portrayed gays and lesbians as a minority group and used the language of civil rights—in many respects continuing the work of the homophile period.
Gay and lesbian rights advocates argued that one's sexual orientation does not reflect on one's gender; that is, "you can be a man and desire a man Veteran activists such as Sylvia Rivera and Beth Elliot were sidelined or expelled because they were transgender. When elected she was married in a heterosexual marriage. The British journal Gay Left also began publication. In , Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors becoming the first openly gay man in the United States elected to public office. Milk was assassinated by a former city supervisor Dan White in Essentially, she established an organization which put forth an amendment to the laws of the county which resulted in the firing of many public school teachers on the suspicion that they were homosexual.
In , a number of people in Sweden called in sick with a case of being homosexual, in protest of homosexuality being classified as an illness. This was followed by an activist occupation of the main office of the National Board of Health and Welfare. Within a few months, Sweden became the first country in the world to remove homosexuality as an illness.
Lesbian feminism , which was most influential from the mids to the mids, 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 frustrated 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 book Lesbian Nation.
Organizers at the time focused on this issue. She was known for creating entertainment spaces specifically for queer women, especially in Latino American community. The term "gay" came to be more strongly associated with homosexual males. In Canada, the coming into effect of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in saw a shift in the gay rights movement in Canada, as Canadian gays and lesbians moved from liberation to litigious strategies. Premised on Charter protections and on the notion of the immutability of homosexuality, judicial rulings rapidly advanced rights, including those that compelled the Canadian government to legalize same-sex marriage.
It has been argued that while this strategy was extremely effective in advancing the safety, dignity and equality of Canadian homosexuals, its emphasis of sameness came at the expense of difference and may have undermined opportunities for more meaningful change. This ruling would be overturned two decades later in Lawrence v. Some historians posit that a new era of the gay rights movement began in the s with the emergence of AIDS , which decimated the leadership and shifted the focus for many.
Without recognizing the lineage of this narrative, Vaid has surrendered to the politics of edification—to the view that social change occurs through individual acts of speaking truth to power. As more and more gay men and lesbians come out, Vaid seems to reason, misrepresentation, prejudice, and discrimination would be contested everyday, repeatedly and relentlessly. And so, like Bawer, her antagonist, Vaid has perhaps unintentionally placed the moral courage and integrity of the individual and the choice to come out at the center of sexual politics.
The s in America were a period of heightened political and cultural turmoil. Against a language of voluntarism, p. Blacks and women were said to be oppressed by the institutional order of America—by its government, laws, schools, cultural representations, and discourses. Moreover, black power and women's liberation challenged an apparent postwar consensus that the individualism and tolerance of America are the antithesis of Soviet state tyranny and European class-based societies.
Black power and women's liberation dared to portray America as exhibiting its own distinctive patterns of social tyranny—of white and male supremacy, and the tyranny of capital over labor. As a result, the core institutions and culture of America disrespect, disenfranchise, and degrade its nonheterosexual citizens. From the perspective of liberationist social theory, a politics of edification would leave the structural supports of compulsory heterosexuality, such as a binary gender order, government policies and laws, and a culture of heterosexual romance and marriage, intact. Liberationists invented a new politics of coming out: The liberationist idea of compulsory heterosexuality meant that institutions, culture, gender, and everyday life were political.
And in place of the liberationist politicizing of the personal realm of the body, gender, eroticism, and intimacy, reformers substitute a morality of personal authenticity and virtue. Liberationists were not entirely untouched, though, by the culture of civic individualism. They insisted that social change required a personal transformation. As a sign of self-liberation, coming out acquired considerable moral significance for liberationists as well. It was then easy for reformers to claim liberationism as part of their heritage and thereby enhance their legitimacy.
They renegotiated the meaning of the closet as an individual choice rather than a social structural condition and as an indicator of moral weakness p. Similarly, coming out was understood as a moral act of courage, virtue, and personal responsibility rather than a collective public act challenging institutional injustice. A liberationist political culture has survived on the edges of lesbian and gay life. As a critique of the institutionalization of normative heterosexuality and gender binarism, liberationism lives on in critical sex theory, local grassroots activism, and a culture of sexual, gender, social, and cultural experimentation.
It may, yet again, give expression to movements of collective protest. However, a politics of normalization—with its political vocabulary of rights, identity pride, visibility, and multicultural integration—has dominated gay and lesbian movement organizations. As a partial explanation of this development, we have introduced the notion of a culture of American civic individualism: The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. The Meanings of Social Life. An Open Letter to Mr. Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, — University of Chicago Press.
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Translated by Richard Miller. A Place at the Table. Blasius, Mark, and S. New York University Press. Homosexuality in Cold War America. The Homosexual in America. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Essays on Gay History, Politics, and the University. An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Routledge and Kegan Paul. Flam, Helena, and Debra King. Emotions and Social Movements. Kennedy, and Mayer N.
Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere. University of Michigan Press. In Radically Gay , edited by Will Roscoe. The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements. Jay, Karla, and A. Out of the Closets. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, — Meeks, Chet, and Arlene Stein.
Collective Action in the Information Age. Murdoch, Joyce, and D. Gay Men and Lesbians v. Penelope, Julia, and Susan Wolfe, eds. The Original Coming Out Stories.
Citizenship, Same-Sex Marriage, and Feminist Critiques of Marriage
It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. The Lesbian and Gay Movements: Culture and Practical Reason. The Subject of Semiotics. The Women's Movement in Abeyance. Taylor, Verta, and Nancy Whittier. The Culture of the Women's Movement. University of Minnesota Press. Third World Gay Revolution.
Homosexuality - Wikipedia
This means, in the first instance, that homosexuals are treated with respect and, in the eyes of the law, are first-class citizens. Normalization assumes that homosexuals share a common humanity with heterosexuals; that they share similar motivations, needs, aspirations; and so on.
Such discourses refer to elaborated accounts of the unequal social status of lesbians and gay men and proposals to bring about social change. We further circumscribed the realm of political ideas by trying, wherever possible, to attend to those discourses that have a clear connection to movement organizations. For example, our interpretation of homophile political ideas is based on an analysis of the publications of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two of the central political organizations of the s and s.
Similarly, our view of gay liberationism relies on publications such as p. This strategy proved more difficult as we turned to the politics of normalization. National organizations such as the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force and Lambda Legal Defense were less connected to newspapers or magazines, which would serve as sites of ideological discussion. We take this relative absence or thinness of organizationally based discourses defending normalization as a sign that ideological debate over this politic was by and large settled by the mid- to late s or at least that dissent had been effectively marginalized.
For an analysis of a rights-oriented integrationist politics, we relied on an examination of the Advocate , especially the editorials of David Goodstein in the s, since we believe he was a key bridge figure between liberationism and a normalizing politics. It was in the early to mids that the ideological clash between liberationism and its normalizing successor took place, and this clash occurred prominently in the Advocate.
We think the juxtaposition of Bawer and Vaid offers a particularly vivid illustration of that clash. Arguably, they offered the most forceful defense of each political agenda. Finally, a word on our schematic history that differentiates four phases: We present these movement phases in a linear fashion, although they have often been parallel currents.
For example, during the period of homophile politics in which individual assimilation was the goal, an ethnic minority model emphasizing group difference surfaced as an alternative political position. He is the author of, among other books, Romantic Longings: Love in America, — Routledge, , Embattled Eros: He is co-editor of Social Postmodernism: Original Essays and Interviews Routledge, His research and teaching interests included contemporary social theory, sexuality studies, and cultural sociology. His research focuses on the sociology of sexualities, particularly the sociology of heterosexualities.
Recent publications include an article analyzing cultural shifts in gay, lesbian, and queer films in Sexualities , Vol. Currently, he is completing a book manuscript that explores the gendered and racial character of heterosexual identities in the context of lesbian and gay visibility. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
Publications Pages Publications Pages. Search within my subject: Politics Urban Studies U. History Law Linguistics Literature. Music Neuroscience Philosophy Physical Sciences. The Politics of Authenticity: The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology. Sociology Online Publication Date: Don't have an account? From sexual liberty to civilized commitment. Civil unions and the future of gay rights. Since when is marriage a path to liberation?
In We are everywhere: A historical sourcebook of gay and lesbian politics , ed. Mark Blasius and Shan Phelan , — Fineman , Martha Albertson. The neutered mother, the sexual family, and other twentieth-century tragedies. Galston , William A. Goods, virtues, and diversity in the liberal state. The fatherhood responsibility movement: The centrality of marriage, work and male sexuality in reconstructions of masculinity and fatherhood.
In Making men into fathers: Men, masculinities, and the social politics of fatherhood , ed. Barbara Hobson , — Same-sex marriage and the Constitution. Why Americans hate welfare: Race, media and the politics of antipoverty policy. Glendon , Mary Ann. The transformation of family law. Goodridge et al v. Department of Public Health. Law and the family in nineteenth-century America. University of North Carolina Press. Foundings, citizenship, and difference in the American political imagination. Democracy and the foreigner. Seduction and rejection in the subordination of white women and women of color.
Romancing heterosexuality in popular culture. Irvine , Janice M. The battles over sex education in the United States.
Steven Seidman, Chet Meeks, and James Joseph Dean
Jakobsen , Janet R. Sexual regulation and the limits of religious tolerance. New York University Press. Female citizenship and independence. In Beyond equality and difference , ed. Gisela Bock and Susan James , 48 — Josephson , Jyl J. Gender, families, and state: Child support policy in the United States. The political ideology of the neo-traditional family. Journal of Political Ideologies 3 2: The question of lesbian and gay marriage. In Playing with fire: Queer politics, queer theories , ed.
Shane Phelan , — The gay rights question in contemporary American law. Lawrence and Garner v. Debunking the myth of the nuclear family.
Relationship rights for a queer society: Why gay activism needs to move away from the right to marry. In Child, family, and state , ed.
Stephen Macedo and Iris Marion Young , — Old wine in new bottles? Women working inside and outside the household. Women's Studies International Forum 24 1: Citizenship and social class and other essays. Equality for same-sex couples: The legal recognition of gay partnerships in Europe and the United States. From welfare to wedlock: Marriage promotion and poor mothers' inequality. Feminists talk back to social conservatives , ed. Cynthia Burack and Jyl Josephson , — Minow , Martha , and Mary Lyndon Shanley.
Relational rights and responsibilities: Revisioning the family in liberal political theory and law. Moran , Rachel F. The regulation of race and romance. Neubeck , Kenneth J. Playing the race card against America's poor. Okin , Susan Moller. Justice, gender, and the family. Gays, lesbians, and dilemmas of citizenship. Gay rights and American law. We will get what we ask for: Why it is good for gays, good for straights, and good for America.
Law and the meanings of marriage.
- Jewelry Jinx!
- Zeke, Ky and the Lightning Rod.
- LGBT social movements.
- THE KHALIFA.
Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry , 23 — Killing the black body: Race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. Survival under the rule of law.