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LGBT social movements
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Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender social movements share related goals of social acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have a long history of campaigning for what is generally called LGBT rights (or gay rights or gay and lesbian rights). The various communities have worked not only together, but also independent of each other in various configurations including gay liberation, lesbian feminism, the queer movement and transgender activism.
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Encyclopedia
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender social movements share related goals of social acceptance of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people have a long history of campaigning for what is generally called LGBT rights (or gay rights or gay and lesbian rights). The various communities have worked not only together, but also independent of each other in various configurations including gay liberation, lesbian feminism, the queer movement and transgender activism. There is no one organization representing all LGBT people and interests although arguably InterPride comes close by coordinating international pride events.
A commonly stated goal is social equality for LGBT people; some have also focused on building LGBT communities, or worked towards liberation for the broader society from sexual oppression. LGBT movements organized today are made up of a wide range of political activism and cultural activity, such as lobbying and street marches; social groups, support groups and community events; magazines, films and literature; academic research and writing; and even business activity.
Overview
Sociologist Mary Bernstein writes: "For the lesbian and gay movement, then, cultural goals include (but are not limited to) challenging dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, homophobia, and the primacy of the gendered heterosexual nuclear family (heteronormativity). Political goals include changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm." Bernstein emphasizes that activists seek both types of goals in both the civil and political spheres.
As with other social movements, there is also conflict within and between LGBT movements, especially about strategies for change and debates over exactly who comprises the constituency that these movements represent. There is debate over to what extent lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgendered people, intersexed people and others share common interests and a need to work together. Leaders of the lesbian and gay movement of the 1970s, 80s and 90s often attempted to hide masculine lesbians, feminine gay men, transgendered people, and bisexuals from the public eye, creating internal divisions within LGBT communities.
LGBT movements have often adopted a kind of identity politics that sees gay, bisexual and/or transgender people as a fixed class of people; a minority group or groups. Those using this approach aspire to liberal political goals of freedom and equal opportunity, and aim to join the political mainstream on the same level as other groups in society. In arguing that sexual orientation and gender identity are innate and cannot be consciously changed, attempts to change gay, lesbian and bisexual people into heterosexuals ("conversion therapy") are generally opposed by the LGBT community. Such attempts are often based in religious beliefs that perceive gay, lesbian and bisexual activity as immoral.
However, others within LGBT movements have criticised identity politics as limited and flawed, elements of the queer movement have argued that the categories of gay and lesbian are restrictive, and attempted to deconstruct those categories, which are seen to "reinforce rather than challenge a cultural system that will always mark the nonheterosexual as inferior."
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 organized community or social life was underground and secret. Thomas Cannon wrote what may be the earliest published defence of homosexuality in English, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd (1749). 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. 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 1792, groups of militant 'sodomite-citizens' in Paris petitioned the Assemblée nationale, the governing body of the French Revolution, for freedom and recognition. 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?
Three years later in Switzerland, Heinrich Hoessli published the first volume of Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen ("Eros: The Male-love of the Greeks"), another defence of same-sex love.
Contrary to stereotypes, the traditionally Catholic and conservative Poland never criminalized homosexuality. The 18th century Poland was marked by the Enlightenment-driven relaxed attitude towards all sexuality, with public figures reported to involve in homosexual or transvestite activities. Such "scandalous" events drew public attention, but did not result in prosecution. Only when subsequently to partitions of Poland Polish territories came under control of the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, did the law imposed by the occupying powers make homosexual acts illegal. Still, prominent figures were known to form homosexual relationships, such as Narcyza Zmichowska (1819-1876), a writer and founder of the Polish feminist movement, who used her private experiences in her writing.
1860 - 1944
From the 1870s, social reformers in other countries had begun to defend homosexuality, but their identities were kept secret. 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. 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 1860s among first-wave feminists and radicals of the libertarian left. They critiqued 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 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, claiming that German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow engaged in homosexual activity.
The 1901 book Sind es Frauen? Roman über das dritte Geschlecht (Are These Women? Novel about the Third Sex) by Aimée Duc was as much a political treatise as a novel, criticising pathological theories of homosexuality and gender inversion in women. 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. Friedrich Radszuweit published LGBT literature and magazines in Berlin (for example "Die Freundin").
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 destroyed in 1933. The Swiss journal Der Kreis was the only part of the movement to continue through the Nazi era.
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. A better documented group is Henry Gerber's The Society for Human Rights formed in Chicago in 1924, which was quickly suppressed.
The independent Polish state abolished the occupying powers' legislation and decriminalised homosexuality in 1932. The police still used gross indecency laws instead to harass homosexuals, but the gay community in Poland thrived, with many important public figures, such as the composer Karol Szymanowski, the poet Boleslaw Lesmian and the novelists Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz and Maria Dabrowska being of homosexual orientation. The German Nazi invasion of 1939 put a close to it.
1945 - 1968
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", emphasizing 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, Britain and elsewhere. ONE, Inc., the first public homosexual organization in the U.S, 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 lobbied within established political systems for social acceptability; radicals of the 1970s would later disparage the homophile groups for being assimilationist. Any demonstrations were orderly and polite. By 1969, there were dozens of homophile organizations and publications in the U.S, 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 neighbourhood of Tenderloin rioted against police harassment at a popular all-night restaurant, Gene Compton's Cafeteria.
After the introduction of Soviet-style communism to Poland, the 1948 law stated that the age of consent for all sexual acts, homosexual or heterosexual, was 15. However, the powerful influence of the Roman Catholic Church made open homosexuality a matter of scandal. While a gay poet Grzegorz Musial could publish officially, Jerzy Andrzejewski's last novel dealing with the subject of homosexuality was censored. The gay subculture grew, with official and underground press alike discussing the subject of homosexuality. However, the traditionally conservative attitudes towards sexuality were used by the secret police to harass and put pressure on individuals.
1969 - 1974
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 more radical, and the Gay Liberation Movement emerged towards the end of the decade. This new radicalism is often attributed to 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. Although Gay Liberation was already underway, Stonewall certainly provided a rallying point for the fledgling movement.
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, and sought ultimately to free the bisexual potential in everyone, rendering obsolete the categories of homosexual and heterosexual. According to Gay Lib writer Toby Marotta, "their Gay political outlooks were not homophile but liberationist". "Out, loud and proud", they engaged in colourful street theatre. 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 U.S. 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.
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 Gay pride parades. From 1970 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 1974 it was replaced with a category of "sexual orientation disturbance" then "ego-dystonic homosexuality", which was also deleted, although "gender identity disorder" remains.
1975 - 1986
From the anarchistic Gay Liberation Movement of the early 1970s 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. In Berlin, for example, the radical Homosexuelle Aktion Westberlin was eclipsed by the Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft.
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... without any implications for your gender identity as a man,” and the same is true if you are a woman. Gays and lesbians were presented as identical to heterosexuals in all ways but private sexual practices, and butch "bar dykes" and flamboyant "street queens" were 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.
In 1977, a former Miss America contestant and orange juice spokesperson, Anita Bryant, began a campaign "Save Our Children", in Dade County, Florida (greater Miami), which proved to be a major set-back in the Gay Liberation movement. 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.
During this period, the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA) was formed in Coventry, England (1978). 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. As with Gay Liberation, this understanding of the lesbian potential in all women was at odds with the minority-rights framework of the Gay Rights movement. 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 1973 book Lesbian Nation. Disagreements between different political philosophies were, at times, extremely heated, and became known as the lesbian sex wars, clashing in particular over views on sadomasochism, prostitution and transsexuality. 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 1985 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.
Mark Segal, an early member of Gay Liberation has continued to pave the road of gay equality. Many refer to Mark Segal as the dean of American gay journalism. As a pioneer of the local gay press movement, he was one of the founders and former president of both The National Gay Press Association and the National Gay Newspaper Guild. He also is the founder and publisher of the award winning Philadelphia Gay News which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. As a young gay activist, Segal understood the power of media. In 1973 Segal disrupted the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, an event covered in newspapers across the country and viewed by 60% of American households, many seeing or hearing about homosexuality for the first time. Before the networks agreed to put a stop to censorship and bias in the news division, Segal went on to disrupt The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and Barbara Walters on The Today Show. The trade newspaper Variety claimed that Segal had cost the industry $750,000 in production, tape delays and lost advertising revenue.
Aside from publishing, Segal has also reported on gay life from far reaching places as Lebanon, Cuba, and East Berlin during the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and Bob Ross, former publisher of San Francisco's Bar Area Reporter represented the gay press and lectured in Moscow and St. Petersburg at Russia's first openly gay conference, referred to as Russia's Stonewall. He recently coordinated a network of local gay publications nationally to celebrate October as gay history month, with a combined print run reaching over a half million people. His determination to gain acceptance and respect for the gay press can be summed up by his 15 year battle to gain membership in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association one of the nation's oldest and most respected organizations for daily and weekly newspapers. The 15 year battled ended after the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette joined forces and called for PGN's membership. Today Segal sits on the Board of Directors of PNA. In 2005, he produced Philadelphia's official July 4 concert for a crowd estimated at 500,000 people. The star-studded show featured Sir Elton John, Pattie Labelle, Brian Adams, and Rufus Wainwright. On a recent anniversary of PGN an editorial in the philadelphia Inquirer stated "Segal and PGN continue to step up admirably to the challenge set for newspapers by H.L. Menchen. "To afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted."
1987 - present
Some historians consider that a new era of the gay rights movement began in the 1980s with the emergence of AIDS, which decimated the leadership and shifted the focus for many. 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". Less confrontational terms that attempt to reunite the interests of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transpeople also became prominent, including various acronyms like LGBT, LGBTQ, and LGBTI. As of 2006, these acronyms have become commonplace descriptors used by organisations that once described themselves as "gay rights" groups.
In the 1990s, organizations began to spring up in non-western countries, such as Progay Philippines, which was founded in 1993 and organized the first Gay Pride march in Asia on June 26, 1994. In many countries, LGBT organizations 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 movements. In the English-speaking world, an important text was Leslie Feinberg's, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come — The Story of Ben Wells", published in 1992. 1993 is considered to mark the beginning of a new movement of intersexuals, with the founding of the Intersex Society of North America by Cheryl Chase.
Gender variant peoples across the globe also formed minority rights movements — Hijra activists campaigned for recognition as a third sex in India and Travesti groups began to organize against police brutality across Latin America, while activists in the United States formed militant groups such as Transexual Menace.
In many cases, LGBTI rights movements came to focus on questions of intersectionality, the interplay of oppressions arising from being both queer and underclass, colored, disabled, etc.
The Netherlands was the first country to allow same-sex marriage, in 2001. As per 2008, same-sex marriages are also legal in Belgium, Canada, Norway, South Africa and Spain, along with two states in the United States, Massachusetts,and Connecticut. Meanwhile, some municipalities keep enacting laws against homosexuality. E.g., Rhea County, Tennessee tried to "ban homosexuals" in 2006.
Opposition
LGBT movements are opposed by a variety of individuals and organizations. They may have a personal, moral, political or religious objection to gay rights, homosexual relations or gay people. People have said same-sex relationships are not marriages, that legalization of same-sex marriage will open the door for the legalization of polygamy, that it is unnatural and that it encourages unhealthy behavior. Supporters of the traditional marriage movement believe that all sexual relationships with people other than an opposite-sex spouse undermines the traditional family and that children should be reared in homes with both a father and a mother.
There is also concern that gay rights may conflict with individuals' freedom of speech, religious freedoms in the workplace, and the ability to run churches, charitable organizations and other religious organizations in accordance with one's religious views. There is also concern that the acceptance of homosexual relationships by religious organizations might be forced through threatening to remove the tax-exempt status of churches whose views don't align with those of the government.
There are also people who are homophobic and do not like gay men and lesbians. Studies have consistently shown that people with negative attitudes towards lesbians and gays are more likely to be male, older, religious, politically conservative, have lower education levels, live in more rural areas and have little close personal contact with openly gay individuals, as well as supporting traditional gender roles.
See also
External links
- Gallagher, John & Chris Bull, , 1996, Crown, 300 pp.
- Milligan, Don, (1973)
- Norton, Rick, , February 12, 2005, updated April 5, 2005.
- Percy, William A., November 22, 2005. Accessed on 18 June, 2006.
- Gerald Schoenewolf,
- Spitzer, RL, Am J Psychiatry. 1981 Feb;138(2):210-5.
- (IGLHRC)
- (2000)
- (USA)
- Good As You
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- , The Indypendent, July 4, 2003
- Indymedia, September 27, 2007
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Further reading
- John Lauritsen and David Thorstad. The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864-1935). Revised edition. 1974; Ojai, CA: Times Change Press, 1995. ISBN 0-87810-041-5*Margaret Cruikshank. The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992. ISBN 0-415-90648-2
- Martin Duberman. Stonewall. New York: Plume, 1994. ISBN 0-452-27206-8
- David Eisenbach. "Gay Power: An American Revolution." New York: Carroll & Graf, 2006. ISBN-10: 0-78671-633-9
- Barry D. Adam. The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement. Revised edition. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. ISBN 0-8057-3864-9
- Warren Johansson and William Armstrong Percy, New York and London: Haworth Press, 1994.
- Robert Aldrich, (ed.) London: Thames & Hudson, 2006.
- David Carter [MA]. Stonewall: the riots that sparked the Gay revolution; New York, NY; St Martin’s Press; 2004. ISBN 0-312-20025-0
- Neil Miller; Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian history from 1869 to the present; New York, NY; Alyson Books; 2006. ISBN 0-7394-6463-0
- Thomas C. Caramagno. "Irreconcilable Differences? Intellectual Stalemate in the Gay Rights Debate." Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. ISBN 0-275-97721-8
- Scott Gunther. Book about the history of homosexual movements in France (sample chapter available online). New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009. ISBN 023022105X
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