Homosexuality has been a controversial issue even before the 19t h Century. Today, people still continue to have mixed views, mainly due to cultural and religious differences. They tend to focus on how they are treated now . However, most never know and understand how far they have actually come.
The concept of homosexuality wasn’t thought of a sexual orientation in America until the late 1800s. Historians today state that “colonial Americans didn’t think about sexual identity the way we do today” (Alsenas, 2008). Instead, they referred to the sexual acts that didn’t lead to pregnancy as sodomy. At that time, religion was the main reason for outlawing sodomy.
Even after the first colonists, Americans still believed that procreation was the only natural purpose in engaging in sex. In response, they kept it illegal because they thought that it was a “crime against nature”. However, throughout the 1800s, affection between men was expressed openly.
Towards the end of the Victorian period, “any mention of sexual activity was considered inappropriate” (Alsenas, 2008), even between husband and wife. During this time, men and women were greatly separated from each other. This society easily promoted same-sex friendships to keep the women and men apart. As a result, this
“allowed men and women to be very open about their feeling toward their same sex friends” (Alsenas, 2008).
As America began to enter the 20t h century, people began to think all homosexual men were ‘highly feminine’. In response, those men wanted to distinguish themselves as something different, so they began to call themselves “queer”. At that time, queer mean you were different, not the derogatory word as it is now.
Some historians feel that World War I had a “freeing effect” on Americans’ sexuality. As more men was recruited to the army, the number of available men decreased and it took the pressure off some women to marry. This led to more people accepting the idea that repressing sexual desire was considered unhealthy. Gay America: Struggle for Equality states that “it has been suggested that women during the war felt freer to explore sexuality with each other than before.” It also says that at that same time, “the military plucked young men out of their homes… and put them into a single sex environment…which increased the chances that they would meet homosexuals and act on same-sex desires.”
The effects of the Great Depression made it hard for women who wanted to support themselves, so “life became especially difficult for lesbians” (Alsenas, 2008). This was because women were expected to give up their jobs so that men could have them. During that moment, the women who chose to stay at work were described as being selfish because they were supposedly keeping a man form providing for his
family. This made the ides of homosexuality offensive due to it not following the traditional gender roles.
Around the time of World War II, homosexuality was considered a mental illness. Because of this belief, the Department of Defense started screening recruitments in order to identify homosexuals. This, of course, did not work. So, as a result, “the military was systematically presenting the possibility of homosexuality to millions of people” (Alsenas, 2008).
Homosexuality was considered grounds for discharge from the military. During the second world war, those discharges usually meant that the individual was undesirable, which often made it harder for them to get a job. However, by the time America actively became involved, the military often payed little attention toward the idea of homosexuality because “It needed as much troop power as it could get” (Alsenas, 2008).”
After the war ended, the “traditional-role-defying” homosexuals were in a bad spot. This was mainly because the return of traditional roles began as soldiers began to return to their families. From there, women were expected to marry and become housewives. However, this want the only issue. The discovery of how common homosexual acts were among Americans started a sense of national paranoia. So, Homosexuals were beginning to be considered as dangerous.
The early 1960s saw an increase in the amount of public discussions about homosexuality. It mainly occurred to discover and attempt to understand homosexuality. Surprisingly, by 1961, Hollywood’s Production Code was revised to allowed to show homosexuality in movies.
During the summer of 1966, Homophile organizations from all over the country came together to form a national organization that would eventually to become the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO). Their goal was “to expand coordination among homophile organizations throughout the Americas.” As a group, they “took on legal cases, produced studies on homosexuality and the law, and coordinated all protests across the entire country” (Alsenas, 2008). Things were finally moving along in the homophile movement because of them.
At the time, there were not many places where people could be openly gay. New York had laws prohibiting homosexuality in public, and private businesses and gay establishments were regularly raided and shut down. During the late hours of June 27, 1969 and the early morning of June 28t h , a riot broke out in front of a gay bar named The Stonewall Inn. Although the police were legally justified in the raiding, which was because they were serving liquor without a license among other violations, New York’s gay community had grown tired of the police department targeting gay clubs. At first, the raid started with the usual insults and rough handling. However, it quickly escalated to where bystanders and other people began to throw bottles at the
police. This riot is considered history’s first major protest on behalf of equal rights for homosexuals.
Around 1980. when Americans first began to get sick due to AIDS, no one could understand what was happening. At first, there was so much confusion surrounding the disease. Back then, people wondered what was causing it, how do you test for it and what could be done about it. During this time, AIDS was considered a disease of homosexual men, so it was referred to as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency). However, the name was changed to, what we know now as, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) after “some heterosexual hemophiliacs, drug addicts and Haitians had been diagnosed with the disease” (Alsenas, 2008).
The cause of AIDS took a long time to discover. At first, doctors came up with a variety of possibilities. However, “in 1984, the National Institutes of Health declared the ‘probable cause’ of AIDS to be a virus, calling it ‘HTLV-iii’” (Alsenas, 2008). In 1983, the FDA stated that “all men who had sex with another man since 1977” (Alsenas, 2008) were at an increased risk.
The AIDS crisis highlighted how vulnerable homosexuals were in a legal sense. The gay community realized early on that if progress was going to happen, then it would have to come from their own. So, “gay and lesbian rights activists essentially dropped their political plans and focused on this new threat” (Alsenas, 2008).
In 1986, the gay and lesbian rights movement experience two blows. The first was a letter to Roman Catholic bishops that ordered church officials to withdraw all support from gay Catholic organizations. The second was from the United States Supreme Court in the case of Bowers v. Hardwick. On August 3r d , 1982, a policeman arrested Michael Hardwick for violating Georgia’s antisodomy law. The case was appealed all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the court upheld Georgia’s state law banning sodomy with a 5-4 verdict.
Four years later, the homosexual community reached a boiling point. Many activists were getting frustrated with the ways things were getting done. They were “tired of countless meetings with officials that went nowhere, tired of approval delays for experimental drugs, [and] tired of seeing violence rising violence against gays” (Alsenas, 2008).
As America entered the 21s t century, the gay and lesbian rights movement made a more dramatic shift. This time it was toward the fight for marriage equality. Same-sex marriage quickly became an issue that contradicted politics across the country.
Another court case that affected the gay community was the Boy Scouts of America v. Dale . The case began when James Dale, an assistant scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts of America, was expelled from the organization when they learned that he was gay and active in the gay rights movement. In 1999, he filed a suit with New Jersey’s Superior Court and argued that his dismissal violated a New Jersey civil rights law that prohibited any public organization from discriminating on the based on sexual orientation. The Boy Scouts, however, pointed out their own policy statements that homosexual conduct was inconsistent with the requirement that a Scout be “morally straight” and “clean.” After losing in state court, the Boy Scouts appealed to the Supreme Court, On June 28t h , 2000, the Supreme court ruled that the Boy Scouts can exclude gay scoutmasters with a 5-4 verdict.
However, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court rules that “a Texas state law criminalizing certain intimate sexual conduct between two consenting adults of the same sex was unconstitutional” (Urofsky, 2014). This meant that the sodomy laws in other states were also unconstitutional. So, in the first time in history, “homosexual activity was legal in all the United States of America” (Alsenas, 2008).
Although, homosexual activity was legal everywhere since 2003, the issue of gay marriage remains in the United States today. In United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court “struck down Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which had defined marriage for federal purposes as a legal union between one man and one woman” (Duignan, 2014). This federal court case allowed states decide for themselves whether to let same-sex couples get married. As of today, 37 states and the District of Columbia has legalized gay marriage. The remaining 14 states have a constitutional amendment that prohibits same sex marriage.
Overall, the LGBTQ+ community is still working to gain the same rights and liberties as others. They are faced with problems that include situations like same-sex marriage. Although they have come farther than before, this particular society of people still have a way to go.