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Essay: Comparing LGBT & Civil Rights Movements: A Historical Overview of Society's Fight for Equality

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  • Published: 1 December 2020*
  • Last Modified: 22 July 2024
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  • Tags: Essays on LGBTQ+ rights

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The LGBT Rights Movement and the Civil Rights Movement are two very well-known crusades in U.S. history that ended up changing society for the better. Both campaigns had different end goals and different purposes, and were both led by diverse groups of people, however, they are also similar as much as they are contrasting to each other. The movements meant to change society and the way a certain minority was treated, with one being the LGBT community and the other being people of color.

The LGBT rights movement was a long-fought movement meant to bring social justice and equal rights to the LGBT, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, party, which is often ostracized from society, due to religious or personal beliefs. The start of the movement can be accredited to Henry Gerber, a World War I soldier who’d witnessed homosexual rights movements in Germany during his deployment. This inspired Gerber to replicate those movements in the United States, which proved he was unique, as many were aware about the injustices towards homosexuals at the time, but these same people did not hold the drive that Henry Gerber had when he returned to the United States of America. This led to him founding the first LGBT-oriented organization, the Society for Human Rights, in 1924, which was meant to publicized homosexuality and remove the societal stigma. However, this journey would never bear fruit, as Gerber and his associates were arrested on no physical charges and their reputation was smashed with salacious allegations. This, in turn, ended with Gerber’s fame dissipating, which is why he is often left out of the spotlight in LGBT history (Public Broadcasting Service). However, after his valiant efforts, the movement slowly began to churn and spread into various parts of society.

One major part of society that the LGBT crusade had a lot of publicity in was literature and public journals. This introduction to books is what largely publicized the idea of homosexuality, accomplishing what Henry Garber had intended to do. An early piece of literature noted for this was “The Well of Loneliness” by Radclyffe Hall, which hones in on two English women who begin falling in love with each other after meeting while serving during World War I. Another book published was “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male”, which formulated the idea that sexuality lay on a spectrum from completely homosexual to completely heterosexual and created the statistic that 37% of men the author had interviewed had participated in homosexual acts, which was scandalous at the time, seeing the status of homosexuals in society. This study proved that LGBT culture was spreading and that a bright future for the movement could be on the horizon. (BreakingPrejudice.org) However, there was still much prejudice from the majority of society to work through.

As mentioned many times before, hate and animosity towards the LGBT party was plentiful back in the 20th century. One commonly used example was during World War II and the Nazi concentration camps. Among Jews, Gypsies, and such other ethnical groups, homosexuals were jailed in the death camps as they were seen as sexually perverted, thus were lowered to the level Jews were viewed at. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) But the prejudice was not just from the Nazi, but also from various people in the United States, most notably, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower signed the infamous Executive Order 10450, which called for the immediate dismissal of any government workers who engaged in “sexual perversion”, which did not outright name homosexuality, however many lesbian and gay government workers were revoked of their jobs after the order was signed. Religion is commonly known to maltreat people associated with the LGBT group, as passages of the Bible condemn homosexual acts. (Christian Apologetics & Research Ministry) An example of a religious group that is against homosexuality that is still active today is the Westboro Baptist Church. They are a group based in Topeka, Kansas who have prejudice against many groups, including the LGBT community, and they have been a major thorn against equal treatment of homosexuals since their founding in 1931. (Westboro Baptist Church) They are still active today, with a recent picket against a local high school that was going to allow a gay student to participate in their sports teams. (ABC News) Lastly, during the early 20th century, homosexuality was viewed as a mental disorder, however that changed after Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist associated with the APA, conducted a study comparing the mentality of people who identified as straight and people who identified as homosexual. This study found that there was no noticeable characters Prejudice will never be fully removed from society, but the LGBT rights movement assisted with diminishing the levels of hate and malice towards the group overall over its course.

Despite all the progress the LGBT movement has made, in the 1960’s the movement almost disappeared, due to major inactivity. However, that was going to change on the fateful evening of June 28th, 1969, when the Stonewall Riots were kicked off. The Stonewall Inn was a popular bar frequented by the gay community of Manhattan, NY. It was frequently raided by police, who usually did close to nothing, but that all changed on June 28th. Police began to storm the bar with unparalleled wrath, and in turn, the bar patrons fought back. Although the stand-off was only for about a week, it started demonstrations nationwide in support of the gay community. (History Channel) This helped put the LGBT community back in the spotlight and rekindle the crusade for LGBT equality and kept it progressing towards its ultimate goal, equal rights. Another example of an event that sustained the fire of the movement was the AIDS epidemic of the 1980’s and 1990’s. In 1981, there was a sudden discovery and spike in diagnoses of the diseases HIV and AIDS, Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. This epidemic was common among needle drug users who shared needles, but also the gay community. Although it was eventually discovered that it could be spread through both genders, the disease was originally assumed to be exclusive to homosexuals, which became a weapon of prejudice for homophobic groups. This was bad for the LGBT community as it gained more prejudice as being gay was viewed as being a disease, however it also publicized the struggle of the LGBT community, garnering support from more people and causing more protests adding to the growing pressure to allow equal rights for homosexuals. (University of California)

Despite Eisenhower’s order to keep people who were “sexually perverted”, with the progression of the gay rights cause, homosexual workers eventually wormed their way back into the politics of the United States. Elaine Noble is the first person who identifies as gay who ran for and was elected to a governmental office in 1974. She was elected state legislator for Massachusetts, starting a small campaign for people in the LGBT party to try and get into politics. The most notable and infamous example of a gay person in politics is Harvey Milk. Harvey Milk was elected to the position of city-county supervisor of San Francisco, California, in a crazy political upset of politics. However, this was not to last, as Milk was shortly assassinated by Greg Moscone. It was a tragic blow to the movement, as one of the major head figures was suddenly dead, but it instilled a confidence in the movement to stride forward. (Breaking Prejudice)

Victory for the LGBT society was a long and drawn-out battle, but the fruits of the labor brought by Henry Gerber, the various bouts in literature, the Stonewall Riots, and the AIDS epidemic began showing in the late 1990’s. Hate crimes were cracked down on immediately by the Obama Administration, with the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in 2009, which named hate crimes aimed against people for their sexual orientation illegal. A domestic partnership is a step below the level of a legal marriage and some of the benefits of being legally married (such as death benefits) are not available. (LegalZoom) California was the first to legalize any sort of homosexual union, legalizing domestic unions between same-sex couples in 1999, with Vermont and New Jersey following suit in 2000. It goes nowhere but up from there, as same-sex marriage was first legalized by Massachusetts in 2004, with that being the first state to legalize a full marriage between a non-heterosexual couple, a major step towards the ultimate goal of the movement. However, the movement reached its climax in 2013, when the Obama administration recognized part of the Defense of Marriage Act, which ruled homosexual marriage as unlawful, as unconstitutional, and that same-sex couples should receive the same benefits of heterosexual marriage and also ruled that all states should hand out marriage licenses, regardless of couple’s sexual orientation. (Breaking Prejudice) The movement had succeeded in getting equal marriage rights for the LGBT community.

The gay rights movement was a long-fought movement that sought to find equal marriage rights for the LGBT community and it ended with the homosexual community obtaining completely equal rights for marriage. There was another major movement in history that aligns with the LGBT rights movement and how the course of it went, known as the Civil Rights Movement. There are some general points and some specific points where both causes coincide and differ with each other. In a general sense, both crusades sought to obtain equal rights, in some aspect, for a certain minority, but the LGBT Rights Movement seeking to obtain equal rights for the LGBT minority, whereas the Civil Rights Movement sought to obtain an equal societal status and identical rights as the white man for the African-American population. Both movements also suffered prejudice, hate, and had to make sacrifices along the way. People involved in the Civil Rights Movement faced excessive discrimination and verbal harassment at the hands of their enemies. There were even a couple people who died for the cause, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated for being the spearhead of the Civil Rights Movement, whereas James Chaney, the first black person to vote, disappeared mysteriously and was found dead. The Civil Rights Movement was a bloodier fight, as more notable people died in the entire Civil Rights fight, rather than the LGBT movement, where many people were arrested or detained, but only Harvey Milk is the most notable death in the entire movement. (Shmoop)

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