How did the government impact the gay community before stonewall
A Summary History of LGBTQ+ Legislation and Representation within Congress
Last month, many across the country acknowledged Pride Month in recognition of the LGBTQ+ community and its growing acceptance in American world. As such, it’s important to contemplate the history of LGBTQ+ legislation and representation in Congress, which has largely mirrored popular opinion—both in support of the movement and against it.
The precise beginning of Federal anti-gay legislation is difficult to settle. Many early laws and resolutions banned sodomy and “obscenities,” categories which included gay relationships without explicitly referencing homosexuality. One early measure, the Immigration Perform of 1917, specifically restricted immigration by individuals who exhibit “constitutional psychopathic inferiority,” a legislative classification also used to discriminate based on sexual orientation. Despite ambiguities in language, there are many early accounts of citizens facing legal punishment for Homosexual relationships, beginning as early as the seventeenth century, when many New England colonial laws ascribed the death penalty for charges of sodomy.
The first appearances of the words “homosexual”
In 1957, at the height of the Space Race, a government astronomer named Frank Kameny received a summons to report immediately to Washington, D.C. The Pentagon had reason to believe he was a homosexual. And for the first time, a queer fought back. (note: while LGBTQ people do not commonly use the word “homosexual” in 2020, it was the word used at the time)
Based on firsthand accounts, recently declassified FBI records, and forty thousand personal documents, comes The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, a new manual (one of the Novel York Times’ most anticipated June 2020 titles) from Harvard and Cambridge-trained historian Dr. Eric Cervini that traces the secret history of the fight for gay rights that began a generation before Stonewall.
The book unfolds over the course of the 1960s, as Kameny built a movement against the government’s gay purges. It traces the forgotten ties that bound gay rights to the Black Freedom Movement, the New Left, female homosexual activism, and trans resistance. Above all, it is a story of America (and Washington) at a cultural and sexual crossroads; of shocking, byzantine widespread battles with Congre
By Emily Sullivan, Historian
June is Pride Month, a celebration of the LGBTQ+ people and the freedom of LGBTQ+ individuals to be themselves. While the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the cancellation of most Celebration events, we can still take time to manifest on the history of Pride, and how members of the LGBTQ+ collective have fought for their rights and visibility.
The Stonewall Inn. Marsha P. Johnson, a prominent activist in New York City’s homosexual community, is credited by some as one of the first people to throw a projectile during the Stonewall Riots, although Johnson personally denied the claim. Learn more about her life and legacy here. Source: Wikimedia
Pride is held in June to commemorate the Stonewall Uprising, a series of riots that began on June 28, 1969 at the Stonewall Inn in Unused York City’s Greenwich Village. Prior to the riots, American gay rights activists favored methods that emphasized nonviolence and education on how gay people could assimilate into American community. By the late 1960s, the atmosphere was ripe for change. Years of Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, combined with the rising popularity of counterculture, prompted gay people fe
How Police Have Failed LGBTQ+ Communities
These occurrences of law enforcement violence constitute just some of the many ways in which LGBTQ+ people are harmed by those supposedly tasked with perpetuating justice. Over-policing and criminal justice system discrimination also disproportionately impact LGBTQ+ people — particularly LGBTQ+ people of color, who endure cross-cutting discrimination that has myriad unjust consequences.
LGBTQ+ people have historically experienced disparate police damage and been targeted while facing bias across every layer of our widespread safety system. For example, law enforcement officials have disproportionately profiled transgender people on the basis of their appearance, clothing, and for doing innocuous things, like traveling to school. Gay men have also been unjustly targeted by law enforcement for decades, with police engaging in undercover operations specifically aiming to criminalize homosexual conduct. Throughout history, police raided bars frequented by Queer people not only in New York City, but throughout the country.
Members of LGBTQ+ communities not only face disparate police harm, they are also underserved by law enforcement. Indeed,
Written by: Jim Downs, Connecticut College
By the end of this section, you will:
- Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from 1960 to 1980
After World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights. The feminist movement, the Ebony Power movement, the environmental movement, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement sought equality, rights, and empowerment in American society. Gay people organized to resist oppression and demand just treatment, and they were especially galvanized after a New York City police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, sparked riots in 1969.
Around the identical time, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive learn of human sexuality in the United States. Prefer Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published research on transsexual psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science. He interviewed more than 8,000 men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, saying that it could not be confined to simple categories of gay and heterosex