Gay liberation

Although the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York City are popularly remembered as the spark that produced a new movement, the origins predate these iconic events.[17] Resistance to police bar-raids was nothing new: as early as 1725, customers fought off a police raid at a London homosexual molly house.^[18]

Organized movements, particularly in Western Europe, have been active since the 19th century, producing publications, forming social groups and campaigning for social and legal reform. In the early 1890s, the trial of Oscar Wilde was widely reported in Germany and spurred discussion of homosexuality, leading to the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany, the first modern gay rights movement.^[19][20]

The movements of the period immediately preceding gay liberation, from the end of World War II to the late 1960s, are known collectively as the homophile movement.^[21] The homophile movement has been described as "politically conservative", although its calls for social acceptance of same-sex love were seen as radical fringe views by the dominant culture of the time.

1960s

The examples and perspective in this article deal primarily with the United States and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. You may improve this article, discuss the issue on the talk page, or create a new article, as appropriate. (June 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Early 1960s New York City, under the

At the beginning of gay rights protest, news on Cuban prison work camps for homosexuals inspired the Mattachine Society to organize protests at the United Nations and the White House, in 1965.^[23][24]

In the years before 1969, the organization also was effective in getting New York City to change its policy of police entrapment of gay men, and to rescind its hiring practices designed to screen out gay people.^[25] However, the significance of the new John Lindsay administration and the use of the media by Mattachine New York should not be underestimated in ending police entrapment. Lindsay would later gain a reputation for placing much focus on quelling social troubles in the city and his mayorship coinciding with the end of entrapment should be seen as significant. By late 1967, a New York group called the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN), essentially a one-man operation on the part of Craig Rodwell, was already espousing the slogans "Gay Power" and "Gay is Good" in its publication HYMNAL.

The 1960s was a time of social upheaval in the West, and the

Vanguard was a gay rights youth organization active from 1965 into 1967 in San Francisco. It was founded by Adrian Ravarour and Billy Garrison, and Vanguard magazine was founded by Jean-Paul Marat and Keith St.Clare. Ravarour had been asked by Joel Williams to help the Tenderloin LGBT youth who suffered discrimination.^[32] Seeing their conditions, Ravarour, a priest, led Vanguard for ten months and taught gay rights, then led Vanguard members in early demonstrations for equal rights. After he resigned in May 1966, J. P. Marat joined Vanguard and led it in six months of protests. Glide Church began to sponsor it in June 1966 assisting Vanguard to apply to become a non-profit and apply for the EOC grant. The organization dissolved due to internal clashes in late 1966 and early 1967. Former members reorganized as The Gay and Lesbian Center and Glide re-directed the EOC funds intended for Vanguard to form a service agency and new non-profit The Hospitality House.^[33]

1969

On March 28, 1969, in San Francisco, Leo Laurence (the editor of Vector, magazine of the United States' largest

Laurence then co-founded a militant group the Committee for Homosexual Freedom with Gale Whittington, Mother Boats, Morris Kight and others. Whittington had been fired from States Steamship Company for being openly gay, after a photo of him by Mother Boats appeared in the Berkley Barb, next to the headline "HOMOS, DON'T HIDE IT!", the revolutionary article by Leo Laurence. The same month Carl Wittman, a member of CHF began writing Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, which would later be described as "the bible of Gay Liberation". It was first published in the San Francisco Free Press and distributed nationwide, all the way to New York City, as was the Berkeley Barb with Laurence's stories on CHF's gay guerrilla militant initiatives and Mother Boats' photographs.

CHF was soon renamed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF); the Gay Liberation Front was a loose network of organizations throughout the US and abroad that determined their own political goals and modes of organization.^[34] One GLF statement of purpose explained their revolutionary ambitions:^[35]

We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society's attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature.

Gay Liberation Front activist Martha Shelley wrote, "We are women and men who, from the time of our earliest memories, have been in revolt against the sex-role structure and nuclear family structure."^[36]

In December 1969 the Gay Liberation Front made a cash donation to the Black Panthers, some of whose leaders had expressed

This statement by Newton was revolutionary. There has been another black civil rights organization that saw gay and lesbians as another oppressed group in the United States during this decade.[38] Newton recognized the same challenges that both oppressed groups face. He writes in his letter:

We haven't said much about the homo- sexual at all but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it's a real thing. I know through reading, and through my life experience, my observations, that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed people in the society.^[38]

Furthermore, Newton called for the removal of derogatory terms in the Black Panther's vocabulary.^[38] This helped advance the Gay Liberation Movement and legitimized it even further.

Although a short-lived group, the Comite Pederastique de la Sorbonne, had meetings during the student uprising of May 1968, the real public debut of the modern gay liberation movement in France occurred on 10 March 1971, when a group of lesbians from the

In 1971, Dennis Altman published Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, considered an important intellectual contribution to the ideas that shaped gay liberation movements in the English-speaking world. Among his ideas were "the polymorphous whole"^{[41]: 58–95} and his posing of the notion of "the end of the homosexual",^{[41]: 216–228} in which the potential for both heterosexual and homosexual behaviour becomes a widespread cultural and psychological phenomenon.^[42]: 116 Similarly, Allen Young's 1972 manifesto "Out of the Closet, into the Streets" envisions gay liberation as the recognition of humanity's innate bisexuality and androgyny within relationships that are free, expressive, and equal. Young portrays lesbians and gay men as the vanguard of sexual and human liberation.^[42]: 118 Sociologist Steven Seidman interprets these intellectual productions as precursors to queer theory.^[42]

See also

• Decriminalization of homosexuality
• Gay Lib v. University of Missouri
• Gay Community News (Boston)
• List of fictional gay characters
• Radical Faeries

Explanatory notes