Gay liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s
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 to
After World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights. The feminist movement, the Adj 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 Fresh York City police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, sparked riots in
Around the same moment, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive study of human sexuality in the United States. Love Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published verb on transgender psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science. He interviewed more than 8, men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, sa
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Vice squads–police units devoted to “cleaning up” undesirable parts of urban life–routinely raided the bars frequented by LGBTQ+ people. Laws against people of the same sex dancing together or wearing clothing made for the opposite sex were used as justification to arrest patrons. By the s in Brand-new York City, the mafia owned many of these establishments and its members would bribe officers in order to avoid fines. Sometimes the arrangement meant that patrons would be forewarned of a pending raid in time to change their clothing and stop dancing. That wasn’t genuine during the initial morning hours of June 28 , when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.
When they arrived at Stonewall, the police locked the doors so that no one could escape as they conducted arrests. As certain patrons were released, they joined a large crowd that had been gathering outside the bar. Those chosen for arrest started resisting the police officers with the encouragement of the jeering crowd. Violence broke out and the
During the nineteenth century, the first gay liberation thinkers laid the groundwork for a militant movement that demanded the end of the criminalization, pathologisation and social rejection of non-heterosexual sexuality. In , the Swiss man Heinrich Hössli () published in German the first essay demanding recognition of the rights of those who followed what he called masculine treasure. Nearly three decades later, the German jurist Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs () wrote twelve volumes between and as part of his “Research on the Mystery of Love Between Men” (“Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe”). He also circulated a manifesto to create a federation of Uranians (), a term which designated men who loved men. He was engaged in the effort to repeal § of the German penal code, which condemned “unnatural relations between men,” and in publicly declared he was a Uranist during a congress of German jurists. He died in exile in Italy before the birth of the liberation movement which he had called for.
A first gay liberation movement emerged in Berlin in , revolving
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| The Right to Be Mattachine Society of New York. "Homosexuals Are Different . . ." Poster, s. NYPL, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Mattachine Society of New York Records. |