The era of gay liberation

            On June 28^th in 1969 the modern gay movement was born at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City (Miller, 336).  That evening, as the police department came to raid the gay bar in the usual pattern, something unusual happened as well: the patrons fought back.  Gay people were fed up with being sweet as pie about their marginalization, and fed up with being ashamed about their sexual preference, their very identity.  From that moment on, everything in LGBT history was defined as being either pre-Stonewall or post-Stonewall, and everything post-Stonewall was based upon a sense of “gay power” and gay pride (Miller, 337).  It is easy to understand then why Neil Miller describes the decades immediately post-Stonewall as the era of gay liberation, because this was a period of “coming out” for the gay community, of liberation from shame.  Gays became a political force, capable of organizing and pushing for legislation to support their own equality.  However, it’s not as if the 70s and 80s were a utopia for LGBT people.  The increased presence and pride of gays led to movement backlash, and Anita Bryant, among others, led a crusade against the homosexual community that they had previously ignored for the most part (Miller 372).  Most importantly, public opinion remained almost entirely against gay equality.  If one defines liberation as a phenomenon based on a public acceptance as well as a personal one, as I do, then gay liberation has been achieved much more thoroughly in the more recent decades than in the 70s and 80s.

            At the end of the 1960s, the entire gay movement was redefined to emphasize a sense of pride in the identity of being gay.  The first act of identifying yourself as a member of the movement became a “proud (and often public) declaration of one’s homosexuality” (Miller 340).  This act of “coming out” was performed to show a lack of the shame that had once characterized gay men in America.  As quoted by Allen Ginsberg two nights after Stonewall in describing the returning patrons, “‘You know the guys there were so beautiful – they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago’” (Miller 337).  A gay man’s entire world changed when homosexuality was a source of pride, and even the word “homosexual,” a narrow concept, was replaced by the new term “gay,” representative of an entire identity (Miller 340).  Perhaps most importantly, gay identity allowed for a feeling of solidarity and community, a gay consciousness.  Under this banner, gay men were able to organize, first into the Gay Liberation Front, then into the Gay Activists Alliance, and even further into the National Gay Task Force and other single-focus associations (Miller 342, 348, 352).  With gay men acting as a single constituency, they became a force to be reckoned with.  As well as galvanizing as a group, individual gay men and lesbians also took an opportunity in the 1970s to become politicians, most famously San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk (Miller 368-371).  The combination of a well-known, openly gay politician and a group of voters who would vote in a block as gay men (and occasionally women) made gays a powerful enough political force for gay rights legislation and sodomy law repeal to become a reality in California (Miller 375).  Though still far from mainstream, the LGBT community achieved a real-world relevancy, a solid constituency, and most importantly a pride in their identities in the late 60s and 70s that they had not possessed previously.

            However, the 1960s-80s, the decades that Miller describes as the “gay liberation” era, were perhaps as full of setbacks as they were of gains.  Celebrity Anita Bryant began a campaign in the 70s that would continue for years to have a devastating effect on public opinion towards homosexuality when she introduced the idea that “Homosexuals cannot reproduce so they must recruit” (Miller 372).  This idea instilled a fear in parents who might otherwise have remained neutral on the issue, and later in the same decade California senator John Briggs was able to get enough signatures to put a question on the 1978 state ballot that, if it passed, would ban openly gay teachers from California’s public schools (Miller 374).  Although the Briggs Initiative was defeated that November, it was a major scare for the gay community.  And in other instances, the pro-gay side did not come off so well, such as the Miami repeal of Dade County’s gay rights law by a massive margin in June of 1977 (Miller 373).  Most devastatingly, in November of 1978, Harvey Milk, the nation’s most famous gay rights crusader, was brutally murdered, with his killer being virtually acquitted of that crime six months later (Miller 378).  And even the death of a leader was nothing when compared with the grief faced by the gay community in 1981, when AIDS was discovered and gay men began dying by the hundreds.  Among the many unfortunate consequences of the disease was the split it caused within the gay community itself.  When the connection became clear between the transmission of AIDS and unsafe sex, conflicts emerged over what sexually active gay men ought to do, culminating in the battle to close the San Francisco bathhouses.  This divisive issue resulted in both sides demonizing each other and gay men being divided.  Between the public backlash of Anita Bryant and the anti-gay movement, and the personal crisis of AIDS, it is clear to see that as much happened to hurt the LGBT community in what Miller describes as the “gay liberation” era as what happened to help it.

            If gay liberation instead is to be defined as widespread public tolerance and/or acceptance of the LGBT community, it is a phenomenon we have come much closer to recent history than in the 1960s-1980s.  Miller describes the 90s to the present in gay politics as the “gay moment,” when gay rights has been around long enough to make its way into the public eye and become a concern of all individuals.  Barack Obama, the current president of the United States, announced during his bid for election that he favored the repeal of the policy barring gays from open military service, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (Simmons).  Although his follow-through in actually supporting this cause has been unreliable, he continues to state that it is one of his priorities, and he’s not alone – much of the top military leadership has publicly stated their support for a repeal, and a recent study shows that 70% of troops wouldn’t really mind serving with openly gay comrades (O’Keefe).  Surveys of the American public show similar statistics, with a majority of citizens in favor of repeal (PEW center).  The president, the military, and the public are all paying attention to this issue, and what’s more, favoring the gays.  The popular media also pays attention to GLBT issues in spades, as with the recent string of young gay suicides.  Every popular news network discussed the issue (Costello).  Moreover, due to the sensitive and tragic nature of this particular case, virtually nobody was arguing on the ‘anti-gay’ side.  Of course, no one is going to argue in favor of suicide, regardless of his or her views on equality, but this issue is still notable as a sign that the country as a whole is not willing to tolerate virulent hatred.  An equally worthwhile indicator of the modern power and momentum of GLBT politics is, in fact, the opposition to them.  Nobody puts up a fight against a force that they don’t think has a chance in the first place, and as I stated earlier, there is a prominent fight being waged against GLBT equality.  There is however an interesting difference between the tactics used in antigay politics of the past and today.  Arguments against GLBT equality have recently begun sounding desperate, with proponents of the agenda often using such tactics as a ‘slippery slope’ argument: commonly recognized as the last, frantic attempt to win of someone who knows they are cornered. 

            Those who are making the argument against GLBT equality have reason to feel this worried, considering the strides being made in the newest arena of the fight: the battle for marriage equality.  A few decades ago, the concept of homosexual couples being allowed to marry would have been scoffed at out of hand.  But in 2004, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled 4-3 that refusing to issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples constituted an unlawful discrimination that would not stand up to rational basis, let alone the standard of strict scrutiny they chose to hold it to (Massachusetts Supreme Court, 2003).  This made Massachusetts not only the first state to legalize same-sex marriages, but also the first state to insist, in a subsequent court decision, that civil unions simply would not do, an argument that continues to be staged (Eskridge-Hunter 125).  Subsequent attempts to overturn these decisions by a vote of the people have consistently failed.  As of December 2010, it is one of five U.S. states and one U.S. district that issue marriage licenses to homosexual couples, along with Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the nation’s capitol Washington D.C (Vestal, Urbina).  This is in addition to New York, Rhode Island, and Maryland, where the state recognizes marriages performed for same-sex couples in other states but does not perform them itself, and California, where same-sex marriages were legal for a brief period of time before the state constitution was amended by a vote of the people to define marriage as between a man and a woman.  (However, all same-sex marriages performed during this time were ruled to still be valid.)  In California, New Jersey, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada, same-sex ‘civil unions’ or ‘domestic partnerships’ that grant all the rights of marriage without the title are allowed.  And in Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Colorado, and Wisconsin, homosexual couples can enter into civil unions or domestic partnerships that grant some or most of the rights of marriage without the title (Vestal).  Taken together this data means that there is some form of legal partnership available in fifteen out of fifty states.  Of course, just any kind of legal partnership is not enough.  For true marriage equality to be achieved, homosexual couples in at least a majority of states would need to be able to do just that: marry.  Despite what opponents may say, there are certain social and personal benefits that come with being able to call a person your spouse that simply do not exist with domestic partnerships and civil unions, even those that grant every privilege of marriage besides the title (Eskridge-Hunter 125).  It may be a while before true marriage for same-sex couples is a reality, but the current of change is strong, and discrimination against the GLBT community, like discrimination against people of color and women, is passing further into history with every moment.

GLBT liberation, when defined as the widespread acceptance and equality of the GLBT community, is a goal we are far from achieving.  However, it is something we are much closer to now, in the early 21^st century, than we were in the late 1960s to the 1980s.  When gays first came out of the closet and begun fighting against oppression in earlier years, they were up against an entire world of people who disagreed with them.  Support for the community came almost exclusively from other gays, or from their close friends and family.  In the modern era, support comes from celebrities, politicians, welcoming churches, clubs, political organizations, and other resources in almost every form.  The current success of gay politics is owed to the steps that the forerunners of gay politics took in the decades leading up to the new millennium, and those steps should be fully recognized and honored.  But liberation as a public as well as a personal phenomenon for the gay community is a phenomenon of the modern day.  Homosexuality is not considered a disorder, and homosexual individuals have established avenues through which they can stand up for their own rights.  The fight is not over, nor will it be for a while.  But the tide is turning.  Public polls since 1988 on the question of whether or not homosexual couples should be able to marry have shown a steadily increasing approval of marriage equality and a steadily decreasing disapproval to a point where, at this exact moment of time, there is about a 50% approval vs. disapproval rate, with approval about to overtake the majority (Franklin).  In this modern era, times are changing, and equality is coming faster than ever.  We have not reached it yet, but the liberation of the GLBT community is much closer at hand now than it was in the time Miller describes as the gay liberation decades.