Gay liberation
The gay liberation movement was a social and political movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s in the Western world, that urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.
The Stonewall Inn in the gay village of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City, was the site of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, and became the cradle of the modern LGBTQ rights movement, and the subsequent gay liberation movement. Early in the 1970s, annual political marches through major cities, were still known as "Gay Liberation" marches. Not until later in the 1970s and well into the 1980s did the marches begin to be called "gay pride parades". The movement involved the lesbian and gay communities in North America, South America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
Gay liberation is also known for its links to the counterculture of the time and for some gay liberationists' intent to transform or abolish fundamental institutions of society such as gender and the nuclear family, regardless of whether they had anything to do with the actual principles of gay rights. For some offsets of movement, the politics were radical, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist. In order to achieve such goals, consciousness raising and direct action were employed. While HIV/AIDS activism and awareness radicalized a new wave of lesbians and gay men in the 1980s, and radical groups have continued to exist ever since, by the early 1990s the radicalism of gay liberation was eclipsed in the mainstream by newly-out, pro-assimilationist gay men and women who stressed civil rights and mainstream politics.
The term gay liberation sometimes refers to the broader movement to end social and legal oppression against LGBTQ people. Sometimes the term gay liberation movement is even used synonymously or interchangeably with the gay rights movement. The Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee was formed in New York City to commemorate the first anniversary of the June 1969 Stonewall riots, the beginning of the international tradition of a late-June event to celebrate gay pride. The annual gay pride festivals in Berlin, Cologne, and other German cities are known as Christopher Street Days or "CSD"s.
Origins and history of movement
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. Resistance to police bar-raids was nothing new: as early as 1725, customers fought off a police raid at a London homosexual molly house.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.
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. 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.
Name
While the movement always included all LGBT people, in those days the unifying term was "gay", and later, "lesbian and gay", much as in the late eighties and early nineties, "queer" was reclaimed as a one-word alternative to the ever-lengthening string of initials, especially when used by radical political groups. Specifically, the word 'gay' was preferred to previous designations, such as homosexual or homophile, that were still in use by mainstream news outlets, when they would carry news about gay people at all. The New York Times refused to use the word 'gay' until 1987, up to that time insisting on 'homosexual'.1960s
Early 1960s New York City, under the Wagner mayoral administration, was beset with harassment against the gay community, particularly by the New York City Police Department. Homosexuals were among the targets of a drive to rid the city of undesirables. Consequently, only the Mafia had the power and financial resources to run gay bars and clubs. By 1965, influenced by Frank Kameny's addresses in the early 1960s, Dick Leitsch, the president of the New York Mattachine Society, advocated direct action, and the group staged the first public homosexual demonstrations and picket lines in the 1960s. Kameny, founder of Mattachine Washington in 1961, had advocated militant action reminiscent of the black civil rights campaign, while also arguing for the morality of homosexuality.The New York State Liquor Authority did not allow homosexuals to be served in licensed bars in the state under penalty of revocation of the bar's license to operate. This denial of public accommodation had been confirmed by a court decision in the early 1940s. A legal study on the city's alcoholic beverage law commissioned by Mattachine New York concluded there was no law per se prohibiting homosexuals gathering in bars; however, laws did prohibit disorderly conduct — which the SLA had been interpreting as homosexual behavior — in bars. Leitsch informed the press that three members of Mattachine New York would turn up at a restaurant on the Lower East Side, announce their homosexuality and, upon the refusal of service, make a complaint to the SLA. This came to be known as the "Sip-In" and only succeeded at the third attempt at Julius in Greenwich Village. The "Sip-In", though, did gain extensive media attention and the resultant legal action against the SLA eventually prevented the agency from revoking licenses on the basis of homosexual solicitation in 1967.
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.
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. 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, 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 sexual revolution and counterculture influenced changes in the homosexual subculture, which in the U.S. included bookshops, publicly sold newspapers and magazines, and a community center. It was during this time that Los Angeles saw its first big gay movement. In 1967, the night of New Years, several plainclothes police officers infiltrated the Black Cat Tavern. After arresting several patrons for kissing to celebrate the occasion, the officers began beating several patrons and ultimately arrested 16 more bar attendees including three bartenders. This created a riot in the immediate area, ultimately bringing about a more civil demonstration of over 200 attendees several days later protesting the raids. The protest was met by squadrons of armed policemen. It was from this event that the publication The Advocate and organization Metropolitan Community Church were born.
Few areas in the U.S. saw a more diverse mix of subcultures than Greenwich Village, which was host to the gay street youth. A group of young, effeminate runaways, shunned by their families, society, and the gay community, they reflected the countercultural movement more than any other homosexual group. Refusing to hide their homosexuality, they were brutalized, rebellious tearaways who took drugs, fought, shoplifted and hustled older gay men in order to survive. Their age, behavior, feminine attire and conduct left them isolated from the rest of the gay scene, but living close to the streets, they made the perfect warriors for the imminent Stonewall Riots. These emerging social possibilities, combined with the new social movements such as Black Power, women's liberation, and the student insurrection of May 1968 in France, heralded a new era of radicalism. After the Stonewall riots in New York City in late June 1969, many within the emerging gay liberation movement in the U.S. saw themselves as connected with the New Left rather than the established homophile groups of the time. The words "gay liberation" echoed "women's liberation"; the Gay Liberation Front consciously took its name from the National Liberation Fronts of Vietnam and Algeria; and the slogan "Gay Power", as a defiant answer to the rights-oriented homophile movement, was inspired by Black Power, which was a response to the civil rights movement.