4.2: From Homophile Movement to Gay Liberation

Civil Rights in the United States - 1950s - 1970s

In the face of Cold War hostility and McCarthyism, gay and lesbian communities further institutionalized and began organizing a homophile movement for civil rights. Los Angeles gay men formed the Mattachine Society in 1951. Its founders, Harry Hay, Bob Hull, and Chuck Rowland, had organizing experience as U.S. Communist Party members. They structured Mattachine into secret cells to survive government infiltration.^[29] The founders blended Marxist theory—that injustice and oppression were deeply embedded in societal structures—with inspiring tactics from the African American civil rights movement. They argued that repressive norms based in heterosexuality left homosexuals “‘largely unaware’ that they in fact constituted ‘a social minority imprisoned within a dominant culture.’” The founders sought to mobilize a large gay constituency through meetings and by creating homophile journals to produce a “new pride—a pride in belonging, a pride in participating in the cultural growth and the social achievements of . . . the homosexual minority.”^[30]

Soon Mattachine grew to include many politically mainstream members who were anticommunist. The founders stepped down in favor of leaders who argued that the mostly white, middle-class, gay members were the same as heterosexual citizens, aside from the private sphere of love. They focused on gaining allies among heterosexual psychologists, clergymen, and public officials. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Del Martin, Phillis Lyons, and their group, Daughters of Bilitis, also “were fighting the church, the couch, and the courts” for equality. Like the more male-run Mattachine Review and One magazine, Daughters of Bilitis’s journal, The Ladder(figure 4.2), consistently assured lesbians of their worth as respectable middle-class people deserving treatment equal to heterosexuals.^[31] Chapters of both organizations spread to the East Coast and Midwest, forming a web of advocates for homosexual civil rights by the mid-1960s who published, lobbied, and picketed the White House and city governments for equality.

Figure 4.2. October 1957 cover of The Ladder. (Public domain, Women and Social Movements.)

By the 1960s, various social movements were developing tactics to fight discrimination and inequality. Black civil rights legal work and direct action produced court-ordered desegregation, antidiscrimination law, and voting rights, although centuries of housing segregation, education, and job discrimination continued to racialize poverty. Frustrations rose in poor communities of color over police brutality and the dearth of economic opportunities. In 1965, gay and lesbian street youth organized in San Francisco. They and trans women often gathered at Compton’s Cafeteria, one of few places where they could meet. When Compton’s management called the police to deter drag queens’ and trans women’s patronage, a riot erupted. The next night, trans hustlers and street people picketed Compton’s and protested police brutality. Although the protest did not end abuse, a new collective militant queer resistance pushed the city to address queer and trans people’s rights as citizens.^[32]

Four years later the Stonewall rebellion broke out after a New York City police raid. Stonewall Inn was a Mafia-run dive that blackmailed gay Wall Street patrons and used those funds to pay off police. In return, police gave the Stonewall advance warning of raids. Raids targeted those in full drag and trans sex workers like Sylvia Rivera. But raids could also ruin the lives of white, Black, and Latinx gay and lesbian customers; newspaper exposure often led to their being fired from jobs or evicted from housing. On June 28, 1969, there was no tip-off for the police raid. Trans and lesbian patrons resisted—refusing to produce identification or to follow a female officer to the bathroom to verify their sex for arrest. They also objected to officers groping them.^[33] A growing crowd outside spontaneously responded to police violence by hurling coins and cans at officers, who retreated into the bar. Rioting resumed a second and third night. The gay poet Allen Ginsberg heard slogans being chanted and crowed, “Gay power! Isn’t that great! We’re one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It’s about time we did something to assert ourselves.”^[34]

The Stonewall rebellion also did not stop police raids, but mainstream and gay coverage and leafleting spurred the creation of gay organizing that was more militant than previous homophile groups. The Gay Liberation Front sought to combine freedom from homophobia with a broader political platform that denounced racism and opposed capitalism. From the Gay Liberation Front arose the Gay Activists Alliance and its “zaps,” or surprise public confrontations with politicians to force them to acknowledge gay and lesbian rights.^[35] Gay liberationists like Carl Wittman drew on past New Left antiwar student activism and the women’s liberation movement. Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto” (1970) rails against homophobia, imploring gays to free themselves by coming out while also acknowledging it will be too dangerous for some. Wittman was attuned to which linked sexism and homophobia. Lesbian feminists emphasized women’s autonomy and well-being rather than identification as mothers, wives, and daughters who indirectly gained from what benefited men. Wittman deemed male chauvinism antigay and urged gay men to stop being sexist. Rather than mimic straight society, gay liberation should reject gender roles and marriage and should embrace queens as having gutsily stood out.^[36]

Gay liberationists continued the fight to overturn homophobia in religion, psychology, and law. Gay Catholics formed Dignity in 1969.^[37] The Unitarian Universalist Association urged an end to legal and social expressions of antigay discrimination in 1970, and the United Church of Christ ordained the first openly gay person in 1972. Episcopalians started Integrity in 1974. Mainstream Protestant denominations like the Presbyterian Church (USA), United Methodist Church, and Lutheran Church in America endorsed decriminalization but still disapproved of homosexuality. Fundamentalist evangelicals became increasingly vocal among denominations opposed to same-sex relationships and gender nonconformity. They began conservative religious organizing in response to progressive changes, propelling to celebrity status some ministers on the right such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Jim and Tammy Bakker. Some LGBTQ+ Christians flocked to the Pentecostal minister Rev. Troy Perry. He founded the Metropolitan Community Church denomination from a house-based service in 1968. Meanwhile, gay Jews in Los Angeles created the first gay synagogue in 1972.^[38] Gay-friendly or gay-run houses of worship proliferated over the decade, but the majority of LGBTQ+ Americans faced discrimination in unwelcoming religious congregations.

Figure 4.3. A Gay Liberation Front logo. (CC-0.)

In addition to trying to integrate religious spaces, gay liberationists demonstrated for the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association list of mental disorders. Activists and gay counselors knew people were not sick for being queer. They used the research findings of their ally, the psychologist Evelyn Hooker; she had demonstrated, on the basis of personality tests she had conducted since 1957, that gay men were equally stable as heterosexual men and sometimes showed more resilience.^[39] In 1973 the association voted unanimously to define homosexuality in its diagnostic manual as “one form of sexual behavior, like other forms of sexual behavior which are not by themselves psychiatric disorders.”^[40] This was a major win on the long road to discrediting claims that homosexuality was a mental illness and the conversion therapies designed to “cure” homosexuals. However, in 1980 the American Psychiatric Association’s third manual introduced “gender identity disorder of childhood” and “transsexualism” as disorders, indicating it preserved a concern about variety in gendered behavior, which sustained forced conversion programs for children and adolescents without increasing access to medical services that some trans adults wanted.^[41]

Politically, in the 1970s efforts to gain equal rights ordinances and to elect lesbian and gay politicians became fruitful. Elaine Noble joined the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1974, and Harvey Milk won a seat in the San Francisco Board of Supervisors election in 1977.^[42] The conservative campaign of Anita Bryant that overturned Florida’s Miami-Dade County gay rights ordinance in 1977 galvanized conservatives on the Christian right and gay activists nationwide against or for, respectively, extending equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. The next year activists managed to prevent California from passing an initiative that would have barred gay teachers from working in public schools. But cities with antigay campaigns experienced increased violence against gay and lesbian people and their businesses, centers, and churches, culminating in the murder of Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone by a former board of supervisors member and ex-policeman, Dan White, in 1978. White was convicted of manslaughter and served five years.^[43]

Amid the volatile cultural battles of the 1970s, there were some victories. By the end of the decade, activists had decriminalized themselves in just under half the nation by overturning twenty-two state sodomy statutes, had countered antigay city initiatives, and had convinced the Democratic Party to include a plank against sexual orientation–based discrimination in its 1980 platform.^[44] They would have to wait until 2003 for the Supreme Court decision on Lawrence v. Texas to strike down sodomy laws nationwide.^[45]

The 1970s also saw a cultural renaissance of LGBTQ+ institution building and cultural productions through publishing and music. More Americans came out despite the real hazards of family rejection, violence, and legal discrimination. Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson survived such dangers to start Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in 1970. STAR, the first organization led by trans women of color, created the first homeless queer youth and sex worker shelter in North America. By recognizing links among homophobia, transphobia, racism, and classism, STAR filled needs other early gay liberation groups were not considering. More often gays and lesbians organized safe spaces through bars, gay baths, bookstores, discos, sports leagues, and musical ensembles.^[46] As the 1970s continued, feminist lesbians of color took the lead in advocating for “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”^[47] This important way of analyzing the world would become known as intersectionality.

Billy Porter Gives A Brief History of Queer Political Action

Billy Porter provides a brief history of queer political actions that predate the Stonewall rebellion. (https://youtu.be/XoXH-Yqwyb0).

• What surprised you about this video? What did not surprise you? What LGBTQ+ organization or historical event described in this video was new to you? Conduct some more research to better understand that organization’s or event’s goals and accomplishments.
• What LGBTQ+ organizations or movements are active now, and how are they similar to or different from the movements discussed earlier

• What surprised you about this video? What did not surprise you? What LGBTQ+ organization or historical event described in this video was new to you? Conduct some more research to better understand that organization’s or event’s goals and accomplishments.
• What LGBTQ+ organizations or movements are active now, and how are they similar to or different from the movements discussed earlier?

Responding to AIDS

In the 1980s, the emergence of a deadly epidemic marked a crossroads for LGBTQ+ activism and institution building. A 1981 newsletter from the Centers for Disease Control reported five Los Angeles gay men had contracted an unusual pneumonia typically found in immune-compromised people. Then the New York Times stated that a rare, aggressive skin cancer had struck forty-one recently healthy homosexuals.^[48] By late 1982, related immunosuppression cases existed among infants, women, heterosexual men, intravenous drug users, and hemophiliacs. The mortality rate of the original patients was 100 percent. Panic spread as media, many government officials, and the gay community asked what linked the affected gay men. Connecting a deadly disease, ultimately called acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) to gay male sexuality provided a new rationale for discriminatory laws and harassment as the political power of the Christian Right continued to ascend.^[49]

In response to AIDS, LGBTQ+ Americans organized new institutions and created new methods to get needed resources, which furthered lively debates over political tactics. Because the health care system failed to address the epidemic’s causes and consequences, New York City gay men founded Gay Men’s Health Crisis in 1982. It became a model for AIDS service organizations that offered information and support to prevent or treat the disease.^[50] Lesbians contributed experience from the women’s health movement, where they had countered male-dominated medicine with their own research and support networks. Black Panther–sponsored free breakfasts and community health clinics became a model for AIDS service organizations.^[51] By 1983 the group People With AIDS had mobilized nationally to demand control over decisions about their care and to draw attention to scapegoating that resulted in job loss and refusal of hospital treatment. They released “The Denver Principles,” which asserted their responsibility to use “low-risk sexual behaviors” without denying their right to “satisfying sexual and emotional lives.”^[52] The gay community split on whether to blame casual sex with multiple partners for the crisis and how to contain the spread of the disease. As city public health officials sought to shut down bathhouses and bars that had spaces for sex, some gay activists agreed with the precaution, but others saw the campaign as more antigay harassment. Those opposed to closures argued that instead of driving gay sex further underground, public sites like bathhouses should become education centers for safer sex practices. Meeting spaces were places where the community organized efficiently to respond to AIDS.^[53]

A major contributor to the AIDS epidemic was willful neglect by the federal government. For the first five years of the epidemic, President Ronald Reagan remained silent about it. In 1986 he and governors from both parties proposed cutting government spending on AIDS. That year the Supreme Court ruled in Bowers v. Hardwick that gay adults did not have constitutional privacy rights that would protect them from prosecution for private, consensual sex.^[54] The Justice Department announced that federal law allowed employment discrimination based on HIV/AIDS status. When Reagan spoke briefly at the Third International Conference on AIDS in 1987 in favor of testing, over twenty thousand of the thirty-six thousand Americans diagnosed with AIDS had died. Congress prohibited using federal funds for AIDS education that condoned same-sex behavior but mandated testing of federal prisoners and immigrants to bar entry to those with HIV.^[55]

This spurred high-impact radical organizing. Larry Kramer and cofounders formed the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) in 1987. It further publicized the New York City slogan “Silence = Death” in demonstrations. ACT UP dramatically disrupted Wall Street, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the high cost of AZT (the first drug treatment) and the appointment of a loudly homophobic Catholic cardinal to the Presidential HIV Commission. ACT UP chapters spread to other cities; the groups became known for their insistence on action and their reclaiming of the term queer.^[56] Keith Haring’s graffiti art spread the message. Cleve Jones created a memorial for people lost to AIDS, inviting loved ones to create three-by-six-foot panels for the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt (figure 4.4). During the second March on Washington in October 1987, volunteers laid out 1,920 panels on the National Mall.^[57]

In tandem with responses to AIDS, often-overlooked portions of LGBTQ+ Americans organized. Trans people were disproportionately poor owing to job discrimination and devastating budget cuts to AIDS programs, welfare, and health programs. For-profit centers sold medical procedures for gender transition at high costs. Bisexuals started forming social and then political rights groups, including the National Bisexual Liberation Group in 1972 based in New York City, San Francisco’s Bisexual Center in 1976, and the national BiPOL in San Francisco in 1983. When the 1987 March on Washington organizers would not include “bi” or “trans” in the march’s title or list of demands, both constituencies argued that the category “gay and lesbian” was not inclusive.^[58] New trans groups arose with transnational scope, including FTM International (advocating for the female-to-male trans community) and International Foundation for Gender Education, along with periodicals like Metamorphosis and Tapestry.^[59]

Figure 4.4. The AIDS Memorial Quilt. (Public domain, National Institutes of Health.)

Conclusion

With the development of intersectional theories and activism, gay, lesbian, and bi Americans who also held other minority statuses founded organizations in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s. Gay American Indians was founded in San Francisco in 1975, and in 1987 the group joined American Indian Gays and Lesbians. Conferences of the American Indian Gays and Lesbians produced the consensus that two spirit was the preferred term for gender-expansive Natives.^[60] The National Rainbow Society of the Deaf (1977) grew from its Florida origins to hold annual conventions around the country as Rainbow Alliance of the Deaf (1982) and to become a force for advocacy. The national Asian Pacific Lesbian Network was founded when organizing for the 1987 march. African American gays and lesbians created religious community with Unity Fellowship Church (1985) and secular groups. When gay men formed the National Association of Black and White Men Together (1981), with local affiliates across the country, they ushered in a new form of interracial organizing. Some queer people of color joined with white gays and lesbians for antidiscrimination and AIDS work and criticized white-dominated queer communities for their racism. Queer people of color worked with other people of color for civil rights, poverty issues, and anti-imperialism while objecting to those communities’ homophobia, sexism, and transphobia. Queer people of color needed their own queer groups by race as respites from coalition work.^[61]

Listen

In a 1989 Making Gay History interview (https://go.geneseo.edu/larrykramer), ACT UP founder Larry Kramer describes being a student at Yale University in the 1950s, before the Stonewall rebellion, and then how he tried to organize gay men to fight the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

• What were some of the challenges that Kramer had to overcome in his lifetime, whether at college or in the fight against AIDS?
• Queer theory emerged during a very turbulent period in U.S. history, with AIDS decimating gay male communities. The anger at the apathy of the U.S. government, in the face of tens of thousands of men dying, drove the radical activism of ACT UP. Describe some of the tactics they used. What do you think of them?
• In the interview, Kramer says there had been “a lot of change and no change” between when he was in college in the 1950s and the late 1980s. What do you think he meant by that? If he were interviewed today, do you think he’d say the same thing, and why?

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. How did the Mattachine Society’s founders’ backgrounds in the U.S. Communist Party influence the organization’s early structure and tactics?
A) They adopted secret cell structures and emphasized collective action against systemic oppression.
B) They focused on religious outreach and public rallies.
C) They prioritized assimilation into mainstream society.
D) They avoided any political ideology in their organizing.

2. What was a key ideological shift that occurred as the Mattachine Society grew and new leadership took over?
A) The organization became more radical and confrontational.
B) The focus shifted to emphasizing similarities with heterosexual citizens and seeking respectability.
C) The group began to reject all forms of public protest.
D) The organization dissolved due to internal conflict.

3. In what ways did the Daughters of Bilitis’ approach to lesbian rights differ from that of the Mattachine Society?
A) They focused exclusively on legal reform.
B) They were primarily a social club with no political agenda.
C) They avoided publishing any journals or magazines.
D) They emphasized respectability and middle-class values while also challenging the church, psychiatry, and the courts.

4. How did the homophile movement’s strategy of seeking allies among heterosexual professionals (psychologists, clergy, officials) reflect broader trends in mid-20th-century civil rights organizing?
A) It mirrored the confrontational tactics of the Black Power movement.
B) It rejected all forms of institutional engagement.
C) It sought legitimacy and social change through engagement with mainstream institutions.
D) It focused solely on underground activism

5. What was a significant limitation of the early homophile movement’s focus on respectability and assimilation?
A) It led to immediate legal equality for all LGBTQ+ people.
B) It often centered the experiences of white, middle-class gays and lesbians, marginalizing others within the community.
C) It resulted in the movement’s complete collapse.
D) It was universally embraced by all LGBTQ+ activists.

Discussion Questions

1. Analyze the impact of Cold War politics and McCarthyism on the strategies and internal dynamics of early homophile organizations like the Mattachine Society. How did external threats shape internal debates about radicalism versus respectability?
2. Compare and contrast the approaches of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis in their pursuit of civil rights. How did gender, class, and respectability politics influence their tactics and public messaging?
3. Discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the homophile movement’s strategy of seeking allies among mainstream professionals (psychologists, clergy, public officials). How did this approach both advance and limit the movement’s goals?
4. In what ways did the early homophile movement’s emphasis on assimilation and respectability contribute to the marginalization of more radical voices and intersectional identities within the LGBTQ+ community?
5. Reflect on the legacy of the homophile movement in shaping later LGBTQ+ activism, particularly the shift toward more confrontational and intersectional strategies in the post-Stonewall era. What lessons can contemporary activists draw from this history?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. A) They adopted secret cell structures and emphasized collective action against systemic oppression.
2. B) The focus shifted to emphasizing similarities with heterosexual citizens and seeking respectability.
3. D) They emphasized respectability and middle-class values while also challenging the church, psychiatry, and the courts.
4. C) It sought legitimacy and social change through engagement with mainstream institutions
5. B) It often centered the experiences of white, middle-class gays and lesbians, marginalizing others within the community.