4.3: Mainstream and Queer Goals

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Beginning in the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, new drug therapies prolonged the lives of people living with AIDS. Although radical, multicommunity AIDS activism continued, work for mainstream legal protections and rights dominated LGBTQ+ activism. LGBTQ+ Americans and supporters sought inclusion in the military, the passage of antidiscrimination laws, and marriage equality. After a campaign promise to end military exclusion, President Bill Clinton responded to pushback from military leaders with a compromise. He supported a congressional law that instructed LGBTQ+ service members to remain closeted and military officials not to pursue people for discharge (figure 4.5). Ironically, this “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy increased discharges of gay service members and continued violence against them until its repeal by President Barack Obama in 2010 ended discrimination based on sexual orientation (but not gender identity).^[62] President Clinton was more effective with his executive order to end antigay discrimination in federal government in 1998 than with his military policy.^[63]

Figure 4.5. Cover of a “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” pamphlet. (Public domain, United States Army.)

Violence against LGBTQ+ Americans continued, including the rural murders of Brandon Teena and then Matthew Shepard. Both murders gained so much media coverage that they eventually became movies. Outrage against antigay violence and prejudice led New York ACT UP members to form Queer Nation in 1990 and inspired groups like the Pink Panthers (1990) and Lesbian Avengers (1992). Their direct actions to liberate sexuality and gender from heteronormativity were defiantly queer. A particularly controversial tactic was exposing the closeted homosexuality of antigay politicians and pundits. New federal hate-crime tracking confirmed the scope of anti-LGBTQ+ violence, indicating that over 10 percent of violent crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s identity were based on sexual orientation, putting that category behind only race and religion. Congressional passage of the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act (1994) included gay bashing as a federal crime to ensure fairer trials.^[64]

Read

Read Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide on Homosexual Conduct Policy, a pamphlet published by the U.S. Army in 2001 that explains to soldiers the new homosexual conduct policy that would become known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (https://archive.org/details/DignityRespectADepartmentOfDefenseTrainingGuideOnHomosexualConductPolicy).

• Does this pamphlet help you better understand the army’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy? Why or why not?
• According to the pamphlet, the army’s goal was to fairly enforce this new policy, to promote unit cohesiveness and readiness. Do you think this pamphlet would have helped achieve that goal?
• What is or isn’t in the policy that might explain why harassment and violence against gay service members continued while it was in effect?

State legislatures and popular ballots featured both antidiscrimination and antigay measures, creating grassroots organizing for and against protecting LGBTQ+ Americans from being fired or excluded from jobs, housing, and public accommodations. Cultural conservatives lamented the gradually increasing acceptance of LGBTQ+ people as celebrity musicians and television and film stars slowly started to come out and weathered backlash to continue their careers. Meanwhile, the Hawaii state supreme court win Baehr v. Miike temporarily legalized same-sex marriage there in 1996.^[65] National LGBTQ+ organizations pushed to extend marriage equality nationwide. Over the next decade states split on whether to ban or legalize marriage equality. Popular support steadily grew in the first years of the 2000s, reaching 60 percent in 2015 when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees same-sex couples the right to marry (figure 4.6).^[66]

Groups that centered young, trans, poor, and minority people warned in the early 2000s that hate-crime legislation and nondiscrimination laws connected to it would further hurt the most marginalized Americans. Dean Spade cautioned that sentences mandatorily extended for hate crimes strengthened “the criminal punishment system” that targets poor (and trans) people of color.^[67] Likewise, some feminist and queer activists opposed the costly push for marriage equality because it supported only heteronormative relationships.^[68] Paula Ettelbrick, among the first, argued in 1989 against endorsing one family form instead of destigmatizing unconventional relationships and sexual expression. Lisa Duggan has argued for broad coalitions to gain universal benefits instead of tying needs like health coverage to employment and marriage.^[69]

Figure 4.6. The White House is illuminated in rainbow colors on the night of the Supreme Court Obergefell ruling June 26, 2015. (CC BY-SA Ted Eytan.)

Conclusion

LGBTQ+ history in the United States has witnessed profound transformations in meanings, the social construction of identities, and how LGBTQ+ people have used collective action to fight for rights and equality. For centuries laws touted marriage as the place for reproductive sex but allowed some men sex for pleasure across race and class. When sex was considered simply a form of behavior and society believed women and men were fundamentally different, same-gender intimacy that was not obviously sodomy was deemed unremarkable. But as sexologists categorized sexuality into normal or pathological identities, psychology and medical science joined the church and state as key social institutions that demonized LGBTQ+ people. Communities of gay and bisexual men, lesbian and bisexual women, and trans people multiplied in the 1950s despite heightened repression, and a portion of these minorities organized for equal rights. Even the HIV/AIDS epidemic, blamed on and falsely identified with gays, could not stop LGBTQ+ organizing. Activists further developed radical tactics from the 1970s to call for liberation from heteronormativity. Legal gains have been arduously won, but foundational power imbalances based on race, class, gender, ability, and citizenship persist. Nonetheless, both legal and cultural changes continue to transform society.

Profile: Institutionalizing Sexuality: Sexology, Psychoanalysis, and the Law (Jennifer Miller and Clark A. Pomerleau)

Sexology, Civil Rights, and Criminalization

European scientists and social scientists developed the social science known as sexology to understand human sexuality. They used biology, medicine, psychology, and anthropology to support beliefs that privileged binary gender identities (man or woman) and reproductive sex while trying to account for gender and sexual diversity. What was at stake for the men who created sexology varied: some felt same-sex attraction, some were sympathetic to those who did, others opposed same-sex behaviors. Their findings became arguments for and against criminalizing same-sex behavior. This profile’s history of sexology prioritizes primary sources to consider how sexologists explained diversity in gender and sexuality and how the field’s spokespersons shifted from an initial focus on social justice to creating oppressive, pathologizing diagnoses. Knowing this history helps us understand sexology’s long-reaching implications as a method by which people worldwide have been taught about queer and trans people.

The earliest form of sexology combatted legal discrimination. The German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (figure 4.7) drew on Plato’s Symposium for his 1860s theory that male-male love was biologically inborn and therefore natural.^[70] Ulrichs used the term urning for a man who desired men and believed the urning’s desire reflected an internal female psyche. After telling his family he was an urning, Ulrichs—freed from his secret—lobbied to repeal sodomy laws. He maintained that consenting adult men who were not being publicly indecent had a civil right to express their love without state persecution. Ulrichs hoped to influence national legal reform as German states unified, so he published “Araxes: Appeal for the Liberation of the Urning’s Nature from Penal Law. To the Imperial Assemblies of North Germany and Austria” in 1870.^[71] The next year, Germany’s assembly refused change and retained a sodomy law in the new law code. Paragraph 175 of the German Imperial Penal Code stated, “Unnatural vice committed by two persons of the male sex or by people with animals is to be punished by imprisonment; the verdict may also include the loss of civil rights.”^[72] Germany would not decriminalize homosexuality until 1969.

Figure 4.7. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. (Public domain.)

Although his argument was unsuccessful, Ulrich’s work influenced other sexologists and became part of a growing field. His contemporary, the Austro-Hungarian human rights journalist Karl-Maria Kertbeny, coined the words heterosexual and homosexual in 1868 as two forms of strong sex drive apart from those that pursued reproductive goals. Out of compassion for a friend who killed himself after being blackmailed for same-sex attraction, Kertbeny argued that sodomy laws violated human rights.^[73] The German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing adopted Kertbeny’s terminology and Ulrichs’s view that men who loved men had womanly desire (figure 4.8). Krafft-Ebing, however, considered anything outside reproductive sex to be an inferior, immoral deviation, which he called degeneracy. His Psychopathia Sexualis, Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study (1894) provided an elaborate taxonomy of “pathological manifestations of the sexual life.” The taxonomy included sexualizing an object (fetishism), sexually enjoying pain (masochism, which Krafft-Ebing considered natural for women), and sexually enjoying inflicting pain (sadism, which Krafft-Ebing considered natural for men). Krafft-Ebing claimed same-sex attraction was usually innate but could sometimes be produced as a result of exposure to other forms of “sexual deviance” like masturbation.^[74] Like Ulrichs and Kertbeny, Krafft-Ebing hoped to influence jurisprudence with psychological claims, but to him, “The laws of all civilized nations punish those who commit perverse sex acts. Inasmuch as the preservation of chastity and morals is one of the most important reasons for the existence of the commonwealth, the state cannot be too careful, as a protector of morality, in the struggle against sensuality.”^[75] Sexology’s language has continued to aid the power to police sexuality legally and has contributed to critiques of that power.

Check Your Knowledge

Contributed by Has Arakelyan, Rio Hondo College

Multiple-Choice Questions

1. What was a major unintended consequence of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy implemented during the Clinton administration?
A) It immediately ended discrimination against LGBTQ+ service members.
B) It increased discharges and violence against gay service members despite its intent to protect them.
C) It legalized same-sex marriage in the military.
D) It was universally supported by LGBTQ+ activists.

2. How did the passage of the Hate Crimes Sentencing Enhancement Act (1994) impact the legal treatment of anti-LGBTQ+ violence?
A) It eliminated all hate crimes in the United States.
B) It only applied to crimes based on race and religion.
C) It ensured that crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias were federally recognized and punished more severely.
D) It was opposed by all LGBTQ+ organizations

3. What was a key criticism of hate-crime legislation and nondiscrimination laws from some trans and minority activists in the early 2000s?
A) They further empowered the criminal punishment system, disproportionately harming marginalized groups.
B) They were too lenient on offenders.
C) They were universally effective in reducing violence.
D) They focused too much on marriage equality.

4. Why did some feminist and queer activists oppose the mainstream push for marriage equality in the 2000s?
A) They believed it would lead to the end of all discrimination.
B) They were against any legal reforms.
C) They wanted to ban all forms of marriage.
D) They argued it reinforced heteronormative family structures and neglected other forms of relationships.

5. What was the significance of the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015)?
A) It guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment.
B) It banned same-sex marriage nationwide.
C) It overturned hate-crime legislation.
D) It repealed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell."

Complex and Analytical Discussion Questions

1. Analyze the tension between mainstream legal reforms (such as marriage equality and hate-crime laws) and the needs of the most marginalized groups within the LGBTQ+ community. How have these reforms both advanced and limited the broader movement for justice?
2. Discuss the role of direct action groups like ACT UP, Queer Nation, and the Lesbian Avengers in shaping the direction and tactics of LGBTQ+ activism in the 1990s and 2000s. How did their approaches differ from those of national organizations focused on legal reform?
3. Evaluate the impact of media coverage of anti-LGBTQ+ violence (e.g., the murders of Brandon Teena and Matthew Shepard) on public opinion, policy, and the priorities of LGBTQ+ activism.
4. How did the language and frameworks developed by 19th-century sexologists like Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Krafft-Ebing continue to influence legal and medical approaches to sexuality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries?
5. In what ways did the intersection of celebrity culture, media representation, and grassroots activism contribute to the growing acceptance of LGBTQ+ people in American society during the 1990s and 2000s? What limitations or challenges remained despite this progress?

Multiple-Choice Questions - Answers

1. B) It increased discharges and violence against gay service members despite its intent to protect them.
2. C) It ensured that crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias were federally recognized and punished more severely.
3. A) They further empowered the criminal punishment system, disproportionately harming marginalized groups.
4. D) They argued it reinforced heteronormative family structures and neglected other forms of relationships.
5. A) It guaranteed same-sex couples the right to marry under the Fourteenth Amendment.