Alain Martinossi: Alain Martinossi is a Ph.D. candidate in the school of education at the University of Southern California. His dissertation is a qualitative analysis of the coming out experience of gay and lesbian high school teachers.
From the late 19th century to the period of its publication, in 1987, Barry D. Adam's book takes the reader through a chronological account of the socio-political history of the struggles, setbacks and victories that characterized the rise of the gay and lesbian liberation movement throughout the world. As he accurately depicts the historical context at each stage of the movement's development, Adam analyses its successes and failures.
The book starts with a brief overview of early European history and discusses the relationship between the domestic arrangements of the time and same-sex sexual behavior as well as the severity of sodomy laws from the middle ages to the middle of the 19th century. Most importantly, Adam shows that the demise of monarchy brought about by the French revolution, the removal of sodomy as a crime from the Napoleonic code, as well as the greater emphasis put on hard work over personal characteristics for the benefit of a nascent capitalist labor market, all helped “set the stage” for the beginning of a gay and lesbian movement.
Adams then goes on to chronicle the early movements (late 19th and early 20th centuries) in Germany, France, England and the United States. In Germany, from the founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee by Magnus Hirschfeld, Max Sphor and Eric Oberg in 1897 to the creation, again by Magnus Hirschfeld, of the Institute for Sex Research in 1919, Adam describes the development of a promising gay and lesbian political movement, flourishing by the 1920s only to be crushed by the advent of Nazism in 1933.
In France, where the political climate was relatively liberal, the focus was not so much on politics as it was on art. Paris was the center of a prolific international artistic community whose members used their art to reflect on the meaning of their homosexuality. In contrast with Germany, where the political struggles of gays and lesbian occupied the public sphere, French gay political thinking, often undetected by the Philistines, found its expression through literature.
During the same period, Adam reports no real gay and lesbian political movement in England. The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology is presented as a timid attempt to create a public forum for the discussion of homosexual concerns which suffered significant setbacks such as Oscar Wilde's trial and conviction in 1895. Most important in England during that period was Edward Carpenter's The Intermediate Sex (1908) which challenged the existing concept of masculinity and spiritualized “homogenic love” and the publication of Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness which, ironically, received so much publicity for being a shocking literary work that it gained international fame. Finally, in the United States, the emphasis was on medical definitions of homosexuality. Inspired by the ideas of Henry Gerber, the Society for Human Rights, the first organized gay movement group in the United States, was founded in 1924. However, it quickly dissolved after the indictment of 3 of its members. One of the members' angry wife had informed the police of the society's existence. This was to be one of many similar incidents during the repressive Red Scare period between 1919 and 1920. From that period until the late 40s, movies, plays and books carrying gay themes were systematically censored. As a result, until the 1950s, American gays and lesbians were efficaciously silenced.
Taking us back to Europe, Adam then examines the rise of the Nazi party and its violent determination to eradicate any political “dissidents” and to produce a “pure” race by exterminating the people deemed “inferior”, including gays and lesbians, many of whom did not, at first, take the threat of the Nazi party seriously. However the Nazi party received support from the old imperial establishment, major industrialists and from those who had become unemployed due to modernization. These three major sources of support represented a powerful reactionary coalition which played a central role in the Nazi's party rise to power.
The Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, marked the beginning of gays and lesbians' realization that the Nazi's intent was to wage a ferocious war against homosexuality. The gay politician Ernest Röhm was among the victims of that massacre. As part of an effort to construct homosexuality as a corruption and a disease, Hitler publicly denounced Ernest Röhm's “vice” along with his alleged plot to overthrow the regime. Starting in 1940, after a revision of Paragraph 175 to include “even homosexual fantasies,” convicted gays and lesbians were sent to concentration camps where a unknown number of them died.
Easily identified by the pink triangle they were forced to wear, gays and lesbians received a particularly harsh treatment in the camps, being the victims of both the Nazis and the other prisoners' homophobia. Yet, although the Nazis were successful in destroying most traces of the early gay culture which had been flourishing in Germany, they failed to eradicate homosexuals. Often discriminated against for not participating in biological reproduction, gays and lesbians, ironically, did not have to rely on it for survival and were just as much a part of the next generation.
Back in the United States, after World War II, the struggle of gays and lesbians continues during the McCarthy era in the 1950s and the rise of the new left in the 1960s. The U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities, although lead by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was backed by capitalists and politicians in an effort to bring back the social order of pre-war years and to counteract political and social changes. A ferocious war was waged against communism.
Although the connection between homosexuality and communism might not have been readily apparent, the reactionary ideology of McCarthysm included a discourse on gender in which gender and power were interlocked. Male homosexuality was presented as the “betrayal of manhood” and homosexuals as “destroyers of society.” Consequently, regarded as traitors, thousands of gays and lesbians were fired from work and sent to jails or mental institutions. After having discovered and enjoyed new possibilities during the war, gays and lesbians were now faced with drastic repression in the post-war years.
Out of this frustration, a homophile movement developed in Los Angeles with the founding of Harry Hay's Mattachine Society in 1951. Originally inspired by Communist models of social changes, the Mattachine Society, after a change in leadership, later adopted a more assimilationist approach and, by 1959, had completely abandoned the original idea of social confrontation and support of a separate homosexual community. Similarly, the Daughters of Bilitis, the first postwar lesbian organization, founded in San Fransisco in 1955, adopted what they deemed the only realistic approach in a time of repression: education and support with integration into mainstream society as the ultimate goal.
The 1960s, inspired by the poets of the Beat generation such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and by the early black movement originally led by Martin Luther King, new movements started to emerge and important political actions were taken each year. In 1961, a new and more radical chapter of the Mattachine Society, founded by Franklin Kameny in Washington D.C., went back to more aggressive and assertive activism: “gay is good.” Two years later, in 1963, the Mississippi Freedom March on Washington prompted a questioning of the existing political system. In 1964, the Society for Individual Rights was founded in San Fransisco and in 1965, East Coast Homophile Organizations groups marched in the streets of Washington and Philadelphia. Between 1965 and 1967, the black movement took a new turn. Weary of the slow progress made by assimilationists, the leaders of the black movement advocated the need for a black nation.
In the meantime, gay and lesbians groups were multiplying throughout the country and, by 1969, had reached a total of 50. Because the generation of homophiles who experienced the McCarthy era had a tendency to shun aggressive activism, homophiles of the new generation, strongly motivated by the many political changes around them, took the lead. Just like the black nationalists had rejected white society, these new gay and lesbian activists refused to be defined by an heterosexual society. Their aim was the creation of a new gay culture.
It was this political climate of socio-political change and rebellion that made possible the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City. Although similar incidents had previously taken place in 1967 in Los Angeles, Stonewall quickly became the symbol of gay liberation. Indeed, new gay liberation groups started to develop and to take various direct political actions. One of the victories of gay and lesbian activists in 1973 was the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association list of diseases. In the aftermath of the Stonewall rebellion, and the new wave of activism it had triggered, gay liberation quickly spread to other continents. New gay liberation groups emerged in Australia, Argentina, Mexico and Western Europe.
While gays and lesbians were enjoying the growing development of their liberation movement, the rise of a new right was underway. First, in the mid and late 1970s, there appeared a number of conservative single-issue groups, many of which focused primarily on issues of family values and sexuality. Second, there was still a substantial number of Americans (22%) who identified themselves as evangelicals and held very conservative social and political views. Finally, the influential political organizers of corporate America sought the support of both single-issue groups and of the religious right for the development of capitalism, bringing them together in order to create a powerful political force. For instance, Anita Bryant's Save Our Children organization and her touring of the United States and Canada in order to campaign against civil rights for gays and lesbians, serves as a perfect example of the nefarious effects of religious politics at the service of conservative capitalism.
In the 1980s, the gay and lesbian movement continued to develop in the United States and throughout the world. In liberal democracies, the focus was on the introduction of “sexual orientation” in the human rights codes. The growing number of gay and lesbian politicians elected to public offices helped the passing of civil rights laws protecting gay and lesbian rights. However, for each of these laws, there were bills systematically proposed, and often passed, to limit or repeal newly gained protections. Thus, despite a substantial amount of victories due to active political action on the part of gay and lesbian activists, same-sex sexuality remained outlawed in half of the States in the U.S., half of the Australian states, and in Ireland. Yet, gay and lesbian organizations continued to develop throughout the world with various degrees of success in the third world, Asia and countries of the Eastern bloc.
But it was also in the 80s that gays and lesbians had to face the crisis brought about by AIDS. Affecting, at first, primarily gay men and intravenous drug addicts in the United States and Europe, this so-called “new” disease was quickly labelled a “gay disease” and, as such, dutifully ignored by the government and the media until 1985, when Rock Hudson's death gave the disease a “popular” face. For many though, homosexuality quickly regained the medical status it had managed to discard in 1973. Gay men became perceived as “disease carriers” and heterosexuals affected by the disease were portrayed as “innocent victims.” The religious right was quick to proclaim AIDS a punishment from God and to use the disease as a political tool.
In the midst of the early confusion, ignorance and strong social stigmatization of the disease, the initial response of many gay movement organizations was to accept society's “medicoreligious” definition and to campaign against promiscuity. Yet having gained substantial political awareness and power by the mid 80s, gay and lesbians were quick to react. Demands for research funding and health care became a priority on the gay and lesbian political agenda and AIDS support organizations sprang up in virtually every major cities throughout the country. Faced with a new crisis, the gay and lesbian community proved, once more, its resourcefulness and its ability to organize for its survival in a hostile, or at best indifferent, society.
Even though Barry D. Adam humbly expresses the need to apologize for what he perceives as inherent limitations in his book, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement remains, to date, the most comprehensive history of the gay and lesbian liberation movement. His historical approach provides us with a better understanding of the various socio-political contexts in which gay and lesbian political thought and activism developed and of the causes of the major setbacks experienced in the process. Both empowering and inspiring, Barry Adam's book informs us that we do have a past. Since, as is often argued, history seems to repeat itself, a better understanding of our past victories and failures might help us increase the likelihood of the former while decreasing that of the latter.
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