On June 12, 2016, the popular gay dance club Pulse in Orlando was the site of a mass shooting by
one assailant. With at least 49 dead and another 50 injured, this hate crime is being called the
worst mass shooting in U.S. history. It occurred during what was LGBT Pride weekend for towns
and cities in and beyond the United States. The immediate, caring response from mayors, police
and FBI authorities, local and national politicians, and the President of the United States, who
reached out to express outrage and concern, demonstrates the enormous shift toward acceptance
and public support for the LGBT community. Although the LGBT community and individuals remain
targets for hate violence and backlash throughout the world, the hard work of activists and allies
made it possible to reach this era, where the perpetrators of violence, not the victims, are
condemned as sick.
Social movements, organizing around the acceptance and rights of persons who might today
identify as LGBT or queer, began as responses to centuries of persecution by church, state and
medical authorities. Where homosexual activity or deviance from established gender roles/dress
was banned by law or traditional custom, such condemnation might be communicated through
sensational public trials, exile, medical warnings and language from the pulpit. These paths of
persecution entrenched homophobia for centuries—but also alerted entire populations to the
existence of difference. Whether an individual recognized they, too, shared this identity and were
at risk, or dared to speak out for tolerance and change, there were few organizations or resources
before the scientific and political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. Gradually, the growth
of a public media and ideals of human rights drew together activists from all walks of life, who
drew courage from sympathetic medical studies, banned literature, emerging sex research and a
climate of greater democracy. By the 20th century, a movement in recognition of gays and
lesbians was underway, abetted by the social climate of feminism and new anthropologies of
difference. However, throughout 150 years of homosexual social movements (roughly from the
1870s to today), leaders and organizers struggled to address the very different concerns and
identity issues of gay men, women identifying as lesbians, and others identifying as gender variant
or nonbinary. White, male and Western activists whose groups and theories gained leverage
against homophobia did not necessarily represent the range of racial, class and national identities
complicating a broader LGBT agenda. Women were often left out altogether.
What is the pre-history of LGBT activism? Most historians agree that there is evidence of
homosexual activity and same-sex love, whether such relationships were accepted or persecuted,
in every documented culture. We know that homosexuality existed in ancient Israel simply
because it is prohibited in the Bible, whereas it flourished between both men and women in
Ancient Greece. Substantial evidence also exists for individuals who lived at least part of their lives
as a different gender than assigned at birth. From the lyrics of same-sex desire inscribed by
Sappho in the seventh century BCE to youths raised as the opposite sex in cultures ranging from
Albania to Afghanistan; from the “female husbands” of Kenya to the Native American “Two-Spirit,”
alternatives to the Western male-female and heterosexual binaries thrived across millennia and
culture. These realities gradually became known to the West via travelers’ diaries, the church
records of missionaries, diplomats’ journals, and in reports by medical anthropologists. Such
eyewitness accounts in the era before other media were of course riddled with the biases of the
(often) Western or white observer, and added to beliefs that homosexual practices were other,
foreign, savage, a medical issue, or evidence of a lower racial hierarchy. The peaceful flowering of
early trans or bisexual acceptance in different indigenous civilizations met with opposition from
European and Christian colonizers.
In the age of European exploration and empire-building, Native American, North African and
Pacific Islander cultures accepting of “Two-Spirit” people or same-sex love shocked European
invaders who objected to any deviation from a limited understanding of “masculine” and
“feminine” roles. The European powers enforced their own criminal codes against what was called
sodomy in the New World: the first known case of homosexual activity receiving a death sentence
in North America occurred in 1566, when the Spanish executed a Frenchman in Florida. Against
the emerging backdrop of national power and Christian faith, what might have been learned about
same-sex love or gender identity was buried in scandal. Ironically, both wartime conflict between
emerging nations and the departure or deaths of male soldiers left women behind to live together
and fostered strong alliances between men as well. Same-sex companionship thrived where it was
frowned upon for unmarried, unrelated males and females to mingle or socialize freely. Women’s
relationships in particular escaped scrutiny since there was no threat of pregnancy. Nonetheless,
in much of the world, female sexual activity and sensation were curtailed wherever genital
circumcision practices made clitoridectomy an ongoing custom.
Where European dress—a clear marker of gender—was enforced by missionaries, we find another
complicated history of both gender identity and resistance. Biblical interpretation made it illegal
for a woman to wear pants or a man to adopt female dress, and sensationalized public trials
warned against “deviants” but also made such martyrs and heroes popular: Joan of Arc is one
example, and the chilling origins of the word “faggot” include a stick of wood used in public
burnings of gay men. Despite the risks of defying severe legal codes, cross-dressing flourished in
early modern Europe and America. Women and girls, economically oppressed by the sexism which
kept them from jobs and economic/education opportunities designated for men only, might pass
as male in order to gain access to coveted experiences or income. This was a choice made by many
women who were not necessarily transgender in identity. Women “disguised” themselves as men,
sometimes for extended periods of years, in order to fight in the military (Deborah Sampson), to
work as pirates (Mary Read and Anne Bonney), attend medical school, etc. Both men and women
who lived as a different gender were often only discovered after their deaths, as the extreme
differences in male vs. female clothing and grooming in much of Western culture made “passing”
surprisingly easy in certain environments. Moreover, roles in the arts where women were banned
from working required that men be recruited to play female roles, often creating a high-status,
competitive market for those we might today identify as transwomen, in venues from
Shakespeare’s theatre to Japanese Kabuki to the Chinese opera. This acceptance of performance
artists, and the popularity of “drag” humor cross-culturally, did not necessarily mark the start of
transgender advocacy, but made the arts an often accepting sanctuary for LGBT individuals who
built theatrical careers based around disguise and illusion.
The era of sexology studies is where we first see a small, privileged cluster of medical authorities
begin promoting a limited tolerance of those born “invert.” In Western history, we find little
formal study of what was later called homosexuality before the 19th century, beyond medical
texts identifying women with large clitorises as “tribades” and severe punishment codes for male
homosexual acts. Early efforts to understand the range of human sexual behavior came from
European doctors and scientists including Carl von Westphal (1869), Richard von Krafft-Ebing
(1882) and Havelock Ellis (1897). Their writings were sympathetic to the concept of a homosexual
or bisexual orientation occurring naturally in an identifiable segment of humankind, but the
writings of Krafft-Ebing and Ellis also labeled a “third sex” degenerate and abnormal. Sigmund
Freud, writing in the same era, did not consider homosexuality an illness or a crime and believed
bisexuality to be an innate aspect beginning with undetermined gender development in the
womb. Yet Freud also felt that lesbian desires were an immaturity women could overcome
through heterosexual marriage and male dominance. These writings gradually trickled down to a
curious public through magazines and presentations, reaching men and women desperate to learn
more about those like themselves, including some like English writer Radclyffe Hall who willingly
accepted the idea of being a “congenital invert.” German researcher Magnus Hirschfeld went on
to gather a broader range of information by founding Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, Europe’s
best library archive of materials on gay cultural history. His efforts, and Germany’s more liberal
laws and thriving gay bar scene between the two World Wars, contrasted with the backlash, in
England, against gay and lesbian writers such as Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall. With the rise of
Hitler’s Third Reich, however, the former tolerance demonstrated by Germany’s Scientific
Humanitarian Committee vanished. Hirschfeld’s great library was destroyed and the books burnt
by Nazis on May 10, 1933.
In the United States, there were few attempts to create advocacy groups supporting gay and
lesbian relationships until after World War II. However, prewar gay life flourished in urban centers
such as New York’s Greenwich Village and Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s.
The blues music of African-American women showcased varieties of lesbian desire, struggle and
humor; these performances, along with male and female drag stars, introduced a gay underworld
to straight patrons during Prohibition’s defiance of race and sex codes in speakeasy clubs. The
disruptions of World War II allowed formerly isolated gay men and women to meet as soldiers and
war workers; and other volunteers were uprooted from small towns and posted worldwide. Many
minds were opened by wartime, during which LGBT people were both tolerated in military service
and officially sentenced to death camps in the Holocaust. This increasing awareness of an existing
and vulnerable population, coupled with Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s investigation of homosexuals
holding government jobs during the early 1950s outraged writers and federal employees whose
own lives were shown to be second-class under the law, including Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings,
Allen Ginsberg and Harry Hay. Awareness of a burgeoning civil rights movement (Martin Luther
King’s key organizer Bayard Rustin was a gay man) led to the first American- based political
demands for fair treatment of gays and lesbians in mental health, public policy and employment.
Studies such as Alfred Kinsey’s 1947 Kinsey Report suggested a far greater range of homosexual
identities and behaviors than previously understood, with Kinsey creating a “scale” or spectrum
ranging from complete heterosexual to complete homosexual.
The primary organization for gay men as an oppressed cultural minority was the Mattachine
Society, founded in 1950 by Harry Hay and Chuck Rowland. Other important homophile
organizations on the West Coast included One, Inc., founded in 1952, and the first lesbian support
network Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955 by Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. Through meetings
and publications, these groups offered information and outreach to thousands. These first
organizations soon found support from prominent sociologists and psychologists. In 1951, Donald
Webster Cory published "The Homosexual in America", asserting that gay men and lesbians were a
legitimate minority group, and in 1953 Evelyn Hooker, PhD, won a grant from the National
Institute of Mental Health to study gay men. Her groundbreaking paper, presented in 1956,
demonstrated that gay men were as well-adjusted as heterosexual men, often more so. But it
would not be until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality as an
“illness” classification in its diagnostic manual. Throughout the 1950s and 60s, gay men and
lesbians continued to be at risk for psychiatric lockup as well as jail, losing jobs, and/or child
custody when courts and clinics defined gay love as sick, criminal or immoral.
In 1965, as the civil rights movement won new legislation outlawing racial discrimination, the first
gay rights demonstrations took place in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., led by longtime
activists Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings. The turning point for gay liberation came on June 28,
1969, when patrons of the popular Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village fought back
against ongoing police raids of their neighborhood bar. Stonewall is still considered a watershed
moment of gay pride and has been commemorated since the 1970s with “pride marches” held
every June across the United States. Recent scholarship has called for better acknowledgement of
the roles that drag performers, people of color, bisexuals and transgender patrons played in the
Stonewall Riots.
The gay liberation movement of the 1970s saw myriad political organizations spring up, often at
odds with one another. Frustrated with the male leadership of most gay liberation groups, lesbians
influenced by the feminist movement of the 1970s formed their own collectives, record labels,
music festivals, newspapers, bookstores, and publishing houses, and called for lesbian rights in
mainstream feminist groups like the National Organization for Women (NOW). Gatherings such as
women’s music concerts, bookstore readings and lesbian festivals well beyond the United States
were extraordinarily successful in organizing women to become activists; the feminist movement
against domestic violence also assisted women to leave abusive marriages, while retaining custody
of children became a paramount issue for lesbian mothers.
Expanding religious acceptance for gay men and women of faith, the first out gay minister was
ordained by the United Church of Christ in 1972. Other gay and lesbian church and synagogue
congregations soon followed. Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), formed in 1972,
offered family members greater support roles in the gay rights movement. And political action
exploded through the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Human Rights Campaign, the
election of openly gay and lesbian representatives like Elaine Noble and Barney Frank, and, in
1979, the first march on Washington for gay rights. The increasing expansion of a global LGBT
rights movement suffered a setback during the 1980s, as the gay male community was decimated
by the AIDS epidemic, demands for compassion and medical funding led to renewed coalitions
between men and women as well as angry street theatre by groups like AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power (ACT UP) and Queer Nation. Enormous marches on Washington drew as many as one
million gay rights supporters in 1987 and again in 1993. Right wing religious movements, spurred
on by beliefs that AIDS was God’s punishment, expanded via direct mail. A New Right coalition of
political lobby groups competed with national LGBT organizations in Washington, seeking to create
religious exemptions from any new LGBT rights protections. In the same era, one wing of the
political gay movement called for an end to military expulsion of gay, lesbian and bisexual soldiers,
with the high-profile case of Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer publicized through a made-for-
television movie, “Serving in Silence.” In spite of the patriotism and service of gay men and
lesbians in uniform, the uncomfortable and unjust compromise “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” emerged as
an alternative to decades of military witch hunts and dishonorable discharges. Yet more service
members ended up being discharged under DADT.
During in the last decade of the 20th century, millions of Americans watched as actress Ellen
DeGeneres came out on national television in April 1997, heralding a new era of gay celebrity
power and media visibility—although not without risks. Celebrity performers, both gay and
heterosexual, continued to be among the most vocal activists calling for tolerance and equal
rights. With greater media attention to gay and lesbian civil rights in the 1990s, trans and intersex
voices began to gain space through works such as Kate Boernstein’s "Gender Outlaw" (1994) and
"My Gender Workbook" (1998), Ann Fausto-Sterling’s "Myths of Gender" (1992) and Leslie
Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors (1998), enhancing shifts in women’s and gender studies to
become more inclusive of transgender and nonbinary identities. As a result of hard work by
countless organizations and individuals, helped by internet and direct-mail campaign networking,
the 21st century heralded new legal gains for gay and lesbian couples. Same-sex civil unions were
recognized under Vermont law in 2000 and Massachusetts became the first state to perform
same-sex marriages in 2004; with the end of state sodomy laws (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003), gay and
lesbian Americans were finally free from criminal classification. Gay marriage was first legal in the
Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Canada; but the recognition of gay marriage by church and state
continued to divide opinion worldwide. After the impressive gains for LGBT rights in post-
apartheid South Africa, conservative evangelicals in the U.S. began providing support and funding
for homophobic campaigns overseas. Uganda’s dramatic death penalty for gays and lesbians was
perhaps the most severe in Africa.
The first part of the 21st century saw new emphasis on transgender activism and the increasing
usage of terminology that questioned binary gender identification. Images of trans women
became more prevalent in film and television, as did programming with same-sex couples raising
children. Transphobia, cissexism and other language (such as “hir" and “them”) became
standardized, and film and television programming featured more openly trans youth and adult
characters. Tensions between lesbian and trans activists, however, remained, with the long-
running Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival boycotted by national LGBT groups over the issue of
trans inclusion; like many woman-only events with a primarily lesbian base, Michfest had
supported an ideal of ingathering women and girls born female. The festival ended after its
fortieth anniversary in August 2015.
Internet activism burgeoned, while many of the public, physical gathering spaces that once
defined LGBT activism (bars, bookstores, women’s music festivals) began to vanish, and the usage
of “queer” replaced lesbian identification for many younger women activists. Attention shifted to
global activism as U.S. gains were not matched by similar equal rights laws in the 75 other
countries where homosexuality remained illegal. As of 2016, LGBT identification and activism was
still punishable by death in ten countries: Iran, Iraq, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Somalia, Sudan, Uganda and Yemen; the plight of the LGBT community in Russia received intense
focus during the 2014 Winter Olympic Games, to which President Obama sent a contingent of out
LGBT athletes. Supportive remarks from the new Pope Francis (“Who am I to judge?”) gave hope
to LGBT Catholics worldwide.
Perhaps the greatest changes in the U.S. occurred between spring 2015 and spring 2016: in late
spring 2015 Alison Bechdel’s lesbian-themed Broadway production Fun Home won several Tony
awards, former Olympic champion Bruce Jenner transitioned to Caitlyn Jenner, and then in June of
2015, the Supreme Court decision recognized same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges). By spring
2016 the Academy Awards recognized films with both lesbian and transgender themes: Carol and
The Danish Girl. And the Supreme Court had avowed that a lesbian family adoption in one state
had to be recognized in all states. However, the United States also saw intense racial profiling
confrontations and tragedies in this same period, turning LGBT activism to “intersectionality,” or
recognition of intersections issues of race, class, gender identity and sexism. With the June 12
attacks on the Pulse Club in Orlando, that intersectionality was made plain as straight allies held
vigils grieving the loss of young Latino drag queens and lesbians of color; with unanswered
questions about the killer’s possible identification with ISIS terrorism, other voices now call for
alliances between the LGBT and Muslim communities, and the greater recognition of perspectives
from those who are both Muslim and LGBT in the U.S. and beyond. The possible repression of
identity which may have played a role in the killer’s choice of target has generated new attention
to the price of homophobia –internalized, or culturally expressed— in and beyond the United
States.
