The Human Rights Campaign

DePauw University Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University Student research Student Work 4-2019 The rP ogression of the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement in the United States: The umH an Rights Campaign Tabitha Adams DePauw University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.depauw.edu/studentresearch Part of the Gender and Sexuality Commons, and the Politics and Social Change Commons Recommended Citation Adams, Tabitha, "The rP ogression of the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement in the United States: The umH an Rights Campaign" (2019). Student research. 104. https://scholarship.depauw.edu/studentresearch/104 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Work at Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Student research by an authorized administrator of Scholarly and Creative Work from DePauw University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Progression of the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement in the United States: The Human Rights Campaign Tabitha Adams DePauw University Honor Scholar Program Class of 2019 Sponsor: Salil Benegal Committee Members: Bruce Stinebrickner and Jeannette Johnson-Licon 2 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ……………………………………………………………………………….5 Preface on Terminology …………………………………………………………………………..7 Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………….9 Chapter One: Historical Overview ………………………………………………………………14 Section 1. Historical Background Before and During the 1950s ………………………..14 Section 2. The Politicization of Gay Activism in the 1960s …………………………….22 Section 3. The 1969 Stonewall Inn Raid and Riots ……………………………………..29 Section 4. Late 1969 to Early 1970s: Gay Liberation Begins …………………………...32 Section 5. Early 1970s Consensus ………………………………………………………38 Section 6. Liberation Breeds Greater Politicization …………………………………….42 Section 7. Opposition Increases Against the Gay Community ………………………….49 Chapter Two: The Human Rights Campaign and More ……………………………………...…54 Section 1. Research Methodology ………………………………………………………54 Section 2. The Human Rights Campaign Fund is Formed ……………………………...55 Section 3. Gay Power Meets AIDS Epidemic …………………………………………..63 Section 4. The 1980s Weren’t Just the AIDS Decade …………………………………..71 Section 5. The 1990s Addition of Queer Politics ……………………………………….76 Section 6. 1990s Political Fights …………………………….…………………………..80 Chapter Three: Progress Picks Up ………………………………………………………………93 Section 1. 21st Century Progress ………………………………………………………...93 Section 2. Violence Leads to Legislation ……………………………………………...112 Section 3. Transgender Rights …………………………………………………………116 Section 4. Additional Areas of HRC Growth ………………………………………….125 Section 5. HRC Controversy …………………………………………………………...135 Section 6. HRC Response ……………………………………………………………...139 Section 7. Where is the HRC and LGBTQ+ Rights Movement Going Next? ………...144 4 Section 8. Limitations and Areas of Further Research ………………………………...154 Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………..157 Appendix 1: Transcribed Interview with Marty Rouse ………………………………………..162 Appendix 2: Transcribed Interview with Candace Gingrich …………………………………..180 Bibliography …………………………………………………………………………………...198 5 Acknowledgements While I could write for pages and pages thanking people for their assistance in this project’s completion, I will try to be as brief as possible. Particularly since this paper is already 150 pages long. I would first like to thank my Honor Scholar Sponsor, Professor Salil Benegal. From meeting with me countless times, exchanging innumerable emails, suggesting multiple different readings, setting much needed deadlines, and providing highly constructive feedback, this project would not have been completed without his stellar guidance. I have greatly enjoyed working with Professor Benegal throughout this process and will miss his mentorship immensely once graduating from DePauw. Second, I would like to thank my first and second readers, Professor Bruce Stinebrickner and Jeannette Johnson-Licon. I would like to thank each of them for their willingness to serve on my committee and providing extremely helpful feedback on my project throughout the year. Whether it be thesis statement suggestions, structure and grammar recommendations, notes on historical context, or simple conversations at the gym, their guidance was truly invaluable. I would especially like to thank Jeannette Johnson-Licon for all of our Hoover Dining Hall breakfast discussions about the LGBTQ+ community. They were some of the highlights of my project. I would also like to thank Amy Welch and Kevin Moore for helping me navigate my way through the Honor Scholar Program all these years. Especially for talking with me at length during the final month of my project. Amy Welch is a true shining star of the Honor Scholar Program; DePauw University is extremely lucky to have her. A special thank you is warranted to the Honor Scholar’s Principia Consortium Program at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. From playing the bagpipes to playing on the Glasgow Women’s Basketball Team, those were the 6 best few months of my life. I will forever be grateful to DePauw’s Honor Scholar Program for providing me that incredible study abroad experience. Not only am I grateful to those directly involved in the Honor Scholar Program, but I would also like to thank all my family and friends. Thank you to all my Kappa and DU friends for listening to me discuss my project continuously and being a constant support system as I finished my project. I would also like to thank my mother for listening me discuss my project at length during Winter Term, Spring Break, and over the phone. The best advice I got throughout this process was during a short minute of frustration in January when I threw up my hands and vocalized a desire to quit the program altogether. While I was just blowing off steam in the moment, my mother recognized this and merely replied, “That is a silly thing to say.” That was the end of conversation and since that moment, I never once contemplated quitting. I am so thankful I listened to her and finished this project. I would lastly like to thank the Human Rights Campaign. Without interning at the organization this past summer, I never would have been inspired to research and write on this topic. Through completing this project, I have learned an immense amount about the organization, the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement, and even my own identity. LGBTQ+ history is not commonly taught in high school or university. Through interning at the HRC and conducting this project, I have come to learn about an important community and movement in the United States that I firmly believe everyone ought to learn about as well. So, thank you to the HRC for inspiring me to learn more about LGBTQ+ people and thank you to LGBTQ+ people across time and space for being such an inspirational community. Keep fighting the good fight and eventually equality will come. I firmly believe this to be true. 7 Preface on Terminology Due to the formation, expansion, and transformation of LGBTQ+ identities, this paper uses the wording LGBTQ+ Rights Movement to describe the overall history of LGBTQ+ rights attained over time in the United States. (Kranz and Cusick 3) use gay as an umbrella term to encompass everyone who identifies as non-heterosexual, yet even they note that not all transgender folk use this terminology. (Egan and Sherrill “Marriage and the Shifting Priorities,” 232) interchangeably use the terms gay and LGBT1 in the attempts to be as inclusive and readable as possible. However, these different scholars published their works in 2005 so they are not as up to date with 2019 terminology. In an attempt to be both inclusive and historically correct, each chapter and section of this paper uses the term, phrase, or description that was the common terminology of that time period. As (Escoffier 202) describes, since the 1950s each ensuing wave of the LGBTQ+ Rights Movement has been identified politically as “homophile, gay, gay and lesbian, lesbian feminist, queer, and LGBT.” (Faderman xvi-xx) provides a more detailed overview of the terms’ history and explains her own use of terminology. For example, Faderman describes how the terms homosexual and homophile formed and were commonly used in the 1940s and 1950s, while gay was used as an in-group term known mainly to people who identified with the homosexual community. Gay as an umbrella term for people who identify with same-sex attraction popularized in the late 1960s and 1970s during and after the Stonewall Inn raid and riots. Gay is often used as this umbrella term today. As groups 1 LGBT stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (Egan and Sherrill, “Marriage and Shifting Priorities,” 232; Escoffier 202; Kranz and Cusick 3). 8 splintered in their identities and organizational structures in the 1960s and 1970s, women coined the term lesbian to describe their identity of women attracted to other women. The 1980s witnessed the morphed wording gay-and-lesbian in an attempt to be more inclusive of both identities. This word was commonly used to describe the movement leading into the 21st century. However, as bisexual, transgender, and queer became terms people increasingly identified with in the 1970s to 1990s, the acronym LGBT and LGBTQ have popularized within American society. There has been debate as well over the letters’ order, with lesbian feminists favoring LGBT rather than GLBT since the L would precede the G. Some have even attempted to stretch the acronym to LGBTQQIAAP,2 however, this acronym has

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