The Fight for LGBT Rights After World War II
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The Fight for LGBT Rights after World War II The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, GLC09866.02 © 2020 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York The Fight for LGBT Rights after World War II BY KORY LOYOLA UNIT OVERVIEW This unit is one of the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Teaching Literacy through History resources, designed to align with the Common Core State Standards. These units were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and evaluate original documents of historical significance. Students will learn and practice the skills that will help them analyze, assess, and develop knowledgeable and well-reasoned points of view on texts and visual source materials. Historians Susan J. Freeman and Leila Rupp recently pointed to the importance of educators in integrating “the changing realities and perceptions of queer people over time” into history classrooms. They noted that “a focus on queer individuals and the LGBT community has become a prominent fixture of public discourse. Yet most students have little grasp of the historical precedents to today’s coming out and gay pride spectacles, and few are critical of the narratives that locate queer liberation as beginning in the present-day United States.”1 This unit is an attempt to illustrate, in part, those historical precedents. The three lessons in this unit explore some of the social and political structures that oppressed LGBT Americans as well as some responses to these structures of oppression. Students will read and view brief secondary source background material and read or examine, analyze, and evaluate textual and visual primary sources. Students will demonstrate their comprehension through class discussions, activity sheets, and written responses. In a culminating activity, students will select one of the primary sources to represent the most significant turning point in the history of LGBT rights for the given period and develop an essay that argues why that moment was a turning point. UNIT OBJECTIVES Students will be able to • Interpret, analyze, and demonstrate an understanding of textual and visual primary sources • Draw logical inferences and summarize the essential message of a primary source • Compose summaries of the major points in a graphic or textual primary source • Compare and contrast the points of view in different types of evidence • Develop an argument about a turning point in the history of LGBT rights ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS • To what extent did social structures oppress LGBT Americans between 1950 and 1990? • To what extent did political structures oppress LGBT Americans between 1950 and 1990? • To what extent did social and political oppression give rise to the movement for LGBT rights in America between 1950 and 1990? 1. Susan K. Freeman and Leila J. Rupp, “The Ins and Outs of US History: Introducing Students to a Queer Past,” in Understanding and Teaching US Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, 2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2017), p. 4. © 2020 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York 2 NUMBER OF CLASS PERIODS: 6 GRADE LEVEL(S): 9–12 COMMON CORE STATE STANDARDS CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.2: Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source; provide an accurate summary that makes clear the relationships among the key details and ideas. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RH.11-12.6: Evaluate authors’ differing points of view on the same historical event or issue by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.11-12.1: Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on [grade-level] topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively. CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.11-12.1: Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence. © 2020 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York 3 LESSON 1 THE LAVENDER SCARE OVERVIEW In the first lesson, students will view and read secondary sources on the treatment of LGBT people, particularly those who worked in the federal government. They will then read and view a selection of primary sources, including a speech, an executive order, an oral history interview, a letter, and picket signs. They will learn how to examine and evaluate these sources through the completion of activity sheets and class discussion. Assess student comprehension through their written response to one of the Essential Questions. Depending on the length of your class periods, this lesson may take two days. OBJECTIVES Students will be able to • Demonstrate understanding of both literal and inferential aspects of written text and images • Summarize the essential message of primary and secondary sources • Draw conclusions based on direct evidence found in primary and secondary sources • Analyze and assess the meanings and messages of a selection of primary sources HISTORICAL BACKGROUND The Fight for LGBT Rights after World War II by Timothy Stewart-Winter, Associate Professor of American Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and History, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University-Newark, and author of Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics The oppression of LGBT Americans did not begin in the post–World War II decades, but they faced increasingly systematic exclusion from public life, in part resulting from the Cold War political climate of fear and distrust of people who deviated from social norms. In response, LGBT Americans challenged their marginalization. The gay and lesbian movement gained steam after the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City. By the 1980s, gay and lesbian people gained political influence in a few American cities, even as the HIV/AIDS crisis posed a new threat. During World War II, military service and jobs in war industries pulled millions of Americans out of their communities of origin, and many gay and lesbian people encountered others like themselves for the first time. In the 1950s, even as Alfred Kinsey’s studies raised awareness about gay life, urban police increasingly spied on, arrested, and jailed LGBT people and closed their establishments. In 1952, in the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, American psychiatrists newly labeled homosexuality as a mental illness. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigation into communism helped fuel a similar, even larger effort to root out gay and lesbian federal employees. Corporations followed suit in investigating and firing gay employees. Demonized in the media, most gay and lesbian people concealed their homosexuality from their friends and relatives. Yet the intensity of anti-LGBT oppression also led some gay people to challenge the social and political structures that oppressed them. A few gay people quietly launched gay rights organizations in cities. One leader in this effort was Frank Kameny, a government astronomer fired for being gay in 1957, who challenged his dismissal. © 2020 The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York 4 In the mid-1960s, Kameny and other “homophile” activists held the first gay and lesbian pickets against antigay policies, modeled on Black civil rights protests, while other LGBT people fought back against police harassment. In 1969, a routine police raid on a New York City gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, led to several nights of rioting, with homeless street youth and people we would now call transgender the first to fight back. Building on movements against the Vietnam War and for Black Power and women’s liberation, a new generation of activists for “gay liberation” disclosed their homosexuality, which they called “coming out of the closet.” They launched parades through city streets to commemorate “Gay Pride” on the anniversary of Stonewall, challenging the public invisibility of LGBT people. By the 1970s, a few openly gay and lesbian people ran for political office, including Harvey Milk, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977. Yet LGBT visibility also inspired backlash. A new movement for traditional family values exploited prejudices and especially demonized gay and lesbian schoolteachers. In the 1980s, the onset of the HIV/ AIDS crisis led to the deaths of many gay and bisexual men, intravenous drug users, and others. The epidemic led to a resurgence of radical gay activism, including the militant organization ACT UP, which challenged government neglect of the crisis. In the 1990s, the LGBT movement was transformed by a debate over military service by gay and lesbian people, as well as by medical advances in the treatment of HIV, increased visibility in popular culture, and demands by transgender people for inclusion and representation. In a landmark 2003 ruling, Lawrence v. Texas, the US Supreme Court struck down state laws criminalizing gay sex; in the decade after Lawrence, state court decisions legalizing same-sex marriage sparked a major backlash and national debate. During the presidency of Barack Obama, Congress repealed the ban on gay military service, and public opinion shifted dramatically in favor of marriage equality, which was legalized nationwide in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015). MATERIALS • Context for Lesson 1 o Video: “The Lavender Scare: How the Federal Government Purged Gay Employees,” Sunday Morning, CBS News, June 9, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-lavender-scare-how-the-federal-government-purged- gay-employees/ o Excerpt from Judith Adkins, “‘These People Are Frightened to Death’: Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare,” Prologue 48, no. 2 (Summer 2016), archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/ lavender.html • Primary Sources o Primary Source 1: Excerpts from Joseph McCarthy, Speech to the Republican Women’s Club, Marquette University, Wheeling WV, February 9, 1950, Partial transcript, Joseph R.