History of the Gay Rights Movement in America

Pre-Stonewall

Beginning in colonial times there were prohibitions of sodomy derived from the English criminal laws passed in the first instance by the Reformation Parliament of 1533. The English prohibition was understood to include relations between men and women as well as relations between men and men.

As Europeans settled in North America, they encountered Native American cultures which had different ideas about sexuality and gender. The accounts of French, Spanish and British travelers about Native American customs are full of references to such cultural differences, such as the acceptance among some groups of same-sex sexual activity and cross-dressing. Reactions to these differences ranged from amused to violent, as Europeans confronted cultures that did not follow what Europeans had always considered to be "natural" laws.

European colonial governments sought to control the sexual behavior of the people within their settlements. The British, French, and Spanish all passed laws regarding sex outside of marriage and "sodomy" - a range of same-sex sexual activities. In early British colonies, as under English law, sodomy was a capital crime (punishable by death). One of the earliest recorded convictions for sodomy in the colonies was that of Richard Cornish, a sea captain executed in 1624 in Virginia for alleged homosexual acts with a servant.

Despite the severity of the laws, however, we know of only a few instances of executions in sodomy cases during the colonial period. People were more likely to be tried for the lesser offense of "lewd behavior," which did not incur the death penalty. Sodomy was a difficult charge to prove - two witnesses were required, and there was no possibility of a tell-tale pregnancy - and people may have been reluctant to place their neighbors' lives in jeopardy with such a dire accusation.

Sara Norman and Mary Hammon of Yarmouth, Plymouth Colony, in 1649 were taken to court for "lewd behavior each with [the] other upon a bed," the first known conviction for lesbian activity in North America. Three years later, Joseph Davis of Haverhill, New Hampshire, was fined for "putting on women's apparel" and made to admit his guilt to the community.

Colonial laws actually made it a crime to cross-dress, usually imposing a fine and some form of public contrition for the offense. Laws about what people could wear were generally intended to preserve social order and maintain a hierarchy within society, and were not directly concerned with homosexuality.

Homosexuality was an issue that many were trying to make sense of. Michael Wigglesworth, a Puritan clergyman, kept a diary for recording his daily life, meditations on faith, and his battles with lust and temptation. For Wigglesworth, however, these feelings took a form that seemed dangerous to record even in his private papers as Wigglesworth was plagued by his attraction to his male students.

In 1653, he struggled with "filthy lust" inspired by "my fond affection for my students while in their presence." Wigglesworth married in 1655, but his attraction to men continued. In 1656, Wigglesworth became minister of the church in Malden, Massachusetts, and became widely known for his epic poem about the Last Judgment called The Day of Doom .

Wigglesworth's carefully encoded confessions were not revealed until the 1960s when his diary was discovered and published. Wigglesworth seems to have taken his secret with him to the grave.

In New England, laws and religious thinkers condemned many different kinds of sexual activity (both heterosexual and homosexual) as sinful acts. The concept of the homosexual as a distinct category of person did not emerge until the late 19th century. Thus early American sodomy laws were not directed at homosexuals as such but instead sought to prohibit non-procreative sexual activity more generally. This does not suggest approval of homosexual conduct. It does tend to show that this particular form of conduct was not thought of as a separate category from like conduct between heterosexual persons.

Homosexuality was clearly being discussed at various levels of society in the 1700s. In 1749, Thomas Cannon wrote what may be the earliest published defense of homosexuality in English, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d . Thomas Jefferson even weighed in on this in 1779 when he revised Virginia law to make sodomy (committed by men or women) punishable by mutilation rather than death .

Instead of targeting relations between consenting adults in private, 19th-century sodomy prosecutions typically involved relations between men and minor girls or minor boys, relations between adults involving force, or relations between men and animals. Nineteenth century American society allowed some leeway for passionate same-sex relationships. Some men and women found love in same-sex "romantic friendships" that society did not view with suspicion.

Walt Whitman's Calamus Poems , published for the first time in the 1860 edition of his Leaves of Grass , extolled "the love of comrades" - men's love for each other - at a time when homosexuality as such was still undefined.

In his private life, Whitman had passionate relationships with a number of men and intimate encounters with many more, as recorded in his correspondence and diaries.

Many of Whitman's readers, including English essayist and poet Edward Carpenter and Oscar Wilde, found in the Calamus Poems a legitimation of love between men, a kind of manifesto of homosexuality. Carpenter was an English poet and early homosexual activist, living in a gay community near Sheffield. In 1874, Carpenter wrote to Whitman, "You have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature.”

Oscar Wilde, author of The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891, was an open homosexual. One of Wilde’s close friends was Lord Alfred Douglas. Douglas’ father strongly disapproved of the relationship and publicly insulted Wilde, leading to Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 after being convicted of "gross indecency” for homosexual offences. In his trial, Wilde defended same-sex relationships by referring to “the love that dares not speak its name” and saying that “it is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it.” For the crime, Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to 2 years of hard labor.

In the 1880s, British parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Bill "outlawing all forms of male homosexual contact". The love of two men not only defied Victorian sexual mores but also the highly stratified British class system. Carpenter strongly believed that homosexuality was a natural orientation for people of a third sex. His 1908 book on the subject, The Intermediate Sex , would become a foundational doctrine of the gay rights movement of the late 20 th century.

Towards the end of the 19th century, women in the United States gained increasing access to higher education and to such professions as social work and teaching, achieving greater independence.

As some women gained access to education and employment, they were able to form permanent, independent partnerships. Sarah Orne Jewett and Annie Adams Fields had such a union -- known as a "Boston Marriage" -- for nearly 30 years. "Boston Marriages," long-term relationships between two women, were not uncommon in the late 19th century among educated, well-off women. Jewett’s "Martha's Lady," a short story, celebrated the redemptive power of love between women.

Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were part of this emerging group of women, as well, when they started their work at Hull House among immigrant communities in Chicago.

By the end of the century, however, the medical profession had begun to investigate same-sex relationships, inspiring a new wave of suspicion and concern. The new science of psychology denounced same-sex love, equating it with arrested development and mental disorder.

This effort to identify the characteristics of a "homosexual" as a distinct kind of person was a reflection of the growth of a new area of medical research. In the 1860s, medical experts began to study men and women whom they called "inverts," members of the "third" or "intermediate sex," or "homosexuals." Early sex researchers tended to ascribe homosexual behavior to some innate biological difference in homosexual men and women. By the turn of the century, the theories of Sigmund Freud pointed to a combination of nature and nurture as the source of homosexual tendencies.

Women who challenged the primacy of men - whether by entering the work place, demanding the vote, or rejecting a man's sexual prerogatives -- were often labeled by doctors as biological misfits and "inverts," one of the terms used for gays and lesbians. Doctors often linked women's political activism to defective sexuality, declaring that if a woman harbored "masculine ideas of independence," she likely possessed other "manly" attributes -- such as excessive body hair, a fondness for cigars and the ability to whistle. While conceding that not every suffragist was a lesbian, these doctors nonetheless determined that their efforts to "invade a man's sphere" was a clear indication that women activists had a "certain impelling force within them."

In the years before World War II, gay men and lesbians developed subcultural forms of daily resistance, usually with distinctive dress and body language.

In the US, one such individual who spoke out was Henry Gerber, a German immigrant who lived in Chicago. Gerber served in the US army and was stationed in Germany with the occupying forces from 1920-1923. It was there that he discovered Brand and Hirschfeld’s homosexual-emancipation movements and decided to attempt a similar organization in Chicago. Gerber organized the first public homosexual organization in America -- the Society of Human Rights -- and published two issues of the first gay publication, entitled Friendship and Freedom .

Gerber wrote, "The Society for Human Rights is formed to promote and protect the interests of people who are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them."

But Gerber’s Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924, lasted less than a year as Gerber and many of its members were arrested and fired from their jobs as a result of their membership.

The first creaking open of the closet led to a colossal shove of repression for decades, but isolated acts of independence, openness, and activism did continue, albeit few and far between.

The female jazz and blues singers of the Harlem Renaissance lived in a world of sexual ambiguity: While many were married, many also had affairs with other women, and presented images of lesbian life and sensibility to the outside world. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Jackie Mabley, Josephine Baker, and Ethel Waters were all part of this world.

In 1925, Blues woman Ma Rainey was arrested in her house in Harlem for having a lesbian party. Her protégé, Bessie Smith, bailed her out of jail the following morning. Rainey and Smith were part of an extensive circle of lesbian and bisexual African ‐American women in Harlem.

Songs recorded by these singers in the 1920s and '30s made reference to "the life" for curious club audiences and blues fans. One song, recorded in 1930, told listeners: "When you see two women walking hand in hand, Just look 'em over and try to understand; They go to those parties - have the lights down low - Only those parties where women can go. You think I'm lying - just ask Tack Ann - Took many a woman from many a man."

After her arrest, Ma Rainey recorded "Prove it on me Blues," which teasingly referred to the event on the album cover and began:

"Went out last night with a crowd of my friends They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men'”

Also in the 1920s, literature continued to push the topic of homosexuality into the public discussion. In 1928, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall was published in the United States, sparking great legal controversy and bringing the topic of homosexuality to public conversation.

In the 1930s. responding to a woman who contacted him seeking a "cure" for her gay son, Sigmund Freud wrote:

"Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. It cannot be classified as an illness; We consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty, too."

During World War II, many men and women who had grown up in rural areas or small towns and had regarded themselves as singular freaks, discovered in military service legions of others who shared their sexual orientation.

World War II marked a turning point in gay and lesbian public life. Historian John D'Emilio has called World War II "a nationwide coming out experience." Men and women from all over the country moved from farms and small towns into sex-segregated environments in the military and war industries, away from the supervision of family and community. For some men and women, it was their first contact with gay men and lesbians and their first chance to explore their own homosexual feelings.

Soldiers flooded into port cities, exploring urban nightlife while on leave. Afterwards, gay enclaves emerged in New York, San Francisco and other cities.

At the outset of the war, being homosexual was not banned, only the act of sodomy. And since women couldn’t commit sodomy, it only applied to men. A US Army Manual for Courts-Martial said, “Sodomy is sexual connection by rectum or by mouth by a man with a human being. Sodomy is an act specifically denounced as an offense in violation of Article of War 93, and it’s punishable by dishonorable discharge and confinement and hard labor in a federal penitentiary for five years.”

During WWII in 1942, the U.S. military decided to intensify its policy on homosexuality. The new policy banned all homosexuals, male and female, from service.

Amid the largest mobilization in U.S. history, the Army, Navy and Selective Service System developed procedures for spotting and excluding homosexual draftees from service: recruits were screened for feminine body characteristics, effeminacy in dress and manner and a patulous (expanded) rectum.

The argument was that their presence would make heterosexual soldiers feel "uncomfortable" and decrease their efficiency and productivity, impairing unit cohesiveness and hence military effectiveness. If found to be a homosexual, you were subject to criminal sanctions under the sodomy prohibition, or could be given a dishonorable discharge from the military, where you would not receive veterans benefits and often had difficulty finding employment because this was on your record.

Over 9,000 enlisted members of the military – out of the 12 million conscripted men for the war effort – were dishonorably discharged as a result of homosexuality during WWII.

Immediately after the war, the military began discharging gay men and lesbians at higher rates than during the wartime years. Between 1947 and 1950, an average of 1,000 men and women a month were being discharged for alleged homosexuality.

But homosexuality in society was beginning to be discussed more openly. “I venture to predict that there will be a time in the future when gay folk will be accepted as part of regular society,” Edith Eyde wrote in the pioneering magazine Vice Versa . And a few literary figures came out: before Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, there was the poet Robert Duncan, who, in his 1944 essay “The Homosexual in Society,” asked liberals to “recognize homosexuals as equals.”

But what really started to bring the issue of homosexuality out into the public was a 1948 report by Dr. Alfred Kinsey.

Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a biologist and zoologist who founded the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, conducted the first wide-scale scientific survey of American sexual practices. His findings, based on 10,000 interviews, rocked the scientific world’s and the general public’s ideas about sexual behavior in America—especially about the prevalence of homosexuality.

The 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, was followed five years later by Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. More commonly called the Kinsey Reports, they brought issues of sexuality into everyday conversation. One historian noted that “Americans first learned from the Kinsey Reports that significant numbers of the nation’s men and women had engaged in homosexual activity.”

Kinsey concluded that 37% of men and 13% of women had had one or more orgasmic homosexual experience. Eight percent of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years, and 4% were homosexual throughout their lives.

Kinsey’s data is usually summed up by the assertion that homosexuals make up 10% of the population. For gays and lesbians, the research showed they were neither deviant nor exceptional. To those hostile to homosexuality, Kinsey’s numbers proved that homosexuality was a grave social threat.

The backlash against this sexual openness was not long in coming. Journalists and politicians started sounding the alarm about gays being part of the Communist international movement.

In 1947, as Cold War fears increased, President Truman instituted a "loyalty program" intended to keep Communists and other subversives out of jobs with the government. However, this policy coincided with a growing cultural unease about sexuality and the stability of the nuclear family, and the program soon began targeting gay men and lesbians as subversive and undesirable as federal employees.

Senator Joseph McCarthy, a Republican from Wisconsin, set off the witch-hunt when he noted the presence of homosexuals on his infamous list of Communists that had infiltrated the State Department.

To deter his attack, Deputy Secretary John Peurifoy in early 1950, who was in charge of ridding his department of security risks, informed a Senate panel that 91 employees had resigned as security risks since the start of 1947. “Most of these were homosexuals,” he revealed.

McCarthy’s allies fanned the fires of homosexual panic, charging that perverts had infiltrated the federal government. Homosexuals, they alleged, were as dangerous as Communists. Similar to McCarthy’s Red Scare, this led to a so-called “Lavender Scare.”

Some politicians falsely believed that homosexuals had infiltrated the U.S. government and posed a threat to national security. These leaders considered communists and homosexuals to be both morally weak and mentally disturbed, and argued that homosexuals could be easily blackmailed by communists into revealing state secrets.

In 1951, the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Department included a section in their report entitled "The Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government." The report concluded they were not fit for government employment: “One homosexual can pollute a government office.” The Senate committee concluded that homosexual federal employees were security risks as they are easy prey for blackmailers and that their “lack of emotional stability” and “the weakness of moral fiber” makes them vulnerable to foreign agents. They concluded that “those who engage in acts of homosexuality are unsuitable for employment in the federal government.”

President Harry Truman said that that he was afraid homosexuals were “a sabotage front for Uncle Joe Stalin.” And the FBI led a national crackdown on homosexuals.

The chief of the D.C.’s vice squad, Lt. Roy Blick, said that the executive branch harbored 3,500 homosexuals – with 300 to 400 lurking inside Truman’s State Department. Suddenly, the homosexual, like the Communist spy, could be anyone. Homosexuality was feared both as an individual weakness and as a menacing force capable of undermining national security.

At its height in the early 1950s, more than 60 people a month lost their jobs due to suspected homosexuality.

As a result, in 1953, President Eisenhower revised Truman’s Loyalty Program to explicitly prohibit the employment of "sexual perverts" by the federal government and many state and local governments soon adopted similar policies.

By signing Executive Order #10450 in 1953, Eisenhower banned the employment of homosexuals by the federal government. It terminated more than 600 federal employees for "sexual perversion," and by 1955, anti-gay witch hunts cost more than 5,000 men and women their jobs, according to historian David Johnson, with the federal government as a result. This disqualified homosexuals from the federal government, the nation’s largest employer.

In one of the most well-known stories of the effects of this new crack-down, Senator Lester Hunt, of Wyoming, killed himself after Styles Bridges, a senator from New Hampshire, threatened to expose Hunt’s son as a homosexual.

Part of where the federal government focused was on immigration. A Senate Judiciary subcommittee recommended in 1950 that US borders be closed to homosexual immigrants. The revised immigration law, which took effect in December 1952, barred “aliens afflicted with psychopathic personality, epilepsy, or a mental defect.” Because homosexuality was officially considered a mental illness, according to the American Psychiatric Association, a homosexual was considered to be “afflicted with a psychopathic personality,” and homosexual immigrants were thus deportable. This lasted until 1990 when gay Congressman Barney Frank persuaded Congress to delete the language barring “sex deviates” from immigration.

The “Lavender Panic” spread and anti-gay persecutions took place throughout the country.

Starting in 1955, a Florida legislative committee headed by former governor and state senator Charley Johns conducted a nine-year investigation into suspected Communists, civil rights leaders and homosexuals, primarily in universities and public education. As a result of the probe, more than a hundred teachers lost their jobs, and students dropped out of college before earning their degrees. Individuals became targets of the investigation because they were seen near suspected gay haunts, including a university library or a bus station.

The final legislative report in 1964, Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, ominously concluded that “Homosexuality is, and for far too long has been, a skeleton in the closet of society.”

In 1955, the arrest of three men in Boise, Idaho, on charges of sexual activity with teenage boys precipitated a massive witch hunt. Time magazine warned of a “homosexual underground” in the state.

The Idaho Statesman opined that “it seems almost incredible that any such cancerous growth could have taken root and developed in our midst. The situation is one that causes general alarm and calls for immediate and systematic cauterization.”

As a result of a panic about homosexuals allegedly preying on underage boys, more than 1,500 men were questioned over a 15-month period. What began as an investigation of alleged pedophiles also ensnared men who had only engaged in consensual sex with other adults.

Sixteen men were arrested on charges that included “infamous crimes against nature.” Ten went to jail, one for a life term.

Eisenhower’s Executive Order stayed in effect until 1975 when the US Civil Service Commission reversed this policy.

But it was in the post-WWII environment that gay communities formed and started to be more open about their sexuality. The experience and bonding that followed led many gay men and lesbians to decide, after the war, against returning to their hometowns in favor of one of the subcultural enclaves that existed in the large cities. Their presence helped fuel a proliferation of gay and lesbian bars in the postwar period. And the bars, in turn, became social institutions for increased contact and cooperation.

San Francisco became known as a gay mecca early in the post-War period. Many discharged gay servicemen, who were in no hurry to return home, remained in the city and maintained the social contacts formed in the same-sex isolation of the armed forces. By the end of the 1950s, San Francisco had more than thirty gay bars, and an estimated 38% of the city’s residences were single-person households.

In 1950, the first homophile organization, the Mattachine Society, was started in Los Angeles by Henry Hay for gay men, and was quickly followed by other organizations. The term “homophile” was used for a specific reason as it was a term preferred over “homosexual” because it emphasized love (“-phile” from Greek) over sex. Therefore these early organizations became known as homophile organizations.

The Mattachine Society was named after medieval and Renaissance French bands of dancers dressed as fools. Henry Hay stated: “We took the name Mattachine because we felt that we 1950s gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through struggle to move toward total redress and change.”

The Society's charter stated that homosexuals constituted "one of the largest minorities in America today," and were a group "victimized daily as a result of our oppression."

They publicly advocated for respect and civil rights for homosexuals by unifying isolated homosexuals, educating homosexuals to see themselves as an oppressed minority, and leading them in a struggle for their own emancipation.

Mattachine began publishing the U.S.’s first openly gay magazine, ONE, in 1953. The Post Office had argued that articles about homosexuality were obscene and specifically objected to one about gay marriage. Five years later, Supreme Court ruled that ONE was not pornographic. This paved the way for gay organizations to communicate via mail.

In 1955, a group of women, led by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, decided to launch the Daughters of Bilitis, the first national organization for lesbians, in San Francisco. They were named for a character and contemporary of Sappho in a book of poetry by Pierre Louis. The name was chosen out of a need for secrecy. “If anyone asked us,” commented Phyllis, “we could always say we belonged to a poetry club.”

DOB called themselves “A Woman’s Organization for the purpose of Promoting the Integration of the Homosexual into Society” and focused on educating the public about lesbians, participating in research about lesbians and repealing anti-LGBT laws. Within five years of its origin, DOB had chapters around the country, including Chicago, New York, New Orleans, San Diego, Los Angeles, Detroit, Denver, Cleveland and Philadelphia.

With Phyllis as editor, DOB began publishing The Ladder in 1956, the first nationally distributed lesbian publication in the U.S. Many of the people who wrote for The Ladder used fake names to protect themselves and the magazine was issued in a brown paper covering. Even Phyllis edited under the name “Ann Ferguson” for a while, but later dropped it to encourage her readers not to hide.

They focused on ending the profound isolation and invisibility of lesbians, eventually involving itself in education and law reform. The DOB challenged the idea that lesbians and gay men were sick, and argued instead that homosexuals were an oppressed minority. The gay rights movement was traditionally male-dominated, and DOB was formed to bring women into the fold. Phyllis and Del stayed together as partners for more than 50 years. In 2008, they became the first gay couple to get married in California after the state’s Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage.

Poets were especially vocal in popularizing gay and lesbian culture.

Nearly a century after Whitman wrote his Calamus poems, in October 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his long poem "Howl" to riveted audiences in San Francisco. The poem defied the 1950s conventions and established Ginsberg as the voice of a generation of non-conformists -- the Beat Generation. "Howl" extolled the pleasures of gay male sex in a graphic, completely unapologetic way. The Beat Generation it inspired came to reject conservatism and heterosexual hegemony. Ginsberg's anthem set the stage for the coming social upheaval and sexual revolution of the 1960s and '70s.

Audre Lorde described a year spent in Mexico as a time of affirmation and renewal because she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet. On her return to New York, Lorde became an active participant in the gay culture of Greenwich Village. One critic noted that “Lorde writes as a black woman, a mother, a daughter, a lesbian, a feminist, a visionary…”

But only the most courageous would consider joining Mattachine or DOB in these years. By 1960, Mattachine had only 230 members, and DOB had enrolled less than half that number.

The main reason, besides being banned from military service, federal employment, and immigration, was how homosexuality was viewed in the medical world.

In the 1950s, psychiatry was united behind the notion that homosexuality was a diseased, pathological disorder. This was perpetuated by the psychoanalytic theories of Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides, who said, “The homosexual is ill, and anything that tends to hide that fact reduces his chances of seeking or obtaining treatment.”

Psychiatrists such as Sandor Rado at Columbia University and Irving Bieber at New York Medical College argued that “homosexuality is attributable to hidden but incapacitating fears of the opposite sex developed in early childhood,” and that male homosexuality was the result of “a detached, hostile father and a close, binding, intimate, seductive mother.” Cornelia Wilbur, also at Columbia, wrote that a lesbian daughter is the result of “a passive, unassertive, gentle and detached” father and a mother who is “dominant, domineering, guilt-inducing and hostile.”

In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) adopted its first formal list of mental illnesses. The APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was created to define and organize the list of known mental disorders, and to give mental health professionals guidelines to treat such illnesses. In its first listing, the DSM labeled homosexuality a mental illness, specifically a “sociopathic personality disorder.”

This implied that it was an illness that could be cured, and would legally last for over 20 years.

At a time when lesbians and gay men were so ostracized, the homophile movement decided its best tactic was to embrace the label of sickness: at least that seemed a half- step up from being criminals. But some argued that such an approach was counterproductive, and that gay people should demand equality with heterosexuals.

The “good news” about the APA’s ruling was that through psychotherapy, homosexuals were said to be able to be cured. Treatment ranged from medication, terms in mental wards, and even electro-shock therapy, including even hormone injections, castrations, and lobotomies.

“Gay people who were sentenced to medical institutions because they were found to be sexual psychopaths were subjected sometimes to sterilization, occasionally to castration, sometimes to medical procedures such as lobotomies, which were felt by some doctors to cure homosexuality and other sexual diseases,” Law Professor William Eskridge says.

“The most famous of those institutions was Atascadero in California. Atascadero was known in gay circles as Dachau for queers, and appropriately so. The medical experimentation in Atascadero included administering to gay people a drug that simulated the experience of drowning, in other words, a pharmacological example of water-boarding.”

In 1951, a New York University professor even reported to the American Psychological Association that he had "successfully treated" a homosexual patient with electric shock therapy at "intensities considerably higher than those usually employed on human subjects."

Specific therapy treatments included Reparative Therapy (aka. gender-specific therapy) where male homosexuals would build a more masculine identity, while lesbians would build a more feminine identity to “cure” themselves of their homosexuality.

Aversion Therapy (aka. covert sensitization) was a therapy procedure where patients were given verbal suggestions to produce unpleasant associations with their homosexual feeling. An example of this for a gay man went as follows:

“I want you to imagine that you are in a room with X. He is completely naked. As you approach him, you notice he has sores and scabs all over his body, with some kind of fluid oozing from them. A terrible, foul stench comes from his body. The odor is so strong that it makes you sick. You can feel food particles coming up your throat. You can’t help yourself and you vomit all over the floor, on your hands and clothes, and you vomit again and again, all over everything.”

Another aspect of Aversion Therapy involved administering a nausea-producing drug, where once the man started to get sick they would be shown the target stimuli – a picture of a man. The idea was that the man would connect in his mind that looking at men would make him physically ill. Another aspect of this type of therapy included electric- shock treatments, where the patient was shown a series of images of men and women, and every time a man was shown he would get shocked. Thus the man would associate images of men with anxiety and pain, while the images of women would associate relief from pain.

Colin Fox was 19 when he “volunteered” for a treatment called “aversion therapy” in 1964 because his family, religion and community persuaded him that homosexuality was a sickness. During therapy sessions, electrodes were fixed to Colin’s arm and leg. He was shown photos of attractive men and jolted with shocks after each. By linking homosexual desire with pain, Colin’s doctors thought they could “cure” him of his attraction to men. At the end of each session, he was “rewarded” with a picture of an attractive woman without getting electrocuted. “The electric shocks were very, very painful,” recalls Colin.

Orgasmic Reorientation was another type of therapy for treating homosexuals. It was thought that by controlling images during masturbation, the person could be “cured” by connecting an orgasm with numerous images of the opposite sex.

Historian Martin Duberman described the situation of how homosexuality was viewed in those days, describing that the predominant view of sexuality was that “Everybody is innately heterosexual, and the only time there is a homosexual outcome is when there is some disturbance in the family situation.” Thus society, and specifically psychiatrists, thought gay people could be “cured.”

Homosexuals were triply condemned: The medical establishment deemed them mentally ill, the law made them criminals and religions branded them sinners.

In the 1960s, the activities and gains of the Civil Rights Movement and other social movements promoted a new sense of hope and assertiveness among politicized homosexuals. Homosexual militancy was nurtured by the politicized atmosphere of the time.

But not all causes of the 1960s were willing to help each other. There were feminists, anti-war activists, the Black Panthers, gay rights activists, and a host of other causes. Bayard Rustin, the man who organized the 1963 March on Washington and had been a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., saw the reality of this when he was shunted to the background once it had been publicly revealed that he was gay.

He was first arrested for his sexual orientation in 1953 in Pasadena on a morals charge: he had been found having sex with another man in a car.

Rustin, a well-known civil rights activist and writer, had traveled to India in 1948 and worked with Gandhi’s movement, and brought nonviolent resistance to the U.S. civil rights movement.

During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Rustin traveled to Alabama to advise Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., counseling him on the strategies and tactics of non-violent resistance. In the wake of the eventual triumph in Montgomery, Rustin became one of King's most trusted advisors and a highly influential strategist for the movement. But while Rustin helped to orchestrate King's rise to power, his sexuality made King and the movement vulnerable to attack. In 1960, King and Rustin planned to stage a demonstration at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. Adam Clayton Powell, the Congressman from Harlem, feared the demonstrations would undermine his own power. Powell called King and told him to cancel the demonstrations, threatening to "reveal" that King and Rustin were having an affair. There was no affair, but King capitulated and Rustin resigned, forced out of the movement he had helped create.

For three years, Rustin lived in a kind of exile. Then, in June of 1963, the leaders of the movement decided it was time to organize a massive march on Washington. Movement leaders knew that Rustin was best qualified to organize the march, but feared his sexuality would be used to discredit the movement. In order to distance Rustin from the march, they appointed A. Philip Randolph director. Randolph, in turn, appointed Rustin his deputy.

US Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, in 1963, attempted to derail the Civil Rights March on Washington by accusing Rustin of being, among other things, a "pervert." It failed to deride the March on Washington, which went ahead as a roaring success in the civil rights movement.

Rustin also organized one of the first Freedom Rides. He influenced, among many others, Stokely Carmichael and the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as well.

Rustin, however, did not begin publicly advocating for gay and lesbian causes until the 1970s. In a 1986 speech, Rustin said: "Indeed, if you want to know whether today people believe in democracy,…if you want to know whether they are human rights activists, the question to ask is, ‘What about gay people?’"

In San Francisco, its reputation as an open city became an issue in the 1959 mayoral race, when incumbent George Christopher was challenged by the city auditor for letting San Francisco became “the international headquarters of the organized homosexuals in the United States.”

To avoid being labeled soft on “sexual deviants,” Christopher, once re-elected, initiated a massive crackdown on gay establishments.

The crackdown also prompted drag performer José Sarria, a waiter at the Black Cat gay bar to run for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961, the first openly gay political candidate in the United States. In a forerunner of the power of gay voters, Sarria garnered more than 6,000 votes under the campaign slogan, “Equality".

In 1964, police harassment of San Francisco’s gay bars led to the formation of the Society for Individual Rights, which enrolled a thousand members by 1966, making it the largest homophile organization in the country.

In the 1960s, some followed the trend of the other counter-culture movements and took to protesting in public in cities in the U.S.

In 1963, the first gay rights demonstration in the US took place on September 19th at the Whitehall Induction Center in New York City, protesting against discrimination in the military.

Protests also took place in Washington, DC, spurred on by Frank Kameny.

Frank Kameny had been a gay rights activist for years, dating back to his being fired as a government astronomer in the Army Mapping Service, a federal government position, in 1957 because he was gay. Kameny didn't leave quietly, however. He contested his firing by the U.S. Civil Service Commission by writing letters to the agency, both houses of Congress and eventually the White House. He sued and lost in lower courts, but pressed on in 1961 with what became the first civil rights claim based on sexual orientation to be brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kameny also went on to start a Mattachine Society branch in Washington.

Kameny called upon the nascent gay rights movement to model itself upon the civil rights movement. To gain equality, he argued, the movement needed to assert itself.

In the early 1960s, as a leader of the Washington, DC branch of the Mattachine Society, Kameny began sending the Mattachine newsletter to the office of J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “It is time to open the closet door and let in the fresh air and the sunshine,” Kameny said in 1968. More than any other activist of his generation, he insisted that gay people had to declare themselves openly.

In April 1965, more than 70 gay protestors demonstrated in front of the White House. In an effort to end discrimination against gay men and lesbians in federal employment, they carried signs that read “Sexual preference is irrelevant to federal employment” and wore buttons that said “Equality for Homosexuals.” This was the first gay protest in the nation’s capital. Kameny and others also protested outside the Pentagon, the State Department, and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

Besides Kameny, one of the early leaders was Barbara Gittings, who had started a branch of DOB in New York City back in 1958.

“She was one of the rare people in the homophile movement — before Stonewall — who took a militant stance,” said David Carter, the author of “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution.” “And she not only took a militant stance, but she was in the forefront.”

In Philadelphia, gay protestors planned to demonstrate every Fourth of July in front of Independence Hall. Called the Annual Reminder, the point was to bring attention to a group of Americans that still don’t have their basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The first Annual Reminder was held in 1965, it saw hundreds calling for gay rights.

In the 1960s, the world’s first gay bookstore—the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop— opened in New York City and stocked gay and lesbian fiction and nonfiction but no pornography. One of the leading gay and lesbian publications, which has now published more than a thousand issues, The Advocate, first appeared—with a print run of 300 copies. The first gay and lesbian religious denomination, the Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches was founded.

To bring all of these organizations throughout the country together, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) was created. They adopted Frank Kameny’s slogan “Gay is good” to counter the onslaught of negativism aimed at gays and lesbians and tried to centralize the ideas that were coming out of both coasts.

This increased discussion and knowledge about homosexuality led to some changes in the law in states, including Illinois, which became the first state to remove its sodomy law from its criminal code in 1962.

But the increased attention of these protests and marches also brought the presence of agents from the Bureau of Special Services to keep tabs on the ringleaders of the movement. The FBI had been attending gay political meetings in New York since the heyday of Mattachine.

Stonewall

Throughout the 20th century, police would routinely raid bars known to cater to gay men and lesbians, arresting and harassing the patrons.

Two years before the infamous Stonewall riots, the Black Cat Tavern in Los Angeles was one of about 10 homosexual bars in the area. On New Years’ Eve 1966, the Black Cat was packed with as many as 75 people, 15 of them in drag. At the stroke of midnight, the Black Cat crowd started kissing to celebrate the arrival of 1967. At least six undercover vice cops immediately pounced. Sixteen Black Cat patrons had been arrested for kissing. All six were tried and convicted for disorderly conduct for “lewd and dissolute conduct” in a public place. Under California law, their convictions meant they had to register as “sex offenders.”

In response to the raid, Jim Kepner and Buddy Ball helped organize a protest. On February 11, 1967, more than 200 people gathered outside the Black Cat Tavern to protest the New Year's Eve police raid.

Bar raids often increased during mayoral campaigns as police pitched in to show the incumbent was tough on crime. In the summer of 1969, New York Mayor John Lindsay was running for reelection, and a new police precinct commander was busily raiding bars.

The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in the Greenwich Village area of New York City. Many saw it as an oasis, a safe retreat from the harassment of everyday life.

“Every night I went in with my collar up, hiding my face, ashamed to be seen,” recalls Michael Levine, who frequented the Stonewall Inn at the time. “But, once in, it was there that I could dance with and kiss my boyfriend, and no one cared.”

The night of June 27, 1969 saw the Stonewall Inn raided by police, though. If the raid went according to the usual pattern, the only people who would be arrested would be those without IDs, those dressed in the clothes of the opposite gender, and some or all of the employees. Everyone else would be let go and the bar would soon re-open.

Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine and his eight detectives from the NYPD (Public Morals Section) had no reason to believe that the raid on the gay Stonewall Inn was going to be any different from other raids in Greenwich Village. As reason for the raid the police said that the Stonewall was selling liquor without a license.

Raids of gay bars like the Stonewall were regular, and the police were generally paid off to allow the bars to stay open.

The raid on the Stonewall was brief and businesslike. Out of the 200 or so people inside the bar that night, the police arrested two barmen, three drag-queens and a lesbian. The customers were allowed to leave one-by-one. A crowd of customers quickly gathered outside, refusing to leave the vicinity of the bar.

The mood of the crowd quickly changed as the police escorted the barmen and the drag- queens to the waiting paddy-wagon.

Then the arrested lesbian was escorted to a patrol car. She fought the police, managed to break away briefly but was recaptured and dragged to the car. Sensing the danger, Pine ordered the car away.

The jeering crowd had become an angry and explosive mob.

In the midst of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, counterculture, student and women's movements, patrons of the Stonewall bar refused to go quietly into the police van.

Riot veteran and gay rights activist, Craig Rodwell, says: 'A number of incidents were happening simultaneously. There was no one thing that happened or one person, there was just… a flash of group, of mass anger'.

Coins, bottles, rocks, and bricks flew. Fires were set off in trash cans.

Detective Inspector Seymour Pine later recalled, 'I had been in combat situations, but there was never any time that I felt more scared than then'.

Hemmed into a small clearing immediately outside Stonewall the police decided to seek sanctuary inside, bolting the heavy wooden door against the crowd outside and called for reinforcements.

“In the civil rights movement, we ran from the police. In the peace movement, we ran from the police. That night, the police ran from us,” Stonewall veteran John O’Brien said.

Pine and his subordinates were almost burned alive when someone squirted lighter fuel through a broken window of the Inn and ignited it by throwing a match inside. The bar caught fire with the police trapped inside.

Meanwhile, a parking meter lying nearby was co-opted as a makeshift battering-ram to smash open the door to the Stonewall.

People in the crowd started shouting 'Gay Power!' And as word spread through Greenwich Village and across the city, hundreds of gay men and lesbians, black, white, Hispanic, and predominantly working class, converged on the Christopher Street area around the Stonewall Inn to join the fray.

The police were reinforced by the Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), a crack riot-control squad which had been specially trained to disperse people protesting against the Vietnam War.

Historian of the riots, Martin Duberman, said, "In their path, the rioters slowly retreated, but - contrary to police expectations - did not break and run… hundreds… scattered to avoid the billy-clubs but then raced around the block, doubled back behind the troopers, and pelted them with debris.”

The mob fought the police with everything they had - Molotov cocktails, bricks, cobblestones, bottles, sticks and parking meters.

There were an estimated 4,000 gay men, drag-queens and lesbians on the streets that night. For the next few hours civil war raged in Greenwich Village.

“For the first time, we weren’t letting ourselves be carted off to jails. Gay people were actually fighting back,” Stonewall veteran Martha Shelley said.

By 3.30am, the riot had burnt itself out. Thirteen people had been arrested on charges ranging from harassment to resisting arrest to disorderly conduct.

The following evening, the demonstrators returned, their numbers now swelled to thousands. With “Gay Power!” echoing throughout Greenwich Village, some 400 nightstick-wielding police officers battled to control a homosexual uprising thousands strong. Intermittent small incidents continued with varying intensity took place over the next four nights. Years of pent-up rage were unleashed.

Although this was not the first time that homosexuals had resisted police abuse, this time, there were significant political consequences. The three days of unrest that came to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion were small in scale, yet they triggered massive change.

According to Martin Duberman, the event simply "gave meaning and coherence to a struggle that was already underway."

“Three nights of rioting at a Greenwich Village bar were to eclipse all that went before and to put the gay movement in line with the mass movements of the 1960s,” wrote Neil Miller in Out of the Past .

The Stonewall Rebellion became a "metaphor for emergence, visibility and pride," one that publicly affirmed the identity of a people burdened with a tradition of invisibility and abuse.

Martin Boyce, a Stonewall veteran, said, “It was another great step forward in the history of human rights.”

Stonewall brought homosexuality out of the shadows.

The initial actions of less than 200 people eventually led to the birth of Gay Liberation. Within months several organizations and newspapers were formed to promote LGBT rights.

Within two years, there were LGBT rights groups in every major U.S. city as well as in Canada, Australia and Europe. In 1970, to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, the first Gay Pride marches took place across the U.S. By 1972 a dozen cities held pride parades, and gay and lesbian people in London, Paris, West Berlin and Stockholm also marched for gay rights.

“This was the Rosa Parks moment; the time that gay people stood up and said ‘no.’ And once that happened, the whole house of cards that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble,” says Lucian Truscott, reporter for The Village Voice .

The word 'Stonewall' had entered the vocabulary of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people everywhere as a potent emblem of the gay community making a stand against oppression and demanding full equality in every area of life.

Thirty years after the rebellion, the U.S. government designated the site of the original Stonewall Inn as a National Historic Landmark and proclaimed: “Let it forever be remembered that here—on this spot—men and women stood proud, they stood fast, so that we may be who we are, we may work where we will, live where we choose and love whom our hearts desire.”

On the 40th anniversary of Stonewall in 2009, President Obama challenged citizens to “commit to achieving equal justice under the law for LGBT Americans.”

And at his 2 nd inaugural address in January 2013, President Obama re-emphasized the historic importance of Stonewall:

“We the people declare today that the most evident of truth that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth.”

The president mentioned it along with the first women's rights convention held in Seneca Falls, N.Y., in 1848 and the civil rights march in Selma, Ala., in 1965. As Brian Ellner pointed out, "The president placed the fight for gay equality alongside the struggles for women's equality and civil rights.”

"We were honored that the president included Stonewall among the historic events in American history that have made our union stronger," said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, one of the largest gay rights organizations.