LGBTQ movements

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  LGBTQ movements are social movements that advocate for the inclusion, recognition, and rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. In 1897, a doctor in Berlin named Magnus Hirschfeld formed the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to campaign publicly against a law that made sex between men illegal. That single act planted the seed of an organized global struggle. How did scattered individuals writing poetry and pamphlets in the 18th century become the force that won marriage equality across dozens of nations? Who were the people who risked their lives to hold that first protest, organize those first drag balls, publish those first books? And why does the movement remain so deeply divided about its own tactics and identity, even after so many victories? The answers move through Enlightenment philosophy, Weimar Berlin, the streets of New York, and the chambers of the world's highest courts.

• 2. Early Voices, Early Risks

  ›

  Thomas Cannon wrote what may be the earliest published defense of homosexuality in English, a work titled Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd, in 1749. Only fragments of it have survived. Social reformer Jeremy Bentham went further around 1785, arguing in an unpublished essay that homosexuality was a victimless crime and that popular hostility toward it was an irrational prejudice fed by religious teachings. The legal penalty for buggery in England at that time was death by hanging, and Bentham was so fearful of reprisal that his essay was not published until 1978. France moved first among nations: in 1791, it became the first country to decriminalize homosexuality, a step linked in part to Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, one of the authors of the Napoleonic Code. The Duchy of Warsaw followed when the Code was introduced in 1808. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was among the earliest men to publicly state their homosexuality. He coined terms for homosexual men and women, and in 1867 he staged what is regarded as the first public gay rights protest. Poet and early advocate John Addington Symonds wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1873, a work later recognized as early gay history; he had already used the word 'homosexual' in that text before the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1892. English sexologist Havelock Ellis published Sexual Inversion in 1897, the first study to treat homosexuality as a neutral sexual condition rather than a pathology or a crime. The book was so controversial that a bookseller was charged in court simply for holding copies of it.

• 3. The Berlin Laboratory

  ›

  Magnus Hirschfeld formed the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexology, in 1919 in Berlin. It conducted research on a vast scale, saw thousands of transgender and homosexual clients at consultations, and advocated for sex education, contraception, and women's rights. Adolf Brand had already broken from Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, disagreeing with the medical framing of homosexuality; Brand was the first to use 'outing' as a political strategy, claiming that German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow engaged in homosexual activity. Women had been largely excluded from the movement until around 1910, when the German government tried to expand Paragraph 175 to criminalize sex between women. Anna Rüling had delivered a public speech in 1904 at Hirschfeld's request, calling for an alliance between the women's movement and the sexual reform movement; it remains the only known contribution she made to the cause. Aimée Duc's 1901 novel Sind es Frauen? Roman über das Dritte Geschlecht served as much as a political treatise as a novel, pushing back against pathological theories of homosexuality in women. Friedrich Radszuweit published LGBTQ magazines in Berlin, including Die Freundin. Then, in 1933, the Nazi rise to power reversed all of it. The institute's library was destroyed. The Swiss journal Der Kreis was the only part of the movement to survive through the Nazi era. In the USSR, the Criminal Code of 1922 had decriminalized homosexuality as part of a broader project to expand women's rights and free sexual relationships. Under Stalin, the country reversed course, recriminalizing homosexuality and banning abortion.

• 4. The Homophile Era

  ›

  Immediately after World War II, homosexual rights groups came into being or were revived across Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, and the United States. These groups preferred the term 'homophile' to 'homosexual,' deliberately placing love above sex in their self-description. ONE, Inc., the first public homosexual organization in the United States, was bankrolled by Reed Erickson, a wealthy transsexual man. A small, clandestine mutual-aid network called Maricas Unidas Argentinas operated in Buenos Aires during the late 1940s and 1950s, providing solidarity and material support to those affected by police persecution during the government of Juan Perón. Scholars now regard it as possibly the earliest LGBTQ organization in Latin America. A 1965 gay march held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia is credited by some historians as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. In San Francisco that same period, the LGBTQ youth organization Vanguard held protests for equality from April through July 1966, followed by the August 1966 Compton's riot, where transgender street prostitutes in the Tenderloin neighborhood rioted against police harassment at Gene Compton's Cafeteria. The Wolfenden Report, published in Britain on the 4th of September 1957, recommended that homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should no longer be criminal. Its findings eventually led to the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between two men over 21 years of age in private in England and Wales. By 1969, dozens of homophile organizations and publications existed in the United States, yet they were largely ignored by the media.

• 5. Liberation and Its Fractures

  ›

  The Stonewall riots of 1969, when gay men, lesbians, drag queens, and transgender women resisted a police raid at a bar in New York City, became the symbolic start of a new phase. Immediately after, groups including the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists' Alliance formed, using the word 'gay' as an act of defiance and defining it broadly enough to encompass a range of non-normative sexualities. Paul Goodman published 'The Politics of Being Queer' that same year. In 1970, drag queen Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera formed Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries within the GLF, focused on housing for homeless gay youth and support for gay prisoners. Craig Rodwell, proprietor of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in lower Manhattan, persuaded the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations to replace the Fourth of July Annual Reminder in Philadelphia with a commemoration of the Stonewall Riots; that first Gay Pride Week included marches in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston. In the United Kingdom, the GLF held its first meeting in the basement of the London School of Economics on the 13th of October 1970. By 1971, those weekly meetings drew between 200 and 300 people. In May 1974, the American Psychiatric Association changed its classification of homosexuality from a 'mental disorder' to a 'sexual orientation disturbance,' following years of activist pressure. But the radicalism had begun splintering even before that decision. Veterans such as Sylvia Rivera and Beth Elliot were sidelined or expelled for being transgender. Butch lesbians and flamboyant gay men were cast as negative stereotypes by a movement that was trying to present gays and lesbians as identical to heterosexuals in every way but private sexual practice.

• 6. Rights, Setbacks, and the AIDS Years

  ›

  Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, becoming the first openly gay man in California to be elected to public office. He was assassinated by former city supervisor Dan White in 1978. That same year, Anita Bryant launched a campaign called 'Save Our Children' in Dade County, Florida, which resulted in an amendment that led to the firing of public school teachers suspected of being homosexual. Mark Segal disrupted the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite in 1973, an event viewed by 60% of American households, many encountering the subject of homosexuality for the first time. Belgium provided a sustained international cause: between 1980 and 1988, the global LGBTQ community rallied behind Eliane Morissens, a Belgian lesbian fired from her teaching post for coming out on television. Protests, fundraisers, and petitions organized across Europe and the Americas. The French magazine Gai pied, the International Lesbian Information Service, and the International Gay Association all mobilized on her behalf. Every court she appealed to, including Belgium's highest court and the European Court of Human Rights, upheld her termination without examining whether employment discrimination had occurred. The AIDS pandemic reshaped everything. As gay men became seriously ill and died in ever-increasing numbers, the leadership of many organizations was depleted, and lesbian activists stepped in as caregivers. ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, formed in 1987. Its offshoots Queer Nation followed in 1990 and the Lesbian Avengers in 1992. A 'War Conference' of 200 gay leaders held in Warrenton, Virginia, in 1988 produced a statement calling for a nationwide media campaign and an annual planning conference; the Human Rights Campaign identifies that gathering as the origin of National Coming Out Day.

• 7. Marriage, Law, and What Remains

  ›

  Iceland legalized same-sex marriage through a unanimous parliamentary vote of 49 to 0 on the 11th of June 2010, becoming the first country to do so through a unanimous legislative act. A month later, Argentina became the first country in Latin America to legalize same-sex marriage. The Netherlands had been first in the world, in 2001. On the 26th of June 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 in Obergefell v. Hodges that the Constitution requires same-sex couples to be allowed to marry regardless of where they live. Taiwan became the first country in Asia to allow same-sex marriage in 2019. In 2003, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down sodomy laws in fourteen states in Lawrence v. Texas, making consensual homosexual sex legal in all fifty states. In June 2020, the Court's Bostock v. Clayton County decision found that the 1964 Civil Rights Act's protections based on sex extend to sexual orientation and gender identity in areas like housing and employment. On the 6th of September 2018, consensual gay sex was legalized in India by that country's Supreme Court, overturning a colonial-era law that had been challenged in court as recently as 2008. Sociologist Mary Bernstein frames the ongoing project as two parallel sets of goals: cultural goals that challenge heteronormativity and political goals that change laws to gain rights, benefits, and protections. Research by Roffee and Waling in 2016 found that LGBTQ individuals often face microaggressions and exclusionary behaviors from within their own community, a tension that has been present since the 1970s and 1980s, when transgender people and bisexuals were regularly sidelined by the broader movement. The Yogyakarta Principles on international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, adopted in 2006 by a meeting of 29 specialists, mark one of the most concrete attempts to build a universal legal framework. Freedom of religion, as a 2020 article by human rights expert Dag Øistein Endsjø argued and as the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsed in a 2023 formal report, can itself protect LGBTQ people: religious communities that embrace LGBTQ equality can claim that laws criminalizing LGBTQ people also violate those communities' own right to practice their faith.