a four-part series by Mark Salzwedel
: Subhuman Adversaries
The Criminalization of Queerness 1960-1985
Although the 1950s proved that LGBT people were not sick, it left for later decades the question of what possible event could make someone gay. Was it a genetic disease? Was it a lazy or misguided social choice? Both physiological theories and social theories abounded in the following three decades.
Aversion therapy was on its way out, but not forgotten, and in its wake, the question of what caused homosexuality remained. Without that information, there was no path forward to steering LGBT people back to heteronormativity, and that was, at its root, the motivation for the research. “How do we stop them from existing?”
Blacks and other minorities were gathering strength and acceptance during the 1960s, and as racial discrimination in the United States started to become illegal, other minorities saw a path toward their fuller participation in society. In 1962, Illinois was only the first U.S. state to decriminalize homosexuality.
The situation for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and especially transgender Americans in the 1960s was dangerous. In many American cities, and perhaps more so in New York, they were targeted by an abusive police force that over-applied the public indecency laws to raid same-sex bars. You could be physically beaten, you could be hauled off to jail, and you could be outed in the press as well.
The Stonewall Riots of 1969 were not the only instances of LGBT Americans standing up to police extortion and cruelty, but it became a rallying point for homosexuals the world over. Protest marches in New York and Boston gathered much attention, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses, and gays and lesbians started running for and winning public offices at the local level. All of this culminated in tens of thousands showing up for the first National March on Washington for LGBT Rights in 1979. The following year, the Democratic National Convention added a plank on gay rights to its party platform for the first time ever. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first U.S. state to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The conservative backlash took the guise of religious zealots pointing their fingers at gays as the source of American social decay. Anita Bryant started accusing gays and lesbians of corrupting children with their “warped” beliefs about families, and she managed to start a trend of making teaching careers and child adoption by LGBT Americans illegal.
One gay man threw a pie in her face in 1977, and her power to scare conservatives waned shortly thereafter. It was not until twenty years later that the last of her work was undone.
And that has been the struggle of the past few decades since 1985: fighting one legal battle after another to approach equal treatment under the law, instead of being treated as second-class citizens or subhuman adversaries. We just wanted to gain custody of our children, to inherit from our partners, to visit our ill partners in the hospital, to adopt children, and to keep from being fired from jobs or discharged from military service for being different.
Mark Salzwedel
917-318-3368
markvonsalzwedel@gmail.com
The Hidden History of LGBT People Part Two: Damaged Brains– The Pathology of Queerness 1900-1960