a four-part series by Mark Salzwedel
Part Four: Gay Plagues and Gay Rights
Taking the Fight to the Courts, 1985 Onward
By the early 1980s, an earlier pandemic (AIDS) made its appearance, and because it first spread among gay men, hemophiliacs, prostitutes, and drug addicts, the Christian right claimed it was God’s judgment on the sinful. Larry Speakes, President Reagan’s press secretary, in 1982 laughed at the idea that the administration would do anything to stop a disease among gay men. He didn’t feel personally threatened by the “gay plague.”
It wasn’t until 1984 that the department of Health and Human Services identified the virus responsible and produced a test to detect it in blood. They promised a vaccine within 2 years. It never arrived.
Over the next 35 years, over 700,000 Americans would die of AIDS, around 60% of them gay men. Some gay men lost most of their friends, and many survivors wondered if they would be next.
Because of that connection, gay men were forbidden to donate blood, even though the FDA screened all donations for HIV. It wasn’t until 1985 (with 12,000 Americans dead) that President Reagan even spoke the word AIDS. It wasn’t until the Reagans’ personal friend, Rock Hudson, died of AIDS that they felt any urgency to develop a treatment for the disease.
After relentless pressure from activist groups and protestors, the FDA finally approved AZT in 1987. It was the first treatment for the disease, and it only seemed to slow the disease’s progress toward eventual death. By 1995, AIDS was the leading cause of death among American men 25-44, and after fifteen years, finally a successful treatment, protease inhibitors, started decreasing the death count.
With the 1990s also came the first advances in the fight for equal rights. The term “domestic partnership” was used to give gays and lesbians the right to some marriage benefits while still not giving them the right to marry. The push to include antigay violence as a hate crime began as well.
In 1993, President Clinton stopped the practice of dishonorably discharging gay and lesbian soldiers, but insisted they had to remain closeted to get that protection through the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. As a result, around one million queers marched on the nation’s capital demanding equal rights, not special accommodations like “domestic partnership” and “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The push for the equal right to marry came to a head in the 1990s. As a lesbian couple in Hawaii sued for the right to wed, conservatives pushed through the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which Clinton signed, allowing states to deny marriages performed in other states. Although precedent was set in Romer v. Evans in 1996, it wasn’t until United States v. Windsor in 2013 that DOMA was finally invalidated. The state couldn’t prove that the denial of gay rights served a valid purpose.
By 2015, 36 of the 50 states had legalized same-sex marriage, and the Supreme Court could no longer turn a blind eye to discrimination against gays. In a 5-4 decision, the Court upheld Obergefell v. Hodges, declaring that the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Constitution held no exception for LGBT Americans. By 2011, gays could visit their partner in the hospital without being turned away. In 2016, the Supreme Court granted LGBT Americans the right to adopt children in every state.
But the fight is not over. Sixty-nine countries, mostly in Africa, criminalize simply existing as a homosexual. Thirteen countries, mostly in the Middle East, allow LGBT people to be executed, even though only five do it regularly. Here in the U.S., 27 states don’t grant any protection or equality to gay people, in Wisconsin you can still discriminate against trans people, and in Utah you can still throw LGBT people out of your property or hotel. And 6 states are still trying to restrict transgender Americans from getting gender reassignment surgery, because there is no national rights protection for them.