A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

Between 1969 and 1979, more than thirty thousand gay people, the majority of them men, moved to San Francisco. Like other great migrations, such as southern African Americans moving north, this shift—which continued into the 1980s—was vital in remaking a minority culture and formed one of the most important gay political and cultural centers in the United States.

In December 1973—six months before the Time article—the American Psychiatric Association, after being lobbied by lesbian and gay activists and professionals within the organization, voted to formally drop homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).

But after Stonewall, gay rights activists—gay liberationists had little interest in specific legal issues—began to lobby to repeal sodomy laws and pass statutes outlawing discrimination against gays. By 1979, twenty states had repealed their sodomy laws, some willingly and others after legal battles.

In 1975, voters in Massachusetts elected Elaine Noble to the state’s House of Representatives, making her the first openly lesbian or gay state legislator in U.S. history.

Proposition 6 was proactive. It sought to prohibit lesbians and gay men, as well as any teacher who was found “advocating, imposing, encouraging or promoting” homosexuality, from teaching in public schools. Lesbian and gay activists—including Harvey Milk—spent months organizing the “No on 6” campaign, which successfully defeated the proposition by a 58.4 percent to 41.6 percent margin.

And on some level, homosexuality offered alternatives to heterosexuals that they found intriguing. That was why heterosexuals, caught between fascination and fear, experienced such ambivalence. A poster held by a lesbian at New York’s Gay Pride March in 1971 summed up this irony. It read: WE ARE YOUR WORST FEAR. WE ARE YOUR BEST FANTASY.

The “dangerous” connection between homosexuals and children was looming large in the public imagination, and much of this sentiment was enacted into law. States began passing laws that affected a range of family issues, such as banning lesbians and gay men from adopting children or becoming foster parents.

The legal and cultural wars of the late 1970s brought LGBT communities across the nation together in powerful ways, including massive rallies and campaigns against this new wave of political repression. When the repression took a violent turn—as it did with the June 24, 1973, firebombing of a New Orleans gay bar, in which thirty-two people were burned to death, or the assassination of San Francisco mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk in 1978—the diverse LGBT community was able to put aside its internal differences to fight a common enemy.

HIV/AIDS is not specifically connected to homosexuality or same-sex sexual behavior. But because it was first detected in gay males and rapidly spread through the gay male community, it immediately became associated with gay men in the public imagination. This quickly lead to three dire consequences. First, gay male sexuality, now synonymous with a fatal illness, became more stigmatized then ever before. Second, this stigmatization led to numerous laws that discriminated against people with AIDS in insurance, the workplace, and housing. In some municipalities, children who were HIV-positive or diagnosed with AIDS were forbidden to attend school. Third, because people with AIDS were so demonized and because they were often associated with outsider groups—by 1983 it became clear that intravenous drug users, Haitian immigrants, and a small number of hemophiliacs were also at high risk—the media and state and federal governments provided little in the way of basic education or even news coverage.

Because of the deep denial of the situation’s gravity—denial that clearly would not have occurred if the majority of people being affected by AIDS had been white heterosexuals—medical research, prevention education, and basic care for the women and men who were sick started far too late. This lack of response, which in retrospect can only be understood as willful negligence, helped construct a social situation that allowed an epidemic to spread unchecked.

Moore argues that European medieval society created categories of “dangerous” groups—Jews, heretics, lepers, homosexuals—whose ostracization made the majority feel safer. Moore’s theory conflates neatly with Mary Douglas’s notions of purity and danger. Douglas points out how societies put into place edicts, laws, social proscriptions, and prejudices that maintain the preexisting conservative underpinnings of society by controlling or stopping what they understand to be cultural pollution.

Author Sarah Schulman notes that the message of her 1990 novel People in Trouble, set in the early days of the epidemic in New York City’s Lower East Side, was “that personal homophobia becomes societal neglect, that there is a direct relationship between the two.”21 This observation—that personal prejudice has a fundamental, devastating effect on public opinion and policy—explains to a great degree how ignorance, misunderstanding, dislike, fear, and hatred of homosexuals could escalate to such an extent that large numbers of Americans could simply not care about the deaths of their fellow citizens.

In many ways, ACT UP was a return to the raucous street actions of the Gay Liberation Front and the “zaps” of the Gay Activist Alliance. But it was also a repudiation of the play-within-the-system approach of the reformist LGBT rights groups.

ACT UP took to the streets almost immediately. On March 24, three weeks after the first meeting, ACT UP members marched on Wall Street demanding an end to profiteering by drug companies and easier access to experimental HIV drugs. Seventeen people were arrested for civil disobedience. Within months, the Food and Drug Administration announced that it would shorten the drug approval process by two years. On April 15, ACT UP marched on New York’s General Post Office, where thousands were waiting in line to file tax returns. This was the first time ACT UP used the image of the upside-down pink triangle and the phrase “Silence = Death.”

ACT UP did not specifically see itself as an LGBT group. All communities were affected by AIDS, but in particular impoverished communities, communities of color, women, immigrants, and—as the epidemic spread—children. ACT UP’s single-issue mandate translated into a multicommunity coalition.

During this time, many LGBT people began using the word “queer” to describe themselves and their culture. This was partly an act of reclaiming language, just as gay liberationists had used once-pejorative words such as “fag” and “dyke” in a new, positive context that could change their political meaning. Unlike those terms, “queer” could be used to describe people with a wide range of sexual identities who were working in coalition.

Just as “queer” had been angrily shouted at lesbians and gay men in past decades, ACT UP and other activists now shouted the word as a declaration of difference and strength.

ACT UP, like many forms of art, was known for “going too far.” But the people who have had to go too far to assert their own independence and deeply held beliefs about social justice—such as Anne Hutchinson, Jemima Wilkinson, Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman, Victoria Woodhull, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Hay, and Bayard Rustin—have made the most lasting changes in American social policy, political beliefs, and everyday lives.