their own subcultures, with their own gathering places, social hierarchies, norms, val-
ues, and group cohesion (that is, a feeling that “we belong together”). Sometimes they
can even work to change social disapproval. Gay men and lesbians have probably been
the most successful at creating social change. Thirty years ago, the mass media com-
monly carried articles about crazy “homosexuals.” How could anybody engage in such
behavior? Today it is just as likely to carry articles about crazy homophobes. How
could anyone be so prejudiced? This is a big change in a short time. What happened?
As early as the nineteenth century, there were gay neighborhoods in some large
cities, such as Paris, Berlin, and New York, but most people with same-sex interests
believed that they were alone (Chauncey, 1993). Medical science believed there were
probably only a few thousand homosexuals, mostly in psychiatric hospitals. That
changed during World War II, where gay and lesbian soldiers found each other and
realized that there were many more than anyone thought (the Kinsey Report of 1948
helped also). However, they still faced oppression.
If a man sat next to you in a bar and offered to shake hands, he could be an under-
cover police officer, who would count the handshake as a “homosexual overture” and
arrest you. An arrest for “homosexuality” could get you fired, kicked out of your
apartment, sent to prison, or sent to a psychiatric hospital (where you could be sub-
ject to electroshock therapy and forced castration). In the 1950s, gay men and les-
bians began forming organizations such as the Mattachine Society, One, Incorporated,
and the Daughters of Bilitis, to petition for the end of police harassment.
The 1969 Stonewall riots, three days of resistance to police harassment in New York
City, led to the formation of the Gay Liberation Front. More gay rights groups followed,
until by 1975, there were hundreds: student groups, religious groups, political groups,
social groups—groups for practically any interest you could imagine, in practically every
city and town in the United States, until a whole new social movement emerged, the
gay rights movement. They were not apologetic. They were loud, in-your-face, “out
and proud”; staging sit-ins, marches, and media “zaps”; shouting rather
than whispering, demanding rather than asking: We are not crazy! We
are not criminals! We are an oppressed minority!
And they were extremely successful. During the next few years,
sodomy laws were thrown out in half of the U.S. states, the Ameri-
can Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of
disorders, a dozen Christian denominations voted to allow gay peo-
ple full membership, and a new term, homophobia,was coined to
describe antigay prejudice (Armstrong, 2005).
In 1977, the top-rated TV sitcom, Three’s Company,was based
on the premise that a straight guy, Jack Tripper (John Ritter), could
pretend to be gay so a conservative landlord would let him share an
apartment with two girls. (That premise would have been impossible
a few years earlier.) By 2004, Queer Eye for the Straight Guychore-
ographed complete makeovers for straight men (to make them more
appealing to women), courtesy of five “fabulous” gay culture experts.
Why was the gay rights movement so successful? One answer may
be the connections with nongay people: It arose simultaneously with
the youth counterculture of the late 1960s, when millions of college-
aged people were protesting all sorts of injustices, from the Vietnam
War to racial inequality. The gay rights activists were mostly college
aged, members of that same counterculture. One of their early slo-
gans was “We are your children.” Political and social leaders were
faced, for the first time, with gay men and lesbians who looked and
acted like other young people, who could indeed be their children.
SEXUAL INEQUALITY 337The modern gay and lesbian
movement is about more than
removing discrimination
against homosexuals. It is also
about the right to live openly
as parents, workers, and
neighbors. n