SXL 115S/ENG 101SPerspectives in Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual StudiesLGB History |
Last update: 24 February 2001
| ca. 700 BCE | Sappho writes love poetry to women | |
| ca. 375 BCE | Plato's Symposion, articulations of homosexuality by the comic poet Aristophanes | "in the time of the god Ouranos, father of Zeus, people were doubled, male+male, female+female, male+female; then they split) and by a certain Pausanias, an exclusive pederast, with his lover the poet Agathon |
| ca. 60 ACE | St Paul | Romans 1:26-27: "For this cause God gave them up into vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature. And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet." |
| ca. 150 | Soranos (Grk physician), Acute & Chronic Diseases | homosexuals are effeminate men affllicted with a diseased mind. Tribades pursue women with almost masculine jealousy. |
| 390 | Roman emperors Theodosius, Valentinian II, and Arcadius proscribe the death penalty for anal intercourse | "All persons who have the shameful custom of condemning a man's body, acting the part of a woman's, to the sufferenace of an alien sex (for they appear not to be different from women), shall expiate a crime of this kind by avenging flames in the sight of the people." -- a law aimed at eliminating male prostitution, which was not enforced since the state continued to collect a tax on male prostitutes until 518. |
| c. 400 CE | St Augustine (d. 430 CE). Converting from Manichaeism (individuals were put on earth to decide good or evil; one of the evils was the necessity to procreate) to Christianity, A. was 'liberated' from his 'insatiable' desire for sex; thus A. was able finally to join the Elect. | Sex by lust was evil; sex unaccompanied by lust, for procreation & children only, was ok. Fornication was a sin, but because children might result, it was less a sin than sodomy or lesbianism. Fallatio was condemned, like non-missionary intercourses. On lesbianism, A. warns his sister who became a nun: "the love which you bear one another ought not to be carnal, but spiritual." |
| 538 | Byzantine emperor Justinian incorporates the death penalty for homosexuality in the Institutes, part of his Corpus juris civilis: "those guilty either of adultery or of giving themselves up to "works of lewdness with their own sex". | In "Novel 77", if homosexuals did not repent & confess (before being burned at the stake), "because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes, and pestilences; wherefore we adminish man to abstain from the aforesaid unlawful acts, that they may not lose their souls." In "Novel 141" (544), following a plague that devastated Constantinople, God had been provoked because "of the defilement of males which some men sacrilegiously and impiously dare to attempt, perpetrating vile acts upon other men. For instructed by the Holy Scriptures, we know that God brought a just judgment upon those who lived in Sodom, on account of this very madness of intercourse ..." |
| 7th cent. | Cummean Fota (Irish monk): influential penitentials | intercrural intercourse - 2 years penance (sexual purity; special prayers; special diets; no meat for monks or nuns) oral-genital contact: first offence - 4 years; habitual - 7 years anal intercourse -- 7 years Theodore of Tarsus: lesbianic or female masturbation - 3 years; male homosexuality - 10 Gregory III: lesbians - 160 days; male homosexuality - 1 year |
| 1114 | same-sex intercourse part of the charges leveled against Christian heretics | |
| 1140 | Gratian's codification of canon law: sodomy was deliberately vaguely defined as any kind of 'abnormal' sexual conduct | "man with man, a woman with a woman, or a man with a woman outside of the fit vessell", along with bestiality, onanism. |
| 1212 & 1214 | Councils of Paris & Rouen | nuns may not sleep together and require a lamp to be kept burning |
| 1215 | 4th Lateran Council | 3 capital sins: idolatry, sexual impurity, homicide |
| c. 1250 | St Albertus Magnus (1206-1280) | homosexuality proceeded from a burning frenzy, was contagious and could spread rapidly from one person to another; the young must be watched therefore carefully. |
| ca. 1250 | St Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) | sins against nature included all lust that was directed solely to the pursuit of venereal pleasure and which entirely excluded procreation (here ranked): bestiality, same-sex relations, "intercourse in an unnatural position", masturbation (equated with effeminancy [Latin molles, like the Greek malakízo, meaning 'to soften' an erection]) |
| 1307 | Philip IV of France arrests grand master of the Masonic Knights Templars on charges of heresy & sodomy | 3000 executed |
| 14th c | Cino da Pistoia: "there are certain women, inclined to foul wickedness, who exercise their lust on other women and pursue them like men" | |
| ca. 1500 | Martin Luther (1483-1546) | "The heinous conduct of the people of Sodom is extraordinary, in as much as they departed from the natural passion and longing of the male for the female, which was implanted by God, and desired what is altogether contrary to nature." |
| ca. 1550 | John Calvin (1509-1564) | condemned all forms of intercourse not leading to procreation as unnatural. |
| ca. 1300 | The heretical group (late medieval) of Albigensians or Cathars or "Bulgars" or "believers in 'bouggerie'" (the etymology for "buggery") | originally just a heresy, for which burning was proscribed. |
| 1533 | parliament under Henry VIII classifies buggery (= same sex activity, bestiality, and anal intercourse by men; no mention of women) as a felony | death, losses of goods, loss of lands. The law was meant to be renewable annually, but made perpetual in 1540 and renewd by Elizabeth II in 1564. |
| 1541 | Rev. Nicholas Udall, author of Ralph Roister Doister, headmaster of Eton | charged with committing buggery, imprisoned, & dismissed from Eton, but released within a few months, appointed headmaster of Westminster. |
| 1548 | Agnolo Firenzuola, Ragionamenti amorosi | the female characters debate why it might not be better for a woman to love another, but this kind of love is not prefereable because the beauty of men, by a decreee of nature, inspires greater desire in a woman than does the beauty of other women. |
| mid-16th c. | rediscovery of Sappho's poetry | |
| 1578 | a Roman church allows marriages between Portuguese men | these are later arrested and burned |
| 1625 | execution of Richard Cornish, ship's master, in Virginia for sodomy with 29-year old William Crouse, "a rascally boy" | |
| 1631 | the Catholic Earl of Castlehaven was charged by his son with committing sodomy with one of his male servants (named in his will), raping & sodomizing his wife | executed on 14 May. |
| 1637 | at Plymouth, John Alexander & Thomas Roberts were found "guilty of lude behavior and uncleane carriage one with another, by often spendinge their seed one upon another" | they were not given the death penalty; but soon after 18 yr old William Hackett, observed on a Sunday copulating with a cow, confessed, the cow was burned before his eyes and he was hanged. |
| 1646 | William Plaine, executed in Connecticut for corrupting town youths | "to some who questioned the lawfulness of such filthy practice, he did insinuate seeds of atheism, questioning whether there was a God." |
| 1649 | 2 women at Plymouth were charged with lewd conduct | one was found guilty, the only prosecution in American history for lesbian activities |
| 17th c. | Sir Edward Coke, in his commentary on law, defines sodomy as homosexual activity or anal penetrative intercourse necessarily involving penetration (thus no lesbianism) | both the active & passive participants (unless minors) were to be rgarded as felons, which made it impossible to prosecute if sodomy took place in private and only between two people, since one could not testify against the other without implicating himself/herself |
| early 18th c. | Lodovico Maria Sinistrari writes a treatise on 'female sodomy' so priests could know what sins to absolve | "sodomy is carnal intercourse in the wrong vessel"; this left out mutual masturbation, and reserved true Lesbianism only for women with long clitorises. |
| ca. 1725 | Voltaire (1694-1778) | "a young boy will often, by the freshness of his complexion, by the intensity of his coloration and by the sweetness of his eyes, resemble a beautiful girl for the space of two or three years." |
| 1765-9 | William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England | "the infamous crime against nature, committed either with man or beast ... an offense of so dark a nature, so easily charged, and the negative so difficult to be proved ..." |
| 1810 | Napoleonic Code | no sexual activity between consenting partners in privacy is a crime; police raid the White Swan gay bar on Vere St in London |
| 19th century | a growing concern about the causes of homosexuality | rising urbanization brought together more people who exhibited differing characteristics; female prostitution became a major concern, and, with it, male prostitution |
| ca. 1815 | F. Carlier, police official in Paris (population: 2,300,000), began to keep tabs on prostitution, which was legal in France | 7242 "pederasts" in Paris (i.e., 3 %) who had come to the attention of the police (3049 Parisians, 3709 provincials, 484 foreigners). |
| 1850 | 1st complete translation of Plato"s Symposium | by Benjamin Jowett and John Addington Symonds (see below) |
| 1864 | 1st "homosexual panic" legal tactic (from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, "The Riddle of 'Man-Manly' Love" translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1994, p. 132 | "The French painter Allard, an Urning, met a 19-year-old youth names Margeriti in Rome in the summer of 1864 and began to court him. However, the latter murdered him, plunging a hammer through his brain, and fled with Allard"s watch and money. Accused of murder and theft, the youth explained that he was enraged, as it were, by those "disgraceful flirtations." The court of justice in Rome, it appears, was not convinced because, it said, he could have refused those offers and could have protected himself. The court sentenced him to life imprisonment." |
| pre 1868 | Alabama Senator William Rufus de Vane King, shared rooms with President James Buchanan [1791-1868] in Washington, DC for twenty years, and wrote two letters that could be construed as containing gay content to James Buchanan, the country's only bachelor president. [Carl Sferrazza Anthony, in The Alyson Almanac 1990, p. 101 | |
| 1870 | Ernest Boulton & Frederick Park arrested in London | for indecent behavior (cross-dressing in public) and for prostitution posing as women [not as male prostitutes] |
| 1885, ca. 10 July | Parliament passes new laws to curb child slavery and (female) prostitution | age of a girl"s consent raised to 16; police had the right to raid suspected houses of women"s prostitution; and "any male person who, in public or private, ... procures ... the commission by any male person of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor ..." with a prison term of no more than a year. Now male homosexual acts, even in private, were criminalized. Prior to this date, the only law concerning male homosexuality was that of 1533, which carried the death penalty until 1861 |
| 1891 | John Addington Symonds | A Problem in Modern Ethics, a review of the existing scholarly literature on homosexuality |
| 1895, February | trials of Oscar Wilde | 1: Lord Alfred Douglas"s father, the Marquis of Queensberry leaves his card for Wilde at the Albemarle Club: "To Oscar Wilde, Posing as a Somdomite!" (sic): => Regina v. Queensberry for libel; suit withdrawn 2: Wilde tried according to the law of 1885, along with Alfred Taylor 3: Wilde tried separately, guilty, sentenced to 2 years hard labor, dies in 1900 |
| 1898 | Vagrancy Act | "any male person who knowingly lived wholly or in part on the earnings of female prostitutes, or who solicited or importuned for immoral purposes" etc. etc. (Always defined as homosexual soliciting, never as men soliciting women) |
| 1865-75 | Karl Heinrichs Ulrichs (1825-1895; pseudonymn: Numa Numantius), wrote pamplets (most influential, "Memnon: Die Geschlectsnatur des mannliebenden Urnings", 1868): his own homosexuality was not abnormal but were inborn and therefore natural; coined the term "urning" (from Ouranos in Plato"s Symposium), "urningin" (female homo), "dioning" (heterosexual male); "mannling" (homosexual men who preferred effeminate men); "weibling" (homosexual menwho preferred powerful men). | up to a certain stage of development, the sexes were the same, after which a threefold division took place: male, female, and the third sex urning/unringin (individuals who had the physical features of one sex and the sexual instinct of the other-inversion) |
| 1869 | Karoly Maria Benkert (pseudonymn: Kertbeny) coins the word "homosexual" | article (reprinted by Magnus Hirschfeld in Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 6, 1905, i-iv, 3-66: "in addition to the normal sexual urge in men and women, Nature in her sovereign mood has endowed at birth certain male and female individuals with the homosexual urge, thus placing them in a sexual bondage which renders them physically and psychically incapable-even with the best intention-of normal erection. This urge creates in advance a direct horror of the opposite sex, and the victim of this passion finds it impossible to suppress the feelings which individuals of his own sex exercise upon him." |
| 1869 | Carl Westphal (1833-90), professor of psychiatry at Berlin | case history of a young lesbian, whose abnomality ("konträre Sexualempfindung") was "congenital, not acquired, and therefore not a vice." Westphal made 200 further case studies |
| 1882 | Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893, director of the Salpêtrière asylum), & Valentin Magna (1835-1916) tried hypnosis with limited success | "inversion was a constitutional nervous weakness due to hereditary degneration." |
| 1887 | Paul Moreau | along with the five senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, and feeling), a sixth sense, genital, which "could also suffer physical or psychical injury without damaging the other mental functions; propensity to injury was due to a hereditary taint, a predisposition to perversion that environmental factors (e.g., age, poverty, constitution, temperament, seasons of the year, climate, food) could encourage-perversions include inversion, nymphomania, satyriasis, bestiality, rape, necrophilia." Little hope of cure since inverts lay halfway between sanity and madness (they should be institutionalized), pulled toward madness and inversion by masturbation-another cause for watching children closely. Inversion is thus seen as a kind of degeneracy, a Darwinian reversal of progressive evolution, arrested development according to Freud. |
| 1899 | Cesare Lombroso | humans had progressed from primitive society to higher levels of cilization, and from a hermaphroditic or self-fertilizing stage to a high monosexual stage. So a child had to repeat the progression of the species, therefore they had to be watched closely. Innate criminality and sexual deviation were equal to moral insanity, and proved that such people had a large number of primitive characteristics such a jutting jaws, malformed crania, close-set eyes; they should be put in asylums. |
| 1894 | Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902): Psychopathia Sexualis (7th ed.) | the purpose of sex was reproductive; non-reproductive sex was unnatural, a perversion of the sexual instinct "man"s sexual drive is the most important factor in social existence, the strongest incentive to the exertion of strength and acquisition of property, to the foundation of a home, and the awakening of altruistic feeling, first for a person of the opposite sex, then for the offspring, and in a wider sense for all humanity" though religion, law, education, and morality all gave civilized man the aids by which he could bridle his passion, man was still always in danger of sinking from "the pure clear heights of chaste love into the mire of common sensuality" abnormal people contracted their inversion from "fequent abuses of the sexual organs (mastrubation) or from an inherited abnormal constitution of the nervous system"; he collected 200 cases, among whom were a collector of violet-striped handkerchiefs, a man who loved to smell roses, a girl who longed to kiss other girls since inversion was pathological, penal laws should be repealed, and patients put in asylums |
| 19th century | Golden Rule Pleasure Club (NYC), gay club | |
| late 19th-century | medical claim that female "inverts had unusually large clitorises," supposedly used "in sexual intercourse as a man would his penis" | George Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Deviance," Salmagundi 58-59 (year?) 114-146, esp. p. 132, citing: Wise, "Case of Sexual Perversion," 90; Lichtenstein, "The Fairy and the Lady Lover," 372; and J.C. Shaw and G.N. Ferris, "Perverted Sexual Instinct," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 10 (1883) 185-204 |
| 1860 | Walt Whitman | Leaves of Grass, including the "Calamus" poems |
| 1895 | founding of the Frauenbewegung or "Women's Movement" | |
| 1896 | Havelock Ellis (1859-1939): Studies in the Psychology of Sex (last edition 1938) | probably some truth in all explanations of homosexuality (acquired, inherited, physical, psychological), though more like inborn and non-pathological; neurosis more common in homosexuals but probably because of intolerance deviations from the norm were harmless and occasionally even valuable sexual experimentation among the young was natural and normal society should repeal its laws sex between consenting adults in private, offer contraception |
| 1896 | first homosexual journal, Der Eigene | |
| 1897, 15 May | founding of the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) publishes the Jahrbuch f¨r sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1899), the first public journal of homosexual studies | Encylopedia Sexualis: a Comprehensive Encyclopedia-Dictionary of the Sexual Sciences: inversion was not a perversion, but the result of certain inborn characteristics influenced by internal secretions of the glands; estimated 3% of the male population was homosexual |
| 1902 | Krupp, Eulenburg, Moltke trials | the German munitions tsar Krupp, though married, held orgies at his Capri villa; rumors leaked out to the press; declared person non grata in Italy for corrupting minors; Krupp sues the German newspaper that had first printed the scandal, but commits suicide the Kaiser had tried to cover up the scandal; his political enemies bring charges against Philip, Prince zu Eulenburg-Herefeld and Count Kuno von Moltke. Moltke first sued his accuser who was sent to jail. The trial agains Eulenburg kept getting deferred until WW I. |
| 1903 | Hirschfeld sends out 6611 questionnaires, the 1st sex survey | 2.2% homosexual |
| 1904 | Anna Rüling address the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee | "In order to obtain for homosexuals and all women generally the opportunity to live according to their natures, it is necessary to actively aid the women"s movement"s efforts to expand educational opportunities and new professions ofr women". |
| 1905 | Texas finally defines sodomy | copulation with a woman per anum |
| 1908 | Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex | homosexuals were fit for progressive leadership in a democratic society since they combined male & female qualities. |
| ca. 1910 | Sigmund Freud wrote little about homosexuality, but believed generally, like Krafft-Ebing, that the sexual drives had been misdirected | homosexuality was a nervous or mental condition; or homosexuality (according to "behavioralists") is just another direction. Homoerotic behavior is a normal part of growing up, though most individuals move beyond this stage -- thus homosexuality is an arrested stage of development, where the child does not move beyond its homoerotic stage. In the absence of a father or in the presence of a weak one, a boy in love with his mother might "fly from incest", or, suppressing his desires for the father, seeks to be like the woman he loves. Since the causes here are environmental, most Freudians believe that homosexuality can be cured. |
| 1910 | Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform | nationalism and cult of motherfhood, fidelity, and spirituality opposed to male carnality and abortion (see the culturalist feminist movement of the 1980s) |
| 1913 | British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology founded | sponsors lectures & pamphlets through the 1920s |
| 1914-1918 | WW I | |
| 1915 | Emma Goldman tours the USA | she includes gays & Lesbians in her calls for socialism |
| 1915 | California defines sodomy | sodomy includes any sexual penetration, however slight and also criminalizes fellatio & cunnilingus |
| 1919 | Magnus Hirschfeld founds the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft | it offered marriage & career counseling, venereal disease testing & reatment, family planning and sex education programs, and psychiatric and physical therapy, a library & museum |
| 1919 | "Anders als die Andern", a movie | depicts the injustice to gays, blackmail; it is suppressed the next year |
| 1919 | Kurt Hiller founds the Aktionsausschuss | a united front of gay groups organized by Kurt Hiller |
| 1919 | urban riots in Chicago & East St Louis, as black veterans return from the war and find unemployment & racism, prompting a "Red Scare" (1919-20), to eliminate all signs of disorder | 16 sailors arrested at the Newport Naval Training Station, entrapment by a squad of 41 police officers who kept coming back for more entrapping |
| 1920 | Natalie Barney writes Pensées d'une amazone | |
| 1921 | Parliament attempts to criminalize lesbianism but the proposal is dropped | the proposal "maligned all good women, the overwhelming majority of whom would not know anything about what the law was trying to cover." |
| 1921 | Marcel Proust writes A la recherche du empts perdu, vol. 4 | "Sodome et Gomorre" |
| 1921 | Magnus Hirschfeld beated by Nazis | |
| 1922 | Andre Gide writes Corydon | |
| 1924 | Inversions, the 1st gay French journal (lasted 5 issues) | |
| 1924, 10 Dec | "The Soceity for Human Rights" founded in Chicago | the 1st gay rights organization in the US; it lasts a couple of months |
| 1926 | lesbian & gay journals banned in Germany | |
| 1928 | Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness | the first lesbian novel |
| 1928 | Adolf Brand surveys German candidates on their stand for election and received the Nazi answer | "Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight and it"s madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally"-anti-communist |
| 1929 | the Aktionsausschuss gains a narrow victory | paragraph 175 of the Prussian constitution is removed |
| 1933 | The Bund Deutsches Frauenverein combats "sexual libertarianism, pornography, abortion, venereal diseases, advertisements for contraceptives and the double standrad" | dissolved and amalgamated anyway into the Nazi Frauenfront German women are removed from government and the work force: "Kinder, Kirche, K¸che" |
| 1933, 6 May | Nazi students destroy the Institute for Sex Research and burn its books, papers and photographs | Hirschfeld, already in France, dies in Nice, 15 May 1935 |
| 1933, 30 June-1 July | the "Night of the Long Knives" | Hitler purges the Ernst Röhm"s Storm Troopers of homosexuality |
| 1933 | Benjamin Tarnowski of St Petersburg | perverts acquired inversion as the children of hysterical, epileptic, alcoholic animic tyhpoid, or debauched parents, or who acquired it by masturbating, reading dirty books |
| 1934 | Paragraph 175 is reinstated in Germany | homosexuality recriminized in Russia; mass arrests of gays in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov, and Odessa: actors, musicians, artists, intellectuals sentenced to many years of hard labor in Siberia |
| 1939-1945 | WW II | |
| 1940 | Himmler orders anyone who had more than one homosexual partner to be sent to a concentration camp | 5-15,000 (Pink Triangles) are sent & 50,000 perople are convicted under Paragraph 175 |
| 1940 | Nederlandsch Wetenschappelijk-Humanitair Kommittee (existing since 1911) is disbanded | the Netherlands Roman Catholic Church helps the Nazis hunt out homosexuals |
| 1944 | in Russia all abortions declared illegal | abortions of 1st pregnancy were illegal in 1936 |
| 1944 | last US law against married women teaching repealed | traditional elementary teachers are constructed as (unmarried) women, and many of these teachers are Lesbians |
| 1947 | "Lisa Ben" (anagram for "Lesbian") publishes "Vice-Versa" | 1st US Lesbian magazine |
| 1948 | Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, interviewed 12,000 American volunteers of both sexes, ages, marital status, from every state, educational and scioeconomic status-a 6-point sliding scale of sexual types (1 = exclusively hetero, 6 exclusively homo) | 37% of men had at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm (50% of men who were still single at age 35) 13% were more homosexual than heterosexual 4% men were exclusively homosexual 28% women had homosexual arousal by age 45, and 13% to the point of orgasm 3% women were lesbian (see "1953", below) |
| 1949 | Newsweek article, "Queer People" | names homosexuals as "sex murderers" and identifes homosexuals as destroyers of society |
| 1950, March | John Peurifoy of the State Dept identifies homosexuals as "security risks" | |
| 1950, April | Guy Gabrielson, nat"l chairman of the Republican party: "Perhaps as dnagerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years" | |
| 1950, Dec | Committee on Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government | homosexuals were subject to blackmail, emotionally unstable, and of weak moral fiber. "One homosexual can pollute a Government office", and revealed that between 1947 and 1950, 1,700 applicants for govt jobs had already been turned down because of homosexuality, 4,380 had b een expelled from the military, and 420 were forced to resign or were dismissed from the government |
| 1950, 1 April | Mattachine Society founded (medieval jesters who "spoke the truth") | met secretly at first to avoid police harassment, red-baited by McCarthy |
| 1951 | The One Institute founded (Thomas Carlyle: "A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.") | an educational group, incorporated in 1953, founds a library and a journal "One Magazine", ruled by the US Supreme Court in 1958 as able to be mailed through the post office now allied with the Homosexual Information Center, Simon Levay director |
| 1951 | Clellan S. Ford & Frank A. Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behavior, a broad survey of world cultures | sexual behavior so widely divergent there is no representative set homosexuality occurs rather commonly (though never predominantly) occurs in 76 societies (a minority of the societies survey): 49 considered it normal & socially acceptable; in 27 societies it was reported that homosexuality either did not exist or was very rare |
| 1953 | Mattachine convention in LA, foundation dissolves when a member threatens to take the names of the membership to the press | |
| 1955 | "Mattachine Review" founded | |
| 1957 | Mattachine Society refounded in SF | the new leadership becomes accommodationist, anti-communistic |
| 1953, Jan. - June 1954 | Senator Joe McCarthy's "House of Un-American Activities" (HUAC) includes homosexuality along with communism | "3,500 sex perverts hold federal jobs"; 655 "perverts" fired from the Eisenhower administration |
| 1953 | Christine Jorgensen, an ex-GI, undergoes surgery in Denmark to become a woman | an earlier case in the 1920s of the Danish painter Einar Wagener who became Lili Elbe but she died soon after |
| 1953 | Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, interviewed 8,000 female American volunteers | by age 45, 13% had had sexual contact with another woman to orgasm 20% had had some sexual contact with another woman 28% "recognized erotic" attractions to other women 3-8% of unmarried women rated 4-6 on the Kinsey line ("predominantly homosexual"), and half of these expressed "no regrets" 68% homosexual (vs 40% heterosexual) women experienced orgasm Kinsey report also lists animal species in which homosexuality occurs: "rats, mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, rabbits, porcupines, marten, cattle, antelope, goats, horses, pigs, lions, sheep, monkeys, and chimpanzees"-"lesbian" chimpanzees mate for long periods and lesbian seagulls mate for life |
| 1953 | "Daughters of Bilitis", founded 1953 (the name is taken from a set of poems by Pierre Louys, "Songs of Bilitis", ca. 1890; Perkins, Special Collections, has a rare copy) by Phyllis Lyon & Del Martin | education, public discussions, advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society |
| 1955 | "Daughters of Bilitis" publishes Ladder | first US publication of feminist writings |
| 1955, Dec. 1 | Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, AL | buses desegregated in 1956, and the Civil Rights movement begins |
| 1955-1956 | Martin Luther King boycotts Atlanta's segregation laws | |
| 1957 | the Wolfenden Commission (England) recommends repealing anti-homosexuality laws. | |
| 1958 | the accommodationist Homosexual Reform Society of England discourages any identification with being gay | |
| 1960 | Lunch Counter sit-ins | |
| 1961 | so many bar raids in San Francisco that the tavern-owners set up the Tavern Guild for self-protection | |
| 1961 | Illinois becomes the 1st state to decriminalize homosexuality between consenting adults in private | |
| 1963 | Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech in Washington DC | |
| 1964 | ACLU advocates changes in the laws against homosexuality | Franklin Kameny (founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington DC, 1961) speaks at the Society of New York, "acceptance as full equals, basic rights & equality as citizens; the right to love whom we wish; "gay is good". New leadership becomes more activist; in San Francisco, the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) aligns itself with Chicanos, gays, blacks, and the poor |
| 1965 | Martin Luther King assassinated | |
| 1965 | Marise Querlin, Women without Men | Lesbianism is more common and more natural than male homosexuality boys, in order to become men, must abandon their love for the mother and turn towards some other woman-his love will become modified without having to change the sex of his choice girls, however, must undergo a complete psychological reversal and to substitute later for the exclusive love of a woman, her mother, the attraction of a man. The girl therefore in her psychological devleopment has a far more perilous path to follow than the boy. Towards the age of 3 or 4 the future woman performs this reversal on the person of her father. But the latter may disappoint her in her immese craving for tenderness, and the girl will therefore have a tendency to revert to the paradise of feminine love. the boy's first sexual sensations are when he starts to masturbate; the little girl does likewise. But whereas the boy has only to follow his course and give up mastrubation while awaiting the sexual act with the woman of his choice, the girl has gradually to transfer part or all of her sexual sensibility. To sum up, this comprises two genital phases, whereas the boy has only one. |
| 1967 | Los Angeles: riots after gay bar raids; demonstrations & speeches | |
| 1967 | Parliament enacts the Wolfenden Report | antihomosexuality laws repealed |
| 1968 | Rev. Troy Perry founds the Metropolitan Community Church in his home | The North American Conference of Homosphile Organizations (NACHO) adopts "homosexuality is in no way inferior to heterosexuality as a valid way of life: |
| 1969, 27 June (Friday) | Stonewall Inn (New York) riots; Christopher St parades | Gay Liberation Fronts begin springing up in SF & NYC: picketing and protesting |
| 1969, Nov | GLF's Jim Owles & Marty Robinson split to found the more moderate Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) | politics now the proper place for gay issues |
| 1970 | NACHO turns gay activist, aligning with the Black Panthers | "Daughters of Bilitis" reverses its accommodationist stance Gay Women's Liberation joined with Women's Coalition Conference: Radicalesbians: "a lesbian is the rage of all women condense to the point of explosion; Lesbian is the word, the label, the condition that holds women in line, a debunking scare term j- woman-identified woman". At the 2nd Congress to Unite Women, they "resolved that Women"s Liberation is a Lesbian plot" |
| 1971 | E.M. Forster, Maurice published posthumously | |
| 1971 | NOW repels attempts to introduce lesbianism as a subject, causes discussions that eventually resolve: "NOW acknowledges the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism." | "Daughters of Bilitis" collapses GAA regroups as the National Gay & Lesbian TaskForce |
| 1972 | ordination of the first openly gay Episcopalian priest, William Johnson | |
| 1973 | Elaine Noble, 1st Lesbian elected to a legislature (Massachusetts) | |
| 1974 | American Psychiatric Association declares homosexuality not a pathology, after two years of panel discussions at their annual conferences | Martin Weinberg & Colin Williams, Male Homosexuals: their Problems and Adaptations: Freudians, because they have been trying to cure homosexuality have not spent enough time studying it; their cases have been too small and too often self-identified patients (i.e., neurotics by definition), no control gorups are used, and most studies have been culture-bound |
| 1974 | Leonard Matlovich dishonorably discharged from the Air Force being gay | |
| 1977, 7 June | Anita Bryant's Save Our Children gets Dade Co., FL to repeal a 6-month old civil rights ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. | Phyllis Schlafly: "if women behave themselves sexually, then men will have to marry them, stay married, and support them. |
| 1977, Nov | Seattle retains its gay rights law | CA rejects the antihomosexual Briggs Proposition 6 Harvey Milk elected to San Francisco Board of Supervisors |
| 1978 | ERA is defeated | National coalition of Black Gays (NCBG) founded, with a journal "Habari-Daftari" still in existence North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) founded |
| 1978, 27 Nov | Harvey Milk, gay activist and member of the San Francisco board of supervisors, and San Francisco Mayor Moscone both assassinated | |
| 1979 | Wm Masters & Virginia Johnson, Homosexuality in Perspective, a case study of 176 homosexuals, of whom they treated 67 to eliminate homosexuality (35% failure rate, and they predicted it would continue to rise after "treatment") | Lesbian and Gay Pride March on Washington |
| 1980 | Black & White Men Together founded | Lesbian Karen Clark elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives |
| 1981 | 1st notice of AIDS | |
| 1982 | 1st international Gay Games | |
| 1983 | congressman Gerry Studds comes out | |
| 1984 | Berkeley: SSSE benefits | |
| 1985 | Supreme Court allows "homosexuality" to be favorably mentioned in Oklahoma schools | Rock Hudson dies of AIDS, one of more than 15,000 deaths attributed to AIDS |
| 1986 | Supreme Court: Bowers v. Hardwick | " any sexual act involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another is a felony" even if committed in private between consenting adults |
| 1987 | ACT-UP founded and initiates a march on Washington | |
| 1989 | US Dept of Defense finds that Lesbians and gay men are well suited to the military | |
| 1991 | Stonewall Group forms in England for "in your face" politics | Connecticutt becomes the 4th state with a gay civil rights bill HIV-positive Tom Duane runs agasint lesbian Liz Abzug for the NY City Council (Duane wins) |
| 1992 | US Supreme Court decleares Kentucky's sodomy law unconstitutional | Vermont votes in an antigay discrimination bill |
| 1996 | May: Supreme Court strikes down anti-homosexual Colorado's Amendment 2 | June: Supreme Court strikes down anti-homosexual Cincinnati's Issue 3 |
| 1997, June | Sex Panic organizes around the issue of Rotello's "Sexual Ecology", a call for safer or no sex among homosexual men |
