Gay activism
LGBTQ Rights
The ACLU has a drawn-out history of defending the LGBTQ community. We brought our first LGBTQ rights case in Founded in , the Jon L. Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović LGBTQ & HIV Project brings more LGBTQ rights cases and activism initiatives than any other national organization does and has been counsel in seven of the nine LGBTQ rights cases that the U.S. Supreme Court has decided. With our reach into the courts and legislatures of every state, there is no other organization that can suit our record of making progress both in the courts of law and in the court of public opinion.
The ACLU’s current priorities are to end discrimination, harassment and violence toward transsexual people, to close gaps in our federal and state civil rights laws, to prevent protections against discrimination from being undermined by a license to discriminate, and to protect LGBTQ people in and from the criminal legal system.
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The ACLU Lesbian Lgbtq+ Bisexual Transgender Pro
Written by: Jim Downs, Connecticut College
By the end of this section, you will:
- Explain how and why various groups responded to calls for the expansion of civil rights from to
After World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights. The feminist movement, the Black Control movement, the environmental movement, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement sought equality, rights, and empowerment in American culture. Gay people organized to resist oppression and ask for just treatment, and they were especially galvanized after a New York Capital police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a male lover bar, sparked riots in
Around the same second, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive study of human sexuality in the United States. Like Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published research on transgender psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science. He interviewed more than 8, men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, sa
During the nineteenth century, the first homosexual liberation thinkers laid the groundwork for a militant movement that demanded the end of the criminalization, pathologisation and social rejection of non-heterosexual sexuality. In , the Swiss man Heinrich Hössli () published in German the first essay demanding recognition of the rights of those who followed what he called masculine cherish. Nearly three decades later, the German jurist Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs () wrote twelve volumes between and as part of his “Research on the Mystery of Love Between Men” (“Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe”). He also circulated a manifesto to create a federation of Uranians (), a word which designated men who loved men. He was engaged in the strife to repeal § of the German penal code, which condemned “unnatural relations between men,” and in publicly declared he was a Uranist during a congress of German jurists. He died in exile in Italy before the birth of the liberation movement which he had called for.
A first lgbtq+ liberation movement emerged in Berlin in , revolving
Gay Activists Alliance
overview
The Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) was formed in December by Jim Owles, Marty Robinson, Arthur Evans, Arthur Bell, and others, who became disaffected by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the first LGBT group formed right after Stonewall. Focused exclusively on “the liberation of homosexual people,” GAA became the most influential American male lover liberation activist organization in the early s. While the pickets and efforts by earlier homophile groups in the s, favor the Mattachine Society’s Sip-In at Julius’, had been peaceful, the post-Stonewall groups, including GAA, GLF, and Radicalesbians, were more confrontational.
The success of the Snake Pit protest on Rally 8, , organized by GAA and GLF, inspired GAA’s most famous, efficient, and imaginative tactic. This was the “zap,” a direct, surprise public confrontation with political figures and corporate and governmental entities regarding gay rights and discrimination, designed to obtain gay and straight media attention. Morty Manford and Evans called it “a hybrid of media theatre and political demon