(edited for copyright purposes-proud patriot Moderator Democratic
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SOURCE SITE
http://www.isreview.org/issues/63/feat-stonewall.shtml
Sherry Wolf is the author of the forthcoming Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of Gay Liberation (Haymarket Books, 2009). Here the ISR prints an excerpt from her book. Wolf is on the editorial board of the ISR.
THE SIXTIES is often perceived as an era of social upheaval and orgiastic revelry. But for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) folks in America, the efflorescence of sexual expression did not begin until the waning months of that decade in the heart of the nation’s then-largest bohemian enclave and gay ghetto, New York’s Greenwich Village. The Stonewall Riots that began in the wee hours of June 28, 1969,1 lasted six nights and catapulted the issue of sexual liberation out of the Dark Ages and into a new era.
The relative freedoms and social acceptance that millions of particularly urban American LGBT people experience today would have seemed as surreal to that earlier generation as the prospect of electing an African-American president. On the heels of the U.S. military’s postwar purge of gays, President Eisenhower signed a 1953 executive order that established “sexual perversion” as grounds for being fired from government jobs. And since employment records were shared with private industry, exposure or suspicion of homosexuality could render a person unemployable and destitute. “Loitering in a public toilet” was an offense that could blacklist a man from work and social networks, as lists of arrestees were often printed in newspapers and other public records. Most states had laws barring homosexuals from receiving professional licenses, which could also be revoked upon discovery. Sex between consenting adults of the same sex, even in a private home, could be punishable for up to life in prison, confinement in a mental institution, or even castration.
In 1917, foreign LGBT people were barred from legally immigrating to the United States due to their supposed “psychopathic personality disorder.”2 Illinois was the only state in the country, since 1961, where homosexuality was not explicitly outlawed. New York’s penal code called for the arrest of anyone in public wearing fewer than three items of clothing “appropriate” to their gender. And California’s Atascadero State Hospital was compared with a Nazi concentration camp and known as a “Dachau for queers” for performing electroshock and other draconian “therapies” on gays and lesbians. One legal expert argues that in the 1960s, “The homosexual…was smothered by law.”3
This repression existed alongside a growing acknowledgement of the existence of lesbians and gays in literature, theater, movies, and newspapers. Cultural outlets exposed an expanding gay world to people who may never have known of its existence, including those who would finally discover affirmation and a name for their desires. In an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) co-founder Phyllis Lyon recounts how when she met her lover and the group’s co-founder Del Martin in 1949 she had no idea there was such a possibility as lesbianism.4 By the 1960s, that would no longer be possible for an adult woman in urban America. Bestsellers like James Baldwin’s Another Country and Mary McCarthy’s The Group included lesbian characters in their plots. And the New York Times ran a front-page story on the city’s gay male scene as “the most sensitive open secret,” leading to a spate of feature articles—ranging from hostile to sympathetic—in Life, Look, Newsweek, and Time.5
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