HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

also called gay rights movement, or gay liberation movement civil-rights movement that seeks to eliminate sodomy laws barring homosexual acts between consenting adults and that calls for an end to discrimination against homosexuals in employment, credit, housing, public accommodations, and other areas of life. Its ultimate aim is to encourage society's tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality. Before the end of the 19th century there were scarcely any movements for homosexual rights. In 1897 a homosexual Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitres Komitee) was founded in Berlin; it published emancipation literature, sponsored rallies, and campaigned for law reform throughout Germany and in The Netherlands and Austria, developing some 25 local chapters by 1922. Its founder, Magnus Hirschfeld, helped sponsor the World League of Sexual Reform, which held a series of international congresses from 1921 to 1935. Adolf Hitler's rise to power in 1933 ended the German movement. The British also were early activists; in 1914 the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded by Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis for both propagandistic and educational purposes. The chief existing homophile organization in Europe is COC, or Cultur-en Ontspannings-Centrum (Culture and Recreation Center), founded in 1966 in Amsterdam, which has become one of the world's centres for homosexual activism. In the United States, the first major male organization was the Mattachine Society, founded in 195051 in Los Angeles by Henry Hay and four friends and later represented by chapters in several other cities. (The name derived from a medieval French society of masked players, Socit Mattachine, and suggested the fact that social constraints forced homosexuals to publicly mask their proclivity.) The Daughters of Bilitis (named after the Sapphic love poems of Pierre Louys, Chansons de Bilitis) was the first major American organization for female homosexuals; it was founded in San Francisco in 1955. The beginning of militant homosexual activism can virtually be dated. About 3:00 AM on June 28, 1969, the Stonewall Inn, a homosexual bar at 53 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, was raided by New York City police. Instead of passively accepting the situation (as in the past), the some 200 homosexuals present began taunting the police and throwing debris; the riot lasted 45 minutes and resumed on succeeding nights. Protest rallies ensued, and homosexual rights organizations proliferated in the United States from the 1970s on. Stonewall came to be commemorated annually in late June in Gay Pride Week (alternatively, Gay and Lesbian Pride Week), not only in American cities but in cities in several other countries. What Oscar Wilde had called the love that dared not speak its name had, by the late 20th century, become highly outspoken. The gay liberation movement in the United States agitated for the repeal of sodomy laws (i.e., laws prescribing criminal penalties for homosexual sex) and tried to obtain other state laws protecting homosexuals' civil rights and outlawing discrimination based on sexual preference. From the mid-1980s the movement was preoccupied by the AIDS epidemic, which affected disproportionate numbers of homosexual males. Gay-rights activists worked to support AIDS patients, heighten awareness of the disease in the homosexual community, and obtain increased government funding for AIDS research. A relatively tolerant atmosphere toward homosexuality exists in the countries of western and northern Europe. The United States and Great Britain have also become more tolerant; about one-half of all American states have no laws prohibiting homosexual acts between consenting adults, and Britain repealed such a law in 1967. Tolerance has also increased in most countries of the East Asian rim and in the states of eastern and central Europe. Latin America, with its Roman Catholicism and its culture of machismo, remained largely hostile, as did the Muslim nations of the Middle East and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Homosexual activity is thus still illegal in large parts of the world, though it is apparently practiced in every society, either openly or surreptitiously. The international homosexual symbol is the Greek letter lambda (l). Additional reading Barry D. Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement (1987), begins with conditions in the medieval world and includes evidence from around the world. John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (1983), focuses on the period before the Stonewall riots. Margaret Cruikshank, The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (1992), analyzes the successes and failures of modern activism.