http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/fea/20090615/202/2939
by Andy Humm
June 15, 2009
The Stonewall Rebellion, when lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender
people fought back against police repression at a Greenwich Village
bar with a six-day riot in June 1969 is considered the birth of the
modern "gay rights" movement. President Barack Obama just declared
June LGBT Pride Month in the United States, following an example set
by President Bill Clinton during his second term. (This year,
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued her own proclamation at the
State Department.)
Obama then switched his position and let his Justice Department file
briefs supporting both the Defense of Marriage Act, prohibiting
federal recognition of legal same-sex marriages, and the Don't Ask,
Don't Tell policy excluding open gays from the military -- even
though he campaigned against both laws.
The 40th anniversary will be marked by the usual LGBT Pride Parade
down Fifth Avenue and by pride marches all around the world from
Youngstown, Ohio, which is having its first this year, to Moscow,
Russia, where activists get beaten every year by skinheads and
police. There now are separate African American pride parades across
the U.S. as well.
Stonewall gives New York a certain preeminence in the LGBT movement,
but the clash was neither the first public display of gay resistance,
nor has the city and state maintained their claim to be the world
leader in progress since then. Five states -- from Massachusetts to
Iowa -- have already beat us to opening up marriage to gay couples.
Maybe it is New York arrogance, but it was not until this year that
New York City launched an ad campaign, euphemistically called
"Rainbow Pilgrimage," seeking gay tourism -- something that cities
such as London and Amsterdam have been doing for years. (Maybe the
rainbow theme is meant to pick up on the 40th anniversary of the
death of Judy Garland, whose signature song was "Over the Rainbow.")
With gay issues so much in the forefront this year, it's a good time
to look at some examples of where New York has led and where it has
followed -- despite its reputation as the birthplace of the modern movement.
Pre-Stonewall History
While the religious right likes to speak about homosexuality as
something that was always condemned, plenty of cultures have
celebrated it -- the evidence appears on some of the Greek urns in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is even evidence of same-sex
union ceremonies in early Christianity, not to mention the Bible's
celebration of the love of such pairs as Ruth and Naomi as well as
David and Jonathan. These couples may or may not have been gay in the
modern sense, but their ardency for each other certainly goes beyond
friendship. Indeed, Ruth's words to Naomi ("whither thou goest, I
will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my
people, and thy God my God" -- Ruth 1:1 6) are often used in wedding
ceremonies.
In the modern Western world, German physician Magnus Hirshfeld
founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to fight for gay rights
and overturn Germany's anti-sodomy laws in 1897. He enlisted such
supporters as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Martin Buber, Herman Hesse and Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His
Institute for Sexual Research was housed in a villa near the
Reichstag from 1919 until the Nazis drove him out in the 1930s,
famously burning the group's library in 1933.
New York's first gay center was a space the post-Stonewall Gay
Liberation Front rented above what was then Gurdy's Folk City on West
Third Street in 1969. The Gay Activists Alliance worked and played in
a space called The Firehouse at 99 Wooster from 1971 until it was
destroyed in a suspicious fire in 1974. The current LGBT Community
Center opened in 1980.
The first significant American gay group was the Mattachine Society,
founded in Los Angeles by Harry Hay and Rudy Gernreich in 1950 -- and
now being dramatized in a new play called The Temperamentals at the
Barrow Group Theatre through July 5 with Thomas Jay Ryan as Hay and
"Ugly Betty" star Michael Urie as Gernreich, who became a famous
designer. New York got a Mattachine chapter in 1951, and it lasted until 1976.
What may well have been the first public gay demonstration in the
United States took place here in 1964 when Randy Wicker led the
Homosexual League of New York and the League for Sexual Freedom in a
protest against the exclusion of gays from the military on Whitehall
Street in lower Manhattan at the U.S. Army Induction Center.
Two years later, New York Mattachine leader Dick Leitsch, John
Timmons and Craig Rodwell, who went on to establish the recently
departed Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in the Village, successfully
challenged the law banning bars from serving gay people with a 1966
"sip in" at Julius' bar, which is still operating on the corner of
Waverly and West 10th Street.
Post-Stonewall History
Stonewall had immediate repercussions in the movement. Soon after, a
group of gay activists formed the Gay Liberation Front, which was of
a piece with the radical liberation activism of the day and made
alliances with other left movements, including the Black Panthers and
the Young Lords. Its members were confrontational and unapologetic,
and their intense group splintered and ultimately burned out in April
1971. (Some veterans of the group are having a reunion panel on June
25 at 6 p.m. at the LGBT Community Center, which I'll be moderating.)
The Gay Activists Alliance broke with the front to focus on
single-issue gay activism in 1970. The alliance lasted about 10
years, spawning splinters of its own such as Lesbian Feminist
Liberation, part of a lesbian separatist movement.
On the first anniversary of Stonewall -- in June 1970 -- New York
City saw the world's first big gay march. Craig Rodwell played a key
role just by posting a sign in the window of his gay bookstore
calling on people to mark the first anniversary of the rebellion, but
he was aided by both Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance.
The Legislative Battles
During the 1960s, states around the country began repealing
anti-sodomy laws as part of the effort to rid legal codes of archaic
laws. New York's legislature, however, would not act on repeal
despite the urgings of a young member of the State Assembly named Ed
Koch. The New York Court of Appeals ruled the state law was
unconstitutional in 1980. It took until 2003 for the U.S. Supreme
Court to overturn the nation's 13 remaining state sodomy laws.
New York City was the first municipality in the world to propose
amending its human rights law to ban discrimination on the basis of
"sexual orientation," a legal phrase coined by the Gay Activists
Alliance in 1971. The City Council, though, refused to pass the law
for years, while many other major U.S. cities moved ahead and passed
gay rights bills. New York did not join them until 1986.
Village Assemblymember Bill Passanante introduced New York State's
gay rights bill -- the first such state bill in the nation -- in
1971, but that didn't pass until 2002, long after states such as
Wisconsin led the way in offering statewide protections in 1985. New
York State still has not added protections on the basis of gender
identity and expression covering people of transgender experience,
but the city did in 2002.
New York State's hate crimes law was held up by a
Republican-controlled Senate until 2000 -- more than 13 years after
it was first proposed following the Howard Beach racial killing in
1986. The sticking point was including "sexual orientation." Most
states had passed hate crimes laws in some form by the time New York did.
A school anti-bullying bill, the Dignity for All Students Act, has
also been held up in the State Senate for more than a decade despite
almost unanimous support in the Democrat-led Assembly. The barrier
is, again, the category of "sexual orientation," as well as "gender
identity and expression."
Two members of Congress from New York, Bella Abzug and Ed Koch,
introduced the first federal gay and lesbian rights bill in 1973,
then an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The bill was
eventually watered down to just provide some job protections through
the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and passed the House last year
but not the Senate.
Gays in Office
In the 1970s, out gays began running for -- and getting elected to --
public office. Here, too, New York lagged.
The first out gay officials anywhere in the U.S. were such pioneers
as Allan Spear, a state senator in Minnesota who came out in 1974,
and Elaine Noble, elected that same year to the Massachusetts
legislature as an out lesbian. Harvey Milk wasn't elected a
supervisor in San Francisco until 1977, only to be murdered by former
Supervisor Dan White the following year -- and immortalized by
Oscar-winning Sean Penn in the movie "Milk" just last year.
In 1991, Passanante was succeeded in the Assembly by Deborah Glick,
the first out gay or lesbian person ever to be elected to a
legislative office in New York.
Significantly, New York now has an out lesbian City Council speaker
in Christine Quinn, one of the highest ranking out gay or lesbian
officials in the United States.
Marriage Matters
The big gay news these days concerns the fate of same-sex marriage in
New York. With the Republicans taking over the State Senate in a coup
with dissident Democrats, the prospects for the bill letting gay
couples marry here is up in the air, even though new Majority Leader
Dean Skelos, a Long Island Republican and opponent of same-sex
marriage, has said his members can vote their consciences on the
bill. The dissidents Democratic senators, Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram
Monserrate, are for the marriage equality bill. However, it
apparently had nothing to do with their coup, which observers have
attributed to billionaire Tom Golisano's desire for lower taxes and
the landlord lobby's fear the Senate Democrat majority would
strengthen rent regulations.
Assemblymember Daniel O'Donnell, a Democrat from Manhattan's West
Side, who got the marriage bill passed in his house, remains hopeful
it will pass the Senate. Prior to the coup, Sen. Tom Duane, also a
Manhattan Democrat was insisting it had the votes to pass.
While the Republican-led majority can block action on the bill, it
does not now nor has it ever had the votes to block New York State
from recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other place.
Legislation that would have denied legal recognition to those
marriages was introduced in the 1990s in Albany and never even
received a hearing in the Senate.
As a result, New York is alone among states in that it recognizes
legal same-sex marriages performed elsewhere but does not perform
them itself. All New York gay couples have to do to be married is
travel to such neighboring jurisdictions as Vermont, Connecticut,
Massachusetts or Canada and wed legally. When they come home, they
will be married in the eyes of the state -- just as if they had been
able to legally marry here.
This has been true since same sex couples in New York began legally
marrying in Canada in 2003. Gov. David Paterson drew much more
attention to this quirk in New York law last year, though, when he
ordered state departments and agencies to report on how they were
complying with it.
Like all other same-sex married couples, New Yorkers lack federal
rights associated with marriage due to the 1996 Defense of Marriage
Act. Sen. Charles Schumer, who voted for that anti-gay bill, this
year became the last statewide official to come out in favor of
same-sex marriage, joining Paterson, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli,
Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who
announced her support the day the governor picked her to succeed Sen.
Clinton, who does not support same-sex marriage.
Serving a Community
Beyond the political arena, New York has played central roles in the
development of the LGBT community, especially in the arts (a whole
other column) but also in the provision of services.
Lambda Legal Defense, founded in 1973 in New York as the first legal
group devoted to defending gay rights, now has offices around the country.
The New York LGBT movement, which I was very much a part of, was
tragically rather weak when the syndrome that came to be called AIDS
was first noticed in 1981. AIDS devastated the gay community but also
led to development of a vast gay social services establishment
starting with the Gay Men's Health Crisis started by Larry Kramer. He
went on to found the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power or ACT UP in
1987, a group dominated by dying gay men and supportive lesbians who
radicalized activism again and changed forever the way people with
diseases advocate for what they need to survive. ACT UP chapters
spread around the world, and the New York contingent still has a few
stalwarts carrying the torch of AIDS activism.
New York City had the first predominately gay, lesbian and
transgendered high school with Harvey Milk High School founded by the
Hetrick-Martin Institute for LGBT youth in 1985. Its continued
existence is testimony to the fact that many mainstream city schools
are still not safe places for such students. The institute itself,
where I once worked as director of education, was founded to advocate
for these youth in 1979 by the late Damien Martin and Emery Hetrick.
New York's SAGE -- for Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders -- was
the first U.S. group for older gays and lesbians in 1978.
Gay journalists founded the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against
Defamation in 1985 to fight anti-gay defamation in the media,
especially at the New York Post. Originally a fierce watchdog, it has
gone on to become a largely West Coast operation famous for big
annual dinners honoring positive LGBT portrayals in the media. Such
has been the arc of the movement.
Joining the Establishment
For better or worse, the political movement has become much more
institutionalized, too. None of the early activists, from the Gay
Liberation Front in 1969 to the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights,
with which I worked in the 1970s and '80s, had paid staff. The
National Gay Task Force (now the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force)
began to change that in 1973. Its executive director, Bruce Voeller,
received a (modest) salary, and it favored the suits of lobbyists
over jeans, t-shirts and the "zap" actions of the Gay Activist
Alliance. The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force now has offices all
over the country with a major presence in New York.
In New York, the Empire State Pride Agenda with paid lobbyists in New
York and Albany and organizers around the state, dominates the
movement in New York politics. The city also has lots of LGBT
political clubs, mostly Democratic but also the Log Cabin Republicans.
Diverse New York has also had a wealth of racial and ethnic LGBT
groups, including the defunct Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization
whose exclusion from the St. Patrick's Parade sparked international
campaigns for LGBT Irish people seeking to participate in mainstream.
(Now gay Irish can march in the parade in Dublin and Queens but still
not Manhattan's.) There are also groups for people of color such as
the Audre Lorde Project, named for the late lesbian poet laureate of
the state. Virtually every major religious sect has an LGBT caucus of
some kind.
Beyond the City
Stonewall, while a spontaneous reaction to police abuse, resulted
from the liberationist and anti-war activism that was in the air in
1969 along with the actions of individual LGBT folk at the bar and in
the street that night who collectively reacted with anger to the
latest indignity to which they were subjected.
Forty years later, New York City still beckons as somewhat of a Mecca
for people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, though it
has become too expensive for many young people just starting out and
less than hospitable when you look at the recent false arrests of gay
men for prostitution. At the very least, New York and its gay and
lesbian residents sparked a nascent movement that spread across the
country and around the globe. Their effort made it easier for
millions of people to live open and satisfying LGBT lives -- without
moving to New York.
--
Andy Humm, a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights,
has been in charge of the civil rights topic page since its inception in 2001.
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