Gay rights seems to be one of the defining issues of this generation and it seems to have swept the developed world all at roughly the same time. According to Wikipedia, the first gay marriage was only legal in 2001 in the Netherlands and other countries have been following suit at a rapid pace.
I guess what I’m curious about is what is it about the current times and circumstances that makes gay rights such a huge issue? Unlike the black rights movement that was borne of a certain time and place and the women’s rights movement which arguably came about due to WWII, gays have always been with us.
There doesn’t seem to be any particular shift in society or thinking that would suggest to me that the gay rights revolution should be happening now rather than 100 years in the past or future.
The other curious thing is how synchronized this movement seems to have been. Universally, across the globe we agreed less than 10 years ago that straight people had certain rights gay people were not allowed to have and now, it seems universally, across the globe, we’re shifting to a model in which they explicitly do. Why did it take until 2001 for even the most progressive of countries to get to the point of full equality for gays?
According to Wikipedia, same-sex “registered partnership” (unlike domestic partnership in the US, Danish “registered partnership” was legalized at the national level and was explicitly crafted to be identical to opposite-sex marriage except with regards to adoption)* has been legal in Denmark since 1989.
Have women and racial/ethnic minorities not always been with us? Isn’t it actually easier to ignore or deny the existence of closeted, majority-race gay people?
*Note to anyone who remembers my contributions to the recent Pit thread on same-sex marriage: I still find the legal/semantic distinction between opposite-sex “marriage” and same-sex “civil union”/“domestic partnership” unacceptable. However, I want to make clear to the OP that government recognition of same-sex relationships at a national level was not first implemented in 2001.
Gay marriage certainly isn’t the starting point of the gay rights movement; it’s only the latest phase of it. In the States alone we could go back five decades through the AIDS crisis and the government’s inaction through the Stonewall riot to the Fifties, where even discussion of the lifestyle in a literary or academic setting was considered pornographic and therefore forbidden in the US mails. The struggle for full equality (for gays, minorities, and women) goes back a lot further than the Sixties.
You can argue that all the civil rights movements around the world were brought to the forefront of world attention with various events in the 1950’s in the U.S. related to black civil rights. By the early 1960’s this includes women’s liberation and by the late 1960’s gay liberation was part of this movement. Other civil rights movements became publicly known around this time or shortly thereafter. Furthermore, this movement quickly spread around the world. The black civil rights movement worked incredibly fast, if you think about it. Until 1965 it was still possible for a state to ban interracial marriage. In 2008 the U.S. has elected a black President who was the child of an interracial marriage. The women’s rights movement also moved quite quickly. The number of women in national legislatures was tiny in the early 1950’s. Now in some countries the proportion of men and women in their national legislatures is almost equal. Gay liberation has worked very fast also. Once any movement gets started in the present world, it moves fast. It quickly gets adopted around the world and its goals are reached within a few decades. This is even clearer in the case of civil rights movements, where the argument for civil rights for a group is often of the sort “If we are all agreed that group X shouldn’t be denied of their rights, shouldn’t this also be true of group Y?”
natural progression of memes, starting with accepting gender, race, then sexual orientation. In another 50 years, we might even see a jewish president in office.
I think part of why Gay rights became much bigger now rather than the past is because of AIDS… Once people started to get sick in the 80’s, suddenly straight people realized that they knew Gay people, and that we were everywhere…
Also, although many of us were fighting for Gay rights in the 70’s and early 80’s, AIDS mobilized huge numbers of Gays and Lesbians… We were seeing friends/partners dying with no support, or many times, weren’t even allowed to visit, because we “weren’t family”…
Anger moved us forward… and after Proposition 8 in California, will continue to move us forward.
Don’t know if this answer makes sense, but this is how I’ve come to see it: there used to be a lot of angsty talk about how my generation (Gen X/Gen Y) had no unifying “cause” in the way that the Baby Boomers had in the '60s, fighting for equal rights for racial minorities and women. Our parents had already trumped our right to rebel against anything, because they’d already taken care of all those big, black-and-white moral issues that used to plague the country.
Then at some point, my generation realized that that wasn’t really true, and one of the major stones our parents had left unturned was gay rights! Not only had they not won equal rights for homosexuals, in many cases their generation was now impeding gay rights! Finally something we could stick to the old codgers!
That, at any rate, is my interpretation. And sorry, it’s probably more an IMHO answer in a GD thread, as I have nothing really to back it up.
This is one of the big problems I have with the whole ‘gay-rights’ movement. I believe in it in terms of feeling its wrong to discriminate against someone based on sexual preferences.
But the idea of GenX/Y’ers moping around whining that they don’t have a ‘cause’, and then them suddenly thinking, “Oh wait, the gays!” makes the whole idea of it pretentious, selfish, and their so-called support disingenuous. They’re doing to feel good about themselves not because its the right thing to do.
The effect is the same, though. And the children being raised right now won’t support gay rights because it’s the right thing to do, either: They’ll accept gay marriage and the like because to them, it’ll be as obvious that gays should marry as it is to us that straights should marry. They just won’t even consider the possibility that it could be any other way, and won’t understand what they read in their history books about the discrimination of earlier times.
In fairness, it’s probably true that a lot of the Boomers were looking for some cause to unite around, since they didn’t have the Nazis to fight, as their parents did. A lot of them were probably smug and pretentious about it too, in the way some gay rights advocates are today. But in the end, does it matter much, since they were, after all, right in what they were fighting for? As are, IMHO, gay rights activists today.
I’d put my money on the dismantling of the Hays code. Although it cannot be held responsible by itself for suppression of gays throughout the whole of history, it did help suppress discussion of the topic during the era of mass communication.
The Hays code completely fell apart in 1968, leading us to actually be able to see gay characters presented as such for the first time in … well, generations.
I think it is due to the changing role of women. Previously, the ideal roles for women and men were quite different. Women were supposed to stay home, take care of the house and it occupants, and men went out, earned money and took care of everything outside of the house from the gutters to commerce and wars. These roles were not universal by any means, but they colored expectations and were perceived to be dictated by God and biology. What each half of a couple did was very different. Trying to cast two men or two women in the couple roles meant that one of them would be forced into a role not suited for their sex.
Nowadays, we expect people to go to work do things in the world, like commerce and war, come home, maintain the home, and take care of their families. No reason two men or two women can’t do that as well as a man and a woman. Granted, the man and the woman couples might have an easier time acquiring children, but some of them are infertile and they acquire children anyway, why not same sex couples?
> Then at some point, my generation realized that that wasn’t really true, and
> one of the major stones our parents had left unturned was gay rights! Not only
> had they not won equal rights for homosexuals, in many cases their generation
> was now impeding gay rights! Finally something we could stick to the old
> codgers!
This isn’t an accurate history of the gay civil rights movement. The gay civil rights movement is only about six years behind the women’s civil rights movement and only about fourteen years behind the black civil rights movement in terms of its progress. I would count the Montgomery bus boycott (1955), the publication of The Feminine Mystique (1963), and the Stonewall riots (1969) to be approximately equal events in the history of each movement. By this I mean that while all three movements existed well before the time of each of these events, these events were approximately equally important in publicizing the movements.
It certainly wasn’t true that there was any generational break in the acceptance of these movements. I remember some political protests from 1971, when I was in college. This was a hipper, more politically conscious place than most colleges, but it wasn’t that far out of the mainstream. Black civil rights was was so thoroughly accepted that it wasn’t much mentioned in protests because it was so taken for granted. Women’s civil rights were mentioned, but it was pretty well accepted. Gay civil rights were also mentioned, and it was almost as well accepted as women’s civil rights.
So it’s not remotely true that one generation accepted black and women’s civil rights and didn’t accept gay civil rights. The progress of black civil rights is only a few years ahead of the progress of women’s civil rights and the progress of women’s civil rights is only a few years ahead of the progress of gay civil rights. To any one who has lived through all these movements, they have actually all moved ahead steadily and quite fast.
The women’s movement was born out of Abolition. It got its start when some women were excluded from an abolitionist convention. The suffragettes started out as abolitionists who found their voice was not welcome. Ironically, the original push to get women the vote died when black men in America received the right to vote and everyone seemed to decide that was enough change for now.
The Montgomery bus boycott (1955) was integral to the black civil rights movement. Rosa Parks refusing to go to the back of the bus was not some random act of someone tired of being persecuted which just became the focal point. Rosa Parks refusal became the focus because she was of unimpeachable background and character.
The Stonewall riots were not planned, nor were they by model citizens or even model gay men. They were started by drag queens who were fed up. I think this makes for a very different political movement than we saw for other minorities.
I think this is a lot of it. HIV/AIDS scared a lot of people out of complacency. It was a call to action not only for gay rights, but for international aid for countries affected by the disease. I think that’s a large part of why both movements are big in the public consciousness right now.
OK so here’s my take…
Long story short, I think it has alot to do with homosexuality becoming more socially acceptable, years ago people in the closet were afraid to admit to being gay let alone fighting for equal rights. Now, as it is by most accounts socially acceptable, if not encouraged through mainstream media (some kids are doing it to be cool, like girls kissing girls), people are coming forward in large numbers with relatively no fear and are proud of who they are, feel they have a right to be equal with all others.
What I’ve seen is a gradual movement in terms of tolerance of sexual variations, beginning with Kinsey’s work and an emerging movement within the gay community. Add in the development of the sexual reassignment surgery, and the emergence of a sexual counter-cultural movement, plus the liberalization of marriage and divorce, and it seems logical that there might be some of “Teh Gays” wanting their mainstream certificates.
Speaking of moping and whining, this is the most irrelevant possible objection.
About all I can say here is that U.S. kids today are pretty well used to the idea that gays deserve equal treatment. In its own way that’s a part of why it’s happening now - a growing portion of the voting population now supports issues like gay adoption and gay marriage.