NEW YORK — They didn’t set out to change history; they weren’t the first LGBT Americans to mobilize against bias.
Yet the June 1969 uprising by young gays, lesbians and transgender people in New York City, clashing with police near a bar called the Stonewall Inn, was a vital catalyst in expanding LGBT activism nationwide and abroad. This month’s anniversary provides an opportune moment to ask: How has the movement fared over the past 50 years? What unfinished business remains?
From the perspective of veteran activists, the progress has been astounding. In 1969, every state but Illinois outlawed gay sex, psychiatric experts classified homosexuality as a mental disorder and most gays stayed in the closet for fear of losing jobs and friends.
Today, same-sex marriage is the law of the land in the U.S. and at least 25 other countries. LGBT Americans serve as governors, big-city mayors and members of Congress, and one — Pete Buttigieg — is waging a spirited campaign for president.
Among those looking back with marvel is Stephen Rutsky, 68, a lifelong New Yorker who joined in rioting and protests sparked by a police raid targeted at gay patrons of Stonewall. He engaged in a wide variety of LGBT activism over the ensuing decades.
“Mobs of gays and lesbians were running around angry and confused, but we all knew that something had sparked a change in our world,” Rutsky remembers. “We’ve come a long way, baby. But lots more to do.”
What’s next
High on the to-do list is passage of federal legislation that would provide nationwide nondiscrimination protections for LGBT people. A bill with that goal, the Equality Act, passed the House of Representatives in May with unanimous Democratic backing but appears doomed in the Senate because of Republican opposition.
Nationally, 20 mostly Democrat-run states already have laws comparable to the Equality Act — protecting LGBT people from discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations and public services. The 30 other states, where Republicans hold full or partial power, have balked.
The result is a patchwork map in which a majority of states make it legal to be fired, evicted or barred from public facilities because of sexual orientation or gender identity.
Another battlefront relates to transgender rights. In the U.S., the Trump administration has moved to revoke newly won health care protections for transgender people, restrict their presence in the military and withdraw federal guidance that transgender students should be able to use bathrooms of their choice.
‘An amazing silver lining’
Historians trace the emergence of America’s gay rights movements to the 1950s, when the Mattachine Society and a lesbian group, the Daughters of Bilitis, were founded in California.
In 1966, Mattachine Society members in New York City successfully staged a “sip-in” to protest laws that banned bars from serving alcohol to gays and lesbians. The terms “gay pride” and “gay liberation” emerged.
The movement broadened after Stonewall, leading to some high-profile events in the late 1970s, including the first national gay rights march on Washington in 1979.
The 1980s proved shattering — but also galvanizing — for gay Americans, as an initially mysterious, unnamed disease morphed into the AIDS epidemic. Many thousands of gay men died.
Longtime activist Lorri Jean, who has served more than 20 years as CEO of the Los Angeles LGBT Center, remembers AIDS in the 1980s as a “horrific disaster” that killed many of the men close to her.
“Yet it had an amazing silver lining,” said Jean, 62. “Suddenly, the most privileged in our community were being impacted as well as the least privileged, and people couldn’t hide in the closet anymore. When they got sick, people knew. That galvanized our community in a way that nothing else ever had.”
Marriage rights
By the mid-1990s, the federal government — slow to respond at the start of the epidemic — was deeply engaged in the fight against AIDS, and the number of new cases finally began to decline. Many gay rights organizations shifted their focus to a long-haul campaign to legalize same-sex marriage. Massachusetts became the first state to do so in 2004; the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans in 2015.
Some activists suggest that the push for marriage equality consumed too much of the LGBT rights movement’s energy, diverting attention from violence against transgender people and the persistently high HIV infection rate among gay and bisexual black men. Others say the marriage campaign was crucial in changing public attitudes.
