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Gay and Lesbian Cultures Flourish during the 1900s
 At the beginning of the 1900s, a strange trend
swept American girls' schools and a number of women's colleges: an intense
form of courtship and friendship between girls known as "smashing." In
smashing, a girl would choose to devote herself to another girl, sending
tokens of affection and performing small tasks for the object of their
affection. When the pursued girl finally returned this affection, she was
officially "smashed." These relationships, which were often extremely
intense, would often continue after school and college in the form of
romantic friendships, otherwise known as Boston marriages.
Middle and upper-middle class women could live together as unmarried
companions, arousing relatively little suspicion from their neighbors. For
example, Jane Addams, the great social reformer and founder of Hull House,
spent most of her life living with a woman. This unique pattern of
relationships between women was soon scrutinized by the increasingly
popular views of the sexologists. However, some women benefited from the
work of sexologists—the term "invert" allowed women with more "butch"
tendencies to freely explore their masculine sides.
 In the 1920s and '30s, gay and lesbian subcultures flourished in many
urban centers, especially under the artistic auspices of the Harlem
Renaissance in New York City, the artistic "salons" in Paris and the
Bloomsbury group in England. The Harlem Renaissance was a period when
African-American writers and artists living in Harlem produced work that
expressed particularly unique sensibilities, including homosexuality and
bisexuality. Openly gay, lesbian and bisexual celebrities of the period
included singers Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Gladys Bentley,
Ethel Waters and
Alberta Hunter, and writers Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
Wallace Thurman
and Countee Cullen. Thousands of white Americans ogled and exploited this
hotbed of decadence, permissiveness and unfettered artistic expression for
their own voyeuristic intentions.
The literary salons of France were tame by comparison, but nonetheless
offered a haven for artists and thinkers—and one of the most notable
lesbian cultures ever documented. Members of this social circle included
writers Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Colette, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.) and
Natalie Barney.
The Bloomsbury group was similar to the French salons, mixing intellectual
discussion with plain sex talk. Many of the members, including Virginia Woolf,
Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington and
E.M.
Forster, were either gay or bisexual. This circle produced many literary
works, and spoke collectively in defense of Radclyffe Hall's Well of
Loneliness, which was on trial for obscenity in 1929. The work was
successfully defended. A self-loathing work by today's standards of
affirmation, Well was the first novel to deal explicitly and
sympathetically with lesbianism.
The Depression Era in America weakened already tenuous attempts at queer
solidarity. Women especially were forced to marry for survival rather than
maintain long-term romantic friendships, because the majority of available
jobs were given to men. Freedom of sexual expression on film suffered a
blow in 1934 when Hollywood enacted a self-imposed code that prohibited
blatant depictions of sexuality, including homosexuality, which had been
seen since the early 1900s.
Despite this somber atmosphere in America, discreet queer communities
formed in Cherry Grove, on Fire Island3, New York, on college campuses and
in Hollywood. In addition, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt quietly lived a
bisexual life, married to President Franklin Roosevelt and sharing a
four-year affair with journalist Lorena Hickock.
In Europe, the sexual permissiveness of the '20s continued into the early
1930s. Berlin especially was a haven for alternative sexuality, rampant
with gays, lesbians, transvestites and the merely curious. Christopher Isherwood chronicled the period's gaiety in his book Berlin Stories,
adapted into the well-known musical and film, "Cabaret." But with Hitler's
rise to power, German gay men suffered myriad atrocities as one of the
"degenerate" groups targeted during the World War II Holocaust. This was
where the pink triangle first appeared as a visible sign of homosexuality,
later to be reclaimed as an empowering symbol of gay identity.
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With America's entrance into WWII in 1941, a sharp change occurred in
lesbian culture. The sudden need for able-bodied men to leave their jobs
for military service and the demand for labor in war-parts factories
thrust women into the workforce.
 The absence of men increased female
bonding and sometimes intimacy on the home front. The same applied to the
hundreds of thousands of women enlisted in the military, which was very
lenient toward lesbianism because of the great need for servicewomen. After the war, when women were no longer needed for the war effort,
military lesbians were ferreted out, discharged and sent back to the
nearest American port. This mass shipment of lesbians to large urban ports
greatly contributed to the growth of urban lesbian culture.
In post-WWII America, pressure to create mainstream nuclear families
forced many gays and lesbians to attempt marriage, even well-known
homosexual figures. Fear of communism ran concurrent with fear of
homosexuals, and many actual and suspected gays and lesbians were ousted
from government jobs. One popular element of this fear was the
pulp-fiction novel, many of which were written about the lurid escapades
of neurotic fictional lesbians.
In the face of mass heterosexual revulsion, those brave enough to resist
the hegemony began to form a gay identity, which eventually translated
into gay pride. Two groundbreaking groups were formed in the early '50s:
the Mattachine Society, a gay discussion group founded by Harry Hay in
1951, and the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian social/political club
founded by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in 1955. Membership in both groups
was small, but despite harassment by police, FBI and CIA, both groups
managed to survive well into later decades.
The early 1960s displayed rumblings of dissent from the queer subculture,
especially in the well-established bar culture, which had long suffered
from police blackmail and harassment. In 1961, openly gay club singer Jose Sarria ran for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco by appealing
exclusively to the gay community. Though he didn't win, the campaign was
historic.
In 1964, Life magazine ran a 14-page article on gay life in America.
Though the writer called it a "sad and often sordid" life, the article
helped bring news of a nationwide queer culture to non-urban gays and
lesbians. Gays were starting to assert their social presence with the
openings of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village in 1967
and the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church, a gay-oriented
Christian Church in San Francisco in 1968.
In the same year, patrons of a Los Angeles gay bar defied police
harassment by bailing out two unjustly arrested fellow patrons from jail.
Police were stunned by the loud public demonstration of support. Later
in the year, in Chicago, a convention of gay rights groups named North
American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) met to create a
Homosexual Bill of Rights and coined the slogan "Gay is Good," an homage
to the Black Power slogan "Black is Beautiful."
These murmurs of protest exploded on June 28, 1969, in the form of the
legendary Stonewall Riot. What began as a routine shakedown at the
Stonewall Inn in New York City became the watershed of the gay rights
movement. Something sparked in the motley crowd of gays, lesbians, hippies
and drag queens singled out for ID inspection and soon patrons and
passerby alike responded to police with taunting, resistance and even
violence. For three hours, the mob ruled the streets of Greenwich Village
and for the next week there would be sporadic riots almost nightly. Though
few people outside of New York City heard about the events at the time, it
marked the definitive turning point of the gay rights movement, from
resigned tolerance of homophobic harassment to self-empowerment and pride.
On the same day in 1970, thousands of people marched in Los Angeles and
New York City to commemorate the first anniversary of Stonewall. These
celebrations marked the first Gay Pride marches, which evolved into the
elaborate Pride Festivals that occur annually in every major American city
and some smaller towns.
The 70s were primarily a period of continued formation of queer identity.
The rise of radical feminism provoked many feminists to extol the benefits
of lesbianism as being free from the oppression of patriarchal society.
These women built all-female communes and co-ops and created the phrase
and theory of "political correctness." This push for a unique
lesbian-identity ran parallel to the needs of various ethnic groups to
create their own singular identities, spawning such crossover subgroups as
 Black lesbians, Chicana lesbians and Asian-American lesbians. Gay men also
were adding nuances to their identities. A new gay type arose in America,
that of the trim, mustachioed macho man. Even while the new masculine type
flouted mainstream stereotypes of homosexual men being effeminate, it also
alienated many members of the gay community who were effeminate.
Disapproval of gender bending swelled within the gay ranks, making
self-expression and individuality difficult.
In 1977, openly gay Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of
Supervisors. During his tenure, Milk helped raise visibility for gay
issues. Unfortunately, Milk was killed by an ex-board member and political
rival the following year. In death, his name became known worldwide and he
was hailed as an emblem of gay rights cause.
The year 1980 rocked the gay community to its foundations with the
epidemic of a deadly illness among gay men resulting from a breakdown in
the immune system. The illness, first named GRIDS (Gay-Related Immune
Deficiency), was soon renamed AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).
The
 disease spread rapidly through the gay community. Although it is no
longer relegated solely to that group, gays and lesbians alike quickly
began to combat the spread of the disease with education and activism,
founding the GMHC (Gay Men's Health Crisis) organization. The devastation
of AIDS has increased solidarity between community members and brought the
plight of queer Americans to the forefront of the national consciousness.
Many celebrities during the decade either announced or flirted with their
gayness or bisexuality, including Madonna,
Sandra Bernhard, Lily Tomlin,
Melissa Etheridge, Boy George and David Bowie.
The 1990s were a decade of unprecedented gains and disappointing losses in
the ongoing struggle for gay equality. In 1992, Democratic presidential
candidate Bill Clinton actively courted the gay vote by making campaign
promises of increased civil rights for gays and lesbians. Clinton, upon
election, would then go on to enact the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy for
gays in the military. This policy merely served to further silence
military gays and lesbians. Throughout the '90s battle was waged in Hawaii
for same-sex marriage, which was legal for one day before being
overturned.
Though the case for same-sex marriage in
Hawaii was lost in 1999, several important benefits were retained. Gay
marriage won a resounding victory in the same year in
Vermont, winning the
right to "Civil Union" that confer virtually all of the same rights and
benefits accorded to heterosexual marriages.
In entertainment, Ellen DeGeneres made news by being the first major
television star to come out as a lesbian, both on-screen and off.
DeGeneres' show "Ellen" was canceled a year after her character's coming
out.
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GVB
