gay rights 
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SOURCE: OutHistory
4/13/2021
"Where Perversion is Taught": The Untold History of a Gay Rights Demonstration at Bucks County Community College in 1968
by Marc Stein
A student protest at Bucks County (PA) Community College in 1968, sparked by the college's decision to block a speech by gay rights advocate Richard Leitsch, should be recognized as a key event in the growing movement for gay liberation.
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SOURCE: The Baffler
3/20/2020
Assimilationists of a Feather
by Elliot Friar and Travis LaCouter
If the history of gay liberation has taught us anything, it’s that assimilationism is one hell of a drug.
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SOURCE: Washignton Post
1/21/20
Arrested for having sex with men, this gay civil rights leader could finally be pardoned in California
A decade before Bayard Rustin became a chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, the civil rights activist was booked into a Los Angeles County jail on suspicion of “lewd vagrancy.”
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SOURCE: The North Star
8/24/19
Bayard Rustin: Prophet Of Freedom, Justice, And Humanity
by Stephen G. Hall
Rustin’s work combined a passion for social justice with a firm commitment to LGBTQ and human rights.
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SOURCE: Smithsonian.com
6/25/19
The Stonewall of the South That History Forgot
by Michael Waters
A month after the riots in New York, a raid on an Atlanta movie theater sparked a gay liberation movement of its own.
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6/16/19
The Vatican's Latest Official Document Is An Insult to the LGBTQ Community and History
by Ed Simon
Our understandings of romance, family, sexuality, and gender have been in flux in the past – within the Church no less – and no amount of thundering about “How the Vatican views it now is how it has always been” can change that.
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6/16/19
The Lavender Scare and Beyond: Documenting LGBTQ History from the Great Depression to Today
by Eric Gonzaba
An illumiting interview with Josh Howard, the director of the Lavender Scare documentary, and historian Eric Gonzaba.
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SOURCE: NPR
1/6/19
In Newly Found Audio, Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin Says Coming Out 'Was An Absolute Necessity'
The rare tape was provided by Rustin's surviving partner who preserved a library of backup recordings. Those recordings have helped foster a better understanding of the gay icon — one that Marcus concedes was absent from his civil rights education.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
1-26-15
How the Germans invented gay rights—more than a century ago
by Alex Ross
It was a German immigrant, Henry Gerber, who first brought the fight for gay rights to America, in the nineteen-twenties.
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SOURCE: Entertainment
6-3-14
Hollywood doing a major movie about Stonewall
Movie's director famous for "Independence Day" and other blockbusters.
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SOURCE: NYT
3-29-14
Dignity Is a Constitutional Principle
by Bruce Ackerman
As we search for guidance on the great constitutional issues of our own time, the place to begin is with the words of Humphrey as he explained why Americans could no longer “justify what we have done to debase humanity.”
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SOURCE: POLITICO Magazine
3-5-14
Why Gay Rights Are Good for Business
by Jonathan Zimmerman
Just like with segregationists, when homophobes realize their bigotry is hurting their bottom line, they back off.
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SOURCE: Telegraph (UK)
7-19-13
Alan Turing to be pardoned for gay conviction
Alan Turing, the World War Two code breaker who later killed himself after receiving a criminal conviction for his homosexuality, looks set to be pardoned.The Government said it would not stand in the way of legislation to offer a full Parliamentary pardon for Turing, who helped Britain to win the Second World War as a skilled code-breaker.Until now, the Government has resisted using the Royal Prerogative to pardon Turing for his conviction for gross indecency in 1952 because he was a homosexual.Ministers had argued that because Turing was convicted of what was at the time a criminal offence, it is not possible to hand him a full posthumous pardon....
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SOURCE: AP
6-8-13
Over 50 years, local activists helped gay-rights movement surmount setbacks, make huge gains
Go back 50 years in time.Homosexuality was deemed a mental disorder by the nation’s psychiatric authorities, and gay sex was a crime in every state but Illinois. Federal workers could be fired merely for being gay.Today, gays serve openly in the military, work as TV news anchors and federal judges, win elections as big-city mayors and members of Congress. Popular TV shows have gay protagonists.And now the gay-rights movement may be on the cusp of momentous legal breakthroughs. Later this month, a Supreme Court ruling could lead to legalization of same-sex marriage in California, and there’s a good chance the court will require the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages in all U.S. jurisdictions where they are legal — as of now, 12 states and Washington, D.C....
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SOURCE: NYT
3-25-13
David Cole: Deciding Not to Decide Gay Marriage
David Cole is a professor of law at Georgetown University.THE Supreme Court will begin hearing two days of oral arguments today on the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the 2008 initiative that banned same-sex marriage in California, and on the Defense of Marriage Act, the 1996 law that forbids federal recognition of same-sex marriage.DOMA poses easier legal issues. The statute, which President Obama believes is unconstitutional and which has been repudiated by Bill Clinton, who signed it, inserted the federal government into marriage law, historically the domain of the states. It was clearly driven by antigay animus, and as lower courts have ruled, there simply is no good reason for Congress to refuse to treat all state-recognized marriages equally.
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SOURCE: NYT
3-26-13
Sea change as gay rights gained momentum
WASHINGTON — The struggle for African-Americans’ rights, symbolized by the bloody 1965 Selma march, is as old as the nation. The effort for American women’s rights began at Seneca Falls, N.Y., more than 150 years ago.The modern fight for gay rights is, by contrast, less than a half-century old, dating from the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York. But this week, as the Supreme Court hears two landmark cases on same-sex marriage, the speed and scope of the movement are astonishing supporters.
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SOURCE: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
1-28-13
Jonathan Zimmerman: The Middle East's Nonexistant Gay Rights Movement
Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of history and education at New York University. He is teaching a course this January at NYU's Abu Dhabi campus.ABU DHABI -- "We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths -- that all of us are created equal -- is the star that guides us still," President Barack Obama declared at his inauguration last Monday, "just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall."But does it also go through Sharjah?That's where two dozen men were arrested and lashed in 2004 at an apparent "gay wedding" here in the United Arab Emirates, where homosexual relations are illegal. Since then, untold numbers of gays have reportedly received lashes, prison sentences, psychological "therapy" and hormone treatments to remedy the so-called "illness" of homosexuality.President Obama received just praise for mentioning Stonewall, site of a 1969 New York police raid and riot that touched off the modern American homosexual rights movement. And to his credit, the president and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have instructed U.S. foreign aid agencies to support gay-rights efforts overseas. "Gay rights are human rights," Ms. Clinton said in 2011....
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SOURCE: WaPo
1-21-13
Obama invokes gay rights in inaugural address
President Obama on Monday became the first president to use the word “gay” as a reference to sexual orientation in an inaugural address, declaring the movement for equality to be part of the pantheon of America’s great civil rights struggles.“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law,” the president said. “For if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well.”Obama also made another reference in the speech to gay equality. He placed the 1969 riot protesting a police raid on a Greenwich Village gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, as a signature event in the civil rights movement — and ranked it with historical turning points in the battles for women’s and racial equality....
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