Reykjavík Grapevine - 31.07.2009, Page 18

The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 11 — 2009
Get Up - Stand Up!
From the Stonewall riots to gay marriage – celebrating forty years of the global gay rights struggle
Gay Pride Special | Retrospective
18
It was a Saturday much like any other
in Greenwich Village, New York.
Business as usual on a balmy night in
June. An assortment of drag queens,
queers and lesbians congregated at the
Stonewall Inn while an assortment of
New York’s finest proceeded to raid
it. Under the usual pretexts, seven
plain-clothes officers roughed up the
resident fags, before bundling them in
the waiting paddy wagon
On this particular hot June night,
however, the fags departed from
the script and decided to fight back.
Amid the confusion and the billy
clubs, it was never clearly established
who started what. According to riot
veteran Craig Rodwell, “it was... a
f lash of group mass anger,” borne
no doubt from being spat on one too
many times. Those thrown out on the
street began to hurl coins in symbolic
derision at the corruption of the police
who extorted massive sums of money
– “gayola” – from gay establishments
by utilising the public morality codes
to regulate their scam. The coins
were soon followed by rocks and
bottles, which were in turn followed
by riot police reinforcements. Word
soon spread through the village and
hundreds of gays and lesbians, black,
white and Hispanic, converged on the
Stonewall Inn and engaged in running
battles with the police late into the
night. Things would never be the
same.
BEFORE STONEWALL
That is not to say that gay solidarity
movements did not exist before the
events of June 1969.
In his seminal 1983 work, Sexual
Politics Sexual Communities,
John D’Emilio documents the
development of gay culture across
America from the turn of the century.
How the revolutionary processes of
industrialization and urbanization
drew ever-increasing numbers
from the farms to the factory f loors
making it easier for gays and lesbians
to explore their sexuality. By the
mid nineteen twenties a vibrant, if
clandestine, gay subculture had grown
in San Francisco, New Orleans and
New York. In society at large, however,
homosexuality remained taboo, and
was criminalized in many states across
America. Simple displays of affection
could lead to arrest and, as D’Emilio
documents, even to declare oneself
a homosexual could lead to enforced
incarceration in a mental institution.
Life was even tougher for lesbians,
whose relative lack of economic power
and independence curtailed their
outlets for sexual expression even
more. In this respect, the Second
World War was a revolutionary event,
temporarily (at least) breaking down
the codes of social norms as women
f looded into the workplace to replace
the absent men. Ironically, it was
America's golden era of post-war
prosperity that brought renewed
repression as the establishment heavily
promoted a stultifying conformity
that centred on the nuclear family
and a culture of consumption to act
as a buttress for the capitalist system
against the perceived communist
threat. This reached unprecedented
heights in the McCarthy era of the
1950s, where homosexuals along
with purported communists were
hounded from their jobs. A ban on the
employment of gays at federal level
introduced in this period remained on
the statute books until 1975.
It was in this repressive climate
that the first gay rights movement
was born. Harry Hay, an openly gay,
card-carrying communist, founded
the Matachine society in 1950 to re-
educate lesbians and gay men to see
themselves as an oppressed minority.
Though Hay remains an immensely
important figure in the evolution of
gay rights, his organisation ultimately
ref lected the same conservative
prejudices of wider society that they
claimed to be fighting. While tacitly
accepting their supposed perversions,
they tried to ingratiate themselves
with the authorities to improve their
institutional treatment, an essentially
craven tactic that became increasingly
at odds with the younger radical
gay activists who increasingly took
their lead from the emerging black
liberation movement of the late 1950s.
The events at the Stonewall Inn
solidified this radicalism channelling
dissent into a bona fide radical
movement. For Craig Rodwell, it was
“...one of those moments in history,
that if you were there, you knew, this
is it, this is what we have been waiting
for”.
AFTER STONEWALL
The legacy of Stonewall is difficult
to overestimate. It helped inspire gay
rights campaigns across America
and the wider world. Indeed the most
high profile and successful gay rights
organisation in Britain takes its name
from the famous inn. Stonewall and
its campaigning aftermath was also
inf luential in improving the portrayal
of gay people in the mainstream
media, particularly Hollywood. Since
the inception of the draconian Hays
code in 1934, sexual “perversion” along
with seduction and prostitution was
banished from the screen. Often, it
tacitly discouraged filmmakers from
even alluding to the love that dared not
speak its name. Prominent examples
from the 1950s included the cutting
of the famously suggestive bathing
scene between Lawrence Olivier
and Tony Curtis (later restored) in
Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus and the
removal of the homosexual subtext
from the film adaptation of Tennessee
Williams classic Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, embodied in the play by Paul
Newman's character.
Even as the sixties progressed and
homosexuality began to be tackled
less obliquely, villainy victimhood
and suffering remained the defining
characteristics of gay roles on screen.
The burgeoning post-Stonewall gay
rights movement tapped into the
hitherto closeted gay Hollywood elite,
prompting more human treatments
of gay characters. This process is,
however, far from compete, as gay
roles in mainstream productions
remain drearily stereotypical, with
gay characters often reduced to
one-dimensional foils to provide
lazy, snickering, humour for a
predominantly straight audience.
TWO STEPS FORWARD...
ONE STEP BACk
Significant progress in improving
the lot of lesbians and gay men was
made in the 1970s, most famously
by the legendary Harvey Milk in
California, the first openly gay man to
be elected to high office in the US (or
anywhere else for that matter). Milk
attained iconic status in perpetuity
for his lead role in the resounding
defeat of the Briggs initiative, which
sought to enforce the removal of all
gay teachers from California public
schools, before being assassinated
in 1977. Optimism was replaced by
despair in the early 1980s, with the
onset of the AIDS epidemic and the
subsequent right-wing backlash
bringing renewed discrimination
in the form of travel bans on HIV
positive men in the US. The struggle
for legislative rights inevitably took
a back seat to survival, with precious
resources being channelled into
awareness and prevention of the killer
virus.
Though progress has been hard
fought and not without setbacks, the
early nineties to the present day have
seen a quiet revolution in gay equality
reform in Western society. European
countries such as Holland have,
unsurprisingly, led the way. Perhaps
most impressive and surprising
have been developments in Spain.
Emerging from the grip of a fascist
dictatorship as recently as the late
seventies, Spain remained deeply
religious and stubbornly conservative
with regard to gay rights, until one
Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero acceded
to power in 2004, introducing a
startlingly radical raft of reforms
including gay marriage and adoption
rights in the teeth of fierce opposition
from the Catholic church and the
conservative Partido Popular.
“Simple displays of affection could lead to arrest.
Even to declare oneself a homosexual could lead to
enforced incarceration in a mental institution”
“What is straight? A
line can be straight, or
a street. But the human
heart Oh No! It’s curved
like a road through
mountains” Tennessee
Williams