First appeared in the June 17, 1999, Windy City Times.
MODERN GAY LIBERATION is a creation not of Stonewall but of the 1960s.
In a previous column I sketched some notable examples of gay activism during the 1960s. The examples showed that the pace of gay activism accelerated rapidly in the second half of the decade, virtually assuring a thriving gay movement in the 1970s whether Stonewall happened or not.
However, the 1960s gay movement did not work in isolation. It was aided by large-scale changes in America's public culture, changes that not only helped the gay movement, but encouraged even gays who had no contact with the movement to be more self-accepting and step forward to claim civic equality.
When someone shakes a soft drink can before opening it, then pulls the tab, the contents spurt out. The Sixties were the shaking; Stonewall simply pulled the tab.
As gay historian Jim Levin pointed out in his valuable 1983 study Reflections on the American Homosexual Rights Movement, if there was a single theme underlying the various social trends of the 1960s it is the growing willingness to question received opinion, to "Question Authority" as one button urged, and to assert individual moral autonomy against the agents of social control -- governments, law, religions, psychiatry, even "propriety."
For instance, the 1960s black civil rights movement demonstrated how unjust some laws were and how irrational were the social prejudices behind those laws. It was easy for gays to see parallels to anti-gay laws and realize how the social opprobrium they endured was like prejudice against blacks.
Frank Kameny coined the slogan "Gay is Good" in 1968 in clear imitation of "Black is Beautiful." Whatever else "Black is Beautiful" meant, it meant that equality should not depend on becoming identical to the dominant majority.
The other main model of social protest was the anti-Viet Nam war movement. Increasingly militant demonstrations suggested to gays that it was legitimate to protest government policy and to consider resisting laws which directly threatened them.
Then too, the fact that some heterosexual anti-war protesters claimed to be gay in order to protest the war or avoid the draft suggested to many young gays that it might not be so scary to acknowledge being gay after all.
Perhaps the best example of the 1960s social ethos was the embrace by some young people of the idea of a "counterculture," a lifestyle emphasizing relaxation of rules, hierarchies and traditional moral strictures.
The theme of the counter-culture was the libertarian one of self-exploration and personal authenticity, in contrast to conformity or conventional respectability. A zealous non-judgmental attitude prevailed, a rule of "Do your own thing." The advocacy of personal authenticity was not lost on gays. The politicized New Left held "teach ins," but the counter-culture held "be-ins".
The counter-culture encouraged the use of psychoactive drugs to explore "alternative consciousness." It encouraged the exploration of Asian religions -- Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, a plethora of gurus. Despite meager results and more quest than insight, the effect of both was to disestablish moralistic Christianity as the sole model of religion.
The counter-culture fostered sexual expression as a means of helping people find personal liberation and permitted occasional bisexual behavior by heterosexuals for the same reason. Its non-assertive attitudes encouraged a kind of mild androgyny among males that challenged aggressive masculinity and the stereotype that gays were unique in lacking masculinity. When a shocked young women once told one such man that he was wearing "girl's tennis shoes," he looked puzzled, shrugged, and said simply, "I don't care."
The imperatives of personal authenticity and self-discovery were reinforced by the newly reborn women's movement, which urged women to reject traditional social role limitations. Women were encouraged to "raise their consciousness" and rethink their self-concepts and preconceptions about women's capacities and autonomy. The message for women was given powerful impetus by the availability of the birth control pill after 1960, allowing women to assert greater control over their sexuality.
The feminist call to reject socially fostered self-concepts and assert sexual self-ownership had clear relevance for gays, even when not directly aimed at them.
One of the most conspicuous changes during the 1960s was the greater openness about sex. Social historians now argue whether there was actually more sex (yes, some), but there was certainly more talk about it in newspapers, magazines, on television talk shows, in living rooms. There was more sex in novels, in plays, in movies. One small magazine mischievously titled itself Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
Partly this was pushed along by the ongoing sexual revolution and the increasing separation of sex from reproduction. But in greater measure it resulted from U.S. Supreme Court decisions steadily restricting the definition of obscenity, allowing an ever-widening range of sexual material to be published.
Inevitably, greater public discussion of homosexuality followed, especially in the latter half of the 1960s, if only because gays were exotic and controversial. The number of newspaper and magazine article multiplied year by year. At one point New York television talk show host David Susskind seemed to have gays on his program so frequently that a contemporary cartoon parodied him by drawing a homosexual interviewing a group of David Susskinds.
Early gay activists solicited and welcomed this publicity, even though it was seldom uniformly favorable, because they saw it as a way of letting closeted gays know they were not alone and sending the message of gay legitimacy to gays they could not reach otherwise. As we know from the results, the strategy worked.
It deserves mention too that during the 1960s there were growing numbers of intellectual challenges to the chief sources of anti-gay oppression: to orthodox Christianity by liberal religion, process theology, and existential theology; to traditional ethical principles by "situation ethics;" and to state enforcement of morals by the concepts of victimless crimes and the over-reach of the criminal law.
Finally, a growing number of researchers and theorists challenged the notion that gays were mentally ill or, like Thomas Szasz, said frankly that the whole concept of mental illness was simply a device for the social control of disapproved behavior.
Despite its excesses and occasional nuttiness, the '60s has a lot to teach us still.