Overview

From the anarchistic Gay Liberation Movement of the early 1970s arose a more reformist and single-issue Gay Rights Movement of the 80s and 90s. This new movement portrayed gays and lesbians as a minority group and used the language of civil rights.

Gay and lesbian rights advocates argued that one's sexual orientation does not reflect on one's gender. Gays and lesbians were presented as identical to heterosexuals in all ways but for private sexual practices; from within this more conformist movement, butch "bar dykes" and flamboyant "street queens" were seen as negative stereotypes of lesbians and gays. Many transgender activists such as Sylvia Rivera and Beth Elliot were sidelined or expelled from the dominant gay rights movement.

Significant Events of the Period

In 1977, Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, becoming the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. Milk was subsequently assassinated by Dan White, a former city supervisor, in 1978.

On that same year, Anita Bryant, a former Miss America contestant, began the "Save Our Children" campaign in Dade County, Florida. This proved to be a major set-back in the Gay Rights movement. The campaign promoted an amendment to the laws of the county which resulted in the firing of many public school teachers on the suspicion that they were homosexual.

Mark Segal and Gay Press

As a young gay activist, Mark Segal understood the power of media. In 1973, Segal disrupted the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, an event covered in newspapers across the country and viewed by 60% of American households, many seeing or hearing about homosexuality for the first time. Before the networks agreed to put a stop to censorship and bias in the news division, Segal went on to disrupt The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and The Today Show with Barbara Walters. As a pioneer of the local gay press movement, he was one of the founders and former president of both The National Gay Press Association and the National Gay Newspaper Guild. He is also the founder and publisher of the award-winning Philadelphia Gay News (PGN).

International Events

In 1979, a number of people in Sweden called in sick with a case of being homosexual, in protest of homosexuality being classified as an illness. This was followed by an activist occupation of the main office of the National Board of Health and Welfare. Within a few months, Sweden became the first country in the world to remove homosexuality as an illness.

In Canada, the coming into effect of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1985 saw a shift in the Canadian gay rights movement, as Canadian gays and lesbians moved from liberation to litigious strategies. Premised on Charter protections and on the notion of the immutability of homosexuality, judicial rulings rapidly advanced rights, including those that compelled the Canadian government to legalize same-sex marriage. It has been argued that while this strategy was extremely effective in advancing the safety, dignity, and equality of Canadian gays and lesbians, its emphasis on sameness and conformity to the mainstream came at the expense of difference and may have undermined opportunities for more meaningful change.

The AIDS Crisis 

In the early 1980s, doctors noticed a disturbing trend: Young gay men in large cities, especially San Francisco and New York, were being diagnosed with, and eventually dying from, a rare cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma. Because the disease was seen almost exclusively in male homosexuals, it was quickly dubbed “gay cancer.” Doctors soon realized it often coincided with other symptoms, including a rare form of pneumonia, and they renamed it “Gay Related Immune Deficiency” (GRID), although people other than gay men, primarily intravenous drug users, were dying from the disease as well. The connection between gay men and GRID—later renamed human immunodeficiency virus/autoimmune deficiency syndrome, or HIV/AIDS—led heterosexuals to largely ignore the growing health crisis in the country, wrongly assuming they were safe from its effects. The federal government also overlooked the disease, and calls for more money to research and find the cure were largely ignored due to embedded social stigma against gays and lesbians.

Even after it became apparent that heterosexuals could contract the disease through blood transfusions and heterosexual intercourse, HIV/AIDS continued to be associated primarily with the gay community, especially by political and religious conservatives. Indeed, the Religious Right regarded it as a form of divine retribution meant to punish gay men for their “immoral” lifestyle. President Reagan, always politically careful, was reluctant to speak openly about the developing crisis, even as thousands faced certain death from the disease.

With little help coming from the government, the gay community quickly began to organize its own response. In 1982, New York City men formed the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), a volunteer organization that operated an information hotline, provided counseling and legal assistance, and raised money for people with HIV/AIDS. Larry Kramer, one of the original members, left in 1983 and formed his own organization, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), in 1987. ACT UP took a more militant approach, holding demonstrations on Wall Street, outside the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and inside the New York Stock Exchange to call attention and shame the government into action. One of the images adopted by the group, a pink triangle paired with the phrase “Silence = Death,” captured media attention and quickly became the symbol of the AIDS crisis.

Silence = Death: The AIDS crisis

The pink triangle was originally used in Nazi concentration camps to identify those there for acts of homosexuality. Reclaimed by gay activists in New York as a symbol of resistance and solidarity during the 1970s, it was further transformed as a symbol of governmental inaction in the face of the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s. The image above depicts the pink triangle on a black background, with the words "SILENCE=DEATH" written below.