This document provides a look at the history of GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) folk, from ancient times to today. It also addresses various popular "myths" and misconceptions about homosexuals and homosexuality. A condensed version of this document, in PDF format for easy printing and distribution, can be found here.     [ Ancient ] [ 533-1861 ] [ 1862-1968 ] [ 1969-1980 ] [ 1981-1995 ] [ 1996-2006 ] [ Notes ]     The Ancient World SUMMARY: HOMOSEXUALITY IN THE ANCIENT WORLD Contrary to the assumptions of many, homosexuals have not always been reviled and persecuted. In fact, the evidence is overwhelming that through much of human history, in a wide variety of cultures, "queer" behavior has been seen simply as part of the normal range of human activity. The acceptance of homosexuality in ancient Greece and throughout the Roman Empire is, of course, well documented. But the Mediterranean world was hardly alone in its views on the matter. Homosexuality was just as widely tolerated, for example, in many Oriental cultures. The first law criminalizing male homosexuality in China was not passed until 1740, after Jesuit Christian missionaries had gained considerable influence, and same-sex marriages were recognized in certain regions of the country until the early twentieth century. In the "New World," the situation was much the same. Homosexuality and transgenderism were readily accepted in many Native American cultures. Indeed, "two-spirit men," males who from an early age heeded a calling to take on female gender with all its responsibilities, were prized as wives by other men, and were respected as being especially powerful shamans. The anti-homosexual sentiment so prevalent in the modern Western world, which views homosexuals as sinners or perverts, has its roots in the prohibitions against same-sex activity in the Levitical laws of Judaism. Interestingly, though, there is no record of anyone ever being prosecuted for violation of those prohibitions. And many scholars and theologians now believe that they were not originally intended as blanket condemnations of all homosexual activity, anyway. In Christian teachings, anti-homosexual sentiment became much more pronounced, but it seems to have been a slow process. Although the evidence is as yet far from conclusive, there is good reason to believe that early Christians actually accepted and perhaps even sanctioned same-sex unions. It was only in the fifth century, under the guidance of St. Augustine and as part of an organized effort to undermine the pagan cults still influential throughout the Roman Empire, that the Church began to establish a doctrine that portrayed all non-procreative sexual acts, including homosexual sex, as heretical and evil. The First Gay Couple in Recorded History? In 1964, in the ancient necropolis of Saqqara, archaeologist Ahmed Moussa discovered a tomb unlike any other known to Egyptologists. It appeared to have been built for a married couple, which in itself was hardly unusual, but those interred within it, Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, were both men. Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum had served Pharoah Nyuserre during Egypt's fifth dynasty, some 4,500 years ago (c. 2450 BC), sharing the title of Overseer of the Manicurists. They are described in inscriptions in their tomb as "royal confidants." In one inscription, the men's names are combined in a linguistic reference to their closeness. Several illustrations depict the men embracing and holding hands. In a banquet scene, they are entertained by dancers, clappers, musicians and singers; in another scene, they oversee their funeral preparations. In the most striking portrayal, the two embrace in the most intimate pose allowed by canonical Egyptian art, surrounded by what appear to be their heirs. Some Egyptologists, not wanting to accept what would seem to be the obvious interpretation, have postulated that the men were actually brothers, perhaps even identical twins. But their representation is entirely consistent with the tomb representations of mixed-gender couples universally believed by researchers to be husbands and wives. To see Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum as brothers would imply that these others, too, should be seen as siblings rather than as married couples, a theory which has not been put forward by any expert in the field. Same-Sex Couples in the Old Testament The Bible describes three emotionally close relationships between two people of the same gender, each of which appears to have progressed well beyond casual friendship. While there is no unmistakable evidence that any of the three were sexually active partnerships, analysis of the original texts and of the historical contexts of the relationships strongly suggests that they were. The first such relationship (c. 1100 BC) is that between Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David, and Naomi, and is described in "Ruth" chapters 1 and 2. The second (c. 1025 BC) is that between King David himself and Jonathan, known from "I Samuel" chapters 18 and 20 and from "II Samuel" chapter 1. The third (c. 650 BC) is the relationship between the prophet Daniel and Ashpenaz, the story of which is recounted in "Daniel" chapter 1. Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome Greece: Among the ancient Greeks, it was taken for granted that what we now consider bisexuality was normal, though it was also recognized that some people were inherently attracted only to members of the opposite sex or to members of the same sex. (Aristotle wrote that the homosexual disposition "occurs in some people naturally... and whether the individual so disposed conquers or yields to it is not properly a moral issue.") As well, pederastic relationships between men and male youths were held in high esteem. Homosexual pairings, both pederastic and egalitarian, were thus quite common, and as a result, it's almost impossible to find any famous figure from Greek history or myth who didn't have at least one same-sex lover. A great many Greek poets, dramatists, lawmakers and philosophers are known to have had same-sex lovers, including Solon, Sappho, Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes and Zeno. It is important to realize, of course, that while most of what we know about homosexuality in ancient Greece involves pederastic relationships, those were not the only same-sex relationships that existed. But as they were held in especially high esteem, those relationships were the ones most likely to be immortalized in poems, myths and histories. Egalitarian relationships, those between men of similar ages, were considered less worthy of note, and were thus less often recorded, or were recorded with "poetic license." Some of the pederastic pairings which appear in Greek mythology, for example, such as the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus which is central to Homer's Iliad, actually seem originally to have been egalitarian in nature. The differences in age between the lovers appear to have been exaggerated by later storytellers who wanted to bring the relationships more in line with the "romantic ideal." In history as well as in myth, homosexual relationships sometimes played an important role in the unfolding of events. The overthrow of the sons of Peisistratus and the subsequent institution of democracy in Athens, for example, was tied, albeit indirectly, to a same-sex couple and a romantic rejection. In 514 BC, Hipparchus, who ruled Athens jointly with his brother, Hippias, was murdered by Harmodius and Aristogeiton. The young Harmodius had become the object of Hipparchus' desires, but as he and Aristogeiton were already lovers, Harmodius had rejected his advances. Hipparchus had responded by refusing to allow Harmodius' sister to participate in a religious festival, insinuating that she was not a virgin. This was such an insult that Harmodius and Aristogeiton had plotted to assassinate both Hipparchus and his brother. Though the lovers were themselves executed after killing only Hipparchus, Hippias thereafter became such a tyrant that the Athenians sought Sparta's help in overthrowing him only four years later. His death was followed by the reforms of Cleisthenes, who established a democracy in Athens. Harmodius and Aristogeiton came to be known as "the Liberators," and were seen well into Roman times as martyrs to the cause of Athenian freedom. A hundred and fifty years later, a general by the name of Gorgidas founded the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military corps consisting of 150 pairs of pederastic lovers. The idea for such a group had originated with Plato, and was explained by Plutarch, who chronicled the history of the Sacred Band, as follows: "For men of the same tribe or family little value one another when dangers press; but a band cemented by friendship grounded upon love is never to be broken, and invincible; since the lovers, ashamed to be base in sight of their beloved, and the beloved before their lovers, willingly rush into danger for the relief of one another." After three decades of successful campaigning, during which they gained a reputation as fierce warriors, Gorgidas and most of the members of the Sacred Band were finally killed in 338 BC in the Battle of Chaeronea, the decisive battle in which Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander (later to become known as Alexander the Great) ended the independence of the Greek city-states. Philip erected a memorial in Chaeronea, at the site of the communal grave where they were buried, to commemorate the bravery of the conquered warriors. Both Philip and Alexander are also known to have had same-sex lovers. Philip had an intimate relationship with Pausanias, who later became one of his bodyguards, and eventually killed him. (Although the reasons for Pausanias' actions were not entirely understood even by ancient historians, it seems that they were linked at least indirectly to his jealousy when Philip spurned him for a younger man.) Alexander was almost certainly involved romantically with Hephaestion, his closest friend and second-in-command, and was especially fond of a young Persian eunuch, Bagoas, the only person whom any historical documents describe as his "beloved." Rome: Roman culture was heavily influenced by that of the Greeks, and so it is hardly surprising that the Romans also tended to have a very matter-of-fact view of bisexuality and homosexuality. Pederasty in the Mediterranean region had largely lost its status as a ritual part of education by the time of Rome's rise, though, and so was seen by the Romans instead as an activity primarily driven by sexual desires. Many Roman leaders are known to have had same-sex lovers, including Sulla, Julius Ceasar, Augustus (who ruled as the first Roman emperor from 23 BC to 14 AD), and most of the emperors who followed until the collapse of the original empire late in the third century. A number of well-known Roman poets and writers are also known to have had same-sex lovers, including Virgil (the author of the Aeneid), Horace and Ovid. The social acceptance of pederastic and other homosexual relations waxed and waned during the centuries, reaching its last zenith during the time of Hadrian (emperor from 117 to 138), who erected statues of his beloved and prematurely deceased Antinous throughout the Roman Empire. Nero (emperor from 54 to 66) is reported to have married, at different times, two other men in wedding ceremonies. Other Roman emperors, including Diocletian (emperor from 284 to 305), are reported to have done the same thing. Elagabalus, a young man who ruled as emperor from 218 to 222, is especially interesting to students of GLBT history, as he was almost certainly transsexual. Though he married and divorced five women (one of them a Vestal Virgin), his most stable relationship was with his chariot driver, a blond slave from Caria named Hierocles, whom he referred to as his husband. He is described as having been "delighted to be called the mistress, the wife, the Queen of Hierocles," is noted to have routinely worn heavy makeup, and is said to have offered half of the Roman Empire to any physician who could equip him with female genitalia. HOMOSEXUALITY, PEDERASTY AND PEDOPHILIA Although experts agree that there is no correlation between sexual orientation and pedophilia, it remains a popular misconception that homosexuality and child molestation are somehow linked. Those who actively claim that homosexuals are likely to molest children typically offer, in addition to a general distaste for homosexuality itself, two bits of "evidence" to support their contention. They point first to the fact that much homoerotic literature and pornography involves very young men, and second, to the fact that through most of human history, homosexuality has been tied to pederastic relationships between adults and youths. The first point, of course, is laughably irrelevant; "lolitas" and "barely-legal teens" are at least as common in straight pornography as young men are in the homoerotic variety. An interest in youth is hardly exclusive to homosexuals. The second point, however, needs to be examined a bit more closely. Pederastic relationships, which involve postpubescent males, were indeed common though much of the ancient world, and in fact are still seen in some cultures today. But pedophilia, which technically refers only to sexual relationships with prepubescent children, has been almost universally condemned. This distinction is important in light of the fact that in most cultures, puberty has been seen as the start of adulthood, for both young men and young women. The same societies which expected boys in their mid teens to become involved sexually with older men as part of a pederastic mentoring process also considered girls of that age to be ready for marriage. Sexual activity between adults and what we in the modern Western world would consider children was not unique to homosexual relationships; indeed, it was probably even more common among heterosexuals. The prevalence of pederastic relationships in many cultures of the ancient world no more links pedophilia to homosexuality than the prevalence of "child brides" in those same cultures links it to heterosexuality. Homosexuality in Asia The Middle East: The cultures of the Middle East were extensively Hellenized in the centuries following the conquests of Alexander the Great, and ritual pederastic traditions based on those of the Greeks survived in those cultures for much longer than they did in the Roman Empire. Such traditions are reflected in Islamic teaching, which expects that men will be more attracted to beautiful boys than to beautiful women, even while exhorting them to resist the temptations they present. It is related that the Prophet Muhammad himself enjoined his followers in the early seventh century to "beware of beardless youth, for they are a greater source of mischief than young maidens." Chaste manifestations of pederastic attraction were incorporated into Islamic mysticism (Sufism) as a meditation known in Arabic as nazar ill'al-murd, "contemplation of the beardless," and in Persian as shahed-bazi, "witness play." This was an act of worship intended to help one ascend to the absolute beauty that is God through the relative beauty that is a boy. Conservative Islamic theologians condemned the custom both on theological grounds, rejecting the idea that human beings can realize themselves in love more perfectly than in religious practices, and on practical grounds, noting that nazar was frequently anything but chaste. Nazar was denounced as rank heresy in the early fourteenth century by Ibn Taymiyya, who complained, "They kiss a slave boy and claim to have seen God!" Despite opposition from clerics, though, the practice survived in many Islamic countries almost to the present day. Non-sublimated pederastic relationships were also widespread, and are widely documented in poetry, literature and art, including in The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of traditional Persian, Arabic and Indian stories first compiled in the ninth century. The poetry of Abu Nuwas in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, Omar Khayyám's quatrains in the twelfth century, "The Rose Garden" (1258) by Sa'adi and the ghazals written by Hafez in the fourteenth century all celebrate pederastic love, as do the paintings and drawings of artists such as Reza Abbasi in the early seventeenth century. The notoriety of the Persians for boyish pleasures was such that in the late eighteenth century, Sir Richard Francis Burton referred to pederasty as "the Persian vice." China: Chinese culture has a tradition of acceptance of bisexuality and pederasty even older than that of the Greeks, though men who had only male lovers were generally less accepted, as the begetting of children, especially sons, was a very important duty for a man in traditional Chinese society. The first law criminalizing male homosexuality in China was not passed until 1740, after Jesuit Christian missionaries had gained considerable influence. Many Chinese emperors, including nearly all of the emperors of the Western Han dynasty (206 BC to 9 AD) are known to have had male lovers. It is said that Emperor Ai, who ruled from 6 BC to 1 AD, once cut off his sleeve rather than wake up his lover, Dong Xian, who was sleeping across it. This story gave rise to the term "the passion of the cut sleeve" as a Chinese term for homosexual love. In the tenth century, in the province of Fujian, pederastic couples were actually married. These "boy marriages" would last for a set period, after which the younger partner would find a wife, often with the help of the older one. The marriages were celebrated by the two families in traditional fashion, and their popularity gave rise to another euphemistic expression for same-sex love in China, "the southern custom." Men's sexual interest in youths was also reflected in prostitution, with young male sex workers fetching higher prices than their female counterparts as recently as the beginning of the twentieth century. Lesbian marriages were celebrated in the Guangdong region of China during the later part of the Qing or Manchu dynasty (1616-1912). Though the origin of the custom is unknown, these marriages, which were treated in all respects as heterosexual marriages and which were expected to be life-long commitments, continued to be celebrated until early in the twentieth century. Japan: Homosexuality has been recorded from ancient times in Japan, and indeed, during the medieval period, love between men was viewed as the purest form of love. Sex has historically been viewed in Japan not in terms of morality, but rather in terms of pleasure, social position and social responsibility; homosexuality has never been seen as a sin in Japanese society or religion. Even today, despite the influence of Western thought on its culture and attitudes, Japanese law still includes no specific prohibitions against same-sex activity. Some of the earliest references to homosexuality in Japanese literature date from the Heian Period. In the eleventh-century The Tale of Genji, often considered the world's first novel, men are frequently moved by the beauty of youths. Buddhist monasteries appear to have been early centers of homosexual activity in ancient Japan, but same-sex love spread from religious circles to the warrior class. By the fifteenth century, it was customary for a young samurai to apprentice to an older and more experienced man, in a practice which closely paralleled European pederasty. The young samurai would be his mentor's lover for many years. The practice was known as shudo, "the way of the young," and was held in high esteem by the warrior class. As Japanese society became pacified, the middle classes adopted many of the practices of the warrior class. Shudo was given a more mercantile interpretation. Young kabuki actors, known as kagema, became the rage. These male actors moonlighted as prostitutes, and frequently used the stage to advertise their charms. They were much sought after by wealthy patrons, who would vie with each other to purchase their favors. As European influence in Japan increased, however, the practice of shudo fell out of favor. Homosexuality Among the Early Christians Some modern scholars, most notably John Boswell, have argued that the early Christian Church actually sanctioned same-sex unions. Ancient prayer-books in both the Eastern and Western Churches contain, alongside heterosexual marital rites, rites of adelphopoiesis, Greek for "the making of brothers." While many scholars assert that they were merely rites of becoming adopted brothers or "blood brothers," Boswell and others have claimed that the rites were in fact no different that the heterosexual rites, and were intended for the making and blessing of sexual unions. Though Boswell's evidence is impressive, his conclusions remain controversial. However, even scholars who disagree with the idea that the early Church sanctioned homosexual unions generally concede that it did not actively persecute homosexuals. Several pairs of early Christian martyrs are widely believed to have been same-sex couples, including St. Perpetua and St. Felicia, who were martyred in Carthage, and St. Sergius and St. Bacchus, who were martyred in Rome. As well, St. Sebastian, another martyr in Rome, has long been associated with homosexuality and with homosexual causes. It has been speculated that St. Paul of Tarsus (Paul the Apostle) might have been romantically involved with St. Timothy, and it has even been suggested, though the idea is of course extremely controversial, that Jesus himself might have been involved in a same-sex relationship with St. John the Evangelist, the "Beloved Disciple." Whatever the status of homosexuality in the early Church, though, the beginnings of Christian persecution of homosexuality were clearly tied to the rise of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire. In 313, the Edict of Milan was signed under the reigns of Constantine I in the east and Licinius in the west. The edict established tolerance for Christianity throughout the Roman Empire, but did not yet make it the official state religion. After the Edict was proclaimed, however, the Christian Church rapidly became very influential amongst the ruling classes of the Empire, and its bishops were established in positions of power and influence. Christianity became the single official religion of Rome less than a century later, under Theodosius, the last emperor to rule (from 379 to 395) a united Roman Empire. The power of the Christian Church was demonstrated in 390, when St. Ambrose excommunicated Theodosius, who had ordered the massacre of several thousand inhabitants of Thessalonica in response to the assassination of his military governor stationed in the city. Theodosius was forced to perform several months of public penance before the excommunication was revoked. While Christianity flourished, though, the Empire was by no means uniformly Christian. Paganism remained a significant influence in many areas, a fact which Christian leaders saw as an obstacle to their proselytizing. During Theodosius' reign, and with his approval, pagan temples throughout the empire were destroyed and replaced with Christian churches. Additionally, the Christian Church began usurping pagan customs and celebrations for their own use. As another tactic in the war against paganism, during the fifth century, Christian leaders began to argue for the suppression of pederasty, as it was one of the mainstays of classical pagan culture. This campaign was rationalized by quotations from the Old Testament, most notably the Levitical condemnation of homosexual activity, and by appeals to long-standing Israelite tradition. The writings of St. Augustine of Hippo, who in spite of having had at least one male lover in his own youth, argued persuasively against homosexual and all other non-procreative sex acts, were of substantial influence. The Christian Church thus came to officially regard homosexuality, which not long before it had tolerated, if not embraced, as sin, and homosexuals as sinners.     [ Ancient ] [ 533-1861 ] [ 1862-1968 ] [ 1969-1980 ] [ 1981-1995 ] [ 1996-2006 ] [ Notes ]     533-1861 SUMMARY: A MILLENIUM OF PERSECUTION By the beginning of the sixth century, under the Church's influence, civil authorities throughout Europe and the Byzantine Empire began criminalizing homosexual acts. Through at least the twelfth century, though, prosecution by both civil and religious authorities remained erratic, as a number of Popes and state leaders were openly homosexual, and as the Church was trying to impose a ban prohibiting priests from marrying, for which the support of homosexual priests was important. But by the late medieval period, "sodomites" (a term coined in the eleventh century) had become the targets of widespread, organized persecution. And as Western influence spread, so did that persecution, into Africa, Asia and the Americas. 533 In his codification of Roman law, Emperor Justinian of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire placed homosexual acts in the same category as adultery, and put them for the first time under civil authority. In a 538 revision of the Justinian Code, homosexuality was criminalized for the first time under Roman law, and possibly for the first time under secular law anywhere in the world. "Because of such crimes there are famines, earthquakes, and pestilences; wherefore we admonish men to abstain from the aforesaid unlawful acts, that they may not lose their souls.... We order the prefect of the capital to... inflict on them the extreme punishments, so that the city and the state may not come to harm by reason of such wicked deeds." A great plague struck Constantinople in 541, wiping out more than a third of the population over the next three years. The emperor and the Church believed that this proved his predictions of the dangers posed by homosexuality. In a 544 revision of the Code, the emperor reminded his citizens that, "Though we stand always in need of the kindness and goodness of God, yet is this specially the case at this time, when in various ways we have provoked him to anger on account of the multitude of our sins.... We ought to abstain from all base concerns and acts -- and especially... the defilement of males which some men sacrilegiously and impiously dare to attempt, perpetrating vile acts with other men." Homosexuals were urged to desist and seek forgiveness through penance. The recalcitrant were turned over to the city prefect; their penalty was death. Justinian and his wife, the Empress Theodora, used the law to attack enemies and to enrich themselves through the confiscation of property. In the process, homosexuals became enemies of the state. 634 King Reccesvinth, the ruler of Visigoth Spain, passed legislation penalizing homosexual behavior, stipulating castration as the penalty. This was the first European secular law to criminalize it. 741 The Edoques, a legal handbook, was issued by Emperor Leo III and his son, Constantine V. It remained the major code of secular law in the East for the next several centuries. It ameliorated the penalty of Byzantine civil law for homosexual behavior from death to mutilation. 955 John XII, Pope from 955 to 963, modeled himself after the third-century Roman emperor Elagabalus, and held homosexual orgies in the papal palace. 1049 The term "sodomy" was coined by Pietro Damiani (Peter Damian) in his Liber Gomorrhianus, in which he attacked homosexual practices and masturbation. Pietro also staunchly opposed clerical marriages. 1093 St. Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109, though committed to celibacy, wrote romantic love letters to his former companions in the Benedictine monastery of Bec in Normandy, indicating his yearning and frustrated desire. 1120 The Church Council of Nablus specified burning at the stake as the penalty for homosexual acts. 1123 The first Lateran Council in Rome declared clerical marriages invalid. Contemporaries pointed out that homosexual priests were more likely to enforce the prohibition. 1157 St. Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, celebrated intimate friendship in On Spiritual Friendship. He explored the relation between spiritual and human friendship in a monastic context, revealing his own conscious homosexual orientation and giving love between persons of the same gender its most profound expression in Christian theology. He encouraged virginity among the unmarried and chastity (not necessarily abstinence) in marriage and widowhood, and warned against any sexual activity outside of marriage, treating same-sex and opposite-sex attraction as equally likely and equally dangerous to the person sworn to celibacy. 1179 The third Lateran Council decreed degradation and confinement within a monastery for clerics guilty of sodomy, and excommunication for laymen. 1212 In Paris, the penalty for sodomy was fixed at death. This was the first secular law to criminalize sodomy since the Spanish Visagoth law of 654, and was the first in Europe to prescribe the death penalty. 1233 The papacy accused the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, with which it was fighting, of sodomy, and enlisted the aid of the newly-founded Franciscan and Dominican orders (who were then directing the Inquisition in southern France) to denounce the supporters of Emperor Frederick II of heresy, sodomy and other offenses against morality. 1266 With the end of the conflict between the papacy and the empire, the Inquisition returned to attacking political opponents as heretics, sodomites and adulterers. 1292 John de Wettre, a knife-maker, was burned at the stake for sodomy after being condemned at Ghent, in present-day Belgium. His was the first execution for sodomy in Western Europe for which records still exist. 1307 On Friday, October 13, some 2,000 Knights Templar, probably all of the members of the order in France, were simultaneously arrested by agents of Philip the Fair. Under torture, they confessed to worshipping idols, plotting against the Pope and the King, and engaging in obscene practices, including sodomy. When the Templars faced the tribunals of the Inquisition, under the control of Pope Clement V, their leaders withdrew their confessions, and for doing so, were executed. Pressed by Philip, the Pope ordered all Christian princes to arrest the Templars. While the charges of widespread homosexuality among the Templars may well have been true, Philip's real motive for attacking them was to plunder their vast treasuries and to break their considerable power. 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy. Among her "crimes" were cross-dressing and inappropriate relationships with women. 1432 In Florence, city officials founded "Gli Ufficiali di Notte" (The Officers of the Night) to root out the practice of sodomy. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, over 17,000 men of Florence had been charged with sodomy, and over 3,000 had been convicted. The prevalence of sodomy and pederasty in Renaissance Florence is perhaps best conveyed by the fact that the Germans later adopted the word "florenzen" to describe the act of having relations with a youth. 1471 Shortly after being elected Pope, Sixtus IV appointed his lover as a cardinal. 1474 In Florence, a charge of sodomy was brought against the 22 year-old Leonardo da Vinci following an anonymous accusation, but after he had spent two months in jail and endured intense questioning by police, he was acquitted, as no witnesses had come forward. By this time, persecution of sodomites was becoming common throughout Italy, France and Spain. 1497 In Venice, Timeotoda Lucca of the Order of the Observants of St. Francis gave a speech at the Church on San Marco in which he blamed a plague terrorizing the city on sodomites. 1507 Article 141 of the Constitutio Criminalis Bambergenis, the criminal code of the German city of Bamberg, contained a prohibition of sodomy of a human being with a beast, a man with a man, or a woman with a woman. This was the first appearance of sodomy as a crime within German law. 1512 On August 31, in Florence, a group of 30 young aristocrats staged history's first gay rights demonstration by charging into City Hall, forcing a senior justice official to resign, and demanding that the council revoke the sentences of all those who had been exiled or deprived of office for sodomy. Remarkably, after a palace coup by the Medici family two weeks later, those demands were actually acceded to. 1513 The Spanish explorer Balboa encountered homosexuality among the chiefs at Quarqua in Panama. A contemporary British account reported that "the most abhominal and unnaturall lechery" was practiced by "the Kynges brother and many other younger men in womens apparell, smoth and effeminately decked, which by the report of such as dwelte aboute hym, he abused with preposterous Venus." To keep "this stynkynge abhomination" from spreading, Balboa turned to the expediency of throwing 40 of these men to be torn apart by his dogs. Many similar observations by a multitude of European explorers followed during the next 300 years, making it clear that homosexuality and transgenderism were readily accepted among Native Americans. (Indeed, "two-spirit men," males who from an early age heeded a calling to take on female gender with all its responsibilities, were prized as wives by other men, and were respected as being especially powerful shamans.) Of course, in the eyes of the Europeans, this toleration of sodomy and crossdressing merely proved that the natives were, indeed, savages desperately in need of help. 1532 Section 116 of the Constitution of Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, stated that "if anyone commits impurity with a beast, or a man with a man, or a woman with a woman, they have forfeited their lives and shall, after the common custom, be sentenced to death by burning." The Constitution represented a culmination of the work to codify the penal code of the Holy Roman Empire begun at the Diet of Freiberg in 1498, and formally adopted by the Diet in Regensburg in 1532. The Carolinian constitution had a great impact on future European penal law, not only in the German states, but also in France and Russia, and brought sodomy under secular jurisdiction for the first time in much of the Germanic and Slovak portions of the empire. 1533 The Buggery Act was adopted in England. Introduced by Henry VIII, and piloted through Parliament by Thomas Cromwell, it was the first legislation against homosexuals in the country, and became the basis for American as well as British law on the subject. The act made "buggery" with man or beast punishable by hanging, though in practice, sentences were frequently commuted to exposure in the pillory. The act was never prosecuted as aggessively as were similar laws in other European states. The artist Michelangelo wrote to Tommaso Cavalieri, the great love of his life, "I could as easily forget your name as the food by which I live; nay, it would be easier to forget the food, which only nourishes my body, than your name, which nourishes both body and soul." Michelangelo wrote a great many love letters and ardent love poems to Cavalieri, and also sent him a series of erotic drawings, the most famous of which depicts Zeus, disguised as an eagle, abducting the young Ganymede. In the drawing, the eagle presses its body tightly against the back of the smiling, pliant Ganymede. 1540 Lord Hungerford of Heyetsbury became the first person executed for violation of England's Buggery Act, though it is likely that the real reason for his execution was treason. 1541 Nicholas Udall, a cleric, playwright, and Headmaster of Eton College, became the first person to be charged for violation of the Buggery Act alone. His sentence was commuted to imprisonment, and he was released in less than a year. 1551 Pope Julius III created a scandal by picking up a young, uneducated hustler and appointing him to the rank of cardinal. 1566 In Florida, then under Spanish rule, Guillermo, a French interpreter, was accused of being a traitor and "a great Sodomite." His was the first recorded execution for sodomy in North America. 1568 Felipe II of Spain ordered the death of all sodomites in his realms. His reign, which lasted until 1598, was extremely oppressive. In Sicily, which was under Felipe's control, however, there was a tradition of tolerance for male-male sexuality, and local authorities resisted his orders and succeeded in handing down lesser sentences in a great many cases. 1605 The Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci included an engraving of the destruction of Sodom in his essay in Chinese on "Depraved Sexuality," introducing Western attitudes towards homosexuality to China. 1610 The Virginia colony adopted the "buggery" laws of England, making sex between two men a capital crime. This was the first "anti-sodomy" law enacted in North America. By the time of the Revolutionary War, such laws existed throughout the colonies. (Adultery was also a capital crime under Virginia law.) 1629 The acting governor of Virginia, John Pott, heard testimony in the matter of Thomas/Thomasina Hall, who claimed to be both male and female, and who had at various times (both before and after coming to Virginia) dressed and worked both as a man and as a woman. Pott concluded that Hall was a true hermaphrodite, and so ruled that he/she should "goe Clothed in mans apparell, only his head to bee attired in a Coyfe and Croscloth wth an Apron before him." Thus was the confused and probably deeply unhappy Hall condemned to endure daily derision. 1634 The Irish House of Commons passed a law modeled on the British Buggery Act. John Atherton, Bishop of Lismore and Waterford, was the driving force behind its passage, and ironically, seven years later, became the first to be hanged for violating it. It is likely, however, that he was not in fact guilty, but was instead the victim of a conspiracy. 1637 A Plymouth colony court tried John Allexander and Thomas Roberts for "often spending their seed one upon the other." Both were found guilty and were severely whipped, and Allexander was branded on the shoulder and banished from the colony. Although the colony had made sodomy punishable by death the previous year, that penalty required penetration, which had not been proven in this case. 1642 In Salem, Massachusetts Bay, Elizabeth Johnson was fined five pounds and severely whipped for several offenses, among them "unnatural acts" with another woman. 1646 In the New Netherlands colony, Jan Creoli, a Negro, was "choked to death, and then burnt to ashes" for sodomy. (It was his second offense.) Manuel Congo, the 10 year-old boy whom Creoli allegedly sodomized, received a public flogging. 1649 Mary Hammon and Sara Norman were charged with "lude behavior... upon a bed" in Plymouth, Massachusetts. Charges against the 16 year-old Hammon were dropped, but Norman was forced to publicly acknowledge her unchaste behavior, and was warned that if there were any subsequent offenses, her punishment would be greater. (The death penalty in Plymouth applied only to sex between men.) Norman is believed to have been the first woman in North America to have been tried and punished solely for lesbianism. 1653 With Oliver Cromwell's rise to power following the beheading of Charles I, executions for sodomy and adultery in England became significantly more common. 1656 The Puritans in New Haven passed a law that punished by death "men lying with men as with women" and women changing "the natural use, into that which is against nature." The law broke from British legal tradition by explicitly citing the Bible as its basis. It was also unique in colonial legislation for its inclusion of women's "unnatural acts." 1658 In Mexico, 14 men were burned to death, and one was given 200 lashes, after having been convicted of sodomy. Four years later, a leader of the Mexican Inquisition sent a letter to his supervisors in Spain complaining that the severe punishments being given to sodomites had proven "ineffective." He noted that over 100 had been indicted, that a large number of the offenders were clergy, and that torture had been used to extract confessions. (One man had been tortured to the point of confessing to sex with forty men, three or four mules and two or three chickens.) 1668 The representative assembly of New Jersey made sodomy a capital crime. Exceptions were made for victims of rape and for those under 14; they could not be executed, but could be sentenced to whatever other punishment the court deemed appropriate. Three years later, the General Court of the Plymouth Colony added sodomy to its list of capital offenses, with similar exceptions. 1682 The Province of Pennsylvania, under a strong Quaker influence, repealed a 1676 law which had made sodomy a capital offense. Under the province's new law, a sodomy conviction resulted only in six months imprisonment, whipping, and the forfeiture of one third of the convict's assets. It was the first American colony to show such leniency. The revision made the province one of only two in North America where a man could not be put to death for sodomy. In West New Jersey, also a Quaker colony, no "anti-sodomy" law had yet been put into effect. 1692 In Massachusetts Bay colony, the Salem witch trials resulted in at least 25 executions. 1700 A new law concerning sodomy was passed by the Pennsylvania assembly. If committed by a white man, sodomy was punishable by life in prison with, at the discretion of the judge, a whipping every three months for the first year. If he was married, the man was castrated and his wife was granted a divorce. If committed by a black man, however, the punishment for sodomy was death. (Such distinctions based on the race of the offender were common throughout the colonies.) 1706 Peter the Great issued a new military legal code based on Sweden's military code. The first Russian law to penalize consensual male homosexuality, it prescribed burning at the stake for sodomy, though it is not known to have ever been enforced. A 1716 revision prescribed corporal punishment, reserving the death penalty for rape or use of violence. The code applied only to the military. Peter himself was reputedly bisexual. 1708 Edward Hyde, Lord Cornbury, was withdrawn as Governor of New York and New Jersey. He was widely reputed to have been a crossdresser, though he is not believed to have been a homosexual. Anne Horton and Alice Pickford were married in England, one of two female couples whose marriages were registered in the parish of Taxal, Cheshire. 1718 The British forced Pennsylvania to bring its laws into compliance with British legal tradition, and so sodomy was made a capital offense. 1725 In England, undercover police officer Samuel Stephens entered Mother Clapp's molly house (a meeting place for gay men) to gather evidence for a raid. He observed men kissing, holding hands, hugging, sitting in each other's laps and dancing, and noted that there were rooms where men could go to have sex. His report led to the arrest of Mother Clapp, who was fined and sentenced to two years in prison. 1726 In England, Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin and Thomas Wright were hanged after being arrested during a raid on Margaret Brown's molly house. George Kedger, another man who had been sentenced to death, was spared when a judge overturned his conviction. 1727 In England, Charles Hitchin, a policeman and crime lord, and a regular at several molly houses, was turned in by a remorseful partner. He was found guilty of attempted sodomy and fined 20 pounds, sentenced to six months in prison, and forced to stand in the pillory. After he was put in the pillory, several of his friends from the molly houses attempted to protect him from the crowd. The crowd attacked them, and a bloody battle resulted. It was the earliest recorded act of gay resistance. 1729 In Prussia, a baker named Ephraim Ostermann was sentenced to death after confessing to fellating another man, Martin Kohler. When Kohler died soon after, his death was attributed to unnatural loss of semen. 1730 In Amsterdam, four men were arrested for sodomy. All of them confessed and were executed, but not before one of them, Pieter Martijn, had given the court the names of 40 other men whom he accused of being sodomites. Fearing divine retribution, Dutch officials launched an unprecedented campaign to eliminate sodomites from the Netherlands. Far more aggressive than their contemporaries in England and France, over the next 80 years, they convicted nearly 600 men of sodomy, and executed more than 50. Dutch law left the method of execution to the discretion of judges, but the most common method was garroting (strangulation with a thin wire or rope), because it was a typical method of executing women. 1740 The Qing (Manchu) government enacted a male rape law, and for the first time in Chinese history, outlawed homosexual acts between consenting males. 1748 Stating what now seems obvious, the French philosopher, Montesquieu, warned in his "The Spirit of Laws" that charges of sodomy, like charges of heresy or witchcraft, could easily be used for political ends. 1775 The first battles of the American Revolutionary War were fought. 1776 In America, the "Declaration of Independence" was signed. In the Netherlands, in the wake of the new wave of persecutions, an anonymous tract attributed to Abraham Perrenot, legal advisor to William V of Orange, defended homosexuals as being of little harm to society, and argued that homosexuality should only be considered a crime when committed with underage boys. 1777 Thomas Jefferson, in a move seen as liberal at the time, proposed a revision of Virginia law to reduce the penalty for sodomy from death to castration. The proposal was rejected. In England, Ann Marrow was found guilty of impersonating a man in marriage and was sentenced to the pillory, where she was so severely pelted that she was blinded. 1778 Lieutenant Frederick Gorthold Enslin became the first American soldier to be court-martialed and discharged from the newly-formed Continental Army for "attempting to commit sodomy." 1783 After almost two years of service in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army and several combat wounds, Robert Shirtliff was discovered to actually be Deborah Sampson, a descendant of Governor William Bradford. She was given an honorable discharge, and later recieved a military pension. She was excommunicated from the First Baptist Church of Middleborough, Massachusetts, for "dressing in men's clothes" and behaving "very loose and unchristianlike." Though she had formed attachments with several women during her time as "Robert," she later married a man, with whom she had three children. 1786 Pennsylvania became the first of the 13 American states to drop the death penalty for sodomy. The new sentence was 10 years in prison and the forfeiture of all property. The liberalism of Pennsylvania's legislature did not reflect a new-found sympathy for sodomites, but rather, a general liberalization of the legal code the young United States had inherited from England. Other states eventually followed Pennsylvania's example, though convicted sodomites could be sentenced to death in South Carolina until 1873. 1789 The U.S. Constitution officially went into effect, and George Washington became the first U.S. President. 1791 In the United States, the Bill of Rights was ratified. In France, Louis Michel le Peletier, de Saint-Fargeau presented a new criminal code to the National Constituent Assembly. He explained that it outlawed only "true crimes" and not "phoney offenses, created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and [royal] despotism." He did not list the crimes "created by superstition" (meaning the Christian religion), but these certainly included blasphemy, heresy, sacrilege and witchcraft, and most probably also included incest, bestiality and same-sex sexual acts, none of which was mentioned in the new Code Penal. All these former offenses were thus effectively decriminalized. 1794 Prussia became the first country in Europe to rescind the death penalty for sodomy without decriminalizing it, replacing the penalty with imprisonment and banishment. 1803 The last known execution for sodomy in the Netherlands occurred in the town of Schiedan, near Rotterdam. 1804 In France, the Napoleonic Code was adopted. Following the example of the Code Penal, it punished sexual acts only when someone's rights were injured, as in the case of a non-consensual act. This effectively legalized homosexuality. (Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, the primary author of the Napoleonic Code, was himself a homosexual.) 1810 Chevalier Charles-Genevieve Louis-Auguste-Andre-Timothee d'Eon de Beaumont, whose gender was a source of considerable controversy during his lifetime, died. He had lived 49 years as a man and 34 as a woman. An aristocrat, diplomat, soldier and spy, d'Eon had worked for the French government in both male and female roles, exhibiting a chameleon-like ability to change from man to woman and back again. In 1762, after being wounded in battle, he had been offered a diplomatic assignment at the British royal court. (French king Louis XV had congratulated him on his new post in a letter in which he wrote, "You have served me just as well in women's clothing as you have in the clothes you are now wearing.") While serving in London, his slight build and pretty features had led many to believe that he was really a crossdressed woman, and people in both England and France had begun placing wagers on his sex. King Louis XV had finally sent a letter to George III of England to settle the matter, stating that d'Eon was a woman. Rather than calming public doubts, though, this had created an even greater frenzy. Lawsuits had been filed by losing bettors, and doctors had been called in to testify. Finally, d'Eon had officially been declared a woman by an English court. The chevalier had responded to this public humiliation with dignity and defiance, writing to a friend, "I am what the hands of God have made me." In exchange for his agreement to live quietly as a woman, d'Eon had been granted a generous pension by the French government. When d'Eon died, five men who had known him were asked to examine the body and record their observations, in order to definitively settle the question of the chevalier's sex. All five men testified that the body was anatomically male. Nicholas Biddle, a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition, recorded that "among Minitarees [Indians] if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclinations he is put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them & sometimes married to men. The French called them Birdashes." 1811 In an account of events at Fort Astoria in the Oregon Territory, Gabriel Franchere made the first written reference to a female berdache, from the Kutenai Indian nation, who dressed as a man and was accompanied by a wife. 1836 The last execution in England for "buggery" took place, although it remained a capital offense until 1861. 1848 The first Women's Rights Convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York. This convention propelled several probable lesbian and bisexual women into the national limelight, most notably Susan B. Anthony. 1849 In one of the first experiments to demonstrate the effect of hormones on sexuality, Arnold Adolf Berthold, professor of physiology at the University of Gottingen, removed the testicles from four roosters. Two became "fat pacifists," while the other two, in whom he had grafted new testicles, began to act like normal roosters again. 1860 Walt Whitman published the first of his homoerotic "Calamus" poems in the third edition of Leaves of Grass, inspiring many later gay poets. 1861 Abraham Lincoln became President of the United States, the Confederate States of America was established under President Jefferson Davis, and the U.S. Civil War began. In England, the Offenses Against the Person Act reduced the penalty for buggery from death to imprisonment of 10 years to life. This was a part of an ongoing process of removing numerous crimes from the category of capital offenses, and did not reflect any particular interest in sodomy, per se.     [ Ancient ] [ 533-1861 ] [ 1862-1968 ] [ 1969-1980 ] [ 1981-1995 ] [ 1996-2006 ] [ Notes ]     1862-1968 SUMMARY: THE CENTURY BEFORE STONEWALL In the late nineteenth century, there was for the first time in centuries a fundamental change in the way that homosexuality was viewed by Western society. A growing number of doctors, beginning to understand homosexuality as an orientation rather than simply as a behavior, argued that it ought to be considered a disease or pathology rather than a crime or sin. (A few actually went so far as to argue that it was just a normal and healthy variation of human sexuality, but their view was largely ignored.) At the same time, traditional gender roles in the Western world were being seriously challenged for the first time. The so-called "New Women" sought self-determination and self-fulfillment, refusing to be defined solely as daughters, wives or mothers, and displaying a "masculine" thirst for education and work. Meanwhile, the dandies or aesthetes, such as Oscar Wilde and other "decadent" artists and writers, embraced such "feminine" values as attention to style, extravagance and artificiality. These languorous men, many of them (unlike Wilde) heterosexuals, were the forefather's of today's "metrosexuals." In a practical sense, though, nothing really changed at all. Homosexuals were still ostracized by society, and most still had to hide lest they be discovered and punished. The world's first homosexual rights organization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, was founded in Berlin by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1897. Hirschfeld went on to found the Institute of Sexology following the end of the first World War, where groundbreaking work was done in the investigation of bisexuality and transgender issues, and where the earliest complete sex-reassignment surgeries were performed. Most of Hirschfeld's work was lost, though, when the Nazis destroyed the Institute and burned the library in 1933. Thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of gay men subsequently died or were murdered in Nazi concentration camps. However, while homosexuals and others who violated the standards of "correct" gender behavior suffered their most blatant persecution in the twentieth century at the hands of the Nazis in Germany, a much more subtle and pervasive persecution had already begun and was continuing in the United States. Even as the women's rights and civil rights movements were bringing the need for equality into the open and were producing legislation aimed at giving women and minorities the same rights enjoyed by white males, homosexuals were being pushed further into the shadows. In the wake of the "Lavender Scare" fomented by Joseph McCarthy in the early 1950s, gays and lesbians in America were denied even basic legal protections. By the late 1960s, the situation had become a proverbial "powder keg," awaiting only a catalyst event to trigger an explosive reaction. 1862 Pioneer sexologist Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, who had worked as an official legal adviser for the district court of Hildesheim in the Kingdom of Hanover before being dismissed when his homosexuality became apparent, took the momentous step of telling his family and friends that he was, using his own word, a "Uranian." ("Uranian" comes from the Greek "uranos" [heaven], and is a reference to Plato's theory of the two gods of love: Pandemian [vulgar] Eros, who governs heterosexual love, and Uranian [heavenly] Eros, who governs love between men.) He also wrote a statement of legal and moral support for a man arrested for homosexual offenses. This was the first public "coming out" and one of the first recorded examples of gay rights activism. Two years later, he published the first of his studies on homosexuality, in which he argued that homosexuality, hermaphroditism and bisexuality were the work of nature, and thus innate and unavoidable. 1865 President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated just before the end of the U.S. Civil War ended. 1867 Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs spoke out for the rights of homosexuals at the Congress of German Jurists in Munich, urging repeal of all anti-homosexual laws. He was shouted down. 1868 Pope Leo XIII discontinued the long-standing practice of castrating young boys for the choirs of the Sistine chapel. 1869 Hungarian psychologist Karl-Maria Kertbeny (born Karl-Maria Benkert) wrote a series of anonymous pamphlets in which he argued against the criminalization of homosexual sex and put forward the view that homosexuality was inborn and unchangeable. In the course of these writings, he introduced the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual." (He had originally used the terms at least a year earlier in private correspondence with Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs.) 1870 Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend, the first U.S. novel to touch on the subject of homosexuality, was published. The fifteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibited the states or the federal government from using a citizen's race, color or previous status as a slave as a voting qualification. Its basic purpose was to enfranchise former slaves. But it was not really until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, almost a century later, that this purpose was actually achieved in all states. 1871 Paragraph 175 of the criminal code of the newly-created German Empire made homosexual acts between males a crime. 1873 South Carolina became the last of the original 13 U.S. states to rescind capital punishment for sodomy. 1881 E.C. Spitzka of New York presented the case of Lord Cornbury, the colonial governor of New York and New Jersey in the early 1700s, in a Chicago medical journal. Spitzka described Cornbury, who was reputed to have been a crossdresser, as a sexual pervert, "a degraded, hypocritical and utterly immoral being." 1882 William Hammond delivered a paper to the American Neurological Association on a "disease" which makes males believe themselves to be females. As an example, he told of Native Americans who lived as members of the opposite sex. 1883 The term "lesbian" appeared in print in its modern context for the first time, in an article about the crossdressing Lucy Ann Lobdell in the Alienist and Neurologist medical journal. 1884 An editorial in a New York medical journal said that "urnings" (a term coined by Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs to describe men who are attracted to other men) had an irrepressible desire to act like females, and that their "perverted feelings" led to insanity and suicide. The editorial reflected the growing sentiment that homosexuality should be moved from the criminal realm to the medical. 1885 The British Parliament enacted the Labouchere Amendment, which prohibited "gross indecency" between males, a broad term that was understood to encompass most or all male homosexual acts. (It is widely believed that lesbianism was omitted from the act because Queen Victoria refused to believe that it existed; however, it is more likely that those presenting the amendment omitted it for fear that criminalizing lesbianism would alert women to its possibility.) 1886 Borrowing Kertbeny's terminology, noted sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing listed homosexuality along with 200 other case studies of deviant sexual practices in his definitive work, Psycopathia Sexualis. The book was so influential that "heterosexual" and "homosexual" became the standard terms for the sexual orientations, superceding Ulrichs' term, "urning." A 21 year-old man identified only as J.M. was admitted to the Insane Department of the Philadelphia Hospital. Philip Leidy later wrote of the case as an example of sexual perversion because J.M. claimed that his name was Jane and that he was a girl, spoke in an effeminate voice, masturbated, and liked to fondle men with both his mouth and his hands. Annie Ryan married Annie Hindle, who gave her name as Charles Hindle, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Gilbert Sarony, a female impersonator, was one of the witnesses. 1889 G. Frank Lydston gave a lecture at the Chicago College of Physicians and Surgeons in which he claimed that sexual perversion was a result of moral, physical and mental defect. He said that those who prefer their own sex are often effeminate and have an inferior physical make up, are likely to recognize one another and congregate together, and are more frequently male than female. Other sexual perversions he discussed included bestiality, and oral sex with a member of the opposite sex. The Denver Times ran a story about two women from Aspen who had come to Denver to elope. Clara Dietrich and Ora Chatfield were ordered by the sheriff to cease living together. They complied for a short time, but then arranged to meet and run away together. 1891 The word "homosexual" was introduced into the English language by J. A. Symonds in A Problem in Modern Ethics. The following year, Charles Gilbert Chaddock, the translator of Psychopathia Sexualis introduced "homosexuality" into the language. Charles Dana presented a paper on sexual neuroses at the New York Post-Graduate School of Medicine. Lumped together in this category were masturbation, same-sex attraction, pederasty, bestiality, flagellation, exhibitionism and sexual murder and cannibalism. 1892 Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's partner at the time, wrote the poem, "Two Loves," which ends with the famous line describing homosexuality as "the Love that dare not speak its name." 1893 F.E. Daniel, editor of The Texas Medical Journal, presented a paper which advocated the castration of male and female sexual perverts, including homosexuals, to prevent them from reproducing and passing on their traits. He also recommended that those convicted of such offenses be stripped of all rights. 1894 John Sholto Douglas, the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, wrote privately to his son Lord Alfred Douglas, complaining about Alfred's relationship with Oscar Wilde, which had begun in 1891. The elder Douglas then went on to publicly accuse Wilde of being a "somdomite," in response to which Wilde charged him with criminal libel. Their conflict led to Wilde's conviction and two-year imprisonment for "gross indecency." 1895 Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for "gross indecency" after a very public trial that raised the topic of homosexuality throughout the English-speaking world, and through most of Europe, as well. An article in The New York Times about intimacy between women stated that fidelity could not exist because "there are no Davids and Jonathans among women." The author claimed that fundamental antagonism existed between women, and it was in a woman's nature to lack humanity. 1896 For the first time on the American stage, two women hugged and kissed in a scene of the play, "A Florida Enchantment." Though the play was not lesbian in content, the scene was so controversial that during intermission, ushers offered ice water to any audience members who felt faint. (The play's story involved some of the characters swallowing magic seeds which transformed them into members of the opposite sex. It was described by The New York Times as vile and stupid, and the worst play ever produced in New York.) Sexual Inversion, the first English-language medical text book on homosexuality, was published by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds. It described the sexual relations of homosexual men, something that Ellis, a British doctor, sexual psychologist and social reformer, did not consider to be a disease or a crime. A bookseller was prosecuted in 1897 for stocking it. Ellis' followup, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, was published in German to avoid British censorship. (The English term "sexual inversion" was a mistranslation of a German term that Karl Westphal, a respected German physician, professor, and journal editor, had coined in 1869. He had theorized that women and men whose sexual desires turn toward members of their own sex possess "contrary sexual feeling" and associated mental illnesses.) 1897 After working for several years as a general practitioner in Magdeburg, Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld (himself a gay man and occasional crossdresser, sometimes called "Auntie Magnesia," or later, "the Einstein of Sex") founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to defend the rights of homosexuals and to work toward repeal of Paragraph 175. It was the world's first homosexual rights organization. 1898 August Bebel, leader of the German Social-Democratic Party, argued on the floor of the Reichstag in favor of the repeal of Paragraph 175, the German "anti-sodomy" law. Bebel brought with him a petition circulated by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which he had signed. Other signers included finance minister Rudolf Hilferding, Albert Einstein, and author Hermann Hesse. Leo Tolstoy sent a letter in support of the petition. 1900 Sigmund Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, his first major work detailing his ideas on psychoanalysis. Dealing as it did with sexual urges, psychoanalysis was frequently used in the treatment of homosexuality, and much discussion of psychoanalysis was devoted to the issue of homosexuality as a sexual disorder. Because homosexuals were classified as mentally ill, they were of course prevented from entering psychoanalytic training, and thus had no voice in the formation of psychoanalytical theory themselves. The rise of psychoanalysis popularised the idea of homosexuality as a disease, which in turn increased the number of homosexuals placed in mental hospitals and prisons. Researchers seeking a "cure" utilized a wide variety of therapies, including aversion therapy, nausea-producing drugs, castration, electric shock, brain surgery and breast amputation. None had any significant success rate. 1901 The death of Murray Hall revealed that the respected New York politician of over 30 years, who had married two women, was in fact one Mary Anderson. It is widely assumed that she was a lesbian who "passed" as a man, but it is also possible that she was transsexual, and saw herself as a man in spite of her female anatomy. 1903 In New York City, police conducted the first recorded raid on a gay bathhouse, the Ariston on West 55th Street. Twenty-six men were arrested, and twelve of them were brought to trial on sodomy charges. Seven received sentences ranging from four to twenty years in prison. 1906 William Lee Howard presented a paper to the American Association of Medical Examiners in Boston warning of the dangers of providing life insurance to male or female homosexuals. He said that they were prone to disease, abused drugs and alcohol, and that males especially detested any form of physical exercise. In an essay published in The St. Louis Medical Review titled "The Problem of Sexual Variants," T.H. Evans claimed that homosexuality was increasing, and that this was due to the decreased need for propagation of the species and to changes in the sexual division of labor which had had an impact on erotic interest. 1907 In Trinidad, Colorado, Katherine Vosbaugh died. She had lived as a man for 60 years, and had married a woman. Even after being hospitalized in 1905 for pneumonia and being discovered to be physically female, Vosbaugh had continued to live as a man, and was referred to by the nickname "Grandpa." (Ironically, Trinidad later came to be known as "the sex change capital of the world," as over half of the sex-reassignment operations in the U.S. during the 1970s and '80s were performed there.) 1909 The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was founded. 1912 At Polly Halliday's restaurant in New York City, Heterodoxy, a feminist luncheon club for "unorthodox women," began meeting bimonthly. 1913 Colonel Alfred Redl, former chief of Austrian counterintelligence, committed suicide when it became known that he had been blackmailed, on account of his homosexuality, into working for Russia for the previous year. In 1950, the Redl affair was cited by U.S. senators as evidence of the security risk homosexuals posed. 1914 The earliest known reference to the word "fag" in print appeared in Jackson and Hellyer's A Vocabulary of Criminal Slang, with Some Examples of Common Usages. Under the word "drag," the following example was listed: "All the fagots (sissies) will be dressed in drag at the ball tonight." 1916 The Provincetown Playhouse, the first major off-Broadway theater, was founded in New York's Greenwich Village. Sir Roger Casement was hanged in England for treason. The evidence against him was so weak that there were pleas from all over the world asking for clemency, including from U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. To stop the demands, the British government released entries from Casement's diary showing that he was a homosexual. Calls for a reprieve came to an abrupt halt, and he was executed. 1917 The United States entered the Great War (World War I). The Immigration Act of 1917 excluded from immigration into the U.S. "persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority." The wording was construed to include homosexuals. Following the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik government removed all Tzarist laws, including those regulating sexual behavior. A book review of House-Mates by J.D. Beresford appeared in The New York Times. In the book, Wilfrid Hornby falls in love with Judith Carrington, but must compete with Helen Binstead for her affection. The reviewer stated that Helen's jealousy was a weak point in the plot, because such behavior would be highly improbable. 1919 The U.S. military revised the Articles of War to make sodomy a felony. Dispatching a squad of young enlisted men to act as decoys, the U.S. Navy, under the orders of Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, initiated a search for "sexual perverts" at the Newport, Rhode Island, Naval Training Station. Twenty sailors and sixteen civilians were arrested. Following the end of World War I, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexology in Berlin. The Institute housed his immense library on sex, and provided educational services and medical consultations. People from around Europe visited the Institute to gain a clearer understanding of their sexuality. The Institute also housed the Museum of Sex, an educational resource for the public which is reported to have been visited by school classes. Hirschfeld's work, which built upon that of Karl-Heinrich Ulrichs, in many ways anticipated Alfred Kinsey's. He was one of the first prominent European researchers to view homosexuality as a normal (and not particularly unusual) part of human sexual behavior. His investigations into bisexuality and transgender issues led to theories about a third, or "intermediate," sex, which conform well to modern research in biology. He invented the term "transvestite," and was one of the first researchers to recognize that crossdressers are frequently not homosexuals. The earliest complete sex-reassignment surgeries were performed at the Institute by Hirshfeld's colleagues, Ludwig Levy-Lenz and Felix Abraham. (One of their early patients, Lili Elbe, originally Einar Wegener, was the subject of a fictionalized biography, Man Into Woman, published in 1933.) Most of Hirschfeld's work was lost, though, when the Nazis destroyed the Institute and burned the library in 1933. Fortuitously, Hirschfeld himself was away from Germany on a world speaking tour at the time. He never returned to Germany, and died in exile in France in 1935. The first showing of the first gay liberation film, "Different From Other People," took place in Berlin. It was banned the following year. 1920 When an Episcopal clergyman was accused of soliciting homosexual contacts at the Newport, Rhode Island, YMCA, where he worked, protests by members of the Newport Ministerial Union and the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island, together with a campaign by The Providence Journal, forced the Navy to conduct a further inquiry into the methods used in uncovering homosexual activity at the Newport Naval Training Station. The investigation was critical of the methods used, but cleared the officers who ordered them of any wrongdoing. The ministers then turned to the Republican-controlled Senate Naval Affairs Committee, which investigated the charges. Their "Report on Alleged Immoral Conditions and Practices at the Naval Training Station, Newport," issued in l921, condemned the conduct of naval officers, including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, for the methods used to entrap homosexuals. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded. The nineteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the so-called "Susan B. Anthony Amendment," extended the right to vote to women. 1921 The U.S. Army issued psychiatric screening regulations excluding men with feminine physical characteristics and "sexual perverts." These regulations remained in effect until just before World War II. Theatre des Eros, the first theater in the world devoted entirely to gay plays, was founded in Berlin. 1922 Canadian immigration authorities allowed the Irish lover of a Canadian citizen to immigrate legally. This was the first time in North America that a same-sex relationship was used as the basis for immigration. Sholom Asch's play, "The God of Vengeance," opened at the Provincetown Playhouse. It was the first play on an American stage to depict gay or lesbian characters, and created a furor when it premiered on Broadway the following year. Magnus Hirschfeld presented a petition to the Reichstag, urging the abolition of Paragraph 175. It was unsuccessful, though it was signed by such prominent intellectuals as Albert Einstein, Herman Hesse, Thomas Mann and Leo Tolstoy. 1923 A delegation of doctors from Russia viewed the gay rights film, "Different from Other People," in Berlin. They expressed surprise that such a film would be banned. During a speech by homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld in Vienna, Nazi youth stormed in. They hurled stink bombs and opened fire. Hirschfeld was unharmed, but many audience members were wounded. The U.S. Federal Government established the Uniform Marriage and Marriage License Act in an attempt to unify the marriage licensing laws which had been adopted by a number of states since the mid-1800s to limit or prevent interracial marriages. By 1929, every state in the union had marriage licensing laws conforming to the federal standards, and for the first time, every marriage, in order to be legally recognized by the U.S. government, had to be licensed. This was, arguably, the point at which marriage in America officially ceased to be primarily a religious matter, and became primarily a civil matter. 1924 The Society for Human Rights was founded in Chicago, dedicated to promoting and protecting the interests of people who, because of "mental and physical abnormalities," were hindered in the pursuit of happiness. This guarded attempt to found a homosexual rights organization in the United States failed when the society was forced to disband in less than a year due to police and media harassment. Members of the group were arrested for publishing an "obscene" paper, and Henry Gerber, its founder, lost his job as a postal clerk. 1926 "The Captive," a lesbian-themed play about a single woman's obsessive love for a married woman, opened on Broadway, starring Helen Menken, then the wife of Humphrey Bogart. It sparked such controversy that the cast members were at one point arrested and that the "Padlock" law was enacted the following year to prohibit Broadway plays (or any other plays in the state of New York) from depicting "sex perversion." Brooks Atkinson, a theater critic for The New York Times, referred to the woman-woman love as twisted, warped infatuation, loathsome and doomed. He described the woman who successfully challenged a man for possession of his wife as a monster who preyed on helpless victims. 1927 "The Drag," the first play with gay male content to be produced in the U.S., debuted in Connecticut on its way to Broadway. It was written and produced by Mae West, who said she wrote it to call attention to the great problem of homosexuality. She described gay men as perverts and mental prostitutes. 1928 Radclyffe Hall's classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was published in France. A London judge found it obscene, and ordered all the copies which had been seized by British customs agents to be destroyed. Forty distinguished witnesses, including Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, had appeared in court to testify in favor of the novel, but the judge had refused to hear any of them. 1929 New York publisher Covici-Friede was convicted of obscenity for publishing Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness. The conviction was appealed and overturned that same year. A statement was published by the Nazi party declaring that anyone who even thought of committing homosexual acts was an enemy of Germany. The first uncontested use of the word "gay" to refer to homosexuals appeared in Noel Coward's musical, "Bitter Sweet." The Great Depression began in the United States. 1930 In Hollywood, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America introduced a self-regulatory code of movie ethics, nicknamed the Hays Code, which discouraged filmmakers from including depictions of sex and sexuality. The regulations became mandatory four years later. The words "homosexual" and "heterosexual" were used for the first time in The New York Times, in a book review of the lesbian novel That Other Love by Geoffrey Moss. 1932 In a book review of Sappho of Lesbos by Arthur Weigell, reviewer Florence Finch Kelly praised the author for focusing on the beauty of her poems and not condemning her by current morality standards. The reviewer explained that since the Greeks "had no sexual morals whatever," Sappho was merely a product of her environment. 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. His regime immediately banned all gay press. On May 6, the Nazis raided the Institute for Sexology, burning 12,000 books, periodicals and documents while a brass band played outside. (Among the irreplaceable items lost were unpublished manuscripts by Karl Ulrichs and Richard von Krafft-Ebing.) On that same day, libraries were ordered to remove and destroy all books with positive or neutral references to homosexuality. In July, Kurt Hiller, who had published the last of the irregular series of newsletters of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in February, was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. The Nazis passed a law providing for "surgical castration as a therapy and crime prevention measure." Homosexuals were the major victims of this law. In the U.S.S.R., a revision of the Soviet penal code outlawed consensual homosexuality, reflecting the growing Stalinist repression. Maxim Gorki, writing in Pravda and Izvestia, called it a "triumph of proletarian humanitarianism," and warned that the legalization of homosexuality had been the main cause of Fascism in Germany. Mass arrests of gays followed in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkov and Odessa. A large number of those arrested were actors, musicians or artists. Accused of engaging in "homosexual orgies," they received years of imprisonment or exile in Siberia. Denmark repealed its "anti-sodomy" law. Psychoanalyst A.A. Brill presented a paper on homosexuality and paranoia at a joint meeting of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association in Boston. He stressed that homosexuality was part of the normal sexual instinct and plays a useful part in social relationships, and that homosexuality was only pathological when combined with adjustment difficulties. However, he also equated homosexuality with paranoia by saying that homosexuals experienced "delusions" of persecution. The Broadway Brevities, a New York weekly tabloid, carried a story which warned of rampant "third-sexers" who had descended on Broadway and were making life intolerable for "normal" people. 1934 Despite the "Padlock" law, Lillian Hellman's play, "The Children's Hour," about two teachers accused by a student of having a lesbian relationship, opened on Broadway. The Soviet law punishing homosexual acts with imprisonment became a federal statute through the active intervention of Stalin. All the republics were required to insert the law into their penal codes. In Germany, on June 30, Hitler's official persecution of homosexuals began with the murder of his long-time ally and head of the Storm Troops, the openly gay Ernst Roehm, and several hundred other real or perceived political enemies, in the "Night of the Long Knives." In a speech justifying the action, Hitler equated being homosexual with being a traitor, and referred to the purge's victims as "homosexual pigs who have besmirched the honor of the party." An editorial in The New York Times defended Hitler's actions, saying that because of the immorality among those arrested, it was impossible to take pity, and that Hitler "gave orders for this plague to be done away with ruthlessly. In the future he will not permit millions of decent people to be compromised by a few such sick men." 1935 Germany's notorious Paragraph 175 (which forbade homosexual sex) was rewritten by the Nazis, broadening the definition of the activity covered, such that mutual physical contact was no longer even required. (Kissing, lewd glances and fantasies all became punishable.) The penalty for violation of the law was also increased, changing homosexual sex from a minor offense to a felony. The number of convictions increased tenfold, to 8,000 annually. Most men convicted under Paragraph 175 were merely sent to jail; however, as the Gestapo were authorized to take gay men into preventive detention of arbitrary duration without an accusation (or even after an acquittal), many, including a number of so-called "repeat offenders," were sent for "re-education" in concentration camps, even if they'd already completed jail sentences. The law remained as the Nazis wrote it for well over a decade. East Germany reverted to the pre-Nazi version of the law in 1950, limited its scope to sex with youths under 18 in 1968, and abolished it entirely in 1988. West Germany retained the Nazi-era statute until 1969, when it was limited to "qualified cases," further attenuated it in 1973, and finally revoked it in 1994 after German reunification. Louis W. Max of New York University addressed a meeting of the American Psychological Association, reporting that he had successfully treated a case of homosexuality by using electroshock therapy delivered at "intensities considerably higher than those usually employed on human subjects." 1936 Mona's, one of the first lesbian bars in the U.S., opened in San Francisco. It became a famous tourist attraction thanks in part to a marquee which read, "Where Girls Will Be Boys." As part of the preparations for the Berlin Olympics, Nazis sent 52 gay men to Mauthausen concentration camp. Random House printed a four-volume edition of Havelock Ellis' Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Prior to its publication, only doctors and lawyers could legally purchase books dealing with human sexuality. 1937 Physicians at Albany Medical College treated an underdeveloped 27 year-old male youth with the newly-synthesized hormone, testosterone, and witnessed an amazing transformation. Within a month, the young man's sexual feelings increased along with his penis size, his voice deepened, hot flashes and migraines which had plagued him for years disappeared, his confidence and energy increased, and hair began to grow on his face and chest. This case, the first in which a human was treated with the hormone, confirmed, as experiments with castrated rats, guinea pigs, and other animals had suggested decades earlier, that "manhood" -- sexuality -- was hormonal. Switzerland repealed its "anti-sodomy" law. Nazis began using pink triangles to identify gay men and black triangles to identify "socially unacceptable" women, including lesbians. THE PINK TRIANGLE The pink triangle was one of the Nazi concentration camp badges, used to identify male prisoners who had been sent there because of their homosexuality. Every prisoner had to wear a badge on his or her jacket, to categorize him or her "according to his kind." Jews had to wear yellow stars, and "socially unacceptable" women, including lesbians, wore black triangles. Not all of the prisoners with pink triangles identified themselves as gay, of course, and most of the gay men who suffered and died in Nazi concentration camps actually wore yellow stars, as they were both gay and Jewish. As a result, it is difficult to construct a coherent gay victim group and count its numbers. The official Nazi estimate of "pink triangle" prisoners was approximately 10,000; other sources put the number at 50,000 or even higher. Fewer than half of those men survived the camps. For non-Jews, their death toll was far above average. In the late 1970s, gay liberation groups resurrected the pink triangle as a symbol for the gay rights movement. Not only is the symbol easily recognized, but it draws attention to oppression and persecution, both then and now. In the 1980s, ACT-UP began using the pink triangle for their cause, but inverted the symbol, making it point up, to signify an active fight back rather than a passive resignation to fate. Today, for many, the pink triangle represents pride, solidarity and a promise to never allow another Holocaust to happen. It is second in popularity only to the rainbow flag as a GLBT symbol. 1939 World War II began when Germany invaded Poland. Bugs Bunny appeared for the first time in drag (as a female dog) in "Hare-Um Scare-Um," his third cartoon. He donned women's apparel in over three dozen additional cartoons over the next 25 years, nearly a quarter of the cartoons in which he appeared. 1940 Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Wendell Wilkie in the presidential election, and thus became the United States' first third-term president. 1941 The word "straight" in reference to sexual orientation was coined by gay author G.W. Henry in a book describing conversations with other gay men. He wrote that "to go straight is to cease homosexual practices and to indulge -- usually to re-indulge -- in heterosexuality." The word originally shared a kinship with the phrase "gone straight," used in reference to former drug addicts. While the word "straight" was not originally intended to refer to people who are inherently heterosexual, it has been corrupted over the years to mean exactly that. The term "drag queen" first appeared in print. ("Drag" had been part of theater slang at least since the nineteenth century, though the popular story that it originated as an acronym for "dressed as girl" seems unlikely.) In December, the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese propelled the United States into World War II. 1942 Although the U.S. Surgeon General, as the U.S. was entering World War II, had declared that gay and lesbian relationships in the armed forces ought to be tolerated as long as they were kept private, the U.S. military revised its code to make it easier to discharge homosexuals. Instead of having to be witnessed committing sodomy, soldiers could be discharged simply for being gay. Philip Wylie's A Generation of Vipers was published, coining the term "Momism" and blaming American mothers for overprotecting their sons and raising "unmasculine" boys unfit for military service. Atlantic City closed its burlesque and drag shows. The Chief of Police stated, "Female impersonators as entertainers are out." In Los Angeles, Jim Kepner began his private collection of gay-related books, clippings, photographs and artifacts, which later became the International Gay and Lesbian Archive, the oldest and largest in North America. The archive opened to the public in 1979. 1943 The Great Depression officially ended as the United States' involvement in World War II brought unemployment to record low levels. 1944 Sweden repealed its anti-gay laws, though the legal age of consent for homosexuals was set higher than that for heterosexuals. A U.S. military directive established homosexuality as a disqualification from the Women's Army Corps (WACS), clearing the way for a purge of lesbians at the war's end. Section VIII, Psychopathic Personality, was added as a category for discharge from the U.S. military, as a "catch-all" that included homosexuality as well as other traits the military considered unsuitable. Those receiving Section VIII (or "blue") discharges were excluded from all military benefits, which became a post-war grievance for many gay GIs. 1945 Following the end of World War II, the Veterans Benevolent Association was founded in New York City. Primarily a social organization for gay veterans, it became peripherally involved in the grievances of GIs denied benefits as a result of Section VIII discharges, and also offered educational programs. The Veterans Administration denied GI Bill benefits to servicemen discharged because of homosexuality. Bob Mizer founded the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles. Mizer, a pioneer in erotic male photography, began publishing Physique Pictorial magazine in 1950. 1946 The United Nations met for the first time. ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer, was unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania. 1947 Lisa Ben (Edythe Eyde's pseudonym, an anagram of "lesbian") began publishing Vice Versa, the first U.S. lesbian magazine, in Los Angeles, "printing" it a few copies at a time on a typewriter with carbon paper. The U.S. Army changed its policy of discharging homosexuals with a "blue" discharge (neither honorable nor dishonorable), discharging them instead with a dishonorable discharge if they had been found guilty of an actual homosexual offense, and an undesirable discharge otherwise. Newsweek, in an article titled "Homosexuals in Uniform," reported that between 3,000 and 4,000 homosexuals had been discharged from the military during World War II. The article described homosexuals as abnormal and as neuropsychiatric cases, but also noted that according to Army files they had higher intelligence than the average soldier, performed admirably, and were law-abiding and hard-working. The U.S. Senate gave the Secretary of State authority to dismiss any employee at his discretion. Although it was primarily intended to allow him to dismiss communists, the "McCarran Rider" also specifically mentioned homosexuals. 1948 Alfred Kinsey, a biology professor who was one of the first to study widespread trends in human sexuality, released his groundbreaking study, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male." The study reported a number of findings that surprised the nation, and became the focus of controversy for decades. Homosexual behavior was not restricted to people who identified themselves as homosexuals, Kinsey found, and by adding those who were but did not identify as homosexuals to those who reported exclusively homosexual experiences, he concluded that roughly 10% of the population was homosexual. (Previously, it had been widely assumed that homosexuals comprised less than 1% of the population.) Further, Kinsey saw heterosexuality and homosexuality only as opposite ends of continuum of sexual orientations, and to the surprise, dismay or outrage of many, he added five different hybrid sexualities in between these two poles to form a seven-point sexuality scale. A subsequent study on female sexuality released in 1953 concluded that 7% of women are exclusive lesbian. Later researchers have failed to precisely duplicate Kinsey's results, coming up with figures indicating that the human race may be as high as 27% gay or as low as 3%. While some of Kinsey's methods and assumptions have become the subjects of controversy, his conclusions are still widely accepted, and his importance as a pioneer in the field of sexual research remains unchallenged. Gore Vidal published The City and the Pillar. The novel received widespread attention, and its publication marked the beginning of a post-war surge in gay writing. The first Danish gay society, F-48, was founded by Axel Axgil. F-48 was very successful, and by the time Axgil stepped down as chairman in 1952, it had reached what was then a world record of 2,600 members in a gay group. Murray Llewellyn Barr, a Canadian geneticist, discovered that inactivated X chromosomes exist in (and only in) the cells of females. The discovery of these "Barr bodies" allowed for determination of an individual's "chromosomal sex," gave rise to a new science, cytogenetics, and led to the discovery of genetic causes for some gender anomalies. Barr was later nominated for a Nobel prize for his discovery. 1949 Newsweek published a story titled "Queer People," which called gays perverts and compared homosexuals to exhibitionists and sexual sadists. It challenged the idea that homosexuals hurt no one but themselves. Two separate events, the explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb and the victory of the Chinese communists over American ally Chiang Kai-Shek, raised American "Cold War" fears to new heights, and set the stage for the paranoia of McCarthyism and the second "Red Scare." (The first "Red Scare" had followed the Russian Revolution in 1917.) 1950 Physique Pictorial began publication in Los Angeles. This was the first of the gay "beefcake" or "physique" magazines. The Mattachine Society was created in Los Angeles by Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland and others. It was named after Mattacino, a character in Italian theater, a sort of court jester who would speak the truth to the king when nobody else would. The primary goal of the organization was to encourage the public to view homosexuals as a persecuted minority rather than as mental deviants. The term "homophile" was coined, and became the self-reference of choice for homosexual activists during the 1950s and '60s. After Stonewall, however, it fell out of favor, replaced by "gay" and "lesbian." Senator Joseph McCarthy's report, "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government," claimed that homosexuals were serious security risks, and led to "witch hunts" for homosexuals working in the government. McCARTHYISM AND THE "LAVENDER SCARE" During a February 1950 Senate investigation of "subversives" (primarily communists) in the U.S. government, Undersecretary of State John Puerifory had spoken of a shadowy "homosexual underground" in Washington that was participating in the "communist conspiracy" against America. Although Puerifory's comments had been made in the context of assuring the public that the U.S. State Department was quite aware of and was actively eliminating security risks, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who had already made a name for himself with his (imaginary) lists of "known communists" being sheltered by the Truman administration, was quick to seize on the political potential of the revelation. McCarthy and others, most notably Senator Kenneth Wherry, whipped up a controversy about the new "pervert peril." (Ironically, McCarthy's anti-homosexual campaign was largely orchestrated by his top aide, Roy Cohn, a closeted gay man who died of AIDS in 1986.) Republican National Committee Chairman Guy Gabrielson declared, "Perhaps as dangerous as the actual communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our Government in recent years." The media was quick to echo their concerns; The New York Times alone ran at least seven stories on the subject during May and June of 1950. In response, the U.S. Senate ordered a full-scale investigation into the matter in June, and appointed Democratic Senator Clyde R. Hoey to lead the investigating committee. Although the Truman administration asked Senator Hoey to downplay the problem, Senator McCarthy effectively ran the committee, and when its report, "Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government," was released in December, it stated that the matter was of deadly seriousness. Homosexuals, the report claimed, were unsuitable for government employment due to their inherently weak moral fiber and to the high security risks they presented because of their susceptibility to blackmail, and had to be rooted out. Government bureaucrats, fearful of being charged with protecting "subversives," dramatically increased their efforts to rid their departments of gays and lesbians. Dismissals of gays from civilian government jobs throughout the United States increased from an average of five per month in the years preceding the "Lavender Scare" to an average of more than sixty per month by the end of 1950. Similarly, the Democratic Truman administration, in trying to prove that it was not sympathetic to "perverts," increased dismissals after the Senate report was released; firings of homosexuals in the State Department alone increased from 54 in 1950, to 119 in 1951, and to 134 in 1952. When the Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower became President in 1953, largely thanks to the suspicions of the Democrats raised by Senator McCarthy and his cohorts, the government became even less sympathetic to homosexuals. One of Eisenhower's first acts as President was to sign an executive order making "sexual perversion" grounds for firing any person working for the federal government, and prohibiting the government from hiring any homosexual man or woman. Soon, state and local governments also began requiring workers to sign "loyalty oaths" swearing their "moral purity" before they would be given jobs, and even many private businesses and organizations adopted similar techniques to screen their employees. For a very large majority of American gays and lesbians, simply being found out could mean automatic dismissal. By the time Senator McCarthy was discredited in 1954, when it was discovered that his lists didn't exist and that many of his charges had been fabricated simply to win political support, the damage was already done. Regulations banning homosexuals from federal civil jobs were not repealed until 1975. For nearly a quarter of a century, thanks in large part to the actions and influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy, gays and lesbians throughout America lived in constant fear of being caught in one of the periodic "witch hunts" intended to round up and eliminate "subversives" from government service. 1951 A lesbian WAF who had received an undesirable discharge sent a letter to the ACLU requesting that they take action to stop the military from destroying lives by discharging homosexuals. The response she received stated that discrimination against homosexuals was not a violation of civil liberties, and recommended that she drop the whole matter and seek medical treatment to get rid of her homosexual desires. The Homosexual In America by Donald Webster Cory was published. The book was a call to action on the part of homosexuals on the model of the emerging civil rights movement. The California Supreme Court ruled that the state's Alcoholic Beverage Control Department had acted improperly in closing the Black Cat in San Francisco in 1949. The court ruled that mere patronage of a public restaurant and bar by homosexuals was not sufficient reason to close it. This was the first time in American history that gay men and lesbians legally won the right to gather openly and publicly. 1952 The U.S. Congress enacted a law banning gays and lesbians from entering the country. The law remained on the books until 1990. The first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I), the so-called "bible" of psychiatry, was published. It listed homosexuality as a disorder. The first benefit for a gay rights cause was held in Los Angeles, to assist with the defense of Dale Jennings of the Mattachine Society, who was being tried for indecency. Jennings admitted in court that he was a homosexual, but denied any wrongdoing, accusing the officer who had arrested him of entrapment. The jury deadlocked, and the case was dismissed. One, Inc., was created as an offshoot of the Mattachine Foundation. The organization included founders of the Knights of the Clock, a support group for interracial gay couples that had begun in Los Angeles in 1950. The name was based on a quote from Thomas Carlyle, who wrote, "A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one." Evelyn Hooker began her historic study of the male homosexual personality. In the late 1950s, she published the findings of her research in a series of monographs, reporting that she could find no signs of maladjustment in gay men's personalities. Her conclusions differed from those of previous researchers in large part because she did not focus exclusively on men who sought to be "helped," instead finding subjects through organizations such as the Mattachine Society. 1953 Newly-elected President Eisenhower banned employment of gays by executive order. This order was not repealed until 1975. Choreographer Jerome Robbins "named names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee, after being threatened with exposure. This was one of the few documented examples of political blackmail of a homosexual. In response to a demand from the House Appropriations Committee, the State Department finally released an actual count, rather than an estimate, of the number of homosexuals who had been dismissed since the "problem of perversion" first made headlines. It announced that 425 employees had been fired since 1947 for "homosexual proclivities." Only 106 non-homosexual "security risks" had been fired during those same years. Illinois' Secretary of State banned the distribution within the state library system of any book "relating to sex." Eight thousand books were withdrawn from circulation before sanity prevailed. In February, Christine Jorgensen, originally George Jorgensen, a former sergeant in the U.S. Army, returned to the United States after spending nearly three years in Denmark undergoing a sex change. She was the first transsexual to gain international notoriety. A letter to her parents, in which she had written, "Nature has made a mistake, which I have corrected, and I am now your daughter," had been leaked by a family friend to the press. More news stories were filed on Jorgensen in 1953 than on any other single individual or event. "Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Bombshell," headlines screamed, as the world press treated her recovery from the surgery both as a matter of profound international importance and as a sexual scandal. Jorgensen has been called the first star of the dawning "Age of Celebrity," the first American to become internationally known not because of her profession, her talents, her lineage, her looks or her wit, but instead, simply because she was who she was. In the wake of the publicity surrounding Christine Jorgensen's sex-change operation, Edward D. Wood, Jr., himself a transvestite, wrote, directed and starred in the feature film "Glen or Glenda," which also starred Bela Lugosi. (Wood, who is widely considered to have been the worst director in Hollywood history, is best known for his 1959 film, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.") Though "Glen or Glenda" was never widely distributed, and like Wood's other films, featured poor production values and writing that frequently devolved into gibberish, it was nonetheless of note both as Wood's first film and as the first film to deal, however ineptly, with the issue of transvestism, treating crossdressing as something other than a comedic device. One, Inc., began publishing One magazine, the first U.S. pro-gay publication, and sold it openly on the streets of Los Angeles. It was designed to present gay and lesbian opinions and concerns to the public. The magazine was the subject of a lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service, won in 1958, and was published regularly until 1967. Harry Hay agreed to relinquish leadership of the Mattachine Society. As the "Red Scare" had progressed, the association of the society with communism had concerned some members and supporters, and Hay, a known communist, was viewed as a liability. Other of the society's founders were similarly ousted. During the 1960s, Mattachine was one of the foremost gay rights groups in the United States, but following the Stonewall riots of 1969, it was increasingly seen as stodgy, traditional and unwilling to be confrontational. The Mattachine Society was officially disbanded in 1987. The Korean War ended. 1954 Lieutenant Louis Morgan and six patrolmen of the Pittsburgh Vice Squad were jailed for "shaking down" homosexuals, taking bribes and framing innocent men. Senator McCarthy was publicly discredited, but the "Lavender Scare" mentality he helped to create in the government remained for years. Frederick Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent accused comic books of contributing to juvenile delinquency, caused a public uproar, and led to Congressional inquiries of comic book publishers, writers and artists. Prominent among its complaints was the supposedly homoerotic nature of the relationships between costumed superheroes and their young sidekicks. John Money, a psychologist with Johns Hopkins University, began publishing a series of papers in which he argued that sexual identity was not established until after birth. His ideas, though since discredited, were widely accepted at the time, and were profoundly influential. They sent a generation of feminists on a futile quest to prove that men and women were really "exactly the same" once societal influences were removed, and convinced a generation of doctors that it was acceptable to arbitrarily "assign" a sex to an intersexed infant through surgery and hormonal treatments. Though such medical intervention was theoretically to be conducted shortly after birth, in reality, the surguries and treatments often lasted well into childhood or even early adulthood. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, explicitly outlawed racial segregation of public education facilities, ruling so on the grounds that the doctrine of "separate but equal" public education could never truly provide black Americans with facilities of the same standards available to white Americans. In August, the body of William Simpson, a flight attendant, was found in North Miami. Four days later, two suspects were arrested, who told police that they had shot Simpson in self-defense after he made a pass at them. The press and public officials showed far more sympathy for the murderers than for their victim. (Public hysteria had already been directed at the homosexual community by Miami area newspapers, politicians and police in the wake of a series of highly sensationalized cases of child molestation and murder the previous year.) The "moral panic" which followed publication of the young men's story led to further police harassment of gay men and lesbians in the city. Gay bars were raided almost nightly by a special police squad known as the "fruit pickers," and patrons were arrested and detained under the pretense of checking for venereal disease. Miami Mayor Abe Aronovitz introduced an ordinance prohibiting same-sex dancing or embracing in public, adopting the mannerisms, gestures or dress of the opposite sex, and association with homosexuals in public places. Commissioners revised the proposed law, limiting it to a ban on bars catering to homosexuals. The city ordinance, passed in October, made it illegal for a bar to sell alcohol to a homosexual, to employ a homosexual, or to allow two or more homosexuals to congregate on the premises. 1955 The Mattachine Review began publication. The New York branch of the Mattachine Society was founded. The Daughters of Bilitis was formed in San Francisco, California, as an explicitly lesbian alternative to other "homophile" groups such as the Mattachine Society. The organization remained influential throughout the 1950s and '60s, but was torn apart by factionalism in the 1970s, when its members split over whether to give more support to the gay rights movement or to feminism. Following the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, the county attorney in Sioux City, Iowa, ordered the detention of known homosexuals, and using Iowa's sexual psychopath law, committed 29 men to asylums without trial. In Boise, Idaho, three men were arrested for homosexual activity. The case exploded into a major "witch hunt," and eventually, over 1,000 men (in a city with a population of only 40,000) were investigated. Nine men were ultimately sentenced to prison terms of 15 years each. The case was the basis for The Boys of Boise, a book by John Gerassi, a former editor of Time and Newsweek magazines, in which it was revealed that the investigations were politically motivated, with the mayor, prosecuting attorney and police all trying to capitalize on homophobia to build their own political careers. Richard Roscoe, a San Francisco photographer for gay "physique" magazines, was tried in federal court on obscenity charges. Though his photographs were clearly not obscene, they featured undraped males, which was sufficient for conviction. "The mother of the civil rights movement," Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man. She was arrested, triggering a year-long boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. The American Law Institute published its Model Penal Code. The code recommended decriminalization of private sexual acts between consenting adults. In 1961, Illinois became the first state to adopt the code and to decriminalize homosexual acts. 1956 The Ladder: A Lesbian Review, the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, was first published. The Church of ONE Brotherhood was founded in Los Angeles. It survived only one year, but was nonetheless of note as the first gay church in the United States. 1957 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) adopted a national policy statement sustaining the constitutionality of state "anti-sodomy" laws and federal security regulations denying employment to gay men and lesbians, and stating that the organization would specifically defend homosexuals only in cases of denial of due process, entrapment, or use of sex offender registration laws against adults engaged in consensual sex. The ACLU reversed its stance on "anti-sodomy" laws and security regulations in 1967. The Crittenden Report, a 639-page summary of an investigation undertaken by the U.S. Navy, stated that there is "no sound basis" for barring gays from the military as a security risk, and that, in fact, "there is some information to indicate that homosexuals are quite good security risks." The Pentagon suppressed the report for nearly two decades. In Great Britain, the Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution (better known as the Wolfenden Report, after Lord Wolfenden, the chairman of the committee) was published, following the conviction of a succession of well-known men for homosexual offenses. Disregarding the conventional ideas of the day, the committee recommended that "homosexual behavior between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence," finding that "homosexuality cannot legitimately be regarded as a disease, because in many cases it is the only symptom and is compatible with full mental health in other respects." The report added, "The law's function is to preserve public order and decency, to protect the citizen from what is offensive or injurious, and to provide sufficient safeguards against exploitation and corruption of others.... It is not, in our view, the function of the law to intervene in the private life of citizens, or to seek to enforce any particular pattern of behaviour." Wladziu Valentino Liberace, high camp performer, candelabrist and pianist, successfully sued the London Daily Mirror for libel after a columnist implied that he was a homosexual. 1958 The Homosexual Law Reform Society was founded in London by straights interested in repealing England's ban on gay sex. The U.S. Supreme Court voted unanimously to overturn the decision of the lower courts in One, Inc. v. Oleson, stating that homosexual publications could not be held to a different standard of obscenity than other publications. The publishers of One magazine had sued the U.S. Postal Service in 1954 after it had declared the magazine "obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy" and had refused to distribute it simply because it dealt with homosexual issues. 1959 U.S. Postmaster Summerfield launched an anti-smut drive, directed largely at gay "physique" magazines and their readers. During a radio speech, Russell L. Wolden criticized the mayor of San Francisco. "Under the benign attitude of the Christopher administration," he said, "those who practice sex deviation operate in San Francisco today to a shocking extent, under shocking circumstances, and in open and flagrant defiance of the law. So favorable is the official San Francisco climate for the activities of these persons that an organization of sex deviates known as the Mattachine Society actually passed a resolution praising Mayor Christopher by name for what the resolution described as the 'enlightened attitude' of his administration toward them." "Some Like It Hot," starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, was released. Acclaimed worldwide as one of the greatest movie comedies ever made, it featured Curtis and Lemmon as struggling musicians who hid from the Mafia by disguising themselves as women and joining an all-girl band. 1960 More than a thousand people attended the first public meeting of the Homosexual Law Reform Society in London. The April issue of Manual, a gay "physique" magazine, was seized by the Post Office. The eventual U.S. Supreme Court decision in Manual v. Day (handed down on June 25, 1962, the same day as the ruling in Engel v. Vitale which declared that prayers in public schools are unconstitutional) echoed the decision in One, Inc. v. Oleson, stating that homosexual material must be judged by the same standards as heterosexual material. The first national lesbian conference, a convention of the Daughters of Bilitis, was held in San Francisco.