history2

Hormone Therapy (mid 20th century): If homosexual men are too effeminate and lesbians too masculine, steroid treatments would theoretically butch up the boys and femme out the girls. Prolonged use also had effects as sterility and cancer

Lobotomy (mid 20th century): By cutting nerve fibers in the front of the brain, homosexual drives would be eliminated. In fact most sexual and emotional reaction capabilities were eliminated. Lobotomies were performed on homosexuals in the United States until the 1950s.

Psycho-Religious Therapy (mid 20th century): By combining religious teachings with psychoanalysis, the gay person would be inspired to become heterosexual.

AND MY FAVORITE!

Beauty Therapy (mid 20th century): All a butch lesbian needs is a good makeover. In IS HOMOSEXUALITY A MENACE? Dr. Arthur Guy Matthew tells of how he cured a lesbian by getting her hair professionally done, teacher her to apply cosmetics which she had never used in her life he says, and hiring a fashion expert, not a homosexual male, who selected the most elegant styles for her to bring out the charm and beauty in her body.

As I said at the beginning, history is not always a collection of fond memories. Just as we celebrate our triumphs, we must also embrace the harsh realities of time.

On September 1st, 1935, paragraph 175 of German Law was amended to include harsh penalties for homosexual behavior. This law was the foundation for the Nazi encampment and persecution of homosexuals up to and during WWII.

The vast majority of homosexual victims were males; lesbians were not subject to systematic persecution. While lesbian bars were closed, few women are believed to have been arrested. Paragraph 175 did not mention female homosexuality. The actual numbers of gays sent to prison/camps are highly inaccurate. Partially because of the stigma surrounding the charge, thus many remaining silent, and partially because the Nazi’s often charged political enemies to be homosexual in order to discredit them. What is believed to be most accurate is that fifty thousand men were officially defined as homosexuals and sentenced to prison between 1933 and 1945. Of those, 5 to 15 thousand were sent to concentration camps. Other reports place the numbers forced into camps to be near 25,000 between 1937 and 1939. The Pink Triangle was used by the Nazis to signify homosexuals. The only group considered lower than those with the pink triangles within camp hierarchy were those who wore a yellow Star of David under a superimposed Pink Triangle. This symbol represented Gay Jewish Prisoners, the lowest of all prisoners, and quite possible among the first to die when Hitler changed his policy on homosexuality in 1942 to include the death penalty. The exact number of those gays who perished in Nazi Concentration camps may never be known, but best estimates are placed as high as 60 %. When the war was finally over, many homosexuals remained prisoners in the camps until 1969 when Paragraph 175 was repealed in West Germany.
These are all to often victims that history has forgotten.

The war is over, the United States is in its element, and as society progresses, so does the gay lifestyle. For many it was difficult to find companionship in the U.S. up to the sixties because of the lack of visibility. In those earlier days, one would not necessarily even know he was going into a gay bar, because the men inside gave to hint to their orientation. Women typically wouldn’t to bars with their husbands, so there was nothing unusual about an establishment that was visited only by men. All too often men would “hook up” as it were by either recognizing another man wearing a red shirt, tie, or displaying a red handkerchief, or by sitting across the bar and giving an unyielding stare at one another for a long enough period of time to recognize the others orientation.

By the late fifties and into the sixties, more over methods of identification were used. A red handkerchief located in the right hip pocket implied that the wearer takes the passive role in a homosexual encounter, whereas placement in the left hip pocket suggested that the wearer would play a more active role. Keys were also an understood signifier for homosexual activity. A key chain worn on the right side of the body indicated that the wearer desires to play a passive role during a sexual encounter while placement on the left side of the body signified that the wearer expected to assume a more dominant role.

These ideas would soon become obsolete with the rise of the gay rights movement and the increased visibility of GLBT persons around the world.

In 1961, Illinois was the first state in the US to decriminalize homosexuality. In 1963, the first gay rights demonstration in the USA took place on September 19th at the Whitehall Induction Center in New York City, protesting against discrimination in the military. And in 1966, the earliest documented gay student organization, The Student Homophile League, was founded at Columbia University.

I leave you tonight with a letter home, received by the Advocate magazine in 1968.

Dear Mom and Dad,

You asked me in your last letter what I want for Christmas this year. Well, I thought and thought…of all the banal gifts we pester one another with…gifts of apology, gifts that try to buy what is not buyable, gifts of gratitude, gifts of guilt. But not for this year…no, not for this year. If Christmas is to mean what it’s supposed to mean, then let’s exchange gifts and are meaningful. The most important gift you could give me would be my freedom.

Free me from my guilt, from all those intricate lessons, which were suddenly held meaningless against my thundering need. Talk to me of compassion and understanding, and talk to me as a person, not unlike any other. Talk to me as your son. I know I should not feel guilty for who and what I am, and yet your voices from my childhood sit upon my conscience like schoolroom misdemeanors.

Free me from my fear. Do not slap back at me with quotes from cellars of accountable wisdom. I have my wise-way sayings, too, for ammunition. But such armaments are four children who are afraid. Reply in an attempt to collide with the truth and be better for the intercourse. I am afraid of losing…what? Your respect? Your love? Your regard? Do I have any of these while living a lie in your presence? Or in my presence either? I have been afraid to admit to myself or to the world that I am different, and I must admit it to you first before its awesome weight will slip from my shoulders and I can stand erect.

Free me from this unjust sense of failure, which I harbor. So I have not lived the life you’d have me live…because I am different. Had I one leg, or no eyes, or no hands, the world would have had pity on me.

But an unseen difference is somehow loathsome to many, and so I have lived in terror and self-pity all these year, afraid to stand proud and thankful as a man should stand. I used to point the terrorized finger of blame at everyone (even you), but a few confrontations with blame have taught me better.

Let the truth be said, so we may at last approach each other as human beings, not as self-inflicted cripples. Neither of us can afford regret. There aren’t enough years left…and there is too little love in the world for regrets. Let’s love now, this Christmas, and keep growing, and learning, and loving.

Signed only, Your Homosexual Son

And then there was StoneWall.

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/index-anc.html#c2
http://www.egyptology.com/niankhkhnum_khnumhotep/
http://www.stonewallsociety.com
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/index-am.html
http://www.scrippscol.edu/scripps/~home/kday/www/Berdache.html
http://www.sbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/fleta.html
http://www.sbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/britton.html
http://www.sbu.ac.uk/~stafflag/timetable.html
http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/HalPages/Gaysemi_1.html
http://www.law.harvard.edu/studorgs/lambda/l_13theo.html
Websters College Dictionary, p.478, Random House, 1991. New York, NY
http://www.holocaust-trc.org/homosx.htm
Long Road to Freedom, The Advocate, 1994. Los Angeles, Calif.