Gay Communities

The Birth of Gay Communities: The Stonewall Rebellion

Modern gay communities originated in older homosexual subcultures that evolved in Western cities from at least the eighteenth century. There is a difference between modern gay communities and their antecedents, however. The shift to the term gay dates largely from events on June 26, 1969, and subsequent days. Significant civil disobedience was perpetrated by homosexual men and transgender persons in the Greenwich Village precinct of New York City in response to yet another regular raid by New York police on bars and premises where homosexuals socialized. The Stonewall Inn was the bar in question that evening, and the raid coincided with the funeral of Judy Garland, a famous Hollywood star and chanteuse whose life and music resonated strongly with homosexual men's sensibilities.

The fact that the raid took place on the night of the funeral was more than just coincidence. Garland had a great many gay fans, and her torch-song style of music gave public expression to hidden emotions and secret situations and symbolically re-positioned marginal and subordinated experiences at the center of the artistic mainstream. In that moment of deep collective loss, another police raid finally cracked gay men's till-then fatalistic acceptance of marginalization and subordination.

That night's events occurred against the backdrop of an era in which critique of Western culture was growing, fueled by the worldwide anti-Vietnam War movement, and civil rights and anti-racism movements in many countries, plus the advent of second-wave feminism. The flowering feminist movement produced an important critique not just of the unequal position of women in Western societies but more broadly of the social and political organization of human sexuality. A new gay liberation, or gay rights movement, was born in Greenwich Village that June, one that built on these other social movements and that quickly and similarly radicalized its political formations and processes. This longstanding connection between gay community politics and related social-reform agendas was to proceed relatively unchallenged into the mid-1990s.

The notion of gay rights also spread rapidly to other Western countries. A good example is the specific mention of sexual orientation in the equal rights section of the post-Apartheid South African constitution, reflecting the contribution of gay rights activists to that struggle.

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