Gay and Lesbian Movement

Transnational gay and lesbian movements bring individuals and organizations together across national boundaries based on shared sexual identities, with the intent to end discrimination and oppression related to sexuality. Gay and lesbian transnational organizing can be traced back to the 1920s, but only since the 1970s can those efforts be considered global. One of the biggest challenges to global organizing is that the modern concept of gay and lesbian identity is firmly rooted in industrialized Western societies and does not necessarily [Page 613]resonate in societies that have different understandings of sexual practices and identities.

The first wave of transnational organizing around sexual identity emerged in Germany in the 1920s. Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay German sexologist whose Institute for Sex Research was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, founded the German Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897. This organization, which fought to change the law that criminalized male same-sex sexual acts in Germany, stimulated the formation of counterparts in other European countries in the first decades of the 20th century. In 1928, Hirschfeld launched the World League for Sexual Reform, which sponsored international conferences that dealt with issues of birth control, marriage reform, and prostitution, as well as homosexuality. But Hirschfeld's intention of creating a coalition of progressive reformers around issues of sexuality in general marginalized the issue of homosexuality. The World League for Sexual Reform sponsored international conferences in 1928, 1929, 1930, and 1932, but it never functioned as an ongoing organization.

The World League for Sexual Reform did not survive World War II, and in the postwar period, the center of the gay and lesbian movement shifted from Germany to the Netherlands. The Dutch Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which went underground during the war, reconstituted itself in Amsterdam in 1946 as the Shakespeare Club, later renamed the Cultuur en Ontspannings Centrum (COC) Nederland (Dutch Cultural and Recreational Center). In 1951, the COC spawned the International Committee for Sexual Equality, a pioneering transnational homophile organization. At its first conference in 1951, representatives from Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland sent a telegram to the United Nations supporting equality for “homosexual minorities throughout the world.” From 1951 to the early 1960s, the International Committee for Sexual Equality fought to educate publics across Europe about what it called “homophile men and women,” to publicize scientific research that undermined the notion of homosexuality as sickness or deviance, and to challenge discriminatory laws. Working out of the COC, a small group of mostly men organized annual conferences that brought together representatives from different countries, issued publications, formed committees, and exchanged correspondence. The United States joined in 1953, but otherwise the organization did not succeed in reaching beyond the boundaries of western and northern Europe, despite some individual contacts in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America.

Unlike national homophile movements, some of which became active and militant before the blossoming of gay liberation in the 1970s, the International Committee for Sexual Equality faded away in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, the center of the gay and lesbian movement shifted to the United States, where the annual commemorations of the Stonewall riot that marked the emergence of gay liberation had repercussions across much of the world.

...