The Modern Gay and Lesbian Political Movement

The modern movement to gain civil and political rights for sexual minority persons has been operating at some level throughout this century. However, there was no significant progress culturally and legally until the 1970s. At that point, the gay/lesbian movement built upon the surging African-American civil rights movement and feminist rights movement and began to gain success.

The sexual minority political movement, as it has developed in the United States during the last thirty years, has helped articulate a new politics. This movement rejected the sharp distinction between the public and private realms and has largely maintained that politics is deeply personal. The intention in this analysis is to discuss the positive and negative consequences of this stance as articulated by the sexual minority community.

The personal has always been political, although it is only during the past few decades that this has been acknowledged and made visible. The personal beliefs of adherents, their personal values and personal social locations, have always affected the way that people vote and the kinds of legislation that they support. There is no neutral public sphere in which all personal qualities drop away from the individual, replaced by an objective persona that operates solon-like to make political judgments. The sexual, too, has always been part of politics, although hidden. Clearly t

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quite negative in regard to homosexuality. His focus was on curing the homosexual through psychoanalysis; other, later theorists emphasized behavioral approaches, also as a cure. Even Jung, who thought that homosexuality should be decriminalized and understood in its cultural context, believed that it was the result of psychological immaturity and was abnormal and disturbed (Hopcke, 1989). Hopcke (1989) believed that Freud and others essentially restated in psychological terms what they had learned about homosexuality and sexual behavior from religious sources. They were unable to escape their cultural context to deal with homosexuality scientifically. Instead, they reinforced the idea that sexuality was primarily to be expressed genitally between male and female for purposes of procreation. This is the mature sexual development path. The Political Movement Psychology and religion undergirded the legal prohibitions against homosexual behavior. The private was already made political before the women's movement and before the sexual minority movements even began. The public sphere included regulation of sexual activity in the home and in all aspects of private life. What the gay/lesbian political movement made explicit was

Category: Government - T