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You are here: Home / Anti-Bullying & Homophobia / How WWII Started The Modern Gay Rights Movement

How WWII Started The Modern Gay Rights Movement

21/10/2015 By ACOMSDave 1 Comment

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Long before Stonewall, the quest for community began.

Headshot of Kira Brekke
Kira BrekkeAssociate Editor, HuffPost Live
Posted: 10/13/2015 01:55 PM EDT | Edited: 10/13/2015 02:21 PM EDT
We often attribute the 1969 Stonewall Riots as being the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. But the first time gay people started coalescing was during World War II, according to USC gender studies professor Chris Freeman.
In honor of October’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) history month, Freeman explained to HuffPost Live’s Alex Miranda that after the draft began, the army started screening people in the early 1940s for homosexuality. It was a term many had never heard before.
“It helped in a certain way to solidify an identity, or it gave a name to an identity, that they just had feelings for,” Freeman said. “And then, through the context of being in the all-male or all-female environments that they wound up in, they found each other.”
After the war, Freeman explained, many of those homosexual relationships remained, and as people resettled in cities rather than “going back to the farm,” early gay communities were created.
“Public sex and gay people meeting each other for that purpose has been perpetual, forever,” Freeman said. “But forming organizations and forming community around it as a modern identity and a modern community village is really a post-WWII phenomenon.”
Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation on gay history here. 

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Filed Under: Anti-Bullying & Homophobia, History Tagged With: gay history, modern history, politics

Comments

  1. David McFarlane says

    21/10/2015 at 11:47 am

    ‘The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle’ by Lillian Faderman – See more at: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews/09/28/the-gay-revolution-the-story-of-the-struggle-by-lillian-faderman/?utm_source=Lambda+Literary+Review+October+2nd%2C+2015&utm_campaign=Newsletters&utm_medium=email#sthash.kS9aNRKT.dpuf

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