The Gay Metropolis by Charles Kaiser
Author:Charles Kaiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1997-09-21T16:00:00+00:00
V
The Eighties
“I don’t think people’s sex lives are very interesting, unless they destroy the person.”
—JOHN FAIRCHILD
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true. … The problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact?”
—EDMUND WHITE, 1980
“What everyone had wanted was bringing them death.”
—RANDY SHILTS
“Out of the closets and into the streets!”
—ACT UP CHANT
THE SEVENTIES had been a time of amazing progress and almost nonstop celebration for much of the gay community. By the end of the decade, gay invisibility was just a distant memory, with the proliferation of gay characters on network TV sitcoms and frequent political battles over gay civil rights laws. Even damaging defeats, like Anita Bryant’s successful campaign to overturn a gay rights ordinance in Miami, were not without incidental benefits. Such reversals proved once again how much the movement could be strengthened by adversity.
Ethan Geto, who had temporarily decamped from New York to Miami to help fight Bryant’s effort, saw the Florida fight as “a watershed.” He said, “I thought this was the first great opportunity nationally to mobilize the gay community with a political consciousness. I hoped that gay rights would mature into a major civil rights issue on the national agenda. And it happened. We were on the nightly news a million times. We got letters and notes that came in by the thousands. They were like this: ‘I live in rural Indiana. And we can’t really say we’re gay here, but there is a place where we do hang out once a week on Sunday afternoons. It becomes like a gay bar, but nobody really knows it. There are three women and five men. We didn’t have much money, but we said we’ll take one week’s pay check from everybody and send it to you people in Dade County because you’re standing up for homosexuals.’”
By 1980, in response to the growing clamor for equality, 120 of the largest corporations, including AT&T and IBM, had adopted personnel policies prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, and 40 towns and cities had passed similar laws or issued executive orders. (Mostly because of fierce opposition from the Catholic Church—whose lobbyist was Roy Cohn—New York City remained pointedly absent from this list at the beginning of the decade.)
Twenty-two states had ended all restrictions on sexual relations between consenting adults, and on the tenth anniversary of Stonewall, seventeen-year-old Randy Rohl took twenty-year-old Grady Quinn to the senior prom in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The National Gay Task Force announced that this was the first time two acknowledged homosexuals had attended a high school prom together in America.
But while thousands of lesbians and gay men responded to these changes by publicly declaring who they were, thousands more still assumed that safety, comfort, and prosperity would continue to flow from inside a closet. And most gay people still believed that a public declaration of their homosexuality would mean losing the chance to rise to the pinnacle of their profession.
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
African-American Studies | Asian American Studies |
Disabled | Ethnic Studies |
Hispanic American Studies | LGBT |
Minority Studies | Native American Studies |
Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 1 by Fanny Burney(32043)
Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 3 by Fanny Burney(31447)
Cecilia; Or, Memoirs of an Heiress — Volume 2 by Fanny Burney(31398)
The Great Music City by Andrea Baker(30768)
We're Going to Need More Wine by Gabrielle Union(18623)
All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda(14678)
Pimp by Iceberg Slim(13768)
Bombshells: Glamour Girls of a Lifetime by Sullivan Steve(13677)
Fifty Shades Freed by E L James(12903)
Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell(12855)
Norse Mythology by Gaiman Neil(12808)
For the Love of Europe by Rick Steves(11386)
Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan(8882)
Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit by John E. Douglas & Mark Olshaker(8691)
The Lost Art of Listening by Michael P. Nichols(7150)
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress by Steven Pinker(6867)
The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz(6305)
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou(6270)
Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil(5818)
