The Trump Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Living Through What You Hoped Would Never Happen by Gene Stone

Author:Gene Stone [Stone, Gene]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Nonfiction, Politics
ISBN: 9780062686497
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

“It’s like in golf. A lot of people—I don’t want this to sound trivial—but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive. It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”

—Donald Trump1

LGBTQ ISSUES

THE BACKGROUND

Being gay in the United States has never been easy. Throughout most of American history, sexual relations between members of the same gender have been considered a so-called crime against nature, i.e., sexual behavior considered to be indecent by society’s current standards. (Anal sex was specifically prohibited by an act of Queen Elizabeth I in 1563, and punished for centuries by harsh prison sentences and steep fines.)

In the early years of our nation, several unsuccessful attempts were made to relax laws against gay men—but not in a way that would seem forward thinking today. For example, in 1779 Thomas Jefferson penned a law for Virginia that decreed castration for men who engage in sodomy—which was actually a liberalization of the previous law that mandated the death penalty. (Jefferson’s draft was rejected by the Virginia state legislature.)

Still, the percentage of gay Americans then was presumably equivalent to that today, as the threat of death or any other punishment has never served to curtail homosexual activity—it just sent it underground. The country preferred not to think about the issue; it was seldom discussed; the English word homosexual didn’t even exist until 1868. Many famous Americans of the past were rumored to be gay or bisexual, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and James Buchanan, the fifteenth president of the United States. A lifelong bachelor, Buchanan shared a home for several years with William Rufus King, a senator from Alabama. The two were referred to as “Siamese twins” due to their constant companionship—a prominent Democrat, writing to Mrs. James K. Polk, referred to King as “his [Buchanan’s] wife.”

Few men lived together openly, however. Lesbians were better able to hide their relationships by calling themselves friends, or by engaging in a “Boston marriage,” or what was the equivalent of what is now known as a domestic partnership. One of the most notable Boston marriages was that of pioneering women’s rights advocate Jane Addams and her “friend,” Mary Rozet Smith.

It wasn’t until the 1920s that some gay rights organizations began to appear, but none of these early efforts managed to sustain themselves. However, after World War II, a few enduring groups were founded, including the Mattachine Society, formed in 1950 to fight for gay male rights, and the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955 to advance lesbian civil rights. Yet the 1950s proved to be the most difficult era for gay men and women in the country’s history. This period, marked by fear of communism (which produced the McCarthy hearings and the Red Scare), was also marred by harassment and persecution of gays (known

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