Gay Marriage: From Stonewall to Albany

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from truthdig:




Gay Marriage: From Stonewall to Albany

Posted on Jun 27, 2011
By Larry Gross


Twoscore and two years ago an urban riot in New York’s Greenwich village became the symbol of a new movement for liberation, so it is fitting that crowds gathered at the site of the Stonewall Inn to celebrate Friday’s historic vote by which New York became the largest state to legislatively approve marriage equality for lesbian and gay citizens.

The struggle for GLBT rights did not begin at Stonewall—that honor, if it is to be awarded to a particular place and particular persons, probably goes to a small gathering of leftist gay men in Los Angeles who founded the Mattachine Society in 1950—but symbols are important, and just as Stonewall became the embodiment of militant queer activism, so too New York’s action last week signifies more than just one more state added to the list of those permitting same-sex marriage.

One of the essential accomplishments of the early pre-Stonewall liberation movement was to change the self-definition of gay people, from that of individuals who deviated from society’s expectations—because they were mentally ill, immoral or criminal—to that of members of a minority group which constituted a community dispersed throughout heterosexual society and largely invisible to outsiders.

The first full-scale polemic for equality, Donald Webster Cory’s “The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach,” was published in 1951. Cory presented a forceful argument that homosexuals constitute a minority within American society: “Our minority status is similar, in a variety of respects, to that of national, religious and other ethnic groups: in the denial of civil liberties; in the legal, extra-legal and quasi-legal discrimination; in the assignment of an inferior social position; in the exclusion from the mainstream of life and culture.” ..............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/gay_marriage_from_stonewall_to_albany_20110627/

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