A Gay History of the United States

By Paul Knobel

This is the chapter on the United States from the author's A Gay History of the World/Human Male Homosexuality; A World History. A Gay History of the World has a chapter for each of the world's 193 countries and there are thus 193 chapters. The whole work can also be purchased on Smashwords.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Knobel
• Release date: Aug 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311069047

Paul Knobel

Paul Knobel is a poet and gay researcher who was born in Australia. He is the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Poetry (2002) which covered the world and came to 1 million words. He is also the author of An Encyclopedia of Male Homosexual Art (2005) and other works including GAYFBA: gay fashion bibliography annotated (2019) and a short biography of Martin Smith, Australia's first gay historian. Both works were published in databases and the poetry encyclopedia is now on the internet. He is also the author of 7 volumes of poems .

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Paul Knobel

A gay history of the United States

Sydney: Burke and Wills

Copyright Paul Knobel 2020

This work forms part of the author’s A gay history of the world.

The definition of homosexuality used is sexual and/or close affectional relationships between persons of the same sex. This definition is a slightly modified form of Alfred C. Kinsey’s in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948), p. 612, which defines homosexuality as: sexual relations, either overt or psychic, between individuals of the same sex.

With regard to homosexuality nothing is to be implied about any person mentioned unless it is specifically stated that that person is homosexual or gay.

Male homosexuality is legal in the United States. It only became legal in 2003 by decision of the United States Supreme Court in the case Lawrence versus Texas; it did not become legal by legislation. In the case an amicus curiae (friend of the court) intervention by Professor George Chauncey of Yale University and other historians was crucial. A previous supreme court ruling had rested on the view that sodomy (anal sex) was universally condemned in western history, but the historians pointed out that far from this being the case there was no agreed on meaning of what sodomy actually was: for instance, as well as being anal sex, it could also be oral sex. Other gay amici curiae included Lambda Legal (who coordinated 16 briefs to complement their own) and Log Cabin Republicans. (An amicus curiae is a person or other party apart from those involved in the case who seeks to give information to a judge to enable him or her to make a fair decision.)

The US is a federation of 50 states with both state and federal laws and male homosexuality was legalized state by state, starting in 1961 with Illinois in the midwest whose capital is the traditionally liberal Chicago (this was six years before Great Britain which decriminalized in 1967). However by 2003, 42 years later, male homosexuality was still illegal in 13 states. The US Supreme Court decision decriminalized male homosex in these 13 remaining states. The crucial decider in Lawrence versus Texas was the 14th clause of the US Bill of Rights, the Equal Protection clause, which guarantees equality for all. Decriminalization over the whole country thus came about by court decision.

Gays have faced much prejudice in the US apart from legal prejudice. For instance up to 1973 homosexuality was regarded as being a mental illness in the United States and only in this year did the American Psychiatric Association remove it from its list of mental disorders.

THE LEGAL AGE OF SEXUAL CONSENT The legal age of sexual consent in the United States differs from state to state and has not been constant. The most common present legal age of sexual consent is between 16 and 18. In some states the legal age of sexual consent can go back to 13 (for example in Connecticut when the older person is no more than 16). It would follow under the Equal Protection Clause of the Bill of Rights, the 14th amendment, that the legal age of sexual consent should be the same in all states. This issue remains to be fought out in court.

United States law is based on that of Great Britain which was imported with British colonization starting from 1607 in Virginia. Indigenous Indian laws applied before European colonization and may still apply (in 2008 the Coquille Indian tribe of Oregon for instance adopted a law recognizing gay marriage). In the island state of Hawaii Polynesian customs also applied prior to US control. In the formerly French speaking southeast, the state of Louisiana was under French law until it was purchased by the United States in 1803. Spanish law applied in Florida (which was a Spanish colony from 1513 to 1763 and 1783 to 1821) and California and other south western states (under Spanish control from 1697 to 1821). Since homosexuality was legalized in France in 1791 it appears to have been legal for the period from 1791 to 1803 in Louisiana and possibly even later since the law is based on French and Spanish codes. (Male homosexuality was legalized in Spain in 1822.)

The legal age of sexual consent (but only for heterosexuals since male homosex was illegal) was raised from the late 19th century. In 1885 it was 10 in most states of the then 38 US states, 12 in 9 states and 7 in Delaware. However these legal ages of sexual consent only applied to females. A chart of them is in Mary E. Odem, Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920 (1995),pp. 14–15 (viewable on the internet in Google Books).As Mary E. Odem’s book makes clear, the legal age of sexual consent was raised due to agitation by middle class women against teenage girls becoming sexually active at what they thought was too young an age. By 1920 the legal age of sexual consent was 16 or 18 in all states except Georgia where it was 14. Willam N. Eskridge’s Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America 1861–2003 (2004) is a landmark study (for further details see the bibliography below).

OTHER LAWS Gay marriage is now legal in over 37 US states by state legislation and Supreme Court ruling (eg Massachusetts and New York, where it became legal in 2011 under the Marriage Equality Act). It is also legal in the federal territory of the District of Columbia, which houses the national capital Washington DC and is under federal control, and in 10 tribal jurisdictions. In 2013 the US Supreme Court cautiously ruled on appeal that it was legal in California (a decision which could make it legal in all states following the 14th amendment granting equal protection); it has been legalized in several other states by the US Federal Court using this ruling. Antidiscrimination laws covering homosexuality exist in many states from Illinois to the traditionally liberal New York on the east coast, the US’s largest city.

A crucial factor in the emergence of gay culture was the lessening of US censorship laws from 1958 when the gay organization ONE, situated in the traditionally liberal Los Angeles on the west coast, established the right to send gay material through the post after a court case which went to the Supreme Court. From 1962 censorship lessened following the Manual Enterprises Supreme Court case (instigated by the gay publisher H. Lynn Womack) when it was found that only works which were patently offensive could be banned. Before this year gay works featuring erotic content, such as books, films and dramatic works, could not be published in the US as they would be labelled pornography (photos of male nudes for instance were illegal). Censorship further lessened in 1970 with the release of The Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Prior to this, books on homosexuality were virtually all of a medical nature and sometimes were restricted to doctors; they were hard to find even in libraries (often being placed in special sections) and those who read them were regarded with suspicion. Censorship laws had the effect of inhibiting the writing of gay history which only commenced in the US tentatively in the 1950s (pseudonyms were used by the first authors who were afraid to use their real names). The effect of the laws was to deny gays our history.

Visual material which can now be readily seen on Google Images and other sites (eg photos of anal sex, masturbation, mutual masturbation, gay orgies) was not available prior to 1966; see further Censorship in the United States in Wikipedia on the internet. However downloading on computers of sexual images of children can lead to jail sentences.

THE US AND GAY RIGHTS As a nation dedicated to human rights and a major world power, the most powerful country militarily in the world with the largest economy, the United States of America has sought to be a leader in world culture. So what happens in the US affects the rest of the world. The concept of American exceptionalism, that the US has a unique and special place in world culture, has recently come into public discourse: see Human rights in the United States: beyond exceptionalism (2011) edited by Shareen Hirtel.

In his second inaugural speech in 2013 President Barack Obama, the first black President and a former professor of law in Chicago, said Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal, as well. This was the first time a US president had made reference to gay rights in his inaugural speech. The gay Latino poet Richard Blanco read the inaugural poem at the president’s swearing it. On 22 July 2011 President Obama allowed gays to openly serve in the US military as is the case in many other countries (eg Israel). In 2014 President Obama signed an executive order prohibiting discrimination on homosexual grounds for federal employees, an historic decision since it signalled to the non governmental section of the US economy that the federal government was taking gay rights seriously.

Under President Obama, with Hilary Clinton, former wife of President Bill Clinton as foreign secretary, the US has been supportive of gay rights internationally. For instance, though initially not a signatory, the US signed the United Nations Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity of 2008. The United States now has several openly gay ambassadors and its embassies actively promote gay rights with employees openly participating in gay events in the states in which they serve.

As can be seen, laws in the US have been and are selectively deployed against gay sexuality and gay culture. Full equality has not occurred yet, nor has justice (which is not the same as equality). Because male homosexuality was illegal it needs to be kept in mind that life for most gays before the present era was very difficult: men were concerned to hide their gayness rather than reveal it since that could lead to jail. Even today this still occurs. Before gay liberation in 1969 most gays did not agitate for gay rights, the exception being the Mattachine Society and that gay group only from the 1950s (see below).

No other nation in the world has had such a dramatic change in its policies towards male homosexuality since legalization in the US in 2003.

Facts

The United States occupies half of the continent of North America. Canada lies to the north and the US-Canadian border stretches from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean. The US is 9,826,000 square kilometers (3,373,000 square miles) in size making it the world’s third largest country. To the southwest is Mexico, a much poorer country whose inhabitants and Latinos (Spanish speakers) from other central and south American states are emigrating illegally to the US in large numbers. Off the coast of Florida in the southeast is the island nation of Cuba. In the northwest of North America, the state of Alaska is separated from the main body of the US by Canada. Alaska adjoins Russia across the narrow Bering Strait and its eastern boundary borders Canada; it was purchased from Russia in 1867 at $7.2 million or 2 cents an acre (Russian law prevailed before 1867). The state of Hawaii lies in the Pacific Ocean. The US dependency of Puerto Rico lies in the Caribbean Sea to the south east of Cuba. The estimated US population in 2014 was 320,000,000 and the capital is Washington DC (District of Columbia, Columbia being an old poetic name for the US). Washington houses one of the world’s greatest libraries which collects works in over 600 languages and 18 million entries in its catalog: the Library of Congress is one of the United States’ greatest contributions to human culture.

The US has the largest economic output of any country at $US 17 trillion (17 thousand billion) annually, twice that of the next largest nation, China. Its foreign debt at $18 trillion and growing is huge also. English is the national language. Spanish is the second most spoken language and growing with 16.4% (54,000,000) of the population speaking it as their primary language and a constant and growing influx of speakers. Spanish speakers are of central and south American ancestry, mainly Mexican. Spanish is followed in numbers of speakers by Chinese, French, Tagalog (the language of the Philippines), Vietnamese, Korean, German, Italian and Russian (all with over 1 million speakers). Ethnologue recorded 337 languages being spoken in the US in 2007 of which 176 are indigenous (these figures may however be low).

Ethnicly the US is one of the most diverse nations in the world. In the 2010 census 13.6% of people, 42 million, were African Americans (formerly called Blacks) who were originally brought to the country from western African coastal countries as slaves and mainly worked on cotton plantations in the southern states (see the nations of west Africa in this history). Together African Americans and Latinos now constitute over 25% of the US population with the Latino population growing faster than the African American. On some estimates a third of the US population will be Spanish speakers in coming decades. The US has 3.8 million Chinese citizens, 3.4 million Philippinos and 3.2 million Indians from India. In a 2007 survey 78.4 % of adults said they were Christians with 51.3% Protestant forms of Christianity and 23.9% being Roman Catholics. The US is thus one of the nations in the western world with the highest number of Christians. The Catholic Church in the US is the largest in the world after Brazil (it is also the most liberal which has led to many issues with the Vatican in Italy where the church is headquartered). Many other religions are practiced in the US (eg there are 6.5 million estimated people of Jewish faith and 2.6 million Muslims). Some 55% of people attend a religious service regularly.

The US is a federal presidential constitutional republic with two houses of parliament which are housed in the one building in Washington DC called Congress. The lower house is the House of Representatives and the upper house, is the Senate; the constitution was created in Philadelphia in the late 18th century and attached to it is a Bill of Rights. The US President has the power to veto bills from Congress which gives him special power. Overseeing the legal and political system is the Supreme Court which mediates between the President and Congress and whose main role is to interpret the constitution. Per person nominal GDP in 2014 was estimated at $US 54,980 amongst the highest in the world; however poverty is widespread and many people live from pay packet to pay packet especially after the 2008 financial crisis.

History

The native peoples of the US arrived from Asia across Beringia, a land bridge then joining North America and Asia, prior to 22,000 years ago (human remains of this date have been found in Canada). The continent of America (which refers to both north and