By Lauren Albrecht
Since the moment colonizers landed in North America, the movement for LGBTQ Equality began and has undergone several dramatic evolutions across time and space on this piece of land.
Out of the foundation of a country settled largely by Puritans, established on land inhabited by native communities that already acknowledged the existence of a third gender, imposing laws based on Christian religious beliefs espousing purity, strict focus on propogation of the Faith, and fanatically heterosexual and cisgender identity, LGBTQ Americans have been fighting since day one.
The first American textbook, the New England Primer of 1687, included religious instruction that “God created male and female” and since 1714, America has had laws on the books outlawing “sodomy.”
Despite our existence since the beginning of recorded time in every civilization, LGBTQ people long existed in the shadows for fear of persecution, punishment and death. From Sarah Norman and Mary Harmon’s conviction for having a lesbian relationship in 1649, to Lieutenant Gotthold Enslin’s dismissal for being gay from the Continental Army in 1778, to President James Buchanan’s relationship with William King, conducted in secret for 13 years, to the 1950 report of Congress on “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government,” which claims that gay people constitute a security risk to the nation and is backed up the APA’s 1952 description of homosexuality as “sociopathic personality disturbance,” underpinned by Truman’s signing the same year of a law that barred LGBTQ immigrants from entry, to Eisenhower’s signing the following year of a law banning LGBTQ people from working for federal agencies, a law that would stay in place until 1993 when it was replaced with the equally-destructive “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” Law, to the Compton Cafeteria Riots of 1966 and the Stonewall Riots of 1969, to the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, from the gross mishandling of the public health crisis of AIDS in the 80’s, and in various forms to this day- LGBTQ people have suffered with, and through, and immersed in, and alongside, a world that has sought to deny, destroy, outlaw, sideline, silence, penalize and eliminate us.
Out of sheer necessity, LGBTQ people organized. We became adept at pushing forward while being battered from all sides. We gathered, coordinated, screamed loudly, asked quietly, cried, mourned, and activated.
After the Obergefell vs Hodges decision in 2015, perhaps our allies have been lulled into a false sense of security.
Perhaps our some members even within our community have come to believe that we have achieved true equality by now.
Nothing could be further from the truth, and I’d like to take a deeper dive into the specifics of inequity, and how we can go about fixing these rifts, with you, dear reader!
