When did the gay rights movement start and what milestones have been made since then?

The modern United States movement for gay rights began in the 1960s, and throughout the 20th and 21st centuries has made great strides to improve the lives of the LGBTQ+ community.

The 1960s and 1970s

Beginning in the early 1960s, tensions between police and gay, queer, and transgender communities started to intensify. In 1969 the Stonewall Riot took place in New York’s Greenwich Village in Lower Manhattan. The event marks the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement in the United States as it empowered many within the community to stand up and publicly fight for their rights. Pride parades that take place in major cities worldwide this month began to commemorate the Stonewall Riots and have taken place since 1970.

The 1980s

The Gay Rights Movement was severely impacted by the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s.

While sexual orientation plays no role in one’s ability to contract AIDS, the higher proportion of gay and transgender people diagnosed with the disease led to a considerable stigma surrounding the illness. The Human Rights Council has reported that transgender women are forty-nine times more likely to be diagnosed with HIV than the general population.

This stigma made the disease more dangerous as people were less likely to seek treatment or information on preventing transmission. This was perpetuated by the policies and rhetoric that came out of President Ronald Reagan and his administration. While the disease began to spread in 1981, President Reagan did not make a speech on the epidemic until 1987. The opinions of white Christian evangelical voters on the AIDS crisis help explain the callous and fatal response from the White House. In 1987, a poll conducted by Gallup found that sixty percent of evangelicals and half of the general population agreed with the statement: “I sometimes think AIDS is a punishment for the decline in moral standards.”

Today, many people diagnosed with HIV can live normal lives. By taking antiviral medication, they can see their viral loads of the disease lowered to the point where they are not considered possible transmitters. Sadly, more than 36 million people have died as a result of contracting HIV, and many see the public health failures to address the spread in the 1980s as a reason for such high levels of transmission and subsequent deaths from the disease.

The 1990s

The 1990s saw two bills target the LGBTQ+ community that has since been repealed or struck down by the Supreme Court: Don’t ask, Don’t tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Don’t ask, Don’t tell, made it illegal for gay members to serve and openly discuss their sexuality. DOMA codified the rights of marriage as an institution between men and women.

The Defense of Marriage Act

The historical record of President Clinton’s support for DOMA has been alerted and rewritten since he signed it into law in September 1996, months before he secured his reelection. The summer before the bill was signed, President Clinton interviewed with The Advocate, where he reaffirmed his “long-standing opinion” that “marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman” and that he remained “opposed to same-sex marriage.”

In 2004, Clinton stated that his position had changed and has defended the signing of the DOMA as a way to prevent Republicans from passing a constitutional amendment that would have made it impossible for individual states to pass laws legalizing same-sex marriage. The LGBTQ+ community has been highly critical of Clinton’s position on the issue and is seen as one of the most significant missteps in the history of social justice in the United States.

DOMA passed with wide veto-proof majorities in both the Senate (85 percent) and House of Representatives (78 percent). The Democratic Party would not take a stand on DOMA until 2008, when the platform of then-Presidential candidate Barack Obama said it should be repealed. However, Congress never took up a bill to repeal the law. Instead, it was struck down in the Supreme Court case Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage nationally in 2015.

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

While the Obama administration could not motivate Congress to repeal DOMA, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed in 2011. Robert Gates wrote an influential report for the Department of Defense published in 2010 that did not find that there would be negative impacts if gay, lesbian, and other members of the LGBTQ+ community could serve openly.