After World War II, the civil rights movement had a profound impact on other groups demanding their rights. The feminist movement, the Black Power movement, the environmental movement, the Chicano movement, and the American Indian Movement sought equality, rights, and empowerment in American society. Gay people organized to resist oppression and demand just treatment, and they were especially galvanized after a New York City police raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar, sparked riots in 1969.
Around the same time, biologist Alfred Kinsey began a massive study of human sexuality in the United States. Like Magnus Hirschfield and other scholars who studied sexuality, including Havelock Ellis, a prominent British scholar who published research on transgender psychology, Kinsey believed sexuality could be studied as a science. He interviewed more than 8,000 men and argued that sexuality existed on a spectrum, saying that it could not be confined to simple categories of homosexual and heterosexual. To evaluate sexual activities, Kinsey used a scale that assigned a number from zero to six to rate sexual urges. A rating of zero meant “exclusively heterosexual” and a rating of six meant “exclusively homosexual.” Kinsey rejected most people’s self-identification at either end of the spectrum because their other answers indicated that they often fell somewhere in between. Kinsey broke ground by discussing a taboo subject in frank terms. His analysis broke down rigidly held categories of sexuality and empowered many gay people to fight for social change.
By the 1960s, a new wave of social activism, fueled by the civil rights movement and other social movements, inspired them to resist oppression and discriminatory laws. In August 1966, the police raided Compton’s Cafeteria, a hangout for mostly transgender and queer people in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, after the owners of the cafeteria had complained that transgender people were loitering there. They congregated at the Compton’s Cafeteria because gay bars often were hostile to them and prohibited them from hanging out there. When the police arrived at Compton’s to arrest the people for loitering, an uprising ensued. The customers fought the police, throwing coffee cups, smashing plates, and breaking windows. The next evening, protestors gathered in front of Compton’s Cafeteria to mark their resistance to oppression.
The exact date of the Compton’s Cafeteria uprising remains unknown, but it did predate a better-known event called the Stonewall Uprising, which lasted six days. On June 28, 1969, a group of LGBTQ people resisted and then fought back after the police attempted to raid their bar, the Stonewall Inn, in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Several hundred people gathered to watch the police attempting to arrest patrons of the business, and as the crowd’s response escalated from mockery to anger, the mood shifted and violence and destruction erupted inside the bar and in the street. Continue reading from Bill of Rights Institute
Milestones in the American Gay Rights Movement (PBS)
History of Gay Rights (History)
Gay Rights Movement (Encyclopedia Britannica)
Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights in U.S. State Legislatures (ACLU)
How Gay Activists Challenged the Politics of Civility (Smithsonian)
