Gay Reparations and Their Critics

This chapter mentions the publication of the New York Times op-ed that calls for gay reparations in the United States, and it discusses the reactions of social conservatives to the article. It talks about homophobic individuals, who have not accepted homosexuals and gay people as human beings entitled to live their lives and deserving of civil rights, who find gay reparations an abomination. It also refers to televangelist Pat Robertson, who implied that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were godly retaliation for abortion, homosexuality, and secularism in the United States. This chapter examines distinct arguments against gay reparations, such as the claim that it is wrong for gay rights activists to apply today’s values to acts of discrimination against the gay community that took place a long time ago. It also reviews claims that gay reparations are divisive and generate a new class of American victims.

Digging Up a Painful Past

This chapter talks about the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, an organization that takes its name from the pioneering gay rights organization of the pre-Stonewall era. It looks at Charles Francis, the president of the Mattachine Society and a leading figure among American gay rights activists, who was a former Republican public relations consultant from Texas with close personal ties to the Bush family. It also discusses Francis’s activism aimed at securing an acknowledgment and apology from the US Congress for discriminatory actions taken by the federal government against LGBT Americans. This chapter analyses the Mattachine Society’s briefing paper “America’s Promise of Reconciliation and Redemption: The Need for an Official Acknowledgment and Apology for the Historic Government Assault on LGBT Federal Employees and Military Personnel,” and it emphasizes the mission of the new Mattachine Society on adjusting the legal struggle to secure an apology from the US government.

The Politics of Gay Reparations

This chapter cites books and articles that have appeared in recent years chronicling gay rights advances in the United States, including Linda Hirshman’s Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution and its declaration that America has become a “post-gay country.” It also points out how America’s gay rights revolution seems unfinished or incomplete in the absence of a national reckoning with the country’s history of systemic anti-gay discrimination. This chapter explains how gay reparations serve to enhance citizenship by acting as an antidote to the toxic legacy that the history of anti-gay discrimination has left in its wake. It reviews laws that allow discrimination rooted from religious beliefs held against LGBT people.

Introduction

This chapter mentions New York police commissioner James P. O’Neill, who during a safety briefing for the 2019 WorldPride festival apologized for an event that took place on June 28, 1969. It recounts the raid of the Stonewall Inn in 1969, a bar in Greenwich Village that provided a safe environment for LGBT people to gather and socialize. The raid turned into a violent clash that spread around the bar’s vicinity and lasted for several days. It also speculates what prompted the rioting at the Stonewall Inn, exploring the theory that the death of singer-actress and gay icon Judy Garland put gay New Yorkers on edge. The chapter discusses the paramount importance of the Stonewall Riots to the rise of the contemporary gay rights movement. It points out that conventional wisdom considers the Stonewall rebellion to have been the first instance of gay resistance in American history.

Foreign Models

This chapter examines gay reparations models from Spain, Britain, and Germany that American gay rights activists emulate. It recounts the long and dark histories of repression of gay people in those three countries, and analyzes how those histories encapsulate the most paradigmatic examples of the repression of homosexuality in the West. It discusses Spain’s repression of homosexuals, which goes back to the Middle Ages and the burning of “sodomites” at the stake during the Spanish Inquisition. It also reviews Britain’s Victorian-era accusation of “gross indecency” and Germany’s notorious Paragraph 175, which justified a bloody crackdown on homosexuality by the Nazis. It explores the significant steps Spain, Britain, and Germany have taken to reckon with their legacies of anti-gay discrimination.

A Shameful History and a Dark Legacy

This chapter introduces Alfred Kinsey, America’s most famous sexologist, who argued in 1953 that homosexual relations are more severely penalized by public opinion and statute law in the United States than in any other major culture in the world. It looks at the US Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in the Lawrence v. Texas case, which meant that the United States was no longer the only major Western democracy criminalizing homosexual conduct between consenting adults. The chapter also mentions Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Michigan, Utah, and Virginia, which banned consensual sodomy without respect to the sex of those involved, and Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri, which prohibited acts of sodomy by same-sex couples. It discusses America’s democratic peers in Western Europe and the Americas that ceased to make consensual homosexual relations a crime, such as France in 1791 and Brazil in 1830.