this fall. on lectures in history george washington university professor chad heap teaches a class about the origins of the gay rights movement. pe describes how participants found common ground with communists, the black power movement, anti-war protesters and other groups fighting against the status quo of american cold war society. he also talks about different groups within the gay rights movement which were often focused on more specific issues like removing the ban on lesbians and gays from holding governmental jobs. his class is about an hour. so, welcome back to class. today we are -- our topic is going to be gay and lesbian liberation. i want to spend a little bit of time setting that up for you, and then we will move right in to a discussion of some of the issues. for the last couple of weeks we've been talking about the

ways that cold war conformity gave rise to new forms of sexual and social order in the first decade or two after the second world war. we've talked about how the cold war conformity established a white suburban middle class heterosexuality as the domestic ideal and norm in america and how nuclear families came to be the kind of central common card of american normalcy. that, in turn, of course, as we discussed before, left a lot of other people out in side that norm, especially those who were left behind in american cities, including people of color and those who were choosing not to get married in what was the most marrying generation in american history, namely lesbians and gay men, but not exclusively so. but those groups as we talked

about before came to it be seen as socially and sexually deviant as threats to the american family, and to democracy, and as people who should be excluded from american society and from the abundance of the post-war economic order. but now we're moving into the 19 -- the late 1960s and early 1970s to look at some of the rebuttals to those notions of cold war conformity and normativety. and there are an array of social and culture movements that arise during the 1960s and '70s to challenge this notion that white middle class suburban heterosexuality is the ideal american identity. those include the civil rights and later a more radicalized black power movement, the anti-war movement and protests against vietnam.

the counterculture, women's liberation and the feminist movement. but today we're going to start out by looking at the emergence of the gay liberation movement and the challenges that it offered to the established cold war order. by the end of class i hope that we have figured out four major themes. one, that we have a pretty good idea what the gay liberation movement was. and although i'm calling it here gay and lesbian liberation, initially it it was just referred to as the gay liberation movement and was believed to encompass both gay men and women's ideas and wishes. we'll also have a sense of how the gay liberation began, how we might position it in american

history. who who or whom it sought to liberate and what the achievements of the gay liberation were. those are going to be our main focal points for today. how i want to start is by ask something you, if you had to pick a moment in history based on your readings or from your understanding of the popular history of gay and lesbian politics, when would you say the gay and lesbian liberation movement began? if you had to pick one moment? so the late 1960s or early 1970s. and is there some particular moment in time that you would attach the movement to? to the stone wall riots. so is the stonewall riots are seen as a kind of mythical

beginning of the gay and lesbian liberation movement. already by 1972 -- and these riots occurred in 1969. they began on friday, june 27th in 1969 as a kind of uprising that arose when the new york police department raided a gay nightclub in greenwich village that was known as the stonewall inn. they were ostensibly cracking down on nightclubs in the city that didn't have the proper licenses to sell liquor to their consumers. and for some reason on this particular night in june of 1967, the patrons decided they had had enough and they didn't want their establishment to be

raided and although the customers weren't really being arrested in any large numbers, they were simply being turned out of the club. they began to fight back. and the stonewall uprising then encompassed three nights of uprisings in greenwich village. there was the first night of the initial arrest and crackdown. and people then reassembled on two subsequent evenings to pro protest the actions of the police and to make a stance about oppression against gay and lesbian consumers in american cities. now at the time this occurred, it wasn't a very notable activity. it happened at about 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. on friday night in to saturday morning. and so it was too late to appear in the saturday newspapers, but it made its way into the sunday newspapers and "the new york

times" thought it was so important they buried it on page 33. and the "new york daily news" put it on page 30. and the headline in the times was four policemen hurt in village raid. and only if you began to read about what happened there did you learn, according to the times, that hundreds of young men went on a rampage in greenwich village shortly after 3:00 a.m. yesterday after a force of plain clothesmen raided a bar that the police said was well known for its homosexual clientele. so the "times" reported that after they were turned out of the club, the young men threw bricks, bottles, garbage, pennies and a parking meter at the policemen who had a search warrant authorize authorizing them to investigate reports of illegal liquor cells. they estimated that about 200 young men were turned out of the bar and that as the uprising went on, the crowd grew to close

to 400 in a melee that the "times" reported lasted about 45 minutes. the "new york daily news" reported very similarly and briefly about the events and said that -- and noted, also, that the same bar had been raided the week before and hadn't provoked any controversy or uprising. but for some reason, the second time people had fought back. t "the daily news" provides us with one of the very contemporary news images of what happened at the stonewall inn and who was rioting. i apologize this isn't quite as clear as it might be. but it suggests to us that the audience was a little bit -- or that the people who were participating in the riots were a bit different than those that were portrayed by "the new york times."

we have in this image not just a picture of hundreds of young men -- although there aren't hundreds in this foe foe, through they're primarily young men. but unlike the characterization in the "times," in this image from the "new york daily news" we see young men of color who have been basically completely written out of the "times" account. in the background you can see a couple of african-american men. in between the two policemen here we see a face of what appears to be a latino young man. and in the image that would appear in the more extensive coverage that "the village voice" offered in its july 3rd issue, we see the presence of transgender or cross-dressing individuals and young street hustlers and a variety of other people who had been written out of the accounts. what's not visible in these

accounts is the kind of legendary lesbian who supposedly threw the first punch at stonewall, according to the myths that circulated about these events, and that became especially prominent in the 1980s as the stonewall myth began to be remobilized as a way of uniting lesbian/gay politics and the political movement again. so that what occurred here was a fighting back against police discrimination and harassment and an attempt to parlay it into a broader social and political movement. rioting continued far into the night that first night, and by the next day when the windows of the stonewall had been boarded up, graffiti began to appear on the windows proclaiming gay power and marking this as a

place that was going to come to have a substantial place in gay and lesbian political memory as a kind of origin point for the gay liberation movement. but what isn't usually recognized today when people talk about stonewall is that this was not the first kind of revolutionary movement in gay and lesbian politics. it wasn't the first time that anybody called for a revolution as the gay liberation activists would do in the preceding -- in the subsequent weeks. already in march of 1969, an activist in san francisco named leo lawrence who was the editor of a magazine published by the society for individual rights, had called for the homosexual

revolution of 1969 which he said would be a chance for gay men and lesbians to join the black panthers and other radical groups to come out in large numbers and sort of challenge the broader social order. nor was it the first time that gay men and lesbians fought back against the police and perceived police harassment. we know of at least two other times that this happened on the west coast. in 1959 in los angeles, two historians tell us that drag queens and street hustlers who hung out at cooper's doughnuts and were frequently harassed by the los angeles police department fought back after the police arrested three people pelting them with doughnuts and coffee cups. and susan striker tells us that in august of 1966, that san

francisco's compton's cafeteria, when the management called the san francisco police to crack down on what they perceived to be sort of raucously behaving transgender individuals in the cafeteria, that the transgender individuals fought back when the police arrived to arrest them as well. and yet even before those events, we had other protests -- street protests against discrimination against lesbians and gay men. we've talked before about the emergence of what historian david johnson has characterized as the lavender scare, the purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government workforce in the 1950s and '60s. and in washington, a group of gay and lesbian activists known

as the vanishing society of washington, began to assemble to combat this discrimination and to lobby for full access to jobs in the federal workforce. they began also by 1965 to stage a series of pickets in washington, d.c. the first of these pickets happened in april of 1965 and was prompted somewhat unusually and unexpectedly by a "new york times" article that had announced the establishment of labor camps for men convicted of homosexual crimes in cuba. so you might ask yourself like why is the vanishing society going to protest these labor camps in cuba and why do they think a good way to protest them is by holding a picket in front of a white house, which they did on saturday, april 17th, 1965.

the first sort of organized picket of the federal government which was attended by seven men and three women. it is not a very large group, but it is the first time that people take up picket signs and march in front of the white house. they did -- and they lead to this kind of development in cuba with the federal government by calling on the same sort of anti-communist cold war rhetoric that had often been used against gay men and lesbians who were thought to pose similar threats to american democracy. and they picketed with signs, for instance that said russia, cuba and the united states unite to persecute homosexuals. right? so they used this instance of persecution in cuba, in communist cuba, and compared it to what they viewed as the persecution of homosexuals or the exclues of gay men and lesbians and the purging of them from the federal civil service.

over time they began to picket more widely in washington. they picketed in front of the pentagon. in front of the civil service commission which is pictured here on the cover of "t ladder," and they began to counter the attacks on gay men and lesbians. but that version of gay protest is a little bit different from the version and the visual representation of gay protests that would come in the post-stonewall period. what i'd like to get us to do for a moment is to talk about if we look at the cover of "the ladder here," the lesbian publication from 1965, and compare it to the gay liberation front's poster from 1970, what are some of the differences that

we can see in the way that the gay and lesbian movement is representing itself? yes. >>. [ inaudible question ] -- it wasn't i would say aggressive but kind of in-your-face powerful. >> so the gay liberation front image gives off a sense of a more powerful outrage where we have upraised fists instead of holding picket signs. you said it gives the sense of being a bigger and more boisterous movement.

which might be the case, although there are, as historian richard myer tells us, there are only 17 people who showed up to take the photograph for this image. the gay liberation front, which had emerged as a self-proclaimed revolutionary organization after stonewall, had a membership of about 150 people at the time, and they only managed to get about 17 of them to show up for -- to take the picture for this image. there are probably a few other people who are left out of the image on "the ladder." so the number of people actually there is probably not that different, but we do have a different sense of the kind of display of them and that we have a more -- they're filling the frame or fully in the image for the gay liberation front, they seem, even though there may not be that many more people actually there, they seem to be

a larger number of people. is there anything else that you notice that's similar or different? here in the middle? >> in the readings it talked about how in "the badder," the woman was wearing a skirt and the men were wearing suits and they were kind of conforming to the gender identity to make it seem like they were with society and they weren't trying to be the same, they were different, and they weren't like this crazy group, that they were actually just as normal as everybody else. >> what about the gay liberation front image? >> well, they were -- i mean i don't remember exactly what it said, but i mean obviously they kind of adapt to the more hippie lifestyle and being free and like men had the long hair and they're not really conforming like in the other picture to the gender identity they are supposed to be conforming to. >> we see a kind of generational

divide in the gay rights movement here. we see in the image from "the ladder." right? because these are only separated by about five hours. but we see older probably professional men and women in "the ladder" who are used in gender conforming attire. in fact, the mannishing society had a rule that women had to wear skirts or dresses when they appeared in public protests and men had to wear coat and tie. it was about respecting themselves as gender conforming individuals and to not call attention to themselves as being different but to call attention to their similarities. whereas the younger crowd in the gay liberation front we have gender-specific clothing. the men and women are dressed in much more similar fashion.

they're in much more casual attire and they seem to be sort of refuting the notion that they have to conform to particular gender norms or expectations. anything else that you notice? what about the wording on the cover in the poster? what do you notice that's similar or different about that? >> the image in general invokes a sense of community. it talks about join the sisters and brothers, they're all kind of -- they're happy to be there and they have their arms around each other and it looks like a tight-knit community, or kind of more of a family vibe. whereas the other one is much more professional which aligns with the professional wear that they were told to wear. >> so we have a more communal kind of effect in the gay liberation front image and

calling -- asking people to join them and join the sisters and brothers. right? it is as if this is a family. and there are several women who are at the front of this image. richard myer points out though that this is a kind of idealized notion of what the -- what people wanted the movement to look like and that the movement is actually an incredibly male-dominated movement, both in the numbers of membership and its leadership at the time. it is a kind of utopian idea of what gay liberation might look like. what about on the first image, "the ladder" talks about ho homo-phile groups rather than the gay liberation front. homo-phile is a word that these early civil rights organizations, including mannishing society, including daughters of the lightest, a

lesbian organization, developed to sort of distance themselves from are the sexual connotations of homosexuality and medicalized ideas about homosexuality that characterized it as deviant medically and psychologically. they've taken the kind of greek -- two greek torms erms oo meaning same and phelia meaning -- what does it mean? love? right. so they are focused on love of people of the same sex. homo-phile rather than homosexual. they are calling attention to the same kind of love that you've noticed or decided was being displayed by the gay liberation front, but they're doing it as a way of sort of distancing themselves from accusations of abnormality, whereas the gay liberation front is embracing those accusations of abnormality and is finding them in a kind of revolutionary

possibility for overturning broader social orders. right? and again, also we have this notion of the homo-phile groups picketing in the nation's capital. we have sort of invited properly conforming activists who are playing a particular role and who are primarily rebutting the kind of discrimination that gay activists saw coming to them from the federal government and their exclusion from federal employment. in the gay liberation front poster we have a call to action. "come out," and gay men and lesbians are being heralded for the first time to make themselves known visibly, to make their identities known, and to see that as a kind of political tactic so that -- we talked about how in the early 20th century gay men and lesbians came out then as well and talked about coming out.

but they were coming out in to the gay community in the same way that a debutante came out into society. by the late 1960s and early 1970s, they've taken that same formulation and they're now saying "come out," but they mean come out to the public, come out and make yourself known and transform the simple act of pride and coming out of the closet in to a form of self-affirmation and an opportunity to build community and to challenge a wide array of social inequities that the gay liberation front is recognizing. and in fact, the gay liberation front is playing on and building on all of the lessons that the whole other array of social and culture movements from this period are developing. the anti-war movement. the civil rights and black power

movement. women's liberation movement. they're taking the best aspects of those and building upon them and they're also situating themselves in alliance with those groups and are seeing their attempts to transform american society not simply as claims to help lesbians and gay men avoid discrimination and oppression, but as an opportunity to transform american society more broadly. so that the organization and activists within the organization began to conceive of their activism as a way of overturning traditional american social structures. carla jay, an activist who edited an important collection of gay liberation documents called "out of the closets, voices of gay liberation," wrote in her introduction to that,

that we perceive our oppression as a class struggle and our oppressor as white middle class male dominated heterosexual society which has relentlessly persecuted and murdered homosexuals and lesbians since the oppressor has had power. so that she's perceiving it in the way that many left movements did in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as an anti-capitalist movement. here we see a lesbian liberation button from the 1970s that says we'll never get it under capitalism. we'll never be liberated under capitalism. because gay liberation and lesbian liberation, like many other leftist movements of the time, thought that it was capitalism that held people in their place, oppress people, the

kind of traditional cold war mentali mentality, the stay-at-home mom, as a way of supporting the booning american economy that limited some people from participating in that economy in order to shore up the social power and cultural power and political power of white male heterosexuals. so that lesbian liberation is saying the only way to achieve true liberation is to establish from capitalism. and lesbian feminists would begin to offer as you read this week, they developed their own cultural products being marketed to each other through lesbian peter c periodicals that sometimes they're willing to give away rather than making a lot of money off of them as a way of refuting the norm of capitalism and finding freedom for sexual and self-expression through a kind of anticapit-capitalist

enterprise. gay groups also, the gay liberation front also teamed up with the anti-war movement, the anti-vietnam war movement and saw themselves as part and parcel of that movement and also saw that movement adding to the liberation of gay men and lesbians so that rather than fighting to end the ban on gay men in the military, which has been a more recent focal point of the gay rights movement, the gay liberation front decided to capitalize on the fact that gay men were excluded from the military and saw in that a kind of political strategy for fighting the war so that they offered slogans such as "send the troops to bed together," or

"soldiers, make each other, not war." so a kind of variation on "make love, not war." but exhorting the soldiers to make out with each other, not to fight war. or perhaps in a slogan that will probably be bleeped, "suck -- to beat the draft. if you didn't want to war, you could be gay. that was the best strategy for getting out of the vietnam war. they also developed the countercultures where they got together in public places and were just groovy and cool. gay liberation front started staging gay-ins in america, gathering in new york central park and los angeles' griffith park where tens of thousands it and men and women gathered just for the day to be publicly gay, to claim public space and to express affection in the spring of 1970 and in subsequent years.

they also built upon the black power movement and feminism. here we see the raised fist of black power, recast as a gay liberation emblem. and the gay liberation front very often marched in solidarity with groups like the black panther party and saw themselves as part -- as an integral part of a larger movement of oppressed minorities seeking to overthrow what they saw as a destructive social order. following black power's assertion that black is beautiful, the gay liberation front increasingly insisted that gay is good. so they are adopting the same kind of rhetoric, black power says "black is beautiful," gay power and the gay liberation front says that "gay is good." and they began to think of

themselves as a revolutionary group that sought gay and sexual liberation more generally. we can see sort of on the right in this image from new york university and student activism there that gay power is being linked exclusively to black power -- to women power, to student power, all power to the people. right? it is thought of as part of this kind of broad movement of social groups who are not endeavoring just to get rights for gay men and lesbians, but are endeavoring to transform american society more broadly. carla jay said that ultimately our struggle reflects the struggle of other revolutionary groups and of other oppressed people, such as blacks, chicanos, american indians and women. and in fact the women's liberation movement and radical feminism probably played one of the most central roles in the early years of gay liberation by

providing them with some of their clearest targets for social and structural reform. martha shelly, a lesbian activist, wrote in a 1970 essay, "gay is good," that "we are women and men who, from the earliest time of our earliest memories, have been in revolt against the sex role structure and new clear family structure." right? so that they then begin to say that it is the nuclear family and traditional gender roles that are actually holding down social progress and sexual progress and that gay and lesbian liberation offers a unique opportunity to work with women's liberation and feminism to overturn this social order. she went on to say, "it is difficult for me to understand --" it is really interesting, pay attention to the kind of "groovy" language here. account it is difficult for me to understand how you can dig

each other as human beings in a man/woman relationship, how you can relate to each other in spite of your sex roles. it must be awful difficult to talk to each other when the woman is trained to repress what the man is trained to express, and visa versa. do straight men and women talk to each other? or does the man talk and the woman not approvingly. is love possible between heterosexuals? or is it all a case of women posing as nymphs, early mothers, sex objects, what have you, and men writing the poetry of romantic illusions to these walking stereotypes." right? so that she is taking the notion -- the plaopularly hold notions and is suggesting that it may be heterosexuality that's

ultimately more oppressive and abnormal than homosexuality and she even questions is it possible for men and women to truly love each when society requires these kind of traditional gender norms that privileged men over women and encourage women to sort of submit to men or at least to downplay their own emotions and needs and desires in the face of male desire. this kind of attack on gender conformity carried over as well into the embracing of alternative gender markers within the gay liberation movement, so that we have this brief moment in the late '60s and early '70s where a kind of androgynous male and in some cases female gay figures began to be used to market the movement to a wider variety of

people and to challenge the notion of gender conformity and the social order so that here in this photo on the right, from life magazine, and an expose that life did on gay culture in 1971, we see sort of boufant hair men in rock attire, we have the gay liberation fist that is also drawing upon black power, and suggesting that this is the kind of epitome of gay power in the image on the left, which is from the publication gay power, which is advertised by this psychedelic gay male butterfly, right or probably playing on stereo types of homosexuality. but it is embracing these kind

of nonconforming, nongender conforming images as the kind of place where power can be found within the movement and where this social and sexual order can be overthrown. and it is not just sort of gender conformity and heterosexuality that is under attack, gay liberation also believes that marriage should be done away with and that marriage is a problematic activity, right. again, this is very much counter to recent trends in lesbian and gay politics which embraced the call for legalizing same sex marriage during this kind of revolutionary movement of gay politics in the late '60s and early '70s. carl whitman, an activist in san francisco, wrote in his gay men festo that marriage is a prime example of a straight institution fraught with role playing. traditional marriage is a rotten

oppressive institution, a contract which smothers both people, denies needs and places impossible demands on both people. gay people must stop gauging their self-respect by how well they mimic straight marriages. and he goes on to suggest, right, that gay liberation can offer new ways of thinking about relationships. he says we're all looking for security, a flow of love, and a feeling of belonging and being needed, but these needs can be met through a variety of social relationships and living conditions. themes we need to get away from, he says, are, one, exclusiveness, property attitudes toward each other, a mutual pact against the rest of the world, right, so he's sort of rebelling against the notion of monogamy and lifetime exclusivity or thinking about

your spouse as somehow your property, right, someone you have control over or own. he says we need to get away from promise about the future, which we have no right to make and which prevents us from or makes us feel guilty about growing, right, so this is more of the kind of groovy language of the day, right, we shouldn't promise relationships into the future, because we're going to grow, we're going to expand, we're going to explore new horizons and so let's not make these promises that we can't keep, they're just going to make us feel bad about ourselves. and then he also says that marriage, one of the problems with marriage is the inflexible roles, roles which do not reflect us at the moment, but are inherited through mimicry and inability to define equalitarian relationships. he seize gay and lesbian relationships as an opportunity to redefine the relationship between two individuals as more

egalitarian or what he calls equalitarian relationships as relationships that don't exist within more structured, bynerized male-female, masculine-feminine roles. and also challenging the notion of the nuclear family, arguing that homosexuality is not an abnormality, but a natural capacity in everyone that has been suppressed by the nuclear family and by society. alan young and other gay activists proclaim gay is good for all of us, the artificial categories of heterosuwal and homosexual have been laid on us by a sexist society, the family is the primary means by which this restricted sexuality is created and enforced. our understanding of sexism, this is the gay activist understanding of sexism, is

premised on the idea that in a free society everybody will be gay. but he's differentiating here between gay and homosexual, right. he's saying that the categories of heterosexual and homosexual have been created by society and placed upon all of us and reinforced by traditional family structures and that the family is the mechanism that reinforces the notion that there is something different about heterosexuality and homosexuality and that values heterosexuality over homosexuality, and instead he suggests that gay is good for all of us, he says, so that gayness becomes a sign of the sexually -- of sexuality freed from hierarchical assumptions of male supremacy and from the nuclear family. right. that gayness becomes in his figu figureation the way to move beyond heterosexual and

homosexual binary. we have this kind of radical challenge to the social structure that is similar to those that were being enacted by black power, by feminism, by the counterculture and other movements. but so far all we have really seen, right, is the way that those play out philosophically or ideologically and the manifestos and ideas that people are lobbying and, in fact, we have already talked about how some of the themes that these revolutionary groups are looking for in the late '60s and early 1970s, refusal to go to war, a refusal to marry, have become -- have been sort of undone by more recent gay and lesbian political movements where the right to serve in the military and the right to get married have become valorized conceptions. so it is pretty clear, right, that gay liberation failed to overturn the social structure in

the same way that lots of other movements failed to have major impacts. but what i want to do is spend a little bit of time talking about some of the early achievements that gay liberation did manage to achieve in the early 1970s. and some of the shortcomings of the movement that were already becoming clear in that period. so that among other things, right, this call to come out and make one's self visible and to take a public and political role in american society had the effect of transforming gay visibility in the united states, and of energizing the political activism that continues up to this day. by 1973, there were over 800 gay and lesbian organizations that had been formed in the united

states and just a four-year period or so, and by the end of the decade, by the end of the 1970s, their numbers reached into the thousands. these included a variety of political organizations, but also community organizations, and businesses that sprang up alongside gay bars, gay churches, synagogues, health clinics, community centers, travel agencies, newspapers, a whole array of services that emerged to build a sense of community and to fulfill roles within that community. in a more concrete example, by 1973, gay activists managed to convince the american psychological association to remove homosexuality from the diagnostic and statistical manual where it previously had been listed as a mental disorder. so they're challenging this notion that we talked about a rising in the earlier cold war

period of homosexuality as a mental illness, that psychiatrists and psychologists could be called in to treat, right. gay activists are rebutting that notion and are successful in getting the american psychological association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. by the mid1970s, gay and lesbian openly gay and lesbian political activists begin to be elected to public offices, most famously in 1977, harvey milke is elected to the board of supervisors in san francisco. the equivalent of their city council. but even before him, lane noble had been elected as the first open lesbian state representative in the state of massachusetts, in 1974. and kathy kuzichenko to the ann arbor city council. we see publicly endorsed gay and

lesbian officials. and by 1975, activists in washington and elsewhere are able to convince the u.s. civil service commission to lift its ban on the employment of gay men and lesbians in the federal government. so those are all very concrete outgrowths of gay liberation, gay and lesbian liberation, although they have become more sort of mainstream activities. other developments that we can see arising from gay liberation also give us some hint of the shortcomings of the movement. so here we see, in these two images, one from life magazine, and another from an unknown photographer, of the gay liberation parade from -- on the left, from 1971, the gay

liberation week parade in new york. these parades and they continue today, we used to call them gay liberation day or gay freedom day, i think san francisco still referred to it as gay freedom day. most people now call them gay pride day. we had a slight change in the nomenclature and the meaning of these movements. they were originally held, right, first one held in 1970, the fact that they're held in late june is no accident. they're intended to be commemorations of the stone wall uprising. and the first one is held in new york, but they quickly spread throughout the rest of the country. and they are meant to symbolize freedom and serve as political marches initially and so the gay freedom day parade in new york, the first ones start in greenwich village near the site of the stone wall in, and at the hub of gay life at that point.

and they marched into the city, ending up in central park. so there are political events that march through the streets with people yelling out as they went, come out, come out, and people leaving their homes and joining the march as they moved into the heart of the core of new york, and into central park where they held political rallies. these were sort of political rallying points. if we think about what may become today, the gay pride movement, or the gay pride parades now in new york, right, they start somewhere up near central park, on fifth avenue and they march down the city, and into the gay neighborhoods and gay night life districts and have become less sort of political rallying points, they usually still hold a political rally on the day preceding the march, and more sort of mass

consumer events that embrace gay pride, but have done away with the kind of political valance of the earliest marches and have certainly done away with gay liberation fronts sort of attack on capitalism, because they have become all about sort of capitalizing on lesbian-gay identity and building up that kind of aspect of the economic power of the lesbian and gay community. but we also see in the lower image, right, the development of the lesbian liberation front or the lesbian feminist liberation movement which signals some of the other problems with gay liberation, right, that it didn't always address the needs of everyone in its midst. karla j. noted that the movement also included struggles within it because we are by no means a homogenous group, karla j.

wrote, the movement reflects our struggles with each other. gay men oppress gay women, white gays oppress black gays and straight looking gays oppress transvestites. and so she signaled, right, this need for gay liberation to combat what she called our own chauvinism, our own sexism, our own racism, as well as our oppression by straight society. and groups like the lesbian feminist liberation movement begin to separate out from gay liberation because they do not feel that their needs are being addressed and feel that the men in the movement are oppressing them and are not paying attention to women's needs within the movement. activists of color also begin to separate out from the movement as do activists that we would consider to be transgender today, who feel that they are not being properly represented.

and the gay liberation front itself basically dissipates and falls away in the early 1970s, and is replaced not just by lesbian feminist movements and other sort of splinter groups, but is replaced by organizations like in new york, the gay activist alliance, which is an exclusively male organization, which no longer sees itself being involved in sort of transforming the social order, but rather is focused primarily on discrimination against gay men for their sexuality. and is not seeing themselves engaged in broader social struggles, and we see this here in one of their most famous activities from 1971, again, reported in life magazine, as the gay activist alliance, pioneers a new political

movement or practice called the zap where they sort of descend upon public officials or media officials to harass them into doing what they want them to do. and here, though, the first and most famous zap that they called a protest at city hall in new york city for marriage rights. right, in 1971. so that already by 1971 this kind of radical attempt to transform america culture and society and to challenge the normalcy and predominance of marriage is being embraced -- is being undermined and gay activists are now embracing heterosexual marriage or marriage in general as a kind of model for their inclusion into society and are moving away from the kind of radical revolutionary movement that they had pioneered in earlier years. so we'll leave off there, and we will begin again next week, talking about some of the other radical political movements that

challenged the social order in the 1960s and '70s. american history tv airs on c-span3 every weekend, telling the american story through events, interviews and visits to historic locations. this month, american history tv is in primetime, to introduce you to programs you could see every weekend on c-span3. our features include lectures in history, visits to college classrooms across the country to hear lectures by top history professors, american artifacts takes a look at the treasures at u.s. historic sites, museums and archives, reel america, revealing the 20th century through archival films and newsreels, the civil war where you hear about the people who shaped the civil war and reconstruction, and the presidency focuses on u.s. presidents and first ladies to learn about their politics, policies and legacies. all this month in primetime, and

every weekend on american history tv on c-span3. all week american history tv is in primetime featuring programs from our lectures in history series, where we take you into college classrooms across the country. each night leads off with a debut of a new program. tonight, it is a look at sexuality in america. we begin at 8:00 eastern with a lecture on the origins of the gay rights movement, that's followed by the discussion on sexual freedom in the 1950s, gays and lesbians in early 20th century america, and race and sex education in the mid-20th century. that's tonight on american history tv here on c-span3. with the house and senate returning from their summer break next week, on thursday, at 8:00 p.m. eastern, we'll preview four key issues facing congress this fall. federal funding to combat the

zika virus. >> women in america today want to make sure that they have the ability to not get pregnant. why? because mosquitos ravage pregnant women. >> but, today they turn down the very money that they argued for last may and decided to gamble with the lives of children like this. >> the annual defense policy and programs bill. >> all of these votes are very vital to the future of this nation. and a time of turmoil and a time of the greatest number of refugees since the end of world war ii. >> gun violence legislation and criminal justice reform. >> every member of this body, every republican and every democrat wants to see less gun violence. >> we must continue to work the work of nonviolence and demand an end to senseless killing everywhere. >> and the resolution for

congress to impeach irs commissioner john koskinen. >> house resolution 828 impeaching john andrew koskinen, commissioner of the internal revenue service, for high crimes and misdemeanors. >> we'll review the expected congressional debate with susan ferrechio, senior congressional correspondent for the washington examiner. join us thursday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span for congress this fall. next, on lectures in history, indiana university professor john bodnar talks about the idea of sexual freedom in the 1950s. and the beginning of dissent against cold war era moral values. professor bodnar describes how america in the 1950s saw itself as a morally righteous nation and how virtue is seen as tied to patriotism. he lists the publication of the kinsey reports on male and female sexuality, the creation of playboy, and the development of the birth contril