Abstract
Verta Taylor on persisting in the face of LGBTQ rights retrenchment.
Less than ten years ago, when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, it was possible to imagine an almost utopian world that social movement activism had won for LGBTQ people. Now, for the first time in its nearly 50-year history, the Human Rights Campaign, the largest U.S. organization advocating for LGBTQ rights, has warned of a national state of emergency for LGBTQ people. Project 2025, the Republican blueprint to dismantle our democracy, fundamentally threatens the hard-won rights and freedoms of LGBTQ people. How did we get here, and what does it portend for the future?
Emboldened by the 2016 election of Donald Trump and false claims that he won the 2020 presidential election, the MAGA movement in the Republican party and rightwing extremists have taken aim at LGBTQ people, flooding state legislatures with bills that strip basic rights. By the end of 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union had tracked 508 anti-LGBTQ bills, with nearly half the states banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth. Much of this legislation focused on children, including bans on LGBTQ-themed books in elementary schools and on transgender people using public restrooms and participating in sports in ways that align with their gender identities. In Florida, the law popularly known as “Don’t Say Gay” banned discussions of sexual and gender identity in official instruction. More than a dozen states passed anti-drag bills restricting drag performances from occurring in public, or anywhere a child could be present, although courts blocked them. The advocacy group GLAAD reported 141 protests and attacks on drag queen events in 2022, organized by extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Three Percenters.
Social movements frequently give rise to opposing movements seeking to reverse their gains. Resistance to LGBTQ equality by the Christian right and conservative governments is well documented, and threat can be a powerful motivation for collective action. Despite hate, discrimination, and resistance, LGBTQ people have a long history of organizing for our rights. We are pushing back—and winning.
Most scholars date the origins of the modern gay rights movement to the Stonewall riots of 1969 when street queens, queers of color, and butch lesbians fought back against bar raids in urban areas with emerging LGBTQ subcultures. But, in fact, organizing began as early as the 1940s and ‘50s and has continued through three distinct cycles of protest. Gay liberation and lesbian feminism emerged in the late 1960s and ‘70s after decriminalization, mobilizing around a politics of difference to create a quasi-ethnic public gay/lesbian identity. In the 1980s, queer activism emerged as a militant form of protest in response to threats posed by the Religious Right during the HIV/AIDS crisis. The movement’s boundaries expanded to include bisexuals, transgender people, and individuals who embraced nonbinary identities. By the early 2000s, a singular focus on same-sex marriage prompted activists and movement organizations to veer away from a collective identity based on difference, societal transformation, and sexual liberation and instead to mobilize around their similarities to the heterosexual majority.
The absence of massive, highly visible protests that unfold during a protest cycle’s peak can cause us to mistake movement turning points for death. But social movements rarely have distinct beginnings and endings. Movements among the same aggrieved group can persist for decades, even centuries, cycling through periods of mass mobilization and lower levels of public activism. When a movement declines, this does not necessarily mean it has died. Pockets of movement activity often continue to exist in what I call abeyance, which can provide the starting points for a new cycle of the same movement, or an entirely new movement in the future. Any doubt about the ability of the LGBTQ movement to survive extreme repression can be banished by the example of the International Committee for Sexual Equality, a transnational organization headquartered in the Netherlands in the 1950s. A classic abeyance structure, this group kept alive the demand for homosexual equality first articulated in Germany in the early 20th century and nearly extinguished by the Nazis, linking to the emergence of a gay liberation movement in Europe and the United States in the 1960s. As was the case then—and still is now—less visible moments of activism play a critical role in social movement continuity over time.
In 1979, I participated in the first national March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. It was neither the beginning nor the end of our struggle. Gender and sexuality are lightning rod issues in contemporary political debates. Yet I know one thing for sure: the LGBTQ movement will survive.