Stonewall and gay rights at 50: Cultural transformation but a tough political road

By Tom Krattenmaker
USA Today, June 27, 2019

My friend Chad gets irritated when people ask him why he did not come out back in the 1960s when he realized he was gay. “They don’t understand what it was like then,” he says.

This was when homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder, gay sex was illegal in 49 states, and bars might refuse you service if they even suspected you of being gay. 

This was before June 28, 1969, when LGBTQ people in Greenwich Village spontaneously decided they had absorbed enough abuse from the police and announced, loud and proud, that they were not going to take any more.

A half-century has passed since the Stonewall uprisings ignited the LGBTQ rights movement and the head-spinning advances that have followed. Although far from over, this story of social change is an invigorating testament to what can happen when society wakes up to injustice and does something about it.

Chad (full name Arnold Chadderton) is 86 now. A Yale Ph.D. who taught English at several colleges before his retirement, he marvels at how much has changed since the time before Stonewall. Now gay wedding announcements commonly appear in newspapers, LGBTQ people from flamboyant to utterly inconspicuous march in pride parades, and an openly gay man has emerged as a prominent presidential candidate. “The Times book review section covered four gay novels today!” Chad enthused in an email to me a few Sundays back.

I asked him over lunch recently if he wishes he could have lived more of his life in today’s environment. “Yes, it would have been so much easier!” he responded.

Chad was 31 when he accepted that his homosexuality was not just a passing phase. “But I never really came out to anybody,” he says. “I just lived my life.” He told me his biggest regret was not coming out to his mother. “She probably knew and felt hurt by my lack of trust in not discussing it with her.”

Then again, who can blame him and others in his generation for being secretive? “You didn’t want to go around telling people you had a mental disorder,” Chad says.

Good reasons for secrecy even after Stonewall

Chad recalls hearing about Stonewall and, over the course of the 1970s, the proliferation of gay pride festivals and parades. He was impressed by the growing movement of LGBTQ people pivoting from furtive to proud and the increasingly positive response from the straight majority. “But it meant little to me personally,” Chad says. “I felt, probably rightly, that I had to stay in the closet to do my job. Back in the ‘70s the students weren’t ready yet for an ‘out’ professor.”

Although never fully out, Chad did become an activist in the 1980s, joining a push to ensure that all public high schools in Connecticut allowed gay student groups to form and meet— hardly a given in those days.

Chad says he is amazed by the number of gay men he knows who remain in the closet even today. This is a reminder that despite all the progress for LGBTQ acceptance and rights, being open about one’s sexuality is still not a viable option in many places and contexts. And amidst the heady celebrations of the Stonewall anniversary, it’s easy to overlook the fact that LGBTQ people remain vulnerable to discrimination in the majority of states.

Politics is not keeping up with public opinion  

Yes, that’s correct: Only 20 states have passed legislation preventing employers or landlords from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. If you’re like the majority of Americans, you’re probably not even aware of this problem. A new poll by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) finds that two-thirds of Americans falsely believe federal law protects LGBTQ people from hiring and firing discrimination in the workplace, and 60% of us falsely believe that federal law prohibits housing discrimination.

Federal law does neither of these. So it goes with politics, which these days seem to lag farther and farther behind the cultural currents and majority viewpoint. 

It’s in the realm of culture and public opinion that LGBTQ people and their supporters have the most to celebrate. Opinion polls find strong majority support for anti-discrimination protections in housing and employment. A majority of Americans oppose the religiously based refusals of servicethat have received such notoriety in recent years, such as bakers not baking for gay weddings. And over 60% the country supports same-sex marriage, double the percentage that doesn’t.

Disturbingly, new polling shows a surprising uptick in young adults who say they are uncomfortable interacting with LGBTQ individuals, as well as increasing support for religiously based service refusals that’s driven largely by dynamics among Republicans. These swings show why hard-won LGBTQ advances cannot be taken for granted.

We have transformed our society

Recent slippage notwithstanding, however, we have witnessed a cultural transformation that probably would have seemed depressingly unfathomable to the Stonewall rioters and activists of 50 years ago, and to people like the young Chad who had to live an important part of their lives underground.

It testifies to the capability of liberal society to do the crucial work that Adam Gopnik writes about in his new book on liberalism, A Thousand Small Sanities — the work of opening our eyes to what Gopnik calls “socially sanctioned cruelty” and taking action to end it.

It’s encouraging to realize that what has happened with LGBTQ rights and acceptance can happen on other fronts, too. So whatever might have progressives down right now — whether it’s gaping inequality, the stubborn persistence of racism, inaction on climate change, or the moral catastrophe at the border — they can take note and take heart.

As we have seen with Stonewall and all that followed, social cruelties can be faced down and turned around, with potentially millions of lives made better, once we shout “enough!” and get busy making change.

Tom Krattenmaker, a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors and director of communications at Yale Divinity School, is the author of “Confessions of a Secular Jesus Follower.” Follow him on Twitter: @TKrattenmaker