Gay and lesbian movements have a century-long history since the founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in a Berlin apartment in 1897. Early initiatives to advance the citizenship rights of gay and lesbian people dissolved in the Holocaust, however, and the authoritarian forms of moral and sexual regulation that swept both the communist world and the Western democracies in the mid-twentieth century almost suffocated the attempts to start over after World War II (Adam 1995: chap. 3). Contemporary movements trace their origins to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, and Los Angeles, where a few brave individuals renewed efforts in the 1950s to carve...

The first formal gay and lesbian movement organization in Canada emerged in 1964 in a historical context similar to that of gay and lesbian communities in the nations of Western Europe, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The post-World War II period in Canada was characterized by the legal prohibition of (male) homosexuality and a highly inhospitable social climate that included the repression of homosexual issues in “respectable” public discourse and an overt regime of persecution (Adam 1993a). Nevertheless, according to historical scholarship, from at least as early as the nineteenth century, there was a series of sites where...

From its modest and clandestine early forms in the 1950s, gay and lesbian activism has evolved into one of the most dynamic, controversial, and internally differentiated sets of social movements in the United States. My goal is to present an analytical history¹ that shows how the general characteristics and tendencies, and the successes and failures, of these movements can be understood in terms of both external and internal factors—aspects of U.S. politics and society, on one hand, and ideological and strategic tensions inside and among these movements, on the other.²

My starting point is the assumption that the characteristically...

The year 1978 was a magical time in Brazil. After more than a decade of harsh military rule, the generals’ demise seemed imminent.¹ Hundreds of thousands of metalworkers, silent for a decade, laid down their tools and struck against the government’s regressive wage policies. Students filled the main streets of the states’ capitals chanting, “Down with the dictatorship!” Radio stations played previously censored songs, and they hit the top of the charts. Blacks, women, and even homosexuals began organizing, demanding to be heard.

During the long, tropical summer that bridged 1978 and 1979, a dozen or so students, office workers,...

In the afternoon of 27 August 1996, about twenty Argentinean lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered activists stormed into the Constituent Assembly (Convención Estatuyente) of Buenos Aires. They carried blown-up photos of Carlos Jáuregui, the country’s most prominent and respected gay activist, who had died of AIDS one week earlier. Followed by members of the press and television crews, the activists tracked down the members of the commission responsible for writing the new municipal charter and shamed each one of them into signing a statement in support of the prohibition of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, alongside gender, age,...

A short history of lesbian and gay life in Britain in the post-World War II period can be depicted as six sedimented layers. Each emerges anew but leaves its continuing traces. The foundation layer—the 1950s and the 1960s—included some press scandals and notorious spy and court cases involving homosexuals such as Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Peter Wildeblood, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and John Gielgud (Hyde 1970); a major government commission recommending (limited) decriminalization of male homosexuality (Wolfenden Report 1957); a campaigning pressure group (the Homosexual Law Reform Society set up in 1958); a law to enact the proposed...

The evolution of the Dutch homosexual emancipation movement is paradoxical. Since the early twentieth century, Christian Democrats have continuously controlled the executive branch of government, yet lesbians and gay men seem to enjoy substantial social freedom and legal protection. Moreover, Dutch society is often referred to as permissive and tolerant toward homosexual lifestyles. How can this paradox be explained? The answer must be sought in the structural characteristics that underpin the political culture in the Netherlands. Usually referred to as the “politics of accommodation” or “consociational politics” (Lijphart 1968), this political culture and its institutions are geared toward achievingconsensus...

Over the past decades we have witnessed the emergence of many identity-based movements in Western Europe and the United States. Having confronted the world with the slogan “Black is beautiful,” the civil rights movement in the United States inspired oppressed groups all over the world to creep out of their shells. No longer asking for sympathy, these groups proudly and vehemently demanded equal treatment and recognition of their right to be different. The feminist movement was, of course, among the front-runners, sparking a process of cultural change that has reverberated to the present day. But there were other minorities, such...

In the struggles of lesbian and gay movements, “speaking out” has a special relevance as the sole act that allows new social subjects to construct their own history, their own identity. It permits them to distance themselves gradually from the identity that has been created by the “other” through denial, pathologization and prohibition, and, more recently, assimilation and normalization. Paradoxically, the effects of banishment and silence have sometimes been achieved through the naming of lesbians and especially gay men, and having been named by the law, medical science, and religion, they are subsequently punished by the institutions of power through...

In 1989, the words “gay and lesbian” were rarely heard in Eastern Europe. Seven years later—at the time of this writing-they (or the local equivalents) are used more often, but the term “Eastern Europe” is dying out. Its validity is denied by the prime minister of the Czech Republic, who reminds listeners acerbically that Prague is west of Vienna. An entire school of Hungarian historiography has devoted itself to picturing Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states as anarriére-boutiqueto Western Europe: as participants in Western Europe’s political and confessional traditions, but detached from the West’s...

Before 1995, southern Africa experienced gay and lesbian visibility only in South Africa. But the so-called book fair dramas in Zimbabwe in 1995 and 1996 (discussed later in this chapter) put the issue of homosexuality onto the agenda of the whole subcontinent, at least in the countries that share English as the official language.¹ In Zimbabwe itself, the gay and lesbian movement began the transformation from merely providing informal social space to acquiring the characteristics and agenda of a rights movement. In Namibia, the homophobic attacks of Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe were somewhat later echoed by president Sam Nujoma, provoking...

The early 1970s brought the first recorded attempts at lesbian and gay political organization in Japan, but the impact was limited. In the 1980s new organizations were founded, and by the 1990s their influence had become strong enough to make a major impact. From the early 1990s onward lesbian and gay groups and individuals gained much media attention and began to work with politicians and bureaucrats in matters concerning AIDS and discrimination against homosexuals. The political and cultural environment had long been thought to prohibit such activities, but the response was not the homophobic, violent reaction many lesbian and gay...

A gay peer educator from the Queensland AIDS Council was explaining some of the background of the epidemic in Australia to a group of Filipino visitors. Asked why he thought the gay community had played such a prominent role in the Australian response, he replied: “I really don’t know; we just seemed to come from nowhere.” The development of the gay and lesbian movement in Australia shows a gap between practice and theory, a trait mirrored in the largely untheorized development of other social movements in Australia. (Note that from this point on, we use gay movements to describe both...

We begin in this concluding chapter by summarizing the empirical results of this book, particularly taking into consideration those elements that all authors deal with in their country chapters. Since parallels in the development of gay and lesbian movements are striking, at least at first glance, we start by outlining similarities across countries. Closer scrutiny shows, however, that these similarities are sometimes misleading, and superficial analogies may hide fundamental disparities. In the second part of this chapter, we therefore try to explain both the cross-national similarities and the differences in the development of gay and lesbian movements. By comparing countries...