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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 22 Conclusion to Part 3 The passage of the Sexual Offenses Act in England in the summer of 1967 and the Stonewall riots in New York in the summer of 1969 were the two most important events, symbolically as well as in fact, leading up to the late-twentieth-century gay rights movement. The one a reform from the top down, the other a rebellion from the bottom up, they met and mingled in an extraordinary outburst of organizing, protesting, demonstrating pressuring—and having a damn good time—all in full view of a startled public. It is not quite true that if not London in 1967 and New York in 1969, then perhaps Paris or Amsterdam or San Francisco a year or two years later might have sparked a like transformation of the homophile movement. London in the mid-1960s and New York throughout the latter half of the twentieth century occupied unique places in the public mind, and events in these two cities had a resonance elsewhere that events in other cities did not. All the same, in the twenty-three months that separated the royal assent to the Sexual Offenses Act and the first night of the Stonewall riots the ACLU called for the decriminalization of homosexual relations between consenting adults in private in August 1967; the Advocate began publication in Los Angeles in September 1967; the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore opened in New York in November 1967; the play The Boys in the Band began its long off-Broadway run on Easter weekend 1968; the first radical gay rights group in France emerged during the student uprising of May 1968; the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations adopted the slogan “Gay Is Good” at its annual conference in August 1968; Allan Horsfall announced the formation of Esquire Clubs Ltd. to open and manage a series of gay clubs in northern England in September 1968; the Metropolitan Community Church was founded in Los Angeles in October 1968; a government- and church-sponsored con334 | 22-V2660 6/19/03 6:51 AM Page 334 G&S Typesetters PDF proof sultation bureau for homosexuals, the Schorer Foundation, began operations in the Netherlands in November 1968; and both Canada and West Germany decriminalized homosexual relations between consenting adults in private in May 1969. Following on that sequence of events something like the Stonewall riots, erupting probably at much the same time, was all but inevitable. And in the wider context of the 1960s, of the civil rights, feminist, and antiwar movements , a broad-based gay rights movement spanning the whole of the Western world was scarcely less certain, requiring only a catalytic event such as Stonewall. That, however, was only the proximate cause of the transformation during the 1970s of the gay and lesbian subcultures, which, naive, fractious, self-indulgent, and even self destructive though they sometimes were, nonetheless established themselves as permanent players in the public life of the developed world. The roots of that change go much deeper, back through the entire twentieth century, well into the nineteenth century. From a longer perspective , what is perhaps most striking about the history of homosexual subcultures in the twentieth century, what made them fundamentally different from their antecedents, was their tenacity even in the face of savage repression , their ability to resurface if given even the smallest opening. That had not always been the case. The sodomitical subcultures that emerged in northwestern Europe late in the seventeenth century and again a century later were met with legal persecution and public hostility that ultimately forced them back underground, largely out of sight and out of touch with society at large. Not so the homosexual subcultures of the late nineteenth century, which, though they encountered scarcely less hostility, inspired imitators , in some instances even direct descendants, in every generation since. In the 1920s, again in the 1940s, and finally, and as it turned out permanently, in the 1960s gay and lesbian subcultures surfaced with ever greater boldness. The difference lay in part in external circumstances: the dislocating effects of two world wars and the influence of feminism and, in the United States, of the civil rights movement. In addition, the late-nineteenth-century labeling of homosexuals, in particular by the medical profession, as a category of persons apart had the effect of crystallizing attitudes not only toward these subcultures but within them more firmly than ever before. But that was not a new development; it was the culmination of...

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