Guiding Questions
(1) Is inclusion of the LGBT community today a sign of
natural progress or the result of agency and struggle?
(2) What does the history of the LGBT Rights Movement
suggest about the future for the LGBT community?
natural progress or the result of agency and struggle?
(2) What does the history of the LGBT Rights Movement
suggest about the future for the LGBT community?
This website is designed as an interactive guided lesson about The Long LGBT Rights Movement.
Students will:
Teacher Note: This lesson can be completed in two different ways, as explained here.
Your teacher will provide you instructions on how to complete the lesson.
Students will:
- Explore background information on LGBT issues
- Analyze primary source documents from key historical moments
- Respond actively to the guiding questions by completing activities at the end of the lesson
Teacher Note: This lesson can be completed in two different ways, as explained here.
Your teacher will provide you instructions on how to complete the lesson.
Introduction
Gay players on professional sports teams. Marriage equality Facebook campaigns.
Sanctity of marriage proposals. Homophobia in the locker room.
Dialogue about gay lifestyles in American society is at an all-time high. A longstanding opposition or marginalization of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) community within American culture has seen major progressive waves over the last several years especially.
Analogous to the social dialogue at-large, American military policy has carried the famous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" mentality (instituted in 1993) until recent removal following the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. Now, more than ever, people are asking and telling about issues surrounding the LGBT community.
Social acceptance and inclusion has accelerated rapidly in recent years. While the search for and identification of the "gay Jackie Robinson" of professional sports - the first professional athlete in male team sports to openly identify as gay - seems to pervade American popular culture, the Marriage Equality campaign highlights the legislative side of the Gay (or LGBT) Rights movement.
A growing acceptance and inclusion of gay lifestyles and LGBT identities highlights a retreat from conservative ideals about homosexuality characteristic of American history. On the surface, the gay presence in America seems to be new and rapidly accelerating. Yet, the social movement has been long and enduring, though often untold. While race, gender, class and other qualities are easily decipherable, sexual orientation and identity is less obvious or intuitive, making LGBT persons and involvements more difficult to notice, follow, and hear.
All social movements take time. The Civil Rights movement, for instance, was lengthy and successes following Martin Luther King, Jr., Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were neither the beginning nor the end for racial inclusion history. Yet, all too often, the Civil Rights movement is reduced to a few key persons, a vital court case, or a turning-point law. Narrow views about racial history hide the real story, which is that of a long and arduous fight for racial inclusion and equality.
Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall writes in "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" that the Civil Rights movement must be understood more completely by tracing its "long" history:
I will then trace the contours of what I take to be a more robust, more progressice, and truer story--the story of a 'long civil rights movement' that took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the 'rise and fall of the New Deal Order,' accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a 'movement of movements' that 'defies any narrative of collapse.' (1235)
Like the Civil Rights movement, the LGBT Rights movement, which has reached a contemporary high, has a long history. This history has not been widely circulated or understood, but with rising importance we as a society must make sense of the movement's past, present, and future.
This website is offered to students as an exploration of LGBT history in the United States. Students can follow a narrative that begins to examine the "Long LGBT Rights Movement." Along the way, primary sources have been gathered for key moments and ideas within the robust LGBT history. Activities are presented on the last tab of this website, which give students an opportunity to engage with new ideas and concepts based on what they learn and know about these issues.
As a historian of the Civil Rights movement, Dowd Hall reexamines racial history in the United States by going back to primary sources and other materials to make sense of the "Long Civil Rights Movement" for her self, since the histories she has seen presented are lacking or insufficient.
As a student of history, you too must be critical in your examination of the past. Have gay persons, LGBT issues, and topics of sexuality been adequately and completely addressed in our history textbooks and classrooms? Perhaps there is a richer history to be examined.
Let's get started! Follow the tabs (on left) beginning with "Background Exploration".
Sanctity of marriage proposals. Homophobia in the locker room.
Dialogue about gay lifestyles in American society is at an all-time high. A longstanding opposition or marginalization of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) community within American culture has seen major progressive waves over the last several years especially.
Analogous to the social dialogue at-large, American military policy has carried the famous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" mentality (instituted in 1993) until recent removal following the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. Now, more than ever, people are asking and telling about issues surrounding the LGBT community.
Social acceptance and inclusion has accelerated rapidly in recent years. While the search for and identification of the "gay Jackie Robinson" of professional sports - the first professional athlete in male team sports to openly identify as gay - seems to pervade American popular culture, the Marriage Equality campaign highlights the legislative side of the Gay (or LGBT) Rights movement.
A growing acceptance and inclusion of gay lifestyles and LGBT identities highlights a retreat from conservative ideals about homosexuality characteristic of American history. On the surface, the gay presence in America seems to be new and rapidly accelerating. Yet, the social movement has been long and enduring, though often untold. While race, gender, class and other qualities are easily decipherable, sexual orientation and identity is less obvious or intuitive, making LGBT persons and involvements more difficult to notice, follow, and hear.
All social movements take time. The Civil Rights movement, for instance, was lengthy and successes following Martin Luther King, Jr., Brown v. Board of Education, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were neither the beginning nor the end for racial inclusion history. Yet, all too often, the Civil Rights movement is reduced to a few key persons, a vital court case, or a turning-point law. Narrow views about racial history hide the real story, which is that of a long and arduous fight for racial inclusion and equality.
Historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall writes in "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" that the Civil Rights movement must be understood more completely by tracing its "long" history:
I will then trace the contours of what I take to be a more robust, more progressice, and truer story--the story of a 'long civil rights movement' that took root in the liberal and radical milieu of the late 1930s, was intimately tied to the 'rise and fall of the New Deal Order,' accelerated during World War II, stretched far beyond the South, was continuously and ferociously contested, and in the 1960s and 1970s inspired a 'movement of movements' that 'defies any narrative of collapse.' (1235)
Like the Civil Rights movement, the LGBT Rights movement, which has reached a contemporary high, has a long history. This history has not been widely circulated or understood, but with rising importance we as a society must make sense of the movement's past, present, and future.
This website is offered to students as an exploration of LGBT history in the United States. Students can follow a narrative that begins to examine the "Long LGBT Rights Movement." Along the way, primary sources have been gathered for key moments and ideas within the robust LGBT history. Activities are presented on the last tab of this website, which give students an opportunity to engage with new ideas and concepts based on what they learn and know about these issues.
As a historian of the Civil Rights movement, Dowd Hall reexamines racial history in the United States by going back to primary sources and other materials to make sense of the "Long Civil Rights Movement" for her self, since the histories she has seen presented are lacking or insufficient.
As a student of history, you too must be critical in your examination of the past. Have gay persons, LGBT issues, and topics of sexuality been adequately and completely addressed in our history textbooks and classrooms? Perhaps there is a richer history to be examined.
Let's get started! Follow the tabs (on left) beginning with "Background Exploration".