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Why “The New Civil Rights”?

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Stonewall, Mattachine, World War II:
Where We Came From

 

 

Editor’s note: I am honored to announce a new addition to The New Civil Rights Movement. Author and editor Dr. William B. Turner, known for his work on “Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy”, among other books, and a regular contributor to the Daily Kos, will be writing occasionally here as well.

William B. Turner is a student of the history of the LGBT Civil Rights Movement.  He holds a Ph.D. in history from Vanderbilt University and a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin.  He has written on the statutory exclusion of lesbian/gay aliens from the United States from 1917 to 1990, Wisconsin’s pioneering legislation prohibiting sexual-orientation discrimination, and on lesbian/gay rights issues in the Carter and Reagan presidential administrations in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, which he co-edited with John D’Emilio and Urvashi Vaid.  He edited the section on the LGBT movement for The Encyclopedia of American Social Movements and wrote the entries on the Defense of Marriage Act, sexuality, and sexual orientation for The Dictionary of American History.  He posts regularly on the Daily Kos web site. He has also published A Genealogy of Queer Theory, as well as various other articles in law reviews on LGBT civil rights and African American civil rights.

I know you’ll enjoy Dr. Turner’s first contribution.


Why “The New Civil Rights”?

The name of this web site is “The New Civil Rights Movement.” The title of the book I’m writing is The New Civil Rights: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Politics and Policy in the United States, 1973-2000. Why do we use the phrase, “new civil rights”? The short answer is that the LGBT movement emerged at the end of a period of dramatic expansion of American civil rights law, and because the LGBT movement is in fact about civil rights issues – equality of opportunity and treatment in all areas of American life – without regard for sexual orientation or gender identity. There is a strategic as well as an empirical component to this choice: the African American civil rights movement has accumulated an enormous fund of moral authority that attaches generally to the concept of civil rights; LGBT activists hope to invoke that moral authority for their own movement by calling it a “civil rights” movement.

As a historian of that movement, I plan to offer a series of short articles on my research into the history of the LGBT civil rights movement. This is the first of those essays. It places the LGBT movement into the larger historical context of the United States.

Virtually everyone points to the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 as the birth point of the modern LGBT civil rights movement. The Stonewall Riots occurred when a group of angry queers fought back against a police raid at a queer bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was a remarkable display of revolt by a group that usually accepted police harassment without much protest. To this day, Pride celebrations around the country and the world commemorate the Stonewall Riots.

As important as Stonewall undoubtedly was, we should not allow it to blind us to the important organizing by LGBT persons that predated the Riots. In his groundbreaking work on the subject, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1945-1970, historian John D’Emilio traces the efforts of “homophile” activists, as they called themselves. Started by a Communist, Harry Hay, in 1952, by 1969 the Mattachine Society was clearly the leading gay rights group in the country, but conservatives had long since taken over the Mattachine Society and pursued a program of trying to work with various authorities, psychiatrists, legal officials, and political leaders to persuade them that discrimination against gay people was morally wrong and a violation of this nation’s founding political and legal principles.

Mattachine eschewed protest politics for the most part, although they did sponsor occasional picketing, against discrimination in federal hiring, for example. They insisted that their picketers wear business clothes to prove their respectability to observers. After the first night of the Stonewall Riots, they posted a sign at the site of the bar calling on queers to reject more rioting.

But Mattachine was behind the times. By 1969, informed Americans knew that various forms of protest could be very effective for civil rights movements. Just as the Mattachine Society called for an end to the Stonewall Riots, so had the NAACP, the leading African American civil rights group at the time, expressed reservations when African American students began conducting sit-in protests against racial segregation in 1960. But the students would not be deterred, and sit-ins worked much better and more quickly than anything the NAACP or anyone else had ever come up with before.

Similarly, the Stonewall Riots produced an amazing outpouring of organizing by and for lesbians and gay men (bisexuals and transgender persons would only become visible parts of the movement in the late 1980s and 1990s, even though many of the participants in the Riots were either bisexual in some important sense, or gender variant, or both). D’Emilio explains that the burst of lesbian/gay organizing in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall was a historical puzzle given the prevailing stereotype at the time of gay people as lonely, isolated individuals who typically did not foster significant communities or relationships. If this stereotype were true, it would have been impossible for such persons to have created the number and variety of lesbian/gay rights groups that emerged almost overnight after Stonewall.

Still, lesbians and gay men had to be educated to see their situation in political terms. D’Emilio means “the making of a homosexual minority” quite literally. He documents the efforts by the Mattachine Society and other homophile organizations to persuade lesbians and gay men to see themselves as an oppressed minority, which many of them did not do automatically. Whatever their significant differences in terms of underlying political beliefs or organizing strategies, the conservatives who took over the Mattachine Society shared one important characteristic with the Communist Harry Hay – the belief that oppression of lesbians and gay men was, at base, a political issue that demanded a political solution.

But the “political solution” has a wide range of meanings, from the low-key lobbying of authority figures that Mattachine leaders preferred to the street riots that erupted from the police raid at the Stonewell Bar. So what were the major historical factors that allowed for the Stonewall Riots themselves to occur, and for them to produce an outpouring of lesbian/gay rights organizing?

Among the most important was World War II. As Allan Berube explains in Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, of course many lesbians and gay men served in the military during World War II. Although official military regulations called for the immediate discharge of any known lesbian or gay man, different commanders had varying approaches to dealing with the lesbians and gay men in their commands. Some immediately pursued discharges on learning of lesbians or gay men, while others appreciated the contributions of lesbians and gay men at a time of acute shortages of person power.

Of course military service during World War II created the ideal circumstances for discovering and acting on same-sex desires. Millions of young people lived away from their immediate families for the first time, usually in sex-segregated environments. After the War ended, many of these former soldiers found themselves discharged in major cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, where they could continue to organize their lives around their same-sex attraction in the anonymity of a large city that also contained many others like them. Protest actions such as the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and later, the ACT-UP protests of the late 1980s required a critical mass of pissed-off queers such as only New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles could produce. Thus, it is no surprise that the Riots occurred in New York City, or that the first openly lesbian/gay persons to hold public office in the United States served at the municipal level in Boston and San Francisco.

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Five of the Wildest Things Trump Said at His Black History Month Celebration

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February 18, 2026

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A jovial President Donald Trump hosted a Black History Month celebration on Wednesday, ad-libbing many remarks that drew online criticism.

‘He’s Not a Racist. He’s My Friend’

“Talk about a piece of work, but he could fight, couldn’t he, huh?” Trump said. “Mike Tyson, boy, I tell you, Mike has been loyal to me. Whenever they come out, they say, ‘Trump’s a racist.’ You know, it’s like a saber. ‘Trump’s a racist.’ Mike Tyson goes, ‘He’s not a racist. He’s my friend.’ He’s been there from the beginning. Good times and bad. But Mike Tyson’s a great guy, and he was so loyal, always been loyal.”

Trump went on to mention his “great friend,” former NFL player Lawrence Taylor, “the greatest defensive player, probably, in the history of football, he’s a great friend of mine.”

Historically Black Colleges and Universities

Trump called Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon “Harmeet Diller,” then asked her about suing “extremely discriminatory” Harvard University. “You keep suing them, the h — — with them,” he said, to laughter.

“I like the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, which I saved,” he claimed — crediting himself for signing bipartisan legislation that secured funding for them in 2019. “They had no funding,” he said.

“We took care of the Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and it was a great thing to do,” he added.

‘Sometimes, We Have to Force Ourselves Upon Them’

Apparently referring to deploying federal forces into U.S. cities, Trump told the audience, “We’re doing it, in a lot of cities. Sometimes we have to force ourselves upon them because they’re so bad. And I don’t even think they know what’s happening to their cities and their towns.”

Confusion between The Bahamas and Bermuda

Speaking of former football great and failed Republican senatorial candidate Herschel Walker, whom Trump endorsed, the president said, “Herschel Walker — speaking about loyal — how good a football player was Herschel? Herschel Walker, now he’s Ambassador to The Bahamas — I don’t know, Bahamas, Bermuda, is he Bahamas? Whatever. It’s a nice place.”

Nicki Minaj

“Jazz, the blues, from rock and roll to rap, Black artists like Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters — How about Nicki Minaj? Do we love Nicki Minaj? Right? I love Nicki Minaj,” Trump said.

“She was here a couple of weeks ago. So beautiful. Her skin’s so beautiful. I said, ‘Nikki, you’re so pure.’ Her nails, her nails, they’re, like, that long.”

“I said, I said, ‘Nicki, are they real?’ And she said — she didn’t want to get into that.”

“But she was so beautiful and so great, and she. And she gets it, you know, more importantly, frankly, she gets it.”

 

Image via Reuters

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‘You’re Kidding Right?’: WH Press Secretary Stunned Over ‘Falsely Called Racist’ Question

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February 18, 2026

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White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared stunned when a reporter asked her for examples of President Donald Trump falsely being called a racist.

The president this week used his statement on the death of Reverend Jesse Jackson to argue that he is not a racist.

“Despite the fact that I am falsely and consistently called a Racist by the Scoundrels and Lunatics on the Radical Left, Democrats ALL, it was always my pleasure to help Jesse along the way,” he wrote.

On Wednesday, a reporter asked, “Where or when does the president believe he’s been falsely called racist?”

Leavitt replied, “You’re kidding, right?”

READ MORE: Trump’s Wild 24 Hour Truth Social Frenzy

“I will pull you plethora of examples,” she said, vowing to get her team “going through the internet of radical Democrats throughout the years … who have accused this president falsely of being a racist, and I’m sure there’s many people in this room and on network television, across the country, who have accused him of the same.”

“In fact, I know that because I’ve seen it with my own eyes,” she said, before noting that Trump is hosting a Black History Month celebration later on Wednesday.

Trump, she said, will “talk about how his policies are advancing opportunity and prosperity for all Americans through record tax cuts, through the Trump accounts that all Americans can access regardless of race.”

“These are a great thing,” she continued, before noting that the president “has also awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding to strengthen educational outcomes at historically Black colleges and universities, across the country.”

READ MORE: ‘Gaslight America’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Blasts Trump Ahead of His Trip to Georgia

She also said that Trump is “protecting the hard-earned benefits of the 2.4 million Black veterans who honorably served in our nation’s armed forces by reducing the Black backlog of veterans waiting for their VA benefits, and for their home loans through the Department of Veterans Affairs.”

“So, there is a lot this president has done for all Americans, regardless of race, and he has, absolutely, been falsely called and smeared as a racist, and I’m happy to provide you those receipts,” she added.

READ MORE: ‘Republicans Have to Lose’: Far Right Extremist Leader Puts Trump on Notice

 

Image via Reuters 

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‘Gaslight America’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Blasts Trump Ahead of His Trip to Georgia

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5 hours ago

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February 18, 2026

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Former Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is sharply criticizing President Donald Trump ahead of his Thursday trip to her former district, where he made — and then apparently forgot — an endorsement in the race to fill her old House seat.

“Well, we have a lot of people that want to take Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Greene’s place,” Trump said on Monday, as The Daily Beast reported. “Many, many candidates, and I have to choose one.”

Greene ignored Trump’s gaffe, but hit him, his administration, and her former Republican colleagues head-on in a post on X where she accused them all of trying to gaslight the American people.

“If you had put America FIRST from the start, instead of your rich donor class and foreign policy, you wouldn’t have to strategize on how to gaslight Americans,” wrote Greene, a former top Trump ally.

READ MORE: Trump’s Wild 24 Hour Truth Social Frenzy

“If you had not called the Epstein files a hoax and treated the Epstein survivors (rape and trafficking victims) like they didn’t exist and if you would release all the files and put your rich powerful friends in prison then Americans might actually listen to your ‘messaging,'” she charged.

Mocking them all as on the “struggle bus,” Greene explained the situation her former constituents now face.

“Approximately 75,000 households in my former district had their health insurance double or more on January 1st of this year because the ACA tax credits expired and Republicans have absolutely failed to fix our health insurance system that was destroyed by Obamacare,” she said.

Republicans have blocked Democrats’ efforts — including a federal government shutdown over the expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies — to prevent the health care premiums crisis.

Greene said that hundreds of thousands of people in her former district saw their health insurance premiums double last month.

“Many dropped their policies and no longer have health insurance,” she wrote. “And that’s on top of EVERYONE ELSE who complains DAILY about the absurdly high cost of health insurance!!!”

She said the billionaires running the White House, the Trump administration, and Congress aren’t affected by the high health insurance premiums, noting that all of them have “very nice affordable government health insurance plans.”

READ MORE: ‘Republicans Have to Lose’: Far Right Extremist Leader Puts Trump on Notice

“I’m talking about younger healthier people and families not on meds who can’t afford to pay $1500 to more than $2000 per month just for their monthly health insurance premiums,” she wrote, “not including $7-10,000 for a deductible before their ridiculously expensive health insurance policy kicks in.”

Greene also took a shot at House Speaker Mike Johnson, who, she said, “claimed he had the Republican plan during the 8 week shutdown in the fall, then carried on and has done nothing proving he lied once again.”

She also blasted Trump’s “messaging” efforts.

“Trump RX doesn’t fix this so that’s not your messaging answer,” she wrote. “A Truth Social Post or Trump video isn’t fixing this either.”

“Messaging won’t fix this,” she added.

Greene then moved on to foreign policy, warning Trump not to go to war with Iran. She also urged him to release the Epstein files, and told him to “stop the bullying, harassment, and name calling.”

“It’s immature, childish, and turning so many people away. Real leaders don’t act this way and it’s a horrible example set on the world’s stage. This isn’t the behavior we want to teach our children.”

“Deliver real results for the regular American people because respect is earned not given,” she said.

READ MORE: ‘Insulting’: Fox News Panel Implodes as Host Clashes With Liberal Guest Over Voter ID

 

Image via Shutterstock

 

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