USA TODAY International Edition
Stonewall reminds us change is possible
‘It would have been so much easier’ to live now
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 New York’s Greenwich Village decided they had absorbed enough abuse from the police and announced 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 a 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. 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.
I asked him over lunch recently whether 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. He says his biggest regret was not coming out to his mother: “She probably knew and felt hurt by my lack of trust.”
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. He recalls hearing about Stonewall and was impressed by the growing movement and the 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.”
Amid the heady celebrations of the Stonewall anniversary, it’s easy to overlook the fact that LGBTQ people remain vulnerable to discrimination. Only 20 states have passed legislation preventing employers or landlords from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.
A new poll by Public Religion Research Institute finds that two-thirds of Americans falsely believe federal law protects LGBTQ people from hiring and firing discrimination in the workplace, and 60% falsely believe federal law prohibits housing discrimination. Federal law does neither of these. So it goes with politics, which lag further and further behind the cultural currents and majority viewpoint.
The realm of culture and public opinion is where LGBTQ people and their supporters have the most to celebrate, even taking into account
some slippage among young people and Republicans in recent polls. We have witnessed a cultural transformation that 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’s encouraging to realize that what has happened with LGBTQ rights and acceptance can happen on other fronts. 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.