Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, And Transgender Movements, Comparative Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Concerted activist challenges to the oppression of sexual minorities date from the late nineteenth century, intensifying in the decades following World War II (1939–1945), and broadening across the globe from the 1990s on. From its beginnings, the movement has been based primarily in large urban centers, where anonymity and economic independence from family are more likely.

Early Activism

Scattered calls for legal reform and public acceptance emerged between the 1890s and 1930s, mostly in Europe. Germany’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee was the preeminent campaigning organization, and Berlin the epicenter of cultural expression, until Nazis repression.

The brief period of political progressivism immediately following World War II spawned new gay activist energy in several European and American cities, resulting in groups like the Dutch Cultuuren Ontspannings-Centrum (Center for Culture and Leisure) and the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis in various U.S. cities. The political, cultural, and religious changes of the 1960s opened up additional space for activist challenge, though still cautious and modest in scale.

Liberationist Radicalism And Mainstream Expansion

A major activist surge under the banner of gay liberation swept over several North American and European cities from 1969 through the 1970s, more confrontational in its strategy, ambitious in its agenda, and successful in mobilization than anything before. The movement was influenced by feminism, parts of it by libertarianism, and, in Europe especially, by socialism. Most lesbians avoided male-dominated groups, working either through feminist groups willing to embrace sexual diversity or lesbian-specific groups. Despite the early influence of arguments that gender categories were socially constructed rather than fixed, significant parts of the movement mobilized on the basis of distinct gay and lesbian identities. This was most widely characteristic of the U.S. movement, but less pronounced in countries where class and other divisions were more politicized, such as in France and southern Europe.

Reformist activism did not disappear, but its objectives were broadened by liberationist visibility. That side of the movement grew slowly in the early 1980s in Australia, Canada, northwestern Europe, and the United States as modest political openings appeared in local politics and as leftist parties prepared to move from purely class-based frameworks and look for new constituencies.

Aids Radicalism And Political Mainstream

The devastation of the first AIDS epidemic threatened the limited gains made through the mid-1980s. At the same time, movement agendas and opportunities for intervention were expanded. By the next decade, impatience with slow response sparked a new wave of radicalism centered on AIDS. It was soon followed by a short-lived but influential wave of “queer” activism, making new demands or reinforcing long-standing ones with theatrical and confrontational tactics. The mid-1990s also saw more visible trans activism, forming distinct groups and claiming more than token recognition of gender identity issues within established groups.

By this time, in Western countries with long-standing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) visibility, mainstream and reformist activism had overtaken transformative radicalism, though many groups contained elements of both. Activism had spread also into religious communities, labor unions, academic institutions, professional associations, media outlets, and ethnic minority communities. Few LGBT movements, however, displayed the institutional proliferation and the mobilization of resources so evident in the United States. In parts of Canada and Europe, new human rights frameworks and much-weakened church authorities allowed for the application of comparative modest resources to effect significant change.

Globalization

The 1990s and 2000s saw dramatic growth of activism beyond the West. The catastrophic spread of AIDS in the global South was mostly fueled by heterosexual activity, but sometimes provided an important lever for lesbian, gay, and trans activists, dramatically so in Brazil. Transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy in the Iberian Peninsula, Latin America, South Africa, and Taiwan also created opportunities. In eastern and central Europe, the slow and partial incorporation of sexual orientation and gender identity into the European Union’s rights framework created additional leverage for activists, especially in countries seeking EU membership.

Political networks have emerged even in the most dangerous of settings, in some cases aided by diasporic communities in the West. State repressiveness has intensified in parts of eastern Europe and Southeast Asia and in most of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. These governments and religious authorities frequently dismiss homosexuality as a Western intrusion and defend what they portray as national traditions.

Local activists usually blend indigenous frameworks with those gleaned from the experience of Australian, European, North American, and other movements. Some self-identify as lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered in roughly the same way as their Western colleagues; others eschew those categories or blend them with more contextually specific characterizations of sexual difference.

There have been considerable similarities in the cultural and political agendas of activist groups around the globe, though in many countries, state repression or popular prejudice focuses attention on countering violence, eliminating legal or de facto criminalization, and claiming the right to meet or organize publicly. Movements have campaigned against media prejudice, demanded protections against workplace discrimination, and sought recognition of family rights, though marriage has not generally been as much at the center of such campaigns as in the United States and a few other Western countries. Trans rights are now widely included in these agendas.

The global spread of LGBT movements has been aided by the formation of transnational networks, the first of them spawned by the urgency of international responses to AIDS. Apart from AIDS, the most institutionalized transnational activism is in Europe, sustained by the EU’s expanding human rights framework and subsidies for LGBT groups like the International Lesbian and Gay Association. Most other international networks remain small or fragile, though they have shown some capacity to mobilize when, for example, LGBT representation is needed in discussions or conferences sponsored by the United Nations. Established groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have added sexual diversity to their mandates, emphasizing the transnational profile of these issues.

Activist political claims have been most successful in Britain, Canada, the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries, and Spain. Significant gains have been made in most other countries in western Europe, a few in central and eastern Europe, and several in Australia, Israel, Latin America, New Zealand, South Africa, and Taiwan.

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