MILITANT DYKE.” Wearing these T-shirts, they entered heterosexual bars in New York and San Francisco and staged “kiss-ins.” They visited suburban shopping malls outside these same cities and chanted, “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous – and we’re not going shopping!” Through these tactics, they not only came out, but forced heterosexuals to acknowledge their presence. Its members wore T-shirts in Day-Glo colors with slogans such as “PROMOTE HOMOSEXUALITY. In the 1990s, the radical organization Queer Nation took coming out to a new level. The coming out narrative became a rite of passage, something to be shared with others, and the centerpiece of gay liberation movements. Activists used the mantra “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are” to demand that people declare their homosexuality.
In the 1980s, the gay and lesbian rights movement radicalized in response to the Christian right and AIDS epidemic. The campaign helped defeat the initiative. Milk gambled that if queer people told their friends they were gay, Californians would realize that they had friends, coworkers and family members who were gay and – out of solidarity – would oppose the proposition. Supervisor Harvey Milk sits outside his camera shop in November 1977. It also showed how coming could be used to build solidarity and recruit other queer people.įor instance, in 1978, in his campaign to defeat a California initiative that would have banned gay teachers from working in state public schools, openly gay elected government official Harvey Milk urged people to “Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.” By the end of the 1960s, queer people who pretended to be heterosexual were said to be “in the closet” or labeled a “closet case” or, in the case of gay men, “closet queens.”īy the 1970s, mainstream journalists were already using the term beyond sexual orientation – to speak of, for instance, “closet conservatives” and “closet gourmets.” A rite of passageīy presenting coming out as a way to end internalized self-hatred and achieve a better life, the LGBTQ movement helped to encourage people to come out, despite associated risks. It was subsequently commemorated in an annual march known today as “gay pride.”Īt the first Gay Liberation March in New York City in June 1970, one of the organizers stated that “we’ll never have the freedom and civil rights we deserve as human beings unless we stop hiding in closets and in the shelter of anonymity.”īy this time, coming out was juxtaposed with being in the closet, conveying the shame associated with hiding. The rebellion included riots and a resistance that lasted for days. New York TimesĬoming out took on a more political meaning after the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, in which patrons of the Stonewall Inn in New York City fought back against a police raid. The first article on Stonewall to appear in The New York Times. Of course, “gay” was ultimately “ outed” when the gay rights movement adopted it following the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. The term “gay” was originally borrowed from the slang of women prostitutes, when they used the word to refer to women in their profession. King” or “gay” – that could be used in mixed company to designate someone as homosexual.
GAY DEFINITION ORIGIN CODE
Such selective sharing relied on code phrases – such as “family,” “a club member,” “a friend of Dorothy’s,” “a friend of Mrs. It did not mean revealing it to the world at large. In this context, coming out meant acknowledging one’s sexual orientation to oneself and to other gay people. The Mattachine Society, the earliest important organization of what was known as the homophile movement – a precursor of the gay rights movement – took its name from mysterious medieval figures in masks. In response, gay life became more secretive.
The 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s witnessed a growing backlash against this visible gay world. A 1931 news article in the Baltimore Afro-American referred to “the coming out of new debutantes into homosexual society.” It was titled “1931 Debutantes Bow at Local ‘Pansy’ Ball.”
Gay men spoke of “coming out” into gay society – borrowing the term from debutante society, where elite young women came out into high society.