Outline Ideas: 3 main parts. Intro talking about before the movement and hiding the culture, the actual beginning of the paradigm shift, and then where the issue stands today and how much progress has been made. I will go into more detail about each of these ideas, but this is the general idea of the paper.
The changing in views on homosexuality is a paradigm shift that is still in progress, but has made incredible progress in recent years. In the past, homosexuality was almost completely ignored culturally because it was so taboo. Gay people would hide their orientation from the rest of the world. The first documentation of homosexuality is from the 1600s and it was about sex culture of the time. “Sex that did not produce children was a problem because it did not make economic sense” (Galarza). Over the next couple hundred years as the industrial economy grew in America and people began gathering more heavily in cities, gay communities began to form. These communities tried to remain hidden because others were not understanding of the homosexual culture.
The paradigm shift began when persecution of homosexuals for simply being different became more prevalent. One of the first major incidences was in 1969 at a bar named Stonewall in New York. The bar catered the gay community and the police came to raid the bar. The people there resisted arrest and it brought along the idea that homosexuals had to work together to gain rights. The movement did not gain much positive ground until the 1990s and 2000s when it became a more known issue. Celebrities such as Ellen DeGeneres who “came out” forced the issue into the media and then the movement truly began once it became headline news. The military has had laws regulating homosexual activity in the military (don’t ask don’t tell) and this was a major front for the fight for gay rights. The generational shift is also helping the movement because many more Millennials have embraced the homosexual culture than previous generations.
Today, many people are very accepting of homosexuality. It is an issue that can be openly discussed and advocated for. The fight for legalizing gay marriage has started to become very successful and receive more and more attention nationally. 32 states now have legal same-sex marriage laws and the Supreme Court is taking five cases about same-sex marriage and is expected to make a ruling regarding the topic in the coming term. Culturally, the openly gay community continues to grow with places for homosexuals to mingle among each other, but also with the rest of society. The United States as a whole has become much more accepting of homosexuality.
Lori Bedell says
Good start. Be sure that you look carefully at what fired things up in the 1990s. Aside from Ellen, are there other individuals who made a difference? What about film/tv presenting images and normalizing them? Think, too, about increasing secularization as well as efforts at legislation (most recently military and marriage). There are also groups like HRC that helped push the movement.