“SEXUAL REVOLUTIONS” THAT HAVE AFFECTED OUR SEXUAL NORMS: GAY LIBERATION. STRUGGLE FOR RESPONSIBLE SEXUALITY EDUCATION
Gay Liberation
On a Friday night in the summer of 1969, a group of police officers raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village in New York City in order to arrest women and men who they thought were gay. Such raids were common, but on this night the patrons of the Stonewall Inn decided they had had enough of this legalized form of harassment. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people resisted arrest, overcame the police, and launched a demonstration that lasted several days.
Within weeks, the Gay Liberation Front was formed to seek justice and equal protection under the law for all members of the gay community. Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people began making themselves visible at political rallies and antiwar demonstrations. Gay activists challenged the socially approved heterosexism that oppressed them, and they began to “come out”—to publicly acknowledge their gayness. Finally, in 1974, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.
The gay liberation movement continues to seek changes that will make it illegal to deprive women or men of their civil rights because of their sexual orientation.
The Struggle for Responsible Sexuality Education
Most American parents want their children to receive comprehensive, age-appropriate, reality-based sexuality education. Public schools, however, have become major battlefields in the struggle to provide young people with the information they need to develop sexual health and well-being.
Many of the same people who oppose legal abortion, safer sex education, birth control, and civil rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people also oppose responsible sexuality education. Few in number, but well organized and often belligerent, opponents include political extremists affiliated with the religious right. They belong to organizations such as the American Family Association, Citizens for Excellence in Education, the Christian Coalition, the Eagle Forum, the National Association for Abstinence Education, Concerned Women of America, and Focus on the Family. These advocates of abstinence-only, fear-based programs continue to infiltrate school boards by mounting “stealth candidates” whose political ties and agendas are disguised until after election ballots are counted.
In contrast, Planned Parenthood, the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality, the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, the Sexuality Information and Education Council for the United States, and more than 90 other organizations are committed to exposing and opposing these political maneuvers. The outcome of this struggle remains to be seen.
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