Analysis on Background Information

The topic that I wrote about was gays and lesbians. The articles that I read about for journal responses were about the bowers vs. Hardwick (1986), marriage rights, Harvey milk, the stonewall riots, don’t ask don’t tell policy, gay rights, and gay and lesbian rights. These articles were all about how gay rights have become a higher importance today. In the 70’s and 80’s gay and lesbians were never talked about and when they were talked about they were referred to as people who had a disease, because there had to have been something wrong with them if they liked someone of the same-sex. These people who thought that gays had a disease or mental disorder had begun the controversy that was holding back the government from giving the homosexuals their rights. The first example of when gays and lesbians banded together and took action for what they wanted was the Stonewall riots. The stonewall riots took place at a place called the stonewall inn. The gay man was not allowed to be in the bar because there was already another gay man in the bar. The homosexuals thought that this was wrong, so they all banded together and protested outside of the inn. This rioting marks the week of gay pride week. Gay pride week has grown from 10,000 people marching to hundreds of thousands to millions. The stonewall riots brought notice to the mistreatment of homosexuals. As people started to take notice of the gays other issues came about, like allowing gays and lesbians to marry, everyday rights, and the right to be who they were in the army. Men like Harvey Milk who was a man in a place of government, used his status to bring notice to the unfairness that homosexuals had to deal with in everyday rights. Then there is the case of Bowers vs. Hardwick where a man named Hardwick was trying to not get convicted of the anti-sodomy laws made for gays that he broke with his partner. The argument that defended this case in court was that for straight people there were anti-sodomy laws so why were there laws for gays and lesbians? Many cases were brought up in court about the anti-sodomy laws and then that started to develop into the main focus that gays are fighting for today which is marriage rights. If American society stopped looking at gays and lesbians as people who had a problem and started looking at them as normal people, then we wouldn’t have this many problems in society today. Americans are always stereotyping people, from Jews to blacks to just normal people that they see on the street. The stereotypes that Americans have put on homosexuals are derogatory and are affecting how the government makes decisions on gay rights. People are afraid that if they give the gays what they want then they will have to give all of the similar minorities the same rights. And they also feel that if they don’t give the gays what they want that they will just go back to being invisible and disappear for awhile. Whether those people around them accept gays or not, they won’t go back to being invisible, if anything changes, they will only become more present, and less invisible.