From the middle ages to 17th century: Times of depression and prosecution
When you want to analyze the rights for gay and lesbian people and their situation nowadays,
you first have to analyze the different factors that have led to the current situation. Already in the Old Testament is spoken about “perverse excrescence against nature”, and also in the old Greek culture homosexuality played a role. But contrary to the Bible, for the Greeks homosexuality was nothing bad, it was accepted, and pederasty was even partially advanced by their culture.
During the middle ages, gay people were excluded and pursued. The Christian church was the leader of this movement against same-sex practices. Although not all members of the church followed those ideas, the leaders of the church made this behaviour the regular and official towards gay people.
Pursue and denunciation was the main target of this policies. The main cause for the pursue of
homosexual people was an interpretation of a tale from the first book of Moses. Christian theologians interpretated the tale during the first century. They thought that the sins in the tale were only of homosexual form, although there was no indication that the tale really means homosexual behaviour as the sin.
The next step was laws that prohibited homosexual behaviour. The roman emperor Justinian made a law for the inhabitants of Constantinople which talks about the tale of Sodom. These laws, published around the year 530 that were based on theological “truths”, have influenced modern legislations all over the world up to the 19th century. The penalty for homosexual acts was often burning or castration. These forms of punishment existed in England up to the 18th century.
In the year 1779, the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson submitted a
legislative proposal that punished homosexual men with castration. As you can see, over almost 1800 years, there was not a big development towards tolerance and acceptance of homosexual people, and even 200 years ago, there came still new laws to punish homosexuals. The 17th century until 1969: First developments towards tolerance and acceptance
During the 17the century, Germany abolished the death penalty for homosexual men, but there was still prison penalty as punishment. The first real development towards more tolerance and the first signs for an emancipation movement started at the end of the 18th century, when their grew up criticisms about the article 175 in Germany. These critics came from associations that were fighting against the article but they pretend they were only arguing with scientific aspects, and not because they were gay.
Growing cities, working women and work away from home made it possible to become more anonymous. This led to the emergence of the first subcultures of gay people, where they could exchange their feelings and experiences.
During the Second World War, the Nazis discovered the article 175 to continue their
repressions against any forms of minorities. They tightened the article, and during the war up to 20000 homosexuals have been carried in concentration camps. In the camps and in the cities, gay people had to wear the “pink triangle” (org. “Rosa Winkel”) so that they could be easily identified.
The article 175 was active until 1969 when he was changed again. He was abolished totally in 1999 during the approximation of laws of the German Democratic Republic.
After the war arose the first gay associations in the United States, especially in the bigger cities, what has left to subcultures around bars and friendship networks. But lesbian and gay people were still far away from being accepted in the society. One of the problems at this time was that as gay people went more and more public, people started having prejudices on homosexual people.
Under President Eisenhower, there were many redundancies of gay people in official jobs, and also in the military was a big number redundancies. Motivated from the governments policies, more and more police officers attacked gay bars and their associations without any permission.
In the 1950s, motivated by the by the militant black civil rights movements, there were more and more protests by gay people which were claiming for their personal rights and equality in job policies. At the end of 1950s there were already more than 50 associations with some thousands members.…
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