The Social Causes of the Gay Pride Movement

The gay pride movement is a group action open to all who desire to get involved in strategies, marches, and events to regularly promote the accepting of the gay community of people in everyday society. Due to the ongoing ritual of male and female being the common standard of the perfect couple throughout history, same sex relationships had always been widely shamed upon. Or kept hidden and secret in order to fit with societies normality. Many physical or mental harm were put upon those who had first decided to express their sexuality.

Though throughout the years being gay has become widely common now especially once former president, Barack Obama passed the legalization of gay marriage law. The gay pride movement is still in action and needed as many people still disapprove. By analyzing the gay pride movement we can determine its cause from society abiding only to male and female legal marriages, medical issues and complications associated, and physical and mental abuse for being gay.

Male and female marriages always made sense to society throughout history as the norm mainly because they are the well known producers of new human life; but starting 1969, came the time for a new mindset to be spread by a group of individuals ready to be heard; The Gay Pride Movement. Being gay can have a lot of different meanings as of sexuality and preference because it can involve many different sexes. Such as males who address themselves as females, but are in love with males, which creates a confusing controversial answer on whether they are truly gay or not, the answer is they are (Michael Kimmel 39). Here the words “same sex” will be attributed to all sexualities that aren’t the standard heterosexual and their likes. At the time, being in love with the same sex was one thing, but wanting to marry them would mean an encounter with the law and court. With no law legalizing, but rather prohibiting same sex activities. The union between same genders gave the gay community another reason to feel more imprisoned to either secretly getting married and also wanting to fight back for the that freedom that they felt they deserved whether it was done cordially or unpleasantly. In 1970, when Richard Baker and James McConnell went to apply for a marriage license, they were denied that right though there was no law saying anything against two males getting married, but Supreme Court ruled there was no law supporting it either. If caught being married illegally they could be arrested immediately or gruesomely beaten especially in states that severely penalized it like Maryland who passed a law against same sex marriage (Randolph Muhlestein). Protests took place, while society had many more people for and against the movement.

A benefit later on seen by the government and many others who supported the group were that many of them are the ones who end up taking care of the many unwanted births. Society knowing the prime factor that a sperm has to hit an egg in order for a fetus to initially begin its growing process inside the female has hindered the same sex marriages to seem even more disowned by society. With same sex, many other complicated arrangements or procedures would have to be done in order to obtain a similar outcome. An easier break through to have a child would mostly result in adoption. As many protests were continuously in action due to constant restrictions from the government such as the Defense of Marriage Act, many people slowly began to unsee it as a bad thing and began to join the movements side. Not until under President Barack Obama’s presidential period, the U.S. congress legalized the union between same sex on June 26 2015 in all the U.S (Holly Baggett) was officially legalized. It also allows respect to should be given to any other outsiders with legal same sex marriage papers too. Though many discriminations still hindered the community besides legalization, but as did health issues concern many as new ideas and doctoral studies have been proven to lead back to the gay community.

Many people who were against the gay movement weren’t only motivated by their marital or relationship statuses unless they felt threatened or disgusted, but also by how unhealthy they presumed the group of individuals were. For many years the starting route of STDs have been associated with male to male sexual intercourse. It was presumed to start from jail cells and spread to the rest of the world once they were freed from incarceration where many assume same sex relationships originated from. Giving many the idea of an unhealthy look on the community. Seeing them as diseased and acting as if they were diseased whether they knew for sure or not. This theory could not fully be proven only because the same amount of gays who had AIDs or HIVs were quickly to the approximate amount of those we didn’t have it. Eventually it was found out that it had nothing to do with same sex, but more to do with unprotected sex and since male same sex sexual activities derange from a naturally unclean place it was more common for them to have an STD (Andrew Sullivan). Since so many had to hide their sexuality to begin with many of them did not know the right way to go about sexual inter course. They considered that since they could not reproduce protection seemed like a drag rather then protection (Sullivan).

When the idea was first introduced, it was first diagnosed as a mental disorder that people were born with or caused by trauma from a sexually abused childhood. The exposure of a child with toys associated to the opposite gender was associated with their future development and attraction for a different sex which those factors don’t relate to sexual appeal at all (Kimmel 114). Society would associate it to a problem that could be fixed, but for those who were gay it was who they were. Many tried to cure it with methods like brainwashing, where the primary goal is to fill the person with all the things the of the opposite sex like heterosexual movies and flirtatious hookups with them while avoiding minimal contact with the preferred sexuality. This method has worked, but only temporarily because the emotions felt before recur once they begin constant exposure with that sex it feels a special connection with things in particular that they don’t feel with the other sex they were brainwashed to like (Kimmel 115). This became tiring for many to be afraid to express themselves as a fear of being changed, but also in fear of being hurt.

As LGBTs got tired of hiding in shadows of their sexualities and began letting their secret out, more abuse was being put amongst them day after day. When coming out, the person risks any harmful or good reaction given to them by those who their truth has been revealed to. Unfortunately for the gay community it was the complete opposite. Many were beat, killed, lost a job position or even burned if found gay. The more people found out, the more homophobia grew. In most households even parents would disown their children or injure them into lying to themselves that they are not gay, straight, bi, transgender, or etc. This is actually the most prominent form of abuse; when they are young. In the article, “ Hazards of Stigma: The Sexual and Physical Abuse of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Adolescents in the United States and Canada,” there are many cases shown of those occurrences. One case was about a boy named Troy, who had been neglected since he could remember by his mother in which he had to be put in foster care where he fell in love with a gay boy only to be caught, separated, and sent to a religious foster family who tried to do exorcisms on him in order to remove this “mindset” from his mind.

When violence is put to the table, war strikes because torture means that people are beginning to see the victim as less than human and this is where the victims call for change. Though the damage wasn’t only physical, but also mental. Trying to bring the people down by making them feel like their efforts weren’t worth nothing, discouraging them by reminding them everyday that they were different, and that they couldn’t change anything about it. Matthew Shepard, an openly gay college student who died from torture caused two other college boys pretending to be gay themselves after a party they all went to in order to attack him verbally and physically with a pistol, tying him up, and taking away his belongings. After being sent to the hospital for urgent care, he still became a victim who died from a hate crime. The Gay Pride Movement would use that as another reason to continue to fight harder as brutally needed to stop. This struck gay protests in Wyoming, where Michael died continuing in his honor though many were killed. Later on passing a bill in his honor known as the Hate Crime Prevention Act associating consequences to anyone who harms to any minority of any sort (Kimmel 207).

As conservative mindsets of marriage took over the governmental ideas, accusations of various diseases spread by many factors other than unsafe same gender sexual relations, and terrible harm such as death caused to many exposing their sexuality, the gay pride movement grew stronger as an alliance trying to convince and stop hate against them caused by society; which are still being dealt with in minor ways till this day.

Works Cited

1. Baggett, Holly. “Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement.” Peace & Change. Vol. 38. no. 4, Oct.
2. 2013.pp. 490–492. http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=90378806&site=ehost-live. Accessed 25 Feb 2019.
3. Muhlestein, Randolph G. “The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage.” Dialogue: A Journal of
4. Mormon Thought. Vol. 40. Issue 3, 2007. pp. 1-39.
5. http://db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=26382340&site=ehost-live. Accessed 25 Feb 2019.
6. Kimmel, Michael S., and Rebecca F. Plante, editors. Sexualities: Identities, Behaviors, and
7. Society. Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.
8. Saewyc, Elizabeth M., Carol L. Skay, Sandra L. Pettingell, Elizabeth A. Reis, Linda Bearinger,
9. Michael Resnick, Aileen Murphy, and Leigh Combs. “Hazards of Stigma: The Sexual and Physical Abuse of Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Adolescents in the United States and Canada.” Child Welfare League of America. Vol. 85, no. 2, Mar. 2006, pp. 195–213.db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=21634755&site=ehost-live. Accessed 26 March 2018.
10. Sullivan, Andrew. “Gay Life, Gay Death.” New Republic. Vol. 203, no. 24, Dec. 1990, pp.
11. 19–25.db07.linccweb.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=12403285&site=ehost-live. Accessed 26 March 2018."

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