These archives and others are vital because they tell a different kind of gay history. This realization revolutionized how Jonathan Ned Katz, one of the group's members, began to interpret the past. They came to realize their oppression was less about their sexual choices and more about social stigmas that pathologize homosexuality. In the 1970s, not long after the Stonewall riots, a group known as the Gay Socialist Action Project began meeting at a Manhattan apartment to read feminist and socialist texts in order to grasp the power dynamics that had oppressed them. Beyond political protests and pride parades, a quieter, more somber effort has taken root among them to report on, collect, and document their history, in order to preserve their past and to demonstrate what makes gay culture distinct. When they did, homosexuality appeared in card catalogs under derogatory subjects like deviance, criminality, and medical disorder.Īs a result, LGBTQ people have come to recognize that documenting their past is an inextricable part of the gay liberation movement. As I show in my book, Stand By Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, historical archives-libraries, both academic and public, and private institutions that make it their mission to hold and properly preserve historical artifacts-have traditionally refused to preserve the records of LGBTQ people. Throughout history, it's been up to queer people to document their own history. Violence against gay people is nothing new, but the mainstream reporting of such incidents is-and the subsequent preservation of the stories of their victims and perpetrators.
But that assault saw little mainstream news coverage at the time, due to homophobia and an unwillingness to report on LGBTQ lives. Until Pulse, in which 49 were shot dead, the deadliest American LGBTQ hate crime was a 1973 arson attack on UpStairs Lounge, a New Orleans gay bar in which 32 died during services for the Metropolitan Community Church, a chapter of the first-ever gay church in the United States. The sheer volume of coverage produced was not due solely to the massacre's scale.
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