Chapter 9: 1960s–70s Liberation Movements

The 1960s United States featured multiple radical social movements, including the hippie counterculture, the sexual revolution, and the antiwar, Civil Rights, and Black Power movements. By the late 1960s, young gay activists who connected anti-gay oppression to other forms of domination longed for a new kind of gay movement. They envisioned a proud, celebratory gay radicalism that would enable them to join these other movements’ fight against injustices such as racism, police brutality, and the war in Vietnam. The June 1969 Stonewall Uprising, the days-long gay and transgender uprising against police raids at a gay bar in Greenwich Village, New York City, inspired these activists to channel that fighting spirit into new organizations and ultimately a new movement. The new gay liberation movement was bold, uncompromising, and deeply anti-assimilationist—in other words, its activists refused to mold themselves or their vision of freedom according to dominant social norms, values, and institutions.