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The Apartheid of the Closet


Listen my children and you will hear of the struggles and burdens of what it was like to be Queer (before Stonewall).

Before the Stonewall Inn riots, our kind were really living in “the apartheid of the closet.”
Even as today, there was a concerted effort to regulate homosexuality. Before 1900, gender inversion was the focus of regulation.   The characteristic rules used to police gender nonconformity were laws prohibiting crossdressing and prostitution.
Laws and ordinances prohibiting public lewdness, sexual solicitation, indecent assignation, disorderly conduct and degeneracy, lewd vagrancy, and independent exposure were adopted, by and large, to control prostitution (a type of gender inversion).
Sodomy laws, originally adopted to prohibit mainly anal but transformed to cover oral sex and target “female impersonators” were also significant.
There were at least three watershed moments of the early 20th century that directly contributed to the emergence of a “gay identity”:
    1. World War I
–      Public attention turned to increasingly visible subcultures of “homosexuals.”
–      The vampire lesbian and the predatory child-molesting (male) homosexual replaced the mannish lesbian and the female impersonator as the object of popular and legal concern.
    1. World War II
–      During World War II, homosexual intimacy became more commonplace and open.
–      The government mounted an anti-homosexual state campaign to erase homosexuality; what emerged was the “mutually protective closet.”
    1. The 1960s (Stonewall riots in 1969; Mattachine Society in 1961)
Gay rights leaders realized that the mutually protective closet was a bad deal for gay people – nothing more than “apartheid” that denies equal citizenship and human dignity.
Historical events of the 20th century involved three overlapping struggles:
    1.  To protect private gay spaces against spying and intrusion of the police
    2. For gays to assert control over the institutions of gay subculture: gay bars and erotica
    3. To insist for equal gay citizenship (public equality and equal treatment on their merits as employees, soldiers, immigrants, and parents.

This information is a direct result of having had CJCR/5957 Sexuality and the Law, as a class from Dr. Gillespie in 2009.

Our history is important and we need to know and share our history brothers and sisters!

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