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 20 th century that directly contributed to the emerg...
Living La Vida Loca East of Eden