What was it like being gay in the past
My So-Called Ex-Gay Life
Early in my freshman year of high school, I came home to find my mom sitting on her bed, crying. She had snooped through my e-mail and discovered a word in which I confessed to having a affection on a male classmate.
"Are you gay?" she asked. I blurted out that I was.
"I knew it, ever since you were a little boy."
Her resignation didn't last drawn-out . My mom is a problem solver, and the next day she handed me a stack of papers she had printed out from the Internet about reorientation, or "ex-gay," therapy. I threw them away. I said I didn't see how talking about myself in a therapist's office was going to make me terminate liking guys. My mother responded by asking whether I wanted a family, then posed a hypothetical: "If there were a pill you could get that would make you straight, would you hold it?"
I admitted that experience would be easier if such a pill existed. I hadn't thought about how my infatuation with boys would play out over the course of my life. In reality, I had always imagined myself middle-aged, married to a woman, and having a son and daughter-didn't everyone want some version of that?
"The gay lifestyle is very lonely," she said.
She told me a
It is dangerous to be different, and certain kinds of difference are especially risky. Race, disability, and sexuality are among the many ways people are socially marked that can make them vulnerable. The museum recently collected materials to document gay-conversion therapy (also called "reparative therapy")—and these objects allow curators like myself to travel how real people trial these risks. With the help of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., Garrard Conley gave us the workbook he used in 2004 at a now defunct religious gay-conversion camp in Tennessee, called "Love in Action." We also received materials from John Smid, who was camp director. Conley's memoir of his time there, Boy Erased, chronicles how the camp's conversion therapy followed the idea that being gay was an addiction that could be treated with methods similar to those for abating drug, alcohol, gambling, and other addictions. While there, Conley spiraled into depression and suicidal thoughts. Conley eventually escaped. Smid eventually left Love in Deed and married a man.
In the United States, responses to gay, homosexual, gender non-conforming, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, and gender non-conforming
Duke’s LGBTQIA+ history is rich and varied, but documentation, especially of earlier decades, can be scant in the University Archives. The experiences of students, faculty and staff in decades past were often not documented and sometimes actively hidden due to homophobia and discrimination. Therefore, when we do find perspectives of an earlier time, it’s a treasure. The Male lover Morning Star, Duke’s first LGBTQIA+ publication of any nice, is one of those treasures. This once-a-semester newsletter was published by the Duke Gay Alliance between 1973 and 1975.
The Gay Alliance, Duke’s first openly queer student collective, was recognized and chartered by the student government in the fall of 1972. The Chronicle reported on Nov. 15 that “When a motion was made to charter Duke’s gay alliance, laughter broke out among the representatives. ‘The reaction of this crowd shows that it is damn well moment for this community to be organized,’ [Dave] Audet [T’73; off campus legislator] said in help of the charter. It was approved unanimously.”
The next evening, an unsigned editorial in the Chroniclecriticized the conditions in which gay students endured at Duke. The students wrote, “In order to adjust to a
Government Persecution of the LGBTQ Community is Widespread
The 1950s were perilous times for individuals who fell outside of society’s legally allowed norms relating to gender or sexuality. There were many names for these individuals, including the clinical “homosexual,” a designation popularized by pioneering German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In the U.S., professionals often used the term “invert.” In the mid-19th Century, many cities formed “vice squads” and police often labeled the people they arrested “sexual perverts.” The government’s preferred term was “deviant,” which came with legal consequences for anyone seeking a career in widespread service or the military. “Homophile” was the term preferred by some prior activists, small networks of women and men who yearned for community and found creative ways to resist legal and societal persecution.
With draft eligibility officially lowered from 21 to 18 in 1942, World War II brought together millions of people from around the country–many of whom were leaving their home states for the first time–to fill the ranks of the military and the federal workforce. Among them were gays and lesbians, who softly formed kinships on m
There’snothingphysically pleasant about climbing Mount Everest. As you fetch to the top, your body is depleted of oxygen. You become nauseous, dizzy, irritable, and miss your appetite. Quite simply, you can die from exhaustion… and many contain.
As a questioning teen in the 80’s, coming out seemed like an impossible mountain to go up. The Mount Everest of my life. There it was, standing before me. Yet, I didn’t even have even a indication as how to fetch there. I didn’t comprehend who had climbed it before me or how they made it to the top. I didn’t even know what was on the other side. For all I knew, it was a gloomy abyss of sadness and hate. All I knew was that is was going to be a very unpleasant experience because that’s what I was told. I was surrounded by a culture… movies, media, education, and social norms, that told me I was to fit into a convenient label that made others relaxed.
Being gay in the 80s meant being isolated from an identity. There was no discussion of homosexuality in school… not even in our year long “Health and Sexuality” class, even though we were in the middle of the AIDS crisis. In U.S. history, there was no mention of the fight for basic human rights tha