There is a tendency, certainly in North America, to view the 1969 Stonewall Riots as the beginning of the GLBTQ movement. The factors that led to that phenomenon actually started to take root much earlier.

Likewise, the popular notion that if it weren’t for the drag queens and ‘trannies’ at Stonewall we wouldn’t have the rights we have - is overly simplistic. They were only part of the Stonewall’s clientele. The Stonewall catered to an element that most homosexuals simply would not have anything to do with. Its clientele was considered “trashy,” rough, and down-and-out.

These were not politically aware activists seeking to bring about change. That came later. Those throwing the bricks and barricading the cops inside the bar on those three fateful nights in June 1969 were young and disenfranchised, one step away from the street or already there. There was no grand plan to liberate homosexuals from the tyranny of dominant culture. Frankly, they were a sorry bunch of young fags nobody wanted to bother with, pissed off with always being pushed around and beaten up by police. The day was hot, and tempers were getting a bit frayed. All it took was one frustrated person to throw a brick and everything erupted.

Like any riot, it was a spontaneous event that got out of hand, a product of years of pent-up frustration, hurt, anger, and opportunity. Those who were ‘at Stonewall’ weren’t thinking of creating a social movement. They were interested in raising a ruckus before being carted, yet again, off to the cells.

That Stonewall came to represent the beginning of the modern gay movement is more a product of marketing than reality. Factors that created the modern gay movement were already in play. What Stonewall did was bring the conditions faced by lesbians and gay men into popular consciousness.

The 60’s were a decade of upheavals and challenges to the status quo. The civil rights, women’s liberation, anti-war/peace, and gay liberation movements entered the general consciousness during the 60’s, but the roots for all those social movements go back further.

The gay movement’s foundation was laid in 1950 with the Mattachine Society and The Daughters of Bilitis. While both of these groups eventually were dismissed as dinosaurs by gay liberationists, they were originally quite radical.

Harry Hay founded The Mattachine Society in Los Angeles. In later years, he would go on to explore queer spirituality and create the Radical Fairies. Despite Hay’s utilizing gender non-conformity in later years, cross-dressing and drag were anathema to the image the Mattachine Society wanted homosexuals to have. Whatever individual views may have been, when appearing in public at rallies or other events, men were expected to wear jackets and ties and women were expected to dress in skirts and hose, like all respectable Americans did.

Hay was a member of the American Communist Party and structured the Mattachine Society along the same lines, as a series of secret cells. In an era when homosexuality was a criminal offence and heavily stigmatized, if one cell of the Society was busted it would not affect other cells or put other members at increased risk. It is a technique historically used by any number of “subversive” organizations, and still used today. This is not to suggest the Mattachine Society was some sort of proto-terrorist group, far from it. I bring this up only to illustrate that “subversive” groups – groups working against the dominant order – utilize the ‘secret cell’ model. The Resistance Movement during WWII in France used the model, as did various anti-Stalinist groups within the Soviet Union.

The Mattachine Society, named after a medieval secret society whose purpose was to challenge the orthodoxy of the day and minimize the personal risk of being executed for heresy by the Church, maintained that being homosexual was not an individual “perversion” but analogous to African-American (then known as “Negro”), Hispanic and Jewish concepts of self and community. It attempted to show America that homosexual men and lesbians did not deserve to be stigmatized, criminalized, and shamed. One of the primary goals, along with education and a re-ordering of the concept of being homosexual, was to “assist…people who are victimized daily as a result of oppression.”

It provided a variety of services to the homosexual community, including peer-counseling and referral services for legal and other professionals, as well as serving as a lobby group for the repeal of sodomy and other discriminatory laws in the US.

Gay liberationists were far more in tune with the tenor of the times than the homophile groups. The homophile movement of the 1950s and early-to-mid 60s sought to work within the system to change attitudes whereas liberationists sought to tear down the existing socio-political system and rebuild it. It was during this era the term ‘gay’ became the dominant term to describe homosexual men and was viewed by the Old Guard in much the same way as some, who identify as gay now, react to the term ‘queer.’

At the same time, those who identified with the far more “street-oriented” term ‘gay’ rejected the term ‘homosexual’ as too bourgeois, too clinical, and a term the dominant culture imposed rather than a term we chose for ourselves…just as those who identify as ‘queer’ tend to dismiss ‘gay’ (or gay, lesbian, bisexual) now.

However, the roots of the homosexual/gay/lesbigay/GLBTQ movement go back even further.

The first wave occurred in the mid-19th Century and was centred in Germany (specifically Berlin), Russia and England and was the first time “homosexuality” was identified as an identity instead of something someone did. The term itself was coined, as was the opposing term “heterosexuality,” during this period.

The concept was that, what we now call gay and lesbian, were in fact a third or intermediate sex. Proponents referred to this intermediate sex as Urnings (“of the heavens”) and believed Urnings bridged the existing genders of male and female, incorporating characteristics of both.

The primary spokesperson for the movement was a Jewish intellectual, Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1867 and later in 1919, the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin - a large and comprehensive academy housing documents and research on the subject of homosexuality. The Committee sought to defend the rights of homosexuals in an era when such rights did not exist, and to repeal Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code which criminalized homosexual acts (primarily between males), arguing the law should not penalize those who had no control over who they were.

The Committee managed to obtain over 5000 signatures on a petition. Signatories included Albert Einstein, the authors Hermann Hesse (who wrote, amongst other works, the novel Steppenwolf), Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and sex researcher Richard von Krafft-Ebbing.

The bill to repeal came before the German Parliament in 1898 but was defeated. However, it continued to come before the Reichstag up until the late 1920s when Hitler’s rise to power destroyed any hope for progress. In fact, Hitler and the Nazis strengthened the clause with Paragraph 175-a and thousands of homosexual men were arrested and sent to slave labour and concentration camps. This is where the Pink Triangle symbol originates, being the badge homosexual male prisoners were forced to wear, similar to the Yellow Star worn by Jews. Women charged with being lesbian wore a Black Triangle.

The Institute was destroyed in 1933 and its vast collection of art, literature and scientific works on homosexuality, and sexuality in general, were burned at large public book burnings. The Nazis strove to rid Germany of any ‘decadent’ and what they saw as anti-Germanic (and therefore unwholesome) influences…Jews, homosexuals, Communists, Gypsies, and the mentally and physically disabled.

The Nazis were so thorough in annihilating any evidence of the Institute and its related developments that, all knowledge of this first movement was forgotten for decades. But it was every bit as organized as anything Canada, the USA, and Western GLBTQ culture has produced since. The Institute for Sexual Research was as respected and as viable as today’s Kinsey Institute. There was a flourishing and sophisticated culture in place - a community - and it was forgotten until the 1970s.

Prior to that, however, were other social movements that, while not specifically “homosexual” (since the term and concept of a separate characteristic did not yet exist) certainly had same-sex, largely male same-sex, activity as a central characteristic.

In the early 18th Century mainly upper- and middle-class men would gather in Molly Houses and were known as Mollies. Cross-dressing played a significant role as did sex between Mollies and working-class boys and men, such as stable hands, clerks, valets, labourers, and errand-boys - most of whom were essentially what we would now call “gay for pay.” Many of the Mollies lived communally in Molly Houses while other men merely ‘visited’.

Well-known gay historian Jonathan Katz wrote that Mollies were an example of individuals gaining a sense of personal autonomy and reacting against the orthodoxy of the day that insisted ‘sodomy’ was a straying from the path, a perversion in the truest sense of the word.

In one case he records, a Mollie appeared before a judge, charged with sodomy and being the patron of a ‘disorderly house’ (a bawdy or whore house). Apparently, the defendant stated that what he chose to do with his own body was nobody’s business but his and certainly was of no concern to the State nor should be. This was in the London of the 1700s, remember, not the 1960s of Trudeau’s Ottawa (“the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”).

For such a statement to be made, an established and supportive system would have had to exist. There must have been an understanding of personal autonomy, distinct from the previous ethos of the human body ‘belonging’ to God, the Church, or the State and essentially nothing more than a machine to be used or controlled by one’s “betters.”

This idea that the individual and the individual alone could decide what to do with his own person, was the bedrock upon which the Age of Enlightenment, and subsequently the French and American Revolutions, were founded upon.

Other histories, most notably those by John Boswell (Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (1980) and The Marriage of Likeness: Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe (1994)), argued that homosexual behavior was tolerated, even celebrated, by the Roman Catholic Church prior to thirteenth-century reforms. In fact, priests sometimes performed rites of bonding or union between two men or two women similar to rites celebrating opposite-sex marriages. Boswell asserted in order for such rituals to occur a visible homosexual community (which he refers to as ‘gay’) had to be in place.

One of the dangers with all these threads of our history is applying the concept of ‘gay’ or even ‘lesbian’ to them. There are two schools of thought: Essentialism argues the state of being emotionally and physically attracted to members of one’s own sex is an essential part of an individual’s psyche and therefore inherent. The other, Constructivism, argues sexual orientation is a social construct, dependent on a myriad of influences. While it would be simplistic to characterize this as suggesting choice, it argues that ‘gay’ is a 20th Century Western construct and that to apply the term ‘gay’ to previous cultures is, at best, anachronistic and at worst a form of almost ‘cultural racism.’

Certainly applying the term ‘gay’ to non-Western manifestations of same-sex activity is a form of imperialism because it dismisses the specific cultural influences at work and operates from a Western Euro-centric point of view.

Setting aside the heavily academic and polemic arguments, it is perhaps worthwhile to keep in mind that it is all too easy to reduce our complex and rich history down to its simplest threads.

Take for instance, the idea that ‘if it weren’t for the drag queens we wouldn’t have our rights.’ This sort of thinking dismisses decades of reality. The rights we currently enjoy as GLBTQ people in Canada really have very little to do with Stonewall and whether or not it was drag queens who led the riots. The Canadian gay rights era began, some would say, not with Stonewall but with the Toronto bathhouse raids of 1979/80. The community’s reaction to those raids was the “Canadian Stonewall”. An argument could be made that Trudeau’s decriminalization of homosexuality in 1968, a year before Stonewall, laid the foundations of the Canadian movement.

It needs to also be pointed out that the rights movement we know today is a different breed of cat from the original gay liberationist model.

In Canada, at least, there was a conscious effort circa 1975 to move away from the radicalism of liberation politics, which sought to challenge the system and force change from the outside in. Instead it adopted a human rights approach, which sought to work within the system to change it. Ironically returning to a pattern, some would say, promoted by the Mattachine Society and the Daughter of Bilitis.

In the human rights model, radical elements, while respected for being who they are and to whom the right to be who they are is assumed, are noticeably absent from the lobbying, meetings, conferences and connections that activists working under this model undertake with politicians. It is important, under this model, to appear as similar as possible to the ones with whom one is trying to work. Whether that’s a good thing or not is up to individual perceptions.

Be that as it may, the fact is in Canada it has not been the drag queens or others who could be perceived as being ‘radical fringe’ who have gained us our rights, but those who have worked for organizations like Egale Canada, Canadians for Equal Marriage, and other similar groups whose boards (right or wrong) tend to reflect white, middle-class, mainstream gay, lesbian, bisexual and sometimes trans community.

One of the benefits of even having a ‘radical fringe’ in any movement is that it moves everyone else towards the larger middle. An MP, for instance, is far more likely to listen to, and take seriously, someone in a suit and tie with a decent haircut than to someone sporting far too many piercings, a Mohawk, and tattoos or “some guy in a dress.”

The other benefit to having a ‘radical fringe’ is that this is where much of the discussion and examinations of cultural, social, political, sexual, and gender orthodoxies takes place and are challenged. Much of what is now accepted as mainstream within feminism, the GLBTQ movement, environmentalism, etc. was originally “radical.”

The world better accepts the Martin Luther Kings than it does the Malcolm X’s but it is the Malcolm X’s who most inform the arguments made by the Martin Luther Kings. The latter distill the arguments, tidies them up a bit, and makes them palatable to the dominant society.

The history of attaining equal rights in Canada is significantly different than the history in the US. We have a different political system and it necessitated a different approach in many ways. In Canada, we have come further in attaining equality rights for lesbians, gay men and, by extension, bisexual men and women than our American counterparts.

So while our drag queens are an important aspect of what we have come to describe as the GLBTQ community, and have played a role in the development of that community, it is not to them we owe our rights here in Canada.

The activists who gained us our rights were the men and women working long, draining hours drafting briefs to present to the Supreme Court, organizing petitions to present to Members of Parliament, issuing Talking Points and News Releases outlining the issues, meeting with politicians and journalists, writing letters, making phone calls, sending emails, sitting through long tedious strategy and policy meetings, organizing and policing rallies, and worrying about budgets and donation bases.