June 28, 1969 is the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. This entry isn't about that . . .

even though it starts out by mentioning it.

Sigmund Freud. Wrong about most stuff and a central character in this drama.

Rather, it's about social evolution, and about evolution itself.

Okay, to start out with I suspect that this anniversary will be mentioned a lot this week as things that come in convenient numbers, like 50 or 100, get mentioned. We've been doing that a lot ourselves, with things 100 years old, and occasionally 50 years old.

And the Stonewall Riots do matter, although perhaps not as much as noted. But then rarely does a singular thing like a riot really mark a shift in anything, so much as serve as a punctuation mark along the shift. That's not always the case, of course.

At any rate, on this date in 1969 there was a police raid on the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village.  Greenwich Village then, as now, was a center of homosexual activity (which I'm putting that way for lack of a better way to put it).

The ostensible object of the raid was because the establishment was a bar but it had no liquor license.  Indeed, the conditions at the bar were pretty bad in general and it operated not only under the law, but below that which any legally established facility would have in terms of its physical plant. It had, for example, no running water and glasses were simply washed in a tub.  It was also owned by individuals who were in the Mafia.

Indeed, they'd only owned it since 1966, when they'd bought what had been a supper club with the intent to convert the establishment into a gay bar, which they did.  It operated more openly, if illegally, in that role than any other New York establishment.

On this day in 1969 the police raided the establishment as they did about once a month.  Normally when they raided they were paid off, and the establishment was normally tipped off about the raids in advance, but this doesn't seem to have occurred in this instance.  Arrests that normally would have been minor and somewhat perfunctory went badly, all the patrons were taken to the police station, and things descended from there into two days of rioting.  

It's the rioting that's the real story.   It commenced at the police station where the police handled the entire matter badly and it went into two days of riotous protests.  It was the first instance of homosexuals having openly protested in that fashion and it cracked a dam, of sorts, on that activity and therefore also in some homosexuals being open about their homosexuality, although by even the late 1950s there were those whose homosexuality was well known, if not discussed, in public life.

A lot of this fits into the times. . .1969. But not all of it does.  Events at the establishment showed both the evolution of thought in general but also the remaining gritty nature of New York in which organized crime played a very large role and there was a definite, even expected, element of police corruption.  There's some speculation, in fact, that the Mafia owners of the establishment failed to notify those present as it hoped to be able to blackmail wealthy patrons, although that's only speculation.  The fact that the Mafia had chosen to open a gay bar and run it illegally says a lot about the position of such an institution at the time, as the Mafia of course made most of its money by way of vice.  It can't help be noted that owning an illegal establishment catering to a disapproved conduct would have presented blackmail opportunities.

At any rate, what's really remarkable is how arrests gone wrong descended into a riot, which basically showed that at least locally views about homosexual conduct no longer reflected an older view that has supported its being regarded as illegal, although we'd note again that the police were not raiding the Stonewall for that reason and that in fact police conduct of the entire matter, from the raid in the first place, to arresting everyone inside the bar, to groping female prisoners in some instances, set the stage for the riots.

And all that takes us to Naomi Wolf.

For those not familiar with Wolf, Naomi Wolf is a "liberal progressive author" who has published frequently on feminist topics, often to the horror of her fellow feminists.*  I don't really have a problem in general with Wolf, in part because I've never read any of her books, I'm not going to, and therefore I'm not sufficiently familiar with them to really have a problem.  But I've read her comments on this or that, not all of which I agree with by some measure, but some of which I do and I'd note that part of the reason that she takes flak is that as a feminist she makes contra feminist statements which feminist don't appreciate.**

Anyhow, she's basically published on topics related to feminism up until now, but following the general trend, she recently attempted to publish a book on homosexuality entitled Outrages:  Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love in which she completely blew it on the story of the criminalization of homosexual conduct in 19th Century Britain.  The BBC got after her about that, as well it should have, and then that lead to the book being yanked, at least temporarily. 

Which takes us back to one of our own earlier threads, where we got things right. . . .

Homosexual conduct was made illegal in the UK, and in much of the US, but not in the way that people think it was.  Rather, it was never the case, as some believe, that "being" a homosexual was illegal because homosexuality itself has existed as a definition for only a little over a century. Rather, homosexual sex was illegal but then so were a lot of other types of sexual conduct or conduct that involved sex.  If you get right to it, the general societal view as that sex was properly something limited to married couples and that marriage was an institution that was a human norm for deep seated reasons and which involved, for part of that reason, children.

Well get back to Sigmund Freud and his role in this in just a minuted.

But first, back to 1969.

By the time of the Stonewall riots the United States Supreme Court had already made big dents in state's abilities to regulate conduct between adults in this area.  Griswald v. Connecticut, had already held that there was a right to privacy.  Griswald held that a blanket ban on contraceptive pharmaceuticals violated a right to privacy, which is frankly a highly dubious result for a Supreme Court opinion.  If a blanket ban on pharmaceutical contraceptives violates a right to privacy, than a ban on any pharmaceutical and substance of any kind also does.  What Griswald really reflects is that a liberal United States Supreme Court was taking the view that sex itself was some sort of Constitutionally protected super right and that all laws restraining it were likely unconstitutional.  That would have been a shocking proposition for the drafters of the Constitution, who were completely comfortable with a lot of laws that limited sexual activity to married couples, but that's what the Supreme Court of the 1960s was basically doing.

Chief Justice Earl Warren.  Appointed by Dwight Eisenhower, Warren presided over a court that was highly active in expanding civil rights.  Under Warren, however, the court ultimately would not only revive Reconstruction era doctrines to enforce the civil rights of blacks in the South, a  highly laudable goal, but would vastly expand the incorporation  of the Bill of Rights, something that people from the left and the right howl about today as it has had numerous unforeseen consequences.  While in my view Warren was correct about this, in his later years the Court expanded its sweep even further and began to create rights that fairly clearly hadn't actually been contemplated in the Constitution. Warren, it might be noted, could never be a Supreme Court justice today. He was an active Mason and was, ironically, the driving force behind Japanese internment during World War Two, during which time he was the Governor of California.  A person has to speculate over whether that role later was influential on his expansion of civil rights in a remorseful reaction to something that was very clearly morally wrong.

A host of cases that were coming up in the wake of the Sexual Revolution would go on from there and effectively gut the state's ability to really regulate effectively in this area.  While in 1960 it remained the case that every state had a law against sodomy, it was also the case that the court in this era had already hinted that it would preclude their enforcement under any circumstance, which became clearer by the early 1970s.  Supreme Court action was probably never really necessary to make that clear and it would theoretically take until 2003 for the Court to make that clear in regards to homosexual conduct.  It's all significant, however, in that the Warren Court of the 1960s was pretty clearly willing to extend a host of rights in regard to sexual conduct that it was largely creating out of whole cloth, having a "living Constitution" view of the the law.  What the Warren Court started in the 1960s the Burger Court continued, even though it was certainly more restrained than the Warren Court.  It was the Burger Court, for example, that issued the opinion in Roe v. Wade.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, who presided over the Court and voted in the majority in Roe v. Wade.  Burger was much more conservative than Warren, but not as conservative as the Chief Justices who followed.  Like Justice Kennedy, he may not have been able to see the logical consequences of some opinions as he notably supported the ongoing criminalization of homosexual acts in a Supreme Court decision in a five to four 1986 decision that upheld a Georgia law on that topic, although by that time the Court's earlier decisions in this area made the decision nonsensical in some ways and forced Burger to rely, to a degree, on Natural Law, something the Court has otherwise been reluctant to do in modern times.

As for the social mores in 1969, by that time the Boomer generation was already, in its liberal end, challenging all of them and the Warren Court was falling in line, as the Courts will sometimes do with the Zeitgeist of their eras.  Courts perceived as trailblazers are often slightly behind whatever is actually blazing a trail.  1968 saw the Hayes Production Code fall as Hollywood sought to recapture the salacious it had been forced to abandon in the 1920s and there was an immediate switch in film making towards more violence and more sex. By 1970 an x rated film with homosexual content, Midnight Cowboy, would win best picture.  By the late 1960s, Playboy magazine had lost all aspects of being something sold in brown paper bags but was sold openly in the grocery store check out line, a status it would lose again in the 1980s.  And in 1969 California passed the first no fault divorce law in the United States, a law signed into law by conservative hero and divorcee Ronald Reagan.  Clearly, as Bob Dylan would have it, "the times, they are a changing".

Ronald Reagan after being elected governor of California.  Reagan is a conservative hero, and probably deservedly so, but in this area he did a decidedly liberal thing that would have enormous long term consequences in the United States.  Like John Wayne having never served in the military during the nation's largest war, conservatives have managed to ignore the fact that Reagan has a bit of a built in conflict here as he was divorced from his first wife himself.

And indeed the raid that gave rise to the 69 riot didn't have enforcement of New York's sodomy laws in mind and it would have been very unlikely to have been a successful raid if it did. Whatever else the Stonewall was, it wasn't a place where that was going on.  It allowed dancing between homosexual couples, and homosexuals and transvestites openly hung out there, but that's about as far as it went. And none of that activity was illegal.  It had a host of other laws that provided the pretext.  A clear element of social embarrassment was involved in being arrested in a raid of that type, however, which gives rise to the blackmail speculation as well as to forming the basis for the riots.

Which is why Stonewall became a marking point in this social evolution.

By the 1960s the laws on all sexual topics, save for one singular area, were on their way out and largely already unenforced.   That fact meant that the time was ripe for a social reaction of the type that the riots reflected, which was all the more the case because of the ongoing Sexual Revolution which was challenging marriage itself.

The Stonewall Riots are a milestone in the development of what became a movement, and that movement is still going on.  In 69, when the movement can more or less said to have emerged more openly, the point was that those who engaged in homosexual activity didn't want to be subject to prejudice because of it.  The movement emerged at a time when all of the walls on traditional conduct were under assault and many were torn down completely, quite a few with highly negative results that are only now being appreciated.  By some point in the 1990s the movement had basically been a success and the real legal prohibitions that homosexuals were subject to were gone, which marks very rapid progress. At that point, however, it changed from a movement seeking tolerance to once seeking normalization and acceptance, both societal and legal.  It largely achieved that with the Obergefell decision which, remarkably, did not result in a hiatus in its goals, as Justice Kennedy in his naivety seem to assume it would.  It has gone on not only to seek full scale societal acceptance, but absolutely demands it. At the same time, it's gone from a movement that was actually fairly limited to homosexual conduct, to one that has embraced all forms of sexual conduct, arguing that there is no norm at all.

Indeed, in that last most recent phase, while hardly noticed by the public its reached the point where many within the early scope of the movement are at odds with the most recent developments.  Homosexual men and women don't all embrace the categorization of "gay" that they are now all tagged with, and they don't all embrace the concept of "transgender" at all.  The new "Asexual" movement hat has tagged a ride along chaffs many in the other camps.  And the rather obvious fact that the entire LGBQT movement has become extremely trendy has meant that rather obviously a lot of people who now wear the badge of being LGBQT are frankly not, something not lost on those who genuinely have attractions outside the norm.

All of which goes back to the point that we made earlier, is any of this really real?

Clearly those who genuinely have same gender attraction would be baffled, and probably offended, by that comment, maybe, but there's no good reason to believe that in fact the actual nature of this is something that's been grossly misunderstood and overplayed.  That a minority demographic of human beings have such attractions is real, and can't be doubted, but it may well be that the current understanding of it is fairly far off the mark.  As our earlier entry noted, there's some who feel that defining people by their sexual attraction is not only a disservice to them, but it's actually fundamentally scientifically wrong.  Further, they'd argue, that by doing that it actual amplifies a behavior by emphasizing it, making, if you will, people "gay", and even "homosexual", by simply insisting that this is what such a person must be because of the attraction they feel. This is a matter of controversy among homosexuals themselves, not all of whom want to be forced to adopt the definition of being "gay" and what that means and others who insist they must do so.  There isn't very good biological evidence for the position that the hard definitions now in current vogue reflect basic human nature.  Indeed, there isn't any.

Leaping back to our earlier post, it must be remembered that the terms "homosexual" and "heterosexual" are actually only a little over a century old and they reflect a psychological characterization of the time which held that all homosexual conduct and all sexual conduct directed towards oneself (which is what heterosexual actually means) was a psychological malady. Indeed, at about that same point it was assumed that excessive focus on sex by conventional males lead to heterosexual conduct as originally defined (we're not going to get too graphic here) that if unchecked evolved into homosexual conduct.  Indeed, that view isn't entirely gone as I've heard it posed fairly recently, and there actually seems to be some evidence to support it, that a strong attraction to pornography (some would use the word addiction) of the depicting female type, leads to more and more graphic pornography and then with some, pornography that's homosexual in character.  I'll note that I've heard that stated, but I haven't researched it and I'm not going to.  Indeed, this thread doesn't address the "cause" of anything.

But what it does address is defining a "cause" which is actually what the surviving term in its original sense, homosexual, does.  All the other current related terms in this set of movements are related to that history of the definition. And that history is one that's sufficiently ironic to call it into question.

Originally, the conduct was universally seen as immoral along with a host of other sexual acts outside of marriage.  It wasn't regarded as a category of anything, however, until Freud and his fellow travelers defined it as such, creating the concept that it was a deep seated psychological malady.  That process of creating that concept, contrary to what Naomi Wolf supposed, is what created the late 19th and early 20th Century treatment under the law and in society.  The condition went from being one that was thought of as a moral failing, but except in really pronounced exceptions one that didn't otherwise define the essence of a person, to one that did in every way.  That in turn created the conditions that people are aware of that existed in the early 20th Century that people presume, inaccurately, existed prior to that.  In the late 1960s as the lid came off of every type of sexual conduct, it came off of homosexuality as well but it was the only one, at that time, that was defined as a psychological malady.  That changed in the early 1970s when homosexual psychologists caused the DSM to be redefined to take that definition out.

But what's notable about that is that a large amount of the DSM and psychological treatment of sex has always been raving baloney in the first place.  So maybe what ought to really be questioned is the entire history of psychology and sex.  Indeed, that questioning has been taking place to some degree and almost everything Freud thought has gone down the tubes as a result, as he thought everything was about sex.

And it turns out it isn't.

Which doesn't mean that all of this doesn't have a psychological component.  Of course it does.  Everything about people has a psychological component. But what it may very well mean is that that component has been pretty badly misunderstood ever since Freud and his buddies first started defining the terms.  The earlier understanding that held it was simply something on the range of human conduct might turn out to be much more accurate.

If that seems to be arguing that society at large has finally grasped the truth here in the modern era, it hasn't.  It may mean that in this area the terms shouldn't really exist at all.  That doesn't mean that a small minority of human beings don't exhibit all of the traits that are unfairly lumped together here for classification.  That is, there are a minority of people who are attracted, in varying degrees, to members of their own gender.  There are some people who desire to dress in the clothing characteristic of the opposite gender (which doesn't necessarily mean that they're attracted to members of their same gender, although some are). There are people who have very little sexual attraction to anyone in their own species at all. But there are also men who are hyper attracted to women, and women who are hyper attracted to me. There are also attractions outside of all of these which we'll not go into as they stray into areas that almost nobody wants to be associated with, but those attractions also exist.

But perhaps outside of that last vaguely referenced area, which needs to be a defining trait for criminal law reasons, and which seems to be an indisputable psychological malady, all of these things are departures from the mean average which is the disputable norm and there would appear to be no good reason whatsoever that anyone should accordingly define themselves accordingly.  A tendency towards an act, in other words, probably ought not to devolve to being a person's entire identity.

Over Father's Day weekend I happened to be in Denver.  I seem to manage to be in Denver every time that some public presentation associated with a movement is going on (I've managed to be in Denver over "4/20" at least three times).  On this occasion, there was a Pride parade going on.  I didn't see it, but there were a fair number of people downtown who had marched in it or turned out to view it, and were self identifying in some fashion as being part of the demographic the parade recognized.

I'm sure that quite a few of the people in the parade were members of the demographic.  I'm also at this point pretty sure that quite a few people in such parades aren't members of the demographic by an inherent inclination, but are identifying as part of it as they like to be part of movements.  Some were just exhibitionist, which has nothing at all to do with having same gender attraction and which has everything to do with being an exhibitionist.  The most notable example of that was a young woman with black lipstick and heavy eye liner wearing a t-shirt you could see through.  That doesn't make her a lesbian. . . that makes her an exhibitionist.  For all the viewer would know, that's all she was.

But the most notable for this conversations were two very attractive young women who were wearing t-shirts that said "All Gay All Day".  Why would anybody be all anything, other than human, all day?  That's not much different from a t-shirt being worn by a male that stated he was attracted to women all day.  If a person defines themselves as "all" anything "all day", it ought to be something really deep, rather than glandular, in nature.

Now, I get the point of their t-shirts but what I'll also note is that they were otherwise decently dressed in the conventional fashion.  Whether their self declared attraction was real or not, what they weren't doing is affecting a "I'm a" so much as as a "I have this" in terms of this attraction, and that's the point here.  It may really be the case that on a society wide basis we're still afflicted by psychological malpractice from the 19th Century that causes society to insist on defining a people by their sexual attractions.  There's something about that which is really odd.

If that's the case, the views that predated the psychological definitions may actually be closer to the biologically correct one.  And if that's the case the ultimate irony is that much of the societal view and the legal views on sexual conduct that predated 1) the psychological intrusion first and 2) the Sexual Revolution secondly, are more correct.  That doesn't argue for a re-criminalization of homosexual sex, that should never have been criminal in the first place, but it would argue for a serious approach to sex in society and the law and what it means. And what it means for most people is that procreation results in creation and a deep seated human bond that the libertine standard bearers of the Sexual Revolution, following (not leading) Hugh Hefner and his juvenile pack of pornographers, failed to grasp.  That actually makes things simpler, rather than more complicated, as that refocuses such topics on where they ought to be, which is the protection of children, and the true dignity of people and in particular women, who are now prostituted in society in various ways to an unprecedented degree, something that all of the turmoil and upheaval in this area of the 1960s and 1970s forgot.

That would also mean that almost all of the recent, and we take a long view of recent here, developments in society, save for the decriminalization of various things which should never have been criminal in nature in the first place, are based on a faulty understanding of things influenced by a science that turns out to be pseudo scientific.  And if that's the case, basing societal institutions and norms on them, or more particularly changing societal institutions and norms of very long standing, and even simply basing societal and demographic labels based on them, is likely to be an error as well. 

And that's something that hardly anyone has bothered to contemplate.

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*Wolf is really quixotic in a lot of ways and she holds some extremely liberal and quite conservative opinions simultaneously.  Part of the reason, however, that I think she meets with opposition is that she's very attractive and presents that way.  In other words, she has always held major babe status and that likely strikes both of some her opponents and some of her proponents off guard.

**She's also been wildly off on statistical data before and what the current controversy might demonstrate is that in the age of the Internet you can no longer get away with that.