The arc of history

The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. By Lillian Faderman. Simon and Schuster; 816 pages; $35 and £25.

OF THE quarter of a million people who massed in Washington, DC, on August 28th 1963 to hear Martin Luther King proclaim “I have a dream”, few would have noticed—much less known what to make of—the six white men who stood in the crowd with signs identifying them as members of the “Mattachine Society”. One of them surveyed the vast ocean of faces and later asked his fellows, “Why aren’t we gays having civil-rights marches too?”

With gay Americans’ astonishing strides in the past decade, it is easy to forget that just a half-century ago the very notion of gay or transgender civil rights was as strange to most Americans as black civil rights had been a century earlier. Until the early 1960s government employees were fired for being homosexual, and the American Civil Liberties Union generally sided with the government. The few “homophile” organisations took deliberately obscure names; Mattachine was supposedly a French medieval secret fraternity.

Lillian Faderman’s new book, “The Gay Revolution...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1LXlcks