The gay rights movement rapidly developed in the second half of the 20th century, and for this reason it is important to place The Trouble with Normal in the immediate political context to which it responds. Warner was writing in 1999, a decade after the height of the AIDS epidemic and a decade before gay marriage would become legal throughout the United States. It is useful to have a sense of what “official” gay rights means in this period, compared to others, since that is one of Warner’s main targets in his book.
The 1950s are often seen as a period of increased community-0building among gays and lesbians in the United States, in part because of the creation of queer spaces in urban areas like New York City after World War II. Gays and lesbians fought back against witch-hunts of homosexuals by forming organizations like the Mattachine Society, which advocated for the acceptance of gay people in America. Unfortunately, abuse of queer people and spaces, such as police raids of gay bars, continued into the 1960s. In 1969, transgendered activists revolted against such a raid of the Stonewall Inn in New York City. The resulting Stonewall Riots are often seen as a symbolic beginning of the modern LGBT rights movement.
In the 1970s, a number of organizations formed that advocated for the sexual liberation of queer people, such as the Gay Liberation Front. This decade also saw the first gay pride parade in New York City, the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness from the American Psychological Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, and the election of openly gay politicians to public office, mostly at a local level. The decade also saw backlash against the gay community, most notoriously in the repeal of a human rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida, led by the aggressively anti-gay Anita Bryant.
The 1980s saw continued backlash against the LGBT community. In 1986, the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick upheld the constitutionality of laws that criminalized oral and anal sex, which were disproportionately used to jail gay people. The opinion would later be overturned in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas, but at the time of Warner’s writing, it was still illegal in many states for gay people to have sex. The 1980s also saw the rise of the AIDS epidemic, caused by the virus HIV; the disease was so strongly associated with the gay community that it was originally called GRID, or Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. As thousands of gay men died throughout the country, activists felt the United States government was willfully neglecting the development of treatment, because of the stigma attached to homosexuality. This led to a surge of direct-action activism by queer groups, including ACT-UP, which was founded in 1987. Effective drugs began to be made the same year, and ultimately more widely available in the 1990s.
The 1990s, according to Warner, saw a movement away from this kind of direct action activism, directly confronting the United States government for its homophobia, and toward an appeal to rights like the right to serve in the military and the right to get married. This was partly in response to a number of federal policies passed during the Clinton administration. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, was passed in 1993. The Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage for federal purposes as between a man and woman, was passed in 1996. Gay activists began attacking these laws as unconstitutional and advocated for gay marriage on a state-by-state basis.
Although Warner thought gay marriage should not be the primary goal of queer politics, it did become a centrally debated issue in American politics in the first decade of the 2000s. Massachusetts became the first state to legalize same sex marriage in 2003. Many other states followed suit, although in some states there was backlash. In California, for instance, same-sex marriage was briefly made legal by a state Supreme Court decision, before being overturned by an amendment to the California constitution, Proposition 8, passed by voters in 2008. Proposition 8 was eventually found unconstitutional, however. In June 2015, a Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges made same-sex marriage legal through the entire United States.
