The U.S. Should Apologize to Gay People

Jonathan Rauch: “You may be aware that for decades the U.S. government fired homosexuals, the military discharged them, and police arrested them. Some of these actions are well within the living memory of most adults. Yet if you are like most people—including me, when I began researching this article—you have not fully appreciated that these policies were not discrimination of any ordinary sort. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing for more than six decades, the United States waged a campaign of legal, social, and psychological obliteration against its homosexual population.”

“The campaign was initiated by the federal government but recruited all of society. The pressure could be felt everywhere. It found you not only at work, where you could be fired, or in bars and clubs, where you could be arrested, but also on the street and in public spaces, where you could be harassed or assaulted; in a doctor’s care, where you might be deemed mentally ill; at home, where you saw gay people ridiculed and pathologized on TV.”

“The goal, as the historian and legal scholar William N. Eskridge Jr. writes in his 1999 book Gaylaw, was not merely to disadvantage homosexual people; it was to erase homosexuality from every corner of public life.”