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Show 9 By the late 1960s, the black civil rights movement and second-wave feminism inspired heightened visibility and militance among younger gays and lesbians. The decade culminated with the 1969 Stonewall Riots, in which the gay, lesbian, and transgendered patrons of a Greenwich Village bar violently resisted a police raid. The Stonewall Riots have since assumed mythical status in the gay collective conscience, nationally and internationally, bringing in their wake an explosion of organizing under the banner of gay liberation.'? Chapter 5 describes the mutual politicizing of a more confident gay community and a more steadfastly anti gay Mormon Church in the 1970s. In particular, I show how both sides made savvy use of public media to air their views, and homosexuality became a decidedly political issue, no longer reducible to LDS notions of personal morality or gay understandings of sexual privacy. Throughout the chapter, I discuss the dynamic between choice and constraint in the LDS Church and its strategic implications for local gays. Researching sexuality for this period is always difficult, let alone homosexuality in a comparatively small city steeped in religious ideology. Particularly for the 1950s, I relied on legal records and fieldwork to determine whether social and legal prescriptions accurately reflected gay men's lives." The need to counteract legal and religious I7Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History From 1869 to the Present (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 363-384. I8The largest document collections supporting this research were the Criminal Register of Actions and corresponding case files for the Utah Third District Court, which encompassed Salt Lake, Summit, and Tooele Counties. The Register of Actions includes chronologically sequenced entries from docket books containing the date, case number, charges, defendants' names, and summary of actions for each case. I extracted all of the sodomy cases and reviewed the corresponding criminal case files for the years |
