LGBTQ Politics

This course will explore LGBTQ protest, politics ,and policy from the end of WW II to the present. We will begin with the persecution of the LGBTQ community in the 1940s and 1950s and then examine how LGBTQ movements began, often as a response to discriminatory policing. We will explore early writings in Queer theory before examining the government neglect and the protests to it that accompanied HIV/AIDs. Our next step is to look at policies from the 1990s to the 2020s, with Clinton’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in the Military to Bush’s Defense of Marriage Act to Marriage Equality under Obama. We will read several critical Supreme Court cases that decriminalized same-sex sexuality and cases that legalized marriage equality and allowed private businesses to discriminate against gay and lesbian couples. Finally, we will examine the most recent effort to politicize LGBTQ people, especially transgender individuals. Throughout this course, we will look at clashes within the LGBTQ movement between radical and liberal factions, women and men, the dominance of whiteness and efforts to be inclusive. In addition, we will examine how new modes of sociality developed by the LGBTQ movement have contributed to mainstream culture