A Gay Term Paper

Homosexuality has existed, openly, since Egypt. It was highly recognized in Ancient Greece, and the Romans had an actual marital relationship two male partners could enter into, this was made illegal after the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and Jesus Christ became the leading deity. Halfway across the world, India had similar customs at the start of the current era; China and Japan joined at the next turn of the millennium. During the Dark Ages, homosexuality all but died, having its rebirth, along with most of our modern ideals, during the Renaissance. There it flourished through the Age of Enlightenment, along the epicenter of scientific knowledge. Homosexuality was present during start of the American Revolution, gay unions first raising their heads in ’Boston Marriages” where two females in a committed relationship, where they were sharing household, granted rights similar to a married couple.

Yet this progress was halted, thanks to the Victorian Age, “Christian Morals” were once again at the focus of British, and, by proxy American minds. The new social order successfully crushed the developed debauchery of the Aristocratic order and reinstalled hope in the growing Middle Class, along rightfully slaying open sexuality, both female and gay. Here in the US, it stayed buried, through the Civil and First World War, because no soldier wanted to be the first to admit these ‘debase’ feelings to others, because of how contemporary culture stood. In those time, people who were homosexual denied it with ever fiber of their beings. Often times these ‘Closet Cases’ were isolated in remote country, never knowing there were others who where like them. In the major cities, a Gay underground developed. This secretive hiding changed during the Second World War, due in part to the 1920s, which successfully lifted away most of the Victorian Veil. When closet country boys where able to meet out city slickers, who knew the Network. While all the men where out, fighting to defeat the Nazis, (who, incidentally, actually shot at a successfully killed homosexual men, instead of merely just denying their existence) women where left here to fend for themselves, with each other.

The gay scene begin developing in the 1950s, coming to term during the Civil rights movement of the 1960s, coming mainstream in the 1970s. From then on out this microscopic community has played Israel, fighting much large, much more heavily armed mainstream society. Their, gays have been fighting for rights against closed-minded bigots, whose ‘moral superiority ’ and blind hatred have been grinded in since birth by their parents, by their churches, by their communities and by society.

The fight for equal rights started in the 1970s. The first gay couple who applied for a marriage license, Jack Baker and James Michael McConnell in Hennepin County, Minnesota, May 18 1970. The license is denied, and this denial was appealed all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. Yet the current trend of Banning Gay Marriage in Certain States is because of a similar case that made it though the Supreme Court, demanding the couple in question was being denied right granted to them through Hawaii’s Constitution, this was in 1993, Hawaiian Legislators in 1998 drafted and ratified the Definition Amendment, legally defining marriage as a union between a man and a women., therefore, making it so that the Supreme Court couldn’t over rule it, because it was part of their Constitution.

Currently 32 states have officially “Banned” gay marriage, by an amendment to their constitution that legally defines marriage as a union between a man and a women, which is what conservative Floridians hope to do in the 2008 Amendment vote. Consequently, this ban fuels a negative attitude towards gays, that their love isn’t worthy of commitment or recognition. California and Massachusetts, along with six other countries have legalized “Same-sex Marriage”, including South Africa, which until about 18 years ago, denied rights based on skin color, so they’re clearly stepping in the right direction. 17 countries and five states recognize Civil unions; along with five states and seven countries that grant rights under other clauses. The first Civil Unions were offered in 1989 in Denmark.