#2000-present

Transgender History. 2012.

A historically written document explaining the term transgender and how the term developed over time. Well documented essay with resources linked at the end of the article. 

Prior to the the 1950s and the Lavender Scare / McCarthy era, there were purges in other institutions of higher education.

Uncovering a little known aspect of history, a University of California, Riverside associate professor has published a paper about purges of gay students and faculty at at least three universities in the 1940s.

The paper details incidents at the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Missouri, where students or faculty presumed to be homosexual were expelled or fired. Two of the universities – Wisconsin and Missouri – created administrative machinery to track students and faculty that were purged, helping to hinder their future success.

Photo of 1993 Camp Trans - Created in direct response to Michigans Womyn’s Festival in 1991

Camp Trans was an annual demonstration and event held outside the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival by trans women and their allies to protest what they perceived as the Festival's policy of excluding trans women from attending the event.

Camp Trans was sparked by a 1991 incident in which Nancy Burkholder was ejected from the festival after another woman asked her whether she was trans and she refused to answer.[2] The MWM festival maintained a women-born-women policy since its inception, as evidenced by posters from the first festival in 1975. Each year afterwards a group of women, both transgender and cisgender, protested the exclusion of trans women from the event. Initially, these protests were small and sometimes carried on inside of the camp.

A more organized group of trans women and their allies began camping and holding demonstrations outside the gate. After a five-year hiatus, Camp Trans returned in 1999, led by transgender activists Riki Ann Wilchins and Leslie Feinberg, as well as many members of the Boston and Chicago Lesbian Avengers The events of this year drew attention and controversy, culminating in tensions as a small group of transgender activists were admitted into the festival to exchange dialogue with organizers and to negotiate a short-lived compromise allowing only post-operative trans women on the festival land.

Pat Buchanan Column. AIDS is Nature’s Punishment, 1983. 

Pat Buchanan is a conservative Catholic republican leader who began writing anti-homosexual articles in the early 1980s. One of his most inflammatory was an article suggesting that AIDS is nature’s retribution for violating the laws of nature.  Along with other conservative religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker and Anita Bryant, their voices provided anti-homosexual discourse to the political and legislative landscape at the time. 

ACT UP Poster, The Catholic Church and AIDS, 1989.

The Catholic Church under the leadership of Archbishop John O’Connor in New York and Archbishop Roger Mahony in Los Angeles issued a report by the U.S. Catholic Bishops stating, ''Not only is the use of prophylactics (condoms) . . . technically unreliable; promoting this approach means, in effect, promoting behavior which is morally unacceptable...” This statement was in direct opposition to the medical findings of the times that using a condom was one way to prevent the spread of AIDS. The Catholic Church wielded social and political power in major cities across the U.S. at the time which resulted in a difficult clash of moral and medical opinions, as well as how to treat the AIDS epidemic. 

In response, the ACT UP organization and the Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM) organizations held a demonstration in front of New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. According to Michael Bronski, in his book, A Queer History of the United States (2011, p. 232), “over a hundred of them entered the cathedral, lay down in the aisles, and were arrested for civil disobedience.” 

Citation: ACT UP Demonstration Poster. Catholic Church and AIDS. New York Public Library Digital Collection. 1989.   http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/12cc2fb0-a878-0131-5d85-58d385a7b928 

Related resources:

“Catholics, Condoms and AIDS”, New York Times, October 20, 1989. http://www.nytimes.com/1989/10/20/opinion/catholics-condoms-and-aids.html 

“Bishops Reject Use of Condoms”, LA Times, October 20, 1989.  http://articles.latimes.com/1989-11-10/news/mn-1313_1_palestinian-homeland

Catholics for Choice. http://www.catholicsforchoice.org/topics/hivaids/ 

ACT UP Digital Collection, New York Public Library, 2016. 

The New York Public Library houses many of the archives of the ACT UP organization that fights to end AIDS and brought the AIDS epidemic into the public conversation beginning in the 1980s. This collection includes over 150 items, posters, and articles.