International Influences in LGBTQ History

From the founding of the American colonies to the present, international connections have played a major role in U.S. LGBTQ history, and LGBTQ-related events in the U.S. have profoundly influenced LGBT history in other nations. Here are a few examples:

• English buggery and sodomy law influenced and served as models for similar legislation in the early American colonies.

• Walt Whitman's 1860 Calamus poems about affectionate and sexual relationships between men, provoked the first homosexual emancipation efforts in England, by John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter.

• The political organization of homosexuals that began in Germany in the late-nineteenth century was discussed in the U.S. and provoked a 1903 proposal to organize American homosexuals, as well as Henry Gerber's founding of the Society for Human Rights, in Chicago, in 1924.

• The controversy in England and the U.S. over Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness, in 1928 and 1929, provoked public discussion of lesbianism in both countries.

• News of the Stonewall uprising of 1969, and the formation of militant, confrontational groups in New York and elsewhere in the U.S. influenced the rise of similar groups in Great Britain.

• The organization of the U.S. lesbian rights group, Daughters of Bilitis, inspired the formation of a similar organization in Australia, in 1969

• The gay liberation periodical, The Body Politic, published in Toronto, Canada, in the 1970s, was read by and influenced gay liberationists in the U.S.

This entry begins to note and list some of the major international influences in LGBTQ history.

Alphabetical Listing

Body Politic (periodical; Toronto, Canada)

Daughters of Bilitis (U.S.)

Daughters of Bilitis (Australia]

Films

Gay Liberation Front (New York City)

Gay Liberation Movement (U.S.)

German Homosexual Emancipation Movement

Hirschfeld, Magnus

Immigration

Periodicals

Stein, Gertrude

Well of Loneliness (novel; Radclyffe Hall)

Whitman, Walt

Carpenter, Edward

Lorca, Federico García

Symonds, John Addington