Prop 8 Trial makes for good history

Observers of the Prop 8 trial are writing some great posts on the history of homosexuality. Given the prominence of historians among the witnesses, this is natural. A great thing. Samples:

Margaret Talbot writes in the New Yorker about George Chauncey ("A Structural Hostility"), who must "focus on the nineteen-thirties through the sixties, the period when, he has argued, gays and lesbians were most sharply stigmatized as deviants and degenerates. But he must also make sure to say, as he did on the stand today, that such attitudes do not belong only to the past."

She links a Rick Perlstein profile of Chauncey from 2004 ("Moment of Decision"), when his scholarship went to the Supreme Court and effectively cut out the argument from tradition:

Sodomy laws, for most of America’s history, were not antihomosexuality laws but bans on all manner of nonprocreative sex. Then came the 1970s. Most states repealed their sodomy statutes as embarrassing anachronisms. But some passed new laws outlawing gay sex exclusively. These laws were as deeply rooted in America’s history and tradition as the lava lamp. At Cobb, Chauncey explained the significance: Bowers did not merely uphold some originary tradition of outlawing sodomy. “It reinterpreted it as if it applied to homosexual couples only. The court said, ‘It’s okay to single out these people.’”

Chauncey and others then worked to overturn this reinterpretation, in Lawrence.

Finally, Independent Gay Forum writes about the trial itself: both Chauncey and Nancy Cott, a marriage historian and expert witness. Interesting passage here about changing language:

When the L.A. historian Stuart Timmons was staying with me researching his book, Gay L.A., he showed me the L.A. Times archives he could access, dating back to the early parts of the 20th Century. But he told me that at first, he wasn’t sure there were many articles about homosexuality; he could not find more than a handful. He knew there were thousands of criminal cases, beatings and deaths from the court documents he had been reading. Did the mainstream press just not cover those stories? Was it a political bias at the historically very conservative L.A. Times?

Then he realized that he was searching for words and phrases he was used to using: “homosexual” and “gay” and “sexual orientation.” But those were not the words journalists would have used prior to our own time.

Try it for yourself. If you have access to any database of news stories up to about the 1960s, see how many articles you can find about homosexuality using the words you know to describe sexual orientation.

Than try using these: “deviant;” “degenerate;” “pervert.”

These will all be useful this semester for various CP weeks.