Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) movements are social movements that advocate for the inclusion, recognition, and rights of LGBTQ people and other gender and sexual minorities.
While there is no overarching organization representing all LGBTQ people, numerous advocacy groups, grassroots networks, and community-based organizations work to advance related causes. The earliest known LGBTQ rights organization was the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, founded in Berlin in 1897.
The common goal of LGBTQ movements is equal rights for LGBTQ people. Specific goals include the decriminalization of homosexuality, legal recognition of same-sex relationships, protections against discrimination, and access to gender-affirming healthcare. Some branches of these movements also emphasize cultural visibility, community-building, and liberation from societal systems seen as oppressive, such as heteronormativity and cisnormativity.
Modern LGBTQ movements encompass a wide range of strategies, including political lobbying, street marches and protests, mutual aid, academic research, and artistic expression. These movements are internally diverse, with ongoing debates over tactics, identity, inclusion, and the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and class.
Overview
Sociologist Mary Bernstein writes: For the lesbian and gay movement, then, cultural goals include (but are not limited to) challenging dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, homophobia, and the primacy of the gendered heterosexual nuclear family (heteronormativity). Political goals include changing laws and policies to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm.Bernstein emphasizes that LGBTQ activists often pursue both cultural and political goals across the civil and legal spheres.
Like other social movements, LGBTQ movements experience internal conflict over strategy, representation, and direction—particularly regarding education reform and who speaks for the broader community. There is ongoing debate over how much common ground exists among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and other queer individuals, and whether they should pursue shared political goals.
In the 1970s through the 1990s, leaders of the lesbian and gay rights movement sometimes downplayed or excluded masculine lesbians, feminine gay men, transgender people, and bisexuals, creating rifts within LGBTQ communities.Bull, C., and J. Gallagher (1996) Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s. New York: Crown. Research by Roffee and Waling (2016) found that LGBTQ individuals often face microaggressions and exclusionary behaviors from others within their own community. These tensions stem from misconceptions and differing beliefs about what constitutes LGBTQ identity.
For example, transgender individuals have reported that other LGBTQ members may dismiss or misunderstand their specific needs, leading to harmful assumptions and potential health risks. Similarly, bisexual people have often felt that their identities are invalidated by both straight and gay communities. Even when individuals align with the broader values of LGBTQ advocacy, inconsistencies and internal prejudice can persist.
Many LGBTQ movements have adopted forms of identity politics that position gay, bisexual, and transgender people as fixed minority groups. This approach has helped secure rights and visibility, but it has also drawn criticism from within the community. Critics within the queer movement argue that fixed categories such as gay and lesbian are restrictive and fail to reflect the fluidity of sexuality and gender. These categories, they suggest, "reinforce rather than challenge a cultural system that always marks non-heterosexual identities as inferior."Bernstein (2002)
Despite differences in approach, many activists share liberal political goals of equality and freedom, seeking to integrate into the political mainstream alongside other marginalized groups.One example of this approach is: Sullivan, Andrew (1997). Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con. New York: Vintage. LGBTQ movements widely oppose "conversion therapy" efforts to change sexual orientation or gender identity, emphasizing that these traits are innate and immutable. Such practices are often rooted in religious doctrines that view non-heterosexual activity as immoral. While religious institutions have historically condemned LGBTQ identities, opposition has never been universal. Attitudes vary widely between denominations, cultures, and eras.
Today, numerous religious communities and individual believers openly support LGBTQ rights.
Historically, anticlerical sentiment in Catholic countries after the French Revolution—combined with the liberalizing effects of the Napoleonic Code—led to the repeal of sodomy laws in many areas. In contrast, Protestant countries, where church authority was less centralized, often retained religiously inspired statutes well into the 20th century. Some laws persist even today; for example, a 2008 court case in India was based on a 150-year-old colonial-era law criminalizing sodomy.
History
Enlightenment era In eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, same-sex sexual behavior and cross-dressing were widely considered to be socially unacceptable, and were serious crimes under sodomy and sumptuary laws. There were, however, some exceptions. For example, in the 17th-century cross-dressing was common in plays, as evident in the content of many of William Shakespeare's plays and by the actors in actual performance (since female roles in Elizabethan theater were always performed by males, usually prepubescent boys).
Thomas Cannon wrote what may be the earliest published defense of homosexuality in English, Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify'd (1749). Although only fragments of his work have survived, it was a humorous anthology of homosexual advocacy, written with an obvious enthusiasm for its subject. It contains the argument: "Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense. Desire is an amatory Impulse of the inmost human Parts: Are not they, however, constructed, and consequently impelling Nature?"
Social reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England around 1785, at a time when the legal penalty for buggery was death by hanging. His advocacy stemmed from his utilitarian philosophy, in which the morality of an action is determined by the net consequence of that action on human well-being.
He argued that homosexuality was a victimless crime, and therefore not deserving of social approbation or criminal charges. He regarded popular negative attitudes against homosexuality as an irrational prejudice, fanned and perpetuated by religious teachings. However, he did not publicize his views as he feared reprisal; his essay was not published until 1978.
The emerging currents of secular humanist thought that had inspired Bentham also informed the French Revolution, and when the newly formed National Constituent Assembly began drafting the policies and laws of the new republic in 1792, groups of militant "sodomite-citizens" in Paris petitioned the Assemblée nationale, the governing body of the French Revolution, for freedom and recognition.Blasius, Mark and Phelan, Shane (eds.), 1997. "We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics", New York: Routledge.
In 1791, France became the first nation to decriminalize homosexuality, probably thanks in part to Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, who was one of the authors of the Napoleonic Code. With the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in 1808, the Duchy of Warsaw also decriminalized homosexuality.
In 1830, the new Penal Code of the Brazilian Empire did not repeat the title XIII of the fifth book of the "Ordenações Philipinas", which made sodomy a crime. In 1833, an anonymous English-language writer wrote a poetic defense of Captain Nicholas Nicholls, who had been sentenced to death in London for sodomy:
Whence spring these inclinations, rank and strong? And harming no one, wherefore call them wrong?
Three years later in Switzerland, Heinrich Hoessli published the first volume of Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen (English: "Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks"), another defense of same-sex love.
Emergence of LGBTQ movement
In many ways, social attitudes to homosexuality became more hostile during the late Victorian era. In 1885, the Labouchere Amendment was included in the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which criminalized 'any act of gross indecency with another male person'; a charge that was successfully invoked to convict playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 with the most severe sentence possible under the Act.
The first person known to describe himself as a drag queen was William Dorsey Swann, born enslaved in Hancock, Maryland. Swann was the first American on record who pursued legal and political action to defend the LGBTQ community's right to assemble. During the 1880s and 1890s, Swann organized a series of drag balls in Washington, D.C. Swann was arrested in police raids numerous times, including in the first documented case of arrests for female impersonation in the United States, on April 12, 1888.
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was one of the earliest men to publicly state their homosexuality. He wrote many essays defending homosexuality, establishing scientific terms and categories for the groups that now make up the LGBTQ+ community. Homosexual men were Urnings or Uranians, while homosexual women were Dionings. In 1867, he staged the first public gay rights protest.
The Uranian poets and prose writers, who sought to rehabilitate the love between men and boys and in doing so often appealed to Ancient Greece, formed a rather cohesive group with a well-expressed philosophy.
A secret British society called the Order of Chaeronea campaigned for the legalization of homosexuality. The society was founded in 1897 by George Cecil Ives, one of the earliest gay rights campaigners, who had been working for the end of oppression of homosexuals, what he called the "Cause". Members included Oscar Wilde,McKenna, Neil (2003), "The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography". (London: Century) Charles Kains Jackson, Samuel Elsworth Cottam, Montague Summers, and John Gambril Nicholson.
Ives met Wilde at the Authors' Club in London in 1892. Wilde was taken by his boyish looks and persuaded him to shave off his mustache, and once kissed him passionately in the Travellers' Club. In 1893, Lord Alfred Douglas, with whom he had a brief affair, introduced Ives to several Oxford poets whom Ives also tried to recruit.
John Addington Symonds was a poet and an early advocate of male love. In 1873, he wrote A Problem in Greek Ethics, a work of what would later be called "gay history." Although the Oxford English Dictionary credits the medical writer C.G. Chaddock for introducing "homosexual" into the English language in 1892, Symonds had already used the word in A Problem in Greek Ethics.DeJean, "Sex and Philology," p. 132, pointing to the phrase "homosexual relations" (here as it appears in the later 1908 edition).
Symonds also translated classical poetry on homoerotic themes, and wrote poems drawing on ancient Greek imagery and language such as Eudiades, which has been called "the most famous of his homoerotic poems". While the taboos of Victorian England prevented Symonds from speaking openly about homosexuality, his works published for a general audience contained strong implications and some of the first direct references to male-male sexual love in English literature.