CHAPTER 27. THE TRUE ORIGIN OF
THE GAY REVOLUTION
Larry and I talked for two hours, and he explained to me that he had founded the group inspired by Frank Kameny22 and the gay uprising at Stonewall.
According to him, the industrial and military complex of the United States controlled the world and promoted homophobia, and we homosexuals were persecuted because we represented the contradictions of the patriarchal system. They hated us for our politics, not for our sexual practices, and our natural alliance was with women, blacks, Latinos, and the Third World.
With the victory of the left, we would achieve the long-awaited freedom.
I was once again left speechless. “What the hell was this talk? How had I not made these clear connections before?” I saw myself - for the first time - as a politician, just like Che Guevara, Martin Luther King, and the guerrillas in the Bolivarian countries.
History has not been kind to Larry. It has not been kind to Henry Hay23 or Frank Kameny either. Without 22 Kameny played a crucial role in the early LGBTQ+ rights movement, advocating for the decriminalization of homosexual acts, the removal of the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and the equal treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals in all aspects of life, including employment, housing, and military service.
23 Harry Hay, (born April 7, 1912, Worthing, Sussex, England—died October 24, 2002, San Francisco, California, U.S.), American gay 97
them, there would have been no Stonewall. Both in the United States and in Costa Rica, there were people who stole our history. In other words, they changed it to make themselves the protagonists.
The gay movement in the United States did not start at Stonewall in 1969. That was just the spark. To have action in the bars, there had to be awareness in Costa Rica and in the United States.
Where did the awareness come from? Well, it started in Germany with Magnus Hirschfeld24 and his Committee for the Study of Sexuality.
Magnus Hirschfeld would become the promoter of the first phase of the homosexual liberation movement, fighting for the abolition of Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which condemned homosexuality, and for the enlightenment of society regarding sexuality through his famous Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which published a yearbook dedicated to homosexual topics.
Regarding etiology, the German neurologist believed that homosexuality was congenital, although it rights activist who believed that homosexuals should see themselves as an oppressed minority entitled to equal rights. He acted on his convic-tions and in large measure prompted the dramatic changes in the status of homosexuals that took place in the United States in the second half of the 20th century.
24 Magnus Hirschfeld, (born May 14, 1868, Kolberg, Prussia [now Kołobrzeg, Poland]—died May 14, 1935, Nice, France), German physician who was an important theorist of sexuality and a prominent advocate of gay rights in the early 20th century. Hirschfeld was born to Jewish parents in a Prussian town on the Baltic coast.