Homosexuality In The 1950's

529 Words3 Pages

In the 1950s American society was your typical suburban neighborhood with white picket fences, and behind it was a happily married husband and wife. Over the years people realized that not everyone wanted to be just like that. Some men didn’t want wives, rather they wanted husbands. Once this was out in the open people were in hysterics treating the dubbed ‘homosexuals’ like garbage. Most thought they were mentally ill or had some past trauma that made them feel that way. Riots, protests, and arrests have been made because people just wanted to be themselves. It got so out of hand that they started throwing accusations at politicians and celebrities. In the beginning, homosexuality was made public in 1947 from a news article. Time and Newsweek had noticed the popularity of the topic from their first and slowly added more. Looking at those articles they used hateful and degrading words such as: degenerate, evil, and disgusting. Even Feminists had claimed that homosexuality was as The Thistle cited,” a psychological disorder all thanks to overprotective mothers.” The articles even mentioned that they thought homosexuals were emotionally unstable from past trauma. These type of articles flocked a huge amount of attention from the public. The articles were extremely prejudiced and …show more content…

Their lack of knowledge on it caused them to believe that they had a “sociopathic personality disturbance.” They even claimed that it was extremely difficult to treat. An article such as EverGreen claimed that they used ‘psychoanalytic treatment’ to help cure them. Half of the time they didn’t even see them as normal humans. They treated them like they were some immoral being. As an example, around the Cold War era, they claimed homosexuals were just as bad as communists. They went as low as to say they were even child molesters. This was mentioned by the Human Rights Campaign on their article about LGBT history