About Us!!

Hi readers! Thank you for coming to our blog. We are three undergraduate students at the University of Maryland studying rhetoric. After considerable amounts of research into the subject of the Gay Rights Movement, we are excited to share our blog, Stepping Out of the Closet in 1960s America, with you. As concerned global citizens, the three of us share a collective interest in contemporary social issues, specifically gay rights. Everyday, each of us is affected by what goes on in the LGBT community, either by direct involvement, empathy for a friend, or support of a loved one. In order to understand the Movement today, we decided to look back and examine the roots of gay rights and how it all started.

The texts we have chosen, a photograph by Leonard Fink of Stonewall Riot Demonstrators, and the cover article to the newspaper “Come Out!” both portray a burgeoning gay community in the 1960s. Looking first at the photograph we see a frustrated group of Americans, ready to literally “smash gay oppression” as it existed at the time. In the “Come Out!” article a group of liberal writers promoted the idea that gay is okay. Together these texts fed off the power of other social movements in the 60s, such as Second Wave Feminism and the Civil Rights Movement. Both the photograph and the newspaper article, capturing the social change of the 1960s, inspired frustrated citizens to promote a more visible gay community.

Something we find unique about the Gay Rights/LGBT Movement is that it has grown more vocal and visible as time has progressed. A person’s sexuality is no longer something resigned to shady nightclubs, or shamed by a majority of Americans; however, time also presents us with a host of new charged issues within this community. Controversies such as marriage equality, job protection, and gender neutrality appear everyday in newspapers, broadcasts, and blogs like ours across the country. The LGBT Movement is not going away, it is only gaining momentum in our lives. At the time of writing, eight states have been added to the growing list of those that allow same-sex marriage, bringing the number of states where marriage equality is a realization to 26. Readers of our blog will better understand and appreciate the ongoing progress of the movement if they take the time to reflect on its origins.

We chose to first share our analyses of stasis and kairos in order to contextualize the texts for the readers. The examination of the stasis gives readers an overview of the main arguments of the texts so that they can know what to focus on as they read the blog. As our primary audience was not alive during the 60s, our kairotic analysis gives them the historical perspective to view the texts. We did not follow a predetermined order for the remaining posts. This variety, we hope, gives readers the chance to make their own connections between the rhetorical elements, thus providing fresh ideas and perspectives for everyone.

Just as the analyzed texts made their own pathetic appeal to their audiences in the 60s, we too beseech our readers to empathize with those in the LGBT community today. For readers who may have views against those expressed on this blog, please realize your ignorance can be harmful; for those who already support a loved one in the LGBT community, understand that action is required to perpetuate LGBT Rights. We hope readers of all views, genders, and sexualities will come away from our blog with new insights regarding the origins of the movement.