Current positions of the ACLU include: opposing the death penalty ; supporting gay marriage and the right of gays to adopt ; supporting birth control and abortion rights ; eliminating discrimination against women, minorities, and gays ; supporting the rights of prisoners and opposing torture ; supporting the right of religious persons to practice their faiths without government interference ; and opposing any government preference for religion over non-religion, or for particular faiths over others.

This move garnered criticism from the left ( for being too tentative in promoting gay rights ) and from the right ( who opposed any effort to allow gays to serve ).

In 1985, Lancaster, a longtime supporter of gay rights, joined the fight against AIDS after his close friend, Rock Hudson, contracted the disease.

She has advocated for stricter gun control laws and gay rights, and voted against California's Proposition 8 during the 2008 elections.

As described by Ronald Bayer, a psychiatrist and gay rights activist, specific protests by gay rights activists against the APA began in 1970 when the organization held its convention in San Francisco.

In 1971, gay rights activist Frank Kameny worked with the Gay Liberation Front collective to demonstrate against the APA's convention.

The gay and lesbian rights movement in the 1970s and 1980s raised the issue by publicizing several noteworthy dismissals of gay servicemembers.

Challenging the constitutionality of DADT, the plaintiffs stated that the policy violates the rights of gay military members to free speech, due process and open association.

In 2006, Soulforce, a national LGBT rights organization, organized its Right to Serve Campaign, in which gay men and lesbians in several cities attempted to enlist in the Armed Forces or National Guard.

* 1959 – Bob Paris, American bodybuilder and gay rights advocate

The FDP supports gay rights ; former party leader Guido Westerwelle is openly gay.

* 1998 – Voters in Maine repeal a gay rights law passed in 1997 becoming the first U. S. state to abandon such a law.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender ( LGBT ) people and their allies have a long history of campaigning for what is generally called LGBT rights, also called gay rights and gay and lesbian rights.

Andy Warhol is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement.

He is best known for his pioneering activism in gay liberation and prison reform, but also for his writing about punk rock and subculture.

In recent days, the Village has maintained its role as a center for movements that have challenged the wider American culture, for example, its role in the gay liberation movement.

Various communities have worked not only together, but also independent of each other in various configurations including gay liberation, lesbian feminism, the queer movement and transgender activism.

The GLF ’ s " A Gay Manifesto " set out the aims for the fledgling gay liberation movement, and influential intellectual Paul Goodman published “ The Politics of Being Queer ” ( 1969 ).

In Canada, the coming into effect of Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1985 saw a shift in the gay rights movement in Canada, as Canadian gays and lesbians moved from liberation to litigious strategies.

The Stonewall riot acquired symbolic significance for the gay rights movement and came to be seen as the opening of a new phase in the struggle for gay liberation.

Many new activists consider the Stonewall uprising the birth of the gay liberation movement.

The growth of lesbian feminism in the 1970s at times so conflicted with the gay liberation movement that some lesbians refused to work with gay men.

Dismissing the reason simply as political correctness, Bronski writes, " gay liberation was a youth movement whose sense of history was defined to a large degree by rejection of the past ".

Within months after Stonewall radical gay liberation groups and newsletters sprang up in cities and on college campuses across America and then across all of northern Europe as well.

Although Hay claimed " never to have even heard " of the earlier gay liberation struggle in Germany — by the people around Adolf Brand, Magnus Hirschfeld and Leontine Sagan — he is known to have talked about it with German émigrés in America, including Rudi Gernreich.

Reviewers have responded, however, that the founders and movements were closely aligned ; that they shared core texts, proponents and slogans ; and that others have stated that, for example, the gay liberation critique was " made possible by ( and indeed often explicitly grounded in ) traditions of antipsychiatry ".

Hippies emerged from a society that had produced birth-control pills, a counterproductive war in Vietnam, the liberation and idealism of the civil rights movement, feminism, gay rights, FM radio, mass-produced LSD, a strong economy, and a huge number of baby-boom teenagers.

Framed and debated as a privacy issue, coming out of the closet is described and experienced variously as a psychological process or journey ; decision-making or risk-taking ; a strategy or plan ; a mass or public event ; a speech act and a matter of personal identity ; a rite of passage ; liberation or emancipation from oppression ; an ordeal ; a means toward feeling gay pride instead of shame and social stigma ; or even career suicide.

With the spread of consciousness raising ( CR ) in the late 1960s, coming out became a key strategy of the gay liberation movement to raise political consciousness to counter heterosexism and homophobia.

The Greek lambda symbol (" L " for liberation ), triangles, ribbons, and gender symbols are also used as " gay acceptance " symbol.

Within the movement for gay and lesbian rights, a debate between advocates of sexual liberation and of social integration was taking shape, with Andrew Sullivan publishing an essay " Here Comes the Groom " in The New Republic in August 1989 arguing for same-sex marriage: " A need to rebel has quietly ceded to a desire to belong ", he wrote.

" In a critique of radicalism in the gay liberation movement, Bruce Bawer's A Place at the Table ( 1993 ) advocated the legalization of same-sex marriage.

* Spiritual liberation, sexual " revolution " or " liberation ," i. e., gay liberation, somewhat catalyzing women's liberation, black liberation, Gray Panther activism.

* Castro clone — or simply ' clone '— a fashion movement arising from the gay community in the Castro district of San Francisco, California

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 ).

Leaders of the lesbian and gay movement of the 1970s, 80s and 90s often attempted to hide masculine lesbians, feminine gay men, transgendered people, and bisexuals from the public eye, creating internal divisions within LGBT communities.

However, others within LGBT movements have criticised identity politics as limited and flawed, elements of the queer movement have argued that the categories of gay and lesbian are restrictive, and attempted to deconstruct those categories, which are seen to " reinforce rather than challenge a cultural system that will always mark the nonheterosexual as inferior.

A 1962 gay march held in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, according to some historians, marked the beginning of the modern gay rights movement.

One of the values of the movement was gay pride.

The Rainbow flag ( gay movement ) | Rainbow flag

As a pioneer of the local gay press movement, he was one of the founders and former president of both The National Gay Press Association and the National Gay Newspaper Guild.

Some historians consider that a new era of the gay rights movement began in the 1980s with the emergence of AIDS, which decimated the leadership and shifted the focus for many.

Under the rules of the Conservative movement, the adoption of multiple opinions permits individual Conservative rabbis, congregations, and rabbinical schools to select which opinion to accept, and hence to choose individually whether to maintain a traditional prohibition on homosexual conduct, or to permit gay unions and clergy.

In the late 1980s the primary seminary of the Reform movement, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, changed its admission requirements to allow gay people to join the student body.

Of the latter two, the gay rights movement and the feminist movement connected after a violent confrontation occurred in New York City in the 1969 Stonewall riots.

What followed was a movement characterized by a surge of gay activism and feminist consciousness that further transformed the definition of lesbian.

Marvin was a liberal Democrat who opposed the Vietnam War and declared his support for the gay rights movement in a January 1969 interview with Playboy magazine.