South, Queer History in the —
Queer History in the Southern United States has taken on a distinct flavor owing to this region’s unique religious and racial history. The rise of conservative Christianity in the South has fostered similarly conservative attitudes towards expressions of gender and sexuality that deviate from Biblical norms. As a result, the South's major metropolitan centers, Atlanta and Houston, have played important roles in the development of its queer communities and civil rights movements. These cities provide homes to two prominent gay publications, The Southern Voice and The Houston Voice, and a variety of political organization, such as Georgia Equality (add more here). In June of 1971, the Georgia Gay Liberation Front (GGLF) organized the first Gay Pride March down Atlanta's main thoroughfare, Peachtree Street, to Piedmont Park. On June 11, 1978, when Anita Bryant, who had founded her “Save Our Children” campaign a year earlier in Dade County, Florida, was slated to address the Southern Baptist Convention at the Georgia World Congress Center, Atlanta Pride was temporarily moved to that date in response to her presence.
While evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities were generally active in leading and sustaining anti-gay campaigns, it is also true that churches and church-related activities have served as clandestine meeting spaces for gay and lesbian people. This is true particularly in rural communities, where churches have often served as the primary, or potentially only, social outlets for gay and lesbians to meet other gay and lesbian individuals. Today, more liberal, gay-affirming churches have been established, in part, due to the centrality of church life for many gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. Reverend Troy Perry, for example, founded the first Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, California, in part because of his experiences growing up as an evangelical Christian in Florida and, later, in Georgia.
Southern cities have become home to prospering black and Latino gay and lesbian communities. For some lgbt people of color, particularly those persons who must remain “on the down-low” due to real or perceived non-acceptance of their sexuality within their own racial or ethnic communities, churches and church-related activities retain a central location in social life. At the same time, there are also more venues in which to be “out” with regards to lgbt sexualities. Mainstream festivals such as Gay Pride and New Orleans’ Southern Decadence, began in 1972, serve as spaces in which the significance of racial differences my be lessened, in favor of lgbt unity, or heightened, due to the underrespresentation of queer people of color. Alternatively, Black Gay Pride celebrations have been well established in cities like Atlanta, Nashville, and Dallas.
One of the most notable events in Southern, as well as national, gay history is the 1986 Supreme Court decision handed down in Bowers v. Hardwick (478 U.S. 186), which upheld Georgia's anti-sodomy laws. This ruling was overturned by the Georgia Supreme Court in the 1998 case Powell v. State of Georgia (270 Ga. 327). A more sweeping victory over sodomy laws came with the 2003 Supreme Court case Lawrence v. Texas (539 U.S. 558) in which the Court ruled that sodomy laws violated a person's right to due process under the Fourteenth Amendment.