someone engaged is such acts, he or she kept the matter to himself or herself, not only because there were laws against homosexual conduct but also because the community at large disapproved of it as much as it disapproved of any kind of abnormal sexual behavior. Not only did society at large disapprove of a homosexual life style, there were laws prohibiting such conduct. Sexual behavior has always been covered by law, not only in Western society but also in Eastern society. Laws were put into place to protect the very young, who were believed to be susceptible to deliberate corruption of innocence. Statutory rape laws were instituted to protect male children against homosexual conduct, as a hedge against the abuse of youngsters by people of the same sex. Other laws existed to protect society against public flaunting of immoral conduct. The idea was to prohibit the conduct by law, and then you won’t have to be exposed to it in the public arena. Coming to the end of the 1960s, gay and lesbian groups were springing up across the United States and Canada, jumping from fifteen in 1966 to fifty in 1969 (D’Emilio, 1983). They no longer wanted to define themselves in terms left over to them by the heterosexist opposition; rather, they sought to build a new gay culture where gay people could be free. Civil rights and integration seemed like endless begging for the charity of liberals who conveniently ignored the everyday physical and psychological violence exerted by homophobic society (Adam, 1987). On the night of Friday 27 June 1969, New York police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall. Bar raids were an American institution-a police rite to “manage the powerless and disrespectable-and in the preceding three weeks, five New York gay bars had already been raided (Adam, 1987). What made the stonewall a symbol of a new era of gay politics was the reaction of the drag queens, dykes...
