It wasn’t until 2003 — nearly 40 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed — that the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) gave LGBTQ people their Constitutional rights, ruling in Lawrence v. Texas that intimate consensual conduct is a liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. For the better part of American history, same-sex activity was treated as a crime to be persecuted under the law, for which citizens could be denied healthcare, housing, education, employment, and access across the board.
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The American Psychiatric Association deemed it a pathology, dedicating more than 20 years to formalizing a language to describe and behaviors to treat what they erroneously deemed a form of mental illness until the egregious diagnosis was removed from the DSM-III-R in 1973. That same year, the Supreme Court modified its definition of obscenity in the landmark case Miller v. California from the of “utterly without socially redeeming value” to that which lacks “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” providing protections to previously censored works of art and culture under the First Amendment.
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Much as same-sex activity was criminalized, so was any expression of — a practice dating back to the 1873 Comstock Laws, a set of federal acts for the “Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” which criminalized sending “obscene” materials, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, personal letters with sexual content, or any information related to their topics through the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). In brief, to be LGBTQ in America posed life-threatening risk.
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