For example, defensive gay litigation of the 1950s soon gave way to the affirmative impact-type litigation of the civil rights movement. This identity transformation through analogy cemented gay rank-and-file perception of the social treatment they faced as unjust, and helped determine what remedies gays would seek. Furthermore, through this attempted identity transformation, activists replaced stigmatizing medico-religious models of homosexuality with self-affirming civil rights-based models. By transforming themselves in the image of a successful black civil rights minority, activists attempted to win over skeptical courts in a period when equal protection doctrine was still quite fluid.
Gay organizers in the 1950s and 1960s moved from avoiding identity-based claims to analogizing gays to African-Americans. This Note helps complicate these dynamics, arguing that gay identity was not just suppressed and then liberated, but substantially transformed by activist efforts during this period, and that this transformation fundamentally affected the nature of gay activism. Existing accounts of early gay rights litigation largely focus on how the suppression and liberation of gay identity affected early activism.
