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→Prevalence of homosexuality going down in cultures that become more conservative
''See also:'' [[Prevalence of homosexuality going down in cultures that become more conservative]]
''See also:'' [[Prevalence of homosexuality going down in cultures that become more conservative]]
The History.com article indicates:
{{Cquote|On a Friday night in February 1926, a crowd of some 1,500 packed the Renaissance Casino in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood for the 58th masquerade and civil ball of Hamilton Lodge.
Nearly half of those attending the event, reported the New York Age, appeared to be “men of the class generally known as ‘fairies,’ and many Bohemians from the Greenwich Village section who...in their gorgeous evening gowns, wigs and powdered faces were hard to distinguish from many of the women.”
The tradition of masquerade and civil balls, more commonly known as drag balls, had begun back in 1869 within Hamilton Lodge, a black fraternal organization in Harlem. By the mid-1920s, at the height of the [[Prohibition]] era, they were attracting as many as 7,000 people of various races and social classes—gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and straight alike...
With the end of Prohibition, the onset of the [[Great Depression|Depression]] and the coming of World War II, LGBTQ culture and community began to fall out of favor. As Chauncey writes, a backlash began in the 1930s, as “part of a wider Depression-era condemnation of the cultural experimentation of the 20's, which many blamed for the economic collapse.”
The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay patrons. In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes “provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often—in the mind of the public and in the mind of authorities—equated with gay men.”
This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also “made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.”
By the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and suburban living, the advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.
Drag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never went away entirely—but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish so publicly again.<ref>[https://www.history.com/news/gay-culture-roaring-twenties-prohibition How Gay Culture Blossomed During the Roaring Twenties], History.com, 2019</ref>}}
=== Martin Luther King viewed homosexuality as a problem ===
=== Martin Luther King viewed homosexuality as a problem ===