Miss Rosen hits it out of the park yet again. From her fantastic article for blind magazine titled “A Brief Story of Homoerotic Photography in America, Part I”:
In the first of a two-part series, we explore how LGBTQ artists created homoerotic photography when it was criminalized and the impact of the emerging Gay Liberation Movement.
The American Psychiatric Association deemed [homosexuality as] 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 “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. . .
Much as same-sex activity was criminalized, so was any expression of [it]. In brief, to be LGBTQ in America posed life-threatening risk.
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