The pardons were granted two years later. The petition, signed by almost half a million people, called for a pardon for more than 49,000 British gay men convicted under historic anti-gay laws in the United Kingdom. Sean Gallup/Getty Imagesįamily members of World War II codebreaker Alan Turing deliver a petition to No. LGBT German police officers in uniform lay a wreath at a memorial to gays and lesbians murdered in the Holocaust by the Nazis, in Berlin on June 21, 2014. This article is adapted from The Case for Gay Reparations, Omar G. By the time the Obama administration lifted the policy in 2011, some 13,000 LGBTQ troops had been dismissed from their jobs.
Surely, the absence of gay reparations-or even a discussion of them-in the United States is not out of a rosy history free of systemic discrimination toward the LGBTQ community, although a valid argument can be made that this history is not particularly well known, save, perhaps, for “don’t ask, don’t tell.” That infamous 1993 policy allowed gays, lesbians, and bisexuals to serve in the military as long as they kept their sexual orientation a secret. “The actions taken by the NYPD were wrong-plain and simple … and for that I apologize,” said New York Police Commissioner James O’Neill. The closest the country has come to embracing gay reparations was in 2019, when, on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the New York Police Department issued a belated apology for the raid that triggered the rebellion. In still other countries, gay reparations have centered on a pardon to anyone convicted under laws that criminalized same-sex attraction, as in the United Kingdom, which in 2017 issued a posthumous pardon to those convicted of “gross indecency,” including Alan Turing, the mathematician credited with shortening the end of World War II or even financial compensation for wages or pensions lost due to having spent time in prison or in a mental institution because of a homosexual offense, as in Spain since 2009 and in Germany since 2016.īut none of this momentum has reached the United States. In 2008, the German government opened a monument to gay victims of the Holocaust, an unknown number whom perished in Nazi concentration camps, many of them victims of gruesome medical experiments intended to eradicate their homosexuality.
In others, they have entailed memorializing the victims of state-sponsored repression of homosexual citizens. In most countries, gay reparations are limited to a government apology to the LGBTQ community for past wrongs and a promise to do better in the future. The policies hardly comprise a homogenous experience, and they do not entail giving people money simply for being gay, as some suspect. In the last decade alone, Canada, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom have embraced gay reparations. It may seem surprising to American readers, but one of the most vibrant human rights movements around the world today is “gay reparations,” or policies intended to make amends for the legacy of systemic discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity.