The History of LGBTQ

A Long Journey to Equality

The chart below is created based on Professor John Boswell at Yale University.

 

The outline of significant development according to Professor Boswell:

  • Up to 18th century, LGBTQ was not defined as a type of people different from others. They were not categorized as a class of human being.
  • In the 19th century, it was treated as a form of mental illness
  • By the 1940s, LGBTQ was discussed as an aspect of psychopathic, paranoid, and schizoid personality disorders.
  • Since 1940, LGBTQ was listed as a pathology, and doctors made bold to treat it. Lesbians were forced to submit to hysterectomies and estrogen injects. However, the treatment made no change to the sexual orientation.
  • In 1948, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, who found Kinsey Institute in Indiana University in 1947, in his book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, states that LGBTQ was common across lines of family, class, and educational and geographical background.
  • In 1959, the Neuroendocrinologist at UCLA, Charles Barraclough in his study, How Neurologically Do Men Differ From Women?, found that there was a difference in the hypothalamus that regulates body temperature, hunger, thirst, and sexual drive.
  • In 1965, another neuroendocrinologist at Oxford University, Geoffrey Harris further studied on the hypothalamus on rats and learned that xx rat exposed to y hormone had no ovulation while xy rat exposed to x hormone had ovulation. It was a significant finding that further proved the neurological factor of LGBTQ.
  • In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed LGBTQ from its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, signifying the end of LGBTQ’s official status as a disease. Today, doctors don’t try to change sexual orientation.
  • In 1977, Roger Gorski, a neurobiologist at UCLA, in his study, Sexual Differentiation of the Brain, located a second sexual dimorphism in the hypothalamus, which was five times larger in volume in the male rat than in the female rat.
  • Since 2012, studies on epigenetic effects on LGBTQ have been developed.

Conclusion

God is known to all human even before they are conceived. This means no one can be unknown to God. So, believing in God is somewhere in our system whether we acknowledge it or not. In other words, believing in God, knowing God, being loved in God, having hope in God, is open to all humans. Therefore, whoever prevents a person from seeking God is sinning against both God and humans. Whoever passes by the oppressed and leave them in bleeding to death is also committing a sin.

Church community has committed these two folds of the sin against oppressed members of society, LGBTQ. Church community has closed doors on them instead of warmly welcoming them just the way the Creator creates them. In addition to barring them from entering the church door, church community has suppressed them to the graveyard instead of making them free and equal just as they are in the eyes of God the Creator.

LGBTQ is the community of relationship rather than reproduction. In creation, humans are created in the relationship. Their hearts are designed to love and be loved, for God the Creator is Love. We are not talking about Hollywood –style- immoral sexual behaviors. That is merely immoral as Paul stated, and this is still not the church business mainly because churches are no longer on the law but love. We are talking about humans genetically unique. Life is a gift from God. So are LGBTQ. Who are the churches to condemn the gift of God? Who can change the love of their heart? No one can, and no one should attempt to change their hearts against their nature.
LGBTQ is the community that churches must protect rather than condemn. They have been severely abused and mistreated by both churches and public. The chart below summarizes the status of LGBTQ. Even though a person thinks LGBTQ is a choice, the person can still accept them when the person asks himself or herself whether she or he is heterosexual by his or her choice. No one believes in false that heterosexuality is a choice. It is given even before the birth. So do LGBTQ. Therefore, all are natural in the eyes of God the Creator. All are included in the work of Jesus Christ. Churches have to learn to see them in the eyes of God.