Less than 10 years ago, was it really illegal to be homosexual in some states of the US? It just seems so recent and hard for me to believe because i'm so young. What was it like back then for gay people?
Everything was done on the down-low and in private! It must have been horrible. Homosexuality was illegal in Ireland until 1993, when a openly-gay Senator, David Norris, took Ireland to the European Court of Human Rights. I still can't get my head around that the title of the court case was NORRIS vs. IRELAND. Can you imagine your name vs. a country in a court of law?
It wasn't illegal to be homosexual necessarily; there were just sodomy bans, which includes anal sex, and in some cases oral sex. I believe that some states went so far as to include any position besides the missionary as sodomizing. Most states did away with these laws in the latter half of the 20th century, but it wasn't until 2003 that the Supreme Court ruled that sodomy laws were unconstitutional in the rest of the states. The laws were largely targeted at gay men, but as I understand it, they really weren't actively enforced. So no, it's not like people in the 70s and 80s went after homosexuals with torches and pitchforks; it was just a stupid way of marginalizing homosexuality. That said, things are exponentially better now than they were even 15 or 20 years ago.
I do recall a law in California back in the 1950's that required psychologists to find a cure for homosexuality. Apparently it was still on the books until about 2010.
A famous case happened in Atlanta, I believe, where police busted into someone's home, wrongly (defective search warrant with the wrong address or something), and in the process of breaking in, found the occupant and his boyfriend having sex in their bedroom. They were arrested for sodomy. That case, if memory serves, went all the way to the Supremes, who determined that the arrest (and the law) was unconstitutional because it violated the right to privacy. A similar statute went down in Texas, though I don't remember the details. As other posters have said, it's not so much that it was illegal to be gay but that it was illegal to have homosexual activity (most commonly described as "sodomy" with various graphic explanations, varying by state.) And, as others have said, for the most part, the statutes were rarely enforced. Last I heard, oral sex (hetero or homo) was still illegal in Virginia. Obviously that isn't vigorously enforced. And I believe a couple of states even have statutes prohibiting masturbation on the books. A lot of oddball laws exist, but they are rarely pulled out of the mothballs unless a prosecutor or officer is simply looking for some violation to throw at someone.
