Love! Valour! Compassion (Historical Context)

Historical Context

The characters in Love! Valour! Compassion! may not be representative of "mainstream" America in the 1990s, but they face all of the same cultural and political events the rest of the country experienced in that decade, as well as some challenges and crises unique to the gay community. The 1990s in America were years dominated by the Bill Clinton presidency; a soaring economy; an amazing boom in electronics, computers, Internet communications, and commerce; a growing healthcare crisis; increasing acts of terrorism involving United States citizens and the military around the world; and high-profile acts of violence here at home, covered by television news that began to operate twenty-four hours a day.

For homosexuals in America, it was also a decade of important gains, controversial setbacks, and tremendous losses. For much of the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was largely ignored by the federal government. First named "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in 1982 at a time when 1,614 cases were diagnosed in the United States and 619 people died from the disease, it was not until 1987 that President Ronald Reagan publicly commented on AIDS and significant attention was focused on its prevention and treatment. By that time, 71,176 people in the United States had been diagnosed with AIDS, and 41,027 were dead.

By the early 1990s, several popular and high-profile figures, including Rock Hudson, Liberace, and Arthur Ashe, had died from AIDS-related complications. In 1990, a teenage hemophiliac named Ryan White received national attention when he announced that he had contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion, and the following year professional basketball player Magic Johnson announced to the world that he was HIV-positive and had likely contracted AIDS from casual, unprotected, heterosexual sex. Suddenly, the AIDS epidemic was not just a cause for concern among homosexuals; it was a cause for concern for everyone. While the disease continued to spread around the country and around the world, more and more resources were provided for AIDS research and prevention campaigns, and the tide began to turn. The estimated annual number of AIDS-related deaths in the United States fell approximately 14 percent from 1998 to 2002, from 19,005 deaths in 1998 to 16,371 deaths in 2002.

In addition to the threat of AIDS, homosexuals in America in the 1990s faced other prominent social and cultural issues. In 1993, the United States military, in an effort to maintain an official ban on gays and lesbians serving in the armed forces while still protecting the civil rights of homosexual soldiers, introduced a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allowed homosexuals to serve their country, provided they kept their sexual orientation a secret. In September 1993, Congress passed a law supporting the controversial military policy.

In a similarly mixed act of legislation, President Clinton signed the "Defense of Marriage Act" in 1996. The act denied federal recognition of same-sex marriages and gave states the right to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages that were licensed in other states. The act did not prohibit states from deciding for themselves whether to legalize gay marriages, but it did make it more difficult for gay couples in long-term relationships to receive the same recognition and rights as heterosexual married couples. That same year, Hawaii became the first state to legalize same-sex marriage.

On the employment scene, in a separate action taken at the same time as the Defense of Marriage Act was passed, the Senate voted against a bill called the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) that would have banned employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. In 2001, ENDA was reintroduced, but by 2003 it had still not passed the Senate, even though some of the nation's largest and best-known employers, such as Walmart and Disney, had begun to forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in their own corporate policy statements.