September 10, 1975: Gays at work.Today, many workplaces have their own lesbian and gay groups. In 1975, Randy Shilts, then a cub reporter for The Advocate, wrote about the inception of gay professional organizations. Such groups, he explained, were "seeking to alleviate the fear and loathing fear and loathing - (Hunter S. Thompson) A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous - Intel 8086s, COBOL, EBCDIC, or any IBM machine except the Rios (also known as the RS/6000). of gay white-collar workers through unity for gay people and education for straight people." The first gay professional organization was the Task Force on Gay Liberation of the American Library Association American Library Association, founded 1876, organization whose purpose is to increase the usefulness of books through the improvement and extension of library services. , formed in 1970 with relative ease. "Other caucuses, such as the Gay Nurses Alliance (GNA GNA Ghana News Agency GNA Globewide Network Academy GNA Georgia Nurses Association GNA Galanthus Nivalis Agglutinin GNA Grand National Alliance (Pakistan) GNA Greater Nanticoke Area ), have had tougher sledding," Shilts wrote. "Their first move was to apply for a booth in the 1974 Pennsylvania Nurses Association convention. Their mere application caused a storm of controversy, and the permit was denied." Instead, GNA staged a walk-through exhibit and held a highly attended slide show, "Gay Patients/Straight Health Care," at the national American Nurses Association American Nurses Association, n.pr professional organization of registered nurses created to encourage high standards in nursing care, pro-mote nursing as a profession, and lobby Congress for issues of concern to nurses. . As lesbian and gay psychologists and psychiatrists fought to declassify de·clas·si·fy tr.v. de·clas·si·fied, de·clas·si·fy·ing, de·clas·si·fies To remove official security classification from (a document). de·clas homosexuality as an illness, they were also forming professional organizations. In 1973 the newly founded Association of Gay Psychologists zapped a "Behavior Therapy for Homosexuals" seminar, and by 1975, a more conservative group had formed within the American Psychiatric Association The American Psychiatric Association (APA) is the main professional organization of psychiatrists and trainee psychiatrists in the United States, and the most influential world-wide. Its some 148,000 members are mainly American but some are international. . "While a handful of courageous gay professionals are taking chances, many more aren't," Shilts wrote. So while Shilts concluded that gay groups had not "hit professional organizations with the force of Hurricane Mary," he added that "the breezes of change are slowly blowing over the white-collar world." Find this 1975 Advocate article on gays in the workplace in the entirety at www.advocate.com |
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