North American and Australian LGBT Movement and Interest Groups

Abstract A study of the LGBT movement within Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Australia reveals the movement’s youth and vitality. Only since the mid-1900s has there been what one might identify as an organized social movement within any of these four countries. A key similarity across the social movements in these four countries has been the formation of associated interest groups. These groups have transformed the LGBT movement. Scholarly research regarding the movement and its attendant interest groups reveals decades of growth and development. These changes over the years allow scholars to investigate topics such as how the LGBT movement compares to other social movements, how various sexual and gender minority communities have been incorporated into the larger movement, and how movement groups have utilized various strategies in pursuit of movement goals. In the United States, the gay rights movement was one of a few distinct movements included within a larger new social movement. These various movements shared the fact they were organized around a goal of identity expression. (The extent to which a gay rights movement morphed into a broader LGBT movement is also an important part of the U.S. story.) In Canada, the modern movement for LGBT individuals exemplified a gradual process rising out of the post–World War era; it was attached to a rise in Quebecois nationalism and the growth of First Nations peoples’ rights movements. Conversely, Australia has seen a slower progression than Canada or the United States, in part because Australia has had a relatively inactive set of social rights movements over the same period. (There is evidence that Australian social rights movements came to consciousness more from a global than a domestic narrative.) Finally, with respect to Mexico, one might assume that LGBT successes there have lagged behind those in the United States because of a more vibrant social movement community in the United States and also because Mexicans are assumed by some to be more religious than residents of the United States. However, there is evidence that the LGBT movement has had greater electoral and policy successes in Mexico. This could in part be due to a history in Mexico of LGBT activists identifying with other revolutionary agents who sought broad structural changes in that country.

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