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The history of homosexuality in the 20th century until the 80s to better understand the general mentality in Stranger Things

The excellent analysis of the presence of triangles around Mike and all the meaning behind them by the brilliant @eeriesilkworm made me want to expand on the part where she discusses the use of the pink triangle for homosexuals during World War II in Nazi concentration camps. I believe that providing historical context, even if it takes place years before the events in Stranger Things, is not only a strong indicator of the depth of the symbolism the show’s artistic team is implementing, but also crucial to understanding how the widespread and normalized homophobia depicted in Stranger Things actually existed in real life during the 1980s—and why it is important to recognize the extent of the homophobia and oppression that prevailed at the time. It seems to me that those most skeptical about the idea of Mike concealing his homosexuality by dating a girl are often unaware of the severity of the oppression faced by the LGBTQ+ community in that era.

If I were to make a chronological post about the history of homosexuality, it would last for hours, and it would be impossible to mention everything, especially since, depending on the country and culture, the history of this community is not the same. I will focus mainly on the situation in pre-war Europe and the United States.

To begin somewhere within this dense topic, I will talk about Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish German neurologist. Very early in his life, he committed himself to fighting against the discrimination faced by homosexuals. In 1897, he founded in Berlin the “Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,” the first association in history dedicated to defending homosexual rights. His goal was clear: to abolish Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code, which criminalized homosexual relations between men. To achieve this, the committee conducted investigations, carried out research, and relied on testimonies. For the first time, homosexuality was studied based on genuine scientific and medical reasoning.

The committee had a simple yet powerful motto: “Through science to justice.” Hirschfeld sought to prove that homosexuality was neither a choice, nor an illness, nor a perversion, but a natural and irrepressible orientation. In its struggle, the committee received support from major figures of the time, including Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and many others.

In 1898, a bill was introduced to abolish Paragraph 175, but it failed. Nevertheless, this first attempt marked the beginning of a struggle. For the first time, a sexual minority organized itself, advocated, and spoke in its own name. For the first time, doctors, intellectuals, and jurists publicly asserted that homosexuality was neither a crime nor a disease. But at the dawn of the 20th century, another world was emerging—a world more violent, more ideological, more deeply structured around hatred. The fight for homosexual rights, barely begun, was about to face the two greatest political upheavals of the coming century. This time, the consequences would be monumental.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the progress achieved at the end of the previous century endured for a time. Slightly more visible than before, homosexuality continued to be theorized. Thanks to the work of Carl Maria Kertbeny and Magnus Hirschfeld with his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual movement began to emerge. This movement for homosexual rights developed mainly in Germany but also found echoes elsewhere in Europe and in the United States.

Art, too, began to embrace the subject: in France, in 1911, the writer André Gide anonymously published Corydon. For the first time in the history of French literature, an author dared to openly champion love between men. The same was true for Marcel Proust, the most celebrated author of his era, whose homosexuality inspired characters in his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), one of the volumes of which is significantly titled Sodom and Gomorrah. In 1909, Akademos—the first French magazine to address homosexual culture—was founded by the poet Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen. Though it lasted only a year, it nonetheless reflected a new creative ferment.

Then came the First World War: four years of violence, combat, and trenches, but also of camaraderie at the front. In the trenches, men lived side by side, and social mixing reached unprecedented levels. In this world where women were absent and death was omnipresent, sexuality found other forms of expression, and deep bonds formed between soldiers. Officially, homosexuality at the front did not exist; it remained illegal in most of the European countries engaged in the war and was legally punished in the armed forces. The subject remained taboo for decades and was almost never addressed.

In France, it was not until 2014 that the Historical Service of the Ministry of Defence (the SHD) opened its files and made its archives available to allow historians to work on the subject—literally only ten years ago. Yet, many letters exchanged between soldiers have been found, some revealing deep, even romantic, affection. Some historians believe that not all of these relationships were homosexual in the modern sense of the term, but rather circumstantial—linked to the absence of women, the need for tenderness, warmth, and human connection in an environment where violence was extreme and daily. Military reports sometimes euphemistically referred to such cases as “excesses of camaraderie.”

As one might imagine, the high commands did not look kindly upon soldiers engaging in such acts. In the French army, for example, there is the case of Corporal Jean Auguste Moret, executed in 1915 for “abandoning his post in the presence of the enemy.” In reality, military reports indicate that Corporal Moret had left his trench to inform the chaplain of cases of homosexuality within his squad. An embarrassing matter, it was quickly covered up by the French general staff, which silenced the corporal for good. On the British side, 270 soldiers were court-martialed and imprisoned for “indecent acts.”

But the First World War, which took millions of men away from their homes, was also an unprecedented space of freedom for female homosexuality. During the war, women entered the public sphere in massive numbers, working in factories, hospitals, and even the military sector. This upheaval of the traditional social order, combined with the prolonged absence of men, opened new spaces of closeness between women. In Scars Upon My Heart, for example—an anthology of poetry by women who experienced the war—several texts speak of the pain of separation between women or the comfort found in the arms of a female comrade.

Another example is Radclyffe Hall, a British poet and novelist who volunteered for the Red Cross during the war and took the opportunity to set up home with her partner. After the war, Hall published The Well of Loneliness in 1928, a novel deeply inspired by that period, depicting a lesbian woman serving as an ambulance driver at the front. The book reflects a new reality: that of women freed from traditional marital frameworks, discovering the possibility of loving and desiring differently.

This assertion of female desire beyond the norm was not limited to the Anglo-Saxon world. At the same time in Spain, another figure emerged: Victorina Durán, an artist, feminist activist, and openly lesbian woman, who founded the Sapphic Circle of Madrid. This informal, clandestine network offered a safe space for discussions and exchanges among women sharing the same sexual orientation.

The First World War, in addition to redrawing the map of Europe, thus triggered a profound societal upheaval that called into question a number of established principles. Meanwhile, in Russia, the October Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 radically altered the political and social climate, as homosexual acts were decriminalized by Lenin as early as December of that year.

The interwar period therefore saw an increasingly assertive homosexual identity. In London, Paris, Vienna, New York, and Berlin, homosexual meeting places multiplied, and more and more activist movements formed to demand the decriminalization of homosexuality. In Berlin, Magnus Hirschfeld continued his fight against the infamous Paragraph 175, still in force. He even succeeded in having the German police grant transvestism permits upon presentation of a medical certificate that he issued through the Institute of Sexology, a private body he founded in 1919 to serve as a research center on homosexuality and transgender identity.

In this climate of relative tolerance from the authorities, the first homosexual anthem was written in 1921: Das Lila Lied. Its author, Kurt Schwabach, a lyricist for Berlin’s most prominent cabarets, dedicated the song to Magnus Hirschfeld.

Homosexuality also experienced a new golden age across the Atlantic, particularly in New York’s Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. The singer Gladys Bentley, openly lesbian, performed in a tuxedo in jazz clubs, playing with her androgynous image. She sang openly suggestive lyrics recounting her romantic adventures with women. She is considered one of the first drag kings in history.

Yet this relative interlude of freedom would ultimately prove short-lived. After the financial crash of 1929, political tensions and the rise of authoritarian regimes put an end to this tentative opening. Little by little, cabarets closed, publications were banned, and homosexuals came under surveillance. The noose tightened, and the horizon of freedom narrowed. The European totalitarian regimes—Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s USSR, Franco’s Spain, and Hitler’s Germany—would go on to persecute, hunt down, and criminalize homosexuality as never before.

In the USSR, Stalin personally reinstated the criminalization of homosexuality in 1933. Sexual relations between men were punishable by up to five years in the gulag, and although the law did not explicitly mention relations between women, the Soviet authorities were nonetheless repressive toward them—particularly on a social and psychiatric level. In fact, Stalin associated homosexuality with mental illness, framing it as a personality disorder linked either to bourgeois decadence or to fascist perversion.

In Mussolini’s fascist Italy, no law officially criminalized homosexuality. According to Mussolini, such a law was unnecessary—after all, in Italy, there were supposedly only virile, dominant, active men. Yet, in 1938, the fascist regime enacted measures to isolate homosexuals, viewing them as a threat to moral order. Men suspected of homosexuality were exiled, most notably to the island of San Domino in the Tremiti archipelago of the Adriatic Sea. This was a form of silent social “purification,” in which homosexuality was monitored, isolated, and silenced.

But it was under Nazi Germany that the persecution would be the most violent. From the moment they came to power in 1933, the Nazis targeted homosexuals as enemies of the State. For Hitler, homosexuality was an ideological and moral danger that threatened the virility of the nation and the birth rate of Germany. Homosexual organizations were banned, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology was attacked, looted, and its works destroyed in the first Nazi book burnings.

In 1935, Nazi authorities amended Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality, to make it harsher. It no longer punished only sexual acts but any behavior deemed homosexual. As a result, arrests soared, and between 1936 and 1939 there were more than 8,000 convictions per year. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 100,000 men were arrested for homosexuality under the Third Reich.

This policy of repression became even more brutal after the opening of the first concentration camps, as between 10,000 and 15,000 homosexuals were deported to places such as Dachau or Lichtenburg. In the camps, homosexuals were identified by an inverted pink triangle sewn onto their uniforms and were prohibited from contact with other prisoners to prevent “moral contagion.” They often endured especially harsh treatment and were subjected to torture, forced castration, and even medical experimentation. At Buchenwald, for example, SS officer Carl Værnet attempted to “cure” homosexuality by implanting testosterone capsules in men he used as test subjects.

Pierre Seel, a Frenchman of Alsatian origin arrested at the age of 17 for frequenting a park known as a gay meeting spot, was sent to Schirmeck, a Nazi “re-education” camp in Alsace. In his memoirs, he recounted witnessing his partner being torn apart alive by dogs trained by the guards—a chilling testimony that was not published until 1994.

After 1945, with the fall of Nazism, the subject remained a long-standing taboo in post-war society. At the Nuremberg Trials, the crimes committed against homosexuals were never mentioned, and surviving homosexuals were not recognized as victims of Nazism. Worse still, some were even imprisoned under Paragraph 175, which remained in force in the Federal Republic of Germany until 1994. It was only in 2002 that Germany officially rehabilitated homosexual deportees.

The 20th century thus saw homosexuality swing between extremes: on one side, the first struggles for greater recognition, and on the other, authoritarian regimes and wars that brought about unprecedented persecution. But after the Second World War, the world began to change, and although many countries continued to criminalize homosexuality, modern societies evolved, and homosexual movements soon emerged, demanding greater recognition, visibility, and freedom—or simply the right to exist.

At the end of the Second World War, the focus was on reconstruction—but for homosexuals, liberation had not come. Repressive laws remained in force, Paragraph 175 still stood in Germany, and homosexuality continued to be seen as a mental illness or a social scourge. As the world gradually split into two distinct blocs—the Soviet East and the Western West—the condition of homosexuals remained persecuted, regardless of the political model.

The USSR, still ruled by Stalin, continued to enforce Article 121 of the Soviet Penal Code, which made homosexuality a crime punishable by five years in the gulag. It was therefore a subject that remained taboo in Soviet society. Sergei Eisenstein, for example, the great filmmaker and central figure of Soviet cinema, always hid his homosexuality to the extent of marrying his secretary in what appears to have been an unconsummated marriage. This repressive policy of the Soviet regime became a standard exported to the rest of the communist bloc, including Poland, Romania, Albania, and even Cuba. Fidel Castro, the island’s first communist leader from 1959 onward, regarded homosexuality as a bourgeois mental illness. In Cuba, homosexuals were even imprisoned in forced labor camps—the Unidades Militares de Ayuda a la Producción—where those considered “deviants” were supposedly to be re-educated.

On the American side, the situation was hardly better. At the war’s end, homosexuality was still classified as a psychiatric disorder, and sodomy remained punishable by prison sentences in many U.S. states. In the 1950s, as the Cold War raged, a political and ideological witch hunt erupted: this was the era of McCarthyism, named after U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. It was an unrelenting campaign to root out communists infiltrated into American institutions—so-called “enemies from within.” This became known as the “Red Scare.” What is often forgotten, however, is that American homosexuals were also regarded as an internal threat. Seen as more vulnerable to blackmail, morally unstable, even inherently disloyal, the U.S. administration believed homosexuals could be manipulated by the enemy because of their shameful secrets.

As a result, homosexuals were hunted down alongside communists—this was called the “Lavender Scare.” Between the 1940s and the 1960s, a true purge swept through government administrations, particularly in diplomacy, the military, and intelligence services. Thousands of civil servants were dismissed for actual or suspected homosexuality. The Eisenhower administration went so far as to formally ban the hiring of homosexuals in the federal civil service in 1953. This hunt naturally fueled a climate of social paranoia, in which homosexuality became a suspicion, a danger, and a taboo.

It was not until the 1960s that real change began to emerge. The decade was marked by a profound transformation of attitudes known as the “sexual revolution.” This was a cultural, political, and social movement that challenged the traditional moral order based on patriarchy, religion, and the repression of desire. In essence, it was the moment when sexuality began to be separated from procreation. Thanks in part to the widespread availability of the contraceptive pill, feminism gained new ground, denouncing the control of women’s bodies. But the sexual revolution also broke a fundamental barrier around marginalized sexualities, such as homosexuality. For the first time since the war’s end, this taboo was discussed openly. This loosening of morals did not resolve everything, but it prepared the ground for the struggles to come.

And it would not take long. The real historical turning point came in New York on the night of June 27–28, 1969. At that time, the city prohibited men from cross-dressing, from dancing together, and even from being served alcohol if they were homosexual. Yet certain hidden places existed to allow society’s outcasts to celebrate despite the prohibitions. One bar became more famous than the rest: the Stonewall Inn. Run by the Mafia, it was one of the few establishments to welcome homosexuals, drag queens, transgender people, the homeless, hippies, drug users, and more.

Police raids were frequent, involving identity checks, arbitrary arrests, and public humiliation. But in the night of June 27–28, 1969, during yet another raid, something changed. The patrons refused to submit. It was the last straw. The police intervention quickly escalated; a crowd gathered, fought back, and pushed the police away. A full-blown riot broke out around the Stonewall and lasted several days. For the first time, the homosexual community did not bend—it defended itself, claimed its right to exist, and formed a movement.

In the months that followed, activist groups sprang up in several major U.S. cities to organize a movement of demands. The “Gay Liberation Front” (GLF), for example, was the first structured militant movement to emerge in the summer of 1969. The GLF did not merely seek tolerance—it demanded total liberation. To achieve this, it organized demonstrations, distributed leaflets, founded activist newspapers, and worked to bring homosexuality out of the shadows. On June 27–28, 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots, the first Pride marches were held in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and even San Francisco.

This movement gradually spread across the Western world, with groups like the GLF appearing in Canada, England, Switzerland, Germany, and even France, where the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire was founded in 1971. Thus began the creation of modern homosexual activism. The famous rainbow flag, emblem of the LGBT movement, was designed in 1978 by American graphic designer and activist Gilbert Baker for a Pride march in San Francisco.

But as the struggle gained momentum across the world in the 1980s, a brutal and tragic setback occurred with the emergence of AIDS.

Identified in 1983, HIV was quickly associated with male homosexuality due to the high number of cases within the gay community. At the time, the media and resurgent homophobic rhetoric referred to it as a “gay cancer” or “pink plague.” In the United States, televangelist Jerry Falwell, a leading figure of the Christian right, declared, for instance, that AIDS was “a divine punishment against homosexuals.”

More broadly, governments were slow to respond to the epidemic, and fear spread rapidly through societies. Yet, this tragedy also galvanized activism. In France, for example, organizations such as Act Up denounced political inaction and the authorities’ disdain. Though horrific, AIDS became a driving force for visibility and global awareness.

Thanks to Act Up’s hard-hitting actions, to the efforts of Lady Diana—who was among the first public figures to come into direct contact with patients—and to the media coverage surrounding the illness of international stars such as Freddie Mercury, public perceptions of AIDS eventually began to shift. These changes pushed political leaders to invest in research and improve communication about the epidemic.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, homosexual rights advocacy began to find a wider resonance, in step with evolving attitudes.