Long before the United States was established, Indigenous nations across North America held diverse understandings of gender and sexuality. While these traditions varied widely between nations, they remind us of a simple truth: people we would today describe as LGBTQI+ have always been part of American history.
But that history has also been shaped by who was allowed to belong. For most of the 20th century, US immigration law explicitly excluded people on the basis of homosexuality or so-called “sexual deviation,” while LGBTQI+ people faced widespread criminalization, surveillance, and discrimination within the country.
For LGBTQI+ individuals who were immigrants, refugees or seeking safety, these systems could overlap in particularly consequential ways. Being queer could mean not only facing persecution at home, but being denied the ability to enter, remain or build a life in the United States.
The Impact of the World Wars
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For most of the 1900s, federal immigration law treated homosexuality as grounds for exclusion. At the same time, migration within the country after the Second World War created boom towns, as people from all over the US moved to cities and major port centers. This migration later helped LGBTQI+ people find community. Greater visibility, however, was accompanied by intensified government scrutiny and policing.
Efforts to suppress queer people emerged from coast to coast. The government increasingly linked homosexuality with supposed moral and national-security threats. In Washington, D.C. in 1947, the US Park Police announced a “Sex Perversion Elimination Program” that specifically targeted gay men. The following June, then-President Harry Truman signed Public Law 615, a regulation that targeted “sexual psychopaths,” which queer people were then classified under.
By the 1950s, the matter intensified. The Lavender Scare, which unfolded alongside the Red Scare, led to the investigation, surveillance and removal of thousands of people from federal government employment because they were suspected of being gay or lesbian. That year, Republican US Sen. Joseph McCarthy ignited a national witch hunt against communists, now known as the Red Scare. Later, anticommunist sentiment combined with mass homophobia after McCarthy alleged that a communist was a “homosexual,” generating mass panic about queer people, who were thought to possess “weak moral character,” per Britannica.
Police raids on gay bars remained rampant, setting the stage for what would later become the Stonewall Uprising. For LGBTQI+ immigrants, encounters with police could carry an additional consequence: immigration enforcement. Roberto Flores Rodriguez, a Cuban-born gay immigrant, for instance, was arrested in New York City for loitering with the purpose of “inducing others to commit lewd and indecent acts,” according to a police officer’s sworn complaint. This charge was routinely used to criminalize queer people’s presence in public spaces. Flores Rodriguez omitted this fact in a later attempt to migrate to the US, and was convicted of perjury in 1956 and deported.
Greater LGBTQI+ immigrant criminalization continued as internal anxieties about communism intensified. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 was the culmination of that sentiment as it blocked immigrants who were "afflicted with psychopathic personality." This terminology was intentionally developed to block queer people. Thirteen years later, queer immigrants were explicitly impacted by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which barred “aliens afflicted with sexual deviation.” In action, these policies meant that a wide number of people suspected of being queer were targeted by immigration officials, sometimes based on stereotypes, appearance or perceived behavior. Public accounts include the 1961 case of Sara Quiroz, who was stopped at the southern border because she had short hair and trousers. She was later refused reentry to the US after disclosing she was a lesbian and unsuccessfully challenged the decision as the US courts upheld her deportation.
At the same time, the civil rights movement brought greater attention to social justice movements. And while broader national acceptance of gay and lesbian people remained lightyears away, some progress was made. In December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. That shift helped undermine one of the medical assumptions that had been used to justify discrimination against LGBTQI+ people, including immigration policy — leading then-APA President to ask the Immigration and Naturalization Service to stop deporting gay immigrants.
From Exclusion to Recognition
Change came slowly. Activists, lawyers and LGBTQI+ communities spent decades challenging the laws and policies that restricted where queer people could live, work, love and seek safety. By 1980, immigrants were no longer directly asked about their sexual orientation during the immigration vetting process. But it took ten more years for activists to successfully advocate for a new policy that repealed the existing ban against queer migrants through the Immigration Act of 1990. In 1994, then-Attorney General Janet Reno designated Matter of Toboso-Alfonso — a 1990 Board of Immigration Appeals decision granting asylum to a gay Cuban man on the basis of his sexual orientation — as binding precedent, formally establishing that persecution based on sexual orientation could qualify as grounds for refugee protection in the United States.
But immigration rights and LGBTQI+ rights continued to intersect in other ways. For decades, same-sex couples were barred from accessing the immigration benefits available to married couples — a U.S. citizen could not sponsor a foreign-born same-sex partner for a green card, and binational couples faced an impossible choice between family and country. That changed in 2013, when the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Windsor struck down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which had defined marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman for federal purposes, and opened the door to equal immigration benefits for same-sex married couples for the first time. This laid the groundwork for lawsuits challenging state bans on same-sex marriages, and eventually led to the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015.
Today, LGBTQI+ people seeking safety in the United States are once again navigating an immigration system undergoing significant change. Policies affecting asylum, visas, detention and deportation can have profound consequences for people who may already be fleeing persecution because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.
History shows us that LGBTQI+ rights and immigrant rights have never existed in separate lanes. The freedom to live openly, cross a border, seek refuge, reunite with family and build a life in safety are deeply connected.
For generations, LGBTQI+ people and their allies have challenged the systems that told them they did not belong. LGBTQI+ History Month is an opportunity not only to remember that history, but to recognize what it asks of us now: to keep building a world where no one is denied safety, belonging or the right to live openly because of who they are or where they come from.
