He might have included Fayetteville, where gays had for years mixed openly with “straights” at George’s Majestic Lounge. Stone charged the “redneck” police with harassment of gays “at every opportunity,” while Weeks called this “poppycock.” Stone remarked on the beginnings of a “gay liberation” movement in Little Rock (Pulaski County) but claimed that conditions were better for gays in Hot Springs (Garland County) and Fort Smith (Sebastian County).
In 1974, in a reverse of the previous order, a search under “Sodomy” in the Arkansas Gazette reads, “see Homosexuality.” The two articles in 1974 feature a debate between Larry Stone, the recently crowned Miss Gay Little Rock, and Little Rock police chief Gale F. The number of homosexuals in America was said by the survey to remain “stable” since Alfred Kinsey, who, in his classic 1948 study, found that at least ten percent of men were either “exclusively or predominantly homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five.” The ten percent figure was later adopted by gay activists as an estimate of the homosexual population, although Kinsey had reported a number closer to four percent for the same demographic among women. Whether or not this translates into an actual rise in same-sex behavior is impossible to measure however, there is little doubt that more people were beginning to talk about such previously taboo subjects as homosexuality in the early 1970s. To put this in perspective, an Arkansas G azette article from 1973 on a survey released by Playboy magazine reports, “There have been dramatic increases in the frequency with which Americans engage in various sexual activities and in the number of persons who include formerly rare or forbidden techniques in sexual repertoires,” including premarital, oral, and anal intercourse. The state law was an equal-opportunity statute, applying to “unnatural” sex acts between both homosexuals and heterosexuals. Supreme Court upheld Arkansas’s sodomy law, denying an appeal by two Miller County men convicted of having sex at a public rest area along Interstate 30. The first reference to homosexuality in the bound index to the now-defunct Arkansas Gazette is from October 1973, four years after the Stonewall Riots (the first “shot” fired in the Gay Revolution, when a group of Greenwich Village gays stood up to police during a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York) and reads, “see Sodomy.” The article states simply that the state Supreme Court had upheld the then-135-year-old Arkansas law, which read: “Every person convicted of sodomy or buggery will be imprisoned in the state penitentiary for not less than one year nor more than 21 years.” The following month, the U.S. However, recent years have seen an increasing organization of LGBTQ+ people in Arkansas, primarily in the emergence of student groups at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County) and other institutions of higher education. The social movement in Arkansas in support of rights for LGBTQ+ people (an umbrella term that covers lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, and more LGBT was also used in the past) has historically been represented by such legal organizations as Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), Lambda Legal, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).