To understand lesbian and gay liberation is to realize the central role that the minority press has played in the formation of identity-based politics, whether the case in point is the African American, feminist, or lesbian and gay movement. The lesbian and gay movement that seemed to appear “spontaneously” across the country shortly after the 1969 Stonewall riots in New York City was in fact the result of a process begun early in a post-World War II urban gay world that was largely invisible to heterosexual society, and whose growing self-consciousness in the decades prior to Stonewall can be traced in large part to the pioneering lesbian/gay press.
The first stirrings of the modern gay rights movement in the United States came about during a period of political and sexual repression. The United States in the late 1940s was obsessed with a desire to return to a state of prosperity and “normalcy” after nearly two decades of disruption: economic depression in the 1930s followed by the Second World War. The country was gripped by the anti-Communist fervor of the Cold War, which prompted the witch-hunts led by such politicians as Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). From the late 1940s through the 1950s, actual or suspected homosexuals were targets of persecution just as real or suspected Communists were; in fact, the categories were often collapsed into the commie-queer bogeyman. As historian John D’Emilio points out, it took little effort to incorporate lesbian women and gay men into the demonology of the period: “According to extreme anti-Communist ideologues, left-wing teachers poisoned the minds of their students; lesbians and homosexuals corrupted their bodies. Communists bore no identifying physical characteristics. … Homosexuals too could escape detection. Coming from all walks of life, they insinuated themselves everywhere in society, including the highest reaches of government.”
Because most people confronted with accusations of homosexuality during these witch-hunts quietly resigned, it is impossible to determine the number of careers and lives that were destroyed. In 1949, during the early stages of McCarthyism, ninety-six “perverts” were fired by the State Department; by 1953 the Los Angeles Hearst newspaper could run the headline: “State Department Fires 531 Perverts, Security Risks.” A Senate committee reported 4,954 cases between 1947 and 1950.
In 1948 America was shocked by the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, followed in 1953 by a companion volume on females. As gay critic Michael Bronski put it, the Kinsey Report (as it was popularly known) told homosexuals what they already knew: they were everywhere; at the same time, it also reinforced many heterosexuals’ most basic fear—that the invisible, undetectable enemy was everywhere.1
In this environment, when gay people began to organize in order to fight back against their oppression, it is no surprise that the organizations they created emphasized secrecy and discretion. The earliest important organization, the Mattachine Society, took its name from mysterious medieval figures in masks, and its form was modeled on the Communist Party, in which secrecy, hierarchical structures, and centralized leadership predominated. Within a few years of its founding in Los Angeles in the winter of 1950, as the Mattachine Society began to attract attention and increased membership, the original leftist leadership was purged and the centralized structure relaxed. After 1953 the Mattachine Society was much more assimilationist than radical.
Throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s the homophile movement, as it was then generally called, slowly expanded and deepened the self-awareness of lesbian and gay people as a distinct, self-conscious, and embattled minority. Central to this awareness was the process known as “coming out”—the individual realization that one was homosexual, and the acknowledgment of this sexual identity to other gay people. As more lesbians and gay men came out, they began to break the silence of decades, demanding an end to laws that criminalized gay people and promoted discrimination and harassment.
In 1951 the American homosexual movement received a significant boost with the publication of the first full-scale account and polemic for equality, Donald Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. Writing as a gay man (but under a pseudonym that referred to André Gide’s homosexual apologia, Corydon), Cory presented a forceful argument that homosexuals constitute a minority within American society: “Our minority status is similar, in a variety of respects, to that of national, religious and other ethnic groups: in the denial of civil liberties; in the legal, extra-legal and quasi-legal discrimination; in the assignment of an inferior social position; in the exclusion from the mainstream of life and culture.”
Cory’s powerfully written, openly subjective description and analysis of the conditions of gay male life in midcentury America served as a stimulus to the emerging homosexual self-consciousness, and Cory was viewed as an inspirational leader of the nascent homophile movement.2 In a 1963 follow-up book, The Homosexual and His Society: A View from Within, written with John LeRoy, Cory restated his thesis “that the invert is a member of a minority group, differing from ethnic and other minorities essentially in that his status as a minority group is unrecognized,” and celebrated the “feeling of group recognition [that] has grown among these people,” leading to the launching “of a struggle for the rights guaranteed to all citizens of a free democratic society.” Describing the beginnings of that movement in “small secret underground groups,” Cory and LeRoy note that, “With diminishing secrecy, several distinct groups and societies have found their way on the American scene, fighting a legal, social and political battle in order to help win public acceptance for the invert and his way of life.”3
When the 26-year-old lesbian who called herself Lisa Ben created Vice Versa (“a magazine for gay gals”) in 1947, she was reflecting the increasing sense of group recognition cited by Cory: “Whether the unsympathetic majority approves or not, it looks as though the third sex is here to stay.” She wondered “whether the war by automatically causing segregation of men from female company for long periods of time has influenced fellows to become more aware of their own kind,” and recognized the possibilities created by changing social and economic conditions: “Today, a woman may live independently from man if she so chooses and carve out her own career. Never before have circumstances and conditions been so suitable for those of lesbian tendencies.”4
Lisa Ben worked as a secretary for RKO Studios and was able to use her office typewriter to produce her magazine. “I put in five copies with carbon paper, and typed it through twice and ended up with ten copies of Vice Versa. That’s all I could manage. There were no duplicating machines in those days, and, of course, I couldn’t go to a printer.” Vice Versa only lasted for nine issues before Lisa Ben’s work conditions changed and she could no longer type the magazine at the office, but in the words of Jim Kepner, founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles, it “established the basic format for the general gay magazine—with editorials, with short stories, with poetry, with book and film reviews, and with a letters column.” It certainly lived up to the subtitle on its front page: “America’s Gayest Magazine.”
In the words of John D’Emilio, “the pioneering effort to publish magazines about homosexuality brought the gay movement its only significant victory during the 1950s.” The magazines he referred to were all, like Vice Versa, published in California: ONE was founded in Los Angeles in 1953, Mattachine Review and the Ladder were launched in San Francisco in 1955 and 1956. But unlike Vice Versa they reached far beyond the editors’ immediate circle—they were distributed nationally and built a combined circulation of about 7,000. They each lasted more than a dozen years, surviving attacks from government agencies and officials determined to shut them down. According to journalism historian Rodger Streitmatter,
People in both large cities and small towns throughout the country were not only reading the articles but were becoming engaged in the debates. Readers of the magazines did not passively accept information from the editors, but they actively participated in forging the ideology of lesbian and gay liberation. Just as the founding of the first African-American newspaper has been credited with marking the beginning of a national movement to secure black civil rights in the early 19th century, by creating a communications medium that allowed women and men all over the country to converse with each other, ONE, Mattachine Review, and the Ladder began to build a national lesbian and gay community.
ONE was founded by a few gay men in Los Angeles who were frustrated by the feeling that they were just talking to themselves and the knowledge that the media wouldn’t print anything about their cause. As Don Slater, one of the founders, later put it, “A social movement has to have a voice beyond its own members. Talking to each other in small groups does not create a social movement.” They named the magazine (and the organization that produced it) from a quotation by Thomas Carlyle: “A common bond of brotherhood makes all men one.”5 America’s first openly sold magazine by and for homosexuals, ONE took a more militant stand than did the Mattachine Society, which by then was adopting a strategy of achieving acceptance by conforming to heterosexual standards. The head of the Mattachine Society, which had relocated to San Francisco, was a former newspaperman, Hal Call, and in 1955 he founded the Mattachine Review as a tool to promote the organization’s philosophy that public attitudes toward homosexuals would improve as soon as “sex variants began behaving in accordance with societal norms.”
Neither Mattachine nor ONE attracted substantial contributions from women, and it took a group of lesbians to fill this vacuum. In 1955 four lesbian couples living in San Francisco began an organization they called the Daughters of Bilitis (the name came from French poet Pierre Louys’s The Songs of Bilitis), and a year later DOB leaders Phyllis Martin and Del Lyon began to publish the Ladder. The first issue stated: “We enter a field already ably served by ONE and Mattachine Review. We offer, however, that so-called ‘feminine viewpoint’ which they have had so much difficulty obtaining. It is to be hoped that our venture will encourage the women to take an ever-increasing part in the steadily-growing fight for understanding of the homophile minority.”
The three magazines carried news of developments around the country affecting lesbians and gay men, and ONE’s editor Jim Kepner accumulated a network of contributors scattered throughout the United States who sent him clippings that he then distributed to the magazines. They also monitored and reported on the efforts of the fledging homophile movement, as it was then called.
ONE, Inc., introduced an array of programs in addition to ONE magazine, all intended to support their mission of homosexual liberation: offering a book service, publishing a guide to homophile organizations and, in 1956, instituting lectures and classes on “An Introduction to Homophile Studies,” “The Homophile in History,” “The Homosexual in American Literature,” “Introduction to the Sociology of Homosexuality,” and “The Orthodox Freudian Texts on Homosexuality,” among others. By 1959, Jim Kepner reported in One Confidential, the institute’s newsletter, the basic course ran for thirty-six weeks and had attracted over two hundred people. The “Homosexual in History” course also ran for thirty-six weeks and “we’ve been amazed at the volume of material brought to light—not easily. … We were swamped in every age and country, despite the efforts of many historians to bury this material.”
The courses, like the magazine, included arguments countering the claim that homosexuality is unnatural, or that homosexuals are necessarily mentally ill. ONE offered extensive accounts and detailed refutations of the arguments made by prominent psychiatrists of the period, exposing the contradictions and faulty logic in the writings of such noted authorities as Albert Ellis:
Having specifically defined exclusive homosexuals and exclusive heterosexuals as similarly neurotic, Dr. Ellis inexplicably judges the former to be more urgently in need of therapy, and to compound the contradiction, his concept of full cure seems to be to encourage a person to lose all interest in, or openness to, homosexual activity, even though, by his definition, this merely substitutes one exclusivist neurosis for another. His definition of neurosis is identical with his definition of cure.
ONE reported and commented on debates that were going on within various religious denominations and informed its readers about developments in other countries, particularly the progress toward legal reform in Great Britain, where the Wolfenden Report of 1957 urged the abolition of laws against homosexual acts by consenting adults in private. Mattachine Review, which mirrored the Mattachine Society’s belief that progress would be achieved through educating and encouraging progressive experts, was the first to publicize the groundbreaking research of psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker, who demonstrated that there were happily adjusted homosexuals and that there was no inherent association between psychopathology and homosexuality.6 The Ladder led the way in arguing that lesbian and gay people had to think of themselves as a political force, not merely as an oppressed minority. Their role became influential when a candidate for mayor of San Francisco in the 1959 election accused Mayor George Christopher of transforming the city into “the national headquarters for sex deviants,” and singled out the Daughters of Bilitis in a warning to parents to guard their daughters. The editors of the Ladder responded with a special issue that helped bring the gay perspective into what became a major public debate. The mainstream media condemned the antigay tactic and Mayor Christopher was reelected by a wide margin. This was a turning point in the emergence of a politically active and visible lesbian and gay community in San Francisco.
The magazines operated with minuscule budgets and volunteer labor—Dorr Legg was hired by ONE in April 1953 as the first paid employee of the gay movement, for “$25 a week, when available. … It generally wasn’t available.” Very few ads were ever placed by businesses; even businesses supported by gay customers were afraid to advertise in these magazines. Despite these odds the circulation of the magazines rose throughout the 1950s, with ONE reaching 5,000 subscribers each month, and Mattachine Review around 1,000. The Ladder had the lowest circulation—a pattern to be repeated later with other lesbian publications—but its readership was much larger than its official circulation of around 700. One Washington, D.C., subscriber invited friends over every month for a “Ladder party” at which she would read the magazine out loud to as many as thirty or forty other lesbians. Similar gatherings were held around the country. Jim Kepner later noted, “Our reach was wider than our limited membership and circulation figures would indicate, as we challenged homophobic psychiatrists, legal, and religious ‘authorities’ and gave voice to those who had previously been voiceless. Gay gossip spread our ideas to many who never saw our magazine.”
Gay people weren’t the only ones who were paying attention to these small magazines: the FBI quickly began to investigate the publications, calling them subversive, disgusting, and shocking. In August 1953, Los Angeles postal officials tried to stop ONE from mailing issues on the grounds of obscenity, but the Post Office in Washington overruled them. Shortly thereafter a Republican senator from Wisconsin, Alexander Wiley, wrote to the Postmaster General, protesting “the use of the United States mails to transmit a so-called ‘magazine’ devoted to the advancement of sexual perversion.” Now the Post Office began a serious campaign, confiscating the October 1954 issue of ONE, and the magazine had to take the matter to court. In the meantime, FBI agents maintained a constant harassment of the editors of all three magazines; the editors, in turn, infuriated the FBI by claiming that “everyone knew J. Edgar Hoover was queer.” As Hal Call put it recently, “I told the FBI agents the same things forty years ago that historians are just saying today.” Despite mounting legal costs, ONE pursued its appeal of the Post Office rulings through the federal courts. In January 1958 the U.S. Supreme Court overruled the decision of the lower courts in a landmark decision establishing that the subject of homosexuality was not, per se, obscene.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision the editors of ONE felt liberated to “advocate homosexuality.” At a time when homosexual acts were illegal throughout the United States, the magazine’s editors asserted the “right, even in the face of much opinion and some law to the contrary, to say that homosexuality is a good thing for homosexuals. We also have a constitutional right to add, for the sake of discussion, that we might think homosexuality a good thing for everybody. We wouldn’t expect that opinion to be popular, but we have the right to express it.” Reflecting on the role of the gay press in the 1950s, Jim Kepner noted: “Most gays then felt that our only concern was to get the police off our backs. My writings were central to advocating the need for Gay self-respect and education, and for building Gay community consciousness and institutions.” And, he added, “We did the job while professional journalists stayed in the closet for thirty years.”
In the spring of 1959 the Village Voice printed an article by Seymour Krim called “The Revolt of the Homosexual,” which purported to be a dialogue between a homosexual and a skeptical heterosexual. The homosexual asserts a demand for “simple human rights” and easily refutes the standard arguments presented by the “heterosexual.” Krim’s imagined dialogue takes on a more militant tone, as he continues:
Those who come after us will laugh at pressures now put on men to keep up a front of courage, indifference to delicacy, male superiority. If I prefer gentleness to harshness, I’m not being a woman. I’m being human, something you might be ashamed of with your strait-jacket notion of masculinity. Like it or not, we will force our way into open society and you’ll have to acknowledge us.
Written a full decade before Stonewall, Krim’s warning reflected the growing willingness of gay people to risk visibility and demand the right to speak for themselves.
In July 1962 a public radio station in New York City, WBAI-FM, broadcast a program, “The Homosexual in America,” in which a panel of heterosexual psychiatrists spent ninety minutes talking about homosexuals and mental illness. This familiar pattern of talking about gay people rather than allowing them to speak for themselves was one time too many for a young gay activist named Randy Wicker. Wicker marched into the station the next day and demanded equal time. The station program manager agreed to the demand and scheduled a second program, this time featuring Wicker and seven other gay men. The announcement drew ridicule from some in the press: a radio-TV critic said the station was “scraping the sickly barrel-bottom” by giving these men the opportunity “to tell their perverted side of the admittedly sad but certainly sinful story.” However, the program was greeted more favorably by others, such as Jack Gould in the New York Times, who believed it encouraged a “wider understanding of the homosexual’s attitudes and problems.”
The following autumn Randy Wicker received a call from a reporter at the New York Times. The reporter, Robert Doty, had been given an unusual assignment by the new metropolitan editor, Abe Rosenthal: to investigate the increasingly visible gay male community. The managing editor at the Times, Harrison Salisbury, later recalled a lot of discussion within the paper about the assignment, as “homosexuality … wasn’t thought of as something you brought forward and you talked about. … They wondered if this was the sort of thing the Times should do.” But if Salisbury and his colleagues were worried that Doty’s story might glamorize the subject of homosexuality, their concerns were unfounded. True, Doty was taken on a tour of the gay world by Randy Wicker and introduced to “normal” gay men. He was given the pioneering studies by California psychologist Evelyn Hooker that found that gay men were as well-adjusted psychologically as were straight men. Yet when it came to writing his story, Doty reverted to the familiar journalistic practices of “objectivity” and “balance.” What this meant was that Doty’s direct contact with healthy homosexuals was overruled by the opinions of “official sources.”
Thus, when the nation’s leading newspaper first put gay people on its front page in December 1963, they were motivated to break their silence by the realization that gay people were beginning to live their lives more openly. That this was not a development welcomed by the New York Times itself could be seen in the headline and lead paragraph of this first-ever front-page article focusing on gay people:
GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN
The problem of homosexuality in New York became the focus yesterday of increased attention by the State Liquor Authority and the Police Department. The liquor authority announced the revocation of the liquor licenses of two more homosexual haunts that had been repeatedly raided by the police. … The City’s most sensitive open secret—the presence of what is probably the greatest homosexual population in the world and its increasing openness—has become the subject of growing concern of psychiatrists, religious leaders and the police.
Doty’s article was typical for the period in that he accepted without question the views of those defined as “legitimate” authorities—political, legal, medical, and religious—and the only comments that came from gay people were buried at the end of the story. Reporters and readers are aware of the significance of sequencing in news stories: the most important facts and opinions come in the first paragraphs—the lead—and the rest of the article proceeds in descending order of importance. The message was both familiar and clear: gay people were the least important sources of information and opinion about their own lives.
As hostile as it was, the Times article signaled an end to the pervasive silence about lesbians and gay men in the press. As the 1960s progressed, more and more articles focusing on gay people began appearing in newspapers and magazines, many of them echoing the Times’s concerns over the growing visibility of gay people. Even more alarming to the press was the insistence of many gay people that they were neither morally degenerate nor mentally ill. In March 1964 the New York Times ran its second front-page story about homosexuals. Spurred by a report from the New York Academy of Medicine, the article was headlined, “Homosexuals Proud of Deviancy, Medical Academy Study Finds.”
The most influential national magazines of the period, Life, Time, and Newsweek, also noticed the presence of the emerging lesbian and gay community and its growing demand for an end to the stigmas imposed by law, medicine, and religion. In June 1964, Life magazine published an extensive article on “Homosexuality in America,” although like most stories of the period it focused exclusively on gay men and ignored lesbians. The introduction to the story, printed over a two-page photograph of shadowy figures standing in a San Francisco leather bar, captures the stance of the media as they confronted the specter of homosexuality:
HOMOSEXUALITY IN AMERICA: A SECRET WORLD GROWS OPEN AND BOLDER. SOCIETY IS FORCED TO LOOK AT IT—AND TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT.
These brawny young men in their leather caps, shirts, jackets and pants are practicing homosexuals, men who turn to other men for affection and sexual satisfaction. They are part of what they call the “gay world,” which is actually a sad and often sordid world. On these pages, LIFE reports on homosexuality in America, on its locale and habits, and sums up what science knows and seeks to know about it.
Homosexuality shears across the spectrum of American life—the professions, the arts, business and labor. It always has. But today, especially in big cities, homosexuals are discarding their furtive ways and openly admitting, even flaunting, their deviation. Homosexuals have their own drinking places, their special assignation streets, even their own organizations. And for every obvious homosexual, there are probably nine nearly impossible to detect. This social disorder, which society tries to suppress, has forced itself into the public eye because it does present a problem—and parents especially are concerned. The myth and misconception with which homosexuality has so long been clothed must be cleared away, not to condone it but to cope with it.
This article clearly reflects the familiar concern with “understanding” homosexuals in order to contain the social problem they represent—in an echo of McCarthyism the article asked, “Do the homosexuals, like the Communists, intend to bury us?” Still, it was relatively progressive, and Life later called on New York state to follow the lead of Illinois which, in 1961, became the first state to make homosexual behavior between consenting adults legal.7 But these signs of progress were short-lived, and these national magazines soon reverted to the hostile patterns of earlier years.
In a January 1966 essay, “The Homosexual in America,” Time paid brief acknowledgment to the growing belief among psychiatrists that homosexuals were not mentally ill, but then devoted most of the essay to undermining that perspective. It concluded:
It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life. As such it deserves fairness, compassion, understanding and, when possible, treatment. But it deserves no encouragement, no glamorization, no rationalization, no fake status as minority martyrdom, no sophistry about simple differences in taste—and above all, no pretense that it is anything but a pernicious sickness.8
The 1960s ushered in an era of social activism across the United States as the civil rights movement, followed by the antiwar movement and the women’s movement, engaged thousands of citizens in grassroots political campaigns. The lesbian and gay movement took on increased fervor as activists began appearing in the Northeast as well as the West Coast. In Washington, D.C., a government employee named Frank Kameny fought back after he was fired because of his sexuality and became one of the key figures in building the gay movement. Kameny founded the Mattachine Society of Washington, which pursued a far more active and militant strategy than its West Coast counterpart, and coined the slogan “Gay Is Good” in a deliberate echo of the familiar “Black Is Beautiful.”9
One of the first vehicles for Kameny’s arguments was the Ladder, which was taken over in 1963 by a new editor, Philadelphia activist Barbara Gittings. One of Gittings’s first acts was to add the words “A Lesbian Review” to the front cover of the Ladder. As she explained, “The subtitle said, very eloquently, I thought, that the word ‘lesbian’ was no longer unspeakable.” Even more daring, Gittings replaced the line drawings previously used on the cover with photographs of actual lesbians, many photographed by her lover and colleague Kay (Tobin) Lahusen.
Another new magazine was begun on the East Coast in 1964, this time in Philadelphia. Drum, published by the Janus Society, a homosexual rights organization founded in 1960, took its name from a famous statement by Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer.” Editor Clark Polak said that he “began Drum magazine as a consistently articulate, well-edited, amusing and informative publication. I envisioned a sort of sophisticated, but down-to-earth, magazine for people who dug gay life and Drum’s view of the world.” Polak was on to something, as Drum’s circulation quickly climbed to 10,000, by far the largest for a gay publication. Like the Ladder under Gittings, Drum took a much more militant stance than had earlier publications. Polak criticized “hyper-conformist” gay people as sellouts for saying they had no problems as long as they didn’t flaunt their homosexuality: “Individuals who pass for straight in the way that light-skinned Negroes pass for white are paying an extremely high price for their homosexuality.”
In 1966 Frank Kameny and another leader of the Washington Mattachine, Jack Nichols, founded their own magazine, the Homosexual Citizen. Although Kameny and Nichols wrote much of the contents, the magazine was edited by a lesbian, Lilli Vincenz. In the first issue Vincenz wrote an editorial explaining the juxtaposition of “homosexual” and “citizen” in the magazine’s name: “These words must seem irreconcilable to the prejudiced. All we can say is that these people will be surprised—for patriotism and responsible participation in our American democracy are certainly not monopolized by white Anglo-Saxon Protestant heterosexuals.”
In 1965 these activists—Randy Wicker in New York, Kameny, Nichols, and Vincenz in Washington, and Gittings, Lahusen, and Polak in Philadelphia—were among the small number who opened a new front in the struggle for gay liberation. Following in the footsteps of civil rights and antiwar groups who were taking their protests to the streets, these activists began marching with picket signs—in front of the White House, the Civil Service Headquarters, and the State Department in Washington, the United Nations in New York, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia. While their small numbers were dwarfed by the much larger protests against the war in Vietnam that often occurred on the same day, these early marches signaled a new visibility for the movement.
Word of the marches was spread not through the mainstream media, which largely ignored them, but in the pages and on the covers of the lesbian and gay magazines, especially the Ladder. When the mainstream media began to pay attention to the growing visibility of lesbian and gay people in the 1960s, their coverage tended toward alarmist expressions, as in the New York Times’s front-page headline, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” The gay publications responded by printing their own reviews of the stories appearing in the New York Times, Time, and Life, blasting them for their prejudice and superficiality. After Life published its “Homosexuality in America” feature, Polak responded with an article in Drum on “Heterosexuality in America, signed by ‘P. Arody’”: “Heterosexuality shears across the spectrum of American life—the professions, the arts, business and labor. It always has. But today, especially in big cities, heterosexuals are openly admitting, even flaunting their deviation.”
The gay press made major strides in reaching larger audiences in the mid-1960s with developments on both coasts. New York journalist Al Goldstein pushed the envelope of sixties’ social tolerance by launching the sex-tabloid Screw in 1968. With contents ranging from reviews of pornographic films to nude photographs of men and women to uncensored classified ads, the magazine was an instant success that quickly reached a circulation of 150,000. One of the novel features of Screw was a column by gay activist Jack Nichols and his lover, Lige Clarke, for which they used the name of the Washington magazine, “Homosexual Citizen.” The column, appearing in the biweekly tabloid, brought news of the gay liberation movement to many thousands—both gay and straight—who would never see the smaller movement magazines.
In one of their columns Nichols and Clarke heralded an important milestone of the movement: in November 1967 a young activist named Craig Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore in New York City, the first gay bookstore in the country. Donald Webster Cory’s Homosexual in America had concluded with a 19-page annotated list of novels and dramas, from Sherwood Anderson to Arnold Zweig, “in which homosexuality is the basic theme, or in which it plays an important minor role.” But even those familiar with Cory’s list would have been frustrated in their attempts to track down many of these works. For them, as for others less aware of the existence of serious writing on homosexuality, walking into a bookstore emblazoned as the “Bookshop of the Homophile Movement” was a revelation and a sort of homecoming. The Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, like its successors around the country, served as a catalyst for emerging lesbian and gay communities, and as an invaluable resource for thousands of queers searching for images and inspiration, affirmation and arousal.
Around the same time, a Los Angeles activist who used the name Dick Michaels took over a movement newsletter, renamed it the Los Angeles Advocate, and turned it into the country’s first commercial gay paper. Focusing mostly on news, covering stories “the straight press wouldn’t print, and what gay people needed to know about what was happening in the world,” the paper was an immediate success. By the end of its second year the Advocate had reached a circulation of 23,000 and was distributed in cities across the country. It was becoming the first national gay news magazine—a role it continues to play today, with a circulation exceeding 80,000.
As activists turned the heat up during the turbulent years of the late 1960s, the Advocate encouraged their newly militant tactics, routinely using the slogan “Gay Power” and thus helping to solidify the identity of the gay movement. In August 1968 the patrons of the Patch, a Los Angeles gay bar, stood their ground and mocked police who raided the bar. The Advocate hailed this as a historic event that signaled “a new era of determined resistance.” And so it did, as the New York City police learned on a June night the following summer. The Stonewall riots may have been the spark that ignited a movement across the country, but the kindling for the bonfire had been prepared over the previous two decades by small and scattered groups of activists who nurtured a movement through the words and pictures of their magazines.
The decade of the 1970s was a period of explosive growth for the lesbian and gay community around the United States, as thousands came out and joined the movement, and as commercial, political, religious, cultural, and social institutions sprang up everywhere. These institutions cultivated the growing sense of community identity and spread the word to a new generation of young people who came out into a world that had been turned upside down.
Newspapers and magazines were founded by lesbian and gay organizations and individuals all over the United States and beyond. Activists Karla Jay and Allen Young published a collection in 1972 called Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation that listed fifteen periodicals published across the United States and Canada in addition to the Advocate and the Ladder. Within a few years that number had more than doubled. Particularly notable was the phenomenal increase in lesbian feminist activism, fueled by the dual forces of the women’s and the lesbian/gay movements. The early 1970s saw the founding of such journals as Ain’t I a Woman?, Amazon Quarterly, Azalea, Dyke, the Furies, Lavender Woman, Lesbian Connection, Lesbian Tide, Sinister Wisdom, Sisters, and Tribad. Although most of these publications did not survive the 1970s, they played a major role in the emergence of lesbian-feminist consciousness and culture, and introduced readers to such powerful writers as Rita Mae Brown, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich. At the same time, more significant lesbian and gay political journals were being founded, notably Gay Community News in Boston and the Body Politic (1971–1988) in Toronto.
Although published in Canada, the Body Politic (TBP) played a central role in the emergence of the U.S. gay movement during this period. The border was not an insurmountable barrier. Many of the writers who contributed to TBP were American; Allan Bérubé, John D’Emilio, Amber Hollibaugh, Vito Russo, James Steakley, and Scott Tucker are among the leading writers of the U.S. movement who found a welcome there. TBP was easily the most sophisticated and ambitious in its intellectual and political scope, and its history of struggle with government censorship and repression gave it an important place in the history of the gay press.
Gay Community News was started in 1973 as the local paper of the movement in Boston but within a few years was playing a larger role as the only national lesbian/gay news weekly, as well as the most significant venue for political analysis and a good deal of cultural writing. Many of the most important political debates of the period were conducted in the “letters” pages of GCN. It is no coincidence that many influential lesbian and gay writers and activists began their movement careers at GCN (among them Michael Bronski, Richard Burns, Phillip Brian Harper, Sue Hyde, Neil Miller, Cindy Patton, and Urvashi Vaid).
The lesbian and gay press played a central role in the emergence of a newly self-confident and visible community that was demanding its share of the American dream. The political successes of the gay liberation movement, and the defeats, were reported in the pages of the lesbian and gay press while the mainstream press continued to ignore or denigrate their efforts. But the true value of the gay press did not become fully apparent until the early 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic brought down the curtain on the “golden age” of the lesbian and gay community in the decade following Stonewall.
By the early 1950s the power of newspapers and magazines was being challenged by a new medium that was to become the most powerful source of images and information in the history of the world. In the beginnings of the television era, it did not take long before the host of a sensationalistic program in Los Angeles, Confidential File, decided to broadcast a program on homosexuality. The program, which aired in April 1954, included an interview with a young gay man who used the pseudonym Curtis White—but only after the host had interviewed a psychiatrist and a police department vice officer, who were presented as the representatives of official authority. “Curtis White,” who said that he did not consider himself to be abnormal, was asked if his family knew that he was homosexual. In what may have been the first instance of what is by now a familiar response, White said, “Well, they didn’t up until tonight… I think it’s almost certain that they will … I think I may very possibly lose my job too.” Asked why he had agreed to appear on the program, given these concerns, White said he hoped to be “a little useful to someone besides myself.” Unfortunately, despite Curtis White’s effective presentation, which was well-received by the Los Angeles press, his boss also watched the program and saw through the fake name and the blurring of his face. Curtis White, whose real name was Dale Olson, was promptly fired.
Despite the risks, lesbians and gay men continued to take whatever opportunities presented themselves to appear on television talk shows and tell their story. In 1958 the first gay man to appear on a television program in New York was a Mattachine Society member, Tony Segura, who wore a hood to disguise his identity. A typical feature of the radio and television talk shows that included lesbian or gay people was the apparently obligatory “balance” provided by an antigay psychiatrist or some other hostile challenger (often, the host himself played the role of attacker).
Radio and television producers of the period—and, unfortunately, many today as well—were unable, or unwilling, to allow lesbian or gay people to speak for themselves without the protection of a medical or religious expert to neutralize the threat to normalcy. The consequence of this balancing act, as the producers no doubt intended, was frequently a circus atmosphere of gladiatorial combat. When gay activists Frank Kameny and Jack Nichols made the first appearance by openly gay people on a Washington, D.C., television program in 1967, the host lost his cool and began yelling, “Get out of my studio, you vicious perverts! … You make me want to vomit!”
Although local radio and television stations found homosexuality suitably titillating for talk show audiences, it wasn’t until 1967 that any of the television networks were willing to approach the topic. CBS producer Fred Friendly had commissioned a documentary “in which homosexuals have a chance to talk about their life and about what it’s like to live in a world where a person is laughed at as homosexual.” But when producer William Peters came back with such a program—built around a conversation with eight gay men in San Francisco—the CBS brass refused to air the program. The word in the office was that they found the program distasteful and risky. But the show had already been announced, and therefore another CBS Reports producer, Harry Morgan, was assigned to the task. This time, however, Morgan did it by the book, television style, and the program, narrated by Mike Wallace, was aired in March 1967. The program explicitly excluded lesbians from its discussion of “The Homosexual.” The only gay men identified by name are white, middle class, and visibly respectable (Jack Nichols, who appeared under the pseudonym Warren Adkins, was fired the next day from his job at a Washington hotel). Others are shown strategically placed behind potted palms, or otherwise hidden from view, as their tormented psyches are bared.
As befits an objective reporter facing an aberration in the natural order, Mike Wallace seemed anxious to know what causes homosexuality (thus, presumably, helping society to prevent it). For authoritative answers Wallace turned to psychiatrists Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides, two leading proponents of the view—now officially discredited—that gays are mentally ill. Their statements were made with a confidence as assured as it was baseless, for they consistently failed to acknowledge the most elementary handicap facing any responsible scientist who wishes to study gay people: the impossibility of obtaining a nonbiased sample from an invisible population. In addition to the psychiatrists, Wallace spoke to members of the clergy—a Catholic priest and a Protestant minister—who admitted that homosexuals, while certainly sinners, are to be pitied and, if possible, saved. Viewers were also treated to the sight of a 19-year-old serviceman being arrested in a park for “soliciting” an undercover policeman and told that his commanding officer and parents would be informed of his arrest. After nearly an hour-long program in which gay men were defined and framed almost entirely from the outside, Wallace concluded: “The dilemma of the homosexual: Told by the medical profession he is sick, by the law that he’s a criminal. Shunned by employers. Rejected by heterosexual society. Incapable of a fulfilling relationship with a woman or, for that matter, with a man. At the center of his life, he remains anonymous … a displaced person … an outsider.”
And that’s the way it was, Tuesday, March 7, 1967. But it didn’t stay that way for long.