October 1952: Dorr Legg was hosting a Mattachine Discussion Group in his living room. A former vice squad officer who’d quit the LAPD in disgust had been invited to give a talk. His subject was the dirty tactics that the police were using to entrap homosexuals. “Plainclothes officers even strap walkie-talkies under their jackets,” he said. “That way, the cops waiting to make the bust can hear the homosexual agreeing to the undercover officer’s proposition.” It caused a huge stir among the twenty men who were there.1
“People don’t know these things. We need to spread the word! We need a magazine!” one man stood up to say when the talk was over. A quarter of the audience was so swept away by the superb suggestion that they wanted to discuss it immediately. They’d start the first homophile magazine!2 While the rest of the audience agonized over how to outsmart dirty police tactics, they adjourned to Dorr Legg’s kitchen.
Dale Jennings, the reluctant hero of the entrapment case that gave Mattachine its big boost, was one of the men who gathered around Legg’s kitchen table. There was also Don Slater, an impish five-foot-six-inch-tall fellow with a gravelly voice and a bent for mocking humor. (He called Mattachine the Stitch and Bitch Club and refused to join, saying, “If any of these people had sex lives, they wouldn’t sit around talking the subject to death.”3) There was Martin Block, a plump, quick-witted New Yorker who’d been with Mattachine since the beginning but was a vociferous critic of “each and every one of their Communist enthusiasms.”4 Johnny Button, who’d said “We need a magazine!” was there, too. (“Little Pipsqueak” was Dorr Legg’s inelegant moniker for him.) Button soon dropped out and left the magazine to the rest of the cantankerous crew.5
They decided that Martin Block, who owned a bookshop and was considered to be “a veritable encyclopedia of literary information,” would be the first editor.6 The magazine’s title, ONE, was suggested at a later meeting by an elementary school teacher, Bailey Whitaker (aka Guy Rousseau), a young black man who became ONE’s official proofreader. Whitaker had been reading Thomas Carlyle’s Essays and was moved by the sentence, “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.” To raise money for the magazine Legg convinced a wealthy acquaintance with a huge Renaissance-style mansion—vaulted ceilings, eight-feet-high candelabras, rare tapestries covering the walls—to hold a benefit. The clean-up expenses were so high after two hundred people drank and cavorted that the still-unborn magazine netted just thirty-five dollars. They dinged friends for donations. ONE’s first issue finally came out in January 1953.7
Jim Kepner came on board soon after. He’d been a reporter for the Daily Worker and a Communist Party member until he was kicked out when he admitted he was a homosexual.8 (Kepner avoided the subject of Communism when Block was around.) Now he supported himself by driving a cab and working in a milk-carton factory because such jobs didn’t require the intellectual energy he wanted to save for his homophile work. As a writer for ONE, Kepner was “Lyn Pederson” “Dal McIntyre,” “Frank Golowitz,” and sometimes “Jim Kepner.” He used pseudonyms to make readers think there were a lot more people writing for the magazine than there actually were.
Dorr Legg used pseudonyms, too, such as “Wendy Lane,” because not many lesbians sent ONE their writing.9 But in the spring of 1953, a lesbian couple—Irma Wolf (aka Ann Carll Reid) and Joan Corbin (aka Eve Elloree)—joined the staff after they heard Legg talk to a Mattachine group about the magazine.10 Reid eventually became ONE’s editor, and Elloree, an artist, became the magazine’s art director. They brought in a twenty-eight-year-old civil service employee, Stella Rush (aka Sten Russell).11 But the magazine’s readers continued to be mostly men, and most articles were aimed at them.
• • •
Dorr Legg had once remarked that homosexuals had four deadly enemies. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he called them: the Social, the Scientific, the Religious, and the Legal.12 ONE would joust valiantly with the first and win some surprising victories.
ONE was headquartered on seedy South Hill Street, in a smoke-filled two-room office that was cluttered with orange-crate bookshelves and desks and chairs from the Goodwill store that was downstairs. One late July afternoon, soon after Sten Russell came to work in the magazine’s office, the downstairs doorbell rang. She went out into the hall and watched two men in dark suits climb the creaky stairs. They showed her their IDs. They said they’d been sent by the Los Angeles postmaster, Otto K. Olesen, whose order of confiscation came from federal post office authorities. The cover of the August 1953 issue of the magazine had asked outrageously, “Homosexual Marriage?” It could not be mailed, the men said.13
If the post office refused to mail the magazine, ONE would be put out of business. Its staff needed a lawyer. Dale Jennings had recently been at a cocktail party in Malibu, where he was introduced to an interesting young attorney who was barely out of law school but had already been mentioned in a Los Angeles Daily News article about civil liberties.14 He’d gotten a black man acquitted of drug possession and LAPD officers dressed down for police brutality.15 Jennings, with Legg, Slater, and Kepner in tow, went to see the straight, very young-looking twenty-nine-year-old in his Beverly Hills office. “We’re difficult, and we have no money,” Dorr Legg admitted after telling Eric Julber about the confiscation. “I’m interested,” Julber said.16
The post office actually had slim basis for a gripe against ONE. The “homosexual marriage” article, which asked “Marriage License or Just License?” presented no threat to society. Homosexuals had no interest in getting married, the writer declared—they despised monogamy, considered it “stuffy and hidebound.” His conclusion was that “Rebels such as we demand freedom” and didn’t care a whit for the privilege reserved for a man and woman.17 The solicitor general to whom the ONE case was referred conceded that there was nothing “obscene” in the piece. Postmaster Olesen had to release the magazine for mailing.
The case hadn’t been dramatic enough to assure Julber’s big reputation as a civil liberties defender, but to the editors of ONE it was a solid tilt in the fight for homosexual rights. They hoped to use it to rally the troops. The post office decision was “historic,” Dale Jennings declared. Never before had a big governmental agency had to admit that homosexuals might have legal rights. But there were still thousands of homosexuals being unjustly arrested, jailed, beaten, ruined—and now it was time to fight. “Want to help?” Jennings challenged ONE’s readers.
Defiant as Jennings’s editorial was, the board knew they’d be bullied again if they weren’t vigilant. Eric Julber agreed to read every issue of the magazine carefully before it was sent off to the typesetter. “Depicting sex acts may be standard practice in heterosexual magazines and literature, but you can’t do it in a homosexual magazine,” Julber warned.18 “No rubbing knees, feeling thighs, holding hands, soaping backs, or getting undressed. No ‘That night, we made love.’ ”19 For the October 1954 issue, he wrote a cover article, “ ‘You Can’t Print It!’ by ONE’s Legal Counsel,” to explain why the stories in the magazine couldn’t be hotter.
That same issue contained an innocuous ad for a Swiss homophile magazine, Der Kreis, which sometimes gave information about how to obtain pictures of naked men. There was also a campy, mock eighteenth-century poem about British homosexuals, “Lord Samuel and Lord Montagu,” by “Brother Grundy,” a philosophy professor at a Canadian university. (The poem had lines such as “His ins and outs with various scouts / Had caused a mild sensation.”) And there was “Sappho Remembered” by “Jane Dahr” (pseudonym for James Barr, the homosexual author of Quatrefoil), a lesbian story about a twenty-year-old woman who spurns her loving fiancé and goes off with Pavia, her exotic thirty-year-old lesbian employer. The hottest line in “Sappho Remembered” was “Pavia touched the delicate pulse beat beneath the light golden hair on the child-like temple.”
In late September 1954, the ONE staff lugged several hundred copies of the October issue to the post office. The next day, they were notified by Otto Olesen’s office that the magazine contained material that was “obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy.” It was not mailable under California and federal codes.20
Dorr Legg called Eric Julber. The magazine still couldn’t afford to pay him, Legg explained. Accounts receivable that month totaled $1,428.89; accounts payable totaled $1,433.70.21 No matter, Julber said. He’d help ONE sue the post office. They’d argue that the postmaster’s refusal to mail the magazine was arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of his discretionary powers. They’d argue that his action was unsupported by evidence, that it deprived ONE of equal protection of the laws, that it was a violation of ONE’s property and liberty without due process.
Julber, still fresh faced and young at the game, decided he’d try to get some heavyweight backup from the ACLU. This was, after all, a First Amendment issue. But the ACLU wasn’t in the business of protecting homosexuals in 1954. “I don’t think we’d be interested in a case like that,” the director of the Southern California branch bluntly told Julber. He was on his own.22
• • •
By the time the Post Office had confiscated ONE for a second time, FBI agents were following the magazine avidly. The November 1955 issue featured an article by the old Mattachine’s fiery Chuck Rowland, writing under the name David L. Freeman, titled “How Much Do We Know about the Homosexual Male?”23 Rowland divided homosexual men into three groups. The “Tories” were the “elegant” ones. They wrote for magazines such as Time and Newsweek; they were in the Diplomatic Service; and “they occupy key positions with the FBI (It’s true!),” Rowland claimed with a mischievous verbal wink. On January 26, 1956, FBI agent M. A. Jones forwarded the article to Associate Director Clyde Tolson. Tolson scribbled on the memo in dark, angry handwriting, “I think we should take this crowd on and make them put up or shut up,” and he forwarded it to J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover wrote in his own furious hand, “I concur.”24 (If there’s truth to the rumor that had been circulating since the 1940s—that Hoover and Tolson were lovers—that might have fueled their fury.)25
The next day, Hoover sent a memo to the director of the FBI’s Los Angeles office: “You are instructed to have two mature and experienced agents contact David Freeman and William Lambert [Dorr Legg], chairman of the ONE board of directors, in the immediate future.” The agents were to tell Lambert that “the Bureau will not countenance such baseless charges appearing in this magazine.” They were to say he’d better “ ‘put up or shut up!’ ” Hoover wrote, adopting his alleged lover’s phrase.26
The Los Angeles office of the FBI did what it was ordered to do. Two agents descended on ONE’s shabby South Hill Street digs. David L. Freeman was nowhere to be seen, but Dorr Legg was sitting there, almost as though they’d had a date. He was ready for them. ONE and the homophile movement had been Legg’s life. He’d been a professor of landscape architecture and an urban planner, but he’d sacrificed his career to the homophile cause. He was now working full-time on ONE. His Japanese American partner, John Nojima, paid their rent and bought their food. Legg wasn’t about to be intimidated by two FBI hacks.
“He was sarcastic, refused to furnish any information regarding David Freeman, and he advised agents that ONE’s attorney, Eric Julber of Beverly Hills, approved everything that went into the magazine,” the FBI men reported. This William Lambert, aka Dorr Legg—who obviously knew his rights—was as cool a customer as these “mature and experienced” FBI men had ever seen. “Do you have any objections to this interview being taped?” Dorr Legg had calmly asked the two. In their subsequent memo to their superior, the FBI men hastened to assure him that they’d been “extremely circumspect.” (What went on in interviews where they hadn’t been so “circumspect” can only be imagined.) The superior didn’t have to worry, the agents kept on. They didn’t believe the meeting was actually being recorded.27 It’s obvious who had the upper hand in this interview in ONE’s tiny office, and how astonishing that was to the two agents. “The interview shows that Lambert is strictly no good,” one of the agents emoted in another memo about the encounter.28
A few weeks later, the US District Court judge Thurmond Clarke—a beefy former football player for USC—ruled that ONE was not mailable because “its filthy and obscene material was obviously calculated to stimulate the lust of the homosexual reader.” Moreover, the judge declared, “The suggestion advanced that homosexuals should be recognized as a segment of our people and be accorded special privileges as a class is rejected.”29
Julber told Dorr Legg that ONE must appeal. He promised to see the fight through though still there was no money to pay him. The appeal verdict was issued on March 1, 1957, by the Ninth Federal District Court of Appeals judges: “At the outset, it is well to dispel any thought that this court is its brother’s keeper as to the type of reading to be indulged in,” the judges said. They upheld “freedom of expression and the place of a free press in the world.” They even waxed poetic: “Morals are not static like the everlasting hills, but are like the vagrant breezes to which the mariner must ever trim his sails.”30 So far, so good.
But the next line was a “nevertheless”: “Sappho Remembered,” they said, “is nothing more than cheap pornography calculated to promote lesbianism.” As for “Lord Samuel and Lord Montagu,” it “pertains to sexual matters of such vulgar and indecent nature that it tends to arouse a feeling of disgust and revulsion.” Homosexuals aren’t disgusted and revolted, the judges said, because the homosexual’s “social and moral standards are far below those of the general community.” But society doesn’t have to put up with it: “Social standards are fixed by and for the great majority, and not by or for a hardened or weakened minority. Obscenity is not defined to fit the concept of morality of society’s dregs.” (So much for “vagrant breezes.”) The appeals court upheld Judge Thurmond Clarke’s decision.31
For four years, Eric Julber had taken nothing but an occasional small retainer fee from ONE. But, as he told Legg, he sincerely believed in ONE’s right to publish and the homosexual’s right to read. He also felt that if he could make something of this case his reputation as a civil rights lawyer would be made. With his own money, he bought a plane ticket to Washington, DC, and he filed a brief on behalf of ONE in the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court had never in its history considered a case that dealt with homosexuality. It accepted Eric Julber’s petition. The justices read his brief and declared they needed no further arguments. On January 13, 1958, five justices, led by Felix Frankfurter, voted to reverse the lower courts’ decisions. ONE’s major topic was homosexuality, but that didn’t mean the publication was obscene or indecent, they concluded; and the Post Office had no right to confiscate the magazine. Though Julber didn’t get to plead, the Supreme Court’s reversal was a huge victory for him, and for Dorr Legg and all the ONE staff. Even more important, it made a remarkable social statement, tacit as it was. Homosexuality was not unspeakable.
Evelyn Gentry Caldwell Hooker was almost six feet tall, a strong-looking woman with a chiselled face. She had a deep voice and a hearty laugh and liked to wear tailored suits. All that plus her professional interest in homosexuals made some in the community think she was a sister. She was careful to make it clear she was “hopelessly heterosexual.”32 She married twice.
In 1932 she received a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Johns Hopkins with a specialty in animal behavior—“rat psychology,” she called it.33 The UCLA Psychology Department, where she’d hoped to teach after receiving her doctorate, wouldn’t hire her because they already had three women professors, and most of the men in the department thought that quite enough. It took years before she even got a job teaching classes at UCLA Extension. During the war, her brightest and most personable night-class student was Sammy From, who worked by day writing contracts between the air force and the Los Angeles–based aircraft industry. One evening, when her then husband, freelance writer Donn Caldwell, was unable to fetch her after class, Sammy From offered her a lift home, and they became friends. He eventually told her, “You have a moral responsibility to study my condition.” “What’s your condition?” she asked. “Homosexuality,” he said. She told him she was “morally neutral” on the subject, but she didn’t know anything about homosexuality. “In which case, you’ll have to learn,” he said.34
Sammy From introduced her to George, his partner of ten years, and to his friends, including two lesbians who threw gay parties in a big ramshackle house in the bohemian Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, not far from where Harry Hay would hold the first meeting of the group that became Mattachine. She thought these homosexuals were an impressive bunch. She was all the more intrigued by Sammy From’s exhortation to study the homosexual “condition,” because they seemed to have no “condition” at all in the usual sense of the term.
When she mentioned to a psychologist friend—Bruno Klopfer, a preeminent Rorschach expert—what Sammy From had suggested, he said, “You must do it! We don’t know anything. What we know about are the sick ones.”35 She began her study by administering Rorschach tests to all the male homosexuals with whom Sammy From and his circle of friends could hook her up. But her project wasn’t well conceived. She hadn’t even thought about a control group. She was off to a false start—and she stopped. She also divorced Donn Caldwell and left Los Angeles to take a job at Bryn Mawr College. But she was restless and unsettled. She was “haunted,” too, by her unfinished project. She returned to Los Angeles in 1951, remarried, and with the encouragement of her new husband, Edward Hooker, she started again.
In 1953 she applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for a grant to study homosexuals. The head of the grants division, John Eberhart, flew to Los Angeles from Washington, DC, to eyeball Hooker. NIMH had been established four years earlier, and Eberhart wanted to make no mistakes about who got funding. She introduced him to her husband. Her putative heterosexuality helped her “pass the test,” as she acknowledged. Eberhart approved her grant; but even at the National Institute of Mental Health, homosexuality was so derided that Hooker’s proposal was dubbed the “Fairy Project.” Hooker never studied lesbians, she later admitted, because “a woman researcher—even a married one—could be undermined by critics who might question her sexuality.”36
Hooker’s project involved thirty homosexual men who were a 5 or 6 on the Kinsey scale—exclusively or predominantly homosexual; and thirty heterosexual men who were a 0 or 1. None of them was ever to have been in psychotherapy. She would give each subject an IQ test and then the three standard psychological projective tests: the Rorschach inkblot test; the Thematic Apperception Test (the subjects had to make up stories about human images); and the Make-a-Picture-Story Test (the subjects had to place cut-out figures in various settings and tell a story about them). Next, she would match homosexual with heterosexual for education and IQ. Then she would assign each subject a number and remove from his test all identifying information. Finally, she would get psychologists who were experts in each of the tests to try to distinguish between the matched pairs of homosexuals and heterosexuals. If the experts were able to discern from the tests who the homosexuals were, then homosexuality was legitimately a “diagnostic category.” But if they couldn’t discern—it wasn’t.
Sammy From again helped Hooker get homosexual subjects from among his friends. He also introduced her to the reconstructed Los Angeles Mattachine Society, headed by Ken Burns. Mattachine was now offering itself up to qualified researchers who wanted to study the homosexual. On June 24, 1953, Hooker made her pitch to Mattachine’s Research Committee: she told them that no one had ever before done a systematic study of homosexuals who weren’t in armed forces disciplinary barracks or institutionalized in prisons or insane asylums. She wanted to study the average homosexual. Mattachine agreed to supply all the men she needed. ONE would also cooperate, Dorr Legg said, and he offered himself.
It was harder to get the heterosexuals. She went to the personnel directors of labor unions. They wanted nothing to do with homosexuals, they told her. Her straight friend Herb Selwyn, a liberal lawyer who’d lectured to Mattachine on Homosexuals and the Law, offered himself.37 But she still had twenty-nine heterosexuals to find. She asked maintenance men and a fireman who came to her home. (“No man who walks through these doors is safe,” her husband teased.) She asked the policeman on the corner. She was studying the ways the average man functions, she told them as vaguely as she could. With great difficulty, she found her thirty heterosexuals.
Hooker lived in Brentwood, on a one-acre estate with a garden bungalow that was separate from the house. She did the testing there because once a man opened the garden gate, he was invisible to the neighbors. That guarantee of secrecy was important for the homosexuals who worried that people would know they were participating in a homosexual study.38
Hooker brought the finished tests to the three experts. Her friend Dr. Bruno Klopfer, professor of clinical psychology at UCLA, knew as much as Hermann Rorschach himself about the interpretation and scoring of the inkblot test. Another professor of clinical psychology, Dr. Edwin S. Schneidman, was the inventor of the Make-a-Picture-Story Test, which was widely used by clinicians everywhere. Dr. Mortimer Meyer was the chief psychologist at the Veterans Administration Mental Hygiene Clinic and an expert analyst of all “projective techniques,” including the Rorschach and the Thematic Apperception Test. If anyone in the world could tell what’s what from projective psychological tests, it was surely these three men.
But the judges’ accuracy in discerning who was the homosexual and who was the heterosexual was no better than it would have been had they flipped a coin. The average psychological adjustment scores they gave to the homosexual and heterosexual samples were about the same. Dr. Klopfer and Dr. Meyer both looked at the sixty Rorschachs, but they agreed only sixteen times about who the homosexuals were—and most of the time, they were wrong. “There are no clues,” they would say with the paired tests in front of them. “I just have to guess.” “These are so similar.”39 Dorr Legg, they said, was definitely a heterosexual. Hooker called him that evening to tell him the interesting news.40
“Are you out to skin us alive?” Dr. Klopfer asked. (He was only half-joking.) He demanded to look at the Rorschachs again—but he was no more successful in identifying the homosexuals the second time. He had to admit that what he saw in these tests was nothing like what he saw in tests of homosexual patients. Dr. Meyer couldn’t find the homosexuals through their Thematic Apperception Tests either. Dr. Schneidman scrutinized the Make-a-Picture-Story Tests and told Hooker, “If you showed me the protocol for thirty schizophrenics, I’d be surprised if I didn’t get twenty-eight. But to identify the homosexuals . . .” He was convinced: “Homosexuality is not a diagnostic category.”41
• • •
In 1956 Hooker presented the results of her research at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association in Chicago. Homosexuality as a “clinical entity” simply does not exist, she told her fellow psychologists, because the homosexual population is as varied as the heterosexual population. A particular form of sexual desire and expression has little effect on personality and emotional development.42 “We knew it all the time, but we needed empirical proof,” a few psychologists in her audience said. “It absolutely can’t be true. You must have had to search and search and search to find those guys,” most of them told her.43
To the midcentury mental health professionals whose livelihoods depended on the notion that homosexuals were sick, Hooker’s research made not one whit of difference. They continued with their prejudices intact, as did vice squads and McCarthyites—to whom all homosexuals were monsters and moral weaklings. But to those homosexuals who were beginning to challenge the prejudices, Hooker’s findings were potent ammunition. Her work demonstrated clearly that none of the standard tests that showed who’s mentally sick and who’s mentally healthy could show who’s homosexual and who’s heterosexual. Here was concrete evidence that the mental health professions were wrong about homosexuality as an illness. It would be another two decades before the American Psychiatric Association would finally remove “homosexuality” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—but Dr. Judd Marmor, an American Psychiatric Association president who participated in the APA discussions, recalled that Hooker’s research was “the reference point to which we had to keep coming back.”44
In 1963 the board of the once-conservative Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco established the Glide Urban Center and hired a black head pastor, Cecil Williams, to minister to the disenfranchised, the poor, people of all races, and the countercultural of every stripe. They also hired a slightly offbeat thirty-one-year-old minister, Ted McIlvenna, whose job it would be to go into the high-crime area of the Tenderloin and reach out to young social castoffs.45 McIlvenna had known the disenfranchised since childhood when he and his father, an itinerate minister, lived on American Indian reservations in the Pacific Northwest. As a young adult, McIlvenna took some time away from organized religion, thinking he might become an actor or a singer, or perhaps an art historian with a specialty in erotic art (because, he believed, sexuality was of the divine); but finally he got a degree in theology. He wasn’t shocked to find that a lot of the Tenderloin castoffs were homosexual transvestites and hookers.
But he was profoundly disturbed by how abused they were by the police on the one hand and roughs on the other, and how alienated they were from organized religion. He needed to figure out how to approach them.
He’d heard of Mattachine, Daughters of Bilitis, and also two new groups in San Francisco that had started a year or so earlier. One of them, the League for Civil Education, was organized by Guy Strait, a fortysomething-year-old gay libertarian who was trying to get gay bar-goers excited about becoming a homosexual voting bloc.46 The other, the Tavern Guild, was an association of gay-bar and gay-restaurant owners who’d agreed to “self-police” to get the Alcoholic Beverage Control Board off their collective backs, and also to donate to homophile concerns to show they weren’t interested only in making money off of homosexuals.47
McIlvenna had heard of a few local celebrities, too. Drag entertainer Jose Sarria, known as the “Nightingale of Montgomery Street,” had two claims to fame: his uproariously clever parodies of operas such as Carmen, which packed rooms at the Black Cat; and his 1961 bid for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, when he ran as the first out homosexual political candidate in the country. (He didn’t win but got 5,400 votes.) McIlvenna had heard also of Louise Lawrence, an early male-to-female transsexual patient of the pioneering endocrinologist, Dr. Harry Benjamin. Reverend McIlvenna invited Sarria, Lawrence, and leaders of the four homophile groups to a January 1964 dinner meeting.48
He wanted to organize a round-table discussion between them and religious leaders, he said, “an off the cuff exploration of homosexuality and the homosexual’s response to the church.” They could have a three-day retreat at a place owned by the United Church of Christ—White Memorial Retreat Center in Mill Valley. They could do it in the spring. “I could pull together the clergymen, and you could pull together the homosexuals . . . Glide has found sponsors to pick up the tab,” he added.49
It was a breathtaking proposal. Totally unprecedented: churchmen sitting down with avowed homosexuals and listening to them. In the days when Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were still steering Daughters of Bilitis to fight against the California sodomy law, they’d approached the two most likely assemblymen, Phillip Burton—who was so progressive he accumulated a six-hundred-page FBI file; and John O’Connell—loved by the Left as the assembly’s most outspoken defender of the rights of the downtrodden. Martin and Lyon had asked them to introduce legislation in the assembly for repeal of the California sodomy law. “We’d be booted out of office if we did that,” the assemblymen told them flatly. “The voters would say we were in favor of sin. Homosexuals need to work on the church first.”50 That “the church” would let itself be “worked on” had seemed far-fetched to Martin and Lyon. But now, incredibly, it was happening.
McIlvenna had also sent feelers out to liberal clergymen who’d been active in civil rights. He told them about awful incidents he’d witnessed in his work. He’d been called to help two homosexual men whose genitals had been kicked in. They were writhing in pain. He telephoned the Presbyterian Hospital for an ambulance, but the dispatcher refused to send one after McIlvenna mentioned the men were homosexuals. McIlvenna wanted to call the police, but the injured men stopped him. “It was the police who did the kicking,” they said.51 Homosexuals were being denied human dignity and civil rights just like black people were, McIlvenna told the clergymen. He convinced them—Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran, and Church of Christ ministers—to come to a three-day meeting and listen to what homosexuals had to say about their needs.
May 31–June 2, 1964: “Forget who you represent,” McIlvenna told the men and women, who were all dressed, by his request, in lounging-about clothes. “We represent the human race. Let’s start there.”52 They shared three days of wrenching talk—about how the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality encouraged hatred and injustice, how homosexuals had no reason to trust the church, how churchly people’s attitude toward homosexuals was the real evil.53
Out of the retreat came the decision to start an organization. They would call it the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. No euphemisms. It would be the first organization to use the word homosexual in its title. Its stated purpose would be “to promote a continuing dialogue between the church and the homosexual.”54 Just as liberal ministers had been standing at the side of black people in their struggles for civil rights, they’d stand at the side of homosexuals; they’d actively welcome homosexuals into their churches. They’d spread the word to their fellow churchmen. They’d tell the hostile world of the homosexuals’ humanity and demand justice for them.
The clergy of the CRH declared their intentions first to the leading magazine of mainline Protestantism, the Christian Century: they were “shattering a taboo,” they proclaimed.55 Eventually they even informed the magazine started by Evangelist Billy Graham—Christianity Today—about their “new theology,” as the magazine called it: “Love is the ultimate and only norm of conduct,” they told Christianity Today’s evangelical readers, and announced to them that they were “opening a channel from the churches to homosexuals.”56 They got Episcopal bishop James Pike to appoint a church committee on homosexuality that would support the repeal of sodomy laws and an end to the harassment of homosexuals by the police and other official authorities. They sent speakers to seminaries to spread their “new theology” to future ministers. They even opened discussions between priests and lay leaders in the Roman Catholic Church.57
It was what Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon had dreamed of: that such moral authorities, churchmen, respected and weighty pillars of society, would stick up for homosexuals. Completely won over by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual after an August meeting, Martin wrote to the Daughters of Bilitis Governing Board, “The Reverend Canon ‘Bob’ Cromey, assistant to Bishop James A. Pike of the Episcopal Diocese here, asked if the homophile organizations had any trouble with police pressure, and reminded us that if there were any trouble the clergy would go to the powers that be and speak up for us.”58 She’d been the one to argue passionately against DOB involving itself with other organizations. But this was different. “The Council has done more for DOB and the homophile movement in general, public relations-wise, in a few months than we have accomplished ourselves in ten years”; and if Daughters of Bilitis was uncomfortable with her involvement in another organization—well, “You may cancel my DOB membership.”59
• • •
To raise money for all that the Council on Religion and the Homosexual hoped to do, the clergymen and the homosexuals agreed they’d hold a Mardi Gras ball on the first evening of 1965. The ministers were taking no chances: Ted McIlvenna and Cecil Williams requested a meeting with the chief of police, Thomas Cahill.
Despite their clerical collars, after they announced they were hoping to discuss a New Year’s dance that would be sponsored by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual they didn’t get to see Chief Cahill. They were told they could meet instead with the SFPD’s Sex Crimes Detail.
On December 28, a roomful of vice squad officers listened with growing incredulity as Williams and McIlvenna announced their business: they were talking about a costume ball for homosexuals? Sponsored by churches? “What are the homosexuals going to do at the ball?” a detective wanted to know.
“We’re going to have a party,” Reverend McIlvenna answered.60
One detective, observing that both ministers wore wedding rings, said, “I see you’re married. How do your wives accept this?”61 Another said, “I don’t understand why you ministers are interested in sex.”
“We’re interested because we want our brothers and sisters to fully participate in their rights as citizens,” Reverend Williams answered patiently. The officers looked stony faced, disgusted, flabbergasted.
Finally, though, the Sex Crimes Detail could come up with no legal grounds on which to prohibit a ball, but the ministers were told that the Council on Religion and the Homosexual must do its own policing—make sure no hanky-panky went on. As Williams and McIlvenna were walking out the door, one of the detectives couldn’t restrain himself. He called out to their backs, “There’s going to be trouble. If you don’t uphold God’s will, we will!”62
The ministers took his threat as a heads-up. The council had three pro bono lawyers advising the group: Evander Smith and Herbert Donaldson, both homosexual; and Elliot Leighton, a straight man. McIlvenna and Williams called the lawyers as soon as they got back to the Glide office. Smith and Donaldson promised they’d be at the ball through the whole evening. They’d stand at the entryway and be witnesses should the police cause trouble. The reverends called the other ministers, too. “Bring your wife,” they told each one, so the wives also could be witnesses if necessary.
The ball was to be held in California Hall, a once-elegant but by the 1960s dilapidated Bavarian-style building on Polk Street. On December 29 California Hall’s manager (pushed by Sex Crimes officers63) informed Reverend McIlvenna that the rental agreement was canceled. The council’s lawyers informed the manager that 1,500 tickets had already been sold, and that the Council on Religion and the Homosexual was ready to sue should he renege. He agreed to honor the contract.64
January 1, 1965: The scene was surreal. Fifty uniformed policemen set up cameras and klieg lights in front of California Hall. Helmeted riot police, batons in hand, stood on either side of the entrance. Newspaper reporters and their photographers stood directly opposite the entrance, ready to click away. Police photographers were there, too. Vans marked with TV-station logos had parked across the street long before California Hall’s doors opened. Their mounted cameras were set to capture footage of the homosexual revelers as they arrived. By nine o’clock, squad cars were parked at the intersections of both ends of the street, their red and blue lights flashing.65 “They couldn’t be any better prepared if they were there to face gangsters with machine guns,” attorney Evander Smith thought as he came down the street, ready to take his place at California Hall’s entrance.66
When the 1,500 people who’d bought tickets to the ball approached 625 Polk Street decked out in Mardi Gras finery, nine hundred of them—seeing that even the church hadn’t been able to guarantee their security—beat a path in the opposite direction. Only six hundred braved the gauntlet.
Three plainclothes vice squad officers came into California Hall at nine o’clock and stood against a wall near the door, glaring at the ticket taker and attorneys Smith and Donaldson and anyone who entered. “Do you have a search warrant?” Smith asked. “Do you have any reason to believe a felony is being committed on these premises?” Donaldson asked. The officers wouldn’t answer.
About ten o’clock, eight more plainclothes officers barged in and stood with the other three in the ten-foot-wide hallway.67 “You need to identify yourselves or get out,” Smith and Donaldson told them. The officers said nothing. Smith told the Lutheran minister, who was standing by, to please call the chief of police. “Tell him that a bunch of hoodlums without the power of speech have invaded a private party, and we’re requesting assistance from the police,” Smith said.
Minutes later, the doors were flung open and six uniformed policemen stormed in—but not in answer to Reverend Colwell’s phone call to Chief Cahill. They strong-armed the two lawyers out the door. “Are we under arrest?” Evander Smith asked.
“What does it look like?” a policeman said.68
Reverend Williams’s wife, Evelyn Williams, who was standing by to witness, cried in outrage, “This is just like the South for black people!”69
“What are the charges?” both lawyers demanded of the policemen who were rushing them to the waiting paddy wagon.
“You’re under arrest for obstructing our inspection of these premises for fire regulation violations,” Chief Inspector Rudy Nieto answered. Cameras flashed as the lawyers were pushed into the wagon and onto the rusty steel benches.70
Nancy May, a straight woman married to a bisexual man, with whom she’d been one of the founders of a new homophile organization, Society for Individual Rights (SIR), had been at the door taking tickets. After the two lawyers were arrested, she called Elliot Leighton, the council’s third lawyer, and told him he must come immediately. The officers returned. “You can’t come in without a warrant,” Nancy May said. “We’re here to inspect,” they said. “Well, you can’t come in,” May repeated. Attorney Leighton arrived in time to see the petite woman being rushed out the door by a burly policeman, and Reverend Cecil Williams pleading with him to stop. When Leighton protested to the policeman, he was dragged into the paddy wagon along with Nancy May.
It was the type of police conduct that homosexuals knew well; but before this night the police had never played their hand in front of average citizens. When the police had pronounced someone lewd and lascivious, a sanctimonious public had never questioned it. But now the clergy, who’d seen what went on, told the newspapers and TV reporters and even delivered sermons about it. They told the whole city that the SFPD had squandered a wad of public money in a major “criminal” operation which involved no criminals.71
Mayor John Shelley received more mail the week following the ball—almost all of it protesting police bullying and insane misuse of resources—than he’d gotten cumulatively in the several months prior.72 As a result of all the bad publicity, Chief Thomas Cahill felt obliged to form a community relations board, to demonstrate that the police were willing to listen to the clergy, and to the homosexuals who were under church protection.
The Council on Religion and the Homosexual didn’t stop there. With sights set on national media they issued “A Brief of Injustices.” It went beyond what the clergy had witnessed to discuss the panoply of social injustices that homosexuals endured: police harassment, prosecution under inequitable laws, entrapment, discrimination in employment.73 No group of men wearing the collar—no moral authority of any kind—had ever before pleaded the homosexual’s case so well to the general public.
By 1966 there were small homophile groups on both coasts and in a few Midwestern cities. Frank Kameny had started East Coast Homophile Organizations in 1963, to bring together groups from New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Now he and other ECHO members, dreaming big, called a national conference. They decided that to be more attractive to Midwest groups—and to avoid being accused of East Coast chauvinism by California groups—the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations would be held in Kansas City, Missouri, on the weekend of February 19, 1966.74 Forty people came—representatives from fourteen organizations. All agreed that if they wanted a big national homophile presence, they needed something with the power to pull a lot more people into the movement. They needed a dramatic cause.
Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin had one to propose. They’d been reluctant to engage in direct action before,75 but Martin was now on the board of trustees for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. With the confidence that they had scores of clergymen behind them, they felt freer to be politically out front. The media was full of stories about the war escalation. There’d already been fierce battles between the United States and the North Vietnamese Army. The Vietcong had shown they were determined. More and more Americans would be needed to fight in Southeast Asia, and many of those drafted would be homosexual. On May 21, the next Armed Forces Day, all the homophile organizations should hold meetings “to consider the problem the homosexual encounters in connection with the military draft,” Phyllis Lyon moved. There could be speakers who were vets, clergymen, lawyers—all condemning the military’s policies on homosexuals.76
Don Slater was at the convention, representing his new magazine, Tangents. (He’d quit ONE the year before because of bitter battles with Dorr Legg, whom he accused of trying to control everything and everyone.) As soon as discussion on Lyon’s proposal opened, the gruff and passionate Slater took to the floor. What this National Planning Conference needed to organize was more than a few polite town hall meetings. Homosexuals everywhere had to protest the injustice that the military always inflicted on homosexual men. They’re drafted, they have to go serve, and then they get less-than-honorable discharges if their homosexuality is discovered.77 The hypocrisy issue is what homophile groups had to deal with, Slater shouted into the microphone. It was like in World War II, when Slater himself had been drafted: the Selective Service turned a blind eye unless a man appeared for his physical in a tutu; but if a homosexual was caught while in the military, he could be court-martialed. The military paid lip service to the prejudice that homosexuals were unfit, but they sent homosexuals off to fight and die anyway. Homophiles need to tell America that if homosexuals are to risk their lives for their country, the hypocritical laws and regulations have got to be changed.78
There was consensus: on Armed Forces Day, there’d be simultaneous dramatic protests in all the major cities the members represented.79 Don Slater, who became spokesman for the event, told the New York Times News Service in April that the protests on May 21 would represent “the first manifestation of a new militancy in the homosexual movement.” He promised “parades and demonstrations” everywhere.80
• • •
The “dramatic protests” were far tamer than Slater had hoped they’d be. In San Francisco, there’d been talk about a parade complete with floats, but in actuality about forty-five people from the various homophile groups81 and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual gathered at Federal Building Plaza and walked around with protest signs. Since it was a Saturday and the Federal Building was closed, there were few spectators. In Philadelphia, members of the Janus Society went to the Naval Yard to distribute leaflets about the military’s injustice to homosexuals. A measure of their success is caught in a letter president Clark Polak wrote Slater: “At least nobody got beat up.”82 In Kansas City, the Phoenix Society, which had been formed months before, met to “discuss the issue.” In DC, Frank Kameny led about twenty people on a four-mile march from the White House to the Pentagon and then hopped on a plane to New York to speak at a small gathering organized by Daughters of Bilitis.
In Los Angeles, Slater invited Harry Hay to be titular chair of the Los Angeles Committee to Fight Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces. Hay actually loathed the military—in the seventies he would counsel men on how to get out of it—but he agreed to head the committee because, he quipped, “You can’t say ‘Shaft the Draft’ if you’re excluded.”83 Slater and the small group that worked with him would have liked to stage dramatic demonstrations, but LA was so spread out. There was no central area that gay people inhabited and no easy way to get the word out to them. They decided on a quintessentially LA solution—a motorcade.
Every night for weeks, Slater and his team worked the dark streets near the gay bars, from Topanga Canyon in the north to Long Beach in the south. Under windshield wipers of all the parked cars, they stuck flyers. The Committee to Fight Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces needed money and needed manpower, the flyers pled. Dancing-drinking-gay-bar-goers came back to their cars, pulled the sheet of paper off their windshield, maybe read it—then crumpled it and threw it away. To most homosexuals in 1966, a homosexual motorcade was unthinkable.
Slater was perplexed. Two years earlier, in 1964—the first time a big national magazine had done a major article on homosexuals, a twelve-page spread—the feisty Slater hadn’t hesitated for a moment. He’d allowed himself, as the editor of ONE, to be photographed for Life’s eight and a half million readers. He’d made sure to look businesslike and “normal,” in a crisp white shirt and dark tie; and his very respectable photo had given the lie to Life magazine’s tired old proclamations about “the sad and sordid world” of gay people.84 Why were most other homosexuals so afraid still to show themselves in daylight?
Dauntless85 and optimistic, Slater and his volunteers constructed boxlike four-feet-tall signs. Those would be put on the roofs of the motorcade cars. They painted dozens of other signs for car trunks, hoods, and doors. “10% of All G.I.s Are Homosexual!” the signs read, or “Homosexuals Are the Most Moral People in the Service—They Have to Be!” or “Sex Belongs to Private Conscience!”
There were only thirteen vehicles in the motorcade. That afternoon, it was drizzling as the protestors took the scheduled twenty-mile route through Los Angeles, starting in Echo Park, near Slater’s home. They covered huge areas of the city—down Cahuenga Boulevard, up Hollywood Boulevard, past the Hollywood Bowl, east on Sunset toward downtown, west through the Wilshire District. To be safe, Slater had notified Eric Julber, Herb Selwyn, and all the other lawyers he knew, asking them to stand by in case there was trouble. There was none.
Slater and Harry Hay were interviewed by several of the LA media. Columnist Paul Coates, now writing for the Los Angeles Times, used the interview as the basis of a mocking editorial in which he called the notion of homosexuals in the military “material for a burlesque skit.” He also quoted the considered opinion of Colonel M. P. DiFusco, the assistant director of personnel management in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense: “We’re responsible for a lot of kids. If we throw them in with homosexuals, we wouldn’t have an army. We’d have chaos.”86
After the motorcade, Slater approached the Los Angeles Times again, trying to get the city editor to do a story: this was, after all, the first gay motorcade in history. The editor informed Slater that he would consider the event newsworthy “only if someone was hurt.”87 Not even Don Slater could believe that the Committee to Fight Exclusion of Homosexuals from the Armed Forces had effected great changes.
Yet CBS News did a two-minute interview with Slater and other committee members that aired nationally at six and eleven. Time magazine sent a photographer. Thousands of Angelenos saw the committee’s hand-lettered signs, and hundreds of thousands all over the country saw the New York Times News Service article in which Slater declared that hypocritical laws and regulations must be changed. “Millions of homosexuals have served honorably in the armed forces through all our wars,” he said, and “all we are asking is that a man’s sex life should be his own business.”88 Most people had never heard or read such things before.