NOTES

PROLOGUE

1. Hal Call (who’d been a student of Johnston), in James T. Sears, Behind the Mask of Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2006), p. 38.

2. Sarah Lockwood Williams, Twenty Years of Education for Journalism: A History of the School of Journalism of the University of Missouri (Columbia, MO: E. W. Stephens, 1929), p. 306.

3. “Professor at M.U. Held on Morals Charge,” Moberly (MO) Monitor-Index, May 27, 1948, p. 6.

4. “Missouri University Professor Held on Charges of Sodomy,” Alton (IL) Evening Telegraph, May 28, 1948, p. 1.

5. “Hold Missouri University Man on Sodomy,” News and Tribune (Jefferson City, MO), July 25, 1948, p. 2.

6. “Professor at M.U. Held on Morals Charge.”

7. Associated Press, “Sodomy Charges Filed Against M.U. Professor,” Northwest Arkansas Times (Fayetteville), May 28, 1948, p. 7.

8. “Jailed Professor Released on Bond: E. K. Johnston Charged with Sodomy, Relieved of Teaching Duties at Missouri University,” Joplin (MO) Globe, May 29, 1948, p. 3.

9. “Missouri Professor Held for Sodomy: Termed Principal in Homosexual Ring,” Pottstown (PA) Mercury, May 28, 1948, p. 2.

10. “Homosexual,” Hope (AR) Star, May 28, 1948, p. 2.

11. Associated Press, “Journalism Professor Held on Charges of Sex Orgies,” Indiana (PA) Evening Gazette, May 28, 1948, p. 1. Dean Mott, whom Johnston had replaced that year as acting dean, could express only bafflement: “Professor Johnston has been an excellent teacher . . . This whole thing is a terrific shock.”

12. Associated Press, “Three Held for Sodomy,” Evening Independent (Massillon, OH), May 28, 1948, p. 14.

13. “Curators Plan Definite Action at University,” News and Tribune (Jefferson City, MO), May 28, 1948, p. 1.

14. “Mad Parties Result in Dismissal of Professor,” Indiana (PA) Evening Gazette, May 29, 1948, p. 2.

15. Associated Press, “Prof Gets Probation,” Abilene (TX) Reporter-News, November 17, 1948, p. 38.

16. “Homosexual,” p. 11. The conclusion of the story about E. K. Johnston is not entirely dismal. He eventually moved to Detroit, where he worked for an advertising agency that handled automotive accounts, and where, Hal Call says, Johnston “earned twice the money he made at the university” (Sears, Behind the Mask of Mattachine, p. 40). Johnston died in 1990 at the age of ninety-two.

17. In addition to my interviews with Brigadier General Tammy Smith and Tracey Hepner in Washington, DC, on November 17, 2012, I consulted the following sources: “Promotion Ceremony for Brigadier General Tammy Smith,” Army Television, August 10, 2012; Leo Shane, “Smith Becomes First Gay General to Serve Openly,” Stars and Stripes, August 10, 2012; Laura J. Nelson, “With Promotion, U.S. Army Welcomes First Openly Gay General,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2012; Matthew L. Wald, “Woman Becomes First Openly Gay General,” New York Times, August 12, 2012; Dorian de Wild, “Tammy Smith: The U.S. Military’s First Openly Gay General,” Huffington Post, August 13, 2012; Bonnie Goldstein, “New Gay General: A Salute Is in Order,” Washington Post, August 14, 2012; Brigadier General Tammy Smith, interview with Lynn Niery, Talk of the Nation, NPR, August 14, 2012.

18. General Tammy Smith, interview with author.

CHAPTER 1: LAWBREAKERS AND LOONIES

1. “A Great Hebrew Charity . . . Brilliant Reception Last Night at Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, February 28, 1895; “Surf Casting the Sport of the Week—Prize for the Biggest Fish,” New York Times, June 26, 1910; “Dorothy James to Wed G. G. Haven,” New York Times, February 2, 1925.

2. Reported in Mark Liebert, MD, “Faces of Criminals,” New York Times, May 30, 1933; also “Facial Indications of Personality” (presented before the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police in Rochester, New York, 1950), Carleton Simon Papers, box 1, folder 31, Special Collections and Archives, SUNY Albany. I am grateful to Brian Keough for making this material available to me.

3. “Police and Fire Visitors Address Local Rotarians,” Evening Independent (Saint Petersburg, FL), October 9, 1931; and lecture for the New England Association of Chiefs of Police, reprinted in Carleton Simon, “A Study of the Negro Criminal,” Police Journal (January 1934): pp. 6–7, 14.

4. Carleton Simon, “Homosexualists and Sex Crimes” (presented before the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Duluth, MN, September 21–25, 1947), Carleton Simon Papers, box 1, folder 34, Special Collections and Archives, SUNY Albany. I am grateful to Brian Keough for making this material available to me.

Illinois’s treatment of homosexuals wasn’t unique. In Ohio, a twenty-one-year-old man and two men in their early thirties were charged with being part of a “sodomy ring” and convicted as “psychopathic offenders.” They were sent by the judge to Luna State Hospital and after “treatment” were transferred to the penitentiary for “two to forty years.” When the men applied for parole after two years, prosecuting attorney Paul Landis testified to the Ohio Pardon and Parole Commission that his office and the community were “unalterably opposed” to their release because the “condition” of the men had “left a trail of evil consequences in this community”: “Landis Opposes Parole of Sodomists from Pen,” Lima (OH) News, February 15, 1948.

5. Arthur Lewis Miller quoted in Hally S. Heatley, “Commies and Queers: Narratives That Supported the Lavender Scare” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, Arlington, 2007), p. 108. As influential as Simon and Miller was psychiatrist Paul DeRiver, who established the Sexual Offenses Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department. His notions about the menace of homosexuals were disseminated to California legislators in 1949 by Richard Keatinge, California’s special assistant attorney general, who warned: “The sex pervert, in his more innocuous form, is too frequently regarded as merely a ‘queer’ individual who never hurts anyone but himself. All too often we lose sight of the fact that the homosexual is an inveterate seducer of the young of both sexes and is ever seeking for younger victims.” Quoted in George Chauncey, “The Post-War Sex Crime Panic,” in True Stories from the American Past, ed. William Graebner (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993), pp. 170–71. Keatinge supported legislation, passed in 1950, that added sodomy and oral copulation to the habitual offender law and imposed a mandatory sentence of life in prison for a third offense. See William N. Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861–2003 (New York: Viking, 2008), p. 432. See also the discussion of DeRiver in Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006); and Paul DeRiver, The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytic Study (1949; second edition: Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1956).

6. The District of Columbia was at the time under the jurisdiction of the US Congress.

7. HR 6071, 80th Congress, 2nd Session, 1948, in Congressional Record, vol. 94, p. 3884. “Providing for the Treatment of Sexual Psychopaths in the District of Columbia, Senate Report 1377, 2nd Session, May 21, 1948.

8. Alfred Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948).

9. Historian Estelle Freedman points out that in the psychiatric and legal literature of the 1940s and 1950s, the terms sex criminal, pervert, psychopath, and homosexual frequently overlapped, and she suggests that psychopath even “served as a code for ‘homosexual’ ”: “Uncontrolled Desires: The Response to the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960,” Journal of American History 74, no. 1 (June 1987): pp. 83–106.

10. Testimony and cross-examination of Thomas L. Ferry, Hollywood Vice Detail, LAPD, in Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board Case File 1960–61, California State Archives, Sacramento.

11. Testimony and cross-examination of Thomas L. Ferry.

12. Memorandum from Deputy Attorney General Warren Deering to Principal Counsel for the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, Bion W. Gregory, September 2, 1960, Alcoholic Beverage Control Appeals Board Case File, 1960–61, California State Archives, Sacramento.

13. That same year, the Alcoholic Beverage Commission had recommended suspending a liquor license that had been granted to Sol Stoumen, owner of San Francisco’s famous Black Cat Café, on the grounds that Stoumen had let homosexuals hang out in his establishment. The liberal California Supreme Court decided that the commission and the state’s Board of Equalization had been too zealous in their crusade against homosexuals. The court restored Stoumen’s license, declaring that as long as there was no evidence of activity injurious to “public welfare or morals,” even homosexuals had the right to freedom of association: Sol Stoumen v. George R. Reilly, 37 Cal., 2d 713, S.F. no. 18310, August 28, 1951. The case started a war between the California Supreme Court and the California State Legislature.

14. California Business and Professions Code (1955), section 24200(e), p. 2230, chap. 1217.

15. Hearing Transcript, April 20, 1960, “In the Matter of the Accusation Against the Criterion Lounge,” ABC Appeals Board Case file 1960–61, California State Archives, Sacramento.

16. There were fewer lesbian establishments than those that catered to gay men in the 1950s and 1960s. But police harassment of lesbians and raids of their bars were common across the country. See, for example: (Memphis) Daneel Buring, “Softball and Alcohol: The Limits of Lesbian Community in Memphis from the 1940s Through the 1960s,” in Carryin’ On in the Old South, ed. John Howard (New York: New York University Press, 1997); (New Orleans) Elly Bulkin, “An Old Dyke’s Tale: An Interview with Doris Lunden,” in The Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (Boston: Alyson Books, 1992); (Washington, DC) Eva Freund, interview with Mark Meinke, Rainbow History Project, Washington, DC, November 3, 2002 (I am grateful to Philip Clark of the Rainbow History Project for sharing a transcript of this interview with me); (Buffalo) Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); (Worchester, MA) Bob Skiba, “Pansies, Perverts, and Pegged Pants,” in Gay and Lesbian Community Guide to New England (1982); (Philadelphia) chap. 7, here, a discussion of the raid at Rusty’s; (Seattle) Ruth Pettis and Lisa Cohen interview with Rosa Bohanan, March 28, 1998, Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project (I am grateful to Ruth Pettis for sharing this transcript with me); (Los Angeles) Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A.

17. Kershaw tried unsuccessfully to appeal the revocation of her liquor license: Pearl Kershaw, Appellant v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, 318 P. 2d, no. 17693. See also Joan W. Howarth, “First and Last Chance: Looking for Lesbians in Fifties Bar Cases,” Southern California Review of Law and Women’s Studies 5, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 153–72. Howarth discusses undercover surveillance in four lesbian bars, including Pearl’s. Officers Gwinn and Davis were also a team in the raid of another Oakland bar, Mary’s First and Last Chance. The owners fought successfully against revocation of their license: Albert Vallerga and Mary Azar v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, 1 Civil No. 18, 184, January 27, 1959, p. 10, California State Archives, Sacramento; and Albert Vallerga and Mary Azar v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, in the Supreme Court of the State of California, S.F. 20285, pp. 12, 14, December 23, 1959, California State Archives.

18. Sten Russell, “A Look at the Lesbian: DOB Convention Report,” Ladder, July 1960, p. 16.

19. Reported in Del Martin, “The Gay Bar—Whose Problem Is It?,” Ladder, December 1959, pp. 4–13ff.

20. There were a few early instances of resistance. The largest raid in Baltimore history was at the Pepper Hill Club. It was carried out by Baltimore police because, they claimed, they had “evidence of homosexuality” among the patrons: 139 gay men and lesbians were taken to the police station. All but five were released without being charged, but the convicted included a lesbian who fought the policemen who tried to lead her into a paddy wagon and a man who insisted on testifying in court, though the charges against him were about to be dropped: Associated Press, “Police Raid Leader Plans to Take Case to Grand Jury,” Cumberland (MD) Evening Times, October 3, 1955.

21. James Mills, “The Detective,” Life, December 3, 1965.

22. Effeminate men and masculine women (identified usually as “homosexual” or “gay” in the mid-twentieth century but often as “transgender” in later years) were particular targets of police on the streets because they were the most identifiable “sexual deviates.” See, for example, Seattle drag queen Kim Drake in Don Paulson and Roger Simpson, An Evening at the Garden of Allah: A Gay Cabaret in Seattle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 105; Leslie Feinberg’s autobiographical novel Stone Butch Blues (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1993); and Frankie Hucklenbroich’s autobiographical novel A Crystal Diary (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1997). Big-city police targeted transgender people of color especially. See, for example, Piri, a black female “stud” from Buffalo and her drag queen brother, in Kennedy and Davis, Boots of Leather, p. 69; and the stories of Meko, a black butch, and Nancy Valverde, a Latina butch, in Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 93–96.

Police surveillance of the activities of homosexual men in parks and restrooms was indiscriminate with regard to color. In Atlanta, for example, police conducted an eight-day stakeout of the restroom at the Carnegie Library and arrested twenty white men for “sodomy,” which was a felony in Georgia. All twenty were indicted, and their names and addresses printed repeatedly in the Atlanta Constitution (September 5, 1953, p. 11; September 10, 1953, p. 7; September 15, 1953, p. 32; September 16, 1953, p. 17). The paper called it “the Atlanta Public Library perversion case” and presented lurid headlines such as “Youth Leader [Jack Macaulay, a twenty-four-year-old Boy Scout official] Given 10 Yr. Morals Term.” The case is discussed at greater length in John Howard, “The Library, the Park and the Pervert: Public Space and Homosexual Encounter in Post–World War II Atlanta,” Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): pp. 166–87. The Atlanta Association of Baptist Churches, which was made up of 128 Atlanta congregations, also informed the faithful of “1,500 sex perverts pursuing their devious designs” in the city’s Piedmont Park: quoted in Arnold Fleischman and Jason Hardman, “Hitting Below the Bible Belt: The Development of the Gay Rights Movement in Atlanta,” Journal of Urban Affairs 26, no. 4 (2004): pp. 407–26. Similar stakeouts and harassment across the country are discussed in William N. Eskridge Jr., “Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet, 1946–1961,” Florida State University Law Review 24, no. 4 (Summer 1997), especially section 2, “Flushing Out the Homosexual: Spies, Decoy Cops, Raids.”

23. People v. Earl 31 Cal. Rptr. 76, Dist. Ct. App. 1963.

24. See John LaStala, “Atascadero: Dachau for Queers?,” Advocate, April 26, 1972. LaStala had been sent to Atascadero a year after the facility was built. See also “Atascadero: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Treatment,” Advocate, October 11, 1972; and Wayne Sage, “Crime and the Clockwork Lemon,” Human Behavior 3, no. 9 (September 1974): pp. 16–25.

25. Statutes and Amendments to the Codes of California, 1952, First Ex. Sess., chap. 23, p. 380, enacted April 17, 1952.

26. People v. Earl 216 Cal. App. 2d 607.

27. Sally Taft was married only briefly, in the 1950s, but she used her married name, Duplaix, until her death on July 19, 2012.

28. Sally Duplaix, interview with author, Chatham, MA (telephone), May 2, 2012.

29. Howard Whitman, “The Biggest Taboo,” Collier’s, February 15, 1947, pp. 24–27.

30. Duplaix, interview with author; and transcript of Duplaix, interview with Arden Eversmeyer, 2001. I am grateful to Arden Eversmeyer for sharing this transcript with me.

31. The documentary Changing Our Minds: The Story of Dr. Evelyn Hooker (directed by Richard Schmiechen, 1992) includes film clips of a young homosexual male being lobotomized in 1949 through the “ice pick” technique that was brought to the United States by neurologist Dr. Walter Freeman. Prefrontal lobotomies were performed on forty thousand mental institution inmates in the mid-twentieth century. Many of them were homosexual. The documentary also shows a 1950s film clip of another young homosexual being given a shock treatment to “cure” him of his homosexuality.

32. Duplaix, interview with author.

CHAPTER 2: AMERICA HUNTS FOR WITCHES

1. Harold B. Hinton, “Welles: Our Man of the Hour in Cuba,” New York Times, August 20, 1933.

2. Hinton, “Welles: Our Man of the Hour in Cuba”; James B. Reston, “Acting Secretary,” New York Times, August 4, 1941; Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR’s Global Strategist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

3. Michael Fullilove, How Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America into the War and into the World (New York: Penguin, 2013), p. 111. There had been gossip when Welles was in Cuba too that he engaged in homosexual relations: Irwin F. Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 83.

4. Orville H. Bullitt, ed., For the President, Personal and Secret: Correspondence Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and William C. Bullitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), pp. 512–16.

5. Mary V. Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996).

6. By 1964, presidents could no longer rely on the discretion of the press. President Lyndon Johnson’s top aide and longtime trusted friend, Walter Jenkins, a husband and father of six, was arrested by two undercover agents in the restroom of a Washington, DC, YMCA, only weeks before the November presidential election. The UPI article about Jenkins’s arrest ran in newspapers everywhere. The media speculated that the arrest of his aide would hurt Johnson’s chances in the election. The president immediately asked for Jenkins’s resignation. See, for example, United Press International, “Johnson Is Stung Hard by Arrest of Top Aide,” Great Bend (KS) Tribune, October 15, 1964; United Press International, “T-Men Knew of Jenkins Since 1959,” Scottsdale (AZ) Daily News, October 17, 1964. Johnson maintained that he’d had no idea about Jenkins’s homosexuality: “I couldn’t have been more shocked about Walter Jenkins than if I’d heard Lady Bird had tried to kill the Pope,” he is quoted as saying in Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 180.

7. Athan Theoharis, J. Edgar Hoover, Sex, and Crime: An Historical Antidote (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1995), p. 32.

8. Bullitt, ed., For the President, pp. xi–xiii and 512–14. FDR’s tolerance of Welles’s homosexual behavior is somewhat surprising considering that, as assistant secretary of the navy in 1919, he conducted the first massive homosexual witch hunt in America. See p. 31.

9. The railway porter incident did not come to public attention until it was reported in the scandal magazine Confidential: Truxton Decatur, “We Accuse . . . Sumner Welles,” Confidential, March 1956.

10. Welles’s resignation did not mark the end of his involvement in matters of state: for example, he was a passionate supporter of the creation of Israel, as he wrote about in We Need Not Fail (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948).

11. Reported in Drew Pearson, “Merry-Go-Round,” syndicated column, November 16, 1943. Pearson, who was no friend of homosexuals (see p. 259), admired Sumner Welles and did not know of what Bullitt had accused him.

12. Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles, p. 350.

13. “Peurifoy’s First-Name Diplomacy Succeeded in Hard Assignments,” New York Times, August 13, 1955.

14. Hugh Morrow, “The Man Who Runs the State Department,” Saturday Evening Post, reprinted in the Milwaukee (WI) Journal, September 6, 1949.

15. Carlisle H. Humelsine, senior State Department official, to James E. Webb, undersecretary of state, confidential memo, June 23, 1950, “Information on Homosexuals” (“declassified 4/12”), ARC Identifier 2666952, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

16. Confidential memo from Humelsine, National Archives.

17. Morrow, “The Man Who Runs the State Department.”

18. Ibid.

19. Hiss had worked for the State Department and had presided over the United Nations Charter Conference. He was convicted in 1950 after having been accused of being a Soviet spy by Whittaker Chambers, who’d been a Communist and a bisexual (and who claimed to have given up both Communism and homosexuality in 1938).

20. The number of Communists McCarthy specified has been reported variously as 57, 205, and 250.

21. William S. White, “ ‘Never Condoned Disloyalty,’ Says Acheson of Hiss Stand,” New York Times, March 1, 1950.

22. Hill quoted in Max Lerner, “Panic on the Potomac,” part 1, New York Post, July 10, 1950.

23. Kenneth Wherry, Report of the Investigations of the Junior Senator of Nebraska . . . on the Infiltration of Subversives and Moral Perverts into the Executive Branch of the United States Government, May 17, 1950. Lister Hill filed a separate report because he and Wherry disagreed over what the report should cover.

24. “New Shocker,” Newsweek, May 29, 1950, p. 18. Newsweek accepted without questioning Blick’s statement, which it called a “real shocker,” that 3,750 homosexuals were employed by the federal government.

25. William S. White, “Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked,” New York Times, May 20, 1950.

26. Wherry, Report of the Investigations of the Junior Senator of Nebraska.

27. Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, Washington Confidential (New York: Crown, 1951), p. 116.

28. Max Lerner, “Panic on the Potomac,” part 3, New York Post, July 12, 1950.

29. Wherry, Report of the Investigations of the Junior Senator of Nebraska.

30. White, “Inquiry by Senate on Perverts Asked.”

31. “Pervert Inquiry Ordered,” New York Times, June 15, 1950.

32. Congressional Record, House, 81st Congress, 2d Session, April 19, 1950, 96:5403. See also Congressional Record, House, March 31, 1950, 4591.

33. Incidents reported in Joseph and Stewart Alsop, “Why Has Washington Gone Crazy?” Saturday Evening Post, July 29, 1950, pp. 20–21, 59–61.

34. David K. Johnson, “ ‘Homosexual Citizens’: Washington’s Gay Community Confronts the Civil Service,” Washington History 6, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 1994/95): pp. 44–63.

35. Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government, report made to the Committee on Expenditures by Its Subcommittee on Investigations, US Senate, 81st Congress, 2d session, December 15, 1950.

36. Ibid.

37. Truman’s White House did work behind the scenes to quash some extremes, as when chief counsel to the subcommittee Francis Flanagan tried to establish a central card index composed of the names of any person, whether or not a federal employee, who was suspected by any government agency of being a homosexual: David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 105. In 1950, however, Truman signed the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which included the regulation that homosexual service members must be discharged from the military.

38. Senator Clifford Case on Face the Nation, CBS, July 8, 1956: “News of Interest,” Washington Newsletter, Mattachine Society, July 16, 1956, p. 3. A short-lived Washington, DC, branch of the Mattachine Society was formed in 1956. It was unrelated to Mattachine Society Washington, which Frank Kameny established in 1961.

39. Betty Deran, interview with Len Evans, May 7, 1983, Len Evans Papers, GLC9, box 1, folder 21, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California Collection, San Francisco Public Library.

40. Routsong’s original title for the novel was A Place for Us. Deran says the title and general story line derived from their experiences of having to leave DC and find “a place” where they could be together: Deran, interview with Evans.

41. Deran, interview with Evans.

42. Confidential memo from Humelsine, National Archives.

43. Deran, interview with Evans.

44. “Tydings Fires 2½ Hr. Blast at McCarthy from Floor,” Washington Post, July 21, 1950, pp. 1ff.

45. McCarthy also practiced dirty tricks on Senator Lester Hunt, a much-loved liberal Democrat from Wyoming, whose son, Lester Jr., had been arrested for soliciting a male undercover agent. McCarthy and his henchman, New Hampshire senator Styles Bridges, told the senator that if he did not resign immediately, they would make sure that the incident became a public scandal. When he did not resign, they informed the media about the son’s arrest and got Roy Blick to prosecute the twenty-year-old. The despondent senator committed suicide in 1954. The case is discussed at length in Rodger McDaniel, Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt (Cody, WY: WordsWorth Press, 2013).

46. Senator Harry Cain, “I Could Not Remain Silent,” as told to Tris Coffin, Coronet, November 1955, pp. 29–34.

47. Many were individuals whose jobs had nothing to do with “national security.” For instance, Ian Nabishima, a Japanese American who’d gotten an honorable discharge from the US Army in 1951, was fired four years later from his job as a clerk-typist at the Public Health Service Hospital in San Francisco. An investigation had disclosed that the twenty-eight-year-old man “associated with known homosexuals under circumstances that raised serious questions about [his] moral conduct,” and that he “frequented a place known as a homosexual hangout”: “Before the United States Civil Service Commission Board of Appeals and Review: In the Matter of Ian A. Nabishima, Appellant,” August 17, 1955; in Len Evans Papers, 93-98, box GLC-9, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California Collection, San Francisco Public Library.

48. John Logan, “You’re Fired!” Mattachine Review 2 (June 1956): pp. 27–29.

CHAPTER 3: NO ARMY OF LOVERS: TOWARD A HOMOSEXUAL-FREE MILITARY

1. Elizabeth Lutes Hillman, Defending America: Military Culture and the Cold War Court-Martial (Princeton, NJ: University of Princeton Press, 2005), pp. 114–19; and Victor Rabinowitz, Unrepentant Leftist: A Lawyer’s Memoir (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996), pp. 293–94.

2. “Kathryn Rising Navy Man’s Bride,” New York Times, April 4, 1937.

3. U.S. v. Hooper, 26 CMR 417 (1958); Hooper, Plaintiff v. Hartman, Defendant, no. 2027, 163 F. Supp. 437 (1958), US District Court, San Diego, CA, May 10, 1958; and Hooper, Appellant v. Hartman, Appellee, no. 16058, 274f, 2d 429, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, December 4, 1959.

4. Quoted in “Trial by Military Court OKd for Retired Officers,” European Stars and Stripes, September 28, 1958.

5. Hillman, Defending America, p. 117.

6. Ibid.

7. Robert O. Bland v. C. C. Hartman, Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 245f, 2d 311, May 3, 1957.

8. Quoted in “Navy Trial Upheld for Retired Officer,” New York Times, September 27, 1958.

9. The October 19, 1949, DOD directive mandated that “An undesirable or blue discharge issued because of homosexual acts or tendencies generally will be considered as under dishonorable conditions and a bar to entitlements [of all veterans’ benefits] under Public Law No. 2, 73rd Congress as amended, and Public Law No. 347, 78th Congress, as amended.”

10. Lawrence P. Murphy, Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy (New York: Haworth Press, 1988): see, for example, how investigators built their case against Samuel Neal Kent, pp. 77ff.

11. In 1951 the Articles of War were adapted into the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

12. Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 77.

13. Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), chaps. 1 and 5.

14. Soon after the war, psychiatrist William Menninger sensibly guessed that for every homosexual who was detected by the military during World War II, “there were 5 or 10 who were never detected”: William Menninger, Psychiatry in a Troubled World (New York: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 226–27.

15. Quoted in Eskridge, “Privacy Jurisprudence and the Apartheid of the Closet,” pp. 703–888.

16. Three research teams of psychiatrists labored over surefire ways to distinguish the real from the phony homosexual using the Rorschach test: M. S. Bergmann, “Homosexuality on the Rorschach Test,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic 9 (1945): pp. 78–83. The military was always reluctant to discharge self-confessed homosexuals in the midst of war. Colonel Zula Johnston, the head of nursing in an army hospital, recalls a trained medic who told his commander, “You can’t send me to Vietnam. I’m gay.” “If we got rid of all the homosexual medics in the army,” the commander answered, “we wouldn’t have any medics”: Zula Johnston, interview with author, Olympia, WA, May 29, 2012.

17. “Medicine: Sanity in the Subs,” Newsweek, August 11, 1947; and Berube, Coming Out Under Fire, ch. 10.

18. Memorandum: Department of Defense to Secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force, October 11, 1949, in Report of the Board Appointed to Prepare and Submit Recommendations to the Secretary of the Navy for the Revision of Policies, Procedures, and Directives Dealing with Homosexuals, March 15, 1957.

19. For a brief history of military regulations against homosexuality see Major Jeffrey S. Davis, “Military Policy Toward Homosexuals: Scientific, Historical, and Legal Perspectives, Military Law Review 131 (January 1991): pp. 55–108.

20. In the navy, for example, there were 483 discharges for homosexuality in 1950, during the Korean War. The year the armistice was signed, in 1953, the number had almost tripled to 1,353: in Randy Shilts, Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military (New York: St. Martins, 1993), p. 70.

21. Carlita “Lee” Durand, interview with author, San Diego, August 3, 2012.

22. Captain Barbara M. S. Pratt, USAF Commander, 3629th School Squadron, Lackland Air Force Base, “Statement,” November 23, 1959, in the private collection of Carlita “Lee” Durand.

23. Dasil C. Smith, MD, “Certificate” re. Carlita K. Durand, October 22, 1959, in the private collection of Carlita “Lee” Durand.

24. Memorandum, October 11, 1949.

25. Durand was able to get her discharge upgraded to honorable in 2008, after a half century of feeling disgraced. She’d turned to alcohol, had been rescued by Alcoholics Anonymous, and became a swimming champion in the Senior Olympics: Durand, interview with author.

26. Sue Young, interview with author, San Diego, July 13, 2012.

27. Canaday, The Straight State, pp. 199–200.

28. Fannie Mae Clackum v. United States, 296f, 2d, no. 246-56, United States Court of Claims, January 20, 1960. The Clackum case was first brought to my attention by Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), pp. 119–23.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

CHAPTER 4: AMERICA PROTECTS ITS YOUNGSTERS

1. “Idaho Underworld,” Time, December 12, 1955. Time fanned the flames of panic nationwide by its sensationalistic references to “a widespread homosexual underworld” that had been “preying on hundreds of teenage boys for the past decade.” The Boise witch hunts are the subject of a full-length book by John Gerassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an American City (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

2. Ralph H. Major Jr., “New Moral Menace to Our Youth,” Coronet, September 1950, pp. 101–8.

3. Jim Duggins interviews with Ralph Neugebauer, August 13, 1994; Bud Robbins, July 20, 1994, and August 16, 1994; and Scott Boxwood, October 8, 1994, and December 3, 1994: “Uncles Project,” San Francisco GLBT Historical Society. All three men were students at the University of Missouri in the late 1940s and were victims of the witch hunts.

4. Milton E. Hahn and Byron H. Atkinson, “The Sexually Deviant Student,” School and Society (September 17, 1955): pp. 85–87; Kathleen Weiler, “The Case of Martha Deane: Sexuality and Power at Cold War UCLA,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 4 (November 2007): pp. 470–96.

5. Daniel Tsang, “Gay Ann Arbor Purges,” Midwest Gay Academic Journal 1, nos. 2 and 3 (1977).

6. Ron McCrea, “Madison Gay Purge,” Midwest Gay Academic Journal 1, no. 3 (1977); Lewis Bosworth, interview with Scott Seyforth, Madison’s LGBT Community, 1960s–Present, Oral History Program, interview 940, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Archives.

7. Barry Werth, The Scarlet Professor: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (New York: Random House, 2001).

8. Ibid.

9. The University of Texas witch hunt preceded the one at the University of Missouri: “University Row Laid to Homosexuals,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 1944, p. 4; “Education: In the Lone Star State,” Time, November 27, 1944.

10. Mabel Norris Chesley, “The High Cost of Snooping,” a series of ten articles about expenditures and methods of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee in the Daytona Beach (FL) Morning Journal, December 1962: in John Egerton Collection, University of South Florida, box 3, folder 8.

11. Emmett Peter Jr., “The Sergeant,” Daily Commercial (Leesburg, FL), April 2, 1963.

12. Sydney P. Freedberg, “The Story of Old Sparky,” St. Petersburg (FL) Times, September 25, 1999.

13. Clip of Senator Johns speaking in film documentary Behind Closed Doors: The Dark Legacy of the Johns Committee, by Allyson A. Beutke, 2000.

14. Mabel Norris Chesley, “Johns Committee Does Little, Spends Lots,” Daytona Beach (FL) Morning Journal, December 10, 1962.

15. Emmett Peter Jr., “Johns Committee: A Balance Sheet,” Daily Commercial (Leesburg, FL), March 31, 1963.

16. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee Papers, box 8, folder 15, June 1, 1960, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

17. James T. Sears, Lonely Hunters: An Oral History of Lesbian and Gay Southern Life, 1948–1968 (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 57.

18. Ruth Perry Papers, John Egerton Collection, box 1, folder 6, University of South Florida.

19. “3 Witnesses Go Mum at NAACP Probe,” Fort Pierce (FL) News-Tribune, February 27, 1958, p. 12.

20. Johns in documentary Behind Closed Doors.

21. “ ‘NAACP Control High Court’—Johns,” Miami (FL) News, February 24, 1959.

22. Johns did not cease his investigations into “integrationist groups” totally. His committee took complaints from right-wing groups such as Florida States Rights, the White Sentinel, and the Un-American Committee of the American Legion, and investigated groups such as the Congress for Racial Equality and the Independent Citizens Committee for Arts, Sciences, and Professions in 1960: Correspondence, August 31, 1960, and September 12, 1960, in the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee Papers, box 3, folder 11, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee. However, the primary focus of the Johns Committee by then was “cleaning up” public education.

23. The professor’s protests had been triggered by an invitation to sociologist Jerome Davis, who’d been denied tenure at Yale because of his leftist sympathies.

24. Mabel Norris Chesley, “What Started Investigations of Educational Institutions?,” Daytona Beach (FL) Morning Journal, December 14, 1962. Johns did not totally cease Red-baiting on campuses, despite AAUP resistance. For instance, an offer to a retired Vanderbilt professor to teach part-time at USF in fall 1962 was withdrawn under pressure from the Johns Committee when it was discovered he’d written a left-leaning book on the Cold War. AAUP blacklisted USF over the case: John Egerton, “The Stormy 1960s at the University of South Florida,” unpublished manuscript, Egerton Papers, box 1, folder 1A, University of South Florida Special Collections.

25. Bonnie Stark, “McCarthyism in Florida: Charley Johns and the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, July 1956 to July 1965” (master’s thesis, University of South Florida, 1985), p. 92.

26. The American Association of University Professors claimed that the Johns Committee “libeled” faculty members by making “tenuous and unproved homosexual ‘smears.’ ” But it never asserted the right to be a homosexual: Statewide AAUP meeting, Saint Petersburg: “Academic Freedom and the Johns Committee Investigations,” T. Terrell Sessums Papers, box 24, Special Collections, University of South Florida.

27. None of the university professors fired for homosexuality fought back in the courts, though three high school teachers did. The Florida Supreme Court declared that the firings of the high school teachers were illegal because confessions were obtained by threats; their teaching licenses were restored: John Egerton, “The Controversy” (unpublished manuscript), pp. 145–46, Egerton Papers, box 3, University of South Florida.

28. Peter Jr., “The Sergeant.”

29. Johns bullied administrators, and they were often cowed by him. For example, on several occasions, he told the University of Florida’s president, Wayne Reitz, that he must help Johns’s “good friend” who was being mistreated by his supervisor (November 9, 1956); that Reitz must hire Mr. O. C. Gay, an air-conditioning maintenance man, to service the new university hospital’s air-conditioning (June 21, 1957); that Reitz must raise the salary of Johns’s “warm personal friend” who was employed in the Soils Department (August 20, 1959); that he must rehire a man who was fired after being charged with a DUI (February 20, 1959); and that he must “talk with the Dean Maloney and see if there is a way to pull up the grades to a desired level” of the son of a friend of Johns’s (January 5, 1964): Office of the President Papers, series P14a, box 40, Department of Special and Area Studies Collections, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

30. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee Papers, series 1486, box 7, folder 19, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee. The names of the investigated have been redacted in the FLIC files.

31. Many of the men caught by the Johns Committee were married to women and did not have a homosexual identity. Their same-sex sexual experiences were with anonymous partners in public places.

32. Egerton, “The Controversy”; and editorial, Daily Commercial (Leesburg, FL), April 23, 1963.

33. Charley Johns was not present at this particular interrogation, though he came to many of them.

34. Series 1486 (FLIC), box 7, folder 19, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

35. Eunice Maude Disney died at the age of forty-nine in 1967, a few years after she’d been forced out of her position at UF.

36. The University of Florida’s dean of women, Marna Brady, who lived in a long-term relationship with another woman, Norma Olson, was untouched by the Johns Committee, as were, undoubtedly, other discreet (and lucky) lesbians on the faculty and in administration at UF and other state-supported institutions: Rita Irene Herron, “ ‘True Spirit of Pioneer Traditions’: An Historical Analysis of the University of Florida’s First Dean of Women, Marna Brady” (PhD dissertation, Florida State University, 2004). Author Rita Mae Brown, who was a student at the University of Florida during the Johns witch hunts, presents a fictional version of Marna Brady, a hypocritical lesbian dean who cancels the autobiographical lesbian character’s scholarship when she’s caught with another woman student: Rubyfruit Jungle (Plainfield, VT: Daughters Press, 1973); and Rita Mae Brown, interview with author, Charlotteville, VA (telephone), January 12, 2015.

37. R. J. Strickland to chair of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, letter, “Personal and Confidential,” October 16, 1959, series 1486 (FLIC), box 3, folder 9, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

38. At least twenty-seven public school teachers were finally purged on the charge of lesbianism. Fifty-three male teachers and seven additional teachers whose gender can’t be determined from the transcripts were also purged on the charge of homosexuality: Karen L. Graves, And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 22.

39. James Schnur, “Cold Warriors in the Hot Sunshine: The Johns Committee’s Assault on Civil Liberties in Florida, 1956–1965” (master’s thesis, University of South Florida, 1995), pp. 124–25.

40. October 20, 1960, series 1486 (FLIC), box 8, folder 43, Florida State Archives.

41. Names have been redacted on most FLIC documents, although occasionally the redactor missed a name: Investigation transcript, June 2, 1962, series 1486 (FLIC), box 10, folder 42, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

42. Ibid.

43. The woman’s name is redacted in most of the files but appears in testimony of May 20, 1960, series 1486 (FLIC), box 8, folder 11, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

44. Debriefing of May by R. J. Strickland, May 9, 1960, series 1486 (FLIC), box 8, folder 7, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

45. Ibid.

46. March 20, 1960, series 1486 (FLIC), box 8, folder 3, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

47. March 20, 1960, series 1486 (FLIC), box 8, folder 4, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee.

48. R. J. Strickland to FLIC chairman, letter, September 21, 1959, series 1486, box 3, folder 9, Florida Legislative Investigation Committee Papers, Florida State Archives, Tallahassee. Requests for payments to informants were also made by Strickland in October and November: ibid.

49. “Senator Johns Offers to Quit; Probe Committee Rapped,” News Tribune (Fort Pierce, FL), April 19, 1963, p. 3; Jerry Mock, “Shakeup Appears to Be Drawing Near in Johns Committee,” Panama City (FL) Herald, May 21, 1963, p. 5.

50. United Press International, “Evans Named to Johns Committee,” Panama City (FL) Herald, November 19, 1963, p. 1.

51. Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida: A Report of the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee (Tallahassee: FLIC, 1964).

52. Harold Rummel, “Nationwide Sale of Florida Homo Pamphlet!” Evening Independent (Saint Petersburg, FL), June 25, 1964.

53. Ibid.

54. Paul Welch, “Homosexuality in America,” Life, June 26, 1964, pp. 66–74ff.

55. “Officials to Map Drive on Deviates,” Miami (FL) News, July 15, 1964.

56. Karl Wickstrom, “The Life of a Homosexual Is Sad, Not Gay,” Miami Herald, August 9, 1964.

CHAPTER 5: MATTACHINE

1. The most extensive biography of Harry Hay is Stuart Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990).

2. Harry Hay, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, ed. Will Roscoe (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), p. 60. Christopher Bram points out that within days of the publication of the Kinsey Report on male sexuality, Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms were also published. Bram observes hyperbolically that “The gay revolution began as a literary revolution”: Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America (New York: Twelve, 2012). But the brutal crackdowns on homosexuals in that same year (see prologue and part 1 of this book) surely had as much and more to do with triggering what became, years later, the “gay revolution.”

3. Harry Hay, “Birth of a Consciousness,” Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review (Winter 1995).

4. Karl Ulrichs had tried to start an even earlier homosexual civil rights movement in Germany, in 1867, declaring he would unite “urnings” (homosexuals) into a mass, and they would “champion” their human rights: see Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs: The Life and Work of Karl Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1988).

5. Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 43.

6. The Society for Human Rights’s charter is reproduced in Jonathan Ned Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Crowell, 1976), pp. 385–88.

7. Edward Sagarin (aka Donald Webster Cory), “Structure and Ideology of an Association of Deviants” (PhD dissertation, New York University, 1966; reprinted, New York: Arno Press, 1975), pp. 64–67. The Veterans Benevolent Association continued until 1954. Other homosexual organizations were established in Europe during the 1940s, such as the Dutch Center for Culture and Leisure (COC), and the Danish “Furbundet af 1948” (“the League of 1948”), both started primarily to fight against laws that criminalized homosexuality.

8. In the 1984 documentary Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community, Hay claimed, “We didn’t know at that point, none of us knew, that there had been a gay organization anywhere in the world before.”

9. Harry Hay, “In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation,” unpublished manuscript, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 26, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

10. Ibid.

11. Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 140.

12. The school was deemed a “Communist front” by the Tenney Committee: Edward L. Barrett Jr., The Tenney Committee: Legislative Investigation of Subversive Activities in California (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951), pp. 105–121.

13. In a 1984 Christmas letter to Don Slater, Jennings talks about his younger years when he was “a loud-mouthed commie,” but there is no evidence of his having belonged to the party: in C. Todd White, “Dale Jennings (1917–2000): ONE’s Outspoken Advocate,” in Before Stonewall: Advocates for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context, ed. Vern L. Bullough (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2002), p. 84.

14. Hieronymous K. (pseudonym for Dale Jennings), “The Mattachine,” ONE, January 1953, pp. 18–19.

15. Three years later, when Dale Jennings was far less smitten with Hay than he’d been at the beginning, he questioned the concept of homosexuals as a “cultural minority.” In his essay “Homosexuals Are Not a People,” written under the pseudonym Jeff Winters, Jennings characterized as simplistic the idea of a homosexual “ethic” or single distinct homosexual “culture.” He echoed Alfred Kinsey’s observation that humanity is not divided simply into homosexual and heterosexual (cf. Kinsey’s 0 to 6 scale), and he was a proponent for “sexual freedom” for everyone: ONE, March 1953, pp. 2–6.

16. Chuck Rowland, interview with Eric Marcus in Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945–1990 (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), p. 31.

17. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 64.

18. Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., p. 128.

19. Gruber later changed his first name to John, claiming he did it so he could stop hearing in his head his mother’s call of “Jimmy! Jimmy!” He and Stevens were leather men and early members of the first gay motorcycle club, the Satyrs, founded in Los Angeles in 1954. The history of their early participation in Mattachine is recounted in Chuck Rowland, “Opening Talk: California State Constitutional Convention of the Mattachine Society,” April 11, 1953, Donald Lucas Papers, box 2, folder 20, San Francisco GLBT Historical Society.

20. Jim Kepner, “Why Can’t We All Get Together, and What Do We Have in Common?” (1997) in Great Speeches on Gay Rights, ed. James Daley (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2010), p. 93. Hay’s recollections about when Bernhard joined the group differ from Kepner’s but are vague and confused. In Radically Gay, Hay recalled that she was introduced to Mattachine in “approximately September of 1951” by two actors, “Paul Bernard” and Phil Jones (p. 76), but he told Stuart Timmons that Jones brought Bernhard to a meeting, and Bernhard later brought “Paul Bernard”: Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 154. Jim Kepner was taken to his first Mattachine meeting in December 1952 by another woman, Betty Perdue, who was known by the pseudonym Geraldine Jackson.

21. Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., p. 128; and Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 154. Harry Hay told Timmons that Bernhard “volunteered to work with the Fifth Order, becoming number eight and the most active woman in Mattachine.” But Hay’s own brief written history of the Fifth Order (“In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation”) does not mention Bernhard. Nor have I been able to find evidence that she was present during some of the most crucial Fifth Order meetings, such as the one in which the members decided to form the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment to raise funds for the Dale Jennings trial. (See below.)

22. Eann MacDonald (pseudonym for Harry Hay), “Preliminary Concepts,” July 7, 1950, box 1, folder 21, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

23. Hay, “In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation.”

24. Joseph Hansen, A Few Doors West of Hope: The Life and Times of Dauntless Don Slater (Los Angeles: Homosexual Information Center, 1998), p. 23.

25. Harry Hay, interview with Jonathan Ned Katz in Gay American History, p. 414.

26. Hay, “Preliminary Concepts.”

27. Homophile became the preferred term in the 1950s because it took the emphasis off of sex, as in homosexual.

28. Mattachine’s FBI file consists of almost a thousand pages and is available online through the FBI’s Freedom of Information Act—Subject: Mattachine Society. The file begins on May 21, 1953, with information given to the FBI by “a confidential informant of known reliability.” As Dan Siminoski points out, the May 21, 1953, memo is “seemingly in mid-text,” indicating that surveillance of Mattachine had at some earlier date been assigned a “highly classified internal security C status, given only to the most important FBI cases in this period.” (C generally indicated Communist and left-wing groups): Dan Siminoski, untitled paper, Dan Siminoski Collection, “FBI Surveillance of Gays and Lesbians,” box 16, folder 13, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

29. “Sense of Value,” discussion notes by “Howard,” September 20, 1951, Mattachine Society Project Collection, 2008-016, box 1, folder 11, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

30. “Social Directions of the Homosexual,” discussion notes by “Harry,” October 4, 1951, ibid.

31. Dale Jennings, “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty,” ONE, January 1953, p. 10.

32. The version of this story that Harry Hay repeated to Stuart Timmons was somewhat different from Jennings’s version in “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty,” and makes Jennings clearly complicit: see Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 164. Of course, the truth can never be known. Jennings wrote in “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty” that even if he had “done all the things which the prosecution claimed,” he wouldn’t have deserved punishment: “I would have been guilty of no unusual act [that is, heterosexuals, too, have oral and anal sex], only an illegal one in this society.”

33. Brochure, Victory!, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 14, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

34. Jennings, “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty.”

35. Recounted in brochure, Victory!, Mattachine Society Project Collection.

36. Hansen, A Few Doors West of Hope, p. 23.

37. C. Todd White, Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), p. 24.

38. Ibid.

39. Harry Hay to Donald Webster Cory (aka Edward Sagarin), letter, April 1952, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 10, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

40. White, Pre-Gay L.A., p. 24.

41. The year before, Hay had read in Donald Webster Cory’s book The Homosexual in America that “the American Civil Liberties Union had evinced an interest in the unconstitutionality of entrapment for the purpose of self-incriminating the victim,” as he wrote to Cory, complaining that the Los Angeles ACLU refused to help Jennings and asking for Cory’s assistance.

42. Hay to Cory, letter, April 1952.

43. Leaflet, “NOW Is The Time to Fight,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 14, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. As brave as Mattachine’s words were, the Fifth Order continued to exercise considerable caution. This first leaflet asked that checks be made payable to “Miss Jean Dempsey, Treasurer,” to an address on Oak Crest Drive, where Harry Hay’s mother lived. (Subsequent leaflets specified that checks be made payable to Miss Romayne Cox.) Most of the literature distributed by the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment carefully placed Jennings’s case in the context of LAPD’s harassment of all minorities—for example, “SO LONG AS ONE MINORITY GROUP IS THUS HARRIED AND HOUNDED, NO MINORITY GROUP OR COMMUNITY GROUP IS SAFE: An Anonymous Call to Arms from the Citizens’ Committee to Outlaw Entrapment,” ibid.

44. The trial is described in Harry Hay’s letter to Jay Clark, October 6, 1952, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 10, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

45. Ibid.

46. Jennings’s victory did not, of course, end vice squad entrapment of homosexual men in California or anywhere else.

47. Hay to Clark, letter, October 6, 1952.

48. Gerard G. Brissette to Mattachine Foundation, letter, February 15, 1953, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 9, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

49. Jennings, “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty,” p. 13.

50. Brochure, Victory!, Mattachine Society Project Collection.

51. Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 174.

52. Hay, “In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation.”

53. “Official Statement of Policy on Political Questions and Related Matters,” February 1953, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 16, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

54. Hay, “In Memory of the Mattachine Foundation.”

55. Paul Coates, “Well, Medium and Rare: Where Is Romayne?” Daily Mirror (Los Angeles), March 12, 1953.

56. Mrs. Henry Hay to Marilyn Rieger, February 23, 1953, and Marilyn Rieger to Mrs. Henry Hay, February 26, 1953, Don Lucas Papers, box 1, folder 3, GLBT Historical Society. I am grateful to Dr. Linda Garber for helping me locate this material.

57. Marilyn Rieger to Paul Coates, March 13, 1953, ibid.

58. Marilyn Rieger to the Mattachine Foundation, letter, March 23, 1953, Mattachine Society Project Collection, folder 8, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

59. “Mrs. Henry Hay” to Marilyn Rieger, letter, April 14, 1953, Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 8, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

60. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 78.

61. Richard H. Gwartney, MD, “Reorganization Study,” March 1953, box 1, folder 18, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

62. Sears, Behind the Mask of Mattachine, p. 141.

63. “A Call to All Members of the Mattachine Society,” Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 1, folder 19, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

64. In Hay’s recollections, he sometimes presented the convention that booted the Fifth Order from power in rosy terms: for example, “This wasn’t the period when you hugged much yet, but nevertheless there was an awful lot of hugging going on that first weekend”: quoted in Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 177.

65. Rowland, “Opening Talk: California State Constitutional Convention of the Mattachine Society.”

66. Harry Hay’s speech is reprinted in “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been a Homosexual?” ONE, April 1953, pp. 6–7.

67. Resolution, Second Mattachine Constitutional Convention, May 23, 1953, Donald Lucas Papers, box 2, folder 21, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.

68. Marilyn Rieger to delegates of the convention, letter, May 23, 1953, Mattachine Society Project Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

69. Marcus, Making History, p. 36.

70. Harry Hay, interview with Peter Adair in Nancy Adair and Casey Adair, Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (San Francisco: New Glide Publications, 1978), p. 242.

CHAPTER 6: THE DAUGHTERS

1. Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States Since World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), p. 28.

2. In 1971 Martin was one of the founders of the pioneering Lesbian Mother’s Union.

3. Phyllis Lyon, “Del Martin (1921– ),” in Before Stonewall, p. 162.

4. Phyllis Lyon, in film documentary No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, directed by Joan E. Biren (JEB), 2003.

5. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, interview with David Mixner and Dennis Bailey in Brave Journeys: Profiles in Gay and Lesbian Courage (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. 19.

6. In the 1950s, few heterosexuals knew that gay meant homosexual, but it was by then a widely used term among urban homosexuals.

7. Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 92.

8. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, Lesbian/Woman (New York: Bantam, 1972), p. 238.

9. Martin and Lyon, Lesbian/Woman, pp. 238–39.

10. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, interview with author, San Francisco, August 14, 1987.

11. Martin and Lyon, Lesbian/Woman, pp. 239–42.

12. See p. 100.

13. The statement of purpose was reprinted, with little change, at the front of every issue of The Ladder, until July 1968, when the magazine was taken over by Barbara Grier and separated from Daughters of Bilitis.

14. “History of DOB” (1976), in June Mazer Lesbian Collection: Daughters of Bilitis Collection, box 1, folder 7, Special Collections, UCLA.

15. Natalie Lando (San Francisco DOB member who typed The Ladder for several years), interview with author, Oakland, April 4, 2012.

16. Letter to Del Martin, January 2, 1957, Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 3, folder 1, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

17. Phyllis Lyon, “Ann Ferguson Is Dead!” Ladder, January 1957, p. 7. At DOB meetings, a “greeter” would stand by the door, introduce herself to new women, and tell them, “You don’t have to give me your real name, not even your real first name”: in Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 100.

18. Lyon and Martin, interview with author. There were a few professionals who braved the risk and even became active members of DOB, such as public school special education teacher Billye Talmadge, partner of DOB president Jaye Bell.

19. Ann Ferguson, “Your Name Is Safe!” Ladder, November 1956, p. 10. The article was reprinted in several issues, including February 1958.

20. Informants’ names have been redacted from the FBI files available under the Freedom of Information Act.

21. US Department of Justice, FBI Report, November 15, 1966, LA File, no. 7, Dan Siminoski Collection of FBI Surveillance of Gays and Lesbians, box 1, folder 2, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

22. Ibid. The memo refers to Mattachine as well as DOB but makes little distinction between the two groups except to say that DOB was an organization for female homosexuals. Mattachine had denounced Communists in the 1953 upheaval, and its policy was to discourage political “subversives” from joining.

23. FBI memos: April 22, April 29, April 30, June 19, 1964, Dan Siminoski Collection, box 1, folder 3, ibid.

24. June 19, 1964 memo, ibid.

25. “Homosexual Women Hear Psychologists,” New York Times, June 21, 1964.

26. Ann Ferguson, “Your Name Is Safe!” Ladder, November 1956, p. 10.

27. Del Martin, “The Homosexual Vote,” Ladder, July 1960, pp. 4–5.

28. “San Francisco Police Raid Reveals Lack of Knowledge of Citizen’s Rights,” Ladder, November 1956, p. 5; “Citizen’s Rights,” Ladder, December 1956, pp. 2–3; Martin, “Gay Bar—Whose Problem Is It?,” Ladder, December 1959, pp. 4–13ff.“Revise Vagrancy Law, Say Experts,” and “An Open Letter to Assemblyman John A. O’Connell,” Ladder, September 1958, pp. 4–6. A 1959 article by Barbara Stephens, “Homosexuals in Uniform,” Ladder, June 1959, pp. 17–20, surprisingly focused on the harassment of homosexual men in the military with not a word about the brutal treatment of lesbians.

29. Del Martin, “The Homosexual Vote,” Ladder, January 1962, pp. 4–5.

30. The ONE Midwinter Institutes were sponsored by the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies, which was developed by Dorr Legg and, starting in 1955, offered the first “gay studies program” in America: See Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 120–21.

31. Dorr Legg, interview with Paul D. Cain in Leading the Parade: Conversations with America’s Most Influential Lesbians and Gay Men (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), p. 3.

32. Hansen, A Few Doors West of Hope, p. 18; and White, Pre-Gay L.A., p. 91.

33. “Homosexual Bill of Rights Sizzles and Fizzles,” Ladder, March 1961, pp. 18 19.

34. Del Martin, “How Far Out Can We Go?” Ladder, January 1961, p. 4. Harry Hay opposed the bill too but, as he wrote in a wishful editorial for The Ladder, he was against it because homosexuals shouldn’t have to ask for rights. In a republic, civil rights “are, and must ever be, INDIVISBLE . . . ALL have the obligation to apply them to each alike, without reservations, or to none! [sic]”: Harry Hay, “Masculine Viewpoint,” Ladder, July 1961, pp. 16–23.

35. Marci M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf), p. 9.

36. “Homosexual Bill of Rights Sizzles and Fizzles,” p. 24.

37. Ibid.

38. Helen Sanders, “Impressions,” Ladder, June 1960, p. 6.

39. Sten Russell, “DOB Convention: A Look at the Lesbian,” Ladder, July 1960, pp. 6–14.

40. See p. 8.

41. Russell, “DOB Convention.”

42. Sanders, “Impressions.”

43. Del Martin, “The Philosophy of DOB—Evolution of an Idea,” Ladder, June 1962, pp. 4–8.

44. According to Randy Wicker, The Homosexual in America was considered by activists of the 1950s and early 1960s as “the bible of the early homosexual rights movement”: in video of a panel discussion at the Stonewall Inn, June 4, 2007. I am grateful to Randy Wicker for sharing this video with me. Cory had written in 1951, “Until we are willing to speak out openly and frankly in defense of our own activities and identify ourselves with the millions pursuing those activities, we are unlikely to find the attitudes of the world undergoing any significant change”: Donald Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach (1951; reprinted, New York: Paperback Library, 1963), p. 14.

45. Donald Webster Cory was a pseudonym of Edward Sagarin, a bisexual man, who in his later work, beginning with The Homosexual and His Society (1963), effectively renounced the theories that had made him important to early activists.

46. Barbara Gittings, interview with author, Philadelphia, October 7, 1987.

47. Lyon, interview with Cain, Leading the Parade, p. 61.

48. Gittings, interview with author.

49. Ibid.

50. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, pp. 89–90.

51. Gittings, interview with Katz, Gay American History, p. 424.

52. Gittings, interview with Marcus, Making History, p. 113.

53. “Tobin” was a pseudonym. She resumed using her real name, Lahusen, in the late 1970s.

54. Gittings, interview with author.

55. Ibid.

56. Ebony magazine did feature blues singer Gladys Bentley in April 1952, in a ghostwritten sensationalistic article in which she disavowed her lesbianism: “I Am a Woman Again,” pp. 92–98.

An African American woman, Pat “Dubby” Walker, became president of the San Francisco DOB in 1960. Cleo Bonner (who used the pseudonym Cleo Glenn), also an African American woman, became president of National DOB in 1963: Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, “Cleo Glenn (Bonner) (Dates Unknown),” in Before Stonewall, pp. 189–90; and Del Martin with Leslie Warren, “Pat Walker (1938–1999),” in Before Stonewall, pp. 191–92. But The Ladder never published a feature on either of them, perhaps because both women were careful in the 1960s about protecting their identities.

57. Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin, “Proposals to General Assembly,” 1964, Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 2, folder 9, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA. Gittings and Tobin also tried to convince DOB to change the name of the organization and to change the DOB “statement of purpose,” which appeared unchanged from its inception in every issue of The Ladder. They were voted down: “Minutes of the DOB General Assembly Meeting, 1964,” box 2, folder 9, ibid.

58. Gittings, interview with author.

59. Barbara Gittings, editorial, Ladder, June 1964, pp. 4–5.

60. Ibid., pp. 5–6.

61. Frank Kameny, “Does Research Into Homosexuality Matter?” Ladder, May 1965, pp. 14–19.

62. Kay Tobin, “Picketing: The Impact and the Issues,” Ladder, September 1965, pp. 4–8.

63. “Cross-Currents,” Ladder, August 1963, p. 11. See pp. 146–50 for a discussion of Scott’s case.

64. Kay Tobin, “Homosexual Voting Bloc Puts Pizzazz in Politics,” Ladder, November 1965, pp. 13–14.

65. Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, and Cleo Glenn to Barbara Gittings et al., letter, June 7, 1965, Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 1, folder 13, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA. Martin and Lyon were encouraged in this position by Reverend Ted McIlvenna of the newly formed Council on Religion and the Homosexual (see pp. 102–8), who wrote Barbara Gittings, in support of their antipicketing position, that if picketing happens at all, it should be “community directed”—that is, directed not by homosexuals but by groups in the larger community that are supportive of them: see Barbara Gittings to Reverend Ted McIlvenna, letter, September 22, 1965, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers, 1993-13, box 17, folder 12, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.

66. Frank Kameny to DOB president and governing board, letter, June 8, 1965, Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 1, folder 13, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

67. Gallo, Different Daughters, pp. 95–96.

68. Gittings, interview with author.

69. Gallo, Different Daughters, p. 131. Gittings confided to her friends about tensions between her and Del Martin: for example, a letter from Barbara Gittings to Barbara Grier, May 8, 1964: “La Martin is all but persona non grata with us, confidentially . . . Her standards are simply different, and actually we disagree with her almost across the board on political matters as well,” in Barbara Gittings/Kay (Tobin) Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, no. 6397, box 57, New York Public Library. In a letter written two months later, July 3, 1964, Gittings refers to Martin as a “prejudiced and frumpy thinker” and says that “DOB will never grow unless it can break from the grip of Del Martin,” ibid. I am grateful to JoAnne Passet for calling these letters to my attention.

70. “History of DOB” (1976), in Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 1, folder 7, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

71. In 1962, for example, there were only 130 dues-paying members of DOB nationally: Del Martin to the DOB governing board, letter, October 26, 1962, in Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 1, folder 10, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

72. Robin Tyler (Arlene Chernick), first interview with author, Los Angeles, September 29, 2013.

73. See p. 410.

CHAPTER 7: JOUSTS WITH THE FOUR HORSEMEN

1. Dorr Legg, interview with Brad Mulroy, c. 1975, W. Dorr Legg Papers, Collection 2010-004, box 1, folder 6, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

2. They were unaware of an earlier effort by another Angeleno, Edythe Eyde (Lisa Ben), who published Vice Versa, a typed and carbon-copied lesbian magazine, between June 1947 and February 1948.

3. Hansen, A Few Doors West of Hope, p. 22; and Joseph Hansen, “Don Slater (1923–1997),” in Before Stonewall, p. 106.

4. Block interview in Martin F. Block Papers, 2006-001, box 1, folder 7, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

5. Ibid. Martin Block recollected that the meeting was not at Dorr Legg’s home but at the home of Johnny Button and his lover, Alvin Novak: Block interview in Martin F. Block Papers. Dorr Legg says that Johnny Button quit after declaring “upon reflection that the whole idea was unintelligent, philosophically untenable, and useless”: William Lambert, “How ONE Began,” ONE, February 1955, pp. 8–15.

6. Lambert, “How ONE Began.”

7. ONE’s Articles of Incorporation were signed by Jennings, Block, and Slater’s lover, Antonio Sanchez, a Mexican American flamenco dancer who worked at a restaurant in Olvera Street, a touristy re-creation of early Mexican-dominated Los Angeles. Sanchez used the pseudonym “Reyes.” ONE got through the State of California’s incorporation process because it promised to “aid in the social integration and rehabilitation of the sexual variant.”

8. Ernie Potvin, ”Kepner Remembered: Pioneer Gay Journalist, Historian, and Archives Founder Departs at 74,” ONE/IGLA Bulletin, Summer 1998, pp. 1ff.

9. Wayne R. Dynes, “W. Dorr Legg (1904–1994),” in Before Stonewall, p. 98.

10. “Ann Carll Reid & the Feminine Viewpoint,” ONE, December 1957, pp. 16–17.

11. Stella Rush, interview with author, Los Angeles, November 10, 2004.

12. Dorr Legg, interview with Paul D. Cain, March 12, 1994. I thank Mr. Cain for sharing a transcript of this interview with me.

13. Rush, interview with author.

14. Legg, interview with Mulroy, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives; and “ONE and the Supreme Court,” Ladder, September 1958, pp. 10–13.

15. Eric Julber, interview with Stuart Timmons, June 24, 2005, in Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A. The Los Angeles Daily News headline announced “Police Brutality Victim Acquitted.”

16. Legg, interview with Mulroy, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

17. E. B. Saunders, “Reformer’s Choice: Marriage License or Just License?” ONE, August 1953, pp. 10–12.

18. “ONE and the Supreme Court,” Ladder, p. 10.

19. ONE’s Legal Counsel, “The Law of Mailable Material,” ONE, October 1954, pp. 4–6.

20. ONE, Inc., Appellant v. Otto K. Olesen, Postmaster of the City of Los Angeles, Appellee, February 27, 1957, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 241 F. 2d 772.

21. Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 31.

22. Julber, interview with Timmons, Gay L.A., p. 119.

23. David I. Freeman, “How Much Do We Know About the Male Homosexual?” ONE, November 1955, pp. 4–6.

24. The handwriting is identified in a memo from Agent Jones to Agent Nichols, February 10, 1956, FBI file, Mattachine Society, Dan Siminoski Collection, box 4, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

25. See, for example, Athan G. Theoharis and John Stuart Cox, The Boss: J. Edgar Hoover and the Great American Inquisition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Anthony Summers, Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover (New York: Putnam, 1993); Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).

26. J. Edgar Hoover to Los Angeles office, letter, January 27, 1956, FBI file, Mattachine Society, Dan Siminoski Collection, box 4, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

27. Memo to Mr. Nichols, February 10, 1956, ibid.

28. Memo from A. M. Jones to Mr. Nichols, February 7, 1956, ibid.

29. ONE, Inc., Appellant v. Otto K. Olesen, Postmaster of the City of Los Angeles, Appellee, February 27, 1957, US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, 241 F. 2d 772.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. Evelyn Hooker, interview with Bruce Shenitz in “The Grande Dame of Gay Liberation,” Los Angeles Times Magazine, June 10, 1990.

33. Evelyn Hooker, interview with Laud Humphreys in Alternative Lifestyles 1, no. 2 (1978): 191–206.

34. Edwin S. Schneidman, “Evelyn Hooker (1907–1996),” obituary, American Psychologist 53, no. 4 (April 1998): 480–81.

35. Ibid.

36. Hooker, interview with Shenitz.

37. Murdoch and Price, Courting Justice, p. 144.

38. Evelyn Hooker, “Reflections of a 40-Year Exploration: A Scientific View of Homosexuality,” American Psychologist 48, no. 4 (April 1993): 450–53.

39. Sharon Valente, “Evelyn Gentry Hooker (1907–1996),” in Before Stonewall, p. 347.

40. Ibid., p. 348

41. Shenitz, “The Grande Dame of Gay Liberation.”

42. Hooker’s presentation to the American Psychological Association was printed the following year in “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual,” Journal of Projective Techniques 21 (1957): 18–31. Hooker had published an earlier paper, “A Preliminary Analysis of Group Behavior of Homosexuals,” Journal of Psychology 42 (1956), 217–225, in which she presented not only her first findings but also homosexuals’ inchoate ideas about a civil rights struggle: “Many homosexuals are beginning to think of themselves as constituting a minority, sharing many of the problems of other minority groups, having to struggle for their rights against the prejudices of a dominant heterosexual majority.”

43. Hooker, interview with Humphreys.

44. Dr. Judd Marmor, quoted in Shenitz, “The Grande Dame of Gay Liberation.” The struggle to get the APA to remove homosexuality from the DSM is discussed at length in chapter 16, “How Gays and Lesbians Stopped Being Crazies.”

45. Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani, Beyond the Possible: 50 Years of Creating Radical Change in a Community Called Glide (New York: HarperOne, 2013), pp. 63–64.

46. According to John D’Emilio, the League for Civil Education’s LCE News, circulated only in San Francisco gay bars, had a printing of seven thousand by 1962, which exceeded the nationwide readership of ONE, Mattachine Review, and The Ladder: Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 189.

47. Del Martin, “History of S.F. Homophile Groups,” Ladder, October 1966, pp. 7–13.

48. Del Martin to Governing Board, January 28, 1964, “An Invitation of Mr. Ted McIlvenna, Methodist Minister to Young Adults,” Daughters of Bilitis Papers, box 1, folder 12, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

49. Ibid.

50. Martin and Lyon, interview with author.

51. Ted McIlvenna, interview with Mark Bowman, January 4, 2005, LGBT Religious Archives Network.

52. “How It Started,” manuscript, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers, 1993-13, box 17, folder 14, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.

53. Martin and Lyon, interview with author.

54. Kay Tobin, “After the Ball,” Ladder, February/March 1965, pp. 4–5.

55. “Clergy Shatter Taboo,” Christian Century, December 23, 1964.

56. “Church Channel to Homosexuals,” Christianity Today, March 4, 1966.

57. Report: Council on Religion and the Homosexual, 1964–1968 (San Francisco: Glide Memorial Church, 1968), pp. 7–9.

58. Del Martin to the DOB governing board, letter, August 26, 1964, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, box 1, folder 12, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

59. Del Martin to DOB governing board, handwritten letter, January 13, 1965, Martin and Lyon Papers, box 1, folder 13, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

60. Williams and Mirikitani, Beyond the Possible, p. 106.

61. Tobin, “After the Ball,” p. 5.

62. Williams and Mirikitani, Beyond the Possible, p. 107.

63. Tobin, “After the Ball,” p. 4.

64. “Chronology of Events Occurring in Connection with Arrest of above Individuals on January 1, 1965,” p. 2, Evander Smith Collection, GLC box 46, folder 4, Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California Collection, San Francisco Public Library.

65. Williams and Mirikitani, Beyond the Possible, pp. 105–107.

66. Evander Smith, interview with Marcus, Making Gay History, p. 148.

67. Herbert Donaldson and Evander Smith, interview with Marcus, Making Gay History, p. 149.

68. “Chronology of Events,” p. 6.

69. Evelyn Williams, quoted in Mixner and Bailey, Brave Journeys, p. 37.

70. “Chronology of Events,” pp. 6–9.

71. Del Martin, untitled manuscript draft, January 14, 1965, Martin and Lyon Papers, box 1, folder 13, June Mazer Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

72. Del Martin, untitled manuscript draft, January 14, 1965.

73. In Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Papers, 1993-13, box 17, folder 8, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco.

74. The National Planning Conference established the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO).

75. Del Martin to Marge McCann, Del Shearer, and Barbara Gittings, letter, June 7, 1965. This is the same letter in which Martin said that DOB would withdraw from ECHO over the picketing controversy: Martin and Lyon Papers, box 1, folder 13, June Mazer Lesbian Collection, Special Collections, UCLA.

76. Minutes, National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations Kansas City, Missouri, February 19–20, 1966, p. 12: Special Collections, Gay/Lesbian, Shields Library, UC Davis; and John Marshall, “Nationwide Attack on Draft Injustices,” The Homosexual Citizen, 1/7 (July 1966), 5–7.

77. “U.S. Homophile Movement Gains National Strength,” Ladder, April 1966, pp. 4–5.

78. Don Slater, “Protest on Wheels,” Tangents, May 1966; Peter Bart, “War Role Sought for Homosexuals,” New York Times, April 17, 1966.

79. “U.S. Homophile Movement Gains National Strength.”

80. Bart, “War Role Sought for Homosexuals”: the article was reprinted in newspapers all over America.

81. Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine, Tavern Guild, Society for Individual Rights, and Guy Strait’s latest homophile iteration, Citizen News.

82. Slater, “Protest on Wheels.”

83. Timmons, Trouble with Harry Hay, p. 221.

84. Peter Welch, “Homosexuality in America,” Life, June 26, 1964, pp. 66–74, 78–80.

85. Joseph Hansen’s affectionate term for Slater in Hansen, A Few Doors West of Hope.

86. Paul Coates, “Problem for Army,” Los Angeles Times, April 24, 1966. Thirteen years earlier, Coates had been the columnist who’d fired the first shot that had ended Harry Hay’s life in Mattachine. See pp. 67–68.

87. Slater, “Protest on Wheels.”

88. “War Role Sought for Homosexuals.”

CHAPTER 8: SLIVERS OF SPACE AND JUSTICE

1. The term transgender didn’t come into wide use until the 1990s. See p. xx.

2. John Rechy, interview with Stuart Timmons, Los Angeles, August 29, 2005, in Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 1–2.

3. The Janus Society had previously been the Mattachine of Philadelphia; but when Mattachine ceased to be a national organization in 1961, the Philadelphia group renamed itself Janus after the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and change.

4. Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 245–46.

5. Address by Clark Polak to the National Planning Committee of Homophile Organizations, Kansas City, Missouri, February 20, 1966: Special Collections, Gay/Lesbian, Shields Library, UC Davis.

6. The following year, Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village, the first gay and lesbian bookstore in America. That same year, the Adonis Bookstore was opened by Mattachine Society president Hal Call in San Francisco; but Call’s store was devoted largely to gay male erotica, while Rodwell’s store featured political and literary works about gays and lesbians.

7. Dick Leitsch, interview with author, New York (telephone), May 19, 2013.

8. Lucy Komisar, “3 Homosexuals in Search of a Drink,” Village Voice, May 5, 1966.

9. At a third bar, the Waikiki, the three men were joined by Randy Wicker. They were also served there without incident.

10. Panel at the Stonewall Bar, June 4, 2007 (video). I am grateful to Randy Wicker for giving me a copy of this video. Craig Rodwell claimed that police entrapment of homosexuals in Greenwich Village bars was sometimes like an assembly line. The police would “send plainclothesmen in fluffy sweaters and sneakers” to sit at a bar and proposition likely homosexual suspects. The Morals Squad kept a room at the Hotel Albert, Rodwell said. “They would just take people from the bars over to the hotel, and there would be a cop waiting in the room.” After the arrest was made, the undercover officer would “go back and get somebody else. Then they’d get them all together and take them down and book them”: Craig Rodwell, interview with Tina Crosby, “The Stonewall Riot Remembered” (unpublished paper, January 16, 1974), New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division.

11. The picture appeared with the Lucy Komisar article “3 Homosexuals in Search of a Drink.”

12. Thomas A. Johnson, “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars: But They Visit Four Before Being Refused Service in a Test of the S.L.A.,” New York Times, April 22, 1966. Leitsch was perennially hoping for fair treatment from the mainstream media, and he made himself widely available for interviews, but almost always he was “burned,” as he complained: “Public Relations,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, January/February 1967, in Mattachine Collection, box 12, folder 4, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. One of the first mainstream newspaper articles to appreciate the struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights appeared in the July 17, 1968, Wall Street Journal: Charles Alverson, “U.S. Homosexuals Gain in Trying to Persuade Society to Accept Them: With a Growing Militancy, They Battle Discrimination on Social, Legal, Job Lines,” though it featured somewhat lurid subheadlines such as “Against the Morals of the Public.”

13. Dick Leitsch, interview with Scott Simon, “Remembering a 1966 ‘Sip-in’ for Gay Rights,” NPR, June 28, 2008; and Sharyn Jackson, “Before Stonewall: Remembering That Before the Riots There Was a Sip-in,” Village Voice, June 17, 2008, p. 1.

14. The following year, 1967, Tony Pastor’s, another village bar, lost its liquor license because the management permitted the establishment to “become disorderly,” allowing “homosexuals, degenerates, and undesirables” to “conduct themselves in an offensive and indecent manner”: “Liquor License Is Revoked at Tony Pastor’s Night Spot,” New York Times, March 18, 1967.

15. Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, a documentary by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, 2005; author correspondence with Susan Stryker, email, July 22, 2013; Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), p. 73; and Susan Stryker, interview with Erick Lyle in On the Low Frequencies: A Secret History of the City (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2008), pp. 134–36.

16. Jim Kepner, quoted in Donn Teal, The Gay Militants (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), p. 41.

17. The police raid and PRIDE protests at the Black Cat are discussed at greater length in Franklin Kameny, “Sad Celebration in L.A. Gay Bars,” The Homosexual Citizen, March 1967, pp. 3–6; and in Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp, 155 56.

18. See also Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 157–58.

19. “Patch Fights Three-Way Battle,” Los Angeles Advocate, August 1968, pp. 3ff.

20. Nancy Love, “The Invisible Society,” Philadelphia, November 1967. This sensationalistic article informed lesbians in Philadelphia, who may not have heard of Rusty’s before, of the bar’s address. Of course, it also informed the Philadelphia police.

21. Marty Selnick, interview with author, Oakland, April 6, 2012; and Marge McCann and Carole (Meyers) Smith, interview with author, Kennett Square, PA (telephone), April 18, 2013.

22. Nancy Gertner, In Defense of Women: Memoirs of an Unrepentant Advocate (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), p. 17.

23. McCann, interview with author.

24. Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, p. 275.

25. Selnick, interview with author.

26. No matter which DOB member wrote the letter, it was always signed “Ellen Collins,” because nobody in the organization dared to use her own name.

27. Ada Bello, interview with author, Philadelphia, March 8, 2013.

28. Ibid.

29. As president of DOB New York, too, Willer believed “that any direct action is precluded by [DOB’s] claim to existing exclusively as a social-service and educational organization”: Jody Shotwell to Barbara Gittings, letter, June 11, 1965; and Barbara Gittings to Barbara Grier, letter, July 11, 1965, Barbara Gittings/Kay (Tobin) Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, box 59, folder 17, New York Public Library. Willer refused to let New York DOB participate in the pickets that Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings were organizing in 1965 in Washington, DC, and Philadelphia. I am grateful to JoAnne Passet for calling these letters to my attention.

30. Homophile Action League Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1968): 1, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

31. In Los Angeles, the lesbian and gay Society of Anubis, founded in 1967, was also woman led, under the presidency of Helen Niehaus. The Society of Anubis was chartered by the state of California in 1969, stating on its application that its primary purpose was to work for “just and enlightened sex laws”: Anubis Bulletin, March 1969, Anubis file, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

32. Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, p. 310.

33. Mark Segal discusses Shapp’s support of the gay community in “Governor Milton Shapp’s Granddaughter,” The Bilerico Project, March 21, 2013.

34. Randy Wicker, interview with author, Hoboken, NJ, March 11, 2013.

35. Wicker, interview with author.

36. Milton Bracker, “Homosexuals Air Their Views Here,” New York Times, July 16, 1962.

37. Jack O’Brian, “Jack O’Brian Says,” New York Journal-American, July 8, 1962.

38. “Cross-Currents,” Ladder, August 1963, p. 20.

39. Picket description from Renée Cafiero, interview with author, Brooklyn, NY (telephone), May 20, 2013; Wicker, interview with author; Peter Golenbock, In the Country of Brooklyn: Inspiration to the World (New York: William Morrow, 2008), pp. 570–71; Betsy Kuhn, Gay Power: The Stonewall Riots and the Gay Rights Movement, 1969 (Minneapolis: 21st Century Books, 2011), p. 56; and John Loughery, The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives and Gay Identities—A Twentieth Century History (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 269.

40. Cafiero, interview with author.

41. Wicker and Cafiero, interviews with author.

42. Frank Kameny to Clifford Norton, letter, July 11, 1969, Frank Kameny Collection, box 29, Norton folder, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

CHAPTER 9: THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET

1. Dan Siminoski Collection, FBI files, box 7, folder 19, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.

2. Franklin Edward Kameny v. Wilber M. Bruckner, Secretary of the Army, et al., Petition to the Supreme Court for a Writ of Certiorari, filed January 27, 1961.

3. Ibid.

4. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 112. In interviews with the authors, Kameny claimed that he’d merely been walking in the park and had stopped to watch an arrest in progress when the police arrested him, too.

5. Franklin Edward Kameny v. Wilber M. Bruckner, Secretary of the Army.

6. Sears, Lonely Hunters, p. 201.

7. Donia Mills and Phil Gailey, “Kameny’s Long Ordeal Personifies Wider Gay Struggles,” Washington Star, April 10, 1981, p. A-8; and Frank Kameny, interview with authors in Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker, The Gay Crusaders (New York: Paperback Library, 1972), p. 93.

8. Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 89.

9. Petition to the Supreme Court for a Writ of Certiorari.

10. Transcript: “50th Anniversary of the Mattachine Society of Washington: Panel Discussion, Lilli Vincenz and Paul Kuntzler, October 13, 2011. I am grateful to Philip Clark of the Rainbow History Project, Washington, DC, for sharing this transcript with me; also Warren D. Adkins (aka Jack Nichols), “Ex-Police Lieutenant Pleads Guilty to ‘Fairy Shakes,’ ” Gay Today, January 29, 1998.

11. Jack Nichols’s unpublished autobiography, Stephanie Donald Collection, pp. 46, 48. I am grateful to Ms. Donald for sharing Mr. Nichols’s manuscript with me.

12. Ibid., p. 21.

13. Ibid., p. 73.

14. Kameny inherited enough money from his mother to buy a house in DC, but he was always financially strapped. Just a year before his death in 2011, the gay and lesbian DC group Helping Our Brothers and Sisters conducted a fund-raising campaign to keep his house from being auctioned off for back taxes. (I am grateful to Charles Francis for bringing this to my attention.) A young gay man also started a “Buy Frank Kameny a Drink” campaign, asking people to donate the $10 it would cost to buy a cocktail to a Facebook page on Frank Kameny’s behalf, “to help Dr. Kameny get back on his feet”: Lou Chibbaro Jr., “Kameny Facebook Page Formed to Help Activist,” Washington Blade, December 30, 2010.

15. Frank Kameny, taped interview with Alison McKinney, May or June 1975, in the private collection of Pokey Anderson. I am grateful to Ms. Anderson for sharing the tape of this interview with me.

16. Frank Kameny, “Civil Liberties: A Progress Report,” 1964 speech at Freedom House, reprinted in New York Mattachine Newsletter, 10/1 (July 1965), pp. 7–22.

17. Paul C. Jones to Frank Kameny, letter, August 28, 1962, Kamenypapers.org.

18. Charles E. Chamberlain to Frank Kameny, letter, August 30, 1962, ibid.

19. Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, president, Mattachine Society Washington, DC, to Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general, letter, June 28, 1962, FBI FOIA File HQ 100-403320 (Mattachine Society); and Gittings, interview with author.

20. “HR 5990,” Gazette (Mattachine Society Washington), Spring 1964.

21. “Group Aiding Deviates Issued Charity License,” Washington Star, September 16, 1962.

22. Ibid.

23. “The Mattachine Society of Washington: Extension of Remarks of Hon. John Dowdy of Texas, in the House of Representatives,” Congressional Record: Appendix, re. A4211, July 5, 1963.

24. “John Dowdy Is Indicted on Charges That He Took $25,000 in an Alleged Bribe Conspiracy,” New York Times, April 1, 1970; and “Dowdy Loses Bid for Parole,” New York Times, March 28, 1974.

25. Campaign ad, “Facts Speak for John Dowdy,” paid for by Friends of John Dowdy, in Malakoff (TX) News, May 6, 1960.

26. John Dowdy, “Dear Friends,” Alto (TX) Herald, May 9, 1963.

27. Statement of the president of the Mattachine Society of  Washington before Subcommittee 4 of the District of Columbia, House of Representatives, August 8, 1963; and “HR 5990,” Gazette.

28. Jack Nichols, unpublished autobiography, p. 47.

29. Statement of the president of the Mattachine Society.

30. “Piety by Fiat,” Washington Post, August 8, 1963.

31. Transcript: “50th Anniversary of the Mattachine Society Washington.”

32. Quoted in “HR 5990,” Gazette.

33. Frank Kameny, 2003 interview with Amin Ghaziani, in “How the Militant Movement Began,” Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide 19, no. 1 (January/February 2012): pp. 11–14.

34. John D’Emilio discusses Rustin’s homosexuality at length in Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

35. Jack Nichols, unpublished autobiography, pp. 49, 74.

36. Gittings, interview with author.

37. Don Slater, “Tangents” column, ONE, July 1965, p. 13.

38. Quoted in Jack Nichols, unpublished autobiography, p. 73.

39. Jack Nichols, November 1994 interview with Paul Cain in “Frank and Jack,” LGBT-Today online.

40. Eva Freund, interview with author, Vienna, VA (telephone), February 9, 2013.

41. Kameny, “Civil Liberties: A Progress Report.”

42. Ibid. Dick Leitsch, who became president of the New York Mattachine Society the next year and staged the Greenwich Village “sip-in” (see chap. 8) the year after that, credits Kameny’s July 1964 speech with bringing him to an understanding of homosexuality as a political issue: in D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, p. 166.

43. Freund, interview with author.

44. Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, pp. 188–205, says that Philadelphia Mattachine, which was almost equally cogendered, was the exception to the rule. But Stein quotes a member of Philadelphia Mattachine who recalls that the women “were always the coffee makers and typists” (p. 205).

45. Kameny was also anxious to attract into the organization black gays and lesbians, and recruitment drives were held in DC African American gay bars such as Nob Hill. Mattachine members met to discuss topics such as “How Can We Bring the Negro into the Homophile Movement.” (Johnson, Lavender Scare, p. 193.) But black membership was minuscule, despite the prominent participation and efforts of Ernestine Eckstein, an African American woman, who was vice president of New York’s Daughters of Bilitis and was brought into Mattachine Society Washington by Barbara Gittings.

46. The next day, Easter Sunday, the New York Mattachine Society staged a similar picket outside the United Nations, ostensibly protesting Cuba’s incarceration of homosexuals.

47. Lilli Vincenz, interview with Mark Meinke, Rainbow History Project, Washington, DC, April 21, 2001. I am grateful to Philip Clark of the Rainbow History Project for sharing this transcript with me.

48. Transcript: “50th Anniversary of the Mattachine Society of Washington.” Of course, not many of the mainstream press photographers thought that a homophile protest by ten people was newsworthy; but it was reported in the October 1965 issue of the scandal magazine Confidential, the cover of which announced, “Homos on the March: The Day They Picketed the White House.” A photo of the picketers featured Kameny in the foreground. Homosexuals across America who had not known about Mattachine before knew about it now if they glanced at the magazine rack of their local supermarket or drugstore. The article even gave the address of Mattachine Society Washington headquarters, and the Mattachine office phone was soon ringing off the hook with inquiries from homosexuals in Iowa and Idaho and everywhere else in America. The Confidential article was the biggest publicity that Mattachine and the cause had gotten to date.

49. Gittings, interview with author.

50. Vincenz, interview with Meinke.

51. Kameny, who had nothing to lose, having already been fired from his government job, used his real name, as did Barbara Gittings.

52. Vincenz, interview with Meinke.

53. Jack Nichols, unpublished autobiography, p. 44. In 1967 Nichols left DC to move to New York with another lover, Lige Clarke. There his activism was focused more on “lifestyle” freedoms than on civil rights. He borrowed the Mattachine Society Washington magazine title Homosexual Citizen for a regular column that he and Clarke wrote for Screw magazine, but their primary emphasis was on encouraging open sexual expression.

54. Kameny, quoted in Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (New York: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 60.

55. Transcript: “50th Anniversary of the Mattachine Society.”

56. Warren D. Adkins (pseudonym: Jack Nichols), “The Washington-Baltimore TV Circuit,” Homosexual Citizen, May 1967, p. 6.

57. Gittings, interview with author.

58. Lilli Vincenz, interview with Jack Nichols, in “Lilli Vincenz: A Lesbian Pioneer,” Gay Today, 2001.

59. Gittings, interview with author.

60. Cory had not yet disavowed his earlier militancy to argue, as he did in his 1963 book The Homosexual and His Society, that all homosexuals were pathologically disturbed.

61. History of East Coast Homophile Organizations: Frank Kameny to Richard Inman, letter, July 13, 1965, in Frank Kameny Collection, box 5, folder 11, Library of Congress Manuscript Division.

62. Leitsch, interview with author.

63. Kameny put himself in charge of the 1964 conference program, where he made sure that no “mental health professional” would be invited as a speaker. The theme of the 1964 conference was “Homosexuality: Civil Liberties and Social Rights.”At subsequent ECHO conferences, Kameny saw to it that “there was not one single doctor, psychologist, psychiatrist, or MD of any sort on the program.” Kameny to Inman, letter, July 13, 1965.

64. Paul Kuntzler in Transcript: “50th Anniversary of the Mattachine Society.”

65. When Ellis delivered a similar speech the year before at a New York Mattachine Society meeting, he was given a standing ovation: David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), p. 37.

66. Gittings, interview with author.

67. Jody Shotwell, “ECHO Convention ’63,” Ladder, December 1963, p. 8.

68. Kay (Tobin) Lahusen, interview with author, Kennett Square, PA, March 9, 2013.