PART II

 

 

Flashback:

The Roots of the Riots

 

Introduction to Part 2

 

 

 

 

The Revolution Began on the Left Coast

LILLIAN FADERMAN

 

THE riots that followed the 1969 raid on the Stonewall Inn in New York and the New York Gay Liberation Front that emerged from those riots were the opening salvos of a militant gay revolution. But as many of the following essays show, the struggle for gay rights had begun two decades earlier. The first gay organizations to last more than a few months, the first gay magazines, and the first gay protests were born on the other side of the continent.

Los Angeles and San Francisco could serve as crucibles for an early movement because even by the mid-20th century those cities hadn't lost entirely the effects of their "frontier town" histories.1 In the 19th century, L.A. and San Francisco were where refugees from other parts of the United States went to be adventurous, to make their fortunes, to escape the stifling rigidities of "back home." There, on the edge of the continent, daring experimentation and action could flourish. It's not surprising, for instance, that in 1911 California became one of the first states to allow women to vote-nearly a decade before the 19th amendment extended the vote to women all over the country. By the mid-20th century, antihomosexual laws were as draconian in California as they were elsewhere in America, but the spirit that was fostered earlier hadn't died.

In the years after World War II, the populations of L.A. and San Francisco burgeoned with gay people2 who had been introduced to those port cities while in the military or working in the defense industry. They stayed or returned because they were drawn to the freedom the cities seemed to promise. A subterranean gay life, and soon gay organizations, flourished in both San Francisco and L.A. Dorr Legg and his African-American lover, Marvin Edwards, migrated from Detroit to L.A. in 1949, certain they could live more comfortably there than in the Midwest. A year later, Legg and another African-American man, Merton Bird, founded Knights of the Clock, a small but remarkably forward-thinking society. In an era when interracial couples were rare and taboo almost anywhere in the country-among heterosexuals and homosexuals alike-a primary purpose of Knights of the Clock, as Martha Stone points out in her essay in this section, was to help interracial gay couples find housing and jobs.

Knights of the Clock was not the only gay organization in L.A. at this time. In 1948, Harry Hay read the newly published "Kinsey Report," which said that ten percent of American men were moreor-less exclusively homosexual, and he dreamed of organizing them. That year he wrote a manifesto in which he compared the murder of homosexuals under the Nazis to the homosexual purges in the State Department, and he drew up plans for a secret organization that would fight homosexual persecution. Two years later, defining homosexuals as "an oppressed cultural minority," Hay and a handful of other men founded the Mattachine Society. As Hay recalls in his essay "Birth of a Consciousness," in 1952 Mattachine member Dale Jennings was accused by an L.A. vice squad officer of making homosexual advances. Mattachine waged an unprecedented battle. To raise money and awareness about Jennings' case, they formed the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. And they challenged the testimony of the police in court. Mattachine's legal victory astonished even gay people, who were not used to winning against the police. New chapters cropped up in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.

The country's first lesbian organization, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), was also born on the Left Coast. As Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon recount in "Lesbian Liberation Begins," their organization, which started in San Francisco in 1955, was founded as a safe alternative to lesbian bars, where raids were always a threat. Though DOB's social function remained its primary appeal for many members, the organization's leaders nudged them toward political action. For instance, Del Martin declared in the December 1956 issue of The Ladder, DOB's new, nationally circulated magazine, that homosexuals "are citizens of the United States, and as such are entitled to those civil rights set forth in the Constitution," and she suggested as early as 1960 that a unified homosexual vote could influence elections. "We do have a voice in the affairs of the community and the nation," she exhorted DOB members in The Ladder. "Let's make it a strong one."

The same year that The Ladder began publishing, Mattachine headquarters moved to San Francisco and also started a nationally circulated magazine, Mattachine Review, which served a vital purpose in disseminating information that most gay people could find nowhere else. Its first issue, for instance, included an account by UCLA psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker about her L.A.-based study which demonstrated that, on major psychological tests such as the Rorschach, healthy male homosexuals could not be distinguished from healthy male heterosexuals. Therefore, "homosexuality" could not legitimately be considered a diagnostic category. (Two decades later her study would help convince the American Psychiatric Association to declassify "homosexuality" from its  Diag-nostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).3

But The Ladder and Mattachine Review were not the first gay or lesbian publications in America. The first was a low-circulation lesbian magazine, Vice Versa, published in L.A. from June 1947 to February 1948, which featured vehement proclamations such as (in the September 1947 issue) "The Third Sex is here to stay!" and fierce excoriations (in June 1947) of "self-styled judges who smugly carve the standards for society." The second gay publication in America, ONE, was started by members of Los Angeles Mattachine in 1952. Two years later, when the office of the L.A. postmaster declared that ONE magazine could not be mailed because it contained material that was "obscene, lewd, lascivious, and filthy," ONE hired a lawyer who took the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1958, the Court concluded that ONE was indeed a homosexual magazine as the postmaster had complained, but that did not mean the publication was obscene. The Post Office had no right to confiscate ONE, the Supreme Court declared. This was the first national gay victory in U.S. history.

As forward-looking as those mid-20th-century periodicals were, their readership was minuscule compared to that of The Advocate, which started in L.A. as a newsletter after a brutal raid on January 1, 1967, of an L.A. gay bar, the Black Cat, discussed in this section by Eve Goldberg. The Advocate, which became a newspaper and then a magazine, moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1974 and later returned to L.A. (Its present circulation of 175,000 makes it America's most-read LGBT magazine.)

California also saw some of the first gay protests in America. John Rechy remembers in "Lawrence Brought It All Back Home" that more than a decade before Stonewall, he was in a gay mini-riot against harassing police in downtown L.A. San Francisco saw another mini-riot in 1966, when about fifty black and Latino "queens" fought police harassment in their favorite hangout, Compton's Cafeteria.4 Californians also made their anger over anti-gay injustices felt in ways short of rioting. In 1951, when authorities tried to suspend the liquor license of San Francisco's Black Cat Cafe because it catered to homosexuals, its owner, Sol Stoumen, took the case to the California Supreme Court. The Court restored Stoumen's liquor license, finding that even homosexuals had the right to free association.5 The 1967 raid on L.A.'s Black Cat was answered by a peaceful public protest that drew 500 demonstrators. The following year saw a dramatic "flower power" protest by gays wielding armfuls of bouquets and occupying the Harbor Division Police Station after a raid on The Patch, a Southern California gay bar. "We're Americans, too!" the protestors had screamed at the raiding police.6 By spring 1969, some gay activists in California were eschewing flower power in favor of images influenced by Black Power. For instance, with more than a passing nod to the Black Panthers, a gay group that staged angry pickets of anti-gay businesses in San Francisco and L.A. dubbed itself "the Pink Panthers."7

Lesbians and gays on the Left Coast were not the only ones, of course, to protest and agitate for change in the years before Stonewall. John D'Emilio points out in "Frank Kameny Takes It Public" that Kameny, in Washington, D.C., pressed the movement in a more militant and assertive direction than it had ever had, beginning with the 1965 picketing he led in front of the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon.

But courageous as all these protests of the 1950s and '60s were, none was "the hairpin drop heard round the world," as New York Mattachine president Dick Leitsch immediately recognized the Stonewall Riots to be in the July 1969 issue of his organization's newsletter. What accounts for the spontaneous explosion of Stonewall was less the preceding twenty years of gay organizing and protest than the widespread militancy and turbulence that characterized the 1960s in big cities throughout America: from the Black Power movement, to the long succession of summertime Black riots, to the huge antiwar movement with its sometimes violent demonstrations, to the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the hot summer of the following year, all of that together led to Stonewall.

October 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOOTNOTES

1.        The effects of San Francisco's and Los Angeles' frontier histories on later gay communities are discussed in Nan Alamilla Boyd's Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (University of California Press, 2003); and Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons in Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (Basic Books, 2006).

2.        In the mid-20th century "gay" was an umbrella term that described people who would be called "LGBT" in the 21st century.

3.        I discuss Evelyn Hooker's study and the APA's declassification of homosexuality in The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (Simon and Schuster, 2015).

4.        Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafeteria,a documentary by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman, 2005.

5.        Sol Stoumen v. George R. Reilly, 37 Cal., 2d 713, S.F. no. 18310, August 28, 1951.

6.        "Patch Fights Three-Way Battle," Los Angeles Advocate, August 1968; and Dick Michaels, "Patch Raids Police Station," Los Angeles Advocate, September 1968.

7.        "Homo Revolt Blasting Off on Two Fronts," Berkeley Barb, April 11-17, 1969; Leo Laurence, "Gay Revolution," Vector, April 1969; and Leo E. Laurence, "Gay Strike Hits Southern California, Berkeley Barb, May 2-8, 1970.

 

 

Harry Hay, by Charles Hefling

 

 

From: Winter 1995

 

 

 

 

Birth of a Consciousness

HARRY HAY

 

THERE are, I imagine, a number of people who wonder, not necessarily what woodwork American 20th-century queers materialized out of, but where did the gay movement come from?

In the 1930s and '40s, there were clusters of homosexuals all over the country impassioned to get a group of some sort going. Two or three brothers would meet for supper and spark up a storm of ideas. By the second meeting, word would get out that such doings were a novel way to cruise, and by the third meeting attendance would double. But when the fourth meeting didn't produce any more new faces, the fifth would get only the by-now burnedout Sparkers of the first. Fini! There wouldn't be a sixth meeting. And this pattern would repeat itself over and over, year after year.

What was the social climate in which all this would be occurring? In the 1920s and '30s, single men didn't, as a general rule, earn enough to live in apartments. They lived in boarding houses. The word "homosexual," a technical adjective in the penal code characterizing illegal aberrations in heterosexual behavior, did not yet appear in any standard dictionary. "Homosexual," as a technical adjective, designated heterosexual men who occasionally were apprehended for engaging in perverted or degenerate acts. These monstrous practices, denounced by biblical and traditional common laws alike, were considered not only social but also political crimes against community standards, crimes that had to be obliterated whenever detected. People who had fallen so low as to engage in them must either be cured for their own good, forcibly if necessary, or be put away for the protection of society.

This general attitude, maintained by both Church and State, vigorously expounded on the front pages of the press and periodically denounced by the editorial sections, guaranteed that the established

 

 

limits of decorum were being observed by the community. Nineteenth-century America, however else it might have perceived itself, was socially divided into two groups, those who kept up with the Joneses and considered themselves respectable-and then there were those others! Borrowing from the French author Alexandre Dumas, those others were the demimondaine, the shadowy halfworld people who chose not to show themselves by the full light of day but only in the twilight. Actors, opera singers, ballet dancers, vaudeville performers, professional card-sharps, riverboat gamblers, acrobats, jugglers, musclemen, magicians, clairvoyants, soothsayers-the women you would never bring home to meet your mother, the men you would never let your sister marry.

From the point of view of the people of the demimonde, the twilight world made perfect sense. It was their world, and its traditional and particular multicultural morality suited their lifestyle. Touring circuses, theater companies, or vaudeville acts straggling from town to town were never welcome except in designated disreputable hotels and boarding houses, and even here they were permitted to enter only by the servants' entrance. Such was "the gay world" in the 19th century, and this pattern did not change, even in the U.S., until the demise of vaudeville [in the 1930s]. The gay twilight world was made for those who slept by day and rose in the afternoon, those who took afternoon coffee and a croissant at kiosks along the street, along riverbanks, or in parks. This gathering of shadows in the waning light was for those who took brisk turns along winding paths as afternoons turned to twilight and lamps began to bloom between trees in early evening. This twilit world was for those who met one another along these walks and shared biscuits and wine before repairing to whatever stage or music hall they might be engaged with.

The downside of the twilight world was that, because its milieus were necessarily places of shadow and darkness where thieves and thugs and blackmailers also abounded, it was a world outside of the law. The people who frequented this world did so at their own risk, and when, as happened quite frequently, there was a police roundup of scoundrels and malefactors in such areas-usually not carried out until after the entertainers had gone off to their several billets-and innocent or unsuspecting bystanders were inadvertently caught up in such a sweep, they stood to lose not only their reputations, but also, when the story was published with pictures on the front page of the newspaper, their lodgings and livelihoods as well. When the police sweeps related to immoral behavior, the social and political ostracism was immediate and total. Homosexual behavior was a despised heterosexual perversion according to law, medicine, and religion. If a person was discovered harboring homosexual inclinations, he was adjudged a heterosexual who had gone bad, who had become degenerate-someone not to be tolerated in decent society.

 

WHEN I was growing up in the 1920s, and was grown in the 1930s, this was what we all heard night and day, day in and day out; it was in the air you breathed. There were those who, like me, didn't believe it, who knew that what we carried was a shining, golden, pulsating dream, a wonderful alternative window to goodness, for which as yet we had no words-and somehow I knew that I was going to find some words for it. There were those who felt they couldn't help being what they were, and who formed little cliques when they were lucky enough to find others like themselves. But there were those who never found another of these "twilight men." And there were those who hated being what they were, those who tried to drown their self-loathing in liquor or drugs, and who cruised dangerously.

Our greatest dangers in such outlaw decades were from sneakraids on public cruising places-always in the three-month stretch just before an election-ABC raids (for Alcoholic Beverage Commission) on those few bars that occasionally would serve you drinks in a dark corner at four times the going price. From 1935 on, blackmailers and the vice squad had nightly quotas of entrapments to carry out. Of all these dangers, the gravest threat to the twilight world-from the 1830s through the 1970s-at  all  times was public exposure and censure. Arrest in a raid, publication of your name in the paper, automatically guaranteed that you would be seen as guilty even before the trial. The cops would call your boss, so you usually lost your job; they would call your landlord, so you'd lose your lodging. The insurance companies would cancel your policies if you had a car. Entrapment usually guaranteed exposure unless your lawyer was able to fix it so you could cop to a lesser charge by bribing the arresting detective or softening up the judge. Otherwise, it would be a felony sentence of up to six or ten years in a state prison on a first offense. After you had completed your sentence on a first conviction, you would be required to register with the police every time you moved, for the rest of your life. A second conviction-in any category of a "morals" charge-and you would be sent to Atascadero State Prison to be cured of your depravity. Atascadero gave you a choice of "curing" method: castration or lobotomy. These conditions ruled our lives and loves in the state of California until State Penal Code item #541-C-C was amended by rescinding portions of its subsections in 1975.

It's an old but still useful cliche among progressives and trade union activists that, socially or politically, the middle class has never produced anything of significance, because middle-class people, regardless of how collectively motivated they may be, always have personal investments to protect-a career they have worked years to develop, a social or political position they have sacrificed so much to attain. Any political movement would have to originate from below. My first Mattachine Society was no exception. It emerged equally from the rough-and-tumble tradeunion organizing experiences of one of us [four founders] and from the outlaw underground community organizing experiences undertaken in the previous decade by the other three. We all knew how to invoke the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment to protect membership lists or activities from unwelcome scrutiny, if and when the local police or the Feds got nosey. Like experienced leftwing fellow travelers everywhere, we all automatically assumed we would be infiltrated by the FBI. And, as it turned out, we were not wrong.

For us queers, the political climate at the state and local levels had been ominous forever: social behavior and morality had always been matters of states' and municipalities' concern. But our federal rights, our labor-union rights to organize and develop social programs, had never been questioned. Now suddenly, in 1948, the political climate had turned ominous. Senator Joseph McCarthy's scurrilous House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) witch hunt, the disgracing of Hollywood actors, writers, and directors who were Marxist-oriented activists or sympathizers, had dragged on for months, terrifying decent people into becoming public snitches. All this demoralized the nation's entire cultural environment. "Loyalty oaths" became ubiquitous, a prerequisite for public or professional employment. America seemed to be moving rapidly toward the type of police state in which public scapegoating had already proven itself to be a highly effective and inexpensive form of control. With President Truman's rush to recognize the new state of Israel, with his push to integrate Negroes into the armed forces, with the further integration of blacks into organized labor, it was obvious to me, as I wrote in the original Call-to-Organize in 1948, that the political scapegoat victim this time around would be us, the queers! We had to begin finding out who we were, what we might be able to be for: we had to organize!

 

EVEN with copies of my "Call-to-Organize" and a new book, Alfred Kinsey's 1948 Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (which I carried to give me credibility), it took me two long, lonely, scary years to find my first recruit [Rudi Gernreich, who was also Hay's lover]. Forming a society of two, and determined to get a discussion group going, we went to an unmarked section of Santa Monica Beach that we knew was frequented by gay brothers. Because the media were whipping up support for the Korean War and Red Scare hysteria was going full blast, we figured that asking brothers to sign our Stockholm Peace Petition would be so radical that they'd be more interested in agreeing to come toa "Kinsey Report" discussion group, right? Wrong! By the end of the summer, we had gotten 500 signatures on our petition, and had found not one person who would dare come to our discussion group, so overpowering was the terror of police reprisal or blackmail.

The next three members [Bob Hull, Dale Jennings, and Chuck Rowland] came out of the 1950 fall historical materialism music classes that I had developed for teaching people's songs at the Southern California Labor School. We-the first five of the group that we would call the Mattachine Society five months later-all had previously trained in underground struggles for social and political justice. We knew that we brothers were ofa different consciousness from the heterosexuals around us. We knew we were not the degraded, degenerate monsters that society's laws and religious prejudices made us out to be. But we also knew that we didn't yet have the concepts, let alone the words, to say so.

At our first discussion group, in December 1950, eighteen of us sat for two hours not really knowing what to say to one another but sensing that no one wanted to leave. At the second meeting, to break the ice, the three of us present from the five-member steering committee started the ball rolling by "coming out" to one another. After about two hours of this, it suddenly flashed on us all that just maybe we each had more in common with the others in this room, friends and newcomers alike, than we had ever had with anybody before, in all our lives! For the first time in any of our experience, we were feeling the prickling surge of collective Brotherhood.

The core group realized that by this process we'd turned a major corner in our perception of gay consciousness. People couldn't wait for the next meeting to learn more about each other, and so about themselves through the experiences of others, and to bring a friend. The golden dream of Brotherhood was enveloping us all. Twenty years later, in the 1970s, this process would be known as "consciousness-raising raps." But in 1951, we had not developed such concepts, let alone the words. We just knew we had invented the organizing tool we'd been looking for. This contagious fever for brotherhood developed for the First Mattachine a mailing list of about 5,000 people in California alone, in 1952, right in the teeth of Senator McCarthy's witch hunt!

Of course, our luck didn't last: our very excitement attracted the first wave of opportunistic, middle-class assimilationists, the negative-imaging homosexuals so unlike the joyous, positive-imaging gay brotherhood of the earlier pioneering wave-opportunists who would insist that we were all exactly the same as heterosexuals except in bed, and that we had nothing in common with one another except our sexual inclinations. My first Mattachine Society set itself the task of functioning by unanimity. Over the next two and half years, 27 Brotherhood Guilds were established. Each guild was responsible for two discussion groups a month. Discussion groups could range from less than fifteen at one meeting to more than 75 at the next. In the course of the first blooming, the Society undertook to publicize and openly defend a vice squad entrapment case against one of its members [Dale Jennings], forcing the city of Los Angeles to withdraw the charges, in the summer of 1952.

This victory brought on that wave of opportunists, expropriating everything in the way of their own assimilationist agenda-thus trampling the bloom of the guild brotherhoods in the process. Still, the sudden burst of marvelous fairy inventiveness involved in publicizing this campaign and raising funds for it was unprecedented. The Lester Horton Dance Theater hosted perhaps the first theater performance benefit for gay concerns in our history and drewa full house. A weekend dance and beach party at Zuma Beach attracted over 500 paying guests during its sixty hours of revelry; and we papered certain areas of the city, including bus stops, with upwards of 10,000 pieces of literature on three occasions.

Out of the heady swirls of cultural togetherness that these five months of activity engendered, a dozen or so Mattachiners coalesced to start the first ongoing gay magazine in the U.S., One, the Homosexual Viewpoint, which first appeared in January 1953 and continued to appear monthly for nearly twenty years. ONE Inc., which in 1955 had been barred by the U.S. Post Office from distributing sexually-oriented materials through the mails, sued and won a Supreme Court decision in 1958 to the effect that gay-oriented materials may be sent through the mails provided they contained material of artistic and/or educational merit. One, recognizing  the  clarion  call  of  its  masthead,  Thomas Carlyle's lovely phrase, "A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one," launched the first nationwide annual Homophile Cultural Conference in January of 1954.

The second wave of Mattachine Societies-the hetero-imitative "Robert's Rules of Order" opportunists who had nothing in common with each other but their sexual inclination-were mainly concerned about getting their several states' laws changed, a quest they soon discovered they had neither the organization nor the experience to accomplish. Business-like, no-nonsense chapters met in L.A. and San Francisco in the fall of 1953 and the spring of 1954. By the fall of 1954, the L.A. chapter had gotten bored and started to decline, but San Francisco had started The Mattachine Review in the summer of 1954, and its success would keep a semblance of a chapter alive for three or four years.

In 1955 two lesbian couples in San Francisco would found the Daughters of Bilitis with its own publication, The Ladder, which would also continue to appear for nearly twenty years. Like the second wave of the Mattachine Society, the DOB would spread several chapters across the country, likewise middle-class, orderly, and respectable, although probably never as hypocritically respectable as was the Denver Mattachine under the leadership, in 1956, of the Rev. Carl Harding, who recommended that all homosexual men marry heterosexually and keep a boy on the side.

 

In 1957, '58, and '59, the Denver, San Francisco, and New York Mattachine chapters mounted a National Mattachine Convention in one of the three cities. It was mostly for show, but the events did develop the outlines of inter-city and inter-state relations. In San Francisco, in 1959, a representative from the mayor's office was introduced to the Assembly, and his remarks attracted the brief attention of the local press. Fliers were being circulated; word was getting around; homophiles as political entities were beginning to emerge. Homophiles disguised as hetero-imitative assimilationists were noted for being present on occasion, although their opinions were not yet being sought.

But the golden dream of brotherhood, which had bloomed so buoyantly in the first Mattachine Guilds, had been snuffed out, not to appear again until we once more started usinga variation of the "coming-out-to-one-another" process at an encounter-type community outreach conference in San Francisco in May 1969. And that had set us back for years! The middle-class assimilationists who inundated us first in the fall of 1952 wasted First Mattachine's golden dream of brotherhood and totally scotched the notion that we might be a cultural minority. Yet when Stonewall burst onto the scene sixteen years later, the new brothers and sisters assumed everybody had always known we were a cultural minority since Day One!

 

From: November–December 2013

 

 

 

 

The Radicalism of Harry Hay

WILL ROSCOE

 

ON August 10, 1948, Harry Hay wrote a prospectus that anticipated the goals, forms, and institutions of today's international lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement to an extent that was truly prophetic. For the next six decades, he brooded over this new movement as it sputtered to life, nudging it onto its feet in the 1950s, steeling its resolve in the 1960s, challenging it to claim its rightful place among the great causes of our time, until 2002, when, still grumbling and grousing, still issuing alarums and calls, his brow furrowed at the horizon, he passed away. He was ninety.

I want first to acknowledge the importance of Harry Hay-his activism and ideas, and his remarkable body of work. It's a radical enterprise-in the sense of the word that Hay liked to point out, "to the root." For in exploring Hay's life and thought we will be returning to the roots of LGBT liberation, contemplating not only its proximate causes and circumstances, but also the nature of the inner conflict that finds its resolution in an act of sheer audacity: declaring an identity, signing up for a cause. And if you have difficulty putting together the idea of "major historical figure" and "really big queen"-well, you've come to the right place! Because   I will argue that this drama queen, in his Holy Fool outfit of jeans and camouflage skirt and fake pearls, ranks among the most inspiring and courageous civil rights leaders in American history.

In the 1950s, Hay was not alone, nor was he the first to challenge society's treatment of homosexuals. Writers like Robert Duncan, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin all published works offering a defense of homosexuals and challenging the prejudice against us. Social scientists like Alfred Kinsey, Donald Webster Cory, and Evelyn Hooker were taking on the biases of their disciplines. And activists like Paul Goodman, Bayard Rustin, and David McReynolds were beginning to step out of the closet. But Harry Hay did something none of these others did: he called a meeting.

Hay is best known for his role in starting up the original Mattachine Society in Los Angeles. Between 1950 and 1953, Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings, Bob Hull, Konrad Stevens, James Gruber, and Rudi Gernreich built an organization that used consciousness-raising groups to recruit members; held fundraisers, events, and lectures; spun offa publication; successfully defended one of its members against entrapment; distributed flyers and leaflets; and began polling political candidates. By 1953, perhaps 5,000 people in northern and southern California had attended Mattachine activities.

Then, when a local newspaper columnist hinted darkly that a "strange new pressure group" named Mattachine might include communists, some members panicked. Hay, of course, was a big commie, as were some of the other organizers. Two conventions were called in the spring of 1953. On vote after vote, the founders and their original vision were affirmed. But red-baiting by conservative dissidents and the fear of investigation led the founders to make a dramatic decision. To give the organization a clean slate, they all resigned.

Make no mistake: the founders were not booted out or voted down. The grassroots, activist Mattachine was betrayed by assimilationists who were threatening to take names to the FBI. But even more heartbreaking, the story of early Mattachine was suppressed. The young activists of the post-Stonewall years-my generationhad no idea that a grassroots, liberation-based movement had existed before. Not until Jonathan Ned Katz' 1976 Gay American History did we know, and what a surprise it was, that an activist movement had flourished over a quarter of a century earlier. And it had all been thought up by a man who used theory and skills he had learned as a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. What's more, he was still alive!

And who would have predicted that Hay would return to L.A. in 1979 and resume a life of renewed activism, and along the way help launch yet another movement-the unruly, indefinable, incomparable Radical Faeries? Then, in 1990, we got Stuart Timmons' masterful biography, The Trouble with Harry Hay, its pages brimming with the names of the activists, actors, artists, writers, musicians, dancers, political figures, and others whom Hay had known, a who's who of bohemian Los Angeles in the mid-20th century. And Hay continued to make high-profile interventions into GLBT politics well into his seventies and eighties, whenever he felt voices were being excluded. But his greatest contribution was the breakthrough that enabled him to see queer folks as a people.

 

IT is almost impossible for us to imagine the consciousness of a time when there simply was no such group. As Hay so often pointed out to anyone who would listen, when he was a young man there was no word for talking about "us"-no common term that didn't amount to a malediction or provoke nervous giggles. We were "that way," "sensitive," or "touched"; "aunties," "nancies," or "fairies." Nothing frustrated Hay more than the anachronistic projection of our modern self-awareness onto the times he lived in as a young man. Hay's point was that the leap from adjective to noun had not been made, and until it had, sexual minorities did not and could not think about themselves in collective ways. It was literally unthinkable.

In the 1930s, when Hay suggested to his boyfriend, Will Geer-the leftist actor who ended his career playing Grandpa Walton-that they starta society of "us" and have serious discussions, Geer snapped back: "But honey, what would we talk about?"

Geer was putting it politely. Henry Gerber, a leftist activist like Hay, who also tried to "call a meeting" in Chicago in the 1920s, provides a blunter appraisal of the prospects Hay faced. "The first difficulty," Gerber recalled, "was in rounding up enough members and contributors so the work could go forward. The average homosexual, I found, was ignorant concerning himself. Others were fearful. Still others were frantic or depraved. Some were blase. Many homosexuals told me that their search for forbidden fruit was the real spice of life. With this argument they rejected our aims. We wondered how we could accomplish anything with such resistance from our own people."

So how do you call a political meeting of a group of people who call each other the "friends of Dorothy"? Will Geer's question was the Gordian Knot that had to be cut if there was to be a movement. For Hay, the answer came in 1948. That August he attended a party of what turned out to be all gay men. He had a copy of "the Kinsey Report" under his arm, and he had just come from signing a petition to place Henry Wallace's name on the California ballot as a candidate for president. Beer flowed, talk followed, and that night a new idea was born.

Wallace's third-party candidacy was drawing support from many activists like Hay, whose roots lay in the Popular Front politics of the 1930s and '40s. This was the period when American Communists forged alliances with a wide range of groups that opposed fascism and the worst ills of capitalism. In America, opposing fascism meant fighting racism. The party lent aid to African-American causes and organizations, and wide-ranging discussions among party intellectuals extended Marxist principles to make the case that cultural, racial, and ethnic minorities had common cause with the working class-over and against an older view that considered minorities the byproduct of capitalism's attempt to divide and conquer.

In Southern California, not uniquely but  especially, African-Americans were one of several groups experiencing racism, and they all had a common enemy in brutally repressive law enforcement agencies and local governments dominated by business interests. The communists worked with them all. And so, in mid-20th century, as Daniel Hurewitz shows in Bohemian Los Angeles (2007), we see the chrysalis of what was to  come-multiculturalism, an analysis of the relationship between class and both racism and sexism, and the ever-shifting coalitional politics that are now so characteristic of the American city.

Meanwhile, at the 1948 party in an apartment in L.A., the discussion ranged from Kinsey and his startling revelations regarding homosexuality to the Wallace campaign. Hay tossed out the idea that a discreet organization, calling itself perhaps, Bachelors for Wallace, could lobby for a plank supporting the right to privacy. The idea took off. At dawn's early light, the revelers straggled home to sleep it off. But not Hay, who was pouring coffee and sitting down at the typewriter.

When he pulled out the last sheet of paper, he had created a prospectus of brazen scope. In this text he used the capitalized word "Minority" fourteen times in the phrase "Androgynous Minority," but that adjective was soon replaced with "homophile," then later still with "gay," "faerie," and "third gender," among others. But the noun was always "minority"-and this was new. The other Mattachine organizers challenged Hay to flesh out this idea. Chuck Rowland recalled, "I kept saying, 'What is our theory?' Having been a Communist, you've got to work with a theory. 'What is our basic principle that we are building on?' And Hay said, 'We are an oppressed cultural minority.' And I said, 'That's exactly it!'"

Hay's ideas were discussed extensively by the founders at discussion groups and in presentations by Hay. When the group adopted a mission statement in 1951, it referred to homosexuals as an "oppressed minority." The organizers put the theory to practice. The thesis states that we area group, so discussions were centered around the questions this idea generated: What do we all have common? What experiences do we share? How can we help each other? The results were powerfully cathartic-and by 1953 the discussion groups had proliferated.

The most fully developed version of the thesis exists in notes that Hay wrote in 1960. He began by borrowing the definition of cultural minorities from a text he used in his Marxist classes, one often cited in the party's discussions about African-Americans, which states: "A nation [that here has the sense of "a people," or a minority, within a larger state] is a historically-evolved, stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture." No single characteristic is determinative, "only a sum total of characteristics, of which, when nations are compared, one characteristic (national character), or another (language), or a third (territory, economic conditions), stands out in sharper relief." As Hay sums it up, all groups "whose motivating persuasions and/or fundamental inclinations evoke decisive patterns towards a socially specific way of life, are to be seen as Social Minorities."

Hay provided several examples to show the variety of ways in which minority identities could be constituted and then creatively reformulated to survive over time. Two were especially key to his argument. The Nisei were the Japanese-Americans interned during World War II, a racist policy that Communists like Hay had protested. Had the Nisei been deported to Japan, as was threatened, their American outlook would have marked them as a minority there as well, even though they remained racially and linguistically Japanese. Similarly, the former American slaves who established a colony in Liberia were black but no longer African; they became a minority within the nation they created.

 

In each case, social and historical contingencies trumped essential traits. Now Hay turned to the case of modern homosexuals. They do not come from a single race or have a single language; they do not have cross-generational kinship systems. But Hay argued that they have two of the four variables in his paradigm: a shared psychological make-up or outlook and distinctive modes of communication. In light of his previous examples, this is enough. As for the other variables, Hay noted, they can be "historically constituted."

I call this the "cultural minority lite" thesis or the existential version. It says that common experiences of being queer, of facing hostile families and communities, learning strategies for surviving, finding others like us, and the values that accrue from these experiences, provide sufficient common bonds for a movement and the seeds of a culture. This version does not make transcendental claims regarding a continuous past or essential traits. It cannot be accused of essentialism in the way that Hay is usually labeled. But as Hay's thinking developed, he elaborated this thesis into what I call the full-on or "transcendental" version of the cultural minority theory. Although more controversial and easily stereotyped,I think it is a richer, more provocative hypothesis than the existential version, and it is equally grounded in Marxist thinking.

Already by 1960, Hay's research had convinced him that "we" had a place in history that transcended modernity. And here is where the two exemplars he cited so often were key-the so-called two-spirit or berdache role of Native North America (which has many parallels worldwide) and the Fool, a folkloric figure in Renaissance Europe that Hay believed was a survival of an ancient, pre-Christian, agrarian village role. Hay concluded that these roles were based on craft and religious specialization. Crafts being tied to production, religion to the redistribution of surpluses, this means that roles such as these are not epiphenomena of the superstructure but integral to the social relations of production, the central subject of Marxism.

 

SINCE Stonewall, the existential model of GLBT identity has been enough to unite us. It has given us an effective civil rights moment, a lively culture of resistance, and bonds of amazing strength that sustained us through the AIDS epidemic. But Hay believed that GLBT people had a deep yearning to see themselves as having a more meaningful place in the human story. A doubt remains at the core: If I'm not sick or deviant, if I'm normal, why don't I have a history? And if I'm different, what's the purpose of it? Hay's thinking encompasses either and both of these models: the minority lite version, grounded in the existential experience of being queer in America; and the full-on transcendental version, grounding us in the broadest narratives of human history. Both affirm identity, both affirm progressive identity politics.

 

This piece was adapted from a keynote speech by the author titled "Radical Love, Visionary Politics: The Adventure of Harry Hay," which was delivered at a conference called "Radically Gay: The Life and Visionary Legacy of Harry Hay," held September 27-30, 2012, in New York City.

 

From: Winter 1995

 

 

 

 

Lesbian Liberation Begins

DEL MARTIN AND PHYLLIS LYON

 

WE ARE erroneously given credit as the founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in 1955. It wasn't even our idea. A young Filipina immigrant envisioned a club for lesbians here in the States that would give us an opportunity to meet and socialize (and especially to dance) outside of the gay bars that were frequently raided by police. Meeting in each others' homes provided us with privacy and a sense of safety from the police and gawking tourists in the bars. Personally, our motivation was simply to meet other lesbians. There were eight of us in the beginning: four couples, four blue-collar and four white-collar workers, two lesbian mothers, and two women of color.

This new secret club, which would later become the first national lesbian organization, was named the Daughters of Bilitis to sound like just another women's lodge. Bilitis (pronounced Bil-Etis) came from The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louys, a long narrative love poem in which Bilitis was cast as a contemporary of Sappho on the Isle of Lesbos. Presumably lesbians would know what the name meant. If anyone else asked, we could say we belonged to a Greek poetry club. In 1958, when renting our first office suite on O'Farrell Street across from Macy's, Del told the building manager that DOB was "an organization concerned with the sociological problems of single women."

The Daughters began in a climate of fear, rejection, and oppression, the aftermath of Congressional hearings and witch hunts by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was relentless in "exposing" Communists and homosexuals in government. Lesbians and gay men, if found out, were subject to reprisals from all quarters of society: employers, police, military, government, family, and friends. After bar raids, police often informed employers or gave lists of arrestees to the newspapers. Parents disowned their adult children. Minors were sent to a shrink or were institutionalized and given shock (or other) treatments. Purges occurred periodically on military bases. Just having "tendencies" or being friends with lesbians could get you a court martial and a dishonorable discharge. Many people lost licenses and their professional careers. Lesbian mothers were denied custody of their children and even visitation rights in some cases. The law, religion, and psychiatry all played a role in the cruel treatment  of lesbians and gay men by society and family. There was no sense of community as exists today. Lesbians were isolated and separated-and scared.

By 1956, we found that there were two other organizations: the Mattachine Society in San Francisco and ONE, Inc. in Los Angeles. They welcomed DOB into the "homophile" movement, but chided us for being separatists. Both Mattachine and ONE were open to both sexes but were overwhelmingly male in membership and program. They were glad to see women getting involved.

Plagued by people's fear of having their names on mailing or membership lists, DOB was constantly hampered in its outreach. Along with parties and discussion groups, the early days involved

 

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, by Charles Hefling

 

a great deal of peer counseling to help overcome the stigma of being branded illegal, immoral, and sick by a hostile society. After its first year, DOB had only fifteen members, although more attended parties and discussions. The group started publishing The Ladder and conducting public forums in a downtown auditorium.

The "1st Rung" of The Ladder was published by the Daughters "from the city of many moods," San Francisco, in October 1956, with Phyllis as editor.  It included the four-fold purpose of  DOB: 1) education of the variant to enable her to understand herself and make her adjustment to society; 2) education of the public to break down erroneous conceptions, taboos, and prejudices; 3) participation in research projects to further knowledge about the homosexual; 4) investigation of the penal code and promotion of changes through state legislatures.

The second issue focused on convincing what few readers The Ladder had that "Your name is safe!" An editorial cited the 1953 decision of the Supreme Court (U.S. v. Rumely) upholding the right of a publisher to refuse to reveal the names of purchasers of reading material to a Congressional investigating committee. That issue was mailed to every woman attorney listed in the telephone directory. The response was overwhelming: "Take me off your mailing list or I will report you to the postal authorities."

There was one positive response from Attorney Juliet Lowenthal. She and her attorney husband Morris had fought the Black Cat bar case (Stoumen v. Reilly) all the way to the California Supreme Court to determine that homosexuals had the right to congregate in public places. Later, when the Lowenthals submitted an amicus brief in the case against Mary's First and Last Chance lesbian bar in Oakland (Vallerga v. Munro), they cited and filed the September and October 1958 issues of The Ladder with the District Court of Appeals. The "misconduct" in the state's case against the bar owners consisted of women dressed in masculine attire, a "female with her arms round another female, kissing themselves on the cheeks and necks, and a waitress calling an undercover policewoman a 'cute little bitch.'" The case went all the way to the State Supreme Court, which found that this conduct was not "inimical to the public welfare or morals," but merely an indication that the clientele was homosexual. The Court also observed that homosexuals should not be expected to exhibit a higher standard of conduct than that expected of other (heterosexual) citizens.

 

FROM the beginning, DOB was engaged in peer counseling and internal discussion groups to allay fears and build self-esteem. Holding public forums allowed lesbians and some gay and transgendered men to attend without committing themselves. Professional speakers included attorneys who explained the law and told us what our rights were and what to do in case of arrest. Those in the mental health professions refuted the sickness theory and promoted self-acceptance. Our contention was that once you accepted yourself, regardless of what others had to say, you could cope better in a hostile society. The professionals who were among society's decision makers gave us the validation we needed then.

In February 1957, the Daughters of Bilitis proudly announced that it had become a full-fledged nonprofit corporation under the laws of the state of California. "It was a signal of our legality and our permanency as an organization," reported The Ladder.

As representatives of DOB, we attended the 1959 Mattachine convention in Denver, where Del appeared on a panel and expressed her annoyance at always having to defend DOB as a separate and distinct women's organization. She pointed out that both coed groups assumed that whatever was said about homosexuality included lesbians, just like the generic term "he." Del said: "Lesbians are not satisfied to be auxiliary members or second-class homosexuals.  One of Mattachine's aims is that of sexual equality. May I suggest that you start with the lesbian? This would certainly be a 'new frontier in acceptance of the homophile' [the theme of the convention]."

This was also the convention at which a new member, William Brandhove, hoodwinked the Mattachine Society into passinga resolution praising San Francisco Mayor George Christopher and Police Chief Thomas Cahill for an enlightened administration in "sociological problem areas." Brandhove claimed the resolution had been mailed to him by members of the S.F.P.D., who requested its passage. We knew there was something wrong and reminded Mattachine members that this was an election year and asked what earthly use it would be to Christopher to gain the endorsement of the Mattachine Society? It wasn't. Brandhove was a plant for Christopher's opponent, Assessor Russ Wolden. The story broke in the weekly San Francisco Progress in a front-page story, "Sex Deviates Make SF Headquarters." Thus DOB might dissolve out of fear. The meeting was heavily attended, and the sentiment was overwhelming to stand our ground and to get a special edition of The Ladder out and onto the newsstands (for the first time). The mailing and membership lists were removed from the office and placed under a blanket in the back of our station wagon for the duration of the crisis.

The daily papers mentioned the story, noted Mattachine's slander suit, ran a few letters, and then dropped it completely. In the meantime, a four-page pamphlet was distributed door-to-door to remind parents of daughters of the existence of the Daughters of Bilitis. Christopher, who was no favorite of lesbians and gays, was re-elected. However, some 9,000 people who went to the polls did not vote for anyone for mayor. What we learned was that it was helpful to have a liaison with the gay male organizations so as to be aware of what they were up to. We also learned-and it has proven to be so in later yearsthat in times of crisis we all pull together and more of us come out.

By 1960, DOB had chapters in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. It had established a book and record service. The L.A. chapter produced a 45-rpm record under the DOB label featuring Lisa Ben singing parodies of "Cruising Down the Boulevard" and "Frankie and Johnnie." DOB also carried "3 Oboli to Aphrodite," the Songs of Bilitis dramatized by "Cherise," a pseudonym for a very well-known stage, radio, and screen actress.

The first national conference of the Daughters of Bilitis was held in San Francisco in 1960 in the penthouse of the Whitcomb Hotel on Market Street. Although the Mattachine Society was an avowed part of the homophile movement, it had always been billed as an organization "interested in the problems of homosexuality." But DOB's publicity release advertised "the nation's first Lesbian Convention." Hal Call, Mattachine's president, wrote that under those circumstances, he felt most Mattachine members-99 percent male-might hesitate to attend. Jaye Bell, president of the San Francisco host chapter of DOB, replied: "If the members of Mattachine were to dress properly and act with decorum no one would take them for Lesbians."

Noting that a few clergymen had attended Mattachine and ONE conferences as individuals but not as representatives of a church, DOB sent a letter to the Northern California Council of Churches asking for an official speaker so as to develop a dialog with the church itself. Some weeks later,a reply came from the executive director apologizing for the delay: "We never had a request of this nature before, and quite frankly, we didn't know how to deal with it." The Reverend Fordyce Eastburn, representing the California Episcopal Diocese, was DOB's luncheon speaker. He said that homosexuals would be accepted in the church, but since homosexuality is a sin, we would be expected to change-either that or embrace celibacy. That was an opening. In 1967 the report of the Joint Committee on Homosexuality, appointed by Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike and on which Don Lucas of Mattachine and Del of DOB had served, was approved by the Diocesan Council. The Committee's recommendations included: endorsement of homosexual law reform, denunciation of entrapment of homosexuals by police and Alcoholic Beverage Control detectives, and the need for a broad sex education program for clergy and laity alike.

The DOB biennial conventions proved to be excellent vehicles for publicity focused on lesbians. The first convention in San Francisco received good press notices. It drew a visit from the Homosexual Detail of the San Francisco Police Department. The two men were primarily interested in finding out if the organization advocated dressing in clothing of the opposite sex. This being our first public appearance, the women were all wearing skirts.

During the second convention, in L.A. in 1962, Terry, president of the host chapter and self-employed, gained nationwide coverage when she was interviewed on television by Paul Coates. By the third, in New York City in 1964, The New York Times had relented on its taboo on the subject and sent a reporter. At the fourth, back in San Francisco, the 1966 convention opened the "Ten Days in August,"a concentrated series of meetings including the second meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO). Phyllis, as publicity director, pulled out all the stops. The San Francisco Chronicle ran a four-column article headlined "S.F. Greets Daughters." The Convention and Visitors BureaU provided help with registration to atone for leaving DOB out of the listing of upcoming conventions. On-the-hour spot announcements were made on two radio stations. Metromedia News taped some of the highlights of the program, and by afternoon Judge Joseph G. Kennedy's luncheon speech was on the air. Television stations did taped interviews and newspapers covered the event, which featured speakers from all branches of San Francisco's city government (including an official representing Mayor John Shelley, albeit the public health director).

Gay male organizations in the 50's and 60's dealt mostly with criminal law and the excesses of law enforcement: gay bar raids; sex in public toilets and parks; entrapment by undercover officers; and police brutality. DOB shared their advocacy of the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, which would make sexual activity between consenting adults in private no longer a concern of the law. But the Daughters, the only national lesbian organization at the time, concentrated more on civil law and family issues.

In January 1957, DOB announced the formation of a group to discuss the problems of "raising children in a deviant relationship." Suffragist Rhoda Kellogg, director of Golden Gate Nursery School, Eleanor van Leeuwen, specialist in parent education for the San Francisco Unified School District, and Faith Rossiter, psychotherapist, participated as discussion moderators, lending assistance on the basis of their knowledge and experience. In her report of the first meeting, Jean Peterson, writing in The Ladder, pointed out that "anything which strays from the sincere feeling or true values can be said to be deviant, and there can definitely be deviant heterosexuals as well as deviant homophiles. The emotional stability of parents will determine the background of the child. Love and security overshadow all other factors. If a child knows love, gives love and receives love, and knows he is wanted, chances are he will be normal and well-adjusted."

The last national conference of the DOB was held in New York City in 1970. Since Rita LaPorte, then national president of DOB, feared she would not be re-elected, and Gene Damon (Barbara Grier) feared she would not be re-appointed by the new board of directors, they stole the mailing list and, in effect, The Ladder. Without a magazine to publish, the convention decided to dissolve the national structure. Chapters would be autonomous, could publish their own magazine, and hopefully would still come together biennially. The Ladder, without an organization behind it, went out of business in 1972.

 

From: September–October 2003

 

 

 

 

Lawrence v. Texas

Brings It All Back Home

 

JOHN RECHY

 

IN STRIKING DOWN the Texas law that made consensual sex in private between members of the same sex a criminal act, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for the majority of the Supreme Court, wrote that the Texas law "demeans the lives of homosexual persons ... entitled to respect for their private lives." By emphasizing the word "respect," Justice Kennedy was not only upholding the right of privacy, he was asserting human dignity. For many, it is difficult to feel grateful. That the matter came up at all is disgraceful to every concept of human decency. For veterans of not-so-long-ago battles for equal rights, the decision will stir memories of outrages survived.

In the late 1950's, the McCarthy hearings aimed at identifying Communist sympathizers had spread their poison to ferreting out homosexuals in the government. That created an exodus to California, a state always known for its liberal attitudes. Perhaps it was that new wave of homosexuals into the state that intensified entrenched prejudices-and what occurred in California was reflected in varying degrees throughout the country.

A series of sweeps on Hollywood Boulevard by police netted hundreds of homosexuals, who were stopped, harassed, even taken into police stations for further interrogation. A scurrilous Hollywood newspaper trumpeted the news: "100's of Deviants Detained, Warned." The arrests were for "loitering." Any two men sitting in a parked car on streets near the Boulevard risked being ordered out by the police, separated, and grilled with questions about each other. Such questioning was meant to determine whether or not they had just picked each other up, a signal of lewd intent. That tactic was so widespread that gay men together, on sensing the presence of the police, whether in bars or on the street, would hurriedly exchange names and brief backgrounds to suggest a friendship, as opposed to a quick connection.

Throughout the S0's and 60's, and even into the 70's, being in a gay bar was dangerous. At any moment a bar could be flooded with light from a squad car. A bullhorn ordered all "queers" to march out in a single line, ostensibly to be checked for ID. Gay men would be insulted, mauled, and in some instances beaten. As many men as could be fitted into a squad car or wagon were taken to headquarters for questioning. Anyone who protested would be threatened with being held on "open suspicion" for 48 hours, released, rearrested, and held again.

Since it was illegal for members of the same sex to dance together (heterosexual women were exempted), a "private" club in Topanga Canyon adopted a system of lights to signal a hostile presence. Bulbs would blink and partners would shift, with gay men dancing with lesbians. The illegality of gay men touching each other even while dancing produced the Madison, a dance during which lines of gay men faced each other, not touching, just going through the motions of a dance.

In 1968, the murder of silent film star Ramon Novarro by two young drifters resulted in the trial not only of the killers but of the star's life. Newspapers all over the country routinely quoted the defense lawyers' reference to the silent-film star as "an old queer." The fact that his murder was brought to trial and the killers convicted was exceptional, occurring mainly because of Novarro's one-time fame. Other incidents of violence against gay people, even murder, were left uninvestigated, even unreported, since it was known that in courtrooms, if the perpetrator of violence against a gay man claimed he had responded in anger at having been the object of a homosexual pass, he would be assured a not guilty verdict.

Plainclothes cops would sit in cars outside gay gathering places in order to trail men leaving together. Without warrants, they pushed their way into private homes, just as, years later, the Texas police would invade a private home and arrest two men in the Lawrence case. Men caught in such situations often went to prison; a sentence of up to five years was not rare.

Entrapment was rampant. Vice cops dressed in the tight white pants popular at one time might, while hanging out in a gay bar or on the street, court or accept an invitation for sex at someone's home, and then arrest the gay man for solicitation. In 1965, a man attempting his first gay encounter was arrested in Twentynine Palms, California, after a plainclothes cop struck up a conversation that led to a mutual agreement to go to a motel. The gay man was sentenced to six months in jail, where he remained incommunicado, the judge claiming he was "insane" and needed to be "scrutinized." After he managed to get out, he became a recluse, petrified for life by the incident.

Countless lives were destroyed by such arrests: men lost their jobs, were ostracized by their families, were threatened with electric shock treatment, ordered to stay away from any place catering to "perverts"-in effect sentenced to a life of loneliness, away from their own kind. All men convicted of a gay sex offense had to register for life as "sex offenders." As such, they were frequently summoned out of their homes at night to participate in lineups for unrelated offenses, heterosexual rape, or child molestation.

Fledgling political groups, such as the Mattachine Society, met in secret, their blinds drawn. Their newsletters-mimeographed sheets-were confiscated by the Post Office even though they had no erotic content. Such a fate awaited the first gay activist magazine, One, which was entirely non-erotic.

In 1973, hundreds of gay men in Griffith Park were rounded up, not on hidden trails where sexual encounters occurred, but simply as they walked along on open roads or gathered publicly around their cars, a traditional gay practice on a warm Sunday afternoon. Suddenly a helicopter, a fleet of squad cars, and more than a dozen police on horses launched an invasion, proceeding to herd dozens of gay men into a wired compound at the foot of the roads. The routed men were kept in the compound for several hours, names and addresses were checked out, and 39 were taken to police headquarters for booking. Those who were released from the compound had to trudge up the miles of road to their cars. Those taken to the station had to abandon their cars along the darkening roads. The Advocate (at that time a small newspaper) described the maneuver as "a full scale military operation, with command post, detention buses, jeeps, a helicopter, marked and unmarked cops, uniformed and vice police ... and a contingent of mounted cops," concluding that it was "a new harassment strategy." The Los Angeles Times reported only that "39 men ... were cited ... for possible prosecution under city ordinances, prohibiting sections designated as hazardous. They could face penalties of up to one year in jail and a $500 fine."

On an early evening in 1977-four years after the repeal of California's anti-sodomy laws-while driving home from UCLA,   I saw muggers fleeing from a man they had assaulted on the street as he walked home with his groceries along a non-gay area. I stopped to be sure that the man was okay: he was bruised and shaken. With him in my car,I attempted to flag down a squad car in the area. Hands readied on their revolvers, the cops got out. The muggers would still be in the area, I told them. Glancing at the wounded man, who was clearly gay, they drove off. I took the bruised man to the police station to report the crime. The desk sergeant studied him knowingly. "What did you try to do with those guys?" he asked.

After I wrote an account of that night for The L.A. Times, and an investigation was ordered because the matter was now public and no gay context had been indicated, I became the object of retaliation, culminating in an attack by baton-swinging cops in Barnsdall Park, a cruising area I often frequented. As I got out of my car, two cops rushed at me with batons raised. I was able to get back into my car and speed toward them. As I drove past, they swung their batons in an action intended for me. I heard the sickening strikes on my car, leaving deep dents. For months afterward, I received threatening anonymous calls.

In 1983, a vice cop and his plainclothes partner, having made an entrapment arrest for lewd conduct in Griffith Park, lingered along the main road with a handcuffed gay man as a trophy until other gay men had gathered. Summoning a park ranger, the arresting cop asked loudly: "Think anyone would mind if I set fire to this part of the park to burn these faggots?" Intending to bring that statement into the court hearing as indicative of the cop's vengeful intent to entrap, the city attorney prosecuting the case said he did not believe that an officer would say that, nor would any judge or jury accept it. The statement was not introduced, and the entrapped gay man was convicted.

There was resistance throughout those years in Los Angeles, however. As early as 1958, as the cops pursued a routine, hour- long harassing tactic of checking IDs at a crowded after-hours gathering place for gay men, Cooper's Donuts on Main Street, the men inside pushed en masse past the cops, and a violent rumble ensued. After the notorious raid on the Black Cat Bar in 1967, riotous disruptions against the police spread to L.A., where 200 gay men marched against a line of heavily armed cops. In early 1969, the nearly fatal beating of a gay man in downtown L.A. created skirmishes and demonstrations sporadically for days.

But the same prejudices that allowed myriad outrages against gay people caused these acts to be ignored by the mainstream press. Unacknowledged, their insurrectionary power was curbed. Although the history of gay oppression is long, its recorded history is brief. For many gay men, history begins with the moment of their last sexual conquest. Many younger homosexuals have no knowledge about what occurred not so long ago-and still occurs away from relatively safe havens, those deceptive gay ghettos. It could all have returned ferociously as long as repressive laws like the one in Texas existed.

On the memorable day of June 25, 2003, in decent, moving words, Justice Kennedy and the four justices who joined him in effect denounced those past horrors as inconsistent with the respect and dignity owed to all human beings. Without in any way belittling the decency of those justices in their opinion-and the courage and commitment of those who fought to bring it about, especially the Lambda Legal Defense Fund and its attorneys- many gay people might view the decision as a vastly imperfect apology for the lives devastated by cruel laws that made possible the myriad humiliations of gay people, the verbal and physical assaults, the screams of "faggot!"-the muggings, the suicides, the murders, trumped-up arrests, incarceration-still occurring even during this time of victory.

The flagrant dissent by Justice Scalia and two of his colleagues-in an effort to uphold the Texas law-will help to keep fertile the atmosphere of hatred that recently allowed three men to mangle Trevor Broudy in West Hollywood and two others to butcher Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. A great battle was won on June 25, but the war continues.

 

From: May–June 2010

 

 

 

 

Unearthing the ‘Knights of the Clock’

MARTHA E. STONE

 

IN his letter to the editor in the January-February 2010 issue of this magazine, Richard Lottridge asked if anything had been written about the role of Merton L. Bird in the founding of the midcentury gay Los Angeles group known as Knights of the Clock. My interest was piqued, and what follows is a brief overview in which l've tried to assemble some (often contradictory) fragments of history.

Enigmatic might be the best word to describe this organization, which was variously called the Knights of the Clock or Clocks. Gay and lesbian historians differ in their reporting of who founded the group, when it was founded, and what its exact name was. The ONE Gay and Lesbian Archives in L.A. maintains that Merton L. Bird, an African-American accountant about whom little is known, was the cofounder, and that it started up around June 1951. The other co-founder was W. Dorr Legg, who used about a dozen pseudonyms throughout his life, and whose name appears in virtually every anthology of gay history. He earned a master's degree in landscape architecture with a specialty in urban planning, taught at Oregon State University, lived in New York and Florida, and came home to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to care for his elderly parents. Most of Legg's lovers were African-American, and he experienced racial discrimination firsthand (though not, according to John D'Emilio in 1983's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, in Detroit's black community). Some historians hold that Bird and Legg met in Michigan, drove around looking for a comfortable place for interracial gay couples, and landed in L.A. in the late 1940s. Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons hold in Gay L.A. (2006) that Marvin Edwards, not Bird, went to L.A. with Legg. Timmons interviewed Edwards for the book, which includes a very youthful candid photo. Edwards was forced to leave L.A. after a year or so, when his landlady discovered he was gay.

Legg has been variously described as charismatic, charming, poised, witty, intelligent, controlling, inflexible, and opinionated. A Republican in politics, he chose to live off the earnings of younger men (according to an interview in Joseph Hansen's 1998 biography of Don Slater). In Legg's 1994 book, Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice, he described Bird as brilliant and gives all credit for the Knights' founding to Bird. "Hostility and harassment were the daily lot of interracial same-sex couples in 1950. [Bird's] idea was that by coming together to form a mutual aid society, the group could at the very least offer each other encouragement. The decision was to form a California nonprofit corporation and call it the Knights of the Clocks, a deliberately ambiguous title." Many historians have quoted from Legg's book, Homosexuals Today; A Handbook of Organizations& Publications (1956), which he wrote under the name of Marvin Cutler, stating that the aim of the Knights was to "promote fellowship and understanding between homosexuals themselves, specifically between other races and the Negro, as well as to offer its members aid in securing employment and suitable housing. Special attention was given to the housing problems of interracial couples of which there were several in the group."

Although most sources give June 1951 as the Knights' founding date, others range from the late 1940s to the early '50s. Perhaps the L.A. group known as the Cloistered Loyal Order of the Conclaved Knights of Sophisticracy (or, sometimes, Sophistocracy, and known as the C.L.O.C.K.S.) inspired the name of Bird and Legg's organization. It may or may not have been formally incorporated. In Gay American History (1976), Jonathan Ned Katz was unable to turn up the legal papers when he searched back in the 1970s, but Edward Sagarin (the pseudonym of Donald Webster Cory) states in what was originally his NYU thesis, later published as Structure and Ideology in an Association of Deviants (1966), that the Knights in corporated  in  1950.  Three  undated  typescripts  in  the  ONE Archives' file on the Knights contain some information about the C.L.O.C.K.S. Their oath of office, following a Masonic-type ritual, was to "practice the arts of sophisticracy diligently, honestly, courteously, amicably, faithfully, and with all of my ability." At the end of the installation, the installing officer and "honor guard" intoned: "By the authority vested in me by the State of California, and as a duly elected officer of this corporation, I hereby declare you [name of office]. Honi soit qui mal y pense." This, the motto of the Order of the Garter, founded in mid-14th-century England, can be roughly translated as "shamed be he who thinks evil of it." Instead of the usual titles (president, VP, etc.), the C.L.O.C.K.S. used medieval ones: Exalted Knight, Senior Knight, Bursar, and Scribe (who kept a Tablet instead of minutes).

In the ONE archive, a few handwritten entries beginning on May 24, 1951, were recorded in an unused 1944 calendar from what appears to be an insurance company. On that date, "application forms were passed out," "minutes were approved as read," and the "Vice President spoke of aims of Club." Gone is the mystique of the Cloistered Loyal Order. One of the Knights' events was planned to take place in June at the Wilfandel Club. According to the still-active club's website, wilfandelclub.com, it was established on November 21, 1945, by two black women to provide "people of all races with a public meeting place in Los Angeles during the 1950s." Another meeting note, dated July 1st, listed members who would sing, play an instrument, dance, and make speeches at an upcoming party. (Bird was listed as one of the  speech-makers.) On that same date, there was an entry for a rough draft of letterhead, "The C.L.O.C.K.S./ Incorporated / Los Angeles/ Calif." The name "Josephine Baker" appears fleetingly ina meeting note, leaving one to imagine all kinds of possibilities.

Yet another event, dated August 4th, was to be a "midsummer frolic" beginning at 9 p.m., with draft beer and spaghetti. The last social event mentioned was a Valentine's meeting with a "social program" planned for Saturday, February 16th, 1952. Events seemed to be admission-by-card only. Other cryptic entries mentioned the Loan Fund, Housing & Employment Committee, the Membership Committee, the Entertainment Committee, and the Legal Aid Committee, of which Bird was chair. "NAACP" is noted without any further comment. Interestingly, Bird's name is consistently spelled "Byrd," and C. Todd White's 2009 book Pre-Gay L.A. lists  "M.  Byrd"  as  Merton  Bird's  pseudonym.  Some members' names and addresses are written throughout the entries, and there's an intriguing mention of a seal and articles of incorporation. Sagarin remarked that meetings were originally held monthly, then semi-monthly. Meetings, he said, usually drew about 35 attendees, with a larger group attending the socials.

Reproduced in Legg's 1994 book and credited to "ONE's Baker Memorial Library and Archives" is a 1951 invitation, engraved in Gothic script, to a Knights social event: the fourth anniversary party of "Gene and Edward" on May 12, 1951, from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m. Legg stated that guests at that event were "a comfortable mix of races and assorted personal relationships including both men's Beverly Hills employers and their families." ONE Archives' handwritten meeting notes do include some female first names.

When did the end come? ONE Archives' file contains no information about the group beyond a handwritten list, dated February 15, 1952, of fourteen members (including Bird and Legg) who owed dues. On that date, the group had $14.15 in the bank. In 1952, Legg and Bird numbered among the founders of ONE, Inc., a group within the Mattachine Society that published One magazine. White mentions that Bird appeared to have offered the Knights' charter as a model, or offered to merge with the Knights, neither of which was accepted. Sagarin noted that "for all practical purposes it had disappeared from the scene" by 1953, though an occasional meeting was held after that date.

A 1966 article in Tangents magazine by Richard Conger implied that the Knights, "formerly of Los Angeles," were represented at the ONE Institute Midwinter Session, an educational program for gay men and lesbians held on an almost yearly basis in various cities and considered a precursor to today's academic programs. The Institute was the brainchild of Legg. Sidney Rothman reported of the Knights (in One  magazine, 1965): "Its originality lay in its avowed intention to enroll men and women alike and their parents and other relatives on an interracial basis. Its meetings and large social gatherings appear not to have been matched in attendance until this present year (1965) by a few social events staged in San Francisco as the joint effort of several homophile organizations in that city. The Knights continued for three or four years but eventually found themselves overshadowed by another Los Angeles development ... the Mattachine." (Conger and Rothman were, according to Vern Bullough in 2002's Before Stonewall, two of Legg's pseudonyms.)

When Legg died in 1994 at the age of 89, he was survived by his partner of over thirty years, John Johnny) Nojima, who died a few years ago. Very little is known at this time about Merton L. Bird. ONE's file contains the names and addresses of some of the earliest Knights. Can any of them be traced? Are any of their addresses close to those noted on the map of "significant locations" in Todd White's book? What might the archives of other California institutions contain? Did any of the Knights' files migrate to other gay organizations following a very celebrated "heist" of papers in 1965 by another ONE, Inc. founder, Don Slater, due to personal and professional disputes with Legg? Does the NAACP's L.A. chapter keep records back to the 1950s? What about the archives of the Wilfandel Club? More research is waiting to be done on this fascinating and pioneering organization.

 

 

Hitchcock's cameo comes early in The Birds.

 

From: March–April 2001

 

 

 

 

The Birds as a Pre-Stonewall Parable

BOB SMITH

 

IN one of the coming attraction trailers for Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds, Tippi Hedren screams, "They're coming! They're coming!" She's warning that a bird attack is imminent, but after seeing the film again recently-an interim of twenty  years-I  began to wonder if she was actually predicting the Stonewall riots and the approach of Gay Pride marchers. I first saw The Birds as a boy in Buffalo, but after seeing the film as an adult, it struck me that The Birds could be a parody of homophobia, for there are entire sections of dialogue in the film where the phrase "The Birds" could easily be replaced by "The Gays."

The Birds opens in San Francisco, where we glimpse Alfred Hitchcock making his traditional cameo appearance, this time as a big queen walking two prissy little dogs [photo at left]. He passes by Tippi Hedren's character, Melanie Daniels, as she enters a pet store, where she meets Mitch Brenner, played by Rod Taylor. Mitch wants to buy a pair of lovebirds for his sister's birthday, but after meeting, flirting, and arguing with Melanie, he departs the store without his gift. Smitten by the hunky Mitch, the infatuated Melanie impulsively decides to order a pair of lovebirds and deliver them to him the following day. Using her father's connections as the publisher of one of San Francisco's newspapers, she tracks down Mitch's address and is about to leave the cage and a letter outside his apartment door, when she learns from the queen who lives across the hall (played by a gay man, the famous character actor Richard Deacon) that Mitch has already gone to Bodega Bay to visit his mother for the weekend.

If we sex-change Melanie Daniels into Daniel Melanie, we have a story about a blond boy toy chasing a ruggedly handsome young daddy. Driving up to Bodega Bay in her snazzy silver convertible to deliver the lovebirds, Melanie ends up staying the weekend with Annie, the town's school teacher. Since this film was made in an era when seemingly no gay man was complete without his gal-pal (who had a hopeless crush), Annie turns out to be a boozy, chain-smoking "fag-hag" played by Suzanne Pleshette, her husky voice beginning its descent to the register in which it sounds as if her larynx is a piece of smoked and pickled salmon. Puffing away on a cigarette, Annie admits to Melanie that she moved to Bodega Bay just to be near Mitch, and goes on to question his heterosexuality by suggesting, "Maybe there's never been anything between Mitch and any girl." Reflecting upon her remark, Annie says, "I think I'll have some of that," and reaches to help herself to a glass of brandy; and the viewer can almost imagine the heartsick school teacher embarking upon a lifetime of solitary drinking. It's a sad and pathetic confession, and since the audience grows to like the sympathetic Annie, it's almost a relief when, later in the film, she gets bumped off by a flock of crows instead of spending the rest of her life pining for a guy that she'll never have.

Mitch is still a "bachelor." And since the film was made in 1963, it comes as no surprise that he has a domineering mother, played superbly by Jessica Tandy. Mitch's mom is a controlling sort who disapproves of everyone he brings home and openly worries that he might leave her. Twisted mother-son relationships were a subject that obviously fascinated Hitchcock, and I like to think that if the Bates Motel had been located in Bodega Bay, Mitch and Norman might have met and become boyfriends.

It has always been clear that The Birds is about "the birds and the bees." The arrival of Melanie, a bad girl who reportedly jumped naked into a fountain in Rome, coincides with the attacks by the birds. In the restaurant scene where the birds attack a gas station attendant, and a dropped match in the flowing gasoline causes a conflagration, a mother attacks Melanie in terms that could easily be used by homophobic nutjobs. "They said when you got here the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you're the cause of all this. I think you're evil. Evil!"

In response, Melanie slaps the hysterical woman, an action that most homophobes deserve but few ever receive. The woman's question, "Where are you from?", is significant because, throughout the film, San Francisco is presented as a locus of evil. Whenever one of Bodega Bay's citizens mentions San Francisco, you can almost hear the disapproval in their voice. Of course, San Francisco has always had a raffish reputation, but since World War II the city has been regarded by some as a Sodom and Gomorrah where odd birds of a certain feather go to flock together.

The first major attack by the birds is at Mitch's younger sister's birthday  party.  The  girl  is  played  by  the  young  Veronica Cartwright, who in The Birds discovered what would become her specialty as an actor, the portrayal of hysterical women. (Tears and panic have become the bread and butter of Miss Cartwright's career. Since her appearance in The Birds, she's screamed in Philip Kaufman's wonderful 1977 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, shrieked in Alien, and, in surely her most memorable performance, projectile cherry-vomited in The Witches of Eastwick.) In the movie, the birds are consistently portrayed as predators on children, a libel that has also been employed against The Gays. Hitchcock even goes so far as to suggest that the birds are lurking pedophiles stalking schoolchildren in the playground. In fact, the birds in the film seem to be truly evil queens, since the two people killed by the birds, Annie and a chicken farmer, are shown to have had their eyes scratched out.

Once the attacks begin, the residents of Bodega Bay have a difficult time accepting the idea that birds could ever become violent. After the attack at the birthday party, the sheriff dismisses the evidence that birds attacked people, and in the restaurant Mrs. Bundy-an ornithologist who, to all outward appearances, is the epitome of a butch lesbian-says: "Birds are not aggressive creatures. They bring beauty into the world." Mrs. Bundy goes on to suggest that if birds started flocking together, "We wouldn't have a chance. How could we hope to fight them?" It's probable that Mrs. Bundy and the sheriff would have voiced the same incredulity if someone had suggested that in a few years drag queens would fight back against the New York City police or that, a decade later, the nearby town of Guerneville on the Russian River would be a gay resort.

It's a shame that Hitchcock didn't stick with his original ending for the film. The last scene of The Birds shows Mitch, Melanie, his mother, and his sister driving off into the distance, but Hitchcock had planned another ending that would have been more memorable while continuing the homophobic subtext. Hitchcock was going to show their car arriving at the Golden Gate Bridge, which, to their horror, would be covered with perching birds. It would have made explicit what people have been saying for years about San Francisco: "They've taken over the city!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Frank Kameny leads march at Independence Hall, Philadelphia, July 4, 1966

 

From: March–April 2012

 

 

 

 

Frank Kameny Takes It Public

JOHN D'EMILIO

 

FRANK Kameny's death last fall has pushed me to think about historical reputation. How do we evaluate the lives of those in the broad GLBT community who have assumed public roles, particularly in the world of political activism? Who gets memorialized? Who gets remembered as a hero? What achievements bring recognition on the historical record card?

Mainstream history books offer little guidance, as they still largely ignore queer topics. While our movement certainly exists in popular consciousness, it seems leaderless and in that sense different from other movements for social justice. For instance, in the long history of the black freedom struggle, at least a few individuals have won a secure place in the historical ledger as larger-thanlife figures. Names like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X have wide recognition. Mention "suffrage" and "feminism" and, at the very least, women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Betty Friedan pop to mind.

But turn to our movement for sexual and gender justice, and the cupboard seems bare. I've heard claims made for Harvey Milk as the most important person in our movement's history. But, I think, really? He was a local elected official for eleven months before being assassinated. Then there was Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society. Sure, he got something started, quit after two years when the going got tough, and then occasionally showed up later at Radical Faerie gatherings. Or Christine Jorgensen, who had very high visibility in the popular culture of her time, to be sure; but the coverage of her almost always took on the tone of freak-show reportage.

In the days after Frank Kameny's death, there was lots of discussion on the web and on various e-mail lists about his place in history. The range of views was extraordinary. Some described him in dismissive tones as just one among many, while others christened him the greatest GLBT hero of all time, bar none. As activists go, Kameny has at least fared well in the published histories of the movement. Oral history narratives like those of Eric Marcus and Paul Cain include a chapter on him. My own overview of preStonewall activism paints him as one of two or three key figures pressing the movement in more militant, assertive directions in the 1960s. In The Lavender Scare,a study of the Cold War persecutions in  Washington,  David  Johnson  makes  him  a  central  agent of change. Kameny figures in Clendenin and Nagourney's journalistic survey of the gay and lesbian movement, 2013's Out for Good, and in Ronald Bayer's account of how the American Psychiatric Association came to eliminate homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses (Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, 1981).

In an effort to think through the question of reputation, and of Kameny's in particular, I went back to the research I did in the 1970s, a time so close to the events most associated with his public career that it could barely be considered history. I pulled out the text of speeches he gave and letters he wrote, documents that in the 1970s were still housed in his and other activists' filing cabinets. I also found the notes I took during an interview with him that I did in 1978.

Born in 1925 in New York City, Franklin Kameny was a Harvard-educated astronomer working for the federal government in 1957. He had every reason to believe, at the dawn of the space age, that not even the sky was a limit to his career possibilities. But the Feds found evidence of his homosexuality and, at a time when "sex perversion" made someone unemployable by both the government and any of its contractors, Kameny was fired and had no prospects of ever finding work in his field again. He appealed the decision, all the way to the Supreme Court, losing at every stage. When these avenues of redress failed, he decided to fight in a different way. With some friends he founded the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW). Over the next fifteen years, he fought tirelessly to change federal policy. He organized the first homosexual rights demonstrations in Washington. He got the ACLU to take on gay rights issues. He challenged the ban on federal employment in every way feasible. He took on the medical establishment's claim that homosexuality was an illness, and coined the slogan "gay is good." In 1971, he ran as an openly gay candidate to be the District of Columbia's non-voting representative in Congress. He helped found and served on the board of the National Gay Task Force, an early, and successful, effort to create a national activist organization. By the mid-1970s, Kameny had the satisfaction of seeing two of his core goals achieved when the American Psychiatric Association voted to declassify homosexuality as a disease and the Civil Service Commission dropped its blanket ban on the employment of gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.

It would be hard to claim that Kameny continued to be a key mover and shaker after the mid-70s. However, he never ceased being an activist, and he always did much behind the scenes that was unheralded. He freely made himself available to individuals who experienced police harassment, lost their jobs, or faced blackmail because of their homosexuality. Later in life, other activists used Kameny's career, with his permission, as a way of winning additional recognition from the federal government. His house is a D.C. historic landmark. The Library of Congress has acquired his papers. The Smithsonian Museum has displayed some of his activist memorabilia. The federal government has formally issued an apology for firing him.

On what grounds can Kameny's activism be seen as singularly significant? For starters, through MSW he charted a whole new direction for homophile organizations. Evaluating where this small movement was in the early 1960s, he astutely characterized its work as either "social service" or "information and education." In his view, neither promised much in the way of permanent change. Instead, drawing explicitly on the civil rights movement and the huge changes its public activism was achieving, he proposed an emphasis on what he called "civil liberties and social action." Forget helping those individuals in need. Forget soothing efforts at educating and persuading the oppressor. Having tried unsuccessfully to win back his job with reasoned argument, Kameny now saw the opposition as "a ruthless, unscrupulous foe" with a "prejudiced mind ... not penetrated by information." To an audience of Mattachine members and sympathizers in New York, he urged "bold, strong, uncompromising initiative."

In practice, this translated into a series of actions that moved beyond   what homophile   organizations   customarily   did. He pushed back against a right-wing member of Congress who targeted MSW. He sent a steady stream of letters to government officials demanding meetings. Most of all, he and those who shared this more assertive outlook took to the sidewalks of the nation's capital. With large picket signs that boldly identified their issue as equal rights for homosexuals, they marched in front of the White House and other government buildings. Kameny eagerly talked to the journalists who flocked to the startling scene of homosexuals unapologetically proclaiming their cause.

Besides the federal government, Kameny aggressively took on the psychiatrists and their disease classification of homosexuality. In the past, Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis had reached out to medical and mental health professionals, but the approach was to win them over as allies and then support their efforts at new scientific research to challenge the sickness model. At its best, this approach led to the kind of work that Dr. Evelyn Hooker ,a social psychologist, began producing in the late 1950s. Kameny was having none of this. He was not relying on experts. "I take the position unequivocally," he declared, that homosexuality "is neither a sickness, a defect, a disturbance, a neurosis, a psychosis, nor a malfunction of any sort." He went further. Taking on religion as well as science and law, he staked out new ground: "We cannot ask for our rights from a position of inferiority, or from a position, shall I say, as less than whole human beings." To Kameny this meant that homosexual acts between consenting adults had to be defended as "moral, in a positive and real sense" and as "right, good and desirable, both for the individual participants and for the society in which they live."

 

MILITANCY and pride-stances that seem so obvious today. They are the foundation upon which the gains of the post-Stonewall decades stand. But when Kameny first articulated these principles, they represented the frontiers of GLBT political thought. What allowed him to stake out that ground so fearlessly? Was it an intellectual confidence gained from having a doctorate from Harvard? Was it the happenstance of personality? Kameny was notoriously brash, sharp-edged, and prickly. He didn't care if his words offended someone. He could come across as tough as nails, unsparing in his assessment of others, and unburdened by self-doubt. He seems to have escaped the internalized sense of inferiority that oppression often breeds.

One of my favorite statements of Kameny comes from a letter he wrote to a New York activist in 1965, the year in which he launched the Washington demonstrations: "I have always said that the world will take me on MY own terms, or it won't get me, and the world's loss will be greater than will mine; that when the world and I differ, I am right and the world is wrong and that if one of us or the other MUST change, it will be the world, because I won't." Can one imagine a stance better suited to a society in which all things queer were reviled, marginalized, or punished?

Kameny was not, of course, alone in his work. The positions that he espoused were enthusiastically embraced by a core of other activists, and the actions that he proposed came to fruition because others took them up, side by side with him. People like Jack Nichols, Barbara Gittings, Craig Rodwell, Randy Wicker, and Lilli Vincenz were among his partners in crime in the 1960s. But there's no doubt that Kameny was staking out the ground and that he had the will-the bull-headedness, perhaps-to keep pressing forward and to succeed in bringing others along. The launching of campaigns against the federal government and the psychiatric establishment brought the movement's biggest victories in the mid-1970s.

So maybe he is the greatest gay hero, deserving a position at the front of the pantheon. But listen to what Kameny himself had to say in an interview in 1978. Stonewall, he asserted, was "a turning point," accomplishing "what we had been trying to do for years and years and years and had never been able to do, and what we had anguished over endlessly: that the gay movement had never been a grassroots movement; it had never fired up the general gay community. Stonewall made the movement a grassroots movement."

And Stonewall itself, he believed, came not from homophile activism but from a larger impulse sweeping the country. "What happened at Stonewall was very much in keeping with the spirit of the times," he told me. "It was an era of tremendous ferment, of activism and militancy that hadn't occurred in recent historical memory   Riots were becoming commonplace in every part of the country. And then you had the whole, very active and pervasive radical community and radical philosophy, which was setting a tone for everything that went on. Stonewall happened at the right moment, and it happened because it was the right moment."

Kameny, never known for his self-effacing modesty, is telling us something important about movements, social change, and individuals. Can one imagine the doctors disavowing generations of theorizing about homosexuality without the militant disruptions of their staid conferences undertaken by this radical grassroots movement? Can one imagine the federal government retreating from their employment ban without all those disruptions of business-as-usual that the mass movements of the '60s and '70s regularly brought to Washington?

Kameny could see that the changes he espoused and the goals he pursued were not about to be achieved until something else of consequence was added to the stew of social change: the energy and strength of mobilized communities, of populations in open revolt. A leader without many followers is not the recipe for permanent change. Kameny never could figure out how to create those armies of lovers clamoring for justice.

Kameny deserves a place in the historical record. He did make a difference in important ways. He is neither just one among the many, nor is he the one without whom the changes that we take for granted today would not have occurred. Kameny himself, I suspect, would be quite happy with such a spare and respectful assessment of his contribution. As he told Eric Marcus just over twenty years ago: "my life has been more exciting and stimulating and interesting and satisfying and rewarding and fulfilling than I ever could possibly have dreamed it would be." He knew he had done right by himself and the world.

 

From: May–June 2012

 

 

 

 

The Black Cat Riot in L.A.

EVE GOLDBERG

 

IT'S the final hour of the year 1966. In Hollywood, a radio deejay sets down the needle on the number eight song of the year. "I love the colorful clothes she wears/ And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair." A few miles away, in Silverlake, things are hopping at the Black Cat. Colored balloons cover the ceiling. Boys dance with boys, the jukebox wails, and a couple of undercover cops play pool over in the corner. Six or seven additional plainclothes officers mill around in the crowd. At 11:30, a gaggle of glittering drag queens arrives in full-blown bouffants, sequins, and wobbly spiked heels. The bartender cranks up the Supremes' "You Can't Hurry Love."

The Black Cat is one of about a dozen gay bars lining Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake, the heart of L.A.'s gay community in the 1960s. Many are beer bars with jukeboxes, pool tables, and pinball machines, inhabiting rundown buildings where the rents were cheap.

It's just a few minutes before midnight on New Year's Eve at the Black Cat, and the Rhythm Queens, a trio of black women singers hired for the night, are getting ready for their big number. Suddenly, the jukebox cuts off, and for a brief moment all that can be heard is the tinkle of champagne glasses. All eyes are riveted on the clock behind the bar. Then a cheer goes up. "Happy New Year!" The Rhythm Queens take their cue, belting out a jazzy "Auld Lang Syne." The bartender snips a string and the balloons cascade down onto dozens of kissing couples.

The undercover cops exchange nods. Without warning, one officer seizes a kissing customer by the shoulders. "You're under arrest!" He pushes the man to the ground. Another cop grabs the bartender. Wine glasses shatter, Christmas decorations come crashing down. Patrons scream with fear, running for the exits. One customer reaches out to open the front door. The butt-end of a pool cue cracks down on his head. Blood spurts from his ear as it splits open. Another man is flung head-first against the jukebox.

Moments later, a dozen uniformed cops from the Los Angeles Police Department charge into the bar, batons swinging. One patron is clubbed from behind, then kneed in the groin. As he falls to the floor, his bowels empty. Two panicked customers rush out the back door, seeking refuge in the New Faces bar just across the street. A couple of plain-clothes officers follow. Just inside the New Faces, the fleeing men are tackled and thrown to the ground. Shocked, the female bar owner comes forward. "Can I see some identification?" she asks the plainclothes officers. In response, one of the cops hits her, then shoves her to the floor. A cop seizes the bartender, Robert Haas, and yanks him across the bar. Haas is struck, dragged out onto the sidewalk, and beaten so severely that his spleen ruptures. He doubles over, going unconscious on the way down.

 

NEW Year's Day, 1967, was another sunny day in L.A. Motorized carts draped in luscious mantels of carnations, daisies, and of course roses glided up Colorado Boulevard in the Rose Parade. Millions of snow-bound Americans were glued to their TVs, watching host Pat Boone chat with Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery as the floats floated beneath a cloudless sky. Over at L.A. County General Hospital, bartender Robert Haas was in critical condition with a ruptured spleen. At LAPD's Parker Center, fourteen Black Cat customers have been booked for lewd behavior. Their crime? Kissing for more than three seconds.

Local businessman Alexei Romanoff was not happy. "I wasn't at the Black Cat that night," he later said, "but within hours I heard about the raid. I was absolutely irate. I got on the phone with friends. Everybody was angry. We talked about making a plan to express our outrage." Romanoff had once been an owner of the New Faces bar. Working as a nurse and pursuing an acting career on the side, he was also intimately involved in the gay bar scene. "In the 1950s and '60s, gay bar culture was a crucial part of our community. It was a place to meet new people, maybe even meet a partner," explained Romanoff. "Police raids at gay bars were common at that time. So were beatings and arrests. It was really scary. We were so vulnerable. Kissing was a crime; cross-dressing was a crime. If you were arrested and identified as being gay, you could lose your job, your income, your house, your family."

I met Alexei in 2010 at his beautifully renovated, mid-century ranch house high in the hills of Pasadena. Sliding glass doors at the back of the house let in abundant sunlight and a sweeping view of the Los Angeles basin. Alexei and his life partner, David Farah, greeted me. It has been 43 years since the Black Cat riot. Alexei is now 74 and retired. "I've shrunk three inches," he admits with an impish grin, but he's still energetic, outspoken, and every bit the passionate activist who played a role in the course of gay American history.

"Before the Black Cat raid, gays were usually meek and scared. If we were arrested, we'd cop to a lesser charge like disorderly conduct so we wouldn't have to register as a sex offender for the rest of our lives. We just wanted to be left alone. But that night, something changed." What changed was that gay people fought back. Two and a half years before the famous Stonewall riots in New York City, they came out of the closet and into the streets of L.A.

"Perhaps it was the reeking mass brutality of this raid that did it," wrote Jim Kepner in the February 1967 issue of Concern, one of the few gay periodicals in the country at the time. "Or it may have been the slow, cumulative effect of years of hard work by small, struggling organizations telling homophiles that they could fight back-and wondering all the while if anyone was listening."

"Remember," says Alexei, "it was 1967. The anti-war protests were going on. Martin Luther King and the civil rights protests were happening. I had marched for black rights, and now I'm thinking: What about us? What about our civil rights?" Indeed the idea of civil rights for gays had been slowly building within the gay community for years, and L.A. was ground zero for much of the pioneering activism that led the way. The first gay political organization in the nation, the Mattachine Society, was founded in L.A. in 1950 by the left-wing activist Harry Hay and a few of his friends. The Mattachine Society's goals were to change the public perception of gays from sexual deviants to an oppressed minority, to end anti-gay discrimination, and to raise their own personal and political awareness through consciousness-raising discussion groups. In 1954, the Mattachine's magazine One, which was the first gay publication in the country, fought a court battle all the way to the Supreme Court to be able to send their magazine through the mail.

In 1966, a new gay organization was formed in L.A. PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education) was more radical, militant, and youth-oriented than previous gay political groups. PRIDE;s founder, Steve Ginsberg, a young landscape designer, was one of the people who organized the response to the Black Cat raid. Alexei explains how this was accomplished: "There was no Internet back then. All we had was the telephone. So I called ten people, and they called ten people. And they called ten more. We looked around for a place to meet. There was one bar owner who was brave enough to let us meet during the day at his bar in Hollywood called The Hub." For six intense weeks, a committed group of ten to fifteen gay men talked, planned, and organized a two-pronged strategy of resistance-in the street and in the courtroom.

"What's important about the Black Cat from a legal perspective," says attorney David Farah, Alexei's life partner, "is that the gay men fought the case not on the basis of entrapment, but on the legal theory that they had equal rights and did nothing to be arrested for. That was a tremendous mind-set change. It's one of those moments in gay history where things changed dramatically. It was a quantum leap." To fight the legal case, defendants turned to the Tavern Guild, an association of gay bar owners who came together to support gay rights causes. Large jars bearing the sign Tavern Guild Legal Aid Fund were placed in hundreds of gay bars throughout L.A. and San Francisco. (It is estimated that there were over 100 gay bars in L.A. alone.)

At the same time, organizers planned a demonstration in front of the Black Cat bar. "We didn't want a tiny protest of fifteen or twenty people," says Alexei. "That had been done before. We wanted as many people out as possible. But we were scared. We were terrified that if we were photographed at the rally we would lose our jobs, our incomes, our families. And there was also the fear of being beaten up by the police. A few months earlier, hippies had protested on the Sunset Strip and the kids were attacked and beaten by the sheriff and the police. We knew it could happen to us." Indeed, L.A. in the early '60s had become a hotbed of violence between police and the public. It wasn't just the gay community that bore the brunt of police batons.

 

ON weekend nights, the Strip was jammed with teenagers. Some local business owners were put off by the flower children who clogged the sidewalks but spent little money. Under pressure from these property owners, the police started to harass, arrest, and haul away the "loitering" teens. In response, Al Mitchell formed RAMCOM-the Right of Assembly and Movement Committee. RAMCOM organized a series of protests that turned into violent clashes between long-haired youths and heavily armed riot police. The Sunset Strip "massacres" were immortalized in the Buffalo Springfield anthem "For What It's Worth" and the low-budget movie Riot on Sunset Strip.

As police harassment continued, RAMCOM next planned six simultaneous demonstrations against "police lawlessness." The demonstrations would take place on Saturday night, February 11, 1967-in Watts, Pacoima, East Los Angeles, Sunset Strip, Venice, and Silverlake. The Silverlake demonstration was organized in conjunction with the gay Black Cat organizers. Eighty thousand flyers announcing the rallies made their way into clubs, bars, coffeehouses, college campuses, and high schools throughout the city.

The Free Press reported that "One of the most interesting and pace-setting reactions to the call to demonstrate came early this week from homosexual organizers who are currently up in arms about New Year's Eve police raids in a number of Silverlake area gay bars. Members of such homophile groups as pride and the Council on Religion and the Homosexual decided to sponsor the sixth demonstration to protest the bar raids and resulting beatings and brutality." In a precedent-setting achievement, gays and straights joined forces to fight against the police violence that affected so many communities throughout the city. But the united front hit some bumps. A prime example: gay activists bowed to pressure from straight organizers, agreeing to omit the word "homosexual" from their flyers.

Meetings, phone calls, flyers, lawyers, court dates, and more phone calls later, the big day arrived. On February 11th, 3,000 people marched down the Sunset Strip carrying signs saying things like "Stop Blue Fascism" and "Free the Strip." Starting at Pandora's Box, wave after wave of teenagers, flower children, college students, and adults paraded down the Strip in a spirited but peaceful protest.

Most of the other demonstrations flopped, however. In Venice, only about twenty protesters showed up. In Pacoima, a tiny group of teen activists was attacked by local gang members, who beat up the kids and ripped up their signs as police watched without interfering. In Watts and East L.A., protests failed to occur at all (perhaps due to the organizers' lack of connection to the black and brown communities).

The Silverlake rally, however, was a huge success. About 500 protesters gathered outside the Black Cat. The crowd was so large that it spilled out from the sidewalk, filling an adjacent parking lot. Picketers carried signs reading "Abolish Arbitrary Arrests" and "No More Abuse of our Rights and Dignity." Religious leaders, attorneys, and gay activists addressed the crowd over loudspeakers from the parking lot. Police monitored the scene at the Black Cat from across the street but kept their distance. Protesters passed out leaflets to passing drivers explaining what the demonstration was all about. Some motorists beeped their horns in support of the demonstrators. Others shouted obscenities as they drove by.

"I was terrified," remembers Alexei. "I was thinking that someone could drive by and shoot me. So there was fear, but also a sense of pride. We weren't hiding anymore. I was standing out in front of the public, being myself, saying 'This is who I am. I deserve the same rights as everybody else. I deserve not to be beat, not to be arrested just for being me.'"

Despite its historical significance as the largest gay protest to date, the Black Cat demonstration was ignored by the mainstream press. However the Free Press covered the rally extensively, declaring: "The Los Angeles homosexual community-long reluctant to come out into the open-now appears ready to launch an entirely new kind of civil rights drive. A drive demanding equal treatment for sexual minorities."

While it didn't make the splash that the Stonewall riots did two years later, the Black Cat resistance marked a turning point in gay history. Asserting in court that gays deserve equal protection under the law set legal precedent. The fledgling pride newsletter morphed into The Advocate-the largest and most influential publication in the history of the gay press. Even the naming of the gay pride movement, and the deeply meaningful use of the word "pride" when referring to gay liberation and new gay consciousness, was born with Steve Ginsberg's PRIDE organization, whose first political action was the protest at the Black Cat.

On November 7, 2008, the Black Cat Tavern was declared a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument. Now home to a Latino gay bar named El Barcito, the building still sports the original sign depictinga smiling black and white cat. Says Alexei: "The fight for civil rights in American happened in many places: at Gettysburg, at Selma and Montgomery, Alabama-these are physical places where people can go and say, 'This is where black civil rights  started.' The Black Cat protest is our Gettysburg. It's our Selma. It's where gay men and women can go and learn about our history. This is where the first large demonstration of gay people in the nation, maybe the world, happened. It happened right here in Los Angeles."

 

Demonstrators at the Black Cat on Feb. 11, 1967

 

From: January–February 2009

 

 

 

 

How the Castro Became ‘The Castro’

TIMOTHY STEWART-WINTER

 

SAN Francisco's Castro District was the first big-city neighborhood in the U.S. where openly gay people elected one of their own to represent them in City Hall. Harvey Milk, the man who was elected in this capacity in 1977, soon became nationally prominent as the leading spokesperson for gay and lesbian rights in a bitterly fought contest over a 1978 statewide ballot measure that would have banned homosexuals from serving as schoolteachers. The Castro's mythical status was cemented by the assassination of Milk and Mayor George Moscone less than a year into Milk's first term, and by the so-called White Night Riots that followed the lenient sentence given to Dan White, the former police officer who murdered them. Today the Castro's terrain of hilly asphalt is a site of pilgrimage, its bars and restaurants home to a lucrative tourist trade and a gay nightlife scene.

But how did the Castro come to be the world's most famous gay neighborhood in the first place? Most accounts focus on two processes. First, gay artists, hippies, and radicals migrated to central San Francisco during and after the 1967 "Summer of Love" in the Haight-Ashbury district, which is nearly adjacent to the Castro. These adventuresome urban pioneers are said to have "discovered" the hidden charm of the picturesque Victorian houses that had suffered long years of neglect under a regimen of asbestos, tar paper, and aluminum siding perpetrated by clueless heterosexuals. The second narrative centers on the mobilization of gay activists, including Milk, who demanded and won the right to be open about their homosexuality and obtain political representation.

Both narratives throw the spotlight on the people who built the Castro district rather than on the larger social conditions in which they operated. In point of fact, the "gayification" of the Castro was strongly affected by the processes of urban change and political development that were taking place at this time.

Between 1849 and 1915, real estate developers built nearly 50,000 Victorian houses in San Francisco. One of the major developers claimed that his goal was to "transform the sandy wastes outside the business part of the city into ... neighborhoods, composed of frugal and industrious people," asserting that their great aspiration was to "serve the great middle class" of the young city, declared Anne Bloomfield in the March 1978 Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

The area around the Castro Street commercial strip was just far enough from San Francisco's northeastern core that its Victorian houses escaped destruction in the 1906 earthquake and fire. This area, long known as Eureka Valley, or sometimes by the name of Most Holy Redeemer Parish, was populated by white ethnics, mostly Catholics, from the 1920s-when the Twin Peaks tunnel brought increased traffic to the area-to the early 70s. Nestled in a valley, unencumbered by tenements or high-rises, Eureka Valley in the 40s and 50s seemed to its residents to be almost self-contained. It was home to small business owners, church officials, schoolteachers, professionals, club organizers, and above all skilled, unionized workers in the waterfront industries of one of America's busiest ports. The city's gay and lesbian community institutions-its barswere elsewhere, in the city's dense northeastern quadrant near the waterfront. The Castro Theatre, built in 1924, was only one of several movie palaces in the neighborhood, but it was the sole one to survive the invention of television.

Having sifted through the historical record on the Castro, I concluded that the dense concentration of storefront taverns along the two or three blocks of Castro Street just below Market was at least as crucial a factor in its gayification as the Victorian houses. Bars had long been central cultural institutions for white men in America's immigrant centers, and San Francisco, known as the "wettest in the West," resisted federal and state enforcement of Prohibition.

The elderly men and women that filmmaker Peter Stein interviewed for his documentary The Castro (KQED television, 1997) recall that the two-block commercial strip on Castro Street alone had nine bars in the post-World War II period. "The consumption of alcohol on a Saturday night per capita was tremendous," one man recalled. Liquor licenses were difficult and expensive to obtain, and when commercial properties changed hands in San Francisco, the licenses frequently remained in place, constituting a neglected feature of the Castro's built environment. In 1950, men made up the majority of Eureka Valley's employed adults, and among them, the largest fraction (46 percent) worked in traditionally blue-collar occupations on the city's waterfront or in the skilled trades. Thirty percent of employed men and 66 percent of employed women worked in non-managerial clerical, sales, or service positions.

But the neighborhood's economic foundation was beginning to deteriorate. Blue-collar jobs, homes, and families all began to leave San Francisco, replaced by white-collar office jobs in the newly built downtown skyscrapers. As shipping was automated and moved across the Bay to Oakland, so too did the waterfront jobs that Eureka Valley men had long held. In the 1950s, the city's banking employment nearly doubled, but maritime employment dropped by a quarter; the white population dropped thirteen percent while the black population increased 43 percent. National trends hurt San Francisco's traditional industries, including timber, oil, and food processing, and companies also sought to escape the city's powerful unions.

By the 1960s, white blue-collar family men were increasingly moving to the suburbs, and the city's adult population was growing younger, more white-collar, and more professional. Spending several nights a week drinking in taverns was not this crowd's idea of a good time. The decline of the male-dominated, "family wage" economy of Eureka Valley was becoming untenable, and women and gay men were challenging longstanding norms. Above all, unlike their straight brothers, San Francisco's growing gay minority patronized the bars faithfully. In 1969, gay liberationist Carl Wittman declared that "San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals"-and this would only become more true in the following decade.

 

THE gay men and women who first made the Castro a gay neighborhood were hippies and other dropouts from middleclass America. In crucial respects, they were as much dissenters from American mass consumer culture as they were its vanguard. Geographers Mickey Lauria and Lawrence Knopp noted in 1985 (in Urban Geography 6) that "relatively low-wage gay renters seeking nothing more than a place to live are sometimes the catalysts in a central-city neighborhood's upgrading." They added that eventually this "first wave ... may attract other more affluent gays to the neighborhood, especially if it is ripe for redevelopment." Many, including Harvey Milk, were themselves displaced by sharp rent increases during the gentrification process.

Gay people were moving into the Castro in the '60s because it was cheap. According to a group of urban studies scholars associated with geographer Neil Smith, a professor at the City University of New York, gentrification occurs when there's a gap between an area's "actual ground rent" and "potential ground rent." Deindustrialization and white flight had deflated the value of Eureka Valley's Victorians, pushing prices down.

In 1963, the Missouri Mule opened on Market Street near Castro, becoming the first bar in Eureka Valley to attract a predominantly gay clientele. Like most gay bars at the time, it was small and poorly lit, its windows painted over so people on the street couldn't see inside. For David Valentine, a printer I interviewed, the presence of the Missouri Mule made Eureka Valley attractive after he quit The San Francisco Examiner, where he'd had to conceal his homosexuality carefully. He wanted to open his own print shop. "One of the reasons I had located my business up here was there was a gay bar across the street," he recalled. Valentine rented a cheap, run-down flat on Market Street in 1968. "When I moved in there I was on an army cot in a sleeping bag, and worked on it for the better part of the year," he said, "all the way up to putting finish on the floor and staining them a dark walnut and then recoating them with polyurethane."

The gayification of the Castro was a transition from one masculine tavern subculture to another. The late Allan Berube, a gay man who was living in a Haight-Ashbury commune at this time (and author of the acclaimed 1990 book Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II), recalled walking downhill into  the  Castro  in  search of  bars that  would tolerate groups of gay patrons. The process of succession in taverns was gradual. One bar even turned gay and then turned back, acquiring a straight clientele once again: "The Mistake on 18th near Castro is now straight and has a new name," wrote a columnist in California Scene, a gay nightlife magazine, in 1971. "When a butch but older character there asked me if I knew the latest ball scores, I knew something was wrong."

Gay hippies created communal living arrangements markedly different from those of the straight nuclear families around them. Newly arrived migrants moved in with friends from back home in the American heartland, in a process that closely resembled classic ethnic patterns of chain migration. Newcomers participated in an alternative economic and social support system, separated not only from the patterns of postwar nuclear family life but also from the regimen of government subsidies, mortgages, and bank loans on which the latter depended. Although its gay population was and is male dominated, lesbians gravitated there as well.

A key part of the Castro's history, discussed at some length in the Shilts biography, is the extent to which some Eureka Valley heterosexuals resisted the arrival of visibly gay people and businesses in the early '70s. As Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells noted in The City and the Grassroots (1983): "Gay settlement was opposed by property, family, and high class: the old triumvirate of social conservatism." Straight residents fought back against the gay onslaught using strategies familiar to many urbanites, including that most tried-and-true tactic, violence, which took the form of gaybashing and vandalism. They also used the apparatus of municipal government to curtail or criminalize "undesirable" ways of using the neighborhood, such as cruising. And an exclusive neighborhood association of business owners, the Eureka Valley Merchants Association, conspired to out gay business owners.

In the crucial summer of 1971, three or four area gay bars mushroomed to seven or eight. On Memorial Day weekend, Toad Hall opened, a bar that became a hit with gay men from all over San Francisco. The Muni Metro subway line under Market Street would soon make the area even more accessible. In May 1971, The San Francisco Examiner ran a profile of Eureka Valley, noting that it "is experiencing a big influx of very young and very hip people. Many 'street artists' have 'discovered' Eureka Valley and as a result the Castro and Market area has some of the best head, arts and crafts shops and galleries around." Six weeks later, the Chronicle asked, "Will Eureka Valley become a new Haight-Ashbury?" and concluded, "Old-time residents undoubtedly hope not."

Leafing through neighborhood newspapers from the period shows that two radically different populations were living near Castro Street. In the Noe Eureka Weekly Shopper, whose complete run from June 1971 to March 1972 is preserved in the San Francisco History Room in the downtown public library, you can glimpse the lives of older, longtime residents drawn together by bingo nights, parish musicals, and clubs celebrating shared Irish, Italian, or Scandinavian descent. In the summer of 1971, articles debated the opening of "new and unusual stores" and expressed "the feeling of seeing the city or the neighborhood seemingly taken over by outsiders."

In contrast, The Castro Village Other, available in the GLBT Historical Society, preserves the lives of gays, hippies, and radicals. In the summer of 1972, one young man advertised for a roommate who was "into bio-degradable detergents [and] into the spiritual trip." Another wrote, "young and interesting Nordic-American male age 27, seeks friends, male or female for tripping and fun." By August, a gay columnist wrote in California Scene that around Castro Street, "local residents have gotten uptight, the police are beginning to drop by the [gay] bars and roving gangs of youths (possibly taking their cue from their parents) are beating up gay guys on their way home at night."

Gays and lesbians began to organize a response to this harassment. At a September 7, 1971, community meeting to elect a new chair for the Eureka Valley Police-Community Relations Council, the fifteen or so "straights" who showed up were dismayed to find some 300 gay men in attendance. One of two anti-gay candidates for the position, a California highway patrolman and president of the Most Holy Redeemer Parent-Teachers' Guild, declared he was "fed up with all the hand-holding in the streets. My wife and child can't go outside without being scandalized." The lopsided turnout meant the two anti-gay candidates and their supporters walked out frustrated. The gay constituency elected their own candidate, a straight former policeman named Bob Pettengill who owned a Castro Street restaurant with a predominantly gay clientele. The Chronicle declared: "A Gay Victory in Eureka Valley." The next month, a front-page article said, "San Francisco's populous homosexual community, historically non-political and inward looking, is in the midst of assembling a potentially powerful political machine."

For the next three years, tensions were fairly high. Toad Hall and other gay bars were repeatedly damaged in suspicious fires. In July 1973, the home of the pioneering gay Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) burned to the ground. Police continued to arrest gay men for dancing in bars and clubs and cruising in parks. By 1974, the Gay Activist Alliance had recorded sixty beatings of gays citywide in a three-month period, with the Castro having the worst record of all.

In late summer 1974, neighborhood resentments came to a head. Late at night on Labor Day, after the bars had closed, fourteen men were arrested in what the Chronicle called "a sweep to clear the  Castro  Street  sidewalks."  They  were  charged  with public drunkenness, obstructing traffic, resisting arrest, disturbing the peace, and drug offenses. Harvey Milk, who had lost his first bid for supervisor the previous year, rallied others to defend the so-called "Castro 14," charging that they were arrested solely because they were gay. A straight woman wrote to the Chronicle in defense of the police sweep: "The smell of pot almost knocks you out as you edge by. They have completely taken over Castro Street and I'm made to feel like an intruder in their own little world-me, a native of the district. They walk around in torn jeans with their private parts showing." But before long, all charges were dropped. According to Shilts, this "sealed the neighborhood's reputation as the new homosexual hot spot."

Meanwhile, gay people opening businesses in the neighborhood found that the Eureka Valley Merchants Association (EVMA), in the words of printer David Valentine, "didn't want to have anything to do with us." In 1970 or 1971, when the EVMA refused to admit Ian Ingham, an antique store owner, he founded the Castro Village Association (CVA), made up largely of gay and hippie businesses. Even a relatively conservative gay shop owner complained in print about "the rigidly anti-gay, deeply Catholic Merchants Association." In the Shilts biography, the conflict between the two business groups is depicted as a pitched battle. My research hints, however, that it may have been somewhat more fluid. Indeed, in December 1971, the CVA placed a front-page notice in the Weekly Shopper thanking the EVMA for its "unexpected, surprise and most welcome, substantial contribution" to promoting the CVA's Christmas events. The following month, the same paper-the paper of the old-timers-even profiled Ingham as "merchant of the week." In time, the Castro Village Association won out over EVMA. And "Castro Village," a branding effort promoted beginning in 1974 by the CVA, became the most common way of referring to the neighborhood, gradually morphing into "the Castro."