CHAPTER 3 Reinventing History

What is gay history? Is it just when we discover that some-one from the past had a long-term intimate relationship with someone of the same sex? Or is gay history simply the history of self-identified homosexuals? What do we make of Native American cultures that did not have concepts of homosexuality vs. heterosexuality? How do alternative interpretations of gender and sexuality fit into the picture?

Clear answers are hard to come by. Discovering that someone was intimate with others of the same sex does add to our history, but it does not make him or her “gay.” “Gay” and “lesbian,” like the word “homosexual.” are terms that are fixed in a specific historical era, namely the 20th century. Unlike other minorities, for whom finding oneself in history is simply a matter of finding out a person’s race or religion, gay people have to put together the pieces of a complex puzzle, often using suspicion and loose associations to discover the hidden lineage that is a part of our history.

But the broader questions of what constitutes gay history and who decides it are more difficult to answer. In a sense, everything we do as lovers of our own sex is historical. What we remember about events and how we tell the stories of those events influences the very nature of history. In addition, everything that is done by others in reaction to same-sex intimacy, by politicians, religious leaders, and medical professionals, shapes the way that society views sexuality.

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J.C. Leyendecker, the commercial artist who came up with the Arrow Collar Man in the early twentieth century, was gay. His inspiration and model, Charles Beach, was his lover.

Gender can also be considered a part of gay history. Homosexual behavior, by both men and women, has often been characterized in the past as a gender transgression. In other words, gay men act “womanish” or “effeminate,” while lesbians act “masculine” or “mannish.” The ways a society defines gender affect the ways it defines sexuality. But what should we make of women who passed as men, drag queens, and Native American berdache? Are they part of a transgendered history or gay history? Or are the two histories inexorably intertwined?

In this chapter, we do not attempt to fully answer these questions. What we have done is create a mosaic of some of the aspects of American history we feel we can claim. From homosexual gathering places to political organizations, and from same-sex intimacy in the Old West to the medical “cures” that doctors have inflicted on queer people for over a century, one thing is certain: Gay people have a heritage and a history that is as multifaceted as our diverse contemporary culture.

Claiming our own—Famous Names

When looking into the past, it’s hard to say exactly who was or was not gay or lesbian. Depending on the era, culture, class, race, and gender of people, certain activities were considered within the realm of “normalcy,” while other activities were considered “deviant.” For example, before the late nineteenth century in the United States, concepts of same-sex love did not carry the same stigma they do today. What we can do is look at those who have loved their own sex throughout history, and celebrate that love, in whatever form it took. We don’t necessarily have to label it as “gay.” Here are some famous names from U.S. history who have been lovers of their own sex:

That Montgomery Clift was a lover of his own sex is such an open Hollywood secret that calling someone “today’s Montgomery Clift” in gossip columns is another way of saving an actor is gay. Here, a bare-chested Clift costarred in From Here to Eternity in 1953 (courtesy of Columbia Pictures)

FRONTIER QUEERS

For the past decade, Jim Wilke has been doing pioneering research into the lives of gay men who were frontiersmen in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were men who went west, either from the desire for adventure or the need to survive, men who worked the ranches, farmed the fields, or joined the army in search of independence and a different way of living from that offered in the cities of the East.

While today we use the term “gay” to describe these men, research has shown that they had no such language to describe themselves until sometime after the Civil War. Nonetheless, these men lived together and loved together, with a commitment beyond any notion of “situational homosexuality.”

Frontier Comrades: Homosexuality in the American West

While filming Red River (1955), John Wayne’s famous demand about Montgomery Clift—that director Howard Hawks “get that faggot off my set”—underscored a common belief that homosexuality had no place in the rough and tumble American West. Recent research, however, indicates that homosexuality was not only common, but may actually have thrived in the frontier.

Moreover, popular folklore which does acknowledge same-sex interactions in the frontier assumes that “situational homosexuality,” the desire for sexual contact with members of the same sex in the absence of opposite sex partners, is the primary motivational force behind any existing homosexuality. Yet this does not account for urban homosexuality in Western cities, or homosexuality among Western women. It appears more likely that Westerners responded to a multitude of internal and external conditions that allowed them to alternately discover or redefine their emotional and sexual desire.

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According to historian Jonathan Katz in his book Gay American History, from the time that Alabama senator William Rufus De Vane King (a fifty-seven-year-old bachelor) met Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan in 1834, until King’s appointment as U.S. minister to France, the two were inseparable. Their intimate relationship caused barbed comments in Washington. Andrew Jackson called king “Miss Nancy,” and in a private letter in 1844. Aaron Brown referred to King as Buchanan’s “better half” and (in jest) referred to Buchanan and King’s “divorce.”

Historian Hubert Bancroft noted that during the 1850s California Gold Rush. “the requirements of mining life favored partnership … sacred like the marriage bonds, as illustrated by the softening of ‘partner’ into the familiar ‘pard.’” In 1914., migrant California fieldworkers were recorded to have not only justified but idealized homosexually monogamous relationships. Larger groups of men in isolated raining, logging. or railroad construction camps appear to have been more gregarious. “Restlessness among the crew” of one Western mining camp brought over half of the camps “brawny, ultra-masculine” men to seek sexual “relief” with each other. Similar conditions existed in Civilian Conservation Corp camps in Texas iii the 1930s and a highway construction camp in California in the early 1950s.

Western cities such as San Francisco, Denver, Salt lake City, and Chicago enjoyed highly developed homosexual urban subcultures which followed patterns established in Eastern cities. Several different “circles” within a city reflected divergent interests and pursuits. All provided a network of mutual support to those fortunate enough to be accepted into them. A San Francisco homosexual man wrote in 1911 that life could he “hard, for many crushing, but it is extremely interesting, and I am glad to have been given the opportunity to have lived it.”

In the 1890s, a Colorado professor wrote that Denver’s homosexual population included “fiye musicians, three teachers, three art dealers, one minister, one judge, two actors, one florist. and one woman’s tailor.” In California, an 1887 land boom led San Diego to build an elaborate Victorian house as an inducement for musician Jesse Owens Sharard and his male partner to move there and lend the city an air of cosmopolitan refinement. Similar social and artistic soirees were held in the 1880s in Southern California at the home of two San Juan Capistrano men.

There was probably no occupation in the West that did not have lesbian and gay participants. William Breakeridge worked as a Union Pacific brakeman before becoming a deputy sheriff at Tombstone, Arizona ’Territory, where he was known and accepted by many of the mining town’s community. Stagecoach driver Charlie Parkhurst was discovered to be a woman only after her death in 1879, a fact which made much newspaper copy. The San Francisco Call remarked that “No doubt he was not like other men, indeed, it was generally said among his acquaintances that he was a hermaphrodite” and that “the discoveries of the successful concealment for protracted periods of the female sex are not infrequent.” Oregon native Lucile Hart, a Stanford medical school graduate, is noted by historian Jonathan Katz to have dressed as a man in order to practice medicine and marry the woman she loved. Her own doctor wrote that “if society will but leave her alone, she will fill her niche in the world and leave it better for her bravery.”

In the 1800s, sodomy laws were found in all states and territories, but were selectively enforced. In 1873, Lawrence G. Murphy, a civilian post trader at Fort Stanton, New Mexico, was charged with a “most unnatural” relationship with a local official in an effort to cancel his military contract. In El Paso, Texas, an 1896 charge of sodomy against Marcelo Alviar brought with it a bond set at $500, the same amount as for murder. The prohibitively expensive bond was punitive, and virtually guaranteed jail time or the loss of the defendant’s life savings or property. This system of select enforcement was similarly applied to gambling houses, saloons, and brothels. Male prostitution existed in varying degrees, from an “elegantly furnished” 1882 Midwestern brothel to a particularly clandestine male street prostitution ring in San Francisco in 1902. Homosexuality in Western prisons was so common that in 1877, San Quentin director Dr. J.E. Pellham launched a crusade against it, advising solitary confinement as therapy.

Among Westerners there existed a gentleman’s agreement that arose from the need to survive in the frontier. One part of this agreement was mutual respect, allowing one “the right to live the life and go the gait which seemed most pleasing to himself.” Historian David Dary has written that cowboys “sought to live lives that were free from falsehood and hypocrisy.” This frontier code of conduct allowed many people to enjoy open relation-ships that would have otherwise not been possible.

Two cowboys from the late nineteenth century pose in a manner traditionally used for portraits of husbands and wires. (©Jim Wilke)

On the open range, cowboys often developed strong and loyal relation-ships with each other. The dangers of stampedes and general rigors of the trail required absolute cooperation: a cowboy who could not be relied on found himself outcast. Loyalty was “one of the most notable characteristics of the cowboy.” and devotion to one’s “pard” was highly regarded. The cow-boy expression that one was “in love.” with someone could sometimes be taken literally. The Texas Livestock Journal remarked in 1882 that “if the inner history of friendships among the rough, and perhaps untutored cowboys could be written, it would he quite as unselfish and romantic as that as of Damon and [Patroclus].”

Many circumstances contributed to personal closeness on the ranch and trail. Cowboys frequently bedded in pairs with their “bunkie,” and a ranch bunkhouse was occasionally called a “ram pasture.” Many cowboys engaged in “mutual solace.” a tender, expressive, and euphemistic terra for sexual relations. Vulgar and explicit “ugly songs” describing phallic size, virility, and sodomy were sung around campfires. In 1920s Nevada, the “sixtynine” sexual position was common enough among cowboys to warrant its own euphemism, “Swanson neuf.”

Gay cowboys continue to be an intrinsic part of the West. In 1957, two Texas cowboys visiting the Mayflower Bar, an Oklahoma City gay bar, described their life as one where there are generally two or three gay cowboys to a ranch, who quietly recognize each other, keeping their identity a secret from the others. While many working horsemen and horsewomen maintain a quiet reticence associated with the broader aspects of ranching culture, the modern lesbian and gay civil rights movement has brought a growing number of openly gay and lesbian ranchers, as well as the creation of the International Gay Rodeo Association, with chapters around the United States and Canada.

Things Were Hopping in Colorado in the late 1800s

Trinidad restauranteur Charles “Frenchey” Vobaugh was a woman who passed as a man and, along with “his” wife, assumed the outward appearance of a heterosexual couple in order to remain married for thirty years. Colorado newspapers were full of successful lesbian and gay elopements. In 1889, the town of Emma was “rent from center to circumference” over the “sensation-al love affair between Miss Clara Dietrich, postmistress and general storekeeper, and Miss Ora Chatfield.” letters written between them caused the Denver papers to remark that the “love that existed between the two par-ties was of no ephemeral nature, but as strong as that of a strong man and his sweetheart.” Despite attempts to separate them, the “lady lovers” successfully eloped. “If the case ever comes into court,” wrote the Denver Times, “from a scientific standpoint alone it will attract wide-spread attention.” In 1898, Boulder teamster W. H. Billings left his wife and sold his horses in order to runaway with Charles Edwards, a saloon entertainer who played banjo and performed acrobatics. A Denver paper reported that Billings was “not happy unless he was trailing around the streets with Edwards” and that “if his home had any charms for him, said his wife, they had fled and all on account of a banjo player.”

She’s Got Balls as Big as a Bull—Homosexuality in the Seventh Cavalry, 1868–1878

Reviews of’ military accounts during the frontier era reveal few instances of soldiers being prosecuted for sodomy. This ’ as not because sodomy was rarely practiced; the military brass chose to disguise such situations rather than admit that they occurred within a military post. This allowed the military to prevent such charges from going on the public record, reflecting both contemporary prejudice and reticence upon the part of the military to acknowledge that such situations existed. In the 1890s, an infantryman was charged in private military correspondence with the “sin of Oscar Wilde”; however, he was publicly drummed out of the 24 Colored Infantry on unrelated charges.

Only when sodomy became publicly evident did the military find it necessary to enact an equally public response. The 1878 death of a Seventh Cavalry laundress caused a sensation that was telegraphed from New York to San Francisco. After ten years of loyal service with the Cavalry, Mrs. Corporal Noonan was discovered to be a man. Because she was a popular midwife, good cook, and nurse. the exposure of “her” identity revealed an extraordinary series of homosexual relationships among cavalrymen on one of the most well-known military posts, George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry.

“She” was a New Mexican teamster that Seventh Cavalry Captain Lewis McClean Hamilton met on the streets of Leavenworth City, Kansas, in 1868. “Their recognition was mutual,” a confidant later recalled. In order to have a relationship, Captain Hamilton brought her into his employ under the guise of a military laundress, appointing “her” to his company, Company A. Military laundresses served at the captain’s prerogative, and the bullwhacker-turned-laundress faithfully followed Hamilton until his death eight months later in the Battle of Washita in November 1868.

After a hunt, (from left to right) Bloody Knife, General Custer, John Noonan, and Ludlow posed for a picture. Noonan was married to another man, who was passing as a woman. Mrs. Noonan washed Mrs. Custer’s clothes. (South Dakota Historical Society, State Archives)

The bullet that pierced Hamilton’s heart that morning left behind an unusual widow. Remarkably, “she” remained in military employ. Her resolve in the matter is admirable, for in addition to developing a growing reputation as a superb laundress, she became known as a sometime nurse, emergency midwife, excellent cook, and tailor. Elizabeth Bacon Custer, wife of Lieutenant General George Custer, employed her in the early 1870s. She recalled that “when she brought the linen home, it was fluted and frilled so daintily that I considered her a treasure. She always came at night, and when I went out to pay her she was very shy, and kept a veil pinned about the lower part of her face.” All of these domestic skills contributed financially to the laundress’s existing income and indicate that she was a very strong-willed and resourceful person. She was also very popular within the social worlds of military society. Mrs. Custer remembered her presence at military halls, wheeling about the barracks floor dressed in “pink tarletan and false curls, and not withstanding her height and colossal anatomy, she has constant partners.”

Following Hamilton’s death, the popular widow eventually married three more times. While the first two husbands deserted the Cavalry, her third and final marriage was successful and endured. With the transfer of the Seventh Cavalry to Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory, in 1873, came Private John Noonan, Company L. His commitment to professional soldiering, an “excellent character,” and subsequent rise from private to sergeant showed Noonan to have been a superb soldier. His reputation was further enhanced by assignments as orderly to the Custer command. In about 1874, “Colonel Tom’s own man,” as Mrs. Custer referred to Noonan, possessed sufficient merit to officially marry Mrs. Noonan. Noonan reenlisted in January 1877, and by the following year had again worked his way up to the rank of corporal.

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Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physician and feminist, was called by her male enemies “the most distinguished sexual invert in the United States.” She was actually, not a lesbian, but an open cross-dresser. A qualified physician, she had to force her service on an unwilling federal government during the Civil War; she eventually won a Congressional Medal of Honor for her work. She also became the first woman in the United States permitted by, Congress to dress in male attire. Eventually, the militant Dr. Walker moved out of step with her sister feminists because her taste in dress offended them. It was one thing to wear the men’s trousers—but it was quite another to go whole bop as did Mary Walker. She affected shirt, bow tie, jacket, top hat, and cane.

When his wife died on October 30, 1878, Corporal Noonan was on escort duty over three hundred miles away. The success of her disguise had been thorough; the laundress who volunteered to prepare the body for burial was quite surprised, emerging from her duties shouting, “She’s got balls as big as a bull, she’s a man!” The news rapidly spread and the surrounding community was “plunged into a pleasurable curiosity to know the particulars.” News of the “unnatural union and apparel” was telegraphed to newspapers from coast to coast. The accuracy of these sensational stories was confirmed by the official report of Post Surgeon W. D. Wolverton, who “found the body to be that of a fully developed male in all that makes the difference in sex, without any abnormal condition that would cause a doubt on the subject.”

The enormous public attention paid to this matter led not only to Noonan’s dishonorable discharge, but because of the public nature of his trespass against social convention and military “honor,” it exacted an equally public punishment. Commanding Officer Sturgis wrote on November 23. 1878, that “if there is any law by which this man could he sent to the penitentiary I would respectfully suggest that it be called into requisition in his case.” Military brass concurred and Sturgis was “instructed to bring the case to attention of the U.S. District Attorney.” However, Noonan committed suicide before prosecution could continue. He died in the Company stables at the age of thirty on November 30, 1878. His death was noted by a local newspaper to have “relieved the regiment of the odium which the man’s presence had cast them.”

While Mrs. Noonan had successfully eluded detection for some ten years, at least one officer was aware of her disguise. First Lieutenant Edward Settle Godfrey noted in 1868 that she was “tall and angular and had a coarse voice” and that “a stiff breeze whisked the veil off her face and revealed a bearded chin.” Goclfrey’s suspicions were confirmed by Hamilton, who told him “the story of her employment.” Until the news became public a decade later. Godfrey never spoke of the matter, believing discretion the better part of honor. The principles of decorum that ultimately destroyed Corporal Noonan had conversely served to protect his wife’s identity prior to her death.

PASSING AND CROSS-DRESSING

Gender roles are ingrained in society and affect nearly all facets of our lives. Depending on the culture, the historical era, and the geographic region of the world, everything from hairstyles and dress to career choices and marriage have had gender-specific “norms.” For a variety of reasons, there have always been individuals who have transgressed those norms.

“Passing” is a specific kind of cross-dressing in which a person dons the attire, stance, walk, and attitudes of the opposite sex in order to pass as that sex. Women throughout history have success-fully passed as men in order to gain access to the greater economic and political opportunities men have typically possessed. Some men and women have also passed to negotiate around social stigmas against same-sex love, and many passed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in order to marry someone of their own gender.

Men who passed as women had many motives aside from access to same-sex intimacy. In a time before gender-reassignment operations (sex changes), passing as a woman was perhaps the closest one could come to “switching” gender, making passing men and women early pioneers of the transgender community. In addition, while men have historically had greater opportunities both politically and economically, the limitations of social expression in a dual-gendered society cuts both ways. From a very young age boys were, and still are, socialized to deny themselves access to certain kinds of activities (like playing with dolls and holding hands with other boys) and to define occupations in terms of gender (e.g., nurses are women and doctors are men). By passing as women, men could engage in activities that society would deem “unacceptable” for men.

In many traditional Native American cultures, cross dressing and transgressing gender norms was celebrated. Berdache, as French explorers called cross-gender Native Americans, were often seen as mystics and seers. Often, cross-gendered people were simply incorporated into the roles and activities of the opposite sex. Unlike most other people of the culture, many berdache had both sexual and emotional same-sex relationships.

art “When I was about twenty [in the 1860s] I decided that I was almost at the end of my rope. I had no money and a woman’s wages were not enough to keep me alive. I looked around and saw men getting more money and more work, and more money for the same kind of work. I decided to become a man. It was simple. I just put on men’s clothing and applied for a man’s job. I got it and got good money for those times, so I stuck to it.”

CHARLES WARNER, WHO PASSED AS A MAN IN SARATOGA SPRINGS, NEW YORK, FOR OVER SIXTY YEARS

By the twentieth century, much cross-dressing in the United States had less to do with passing than it did with identifying with lesbian and gay cultures. Butch and femme roles have enjoyed a resurgence in recent years, as lesbians have come to appreciate the distinctive pleasures and freedoms from gender expectations such roles can bring.

Drag, too, has its history. Entertainment drag was an important part of cabaret theater in the early and mid twentieth century, and continues in various forms today. We’ve compiled a list of some of the great drag performers of that era.

Clothes and attitude, it seems, do make the man (and, of course, the woman)

The Man Who Lived Thirty Years as a Woman

In 1951, Ebony printed an article about Georgia Black, a man who had passed as a woman for thirty years in a small southern town. It is a rare glimpse into the life of a passing man who negotiated sexuality and gender to become the woman she truly wanted to be. Given the historical context of the piece, Ebony, while relying on popular notions of homosexuality, gives Georgia the dignity she deserved in a community that embraced her even after it was discovered she had been a he. Below is an abridged venison of that article.

By every law of society, Georgia Black should have died in disgrace and humiliation and been remembered as a sex pervert, a “fairy,” and a “freak.”

But when Georgia Black died in Sanford, Florida, four months ago, both the white and colored community alike paid its solemn tribute. A funeral cortege wound its way though the hushed crowded streets of the Negro section. And lining the sidewalks of the Dixie town that had once barred Jackie Robinson from its stadium, Negro and white mourners rubbed elbows, bowed heads, and shed genuine tears.

Exposure of Georgia Black as a man who had passed for a woman for thirty years was the tragic anti-climax to his death and revealed one of the most incredible stories in the history of sex abnormalities.

The exposure came about after County Physician Orville Barks of Sanford, Florida, found to his shocked amazement that the sick “woman” he was examining had all the physical characteristics of’ a man.

Black’s decision to camouflage these characteristics and cross the sex line was made when, as a fifteen-year-old boy (then named George Canter) on a farm near Galesville, South Carolina, he rebelled against the grueling slavery of work in the fields and ran away to Charleston. There he became a house servant in a mansion where a homosexual—a male retainer at the mansion—invited hint to become his “sweetheart.” Illiterate, untutored, and insecure, having only a faint notion of right and wrong, the simple farm boy from the South Carolina hinterlands gracefully accepted. Black’s “boyfriend” dressed him in women’s clothes and coached him in feminine actions and mannerisms.

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According to historian Allan Bérubé. “Jeanne Bonnet grew up in San Francisco as a tomboy and in the 1870s, in her early twenties, was arrested dozens of times for wearing male attire. She visited local brothels as a male customer, and eventually organized French prostitutes in San Francisco into an all-woman gang whose members swore off prostitution, had nothing to do with men, and supported themselves by shoplifting. She traveled with a special friend, Blanche Buneau, whom the newspapers described as ‘strangely and powerfully attached’ to Jeanne. Her success at separating prostitutes from their pimps led to her murder in 1876.”

Under the schooling of this unidentified “boyfriend,” the masquerade of Georgia Black became second nature. Even when his “lover” eventually forsook him, Georgia had become so accustomed to an unnatural way of life that he began looking for another man. In Winter Garden, Florida, Black met Alonzo Sabbe, at the time a seriously ill man. An unselfish, generous person, Georgia nursed Sabbe back to health. When he recovered, Sabbe asked Black to marry him.

It was during the marriage to Sabbe that Georgia adopted a “son,” a fact that made her masquerade all the more convincing. The “son,” a Pennsylvania steelworker, was devoted to his “mother,” often sent her gifts and money, and was astounded to learn Black’s true sex. Sabbe died shortly after the marriage and Georgia, now living in Sanford, married again.

Her second husband was Muster Black. The marriage took place in the home of Mrs. Joanna Moore, principal of Sanford’s Negro elementary school. A prominent Negro minister officiated. Black, a World War I vet, died seven years after the marriage. As his “widow,” Georgia collected a pension from the Veterans Association.

The reverence that friends and neighbors gave gentle Georgia Black in death was equaled only by tile fierce loyalty townsfolk of both races accorded him during the last days of his life when sensational radio and newspaper publicity revealing his true sex spilled across the nation.

Dr. Orville Barks, the county physician who reported Black’s secret, seemed somewhat regretful that he had become involved. A number of’ people bitterly condemned Barks for what they termed his “indiscreet” revelation.

Members of the St. James Methodist Church uttered approving “amens” each Sunday as Pastor Thomas Flowers asked their prayers for “our worthy Sister Black, who was even one of the most important leaders in our church.” Succinctly, Sanford public opinion was divided into two classes: those who didn’t believe Black had deceived them, and those who didn’t care.

Mr. and Mrs. Walter Hand, who operate Sanford’s Greyhound bus agency, were in the class of nonbelievers. Representative of the well-to-do whites who stoutly defended Black, the Hands said Georgia had done domestic work in their home for ten years. “Georgia is a perfectly wonderful person,” Mrs. Hand declared. “I don’t believe what they say about her.”

Another wealthy Sanfordite, for whom Black did domestic work, said defiantly, “I don’t care what Georgia Black was. She nursed members of our family through birth, sickness, and death. She was one of the best citizens in town.”

Black himself gave the impression of an amazing innocence of the double life he had led. In fact, despite all the evidence, official statements, and pictures. Georgia insisted that fate had intended hire to be a female. Admitting that he had male organs, he dismissed them as “growths,” and declared he had never had any emotional feeling for a woman.

“The doctor says he didn’t see how I coulda married, but I don’t pay no ’tention to that doctor. My husbands and me had a peaceful, lovely life,” he stated.

A month before his death, as he lay in his bed, arms skin and bone, fingernails like thick encrustations of lime, sunken jaws sloping down to a chin covered with a light, white heard, Georgia told Ebony his story. His clear, dark eyes gave life to the wasted face, topped with coarse, heavy, black hair, fringed with white where the dye had faded. The final thing he said was:

Berdache Roles in North American Tribes

Over 133 North American tribes have been documented to have berdache, or two-spirit, roles in their societies. Berdache were individuals with alternative gender roles, involving cross-gender behavior or same-sex relationships (for example, men who did traditional women’s work or women who engaged in hunting and warfare). While some tribes gave no formal name to this behavior, an equal number formalized the two-spirited roles within their cultures. Listed below are several tribes from around North America with berdache roles:

We’wha (Zuni) (Courtesy of National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)

Seven Famous Female Impersonators

From the beginning of the century through the 1930s, drag performers enjoyed a heyday in New York City everywhere from seedy dives to Broadway, and the popularity of female impersonation spread across the country. By the late 1930s, drag performance had been driven underground, primarily existing in gay clubs. There were, however, exceptions, such as T. C. Jones, who played on Broadway in New Faces of 1956. Jones always removed his wig at the close of a performance. Here are seven other famous female impersonators from history:

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Lavish costume and drag balls were popular in America from the 1820s through the 1930s, and were great social occasions in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New Orlcans, and Chicago. Dozens of enormous gay balls took place in Harlem and Greenwich Village each year from the 1860s through the 1930s. Society people, politicians, and flamboyant homosexuals rubbed shoulder pads at these events. The Vanderbilts were known to attend New York’s Hamilton Lodge Ball, as was May Jimmy Walker (sometimes in drag).

1. Gene Malin was a six-foot, 200-pound effeminate man who performed both in and out of drag costume. Briefly, in the late 1920s, he was the top earner of Broadway. By 1932, he had moved to a club in Hollywood hearing his name. A year later, Malin’s career was cut tragically short when the twenty-five-year-old drove his automobile off a pier and drowned.

2. Julian Eltinge was active from the end of the nineteenth century through 1940. Though presumed to be homosexual, Eltinge went to extraordinary lengths to stress his heterosexuality, beating up stagehands, members of the public, and fellow vaudevillians who made any suggestive remarks about his sex life.

3. Karyl Norman billed himself as “The Creole Fashion Plate,” but was known behind his back as “The Queer Old Fashion Plate.” Milton Berle recalls that Norman was so used to wearing high heels that by the late 1920s. he found it impossible to put on stale footwear.

4. Bert Savoy teamed up with another gay man, Jay Brennan, who appeared in male attire. Much of Mae West’s personae was inspired by Savoy. On June 26, 1923, rumor has it that he and a friend were walking on Long Beach, Long Island, when a thunderstorm swept across the area. After a particularly strong clap of thunder, Savoy commented, “Mercy, ain’t Miss God cutting up something awful?” Immediately, there was a lightning bolt from the sky and both Savoy and his friend were instantly killed.

5. Rae Bourbon performed around the country from the 1930s through the 1960s. His raunchy behavior caused him to be ostracized from other female impersonators and frequently landed him in jail. In the mid-fifties, as a publicity stunt, he claimed to have had a sex change in Mexico per-formed by a Hungarian doctor. In 1968, he was accused of murder, and three years later, he died in a Texas jail hospital of a heart attack.

6. Jose Sarria gained fame for his many performances at the Black Cat on Montgomery Street in San Francisco, a popular bar for the city’s gay and bohemian subcultures of the 1950s. His famous performances included his own parodies of grand operas like Aida and Carmen. Aside from his talents on the stage, he ran unsuccessfully for the Board of Supervisors in 1961, the first openly gay candidate in the nation. In 1960 he became the first Empress of San Francisco, beginning what continues today as the Imperial Court.

Around the World in 80 Ways was Rae Bourbon’s eighth album. Others included You’re Stepping on My Eyelashes. Hollywood Expose, and Let Me Tell You About My Operation. (Collection of Don Romesburg)

7. Billy Jones was perhaps Atlanta’s (and the South’s) most famous drag queen in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning in 1961, he performed as Phyllis Killer at the Joy Lounge and as head of “Billy and the Beautiful Boys” at Club Centaur. He also hosted the Phyllis Killer Oscar Awards for seventeen years.

Butch-Femme Relationships

Butch-femme relationships are a style of lesbian loving and self-presentation that can in America be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Butches and femmes have separate sexual, emotional, and social identities outside of the relationship. Some hutches believe they were born different from other women; others view their identity as socially constructed.

While no exact date has yet been established for the start of the usage of the terms “butch” and “femme,” oral histories show their prevalence from the 1930s on. The butch-femme couple was particularly dominant in the United States, in both black and white lesbian communities, from the 1920s through the 1950s and early 1960s.

Because the complementarity of butch and femme is perceived differently by different women, no simple definition can be offered. When seen through outsiders’ eyes, the butch appears simplistically “masculine,” and the femme, “feminine,” paralleling heterosexual categories. But butches and femmes transformed heterosexual attitude and dress into a unique lesbian language of sexuality and emotional bonding. Butch-femme relation-ships are based on an intense erotic attraction, with its own rituals of courtship, seduction, and offers of mutual protection. While the erotic connection is the basis for the relationship, and while hutches often see themselves as the more aggressive partner, hutch-femme relation-ships, when they work well, develop a nurturing balance between two different kinds of women, each encouraging the other’s sexual-emotional identity. Couples often settle into domestic long-term relationships or engage in serial monogamy, a practice Liz Kennedy and Madeline Davis (authors of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold) trace back to the thirties, and one they view as a major lesbian contribution to an alternative for heterosexual marriage. In the fifties, butch-femme couples were a symbol of women’s erotic autonomy, a visual statement of sexually and emotionally full lives that did not include men.

In the fifties, hutch women, dressed in slacks and shirts and flashing pinky rings, announced their sexual expertise in a public style that often opened their lives to ridicule and assault. Many adopted tens clothes and wore “DA” haircuts. The butch woman took as her main goal in love-making the pleasure she could give her femme partner. This sense of dedication to her lover rather than to her own sexual fulfillment is one of the ways a hutch is clearly distinct from the men she is assumed to be imitating.

Before androgynous fashions became popular, many femmes were the breadwinners in their homes because they could get jobs open to traditional-looking women, but they confronted the sane’ public scorn when appearing in public with their hutch lovers. Contrary to gender stereotyping, many femmes were and are aggressive, strong women who take responsibility for actively seeking the sexual and social partner they desire.

Particularly in the fifties and sixties, the hutch-femme community became the public face of lesbianism when its members formed bar communities across the country. In earlier decades, butch-femme communities were tightly knit, made up of couples who, in some case, had long-standing relationships. Exhibiting traits of feminism before the seventies, butch-femme working-class women lived without the financial and social securities of the heterosexual world. Younger butches were often initiated into the community by older, more experienced women who passed on the rituals of dress, attitude, and erotic behavior.

Bars were the social background fur many working-class hutch-femme communities, and it was in their dimly lit interiors that hutches and femmes could perfect their styles and find each other. In the fifties, sexual and social tension often erupted into fights and many hutches felt they had to be tough to protect themselves and their women, riot just in bars, but on the streets as well.

With the surge of lesbian feminism in the early seventies, butch-femme women were often ridiculed and ostracized because of their seeming adherence to heterosexual role playing. In the eighties, however, a new understanding of the historical and sexual-social importance of butch-femme women and communities began to emerge. Controversy still exists about the value of this lesbian way of loving and living, however. The American lesbian community is now marked by a wide range of relational styles: Butch-femme is just one of the ways to love, but the hutch-femme community carries with it the heritage of being the first publicly visible lesbian community.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

During the 1920s and early 1930s, what has come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance reshaped and celebrated African American culture. Often ignored, however, is the incredible contribution that the Harlem Renaissance has made to lesbian and gay community and culture.

Hopeful for social progress and new possibilities, many young and progressive African Americans flocked to Harlem, a mecca for these self-defined “New Negroes.” Harlem became the worldwide center for African American jazz, literature, and the visual arts, and a place known for a bohemian, decadent nightlife.

It was within the arts and nightclub scenes of Harlem that lesbian and gay life was most openly explored and expressed. For African American and white homosexuals alike, Harlem provided a particular kind of freedom, and saw an early formation of a self-aware lesbian and gay community in the United States.

The Harlem Renaissance

Forming a Queer Consciousness Through the Blues

Many lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals, Black and white together, developed a tangible if tentative collective identity in New York during the 1920s and 1930s. The Harlem Renaissance, long celebrated in African American history for its rejuvenation of an oppressed people’s culture, art, literature, and especially music, also served as a queer renaissance within a renaissance.

After World War I created a growth in industrial production in the northern United States, great numbers of Blacks migrated north from southern rural areas to fill factory jobs that were opening up for them. By the 1920s, large African American communities had formed in cities across the north, most notable in Detroit, Chicago, and Buffalo. Of these communities, however, New York’s I laden’ was by far the biggest and brightest, a subcity with Black residents in charge of every aspect of their community.

The 1920s and 1930s are also known as the Jazz Age. This music radiated the Harlem social sensibility regarding sex and sexuality. Some of the legends of the blues—Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters. Gladys Bentley, and Ma Rainey, to name a few—played integral rulers in shaping Harlem’s musical and sexual subcultures. These singers were not only long on talent and sass, they also lied openly bisexual and lesbian lives.

The whole of the Black experience in America—poverty, racism, love, hate, homesickness, and loneliness—is reflected in the blues, where life’s too rough to limit one’s possibilities for happiness. The blues, and the blues community, accepted sexuality in all its manifestations. The blues reflected a certain toleration for bi- and homosexuality in antiestablishment Harlem. Many blues artists took full advantage of this situation.

Gladys Bentley was perhaps the brassiest of her fellow blues singin’ queers. Weighing 250 to 300 pounds, this dark, imposing woman with the masculine voice and white tuxedo lit up the famous Harry Hansbemv-’s Clara House, where she often gigged as a featured performer. The smoky nightclub on 133rd Street got even smokier when Gladys was at the piano, belting out familiar tunes peppered with saucy, sometimes downright obscene, new lyrics. Bentley, who was bisexual, profited from her role as a “male impersonator” and played up the stereotypical “bull-diker image people flocked to Marlene to see. Regular colubgoers and celebrities alike were her fans. The crowning jewel in her lesbianism came in the form of a civil ceremony performed in New Jersey, where Bentley married another woman.

Known as the “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey was another Black lesbian singer with an attitude. In her famous song “Prove It On Me,” Rainey sings:

Prior to recording the song, Rainey proved it on herself in 1925 when she was arrested for throwing a dyke orgy at her flat, featuring some hot numbers from her all-female chorus. The incident also proved to be financially lucrative in light of the “scandal” that followed. “Prove It On Me,” advertised with a picture of a squat, dark woman (a striking resemblance to Rainey herself), decked out in full male drag chatting up two femme flappers, skyrocketed record sales. Ma Rainey defended her lesbian experiences with a ferocity.

The avenues through which these extraordinary women plied their trade were not limited to Harlem’s public nightspots. The blues, jazz, and dancing (as well as some fabulous bootleg booze) were regular fixtures at rent parties, private affairs to raise money for rent when times were tight. Rent parties were the ideal place for lesbians and gay men to mingle in relative safety, which they did with relish. Bessie Smith sang about one such party in “Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.” Harlem rent parties garnered a reputation well outside the city for their Babylonian abandon, as examples of the freer path-ways to exploring sexual alternatives expressed in the music of the era.

Just as both queer men and women participated actively in rent parties, both male and female queerness was celebrated in the blues. Though the ladies grabbed a majority of the blues spotlights singing about each other, male singers got into the act as well, and thrived. Women and men sang about themselves and each other. George Hanna performed many a gender-bending tune, perhaps the most famous of which is “The Boy in the Boat,” an ode to the joys of woman-to-woman encounters:

art DID YOU KNOW…

Bruce Nugent’s “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade!” was the first published story on homosexual love written by an African American; it was published in the magazine.FIRE! in 1926. The following is an excerpt:

“Alex turned in his doorway…up the stairs and the stranger waited for him to light the room … no need for words … the, had always known each other …as they undressed by the blue dawn … Alex knew he had never seen a more perfect being … his body was all symmetry and music. …Alex called him Beauty. … Long they lay … blowing smoke and exchanging thoughts … and Alex swallowed with difficulty … he felt a glow of tremor …, and they talked and … slept.”

“Freakish Blues” is another song in which George Hanna blurs the lines of sexual boundaries in much more explicit terms.

A cursory glance at some blues lyrics may not fill one with the greatest sense of queer positivity. “Sissy Man Blues,” a song recorded by a variety of male vocalists. insists: “if you can’t bring me a woman, bring me a sissy man.” Ma Rainey wrote about her husband’s homosexual exploits with a queer called “Miss Kate.”

A deeper look reveals that though some songs poke fun at and even question some aspects of queerdom, none of them arc written with any real contempt toward homosexuality. Humored to have been initiated into “the Life” by friend and mentor Ma Rainey, singer Bessie Smith’s lesbian pursuits were well documented, although she was married to a man. In addition, the women in her mid-1920s show “Harlem Frolics” were known for getting involved with each other. When it came to learning women-loving ways, Smith had a front-line education.

The blues pokes fun and questions most things. typically shrugging its shoulders in the end and saying, “Oh well, that’s just the way it is.” Blues singers are like that kid in grade school who pulled your ponytails but ran from you if you approached…they teased you if they thought you were groovy. The blues helped lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals not only accept themselves but turn around and make fun of themselves as well. There are few more distinctively queer characteristics or stronger gay weapons of modern life than an ironic sense of humor.

Six Reasons Why Langston Hughes Couldn’t Have Been Gay

Langston Hughes was widely regarded by contemporaries as gay. But his chief biographer, Arnold Rampersad, devotes much space to “proving” that Hughes wasn’t, despite the poet’s having shown no particular love interest in women, and the fact that he was often seen running around with effeminate and pretty young men. Rampersad’s reasons:

3. Hughes couldn’t have been gay because, even though most of his close friends were, he apparently didn’t have sex with them, or admit to them if he was gay, though he admitted having sex once with a sailor.

6. When Hughes shipped out in the Merchant Marine to tile coast of Africa, and the white sailors brought two local boys on board for a ganghang, Hughes protested instead of joining the fun, as, Rampersad asserts, any gay man obviously would have done.

White Folks “Slumming” in Harlem

Accompanying the widespread popularity of Harlem’s decadent parties, balls, and music came what historian Lillian Faderman calls the “sexual colonialism” of Harlem—white, largely middleclass heterosexuals, lesbians, and gay men streaming uptown to participate in what they perceived as Ilarlem’s free-for-all atmosphere. In Harlem, they felt as though they could escape the restrictive societal norms imposed on them by colleagues and family. Homosexual experiences were the height of taboo, and they could have a taste of that as well in Harlem. The Cotton Club and the Clam House were heavily frequented by white thrill-seekers, anxious to titillate their repressed desires with bootleg liquor, marijuana dens, and peep shows.

For bi- and homosexual whites, however, Harlem represented more than just an exotic place where they could play all night and escape in the morning. Many felt as though they could, to a degree, relate to African Americans, likening their experiences with bigotry in mainstream society to the oppression of racism. A tenuous bond could be formed between the white queers and the Blacks of Harlem, as both sides knew the sting of prejudice. In Blair Niles’s book Strange Brother, the author speaks through one of his characters: “In Harlem I found courage and joy and tolerance. I can be myself there.… They know all about nee and I don’t have to lie.”

Without doubt, the white upper class exploited Harlem to a degree in those glory days. It is a compromise made by any area that relies somewhat on tourism for income. Wealthy white patrons introduced the Harlem Renaissance culture to the masses, resulting in varying levels of misrepresentation.

On the other hand, the whites who went to Harlem for sexual freedom were participants in Black queer culture. They danced in Black clubs, read Black literature, purchased Black art, and, perhaps above all, listened to Black music. With the aid of the blues, both white and Black lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals were able to develop a queer consciousness together, in part because the music and the performers they enjoyed provided the means to recognize and validate themselves with a homosexual identity more concrete than it had ever been before in American history.

GATHERING PLACES

For well over half of the twentieth century, the constitutionally guaranteed right to associate freely was denied to lesbians and gay men. Lesbian and gay men who sought out public social interaction risked harassment, arrest, and the potential loss of family, friends, and careers.

Yet men who loved other men and women who loved other women did meet: More was at stake than simply having a drink at a local watering hole or finding sexual gratification in a public bath-room. Finding other homosexuals meant ending the isolation, if only for a short while, and discovering a community that validated one’s sexuality. Because traditional gathering places were simply not accessible to them, these courageous gay people sought out, created, and discovered innovative new spaces to congregate for friend-ship, love, and sex.

This section explores the many places gay men and lesbians carved out as safe spaces of their own long before gay liberation. The variety of locales bears testimony to the innovation of gay men and lesbians in their time.

Cruising at the YMCA

Cruising at the YMCA has been celebrated in painting—as in a 1933 canvas YMCA Locker Room by Paul Cadmus—in literature—as in the 1920s gay novel The Scarlet Pansy—and in song—as in the popular 1970s Village People song “YMCA.” The ambiguity and the campiness of the Village People’s song speak to the gay male experience in America, but the song’s lyrics also uncannily reflect the YMCA’s 150-yearold mission to help urban young men help themselves. Talk of anonymous, public sex at the YMCA often provokes laughter partly because most people find the thought of men having sex with each other incongruous with the “C” in the Young Men’s Christian Association. But the Christian mission of the YMCA and the presence of cruising there have evolved together for at least the last hundred years, maybe longer.

YMCA gyms, locker rooms, and dormitories offered public spaces where men had easy physical access to each other. The Christian reputation of the YMCA protected cruisers from the police harassment and gay-bashing that were a threat in other public urban spaces. The YMCA’s pioneering work in American physical culture starting in the 1880s made the YMCA a place where male physical beauty could be openly contemplated. The Christian mission of the YMCA was not only a great cover for men in the closet, but it may also have been easier for men burdened with internalized homophobia to frequent a potential cruising area if that place was Christian. Finally, the images of the kinds of men at the YMCA—“clean-cut” youth, working-class men, and fresh farm boys—attracted men who were interested in connecting sexually with “real” (i.e., straight) men. The YMCA was often a first stop for young men moving from the country to the city, and the YMCA introduced man rural young men to the urban gay subculture.

Wayne Flottman grew up in southeastern Kansas and went to the YMCA for the first time in 1958 in Denver, Colorado. “I was somewhat naive about what went on there,” he recalled, though his first night there he saw “some guy sitting in an open window totally nude,” which led to his first YMCA sexual encounter. Martin Block recalled a “police friend” in the 1940s who went to the YMCA for sex because his fellow police officers never raided it. He knew a gay couple in the 1930s who had cruised at the YMCA in the 1890s. YMCA ministers and leaders also participated in the cruising scene. One ordained minister said he first heard about the sex scene at the YMCA from other seminarians in the 1950s. Donald Vining’s diary confirmed what many gay men had long suspected: that YMCA desk staffs were often completely infiltrated by gay men. But being gay was not pre-requisite for cruising at the Y. “Most of the men I had sex with [at the Y],” recalled one interviewee. “considered themselves completely straight.”

Cruising at the YMCA has changed since the 1970s, transformed in part by the rise of the gay movement, in part by AIDS. But without a doubt, it played a key role in the emergence of gay communities and identities in American cities, and in the memories of the many gay men for whom it lived up to its reputation as—in the words of gay author Sam Steward—“the biggest Christian whorehouse in the world.”

Gay Beach, 1958

Ihadn’t gone near a gay beach for years when Marty and I drove out last summer to one of California’s most famous. It was a long pleasant drive out the Boulevard and it seemed that quite a few others were going our way—a red convertible with two sunbaked blondes; two sporty lesbians in an MG; a carload of screaming queens.…

We arrived early. “Look at that!” Marty said with a sweep of his bronzed arm. “Doesn’t the sight of that crowd thrill you? Right out in the open, hundreds of our people, peacefully enjoying themselves in public.

“I often lie awake nights wondering how long it’ll take our group to become aware of itself—its strength and its rights. But I hardly ever appreciate just how many of us there really are except when I come here. Except for a few minutes on the Boulevard after the bars close, this is the only place where we ever form ‘a crowd,’ and there’s something exciting about seeing homosexuals as a crowd. I can’t explain how it stirs me, but I think beaches like this are a part of our liberation.”

It was the largest crowd of homosexuals I’d ever seen. I stood around, looking at the remarkably handsome bodies, the colorful beach togs, the posturings, the camping.

The United States has hundreds of miles of line public beaches, I guess homosexuals like to go swimming as much as anyone else, and there is something about the beach that makes one want to discard the mask and give up the defensive pretense that is second nature with most homosexuals. There must be six or eight million homosexuals in this country, so it’s not surprising that here and there—one narrow sliver of Miami Beach, another in Santa Monica, Laguna Beach, Provincetown, the “Indiana dunes,” and a few spots like Fire Island—a few cramped areas have come to be known as “gay beach,” “faggot’s beach,” “queer alley.” “bitch beach,” etc. But in all the learned claptrap I’ve read by so-called authorities on homosexuality, I don’t recall any realistic description of a gay beach. The “authorities” prefer the clammy atmosphere of the bathhouse or the clandestine bar.

The July 1958 cover of ONE magazine provided a rare glimpse at gay recreational life in the fifties. (San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Historical Society)

Ronnie Chaise, an angel-faced, willowy young hank clerk I met at the beach that summer, exploded one Sunday when a husky married couple and two noisy kids settled down near us, looked around a bit, then muttering about “damned queers taking over the place,” picked up baggage and brats and headed for a more moral beach. Ronnie had just come, slim and dripping, out of the water and was settling down on his towel when he heard them. “Well, go somewhere else if you don’t want to be contaminated,” he howled. “You’ve got fifty miles of beach around here and this is all we’ve got. So disappear!”

“I offended them? Then offended us. Why always put the blame on this side? They started it. We weren’t doing anything to spoil their day, except existing. Let them go somewhere else. This is our beach. It’s small and crowded, but its ours “

“What claim do we have to it?” I goaded him. “The cops and the papers don’t think its ours. And those people had just as much right here as we have.”

“Rights, hell. You have the rights you earn. So we don’t have a spelled-out legal title to this hundred yards of sand, but neither do heterosexuals have a title to the rest, or any right to chase us off here, like the police try to do every once in a while. They’ve taken squatter’s rights on the rest and we’ve taken squatter’s rights on this. And if they don’t want us ‘contaminating’ the rest of their beaches, then they’d better leave us alone here.

“Nobody told those people they couldn’t spend the day here. They objected to us and left. But there are plenty of other heteros around here who mind their own business, or maybe even enjoy our company.

“We’ve got to establish our right to have our own little corner, and when guys like that accidentally stumble into it, we have to see they act decent or get out fast, or we won’t even have this. Now come on, let’s go out and plunk in the water. I want to get cooled off. I didn’t come out here to talk politics.”

A really nelly one was camping it up in a large crowd of bikini-clad youths nearby. I knew one of them, Billy Forsing, and Ronnie wanted an introduction, so we went over and joined them. I didn’t hit it off too well. Like an importunate reporter, more concerned with analyzing the beach than enjoying it, I asked the nelly one if he thought it gave a very good impression to make such a display in public.

“Well, get this one!” one of the others shrilled, and most of the bunch quickly flounced off for a swim, leaving Ronnie and me with Billy and George, the nelly one. He turned on me like an angry cat. “You’re darned right I camp it up out here. Why not? It’s about time these yokels learned to face the fact that we exist. I’m tired of hiding it. I work in a prissy office where half the guys in the place are really belles, but they’d all faint dead away if anyone dropped a hobby pin. I come out here to let my hair down, and I let it down good. Anybody else out here is here for the same reason, or else they’ve come to see the show. Show they want—show they’ll get—from me, at least.” With that, he upped and did a quick imitation of a strip teaser saucily showing her backside to the audience, and ran off to join his friends.

Then Ronnie and I took off for one of the gay bars facing the beach—and those bars are different from any other gay bars I’ve ever seen; they’re really a sort of extension of the beach—and then wandered down for a look at bicep-pumpers that were exhibiting their rippling muscles farther down the beach. And that place in itself is something to write about …some other time.

Anatomy of a Raid, 1967

There was nothing very unusual about the Yukon—nothing to make it stand out from dozens of other small gay bars. As in any neighborhood place, most of the customers during the week were regulars who lived nearby. The bar usually wasn’t jammed until Friday and Saturday nights and for the Sunday after-noon “beer bust.” Even then, it took only about thirty-five people to make a mob in the Yukon. So, as I say, there was nothing unusual about the place—that is, not until that Friday night near the end of March 1996.

On that fateful Friday, I had picked up my lover, Larry, when he got off work. We went to the Yukon and drank beer for an hour or so. Several friends we hadn’t seen for a while wandered in, and it looked like it was going to be a good fun night. We went to dinner and got back to the bar by about 10:30. By then the place was crowded, and there was a lot of laughing and joking around. There were several people I hadn’t seen before, but that, too, was normal on a crowded night.

“Jane Jones” a Los Angeles women’s bar, circa 1942. (Courtesy Paris Poirier)

At one point, about 12:30 A.M., Tommy [the bartender] was passing by and stopped to talk to me. After we talked a few minutes, he looked over my shoulder toward the door. I turned and saw several uniformed policemen coming in. One of them, whom we later referred to as Hooknose, yanked the jukebox cord and ordered the lights turned up. The other, who chewed gum steadily, just stood around.

During the 1950s, the Jewel Box Lounge in Kansas City, Missouri, billed itself as “The Most Talked About Night Club in the Midwest.” Drag performers, called “femme-mimics,” performed musical and comedy numbers in classic cabaret style. (Courtesy of the Gerber/Hart Library and Archives, Chicago, IL)

Hooknose announced, “We’re going to make a few arrests. Just stay where you are. Anyone who runs will be shot.” No one ran. He went behind the bar, checked the license, then went about his fun task of picking victims.

I’m not sure where he started, but I think it was with two boys dressed in cowboy garb. He then picked George, who was standing at the bar to Larry’s right. Each tap on the shoulder was punctuated with “You’re under arrest.” At one point he stopped to count on his fingers, seemingly figuring out how many people the cars outside could take. Then he went back to his grim business. He skipped over Larry. I felt the dreaded tap and turned. “You’re under arrest.”

Altogether they took twelve people that night—about a third of the patrons. At the Hollywood station, we assembled in a small room just inside the back door.

Gum Chewer, still chewing, advised us of our “rights.” Then, as we passed through a door into the cell area, he pointed to each and said, “Lewd conduct.” Then Gum Chewer called us out one at a time and talked to us for a minute or so. When my turn came, Gum Chewer pointed toward the cell. “See that boy in the blue shirt?” It was Lee; I’ve known him for years but never had sex with him. “You humped him,” the Man said. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.

That’s pretty much the way it went for each one. Lee was accused of groping someone sitting next to him, and that guy was charged with rubbing legs with Lee. Tommy was supposed to have groped one of the “cowboys.”

When I was booked, I answered the questions about name and address but balked at where I worked. “That’s not necessary, is it?” I asked, not knowing what they were entitled to know. “You don’t have to say a damn thing.” he snapped back.

After that there was a lot of waiting in little rooms as the cops took mug shots and fingerprints of each person. I couldn’t understand how some of the guys could joke around and laugh. I was worried about my job and personal matters that this arrest could make worse. One young Canadian boy was in a state of near-panic. He was so frightened that the cop trying to take his fingerprints was having a rough time. The cop threatened to knock him off his ass if he didn’t relax, which just made things worse. The hassle went on for what seemed like a long time.

It was past 4 A.M. when I finally left the jail. I was irritated, tired, scared, and depressed. And I still am whenever I think about that night.

—DAVID S., AS TOLD TO DICK MICHAELS, EXCERPTED FROM THE ADVOCATE, JULY 1968

Rikki Streicher and the Lesbian Bar

When Rikki Streicher died in 1994 after a long struggle with cancer, San Francisco’s mayor saw that the city flags flew at half-mast. As the founder and owner of Maud’s Study, the longest running women’s bar in San Francisco, member of the board of directors of the Federation of Gay Games, and a local activist, Streicher had a profound effect on the lesbian and gay communities not only in San Francisco, but nationally as well.

While her support of the Gay Games and lesbian and gay athletics was legendary, she is best known as the proprietor of Maud’s and, later, of Amelia’s, a popular women’s dance club.

Maud’s, which opened in 1966 and quickly became a popular lesbian hangout in the Haight-Ashbury district, was in some ways typical of pre—gay liberation bars. More than just a bar, it was a safe place for lesbians to congregate, discuss their lives and issues of the day, play pool, and, of course, drink.

Gay and women’s bars in the forties, fifties, and sixties were a central part of the lesbian community. For many lesbians, the bars were the only gathering place they had. The local women’s bar was a home away from home, a group living room, and a community center. Patrons would have birthday, anniversary, and graduation parties at their favorite bar.

Unfortunately, there were very few exclusively lesbian bars, and most lesbians would gather at gay bars that were primarily patronized by gay men. Drag queens, sissies, and butch and femme women would all gather in the same places out of economic necessity, a sense of camaraderie, and a need for mutual protection.

In these bars, one might meet friends or sexual partners. Perhaps more significantly, the bars were a place where lesbians could celebrate their collective sexuality with each other and gay men. More than just being a place where men could love men and women could love women, the bars were an entire cultural underground that did not exist elsewhere. The lesbian and gay bar world was exciting, bohemian, and often a little grungy. Author Judy Grahn recalls entering a small, cramped gay bar in 1961 to the smell of both tobacco and marijuana smoke, and the sight of overflowing toilets.

Of course, going to a lesbian or gay bar before the late 1970s was not without significant risks. Police raids, harassment by men while walking to and from the bars, and risk of exposure were constant threats to lesbians who visited lesbian and gay watering holes. In many cities, men and women who were arrested during raids on gay bars would find their names and addresses printed in the local papers. Sometimes the police would even call the employers of those arrested and tell them the nature of the offense. Still, according to Phyllis Lyon in Last Call at Maud’s, a documentary about Maud’s and women’s bar culture. “It was a lot of fun, in spite of the danger.”

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, women’s bars were giving way to a new generation of lesbian life. Many former bar regulars were becoming part of the Clean and Sober movement, and the younger crowd became attracted to the once-a-week “women’s night” at larger, flashier gay discos. Neighborhood bars and places like Maud’s found it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. As times have changed, exclusively lesbian bars are becoming an endangered species.

In 1989, Maud’s Study closed its doors forever. For many San Francisco Bay Area lesbians, it was the end of an era. On closing, Rikki Streicher commented, “You can’t go on forever.… Nothing does.” Rikki Streicher, community leader, was sixty-eight when she died.

art DID YOU KNOW…

The first homosexual-advocacy group in the United States was the Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 by Henry Gerber. The Chicago organization lasted less than a year. In that time, they issued a mimeographed newsletter, “Friendship & Freedom.” The group split after they were jailed when one member’s wife reported them to a social worker, who called the police. Bailing out the nine members cost Gerber his life savings of two-hundred dollars, leaving him bitter that other homosexuals had failed to help him. The Gerber/Hart Library in Chicago is named in his honor.

EARLY ORGANIZATIONS

In the first half of the twentieth century, homosexual communities had virtually no organizations for political change. Ever since the 1950s, however, lesbians and gay men have experienced a continuous, dynamic, and growing political consciousness. Part of our understanding of ourselves as a body politic comes from the early organizations, whose members were not afraid to articulate the issues and debates around the need for social change. Generally, early organizations can be grouped into two distinct periods: homophile and gay liberation/lesbian-separatist.

Homophile organizations, born out of the efforts of gay men and lesbians during the fifties and sixties, were primarily interested in working from within the system to bring about changes in governmental laws and policies that oppressed gay people.

The three main national homophile organizations of the 1950s and 1960s were the Mattachine Society, ONE, Inc., and the Daughters of Bilitis. Gay liberation and lesbian-separatist groups came on the heels of the late sixties antiwar movement and the militant revolutionary movements of people of color. Rather than seeking to bring greater civil liberties to gay people through legislative change, gay liberation organizations sought to overhaul the entire governmental structure.

At the time of the Stonewall Riot in 1969, there were approximately four dozen gay political organizations. By the early seventies there were more than 400 such organizations around the country.

The Mattachine Society

In 1950, a small group of leftist male homosexuals— including Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland and Bob Hull—formed the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles. The name means “little fool.” Mattachines were male court jesters who dressed as women and performed songs and spiritual rites in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Spain and France. Hay characterized the group as a “service and welfare organization devoted to the protection and improvement of society’s androgynous minority.” The society’s charter called for “the solution of human sex behavior problems through various accepted techniques involving change of attitude and law.”

Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay (right), with his lover, John Burnside, at the closing of the 1994 Gay Games in New York. (Dan Nicoletta)

In 1953, the organization was split by political differences and a conservative new camp forced out the original founders. The depoliticized group eventually folded in Los Angeles, but gained new members in San Francisco and elsewhere. The main publication of the group was The Mattachine Review, a monthly that began publication in 1955 and featured articles, book reviews, humor, fiction, criticism and opinion, news reports, and commentary on legal, social, and cultural trends.

Although homosexual groups existed before this time, Mattachine was the first to establish a legally incorporated and long-lasting organization, and it represents the beginning of today’s organized gay movement.

— EXCERPTED FROM “CIVIL RIGHTS/SOCIAL RITES: PRE-STONEWALL HOMOPHILE ORGANIZATIONS,” FROM “100 YEARS BEFORE STONEWALL” EXHIBIT (UC BERKELEY, JUNE 1994)

art “I can’t tell you bow deeply moved I am to be standing here in front of a hundred of my brothers and sisters determined at last to do something about the oppression we have suffered in silence for so many centuries. I look forward to the day when we will not gather behind closed doors, but will be out marching, arm-in-arm, singing militant songs, marching down all the main boulevards of America, and the world.”

CHUCK ROWLAND, AT THE APRIL 1953 MATTACHINE SOCIETY REORGANIZING MEETING. AFTER THIS SPEECH, THE SHOCKED MEMBERSHIP REJECTED THE IDEOLOGY OF ITS MILITANT FOUNDERS AND VOTED OUT THE OLD GUARD.

ONE, Inc.

The founders of ONE, Inc., held their first meeting in Los Angeles in 1952 to “work for the betterment of the lives of homosexual men and women.” The name was chosen from Thomas Carlyle’s phrase “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men one.” The group’s goal was to “bring to light the lack of civil rights protections for the homosexual and to bring homosexuals and heterosexuals together in closer communication.” Its endeavors included education, publishing, research, and social service.

The journal One was a leading voice in the homophile rights movement. It was sold to subscribers and from newsstands and contained articles, poetry, fiction, book reviews, and letters expressing “The Homosexual Viewpoint.” The group successfully contested an attempt by the United States Post Office to declare their magazine obscene, thus securing the right of homosexuals to publish and mail homophile materials.

ONE Institute of Homophile Studies was formed in 1956 and began offering forums, public lectures, and classes. The organization maintained a large library of fiction, nonfiction, and periodicals, in several languages, devoted to homosexual questions. ONE also offered a book service that supplied books on homosexuality from publishers around the world.

— EXCERPTED FROM “CIVIL RIGHTS/SOCIAL RITES: PRESTONEWALL HOMOPHILE ORGANIZATIONS,” FROM “100 YEARS BEFORE STONEWALL” EXHIBIT (UC BERKELEY, JUNE 1994)

SIR (Society for Individual Rights)

In 1964, the Society for Individual Rights was founded in San Francisco. Its official monthly magazine, Vector, was widely read and greatly influenced gay San Francisco in the middle to late 1960s. Its pages document the struggles between the homophile establishment and the new gay liberation movement. It also featured articles, theater and book reviews, club news, and interesting cover art and graphic design. In June 1969, it published its first frontal-nude photograph.

The group established a gay community center, providing for the first time a place where homosexuals could associate and organize beyond the bars and private homes. The SIR political committee hosted candidates’ nights, and local politicians began to court gay voters. SIR also engaged in job counseling and legal referral, as well as organizing gay bowling.

— EXCERPTED FROM “CIVIL RIGHTS/SOCIAL RITES: PRESTONEWALL HOMOPHILE ORGANIZATIONS,” FROM “100 YEARS BEFORE STONEWALL” EXHIBIT (UC BERKELEY, JUNE 1994)

Daughters of Bilitis

The first national lesbian organization was established in September 1955 when a group of eight women, including Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, met in San Francisco to form a club whose main purpose at the time was to offer lesbians a social alternative to the gay bar. In addition, they believed there was a need for a broad program of education for both lesbians and the public, as well as a need for legal reform and more adequate research than had yet taken place. The group called themselves the Daughters of Bilitis, from Pierre Louys’s poem “Song of Bilitis,” in which Bilitis is a lesbian on the isle of Lesbos with Sappho.

Daughters of Bilitis Founders Del Martin (left and Phyllis Lyon during a moment of laughter in 1987.(© JEB)

In 1956 they started publishing a monthly magazine, The Ladder, which contained news items, fiction and poetry, book reviews, research reports, and political and social commentary. By 1958 chapters had been founded in Los Angeles and New York, and later in other cities. Other DOB activities included discussion groups, social events, research activity, and, later, participation with male homosexual groups and San Francisco’s Council on Religion and the Homosexual in social, religious, and political activities.

— FROM “CIVIL RIGHTS/SOCIAL RITES: PRESTONEWALL HOMOPHILE ORGANIZATIONS,” FROM “100 YEARS BEFORE STONEWALL EXHIBIT” (UC BERKELEY, JUNE 1994)

Gay Liberation —(Way) Beyond Assimilation

Gay liberation was “born” in the late sixties. A series of protests against police harassment of gay people in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York culminated in June 1969 when, in the Stonewall Rebellion, gay people rioted for several nights against police oppression. During the next two years, gay liberation groups formed in dozens of cities. People met in bars, in classrooms, at people’s houses, and in parks. Young queens and old bar dykes, lesbians and gay men who had been active in leftist politics since the Depression, lesbian factory workers living in small towns in the Midwest, and New Left dykes and fags who thought they had all the answers, came together and became the gay liberation movement.

Some of the lesbians and gay men of the early years of the movement had been inspired by the National Liberation Front of Vietnam and by revolutionary groups like the Black Panther Party. We did not demand an equal position within the fundamentally flawed American society. Rather, like the Black Liberation Movement, we demanded that straight society get its foot off our necks, so that we could create a world in which we would want to live. While the existing homophile civil rights organizations were asking that we be allowed to enter the armed forces, we were bringing gay liberation to the antiwar movement—whether the movement wanted it or not. Some Gay Liberation Front (GLF) activists took the position that all young men should claim to be gay to avoid the draft.

Gay people of color were central to the Stonewall Rebellion, and many people of color continued to participate in gay liberation despite insensitivity within the movement. In some cities, gay people of color formed separate groups. In 1971, Third World Gay Revolution began in New York; their sixteen-point program ends:

We want a new society—a revolutionary socialist society. We want liberation of humanity, free food, free shelter, free clothing, free transportation, free health care, free utilities, free education, free art for all. We want a society where the needs of the people come first. We believe that all people should share the labor and products of society, according to each one’s needs and abilities, regardless of race, sex, age, or sexual preferences. We believe the land, technology, and the means of production belong to the people and must be shared by the people collectively for the liberation of all.

Gay liberation was also heavily influenced by the women’s liberation movement. Most gay liberationists believe strongly that the roots of our oppression are tied to sexism, the systematic oppression of women, which is enforced through gender roles and the nuclear family. Throughout history, lesbians—the only women who are not tied into male approval and rewards—have always been active in the women’s movement. In 1969 and 1970, we started to demand recognition and support.

Lesbians in the gay liberation movement often found the same sexism we had experienced from the straight left, and in the rest of our lives as well. Lesbians formed caucuses in some GLFs. In these caucuses and elsewhere, contradictions began to arise between gay-movement-identified lesbians (often calling themselves “gay women”) and women’s-movement-identified lesbians (often calling themselves “lesbian women”). However, as lesbians began to develop our own movement, history, and issues, those distinctions became less important. In cities as far apart as New York and Yellow Springs, Ohio, separate radical lesbian groups worked more or less closely with the men of the Gay Liberation Front. By 1973, lesbian separatist groups existed in most cities, although some lesbians remained in mixed groups.

Gay liberationists joined with other groups to march in a San Francisco counterculture demonstration in 1974. (Rink Foto)

In 1972, first in the lesbian journal Spectre and then in Furies, lesbians began to declare that we had to organize separately from both straight women and gay men in order to achieve liberation.

It is impossible to discuss here all of the events that made up the first wave of the gay liberation movement. We had demonstrations and mock weddings. We spoke in schools, churches, and parks. We had conferences and love-ins. We tried to get rid of racism, organized crime, and drink-pushing in lesbian and gay bars. We worked in collectives, ran free stores, set up health clinics, provided support for the Black Panther Party, and joined in the Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention. There were dozens of underground papers, including Body Politic, Gay Liberator, Lesbian Woman, Gay Sunshine, Come Out, and the Gar Community News. We began radio shows and made movies and at least one group briefly took over a television station. We confronted the heterosexism of the left, psychiatry, the women’s movement, and the church.

In the twenty-five years since Stonewall, many different lesbian and gay liberation voices have developed. But despite practical, strategic, and theoretical disagreements, certain common themes unite us: 1) Gay is not as good as straight—it is better. We bring to the world not only our love for people of the same sex, but also the cultures and strength we have developed in affirming and fighting for that love. We do not seek to assimilate or to imitate straight institutions like the nuclear family. 2) Gay people are not free in today’s society. We are revolutionaries. We must create a society we want to live in. 3) Gay liberation is a broad movement. We can and must address all issues that impact our lives. We oppose war, poverty, environmental destruction, and the oppression of people based on race, sex, class, age, looks, physical ability, et cetera.

It is common to speak of the gay liberation movement as a historical period that the community has long since “outgrown” in favor of more assimilationist goals like joining the military or legalizing gay marriage. But as ACT UP, Queer Nation, and Lesbian Avengers have recently shown, our community is strongest when we are clearly and defiantly articulating a gay liberation vision. That vision, which puts our love at the center of our struggle, can never be denied.

The Gay Liberation Front —Revolutionary Queers

DO YOU THINK HOMOSEXUALS ARE REVOLTING? YOU BET YOUR SWEET ASS WE ARE! We are going to make a place for ourselves in the revolutionary movement. We challenge the myths that are screwing up this society.

MEETING: Thursday, July 24, 6:30 P.M., at Alternate U—69 West 14th Street at Sixth Avenue.

Shortly after the Stonewall Riots in New York City, a group of young lesbians and gay men, frustrated by what they saw as milquetoast assimilation in the homophile movement, decided to break from business as usual. Influenced by the peace movement, the Black Panther Party, and the burgeoning women’s movement, they formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF).

At two meetings in the last weeks of July 1969, GLF was born. The start was bumpy, a sign of the turbulent nature of the revolutionaries involved. According to early GLF member Charles Pitts, at the second meeting “the chairmanship was constantly switched around because there was a rather sharp division in the meeting as to whether the purpose of the group should be self-enlightenment (as a kind of consciousness-raising-type thing) or integration immediately with other revolutionary or militant movements.” By the end of the meeting, the group had developed a mission statement:

We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot cone about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature. We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths. We are going to be who we are. At the same time, we are creating new social forms and relations, that is, relations based upon brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality. Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing—revolution!

While many GLF members were either expatriates from Mattachine or members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) or other leftist groups, GLF represented more than just the radical gay left. As Donn Teal said in The Gar Militants (1971), “It appeals to a variety of young or young-minded American homosexuals whose sole common denominator was impatience.”

As a result, the GLF organized a variety of events. From political actions and “zaps” to communal dinners, and from encounter-group consciousness-raising to gay and lesbian dances, the GLF had designs not on political reform, but on the creation of a whole new world: a world where “gay is good,” sexism and racism were eradicated, and the military dismantled.

Of course, theory and practice did not always coincide. Many of the GLF men, while progressive and outwardly supportive of women’s liberation, were unable and/or unwilling to apply their beliefs to their actions. Many lesbians quickly became disenchanted with the GLF and began focusing more on lesbian-feminist organizations. And while there were a few people of color in GLF, the group was primarily white. By the end of 1969, the politics of the radical elements of the organization alienated more moderate members, who split off to form the Gay Activists Alliance.

But for many, the Gay Liberation Front, along with groups like the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF), which had formed in the Sari Francisco Bay Area in the spring of 1969, served as the inspiration for a new generation of both personal and overtly political gay activism. Hundreds of gay liberation organizations sprang up in cities large and small. Gay and lesbian self-perceptions would never be the same.

The Furies

In the early 1970s, lesbians were not chic. In fact, most people did not even know we existed. So it was revolutionary to say that women (as opposed to men) were primary, and that women-loving women—lesbians—could change the world. The Furies spoke and lived this understanding, and our impact moved beyond the short life of the collective (1971–1973) and the newspaper (1972–1973). The Furies put in print ideas that were previously unimaginable: “Women-identified Lesbianism is more than just a sexual preference, it is a political choice. It is political because relationships between men and women are essentially political, they involve power and dominance. Since the Lesbian actively rejects that relationship and chooses women, she defies the established political system.” (Charlotte Bunch, “Lesbians in Revolt,” The Furies, January 1972)

We named heterosexuality as the problem. We were radical and separatist. We were outlaws against the patriarchy. We understood lesbian life as feminist theory in action, including taking control of our bodies and exercising sexual self-determination. Because lesbian-feminists politicized lesbianism, we have been criticized for desexualizing lesbian identity. But we pushed lesbianism beyond being a question of either private sexual preference or equal civil rights into the realm of sexual politics and talk about sex. Later we would learn a lot more about the oppression, as well as the liberation, of openly claiming our sexuality as lesbians.

Furies Collective members in 1972 during a newsletter mailing gathering. (§JEB)

We were twelve white adults, ages eighteen to twenty-eight, and three children who lived and worked collectively in Washington, D.C. We said good-bye to the New Left and to gay liberation because they were male dominated, and to the women’s movement because they were unwilling to make room for visible lesbians and lesbian issues. We hoped to create a political ideology based on our understanding of ourselves as lesbians and feminists, to build institutions to meet women’s basic needs (like child care centers), and to change ourselves so we could stop oppressing others because of our own class and race privilege. Our rage at the way things were and our energy to transform them were both so burning hot that we knew we would succeed.

We did achieve our first goal. But the differences among us, primarily class, led to repeated painful conflicts that soon ended The Furies. In the next few years, former members went on to co-found Olivia Records, Quest/a Feminist Quarterly, Diana Press, Women in Distribution, and Moonforce Media, helping to break ground for the huge growth in lesbian and feminist business and culture that followed.

art DID YOU KNOW…

San Francisco’s preview to Stonewall was the 1965 New Year’s Day charity drag ball for the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. As the night began, the police swarmed around California Hall, filmed people arriving at the event, and then attempted to enter the ball-room. They were stopped by two young lawyers guarding the door—Evander Smith and Herb Donaldson—who were arrested after telling the police that they could enter only with invitations or a warrant. The media recorded it as a night of shame for the police, and a judge ordered all charges dropped. It was a major victory in the struggle for civil rights.

The Furies Collective: Ginny Berson, Joan E. Biren, Rita Mac Brown, Charlotte Bunch, Sharon Deevey, Helaine Harris, Susan Hathaway, Nancy Myron, Tasha Peterson, Coletta Reid, Lee Schwing, Jennifer Woodhul.

EARLY DEMONSTRATIONS

Since the 1950s, gay men and lesbians have been acting up, acting out, and struggling for gay recognition and rights. It was not until the 1960s, however, that homophile groups and others began protesting against the injustices they faced in public arenas. The early demonstrations varied from peaceful picket lines and gay-ins in the mid-sixties to the famous Stonewall Riots of the first hours of June 28, 1969. By the early 1970s, protests included activist “zaps” and quick, media-savvy actions.

Stonewall holds a special place in gay mythology, as a symbol of the spirit of gay liberation when gay men and lesbians finally said, “Enough!” to the police brutality and the unjust treatment of us by society. Even before Stonewall, the gay movement was becoming more radicalized, inspired by the different revolutionary movements of the time. But it was Stonewall that gave gay liberationists the inspiration for immediate action.

Activism and demonstrations have continued to be an important part of gay and lesbian life, as we demand visibility in a society which, it seems, would often rather we just disappeared.

Seven Demonstrations Before Stonewall

1. The Cuban Labor Camp Protest (April 17. 1965): Craig Rodwell of the New York Mattachine Society (NYMS) and Jack Nichols of Mattachine Society, Washington, D.C., staged protests in front of the United Nations and the White House after hearing that the Cuban government was putting known homosexuals into labor camps. Their picket signs read, “15 Million U.S. Homosexuals Protest Federal Treatment,” and “Cuba’s Government Persecutes Homosexuals. U.S. Government Beat Them to It.”

2. The Janus Sit-In (April and May 1965): After the manager of a Philadelphia restaurant refused to serve several women and men he thought were gay based on their “appearance,” the Janus Society (a lesbian and gay organization) staged several sit-ins. At the first one, police arrested four people, including Clark Polak, Janus Society president.

Pickets protest the treatment of gay men and lesbians by the government. This photo was used as a cover for the October 1965 issue of The Ladder, the first lesbian magazine in the United States. (Courtesy of Sherry Thomas)

3. The Government Protests of the Summer of 1965: To protest government treatment of homosexuals in military and government employment, members of the Eastern Conference of Homophile Organizations (ECHO) staged a series of picket lines at the Civil Service Commission building, the State Department, the Pentagon, the White House, and, on the Fourth of July, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Organizers excluded people who were underage or not dressed “properly” from marching. Seven men and three women picketed the White House in May; when ECHO groups protested in front of the White House again five months later, their numbers had risen to forty-five.

4. The Village Sip-Ins (April 1966): In New York City’s Greenwich Village, after a flurry of gay liar close-downs and alcohol license revocations, Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmons of the New York Mattachine Society held “sip-ins” at Village bars to test the State Liquor Authority’s policy against bars serving homosexuals. After being turned away from Julius, a gay bar, for being homosexual, they protested to the city’s Human Rights Commission, and the policy was dismissed.

5. The Black Cat/New Faces Demonstration (January 1967): At New Year’s Eve parties at the Black Cat and New Faces bars in the Silverlake district of Los Angeles, police conducted violent raids, seriously injuring several patrons and leaving a bartender in the hospital with a fractured skull and a ruptured spleen. Sixteen men were arrested and found guilty of lewd conduct. Soon after, several hundred gay men and women rallied on Sunset Boulevard in protest, and pickets marched in front of the Black Cat.

6. The Griffith Park Gay-In(March 1968): Griffith Park, in the middle of Los Angeles, was well known as a cruising area for men to have sex with each other. Police often would conduct sweeps of the area, entrapping and harassing gay men. On St. Patrick’s Day, two drag queens who called themselves “The Princess” and “The Duchess” held a party at the park’s Horseshoe Bend for all passers-by and area regulars. Over two hundred gay men ate cake, played volleyball (one report said the “Nells” played against the “Butches”), danced, and socialized. The Advocate called it Los Angeles’s first major homosexual love-in.

7. The Patch Police Station Raid (August 1968): After police officers arrested two men and harassed the crowd at the Patch, a popular Los Angeles gay hotspot, bartender/activist Lee Glaze took to the stage and told the gay men there not to be intimidated. “It’s not against the law to be a homosexual,” he said. “and it’s not a crime to be in a gay bar.” To cheers and applause, he told a member of the audience, who owned a flower shop, that he would buy all his flowers, and then invited everyone to come with him to the police station to welcome out the two arrested. According to The Advocate, twenty-five patrons “marched into the waiting room carrying bouquets of gladioli, mums, daisies, carnations, and roses (but no pansies).”When the prisoners were released, they were showered with flowers and affection.

Stonewall Revisited

The story of what really happened at Stonewall has yet to he distorted and embellished beyond the point of recognition, but it’s well on its way. The myth gets a boost every time someone writes about how “heroic drag queens started a riot at the Stonewall Inn, which marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.”

The Stonewall Inn was a nondescript two-story building at 53 Christopher Street, just off Sheridan Square in New York’s Greenwich Village. You didn’t just walk into the Stonewall, you had to be admitted. “You had to he identified by someone at the door who either assumed or knew you were of that life. I had worked at so many of the gay bars as a performer and hatcheck girl that I was often called to the door and asked, ‘Do you know this person?’ You see, at that time there was a lot of entrapment going on,” said former hatcheck girl Dawn Hampton.

The Stonewall had a main bar, a dance floor, and a jukebox. There was another bar in back, with tables where people could sit. The late Morty Manford, who was a nineteen-year-old college student in 1969, recalled that the Stonewall was a dive. “It was my favorite place, but it was shabby, and the glasses they served the watered-down drinks in weren’t particularly clean.”

The Stonewall Inn attracted an eclectic crowd, from teenage college students like Morty Manford to conservatively dressed young men who stopped in with their dates after the theater or opera. There was also a sprinkling of young radicals, people like Ronnie Di Brienza, a twenty-six-year-old long-haired musician who didn’t consider himself gay or straight: “I just consider myself a freak.”

The Stonewall Inn was not a generally welcoming place for drag queens, although as Martin Duberman notes in Stonewall, “a few favored full-time transvestites, like Tiffany, Spanola Jerry, a hairdresser from Sheepshead Bay, and Tammy Novak … were allowed to enter Stonewall in drag.”

The nightly crowd at the Stonewall Inn did include, however, quite a few men that Dick Leitsch described as the “fluffy sweater” type. “They were sissies, young effeminate guys, giggle girls.” Leitsch, who was then executive director of the Mattachine Society, said you rarely saw people in full drag because “in those days you got busted for dressing up unless you were on your way to or from a licensed masquerade ball.”

If men dressed as women were an uncommon sight, real women at the Stonewall Inn were rarer still. More often than not, when Dawn Hampton worked at the Stonewall she was the only woman there, yet she felt fully accepted. “A lot of the kids called me ‘Mommie.’”

June 27, 1969, was not an average Friday night at the Stonewall Inn. Earlier that week, on Tuesday night, the police had raided the Stonewall “to gather evidence of illegal sale of alcohol.”

As Ronnie Di Brienza later wrote in an article in The East Village Other: “On Wednesday and Thursday night, grumbling could he heard among the limp-wristed set. Predominantly, the theme was, ‘this shit has got to stop!’

…It used to be that a fag was happy to get slapped and chased home, as long as they didn’t have to have their names splashed onto a court record. Now, times are achangin’. Tuesday night was the last night for bullshit.”

Morty Manford was at the Stonewall Inn when several plainclothes officers entered the bar around 2:00 A.M. on Saturday. “Whispers went around that the place was being raided. Suddenly, the lights were turned up, the doors were sealed, and all the patrons were held captive until the police decided what they were going to do. I was anxious, but I wasn’t afraid. Everybody was anxious, not knowing whether we were going to be arrested or what was going to happen.

“It may have been ten or fifteen minutes later that we were all told to leave. We had to line up, and our identification was checked before we were freed. People who did not have identification or were underage and all transvestites were detained.” Of the 200 people ejected from the Stonewall that night, 5 who were dressed as women were detained.

After being released from the bar, Morty watched and waited outside. “As some of the gays came out of the bar, they would take a bow, and their friends would cheer.” It was a colorful scene, Morty recalled, but the tension began to grow. The crowd grew to more than 400 people.

Lucian Truscott IV, who was also at the Stonewall that night reporting for the Village Voice, wrote that the scene was initially festive: “Cheers would go up as favorites would emerge from the door, strike a pose, and swish by the detective with a ‘Hello there, fella.’ The stars were in their element. Wrists were limp, hair as primped, and reactions to the applause were classic. ‘I gave them the gay power bit, and they loved it. girls.’ ‘Have you seen Maxine?’ ‘Where is my wife? I told her not to go far’” Truscott reported that the mood changed once the paddy wagon arrived and three drag queens, the bartender, and the doorman were loaded inside. The crowd showered the police with boos and catcalls and “a cry went up to push the paddy wagon over, but it drove away before anything could happen.… The next person to come out was a dyke, and she put up a struggle.” At this point Truscott reported that the police had trouble keeping “the dyke” in the patrol car. “Three times she slid out and tried to walk away. The last time a cop bodily heaved her in. The crowd shrieked. ‘Police brutality’.‘Pigs!’”

The tension continued to rise. Truscott wrote: “Limp wrists were forgotten. Beer cans and bottles were heaved at the windows.” Reporter Howard Smith retreated inside the bar along with Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine and the police officers who had conducted the raid. Once inside the bar, they bolted the heavy front door.

From his vantage point outside the bar, Morty remembered seeing someone throw a rock, which broke a window on the second floor of the Stonewall Inn building. “With the shattering of the glass, the crowd collectively exclaimed, ‘Ooh.’ It was a dramatic gesture of defiance. For me, there was a slight lancing of the festering wound of anger that had been building for so long over this kind of unfair harassment and prejudice. It wasn’t my fault that many of the bars where I could meet other gay people were run by organized crime.”

Inside the Stonewall, Village Voice reporter Howard Smith, who’d been accompanying the police, heard the shattering of glass, including at least one of the two large plate-glass windows on the first floor. The windows, which were painted black from the inside, were backed by plywood panels.

There was pounding at the door and people yelling. Smith wrote: “The door crashes open, beer cans and bottles hurtle in.…At that point the only uniformed cop among them gets hit with something under his eye. He hollers, and his hand comes away scarlet.…They are all suddenly furious. Three run out to see if they can scare the mob from the door. [Inspector Seymour] Pine leaps out into the crowd and drags a protester inside by the hair.”

Di Brienza picks up the story: “A bunch of ‘queens,’ along with a few ‘butch’ members, grabbed a parking meter and began battering the entrance until the door swung open.”

Inside, Smith and the police ducked as more debris was thrown in through the open door. In response, Smith wrote: “The detectives locate a fire hose, the idea being to ward off the madding crowd until reinforcements arrive.” Lucian Truscott describes what happened next: “Several kids took the opportunity to cavort in the spray, and their momentary glee served to stave off what was rapidly becoming a full-scale attack.”

Smith grew fearful as the tension escalated. “By now the mind’s eye had forgotten the character of the mob; the sound filtering in doesn’t suggest dancing faggots any more. It sounds like a powerful rage bent on vendetta.…” The crowd then heaved the uprooted parking meter through one of the plate-glass windows. The plywood behind the window gave.

Smith wrote: “It seems inevitable that the mob will pour in. A kind of tribal adrenaline rush bolsters all of us; they take out and check pistols. [Inspector] Pine places a few men on each side of the corridor leading away from the entrance. They aim unwavering at the door.… I hear, ‘We’ll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through the door!’” From outside the bar, Truscott recalled, “I heard several cries of, ‘Let’s get some gas.’”

A stream of liquid poured in through the broken window. Smith wrote: “A flaring match follows. Pine is not more than ten feet away [from the window].” Pine aimed his gun at the shadows framed by the window. But he didn’t fire.

Smith wrote: “The sound of sirens coincides with the shoosh of flames where the lighter fluid was thrown. Later, Pine tells me he didn’t shoot because he had heard the sirens in time and felt no need to kill someone if help was arriving. It was that close.”

Reinforcements arrived, in the form of New York City’s Tactical Police Force, and the streets were cleared in coordinated sweeps of the area. According to newspaper accounts in the days that followed, thirteen people were arrested that night and three police officers suffered minor injuries. No mention was made of civilian casualties.

art “It was Inhumane, senseless bullshit. [The police] called us animals. We were the lowest scum of the Earth at that time.… Suddenly, the nickels, dimes, pennies, and quarters started flying. I threw quarters and pennies and whatnot. ‘You already got the payoff, and here’s some more!’ To be there was so beautiful. It was so exciting. I said, ‘Well, great, now it’s my time. I’m out here being a revolutionary for everybody else, and now it’s time to do my thing for my own people.”

SYLVIA RIVERA, DRAG QUEEN AT THE STONEWALL RIOT

The riot had ended by the time Vito Russo happened on the scene in front of the Stonewall, although people were still out on the sidewalks yelling at the police. He recalled, “I didn’t get to see a lot of the hysteria that’s been described in the press because I got there too late. I went to the little triangular park across the street and sat in a tree on a branch. I watched what was going on, but I didn’t want to get involved. People were still throwing things, whatever they could find, mostly garbage. Then somebody came along and spray painted a message to the community on the front of Stonewall that this was our neighborhood, and we weren’t going to let them take it away from us, that everybody should calm down and go home. But that’s not the way it worked out, because there were constant confrontations for the next two nights.”

Among gay people, both the organized gay community and those who remained on the sidelines, there was intense debate over how to respond to the riot. On one side were those who wanted the riots and mass protests to continue, and on the other were many who wanted an immediate end to the violence and public demonstrations. One fear among those who wanted peace restored was that the police would retaliate with increased bar raids, harassment, and arrests.

Saturday night, the crowds gathered once again in front of the Stonewall, and this time they included “onlookers, Eastsiders, and rough street people.”

But the majority of the hundreds of people who crowded onto Christopher Street and jammed Sheridan Square were young gay men. And despite some nasty confrontations with the police, there was plenty of humor and camp left over from the previous night. As Lucian Truscott reported: “Friday night’s crowd had returned and was being led in ‘gay power’ cheers by a group of gay cheer-leaders. ‘We are the Stonewall girls/We wear our hair in curls/We have no underwear/We show our pubic hairs!’ … Hand-holding, kissing, and posing accented each of the cheers with a homosexual liberation that had appeared only fleetingly on the street before.”

Not every gay person was thrilled with the very public displays of gay camp and freely expressed same-sex affection. As Truscott observed, “Older boys had strained looks on their faces and talked in concerned whispers as they watched the up-and-coming generation take being gay and flaunt it before the masses.”

The violent challenge to police harassment and repression at the Stonewall Inn was more than enough to earn the riot a place in gay American history. For a variety of reasons, the riot was a key turning point in the gay rights struggle across the country. It led to a virtual explosion of activity and organizing, primarily among young people, in the months and years immediately following.

Operation Liberation

In 1972, a handful of courageous Boston lesbians decided to “liberate” a local straight bar for all women by announcing their lesbian presence. Following is a narrative of that event.

We’d been thinking it would be a good idea to liberate a local bar for women to go to, something that would be different from the expensive institutionalized gay bars. Finally we picked this place that we had an idea was fairly hip, and about fifteen of us went over one Tuesday night. The trouble was, it turned out that our impressions had been slightly off; the clientele that night turned out to consist of a few couples and a number of single men, including some really tough-looking motorcycle gang—type characters. These last in particular really did not dig us at all: As we were dancing, they stood around threateningly, making comments like, “You’re disgusting,” and “What you need is some prick.” Some of them aggressively asked us to dance. Then one of them poured some beer on one of us. She turned round and spilled the rest of his beer into his lap, and others of us came to her support and spilled beer on another guy, who, it turned out, hadn’t actually been being offensive at all. Someone took out a gun and the atmosphere became fairly tense; a number of us decided to leave.

The rest stayed on, dancing in a rather nervous circle that kept being closed in on by three ugly-looking characters, who continued to make insulting comments. Then this woman who had been sitting at the bar and who seemed to have some official connection with the place went up to them and told them to stop harassing us, we weren’t doing them any harm, and they left at her request. When we ourselves split half an hour later we went up and thanked her, and she spoke sympathetically about people who had no place to go. Also, the guy who had been the innocent victim of the beer-throwing came and spoke to us, saying he really admired our guts, and as we walked out the door the barman said. “See you again.”

So the action was, in those terms, a success; it gave us some sense of our strength, as well as of our fears and weaknesses. We plan to go back there again and work toward making it a more comfortable place for us.

HOMOPHILE MAGAZINES

In many ways, the gay and lesbian movement has been as much about words as it has been about action. From the first typewritten newsletters in the 1940s to the glossies of today, gay men and women have used the printed word to communicate the ideas and aspirations of a people to a wider audience.

In 1947, a young secretary in Los Angeles, who took the name Lisa Ben, put her ideas about homosexuality down on paper in her own “magazine,” Vice Versa, produced using carbon paper on her office typewriter. She was able to produce only ten copies of each edition. Ben was not part of an organized movement.

It was the burgeoning homophile movement in the early fifties that spawned what has been termed the “homophile press.” These publications, whose circulation varied from 500 to 5,000, served to unite gay people and fledgling organizations across the country. Along with the organizations and bars, the presses were a critical part of the kinetic energy that shaped the early movement.

Vice Versa — in Explanation

Here are a few excerpts from Vice Versa.

Have you ever stopped to enumerate the many different publications to be found on the average newsstands? There are publications for a variety of races and creeds. A wide selection of fiction is available for those who like mysteries, westerns, science fiction, or romantic stories. For those who prefer fact to fiction, a variety of publications on politics, world affairs, economics, and sports are available. And newsstands fairly groan with the weight of hobby and miscellaneous publications devoted to subjects ranging from radio, engineering, gardening, home improvements, and sailing, to travel, fashions, and health.

Yet, there is one kind of publication that would, I am sure, have a great appeal to a definite group. Such a publication has never appeared on the stands. Newsstands carrying the crudest kind of magazines or pictorial pamphlets appealing to the vulgar would find themselves severely censured were they to display this other type of publication. Why? Because Society decrees it thus.

Hence the appearance of Vice Versa, a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound piles of Convention. The circulation of this publication, under the circumstances, must be very limited, going only to those who, it is felt, will genuinely enjoy such a magazine. This little publication, at present free of charge, will be published whenever there is enough suitable material to warrant the appearance of another edition.

Perhaps even Vice Versa might be the forerunner of better magazines dedicated to the Third Sex that, in some future time, might take their rightful place on the news-stands beside other publications, to be available openly and without restriction to those who wish to read them.

The following is a slightly altered version of a chain letter which has been tickling the funny-bones of quite a few people lately. Here it is adapted to apply to “us folks”:

This chain letter was started in Hollywood in the hope of bringing relief and happiness to tired lesbians. Unlike most chain letters, this one does not cost you any money. Simply send a copy of this letter to five equally tired lesbian friends. Then bundle up your girl-friend and send her to the dyke at the top of the list.

When your name comes to the top of the list, you will receive 17,178 women. Have faith—do not break the chain. One butch broke it and got her own fluff back.

The Homophile Press

The Homophile Movement of the 1950s and 1960s spawned a handful of newsletters and magazines, with names like Tangents, Citizens News, Vector, Town Talk, LCE, News, and the P.R.I.D.E. Newsletter, which later developed into The Advocate. The three major homophile magazines, however, were One magazine, which had an unapologetic voice about being gay; The Ladder, a monthly by and for lesbians; and the Mattachine Review, the magazine affiliated with an early homophile group, the Mattachine Society. The organizations publishing these papers felt that homosexual rights had more to do with shaping the behavior of gay men and lesbians to better fit into society’s restrictions and to keep from getting arrested and losing their jobs—than with changing public attitudes toward that behavior. Still, the fact that such organizations existed at all is commendable.

Homophile magazines provide an up-close-and-personal view of what it was like to be a “deviant” during those early days of the movement. For many gay men and lesbians, the magazines were a kind of survival manual, providing a lifeline to a community otherwise disparate. Articles addressed everything from what to do in case of a police raid to providing news on books being published about homosexuality, and from political essay to advice for the lovelorn.

Sometimes those categories overlapped. Many articles reflected a homophile appeal for “respectability.” They criticized public sex as an act of self-hatred, and often attempted to dissuade people from going to homosexual bars. In one article, using the case of “Janet” the lonely lesbian who was dissatisfied with the “bar crowd,” One pleaded for the establishment of lesbian social centers as an alternative to bars. Acknowledging the impracticability of a “lesbian center,” the magazine nevertheless urged the Janets of the world to investigate the idea: “We hope for the sake of Janet—and all the Janets—that they try, for without some effort on their part, Janet and other homosexual women will never have the opportunity to meet the kind of people with whom they want to associate.”

Just exactly what kind of people are those whom Janet wants to meet? According to One, they must look “safe.” That is, they mustn’t look too homosexual: “Look around you—at the girl with the close-cropped hair, fly-front pants, and oh so masculine voice and mannerisms (what’s she trying to prove?)… at the boy with the rouged face, plucked eyebrows, and flailing arms (and he?); listen to some of the language and remarks; watch them on the streets and in the restaurants; listen to their voices, and watch the way they walk.”

Onealso cautioned it, readers.“In business, advertising is a great asset—in gay life it can be a thorn in your heart.…We don’t have to broadcast! We know each other!”

The Ladder was especially nervous about lesbians who openly flaunted their sexuality. The magazine consistently admonished lesbians to cultivate “respectability,” and that meant dressing and behaving in a manner “acceptable to society.”

A vast majority of gay men and lesbian, around the country weren’t active in or in many cases even aware of the magazines and organizations. Many in the “bar culture” crowd and outside of the homophile movement saw the magazines as either too dogmatic and political or too conservative The homophile movement was also distinctly white and middle class. Still, the homophile magazines are some of the few accounts we have by and for gay people at the time.

Letters to the editor in particular are a rare record of how gay men and women of the era felt about and coped with being homosexual. Their feelings ran the gamut. from the positive: “In God’s sight I feel sure that two people of the same sex are just as much married as a married man and woman if they pledge themselves to one another and art deeply in love”; to the not-so-positive: “Homosexuality is much more than just love between men: It’s a rough and dirty road of shame and despair leading nowhere but to HELL.…I believe anyone wanting to be part of the Homophile Movement should at least be examined once by a psychiatrist or have had some treatment somewhere before he was twenty-one, for being homosexual.”

THE LADDER

The October 1964 Corer of The Ladder,published by the Daughters of Bilitis. The first issue of The Ladder appeared in October 1956, the final issue appeared sixteen years later in the fall of 1972. (Courtesy of Sherry Thomas)

The pages of these magazines chronicle the lives of gay men and women as they struggled to make a place for themselves in American society. Lesbian activist and author Joan Nestle offers a gentle interpretation of The Ladder’s anxiety about lesbian appearances: “The writing in The Ladder was bringing to the surface years of pain, opening a door on an intensely private experience, giving voice to an ‘obscene’ population in a decade of McCarthy witchhunts. To survive meant to take a public stance on societal cleanliness.”

The homophile press withered as the more radical generation of gay and women’s liberation spawned its own publications, which pioneered a politics of openness. Cautious and conservative as they may appear now, the homophile press nonetheless served as a forum for discussion and argument in the formative days of the gay and lesbian “community,” and provided a place for homosexuals to begin to define their politics and culture.

Gay Liberation and Lesbian-Feminist Magazines and Newspapers

Along with the post-Stonewall explosion in gay organizations was an explosion in gay publishing. The following list represents just some of the gay liberation and lesbian-feminist periodicals founded between 1969 and 1972 (an asterisk denotes a lesbian-feminist periodical):

1969

1970

1971

1972

DEVIANT MEDICINE

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, doctors in the United States seized upon European theories of the homosexual “deviant,” drawing upon such German authors as Richard Krafft-Ebing and Karl Henrich Ulrichs. From that time forward, homosexuality was considered a disease by a considerable segment of the medical community. For decades to follow, homosexuals, both male and female, became the subjects of experimentation, stigmatization, and outright torture by the medical community.

It is often assumed that advancements in medicine create a better world for everyone; that discovering cures, identifying diseases, and locating psychological disorders is an impartial, unbiased process toward a great, healthy society. No one knows better than lesbians and gay men how false this can be. In the last century, gay people have been accused by medical and psychological professionals of being psychopathic, hormonally imbalanced, sex-crazed, child-seducing, paranoid, masochistic, immature, and physically defective. Medicine, like all fields of study, is shaped in part by the biases of the people who study it, and the society in which they live. In this section, we illustrate both the ways in which doctors and psychologists have pathologized lesbians and gay men, and the success story of how we became “healthy” again.

Dr. Evelyn Hooker Leading the Fight from Psychopathology to Liberation

“She never treated us like some strange tribe, so we told her things we never told anyone before.”

In post-World War II America, homosexuality was labeled a mental illness by the American psychiatric community, and believed by society in general to be a mental illness, psychopathology, criminal offense, and a sin. But, due largely to the efforts of Dr. Evelyn Hooker, that eventually changed.

art “But what means the most to me, I think, is … if I went to a gay gathering of some kind, I was sure to have at least one person come up to me and say, ‘I wanted to meet you because I wanted to tell you what you saved me from.’ I’m thinking of a young woman who came up to me and said that when her parents discovered she was a lesbian, they put her in a psychiatric hospital. The standard procedure for treating homosexuals in that hospital was electroshock therapy. Her psychiatrist was familiar with my work, and he was able to keep them from giving it to her. She had tears streaming down her face as she told me this. I know that wherever I go, there are men and women for whom my little bit of work and my caring enough to do it has made an enormous difference in their lives.”

DR. EVELYN HOOKER IN MAKING HISTORY

Dr. Hooker began her work in the late 1940s at the urging of a young gay man she had befriended in one of her courses and his friends. In 1953, she applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for a grant to study gay men. This was at the height of the McCarthy era, and homosexuals were one of the primary targets of the nation’s hysteria. Therefore, just securing the government grant was a major accomplishment.

The final paper, presented to the American Psychological Association in 1956, was titled “The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual.” Her controversial and widely publicized findings were that gay men are as well adjusted as straight men.

It took another twenty years of work by Dr. Hooker and other psychologists, and the efforts of the early gay rights movement, but finally in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders, its official list of mental diseases.

Thirteen Theories to “Cure” Homosexuality

Since the late nineteenth century doctors and religious leaders have been attempting to cure the desire for same-sex intimacy. The desire to “cure” homosexuality comes from societal discomfort with same-sex love rather than from any real pathology on the part of lesbians and gay men. Despite claims to the contrary, none of these “cures” work.

• Prostitution Therapy (late nineteenth century): Through sex with prostitutes, “inverted men” would experience co-gender sexual desire. Famous sexologist Havelock Ellis noted that “the treatment was usually interrupted by continual backsliding to homosexual practices, and sometimes this cure involved a venereal disorder.”

• Marriage Therapy (late nineteenth century): When presented with the option of courting and marriage, the “deviant” would naturally go “straight.” Dr. William Hammond, a New York medical researcher, prescribed a gay man “continuous association with virtuous women, and severe study of abstract studies (like math).”

• Cauterization (late nineteenth century): Dr. Hammond also suggested that homosexual patients be “cauterized [at] the nape of the neck and the lower dorsal and lumbar regions” every ten days.

• Castration/Ovary Removal (late nineteenth century): In a pre-Hitler world, the medical community did not consider castration particularly horrific. Aside from believing that removal of the testes would eliminate the sexual drive of the homosexual, many doctors also thought homosexuality to be hereditary.

• Chastity (late nineteenth century): If homosexuality could not be cured, then homosexuals had no moral choice but to remain chaste. Catholic doctor Marc-André Raffalovich confessed that “the tendencies of our time, particularly the prevalent contempt for religion, make chastity more difficult for everyone.”

• Hypnosis (late nineteenth/early twentieth century): New Hampshire doctor John D. Quackenbos claimed that “unnatural passions for persons of the same sex”—like nymphomania, masturbation, and “gross impurity” —could be cured through hypnosis.

• Aversion Therapy (early to mid twentieth century): Reward heterosexual arousal and punish homosexual attraction, often through electric shock. In 1935, New York University’s Dr. Louis Max said of a homosexual male patient that “intensities [of shock] considerably higher than those usually employed on human subjects definitely diminished the value of the stimulus for days after each experimental period.”

• Psychoanalysis (early to mid twentieth century): With Freud came a whole new discussion of possible cures through a psychoanalytic approach. In the 1950s, Edmund Berger, M.D., spoke of homosexuality as a kind of “psychie masochism” in which the unconscious sets a person on a course of self-destruction. Find the cause, such as resentment toward a domineering mother, and you find the cure.

• Radiation Treatment (early to mid twentieth century): X-ray treatments were believed to reduce levels of promiscuous homosexual urges brought on by glandular hyperactivity. In 1933, New York doctor La (Forest Potter lamented Oscar Wilde’s being born too soon, because if he were still alive, “we could [have] subjected the overactive thymus to X-ray radiation, atrophied the gland, and suppressed the overactivity of its function.”

• Hormone Therapy (mid twentieth century): If homosexual men are too effeminate and lesbians are too masculine, steroid treatments would theoretically butch up the boys and femme out the girls. Prolonged use also had effects such as sterility and cancer.

• Lobotomy (mid twentieth century): By cutting nerve fibers in the front of the brain, homosexual drives (indeed, most sexual and even emotional reaction capabilities) were eliminated. Lobotomies for homosexuality were performed until the 1950s in the U.S.

• Psycho-Religious Therapy (mid twentieth century): Religious doctors and therapists combined religious teachings with psychoanalysis to inspire heterosexuality. Man on a Pendulum (1955) written by rabbi/psychoanalyst Israel Gerber, is the “true story” of such a treatment.

• Beauty Therapy (mid twentieth century): All a butch lesbian needs is a good make-over. In Is Homosexuality a Menace? (1957), Dr. Arthur Guy Matthew tells of how he cured a lesbian by getting her hair “professionally coiffured,” teaching her to apply cosmetics—“which she had never used in her life”—and hiring “a fashion expert (not a male homosexual) who selected the most elegant feminine styles for her to bring out the charm and beauty in her body.”

art DID YOU KNOW…

Sigmund Freud did not consider homosexuality a mental illness. In responding to a worried mother, Freud wrote in 1935: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot he classified as an illness; we consider it to he a variation of the sexual development. Many highly respected individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime, and cruelty, too.”

Tribe	Region	Male Role	Female Role
Blackfeet	Plains	ake’skassi	sakwo’mapi akikwan
Cheyenne	Plains	heemaneh’
Cocopa	Southwest	elha	warhamch
Dakota	Plains	wingkta wingkte	koskalaka
Klamath	Colombia Platean	tw!inna’ek	tw!inna’ek
Kutenai	Columbia Plateau	kupalhke’tek	titqattek
Maricopa	Southwest	ilyaxai’	kwiraxame’
Mojave	Southwest	alyha	hwami
Northern Paiute	Great Basin	tuva’sa	moroni noho
Shoshoni	Great Basin	tubasa	nuwuduka waippu sungwe
Zuni	Southwest	lhamana	katsotse