LILLIAN FADERMAN on the Struggle for Gay Rights
“How we went from being pariahs, to being invited to the White House, to being able to serve openly in the military—that’s what I asked myself when I was writing the book. What had to happen before we could achieve the successes that we finally achieved?”
For much of American history, there has been tension between those who felt the American Experiment was “their” experiment and those who felt excluded from it. Those who most visibly felt excluded were slaves, and later their freed descendants. But among those who felt shut out for most of American history but whose exclusion was in some ways less visible and less public—until about fifty years ago—were Americans who were not heterosexual.
While the efforts to expand basic rights to all Americans in the United States started at least a century ago, if not two centuries ago, the effort to ensure that gay people have equal protections and rights is a comparatively recent phenomenon. (Gay is used in this context as the historical umbrella term, as Lillian Faderman has done in her book, to refer to the LGBTQ community.)
The effort to seek these rights did not surface publicly until the late 1960s. Prior to that time, because of prejudice and laws against homosexuality, gay people were generally more focused on not being publicly identified. Those so identified were often arrested or fired from their jobs, or both. Often they accepted that fate, recognizing that American society seemed completely against any effort to legalize gay activity.
That changed in a very public way in late June of 1969 in New York City when the police, in an otherwise routine raid of a gay bar—the Stonewall Inn—met physical resistance from bar patrons to the effort to place them under arrest. For several of the following nights, at Stonewall and in the surrounding neighborhood, there were demonstrations against the arrests and physical resistance to further arrests.
The gay revolution in America might be said to have been born from these events. Gay people organized to seek not only protection from arrests, but also rights that they had long been denied. The effort took many forms—legal challenges, legislative efforts, marches and protests, and public education.
Progress was slower than might have been expected. Not until 2003 did the Supreme Court invalidate state sodomy laws, which had often prohibited any form of gay sexual activity; not until 2015 did the Supreme Court legalize same-sex marriage, long seen by many in the gay community as a basic human right denied to them; and not until 2020 did the Supreme Court state that the protections of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to gay people. These Supreme Court decisions did not resolve all legal issues affecting the gay community, but the progress seen in this century likely could not have been anticipated in the latter years of the previous century.
The effort to describe the fight for gay rights over the past seventy-plus years was tackled quite well by Lillian Faderman in her epic book The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. As a participant in many of the episodes that were part of this revolution, she has firsthand knowledge of many of the critical events described in the book. I had the opportunity to interview her about her book as part of a virtual New-York Historical Society program on September 25, 2020.
DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): What prompted you to write this book? This is a fairly definitive history of the gay revolution. We’ll talk about that phrase, gay revolution, in a moment. You didn’t feel there was enough literature on this already?
LILLIAN FADERMAN (LF): All of my books come out of a personal desire to know something. I came out in the 1950s, into the gay-girls, working-class bar culture. Things were absolutely awful. We were victimized by the police, we were crazies to the mental health profession, we were subversives to the government.
I wanted to know how we got from 1956, when I came out as a teenager, to what was happening in the Obama administration, when one of my great heroes, Frank Kameny—who had been fired from his government job in the late 1950s because he was a homosexual—had been invited to the White House no less than eight times. How did that happen?
Just about the time I was ready to write the book, when I was putting together a proposal, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was finally repealed. It was such an incredible evolution. How we went from being pariahs, to being invited to the White House, to being able to serve openly in the military—that’s what I asked myself when I was writing the book. What had to happen before we could achieve the successes we finally achieved?
DR: You call your book The Gay Revolution. Why do you use the word gay, not gay and lesbian?
LF: My original title was Our America Too: A Gay and Lesbian History. I realized I wanted to add bisexual, and then I wanted to add transgender. But by the time I finished the book, the alphabetism was LGBTQQIAAPP. There wasn’t enough room on the cover for all of that to describe our entire community.
When I came out, gay was the umbrella term for all of us in the 1950s. The straight world really didn’t know that gay meant homosexual. It had been an underground term, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century.
DR: Your book mostly is from the 1940s and ’50s forward. In the beginning of our country, I assume there were gay and lesbian people, but there was no mention of it. What was going on the 1700s and 1800s?
LF: They wouldn’t have called themselves gay or lesbian. Homosexual was a term that was coined in the nineteenth century. In the course of my research for other books, I discovered a very interesting case of a woman in 1642, who was sentenced to be “severely whipped and fined” for being caught on a bed with another woman.
Of course there were women who had relationships with other women. There was evidence of men who were whipped and, in one case, even hanged for having committed sodomy, but it was thought that anyone could commit an “immoral act” of that nature.
It wasn’t an identity. There was no such thing as “the homosexual”—no such thing as a person who declared, “This is my identity.” There were certainly sodomites, there were women who committed “unnatural acts,” but identity began to develop in the nineteenth century.
DR: In ancient Greece and Rome, it was fairly common to have homosexual relationships, and it wasn’t looked upon with great horror. Why do you think, as civilization advanced for several thousand years, that changed? Was it religion?
LF: It was the Judeo-Christian religion. Same-sex relationships, or sodomy as we came to call it, became a sin. Western culture inherited that notion. It was considered sinful, men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women. The sexologists who emerged in the later nineteenth century also pathologized homosexuality. So it became a sin on the one hand and a pathology on the other hand.
DR: Let’s go to the 1940s and 1950s. In the United States, you didn’t need to be caught doing something that was a homosexual act. If you were just thought to have engaged in this practice, you could be arrested. Isn’t that right?
LF: You could be arrested if you were caught in a gay bar. Gay men were very often entrapped by vice-squad officers. In the 1950s, if you were thought to be homosexual, if you worked for the government, even if you worked in a private business, if you were thought to be homosexual, you could be fired. And many homosexuals were.
There was a real witch hunt of homosexuals, beginning in the State Department, and it filtered down to homosexuals in all government, a witch hunt that fired numerous gay men and lesbians. Businesses emerged such as Fidelifacts that offered private companies a thorough investigation of employees or potential employees to see if they were homosexuals. If you were a known homosexual in the 1950s, it was very hard to be employed.
DR: The gay community organized a bit in the 1950s. Gays had the Mattachine Society, and lesbians organized the Daughters of Bilitis. Those organizations weren’t saying, “Let’s go lobby for our rights, let’s go to the Supreme Court.” They were saying, “Let’s just talk about our challenges and how we can help each other.” Is that more or less right?
LF: The founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, wanted to be a little more political than the women who joined were interested in being. And so it became primarily an organization, and a fairly small one, that offered an alternative to the very dangerous lesbian bars.
Mattachine wanted to get rid of the sodomy laws. They were a little more political, but they started small. A huge victory for them was a case in Los Angeles with a man by the name of Dale Jennings, who was entrapped by an undercover officer. The Mattachine Society decided that they would fight that. They sponsored Dale Jennings going to court. He said, “Yes, I’m a homosexual, but just because I’m a homosexual does not mean I’m guilty of what I was charged with.”
And they won the case. It was that kind of very small victory, usually local victories, in the 1950s.
DR: In the 1950s and 1960s, there was an organization in Congress called the House Un-American Activities Committee. They interested themselves in homosexual activities. Were they trying to get people to admit that they were homosexual and get them out of government?
LF: Beginning in the late 1940s, a man by the name of John Peurifoy, who was the undersecretary of state, decided that would be a good thing to do. It would give him a major role to play in government. He announced that he had identified ninety-one homosexuals who were working in the State Department and fired them.
This was the beginning of a witch hunt of homosexuals at all levels of government, not only the State Department. Homosexuals simply could not work in government. The original idea was that it was so terrible to be a homosexual, if the Soviets found out about it, they could easily blackmail the person into giving away state secrets. But people were fired who had jobs that had nothing to do with the nation’s security, and it ballooned from there. Hundreds of people were fired from federal employment and then state employment and private businesses as well.
It wasn’t simply that there was a concern that homosexuals were a threat to the nation’s security because they could be blackmailed. It was also a moral prejudice against homosexuals that spread like a virus.
DR: Were any members of Congress standing on the floor of the House or Senate saying, “These individuals have certain rights under our Constitution and we shouldn’t be doing these things to them”?
LF: No, because it was absolutely not believed that we had rights under the Constitution. It took a long, hard fight to convince politicians that homosexuals, or LGBTQ people as we would say today, had any rights under the Constitution.
The first battle that was won was won by a magazine called ONE that came out of the Mattachine Society. It was a homophile magazine. In 1954, it was declared obscene. There was absolutely nothing obscene about it, but the Post Office announced that it would not mail copies of the magazine.
ONE decided, with the help of the ACLU, that they would fight for their rights. They fought first in California courts, went all the way to the Supreme Court. And in 1958, the Supreme Court actually declared that ONE had a right to publish. This was the first real legal victory for the lesbian and gay community.
DR: The psychiatric community, what did they say about homosexuality?
LF: In 1952, the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was published. It was sort of the bible for the psychiatric community. And homosexuality was there as a mental disorder. Frank Kameny, one of the great heroes of the gay rights movement, realized that homosexuals would never get their rights as long as they were considered mentally disordered.
Finally, in 1973, because of his activism and the activism of other gay and lesbian people such as Barbara Gittings and Jack Nichols, the American Psychiatric Association decided that they would declassify homosexuality per se from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
There was some wonderful research that they had simply ignored. For instance, in the 1950s, a psychologist by the name of Evelyn Hooker did an absolutely crucial study in which she asked thirty gay men and thirty heterosexual men to do a battery of diagnostic tests that psychiatrists used to decide if someone was mentally disordered. These were blind tests.
She then gave the results to specialists, psychiatrists, specialists in the field. She asked them to distinguish between the homosexuals and the heterosexuals in those diagnostic tests, and they could not make that distinction.
This was in the 1950s that Evelyn Hooker did her work. It was totally ignored by the American Psychiatric Association until Frank Kameny and other activists insisted that they look at such research. That was influential in convincing the APA that we were not mentally disordered.
DR: Some people would say that the most important date in the gay revolution was in July of 1969, when the New York Police Department raided a gay bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn. What happened that night?
LF: The first response was actually June 28, 1969. The police did what they had done for decades. They decided they would raid the Stonewall Inn. They came in, lights went up, they asked for everyone’s ID. To some people they said, “Okay, you can go.” Those people went out.
Usually, if the police raided a gay bar and dismissed someone after looking at his ID or her ID, that person would be so delighted that they would just run off. But this time they waited outside, they waited for their friends, and a crowd began to congregate. It was Greenwich Village, after all. The crowd got bigger and bigger.
Finally the police took out a very butch lesbian and put her in the police car. The other door of the police car was open. She got out the other door, they threw her back in, she got out the other door, they threw her in again, and she escaped once more.
She said to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?” And somebody threw a rock. That was the beginning of the riots that lasted four nights.
It happened at the end of the 1960s, in June 1969, after a whole decade of protests by people for their rights, protests against the wrongs that the government had done. This was the decade of the protests against the Vietnam War, for instance. It was the decade of Black Power and protests for Black civil rights. It was the decade when feminists were doing zaps on the American beauty pageant, for instance.
Whether it was conscious on the part of the rioters or if it was subconscious, gay people realized that they had to send a message that they weren’t putting up with this abuse anymore. And I think that’s why these Stonewall riots happened on that particular night.
DR: After the civil rights protests and the Vietnam War protests of the 1960s, it was recognized by the gay community that if you did some protesting, marches on Washington, you might actually get more attention. Is it fair to say that, subsequent to Stonewall, the gay community began to say, “Let’s do more things publicly and actively”?
LF: The first protests were in 1965, when Frank Kameny organized pickets of the White House and the Pentagon and the State Department. At the first protest in April of 1965 at the White House, there were ten picketers, but they were so brave. They were carrying signs saying, “We’re homosexuals and we demand our civil rights.” They also picketed Independence Hall in Philadelphia on July 4. They did that every year until 1969.
DR: In the late 1970s, I worked in the White House for President Carter, and an aide to President Carter, Midge Costanza, invited a number of gays to come to the White House for a meeting. Why did that cause such a big controversy?
LF: She had the job of being his window to the world, as Midge Costanza liked to call it. She would very often meet with various groups, such as veterans groups or women’s groups. She thought it was perfectly plausible to invite those fourteen lesbian and gay leaders to the White House. President Carter conveniently was at Camp David. He was not present.
Nothing much came out of that meeting except that it was a huge morale boost to the gay community. But President Carter suffered a lot of flak from that meeting. He was very uncomfortable when he discovered what had happened.
DR: President Carter lost his effort for reelection and he was succeeded by Ronald Reagan. Reagan, as president, saw that a number of men who were gay were dying of a disease that later became known as AIDS. What was the impact of AIDS in the gay community initially? And why was Ronald Reagan unwilling to utter the word “AIDS,” at least for a number of years?
LF: The impact was huge. Ultimately, over three hundred thousand people died before protease inhibitors were distributed to stop the deaths from AIDS. The religious right was delighted that this was happening. Pat Buchanan, for instance, wrote numerous editorials about “this is God’s judgment on the homosexual community; before they were spreading their moral disease, and now they’re spreading their physical disease to innocent people.” He and others on the far right wanted people to be quarantined or homosexuals to be tattooed.
The religious right victimized the gay community, and the government did absolutely nothing. Larry Speakes was Ronald Reagan’s press secretary. He made a joke of AIDS. He was asked about it by a reporter, and he said, “I don’t have it. Do you? Homosexuals get it.”
Reagan never mentioned AIDS for years into his presidency. Even when his good friend Rock Hudson, the movie star, died of AIDS, he would not acknowledge that’s what killed his buddy.
Reagan finally mentioned AIDS in 1987. Because we had no leadership from the White House, people in Congress were permitted to go ahead with their prejudices. People like Jesse Helms said that the only funding should go to abstinence education rather than research to figure out how to get rid of this disease.
Because there was no leadership in the White House in the 1980s, it was a huge tragedy. Reagan was in good part responsible for the fact that AIDS was not stemmed until the 1990s.
DR: Subsequently, President Bill Clinton, at the beginning of his administration, was under some pressure to allow gays to serve in the military, but the military resisted that. What was the compromise that was developed?
LF: Clinton was very much beloved by the lesbian and gay community when he was running for office, and he actually made some promises. One was that if he were elected president, he would make sure that gays and lesbians could serve openly in the military. I think it was a sincere promise. It was one of the first things he tried to do when he took office.
He learned very quickly that there was a lot of blowback from the military. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was supposed to be a compromise. If you were gay or lesbian, you could serve in the military as long as you didn’t talk about it.
There wouldn’t be witch hunts as there were in the military before. People wouldn’t be dismissed when it was discovered that they were homosexual, but the job would be to keep it a secret. But it didn’t work, because eventually people were outed. They suffered almost as much as they had before.
DR: There was also an effort by Congress in those days to pass a bill called the Defense of Marriage Act, which basically said that states couldn’t allow homosexuals or lesbians to marry. President Clinton, under a lot of pressure, signed that legislation. What was the impact of that legislation on the country at that time?
LF: What had happened is that in Hawaii, three same-sex couples in 1991 made an issue of it. They wanted to get married, and finally went to the Hawaiian courts in ’93. By 1996, it looked as though the State Supreme Court of Hawaii was going to approve same-sex marriage.
Immediately various other states reacted by passing their own state Defense of Marriage Acts. There was pressure on Clinton in 1996 to sign a federal Defense of Marriage Act. He was up for reelection and he threw us under the bus, as sympathetic as I know he was to the gay community. He appointed many lesbians and gays to various offices in his administration, but he also wanted to get reelected.
DR: Eventually the gay community began to litigate that issue, among others, and a number of important issues went to the United States Supreme Court. And the court, in opinions authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, basically said it was illegal to deny gays certain rights.
How did that impact the gay community? Were people surprised that somebody appointed by Ronald Reagan would write such important decisions for the future of the gay and lesbian community?
LF: It began in the 1990s with Romer v. Evans, involving a Colorado law that came to the Supreme Court that said that gay people could not petition their government for equal rights and cities and counties in Colorado couldn’t pass “special laws” [banning discrimination against] homosexuals.
Homosexuals challenged that, and it went all the way to the Supreme Court. Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, saying that you could not make one class of citizens a stranger to the law. He said that [the state’s] Amendment 2 was unconstitutional, that Colorado could not say cities and counties could not give gay people equal rights.
Then, in 2003, Justice Kennedy wrote another very surprising majority opinion, in Lawrence v. Texas. That repealed all of the sodomy laws. There were only about thirteen states that still had sodomy laws by that time. But because of the Supreme Court, so-called sodomy was no longer illegal. It was one’s constitutional right to privacy.
Sodomy, I should say, did not refer to just one specific act. In some states it referred to any act that was outside of the marriage act. Lesbians too were often penalized and punished under the sodomy law.
Then Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion on the Edith Windsor case. At that time there were several states that already permitted same-sex marriage, including New York, but the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriage.
So when her partner died, Edith Windsor was supposed to pay the federal government an inheritance tax that amounted to over one-third of a million dollars. If she had been heterosexual and married, she wouldn’t have had to pay that tax. So that went to the Supreme Court. And again, Justice Kennedy wrote the wonderful majority opinion saying that the Defense of Marriage Act in that case was illegal. And Edith Windsor did not have to pay one-third of a million dollars.
Finally he wrote the majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which said that it was unconstitutional to deny same-sex couples the right to marry. That was in 2015.
DR: The gay and lesbian community has obviously received a lot of support from the Supreme Court in recent cases, as you’ve mentioned. How has the Congress done? Has it been willing to make changes in existing laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act to accommodate gay issues?
LF: The Congress has not yet been as sympathetic. In 1974 and again in 1975, Bella Abzug and Ed Koch [both representatives from New York City] tried to get Congress to pass an equality act, which would have added lesbians and gays to the 1964 and 1968 Civil Rights Acts. That didn’t get much traction at all. It had never gotten traction, but it’s again up for discussion in Congress.
But what happened more recently, last June, with the Supreme Court, which was just such a welcome surprise is that the court declared that LGBTQ people really fit under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The act banned discrimination on the basis of sex, and the court said that should apply to LGBTQ people.
There were three cases before the Supreme Court, two cases of gay men and one of a transgender woman. Astonishingly and wonderfully, John Roberts and Neil Gorsuch sided with the liberal justices, and Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion there. So the Supreme Court in some ways has been truly wonderful.
DR: In recent years, there have been some fights in certain state legislatures about allowing transgender individuals to use certain bathrooms. What has that fight been about, and where does it now stand?
LF: There was a false allegation that straight, cisgendered men would dress as women just to get into the women’s bathroom. I don’t think there’s a single case in which that has happened.
It has caused a huge uproar, particularly from the religious right. In Houston, Texas, for instance, there was a liberal mayor who was usually popular, Annise Parker. The transgender bathroom issue became huge when she was up for reelection. It was presented in such a way by the religious right that it scared voters that there would be all of these straight guys dressing as women, invading women’s bathrooms in order to rape women. Parker lost her office, which was a tragedy. That kind of thing has happened in various cities and counties around the country.
DR: Were you surprised that the business community and the sporting community sided with those who cared about civil rights and civil liberties on those issues?
LF: I was so pleased by it. There was one instance where I was particularly delighted, and that was in the state of Indiana. There was a so-called Religious Freedoms Bill that was going to be signed by, at that time, Governor Mike Pence, and the business community stepped up, beginning with Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com and Angie Hicks of Angie’s List and a number of other major businesses. They said, “This is discriminatory, and if you sign it, we are not doing business in Indiana.” And Governor Pence backed down. It became a bill that was not so patently discriminatory against the LGBTQ community. Then he became vice president.
DR: As you look back on the last seventy years or so, who would you say are the one or two most important people in terms of winning rights for gays and lesbians?
LF: My great hero is Frank Kameny because he saw it all. He understood what needed to be done. He understood that we had to come out. He understood that the American Psychiatric Association had to stop calling us mentally ill. He began those early battles that finally we won. He had such vision. He’s, for me, the grandfather of gay rights.
Another person who was very important in the movement, someone I wrote a biography about, in fact, is Harvey Milk. Now, Harvey Milk had huge charisma. He was a wonderful speaker, had terrific ideas. He wasn’t in office very long, but he played a role that was tragic and yet very important for the movement. He became our martyr. He became our instance of “This is what homophobes do to gay people, and this is a huge injustice.” I think that the straight world understood our grief because he was martyred.
DR: For those who may not know, Harvey Milk was elected to be a supervisor in San Francisco—I think the first openly gay person to be elected to a major position in the United States.
LF: There were two women who were elected to public office in 1974, two lesbians, but he was the first openly gay man in public office.
DR: He was assassinated while in his offices. Ultimately the killer went to jail.
LF: He was given a wrist slap of something like eight years, and he got three years off for good behavior. He was a fellow supervisor who had made it clear all along that he hated the gay community and hated Harvey Milk. It was certainly a homophobic act on his part.
DR: If you look back on the gay revolution, would you say the most important or seminal event was the Stonewall rioting? What would you say are the one or two most important events?
LF: Stonewall was very important, not because of the event itself, which could easily have gotten lost to history, but because of what happened afterward. Immediately young people realized they had to organize, and they had to organize militantly. There had been these organizations in the 1950s, like Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis, but they were not militant organizations. Frank Kameny had these very important pickets in front of the White House and the State Department, but they didn’t attract many people.
The Gay Liberation Front that emerged out of Stonewall decided that we would do marches, pride parades that attracted, in the beginning, thousands of people, and then eventually hundreds of thousands of people. And then marches on Washington that attracted almost a million people to one of the marches, in 1993. Stonewall was a huge trigger in bringing to young people’s attention that there is a cause to fight for here.
DR: What would you like the government of the United States or society to do to make certain that gays and lesbians have the rights they’re entitled to?
LF: What the Supreme Court decided in June 2020 was crucial, but there needs to be the equality act that Bella Abzug and Ed Koch introduced in 1974 and in 1975 to assure the rights of the LGBTQ community. Because as has happened in many places, you can get married on a Sunday and still be fired from your job on a Monday. Hopefully because of the Supreme Court decision, that won’t happen so often, but the word needs to be spread that the Supreme Court made that decision last June.
DR: Should somebody use the word gay, lesbian, or an acronym? What would you say is the right way to identify people?
LF: Our community is so diverse in terms of all demographics, race and class and generation. People of my generation, for instance, will never adjust to the word queer. Young people love it. It’s a good umbrella term for young people. I prefer lesbian or gay. A lot of people now, within the community, call themselves nonbinary. I think it’s important to ask someone what their preferred pronouns are. Maybe the best approach is always to ask, “How should I refer to you?”