A Queer History of the United States (25 page)

These neighborhoods were often in the less prosperous sections of cities. One reason is that most veterans, even those with access to GI Bill benefits, had little money. A second is that the small-scale economy of these areas facilitated affordable retail space—a necessary building block for newly forming communities, especially since many lesbians and gay men decided to start their own businesses. Having made the decision to be more open about their sexuality, they understood they might have a difficult time finding employment; going into business for themselves allowed them to act, dress, and speak as they chose. And if they were veterans, they could take advantage of the GI Bill’s business loan guaranty program. (These businesses are the source of the stereotype of a gay man running an antique shop or a lesbian running a dog-grooming service.) Third, the less affluent neighborhoods of a city were often less policed—a plus for lesbians and gay men, who were acutely aware of how social and legally marginalized they were. But lower-income urban neighborhoods also had their disadvantages; for example, city officials were less interested in providing services such as street cleaning. Furthermore, a distinctly homosexual neighborhood allowed the police to always know where homosexuals were.

The lesbian and gay bar was a central pillar of these communities. It offered space for socializing, hearing community news, and meeting new friends or sexual partners. Boston’s gay bar scene in the late 1940s ranged from the upscale Napoleon Club in Bay Village, where jackets and ties were required, to the Lighthouse in the city’s notorious Scollay Square, which catered to sailors and gay male civilians.
30
Not far from the Napoleon Club was Vickie’s, a lesbian bar in the Hotel St. Moritz, and Cavana’s, a tough bar described by the
Mid-Town Journal,
a local scandal sheet, as “the bistro where muscular amazons, who could punch as hard as Popeye after he had eaten three cans of spinach, would cuddle blonde cuties on their laps as they guzzled boilermakers.”
31
Many of these neighborhoods had nightclubs featuring performers who played to homosexual audiences using lesbian- and gay-specific language, stories, and songs.

These bars and clubs promoted the crossover appeal of drag performers and gay comics, who blurred gender and sexual lines as they had earlier in the century. The Jewel Box Revue, which started in 1930, was an elaborate touring show of female impersonators, lavish spectacle, and gay-themed comedy. The revue played smaller clubs, such as the Garden of Allah, but also large theaters in cities such as New York, where the show headlined at Loews State Theater at Forty-fourth Street and Broadway and Harlem’s Apollo Theater. In production numbers such as “It’s an Old Mannish Custom” and “Can’t Do a Show Without Girls,” the performers spoofed and took seriously the conventions of gender roles.

These overtly homosexual shows were sometimes unwelcome in smaller cities. Butch lesbian singer Frances Faye, born Frances Cohen in Brooklyn, had a far easier time as a performer in small clubs. Noted enough to appear in a 1937 Bing Crosby film and on television, she was famous for singing jazz and show tunes in nightclubs. In the mid-1940s she began tossing off bawdy lines and references to homosexuality in songs, often adding, “It’s not dirty, it’s just how I say it.” In the late 1940s she was hardly hiding her lesbianism, and in the late 1950s she was chanting at the end of her act, “Frances Faye, all the way, gay gay gay, is there any other way?”

Sometimes bars, especially in small cities, were the only site to offer community across class and gender differences. Ricardo Brown writes that “Kirmser’s was the underground queer bar in St. Paul, a hidden sanctuary for homosexual men and women in the 1940s.”
32
Homosexuals new in town would hear about a bar or club in any number of ways. Sometime bars would advertise in code. Boston’s College Inn Club ran advertisements that boasted the club had “Singing Waiters—New York Style.”
33
Often when local newspapers ran exposés of “sex pervert” arrests, they would mention the bar name; this too would be a key—albeit an intimidating one—to finding community.

The growth of the new gay and lesbian communities can be better understood in conjunction with how other marginalized groups were treated in cities. Race, configured differently in each city, helped define the character and the political cultures of gay bars and communities. Marc Stein writes about how complicated the racial politics were in Philadelphia during the 1940s and 1950s, when the racially diverse city was becoming less segregated. While many white homosexuals were moving to or visiting Center City, the emerging “gay neighborhood,” their African American counterparts were living and socializing in the neighborhoods in which they were born.
34

Racial tension and violence were also indicative of widespread sexual anxiety. In June 1943 a small group of white sailors claimed they were jumped by Mexican Americans wearing zoot suits—long jackets with wide, padded shoulders worn over high-waisted, pegged pants. After the accusation, two hundred sailors swept through East Los Angeles and attacked all men wearing zoot suits. Many of those attacked were teenage boys, some as young as twelve or thirteen. The victims, accused of draft dodging and assaulting white women, were stripped and thrown into the gutter, their clothing burned. The riots continued for several days; the police did nothing to stop the thousands of servicemen who were displacing their sexual anxieties onto “illegal” Mexican American youths. After Eleanor Roosevelt condemned the riots as stemming from anti-Mexican discrimination, the
Los Angeles Times
attacked her for communist leanings. The zoot-suit riots were a turning point for the Mexican American community and organizing, and “the racial battles of the 1940s promoted a clear and increasingly powerful model of oppression-driven group-based political power.”
35

Seven years later, William Parker—whom many in the homosexual community dubbed “Wild Bill Parker”—became chief of police in Los Angeles. His approach to law enforcement has been characterized as “Confront and command. Control the streets at all times. Always be aggressive. Stop crimes before they happen. Seek them out. Shake them down. Make that arrest.” Parker’s tough stance was clearly an attack on targeted groups. Not surprisingly, the arrests of those accused of “sex perversion” crimes skyrocketed. Police misbehavior, ranging from intimidation, threats, illegal searches, and blackmail to out-and-out violence, is never aimed at only one marginalized community. The growth of the new gay and lesbian communities, shaped not only by their members by outside forces, can be understood only in conjunction with how other marginalized communities are treated in these cities.
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Interracial marriage was criminalized in many states—and would be until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling
Loving v. Virginia—
and interracial dating was frowned upon. Even so, there was probably more conscious discussion of interracial relationships and racism in homosexual than in heterosexual communities. Sometimes these social arrangements were complicated. In Buffalo, New York, most African American lesbians met one another through a circuit of house parties. The more upscale and nonhomosexual black nightclubs, such as Little Harlem and Club Moonglo, were open to both black and white patrons and were hospitable to lesbians, thus creating a congenial interracial space for socializing.
37
In his July 7, 1943, diary entry, Donald Vining, who was working at the front desk of the William Sloane House YMCA in Manhattan, notes that two men, one “very blond” and the other a “very black negro sailor,” who were possibly a couple, came in looking for a double room, which they could not rent because the Y was full. While his fellow clerks voiced racist opinions, Vining wrote the following ambiguous, disconcerting self-reflection:

At all of which I sigh, for nothing has made me so hopeful and happy in a long time as the sight of that blond and the inky black sailor together, asking for a double. I suppose there’s a certain amount of hypocrisy in me that lauds such a relationship and shrinks from sex with the many negroes who frequent the Lyric and even the Apollo, but the fact that one grants equality to other races doesn’t seem to me to mean that you necessarily should be willing to sleep with them. But is my revulsion a kind of prejudice? I don’t know but I think not.
38

Awareness of a shared minority status across race, complicated by racial and gender tensions, led naturally to a homosexual political identity. This political identity, formed within a potentially vibrant, self-supporting social structure, took root in major American cities after the war and grew into the LGBT movement that we know today.

Nine. Visible Communities/Invisible Lives

Gay men and lesbians had been forming community over the previous century. After World War II, they began to methodically create national organizations to address injustices against them. This incorporation of political concerns with a cultural community was the beginning of today’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movement. America had long been a country of joiners, often around nationalistic or patriotic associations and especially after wars. Combining the intents of organizations such as the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, a social club founded in 1868; the American Legion, a veterans’ organization founded in 1919; and the Knights of Columbus, a benevolent society founded in 1881 for Irish immigrant men, homosexuals slowly formed their own “homophile” groups.

In 1945 a few homosexual men in New York formed the Veterans Benevolent Association and sponsored well-attended dances and parties. In 1947, Edith Eyde, a secretary at Hollywood’s RKO Pictures, wrote and typed each issue of the first American homosexual publication,
Vice Versa—
subtitled “America’s Gayest Magazine”—using the pseudonym “Lisa Ben” (an anagram for “lesbian”). Her purpose was to find and befriend other lesbians; she gave copies to friends to pass around. A year later in Los Angeles, Merton L. Bird, an African American man, and his lover, W. Dorr Legg, started the Knights of the Clocks. (“Clocks” was an acronym for “Cloistered Loyal Order of the Conclaved Knights of Sophisticracy.”) One of its purposes, as Legg noted in his 1956 book
Homosexuals Today: A Handbook of Organizations and Publications,
was to
“promote fellowship and understanding between homosexuals themselves, specifically between other races and the Negro, as well as to offer its members aid in securing employment and suitable housing. Special attention was given to the housing problems of interracial couples of which there were several in the group.”
1
The Knights existed for three or four years, hosting dinners, socials, and (according to some) the occasional sex party.

There is a commonly held belief that the 1950s were marked by national economic prosperity, traditional family life, sexual restraint, and a well-meaning conservatism, in clear contrast to the 1960s, a decade of radicalism and violent social change. Such simplistic categorization is misleading. In 1955, tranquilizers were rarely prescribed, but their “consumption reached 462,000 pounds in 1958 and soared to 1.15 million pounds merely a year later.”
2
Mid-decade, forty to fifty million people—25 percent of Americans—were poor, and 60 percent of those over age sixty-five had annual incomes of less than one thousand dollars.
3
At the 1960 Republican National Convention, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI and possibly a homosexual, warned the country that “the three most dangerous groups in America are communists, beatniks, and eggheads.” The FBI, seeking to discredit Martin Luther King Jr., spent enormous amounts of time and money spying on his private life. Cold War politics gave rise to reactionary policies, and the Kennedy administration drastically increased military spending—nine billion dollars in the first fourteen months of the administration—dangerously ramping up the arms race. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, homosexuality was far from being “unspoken,” as popular thinking has it; America was increasingly obsessed with it.

Sex and the Beginnings of a Movement

Key to this obsession was the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
in January 1948, permanently changing how Americans discussed sexuality. The Kinsey Report, as it was commonly known, was a detailed, scientific study of American male sexual activity. Kinsey, who had made his reputation studying the anatomy, biology, and behavior of gall wasps, recruited a team of trained interviewers to gather data from twelve thousand men, then used the data from 5,300 of them to produce preliminary conclusions about male sexual behavior. The findings were nuanced by age, economic class, and education level. Kinsey was interested only in his informants’ behavior, not in how they understood their identity. In the report’s “Historical Introduction,” he explained that his study was “an attempt to accumulate an objectively determined body of fact about sex which strictly avoids social or moral interpretations of the fact.”
4
Kinsey’s statistics and in-depth analysis discussed multiple aspects of sexuality, including fantasy, masturbation, premarital sex, and sexual contacts with animals. As the United States attempted to readjust to an overtly heterosexual paradigm after World War II, Americans found Kinsey’s findings on homosexuality the most shocking. Not only were the findings initially unbelievable, they demanded to be acknowledged as scientific.

The Kinsey Report was a media sensation, joked about in popular songs, Broadway plays, and television shows. The mainstream press carefully, and accurately, extracted some remarkable statistics: 37 percent of all males had some form of homosexual contact between their teen years and old age; 50 percent of males who remained single until the age of thirty-five had overt homosexual experiences to orgasm; 10 percent of males were more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five; 4 percent of males were exclusively homosexual throughout their lives.
5

Five years later, in 1953, Kinsey released
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
.
This study received less attention, perhaps because Kinsey estimated that the incidence of homosexual behavior in women was half of what he found in men. He did note, however, that the incidence of female orgasm was far higher in homosexual than heterosexual contacts.
6

Americans now understood that homosexuals were everywhere, even if you could not see them. Kinsey devised a simple scale of sexual experience, now called the Kinsey scale. The scale ranged from 0, indicating exclusively heterosexual encounters, to 6, for a person who has experienced only homosexual encounters.

Kinsey’s findings were vilified by clergy, conservative journalists, and traditional psychoanalysts. Although some Americans were outraged, most were fascinated. This was why
From Here to Eternity
and
The Naked and the Dead
were best sellers. Along with this fascination came questioning. Undoubtedly “the report gave rise to a culture of suspicion surrounding male identity and sexuality.”
7
This new atmosphere of doubt was hinted at, but also openly articulated. Shortly after the Kinsey Report’s publication,
Life
magazine reported that “new worlds of suspicion . . . were opened to doubting wives by Kinsey’s revelations on men.”
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In the old way of thinking, the “invert” was immediately identifiable by his effeminate affect; but this new, hidden homosexual could be lurking anywhere, in any male. And he was a direct threat to heterosexuality. It was in this context that the homophile groups were founded.

The emergence of political action from within a community predicated on finding sexual partners was not only logical but vital. Although elements of politicized community and sexuality are present in Edith Eyde’s work and the Knights of the Clocks, it was Harry Hay, a labor organizer with ties to the Communist Party, who brought those elements together. While circulating a petition for the Stockholm Peace Pledge in the late 1940s, as well as looking for men with whom to discuss the Kinsey Report, Hay connected with like-minded thinkers. Several months later, in November 1950, the Mattachine Society was born. Hay’s training in Communist Party ideology and his conceptualization of the Mattachine Society were directly linked and had lasting influences on LGBT organizing. (Hay resigned from the Communist Party in 1951 because of its antihomosexual stance.)

Using Marxist cultural theory, Hay understood homosexuals to be a distinct and oppressed class of people able to combat ignorance with education and organize against the prejudice of the dominant culture. Rather than simply shared sexual desires, this new cohesive identity was based on common political concerns as well as a distinctive history and culture. The group’s “missions and purposes” stated in part: “The Mattachine Society holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a consequence of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow-minorities—the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish Peoples. The Society believes homosexuals can lead well-adjusted, wholesome, and socially productive lives once ignorance and prejudice against them is successfully combated, and once homosexuals feel they have a dignified and useful role to play in society.”
9

The Mattachine Society—the name was derived from a French Renaissance secret fraternity of unmarried men—was organized on a Communist Party model of individual cells and hierarchical membership. The society was made up mainly of gay men, but included lesbians. To attract new members, the organization sponsored lectures, socials, and discussion groups. A few members started a publication, and the first issue of
ONE
came out in January 1953. Sold through subscription, and eventually on newsstands in large cities, it was published until 1972. (Its highest circulation was five thousand in 1960.) One of Mattachine’s first actions was to protest the arrest of Dale Jennings, a member arrested for “lewd and dissolute behavior” in 1952. This protest was indicative of the group’s commitment to challenge police harassment and arrests of women and men in bars and cruising grounds. Given the institutionalized hostility homosexuals faced, Mattachine’s growth was rapid. By 1953 it had over two thousand members and sponsored over a hundred discussion groups.

Mattachine’s growth brought political diversity. With a membership that entertained a wide range of opinions, the organization found it difficult to maintain its radical vision, especially since Mattachine was clearly connected to the political left. This was a concern because “McCarthyism,” the communist witch hunt begun by Senator Joseph McCarthy in 1947, was gripping Washington. The “red scare” of McCarthyism led directly to the “lavender scare,” a conflation of communism with homosexuality. David K. Johnson notes that “over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, approximately 1,000 persons were dismissed from the Department of State for alleged homosexuality. The highest profile cases may have involved suspicion of communism, but the majority of those separated were alleged homosexuals.”
10

The Mattachine Society underwent a major ideological split in 1953, when some members disagreed with Hay’s concept of a distinct homosexual culture. During the national convention, Marilyn Rieger and others argued that homosexual equality would happen only “by declaring ourselves, by integrating . . . not as homosexuals but as people, as men and women whose homosexuality is irrelevant to our ideals, our principles, and our aspirations.”
11
This split also produced, in 1955,
The Mattachine Review,
which reflected Rieger’s ideological stance. (It continued publication until 1966, with a circulation never larger than 2,500.) This major distinction—between claiming an outsider status and demanding acceptance as part of the “normal” majority—has remained, in various forms, the defining division in the LGBT movement.

This split did not affect the emergence of a lesbian movement in 1955, when Phyllis Lyon, Del Martin, and three other lesbian couples, two of them interracial, formed the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Unlike the Mattachine Society, whose founding was intentionally political, the DOB was conceptualized as a social group and a way to meet other lesbians. Lyon and Martin chose “daughters” because it sounded respectable (like Daughters of the American Revolution), adding Bilitis, a fictional lesbian in Pierre de Louys’s nineteenth-century poetry cycle
Songs of Bilitis.
Like “Mattachine,” the name remained obscure to the average person.

The Daughters of Bilitis quickly began social and political work. Within a year they were sponsoring lectures and discussions, working with Mattachine when it was beneficial to both groups. In 1956 the DOB began publishing
The Ladder,
similar to
ONE
and
The Mattachine Review,
but focused only on issues of interest to lesbians. (
The Ladder
ceased publication in 1972.)

The formation of a lesbian homophile organization brought gender issues to the forefront. Many lesbians had been, or still were, married; exposure would mean losing custody of their children. As single women in the workforce, lesbians also faced pressure to earn a living while having fewer job opportunities, being paid less than men, and dealing with sexual harassment. Different sexual cultures also resulted in political disagreements. Marci Gallo quotes Billye Talmadge, an early DOB member: “There was a lot of animosity and resentment over the fact that it was the gay guys who were creating such havoc with the police—the raids, indiscriminate sex, their bathroom habits . . .”
12

Ironically, in the 1950s and into the next decade, bars and public cruising areas were serving far larger communities of homosexual women and men than any “respectable” homophile organization. Lesbian bar culture was fundamentally a working-class phenomenon, often rooted in butch/femme culture. As D’Emilio points out, “Women who went to the bars belonged to a group that was larger, more stable, and more familiar than what DOB offered.”
13
For men who had no access to the privacy of a room and lived in areas where there were no bars, the sexual culture of public parks, movie theaters, and men’s rooms was one of the few options available. A wide range of public venues frequented by men has been fully documented across the country. Small Southern cites and towns had them, including “Jackson, Hattiesburg, and even Vicksburg, where homosexuals, as early as the 1950s, dubbed . . . hotels with active tearooms [men’s rooms] as ‘silver tray’ establishments.”
14
There were other places homosexuals could meet. Men could often find one another at Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland concerts; Chris Connor, a noted jazz singer widely known to be lesbian, always had a large lesbian contingent in the audience. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, avant-garde and underground films and the theaters that screened them were the building blocks of homosexual communities.
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