A Queer History of the United States (29 page)

The Beats’ disaffected position was shared by many in America, explaining why their mythos became an object of such fascination. By the mid-1950s, beatniks—a term coined by Herb Caen, a San Francisco columnist—appeared. Beatniks were “avant garde camp followers” and a “faddish commercialization” of the Beats, as well as “a slightly more adult alternative to rock and roll.” But the phenomenon was indicative of how much average Americans longed for alternatives, even in their imaginations, to their lives.
43
The Beat movement and beatnik culture were a conduit of homosexual culture to a much wider audience. They were also a sign of how remarkably omnipresent homosexuality was in mid-century America. In a 1982 essay, “A Definition of the Beat Generation,” Ginsberg credits the Beats with launching the radical women’s liberation, Black Power, and gay liberation movements; promoting sentiment against the war in Vietnam; igniting an interest in Eastern religions and philosophy; and fostering the idea of free love—or as the 1960s hippies, the spiritual descendants of the Beats, called it, “do your own thing.”
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The cultural valorization of the Beats coincided with the legal validation of homosexual representation in the media. In 1954, the October issue of
ONE
magazine, which contained a lesbian coming-out story and a comic poem about a British sex scandal, was seized by the U.S. Post Office as nonmailable because of obscenity.
ONE
lost two appeals at the federal level because, according to the court, “an article may be vulgar, offensive, and indecent even though not regarded as such by a particular group . . . because their own social or moral standards are far below those of the general community. . . . Social standards are fixed by and for the great majority and not by and for a hardened or weakened minority.” The court left no doubt that homosexuals, as a group, were not part of the “general community.” In 1958, on final appeal, the Supreme Court ruled in
ONE
’s favor, simply citing their 1957 decision in
Roth v. United States
that to be considered obscene, material must be judged in its entirety and not singled out for its content alone. The same decision had previously been cited by a San Francisco court in a ruling that overturned a ban on distribution of Ginsberg’s
Howl and Other Poems
because of its blatantly homoerotic imagery.

Like the gay men who made advances in theater and film, the Beats were mostly concerned about men. Ginsberg wrote empathetic poems about his mother, and, like Whitman, writes of universal sexual liberation. But as a movement, the Beats treated women as subservient to male needs and created no room for women to explore their individual potential. The Beats, who drew enormous inspiration from African American street culture and jazz, were also almost entirely white, with a few exceptions, such as LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka), on the fringes of the movement.

Movements Growing Together and Apart

The LGBT movement grew quickly and effectively because of its mix of people of different races, classes, and genders. It did not work in coalition with other social justice movements, even though many LGBT people had personal investments in other movements. This was the case for several reasons. Except for the Gay Liberation Front and the Radicalesbians, which would emerge in a few years, most LGBT groups were not interested in other issues. In addition, many heterosexual feminists and civil rights advocates held biases against homosexuals. Some heterosexual feminists felt that open lesbians in the feminist movement would give credence to the accusation that feminists were all man-hating lesbians. The irony is that the feminist movement’s fundamental critique of sexual power differences, inequalities in the workplace, and the legal inequities and problems faced by women in relationship to family, marriage, and children were all first articulated by the Daughters of Bilitis. Issue after issue of
The Ladder
contained articles and letters describing the problems faced by women. Heterosexual feminists never acknowledged their debt to lesbians.

There were, of course, people whose social analysis had its origins in multiple identities, especially the experience of being both black and homosexual. One example is playwright Lorraine Hansberry, author of
A Raisin in the Sun
(1959) and
The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window
(1964), which included an openly homosexual character and dealt with issues of race, freedom, and responsibility. In a letter to
The Ladder
in 1957, Hansberry argued that in the homophile movement, “there may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance, but a philosophically active anti-feminist dogma.”

James Baldwin’s 1955
Giovanni’s Room
and 1962
Another Country
dealt with the complicated intersections of sexuality and race through homosexual characters. As early as 1949, in his essay “The Preservation of Innocence,” Baldwin directly connected heterosexual hostility toward homosexuals to white hostility toward African Americans. He saw both as a failure of the imagination to connect fully with one’s own humanity. He explores this idea in his 1963
The Fire Next Time:
“White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.”
45
Historian John Howard charts how interracial homosexual relationships, sometimes less obvious than heterosexual ones, were often the way that white men became involved in the civil rights movement.
46

Action was needed as much as thought. Bayard Rustin, longtime advisor and mentor in nonviolence thinking to Martin Luther King Jr., was a gay black man responsible for several major successes of the civil rights movement. According to John D’Emilio, in 1953 Rustin was asked to leave the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Quaker-based American Friends Service Committee, both of which were deeply committed to traditional Christian morality along with their peace-based work, after he was arrested on a morals charge for having sex with two men in a car.
47
Soon after, Rustin was deeply involved with the Montgomery bus boycott and then became chief organizer of the March on Washington, for which he was featured on the cover of
Life
in September 1963. Attempting to discredit him, white supremacist Senator Strom Thurmond read into the congressional record Rustin’s morals charges and said that the march was being planned by a “communist, draft-dodger, and homosexual.” Perhaps the confluence of these identities is what made Rustin so successful, but larger social changes demanded more of him. Pauli Murray—the first African American female Episcopal priest, cofounder of the National Organization of Women, and a closeted lesbian—chastised Rustin and others for their exclusion of black women from the march’s speakers list.

Along with the battle for civil rights, other changes were happening in America, most clearly seen in highly politicized youth counterculture. The teen culture of the 1950s had by the early 1960s transformed itself into a new, vibrant national youth culture that was politically aware, responsive to social issues, and understanding of personal experience in a larger context. It also promoted experimentation with sex, gender, and drugs. Beginning with the Beatles’ U.S. television debut in February 1964 and continuing through the introduction of the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, the Doors, David Bowie (whose even more outrageous alter ego, Ziggy Stardust, would emerge a few years later), and others, American teens were faced with rock stars that radically broke from traditional masculine affect and hinted at their own homoerotic longings. Performers such as Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Aretha Franklin, and Dusty Springfield gave voice to women’s sexual desires, although in a context of traditional heterosexuality.

The hippie ethos espoused free love, antimilitarism, communal living, anticapitalism, and a soft version of anarchistic antiestablishment sentiment. It brought together many of the ideas of the Beats, homophile groups, feminism, and civil rights. It was also resonant with the nineteenth-century anarchists, free lovers, transcendentalists, commune advocates, and some radical labor activists. Gender roles were quickly changing. Women were beginning to think of themselves as independent from men and place value on being able to form friendships with other women. Men—many of whom grew their hair long, sported earrings, and wore colorful clothing that would have been condemned as too feminine five years earlier—were no longer immediately chastised for expressing their feelings. The cultural terror of men wearing their hair long is a vivid example of how change in gender affect was deeply threatening. For years, mainstream media posted the panicked response: “You can’t tell whether it’s a boy or a girl.”

The flourishing of 1960s youth culture, with its integration of sexuality and sexual freedom into everyday life, was the result of a slow, incremental, yet constant homosexualization of America. It was also the beginning of a new kind of homosexuality that was, first and foremost, a form of political resistance.

Ten. Revolt/Backlash/Resistance

Country in Revolt

Throughout the 1960s and until peace was declared in 1975, the Vietnam War was the continual backdrop—dramatic, violent, appalling, and tragic—that defined everything that was happening in the United States. The Eisenhower administration had sent close to nine hundred advisors to South Vietnam to prevent what the U.S. saw as a potential communist takeover by the North Vietnamese. By 1963, President Kennedy had dispatched sixteen thousand American military personnel. Howard Zinn, in
A People’s History of the United States
,
notes:

From 1964 to 1972, the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world made a maximum military effort, with everything short of atomic bombs, to defeat a nationalist revolutionary movement in a tiny, peasant country—and failed. . . .

In the course of that war, there developed in the United States the greatest antiwar movement the nation had ever experienced.
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By the end of the war, the losses on all sides were tremendous. The United States suffered the least, with 58,159 men dead, 303,635 wounded, and 1,719 reported missing. The South Vietnamese government reported 220,357 dead and 1,170,000 wounded. The National Liberation Front in North Vietnam reported 1,176,000 dead or missing and a minimum of 600,000 wounded. The civilian casualties were staggering: two million in North Vietnam and over a million and a half in South Vietnam. United States citizens were constantly divided over the war, often along generational, race, and gender lines.

The popular movement against the war started in the early 1960s with national faith-based peace groups, such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation (of which Jane Addams was a founding member), the American Friends Service Committee, and the Catholic Worker Movement. It then quickly spread to youth-based political groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), one of the founding groups of the New Left. SDS was organized in 1960 with the writing of its manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. Maurice Isserman points out that “in 1961 SDS had roughly 300 dues-paying
members;
by 1968 it had roughly those many
chapters.
”
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The United States saw the worst outbreaks of sustained public violence since the labor riots and strikes of the 1920s. The most shocking events were the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Between 1964 and 1969, close to seventy-five major urban race-related riots broke out across the country, in cities as large as Los Angeles and New York and as small as York, Pennsylvania, and Plainfield, New Jersey. After the King assassination, there were riots in sixty cities. In total there were close to one hundred and twenty deaths; over three thousand injured (by a conservative count); over fifty thousand women, men and children arrested; and billions in damage.

Almost all of the people killed, injured, or arrested were African Americans. In 1966, the Black Panther Party formed in order to further the Black Power movement using more militant and aggressive tactics than mainstream African American civil rights groups. Private and police assassinations of civil rights workers, both black and white, and of members of Black Power groups were not infrequent.

Along with the Vietnam War and racial tensions, the rise of feminism was dividing the country. After women won suffrage, the organized feminist movement had little public presence. Beginning in the 1960s—with the approval of the birth control pill by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration—the second wave of the feminist movement began. For nearly half a century, feminists had identified lack of reproductive control as a central impediment to women’s personal, sexual, and economic independence and freedom. The Pill suddenly, and simply, separated sex from reproduction, marriage, and the family. In 1961 doctors wrote prescriptions for four hundred thousand women. A year later, 1.2 million women were taking it. Three years later that number had jumped to 3.6 million women.

The introduction of the birth control pill, interestingly enough, helped the cause of homosexual liberation and struck against anti-homosexual prejudice. The major moral, scientific, and legal argument against homosexual activity had always been that it does not lead to reproduction and is thus unnatural. The birth control pill made the separation between sex and reproduction socially acceptable.

By the end of the 1960s, radical feminism added an analysis of heterosexuality—an analysis often implicit in the writings of the homophile groups—to the understanding of women’s oppression. Groups such as the Redstockings and Cell 16 often drew on a Marxist analysis of women as a distinct cultural group and an oppressed class of people. Like the anarchists and radical labor activists in the early part of the century, and the more recent Black Power advocates, radical feminists were interested not in reforming a system they considered essentially corrupt, but in replacing it with one that was more just and equitable. Under the umbrella of the Women’s Liberation Front, radical feminist groups began staging high-profile demonstrations, including the September 1968 “No More Miss America!” protest in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

The progressive politics of the late 1960s were predicated on the principle that a person had complete autonomy and control over her or his body. This included freedom from violence, control of reproduction, the ability to engage in any consensual sexual behavior, and the freedom to take drugs. The massive numbers of men killed in Vietnam or returning wounded or mutilated was a constant reminder—increasingly broadcast on television—of the fragility of the body as well as the importance of making your own choices about it. This new wave of activism was constituted mainly of younger people, because of the strong antiauthoritarian views emanating from anger over U.S. policy in Southeast Asia.

Like much of the counterculture, political messages were framed in sexual contexts. To promote draft resistance, folk singer Joan Baez and her sister Mimi Farina posed for a poster that read “Girls Say Yes to Boys Who Say No.”

At the August 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, conservative Democratic mayor Richard Daley deployed twenty-three thousand police officers to manage ten thousand antiwar demonstrators. Violent chaos ensued as police tear-gassed and beat the mostly peaceful demonstrators. The official government investigation of the convention violence called it a “police riot.” Captured on film, the violence was so extreme that it received worldwide condemnation, even as U.S. polls showed widespread support for the police. In October 1968, SDS passed a resolution titled “The Elections Don’t Mean Shit—Vote Where the Power Is—Our Power Is in the Street.”

Following these models, homosexual liberation became predominantly a political question. In early 1969, Carl Wittman, the son of Communist Party members and a drafter of the Port Huron Statement, wrote “A Gay Manifesto” while living in the midst of the political and gay scenes in San Francisco. It became the defining document for a new movement. The conclusion lists “An Outline of Imperatives for Gay Liberation”:

1. Free ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self defense and political activity; initiate counter community institutions.

2. Turn other gay people on: talk all the time; understand, forgive, accept.

3. Free the homosexual in everyone: we’ll be getting a good bit of shit from threatened latents: be gentle, and keep talking & acting free.

4. We’ve been playing an act for a long time, so we’re consummate actors. Now we can begin to be, and it’ll be a good show!
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Wittman’s combination of community building, constructive dialogue, goodwill, trust, and fun was a mixture of New Left organizing, homosexual playfulness, and the single most important directive of gay liberation: to come out. (The term “coming out” had not been in common use before; previously the metaphor had been about
coming into
the homosexual world.) For gay liberationists, coming out was not simply a matter of self-identification. It was a radical, public act that would impact every aspect of a person’s life. The publicness of coming out was a decisive break from the past. Whereas homophile groups argued that homosexuals could find safety by promoting privacy, gay liberation argued that safety and liberation were found only by living in, challenging, and changing the public sphere.

Physical resistance was the logical course of action in this context. For over two days in August 1968, transvestites and street people in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District fought with police at the Compton Cafeteria after management called in the officers to eject some rowdy customers. Undoubtedly there were numerous similar, but unrecorded, incidents in which gay individuals and groups resisted arrest and police violence. But the most famous incident took place a year later.

In the early hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, police conducted a routine raid on the Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. They evicted patrons and arrested some of the staff. A crowd gathered outside and refused to leave. Clashes with the police ensued. Even though the bar had been closed, crowds gathered again and the scene was repeated, with less violence, late Saturday evening. After a few days of calm, more protests and some violence occurred the following Wednesday night. The events at Stonewall were not riots, but sustained street altercations of raucous, sometimes violent, resistance. The larger culture of political militance was evident in the slogans that emerged immediately after Stonewall, such as
GAY POWER
and, as someone chalked on the front of the now closed Stonewall Inn,
THEY WANT US TO FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY [BUT] THEY INVADE OUR RIGHTS
.
4

The only viable gay political organization that existed in New York at the time was Mattachine. Its members viewed the Stonewall incident and the highly public political activities that ensued as a disruptive departure from their political process. On June 28, Mattachine members were already working with the police to stop further protests. They even posted a sign on the closed bar:

WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH

OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP

MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET

CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF

THE VILLAGE—MATTACHINE

At one of the last Mattachine meetings before the police attack on the Stonewall Inn, Jim Fouratt, a younger member, insisted: “All the oppressed have to unite! The system keeps us all weak by keeping us separate.”
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Stonewall was less a turning point than a final stimulus in a series of public altercations. A coalition of disgruntled Mattachine members, along with lesbians and gay men who identified with the pro–Black Power, antiwar New Left, called for a meeting on July 24, 1969. The flyer announcing the meeting was headlined, “Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.”

This radical change in rhetoric was indicative of fiercely antihierarchal, free-for-all, consensus-driven discussion. Out of it emerged the Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The group took its name from the Women’s Liberation Front, which in turn had taken its name from the Vietcong National Liberation Front. More traditionally anarchist than leftist, the lack of structure and clash of ideas in GLF was perfectly indicative of the intellectual, social, sexual, and political excitement of the time. A GLF member stated that “GLF is more of a process than an organization.”
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But it was a powerful process that produced results. Within a year, GLF had organized Sunday night meetings, nineteen “cells” or action groups, twelve consciousness-raising groups, an ongoing radical study group, an all-men’s meeting, a women’s caucus, three communal living groups, and a series of successful community dances, in addition to publishing the newspaper
Come Out!
The publication became a model for numerous highly influential LGBT community newspapers, including Michigan’s
Gay Liberator,
Philadelphia’s
Gay Alternative,
San Francisco’s
Gay Sunshine,
and Boston’s
Fag Rag
and
Gay Community News.
Hundreds of independent GLF groups immediately sprang up on college campuses and in cities across the country.

GLF’s open-ended process, as well as its refusal to see antigay bias or hatred as disconnected from other forms of oppression, neither resulted in hoped-for coalitions nor appealed to all members. Women’s liberation, Black Power, antiwar, and labor groups were unwilling to work with GLF because of their own dislike or fear of homosexuality.

By November 1969, after a discussion of donating money to the Black Panthers, some GLF members decided to start the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). This new organization would, according to its constitution, focus only on achieving civil rights for gay people, “disdaining all ideologies, whether political or social, and forbearing alliance with any other organization.”
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Although GAA disdained official political ideologies, it was forthright in confronting antihomosexual bias in media, legal, and social venues. Much of its power came from its “zaps”—high-profile public confrontations of people and institutions that promoted antihomosexual sentiments—which garnered enormous attention and brought LGBT issues into the media.

GLF and GAA coexisted until GLF’s demise in 1972. As GAA grew and some of its leaders began to have political ambitions, their agenda became more reformist and conservative. Transgender activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson had left GLF to help form GAA, but ultimately found themselves, and issues of gender identity, excluded. In 1970 they started Street Transvestite Action Revolution (STAR), which became the foundational group for contemporary transgender activism. By 1974 GAA was crumbling, and prominent members such as Bruce Voeller left to start the National Gay Task Force (now the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force). When GAA finally folded in 1980, it had, according to historian David Eisenbach, reverted to GLF’s inclusive political analysis.
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