A Queer History of the United States (ReVisioning History Book 1)

by Michael Bronski

The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice lobbied aggressively to clean up the Broadway stage and was particularly vigilant against homosexual themes and characters. In 1922 it urged the city to close Sholem Asch’s classic 1907 Yiddish drama The God of Vengeance because of its setting in a brothel and its lesbian content. In February 1927, the society instigated the shutting down of Arthur Hornblow Jr.’s drama The Captive, which had been running since the previous September, because of its overt lesbian theme. The society, a private organization, worked closely with the district attorney, who had the New York City police raid the theater and serve arrest warrants to the actors. Two months later, the Republican-run state assembly passed a law that prohibited theatrical performances “depicting or dealing with the subject of sex degeneracy, or sex perversion.” It also instituted the Wales Padlock law, which allowed police to close a theater for a year if the owners were convicted of presenting a play that violated obscenity laws. (The Wales Padlock law remained on the books, largely unenforced, until 1967.) The society’s power came from the support of organized religion and the legal system.