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

by Michael Bronski

Boston marriages were prominent at women’s colleges, where professors and administrators such as Jeannette Marks and Mary Woolley at Mount Holyoke, and M. Cary Thomas and Mary Garrett at Bryn Mawr, were famously coupled.

These women had, through social position, inherited wealth and access to powerful male figures, giving them substantial political and social clout in shaping discussions and public opinions.

In the 1880s, Philadelphia painter and photographer Thomas Eakins did extensive work with the male nude, including a series of photographs of a probably eighteen-year-old Billy Duckett, who was intimately involved, and lived for five years, with Walt Whitman. (Eakins also took formal photographs of Whitman, including a traditional “wedding portrait” of Whitman and Duckett.)17 The Swimming Hole, Eakins’s famous 1885 painting of five youths bathing nude on a lake, echoes Whitman’s images of an eroticized pastoral scene from “Song of Myself”:

In 1869, Karl-Maria Kertbeny argued in a series of pamphlets that Prussian laws punishing same-sex sexual activity contradicted the “rights of man” and a natural human desire. In these pamphlets he coined the word “homosexual.”

Symonds’s first major work, privately printed in 1883, was a historical analysis of same-sex male love titled A Problem in Greek Ethics. It was followed by a contemporary political analysis, A Problem in Modern Ethics, in 1891. As a critic, Symonds was interested in manifestations of same-sex desire in classical art and literature and how they could be used to argue for personal freedom under the law.

Whitman’s profound impact on Carpenter and Symonds is a prime example of how American thinking about sexual freedom, intimately connected to uniquely American concepts of democracy and citizenship, influenced European political thought.

John Harvey Kellogg urged sexual abstinence and believed that “neither the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of onanism,” by which he meant masturbation. He advocated whole grains and invented the corn flake to grapple with these urges.

The social purity movement continued a line of thought that traces back to the Puritans’ entrenchment of individual restraint and persecution as values fundamental to their vision of a “city upon a hill.”

These alternative models have been the bedrock for the LGBT liberation and equal rights movements that began to come into existence in 1950. The structures of racial prejudice and resistance to racism have profoundly shaped how Americans have conceptualized and responded to most problems of social inequality.

Anderson suggested that, as historian Margaret Marsh puts it, “homosexuality might be a more normal form of sexual behavior than heterosexuality” and that “she and her friends represented the link between the anarchist-feminist idea of sexual liberation as one component . . . of a society of freely cooperating individuals.”17 These anarchist writings about homosexuality are a radical break from most thinking in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They argue that sexuality is natural and positive, that sex can be solely about pleasure and, if consensual, should not be the subject of any laws. These basic precepts about sexuality, and homosexuality, that are present today in the LGBT movement—both its liberatory and civil rights sides—find their roots in anarchist thinking. The labor movement profoundly influenced the LGBT movement by conceptualizing workers not as individuals, but as a class of people who are treated unjustly. The early labor organizations—in particular the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as the Wobblies, which had over one million members in 1923—conceptualized a worldwide movement based on identity and group status. This concept is the historical basis for the thinking of Harry Hay (whose membership in the Wobblies was formative to his political education) when he founded the Mattachine Society, an early homosexual rights group, in 1950. Comparisons of other political movements to the LGBT movement are always inexact. Homosexual...

The most common sexological theory of same-sex desire was that it was the result of physical, emotional, or psychological “inversion.” In other words, the gender of persons who desired their own sex was somehow reversed. When a man desired a man, it was actually a woman—presumably existing within the man’s body—who was desiring a man. When a woman desired a woman, it was actually a male essence within the woman’s body who felt that desire. This metaphysical explanation, accepted as scientific (at this point of the emergence of psychology as a science), had a substantial effect on the public imagination for the next fifty years. It became how many people understood the phenomenon of same-sex desire. Theories of inversion were published widely, and sexologists were understood by the average person to be the experts on a “new science.” The idea of the “invert,” or “third sex,” also quickly and profoundly informed two popular and lasting stereotypes: the mannish lesbian and the effeminate homosexual man.

As early as 1802, Washington Irving noted that American theater “promoted flirtatious fantasies for all.”

Public entertainment—including the “legitimate” stage, as well as burlesque, vaudeville, nickelodeons, movie theaters, and other amusements—was understood by many public moralists to be an environment of sexual promiscuity, criminal activity, and gambling.

For social moralists, the theater promoted instability and immorality by allowing deviations from sexual and gender norms to materialize on the stage. The tremendous growth of theater culture in cities aggravated this threat. As gender bending became common on the stage, the sheer theatricality of the inversion made it, as Howells states, a parody: rather than reinforce sexology’s negative view of the “third sex,” the theater destabilized and even normalized it. Homosexual audiences, who understood both the threat of the “inverted” image and how the parody operated, could appreciate the performance as both.

The growth of American cities in the early twentieth century intricately shaped the development of the homosexual community and individual’s lives by radically altering female and male gender roles and sexual behaviors.

As the United States shifted from an agricultural economy to one predicated on industry and a service economy, many young women and men left small towns and farms to look for work and a new life in cities. The rise of communities of single women and men presented new models of how individual’s lives might be led. It also generated new structural models of public socializing that had an enormous impact on urban culture. This paradigm shift in American culture had a major effect. A society that defined the ideal relationship—and the only proper, moral sexual relationship—as reproductively heterosexual within legal marriage now had to come to grips with the reality that other life arrangements were possible and increasingly prevalent.

Young Men’s Christian Association. Founded in Great Britain in 1845, its mission was to provide not only inexpensive rooms and food, but the moral instruction and wholesome companionship that a young man away from his Christian home would need to combat the corrupting influence of the city.

The first YMCA in the United States was built in Boston in 1851. The organization’s growth was so rapid that by 1940 there were a hundred thousand YMCA rooms (often with beds for two or more men) throughout America. The Young Women’s Christian Association, founded in Great Britain in 1853 and incorporated in the United States in 1907, provided similar residences for women.

Settlement houses attempted to build community in working-class neighborhoods, providing lodging, meals, adult and child education, exercise, and cultural programs. They also prioritized the sharing of knowledge and skills among their residents and the community.

Along with literary readings, art studios, music rooms, and a gymnasium, Hull House offered a place for socialist labor organizers to meet. Addams felt strongly that labor organizing was necessary to ensure that workers had safe conditions, worked reasonable hours, were paid fairly, and gained some satisfaction from their work.

Like Hull House and Henry Street, male-segregated spaces and the acceptance of bachelorhood as an appropriate social status for young men were catalysts for same-sex community formation.

George Chauncey charts how the YMCA, especially through the 1920s and 1930s, became a visible and internationally noted place for homosexual men to find one another for sex and socializing. He notes that by the 1930s some gay men joked that YMCA meant “Why I’m So Gay.”17 The YMCA, and other all-male facilities that promoted socializing and health through (nude) swimming, calisthenics, and other forms of physical exercise, were logical places for homosexual men to meet one another.

Homosexuals and African Americans shared a sense of social stigmatization, marginalization, and criminalization. George Chauncey charts the growth of homosexual neighborhoods in New York, such as Greenwich Village and Harlem. Greenwich Village was in many ways accepting of people of color. Harlem, a primarily African American community, was accepting of homosexuals of color as well as some white homosexuals. Chauncey details how Harlem, the center of African American life in New York, became the site for both exciting artistic explorations of black culture and public manifestations of homosexual culture. Harlem’s world of jazz clubs, speakeasies, cellar clubs, and low-end and upscale nightclubs (the latter frequented by wealthy white patrons) encouraged sexualized performances.

In the later decades of the nineteenth century, burlesque, a form of theatrical parody, was extraordinarily popular. Its main objective was to parody existing social norms, frequently gender norms. (The Latin root of “burlesque” is “burra,” meaning “trifles” or “nonsense.”) The popularity of burlesque—and later vaudeville, which presented a collection of acts, including burlesque, in a revue—greatly shaped American popular culture.

Homosexual community developed, in part, through the public discourse of sexology and the invention of the “invert.” Simultaneously, popular theater and film were subverting this pathologized image by challenging what “invert” meant.

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.

Post-Prohibition San Francisco hosted a wide range of gender-transgressive nightclubs—often featuring vaudeville performers as well as female impersonators—and a highly visible sexual culture that included lesbians and homosexual men.34 The prevalence of theatrical female impersonation and drag in San Francisco led growing numbers of ostensibly heterosexual tourists to visit the bars and nightclubs usually frequented by homosexuals.

On the East Coast, Harlem clubs were frequently visited by white heterosexuals who were looking for sexual and social excitement not found in predominantly white, “respectable” neighborhoods. This semi-institutionalized crossing over of individuals from the dominant culture into a “strange” subculture (often located in a racially or sexually segregated ghetto) was called “slumming,” and it both excited and disconcerted the slummer. It allowed someone who was usually an “insider” to become, for a period of time, the “outsider” in another culture. It was also a conduit through which lesbian and gay male culture interacted with, and was introduced into, mainstream culture.

George Chauncey charts the vital, public “fairy” culture that thrived in New York’s Bowery and Greenwich Village in the 1920s and 1930s. As ideas of public space changed, homosexuals found public streets and parks useful for meeting one another. These public places became a space to enact formerly private aspects of life.

Bars, clubs, and night spots that catered to a homosexual clientele, even if nonhomosexuals were there slumming, were frequently targets for police raids instigated by public outrage or by politicians promising to make public spaces “safe” for women, children, and families. More dangerous to homosexuals, however, were the legal and moral crusades that emerged in the late 1930s. These climaxed in the summer of 1937, when widespread panic broke out over alleged sexual psychopaths who would harm and murder children. The frightening image of the sexual psychopath was clearly linked to the emerging figure of the male homosexual. These campaigns were connected to the local police assaults on homosexual venues in Los Angeles.39

Over the next decade, more waves of “sex panics” spread across the country and similar laws were passed. The laws differed in detail from state to state, but usually allowed the courts to incarcerate suspected “sexual psychopaths” for undetermined periods of time in mental institutions. These laws were broadly written, and the definition of “sexual psychopath” always remained vague so that it could be applied as indiscriminately as possible.

Sexual psychopath laws, clearly influenced by social purity concerns, almost always presumed children were being victimized. By the mid to late 1940s, “during the nationwide campaigns against sexual psychopaths, the terms child molester, homosexual, sex offender, sex psychopath, sex degenerate, sex deviate, and sometimes even communist were used and became interchangeable in the mind of the public.”

The more public homosexuals became, the more they were believed to threaten society.

Roosevelt embraced eugenic thought. For Roosevelt, masculinity and nationhood were completely tied up with worries about “racial degeneracy.” In a speech to the National Congress of Mothers on May 13, 1905, Roosevelt bemoaned the idea of family planning and claimed that “if the average family in which there are children contained but two children the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the point of extinction.” He added that such “race suicide” would not be regrettable, since a race that wants to have fewer children does not deserve to exist.12 As Roosevelt was becoming the emblem of American manhood, a group was forming in Great Britain that would soon affect American boys. In 1907 Robert Baden-Powell, a noted lieutenant general in the British Army stationed in India and Africa, adapted a military training manual, Aids for Scouting, for boys. A year later he wrote Scouting for Boys and founded what would become an international movement, the Boy Scouts.

For Baden-Powell, Scouting was a “character factory” whose purpose “from the very beginning [was] conceived as a remedy to Britain’s moral, physical, and military weakness.”14 Intrinsic to Baden-Powell’s vision of the Boy Scouts was the formation of an idealized national citizen who would embody the perfect white male. Baden-Powell’s emphasis on national patriotism flirted with fascism, since as late as 1937 he was arguing for links between the British Scouts and the Hitler Youth groups; he was overruled by the Boy Scouts International Committee.

Leyendecker, who was openly homosexual, designed the iconic “Arrow Collar Man,” who represented both stalwart masculinity and urban, middle-class upward mobility. Leyendecker’s slightly sleek and prettily dressed office clerk drew on homosexual traditions of the dandy and the fop. The Arrow Collar Man was so enormously popular that even Theodore Roosevelt singled out the image as “a superb example of the common man.” Commentators never mentioned that Leyendecker’s model for the Arrow Collar Man was his lover, Charles Beach, with whom he openly lived and socialized.

Paul Cadmus, who often worked on government commissions from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). His raucous, sexualized images of obvious homosociality, including murals such as The Fleet’s In! (1933) and YMCA Locker Room (1933) and etchings such as Two Boys on a Beach (1938), are considered important contributions to American pictorial art.

The Espionage and Sedition Acts provoked a series of raids between 1919 and 1921, organized by U.S. attorney general Alexander Mitchell Palmer. Known as the Palmer Raids, they were aimed at known and suspected radicals, including aliens, U.S. citizens, and groups.

The anti-immigrant sentiment—aimed at recently arrived European Catholics and Jews—dovetailed with the white supremacist and eugenicist thinking of the social purity movement.

Most anti-Red propaganda included pro-marriage and pro-family sentiments.

Although rarely stated in anti-Red material, clearly the new visibility of the invert, the mannish lesbian, and the pansy were instrumental in fueling panic over the sexual threat to the American family and domesticity.

The Red Scare began in April 1919 and was essentially over by the late summer of 1920. The great Bolshevik threat never materialized, public opinion turned against Palmer, big business began seeing the value of immigrants as workers, and more traditional ideas about sexuality and gender began to change. Nevertheless, the impact of the Red Scare was tremendous. The formation and growth of conservative, patriotic groups was startling. The American Legion, for example, was founded in May 1919; it had one million members by December and would be a core of conservatism activism for the next century. After the Red Scare, membership in the Ku Klux Klan increased, union membership decreased, antistrike legislation flourished, and forms of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment became institutionalized.30

The hysteria of the Red Scare was a successful attempt to “freeze and preserve nineteenth-century economic liberalism and eighteenth-century political institutions.” In doing so it shaped a contemporary political philosophy that promoted whiteness as central to an American identity, Gilded Age capitalism over more equitable forms of economic structures, and traditional gender roles and sexual arrangements. Each of these characteristics would have a strong effect of the formation of an LGBT movement in the following decades.

Men living together generated anxiety, as did the imagined possibility of younger men being sexually exploited. This anxiety eventually caused the federal government to focus less on programs aimed at unattached people, and ultimately to avoid implementing policies that might be seen as enabling “sexual perversion.”1

Wartime conditions produced social systems appealing to homosexuals. Single-sex environments encouraged homosocial relationships. Lesbians who were economically and socially independent of men found the military a haven. Homosexual men could now avoid their family’s heterosexual expectations. Many men, including homosexuals, found outlets for their abilities and talents in the military. The United Service Organization (USO), a private organization founded in 1941 to boost morale by providing recreation and other services for the military, brought entertainment to the troops and offered a place for men with theatrical interests.

The benefits of the military for homosexuals were outweighed by the reality that sodomy was prohibited by Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The article stated: “Any person subject to this chapter who engages in unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex or with an animal is guilty of sodomy. Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete the offense.”

While the code regulated the behavior of homosexual service members, it did nothing to keep them out. But by mid-1941 the Selective Service had instituted a policy to screen homosexuals from joining the military (although the policy did not always succeed). This decision had a complicated history.

As the screening process was amended by other psychiatrists and the army surgeon general over the next year, homosexuality became a disqualifying category. The armed forces now banned people with “homosexual proclivities” because they had “psychopathic personality disorders.” These new categories conflated the idea of the “sexual psychopath” with stereotypes predicated on gender norm deviation.

For the first time, a direct link was being made between homosexual behavior and a threat to national security.

“Sensitive” men often found one another while working on the extraordinarily popular “soldier shows” for which the USO provided the know-how and the materials. These shows were written, directed, and performed by men in the armed forces. Since there were no women in outlying camps, enlisted men would perform female roles in drag. Performances ranged from comic portrayals of burly men in dresses to realistic female impersonation. For actors and audiences, these performances were a needed relief from the stress of war. For men who identified as homosexual, these shows were a place where they could, in coded terms, express their sexual desires, be visible, and build a community.