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

by Michael Bronski

In 1941 secretary of war Henry Stimson ordered all “sodomists” be court-martialed and, if found guilty, sentenced to five years of hard labor. The courts-martial quickly became too costly. In 1942 Stimson allowed Section 8 discharges—called “blue discharges,” after the color of the paper on which they were printed—for homosexuals. A Section 8 discharge was not a dishonorable discharge, issued after a court-martial, but neither was it an honorable discharge. The Veterans Administration quickly determined that a Section 8 discharge precluded a former service member from entitlements. These included access to health care at a VA hospital and accessing the numerous benefits of the GI Bill, such as college tuition, occupational training, mortgage insurance, and loans to start businesses. Worse, a Section 8 discharge often meant that the former service member was unable to get a job in civilian life.

The implicit inclusion of homosexuals in the military, juxtaposed with official discrimination, complicated the homosexuals’ relationship to the ideal of American citizenship.

The effect of these witch hunts was personally traumatic. Pat Bond states that at her base in Tokyo, over five hundred women were sent home and discharged. She vividly recalls a specific tragic incident: “They called up one of our kids—Helen. They got her up on the stand and told her that if she didn’t give names of her friends they would tell her parents she was gay. She went up to her room on the sixth floor and jumped out and killed herself. She was twenty.”25

After the war, homosexual novelists began exploring the intense emotional lives of men who had fought in the war. These novels were an attempt to uncover how the severe trauma of the war affected not only fighting men but American masculinity.

Lesbian and gay male veterans frequently decided not to return to their towns of birth; instead they moved to large cities, where they knew they could live more openly. Homosexuals had undergone a sexual revolution during the war. This revolution contributed almost immediately to a new sense of community, first in the armed forces and then in civilian life. Large cities across the country—especially those on the East and West coasts, where women and men from overseas disembarked on their return—saw enormous growth in the number of lesbians and gay men.

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

Sometimes bars, especially in small cities, were the only site to offer community across class and gender differences.

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.

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.”8 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.

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.

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.

The “red scare” of McCarthyism led directly to the “lavender scare,” a conflation of communism with homosexuality.

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.

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.

Lesbian bar culture was fundamentally a working-class phenomenon, often rooted in butch/femme culture.

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.

The large number of lesbian pulps written by heterosexuals confirmed the prejudices of the psychologists. Pulps—mass-market, inexpensive paperback books—had a visibility, and an audience, far wider than the mainstream titles with lesbian or homosexual themes. Pulps were sold on newsstands, not in bookstores. With their lurid, eye-catching cover art, they were a major venue through which heterosexuals and homosexuals discovered homosexual subculture. In the 1950s, many of the gay male pulps were reprints of previously published literary novels. Almost all of the many hundreds of lesbian pulps were paperback originals, edited and published by mainstream paperback houses run by heterosexual men.

Over the next five decades, the rise of an LGBT consumer culture increasingly defined the community, with complicated results. The LGBT community became more acceptable, since its identity predicated on consumption, not sexual behavior. But more progressive political action was frequently impeded as acceptability in the marketplace became valued over core political values of justice and fairness.

Many contemporary lesbians look to the pulps as prime examples of butch/femme identities that have been central to the organization of lesbian culture in the United States for much of this century.

James Dean’s sexuality was an open enough secret that in Walter Ross’s 1958 best-selling novel The Immortal, the main character, who was clearly modeled on Dean, was a homosexual who also slept with women. Published just over two years after Dean’s untimely death, the book, with cover art by the young Andy Warhol, was advertised with a forty-foot by twenty-foot billboard in midtown Manhattan.

In the postwar era, style and dress for heterosexual women and men evolved quickly as they began reacting to changes in gender roles and gender presentation. Gay men and lesbians had created cultures that produced specific physical markers—clothing, speech, imagery, affect, and deportment—crucial to identifying one another and creating group identity. Ironically, many of these styles and new ways of displaying gender, which often made gay and lesbian people more vulnerable, were ultimately adopted by mainstream culture.

The emerging gay culture was beginning to be acknowledged by heterosexuals as a major influence on mainstream culture. This was especially true of the influence of gay males on the mainstream arts.

Caffe Cino, a Greenwich Village coffee house founded by Joe Cino, was the first off-off-Broadway theater.

The alternative arts scene in New York culture, including theater, fine arts, music, and literature, was intricately tied to the continual growth of homosexual culture. Similar cultural scenes were evolving in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake and San Francisco’s North Beach. The impact on national American culture was enormous.

The filmmakers began drawing on past mass-produced popular culture—1930s films, classic film stars with exaggerated gender expression, and vintage mass-produced artifacts such as lamps, jewelry, and clothing—to express their ideas. This reclaiming of past popular culture, often making fun of it while simultaneously using it to comment on the present, was called “camp.”

Andy Warhol noted that “drag queens are ambulatory archives of ideal movie-star womanhood.” Considered the primary theoretician of the pop art movement, Warhol specialized in taking the everyday and the mundane—the familiar image of a Campbell’s soup can—and insisting that viewers adjust their reality to see them differently.

The Beats were members of a small literary movement that started in the homosexual and bohemian enclaves of San Francisco and New York in the early 1950s. The movement produced great works that changed American culture, such as Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch. The word “beat,” with origins in drug and jazz culture, originally meant “robbed,” and came to mean, for these writers, “The world is against me.”41 Ginsberg noted that “the point of beat is that you get beaten down to a certain nakedness where you are actually able to see the world in a visionary way.”42

The Beat movement and homosexual culture were inextricably intertwined. The Beat writers’ rejection of enforced gender roles and sexual behaviors, their reliance on self-expression through the arts and resistance to censorship, their antimilitarist and antistatist stance, and their insistence on being true to their own vision were all qualities that had been manifested by homosexual communities. Not all Beat writers were openly homosexual, but many were: Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners, Robert Duncan, William Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Jack Spicer, Steve Jonas, Herbert Hunke, Harold Norse. Some heterosexual Beats, such as Kerouac and Neal Cassady, also had sex with men.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!3 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.

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.

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

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).

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.”6 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!

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.”

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 beca...

GAA’s single-issue politic had a much greater impact than GLF on mainstream gay political organizing. It became the template for the contemporary gay rights movement, which works to change, not overthrow, the system.

Betty Friedan’s antilesbian sentiments were so present in NOW that a group of lesbians, including Karla Jay and Rita Mae Brown, formed the Lavender Menace, a guerilla action group. They confronted NOW’s members at its Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970, where they passed out their manifesto, “The Woman-Identified Woman.” A year later, NOW passed a resolution affirming that lesbian rights were “a legitimate concern for feminism.”

The Lavender Menace, who now called themselves Radicalesbians and understood that their concerns were distinct from those of heterosexual women and gay men, began a distinct movement: lesbian feminism.

In the early 1970s, women started national networks of small presses, such as Daughters Inc., which published Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking lesbian novel Rubyfruit Jungle. They also founded over a hundred newspapers, magazines such as Amazon Quarterly, and music cooperatives and festivals such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.

As with the Mattachine, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Women’s Liberation Front, and the Black Panther Party, the work of a few people in small organizations touched the lives of large numbers of people and changed the world. One way the LGBT political groups did this was through their enormous influence on mainstream culture, now that homosexuality was more openly discussed than ever before. Publishing, film, TV, and the press reached millions of Americans.

On October 31, 1969, just four months after the Stonewall conflict, Time had a cover story called “The Homosexual in America.” The article inside featured photos of gay liberationists on a picket line and a drag queen in a beauty contest. A discussion sponsored by the magazine among a panel of “experts,” including psychiatrists, clergy, liberals, and gay activists, was clearly won by the latter two. As Time noted, “the love that once dared not speak its name now can’t keep its mouth shut.”

The mainstream publishing industry, having discovered that positive depictions of lesbian and gay male life were a niche market, quickly published books on the subject.

Dozens of fiction and nonfiction books presenting similar material were published by mainstream and smaller publishers over the next five years. Unlike pulp novels and sociological studies, these books determinedly affirmed homosexuality.