Top Quotes: “A Queer History of the US” — Michael Bronski
Introduction
“In the late 90s, the grassroots political action group Queer Nation popularized the reclaimed ‘queer’ so successfully that within a few years, national TV shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy used the word without offense.”
“Emperor Tiberius would bathe in a deep pool and have young boys, whom he called his ‘minnows’ swim between his legs and nip at his genitals.”
“Many of the most important changes for LGBT people in the past 500 years have been a result of war. From the Amer. Revolution to the war in Vietnam, wars have radically affected LGBT people and lives. These wars have had an enormous impact on all Americans, but their effects on LGBT people have been particularly pronounced, in part because the social violence of war affects sexuality and gender.
The second realization was that entertainment in its broadest sense — popular ballads, vaudeville, films, sculptures, plays, paintings, porn, pulp novels — has not only been a primary mode of expression of LGBT identity, but one of the most effective means of social change. Ironically, the enormous political power of these forms was often understood by the people who wanted to ban them, not by the people who were simply enjoying them.”
Colonial Times
“In Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expeditions (written between 1804–10), Nicholas Biddle notes that ‘Among Mamitarees if a boy shows any symptoms of effeminacy or girlish inclinations he’s put among the girls, dressed in their way, brought up with them, and sometimes married to men.’”
“The Puritans’ view of the world and sexuality — which would have a tremendous effect on America — was shaped by their experiences in Great Britain before arriving in the New World. The Reformation and the founding of the Anglican church by Henry VIII in 1534 brought about the collapse of a cohesive Roman Catholic polity in Europe. From 1558–1649 Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I ruled England and the colonies. During that time English culture accepted and promoted a wide range of diverse, sometimes conflicting, views about sexuality and gender. These ideas were intimately connected with how Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan culture thought about religion and religious practice. Cross-dressing — which had been condemned by Catholic theologians such as Augustine and Tertullian since the 2nd century — was a mandated theatrical convention, since women weren’t allowed to perform on the stage. There was an enormous public fascination with female cross-dressing, as witnessed by several plays. For instance, the popular 1607 play The Roaring Girl dramatized the life and celebrated cross-dressing criminal career of Mary Frith, who was also known as Moll Cutpurse. The 1609 play Epicoene revolved around cross-dressing and included numerous allusions to same-sex sexual behavior.
Social and legal prohibitions against same-sex activity in Elizabethan England were applied haphazardly. Same-sex relationships were illegal, but the culture was accepting enough to allow for public representation and discussion of same-sex attraction and sexual behavior.”
“While procreative sex between a husband and a wife was the only officially acceptable mode of sexual activity, some stats show that at least 10% of Puritan marriage occurred after a pregnancy, and premarital sex generally went unpunished if it resulted in a stable marriage.
The individual soul was the life of the Puritan community and, conversely, the community was an embodiment of the soul.”
“As a theologically based society, Puritans acted harshly toward religious diversity. In 1634, when Salem pastor Roger Williams was accused of spreading ‘diverse, new, and dangerous opinions’ — advocating more religious freedom and toleration of native peoples — he was exiled. Upon leaving the Bay Colony, he founded Providence Plantation, now RI. 3 years later Anna Hutchinson was imprisoned, then exiled from MA Bay Colony, for dissenting from Puritan doctrine, freely interpreting the Bible, preaching as a woman, and running Bible study groups for women. She and her followers settled in Providence Plantations. MA Bay Colony ministers labeled Hutchinson a ‘Jezebel’ — the implication being that she, like the figure from the Book of Judges, was a sexually dangerous woman. Hutchinson’s theological boldness caused others to view her behavior as gender deviance. ‘You’ve stepped out of your place,’ noted one minister. ‘You’ve rather been a husband than a wife, a preacher than a hearer, and a magistrate than a subject.’ Over the decades, Providence Plantations became, for its time, a progressive colony. Capital punishment was rare, and debtors’ prisons and trials for witchcraft were abolished. In 1652 it was the first colony to ban all slavery, regardless of color.”
“In 1624 Thomas Morton and others, including 30 male indentured servants, founded a decidedly non-Puritan colony in Wollaston, now Quincy, outside of Boston. They named the colony Merrymount, punning on Maremount and Mary-Mount, direct references to bestial sodomy and Roman Catholicism. Morton befriended the local Algonquian tribe, whose culture he admired, and urged intermarriage between native women and male colonists. He also released the indentured servants and made them equal ‘consociates.’”
“The infamous Salem witch trials of 1692–3, in which 20 people were executed and 5 more died in prison, were a grim manifestation of the excesses of the Puritan imagination. However, the MA General Court issued a public apology for the trials 5 years later and eventually granted monetary compensation to the families of those executed.”
“From the 16th-19th centuries, over 650k Africans were brought to N. America as slaves. However, this is a relatively small number compared to the 12 million Africans who were transported and sold, mostly in the Caribbean and S. America, in the mid-Atlantic slave trade, also referred to as the first Middle Passage.”
“In the mid to late 17th century, laws in the colonies began to change. In 1654 a VA court declared that John Casor, an African servant, was legally a slave for life. Gradually, African indentured servants became legally treated as slaves, with no possibility of ending their servitude. This shift occurred for a number of complex reasons, the most pertinent of which is that Africans, in contrast to indentured whites, had no outside social and cultural support systems of other Africans in the country and thus were more easily enslaved.”
“The colonies never abolished their sodomy laws.
This wasn’t true in France, which abolished its sodomy law under Enlightenment precepts. In 1789 — more than a decade after the Amer. Declaration of Independence — the French National Assembly produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man, boldly stating that true civil liberty included the right ‘to do anything that doesn’t injure others.’ By 1791 this progressive thinking reached its logical conclusion when the Constituent Assembly abolished punishments for crimes ‘created by superstition, feudalism, the tax system, and despotism.’ These included blasphemy, heresy, witchcraft, and sodomy, all crimes that were distinctly related to the persecuting society throughout European history. The only crimes connected with sex punished under the new French legal code were rape, child prostitution, and the selling of obscene photos. This extraordinary legal reform had wide-ranging effects when, in 1810, it was incorporated into the Napoleonic Code. As a result, it was implemented in all French colonies and wherever Napoleon established governments in Europe and the Americas.”
“One of the most important changes of the Revolutionary era was the invention of a new form of Amer. masculinity. As the colonies claimed their political independence from Britain, it was clear they’d have to establish a new, distinct culture that would reflect their own political ideology. One of the ways they did this was to consciously invent a new ‘American man’ who represented all of the new virtues of the Republic and had little connection to the traditional Englishman. This new American man was bold, rugged, aggressive, unafraid of fighting, and comfortable asserting himself. This model was in complete contrast to the Englishman, who was stereotyped as refined, overly polite, ineffectual, and often effeminate.”
“This is, in part, why the US didn’t abolish its sodomy laws. Highly gendered societies reinforce traditional ideas about gender through regulating sexual behavior. In the fervor of those revolutionary years and the promotion of a national masculinity, the idea that sodomy laws might be abolished might’ve been understood, even by Enlightenment men, as counterproductive.”
“During the 1776 Continental Congress, Adams and his wife, Abigail, wrote one another frequently, and she was direct in her concerns:
I long to hear that you’ve declared an independency. and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors…If particular care and attention isn’t paid to the ladies, we’re determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend.”
“Abigail Adams wasn’t the only woman with these ideas. Over the next decade, women lobbied for suffrage, only to be consistently denied the right to have a voice in their government. While some states allowed female suffrage for a short while, this quickly changed. Women were denied suffrage in NY in 1777, in MA in 1780, and in NH in 1784. In 1787 a congressional convention allowed the states to decide on suffrage; all states but NJ denied women the right to vote. NJ revoked female suffrage in 1807. In 1867 the 14th Amendment stipulated specifically that suffrage is the right of male citizens alone.”
“Jemina Wilkinson, a charismatic evangelist, was born a Quaker in 1752. In 1775, during a series of debilitating illnesses and fevers, she believed that Christ entered her body and that she was now neither female nor male, but was commanded to bring her ministry to the new country. She renamed herself ‘Publick Universal Friend,’ refused to use the pronouns ‘she’ or ‘he,’ and dressed in gender-neutral clerical garments that made her sex unreadable (although contemporary accounts state that many in her audience saw her as male). Wilkinson’s gender presentation, as well as her theological message — she preached complete sexual abstinence, strict adherence to a narrowly defined interpretation of the 10 Commandments, unqualified universal friendship, and the apocalyptic vision of the harshest Hebrew Bible prophets — made her a sensation throughout RI, PA, and MA. In the mid-1780s the popular press and pamphlet culture covered her sermons in detail and placed particular emphasis on her sexually ambiguous persona. She had a huge following that verged on a cult and eventually started her own religious settlement in C. NY state.
Deborah Sampson Gannett’s public career was as noted as Wilkinson’s. She was born in 1760 outside Plymouth. In May 1782, dressed as a man, she enrolled in the Continental Army under the name Robert Shurtliff. She fought in several battles until she was discovered, after being wounded in 1783, to be a woman. She received an honorable discharge and in 1785 married Robert Gannett. In a few years’ time they had 3 children. Sampson Gannett was relatively unknown until 1797 when, in conjunction with writer Herman Mann, she published a semifictional narrative of her time as a cross-dressed Revolutionary soldier. The work was a straightforward tale that touched on the author’s possible homosexuality through details of titillating, affectionate interactions with women. Sampson Gannett’s intention in publishing the narrative was to gain public attention for her attempt to be awarded a military pension.
In 1802 Sampson Gannett commenced a series of public lectures about her life. She spent much of her time on stage — after stating that she could not explain why she chose to cross-dress and join the Continental Army — extolling traditional gender roles for women. Near the end of the presentation, she left the stage, returned dressed in her army uniform, and executed complicated and physically taxing military drills. Her presentation was extremely popular in Boston, and she repeated it in other New England cities. In 1816, after years of petitioning and with help from Paul Revere, Sampson Gannett was finally awarded the full pensions she deserved by both MA and Congress.”
The 19th Century
“From its earliest days, SF was known as a wide-open town: an urban space with few social restrictions and a high tolerance for illegal behavior, including same-sex sexual activity and deviation from gender norms. The roots of this reputation can be found in the mostly all-male culture of the gold rush. Saloons, dance halls, rowdy theaters, and brothels were plentiful and, except for a small number of female workers, were patronized only by men.
In 1846 the population of SF — then called Yerba Buena — was just over 500. In 1848 gold was discovered at nearby Sutter’s Mill in Coloma. The next year nearly 90k people journeyed to NorCal, only half of them from the US. By 1855 the area’s population had swelled by another 300k. SF’s population grew correspondingly. In 1850 it had jumped to 25k, a decade later it was 57k, and by 1870 it had nearly tripled to 150k. Housing consisted mainly of rooming houses and cheap hotels, augmented by all-male public baths. In 1849 there were only 300 women, 2/3 of them prostitutes, in a population of 25k.
In 1850 organized same-sex dancing was perfectly acceptable, as was entertainment featuring cross-dressing. The public social life in SF was so vibrantly nonconformist that British adventurer Marryat dubbed it ‘Sodom by the Sea’ in 1855.
The ethnic diversity of this nearly all-male population contributed to a culture of uneasy and frequently disrupted tolerance unique to the area and the time. Many men who migrated to CA and SF were from S. America, China, and Europe.
China, and Europe. In 1870, when SF was the 8th largest city in America, close to 60% of its citizens were foreign-born. There was also a large influx of fugitive slaves and free Africans during this time; in 1867 black Americans could use public transportation, and by 1869 they could vote. 6 years later, SF schools were desegregated for blacks. Hispanic and Chinese communities were central to creating SF’s economic infrastructure and shaping its sensibilities in food, architecture, and pop culture.”
“A reason that noncomformative sexuality and gender was relatively acceptable in SF after 1849 was its thriving economy. The presence of large businesses such as Wells Fargo and the city’s position as a major seaport made SF a center of commerce, a status enhanced in 1869 by the completion of the transcontinental railroad. John D’Emilio argues that historically, LGBT communities benefit in societies predicated on free labor–that is, a non-family-unit-based economy in which unmarried women and men are able to sustain economic independence. The boom economy of SF in the second half of the 19th century is a prime example.
A closely connected idea is historian George Chauncey’s argument that gay and lesbian communities found their earliest manifestations in poor and working-class cultures, because wealthier classes could maintain a greater degree of personal privacy. For LGBT people, the luxury of privacy was antithetical to forming communities, which are, by their nature, public in bringing similar people together.
Even as it prospered economically, late-19th-century SF insisted on maintaining its identity as an outlaw culture. But not all San Franciscans embraced the idea of a wide-open town. In response to rising crime in 1851 and 1856, vigilante communities were formed to combat vice. These groups wielded, often by violence, enormous social and political power in efforts to curb what they saw as social anarchy and excessive sexuality.”
“Because same-sex couples couldn’t have children, their relationships, while illegal under sodomy laws, were less scrutinized under race laws than straight relationships and could often go unnoticed if the parties involved were discreet (as was always mandated by sodomy laws).”
“Free love advocate Victoria Woodhull in 1872 was the first woman to run for president. Her arguments are sustained philosophical attacks against the state’s regulation of sexuality and affection. In an 1871 speech, she states:
Yes, I’m a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it’s your duty not only to accord it, but as a community, to see I’m protected in it. I trust that I’m fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing else.”
“Whitman’s utopian sexual democracy wasn’t in sync with the reform politics of late 19th-century America, nor was it useful for political organizing at the time. With the exception of a few progressive thinkers like Victora Woodhull, social change movements of the 19th century, such as abolition and suffrage, didn’t consider sexual expression integral to their vision. For many women reformers, male sexuality was the problem, not the solution. The suffrage movement was focused not only on gaining women’s political independence, but on reforming an economic system that required women to have sex with men, in or out of marriage, in exchange for financial support. Historian Beryl Satter notes that even progressive women ‘agreed with more conservative women activists that male lust damaged society, and that female virtue would improve it.’ They saw unrestrained male desire as the cause and effect of widespread gambling, alcoholism, and prostitution, all of which threatened women’s homes and families, public decency, and personal freedom. Most women reformers endorsed accepted ideas about male sexual restraint and female purity as necessary to Amer. social progress, a concept that had roots in the Second Great Awakening of the early 19th century.”
“Early 19th-century diet reformist Sylvester Graham believed that alcoholism and sexual urges were brought on by unhealthy food, in particular meat and food additives. He invented healthy, or ‘pure,’ whole-grain breads and crackers designed to curb list, particularly masturbation, which he believed contributed to blindness. At the beginning of the 20th century, John Kellogg urged sexual abstinence and believed that ‘neither the plague, nor war, nor smallpox 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 most noted male performer of these decades was William Dalton, internationally famous as female impersonator Julian Eltinge. Born outside Boston in 1881, Eltinge began performing as a female impersonator in a local theatrical revue at 15. By 1904 he was performing on the NY stage in musical comedies. Some stage performers dressed in women’s clothing for a comic effect; Eltinge convincingly portrayed women who dressed beautifully and embodied the gender ideals of the day.
Eltinge played theaters all over the US and Europe. He made his producer so much money that in 1912, the businessman named his newly constructed Broadway playhouse the Eltinge 42nd St Theater. Eltinge’s popularity rested on his subversive ability, in a society ‘in which gendered behavior was understood as the natural, inevitable expression of physical sex,’ to expose these roles as culturally constructed. Little is known about his personal life. Many historians now presume he was gay; making the matter more complex, he was also famous for aggressively portraying a masculine persona offstage.”
The 20th Century
“This newly defined pathological identity, despite what some progressive sexologists intended, was a social and political threat that caused the public moralists to react. The immediate effect of this moral backlash was the enforcement of laws that censored productions on the stage. The NY Society for the Suppression of Vice lobbied aggressively to clean up the Broadway stage and was particularly vigilant against homosexual themes and characters.”
“Alarmed by the increasing sexual content of films and the industry’s ‘immorality,’ public moralists took a stand in the late 20s. Threatening to invoke government censorship, mainstream Protestant and Catholic groups allowed the industry to set up a system of self-regulation, the template of which was generated by a group of Catholic laymen and clergy. Adhering to the conservative Catholic theology, this group presented the head of the industry’s trade associations with a highly restrictive code of subjects and themes to be avoided. This censorship process would occur during film production, ensuring that there was little chance of questionable material even being filmed.
The regulations stipulated that ‘pictures shall not imply that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing,’ thus mandating that adultery and nonmarital sex could never be presented in a neutral or positive manner. They also stated that all references to ‘sexual perversion’ were forbidden. This new set of restrictions, the Hayes Code, was formally adopted by the industry in March 1930. Starting in July 1934, all films were required to have a certificate stating that they adhered to the standards of the code before they were released. For almost 2 full decades, until individual film directors challenged the code in the mid-50s, there could be no mention of homosexuality or many other taboo topics in a Hollywood film.”
“In Sept. 1937, J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director (who was emotionally, if not sexually, involved with his [male] assistant), wrote an article called ‘War on the Sex Criminal’ that was published in the NY Herald-Tribune and widely reprinted. Hoover’s article was clearly inciting fears of the more public homosexual:
The present apathy of the public toward perverts, generally regarded as ‘harmless,’ should be changed to one of suspicious scrutiny. The harmless pervert of today can be and often is the loathsome mutilator and murderer of tomorrow…The ordinary offender [turned] into a dangerous, predatory animal, preying upon society because he’s been taught he can get away with it.
These attacks, always in coded language that never mentioned ‘fairy,’ ‘pansy,’ or ‘homosexual,’ were primarily aimed at gay men. IL, CA, MI, MN, and OH almost immediately passed ‘sexual psychopath laws,’ and other states followed. 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 40s, ‘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 conflation of the vague ‘sexual deviancy’ with homosexuality and child molestation set up what was to become a widely accepted myth: that male homosexuals were innately driven to seduce or sexually assault male children. This myth was a strong influence in shaping the public discussion of homosexuality well into the 21st century.”
“The US was slowly turning from a culture of production to one of consumption–a process that would reach its apotheosis in the 50s. This culture shift is illustrated by the success of the assembly line (often attributed to Henry Ford, but actually based on ideas from employees) and the production of the Model T car. Efficiency and relative worker safety made the Model T so inexpensive that by 1916, 8 years after its inception, 472k were sold. By 1918, 1 family in 13 owned a car; 11 years later, 4 out of every 5 families possessed one. Ford also broke with other manufacturers by offering the unheard-of wage of $5/day (so that his workers could buy one of his cars). This interplay between mass production and mass consumption was later called Fordism.
The invention of the car was transformative for Amer. culture. It greatly increased personal mobility, thereby destabilizing patterns of living that were based on the biological family. More important, it gave people access to private space away from home. By the 20s the auto was fully established as a site of sexual freedom, especially for young people, who now had access to ‘lovers’ lanes.’ This new innovation in romantic and sexual privacy was also a boon to those engaged in same-sex relationships.”
“By the 20s and 30s, the art of window design and display was spearheaded by gay men who drew on a tradition of homosexual asthetics to promote this wave of consumerism.”
“Marie Equi was born to Irish and Italian immigrant parents in MA in 1872. At age 21 she moved to Portland, with her partner, Bess Holcomb, who had a job offere there. Several years later they moved to SF, where Equi studied medicine. Her disaster relief work after the ’06 earthquake earned her a commendation from the US Army. In Portland, she performed abortions and worked with Margaret Sanger, with whom she may’ve had a sexual relationship. A member of the Wobblies, Equi was known for her suffrage and labor organizing. She later became an anarchist. In 1915, with her partner Harriet Speckart, she adopted a child named Mary, who referred to her moms as ‘ma’ and ‘da.’ Her crime was protesting against the US’ entry into WWI; during a rally in Portland supporting preparedness for war, she had unfurled a banner that read ‘PREPARE TO DIE, WORKINGMEN, JP MORGAN & CO WANT PREPAREDNESS FOR PROFIT.’”
“Trade union organizing, for example, was often split on gender lines. As a result, women union members, because they weren’t competing with men for attention or social status, often had both the training and personal confidence to advance into local politics. Single-gender union organizing launched many women into electoral politics. Annie Malloy, for example, an Irish working-class woman and head of the Telephone Operators’ Union, ran for Boston City Council in 1922. Margaret Foley, a pivotal member of the Hat Trimsters’ Union in Boston, became a major figure in the powerful Women’s Trade Union League as well as the suffrage movement. She continued her political work until the 40s. Foley lived most of her life with her companion, Helen Goodnow, a suffrage worker from a well-to-do Boston family. For women like Malloy and Foley, all-women spaces provided an intensive network of friends and political support, allowing them to interact with a larger political world and form long-term relationships across class lines.
The commitment to women’s rights and labor issues that was woven into these personal relationships was often connected to a third issue: antimilitarism. Equi and Flynn, like Jane Addams, were outspoken WWI opponents. In 1915, Addams was elected the first head of the Woman’s Peace Party at that org’s founding meeting; later that year she presided over the Intl Congress of Women, a peace conference held at The Hague. At the congress, the Women’s Intl League for Peace and Freedom was formed, with Addams as its first president.”
“Many of the women who become prominent in shaping the New Deal were lesbians. Esther Lape, a journalist, and her partner, lawyer Elizabeth Reed, were Eleanor Roosevelt’s political mentors. Nancy Cook occupied a high position in the Democratic Party’s Women’s Division; her partner, Marion Dickerman, ran for public office and was involved in education reform. Molly Dewson was influential as the director of the Women’s Division of the Democratic National Committee; her partner, Polly Porter, had a long history working in the suffrage movement. All of these women were deeply committed to women’s rights, progressive education, labor reform, racial justice, international human rights, and antimilitarism. The person who helped their ideas influence government policy — they were unofficially called the ‘ladies’ brain trust’ — was Eleanor Roosevelt, a close friend to all of them, and in many ways the center of their circle.
FDR’s appointments, on Eleanor’s advice, of Frances Perkins as the first female sec. of the treasury and of Mary McLeod as director of the Division of Negro Affairs in the National Youth Administration — making her the first black woman appointed to a position in the federal government — were groundbreaking. Eleanor’s ‘ladies’ brain trust’ was the logical outgrowth of earlier female support networks. These networks were ongoing and complicated. Political change originates in a multiplicity of intersections of the personal and organizational that are always the result of many years of social and political evolution. The historic moment in which Eleanor Roosevelt and her trusted friends were able to help shape national policy was the result of a wide variety of mainstream and radical groups that fought for social justice, as well as the complicated lives of all the women and men involved in these struggles.”
“Both the Federal Transient Program and CCC were single-gender New Deal programs that gave work to displaced adult men. 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.’”
WWII
“WWII changed ideas about private and public, broadening the parameters of social permissibility. It was now permissible to show deeply felt personal emotions in public. Crying as a loved one shipped out, weeping over a death, and other displays of emotional pain and distress were acceptable public behaviors. This was also true of sexual passion and desire, as illustrated by the famous V-J Day in Times Square photo, in which a sailor is passionately kissing a nurse in broad daylight. Such behavior, unthinkable before the war, was now acceptable. Servicemen on leave, even if intoxicated, were respected by civilians. The emotional urgency of the war changed social and sexual expectations. Women could now socialize, even flirt, with servicemen in public venues.”
“In 1942 Stimson allowed Section 8 discharges — called ‘blue discharges,’ after the color of the paper on which they were printed — for gays. 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 healthcare 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 Sect. 8 discharge often meant that the former service member was unable to get a job in civilian life.
The army alone issued 49k-68k Sect. 8 discharges. As the war drew to a close, Sect. 8 discharges were given more frequently. Gays weren’t the only ones affected. Blacks were discharged, often for protesting civilian and military Jim Crow laws, in such disproportionate numbers — 22% for a group that made up only 7% of the army — that the national black press started a campaign against the practice.
For gays, receiving a Sect. 8 — which essentially indicated mental illness — could be devastating. Women and men were often committed to psych units for exams, grilled about their sexual thoughts and practices, and forced to give names of their sex partners. Many men were physically and sexually abused, and public humiliation was commonplace. In some places, gay servicemen were rounded up and placed in ‘queer stockades’ until they could be processed. 5k+ gays were released with Sect. 8 discharges from the army, and 4k+ from the navy.”
“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 gays 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.”
“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-waited, pegged pants. After the accusation, 200 sailors swept through East LA and attacked all men wearing zoot suits. Many of those attacked were teen boys, some as young as 12 or 13. 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 LA 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 40s promoted a clear and increasingly powerful model of oppression-driven group-based political power.’”
After Stonewall
“The only viable gay political org that existed in NY 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 Stonewall, Jim Fouratt, a young member, insisted: ‘All the oppressed have to unite! The system keeps us all weak by keeping us separate!’
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 July 24, 1969, meeting. The flyer announcing it was headlined: ‘Do you think homosexuals are revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are.’”
“The exciting, confusing, and often contradictory whirlpool of LGBT politics in the years after Stonewall helped, along with other forces, to shape the movement. It’s striking, however, to realize that the number of people actively involved in these orgs were miniscule. 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 orgs 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.
Much of the mainstream press was implicitly positive. On Oct 31, 1969, just 4 months after Stonewall, Time had a cover story called ‘The Homosexual in America.’ The article featured photos of gay liberationalists 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 April 1971 Playboy issue featured a long ‘roundtable’ on homosexuality that was clearly skewed against the conservative voices. The Dec 31, 1971, Life issue included an 11-page spread titled ‘Homosexuals in Revolt.’ It was decidedly affirmative, featuring numerous upbeat photos of lesbian and gay activists.’”
“In 1972, MA voters elected Elaine Noble to the state’s House, making her the first openly lesbian or gay state legislator in US history. Around the same time, activists were introducing nondiscrimination bills, misnamed by the press as ‘gay rights bills,’ in towns, cities, and counties around the country. These laws — modeled on the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids discrimination on ‘race, color, religion, sex, [or] national origin’ — targeted discrimination based on actual or perceived sexual orientation. Liberal university cities passed the first such laws, starting with East Lansing, MI, in March 1972 and Ann Arbor in August. Larger cities, such as Seattle, Minneapolis, and DC, followed. By 1976, 29 such laws had been passed in the US.”
“The fight in Dade Co. gained national attention. On June 7, in a special referendum with record-breaking voter turnout, the ordinance was repealed, 69%-40%.
After the win, Bryant announced she was going to start a national campaign against ‘gay rights laws.’ But the energy generated by the Bryant campaign had already begun to spread. In April and May 1978, laws protecting gays from discrimination were repealed in St. Paul, Wichita, and Eugene, even though Bryant didn’t personally campaign for their repeal.
The tide turned a bit, back to favoring gay rights, when in Nov. 1978 CA’s Prop 6 — also known as the Briggs Initiative — failed. While the referendums to repeal nondiscrimination laws were reactive, Prop 6 was proactive. It sought to prohibit lesbians and gay men, as well as any teacher who was found ‘advocating, imposing, encouraging, or promoting’ homosexuality, from teaching in public schools. Lesbian and gay activists — including Harvey Milk — spent months organizing the ‘No on 6’ campaign, which successfully defeated the prop by a 58% to 42% margin.
The Dade Co. and Prop 6 votes presented different challenges, but the main reason queer activists were victorious in the latter was a striking difference in organizing styles. Pro-gay activists in Dade Co. brought in outside spokespeople, used a rhetoric of human rights, and countered religious arguments with secular ones. In CA, the ‘No on 6’ campaign, using the gay lib-influenced slogan ‘Come Out! Come Out! Wherever You Are,’ urged lesbians and gay men to explain to their families, neighbors, and fellow citizens how Prop 6 would affect their lives. Citizens in CA responded to a personal appeal that allowed them insight into the lives of lesbians and gay men, while the Florida vote was lost when people failed to be persuaded by intellectual or political arguments. The contrast between these two approaches is even more striking given that in both cases, the opposition focused on the threat of gays to children.”
“The ‘dangerous ‘connection between gays and children was looming large in the public imagination, and much of this sentiment was enacted into law. States began passing laws that affected a range of family issues, such as banning lesbians and gay men from adopting children or becoming foster parents. Ironically, although the charges of recruitment and sexual molestation were aimed almost entirely at gay men, legal restrictions on adoption and foster care disproportionately affected lesbians.”
“The legal and cultural wars of the late 70s brought LGBT communities across the nation together in powerful ways, including massive rallies and campaigns against this new wave of political repression. When the repression took a violent turn — as it did with the June 24, 1973, firebombing of a New Orleans gay bar, in which 32 people were burned to death, or the assassination of SF mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk in 1978 — the diverse LGBT community was able to put aside its internal differences to fight a common enemy.”
The AIDS Crisis
“ACT UP took to the streets almost immediately. On Mar 24, 3 weeks after the first meeting, ACT UP members marched on Wall St demanding an end to profiteering by drug companies and easier access to experimental HIV drugs. 17 people were arrested for civil disobedience. Within months, the FDA announced that it would shorten the drug approval process by 2 years. On Apr 15, ACT UP marched on NY’s General Post Office, where thousands were waiting in line to file tax returns. This was the first time ACT UP used the image of the upside-down pink triangle and the phrase ‘Silence = Death.’ In June, ACT UP, along with other national AIDS groups, took part in civil disobedience at the White House to protest the federal government’s inaction on AIDS. As with the Gay Liberation Front, within months of ACT UP’s formation, local offshoots were started in cities across the country.”
William Buckley urged that ‘everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect common-needle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.’ The Reagan admin., meanwhile, had done almost nothing in the early years of the epidemic. The president himself — in what can only be seen as a conscious, and shocking, act of indifference — had mentioned AIDS publicly only twice, briefly, before giving a speech during the Third International Conference on AIDS in DC on May 31, 1987. This was after 36k Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, of whom 21k had died.”
“After a Jan. 1988 article in Cosmopolitan assured women they could have no-risk vaginal intercourse with an HIV+ man without a condom, 500 ACT UP demonstrators, organized by ACT UP’s Women’s Caucus, picketed the publication’s offices.”
“ACT UP’s defiant theatricality was evident in one of its most famous political protests. On Dec 12, 1989, 500+ activists, including ACT UP members and a separate but affiliated group, WHAM, held a ‘Stop the Church’ demonstration in front of NY’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral. 100+ of them entered the cathedral, lay down in the aisles, and were arrested for civil disobedience. They were protesting the influence that the archdiocese and Cardinal John O’Conner had exerted on city and state policy related to AIDS, safe-sex education, sexuality, and reproductive rights. The archdiocese had lobbied heavily, with expensive public ads as well as political pressure, to stop a program that dispensed condoms in public high schools and youth homeless shelters, as well as to stop needle exchange programs, which were proven effective in preventing HIV transmission in IV drug users. The archdiocese also promoted the falsehood that condom use was an ineffective means of controlling HIV transmission. In addition, it lobbied against any HIV and sex education that didn’t promote abstinence as the only way to prevent AIDS and pregnancy. O’Conner was quoted as saying, ‘The truth isn’t in condoms or clean needles. These are lies, lies perpetrated often for political reasons on the part of public officials…[and] some healthcare professionals.’”
Conclusion
“In her essay, ‘What Married Same-Sex Couples Owe to Hippie Communes,’ Nancy Polikoff details how the ’73 Supreme Court ruling USDA v. Moreno, which allowed hippie communes to receive food stamps, was pivotal to the Court’s 1996 Romer v. Evans decision, which forbade Colorado from treating gays as a group different from other groups. A 2010 US District Court decision also used USDA v. Moreno to argue that same-sex couples married in MA should be married under federal law as well.”
