Top Quotes: “Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution” — Linda Hirshman
The Early 20th Century
“The hall monitors were mostly looking the other way. As the great urbanization began, rural-based Protestant vice squads were focused on controlling the heterosexual behavior of males, especially of working-class males, and keeping the newly emancipated female factory workers safe. The vice squads — along with the anxious families back home — saw to it that urban boardinghouses and indeed whole neighborhoods were segregated by sex.
But in building single-sex residential hotels with shared bathrooms, the YMCA became “YMCA.” The mere act of showering at the Sloane House YMCA in New York produced so many sexual encounters that gay diarist Donald Vining once had to give up bathing in order to get some rest. Because boardinghouses had no kitchens, restaurants and cafeterias sprang up nearby.
Rooming houses, restaurants, the YMCA, and soon whole neighborhoods in growing cities like Los Angeles, Washington, New York, and San Francisco became centers of gay settlement. By the time gay people started keeping the diaries available to us, the young gay men pouring into the cities from farms and small towns already knew to go to Greenwich Village and DC’s Lafayette Square.”
“Prohibition had the unexpected consequence of making behaviors like homosexuality, which had always been criminal under the sodomy laws, part of a whole culture of socially accepted criminality. Being gay got a sort of respectability by association. At the end of the Prohibition period, several New York speakeasies openly advertised drag entertainment to their mixed clientele, what contemporaries called the “pansy craze.””
“The state liquor authority deemed the mere presence of homosexuals to constitute “disorder.”
No longer could gay men — or lesbians for that matter — gather in pleasant illicit surroundings alongside nongay patrons. This was particularly hard on the lesbians, who would not meet on streets and beaches like the men.”
“The San Francisco Chronicle issued an appeal for people to pick up hitchhiking soldiers from the bases nearby. But when they arrived in town, they got a mixed reception, as MPs suddenly started patrolling in parts of San Francisco that had never known serious antivice crusades. The army’s police stood outside two gay bars, the Silver Dollar and the Pirate’s Cove, declaring them off limits to the service members whose patronage was crucial to their profits. Of course it wasn’t all bad: when published in the local papers, the Armed Forces Disciplinary Control Board lists of off-limits places soon became a field guide to the whereabouts of San Francisco gay bars. The gay action was so hot at the San Francisco Pepsi-Cola Serviceman’s Canteen that civilians poached military uniforms in order to get inside.”
“Stalin didn’t much like homosexuals. Although the Bolsheviks decriminalized homosexual acts in 1918, sixteen years later, the dictator acted personally to reverse that liberal development. After 1934, the Soviets treated homosexuality as the decadent product of bourgeois culture, punishable by years at hard labor.”
“In April 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450 barring “sexual perverts” from federal employment.
And the consequences were scalding. Departments that did keep records indicate that a hundred employees a year resigned or were fired for sexual perversion, rising to four hundred a year between 1953 and 1955. By 1960, the State Department reported “firing one thousand homosexuals. Historian David Johnson estimates that the numbers from State imply at least five thousand firings in the government as a whole. Government contractors took their cue from their biggest customers. Congress, which at that time legislated for the District of Columbia, passed a tough new sexual psychopath law.”
“”The only thing I regret,” Peter Szluk, head of security for the State Department until 1962, told historian Griffin Fariello about his job firing gays, “was within minutes and sometimes maybe a week, they would commit suicide. One guy he barely left my office and boom — right on the corner of Twenty-first and Virginia.”
“Historian David Allyn reports that one of the liveliest meetings of the league centered on a discussion of whether public masturbation was illegal if no one was actually struck by flying semen.”
“As recently as 1965, Connecticut, for example, had a century-old law that made the use of contraception by anyone, including married couples, a criminal act.”
“The line of Supreme Court decisions directed to protecting people from reproducing if they don’t want to turns out to be the primal spring of rights for gays and lesbians, even though they are the least likely candidates for unwanted pregnancy. Once sexual practices became a matter of individual decision making protected from the regulatory agency of the government, the inexorable logic of the precedent should have dictated the demise of the laws against the private practice of sodomy, generally understood to mean anything other than heterosexual genital intercourse.”
“Somehow the hippie potluck nuptials did not offset the falsity of Wittman’s sexual commitment. One year later, he and Feingold took the step guaranteed to break up a homosexual’s heterosexual marriage — they moved to San Francisco. Wittman, always and to his core an activist, took up with the Bay Area War Resistance. He also, Mungello reports, took up with him and with, numerous other gay men in the Bay Area in the priapic California sunshine.”
Post-Stonewall
“The last thing Mattachine president Dick Leitsch wanted after Stonewall was a protest meeting. Mattachine had a relationship with the authorities and progress was slowly being made. Just a few years earlier Leitsch got the New York licensing authorities to abandon the rule against gay hairdressers. He went to a function the Democratic Party was holding and had a chat with the wife of the New York secretary of state. “You know, if you’re a homosexual you can’t be a hairdresser,” he told her. “That’s ridiculous,” the politico’s well-coiffed spouse responded. “Do you mean my Mr. Rodney?” “You’d better not tell your husband about Mr. Rodney or he could lose his license,” Leitsch replied. “And so they changed it,” he concludes proudly.”
“GAA zaps, occurring without warning and in vulnerable spaces, were intended not to make their lives as good as the lives of their oppressors, but to make the lives of the authorities as miserable as the lives the gay citizens were living.”
“When Harper’s magazine published an article by intellectual heavy hitter Joseph Epstein, expressing his wish to “wipe homosexuality off the face of the earth,” GAA activists brought cakes and a big coffee urn to the offices of the magazine, interrupting publication to demand equal time to reply. As each of Harper’s employees walked into work that morning, he or she was greeted by a GAA demonstrator: “I’m a homosexual,” the activists said. “Have a doughnut.” As decades of ensuing activism would prove, again and again, it’s hard to wish someone off the face of the earth when he’s offering you a doughnut. Even if he’s trespassing.”
“Typically, when Mattachine did not live up to Rodwell’s radical expectations, he simply founded a new organization, Homosexual Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN). Rodwell was the only member. Nonetheless, at crucial junctures, he “represented” HYMN at regional and national meetings like the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ECHO), pulling the discussion and resolution of important issues his way.
By Stonewall, Rowell had perfected the two other activities crucial to social organization but not requiring consensus: the bookstore and the march. Unlike other gay bookstores, the bookstore Rodwell founded did not sell pornography. As a result, the store could have big, open windows that admitted the light and made the place a warm and welcoming destination. There was a gay bulletin board. Organizations could come and distribute their literature or sell it. Professors sent their students there for everything from literature to counseling on how to tell their parents they were gay. When it finally closed in 2009, Rodwell’s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, founded in 1967, was the oldest gay bookstore in the country.”
“It did feel sort of empty in front of the Stonewall at two o’clock that first year. Young gay lawyer Michael Lavery thinks there could not have been more than twenty-five at noon. If there were a thousand people after all that work, it was a lot. As they marched up Sixth Avenue, however, the march grew. First it doubled; then, most observers think, it doubled again. Somewhere between two thousand and ten thousand people marched through the streets of New York. When they got to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, the first marchers climbed a little rise and looked back to see gay people filling the entire space and still pouring down the street. Frank Kameny remembered the forty-five people at the last annual reminder and now he saw thousands. He was there with his good friends Jack Nichols and Lige Clark. We were, they wrote in the new New York weekly, Gay, “awestruck by the vast throngs of confident humanity wending their way into a promised land of freedom-to-be.””
“Richard Socarides, fifteen years old and gay, had his family’s Manhattan town house at Seventy-eighth Street and Third Avenue to himself the last weekend in June 1970. Richard brought his high school boyfriend to spend the night. After making love Sunday morning, they decided to go to Central Park. As they crossed Fifth Avenue, they encountered a vast throng of people holding up signs and chanting about gay rights. Smilingly, Richard said to his lover, “Well, I think we did our little bit for gay rights this morning.” Twenty-five years later, Socarides took his place in the White House as the first official adviser to an American president on gay and lesbian matters.”
“The gay movement did not just change America for gay people Because of the challenge to psychiatry by the well-adjusted homosexuals, academic psychiatrist Spitzer and his colleagues were forced to address a question central to the treatment of mental illness for everyone. What is the status of behavior that society doesn’t like but that the people who practice the behavior think is fine? Rightly or wrongly, to this day, Spitzer thinks there’s something not optimal about homosexuality, a behavior that does not lead to survival in a simple Darwinian world. He figured out right away that in order to protect the homosexuals whom psychiatry had hurt so badly and with no defensible scientific proof of treatable illness, he had to distinguish between what he calls less than “optimal social functioning” and disease. From there, the entire diagnostic machinery had to be re-engineered from the ground up, with a big effort to avoid pathologizing behaviors that are just socially unfamiliar. The process eventually produced the famed DSM III, an attempt to frame mental illness as a medical condition, not just some analyst’s intuition or interpretation of the work of Dr. Freud.
Spitzer was the chief draftsman of DSM III. He says it was the gay challenge that started him down the road of rethinking the whole procedure of identifying mental illness. In an article about DSM IIl and Spitzer, the New Yorker concludes that, “In the course of defining more than a hundred mental diseases, he not only revolutionized the practice of psychiatry but also gave people all over the United States a new language with which to interpret their daily experiences and tame the anarchy of their emotional lives.” And so the gay revolution changed America for everyone.”
“The Metropolitan Community Church spread like early Christianity. From the beginning, unlike almost any other organization of the gay revolution, they met weekly; it was Sunday services after all. “First there were twelve and then twenty-four and then three hundred,” Perry remembers. Two years after Perry started, in 1971, the Metropolitan Community Church held its first service in its own building, A thousand people attended. Jews came and decided to start the first gay synagogue. By 1970, there were MCC churches in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Chicago, and Honolulu, and enough leaders for a “federation, the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.” Within a few years there were MCC congregations all over the world.
The MCC had the first gay-rights lobby in Washington, with an office right down the street from the Supreme Court. For two years, they were the only gay lobby in DC. During the AIDS epidemic, the MCC made buttons that read GOD IS STRONGER THAN AIDS. The church buried five thousand of its members. And then, “We ended up preaching funerals for people who were not members of MCC,” Perry says. “The parents would come to me and say would you preach my son’s funeral? We’re from Alice, Texas, and our Baptist Church wouldn’t understand.” MCC pastors went in and washed the bodies before the morticians would touch them. Today there are forty thousand members in three hundred congregations.”
“In 1980, Endean decided to imitate the Republican election machine and start a gay political action committee (PAC). If the gay lobby couldn’t convince the existing legislators to support gay rights, maybe they should start electing people who would. After all, that’s what the Republicans had just done in the 1980 election. By then Endean knew some gay millionaires other than Goodstein (whom he loathed). Together, Endean and his gay plutocrats founded the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRC-F), a gay PAC with no mention of homosexuality in its title. And so in a decade, the gay movement went from the leather-clad SDS alums of the Gay Liberation Front to an elite club of the richest gay men in America — what San Francisco social chronicler Armistead Maupin called the “A-gays” — meatpacking heir James Hormel, the impossible David Goodstein, even a Republican, beer heir Dallas Coors. A-gays in LA had been meeting at one another’s fancy homes for several years now. A handful of courageous California pols even stopped by to make speeches (and raise money). HRC-F took it national. The blockbuster black-tie gay fund-raiser was born.”
“By the time Milk surfaced, historians estimate that somewhere between 20 and 25 percent of the population of San Francisco was gay. As the gay migrants flooded in, they were greeted with every imaginable inducement to register to vote. The bars were registering gay voters.”
“Unlike the angry Stonewall rioters, San Francisco gays were registered to vote. They turned their political wrath on the politicans they held responsible for White’s light sentence: they retired the district attorney who unsuccessfully prosecuted White as well as every member of the Board of Supervisors except Milk’s gay successor, Harry Britt. The liberal establishment had to pass the first big-city gay civil rights law in the country. Thereafter gay candidates and balanced tickets were synonymous in the city by the bay.”
“It is not a stretch to imagine Milk as the mayor of San Francisco, and thus the first gay mayor of any American city, large or small. Had Milk lived, the genuinely populist coalition he started could have transformed that city and been a model for a revived liberal politics everywhere.
Instead, the Alice Club’s reform-minded gradualists, funded and to some extent dominated by the wealthy David Goodstein, recaptured control of the important San Francisco branch of the gay movement. The substance of their agenda moved to the right — they just wanted to be included in the gentrification of San Francisco instead of being allied with labor and other marginal groups to make the process more just for everyone. As America moved to the right and the seventies drew to a close, gays were not idealistic insurgents, but part of the California political establishment. Maybe it’s just as well. They were soon going to need every weapon they had.”
“For the gay revolution, part of what brought change was the technology of the blood test for AIDS. Before the test, AIDS victims like Victor Bender were often at death’s door when they found out they were sick and came out. They had little time to act politically or in any other way. After the test, they could learn they were infected long before they even felt sick.”
“Led by their board chairman, dying activist Dan Bradley, wearing a large funeral wreath, they blocked Pennsylvania Avenue. The police, wearing bright yellow rubber gloves like the ones people use to wash dishes with, picked them up and carried them to the waiting vehicles. Again the photographs were everywhere Dan Bradley, former president of the Legal Services Corporation, carried off like a dirty dish.”
“Denver, which would ultimately test the access of gay people to democratic self-governance, is a perfect example of the process. Within a year of Stonewall, Denver had a gay-liberation front. When the Denver police parked a bus decorated with a “Johnny Cash Special” sign near the gay cruising area and assigned an undercover agent to entice men on so other cops could arrest them until the bus was full, the new coalition called a press conference and a political movement was born.
Activists succeeded in getting the Denver City Council to repeal its lewd-loitering and cross-dressing ordinances in 1973.”
“On The Oprah Winfrey Show, in a new low point for daytime TV, the teaser for his segment of the show asked, “Is killing gays the solution for AIDS? Stay tuned.””
“Help came from unexpected places. After a harrowing sexual-harassment, rape, sodomy, and adultery scandal at the army’s Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1996, the army took a sudden interest in the treatment of women. As the National Gay Task Force’s Sue Hyde had noticed almost a decade before, military women were always disproportionately targeted for accusations of homosexuality; it was a way to keep them in line. A July 1997 secretary of the army’s Senior Review Panel Report on Sexual Harassment finally recognized that “one particular form of sexual harassment not addressed in the survey that they had done for the report] but commented on in a few focus groups and by other female soldiers in informal discussions, was the fear of being accused of being a homosexual. Female soldiers who refuse the sexual advances of male soldiers may be accused of being lesbians and subjected to investigation for homosexual conduct. As in the case of men falsely accused of sexual harassment, women accused of lesbianism believe that the mere allegation harms their careers and reputations irreparably.” Undersecretary of Defense Edwin Dom issued a guideline to protect such women: “The fact that a service member reports being threatened because he or she is said or is perceived to be a homosexual shall not by itself constitute credible information justifying the initiation of an investigation of the threatened service member.” Slowly the environment changed.”
“Listening to the president in his apartment nearby, former fund-raiser and movement activist Michael Rogers got pissed. He knew the Republican Party was riddled with closeted members, and he was “sick and tired of watching the Bushies use marriage to get elected when they were then going out and sucking dick.” He didn’t have a bank of microphones, but he had learned a lot about direct action years before when he was in ACT UP. That February, he started calling the offices where the closeted gay staffers worked and asking whoever answered the phone questions like, “I want to know why Pete Meachum is working for Ginny Brown and he’s a gay man.” Tell whoever answers the phone, Rogers figures, and everybody in the office will know. He kept calling around and asking.
Rogers’s neighbor, John Aravosis, had the same reaction Rogers did. He was so angry at the president’s proclaiming a campaign against gay people he started a website, DearMary.com. Write to Vice President Cheney’s openly gay daughter, Mary, it urged, and ask her to stop the campaign for an anti-gay marriage amendment. Then Aravosis started a regular blog, Americablog. Down the street, Rogers saw what Aravosis had done, quit his phoning around, and started BlogActive.com. As he gathered his information about the gay staffers and legislators working against the gay community, he started publishing their names. “No community, Rogers says, “should be expected to harbor its own enemies.” And so the List was born.”
