Assignment 1 @ AUGUST 6th

Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1999.

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This is a thoroughly modern story-with its inspired crisis, the emphasis on coming out, and the role ofthe lesbian and gay movement in both provoking the reporters' interest and inspiring my own delayed announcement-and yet there are threads that we can follow back in time as well. That my father thought about but rejected the comparison to Aunt Leila suggests the tangled relationship of Boston marriage to contemporary lesbianism. That he took a social constructionist position (without having any idea what that might be) on the question of why I was a lesbian, in contrast to Verta's mother, who assured us she knew all about the gay gene, suggests the continuing dispute about the making of sexualities. And that my saying the words, "I am a lesbian," took so long and meant so much to me reflects the salience of naming.

Too often we think of twentieth-century events as massive watersheds in the history of same-sex sexuality. Supposedly the Second World War catapulted us into a new era. And the famous riot at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village in 1969, which marks the beginning of "gay liberation," looms large, dividing the decades into "before" and "after" Stonewall. But as we have already seen in considering the early twentieth century, identification, visibility, and community were not entirely novel in the 1940s and 1950s. And there is nothing inevitable about the shape of lesbian and gay life at the end of the century. It is important to remember this as we explore the tumultuous developments since the 1930s.

I begin my consideration here with the mixed impact of the Second World War on both women and men and the consequences ofthe McCarthyite attack on "homosexual per­ version" in the postwar years. Intensified oppression brought terrible hardship, but it also spread the word about homosex­ uality. I consider how, in the hostile world of the 1950s, gay

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and lesbian subcultures persisted. I then turn to the complex world ofthe butch/fem working-class bar culture of the 1940s and 1950s, a striking contrast to the persistence of romantic friendship among middle-class and upper-class women. I end with what was, indeed, an arresting new development: the emergence of a social movement organized around same­ sex sexuality. The homophile movement of the 1950s paved the way for organized resistance that eventually took many forms. When political groups succeeded in mobilizing the social worlds that continued to bring together the largest number of gay and lesbian people, they held out the greatest promise. I end, short of the famous Stonewall riot, with small demonstrations and political campaigns-indications that Stonewall is indeed just a handy way of marking a turning point that had been long in the making.

Is

The Second World War holds an important place in the history of same-sex sexuality, having created spaces for the survival and spread of the gay cultures that had flourished in New York and elsewhere in the 1920s. As we have seen, the economic crisis of the 1930s and the accompanying cultural backlash against the social experimentation of the Roaring Twenties pushed gay culture out of the mainstream and more or less out of sight in most places. But America's entrance into the war to some extent reversed that process. Not only did mobilization bring about increased geographical mobility, re­ moving soldiers and sailors and women war workers recruited to boom towns from the confines of small-town life, but the sex-segregated nature of both the military and the war indus­ try heightened the chance that individuals with unexpressed or unacknowledged same-sex desires would make contact with others who shared those feelings. Women with access

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to formerly male jobs in industry experienced a loosening of social and sexual control. Even respectable white middle­ class women could socialize in public without men and wear pants publicly without reproach. But, ironically, it was the military that gave the biggest boost to the elaboration of gay culture.

From the very beginning of wartime mobilization in 1941, attempts to eliminate homosexuals from the ranks of

fighting men called attention to their existence. As part of the intensified psychological testing designed to improve the mental health of the armed forces, men inducted into the military encountered frank and potentially consciousness­ raising questions about their sexual conduct and desires. Homosexual men, the military assumed, were too effeminate to be good soldiers and too mentally unstable to hold up under pressure. Because masculinity suited, rather than un­ suited, women for military service, women inductees escaped scrutiny for sexual deviance until near the end of the war, when the mother of a private discovered love letters written to her daughter by a Women's Army Corps sergeant and threat­ ened to tell the world that the Corps was "full of homosexuals and sex maniacs." 1 From the first men faced questions about whether they liked girls, if they were homosexual or had had homosexual feelings, or if they had had sex with men

or boys. Some gay men lied to get into the service, others told the truth and suffered the consequences. Psychiatrist interviewers, trained by the Selective Service, watched for

bodily discomfort or effeminate physical characteristics in naked selectees or pricked up their ears at questions such as, "Why do I get embarrassed with women? ... Why have I been approached by so many (fairies?' "2 What this process meant was that every man inducted into the armed forces had to classify his sexuality and confront the possibility of homosexual feelings or experiences.

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Despite the best efforts of the psychiatrists, the new screening process did not, in fact, keep confirmed or potential gay men out of the service. For a variety of reasons-because men who already identified as gay excelled at hiding their inclinations, because some men did not label their feelings or behavior as "homosexual;' because gay military officers looked the other way, and at bottom because eventually any warm body would do-gay men in significant numbers found themselves in the armed forces. Nineteen-year-old New York City draftee Robert Fleischer, desperate to get into the army, enthusiastically proclaimed his liking for girls in 1943 and made it in. "My God, couldn't he see my curly platinum hair that was partly bleached, the walk, maybe the sissy S in my voice?" he wondered. 3

With no formal screening procedures in place for women, lesbians flocked to the military. Pat Bond, who enlisted- in 1945, described the officer at the recruiting station as looking "sort of like all my old gym teachers in drag. Stockings, little earrings, her hair slicked back and very daintily done so you couldn't tell she was a dyke, but I knew! "4 Yet the military brass were not unconcerned about lesbianism. Rumors about the sexual immorality of the Women's Army Corps-spread by servicemen and not, as the military feared, by German spies-hampered recruitment efforts, leading to tightened screening procedures as the war progressed. Women's Army Corps recruiters began to inquire about enlistees' motivations for joining up, asking if they wanted to "be with other girls." 5

Throughout the war, the WAC leadership hoped to suppress lesbianism without calling public attention to the problem, so what might look like tolerance was in reality an attempt to protect the fragile reputation of the Corps. 6

Once in, men found themselves in an all- male environ­ ment that fostered bonding between "buddies" and threw men together in tents, beds, and train berths. Gay men could

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find ways to have sex if they dared. As in Newport during the First World War, even heterosexual men might engage in same-sex acts, as long as they did the penetrating, without feeling any stigma. Lesbians in the military tended to pair off, drawing attention, according to one observer, only if they ways hung out together, shared a cigarette, kissed lingeringly, or called each other "darling" or "sweetheart:'? Yet increasing fear for the reputation of the Women's Army Corps provoked investigations that targeted any woman with a masculine "haircut ... manner of wearing clothing ... posture ... or stride" or any woman trying to "date other girls such as a man would."8

Despite official disapproval of homosexuality in the mil­ itary, gay women and men found themselves sometimes tol­ erated in the interests of the war effort and able to fit into special roles. Astonishingly, psychiatrists advised Women's Army Corps officers that they could mold "potential ho­ mosexual tendencies" into strong admiration for a woman leader that would produce an exemplary soldier.9 Cross­ gender occupations-motor transport for women, secretarial work or nursing for men-made a place for butch women and "sissy" men, though African American women in the Women's Army Corps had to fight to stay out of the most menial service jobs. Even extremely effeminate men could play the barracks ''fairy;' a comic role familiar to many from the 1920s "pansy craze." All-male (and racially segregated) shows that soldiers put on for the troops gave some men the chance to dress in drag. Army Special Services put out handbooks with scripts, music, lyrics, set designs, and even dress patterns. Performing in drag for one's buddies was not without its dangers, despite the long tradition of men in sex-segregated cultures dressing up as women as an ironic way of affirming their masculinity. The crackdown on female impersonation in the 1930s had associated drag more firmly

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with homosexuality and perversion, so soldier drag queens

had to walk a line. 10

Off base, gay men and women sought out institutions where they could socialize, giving an enormous boost to the gay bar. Traditional sites such as private parties increasingly gave way to public commercialized forms of entertainment suited to a young, large, and geographically mobile popu­ lation. From the rare lesbian bars such as Mona's in San Francisco and the If Club and Lakeshore Club in Los Angeles to the posh hotel bars for men at the Astor in New York, the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco, and the Biltmore in Los Angeles to the interracial public drag balls at Finnie's Club in Chicago and Phil Black's Fun Makers Club in Harlem, military women and men, whether middle or working class, white or of color, could find a place to be themselves. Wartime mobility spread the news of choice locations and disseminated gay slang across the country, helping to nationalize lesbian and gay subcultures. Sometimes the military police, concerned with fighting vice and especially venereal disease, even served as a source ofinformation about the gay life by posting certain

establishments as off-limits. 11

If wartime mobilization fostered a boom in lesbian and gay subcultures, above all in San Francisco, the port of depar­ ture for and arrival from the Pacific theater of war, life in the military was not all fun, games, and drag shows for gay service personnel. Unable to imprison all homosexual offenders, the military, prompted by psychiatrists, instituted the system of dishonorable discharges (known as "blue discharges" because they were printed on blue paper) for homosexuals during the war. Only criminal offenders who committed same-sex rape or had sex with a minor would be imprisoned. Those classified as "true" or "confirmed" homosexuals who engaged in consensual sex would be discharged. And "normal young

" not "by nature homosexuals" but who "submitted men,

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GI drag shows during the Second World War: "This Is the Army" and "Jumping with Jodie." Army Signal Corps

Photograph Collection, l 11-SC-1405222 and 111-SC-208040. Courtesy of the National Archives, Washington, D.C.

BECOMING A PEOPLE

to the practice" because drunk or curious would be "re­ habilitated and retained;' so great was the nation's need in wartime. 12 This supposedly more humane system, based on the paternalistic pity introduced by the medical reformers at the turn of the century, not incidentally increased the power of the psychiatric profession. And the new system,, despite the rejection of across-the-board legal sanctions, enhanced the military's system of surveillance and punishment of ho­ mosexuals. Listen to the interrogation of a woman corporal accused of a sexual relationship with a woman lieutenant:

Q. What do you do when you and Lt. Foster get together and make

love?

A. We just love each other.

Q. How? Describe it to me.

A. We put our arms around each other and love each other ....

Q. Have you ever touched her sexual organs?

A. No ma'am.

Q. What physical reaction do you get from kissing Lt. Foster and

petting her?

A. I would say I get the same reaction that I would get from kissing

a man ....

Q. Have you ever heard the term "to come" expressed-meaning

someone has been relieved physically, that one has had a

physical reaction as a result of being made love to?

A. Yes ma' am.

Q. How do you love one another to get this reaction?

A. We are very close to each other ....

Q. Did you learn it from her?

A. I think we learned it together ....

Q. We are here to eliminate from the Army people who practice

this kind of thing. If you know anything about these kinds of

people ... we want you to tell us.

A. . .. Do I have to drag other people into this?13

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Approximately ten thousand Gls, all but a few dozen of them men, themselves interrogated about their sex lives and lovers, locked up on psychiatric wards, publicly humiliated and abused, and eventually discharged with a stain on their records they could never erase.

The war had complex consequences for people with same-sex desires. Gay veterans who survived in the military came home more aware of gay life and identity. But military service also raised real dangers of exposure and punishment.

Postwar

In an increasingly hostile postwar environment, those with blue discharges found themselves denied GI benefits and access to many jobs. Marty Klausner, a gay GI with a dishon­ orable discharge who ran into one roadblock after another in his attempts to find work and get schooling in Pittsburgh, wrote to a friend in 1946, "I'm terrifically unhappy and am constantly in a state of utter confusion as to what to do and where to turn." 14 A woman dishonorably discharged from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio nevertheless counted her blessings because she had an understanding family. In contrast, "Two of the girls discharged for homosex­ uality have committed suicide and one other has disappeared completely," she reported. ls

From the military, antihomosexual policies spread to the civilian sector of government. In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, with its glorification of the nuclear family as a bastion against communism, gay men and lesbians lost jobs in government with devastating personal consequences. Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his trusty (and, ironically, gay) aide Roy Cohn at his side, linked communist subversion with "homosexual perversion." A 1950 Senate committee report titled Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in

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Government concluded even one pervert "tends to have a corrosive influence upon his fellow employees. These perverts will frequently attempt to entice normal individuals to engage in perverted practices. This is particularly true in the case of young and impressionable people who might come under the influence of a pervert:' 16 New York Daily Mirror columnist Lee Mortimer wrote a series of lurid exposes reporting lesbians formed cells in schools and universities and wormed their way into the armed forces, where they seduced even raped their innocent peers. In government cc 10,000 faggots"-"people you wouldn't let in your garbage wagon" ­ had infiltrated, with dire results.17 Dismissals.from all levels of government service increased, and countless lesbians and gay men never made it through the new screening processes designed to keep them out in the first place.

Even if they avoided government or military service, gay men and lesbians could not assume they would be safe. A nationwide panic about ''sexual psychopaths" increased fears of "deviants;' including homosexuals. When news of a sex crime hit the papers, police often cracked down on male homosexuals, regardless of the facts of the case. After the murder of a child in Chicago in 1946, Marty Klausner, the gay GI quoted above, wrote to a friend: "I suppose you read about the kidnapping and killing ofthe little girl in Chicago­ ! noticed tonight that they 'thought' (in their damn self righteous way) that perhaps a pervert had done it and they rounded up all the females [gay men]-they blame us for everything." 18

Furthermore, the Federal Bureau oflnvestigation, headed by the infamously closeted J. Edgar Hoover, gathered records of morals arrests from local police departments, scoured newspapers for articles about the gay subculture, compiled information about gay bars, and infiltrated the early ho­ mosexual rights organizations. Post office officials instituted

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surveillance of men who subscribed to physique magazines other publications popular with gay men and even joined

gay pen-pal dubs to try to trace networks of''deviants." Raids on lesbian and gay bars and gay male cruising spots increased, and newspapers routinely printed the names and addresses of those caught up in the sweeps. Police arrested sixty-three women in a single raid in New Orleans in 1953.19 In Boise, Idaho, in 1955, the arrest of three men accused of having sex with teenage boys led to a fifteen-month investigation that involved questioning 1,400 residents.20 A Florida legisla­ tive committee headed by conservative state senator Charley Johns launched an investigation in 1958 ofhomosexual activ­ ity at the University ofFlorida. Paying precious little attention to legal niceties, the Johns Committee questioned witnesses, publicized charges based on hearsay, and eventually dismissed sixteen members of the faculty and staff. All, not coinciden­ tally, were involved in the civil rights movement, confirming the conclusion of the Florida Civil Liberties Union that sexual morality was not the real or only issue in this investigation.21

Although such assaults took their toll, heightened war­ time expectations led in the immediate postwar years to an early attempt to win justice for homosexuals. Launched by black civil rights advocates who pointed to the racist use of dishonorable discharges against African American soldiers who had ventured to protest their racially unfair treatment, a campaign against the punitive discharge measures included homosexual veterans as " 'unfortunates' of the Nation preyed upon by the blue discharge."22 Some gay veterans even dared to speak out publicly on their own behalf. A discharged Women's Army Corps officer wrote anonymously in 1945 to Yank, the army weekly, pointing out, "Many Army medical doctors believe strongly concerning the injustice of this situ­ ation. If only people would realize this and help us with un­ derstanding rather than casting us out with condemnation! "23

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Veteran as early as 1920s to orga­ nize homosexuals, asked director of the Mental Hygiene Bureau in Washington, "Shall these thousands of homosex­ uals who fought in this war have come back to this country to find they fought in vain persecution of them is still going on as before in land of ours, disgr(;lced by

presence of hypocritical fanatics?" 24 During a brief period some homosexuals won upgrades of their discharges. But in 1947, when army hard-liners re­ placed most discharges with general discharges, nothing changed in the case homosexuals, who remained "undesirable" and, reversing wartime policy, became "unre­

claimable" as well. But the witch-hunts in the military and civilian life did not

succeed in destroying the existing subcultures. As in the case of the armed forces' screening process, public discussion of the "homosexual menace" spread word ofthe gay life. This meant that it was easier to find not only for the hostile observers but also for those seeking such a life.

to Go

Despite the forces of oppression unleashed against those with same-sex desires in the Cold War years, sources of informa­ tion on homosexuality multiplied and enclaves of acceptance persisted or opened up in a variety of places. Alfred Kinsey's famous studies Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, which followed in 1953, presented the shocking finding that far more white Americans (Kinsey included information only about his white subjects) engaged in same-sex sexual relations than was commonly believed. With his characteristic statistical precision, Kinsey stated that 3 7 percent of white males and 13 percent of white females had had orgasms with someone of

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the same sex, and 50 percent of white men and 28 percent of white women had had some kind of"homosexual response."25 Although Kinsey sought to break down the notion that people could be divided into two rigid categories of "heterosexual" and "homosexual;' his seven-point continuum from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality did not really ac­ complish that. But he certainly caught and held the attention of Americans, whose eyes were opened to a far wider variety of sexualities than they had previously acknowledged.

Along with the Kinsey reports, an explosion ofbooks and magazines brought homosexuality into the public arena. Les­ bian pulp novels appeared on the shelves ofcorner drugstores. Mostly written by male authors for a heterosexual audience, such inexpensive paperbacks depicted lesbian life as pathetic and unhappy. Even the stories written by lesbian authors, who were more likely to depict strong and admirable heroines, generally had to end unhappily. Yet lesbian readers treasured these books, since at least women loved and desired other women within their covers. Imagine what it might have been like for a lesbian to read the following passage, even if the novel ended with Laura bravely giving up her sorority sister Beth to heterosexuality:

"Mmmm .... " Beth murmured as Laura's hands began to trace

the curves of her back. "Oh, that's marvelous." She shivered a little

and Laura trembled with her. "Under my pajamas, Laur." ... And

Laura's hands descended to their enthralling task again, caressing

the flawless hollows, the sweet shoulders. She was lost to reason

now .... A wash of heat flooded Laura's face. She bent over Beth

and began to kiss her like a wild, hungry child, pausing only to

murmur, "Beth, Beth, Beth .... " Beth rolled over on her back

then and looked up at Laura, reaching for her, breathing hard and

smiling a little, and her excitement consumed the last of Laura's

reserve. Her lips found Beth's, and found them welcoming.26

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Gay men could read their own pulp novels or choose from the burgeoning male physique magazines that the Supreme Court had declared were not obscene. Serious literature, too, such as Jean Genet's Our Lady ofthe Flowers, James Baldwin's Another Country, William Burrough's Naked Lunch, and Mary McCarthy's The Group included gay and lesbian characters. Even Hollywood, where film producers had since 1930 ad­ hered to a code that banned "sex perversion;' began cautiously to explore same-sex sexuality in the early 1960s in such films as The Children's Hour and Advise and Consent.27

The "beat" scene of the 1950s, too, like earlier avant­ garde artistic subcultures, called attention to homosexuality and created a space within cafes and coffeehouses where gay life flourished. The North Beach section of San Francisco became the center of an artistic movement that rejected the conformity and consumerism ofthe Cold War era and instead celebrated sexual experimentation and social protest. Allen Ginsberg's Howl, a poem in the tradition of Walt Whitman, made North Beach famous when in 1957 the police confis­ cated copies and arrested bookstore owner Lawrence Fer­ linghetti for selling obscene literature. Journalists denounced the beats as "young hedonists who don't really care whether something is good or evil, as long as it is enjoyable" and as ''po­ ets, pushers, and panhandlers, musicians, male hustlers, and a few marginal esthetes seeking new marginal directions:' 28

When police raided a coffeehouse in normally staid Phila­ delphia in 1959, the escalating conflict pitted the authorities against "men in beards" and "girls in tights." One reporter explained, "The proprietors and habitues say they are col­ lege students, artists and art students, persons looking for a quiet place to spend an inexpensive evening in a non­ alcoholic atmosphere. Neighbors of the places and policemen add to that list homosexuals, dope users and various types of odd characters."29

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In yet a different arena, the drag balls that had long served as a central institution of the gay male world reached their peak of popularity and visibility in the immediate postwar years. Although the balls in Chicago and New York attracted both African American and white crowds, it was the black press that reported on them. On the black and working­ dass South Side of Chicago in the 1950s, Finnie's Ball was the social event of the year. As Ebony described the 1952 ball: ((The men who don silks, satins and laces for the yearly masquerade are as style-conscious as the women of a social dub planning an annual charity affair or a society dowager selecting a debutante gown for her favorite daughter."30 That the drag balls drew giant crowds and made the pages of the major African American publications at the same time that the military and federal government undertook purges of homosexuals shows that the forces of toleration and op­ pression always intermingled. And the interest of the larger African American community in the drag balls, although not always entirely positive, suggests that the coexistence of gay and straight worlds (and also perhaps a more fluid notion of sexuality) that characterized urban life early in the twentieth century may have lingered longer in some communities than in others.

Another, very different community that bucked the trend ofthe antihomosexual 1950s was Cherry Grove on Fire Island, New York. Gay theater people had first discovered Cherry Grove in the 1930s, and in the postwar years the small, isolated summer community became ((like a very private gay country dub;' according to one insider.31 ccI was free as a bird in the fifties," she added. News of Cherry Grove spread by word of mouth at gay bars or private parties in New York. English poet W. H. Auden and his companion Chester Kallman spent time in Cherry Grove, as did other literary celebrities such as Carson McCullers, Tennessee Williams,

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and Truman Capote. By the 1950s, newspaper references such as "Cherry Grove, Fire Island's outpost of Greenwich Village," helped to solidify the community's reputation and draw ever more gay and lesbian visitors. As one Grover put it, everyone knew that "this was where gay people could go and have a ball."32 Like other resorts, this was an exclusive world, open only to white, middle- and upper-class people loosely connected to the world ofthe arts. Yet its very existence testifies to the oases some people could construct in the face of massive oppression.

Across the country, men and women with same-sex de­ sires sought out places where they could live their lives as freely as possible. San Francisco, already a city with a reputation as wide open to sexual and gender nonconformity, became a sort of gay haven in the postwar years. As a tongue-in-cheek news­ paper headline proclaimed in 1949, ((HOMO-SEXUALS AND

LESBIANS WELCOME TO SAN FRANCISCO-HALF-A-DOZEN CEN­ TERS AVAILABLE FOR YOUR USE-YOU MAY FREQUENT WITHOUT MOLESTATION COUNTLESS THEATERS AND PARKS-WE CATER TO YOUR NEEDs:'33

But even those who did not end up in the gay capital of San Francisco might find an expanded social scene at home. In the aftermath of the war Washington, D.C., hosted numer­ ous bars, segregated by both race and sex. In the late 1940s cities such as Kansas City, Missouri, Richmond, Virginia, Worcester, Massachusetts, and San Jose, California, boasted gay bars. In addition, public cruising areas for men interested in sex with other men expanded in the postwar years. Ac­ cording to a sensational expose that inadvertently provided a guide to gay life, Lafayette Square-((Garden of Pansies" ­

as well as Dupont Circle attracted men looking for men in Washington.34 If this was not exactly news-remember Jeb Alexander picking up men in the l 920s-the places where gay men might find each other were increasing.

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In Flint, Michigan, and surely in other cities as well, the postwar boom in automobile ownership made cars, as well as bars and parks, handy places where men might have sex with other men. At 2:30 on a June morning in 1950, police discov­ ered a cross-dressed twenty-five-year-old African American male employee of Fisher Body having sex in a parked Chevro­ let with another man who worked for the power company. Applying an unconsciously ironic term, the court-appointed psychiatrists in the case deemed the man dressed in women's clothes an "active homosexual." The cross-dresser told them that she was "born queer" and that she had "practiced the use of his mouth as a sex organ" since the age of eight. judge, as a result of the evaluation, committed her to Ionia State Hospital. 35 In Flint, most of the arrests for consensual sodomy in the 1950s resulted when the police found men having sex in cars.

Cars, within financial reach ofthe auto workers of Flint as well as well-paid working-class men in other cities, also stim­ ulated the growth of more traditional gay gathering places. "Tearooms" sprang up at roadside rest stops across the coun­ try, and people in towns without bars could drive to the nearest city. 36 Depending on where they lived, lesbians and gay men in the postwar years might have to decide to leave home and head to a big city to continue "in the life." Or they might, like Birmingham, Alabama, native "Barry Kline;' stay home but take advantage of local and longer-distance travel to explore gay worlds. 37 Whatever the method, and despite the dangers, people knew there were places to go.

and Fem in 1950s: Heyday Lesbian Bar

The war had special cbnsequences for lesbian women because, once it had loosened social conventions for all women, the be­ havior oflesbians no longer stood out so vividly. Heterosexual

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women war workers did things "respectable" women had never done-they went out in public to bars and dubs without male escorts, and they wore pants on the street-normalizing some aspects oflesbian behavior. Although lesbians could be spotted at gay institutions long before the 1940s, specifically lesbian bars opened only as women broke through the so­ cial conventions mandating female abstinence alcoholic beverages and the need for a male escort in public.

Class, race, and ethnicity played important roles in struc­ turing lesbian bar life. In blue-collar Buffalo, New York, the place we know most about, the lesbian bar in 1940s was primarily the preserve of white working-class women, al­ though the crowd grew more diverse in the 1950s. Upper- and middle-class Buffalo women in the 1940s mostly socialized in posher straight places or at home, but by the 1950s middle­ dass lesbians could be seen in both lesbian and mixed gay and lesbian bars. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the 1960s it was not class but willingness to be "out" about one's sexuality that distinguished bar-going lesbians from those who stayed away, and the two groups sometimes partied and played softball together. 38 Memphis, Tennessee, had no lesbian bars until the 1960s, but lesbians and gay men would go in groups to straight "juke joints" or "mom-and-pop bars" where they felt at home. As in Albuquerque, the softball field also served as closeted lesbian space. 39

African American and Native American women were welcome only in small numbers at the white bars in Buffalo, yet they lacked their own places. They threw house parties or patronized racially mixed dubs in which heterosexual and homosexual women and men rubbed shoulders. In South Philadelphia in the 1950s, a bar called Jeannette Dembry's had a primarily African American lesbian dientele, whereas specifically African American lesbian bars did not open in Detroit until the 1960s.40 Black women began to desegregate

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aec~aaies wore on, to venture out more often, making

not only more diverse but more racially and class society.

Finding a lesbian bar Marla, a black lesbian from been in the military and who worked as a taxi dispatcher, found out about the lesbian bar Bingo's when she answered a call. "They were surprised that it was a woman 'cause men had always been dispatchers .... And I started talking to them

out woman on the phone and I been same branch of the service. I'm trying to find

out where bar was 'cause I was going to go down and meet them, not knowing kind of bar I was going to go into right away."41 For some women, the lesbian bar represented a lifeline. As a woman from Lowell, Massachusetts, described the Moody Gardens in the 1950s, "To us it was our world, a small world, yes; but if you are starving you don't refuse a slice of bread, and we were starving."42

The bar culture developed well-defined norms and modes of dress and behavior. Women identified as either "butch" or (the preferred African American term) "stud," or else they were "fern." Not simply a mimicking of heterosexuality, the embracing of different gender styles served as both an erotic statement and a social system. By the 1950s the long tradition of utilizing masculinity as a way of proclaiming sexual interest in women had resulted in a new-style lesbian, the "tough butch." She dressed in typical male working-class attire as much ofthe time as possible and went to the bar every evening of the week. This set her apart from straight middle-class society, marked her as different, and put well-paying jobs and other privileges out of reach. Ferns, who dressed more conventionally, could hold down traditional female jobs but nevertheless announced their sexual identity through their

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Butches and fems, ca. 1945. The Buddy Kent Collection. © LHEF, Inc. Courtesy of the Lesbian

Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, New York.

association with butches. Butch and fern couples, on the city streets, proclaimed their sexual desires publicly. As one Buffalo butch described it, "People looked at me a lot ... either they weren't sure if I was male or female or I looked like a lesbian to them ... and I looked either like a woman in men's clothes or they didn't know what the hell I was."43

Being either butch or fern was imperative. The 1950s com­ munity had derogatory terms for women who could not be consistently characterized as one or the other-"ki-ki" or ''AC/DC"-but even such women confirmed the duality of the system, for they could only switch between roles, not combine them.

Butch and fern roles determined an individual's poten­ tial sexual partners and structured intimate relationships between women. The butch or stud was the "doer;' whose primary goal was to give the fem sexual satisfaction. Carried to its furthest point, this system produced the ideal of the

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untouchable or "stone" butch, never her lover lay a finger on her. "If I could give her satisfaction to the highest, that's what gave me satisfaction," as a Buffalo stone butch put it.44 How often stone butches attained the goal of un­ touchability is open to debate. But certainly the butch/fem system emphasized the pleasure of the fem, thus affirming women's sexuality. As Joan Nestle, who came out as a fem in the 1950s, put it, "We knew what we wanted and that was no mean feat for young women of the 1950s, a time when the need for conformity, marriage and babies was be­ ing trumpeted at us by the government's policy makers!'45 Proclaiming oneself butch or fem through dress and behav­ ior determined the universe of potential lovers and part­ ners. Whether for a single sexual encounter or for the se­ rial monogamy that characterized lesbian relationships in the bar culture, butches sought out only fems, and fems only butches.

Bar life was both welcoming and dangerous, and on this tricky terrain lesbians created and fought for public social space for themselves. "Barrooms were a way of life; that's where you were among friends. I think it's a place where you could let your hair down; could really be yourself," a Buffalo woman remembered.46 Yet lesbian bars were not safe from the incursion of straight men, who might try to pick up a fem or start a fight with a butch. In Detroit, heterosexual couples visited the bars to gawk at the lesbians. "You just got to the point where you, if you wanted to enjoy yourself, you had to ignore them because they really never said anything to you, they would just sit there and be amused. I mean, we were their x- rated, sort of like, back in the fifties, sixties."47 In the parts of town where lesbian bars were located, lesbians mixed with denizens ofthe sexual underworld. Some fems worked as prostitutes, hiking up the chances for fights between butches and straight men.

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Like drag in the gay male world, butch and fem ways of being challenged mainstream gender roles and created a core identity, even if it was one that changed over time. Just as the male world of the 1920s and 1930s distinguished between "fairies" and "normal" men who might have sex with them, in the bar culture ofthe 1940s butches were "gay" because oftheir masculine inclinations and sexual interest in women, while fems often saw themselves as different from heterosexual women only because of their association with butches and their participation in the community. In this context it was not even clear that butches and fems were both "lesbians!' changed by the end of the 1950s, when, as in the male world, same-sex sexual attraction, rather than gender presentation, increasingly became the salient marker of who was "gay." As a butch woman who came out in 1957 while still underage put it, "I knew, before I put a concept or a word to it that I was gay .... And I had a friend at the time; we used to talk about how we were different and how we liked girls and we had crushes on girls."48

Women in the bar culture made same-sex love and desire publicly visible, and in this way they engaged in a form of everyday resistance. Not only did butch/fem couples af­ firm women's autonomous sexuality to those who saw them on the streets, but butches challenged traditional expecta­ tions of feminine appearance and behavior by dressing pub­ licly in masculine styles and by standing up for-and even physically fighting for-their right to "their" fems and to public space.

The emergence oflesbian bar culture in the postwar years gave a public face to female same-sex sexuality. Not all women who loved other women, of course, would dare to venture into a lesbian bar. But the "sexual courage" of butches and fems made a difference, even for those women who would never have claimed kinship with tough bar lesbians.49

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Persistence

Women-especially middle­ tinued to form relationships women that neither they nor the larger society labeled "lesbian." Well into the twentieth century, women formed couples, made lives to­ gether, expressed erotic longing they

the world around them could distinguish what they were from ((female homosexuals." From the White House in Wash­ ington to Main Line of and to New York's Greenwich Village San Francisco's Chinatown, romantic friendships lingered alongside public world of the lesbian bar culture. Consider these cases:

First lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a married woman who moved in a world of respectable but indubitably lesbian women, something certainly confused those looking in from the outside, both then and now. In the famous passage we have already encountered, the journalist Lorena Hickok wrote to Roosevelt remembering "the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips," and Roosevelt confided her wish to "lie down beside you tonight and take you in my arms." Although Franklin Roosevelt called some of Eleanor's necktie-wearing friends ''she-men;' Eleanor herself did not transgress the boundaries ofrespectability enough to merit denunciation by Franklin or anyone else as a lesbian or bisexual woman. How she viewed herself we shall never know, in part because Lorena Hickok burned most of Eleanor's letters after her death. But if we consider Eleanor in context, in her world of coupled women who exchanged pinkie rings and brought each other violets, who reveled in the romance of the closet, we can see that, as with Julia Boyer Reinstein back in Deadwood, it was their respectability, their class privilege, their ladylike pearls, that protected them. so

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If

academic in Philadelphia, formed atight circle and Maud Swartz, When Newman first older Schneiderman "Paul;' as Newman called ...... ...,,,..,"',,....

There must be thousands ofwomen who feel like us, eurning [yearn­

ing], eurning all the time for warmth and tenderness from a loved

one, only to be worn out and settled down to the commonplace

everyday grind. You ask whether one should grasp at the possibility

for joy held out to one-Why not? I always feel that whatever I

have done, could not be done in any other way because of the kind

of personality that I am, and not for any other consideration ....

What I mean is that if any of my love affairs did not go further

than they did it was [not] because of the possible circumstances

that might follow but because it just did not happen. 52

Newman seemed to have found her life's love in Miller, but Miller, torn about making a commitment to Newman, had an affair with a married man and, in became pregnant. Taking advantage of a trip to an international congress of working women in Vienna, the two women left for Europe, telling their friends that Miller was going to adopt an orphan. When they arrived back in New with Miller's daughter Elisabeth in tow, the two women settled in to their Greenwich

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Village home, displaying pictures Elisabeth on their desks at work. Together they raised her, Newman con­ tinuing in her labor activism and Miller going into high-level government service, including heading the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor. Their seems to have grown increasingly difficult after the Second World War, when Miller began to travel extensively for the International Labor Organization. Differences of class and ethnic background, as well as what might be considered either personal style or gender, caused more friction over time. Newman was gruff, a ccgive-them-hell kind of person," whereas the press described ('Mother Miller;' embroidering during meetings, as ''a practical, lovable champion of feminine rights."53 When Miller had an affair with a man in India in the 1950s, Newman reacted with fury, and two women had almost no contact for six years. Eventually they reconciled and spent the last years of their lives living together. But Miller insisted to Elisabeth that they were not «lesbians in the conventional sense" and that the relationship was not «fully sexual." New­ man threatened to sue a historian who implied that they were lesbians. 54

And one final example: Margaret Chung, the first American-born woman physician of Chinese descent, famous as ((Mother Chung" to thousands of American servicemen during the Second World War, formed romantic attachments with at least two women in the 1930s and 1940s. 55 She met Elsa Gidlow, an openly lesbian poet, in the late 1920s when Gidlow and her lover, Tommy, became Chung's patients. Chung at this time dressed in male clothing and used the name Mike. Gidlow described her attraction to this «striking woman in her late thirties, smartly dressed in a dark tailored suit with felt hat and flat-heeled shoes." 56 Gidlow, in an open relationship with Tommy, courted Chung, who seemed to reciprocate her feelings but was unwilling to go any further. Gidlow's journal

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describes ((a spontaneous kiss on the mouth" from Chung Chung's positive response to Gidlow's insistent question,

«Do you love me?" Yet Chung was cautious. After performing surgery on Gidlow, Chung told her in the recovery room, «You gave me hell this morning for operating on you; and then you asked me if I loved you. were people around too;' suggesting that reticence came from fear of being labeled deviant.57 And in fact Bessie Jeong, another Chinese Ameri­ can physician trained in the 1930s, Chung ((was a homo, a lesbian."58

Chung broke from Gidlow after this incident and shortly afterward announced her engagement to a man she never married. Gidlow agonized: ((Heavens! how I want to see her . . . . Sometimes I could strangle her for the way she torments me: but there is no use thinking of her .... but I would give a year-two years of my life to hold her in my arms for half an hour."59

During the Second World War, Chung, who had by then refashioned herself as both maternal and feminine, took up an intimate relationship with Sophie Tucker, a famous vaudeville performer. This time Chung seemed to mask whatever erotic attraction she may have felt and to take the role of ((pal" or mother. Hanging around with Tucker during her stint in San Francisco, Chung asked, ((Did you miss me, last night, Boss? ... You are an angel to put up with all my shennani­ gans, ... and dont [sic] think I dont appreciate it and love you for your own dear self."60 She signed letters ((Your adoring Mom;' saved a special bedroom for Tucker, left her romantic and silly good-night notes. When Tucker helped raise money to pay the mortgage on Chung's house, Chung wrote her: ((Wish I could run and jump on your lap and put my arms around you and kiss your dear cheeks-or pinch them hard for you-wish you could look into my eyes and see the mute gratitude there .... I'm the luckiest person in the world, to

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"To Miss Elsa Gidlow, with keenest admiration," Margaret Chung, 1927. Courtesy of the Gay and

Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California.

have your I love you, sure & for keeps."61 In this relationship, lacking up-front lesbian identity and the resulting erotic possibilities, Chung felt freer to express her love for no one seemed to think <'Mother Chung" her bawdy heterosexual stage pres­ ence, were lesbians.

These women's stories make it dear that much had changed by the mid-twentieth century, yet the emer­ gence of an identifiable lesbian culture in working-class bar communities not out public acceptance of older­ style coupling between women. Discretion and respectabil­ ity, aided by economic and other forms of privilege, made all the difference. Yet there were connections between the two worlds. Just as in the community of tough bar lesbians

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some women living in couples-Lorena AA.._._,...'",.., ...,, Pauline Newman, Margaret Chung in the 1920s-took on a masculine persona or style. Cross-dressing continued to cross classes. And of course, however much women in respectable couples pretended differently, they knew about the worlds in which people acted on same-sex desires. Eleanor Roosevelt hanging out with her lesbian friends, New­ man and Frieda choosing to live in Greenwich Village, Margaret Chung's fascination with fear of Elsa Gidlow's lesbian sexuality-all of this warns us to avoid making simple assumptions about sexuality and even in the twentieth century.

Into Streets

What was new under the postwar sun was the formation of lasting organizations designed to improve the lives of those who loved and desired people of the same sex. At what was perhaps the height of oppression of people with same-sex desires, they began to fight back. The very idea of organizing had become possible only because of the notion that a variety of people shared something fundamental with others who had similar desires. We have seen this process in the making. By the mid-twentieth century, individuals who had previously identified as "pansies" or "bulldaggers" or "queers" or "butches" began to embrace, often in addition to these other identities, the idea that they all, women and men, masculine and feminine alike, had something in common. That overarching identity served as the basis for a variety of organizations. As we shall see, some groups emphasized the basic similarity of people with same-sex desires to people with mixed-sex passions, while others called attention to difference. These basic divisions, linked to assimilationist strategies ("we're just like you, so treat us that way") and

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confrontational ("we're here, we're queer, get used to it") ones, continue into present.

Not that resistance was entirely new: when four Harlem drag queens were convicted in 1928 and sentenced to sixty days in the workhouse, they called out to the arresting officers as they were led away, "Goodbye dearie, thanks for the trip as we'll have the time of our lives."62 Taking a less campy tack, butches who fought straight men in the bars asserted their right to live and love as they chose. But that such people could organize and fight collectively to improve their situation­ that was very much a new concept.

The first ephemeral organizations in the United States took their inspiration from Weimar Germany in the 1920s, which before the Nazis came to power had been home to a vibrant gay and lesbian culture. There the adoption of a "third sex" identity linked women and men and served as the basis of a civil rights organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. (Another group, all male, known as the Com­ munity of the Special, asserted the differentness-indeed, superiority-of men who desired men over both lesbians and heterosexuals.) Henry Gerber, whom we have already met protesting the discharges of veterans after the Second World War, learned about the pioneering German homosex­ ual rights movement while a soldier in the American army of occupation in Germany after the First World War. On his return, in 1924 he founded what he called the Chicago Society for Human Rights. He managed to recruit a few members and publish two issues of a paper before the police arrested him and the other officers of the group. Reflecting the medical views of homosexuality as well as the cherished American tradition of individual rights, the society's declaration of purpose proclaimed that the organization would promote and protect ''the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the

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legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed Declaration of Independence:'63

In 1930 a German emigre, Ernst Klopfleisch, conceived a plan to form a similar organization in New York. Klopfleisch, like Gerber, knew about the German Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and had made plans while still in Germany to turn a summer resort where he worked into a gathering place for "inverts." Klopfleisch (who changed his name to Ernest Elmhurst after arriving in this country) thought that the only place to reach the "inverts" was at the lavish costume balls that drew thousands of participants. "This would be where to take the first step by distributing cards, which could be placed on the tables, announcing the idea of an organization;' he wrote to Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Scientific­ Humanitarian Committee. 64 Then the membership fees of those who joined could be used to rent rooms in a private club; dances could turn an enormous profit. The group never got off the ground, but Klopfleisch's schemes linked politi­ cal organizing to social worlds in a way that turned out to

be prophetic. Take, for example, the origins of the first enduring group

that made up what came to be known as the "homophile movement." The Mattachine Society, born in 1950, was the brainchild of Harry Hay, a member of the Communist Party. In an attempt to find homosexuals with leftist political lean­ ings, Hay and his first recruit took copies of a Communist Party petition against the Korean War to the gay male beaches in Los Angeles, reasoning that anyone willing to sign might be interested in a homosexual rights organization.65 This plan never panned out, but Hay's personal contacts even­ tually turned up three more interested men who together

founded Mattachine. In its original secret, cell-like, and hierarchical incar­

nation, Mattachine was modeled on the Communist Party.

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organization sponsored discussion groups, developed a theory of homosexuals as a cultural minority, fought police harassment, and in 1953 even began to a magazine, One. Hay's original impulse to recruit in gay culture cropped up again in 1952, a Los Angeles police officer entrapped one ofMattachine's founders in a park and charged him lewd and dissolute behavior. Mattachine members organized what they called the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment and circulated flyers at gay beaches and bars, in restrooms, and at park benches and bus stops in areas of the city where homosexual men lived. When the jury deadlocked on the case, district attorney's office dropped the charges, leading to a growth spurt for the Mattachine Society.

But despite Mattachine's growth and spread, its structure, which promoted progressive analysis and militant action, also limited recruitment and made Mattachine extremely vulner­ able in the anticommunist climate of the 1950s. In 1953 an internal revolt and the resignation of the original leaders led to a retreat to respectability. No longer asserting the rights of homosexuals as a cultural minority, the new Mattachine insisted that "the sex variant is no different from anyone else except in the object of his sexual expression."66 The accom­ modationist strategy won important allies among religious leaders, civil libertarians, psychologists, and attorneys, and the movement continued to fight for basic civil rights. When the Los Angeles postmaster refused to handle copies of One in 1954 on the grounds that it was "obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy," the editors contested the decision all the way to the Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court's decision favoring the postmaster. 67

The position of the refashioned organization, which in­ cluded women but was dominated by men, was similar to that of the first national lesbian organization. Daughters of Bilitis, launched in 1955 in San Francisco, had as its original

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to scene, couples who met to

Lyon, the force V'-'J..u.u......

years, encountered San Francisco branch of Mattachine,

which inspired to DOB a political organization

original group ofeight women split in half over the '-I u.•....01..JLV.l.I. DOB's purpose, working-class women opting to continue developing a social club.

DOB and its publication, the Ladder, worked to prove respectability lesbians and to win acceptance within

mainstream society. In this the organization set itself apart from the most visible lesbians in American society, the butch and fem women who patronized the bars. DOB urged women to adopt "a mode ofbehavior and dress acceptable to society;' and an early issue of the Ladder proclaimed: "The kids in fly front pants and with butch haircuts and mannish manner are the worst publicity that we can get." 68 In turn, women in the butch/fem community sometimes had little use for organizations such as Mattachine. Bar lesbians in Buffalo joined the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier when it coalesced, but some withdrew disillusioned. One woman reported challenging a Mattachine member: << (Well, you tell me what you really want and what you're really fighting for, and if you're fighting for something that I don't already have I'll gladly pay another year's dues and get in.' She said, 'We're fighting to be able to work where you want to.' I said, (I work where I want to.' She said, 'To be able to live where you want to without harassment.' I said, 'I live where I want to without harassment.' You know, (To be able to have your neighbors know what you are and not have them ... 'I said, 'My neighbors know what I am: "69 A Native American woman who lived in Los Angeles in the 1950s went to a homophile meeting with some gay male friends and decided

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"it wasn't for women at my level."70 Class differences could play a powerful role in dividing the lesbian world.

Despite the differences between DOB and the bar culture, some women bridged the two sides. The first homophile activists in Philadelphia were middle-class white lesbians who had been part of the bar culture of the 1950s. Likewise in Cincinnati, a woman involved in homophile organizing in the 1960s hung out in the bars with gay men, "rough" lesbians, and bisexual women. 71

The gay male world, which had a long history of eroticiz­ ing class differences, had more success in bridging the chasm between the culture and the movement. Gay bars in San Francisco in the early 1960s served as the source of political mobilization. As in Greenwich Village and Harlem in an ear­ lier decade, the bohemian culture of the North Beach section ofSan Francisco-the home ofwhat become known as "beat" culture-fostered both sexual experimentation and political radicalism. Jose Sarria, who performed in drag at the Black Cat bar in North Beach, ran for city supervisor in 1961, and in 1962 the proprietors and employees of several of the city's gay bars formed the Tavern Guild to fight police harassment. Yet it was not always so easy to mobilize men in the bars. In New York, Mattachine member Randy Wicker carried homophile movement literature on his cruising rounds in the bars and met with little success. << 'There's Miss Mattachine,' they would say. They didn't want to hear about it. They would give you arguments: 'We don't want people to know we [look like] everybody else. As long as they think everyone's a screaming queen with eyelashes, we're safe.' "72 Yet in general the male homophile movement built sturdier bridges to traditional gay male life in the bars and on the streets.

In contrast to the more-or-less separatist politics of the national scene, where Del Martin of the Daughters of Bilitis angrily pointed out men's failure to recognize that lesbians

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"are not satisfied to be auxiliary .,...,...,,,~"""''""' or second class homosexuals,'' gay women men sometimes worked together.73 In 1957 a member of the Ell Club in blue-collar Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, wrote to the Ladder to tell how the dub had been formed <'for the purpose of bringing closer unity between the boys and girls .... We abide by the fact that we are all working for one goal, to be accepted." 74 Although the Ell Club never become part of the burgeoning homophile movement, its goal of unity foreshadowed developments in nearby Philadelphia, where the first homophile activists, as we have seen, were middle-class white lesbians who moved in mixed-sex social worlds. When the Mattachine Society of Philadelphia was organized in 1961, it had a lesbian president and other women among the leaders and members. Later that year the national Mattachine Society, plagued with financial woes, cut ties with all local chapters, and the Philadelphia group took on a new name, the Janus Society. Like both Mattachine and DOB, the Janus Society pursued a strategy of respectability, but it did so as a group of both women and men. After the demise of the Janus Society, Philadelphia's Homophile Action League continued the pattern of lesbian leadership and mixed membership. 75

It is easy enough to find fault with the homophile move­ ment for its accommodationist tactics, but it is important to remember just how much it meant that members felt no need to apologize for being gay or lesbian. The parallel story ofBayard Rustin, an African American pacifist and civil rights activist in this period, is instructive. Rustin, born in 1912 in the Quaker community of West Chester, Pennsylvania, could have been one of the leftist gay men recruited by Harry Hay on the beaches of Los Angeles, except that he had broken with the Communist Party in 1941 when ordered to give up his work for racial justice. 76 But Rustin threw his energies instead into groups working for peace and civil rights, where

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sexuality persistently caused His colleagues' knowledge of his desire young men troubled his years at the Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. When he was arrested in a parked car (shades of Flint!) with two other men in Pasadena in 1953 and sentenced to sixty days for lewd vagrancy, Fellowship of Reconciliation dismissed

For his mentor, A. J. Muste, issue was not same-sex sexuality but promiscuity. He had earlier written to Rustin: "No one, no one, has any business being self-righteous-but to ourselves we do apply standards and there are some limits to self-indulgence, to lying, to being the play-boy, for those who undertake to arouse their fellows to moral issues .... if thy right hand offend cut it off."77 And things never got any easier. Rustin found a home in the War Resisters' League and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, in which

played a leading but backstage role as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., but talk of his sexuality continued to hound

Attacked by both Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell and South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond (armed by no less than notorious FBI director J. Edgar Hoover), in his courageous and troubled career Rustin reminds us what it meant that some organizations took same-sex desire for granted.

Ironically, perhaps, the civil rights movement and even­ tually the New Left inspired a new militancy in Mattachine, DOB, and Janus. When the homophile groups of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington joined together in 1963 to form a coalition known as ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations), forces both within and outside these groups began to veer away from the politics of assimilation and respectability. As early as 1964 we can see the origins of the sexual, in-your-face, gay male political style that would later flourish in the gay liberation movement ofthe 1970s. The new male president of Philadelphia's Janus Society advertised his

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planned publication, Drum, as a place for "news for (queers: and fiction for <perverts.' "78 With photographs ofmale nudes, irreverent comic strips and fiction, and openness about sex, Drum represented a very different kind of gay activism. Once launched, Drum quickly outstripped all other homophile publications, gaining a circulation of fifteen thousand.

As the 1960s drew to a close, homophile activism had taken on a variety of faces. One faction clung to the strategy of '<we're just like you:' Some within this group adopted new militant tactics, such as picketing. Another fac­ tion, represented by Drum, celebrated sexuality and embraced a gay aesthetic based on difference from heterosexuality. In considering the diversification of the homophile movement, it is important to remember that all these tendencies had deep roots in same-sex communities.

The moment that typically defines the beginning of the contemporary gay and lesbian movement is the Stonewall riot. But it was not the homophile leadership or the publishers of gay publications who fought the police in the famous raid in 1969. Butches and drag queens claimed the spotlight that night. And it is important to remember that this was hardly the first militant gay protest in the nation's history. In 1963 Randy Wicker, an inveterate homophile activist, led a picket line at the Whitehall Induction Center, protesting the violation of draft record confidentiality of homosexuals. Two years later a tiny contingent in respectable dresses (for women) and ties (for men) marched in Washington, D.C., carrying signs proclaiming "Homosexuals Should Be Judged as Individuals" and "Support Homosexual Rights:'79 On July 4 of that same year, and in <Annual Reminders" staged for the following four years, protesters demonstrated at Independence Hall in Phil­ adelphia as a reminder that the Declaration of Independence had not brought freedom to an.so In 1967 brutal police raids on bars in Los Angeles provoked a demonstration on Sunset

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Boulevard. 81 Such manifestations make it dear that Stonewall was only amatter of time.

It is impossible to understand either the rapid growth of gay and lesbian cultures or the burgeoning of gay and lesbian organizing without acknowledging the contradictory forces that made homosexuality a more public subject in the second half of the twentieth century. From wartime questioning to McCarthyite denunciations, from the Kinsey reports to such incidents as the 1955 protest against naming the new bridge spanning the Delaware River at Philadelphia after Walt Whit­ man, it was becoming harder and harder to ignore the exis­ tence ofmen who loved men and women who loved women. 82

Same-sex communities in the bars and elsewhere gave rise to-at the same time that they sometimes spurned-the early organizations oflesbians and gay men who determined to fight for social recognition, acceptance, and legal rights. The kernel of the idea of an organization of people who loved and desired others of the same sex came from the pioneering efforts in Germany, but until the 1950s American soil proved unable to nurture the tender shoots planted by Henry Gerber and Ernst Klopfleisch. Then the Mattachine Society, with roots in the Communist Party, and the Daughters of Bilitis took hold and began to grow. With the model of civil rights activism before their eyes (despite the civil rights movement's own less than tolerant attitude to same-sex sexuality), gay men and lesbians came together, sometimes working for assimilation into the mainstream and sometimes proudly asserting their difference.

But as we have seen, it was not just the middle-class les­ bians who donned dresses to march on picket lines or the gay men in suits who challenged the psychiatric definition of ho­ mosexuality who were doing politics in the 1950s and 1960s. The butch bar lesbians who slugged it out with straight men

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in the streets and the drag queens who dared to flaunt their finery in public were also engaged in acts ofpolitical resistance that forever changed the nature of sexual politics in American society. Without the long history of same-sex cultures and communities-and without the intensified oppression of the postwar years-there would have been no movement.

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