Faced with intense scrutiny by law enforcement during the 1950s, gays and lesbians nonetheless began an unprecedented level of political and social organization, laying the groundwork for important gains in the future.
Prior to World War II, religious, medical, and legal condemnations of homosexuality permeated society so fully that they prevented any tangible social or political interaction. By 1940, however, the massive mobilization for the war—especially the sex segregation of millions of young, single women and men both at home and abroad—pro-foundly affected how homosexuals viewed themselves and their sense of community. The military’s psychiatric screenings for homosexuality were so perfunctory, and the need for personnel so great, that careful relations among homosexual servicemen and women often went unchecked. Gay women working industrial jobs on the home front also experienced new opportunities to interact. By the end of the war, a solid, though still small, gay subculture began to emerge in America’s larger cities, centered especially in gay bars.
Homosexual acts, however, were still against the law in every state, and the vast majority of gay men and women were frightened of public exposure. The increasing paranoia over domestic COMMUNISM, fueled in large part by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s anticommunist crusade, did not help matters either. Reports of several gay State Department employees receiving discharges on the grounds of “moral turpitude” led the U. S. Senate to launch a full inquiry into government employment of homosexuals in June 1950. Testimony by psychiatric experts presented homosexuality as a sign of pathology and mental disease. In 1953, Alfred C. Kinsey’s groundbreaking reports on America’s sexuality—which indicated surprisingly high incidences of homosexual experiences “in every age group, in every social level [and] in every conceivable occupation”— helped to fuel antigay paranoia as much as it helped to shatter long-held attitudes about homosexual tendencies.
Discharges for homosexuality in both government agencies and the military increased substantially. Law enforcement, bolstered by the support of J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, began a broad campaign of increased surveillance and harassment of homosexuals and gay establishments.
With the unparalleled increase in homosexual oppression came an equally unparalleled increase in homosexual, or “homophile,” organizations. In November 1950, Harry Hay and four gay male colleagues started the most prominent of these groups, formally naming it the Matta-chine Society in April 1951. Their founding principle was the recognition of homosexuals as an oppressed minority group distinctive from the heterosexual majority, a concept unfathomable before World War II. After the group successfully defeated the arrest of one of its founders for allegedly propositioning a plainclothes police officer in June 1952, membership rolls swelled in various “guilds” along the California coast, though at its peak the society was never much larger than 2,000 people.
By 1953, the group’s biggest strength—the founders’ past involvement in the Communist Party imbued them with a strong sense of group organization and a knack for political activism—also proved to be its greatest liability. With anticommunist pressures mounting, more conservative members of the group staged a successful takeover at Mattachine conventions in April and May 1953. They shifted the group’s focus away from establishing a homosexual minority through public activism, instead adopting an accommodating view directed at presenting homosexuals as virtually no different from members of middle-class heterosexual society. Almost immediately, membership plunged, and by the early 1960s, the national organization splintered off into more activist-minded East-Coast groups and the more conservative San Francisco contingent.
Though it did include lesbian members, the Matta-chine Society dealt almost exclusively with the concerns of gay men, so, in 1955, a San Francisco-based lesbian couple, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, formed the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) with six other women. Many lesbians had children from heterosexual marriages in the past, and the prospects for now-single women earning an adequate wage were slim in the 1950s. The DOB viewed its role as offering lesbians “help, friendship, acceptance and support.”
With all homophile organizations suffering from chronically low membership, their journals, including the Mattachine Review, the DOB’s Ladder, and the independent ONE, served as vital instruments for reaching out to lesbians and gay men who did not reside in major cities. They also helped give the homophile movement its biggest victory. In January 1958, the U. S. Supreme Court, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, unanimously overturned lower court decisions permitting the Los
Angeles postmaster’s seizure of ONE on the grounds that it was “obscene.” Indeed, court decisions allowing the dissemination of literature previously deemed indecent— particularly the work of the Beat Generation, led by openly gay poet Allen Ginsberg—became a turning point for the homophile movement, as more and more material about lesbians and gay men made its way into mainstream American society.
By the late 1960s, the homophile movement, greatly overshadowed by the Civil Rights movement and the movement for women’s status and rights, had made some gains, but still had only limited accomplishments to show for its efforts. From 1965 through 1969, gay rights advocates staged demonstrations each Fourth of July at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. It was not until June 27, 1969, that the full-fledged national gay rights movement began, when a routine police raid of Stonewall, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, erupted into several days of rioting by gay men and lesbians and created a greater sense of public consciousness than ever before.
Further reading: John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Cemmuni-ties: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); John Loughery, The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998).
—Adam B. Vary
World History
