During World War II and especially the twenty years after brought great political and
social changes to the U.S.. Undoubtedly, one of the major changes was the new awareness
of homosexuality. If this new awareness was to the advantage or if it was really wanted
by the gay and lesbian population is a question that arises; if they really had a choice
in the matter is another.
I think gays= relentless struggle for acceptance into mainstream society came from the
American constitution itself. After all, the gay liberation movement started in America,
the land of the free, where all men are created equal and with an inalienable right to
pursue their own happiness. No one should be able to take these rights away from anyone.
Also, in the 1950s, the civil rights movement became active and words like desegregation
and equal rights for all became synonymous with the American way of life. Stand up and
fight against those who have done you wrong! This is what gave homosexuals such a
conviction to start fighting for their own cause.
This paper will follow the progress of gay and lesbians in the twentieth century before,
during and after World War II. What was their position in the armed forces during the war
and what was government and military policy during and after the war on gays in the army
and in government positions? How did gay and lesbians respond to the new policies after
the war and why were organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of
Bilitis founded?
On December 7, 1941 at 7:55 a.m. local time, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Unites
States declared war on Japan and was suddenly a participant in the largest war in the
history of mankind. A massive military force of 12 million men was assembled. American
soldiers were sent to Europe and Japan to participate and win the Big One. The military
bureaucracy grew accordingly and thousands of new jobs were created. With the military=s
enormous demand for personnel, drafted American men found themselves in isolated gender
segregated environments. All the big war movies depict this with the GI=s longing for
leave so he could go downtown and find himself a prostitute. What these movies do not
show is a new community, within the military, of homosexuals who until now lived socially
isolated lives because they were either unsure of what they were or of their sexual
preferences or just plain scared of what people would think if they found out their
secret. In the military, these people found other gay men who were in the same
predicament. They weren=t alone.
Before the war, gays and lesbians were almost invisible from society. They were not
mentioned in the popular media and the general population was oblivious to their
existence. An occasional arrest or school expulsion of a Asexual psychopath@ were the
only vague signs that the public would hear about. Now that the military accepted or at
least needed the cooperation of all men, including homosexuals, an important page had
been turned in the progress of gay rights, however, it also set the scene for
discrimination and prejudice.
Homosexuals were in all branches of the armed forces, from paper pushing to front line
combat. Before enlisting, interrogators had forced them to describe their lifestyle,
which in turn made it impossible for homosexuals to continue hiding in the closet but
instead had to take the first step in living a new open lifestyle. They were classified
as Asexual psychopaths@ on their military records, however, they were not being
discriminated by the military at this point in time. An apparatus was even set up to
accommodate gay personnel. Through this apparatus, the military ended up with quite an
extensive record of homosexual behavior and was considered an expert on the subject.
Military scientists much later said that through studying homosexuals' behavior could
find nothing to support evidence that gay and lesbians were in any way psychopaths or
had any form of mental disorder. This report came out after the 1940s and 1950s; until
then, the military denied having made any research on homosexuals.
After World War II, the military suddenly made a decision not to have gay or lesbians in
the armed forces anymore. They would be discharged without any benefitsa even though they
hadn=t done anything wrong. This caused gay veterans to unite and fight against sexual
discrimination and some were later the founders of organized gay rights movements.
Exposed by the war, gays and lesbians decided to continue living their lives in the open,
although many still preferred living quietly in discrete suburbs, coming out only under
pseudonyms in articles or books.
Bars for gays and lesbians became a major gathering place. Here they could mingle and be
themselves. These bars became wide spread and were not only confined to the major U.S.
cities but were established in many small towns as well. The general public and media
started noticing this growth and with the common knowing of homosexuals being perverted
sexual psychopaths, child molesters, sex offenders and sex degenerates, a fear spread for
the safety of women and children who could be snatched by these dangerous people. This
fear initiated the anti-gay policies and sex psychopath laws of the late 1940s and early
1950s, where gay and lesbians were witch hunted and fired from their work place. The
policy that had the greatest impact was President Eisenhower=s signing of Executive Order
#10450, stating that sexual perversion was reason for prejudice hiring and firing of
workers
Gay veterans were a select group of American patriots, who, for the most part wanted
things to go back to how they were and just lead secure and stable lives. These new
policies caused much irritation and the veterans felt they were constantly being
mistreated, which gave them all the more reason to speak up. They could have continued to
live quiet lives but they were pushed into the open by the government, and now that they
were exposed, they weren't going to go back in the closet without a fight. The new strict
moral values of the postwar period and the nuclear family did not help gays and lesbians
blend into society. Instead, homosexuals were being scapegoated and considered sex
deviates. The idea of deviates and wave builders went well together with the red scare
and homosexuals were feared even more than before. Communist homosexuals would mean the
downfall of western society as we know it....at least that is what the government wanted
us to believe. The theory of homosexuals being sex deviates was also supported by
psychiatrists who wanted more influence over the criminal justice system and allowed for
the incarceration of homosexuals into mental institution. This caused arrests for sodomy,
perversion and indecency to skyrocket and many men and women ended up in these
institutions.
The military=s turnaround and postwar treatment of homosexuals and the homophobia and
irrational fear of gays that they caused, made its way to the civilian bureaucracy. In
the 1950s, senators launched an attack on gay employees. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the
crusade against homosexuals and communists and was feared by nearly all American; he had
the power to dismiss you from your place of work and put you in an institution.
Homosexuals were even considered to be easier targets for communist propaganda and were
also the main reason for the purges in the government sector. People were afraid gays
would deliver U.S. secrets to the Russians.
Even though gays and lesbians were hounded everywhere, they didn=t defend themselves from
the attacks. Homosexuals had no one to speak up for them at that time and were unsure of
what to do. Instead they isolated themselves and bottled up the anger and fear they felt
for society. Gay veterans were no exception, however, they didn't accept the
circumstances and conditions that had been set before them. They understood it was
impossible for them to live the way they used to; in order for them to lead an open life,
the hounding had to stop. They had fought a war to preserve their liberty and no one
should be able to take that away from them now.
The first organization for gays was founded in Germany. The Scientific Humanitarian
Committee wanted to abolish the German anti-gay penal code and to educate the public on
being gay. The movement was short lived and was disintegrated when the Nazi regime came
to power. There was also an effort for gay organizing in Chicago during the 1920s but
they dissolved without major recognition. Then came the Mattachine Society. It was
founded in 1950 in Los Angeles as a response to anti-gay campaigns in Washington, the
constant police raiding of gay bars and that gays were an oppressed minority and should
have someone to speak for them. The Mattachine Society would help gays out of jail,
consult gays and refer them to psychiatrists, if they needed one. However, staying above
budget was not easy. Call says the active members were doing more than they were getting
paid for. Publishing the Mattachine Review, a gay magazine, was a demanding occupation
and member fees did not cover all the work that had to be done. A bar directory was also
published by the Society together with the Daughters of Bilits=s own magazine, the
Ladder. The original founders were gay veterans from WWII and consisted of Chuck
Rowland, Bob Hull, Harry Hay, Rudy Gernreich, Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Stan Witt
and Paul Bernard. The most charismatic of these was Chuck Rowland. He himself was an army
veteran and an idealist. After the war, he had joined the American Veterans Committee and
later the communist party. Being a member of the communist party would later cause him
his seat with the Mattachine Society. These founders had a vision that all homosexuals
would eventually come out and parade down the streets of LA. Until then, they sought
refuge under pseudonyms when publishing anything of homosexual nature.
Many joined the Society but no one knew who ran the organization. Rowland and the others
thought it safest to keep it that way in the beginning. In 1954, the founders decided to
become an open democratic organization and a vote was held as to whom should be the
leaders. Rowland and the others wanted a radical group of expansionists and protesters.
Hall Call, their opposition, wanted to take a more conservative approach. He meant that
for the group to survive, they did not want to attract unnecessary attention to
themselves; also to have an open organization, they had to eliminate everything that
could give the government, especially McCarthy, an excuse to shut the organization down,
which meant removing the communist faction from the group. Call won the vote and most if
not all of the original founders were asked to resign. This decision left them very
bitter and the question whether they had done the right thing by going "public" they way
they had is still asked. Rowland claimed Call was the reason for the Mattachine=s
downfall, having not an ounce of organizational spirit in his whole body. Call on the
other hand, who was a journalist, saw the McCarthy threat as real and if the Mattachine
Society wanted to enhance the Society and do some good, staying low was the only answer.
Membership later decreased in the late 1960s and members instead joined a seceded branch
of the Society called SIR.
Up until 1950s, no Aopen-minded@ study had ever been made of male homosexuals. However,
in 1956, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a professor at UCLA, presented a paper to the American
Psychological Association in Chicago, in which she had conducted an experiment of
homosexuals and heterosexuals to study their Afundamental personal behavior@ using the
Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception and the Make a Picture tests. The judges were
internationally recognized scientists and were not told who had been taking the tests.
The result came out and the judges could not find any relation between the subjects=
sexual preferences and their answers. Dr. Hooker received the Distinguished Contribution
Award for her study.
Dr. Hooker was also confronted by many lesbians, asking her to conduct a test on them as
well. She refused on the grounds that a woman conducting tests on women would be
considered biased and not be taken seriously.
In 1955, lesbians in San Francisco founded the lesbian equivalent to the Mattachine
Society; they called it the Daughters of Bilitis. The movement was unsure on how to
proceed; whether they should engage in picketing and other civil rights activities or
whether it should challenge the medical profession's claim that homosexuality was an
illness. Their task consisted of counseling lesbians and educate mothers who thought
their daughters might be lesbian. One sad case was when a daughter confronted her parents
and told them of her being a lesbian. The parents didn=t take it as well as she might
have hoped for. Instead they raised a gravestone with her name on it and declared her
dead by listing her in the obituaries in the local newspaper.
In June of 1969, the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, was considered the dawning of the
gay liberation movement. A police raid caused homosexuals to riot, not accepting the
constant terrorizing from the authorities. The three day rioting led to the beginning of
a new mass movement, the Gay Liberation Front, derived from the controversial Vietnamese
National Liberation Front; wanting radical change, much like Chuck Rowland and the
founders of the Mattachine Society and fighting fiercer and with more pride and
confidence than before. Gays and lesbians began joining forces and recognized their
common cause; to stand up for their rights as human beings and not willing to be
suppressed any longer. This historic event is every year embodied in New York's Gay
Parade.
There was a nationwide protest against the discrimination of gay military personnel but
it didn=t have much impact. Military policy is still very much biased against homosexuals
in the armed forces; even after government institutions loosened up their restrictions on
gay policy. The military argued that homosexuals in service would threaten the moral and
job performance of enlisted personnel. The discharge policy backfired. Instead of
producing Asexual security@ for the soldiers, it reinforced hostility and prejudice among
personnel. This policy goes against the secret military reports that say gays are suited
for the military and the gay history of World War II, which showed that gay men could be
just as courageous as straight men. It only leaves us to believe that the military has no
respect for gay personnel and are only using them when in a crisis and being in need of
cannon fodder.
Looking back, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were the pioneers for
all gay and lesbians. They created a sturdy foundation on which to build a national
recognition and understanding of homosexuals. Without them there would most probably not
have been a Stonewall Inn incident. Who is to blame for homosexuals having to fight for
recognition and acceptance against what seemed to be the entire American public? Before
World War II, the public was uneducated and unaware of the gay and lesbian society they
lived with. Like a child, they were easily affected by government doctrine, justified by
the government=s need to keep the economy growing by uniting the people with false
anti-Communist anti-gay propaganda and thereby creating an illusionary external and
internal enemy. From a purely economic view, the government wanted Keyen=s AAnimal
Spirits@ (herd mentality) to be positive and united and not have them go into another
depression of pessimistic thinking. The postwar years were the first time the government
had this much control over industry and officials thought it should stay that way. To do
this, the public had to be satisfied and not worried about another recession. Communism
and the gay threat were just the excuses the government needed to unite the population.
They would foster the American ideal on how to be and act and deviance from this ideal,
would cause the ARussian Bear@ to invade the American peace loving neighborhoods.
I think homosexuals were used as scapegoats and were a minority that could be sacrificed
for the governments proclaimed Agood@ of the nation.
SOURCES:
$ The American Record; volume II: since 1865, by William Graebner & Leonard Richards,
McGraw-Hill, Inc.
$ Making History; The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945 - 1990, by Erik
Marcus, HarperCollins Publishers
INTERESTING AND MORE DETAILED EXCERPTS FROM INTERNET SOURCES FOR FURTHER READING:
The Stonewall Inn, (named after the Confederate General 'Stonewall' Jackson), was a gay
bar (said to be sleazy and Mafia-run) at 51-53 Christopher Street just east of Sheridan
Square in New York's Greenwich Village. On the night of 27/28th. June, 1969, a police
inspector and seven other officers from the Public Morals Section of the First Division
of the New York City Police Department arrived shortly after midnight, served a warrant
charging that alcohol was being sold without a license, and announced that employees
would be arrested.
The patrons were ejected from the bar by the police while others lingered outside to
watch, and were joined by passers-by. The arrival of the paddy wagons changed the mood of
the crowd from passivity to defiance. The first vehicle left without incident apart from
catcalls from the crowd. The next individual to emerge from the bar was a woman in male
costume who put up a struggle which galvanized the bystanders into action. The crowd
erupted into throwing cobblestones and bottles. Some officers took refuge in the bar
while others turned a fire hose on the crowd. Police reinforcements were called and in
time the streets were cleared. During the day the news spread, and the following two
nights saw further violent confrontations between the police and gay people.
The event was important less for its intrinsic character than for the significance
subsequently bestowed on it. The Stonewall Rebellion was a spontaneous act of resistance
to the police harassment that had been inflicted on the homosexual community since the
inception of the modern vice squad in metropolitan police forces. It sparked a new,
highly visible, mass phase of political organization for gay rights that far surpassed,
semi-clandestine homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s, exemplified by the Mattachine
Society. The Mattachine Society newsletter described the rebellion as 'the hairpin drop
heard round the world'.
The event has been commemorated by a parade held each year in New York City on the last
Sunday in June, following a tradition that began with the first march on 29th. June,
1970, and by parallel events throughout the United States.@
STONEWALL: THE HISTORICAL EVENT
The confrontations between demonstrators and police at The Stonewall Inn in Greenwich
Village over the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 are usually cited as the beginning of the
modern movement for Lesbian/Gay liberation. What might have been a routine police raid on
a bar patronized by homosexuals, became a signal event which sparked a movement. The
Stonewall riots have developed into the stuff of myth, about which many of the most
commonly held beliefs are probably untrue.
In 1969, it was illegal to operate any business catering to homosexuals in New York
City-as it still is, today in 1991, in many places in the United States and elsewhere.
The standard procedure was for the New York City police to raid such establishments on a
semi-regular basis, to arrest a few of the most obvious 'types' and to fine the owners
prior to letting business continue as usual by the next evening. It has been suggested
that the majority of the patrons at the Stonewall Inn were black and Hispanic drag
queens, but perhaps the goddess has always valued these rare creatures much too highly to
ever let them become a majority. In fact, most of the patrons that evening were most
likely young, college-age white men expecting to spend the rest of their lives in the
quiet desperation of the middle-class closet. They knew that it was reasonably safe to
enter the Stonewall Inn precisely because there were a few colored drag queens, butch
bulldykes and others whose double-minority status made them far more likely candidates
for arrest; this gave everyone else time to cover their faces and run for the nearest
exit.
After midnight June 27-28, 1969, four men and two women from the New York Tactical Police
Force called a raid on The Stonewall Inn at 55 Christopher Street. After leaving the bar,
many of the patrons decided to wait around outside while the police dispatched the 'usual
suspects' into the vans. It is said that this was the first time where Lesbians and Gay
men fought back; in fact, there had already been several incidents in both Los Angeles
and New York where sizable groups of Gays had resisted arrest. More to the point, the
queens targeted for arrest had always fought back, alone and unsupported as they were led
time and again to the vans. What was unique about Stonewall and gives it a resonance
which continues to inspire today was that it was perhaps the first time when Lesbians and
Gay men as a group were able to see beyond the lipstick and the high heels, beyond the
skin color and recognize the oppression which threatens us all.
The greatest great myth concerning the Stonewall riots is that it was a Lesbian/Gay
event. It is likely that many of those who began pitching pennies, then beer bottles, at
the police that night weren't even homosexual. The only publicly reported arrest was a
straight folk singer who was appearing next door and who joined the melee after leaving
work. The streets of Greenwich Village were home to many young people whose politics were
defined by the blossoming anti-war movement, left-wing political ideologies and the
successes of the Women's liberation and Black Civil Rights movements. Like their
Lesbian/Gay brothers and sisters, they were prepared to recognize oppression and thus
willing to respond to it. (Anyone who thinks being able to see oppression is easy has to
only remember the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.)
In all, some 300 to 400 people became involved in the attempt to stop the arrests,
erupting into violent protest. The police and the bar owners, who were perceived to be
part of the repressive system at work, barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn for
protection. While they awaited reinforcements, the crowd outside attempted to burn the
bar down with the cops inside. Eventually, a squadron of patrol cars arrived and chased
the crowd away from the bar, and then around the narrow village streets for several
hours. The following night, a new crowd assembled outside the Stonewall and rioted when
the police attempted to break it up. Provocative articles appearing in the NY Post, Daily
News and especially The Village Voice helped to consolidate Gay willingness to fight
back.
Within a few days, representatives of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis
organized the city's first ever "Gay Power" rally in Washington Square. On July 27, 1969,
speeches by Martha Shelley and Marty Robinson were followed by a candlelight march to the
site of the Stonewall Inn. Five hundred people showed up, thought to have included almost
the entire 'out-of-the-closet' population of Lesbians and Gay men in New York, as well as
their supporters from the political left. The rest as they say is history... STONEWALL:
The Movement
Before Stonewall, there were a number of groups working for homosexual rights, ever since
the concept had been defined in nineteenth century Germany, home to the world's first
politically organized movement. In the United States, since April 1965, Frank Kameny of
Washington, DC had been organizing Homosexual Reminder Days on the ellipse across from
the White House and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. These were sedate affairs of a
few dozen picketers with the men in jackets and ties and the Lesbians in skirts and
dresses. Their principal demand was for civil service protection and the right of
homosexuals to hold government jobs. The New York delegation that attended the July 4th
picket in 1969, one week after Stonewall, held hand and shouted down the other marchers.
This was the last Homosexual Reminder Day and a clear sign that the Stonewall riots had
set something new in motion.
During the first year after Stonewall, a whole new generation of organizations emerged,
many identifying themselves for the first time as "Gay" meaning not only a sexual
orientation, but a radical new basis for self-identification and with a sense of open
political activism. Older groups such as the Mattachine Society or the Westside
Discussion Group whose members had used first names or altogether fictitious ones to
protect their identities soon made way for the Gay Liberation Front and the various
regional Gay Activists Alliances. The vast majority of these new activists were under
thirty, new to political organizing and believed everything was possible. Many groups
were affiliated with specific colleges and universities, again with "Gay" replacing
"Homophile" in the names of most older groups and almost all new ones. By the summer of
1970, groups in at least eight American cities were sufficiently organized to schedule
simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots for the last Sunday in June. The
events varied from a highly political march of three to five thousand in New York to a
parade with floats for 1200 in Los Angeles.
MATTACHINE SOCIETY
One of the earliest gay movement organizations in the USA. It began in Los Angeles in
1950-51. Its name was given by the pioneer activist Harry Hay in commemoration of the
French medieval and Renaissance SociJtJ Mattachine, a musical masque group which he had
studied while preparing a course on the history of popular music for a workers' education
project. The name was meant to symbolize the fact that "gays were a masked people,
unknown and anonymous", and the word, also spelled matachin or matachine , has been
derived from the Arabic of Moorish Spain, in which mutawajjihin , relates to masking
oneself. Such an opaque name is typical of the homophile movement of the time in which
open proclamation of the purposes of the group through a revealing name was regarded as
imprudent.
At first the structure of the society followed that of freemasonry with a pyramid
structure, where cells at the same level would be unknown to each other. The founders
were Marxists and analyzed homosexuals in terms of an oppressed cultural minority. The
communist leanings of the organization put it under some pressure during the
anti-Communist phase in the USA. The era of McCarthyism had begun on 9th. February, 1950
with a speech by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, at Lincoln's Birthday dinner of
a Republican League in Wheeling, West Virginia. Paul Coates wrote in a Los Angeles
newspaper in March 1953 linking "sexual deviates" with "security risks" who were banding
together to wield "tremendous political power". The Mattachine Society was restructured,
with a more transparent organization, and its leadership replaced. It also changed its
aims to the assimilation of homosexuals into general society, which reflected its
rejection of the notion of a homosexual minority. However the Society declined, and at
its convention in May 1954 only forty-two members attended.
The Mattachine Society produced the monthly periodical ONE Magazine , starting in January
1953 and eventually achieving a circulation of 5000 copies. The regular publication of
the magazine ceased in 1968, but its publisher, ONE Inc., still exists.
In January, 1955 the San Francisco branch of the Mattachine Society began a more
scholarly journal, Mattachine Review , which lasted for ten years. The periodicals
reached previously isolated individuals and helped Mattachine to become better known
nationally. Chapters functioned in a number of USA cities through the 1960s. However,
they failed to adapt to the radical militantism after the Stonewall Rebellion and faded
away.
a to loose your benefits in the military, such as a military pension, you normally had to
act undisciplined, refuse orders and putting your buddies life in danger.
|