J

R e v i s € d Edition

Movement
BARRY ADAM
 wRlSE OF A

GAY AND
LESBIAN
Movement
BARRY D. ADAM

The past decade has seen a wealth of changes in

the gay and lesbian movement and a remarkable
growth in gay and lesbian studies. In response
to this heightened activity Barry D. Adam has
updated his 1987 study of the movement to offer
a critical reflection on strategies and objectives
that have been developed for the protection
and welfare of those who love others of their
own sex.
This revised volume addresses the move¬
ment’s recovery of momentum in the wake of
New Right campaigns and its gains in human
rights and domestic partners’ legislation in sev¬
eral countries; the impact of AIDS on movement
issues and strategies and the renewal of militant
tactics through AIDS activism and Queer Nation;
internal debates that continually shift the mean¬
ings composing homosexual, gay, lesbian, and
queer identities and cultures; the proliferation
of new movement groups in Eastern Europe,
Latin America, Asia, and Africa: and new devel¬
opments in historical scholarship that are
enriching our understanding of same-sex bond¬
ing in the past.
Adam delineates the formation of gay and les¬
bian movements as truly a world phenomenon,
exploring their histories in the United States,

(Continued on back flap)

 30ST
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 1

THE RISE OF
A GAY AND LESBIAN
MOVEMENT
Revised Edition |
'• '.v 1
 SOCIAL MOVEMENTS PAST AND PRESENT

Irwin T. Sanders, Editor

Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement
by Herbert Aptheker
The American Communist Movement: Storming Heaven Itself
by Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes
The American Peace Movement: Ideals and Activism
by Charles Chatfield
American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform
by Jack S. Blocker Jr.
The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to
Respect
by Lawrence Finsen and Susan Finsen
The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Rise of the Religious Right: From
Polite to Fiery Protest
by Dallas A Blanchard
The Antinuclear Movement, Updated Edition
by Jerome Price
The Charismatic Movement: Is There a New Pentecost?
by Margaret Poloma
The Children’s Rights Movement: A History of Advocacy and Protection
by Joseph M. Hawes
Civil Rights: The 1960s Freedom Struggle
by Rhoda Lois Blumberg
The Conservative Movement, Revised Edition
by Paul Gottfried
The Consumer Movement: Guardians of the Marketplace
by Robert N. Mayer
Controversy and Coalition: The New Feminist Movement
by Myra Marx Ferree and Beth B. Hess
The Creationist Movement in Modern America
by Raymond A Eve and Francis B. Harrold
 Family Planning and Population Control: The Challenges of a
Successful Movement
by Kurt W. Back
Farmers’ and Farm Workers’ Movements: Social Protest in American
Agriculture
by Patrick H. Mooney and Theo J. Majka
The Health Movement: Promoting Fitness in America
by Michael S. Goldstein
The Hospice Movement: Easing Death’s Pains
by Cathy Siebold
Let the People Decide, Updated Edition: Neighborhood Organizing in
America
by Robert Fisher
Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890-1900
by Gene Clanton
The Prison Reform Movement: Forlorn Hope
by Larry E. Sullivan
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement
by Barry D. Adam
Self-Help in America: A Social Movement Perspective
by Alfred H. Katz
Social Movements of the 1960s: Searching for Democracy
by Stewart Burns
 THE RISE OF
A GAY AND LESBIAN
MOVEMENT
Revised Edition

Barry D. Adam

Twayne Publishers
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan
New York

Prentice Hall International

London Mexico City New Delhi Singapore Sydney Toronto
The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, Revised Edition
Barry D. Adam

Copyright © 1995 by Twayne Publishers

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
Publisher.

Twayne Publishers
An Imprint of Simon & Schuster Macmillan
866 Third Avenue
New York, New York 10022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Adam, Barry D.
The rise of a gay and lesbian movement / Barry D. Adam — rev. ed.
p. cm. — (Social movements past and present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8057-3863-0 — ISBN 0-8057-3864-9 (pbk.)
1. Gay liberation movement—History. 2. Homosexuality—History. I. Tide. II. Series.
HQ76.5.A33 1995
305.9'0664—dc20 94-34364
CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.©™

10 987654321 (alk. paper)

10987654321 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Contents

Preface to the Revised Edition ix

Preface to the First Edition xi

1. Origins of a Homosexual People 1

2. Early Movements and Aspirations 19

3. The Holocaust 49

4. The Homophiles Start Over 60

5. Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 81

6. The Rise of the New Right 109

7. Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 128

8. Queer Politics 145

9. Coming Out around the World 165

Conclusion 177
Notes 181
Works Cited 189
Selected Bibliography 211
Index 215
Preface to the Revised Edition

This revision of The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, first pub¬
lished in 1987, documents a wealth of changes that have begun occur¬
ring in the movement and benefits from the remarkable growth in
gay and lesbian studies in recent years. To name just a few of these
changes, this revised volume addresses

• the movement’s recovery of momentum in the wake of New

Right campaigns and its gains in human rights and domestic part¬
ners’ legislation in several countries;
• the impact of AIDS on movement issues and strategies and the
renewal of militant tactics through AIDS activism and Queer Nation;
• internal debates that continually shift the meanings composing
homosexual, gay, lesbian, and queer identities and cultures;
• the proliferation of new movement groups in Eastern Europe,
Latin America, Asia, and Africa; and
• new developments in historical scholarship that are enriching
our understanding of same-sex bonding in the past.

To this end, Chapters 7-10 are either new or entirely reworked. Early
chapters have also been amended.

If there is a danger in a book about any social movement, it lies in a

tendency to identify a retrospective coherence in its subject—one that
obscures the grass-roots reality consisting of fits and starts, fragile ini¬
tiatives and collapses, and individual feats of boldness that character¬
ize the formation of a social movement. Writing about a “gay/lesbian
movement” inevitably evens out the diversity of experiences and aspi¬
rations that go under this label and give the movement an apparent life

IX
X Preface to the Revised Edition

that would supposedly transcend the personal dilemmas, decisions,

projects, and retreats that make it up. The problem is especially acute
in conjuring forth a lesbian movement. Lesbians have fundamentally
shaped the course of both the women’s and the gay (or gay-lesbian)
movements and have shifted back and forth between the two, at times
debating with each other from within the two camps, as well as flow¬
ing through autonomous lesbian organizations. Any talk of the gay and
lesbian movement must take account of these qualifications.
The “payoff’ in doing sociological history, on the other hand, is
pulling together and displaying the accomplishments and missteps of
past actors to better inform action in the present. The challenge is to
identify the critical factors that have given personal and historical sub¬
jectivity to desire, that have shaped the faces and territories of homo-
sexually interested peoples, and that have generated homophobia and
heterosexism. If this analysis is to be useful, it must offer a critical
reflection on strategies and objectives and build knowledge for the
protection and welfare of those who love others of their own sex.
In this revision, I am grateful for the assistance of Harold Averill
and Gerry King of the Canadian and Lesbian and Gay Archives in
Toronto, of Hubert Kennedy on the early German movement, James
Green on Latin America, and Massimo Consoli and Ray Best on Italy.
Most importantly, I thank John Dufour for immeasurable care and
support.
Preface to the First Edition

This book, delineating the formation of gay and lesbian movements

as a world phenomenon, would have been inconceivable a decade
ago. It is only through the impact of the movements themselves on
the larger society that gay and lesbian history has come to be a “fit”
subject to write about and a “legitimate” topic for research. And it is
only through the pioneering investigations of such scholars as
Jonathan Katz, Jeffrey Weeks, Lillian Faderman, James Steakley, Ilse
Kokula, Hans-Georg Stiimke, Rudi Finkler, Jacques Girard, Marie-Jo
Bonnet, and countless others who have written for the gay press that
the story of homosexual people is coming into view.
The study of social history is itself part of a historical context, and
this work is no exception. Its limitations owe partly to the state of liter¬
ature on or by the movement—and certainly to the capabilities of the
author. Almost nothing has been written from the perspective of the
gay and lesbian movement as a transnational event, nor has an interna¬
tional flow of information been well developed. like other communica¬
tion systems, knowledge of the movement follows a “center-periphery”
pattern. The movement in New York City is the best known, and the
movement in the United States in general is much better documented
than movements in other countries. Though Italians know about the
Stonewall rebellion in Greenwich Village and mark it with a gay pride
day, few Americans know about Bologna’s city-sponsored gay commu¬
nity center.
Most movement documents have appeared in English, French, and
German, and some in Spanish, and these references are reflected
here. Very significant movements have developed in Scandinavia, the
Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, and Indonesia, but almost all accounts of
them remain in their national languages. My coverage is once

xi
Xll Preface to the First Edition

removed from these movements, since I have had to rely on character¬

izations of them in the first four languages. Thus I have not fully reme¬
died the information economy. New research, however, will no doubt
allow a future fleshing out of the overall picture.
This study is, as well, a sociological treatment of the rise of the gay
and lesbian movement; it shows its roots in what Theda Skocpol
(1984) calls “comparative-historical sociology” or what Doug
McAdam (1982), referring specifically to social movement analysis,
calls the “political process model.” The sociologist cannot be content
with tracing the development of any social formation as the simple
unfolding of unanchored ideas, the creature of charismatic leaders, or
an unexplained sequence of events. Alain Touraine (1981) views
“society as a cultural field torn apart by the conflict between those
who take over historicity for themselves and those who are subjected
to their domination and are struggling for the collective reappropria¬
tion of this historicity” (62). He defines a social movement as “collec¬
tive organized action through which a class actor battles for the social
control of historicity in a given and identifiable historical context”
(32-33). The course of social movements depends on a sometimes
hidden context of political economy and social conflict. Larger social
structures and historical changes allow for the possibility of a move¬
ment and inevitably shape its agenda. Its transformation partakes of
shifts in the total social system as much as in outcomes of internal
decisions and strategies. The terms of debate shaped by competing
social coalitions can give way, intensify, or shift to new ground
according to conflicts apparently far removed from the social move¬
ment at hand.
Following his review of social movement theory, McAdam (1982)
identifies a set of critical issues to be addressed for understanding the
rise of a movement:

• Latent political leverage available to most segments of the pop¬

ulation
• Subjective transformation of consciousness
• Level of organization within the aggrieved population
• Collective assessment of the prospects for successful insur¬
gency
• Alignment of groups within the larger political environment
(36-38)
 Preface to the First Edition Xlll

And Jean Cohen (1985) cautions that in studying the “new social
movements,” we must find them on the terrain they now occupy as
“contemporary collective actors consciously struggle over the power
to socially construct new identities, to create democratic spaces for
autonomous social action, and to reinterpret norms and reshape insti¬
tutions” (690).
Chapter One

Origins of a Homosexual People

The first social movement to advance the civil rights of gay people
was founded in Germany in 1897. To understand where this early gay
movement came from and where today’s movement is going, it is nec¬
essary to look at the social conditions that made the movements pos¬
sible. Before any social movement comes into existence, a set of
prerequisites must be in place. An identifiable social group with con¬
siderable political awareness must be presumed before a movement
is conceivable; those conditions came about relatively recently on the
historical stage for same-sex relationships. Homosexuality has not
always been organized as a separate “people.” The evidence from
non-Westem cultures shows clearly that relationships we call “homo¬
sexual” were organized in quite different ways, making the develop¬
ment of a group identity and movement highly unlikely.
A glance through historical and anthropological research reveals a
great variety of ways of being homosexual. In societies as far-flung as
Melanesia, Amazonia, central Africa, and western Egypt, it has been
common for many (sometimes all) males to have homosexual rela¬
tions, at least for a period of their lives (Adam 1985a, 19; Herdt 1984;
Levi-Strauss 1969, 446; Evans-Pritchard 1970, 1430; ‘Abd Allah 1917,
7). In these societies, sexual relations between older and younger
males are thought to be part of parenting and growing up. Indeed,
some Melanesian societies believe that without this sexual socializa¬
tion their sons would fail to grow into worthy and robust men.
Where sexuality between men is both obligatory and common to
all, the idea of homosexual “persons” makes little sense. K. J. Dover

1
2 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

(1978) offers another example. The classical Greek and Roman litera¬
ture, the foundation of much of Western thought, leaves no doubt as
to the general acceptability of same-sex bonding in those societies
(see also Foucault 1978). In ancient Greece, adolescence was a time
when young men left their biological families to become the lovers of
adult men. Sexuality was but one element of an affectional and educa¬
tional relationship in which youths learned the ways of manhood.
Though less is known about similar relationships that may have exist¬
ed among women, the writings of Sappho from this same era gave the
name of the island of Lesbos to love between women.
Anthropology records as well the existence of gender-mixed per¬
sons among many of the native peoples of North and South America,
Polynesia, Indonesia, and eastern Siberia. The gender-mixed North
American berdache and the Polynesian mahu cannot be equated with
the modern notion of the homosexual (Callender and Kochems 1983;
Blackwood 1984; Levy 1971; Williams 1986). Still, it is known that
female berdaches sometimes married women, and male berdaches,
men. Sexual relationships between conventional men and male
berdaches appear usually to have met public acceptance, if not
approval. Even these examples of socially recognized homosexual
relations do not cover all the forms of same-sex intimacy expressed in
these and in homophobic societies. The creative anarchy of human
experience is never fully contained by the social institutions of soci¬
eties, and the varieties of homosexual experience have always exceed¬
ed their publicly recognized forms.
Sexual relations between women and between men, known in a
great many cultures and in the history of our own, were rarely separat¬
ed to create persons known as “homosexuals.” The task in this chap¬
ter on the origins of a homosexual people is to find out how
women-loving women and men-loving men became thought of as
“homosexuals.” From this it will become possible to understand how a
sexual preference became a people and how lesbians and gay men
became a minority. Once homosexuality is transformed into a people,
the idea of a gay movement finds its place.

The Medieval World

Just how the erotic and affective spheres fit together with econom¬
ic, political, social, ideological, and aesthetic aspects of life is the sub¬
ject of a good deal of thought among scholars. Certainly new strides
 Origins of a Homosexual People 3
Ak/ J.

in empirical and theoretical research will further sharpen our under¬

standing of how gender, production, and reproduction influence our
emotions and attractions. Suffice it to say that shifts in fundamental
social arrangements of producing and distributing the goods of soci¬
ety have influenced such unexpected areas as sexuality and love. In
the development of modern capitalist societies, family, gender, and
sexuality took on new meanings, and homosexuality eventually re¬
formed into the lesbian and gay worlds of today. From the fifteenth
through the nineteenth centuries, Western societies were trans¬
formed from agrarian to urban industrial systems. People who once
produced what they ate and what they wore, as well as the places
where they lived, gradually became wage earners who sold their
labor in a commodity market. People who were once limited to village
and agrarian life became mobile city dwellers. People who were once
guaranteed a livelihood in farming lost the land base that provided
self-sufficiency.
Though the effect of all these changes on family, gender, and sexu¬
ality was both complex and indirect, personal, private, and intimate
relationships changed during this period at least partly as a result of
the rise of capitalism. For workers in urban labor markets, the mean¬
ings of mateship underwent subtle but profound alterations. The
authority of parents over new generations declined, and the con¬
straints and responsibilities of family ties began to give way to person¬
al freedoms and an individualistic ethic. The decline of the old order
brought new freedoms, and in the new milieu a gay world emerged.
In the feudal period, the importance of family can scarcely be over¬
estimated. Families held the key to one’s future well-being. Personal
happiness and success depended on cooperation with family mem¬
bers, as it was their labor and goodwill that determined how well one
ate, how one survived sickness, and how one resisted injustices com¬
mitted by others. Individual prosperity hinged largely on inheritance,
and marriage was necessarily a practical arena wherein family ambi¬
tions could be played out. The fates of individuals often rested on
advantageous partnering. With the future prosperity of both marital
partners and their families at stake, marriage could not be merely a
matter of personal choice. In the words of the family historian
Lawrence Stone (1977), “Among the upper and the middling ranks, it
[marriage] was primarily a means of tying together two kinship
groups, of obtaining collective economic advantages, and securing
useful political alliances. Among peasants, artisans, and laborers it was
4 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

an economic necessity for partnerships and division of labor in the

shop or in the fields” (5). In this context, the personal preferences of
marital partners could figure as only one factor among many in the
selection of mates. Romantic love, in fact, posed dangers if taken too
seriously. Stone continues, “Romantic love and lust were strongly con¬
demned as ephemeral and irrational grounds for marriage” (85). Love
was thought to be a base and unbecoming motive for mateship when
the practical questions of survival and the material quality of life were
at risk (Flandrin 1979, 164), and theologians and moralists remained
resolute in their condemnation of it. Emotional attachments ideally
grew up between husband and wife after marriage out of duty and
mutual dependence. Failing that, emotional interests would have to be
pursued outside marriage (Adam 1985b; cf. Stone 1977, 102). Such
social arrangements left little room for any publicly organized gay
existence.
We are now accustomed to thinking of homosexual relationships as
alternatives to the nuclear family system as lesbians and gay men are
able, much more than before, to form exclusive, long-term relation¬
ships in the midst of a supportive subculture. But in the feudal period,
same-sex mateships were more likely to come about between neigh¬
bors, friends, and household members or arise in same-sex institu¬
tions like seminaries, colleges, or armies (Bray 1982, 43; Sylvestre
1983). Several of these relationships in the historical records occurred
between well-known literary men and their manservants. Seventeenth-
century sodomy trials often involved servants, apprentices sharing
common beds, or noblemen and household members. The trial of the
earl of Castlehaven in 1631 is among the most notorious (Bingham
1971, 448). King James I of England and Sir Francis Bacon are other
well-known examples. Records of the early American colonies confirm
that intimate relations typically arose in already existing social net¬
works among those who knew each other well (Katz 1983, 75). The
household and the community, then, were the matrix for almost all
emotional ties, and same-sex friendships were no exception. Alan Bray
(1990) argues that two discourses of male affection coexisted in seven¬
teenth-century England in uneasy tension: one discourse prized the
male friend and bedfellow along with his kiss and embrace, while
another discourse located sodomy as a vice lying in the hearts of all
men, the expression of which so threatened the natural order that it
was tantamount to heresy or treason. Toward the end of the century,
the suspicion of sodomy tended to be associated with the employ of
 Origins of a Homosexual People 5

menservants and bedfellows from the lower classes; only “gentlemen”

were thought worthy of friendship. The potential accusation of
sodomy increasingly cast a chill on male friendship such that by the
eighteenth century, the custom of kissing among English men had
disappeared altogether (Norton 1992,128).

Romantic Friends
Romantic friendships among women flourished as long as women
fulfilled their roles as wives and mothers. Because to the traditional
mind sexuality was a male preserve, women’s relationships were usu¬
ally thought not to be sexual by definition. In Lillian Faderman’s
(1981) words, “because love without a penis was an impossibility to
sixteenth-century England, women were allowed to demonstrate the
most sensual behavior toward one another without suffering the stig¬
ma associated with such behavior in more recent times” (32). So per¬
vasive was this social definition that even those few women who were
able to form exclusive lifelong relationships escaped the suspicion of
sexuality.
Perhaps the best-known case in point is that of the ladies of
Llangollen. As upper-class Irish women, they were among the few who
could support themselves, thus avoiding dependence on men. Their
1778 elopement “was considered not only socially permissible but even
desirable.... Women envied them because they seemed not to have to
be bothered with what many eighteenth-century females considered
the duty and burden of sex. Romantic men admired them because they
seemed to keep by choice ‘the crown of their virtue’; they lived togeth¬
er because they were too spiritually pure to be sullied by the ‘physical’”
(Faderman 1981, 122). Not having to risk symbolic masculinization
through entry into the male-controlled labor market, they were able to
pay homage to the trappings of femininity and preserve a distinctly
prefeminist consciousness. As Faderman notes, “At the start of the
French Revolution they feared only for the safety of the nobility” (1981,
123) at the same time as the revolution was spawning the first serious
feminist challenges to feudal patriarchy. Even in the nineteenth centu¬
ry, older definitions survived to remove female intimacy from the cate¬
gory of things sexual, so that there was little reason for such
relationships to be called sexual or homosexual and no warrant for
women to identify themselves in terms of a sexual orientation. As
Martha Vicinus (1992, 476) remarks, in an era before the consolidation
6 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

of the concept of the “lesbian,” independent and women-loving women

were more likely to be found living the social scripts of the passing
woman, the mannish woman, the libertine, or the romantic friend.
In 1811 when the mother of a schoolgirl accused Marianne Woods
and Jane Pirie, mistresses of a boarding school for daughters of the
wealthy, of “improper and criminal conduct” with each other, the
British courts debated whether a sexual relationship between women
was even possible—this at the same time as an increasing number of
men were going to the gallows convicted of sodomy. Should one part¬
ner dare to break out of her gender by passing as a man and assume
male privileges, however, punishment could be harsh (Faderman
1981, 51, 147; Crompton 1981, 11; Bonnet 1981, 51-57; see also
Faderman 1983). As long as women married, fulfdling their roles
through dowry, domestic labor, and the production of heirs, their rela¬
tionships with each other escaped attention, whether punitive or sup¬
portive.
The vigilance of the church and the state was nevertheless uneven
and episodic; even some male friendships escaped the strict bound¬
aries imposed by official definitions of sodomy. There are instances of
young men in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth cen¬
turies whose letters show an unself-conscious exuberance in their
mutual passion and affection (Rotundo 1989). Perhaps it is twentieth-
century architecture with its widespread provision of privacy in
advanced capitalist societies that has irrevocably sexualized the mean¬
ing of sleeping together—a practice that was once considered above
suspicion because it was thought to be due to necessity. Since the
great moral crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries that
hounded sodomites, heretics, Jews, and rebellious women to their
deaths (Boswell 1980), sodomy had been a capital crime. For those
whose affections attracted the notice of authorities, their lives enter
the historical record as a tale of cruel persecution and death at the
hands of priests and judges (Crompton 1976, 277; Oaks 1978, 268;
Monter 1981, 41; Katz 1983, pt. 1; Ruggiero 1985). Homosexual rela¬
tionships were forced underground; their exposure was almost always
due to misfortune. Indeed, much of the history of same-sex friend¬
ships is lost to us because of their careful concealment. What is known
today of this period is seen through the prying eyes of their enemies,
and it is early persecutory campaigns that make us aware today of the
origins of the gay world.
 Origins of a Homosexual People 7

The Molly Houses

What distinguishes the modern lesbian and gay worlds from
anthropological and historical examples of homosexuality is the devel¬
opment of social networks founded on the homosexual interests of
their members. In precapitalist societies, homosexuality was enclosed
by existing social relationships. It emerged within the household, the
larger family, and local groups. In the modem period, people who may
have had no previous contact with each other discovered each other
through mutual attraction. First a gay male and then a lesbian world
grew up in new territory. Same-sex friends and lovers began to carve
out social spaces, progressively freeing themselves from the encum¬
brances of their antihomosexual environs. From these beginnings
came the lesbian and gay worlds that we recognize today:

1. Homosexual relations have been able to escape the strictures

of the dominant heterosexual kinship system.
2. Exclusive homosexuality, now possible for both partners, has
become an alternative path to conventional family forms.
3. Same-sex bonds have developed new forms without being
structured around particular age or gender categories.
4. People have come to discover each other and form large-scale
social networks not only because of existing social relationships but
also because of their homosexual interests.
5. Homosexuality has come to be a social formation unto itself
characterized by self-awareness and group identity.

These criteria distinguish the gay and lesbian worlds from anthropo¬
logical and historical forms of homosexuality, and it is on this founda¬
tion that gay and lesbian civil rights movements have been built.
Some scholars claim that a continuous homosexual subculture has
existed since as early as the twelfth century (Monter 1981, 42;
Trumbach 1977, 9). From the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries, a reli¬
gious movement known as the Beguines allowed many women and
some men (the Beghards) to emulate monastic life through a personal
commitment to piety and celibacy. Not recognized by church authori¬
ties, this movement where women often lived together independent of
men, eventually came under scrutiny for suspicion of heresy and
homosexuality (Lemer 1972, 39). In the fifteenth century, the ruling
8 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

mercantile elite of Venice (then the imperial power of its day) largely
presumed that sodomy followed the classical model of older with
younger men, but when it began to investigate charges of sodomy, it
also turned up the beginnings of public homosexual networks cen¬
tered in apothecaries, pastry shops, and church porticoes, suggesting
an embryonic gay system (Ruggiero 1985). Documents from the
Spanish Inquisition of the late sixteenth century also reveal a similar
prototypical gay world in Seville (Perry 1988, 71) and Valencia
(Carrasco 1985,134-35).
Once again, the ruling elites of that era bequeathed us the docu¬
ments that describe what happened. Gay people, rarely allowed to
speak for themselves on the historical record, became known to us
through the writings of those who aimed to condemn, punish, and
annihilate them.1 Rictor Norton (1992) notes that moral crusaders
turned up a fairly well developed gay male world in London in a series
of raids launched in 1698, 1707, and 1726. In the prosecution of
Mother Clap’s Molly House in 1726,

a police constable gave evidence that he had visited the house on a Sunday
evening and found between forty and fifty men “making love to one another,
as they called it.” Some, he reported, sat on another man’s lap, kissing them,
and using “their hands indecently.” Others would dance, curtsy, and mimic
the voices of women. After settling on a partner for the evening, they would
go to another room on the same floor “to be married as they called it.”
(Bullough 1976, 480-81)

By the early 1700s, a network of gay meeting places was frequented

by men from all walks of life. One trial docket listed defendants drawn
from the food trades and the ranks of cabinetmakers, upholsterers,
printers, lawyers, clerks, footmen, servants, watermen, and soldiers,
all of whom were among those scooped up in a molly house raid
(Trumbach 1977,19). Jeffrey Weeks (1977) notes,

Edward Ward in The Secret History of London Clubs (1709) records the exis¬
tence of “the Molly’s Club” where a “curious band of fellows” met in a tavern
in the city and held parties and regular gatherings. A writer in 1729
described in more detail “their walks and appointments to meet and pick up
one another and their particular Houses of Resort to go to_” About twenty
such places were known, most of them in the Covent Garden/Lincoln’s Inn
area. (36)
 Origins of a Homosexual People 9

In France, too, police authorities were becoming alarmed by what

they perceived to be an increase in sodomy. A wave of arrests swept
up men from public parks and societes d’amour in the early 1700s. D.
A. Coward notes that in Paris, “the Tuileries was the traditional temple
of male love” (243). One writer noted in 1724 a need to control the
growing audacity of sodomites lest “these kinds of persons lift their
masks believing everything is permitted to them, to form influential
leagues and societies by putting respected people at their heads” (Rey
1982, 116; my translation). Paris police records from the same year
include a confession from one man that another had proposed “that he
wanted very much to get to know me, and that we would live together,
that he would pay for half of the room, that we would live together like
two brothers, that we would drink and eat together” (Rey 1985,180).
And in the Netherlands, there is a reference as early as 1689 to
buildings frequented by sodomites. Amsterdam, too, endured its first
major expose of homosexual networks in 1730-31, resulting in 300
prosecutions and 70 executions. Several more prosecutorial waves fol¬
lowed through 1798, which in its last days included the prosecution of
eleven women and the imprisonment of eight of them (Van der Meer
1989,1991).
These early attempts by gay men to claim a few spaces for them¬
selves drew the battle lines that are still being fought over.
Governments and their police, moral reformers, and reactionaries
seem still to begrudge lesbians and gay men the freedom they have
created and defended for themselves. One 1725 raid on a molly house
in Covent Garden met “with determined and violent resistance” (Bray
1982, 97). One man, William Brown, entrapped in 1726 at Moorfields,
retorted on his arrest, “there is no crime in making what use I please
of my own body” (Bray 1982, 114). But despite the modem efforts of
feminists and gay liberationists, this right has yet to be fully recog¬
nized in the Western world.

Capitalism and Romantic Love

The developing capitalist economy provided new options for people

confined to agrarian families. Wage labor opened new possibilities for
people once dependent on access to land for their livelihood. Expelled
from its traditional land base over a period of several centuries, the
10 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Western European peasantry eventually found itself in a market where

survival depended on the ability to sell one’s labor. With this new
source of income, the meaning of family and marriage changed con¬
siderably. Marriage no longer determined the entire economic life of
its (male) members, nor implicated a lineage, and decisions about
whom to marry fell increasingly into the hands of the marital partners
themselves. The emotional functions of family life loomed larger, as
productive economic life split off into the public realm.2
These changes had very different effects on men and women. Men
became much more able to select mates on the basis of personal con¬
siderations. For women, however, whose access to the wage labor
market was more limited, marriage retained much of its practical eco¬
nomic meaning. A young woman’s future well-being was bound up in
making a correct marriage. For men, whose advancement had less to
do with their family lives, simple personal preference could be a major
factor—and men who preferred men could more easily discover each
other in the expanding urban milieus: in pubs and coffeehouses, pub¬
lic parks and railway stations, particular walkways and streets. The
public sphere remained a male preserve. Women could be far less
mobile, and female bonding continued much in the feudal mode into
the nineteenth century.3
As men developed clandestine meeting places out of the sites of
public encounters, women’s romantic friendships formed through
existing social networks. The traditional patriarchal denigration of
women’s activities as trivial and inconsequential has made their histor¬
ical rediscovery that much more difficult. It also, ironically, provided a
level of freedom that was pushed back only later. Just as the molly
houses flourished between raids, public inattention to women’s rela¬
tionships allowed for an “entire female world of love and ritual”
(Smith-Rosenberg 1975, 1; Lengerke 1984). A vast network of
women’s friendships grew up among neighbors and kin and, in the
nineteenth century, in colleges. An 1882 American letter details col¬
lege women

falling violently in love with each other and suffering all of the pangs of unre¬
quited attachment, desperate jealousy, &c &c. ... And they write each other
the wildest love letters and send presents, confectionery, all sorts of things
like a real courting of the Shakespearean style. If the “smash” is mutual, they
monopolize each other and “spoon” continually, and sleep together, and lie
awake all night talking instead of going to sleep. (Sahli 1979, 22)
 Origins of a Homosexual People 11

A few enterprising nineteenth-century women did move into the

public sphere, making the difficult leap out of the constraints of
Victorian femininity by passing as men. Jonathan Katz (1976, 232ff)
reports on Mary Anderson/Murray Hall, a New York politician who
married (women) twice and successfully maintained a male identity
until her death. Few women, however, could risk independence from
husbands and fathers without being perceived as “fallen women,” and,
indeed, the history of prostitutes may yet reveal an arena where
women asserted their own sexual and emotional interests with other
women, as well as with men.
For almost all “kindred spirits,” however, a life together could be
nothing more than a utopian fantasy (Taylor and Lasch 1963, 23). It
was not until the end of the nineteenth century that some romantic
friends became lesbians in the modern sense. As women began to
enter wage labor and acquire some financial independence, they were
better able to realize their personal preferences, and some chose
women as life companions. Lesbians began to turn up in the public
gay world. An 1889 Parisian Guide des plaisirs refers to a lesbian
restaurant in Montmartre (Altman 1982, 7; see also Jay 1983, 18).
Lesbians appeared in New York’s gay world in the 1890s (Katz 1983,
218), and as they slipped away from male control they began to share
the opprobrium of homosexual men.

The Stage Is Set

With material reality so fundamentally altered, traditional ideas
could survive no longer. The French Revolution, which swept away a
monarchy and symbolically marked the end of the feudal era, brought
with it reforms improving the lot of peoples oppressed by the tradition¬
al order. Jews and national minorities acquired the rights of citizen¬
ship, and sodomy was dropped from the new Napoleonic Code.
Sexuality joined religion—at least ideally—as a private confession out¬
side the legitimate interests of government. The liberal ideals of the
bourgeois era proclaimed the equality of all. For the purposes of the
capitalist labor market, competence at one’s job and the ability to pro¬
duce a profit were the first principles. Accidents of birth and personal
characteristics declined in importance now that ambition, hard work,
and inventiveness were to constitute the road to success. Liberals fore¬
saw an age when inherited and private traits would fade from the pub-
12 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

lie economy, and a new system of opportunity and liberal ideals would
set the agenda for traditionally disenfranchised minorities. Women
and ethnic groups, religious and sexual minorities, took to heart the
promise of equal opportunity and wondered why they should be
denied full participation in civil society.
Two centuries ago, then, the stage was set, the actors assembled,
and much of the script worked out for the dramas of the modern era.
The liberal promise of equal rights for all became the rallying cry for
the victims of the old system. Still, sharp breaks are rare in history,
and these changes remained hedged about by many traditional struc¬
tures. The capitalist revolution proved not to be so far-reaching as lib¬
erals and socialists anticipated. Traditional disabilities woven into the
fabric of the emerging society were not so easily expunged. The domi¬
nant classes resisted any compromise of their powers, and egalitarian
trends ran up against serious obstacles and reverses. The agrarian
morality, developed through centuries of accumulated human experi¬
ence in response to an earlier reality, was still embedded in the foun¬
dations of Western cultures and preserved in religion and tradition. In
feudal societies, founded on production relations organized by patriar¬
chal assumptions, neither homosexuality nor the independence of
women had a place; they made “no sense.” And as capitalist societies
emerged, traditional distinctions could be enlisted to fulfill new func¬
tions: families could be reshaped to complement the needs of capital,
and subordinated peoples could be recruited into the reserve army of
labor. Political elites, of course, fearful of all challenges to their preem¬
inence, struck at those who were associated with the rising social
order. In the wake of the French Revolution, the British elite, for
example, reacted with a general crackdown against dissident elements
during a period that Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985) charac¬
terize as the “English terror” (115). This was a time when the British
elite was consolidating “its ‘standards of life’ as ‘the national interest’”
(203) guaranteed by an expanded state system. Among its actions was
a wave of executions against sodomites in the first decades of the nine¬
teenth century (Gilbert 1977, 98) .4 Gay bars came under renewed
attack, the 1810 attack on the White Swan on Vere Street being the
best known.
Despite these formidable odds, however, a male homosexual
underground was well established by the nineteenth century, and the
first signs appeared of a gay intelligentsia and public existence. By the
 Origins of a Homosexual People 13

end of the nineteenth century, astonished outsiders were describing

the extensiveness of the gay world. Lydston, writing in the United
States in 1889, remarked, “There is in every community of any size a
colony of male sexual perverts; they are usually known to each other,
and are likely to congregate together. At times they operate in accor¬
dance with some definite and concerted plan in quest of subjects
wherewith to gratify their abnormal sexual impulses” (Burnham 1973,
41). And Francis Anthony, in a paper read before the Massachusetts
Medical Society in 1898, stated,

I have been told—and I am informed that the fact is true of nearly every cen¬
tre of importance—a band of urnings, men of perverted tendencies, men
known to each other as such, bound by ties of secrecy and fear and held
together by mutual attraction. This band . . . embraces, not as you might
think, the low and vile outcasts of the slums, but men of education and refine¬
ment, men gifted in music, in art and in literature, men of professional life
and men of business and affairs. (Katz 1983, 293)

The German Social Democrat W. Herzen (1977) wrote in 1898,

“The homosexuals of Berlin, Hamburg, London are certainly not less
numerous than those of Paris or Brussels. There are places here
where homosexuals hold their gatherings, baths they frequent,
premises where they hold their dances, streets in which male prosti¬
tutes offer themselves to homosexuals. Homosexuals have their Cafe
National in Berlin” (37). Havelock Ellis (1942), too, remarked on
“homosexual baths, pensions, and hotels” in Berlin and on baths in
Sydney, Australia (4: 133-34). The 1899 Mazet Committee in New
York City found a series of gay clubs in the Bowery and the
Tenderloin district (Katz 1976, 44ff; Katz 1983). A few of these nine¬
teenth-century accounts spoke of lesbians involved in the bar culture.
Karl Marx believed that men thrown together in the industrial
workplace would develop a new solidarity expressed as working-class
consciousness. It is an irony of social theory that industrialization did
produce the conditions in which arose a new form of male, and later
female, bonding. In this entirely unexpected way, the “alienation of
man from man,” which Marx believed to be an inevitable consequence
of workers competing against one another for jobs in a capitalist soci¬
ety, led to a vast range of responses and solutions, both personal and
collective. Modern gay and lesbian worlds, born of the changes
wrought by capitalism, have been among the solutions, offering oases
14 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

of refuge and intimacy in a depersonalized, atomized world. And,

along with feminist visions of the nurturant women’s culture at the
margins of capitalist production, modem gay and lesbian worlds have
developed ambivalent relations with societies that would contain or
suppress them.

Prelude to a Political Movement

During this era a new generation of poets and writers sought to
articulate a modem vision of homosexual experience. In Europe and
North America, a new people came to consciousness of itself in the
mid-1800s. Still these first voices raised in defense of gay rights in the
nineteenth century were marked by the pervasive heterosexism of the
day. Those who first sought to give public expression to the gay expe¬
rience had to grope for a language in which to embody a new reality.
There were no ready channels to give shape to homosexual lives, and
early writings drew on a range of discursive resources to present a
public face for same-sex love. Antihomosexual prejudice complicated
the task, leading often to indirect, morally acceptable characterizations
of gay life. This development of a self-understanding was a critical step
toward locating oneself in the world and arranging social and political
priorities that would crystallize into a movement.
British writers often drew on the classical education they received
as schoolboys to make sense of their affections for boys and men.
John Addington Symonds’s 1868 ode from his Tales of Ancient Greece
tells of the courtship of Eudiades and Melanthius and their subse¬
quent love affair:

But day by day living with him he learned

New sweetness, and the fire divine that burned
In the man’s heart was mirrored in the boy’s,
So that he thirsted for the self same joys,
And knew what passion was, nor could abide
To be one moment severed from the side
Of him in whom whatever maketh sweet
The life of man was centred and complete.
(Reade 1970,122-23)

In the United States, Walt Whitman envisioned male love in opti¬

mistic and democratic terms as an extended egalitarian network of
“adhesive comrades” (see Martin 1979; Katz 1976, 337-65). The North
 Origins of a Homosexual People 15

American landscape formed an ever-present backdrop to Whitman’s

celebration of the sensual body and his very modern synthesis of
democratic values, equality for women, and “manly friendship.” The
Calamus poems retain a freshness and immediacy that continue to
attract adherents today. Whitman’s homoeroticism reflected contem¬
porary America with its belief in the possible, its pioneering optimism,
and its sense of comradeship among peers. Yet Whitman’s vision
retained a critical—even utopian—thrust. In a society that was begin¬
ning to betray its own ideals, Whitman posed an almost subversive
alternative. As ideals of liberty and equality were transformed into the
liberty of business tycoons and the reality of class privilege, Whitman
expressed a concrete sense of the rallying cry of the French
Revolution, including its third element: “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”
Whitman’s (1955) affirmation of nature, the common man and woman,
and comradeship implicitly rejected the machine and urban alienation.
And his instructions to posterity could not be clearer:

Recorders ages hence,

Come, I will take you down underneath this impassive exterior, I
will tell you what to say of me,
Publish my name and hang up my picture as that of the tender-
est lover,...
Whose happiest days were far away through fields, in woods, on
hills, he and another wandering hand in hand, they twain
apart from other men,
Who oft as he saunter’d the streets curv’d with his arm the
shoulder of his friend, while the arm of his friend rested upon
him also. (118-19)

On the other hand, Whitman’s contemporary Herman Melville

looked away from America to Polynesia for a more hospitable climate
in which to set his homoerotic romances (Austen 1977; Katz 1976,
467). And from the intense and tempestuous relationship of Paul
Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud came the poetry of renegades with its
contempt for all things conventional and its leap into the radical possi¬
bilities of love without rules. Rimbaud (1979) wrote,

Lovers who would be friends—

Without vows, always true,
Free-hearted, without promises—
Such are we and our virtue.
(see Schmidt 1979)
16 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Karl Ulrichs, a Hannover lawyer, opened the debate on homosexual

rights in the political and legal arenas in 1864, in the first book of his
12-volume work. His timing was critical: Napoleon had brought an
enlightened legal code born of the French Revolution to much of
Europe. As the German states became unified under Prussian aus¬
pices, the new German empire was adopting the Prussian legal model,
which recriminalized homosexuality. Ulrichs, imprisoned in 1866 by
Prussian authorities for protesting their takeover of Hannover, took
his plea for equal treatment of homosexuals to an 1867 Congress of
German Jurists, only to be shouted down from the podium (Steakley
1975, chap. 1; Kennedy 1988; Baumgardt 1984). In 1869, K. M.
Kertbeny, a Hungarian writer, joined the fray with a lengthy open let¬
ter to the Prussian minister of justice (in which he coined the word
homosexual) to plea for the omission of love between men from crimi¬
nal law (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974, 6-8). Despite Ulrichs’s and
Kertbeny’s efforts, Paragraph 175 was reinserted into German law in
1871, subjecting gay men once again to legal prosecution throughout
unified Germany.
Ulrichs’s life work showed its origins in the popular scientific cur¬
rents of the day. Caught up in the evolutionist rhetoric that framed
most Victorian social theorizing, Ulrichs formulated homosexuality as
a congenital anomaly (Naturspiel) like left-handedness or a cleft
palate. This transitional work squeezed same-sex relationships into
heterosexual molds by inscribing male-female sexuality into the
homosexual psyche. The homosexual male (called “Urning,” from
Plato’s Symposium) was presented as “a feminine soul confined to a
masculine body” (Kennedy 1988; Ulrichs 1975, my translation).
Lesbians were thought to be males encased in women’s bodies and
thus, being men, were “naturally” attracted to women. Gay people
became nothing more than mistaken heterosexuals in this quaint for¬
mulation; consequently “homosexual individuals were seldom attract¬
ed to one another” but only to “normal” members of their own sex.
(The attraction of “normals” to cross-gender people was something of
a mystery in this theory.) At the same time, these biological founda¬
tions allowed Ulrichs to argue that homosexuality was as “healthy as
fish in water” and that criminal penalties could never be more than
needlessly cruel and useless punishments. But even Ulrichs found it
necessary to add a labyrinth of new categories to his theory to accom¬
modate the many homosexual people who showed no disjuncture
between “soul” and “body.”
 Origins of a Homosexual People 17

At the same time, his third-sex theory did express how much
homosexual men had come to believe themselves to be a people apart.
An intolerant society, refusing same-sex bonds a place, separated
homosexually inclined people in attempts to suppress and control
them. Homosexually interested people were taking on the traits of eth¬
nicity: separate social ties and subcultures, collective identity, and a
folklore about how to cope with a malicious outside world.
The gay world was also attracting unsympathetic attention from
self-appointed guardians of moral order and respectability. In the late
nineteenth century, a few gay people began to fall into the hands of
physicians and psychiatrists who reported on them in medical jour¬
nals. Case studies of the 1880s and 1890s started to outline a “homo¬
sexual personality type” concocted out of Victorian morality,
phrenology, and personal apprehensions. This is the era when the
medical profession was consolidating itself as an expert monopoly
over a series of “disorders.” Physicians were transforming masturba¬
tion into a disease and busying themselves with new machines, con¬
straints, and surgical operations to bring it under control (Parsons
1977, 55). Medical scrutiny moved on to cultivate a set of “feminine
disorders,” and the profession campaigned to suppress abortions
throughout the United States. Homosexuality, too, fell under the dis¬
approving gaze of the medical profession, and some physicians did not
hesitate to remove ovaries from women and castrate men in their war
against “perversion” (Katz 1976, chap. 2; Katz 1983, pt. 2). Ulrichs’s
third-sex theory, shorn of its claim for civil rights, reappeared as a
medical syndrome subject to the reformative technocracy of the
experts. Medicine thereby became another weapon among the arma¬
ments arrayed against same-sex love, opening a century of experimen¬
tation, drugging, electroshocking, mutilation, and psychological
manipulation (Adam 1978, chap. 2). Medical ideologies were to find
their way into new legislation to confine lesbians and gay men to pris¬
ons and mental hospitals and block them from professional and gov¬
ernmental employment, immigration, and the simple right to live
unmolested.

In 1891, John Addington Symonds printed 50 copies of A Problem in

Modern Ethics, a systematic review of the existing scholarly literature
on homosexuality. There he sought to refute such vulgar errors as the
confusion of male homosexuality with effeminacy and the belief that
homosexuals “prey” on youth. He set cross-cultural variation in atti-
18 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

tudes about homosexuality against the tortuous reasonings of the

medical ideologues who would turn homosexuality into a disease and
argued for decriminalization in a set of 14 propositions at the book’s
conclusion. What interested Symonds most, whether he treated clas¬
sical sources in A Problem of Greek Ethics or Ulrichs’s third-sex theo¬
ry in A Problem of Modern Ethics, was the simple valorization of male
love. In the end, he remained most deeply impressed by Whitman’s
“intense, jealous, throbbing, sensitive, expectant love of man for man
. . . a love that finds honest delight in hand-touch, meeting lips, hours
of privacy, close personal contact... a daily fact in the present, but
also a saving and ennobling inspiration” (1896,123).
This swirl of conflicting ideas, then, closed the nineteenth century
and led to the birth of the first homosexual social movements. It was a
period of creative ferment; a series of disparate discourses emerged
out of distinct national and theoretical foundations. This generation
took the first steps toward dialogue among those who embarked on
lifelong quests for the classical and contemporary traces of a sexuality
actively suppressed for centuries. But more important were the urban
subcultures creating folklores about surviving, succeeding, and enjoy¬
ing gay and lesbian lives. It is against this backdrop that the first gay
civil rights movement was founded.
Chapter Two

Early Movements and Aspirations

The founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee

(Wissenschaftlich-Humanitares Komitee) on 15 May 1897 in a
Berlin apartment inaugurated the first of several gay organizations
that sprang up in Germany over the next 35 years. Founded by
physician Magnus Hirschfeld, publisher Max Spohr, lawyer Erich
Oberg, and novelist Franz Josef von Biilow, the committee became
the leading voice for equal rights for homosexual men and women
until its suppression by the Nazis in 1933 (Herzer and Steakley
1986, 201).1 It had a profound impact outside Germany as well as
within, with adherents such as the Dutch lawyer Dr. Jacob
Schorer setting up a Netherlands committee in 1911, the Swedish
steelworker Eric Thorsell taking its message to Sweden in the
1930s (Rogier 1969; Tielman 1982),2 and small clubs starting up in
Basel and Zurich (Schiile 1994). In other countries of Europe and
North America, where gay organizations remained much more
limited, the German movement offered a lifeline for isolated but
aware lesbians and gay men, influencing their thinking and help¬
ing lay the groundwork for movements that emerged after World
War II.
The development of gay and lesbian subcultures has varied consid¬
erably from nation to nation, and this chapter surveys those countries
where gay political writing and organization arose before the
Holocaust.

19
20 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Germany

The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals

themselves.
—1921 United Front Action Committee appeal

Germany of the 1890s was an unstable mix of feudal and modern

elements; the early homosexual movement was but one of many lib¬
eral, middle-class, and workers’ movements that developed at this
time. With the German states united in 1871 under the auspices of
the Prussian monarchy, Germany entered the twentieth century with
a state system still largely in the hands of a conservative coalition
composed of the old landed aristocracy (Junkers) and a growing
capitalist class, which together held its army, bureaucracy, and
established church. The Prussian monarch continued to exercise
real power, representing the interests of a traditional patriarchal
order that looked with suspicion on the reform, and sometimes revo¬
lutionary, movements taking root among the urban masses and new
middle classes. The late 1800s was an era of considerable social
rethinking and experimentation. The cautious women’s movement,
standing for motherhood and moral purity, began to develop a left
wing with the publication of the journal The Women’s Movement (Die
Frauenbewegung) in 1895 (Evans 1976). A series of “life-reform
movements” (Lebensreformbewegung) were emerging: a youth
movement (Wandervogelbewegung), a health movement
(Naturheilbewegung), nutrition reform (Ernahrungsreform), clothes
reform (Kleiderreform), and nudism (Freikorperkultur) (Steakley
1975, chap. 2).
The appearance in 1896 of the first homosexual journal, Der
Eigene, under the editorship of Adolf Brand,3 and of Magnus
Hirschfeld’s book, Sappho und Sokrates, presaged the founding of the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee itself. In his book Hirschfeld
(1975) set out the mandate for homosexual advancement. Deriving
his ideas directly from Ulrich’s evolutionary theory, he wrote that
homosexuality shows itself as a “deep, inner-constituted natural
instinct” and as a gender stage between the extremes of masculinity
and femininity (my translation). Each of the antihomosexual theories
is refuted in turn. The sickness theory: its conclusions, based on sam¬
ples drawn from psychiatric clinics, are biased. The criminal theory:
 Early Movements and Aspirations 21

countries where homosexuality is legal (France, Italy, Holland,

Belgium, Luxemburg, Bavaria, Wiirttenberg) do not experience
unusual problems. The degeneracy theory: consider the “robust” but
prohomosexual Albanians, Scythians, Dalmatians, and Celts—and the
“great” homosexuals of history. Indeed, Hirschfeld rebukes science
for its failure to stand for justice.
At the beginning, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee resolved
on a petition and publicity campaign to garner support for the abolition
of Paragraph 175, which subjected homosexuality to legal penalties,
and to educate Germans about “Uranian” men and women. As early as
1898, the petition received support from the leader of the Social
Democratic party, August Bebel, who stood up in the German parlia¬
ment (Reichstag) to urge other parliamentarians to sign it (Lauritsen
and Thorstad 1974, 13). (Bebel was a noted supporter of women’s
rights and had published a book on women and socialism in 1878.) By
the following year, Spohr’s printing house had published 23 titles on
homosexuality, and the committee had issued a scholarly journal, The
Yearbook for the Intermediate Sex (Jahrbuch fur sexuelle
Zwischenstufen), which continued to be published until the inflationary
crisis of 1923 (Steakley 1975, 24). Publicity intended to educate the
elite was sent out to newspapers, administrators, mayors, and courts,
and a pamphlet called What the People Should Know about the Third
Sex was produced in 1903, seeking to inform Germans about the
“Uranian” fact. This opening text was deeply influenced by the pro¬
gressive thought of the day, taking Ulrichs’s essentially congenital the¬
ory to argue against persecution. It demonstrates the ubiquity of
homosexuality through anthropological references and insists that
homosexuals are among the benefactors of humanity, concluding,
“every uranian owes a duty to himself [sic]: self-realization is his right,
of that which has come to him by birth he must make the best”
(British Society 1975,10).
In addition, the committee in 1903 sent out 6,611 questionnaires to
Berlin students and factory workers in the first sex survey of its kind.
From it Hirschfeld concluded that 2.2 percent of the general popula¬
tion was homosexual. (Hirschfeld was fined 200 DM for his trouble,
after six of the students charged him with “obscenity” [Steakley 1975,
33; Baumgardt 1984, 20].) In the same year, the petition reached 6,000
signatories including such luminaries as writers Hermann Hesse,
Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig, and Lou Andreas-
Salome; the philosopher Karl Jaspers; artists and musicians George
22 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Grosz, Carl Maria Weber, and Engelbert Humperdinck; socialist politi¬

cians Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Kautsky, and Eduard Bernstein; sociolo¬
gists Max Scheler and Franz Oppenheimer; the sexologist Richard
von Krafft-Ebing; the theologian Martin Buber; and the physicist
Albert Einstein (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974, 14; Stiimke and Finkler
1981, 422).
In 1905, reform of Paragraph 175 came up again in the Reichstag
when Adolf Thiele and Bebel argued for its abolition. The liberal and
conservative parties expressed outrage at the idea and the law
remained on the books.
Whatever the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’s merits, not all
agreed on its medical-scientistic orientation or its endorsement of the
gender-mix conceptions of Ulrichs. In 1902, those around Der
Eigene—Adolf Brand along with Benedict Friedlander and Wilhelm
Jansen—organized the Community of the Special (Gemeinschaft der
Eigenen) centered on a more purely ancient Greek understanding of
intermale relations (Steakley 1975, 43; Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 27;
Baumgardt 1984, 27). As set forth in Friedlander’s 1904 Renaissance
des Eros Uranios, homosexuality was idealized as the relationship
between an adult bisexual male and a youth in a strictly masculine
context, a concept that found resonance in the literary circle around
the poet Stefan George. Male bonding was understood in terms of the
Mannerbund, an idea of masculine comradeship founded in martial
values (Oosterhuis 1991). As such, the Eigene offered nothing to
women and ruled themselves out of the increasingly friendly align¬
ment of the committee with the Social Democrats, retreating instead
to the extreme individualist philosophy of Max Stimer. By 1907, the
Eigene completed the split from the Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee and the group successfully maintained its journal until
1931.
Hirschfeld attempted to engage more women in the committee’s
work, and by 1901 the Yearbook was publishing confessional state¬
ments by women. As E. Krause declared in an article titled “The Truth
about Me,” “I am proud of my exceptional state.... What I demand is
humanity, an impartiality, equal rights for all” (Faderman and
Eriksson 1980, 23, 30).
At the same time, the mainstream women’s movement (Bund
Deutsches Frauenverein) was preoccupied, as were its Victorian
counterparts elsewhere, with women’s rights articulated within tradi¬
tional conceptions of femininity—motherhood, purity, and morality—
 Early Movements and Aspirations 23

rather than challenging women’s gender role. In the 1890s, it cam¬

paigned with evangelical Christians and the anti-Semitic right to stiff¬
en penalties against prostitution, “obscenity,” and “immorality.”
Helene Stocker’s questioning of gender ideology in the early 1900s
attracted supporters who gathered together in a New Morality move¬
ment that challenged the old guard. Stocker, arguing against the
mainstream, declared that many of the attributes of femininity were
the result of socialization and not women’s inherent nature. She
believed that marriage was often constricting and that “individual
women should be allowed to dispose over her own body without
interference from the state” (Evans 1976, 138). Her break with the
women’s movement came in 1904 when she pressed for support and
protection of unmarried mothers, a group considered immoral and a
threat to the family by the contemporary women’s movement. This
led to the founding of the Association for the Protection of Mothers
and Sexual Reform (Bund fur Mutterschutz und Sexualreform),
which initiated sharp debates within the women’s movement and
extended the logic of its position toward support for divorce law
reform, contraception, and abortion. It was this opening in feminist
theorizing that eventually led Stocker to join the directorship of the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and begin a dialogue between the
two movements.
In 1904, Anna Ruling addressed the committee’s annual conference
with the question, ‘"What interest does the women’s movement have in
the homosexual question?” She pointed out to the largely male gay
movement (as lesbians have had to do so many times since), “In order
to obtain for homosexuals and all women generally the opportunity to
live according to their natures, it is necessary to actively aid the
women’s movement’s efforts to expand educational opportunities and
new professions for women” (Faderman and Eriksson 1980, 86).
Adopting the third-sex framework, Ruling decried middle-class opposi¬
tion to “uranian liberation” and castigated the women’s movement’s
silence on lesbian issues, looking toward the New Morality movement
and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee for help in freeing “uran¬
ian women” from having to marry.
By 1910, the mainstream women’s movement succeeded in purging
its radicals in order to reestablish its earlier precepts, a mix of volkisch
nationalism and the cult of motherhood, fidelity, and spirituality
opposed to male carnality and abortion (Evans 1976, 156). The
Mutterschutz association went on to rally against a 1911 Reichstag
24 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

committee proposal to extend Paragraph 175 to women (Lauritsen and

Thorstad 1974, 15; Pieper 1984) but became a much weaker political
force owing to internal dissension and its exclusion from the federa¬
tion of women’s organizations.
In 1907, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was canvassing
political parties for their positions on law reform as Reichstag elections
approached. A public debate on Paragraph 175 sponsored by the com¬
mittee attracted more than 2,000 (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974, 15).
But 1907 also brought the first major crisis to afflict the fledgling gay
movement in the form of the Eulenburg scandal. The affair began
when an independent Berlin newspaper launched a series of increas¬
ingly direct articles implicating the highest echelons of the imperial
administration—perhaps even the kaiser himself—in homosexual
practices (Steakley 1983, 22). In one sense the Eulenburg affair was
not about homosexuality at all; the charges were simply convenient
weapons to disrupt and embarrass the conservative coalition. The
scandal was fueled, then, by deeper divisions in German society and
directed at discrediting the ruling aristocracy. The issues posed partic¬
ularly acute problems for the two gay organizations. The imperial gov¬
ernment represented a deadweight they had little interest in
maintaining, but the homosexual weapon posed other dangers, for the
gay movement could scarcely go along with the unfolding logic of the
scandal, which presumed that homosexuality constituted a disqualifi¬
cation from public office. The general format for the scandal had been
set five years earlier when the Italian government had expelled the
German industrialist Alfred Krupp for his dalliances with Italian boys
on the elite resort island of Capri. A subsequent expose in the Social
Democratic newspaper Vorwarts had resulted in Krupp’s suicide
(Manchester 1968, 229-34).
In the ensuing courtroom maneuvers, Magnus Hirschfeld appeared
as an expert witness in the trial of General Kuno Count von Moltke,
military commandant of Berlin; he stated that “Moltke’s ‘unconscious
orientation’ could ‘objectively’ be labeled ‘homosexual,’ even if he had
never violated Paragraph 175” (Steakley 1983, 71-72). Adolf Brand,
who had added the German chancellor, Bernhard Prince von Biilow,
to the list of high-placed homosexuals, was brought to trial on libel
charges and sent to prison for 18 months. The trial of Philipp Prince
zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, the kaiser’s close friend and adviser, was sus¬
pended for “health reasons” as the evidence accumulated of his sexual
 Early Movements and Aspirations 25

friendship with a Bavarian farmer. It seems that both Hirschfeld and

Brand hoped to expose the hypocrisy of a government that included
homosexually interested men in its ranks while penalizing homosexu¬
al acts. Their testimony, however, was assimilated instead into a more
traditional moral grid, resulting not in law reform but in a hardening of
the battle lines. The trials ultimately sharpened the homosexual-het¬
erosexual cleavage and overwhelmed more traditional conceptions of
intermale sexuality, feeding into eugenic and militarist ideologies of
the day that typified homosexuals as a conspiratorial threat to the
nation’s “manhood” and birthrate.4 These were conceptions shared by
the mainstream women’s movement and bourgeois political parties
along with more reactionary elements of German society.
The immediate effect on the gay movement was a serious flight of
support among those frightened that the movement might be willing
to betray even them to the authorities by violating the most common
defensive strategy employed by gay people—self-concealment. Any
significant gains to be made by the life-reform and socialist move¬
ments would have to await more fundamental changes in the structure
of German society.
New hope arose in the closing days of World War I when the imper¬
ial order was forced to give way in the face of military defeat. In the
autumn of 1918, war-weary soldiers and workers deserted their com¬
manders and bosses to form popular democratic councils of their own,
and the kaiser fled to the Netherlands. This German revolution swept
throughout the nation in less than a week in November of 1918, and
Magnus Hirschfeld was among the speakers to welcome the masses
who surged, red flags aloft, into the square in front of the Reichstag at
the height of the insurrection. There he declared, ‘Together with a
true people’s state with a genuinely democratic structure, we want a
social republic. Socialism means solidarity, community, reciprocity,
the further development of society into a unified body of people. . . .
Long live the free German Republic!” (Steakley 1975, 71-72). But the
tragedy of the German revolution was its failure to dissolve the tradi¬
tional power bases of the old ruling elites: no land reform ensued to
dispossess the Junkers, nor did industrial democracy overturn capital¬
ism. Though displaced from government, the conservative coalition
(with collaborationist Social Democratic politicians) rallied its forces
and dissolved the workers’ and soldiers’ councils to reconstitute itself
as a major force in German society—now increasingly resentful of the
26 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

abrogation of its traditional privileges. The tragedy of the ensuing

Weimar Republic of 1918 to 1933 was its failure to resolve this volatile
mix of reactionary and emancipatory forces.
Still there were causes for optimism in the 1920s: the Social
Democrats came to power in Parliament, the right to vote was granted
to women, and gay society experienced an unprecedented flourishing.
In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sex Research (Institut fur
Sexualwissenschaft), which became an internationally respected cen¬
ter for the documentation of sexuality, “offering marriage and career
counseling, venereal disease testing and treatment, family planning
and sex education programs, and psychiatric and physical therapy,” as
well as a library and museum of “biological, sociological, and ethnolog¬
ical materials” (Steakley 1975, 91). A movie, Anders als die Andern,
appeared in the same year, featuring the injustice of blackmail and a
lecture by Hirschfeld. It was a popular success despite disruptions in
the audiences and police closures in several cities. It was suppressed
by the censors in 1920 (Theis 1984).
In the same year, a united front (Aktionsausschuss) of gay groups
was organized by Kurt Hiller, a pacifist, socialist, and committee direc¬
tor. Hiller brought together the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,
the Eigene, and the new German Friendship Association (Deutscher
Freundschaftsverband) to issue this appeal for its second congress:

We must demonstrate that we have learned to win our human rights our¬
selves and have created an organization which demands respect. We no
longer want only a few scientists struggling for our cause; we want to demon¬
strate our strength ourselves. ... No homosexual should be absent—rich or
poor, worker or scholar, diplomat or businessman. ... we must show
whether we have developed into a fighting organization or just a social club.
He who does not march with us marches against us. (Steakley, 1975, 77)

In 1921, Hirschfeld set up a World League for Sexual Reform,

which gained 130,000 members worldwide through the 1920s. The
appointment of a Social Democratic minister of justice, who was
himself a petition signer, prompted the Scientific-Humanitarian
Committee to submit its petition to the Reichstag in 1922 (Lauritsen
andThorstad 1974,16, 30).
And yet, as James Steakley (1975) remarks,

It appears that the almost legendary flowering of the homosexual subculture

during the heyday of the “Golden Twenties” worked to the detriment of the
 Early Movements and Aspirations 27

emancipation movement; a contradiction between personal and collective lib¬

eration emerged, for it was far easier to luxuriate in the concrete utopia of the
urban subculture than to struggle for an emancipation which was apparently
only formal and legalistic. (78, 81)

As early as 1905, Hirschfeld (1975) had documented a Berlin gay

world of “more than 20 bars” catering to a variety of social classes and
tastes, plus “restaurants, hotels, pensions, baths” as well as dance
clubs, party circuits, and drag balls. He noted lesbian cafes (including
one preferred by Jews) and costume balls. Personal advertisements
for special friends placed by women and men were common in the
newspapers (my translation; see also Rich 1981, 16). A glimpse of the
same community 18 years later comes from a remarkable 1923 article
in Mercure de France, where Ambroise Got, a French diplomat in
Berlin, described the German gay world through the eyes of the
shocked bourgeois, characterizing it as “a mad whirl of pleasure ... a
wild rush to enjoyment” (655; my translation). In a visit to the Kleist-
Casino (still in existence in the 1980s), Got found a largely white-collar
clientele and “a tiny orchestra consisting of a piano and a violin, play¬
ing soothingly sentimental and langorous airs. . . . [S]ome chat, hand
in hand, of inconsequential things; others touch, caress and look long¬
ingly at each other. There are men of all ages” (673). Got then goes to
the Eros Theatre (first opened in 1921) to see an adaptation of
Marlowe’s Edward II and a play by Sudermann called Friend
(Freundin) about a woman who leaves home and child for another
woman. Got is astonished by the diversity of cabarets, restaurants, and
branches of the Friendship Association scattered throughout
Germany, many with clubhouses sponsoring dances and other social
activities. By the mid-1920s, more than 30 journals had come out, one
of which, Die Insel, reached a circulation of 150,000 in 1930.
Some 14 bars and clubs for lesbians flourished in Berlin during the
1920s. With the mainstream women’s movement firmly entrenched in
naturalist and essentialist doctrines about femininity, no opportunity
arose for the theorization of lesbianism as a general women’s issue
and none of the alliances of lesbian liberation with feminism that
emerged in the 1970s became possible in the 1920s. Lesbian organiza¬
tions remained closely aligned with gay male forms throughout the
Weimar Republic, with social clubs typically meeting in the same club¬
houses and journals printed on the same presses as their male coun¬
terparts (Kokula 1984).
28 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

At the close of the 1920s, the movement’s long struggle for law
reform seemed ready to bear fruit. Kurt Hiller drew together the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the Institute for Sex Research,
the Bund fiir Menschenrecht, Bund fur Mutterschutz, and three
other nongay sex reform groups into a Coalition for Reform of the
Sexual Crimes Code (Kartell fiir Reform des Sexualstrafrechts),
which called for equality for women, liberalization of marriage laws,
distribution of contraceptives, abortion reform, and abolition of illegit¬
imacy. It also sought to overturn Paragraph 175, and in 1929, in a
close vote, a Reichstag committee approved a penal reform bill that
would at last drop the infamous paragraph from German law (Kokula
1984, 83, 85; Baumgardt 1984). But, in fact, the work of the early gay
movement was soon to be so thoroughly obliterated that few would
remember that it had existed at all. Gay people were to suffer a sys¬
tematic campaign of intimidation, harassment, and ultimately geno¬
cide. For consideration of this era, we must turn to an account of the
Holocaust—but first, let us look at contemporary developments else¬
where.

France

Love alone matters and not the sex to which it is dedicated.

—Natalie Barney, “L’Amour defendu,” in Traits et portraits

Love is to be reinvented.
—Jean Cocteau, Le Livre blanc

Though Germany was unique in its development of a sustained gay

political movement before World War II, France merits attention for
the artists and writers who reflected on the meanings of their homo¬
sexuality during the same period. In the words of Gilles Barbedette
and Michel Carassou (1981), “Unlike the German homosexual move¬
ment created by “men of science,” it is undeniable that homosexuals
in France felt their first hours of freedom when men and women of let¬
ters set out to write on the subject, thereby partly thwarting the psy¬
chiatric trap which sought to contain homosexuality” (102;
translation). Between the Commune and World War II, Paris was a
cultural mecca for both native and expatriate artists, becoming a cru-
 Early Movements and Aspirations 29

cible for such creative trends as impressionist and surrealist art, the
ballet, and the shaping of the modem novel. Homosexuality is relevant
to this cultural florescence in two ways: (1) among the creative circles
were social networks formed and held together by their participants’
shared fate as homosexuals, and (2) as homosexuality became an ele¬
ment in bringing about particular combinations of personalities, these
circles, in turn, began to reflect on their experiences of being homo¬
sexual. These thoughts on homosexual experience in repressive soci¬
eties set forth conceptions that still influence modem understandings.
If we step back to compare the political economies of Germany and
France in this era, it is clear that French culture emerged from a very
different set of social forces. Unlike the German experience, the 1789
French Revolution had swept away (in Karl Marx’s words) “all manner
of medieval rubbish,” thereby incapacitating the feudal classes that in
Germany exercised power for so long. The nineteenth-century partial
restoration of empire in France suffered further defeats in the Franco-
Prussian War of 1870, when the reigning prince fled with his support¬
ers, leaving Paris in the hands of its workers. In their hour of freedom,
the workers declared the short-lived Commune. The Dreyfus case at
the turn of the century further marked a symbolic victory for republi¬
cans and liberals over the church and aristocracy.
By the first decades of the twentieth century, then, France was at
the forefront of European nations in the fragmentation of traditional
coalitions and, thus, in many respects was among the most “modem.”
The result of this was a “weak” state, decried by some historians, but
good news for the grass-roots who took advantage of the new free¬
doms to invent and imagine. As Gertrude Stein (1940) remarked, in
her inimitable style, of French tolerance:

It is not civilised to want other people to believe what you believe because the
essence of being civilised is to possess yourself as you are, and if you possess
yourself as you are you of course cannot possess any one else, it is not your
business. It is because of this element of civilisation that Paris has always
been the home of all foreign artists, they are friendly, the French, they sur¬
round you with a civilised atmosphere and they leave you inside of you com¬
pletely to yourself. (56-57)

Everyone had their enclaves and balls: students, underworld gangs,

Arabs and blacks, sailors and servants (Brassai 1976). Gay people
were no exception with a world of “disreputable bars, high-society
30 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

bars, dance halls, drag balls, night clubs, and music hall promenades”
(Barbedette and Carassou 1981, 15). Best known of these was the
famed Magic City transvestite ball, a glamorous and outrageous cele¬
bration akin to Mardi Gras. Lesbian nightclubs and restaurants are
reported at least as early as 1881 (Altman 1982, 7), and three were well
established in the 1920s. One of them, Le Monocle, like Magic City,
specialized in the transvestite style. Says Andre du Dognon, “It was
the epoque of ‘sacred monsters.’ . . . We were sort of princesses con¬
demned to the sidewalk” (Barbedette and Carassou 1981, 60) .5
Parisian life attracted such refugees as Oscar Wilde, following his
release from prison, and Sergei Diaghilev, dismissed from the
Imperial Theatre of Russia owing to artistic rivalries and gossip cam¬
paigns around his homosexuality. It was on French soil—free of the
absolutist Russian state—that Diaghilev organized the Ballets Russes
with the assistance of French artists and musicians. Though analysis
of the complexities of the financial and artistic creation of the Ballets
Russes falls outside the scope of this book, suffice it to note the exis¬
tence of a homosexual “strand” in the process of cultural production.
Igor Stravinsky’s characterization of “Diaghilev’s entourage—[as] a
kind of homosexual Swiss Guard” cannot be ignored when consider¬
ing the relation of the ballet to its Parisian milieu, nor can the fact that
the major dancers and choreographers, who shaped much of the
Ballets Russes repertoire, themselves matured artistically as
Diaghilev’s lovers.6
Much of French artistic life was as gregarious as Paris street life
with its literary salons and cafes. Though much history is typified as
the actions of handfuls of great individuals, cultural production is not
simply the work of lone geniuses but the outcome of fruitful collabora¬
tions, whether explicit or implicit, that are nurtured by a complex of
favorable conditions.
Most remarkable of the salons was that of Natalie Barney, a charis¬
matic American heiress who so inspired a generation of artists that
she appears as a character in many books and was the object of pub¬
lished love poetry and epigrams and a subject for portraitists. Most of
Paris’s literary elite passed through Barney’s salon and some, as her
friends and lovers, generated early reflections on the new lesbian.
Barney’s circle, composed largely of independent, creative women,
moved beyond the “romantic friendship” model of the nineteenth cen¬
tury toward explicitly “lesbian” definitions of women’s relationships.
Out of Barney’s early affair with Liane de Pougy came a volume of love
 Early Movements and Aspirations 31

poems, Quelques Portraits—Sonnets de Femmes, in 1900, and Pougy

published Idylle saphique in 1907 (Wickes 1976, 40ff). Her 10-year
intermittent love affair with Renee Vivien included pilgrimages to the
Greek island of Lesbos, and her weekly soirees (with a Greek Temple
a Vamitie amidst the garden) paid homage to Sappho in poetry read¬
ings and impromptu dramas. Vivien, in turn, dreamed of Lesbos as “a
great unknown imaginary territory” in which to inscribe a women’s
space and genealogy (Blankley 1984).
Lillian Faderman (1981) takes exception to the lesbian discourse
produced by the Barney circle (268). Notions of the “Sapphic” or “les¬
bian” were in circulation as early as the period leading up to the
French Revolution, and they were revived in the nineteenth century
by such male authors as Balzac and Baudelaire.7 The influence of this
so-called aesthetic-decadent tradition is clear in the writing of many of
the texts of Barney and her friends. It is a sensibility not far removed
from Catholic orthodoxy in its use of lesbianism as a sign of morbidity
and exoticism. Certainly Renee Vivien’s domestic arrangements could
have been lifted from the pages of Baudelaire, with their “odor of
incense, of flowers, of overripe apples.” Colette remarked, “Nothing
could dispel the uneasiness engendered by the strangeness of the
place, bound to astonish a guest, the semi-darkness, the exotic foods
on plates of jade, vermeil, or Chinese porcelain, foods that had come
from countries too far away.” Barney’s gifts to her of “jades, enamels,
lacquers, fabrics . . . ancient Persian gold coins . . . glass cabinets of
exotic butterflies ... a colossal Buddha” show similar inspiration
(Wickes 1975, 91-93). The literary connections with the decadents are
direct enough with Pierre Louys, author of Les Chansons de Bilitis,
often featured at Barney’s gatherings.
Still, the revaluation of these inherited symbols cannot be ignored.
Though Faderman (1981) excoriates Baudelaire’s Victorian “childish
wallowing in the deliciousness of ‘sin’” (269), the thrust of the aesthet¬
ic initiative is decidedly two-edged. Whether it was Oscar Wilde and
Aubrey Beardsley or Renee Vivien and Djuna Barnes, the writers of
this era reconstituted the symbols of lesbian and gay worlds provided
to them by luxuriating in and affirming their specialness. In delight¬
ing, with Aleister Crowley, in “evil,” this romance with things “wicked”
ultimately negated the received dogma that labeled them “sinful” in
the first place—an insight not lost on readers of the period.
Despite the liberalism of French society, lesbian writing was never¬
theless accomplished against a number of more conservative trends of
32 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

the published word. The French medical profession, like its counter¬
parts in Germany and the United States, occupied itself with “the
homosexual” as it might with a peculiar insect, “scientifically” classify¬
ing and dissecting him or her for public inspection. Medical textbooks
appeared with “just-so” stories about “pederasts” designed to intimi¬
date the unwary with depictions of “perverts” heading toward a bad
end (Hahn 1979; Bonnet 1981, 90)—a tradition not much changed in
postwar academic texts (Adam 1978, 32; Adam 1986; Norton and Crew
1974, 274). Popular novels of the day consigned homosexual charac¬
ters to the obligatory “final solution” of suicide or some other untimely
death (Barbedette and Carassou 1981, 107; Adam 1978, 30-34). This
feudal ideology dressed up as medicine or biography had its practical
counterpart in harassment by police, who would seize gay men cruis¬
ing in the Tuileries or dancing at the Bal de la Montagne Sainte-
Genevieve (Hahn 1979; Brassai' 1976). It is against this backdrop that
we must understand the pioneering efforts of those like Natalie
Barney, who published her Pensees d’une Amazone in 1920, consolidat¬
ing her reputation as the “matron saint of Lesbos” (Wickes 1976,171).
Pensees reflects the issues of the day with its references to Whitman,
Ulrichs, and Symonds and its defense of Oscar Wilde. Natalie Barney
was the model for Valerie Seymour in Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 novel, The
Well of Loneliness. She is described as “placid and self-assured, [she]
created an atmosphere of courage: everyone felt very normal and
brave when they gathered together at Valerie Seymour’s. There she
was, this charming and cultured woman, a kind of lighthouse in a
storm-swept ocean” (Wickes 1976,177).
Marcel Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe appeared in 1921, the fourth
volume of his monumental A la recherche du temps perdu. Proust’s
work is most notable in its presentation of a topic generally shielded
from public view. As one unsympathetic observer of the Parisian
scene remarked, “The publication of the first part of Sodome et
Gomorrhe was like the staking out of new ground by an adventurous
colonist” (Huddleston 1928, 273). Still, Sodome et Gomorrhe was
deeply marked by the medical ideologies and Germanic theories of its
time. Proust’s portrayal of the gay world shows profound ambivalence
in its willingness to embrace “illness” metaphors, its reliance on the
third-sex theory, and its assumption of a number of stereotypes link¬
ing homosexuality with conspiracy, neurosis, and effeminacy (Rivers
1983). Much of Proust’s view was colored by his experiences at the
salon of the Count Robert de Montesquiou, “a great dandy and aes-
 Early Movements and Aspirations 33

thete who entertained on a lavish scale, organizing elaborate parties in

his Pavilion of the Muses, presenting dances from the Ballet Russe,
the music of Debussy, or the poetry of Mallarme and Verlaine read by
the stars of the Comedie-Franqaise” (Wickes 1976, 106). This, with
Proust’s juggling of his character’s genders, provoked disdain in
Natalie Barney (112), and Andre Gide found the book a “dissimula¬
tion, a desire to protect himself, a camouflage of the cleverest sort”
(Rivers 1983, 155). What is modern in Proust is his depiction of homo¬
sexuality not as a few isolated individuals but as a social world. The
gender-inscribed discourse of the third-sex idea ruptures in the face of
these first descriptions of everyday gay encounters. Homosexuals
become “a race accursed, persecuted like Israel, and finally, like
Israel, under a mass opprobrium of undeserved abhorrence, taking on
mass characteristics, the physiognomy of a nation” (Proust 1963, 276).
“They form in every land an Oriental colony” in diaspora from Sodom,
which leads Proust in pursuit of his analogy to Israel to imagine (but
discount) a new Sodomite nation.
It is no doubt partly in response to Sodome et Gomorrhe that Andre
Gide published Corydon in 1922. It had been written 11 years earlier,
but like so many other gay texts of the day, such as E. M. Forster’s
Maurice or Gertrude Stein’s O.E.D., it languished in a drawer to
await a more progressive era. Like many other gay people, Gide
undertook the personal odyssey of coming out over a number of
years, discovering Whitman in the 1890s (Rhodes 1940, 156) and
wrestling with a religious upbringing. Unlike the heterosexual script,
which equates the discovery of sexuality with loss of innocence, Gide
abandoned the torment of asceticism to find innocence through sexu¬
al encounters with Arab youths, regretting only “the irretrievable
years wasted with sanctity” (Mann 1948, 53). Corydon, too, opens
with Whitman and a call for “someone who would lead the attack”
against “the thick evil of lies, conventions and hypocrisy” surround¬
ing the topic of homosexuality (1950, xiv, 10). With Symonds, Gide
dissents from the gender logic of the third-sex idea and, perceiving
the enemy to be medical moralism, presents a lengthy set of etholog-
ical findings to contradict assumed notions about the “natural.”
Corydon closes with the noble image of the Theban army of lovers
honored in the Greek tradition. When questioned by a reporter fol¬
lowing his winning of the Noble Prize for literature, Gide insisted
that Corydon was his “most important” book, knowing well that the
prize had come in spite of it (xii).
34 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Gide was very much a topic of conversation in 1924 when

Inversions, the first French gay journal, was issued. It published five
numbers before being shut down by the police as an “outrage to good
morals.” Founded by Gustave-Leon Beyria, an office worker, Gaston
Lestrade, a postal worker, and Alfred Zahnd, a Swiss carpetmaker,
Inversions made this appeal in its opening statement: “We wish to cry
out to inverts that they are normal, healthy beings, that they have the
right to live their lives fully, that they owe nothing to a morality creat¬
ed by heterosexuals” (Barbedette and Carassou 1981, 170; my transla¬
tion).
Inversions was very much aware of the German movement, printing
translations of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld. It addressed the trial of Oscar
Wilde, the formulation of the Napoleonic Code, the Greeks, the
“great” homosexuals of history, even zoology. After the police raid
ended Inversions, it was revived as L’Amitie, but this too succumbed to
state repression. Without the scientific legitimacy of the Jahrbuch fur
sexuelle Zwischenstufen or the cachet of elite literature, this potentially
popular magazine aroused the anxiety of French officials who charged
that it was a “cynical apology for pederasty, a systematic appeal to
homosexual passions and an incessant provocation to the most
unhealthy curiosities” (Barbedette and Carassou 1981, 272). With
eugenic ideas circulating under the sponsorship of the Catholic Right,
the prosecution described L’Amitie in a closed trial in 1926 as “propa¬
ganda liable to compromise the future of the race with its neo-
Malthusian tendencies.” The outcome was 10 months in prison for
Beyria and six for Lestrade.
Prewar France, then, offered a unique social milieu for the explo¬
ration of cultural identities. Jean Cocteau’s motto, “What the public
reproaches you for, cultivate! It’s you,” was adopted by many. And yet
a comparison of France and Germany yields several ironies. Despite
(or perhaps because of) their authoritarian state, Germans organized a
public gay and lesbian movement before 1918, whereas the relatively
liberal political climate of France nurtured no equivalent. The compar¬
atively public openness of German gay and lesbian life contrasted with
the apparent social conservatism of France, where gay political
thought was displaced into literature. When Cocteau (1958) published
his erotic confessions in Le Livre blanc in 1928, it appeared anony¬
mously despite its closing line, “But I’m not willing just to be tolerated.
That wounds my love of love and of liberty” (88). Even in Paris, the
 Early Movements and Aspirations 35

expression of same-sex love had to resort to masks and subterfuges in

the face of the heterosexist hegemony.

England

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the

curious attractiveness of others.
—Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young

A map of the world that does not include utopia is not worth even
glancing at.
—Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism

In the 50 years before World War II, gay networks in England as on

the Continent developed an increasingly public literature. All of this
resulted in a very cautious British Society for the Study of Sex
Psychology, a public forum for homosexual issues, but no organized
gay or lesbian movement. These tentative initiatives were undoubtedly
marked by the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, which, as Jeffrey Weeks
(1977) observes, “created a public image for the homosexual and a ter¬
rifying moral tale of the changes that trailed closely behind deviant
behavior” (21) .8 The willingness of the British courts to condemn the
nation’s leading playwright to two years’ hard labor created a symbolic
victory for the “moral purity” forces of the day and chilled the coming-
out process of the British gay world. The trial of Oscar Wilde was an
act of labeling so widely publicized that few in the English-language
world escaped its effects. It provided the stamp of legitimacy for the
suppression of any public mention of same-sex love and served as a
warning to its adherents. In the year following the trial, Edward
Carpenter’s Love’s Coming of Age, which contained a chapter on
“Homogenic love,” and Havelock Ellis’s volume on “sexual inversion”
both lost their publishers. Carpenter’s book eventually appeared with
the small socialist Labour Press, and Ellis’s was published in
Germany.
Still, the trial of Oscar Wilde was not an isolated occurrence but the
culmination of decades of contending political forces in Victorian
England. Although none of the mid-nineteenth-century movements
36 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

aimed to persecute gay people—indeed, few identified homosexuality

as an issue at all—an unlikely mix of physicians, middle-class moral¬
ists, and established policymakers produced a legislative compromise
that caught homosexuals in its net. As physicians campaigned to make
medicine their professional monopoly, they battled midwives, abor¬
tionists, and other folk practitioners to extend their professional
“expertise” over a new range of unregulated human behavior. Among
these “newfound lands” was sexuality, and medical texts spread a veri¬
table hysteria through the 1880s about the “dangers” of masturbation
that resulted in fiendish machines to prevent children from indulging
in the “evil deed” and surveillance systems in families and hospitals to
stamp it out. Soon enough, homosexuality was colonized as yet anoth¬
er widespread phenomenon that could be cultivated as a “disease”
requiring medical intervention (Neuman 1975, 1; Gilbert 1975, 217;
Parsons 1977, 55).
As well, protests raised by the women’s movement against the com¬
pulsory testing of suspected prostitutes for venereal disease ultimately
contributed to legislation that raised the age of consent for all sexual
activities and extended police surveillance over prostitution. Judith
Walkowitz (1980) remarks, “Begun as a libertarian struggle against
the state sanction of male vice, the repeal campaign helped to spawn a
hydra-headed assault against sexual deviation of all kinds. The strug¬
gle against state regulation evolved into a movement that used the
instruments of state for repressive purposes” (1; see also Walkowitz
1983). It was an amendment to this parliamentary bill on prostitution
that in 1885 recriminalized male homosexuality (the medieval sodomy
law having fallen into disuse).9
The “purity” campaign went on to win new laws suppressing the
distribution of contraceptive information; then in 1889, the Indecent
Advertisements Act banned publicity for VD remedies. An 1898 law
prescribed flogging for “soliciting for immoral purposes,” a penalty
imposed primarily on homosexual propositioning (Bristow 1977, 126,
193, 204).
The roots of antihomosexual repression in England show signifi¬
cant differences from Germany. With its aristocratic classes long since
politically neutralized, this legislative wave was no feudal remnant but
rather a modem development that required the assent of England’s
ruling classes, now capitalist. It was only in the nineteenth century,
with the growth of state bureaucracies, that governments became able
to supervise the masses through the extension of compulsory educa-
 Early Movements and Aspirations 37

tion, the expansion of the penal system, the development of military

conscription, and the implementation of censuses. The creation of pop¬
ulation and family policies became possible on this foundation, and
with national statistics at their disposal, Malthusian and eugenic ideas
came into their own. The intrusion of the capitalist state into the pri¬
vate familial and sexual realms proved functional to a system that
needed a high birthrate (though eugenicists at times feared the prolif¬
eration of the “wrong kinds” of people). The prohibition of “irregular,”
nonreproductive sexuality and the promotion of reproduction came
about at a time when the rapidly expanding capitalist economy
required an immense labor supply. Indeed, an oversupply of workers
would ensure the lowest possible wage rates. To sustain the socioeco¬
nomic configuration most favorable to the capitalist class, the least
desirable outcome would have been a scarcity of labor, which would
force employers to compete against each other by raising wages.
Through the nineteenth century the demand for reproduction was
reflected in increasing state regulation of family life. The Factory Acts
of the 1840s moved women out of wage labor; common-law marriages
were forced into legal straitjackets; and medical and “helping” profes¬
sionals developed to supervise family stability. Women increasingly
were redefined as mothers and wives incapable of performing wage
labor (see esp. Weeks 1981; Donzelot 1979). Humanitarian legislation
to protect women and children from the degradations of factory work
helped revalue women’s reproduction o/laborers over their production
as laborers. As employment was withdrawn from women, they neces¬
sarily became more dependent on men and thus possessed fewer
options in determining their own lives. Lesbianism as an alternative to
the nuclear family (and as opposed to “romantic friendship”) became
an even more remote possibility, and male homosexuality fell under
the baleful eye of the state and its agents.

Though Oscar Wilde is best known today for his apparently frivo¬
lous drawing-room comedies, his epigrams and sly observations flow
from deeper sources. His mauling of upper-class pretense came from a
viewpoint shaped by his mother’s Irish nationalism, his own utopian
socialism, and his love of young men. His marginality as an Irishman
and homosexual no doubt contributed to his aesthetic and socialist
protest against bourgeois meanness and vulgarity.
Wilde’s 1890 essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism, contains
this prescient line: “As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sick-
38 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

ened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the
punishments that the good have inflicted” (1973, 1087-88). When
sentence was pronounced against him in 1895, Mr. Justice Wills
could scarcely contain his righteous indignation, stating, “It is the
worst case I have ever tried,” and naming Wilde as “the centre of a
circle of extensive corruption of the most hideous kind among young
men” (Hyde 1948, 339). Wills’s condemnation of Wilde as a “corrup-
tor of youth” recalls the classical parallel of the trial of Socrates, and
Wilde’s now famous defense consciously invoked Greek ideals.
When asked by the crown prosecutor about the “love that dare not
speak its name,” a line drawn from a poem written by his lover, Lord
Alfred Douglas, Wilde replied,

It is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was

between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philos¬
ophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.
It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. ... It is in this
century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as
the “Love that dare not speak its name,” and on account of it I am placed
where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection.
There is nothing unnatural about it. (Hyde 1948, 236)

But certainly the preeminent English thinker on homosexuality was

Edward Carpenter. An active lecturer for socialist causes, Carpenter in
his work shows the now familiar combination of progressive Victorian
ideas on sexual issues: Ulrichs’s third-sex theory, Whitman’s democra¬
tic vistas, and the doctors’ busy reprocessing of Christian moralism
into scientific dogma. Carpenter was deeply uncomfortable with his
Victorian milieu, rejecting its “commercialism,... cant in religion,...
futility in social conventions, . . . denial of the human body, . . . class-
division, . . . cruel barring of women from every natural and useful
expression of their lives,” and sexual hypocrisy (Rowbotham and
Weeks 1977, 27). Carpenter delved into the alternatives to his society
in his search for a place for “romantic comradeship,” voyaging to the
United States in 1877 and 1884 to see Whitman and to India in 1890
and joining English socialist movements to find refuge from bourgeois
propriety (Tsuzuki 1980).
A chance meeting in a railway carriage led to a lifelong relationship
with George Merrill in 1891, and their rural retreat attracted pilgrim¬
ages by reformers, bohemians, lesbians, and gay men inspired as
much by the example of their life together as by Carpenter’s work.
 Early Movements and Aspirations 39

In The Intermediate Sex (1908) Carpenter mapped “homogenic

love” onto the terrain of contemporary debates, sorting through dis¬
tinctions between masculinity/femininity, body/soul, spiritual/sensu¬
al, and nature/nurture. German influence was clear in his association
of Uranians with androgyny, characterizing males as having “gentle,
emotional dispositions” and females as “fiery, active, bold and truthful”
(27). He discounted Krafft-Ebing’s morbidity theories, finding neu¬
roses “the results rather than the causes of the inversion,” but allow¬
ing for a distinction between congenital “born lovers of their own
kind” and situational “confused” or curious inverts (55-62). A denunci¬
ation of “self-abuse” and “sensuality” in youth owed much to the med¬
ical viewpoint. Carpenter strained to recontextualize “comrade
attachment” as an altruistic and spiritual sentiment and endorsed the
Greek ideal of the “continent,” “temperate,” “even chaste” sublimation
in “finer emotions,” cautioning against “a too great latitude on the
physical side” (34, 69-70). Carpenter envisioned a place for homosex¬
uality in an ordered universe in terms of the heroic friendships of the
ancients or Whitman’s “fervid comradeship, . . . the counterbalance
and offset of materialistic and vulgar American Democracy.”
This spiritualization of “homogenic love” partook of the same strate¬
gy used by the nineteenth-century women’s movement, which adopt¬
ed “passionlessness” as an attribute to emancipate women from the
temptress imagery of the Judeo-Christian tradition (Cott 1978, 219). It
protested the relentless sexualization of the world finally accom¬
plished in the post-Freudian period; today Carpenter’s very rich set of
names for same-sex bonding has given way to the triumph of “homo-
sexuality,” which reduces lesbians and gay men to the meeting of body
parts. Carpenter’s work is a final plea for a more whole understanding
of same-sex love. His historical and anthropological anthologies
revolve around “romantic friendship” and “comrade attachment,” not
orifice and orgasm (Carpenter 1982,1975).
Carpenter’s work is a proposal for a full-blooded concept of friend¬
ship and a protest against the emotionless, “tough” masculinity that
was coming to the fore. The booming nineteenth-century capitalist
system created a labor market that pitted man against man to exhibit
the requisite personality types. Masculinity was reconstituted to
reflect the machine to which the worker had to adapt. The industrial
economy sought to discipline and regularize workers as steady, reli¬
able, emotionless, hard, and instrumental. Even the fashion system
showed the revaluation of male purpose, as the flamboyance of the
40 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

aristocracy gave way to the “fastidious austerity” of the businessman

and sober practicality of the male worker (Ewen and Ewen 1982, 132).
Homosexual friendship as a form of male tenderness and avenue to
male bonding became disvalued (or disvalued again) by the logic of
capitalist competition as a “failure” betraying masculine “virtues” nec¬
essary for “success.” Any male temptation to sexual exploration would
be contained by the monogamous family. A dependent wife and chil¬
dren ensured that men would be “good” workers who would not risk
unemployment through industrial rebellion (Horkheimer 1972, 120;
Rapp 1978, 286).
At the same time, Carpenter’s caginess about sexuality participated
in the “denial of the human body” he longed to escape, but his reti¬
cence ought to be assessed in light of the conspiracy of silence insti¬
tuted in the wake of the Wilde trials. Even his own books fell under
the ban. In a 1911 visit to the British Museum, Carpenter found that
The Intermediate Sex was not listed in the library’s card catalog. It took
two years of pressure to convince the library to acknowledge the
book’s existence to its borrowers (Weeks 1977,117-19).
When one of Carpenter’s admirers, Laurence Housman, pulled
together a small network of gay professional men in the Order of
Chaeronea, it made no attempt at public education but met clandes¬
tinely (Weeks 1977, 122-27). After Magnus Hirschfeld addressed the
International Medical Congress in London in 1913, however, the net¬
work became the nucleus for the new British Society for the Study of
Sex Psychology. Carpenter became its first president in 1914.
The society sponsored public lectures and produced pamphlets
throughout the 1920s, publishing among others Stella Browne’s
Sexual Variety and Variability among Women, Havelock Ellis’s The
Erotic Rights of Women, Edward Westermarck’s The Origin of Sexual
Modesty, Laurence Housman’s The Relation of Fellow-Feeling to Sex,
and Edward Carpenter’s Some Friends of Walt Whitman (Weeks 1977,
134). The society attracted such distinguished members as George
Bernard Shaw and E. M. Forster, the communist publicists Maurice
Eden and Cedar Paul, and Oscar Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland. It also
maintained links with Bertrand Russell and Magnus Hirschfeld, as
well as the American birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, Soviet
feminist Alexandra Kollontai, and writer Radclyffe Hall.
Carpenter (1982) looked with hope to the women’s movement, see¬
ing it as an advocate of egalitarian marriage (“a true comradeship
between man and woman”) and a herald of romantic comradeship for
 Early Movements and Aspirations 41

same-sex pairs (39). As women asserted increasing power over their

lives through the women’s movement, he looked forward to “a marked
development of the homogenic passion among the female sex”
(Carpenter 1908, 77-78).
The irony of the Victorian mapping of intimacy, which opposed
male carnality to female purity, however, was that same-sex bonds
took on radically different meanings. It was an attitude expressed in
Gertrude Stein’s characterization (if Hemingway’s account of it is to be
believed) of male homosexual acts as “ugly and repugnant,” whereas
“in women it is the opposite. They do nothing that they are disgusted
by and nothing that is repulsive and afterwards they are happy and
they can lead happy lives together.”10 This interpretation allowed
“romantic friends” to participate in the Victorian women’s movement,
which occupied itself with “morality” legislation, antiprostitution cam¬
paigns, and temperance along with right-to-work and right-to-vote
issues. The Labouchere Amendment (which recriminalized male
homosexuality) by being tacked onto an antiprostitution bill thereby
ranged male and female “homosexuality” (to use a too modern word)
at opposite ends of a moral spectrum.
Nancy Sahli and Lillian Faderman use the language of a “fall” from
“innocence” to contrast the idyllic, prestigmatized ties between
Victorian women to the carnalized and perverse lesbian, a transition
occurring in the early years of the twentieth century (Sahli 1979, 17;
Faderman 1981, 241). Without denying the role of the sexologists and
novelists who helped recategorize lesbians with gay men, it is impor¬
tant not to forget the changing political economy of the era. It is only
because of the powerlessness of Victorian women that patriarchal
authorities could afford to trivialize women’s relationships and tolerate
them as not very serious. It is when women first began to achieve
financial independence in wage labor that romantic friends could
divest themselves of the constraints of marriage and heterosexuality
(see Ferguson 1981, 11). And it was at this moment, when women
threatened to escape male control, that lesbianism crystallized as a
suppressed and reviled identity.
First steps toward articulating a lesbian identity are scattered refer¬
ences made by Edith Lees (married to Havelock Ellis) and by Stella
Browne, a birth control and abortion law reformer, who implicitly
linked lesbian emancipation to the principle of the right to control
one’s own body. In “Sexual Variety and Variability,” Browne (1977)
remarks that “many women of quite normally directed (heterosexual)
42 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

inclinations realise in mature life, when they have experienced pas¬

sion, that the devoted admiration and friendship they felt for certain
girl friends had a real, though perfectly unconscious spark of desire in
its exaltation and intensity” (102-103).
Most significant of all was the 1928 publication of Radclyffe Hall’s
Well of Loneliness, a tortured polemic for the “merciful toleration” of
the “pitiful plight of inverts” (Faderman 1981, 320, 467). The presenta¬
tion of lesbianism as a “painful anomaly” (Weeks 1977, 110; see Ruehl
1982) caused Romaine Brooks (Natalie Barney’s lover) to remark that
it was a “ridiculous book, trite, superficial” (Faderman 1981, 322).
Despite its highly ambivalent approach, The Well of Loneliness was, in
a rerun of British history, abandoned by its publisher and subsequent¬
ly printed in Paris. When imported to Britain, it was seized by customs
and forced through an obscenity trial where the courts convicted it of
not having “stigmatised this relationship as being in any way blame¬
worthy” (Weeks 1977, 109). This time the British mania for silence
subverted itself as an instrument to suppress the book and generated
such international publicity that The Well of Loneliness became the
best-known English-language book with a lesbian theme of its genera¬
tion. And simply by breaking the silence about lesbianism, it gave
hope to thousands by daring to portray an independent relationship
between women as viable and right.

United States

We stand in the middle of an uncharted, uninhabited country. That

there have been other unions like ours is obvious, but we are
unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything for
ourselves. And creation is never easy.
—F. O. Matthiessen, in a letter to his lover, Russell Cheney, 1925
(Hyde 1978, 71; Katz 1983, 415)

In the decades before World War II in the United States, medical

definitions of homosexuality enjoyed a dominance unparalleled in
Europe. Despite the supposed guarantee of freedom of speech in the
U.S. Constitution, state and city governments suppressed the first gay
and lesbian voices raised in arts and politics, thereby establishing
medicine as the only approved dogma on homosexuality. Only the
short-lived Chicago Society for Human Rights dared put forward the
 Early Movements and Aspirations 43

question of civil rights for gay people, though abundant evidence

points toward a well-developed gay underground in all the major cities.
Edward Stevenson’s 1908 The Intersexes, the first book of its kind by a
gay American writer, identified social clubs and baths, cafes and
restaurants, bars and music halls in such cities as New York, Boston,
Washington, Chicago, New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco,
Milwaukee, and Philadelphia (see Mayne 1975; Katz 1983, 326-30).
Jonathan Katz’s remarkable documentary collections offer a wealth
of insight into tum-of-the-century gay society through the eyes of writ¬
ers, state commissions, doctors, and correspondents with the German
movement. The 1911 report of the Chicago Vice Commission scarcely
conceals its astonishment on finding

whole groups and colonies of these men who are sex perverts, but who do
not fall in the hands of the police on account of their practices, and who are
now known in their true character to any extent by physicians.... It appears
that in this community there is a large number of men who are thoroughly
gregarious in habit; who mostly affect the carriage, mannerisms, and speech
of women; . . . they have a vocabulary and signs of recognition of their own.
(Burnham 1973, 47; Katz 1983, 335)

Nor was American gay society the preserve of only men or white
people. Though the literary evidence suggests that romantic friend¬
ships among women were common until World War I and beyond
(Faderman 1981, 298), lesbians, too, were known in the largely male
bar circuits of New York (Katz 1983, 218-19). Racial segregation ironi¬
cally opened the way for the artistic expression of homosexual experi¬
ence. While gay topics were being pushed out of white theaters in the
1920s, “race records” (ignored or misunderstood by white authorities)
included Ma Rainey’s renditions of “Sissy Man Blues,” “B[ull] D[yke]
Woman’s Blues,” and “Fairy Blues” (Katz 1983, 443). Bessie Smith’s
participation in Detroit’s “buffet flats” (underground bars), Claude
McKay’s observations of “the dark dandies loving up their pansies” in
Harlem bars, and Richard Bruce Nugent’s 1926 essay, “Smoke, Lilies,
and Jade,” in the short-lived literary journal, Fire!, leave little doubt
about organized gay life among black Americans (Katz 1976, 80; Katz
1983, 367,443, 447; Christopher 1991,16).
Meanwhile, public awareness of lesbians and gay men was limited
to occasional lurid newspaper articles linking “sex perverts” to murder
and other crimes and to the advice of “experts” warning against mas-
44 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

turbation and “darker” evils. Medical journals published case studies

of unrelieved misery—sad tales designed to frighten anyone who
dared fall in love with a friend. An infrequent report would recognize
that the social condemnation of homosexuality was the problem and
not homosexuality itself (Katz 1976, 150), but the preponderance of
medical attention was devoted to the armory of repression: castration,
hypnosis, surgery, electroshock, drugs, and hormones (Katz 1976;
Weinberg and Bell 1972).
As in England, the domination of American politics and economy
by big business molded legal and moral norms after its own image. As
Michel Foucault (1980) remarks, a regime of supervision and control
was established to protect the means of production while it was in
workers’ hands through a “formidable layer of moralisation deposited
on the nineteenth-century population” (41). Early industrialists
showed no reluctance in examining the “moral lives” of workers and
did not hesitate to dismiss those who violated Victorian ideals of sexu¬
al propriety.11 In North America there were a number of instances of
industrial towns founded, built, and governed by a single capitalist
family who enforced moral standards. Antonio Gramsci (1971) argues,
“The new industrialism wants monogamy; it wants the man as worker
not to squander his nervous energies in the disorderly and stimulating
pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction. . . . The exaltation of passion
cannot be reconciled with the timed movements of production,
motions connected with the most perfected automatism” (302,
304-305; see Poster 1978,169).
Industrial labor shaped men’s experiences and organized a mascu¬
line ideology through which men were to understand and direct their
lives. The repressive climate “inoculated” most men against homosex¬
ual activity and convinced them of its inutility. Competitiveness coun¬
teracted male bonding and the “team” absorbed intermale affection.
Even the male gestural repertoire for affection needed to be dressed
in the language of aggression: intermale touching could occur legiti¬
mately only as mock punches, slaps, and jabs.
No subordinated group that is victim of the same practices and
information sources as the larger society can entirely escape the
malevolent effect of so much indoctrination.12 But even the most over¬
whelming propaganda system cannot completely convince people to
ignore their own experiences, pleasures, and satisfactions when they
seem so “natural, pure, and sound” (Katz 1976, 376).
 Early Movements and Aspirations 45

And there were leaks in the American ideological umbrella, often

provoked by European thought. Representatives of the Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee lectured in New York in 1906 and 1907, cre¬
ating links between the German movement and gay Americans (Katz
1976, 381-82). Even more remarkable was Emma Goldman’s inclusion
of freedom for homosexuals among the anarchist issues for which she
campaigned in her 1915 lecture tour across the United States. In an
article written for the Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen in 1923,
Goldman acknowledged the influence of lesbians she met in prison as
well as the writings of Hirschfeld, Carpenter, Ellis, and Krafft-Ebing on
her awareness of antihomosexual oppression. Edith Lees also defend¬
ed the sexually “abnormal” in a lecture tour of the United States in
1915, prompting Margaret Anderson to take her to task for understat¬
ing the pain of those “tortured or crucified everyday for their love”
(Katz 1983, 366). Anderson’s Little Review continued to publish fiction
about women-loving women into the 1920s even as the subject was
falling under the pall of medical pathology (Faderman 1981, 308).
Popular literature continued to reflect an unself-conscious celebration
of female romantic friendship at least into the 1910s, but new trends
were evident (Faderman 1981; see Simmons 1979). The potential of
female relationships as alternatives to heterosexuality was put forward
positively in Florence Converse’s 1897 novel Diana Victrix but nega¬
tively in an 1898 Women’s Christian Temperance Union advice book,
What a Young Woman Ought to Know, which rejected women’s friend¬
ships as “a sort of perversion, a sex mania” (Faderman 1981, 168; Katz
1976, 295). In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a new
vision of womanhood emerged among women “loving and living with
other women, within the separatist environment of women’s colleges,
settlement houses, and reform organizations” (Smith-Rosenberg 1985,
256). This was a period of such notable romantic friendships as those
between Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, Jeannette Marks and
Mary Woolley, Vida Scudder and Florence Converse, and M. Carey
Thomas and Mamie Gwinn (Smith-Rosenberg 1985, 254). By World
War I, however, these “new women” faced a disciplinary tide of official
warnings against the danger of lesbianism (Faderman 1991, 50).
For women in North America as in England, the winning of access
to paid work and to the vote were necessary prerequisites for self-
determination. With the masses of women only beginning to filter into
wage labor (and, at first, into subordinate and poorly paid positions),
46 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

the degree of financial independence needed to found one’s own

household and escape dependence on men was available to only a few.

The Society for Human Rights was the first formally organized gay
movement group in the United States. Founded by an itinerant preach¬
er and laundry, railway, and postal workers, the society was incorpo¬
rated in Chicago on 10 December 1924. The inspiration for a gay
rights group came from Henry Gerber, a German-American postal
worker who had served with U.S. occupation forces in Germany from
1920 to 1923 and had been able to participate in the German move¬
ment at that time (Katz 1976, 385-89; Katz 1983, 554-61). The Society
for Human Rights succeeded in putting out two issues of a (now lost)
journal, Friendship and Freedom, and quickly contacted its counter¬
parts in Europe. L’Amitie noted, ‘The first page of Friendship and
Freedom is composed of an article on ‘Self-control,’... a poem of Walt
Whitman, and an essay, ‘Green carnations,’ on Oscar Wilde”
(Barbedette and Carassou 1981, 263; my translation). The society
came to a sudden end when the wife of one of the directors caught
wind of it and called the police. Three directors were dragged through
court, and the Chicago Examiner trumpeted, “Strange sex cult
exposed.” In Gerber’s words, ‘We were up against a solid wall of igno¬
rance, hypocrisy, meanness and corruption. The wall had won” (Katz
1976, 393).
The fate of the Chicago Society for Human Rights was no isolated
incident. American democracy had long been compromised by an
authoritarian underside. Governments had been quick to sweep away
constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly when
workers sought to organize themselves into unions during the late
nineteenth century and when peace advocates questioned the reasons
for the entry of the United States into World War I (Goldstein 1978).
In 1919, urban riots broke out in Chicago and East St. Louis as black
veterans returning from the war found unemployment and racism in
the ghettos. Increasingly nervous about the recent Russian Revolution
and about domestic political restiveness, the federal government
plunged into the Red Scare of 1919-20, arresting thousands suspected
of socialist or anarchist sympathies. Emma Goldman was among the
deportees. Like British repression following on the heels of the
French Revolution, American authorities sought to eliminate all signs
of “disorder,” including homosexuality. It was also in 1919 that investi¬
gation of homosexuality at the Newport (Rhode Island) Naval Training
 Early Movements and Aspirations 47

Station resulted in the jailing of 16 sailors. An official committee,

which reviewed the incident, found that a 41-man “pervert squad” had
sought to entrap navy men and that “these boys not only permitted
one [sexual] act to be performed upon them, but returned time after
time to the same suspect and allowed a number of acts to be per¬
formed. ... Not one boy declined the assignment,” and several had
received citations for their “interest and zeal in this work.”13 It was in
this inauspicious climate that the first American gay civil rights group
came into existence.
After his dismissal from the post office, Henry Gerber went on to
become circulation manager for Chanticleer, where he wrote occasion¬
al progay articles and critically reviewed the maudlin gay-themed nov¬
els of the 1930s. In later correspondence with Manuel Boyfrank, he
alternated between disillusionment and fantasies of a restored move¬
ment to fight the religious fanatics, blackmailers, psychiatrists, and
“imperialist and fascist politicians who want a big population for can¬
non fodder” (Katz 1983, 558). In his words, “Capitalism, loyally sup¬
ported by the churches, has established a Public Policy that the
Sacred Institution of Monogamy must be enforced; and such a fiat is
the deathknell to all sexual freedom” (Katz 1976, 394). (Gerber died in
1972 at the age of 80.)
When homosexual themes turned up in the movies, censors sliced
Alla Nazimova’s 1923 Salome and Carl Dryer’s Mikael (released in
New York as Chained, The Story of the Third Sex) (Russo 1981, 22, 27).
The staging of Edouard Bourdef s The Captive (which played unmo¬
lested in Paris) and Mae West’s The Drag sparked police raids in 1927
and led to a toughened New York State censorship law that banned
any reference to “sexual perversion” (Katz 1976, 87).
The Well of Loneliness endured another obscenity trial, this time in
New York, but was ultimately acquitted by an appeals court. The
establishment of the Motion Picture Code in 1930 assured ideological
purity through self-censorship, introducing a new period of revisionist
history. Thus, when Madchen in Uniform opened in 1932, depictions
of romantic friendships among schoolgirls were cut out. The lesbian
Queen Christina of Sweden was married off to a Spanish ambassador
in the 1933 film in violation of history, and the 1936 movie of Lillian
Heilman’s Children’s Hour was completely rewritten to heterosexual-
ize it (Russo 1981, 57, 63, 65). Through the 1930s, panics around
child molesters and sexual criminals swept through the United
States, uniting “media, citizen’s groups, and law enforcement”
48 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

(Freedman 1989, 205) into pressure groups whose legacy was a series
of “criminal sexual psychopath” laws. These laws allowed the courts to
categorize a wide range of people, including homosexual men, as dan¬
gerous sexual offenders and to sentence them to lengthy—sometimes
unlimited—terms in prison. It was not until the 1950s that lesbian and
gay Americans tried again to break through the “conspiracy of
silence.”
Chapter Three

The Holocaust

[Gay people] had their golden age a half century ago, a lost conti¬
nent obliterated by the totalitarian bloodbath.
—Guy Hocquenghem, Race d’Ep!

New Sources for Old Fears

The breaking up of feudal society organized around kin and hierar¬
chy created a world with new possibilities, especially for traditionally
oppressed classes: peasants and serfs, women, national minorities,
and Jews. In this new world, “comrade attachment” between men and
between women found new avenues for expression and new voices.
But capitalism is no unitary phenomenon, and its development
through the particular political makeup of different nations resulted in
divergent conditions for the emergence of a gay people. Increasingly
evident from the historical record is the fact that “homogenic love”
faced difficulties that were not merely a question of overcoming older
holdovers but hindrances stemming from modern sources (Adam
1985b).
Though the rise of capitalism opened new channels for homosexual
expression, it also laid the groundwork for the reorganization and reju¬
venation of older doctrines proscribing it. This unstable mix of ambiva¬
lent and contradictory trends presented little security to lesbians and

49
50 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

gay men whose social niches remained vulnerable to larger events

beyond their control. In countries where feudal remnants, still smart¬
ing from recent defeats, combined with big business, particularly mur¬
derous coalitions came about to crush the gains of traditionally
disenfranchised peoples. In countries where the state itself became the
sole capitalist, there was no countervailing force to the imposition of
particularly virulent forms of the productivist/reproductivist ideology.
To understand the changing prospects of the gay and lesbian move¬
ment, we cannot neglect the larger social milieu that provided both
the resources for the emergence of a homosexual people and an impe¬
tus for other social classes to seek the destruction of the gay world.
Nor can the postwar movement ignore the lessons of the Holocaust,
where the early gay movement came to such a bitter end.

Stalinism
When the Russian Revolution succeeded in abolishing Europe’s last
absolute monarchy, all eyes turned toward the new social experiment
in the East. In a single blow, an ancient autocracy had apparently
given way to a popular democracy of workers’ councils and peasant
communes accompanied by sweeping reforms in family and sexual
life. The new constitution mandated the legal equality of women, vol¬
untary marriage and divorce, legalized contraception and abortion,
state-supported day care, employment rights for women, and materni¬
ty leave provisions (Millett 1969, 168). Criminal penalties for adultery
and homosexuality were dropped in favor of an official policy of with¬
drawing the state from the private realm. Soviet delegates to the
World League for Sexual Reform reiterated the official position
throughout the 1920s. In the words of Dr. Baktis’s The Sexual
Revolution in Russia (1925), “As for homosexuality, sodomy, and what¬
ever other forms of sexuality that are considered as moral violations
by European legal codes, Soviet law treats them just the same as so-
called natural intercourse. All forms of intercourse are private mat¬
ters” (22; my translation).
This clear-cut policy helped influence the leftward drift of the gay
movement in Germany as the German Communist party assured gays
in the 1928 election campaign that “there is no need to emphasize that
we will continue to wage the most resolute struggle for the repeal of
these laws [Paragraph 175] in the future” (Steakley 1975, 85). Wilhelm
Reich’s Sexpol movement became active within the party in 1930-31,
 The Holocaust 51

and Communist deputies supported repeal in parliamentary commit¬

tees at this time.
The dream of a land with the freedom to love recurs frequently in
gay writing. Whether in Melville’s voyages to Polynesia, the flight of
so many American writers to Paris, Isherwood in Berlin, or Gide in
Algeria, many sought (and some found) countries where they could
escape the antisexual suffocation of their homelands. The socialist cri¬
tique of bourgeois morality promised as well to overcome the contem¬
porary system that claimed liberty and equality for itself but instead
appropriated them for the monied classes. That the Soviet Union
raised such hopes in the 1920s cannot be surprising, and Gide among
others became increasingly involved in the Communist movement
(Mann 1948, 151). With high expectations, Gide went to Moscow in
1936 where he found not freedom but a new bureaucratic class
upholding the Stalin personality cult and enforcing a rigid ideological
conformity in the press, in art and music, and in family and sexual life
(see Gide 1937).
What went wrong? The debates over the “betrayal” of the Russian
Revolution continue unabated today, though few efforts have been
made to explain the dramatic reversals of Soviet policy on the family
and sexuality. What we do know is that grass-roots organizations
gave way to a new dictatorial state that exerted unprecedented con¬
trol over all of Russian life. As early as 1921, workers’ councils were
replaced by a central administration for directing economic produc¬
tion and distribution. By 1929, unions had lost “rights to participate in
enterprise management and to bargain over wages and working con¬
ditions on behalf of their worker members” (Skocpol 1979, 219, 228);
moreover, the nonparty press was choked off (Medvedev 1977, 205).
The Communist state under Stalin’s leadership embarked on a crash
program to industrialize an essentially peasant society and to seize
direct control of agricultural production from its peasant holders. The
result, in Alvin Gouldner’s (1980) words, was “a regime of terror aim¬
ing at the collectivization of property” conducted by an “urban-cen-
tered power elite that had set out to dominate a largely rural society to
which they related as an alien colonial power” (214, 226). This war
against the peasantry consolidated a centralized state that suppressed
all opposition through a massive police and prison apparatus that
knew no bounds in imagining enemies.
From 1933 to 1938 the terror encompassed the Communist party
itself. Half of the party membership was arrested, and as Nikita
52 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Khrushchev later revealed, 70 percent of the party’s Central

Committee was “arrested and shot”: “Stalin killed and tortured more
Communists than any other dictator in the twentieth century”
(Gouldner 1980, 233, 256). Thus, Stalin and the Soviet state bureaucra¬
cy succeeded through the 1930s in eliminating most of the original
revolutionaries and much of the socialist program: “Persons were
jailed, shot or exiled not because of what they had done but because of
their supposed readiness to do injury to Soviet society inferred on the
basis of their social category: social origin, nationality or group mem¬
bership” (Gouldner 1980, 234). Ironically, Stalin restored many of the
characteristics of absolute monarchy in his personal dictatorship and
persecution of traditional outgroups of Russian society: Jews, intellec¬
tuals, national minorities—and gay people.
According to John Lauritsen and David Thorstad (1974), “In
January 1934, mass arrests of gays were carried out in Moscow,
Leningrad, Kharkov, and Odessa. Among those arrested were a great
many actors, musicians, and other artists. They were accused of
engaging in ‘homosexual orgies,’ and were sentenced to several years
of imprisonment or exile in Siberia” (68; see also Hauer 1984).
Homosexuality was recriminalized in 1934, punishable by a five-year
prison sentence, and other social legislation was rolled back: abortion
of first pregnancies was outlawed in 1936, and all abortions in 1944.
Divorce became subject to fines, and common-law marriage lost legal
recognition (Millett 1969,172).
The 1991 fall of the Soviet regime opens new possibilities for recov¬
ering the history of gay and lesbian life in Russia, which until now has
been concealed by the state. Mikhail Kuzmin’s 1904 book, Wings, sug¬
gests the existence of an early gay intelligentsia in Russia similar to
that found in the rest of Europe (see Karlinsky 1979). Hirschfeld
(1975) includes Saint Petersburg among the European centers with a
gay life in his 1905 book. Kuzmin’s lover was among the victims of the
terror, and “Kuzmin himself was reportedly on the list of those to be
executed when he died in 1936” (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974, 65).
Herbert Marcuse’s (1961) analysis of Soviet Marxism suggests one
explanation for the reactionary morality of Stalinism. As the Soviet
state pressed for rapid industrialization, it installed the
productivist/reproductivist ethic favored by Victorian capitalists,
which similarly aimed to create an expanding labor supply and disci¬
plined work force. The antihomosexual laws of the Stalinist period
remain on the books until 1993, and the state monopoly of the commu-
 The Holocaust 53

nications media assured an almost unbroken silence on the subject.

The full story of the Stalinist terror and gay people has yet to be told
(but see Jong 1985).

Nazism
In 1933 the early gay movement came to an abrupt end. With the
Nazi party in power, the German state made every effort to wipe away
the restive, subordinated groups who agitated for their rightful places
in German society. The Nazi machine crushed workers’ and women’s
movements, Communists and socialists, peace activists and dissidents.
With a racial ideology glorifying the “Aryan,” it developed a network of
concentration camps to contain and destroy “inferior” peoples: Jews,
Slavs, gypsies, criminals, the disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses—and gay
people. The Nazis wanted to roll back history to an earlier, supposedly
more harmonious era of German greatness. To do so required the
removal of the “abrasive” groups of the modem period. Ernst Rohm,
leader of the Nazi party militia (the Sturmabteilung), characterized the
ascendance of Nazism this way: “National Socialism signifies a spiritu¬
al rupture with the thinking of the French Revolution of 1789” (Gallo
1972, 36). Not only would the peoples released by the collapse of feu¬
dalism be driven out; even the memory of them would be extin¬
guished. And, with the gay movement, they almost succeeded. Even
after World War II, the early gay movement shrank to no more than a
rumor and a hope for the mass of lesbians and gay men. A new gener¬
ation grew up isolated from a cultural heritage that had embodied its
experiences and possibilities.
Extreme conservative forces had always been forthright in their
hatred of gay people. They had assaulted Hirschfeld in 1920, and in
1921 he was so badly beaten that some newspapers printed an obitu¬
ary. With shifting government coalitions in the 1920s, censorship
returned, and gay and lesbian journals were banned in 1926 and 1928.
Anti-vice crusaders, some with roots in the Protestant church, called
more stridently for the suppression of homosexuality.1 The Nazi party
had been unambiguous in its reply to Adolf Brand’s survey of candi¬
dates for the 1928 election: “Anyone who even thinks of homosexual
love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people
and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a
fight and it’s madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally”
(Steakley 1975, 84).
54 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Still, it seems that many in the gay movement—like so many oth¬

ers—did not take the Nazi threat seriously in the early days. Was not
Ernst Rohm himself homosexual and a member of the Bund fur
Menschenrecht? Still even the Social Democrats, in a replay of 1907,
could not resist baiting the Nazis with the charge of homosexuality in
high places, thereby adopting the Nazi’s own rhetoric by claiming that
the “moral and physical health of German youth stands at risk”
because of it (Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 124). As the Gestapo closed
the gay press in the first months of the Nazi regime, the final issues of
gay journals were announcing upcoming dances and meetings, show¬
ing few signs of their impending fate.2 Christopher Isherwood (1976)
remarked, “Boy bars of every sort were being raided, now, and many
were shut down” (124). (Isherwood subsequently fled Berlin for
England.) On 27 February 1933, Max Hodann and Felix Halle of the
Institute for Sex Research were arrested, and on 23 March Kurt Hiller,
the leading organizer of the sex law reform coalition of the 1920s, was
seized and imprisoned in the Oranienburg concentration camp. (Hiller
was released after nine months and escaped to Prague and later
London with Walter Schultz, a man he met in the Oranienburg camp
who was to become his lover of 30 years.)
On the morning of 6 May 1933, a hundred Nazi students from a
nearby school for physical education appeared at the doors of the
Institute for Sex Research:

They smashed the doors down and rushed into the building. They spent the
morning pouring ink over carpets and manuscripts and loading their trucks
with books from the Institute’s library, including many which had nothing to
do with sex: historical works, art journals, etc. ... A few days after the raid,
the seized books and papers were publicly burned along with a bust of
Hirschfeld, on the square in front of the Opera House. (Isherwood 1976, 129)

Like the sacking of the ancient library at Alexandria, which blotted

out a good deal of ancient culture from human history, the Nazis
destroyed 12,000 books and 35,000 pictures (Steakley 1975, 105),
burning much of the heritage of those who dared to love others of
their own sex. Hirschfeld was already outside Germany and tried to
start again in Paris, but he died in Nice on 15 May 1935. His lover,
Kurt Giese, once a secretary at the institute, moved on to Prague,
where he committed suicide in 1936 (Isherwood 1976, 129) in the face
of a German invasion.
 The Holocaust 55

Switzerland became a sanctuary for other refugees from Nazism.

Helene Stocker, Anita Augspurg, and Lida Heymann, all veterans of
Mutterschutz and the struggle to define a progressive women’s move¬
ment, fled to Switzerland. Stocker continued on to the United States.
All three died in 1943 (Evans 1976, 264). Stefan George, the homoerot¬
ic poet, also took refuge in Switzerland, and Der Kreis, a publication
founded in Zurich in 1932, became the only gay journal to survive the
war (Hocquenghem 1979, 93; Bullough 1976, 664).
Just what elements of German society propelled the Nazi party to
power remains a subject of scholarly debate. Most evidence points to a
three-fold coalition. Among the early adherents of Nazism were follow¬
ers of the old conservative political parties: the agrarian aristocracy
(the Junkers), the military, the bureaucracy, and the church—in
short, the old imperial establishment deposed at the end of World War
I. The second major bloc of support came from major industrialists,
who still remembered the 1918 revolution and saw Nazism as a bul¬
wark against the popularity of socialism among German workers.
When the Nazis did come to power, they assured a passive work force
for the capitalist elite by abolishing or taking over trade unions and
imprisoning the political Left. Third and more difficult to assess is the
mass base of the Nazi movement. Strong suspicion has also been cast
upon those elements of the German population who had lost status
during the preceding decades because their jobs had disappeared
owing to the advance of technology, competition from big business, or
the inflation crisis of 1923-24. It was “the small peasant farmers, the
independent artisans and the rest of the multifarious mass of individ¬
ual tradesmen, petty entrepreneurs, salesmen and shopkeepers”
(Sohn-Rethel 1978, 131) who were most attracted to the Nazi promise
to restore a lost, more orderly and comfortable world.3 This powerful
reactionary coalition lashed out at all the symbols of the modem era
that provoked in them such insecurity and resentment.
Nazism revived much of the ultraconservative ideology propagated
by the prewar imperial court. Adolf Stocker, the court preacher
attached to the kaiser, had consistently denounced Jews, feminists, lib¬
erals, and gay people for creating the ills of German society through¬
out the imperial regime (Steakley 1975, 37). Now Himmler believed
women’s organizations to be “a catastrophe,” which masculinized
women, destroyed their charm, and led the way to gender-mixing and
homosexuality (Vismar 1977, 314; my translation). Ironically, the
Bund Deutsches Frauenverein, the major women’s organization, was
56 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

already on record as “combating sexual libertarianism, pornography,

abortion, venereal diseases, advertisements for contraceptives and the
double standard” and could only vainly protest its solidarity with
Nazism when it was dissolved in 1933 in favor of the Nazis’ own
Frauenfront (Evans 1976, 237, 254ff). In the 1930s, women were
removed from government and the professions in accord with Nazi
policy, which prescribed women’s place as being among “children,
church, and kitchen” (Kinder, Kirche, Kuche), but women quietly
resumed wage labor during the war years, as they did in the United
States, in order to fill the labor shortage created as male workers went
to battle (Evans 1976, 262; Millett 1969,159-66).
For those who nourished illusions about Nazi intentions toward gay
people, the Night of Long Knives was a grim awakening. On the week¬
end of 30 June through 1 July 1934, Hitler, Himmler, and Goring had
several hundred political rivals murdered. Among them were the
Strasser brothers, who had taken too seriously the “Socialist” claim of
“National Socialism” by calling for implementation of such early ele¬
ments of the Nazi program as abolition of incomes unearned through
work, nationalization of trusts, and a ban on land speculation. Also exe¬
cuted where the holdouts from the old imperial regime who balked at
the Nazi line. But the best-known victim was Ernst Rohm, who led a
“vicious and quite popular struggle against the old order in general”
and had dared to call for a “Second Revolution” against “reactionaries
[and] bourgeois conformists” in April of 1934 (Gallo 1972, 37; Geyer
1984, 204).
When Adolf Hitler stood before the Reichstag two weeks after the
Night of Long Knives, he denounced supposed international
Communist and Jewish “conspiracies,” Rohm’s “plot” against the
regime, and his “vice,” claiming that some of Rohm’s associates had
been caught in bed with male lovers on that fateful weekend.
Meanwhile, the Nazi press defamed Rohm’s militia for its “homosexu¬
al cliques.”
Nazi doctrine constructed homosexuality as an urban corruption
and a disease alien to “healthy” village life but easily spread through
seduction and propaganda. With a single-minded pronatalist policy
aimed toward producing “Aryan” Germans, sterilization and extermi¬
nation were reserved for subordinated peoples, including homosexu¬
als. In 1934, Paragraph 175 was extended to include “a kiss, an
embrace, even homosexual fantasies,” and in 1936, Himmler reorga¬
nized the Gestapo to create a division responsible for ferreting out
 The Holocaust 57

political and religious dissidents, Freemasons, and homosexuals. In

1940, Himmler ordered that everyone completing a prison term under
Paragraph 175 was to be sent to a concentration camp if they had had
“more than one partner.”4
Just how many gay people died at the hands of the Nazis will never
be known. Concentration camp officials destroyed many of the records
as the Allied armies marched into Germany, and other records held in
East Germany remained closed until the reunification of Germany in
1990. From his examination of extant camp records Rudiger
Lautmann (1980-81) offers a conservative estimate of 5,000 to 15,000
camp inmates designated as homosexuals by a pink triangle. The
Gestapo had a number of ready-made resources for locating gay peo¬
ple when Hitler became chancellor of Germany. One police district
alone in Berlin had an accumulated list of 30,000 names of suspected
homosexuals in its files. Some 50,000 people were convicted under
Paragraph 175 during the Nazi period, and judicial files existed on
many more convicted before 1933 (Steakley 1975, 110, 113; Herzer
1985; Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 263-67). And certainly the many col¬
laborators and sympathizers with Nazism were no more loath to turn
in their homosexual neighbors than they were to hand over Jews and
the many other victims of Nazi terror.
As Germany invaded other European countries, it cast its deadly
net wider. The Nederlandsch Wetenschappelijk-Humanitair
Kommittee, which had existed from 1911, fell in 1940, and bar raids
took many more, a move welcomed by the Dutch Roman Catholic
church, which had been campaigning for the suppression of gay peo¬
ple throughout the 1920s (Tielman 1982; Rogier 1969). Heinz Heger
(1980) a 22-year-old Austrian student, was arrested in 1939 on the
basis of an intercepted postcard he had addressed to his lover (19, 39).
Those caught by the police network included “unskilled workers and
shop assistants, skilled tradesmen and independent craftsmen, musi¬
cians and artists, professors and clergy, even aristocratic landowners”
(Heger 1980, 9).
Camp prisoners were classified by a set of colored triangles: green
for criminals, red for Communists, blue for emigrants, black for “aso-
cials,” purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, brown for gypsies, yellow for
Jews, and pink for homosexuals (Lautmann 1980-81). Most camp
observers agree that, despite the desperate conditions afflicting all
prisoners, an internal hierarchy could be discerned. Greens and reds
more often achieved easier jobs, supervisory positions, and thus better
58 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

diets, while brown, yellow, and pink triangles were subjected to dis¬
proportionate violence, hard labor, and starvation (Heger 1980, 32;
Kogon 1976, 44). Heger (1980) recounts the relentless beatings and
pointless labor experienced by pink-triangle inmates, being forced to
stand naked in subzero weather, and dawn-to-dusk work moving snow
with their bare hands from one side of a road to the other and then
back again (35) .5 In Sachsenhausen, most homosexuals were included
among laborers sent to the clay pits (for brick manufacture) in order
to load and push rail carts. Supplied with a diet that fell below the daily
minimum necessary for survival and subjected to Gestapo violence,
homosexuals suffered an extremely high death rate. Lautmann,
Grikschat, and Schmidt (1977) quote a survivor who observed, “The
SS were glad if several 175ers were left on the road by evening. When
in January 1943, the number of dead homosexuals at Klinker [clay
pits] reached a total of 24 in a single day, commanding headquarters
became somewhat disquieted. There followed a pause” (349; my trans¬
lation). Comparison of the camp records of red-, purple-, and pink-tri¬
angle prisoners shows that the death rate for homosexuals was half
again as high as for the other two categories (350).
Late in the war, Himmler toyed with the idea of “curing” homosexu¬
als by forcing them to visit brothels. (Heger asked stand-ins to take
his place.) Once, he ordered that homosexuals willing to be castrated
would be released to fight at the Russian front (Heger 1980, 98).
Tiring of this, the Gestapo subjected homosexuals and other prisoners
to the notorious “medical experiments” conducted by physicians who
mutilated, injected, burned, and froze prisoners to death in the name
of science.
Rudolf Hoss (1951), the commandant of Sachsenhausen and later
of Auschwitz, wrote this observation in his diary: “Should one of these
[pink triangles] lose his ‘friend’ through sickness, or perhaps death,
then the end could be at once foreseen. Many would commit suicide.
To such natures, in such circumstances, the ‘friend’ meant everything.
There were many instances of ‘friends’ committing suicide together”
(104-105).
Perhaps most ironic of all is what little effect the genocide of gay
people had on homosexuality as a whole. Eugen Kogon (1976)
observed that “homosexual practices were actually very widespread in
the camps. The prisoners, however, ostracized only those whom the
SS marked with the pink triangle” (43; see Heger 1980, 61). Heger
could never quite understand why his persecutors would beat him for
 The Holocaust 59

being homosexual and then force him to commit homosexual acts

with them (29). It was as if a great enough sacrifice to the altar of
morality released them from its obligations (see Adam 1978, 69-77,
54-58). Whatever gods the Nazis served, the genocide of a generation
of homosexuals, the extermination of gay thought, and the intense
supervision of those who might be tempted to homosexuality were not
enough to contain the human potential for same-sex love.

The Holocaust then effectively wiped away most of the early gay
culture and its movement through systematic extermination and ideo¬
logical control. Its legacy was a willful forgetting by both capitalist and
communist elites who tacitly confirmed the Nazis’ work by denying
lesbians and gay men any public existence. The doctors, the bishops,
and the police could now fully occupy the gay domain. A new genera¬
tion awoke to homosexual feelings reviled as “sick,” “sinful,” and
“criminal”; they could find one another and their tradition only at great
personal cost. But unlike the third- and fourth-world peoples decimat¬
ed or annihilated by European colonialism, lesbians and gay men
emerged in undiminished numbers in new generations. Not reliant on
biological reproduction, a gay and lesbian nation grew up again in the
very heart of its enemies. No matter how fervent the hatred of judges
or psychiatrists, politicians or business people, preachers or patri¬
archs, same-sex love appeared again among their own sons and
daughters as it did in the rest of society.
Chapter Four

The Homophiles Start Over

The McCarthy Terror

When lesbians and gay men organized again after World War II,
they faced a new range of repressive forces in Western Europe and
North America. Though fascism was defeated in Germany, a reac¬
tionary coalition had mobilized in the United States, reaching its
height in the early 1950s with the prosecutorial activities of Senator
Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Though McCarthy’s name has come to characterize the whole era,
history is never made by a single individual or lone governmental
committee. McCarthyism, like its reactionary predecessors, needed
supporters in order to assert power. In the first postwar decade, capi¬
talist and governmental elites deployed their forces to restore the pre¬
war social order and hold off the forces of change. Wartime labor
needs had overturned traditional pecking orders among ethnic
groups, and families had been disrupted by the mobilization for war.
National liberation movements in Asia and Africa were challenging
Western domination. McCarthyism was simply the most visible
aspect of a restorationist trend that was directly to affect lesbians and
gay men.
As early as 1945, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce conducted an
active anticommunist campaign. Deeply alarmed by Soviet power in
Eastern Europe and later by the 1949 revolution in China, the cham-

60
 The Homophiles Start Over 61

ber’s program directors drew together big businessmen, the Roman

Catholic church hierarchy, federal agencies, and veterans’ groups, all
of whom held “an apocalyptic view of Communism and an unremitting
zeal to defeat the Soviet Union and its American supporters” (Irons
1974, 79). The apparently growing popularity of the Communist party,
with its program to expropriate the business class, appeared to be the
most visible of the menacing changes occurring at home. Strong con¬
servative sentiment often arises among groups of people who feel their
standard of living is declining and who, consequently, look back in
time toward images of a better world. Social research at the time
revealed that McCarthyism appealed most to small businessmen
(especially the less educated) and long-term Republican voters; both
groups responded to the conservative call to preserve the “American
way.” As with earlier reactionary movements, McCarthyism drew on
“a wistful nostalgia for a golden age of small farmers and businessmen
and [was] also an expression of a strong resentment and hatred
toward a world which makes no sense in terms of older ideas” (Trow
1958, 270; see Griffith 1974).
As the nation again prepared for war, this time to “stop commu¬
nism” in Korea, the federal government set up loyalty commissions to
examine any connections between government employees and sus¬
pected “subversives.” The commissions scrutinized their personal
lives for what they thought were “tell-tale” details: “communist associ¬
ates,” “un-American” magazines or books, affiliation with Henry
Wallace’s Progressive party—even “too great sociability with black
people or unorthodox styles of dress” (Goldstein 1978, 299-303).
When Wallace was trounced at the polls in 1948, even liberal organiza¬
tions began to yield in the face of McCarthyite campaigns.1 Congress
responded with new laws to ban the Communist party and register
members of “subversive” groups; blacklists were drawn up of persons
to be seized in case of national emergency, and plans were made for
concentration camps to contain them (Goldstein 1978; 322-24).
On the face of it, there is no reason homosexuality should have
been mixed into the anticommunist furor of postwar America, but in
McCarthyism as in other reactionary ideologies, psychosymbolic con¬
nections between gender and power assigned a place to homosexuali¬
ty. For the authoritarian mind, male homosexuality signified the
surrender of masculinity and the “slide” into “feminine” traits of weak¬
ness, duplicity, and seductiveness. As Leslie Fiedler (1954) remarks,
“McCarthy touched up the villain he had half-found half-composed,
62 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

adding the connotations of wealth and effete culture to treachery, and

topping all off with the suggestion of homosexuality.... The definition
of the enemy is complete—opposite in all respects to the American
Ideal, simple, straightforward, ungrammatical, loyal, and one-hundred-
percent male” (77). Like the German militarists of the Weimar period
or the British at the time of Napoleon, the McCarthyites drew togeth¬
er personal feelings of self-esteem expressed in terms of “manhood”
with national self-esteem and belligerence. Working within a gender
discourse that associated maleness with toughness and effectiveness,
in opposition to supposedly female weakness and failure, male homo¬
sexuality symbolized the betrayal of manhood—the feminine enemy
within men.
A 1949 Newsweek article called “Queer People” had already named
homosexuals as “sex murderers,” echoing a consistent media theme
identifying homosexuals as destroyers of society.2 From there, it was
but a small step to brand gay people as traitors and to call for their
expulsion from public life (Adam 1978, 46-48).
In 1950, a series of incidents injected homosexuality into the ris¬
ing anticommunist tide. With loyalty commissions so closely scruti¬
nizing the personal lives of government workers, it is not entirely
surprising that homosexuality should be turned up and labeled as
one of the suspect behaviors. In March, the testimony of John
Peurifoy of the State Department security program identified homo¬
sexuals as among the “security risks.” In April, Guy Gabrielson,
national chairman of the Republican party, declared, “Perhaps as
dangerous as the actual Communists are the sexual perverts who
have infiltrated our Government in recent years.” In May, New York
State governor Thomas Dewey “accused the Democratic national
administration of tolerating spies, traitors, and sex offenders in the
Government service.” In June, an inquisitorial subcommittee met to
investigate “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in
Government” (Katz 1976, 91-94). The subcommittee’s December
1950 report projected a right-wing paranoia, claiming homosexuals to
be subject to blackmail, emotionally unstable, and of weak “moral
fiber.” “One homosexual can pollute a Government office,” they wrote,
calling for a thorough purge of homosexuals from government and
revealing that between 1947 and 1950, some 1,700 applicants for gov¬
ernment jobs had already been turned down because of homosexuali¬
ty, 4,380 had been expelled from the military, and 420 were forced to
resign or were dismissed from the government.3 John D’Emilio (1983)
 The Homophiles Start Over 63

estimates that 40 to 60 lesbians and gay men were dismissed per

month between 1950 and 1953 (41-44).
Nor was the repression restricted to the federal level. It extended to
state and local governments throughout the country and even spilled
over to other nations in the Western alliance. Police departments did
not hesitate to round up dozens—sometimes hundreds—who dared
turn up in lesbian and gay bars; others were entrapped in parks or on
the street and pressed to reveal their friends who would then, in turn,
be subjected to similar treatment. Local politicians in Miami ordered
beach sweeps in 1953 and outlawed the wearing of drag. Following the
murder of a gay man in 1954, Miami newspapers “demand [ed] that the
homosexuals be punished for tempting ‘normals’ to commit such
deeds” (Taylor 1982, 9). A 1953 New Orleans bar raid netted 64 les¬
bians, and a 1955 Baltimore raid got 162 gay men—the list is lengthy
(D’Emilio 1983, 50ff). Perhaps the best-documented antigay panic
occurred in Boise, Idaho, in 1955. A small state capital dominated by a
conservative Mormon elite, Boise erupted in a major scandal after a
teenage boy admitted to engaging in sex with a local man; this resulted
in nine men being sentenced to 5- to 15-year prison terms for the crime
of being homosexual (Gerassi 1966). And in 1958, a Florida senator
succeeded in having 16 faculty and staff members purged from the
state university at Gainesville and in having a state committee publish
pamphlets “to prepare . . . children to meet the temptations of homo¬
sexuality lurking today in the vicinity of nearly every institution of
learning” (Florida Legislative Investigation Comm. 1975; see D’Emilio
1983). In response, many bars and dance clubs developed elaborate
defense systems with double doors opened only after patrons were
screened. Should the police appear at the door, lights could be turned
up to alert everyone inside to act “straight” until the danger passed.
McCarthyism invaded Canada with a decade of antigay witch hunts
conducted in the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the National
Film Board, and the National Research Council. The Royal Canadian
Mounted Police even concocted a scheme to map all the homosexuals
in Ottawa a project eventually abandoned when the map at police
headquarters became overwhelmed with red dots (Sawatsky 1980,
112-29). Gay and lesbian existence was acknowledged only in the yel¬
low press, police action, and psychiatry, while the state and
“respectable” newspapers consolidated police and medical discourses
through a Royal Commission on Criminal Law Relating to Criminal
Sexual Psychopaths, which met through the mid-1950s (Kinsman
64 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

1987). In this decade, Jim Egan, a lone, persistent letter writer to the
Canadian press, offered a passionate and articulate view of the gay
world but succeeded only in having an occasional letter published in
the tabloid press (Champagne 1987).
Just as the British state attacked a series of imagined enemies in
reaction to the French Revolution, it once again institutionalized itself
in the early postwar period as the guardian of a particular form of
gender, race, and class privilege. L. J. Moran (1991) remarks, “The
male body becomes a device through which an idea of the nation is
realised.... Thus manliness/nation is represented as order, strength,
rationality, the upper part of the body, stiffness, harmony, proportion,
stability, unchanging values, timelessness ... [while the] homosexual
is produced through a particular chain of associations: the emotional,
effeminate, weak, subversive, conspiratorial, rebellious, revolutionary,
corrosive, dark, dangerous, sensuous, irrational, unstable, and cor¬
rupt” (160-61). Among its victims was Alan Turing, the mathemati¬
cian who broke the Nazi code for British intelligence and established
the early principles of the computer (Hodges 1984). In the 1950s, les¬
bians and gay men were subject to unrestrained violence and black¬
mail as they were bereft of any recourse to police. Bars that tolerated
a gay clientele were vulnerable to police raids and the suspension of
their liquor licenses (Horsfall 1988, 16; Jeffery-Poulter 1991, 62).
Prosecutions peaked in 1954 with the conviction of Lord Montagu and
Peter Wildeblood. But in Britain, it was a government commission
appointed in the same year to study the “problem” of homosexuality
that was to turn the tide of antigay persecution.4
The McCarthy terror exacted an immense toll from ordinary les¬
bians and gay men, with thousands being thrown out of work and
imprisoned in jails and mental hospitals.5 Today, with the benefit of
hindsight, one cannot but marvel at the speed at which the intelli¬
gentsia of the day adopted the official line. The mass media applaud¬
ed the state-directed purges; medical researchers tinkered with
lobotomies, castration, and electroshock to “rehabilitate” gay peo¬
ple; churches sanctioned the persecutions as “Christian”; and
Hollywood continued revising history with heterosexualized screen
biographies of such notables as Valentino, Hans Christian Andersen,
Alexander the Great, Michelangelo, and General Charles Gordon
(Russo 1981, 66-90). Even the American Civil Liberties Union aban¬
doned both Communists and lesbians at the time of their greatest
peril (Berube and D’Emilio 1984, 759). Not until 1990 was the
 The Homophiles Start Over 65

McCarthy-era immigration law that barred lesbians and gay men

entry to the United States overturned; the repressive legacy continued
in decades of dishonorable discharges from the military (see Williams
and Weinberg 1971).

Homophiles under Siege

The right which I claim for myself, and for all those like me, is the
right to choose the person whom I love.
—Peter Wildeblood, Against the Law

Gay men and lesbians joined with other minorities in the 1950s in
pressing for liberal democratic societies to live up to their self-pro¬
fessed ideals of “liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness” for
all. Only too aware of the climate of repression around them, the
first homophile groups typically adopted a cautious approach to
social change, hoping first merely for survival and, only then, for an
abatement of the general hostility. The Amsterdam Cultuur-en-
Ontspannings Centrum (COC) was revived in 1946 from the sub¬
scribers’ list to Levensrecht, the journal of the Netherlands
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Levensrecht had begun publishing
in 1940, but with the Nazi invasion imminent, its editor destroyed its
records after committing its 500 members’ names and addresses to
memory for the period of the war. In Denmark, Axel Axgil and Helmer
Fogedgard organized the Forbundet af 1948, issuing the journal
Vennen the following year and spawning other Scandinavian chapters
that became independent in 1951-52—the Riksforbundet for Sexuellt
Likaberattigande (RFSL) in Sweden and Det Norske Forbundet av
1948 in Norway. These were not easy times even in Northern Europe.
Axgil was fired from his job, evicted from his apartment, and expelled
from his political party for his organizing efforts (Kleis 1980). In 1955,
some 80 men associated with the movement, including Axel Axgil and
his lover, Eigel Axgil, were jailed for selling pictures of male nudes
(Miller 1992, 354). The Roman Catholic church in the Netherlands,
having welcomed the Nazi persecution of gay people in official publica¬
tions during the war, called for recriminalization thereafter (Rogier
1969; Ramsay, Heringa, and Boorsma 1974). The Norwegian state
church warned against a supposed “world conspiracy” of homosexuals
in 1954 (Offerman 1984; Kleis 1980). Elsewhere, Arcadie in Paris,
66 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Mattachine in Los Angeles, and the Daughters of Bilitis in San

Francisco found few allies during the cold war of the 1950s.
Wartime left an ambiguous legacy to women, gay people, and
national minorities. On the one hand, it had opened unprecedented
employment opportunities and exposed millions to new life-styles both
at home and abroad. On the other hand, the end of war brought pres¬
sures to restore the prewar social order—or an idealized memory of
it—and this restoration sought to roll back new financial and personal
freedoms.
With great numbers of male workers at the battlefront and a rapid¬
ly rising need for military hardware in the United States, new jobs
had become available during wartime for women and black people in
high-paying industrial manufacturing. Government policy had afford¬
ed a respite to Mexican workers from the traditional threat of depor¬
tation. Women benefited from state-supported day-care services,
which allowed them to work and socialize together in unprecedented
numbers and to take for granted the freedoms long enjoyed by men
such as going out unescorted and patronizing bars on their own (see
Berube 1983). With greater independence and access to the public
world, women increasingly experienced the opportunities that had
long permitted men to create gay places and other supportive envi¬
ronments.
The many men and some women who entered military life also
overcame small-town isolation, made new friendships in same-sex
environments, and encountered gay life in port cities (Berube 1990).6
At war’s end, however, state and economic elites moved decisively
to reestablish their version of the “American way of life.” As Jo
Freeman (1975) points out,

The returning soldiers were given the GI Bill and other veterans benefits, as
well as their jobs back. Women, on the other hand, saw their child-care cen¬
tres dismantled and their training programs cease. They were fired or
demoted in droves and often found it difficult to enter colleges flooded with
ex-GIs matriculating on government money. Labor unions insisted on con¬
tracts with separate job categories, seniority lists, and pay scales for men
and women. (23)

Popular women’s magazines of the day extolled the virtues of

home, husbands, and babies, reasserting the old gender categories.
 The Homophiles Start Over 67

Along with women and minorities, lesbians and gay men came under
renewed attack after the war. The U.S. military began building an
apparatus of surveillance and expulsion directed against gay men and
lesbians during World War II (Berube 1990). Official toleration of spe¬
cial friendships among military men and women during the war yield¬
ed to concerted propaganda to suppress, isolate, and eliminate them
afterward (see Berube 1981, 20; D’Emilio 1983, 24-29; Katz 1976, 637).
Allan Berube and John D’Emilio (1984) state that early postwar navy
“lectures project a stereotype of lesbians as sexual vampires: manipu¬
lative, dominant perverts who greedily seduce young and innocent
women into experimenting with homosexual practices that, like nar¬
cotics, inevitably lead to a downward spiral of addiction, degeneracy,
loneliness, and even murder and suicide” (759).
Like other subordinated people, lesbians and gay men experienced
acute contradictions in the 1950s. After finding new possibilities
through war mobilization, they encountered repression in peacetime.
Full employment and urban life had been the unintended conse¬
quences of national war preparations. But once the ruling elites were
freed from Nazi imperialism, they tended only to reestablish the old
order.
Out of this tension between new possibilities and renewed suppres¬
sion, a homophile movement arose. The first stirrings of movement
activity in the United States appeared among recently demobilized
men in the Veterans Benevolent Association in New York and among
working women in Los Angeles. Both groups developed out of exist¬
ing friendship networks and made no attempt to go public. When “Lisa
Ben” printed nine issues of a circular called Vice Versa in 1947 and
1948, it received only private distribution among Los Angeles lesbians
(D’Emilio 1983, 32; Katz 1983, 618ft).
Most important of all was the creation of the Mattachine Society in
Los Angeles in 1951. Named for the medieval Italian court jester who
expressed unpopular truths from behind a mask, Mattachine originat¬
ed with a comprehensive vision of social and political change for gay
people and a willingness to challenge antihomosexual attacks even in
the midst of McCarthyism. The idea for Mattachine was developed by
Harry Hay, a music history teacher at the People’s Educational Center
in Los Angeles. Together with Rudi Gernreich, Dale Jennings, Bob
Hull, and Chuck Rowland, also center workers, Hay drew on
Communist models for inspiration in organizing and effecting social
68 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

change (Timmons 1990, 144).7 In its founding statement of “Missions

and Purposes,” Mattachine pledged

• “TO UNIFY’ those homosexuals ‘isolated from their own kind.

y

• TO EDUCATE’ homosexuals and heterosexuals” toward “an

ethical homosexual culture ... paralleling the emerging cultures of
our fellow-minorities—the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish Peoples....
• TO LEAD’; the ‘more ... socially conscious homosexuals
[are to] provide leadership to the whole mass of social deviates’” and
also
• “to assist ‘our people who are victimized daily as a result of our
oppression.’” (Katz 1976, 412; see D’Emilio 1983, 59ff)

With its first members drawn from signatories to an anti-Korean

War petition circulated around gay beaches, word spread quickly until
Mattachine had more than a hundred discussion groups in southern
California in 1953.
There was occasional cause for optimism. The 1948 Kinsey Report
had made a worldwide impact in revealing how widespread homosex¬
ual experience was among Americans. Edward Sagarin (pseudonym,
Donald Webster Cory) published The Homosexual in America in 1951.
Though in retrospect a somewhat weepy and ambivalent book, it pre¬
sented a plea for toleration and offered the only publicly available pre¬
sentation of gay life by a homosexual writer. Also in 1951, the owners
of a San Francisco gay bar, the Black Cat, established in California
Supreme Court the right to serve gay customers. (The state later
attempted again to suppress gay bars with a 1955 law to remove liquor
licenses from “resorts for sexual perverts” [see Martin and Lyon 1972,
234; D’Emilio 1983,187].)
In its first years, Mattachine secured a public victory by winning an
acquittal for one of its members, Dale Jennings, on a sex charge aris¬
ing from police entrapment. A Mattachine discussion group founded
One, the first American homophile magazine to be distributed pub¬
licly. (Its editorial board consisted of two women and four men, includ¬
ing Jennings.) But One soon had to struggle through the courts to lift
a ban imposed on it by the U.S. Post Office in 1954. (In 1958, the U.S.
Supreme Court ruled that the post office ban violated First
Amendment rights to free speech.)
 The Homophiles Start Over 69

But the tense political climate of the 1950s set the tone for
Mattachine’s first convention in 1953. After a tumultuous weekend
sorting through Mattachine objectives, its founders bowed out in favor
of an anticommunist Coordinating Council led by Kenneth Burns,
Marilyn Rieger, and Hal Call. The change in leadership brought a dra¬
matic reversal in Mattachine policy. In what John D’Emilio calls a
“retreat to respectability,” Mattachine adopted a low-profile, accommo-
dationist stand that defined movement strategies for more than a
decade.
The approach of the new leadership was premised on the belief that
assimilation into the larger society could be accomplished more readi¬
ly by minimizing the “disability” that stood in the way of full participa¬
tion. The assimilationists insisted that gay people are just the same as
heterosexuals except for what they do in bed. The appropriate strate¬
gy for attaining equality, then, was to stress the common humanity of
homosexuals and heterosexuals and keep sexuality as such private. It
was an approach founded on an implicit contract with the larger soci¬
ety wherein gay identity, culture, and values would be disavowed (or
at least concealed) in return for the promise of equal treatment. The
movement would “educate” away the “prejudices” of the ignorant and
rely on “goodwill.” Tolerance would be earned by making difference
unspeakable (see Adam 1978, chaps. 4-5, esp. p. 121). By 1959,
Mattachine had retreated so far from the possibility of open confronta¬
tion that it “billed itself as an organization ‘interested in the problems
of homosexuality,’” not as a gay organization at all (Martin and Lyon
1972, 231). The term homophile became virtually synonymous with the
assimilationist strategy at this time.8
When the Daughters of Bilitis came into being in 1955, the
homophile platform was clear in its orientation. Named for Pierre
Louys’s poems on a lesbian theme, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB)
was founded by four couples in San Francisco and was the first post¬
war lesbian organization. Under the leadership of Del Martin as presi¬
dent and Phyllis Lyon as editor of the Ladder (founded the following
year), DOB stated its objectives to be:
• “Education of the variant”
• Development of a library on the “sex deviant” theme
• Public discussions “to be conducted by leading members of
the legal, psychiatric, religious and other professions”
• “Advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to soci-
70 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

ety” (see Martin and Lyon 1972, 219; Faderman 1981, 378-79; Katz
1976, 420-26).

Later the association added to its aims “participation in research

projects” and “investigation of the penal code as it pertains to the
homosexual . . . and promotion of these changes through the due
process of law in the state legislatures.”
After the McCarthy terror, accommodation seemed the only realis¬
tic choice. Like other minorities facing a seemingly unmerciful oppres¬
sor, the homophiles sought to placate the enemy by being law-abiding
and deferential and by lying low. The authorities seemed to have
become wild beasts; there was nothing to be done but appease them,
mollify them, and hope they would exhaust their malicious rage (see
Adam 1978, chap. 4, esp. p. 95).
In Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union had settled on a
division of the spoils, setting up national governments in their own
images: Soviet central bureaucracies in the East, conservative capi¬
talist governments in the West. For gay people, the war’s end
entrenched losses suffered through the Holocaust. Pink-triangle
prisoners released from the concentration camps found that they
were still criminals in both the Soviet and American occupied zones
and, as such, ineligible for compensation or even recognition as vic¬
tims of fascism (Hohmann 1982, 27; Stiimke and Finkler 1981). The
psychiatrists and criminologists, who had gained a monopoly over
the public discussion of homosexuality with Nazi sponsorship,
retained their dominance in the cold war period. With American
occupation, the McCarthyite chill descended over Western Europe,
and gay organizations necessarily shared the cautious homophile
approach to social reform.
The Netherlands COC sponsored five International Conferences for
Sexual Equality between 1951 and 1958, offering support and, most
important, hope for lesbian and gay organizations in Europe. In West
Germany, two decades of Christian Democratic government pre¬
served Paragraph 175 within a larger “God-and-family” social policy,
which resisted all attempts at reform despite a 1949 petition by surviv¬
ing adherents of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to abolish it.
For gay men, the 1950s offered little improvement over the Nazi era;
prosecutions under Paragraph 175 actually increased in the period
1953-65 compared with the years of the Third Reich. Among those
incarcerated in German prisons in the 1950s and 1960s were former
concentration camp victims who now received sentences as long as six
 The Homophiles Start Over 71

years as “repeat offenders” for not renouncing their homosexuality

(Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 368-70; Schilling 1983). Two of the many
testimonials gathered by Joachim Hohmann in Keine Zeit fur gute
Freunde (1982) express the mood of the period:

The younger generation can scarcely conceive how gays used to have to live:
always fearing for their livelihood, freedom and reputation, always having to
playact in order not to raise suspicions. (151; my translation)
Friendships, if they came about at all, were constantly dependent upon the
perceptiveness of prudish neighbors, the sharp eyes of the police, on jealous
friends, and even the “toleration” of one’s own relatives. (24; my translation)

In 1955, West Berlin confirmed the Nazis’ seizure and pillage of

the Institute for Sex Research by retaining legal title to its land and
property (and remained intransigent in this claim despite gay move¬
ment protests in the 1980s). In this political climate, only scattered,
clandestine, and very small homophile groups came into existence,
often as circles of friends who put out magazines that made oblique
references to homosexuality or as human rights groups addressed to
general law reform. The Swiss journal Der Kreis, published through¬
out the period until 1967 (opening the way for the Swiss Organization
of Homophiles), and the International Conference for Sexual Equality
issued a German newsletter from Amsterdam from 1951 to 1958. As
early as 1953, the Hamburg Society for Human Rights (Gesellschaft
fur Menschenrechte) issued the journal Humanitas. Other publishing
ventures such as Der Ring and Freond soon dissolved as their editors
were jailed by the authorities for daring to print pictures of adult men
in bathing suits. An attempt by Kurt Hiller to refound the Scientific-
Humanitarian Committee in 1962 met with little success (Hohmann
1982, 21-27; Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 340-409; Baumgardt 1984b, 38;
Werres 1973). None could overtly present itself as gay oriented. For
Germans, the advent of gay liberation in the 1970s would offer the first
opportunity for open organization.
In France, Andre Beaudry gathered together the subscribers to Der
Kreis in Paris to found Arcadie in 1951.9 The free and easy days of the
1920s and 1930s were gone, extinguished through Nazi rule. The con¬
servative governments of the 1950s hedged around gay existence with
catch-all laws. A law raising the age of consent to 21 was retained from
the previous profascist Vichy government. In 1946, a “good morals”
law limited the employment of gay people in public service. In 1949,
the Paris police chief banned transvestite balls and forbade men from
72 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

dancing together, ending a tradition extending back into the nine¬

teenth century. In the same year, a new solicitation law criminalized
“provocative attitudes” in public places. Futur, a “journal of informa¬
tion for sexual equality and freedom,” which appeared from 1952 to
1955, was suspended in 1953 and again in 1954 under the same law
that had felled LAmitie (Girard 1981,13-39).
Arcadie attracted such well-known writers as Jean Cocteau and
Roger Peyrefitte and succeeded in issuing a high-toned “literary and
scientific review” called Arcadie in 1954. Jacques Girard (1981)
describes Arcadie’s approach as a sort of “ministry” to “the profound
physical and moral distress of homophiles,” linking it to the seminari¬
an background of its founder (44, 48; my translation). Like its
homophile counterparts in the United States, Arcadie assumed a qui-
etist disengagement from public action in the 1950s, stressing moral
discipline and respect for law, morality, and public powers. Indeed,
when it opened its clubhouse, CLESPALA (Club Litteraire et
Scientifique des Pays Latins), in 1957, it insisted on observing the
norms of heterosexist propriety by forbidding kissing on the dance
floor (57, 71).
By the end of the decade, the Mouvement Republicain Populaire,
the political arm of the French Roman Catholic church, began to press
for further “moral reform,” and in 1960, a conference sponsored by the
church and the psychiatric profession denounced a supposed “homo¬
sexual peril.” Soon the Gaullist government had declared homosexual¬
ity a “social plague” along with alcoholism and prostitution (15-19; see
Hocquenghem 1978, 51).
In the United Kingdom a government commission appointed to
investigate the “problems” of homosexuality and prostitution produced
an unexpectedly liberal recommendation in 1957. The homophile
movement in Britain came about specifically to preserve and promote
the commission’s recommendation that “homosexual behavior
between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal
offense” (Wolfenden et al. 1962, 25). The Wolfenden Commission
resisted the efforts of some of its own members who were physicians to
force all gay men into therapy, prompting a minority report from the
doctors who decided that anyway “a prison sentence could have thera¬
peutic value” (76). The report reached its liberal conclusion via a tortu¬
ous path, reasoning that children must be saved from homosexuality
through stiffer penalties on underage sex and that the age of consent
be set at 21; that military homosexuality remain criminal for the
 The Homophiles Start Over 73

“preservation of discipline”; and that family breakdown be averted by

avoiding the “disaster” of homosexuals marrying.
In an effort to keep the spirit of reform alive, the Homosexual
Reform Society and its “charity arm,” the Albany Trust, were founded
in 1958 Qeffery-Poulter 1991, 38). Like its predecessors, the society
disavowed any identification with being homosexual in favor of presti¬
gious sponsors. Eventually a newsletter, Spectrum, appeared; a public
forum was held in 1960; a journal, Man and Society, was issued in
1961; and a lesbian organization, the Minorities Research Group,
appeared in 1962—all founded squarely on the Wolfenden Report’s
right-to-privacy argument (Weeks 1977,168-72; Laurie 1990).
In the 1950s, then, lesbian and gay organizations were lone voices
with little ability to break through the ideological fog generated by the
media and the professional and legal establishments. The 1950s gener¬
ation had been effectively severed from a rich history of gay writing
through systematic obliteration of their cultural heritage by fascism.
But gay people themselves could not but recognize anew that the offi¬
cial ideologies presented by church, medicine, and police offered, at
best, twisted and alien images of their own experiences and elaborate
lies about their feelings and intentions (see Adam 1978, 30-53). The
homophiles believed that forthright opposition to the official line
would invite swift retaliation, concluding that assimilationism would be
the safest course of action. The homophiles deferred to the profession¬
als, hoping to engage them in dialogue and believing that conformity
would bring toleration.10
The lesbian and gay movements were not alone in these dilemmas,
and as a new militancy began to sweep black people, students, war
draftees, Chicanos, and women in the 1960s, they began to reassess
the assimilationist strategy.

The Rise of the New Left

Like members of other minority groups, homosexuals are interested

in their rights, freedom, and basic human dignity, as homosexuals.
—Franklin Kameny, founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington

Lesbians and gay men were not the only casualties of the 1950s
restoration of traditionally privileged classes in North America and
Western Europe. The pioneering efforts of black people in the
74 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

American South in challenging the established political order were to

galvanize a disparate set of aggrieved social groups through the 1960s.
The proliferating social movements of the decade, which came to be
known as the New Left, engendered a militancy in the gay community
that overturned the homophile approach. Like the early German gay
movement before it, the homophile movement of the 1960s expanded
and reorganized as part of a larger social upheaval and soon began to
question the premises of the assimilationist approach.
Important for the new outlook was the example set by the Beat gen¬
eration, at first a small group of outlaw poets who rejected the conser¬
vatism of the 1950s by reveling in the forbidden pursuits of drugs,
anarchism, and hedonism.11 Among them were Allen Ginsberg and
William Burroughs, who did not hesitate to celebrate homosexuality
among other taboo pleasures. Ginsberg wrote his famous “Howl” in
1955 as a paean against the bankruptcy of the repressive consumer
society of the day. “Howl” came about at a time when Ginsberg had
fallen in love with Peter Orlovsky and among its lines were:

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly

motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love

These lines put the poem’s publisher in court facing obscenity

charges.12 (He was acquitted.)
The Beats gave new life to the artistic and bohemian districts of San
Francisco (the North Beach) and New York (Greenwich Village),
which developed in the 1960s as free zones for cultural dissidents of
all types. Many gay men and lesbians were among those who sought
refuge and new lives there.
But San Francisco was not yet ready to recognize its homosexual
minority when the subject became an issue in the 1959 city election.
By that year, the Daughters of Bilitis had chapters in New York, Los
Angeles, Chicago, and, briefly, Rhode Island, as well as San Francisco.
Mattachine had small groups in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New
York, Boston, Denver, Philadelphia, and, for a time, Detroit, Chicago,
and Washington, D.C.13 Both groups were by now holding national
conventions, and in September 1959 Mattachine met in Denver, where
for the first time it received relatively positive newspaper coverage. It
was a short-lived success. In October, Denver police raided the homes
 The Homophiles Start Over 75

of Mattachine leaders, jailing one and procuring the dismissal of

another from his job. The San Francisco Progress proclaimed, “Sex
Deviates make S. F. Headquarters,” and the opposition candidate in
the city’s mayoral election accused the incumbent of tolerating vice.
As John D’Emilio (1983) remarked, “The San Francisco press criti¬
cized Wolden [the opposition candidate] not because he had attacked
a persecuted minority but because, as the Examiner put it, he had
‘stigmatized the city5 by suggesting that it tolerated such life-styles”
(121-22; see Martin and Lyon 1972, 227). When gay bar owners
revealed to an investigatory commission the following year that they
had been forced to pay off San Francisco police officers in order to
stay open, the police retaliated with mass roundups of bar patrons
through 1960 and 1961 until all the bar owners who had testified were
out of business. The upshot was a Tavern Guild of bar owners deter¬
mined to support one another against police assaults (D’Emilio 1983,
182-84,189).
In 1955-56, Martin Luther King, Jr., came to prominence as black
people in Montgomery, Alabama, boycotted the city’s segregated bus
system. Like so many other social movements that came to have a pro¬
found impact on their societies, the early black movement had the ini¬
tially “conservative” intention of enforcing the law and fulfilling the
promise of liberal democratic societies. It worked through the late
1950s and the early 1960s to reclaim basic rights to vote and to receive
public services; it demanded that black people be integrated into
schools and universities, into restaurants and transportation facili¬
ties—in short, to be let in to American society—and it worked to
achieve these ends through nonviolent public action.
It was a struggle that caught the imagination of people around the
world. College support for the civil rights struggle coalesced in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) formed in 1960
to work with the voter registration project and participate in the free¬
dom rides to integrate the bus system. Preparation by the Kennedy
and Johnson administrations for yet another foreign war to “stop com¬
munism”—this time in Vietnam—further impelled both students and
blacks (traditionally among the first groups to be drafted for war duty)
toward civil disobedience. An antiwar movement began to emerge
among once complacent sectors of the population.
Hopeful signs appeared in 1961. Illinois adopted the Model Legal
Code of the American Law Institute, thereby becoming the first state
to decriminalize homosexuality between consenting adults in private
76 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

(Gunnison 1969, 119). The Motion Picture Association of America

reversed the Motion Picture Code to accommodate Otto Preminger’s
Advise and Consent, thereby lifting the ban on gay themes in the
movies. (The homosexual character in Advise and Consent neverthe¬
less is obliged to commit suicide [Russo 1981, 121].) A Black Cat drag
queen, Jose Sarria, declared himself a candidate for city supervisor of
San Francisco, winning 6,000 votes (D’Emilio 1983,188; see also Adair
and Adair 1978, 72-73).
Also in 1961, Franklin Kameny founded the Mattachine Society of
Washington, D.C., eventually forcing a confrontation with the
homophile old guard and opening the way for a more aggressive
assertion of gay rights. Kameny was an astronomer who had been dis¬
missed from the federal civil service in 1957 under the security legisla¬
tion set in place by the McCarthyites. The Mattachine Society of
Washington (MSW) made the rounds of the federal agencies in 1962
and 1963, launching complaints against the Civil Service
Commission’s discriminatory policies and surviving an attempt in the
House of Representatives to “revoke Mattachine’s permit to raise
funds” (D’Emilio 1983, 156; Marotta 1981, 22ff; Gunnison 1969,
120-21).
Confrontations between police and the black, student, and antiwar
movements intensified during this period. In 1963, hundreds of thou¬
sands of people made the March on Washington to demand their civil
rights. By 1964, student civil rights workers returning to class from
the Mississippi Freedom Summer had shared the experience of black
movement workers and began to question the political system that so
strongly resisted the implementation of its own liberal principles.
Reflecting upon their own roles in the larger capitalist system, the stu¬
dent movement attacked the complicity of the universities, working
toward an analysis that punctured the rhetoric of business and politi¬
cal elites and sought to understand the oppression of people (especial¬
ly nonwhites) both at home and elsewhere in the American empire.
No longer was it a question only of the civil rights of black people; stu¬
dents weighed the moral choices inherent in their own lives, believing
“that a political movement is created by thousands of individuals who
say ‘no’ to the structures and politics of the dominant society, who
refuse to take part and in so doing create a crisis of legitimacy that
stops the machine” (Breines 1982, 23).
When Kameny (1969) took his message to the Mattachine Society
of New York (MSNY) in 1964, he called for “acceptance as full equals
 The Homophiles Start Over 77

. . . basic rights and equality as citizens; our human dignity; . . . our

right to the pursuit of happiness ... right to love whom we wish,” mak¬
ing explicit reference to the black civil rights struggle (144). Gay peo¬
ple, Kameny argued, had been too long the victims of prejudice and
discrimination and had too long tolerated medical domination; they
needed to proclaim a pride in being gay:

Increasingly, homosexuals are becoming impatient with the place of their tra¬
ditional role as that of a mere passive, silent battlefield, across which conflict¬
ing “authorities” parade and fight out their questionable views, prejudices,
and theories. . . . Homosexuality is . . . something around which the homo¬
sexual can and should build part of a rewarding and productive life and some¬
thing he can and should enjoy to its fullest. (130)

In face of the MSNY president’s traditional homophile contention

that “we must lose the label of homosexual organizations,” Kameny
asserted simply that “gay is good!” In its 1964 election, MSNY swept
away its old leadership (including Edward Sagarin) in favor of an
activist slate (see Adam 1978, 89,145; Marotta 1981, 31).
The move toward activism provoked turmoil among the Daughters
of Bilitis. Barbara Gittings, the founder of the New York DOB in
1958, had become the editor of the Ladder in 1962, moving the jour¬
nal toward an “antisick,” mass-movement stance. With new militance
emerging among the other organizations, the DOB leadership with¬
drew from the conference of East Coast Homophile Organizations
(ECHO) and removed Gittings from the Ladder in 1965. Members of
DOB, sharply divided between the homophile and new militant strate¬
gies, responded by expelling the conservative leadership in favor of
its first black president, “Ernestine Eckstein.” When the old leader¬
ship regained control in 1966, many activists left the DOB for
Mattachine (see D’Emilio 1983, 172-73; Katz 1976, 420-26; Marotta
1981,49).
Meanwhile, ECHO groups took to the streets in 1965 in public
demonstrations at the Civil Service Commission, Department of State,
Pentagon, White House, and Independence Hall in Philadelphia,
attracting the attention of national news media. In New York, the city
administration had launched a “cleanup” campaign to close gay bars to
“improve” the city’s image for the World’s Fair. When John Lindsay
came to the mayor’s office, gay leaders pressed for an end to
“Operation New Broom,” and MSNY held a “sip-in” in a New York bar
78 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

to establish the right of gay people to attend bars unmolested by

police (Marotta 1981, 32, 39; D’Emilio 1983,164-65).
In San Francisco, four men organized the Society for Individual
Rights (SIR) in 1964, attracting several hundred members in a few
years. Soon SIR was holding candidates’ nights to review election con¬
tenders in its own clubhouse, publishing a magazine called Vector and
sponsoring a full calendar of dances, drag shows, bridge clubs, bowl¬
ing leagues, outings, meditation groups, and art classes (D’Emilio
1983, 190-92). With the assistance of Glide Memorial Methodist
Church, a black downtown congregation, a Council on Religion and
the Homosexual was organized. A fund-raising ball for the council
held on New Year’s Eve of 1965 turned out 600 guests who were
forced to cross police lines and face police photographers in order to
attend. Experiencing for the first time the routine police harassment
long endured by gay and lesbian San Franciscans, the council clergy¬
men and lawyers protested loudly to the local press, which in turn
made the first serious effort to communicate that abuse to the public
(D’Emilio 1983, 193-94; Martin and Lyon 1972, 239). The San
Francisco movement went on to set up a Citizens Alert telephone line
to serve a gamut of youthful, black, Chicano, and gay victims.
The period from 1965 to 1967 marked a new stage for the New Left.
The black power movement began to come apart over issues of strate¬
gy. In 1964, Malcolm X posed the question “Ballots or bullets?” and
many, despairing of the slow gains made by the integrationists and
alarmed by mounting state repression, opted for abandonment of
white society and the construction of a black nation. Others argued for
a revolutionary transformation of American society to overturn the mil¬
itary-industrial complex that preserved corporate power against the
subordinated peoples of America and the third world. Black people in
the northern ghettos revolted in a series of urban uprisings through
1967 and 1968. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) faltered
through factional in-fighting, while the antiwar movement reached a
new height of mass mobilization in marches on Washington.
Though the impermanence of the 1960s movements has since been
much lamented on the left, the “utopian and ‘anti-organizational’ char¬
acteristics of the New Left were among its most vital aspects” (Breines
1982, 5). These qualities empowered and mobilized millions of people
and gave voice to new categories of the powerless and oppressed. Out
of the decay of the New Left came the modem feminist and gay libera¬
tion movements.
 The Homophiles Start Over 79

Both women and gay people have long been taught to “know their
place,” to keep silent before their “superiors,” and to believe them¬
selves unworthy of the rights and privileges of men and of heterosexu¬
als. Both now found themselves deeply involved in optimistic
affirmative movements that ironically exempted them from their pro¬
grams. As Judith Hole and Ellen Levine (1971) note, “Women had
gone to the South to work alongside men in the fight for equality only
to find that they were second-class citizens in a movement purportedly
determined to wipe out all discrimination” (110; see also Evans 1979).
New Left ideals called for broad-based, egalitarian, participatory
democracy, eschewing bureaucracy and leadership for fear the voices
of the masses would rapidly disappear through institutionalization.
Still, Stokely Carmichael announced that “the only position for women
in SNCC is prone,” and Eldridge Cleaver denounced homosexuality as
an evil as great as being the chairman of General Motors. Student
leaders often exhibited the same mentality. Like the Mattachine’s
early roots in American communism, modem feminism and gay libera¬
tion emerged from antecedents that provided them with both political
foundations and explicit rejection. Rumblings of discontent among
movement women were discernible in 1964. By 1967, the failure of the
National Conference for a New Politics to address women’s issues led
to a walk-out and the formation of feminist groups in Chicago,
Toronto, Seattle, Detroit, and Gainesville, Florida (Freeman 1975, 59).
Gay and lesbian groups were springing up across the United States
and Canada, jumping from 15 in 1966 to 50 in 1969 (D’Emilio 1983,
199). A new politicized generation transformed the homophile move¬
ment, often sweeping aside the leadership that had survived
McCarthyism. The homophiles, who had been deeply affected by the
McCarthy terror, now seemed too cautious, too fearful. Many
homophile leaders nevertheless had been inspired by the changes
around them. The 1968 North American Conference of Homophile
Organizations (NACHO) resolved that “homosexuality is in no way
inferior to heterosexuality as a valid way of life” and accepted the “gay
is good” credo (Gunnison 1969, 113). Similarly, in Britain the North-
Western Homosexual Reform Committee of the Albany Trust rejected
the medical doctrine of homosexuality as the British Labour govern¬
ment at last implemented the Wolfenden recommendations in 1967
(Weeks 1977,181).
But like the black nationalists, the gay and lesbian veterans of the
New Left movements no longer wanted to define themselves in terms
80 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

left over to them by the heterosexist opposition; rather, they sought to

build a new gay culture where gay people could be free. Civil rights
and integration seemed like endless begging for the charity of liberals
who conveniently ignored the everyday physical and psychological
violence exerted by homophobic society.
The student and antiwar movements were already sweeping
Europe and gay liberation followed quickly on their heels. Student
action in 1968 at Columbia University in New York and at the
Sorbonne in Paris nurtured the first stirrings of the new gay liberation.
Within three years almost every sizable city in North America and
Western Europe would see a gay liberation front in its midst.
Chapter Five

Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism

From the Stonewall Rebellion ...

Liberation for gay people is to define for ourselves how and with
whom we live, instead of measuring our relationships by straight
values. ... To be a free territory, we must govern ourselves, set up
our own institutions, defend ourselves, and use our own energies to
improve our lives.
—Carl Wittman, Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto

On the Friday night of 27-28 June 1969, New York police raided a
Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall. Bar raids were an
American institution—a police rite to “manage” the powerless and dis¬
respectable—and in the preceding three weeks, five New York gay
bars had already been raided. What made the Stonewall a symbol of a
new era of gay politics was the reaction of the drag queens, dykes,
street people, and bar boys who confronted the police first with jeers
and high camp and then with a hail of coins, paving stones, and park¬
ing meters. By the end of the weekend, the Stonewall bar had been
burned out, but a new form of collective resistance was afoot: gay lib¬
eration. The Mattachine Action Committee responded to the
Stonewall outbreak with a flier on 29 June calling for organized resis¬
tance, and within a few days radical students at the Alternative

81
82 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

University were providing meeting space for a Gay Liberation Front

(Teal 1971,17-23; Marotta 1981, 72-85).
Still, Stonewall was no isolated event. A police campaign against
Los Angeles gay bars in 1967 had sparked a rally of several hundred
“on Sunset Boulevard, where they listened to angry speakers intoning
the phrases of confrontational politics” (D’Emilio 1983, 227), and stu¬
dent activism, especially on the campuses of Columbia University and
the Sorbonne, were associated with the formation of radical gay cau¬
cuses. In 1967 and 1968, political tensions were mounting to new
heights with clashes between police and black nationalists, hippies,
students, and antiwar demonstrators, most notably at the National
Democratic Convention in Chicago. In the Netherlands, the Socialist
Youth formed a gay caucus, and student groups openly sponsored gay
dances on campus (Straver 1973, 170-72). Student Homophile
Leagues were formed in 1967 at Columbia by Robert A. Martin and at
New York University by Rita Mae Brown. In 1968, the Columbia group
picketed a psychiatric seminar on homosexuality held on campus
(Martin 1983). In May of the same year, Paris erupted in a general
strike and students seized the campus of the Sorbonne in a protest
that shared New Left goals. Amidst the “liberated zones,” a Comite
dAction Pederastique Revolutionnaire met, much to the dismay of the
orthodox Left (Girard 1981, 80).
The new militants, then, typically came out of student and other
New Left movements and carried with them current debates and pre¬
cepts, which they turned to issues of gender and sexuality. Radicalized
by their experiences in black and student organizations, they were
now thinking through their own lives with new concepts and were tak¬
ing a militant message to new constituencies. Feminists and gay liber-
ationists often thought of themselves as revolutionaries rejecting a
fundamentally unequal and corrupt power establishment in favor of
participatory democracy whereby all the voiceless and suppressed
could gain a measure of control over their own lives. Civil rights had
become passe: Why petition to be let into a social system so deeply
riven by racism, sexism, militarism, and heterosexism?
The goal that radical women and gay men shared with the counter¬
culture was “to construct community institutions based on democratic
participation”: free universities, an underground press, communes, a
society of cooperative and nonexploitative relations (see Breines
1982). Deeply suspicious of leaders, bureaucracies, and political par¬
ties, the fundamental movement unit was the consciousness-raising
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 83

group. As explained in Come Out!, the journal of New York’s Gay

Liberation Front (GLF), it was a deceptively simple mechanism:

A consciousness raising group is a group of gay people who have regular ses¬
sions together. By consensus a topic is selected for each session. Each mem¬
ber of the group contributes her personal experiences relating to the chosen
topic. When all of the testimony is heard, the group locks into the similarity
in the experiences related by all the members.... A gay person begins to see
that his personal hang-ups, those that he was afraid to divulge to others, are
indeed the same hang-ups that other gays were also afraid to divulge. It
becomes increasingly difficult to explain this commonness without consider¬
ing each person’s interactions with sexist society. (Gavin 1971,19)

The group’s chair would be selected by lot and rotated from meet¬
ing to meeting. To limit the formation of elites, every person in the
group would be given the floor in turn. Analysis of one’s situation was
to flow from the collective experience, owning nothing to received
dogmas. Consciousness raising was a technique well known from the
“speaking bitterness” campaigns of the Chinese cultural revolution,
and were intended to help empower the powerless and grant participa¬
tion to the masses.1
The result of these intense discussions was immense anger, joy,
pride, and a boiling over of new ideas. People glimpsed the future and
fell in love with a utopia far from the bad old days with their repression
and terror, hiding and fear. Gay liberation groups rarely reached the
consensus they assumed would come out of consciousness raising,
but stimulated outpourings of hopes and ambitions of irreconcilable
diversity. Resolutely guarding itself against stasis, gay liberation in its
heyday—from 1969 to 1972—functioned as an ongoing catalyst. Like
the New Left itself, which had spawned new social movements, gay
liberation ultimately was to produce a larger set of gay and lesbian
groups.
Sexuality was a yet undeveloped theme in radical thought. In addi¬
tion to the Beat poets, New Left figures such as Paul Goodman and
Daniel Cohn-Bendit had raised it at various times as did a few relative¬
ly isolated European intellectuals. Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex
raised many of the issues of modem feminism two decades before the
revival of the modem movement, and Herbert Marcuse, who had been
a youthful participant in the 1918 German revolution and had been
steeped in the thinking of the life-reform movements of the Weimar
Republic, caught the imagination of many gay liberationists. His Eros
84 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

and Civilization, published in the ideological wasteland of 1955,

bridged the prewar and postwar gay movements with its implicit
vision of homosexuality as a protest “against the repressive order of
procreative sexuality” and as an affirmation of a liberated sensualism
(37, 155, 183). James Baldwin, one of the leading voices of black mili-
tance, wrote movingly of gay relationships as early as 1956 in his
novel, Giovanni’s Room, which bears this dedication from Walt
Whitman: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” As well, Allen
Ginsberg, testifying at the trial of black and student movement leaders
arrested at the Chicago Democratic convention, invoked the socialist
fratemalism of Whitman and Carpenter. In the face of the prosecutor’s
characterization of the Chicago protestors as “freaking fag revolution¬
aries,” Ginsberg (1974) spoke out for “a natural tenderness between
all citizens, not only men and women but also a tenderness between
men and men as part of our democratic heritage, part of the
Adhesiveness which would make the democracy function: that men
could work together not as competitive beasts but as tender lovers and
fellows” (14; seeTytell 1976, 243).
Gay liberation never thought of itself as a civil rights movement
for a particular minority but as a revolutionary struggle to free the
homosexuality in everyone, challenging the conventional arrange¬
ments that confined sexuality to heterosexual, monogamous families.
For gay liberation, there was no “normal” or “perverse” sexuality,
only a world of sexual possibilities ranged against a repressive order
of marriage, oedipal families, and compulsory heterosexuality. It is in
this context that Dennis Altman could foresee an “end of the homo¬
sexual” because “gay liberation will succeed as its raison d’etre disap¬
pears” (Altman 1971, 225; see Front Homosexual 1971). Once
everyone was free to express her or his latent sexualities, boundaries
between the homosexual and the heterosexual should fade into irrel¬
evance and false partitions in the flow of desire give way to personal
fulfillment.
Carl Wittman’s (1972) 1970 “Gay Manifesto” drew together many of
the themes of gay liberation thinking. Announcing “we are euphoric,
high, with the initial flourish of a movement,” it began, “we have to
realize that our loving each other is a good thing.” Characterizing San
Francisco as a “refugee camp” and a “ghetto” controlled by the hetero¬
sexist occupational forces of law, police, employers, and capital,
Wittman called for rejection of heterosexual standards of gender and
monogamy, an end to homophile conformity and closetry, resistance
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 85

to street violence and police harassment, and confrontation with the

“psychological warfare” purveyed by the mass media. “We strive,” he
continued, “for democratic, mutual, reciprocal sex,” affirming the pos¬
sibility of this ideal even in man-boy and sadomasochistic relation¬
ships. Gay liberation also meant coalition with other progressive
forces, especially feminism, as well as with black, Chicano, radical,
hip, and homophile movements (157-71).
Gay liberation groups sprang up in the spring and summer of 1969
in the San Francisco Bay area, New York City, and Minneapolis. Leo
Laurence forwarded the radical plank in the pages of SIR’s Vector and
came out with his lover in the countercultural Berkeley Barb. The
upshot was his lover’s dismissal from his job with a steamship compa¬
ny and Laurence’s removal from the editorship of Vector. They then
formed a Committee for Homosexual Freedom, which picketed the
steamship company and then a record store that had also fired a gay
employee. In Minneapolis, a group called Fight Repression of Erotic
Expression launched Jack Baker in a successful campaign to become
president of the university students’ association (Knopp 1987, 248).
The Stonewall rebellion in New York engendered a wave of new
groups willing to take immediate, direct action against the old array of
antihomosexual institutions. In late summer, the New York GLF and
the Mattachine Action Committee picketed in a park where trees had
been cut down to eliminate cruising (that is, gay men meeting each
other). The GLF joined in antiwar rallies and presented the new plat¬
form to the 1969 North America Conference of Homophile
Organizations (NACHO) in Kansas City. By fall, GLF dances were reg¬
ular events in New York, Chicago, and Berkeley, cities where men
had often been arrested for dancing or touching in public. Pickets
arrived at the Village Voice protesting its refusal to print the word gay
and at Time magazine and the San Francisco Examiner for their
demeaning treatment of gay people. Newspapers such as Gay Power,
Come Out!, and Gay sprang out of movement committees. The GLF
confronted Western and Delta airlines about their employment prac¬
tices, and SIR picketed Macy’s for having gay men entrapped by police
in its washrooms. Transvestites formed Street Transvestite Action
Revolutionaries, and blacks and Hispanics organized Third World Gay
Revolution. At the end of the first year, 2,000 to 3,000 people marched
to Central Park in New York to commemorate the Stonewall rebellion,
as did hundreds in Los Angeles and Chicago (see Teal 1971; D’Emilio
1983; Humphreys 1972b).
86 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

In 1970, after “three terrible, joyous days of open, honest battle,”

conflicts between gay liberation and the old guard wrenched apart a
NACHO meeting in San Francisco. In the end, the conference
“passed motions supporting women’s liberation and the Black
Panthers, calling for immediate withdrawal of American forces from
Vietnam, authorizing a Gay Strike Day, and calling for memorializa-
tion of homosexuals killed in Nazi concentration camps” (Rankin 1970,
4; Humphreys 1972b, 108). In the same month, the Black Panther
leader, Huey Newton (1972), declared his solidarity for the gay move¬
ment, stating that “homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by
anyone in the society. Maybe they might be the most oppressed peo¬
ple in the society” (195). Gay and lesbian delegates, in turn, showed
up at the Panther-sponsored Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional
Convention in September to claim their place in the radical coalition
that so upset the ruling elites of the United States.
But as early as November 1969, GLF experienced a schism. Jim
Owles and Marty Robinson walked out to found the Gay Activists
Alliance (GAA) in New York, having found the GLF too anarchic and
self-focused, strong on rhetoric but unable to plan effectively, and
too preoccupied with revolutionary doctrine to address the day-to-
day discrimination occurring around it. The GAA wanted to concen¬
trate on the one issue of gay rights without the diffusion of energy
into other New Left causes evident in the GLF. For the GLF, the
GAA represented a regression to homophile accommodationism and
an abandonment of total social transformation for piecemeal reform.
The GAA’s adoption of a committee structure and elected leadership,
they believed, betrayed the GLF’s commitment to consensus and
participatory democracy. The movement was facing a transition
experienced by so many others before it, when charisma and chil-
iasm give way to structure and institution. In the end, the GAA
proved more durable and effective, and the GLF soon exhausted
itself (see Altman 1971, 116; Humphreys 1972b, 124; Teal 1971, 106;
Marotta 1981,150).
In practice, many participants flowed between both organizations,
and the two cooperated on a number of projects. Renewed bar raids in
March 1970 brought another round of street demonstrations. Election
candidates faced sharp questions on gay rights, and GAA activists
forced the New York mayor to address gay issues before television
and opera audiences. City hall, the New York Post, Harper’s, the New
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 87

York Times, and the “Dick Cavett Show” felt the wrath of the GAA in
1970 and 1971 “zaps,” or confrontations. The GAA set up task-oriented
committees on political action, police, elections, civil rights law for the
city, fair taxes, law, news, leaflets and graphics, fund-raising, social
affairs, and member orientation—soon accumulating a thick dossier
on antihomosexual discrimination.
The GAA’s response was often ingenious: “In the summer of 1971,
the owner of a credit agency on New York’s Forty-second Street was
questioned about his agency’s practice of informing employers of the
suspected homosexual tendencies of prospective employees, as well
as credit applicants.” When questioned about how he determined sex¬
ual orientation, he was quoted as saying, ‘“If a man looks like a duck,
walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and associates with ducks, I’d
say he is a duck.’ In a short time, a dozen GAA members dressed in
duck costumes were waddling around the sidewalk at the entrance to
the credit agency, quacking and carrying picket signs” (Humphreys
1972b, 126).
Perhaps the best-known success of the early 1970s was the
assault mounted against American psychiatry, which resulted in the
1973-74 removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric
Association’s (APA’s) official diagnostic manual. A century of psychi¬
atric talk in the United States had provided the underpinnings for a
range of antihomosexual practices. After all, what rights could a psy¬
chopathology have? If gay men and lesbians were no more than dis¬
eased beings, then state institutions had a duty to stamp them out by
isolating them in prisons and hospitals, excluding them from a wide
range of employment, barring them from entering the country, ban¬
ning them from bars, and suppressing their voices in the arts and liter¬
ature. One magazine had long disdained psychiatric ideology, but it
was not until the militant 1970s that gay people gained sufficient
strength and confidence to confront the therapeutic establishment
directly. In 1968, even before Stonewall, a contingent of San
Franciscans arrived unannounced at a convention of the American
Medical Association to speak out against the scientistic extermination
of homosexuality. In the same year, students demanded of a medical
forum at Columbia University that “it is time that talk stopped being
about us and started being with us” (see Teal 1971, 293-97; Kameny
1969; Bayer 1981, 92). Gay liberation fronts stormed San Francisco,
Los Angeles, and Chicago conventions of psychiatry, medicine, and
88 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

behavior modification in 1970, where sessions on the “treatment” and

“correction” of homosexuality were disrupted with cries of “bar¬
barism,” “medieval torture,” and “disgusting” and with demands for
equal time.
These GLF zaps rapidly polarized the psychiatric profession
between such hard-line conservatives as Edward Bergler, Irving
Bieber, Charles Socarides, Lionel Ovesey, and Lawrence Hatterer
(whom Allen Young characterized as the “war criminals”) and a grow¬
ing liberal contingency, including Ernest Van Den Haag, Hendrik
Ruitenbeek, and George Weinberg, who had been questioning the
psychiatric label for some years. An unprecedented panel of gay peo¬
ple was arranged for the 1971 convention of the APA in Washington,
D.C., where Frank Kameny, Larry Littlejohn of SIR, Del Martin of
DOB, Lille Vincenz, and Jack Baker, president of the University of
Minnesota Students’ Association, represented the movement. A 1972
panel included liberal psychiatrists and a gay psychiatrist who
appeared wearing a mask. The issue reached a climax in 1973 with a
debate between Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides on one side and
Judd Marmor, Richard Green, Robert Stoller, and Ron Gold on the
other. Gold’s paper, “Stop! You’re Making Me Sick,” represented the
gay movement’s position.
Official changes were already under way elsewhere as the
American Sociological Association passed a no-discrimination resolu¬
tion in 1969; the National Association for Mental Health called for
decriminalization in 1970; the states of Connecticut, Colorado, and
Oregon did decriminalize in 1971; a federal court stopped automatic
dismissal of gay people from federal employment in the same year;
and the National Association of Social Workers rejected the medical
model of homosexuality in a 1972 resolution. As the GAA waned
through internal dissension (coming to an end, at least symbolically,
when its community center was fire-bombed in 1974), leading move¬
ment activists reorganized as the National Gay Task Force to press
forward the antipsychiatric struggle. When the APA Council accepted
deletion of homosexuality from the diagnostic manual in a unanimous
vote in 1973, the conservatives forced a referendum on the issue. The
result of this curious spectacle of defining pathology by plebiscite was
a vote of 58 percent for deletion and 37 percent for retention in 1974.
In the end, the new diagnostic manual included a compromise catego¬
ry that continued to allow psychiatrists to “treat” people unhappy with
their sexual orientation.
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 89

The movement forced debate on homosexuality among a number

of professional and scholarly associations in the 1970s, opening the
way for the formation of gay and lesbian caucuses within several disci¬
plines: librarianship in 1970; modern languages and psychology in
1973; sociology in 1974; history, psychiatry, and public health in 1975;
nursing and social work 1976; and a general Gay Academic Union in
1973 (see Noll 1978,173-77).

... to a World Movement

Within two years of the Stonewall rebellion, gay liberation groups
emerged in every major city and campus in the United States, Canada,
Australia, and Western Europe. With a gay liberation press founded in
Los Angeles (Advocate), New York (Come Out!), San Francisco (Gay
Sunshine), Boston (Fag Rag), Detroit (Gay Liberator), Toronto (Body
Politic), and London (Come Together), far-flung organizations became
much more connected and aware of diverse initiatives. On three conti¬
nents, gay movements in the early 1970s developed along a similar
course, with parallel Left-oriented gay liberation groups forming along¬
side more liberal civil rights organizations. With the general decline of
New Left movements in the late 1970s, self-professed gay liberation
fronts faded as well, leaving reformist groups in the political field and
engendering a new proliferation of gay and lesbian interest groups
organized within existing institutions: in the workplace, church, the
theater, social services, business, and sports.
The British experience illustrates the process in the early 1970s.
The North-Western Committee of the Homosexual Law Reform
Society reconstituted itself as the Committee (and then, Campaign)
for Homosexual Equality (CHE) in 1969, adopting a platform aimed
“to remove fear, discrimination and prejudice against homosexuals, to
achieve full equality before the law, and to promote the positive accep¬
tance of homosexuality as a valid way of life” (Marshall 1980, 78). A
successful, nonthreatening formula, it attracted 60 local groups by
1972, which offered telephone counseling, regular discos and meeting
places, and a concrete political agenda: equalization of the age of con¬
sent at 16, extension of the 1967 decriminalization to the military, to
Scotland, and to Ulster; abolition of gross indecency laws, and free¬
dom of the gay press (see Weeks 1977, 207-13; Galloway 1983).
Gay liberation arrived in London in 1970, when Aubrey Walter and
Bob Mellors returned from New York to call a gay liberation meeting
90 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

at the London School of Economics. Like its American counterparts,

the London GLF evolved through high-energy consciousness-raising
groups into a collection of workshops focusing on antihomosexual
practices in psychiatry, religious denominations, and government.
Soon it was working on public education, women’s and youth issues,
the media, and street theater. Coming out, or public confrontation of its
antagonists, was always a central feature of gay liberation. As well as
forcing its persecutors to become aware of the maliciousness of their
actions, coming out had an immensely exhilarating and self-healing
effect on gay men and lesbians who had, for so long, lived a secretive
and shamed existence (see Adam 1978, 126). Essential for personal
and social change was gay pride, asserting the worth and capability of a
people rejected as despicable and weak. For the London GLF, its first
act of coming out took the form of a November 1970 demonstration in
“Highbury Fields, where a prominent Young liberal had been arrested
by the police and accused of ‘indecency’” (Walter 1980, 12). At its
height in 1971, the GLF was active in Birmingham, Manchester,
Bristol, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Leeds. But the GLF was all but defunct
by the end of 1972, torn apart by tensions between women and men,
drag queens and machos, socialists and counterculturalists. By draw¬
ing together such a diversity of gay people and engendering such
utopian aspirations, the GLF could not resolve the intensely different
experiences of its adherents. If male domination was the problem as
the feminists and effeminists agreed, then rejection of masculinity was
the solution, and many GLF men briefly embraced “gender-fuck”
drag—mixing beards and dresses, jewelry and leather—in order to par¬
ody gender. If sexual repression and the nuclear family were the prob¬
lem, then public affection and sexual communism could be the answer.
In the end, few could so radically rearrange their emotional lives, and
such experiments proved more dramatic than viable. At the personal
level, many who had come out for companionship and community
experienced too much hostility and pain in the GLF cauldron to want to
continue devoting so much of themselves to the cause, and GLF yield¬
ed to CHE’s more sober and limited style.
In Canada, sporadic homophile groups had come about as early as
1964 with the Vancouver Association for Social Knowledge and in 1965
with the Ottawa Council on Religion and the Homosexual (Adam,
1993c). A group of six, who wrote an open letter to Toronto newspa¬
pers and to Liberal prime minister Lester Pearson, raised the question
of decriminalization in 1964. But it was not until 1967, when the British
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 91

Parliament approved a new Sexual Offenses Act, that debate in Canada

began in earnest. Also in 1967, the Supreme Court upheld the indefi¬
nite sentence of a Northwest Territories man, Everett Klippert, as a
“dangerous sexual delinquent” following repeated convictions for con¬
senting sexual relations with adult men. The following year, the justice
minister, Pierre Trudeau, promised law reform, stating that “the state
has no place in the bedrooms of the nation” (Sylvestre 1979, 24), and
in August 1969 a new “consenting adults in private” law was pro¬
claimed following passage by the Liberal and New Democratic parties
in Parliament. (Many Conservatives and the right-wing Parti Creditiste
voted no.)
The modern gay and lesbian movement took the familiar route.
Campus groups organized first at the University of Toronto in 1969
and, within three years, across the nation. A Gay Liberation Front
formed in 1970 in the well-developed counterculture of Vancouver and
then in 1972 in Montreal (Front de Liberation Homosexuel) and
Toronto (Gay Action). In 1971, a group around George Hislop staked
out more moderate ground with the Community Homophile
Association of Toronto (CHAT).
When the first march on Parliament was held in 1971, Gays of
Ottawa enunciated its law reform program: abolition of the gross inde¬
cency law, a uniform age of consent, protection through the human
rights codes, equal rights for homosexual couples, destruction of
police files, and the ending of discrimination in immigration, employ¬
ment, custody and adoption, and housing Qackson and Persky 1982,
217-20). A national meeting in 1972 to plan strategy for a federal elec¬
tion led to annual meetings coordinated by a National Gay Rights
Coalition.
As in the United States and the United Kingdom, gay organizations
unfolded in Canada throughout the 1970s even in small towns and
rural areas where, for the first time, they often preceded the commer¬
cial infrastructure of bars and public meeting places. In small cities,
such as Saskatoon (in 1973) and London, Ontario (in 1974), communi¬
ty-run clubhouses offered the first gay and lesbian places in their
regions (see Warner 1976). In sparsely populated areas, such as
Newfoundland, northern Ontario, and the British Columbia interior,
the urban press provided the catalyst to overcome geography and con¬
nect widely dispersed gay and lesbian readers.
In Australia and New Zealand, gay and lesbian organization showed
much the same pattern of development as its kin in the rest of the
92 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

English-speaking world. With the deepening involvement of Australian

forces in the war against Vietnam, an antiwar movement mobilized
through the late 1960s, opening an intense political debate and a crisis
of confidence in the entrenched Liberal administration. Homophile
groups surfaced in New Zealand in 1964 with the Dorian Society
(Parkinson 1988, 168) and in Australia in 1969 with the Australian
Capital Territory Homosexual Law Reform Society and the DOB in
Melbourne in 1970. A more enduring homophile group, the Campaign
against Moral Persecution (CAMP), formed in Sydney through the ini¬
tiative of John Ware and Christabell Poll, CAMP stressed the “ordinar¬
iness of homosexuality” and sought reform through public education
(see Thompson 1985, 10; Johnston 1984; Altman 1979; Watson,
French, and Blockman 1983). The group quickly formed chapters in
the other state capitals, issuing a journal, CAMP Ink, from 1971. In its
first demonstration in October 1971, CAMP targeted Liberal party
headquarters in Sydney to challenge the preselection candidacy of an
opponent of homosexual law reform. When an election was called in
1972, a gay activist ran against the Liberal prime minister, gamering
218 votes. (A similar attempt was made against the New Zealand
prime minister to publicize gay concerns.) The ensuing Labour party
government decriminalized homosexuality the following year in areas
of federal jurisdiction—the Australian Capital and Northern
Territories. With gay liberation splitting from CAMP in the mid-1970s,
public actions against media, churches, and government reached a
height only to die down by 1975-76.

The postwar hegemony of the United States, especially among the

advanced capitalist nations, as well as among much of the third world,
has also had an impact on the social organization of homosexuality
and the development of a political movement. But national traditions
and varying arrays of social preconditions have led to different paths
of movement development. As argued earlier, a complex set of socio¬
economic factors and political possibilities created the crucible in
which homosexuality became organized into gay and lesbian subcul¬
tures in Western countries. With a shared language, cultural diffusion
became an important stimulus for parallel development of the gay
world and its movement in the United States, United Kingdom,
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. (Despite its nationalism, Quebec
cannot help but be deeply influenced by the Anglo-American culture
that surrounds it.) Among other language communities and among
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 93

nations with different political legacies and economic systems, the

movement, although cognizant of the Stonewall heritage, has devel¬
oped along alternative paths.
In the Federal Republic of Germany, student activism and the com¬
ing to power of the Social Democrats preceded the emergence of the
modem feminist and gay movements. With the end of the cold war
Christian Democrat government, the Social Democrats decriminalized
homosexuality in 1969, later lowering the age of consent from 21 to 18
in 1973. Campus action groups (Aktionsgruppen) sprang up across the
country in 1971-73, often following screenings of Rosa von
Praunheim’s controversial film, Not the Homosexual Is Perverse, But
the Situation in Which He Lives, which documented the gay upheaval
in the United States. Among the first such groups was Homosexuelle
Aktion Westberlin, which adopted an explicitly radical approach (see
Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 410-14).
In the Netherlands, a peculiar balance of political forces that has
guaranteed a more genuinely pluralistic society than other liberal
democracies combined to allow more direct participation of the 1950s
homophile movements in the political process and less direct con¬
frontation between the state and homosexuality than in Germany or
English-speaking countries. The result has been considerable conti¬
nuity in the national gay and lesbian federations of the Netherlands
(as well as Denmark, Norway, and Sweden), all of which have worked
well and have survived from their founding in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Gay liberation, although provoking a rethinking of the political
agenda, never overturned the early organizations but instead became
largely integrated into them, causing a partial name change for the
COC from the Netherlands Homophile Association COC (selected in
1964) to the Netherlands Association for the Integration of
Homosexuality COC in 1970-71 (see Tielman 1982; Ramsay, Heringa,
and Boorsma 1974).2 Lesbian and gay social integration in the
Netherlands has moved toward the elimination of police supervision
and censorship, while the state supports access to the media, funding
for social service projects and scholarly research, and legal accommo¬
dation for gay people in immigration, housing, the military, and edu¬
cation.
In France, the “pederastic” committee of May 1968 disappeared as
quickly as it had arisen, along with the barricades of that fateful
month. Not until 1971 was there a second outburst, following an issue
of Tout (edited by Jean-Paul Sartre), that called for sexual liberation—
94 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

free disposition over one’s own body, free abortion and contraception,
the right to homosexuality, and the right of minors to freedom of
desire (Girard 1981, 83ff; Front Homosexuel 1971). Tout’s “call to
arms” found hundreds of adherents—as well as police seizure of the
issue as an “outrage to public morals.” Here emerged the Front
Homosexual Action Revolutionnaire (FHAR), which issued a Report
against Normality (also seized by police) proclaiming a new sexual
revolution. Like gay liberation, FHAR took a spontaneous turn,
eschewing leadership for a series of ad hoc action groups that con¬
fronted professional “experts” and the established Left with slogans
designed to explode bourgeois morality and sexual repression. The
enemy was “le sexisme, le phallocratisme et l’heterofliquisme,” and
FHAR declared to a startled citizenry that “we get fucked by Arabs.
We’re proud of it and will do it again.... Our asshole is revolutionary”
(Girard 1981, 89-90). By 1972, FHAR had spread to major French
cities and Belgium, while the Frente Unitario Omosessuale
Rivoluzionario Italiano (FUORI) had sprung up in Turin, Rome, and
Milan. FUORI invaded a sexology conference in San Remo to oppose
the oppressive practices of penology and psychiatry. In Rome, the
Associazione Culturale Roma-1, a low-profile group that had formed in
1968, became Rivolta Omosessuale in 1972, eventually evolving by
1975 into Organo del Movimento Politico degli Omosessuali (OMPO),
a gay and lesbian cultural center (Consoli 1990, 63).
Again like gay liberation, FHAR soon lost its momentum, to be suc¬
ceeded by a civil rights-oriented Groupe de Liberation Homosexuelle
(GLH), and in Italy, FUORI joined with other progressive movements
affiliated with the Radical party, which took its demands to
Parliament. The GLH soon split into two factions: the Groupes de
Base (GLH-GB), organized in 1975 and 1976 around fighting antigay
discrimination in law, employment, residence, police, and media, and
the Politique et Quotidien (GLH-PQ), which developed a more radical
analysis. The first group adopted the single-issue program in an effort
to bring together a broad spectrum of gay people with diverse back¬
grounds and beliefs. It continued to look forward to a time when
social distinctions based on gender and sexual orientation could be
dissolved and when the commercial ghetto would fade away unneed¬
ed. With Trotskyite inspiration, the GLH-PQ argued that homosexual
identity was an invention of the bourgeoisie, the better to contain
unruly desires in a police-supervised ghetto. Why, the GLH-PQ mili¬
tants wondered, were antihomosexual practices most concentrated in
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism, 95

the institutions of repression—the family, the church, the military, the

police, the prison, sports, and the schools? Might the key to a liberat¬
ed society be a class struggle against the bourgeoisie combined with
the liberation of the repressed homosexuality holding together the
institutions of repression? Neither of the GLH tendencies survived
past 1978, but perhaps most notable was the GLH-PQ’s unique devel¬
opment of some tenets of early gay liberation into the late 1970s.
In southern Europe and Latin America, gay organizations have
proved much more ephemeral, traceable to important differences in
economies and politics. Traditional gender differences, often labeled
Latin machismo, have remained strong in societies where industrial
employment encompasses a small portion of the population and
women, especially, have been less able to enter wage labor and there¬
by upset the gender system. So strong are gender codes that gender
differences inscribe themselves even within homosexuality, creating
two classes of men: the machos, who may with impunity take the
“active” role in sex with males or females, and the effeminates (every
nation has its terminology), who are stigmatized for “degrading”
themselves to the status of women, in bed and out (see Young 1973,
60ff; Carrier 1976; Lacey 1979; Arboleda 1980; Adam 1993). With a
sexual semiology defined far more by gender than by sexual orienta¬
tion, a gay world and identity are much less likely to develop.
Lesbians, typically, have no public recognition, and the power of kin
make independent same-sex relationships even less likely for women
than men.
In addition, alliances between U.S. capitalists and indigenous land-
holding elites have often resulted in semifascist governments aided by
successive U.S. administrations. Under such regimes, political organi¬
zation of any kind becomes perilous. Notwithstanding these factors,
small gay worlds have emerged in those sectors of Latin America that
most resemble North America and Western Europe: in major cities
with large mobile work forces that earn enough money to afford a
drink in a bar. Diffusion of the gay ideal clearly plays a role, as well, in
the commercial establishments that consciously model themselves
after American examples.
In Argentina, for example, a Frente de Liberacion Homosexual
formed in 1973 as part of an alignment of political forces emerging at
the end of a dictatorship. Six issues of Somos appeared that defined a
clear left liberationist politics and included reports of the massacre of
gay people under the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Gay lib-
96 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

eration was forced to dissolve with the return of right-wing death

squads and military government in 1976, when tens of thousands of
Argentines identified with progressive movements died at their hands
(see McCaskell 1976).
The first of several short-lived gay organizations began in Mexico
City in 1971, when a Frente de Liberation Homosexual formed in
response to the firing of several gay employees by the Sears store in
Mexico City.
By the mid-1970s, gay liberation was in crisis, and out of the
malaise and exhaustion after the radical phase of the gay and lesbian
movement came a reorganized and diversified set of movement
groups. Most central of all the divisions that fragmented early gay lib¬
eration was that between women and men, and an autonomous lesbian
feminism opened the way for revitalization.

Lesbian Feminism

Feminism at heart is a massive complaint. Lesbianism is the solution.

—Jill Johnston, in Ms.

Intense political debates and dramatic shifts in analysis character¬

ized the emergence of lesbian activism in the early 1970s. Coming out
of a flux of rapidly changing and inconsistent movement strategies
developing among feminists, gay liberationists, and homophile les¬
bians, women went through fundamental debates about what a lesbian
is and what lesbians should work for. Having a much less extensive
public-bar sector than gay men have, many women came out for the
first time in the midst of the women’s movement and struggled for
both a personal and a political orientation in an environment radically
different from that of “traditional” lesbians. Because these women had
so much on the line and so little anchorage in tradition, their struggles
over basic questions often reached a high intensity and were resolved
in frequently contradictory ways.
As late as 1970, the New York Daughters of Bilitis was holding to
the cautious homophile position, only to be interrupted by the police
at one meeting where they had just reaffirmed their political neutrality
and had abstained from joint action with the Gay Activists Alliance.
They soon reversed themselves, and the DOB president, Ruth
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 97

Simpson (1977), began to invite notable feminists to speak in the ensu¬

ing months (Marotta 1981). Del Martin, a DOB cofounder, had joined
the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1967, and many other
lesbians were already working behind the scenes for women’s rights.
Feminists at this time, however, were not always pleased to find les¬
bians among their ranks. Betty Friedan, in The Feminine Mystique
(1963), had endorsed the stereotype of male homosexuality, charac¬
terizing it as “shallow unreality, immaturity, promiscuity,” while leav¬
ing lesbians invisible (276). When Rita Mae Brown attempted to
confront heterosexism in the women’s movement in 1970 as newslet¬
ter editor of the New York chapter of NOW, Betty Friedan, then the
national president of NOW, denounced a supposed “lavender menace”
threatening the credibility of feminism. Brown and other suspected
lesbians were purged from the organization (see Brown 1972; Abbott
and Love 1972, 109-12, 127; Freeman 1975, 99). Similar confrontations
occurred among radical feminists in Boston and at the 1971 National
Women’s Conference in the United Kingdom, where attempts to raise
lesbian issues were rejected as “red herrings” and “private problems”
(Carden 1974, 53; Walter 1980,150).
Lesbians received a more sympathetic welcome in San Francisco in
February 1970, when Gay Women’s Liberation joined with the Bay
Area Women’s Coalition Conference. In New York, they regrouped
with activists from both women’s and gay liberation to hammer out the
now famous manifesto, “Woman-identified Woman.” Calling them¬
selves Radicalesbians (1971), they asserted that “a lesbian is the rage
of all women condensed to the point of explosion” and pointed out that
feminists could never escape the lesbian accusation. “Lesbian is the
word, the label, the condition that holds women in line,” they argued,
“a debunking scare term that keeps women from forming any primary
attachments, groups, or associations among ourselves.” Lesbianism
was independence from men, freedom from male approval, a matrix of
women’s solidarity: as such it was at the heart of feminism.
When the Second Congress to Unite Women met in New York in
May, participants at a theater evening found themselves plunged into
darkness. When the lights came up, they saw at the front of the audito¬
rium 20 Radicalesbians wearing “Lavender menace” T-shirts who pre¬
sented a list of grievances. The conference was liberated: workshops
on lesbian issues were presented the next day, an all-women’s dance
was a resounding success, and the conference ended with a set of res-
98 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

olutions beginning, “Be it resolved that Women’s Liberation is a

Lesbian plot” (see Radicalesbians 1971; Teal 1971, 179-81; Hole and
Levine 1971, 239-40; Abbott and Love 1972,113-14).
But the war was not won. In the fall of 1970, when Gay People at
Columbia held a public forum, Kate Millett came out as a lesbian in
response to a question from the floor. Time magazine, which had pro¬
moted her as the preeminent feminist thinker, now announced her
demise—a classic example of the tactics decried by the “Woman-iden¬
tified Woman” manifesto. The case became a test of the new solidarity,
and in a December press conference, leading feminists, such as Ti-
Grace Atkinson, Gloria Steinem, Florynce Kennedy, Sally Kempton,
Myma Lamb, and Susan Brownmiller, rallied to Millett’s defense. By
1971, even NOW had turned around, resolving that “N.O.W. acknowl¬
edges the oppression of lesbians as a legitimate concern of feminism.”
In 1973, at the behest of its Lesbian Caucus, the group appointed a
National Task Force on Sexuality and Lesbianism (Abbott and Love
1972,119-23,134; Abbott 1978).
It had been an exhilarating time, which forged a major realignment
of lesbian forces. “This was,” remarked Jill Johnston (1973), “a
momentous series of steps from self-hatred in guilt and secrecy to
apologetic pleas for greater acceptance and legal sanctions to affirma¬
tion of identity to aggressive redefinition in the context of revolution”
(149). The immediate outcome was a massive mobilization of lesbian
energies in a cultural renaissance with the founding of such notable
journals as Ain’t I a Woman? (Iowa City), the Furies (Washington,
D.C.), Amazon Quarterly, Lesbian Tide, Sinister Wisdom (Charlotte,
N.C.), Lesbian Connection (Lansing, Mich.), Long Time Coming
(Montreal), Sappho (London), and Unsere Kleine Zeitung (Berlin) as
well as numerous local publications. A series of annual national
women’s music festivals began in 1973-74, stimulating an outpouring
of creative talent, the rise of internationally known artists such as Meg
Christian, Cris Williamson, Holly Near, and Margie Adam, and the
founding of Olivia Records, devoted to the growing women’s culture
(St. Joan 1978; Nixon and Bergson 1978).
The redefinition of lesbianism as a form of feminist “nationalism”
also spelled the end of the Daughters of Bilitis and secession from the
gay movement. Both the New York chapter and the national DOB col¬
lapsed in the highly charged days of 1971. Rita Laporte and Barbara
Grier seized the Ladder from the national DOB in 1970 to publish it as
a radical lesbian journal from Reno, Nevada, but they were unable to
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 99

keep it going after 1972 (see Martin and Lyon 1972, 251; Grier and
Reid 1976; Marotta 1981, 263-69; D’Emilio 1983, 230).
From the beginning of gay liberation, lesbians often found them¬
selves vastly outnumbered by men who were, not surprisingly, preoc¬
cupied with their own issues and ignorant of the concerns of women.
Many women became increasingly frustrated as gay liberation men
set up task groups to counter police entrapment, work for sodomy law
reform, or organize dances that turned out to be 90 percent male. Men
took for granted many of the social conditions that made it possible for
them to be gay. But lesbians needed to address fundamental problems
facing all women—such as equal opportunity in employment and vio¬
lence against women—in order to have sufficient independence to
become lesbian. Most men had at least the financial independence of
wage labor and a well-developed commercial scene to fall back on,
whereas many women were struggling to gain a foothold in employ¬
ment and create places where lesbians could be together. In a move¬
ment that was supposed to forward their cause, lesbians grew angry at
having to devote time and energy to “reminding” men of their exis¬
tence. Many lesbians suspected that gay men would be happy to
accept the place befitting their sex and class while leaving the system
of male domination intact. As Marie Robertson stated to the Canadian
National Gay Rights Coalition, “Gay liberation, when we get right
down to it, is the struggle for gay men to achieve approval for the only
thing that separates them from the ‘Man’—their sexual preference”
(Robertson 1982,177).
Early on, a move toward lesbian autonomy was under way. In April
1970, women-only dances were organized through the New York GLF
to create a space where women could meet. In Los Angeles, the GLF
Women’s Caucus became Gay Women’s Liberation and then Lesbian
Feminism in rapid succession. Women-only meetings were held in
CAMP-Sydney for similar reasons. With the apparent embrace of les¬
bianism by the women’s movement in the early 1970s, lesbians around
the world began withdrawing from gay liberation from 1971 to 1973.
The Furies were founded in 1971 in Washington; Purperen Mien and
Paarse September formed in Amsterdam in 1971 and 1972; London
GLF split in 1972; and the Homosexuelle Aktionsgruppe Westberlin
formed a Frauengruppe in 1972 (later becoming Lesbisches
Aktionszentrum). Further lesbian organization in Germany usually
occurred under the auspices of women’s centers sponsored by femi¬
nists. Les Gouines Rouges left FHAR in Paris, and the Women’s
100 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Subcommittee of the New York GAA became Lesbian Feminist

Liberation.3
Every social movement must at some point choose what to retain
and what to reject of its past. What traits and attitudes are the results
of oppression and what are healthy and authentic? Which tactics come
from the wisdom of forebears in facing the enemy and which merely
imitate the established power system? Every movement at some time
vacillates between “nationalist” and “integrationist” positions. The
black movement divided over whether it wanted to affirm similarity or
difference, whether it wanted to abandon Sambo-ism and claim its
share of the goods of advanced capitalism, or to affirm all things
African and reject a morally bankrupt and exploitative society. Gay lib¬
eration encountered similar dilemmas. Were drag queens a heterosex¬
ist stereotype acted out by self-hating homosexual men or were they
the vanguard of the new gay man, rejecting the violence and misogyny
of machismo and proudly coming out with their homosexuality for all
to see? Feminists were not immune to the problem. Was motherhood
a burden to be collectivized (or avoided) or was it women’s unique
contribution to humanity? Was housework merely drudgery to be
shrugged off for fulfilling and paid employment? Was it an essential
but unrecognized component in the reproduction and maintenance of
the capitalist work force?
The positions taken on these questions by lesbian feminists are
inextricable from the debates of the overall women’s movement. After
an early period of feminist integrationism, many feminists tended
toward a socialist feminist camp, which argued for a comprehensive
inclusion of women, gay men, and other subordinated people in a
broad front against patriarchal capitalism, or toward a certain “nation¬
alism,” which aimed for a women’s culture and values wherein lesbian¬
ism was revalued as the highest expression of women’s solidarity and
as central to women’s struggle. As Ti-Grace Atkinson (1973)
remarked, “Lesbianism is to feminism what the Communist Party was
to the trade union movement” (14).
Many responded favorably to the new lesbian visibility, declaring
themselves “political lesbians” in solidarity without necessarily involv¬
ing themselves sexually with women. After the initial euphoria wore
off, however, it became clear that acceptance was often superficial.
Lesbian concerns were once again too often ignored, and few hetero¬
sexual women were willing to let go of their “heterosexual privilege”—
what Charlotte Bunch (1976) called the “actual or promised benefits
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 101

for the woman who stays in line,” or “the small and short-term bribe in
return for giving up lasting self-discovery and collective power” (60).
This inaugurated yet another split with the development of “lesbian
separatism” in 1972 to 1974. The separatists built within the nationalist
position, defining lesbianism as a “woman-identified experience, . . .
sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giv¬
ing and receiving of practical and political support” (Rich 1983, 192;
Myron and Bunch 1975). Like other forms of nationalism, its theorists
embarked on synthesizing a transhistorical women’s mythology that
reordered the universe in terms of gender opposition. Unlike the early
feminists who sought to annihilate gender, insisting that such distinc¬
tions were social inventions, the nationalists adopted the opposite posi¬
tion, affirming an essential biological difference between men and
women and working to rescue a women’s culture from millennia of
male domination. In contrast to male competitiveness and militarism,
women would found a new civilization on their own traditions of moth¬
erhood and nurturance.
So total was the new paradigm that Jill Johnston (1975) could claim,
“Considering the centrality of lesbianism to the Women’s Movement it
should now seem absurd to persist in associating lesbian women with
the male homosexual movement. Lesbians are feminists, not homo¬
sexuals” (85). Mary Daly (1978) drew a sharp line between lesbians,
whom she defined as “women who are woman-identified, having
rejected false loyalties to men on all levels,” and gay women, who
“although they relate genitally to women, give their allegiance to men
and male myths, ideologies, styles, practices, institutions, and profes¬
sions.” The latter group, she claimed, remained male-identified by col¬
laborating with “heterosexist [sfc] ‘gay pride’ protests promoted by
and for men” (20, 26). If the pivotal distinction of human civilization is
gender, then gay men are simply men and thus of little interest for les¬
bian politics.
The consolidation of lesbian identity around feminist nationalist
precepts was not without problems for many lesbians. Women whose
experience of lesbianism had been shaped by the bar community
often found themselves rejected as “male-identified.” Feminists of the
early phase, who defined the core of feminism as the elimination of
gender, believed that “all role playing is sick” including the “butch-
fern” distinctions that remained an aspect of bar culture (Koedt 1973,
249; see Abbott and Love 1972, 36, 60; Marotta 1981, 250). Others
were taken aback by the new “political lesbian” who wanted to “try it
102 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

out” but knew nothing of the day-to-day hardship experienced by les¬

bians. Barbara Ponse (1978) found that “the self-labeled political les¬
bian who is bisexual or heterosexual in practice is somewhat of a
mystery to women who have always defined themselves as lesbians,”
and many felt used by apparently bisexual women who had no interest
in emotional commitment (112, 123, 212). Many suspected political
lesbianism to be a form of sexual “tourism”—“the one who was going
to liberate herself on my body,” as Rita Mae Brown (1972) put it (191;
see Gay Revolution Party 1972,179).
Paradoxically, although the redefinition of lesbianism as a form of
women’s class consciousness gave permission to heterosexual women
to experiment with lesbianism, it tended, at the same time, to remove
sexuality from lesbian identity. As Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and
Sharon Thompson (1983) state,

In pointing to anger rather than eros as the wellspring of lesbianism, the

[Woman identified Woman] manifesto opened the way for the desexualiza-
tion of lesbian identity. . . . While the pre-feminist-movement lesbian could
not forget her differences from straight women, the feminist lesbian could
scarcely perceive them. Ultimately, this homogenization suppressed but
could no more eliminate the tensions of difference between lesbian and
straight women than it could between white women and women of color. (33)

For lesbians who decided to stay with the gay movement, feminist
nationalism had taken an unfortunate turn. Whereas early feminist
writers called for an end to the suppression of female sexuality, later
nationalists appeared to be falling back on an image of women as
above sexuality. As Jill Johnston (1973) wondered, after listening to Ti-
Grace Atkinson’s pleas for the political lesbian, “in her feminist ratio¬
nale she had told us that the female dynamic is love and the male
dynamic is sex. Translated: Man-Sex-Evil versus Woman-Love-Good”
(117-18). Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin (1978) thought that political
solidarity was all very well but that the meaning of lesbianism lay else¬
where: “We believe that the majority of lesbians who come around to
any gay group are not looking for analysis or warfare or reconstruc¬
tion-They want to meet and mix with other gay women in the legit¬
imate pursuit of friendship and love” (151). And in an article called
‘Why I Am a Gay Liberationist,” Chris Bearchell (1983) rejected the
“imaginary world where lesbians are pure and gay men are sex per¬
verts,” arguing, “Every time a lesbian is a feminist to the world and a
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 103

lesbian only to her feminist friends she is behaving with the same
‘closetry’ that characterized much of ghetto life, with the additional
betrayal that she is doing so in the name of freedom for women” (59).
Whereas some feminists denounced the gay movement’s failure to
take gender abolition as its sole issue and its willingness to embrace
such politically incorrect people as drag queens and butch lesbians,
others viewed the movement’s willingness to embrace such a diversity
as a strength. And whereas Rita Mae Brown and Martha Shelley were
attacked as male-identified for promoting coalition between lesbians
and people oppressed by class and race, others believed that social
transformation could not be a question of gender alone. Gittings and
Tobin (1978) claimed that lesbian separatists had identified the wrong
enemy with their “supercharged response to sexism and male chau¬
vinism, to the point that they spend much time and energy attacking
the sexism of the handiest men around, the gay men in the move¬
ment” (151). And Bearchell (1983) complained,

It is, after all, our sexuality, and the sexual minorities in our community, that
are under attack. Here, it seems, is where we must defend ourselves. But
suddenly the same radical feminists who had denounced gay liberationists
for our concern with such un-radical things as rights, were nervous about
being in a coalition with us because we might take some not-quite-
respectable position on sex. (59)

Gay men’s reactions to the lesbian secession ranged from breast¬

beating to confusion and resentment. About the time many feminists
became political lesbians, some gay men became “effeminists,” taking
to heart lesbian criticism of their male privilege and renouncing all
personal signs of masculinity. The effeminists recalled the earlier
debates over drag in gay liberation and later reemerged as “radical
faeries” searching for a tradition of “gay male spirituality” parallel to
feminist cultural nationalism. Harry Hay, a founder of the first
Mattachine, and his lover, John Burnside, figured among its relatively
small number of adherents (Collier and Ward 1980; Hardy 1980).
Most gay organizations scrambled—often too late—to accommodate
lesbian demands, but some groups successfully retained female and
male participation by moving toward parity decision making in the
organization’s day-to-day affairs. Many of the tensions between les¬
bians and gay men, then, stemmed from a tendency of many gay men
to ignore the structural inequality that lesbians shared with other
104 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

women and to expect lesbians to understand themselves only as a sex¬

ual minority, while the “nationalist” school of lesbian feminism (see
Frye 1983) tended to ignore the violence that straight men directed
toward gay men and to expect male homosexuality to be a variant of
male solidarity against women.
With the feminist movement continuing to develop inconsistent
trends in the late 1970s, debates on the future of lesbian organization
went on unabated. Cultural nationalism offered quite a different agen¬
da for lesbian struggle than did integrationist approaches, whether
from a liberal civil rights approach or from a more radical socialist
feminist model. The immediate outcome of these conflicts was consid¬
erable fragmentation of lesbian energies and a renewed confrontation
between these tendencies in the sex debates of the 1980s. But for this
story, we must look at the movement in the 1980s.

The Movement and the Grass Roots

The paradox of the 1970s was that gay and lesbian liberation did
not produce the gender-free communitarian world it envisioned, but
faced an unprecedented growth of gay capitalism and a new masculini¬
ty. While debates raged inside the movement, the actions of gay liber-
ationists and lesbian feminists entered a larger political field, which
transformed and expanded the gay world in unexpected directions.
The most immediate effect of the movement on the masses of gay
men and lesbians, who were largely unacquainted with its internal
debates and struggles, was a new sense of pride, an honest affirmation
of a personal emotional life, a sense of relief at not having always to
hide or apologize, and a new claim (or reclamation) of the symbols of
masculinity. After the “gender-fuck” drag of the early 1970s and the
intense critique of gender, both lesbians and gay men began more and
more to embody a certain working-class ideal of masculinity; the fash¬
ion was “jeans and denim workmen’s overalls ... topped by a man’s T-
shirt or workshirt . . . [and] heavy men’s workboots or sneakers”
(Cassell 1972, 83; see Faderman 1992). While heterosexual men were
relaxing into a new androgyny in the 1970s, adopting longer hair,
brighter colors, and softer fabrics, gay men and lesbians were making
a mass commitment to denim, plaid, and leather.
The gender shift is perhaps not so surprising in retrospect.
Masculine symbols offer the most ready-at-hand vocabulary of self-
assertion. As gay people gained self-confidence and demanded
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 105

respect, they began to present themselves as serious and tough. Still,

it is important not to confuse this artful masculinity with conventional
male chauvinism. The new gay masculinity had a specific meaning. It
was an open secret among gay men that the apparent motorcyclists
and cowboys standing in gay bars were gentle men at heart. Although
this cultivated masculinity was a disappointment to gay men of the old
school who thought they wanted “real men,” for most the apparent
inconsistency was attractive and right. Among lesbians, the new dress
code rejected the incapacitating delicacy and frilliness vaunted by the
heterosexist press in favor of the self-reliant image of the Amazon.
Once the new self-confidence was fully internalized, the masculinist
style began to wane—but more quickly for lesbians than for gay men.
In another sense, the new masculinity participated in one of the
deepest aspirations of the movement—that is, to develop egalitarian
relationships free from role playing. In this, the movement was an
inheritor of a 200-year trend toward egalitarian ideals in the compan¬
ionate marriage. Long the victims of male violence and control in fami¬
lies, women had sought to improve their status at home and espouse
full equality. It might be argued that homosexual relationships have an
inherent interest in shedding gender and that they have, in fact, pio¬
neered work sharing and role flexibility in coupled relationships.
Whether ahead of or with progressive trends in heterosexual relation¬
ships, Stonewall marked a decisive break with a waning tradition of
gender within homosexuality. The masculinization of the 1970s dis¬
solved remnants of the “real man” versus “queer” distinction
(described earlier as the Latin American model), which is so evident
in historical documents of gay life in the West (see Chauncey 1985).
As Rudy Kikel (1981) put it, “Up until liberation, I really feel that we
were all in love with straight men. . . . what we found was that we
could find that [maleness] in each other. And the great benefit was
that we became sexual objects for each other” (12). As well, sex roles
(as opposed to gender) largely disappeared in the 1970s in that “the
most common set of sexual preferences among gay males is for all
roles, both oral and anal and active and passive” (Harry 1976-77,150).
Joseph Harry found only a folk distinction between “versatile” and “not
versatile” but not a distinction between sex roles.4
None of this is to say that the new trends solved the much thornier
micropolitics of day-to-day living or that gender entirely lost its mean¬
ings. As women have increasingly entered male-identified jobs and
vice versa (and gay people are on the cutting edge of this change),
106 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

gender has become more and more disarticulated from the division of
labor. Still, problems of initiative and response, active and passive,
domination and submission, continue to crop up in actual relation¬
ships, and discussions of them inevitably become entangled in gender
vocabularies, which have so long characterized the differences. In the
gay world, drag has been shunted off to the side, becoming a “little tra¬
dition” outside a larger mainstream. Transvestism has become a world
of its own, with many female impersonators developing professional
identities and straight audiences. Debates among lesbians about
butch-fem relationships have resurfaced to recover what was valuable
in the bar dyke tradition and to rearticulate feelings and practices that
egalitarian slogans never dealt with.
The other paradoxical outcome of gay liberation was the expansion
of the gay ghetto. The success of the movement in beating back stage
management and repression of gay places allowed for a new genera¬
tion of businesses oriented to a gay market. Within a decade, every
major city in North America and Western Europe had a new range of
bars and saunas, restaurants and discos, travel agents and boutiques,
lawyers and life insurers, social services and physicians, who catered
specifically to a gay clientele. At the same time, there was a remark¬
able development of many women-owned and -operated places, many
of which were havens for lesbians.
While gay liberation zapped public institutions, a new class of small
businessmen (and some women) began carving out a commercial
ghetto that directly touched the lives of many more gay people than
the movement itself. While gay liberation theory presumed that the
release of homosexuality would explode conventional sexual and
familial arrangements, capitalist environments cultivated new institu¬
tions compatible with itself. The result, remarked Dennis Altman
(1980), was a new masculine gay man who was “non-apologetic about
his sexuality, self-assertive, highly consumerist and not at all revolu¬
tionary, though prepared to demonstrate for gay rights” (52).
The capitalization of homosexuality in the 1970s shaped gay male
identity in quite another way. Neither Ginsberg’s vision of “tender
lovers and fellows” nor gay liberation’s democratic gay community
could come to pass under such auspices. As businessmen developed
efficient sex delivery systems for gay men, a world of adhesive com¬
rades and brothers became a more remote ideal. The unique potential
inherent in homosexuality to rehumanize relationships among men
became increasingly closed off in favor of orgasm without communica-
 Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism 107

tion. Relationships among men were participating in the growing sexu¬

al reductionism of the current century: male bonding in the commer¬
cial gay world tended to implode into its sexual aspect, and those who
did manage to make long-term commitments to each other often with¬
drew from the commercial world to do so. As Laud Humphreys (1972)
observed, “In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith postulated the ideal
form of human relationship as being specific, depersonalized, short¬
term and contractual. This capitalist ideal is realized in the sex
exchange of the homosexual underworld [sz'c] ” (66).
The new sexual “freedom” brought a tremendous release of energy
and profound exploration of erotics as a value in itself. Early gay and
lesbian liberationists looked forward to an era of plural bonding, freed
of the oppressive weight of monogamy, jealousy, and sexual boredom.
But many gay men began to feel a certain sexual alienation and emo¬
tional suffocation.5
Thus, whereas the lesbian movement began to submerge sexual
topics under talk of sisterhood, thereby slipping back toward tradition¬
al definitions of female sexuality, gay men found themselves unable to
talk forthrightly of their need for love, confirming traditional male
socialization that demands that men be sexual but unemotional. As
Andrew Holleran (1979) confessed in a perceptive article for
Christopher Street,

Last week in the baths I was sitting in a corner waiting for Mister Right when
I saw two men go into an even darker nook and run through the entire gamut
of sexual acts. And when they were finished—after all these kisses . . . and
moans and gasps, things that caused scandals in the nineteenth century, top¬
pled families, drove Anna Karenina to suicide— . . . after all that, they each
went to a separate bedroom to wash up. Now you may view this as the glory
of the zipless fuck, but I found it suddenly—and it surprised me, for I’d
always adored this event before—the most reductive, barren version of sex a
man could devise. (12)

The commercial gay world could provide “fast-food” sex, but it did
nothing to nurture lasting relationships among men. It contained and
marketed gay male sexuality back to gay men, but reproduced the
competitive alienation among men experienced in the larger society. It
was, in fact, as Joseph Harry and William Devall (1978) found, a satis¬
factory arrangement for “persons with significant components of het¬
erosexuality in their self-identity” who “vacationed” in the gay ghetto
108 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

but had no interest in emotional involvement with other men.6 But for
gay men, it was not always enough.
The irony of the 1970s, then, was the ease with which gay and les¬
bian aspirations were assimilated, contained, and overcome by the
societies in which they originated. The gender challenge of the libera¬
tion movements (itself imminent in the increasingly complex division
of labor of modem capitalism) became the gender affirmation of the
end of the decade, whether as gay male masculinity or lesbian femi¬
nist nationalism. The socialist challenge of the New Left helped con¬
tribute to its opposite: a bigger commercial ghetto. Still, these
paradoxes were not simply historical cycles or pendulum swings
against an unchanging background. Each social convulsion pulled out,
amplified, and rewove disparate, discursive strands into different
social patterns. Each stage experimented with new combinations of
received elements, producing a changed social fabric. But the disarray
of outcomes was soon to fall prey to a reorganized enemy as conserva¬
tive forces in the United States formed the New Right.
 Chapter Six

The Rise of the New Right

He struggles with dream figures, and his blows strike living faces.
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968,143)

On 7 June 1977 voters in Dade County, Florida, repealed a six-month-

old civil rights ordinance that had prohibited discrimination on the
grounds of “sexual orientation.” Through 1978, similar repeals grew
into a wave striking down equal rights laws across the United States.
Emboldened by an increasingly reactionary climate, police and street
violence against gay people escalated, television programs appeared
resurrecting old stereotypes, and many public leaders shed their
veneer of liberalism to attack gay people as immoral sexual predators
and threats to the family. After a tumultuous year and a half, Harvey
Milk, the best-known openly gay public official in the United States,
was assassinated.
The reactionary trends of the late 1970s encompassed much more
than the rights of gay people. A disparate set of opponents to New Left
and liberal ideals was pulling together into a more coordinated force.
Segregationists and antibusing groups chipped away at voting rights
legislation, affirmative action programs, and health and social services
won by the civil rights movement. The Equal Rights Amendment
(ERA), intended to stop discrimination against women, went down to
defeat, and “right to life” groups challenged feminist claims to a right
to control one’s own body, including a right to terminate pregnancy.
• Under the guise of reducing government regulation, business associa-

109
110 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

tions pressed for lowered health and safety standards and for so-called
right-to-work legislation designed to contain and destroy labor unions.
The new conservatism appeared primarily in English-speaking
countries and preeminently in the United States. In France, southern
Europe, and much of Latin America, the 1980s brought social democ¬
ratic governments or, at least, an end to dictatorship and an often
improved political climate for lesbians and gay men. Opposition there
tended to come from extremist, neofascist groups enjoying little popu¬
lar support. In France, for example, a small fascist commando unit ran¬
sacked a gay film festival in 1978, but the far right had little electoral
impact or long-term effect on the civil liberties of lesbians and gay
men. In West Germany as well, gay movement meetings suffered dis¬
ruptions by neo-Nazis, who, in one incident, assaulted a meeting hall
in Munich with tear gas (Girard 1981, 144; Rusche 1984a). In the
United States, on the other hand, reactionary ideologies gained signifi¬
cant popular support and fueled new repressive moves. What, then,
led to the events of the late 1970s and early 1980s and what structural
and historical changes gave rise to the New Right?
A look at the Save Our Children organization, which led the Dade
County repeal, reveals a profile of the antigay forces. Headed by evan¬
gelist singer Anita Bryant, the antigay campaign drew together con¬
servative religious leaders and politicians. Founding the campaign
squarely on fundamentalist church networks, Bryant garnered support
from the National Association of Evangelicals, representing more than
three million people from 60 denominations (Wuthnow 1983, 173).
Through its television programs (such as “PTL Club,” “700 Club,” and
‘The Old-Time Gospel Hour”) the electronic church gave Bryant a
nationwide platform and raised funds for her, while Jerry Falwell cam¬
paigned in person and B. Larry Coy, from the Falwell ministries,
became a campaign director. The right-wing Christian Cause, a direct-
mail political lobby, also drew on a national reservoir of conservatives,
extending its purview to supporters from Jewish and Roman Catholic
hierarchies. The archbishop for Miami sent around a pastoral letter to
local Roman Catholic churches, calling on their congregations to vote
against civil rights for lesbians and gay men, and 28 rabbis and the
president of the Miami Beach B’nai B’rith joined the chorus. Close
supporters and directors of the campaign included Florida senators
and its governor, antiabortion and anti-ERA activists, police represen¬
tatives, YMCA and Kiwanas leaders, a football manager, and psychia-
 The Rise of the New Right 111

trists who had fought to keep homosexuality labeled “sick” (Young

1982, 37; Bryant 1977).
The gay defense campaign, organized as the Dade County Coalition
for Human Rights (DCCHR), and the Miami Victory Campaign opted
for a “‘high-toned’ human rights approach of flag-waving and pictures
of the endangered American constitution” (Merrill 1977-78, 11). Gay
businessmen and Democratic party gay club leaders chose a profes¬
sionally directed media campaign for the DCCHR, eschewing door-to-
door canvassing and ignoring Miami’s large Cuban and black
communities. The media campaign ran afoul of pro-Bryant editorials
and continual suppression and cutting of progay ads in the Miami
newspapers (consistent with their editorial stance in the McCarthy
years). Only the Miami Victory Campaign made belated efforts at pop¬
ular mobilization. On 7 June 1977, equal rights were repealed by a
massive margin: 202,319 to 83,319.
Within a few months, Anita Bryant was on tour throughout the
United States and Canada. In April 1978, the city of St. Paul,
Minnesota, lost its gay rights law in a referendum vote of 54,090 to
31,690; in May, Wichita, Kansas, repealed by 47,246 to 10,0054 The
Oklahoma state legislature joined in, unanimously passing a law to dis¬
miss teachers who “advocate” or “practice” homosexuality.
When the antigay crusade arrived in Eugene, Oregon, many now
classic traits were apparent (Gay Writers’ Group 1983). The New
Right group, calling itself Volunteer Organization Involved in
Community Enactments of the People (VOICE), relied heavily on fun¬
damentalist churches for its labor, attracting small- and big-business
financing and local Republican party organizers. The winning ideologi¬
cal formula equated the no-discrimination law with “child molesting,”
“gay recruiting,” “boy prostitution,” “threat to the family,” and a
“national gay conspiracy,” adding the argument that “the majority has
the right to do business with and rent to people of their choice.”
Presented as a “freedom of conscience” issue, the repeal campaign
asserted the right of local capitalists to employ and lodge only those
whom they like, against the right of workers and minorities to earn a
livelihood and find shelter. In May 1978, the rights of gay people in
Oregon again suffered a loss by 23,000 to 13,427.
The next confrontation was to come in November. The New Right
hoped to consolidate its successes in a fifth repeal campaign in Seattle
and in an Oklahoma-style proposal in California to dismiss anyone
112 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

“encouraging, or promoting private or public homosexual activity . . .

likely to come to the attention of children.” In California, the attempt¬
ed civil rights rollback faced well-established gay and lesbian commu¬
nities that understood it as a threat to their very survival. San
Francisco—Carl Wittman’s “refugee camp of Amerika”—had just
gained its first gay city supervisor with the 1977 election of Harvey
Milk. Gay neighborhoods had emerged around Castro and Folsom
streets; they were “liberated zones” to some and “ghettos” to others,
but in any case a territorialization of sexual desire in a political system
based on geographical representation. As Manuel Castells (1983)
remarked, “Many gays were able to live in their neighborhoods
because they organized collective households and they were willing to
make enormous economic sacrifices to be able to live autonomously
and safely as gays ... a financial and social cost that only ‘moral
refugees’ are ready to pay” (160—61).2 While the white middle classes
were abandoning the cores of many cities across the United States,
gay people were intent on building habitable urban communities
enriched by street life and indigenous festivals in aesthetic surround¬
ings. In San Francisco, the Castro Street Fair, first organized by
Harvey Milk in 1974, had become one such festival.
Gay and lesbian settlement in San Francisco, Castells points out,
filled in city space left over and “opposed by property, family, and high
class: the old triumvirate of social conservatism” (153). When Harvey
Milk at last entered City Hall after a number of tries, he counted on
the support of the dispossessed of San Francisco—a coalition of labor
unions, blacks, Asians, Chicanos, feminists, hippies, and, of course,
lesbians and gay men.3 His electoral program opposed the destruction
of neighborhoods by big capital and called for a fair tax to force big
business to pay its share of city revenue, making a populist appeal for
a city governed for its inhabitants.
When the Dade County repeal became known in June of 1977,
3,000 had turned out in San Francisco to protest; a year later, as the
reactionaries swept toward the Pacific coast, 250,000 rallied for Gay
Pride Day in 1978. Public opinion polls in the summer of 1978 revealed
a likely win for the antigay initiative sponsored by State Senator John
Briggs, which was to expel from the school system gay men and les¬
bians as well as those who presented homosexuality positively. Some
30 organizations sprang up across California in response, most notably
the Bay Area Committee against the Briggs Initiative (BACABI), the
Committee against the Briggs Initiative, Los Angeles (CABILA), and
 The Rise of the New Right 113

Concerned Voters of California. Whereas the latter group, sponsored

by Advocate publisher David Goodstein, took the cautious approach
pioneered in Miami, stressing abstract principles, the respectability of
gay people, and conventional public relations strategies, BACABI and
CABILA aimed for mass mobilization and high visibility (see Ward
and Freeman 1979; Hollibaugh 1978). They took every opportunity to
call out public demonstrations and confront Briggs’s supporters in
public forums.
Harvey Milk debated with Briggs on television and in town halls,
taking on each of Briggs’s inflammatory claims by pointing out, for
example, that child abuse was an overwhelmingly heterosexual prob¬
lem (there had been no case of homosexual molestation of children in
California schools), and that far from removing governmental control,
the Briggs Initiative would place the state in the bedrooms of the
nation. In the end, the gay and lesbian movement succeeded in win¬
ning endorsements from a series of unions (teachers, auto workers,
steelworkers, Teamsters, culinary workers, postal workers) and from
black and Chicano leaders, including Angela Davis and United Farm
Workers leader Cesar Chavez. Apart from a contribution from the
Atlantic Richfield oil company, the Briggs forces relied on the evangel¬
ical churches and fund-raising lists compiled by the Anita Bryant cam¬
paign (a consortium that became Christian Voice), winning
endorsements from the Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriffs
Association, the Ku Klux Klan, and the American Nazi party (Shilts
1982, 247). California voters rejected Briggs’s Proposition 6, 58 to 42
percent.
On that same day in November, Seattle voters retained their gay
rights law by 63 to 37 percent. The repeal forces, led by two police offi¬
cers, had suffered a blow mid-campaign when one of their leaders,
Dennis Falk, murdered a black youth while on duty. With sufficient
lead time to campaign in a generally liberal city, a willingness to go to
the people and build coalitions, and the bungling of its opponents, the
three gay defense groups scored an impressive victory.
Many breathed a sigh of relief that the New Right was not invinci¬
ble, but within weeks, Harvey Milk was felled by an assassin’s bullets.
His murderer was a former city supervisor, Dan White. White had
been a police officer in San Francisco and had won a seat in City Hall
in 1977 with a promise to keep a youth home out of his ward. On a city
council evenly divided between neighborhood activists representing
gay, feminist, black, and Asian concerns on the one side and more tra-
114 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

ditional probusiness representatives on the other, White soon attract¬

ed business interest, eventually taking up an offer to open a fast-food
franchise in a major business redevelopment project. His vote on
council tipped the balance toward big-business interests with tax
breaks and development incentives granted through city legislation.
White also cast the only vote against a gay rights ordinance intro¬
duced by Harvey Milk and opposed city cooperation with Gay
Freedom Day celebrations. After resigning in the fall of 1978 and then
wishing to regain his seat, White found Mayor George Moscone
unwilling to reappoint him. Believing himself betrayed by the liberal
bloc on the council, he shot both the mayor and Harvey Milk in their
City Hall offices on 27 November (see Weiss 1984, esp. 100, 126,
158-59).
San Franciscans responded with a massive candle-lit procession to
City Hall to commemorate its slain reformers. Five months later, they
would return in rage. In the interim, Dan White had gone to trial
where police witnesses characterized him as “a man among men . . .
[and the] most valuable player [in the] law enforcement softball tour¬
nament.” Psychiatrists pronounced him “depressed” and suffering
from “diminished capacity” owing to a junk-food diet. On 21 May 1979,
a jury from which gay people had been excluded convicted White on a
manslaughter charge that carried a sentence of seven years and eight
months. (In fact, White was released after little more than five years
on 6 January 1984.) Though the murder of public officials was subject
to the death sentence in California, White had received the lightest
possible penalty. The day of the verdict, thousands marched on City
Hall, protesting that White had “got away with murder” and that the
court had declared “open season on faggots.” At City Hall, the insur¬
gents set 11 police cars aflame and smashed City Hall windows; 120
went to the hospital with injuries (Weiss 1984, 407-13; Shilts 1982,
329; McCaskell 1979). The police, many of whom had sported “Free
Dan White” T-shirts during the White trial and had invaded a bar a
month earlier where they beat several lesbians, now retaliated with a
siege of Castro Street, attacking pedestrians and destroying a gay bar.
A tumultuous two years ended with a different kind of response
from lesbians and gay men. Before, when Nazis and McCarthyites had
targeted gay people, they proved unable to respond effectively. Nearly
all attempted to fend for themselves individually by running for cover,
adopting the duplicity of closetry, and playing the heterosexist game
through marriage and conformity.4 Individual solutions exacted an
 The Rise of the New Right 115

immense cost through the psychological suffocation and fear suffered

by those in hiding and, more gravely, through the incarceration and
murder of thousands ferreted out by the state and its agents. This
time, gay people resisted, intending to seize their own destiny and
conserve the small spaces they had so laboriously carved out of the
cities. When homosexuality was a “vice,” an “illness,” or a “luxury,” it
could never resist the depredations of moral entrepreneurs, police, or
kin, and Western history is the record of centuries of underground
homosexual life. Only by embracing it as an identity could homosexu¬
al desire be reorganized as a collectivity capable of defending itself
from its enemies.

The Sources of Homophobia

But where did these enemies come from and why did they take on
themselves the fight against homosexuality? The answer is not an
easy one—no easier than tracing the roots of Nazism and
McCarthyism—but like these reactionary movements, a set of con¬
stituencies, networks, and alliances can be identified. In brief, three
components of the opposition deserve attention. First are the adher¬
ents of a number of single-issue groups, many of which appeared in
the mid- and late 1970s to defend traditional social arrangements
against their critics. Most important here are a range of groups
focused on “family” and sexuality, such as antiabortion, anti-ERA,
antipomography, and antigay campaigns per se, and also groups with
overlapping membership and leadership that oppose gun control and
support the military buildup and economic empire building of the
United States in the third world. Second are the 22 percent of the
United States population who identify themselves as evangelicals and
who thereby adopt a religious ideology of general social conservatism
and particular homophobia. In many ways, this constituency has been
a traditional source of American conservatism, having been the major
force behind the temperance movement and the prohibition of alcohol
during the 1920s, a bulwark against science and Enlightenment values
(best known from the Scopes trial of 1925, where the theory of evolu¬
tion was condemned as a heresy), and a proponent of McCarthyism
and other anticommunist organizations, as well as antifluoridation,
antiobscenity, and anti-secular education campaigns in the 1950s (see
Gusfield 1963; Hughey 1982). The third component, which has largely
distinguished the New Right from the old, is a significant fraction of
116 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

the capitalist class (from both the corporate elite and small business)
and its political organizers who seek to pull together the first two com¬
ponents into a political force supportive of capitalist development
unfettered by state regulation, community control, civil rights, or inter¬
national law.
Having identified three components, it is important to bear in mind
that these social formations do not form a coherent bloc. On the one
hand, many individuals and groups do not support others in this appar¬
ent alliance. Antiabortion groups that draw disproportionately from
Roman Catholics, for example, usually show little interest in other por¬
tions of the evangelical agenda. Conservative Jews who join with the
religious right must contend with a long tradition of anti-Semitism
among American evangelicals. On the other hand, important conver¬
gences are evident as the same right-wing ideologues and organizers
often appear among the leadership of organizations spanning a diversi¬
ty of issues.
The “profamily” coalition is one response to a number of social indi¬
cators often interpreted as meaning the “breakdown of the nuclear
family.” Interpretation of rising divorce and abortion statistics, the
growing visibility of gay people, and the identification of widespread
wife and child abuse have set feminists and gay liberationists apart
from the recent single-issue movements. Whereas the former point to
dissatisfaction with a family form characterized by male domination
and a limiting division of labor as the source of change, the latter typi¬
cally call for the suppression of the alternatives to the traditional fami¬
ly in favor of state intervention to shore it up. And whereas the
liberationists seek to disestablish the legally bound family system that
presumes and enforces female dependence in favor of the freedom to
choose among domestic alternatives, the traditionalists (who, ironical¬
ly, condemn big government in the next breath) enlist government to
curb working mothers, single parents, and gay and lesbian families
along with child-care centers, refuges for battered wives, and child
custody for gay parents, all of which provide escape routes from the
patriarchal family system. For many people who find that the tradition¬
al arrangement of male wage earner and housewife “works,” feminism
has been experienced as an attack on their personal worth and an invi¬
tation not to fulfillment in a professional job but to abandonment in an
unfriendly labor market. The statistics on female poverty speak clearly
of the casualties of family breakdown as female-headed households
make up the bulk of the very poor.
 The Rise of the New Right 117

During her campaign against equal employment rights for gay peo¬
ple, Anita Bryant worried that “so many married men with children
who don’t have a happy marriage are going into the homosexual bars
for satisfaction” (Kelley 1978, 76). The core of Phyllis Schlafly’s cam¬
paign against the ERA shared similar anxieties, claiming in Frances
FitzGerald’s (1981b) words, “If women behave themselves sexually,
then men will have to marry them, stay married, and support them.
That there exists a trade-off between sexual propriety and financial
security for women is in fact the underlying theme of all the ‘pro-fami¬
ly’ groups” (25). The ERA, opponents worried, “would consign mar¬
ried women to the same unhappy predicament of unwed or deserted
mothers, by lifting from husbands and fathers any special obligation to
support their families” (Boles 1979, 106). Ironically, as advocates of
the free market, the New Right appears to believe that the traditional
trade-off could not survive a free market of alternatives and that too
many would abandon it without state institutionalization.
For inhabitants of advanced capitalist societies, families have been
charged with emotional meaning as havens in a heartless world.
Especially for male wage-earners, the competitive, impersonal labor of
capitalist employment contrasts with the promise of trusting, nuturing
relationships at home. Given this symbolic opposition, any threat to
the family portends a completely contractual world where sex, food
preparation, and child rearing would all presumably become only
impersonal paid services. As Linda Gordon and Allen Hunter
(1977-78) have remarked of the profamily movement, “The images of
the aborted fetuses, the emphasis on the cruelty of abortion, reflects a
fear for the withdrawal of motherly compassion” (14; see also Luker
1984, 163). For the traditionalists, “sexual freedom has dissolved the
bonds of the society, leaving nothing but a quasi-criminal anarchy in
the home, the workplace, and the school” (FitzGerald 1981b, 25).
There is a need, then, that sex not become too easy. Allowing abortion
and contraceptives, especially to youths, or sex education in schools
contributes to lowering the double standard. Indeed, sociological
research on the profamily forces frequently reveals their strongest
support comes from women who are housewives without advanced
education (and thus limited job prospects), with more than three chil¬
dren and with strong church participation: prochoice groups more
often include women who are “educated, affluent, liberal profession¬
als” (Luker 1984, 194-98; see Conover and Gray 1983, 111). For many
whose options appear to be the continued dependence and security of
118 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

the patriarchal family or else abandonment in a heartless labor mar¬

ket, the ERA and gay rights apparently symbolize a future fraught with
difficulties.
The irony of the New Right position is its fervent support of
American capitalism at the same time as it struggles against moderni¬
ty. Like the racists who observe black ghetto poverty and then con¬
clude that black people cause urban decay, the profamily people
confuse cause and effect, problem and solution. Black history shows
that impoverished sharecroppers, attracted northward by the promise
of a better life in industrial employment, found instead residential seg¬
regation, unstable employment, and a white capitalist class with little
interest in investing its profits back into black neighborhoods.
Similarly, the modern gay and lesbian communities, which have creat¬
ed new styles of community and intimacy in modem, anomic societies,
are instead identified with the loss of community that is characteristic
of modem capitalist societies. What is missing from the New Right
analysis is the entire social mechanism that engenders the changes
they so fear, for it is capitalist economic development that opened
alternatives to kin-controlled livelihoods; that offered medical, food,
and domestic services on a cash market; that employed women as a
cheap, docile reserve of labor; and that constructed the heartless labor
market that dissolved kin obligations, thereby creating new pressures
and opportunities that have made new forms of intimacy possible.
Caught in this symbolic vortex, homosexuality for the New Right,
as for the Nazis, signifies the modernity, the sexual freedom, and the
dissolving underpinnings of traditional domesticity. The reactionaries
have never been interested in the experience of gay people or in hear¬
ing their voices, often priding themselves in their ignorance of the
subject and demanding that gay and lesbian speech be silenced as
“obscene,” “immoral,” or “subversive,” thereby giving free reign to
their own projective fantasies of child molesters and sex fiends.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about modern homosexuality is, in
fact, the refounding of intimacy and community on the very sites of
advanced capitalist development: in the commercial sex scene (bars
and baths), in declining urban districts used up and abandoned by
investors, and in the workplace.5 Like racists, whose short-circuited
analysis jumps over the social and historical antecedents of black
poverty, heterosexists protect the causes of their anxieties and blame
those who are trying to cope with the same difficult environment. Like
the Nazis, who found it much easier to attack a visible but relatively
 The Rise of the New Right 119

powerless symbol of modernity, heterosexists displace their fear and

anger of modem society on lesbians and gay men.

Evangelical churches figure prominently in the profamily move¬

ment, both in leadership and in popular support. Symbolic of the once
dominant rural white Protestant class in the history of the United
States, evangelicals have been fighting a century-long campaign to
retain moral and political influence in an increasingly diverse and sec¬
ular society. Since the split of American Protestantism in the 1920s
between a liberal majority, which has accommodated itself to the exi¬
gencies of urban capitalism, and a conservative minority, intent on pre¬
serving the moral absolutism characteristic of the agrarian roots of
Christianity, Evangelicals have manifested several strategies to con¬
serve tradition. When faced with a world where old cognitive maps
prove inapplicable, people can revise their worldviews (as did the lib¬
eral Protestants), withdraw from the larger society, or attempt to pre¬
serve or restore the old order. Each strategy has a very different
political impact, and the Anabaptist and Pentecostal tendencies usually
choose to insulate themselves from secular cultures and abstain from
mainstream politics, some building communities dedicated to preserv¬
ing antiquated life-styles in their entirety (see Hunter 1983).
It is among the Baptists that political activism combines with
Christian traditionalism, but even here there are important divisions.
Black Baptists have always been much more impressed by biblical
themes of brotherhood, freedom, and the promised land than by the
moralism and authoritarianism of the white churches, and Baptists
have been central in the struggle for black civil rights from Martin
Luther King, Jr., to Jesse Jackson. It is conservative white Baptists
who tread the fine line between disengagement from a world of secu¬
lar humanism and political engagement. Biblical injunctions alone,
then, explain very little about religious responses to homosexuality, as
their interpretation is as diverse as the political spectrum itself. White
fundamentalist Baptism has developed a peculiar ideology that George
Lipsitz (1983-84) calls a mixed “cult of self-improvement,” and “reli¬
gion of upward mobility, encouraged adjustment, amicability, opti¬
mism, and conformity” (101). Its preachers rage against the
heterogeneity of American society, which has dislodged the absolutist
vision of fundamentalism from its once privileged status and forced it
to retreat into being no more than one private confession among
many. Their fervent identification with the American state and its
120 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

imperial ambitions, their adoration of nineteenth-century capitalist ide¬

ologies of frontier individualism, and their zealous belief that God is
on their side are a unique construction of Christian doctrine paralleled
only by the other essentially nativist American church, the Mormons.
The peculiarities of white fundamentalist beliefs stem from the soci¬
ological base of the Evangelical churches. When compared with other
denominations, Evangelicals are more often older, married, and
female, have lower education and income, and live in rural areas espe¬
cially in the southern states (Hunter 1983, 49; Lienesch 1982; Simpson
1983, 188, 195). At the opposite extreme, those with no religion are
more often male, single, skilled workers or professionals, and live in
urban centers in the western states. The demographic profile bears
comparison with supporters and opponents of women’s and gay
issues. Opponents of the gay equal rights ordinance in Eugene,
Oregon, were disproportionately older, Evangelical, less educated,
and members of traditional families; supporters were younger, single,
well educated, and unreligious (Gay Writers’ Group 1983, 23). The
profile of opponents to the ERA (when compared with supporters)
shows trends toward women with lower education and income, white
middle-aged men, and rural dwellers who attend church regularly.
Black people supported the ERA overwhelmingly.6 Psychological stud¬
ies of homophobia have also found it correlated with measures of
racial prejudice and endorsement of traditional gender roles, and the
contours of antigay dogma show many of the same traits as other
racisms (MacDonald et al. 1973; Henley and Pincus 1978; Adam 1978,
42-51; Seltzer 1992; Herek 1988).
This is also a very well organized constituency. Of all the religious
groups in the United States, Evangelicals attend church most fre¬
quently and give it money most consistently, also turning out to vote
in elections at the highest rate. This gives Evangelicals political influ¬
ence that extends well beyond their numbers, and new gains in televi¬
sion have greatly increased their apparent strength. Because time and
space in communications media in the United States are commodities
like any other, access to the nation is a simple question of money.
Whereas religious broadcasting was once a public service given to a
variety of local viewpoints, by “1980, ninety percent of all religion on
television was commercial,” bought by the new religious right
(FitzGerald 1981a, 59). Most notable of these are Jerry Falwell’s “Old
Time Gospel Hour,” Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network,
and a host of smaller electronic evangelists who campaign for money
 The Rise of the New Right 121

with images of the starving in Africa, or the scare tactics of lesbian and
gay teachers in the classroom. In addition to the television church,
Falwell’s Moral Majority and Robertson’s Christian Voice issue regu¬
lar direct-mail appeals. A 1981 letter from Falwell warns, “Please
remember, homosexuals do not reproduce! They recruit! And, many
of them are out after my children and your children”; a Christian Voice
fund-raising letter cries, “Can’t let militant gays, ultra liberals, atheists,
porno pushers, pressure Congress into passing Satan’s agenda instead
of God’s” (Young 1982, 307, 309). More recent letters exploit the fear
of AIDS to raise funds for antigay campaigns. In 1979, the gay move¬
ment succeeded in temporarily removing television preacher James
Robison from the air in Dallas and New York, arguing that gay people
should at least have equal time to refute the endless barrage of vilifica¬
tion. Because the television networks refused gay people any time,
they canceled Robison’s show rather than apply the equal-time princi¬
ple. Before long, however, Robison was restored as was.
Finally, the group that has attracted most recent attention has been
corporate families and political organizers seeking to harvest the
social conservatives for the advancement of corporate capitalism and
have scored notable successes in shaping U.S. government policy.
Best known is Richard Viguerie, a fund-raiser for the George Wallace
presidential bid, who compiled a massive mailing list of American con¬
servatives and has proven successful in direct-mail fund-raising for var¬
ious New Right causes. Viguerie, Paul Weyrich (Committee for the
Survival of a Free Congress), Terry Dolan (National Conservative
Political Action Committee), and Howard Phillips (Conservative
Caucus) attracted significant capitalist backing to create a set of politi¬
cal lobbies and policy institutes with which to cultivate the profamily,
single-issue, and religious-right organizations for the capitalist class.
Most evident among the funding sources is the Joseph Coors fami¬
ly (breweries). The Coors corporation has a lengthy record of intimi¬
dating employees with lie-detector tests to root out Communists, gay
people, and union sympathizers, and it has a reputation for excluding
women, blacks, and Chicanos from advancement in the corporation.
One of Harvey Milk’s early political accomplishments was to forward
Howard Wallace’s campaign to remove Coors beer from San
Francisco gay bars. The financial linkages between the American cor¬
porate elite and New Right organizations are not easy to discover, but
well documented is the backing of the Scaife Foundation (Mellon for¬
tune in steel, Gulf Oil, and banking), Pew Freedom Trust (Sun Oil),
122 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

billionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt, the Marriott family (hotels and

amusement parks), the Hearst family (newspapers), Amway corpora¬
tion, California industrialist Robert Fluor, and, according to the
Washington Post, donations from Weyerhaueser, Ford, Reader’s Digest,
Potlach, Mobil, Coca-Cola, Consolidated Foods, Ashland Oil, Citibank,
Republic Steel, General Motors, Morgan Guaranty Trust, and IBM.7
All this political maneuvering occurred against a backdrop of events
directly shaped by the same elite actors. The economic recession of
the late 1970s and the retrenchment of major industries increased
unemployment, creating greater defensiveness in a population anxious
for its livelihood. As American capitalism continued its trend toward
capital-intensive high-technology production at home while relying on
third-world sources for its cheap labor supply, American workers,
women, and minorities were forced toward “concessions” and “conser¬
vation” of their positions and away from the struggle for greater equal¬
ity. As the capitalist class maintains a near monopoly over mass
communications media in the United States, it can as well provide
interpretations, frame debates, and set agendas for social problems
and their solutions, including explanations for economic rollbacks and
the deployment of force both at home and abroad. With overt
McCarthyites returned to power in the Nixon and Reagan administra¬
tions, the impression of a popular “shift to the right” could be present¬
ed (though public opinion polls do not show a change on women’s or
gay issues [Mueller 1983]). With a president in the 1980s who was
directly identified with Hollywood mythologies, well-worn militarist
formulas enjoyed yet another revival. Combining slighted national self¬
esteem with masculinist ideology in a rhetoric of football, war, and
western movies, the Reagan presidency appropriated the military
hardware to arm guerrilla and state armies in Nicaragua, El Salvador,
Angola, and Mozambique.8 The reconsolidation of a national fantasy of
obsessive anticommunism and suppression of movements for self-
determination both at home and abroad stalemated the gay and les¬
bian movement, forcing it into a defensive mode. The Reagan
presidency created a uniquely effective union of state and media to
legitimize the dismantling of state services and civil liberties.
The emergence of the New Right cannot be chronicled without not¬
ing the participation of apparently homosexual people within reac¬
tionary organizations. In several instances, New Right adherents have
been exposed in homosexual activities through police entrapment or
by the press. Congressmen Jon Hinson, a Mississippi ultraconserva-
 The Rise of the New Right 123

tive, and Robert Bauman, once president of the far-right Young

Americans for Freedom, are cases in point. Both had voted against
progay legislation in Congress. Others include the Reverend Leo
McKenzie, communications director of the archdiocese of
Philadelphia and vocal opponent of gay rights; Billy James Hargis, a
prominent fundamentalist preacher of the 1950s; and Nixon Supreme
Court nominee Harold Carswell.9 All were drawn from the same
groups as other New Right followers and no doubt had had no contact
with the gay world, experiencing their homosexuality as a guilty
secret scarcely admitted to themselves, much less to other people, and
carefully concealed behind what Laud Humphreys calls a “breastplate
of righteousness.”
More problematic is the case of Terry Dolan, director of the
National Conservative Political Action Committee, a major New Right
force, who took a libertarian position, regretting the moralism of the
religious right while opposing civil rights legislation of any kind in the
hope that big government might be reduced in general.10 Emboldened
by the gains of the 1970s, gay conservatism came to the fore most
notably in the formation of Republican party gay clubs and in gay busi¬
ness organizations. Nearly always white (upper) middle-class men,
whose class position has apparently overcome the implications of their
homosexuality, they fervently wish for an exception in conservative
ideology to allow them the place appropriate to their backgrounds.
Hard times often stimulate cautious or conservative responses
among those under attack, as the homophile movement of the 1950s
demonstrates. And certainly repression causes social movements to
reevaluate their tactics and wonder if everything would be different
had they taken another course of action. In 1932, a member of the
Nazi militia wrote to the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin
to condemn its law-reform policy, claiming that if only the committee
had presented gay men as “healthy, regular guys, boy scouts, army
officers, or athletes,” instead of talking so much about sex reform,
then homosexuality would not have had such bad press. The Nazis, he
assured the committee, were willing to ignore one’s private life—only
the real deviants like pedophiles would be sterilized (Stiimke and
Finkler 1981, 103-10; my translation). It is perhaps not surprising that
in periods of intensified persecution accommodationist and conserva¬
tive strategies should again come forward and voices should again be
raised to argue that everything would be all right “if only” gay people
would get good press through effective image making, acting
124 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

respectably, and abandoning leathermen, boy lovers, and butch dykes

(e.g., Kirk and Madsen 1989).

Under Attack in the United Kingdom, Canada, and

Australia
In the nations of the British legal tradition, there is less reason to
talk of a New Right than in the United States. With much smaller evan¬
gelical populations, fewer single-issue groups, and none of the trap¬
pings of the central power of the capitalist world, antigay practices of
the late 1970s and early 1980s show considerable continuity with earli¬
er periods and little, if any, distinction need be made between old and
new conservatism. All three nations, nevertheless, have been subject
to the same trends of the world capitalist economy and, with a shared
language and cultural tradition, have not been impervious to develop¬
ments in the United States. The rightward drift of the United States
emboldened moral entrepreneurs, the police, and conventional con¬
servatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
In the United Kingdom, Evangelicals formed the Festival of Light
as early as 1971, and in 1976, Mary Whitehouse, a longtime cam¬
paigner against “declining morals” on the British Broadcasting
Corporation (BBC), had Gay News charged with “blasphemy” for pub¬
lishing a poem on Christ. Though the blasphemy law was virtually
moribund, not having been used since 1921, she won the conviction
of its editor, who received an 18-month suspended sentence and a
£500 fine; Gay News itself was fined £1,000 plus court costs. A Gay
News defense fund eventually paid costs after the House of Lords
upheld the conviction in 1979 despite massive public demonstrations
and outrage at the absence of press freedom revealed by the convic¬
tion (see Weeks 1977, 205, 268; Weeks 1981, 277, 281; Tracey and
Morrison 1979, 9-17).
The Whitehouse campaign proved to be only an opening salvo in a
series of assaults on lesbians and gay men consolidated by the
Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. Closely aligned with
the Reagan administration in the United States, the Thatcher govern¬
ment reasserted the moral regulation of the state through a series of
symbolic acts. In 1984, two gay men were fined £100 for the crime of
kissing on a London street; police staged several raids on gay pubs;
and Customs impounded much of the inventories of two gay and les¬
bian bookstores—London’s Gay’s the Word and Edinburgh’s Lavender
 The Rise of the New Right 125

Menace (Jeffery-Poulter 1991:168-69). In 1988, the Conservative gov¬

ernment in the House of Commons passed Clause 28, which forbids
“teaching ... the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family
relationship,” sparking a demonstration of 10,000 protesters in the
streets of London (223). When the Commons bill appeared before the
House of Lords in February 1989, three lesbians descended a rope lad¬
der from the visitors’ gallery to the House floor to dramatize their out¬
rage; others succeeded in breaking into a news broadcast of the BBC
to bring their appeal to the British people (Sudell 1988). The outcome
has been that “lesbian and gay groups are failing to get rooms to meet
in on council property, failing to get grants for equipment and workers,
[and] failing to have journals and books published with council sup¬
port” (Green 1990, 6). In 1989, British courts were convicting some
3,000 men for mutually consenting acts of sex by reviving once “dead
letter” laws containing sweeping references to “public order,” “public
morals,” and “indecency” (Tatchell 1992,89).
In Canada, a wave of police raids from 1975 to 1981 owed much to
conservative governments already in power for more than a genera¬
tion—the first being the Jean Drapeau administration of Montreal and
the second the Conservative government of Ontario. Following wide¬
spread practice in North America, Montreal police launched a
“cleanup” campaign in the months preceding the opening of the 1976
Olympic Games, descending on seven bars and a bathhouse in four
raids to intimidate the city’s gay men and lesbians. Using nineteenth-
century bawdy house laws that permitted the arrest of everyone
“found in” a place “resorted to for the practice of acts of indecency,”
police could undermine the 1969 decriminalization law by allowing
judges to define gay conduct as indecent. In 1976, a bath raid in
Montreal seized 89 men and a membership list of 7,000 and another in
Ottawa netted 27 men and 3,000 names. The raids reenergized the
flagging gay and lesbian movements in Quebec, leading to the forma¬
tion of the Association pour les Droits des Gai(e)s du Quebec
(ADGQ). When Montreal police struck again at a popular gay bar in
October 1977, arresting 145 as “found-ins” and 8 for “gross indecen¬
cy,” the ADGQ mobilized demonstrations that paralyzed the city core
and organized a defense committee that fought each case through
years of litigation. (Those who refused to plead guilty were ultimately
acquitted after six years in court.)
The Drapeau administration was a holdover from an earlier era of
Quebec politics, taking its cues from the Catholic Right. In the 1960s,
126 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Quebec’s own New Left formed as a nationalist movement intent on

preserving French-language culture in North America without the
patronage of the Roman Catholic church or the domination of Anglo-
Canadian capital. As a participant in the nationalist alignment, the
ADGQ pressed the Parti Quebecois, which had recently come to
power as the provincial government, to remedy the Montreal persecu¬
tion. Clearly not averse to tweaking the noses of the old guard, the
government added “sexual orientation” to the Quebec Charter of
Human Rights on 15 December 1977 (see Sylvestre 1979, 57-60,
141-47; Jackson and Persky 1982, 229-30).
In Toronto, police invaded the offices of the journal, the Body
Politic, on 30 December 1977, ostensibly to seize evidence on a charge
of “using the mails to transmit immoral, indecent and scurrilous mate¬
rial.” The charge arose from the November publication of an article
called “Men Loving Boys Loving Men,” which took a sober look at
pedophilia. Though the prosecution needed only a single copy of the
journal to press its case, the police carried away 12 packing crates of
material, including the journal’s financial records and subscription
lists, leading to fears that police were compiling “pink lists” of gay
Canadians for further persecution. Legal proceedings continued
through 1978 as Renaissance International, Canada’s Evangelical
moral crusaders, sponsored Anita Bryant on a national tour and
Toronto police began the first of several bathhouse raids in
December. In February 1979, a Toronto court acquitted the journal,
but the Conservative provincial government appealed, keeping the
Body Politic in the courts with appeals and new charges until its ulti¬
mate acquittal in 1983. Perhaps more significant than the actual
charges was the province’s ability to curb a dissident press by impos¬
ing a six-year financial drain on a largely volunteer and nonprofit col¬
lective.
In 1979, the progressive mayor of Toronto, John Sewell, spoke out
against the provincial prosecution of the Body Politic, creating a furor
that spilled over into the 1980 city election. With George Hislop, the
city’s first openly gay candidate running with the mayor’s endorse¬
ment, the campaign attracted antigay pamphleteering from
Renaissance International, the city police, and the ultraright fringe.
Both Hislop and Sewell went down to defeat in November. (Sewell
increased his popular vote from 39 to 47 percent but lost to a single
conservative candidate; two candidates had split the conservative vote
 The Rise of the New Right 127

in the previous election, which had brought him to the mayor’s office
[Casey 1981; Jackson 1980-81; Fleming 1983].)
Three months later the Conservative provincial government called
an election for 19 March 1981. On 5 February, the same week of the
election call, 150 Toronto police officers arrested 286 “found-ins” and
20 “keepers” in a massive raid on several bathhouses, thereby arrest¬
ing the largest number of Canadians in a single action since the decla¬
ration of the War Measure’s Act in 1970 to stem the activities of the
Front pour la Liberation du Quebec. In a cynical bid to capitalize on
the preceding municipal election, the Conservatives succeeded in win¬
ning away seats from the New Democratic Party (a long if ambivalent
supporter of civil rights for gay people) in Toronto, returning to power
with a parliamentary majority.
It was also at the height of the Anita Bryant campaign in North
America that Australian police took an unexpectedly harsh turn. Police
attacked a Gay Mardi Gras rally of about 2,000 people in Sydney on 24
June 1978, beating demonstrators and arresting 23 women and 30
men. Demonstrators who had not been arrested maintained an
overnight vigil at the Darlinghurst police station in solidarity with
those who had been seized. With Mary Whitehouse arriving at the
invitation of the local Festival of Light, a Gay Solidarity Group formed
to defend the Mardi Gras 53. With sympathetic protests directed
against New South Wales tourist offices in Melbourne, Adelaide, and
Brisbane, the Gay Solidarity Group on 15 July marched on the
Darlinghurst station, where 14 more were taken by police. By the end
of the winter, the toll had risen to 184 when courts threw out most of
the charges.11
In Canada and Australia, the unintended consequence of police
actions was the revitalization of gay organizations that had fallen into
some disarray in the 1970s. The day after the bath raids in Toronto
and again two weeks later, 3,000 marched on the No. 52 Division
police station, spawning a Right to Privacy Committee that became the
largest gay organization of the city in the 1980s (Hannon 1980).
Chapter Seven

Civil Rights and Electoral Politics

German sociologist Max Weber once defined the state as “an associa¬
tion that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence”
(Gerth and Mills 1958, 334), and it is state power that has primarily
preoccupied the gay and lesbian movements of the 1980s. It is per¬
haps a sign of the maturity of the movement that activists have suffi¬
ciently learned the rules of the game to have begun to make
significant headway through law reform in many countries. No longer
unorganized individuals easily controlled by the state, gay people
have, in the modern era, followed some well-tested routes toward
political efficacy. Like the Irish and Italians in the United States in the
first decades of this century, or the blacks of today, gay men and les¬
bians have taken on many of the traits of ethnicity to assert their polit¬
ical will. Increasingly organized through an indigenous press, in
neighborhoods, at work, and at church, lesbians and gay men have
forged a social movement that, like others, seeks to give them a voice
in their own future and to defend themselves against the violence of
the state and of others.
In the modern liberal democracies of the European Union, North
America, Australia, and New Zealand, issues and struggles have devel¬
oped common patterns, such that annual conferences of the
International Lesbian and Gay Association (founded in Coventry,
England, in 1979) can provide a useful forum for sharing experiences
and developing new policies. The 1980s and early 1990s have also
seen the unprecedented emergence of fledgling organizations in sev-

128
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 129

eral state socialist and third-world countries. The political rules and
social priorities of these new groups in Eastern Europe, Latin
America, Asia, and Africa differ sufficiently from the mature move¬
ments such that fruitful world comparisons shift from comparisons
among liberal democracies (Chapter 9 reviews developments else¬
where) .
This section on civil rights and electoral politics focuses, then, on
political gains in liberal democracies. The cutting edge of legislative
change has been the introduction of sexual orientation into human
rights codes, which outlaw discrimination in employment, housing,
and state services. Notable accomplishments in civil rights law, how¬
ever, cannot distract attention from the fact that many jurisdictions—
especially in the United States—continue to criminalize sexual
contacts between men and subject gay men to arbitrary police and
judicial harassment for the expression of mutually consenting acts of
sexuality and affection. (Lesbians are typically ignored in these laws.)
Lesbians and gay men now have extensive experience in holding
elected office in city, intermediate, and national assemblies on four con¬
tinents. Still, despite these developments, conservative and neoconserv¬
ative sectors of modem governments continue to play out local “sex
scandals” through moral frameworks that have shown little change
since 1897. Medieval Western presumptions about homosexuality live
on, especially in the practices of police and military organizations,
orthodox churches, New Right lobbies, and aristocratic remnants.
Just what the gay civil rights movement “wants” is summed up in
this exemplary statement of the French Comite d’Urgence Anti-
Repression Homosexuelle (CUARH) adopted in 1979:

• Abolition of the law fixing a higher age of consent for homo¬

sexual relations than for heterosexual
• Addition of “sex” and “sexual orientation” to the antiracism
laws that ban discrimination
• No discrimination in employment or housing
• Custody and visitation rights for gay parents (which would
“suppress the paradox which wants homosexuals to be reproached
for not having children, then takes them away when they do have
them”)
• Recognition of “social, administrative, judicial and fiscal rights
of two people living together as a homosexual couple”
130 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

• Right to adopt children

• Destruction of police files on lesbians and gay men
• An end to isolation of gay people within prisons
• Deletion of “homosexuality” from the World Health
Organization classification of mental illness
• An end to medical research and therapy to change sexual ori¬
entation
• Compensation for gay victims of Nazism and recognition of
them in memorials
• Right of asylum to persons persecuted in other countries
because of their homosexuality
• International recognition of the problem of antigay
intolerance1

As the momentum of New Right campaigns faltered in the United

States in the mid-1980s, gay and lesbian rights began to reappear on
public agendas. The troubles of the New Right became increasingly
evident in a series of sex scandals involving the Christian fundamental¬
ist leadership beginning in 1987, and the failure of Pat Robertson to
attract significant support in a bid for the Republican presidential nom¬
ination in 1988. Despite the discovery of AIDS in 1981 and a period of
public hysteria in the English-speaking world around AIDS in the mid-
1980s, the decades of work by lesbian and gay organizations began to
come to fruition. Gay men and lesbians became increasingly active
participants in all spheres of civil society as they organized at work, in
communities, in churches, in health and social services, in sport, and
in the media, education, and the arts.

Winning Human Rights Protection

The struggle for the inclusion of “sexual orientation” in human
rights legislation is an attempt to provide legal recourse for people
denied employment or shelter because of their homosexuality. It is a
law reform that demands no more than the realization of the self-pro¬
claimed principle of liberal democracies that everyone receive equal
and impartial treatment before the law and that people be evaluated
according to their job performance and not by criteria irrelevant to
their competence. The passage of human rights legislation has fol¬
lowed a pattern of first winning hard-fought gains at the grass-roots
level in labor unions and voluntary associations and then at municipal,
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 131

state, or provincial levels, beginning with the 1977 amendment in

Quebec, and finally achieving national human rights guarantees, pio¬
neered by Norway in 1981.
In the United States, gay and lesbian organizations succeeded in
forging an unusual consensus in Wisconsin that included endorse¬
ments from the whole range of religious authorities. With even Roman
Catholic and Baptist officials agreeing that gay people should not suf¬
fer discrimination despite the churches’ rejection of homosexuality
itself, the reform became a no-risk proposition for Wisconsin politi¬
cians who amended the state’s human rights law in 1982. In California,
civil rights legislation passed the state house and senate twice, only to
be vetoed by successive Republican governors. The second veto in
1991 provoked violent demonstrations in the major cities, and the law
was later signed in a more limited form to confirm an existing judicial
ban on discrimination in employment. Massachusetts joined the trend
with a human rights law in 1989, Hawaii and Connecticut in 1991, and
Vermont and New Jersey in 1992. In 1990, the human rights law in St.
Paul, Minnesota, which had been repealed during the Anita Bryant
campaign, was restored, surviving a second referendum challenge in
1991. A statewide law followed in 1993.
In Australia, New South Wales pioneered human rights reform in
1982 despite stiff opposition from church groups. A coalition of
Anglican, Salvation Army, Roman Catholic, and New South Wales
Council of Churches officials campaigned from the pulpits to suppress
the antidiscrimination bill. The Labour government, nevertheless,
added “sexual orientation” to its human rights law despite the shrill
claims of television evangelist Fred Niles that homosexuals would be
seizing children from school classrooms as a result. Nine years later
the state of South Australia followed with an amendment of its own
(Anderson 1991, 39).
In Canada, Ontario became the second province to adopt human
rights legislation in 1986. The reform followed on the collapse of a 42-
year reign of the Conservative party, when a minority Liberal govern¬
ment, dependent on the New Democratic Party (NDP), came to
power. When the Liberals introduced a bill to amend the human rights
law to protect the disabled, they could not ignore an NDP amendment
to include sexual orientation, and the bill succeeded despite a concert¬
ed campaign against it by the province’s Roman Catholic hierarchy
and evangelical preachers (Adam 1993c). The following year, law
reform was generated by NDP governments in Manitoba and the
132 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Yukon. With these precedents, human rights protection for lesbians

and gay men became almost uncontroversial, with even the Conserva¬
tive government in Nova Scotia making the change in 1991. In the
same year, the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications
Commission added sexual orientation to its regulation banning hate
propaganda from Canadian broadcasting. New Brunswick amended
its human rights act in 1992, and British Columbia and Saskatchewan
in 1993.
Norway’s law was initiated by Conservative parliamentarian
Wenche Lowzow, who discovered her own lesbianism and entered a
relationship with Kim Friele (then general secretary of Norway’s
major gay organization, DNF-48) while her party was part of a govern¬
ing Labour, Centre, and Conservative coalition. The 1981 law, drafted
on the model of legislation protecting women and minorities, extends
beyond protection against discrimination to include a provision against
hate propaganda. The law bans “statements of an aggravated insulting
nature” and “statements inciting violence” against “homosexual ten¬
dencies, way of life or orientation” in addition to the standard safe¬
guards against discriminatory acts. The Supreme Court of Norway
delivered its first conviction under the antidefamation law in 1984, rul¬
ing in a 4-1 decision that television evangelist Hans Bratterud had vio¬
lated the law by demanding in a radio broadcast the dismissal of all
homosexuals from leading positions. The court reasoned that “it is no
encroachment on the freedom of worship that qualified insults to vul¬
nerable minority groups are forbidden.”2
Also in 1981 the Council of Europe passed an equal rights resolu¬
tion, and in 1984 the European Parliament adopted perhaps the most
comprehensive statement on the civil rights of lesbians and gay men
to date (Pronk 1985). In 1985 the French National Assembly added
sexual orientation to the antiracism law, Denmark followed in 1987, as
did Sweden (with a law banning discrimination by commercial organi¬
zations) and the Netherlands in 1992 (Tielman and Hammelburg 1993,
308, 329). The Danish, Swedish, and Dutch laws, like their Norwegian
counterpart, contain a provision banning hate propaganda against gay
people. Ireland is unique in having banned “incitement to hatred”
against gay people without having legislated protection against dis¬
crimination because of sexual orientation (Norris 1993,161).
The achievement of a national human rights law in New Zealand in
1993 is especially remarkable given the acrimonious national debate
that preceded the decriminalization of male homosexual relations only
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 133

eight years previously. At that time, the lesbian and gay movement suc¬
ceeded in having the law reformed in the midst of an intensive antigay
campaign led by the Coalition of Concerned Citizens, organized by the
Reformed Churches, Pentecostals, the Assembly of God, the Salvation
Army, and four reactionary members of parliament (Parkinson 1988).
For every legal breakthrough, however, there have been dozens of
legislative bills and referenda that have denied equal rights for les¬
bians and gay men or even abolished existing protections. New Right
coalitions in the United States have continued to generate homopho¬
bic panics in several locations. Voters in Houston repealed a civil
rights ordinance by a 92 percent margin in the midst of an AIDS hyste¬
ria created by a coalition composed of the Chamber of Commerce,
real estate developers, doctors and lawyers, and the Republican party.
Repeal supporters were typically highly homophobic, fundamentalist
Christians with low education and income and longtime residence in
Texas (Gibson and Tedin 1988; Lang 1989). Referendum repeals have
also succeeded in Santa Clara County, California, in 1980; Tacoma,
Washington, Irvine, California, and Athens, Ohio, in 1989; Tampa,
Florida, in 1992; and Cincinnati, Ohio in 1993. The apparent “gap” in
antigay initiatives in the mid-1980s was due to New Right attention
being turned to referenda designed to penalize or quarantine people
living with HIV at that time.
The 1992 Republican party convention attempted to attract these
voters behind a “traditional family values” banner in an unsuccessful
campaign for the presidency, however, in the same election. 53 per¬
cent of Colorado voters approved a referendum initiative that preemp¬
tively banned human rights protection for gay men and lesbians
thereby overturning city laws in Denver, Boulder, and Aspen
(Wockner 1992b). A similar initiative failed at the same time in
Oregon by a 55 percent vote, though a set of rural counties attempted
to reintroduce a ban in 1993 despite a state law prohibiting local
human rights repeals. Financial support and leadership for the repeal
drive was strongest among small businesspeople and in “mid-sized
towns and semi-rural areas within an hour’s drive of larger metropoli¬
tan centers” (Burris 1993). The repeal vote was highest in counties
with lower education and lower income levels.
While several national, as well as state or provincial governments,
have responded to the gay and lesbian movement in assuring equal
citizenship rights, others continue to criminalize same-sex erotic con¬
tact, especially for men. Among European Union Countries, the last
134 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

hold-outs from decriminalization were resolved in the late 1980s and

early 1990s. These last decriminalizations primarily involved local gay
and lesbian organizations securing rulings from the European Court
of Human Rights against areas of current or former British administra¬
tion. A suit brought by Jeffrey Dudgeon of the Northern Ireland Gay
Rights Association led to decriminalization in 1982 Qeffery-Poulter
1991, 151; Tatchell 1992, 26). A similar action brought by openly gay
Irish senator David Norris (1993) won a court order for decriminaliza¬
tion in 1988, but the government of Ireland waited five more years
before complying in 1993. The Isle of Man and Gibraltar dropped their
antihomosexual laws in 1992.
Sometimes decriminalization has been accomplished only at the
price of retaining discriminatory holdover legislation or of imposing
new restrictions on the rights of gay men and lesbians. The 1969
reform in the Federal Republic of Germany created an exemption to
Paragraph 175 for consenting adults in private but did not abolish the
sodomy law itself. In October 1990, 6,000 people marched in the
streets of Berlin against Paragraph 175 as the reunified German gov¬
ernment sought to reconcile the criminal codes of the East and West
(Schock 1990). The German government ultimately adopted the posi¬
tion of the former German Democratic Republic, which had abolished
Paragraph 175 in 1988, finally accomplishing an objective the gay
movement had set a century previously. Two of the new federal states,
Brandenburg and Thuringia, also wrote “sexual orientation” into the
human rights clauses of their constitutions.
In Austria and Finland, decriminalization in 1970 and 1971 was cou¬
pled with press muzzle rules providing jail sentences for “incitement”
to homosexuality and for membership in a gay group. When the
Finnish organization Sexuaalinen Tasavertaisuus (SETA) demonstrat¬
ed publicly against the law in 1981, 20 were arrested, but no charges
were laid. Similarly, Homosexuelle Initiative (HOSI), formed in Vienna
in 1979 (and later in four other cities), published a journal and in 1982
opened a gay community center (Rosa Lila Villa) with assistance from
the Vienna city council, despite a state law suppressing gay publicity
(Manson 1985; Hauer et al. 1984, ll).3
By 1990, all but one of the Australian states had decriminalized
homosexuality, leaving Tasmania in the grips of a Christian fundamen¬
talist campaign to retain its antisodomy law (Miller 1992, 274).
By contrast, the United States lags well behind the record of the
other advanced capitalist nations with almost half of the states still
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 135

criminalizing homosexuality. The “unfree” states are concentrated in

the more conservative southern and Rocky Mountain regions. The
District of Columbia decriminalized only after two tries, when in 1993
the U.S. Congress refrained from vetoing the reform, which it had
done previously.
The judicial record regarding homosexuality is mixed in the United
States. Lower courts have generally upheld students’ right of assembly
when universities have refused to recognize gay and lesbian campus
groups, even overturning a 1981 Florida law that would have cut off
state funding to colleges that tolerated gay campus organizations.
Despite this precedent, the gay and lesbian students association of the
University of Alabama was forced into court in the early 1990s when
the state legislature outlawed it. After seven years of court battles
sponsored by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the
National Gay Rights Advocates, the U.S. Supreme Court in 1985
struck down the Oklahoma law that banned the favorable mention of
homosexuality in schools as an unconstitutional interference with free
speech. The decision came on a perilous 4-4 tie vote that resulted in
the upholding of a lower court ruling. In June 1986 the Supreme Court
ruled in a 5-4 decision that states retain the right to criminalize private
sexual conduct between consenting adults. The Bowers v. Hardwick
case began in 1982 when a police offer arrested Michael Hardwick, an
Atlanta gay man, in Hardwick’s own bedroom and charged him with
violating the Georgia law that declares “any sexual act involving the
sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another” to be a
felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. As the judges who
presided over the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s retired, their
successors have been more and more conservative. By 1992 two-
thirds of the U.S. federal judiciary were appointed by the Reagan and
Bush administrations, which had accumulated a 12-year record of gut¬
ting civil rights legislation, thus dimming the prospects of further
decriminalization through the courts (Stoddard 1992, 555).
From time to time the judiciary has even acted complicitly with the
murderers of gay men. From the 1962 murder of former Labour party
chairman, George Brinham, in the United Kingdom to the 1992 mur¬
der of Joe Godfrey in Australia (Horsfall 1988, 22; Wockner 1992c, 7),
many courts have been willing to hand out very light sentences or out¬
right acquittals to murderers who claim their victims have made sexu¬
al advances toward them. In some cases of “queer bashing,” the
“respectable” middle-class background of the murderers has sufficed
136 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

to convince judges to give probationary or suspended sentences even

where sexual approaches were not alleged but the victim was thought
to be gay (see Monk 1986; Lesk, Popert and Taylor 1986; Comstock
1991).

Recognizing Domestic Partnerships

Where sexual orientation protection has already been won, the
question of the legal recognition of gay and lesbian couples has
emerged as a primary concern of movement groups. If discriminatory
treatment is to be overcome, so the argument goes, does that not also
require that same-sex relationships be able to take part in the rights
and responsibilities of marriage and family? Opponents to this trend
have noted that even heterosexuals are fleeing marriage and tradition¬
al family forms and have questioned why lesbians and gay men would
want to buy into a bankrupt legal relationship fraught with problems of
domination, domestic violence, and state supervision. Yet it is equally
clear that there are many same-sex couples who are disadvantaged by
exclusion from the legal benefits bestowed on married couples in
inheritance, pensions, taxation, immigration, housing, workplace
perquisites, health care, and parenting (Bell 1991). Some couples have
been innovating rites of their own to celebrate their lives together; oth¬
ers have been marking their relationships with ceremonies of holy
union at Metropolitan Community Churches (Sherman 1992).
For jurisdictions primarily in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, and
Canada, where sexual orientation protection is combined with existing
legal recognition of unmarried heterosexual couples, the inclusion of
gay and lesbian relationships has been coming about through judicial
or legislative action. The usual approach has been to allow “marriage”
per se to remain an essentially heterosexual category while conferring
a similar range of rights and obligations on same-sex couples as
“domestic partners.” The Danish lesbian and gay association, LBL/F-
48, won comprehensive legal recognition of gay and lesbian relation¬
ships in 1989 with a “registered partnership” system. The bill passed
through a free vote in the Danish parliament despite the unwillingness
of the Conservative party to adopt it as government legislation
(Hansen and Jorgensen 1993). The Danish rules require one partner
to be Danish, withhold adoption or joint custody rights, and apply the
existing liberal divorce regulations. Unregistered gay couples retain
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 137

the rights of “unmarried cohabitants” to pension, death duty, and

housing. On 1 October 1989, pioneering activists Axel Axgil, then 74,
and Eigil Axgil, 67, became the first registered partnership, and they
celebrated their union by riding through the streets of Copenhagen in
a jubilant parade. By 1992, 809 male couples and 492 female couples
had registered and 17 had divorced (Wockner 1993, 7). Norway
became the second nation with a domestic partnership law in 1993.
Sweden followed in 1994.
The Netherlands, Australia, and Canada have a patchwork of
domestic partners’ rights precedents set by city officials, local courts,
and provincial governments. Immigration department regulations in
the Netherlands and Australia now permit citizens to sponsor foreign
same-sex partners under their family reunification policies (Hendriks
and Ruygrok 1993; Hart 1993). In two decisions in 1993, the Canadian
Supreme Court refused to recognize gay relationships. In one case,
longtime activist Jim Egan, then 72, was denied a spousal allowance
for his lover of 45 years, John Nesbit (Brown 1993). In the other, Brian
Mossop was denied a day off work to attend the funeral of his lover’s
father. On the other hand, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled in 1989
that Les Beau had to be permitted to visit his lover, Tim Veysey, in
prison under the Private Family Visiting Program or “conjugal visit”
program. In this case, the law already provided for a range of eligible
visitors extending well beyond the category of spouse. Apart from
these court decisions, a series of rulings show a trend toward recogni¬
tion: the Ontario and New Brunswick governments extended spousal
benefits to provincial employees; the Ontario Human Rights
Commission struck the “other sex” requirement from its definition of
spouse; and the British Columbia Supreme Court added domestic
partners into the province’s Medical Services Plan. A comprehensive
domestic partnership bill failed in the Ontario legislature in 1994.
In the United States, much of the attention around domestic part¬
ners’ rights focused on the Sharon Kowalski case. Severely disabled in
a 1983 car crash, Sharon Kowalski was seized from Karen Thompson
by Kowalski’s homophobic parents through a 1985 court order.
Thompson struggled for six years against an onslaught of “experts”
and lawyers to legally validate Kowalski’s decision to return to her
home with Thompson. After Kowalski’s father resigned as her
guardian in 1990, a court awarded guardianship to a third party,
because Thompson’s organizing efforts to win Kowalski back had pub-
138 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

licized their lesbianism. They were finally reunited by an appeals court

in 1991 (Thompson and Andrzejewski 1988; Schmitz 1991). A dozen
cities in California and northern states have recognized domestic part¬
nerships among their own employees and two of them (Seattle and
San Francisco) survived referendum repeal propositions in 1990.
Congress vetoed a similar attempt to extend domestic partners’ rights
to city employees in Washington, D.C., in 1993.
Domestic partners’ rights, then, are still very much a frontier of
movement work in most places. The imposition of heterosexist
requirements has been especially harsh regarding the custody of chil¬
dren. While a very few exceptional adoptions of children by lesbians
or gay men have occurred, the courts continue to seize children from
gay and lesbian households despite the competence and care of par¬
ents (Lewin 1993), frequently subjecting them to various closet rules:
a lover must be absent or sleep in a separate bed; the child cannot stay
overnight; or the parent will lose visiting rights if he or she lives with
someone of the same sex (Ryder 1990; Eaton 1990).

Attaining Elected Office

Against the expectations of many, openly lesbian and gay candi¬
dates for political office have been able to be elected in a wide variety
of places and a number of political parties have endorsed the idea of at
least basic civil rights for all regardless of sexual orientation. Party
support has come first from Social Democratic (or Green) and
Communist parties (or their successors) and occasionally from tradi¬
tional liberal or centrist parties once precedents have already been set.
In 1977, the French Socialist party, as well as the French and Italian
Communist parties, adopted gay rights planks. In 1981, the Spanish
Socialist Workers (PSOE) and Communist (PCE) parties followed suit
(Mirabet i Mullol 1985, 446-48). With the French Socialists and
Spanish PSOE in power in the early 1980s, both nations moved for¬
ward to equalize their laws. An early act of the French government
extended amnesty to 156 gay men convicted under a discriminatory
age-of-consent law and to abolish the “homo squad” of the Paris police.
In 1982, the age of consent was equalized for all at 15, and under a
general plan to regularize dozens of pirate radio stations, the govern¬
ment licensed Frequence Gaie, the first full-time gay radio station in
the world (but not until the station’s listeners demonstrated in force
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 139

through Paris street to support its mandate).4 In 1985 the National

Assembly added sexual orientation to the antiracism law. The Spanish
Socialists removed homosexuality from the repressive “Social
Danger” law in 1979. Passed in 1970 by the previous fascist govern¬
ment of Francisco Franco, the law had declared gay people a social
danger in the manner of the Gaullist law of 1960, thereby providing a
warrant for police persecution. In 1984 homosexuality was removed as
an offense from the Spanish Code of Military Justice.
In Italy and the United Kingdom, where leftist parties dominated
city politics and conservatives held national power, lesbian and gay
organizations won municipal support for community centers in several
cities. The 28th of June Cultural Center in Bologna opened in 1982
with the assistance of Communist city administrators, while Labour
city councils in Manchester and London also funded lesbian and gay
community centers in England in the 1980s. The Conservative nation¬
al government, however, later abolished the London council altogeth¬
er, and the London center was not able to survive for long afterward.
Openly lesbian and gay politicians have demonstrated, against the
pessimists, that homosexuality is not an insuperable barrier in gaining
the confidence of the people and that in many instances, majorities of
voters are willing to understand the concerns of gay people and under¬
stand the relationship of those concerns to their own interests. To see
just how such successes have been achieved, it is best to distinguish
among three styles of publicness: (1) those elected primarily in
Europe as part of a party list, (2) incumbents who come out after win¬
ning at least one election, and (3) those winning elected office as open¬
ly gay candidates in district elections.
The key to public office in party list systems is to win the approval
of the party, which is allocated parliamentary seats according to its
proportion of the popular vote. Angelo Pezzana, elected on the Radical
party ticket in Piedmont in Italy, and Herbert Rusche (1984b) and
Christina Schenk, with the German Green party, were nominated to
parliament by parties formed from coalitions of progressive social
movements (such as feminist, ecological, peace, student, and civil
rights movements) where the gay and lesbian movement is an explicit
participant. Gay candidates have also succeeded at the city level in
Italy, with Paolo Hutter elected in Milan in 1985 and 1990 and Franco
Grillini and Beppe Ramina in Bologna in 1990, all with the Communist
party (Consoli 1990, 132). The inclusion of Eveline Esthuis as one of
140 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

two Communist representatives in the parliament of the Netherlands

follows the party’s adoption of a stronger feminist orientation in the
early 1980s.
The experience of incumbent parliamentarians who either came out
voluntarily or were exposed is more mixed. Wenche Lowzow was
retained, after coming out, on the Norwegian Conservative list
through one election but dropped in 1985 following the dissolution of
the Conservative alliance with the social democrats. Maureen
Colquhoun, a British Labour member of parliament (M.P.), endured a
press expose of her relationship with the editor of the lesbian journal
Sappho and lost her seat in the 1979 Conservative sweep of the United
Kingdom (see Colquhoun 1980). Chris Smith, a British Labour M.P.
who came out in 1984, was subsequently reelected twice.
In the United States, Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, Democratic
party congressional representatives from Massachusetts, have also
won reelection in their districts. Svend Robinson, the New Democratic
Party M.P. from suburban Vancouver who came out publicly in 1988,
won two subsequent elections even despite the sharp diminution of
his party’s fortunes in 1993. As well, Irish senator David Norris (1993)
has been reelected since 1987, while Swedish Social Democratic M.P.
Kent Carlsson has also gone public.
Since the breakthrough election of Elaine Nobel to the Massachusetts
House in 1974 and Minnesota senator Allan Spear’s coming out in the
same year, a number of state and local politicians in the United States
have employed a similar winning formula. Rarely sponsored by busi¬
ness, privilege, or wealth, openly lesbian and gay candidates have
won on popular platforms combining the concerns of racial minori¬
ties, feminists, tenants, the elderly, neighborhood activists, labor
union members, environmentalists, and, of course, gay people them¬
selves. David Scondras’s election to the Boston City Council is a case
in point. A longtime activist in tenants’ organizations, health centers,
and food co-ops, Scondras was instrumental in exposing a massive
arson-for-profit conspiracy where land speculators and landlords had
been burning their buildings (dispossessing and sometimes killing
tenants in the process) in order to collect insurance payments
(Goldsmith 1981; Brady 1983). He won a fifth term in 1991. By 1992
there were some 75 openly gay and lesbian elected officials across
the United States, of which 11 were elected to state houses.5 As well,
black and Latino gay candidates have begun to win city council seats
with Keith St. John in Albany, New York (1989), Ricardo Gonzalez in
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 141

Madison, Wisconsin (1989), and Sherry Harris in Seattle (1991). In

the 1980s, several cities—namely, Laguna Beach, California, Key
West, Florida, and Bunceton, Missouri, in the United States and
Fitzroy, Victoria, in Australia—elected gay mayors. Manchester,
England, inaugurated its first openly lesbian mayor in 1985. In 1984,
West Hollywood, California, voters chose an unprecedented majority
of gay and lesbian candidates for their city council, and in 1983 voters
in Sydney, Australia, added three gay men to that city’s government
until the state of New South Wales abolished the city council alto¬
gether in 1987.6 Paul O’Grady, however, continues to serve as a
Labour M.P. in the New South Wales Upper House. Finally, in
Canada as well, electoral success at the municipal level was evident
across the country.7

Resisting Violence
The gay and lesbian movement has never been able to ignore state
systems as laws, regulations, and bureaucratic practices have been
central agents in reproducing the social relations that have long disad¬
vantaged gay people. The inclusion of sexual orientation in human
rights laws and the assertion of domestic partners’ rights have been
important steps in creating avenues of redress for people who have
lost their jobs, been evicted from apartments, and been denied state
services. Yet the law is only one sphere of state activity, and the strug¬
gle over heterosexist regulation goes on as well in such areas of state
purview as the military and police, censorship, family, and immigra¬
tion policy.
The police and military remain centers of antigay violence in many
countries, even acting with a certain relative autonomy from the states
that employ them. Jeffrey Weeks (1981) observes that in the first
years following decriminalization in England, “between 1967 and 1976,
the recorded incidence of indecency between males doubled, the
number of prosecutions trebled and the number of convictions
quadrupled” (275). It is a pattern reproduced elsewhere with suspi¬
cious regularity. Dramatic police raids are often staged soon after the
passage of liberalized laws, and “sex scandals” are manufactured for
eager press consumption. Even so, mass roundups of gay men and les¬
bians are only the most visible aspects of a systematic surveillance
machine that routinely processes thousands more. As Doug Wilson
(1984) points out, although the mass arrest of more than 300 men in
142 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

raids of Toronto bathhouses attracted considerable press attention in

1981, the routine arrest of 800 others on indecency charges in the
same year went unnoticed (9). While Canada’s indecency law has
been dropped, vague laws on “lewdness” or “public morals” continue
to allow police to imprison large numbers of gay men in many places
(Nealon 1990).
The military has been among the most recalcitrant of institutions to
accede to the trend of assuring lesbians and gay men full citizenship
rights. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, virtually all of the European
Union (Tatchell 1992, 81-82), Canada, and Australia had overturned
the regulations that had permitted discrimination against gay people
by the military. The United States, the United Kingdom, and
Germany, however, continue to dismiss thousands of men and women
each year who are accused of having “homosexual tendencies,” often
officially labeling them as gay in the process, thereby making them
the targets of employment discrimination. Despite the Democratic
administration of Bill Clinton and a massive march on Washington in
1993, an unworkable “compromise” policy continued to permit the
expulsion of gay men and lesbians from the U.S. military should they
allow themselves to become known (see Adam 1994).
These police ideologies are not without effect, sometimes leading
to police challenges to civilian administration of the legal apparatus.

• On Gay Pride Day in 1980, Fred Paez, the secretary of the

Houston Gay Political Caucus and an active investigator of police vio¬
lence, died of a gunshot wound to the back of the head while in police
custody. Two Houston policemen, subsequently tried for “negligent
homicide,” claimed that Paez had made sexual advances to them and
had been shot “accidentally.” Both were acquitted. When a reform
city council came to office with gay support in 1984, police responded
with a series of 11 raids on gay bars and bookstores in Houston.
• A series of police raids and arrests in Sydney occurred in the
months following adoption of the 1982 New South Wales civil rights
law. The movement responded by parking a trailer emblazoned with
the words “Gay Caravan Embassy” across the street from the house
of Premier Neville Wran. The gay “diplomatic mission” to the premier
pressed for a decriminalization bill to follow the human rights law and
for an end to police harassment. (Decriminalization was won in 1984.)
• In Almeria, Spain, the murder of three young gay men found
handcuffed together and burned beyond recognition in the back seat
 Civil Rights and Electoral Politics 143

of their car was determined to be the work of the Guardia Civil. Three
officers were subsequently sentenced to 12- to 24-year terms for the
murders.
• Paris police instigated a new round of harassment of gay bars
in 1984 as the Socialist government moved forward with liberalization
of the law.
• In New York, police pillaged a bar frequented by black gay
men the same night that Vice President Walter Mondale addressed a
fund-raising dinner for gay civil rights a few blocks away.

The videotape surveillance and entrapment of men caught mastur¬

bating in washroom stalls or the discovery of boys having sex with
men is the kind of evidence often accumulated by police over several
months for eventual release in a single dramatic press conference
identifying “sex and prostitution rings” or “white slavery rackets.” The
publication of the names, addresses, and occupations of the accused
following such press conferences has often preceded the presentation
of police budgets before city councils in the United States and Canada.
Publication of names frequently preempts any penalties imposed by
the courts by exacting a wave of job dismissals, evictions, and some¬
times suicides of the accused.
Mindful of the use to which police files were put in identifying gay
people for the Nazi genocide, gay leaders have petitioned govern¬
ments to eliminate police “pink lists” of gay and lesbian citizens who
have committed no crimes but are documented solely because of
their homosexuality. The West German police even succeeded in win¬
ning the conviction on libel charges of gay activist Gerd Blomer, who
had accused them of keeping such lists, only to be exposed some
months later as being guilty of Blomer’s accusation (McCaskell
1980). The Canadian solicitor-general announced that police files on
gay people were ordered destroyed in 1984; the issue has arisen, as
well, in the United States, France, Israel, Italy, and Switzerland. With
the fall of Communist regimes in the 1990s, the destruction of pink
lists has emerged as a priority for gay and lesbian groups in Eastern
Europe. Police observation of gay people calls to mind Guy
Hocquenhem’s (1978) wry observation, ‘The law is clearly a system
of desire, in which provocation and voyeurism have their own place”
(49).
Street violence, combined with state violence, poses a particularly
deadly threat to lesbians and gay men. In recent years, organized
144 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

attacks on gay and lesbian institutions and individuals have led to

antiviolence projects among movement groups. Gay and lesbian book¬
stores and churches have been subject to fire bombings across the
United States and Canada. In 1991, a fascist youth gang of 20 attacked
a fundraising event for the International Lesbian and Gay Association
at the Grundezeit Museum in Berlin (Motte-Sherman 1991). But much
more pervasive are the assaults and murders committed against peo¬
ple in or around gay-identified places and against people perceived to
be gay or lesbian. Studies of perpetrators typically reveal groups of
young men between 15 and 25 years old who are marked above all by
their ordinariness (Comstock 1991, 106). Acting with the sometimes
overt, sometimes tacit complicity of police, churches, courts, their
families, and communities, these men are able to view gay people
(often along with women and minorities) as unworthy victims on
whom they can demonstrate the power and status promised to them
by patriarchal society. In response, the National Gay and Lesbian Task
Force in the United States has succeeded in having sexual orientation
included in hate crimes legislation that mandates harsher penalties for
crimes motivated by bigotry. Some movement groups have organized
episodic street patrols and have distributed distress whistles in an
attempt to stem homophobic violence.
Gay and lesbian movement groups of the 1980s and 1990s have
built on the groundwork laid by their homophile and gay liberation
antecedents, succeeding in writing into law some of the elemental
guarantees necessary for life, freedom, and security in democratic
societies. The maturation of movement organizations, the developing
infrastructure of gay and lesbian communities, and the integration into
national political processes have created unprecedented conditions for
the flourishing of same-sex desire, bonding, and cultures. Still, history
has within it no inevitable movement toward progress or enlighten¬
ment. The distress of people threatened or displaced through socio¬
economic dislocation in the modern world system not only creates
forces for change but also creates resentment and nostalgia for what
may seem in retrospect to be more “stable,” happier times from the
past. This attraction to New Right and neofascist ideologies poses per¬
sistent dangers to lesbians and gay men as the wish for a secure,
ordered world becomes translated into neoconservative movements to
restore the privileges of patriarchy, white domination, and lost imperi¬
al grandeur—a vision from which gay people remain always excluded.
Chapter Eight

Queer Politics

A great deal of gay and lesbian movement activity engages state insti¬
tutions both to remove the regime of surveillance, harassment, and
imprisonment that has historically characterized state relations with
gay men and lesbians, but also to secure basic avenues of legal
redress for those who have experienced discrimination. Those coun¬
tries most willing to carry through democratic principles of bringing
the full range of their citizens into their political processes and those
countries with comparatively insignificant New Right constituencies
have come the farthest in integrating lesbians and gay men into civil
society. But civil rights and electoral strategies have run up against
several critiques from within gay and lesbian movement groups.
Like social movements of women or Afro-Americans, “the” gay and
lesbian movement is no unitary phenomenon but rather a collection of
diverse social groups, competing schools of thought, and evolving
debates over fundamental questions of who homosexually interested
people are and what the objectives of movement activity should be.
The creation and cultural development of proud gay and lesbian identi¬
ties since the Stonewall era, in reaction to the more cautious
homophile, have themselves given birth in the 1990s to debates over
“queer” theories and identities. The postulation of yet another identity
label arises as a “solution” to several changes and tensions that have
come about in the quarter century since Stonewall. One such develop¬
ment has been a certain weariness with the twists and turns that les¬
bian identity has taken during the period. In the 1980s a wave of

145
146 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

lesbian “sex radicals” challenged the cultural feminism of the late

1970s (see Chapter 5) through the “sex debates.” Many women tired
of the moral idealism of the “woman-identified” real lesbian that
implicitly excluded all but a few who could or who wanted to live up to
its demands. A growing segment of those who felt left out this ideal¬
ized “lesbian” category rallied around “bisexuality” as an alternative
sexual identity. A second area of discursive change came out of the
ongoing diversification and decentralization of gay and lesbian organi¬
zation. Many groups of Asian, African, Latin American, Arabic, and
aboriginal cultural heritage, as well as people differentiated by physi¬
cal ability, age, or transgenderism, found contemporary ideas of the
“gay” and “lesbian” too constraining to express their ways of being
sexual and affectional. Some organizations responded to these
changes by renaming themselves to add, typically, “bisexual” or
“transgender” to their billing; others opted for “queer” with the hope
of encompassing everyone and even potentially to include those het¬
erosexuals who rejected heterosexism as an ideology and a system. A
third stream of thought challenging the contemporary “gay” and “les¬
bian” flowed from nationalist misgivings that civil rights and electoral
strategies pursued by the mainstream movement were leading to the
homogenization of gay people, the denial of difference, and conversion
into replicas of heterosexual banality. Bringing back the idea of
“queemess” reasserts a dissident social space and transforms existing
ideas bequeathed to same-sex desire. Carolyn Dinshaw and David
Halperin (1993, iii-iv), in introducing the journal GLQ, remarked,
“‘Lesbian’ and ‘gay’ tend to function (from the outside) as administra¬
tive labels for the management of sexual difference and tend to legis¬
late and police (from the inside) personal identities and individual
behaviors” while queer stresses “the fractious, the disruptive, the irri¬
table, the impatient, the unapologetic, the bitchy, the camp.” Among
the interests of queer nationalism is a desire to value and retain the
particularity and difference developed in gay and lesbian cultural
forms.
These three areas of cultural ferment, which have shifted move¬
ment self-conceptions and directions, merit a closer look.

Debating Sex
In 1980, the Lesbian Rights Committee of the National Organization
for Women (NOW) succeeded in having the national convention adopt
 Queer Politics 147

a resolution that “NOW does not support the inclusion of pederasty,

pornography, sadomasochism, and public sex as Lesbian rights
issues, since to do so would violate the feminist principles upon which
this organization was founded” (Ehrenreich, Hess, and Jacobs 1982,
88). In 1982, the Cambridge (Massachusetts) Women’s Center
expelled a lesbian sadomasochist support group by a vote of 9-1 on the
grounds that it was contrary to feminist principles. By the end of 1984,
a clear division had emerged as feminist anticensorship groups sprang
up across North America to challenge this enforcement of the cultural
feminist position in feminist organizations.
For many feminists, the cultural feminist view (basically a national¬
ist position) evolved out of a series of experiences in attempting to
gain rights for women. The way to end male exploitation made possi¬
ble by women’s relative powerlessness was to develop defenses and
alternatives to the violence experienced day to day by so many women
in society. The perpetuation of wife abuse depended on the inability of
women to flee male violence at home, so the movement organized
refuges for battered wives. Rape would never be controlled while pros¬
ecution depended on police who believed sexual coercion to be a male
right, so activists opened rape counseling centers. Low status in the
employment market left women vulnerable to sexual harassment on
the job, so feminists pressed for legal protection from it. The organiza¬
tional wave among women in the 1970s was toward groups of “women
against violence against women.” Here, it seemed, was a social realm
in which the concrete daily effects of women’s oppression could be
relieved at least in part.
While most feminists retained more liberal or socialist analyses of
women’s oppression, the ongoing struggle against violence and the
collective solidarity engendered by the struggle began to lead to the
consolidation of the cultural feminist worldview. Like so many previ¬
ous social movements, this nationalist tendency elevated the feminist
conflict into a cosmic battle that revalued itself as the unqualified good
against an implacable enemy—a position that, according to Angela
Miles (1981), “asserts a feminine essence, which contains all that is
good in humanity, in opposition to the oppression and destruction of
civilization which is ascribed to maleness itself; it posits as its aim the
establishment of a free and good all-female society” (485). It is per¬
haps not surprising that theorists with strong theological back¬
grounds, such as Mary Daly and Sally Gearhart, played such major
roles in the formulation of this Manichaean cosmology. Women’s cul-
148 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

ture is fundamentally different from men’s, the nationalists argued,

because of women’s unique commitment to life through their procre¬
ative potential. They claimed that “feminist analysis is founded in the
central aspect of reproduction for all species. . . . Reproduction is the
epitome of creativity, the ultimate creative act, belonging particularly
to women” (Hughes 1985, 96-97).
In this context, pornography loomed large as a primary indicator of
what was wrong in the relations between women and men. Not the
harbinger of sexual liberation as claimed by the editors of Playboy,
pornography so often duplicated and intensified the most reactionary
images of women as willing objects of male sexual predation, seeming¬
ly expressing and reinforcing a male culture of violence. Images of
dominated and mistreated women abounded in pornography, leading
many women to read these images as a form of hate literature inciting
men to all the behaviors they were working to overcome. Patricia
Hughes summed up the anxieties of many women in asking, “Is it pos¬
sible for that man to treat me ... as a human being when he received
gratification from seeing someone who looks like me bound, beaten,
humiliated?” (100). Many suspected that the proliferation of porno¬
graphic images in popular culture represented a male backlash
against the rise of feminism. As Eileen Manion (1985) notes, “Insofar
as it blatantly sneers at us, tediously insists we are nothing but cunts,
bunnies, pussies, and chicks, it seems like the grandiose ravings of
the (male) infantile imagination” (69).
But the war against pornography had subtly shifted the contours of
feminist discourse. In a decade, feminist reasoning had seemingly
come full circle: from arguing the artificiality of gender and demand¬
ing its transcendence, it now asserted an unbridgeable chasm
between the sexes and the need to obliterate “death-loving” male val¬
ues. The new nationalism, or cultural feminism, rang with echoes of
nineteenth-century argumentation that women are essentially more
pure, more temperate, and more moral than men, and that women’s
mission is to battle male lustfulness and corruption. Antipomography
literature implicitly endorsed some very traditional assumptions about
the nature of women and their roles in society. As Carol Vance (1984)
notes, “Through a culturally dictated chain of reasoning, women
become the moral custodians of male behavior, which they are per¬
ceived as instigating and eliciting” (4; see Snitow 1985,143).
But pornography has a very different meaning for gay men than
that offered by cultural feminism. Whereas women observing pomog-
 Queer Politics 149

raphy often found a medium made about them but by and for hetero¬
sexual men, gay men more often found a medium that presented
images of themselves for their own consumption. Where many women
found the depiction of coercion to be a form of hate literature directed
against them, gay men typically read consent even into portrayals of
sadomasochistic sex, because both partners, at least on the face of it,
shared the same status as men and were being presented to viewers
who likely shared their sexual tastes. For feminist nationalists, sado¬
masochism looked far too much like a male fantasy of beating and
humiliating women in complicity with the domestic violence that
women suffered in the larger society. For gay men, where consent is
presumed, sadomasochism represents no more than a sexual drama
where, one might say, Halloween masks are not confused with real
devils. For most gay men, then, pornography filled a relatively benign
role of affirming their sexuality in the midst of a sex-phobic society
and of offering aesthetic images of men as pleasurable and playful in
contradiction to the predominant imagery of men as instrumental and
controlling. While some feminists were finding a legitimation of male
dominance in pornography, many gay men were finding its subversive
potential in allowing men to express tenderness and make love with
each other in opposition to deeply held taboos of patriarchal society.
Nor were many lesbians willing to “buy” the antipornography vision
of feminism or of female sexuality. In 1981, a self-proclaimed Lesbian
Sex Mafia turned up in New York to raise such forbidden topics as
sadomasochism and butch-fem relationships, concurring with Gavle
Rubin’s remark, “I, for one, did not join the women’s movement to be
told how to be a good girl.” Critics of the antipomography position
confronted defenders in an acrimonious 1982 Scholar and the
Feminist Conference at Barnard College; the Samois collective pub¬
lished a lesbian sex book on sadomasochism and other taboo sexuali¬
ties in San Francisco; and four publishing ventures {On Our Backs,
Bad Attitude, Power Exchange, Outrageous Women) took up the chal¬
lenge to create a nonexploitative erotica by and for lesbians in 1984
and 1985.
Meanwhile, antipornography proponents pressed forward in the
mid-1980s with a legal initiative, written by Andrea Dworkin and
Catharine MacKinnon, to declare pornography a violation of women’s
civil rights. Introduced first in Minneapolis where it was vetoed by the
mayor, the initiative reappeared in Indianapolis, where it drew support
from a councillor active in the Stop ERA movement, from the mayor
150 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

who was a Presbyterian minister, from the police, and from the
Christian Right. It passed by 24 votes cast by Republicans to five cast
by Democrats on the council (Duggan, Hunter, and Vance 1985,
131-33). The law was subsequently blocked by a court ruling citing
First Amendment rights.
While the Dworkin-MacKinnon proposal made little headway in
the United States, it proved a powerful tool in the hands of conserva¬
tive administrations in Canada. With a legal edifice including customs
seizures, provincial film review boards, and federal obscenity legisla¬
tion already in place, the proposal became a way of “modernizing” tra¬
ditional state control of gay and lesbian expression by dressing it in
feminist rhetoric. Canada Customs was already routinely scissoring
pages and inking out paragraphs of magazines that conflicted with
individual officers’ notions of “decency,” and Toronto police had
repeatedly obtained convictions of the city’s gay and lesbian book¬
store, Glad Day, for stocking “obscene” material that had already
passed through Customs’ screening. The Ontario film review board
had already banned Not a Love Story, a film made by (ironically) femi¬
nist antipornography activists. And in 1979, the Supreme Court of
Canada had ruled that the Vancouver monthly Gay Tide had no right
of access to the city newspaper (in order to put a small advertisement
to announce its existence) because only those who own presses have
the freedom to determine what they print. Against this backdrop, the
Supreme Court of Canada adopted part of the reasoning presented by
the feminist legal organization, Legal Equality Action Fund (LEAF), in
the 1992 Butler decision by adopting the criterion that obscenity could
be determined according to the “harm” to women and children that
the “community” believes may flow from exposure to sexual represen¬
tations (Bearchell 1993, 37). The immediate result of the Butler deci¬
sion was court confirmation of a massive Customs seizure of gay
erotica from Glad Day (including innovative journals that challenged
conventional standards of gay beauty by eroticizing “bear”-like and
Asian men), and the 1993 conviction of the lesbian magazine, Bad
Attitude.
In other places, censorship practices traditionally also fell most
heavily on representations of lesbian and gay lives and sexuality. The
New Zealand Indecent Publications Tribunal included a wide range of
sexual and nonsexual publications on its prohibited list. In 1984,
British Customs seized 800 books from London’s gay and lesbian
 Queer Politics 151

bookstore, including yet again The Well of Loneliness and Edward

Carpenter’s works, later admitting in court that its prosecution relied
on criteria no more sophisticated than the simple equation of “gay”
with “obscene.” Charges were eventually dropped in 1986. Then, in
1991, a police raid on a gay party resulted in the British courts convict¬
ing 15 men of mutually consenting sadomasochistic sex, eight of
whom were sentenced to one to two and a half years in prison.
In the United States, conflicts over gay and lesbian cultural repre¬
sentation centered on the Mapplethorpe exhibition and school curricu¬
la. In the first instance, the U.S. congressional representatives
demanded that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) withdraw
its subsidy for a national tour of the work of gay photographer, Robert
Mapplethorpe, and revoke arts grants for four other gay and lesbian
artists. In a much publicized trial, the director of the Cincinnati
Contemporary Arts Center was acquitted of obscenity and the courts
later ruled that the NEA could not withdraw funding it had granted
through an equitable process. In the second instance, the New York
City school board dismissed its schools chancellor, Joseph Fernandez,
for approving a “rainbow” curriculum. Conceived as an educational
program to recognize the diversity of families represented by city
school children and to reduce violence against minorities by improv¬
ing intercultural understanding, the curriculum fell victim to an outcry
against mentioning homosexuality in schools. Three Alyson Press
books that had been recommended as supplementary reading—
Michael Willhoite’s Daddy’s Roommate and Leslea Newman’s Gloria
Goes to Gay Pride and Heather Has Two Mommies—became widely
banned across the country. In an effort to remedy the many egregious
stereotypes propagated by the U.S. image industry, chapters of the
Gay and Lesbian Association against Defamation (GLAAD) have orga¬
nized in several major cities and have had a significant impact on cine¬
matic and television portrayals.
The gay movement, perhaps preoccupied with defending what little
erotica exists, has yet to challenge the limitation of gay pornography
that infrequently presents the beauty of Asian or black men, repro¬
duced Hollywood icons of male muscularity, and seems unable to con¬
textualize sexuality in broader emotional contexts. The growing
market in gay male Gothic romances suggests a widespread interest
in a richer vision of intermale relationships than the strictly sexual.
The libertarian position tends to limit itself to the cherished liberal
152 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

principle of the right of individuals to do as they see fit as long as they

hurt no one else. Despite its radical pretensions, it is an argument that
abstains from any critique of the ways in which sexual representations
and have already been shaped by the logic of capitalism, where sexu¬
ality is increasingly marketed as a commodity like others, spilt off and
contained in sex ghettos, and encoded with the competitive individual¬
ism of the market economy. Like other arguments for individual free¬
dom, it throws comparatively powerless and unorganized individuals
into prestructured social settings where they have to make do with the
possibilities presented by entrepreneurs and governments.
Most contentious of all is the issue of sexual contact among adults,
youths, and children. Gay people, who are again and again painted as
“child molesters” by the religious right, have, sometimes unwillingly,
had to consider the question. So emotionally charged is the question
that discussion has only infrequently attained the level of “debate”
with even the possibility of considering it being choked off, shouted
down, or censored in most instances. Very little scholarly attention
has been give to pedophilia, nor have its participants, young or old,
been given forums to explain their experiences, at the same time as a
wave of antipedophile hysteria has swept across the English-speaking
countries, France, and West Germany since the 1970s. In this period,
an unrestrained public campaign fed by police and press has discov¬
ered “sex rings” in unlikely places and has led to the widespread pas¬
sage of repressive legislation and the imprisonment of pedophiles for
terms exceeding those meted out to murderers.
These campaigns are made possible only by a complex net of pre¬
sumptions about children, gender, and sexuality that is peculiar to
these societies. For the Melanesian peoples, who hold that the insemi¬
nation of boys is necessary for them to attain sexual maturity, the
antipedophile complex is inconceivable, and for many societies where
sexuality is the integral component of the pedagogical relationships of
older and younger men, current Western attitudes would be thought
puzzling or reprehensible.1
For all nations with liberal, democratic traditions, the issue revolves
around the question, “At what age can people give consent for sexual
relations?” Anthropological and historical comparisons are of limited
value here as individual consent rarely emerges out of the large social
complex of collective decision making to become a primary issue. In
the advanced capitalist nations, where individual sexual choice is
 Queer Politics 153

founded on financial independence, entry into wage labor underlies

individual mastery over his or her own domestic arrangements, and
the law typically follows along. It can be no accident that age-of-con-
sent laws governing sexuality approximate the age when young people
are permitted employment (and in those countries where the discrep¬
ancy between the two legal ages is wide, the tension between practice
and the law is greatest).
The sexual practices of those under these ages opens another,
more trenchant set of conflicts. The New Right has effectively played
on parental anxieties by typifying gay men and lesbians as child
molesters intent on seizing children from parental jurisdiction.
Intergenerational sexuality also reopens the dialectic between plea¬
sure and danger that has divided feminists on pornography and sado¬
masochism. For many feminists, all too aware that the relative
powerlessness of women and children deprives them of the conditions
in which consent is possible, age-of-consent laws form a necessary bul¬
wark against sexual abuse. Children, without the resources to deter¬
mine their own living arrangements, schooling, finances, or even diet
seem similarly defenseless against the structural power of adults,
especially when the relationship is between female children and male
adults. Lorenne Clark (1980) enunciates the widespread feminist
objection “because the sexual behaviour ... violates the requirements
of mutuality and/or equality which are the hallmarks of permissible,
non-coercive, sexual conduct which does not violate the physical
integrity or rights of some of the participants” (10). And indeed, with
increasing public attention focused on the issue, more and more
women, and some men, have come forward in the 1980s and 1990s to
denounce the sexual abuse they experienced as children.
Since the 1970s, Canada, Switzerland, and many of the European
Union countries lowered the legal definition of the age of consent to 14,
15, or 16 years, thereby rendering large categories of “pedophilia”
unproblematic. The United Kingdom manufactured a much bigger
problem in retaining the inordinately high age of 21 as its legal age of
consent for so long. In 1989 alone, some 31 men were sentenced to
three- to four-year prison terms (Tatchell 1992,84) for mutually consent¬
ing sex with males between 16 and 20. In 1994, the British Parliament
lowered the age of consent to 18. The few small pedophile groups that
emerged in the 1970s, for the most part, accepted the framework of the
current debate, contending that consent is possible among youths and
154 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

children and asking that their relationships be evaluated by the same

criteria as others: when coercive or exploitative, let them be banned;
when mutually pleasurable, caring, and desired, let them be.2 A rising
tide of prosecutions in the United States (Mitzel 1980), Canada
(Sylvestre 1976, 40-46; Hannon 1982), the United Kingdom (O’Carroll
1980), Australia, and Germany (Witzel 1985; Hohmann 1982, 33) led to
the dissolution of virtually all of the pedophile groups by the 1980s.
“Child pornography” legislation in many countries has suppressed the
ability of such last holdouts as the North American Man-Boy Love
Association to raise their position or appeal for reconsideration of cam¬
paigns that have suppressed the sexuality of young people as effectively
as they have incarcerated their adult partners.
The antipedophile campaigns of our era have been bound together
with larger feminist campaigns against sexual harassment and domes¬
tic violence and a historical trend to define more sharply the bound¬
aries of personal inviolability. Long the objects of unwanted male
attention, trespass, and assault, an important objective for the women’s
movement has been the demand that men no longer take for granted
their “right” of access to the bodies of women and children. The strug¬
gle for equality, citizenship rights, and democratic participation has
perhaps inevitably involved expression of respect for personal integri¬
ty through a vocabulary of personal space already established by adult
(heterosexual) men. It is a space premised on a concept of privacy
made possible only by the affluence of advanced capitalist societies.
(In very few if any of the societies studied by historians or anthropolo¬
gists can people presume a bed of their own, not to mention a bed¬
room of their own.) This assertion of democratic rights carries with it,
however, the likelihood of establishing the social distance of adult het¬
erosexual men as the normative standard for personal interaction
expected of everyone, and thus the adoption of the competitive and
unsupportive style long associated with conventional masculinity as a
universal practice. While resisting the assaults directed their way by
straight men in groups, gay men have been reaching for new ways to
bring men back into physical and emotional contact in order to bridge
the conflictive space now established as normative male behavior. In
that sense, gay men already have the luxury of presuming the equality
that feminists still strive for, but perceiving the pathologies of the tra¬
ditional male pattern, gay men have been experimenting with ways to
bring in closeness and erotics.
 Queer Politics 155

Confronting AIDS
AIDS was first identified in the U.S. medical literature in 1981, arriv¬
ing in the midst of the Reagan administration and during the ascen¬
dancy of the New Right. Appearing as an unknown and unanticipated
phenomenon at the site of some of the deepest anxieties of Western
civilization—namely, sex and death—it was not long before AIDS was
being encoded by highly charged rhetorics generated by the New
Right (Adam 1992a). AIDS rapidly assumed a significance unlike that
of other life-threatening diseases as a symbol of the social divide
between church- and state-sanctioned orthodoxies on the one hand,
and the toleration of, or celebration of, single or multiple parenthood,
gay and lesbian households, and women-controlled fertility on the
other. Confronting AIDS inevitably raised questions of who was going
to supervise and regulate the sexuality of whom in order to stem the
epidemic tide.
From 1981 to 1983, an official conspiracy of silence refused to rec¬
ognize a disease that was ravaging gay men and intravenous drug
users. Unlike Legionnaire’s disease, where a mysterious affliction
affecting white, middle-aged war veterans received immediate and
massive government assistance and public sympathy, AIDS lan¬
guished in obscurity until U.S. television found more “respectable”
and “innocent” victims of the disease among children, people who had
received blood transfusions, and, in 1985, the popular actor Rock
Hudson.
Once the silence about AIDS had been ruptured, AIDS became the
subject of a widespread panic (Altman 1986; Watney 1987) fueled by
the mass media promotion of right-wing demagogues who vilified gay
men as a threat to public health. Traditionalists were quick to exploit
AIDS as a weapon in the advancement of a “family values” agenda and
succeeded in a few places like Houston, Texas, in stampeding the elec¬
torate into repealing human rights protections for lesbians and gay
men. A wide range of local jurisdictions prepared reforms to quaran¬
tine laws, forceable testing programs for vulnerable populations, and
bathhouse closures in response to the AIDS panic. The U.S. govern¬
ment banned HIV-positive people from entering the country, and
despite a boycott by the International AIDS Association and an initia¬
tive by the Clinton administration, Congress reaffirmed its exclusion
in 1993.
156 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Gay and lesbian communities, already staggered by the growing

numbers who were falling to the new epidemic, began to mobilize to
cope with the expanding emergency. Their first priorities were to offer
immediate assistance to people with AIDS, to defend themselves
against state and corporate initiatives to deprive them of liberty and
work, and to let people know how to avoid infection by HIV.
Traditional conservative forces, whether based in the church, state, or
patriarchy, seemed more than a little reluctant to cede the power to be
sexual (including homosexual) to the masses, preferring to use AIDS
to forward a moralist agenda and have the uninformed “suffer the con¬
sequences” of sexually transmitted disease (Adam 1992a). AIDS
groups countered the monogamy-or-abstinence refrain of the tradition¬
alists by inventing “safer sex” to affirm the enjoyment of nonpenetra-
tive sex and to advance the simple technology of the latex barrier as
means of preserving sex while avoiding HIV.
AIDS became the impetus for a new wave of mobilization and a new
set of organizations, some of which developed unprecedented, rou-
tinized connections to state institutions, social welfare systems, and
health bureaucracies (Adam 1992b; Altman 1988). The social response
to AIDS rapidly outstripped its beginnings in the gay and lesbian
movement, leading to community-based AIDS organizations that soon
embraced a wide range of people affected by AIDS and encompassed
virtually every city in North America, in the European Union coun¬
tries, and Australia and New Zealand by the late 1980s. As the panic of
the mid-1980s began to subside, many governments recognized that
subsidization of the community-based AIDS movement of committed
volunteers and front-line AIDS workers, would prove to be a cost-effec¬
tive method of meeting the exigencies of the AIDS epidemic. Though
the state-funding of AIDS organizations has been uneven at best, their
increased incorporation into the larger welfare system has tended to
shape them into the form of social service agencies with one particular
mandate amidst a much larger AIDS establishment composed of pub¬
lic health officials, medical and social service professionals, and state
bureaucrats (Adamforthcoming).
The impact of AIDS on gay and lesbian movement organizations
has been multifaceted. While AIDS organizations have tended to
syphon away much of the leadership of gay and lesbian organizations,
the indiscriminate reach of the AIDS epidemic has tended to draw
new constituencies of gay men and their friends and relatives into the
struggle for legal protection and the advancement of gay and lesbian
 Queer Politics 157

cultures. The social legacy of AIDS has been equally disparate. It has
killed many hundreds of thousands in countries of the northern and
western hemispheres, the majority of whom have been gay men,
including a significant portion of the male leadership of movement
organizations. It emboldened those who would return gay people to
the closet. But at the same time, AIDS has also led to the unprecedent¬
ed institutionalization of gay-friendly organizations, an increased
recognition and discussion of gay sexuality, and a public reimaging of
gay men and lesbians in their now-public roles as caregivers, educa¬
tors, and volunteers. In several countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, and
Latin America, AIDS has been the stimulus for the first gay and les¬
bian organizations and has curbed state proclivities to deny and
repress above-ground networks of gay people.
The story of the mobilization around AIDS deserves a book of its
own (Adam forthcoming). The surge of organizations—whether gay,
“mixed,” or nongay—and the growth of an AIDS “industry”—includ¬
ing governments, medical, and therapeutic professions, the pharma¬
ceutical industry, and many more—exceeds the parameters of the gay
and lesbian movement. Still, the social responses to AIDS have been
indelibly shaped by preexisting gay and lesbian organizations that ral¬
lied to defend those stricken by the syndrome, worked to build sup¬
portive, nonpunitive programs, and pressed for adequate treatment
and research. Gay movement initiatives made it possible to organize
an institutional response that let everyone know about safer sex rather
than relying on police measures or patriarchal control over the sexual¬
ities of women, young people, and gay people, as was demanded by
conservative forces. Lesbian and gay groups took responsibility for
doing something about AIDS in the mid-1980s when the larger society
was either panicking or denying the threat, and many of those partici¬
pants remain deeply involved in the organizations that have diverged
from the movement itself.

Organizing Everywhere
The contemporary history of movement development has been
toward ongoing diversification and decentralization. While many
cities often had only one often campus-based group in 1970 at the
time of gay liberation, the gay and lesbian press in every sizable city
today typically lists dozens of local groups organized by gender, eth¬
nicity, religion, workplace, and cultural or recreational interest. This
158 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

proliferation and fragmentation of movement organizing has had a per¬

vasive impact on the larger society; few social groups or institutions
can continue to content themselves with the idea that lesbians and gay
men are outside their membership or purview. Gay and lesbian con¬
cerns have become harder to ignore when they come from peers,
friends, and co-workers. These trends have also fundamentally affect¬
ed how gay people understand who they are, what they want, and
what movement objectives should be.
People of color have been active in gay and lesbian groups from
their inception, working within homophile groups and organizing
autonomously amid gay liberation. People of Asian, African, and Latin
American descent have come together to confront racism in the gay
world and homophobia within racial communities, often organizing
first in countries with well-established gay and lesbian movements to
reach out to compatriots in the third world. A First National Third
World Lesbian and Gay Conference met as a result of the 1979 march
on Washington and has continued onward with meetings in Canada
and England. National Black Gay and Lesbian Leadership Conferences
have been meeting since 1978 in the United States (Benjamin 1992).
As well an antiracist movement uniting Black and White Men
Together/Men of All Colors Together has met regularly since 1980 in
national conventions (Christopher 1991). This movement activity has
been accompanied by a flourishing of black gay and lesbian arts, with
landmark books by Joseph Beam and the Combahee River Collective,
and films by directors Isaac Julien and Marlon Riggs.
Chinese, Filipino, South Asian, and Arabic gay and lesbian net¬
works in diaspora have typically begun to meet for the first time in the
1980s and 1990s in advanced capitalist countries while developing
links to their counterparts in “home” countries. In 1987, aboriginal
people began annual Native Lesbian and Gay Gatherings in the United
States, while a Toronto Gays and Lesbians of the First Nations formed
in 1989 (Charles 1990).
Furthermore, lesbians and gay men who are the same age or have
a common disability meet together. Youth groups are widespread, and
New York’s Senior Action ir a Gay Environment, founded in 1979, was
the best known organization of older people. The Rainbow Coalition
for the Deaf, begun in 1976, has chapters around North America; a
student group received college recognition in 1984 at Gallaudet
College for the deaf. The Gay and Lesbian Blind organized in New
York in 1978, and a Chicago Lambda Resource Center for the Blind
 Queer Politics 159

began making cassette books on gay topics in 1980. Physically dis¬

abled New Yorkers organized Mainstream in 1984, and few sizable
communities lack a group affiliated with the Gay Alcoholics
Anonymous Acceptance Network.
As well, the multiplication of organizations of gay people has stimu¬
lated the development of an international federation of Parents,
Friends, and Families of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG). Founded as a
support group for parents distressed by their children’s homosexuali¬
ty, PFLAG has matured into broad-based network of nongay people
working for gay and lesbian equality.
The status of gay people in religion has been perhaps most prob¬
lematic of all, given the intense hostility of most Judeo-Christian
church officials toward homosexuality since the thirteenth century. It
is likely no accident that the first gay movement group called itself the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, thereby clearly separating itself
from religion and staking its claim on the territory of the
Enlightenment. Whereas most of the liberal democracies have sepa¬
rated church and state and have accepted a plurality of political view¬
points, the idea of sexual pluralism has yet to escape the weight of
religious occupation. Christian, Jewish, and Islamic organizations have
long been primary sources of antigay ideologies. When exercising
punitive power of their own, churches have subjected sodomites to
death and mutilation; when closely interlocked with modern states,
they have often harassed, imprisoned, and even executed gay people
for daring to love persons of their own choosing.
Christian Democrat parties in Europe and the evangelical Right in
North America, Australia, and New Zealand have been major forces
blocking recognition of equal rights for lesbians and gay men and
have frequently shown a willingness to endorse or lead persecutory
campaigns against them. In court cases where gay people have sought
redress against discrimination and in human rights law reform, a simi¬
lar set of denominations has appeared regularly as active opponents.
Roman Catholic, Orthodox Jewish, Salvation Army, and various
Pentecostal and evangelical denominations have committed resources
to amicus curiae briefs in court cases, have propagandized through
the pulpit and their own television programming and have organized
letter-writing and electioneering campaigns to prevent the full enfran¬
chisement of lesbians and gay men in society. It is noteworthy that in
the Netherlands, where 49 percent of the population identifies itself as
without religion and that portion of the population has organized itself
160 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

as a significant political force, lesbians and gay men live with consider¬
able state acceptance (Schedler 1993). It is also in the Netherlands
that Pope John Paul II in 1985 met the most vocal public resistance to
the antigay and antifeminist pronouncements of his world tours.
The churches, of course, do not form a monolith. In general, liberal
Protestant congregations where policy is determined democratically
have been reconsidering antigay positions, while conservative
Protestant, orthodox, and Roman Catholic churches, with their author¬
itarian administrative structures, have persisted with policies frozen in
medieval theologies.
For lesbians and gay men with no wish to abandon their religious
beliefs, few churches have been willing to extend the hand of friend¬
ship; churches of one’s own have been the solution. Troy Perry, an
expelled Pentecostal preacher, founded a ministry to the gay commu¬
nity in 1968. Growing from a congregation of 12 in Los Angeles, his
group by 1983 became the center of a Universal Fellowship of
Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) of 195 congregations
in 10 countries. Local MCC congregations endured some 17 attacks
by arsonists through the 1970s and 1980s (Perry 1990, 76). From 1981
to 1992, UFMCC has been repeatedly refused membership or even
observer status at the U.S. National Council of Churches. The
UFMCC has not been alone in founding gay-positive churches. Dr.
James Tinney founded Faith Temple in Washington in the black
Pentecostal tradition, and a Unity Fellowship Church Movement now
serves African-American communities in several major cities. The
Centre du Christ Liberateur, founded in 1976 in Paris, has also served
as a general Protestant ministry to lesbians and gay men. The inde¬
pendent gay churches have earned reputations for social service work
such as telephone hot lines for the troubled and support groups for
parents and alcoholics. Jews organized gay and lesbian synagogues as
early as 1970 in New York and, since then, across the United States,
Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, France, and Israel (Brick
1979; Teal 1971, 280).
A few have found a place for themselves within their churches
through liberal Protestant theologies holding that the gender of partic¬
ipants in human relationships is not at issue, only the quality of the
relationship. The influential 1963 statement Towards a Quaker View of
Sex opened the way with the proposition “homosexual affection can be
as selfless as heterosexual affection, and therefore we cannot see that
it is in some way morally worse” (Heron 1966, 41). The Unitarian
 Queer Politics 161

Universalists called for an end to discrimination in 1970, opening an

Office of Gay Concerns within the church in 1973 (Gearhart and
Johnson 1974, 69; Humphreys 1972b, 152). When the Golden Gate
Association ordained William Johnson, an openly gay candidate for the
ministry, it forced a wary acceptance of the issue in the United Church
of Christ and the formation of a gay and lesbian caucus Qohnson
1979). And in 1972, the Evangelical Lutheran church of the
Netherlands held that “there is no obstacle” to gay ministers (Mirabet
i Mullol 1985, 323; my translation).
The ordination of gay and lesbian clergy also dominated the public
agenda of Canada’s largest Protestant denomination in the 1980s. Gay
and lesbian members of the United Church of Canada had long
pressed it for recognition of its concerns, and in 1984, the church
assembly resolved to oppose discrimination but rather paradoxically
refused to hire them as its own clergy. This contradiction culminated
in the decision by the 1988 convention to extend the right of ordina¬
tion to (openly) gay and lesbian members. This hard-fought resolution
provoked the secession of some of the evangelical wing of the church
(Riordan 1990).
The experience in other Protestant denominations is far more
mixed. Gay and lesbian caucuses among Episcopalians, Methodists,
Lutherans, and Presbyterians have encountered considerable resis¬
tance. Most others are organizations “in exile” from churches such as
the Brethren/Mennonite Council on Gay Concerns, Gay People in
Christian Science, Affirmation (Mormon), Kinship (Seventh-Day
Adventist), American Baptists Concerned, and Integrity (Anglican
Church of Canada). Dignity, the organization of gay and lesbian
Catholics founded by Father Pat Nidorf in San Diego in 1969, faces
hostility and suppression by the Roman Catholic hierarchy. Despite
church officials, Dignity has sprung up across the United States,
Canada, Mexico, and Spain. David et Jonathan, the French equivalent,
has also spread rapidly since 1972.

Fighting Back
The institutionalization of gay and lesbian politics in the form of
AIDS service organizations and law reform campaigns left many dis¬
satisfied. As more people in diverse communities organized them¬
selves into gay and lesbian groups, they contested the limitations of
the older movement groups that were often dominated by white, mid-
162 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

dle-class people. Those impatient with business as usual at AIDS ser¬

vice agencies broke away to form more confrontational groups such as
the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) in the United States,
Australia, and Europe and AIDS Action Now! in Canada in order to
demand immediate action to overcome AIDS. The entrenchment of
the New Right and the durability of everyday homophobia convinced
increasing numbers of people to turn out to successive marches on
Washington in 1979, 1987, and 1993. And a new generation 20 years
younger than gay liberation, and whose formative political experiences
came out of ACT-UP protests, initiated new militant action groups in
the form of Queer Nation. Queer nationalism found particular strength
in countries where civil rights strategies were less successful and
impatience with the stagnation of gay and lesbian advancement fueled
a new militance.
Despite the appearance of a normalization of politics and increasing
social integration that accompanied the civil rights strategy, mass
demonstrations never went away in the decades following the
Stonewall rebellion. Even the gains in legislative reform and electoral
politics still depended on years of grass-roots work and support, peti¬
tions and demonstrations, fundraising and meetings. Some 200,000
people marched on Washington on 14 October 1979 to protest New
Right power and the intransigence of the U.S. Congress. The 1984
convention of the Democratic party brought out 100,000 marchers in
San Francisco to demand:
• immediate, increased funding for AIDS research;
• provision of social services for lesbian and gay youth, aged,
disabled, prisoners, and poor;
• “an end to violent attacks against lesbians and gay men”;
• an executive order prohibiting discrimination in federal
employment;
• a national lesbian and gay rights law;
• child custody, adoption, and visitation rights;
• enforcement of civil rights legislation, including within the
lesbian/gay community;
• passage of the Equal Rights Amendment;
• an end to discrimination in immigration and naturalization
law;
• the right of women to choose “if and when to bear children,”
including the right to choose abortion;
• legal recognition of lesbian and gay relationships;
• repeal of sodomy and solicitation laws.
 Queer Politics 163

In fact, the convention did adopt several of the demands and black
presidential nominee Jesse Jackson embraced lesbians and gay men
into his Rainbow Coalition.
People with AIDS led the second March on Washington of perhaps
a half million people on 27 October 1987. Together with the Names
Project quilt, marchers pressed the Reagan administration to address
the AIDS crisis.
Against this backdrop, Queer Nation first appeared in New York in
the spring of 1990 and emerged spontaneously across the major cities
of the United States, and in Toronto, Melbourne, and Sydney. Queer
Nation quickly gained a reputation for direct-action confrontational tac¬
tics by protesting right-wing politicians, holding kiss-ins in shopping
malls and straight bars, marrying same-sex couples on the steps of a
Roman Catholic cathedral, and forming pink patrols against street vio¬
lence. Perhaps the best known national protest in the United States
was a series of demonstrations and boycotts directed against Cracker
Barrel restaurants for their purge of gay and lesbian employees. Also
in 1990, OutRage appeared in London, where it held a kiss-in at the
Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus, invaded the Isle of Man to press for
decriminalization, infiltrated an awards ceremony to protest press
homophobia, and demonstrated against religious homophobia on the
steps of Anglican churches.
The Queer Nation idea intended to challenge the now
“respectable,” integrated gay/lesbian in favor of a radical coalition of
the sexually excluded, including bisexuals, transgendered people,
and presumably some heterosexuals as well (Duggan 1992). Allan
Berube and Jeffrey Escoffier (1991) found that ‘They are trying to
combine contradictory impulses: to bring together people who have
been made to feel perverse, queer, odd, outcast, different, and
deviant, and to affirm sameness by defining a common identity on the
fringes. They are inclusive, but within boundaries that threaten to
marginalize those whose difference doesn’t conform to the new
nation” (12). Like gay liberation before it, Queer Nation combined
spontaneous high energy and an anarchistic internal dynamic that
resulted in a wave of high-profile challenges to heterosexism but also
in the division and dissolution of many groups after a couple of years.
Despite a new freshness and resolution brought to the post-Stonewall
movement, queer nationalism contained its own set of contradictions.
Its claim to an identity that is more inclusive than gay or lesbian
inevitably stumbled over a new series of oppositions and exclusions.
Neither historical (such as romantic friendships) nor anthropological
164 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

forms of same-sex bonding have any connection to the “queer”: the

berdache and the two-spirited idea of aboriginal Canadians find no
place among its connotations. Its embrace among a young, urban,
intellectual cohort intentionally separates away the “assimilated” and
“respectable” who do not share the queer impulse to shock the bour¬
geoisie. And the queer nationalists must contend with the fact that few
“ordinary” lesbians and gay men have taken up the term in referring
to themselves. While claiming to reject the policing of identity, queer
nationalism, like other nationalisms, engages in a covert moralism by
valuing difference for itself. Other culturalist or nationalist trends have
tended toward political myopia where social action is abandoned for
spiritualism or left vulnerable to co-optation by conservative forces
(see Adam 1993b). In the case of queer nationalism, the tendency is
toward reducing politics to questions of aesthetics, style, or perfor¬
mance, while failing to address the state, political economy, kinship, or
family structures.
Arlene Stein (1992) sums up changing lesbian self-conceptions in a
three-stage model. The homophile era was an ‘“old gay’ prefeminist
world, a series of semi-secret subcultures located primarily in urban
areas, formed in relation to the hegemonic belief that heterosexuality
was natural” (37). The woman-identified woman of the cultural femi¬
nists “transformed lesbianism into a normative identity” of “lifestyle
preferences” and “ideological proclivities” (39), which succeeded in
drawing some heterosexual feminists into its ambit while marginaliz¬
ing many lesbians. The outcome of the sex debates and of challenges
posed by women unwilling to deny their bisexuality has been a decen¬
tering of lesbian activism in the form of “lesbian parenting groups,
support groups for women with cancer and other life-threatening dis¬
eases, new and often graphic sexual literature for lesbians, organiza¬
tions for lesbian ‘career women’ and lesbians of color, and mixed
organizations where out lesbians played visible roles” (35). In this sce¬
nario, Queer Nation turns out not as the overarching unifier but as yet
another fraction in the overall mosaic of contemporary gay and lesbian
organizing.
Chapter Nine

Coming Out around the World

Gay and lesbian organization has generally been more tenuous out¬
side the advanced capitalist nations of the European Union, North
America, Australia, and New Zealand. Homosexuality in the form of
gay and lesbian identities and networks encompasses only a portion
of homosexually interested humanity, as so many people in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America remain in agrarian production character¬
ized by traditional kinship and gender systems and precapitalist
codes of homosexual desire. Poverty and limited access to housing
and transportation entail a lack of privacy, greater reliance on and
supervision by families, and more localized personal friendship net¬
works. Nevertheless, the wish to realize deeply felt emotional and
sexual preferences has motivated many in the urban sector to
embrace gay and lesbian identities and to stand up for the right to
experience pleasure, form households, and make friends without
interference from the state, church, or families. The example of gay
and lesbian communities and movements has proven to be highly
influential in other countries. The first commercial venues typically
appear in the largest cities where they attract a literate and traveled
clientele and coexist with indigenous forms of same-sex attraction
and bonding. They are often soon followed by clubs, political groups,
and AIDS service organizations that emerge from the friendship net¬
works developed inside and outside of the commercial scene.
The working groups of the International Lesbian and Gay
Association (ILGA) attempt to monitor civil rights around the world,

165
166 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

twin established organizations with new ones, and link international

efforts around asylum, the military, churches, youth, ableism, health,
trade unions, AIDS, and prisoners.1 Gay and lesbian refugees fleeing
persecution in their home countries have found asylum in several
countries, but few maintain a consistent policy of recognizing persecu¬
tion on the grounds of sexual orientation as adequate reason for
refugee status.2 In 1991, Amnesty International (1994) agreed after a
lengthy debate to defend people imprisoned around the world because
of their homosexuality. In 1993 the World Health Organization
dropped homosexuality from its International Classification of
Diseases, and the United Nations Economic and Social Council grant¬
ed ILGA the status of a nongovernmental organization permitting it to
submit statements to the United Nations on lesbian and gay issues.3

Eastern Europe
The state socialist nations of Eastern Europe created many of the
fundamental social conditions that made gay and lesbian worlds possi¬
ble at the same time as they inhibited their development. Nations
structured on the Soviet model pursued a model of economic develop¬
ment that built urban industrial systems, moved much of their popula¬
tions from agriculture to wage labor, and opened employment
opportunities for women. As in capitalist societies, state socialist soci¬
eties displaced kinship as the primary determinant of people’s life
chances, disestablished churches, and devolved (except in the case of
China) decisions about family and reproduction to the individual level.
Many years before the collapse of state socialist governments, gay
bars and coffeehouses emerged in East Berlin, Prague, and Budapest;
gay and lesbian movement groups organized in East Germany and
Yugoslavia. Yet all of these social formations were severely compro¬
mised by the immense power of central bureaucracies that regulated
so many aspects of life and suppressed public organizations that
lacked explicit state approval. With monopolistic control of communi¬
cations systems and state administration of personal mobility, com¬
mercial meeting places, and housing, movement formation was
severely limited (Hauer etal. 1984).
A comparison of East and West Germany reveals the differences.
While the Communist government, true to its prewar commitment,
ceased prosecuting men for homosexual acts after World War II, it
seized control of businesses in the country, thereby dissolving the les-
 Coming Out around the World 167

bian and gay bars that had flourished from 1945 to 1947 and pushing
gay people out of the public sphere (Klimmer 1969; Kokula 1983, 17).
The government of the Federal Republic on the other hand, main¬
tained a policy of persecution through the 1950s, but small business-
people opened a number of unofficial gay and lesbian bars out of
which a public gay community and movement emerged. As early as
1973, a Homosexuelle Interessengemeinschaft Berlin applied without
success for permission to meet in East Germany. In 1982, a modem
gay and lesbian organization arose under the auspices of the state-
approved Evangelical Student Congregation. By the mid-1980s, gay
and lesbian work groups had organized across the East so that a fully
formed national federation was already in place at the time of the
reunification of Germany.
Russia’s first underground gay organization, the Leningrad Gay
Laboratory survived only from 1984 until its dismemberment by the
KGB in 1986 when its founder, Alexander Zaremba, was imprisoned,
and other members were fired, exiled, or banished to Siberia
(Schluter 1992, 6). Under the policy of glasnost initiated by Mikhail
Gorbachev, gay and lesbian groups began to spring up along with
thousands of other voluntary associations in Russian society. The
Moscow Association of Sexual Minorities (later Moscow Gay and
Lesbian Union) started in 1989 and began publishing Tema in 1990.
Both the press and activists suffered police attacks, but thousands
came out for Russia’s first gay and lesbian pride week in the summer
of 1991. When the administration of Boris Yeltsin in 1993 abolished
the criminal penalties for homosexuality that had been introduced in
the Stalinist period, almost a thousand gay men were in prison and
“pink lists” of suspected homosexuals were kept by police, according
to official sources (Gessen 1994). New gay and lesbian groups were
soon reporting from all across Russia, including several cities in
Siberia.
Several republics newly released from the Soviet Union also
decriminalized from 1991 to 1993. Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Ukraine,
and Kazakhstan dropped the Stalinist law as gay and lesbian groups
organized in their capitals. As well, new groups appeared for the first
time in 1993 in the Moldovan and Uzbek capitals.
In the latter years of Yugoslavia, movement groups formed in
Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia. The Slovenian group, Magnus, dates
from 1984 (Renar 1989), and a lesbian section from 1988 (Anderson
1991, 30). Both gay and lesbian groups organized after 1988 in Zagreb.
168 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

The group Arkadia appeared briefly in 1991 in Belgrade before the

Serbian government launched a campaign against a wide range of
imagined enemies (including homosexuals) in the midst of a civil war,
arresting its chairperson and interrogating its members.
Small, low-profile groups had formed in Czechoslovakia (Lambda
Prague 1982), Poland (1986), and Hungary (Homeros Lambda 1988)
during the Communist era; these participated in annual international
meetings of the Eastern European movement beginning in 1987
(Catalano and Steinman 1988). With the fall of Soviet-style govern¬
ments at the end of the 1980s, gay and lesbian groups, bars, and maga¬
zines developed quickly across the region, with the group Gemini
appearing in Bulgaria in 1992. Apart from Serbia, only Romania
retained its sodomy law, attracting the attention of Amnesty
International for its persistent imprisonment of gay men.

Mediterranean Countries
Gay and lesbian groups have tended to be fewer and more recent in
southern Europe than in the North. Their comparatively late emer¬
gence has been associated with the presence of fewer of the social
conditions that allow for the emergence of organized gay and lesbian
life, and thus of civil organizations. Mediterranean regions have long
functioned as economic peripheries to the industrial centers of the
North; their populations have been poorer, more rural, and more orga¬
nized around traditional kinship forms. Greece and Spain suffered mil¬
itary dictatorships into the 1970s that suppressed popular mobilization
of all kinds. As in Latin America, homosexual relationships tended
toward the role-defined model which exempted the “active” male from
any particular label but condemned the “passive” male to a stigmatized
status. The decline of regional disparities through the economic, legal,
and communications union of the European Union have also improved
the mobility, housing, and personal autonomy of women and men and
thus enhanced the conditions for gay and lesbian cultural formation.
In Spain, a gay and lesbian movement sprang forth at the death of
Francisco Franco. During his dictatorship, two Barcelona lawyers,
Armand de Fluvia and Mir Bellgai, circulated a letter to protest the
1970 social danger law and pulled together six Spanish subscribers to
Arcadie to form an underground Agregacion Homofilo para la
Igualdad Sexual (AGHOIS). During this time, the group developed
contacts with other European organizations, having the AGHOIS bul-
 Coming Out around the World 169

letin mailed back to Spain through Arcadie and then, following a com¬
plaint to the French government by the Spanish foreign minister,
through the Swedish Revolt (Fluvia 1978; Mirabet i Mullol 1985,
244-45). Following the death of Franco, gay liberation went public in
1977 in Barcelona as the Front d’Alliberament Gai de Catalunya
(FAGC), soon followed by Euskal Herrico Gay Askapen Mugimendua
(EHGAM) in Bilbao, and a number of groups in Madrid, Malaga, and
other major cities.
Italy’s most successful contemporary gay and lesbian movement
organization is ARCI-Gay, a branch of the Associazione Ricreative e
Culturale Italiana, a cultural association affiliated with the Communist
party and its successor, the Party of the Democratic Left. Founded in
1980 in Palermo in response to the suicide of two lovers aged 15 and
25, ARCI-Gay organized a gay pride day on 28 June 1981 (Grillini 1990,
113-14). In 1985 ARCI-Gay opened a national office in Rome and the
Italian Communist Youth Federation (FGCI) elected a member of
ARCI-Gay, Nikki Vendola, as its national secretary that same year. By
1989, ARCI-Gay counted some 25 local clubs throughout Italy and
13,000 members (Consoli 1990, 72).
The Greek gay organization, AKOE, first demonstrated publicly in
1981 against a solicitation bill, which subsequently banned sexual
propositioning whether for money or not. AKOE has attempted to
defend the journals, Amphi and Kraximo against repeated prosecution
for “offending public morals” (Vassilas 1984). In 1991, Amphi editor
Irene Petropoulou was sentenced to five months in prison and a 50,000
drachma fine for the same offense because she refused to accept per¬
sonal ads directed to lesbians by heterosexual men.
In Turkey and Cyprus, the state has acted against gay initiatives
without regard to the most basic of civil rights. Gay men have been
subjected to repeated police attacks and beatings in the 1980s. Gay
activism found a small public space in the pages of the Turkish Radical
Green party publication that was subsequently subjected to prosecu¬
tion in 1989 (Tielman and Hammelburg 1993, 334). A gay pride cele¬
bration planned in 1993 was suppressed by police; 22 of its European
supporters were deported. In Cyprus, a Gay Liberation Movement
came about in 1987. Its leader Alexandras Modinos succeeded in hav¬
ing the European Court of Human Rights declare the Cypriot sodomy
law to be invalid in 1992 (ILGA Bulletin 3/1993: 23). The response of
the theocratic Cypriot state has been to threaten to excommunicate
gay people.
170 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Israel’s Society for the Protection of Personal Rights has had to

struggle against a state system that institutionalizes Judaism as the
official religion (Sofer 1985) but has nevertheless won decriminaliza¬
tion in the 1980s and a 1992 limited ban on workplace discrimination.
The Arabic nations of the Mediterranean region lack the founda¬
tions for movement groups as they they have developed only limited
separation between the state and religion and little tolerance for grass¬
roots organization that lack approval of government or Islamic offi¬
cials. Homosexual relations remain coded by indigenous role-defined
norms (Schmitt 1991) and subject to theocratic surveillance and sup¬
pression, despite a rich tradition of Arabic and Persian literature
extolling the love of boys.

Latin America
Several factors account for the comparative fragility of gay and les¬
bian movement groups in Latin America. Popular indigenous forms of
same-sex attraction and bonding tend to follow a role-inscribed pattern
where only “pasivo” males and a very few, if any, “masculine” women
become socially differentiated (see Adam 1993a). Gay- and lesbian-
identified people represent only a fraction of the homosexually active
population and tend to appear only in the most cosmopolitan centers.
Several Latin American countries have recent histories of dictatorial
governments that denied freedom of speech and assembly to their citi¬
zens. As in Spain and Eastern Europe, gay and lesbian mobilization
has typically come about as part of a larger wave of activism that
reasserted democratic rights against repressive regimes. Even in offi¬
cially democratic states, gay people have had to contend with vague
and sweeping police powers, as well as strong reactionary forces,
which have not hesitated to harass, extort, and assassinate powerless
sectors of society.
In Mexico, gay liberation revived itself as the Frente Homosexual
de Accion Revolucionaria (FHAR) “in response to numerous anti-gay
assaults and murders and police harassment in the Federal District”
(Kyper 1979). They first appeared publicly as part of a 1978 demon¬
stration in support of students arrested after the 1968 Olympics; by
1979, FHAR and the new lesbian group, Oikabeth, drew 1,500 in a gay
pride march through Mexico City. In 1982, the Revolutionary Workers
party even ran an openly gay candidate, Rosario Ibarra, for president.
 Coming Out around the World 171

Police raided and closed gay bars in Guadalajara from 1989 to 1990,
and the clubhouse of the Grupo Orgullo Homosexual de Liberation
(GOHL) suffered a fire bombing during the same period. When
GOHL rallied its members and invited ILGA to meet in Guadalajara in
1991, the city’s mayor ordered its disbanding, and ILGA held an
impromptu conference in Acapulco instead. In 1992, an unnamed
death squad murdered six gay activists in Mexico City, including
Francisco Estrada, a founder of Mexico’s major AIDS organization.
Neftali Ruiz, an activist who had been campaigning for an investigation
of police murders of gay men, was himself found murdered in 1993.
These assaults and murders follow a pattern of repression already well
established against dissident journalists and peasant organizers in
Mexico (see Lumsden 1991; Green and Asis 1993; ILGA Bulletin
2/1993).
In Brazil, the gay and lesbian movement organized in the waning
days of dictatorship to develop relatively rapidly with the restoration
of parliamentary democracy. As early as 1961-64, an underground
gay press circulated in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo until its suppres¬
sion following the United States-backed coup that replaced the demo¬
cratically elected president with a military dictator in 1964 (Clarke
1984). With the regime’s promise of an “opening” toward democracy
in the late 1970s, a gay journal, Lampiao, began, and a group called
Somos formed in Sao Paulo amid widespread agitation for democracy
from many sectors of the Brazilian population. Soon Lampiao was in
court on a public morals charge, and police had imprisoned 1,500 in
sweeps through the gay ghetto following a 1980 national conference
held in Sao Paulo. More than a thousand turned out to protest the
police roundups in June of 1980. When the military regime stepped
down in 1982, the Workers’ party fielded eight gay candidates, includ¬
ing an incumbent, Joao Baptista Breda (who had come out on nation¬
al television).
In the 1990s gay and lesbian groups remained active in Rio de
Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Manaus, and Bahia (Rubio and Fernandez 1992,
24-25) amidst a well-developed commercial gay scene. The decline
of overt state-sanctioned violence against gay men and lesbians after
the fall of Brazil’s dictatorship has been replaced by a rise in vio¬
lence committed by less easily identified perpetrators. The Grupo
Gay de Bahia documented some 1,200 murders of gay people in the
1980s, including many men killed in AIDS-phobic attacks and
172 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

women killed by men as part of a larger pattern permitting male vio¬

lence against insubordinate or “unfaithful” women (ILGA Bulletin
4/1991, 9-10; 5/1992, 17). Amnesty International reported the 1993
assassination of Renildo Jose dos Santos, an openly gay municipal
councillor in the town of Coqueiro Seco in Alagoas. He appears to
have been killed by the mayor, the mayor’s father, and three military
policemen.
Recent Argentine history shows a similar pattern. Leftists formed
very small gay liberation groups from 1969 to 1973 (Green and Asis
1993, 5). The military dictatorship that came to power in 1976 revived
the sweeping police powers left over from the 1950s Peronist dictator¬
ship, and a series of police raids against gay bars from 1976 to 1978
closed down the commercial gay scene. With the instigation of the
Roman Catholic Bishop of San Martin, more than 1,400 were detained
in bar raids leading up to the 1978 world soccer match in Buenos
Aires. Some 400 gay men “disappeared” during the “dirty war” con¬
ducted by the military dictatorship Qauregui 1987, 169-72). In 1982
and 1983 the Comando Condor and Comando de Moralidad death
squads exacted a wave of murders against gay men in the arts.
With the fall of the dictatorship, gay bars began to reopen, and a
Comunidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA) was founded in 1984.
CHA’s first public event brought a contingent of a hundred people into
a mass demonstration for justice after the dirty war Qauregui 1987,
203). With undiminished police and church powers in the “democrat¬
ic” period, bars have been subject to mass arrests of patrons in 1984,
1987, 1989, and 1990. CHA has found itself blocked in its pursuit of
legal recognition in the courts, which means it has been unable to rent
an office or open a bank account. When confronted with gay and les¬
bian activists abroad, President Carlos Menem promised to grant CHA
legal recognition but has yet to do so (Freda 1992). The tabloid press
published the names of eight executive committee and 35 other CHA
members in 1990, resulting in a wave of dismissals. Despite this ongo¬
ing regime of repression, 300 turned out for CHA’s gay pride day in
Buenos Aires in 1992 (Wockner 1992c, 7).
The recent histories of Chile and Uruguay have paralleled
Argentina. Military rule in Uruguay from 1973 to 1985 entailed police
repression, bar raids, and “pink lists” (Miller 1992, 219). The gay and
lesbian groups—Cotidiano Mujer, Homosexuales Unidos, and
Movimiento Integration Homosexual, appeared only in the late 1980s
(Rubio and Fernandez 1992, 27). The removal of the Chilean dictator-
 Coming Out around the World 173

ship by referendum created an opening for the formation of the les¬

bian feminist group, Ayuquelen, in 1988 and a Movimiento de
Liberation Homosexual in Santiago in 1991. Police raids in 1990 in
Valparaiso netted 500 men whom police subjected to compulsory HIV
tests.
In Colombia, gay studies groups held meetings in 1976 and two
newspapers, El Otro and Ventana Gay, appeared sporadically from
Medillin and Bogota. The first public gay pride parade occurred in the
capital in 1983, and a Colectivo de Orgullo Gay organized there in
1985, issuing a paper called De Ambiente (later Urania). In 1985 and
1986, death squads reportedly made up of off-duty police officers, mur¬
dered some 50 gay men in Cali (ILG A Bulletin 4/1987, 9). Amnesty
International (1994) has reported many gay victims among the thou¬
sands murdered by Colombian death squads in the 1990s. Vigilantes
killed eight gay men in Quito, Ecuador, in 1992. Police repression and
a sodomy law have restricted above-ground gay organization to the
AIDS group, SOGA, itself subject to police harassment. In Venezuela,
Edgar Carrasco and Luis Alvarez produced Entendido in the early
1980s, attempting to organize around a large police raid on a Caracas
disco in 1982. A Grupo Entendido is reportedly still active (Herrick
1984; Rubio and Fernandez 1992, 27).
In 1983, the Grupo Autoconciencia Lesbianas y Feministas became
active in Lima following a meeting of the Latin American Women’s
Conference and began to issue a newsletter, Al Margen. The
Movimiento Homosexual de Lima (MOHL), founded in 1985, has
become the ILGA information coordinator for Latin America and its
chairwoman, Rebeca Sevilla, became ILGA secretary-general in 1992.
Peruvian gay men have been targeted and murdered by terrorist
movements in the 1980s. Tupac Amaru forces murdered seven gay
men in Tarapoto as part of a campaign against “homosexuals, prosti¬
tutes, thieves, and drug users,” and Sendero Luminoso has been impli¬
cated in other deaths. Police, accompanied by television cameras,
have staged repeated raids on lesbian and gay bars in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, including the arrest of participants in an AIDS
fundraiser in 1991 (Chauvin 1991). According to press reports,
President Alberto Fujimori ordered the dismissal of 117 civil servants
in 1993 because of their homosexuality (Tielman and Hammelburg
1993, 315).
A 1987 police raid in San Jose, Costa Rica, led to the founding of a
gay response network and subsequent religious, church, and lesbian
174 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

groups (Alcazar 1991; Schifter 1989). San Jose hosted the second
meeting of Latin American and Caribbean Lesbian Feminists (the first
being in Cuernavaca, Mexico, in 1988) despite an uproar generated by
the church, state, and press. A lesbian Colectivo Humanas came about
as a result of the meeting. In Nicaragua, a gay and lesbian organiza¬
tion emerged out of a safer sex education project sponsored by the
Sandinista Ministry of Health (Sorrell 1991), making its first public
appearance among celebrants of the eleventh anniversary of the
Sandinista revolution in 1990. The fall of the Sandinista government in
1990 in favor of a U.S.-sponsored coalition resulted in a 1992 law that
criminalized homosexuality for the first time in Nicaraguan history.
In many Latin American societies, then, small urban gay and les¬
bian organizations have emerged against the odds to provide journals,
AIDS support, and defense against state predation. The struggle to
create even minimal space for gay and lesbian existence has often had
to face very powerful reactionary coalitions composed of landholding
elites, the Roman Catholic church, and the military. These coalitions
have lengthy records of profound suspicion of social change and a vir¬
tually boundless willingness to attack those who would challenge
inequality. Their power has frequently been consolidated and bol¬
stered by U.S. military, economic, corporate, and mass media assis¬
tance. Their instruments of repression have included from time to
time the army and police, as well as death squads and armed gangs.
The history of gay and lesbian movements in Latin America is bound
together with the larger history of democratic forces—such as move¬
ments of peasants, workers, students, and intellectuals—attempting to
assert fundamental civil rights and economic justice against authoritar¬
ian and sometimes genocidal social institutions.

Asia and Africa

In Asia and Africa, gay and lesbian movement activity has been
more sporadic. Among the diverse cultures of Indonesia, Polynesia,
and the Philippines are rich local traditions of homosexuality linked
with shamanism, the theater, transgenderism, and patron-client rela¬
tionships. The concept of gay or lesbian identity is only one among
many possibilities, and homosexually interested people may be orga¬
nized under these alternate auspices. Nevertheless, Lambda Indonesia
has existed since 1983 and counts groups in Jakarta, Kebumen,
Denpasar, Yogyakarta, and Surabaya. It has published Gaya
 Coming Out around the World 175

Nusantara since 1987 (Translation Group 1984; Anderson 1991, 21;

Gayzette 102, 4). Similarly, a few small groups emerged in the
Philippines during the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and since
(Fleras 1993). The destruction of aboriginal cultures in the Indonesian
province of West Irian and in Papua New Guinea has been erasing the
last surviving cultures where homosexuality has been expected of all
males (Adam 1985a). Forestry conglomerates and Islamic and Roman
Catholic proselytizers have wreaked havoc on the Asmat people in par¬
ticular (Beveridge 1991).
In Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, AIDS has given the impetus
for group formation (Walderhaug 1991, 16). Thailand’s reputation for
open, socially accepted heterosexuality and homosexuality has attract¬
ed “sex tourists” from advanced capitalist countries, including Japan,
thereby complicating local forms of same-sex eroticism with a com¬
mercial overlay (Jackson 1989; Miller 1992). Apart from raids on the
commercial scene during a brief military dictatorship, the state has
shown little interest in sexual regulation. In Singapore, on the other
hand, police closed bars and forced homosexual men into HIV testing
as part of a state policy to promote marriage and fertility among the
Chinese middle class (Durand 1990).
Like Thailand, neither the state (Buddhist) religious institutions,
nor public organizations have attempted to regulate homosexuality in
Japan. Despite a very well developed gay and lesbian bar scene and
commercial press, movement organization has been a comparatively
late development. Apart from a short-lived attempt in the late 1960s,
movement groups have not come about until the 1980s, with OCCUR,
a Japan ILGA group, and the lesbian Regumi group in Tokyo, as well
as groups in Osaka (Lunsing 1994).
With decriminalization in 1991, a small gay group has appeared in
Hong Kong, as has a lesbian group in Taipei called Wo Men Zhi Jian.
Within China, AIDS education prompted the state in 1993 to permit a
short-lived gay support group in Beijing, called Man’s World. It was
closed by state authorities after a few months. In addition, a clandes¬
tine group in Suzhou contacted ILGA in 1992 (ILGA Bulletin 3/1992,
23; 4/1991,21).
Reports of movement activity in India are very recent: the lesbian
group, Sakhi, was formed in 1992 in New Delhi; people protested
against police entrapment and arrests in a park in New Delhi; and
Bombay Dost, a gay and lesbian journal, began publication. Only a few
reports have filtered out from the theocratic state of Iran. In 1990, the
176 The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement

Ayatollah Musavi Ardebili reportedly called for the extermination of

homosexuals over the Voice of the Islamic Republic of Iran. This was
followed by reports of the execution of three men in Nahavand and
two women in Langrood in 1990 and two more executions and 90
arrests in 1992 (Wockner 1991a, 1992a).
Small Asia-wide gay and lesbian conferences have been held in
Tokyo, Bangkok, and Manila since the mid-1980s.
In South Africa, the Gay Association of South Africa came about in
1982 with a largely white membership. Its publication was banned by
the white minority government of the day. Nonracial organizations
emerged soon after with the Gay and Lesbian Organization of
Witwatersrand (GLOW) in 1983 and the Organization of Lesbian and
Gay Activists in Cape Town (OLGA) in 1987, both of which aligned
themselves with the anti-apartheid struggle of the African National
Congress. One of GLOWs leaders, Simon Nkoli (1988), endured four
years of imprisonment from 1984 to 1988 before being acquitted of
murder together with a group of others arrested at the same demon¬
stration. With the easing of emergency powers by the Willem de Klerk
administration, GLOW celebrated South Africa’s first gay and lesbian
pride march in Johannesburg with a turnout of 800. Two thousand
appeared the following year (Wockner 1991b).
In the early 1990s, the first gay and lesbian organizations in other
African countries have been identifying themselves to ILGA:
Gentlemen Alliance in Lagos (1989), Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe
in Harare (1990), and Afro Lesbian and Gay Club in Accra (1991). The
Zimbabwean group was forced underground when Prime Minister
Robert Mugabe denounced it in 1994.
Conclusion

In the advanced capitalist societies of the European Union, North

America, Australia, and New Zealand, the gay and lesbian movement
has come to be seen in liberal and leftist analyses as a movement in
defense of minority rights. (Conservatives still tend to want to define
movements of social change in terms of social “decay” or disorganiza¬
tion.) This view has been taken up in large part by recent theorists of
the “new social movements,” which were born (or reborn) in the
1960s and 1970s New Left era (Adam 1993b). There is certainly some
truth in this position: the minority civil rights paradigm can be suc¬
cessfully used to make claims in liberal democratic societies, it is
understood in civil society, and it has shaped the self-concepts and
aspirations of gay men and lesbians themselves. While it is true at
least for one historical moment and as an expression of one face of
movement practice, it is too limited in its grasp of the larger implica¬
tions of historical change. The gay and lesbian movement—like the
feminist movement, black and Latino movements, environmentalist
movement, and others—poses a challenge to the larger social organi¬
zation of power that opposes center against periphery and dominant
groups against the subordinate.
The degree to which these movements are successful is the degree
to which power monopolies are undermined, destabilized, and recon¬
stituted; their successes also transform the boundaries of otherness
and thus reflect on their own identities and intentions. The minority
paradigm separates homosexual desire into its own ghetto, the better
to secure the hegemonies of heterosexism, patriarchy, white suprema¬
cy, capitalism, and so on. Yet inevitably the challenge posed by gay
and lesbian groups—whether engaged inside institutional politics or

177
178 Conclusion

pressing from outside—is to contest difference and deny/defy power.

The gay and lesbian movement, then, shares with other new social
movements a democratic thrust of drawing disenfranchised popula¬
tions into—while at the same time reordering—civil society and politi¬
cal processes; it differs from them in its particular promise to
rehumanize the competitive and alienated relationships that separate
men from men and women from women. Its effect in the longer term
exceeds the boundaries of the liberal rhetoric of minority rights by
affecting predominant ideas circulating through entire societies con¬
cerning gender equality, interpersonal intimacy, and individual
authenticity.
New social movements theory typically postulates that popular
mobilization in the current era has been characterized by a shift
toward

• attempts to reverse economic and political “colonization” of

the lifeworld,
• the mobilization of largely middle-class constituencies, and
• the rise of a new “cultural politics” oriented less to “bread-
and-butter” issues than to questions of identity, rights, and autonomy.
(Adam 1993b; forthcoming)

While its imagery of contemporary movement practice describes the

evolution of the gay and lesbian movement toward “networks com¬
posed of a multiplicity of groups that are dispersed, fragmented, and
submerged in everyday life” with “short-term and reversible commit¬
ment, multiple leadership, temporary and ad hoc organizational struc¬
tures” (Melucci 1989, 60), this version of new social movements
theory offers only partial applicability to gay and lesbian mobilization.
Gay and lesbian organizations

• are not simply protective of existing life-styles but also innova¬

tive of new ways of living,
• remain fully engaged with the state in order to change tradi¬
tional moral regulation,
• are much more than a middle class or first world mobiliza¬
tions,
• vary widely in organizational form from the formal, federal
model of Italy and Denmark to the spontaneism of OutRage and
Queer Nation, and
 Conclusion 179

• address virtually every sphere of life, including the workplace

and labor unions, violence in the streets, housing and domestic
arrangements, health and social services, organized religion, and cul¬
tural representations in mass media and education.

Nor is the gay and lesbian movement simply an example of “identity

politics”—a claim that applies at most to its cultural nationalist face
but not to the whole of gay and lesbian movement practice.
Indeed, cultural nationalism, whether in the form of cultural femi¬
nism or queer nationalism, has significant implications for the future of
the movement. Cultural nationalism is an important, perhaps inevitable,
moment in the empowerment of inferiorized people (Adam 1978; 1993b,
329). It is a process of self-affirmation and a rupturing of the silences
enforced by dominant cultural traditions that withdraw the resources for
developing the self as a subject in the world. It is also self-limiting and
shortsighted in meeting the challenge of the larger social forces that
determine the well-being of lesbians and gay men. To have an impact in
reorganizing the structures of power requires alliances with other
democratic movements, such as movements of women, workers, racial
minorities, and environmentalists (all of which already include lesbian
and gay members). The electoral strategies of openly gay/lesbian candi¬
dates are instructive in showing that other social constituencies can
understand the common interests that they may share with gay people
and help to realize them just as lesbians and gay men can work for
social justice for other people. The larger objective of overcoming anti¬
gay oppression requires change to the larger system of power by

• pressing for workers’ participation in managing the workplace

in order to assert equitable criteria in hiring and advancement and to
counter the arbitrary authority of individual employers;
• working for a perestroika of the mass media, which in many
countries is well protected against state interference but which for¬
wards a narrow ideological agenda favored by its moneyed and pow¬
erful owners (Herman and Chomsky 1988);
• challenging and participating in a wide range of state agencies
that determine everything from the delivery of health services to
policing;
• acting within democratically organized religious bodies to
revalue gay and lesbian lives while acting to curb the power of antide¬
mocratic churches;
180 Conclusion

• joining in local initiatives to control violence whether in

households, the streets, or the state apparatus; and
• examining the internal organization of gay and lesbian com¬
munities, including the role of local bourgeoisies and the commercial
scene, as well as the degree of representation of the diverse nature of
the community in its own leadership.

So far there has been only minor awareness among people of the
northern and western hemispheres of the struggles of lesbians and
gay men in the developing world. To date the International Lesbian
and Gay Association works with a tiny budget and a fragile network of
volunteers in an attempt to monitor the status of gay people around
the world. Gay men and lesbians in Argentina, Colombia, China, and
many Islamic states, especially Iran, face often lethal organized
assaults by the state and by unofficial death squads. As well, the inter¬
national movement has yet to consider linkage with aboriginal move¬
ments to support indigenous cultures that institutionalize homosexual
relationships but that have come under siege by modern entrepre¬
neurs and missionaries. Indeed, the governments of the advanced,
capitalist nations, especially the United States, often actively assist the
perpetrators of violence against gay people. ILGA’s twinning project
between movement groups in the northern and western hemispheres
and those in the southern hemisphere has taken the first step in
advancing the safety of lesbians and gay men around the world. Yet
international support remains largely a new frontier where the move¬
ments in Western countries have considerable potential to affect the
foreign policy of their own governments and to influence others by
taking up the tools developed by Amnesty International. Despite the
press of local issues and meager resources to meet these demands,
the challenge today is to offer support to gay and lesbian groups strug¬
gling for human rights around the world without imposing Western
priorities or identities on them.
Notes

1. Origins of a Homosexual People

1. See Foucault 1980 on the development of knowledge in order

to control.
2. This sections telescopes the great deal of family history better
developed in Foreman 1977 and in the work of Philippe Aries, Jean-
Louis Flandrin, Lawrence Stone, Mark Poster, and others.
3. This section condenses several stages of capitalist develop¬
ment that are treated in more detail in Adam 1985b.
4. See Thompson 1980 on the British “counter-revolution.”

2. Early Movements and Aspirations

1. This section is heavily indebted to the pioneering research of

James Steakley (1975), John Lauritsen and David Thorstad (1974),
and Hans-Georg Stiimke and Rudi Finkler (1981).
2. See Fredrik Silverstolpe’s forthcoming book, Gay Stockholm,
1860-1960.
3. The rendering of Eigene into English has caused translators
headaches. Its closest approximations are “the special,” “the particu¬
lar,” “the essential,” “one’s own.”
4. For an incisive discussion of the implications of the
Eulenberg affair, see Steakley 1983, 42-47, and Hull 1982.
5. My translation. Unfortunately, “monstres sacres” loses much in
translation.

181
182 Notes

6. Philip Dyer, “Origins,” “World of Art,” and “Widening

Horizens,” in Spender 1974, esp. 35, 67.
7. Bonnet 1981, 96-165, 207. Baudelaire had gone to trial,
charged with obscenity for publishing poems with lesbian themes in
Les Fleurs du Mai.
8. Much of this section is indebted to the fundamental work of
Jeffrey Weeks.
9. F. B. Smith (1976) argues that the Labouchere Amendment
was almost unintentional, having been slipped into an antiprostitution
bill with almost no debate. This does not explain why the amendment
would be seen as so “natural” that it did not occasion opposition.
10. Wilson 1974, 265, drawn from Ernest Hemingway, A
Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1964), 20.
11. See Baritz 1960, 33, on the activities of the Ford Motor
Company.
12. For an examination of coping strategies among subordinated
peoples—some of which contribute to that subordination—see Adam
1987.
13. U.S. Senate, Committee on Naval Affairs, 1975, 11, 30; see
Chauncey 1985 and Murphy 1988. The entrapment squad reported to
the then Acting Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt.

3. The Holocaust

1. Steakley 1975, 88; Isherwood 1976, 18; Kokula 1984; Bleuel

1974, 5; for the most complete history of this period see Stiimke and
Finkler 1981.
2. Personal communication from James Steakley.
3. See Abraham 1981; Blackbourn and Eley 1984; Dobkowski
and Walliman 1983; Moore 1966; Hamilton 1982.
4. On Nazi ideologies of homosexuality, see Schilling 1983;
Herzer 1985; Stiimke and Finkler 1981; Block 1983; Mosse 1982;
Steakley 1975.
5. Much of this was dramatized in Martin Sherman’s 1980 play,
Bent.

4. The Homophiles Start Over

1. Wallace’s Progressive message clearly interested some gay

people. F. O. Matthiessen made the seconding speech for Wallace’s
 Notes 183

nomination as presidential candidate at the party convention (Hyde

1978, 362), and Harry Hay toyed with the idea of a Bachelors for
Wallace group to organize gay people (see Katz 1976, 408, and
Timmons 1990,135).
2. See Katz 1976, 586, 610, 639, 643-46, 651-52. The West
German press took a similar line at this time, a direct inheritance of
Nazi precepts. See Stiimke and Finkler 1981, 373-86.
3. U.S. Senate, Committee on Expenditures in the Executive
Departments, Subcommittee on Investigations, 1975.
4. Weeks 1977, 159-61; Wildeblood 1955, esp. 35, 42, 46. For the
antigay campaigns of the British press, see Pearce 1973.
5. For some of the personal stories about living through
these times, see especially Katz 1976, chap. 2, and Adair and Adair
1978.
6. See also Christopher Isherwood’s comments in Praunheim
1980, 32.
7. It should be noted, however, that the Community party itself
was opposed to homosexuality in line with the Stalinist position, and
Hay was obliged to leave the party to do his Mattachine work
8. Jacques Girard attributes the coining of the word to the Dutch
activist de Arent Van Sunthorst in 1949. See Girard 1981, 49.
9. Der Kreis was the only prewar gay publication to survive into
the 1950s, by publishing in Switzerland. In 1951 it was a trilingual
journal with a circulation of 800.
10. See Martin and Lyon 1972, 238, for a defense of this policy.
11. See D’Emilio 1983, 177-80; Tytell 1976. Catharine Stimpson
(1982-83) points out that the Beat style, like most of the New Left,
contained no challenge to sexism.
12. On this new relationship with Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg
(1974) remarks,

We made a vow to each other that he could own me, my mind and every¬
thing I knew, and my body; and I could own him and all he knew and his
body; and that we would give each other ourselves, so that we possessed
each other as property, to do everything we wanted sexually or intellectual¬
ly, and in a sense explore each other until we reached the mystical “X”
together, emerging two merged souls. We had the understanding that when
our (my particularly) erotic desire was ultimately satisfied by being satiated
(rather than denied), there would be a lessening of desire, grasp, holding
on, craving and attachment; and that ultimately we would both be delivered
free in heaven together. (23)
184 Notes

13. At its height the DOB included chapters in New Orleans,

Reno, Portland, San Diego, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Philadelphia,
and Melbourne, Australia. See Martin and Lyon 1972, 227.

5. Gay Liberation and Lesbian Feminism

1. On consciousness raising, see Altman 1971, 113; Teal 1971;

Freeman 1975,124-25; Evans 1979, 214-23; Breines 1982.
2. A branch of the COC was also founded in Antwerp in 1965 as
the Belgische Vereiniging voor Sexuale Rechtvaardigheid COC
(Maroey 1969). I am grateful for conversations with Rob Tielman,
Judith Schuyf, Kim Friele, and Wenche Lowzow on the Netherlands
and the Norwegian movements. They are, of course, not responsible
for my interpretation.
3. Teal 1971, 58; Abbott and Love 1972, 116; Jay and Young
1972, 292-320 passim; Kokula 1975, 64, 72-79; Girard 1981, 103;
Garcia Gaudilla 1981, 45; Marotta 1981, 175-82; Thompson 1985, 58;
Taylor and Whittier 1992,108.
4. On the new masculinity, see Humphreys 1972a; Hocquenghem
1979, 67; Girard 1981, 115; White 1980; Blachford 1981; Marshall
1981. Renaud Camus (1981) put it this way: “Well, I like fake butch
types better than real ones; the real ones are a pain in the ass.
Besides, I like fakes. I like guys who look very male, physically, but
who are actually very sweet and nice, and not aggressive at all”
(108-109).
5. Harvey Fierstein’s Broadway play Torch Song Trilogy wrestles
with similar dilemmas.
6. On the sexual ghetto argument, see also Altman 1978;
Dahmer 1978; Shiers 1978; Altman 1982.

6. The Rise of the New Right

1. See Gay Community News 5, no. 42 (1978): 1, and 5, no. 44

(1978): 1.
2. Castells argues that this development was mistakenly called
“gentrification,” a process whereby external capital “upgrades” a poor
neighborhood, thereby displacing the local inhabitants for a profit to
investors. Gay people, however, generally built their communities
with little capital and through their own labor for their own use. See
also “Gay Ghetto” in Levine 1979.
 Notes 185

3. See Shilts 1982, 107; Weiss 1984, 77. See also the Academy
Award-winning documentary The Times of Harvey Milk.
4. On coping strategies to persecution, see Adam 1978, chaps.
3-4.
5. The first two issues are discussed earlier. On the questions of
workplace lesbianism, see the very interesting work of Beth
Schneider (1984a and 1984b).
6. Burris 1983, 312-13. See also Zurcher and Kirkpatrick 1976,
260, on the social profile of crusaders against pornography.
7. See Ericson 1982, 91; Crawford 1980, 11-15; Young 1982, 128;
Huntington and Kaplan 1982, 63; Himmelstein 1983.
8. On the capitalist state and media, see Parenti 1978; Herman
and Chomsky 1988. On the social psychology of the New Right, see
Hixson 1992.
9. Young 1982,105,132-34, 141; Liebman and Wuthnow 1983, 2;
Body Politic 55 (1979): 16.
10. Young 1982, 141; on the complicity of the oppressed in their
own oppression, see Adam 1978.
11. See news accounts in Body Politic 45 (1978): 9, and 46 (1978):
11; Gay Community News 6, no. 2 (1978): 11; Thompson 1985, 29; the
film Witches and Faggots—Dykes and Poofters. I am also grateful for
comments by Robert French.

7. Civil Rights and Electoral Politics

1. Girard 1981, 179-81, my translation. The Swedish RFSL once

challenged the Swedish government to disavow the WHO classifica¬
tion by having gay people around the country stay home from work
one day and call in saying they were “sick” with homosexuality.
2. For this section, see news reports in Body Politic, Gay
Community News, and Pedersen 1985.1 am also grateful for conversa¬
tions with Wenche Lowzow and Kim Friele and for a copy of the par¬
liamentary debates leading to passage of the law.
3. The International Gay Association met in Vienna in 1983 and
in Helsinki in 1984 in solidarity with local movements.
4. The station has since evolved into Futur Generation, a consor¬
tium of gay, Italian, and other ethnic broadcasting groups sharing air
time among themselves (Stempel 1989).
5. Cal Anderson in Washington, Karen Clark and Allan Spear in
Minnesota, Susan Farnsworth and Dale McCormick in Maine,
186 Notes

Deborah Glick in New York, Glen Maxey in Texas, Gail Shibley in

Oregon, Ron Squires in Vermont, Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin and
Liz Stefanics in New Mexico (Wockner 1992b, 14).
6. In West Hollywood, John Heilman, Steve Schulte, and Valerie
Terrigno went to city hall; in Sydney, Craig Johnston, Brian
McGahen, and Bill Hunt.
7. Raymond Blain in Montreal in 1986, Gordon Price in
Vancouver in 1988, Glen Murray in Winnipeg in 1989, Kyle Rae in
Toronto in 1991, and Michael Phair in Edmonton in 1992.

8. Queer Politics

1. On cross-cultural studies of pedophilia see Adam 1985a,

Herdt 1984, Evans-Pritchard 1970, ‘Abd Allah 1917.
2. For two very different views from within the movement, see
Allen Ginsberg’s (1974) characterization of man/boy love as “an
exchange of nature-bounties. Older people gain vigor, refreshment,
vitality, energy, hopefulness and cheerfulness from the attentions of
the young; and the younger people gain gossip, experiences, advice,
aid, comfort, wisdom, knowledge and teaching from their relation
with the old” (16), and Michael Alhonte’s (1981) critique of the ten¬
dency of older men to use money to assert dominance in relation¬
ships and to project their own ideas of “age-appropriate” behavior
onto youth as “either the young, ingenuous protege or the streetwise,
butch, jock punk.” Some, he concludes, “find me old enough to screw
but not old enough to talk to” (157-58).

9. Coming Out around the World

1. The International Lesbian and Gay Association can be con¬

tacted at Antenne Rose & FWH, 81, rue Marche-au-charbon, B-1000
Bruxelles 1, Belgium. The International Gay and Lesbian Human
Rights Commission is at 1360 Mission Street, #200, San Francisco,
CA 94103.
2. Austria, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, Norway,
Sweden, and the United States have accepted at least one refugee
fleeing antigay persecution in recent years (Tatchell 1992, 81; I LG A
Bulletin, March 1992,18).
3. In the ECOSOC Committee on Non-Governmental
Organizations, the following nations voted in favor of ILGA France,
 Notes 187

Greece, Ireland, Russia, Sweden, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Chile, and

Cuba. Four voted against: Iraq, Lesotho, Oman, and the Sudan. Three
abstained: Ethiopia, Libya, and the Philippines (ILG A Bulletin, March
1993, 5). In order to retain its status, the ILGA was forced to expel the
North American Man-Boy Love Association from its membership fol¬
lowing a threat by the U.S. delegation to withhold funding if the
United Nations failed to do so.
■

<
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Selected Bibliography

Abbott, Sidney, and Barbara Love. Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. New
York: Stein & Day, 1972. Chronicles the heady days from 1969 to 1972 as
new definitions of lesbianism emerged from the turmoil of feminist and
gay liberation activism. This book is close to the events and itself shows
the transitions in the ways lesbians were thinking about and organizing
themselves.
Altman, Dennis. Homosexual Oppression and Liberation. New York:
Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971. Written by an Australian participant in
New York’s gay liberation struggles of 1969-70, this book is widely
regarded as the classic statement in liberation philosophy. Altman’s 1982
Homosexualization of America reflects on the flourishing gay culture of
the decade following the Stonewall rebellion.
Anderson, Shelley. Out in the World. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand, 1991. A quick
guide to lesbian groups around the world.
Cant, Bob, and Susan Hemmings, eds. Radical Records. London: Routledge,
1988. An important sourcebook of British gay and lesbian history, includ¬
ing articles by some of the participants in early movement groups.
Consoli, Massimo. Stonewall. Rome: Napoleone, 1990. The primary reference
on the international movement in Italian, with an appendix by the presi¬
dent of Italy’s ARCI-Gay.
D’Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1983. The most complete account of the homophile
movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, contextualized in
a social history of the era.
Duberman, Martin. Stonewall. New York: Dutton, 1993. A historical biogra¬
phy of several of the participants in the now mythic New York event that
spawned gay liberation.
Eldorado. Edited by the Berlin Museum. Frolich & Kaufmann, 1984. A lavish¬
ly illustrated collection of the “history, daily life, and culture” of homo¬
sexual women and men in Germany in the century preceding 1950.

211
212 Selected Bibliography

Based on a 1984 exhibition at the Berlin Museum, it offers a rich and

meticulously researched portrait of the early gay movement and its envi¬
rons. In German.
Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. New York: Penguin, 1991. A
panoramic history of the evolution from “romantic friendship” to contem¬
porary lesbianism based on literary sources and interviews.
Faderman, Lillian, and Brigitte Eriksson. Lesbian Feminism in Turn-of-the-
Century Germany. Weatherby Lake, Mo.: Naiad Press, 1980. A collection
of the significant literary and political documents on lesbianism from
1895 to 1921 in Germany, including Anna Ruling’s 1904 address to the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. In English.
Gay Left Collective. Homosexuality: Power and Politics. London: Allison &
Busby, 1978. Compiled by the editorial collective of the 1970s journal
Gay Left, this book presents one of the best theoretical treatments of the
place of gay and lesbian movements in advanced capitalist society.
Girard, Jacques. Le Mouvement homosexuel en France, 1945-1980. Paris:
Editions Syros, 1981. The definitive history of the gay movement in
France from the founding of Arcadie after the war to the liberationist out¬
bursts of the 1970s. In French.
Grier, Barbara, and Coletta Reid, eds. The Lavender Herring. Baltimore:
Diana Press, 1976. Selections from the Ladder, the first enduring lesbian
journal in the United States, which show the move from homophile to
feminist consciousness through the 1960s.
Hendriks, Aart, Rob Tielman, and Evert Van Der Veen, eds. The Third Pink
Book. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993. The third in a series of
“pink” books edited in association with the International Lesbian and
Gay Association, these essays present the best sources on the state of
gay and lesbian rights around the world.
Humphreys, Laud. Out of the Closets. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall,
1972. An entertaining sociological account of the early days of gay libera¬
tion (1969-72) in the United States; a book that has stood the test of
time.
Jackson, Ed, and Stan Persky, eds. Flaunting It! Vancouver: New Star, 1982.
An anthology drawn from Canada’s leading gay journal, Body Politic,
from 1972 to 1982. The books addresses a wide range of themes and
includes a chronology of movement events.
Kinsman, Gary. The Regulation of Desire. Montreal: Black Rose, 1987. The
primary gay and lesbian history of Canada, including the early develop¬
ment of movement groups across the country.
Kokula, Ilse. Der Kampf gegen Unterdruckung. Munich: Verlag
Frauenoffensive, 1975. Treats the development of the autonomous les¬
bian movement in Berlin in the early 1970s. In German.
Lauritsen, John, and David Thorstad. The Early Homosexual Rights Movement
 Selected Bibliography 213

(1864-1935). New York: Times Change Press, 1974. The first book to
reveal the story of the early German gay movement to modern gay liber-
ationists. Contains one of the very few references to gay people under
Stalinism.
Marotta, Toby. The Politics of Homosexuality. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Focused on the New York gay and lesbian militants of the Stonewall
rebellion and its aftermath, the book is much more distant from the
events it describes than are Abbott and Love, Altman, and Humphreys,
resulting in a more integrated and somewhat more conservative narra¬
tive of the events.
Martin, Del, and Phyllis Lyon. Lesbian/Woman. San Francisco: Glide
Publications, 1972. Written by co-founders of the Daughters of Bilitis,
this book offers a glimpse of the homophile 1950s and of the authors’
own changes during the radicalism of the 1960s.
Mirabet i Mullol, Antoni. Homosexualidad Hoy. Barcelona: Editorial Herder,
1985. The most important reference in Spanish on homosexuality, this
book provides an encyclopedic overview of changing theories, as well as
a precis on the emergence of the gay movement in post-Franco Spain,
especially in Barcelona. In Spanish and Catalan.
Steakley, James. The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany. New
York: Arno, 1975. This slim volume remains the most important text in
English on the prewar German gay movement.
Stiimke, Hans-Georg, and Rudi Finkler. Rosa Winkel, Rosa Listen. Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1981. The most comprehensive treatment of the gay movement
in Germany, this book carefully documents the early period, the destruc¬
tion of gay people and their movement during the Holocaust, and the
persecution of the 1950s and 1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany.
In German.
Tatchell, Peter. Europe in the Pink. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1992. A
methodical inventory of the state of gay and lesbian rights across
Europe.
Teal, Donn. The Gay Militants. New York: Stein & Day, 1971. The first docu¬
mentary history of the Stonewall rebellion, this book remains a gold
mine of original sources; conveys the flavor of the period like no other.
Tielman, Rob. Homoseksualiteit in Nederland. Amsterdam: Boom, Meppel,
1982. The major gay history of the Netherlands, including the develop¬
ment of the COC, by a former president. In Dutch.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Coming Out. London: Quartet, 1977. The leading gay history
of Great Britain, this book has been followed in an “unintended trilogy”
by Sex, Politics, and Society and Sexuality and Its Discontents, which treat
the social and theoretical histories of sexuality and its observers.
Index

Aboriginal people, 158,164,175 Baudelaire, Charles, 31,182

Adhesive comrades, 14, 39, 84,106 Bearchell, Chris, 102-3
Aesthetic-decadent movement, 31 Beardsley, Aubrey, 31
Africa, 1,176 Beaudry, Andre, 71
Afro-Americans. See Black people Beauvoir, Simone de, 83
AIDS, 121,130,133,155-57,162-63,166, Bebel, August, 21-22
173-75 Beghards, 7
Altman, Dennis, 84,106 Beguines, 7
Amnesty International, 166,168,172-73, Belgium, 13, 94,184
180 Berlin, 13,19, 21, 24, 27, 51, 57, 71, 93,
Amsterdam, 9, 65, 71, 99 98-99,123,134,144,166-67
Anders als die Anderen, 26 Bernstein, Eduard, 21
Anderson, Margaret, 45 Berube, Allan, 67,163
Andreas-Salome, Lou, 21 Bisexuality, 22,102, 107,146,163-64
Antidiscrimination laws. See Sexual orien¬ Black people, 29, 43, 46, 61, 66, 68, 73-78,
tation protection; Domestic partners 82, 84-86,100,111-13,118-20,140,
legislation 151,158,160
Arab, 94,158,170 Boise, Idaho, 63
Arcadie, 65, 71-72,168-69 Boston, 43, 74, 89, 97,140
Argentina, 95-96,172 Brand, Adolf, 20, 22, 24-25, 53
Asians, 112,150-51,158,174-75 Bray, Alan, 4
Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 98,100,102 Brazil, 171-72
Augspurg, Anita, 55 British Society for the Study of Sex
Australia, 89, 91-92,127,131,134-35, Psychology, 35,40
137,141-42,154,160,162 Brooks, Romaine, 42
Austria, 57,134,186 Brown, Rita Mae, 82, 97,102-3
Axgil, Axel, 65,137 Browne, Stella, 40-41
Bryant, Anita, 110-11,113,117,126-27,
Bacon, Sir Francis, 4 131
Baker, Jack, 85, 88 Buber, Martin, 21
Baldwin, James, 84 Bulgaria, 168,187
Barbadette, Gilles, 28 Biilow, Franz Josef von, 19
Barnes, Djuna, 31 Bunch, Charlotte, 100
Barney, Natalie, 28, 30-33, 42 Bums, Kenneth, 69
Bars. See Gay world; Lesbian world Burroughs, William, 74

215
216 Index

Business lobby. See Capitalism Cultuur-en-Ontspannings Centrum

(COC), 65, 70, 93
Call, Hal, 69 Cyprus, 169
Canada, 63-64, 79, 89-92, 111, 125-26, Czech Republic, 168
131-32,137,141-44,150,153-54,
158,160-62,163,186 D’Emilio, John, 62, 67, 69, 75
Capitalism, 3, 6, 9-14, 20, 25, 37, 39-40, Daly, Mary, 101,147
44,47,49, 59, 76,104,106-8,118, Daughters of Bilitis, 66, 69-70, 74, 77, 92,
120,122,152; Business lobby, 44, 50, 96-98,184
55, 60-61, 111, 113,116,121-23,133, Decriminalization of homosexuality, 16,
140,180 18, 21, 50, 75, 90,92-93, 99,125,132,
Carassou, Michel, 28 134-35,142,162-63,167,174
Carlsson, Kent, 140 Democratic Party (U.SA), 111, 140,142,
Carmichael, Stokely, 79 150,162. See also Liberalism
Carpenter, Edward, 35, 38-41, 45,151 Denmark, 65, 93,132,136-37,186
Castells, Manuel, 112,184 Denver, 74,133,183
Castlehaven, Earl of, 4 Detroit, 43, 74, 79, 89,183
Censorship, 26, 42, 47, 51, 53-54, 72, 87, Dewey, Thomas, 62
93,124,126,134,150-52 Diaghilev, Sergei, 30
Chicago, 43, 46, 74, 79, 82, 85, 87,158 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 146
Chicago Society for Human Rights, 42,46 Disabled people, 53,137,158-59,162
Chile, 95,172-73,187 Dolan, Terry, 121,123
China, 83,175 Domestic partners rights, 91,129,
Christian Democrats, 70, 93,159. See also 136-38,162
Conservatism Douglas, Lord Alfred, 38
Clark, Lorenne, 153 Dover, K. J., 1
Cleaver, Eldridge, 79 Drag. See Transgenderism
Cocteau, Jean, 28, 34, 72 Dworkin, Andrea, 149-50
Cohen, Jean, xiii
Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 83 Ecuador, 173
Colette, 31 Egan, Jim, 64,137
Colombia, 173 Eigene, Die, 20, 22, 26,181
Colorado, 88,133 Einstein, Albert, 21
Colquhoun, Maureen, 140 Ellis, Havelock, 13, 35,40, 45
Communism, 40, 50-53, 56-57, 59-62, 64, England. See United Kingdom
67, 75,138-40,16&-69,183 Equal Rights Amendment (U.SA),
Consciousness raising, 82-83, 90 109-10,115,117-18,120,149,162
Conservatism, 20, 22, 55, 61-63, 71, 74, Escoffier, Jeffrey, 163
88, 91,110,115,119,121,123-27, Esthuis, Eveline, 139
129,131-32,135-36,139-40,144. Estonia, 167
See also Christian Democrats; New Ethnicity model, 17,177. See Gay world;
Right; Republican Party Homosexual persons; Lesbian world
Corrigan, Philip, 12 Eulenburg scandal, 24-25
Costa Rica, 173-74,187 Evangelicalism, 23,110-11,113,115-16,
Coward, D. A., 9 119-21,124,126,130-34,159,161,
Croatia, 167 167. See also Protestantism
Crowley, Aleister, 31
Cuba, 111, 187 Faderman, Lillian, 5, 31, 41
 Index 217

Family: and social change, 3-4, 9-10,12, Giese, Kurt, 54

37, 40,105-6,116-18; as political Ginsberg, Allen, 74, 84,106,183,186
issue, 23, 50-51, 73, 84, 90, 111, Girard, Jacques, 72,183
115-19,125,133,136,159 Gittings, Barbara, 77,102-3
Feminism, 5,14, 23, 27, 55, 79, 82-83, 85, Goldman, Emma, 45-46
96-104,112,116,139-40,148,150, Goodman, Paul, 83
153-54; Cultural or nationalist femi¬ Gordon, Linda, 117
nism, 98,100-1044,108,146-49,164, Got, Ambroise, 27
179. See also Lesbian feminism; Gouldner, Alvin, 51
Women’s movement Government. See State
Feudalism, 3-4,11 Gramsci, Antonio, 44
Fiedler, Leslie, 61 Great Britain. See United Kingdom
Finland, 134 Greece: ancient, 2,14, 22, 33-34, 38-39;
FitzGerald, Frances, 117 modem, 31,168-69,187
Forster, E. M., 33,40 Green party, 138-39
Foucault, Michel, 44 Grier, Barbara, 98
France, 93, 28-35, 71-72, 93-95,110,129, Grosz, George, 21
132,138-39,143,152,160-61,186
Frank, Barney, 140 Hall, Radclyffe, 32, 40, 42, 47,151
French Revolution, 5,11-12,15-16, 29, Halle, Felix, 54
31,53 Halperin, David, 146
Freeman, Jo, 66 Hamburg, 13, 71
Friedan, Betty, 97 Hardwick, Michael, 135
Friedlander, Benedict, 22 Harry, Joseph, 105,107
Hay, Harry, 67,103, 183
Gainesville, Florida, 63, 79 Heger, Heinz, 57-58
Gay and lesbian movement: contempo¬ Herzen, W., 13
rary, 71,128-176; early German, Hesse, Hermann, 21
19-28, 34, 43, 45-46, 53-54; prewar Heymann, Lida, 55
U.S., 46. See also Gay liberation; Hilferding, Rudolf, 21
Homophile movement; Lesbian femi¬ Hiller, Kurt, 26, 28, 54, 71
nism; Lesbian movement; New Right Himmler, Heinrich, 55-58
Gay liberation, 80-97, 99-100,102-4, Hirschfeld, Magnus, 19-22, 24-27, 34, 40,
106-7,116,172 45, 52-54
Gay world, 3, 7-14,17, 26-27, 29-31, 33, Hislop, George, 126
43, 52, 54, 63-64, 95,106-8,112,118, Hitler, Adolf, 56-57
164,166-67. See also Lesbian world Hocquenghem, Guy, 49,143
George, Stefan, 22, 55 Hodann, Max, 54
Gerber, Henry, 46-47 Hohmann, Joachim, 71
Germany: Democratic Republic, 57,134, Hole, Judith, 79
166-67; Empire, 13,16,19-25, 29; Holleran, Andrew, 107
Federal Republic, 70-71, 93, 99,110, Homophile movement, 65-74, 76-79,
134,139,142-43,152,154,167,183, 84-86, 90-93, 96,164
186; Third Reich, 53-59; Weimar Homophobia and heterosexism, origins
Republic, 26-28, 50 of: 12,14, 20, 36-37, 40-41,44-45,
Gemreich, Rudi, 67 49-50, 55, 61-62, 64, 67,115-123,
Ghana, 176 133,144. See also New Right;
Gide, Andre, 33-34, 51 Violence
218 Index

Homosexual persons, 1-3, 6-7,16-17, 33, Kinsey Report, 68

115,165,170,174; culture of, 7, Kogon, Eugen, 58
14-15,17-18, 30, 33,105. See also Kollontai, Alexandra, 40
Gay world, Lesbian world Kowalski, Sharon, 137
Homosexuality: anthropological research Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 21, 39, 45
on, 1-2, 21; early theories of, 16, 20, Kreis, Der, 55, 71,183
21 Krupp, Alfred, 24
Hoss, Rudolf, 58 Kuzmin, Mikhail, 52
Housman, Laurence, 40
Houston, 133,142 Labor movement, 20, 46, 51, 53, 55, 66,
Hughes, Patricia, 148 112-13,130,140,179
Hull, Bob, 67 Labour Party, 79, 92,131-32,135,139-41,
Humphreys, Laud, 107,123 171; See also Social Democrats
Humperdinck, Engelbert, 2 Latin America, 95,105,110,158,170-74.
Hungary, 16,168 See also names of individual countries
Hunter, Allen, 117 Latinos, 66, 68, 78, 85,112-13,140
Latvia, 167
Immigration, 65, 87,91,93,130,136-37, Laurence, Leo, 85
162,166,186 Lauritsen, John, 52,181
India, 38,175 Lautmann, Rudiger, 57-58
Indonesia, 2,174-75 Lees, Edith, 41, 45
Institute for Sex Research, 26, 28, 54, 71 Lesbian feminism, 27, 96-104,107; les¬
International Lesbian and Gay bian separatism, 99,101,103
Association, 128,144,165-66,171, Lesbian identity, 6,11, 30-31, 41, 96-97,
173,175-6,180,185-87 101; political lesbians, 100-103,
Iran, 175-76 145-46,164
Ireland, 5, 37,132,134,140,187 Lesbian movement, x; contemporary,
Isherwood, Christopher, 51, 54,183 128-76; homophile, 66, 69-70, 73, 77,
Israel, 143,160,170 96,164. See also Daughters of Bilitis;
Italy, 8, 23, 94,138-39,143,169 Lesbian feminism; New Right
Lesbian world, 3, 7,10,13-14, 27, 30-31,
Jackson, Jesse, 119,163 43, 63-64, 66, 99,101,106,112,118,
James I, 4 164,166-67
Jansen, Wilhelm, 22 Levine, Ellen, 79
Japan,175 Liberalism, 11-12, 20, 22, 29, 55, 61, 72,
Jaspers, Karl, 21 90-92,109,114,119,131
Jennings, Dale, 67-68 Lipsitz, George, 119
Jews, 6,11,27, 49, 52-53, 55-57, 68,110, Lithuania, 167
116,159-160 Llangollen, Ladies of, 5
Johnston, Jill, 96, 98,101-2 London, 8,13, 54, 89-90, 98-99,124-25,
139,150,163
Kameny, Franklin, 73, 76-77, 88 Los Angeles, 66-68, 74, 82, 85, 87, 89, 99,
Katz, Jonathan, 11, 43 112,160
Kautsky, Karl, 21 Louys, Pierre, 31, 69
Kazakhstan, 167 Love, romantic, 4. See also Relationships
Kertbeny, K. M., 16 Lowzow, Wenche, 140
Kikel, Rudy, 105 Lyon, Phyllis, 69
King, Martin Luther, 75,119 MacKinnon, Catharine, 149-50
 Index 219

Man-boy relationships, 1-2, 8,14, 22, 85, Netherlands, 9,19, 25, 57, 65, 70, 82, 93,
123-24,126,143,147,152-54,186-87 132,137,140,159-61,186
Manion, Eileen, 148 New Democratic Party (Canada), 91,127,
Mann, Thomas, 21 131,140. See also Social Democrats
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 151 New Left, 74, 78-79, 82-83, 86, 89,108-9,
Marcuse, Herbert, 52, 83 126
Martin, Del, 69, 88,97 New Orleans, 43, 63,184
Marx, Karl, 13, 29 New Right, 109-24,130,133,144,150,
Masculinity, 5, 20, 22, 39-40, 44, 55, 62, 153,155
64, 90, 95,103-6,108,122,154,184 New York, 11,13, 43, 45, 47, 67, 74,
Mattachine, 66-69, 74-77, 79,81, 85,103 76-77, 80-83, 85-87, 89,96-100,121,
Matthiessen, F. O., 42,182 143,149,151,158-60,163
McAdam, Doug, xii New Zealand, 92,132,150
McCarthyism, 60-65,67,70,76,79,115,122 Newman, Leslea, 151
McKay, Claude, 43 Newton, Huey, 86
Media treatment, 24, 43, 46-47, 62-64, 66, Nicaragua, 122,174
78, 85-87, 98,109, 111, 120,122,140, Nigeria, 176
143,155,179 Nobel, Elaine, 140
Medicine, 17-18,22, 32, 36,39, 42, 44, 58, Norris, David, 140
64, 87-88,130 Norton, Rictor, 8
Mellors, Bob, 89 Norway, 65, 93,131-32,137,140,186
Melville, Herman, 15, 51 Nugent, Richard Bruce, 43
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 109
Metropolitan Community Church, 136, O’Grady, Paul, 141
160 Oberg, Erich, 19
Mexico, 66, 96,161,170-71 Oppenheimer, Franz, 21
Miami, 63,109-11 Oregon, 88, 111, 120,133,186
Miles, Angela, 147 Ottawa, 63, 90-91,125
Military and militarism, 22, 25, 62, 65-67, Owles, Jim, 86
72, 78,93, 95-96,101,115,122,139,
142,166,171-72,174 Paez, Fred, 142
Milk, Harvey, 109,112-14,121 Parenting. See Domestic partners rights;
Millett, Kate, 98 Family
Minneapolis, 85,150 Paris, 9,11,13, 28-30, 32, 34,42, 51, 54,
Moldova, 167 65, 71, 80, 82, 99,138-39,143,160
Molly house, 7-8 Pedophilia. See Man-boy relationships
Montreal, 91, 98,125-26,186 Perry, Troy, 160
Moran, L. J., 64 Peru, 173
Peyrefitte, Roger, 72
Napoleonic Code, 11,16, 34 Pezzana, Angelo, 139
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, 88, Philadelphia, 43, 74, 77,183
135,144 Philippines, 175,187
National Organization for Women, 97-98, Poland, 168
146-47 Police, 8-9, 26, 32, 34, 36, 47, 51, 57,
Nationalism, 25, 62, 64, 79,100-101,122, 63-64, 68, 71, 74-75, 78, 81-82,
126,146-49,163-64,179. See also 84-85, 87, 91,93-96, 99,109-10,
Feminism; State 113-14,124-27,130,138,141-43,
Nazism, 53-59, 65, 71, 86,123,130 150-51,167,169,171-73
220 Index

Poll, Christabell, 92 Sado-masochism, 85,147,149,151

Ponse, Barbara, 102 Sagarin, Edward, 68, 77
Pornography, 56,115,147-51,154 Sahli, Nancy, 41
Pougy, Liane de, 30-31 San Francisco, 43, 66, 68-69, 74-76, 78,
Praunheim, Rosa von, 93 84-87, 89, 97,112-14,121,138,149,
Pro-natalism, 25, 37, 47, 50, 52, 56 162
Protestantism, 53, 65,119,131,149, Sanger, Margaret, 40
160-61,163. See also Evangelicalism Sappho, 2
Proust, Marcel, 32-33 Sarria, Jose, 76
Psychiatry, 17, 63, 69-70, 72, 82, 87-88, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 93
90, 94,110-11,114. See also Sayer, Derek, 12
Medicine Scheler, Max, 21
Purity campaigns, 20, 22, 35-36, 41,148 Schenk, Christina, 139
Schorer, Jacob, 19
Quebec, 92,125-26,131 Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,
Queer, 62,145-46,162-64 19-24, 26, 28, 45, 70-71,123,159
Seattle, 79, 111, 113,138, 141
Radical faeries, 103 Serbia, 167-68
Reich, Wilhelm, 50 Sexual orientation protection, 91,109,
Relationships, personal, 3-6, 9-11, 58, 90, 111-13,120,126,129-34,139,144,
105-7. See also Adhesive comrades; 162. See also Domestic partners leg¬
Domestic partners legislation; Man- islation
boy relationships; Romantic Shaw, George Bernard, 40
Friendship Singapore, 175
Republican Party (U.S.A.), 61-62, 111, Skocpol, Theda, xii
123,130-31,133,150. See also Slovenia, 167
Conservatism Smith, Bessie, 43
Rieger, Marilyn, 69 Smith, Chris, 140
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 21 Snitow, Ann, 102
Rimbaud, Arthur, 15 Social Democrats, 13, 21-22, 24-26, 54,
Robertson, Marie, 99 93,110,138,140
Robinson, Marty, 86 Social movement theory, ix-x, xii-xiii, 1,
Robinson, Svend, 140 177-79
Rohm, Ernst, 53-54, 56 Socialism, 12, 21, 25, 35, 37-38, 46, 51-53,
Roman Catholicism, 31, 34, 57, 61, 65, 72, 55, 82, 90,100,138-39,143,166
110,116,125-26,131,159-61,163, Sodomy, 4-6, 8-9,11-12, 36, 50
172,174-75 South Africa, 176
Romania, 168 Soviet Union. See Russia
Romantic friendship: among women, 5-6, Spain, 8,138-39,142,161,168-69
10-11, 30, 39, 41,45, 47; among men, Spear, Allan, 140
4, 6, 9,14-15, 18, 38-39. See also Spohr, Max, 19, 21
Adhesive comrades; Relationships Stalinism, 50-53
Rowland, Chuck, 67 Stansell, Christine, 102
Rubin, Gayle, 149 State, 6, 20, 29, 36-37, 53, 61-64, 66, 72,
Ruling, Anna, 23 77, 87, 91, 93,116,124,128,141-42,
Rusche, Herbert, 139 145,156,170-71, 179. See also
Russia: czarist, 30; Soviet, 50-53, 58,167; Censorship; Police
post-Communist, 52,167,187 Steakley, James, 26,181-82
 Index 221

Stein, Arlene, 164 Uranian, 21, 23, 39

Stein, Gertrude, 29, 33, 41 Umings, 13,16
Stevenson, Edward, 43 Uruguay, 172
Stimer, Max, 22 Uzbekstan, 167
Stocker, Adolf, 55
Stocker, Helene, 23, 55 Vance, Carole, 148
Stone, Lawrence, 3-4,181 Vancouver, 90-91,150,186
Stonewall Rebellion, 81, 85, 89. See also Venezuela, 173
Gay liberation Venice, 8
Stravinsky, Igor, 30 Verlaine, Paul, 15, 33
Studds, Gerry, 140 Vicinus, Martha, 5
Sweden, 19, 65, 93,132,137,140,169, Violence, 85,100,104-5,109,135,141-44,
185-87 147,162,180. See also Homophobia,
Switzerland, 19, 55, 71,143,153,183 Nazism
Sydney, 13, 92, 99,127,141-42,163,186 Vivien, Renee, 31
Symonds, John Addington, 14,17, 32-33 Walkowitz, Judith, 36
Wallace, Henry, 61,182-83
Thailand, 175 Walter, Aubrey, 89
Thiele, Adolf, 21 Ware, John, 92
Third-sex theory, 16-18, 23, 32-33, 38 Washington, 43, 74, 76, 78, 88, 98-99,135,
Thompson, Sharon, 102 138,142,158,162-63
Thorsell, Eric, 19 Weber, Carl Maria, 21
Thorstad, David, 52,181 Weber, Max, 128
Tinney, James, 160 Weeks, Jeffrey, 8, 35,141,182
Toronto, 79, 89-91,126-27,142,150,158, Well of Loneliness, The, See Hall,
163,186 Radclyffe
Touraine, Alain, xii West Hollywood, California, 141,186
Transgenderism: among men, 2, 8, 30, 63, Westermarck, Edward, 40
71, 76, 81, 85, 90, 95,100,103-4,106, White, Dan, 113-14
174; among women, 2, 6,11, 55, Whitehouse, Mary, 124,127
103-4,106; movement, 85,146,163. Whitman, Walt, 14-15, 32-33, 38, 46, 84
See also Radical faeries Wilde, Oscar, 30-32, 34-35, 37-38, 40,
Turing, Alan, 64 46
Turkey, 169 Wildeblood, Peter, 64-65
Willhoite, Michael, 151
Ukraine, 167 Wisconsin, 131,141,186
Ulrichs, Karl, 16-18, 20-22, 32, 34, 38 Wittman, Carl, 81, 84,112
United Kingdom, 4-6, 8-9,12,14, 35-42, Wolfenden Commission, 72-73, 79
64, 72-73, 79, 89-90, 92, 97,124-25, Women’s movement, 20, 22-25, 39-41,
135,139-42,150-51,153-54,158,160 53, 55-56, 79, 86,97-98,100-101. See
United States: 1945-1969, 55-56, 60-70, also Equal Rights Amendment;
74-79; 1970-1994, 81-89, 92, 95, Feminism; Lesbian movement
109-24,129-31,133-35,137,140-44, World League for Sexual Reform, 26, 50
149-51,154-55,158,160-63,174,
180,186-87; pre-1945, 4, 6,10-11, Zimbabwe, 176
13-15, 38, 42-48. See also New Right Zweig, Stefan, 21
The Author

Barry D. Adam is professor of sociology at the University of Windsor,

Ontario, and the author of The Survival of Domination (1978). His
research on the sociological construction of AIDS amd the personal
strategies of people infected with HIV have devised for coping with
these constructions will appear in Experiencing HIV, to be published
by Columbia University Press.
DEMCO 38-296
very little information about the activities of gay
men and lesbians has been made available. In
this global picture of the mobilization of homo¬
sexuals Adam identifies the critical factors that
have given personal and historical subjectivity to
desire, that have shaped the faces and territories
of homosexual people, and that have generated
homophobia and heterosexism.
Treating the sociological aspects of the rise of
the gay and lesbian movement, Adam also looks
at “new social movements” theory in relation to
the gay and lesbian movement and cultural
nationalism—whether in the form of cultural
feminism or queer nationalism—which he con¬
siders an important, perhaps inevitable, moment
in the empowerment of inferiorized people.

THE AUTHOR
Barry D. Adam is professor of sociology at the
University of Windsor, Ontario, and the author
of The Survival of Domination (1978) and the
forthcoming Experiencing HIV, to be published
by Columbia University Press.

Jacket photo: 1991 New York City Gay & Lesbian

Pride March, Moment of Silence in front of 42nd
Street Library. © 1991 Morgan Gwenwald.

Jacket design by Jody L. Ouellette

© 1995 Simon & Schuster Macmillan

Twayne Publishers
An Imprint of Simon 8-o uster Macmillan
866 Third Avenue
New York, Nev York 1002'j
Social Science/Political Science

Barry Adam offers a concise and thorough introduction to the history of

the lesbian and gay struggles of the twentieth century. . . . No other work
provides such a wealth of information and insight in an accessible style
that combines historical detail with sociological sophistication.
Larry Gross
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania

Adam’s revision offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and accurate

overview of one of the most vital movements on the contemporary politi¬
cal scene. . . . This is the definitive book for use in courses in social move¬
ments, politics, social problems, and American society.
Verta Taylor
Ohio State University

Since its original publication in 1987 this book has become the classic of
the field. It is now brilliantly updated to incorporate all the latest global
“queer” developments. Barry Adam’s book is fascinating reading for every
lesbian and gay man who seeks to understand their history and required
reading for every student of social movements.
Ken Plummer
University of Essex

Adam’s book is a landmark in the field of gay and lesbian studies. This
revised edition is essential reading for all those interested in social move¬
ments, identity politics, and collective action.
Jan Willem Duyvendak
Catholic University ofNymegen and
Amsterdam School for Social Science Research

ISBN 0-8057-3863-0
90000

Twayne's Social Movements

Past and Present Series ,