The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York

'An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail'

Stephan Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781135905675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Between 1966 and 1975 North American youth activists established over 35 school- and community-based gay liberation youth groups whose members sought control over their own bodies, education, and sexual and social relations. This book focuses on three groundbreaking New York City groups -- Gay Youth (GY), Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.), and the Gay International Youth Society of George Washington High School (GWHS) -- from the advent of gay liberation in NYC in 1969 to just after its dissolution and the rise of identity politics by 1975. Cohen examines how gay liberation -- with its rejection of stultifying sex roles, attack on institutional oppression, connection between personal and political liberation, celebration of innate androgyny, and resolute anti-war and anti-capitalist stance -- shaped understandings of sexual identity, membership criteria, organization, decision-making, the roles of youth and adults, and efforts to effect social change.

Chapter One

Prior to Gay Liberation: Sin, Crime, and Illness

In American society prior to gay liberation, young people wrestling with issues of sexuality were traditionally confronted by societal barriers characterizing same-sex acts as sinful, criminal, and/or the result of mental illness. Age presented an additional obstacle to gay youth, denying them entry into the culture of bars, an established venue for fellowship. Fearful of “contributing to the delinquency of a minor,” homophile organizations generally refused membership to those under twenty-one.¹

For much of the twentieth century, physicians and psychoanalysts debated whether homosexuality was a vice of weak-willed individuals, an acquired form of insanity, or a degenerate congenital defect.² The 1952 American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classified homosexuality as a Sociopathic Personality Disturbance, thus giving a medical legitimacy to official and unofficial discrimination.³ Homosexuality, once construed as deviant, sinful, and criminal, was now categorized as a sickness among a class of individuals known as homosexuals. In the 1968 DSM-II, sexual deviations including homosexuality were reclassified as Personality Disorders.⁴ The psychiatric profession attempted to pinpoint homosexuality’s cause, classify cases, and find a treatment for its cure.

EDUCATORS’ AND RESEARCHERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON HOMOSEXUALITY

Educational discourse echoed medical discourse. Before the 1970s, the discussion of homosexuality in relationship to education was likely to be ignored or treated with an a priori assumption of deviance and illness.⁵ The multiplicity of homosexual behaviors documented by Kinsey et al., and their cautionary advice to refrain from the use of the words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” “as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons,” was largely disregarded within popular and academic discourse; it was however observed by adult activists who generally used the term “homophile” to describe their groups.⁶

Perplexed and troubled by feelings of difference, adolescents were confronted with a homophobic body of literature and a frequently hostile educational system. Sociologist Willard Waller considered homosexuality to be contagious, asserting in The Sociology of Teaching (first published in 1932) that the homosexual was liable to develop “an indelicate soppiness in his relations with his favorites.”⁷ He described personality traits principals and superintendents could use to screen prospective male teachers or identify and fire homosexuals already on staff.⁸ The profession’s numerous female teachers were not addressed. These and other predatory attributions rendered educators both vulnerable and reactionary.

The pathological view continued. Bieber’s 1962 study of 106 homosexual patients ascribed same-sex attraction to an unrealistic fear and loathing of the opposite sex that was defined as a pathologic condition.⁹ Youth (as activists Allen Young, Randy Wicker, and Barbara Gittings recall) found few positive gay role models.¹⁰ Oppressive texts such as Bergler, Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life, 1957; Ellis, Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure, 1964; and Charles Socarides, The Overt Homosexual, promulgated views of illness and deviance that caused pain and suffering to readers.¹¹ Daniel Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America was a rare exception.¹²

The theme of deviance shaped curriculum. In NYC, a commonly used sex education text emphasized the unhealthy nature of post-pubescent same-sex affections and the threat predatory adults posed to youth.¹³ This put at risk the very teachers who might otherwise have been able to best assist youth. In New York City, the Board of Education’s Board of Examiners refused to license openly homosexual teachers.¹⁴

OVERCOMING ISOLATION

Sexual identity development, and thus LGBT student activism, was stymied in the hostile 1950s climate. Barbara Gittings recalled that during the pre-Stonewall era “the big questions for my generation were: ‘Are we normal?’ ‘Are we sick?’ ‘Are we criminal?’ We didn’t ask ‘What legacy are we leaving for the next generation?’ Although we certainly assumed that what we were doing would result in a better world.”¹⁵ Support was tenuous. Interviewed in the movie Silent Pioneers, a black lesbian emphasized, “Nobody talked about racism.” Maua Adele Ajanaku, recalled, “If something happened to me in a bar I couldn’t count on anybody standing up and covering my back.”¹⁶

Randy Wicker found the public image of homosexuality bore no relation to his experience as an adolescent.¹⁷ Press accounts presented homosexuals as communists or exotic creatures with falsetto voices. In the 1950s, Burgess and Maclean, labeled as “communist sympathizers” and spies for Russia, were respectively described by the New York Times as “admittedly homosexual” and prone to “homosexual tendencies” when drunk.¹⁸ The young and wealthy Leopold and Loeb, infamous as thrill seekers, committed the page one crime of the century, the murder of fourteen-year-old Robert Franks in 1924.¹⁹ Wicker questioned such characterizations.

I had no basis to doubt it in one sense because I wasn’t out. But I wasn’t effeminate. I didn’t speak in a falsetto voice. I loved America and wasn’t disloyal—so my rejection of the “stereotype” was simply intuitive.²⁰

Nevertheless, some adolescents did manage to break their isolation and collectively identify feelings of difference. Writer and editor Jack Nichols established an informal high school student group.²¹ Jack shared books such as Daniel Webster Cory’s The Homosexual in America with friends, developed a social network, held gatherings, and even found key supportive adult mentors.²² While this group of friends was by necessity unobtrusive, it accomplished two of the three steps towards personal affirmation later taken by Gay Youth, namely: breaking isolation and consciousness-raising (leading to the third step of visible protest).

Queer adolescents (and adults!) found informal spots for social interaction. In Florida, young teenagers gathered at a drug store counter.²³ During the early 1950s, Hollywood Boulevard was the place to meet a carload of compatriots.²⁴ In NYC, hustlers and drag queens congregated behind the New York Public Library in Bryant Park, although gays meeting there were subject to police entrapment. Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway, Queens was a popular meeting place during the 1950s and 1960s.²⁵ A revelatory late 1940s photograph shows same sex dancing; couples are apparently jitterbugging by the Long Beach, Long Island dunes (fig. 1.1).

Gay visibility outside of circumscribed safe enclaves carried its dangers. Donald, recorded in Word Is Out, explained:

In the sixties [prior to 1969] if you said something to someone about relationships between two men, somebody might want to punch you in the face. Now if you rap to a brother, if he’s gonna deal, he’ll deal.²⁶

Fig. 1.1. “Pt. Lookout, Long Beach, NY, late 1940s, same sex dancing on the beach.” (Photographer unknown, Collection 017: Gay Beach Photographs, National History Archive, LGBT Community Center, 208 W. 13th Street, NY, NY 10011.)

The risk of exposure, inability to act, paucity of safe meeting places, and lack of information stymied teenagers from developing a gay identity and finding community.²⁷ Even as late as 1979, many gay males did not come out until adulthood.²⁸

HOMOPHILE MOVEMENT

During the 1950s and 1960s, homophile organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society began to challenge the characterization of homosexuality as an illness. The original left leaning Mattachine Society founded by Harry Hay in 1950 (named after the French Société Mattachine in turn derived from the “Italian ‘mattachino’ meaning a court jester who dared to tell the truth to the king”) ²⁹ partook in a ritual in which members stood in a circle and repeated after the Moderator, “Let us hereby resolve that no young person among us need ever take his first step out into the dark alone and afraid again.”³⁰ Hay, a radical force in the early homophile movement, sought to unify isolated individuals, educate and develop a homosexual culture, and lead via political action.³¹

Members fearful of McCarthy-era persecution unseated its original leadership and Mattachine became increasingly circumspect. It and other homophile groups sought social assimilation, tolerance, and “civil rights within the existing system,” emulating the goals and tactics of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.³² The Mattachine Society endeavored to:

promote educational research projects in all phases of sexual deviation; to aid sexual deviants against discrimination and help them in their adjustments to society; to educate the general and professional members of the public concerning the problems of the sexual deviant.³³

The Daughters of Bilitis was named for “the heroine of the fictional Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louys portrayed as a contemporary of Sappho and living a lesbian life.”³⁴ It served “women over twenty-one years of age interested in furthering the education of the variant, in assisting her to adjust to society, and in working towards the goal of educating the public toward an acceptance of the homophile in society.”³⁵

The Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine sponsored public forums, published journals, and bravely demonstrated “to call attention to injustices perpetuated against homosexuals.” Jack Nichols, Frank Kameny, Lilli Vincenz and seven others held the first gay civil rights picket of the White House on April 17, 1965.³⁶ The efforts of homophile groups to “integrate the homosexual citizen into the community” established the groundwork for the gay liberation movement.³⁷

BARRIERS TO YOUTH

Homophile groups, whose members were vulnerable to being stigmatized as “dirty old men/women,” were off-limits to adolescents.³⁸ Even during the 1970s, many adolescent males were loath to admit an age and high school status that identified them as “jail bait.”³⁹ Young lesbians faced similar hurdles. Phyllis Lyon and Del Mart...