Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities

Second Edition

John D'Emilio

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780226922454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

With thorough documentation of the oppression of homosexuals and biographical sketches of the lesbian and gay heroes who helped the contemporary gay culture to emerge, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities supplies the definitive analysis of the homophile movement in the U.S. from 1940 to 1970. John D'Emilio's new preface and afterword examine the conditions that shaped the book and the growth of gay and lesbian historical literature."How many students of American political culture know that during the McCarthy era more people lost their jobs for being alleged homosexuals than for being Communists?... These facts are part of the heretofore obscure history of homosexuality in America—a history that John D'Emilio thoroughly documents in this important book."—George DeStefano, Nation "John D'Emilio provides homosexual political struggles with something that every movement requires—a sympathetic history rendered in a dispassionate voice."— New York Times Book Review "A milestone in the history of the American gay movement."—Rudy Kikel, Boston Globe

1
Identity, Community, and Oppression: A Sexual Minority in the Making

ONE
Homosexuality and American Society: An Overview

On a Saturday afternoon in November 1950, five men convened at the home of Harry Hay in the Silverlake district of Los Angeles. They gathered to discuss a proposal written by Hay that had as its purpose “the heroic objective of liberating one of our largest minorities from . . . social persecution.”¹ All of the participants were members of the group they intended to liberate—America’s homosexual minority. Out of their meeting eventually came the Mattachine Society, the organizaton whose founding heralded the beginning of the gay emancipation movement in the United States.

Embedded in Hay’s proposal were certain assumptions that few contemporaries, homosexual or heterosexual, shared. Whether viewed from the vantage point of religion, law, or science, homosexuality appeared not as a mark of minority group status but as an individual problem, as evidence of moral weakness, criminality, or pathology. Nor would most Americans at that time have considered the treatment accorded homosexuals and lesbians a form of “social persecution.” Instead, it seemed to constitute an appropriate response to behavior that offended common decency, violated accepted norms, and threatened the welfare of society. Rather than liberation, Americans who thought about homosexuality at all, including many gay men and women themselves, would have preferred elimination. Earlier generations would even have been puzzled by the categorization of a group of people on the basis of their erotic behavior.

Untangling the jumble of facts that make up the early history of the gay emancipation movement requires a preliminary exploration of the elements that created the mid-twentieth-century construction of homosexuality. What made it possible for eroticism to become the basis for an identity that some people took on? What meanings did American society ascribe to homosexual behavior, and how did those meanings shape the experience of lesbians and homosexuals? What forces constrained them from breaking with the dominant views of their sexuality? What propelled some of them into a political movement, and why did that movement originate when it did?

I

For the North American settlers who migrated from England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the imperative to procreate dominated the social attitude toward and organization of sexuality. The production of children by each conjugal pair was as much a necessity as the planting of crops in the spring, since the cooperative labor of parents and their offspring generated the material goods that sustained life. Fertility in colonial America was extraordinarily high; the average pregnancy rate for white New England women was more than eight. “Heterosexuality” remained undefined, since it was literally the only way of life.²

Under such conditions, the existence of lesbians and gay men was inconceivable. Though criminal records, church sermons, and other evidence reveal homoerotic activity among the residents of the colonies, nothing indicates that men or women thought of themselves as “homosexual.” Same-sex erotic behavior remained sporadic and exceptional. Even the trials of persistent offenders document daily lives that revolved around a heterosexual family role. The prevailing ideology reflected the facts of social existence. Colonists labeled what the twentieth century calls homosexual behavior a sin and a crime, an aberrant act for which the perpetrator received punishment in this world and the next. Nor did they conceive of homosexual acts as different in essence from other sexual transgressions—such as adultery, fornication, or bestiality—that occurred outside the sanctioned bonding of husband and wife.³

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the momentous shift to industrial capitalism provided the conditions for a homosexual and lesbian identity to emerge. As a free-labor system, capitalism pulled men and women out of a household economy and into the marketplace, where they exchanged their individual labor power for wages. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the socialized production of commodities spread, goods formerly made in the home could be purchased. The family, deprived of the functions that once held it together as an economic unit, became instead an affective entity that nurtured children and promoted the happiness of its members. Birth rates declined steadily, and procreation figured less prominently in sexual life. In place of the closely knit villages, the relatively small seaport towns, and the sprawling plantations of the preindustrial era, huge impersonal cities arose to attract an ever larger proportion of Americans. The interlocking processes of urbanization and industrialization created a social context in which an autonomous personal life could develop. Affection, intimate relationships, and sexuality moved increasingly into the realm of individual choice, seemingly disconnected from how one organized the production of goods necessary for survival. In this setting, men and women who felt a strong erotic attraction to their own sex could begin to fashion from their feeling a personal identity and a way of life.⁴

In America’s cities from the 1870s through the 1930s, there emerged a class of people who recognized their erotic interest in members of their own sex, interpreted this interest as a significant characteristic that distinguished them from the majority, and sought others like themselves. Case histories compiled by doctors, vice commission investigations into the underworld of American cities, newspaper accounts of the scandalous and the bizarre, and, more rarely, personal correspondence and diaries testify to the wide social variety of these gay lives. The group included letter carriers and business executives, department store clerks and professors, factory operatives, civil service employees, ministers, engineers, students, cooks, domestics, hoboes, and the idle rich. Both men and women, blacks and whites, immigrants and the native born people these accounts. Some were or had been married; others were single. Many lived in relative isolation, while quite a few had formed lasting partnerships and acquired a circle of lesbian or homosexual friends. Their sexuality had propelled some toward a lifetime commitment to homoerotic relationships, whereas for others, homosexual involvements were sporadic and transitory, brief detours off a well-worn path.⁵

Gradually finding methods of meeting one another, these men and women staked out urban spaces and patronized institutions that fostered a group life. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, male homosexual transvestites and their ordinary-looking comrades made their liaisons in saloons and clubs scattered through the least respectable parts of town. In the largest cities, such places had multiplied by the 1920s to a point that permitted differentiation of clientele by social class and “type.” By World War I, gay men regularly cruised certain thoroughfares and parks, from Riverside Drive in New York and Lafayette Park in Washington to the Presidio in San Francisco. Some public bathhouses and YMCAs became gathering spots for male homosexuals. In St. Louis and the nation’s capital at the turn of the century, annual drag balls that brought together black gay men evinced well-developed networks among them. Lesbians and gay men formed literary societies and planned private entertainments that sustained friendships and promised dependable social interaction. Newspapers revealed the existence of working class couples, sometimes legally married, in which both members were women, with one of them passing as a man to obtain work. Occasionally a circle of such cross-dressing women would come to light. Among the faculties of women’s colleges, in the settlement houses where some alumnae lived, and in the professional associations and clubs that college-educated women formed, one could find lifelong intimate relationships supported by a web of friendships with other lesbians.⁶

By 1915, one observer of male homosexual life was already referring to it as “a community distinctly organized.”⁷ Meeting places for public liaisons, institutions such as bars, and friendship networks dotted the urban landscape. During the 1920s and 1930s, they acquired a measure of stability, slowly grew in number, and differentiated themselves to allow for specialization by social background and styles. Gradually a subculture of gay men and lesbians was evolving in American cities that would help to create a collective consciousness among its participants and strengthen their sense of identification with a group.

II

A society hostile to homosexual expression shaped the contours of gay identity and the gay subculture. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, homosexual behavior was excoriated as a heinous sin, the law branded it a serious crime, and the medical profession diagnosed homosexuals and lesbians as diseased. Together, they marked gay people as inferior—less moral, less respectable, and less healthy than their fellows. Exposure promised punishment and ostracism. It hovered about gay life as an ever present danger, always reminding homosexual men and women of the need for secrecy and careful management of information about their sexual preferences. Coupled with the restrictions that social custom and law placed on public discussion of homosexuality, fear of discovery kept the gay world invisible. It also erected barriers against self-awareness and made it difficult for women and men to find entry into the homosexual subculture.

Biblical condemnations of homosexual behavior suffused American culture from its origin. For seventeenth-century settlers, with only a precarious foothold on the edge of an unknown continent, the terrible destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by an angry God evoked dread. Men who lay with men, the book of Leviticus warned, committed an “abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Paul considered lustful behavior between men and between women “vile passions . . . against nature.” Colonial ministers railed against sodomy in their sermons. Although the world view of most twentieth-century Americans had ceased to be as biblically centered as that of their colonial predecessors, and although modern believers might be less inclined to expect ruin to pour down from heaven, religious teachings still shaped their views of sexuality and their sexual behavior to a large degree. The information Alfred Kinsey culled from 10,000 interviews convinced him that nothing in American society had “more influence upon present-day patterns of sexual behavior than the religious backgrounds of that culture. . . . Ancient religious codes are still the prime source of the attitudes, the ideas, the ideals, and the rationalizations by which most individuals pattern their sexual lives.” Derrick Sherwin Bailey, a biblical scholar who undertook in the 1950s a comprehensive reevaluation of Christian theology and homosexuality, closed his book with the thirteenth century because “it does not appear that the tradition has undergone any significant alteration since that time.” He found the antihomosexual interpretation of the Sodom episode “accepted without question” and at the base of “the thought and the imagination of the West in the matter of homosexual practices.”⁸

The law stipulated harsh punishments for homosexual acts. Colonial legal codes, drawn either directly from the Bible or from the theologically influenced English buggery statute of 1533, prescribed death for sodomy, and in several instances courts directed the execution of men found guilty of this act. Magistrates invoked statutes prohibiting lewd behavior in order to prosecute other homosexual behavior by men and women. Although most states abolished the death penalty for sodomy in the half century after independence, all but two in 1950 still classified it as a felony. Only murder, kidnapping, and rape elicited heavier sentences. Through penal code revisions and court rulings, statutes had also become more inclusive in the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. State legislatures rewrote laws and judges reinterpreted them, so that erotic activity between women and oral sex between men fell within the domain of the sodomy and “crime against nature” statutes.⁹

Although comparatively few men and virtually no women suffered the full punishment permitted under these laws, the statutes imposed the stigma of criminality upon same-sex eroticism. The severity with which legislatures and magistrates viewed homosexual behavior, moreover, buttressed the enforcement of a wide range of other penal code provisions against homosexuals and lesbians. As a gay subculture took root in twentieth-century American cities, police invoked laws against disorderly conduct, vagrancy, public lewdness, assault, and solicitation in order to haul in their victims. Gay men who made assignations in public places, lesbians and homosexuals who patronized gay bars, and occasionally even guests at gay parties in private homes risked arrest. Vice squad officers, confident that their targets did not dare to challenge their authority, were free to engage in entrapment. Anxious to avoid additional notoriety, gay women and men often pleaded guilty even when the police lacked sufficient evidence to secure convictions. Court proceedings seemed designed to instill feelings of shame and obliterate self-esteem. A New York City magistrate, writing in 1951, described how the court attendant’s “normally stentorian voice drops to a whisper” when reading a homosexual-related complaint, while judges commonly directed gratuitous, abusive language at defendants.¹⁰

Besides facing the moral condemnation of churches and the punishments imposed by law, gay men and women found themselves scrutinized by a medical profession that diagnosed homosexuality as a disease. In the 1880s and 1890s, when the scientific literature first appeared, doctors engaged in a spirited debate over whether homosexuality was a vice indulged in by weak-willed, depraved individuals, an acquired form of insanity, or a congenital defect that indicated evolutionary degeneracy. In time, advocates of the first view dropped out of the discussion, content to leave the regulation of homosexual behavior to the church and the criminal justice system. Among proponents of a medical model, a near consensus had emerged by the early twentieth century that homosexuality was hereditary in its origins.¹¹

The implications drawn from the congenital framework, however, varied considerably. In Germany and Britain, for instance, a minority of doctors argued that individuals should not be punished for a biological inheritance over which they had no control, and the congenital perspective thus served as the intellectual underpinning for vigorous homosexual reform movements. In the United States, on the other hand, doctors emphasized the tainted nature of the inheritance. Homosexual impulses, the argument ran, generally remained inactive until they were inexplicably triggered in people who had been leading otherwise heterosexual lives. Its unexpected manifestation made homosexuality an especially dread disease. It provoked exaggerated descriptions of infection and danger, with some medical men even proposing and carrying out sexual surgery to prevent such defectives from passing their traits on to future generations. Perhaps because Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock at the turn of the century feared racial “contamination” by immigrants and blacks, homosexuality stimulated worries about evolutionary degeneracy.¹²

Though a disease model exercised hegemony among doctors until the 1970s, it underwent major reformulation as Freudian psychoanalytic perspectives gained preeminence after World War I. Despite Freud’s postulation of a continuum between constitutional and environmental influences on sexual development, psychoanalysis decisively shifted medical investigation of sexuality to the psyche and away from the body, where nineteenth-century science had focused its attention. Freud himself did not write extensively on homosexuality (though when he did, he tended to view it sympathetically and to refrain from categorizing it as pathological), but his theories did provide a much sharper definition of the “normal,” with the libido moving in stages from polymorphous expression in infancy to genital heterosexuality in adults. Almost without exception, however, Freud’s pupils and successors in psychoanalysis placed homosexuality firmly in the sphere of pathology. Adherents of libido theory argued a variety of possible causes, from unresolved Oedipal conflicts to oral fixations, that might lead to a homosexual orientation; other psychiatrists, such as Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, emphasized the importance of nonsexual needs in obstructing sexual development. Thus homosexuality might be itself the psychological malady needing treatment, or it might be the symptom of some other personality disorder. In any case, it remained a mental health problem requiring psychiatric treatment.¹³

Besides pathology, the common thread of gender differences ran through both the somatic and the psychoanalytic literature on homosexuality. Doctors of whatever theoretical persuasion pursued ...