The Fifties

An Underground History

James R. Gaines

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781439101643
• eBook ISBN: 9781439109915
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

An "exciting and enlightening revisionist history" (Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author) that upends the myth of the 1950s as a decade of conformity and celebrates a few solitary, brave, and stubborn individuals who pioneered the radical gay rights, feminist, civil rights, and environmental movements, from historian James R. Gaines. An "enchanting, beautifully written book about heroes and the dark times to which they refused to surrender" (Todd Gitlin, bestselling author of The Sixties ). In a series of character portraits, The Fifties invokes the accidental radicals—people motivated not by politics but by their own most intimate conflicts—who sparked movements for change in their time and our own. Among many others, we meet legal pathfinder Pauli Murray, who was tortured by both her mixed-race heritage and her "in between" sexuality. Through years of hard work and self-examination, she turned her demons into historic victories. Ruth Bader Ginsburg credited her for the argument that made sex discrimination unconstitutional, but that was only one of her gifts to the 21st-century feminism. We meet Harry Hay, who dreamed of a national gay rights movement as early as the mid-1940s, a time when the US, Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany viewed gay people as subversives and mentally ill. And in perhaps the book's unlikeliest pairing, we hear the prophetic voices of Silent Spring 's Rachel Carson and MIT's preeminent mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who from their very different perspectives—she is in the living world, he in the theoretical one—converged on the then-heretical idea that our mastery over the natural world carried the potential for disaster. Their legacy is the environmental movement. The Fifties is an "inspiration…[and] a reminder of the hard work and personal sacrifice that went into fighting for the constitutional rights of gay people, Blacks, and women, as well as for environmental protection" ( The Washington Post ). The book carries the powerful message that change begins not in mass movements and new legislation but in the lives of the decentered, often lonely individuals, who learn to fight for change in a daily struggle with themselves.

GAY RIGHTS “To Be Nobody but Yourself”

The path to progress in a hopeless cause

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Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

—George Orwell, 1984, 1949

Picture of an unhappy man: Harry Hay in the late 1930s, when he was living a double life in his marriage and in the Communist Party.

At the worst possible moment for an unpopular idea and at the worst time of his life, Harry Hay dedicated himself to an idea that everyone told him was impossible, even dangerous. It came to him during what he later called his “period of terror,” when he had never felt so alone. He was a gay man in the closet, living with a wife he considered his best friend and two young daughters he adored. He was also a member of the U.S. Communist Party, which cast out gays as “deviates” and “perverts.” During his last days at home with his family, he was tortured by nightmares about falling down mountainsides, crashing in his car, losing his children in the wild, even hurting them and his wife.

He was far from alone in such torment. Like other gay men he knew and millions of others across the country, he was passing for straight at a time when to be gay was beyond shameful: It was criminal. Even the combatant nations of World War II were as one in harshly condemning this “crime against nature.” When the Allies liberated the concentration camps, they did not set free all the men with pink triangles on their shirts. Those with previous convictions in Nazi courts for so much as flirting with another man were forced to serve out their harsh prison sentences, with no credit for time served in the camps. During and after World War II, being gay was an especially odious kind of treason.

It was then that Harry Hay had the idea that being “homosexual” should not be an object of shame but was an aspect of human identity worthy of respect and recognition—a notion that was then unthinkable, even among those who had most reason to think it. Failing to find anyone willing to support him in the idea, Harry Hay stood alone with it for what must have seemed to him a very long time.

McCarthyism was not a word yet, but it was a fact. The charge of Communist subversion had been a useful political tool ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. From the 1930s to the 1950s, it was used most often in the effort to discredit FDR’s New Deal progressivism and to elect conservative Republicans. The tactic often worked, even when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies during the war, but it gained enormously greater firepower within weeks of V-J Day, when the first undercover Soviet agent and the first American traitor came forward to give headline writers and conservative candidates a great gift: news that the U.S. had been riddled with Communist spies and that some were still hiding in their midst. There had been and were still some Soviet spies in the U.S. then, but eventually the hunt for subversives would ensnare an untold number of innocent Americans, who were driven out of jobs, families, and friendships, sometimes to prison, sometimes to suicide. More than any other single group, the “security risks” of the Red Scare were gay or accused of being gay by some chatty neighbor, competitor, or holder of a grudge.

Thanks to Harry Hay’s familiarity with the secrecy of Communist cells, the FBI did not discover he was gay even as he articulated, recruited, and organized the Mattachine Foundation, better known as the Mattachine Society, the first sustained advocacy group for gay rights in American history. Eventually, he, other Party members, and “fellow travelers” in the leadership were purged in fear that their toxic politics would taint the cause and its membership.

After Harry Hay lost control of it, the Mattachine Society became rigorously conventional, insisting that its members adopt the appearance and manner of “proper citizens.” It also traded the secrecy of cells and anonymity of leadership for alliances with psychologists and psychiatrists who diagnosed gays as “psychopaths.” Through a press and a book service co-owned by its new leader, Hal Call, it published and distributed books relevant to the gay community, books that could rarely find a conventional publisher. Its other activities narrowed until financial problems finally led the new Society to break off from all the local chapters.

In the late 1950s, however, thanks to Harry Hay’s activist descendants—especially Frank Kameny, a man just as stubbornly principled as Harry—the Mattachine Society recaptured the defiant spirit of its first years, without which there might or might not have been a rebellion at the Stonewall Inn, a gay liberation movement, the freedom to marry the person you love, or the ability of millions of Americans simply to live openly as the people they were born to be.

Harry Hay’s story was far from unsung. He sang it himself on every occasion. “Harry snuggles up to interviewers like a cat to a fire,” his friend and ally Jeff Winters said. He was also a diligent amateur historian, and thanks to his and others’ voluminous records and memories, the birth of the Mattachine Society is richly detailed. Less clear is why Harry Hay, Frank Kameny, and others like them stayed the course, why it was they who did it, what it takes.

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A striking clue appears in a story his mother told about Harry as a toddler. He was standing at the top of the stairs in their family home on the southern coast of England. Born into an upper-middle-class Edwardian household, he was dressed all in white—twill jacket, matching trousers, linen hat—in preparation for a walk with his nurse and his baby sister. But there he stood, refusing to come downstairs without his gloves, or, as he put it, his “gubs.” His sister was already in the pram, the nanny told him, and his mother, more forcefully, pointed out that the day was warm and sunny, there was no need for gloves. Harry would not budge, however, until his pair of buttoned, gray suede gloves was found and installed. Harry was “born a sissy,” as his friend and biographer Stuart Timmons put it, but he was also the product of a strictly formal family with deep roots in the Scottish Highlands, where devotion to clan was mixed with a fierce individualism and resistance to authority. As a preteenager, Harry Jr. once told Harry Sr. at the dinner table that something he had just said about ancient Egypt was “wrong.” There was a stunned silence while the family waited for him to apologize. When he did not, his father dragged him outside and beat him bloody with a leather shaving strop. He did not cry. When it was over, he checked his source, saw that he was right, and never said he was sorry.

By that time, the family had moved to Los Angeles, his father’s birthplace. Big Harry, as he was known, had been a student of mine engineering at the University of California at Berkeley. He graduated at the peak of Africa’s colonization and made his fortune in Johannesburg working for Cecil Rhodes (as in Rhodesia). Rhodes was a lifelong bachelor who was known to surround himself with buff, good-looking male employees, including Harry’s father, who eventually became manager of the world’s largest gold mine, the South Deep in South Africa’s Witwatersrand Basin. Harry finally told his mother he was gay only after his father died, explaining that he had waited because he knew how much his father would have despised him for that. His mother had only one comment, he remembered: “Your father knew Cecil Rhodes.” She never elaborated, and they never spoke of it again, so her meaning was never quite clear: Was his father bisexual, or had he pretended to be?

By every account, his father never showed much affection for any of his children. A relative said years later that she thought the family seemed somehow “wounded… rigid, cold, unable to express simple love and affection.” Harry remembered that when he was 8 or 9, his father—who was “beginning to know what it is he has spawned and is worried about it”—came home with a pair of boxing gloves. He told his son to hit him, but “I just couldn’t. I tried to explain to him…. He just thought I was wishy-washy, but I just couldn’t do it.”

When he was 13, his father began sending him to work summers on a relative’s farm in Nevada, to make his own spending money, to learn the value of hard work, and to adopt other manly virtues. In the summers that followed, Harry came to like working on the farm, in part because it exposed him to ideas, values, and experiences that would guide the rest of his life. In that first summer, Native Americans among his fellow workers introduced him to tribal culture and rituals that would later inspire him to study sexuality in indigenous cultures, especially the tribes of the Southwest. During the summer after his freshman year at Stanford, he received his first lessons in radical politics from field hands who were members of the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. After that summer of 1931, he had hoped to continue his studies in theater at Stanford, but by then his father had lost his fortune to the Depression. On the other hand, the theater of the moment made his academic studies pale. Playwrights such as Clifford Odets and plays like his Waiting for Lefty were turning the stage into a platform for radical protest, and there was no greater drama than what was happening in the streets.

Less for politics than for love, perhaps, Harry came under the spell of actor Will Geer, later known to TV audiences as Grandpa Walton. He followed Geer to some of the great demonstrations of the period, including San Francisco’s 82-day general strike in 1934. There, he was in a crowd of demonstrators when the National Guard opened fire on them. “You couldn’t have been part of that and not have your life completely changed,” he said later. He also followed Geer into the Communist Party and began serious classroom study of Marxism. His progress in theory was slow at first, but in time he became adept at Party ideology and practice. He stuffed envelopes for the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, marched for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War, protested Jim Crow laws, and advocated for the Party’s position that Black Americans, as a distinct cultural minority, should have a separate nation.

He joined the Party despite knowing its hostility toward gays. The Wobblies on the farm and his early comrades made that plain with pointed, offhand slurs. In 1933, Stalin declared acts of male homosexuality to be punishable by five years at hard labor, and in the same year Hitler’s Germany criminalized it as part of the campaign against libertinism in the Weimar Republic. Also in 1933, and to the same end, storm troopers confiscated Magnus Hirschfeld’s library at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science and consigned it to a book-burning. Much worse was to come in law-enforcement sweeps and increasingly harsh punishments under the infamous Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which consigned gays to prison and concentration camps by the tens of thousands. In the U.S., the legal status of gays was disturbingly similar. By the late 1930s, sodomy was a felony in all but one of the states (New York) and punishable elsewhere by three years to life in prison. Those who submitted themselves to “treatment” faced everything from electroshock to lobotomy to castration.

Given such brutal consequences, many gay men, including two of Harry’s closest friends, decided to marry women. Thinking about the decision they made and the prospect of unending conflict between his public and private lives, Harry wondered if perhaps they had made the right choice. To explore his options, he sought out a psychiatrist, who suggested, “Maybe instead of a girlish boy, you’re looking for a boyish girl. Do you know one?”

A fellow Party member named Anita Platky came immediately to mind. They were already good friends, and during a long courtship before they married in 1938, he had been open with her about the fact that he was “very actively gay,” as he put it. At a time when there was very little reliable literature on the subject of homosexuality, they trusted what the psychiatrist had told him: “All you do is simply make up your mind to close one book and open another.” Years later, he said they had had “a wonderful relationship… and she never had any problems with me. I never looked at another woman. But the men—oh, the men….”

After the wedding, they plunged into Party work together. They investigated root causes and cures for the slums of L.A. and built an elaborate statistical case for government housing subsidies. They held frequent discussion groups at their home and often went to more than a half-dozen Party meetings a week. In 1943, after five years of marriage, Harry and Anita adopted their first daughter, Hannah, which bonded them even more closely, and Harry supported the three of them with his job in an aircraft factory.

That defense work won him a special deferment from the World War II draft, saving him from what he feared most about life in the military, “falling uncontrollably back into homosexuality.” He was right to be concerned about that, wrong to think his deferment could save him from it. Though some draft boards, military psychiatrists, and recruiters tried to weed out gays, others tacitly conspired with gay draftees’ wish to serve. Of the 18 million men who eventually served in World War II, only about 5,000 were exempted because they were gay. Chuck Rowland, a draftee who became a founding member of the Mattachine Society, remembered knowing “nobody, with one exception, [who] ever considered not serving. We were not about to be deprived of the privilege of serving our country in a time of great national emergency by virtue of some stupid regulation about being gay.” In fact, he joined a familiar gay cohort at Minnesota’s Fort Snelling, his induction station. “I found that all of the people I had known in the gay bars in Minneapolis–St. Paul were all officers who were running this ‘seduction station.’ ” For bringing gay men together as nothing had ever done before, World War II actually served as an accelerant of gay liberation.

Harry Hay didn’t need to enlist to join in: Gay soldiers found him in Los Angeles, as they found the gay scene in every port of call in the U.S., even though they knew that their uniforms would not protect them from the military police or local law enforcement. The LAPD was infamous for raiding gay bars (and for extorting “gayola” from their owners), as well as spying on public toilets and recruiting hunky Hollywood actors-in-waiting as entrapment bait. In the military, getting caught led to a “blue discharge,” a permanent and costly mark of disgrace. On the other hand, drag shows were officially encouraged as entertainment for the homesick, lovelorn troops. Gays were among their top stars, and they were popular with gay and straight soldiers alike, which reflected their service together in combat. As an Army medic who served from the Normandy invasion to the Battle of the Bulge put it: “No one asked me if I was gay when they called out ‘medic!’ ”

Harry tried to resist the waves of men in uniform that regularly flooded the parks and gay bars of L.A., but without success. It did not help that the family home was in Silver Lake, a district of left-wing activists, avant-garde artists, writers, and movie people known as the “Swish Alps,” which had some of the best cruising spots in the city. As Harry felt himself increasingly drawn to them, his sleep was visited by dreams of danger. Anita told Hannah about one such dream: “He was holding onto the edge of a cliff, and knew he was going to fall a long, long way. He was just holding on by his fingernails. It would be painful and very frightening, and he would wake up feeling terrible.”

Harry said his “period of terror” began in 1946, around the time they adopted a second daughter, Kate. Friends from that time noticed his increasing anxiety, and pictures of him in the family photo album showed the strain. “Other married men I knew were looking forward to their retirement, to time with their wives,” he said. “I didn’t have those dreams. I had made a dreadful mistake, and I felt I must simply play it out, getting through every day.” He found his refuge in research, teaching, and activism. When he had mastered Marxist theory, the Party asked him to start giving classes in it, and in 1946 he threw himself into People’s Songs, a group cofounded by Pete Seeger to distribute and perform folk mus...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Seeing in the Dark
• 1. Gay Rights: “To Be Nobody but Yourself”
• 2. Feminism: Meet Jane Crow
• 3. Civil Rights: The War After the Wars
• 4. Ecology: Before We Knew
• Epilogue: The Best of Us
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Cover
• Notes on Sources
• Bibliographies
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright