Making Gay History

Eric Marcus

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061844201
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: LGBT-Studien

"Rich and often moving... at times shocking, but often enlightening and inspiring: oral history at its most potent and rewarding." — Kirkus Reviews

A completely revised and updated edition of the classic volume of oral history interviews with high-profile leaders and little-known participants in the gay rights movement that cumulatively provides a powerful documentary look at the struggle for gay rights in America.

From the Boy Scouts and the U.S. military to marriage and adoption, the gay civil rights movement has exploded on the national stage. Eric Marcus takes us back in time to the earliest days of that struggle in a newly revised and thoroughly updated edition of Making History, originally published in 1992. Using the heartfelt stories of more than sixty people, he carries us through a compelling five-decade battle that has changed the fabric of American society.

The rich tapestry that emerges from Making Gay History includes the inspiring voices of teenagers and grandparents, journalists and housewives, from the little-known Dr. Evelyn Hooker and Morty Manford to former vice president Al Gore, Ellen DeGeneres, and Abigail Van Buren. Together, these many stories bear witness to a time of astonishing change, as queer people have struggled against prejudice and fought for equal rights under the law.

PART ONE

Before

Chuck Rowland with his sister Mildred Reinhardt in 1943.

AT THE close of the nineteenth century, more than fifty years before the gay civil rights movement took root in the United States, the first organization for gay people, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, was founded in Germany. The then-radical goals of the committee included the abolition of Germany’s antigay laws and the promotion of public education about homosexuality. The committee also set out to encourage gay people to take up the struggle for their rights. The rise of the Nazis brought a brutal end to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, and for decades after, Germany’s gay civil rights movement would remain dormant.

In the United States, it wasn’t until 1950 that the gay rights effort really got its start, with the founding of an organization called the Mattachine Society. But the stirrings began years before, and included the Society for Human Rights, a very short-lived gay rights organization founded by Henry Gerber in Chicago in 1924, and the Veterans Benevolent Association, a gay veterans social group founded in New York City in the 1940s.

The years immediately following World War II proved to be an especially fertile time for those gay men and women who dared to imagine that something could be done to improve the challenging conditions under which many of them lived. A handful did more than just imagine. Among them was a young man named Sam From, who was a student in one of psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker’s introductory night classes at UCLA in Los Angeles, California.

Dr. Evelyn Hooker

It became clear almost immediately that Sammy From was the most outstanding student in the class. He talked with me at intermission. He asked questions. There was just no doubt that he was the bright and shining star. You know, when a teacher finds a person like that, you fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

When Sammy discovered that I was taking the streetcar home after class, to save gasoline—this was during the war—he began driving me. Sammy had all the gasoline he wanted because he was writing million-dollar contracts between the Army Air Corps and the aircraft industry in this area. He had a high school education. His father was a junk dealer.

Our friendship developed gradually, but I had an idiotic policy then. I thought instructors should not fraternize with their students. It wasn’t until he had finished my course that Sammy called me and asked if he could come over. We spent the evening talking. When he left, my husband Don turned to me and said, “Well, you told me everything else about him, why didn’t you tell me he was queer?” I said, “How could you possibly tell? You’re crazy!” To which Don replied, “He did everything but fly out the window.”

Sammy was very eager to get to know us. He and his lover, George—a much older man who was introduced as Sammy’s cousin—invited us to dinner, and we went. (It was a delicious dinner.) They wanted my approval so much that they were afraid to let me know they were gay.

I don’t remember a time when Sammy or George said, “We’re gay.” They just gradually let down their hair and became very good friends of ours. They adored Don, who was very handsome, a marvelous talker. He was a sort of freelance writer in Hollywood and also worked on radio and did some painting. He liked them very much and wasn’t bothered by the fact that they were gay. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to be bothered by things like that because he had lived in Hollywood for a long time.

I didn’t know much about homosexuality before I met Sammy, George, and their friends. As a matter of fact, when I was in college at the University of Colorado, The Well of Loneliness was circulating quietly. I remember reading it and thinking, Oh, gee. I wouldn’t like to have to live my life with all that secrecy. But it has always made a lot of sense to me when gay people say, “I had to have been born this way because almost from the very beginning of my sexual consciousness I was interested in men” or “I was interested in women.” I was interested in men from the time I was an adolescent, and there was never any question about that. I think that that understanding, together with the rather extraordinary cross section of society into which I was introduced by Sammy, made the difference.

In 1945, after I had known them for about a year, Sam and George invited us to join them on a Thanksgiving holiday in San Francisco. We had an absolutely marvelous time. Sammy was one of these people I described as an “if” personality. If all the restraints were off, if he didn’t have to behave like a businessman or a manager, then he was funny, funny, funny! He was dramatic and campy.

On the first night we were in San Francisco, Sammy insisted that we go to Finocchio’s to see the female impersonators. My eyes were wide! I’d never seen anything like that. Besides the dance routines, there were two old bags from Oakland who did a lot of female patter. It was funny, funny, funny! You absolutely believed that these female impersonators were the real thing. Then all of a sudden, they took out their breasts and bounced them up and down on the stage! The whole house just came down.

After the show, we came back to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill for a snack. I was unprepared for what came next. Sammy turned to me and said, “We have let you see us as we are, and now it is your scientific duty to make a study of people like us.” Imagine that! This bright young man, somewhere in his early thirties, had obviously been thinking about this for a long time. And by “people like us” he meant, “We’re homosexual, but we don’t need psychiatrists. We don’t need psychologists. We’re not insane. We’re not any of those things they say we are.”

AT THE time, psychiatrists and psychologists, with few exceptions, believed that homosexuals suffered from a treatable mental illness. Despite the virtual absence of dissenting opinion, some homosexuals refused to accept the prevailing dogma, but they were almost powerless to challenge it. Sam believed that a scientific study was needed to prove what he knew to be true.

Sammy wanted me to show the world what they were really like, but I just couldn’t see how I could add one more thing to what I was already doing. I said, “I can’t study you because you’re my friends. I couldn’t be objective about you.” He replied that they could get me a hundred men, any number of men I wanted. Sammy would not let me go. He said, “You’re the person to do it. You know us. You have the training.” So I said I would talk to a colleague about it.

I shared an office with Bruno Klopfer, who was one of the world’s greatest experts on the Rorschach test. I told him about Sammy’s suggestion. He jumped out of his chair and said, “You must do it, Eeevah-leeeen! You must do it! Your friend is absolutely right. We don’t know anything about people like him. The only ones we know about are people who come to us as patients. And, of course, many of those who come to us are very disturbed, pathological. You must do it!”

WITH BRUNO Klopfer’s urging, Dr. Hooker began her study. But in 1947, after completing “fifty or seventy-five” interviews with gay men, Dr. Hooker’s husband, who had long suffered from alcoholism, asked for a divorce. With her personal life in collapse, she set aside her research and took a teaching job at Bryn Mawr, outside Philadelphia. It would be six years before Dr. Hooker picked up the threads of her landmark study.

LISA BEN* had been living in Los Angeles for just a few months when Sam From first proposed his idea of a study to Dr. Evelyn Hooker. Born in 1921, Lisa grew up in a rural northern California town, and came of age in a nation upended by the Second World War. Like millions of other young people who were either drafted into the military or streamed into the major cities to take jobs in the booming wartime economy, she left home not knowing what she would find. Arriving in Los Angeles in the closing months of the war, Lisa eventually stumbled upon a largely hidden and vital community populated by people just like herself.

Lisa Ben

It was a while before I knew other gay gals and learned from them what gay meant. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know the word lesbian. I knew how I felt, but I didn’t know how to go about finding someone else who was like me, and there was no way to find out in those days.

I found out one day when I was sunning myself up on the top of the garage of the place where I had a room. Some other girls who lived in the building came up and spread out their towels and started to talk among themselves. I noticed that although there was plenty of talk, they never mentioned boys’ names. I thought, Well, gee, that’s refreshing to hear some people talk who aren’t always talking about their boyfriends and breakups. I got started talking to them just out of friendliness.

I don’t know what brought up the subject, but one of the girls turned to me and said, “Are you gay?” And I said, “I try to be as happy as I can under the circumstances.” They all laughed and then told me what it meant. And I said, “Well, yes, I guess I am because I don’t really go out and search for boyfriends. I don’t care for that.” So they told me that I must come with them to a girls’ softball game, which I did, but I didn’t tell them that softball bored the tar out of me, which I know is very funny for a lesbian to say. I went along to be with the crowd.

The next week or so they took me down to a gay bar called the If Club. When we all walked in there, why, someone was bringing a birthday cake to one of the booths. There were some girls sitting there, and they were all singing “Happy Birthday.” I looked around me, and tears came to my eyes—partly because of the cigarette smoke—and I thought, How wonderful that all these girls can be together. Of course, we called them girls at that time.

The girls could dance together there, and I started dancing with one or the other of them who would come over and ask me; I never asked them. They asked me because I was obviously feminine. I had my hair long and I wore jewelry. I didn’t look like a gay gal. I didn’t have the close-cropped hair and the tailored look that was so prevalent in those days. I didn’t do any of that jazz because I didn’t feel like it. And darned if I was going to do it just because everybody else did. I’m a girl and I’ve always been a girl. The only difference is I liked girls.

On the other side of this If Club was a bar, and the men could come in off the street and they could sit at the bar and watch the girls dance. They were straight, as far as I knew. The proprietor never let the men over where the girls were. That was forbidden.

After I went to the If Club, I got invitations out to here and there, and I found out about a few more gay bars. I was always afraid that the police would come, although they didn’t seem to bother the girls’ clubs much. But I was afraid, and for that reason I never drank any strong liquor at the clubs so I’d have my wits about me if anything like that happened. I didn’t want to be so addled that they would take me off in the paddy wagon and put me in the pokey.

I was in a club down at the beach one time when the police came in. They just swaggered around and were very unpleasant. They zeroed in on one boy in a bright red shirt—he had slightly long hair for that time—and they gathered around him in a circle. I think they made him prove that he was a boy, but you couldn’t see. I thought, What a horrible thing to do to the poor fellow.

After the police took our names, they left. Well, I was frightened and wanted to leave, but the two women at the table said, “Wait a half hour because sometimes the police lurk outside and then as you leave they’ll take you in.” I waited and then I got in the car and drove home. I never went back to that place again.

So I was never in a real raid, but I read about them. In those days, every once in a while there would be an article in the newspapers with headlines like, “Party of Perverts Broken Up at Such and Such,” and there would be a list of names. I didn’t think I was a pervert or sick. Why would I be sick? I never, ever wanted to be like everyone else and raise a family or have babies. On the other hand, I never wanted to go stomping around in boots either or be in the business world. I was a misfit all the way around, I guess.

TWO YEARS after she first learned what gay meant, Lisa decided to put some of her thoughts about lesbians and gay life into print. She approached her modest writing project with the same innocence as she did her first forays into Los Angeles’s largely hidden gay subculture, and never considered that there was virtually no precedent for what she set out to do.

I published the first issue of Vice Versa, a magazine for gay gals, in June 1947. I wrote Vice Versa mainly to keep myself company. I called it Vice Versa because in those days our kind of life was considered a vice and it was supposedly the opposite of the lives that were being lived and approved of by society.

The magazine was just some writing that I wanted to get off my chest. There was never anything in the magazine that was sexy or suggestive. I purposely kept it that way in case I got caught. They couldn’t say that Vice Versa was dirty or naughty or against the law.

I typed the magazines at work; I was a secretary at a Hollywood studio. I had a boss who said, “You won’t have a heck of a lot to do here, but I don’t want you to knit or read a book. I want you always to look busy.”

I made five copies at a time with carbon paper, and typed it through twice and ended up with ten copies. That’s all I could manage. There were no duplicating machines in those days, and, of course, I couldn’t go to a printer. Then I would say to the girls as I passed out the magazine, “When you get through with this, don’t throw it away. Pass it on to another gay gal.” In that way Vice Versa would pass from friend to friend.

I wrote almost everything in the magazine, although once in a while I would get a contribution. I wrote book reviews, although there were very few books around at the time that said anything about lesbians. Even though it had been around since 1928, I wrote a book review on The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel. If there were any movies around that had the slightest tinge of two girls being interested in one another, I would take that story within the movie and play it up. And then I wrote poetry.

I was never afraid of being caught. That’s the funny part about it. I never realized how serious it was. I blithely mailed these things out from the office with no return address, until one of my friends phoned me and said, “You know, you really shouldn’t be doing that. It is against the law and it c...