The Gay Revolution

The Story of the Struggle

Lillian Faderman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781451694130
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

"This is the history of the gay and lesbian movement that we've been waiting for." — The Washington Post The sweeping story of the struggle for gay and lesbian rights—based on amazing interviews with politicians, military figures, and members of the entire LGBT community who face these challenges every day. The fight for gay and lesbian civil rights—the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heart-breaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers—is the most important civil rights issue of the present day. In "the most comprehensive history to date of America's gay-rights movement" ( The Economist ), Lillian Faderman tells this unfinished story through the dramatic accounts of passionate struggles with sweep, depth, and feeling. The Gay Revolution begins in the 1950s, when gays and lesbians were criminals, psychiatrists saw them as mentally ill, churches saw them as sinners, and society victimized them with hatred. Against this dark backdrop, a few brave people began to fight back, paving the way for the revolutionary changes of the 1960s and beyond. Faderman discusses the protests in the 1960s; the counter reaction of the 1970s and early eighties; the decimated but united community during the AIDS epidemic; and the current hurdles for the right to marriage equality."A compelling read of a little-known part of our nation's history, and of individuals whose stories range from heart-wrenching to inspiring to enraging to motivational" ( Chicago Tribune ), The Gay Revolution paints a nuanced portrait of the LGBT civil rights movement. A defining account, this is the most complete and authoritative book of its kind.

PART 1

SCAPEGOATS

Chapter 1

LAWBREAKERS AND LOONIES

“HOMOSEXUALIST PSYCHOPATHIC INDIVIDUALS”

Dr. Carleton Simon was an enlightened man. Though special deputy police commissioner for New York State since 1920, he opposed the death penalty, and he advocated the rehabilitation of criminals. He opened a psychiatric clinic to serve the mentally disturbed down-and-out of the Bowery; and he disputed the use of the “water cure,” a torture technique devised by the US Army to interrogate prisoners during the occupation of the Philippines in World War II. He was a star among law enforcement officials and the medical establishment, and among society’s upper crust, too.¹

But Dr. Simon had his idiosyncrasies and prejudices. The bald, hulking doctor dabbled in phrenology. He assured his formidable audiences, including the New York Academy of Medicine and the New York State Association of Chiefs of Police, that a criminal could be identified even before he committed a crime by a drooping eyelid or a hanging corner of the mouth.² Simon was also an expert on race. “Negro criminals,” he opined, were “dishonest, shiftless, and unreliable.”³ His 1947 lecture to the International Association of Chiefs of Police on “Homosexualists and Sex Crimes,” a model of bigotry and flawed logic, passed for science that lay people accepted uncritically. The “born-male homosexualists,” he asserted, are easy to spot by their female characteristics: their walk, body contour, voice, mannerisms, texture of skin, and also their interest in housekeeping and theatrical productions. The “women homosexualists” are fickle, always eager to add to their list of conquests, and are extremely jealous of the object of their lusts.

Though Simon granted that some homosexualists live as “decent members of society,” many, he insisted, have psychopathic personalities, are indifferent to public opinion, and become “predatory prostitutes.” He extolled the state of Illinois’s treatment of “homosexualist psychopathic individuals” and recommended it be adopted everywhere. In Illinois, convicted “homosexualists” could be held as psychiatric prisoners until they “recovered.” If they “recovered,” they were then tried for having committed sodomy, which was punishable in that state by up to ten years in prison.⁴

Dr. Simon had influential counterparts all over the country, such as Dr. Arthur Lewis Miller, a Nebraska physician who was state health director. From that position of authority, Dr. Miller disseminated his theory about the homosexual’s cycles of uncontrolled desire, which were as regular as women’s menstrual cycles. “Three or four days in each month, the homosexual’s instinct [for moral decency] breaks down, and he is driven into abnormal fields of sexual practice.” Because the homosexual can’t control himself, the doctor told the Nebraska State Medical Association, science must step in. “Large doses of sedatives or other treatment” were what Dr. Miller recommended to help the homosexual “escape from performing acts of homosexuality.”⁵

When Dr. Miller was elected to the US Congress, he brought his ideas with him to Washington. As Congressman Miller, he authored a Sexual Psychopath Law for the District of Columbia.⁶ The Miller Act, as it was called, passed both the House and the Senate without difficulty. It made sodomy punishable by up to twenty years in prison. It also mandated that anyone accused of sodomy (defined as either anal or oral sex) had to be examined by a psychiatric team. The psychiatrists would determine whether the accused was a “sexual psychopath”—one who through “repeated misconduct in sexual matters” had shown himself to be unable to control his sexual impulses. If a man were picked up several times by the DC police for cruising in Lafayette Park, for instance, the psychiatric team could diagnose him to be a “sexual psychopath,” and he could be committed to the criminal ward of the District of Columbia’s St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, even before being allowed his day in court. Under section 207 of the bill, he would remain there until the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s “finds that he has sufficiently recovered.” The Senate Committee on the District of Columbia called the Miller Act a “humane and practical approach to the problem of persons unable to control their sexual emotions.”⁷

• • •

President Harry Truman signed Dr. Miller’s bill into law in June 1948. Five months earlier, Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male had been published. No one who was reasonably informed could have escaped knowing about Kinsey’s book because it was reviewed in every major newspaper and magazine in the country. Kinsey’s name became a household word. He and his team had interviewed 5,300 men, asking each of them over three hundred questions: the Kinsey Study found that 46 percent of American males admitted that as adults they’d “reacted” sexually to both males and females; 37 percent admitted to having had at least one homosexual “experience” as an adult; 10 percent said that as adults they’d been “more or less exclusively homosexual” for at least three years.⁸

Even those who chose to believe that Kinsey’s numbers were inflated had to admit the likelihood that vast numbers of the male population were having sex with other men. But, in a stunning disconnect, lawmakers and the medical doctors who influenced them preferred to insist that people who engaged in such acts comprised a tiny distinct group, different from the rest of humanity. These “homosexuals” were lawbreakers and loonies, and they must be controlled.⁹

CONTROLLING THE LAWBREAKERS

About ten o’clock on the evening of September 4, 1959, Thomas Ferry, a strikingly well-built young man in tight jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt, walked into Tiger’s, a beer-and-wine bar on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip. The routine wasn’t new to him; he’d been in Tiger’s five times in the last weeks. He sat down at the end of the long bar so that he could see the action, and he ordered a beer. Ten o’clock was early for a Friday night, and the crowd was thin. As Ferry sipped from his glass, he idly watched a shirtless man in his twenties, eyebrows penciled and eyes mascaraed, stand at the jukebox and feed it dimes, and then walk back to his seat with an exaggerated swishing of his hips. Ferry hadn’t taken more than a few sips of his beer before the bartender placed in front of him another full glass. The bartender nodded in the direction of a man sitting a few stools away. The man, in his thirties perhaps, was smiling at Ferry. Ferry had been in Tiger’s no more than ten minutes, but he knew he’d already caught his fish.

Ferry got up and walked over to where the man was sitting. “Thanks for the beer,” he said. “Do I know you?” “No, but I’d like to know you,” the man said. He introduced himself as Jim Cannon and offered his hand. Ferry shook hands warmly, and then pulled a business card from a back pocket and gave it to Cannon. The card said that the affable young man was Tom Ferry, a salesman. “Well, pleased to meet you, Tom,” Cannon said, putting the card in his wallet.

“Let me buy you a drink now,” Ferry said, standing close to Jim Cannon’s bar stool.¹⁰

Two of Jim Cannon’s friends who’d just come back from San Francisco walked into Tiger’s and, spotting Cannon, came over to chat about their gay adventures up north. Ferry stood there patiently, listening. “Why don’t you sit down,” Cannon suggested, and Ferry took the stool next to him. In the dark of the bar, Cannon, still talking with his friends, put a hand on Ferry’s knee. Ferry sat there. Cannon squeezed his thigh, stroked his pubic area, and Ferry still didn’t move away.

After Cannon’s friends went off to find a table, Ferry said casually, “Well, it’s too dead in here for me. I think I’ll leave. Do you want to go? My car’s across the street.”

“Yeah, swell!” Cannon said, flattered by the buff younger man’s willingness. They left and crossed the street together. Officer Martin Yturralde, who was waiting in the unmarked car, got out to witness Thomas Ferry flash his officer’s badge at James Cannon, pull out his handcuffs, and make the arrest. Officers Ferry and Yturralde deposited the stunned Cannon into the back of the car and drove him to the Hollywood police station, where he was asked to take out his wallet and show his identification. Officer Ferry plucked his “salesman” card from Cannon’s wallet because he knew he’d be using it again.¹¹ James Cannon was charged under Penal Code 647.5: Vag-lewd, which covered vagrancy as well as lewd and lascivious conduct.

Ferry’s report was added to the record the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control had been building for months—reports of dozens of visits to Tiger’s by undercover agents and officers. After the deputy attorney general of California examined their testimonies, he affirmed the ABC’s recommendation. The bar’s license was revoked.¹²

• • •

The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control had actually been created because of homosexuals. Before 1955, there was only an Alcoholic Beverage Commission, under the Board of Equalization. In 1951 the California Legislature authorized and pledged to finance a four-year study on “Sexual Psychopath Legislation” in twenty-three states and the District of Columbia.¹³ Four years later, horrified (as they’d expected to be) by what the study told about homosexuals and their “victims,” the legislators passed a constitutional amendment that created a Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and added a section to the Business and Professions Code that said that a liquor license could be revoked if a place was a “resort” where “sexual perverts” congregated.¹⁴

The newly created ABC was charged with maintaining public safety in establishments that served alcohol—and homosexuality, the legislature and most of America agreed, was intensely injurious to the public. Undercover agents and vice squad police were sent out on fishing expeditions, to find any evidence that the ABC could use to close the doors of homosexual bars. In San Francisco, by the late 1950s, there were so many undercover officers and agents that some nights they made up 25 percent of the people in the bar. For several months in 1959, for instance, agents were sent to a small, sedate bar on Geary Street, the Criterion Lounge. According to the hearing transcript of the agents’ testimony, one evening there were sixteen patrons and four undercover officers in the bar—each officer waiting for a patron to do something lewd to him.¹⁵

• • •

Lesbians were less likely than homosexual men to make a sexual move on a stranger after a brief conversation, but women agents and undercover officers were sent into lesbian bars as spies.¹⁶ Almost as soon as the Alcoholic Beverage Control was established in 1955, vice squad officer Marge Gwinn was sent with another undercover policewoman, Helen Davis, to do surveillance on Pearl’s, a lesbian bar that catered mostly to Latinas, for whom the place was like a social club. Gwinn passing for butch in boy’s pants and short pomaded hair, and Davis passing for her femme, hit pay dirt after only a few nights. Lorinda Pereira, a young woman in a dress and high heels, plopped herself down on the lap of short-haired Dorothy Gardner, who was decked out in a man’s shirt and fly-front trousers. Gardner petted Pereira’s leg and then rested her hand somewhere near Pereira’s pubic area—and Officers Gwinn and Davis quietly summoned their Oakland Police Department colleagues for a 1:30 a.m. raid. With a nod to the raiding police, the two officers identified the two women whose behavior was “injurious to public welfare and morals.” Pereira and Gardner were the first to be taken out to the paddy wagon. At the station, they were charged under Penal Code 647.5, “vag-lewds,” and were given suspended sentences of thirty days. Their “misconduct” was the heart of the ABC case to revoke Pearl Kershaw’s liquor license and shut the bar down.¹⁷

At a time when bars were the only public place where homosexuals could congregate, the loss of any gay bar was no small thing. Yet there was almost no public protest among gay bar-goers when Pearl’s was lost; nor when the North Coastal Area administrator of the ABC, Sidney Feinberg, declared a “vigorous” campaign to revoke the licenses of all gay establishments in the region. Feinberg, an imposing figure with a booming voice,¹⁸ announced publicly that he’d put a dozen undercover agents to work, “gathering evidence.”¹⁹ But to protest, homosexuals would have had to admit they were part of a group called “perverts” and “psychopaths.” Everywhere, homosexual anger was tamped down by shame and fear.²⁰

• • •

If you let your homosexuality show, the streets were even more unsafe than the bars. George Barrett was a police officer with New York’s Sixteenth Precinct. “Germs,” “degenerates,” and “perverts” he called the homosexuals and “other lawbreakers” he ran into on his beat around Times Square, an area he dubbed “the sewer.” Barrett admitted to being “obsessed” with cleaning up the sewer and getting rid of the “germs.” His language, and his looks too, were a caricature of the hard-boiled film noir cop: “If I can’t get the best of a guy with punches, I’ll kick him, and if he’s a better kicker than I am, I’ll go with the stick or the jack, and if I have to, I’ll use my gun,” he told James Mills, a reporter for Life magazine in 1965. Mills described him in a long, illustrated feature article as having eyes as cold as gun metal and a jaw as hard and square as a brick. Barrett liked the description. “My wife says I got a mean look too,” he boasted. Most nights, Barrett roamed the area between Forty-Third and Forty-Fifth Streets, looking to bust homosexual prostitutes and their clients. He relished his work so much that he invited Mills to come along and watch the perverts with him.

“These animals, I’ll eat them up!” he told the reporter, who shadowed him up and down the streets. Barrett pointed out a gro...