The Queerness of Home

Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity after World War II

Stephen Vider

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226808222
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia del mundo

Vider uncovers how LGBTQ people reshaped domestic life in the postwar United States. From the Stonewall riots to the protests of ACT UP, histories of queer and trans politics have almost exclusively centered on public activism. In The Queerness of Home, Stephen Vider turns the focus inward, showing that the intimacy of domestic space has been equally crucial to the history of postwar LGBTQ life.Beginning in the 1940s, LGBTQ activists looked increasingly to the home as a site of connection, care, and cultural inclusion. They struggled against the conventions of marriage, challenged the gendered codes of everyday labor, reimagined domestic architecture, and contested the racial and class boundaries of kinship and belonging. Retelling LGBTQ history from the inside out, Vider reveals the surprising ways that the home became, and remains, a charged space in battles for social and economic justice, making it clear that LGBTQ people not only realized new forms of community and culture for themselves—they remade the possibilities of home life for everyone.

ONE

Integrations

CHAPTER ONE

“Something of a Merit Badge”: Lesbian and Gay Marriage and Romantic Adjustment

James Kam and Mario Firpo met in San Francisco in 1945: as Kam later recalled, he and Firpo literally “bumped into each other” while both were running to catch a streetcar. The two men began living together three years later, in the house Firpo owned on Union Avenue, and they stayed together another eight years until Firpo died in 1956 at age forty-two. In his final will, Firpo left the house to Kam, then fifty-five years old, but Firpo’s family contested the claim on the basis of an earlier conflicting will. The case reached the San Francisco Superior Court in 1958. When Kam was called to testify, the lawyer for Firpo’s family pressed him to describe the nature of his relationship with Firpo. Kam repeatedly used the word “friendship,” but the attorney pushed for clarification: “Anything more?” Kam’s own attorney stepped in and requested they go off the record. When they returned, Kam offered this reply, “Complete homosexual marriage. Is that more clear to you?” He explained further, “There were no papers, no law, no nothing. It was just a complete question of decency between two men. He trusted me and I trusted him blindfoldedly. . . . It was a complete, voluntary, beautiful life.”1

Kam’s appeal to the language and ideals of marriage—trust, consent, and fulfillment—to describe a long-term same-sex relationship came under unusual duress, but it was not in itself exceptional. Gay men and lesbians of the 1950s and 1960s routinely used the word “marriage” to describe long-term same-sex relationships. Even in the absence of legal recognition, the rhetoric of marriage held significance for many same-sex couples as a means of understanding and structuring their romantic and sexual lives. Such relationships were not unprecedented, but they took on particular visibility in the postwar period, as the state and culture at large newly prioritized and idealized a model of companionate heterosexual marriage, with the husband-father as the primary breadwinner.2

This prioritization of marriage particularly shaped the emerging “homophile” movement, a network of organizations and activists dedicated to improving the legal and social positions of gay men and lesbians—although how this would best be achieved was an ongoing source of debate.3 Early activists particularly highlighted the question of “homosexual marriages”: Were they possible? Were they desirable? And what should they look like? What was at stake was not merely the possibility of long-term gay relationships but the capacity of gay men and lesbians to achieve happiness, emotional stability, and social integration—grouped at the time under the broad, often ambiguous psychological concept of “adjustment.” The framework of adjustment—a distinctly American conception of mental health, with roots in social reform, social hygiene, and psychoanalysis—gained wide circulation during World War II and the immediate postwar years. Disregarding definitions of “well adjusted” as always heterosexual, homophile activists frequently invoked the adjustment of the homosexual as a major goal of the movement: to help the individual to adapt to the environment—to make the best of his or her situation.

Within this context, homophile writers and their readers increasingly privileged the capacity for romantic commitment as a sign of mental health in its own right. This new measure—what I call romantic adjustment—provided a language and structure for normalizing same-sex relationships and supporting self-acceptance, by placing gay men and lesbians in greater harmony with prevailing social and sexual ideals of romantic domesticity. Both lesbian and gay activists highlighted homosexual marriage as an alternative to “immature” forms of sexual expression, including anonymous sexual encounters and short-term relationships. As Donald Webster Cory and John P. LeRoy explained in their 1963 book, The Homosexual and His Society, “Two men or two women who strive to spend the rest of their lives together feel the stigma against their homosexuality would be mitigated—at least in their own eyes—if their relationship resembled a regular marriage.”4 For homophile writers and readers, homosexual marriage offered an aspirational model for citizenship. Greater domestic stability, they argued, would ensure greater personal fulfillment and a greater sense of belonging.

Cory and LeRoy’s caveat, “at least in their own eyes,” also suggests the major limitation of extralegal homosexual marriage: fear of social disapproval or legal sanction meant that long-term same-sex relationships largely needed to be kept private. The early homophile movement prioritized privacy in two ways: first as a legal right, in particular, freedom from unlawful search and seizure and police surveillance; and second, as a social strategy, restricting disclosure of sexual identity or practices as a pragmatic response to stigmatization. Privacy was understood as protective.5

These claims to privacy were rooted in expectations about racial and class privilege. Since the nineteenth century, the expansion of an American middle class has depended on social and legal constructions of privacy, with the home privileged as a space shielded from public view. This model of domestic privacy has nevertheless been persistently denied to poor and working-class people and people of color: as Nayan Shah and others have shown, the homes of single people, poor and working-class people, people of color, and interracial couples and families have typically proven more permeable—more subject to surveillance by police, the state, and social workers.6 For the predominantly white leaders and followers of the homophile movement, threats to domestic privacy were experienced as forms of class and race dislocation—a loss of social status.7 Homophile writers and readers presented homosexual marriage as one way to combat this status loss: advocates for homosexual marriage promised greater respectability through social and sexual containment.8 If homophile activists could not eliminate laws and social prejudice against gay men and lesbians, marital domesticity could at least make gay people more mature and less visible. Gay men and lesbians of color also, of course, formed long-term relationships and even held wedding celebrations, but their voices were rarely heard in homophile circles.

At the same time, gay men and lesbians diverged in the degree to which they prioritized homosexual marriage as a form of adjustment. From the 1950s into the early 1960s, gay male activists grew increasingly prescriptive in recommending marriage as the healthiest form of same-sex relationship, and one with the greater potential for advancing the political goals of gay integration and toleration. Lesbian activists, meanwhile, increasingly articulated a feminist critique of marriage as a restrictive social institution. Homosexual marriage ultimately proved more appealing to gay male activists than lesbian activists because gay men could more easily imagine the constraints of marriage as a means of consolidating white middle-class social privilege.

In looking back to practices of and discourses around homosexual marriage in the postwar period, I aim specifically to show the extent and diversity of debate around homosexual marriage among homophile activists, and to understand the social and political pathways it both opened and closed.9 I also aim to understand how homosexual marriages of the 1950s might alter our understanding of marriage in the postwar period and its reverberations today. Homosexual marriage mattered to homophile activists—and particularly men—because it promised to reconcile the demands and entitlements of middle-class life with the presumed deviancy of same-sex desire. This vision of domestic citizenship through extralegal homosexual marriage might be understood as a precursor to what Lisa Duggan has popularly termed “homonormativity.”10 At the time, Duggan was responding to the rise of neoliberal gay advocacy groups and writers, and the growing push for state and federal recognition of same-sex marriage. With same-sex marriage now legally recognized, if not uncontested, nationwide, homosexual marriages of the 1950s and 1960s provide a case study for examining an inherent dilemma of domestic citizenship: the constant demand to make domestic life public—to perform privacy.

DEFINING HOMOSEXUAL MARRIAGE

It is impossible to say how many men and women formed “homosexual marriages” in the 1950s and early 1960s, but two surveys of gay and lesbian life from the period suggest that long-term same-sex relationships were relatively common. From 1960 to 1961, the ONE Institute, founded in 1955 as the educational branch of the Los Angeles homophile organization ONE, Inc., circulated a questionnaire to its national mailing list of several thousand men and women, as well as readers of the Mattachine Review. It eventually tabulated results from 388 male respondents, with a median age of 34.8. In the words of the survey, 113 of those respondents were currently “homosexually married.” The average length of those relationships was 4.9 years—meaning most of them had been started in the mid-1950s. Overall, roughly 40 percent of the respondents reported being involved in one or more homosexual marriages at some point—amounting to 278 long-term relationships, with an average length of 3.8 years, though 97 lasted more than 5 years, and 16 more than 15 years. “Homosexually married” was not defined but tapped into vernacular understandings of homosexual relationships as serious emotional commitments parallel to heterosexual marriages, even if they were not legally recognized.11

A similar, smaller survey, conducted in 1959 by the lesbian homophile group the Daughters of Bilitis, did not use the word “marriage” but also found that the majority of participants who responded (100 gay men, 157 lesbians) had been in same-sex relationships lasting longer than a year, with somewhat longer relationships on average for women. One crucial difference was in rates of heterosexual marriage: only 15 percent of men had ever been legally married versus 27 percent of women, reflecting, the survey analyzers surmised, “the greater social pressure on women to marry.”12 These surveys cannot be taken to give a definitive sample of gay men and lesbians of the period, but they do reflect the political base the homophile movement sought to consolidate: participants in both surveys had higher incomes and more education than average. The Daughters of Bilitis survey also noted that nearly all participants were white. The ONE survey did not ask about race at all, likely because the researchers simply assumed most men on their mailing lists were white.

Sometimes, homosexual marriages were marked with wedding ceremonies. In 1963, for example, Jody Shotwell reported in the lesbian homophile magazine The Ladder on a “gay wedding” in Philadelphia between two young women—one dressed in a “white shirt and a black knitted vest,” the other in a kelly-green dress with rhinestones—with a butch “best man” and bridesmaids with their hair in beehives. The ceremony, held at a “private home on a quiet street,” was officiated by the male manager of a local gay bar. All that seemed unusual to Shotwell was that the participants were women: she noted matter-of-factly that she had “of course, heard of gay weddings, but in most cases the couples were men.”13 Some gay weddings may have been staged as camp. Reporter Jess Stearn recounted one lavish New York wedding where one groom appeared in drag.14 But most, like the one Shotwell attended, appear to have been quite earnest as expressions of commitment.15

Gay and lesbian wedding ceremonies were nevertheless exceptional. More often, sharing a home itself was understood by gay men and lesbians as the primary means for a couple to demonstrate their commitment. Helen Branson described the process in her memoir about the gay bar she operated in Hollywood in the 1950s: “When these boys join forces and set up housekeeping, they are said to be married . . . and they behave similar to a heterosexually married couple.”16 A gay lexicon within the report Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida, produced in the early 1960s by a Florida investigative committee, similarly defined “gay marriage” as “mutual agreements between homosexuals of either sex to live together and observe the normal code of ethics concerning marital fidelity.”17

Even those who had yet to find a long-term romantic partner tended to view such a relationship as an important goal. From the late 1950s to the early 1960s, the homophile magazine ONE received many letters—some published, some not—by men expressing their loneliness and their desire for a romantic partner. One young man with the initials B. C. explained that he had begun exploring “gay life” two...