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CHAPTER TWO

Repression, Resistance, and War: The Birth of Gay Identity

When the famous Irish-born writer Oscar Wilde was convicted of sodomy in 1895 and sentenced to two years of hard labor, newspapers around the world were filled with lurid descriptions of a form of sexuality few had previously acknowledged existed. The trial came to define gay men in the popular consciousness as effeminate aesthetes, but also raised awareness among latent homosexuals of the existence of others like them. Newspaper accounts allowed Londoners to discover where to go to find men looking to have sex with other men. But it was hardly an exuberant “coming out” moment. Wilde, who was married with two children, accepted the popular clinical thinking about his “condition.” His writings of the period reflect the debate about whether homosexuality was a form of sickness or insanity, complaining of his “erotomania” while in prison.¹ For years Wilde remained the world’s most famous gay man.

Early on, women who had sex with women were less visible than gay men. Men’s greater financial independence and integration in the public spheres of work and community afforded them more opportunities to explore alternative sexual lifestyles. Wage-earning men could live in urban boarding houses where they could invite other men to their rooms, providing an outlet beyond familial controls, something far less available to working-class women. In addition, while most working-class women in the United States during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were literate enough to read the Bible, few left records of their intimate lives. As lesbian historian Lillian Faderman concludes, “The possibility of a life as a lesbian had to be socially constructed in order for women to be able to choose such a life. Thus it was not until our century [twentieth] that such a choice became viable for significant numbers of women.”²

In the mid-nineteenth century, a few working-class women who “passed” as men in order not only to seek employment but also in some instances to pursue romantic relationships with other women came to the attention of authorities. Stories appeared in newspapers about cross-dressing lesbian women such as “Bill” in Missouri who became the secretary of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers. One report read: “She drank…she swore, she courted girls, she worked hard as her fellows, she fished and camped, she even chewed tobacco.”³ As it was virtually unheard of for women to wear trousers, especially in urban environments, almost nobody suspected the identity of an androgynous woman dressed as a man. Not all of these passing women were lesbians; some were seeking equality with men and freedom from raising children. Performing men’s work for men’s wages, owning property, holding bank accounts in their own names, and voting were among the many benefits these women accessed that were typically available to men only. But a fair number of these passing women did get married to other women, occasionally more than once, as newspaper headlines of the day announced: “A Gay Deceiver of the Feminine Gender,” “Death Proves ‘Married Man’ a Woman,” and “Poses, Undetected, 60 Years as a Man.”⁴ Union Army doctors recorded at least four hundred women who served surreptitiously as men during the Civil War.⁵

It was not until the 1880s, when sexual relationships between women in the United States were more openly acknowledged, that they were repressed. Laws against “perversion” and “congenital inversion” were applied to women as well as men for the first time. In Britain, though, lesbianism was left out of the criminal code because Victorian prudery dictated that women had no desire for sex, and legal authorities feared that including sanctions against women having sex with others of their gender would actually promote homosexuality among them. Lord Desart, who had been the director of public prosecutions when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for sodomy, said this about including lesbianism in the 1921 criminal code: “You are going to tell the whole world that there is such an offense, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it. I think it is a very great mischief.”⁶

For American women of the middle class, access to higher education provided the first opportunity to break free from their families and experience life surrounded by other young single women, especially for those attending all-female institutions. Between 1880 and 1900, 50 percent of college women remained single, as opposed to 10 percent of non-student women their age.⁷ For those college graduates who sought professional careers, which usually meant eschewing marriage, the phenomenon of cohabitating “spinsters” or “Boston marriages” developed. These same-sex relationships, often referred to at the time as “romantic friendships,” were not always sexual, but letters, novels, and occasionally even shared beds indicate they often were. The statistics that sexologist Alfred Kinsey gathered among women born in the late nineteenth century show that 12 percent of them had had orgasms from sexual contact with another woman.⁸

However, some of these women, including radicals like Emma Goldman, didn’t always perceive their intimate relationships with other women as lesbian relationships. Despite erotic correspondence between Goldman and Almeda Sperry, a woman with whom she’d reputedly had a sexual affair, Goldman expressed the common notion that lesbians were man-haters, and since she was not antagonistic toward men she didn’t categorize herself that way. In one letter, Goldman expressed her dismay about a woman friend who ran off with another woman: “Really, the Lesbians are a crazy lot. Their antagonism to the male is almost a disease with them. I simply can’t bear such narrowness.” ⁹ What’s striking is that this negative perception of lesbians was echoed by a woman who campaigned on behalf of gays and lesbians and who denounced all legal punishment against homosexuality.

The number of women entering the U.S. labor force between 1870 and 1900 tripled from 1.8 million to 5.3 million, double the rate of increase of women in the population overall.¹⁰ For many of these women leaving their families in rural areas for urban industrial centers, it was the first time they would have an opportunity to live independently, and often they shared housing to save costs. Not all or even most of them experimented with lesbian sex, but anecdotal accounts from some of these women along with the popularity of novels and proliferation of articles about female “inverts” and their “disorders,” reveal that lesbianism was on the rise. Prior to 1895, only one article on lesbianism existed in the Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, which covered the previous 150 years. By 1916, there were nearly 100 books and 566 articles covering women’s sexual “perversions.”¹¹ With social mores hovering between Victorian sexual stultification and the urban lesbian chic of the roaring twenties, early twentieth-century lesbians were construed as gender-bending and even hypersexualized. As Faderman explains, “Lesbianism and masculinity became so closely tied in the public imagination that it was believed that only a masculine woman could be the genuine article.”¹²

As industry grew, so did the gap between the lives of the wealthy classes and the impoverished working class. In the late nineteenth century, upper-and middle-class men often sought out casual encounters with younger working-class men whom, they believed, were indifferent to anti-homosexual mores. Aside from bourgeois prejudice, this belief was also based on the real-life conditions of working-class people, who were crowded into one-room tenements and slums where middle-class social rules against sexual promiscuity and alternative sexual activities often did not apply.

The bourgeois family and its moral codes of sexual control and hard work held the upper classes to strict rules of conduct—at least outwardly. They believed that sexual purity among women was essential for them to carry out their domestic roles as teachers and disciplinarians of their children, and sexual control among men allowed them to be successful in business. Men were allowed their occasional discreet trysts, unlike women, but stepping over the line was harshly punished. Oscar Wilde, whose writings were widely read and respected by the middle class, may not have been convicted if he hadn’t publicly flaunted his sexual activities with much younger men, amid loud outcries over the corruption of youth and the importance of the family to the maintenance of the British Empire. Lust and sexual perversion were cited by social-purity advocates as enemies of the empire. “Rome fell; other nations have fallen; and if England falls it will be this sin, and her unbelief in God, that will have been her ruin,” wrote one advocate of sexual purity.¹³

New patterns of living, however, defied the puritanical calls to abstain from homosexuality. Gays and lesbians invented ways of meeting, and by the early twentieth century virtually every major American and European city—and some small towns—had bars or public places where gays could find one another. Berlin was the global center of a gay subculture, with hundreds of bars and cafés that catered to a largely homosexual clientele until the early thirties rise of the Nazis that laid waste to gay lives and culture. The revolutionary legacy of France made it the only industrial country without laws against homosexuality, and Paris became a magnet for expatriate American lesbian literary figures fleeing repression. Riverside Drive and the Bowery in New York City, Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., YMCAs and public bathhouses in St. Louis and Chicago all served as gathering spots and cruising spaces for gays. Poet Walt Whitman, the most famous nineteenth-century American homosexual, called Manhattan the “city of orgies, walks and joys” and bragged of New York’s “frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love.”¹⁴

Popular songs among Blacks in the 1920s and 1930s with lesbian and gay themes and titles such as “Sissy Man Blues” and “Fairey Blues” provide evidence of an African-American gay community.¹⁵ Black lesbian butch/femme couples even married in large wedding ceremonies in Harlem during the 1920s. By altering the first name of the butch lesbian, these couples actually obtained legal licenses from the city.¹⁶ Writer Sherwood Anderson popularized these post–First World War marriages in his collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio. The annual Harlem Hamilton Lodge Ball, or what Blacks in the neighborhood called The Faggots Ball, drew thousands of Black and white men and women to watch and participate in the country’s most celebrated and flamboyant drag queen event. Harlem resident Abram Will described what must have been the biggest event to transgress gender and racial norms of that era:

There were corn-fed “pansies” from the Deep South breaking traditional folds mixing irrespective of race. There were the sophisticated “things” from Park Avenue and Broadway. There were the big black strapping “darlings” from the heart of Harlem. The Continent, Africa and even Asia had their due share of “ambassadors.” The ball was a melting pot, different, exotic and unorthodox, but acceptable.¹⁷

Gay historian George Chauncey presents a fascinating challenge to the assumption that all early gays were closeted, particularly those in big American cities like New York. Using police records, newspaper accounts, novels, letters, and diaries between 1890 and 1940, Chauncey counters “the myth of invisibility” and focuses on a thriving gay male scene in Harlem, Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, and Times Square neighborhoods in Gay New York.¹⁸ But only those men who assumed the sexual role and effeminate dress and mannerisms of women conceived of themselves as gay, or called themselves by the popular terms of the day: “fairy,” “pansy,” or “queer.” In that sense, gender identity was what determined sexual identity, including for those partaking in homosexual sex. As Chauncey argues, “The heterosexual-homosexual binarism that governs our thinking about sexuality today, and that, as we shall see, was already becoming hegemonic in middle-class sexual ideology, did not yet constitute the common sense of working-class sexual ideology.”¹⁹ In a sense, the campy femininity of those who identified as gay often acted to reconfirm the masculinity of “normal” men who had sex with them. Gay men wanting to attract suitors dressed and spoke in ways that were known to be gay, and hung out in parks, bathhouses, and pubs where they could attract others like themselves or working men and sailors on leave looking for sex.

Gays in working-class districts were accepted in some circles as part of city life, if not always respected or welcomed. They made easy targets for those looking to steal from or rough up someone whose outlaw status made it unlikely that they would go to the police, as hundreds of those suspected of being homosexual were arrested on charges of “indecency” every year. While it is difficult to speculate on how people attracted to those of the same sex perceived themselves in the era prior to the Second World War, evidence from diaries and novels seems to indicate that “‘Coming out’…was a lonely, difficult, and sometimes excruciatingly painful experience.”²⁰ Even for those able to enjoy the urban gay subculture in their leisure time, coming out to families and coworkers most often meant risking social ostracism at least and the loss of a job in most cases. No wonder then that some of the liveliest gay American scenes were in places where men lived apart from the families and communities in which they were raised.

With the exception of Jewish immigrants fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, most of the millions of immigrants arriving in New York from Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere around the turn of the twentieth century did not come with their families. For example, 80 percent of Italians who came to the United States between 1880 and 1910 were men, most of them between fourteen and forty years old. By contrast, 42 percent of immigrant Jews were women and 25 percent were under fourteen years of age.²¹ The huge influx of single working men often settled in tenements and rooming houses, far from wives and family, if they had any. The New York Times Magazine referred to its hometown as the “City of the Single,” where during the first third of the twentieth century, 40 percent of the male population over fourteen was unmarried.²² The social, work, and home lives of working-class men were conducted in largely sex-segregated environments. Even most popular after-work entertainment in pubs was largely male, since aside from prostitutes women rarely frequented pubs in that era. The lack of available women, as well as the camaraderie of the workplace, the military, and the bars, led some of these men to experiment sexually with other men. During the gold rush of the late nineteenth century, a vast migration of miners and speculators streamed into San Francisco, already California’s biggest port city, creating huge concentrations of single migrant men passing through that city’s boarding houses. “In 1890, there was one saloon for every ninety-six residents, the highest proportion in the United States—double that of New York or Chicago,” explains one historian.²³ In San Francisco as in New York, this large transient population was less likely to feel the constraints of social norms and rules.

Fear of public exposure and middle-class social convention drove thousands of professional men, often married with children, to have sex with working men in secret, on the “down low.” They went “slumming” on the Bowery, in Greenwich Village cafés, in San Francisco’s North Beach, and at the massive Harlem balls. Tragically, many of them blamed the more flamboyant gays and “mannish” lesbians for the hostility and fear mainstream society heaped on them. One gay man in the 1930s summed up the contempt of many “assimilated” middle-class gays this way: “As the cultured, distinguished, conservative Jew or Negro loathes and deplores his vulgar, socially unacceptable stereotype…so does their homosexual counterpart resent his caricature in the flaming faggot…. The general public [makes no distinction], and the one is penalized and ostracized for the grossness and excesses of the other.”²⁴

The new openness of urban gay subcultures gave way to new theories of homosexual behavior. Doctors and sexologists advanced the notion that homosexuality was inherent in a person who had no power to change his or her nature. The widespread conception of gays as butch women and effeminate men ran so counter to the feminine and masculine ideals put forward in popular culture that ruling-class ideology embraced the unscientific conclusion that gays were suffering from a condition that set them apart from “normal” people. Gender-based biological explanations only served to confirm the inevitability of bourgeois gender norms and the nuclear family.

Many gays and lesbians themselves thought that their erotic urges and desires made them fundamentally different from heterosexual society. Writers such as Radclyffe Hall, who successfully fought the banning in the United States of her lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928 (it was, however, banned in Britain), popularized the medical definition of homosexuality as an inescapable, emotionally tormenting, natural deviance. The Well of Lonliness remains today one of the most widely read lesbian works of fiction, despite its anachronistic portrayal of sexual inversion. It was for years the only lesbian novel that demanded of the world, “Give us also the right to our existence!”²⁵

The development of a visible and identifiable gay minority not only led to gay oppression but also to the possibility of organized resistance to it. Socialist Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx and a close friend of sexologist Havelock Ellis, wrote and spoke frequently to large crowds on women’s liberation and the rights of homosexuals. In Germany, Social Democratic Party (SPD) member Magnus Hirschfeld started the first gay organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, in 1897. Hirschfeld, with the support of the SPD, campaigned to repeal a law against men having consensual sex.²⁶ During the failed German Revolution of 1918–1923, dozens of gay organizations and periodicals appeared calling for the liberation of homosexuals. Following the Russian Revolution of 1917, when all laws against gays were struck from the books, the German Communist Party argued, “The class-conscious proletariat…approaches the question of sex life and also the problem of homosexuality with a lack of prejudice.… [T]he proletariat…demands the same freedom from restrictions for those forms of sex life as for intercourse between the sexes.”²⁷ The anarchist Emma Goldman went on a speaking tour throughout the United States in 1915 and defended homosexuality. Goldman commented to friends about the numbers of men and women who would approach her afterward to say that it was the first time they had ever heard about others like themselves.²⁸

But for most gays and lesbians through the early twentieth century, life was filled with self-hatred and public condemnation. Few had the luxury of coming out for fear of losing jobs or the risk of becoming a social pariah. Pervasive legal and religious hostility and social restrictions sent many to seek a “cure” from doctors or to find a release from emotional strain and internalized self-loathing through alcohol and drugs. In a pattern that was to repeat itself later in the twentieth century, gay life in the United States was forced out of the public sphere by the end of the twenties as authorities and their ideology reasserted control over the sex lives of workers and the poor. As Chauncey argues, “the state built a closet in the 1930s and forced gay people to hide in it.”²⁹

“Do you like girls?”

Sixteen million young American men and women enlisted or were drafted for duty during the Second World War. Almost as many millions more—mostly young women—left home for military or industrial jobs in new cities, often living in boarding houses and dorms, as part of the war effort. Never before had there been this many young people mobilized into sex-segregated living situations, often under life-and-death conditions in which bonds between people can be intense and long lasting. The impact on sexuality overall, and on homosexuality in particular, was astonishing.

Among the famous gays who served were actors Tyrone Power and Rock Hudson and writers Gore Vidal and John Cheever. But a wealth of evidence exists to prove that the war created conditions for sexual experimentation and the development of a gay identity among hundreds of thousands, if not more. If researcher Alfred Kinsey’s wartime studies are accurate and can be applied to the U.S. military population, then at least 650,000 and as many as 1.6 million male soldiers were gay.³⁰ D’Emilio writes,

In releasing large numbers of Americans from their homes and neighborhoods, World War II created a substantially new “erotic situation” conducive both to the articulation of a homosexual identity and to the more rapid evolution of a gay subculture. For some gay men and women, the war years simply strengthened a way of living they had previously chosen…. At the same time, those who experienced strong same-sex attraction but felt inhibited from acting upon it suddenly possessed relatively more freedom to enter into homosexual relationships. The unusual conditions of a mobilized society allowed homosexual desire to be expressed more easily in action. For many gay Americans, World War II created something of a nationwide coming out experience.³¹

The First World War, by comparison, only mobilized 4.7 million Americans over a nineteen-month period.³² However, its cataclysmic impact on European life translated into a similar phenomenon there. Books referring to sexual trysts in the trenches, homoerotic relationships between comrades in arms, poetic exchanges, and long nights in fear-and lust-induced embraces are chronicled in collections such as Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches.³³ Of the homosexually-tinged poetry between soldiers, one writer explains, “No one turning from the poetry of the Second World War to that of the First can fail to notice there the unique physical tenderness, the readiness to admire openly the bodily beauty of young men, the unapologetic recognition that men may be in love with each other.”³⁴ In the twenties, a largely underground subculture for gay men and lesbian women expanded in London, Paris, and Berlin in particular. The successful prosecution in Britain of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness in 1928 was evidence of the continued state repression of any open expression of same-sex love, even in popular literature.

One major, if indirect, impact that the First World War had on gays in the U.S. military was the $1 billion cost incurred for the care of psychiatric casualties—half of all veterans’ hospital beds were still filled with psychiatric inpatients at the start of the Second World War.³⁵ This enormous cost was used as an incentive by the emerging psychiatric profession to promote the necessity of psychiatric screening for the millions of military inductees in the lead-up to the new war.

One of the chief advocates for psychiatric screening, Harry Stack Sullivan, was a psychologist who lived discreetly with his male lover in Bethesda, Maryland. Sullivan did not believe that gays should be banned from military service or discriminated against in any way and had no intention of including any reference to homosexuality in the screening. But in May 1941, the Army Surgeon General’s office for the first time included “homosexual proclivities in their lists of disqualifying deviations.”³⁶ There were—of course—no scientific means of determining who was gay; therefore, crude guidelines called for excluding any man who displayed “feminine bodily characteristics,” “effeminacy in dress and manner,” or “a patulous (expanded) rectum.” As historian Allan Bérubé notes, “All three of these markers linked homosexuality with effeminacy or sexually ‘passive’ anal intercourse and ignored gay men who were masculine or ‘active’ in anal intercourse.”³⁷

What this amounted to in practice was hardly scientific. Millions of young men were forced to stand naked in front of physicians, or their assistants, and were asked—often to their great embarrassment—“Do you like girls?”³⁸ Given the years of propaganda for a coming war against the Nazis, the stigma of being deemed unfit for service, and the fact that nearly a whole generation was being mobilized to fight, ample incentive existed for those who knew they were gay to lie and go to war with their peers.

Coming out in close quarters

The armed forces segregated men in crowded barracks or in close ship quarters. The fear of death in a war that killed more than four hundred thousand Americans was ever present and created harsh and extraordinary circumstances in which the norms of civilian life were often suspended. Men on leave in port cities danced together, an offense that would have brought arrest during peacetime; soldiers performed in popular drag shows with explicit homosexual themes to rapturous applause in Europe and the Pacific; GIs shared beds in crowded YMCAs and slept wrapped in each others’ arms in public parks while waiting to be shipped overseas; and intense emotional bonds were formed between soldiers who were often physically demonstrative in ways that American male culture in peacetime condemns.³⁹ This created an atmosphere in which homosexuality was often ignored or accepted by peers. Gay veterans, such as Long Island native Bob Ruffing, recall how easy it was to cruise other men in the military. Said Ruffing, “When I first got into the navy—in the recreation hall, for instance—there’d be eye contact, and pretty soon you’d get to know one or two people and kept branching out. All of a sudden you had a vast network of friends, usually through this eye contact thing, some through outright cruising. They could get away with it in that atmosphere.”⁴⁰

Nearly 250,000 women served in the armed forces, most of them in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC), and few, if any, were rejected for lesbianism. Working as mechanics, drill instructors, and motor vehicle operators, women in the armed services were recruited with posters showing muscular, short-haired women wearing tight-fitting, tailored uniforms. Training manuals praised the female comradeship and close bonds between recruits, two-thirds of whom were single women under the age of twenty-five. There is evidence to suggest that a disproportionate number of women who joined the WAC were lesbians looking to meet other women and to get the opportunity to do “men’s work.”⁴¹ Even a popular Fleischmann’s Yeast advertisement during the war showed a uniformed WAC riding a motorcycle beneath the heading: “This is no time to be FRAIL.”⁴² More than a few WAC veterans recall women showing up for their inductions wearing men’s clothing with their hair slicked back in the classic butch style of out lesbians of the day.

The realities of the war and the dire need for servicemen and women trumped all other concerns of the War Department. Despite the official hostility to homosexuality in the military, very few gays were actually rejected. Out of eighteen million men examined for service, only four thousand to five thousand were officially nixed for being homosexual.⁴³

The most famous example of how central many gays and lesbians were to the war effort and the impact that had on forcing an unofficial wartime suspension of the witch hunt is recounted by historian Randy Shilts. General Dwight Eisenhower, acting on a rumor, ordered a member of his staff, WAC sergeant Johnnie Phelps, to draw up a list of all lesbians serving in the WAC battalion for him to dismiss from service. After informing him of the medal-winning service of the battalion and the vast number of lesbians in it, Phelps said, “I’ll make your list, but you’ve got to know that when you get the list back, my name’s going to be first.” The secretary of the battalion then interrupted to say, “Sir, if the General pleases, Sergeant Phelps will have to be second on the list. I’m going to type it. My name will be first.”⁴⁴ General Eisenhower promptly tore up the order.

With millions of men gone from the workforce, jobs in aircraft and shipbuilding, as well as in clerical and consumer industries, opened up to women for the first time. Many women had to relocate in order to take these jobs and found housing in same-sex dormitories, boarding houses, and trailers. Aside from working and living in close proximity with other women, many had a chance to socialize in all-female environments. Despite persistent anti-homosexual bias in society, the unprecedented mobility afforded to many working-class women during the war loosened previous sexual constraints. As D’Emilio argues,

The war temporarily weakened the patterns of daily life that channeled men and women toward heterosexuality and inhibited homosexual expression…. For men and women conscious of a strong attraction to their own sex but constrained by their milieu from acting upon it, the war years eased the coming out process and facilitated entry into the gay world.⁴⁵

The social upheaval created by the Second World War has had a long-lasting impact on gay life in the United States. Some men and women who had been pulled from small-town life at an early age were attracted to port cities, such as San Francisco, which presented the opportunity to be openly gay among a community of others like themselves. San Francisco in particular became a gay mecca toward the end of the war, when fighting was most intense in the Pacific, and official military policy turned up the heat on gays, discharging gay men by the hundreds into the picturesque port town. Denver, Kansas City, Buffalo, and San Jose, California, among other cities, opened their first gay bars after the war and developed the beginnings of gay enclaves. During the postwar period, there was a flood of new gay-and lesbian-themed books in which, unlike past works, gay characters accepted their sexuality, even if these books still portrayed gay and lesbian characters as tragic figures. Like many Black soldiers who were emboldened to fight against racial segregation at home after their participation in a war they were told was about fighting for democracy, gays returned from the war with a greater sense of entitlement to rights and benefits.

Tellingly, while the U.S. government attacked the barbarism of the Nazis, it managed to avoid any discussion of Adolf Hitler’s treatment of homosexuals. While gays were “coming out under fire” in the American armed forces, the Nazis went on a campaign of terror against homosexuals in Germany. Beginning in 1938, gays and lesbians were sent to concentration camps and were forced to wear pink triangles. Berlin, which had been home to one of the world’s largest gay subcultures, became a nightmare for gays. “Indecent activities” between two men or two women—a touch, a kiss, or handholding—were enough to be sent to the camps. The head of Hitler’s storm troopers, Heinrich Himmler, said, “We must exterminate these people root and branch…the homosexual must be entirely eliminated.”⁴⁶ The Nazis claimed to be doing all of this in the name of the sanctity of the family and motherhood. In Germany, a country wracked by unemployment and destitution and gearing up for war, Hitler imposed a complete lockdown on dissent of every kind, including the implied dissent of homosexuality.

Among the many crimes of the United States in that war, one crime that has remained largely hidden from history is the decision by the U.S. occupying forces to continue the imprisonment after the war of gays and lesbians who were found in Hitler’s concentration camps.⁴⁷ Of the estimated fifteen thousand gays sent to the camps, one-third survived, many of whom were forced to remain in prison in American-occupied West Germany through the 1960s, when the Nazi-era anti-homosexual law, Paragraph 175, was finally stricken from the books.⁴⁸

While the number of homosexuals thrown into Hitler’s camps is far outnumbered by other targeted groups, accounts from survivors leave no doubt of the universality of barbarism meted out to all of the Third Reich’s victims. Of the non-Jewish prisoners in the camps, homosexuals had the highest death rates, 53 percent, three-quarters of whom died within a year of their imprisonment.⁴⁹ Pierre Seel’s memoir of his experiences in the camps describes vividly the recollection that decades later still awakens him shrieking into the night. He was ordered along with others of his barracks to watch in indescribable horror as his eighteen-year-old lover was stripped naked and torn to shreds by German shepherds while his lover’s final screams echoed inside a tin pail placed over his head.⁵⁰

Cold War crackdown

Nothing shook up the sexual consciousness of postwar American society like the release of the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey Reports on American male and female sexual behavior. Fifty percent of ten thousand men surveyed admitted erotic feelings at some point toward other men; 37 percent had had sex with men; 4 percent claimed to be gay. Of the women surveyed, 28 percent admitted erotic feelings toward other women, while 13 percent said they’d had sex with women; about 2 percent said they were lesbians.⁵¹ Alfred Kinsey commented at the time that, given the predominance of homophobia, his results indicated “such activity would appear in the histories of a much larger portion of the population if there were no social constraints.”⁵² Kinsey’s studies gave public expression to the reality of a growing gay minority in the United States. This was to have a profound impact on gays’ ability to mobilize for their rights. In the immediate postwar period gays in the United States went from complete isolation to developing an awareness of themselves as an oppressed class of people.

As groundbreaking as these studies were in revealing the widespread presence of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in U.S. society after the war, it is important not to take Kinsey’s figures as permanent and suprahistorical. Instead, what Kinsey’s studies and others since suggest is that LGBT people are not a fixed proportion of any society, but instead their ability to come out or for anyone to explore alternative sexual possibilities are largely shaped by fluctuating social and economic conditions. D’Emilio again sums up well the implications of this perspective:

I have argued that lesbian and gay identity and communities are historically created, the result of a process of capitalist development that has spanned many generations. A corollary of this argument is that we are not a fixed social minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the population. There are more of us than one hundred years ago, more of us than forty years ago. And there may very well be more gay men and lesbians in the future.⁵³

If the war opened up a vast space for the development of a gay community, the postwar period witnessed concerted attempts to close that space. The shifting needs of the American Empire, which emerged from the war a superpower, did in fact create both the conditions for heightened repression and sowed the seeds of opposition.

There were strong economic and social incentives for ratcheting up harassment and legal discrimination against gays after the war. With U.S. industry churning out more than 60 percent of all manufactured goods in the world, the need for a higher birth rate to staff the labor force and military raised the idealization of the nuclear family to new levels. America’s new industrial prowess brought household appliances and a marketing blitz unknown to previous generations of workers.

Women were driven out of the industrial jobs they held during the war. White women were told to go back home, put on housedresses, and make babies, while Black women were meant to return to their prewar jobs as low-wage domestic servants. Gone were women’s practical, square-shouldered, androgynous fashions of the 1940s; in came the frilly dresses with exaggerated busts and hyperfeminine lines of the 1950s.

Unlike the previous image of the working-class male—who in the thirties and late forties unionized, took political action, and went on strike—a new masculine domesticity was encouraged. Sociologists like C. Wright Mills dissected Corporate America’s drive to create “organization man,” an obedient team player who assiduously followed the rules of the corporate structure, bowed to authority, and sought domestic security while eschewing confrontation and struggle. The new medium of television was used to help promote a suburban family man and avid consumer in shows like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. As one historian put it, “Cold War political discourse tended to position Americans who protested the rise of ‘organization man’ or who rejected the postwar American dream of owning a home in the suburbs as homosexuals and lesbians who threatened the nation’s security.”⁵⁴

This heightened emphasis on the nuclear family was part and parcel of an era of political reaction in the United States. The launching of the Cold War with the Soviet Union brought with it an anticommunist witch hunt at home, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Gays were among McCarthyism’s many targets. Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, both reflecting and promoting the twisted conflation of communism and homosexuality of the time, equated the way secret members of the Communist Party supposedly recognized each other to gay men cruising for sex in public places in his 1949 work, The Vital Center.⁵⁵

The U.S. Senate launched an investigation into allegations of homosexuals “and other perverts” in federal government jobs in 1950. According to the Senate report, gays “lack the emotional stability of normal persons”; “sex perversion weakens the individual”; and “espionage agents could blackmail them.”⁵⁶ This led to President Eisenhower’s executive order calling for the dismissal of homosexuals from government service. Disbarment from the military of gays, or suspected gays, went from a trickle to two thousand every year during the 1950s, and up to three thousand or more per year into the 1960s.⁵⁷ D’Emilio situates the crackdown on gays and lesbians within the wider social context:

The anti-homosexual campaigns of the 1950s represented but one front in a widespread effort to reconstruct patterns of sexuality and gender relations shaken by depression and war. The targeting of homosexuals and lesbians itself testified to the depths of the changes that had occurred in the 1940s since, without the growth of a gay subculture, it is difficult to imagine the homosexual issue carrying much weight. The labeling of sexual deviants helped to define the norm for men and women…. There was a congruence between anti-Communism in the sphere of politics and social concern over homosexuality. The attempt to suppress sexual deviance paralleled and reinforced the efforts to quash political dissent.⁵⁸

Though both gays and Communist Party (CP) members were persecuted by the anticommunist witch hunt, gays could not look to the CP for solidarity. After Stalin took power in the Soviet Union, he reversed all the gains made by the 1917 Revolution by the early 1930s, including the revolution’s laws decriminalizing gay sexuality. The CP in the 1950s adopted Stalin’s hostility to homosexuality, denouncing it as a “bourgeois deviation.”⁵⁹

Nonetheless, the first U.S. movement to organize against gay discrimination on the job and police harassment in the bars and cruising spots was initiated by former members of the CP. The broader critique of economic injustice and racism that initially attracted many people to the CP, despite its many failings, not surprisingly compelled these communists to take up the fight against antigay bigotry. Harry Hay left the CP—and his wife—to help found the Mattachine Society in Southern California in 1950. Named after an ancient masked secret fraternity that told truth to power, the Society’s “Statement of Purpose” claimed the group’s goals were to unify, educate, and lead the homophile—meaning pro-homosexual—movement. Shaped by the reactionary atmosphere and isolation that defined the lives of most gay and lesbian people, the statement called for the creation of a feeling of “belonging,” to develop “a homosexual ethic…disciplined, moral, and socially responsible,” and to “provide leadership to the whole mass of social deviants.”⁶⁰ Yet, these “pioneers in a hostile society,”⁶¹ began to develop a theoretical understanding of their oppression rooted in the structure of capitalist society, solidarized with Latinos assaulted by police, and experienced rapid growth in organizing efforts after waging a successful campaign against the police entrapment of one of their members. By 1953, they estimated that more than two thousand men and women had participated in Mattachine’s activities.⁶² In an era of racial segregation, Mattachine was open to all. A Black member of the organization, Guy Rousseau, provided the name for the monthly magazine, One, whose editorial board members were in Mattachine. The title’s allusion to Second World War jargon, “He’s one,” was recognizable to gay men of that era.⁶³

But the gay movement was not immune to the McCarthy crusade. A red-baiting article attacking the group’s secrecy and insinuating communist influences inside Mattachine appeared in 1953 in the Los Angeles Mirror, stoking suspicion and division within the group, with profound ramifications for Mattachine’s structure and political organizing thereafter. With the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in full swing against communists and dissenters of every sort, anticommunist gays took over the leadership of the group, banned communists like Hay, and turned away from challenging the government jobs ban to focus on urging its members to “try to get cured.”⁶⁴

Hay stayed active in gay politics throughout his life and remained committed to struggles against oppression and exploitation. When film director Elia Kazan—who had cooperated with the McCarthyite HUAC hearings in 1952 by providing names of communists—was given an Honorary Academy Award in 1999, an elderly Hay and his lover John Burnside joined hundreds in protesting Kazan’s duplicity. The eighty-seven-year-old Hay proudly marched wearing his signature love beads and long mane of gray hair, saying he was an unrepentant communist who had no regrets for having helped launch a movement that changed his own life and affected millions of others.⁶⁵

In San Francisco in 1955, lovers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), naming the lesbian advocacy group after an erotic poem. More than fifty years later, this couple was the first in San Francisco to marry after the California Supreme Court found the illegality of same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, though notably the corporate media made almost no mention of their historic contribution to lesbian rights.

Given the much lower visibility and numbers of lesbian activists, the group of mostly white-collar women workers focused on lesbian self-help and tried to provide a social space outside the bar scene, as limited as it was. An estimated thirty lesbian bars existed throughout the country by 1963, whereas there were that many gay male bars in San Francisco alone.

The Cold War atmosphere and constant police harassment helped to nudge both the Mattachine Society and the DOB in a conservative political direction. Both organizations sought to “stress conformity” in order to “diffuse social hostility as a prelude to changes in the law and social policy.”⁶⁶ Del Martin’s “President’s Message” that appeared in the first issue of the DOB’s publication, the Ladder, argued, “Membership is open to anyone who is interested in the minority problems of the sexual variant…. Why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red-blooded American woman who dares to claim it?”⁶⁷ The one big victory of that era came in 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in an unwritten decision to allow the circulation of the gay publication One through the mail.

The continued repression of gays and lesbians in American society served to keep most of them closeted. Hollywood films portrayed gays as tragic and suicidal figures. Time magazine ran a story on homosexuality in 1966 in which the author characterized it as “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality…no pretense that it is a pernicious sickness.”⁶⁸ The American Psychiatric Association kept homosexuality on the books as a mental illness until 1973, when the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s forced a change in medical thinking.

The battle over LGBT people in the military

Despite the fact that, in 2008, 75 percent of all Americans supported the right of LGBT people to serve openly in the military—including majorities of both major political parties and 50 percent of military personnel—the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy signed into law by Bill Clinton remains in place.⁶⁹ There has been rising support for un-closeted LGBT military servicepeople over the years since the policy was enacted in 1993, when 44 percent of the overall population supported the right of gays to serve openly in the military.⁷⁰ Any notion that this policy overturned the antigay witch hunt is misguided, even though it technically allows lesbians and gays to serve so long as they remain closeted. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, the Pentagon fires two LGBT people each day, which is actually fewer than the number hounded out of the military prior to the wars inspired by the events of September 11, 2001.⁷¹

In late August 2008, the first-ever study was done on transgender military personnel and their treatment. More than one-third of the 827 people surveyed said they had experienced discrimination and 10 percent had been turned away by the Veterans Administration due to their sexual nonconformity.⁷² In defiance of the actual policy, one in five transgender military personnel had been asked about their sexual orientation. In keeping with military social mores that value masculinity over femininity, pre-transition transwomen (men who are physically transitioning into women) had been discriminated against more than pre-transition transmen (women who are physically transitioning into men).⁷³

Any suggestion that lifting such a ban would amount to a wild social experiment is easily put to rest by the facts. Twenty-four nations, including those with recent histories of fascist or apartheid regimes, such as Spain and South Africa, currently have LGBT people serving openly in their military forces with no serious internal strife reported. This is not a new development. Back in 1992, when the ban on gays in the military was being debated during an election year, the Washington Monthly weighed in decisively on the question:

But with our policy stuck in hypotheticals, the strongest argument for gays in the military is quietly made elsewhere—in countries such as Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Israel, and to a lesser extent France, where gays have already been integrated into the armed forces. While the Pentagon pursues a policy that every year hounds 1,000 able-bodied gay men and women out of the service—wasting $27 million in training costs annually—other countries demonstrate that with the right mix of education and cajoling, a military with gays can work.⁷⁴

Why then was a policy that institutionalizes discrimination and advances reactionary gender norms enacted in the first place? While the 1992 election campaign was marked by rabid homophobia from the podium of the Republican National Convention, the party leadership was not immune to the social upheavals taking place on the streets. As will be discussed in greater detail in later chapters, the AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) crisis sparked a rise in LGBT activism from 1988 to 1992, to a level not seen since the early 1970s. Then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney had even argued that excluding gays from the military on the basis of them being a security risk was an “old chestnut.”⁷⁵ When activists outed President George H. W. Bush’s Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams as gay, Bush responded, “Who cares?”⁷⁶

Yet the leadership of the Democratic Party under the rising star of Arkansas governor Bill Clinton adopted an approach that has become familiar to millions of Americans since. They “compromised” with the far right while equivocating and insisting that their deal was both pragmatic and just. Clinton expressed sympathy and hosted an unprecedented personal meeting with gay and lesbian leaders in the White House to promise lifting the ban on gays in the military—as well as promising to pass gay civil rights legislation—all the while betraying his base. Exactly four days after his inauguration, Bill Clinton’s administration “declared defeat and unconditionally surrendered on the issue” on Face the Nation.⁷⁷ In a posture that was to become the standard on virtually every social and economic policy, the Clinton administration—with both houses of Congress in Democrats’ hands—insisted that if his base didn’t support a crappy deal, a worse one was sure to pass instead. The politics of lesser-evilism, that is, the presumption that accepting a bad deal is the best way to prevent something worse, became the political justification for many of Clinton’s most conservative and pro-corporate policies. As one gay Democratic Party activist put it at the time, “we elected a president and got a barometer.”⁷⁸

Some political responsibility for the “don’t ask, don’t tell” legislation must be laid at the door of the leadership of many of the LGBT groups as well, in particular Human Rights Campaign (HRC). In 1993, an estimated one million people marched on Washington for LGBT rights, yet the movement leaders diverted an estimated $3 million into the Democratic Party coffers and deflated the demands of activists hungry for change.⁷⁹ Urvashi Vaid, a former leading member of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), is refreshingly honest and reflective on the decisions taken at that time when she writes:

Electoral politics is extremely seductive to all movements for social change; it seems the shortest distance to liberation. The theory is invitingly simple: elect people who support you, and they will do the right thing. But the fact is that when broad-based protest movements—like the black civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement—shifted their major focus from community organizing to electing our own, the movements lost momentum even as they gained mainstream acceptability.⁸⁰

In the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, all the major Democratic candidates—including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama—called for the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in their primary campaigns. Former secretary of state and retired general Colin Powell, who helped craft the policy under Bill Clinton, called for “reevaluating” the policy in December 2008 given the shifts in public attitudes over the years since it was implemented.⁸¹ It remains to be seen what will come of this, though with wars spreading and quagmires deepening it’s quite possible that this anachronistic nod to bigotry may be swept aside out of sheer desperation for more “boots on the ground.” But if history is a teacher, without activists putting pressure on politicians, it is possible that we could see the end of “don’t ask, don’t tell” and the creation of some other “compromise” to appease homophobes in the military and government. Nonetheless, if LGBT people are eventually deemed qualified to kill or be killed for the empire, then other legal and social restrictions would only be amplified.

Some progressives who oppose U.S. military operations around the world ask whether the left ought to support the right of sexual minorities to serve openly in the military. What is the point, they argue, of challenging legal restrictions to the bulwark of American imperialism if one doesn’t agree with its methods and aims? While hostility to the military is certainly understandable, this approach raises the question too narrowly and ignores the wider implications of social policies advanced by the federal government in its hiring practices. In essence, allowing the U.S. government to continue to discriminate on the basis of sexual and gender behavior in its military workforce of nearly three million people⁸² gives a green light to persistent social and legal restrictions on LGBT people and continued bigotry. There is nothing incompatible with demanding an end to draconian laws barring open LGBT folks from serving in the military while opposing armed forces recruitment and U.S. imperial actions all over the world. The demand for equal access not only exposes the hypocrisy of an institution that claims to expand democracy while advancing its antithesis, but it can also have a direct impact on the lives and consciousness of millions of people who are compelled by economic circumstance or social conditioning to turn to the military for employment. In addition, it can create yet another chink in the system’s ideological armor. As with war itself, demands for equality, even inside a reactionary institution, can have unintended consequences.