Gays: A Struggle For Acceptance Essay, Research Paper
Gays: A Struggle for Acceptance
“When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the
angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference, that reward will
go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to
expose and rout the prevailing prejudice.”
- John Shelby Spong
Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Newark, NJ
November 21, 1996
During World War II and especially the twenty years after brought great
political and social changes to the U.S.. Undoubtedly, one of the major changes
was the new awareness of homosexuality. If this new awareness was to the
advantage or if it was really wanted by the gay and lesbian population is a
question that arises; if they really had a choice in the matter is another. I
think gays’ relentless struggle for acceptance into mainstream society came from
the American constitution itself. After all, the gay liberation movement started
in America, the land of the free, where all men are created equal and with an
inalienable right to pursue their own happiness. No one should be able to take
these rights away from anyone. Also, in the 1950s, the civil rights movement
became active and words like desegregation and equal rights for all became
synonymous with the American way of life. Stand up and fight against those who
have done you wrong! This is what gave homosexuals such a conviction to start
fighting for their own cause. This paper will follow the progress of gay and
lesbians in the twentieth century before, during and after World War II. What
was their position in the armed forces during the war and what was government
and military policy during and after the war on gays in the army and in
government positions? How did gay and lesbians respond to the new policies after
the war and why were organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters
of Bilitis founded? On December 7, 1941 at 7:55 a.m. local time, Japan attacked
Pearl Harbor. The Unites States declared war on Japan and was suddenly a
participant in the largest war in the history of mankind. A massive military
force of 12 million men was assembled. American soldiers were sent to Europe and
Japan to participate and win the Big One. The military bureaucracy grew
accordingly and thousands of new jobs were created. With the military’s enormous
demand for personnel, drafted American men found themselves in isolated gender
segregated environments. All the big war movies depict this with the GI’s
longing for leave so he could go downtown and find himself a prostitute. What
these movies do not show is a new community, within the military, of homosexuals
who until now lived socially isolated lives because they were either unsure of
what they were or of their sexual preferences or just plain scared of what
people would think if they found out their secret. In the military, these people
found other gay men who were in the same predicament. They weren’t alone.
Before the war, gays and lesbians were almost invisible from society. They were
not mentioned in the popular media and the general population was oblivious to
their existence. An occasional arrest or school expulsion of a Asexual
psychopath@ were the only vague signs that the public would hear about. Now that
the military accepted or at least needed the cooperation of all men, including
homosexuals, an important page had been turned in the progress of gay rights,
however, it also set the scene for discrimination and prejudice. Homosexuals
were in all branches of the armed forces, from paper pushing to front line
combat. Before enlisting, interrogators had forced them to describe their
lifestyle, which in turn made it impossible for homosexuals to continue hiding
in the closet but instead had to take the first step in living a new open
lifestyle. They were classified as Asexual psychopaths@ on their military
records, however, they were not being discriminated by the military at this
point in time. An apparatus was even set up to accommodate gay personnel.
Through this apparatus, the military ended up with quite an extensive record of
homosexual behavior and was considered an expert on the subject. Military
scientists much later said that through studying homosexuals’ behavior could
find nothing to support evidence that gay and lesbians were in any way
psychopaths or had any form of mental disorder. This report came out after the
1940s and 1950s; until then, the military denied having made any research on
homosexuals. After World War II, the military suddenly made a decision not to
have gay or lesbians in the armed forces anymore. They would be discharged
without any benefitsa even though they hadn’t done anything wrong. This caused
gay veterans to unite and fight against sexual discrimination and some were
later the founders of organized gay rights movements. Exposed by the war, gays
and lesbians decided to continue living their lives in the open, although many
still preferred living quietly in discrete suburbs, coming out only under
pseudonyms in articles or books. Bars for gays and lesbians became a major
gathering place. Here they could mingle and be themselves. These bars became
wide spread and were not only confined to the major U.S. cities but were
established in many small towns as well. The general public and media started
noticing this growth and with the common knowing of homosexuals being perverted
sexual psychopaths, child molesters, sex offenders and sex degenerates, a fear
spread for the safety of women and children who could be snatched by these
dangerous people. This fear initiated the anti-gay policies and sex psychopath
laws of the late 1940s and early 1950s, where gay and lesbians were witch hunted
and fired from their work place. The policy that had the greatest impact was
President Eisenhower’s signing of Executive Order #10450, stating that sexual
perversion was reason for prejudice hiring and firing of workers Gay veterans
were a select group of American patriots, who, for the most part wanted things
to go back to how they were and just lead secure and stable lives. These new
policies caused much irritation and the veterans felt they were constantly being
mistreated, which gave them all the more reason to speak up. They could have
continued to live quiet lives but they were pushed into the open by the
government, and now that they were exposed, they weren’t going to go back in the
closet without a fight. The new strict moral values of the postwar period and
the nuclear family did not help gays and lesbians blend into society. Instead,
homosexuals were being scapegoated and considered sex deviates. The idea of
deviates and wave builders went well together with the red scare and homosexuals
were feared even more than before. Communist homosexuals would mean the downfall
of western society as we know it….at least that is what the government wanted
us to believe. The theory of homosexuals being sex deviates was also supported
by psychiatrists who wanted more influence over the criminal justice system and
allowed for the incarceration of homosexuals into mental institution. This
caused arrests for sodomy, perversion and indecency to skyrocket and many men
and women ended up in these institutions. The military’s turnaround and postwar
treatment of homosexuals and the homophobia and irrational fear of gays that
they caused, made its way to the civilian bureaucracy. In the 1950s, senators
launched an attack on gay employees. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the crusade
against homosexuals and communists and was feared by nearly all American; he had
the power to dismiss you from your place of work and put you in an institution.
Homosexuals were even considered to be easier targets for communist propaganda
and were also the main reason for the purges in the government sector. People
were afraid gays would deliver U.S. secrets to the Russians. Even though gays
and lesbians were hounded everywhere, they didn’t defend themselves from the
attacks. Homosexuals had no one to speak up for them at that time and were
unsure of what to do. Instead they isolated themselves and bottled up the anger
and fear they felt for society. Gay veterans were no exception, however, they
didn’t accept the circumstances and conditions that had been set before them.
They understood it was impossible for them to live the way they used to; in
order for them to lead an open life, the hounding had to stop. They had fought a
war to preserve their liberty and no one should be able to take that away from
them now. The first organization for gays was founded in Germany. The Scientific
Humanitarian Committee wanted to abolish the German anti-gay penal code and to
educate the public on being gay. The movement was short lived and was
disintegrated when the Nazi regime came to power. There was also an effort for
gay organizing in Chicago during the 1920s but they dissolved without major
recognition. Then came the Mattachine Society. It was founded in 1950 in Los
Angeles as a response to anti-gay campaigns in Washington, the constant police
raiding of gay bars and that gays were an oppressed minority and should have
someone to speak for them. The Mattachine Society would help gays out of jail,
consult gays and refer them to psychiatrists, if they needed one. However,
staying above budget was not easy. Call says the active members were doing more
than they were getting paid for. Publishing the Mattachine Review, a gay
magazine, was a demanding occupation and member fees did not cover all the work
that had to be done. A bar directory was also published by the Society together
with the Daughters of Bilits’s own magazine, the Ladder. The original founders
were gay veterans from WWII and consisted of Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Harry Hay,
Rudy Gernreich, Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Stan Witt and Paul Bernard. The
most charismatic of these was Chuck Rowland. He himself was an army veteran and
an idealist. After the war, he had joined the American Veterans Committee and
later the communist party. Being a member of the communist party would later
cause him his seat with the Mattachine Society. These founders had a vision that
all homosexuals would eventually come out and parade down the streets of LA.
Until then, they sought refuge under pseudonyms when publishing anything of
homosexual nature. Many joined the Society but no one knew who ran the
organization. Rowland and the others thought it safest to keep it that way in
the beginning. In 1954, the founders decided to become an open democratic
organization and a vote was held as to whom should be the leaders. Rowland and
the others wanted a radical group of expansionists and protesters. Hall Call,
their opposition, wanted to take a more conservative approach. He meant that for
the group to survive, they did not want to attract unnecessary attention to
themselves; also to have an open organization, they had to eliminate everything
that could give the government, especially McCarthy, an excuse to shut the
organization down, which meant removing the communist faction from the group.
Call won the vote and most if not all of the original founders were asked to
resign. This decision left them very bitter and the question whether they had
done the right thing by going “public” they way they had is still asked. Rowland
claimed Call was the reason for the Mattachine’s downfall, having not an ounce
of organizational spirit in his whole body. Call on the other hand, who was a
journalist, saw the McCarthy threat as real and if the Mattachine Society wanted
to enhance the Society and do some good, staying low was the only answer.
Membership later decreased in the late 1960s and members instead joined a
seceded branch of the Society called SIR. Up until 1950s, no Aopen-minded@ study
had ever been made of male homosexuals. However, in 1956, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a
professor at UCLA, presented a paper to the American Psychological Association
in Chicago, in which she had conducted an experiment of homosexuals and
heterosexuals to study their Afundamental personal behavior@ using the Rorschach,
the Thematic Apperception and the Make a Picture tests. The judges were
internationally recognized scientists and were not told who had been taking the
tests. The result came out and the judges could not find any relation between
the subjects’ sexual preferences and their answers. Dr. Hooker received the
Distinguished Contribution Award for her study. Dr. Hooker was also confronted
by many lesbians, asking her to conduct a test on them as well. She refused on
the grounds that a woman conducting tests on women would be considered biased
and not be taken seriously. In 1955, lesbians in San Francisco founded the
lesbian equivalent to the Mattachine Society; they called it the Daughters of
Bilitis. The movement was unsure on how to proceed; whether they should engage
in picketing and other civil rights activities or whether it should challenge
the medical profession’s claim that homosexuality was an illness. Their task
consisted of counseling lesbians and educate mothers who thought their
daughters might be lesbian. One sad case was when a daughter confronted her
parents and told them of her being a lesbian. The parents didn’t take it as well
as she might have hoped for. Instead they raised a gravestone with her name on
it and declared her dead by listing her in the obituaries in the local newspaper.
In June of 1969, the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, was considered the
dawning of the gay liberation movement. A police raid caused homosexuals to riot,
not accepting the constant terrorizing from the authorities. The three day
rioting led to the beginning of a new mass movement, the Gay Liberation Front,
derived from the controversial Vietnamese National Liberation Front; wanting
radical change, much like Chuck Rowland and the founders of the Mattachine
Society and fighting fiercer and with more pride and confidence than before.
Gays and lesbians began joining forces and recognized their common cause; to
stand up for their rights as human beings and not willing to be suppressed any
longer. This historic event is every year embodied in New York’s Gay Parade.
There was a nationwide protest against the discrimination of gay military
personnel but it didn’t have much impact. Military policy is still very much
biased against homosexuals in the armed forces; even after government
institutions loosened up their restrictions on gay policy. The military argued
that homosexuals in service would threaten the moral and job performance of
enlisted personnel. The discharge policy backfired. Instead of producing Asexual
security@ for the soldiers, it reinforced hostility and prejudice among
personnel. This policy goes against the secret military reports that say gays
are suited for the military and the gay history of World War II, which showed
that gay men could be just as courageous as straight men. It only leaves us to
believe that the military has no respect for gay personnel and are only using
them when in a crisis and being in need of cannon fodder. Looking back, the
Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were the pioneers for all gay
and lesbians. They created a sturdy foundation on which to build a national
recognition and understanding of homosexuals. Without them there would most
probably not have been a Stonewall Inn incident. Who is to blame for homosexuals
having to fight for recognition and acceptance against what seemed to be the
entire American public? Before World War II, the public was uneducated and
unaware of the gay and lesbian society they lived with. Like a child, they were
easily affected by government doctrine, justified by the government’s need to
keep the economy growing by uniting the people with false anti-Communist anti-
gay propaganda and thereby creating an illusionary external and internal enemy.
From a purely economic view, the government wanted Keyen’s AAnimal Spirits@
(herd mentality) to be positive and united and not have them go into another
depression of pessimistic thinking. The postwar years were the first time the
government had this much control over industry and officials thought it should
stay that way. To do this, the public had to be satisfied and not worried about
another recession. Communism and the gay threat were just the excuses the
government needed to unite the population. They would foster the American ideal
on how to be and act and deviance from this ideal, would cause the ARussian
Bear@ to invade the American peace loving neighborhoods. I think homosexuals
were used as scapegoats and were a minority that could be sacrificed for the
governments proclaimed Agood@ of the nation.
SOURCES: – The American Record; volume II: since 1865, by William
Graebner & Leonard Richards, McGraw-Hill, Inc. – Making History; The
Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945 – 1990, by Erik Marcus,
HarperCollins Publishers
INTERESTING AND MORE DETAILED EXCERPTS FROM INTERNET SOURCES FOR FURTHER
READING:
The Stonewall Inn, (named after the Confederate General ‘Stonewall’ Jackson),
was a gay bar (said to be sleazy and Mafia-run) at 51-53 Christopher Street just
east of Sheridan Square in New York’s Greenwich Village. On the night of 27/28th.
June, 1969, a police inspector and seven other officers from the Public Morals
Section of the First Division of the New York City Police Department arrived
shortly after midnight, served a warrant charging that alcohol was being sold
without a license, and announced that employees would be arrested. The patrons
were ejected from the bar by the police while others lingered outside to watch,
and were joined by passers-by. The arrival of the paddy wagons changed the mood
of the crowd from passivity to defiance. The first vehicle left without incident
apart from catcalls from the crowd. The next individual to emerge from the bar
was a woman in male costume who put up a struggle which galvanized the
bystanders into action. The crowd erupted into throwing cobblestones and bottles.
Some officers took refuge in the bar while others turned a fire hose on the
crowd. Police reinforcements were called and in time the streets were cleared.
During the day the news spread, and the following two nights saw further violent
confrontations between the police and gay people. The event was important less
for its intrinsic character than for the significance subsequently bestowed on
it. The Stonewall Rebellion was a spontaneous act of resistance to the police
harassment that had been inflicted on the homosexual community since the
inception of the modern vice squad in metropolitan police forces. It sparked a
new, highly visible, mass phase of political organization for gay rights that
far surpassed, semi-clandestine homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
exemplified by the Mattachine Society. The Mattachine Society newsletter
described the rebellion as ‘the hairpin drop heard round the world’. The event
has been commemorated by a parade held each year in New York City on the last
Sunday in June, following a tradition that began with the first march on 29th.
June, 1970, and by parallel events throughout the United States.@
STONEWALL: THE HISTORICAL EVENT
The confrontations between demonstrators and police at The Stonewall Inn in
Greenwich Village over the weekend of June 27-29, 1969 are usually cited as the
beginning of the modern movement for Lesbian/Gay liberation. What might have
been a routine police raid on a bar patronized by homosexuals, became a signal
event which sparked a movement. The Stonewall riots have developed into the
stuff of myth, about which many of the most commonly held beliefs are probably
untrue. In 1969, it was illegal to operate any business catering to homosexuals
in New York City-as it still is, today in 1991, in many places in the United
States and elsewhere. The standard procedure was for the New York City police to
raid such establishments on a semi-regular basis, to arrest a few of the most
obvious ‘types’ and to fine the owners prior to letting business continue as
usual by the next evening. It has been suggested that the majority of the
patrons at the Stonewall Inn were black and Hispanic drag queens, but perhaps
the goddess has always valued these rare creatures much too highly to ever let
them become a majority. In fact, most of the patrons that evening were most
likely young, college-age white men expecting to spend the rest of their lives
in the quiet desperation of the middle-class closet. They knew that it was
reasonably safe to enter the Stonewall Inn precisely because there were a few
colored drag queens, butch bulldykes and others whose double-minority status
made them far more likely candidates for arrest; this gave everyone else time to
cover their faces and run for the nearest exit. After midnight June 27-28, 1969,
four men and two women from the New York Tactical Police Force called a raid on
The Stonewall Inn at 55 Christopher Street. After leaving the bar, many of the
patrons decided to wait around outside while the police dispatched the ‘usual
suspects’ into the vans. It is said that this was the first time where Lesbians
and Gay men fought back; in fact, there had already been several incidents in
both Los Angeles and New York where sizable groups of Gays had resisted arrest.
More to the point, the queens targeted for arrest had always fought back, alone
and unsupported as they were led time and again to the vans. What was unique
about Stonewall and gives it a resonance which continues to inspire today was
that it was perhaps the first time when Lesbians and Gay men as a group were
able to see beyond the lipstick and the high heels, beyond the skin color and
recognize the oppression which threatens us all. The greatest great myth
concerning the Stonewall riots is that it was a Lesbian/Gay event. It is likely
that many of those who began pitching pennies, then beer bottles, at the police
that night weren’t even homosexual. The only publicly reported arrest was a
straight folk singer who was appearing next door and who joined the melee after
leaving work. The streets of Greenwich Village were home to many young people
whose politics were defined by the blossoming anti-war movement, left-wing
political ideologies and the successes of the Women’s liberation and Black Civil
Rights movements. Like their Lesbian/Gay brothers and sisters, they were
prepared to recognize oppression and thus willing to respond to it. (Anyone who
thinks being able to see oppression is easy has to only remember the Clarence
Thomas confirmation hearings.) In all, some 300 to 400 people became involved
in the attempt to stop the arrests, erupting into violent protest. The police
and the bar owners, who were perceived to be part of the repressive system at
work, barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall Inn for protection. While they
awaited reinforcements, the crowd outside attempted to burn the bar down with
the cops inside. Eventually, a squadron of patrol cars arrived and chased the
crowd away from the bar, and then around the narrow village streets for several
hours. The following night, a new crowd assembled outside the Stonewall and
rioted when the police attempted to break it up. Provocative articles appearing
in the NY Post, Daily News and especially The Village Voice helped to
consolidate Gay willingness to fight back. Within a few days, representatives of
the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis organized the city’s first
ever “Gay Power” rally in Washington Square. On July 27, 1969, speeches by
Martha Shelley and Marty Robinson were followed by a candlelight march to the
site of the Stonewall Inn. Five hundred people showed up, thought to have
included almost the entire ‘out-of-the-closet’ population of Lesbians and Gay
men in New York, as well as their supporters from the political left. The rest
as they say is history… STONEWALL: The Movement Before Stonewall, there were a
number of groups working for homosexual rights, ever since the concept had been
defined in nineteenth century Germany, home to the world’s first politically
organized movement. In the United States, since April 1965, Frank Kameny of
Washington, DC had been organizing Homosexual Reminder Days on the ellipse
across from the White House and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. These were
sedate affairs of a few dozen picketers with the men in jackets and ties and the
Lesbians in skirts and dresses. Their principal demand was for civil service
protection and the right of homosexuals to hold government jobs. The New York
delegation that attended the July 4th picket in 1969, one week after Stonewall,
held hand and shouted down the other marchers. This was the last Homosexual
Reminder Day and a clear sign that the Stonewall riots had set something new in
motion. During the first year after Stonewall, a whole new generation of
organizations emerged, many identifying themselves for the first time as “Gay”
meaning not only a sexual orientation, but a radical new basis for self-
identification and with a sense of open political activism. Older groups such as
the Mattachine Society or the Westside Discussion Group whose members had used
first names or altogether fictitious ones to protect their identities soon made
way for the Gay Liberation Front and the various regional Gay Activists
Alliances. The vast majority of these new activists were under thirty, new to
political organizing and believed everything was possible. Many groups were
affiliated with specific colleges and universities, again with “Gay” replacing
“Homophile” in the names of most older groups and almost all new ones. By the
summer of 1970, groups in at least eight American cities were sufficiently
organized to schedule simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots for
the last Sunday in June. The events varied from a highly political march of
three to five thousand in New York to a parade with floats for 1200 in Los
Angeles.
MATTACHINE SOCIETY
One of the earliest gay movement organizations in the USA. It began in Los
Angeles in 1950-51. Its name was given by the pioneer activist Harry Hay in
commemoration of the French medieval and Renaissance SociJtJ Mattachine, a
musical masque group which he had studied while preparing a course on the
history of popular music for a workers’ education project. The name was meant to
symbolize the fact that “gays were a masked people, unknown and anonymous”, and
the word, also spelled matachin or matachine , has been derived from the Arabic
of Moorish Spain, in which mutawajjihin , relates to masking oneself. Such an
opaque name is typical of the homophile movement of the time in which open
proclamation of the purposes of the group through a revealing name was regarded
as imprudent. At first the structure of the society followed that of freemasonry
with a pyramid structure, where cells at the same level would be unknown to each
other. The founders were Marxists and analyzed homosexuals in terms of an
oppressed cultural minority. The communist leanings of the organization put it
under some pressure during the anti-Communist phase in the USA. The era of
McCarthyism had begun on 9th. February, 1950 with a speech by Senator Joseph R.
McCarthy of Wisconsin, at Lincoln’s Birthday dinner of a Republican League in
Wheeling, West Virginia. Paul Coates wrote in a Los Angeles newspaper in March
1953 linking “sexual deviates” with “security risks” who were banding together
to wield “tremendous political power”. The Mattachine Society was restructured,
with a more transparent organization, and its leadership replaced. It also
changed its aims to the assimilation of homosexuals into general society, which
reflected its rejection of the notion of a homosexual minority. However the
Society declined, and at its convention in May 1954 only forty-two members
attended. The Mattachine Society produced the monthly periodical ONE Magazine ,
starting in January 1953 and eventually achieving a circulation of 5000 copies.
The regular publication of the magazine ceased in 1968, but its publisher, ONE
Inc., still exists. In January, 1955 the San Francisco branch of the Mattachine
Society began a more scholarly journal, Mattachine Review , which lasted for ten
years. The periodicals reached previously isolated individuals and helped
Mattachine to become better known nationally. Chapters functioned in a number of
USA cities through the 1960s. However, they failed to adapt to the radical
militantism after the Stonewall Rebellion and faded away.
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