Gay Liberation, to Stonewall

GAY LIBERATION, TO STONEWALL. On 27 June 1969, the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village that catered especially to African Americans and Latinos, reacted violently to a police raid. Their angry and unprecedented response sparked three days of rioting, not only at the police as such, but to the system of mob ownership of gay bars, and the common collaboration of police with mobsters in shaking down gay men and lesbian for money and favors.

The Stonewall revolt, following years of legal efforts in New York state and within Manhattan to affirm homosexuality equality under the law and within fields of employment, marked opening shots of a widening campaign for a larger goal. The liberation of poor and marginalized gays and lesbians in particular from secretive outcasts into the aggressive section of a minority group with its own issues, culture, and politics became a victory of major proportions. Annually, on the last Sunday of June, Stonewall has been commemorated by massive Gay Pride marches in New York City and San Francisco as well as by smaller turnouts throughout the United States and abroad.

The origins of gay liberation can be found within the historic European Left, particularly in Germany and the Soviet Union. The German physician Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897 to foster tolerance toward gays and lesbians. In the Reichstag on 13 January 1898, a leader of the German Socialist Democratic Party, August Bebel, spoke in favor of a petition decriminalizing homosexual acts. Other major leaders of the Social Democratic Party, including Karl Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, became primary supporters. The Party took up the cause and Die Neue Zeit, the most prestigious newspaper of socialists anywhere, dramatized the issue. From elsewhere in Europe, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and Sigmund Freud, who insisted that “inverts cannot be regarded as degenerate,” supported this campaign. The Soviet Union and the German Communist Party both supported the movement to decriminalize homosexuality. In Germany, Wilhelm Reich led the formation of the Deutscher Reichsverband für Prolitarische Sexualpolitik that enlisted more than 20,000 members. After the Nazi’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviet Communist Party reversed its previously liberal approach and defined homosexuality as “the product of decadence in the bourgeois sector of society.” Later, falling backward on this issue as well as others, the Soviet state waged mass arrests of gays.

Homosexual tolerance took a different course in the US Left. Within the German-American free thought movement dear to the “48ers” but also allied with the socialists, the tabloid Der arme Teufel, issued weekly in Detroit by its inveterate writer and lecturer Robert Reitzel, urged tolerance as a matter of human freedom. English-language anarchists and libertarians, following Walt Whitman, quietly or openly, similarly urged an openness to the varieties of sexual expressions in their scattered publications.

After the turn of the century, the massing of large-scale extractive industries such as timber, touched by the Industrial Workers of the World with its own agitators and halls, encouraged a sexual openness within the all-male crews. Certain writings and lectures of Emma Goldman and other freethinkers and anarchists offered other encouragements during the 1910s. The eclipse of the anarchist movement diminished discussions, although a short-lived Society for Human Rights established in Chicago in 1923 encompassed the issue.
Meanwhile, bohemian circles of the American left, especially but not only in Greenwich Village and its lesser counterparts elsewhere in the United States, prompted a greater range of sexual freedom. These developments had curious, ambivalent influences on the Communist Party. In seafaring trades, both on shipboard and in the neighborhoods such as New York’s Chelsea where sailors lived or socialized, the freedom of personal autonomy won by unionization counted heavily. The West Coast-based Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, widely known as the most gay-friendly union in the country and perhaps the world, ardently supported Communist causes. Meanwhile, within cultural and artistic circles, including the movie industry, gay and lesbian radicals joined the Left without much discussion, in Party and union circles, about their life-style choices.

By the 1940s, according to anecdotal recollections, thousands of gay Communists or near-Communists accepted what would later be known as a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell” policy within the Party. Mary Inman, foremost Communist theorizer on the “Woman Question” until her expulsion, sought to open up the issues, as wartime displacement of young people from hometown insularity drastically expanded opportunities for homophile activity. Admired Los Angeles Communist Harry Hay made himself a brave political pioneer on the Left by avowing his status openly within the CP, forming “Bachelors for Wallace” in 1948 to support the Progressive Party ticket.

Given the momentum of the then-recent war years, Hay’s timing made perfect sense. Given the plunge of American politics and culture into the Cold War, he could not make progress within the Left itself. Communist leaders anticipated what they called “Five Minutes to Midnight,” the probable arrival of Fascism, and in preparing themselves to go underground, also set to trim Party membership in various ways, as a defense against FBI infiltration and blackmailing. Those engaging psychoanalysts, for instance, were asked to resign, and along with them, known homosexuals, and for the same purported reasons. California Communists, with longshore and Hollywood workforces heavy in their ranks, were most likely suspect. Seafaring workers and film industry employees were also the least eager to accept the new rules, sustaining a large left cohort just outside Party into a stubborn periphery, determinedly supporting most Left causes. Hay proposed that he be excluded formally from the Party, allowing him to remain active in the same circles. He was formally expelled as a “Security Risk,” while simultaneously described in Los Angeles Party documents as a “Lifelong Friend of the People.”

Hay made clear in his discussions and writings that his very definition of a homosexual minority came from his own Marxist studies, almost certainly from Lenin’s attempt to grapple theoretically and strategically with the rights of nations and ethnic groups. He and fellow gay activist Charles Rowland consciously employed the rhetoric and strategies learned within the CP, and took pride in doing so. The Mattachine Society, then, played a formative role in the gay rights movement without leaving the Popular Front behind.
The Mattachine Society pushed forward against a politically hostile climate. At this time, all but two states classified sodomy as a felony, with only murder, kidnapping, and rape eliciting heavier sentences. Psychiatry branded homosexuals as pathological, and religion castigated homosexual activity as sinful. In tandem with the anticommunist hysteria of the time, the federal government conducted anti-homosexual witch-hunts. The chair of the Republican Party asserted, “Sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years … [are] perhaps as dangerous as the actual Communists.” That same year, in 1950, the Senate authorized an investigation into the presence of homosexuals “and other moral perverts” in the government. Its report argued that homosexuals lacked “emotional stability of normal persons” and warned that even “one homosexual can pollute a government office.” By emphasizing the risk that homosexuals could be lured or blackmailed into betrayal of the United States, the Senate report directly linked the homosexual—the sexual subversive—to the Communist, the political subversive.

During Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, the loyalty-security program explicitly listed “sexual perversion” as sufficient cause for disbarment from federal employment. In contrast to the relatively tolerant attitudes in the military during World War II, this administrative policy precluded all due-process guarantees for homosexuals. Dismissals of gays and lesbians doubled to 2,000 per year; and in 1960 rose to 3,000. The Federal Bureau of Investigation fed the Civil Service Commission an endless stream of names garnered from local police departments. The Post Office added names to this blacklist by attaching tracers on the mail of subscribers of suspect publications. During the 1950s, arrests of homosexuals—many through entrapment—exceeded 1,000 per year in Washington DC, and 1,200 per year in Philadelphia.

Defying this trend, the Mattachine Society grew. In February 1952, after one of its founding members fell victim of entrapment by the Los Angeles Police Department, the leaders organized the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. The defendant admitted to the court that he was homosexual, but denied the charges against him. A deadlocked jury caused the District Attorney to drop the charges. This unprecedented fight-back caused Mattachine to grow to more than 2,000 participants organized into nearly 100 discussion groups. In January 1953 the Mattachine Society launched One, the first homosexual magazine, whose circulation soon reached 2,000.

Harry Hay and his fellow activists, mostly former Communists, became the targets of increasing severe red-baiting by the press and, as the pressure increased, even within the Society’s own ranks. At Mattachine’s first convention in April 1953, delegates supported the leadership’s positions opposing McCarthyite attacks on the Society. Fearing that their former political affiliation would damage Mattachine, however, the leadership group resigned, opening a major opportunity to gay conservatives.

The new leadership, by contrast to the radical founders, emphasized that gays and lesbians were “just like everyone else” except for sexual preferences. They attempted to enlist leading academics and legal experts to legitimate and help achieve legal equality for gays and lesbians, reassuring members that “homosexuals are not seeking to overthrow or destroy any of society’s existing institutions, laws, or mores, but to be assimilated as constructive, valuable, and responsible citizens.” Membership declined precipitously. By 1955, however, the publication of the Mattachine Review gave renewed impetus to the organization, and membership began to rise.

The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) and its publication, The Ladder, emerged in 1955 to promote the specific needs of lesbians. The DOB worked closely with One and the Mattachine Society. Nonetheless, as late as 1959, Del Martin, one of the founders of DOB, reminded delegates to a Mattachine convention: “Lesbians are not satisfied to be auxiliary members or second-class homosexuals.” In the early 1960s, openly gay and lesbian communities formed and provided havens for non-conformist lifestyles.

In a separate world of Left politics, the Young People’s Socialist League, historic successor to a series of youth organizations affiliated with the Socialist Party, revived during the 1950s, merged with the Young Socialist League (stemming from a separate leftwing tradition) and established many new chapters during the later 1950s and early 1960s. These socialist youth groups were quietly known, in leftwing circles, “homophile” and open to gays and lesbians. Tom Kahn, the leading operative of the merged YPSL, was widely believed to be a sometime partner or lover of the YPSL’s favorite guest speaker, civil rights champion Bayard Rustin.

A decade earlier, the Beats had propounded a way of life notably disregarding conventional rules and regulations about sexual relationships. Many of the most important figures were openly gay, including the movement’s poet laureate, Allen Ginsberg, whose canonic work Howl also apologetically drew from the Communist experience of his mother. The 1960s counterculture, however, provided a larger space within which gays and lesbians could begin to live openly. San Francisco witnessed the rise of a massive gay and lesbian movement, along with numerous police raids on gay bars. So did Los Angeles, with its booming nightclub scene prompted in part by former Communist or Communist sympathizers, eager to accommodate gay and gay-friendly guests.

The cultural and political developments of the 1960s provided the backdrop for the events at the Stonewall Inn in 1967, which gave rise to the growth and consolidation of a powerful movement. That same month, in June, Del Martin registered in The Ladder one of the first responses to women’s liberation from within the growing gay and lesbian movement: “The Lesbian, after all, is first of all a woman—an individual who must earn her own livelihood [someone who is] much more concerned with problems of inequality in job and educational opportunities.” The logic of this position led Martin to argue in favor of lesbians leaving homophile organizations in order to participate in NOW, the League of Women Voters, and women’s professional organizations. However, NOW’s ambivalence towards open homosexuality prompted many lesbians turn back and to ally gay men.

In the same way that the slogan “Black Is Beautiful” encapsulated the Black Power movement, “Gay Is Good” epitomized the outlook of the new gay and lesbian consciousness emerging post-Stonewall. Modeling itself on the concepts of Black militants, this branch of the gay and lesbian movement no longer sought acceptance by the dominant culture. They demanded equality, not acculturation. The Gay Activist Alliance (GAA), founded in 1970, set out a clear statement of principle: “We, as liberated homosexual activists, demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings through confrontation with and disarmament of all mechanisms which unjustly inhibit us.” The GAA began circulating petitions calling for elimination of all discriminatory legislation. This legislative focus provided the arena for the greatest degree of unity between gay men and lesbians and the various ideological tendencies and lifestyles present in their communities. Numerous Gay and lesbian newspapers, softball teams, choruses, Democratic Party clubs, bars, and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings organized as basis for self-affirmation. Gay men and lesbians commonly leaned toward the liberal-to-radical side of American politics.

After Stonewall, Left organizations increasingly supported gay rights. Support grew within liberal institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as the Democratic Party. Marxist organizations bequeathed a mixed record. The Communist Party arrived late, and despite a renunciation of homophobia, it gave only meager support for gays rights until the twenty-first century. The more dogmatically Marxist parties and organizations considered class (or class combined with race) to be the only meaningful determinant in human evolution and downplayed the concerns of gays and lesbians. The major Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), wax widely known as antigay until a major shift in the mid-1970s. At that time, some SWP leaders “came out,” and gay issues were energetically advanced as part of the SWP program. Most of the smaller Trotskyist groups, such as the Workers World Party, also supported gay liberation. Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in America, strongly supported gay rights and had many openly gay members. The Socialist Party ran the openly gay David McReynolds for president repeatedly.

Post-Stonewall, the acceptance of the gay and lesbian agenda by the African American leadership constituted a major breakthrough. For example, African American Congressional representatives without exception have co-sponsored legislation to outlaw discrimination. Pre-Stonewall, the Reverend Jesse Jackson was the first leader of national prominence to embrace the gay and lesbian movement’s full agenda, including spousal rights, the rights of gay and lesbian parents to claim custody of their children, and the decriminalization of sodomy. On 11 October 1987 Jackson addressed more than a half-million demonstrators at the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, mobilized around a platform that included a call for an end to sexism, racism, and apartheid. Gays and lesbians constituted an important part of Jackson’s white supporters.

In short, during the years following the police riot at the Stonewall Inn, activists identified the forces opposing gay liberation as the same forces opposing greater rights for other minorities and oppressed groups. As the Right increasingly stressed traditional values and the maintenance of familial and religious structures as a means of attracting and holding electoral support, gays and lesbians found their natural allies to be somewhere on the Left. Progressive and liberal organizations, in turn, increasingly accepted gay rights as givens of the progressive agenda. Homophobia, whenever it reappeared in liberal or Left circles, gained immediate condemnation.

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