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A near guarantee in social history is that every movement produces a reaction. Queer history, for better and worse, bears out this prediction. In Part I of this blog series, I relayed the whirlwind of accusations which sparked the Lavender Scare of the 1950s and 60s, ending with executive actions which saw queer Americans effectively purged from their careers in the federal government.
That tragic narrative is fortunately not the end of the story. Indeed, the Lavender Scare might be considered a foundational event spurring what would become the American queer liberation movement of the late 20th century. Resistance is thus a feature in the history of the Lavender Scare, and the decades of work launched in its wake remain a testament to queer resilience.
Aftermath
In my last post discussing the Lavender Scare’s spark and subsequent destruction, the story ended in 1953 with President Eisenhower’s notorious Executive Order #10450. This action barred queer individuals from the federal government while threatening terrible consequences for any such employees who refused to abandon their positions.
This apex event of state-orchestrated persecution was soon followed by the downfall of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the architect of the Lavender Scare who became subject to insidious accusations of homosexual affairs himself. Fittingly, the disgraced senator perished from alcoholism complications in 1957 – but the crisis he engendered would outlive him. Fortunately, so too would the resistance that emerged in his ignominious wake.
McCarthy’s death may have given a grim satisfaction for those whose lives and livelihoods (including but far beyond the queer community) he destroyed, but for many of those most impacted by his legacy there remained much left to fight for. In the 1950s, however, this emergent generation of queer activists spent most of their time fighting against the system which was now formally lodged against them. This struggle formed the bedrock of the queer civil rights movement in the US, and would prove to be a multi-decade project reaching every corner of the country.
The Mattachine Society
The seeds for a queer revolt were already there when McCarthy first stepped onto the Senate floor and into history with his infamous diatribes against supposed Communists. To be sure, the World War II era and subsequent early years of the Cold War saw sharply increased repression of queer Americans. Nevertheless, the visibility and dynamism of queer culture which flourished in earlier decades did not ever fully disappear; like the queer individuals who were making that culture, it simply evolved with changing (threatening) times. America’s urban centers had provided community and connection to queer Americans throughout these years and did so throughout the Lavender Scare also. These environments would provide the geographic and intellectual basis for a new movement against that community’s would-be persecutors.
The early development of the “Mattachine Society” is an exemplar, and this group would go on to challenge the laws and regulations which had emboldened queer persecution in wider American society. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Mattachine’s Society’s foundations date from 1950 – the infamous year when Senator McCarthy formally sparked the Lavender Scare and a series of congressional investigations into federal homosexual employment commenced. Originally known as the Mattachine Foundation, it was founded by a quintet of men in Los Angeles: Harry Hay, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings, Konrad Stevens, James Gruber and Rudi Gernreich.[1]
Though their exact political affiliations in their day are debatable, from a modern perspective each would have been considered at least progressive or leftist. Henry Hay, the founder and leader of the group, was himself a proud Communist organizer for eighteen years prior to dedicating himself to the queer liberation movement.[2] In a 1974 interview, Hay described the founding of the Mattachine Society in the frenetic moment of the Lavender Scare:
“The anti-Communist witch-hunts were very much in operation; the House Un-American Activities Committee had investigated Communist ‘subversion’ in Hollywood. The purge of homosexuals from the State Department took place. The country, it seemed to me, was beginning to move toward fascism and McCarthyism…It was obvious McCarthy was setting up the pattern for a new scapegoat, and it was going to be us—Gays. We had to organize, we had to move, we had to get started.”[3]
Hay went on to describe the prospectus, adopted in July 1950, which set out the basic social and political goals of the new organization, as well as the earliest underground efforts of his new body:
“At the start of our organizing, ‘X’ and others felt that if we made bad mistakes and ruined the thing it might be many, many years before the attempt to organize Gay people would be tried again. So we had to do it right, if possible. That’s why we operated by unanimity and were very slow-moving. We talked about the prospectus of the foundation, made our contacts with a fighting lawyer, who had defended one of us in court on a Gay charge, applied for a preliminary charter for a nonprofit corporation, and began (as of late November 1950) to have our discussion groups.”
Hay’s account describes his reverence for concurrent civil rights movements of his age, particularly those led by the Black community, and his organization’s intent to apply the wisdom of these movements’ ongoing growth and successes to his community’s cause. Hay reported that women were also involved with and supported the Mattachine movement from its beginning, offering logistical assistance and meeting spaces as well as their own insights into the group’s design and advocacy.
Getting Started
The Mattachine Society, as originally conceived, had relatively straightforward aims: to rescind and repeal laws (at all levels of government) which harassed and persecuted gay Americans. More broadly, it aimed to advance acceptance and understanding of homosexuals in wider American society. To modern queer audiences, these aims may sound simplistic, mundane and outright assimilationist (a controversial subject to be discussed further below).
Within the context of the early 1950s, however, these were radical goals: Hay departed his local Communist organization recognizing the challenges that his new work posed for his old affiliation, but was retained in a sort of emeritus role as “a lifelong friend of the people.” Other individuals involved with the Mattachine Society did so with the upmost secrecy and often leveraged anonymous names (i.e., “X” in the quoted source above). No one was under any illusion about the monumental task ahead, or the very real risks to lives and livelihoods.
The Mattachine Society, and the American queer community at large, faced down a narrative that its opponents had already written: that queer Americans (namely and particularly gay men) were inherently unstable, weak and easily manipulated – representing a profound threat to national security in any official positions or authoritative roles.[4] Homosexuality, moreover, was an “Eastern” aberration, diametrically opposed to a Christian, patriotic and democratic society; historically, the argument went, homosexual acceptance was responsible for the downfall of every society where it became rooted.[5]
These claims, however nonsensical to modern audiences, had formed the very real basis of discriminatory laws such as Executive Order #10450. Therefore, they had to be met with a counterargument suitable to the prevailing mores of the moment. The Mattachine Society, and other early queer rights organizations in the wider “Homophile Movement”, attempted to do just that. Simon Hall notes that “[these organizations] sought to turn these arguments on their head by laying claim to full citizenship rights…following in a rich and deep-rooted tradition of patriotic protest.”[6] In this sense, Hall argues, the early queer rights movement followed in the footsteps of the early 20th century feminist movements and especially the mid-century Black civil rights activists.
Under Henry Hay’s early leadership, the Los Angeles chapter of the Mattachine Society would also be early pioneers in fighting back against the medical discrimination directed toward the queer community. Alongside the publicized congressional investigations of 1950, the inaugural 1952 DSM characterization of homosexuality as a mental illness represented a searing moment of stigmatization. It necessarily became a touchstone for the early queer rights movements: the Mattachine Society, recognizing the deep implications of this designation, argued that homosexuality was simply an alternative to heterosexuality which was both ethically and morally neutral.[7] Far from a disorder, homosexuality was a long-known variation in the human condition.
The Mattachine Society and its counterparts (both concurrent and soon to emerge) thus had plenty of battles to fight and powerful interests in opposition. In the early to mid-1950s, their activism largely played out in localized efforts (such as protests and activism in favor of homosexual men persecuted by local police, or questionnaires to political candidates asking them to clarify their views toward the queer community). Also important were periodicals like the Mattachine Review which raised awareness of the group’s existence, casus belli and core political aims over its approximately ten-year run through the mid-1960s.[8]
Will Hansen notes that the Mattachine Review was particularly in tune to the emerging patriotic framing of queer activism. He writes, “[a]ticles in the Mattachine Review often referred to the contributions of homosexuals in the military, and deployed Cold War rhetoric regarding democracy, justice, anti-communism, and other American ideals.”[9] The Mattachine Society and its counterparts were thus profoundly shaped by the sociopolitical context of their day – for better and worse.
Splits and Shifts
While the Mattachine Society was founded in Los Angeles, queer activism was not isolated to this singular location; indeed, regional and smaller chapters of the Mattachine Society would spring to life amid the 1950s Homophile Movement.[10] More importantly in a historical sense, however, was the trajectory of (d)evolution which the original Los Angeles chapter faced as the decade wore on.
The first major split occurred in 1953, when Henry Hay himself was effectively ousted from his own organization at that year’s Mattachine Convention. While officially pushed out because of his Communist background, Hay later indicated that his departure also represented an ideological shift for the Mattachine Society:
“The Mattachine after 1953 was primarily concerned with legal change, with being seen as respectable—rather than self-respecting. They wanted to be dignified by professional ‘authorities’ and prestigious people, rather than by the more compelling dignity of group worth.”[11]
David Johnson argues that the original Mattachine organization afterward “disavowed political activism, and functioned largely as a self-help group for homosexuals.”[12] It began to stray from its original mission, and infighting within the group perhaps became inevitable. A new leader, Hal Call, eventually assumed a version of Hay’s former role within the California branch of the Mattachine Society and pushed it firmly into a more conservative and assimilationist position. Call was alarmed by the loosely Communist origins of the original Mattachine (the main reason that Hay had been forced out in 1953) and saw that affiliation as a literal life-or-death crisis for his community.[13] In his view, apparently shared by others, associations with perceived radical political ideologies was incompatible with the safety and prosperity of queer Americans in a society where Senator McCarthy still reigned supreme. His influence was among those which pushed the organization more firmly toward the narrative of gay patriotism.
This ideological and tactical adjustment came with a geographic one as the Mattachine headquarters moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco; thereafter, the Mattachine branches which had developed elsewhere were effectively told to go it alone, and support their members as they saw fit.[14] This retreat, however, left a yawning gap in leadership within the first years of the Homophile Movement in the US. The initiative soon switched from the West Coast back to the East, and to the very city where the Lavender Scare had begun in earnest.
The Washington Mattachine Society
Frank Kameny, now one of the foremost figures in American queer history, hardly expected to become anything of the sort when he enlisted in the US Army just days shy of his eighteenth birthday in 1943.[15] Kameny soon found himself among the tens of thousands of young Americans battling the Nazi European empire, grinding toward Germany until the war finally ended in 1945. Kameny was discharged in May 1946, and returned to the US to earn a PhD in astrophysics in 1956.[16]
All was set for Kameny to have a fulfilling, prosperous future as he returned to the military in July 1957 with the Army Maps Service. His unique skills set, coming after an honorable tenure in the armed forces, should have made for a successful career as the Cold War calcified. The “problem”, however, was that Kameny was not just a good soldier – he was also a gay man.
The Lavender Scare, and Executive Order #10450, applied throughout the US government – including the entirety of the US armed forces. Officially, homosexuality was prohibited among servicemen and women and could result in swift discharge if discovered, as well as lifelong stigma and unemployment thereafter. The culling of queer servicemembers had gathered pace throughout the 1950s, with the Lavender Scare accelerating a trend that had been underway since World War II ended. Estimates suggest that between 1952 and 1965, as many as thirty-thousand servicemen were discharged on grounds of homosexuality.[17]
In October 1957, just months after his employment commenced, the Army Maps Service obtained evidence that Kameny had been briefly detained in San Francisco the year prior on a charge of “lewd behavior”.[18] This charge was a common tactic deployed by police to harass queer men found in known gay establishments or engaged in consensual affairs. Kameny was questioned as to his sexuality but refused to confirm or deny his investigators’ suspicions; he was summarily fired, as thousands of queer Americans had been throughout the Lavender Scare.
But as Kameny later claimed, “[t]o the best of my knowledge and belief, I was the first person to fight back.”[19] Kameny’s firing represented an existential event, and fundamentally altered the trajectory of his life: he characterized the moment as “a declaration of war against me by my government,” adding, “I tend not to lose my wars.”[20] Kameny, as events would prove, was more than ready for a bruising fight.
By the early 1960s, Kameny had fully integrated his personal battle for justice into the larger battle for queer rights throughout the US. In 1961, he co-founded the Mattachine Society of Washington (MSW) with an explicitly proactive, belligerent edge which had been largely lost in the San Francisco organization of the same name.[21] Ironically, Kameny’s first (ideological) fight would be with none other than Hal Call himself, who found Kameny’s approach alarming and repeatedly demanded that he disabuse his organization of the Mattachine branding (Kameny apparently shrugged off this request).[22]
Kameny and his allies had plenty to occupy them apart from West Coast remonstrances: the year before the MSW’s founding, Kameny’s wrongful termination case was considered for review at the Supreme Court of the United States. In his legal arguments, Kameny alleged that employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was effectively the same as discrimination on the basis of race or religion.[23] These were groundbreaking claims, and represented a legal milestone for centering the rights of sexual minorities within the supposed democratic design of the United States. When the Supreme Court ultimately declined to take up the case, Kameny kept going. He served as a paralegal assistant to queer individuals attempting to file their own lawsuits, and in 1963 became the first openly gay person to testify before Congress.[24]
The MSW would prove a vibrant and potent force in the fight for queer justice throughout the 1960s, even organizing highly controversial picket lines in front of the State Department and White House in 1965. As with the original Mattachine Society, David K. Johnson notes that the MSW drew heavily on lessons learned from those movements around it:
“MSW members adopted the methods of traditional reform groups, particularly those of the civil rights movement. As an advocacy group, MSW modeled itself after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). It sought meetings with government officials, shepherded test discrimination cases through the courts, leafleted government buildings with pamphlets on how to handle an arrest or federal interrogation, and publicized its cause wherever possible.”[25]
Intersectionality?
Of course, the Homophile Movement and its offshoots were hardly operating in a vacuum; indeed, the early stages of American queer activism would not have been possible without the work of Black American activists and the various womens’ movements which commenced before and operated concurrently. But despite the obvious and significant influences, the Mattachine and similar groups were dominated by white, mostly cisgender men.
There were, of course, important exceptions during this time period – one key example is that of the League for Civil Education founded by Latino American José Sarria. Sarria, also a World War II veteran and famous drag queen, was the first known openly gay man to run for an American political office and has been the subject of an earlier post on this blog.[26]
There were efforts within the MSW to recruit Black men into the organization in the mid-1960s. Washington D.C. has long been a racially diverse city, and Black queer men already had their own communities and culture within the makeup of the wider DC area queer community. The MSW leadership seemed to recognize the importance of bringing Black queer voices into the organization, and reportedly sent representatives to discuss membership at a Black queer nightclub on Nob Hill.[27] Members also reported MSW meetings dedicated to developing strategies for Black recruitment, but David K. Johnson notes that “MSW never attracted more than a token African-American membership.”[28]
The experiences of one Black member of a Mattachine group illuminate why the Black queer community may have hesitated in joining the largely white-led organization. Wendell Phillip Sayers, who would go on to be the first Black attorney to be hired in the Colorado state attorney general’s office, was among the early members of the Mattachine Society Denver chapter in the late 1950s.[29] Sayers attended several Mattachine Society meetings, including the sixth national convention held in Denver in 1959. In a 1989 interview, he recalled:
“I went first place, I’d say, to know or to meet somebody who was like me. I mean gay by that. That was my primary purpose in going. It developed later, or as time went on, that once I found there were others besides me I was much better able to accept myself… They weren’t accustomed to having any contacts with Blacks. So I come in and for once I found somebody else besides me that would say they were gay, see.”[30]
Sayers goes on to describe how the dozen or so other men at his first Mattachine meeting “were not friendly” and greeted him with suspicion, though he adds that this reaction may also have been due to his known career as a lawyer (and thus part of law enforcement). This glimpse into the experiences of one Black individual demonstrates that although Black participation was theoretically desired, true intersectionality within these queer activist organizations remained a long way off. The immense pressures facing queer Black Americans at the height of the Civil Rights Movement are a crucial piece of additional historical context within this part of the narrative.
The work of women queer activists within the Homophile Movement is, of course, its own unique history. Women were involved with Mattachine groups from the days of Henry Hay and throughout the organizations’ histories, and three women joined in Kameny’s 1965 pickets in Washington, D.C.[31]
But while women were active among the Mattachines, a historic lesbian organization also dates from the height of the Lavender Scare. The San Francisco-based Daughters of Bilitis was first formed in 1955 at the suggestion of a Filipina factory worker Rosalie “Rose” Bamberger.[32] Like gay men, lesbian women in urban centers found themselves subject to police harassment and arrest. These aggressions were compounded by the problems of misogyny and targeted violence against women.
The Daughters, like the Mattachine, quickly experienced their own divergences: Bamberger, who had wanted to maintain it as a private lesbian social club, left the group when journalists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon pushed it toward an explicitly activist orientation.[33] The latter approach was apparently successful as more chapters opened in Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago and Rhode Island within five years.
The Daughters had their own publication, The Ladder: A Lesbian Review, which became the first nationally distributed lesbian magazine. The magazine was usually arts and culture focused, with occasional political updates and discussion pieces on issues of interest for the lesbian community. The Ladder would be published regularly until 1972.
A key leader among the Daughters in the 1960s was Ernestine Eckstein, the Vice President of the New York City chapter. She was among the women (and the only Black woman) who participated in the 1965 White House picket. She served as a commanding voice within the lesbian movement calling for a more explicitly political posture for the organization and the wider lesbian community.[34] Eckstein was among the boldest queer voices of her generation, unequivocal and unafraid to be publicly acknowledged as a Black lesbian.
In June 1966, she became the first Black woman to appear on the cover of The Ladder, a risky move in a period rife with both racist and queerphobic violence.[35] Speaking on the dangers of being an “out” lesbian, Eckstein said in a 1965 interview:
“I think any movement needs a certain number of courageous martyrs. There’s no getting around it. That’s really the only thing that can be done, you have to come out and be strong enough to accept whatever consequences come.”[36]
Scared No More?
Incredibly, this discussion thus far represents the briefest review of the resistance which emerged after the Lavender Scare, and those transformative individuals who set the stage for a revolution at Stonewall in 1969. Fortunately, many of these activists lived to see critical achievements made possible by their early (if often imperfect) efforts.
The 1970s in particular brought significant steps forward for the American queer community. After years of dedicated activism, Frank Kameny and his allies secured a historic win in 1972 when the American Psychiatric Association formally removed homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).[37] That same year, the Supreme Court finally ruled that homosexual orientation could not be leveraged to terminate a federal employee – effectively forbidding the original basis and discrimination which had defined the Lavender Scare to begin with.[38] Two years later, in 1975, Senate committees which had been originally charged with rooting out homosexuality in the federal government were disbanded. That year saw another step forward as the Civil Service Commission set forth new guidelines confirming that queer individuals could no longer be barred or fired from federal employment on the basis of sexual orientation alone.[39]
For those whose lives were destroyed by the events of the 1950s, these changes were perhaps cold comfort coming far too many years too late. Nevertheless, they affirmed that US society (and by extension, its federal government) were in a period of transition toward greater equality and justice. Progress forward was often limited and in halting steps. Severe challenges, and heart-wrenching setbacks, were still to come: the 1980s brought the apex of the AIDS crisis and the seeming indifference of a new conservative wave of US leadership, while the 1990s brought the deeply flawed “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy (though arguably the best possible compromise position achievable at the time on queer participation in the military).
To be sure, there was a tremendous and long distance yet to go even as the original Lavender Scare finally receded into history. Even so, the courageous voices that emerged from that period achieved transformative changes, fundamentally altering the perception and role of the queer community in American society. It is difficult to imagine how the modern queer community would have been shaped had such a dynamic resistance never emerged after the trials of the 1950s.
In September 2010, Frank Kameny (then in his 80s) attended President Barack Obama’s ceremony to celebrate the formal repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”. It was a fitting coda to a life of leadership, as Kameny passed away the following year.[40] He is now honored in the National WWII Museum’s Liberation Pavilion, and a street named for him in Washington, D.C. – the scene of so many of his lifelong battles – was dedicated in June 2020.
In April 2023, President Joe Biden issued a White House proclamation to acknowledge the 70th anniversary of the Lavender Scare. The proclamation read: “The struggle for equal justice is not over. Today and in each generation, we must rededicate ourselves to ending the hatred and discrimination that LGBTQI+ Americans continue to face.”
Kameny’s story was one of hundreds from his age, those Americans who fought the earliest public battles for queer liberation in the US. Kameny, Eckstein, Hay and many others have left today’s queer Americans not merely with a unifying history, but a torch yet to be carried forward.
[1] “The Mattachine Society”, Library of Congress Research Guides, accessed December 25, 2024, https://guides.loc.gov/lgbtq-studies/before-stonewall/mattachine.
[2] “Harry Hay: Founding the Mattachine Society: ‘A call to me . . . more important than life’”, Out History, accessed December 25, 2024, https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/hay-mattachine/hhfm.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Judith Adkins, “’These People Are Frightened to Death’ Congressional Investigations and the Lavender Scare,” Prologue Magazine, Summer 2016, Vol. 48, No. 2 (publication of the National Archives), https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2016/summer/lavender.html.
[5] Naoko Shibusawa, “The Lavender Scare and Empire: Rethinking Cold War Antigay Politics,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 4 (2012): 729, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44376170.
[6] Simon Hall, “Americanism, Un-Americanism, and the Gay Rights Movement,” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 4 (2013), pg. 1111, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24485877.
[7] Ronald J. Hunt, “Gay and Lesbian Politics,” PS: Political Science and Politics 25, no. 2 (1992), pg. 222, https://doi.org/10.2307/419712.
[8] Library of Congress, ibid.
[9] Will Hansen, “The Cold War and the Homophile, 1953–1963,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 38, no. 1 (2019): pg. 86, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26926689.
[10] Other organizations, including those led by women and prioritizing lesbian issues, also emerged during this time period; as with the Mattachine Society, they produced mixed results and outcomes within in the wider history of this period in early queer activism.
[11] Out History, ibid.
[12] David K. Johnson, “‘Homosexual Citizens’: Washington’s Gay Community Confronts the Civil Service,” Washington History 6, no. 2 (1994): pg. 55, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40073414.
[13] “Cold War, Lavender Scare, and LGBTQ+ Activism,” National Park Service, updated October 8, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cold-war-lavender-scare-and-lgbtq-activism.htm.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Stephanie Hinnershitz, “Frank Kameny: WWII Veteran, Patriot, and LGBTQ+ Activist,” National World War II Museum, June 26, 2024, https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/frank-kameny-wwii-veteran-patriot-and-lgbtq-activist.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Hansen, pg. 87.
[18] Hinnershitz, ibid.
[19] Kay M. Lim and Julie Kracov, “The lavender scare: How the federal government purged gay employees,” CBS News, June 9, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-lavender-scare-how-the-federal-government-purged-gay-employees/.
[20] National Park Service, ibid.
[21] Hall, pg. 1112.
[22] National Park Service, ibid.
[23] Johnson, pg. 56.
[24] Lim and Kracov, ibid.
[25] Johson, pg. 57.
[26] My previous blogpost on José Sarria’s historic achievements can be read here: https://andreamariana.com/?p=931.
[27] Johnson, pg. 58.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Interview of Wendell Sayers, Making Gay History (podcast), Season 1 (Episode 2), interviewed January 14, 1989, https://makinggayhistory.org/podcast/episode-1-2/.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Johnson, pg. 59.
[32] Sara E. Cohen, “How the Daughters of Bilitis Organized for Lesbian Rights,” Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, February 28, 2023, https://womenshistory.si.edu/blog/how-daughters-bilitis-organized-lesbian-rights.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Library of Congress, ibid.
[35] Interview with Ernestine Eckstein, Making Gay History (podcast), Season 4 (Episode 9), interviewed 1965, episode published January 24, 2019, https://makinggayhistory.org/podcast/ernestine-eckstein/.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Hunt, pg. 222.
[38] The National Archives Foundation, “The Lavender Scare,” accessed November 24, 2024, https://archivesfoundation.org/newsletter/the-lavender-scare/.
[39] Adkins, ibid.
[40] Hinnershitz, ibid.