Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: Second Edition

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1983 by The University of Chicago

Preface and Afterword © 1998 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1998

Printed in the United States of America

12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04    6 5 4 3 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

D’Emilio, John.

Sexual politics, sexual communities : the making of a homosexual minority in the United States, 1940–1970 / John D’Emilio.—2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-10: 0-226-14267-1 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14267-8 (paper)

ISBN: 978-0-226-92245-4 (e-book)

1. Gay liberation movement—United States—History. I. Title

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

SEXUAL POLITICS, SEXUAL COMMUNITIES

The Making of a

Homosexual Minority

in the United States

1940–1970

JOHN D’EMILIO

Second Edition

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Estelle

Contents

Preface, 1998

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part 1. Identity, Community, and Oppression: A Sexual Minority in the Making

1. Homosexuality and American Society: An Overview

2. Forging a Group Identity: World War II and the Emergence of an Urban Gay Subculture

3. The Bonds of Oppression: Gay Life in the 1950s

Part 2. The 1950s: Radical Visions and Conformist Pressures

4. Radical Beginnings of the Mattachine Society

5. Retreat to Respectability

6. Dual Identity and Lesbian Autonomy: The Beginnings of Separate Organizing Among Women

7. The Quest for Legitimacy

Part 3. The 1960s: Civil Rights and the Pursuit of Equality

8. Gay Life in the Public Eye

9. Civil Rights and Direct Action: The New East Coast Militancy, 1961–1965

10. The Movement and the Subculture Converge: San Francisco During the Early 1960s

11. High Hopes and Modest Gains

Part 4. The Liberation Impulse

12. A New Beginning: The Birth of Gay Liberation

13. Conclusion

Afterword, 1998

Notes

Index

Preface, 1998

When Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities was originally published in 1983, it was one of a handful of pioneering works in gay and lesbian history and, in one sense at least, a first. Until its release, there were no monographs in U.S. gay history, no historical narratives of the gay and lesbian past in this country.¹

In this preface, I want to reflect upon the conditions that created this book. What provoked me to research and write it? What experiences shaped it (and me)? What assumptions propelled the work forward? In what context were the questions framed, the research done, the answers puzzled through? In the afterword I will turn to another set of issues: How has the passage of time changed my outlook and understanding? In particular, in what ways has subsequent gay and lesbian historical writing modified my interpretation of the homophile movement and the post–World War II era? And how does the longer view that the end of the century offers complicate assumptions that guided me two decades ago?

Though published in the 1980s, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities is a product of the 1970s, the historical moment bounded by the Stonewall Riots in New York City and the onset of the AIDS epidemic. For many gay men and lesbians in the United States, and especially in New York City where I lived and was going to school, the decade brought a dramatic experience of change that daily left one almost giddy with hope and an expectant sense of possibility. Something had happened, was happening, all around us.²

Of course, what that something seemed to be depended on one’s experience. By the time I came into the gay liberation movement early in 1973, I had managed to construct for myself a very full gay life. I had a lover, a wide circle of gay male friends, and a broad familiarity with the public institutions of the gay subculture in New York City—from bars, restaurants, and cruising strips in the Village, Times Square, and Third Avenue, to parks, the West Side docks, the subways, and the ticket line for the Metropolitan Opera. Entering the orbit of the movement broadened my world in two very important ways. It gave a political edge to my identity as a gay man. And, despite the reputation of the seventies as the separatist decade, I met lesbians for the first time and formed a significant number of important relationships with them.

By the mid-1970s, virtually every gay man or lesbian I knew, whether through social, sexual, or political activities, had a few characteristics in common. We were born in the second quarter of the twentieth century and had consequently come of age—as the work of historians of sexuality now informs us—at a time when a particular form of identity, revolving around same-sex desire, was coming to the foreground, and when the conditions of gay life offered a mix of both opportunity and constraint. We all had experienced some kind of struggle, or difficulty, related to our homosexuality. For some, the struggle had been external, an overt conflict with authority of one sort or another; for others, the difficulty had been largely internal, one of having resisted the desires and yearnings that seemed to spring from the core of our selves; for still others, the problems were primarily practical in nature, involving a search for information, understanding, companionship; and for many, it encompassed all three. Despite these struggles, we had also all made the leap toward acknowledging, to ourselves and others in the gay world, that we were homosexual. Finally, almost everyone who filled my gay universe had been touched in some way by the sixties, by the complex of social, cultural, and political upheavals which called into question most forms of authority, knowledge, and institutional arrangements.

Bring those shared characteristics together in the context of a radical liberation movement and one can begin perhaps to apprehend how easily politics came to infuse the very essence of our queer souls. By politics I don’t mean elections and candidates and campaigns and voter mobilization. Rather I mean it in the way that word was most often used by radicals of the sixties and early seventies: as collective action for the purpose of changing institutions, power relationships, beliefs, and social practices, whether at the level of the national government and the corporation or at the level of family relationships, schools, and neighborhood institutions.

Because I came to gay liberation through the Gay Academic Union, an effort to mobilize faculty, staff, administrators, and graduate students to make colleges and universities into environments hospitable to lesbians and gays, it was natural that movement work for me and many others in the group should involve the generation of new knowledge.³ An important strand of the radicalism of the 1960s had focused on what might be called the politics of knowledge. Knowledge, or scholarship, did not exist in a vacuum of objectivity but instead was enmeshed in, subservient to, productive of, or resistant to power relationships and institutional structures. Whether it was the antiwar movement exposing the ties between university researchers and the Pentagon, or the Black Power movement decrying the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum, or radical feminists attacking the gendered assumptions of psychoanalysis, the radical forebears of gay liberation had trained a spotlight on the power of knowledge—to corrupt, to oppress, to empower, to free.

What this meant to me, and to others with whom I collaborated, was that research, writing, and scholarship became activities that counted for something, though not in their own right or detached from the world around them. They mattered because there were connections between knowledge and power, between consciousness and experience, between ideas and action. Changing ideas was one way to provoke other kinds of change, while the actions that we, as a movement, were taking simultaneously altered the conditions of life out of which new ideas might then spring. In other words, it was hard, for me at least, to imagine any kind of gay scholarship without the movement which supported it, while the production of knowledge seemed an essential component of a successful social change movement.

At the same time, intellectual work, at least in the domain of history, seemed hopelessly handicapped by one of the forms that gay oppression took. Sometimes we framed the problem as one of silence imposed by an oppressive society. At other times we expressed it as an issue of lies and myths about us, not noticing the contradiction between these two ways of describing our challenge. In either case, it made the prospect of writing a dissertation on some aspect of the history of homosexuality, which is what, in 1974, I proposed to the history department at Columbia, a daunting task. At the time, Martin Duberman was the only professional historian I knew of who had come out of the closet, but he was just embarking on research into the broader history of sexuality which, at that time, was itself an almost completely untouched subject.⁴ Jonathan Ned Katz, an activist/scholar with whom I had become friends through the GAU, had written a play, Coming Out, which had been produced Off-Off-Broadway.⁵ The dialogue all came from documents that Katz had collected as part of his continuing research for what became, in 1976, Gay American History. His discoveries were thrilling, but also sobering. If it was taking so much effort to find documents scattered across four centuries, how was I going to find the material to be able to write a focused piece of gay and lesbian history, the kind of monographic study that a dissertation is supposed to be?

Deciding to write about the gay movement seemed the perfect choice. It appealed to my interests and to the moment: in the wake of the 1960s, the study of social movements had generated interest among historians, sociologists, and political scientists; besides, since gay liberation was profoundly changing the world around me, what could be more important than studying it? It had utility: uncovering the pre-Stonewall legacy of struggle would provide the contemporary movement with a wider angle of vision. Above all, it might actually be achievable. In a past that seemed characterized by silence and invisibility, a movement to make change, at least, could be found. Movements, after all, are composed of organizations with memberships, goals, newsletters, activities. Nevertheless, I had so internalized the gay liberationist view that the Stonewall Riots had started everything—that before Stonewall was a bleak wasteland with few stories to define the landscape—that I assumed I would be writing a work of contemporary history. As I originally conceived the project, perhaps half the work would be about pre-Stonewall life and activism; but the heart and soul would be the events of the 1970s.

So the research began. The process was both exhilarating and laborious, with more of the latter than the former. Had I been working on a standard topic in U.S. history—for instance, some aspect of the New Deal, or the coming of the Civil War—I would have been able to read a huge literature and absorb the general contours of my topic even before stepping into an archives. I would know, in other words, that I was entering a long-standing conversation in mid-sentence. But writing gay history, a phrase without any currency in the mid-1970s, felt like an act of invention. True, in the wake of Stonewall, there were a few books by gay and lesbian liberationists that touched in small ways on pre-Stonewall politics, but otherwise the slate was blank.⁶

Though I received support for the work from the usual places that graduate students look (an extremely helpful faculty adviser and fellow students at Columbia who were eager to read my drafts), what kept me going and what was responsible for much of the early published work on lesbian and gay history was a parallel intellectual structure that community-based activist scholars were creating in the 1970s. In New York I joined first a gay men’s study group that explored the utility of Marxist theory for understanding the political economy of sexuality, and then a gender-mixed study group on the history of sexuality that met for several years. As the 1970s progressed, groups like these sprouted in a number of cities, creating a network of gay and lesbian community history projects that kept in close touch and fed one another’s thirst for knowledge.

Only very slowly did the contours of the book emerge. Early on in the research I made contact with the New York Mattachine Society, one of the organizations you will read about in this book. Its director, Richard Wandel, gave me free run of their library and old office files. Four weeks later, when he informed me that the organization had gone belly up and was closing, he allowed me to move some file cabinets and stacks of periodicals into my apartment, so my research could proceed. Over the course of a year, I worked my way through every issue of ONE, Mattachine Review, and The Ladder. The reading was helpful in the sense that it gave me a feel for what lesbians and gay men in the orbit of this tiny social movement were thinking, but I still had little sense of what they were actually doing. And, for the most part, I still had no idea of who they were, since most writers in these publications used pseudonyms until well into the 1960s.

Meanwhile, from Jonathan Katz, who was nearing completion of Gay American History, I learned a seemingly incredible story of a small group of Communist Party members in southern California who founded the Mattachine Society at the onset of the McCarthy era. He had heard this from Harry Hay, one of the founders whom Katz had interviewed for his book.⁷ Hay had also given him names and phone numbers of other activists from the 1950s, so, at the end of the summer in 1976, I headed toward California for a round of research and interviewing.

The several months I spent in Los Angeles and San Francisco finally gave me a story to tell. I plugged into a network of older California activists, many of whom had known each other for two decades or longer and virtually all of whom were eager to talk. Already, by 1976, most of them were feeling that history had passed them by; the young whippersnappers of gay liberation and lesbian feminism seemed to have no use for the work they had done in harder times. The fact that I was willing to listen, that I deemed their stories important enough to tape and, eventually, to recount as history, was enormously validating to them. In the course of the fall I interviewed about three dozen participants. Some lasted only an hour. Others stretched into several sessions spread over days.⁸ More importantly, perhaps, some of these individuals, notably Jim Kepner, Dorr Legg, and Don Lucas, opened to me the extensive personal archives they had kept over the years. These documents were critical because they allowed me to test my oral histories, taken many years after the events from individuals who did, after all, have an interest in magnifying the importance of their work, against a paper trail from the past.

At some point during this research trip, the organizing concept of the project shifted dramatically. I realized that the pre-Stonewall events, which I had originally imagined as somewhat akin to a preface to the real story of gay liberation, had a historical integrity of their own. They were, in short, significant enough to be placed at the center of what I was writing. The homophile movement, as the participants called it, had many of the earmarks of other social change movements in their early phases: visionary founders; hard times and tribulations; serious debates over philosophy, strategy, and tactics; victories that mattered. Hence, I determined that the book ought properly to stop with the Stonewall Riots in order to highlight more effectively the distinctive character and contribution of the activists of a preceding generation.

Two other aspects of the intellectual genesis of Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities deserve comment. The first speaks directly to the ways the present can shape our view of the past. In 1979 I made a second extended trip to San Francisco, intending to write while I continued to do research there. My stay coincided with important events in the life of the city. In November 1978, Californians rejected at the polls a statewide antigay ballot initiative that would have, among other things, prevented any gays or lesbians from teaching in the state’s public schools. A few days after the election, Dan White, a conservative member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, assassinated George Moscone, the mayor, and Harvey Milk, the city’s first openly gay supervisor and an outspoken proponent of gay rights. White’s trial was wrapping up as I arrived; a few days later, the jury returned a voluntary manslaughter verdict that could have seen White released after less than five years in prison. That night, thousands of lesbians, gay men, and their supporters rioted at City Hall, smashing windows and setting fire to police cars. The police responded by invading the Castro, the main gay neighborhood in San Francisco, and indiscriminately assaulting pedestrians on the street and patrons of gay bars.⁹

What I witnessed that night, as well as over the succeeding days and weeks, allowed me to read my historical research in a new light. I saw how dependent the movement was on the subculture; in reality, the subculture, or community, was the sea in which activists swam. Much of the crowd that gathered in front of City Hall had poured out of the bars when they heard about the jury’s verdict.

In my research I had noted how the movement before Stonewall seemed to develop further in San Francisco than in any other city—an interesting fact for which I had only the circular explanation that San Francisco was, after all, the gay capital of the United States. Now, with my interest piqued by contemporary events, I began to search more deeply. Clues whose meaning had eluded me became significant. I uncovered an interlocking set of events and circumstances—the Beat subculture in San Francisco and its gay subtext, patterns of state harassment, and gay-related scandals involving police corruption—that provoked activism within the pre-Stonewall bar world. Out of this I was able to fashion an interpretation of San Francisco’s gay social and political history, the subject of Chapter 10. I was also able to emphasize throughout the story the critical nature of the movement’s relationship to the subculture, or what we now call the community. To the degree that the movement remains separate and the community estranged, advances will be slow in coming. To the degree that the relationship is strong, change will be expansive.

A second aspect of the book’s intellectual origins involves the broader historical framework into which I set the homophile movement. During this same stay in San Francisco, I had the privilege to be closely involved with a group of community-based intellectuals who had gathered together in the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. Many of them—Allan Berube, Jeffrey Escoffier, Estelle Freedman, Eric Garber, Amber Hollibaugh, Gayle Rubin—went on in the 1980s and 1990s to produce significant work on gay history, sexuality, and sexual politics. Combined with the intellectual stimulation and encouragement of my study groups in New York, this made for a situation in which we were all encouraging one another to think big and creatively. The movement of which our research and writing and forums and slide shows were a part was so evidently remaking the world around us that it seemed inevitable that we would strive to connect our work to broad themes and large social processes. Thus, it made sense to ask questions about how events such as World War II and political trends like McCarthyism impinged on gay life and activism. It also made sense to play with taken-for-granted concepts like sexual orientation and ask whether they had always existed, whether they described the essence of human beings, or whether they were creations of history that came into being under one set of social, cultural, and economic conditions and might remake themselves in yet other ways in the future. Hence the opening chapters of the book, which set the stage for the specific story of lesbian and gay activism in its formative stages.

Having reread Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities myself this fall in order to write this preface, I would like to think that placing its creation in a historical context of its own will enrich the reading of it today. For instance, knowing the assumptions and experiences that I brought to the project may help to explain some of the interpretive choices I made. At the very least it should remind you, the reader, that many of today’s assumptions and experiences were not available to me then and thus were unable to influence my outlook.

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making. In the course of writing it, I have incurred substantial debts to friends, teachers, and colleagues that I acknowledge more than gratefully.

I began this study as a doctoral dissertation in the history department of Columbia University, under the direction of Professor William Leuchtenburg. His formidable skill as an editor has improved the manuscript considerably. He also set consistently high standards for historical work and, without ever asking me to abandon my point of view, insisted that I use the persuasion of evidence carefully marshaled, rather than rhetoric carelessly employed, to make my argument. Estelle Freedman of Stanford University has been through more versions of the manuscript than either of us cares to remember. From the first chapter outline to the final draft, she has combined the criticism of a fine historian with the understanding of a long-time friend, to prod me along to completion. I have also benefited from readings from Kenneth Jackson, Rosalind Rosenberg, Joseph Interrante, Jim Oleson, James D’Emilio, William McLaughlin, Susan Stone Wong, Duane Tananbaum, Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, and Gary Rubin. The librarians and supporting staff at the Institute for Sex Research in Bloomington, Indiana, made a research trip there most profitable. A Kent fellowship from the Danforth Foundation, a scholarship from the Gay Academic Union of California, and financial assistance from Jim Oleson enabled me to finish the research and writing. Peter Lowy generously defrayed the cost of copying drafts, and Joe Duchac typed the final version with speed and accuracy. The members of my New York study group in the history of sexuality—Lisa Duggan, Jonathan Katz, Carole Vance, and Paula Webster—always posed incisive questions about my work and made the task of thinking and writing about sexuality an enjoyable one.

In many ways this book is also a product of the movement whose history it chronicles. I was privileged to be one of the founding members of the Gay Academic Union in New York in 1973. The men and women who sustained GAU during its first three years provided a supportive context in which it was first possible even to imagine writing about some aspect of the history of homosexuality. All of them had a part in my decision to undertake this project, but I especially want to thank Joseph Cady, Martin Duberman, and Bert Hansen. Their example convinced me that scholarship and a commitment to social change are not mutually exclusive. Activists in the homophile movement not only made the history I have written about but graciously consented to my demands on their time in the form of interviews. Several of them—Harry Hay, Chuck Rowland, James Kepner, Dorr Legg, and Frank Kameny—deserve special thanks for having saved the documents that are the raw material of this study, for inviting me into their homes to do the research, and for responding to repeated requests for another interview or letter. A number of gay publications and organizations provided me with a forum for presenting work in progress—the Body Politic of Toronto, Gay Community News of Boston, the North Shore Lesbian and Gay Alliance of Massachusetts, and the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project, among others. They allowed me to test my ideas and to receive comments along the way from the community whose history I was writing.

Last but not least, there has been the help of friends. Tony Ward and David Roggensack lived with me throughout the writing of this book. They created a home environment in which concentrated work was possible and the right balance of pushing and encouragement to keep me going. Jonathan Katz and Allan Bérubé shared with me their enormous knowledge of gay history and their unswerving conviction that its study is worth pursuing. Members of the Re-Evaluation Counseling Community in New York, especially Sylvia Conant, John Bell, Dorothy Stoneman, Tom Roderick, and Elizabeth Higginbotham, were smart enough to break any writing blocks I had. Jim Oleson was there when I most needed him. My parents, Vincent and Sophie D’Emilio, always expressed confidence in my abilities and trust in my choices, and they have made a difference.

Most of all, I want to thank Estelle Freedman. As a respected colleague, a committed feminist, and my dearest friend, she shared all of the ups and downs in a way that no one else could.

Introduction

Since June 1969, when a police raid of a Greenwich Village gay bar sparked several nights of rioting by male homosexuals, gay men and women in the United States have enlisted in ever growing numbers in a movement to emancipate themselves from the laws, the public policies, and the attitudes that have consigned them to an inferior position in society. In ways pioneered by other groups that have suffered a caste-like status, homosexuals and lesbians have formed organizations, conducted educational campaigns, lobbied inside legislative halls, picketed outside them, rioted in the streets, sustained self-help efforts, and constructed alternative separatist institutions on their road to liberation. They have worked to repeal statutes that criminalize their sexual behavior and to eliminate discriminatory practices. They have labored to unravel the ideological web that supports degrading stereotypes. Like other minorities, gay women and men have struggled to discard the self-hatred they have internalized. Many of them have rejected the negative definitions that American society has affixed to their sexuality and, instead, have begun to embrace their identity with pride.

From the beginning a curious inconsistency appeared between the rhetoric of the gay liberation movement and the reality of its achievements. On the one hand, activists in the early 1970s repeatedly stressed, in their writing and their public comments, the intertwining themes of silence, invisibility, and isolation. Gay men and lesbians, the argument ran, were invisible to society and to each other, and they lived isolated from their own kind. A vast silence surrounded the topic of homosexuality, perpetuating both invisibility and isolation. On the other hand, gay liberationists exhibited a remarkable capacity to mobilize their allegedly hidden, isolated constituency, and the movement grew with amazing rapidity. By the mid-1970s, homosexuals and lesbians had formed more than 1,000 organizations scattered throughout the country. Many of these groups directed their energy outward, exerting pressure on legislatures, schools, the media, churches, and the professions. Activists proved capable of turning out tens of thousands of individuals for demonstrations, and they won impressive victories in relatively quick order. Many lesbian and gay male organizations also looked inward, toward their constituency. Activists created newspapers, magazines, health clinics, churches, multipurpose social centers, and specialized businesses—in short, a range of institutions that implied the existence of a separate, cohesive gay community.

Clearly, what the movement achieved and how lesbians and gay men responded to it belied the rhetoric of isolation and invisibility. Isolated men and women do not create, almost overnight, a mass movement premised upon a shared group identity. In combating prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory practices, moreover, gay liberationists encountered a quite clearly articulated body of thought about homosexuality. And, if lesbians and homosexuals were indeed invisible, the movement’s leaders displayed an uncanny ability to find them in large numbers.

The present study began as an effort to resolve this contradiction, specifically by searching for the roots of the gay liberation movement in the political efforts of homosexuals and lesbians that preceded it. Militants in the early 1970s gave faint acknowledgment to the work of a previous generation, to the men and women who composed the homophile movement and who staffed organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s and 1960s. But, almost in the same breath, modern-day liberationists glibly denied the importance of their forebears. Mattachine had a reputation as the NAACP of our movement, ¹ a damning description during years when groups like the Black Panther party were capturing the fancy of young radicals. When seen from a longer historical view, however, the comparison was intriguing since the NAACP, cautious and moderate as it may have been, had compiled over several decades a record of achievement that helped make possible the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Did the homophile movement play a similar role for gay men and women? Did its work perhaps prepare the ground for the victories of the 1970s?

As I researched the first phase of the gay emancipation struggle in the United States, it became apparent that its participants, and their work, deserved more than consignment to the dustbin of history. It is true, without question, that the homophile movement had failed to attract large numbers of lesbians and homosexuals to its cause. Nor had it succeeded in substantially revising the laws and public policies that kept them in a state of second-class citizenship. But at a time when heterosexual Americans appeared virtually unanimous in their disapproval, if not condemnation, of same-sex eroticism, the first generation of gay activists did open a debate on the topic. The homophile movement targeted the same groups and institutions as would gay liberation members in the 1970s—urban police forces, the federal government, the churches, the medical profession, the press and other media—and through its persistence managed to rupture the consensus that shaped social attitudes toward homosexuality and society’s treatment of gay people.

Searching for the answer to one puzzle, however, only raised another, more vexing problem. Much of what homophile activists fought against—moral condemnation by the churches and the criminal status of homosexual behavior, for instance—had existed for centuries. Why, then, did a gay emancipation movement come into existence only in the post–World War II era? And why did it not become a mass movement until the end of the 1960s? One could point to the specific proximate causes of political activism, such as the publication of the Kinsey study of male sexual behavior in 1948 and the repression of the McCarthy era or, in the case of gay liberation, to the model provided by the radical movements of black and white youth and of women in the 1960s. But these explanations still leave unresolved the question, Why not earlier? The United States had experienced both repression and mass militancy in earlier periods of its history. Moreover, other groups—blacks, women, workers—had a history of resistance to oppression and exploitation that stretched back for more than a century. Why had homosexuals and lesbians not taken up their own cause generations ago?

The recent historical literature on human sexuality suggested a way of approaching this problem. Motivated perhaps by the much heralded sexual revolution of the 1960s, or by the challenges to sexual ideology that the contemporary feminist and gay liberation movements have posed, historians have begun to study the erotic life of men and women as never before. Borrowing from the work of anthropologists and sociologists, some historians have discarded the view that sexuality is primarily a biological category, an innate, unchanging drive or instinct immune from the shifts that characterize other aspects of social organization. Instead, as a number of writers have argued, eroticism is also subject to the forces of culture. Human beings learn how to express themselves sexually, and the content of that learning is as varied as the societies that women and men have formed through the ages. Particular erotic practices, from heterosexual intercourse to masturbation and sodomy, have a universal existence. But how individual men and women interpret their sexual activity and desires, and the meanings that different societies affix to erotic behavior, vary enormously from one culture to another and from one historical era to the next.²

In studying homosexuality, some historians have begun to entertain the idea that human sexuality is a socially constructed, changing category. In recent books several writers have argued that the homosexual or the lesbian—that is, the person defined by society and by self through a primary erotic interest in the same sex—is a nineteenth-century invention.³ Before then, in Western Europe and in the portions of North America populated by European settlers, men and women engaged in what we would describe as homosexual behavior, but neither they nor the society in which they lived defined persons as essentially different in kind from the majority because of their sexual expression. The absence of rigid categories called homosexual and heterosexual did not imply approval of same-sex eroticism. Men and women caught in such an act were severely punished, but their behavior was interpreted as a discrete transgression, a misdeed comparable to other sins and crimes such as adultery, blasphemy, and assault. By the late nineteenth century, a profound conceptual shift had occurred. Some men and women were homosexuals. The label applied not merely to particular sexual acts, as sodomite once had, but to an entire person whose nature—acts, feelings, personality traits, even body type—was sharply distinguishable from the majority of normal heterosexuals.

When applied to the topic of gay politics, this interpretation offers a new angle of vision that helps to illuminate both the timing and the course of the homosexual emancipation movement in the United States. The movement’s history cannot be understood merely as a chronicle of how activists worked to mobilize masses of gay men and lesbians and to achieve a fixed agenda. Instead, the movement constitutes a phase, albeit a decisive one, of a much longer historical process through which a group of men and women came into existence as a self-conscious, cohesive minority. Before a movement could take shape, that process had to be far enough along so that at least some gay women and men could perceive themselves as members of an oppressed minority, sharing an identity that subjected them to systematic injustice. But before the movement could become a significant social force, the consciousness and the conditions of daily life of large numbers of lesbians and homosexuals had to change so that they could take up the banner carried by a pioneering few. Thus activists had not only to mobilize a constituency; first they had to create one. The fact that most of them remained unaware of this task did not make it any less critical.

The study that follows, then, is more than an account of the first two decades of the gay emancipation movement and less than a history of homosexuality in American society. Although the primary focus remains the story of a movement for social change, I have attempted to situate the growth of a gay politics within the larger setting of the evolution of a gay sexual identity and an urban subculture of homosexuals and lesbians. In Part I, I present the historical background of the origins of the movement. Chapter 1 describes the transformation of homosexuality, both conceptually and in its actual expression, from a sexual act to a personal identity; and it provides an overview of the sanctions and the negative attitudes directed toward men and women who engaged in homoerotic behavior. The next two chapters detail the events, roughly from 1940 to 1960, that helped shape an urban gay subculture and the modern forms of gay oppression. Chapter 2 focuses on World War II and the boost it gave to the formation of a collective gay life, while Chapter 3 examines the intensification of antihomosexual attitudes and penalties during the McCarthy era.

Part II chronicles the first decade of the movement, when a tiny number of people struggled simply to keep gay organizations alive. In Chapter 4, I look at the founding of the Mattachine Society by a group of leftist homosexuals. Chapter 5 charts the abrupt shift in the Mattachine philosophy from an emphasis on mass militancy and homosexual difference to a stress on political gradualism and the insignificance of sexual expression. Chapter 6 describes the founding of the Daughters of Bilitis and the historical specificity of lesbian identity and life. In Chapter 7, I assess the accomplishments and limitations of the homophile movement in the latter half of the 1950s, when its leaders adopted an accommodationist approach to social change.

Part III examines the homophile movement during the 1960s, a turbulent decade in American history. As I argue in Chapter 8, the sexual revolution of the decade extended to homosexuality, as Supreme Court decisions removed legal barriers to the presentation of homoeroticism in print and in visual media, and a bewildering variety of images and viewpoints about homosexuality appeared. This barrage of information made it easier for people to come to a self-definition as homosexual or lesbian, strengthened the institutions of the subculture, and gave activists more opportunities for action. Chapter 9 traces the growth during the early 1960s of a militant wing of the movement in the East where, influenced by the example of the civil rights effort, gay activists adopted direct action protest techniques. Chapter 10 focuses on events in San Francisco during the decade. There an unusual set of circumstances provoked the first important stirrings of political consciousness within the subculture of gay bars, so that San Francisco’s experience came to foreshadow what would happen in cities throughout America in the 1970s. Chapter 11 takes the story of the homophile movement up to the birth of gay liberation and assesses its success in ending the negative consensus