All Content - Final Exam

Sigmund Freud

- Everyone passed through a homosexual stage on the way to general maturity - On reaching maturity, people were supposed to focus congenital heterosexual coitus - Otherwise, they were fixated on an earlier stage - Many blamed mothers for not allowing their child to grow and develop correctly (not allowing independence)

Learning to be Gay: Gay Cultural Literacy

- Ky-ky: stigmatize people that switch roles by constantly performing masculinity or femininity - Queer tastes in dress, décor, art, music - Opera, theater, fashion: arts of self-invention - "Gay sensibility": cultivated, refined, and produced in bars - Still regarded as fundamentally effeminate from the POV of mainstream culture

Shift from Incidental to Targeted Policing of Homosexuality

- Policing began in late 19th century: felony sodomy laws (relatively few persecutions) - Early 20th century: misdemeanor charges including disorderly conduct and loitering - 1923-66: more than 50000 arrests on disorderly conduct/loitering in NYC alone!

Anti-Gay Psychoanalytic Theories and Manifestations (5)

- Sigmund Freud - Edmund Bergler - Military - Movies - Everyday social pressures

World War II Pin-Up Culture

- Women sent soldiers pinup photographs of themselves - Playboy: 1953 first issue. Designed for bachelor that resisted marriage to play around - Epitome of heterosexuality, didn't want to be tied down to a single woman - Sexual interest in women as the primary sign of heterosexuality, instead of men's marriage to one - Men who weren't married were not necessarily suspect

Legal Challenges in the 1960s: Censorship curtailed

Roth v. U.S. (1957): right to have gay magazines - 1969: affirmed right of people to possess pornography in their homes - Feeling of securities - Reduced fear of gay men of receiving these magazines

Solidification of Gay Male Culture - Why?

Solidified gay identities and minority identity of gender-normative gay men because the military singled them out as a group for persecution

How Did Gay People Respond to Claims Their Love Was a Sin?

_ The Church remained one of the most powerful sources of anti-gay ideology - Insisting as a matter of faith that homosexuality could not be a sin: God made me them this way, it was part of God's plan, therefore they are blessed! - If God made them love someone so strongly, it can't be wrong

Magnus Hirschfeld

- 1868-1935 - Linking sexological research and activism. Researched and lectured across the world - Founded an Institute for sex research. It was male-dominated but with lesbian leaders as well - Against Germany's sodomy law: immoral to criminalize people for doing something the cannot control - Powerful proponent of third-sex (intermediate sex). He adopted a minoritarian position arguing homosexuals were a distinct and identifiable group of people - Publications: Different from the Others - Opposed by Adolf Brand

Vast Scale & Diversity of Gay World: Gay Bars in the 1940s-1950s

- 1940s and 1950s: 5 distinct gay neighborhoods in Manhattan alone: Greenwich Village, Times Square, East Fifities, West Seventies, Harlem - Distinguished by class, race, and cultural style - Racially segregated as neighborhoods themselves: Harlem bars were the only ones that actively welcomed black clientele - Even racially segregated bars were differentiated among class: East fifties (elegant, businessmen's bars, very exclusive and discrete), Greenwich village lesbian bars (more visible), Harlem (class-stratified) - NOTE: More crossing of racial divides in gay communities than in straight ones → everyone was outside their status - Gay males scene larger than the lesbian one - Importance: Postwar gay life was so expansive that it found a way to reproduce the city's divisions - Pattern in larger cities as well: Chicago had white, back, and Mexican bars - In smaller cities, however, there were so few options that the bars were more likely to be diverse (no place else to go)

Cold War Antigay Politics

- 1945-1965: Most dangerous years in the 20th century for gay people - Local panics and crackdowns preceded federal purges: Local antigay campaigns in cities across the country, not just Washington (The Lavender Scare) in places like Boise, Idaho - Florida Legislative Investigation Committee interrogated and forced gays to leave Florida university - Local purges: 1953 - one of Eisenhower's first acts in office was to issue and order to ban working of homosexuals in government - Forced gay employees to be more secretive about their lives - Legacy of anti-Semitism: framework to describe gays as not loyal to the nation (loyal to a sub-group), convert youth into becoming Jew/homosexual, being hard to detect - McCarthy: Lavender Scare - Antigay campaigns broke out throughout this period: from laughter to fear and hatred - A generation of people became accustomed to these raids: not linear, periods of peace and periods of massive raids

Everyday Survival Strategies: Gay Codes

- 1950s: gay people were producers and consumers of codes. Intricate ways to communicate with one another without drawing the attention of outsiders - Lingo: gay, 69, seafood, trade, etc. - Double Entendre - Wise - The open secret - Unthinkable to most people to reveal homosexuality - Moral code bound gay people together by making it a moral imperative to protect others and the gay world from outsiders. Not coming out was the norm - Using codes was rewarding: relished expertise in part because the skills were appreciated and valorized - Counterintuitive: code was portrayed as a burden later, but many found it pleasurable by giving you status and self-satisfaction (pride by excelling at code) - Codes were necessary because censorship forced people to use them

Advertising Brochures in Physique Magazines

- Adopted practice to provide background on guy they featured or even short interviews - "Quiet and soft-spoken" "greatest hope to become and actor" → code of gayness - Joe Dallesandro: symbol of gay subculture - 1955 Grecian Guild Pictorial → invoking Greeks as a way to legitimize male admiration of male bodies. Love and desire as normal; important historical past; even admirable - Tom of Finland: hypermasculine gay lover culture - Nothing effeminate about magazines: normal-looking guys that pleasurably consumed erotic materials

Harry Hay

- Aims and purposes of the Mattachine Society: turn shame of being gay into a pride of belonging to a minority with its own contribution to the human community - Gay people have a unique gay identity and vision of homosexual culture with its own positive values - Connections to Communism: Communist Party experience gave the founders organizational skills. It allowed them to be secretive and cell-like and protected members from public exposure

Double Entendre

- Alertness or sensitivity to secret meaning by common words in a particular context - Gay songwriters were masters at this - Being wise meant also being alert to the possibility that words would mean more than one thing - Double entendre often drew on cultural tendencies

Religious: Moral Degradation

- Also couched in developmental terms - Advocated by police and popularized by the press - Descent into sin with homosexual solicitation. Anyone engaging in deviations was likely to descend into worse depravity. Take these men off the streets before it's too late - No matter how harmless homosexuals seem, they have made a break with morality and might degenerate even more (drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder) → threat - Homosexual is not content with being degenerate himself, ever-seeking for younger victims to have other be like himself. Ever on the prow (seeking new young victims) - Threat to both sexes → any deviate sexual practice - Americans need to discard pre-war ideas of homosexuals as harmless queens easy to identify → masculine-looking men instead

Adolf Brand

- Argued homoerotic desire was not a sign of femininity but instead a desire of masculine virility that served the national purpose (drew men together to protect the nation and teach each other about comrade love) - Homoerotic desire was not limited to a minority of men - Love that was characteristically German - Found third-sex theory demeaning - Organization consisted entirely of men - Embrace fascism and nationalism - Nazis shut down debate when they rose for power, denouncing Hirschfeld as a Jew, communist, etc.

Learning to be Gay: Butch/Femme

- Bars set the tone and taught precise ways to being butch/femme - Policed behavior of newcomers: ridiculing women who did it inconsistently or ineptly through minor verbal harassment - Once accepted, they started learning how to be gay: taught how to dress (shirt, jackets), how to cut hair to tie it back into a duck's tail when going to a bar, how to relate to women, etc. - Not the only organizing principle, but widespread and important - Insisted on a degree of conformity within the spaces they controlled - Hard to fit in at all if you didn't fit into one of those categories - Equivalent for gay men: queens and butches

Masculinization of Gay Male Culture

- Before the war, effeminate queens were the prime model of gay world - War disrupted social networks that sustained pre-war gay culture. Pulled people apart and ruptured gay friendships as it created new ones - Highly masculinized environment of the military that punished non-masculine stances. Some managed to be a GI drag or found other jobs that were less masculine. But most opted out of being the barrack's fairy - Introduced soldiers to other men and gay friends that convinced them that homosexuality and masculinity were not mutually exclusive - Most who identified as gay thought it was a sexual identity (not a gender identity) → easier for conventionally masculine men to identify as gay (no need to give up masculine identity)

The Early 20c German Homosexual Movement

- Berlin widely regarded as having a vibrant gay and cultural scene - Gay political movement deeply fractured by difference of gender normative and transgressive queers - Magnus Hirschfeld 1868-1935

National Influences: the Black Civil Rights Movement

- Black Civil Rights = engine driving minority rights after the war - Mass mobilization of African Americans to secure freedom. Soldiers that served oversees wanted a share in the democracy - Pioneer claims and tactics that other groups followed - Donald Webster Cory: The Homosexual in America (1951)

Legal Challenges in the 1960s: Right to Privacy for (Hetero)Sexual Intimacy

- Both state and federal courts became greater defenders of individual rights to privacy and personal autonomy - People had a right to make decisions about partners without government interference - Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): Could not ban contraceptives to married couples (right to use contraceptives) - Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended this to gay couples - Roe v. Wade (1973): women had a right to terminate pregnancy - Lawrence v. Texas (2003): gay people also have a right to sexual intimacy. HOWEVER, only 5:4 vote ☹

Christine Jorgensen and the Emergence of Transsexuality

- Category distinguished from homosexuality - European doctors began experimenting with procedures in 1920s and 1930s - Surgical procedures to reassign sex became available in the 1940s from a handful of doctors in Scandinavia - 1952: George Orgensen travels to Copenhagen to become Christine Jorgensen - Publicity: press covered her arrival to the US. Sold her story to a newspaper for 25,000 dollars. Scandal magazines tried to imagine what she would look like in a bathing suit - Avoided campy persona drag queens often adopted. Image of respectable femininity - She insisted she was a woman: not a homosexual or transvestite - Embodiment of white eroticized femininity

How Did Gay People Respond to Claims Their Love Was Sick/Immature?

- Claims gays were developmentally stunted - Response: counter-developmental narrative: story about themselves that became the standard narrative. Story about how they first had struggled to deny their desires and oppress them (therapy, heterosexual marriage) only to realize the disastrous consequences of this, and then accepted their nature and embraced gay life - Showed they could be capable of mature love

Donald Webster Cory: The Homosexual in America (1951)

- Complicated figure who later turned against the movement and later argued gays are borderline 'sick' and need a cure soon - The Homosexual in America drew on postwar global discourses and the political language of civil rights movement - Homosexuals as a minority of American citizens - Discrimination against gay people inconsistent with American democracy and the democratic principle - Critique of the press creating hostile stereotypes of gay people as violent - Antigay hostility was taught and reinforced by everyday anti-gay slurs. It was inculcated and subtle, and utilized to teach people to hate - Analysis of antigay hatred: taught and magnified by the press and everyday practices (bad jokes, taunts, unchallenged bullying, policing) - Modeled in part on An American Dilemma and The Souls of Black Folk - The Souls of Black Folk: Homosexuality is natural to homosexuals. They are forced to hide but accused as living a lie at the same time. They are condemned for being promiscuous although they cannot lead normal lives. Seduction into lifestyle that is portrayed as inferior but attractive to others is contradictory

Effects of Early US Homophile Publications

- Created a movement infrastructure, but were tiny - Largest publications never had more than 2000 subscribers - Communist pasts: Harry Hay from the Mattachine Society - Prominent feature of gay life

The Ladder

- Created in 1957 - Monthly publication of DOB - Most conservative of the 3

Priority Issues for the Homophile Militants

- Criminalization of gay bars - Police entrapment - Antigay medical theories - Employment discrimination

Homophile = Same-Sex Love

- Demonization led them to choose that term because they claimed they were capable for loving another person as well as sexual desire (critics accused them of being selfish and incapable of loving others) - Often criticized by other gay people for dodging sexual character of their sexuality

The Open Secret

- Did not name themselves, did not offer an explicit challenge to heteronormativity - Don't ask, don't tell. Family members did not discuss the issue

Pulp Novels: Real vs. Situational Lesbians

- Difference of age - Real: bad girls, tomboys, predator older women - Situational: gender normative, not sure of what they wanted. Often embraced lesbianism because the men were awful (maybe a feminist text?)

Spaces in the Military

- Drag shows: not convincing like illusionism; often in groups (no icon to point to); try to portray gender as an unbridgeable gap - Jobs - Urban life - Military bases and bunks - Hotels - Front lines - Veterans' organizations

Contradictory Pressures (Europe and the U.S.)

- Dramatic escalation in antigay policing - Inspired to claim their rights based on humanitarian efforts - Shaped kind of work they did → creating safe spaces, creating communication networks. Did not encourage most to come out as gay - No authority to speak on their own behalf → devoted to people like Evelyn Hooker and Dr. Kinsey

Lessons from the Black Civil Rights Movement

- Every other political movement was becoming more militant - Not ALL black activist were straight and not ALL gay activists were white Profound tangible impact - Inspired northern white students to go south and work with Black activists: Mississippi Freedom summer 1964 (voter registration campaigns) - Students radicalized, some where gay - Solidarity that community institutions gave them - BUT also learned concrete lessons about how to organize politically: how to mobilize people by addressing issues that affected them most directly (assaulted dignity on daily basis), mobilize people into symbolic actions that reframed the nature of a problem (drew attention)

Postwar Readjustment of Soldiers

- Everyone expected the family to play a key role in turning soldiers back into civilians - Magazines told women that they had a patriotic duty to civilize their returning men, even if doing so required to give up some of their freedom gained during the war - Employer: industrial employer thought women should give up their jobs for returning veterans. Women went on to find other jobs, but went on to low-paying jobs with no hopes for promotion (typing; taking orders from male bosses; fewer options) → dependence on men

Forms of Harassement

- Excommunication: Church to expel homosexuals as unrepenting sinners - Employers fired gays - Families expelled gays → " I don't want you in this house" (The Children's Hour) - Verbal harassment on the street, schools, etc. - Beatings - Everyday forms of torment reminded them they were despised by and excluded from mainstream society

Every-Day Social Pressures

- Exerted by families, neighborhoods, church, employers - Prove heterosexuality by getting married. Difficult to exist socially if one was not married - Requirements for social citizenship and imaginative member in the nation → marriage and parenthood - HETERONORMATIVITY: powerful social forces promoting heterosexuality → compulsory and inevitable and everyone must follow in order to be considered human in society - Higher percentage of population married in 1950s and 1960s married than in any other historical time in the US - Those who didn't marry seemed immature → most considered marriage to be the ultimate sign of maturity - Responsible and stable employees were married → required in order to be promoted to highly-responsible jobs - Homosexuality = single, selfishly-unattached people. Dangerous because they might seduce boys or girls into escaping life of responsibility - Homosexuality as a disease: contagious because heterosexuality was not a stable category (anyone could be seduced into it and was susceptible to homosexual temptation)

Edmund Bergler

- Famous for publishing books to teach readers that homosexuality was a disease that is curable, not a way of life - Scientific authority to long-standing moral premises - Marriage was the defining turning point on transition from childhood to adulthood (heterosexuality as a fragile achievement) - Children who were not yet mature could be seduced into the gay life (by others or by wanting to escape their responsibilities)

Paperbacks

- First published in 1920s - Popularity grew in 1930s due to the Depression - Pocketbooks company began selling small paperback books: cheap paper, and cheap to produce and buy - Importance: pulp novels depended on volume for profit - Signed distribution contracts with tabloid newspapers and newsstands and variety stores (other outlets than bookstores) - Paperback originals flew under the radars: newspapers never reviewed them. Not subjected to the same degree of censorship because they weren't novels - They saturated the American cultural landscape - Hundreds of pulp novels, some became national Bestsellers 1. Women's Barracks (1950) 2. Spring Fire (1952)

Mattachine Society

- Founded in 1950, Los Angeles - Both men and women but mostly men - Founder: Harry Hay - Large organization - Chapters in more cities: NY, Chicago, Denver, etc. - 2 years after it was founded a small cell of the Mattachine Society started ONE - Challenged anti-gay policing - Approaches to homophile organizing: publications and creating safe spaces (meetings in houses) - This fits into the Civil Rights and Declaration of Human Rights ideology which argues everyone should have access to rights irrespective of some characteristics - Structure = Pyramid of five orders. Orders subdivide into separate cells that would divide horizontally. Fifth order constituted by the founders → organized leadership - Focus only on a set of reform goals (theoretical understanding of why we're oppressed)

DOB: Daughters of Bilitis

- Founded in 1955, San Francisco - Founders: Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin - Women's organization - First national lesbian organization in the United States - Separate society from the Mattachine Society: Mattachine is mainly gay men, lesbians are usually treated in a condescending and as second-class homosexuals in these organizations - Different interests between gay men and lesbian women - Social club - Took a conservative approach to helping lesbians deal with society - Reject bar culture that plays into gay scene - Focus more on professional settings - Lesbian women not much economic power without husbands, locked into households and marriages - Lesbians need help with professional and personal lives - Rejected Buch-Fem dynamic: the bar scene and this dynamic won't lift lesbians up - Disbanded in 1970 due to the rise of more radical activism

Lavender Scare Human Examples

- Frank Kameny: founder of Mattachine society dismissed from government job in 1957 for homosexuality - Dick Leitsch: president of NY Mattachine society. Very deep connection to bar scene→ politicized when his friends were arrested. Remained connected to bars. Upsurge in arrests made him an activist for about a decade

Older Laws Regulated Male Conduct; now they Discriminated against both Gay Men and Lesbians

- GI Bill denied to people with a dishonorable discharge - DISCRIMINATED against them on the basis of status, not just their conduct

The Stonewall Myth

- Gay bar in Greenwich village - Raided June 1969 - Customers fought back - Parade to commemorate the events = origin of LGBTQ pride marches to party, protest, and claim right to be visible in communities - Before Stonewall: social hostilities and ashamed; accepted policing - After: stonewall inspired unprecedented gay challenges to police and increase in gay consciousness - NOT true: gay life existed before stonewall and so did the gay movement - Popular memory ignores continuities in gay politics - DOES capture something about real changes that took place in gay consciousness in 1960s. Not a singular moment, but instead a dramatic indication of a wider generational shift of which Stonewall was but one manifestation - Changes in politics and legislation - Changes in African American and Latino politics

Criminalizing Populations

- Gay people aren't inherently a criminal population - But they were criminalized for going to a bar - Demonized in ways that make it seem like they deserve to be criminalized - Criminal behavior often tolerated nonetheless: don't ask, don't tell: Bar patrons developed strategies to get around the rules. Gay people saw a cop walking to the bar, get served and then got paid to not report the bar - Crackdowns were designed to reassure public more than solve problem at hand. Typically crackdowns followed a bigger incident - Not everyone started with the same relationship to the law: In the 1950s,Blacks, Latino, etc. men were harassed for color on top of sexuality. Set up a different response to police harassment and was viewed by them as a part of a larger phenomenon

Lesbian Pulps: Seduction and Community

- Gay publication boom - Connected lesbians across the country and encouraged fears about the fragility of homosexuality in men and women - Lonely existence of lesbians - Strange, twilight, seductive world: a world nonetheless - Erotic passion between women as a fact of life - Provided glimpses of gay bar scene and social scene: lager community for people unaware of this world - 1952 Congressional investigation: denounced "Women's Barracks" (1950 novel) - Censorship threats diminished in 1960s and novels became even more erotic and soft porn-y - Softcore porn: a handful became major lesbian authors like Patricia Highsmith (wrote lesbian novels as Claire Morgan), author of The Price of Salt

How did Bars Survive? (5)

- Gay staff/bartenders: drew a crowd and provided continuity. Knew names of the regulars and sometimes bailed them out - Legal challenges: challenged loss of their liquor licenses in court. Some fought for their right to serve homosexuals. In the 1950s, courts began to rule people could not be excluded simply because they were gay. But liquor authorities kept closing them because patrons were disorderly (by being gender inverts) - Bribes & mob connections: mob sometimes provided protection for a price. Bar owners had to pay off local cops - Excluded "obvious" queers because they were likely to draw attention of police. Upper-class bars were especially likely to do this. There was sometimes a doorman to keep out straights and queers that were too gay - Regulated customer behavior: dancing was especially dangerous: made clear that the couples were gay. Few allowed it, or they confined it. Signals in place to tell people to stop dancing (e.g.: turning on the light)

The Post-War Years: Two Lessons

- Gay world remains resilient and expansive, even in the face of oppression and antigay policing. In fact, the number of meeting places grew - Segregation of gay life: all gay bars created a cohesive and distinctive gay culture that was not integrated into general life

Lingo

- Gay: before the 60s few outsiders realized gay had specifically homosexual connotations - 69: mutual oral sex - Seafood: sailors - Trade: normal man willing to have sex with a gay man

Wise

- Heterosexuals who could pick up on the codes - Most heterosexuals were seen as slow or dumb - Many heterosexuals who were wise conspired with gay people to leave their heterosexuality

Alfred Kinsey's Findings

- Homosexual contacts were much more common than one imagined. As a statistical matter, they were perfectly normal - NEVER said 10% of the population was gay → NEVER discussed homosexuals, only homosexual contact - Found that 4% of men had exclusively homosexual contact - 37% of men had at least one contact to orgasm - 25% of men had a numerous of homosexual contacts for at least 3 years, ages 16-65 - 50% of men had occasional erotic responses to other men

Gay Male Physique Magazines & the Affirmation of Homoerotic Desire

- Homosexual desire as distinct from inversion - Fascination with bodybuilding (e.g.: Eugene Sandow) - Selling photos of models for artists to use if they couldn't find a model → had a pornographic vibe - Many of their models were gay but other were not - Creation of an imaginative community of gay people

How Did Gay People Respond to Claims Their Love Was Abnormal/Unconventional?

- Homosexuality was accepted and incorporated in other societies: not a threat to society. American society itself was abnormal. - Veterans had seen other cultures during the war: the way things were organized in the US was not the only way! - Liberal romantic individualism of the post-war years: human rights discourse stressed right to choose partner in life - Individuals should follow their love wherever it took them: trump other affiliations - Anti-racist origin: right to love someone from another ethnic origin or religion... Or sex? - Importance: Gave the dominant culture a gay reading and found resources for themselves in that culture, even when they weren't intended to

The Big Sleep (1946)

- Humphrey Bogart - Premise: postwar fascination with shameful secrets - Banter about having sex through riding horses and races

Collective Resistance: Finding Other Gay People

- If you had no access to alternative perspectives, it would be hard not to despair - Many DID resist these ideas - Greenwich village: support for lesbians. Meeting gay people gave queers security in their company and feel like they were not abnormal (queerness is not an illness) - Undermines policing efforts → main obstacle to efforts - Resources to resist condemnation and come to terms with sexuality → they could be accepted amongst friends ☺(Martha in TCH never found that) - Friendships and networks made it possible to develop emotional resources to resist hostilities

Early US Homophile Publications: Precursors

- Knights of the Clock, LA, 1940s. Support group for interracial gay couples - Veterans Benevolent Association, NYC, 1946. One of the many postwar organizations. In part founded to face discrimination for gay veterans losing GI Bill benefits and had discussion groups and important debates about cruising - The League, NYC, 1952. Discussed recent books and articles. Organized a chapter of Mattachine in NYC - Common trend: support to gay people; discussion of political issues

From Sodomy to Degenerate Disorderly Conduct

- Lower evidence requirements and fewer procedure protections - Easier to use to harass gay people - Largely used against poor and African-Americans and immigrants as well - Shift from regulation of homosexual conduct to discrimination based on identity or status as a homosexual

Police Persecution & Male Physique Magazines

- Many photographers arrested. Some spent time in jail - Even subscribers could encounter trouble: humiliation ritual; obligation to confess how the FBI had discovered you as gay - Newton Arvin: Smith professor arrested in 1960 for possessing magazines. Destroyed his career. Freedom to read undermined - Contradictions of queer life: many participated in a rich culture but they had to hide their own involvement - Became habituated to simulation from outsiders

Alfred Kinsey's Study: Consequences

- Many worried that his study showed just how easy it was to slip into homosexual behavior → strengthened bad notions to some extent - Shattered the alleged symmetry between moral and statistical normalcy - Showed that it was not statistically abnormal

Early US Homophile Groups and Publications (5)

- Mattachine Society - One - Mattachine Review - DOB (Daughters of Bilitis) - The Ladder

Homosexuality as an Illness

- More pronounced in the mid 50s - Edmund Bergler - Media full of stories about marriages and fulfillment of heterosexual romance - Hetoronormative pressures made gay people feel lonely

World War II

- More than any other 20th century war, it was a collective drama - Inspired nationalism - Inspired people to treasure their loved ones

Implications of Transsexuality

- Most gay men and lesbians thought transsexuality had nothing to do with them - Some were worried heterosexuals would think it had everything to do with them - Debate: extend tolerance to others, or remain as separate - Reinforced the distinction between gender-normative and gender-nonconforming - No one though of themselves of being part of a larger group of queer people: scorning others, claiming moral superiority (transsexuals claiming normality since after they changed their sex they loved people of their other sex often) - Appeal of normality even among the queer community points at the powerful cultural pressure - Forced everyone to segregate sex, gender, gender identity, and sexuality: drawing finer distinctions - Reemphasizing difference between men and women - Persistent fear that these lines were all too permeable ("From GI to Blonde Beauty" - Christine Jorgensen)

Detecting Gayness

- Networks - Language → connotations and tones - Whistle - Eye-contact - Conversation topics → women talking only of women to signal homosexuality

Movies

- Normalize heterosexuality - Heterosexual union a structural narrative of every film - Two narrative arcs: hero (man) pursuing objectives; hero (man) pursuing woman. He usually succeeds in both quests - Lead to marriage or romantic union implying marriage (inevitable outcome of the sexual cycle) - Psycho by Hitchcock: Norman has a dominating mother that leads him to murder hotel guests

Small Booms in Novels About Gay Men After WWII

- Other Voices Other Room - Truman Capote - Early 30s: pansy craze → queens protagonists (hilarious) - 1970s: men who were totally absorbed in gay subculture. From heterosexuality to homosexuality, doubts about whether women could satisfy them, eventually found fulfillment and love with other men but took a long time and the journey was hard - Reflect difficulty of gay life - NONE of them had the mass readership that lesbian pulp novels had in the postwar years

Everyday Survival Strategies: The Double Life

- Passing, being wise, open secrets, the social contract - Secret from outsiders → outsiders assumed that they must've been ashamed since they kept it a secret, BUT powerful social pressures forced them to keep it a secret - Didn't say 'they were in the closet' (60s concept): Implies isolation from gay people and heterosexuals, which was not true in the 50s! - Harder to find gay people, but they eventually did and were showed how to find others like themselves - Double life: moved between the gay world and the straight world. Could have many gay friends and still pass as straight - Stakes were high: a lot to lose by coming out → not draw suspicion that they were gay (avoided the subject, talked about girls as sexual organic objects, many transferred to social circles where guy talk wasn't so prominent) - Peer pressure to bring female dates to Harvard and Princeton weekend and other things: otherwise considered a misfit and excluded. Often dates were clueless, gay men didn't want to lead women on but felt they had no other choice. Some did know the situation, either directly through explicit conversations or suspected - Heteronormativity: presumption of heterosexuality.Easy to pass as straight, some never thought others could be queer. Only gay people were looking for signs - Many found pleasure in the double life: relished the way it gave them entre into an alternative public sphere

Internalization

- People felt ashamed or guilty about their sexuality - Churches: ideology that made them ashamed of their sexual desires by contradicting God's will - "Unnatural" → sodomy as unnatural lust (religious view) BUT ALSO pseudoscientific discourse - The Children's Hour → "I feel so sick and dirty." Last act: Supreme act of self-hatred and despair OR expression of love for Karen? Overcome by shame, self-hatred, and regret

Consequences of Policing

- Pervasive policing forced people to go to segregated all-gay bars - Policing of the bars themselves strengthened people's identity as gay and increased solidarity between gays - People were most likely to encounter police at the bars: reminded them that they were a despised class of outsiders - Policing reinforced class and gender divisions: gender inversions as markers of gays increased resentment of gender normative homosexuals (fear that they would attract the wrath of the law) - Most marginalized of queers were the ones to riot - Bars engaged in criminal behavior in order to answer to policing → corruption

Anti-Homosexuality as a Historical Problem

- Popular memory of the 1950s as conservative is more of a cliché than accurately historical. A lot of people embraced sexual pleasure and freedom - Intellectual debates on sexual matters: Reference to the Kinsey Report → icon of pop culture, Kinsey became an advocate of pro-sex and pro-gay issues - problem: mass separation of men and women = destabilization of gender conventions in the home front and homosociality in the battle front - Nothing is inevitable: contexts makes some actions thinkable or unimaginable, some actions doable or not - Has to be brought into being by human action, debate, and struggle - Hatreds aren't natural or inevitable → they have to be culturally produced

The Police and the Press: Language & Terms like "Sex Deviate"

- Portraying cities as overrun by countless sex offenders - Homosexuals banned from jobs involving contact with children: bus drivers, teachers, etc. - Language: Press, police, and government officials used terms mixing moral and psychological theories to describe them - "Sex deviates": Used for both men and women, but men were feared more than women because they were men and men were feared more on sexual matters. Could include an adult lesbian having having consensual sex or a murder → ambiguous

Why All-Gay/Only-Gay?

- Post-war bars all-gay, not attracting both straights and queers - Policing segregates gay world: gays excluded from most bars, but a few catered to them. If you wanted to be open , then you had to go to a gay bar - Business opportunity to serve criminalized market: risk, but charged higher prices and got a dedicated clientele - "Women's bars" were almost unthinkable → bars as male spaces and masculinized. Any bar that was all-women was a lesbian one - Secretive: did not draw attention to itself, cryptic names - Entering a different universe: large closet - Conventionally masculine: not pansy, or at least not trying to be - Erotic charge: shirts and ants worn tighter than usual - Gay bar scene from Advise and Consent (1962)

WWII: Popular Mobilization for Heterosexuality

- Powerfully reinscribed gender difference: women's passivity and subordination in the home front and men's bravery and aggressiveness in the front lines - Personal appeals to bind people to the abstract concept of a nation by evoking the soldier (embodiment of national purpose). Soldiers were fighting for freedom and for family reunion - BUT most men thought for the men around them, not for families back home - Thin line between homosociality and homosexuality

Military

- Pressure on men to be heterosexual when coming home after the war - Magazines developed a compelling narrative where heterosexual reunion and family were inevitable and desirable - Heterosexual process was NORMAL and INEVITABLE

GI Bill & Promotion of Heterosexuality

- Product of a vast project of social engineering - Designed to show profound gratitude to soldiers, while ensuring reintegration into societies - Generous housing and educational allowances - Encouraged formation of families and settling down by directly funding suburb booms and subsidizing home ownership (no down-payment) - Veterans had preferential access to hiring, education, and training - Advantages over women whose sacrifices were ignored - Effects of policies could be seen throughout postwar society: number of unmarried adults dropped precipitously, people started getting married earlier, birth rate jumped (baby boom) - Pressure to marry → hard to imagine life without starting a family - Heteronormativity as a cultural force

Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1948)

- Protected all persons without distinction of any kind - Insisted on the right of people to personal autonomy in response to Fascist effort to regulate private life - Insisted on people's right to control intimate aspect of their lives - E.g.: Freedom to marry in response prohibiting Jews from marrying non-Jews

Anti- Gay Theories (2)

- Psychoanalytic: the developmental process - Religious: moral degradation

Pro-Gay Social Psychology: Evelyn Hooker

- Questioned psychological norm - Rejected that homosexuals were pathological - She got to know gay people and developed a study consisting of personality tests based on a sample of ordinary people (not those seeking clinical help) - Then asked panel of expert clinicians without knowing the subject's sexual orientation to determine who was maladjusted - Clinicians were unable to distinguish between the two: both are equally well-adjusted - In previous studies, gay were classified as maladjusted because they went into the research with doctors assuming they were maladjusted

Camp: Cultural Style

- Quintessential gay male style; style of interaction - Hyperperfomative in their femininity or masculinity - Responded to gender contradictions by cultivating wit that highlighted the artificiality of gender roles. Undermined the seeming naturalness of gender and character - Verbal play - Learned from others at bars - Crossed lines of race and class - Many rejected that sensibility: critical because they saw these tastes and styles as so dominant

How Did Gay People Respond to Claims Their Love Was Unnatural?

- Reflecting on the evidence of their own bodies: natural because it seemed natural to them. TCH: Martha as loving Karen in ways she cannot control or fathom. Something she DISCOVERS in herself, not a choice - Drew from Kinsey's arguments: seen in other species - Drew from Webster Cory: natural to gay people. Letter to ONE: why would anyone have sex with anyone from the same sex if it is against his/her nature?

Pro-Gay Cultural Relativism: Ruth Benedict & Margaret Mead

- Rejected the idea that homosexuality resulted from biological/genetic sources - Questioned universality of cultural norm. Critique of developing universal theories - Social processes shaped the individual both at the broad level of culture and at the level of family. Culture, not biology, shaped human difference - Margaret Mead: different cultures organize sexuality in different ways. The Euroamerican culture is not universal (radical) - Ruth Benedict: many things were considered normal and flourished in other societies which were considered abnormal in the US. Neurotic gays were that way because of cultural hostility, not homosexuality. Cultural hostility was the problem

Lesbian Bars

- Relatively few: 2 in Hollywood (more gay male bars historically) - Once they began exploring gay bars they discovered they liked some more than others (some were pretentious) - Recognized the people they wanted to be with or become - Learned different ways of being gay

World War II: Revealing the Fluidity of Sexuality

- Reminded many men that gay men were not the only ones capable of same-sex love and desire - Cravings for affection and sexual intimacy that cannot always be contained by the categories of heterosexuality vs. homosexuality - The war as a life of its own: no worry about constraints - Temporary but powerful rupture in heterosociality: photographs with physical contact, homosexual joking to diffuse tensions, mannish intimacy (pinups on walls to announce desire for women and diffuse homoeroticism)

The Importance of Gay Bars

- Safe, all-gay social places. Only all-gay public places where gay people could find other gays in those days (or at least most accessible) - Postwar gay life was so expansive that it found a way to reproduce the city's divisions - Not the only places were people gathered, not loved by everyone, BUT single most common and significant place - More gay bars in NY in the 50s than there are today - Many more lesbian bars in NY alone than in NY, SF, and LA combined today - Need to hide from the straight world, and no access to queer liaisons otherwise → helps account for why bars have receded in importance in recent years - Not just about loving women, but about a cultural ambiance that didn't exist elsewhere. Might be recognized and seen as a lesbian: dress gayly and study each other for costumes - Friends they met there often became the center of social and emotional lives - Chance for cruising

Early Stages of Transsexuality

- Sex reassignment surgery did not become readily available in the US for more than a decade - SRS: Sex reassignment surgery (Gender Confirmation Surgery) - 1964: Gender Identity Clinic established at John Hopkins (mostly MTF applicants) - Surgery remained very expensive and few could afford it - 1950s Purple Pill: hormonal treatment became more widely available - Homosexuality still associated with transgender behavior in society at large and the gay community. Lesbian butches or effeminate queens: some adopted them strategically to identify as queer to other people - Debate on the drag ball circuit: should someone who had taken hormones be allowed to compete? - Holly Woodlawn (MTF)

The Problem of Shame

- Shame was common in the 50s, but don't forget gay people did defend themselves! - Reflected and discussed on the problem of shame - Some gay people tried to help others overcome their shame

Antigay Policing: 3 Changes

- Shift from incidental to targeted policing of homosexuality - From sodomy to degenerate disorderly conduct → Shift from regulation of homosexual conduct to discrimination based on identity or status as a homosexual - Older laws regulated male conduct; now they discriminated against both gay men and lesbians

Nazis & Homosexual Life in Germany

- Shut down gay clubs and lesbian bars - Criminalized homosexual fantasy as well as acts - Arrested more than 100,000 men - Sent some to mental hospitals and concentration camps - Pink triangle identifier - Degenerates that should be eliminated because they threatened purity - Troubled by Brand's theory and the homoeroticism of their movement! - Denounced Hirschfeld as a Jew, communist, etc.

Pro-Gay Theories (3)

- Social psychology: Evelyn Hooker - Cultural Relativism: Ruth Benedict & Margaret Mead - Questioning the Norm: Alfred Kinsey

One

- Started in 1952, Los Angeles - Most militant of early gay publications - Published police reports about police crackdowns - Advocated for homosexual marriage - Dorr Legg = writer and editor

Mattachine Review

- Started in 1955 - After split in Mattachine society - Less militant - Still reported on police harassment and gay resistance

European Homophile Groups

- Swiss magazine: only gay group left; had links to early German organization - Der Kreis, Zurich, founded 1932 - COC, Amsterdam, 1946: club houses; publications. Did a lot of the same things American groups would begin to do year later - League of 1948 - ICSE (International Committee for Sex Equality) Amsterdam, 1951: coordinating organizations - Arcadie, Paris, 1954: Profound influence on Mattachine Society - Trend: American homophile activism was never a purely American phenomenon but was part of a larger transnational movement

War's Impact on Lesbians

- Taste of independence and freedom without men: easier to support themselves without a man's higher wages - Easier for women to live together (financially, but also culturally): many took up housekeeping together, sharing rooms instead of living with their families - Gave lesbians enough income to support lesbian culture. Lesbian bar culture expanded (quintessentially a men's place in the past) - Lesbians adopting masculine style stood out less: people were familiar with women taking on masculine jobs and looking butch (gender transgressive). It was easier to fit in without effeminacy - Publicity was designed to show how women could retain their femininity even while doing masculine jobs

Why did the Homophile Movement become more Militant?

- The changing legal climate in the early 1960s - Crackdowns politicized people, broke the "social contract" - Long before masses of gay people chose to come out of the closet, the police broke walls between public roles and private lives - No choice but to fight policing head on. Reality of repression fueled militancy in 1960s - Lessons from the black civil rights movement & influence of its growing militancy

Pro-Gay Alfred Kinsey: Questioning the Norm

- Trained as a zoologist. Background made him skeptical of psychoanalytic theories - Established scholarly reputation by collecting and classifying gall wasps → academic credentials. Used prestige to challenge homosexual discrimination - He was astonished to read sweeping claims about sexuality based on single case studies. Believed scientists needed more empirical data before developing theories about sexuality - Collected data by collecting sexual histories when talking to people. Ultimately interviewed 18,000 people - Widely criticized for sampling techniques, but no other study has matched the power of the interview power - Secured cooperation of people he interviewed personally and privately: no judgments, guaranteed anonymity, interviewees assigned numbers (not names), developed notational system that allowed him to record information - Study of sexual behavior of the human male and female

Legal Challenges in the 1960s: Gay Bars Decriminalized in CA & NY

- Treat LGBT people not as agents of vice or civil disorder, but as citizens - Fractured nature of the State → not a monolithic entity, different interests and perspectives - Struggle amongst various agencies in CA in the 1950s - Mere presence of homosexuals not enough to shut down a bar, BUT later banned resorts for sex perverts → raids escalated - Later Supreme Court rules banned resorts for sex perverts unconstitutional - 1957: NY's highest court rules that the police must allow homosexuals to do the same thing in bars that heterosexuals do: new security, optimism, dancing, touching each other, etc. allowed - Constant resistance from police: courts weren't successful in curtailing police until mid 60s - Escalation of policing in the early 1960s → contradiction with human rights (massive crackdowns, arrests, etc.). Led many to believe the State itself was violating the terms of the social contract - Mid 1960s: regular bar raids over in San Francisco - Pushed homophile movement to be more intense

Why did Homophile Activism Start After WWII?

- Upsurge of antigay policing BUT widespread insistence on gay rights - European homophile organizations inspired gay others to claim rights → "League of 1948", Copenhagen, 1948 - Hope of freedom and human rights against fascism. Against racism and genocidal policies of Nazis - Human liberalism ☺ sacred character of human rights - Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UN, 1948) - Gay Europeans felt compelled to organize a gay movement because they faced an increasingly hostile political climate with diminished rights - There were antigay politics in Europe after the wars despite humanitarian sentiment. Focus on reconstructing the family as key to reestablishing social stability

Postwar Reunions: Gratitude and Anxiety

- V-J Day photo (Life, 1945): happiness and reunion of victory, but also highlight issues (he is not in the home; he is kissing everyone; he is too aggressive) - Worry about the military having broken down moral constraints. Veterans = aggressive and deadly masculine culture that witnessed horrible scenes - Gratitude and anxiety about veterans → promote heterosexuality as a stabilizing force - People worried about unattached men not domesticated by family and women - Crimes by veterans: number did not increase but individual incidences were broadcasted (produced panic and public attention) → press attention to the problem of sexual violence and sexual deviation - Sex crime panics provided press and police an unusually compelling platform for teaching stories of homosexuals as a threat

War's Impact on Civilian Women

- Workforce: employers forced to step back from systematic race and gender discrimination. No choice but to hire women to perform jobs performed by men in the past - Government suddenly championed women's work as patriotic. Female factory worker = iconic figure known as Rosie the Riveter - Number of women working outside home increased 50% during the war - Many women let more traditional occupations like being a waitress or laundry workers to work in factories

Hal Cal

Communism - Concerned about Mattachine Society association with Communism: because it had several Communist members, the organization was associated with the Communist agenda - Wants a separate association from Communism - Organization should be clear about getting rid of Communist influences Relationship to Harry Hay - Reject idea of homosexual minority. The only way homosexuals differ is sexual preference - Not necessarily something that needs to be politicized - Unnecessary to create distinct gay culture - Help people adapt to normal lives to fit into society