A Queer History of the United States (26 page)

Lesbians claimed community in public space. The Legion of Decency, a Catholic film censorship group, complained to Paramount Pictures that Lewis Allen’s coded lesbian ghost story
The Uninvited
was a problem because “in certain theaters large audiences of questionable type attended this film at unusual hours. The impression created was that they had been previously informed of certain erotic and esoteric elements in this film.”
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Disagreements over the political efficacy of a distinct homosexual culture, as well as the different concerns of lesbians and gay men, resulted in two distinct responses to legal issues faced by homosexuals. The first was to work toward securing sexual freedom for all women and men by repealing sodomy laws and ending police harassment associated with homosexual socializing or activity. This approach was predicated on the anarchist belief that the state had no business in citizens’ personal lives. The second was to seek equality under the law and end all forms of discrimination against lesbians and gay men, including workplace discrimination and issues relating to child custody. This approach was similar to the battles being fought by African Americans and other disenfranchised groups.

Being Public in Print

Through the 1950s and 1960s, there was an unparalleled outpouring of representation and discussion about homosexuals. Mainstream publishing houses released hundreds of novels featuring homosexual characters and themes. These included respected, popular literary works such as Carson McCullers’s 1946
Member of the Wedding,
Truman Capote’s 1958
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
, and James Baldwin’s 1962
Another Country.
Popular literature by James Barr, Patricia Highsmith, Jay Little, Brigid Brophy, Lance Horner, and Jane Rule sold to a mainstream audience or, like Barr’s
Quatrefoil,
a mostly gay male readership. Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1955
The Memoirs of Hadrian
and Mary Renault’s books, such as the 1956
The Last of the Wine,
set in a highly homoerotic ancient Greece, allowed homosexual readers to imaginatively construct a historical past. Lakey, a lesbian character modeled on woman-loving poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, was the most prescient and emotionally balanced central figure in Mary McCarthy’s 1962 best seller
The Group.
The 1950 thriller by lesbian writer Patricia Highsmith,
Strangers on a Train,
which would become a film by Alfred Hitchcock a year later, explored issues of guilt and innocence (and the fine distinction between being an outcast and a criminal) through a homoerotic relationship that included blackmail and murder.

Some of these books were overtly political. Willard Motley, a gay African American writer from Chicago who was connected to the WPA Federal Writers’ Project and helped start a literary magazine at Hull House, wrote the best-selling
Knock on Any Door
in 1947. It explores the nurturing relationship between a basically heterosexual hustler and his steady john, who loves and supports him to his death. The novel is a devastating exposé, in line with the ideas of earlier progressive reformers, of the effects of crime and poverty on city dwellers.
Knock on Any Door
sold fifty thousand copies in one month, earning its author a six-page spread in
Life.
A surprising number of novels, such as John Horne Burns’s 1949
Lucifer with a Book,
Fritz Peters’s 1951
Finistere,
and Gerald Tesch’s 1956
Never the Same Again,
feature young male teens who have a clearly articulated homosexual identity, marking the first time that portraits of gay youth were seen in literature.

Homosexuals might see themselves reflected in these novels, but other mainstream publications facilitated their meeting one another. The 1952
Washington Confidential,
a best-selling exposé of political and sexual corruption written by journalists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, contains a chapter, replete with inflammatory antihomosexual language, titled “Garden of Pansies.” The chapter lists, with addresses, over fifteen homosexual gathering places, including bars, hotel lobbies, public restrooms, and bathhouses.
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Similarly, the June 26, 1964, issue of
Life
included photos of gay male cruising places such as New York’s Washington Square, Los Angeles’s Pershing Square, and San Francisco’s leather S/M scene. A double-page photo spread of men at the Tool Box, a gay biker bar, was captioned, “These brawny young men in their leather caps, shirts, jackets and pants are practicing homosexuals, men who turn to other men for affection and sexual satisfaction. They are part of what they call the ‘gay world,’ which is actually a sad and often sordid world.”

Such feature stories and exposés were manifestations of Americans’ desire to grapple with the changes that happened after the war. Part of this process was an intellectual reevaluation of the relationship between the individual and society. Harry Hay’s idea of a cultural minority fit neatly with liberal, contemporary trends in sociological and psychological analysis. Both of these approaches—professionalized by “experts”—had a major role in shaping how Americans thought about the homosexual. Sociological works such as the 1950
The Lonely Crowd
by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney and William H. Whyte’s 1956
The Organization Man
mapped a sociological portrait of the American character and were a template for works analyzing the homosexual.

Beginning with the publication of Donald Webster Cory’s
The Homosexual in America
in 1951, numerous nonfiction works—books, journal articles, and magazine pieces—examined the place of the new homosexual in American society. Jess Stern’s popular, journalistic
The Sixth Man
, published in 1962, was filled with pitiable images of homosexuals, as was his 1964
The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian.
The “sociology of the homosexual” was frequently conflicted, and when presented through the lens and language of journalism, often exploitative. The bias of these books was balanced by others. In the 1962
Strangers in Our Midst: Problems of the Homosexual in American Society
, Alfred A. Gross stated that “it is high time to discard the view that the homosexual’s conduct excludes him from the protection of the community” and compared contemporary sex laws to the Spanish Inquisition and Nazi Germany.

Psychology had risen in American culture to be an influential lens through which people understood themselves and society. In 1956 Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a psychologist at UCLA, used funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to administer three standard personality tests to thirty homosexuals and thirty heterosexuals. The anonymous responses were read by three experts, who discovered absolutely no differences between the two groups. Hooker’s paper was published in 1957, but made little impact on the thinking of the professional community. Why was this?

Professional psychological thought in the 1950s and early 1960s was in direct reaction to the social and sexual freedoms claimed by women and homosexuals. Because those freedoms were seen as fundamentally threatening to how society was organized, it was virtually impossible to treat homosexuality with any neutrality. (Kinsey did, which is why his critics were so vehement in their attacks on him.) The country was in a period of cultural panic and turned to psychologists for solutions to the “problem” of the homosexual.

Psychoanalysts such as Edmund Bergler, Irving Bieber, and Frank S. Caprio were conservative traditionalists who viewed homosexuality as a serious problem. In his 1956
Homosexuality: Disease or a Way of Life,
Bergler wrote that “homosexuality is a neurotic condition. . . . Specific neurotic defenses and personality traits that are partly or entirely psychopathic are specifically and exclusively characteristic of homosexuals, and . . . these defenses and traits put the homosexual into a special psychiatric category.”
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Caprio was equally dismissive in his analysis: “Lesbianism is a symptom, and not a disease entity. It is the result of a deep-seated neurosis which involves narcissistic gratifications and sexual immaturity. It also represents a neurotic defense mechanism for feelings of insecurity.”
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Psychoanalysts believed that homosexuality, like most diseases, could be cured—a template that reinforced legal codes as well as everyday social bias. These psychoanalytic theories were predicated on deeply conservative ideas about sexuality. Bergler was also against divorce, premarital sex, and all forms of sexual experimentation; he supported traditional notions of sex, gender roles, and family arrangements and believed that women’s sexuality was inseparable from reproduction and motherhood.

Bergler and Beiber received great public attention, but so did more liberal theorists. Albert Ellis, whose voluminous, popular writings on sex were published for a half century starting in the early 1950s, spent his career fighting what he called “sex guilt.” His radical ideas were shocking. In the 1958
Sex Without Guilt
he stated: “Some of us are able to benefit from adultery and some of us are not. Had we dare, then, make an invariant rule for all?”
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He also claimed that “female frigidity” did not exist; it was a male invention to control women. And in complete repudiation of a century of conservative medical advice, he argued that it is “difficult to conceive of a more beneficial, harmless, tension-releasing act than masturbation.”
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Ellis’s high popularity was undoubtedly due to the fact that he gave people professional permission to do what they were already doing. It is telling that when he wrote his 1965
Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cures
,
Ellis, not unlike Bergler and other conservatives, understood homosexual desire as a serious pathology: “Most fixed homosexuals, I am now convinced, are borderline psychotic or outrightly psychotic.”
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(By the early 1970s, Ellis had changed his views and become an active supporter of the gay rights movement.)

Bergler and Ellis were philosophically antithetical to one another on many issues, but agreed on the differentiations between female and male homosexuality. Both argued that male and female homosexuals were pathological, but that it was easier for the lesbian to be “cured” if she only accepted marriage and motherhood. The male homosexual was viewed as a predatory, hypersexual loner with few friends and no connection to a “civilizing” heterosexual family. These widely disseminated archetypes—the lesbian waiting to be fulfilled as a woman, the sexually rapacious homosexual male—were fantasies that emerged after World War II. Each served a specific cultural function that was to play out in mass-market publications.

The large number of lesbian pulps written by heterosexuals confirmed the prejudices of the psychologists. Pulps—mass-market, inexpensive paperback books—had a visibility, and an audience, far wider than the mainstream titles with lesbian or homosexual themes. Pulps were sold on newsstands, not in bookstores. With their lurid, eye-catching cover art, they were a major venue through which heterosexuals and homosexuals discovered homosexual subculture. In the 1950s, many of the gay male pulps were reprints of previously published literary novels. Almost all of the many hundreds of lesbian pulps were paperback originals, edited and published by mainstream paperback houses run by heterosexual men. Some pulps, written by lesbians such as Marijane Meaker (under the pen name Vin Packer), Ann Bannon, and Valerie Taylor, presented a sympathetic view of lesbian life, although their exploitative packaging emphasized sordidness and loneliness. Valerie Taylor’s 1960
Stranger on Lesbos
was billed as “the searching novel of a lonely young wife faced with the temptations of unnatural love”; this was a complete misrepresentation. In contrast, the majority of lesbian pulps, written by heterosexual men, were exploitative and unsympathetic.

For many lesbian readers, these novels performed the same function as the
Life
magazine article did for gay men: they were guidebooks to lesbian life. Many of the pulps described Greenwich Village bar life and how women dressed to be recognizably lesbian. For heterosexuals, the books were titillating; although they reinforced stereotypes, they made lesbianism, and by extension homosexuality, visible. In her introduction to the anthology
Lesbian Pulp Fiction,
Katherine Forrest describes finding Ann Bannon’s
Odd Girl Out
in Detroit, Michigan, in 1957:

I did not need to look at the title for clues; the cover leaped out at me from the drugstore rack: a young woman with sensuous intent on her face seated on a bed, leaning over a prone woman, her hands on the other woman’s shoulders.

. . . I found it when I was eighteen years old. It opened the door to my soul and told me who I was. It led me to other books that told me who some of us were, and how some of us lived.
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Ann Bannon’s novels, as did others, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It is safe to say that millions of these books were sold, reaching an audience far beyond the homophile publications.

The psychologist’s view of homosexual men was not reflected in the gay male novels, but in a new genre: the physical culture magazine for homosexual men. In 1945 Bob Mizer, a Los Angeles photographer, took “beefcake” photos of men at Venice’s Muscle Beach and started a small business catering to bodybuilders who needed photographs for competitions. In 1951 he published
Physique Pictorial,
the first physique magazine aimed at the male homosexual interested in appreciating, rather than becoming (as in Bernarr Macfadden’s
Physical Culture),
the idealized male form. Mizer’s photographs drew on the images of von Gloeden, Day, and Eakins as well as the photographs of the male body that were prevalent during the war. There was no frontal nudity (until censorship laws changed in the late 1960s), but the eroticized male body was now more prevalent then ever in popular culture.