During World War II and especially the twenty years after brought great political and social changes to the U.S.. Undoubtedly, one of the major changes was the new awareness of homosexuality. If this new awareness was to the advantage or if it was really wanted by the gay and lesbian population is a question that arises; if they really had a choice in the matter is another.
I think gays= relentless struggle for acceptance into mainstream society came from the American constitution itself. After all, the gay liberation movement started in America, the land of the free, where all men are created equal and with an inalienable right to pursue their own happiness. No one should be able to take these rights away from anyone. Also, in the 1950s, the civil rights movement became active and words like desegregation and equal rights for all became synonymous with the American way of life. Stand up and fight against those who have done you wrong! This is what gave homosexuals such a conviction to start fighting for their own cause.
This paper will follow the progress of gay and lesbians in the twentieth century before, during and after World War II. What was their position in the armed forces during the war and what was government and military policy during and after the war on gays in the army and in government positions? How did gay and lesbians respond to the new policies after the war and why were organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis founded? On December 7, 1941 at 7:55 a.m. local time, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Unites States declared war on Japan and was suddenly a participant in the largest war in the history of mankind. A massive military force of 12 million men was assembled. American soldiers were sent to Europe and Japan to participate and win the Big One. The military bureaucracy grew accordingly and thousands of new jobs were created. With the military=s enormous demand for personnel, drafted American men found themselves in isolated gender segregated environments. All the big war movies depict this with the GI=s longing for leave so he could go downtown and find himself a prostitute. What these movies do not show is a new community, within the military, of homosexuals who until now lived socially isolated lives because they were either unsure of what they were or of their sexual preferences or just plain scared of what people would think if they found out their secret. In the military, these people found other gay men who were in the same predicament. They weren=t alone.
Before the war, gays and lesbians were almost invisible from society. They were not mentioned in the popular media and the general population was oblivious to their existence. An occasional arrest or school expulsion of a Asexual psychopath@ were the only vague signs that the public would hear about. Now that the military accepted or at least needed the cooperation of all men, including homosexuals, an important page had been turned in the progress of gay rights, however, it also set the scene for discrimination and prejudice.
Homosexuals were in all branches of the armed forces, from paper pushing to front line combat. Before enlisting, interrogators had forced them to describe their lifestyle, which in turn made it impossible for homosexuals to continue hiding in the closet but instead had to take the first step in living a new open lifestyle. They were classified as Asexual psychopaths@ on their military records, however, they were not being discriminated by the military at this point in time. An apparatus was even set up to accommodate gay personnel. Through this apparatus, the military ended up with quite an extensive record of homosexual behavior and was considered an expert on the subject. Military scientists much later said that through studying homosexuals' behavior could find nothing to support evidence that gay and lesbians were in any way psychopaths or had any form of mental disorder. This report came out after the 1940s and 1950s; until then, the military denied having made any research on homosexuals. After World War II, the military suddenly made a decision not to have gay or lesbians in the armed forces anymore. They would be discharged without any benefitsa even though they hadn=t done anything wrong. This caused gay veterans to unite and fight against sexual discrimination and some were later the founders of organized gay rights movements.
Exposed by the war, gays and lesbians decided to continue living their lives in the open, although many still preferred living quietly in discrete suburbs, coming out only under pseudonyms in articles or books.
Bars for gays and lesbians became a major gathering place. Here they could mingle and be themselves. These bars became wide spread and were not only confined to the major U.S. cities but were established in many small towns as well. The general public and media started noticing this growth and with the common knowing of homosexuals being perverted sexual psychopaths, child molesters, sex offenders and sex degenerates, a fear spread for the safety of women and children who could be snatched by these dangerous people. This fear initiated the anti-gay policies and sex psychopath laws of the late 1940s and early 1950s, where gay and lesbians were witch hunted and fired from their work place. The policy that had the greatest impact was President Eisenhower=s signing of Executive Order #10450, stating that sexual perversion was reason for prejudice hiring and firing of workers Gay veterans were a select group of American patriots, who, for the most part wanted things to go back to how they were and just lead secure and stable lives. These new policies caused much irritation and the veterans felt they were constantly being mistreated, which gave them all the more reason to speak up. They could have continued to live quiet lives but they were pushed into the open by the government, and now that they were exposed, they weren't going to go back in the closet without a fight. The new strict moral values of the postwar period and the nuclear family did not help gays and lesbians blend into society. Instead, homosexuals were being scapegoated and considered sex deviates. The idea of deviates and wave builders went well together with the red scare and homosexuals were feared even more than before. Communist homosexuals would mean the downfall of western society as we know it....at least that is what the government wanted us to believe. The theory of homosexuals being sex deviates was also supported by psychiatrists who wanted more influence over the criminal justice system and allowed for the incarceration of homosexuals into mental institution. This caused arrests for sodomy, perversion and indecency to skyrocket and many men and women ended up in these institutions.
The military=s turnaround and postwar treatment of homosexuals and the homophobia and irrational fear of gays that they caused, made its way to the civilian bureaucracy. In the 1950s, senators launched an attack on gay employees. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the crusade against homosexuals and communists and was feared by nearly all American; he had the power to dismiss you from your place of work and put you in an institution. Homosexuals were even considered to be easier targets for communist propaganda and were also the main reason for the purges in the government sector. People were afraid gays would deliver U.S. secrets to the Russians.
Even though gays and lesbians were hounded everywhere, they didn=t defend themselves from the attacks. Homosexuals had no one to speak up for them at that time and were unsure of what to do. Instead they isolated themselves and bottled up the anger and fear they felt for society. Gay veterans were no exception, however, they didn't accept the circumstances and conditions that had been set before them. They understood it was impossible for them to live the way they used to; in order for them to lead an open life, the hounding had to stop. They had fought a war to preserve their liberty and no one should be able to take that away from them now.
The first organization for gays was founded in Germany. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee wanted to abolish the German anti-gay penal code and to educate the public on being gay. The movement was short lived and was disintegrated when the Nazi regime came to power. There was also an effort for gay organizing in Chicago during the 1920s but they dissolved without major recognition. Then came the Mattachine Society. It was founded in 1950 in Los Angeles as a response to anti-gay campaigns in Washington, the constant police raiding of gay bars and that gays were an oppressed minority and should have someone to speak for them. The Mattachine Society would help gays out of jail, consult gays and refer them to psychiatrists, if they needed one. However, staying above budget was not easy. Call says the active members were doing more than they were getting paid for. Publishing the Mattachine Review, a gay magazine, was a demanding occupation and member fees did not cover all the work that had to be done. A bar directory was also published by the Society together with the Daughters of Bilits=s own magazine, the Ladder. The original founders were gay veterans from WWII and consisted of Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Harry Hay, Rudy Gernreich, Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Stan Witt and Paul Bernard. The most charismatic of these was Chuck Rowland. He himself was an army veteran and an idealist. After the war, he had joined the American Veterans Committee and later the communist party. Being a member of the communist party would later cause him his seat with the Mattachine Society. These founders had a vision that all homosexuals would eventually come out and parade down the streets of LA. Until then, they sought refuge under pseudonyms when publishing anything of homosexual nature. Many joined the Society but no one knew who ran the organization. Rowland and the others thought it safest to keep it that way in the beginning. In 1954, the founders decided to become an open democratic organization and a vote was held as to whom should be the leaders. Rowland and the others wanted a radical group of expansionists and protesters. Hall Call, their opposition, wanted to take a more conservative approach. He meant that for the group to survive, they did not want to attract unnecessary attention to themselves; also to have an open organization, they had to eliminate everything that could give the government, especially McCarthy, an excuse to shut the organization down, which meant removing the communist faction from the group. Call won the vote and most if not all of the original founders were asked to resign. This decision left them very bitter and the question whether they had done the right thing by going "public" they way they had is still asked. Rowland claimed Call was the reason for the Mattachine=s downfall, having not an ounce of organizational spirit in his whole body. Call on the other hand, who was a journalist, saw the McCarthy threat as real and if the Mattachine Society wanted to enhance the Society and do some good, staying low was the only answer. Membership later decreased in the late 1960s and members instead joined a seceded branch of the Society called SIR.
Up until 1950s, no Aopen-minded@ study had ever been made of male homosexuals. However, in 1956, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a professor at UCLA, presented a paper to the American Psychological Association in Chicago, in which she had conducted an experiment of homosexuals and heterosexuals to study their Afundamental personal behavior@ using the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception and the Make a Picture tests. The judges were internationally recognized scientists and were not told who had been taking the tests. The result came out and the judges could not find any relation between the subjects= sexual preferences and their answers. Dr. Hooker received the Distinguished Contribution Award for her study.
Dr. Hooker was also confronted by many lesbians, asking her to conduct a test on them as well. She refused on the grounds that a woman conducting tests on women would be considered biased and not be taken seriously.
In 1955, lesbians in San Francisco founded the lesbian equivalent to the Mattachine Society; they called it the Daughters of Bilitis. The movement was unsure on how to proceed; whether they should engage in picketing and other civil rights activities or whether it should challenge the medical profession's claim that homosexuality was an illness. Their task consisted of counseling lesbians and educate mothers who thought their daughters might be lesbian. One sad case was when a daughter confronted her parents and told them of her being a lesbian. The parents didn=t take it as well as she might have hoped for. Instead they raised a gravestone with her name on it and declared her dead by listing her in the obituaries in the local newspaper.
In June of 1969, the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, was considered the dawning of the gay liberation movement. A police raid caused homosexuals to riot, not accepting the constant terrorizing from the authorities. The three day rioting led to the beginning of a new mass movement, the Gay Liberation Front, derived from the controversial Vietnamese National Liberation Front; wanting radical change, much like Chuck Rowland and the founders of the Mattachine Society and fighting fiercer and with more pride and confidence than before. Gays and lesbians began joining forces and recognized their common cause; to stand up for their rights as human beings and not willing to be suppressed any longer. This historic event is every year embodied in New York's Gay Parade.
There was a nationwide protest against the discrimination of gay military personnel but it didn=t have much impact. Military policy is still very much biased against homosexuals in the armed forces; even after government institutions loosened up their restrictions on gay policy. The military argued that homosexuals in service would threaten the moral and job performance of enlisted personnel. The discharge policy backfired. Instead of producing Asexual security@ for the soldiers, it reinforced hostility and prejudice among personnel. This policy goes against the secret military reports that say gays are suited for the military and the gay history of World War II, which showed that gay men could be just as courageous as straight men. It only leaves us to believe that the military has no respect for gay personnel and are only using them when in a crisis and being in need of cannon fodder.
Looking back, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were the pioneers for all gay and lesbians. They created a sturdy foundation on which to build a national recognition and understanding of homosexuals. Without them there would most probably not have been a Stonewall Inn incident. Who is to blame for homosexuals having to fight for recognition and acceptance against what seemed to be the entire American public? Before World War II, the public was uneducated and unaware of the gay and lesbian society they lived with. Like a child, they were easily affected by government doctrine, justified by the government=s need to keep the economy growing by uniting the people with false anti-Communist anti-gay propaganda and thereby creating an illusionary external and internal enemy. From a purely economic view, the government wanted Keyen=s AAnimal Spirits@ (herd mentality) to be positive and united and not have them go into another depression of pessimistic thinking. The postwar years were the first time the government had this much control over industry and officials thought it should stay that way. To do this, the public had to be satisfied and not worried about another recession. Communism and the gay threat were just the excuses the government needed to unite the population. They would foster the American ideal on how to be and act and deviance from this ideal, would cause the ARussian Bear@ to invade the American peace loving neighborhoods.
I think homosexuals were used as scapegoats and were a minority that could be sacrificed for the governments proclaimed Agood@ of the nation.
I think gays= relentless struggle for acceptance into mainstream society came from the American constitution itself. After all, the gay liberation movement started in America, the land of the free, where all men are created equal and with an inalienable right to pursue their own happiness. No one should be able to take these rights away from anyone. Also, in the 1950s, the civil rights movement became active and words like desegregation and equal rights for all became synonymous with the American way of life. Stand up and fight against those who have done you wrong! This is what gave homosexuals such a conviction to start fighting for their own cause.
This paper will follow the progress of gay and lesbians in the twentieth century before, during and after World War II. What was their position in the armed forces during the war and what was government and military policy during and after the war on gays in the army and in government positions? How did gay and lesbians respond to the new policies after the war and why were organizations like the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis founded? On December 7, 1941 at 7:55 a.m. local time, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The Unites States declared war on Japan and was suddenly a participant in the largest war in the history of mankind. A massive military force of 12 million men was assembled. American soldiers were sent to Europe and Japan to participate and win the Big One. The military bureaucracy grew accordingly and thousands of new jobs were created. With the military=s enormous demand for personnel, drafted American men found themselves in isolated gender segregated environments. All the big war movies depict this with the GI=s longing for leave so he could go downtown and find himself a prostitute. What these movies do not show is a new community, within the military, of homosexuals who until now lived socially isolated lives because they were either unsure of what they were or of their sexual preferences or just plain scared of what people would think if they found out their secret. In the military, these people found other gay men who were in the same predicament. They weren=t alone.
Before the war, gays and lesbians were almost invisible from society. They were not mentioned in the popular media and the general population was oblivious to their existence. An occasional arrest or school expulsion of a Asexual psychopath@ were the only vague signs that the public would hear about. Now that the military accepted or at least needed the cooperation of all men, including homosexuals, an important page had been turned in the progress of gay rights, however, it also set the scene for discrimination and prejudice.
Homosexuals were in all branches of the armed forces, from paper pushing to front line combat. Before enlisting, interrogators had forced them to describe their lifestyle, which in turn made it impossible for homosexuals to continue hiding in the closet but instead had to take the first step in living a new open lifestyle. They were classified as Asexual psychopaths@ on their military records, however, they were not being discriminated by the military at this point in time. An apparatus was even set up to accommodate gay personnel. Through this apparatus, the military ended up with quite an extensive record of homosexual behavior and was considered an expert on the subject. Military scientists much later said that through studying homosexuals' behavior could find nothing to support evidence that gay and lesbians were in any way psychopaths or had any form of mental disorder. This report came out after the 1940s and 1950s; until then, the military denied having made any research on homosexuals. After World War II, the military suddenly made a decision not to have gay or lesbians in the armed forces anymore. They would be discharged without any benefitsa even though they hadn=t done anything wrong. This caused gay veterans to unite and fight against sexual discrimination and some were later the founders of organized gay rights movements.
Exposed by the war, gays and lesbians decided to continue living their lives in the open, although many still preferred living quietly in discrete suburbs, coming out only under pseudonyms in articles or books.
Bars for gays and lesbians became a major gathering place. Here they could mingle and be themselves. These bars became wide spread and were not only confined to the major U.S. cities but were established in many small towns as well. The general public and media started noticing this growth and with the common knowing of homosexuals being perverted sexual psychopaths, child molesters, sex offenders and sex degenerates, a fear spread for the safety of women and children who could be snatched by these dangerous people. This fear initiated the anti-gay policies and sex psychopath laws of the late 1940s and early 1950s, where gay and lesbians were witch hunted and fired from their work place. The policy that had the greatest impact was President Eisenhower=s signing of Executive Order #10450, stating that sexual perversion was reason for prejudice hiring and firing of workers Gay veterans were a select group of American patriots, who, for the most part wanted things to go back to how they were and just lead secure and stable lives. These new policies caused much irritation and the veterans felt they were constantly being mistreated, which gave them all the more reason to speak up. They could have continued to live quiet lives but they were pushed into the open by the government, and now that they were exposed, they weren't going to go back in the closet without a fight. The new strict moral values of the postwar period and the nuclear family did not help gays and lesbians blend into society. Instead, homosexuals were being scapegoated and considered sex deviates. The idea of deviates and wave builders went well together with the red scare and homosexuals were feared even more than before. Communist homosexuals would mean the downfall of western society as we know it....at least that is what the government wanted us to believe. The theory of homosexuals being sex deviates was also supported by psychiatrists who wanted more influence over the criminal justice system and allowed for the incarceration of homosexuals into mental institution. This caused arrests for sodomy, perversion and indecency to skyrocket and many men and women ended up in these institutions.
The military=s turnaround and postwar treatment of homosexuals and the homophobia and irrational fear of gays that they caused, made its way to the civilian bureaucracy. In the 1950s, senators launched an attack on gay employees. Senator Joseph McCarthy led the crusade against homosexuals and communists and was feared by nearly all American; he had the power to dismiss you from your place of work and put you in an institution. Homosexuals were even considered to be easier targets for communist propaganda and were also the main reason for the purges in the government sector. People were afraid gays would deliver U.S. secrets to the Russians.
Even though gays and lesbians were hounded everywhere, they didn=t defend themselves from the attacks. Homosexuals had no one to speak up for them at that time and were unsure of what to do. Instead they isolated themselves and bottled up the anger and fear they felt for society. Gay veterans were no exception, however, they didn't accept the circumstances and conditions that had been set before them. They understood it was impossible for them to live the way they used to; in order for them to lead an open life, the hounding had to stop. They had fought a war to preserve their liberty and no one should be able to take that away from them now.
The first organization for gays was founded in Germany. The Scientific Humanitarian Committee wanted to abolish the German anti-gay penal code and to educate the public on being gay. The movement was short lived and was disintegrated when the Nazi regime came to power. There was also an effort for gay organizing in Chicago during the 1920s but they dissolved without major recognition. Then came the Mattachine Society. It was founded in 1950 in Los Angeles as a response to anti-gay campaigns in Washington, the constant police raiding of gay bars and that gays were an oppressed minority and should have someone to speak for them. The Mattachine Society would help gays out of jail, consult gays and refer them to psychiatrists, if they needed one. However, staying above budget was not easy. Call says the active members were doing more than they were getting paid for. Publishing the Mattachine Review, a gay magazine, was a demanding occupation and member fees did not cover all the work that had to be done. A bar directory was also published by the Society together with the Daughters of Bilits=s own magazine, the Ladder. The original founders were gay veterans from WWII and consisted of Chuck Rowland, Bob Hull, Harry Hay, Rudy Gernreich, Konrad Stevens, Dale Jennings, Stan Witt and Paul Bernard. The most charismatic of these was Chuck Rowland. He himself was an army veteran and an idealist. After the war, he had joined the American Veterans Committee and later the communist party. Being a member of the communist party would later cause him his seat with the Mattachine Society. These founders had a vision that all homosexuals would eventually come out and parade down the streets of LA. Until then, they sought refuge under pseudonyms when publishing anything of homosexual nature. Many joined the Society but no one knew who ran the organization. Rowland and the others thought it safest to keep it that way in the beginning. In 1954, the founders decided to become an open democratic organization and a vote was held as to whom should be the leaders. Rowland and the others wanted a radical group of expansionists and protesters. Hall Call, their opposition, wanted to take a more conservative approach. He meant that for the group to survive, they did not want to attract unnecessary attention to themselves; also to have an open organization, they had to eliminate everything that could give the government, especially McCarthy, an excuse to shut the organization down, which meant removing the communist faction from the group. Call won the vote and most if not all of the original founders were asked to resign. This decision left them very bitter and the question whether they had done the right thing by going "public" they way they had is still asked. Rowland claimed Call was the reason for the Mattachine=s downfall, having not an ounce of organizational spirit in his whole body. Call on the other hand, who was a journalist, saw the McCarthy threat as real and if the Mattachine Society wanted to enhance the Society and do some good, staying low was the only answer. Membership later decreased in the late 1960s and members instead joined a seceded branch of the Society called SIR.
Up until 1950s, no Aopen-minded@ study had ever been made of male homosexuals. However, in 1956, Dr. Evelyn Hooker, a professor at UCLA, presented a paper to the American Psychological Association in Chicago, in which she had conducted an experiment of homosexuals and heterosexuals to study their Afundamental personal behavior@ using the Rorschach, the Thematic Apperception and the Make a Picture tests. The judges were internationally recognized scientists and were not told who had been taking the tests. The result came out and the judges could not find any relation between the subjects= sexual preferences and their answers. Dr. Hooker received the Distinguished Contribution Award for her study.
Dr. Hooker was also confronted by many lesbians, asking her to conduct a test on them as well. She refused on the grounds that a woman conducting tests on women would be considered biased and not be taken seriously.
In 1955, lesbians in San Francisco founded the lesbian equivalent to the Mattachine Society; they called it the Daughters of Bilitis. The movement was unsure on how to proceed; whether they should engage in picketing and other civil rights activities or whether it should challenge the medical profession's claim that homosexuality was an illness. Their task consisted of counseling lesbians and educate mothers who thought their daughters might be lesbian. One sad case was when a daughter confronted her parents and told them of her being a lesbian. The parents didn=t take it as well as she might have hoped for. Instead they raised a gravestone with her name on it and declared her dead by listing her in the obituaries in the local newspaper.
In June of 1969, the Stonewall Inn, Greenwich Village, was considered the dawning of the gay liberation movement. A police raid caused homosexuals to riot, not accepting the constant terrorizing from the authorities. The three day rioting led to the beginning of a new mass movement, the Gay Liberation Front, derived from the controversial Vietnamese National Liberation Front; wanting radical change, much like Chuck Rowland and the founders of the Mattachine Society and fighting fiercer and with more pride and confidence than before. Gays and lesbians began joining forces and recognized their common cause; to stand up for their rights as human beings and not willing to be suppressed any longer. This historic event is every year embodied in New York's Gay Parade.
There was a nationwide protest against the discrimination of gay military personnel but it didn=t have much impact. Military policy is still very much biased against homosexuals in the armed forces; even after government institutions loosened up their restrictions on gay policy. The military argued that homosexuals in service would threaten the moral and job performance of enlisted personnel. The discharge policy backfired. Instead of producing Asexual security@ for the soldiers, it reinforced hostility and prejudice among personnel. This policy goes against the secret military reports that say gays are suited for the military and the gay history of World War II, which showed that gay men could be just as courageous as straight men. It only leaves us to believe that the military has no respect for gay personnel and are only using them when in a crisis and being in need of cannon fodder.
Looking back, the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were the pioneers for all gay and lesbians. They created a sturdy foundation on which to build a national recognition and understanding of homosexuals. Without them there would most probably not have been a Stonewall Inn incident. Who is to blame for homosexuals having to fight for recognition and acceptance against what seemed to be the entire American public? Before World War II, the public was uneducated and unaware of the gay and lesbian society they lived with. Like a child, they were easily affected by government doctrine, justified by the government=s need to keep the economy growing by uniting the people with false anti-Communist anti-gay propaganda and thereby creating an illusionary external and internal enemy. From a purely economic view, the government wanted Keyen=s AAnimal Spirits@ (herd mentality) to be positive and united and not have them go into another depression of pessimistic thinking. The postwar years were the first time the government had this much control over industry and officials thought it should stay that way. To do this, the public had to be satisfied and not worried about another recession. Communism and the gay threat were just the excuses the government needed to unite the population. They would foster the American ideal on how to be and act and deviance from this ideal, would cause the ARussian Bear@ to invade the American peace loving neighborhoods.
I think homosexuals were used as scapegoats and were a minority that could be sacrificed for the governments proclaimed Agood@ of the nation.