California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

in integration, education, understanding, civil rights, elimination of unfair practices and discrimination, and abolishment of false ideas about human sexuality.”⁷² Even in its very early days the founders of the organization recognized that theirs was a lobbying group with political goals, however muted and tentative they may be: “Once it has been conclusively demonstrated that variants can be unified in their own behalf, and when the time is agreed to be right for such a move,” they asserted, “it is considered imperative for the Society to move into the realm of political action to erase from the law books discriminatory legislation presently directed against the sexual variant minority.”⁷³ At the Society's 1954 convention in San Francisco the chair of the newly established legislative committee noted that no legislation of use to gay Californians had been passed in the Republican legislature, and that 1954 was an election year: “The chief factor here is the exercise of every American's basic franchise—that of voting…. THIS NEED FOR US TO ASSUME THIS RESPONSIBILITY OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP CANNOT BE OVERSTRESSED, FOR UNLESS WE VOTE, WE AS INDIVIDUALS AND AS AN ORGANIZATION HAVE NO REAL RIGHT TO CRITICIZE OFFICIALS AND THE LAWS THEY ENACT.”⁷⁴

      The involvement of Mattachine in electoral politics began with the organization's creation, when the committee sent various candidates for office in Los Angeles a questionnaire soliciting their opinions on the question of making material on homosexuality available in schools. The accompanying letter attempted to demonstrate the potential electoral power of gay Angelenos, suggesting that if even only “a conservative percentage of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's testimony before the 1951 California State Legislature's Interim Committee is conceded, there are at least 150,000 such persons in the Los Angeles area alone.”⁷⁵ LA Mirror journalist Paul Coates saw as early as December 1953 that gay rights activism had the capacity to shape the way in which political parties conceptualized social change in the postwar age. Pointing to the forthcoming midterm elections in California, Coates observed the Mattachine questionnaire gambit, describing it as a “broadside from a strange new pressure group. An organization that claims to represent the homosexual voters of Los Angeles is vigorously shopping for campaign promises.” Mattachine, he noted, “pointedly hints it has the potential support of 150,000 to 200,000 homosexuals in this area.”⁷⁶ It would be some time before homophile politics gained general recognition in mainstream political debate in California, and throughout the 1950s a system of legalized repression of gay bars and political meetings relating to homophile activism kept sexuality out of the political lexicon of all elected politicians. Yet Coates was right to perceive the potential for gay rights to gain electoral traction at the same time as it struck a chord with a political class developing a new program for gaining and maintaining power in the 1950s and 1960s.

      The language of rights deployed by both the racial and sexual equality movements contained similar cadences and perspectives to the intellectual debate that underpinned the Stevenson campaign in California. The development of civil rights organizations set up as lobby groups to press for political rights and representation in the halls of power mirrored the establishment of clubs and societies based around the advancement of the Democratic Party in California, a state in which the terms of political debate had been set in particularly narrow terms and in which existing channels of legislative action had proved to be inadequate when questions of civil rights came into play. The years between 1952 and 1958 would see the rapid rise not only of the Democratic Party in California politics, but also a concomitant rise of the influence of grassroots political organizations that would play a role in dramatically reshaping the ideological agenda of Democratic liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

      CHAPTER 4

      A Democratic Order