The U.S. Senate launched an investigation into allegations of homosexuals “and other perverts” in federal government jobs in 1950. According to the Senate report, gays “lack the emotional stability of normal persons”; “sex perversion weakens the individual”; and “espionage agents could blackmail them.”56 This led to President Eisenhower’s executive order calling for the dismissal of homosexuals from government service. Disbarment from the military of gays, or suspected gays, went from a trickle to two thousand every year during the 1950s, and up to three thousand or more per year into the 1960s.57 D’Emilio situates the crackdown on gays and lesbians within the wider social context:
The anti-homosexual campaigns of the 1950s represented but one front in a widespread effort to reconstruct patterns of sexuality and gender relations shaken by depression and war. The targeting of homosexuals and lesbians itself testified to the depths of the changes that had occurred in the 1940s since, without the growth of a gay subculture, it is difficult to imagine the homosexual issue carrying much weight. The labeling of sexual deviants helped to define the norm for men and women…. There was a congruence between anti-Communism in the sphere of politics and social concern over homosexuality. The attempt to suppress sexual deviance paralleled and reinforced the efforts to quash political dissent.58
Though both gays and Communist Party (CP) members were persecuted by the anticommunist witch hunt, gays could not look to the CP for solidarity. After Stalin took power in the Soviet Union, he reversed all the gains made by the 1917 Revolution by the early 1930s, including the revolution’s laws decriminalizing gay sexuality. The CP in the 1950s adopted Stalin’s hostility to homosexuality, denouncing it as a “bourgeois deviation.”59
Nonetheless, the first U.S. movement to organize against gay discrimination on the job and police harassment in the bars and cruising spots was initiated by former members of the CP. The broader critique of economic injustice and racism that initially attracted many people to the CP, despite its many failings, not surprisingly compelled these communists to take up the fight against antigay bigotry. Harry Hay left the CP—and his wife—to help found the Mattachine Society in Southern California in 1950. Named after an ancient masked secret fraternity that told truth to power, the Society’s “Statement of Purpose” claimed the group’s goals were to unify, educate, and lead the homophile—meaning pro-homosexual—movement. Shaped by the reactionary atmosphere and isolation that defined the lives of most gay and lesbian people, the statement called for the creation of a feeling of “belonging,” to develop “a homosexual ethic…disciplined, moral, and socially responsible,” and to “provide leadership to the whole mass of social deviants.”60 Yet, these “pioneers in a hostile society,”61 began to develop a theoretical understanding of their oppression rooted in the structure of capitalist society, solidarized with Latinos assaulted by police, and experienced rapid growth in organizing efforts after waging a successful campaign against the police entrapment of one of their members. By 1953, they estimated that more than two thousand men and women had participated in Mattachine’s activities.62 In an era of racial segregation, Mattachine was open to all. A Black member of the organization, Guy Rousseau, provided the name for the monthly magazine, One, whose editorial board members were in Mattachine. The title’s allusion to Second World War jargon, “He’s one,” was recognizable to gay men of that era.63
But the gay movement was not immune to the McCarthy crusade. A red-baiting article attacking the group’s secrecy and insinuating communist influences inside Mattachine appeared in 1953 in the Los Angeles Mirror, stoking suspicion and division within the group, with profound ramifications for Mattachine’s structure and political organizing thereafter. With the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in full swing against communists and dissenters of every sort, anticommunist gays took over the leadership of the group, banned communists like Hay, and turned away from challenging the government jobs ban to focus on urging its members to “try to get cured.”64
Hay stayed active in gay politics throughout his life and remained committed to struggles against oppression and exploitation. When film director Elia Kazan—who had cooperated with the McCarthyite HUAC hearings in 1952 by providing names of communists—was given an Honorary Academy Award in 1999, an elderly Hay and his lover John Burnside joined hundreds in protesting Kazan’s duplicity. The eighty-seven-year-old Hay proudly marched wearing his signature love beads and long mane of gray hair, saying he was an unrepentant communist who had no regrets for having helped launch a movement that changed his own life and affected millions of others.65
In San Francisco in 1955, lovers Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon founded the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), naming the lesbian advocacy group after an erotic poem. More than fifty years later, this couple was the first in San Francisco to marry after the California Supreme Court found the illegality of same-sex marriage to be unconstitutional, though notably the corporate media made almost no mention of their historic contribution to lesbian rights.
Given the much lower visibility and numbers of lesbian activists, the group of mostly white-collar women workers focused on lesbian self-help and tried to provide a social space outside the bar scene, as limited as it was. An estimated thirty lesbian bars existed throughout the country by 1963, whereas there were that many gay male bars in San Francisco alone.
The Cold War atmosphere and constant police harassment helped to nudge both the Mattachine Society and the DOB in a conservative political direction. Both organizations sought to “stress conformity” in order to “diffuse social hostility as a prelude to changes in the law and social policy.”66 Del Martin’s “President’s Message” that appeared in the first issue of the DOB’s publication, the Ladder, argued, “Membership is open to anyone who is interested in the minority problems of the sexual variant…. Why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red-blooded American woman who dares to claim it?”67 The one big victory of that era came in 1958 when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in an unwritten decision to allow the circulation of the gay publication One through the mail.
The continued repression of gays and lesbians in American society served to keep most of them closeted. Hollywood films portrayed gays as tragic and suicidal figures. Time magazine ran a story on homosexuality in 1966 in which the author characterized it as “a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality…no pretense that it is a pernicious sickness.”68 The American Psychiatric Association kept homosexuality on the books as a mental illness until 1973, when the struggles of the late 1960s and early 1970s forced a change in medical thinking.
The battle over LGBT people in the military
Despite the fact that, in 2008, 75 percent of all Americans supported the right of LGBT people to serve openly in the military—including majorities of both major political parties and 50 percent of military personnel—the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy signed into law by Bill Clinton remains in place.69 There has been rising support for un-closeted LGBT military servicepeople over the years since the policy was enacted in 1993, when 44 percent of the overall population supported the right of gays to serve openly in the military.70 Any notion that this policy overturned the antigay witch hunt is misguided, even though it technically allows lesbians and gays to serve so long as they remain closeted. According to the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network, the Pentagon fires two LGBT people each day, which is actually fewer than the number hounded out of the military prior to the wars inspired by the events of September 11, 2001.71
In late August 2008, the first-ever study was done on transgender military personnel and their treatment. More than one-third of the 827 people surveyed said they had experienced discrimination and 10 percent had been turned away by the Veterans Administration due to their sexual nonconformity.72 In defiance of the actual policy, one in five transgender military personnel had been asked about their sexual orientation. In keeping with military social mores that value masculinity over femininity, pre-transition transwomen (men who are physically transitioning into women) had been discriminated against more than pre-transition transmen (women who are physically transitioning into men).73
Any