the struggle for acceptance

"When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be
the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference, that
reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their
privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudice."- John Shelby
SpongEpiscopal Bishop of the Diocese of Newark, NJNovember 21,
1996A Struggle for AcceptanceDuring 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
workersGay 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. SOURCES: $ The
American Record; volume II: since 1865, by William Graebner & Leonard
Richards, McGraw-Hill, Inc.$ Making History; The Struggle for Gay

and Lesbian Equal Rights 1945 - 1990, by Erik Marcus, HarperCollins
PublishersINTERESTING AND MORE DETAILED EXCERPTS FROM
INTERNET SOURCES FOR FURTHER READING:The Stonewall Inn,
(named after the Confederate General 'Stonewall' Jackson), was a gay
bar (said to be sleazy and Mafia-run) at 51-53 Christopher Street just east
of Sheridan Square in New York's Greenwich Village. On the night of
27/28th. June, 1969, a police inspector and seven other officers from the
Public Morals Section of the First Division of the New York City Police
Department arrived shortly after midnight, served a warrant charging that
alcohol was being sold without a license, and announced that employees
would be arrested. The patrons were ejected from the bar by the police
while others lingered outside to watch, and were joined by passers-by.
The arrival of the paddy wagons changed the mood of the crowd from
passivity to defiance. The first vehicle left without incident apart from
catcalls from the crowd. The next individual to emerge from the bar was a
woman in male costume who put up a struggle which galvanized the
bystanders into action. The crowd erupted into throwing cobblestones
and bottles. Some officers took refuge in the bar while others turned a fire
hose on the crowd. Police reinforcements were called and in time the
streets were cleared. During the day the news spread, and the following
two nights saw further violent confrontations between the police and gay
people. The event was important less for its intrinsic character than for
the significance subsequently bestowed on it. The Stonewall Rebellion
was a spontaneous act of resistance to the police harassment that had
been inflicted on the homosexual community since the inception of the
modern vice squad in metropolitan police forces. It sparked a new, highly
visible, mass phase of political organization for gay rights that far
surpassed, semi-clandestine homophile movement of the 1950s and
1960s, exemplified by the Mattachine Society. The Mattachine Society
newsletter described the rebellion as 'the hairpin drop heard round the

world'. The event has been commemorated by a parade held each year in
New York City on the last Sunday in June, following a tradition that began
with the first march on 29th. June, 1970, and by parallel events
throughout the United States.@STONEWALL: THE HISTORICAL
EVENTThe confrontations between demonstrators and police at The
Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village over the weekend of June 27-29,
1969 are usually cited as the beginning of the modern movement for
Lesbian/Gay liberation. What might have been a routine police raid on a
bar patronized by homosexuals, became a signal event which sparked a
movement. The Stonewall riots have developed into the stuff of myth,
about which many of the most commonly held beliefs are probably
untrue.In 1969, it was illegal to operate any business catering to
homosexuals in New York City-as it still is, today in 1991, in many places
in the United States and elsewhere. The standard procedure was for the
New York City police to raid such establishments on a semi-regular basis,
to arrest a few of the most obvious 'types' and to fine the owners prior to
letting business continue as usual by the next evening. It has been
suggested that the majority of the patrons at the Stonewall Inn were black
and Hispanic drag queens, but perhaps the goddess has always valued
these rare creatures much too highly to ever let them become a majority.
In fact, most of the patrons that evening were most likely young,
college-age white men expecting to spend the rest of their lives in the
quiet desperation of the middle-class closet. They knew that it was
reasonably safe to enter the Stonewall Inn precisely because there were
a few colored drag queens, butch bulldykes and others whose
double-minority status made them far more likely candidates for arrest;
this gave everyone else time to cover their faces and run for the nearest
exit.After midnight June 27-28, 1969, four men and two women from the
New York Tactical Police Force called a raid on The Stonewall Inn at 55
Christopher Street. After leaving the bar, many of the patrons decided to

wait around outside while the police dispatched the 'usual suspects' into
the vans. It is said that this was the first time where Lesbians and Gay
men fought back; in fact, there had already been several incidents in both
Los Angeles and New York where sizable groups of Gays had resisted
arrest. More to the point, the queens targeted for arrest had always
fought back, alone and unsupported as they were led time and again to
the vans. What was unique about Stonewall and gives it a resonance
which continues to inspire today was that it was perhaps the first time
when Lesbians and Gay men as a group were able to see beyond the
lipstick and the high heels, beyond the skin color and recognize the
oppression which threatens us all.The greatest great myth concerning the
Stonewall riots is that it was a Lesbian/Gay event. It is likely that many of
those who began pitching pennies, then beer bottles, at the police that
night weren't even homosexual. The only publicly reported arrest was a
straight folk singer who was appearing next door and who joined the
melee after leaving work. The streets of Greenwich Village were home to
many young people whose politics were defined by the blossoming
anti-war movement, left-wing political ideologies and the successes of the
Women's liberation and Black Civil Rights movements. Like their
Lesbian/Gay brothers and sisters, they were prepared to recognize
oppression and thus willing to respond to it. (Anyone who thinks being
able to see oppression is easy has to only remember the Clarence
Thomas confirmation hearings.) In all, some 300 to 400 people became
involved in the attempt to stop the arrests, erupting into violent protest.
The police and the bar owners, who were perceived to be part of the
repressive system at work, barricaded themselves inside the Stonewall
Inn for protection. While they awaited reinforcements, the crowd outside
attempted to burn the bar down with the cops inside. Eventually, a
squadron of patrol cars arrived and chased the crowd away from the bar,
and then around the narrow village streets for several hours. The

following night, a new crowd assembled outside the Stonewall and rioted
when the police attempted to break it up. Provocative articles appearing
in the NY Post, Daily News and especially The Village Voice helped to
consolidate Gay willingness to fight back.Within a few days,
representatives of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis
organized the city's first ever "Gay Power" rally in Washington Square. On
July 27, 1969, speeches by Martha Shelley and Marty Robinson were
followed by a candlelight march to the site of the Stonewall Inn. Five
hundred people showed up, thought to have included almost the entire
'out-of-the-closet' population of Lesbians and Gay men in New York, as
well as their supporters from the political left. The rest as they say is
history STONEWALL: The MovementBefore Stonewall, there were a
number of groups working for homosexual rights, ever since the concept
had been defined in nineteenth century Germany, home to the world's
first politically organized movement. In the United States, since April
1965, Frank Kameny of Washington, DC had been organizing
Homosexual Reminder Days on the ellipse across from the White House
and at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. These were sedate affairs of a
few dozen picketers with the men in jackets and ties and the Lesbians in
skirts and dresses. Their principal demand was for civil service protection
and the right of homosexuals to hold government jobs. The New York
delegation that attended the July 4th picket in 1969, one week after
Stonewall, held hand and shouted down the other marchers. This was the
last Homosexual Reminder Day and a clear sign that the Stonewall riots
had set something new in motion.During the first year after Stonewall, a
whole new generation of organizations emerged, many identifying
themselves for the first time as "Gay" meaning not only a sexual
orientation, but a radical new basis for self-identification and with a sense
of open political activism. Older groups such as the Mattachine Society or
the Westside Discussion Group whose members had used first names or

altogether fictitious ones to protect their identities soon made way for the
Gay Liberation Front and the various regional Gay Activists Alliances. The
vast majority of these new activists were under thirty, new to political
organizing and believed everything was possible. Many groups were
affiliated with specific colleges and universities, again with "Gay"
replacing "Homophile" in the names of most older groups and almost all
new ones. By the summer of 1970, groups in at least eight American
cities were sufficiently organized to schedule simultaneous events
commemorating the Stonewall riots for the last Sunday in June. The
events varied from a highly political march of three to five thousand in
New York to a parade with floats for 1200 in Los Angeles.MATTACHINE
SOCIETYOne of the earliest gay movement organizations in the USA. It
began in Los Angeles in 1950-51. Its name was given by the pioneer
activist Harry Hay in commemoration of the French medieval and
Renaissance SociJtJ Mattachine, a musical masque group which he had
studied while preparing a course on the history of popular music for a
workers' education project. The name was meant to symbolize the fact
that "gays were a masked people, unknown and anonymous", and the
word, also spelled matachin or matachine , has been derived from the
Arabic of Moorish Spain, in which mutawajjihin , relates to masking
oneself. Such an opaque name is typical of the homophile movement of
the time in which open proclamation of the purposes of the group through
a revealing name was regarded as imprudent. At first the structure of the
society followed that of freemasonry with a pyramid structure, where cells
at the same level would be unknown to each other. The founders were
Marxists and analyzed homosexuals in terms of an oppressed cultural
minority. The communist leanings of the organization put it under some
pressure during the anti-Communist phase in the USA. The era of
McCarthyism had begun on 9th. February, 1950 with a speech by
Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, at Lincoln's Birthday dinner of

a Republican League in Wheeling, West Virginia. Paul Coates wrote in a
Los Angeles newspaper in March 1953 linking "sexual deviates" with
"security risks" who were banding together to wield "tremendous political
power". The Mattachine Society was restructured, with a more
transparent organization, and its leadership replaced. It also changed its
aims to the assimilation of homosexuals into general society, which
reflected its rejection of the notion of a homosexual minority. However the
Society declined, and at its convention in May 1954 only forty-two
members attended. The Mattachine Society produced the monthly
periodical ONE Magazine , starting in January 1953 and eventually
achieving a circulation of 5000 copies. The regular publication of the
magazine ceased in 1968, but its publisher, ONE Inc., still exists. In
January, 1955 the San Francisco branch of the Mattachine Society began
a more scholarly journal, Mattachine Review , which lasted for ten years.
The periodicals reached previously isolated individuals and helped
Mattachine to become better known nationally. Chapters functioned in a
number of USA cities through the 1960s. However, they failed to adapt to
the radical militantism after the Stonewall Rebellion and faded away.a to
loose your benefits in the military, such as a military pension, you
normally had to act undisciplined, refuse orders and putting your buddies
life in danger.1