The red scare and lavender scare of the 1950s defined communists and homosexuals as bogeymen in order to frighten and intimidate the American public into tolerating and enabling purges in government and the arts. Part of what made both witch hunts so effective was that anyone could be accused of being a communist or homosexual, and the accused were guilty until proven innocent. Harry Hays found a unique way to avoid accusations: he embraced them. He was both an out homosexual and a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party.
Born in England, Hays and his family moved to California after his father was severely injured in a factory accident. During the summer, he would work on a ranch in Nevada. There he was introduced to the economic ideas of Karl Marx after his encounters with members of the International Workers of the World (IWW), a labor rights organization. The main ideas of Marxist philosophy, both politically and in terms of collective organization, would become major influences on him and part of the founding ideas of the new homophile movement to come.
THAT WAS THEN, THIS IS NOW
As a communist and a gay man, Hays understood that the purges Senator McCarthy led were targeting people like him on both sides of his life. Under the scares of the 1950s, people lost their jobs, were socially shunned, and suffered financial loss. What Hays saw was that the people targeted had no networks of support when they were under investigation. At the same time, he was also paying attention to the actions and successes of the civil rights movement under leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, and Bayard Rustin.
The Mattachine Society founder Harry Hay (1912-2002) (third from left) appears at a press conference at the Stonewall Inn on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
A third influence came when Hays met someone who claimed to have been a member of the Society for Human Rights. Hays had never heard of this group. No one had, as there was no public history of the SHR, save for a newspaper article describing it as a cult. Hays found Henry Gerber’s vision inspiring. With his organizational background, he believed he could make it work.
Along with Chuck Rowland, Dale Jennings, and Bob Hull, Hays formed the Mattachine Foundation in Los Angeles in 1951. The goals of the foundation were to bring gay people together, provide education and leadership, and encourage political action. Possibly inspired by the circumstances of how their predecessors had been shut down, they used a cell structure for the organization. As they gained new members and opened new chapters in other cities, members knew only the identities of the other members of their individual cells. So if a group in San Diego was compromised, the arresting authorities would not have any information with which to pursue groups in other cities.
Not everyone in the foundation was happy with the strong Marxist ideals of Hays, though. In 1953, there was a break within the group. The founding leaders were removed and replaced with new officers. The group became more conservative in its politics and actions, and it was renamed the Mattachine Society. Four years later, the society moved operations to San Francisco.
The Mattachine Society was both influential and successful. Chapters began in major cities, including Boston, Detroit, Denver, and New York, before disbanding. But just as the society was closing down nationally, its Washington, DC, chapter started up, and the society wasn’t about to call it quits just yet. Frank Kameny, who had been a victim of the previous decade’s panics and purges, led the DC group. Kameny had been an astronomer with the US Army Map Service until he was outed as a gay man.
Under Kameny’s direction, the DC chapter took a different approach from the West Coast founders. While Hays was influenced by Marxist communism, Kameny used the language and reasoning from his study of constitutional rights. He and his community became very skilled and effective at lobbying the US government on their own terms—up to and including writing to President John F. Kennedy requesting that homosexuality be decriminalized.
THE INTERNATIONAL GAYAND LESBIAN ARCHIVE
An offshoot of the Mattachine Society was a side organization called ONE Inc. Members of the society felt that a different kind of organization was needed to better promote educational goals. The group began by publishing a magazine, called ONE, which debuted in 1953 and ran until 1968.
Among ONE’S most prolific writers was Jim Kepner. Kepner was born in 1923 and left his adoptive family at the age of nineteen to move to San Francisco, where he had learned a gay and lesbian community was beginning to flourish. Kepner loved to read, and shortly after he moved to the city he began collecting books about gay men and lesbians. These included cheap paperback novels and psychological and medical books.
His collection continued to grow long after World War II. In the 1950s, he acquired a huge collection of newspaper clippings and magazine articles, and in 1954 he started writing articles himself. Kepner published more than 1,600 articles. His personal collection, which he named the Western Gay Archive, was made open to the public in 1979. The name was changed to ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives when the collection moved to the University of Southern California in 2000. Today the archive consists of more than two million books, magazines, and newspapers, as well as video and audio recordings, photographs, artwork, and more. It is one of the largest collections of LGBTQ+ materials in the world.
SISTERS DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES
Just as gay men and women returning from Europe after World War II settled in New York City, San Francisco, California, was the main port of return from the Pacific theater. By the 1950s, the North Beach neighborhood had become the place to be if you were gay. There were several prominent bars, meetings and parties held in private homes, and an ample amount of socializing and cruising in the parks and on the beaches.
This 1965 photo shows Dick Leitsch (1935-) at the Mattachine Society’s East Coast location. Leitsch became the president of the Mattachine Society in the 1960s.
But for as much gay life as there was, it was still pushed to the margins. Dancing in gay bars was prohibited, and raids by the police were frequent. It was this lack of safe spaces that gave Rose Bamberger, a Filipino woman, the idea to found a social club for lesbians. Together with seven other women, Bamberger formed the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1955. The name came from a poem by Pierre Louys called “The Songs of Bilitis,” which was a tribute to the famous Greek poet Sappho, who had written of love between women thousands of years ago.
The founding membership was remarkably diverse, with half the members coming from working-class backgrounds and the other half being more middle class. During the first few meetings, it was decided the club colors were blue and gold, and that the club pin would be in the shape of a triangle. Out of the original eight, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were elected to leadership positions.
It was decided that the DOB was to be a women-only group that would reflect the struggles of both women and homosexuals. New members had to be sponsored by one of the founding members, homosexual, female, and of “good moral character.” Members also had to be twenty-one years of age or older, as the group wanted to avoid being seen as interacting with minors.
The poet Sappho (c. 630-c. 570 BCE) wrote verse about love between women over 2,500 years ago. She lived on the island of Lesbos, which is where the word "lesbian” comes from.
After several meetings, Martin called for new rules, including a dress code. Out of concern that prospective members might be scared off by women appearing too “butch,” or masculine presenting, strictly feminine attire was enforced. “If slacks are to be worn,” stated the new rules, “they must be women’s slacks.”
SEE HOW THEY RISE UP
One of the ways the DOB reached out to the community was through its newsletter, The Ladder. Its name came from the notion that the publication would help lesbians rise up, becoming both publicly visible and more mobile socially. Beginning in 1956, the journal published news and essays about homosexual and women’s issues, along with poetry and fiction. This combination of art and reportage offered many different ways to explore and express lesbian identity.
In 2004, Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin (right) were the first same-sex couple to be married in San Francisco. In 1955, they founded the Daughters of Bilitis, the first organization for homosexual women.
In an attempt to make connections between the organization and female professionals, staffers looked up the addresses of all the female lawyers in San Francisco in the telephone directory (books that contained telephone numbers and addresses for both private citizens and public businesses). Copies of the second issue were mailed to every woman practicing law in the city. Many were angered by this unsolicited mailing and demanded to be removed from the mailing list. Some of them were angry because the mailings insinuated that they were gay when they were not. Some were gay but in the closet, and they were eager to keep their personal and private lives separate. But not all the responses were negative, and the DOB did gain some new members from the stunt.
The Ladder became a very important publication for gay women. Up until it ceased publication in 1972, it supported cooperation with scientific research on sexuality, encouraged members to write regularly to their legislators, and provided an outlet for many lesbian writers to begin publishing.
The presence of organizations like the Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society, and ONE Inc. helped to shape the character of California (especially San Francisco) as a progressive and inclusive place for gay men and lesbians. The combination of activism and social spaces offered a diversity of lifestyle possibilities. This environment also helped form the idea that the recreational and political sides of homosexual society didn’t have to be in conflict with each other. Activist groups offered an alternative to the bar scene, but they also helped to protect and support the bars.