PROMPT:

“The closet” has often been described as a strategy to resist the anti-queer and anti-trans violence of American culture in the period after the Second World War, and the culture of the LGBTQ closet has often been seen in complex terms–both as an accommodation of homophobia/transphobia, as well as a more subtle form of resistance to homophobia/transphobia. In your responses this week, explore the ways in which the culture of the closet both reinforced AND challenged the homophobia and transphobia of US culture in the 1940s-1960s. As you look at the readings for Week 10 by Johnson and Stryker, and view the film about the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot (*via libraries.rutgers.edu, select the Kanopy database), you might also consider the ways in which gender created new ways to think about LGBT self-image. In particular, you might concentrate on the ways in which gender identities converged based on masculinity and femininity, as well as trans and cisgender identity. You might also think about the importance of race and class in addition to gender differences. For example, did “Liberation” mean something different for cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and transgender members of the community? Was “Liberation” more complicated for working-class people and/or people of color?

What was “the closet,” and how was Gay, Lesbian-Feminist, and Trans Liberation a movement to liberate people from the institutions of oppression known as “the closet”? How do you see different institutions of the “closet” in our readings from the past three weeks (choose one or two examples from Weeks 7-9), and how do you see manifestations of subversion and political liberation in the readings in Week 10 (choose at least one example)? The first four files upload are readings from week 7-9, and the last two are from week 10.

Guidelines:

As you develop your answers to the Discussion Board, remember to focus on naming specific people, locations, terms, etc. from the readings. Remember to cite page numbers.

You should write about 350-500 words (or about a page to two pages in double spaced, 12-point font), but you may write as much as you wish.

Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics

of San Francisco’s Gay Bars, 1950-1968

Author(s): Christopher Agee

Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 462-489

Published by: University of Texas Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629672

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Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics

of San Francisco’s Gay Bars, 1950-1968

CHRISTOPHER AGEE

University of California, Berkeley

JOHN MINDERMANN ENTERED THE San Francisco Police Depart-

ment (SFPD) as a patrol officer in 1959. Born and raised in San Francisco,
Mindermann was the son of a cop, and although he had graduated from
college with the intention of becoming a teacher, he eventually followed in
his father’s footsteps. The hulking, six-foot-plus young man sought a life of
adventure in the SFPD. Years later and after he had retired, Mindermann
explained his attraction to police work: “I had interests in apprehending bad
guys, in getting guns and knives off the street. Like a lot of police officers
who were young and physically engaging, I enjoyed physical confrontations.
I mean we used to kid among one another, I mean, physical confrontations
could actually be good therapy.”‘

But when the young Mindermann was temporarily assigned to San
Francisco’s Polk Gulch neighborhood and he encountered his first gay bar,
the Cable Car Village, the rookie officer smarted with confusion rather than
excitement and pride. “I walk into the Cable Car Village,” Mindermann
remembered:

and I stopped as I go inside the front door. And I’m shocked because I
see nothing but men down the bar, and in the back there’s a jukebox,
and there’s I guess a small dance floor, because I never quite got back
that way-it’s maybe forty feet. And I see men dancing with each other
back there, and whoa! and I stopped. I’ve never seen anything like this.
I look in there and I go wha-could this be a-a-a, in the parlance of
SFPD, could this be a “fruit joint”? Well maybe it is. And everything

‘John Mindermann interview, 29 March 2004 and 14 April 2004. This article is based
on the research from “Gayola: The San Francisco Police Department, the Department of
Alcoholic Beverage Control, and San Francisco’s Homosexual Bars, 1950-1965,” chap. 3 of
my “The Streets of San Francisco: Blacks, Beats, Homosexuals, and the San Francisco Police
Department, 1950-1968,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2005.

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15 , No. 3, Septcmber 2006
C) 2006 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

462

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Gayola 463

stops when they see, when they see me. Everybody’s apprehensive.
They’ve never seen this guy before, you know. I look in, and I go, “I

better not do anything because there’s so many of them and there’s
just me and I have no radio.” But I think it’s a fruit joint, so I back
out and I go about my diligent business.2

Although Mindermann’s superiors recognized that Polk Gulch neighbor-
hood contained one of the highest concentrations of gay bars in the city,
they had done little to prepare the young patrol officer for his encounter

with gay men. Mindermann related that he was only vaguely aware of the

mayor’s and police chief’s various policies on homosexuality. And if the
patrol officer had been attuned to his superiors’ attitudes, it is unlikely he
would have gained a clearer picture of the appropriate course of action.
Officers throughout the department often competed with one another to
realize different visions of law enforcement, particularly on the issue of gay
bars. This interdepartmental tension forced policemen to constantly assess
the professional standards of the officers around them. Mindermann’s su-
pervising sergeant regulated some gay drinking establishments by collecting
payola (meaning police extortion and dubbed “gayola” by the local press
in 1960), possibly behind the back of his lieutenant. The sergeant doubted

that Mindermann would be willing to work within a payola regime, and
when the young officer questioned him about the Cable Car Village, the

sergeant nervously insisted that allowing the bar to operate enabled him
to locate the city’s gay men when he needed to solve violent, gay-related

crimes. “My god,” Mindermann recalled thinking, “this is police wisdom.”
The rookie cop’s naivete ensured that he would never again be assigned
the Polk Gulch beat.3

John Mindermann’s story of shock, ambivalence, personal prerogative,
and collegial mistrust challenges academia’s understanding of the policing of
sexuality. In recent years historical studies by Nan Alamilla Boyd and John
D’Emilio have revealed that the expanded postwar policing of homosexual-
ity-particularly the policing of homosexual bars-helped to energize and
shape gay and lesbian civil rights organizing.4 These works, like most civil
rights narratives, have portrayed police-community interactions as part of a
larger, uncomplicated, two-sided conflict between the citizenry and the gov-
ernment.5 Police departments, however, have their own political motivations,

2Ibid.
3Ibid.

‘Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide-Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003); and John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Scxual Communities:

7he Making of a Homosexual Minority in thc United States, 1940-1970, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).

5The difficulty of researching police departnents is compounded when they have destroyed
their past records, as the SFPD has done.

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464 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

and these interests profoundly affected the strategies of post-World War II

civil rights movements. Edward Escobar has studied the relationship between

the police leaders and civil rights organizing through his work on Mexican
Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department. Los Angeles police

chiefs and commissioners, Escobar argues, helped racialize and criminalize
Mexican Americans to build support for growing police budgets. Mexican
Americans responded by using their new racial designation to demand the
rights and protections conferred to other racially defined groups.6

Like the LAPD leadership described by Escobar, the SFPD’s upper ech-

elons-called “the high brass”-had a political identity separate from that
of city hall. But Mindermann’s experiences complicate the picture further,

revealing that the policies and dicta of police chiefs often did not reflect the
beliefs and activities of the rank and file. Indeed, rifts of class, rank, and station

all fragmented the SFPD’s interests and separated the beat officer from policy
makers in both city hall and the Hall of Justice. The high brass, moreover,
maintained a decentralized organizational structure that gave patrol officers
great autonomy in their daily activities. Police leaders prioritized their own
political power over professional policing, and they therefore refused to either
coordinate their policies across station lines or add the supervisory positions
needed to monitor the officers on the beat. Thus, when line officers assessed
the lawfiuness of community members on the street, they drew upon more
than the legal codes and official department policies. The beat officers’ own
sense of right and wrong, their yearning for the admiration of their peers,
their interest in winning or imposing respect from the community, and their
desire to achieve all of these goals in the least time- and energy-consuming
manner also influenced how they both defined and responded to cnme.

San Francisco’s city leaders fully recognized that the decentralized nature
of the SFPD provided beat cops with tremendous discretionary power in
defining criminal behavior. Downtown politicians and pundits tolerated the
police force’s subjective policing when it was directed toward issues for which
the city leaders saw a clear civic consensus. During the early and mid- 1950s,
for instance, city hall leaders and the most prominent journalists character-
ized the city’s racial and sexual interests as homogeneous (meaning white
and heterosexual), and they therefore encouraged the SFPD to criminalize
behavior they deemed black and homosexual (city leaders never publicly
considered that gay men might have been serving in the SFPD).7

6Edward Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans
and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999).

‘Conversely, the city’s elite did accept religious, ethnic, and class pluralism, and it therefore
admonished the SFPD when officers employed subjective charges against people for their
religious, ethnic, or laboring status. Between the mid- 1950s and mid- 1960s San Francisco’s
mainstream discussions of race and crime focused almost exclusively on African American
residents. During this period the major dailies occasionally reported on crimes committed
by Chinese Americans and Latinos, but neither pundits nor politicians used these incidents

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Gayola 465

Within this policing regime police chiefs could affect police-homosexual
relations by ordering individual raids and sweeps. Boyd and D’Enilio have
focused their discussions of police around these well-publicized clashes and
are correct to argue that the threat of police crackdowns spurred gay rights
organizing and helped gay activists achieve public attention. Scholars of the
history of sexuality have typically erred, however, in using the raids directed

by the high brass to generalize about the rank and file’s daily activities.
Raids seldom indicated an upswing in pressure from officers walking the
beat. John Mindermann’s narrative reveals that the individual personalities,
values, and beliefs of the actors on the street shaped interactions between the

police and the community in general and the relations between the SFPD
and the homosexual bars in particular. Recognizing the political divisions
within the police department and the discrepancies between the police
raids and the daily activities of beat cops reveals that the police’s anti-gay
bar activities were motivated by more than city hall’s hostility toward gay
men. Key confrontations between police and the gay bars also represented
a mainstream political struggle for power over the police. Placing these
clashes in the context of police politics shows that San Francisco’s gay bar
owners integrated their civil rights movement into the mainstream political
sphere by exploiting an existing discourse about police organization.

A group of owners of gay bars first used police politics to advance
gay civil rights in the celebrated 1960 “gayola scandal.” The bar owners
publicly accused eight law enforcement officials of extorting payoffs, and
the media made front-page news of the subsequent trials. The first police
officer whom bar owners targeted was John Mindermann’s former sergeant
from the Polk Gulch neighborhood. Scholars have correctly identified
the gayola scandal as a watershed moment in San Francisco’s gay civil
rights history, but they have presented the affair as a simple fight between
the SFPD and gay drinking establishments. Bar owners, however, were
exploiting a clean government movement within the SFPD and pitting
corrupt officers against a reformist chief of police. Throughout the 1960s
the movements for gay civil rights and police professionalization repeat-
edly used one another for their own political ends, and together the two
restructured civic life in San Francisco.

to generalize more broadly on questions of race and policing. The mainstream’s focus on
African Americans was due, in part, to that population’s rapid growth and political mobiliza-
tion. Between 1940 and 1960 the black population jumped from .8 to 10 percent of the
city’s general population. The Chinese American population, on the other hand, rose from

2.8 to 4.9 percent of the general population during these years, and in 1960 the U.S. Census
created a separate racial category for “Hispanics” and counted this group as 7 percent of the
population. Mainstream discussions of race and policing began including Latinos and Chinese
Americans during the mid- and late 1960s as both groups experienced surges in population

and upswings in political organizing. For population figures see Brian J. Godfrey, Neighbor-
hoods in Transition: The Making of San Francisco’s Ethnic and Nonconformist Communities
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 97.

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466 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

THE SAN FRANCISCO POLICE DEPARTMENT AND THE REGULATION

OF HOMOSEXUAL BARS

World War II brought tens of thousands of men and women into the mili-

tary ports and industrial shipyards of the San Francisco Bay Area. Leaving

the watchful eyes of their hometown families and neighborhood friends

to serve in sex-segregated military units and shipyard crews, many homo-

sexual men and women found that they had entered environments of sexual
possibility. Some of these local war workers and visiting service persons

began to patronize a homosexual bar industry that had been a part of the
city’s tourist landscape since the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. The U.S.

military’s wartime purges of gay men expanded the city’s gay and lesbian
bar industry still further. Soldiers discharged in these military sweeps were

generally detained for the length of the purge and then released en masse
into the streets of San Francisco. Given the choice of remaining in the Bay

Area or returning to their families to explain their dishonorable “blue”

discharge, many gay soldiers opted to make San Francisco their new home.8
By 1950 San Francisco contained at least thirty-four gay and lesbian bars.
The day-to-day policing of these drinking establishments fell primarily into
the hands of the SFPD’s uniformed patrol officers.9

Recent historiographical reckonings of gender in midcentury America
have helped to highlight the ways that gender identity was at issue on the
streets.10 In San Francisco the mainstream press largely ignored the city’s
gay and lesbian drinking establishments; its limited homosexual reporting
more frequently revolved around chilling images of psychopaths.” Similarly,
homosexuality was not a common topic of conversation within the ranks
of the SFPD. When police did raise the issue of homosexuality, officers
did not use the subject to provoke fear but rather to make effeminate gay
men the punch line of their jokes. In 1959, for instance, the San Francisco
Police Officers Association journal reported that two officers were “embar-
rassed when they happened upon a pretty young thing, her satin skirt lifted,
relieving herself between two autos parked on Fillmore St. But shucks, it

8Boyd, 1 1; Allan Berube, Coming out under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in
World War Two (New York: Free Press, 1990), 29-30, 51.

9For a discussion of the growth of San Francisco’s gay bar industry see Boyd, 113-14,

125-33; Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community,
1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 209, 214-16; Martin Meeker,
“Come out West: Communication and the Gay and Lesbian Migration to San Francisco,

1940s-1960s,” Ph.D. diss., University of Southern California, 2000, 10; and B&rube, 113.
‘0A number of scholars have investigated the performance of gender in battles over street

space. See, for instance, Boyd; Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slip-

pers of Gold: Tlhe History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993); and George

Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World,
1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

See, for example, the reporting on the serial killer Stephen Nash: “Man of Hate Speaks
Chillingly of Love,” San Francisco Chronicle, 16 December 1956: 22.

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Gayola 467

was only gay Willie-Boy Bell. The boys at City Prison were delighted with
his new Maidenform.”‘2

As this quotation illustrates, many beat patrol officers did not regard the

policing of gay people as “real” or manly law enforcement. The uniformed
officers on the beat proved their manliness to one another by physically
controlling citizens they deemed dangerous and by making what were called
“strong” arrests-felony charges with long sentences.”3 The arrests of gay
and lesbian people often involved “weak” charges of vagrancy (charges
that were frequently dismissed in court), and no officer would ever want

to admit that a gay man had posed a physical challenge.’4
Moreover, while many police found the antigay exploits of other patrol-

men amusing, most beat officers found working in close contact with gay
men unsettling. Few wished to conduct this sort of policing themselves.
Discussing temporary transfers to the inspector’s bureau’s sex detail, Chief
Thomas Cahill later admitted, “Now I know that my officers who were on
those assignments, vice assignments, resented it very much. They wanted
no part of it. They’d rather get out and do regular police work than to be
working undercover to entrap people like those.”‘5

Despite the obvious bewilderment that dealing with homosexuality on
the streets elicited from young officers like John Mindermann, the high

“2San Francisco Police, November 1959: 9. I would like to thank Sgt. Ray Shine for pro-
viding me with access to the back copies of the San Francisco Police Officers Association’s
(POA) journal, San Francisco Police. A complete run of San Francisco Police does not exist,
and unfortunately there are significant gaps in the POA’s collection.

“3Police officers generally viewed African Americans as the most physically threatening
citizens, and the department therefore placed a premium on a patrol officers’ ability to subdue
black men physically.

“4The SFPD’s sex detail investigated all forms of sex crimes. While uniformed beat officers
focused on gay and lesbian people on the city’s streets and in the bars, sex detail concentrated
on gay activity primarily in parks, public bathrooms, and bus terminals. The sex detail included
four to five officers and operated under the Bureau of Special Services, the inspector’s bureau
responsible for investigating so-called vice crimes. For a discussion of the sex detail, see ‘S.F.
Drive on Sex Deviates,” San Francisco Examiner, 1 July 1954: 1, 12. The inspectors in the sex
detail took a different approach toward gay men than did patrol officers for two reasons. First,
inspectors could often make ‘stronger” arrests for sexual activity in nonbar spaces such as parks,
bus stations, and public restrooms. Second, inspectors had different standards of masculine polic-
ing. Because inspectors were charged with addressing crimes that had already been committed
rather than enforcing “order” in a specific neighborhood, inspectors placed less emphasis on
physical prowess and more importance on investigation and crime-solving abilities.

“5’Thomas Cahill Interview,” from the “Shedding a Straight Jacket Oral History Col-
lection” (hereafter “Shedding a Straight Jacket”), Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender
Historical Society of San Francisco (cited hereafter as GLBTHS), no. 97-026. For other fear-
fiul law enforcement accounts of policing gay men see San Francisco Police, November 1959:
9. Even inspectors from the sex detail were sometimes unnerved by close contact with gay
men. In 1953, for instance, when two male homophile activists arranged a meeting with a sex
detail officer, the inspector brought a female officer along in order to prevent any advances
(although there is no evidence to suggest policewomen were consistently used to police gay
men). “Don Lucas Interview,” 325, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 97-032.

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468 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

brass provided the patrolmen with very little guidance on how to handle

gay and lesbian bars. Indeed, throughout the 1950s the SFPD’s leadership
failed to provide its rank-and-file officers with tactical direction in nearly all
policing matters, and the high brass actively condemned patrolmen who
requested assistance. Mindermann later explained:

One overriding theme that I’d like to touch upon, just briefly, is that
during this period of time, if you were to be regarded as an effective

police officer in the SFPD, the bottom-line . . . criteria was that you

had to be able to handle anything that came up. Okay? That was it.
If you had to call for help, if you had to call for assistance, if you
couldn’t figure it out, [in the voice of his supervising officer,] “What?
Why did we hire you? We hired you specifically because we’re going

to send you into situations, and you have to do what’s ‘right.’ So
don’t call us.” So you had to figure it out. There were a lot of ad-hoc,
spontaneous, without form, but highiy effective resolutions to things
that guys did…. And there wasn’t anything out there. I mean, you
were it. Which was one of the great attractions to the work.’6

SFPD leaders fostered this culture of independence in part to make a
virtue of the police department’s shortcomings. The SFPD, for instance,

was woefully backward in communication technology; patrolmen could

rarely call for assistance because the department did not provide them with
portable radios and because the city installed its police call boxes a lengthy
eight blocks apart. Patrolmen in the city’s busy commercial areas also lacked
adequate supervision. Precinct captains in the city’s quieter residential
districts repeatedly resisted attempts to redistribute their lieutenants and
sergeants to areas with more police activity, and all members of the high
brass opposed the creation of new supervisory positions that would diffuse
their own personal political power.’7

The high brass also promoted the patrolmen’s discretionary power as a
means of self-protection. Under the SFPD’s policing regime, department
leaders were able to scapegoat police officers at the bottom of the ladder
whenever police tactics or decisions angered politicians and the press.

“They left the troops . . . out there to try to come up with something,”

‘6John Mindermann interview.

“7”Honesty vs. Graft in the Police Dept.,” San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 13 October
1959: 4, and 16 October 1959: 39; John Lehane interview, 23 June 2003; and Kevin Mul-

len interview, 21 November 2002. John Lehane grew up in San Francisco and joined the

SFPD in 1947. Lehane was active in the San Francisco Police Officers Association and served

briefly as the organization’s president in 1970. Born in 1935, Kevin Mullen graduated from

St. Ignatius High School and entered the SFPD in 1959. Also see ‘Longtime Police Policies

Junked-Stern Ahern Hand Brings Change,” San Francisco Ncws-Call Bulletin, 15 October

1959: 11; and William Joseph Winters, “Redistribution of the Patrol Force of a Hypothetical

City,” master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1957.

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Gayola 469

Mindermann recalled in discussing the department’s responses to black
civil rights protests. “You were expected to take the proper police action,
but you were given no direction. Yet you were accountable.”‘8

Without guidance from the high brass San Francisco patrol officers chose
from a number of options when learning of the existence of a homosexual
bar on their beat. One choice was to use the existing state penal codes,
although this approach had become more complicated for law enforcement.
In a 1951 San Francisco case the California State Supreme Court declared
that law enforcement officials could not close a bar simply because it at-
tracted a gay and lesbian clientele. The state legislature responded to the
ruling with a series of laws enabling officers to prosecute homosexual bars,

but only if they viewed any sexual activity. The lawmakers set severe penalties
for these charges, such as revoking a liquor license, and yet homosexual bar

prosecutions therefore involved lengthy hearings and considerable amounts

of time and effort on the part of the arresting officers.’9
Most patrolmen, accordingly, needed considerable pressure from city

officials to spend this amount of energy on work they found disgusting and
outside the bounds of serious police work, and San Francisco’s politicians

and media pundits never demanded gay eradication. In Sacramento the state
legislators justified their stringent, antigay legislation as a preventive measure
against Communist infiltration, but the political leaders in labor-friendly San
Francisco did not share these cold war concerns. Moreover, San Francisco

officials recognized that high-profile crackdowns ran the risk of advertising
the size of the city’s homosexual population to the rest of the nation. Local

elites simply asked the police to keep homosexual bars out of the public eye.
As a result, a gulf emerged between the state legislature’s harsh laws and the
local city leaders’ more moderate expectations. This gap between laws and

“8John Mindermann interview. The most notorious postwar example of SFPD officials
scapegoating a lower-ranking officer came in 1960, when the high brass made a lowly inspec-

tor responsible for the supervision of a massive protest against the U. S. government’s House

Un-American Activities Committee. The inspector had no experience in crowd control, and

as the high brass remained far away, the officer ordered his men to attack the demonstrators.

The press eventually pilloried the inspector for his actions and for his subsequent false claims

that protesters had initiated the violence, and when the high brass offered him no cover, he

was forced to leave San Francisco in disgrace. For discussions of the 1960 city hall protest

and its aftermath see Ralph Tyler, “Why It Happened in San Francisco,” Frontier June 1960:

5-11; “Jury Ready to Deliberate in Riot Case,” San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 3 May 1961:

1, 7; “S.F.’s Riot-Haunted Cop,” San Francisco Examiner, 17 April 1965: 19; and the film

produced by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California entitled Operation

Correction (San Francisco, 1961).

‘9William N. Eskridge, Jr., Gaylaw: Challen,ging the Apartheid of the Closet (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999; repr. 2002), 32, 61-62, 72. This legislative movement

included the 1954 opening of Atascadero State Hospital. Known as “Dachau for Queers,”

Atascadero staff subjected men convicted of either consensual sodomy or child molestation

to lobotomies, electrical and pharmacological shock therapy, and castration, all authorized by

a 1941 law.

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470 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

expectations enabled police officers to develop their own, informal, and less

taxing responses to gay and lesbian drinking establishments.
A more common police tactic was to turn a blind eye. Discussing the

gay bars on his beat just blocks from the Hall of Justice, Sgt. John Lehane
remarked:

It was just another bar. It’s like it was down the street from the station.
There were all gays in there so you . .. would only go down there
when you get called. And they had the same problems as straight bars,

see. And . . . they didn’t want the police around the place, see. And
when you got there they usually took care of their beefs themselves,

or if you did, they wanted you [out] as fast as they could get you out
of there. And the police didn’t want to go near them, anyway. It was
like a Mexican standoff.20

Some police officers, however, took a more aggressive approach to
homosexual bars. These patrolmen focused most of their attention on gay
bars rather than lesbian drinking establishments, but lesbian nightspots
increased their chances for persecution if they allowed cross-dressing.2′
Officers had a wide range of harassing tactics at their disposal, and some
chose to pursue payola. In addition to providing personal profit, this last
method required a relatively small amount of contact with gay people.
The police particularly targeted the city’s downtown and waterfront gay
bars with extortion, since these male, lower-class establishments permitted
physical contact ranging from dancing to sexual intercourse and other illicit
activities, including drug use, gambling, and prostitution. “You’ve got to
understand,” former gay bar owner Bob Ross recalled, “that a lot of these
people operating these bars were very shady to start with, and they were
looking for quick money-and the cops knew that. And they were serving

20″Thomas Cahill Interview,” 110, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 97-026;

and John Lehane interview.

2″For a discussion of police officers disregarding lesbians see Richard Hongisto interview, 8
April 2002. Hongisto was the son of a sheet metal worker, and after earning a degree from San

Francisco State College he joined the SFPD in 1960. Hongisto was elected sheriff in 1971 and

appointed police chief in 1992. For an example of the SFPD police journal ridiculing cross-dress-
ing lesbians see San Francisco Police, September 1959: 9. Boyd has identified the 1954 police

raid on Tommy’s Place, a North Beach lesbian nightspot, as an example of police persecution

of lesbians (9 1-101). However, the SFPD only became interested in Tommy’s Place during an
ongoing investigation into the relations between an African American man and a group of white

high school-aged women. Police closed Tommy’s Place but did not use the incident to justifr a
wider crackdown on lesbian bars or women. See also “Schoolgirls’ Vice, Dope Revealed in S.F.

Bar Raid: Man Held as Corrupter of Youths,” San Francisco Chronick, 9 September 1954: 1,
14. Lesbian bars faced a greater threat from male heterosexual residents and tourists who tried

to pick up, mock, and intimidate lesbian patrons. See Sherri Cavan, ‘Social Interaction in Public
Drinking Places,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1965.

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Gayola 471

rot-gut booze in many cases, and the cops knew that also. So their prices
were based according to that.”22

Bob Ross’s gay bar was in the lower Market Street area, and he paid his
protection payment directly to a captain. The bar owner recalled how a

police officer first approached him on the issue of payoffs:

[Upon entering, the police officer asked,] “Hi Bob, are you the
manager?” And I’d say, “Why yes.” “Hi, I’m Lieutenant So-and-so.”
“You don’t say, Lieutenant So-and-so.” “Yes, the San Francisco Police

Department.” And right away you’d go “Oh shit.” You know, “What

are we up to now?” And the first time he came in he was soliciting
for the . . . Police Athletic League. And I said, “Oh.” I said, “I just

sent them $25 or something.” And he said, “Oh.” He said, “This is
actually the Police Officer’s Retirement League section of the Police
Athletic League.” I said, “I never heard of that.” He said, “You will;
let me show you.” And I said, “What do you need, $100?” He says,
“No, it’s gonna be $500 a month.” And he says, “The captain’ll be
by to collect it next Tuesday at 7:30.” That’s how brazen they were.
The captain walked in at 7:30 to collect his money.23

In addition to the monthly payoff, Ross claimed, he was also responsible for
buying the captain’s dinner and supplying him with a female prostitute.24

The decision to extort money, as with other types of harassment, stemmed
from individual patrolmen’s bigotry and greed but also from pressure exerted
by supervising officers. The culture of the SFPD condoned officers who
made payoff demands, and officers could collect payola, particularly at the
Northern, Central, and Southern police stations, without losing standing
among their peers.25 Police officers judged each other, first and foremost,
on their ability to arrest violent community members and physically subdue
those whom they regarded as disrespectful; collecting payola did not prevent
officers from fulfilling either of these goals. “You [could] be a very good cop,”
John Mindermann recalled, “and still take advantage with respect to money,

drinking, so forth. SFPD, the culture allowed for certain of these discretion-
ary activities that were illegal…. I saw many, many excellent officers who
worked diligently making very high quality officers and worked very, very
hard who were involved in these kinds of petty activities.”26

22Bob Ross interview, 5 October 1999. There is no evidence of San Francisco police officers

ever extorting money from a lesbian bar.

23Ibid.
24Ibid.
2″Northern Station covered the Polk Gulch and Fillmore neighborhood bar areas; Central

Station included the bars in the Tenderloin, North Beach, the Embarcadero, and the lower

Market Street areas; and Southern Station monitored the bars in the South of Market district.

26John Mindermann interview.

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472 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

Even as the department culture excused extortion, the SFPD’s poor work-

ing conditions provided some officers with the justification they needed to

participate in payola practices. Patrolmen complained about limited training

and promotional opportunities, and they argued that the SFPD provided

them with substandard equipment and salaries that, while higher than the

state’s other police departments, were diminished severely by the city’s

high cost of living and the costs-borne by each policeman himself-of a

uniform, gun, baton, and handcuffs.27 “There wasn’t … much managerial
concern for the needs of the troops,” Capt. Kevin Mullen remembered of
his early years in the department. “We didn’t have heaters in the cars. And I

think we did not get heaters until cars stopped coming without them.”28

Members of the SFPD’s high brass who might have been inclined to

break the department’s networks of corruption were stymied by its diffuse
political and policing structure. During the early 1950s political power
lay with the district station captains and the inspector’s bureau chief and
not with the chief of police. Under this decentralized system the various
district station captains ran their police houses with little oversight, and
each demanded or forwent extortion payments as they saw fit. But while
captains or lieutenants could easily demand that their officers collect pay-

ments for them, thwarting extortion in the lower ranks was a more difficult
proposition. The high brass’s principal obstacle in preventing payola was
its inability to supervise all of the beat officers. Each district captain had

three lieutenants who were then expected to control fifteen to eighteen
sergeants, too many for the desk-bound lieutenants to monitor. Even if a
lieutenant managed to keep tabs on his sergeants, it was impossible for the
officer to know what activities the district’s 63 to 116 patrol officers were
doing on their sergeants’ behalf. As the only officers who left their desks
and monitored the patrolmen on the streets, the department’s two hun-
dred sergeants held the most policing power in the SFPD. It was therefore
the SFPD’s two hundred sergeants who exerted the most control over the
department’s gay bar policies.29

City hall officials tolerated or encouraged SFPD corruption during the
early postwar period. Politicians benefited monetarily and politically from
the payola regime; corrupt officers passed their political allies a cut of the
tribute, allowed officials to use their morning briefings for campaign stops,

27The cost of these items in midcentury ran about $400. See Gale Wright interview, 4 June

2003. Gale Wright moved to San Francisco as a youth and after attending City College for

two years joined the SFPD in 1957. See also Elliot Blackstone interview, October 16, 1999.
Elliot Blackstone was a San Francisco police officer, and during the late 1960s he served as
the homosexual community liaison for the SFPD’s Police-Community Relations Unit.

28Kevin Mullen interview. See also “The Untold Story of the San Francisco Police Depart-

ment,’ San Francisco Chronicic, 8 February 1955: 1; and ‘Honesty vs. Graft in the Police
Dept.,” San Francisco News-Call Bulktin, 13 October 1959: 4.

29Elliot Blackstone interview and San Francisco Police Department, San Francisco Police
Department Study (San Francisco: City of San Francisco, 1957), 13.

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Gayola 473

and helped get out the vote on election days. (Conversely, police officers

aided their conservative political allies by allowing thugs to intimidate voters
in precincts with large black or liberal voting populations.) San Francisco
police officers had played these political roles for decades. Indeed, investiga-
tors during the 1930s had publicly exposed the SFPD as an “organized”
and “powerful electioneering force,” but neither the city’s downtown elites
nor the general public had responded with sustained demands for clean
government reform.30

In the early 1950s, however, a police professionalization movement
arose from San Francisco’s business class. The city’s leading bankers and
entrepreneurs argued that police graft impeded the migration of East Coast
capital to the city. These police professionalizers cared less about other
forms of subjective policing (such as harassment and brutality), but they
proposed to eliminate law enforcement’s economic power over businesses.
The reformers set out to restructure the state’s law enforcement agencies
and place each department under the control of a more powerful chief.

The professionalizers hoped that by filling these posts with reformers they
could clean up law enforcement from above.3′

The professionalization movement’s first victory came at the state level
in late 1954, when CasparWeinberger, a first-year Republican assemblyman
from San Francisco, led a bipartisan effort to reform the state’s corrupt

liquor control agency. Weinberger’s work produced the Department of
Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), and the reformist leaders of the new
ABC eradicated most of their department’s largest payola networks. The
ABC’s centralized and more aggressive policing regime increased the state’s

police supervision over all bars, but liquor officials focused particular atten-
tion on California’s homosexual bars.32

The state liquor officials’ special interest in gay bars stemmed in part from
their 1951 legal defeat in the Black Cat Cafe case. In 1950 San Francisco

30″Honesty vs. Graft in the Police Dept.”; and “Why Federal Agents Bypassed S.F. Po-

lice,” San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 13 October 1959: 4, and 14 October 1959: 4. For

discussions of Republicans intimidating black voters see “Challenge ‘Raids’ on S.F. Polls,” San
Francisco Examiner, 9 November 1960: B; “Voter Challenges Set off Dispute,” San Francisco
Chronicle, 9 November 1960: 14; and “Row over Polling at Hunters Point,” San Francisco

Chronicle, 7 November 1962: 1B.

3″Samuel Walker, Popular Justice: A History of American CriminalJustice, 2nd ed. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 131.

32″Knight to Fill New Liquor Post Soon,” San Francisco Chroniclk, 4 November 1954:
1; “Knight Criticizes ‘Food-in-Bars’ Law,” San Francisco Chronicle, 24 March 1955: 1; and
Caspar W. Weinberger with Gretchen Roberts, In thc Arena: A Memoir of thc 20th Century

(Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2001), 102-3. Boyd’s Wide-Open Town discusses the ABC’s

policing of San Francisco’s gay bars (123, 134, 144, 207). I have limited my discussions of

the ABC and other state and federal policing agencies (such as the Armed Forces Disciplin-

ary Board) because SFPD patrol officers rarely paid these outside organizations any heed. I
disagree with Boyd’s contention that the state liquor officials’ various victories and defeats
affected the intensity of policing by the SFPD.

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474 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

city officials had called upon state liquor officials to revoke the liquor license
of Sol Stoumen, the owner of the Black Cat Cafe, when he refused to hire
unionized workers.33 Although only a portion of the Black Cat’s bohemian
clientele was homosexual, liquor officials decided to use this patronage to
justify their license revocation. Thus, by way of a labor dispute, state liquor
agents entered the new territory of homosexual bars. Stoumen caught the

liquor officials off guard by fighting the revocation, and in the 1951 case
Stoumen v. Reilly the moderately liberal California State Supreme Court
unanimously sided with Stoumen. The justices declared that “mere proof
of patronage by homosexuals” without additional evidence of “illegal or
immoral acts” was insufficient for a license revocation. The shocking deci-
sion made California the only state in the nation to provide a modicum of
legal legitimacy to gay and lesbian bars.34

The high court’s decision enraged and embarrassed some state liquor
officials, but the Board of Equalization was too corrupt and decentralized
for liquor control leaders to mount an effective campaign against homo-
sexual bars. The cleaner and more tightly organized ABC now provided
the resentful liquor administrators with the opportunity they desired. The
ABC officials sent their agents to pursue gay and lesbian bars, organized a
legal process that made it nearly impossible for homosexual bars to defend
themselves against charges of sexual impropriety, and circumscribed the
protections of Stoumen by persuading the State Supreme Court to expand
the definition of “illegal or immoral acts.”35 Indeed, in the 1959 Vallerga
v. Munro decision the ABC pushed the state’s high court to define “illegal
or immoral acts” as any activity (not just sexual activity) that could be

33″Appellant’s Petition for a Hearing by the Superior Court,” Stoumen v. Reilly, Superior
Court of the State of California, 14-15, and “Opening Brief for Appellant,” Stoumen v.

Reilly, California District Court of Appeal, 66, GLBTHS. Previous histories have erred in

assuming that state liquor officials targeted the Black Cat Cafe because of its gay and lesbian

clientele: D’Emilio (187) asserts that Stoumen did not make the payoffs demanded of bars

with homosexual patronage, and Boyd (116, 121-23) states that the prosecution occurred

as part of a wider crackdown. By failing to understand the initial Black Cat case as a labor is-

sue, historians have overemphasized the street-level changes brought about by Stoumen. The

relative laxity of homosexual bar policing during the early 1950s can also be attributed to the

decentralization of policing and the reticence of rank-and-file officers. It is likely that some
SFPD officers were not even aware of the Stoumen ruling, and policemen continued using
informal tactics with impunity to either regulate gay bars or drive them out of business.

34″Opening Brief for Appellant,” Stoumen v. Reilly, California District Court of Appeal,

66; Stoumen v. Reilly 37 Cal. 2d (1951), 713; and Eskridge, 94.

350ne way ABC officials stacked the legal process against homosexual bar owners was

-by instructing their agents not to warn gay and lesbian bar owners of infractions and not
to document any information about the persons involved in the infractions. Thus, after a

year-and-a-half-long investigation, the ABC presented a bar owner with a list of incidents,
some more than eighteen months old, in which faceless, unnamed, and unnumbered persons

were said to have committed specific illegal acts. See “Appellant’s Opening Brief,” Stoumen
v. Munro, 50, 9-12, 283.

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Gayola 475

construed as homosexual. The ABC’s new policing regime allowed liquor
officials to reduce the average homosexual bar’s lifespan to less than two
years.36

The SFPD, however, remained unreformed, and police officers on the

take either failed to assist or actively interfered with the ABC’s attempts to
eliminate homosexual bars. After busting a gambling hall in 1955 a frus-
trated official from the office of the state attorney general raged: “We always
get an answer that they investigated and found nothing illegal was going
on and we usually get the answer that they visited the place and asked the
owner if he was violating the law…. Of course the owner says he was not.
Such reports from the police are an insult to the intelligence of a low-grade
moron.”37 But Sacramento’s efforts to shame the SFPD into assisting with
the state’s antivice campaign produced little effect. Thus, between 1955
and 1960 the ABC drive slowed the rate of increase in San Francisco’s
homosexual bars but failed to bring about a reduction (the number rose

from fifty to fifty-three).38
In the mid-1950s the San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s second-largest

newspaper, took the lead in bringing professionalization to the SFPD. The

Chronicle sought to overtake the San Francisco Examiner (the self-pro-
claimed “Monarch of the Dailies”) in both circulation and political power,
and the Chronicle’s editor viewed its exposure of the department’s corrup-
tion as the key to both of these endeavors. Chronicle editors understood
that articles on police criminality and incompetence made for good copy
and would thus allow the newspaper to cut into the Examiner’s readership.
But the Chronicle also recognized that the Examiner depended upon the
SFPD’s lack of professionalism for its influence over city hall. The Examiner

36In the 1959 case of Vallerga v. Munro the state supreme court ruled that “any public
display which manifests sexual desires and urges” that appeared in the bar “as a continuing
course of conduct” could be considered harmful to the welfare and morals of society. Boyd’s
(206-7) and D’Emilio’s (182) narratives both present this ruling as an advance in gay rights
because it affirmed the right of gay and lesbian people to congregate in bars and because it
spoke in the language of civil rights. But, as Boyd notes in passing, the vague meaning of
“continuing course of conduct” and the potentially all-encompassing definition of “sexual
desires and urges” suddenly placed all gay and lesbian bars at risk. Indeed, most contempo-
rary observers viewed Vallerga as a victory for the ABC, and there is no public evidence to

support Boyd’s and D’Emilio’s argument that Valer,ga inspired owners of gay bars to expose
police corruption. Nor does it appear that the ruling stifled the ABC’s campaign. The ABC’s
Northern California prosecutor expressed delight over the Vallerga decision, remarking that
it “probably” made the closure of all homosexual bars “inevitable.” See “Oh, Bitter Dicta! A
Case Won-and Lost,” Ladder4, no. 5 (February 1960): 9, 7, 20; and “Appellant’s Opening
Brief,” Stoumen v. Munro, 32.

37″Grand Jury to Get Report on Raids,” San Francisco Chronick, 25 April 1955: 1, 10.
For information on how the “tip-off flourishes” in San Francisco see “The Untold Story of
the S.F. Police Dept.,” San Francisco Chronicle, 31 January 1955: 1.

38Helen P. Branson, Gay Bar (San Francisco: Pen-Graphic Press, 1957), 43; “Appellant’s
Opening Brief,” Stoumen v. Munro, 73; and Meeker, “Come out West,” 28.

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476 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

mobilized police officers to campaign for friendly political candidates, and
these politicians then repaid the Examiner by promoting the newspaper’s
allies within the SFPD. The Examiner also often influenced city hall by
supporting the SFPD’s attempts to manipulate elections by mobilizing
it on certain issues. If the Chronicle could create a less corrupt and more
apolitical police force, it could also help to remove the Examiner’s influence
from the mayor’s office.39

The SFPD simply ignored the Chronicle’s printed criticism, but in
November 1955 the newspaper took a major step toward police profes-
sionalization when it successfully backed George Christopher for mayor.
Shortly after his election Mayor Christopher told reporters: “The success
of my administration depends a great deal on the success of the Police De-
partment.”40 Christopher made it clear that he wanted a chief committed
to ridding the SFPD of corruption, and in 1959 the mayor found his ally
in Thomas Cahill. Known nationally as a “clean government” reformer,
Chief Cahill quickly impressed Christopher and the Chronicle with several
gestures toward professionalization. But the new police leader proved to
be more of a pragmatist than an ideologue. Before making a controversial
crackdown on the SFPD’s organized extortion Cahill waited for an outside
catalyst; or, as one officer later quipped, “Cahill didn’t go looking for gayola;
gayola came to him.”4′

POLICE PROFESSIONALIZATION AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION

OF THE HOMOSEXUAL IMAGE

In late 1959 and early 1960 a series of events helped inspire owners of
gay bars to challenge Chief Cahill on the issue of police extortion. First, a
controversy over homosexuality and dirty politicking appeared in Mayor
Christopher’s 1959 reelection campaign. During this political scandal San
Francisco’s owners of gay bars watched as some members of the press toler-
ated gay legal assertiveness against political corruption.

‘9Scott Newhall, A Newspaper Editor’s Voyage across San Francisco: San Francisco Chronicek,
1934-1971, and OtherAdventures: Oral History Transcript(Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1990), 217-18; Kevin Mullen interview; and Malcolm Glover interview, 7 July 2004.

Malcolm Glover joined the San Francisco Examiner in 1946 and served as the newspaper’s

police beat reporter for nearly four decades.
40″Christopher Promises Police Modernization,” San Francisco Chronick, 29 December

1955: 1. Christopher worked to clean up the police department during his tenure as mayor

becausc he was genuinely disturbed by vice and he understood that city officials would focus
on his business-friendly agenda, including his efforts toward redevelopment and the wooing

of major league baseball, only if he kept the police department off the front pages. See Kevin

Mullen interview; and “Big-Thinking S.F. Mayor of 50s and 60s Is Dead,” San Francisco

Cbronicke, 15 September 2000: Al.
“”Big Police Shakeup for ‘Efficiency,'” San Francisco Chronicle, 15 November 1958: 1;

and Kevin Mullen interview.

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Gayola 477

Christopher entered the 1959 election riding high. His pro-growth,
clean-government policies had made him a popular figure in the city,
and it appeared clear that he was headed for an easy victory over his op-
ponent, Russell Wolden.42 Wolden had run an incompetent campaign and
desperately needed an issue with which to close the gap. Weeks before the
election the challenger tried to shift the city’s attention away from issues of
government reform and economic growth to cultural fears; he proclaimed
that Christopher had allowed San Francisco to become a haven for homo-
sexuals.43 Wolden then revealed that the Mattachine Society, a gay rights
organization, had recently held a convention during which it had passed a
resolution praising the progay leadership of Christopher. The Mattachine
Society boldly responded by going public itself, revealing that a Wolden
operative had submitted this resolution and daringly announcing that it
intended to sue Wolden for slander. In a rare turnabout the press reported
neutrally on such public assertiveness by homosexuals. The media excoriated
Wolden for violating the city’s homosexual closet, but pundits also expressed
tremendous scorn over Wolden’s shady use of an operative. Prioritizing
clean government over its long-standing closeting of homosexual people,
the newspapers publicized the Mattachine Society’s lawsuit against Wolden.
Indeed, a local newspaper declared Mayor Christopher’s and Chief Cahill’s
targeting of corruption in the police department evidence of a true “moral
revolution in the city.”44

42Previous histories have argued that Mayor Christopher’s tough-on-crime image had made

him a vulnerable candidate in 1959. Scholars have assumed that voters saw the SFPD’s new

assertiveness as a violation of the city’s culturally permissive tradition (see Boyd, 142, 204).
But during the late 1950s the press generally discussed Christopher’s and Cahill’s profes-

sionalization campaign in terms of government reform and the threats of predatory criminals.

For instance, the press celebrated Operation S, a professionalization program that saturated
so-called high-crime neighborhoods with police officers, as a program targeting muggers and

murderers. Few mainstream pundits wondered whether Operation S also ensnared citizens the

city might view as less physically dangerous and more culturally interesting. Media figures did
not present police interactions with bohemians in North Beach as evidence of Christopher’s

and Cahill’s professionalization. Rather, both cultural liberals and cultural conservatives used
articles on relations between police and bohemians to argue for a centralization of police power.

Mayor Christopher was therefore rarely implicated in the discussions over the policing of the

beats. For longer discussions of Operation S and the policing of North Beach see Agee, “The
Streets of San Francisco,” chaps. 1 and 5.

43Jim Kepner, Rough News-Daring Views: 1950s Pioneer Gay PressJournalism (New York:

Haworth Press, 1998), 377, 379; and “Praise of Mayor’s Policy on Deviates Engineered by

Ex-Police Informer,” San Francisco Cbronick, 9 October 1959: 1, 5. Wolden did not enter the

1959 race with a reputation as a teetotaler. Prior to the election, Herb Cacn mentioned Wolden

and “his handsome wife” “rolling along California Street at midnight in their sleek convertible.”
See Herb Cacn, Only in San Francisco (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960), 15.

‘Kepner, Rough News, 385-86; “Wolden Sued for Slander,” San Francisco Chronicle,
9 October 1959: 4; “‘Plant’ Revealed in Wolden’s Smear Drive,” San Francisco Examincr,
9 October 1959: 1, 8; George Dorsey, Christopher of San Francisco (New York: Macmillan,
1962), 189-90; and “The Shining Badge,” San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 19 October
1959: 14. For additional discussions of the Wolden scandal see D’Emilio, 121-22.

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478 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

The press’s reaction to the Wolden affair suggested to owners of gay

bars a new political strategy. Historians have already recognized that the

1959 mayoral campaign helped provide gay activists with greater public

visibility, but the episode also showed that gay men could use the issue of

dirty government not only to enter the public discourse but also to take
legal action against antigay corruption. Meanwhile, an upswing in both
national police scandals and local antipolice protests were also beginning to
normalize citizen challenges to law enforcement.45 In early 1960 these events

and an extended downturn in the local bar economy motivated a group of

owners of gay bars from the Polk Gulch, Embarcadero, and lower Market

Street areas to organize a coordinated attack against the payola demands
of their local police officers. This group of bar owners-which included
both homosexual and heterosexual men-met with Police Chief Cahill to

confront him with evidence of police corruption. The intense reaction to

the Wolden scandal had made it clear to Cahill that his job security hinged
on his reputation against corruption, and he therefore agreed to entrap and
prosecute the offending police.46

Captains and lieutenants were spared during the subsequent prosecu-
tions, but in fewer than four months a grand jury had indicted seven
Northern and Central Station police officers and one ABC agent for ex-
torting money from gay bars. The first sergeant to go to trial pled guilty,
but the seven remaining officers contested their charges in what the press
dubbed the “gayola” scandal. The press desired government reform and
thus expressed little antigay animus during the gayola trials. The accused
officers, however, ultimately escaped with acquittals. During the trials de-
fense attorneys succeeded in focusing the juries’ attention on homosexuality
rather than police corruption.47

Still, despite the not-guilty verdicts the gayola trials dramatically
refigured relations between the SFPD and homosexual bars. Through this
scandal Chief Cahill had exhibited his willingness to prosecute extortion-
ists, and police at the station level were therefore obliged to dismantle
their payoff networks. Bar owners had thus been able to use the politics

“s”Big Beatnik Rally to Protest Raids,” San Francisco Chronicle, 31 January 1960: 5. In
the summer of 1959 the Chicago Police Department experienced a well-publicized scandal.
See Samuel Walker, A Critical History of Poliec Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism
(Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1977), 170.

‘”Bob Ross Interview,” 45-46, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 98-012.
47″lst Bar Bribe Cop Plans Guilty Plea,” San Francisco Examiner, 10 July 1960: 3; and

“All 4 Cops Acquitted in ‘Gayola’ Trial,” San Francisco Chronicek, 20 August 1960: 1, 5.
Not understanding the importance of police professionalization has prevented historians from
recognizing why the press discussed the gay bar owners with relative civility during the gayola
scandal. Boyd, for instance, speculates that the journalists wished to chastise Cahill for his more
assertive policing policies (209). I argue, however, that by avoiding sensational discussions of
the bars and their owners the journalists were supporting Cahill and his attempts to use the
bar owners’ accusations to clean up the department. For example, see “Police Candor,” San
Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1960: III, 2.

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Gayola 479

of police professionalization to forge a temporary alliance with govern-
ment reformers and free themselves from the demeaning and financially
burdensome practice of extortion.

This victory, however, carried heavy consequences. Payola had served as

a form of harassment, but the payments had also offered gay and lesbian
bars a modicum of protection from the antihomosexual whims of outside
politicians and agencies. Corrupt officers had profited from homosexual
bars, and they had therefore resisted demands for sweeps and crackdowns.

Under the new policing regime these corrupt officers were no more likely
to prosecute homosexual bars on their own, but they were more willing
to conduct raids when ordered to do so by their superiors. Policing power
over gay bars was thus shifted from the SFPD’s beat officers to the mayor

and the chief of police.

In the wake of the gayola scandal Mayor Christopher launched an of-
fensive against homosexual drinking establishments. Concerned that gay
and lesbian bars provided spaces for sexual activity that could offend the

public while also providing tempting shakedown targets for dishonest
police, Christopher called for an open-ended sweep, and Chief Cahill
responded with raids on disreputable bars, both homosexual and hetero-
sexual alike.48

More important, Cahill now began providing the ABC with plainclothes
policemen. During the late fifties owners of homosexual bars had begun
photographing ABC officers, and the state liquor agency department there-
fore required additional agents who were not recognizable to bartenders at

these establishments. With its new supply of SFPD officers the ABC spent

the next year and a half shutting down twenty-five gay and lesbian bars,
including all of the bars that had been involved in the gayola scandal. But

as quickly as the SFPD and ABC used their power to close homosexual
bars, more opened.49

Indeed, law enforcement officials found that the average owner of a gay
and lesbian bar was far more likely to resist license revocations than the bar
owners of the previous decade. This increased fortitude largely stemmed
from the fact that a growing number of gay and lesbian bar owners were
homosexual themselves. Although these gay and lesbian entrepreneurs

remained dedicated to the bottom line, many viewed their bars as more
than business ventures. Gay and lesbian owners of bars often saw their
establishments as community-building efforts and therefore showed a

48″City, State Officials Plan Crackdown on ‘Gay Bars,'” San Francisco Chronicle, 29 June

1960: 4; and “Appellant’s Opening Brief,” Stoumen v. Munro, 176-77.

49San Francisco Chronicle, 21 April 1960 and 29 April 1960, GLBTHS, 1950s and 1960s

news clippings box, gayola folder; “65 Freed in ‘Gay Bar’ Case,” San Francisco Examiner, 7

September 1961: 3; and “Special Cops for ‘Gay’ Bars,” San Francisco Examiner, 12 October

1961: 3; Eskridge, Gaylaw, 80; D’Emilio, 183; and Morton Colvin interview, 5 November

1999. Morton Colvin served as an ABC prosecutor in San Francisco during the 1960s.

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480 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

greater tenacity and resolve in their conflicts with law enforcement.50 Thus,
when the ABC revoked the license of bar owners who were gay or lesbian,

these entrepreneurs often did not abandon the idea of operating a bar but

instead quickly reopened using friends, lovers, or relatives as “fronts” for
the license application.5′ These individual acts of resistance impeded the
ABC’s drive. As a result, even though the ABC’s postgayola offensive had

successfully eliminated twenty-five homosexual bars by 1962, the city still
contained twenty-four other gay and lesbian drinking establishments.52

The rise in gay and lesbian ownership of homosexual bars facilitated the
development of a small social world among homosexual bar owners and
bartenders, and this gay and lesbian network took concrete shape in August
1961 with the first convening of the Tavern Guild. Initially a social organi-
zation, the guild quickly developed a wide array of strategies by which to

combat law enforcement. Its members distributed images of ABC and SFPD
undercover agents, informed one another of legal loopholes to avoid bar
closures, and even began funding legal challenges to the constitutionality
of antigay state statutes.53

Nan Boyd has discussed three of the factors that allowed the bar owners to
transform the Tavern Guild into the engine of the city’s homosexual libera-
tion movement. First, bar owners possessed a job security and steady source
of income that allowed for open and vigorous challenges to the SFPD; after
all, bar owners did not need to worry about losing their jobs or clientele.
Second, the members of the Tavern Guild were able to capitalize on the

“0For a discussion of San Francisco gay and lesbian bars serving as “home territories” or
community service centers see Sherri Cavan, “Social Interaction in Public Drinking Places,”

Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1965, 147-48, 276.

5″See, for example, ‘Bob Ross Interview,” 60, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no.
98-012; and “Charlotte Coleman Interview,” 72, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS,

no. 97-023.

52Eskridge, 80.

53William “Uncle Billy” Morrell, owner of the 585 Club gay bar and steakhouse, orga-

nizcd both the bar owners involved in the gayola prosecution and those involved in the first
meeting of the Tavern Guild. It is not clear from the existing sources, however, that his work

with the heterosexual and homosexual bar owners in the gayola prosecution inspired him to

create the Tavern Guild. See “Bob Ross Interview,” 30, 58, 60, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,”
GLBTHS, no. 98-012; “Bill Plath Interview,” 15, 16, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS,
no. 97-024; “Charlotte Coleman Interview,” 72, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS,
no. 97-023; Tavern Guild Foundation, “What We’re All About” (n.d.), Tavern Guild of San
Francisco Records (cited hereafter as TGSF), GLBTHS, box 1, folder 1; Minutes, TGSF, 19
February 1963, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 11; Minutes, TGSF, 2 February 1965, TGSF,
GLBTHS, box 1, folder 14; and “Remarks of Darryl V. Glied, President of Tavern Guild of San
Francisco,” 30 March 1965, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 14; George Applegate to William

Plath, 21 May 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 4, folder 12; Minutes, 19 May 1964, written 26
May 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13; and Minutes, 30 June 1964, written 10 July

1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13. D’Emilio (189) and particularly Boyd (223-26)
have provided important and useful discussions of the Tavern Guild. This section of my article
builds upon these studies by utilizing the recently processed Tavern Guild Papers.

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Gayola 481

organizing potential of bar space. Bars represented one of the few semistable

homosexual gathering areas in the city, and guild members used these sites
to raise money and disseminate information. Third, as small businesspersons,
guild members were able to cultivate a professional homosexual identity in
the press.54

The cultural and sexual revolutions of the 1960s helped bar owners win
public support in their battles against police. As scholars such as D’Emilio
and Richard Candida Smith have noted, the publicity given to both the

North Beach beat scene and the obscenity trials of sexually explicit avant-
garde art expanded the boundaries of acceptable gender and sexual behav-
ior.55 It was not unusual, however, for police leaders to simply ignore the
press’s critiques of its repressive tactics, and the SFPD’s high brass generally

decreased the intensity and severity of its enforcement tactics only when
the mayor or judges forced it to do so. By forging new alliances with liberal
pundits and civic leaders, the city’s gay bar owners ultimately pushed both
city hail and the courts to restrain Cahill’s crackdown. The gay and lesbian
businesspersons in the guild made connections with liberal elites by proving

that their professional masculine image was not only culturally tolerable
but also politically and financially useful. As Boyd reveals, the Tavern Guild
opened its meetings to campaigning politicians and supplied them with both
funds and votes.56 Bob Ross remembered these gatherings and explained

that by 1964 the guild had established itself as “the sounding board for
the [gay and lesbian] community on politicians.”57

Because the gayola scandal had shifted the power over the SFPD’s gay
bar policies off the patrol beat and into the offices of Christopher and Cahill,

the bar owners’ success in centralizing the policing of homosexual drinking
establishments made their new professional image particularly attractive to a
young generation of establishment liberals intent on challenging the mayor’s

54Boyd, 223-36; Tavern Guild Foundation, “What We’re All About” (n.d.), TGSF,
GLBTHS, box 1, folder 1. Gay bars held three fimd-raisers for the Mattachine Society in
1964. See Martin Meeker, “Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine
Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of the History of Sexuality

10, no. 1 (January 2001): 109. For discussion of the “cross-pollination” between the Tavern

Guild and the Society of Individual Rights see “Herb Donaldson Interview,” 8, “Shedding a

Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 97-025.

55D’Emilio, 176-82; and Richard Cindida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and
Politics in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), pt. 3.

56Boyd, 226.
57″Bob Ross Interview,” 54, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 98-012. In

1964 the organization also established a political committee that arranged meetings with city

officials to build bridges between the guild and the existing city government. See Minutes,

19 May 1964, written 26 May 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13; and Minutes, 18
November 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13. The Tavern Guild also used bar benefits
to make contributions that connected it with the city’s other homosexual and nonhomosexual
progressive agencies. See Tavern Guild Foundation, “What We’re All About” (n.d.), TGSF,
GLBTHS, box 1, folder 1.

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482 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

leadership of the city. This rising group of liberal journalists, lawyers, politi-
cians, religious leaders, and businesspersons had first gained visibility during
the late 1950s, when the city began debating law enforcement in the North
Beach neighborhood. The city’s conservatives encouraged the police to
harass North Beach bohemians, warning that cultural and sexual pluralism
threatened the city’s civic reputation. The new generation of liberals, however,
entered the debate by insisting that tolerance for cultural and sexual pluralism
was both safe for the city’s streets and a more modern, urbane, and self-assured

expression of a civic sensibility. They expanded the debate over police profes-
sionalization, arguing that the city should curtail not only the patrolmen’s
independence in decision making about tactics but also the officers’ powers
to label cultural and sexual crimes. Moreover, the liberals recognized that the
city’s crackdown on homosexual bars would enable them to implicate Mayor
Christopher and Chief Cahill in their charges of old-fashioned politics. (The
young liberals had painted patrol officers as philistines and prudes in their
dealings with the North Beach beats but had not been able to extend these
charges to Christopher and Cahill.) The new generation of political liberals
could use the gay bar discussions to present themselves as a hipper and more
attractive alternative to the leadership in city hall. Thus, the rising liberals,
including the reporters and editors at the Chronicle, began supporting gay
bars and building bridges with gay bar owners.8

Evidence of the developing alliance between liberals and gay bar owners
first appeared in the summer of 1961, when, just prior to the formation of
the Tavern Guild, the police conducted a large-scale raid of the Tay-Bush
Inn. In the aftermath of this event bar owners used their new professional
homosexual image, their nascent coalition with liberal reporters, and the
SFPD’s new policing regime to curb the aggressiveness of Mayor Christo-
pher and city hall. Police stormed the Tay-Bush Inn late in the evening of 13
August. A portion of the bar’s 242 patrons were working class and people
of color, but in the days following the raid the San Francisco Examiners

58San Francisco’s professional gay image was first cultivated by the area’s homophile activ-
ists. The historian Martin Meeker explains that activists in the local Mattachine Society and
the Daughters of Bilitis were successful at injecting this new “mask of respectability” into the
city’s press. Indeed, journalists covering the gayola scandal took their cues from the homophile
movement’s images and described the gay bar owners as professionals (Meeker, “Behind the
Mask,” 81). For a similar analysis see Mark Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian
and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 212-19.
George Chauncey argues that a new and self-consciously masculine gay male culture first
arose in America’s urban homosexual communities on a significant scale during the 1940s.
Chauncey terms this image the “new virile look” and explains that homosexual men during
this period could adopt a masculine identity because society as a whole was now dividing
men along lines of sexual-object choice, not gender persona (358). Throughout the fifties
middle-class homosexual novels and homoerotic muscle magazines continued spreading this
masculine gay image. See Don Romesburg, “Camping out with Ray Bourbon: Traveling
Female Impersonators and Queer Dread of Wide-Open Spaces, 1930-1970,” unpublished
paper, courtesy of the author, 25.

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Gayola 483

and San Francisco Chronicle’s front-page accounts presented the Tay-Bush
arrestees as white male professionals. The conservative Examiner was

critical in its descriptions of the Tay-Bush’s bar scene, but the newspaper
printed a photograph of some of the accused bar patrons: all white males

wearing suits and ties. Moreover, the newspaper calmly reported that the

Mattachine Society hoped to use the raid to build “tolerance” for gay and

lesbian people.5 The Chronicle offered a more sympathetic depiction of the
bargoers and featured Bob Johnson, the white, gay, twenty-seven-year-old
owner of the Tay-Bush Inn, as a persecuted professional. Characterizing
Johnson as a martyr who “seemed more concerned about his patrons than

himself,” the newspaper used Johnson’s quotations to mock police for their
parochial and prudish regulation of white men’s sexual privileges.60

As liberals ridiculed the police moderates in the press and at city hall
grew sensitive to charges of outmoded politics. Thus, some pundits began

accepting the professional homosexual bar image and called on law en-
forcement to segregate rather than eradicate gay bars. Two months before

the Tay-Bush raid Guy Wright, a local newspaper columnist, stated that
while he was neither “tolerant” nor “even broadminded” on the subject of

male homosexuality, he believed that local law enforcement should ease its
pressure on gay bars and return to its earlier and less aggressive closeting

strategy. Wright argued that the closures of gay bars would simply push gay

men into heterosexual bars. But while Wright was ostensibly disgusted by
the prospect of his own intimate contact with gay men, he also character-

ized the city’s acceptance of closeted gay bars as a sign of its cosmopolitan
self-assuredness. Remarking on the new law enforcement regime, Wright
turned his scorn toward the ABC agents and quipped: “None of the cus-
tomers is shocked by anything that goes on [in gay bars], only the tourists
from the liquor board.”6′

Chief Cahill could afford to ignore the liberal critics and even the calls by
moderates for turning a blind eye to the gay bars. As an appointed official
with strong backing by city hail, Cahill remained relatively insulated from
shifts in public sentiment. His job security during the 1950s had rested on
his ability to rid the department of corruption; in the 1960s it was based
on his capacity to control mass demonstrations and the supposed threat of
black male violence. He therefore ignored the subtle gestures of support for
gay bars, and the SFPD continued warning the city of the dangers lurking

59″Vice Raid Justified-Mayor,” San Francisco Examiner, 15 August 1961: 12; and
“Vice Case to Test Public ‘Tolerance,'” San Francisco Examiner, 16 August 1961: 1. There

is evidence that in other cities police used raids to compel bar owners to make extortion
payments. It is probable that some raids were used for this purpose in San Francisco prior to

Mayor Christopher’s tenure. But after the gayola scandal Mayor Christopher and Chief Cahill

directed raids to eliminate payola opportunities.

6″Big Sex-Raid-Cops Arrest 103,” San Francisco Chronicle, 14 August 1961: 3.
6″”Separate Barrooms for the ‘Third Sex’?” San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, 26 June

1961: 15.

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484 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

within the city’s homosexual closet. After closing the Tay-Bush Inn, for
instance, police spokesmen emphasized the same-sex dancing they claimed
had been occurring inside the bar as a sign of its immorality.62

Mayor Christopher, however, was much more vulnerable to shifts in
public opinion. Sensing a political danger in his personal connection to the
SFPD’s gay bar raids, he adjusted his own rhetoric. Rather than characteriz-
ing homosexual people as an insidious sexual threat, Christopher rationalized
the Tay-Bush’s closure as a response to dangers inherent in the crowded
bar’s alleged violations of fire codes. The mayor insinuated that the SFPD’s
goal was to maintain a protective closet for homosexuals in San Francisco
and not to break open a dangerous or disruptive one. Christopher’s shift
in language reflected a change in policy. To distance Christopher from the
gay bar crackdown Cahill decreased his department’s gay bar raids. Arrests
for lewd and indecent acts, lewd conduct, lewd vagrancy, and visitor to a
disorderly house therefore dropped from 730 in 1961 to 217 in 1962 and
to 195 in 1963. (These four charges were the most common accusations
the SFPD used against homosexual bar patrons, but the department did
not identify gay and lesbian bar arrests specifically. )63

After its formation the Tavern Guild also grew increasingly assertive
in its legal challenges to police raids throughout the early 1960s. This

62San Francisco Chronicle, 14 August 1961: 3.
63″Vice Raid Justified-Mayor,” San Francisco Examiner, 15 August 1961: 1; the San

Francisco Police Department, City of San Francisco, Annual Reports, “Adults Arrested and

Charged by Sex and Race” (San Francisco, 1961, 1962, and 1963), San Francisco Public Li-

brary. D’Emilio has noted that Christopher “‘applauded’ the raid as ‘justified’ and praised the

police for ‘being on the right track'” (184). This is correct but misses the important change

in how the mayor explained the term “justified.” Boyd attributes the post-1961 decline in

high-profile raids to the state legislature’s rewriting of California vagrancy law, Penal Code

647a, which included the offenses of “disorderly conduct,” “solicitation,” and “lewd vagrancy.”
She mistakenly states that when the legislators revised the vagrancy code in June 1961, they

circumscribed the police’s ability to arrest homosexual people for their gay status and thus

denied officers the “power to control and dominate queer public space” (Boyd, 216-19). But
while the legislature reformed the vagrancy code to protect most citizens from status-based

charges, the lawmakers specifically strengthened the codes targeting gay and lesbian people.

As in the Valler,ga decision, Penal Code 647a allowed police to criminalize homosexual people
by making criminal vagrants of anyone who solicited others to engage in “lewd or dissolute

conduct in any public place or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view,”
an extended definition of space that spoke directly to the semipublic, semiprivate nature of
bars. Penal Code 647a also allowed police to consider as vagrants all persons who loitered at

a public toilet or who loitered around “any school or public place which children attend or
normally congregate.” In the 1960s American Civil Liberties Union lawyers and other civil
libertics attorneys worked to constrict and overturn these provisions, primarily using argu-
ments about the law’s vagueness. Penal Code 647a remained on the books, however, until

it was overturned in the 1979 Pryor v. Municipal Court case, when a superior court judge
accepted the argument that the statute violated due-process guarantees because it was vague

and arbitrarily enforced only against gay men. See “Appellant’s Opening Brief,” Stoumen v.
Munro, 176-77; ACLU News, July 1961: 3, July 1963: 2, August 1963: 1, and October

1964: 1; and Eskridge, 110.

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Gayola 485

aggressiveness and the SFPD’s continued repression fueled a rise in bar

owner participation in the guild. In the latter half of 1964 the ebb and
flow of the Tavern Guild’s active membership seems to have given way to

a steady and stable growth, and by November the guild’s minutes were
proclaiming that attendance “seems to get larger at every meeting.”64
With growing energy and funds the Tavern Guild in the mid-1960s stood

securely at the center of the city’s burgeoning gay rights movement.

THE NEW YEAR’S DAY BALL AND THE LIBERATION OF

SAN FRANCISco’s GAY AND LESBIAN BARs

By the end of 1964 gay bar owners had used the professionalization move-

ment to constrict the policing options open to patrol officers and fostered

a public image that had somewhat restrained homophobes in city hall. But

bar owners still had little power over Chief Cahill. Indeed, while the SFPD
leader had curtailed the department’s attention-grabbing raids, he quietly

continued supplying the ABC with officers in its ongoing antihomosexual
bar drive. In a city that was by that date dominated by concerns about black
violence and mass protests bar owners could not build enough political

pressure to threaten the police chief’s job security. The 1965 New Year’s
Day Ball, however, provided bar owners with a new opportunity to coerce

the chief and a new legal avenue by which to end police repression.

In 1964 the Tavern Guild used its fund-raising capabilities to help

launch an effort to bring together San Francisco’s homosexual activists
and the local progressive Protestant clergy. Traditionally, San Francisco’s
gay and lesbian activist groups had chosen obscure and unrevealing names
for their organizations in order to shield them from public scrutiny. But
by this point the gay and lesbian organizers of this effort felt comfort-
able enough with their own professional image and protected by the
legitimizing presence of the clergymen that they named this alliance the
Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH). The creation of the
CRH marks the first time in American history that an organization used
the word “homosexual” in its title.65

“Minutes, 24 November 1964, written on 3 December 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1,
folder 13.

65″Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Interview,” 1 May 1990, 16-17, Scott Bishop Papers, San
Francisco Public Library (hereafter SFPL), no. 90-11, box 1, folder 10; and “Cops Invade
Homosexual Benefit Ball,” San Francisco Chronick, 2 January 1965: 12. The CRH worked

to repay the Tavern Guild for its funding by excrting pressure on the ABC. A few days after
six ministers from CRH conferred with the state liquor agency an ABC hearing board officer

broke from convention and ruled against an ABC agent making charges in a B-girl case. (A
B-girl was a covert employee of the bar who induced male patrons to buy her cocktails. The
bartender secretly served the B-girl nonalcoholic drinks so that she could continue encourag-

ing more drink orders.) The ABC hearing officer criticized the manner in which the agent

misrepresented himself in gathering the evidence. Minutes, 24 November 1964, written 3
December 1964, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, folder 13.

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486 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

On 1 January 1965 the CRH held a New Year’s Day Ball to celebrate

its incorporation. The SFPD initially signed off on the dance and granted

the temporary license for the event, but Chief Cahill backpedaled on the
department’s agreement, and on the night of the dance officers arrived with
floodlights, cameras, and a stack of blank identity information cards. These
scare tactics succeeded in sending a majority of the fifteen hundred attendees

back home, but five or six hundred braved the situation and passed by the

SFPD’s flashing camera bulbs.’6
The CRH’s religious leaders attempted to reason with the police, but

their efforts were hampered by the conspicuous absence of Catholic priests
from their organization. In the mid-1960s the SFPD was still a force staffed
overwhelmingly by Catholics, and neither the Catholic Church nor the city’s

Catholic lay groups (which led local Catholic responses to so-called vice issues

until 1966) were pressuring the department to rethink its policing policies
toward gay and lesbian San Franciscans. Indeed, the police may even have
viewed the coalition of homosexuals and Protestants as a threat to the city’s

old Catholic tradition.67 Thus, the police attempted to enter the ballroom
illegally to find building code violations and arrested four CRH organizers
who impeded their way.’ When the police realized that they could not muster
any grounds on which to arrest the revelers, they lined up outside on the

street and tried to incite a riot by taunting the guests in the ballroom. The
CRH organizers linked their arms across the building’s entrance to restrain
the increasingly agitated dancers, and the police finally relented and left the
event. Although the SFPD failed to make substantial arrests, the department
probably viewed the evening as a success. As in earlier bar busts, the SFPD
had been primarily interested in embarrassing gay and lesbian people and
disrupting their attempts to socialize in public view.69

The following day the CRH struck back with a news conference in which
the ministers and their wives lined up before the media cameras and railed
against the police department for its tactics. The SFPD paid little attention to
these protests, but the subsequent trial of the four CRH organizers arrested

‘”Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Interview,” 19, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-11,
box 1, folder 9.

67″Robert Cromey Interview,” 25 April 1990, 11, 12, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no.
90-1 1, box 1, folder 8; and “Herb Donaldson Interview,” 14 February 1990, 2, Scott Bishop
Papers, SFPL, no. 90-1 1, box 1, folder 5. The participation of the Protestant ministers in the
CRH did not necessarily reflect or lead to a more progressive attitude toward San Francisco’s

homosexual population by the Protestant population at large. Many of CRH’s most forceful
religious spokesmen received their salaries from national or state organizations and were on
special assignment or serving in missionary capacities. These religious leaders therefore did
not have to answer to local congregations. See “Charles Lewis Interview,” tape 1, “Shedding
a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 02-169.

‘”Herb Donaldson Interview,” 50, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 97-
025; and “Charles Lewis Interview,” tape 1, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no.
02-169.

69ACLU News, February 1965: 4; Bob Ross interview; and Boyd, 229.

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Gayola 487

that night represented a turning point in relations between the police and
the local homosexual community.70

Fortuitously for the gay and lesbian activists involved, the trial of the four
CRH organizers landed in the courtroom of Judge Leo Friedman, a liberal
former defense attorney. For the past decade and a half the city’s more con-
servative judges had allowed police to give contradictory, inaccurate, and
formulaic testimony in their antigay cases, but when the SFPD witnesses in
the CRH trial failed to match their testimony to the charges they had issued,
Friedman took the officers to task. Conducting much of the cross-examination
himself, Judge Friedman ultimately directed the jury to deliver a not-guilty
verdict. Momentously, Friedman then turned to the defendants and offered
them the opportunity to file a wrongful arrest lawsuit.71

The gayola scandal had consolidated the responsibility over gay bars into
the hands of the police chief, and the CRH now threatened Chief Cahill
with a potential 1.5-nillion-dollar lawsuit. Cahill responded by ceasing the
police department’s large-scale bar raids, and the chief cut off his supply
of plainclothes officers to the ABC. This latter decision left the ABC too
undermanned to enforce liquor laws, and the agency was quickly over-
whelmed by an upswing in gay and lesbian drinking establishments. Thus,
through their manipulation of the SFPD and the police professionalization
movement San Francisco’s homosexual bar owners successfully established
a stable social world for the city’s gay and lesbian community.72

The gay and lesbian community’s victory over the police department
was far from complete. Chief Cahill had ended the department’s support of

the ABC and had eliminated large-scale police actions, but the continued

70’Angry Ministers Rip Police,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 January 1965: IA; and “Robert
Cromey Interview,” 25 April 1990, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-11, box 1, folder 8.

71″Witness Breaks up a Courtroom,” San Francisco Chronick, 11 February 1965: 2; “Trial
Halted on Technicality,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 February 1965: 3; “Judge’s Q. and A.

on Raid,” San Francisco Examiner, 11 February 1965: 9; ‘Court Orders Jury to Free 4 in
Trial,” San Francisco Examiner, 12 February 1965: 14; and “Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin

Interview,” 20, Scott Bishop Papers, SFPL, no. 90-11, box 1, folder 9. Serving as assistant

district attorney from 1920 to 1925, Friedman earned notoriety for prosecuting the Roscoe

“Fatty” Arbuckle case. Friedman then served nearly four decades as a criminal lawyer before

his election to the bench in 1963. See “Friedman’s Big Hurdle to Municipal Court,” San

Francisco Examiner, 6 November 1963: A.

72After nearly a decade the lawsuit was settled out of court for $50. “Bob Ross Interview,”

57, “Shedding a Straight Jacket,” GLBTHS, no. 98-012; and Bob Ross interview. The New
Year’s Day Ball is a well-covered subject in the historiography of gay and lesbian San Francisco,

but historians have not previously discussed the potential lawsuit or its importance. Rather,

scholars have focused on the public support the ball organizers received from the city’s
Protcstant clergy and the acquittal the CRH ministers won in their trial. These studies have

then assumed that this negative publicity and failed prosecution persuaded the police to curb

their repression of gay bars. But the SFPD frequently ignored press conferences and critical
newspaper reports, and police officers could still expect to secure convictions from the city’s
more conservative judges. For previous discussions of the ministers’ press conference and the
CRH trial sce Boyd, 234-35; and D’Emilio, 194-95.

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488 CHRISTOPHER AGEE

diffuse supervision and control of the SFPD’s lower ranks made the chief
largely unaccountable for individual acts of police harassment and brutal-

ity.73 Indeed, many rank-and-file officers remained only vaguely aware or
completely ignorant of the raid on the CRH New Year’s Day Ball and its

aftermath.74 Thus, in June 1965 the Tavern Guild worked to aid four gay
men who had been severely beaten and unlawfully detained by eight po-

lice officers. To establish an organized response system to these individual
encounters between homosexuals and policemen, gay and lesbian activists

created Citizens Alert, a police-brutality hotline service. Citizens Alert
ultimately failed to reduce police brutality, but the organization proved an
important vehicle in building alliances between gay and lesbian organizers
and activists representing the city’s other ethnic and racial communities
who had also experienced police brutality.75 Gay and lesbian activists also
started working to expand their political reach beyond their taverns and
into the halls of government itself now that their bars were protected from
police repression and their status as white professionals was more firmly

established. A new period in San Francisco’s homosexual history began as
leadership in the homosexual movement passed from gay and lesbian bar
owners into the hands of full-time activists, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Moving police politics to the center of gay civil rights history reveals
how San Francisco’s gay bar owners used an existing discourse about police
organizational reform to integrate their movement into the mainstream

political sphere. Earlier studies of gay and lesbian civil rights have discussed

the cultural changes that allowed activists to achieve access to public space
and a mainstream political voice. In the best discussion of California’s
postwar cultural revolution Richard Candida Smith’s Utopia and Dissent

shows how legal debates over the censorship of avant-garde art broadened
mainstream acceptance of marginal gender and sexual behavior. Gay bar
raids, Nan Boyd and John D’Emilio argue, allowed bar owners to capitalize
on the electorate’s increasing tolerance for sexual pluralism. The media’s
coverage of the bar raids provided bar owners with a venue in which to
advertise themselves as culturally tolerable. Shifts in culture certainly helped

7While Cahill could expose a police officer’s shakedown practices through a prearranged

sting, the chief could not re-create acts of brutality. Community members thus had more

difficulty holding Cahill accountable for not putting an end to brutality.

71 interviewed seven former SFPD officers who were walking a beat in 1965, and only
two, both of whom eventually formed political alliances with gay and lesbian activists, rccalled

the ball or the trial.

75Minutes, 22 June 1965, written 1 July 1965, TGSF, GLBTHS, box 1, foldcr 14; and

John Mindermann interview. On Citizens Alert see San Francisco Chronick, 27 August 1967:

20. In 1965 the Tavern Guild also created an agreement with a bail bond agency in which the

agency examined the daily arrest records and notified the guild of any gay-related arrests that

had occurred in Tavern Guild bars. See Minutes, 22 June 1965, written 1 July 1965, TGSF,

GLBTHS, box 1, folder 14.

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Gayola 489

bar owners to win public sympathy, but scholars have overemphasized the
role of public opinion in shaping SFPD policies. Gay and lesbian activists
never created a public outcry powerful enough to threaten the job security
of San Francisco police officers. Bar owners, however, used their clashes
with the police to forge alliances with political elites engaged in an ongoing
debate over police corruption and professionalization.

Between the end of World War II and 1966 the relationship between
the SFPD and San Francisco’s homosexual bars passed through three major
stages. In the first period, the years before 1960, city leaders allowed patrol

officers broad discretion in both their definitions of and responses to criminal
and homosexual behavior. Some police chose to regulate gay establishments
through extortion, but as early as the mid-1950s business leaders began
expressing concern over the SFPD’s payola practices. The second stage, ini-
tiated by the gayola scandal of 1960, freed gay bars from extortion. Power
over the SFPD’s gay bar policy then shifted into the hands of the mayor
and the chief of police. At the same time these two civic leaders sought to
eliminate the establishments that had provided the payola networks, and so
they initiated raids on disreputable bars and supported state liquor agents in
their undercover policing of gay and lesbian establishments. This centralized
policing regime proved far more effective at closing homosexual bars, but
the consolidation of policing power by the high brass also provided gay bar
owners with more concrete targets. Bar owners removed the mayor from
the campaign against gay bars by building alliances with a new generation of
liberals. Even while it was difficult to apply the same political intimidation
to the chief of police, the gay bars and liberals together greatly expanded the
terms of the police professionalization debate. By 1965 the growing alliance
between homosexuals and liberals had found its weak spot in the SFPD in
the CRH’s potential lawsuit. At this point the police-gay bar relationship
entered a third stage. Gay and lesbian bar owners used both their status as

legitimate civic participants and their legal claim to force the chief of police
to end the department’s organized pressure on gay bars.

The story of liberation for San Francisco’s homosexual bars suggests

how important it is for scholars of both politics and sexuality to reassess
the relationship between urban citizens and urban government during the
post-World War II era. Previous historians have correctly noted the massive
expansion and centralization of government authority during the cold war
period, but this trend did not always produce a single coordinated effect.
For many marginalized San Franciscans beat patrol officers represented the
government officials with whom they had the most day-to-day contact, and
these relationships were highly contingent on the individual actors on the
street. By exploiting the politics of policing, San Francisco’s gay and lesbian bar
owners used their street-level conflicts with the police to win unprecedented
civic legitimacy.

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• Contents

462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489

• Issue Table of Contents

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. i-iv+355-536
Volume Information [pp. 529-535]
Front Matter [pp. i-iii]
Editor’s Note: Mathew Kuefler [p. iv]
Methods
Queer Hoover: Sex, Lies, and Political History [pp. 355-381]
Studies
Children of Disorder: Clerical Parentage, Illegitimacy, and Reform in the Middle Ages [pp. 382-407]
Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy: Eighteenth-Century English Representations of Sapphism [pp. 408-431]
Authenticity and Asceticism: Discourse and Performance in Nude Culture and Health Reform in Belgium, 1920-1940 [pp. 432-461]
Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Francisco’s Gay Bars, 1950-1968 [pp. 462-489]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 490-491]
Review: untitled [pp. 492-494]
Review: untitled [pp. 495-499]
Review: untitled [pp. 499-502]
Review: untitled [pp. 502-508]
Review: untitled [pp. 508-512]
Review: untitled [pp. 512-517]
Review: untitled [pp. 517-521]
Books of Critical Interest [pp. 522-524]
Back Matter [pp. 525-536]

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ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay
and Trans Activism, 1964-2003

Devor, Aaron H.
Matte, Nicholas.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 10, Number
2, 2004, pp. 179-209 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Rutgers University at 03/18/11 4:50PM GMT

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v010/10.2devor.html

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v010/10.2devor.html

ONE INC. AND REED ERICKSON
The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism,

1964 –2003

Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte

People who are today known as transgendered and transsexual have always been
present in homosexual rights movements. Their presence and contributions, how-
ever, have not always been fully acknowledged or appreciated. As in many other
social reform movements, collective activism in gay and lesbian social movements
is based on a shared collective identity. Homosexual collective identity, especially
in the days before queer politics, was largely framed as inborn, like an ethnicity,
and based primarily on sexual desires for persons of the same sex and gender.1

However, such definitions make sense only when founded on clearly delineated
distinctions between sexes and genders. It becomes considerably harder to delin-
eate who is gay and who is lesbian when it is not clear who is a male or a man and
who is a female or a woman. Like bisexual people, transgendered and transsexual
people destabilize the otherwise easy division of men and women into the cate-
gories of straight and gay because they are both and/or neither. Thus there is a
long-standing tension over the political terrain of queer politics between gays and
lesbians, on the one hand, and transgendered and transsexual people, on the other.

These boundary issues, with which recent gay and lesbian social move-
ments have struggled, have been intrinsic to definitions of homosexuality since the
concept of homosexual identity was first consolidated at the turn of the last cen-
tury.2 Early sexologists and their contemporaries commonly assumed that homo-
sexuality was epitomized by females who seemed to want to be men and by males
who seemed to want to be women.3 For example, J. Allen Gilbert’s 1920 article in
the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, which described the 1917 gender
transformation of Lucille Hart into Dr. Alan Hart, was titled “Homosexuality and
Its Treatment.”4 Similarly, Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness (1928),
about a (transgendered) female who yearned to be a man, almost single-handedly

GLQ 10:2

pp. 179 – 209

Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press

defined lesbianism in the popular imagination for much of the twentieth century
and is still widely acclaimed as a classic of lesbian literature.5 It is not surprising,
then, that many gays and lesbians who are not transgendered have been eager to
make it clear that they are not, given that their societies commonly use gender
transgressions to enforce homophobia. Yet others, eagerly seeking to valorize pre-
sumed homosexual people from the past, have adopted gender transgressiveness
as a symbol of gay and lesbian pride. Nearly a hundred years since homosexuality
was formally defined, news reports and gay and lesbian activists still routinely
claim both historical and contemporary transgendered people as lesbian and gay.6

Only more recently have differently gendered people named themselves
transgendered and transsexual and begun to build politicized organizations under
self-defined banners.7 During the last half century there also have been many
examples of transgendered and transsexual people being shunned by gay and les-
bian political organizations or having their histories expropriated. Despite this,
many transgendered and transsexual people tried to persuade these organizations
to embrace and endorse the fight for the rights of transgendered and transsexual
people among and around them.8 In this essay, after briefly expanding on this
point, we tell the story of how one transsexual man was instrumental in the found-
ing of one of the oldest and longest-running gay and lesbian groups in the United
States. In doing so, we attempt to recoup a lost bit of the confluent histories of the
transgendered and of the gay and lesbian social movements and to encourage the
reexamination of how these two groups might work together more productively.

Gay/Lesbian and Transgender Politics

The modern gay and lesbian rights movement in the United States reached a mile-
stone in the summer of 1969, when rioting broke out in New York City’s Greenwich
Village. The rioting, which lasted for several nights, began when female and male
transgendered people resisted arrest at a gay bar, the Stonewall Inn.9 Over the next
few years, while gay and lesbian rights organizing expanded rapidly, the distinc-
tive gifts and needs of transgendered people were often marginalized by the lead-
ership of early gay and lesbian organizations. Bull daggers and drag queens,
transgendered and transsexual people, were largely treated as embarrassments in
the “legitimate” fight for tolerance, acceptance, and equal rights. Several inci-
dents in the 1970s and 1990s were flash points for the smoldering tensions between
homosexual people trying to attain social and political weight for themselves and
others who hoped to achieve equal rights for all. These incidents illustrated the
perception of some in the homosexual population that transgendered and trans-

180 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 181

sexed people presented too great a challenge to mainstream society and thus dis-
credited the endeavors of more “acceptable” gays and lesbians.

Lesbians and feminists have been more at the forefront of these struggles
than gay men. In particular, some of the most hotly contested battles recently have
been over the question of whether or not male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals are
women for the purposes of inclusion in women-only organizations. Transgendered
and transsexed people have posed the greatest challenges to gender definitions at
a historical moment when women in general, and lesbians in particular, have
begun only recently to feel that they exist as political players in their own right. Yet
as lesbians and feminists have tentatively gained ground, transgendered and
transsexual activists have argued that the identity categories of “lesbian” and
“woman” do not exclude those with histories as men and that these categories are
in fact a matter of subjective self-identification.10 Many lesbian-feminist organiza-
tions and individuals nevertheless insist on a definition of womanhood that leaves
no room for women who were born male.

Just such an interpretive clash occurred at Olivia Records in the 1970s. A
women-only, lesbian-dominated recording company, Olivia was a source of pride
to many feminists. Among the many challenges it faced in its early days was a
paucity of women with well-honed recording skills who wished to work long hours,
for little or no pay, in a women-only company with a questionable financial future.
One such woman, Sandy Stone, who had been a recording engineer for A&M
Records, was an MTF transsexual, a fact she never concealed from the other
women at Olivia.11 When it became more widely known that Stone was an MTF
transsexual, some lesbian feminists were outraged, because they thought of her as
a man who had infiltrated a women-only organization. The other women at Olivia
initially resisted the pressure to request Stone’s resignation, but in 1977 they suc-
cumbed when they believed that the company’s very existence was at stake.12

Two years later, in The Transsexual Empire, lesbian-feminist Janice Ray-
mond further publicized the story of Stone’s tenure at Olivia and used it to support
her case against transsexualism. Raymond vilified transsexualism as a “social
tranquilizer” that was “undercutting the movement to eradicate sex-role stereotyp-
ing and oppression.”13 The persistence of Raymond’s theories about transsexual-
ism became evident once again in a very public way in the early 1990s at the
Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a five-day women-only event run every year
since 1976 on 650 acres of private land.14 It is unclear when transsexual women
began to attend it, but at least one, Nancy Jean Burkholder, had been to it once
before 1991; in that year she was expelled for being transsexual. Over the next
several years controversy raged over who should be allowed into the festival. Les-

bian, gay, and feminist newspapers and magazines were barraged with letters to
the editor. In 1994, 1995, and every year from 1999 to 2003 transgendered and
transsexual activists set up an informational and protest “Camp Trans” outside the
gates of the festival. Eventually, the organizers of the event, bowing to pressure
from this coalition, said that anyone self-defined as a “womyn-born womyn” would
be allowed into the festival.15

The combined gay and lesbian movement has also proved resistant to
aligning itself with transgendered and transsexual people. Prior to the 1993 March
on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Rights, for example, transgendered and
transsexual people worked to have the word transgendered added to the name of
the march. Ultimately, the organizing committee decided to exclude the word from
the title. Furthermore, when the decision was announced at an organizational
meeting, cheers went up from some of those present.16

By 1997 more consistent progress toward unity had been made, with
various gay and lesbian organizations expanding their mandate to include trans-
gender perspectives. In September 1997 the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force
amended its mission statement to include transgendered people.17 Similarly, in
September 1998 Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays voted to
include transgendered people in their mission statement.18 In April 2000 three
transgendered activists were featured speakers at the Millennium March for
Equality in Washington, DC, which drew hundreds of thousands of participants.19

In March 2001 the Human Rights Campaign, which calls itself “America’s largest
gay and lesbian organization,” amended its mission statement to include transgen-
dered people.20

Nevertheless, there remains much work to be done to redress the long-
standing rejection of transgendered and transsexual people by gays and lesbians.
Part of this work is to make gays and lesbians aware of the important contributions
of transgendered and transsexual people to the queer movement. This article seeks
to share the story of one transsexual man who quietly ensured the survival of one
of the first homosexual advocacy organizations, and now the oldest, in the United
States. The article first looks at early gay activism in California in the 1950s; then
it describes the context in which ONE Inc. and the Erickson Educational Founda-
tion (EEF) began to work together to educate society about and to provide support
to homosexual, transgendered, and transsexual people. It looks at the circum-
stances in which the two organizations developed, became partners, and eventually
ended their relationship. Finally, it discusses the history of ONE after it lost the
EEF’s support and explains the importance of the organizations’ partnership to
contemporary queer activists and historians.

182 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Early Gay Activism in California

Early efforts to represent and better the social position of sexual and gender
minorities in the United States were initiated by people with firsthand knowledge
of the pain of trans- and homophobia. They created organizations aimed at undo-
ing the social stigma faced by LGBT people. So when the EEF and ONE began to
work together in 1964, their goals and methods were similar in many ways. Never-
theless, the realities of the social stigmas faced by gays and lesbians, on the one
hand, and by transgendered and transsexual people, on the other, could be quite
different. Thus organizations whose purpose was to eradicate these stigmas also
needed to be different in some respects. ONE’s main focus was the experience of
gay men, whereas the EEF’s was that of gender-variant (particularly transsexual)
people. Nevertheless, Reed Erickson, the foundation’s founder, was keen to have
the EEF work with gay and lesbian groups toward common goals. Therefore a brief
introduction to the two organizations prior to their partnership is in order.

The early 1950s saw the creation of several groups whose aim was to
improve social conditions for sexual minorities. The Knights of the Clock, one of
the first homophile groups in the United States, was formed in Los Angeles in
1950 by Merton Bird and W. Dorr Legg. It continued to meet until the mid-1960s,
and its function was to provide support for gay people in interracial couples.21 The
better-known, longer-lasting Mattachine Society, originally conceived as a politi-
cal and civil rights discussion group for homosexual people, was also formed in
Los Angeles in 1950, by Harry Hay. Other groups soon emerged in southern Cali-
fornia, largely in response to the 1952 arrest of Dale Jennings, a member of the
Mattachine Society, for soliciting an undercover police officer.22 “A veritable flood
of social protest” ensued after Jennings, who later accused the arresting officer of
entrapment, admitted in court that he was homosexual but denied that this made
him guilty of “lewd conduct.”23

It was in this social climate that ONE, whose founders included Legg,
Bird, Jennings, and Martin Block, another former member of the Mattachine Soci-
ety, was incorporated in Los Angeles in October 1952. Taking its name from a
famous quote by Thomas Carlyle, “A mystic bond of brotherhood makes all men
one,” the organization set about “to aid in the social integration and rehabilitation
of the sexual variant.”24 To achieve its goals, which were primarily educational,
ONE would produce publications, provide programs, and stimulate and support
research.25 The progress it made toward accomplishing these goals was impressive
and swift.

For example, by January 1953 ONE had started to disseminate information

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 183

about homosexuality by publishing ONE Magazine, the first publicly available pro-
homosexuality periodical in the United States. The magazine sold for twenty-five
cents and was bravely hawked on the streets of Los Angeles, as well as distributed
through the U.S. postal system.26 By October 1954 the magazine had thousands of
subscribers, but in that month the U.S. Post Office declared it obscene and unmail-
able and confiscated the issue. ONE promptly sued the U.S. Post Office for infringe-
ment of the constitutional right to freedom of the press. The case was not decided
until 1958, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that gay and lesbian publications
were not a priori obscene and could therefore be mailed legally through the postal
system.27 ONE Magazine continued to be published until 1967.28 In 1958 ONE
Institute also began to publish the first scholarly journal devoted to homophile
studies, ONE Institute Quarterly, which today continues as the Journal of Homo-
sexuality and as the online International Gay and Lesbian Review.29 ONE Institute
Quarterly was intended to stimulate further educational publications and research
in “homophile studies,” a field that ONE itself was pioneering.

While ONE Magazine and ONE Institute Quarterly both served as forums
for gay-positive material and research, ONE Inc. also developed more traditional
educational resources primarily through ONE Institute and its “extension divi-
sion,” which prepared short courses and events. For example, in January 1955 it
began to offer a “Mid-Winter Institutes” series, the first of which was held at the
Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. The one-day event consisted of meetings, discus-
sions, a luncheon, and a dinner banquet and featured the psychiatrist Blanche M.
Baker and the psychologist Evelyn Hooker. The second Mid-Winter Institute took
place in January 1956.30 The Mid-Winter Institutes, which continued into the
1980s, expanded to include scholarly talks, roundtable discussions, and theatri-
cal presentations. Several hundred people attended these college-level, nondegree
courses each year.

Through the extension division, ONE Institute also helped establish homo-
phile studies and ONE Inc. chapters outside Los Angeles. Doing so often involved
cooperating with other, local groups. For example, in 1957 ONE Institute offered
a short course in conjunction with the Daughters of Bilitis at the home of Dr. Harry
Benjamin in San Francisco. It also offered lectures in conjunction with local hosts
in Denver (1959), San Francisco (1957, 1960), Chicago (1963, 1971), New York
(1968), and Milwaukee (1973).31 This Sunday-afternoon lecture series, which
began in Los Angeles in 1958, has continued virtually uninterrupted ever since.32

Through the lecture series and the Mid-Winter Institutes, ONE Institute offered a
nondegree component comparable to what was done by extension divisions at com-
munity colleges and universities.

184 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

ONE Institute sought to provide still other formal educational opportuni-
ties. In October 1956 the ONE Institute of Homophile Studies was launched and
held its first classes. The word homophile was chosen over the word homosexual
because the founders of ONE Institute felt that homosexual implied medicalization
and pathologization, whereas the more etymologically correct homophile was less
encumbered by such negative connotations. The institute’s goal was to become a
degree-granting research institution in homophile studies.33 The first course, in
which fourteen students met for two hours per week for nine weeks to study homo-
sexuality in biology and medicine, history, psychology, sociology and anthro-
pology, law, religion, literature and the arts, and philosophy was simply called
“An Introduction to Homophile Studies.” By the 1957– 58 term the institute had
expanded its schedule to two nine-week semesters, and over the next thirty years
it developed a plethora of more specific courses, including “Homosexuality in
History,” “Sociology of Homosexuality,” “The Gay Novel,” “The Theory and Prac-
tice of Homophile Education,” “Homophile Ethics,” “Psychological Theories of
Homosexuality,” “Counseling the Homosexual,” “Law and Law Reform,” and “Near
Eastern Foundations of Biblical Morality” (31– 47).

These early courses represent the beginnings of the multitude of college
and university courses and programs now devoted to the study of lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgendered, and queer people. When ONE Institute began its pio-
neering work, however, the support network at colleges and universities for this
area of study simply did not exist. The financial support for this work had to come
entirely from private sources, and the social stigma associated with offering such
support made trying to entice donors extremely difficult. Although ONE had clear
goals and methods for accomplishing them, the organization was greatly hindered
by its severe shortage of resources. In 1964, badly in need of an injection of fund-
ing, ONE Inc. met Reed Erickson.

Reed Erickson and the EEF

Erickson had launched the EEF in June 1964 as a nonprofit philanthropic organi-
zation funded and controlled, despite having a board of directors, almost entirely
by himself. The foundation’s goals were “to provide assistance and support in
areas where human potential was limited by adverse physical, mental or social
conditions, or where the scope of research was too new, controversial or imagina-
tive to receive traditionally oriented support.”34 A substantial part of the founda-
tion’s work, therefore, was funding what Erickson considered to be progressive proj-
ects. During the twenty years of its existence, the EEF made available millions of

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 185

dollars from Erickson’s personal wealth for the advancement of causes in which he
believed. These fell into three main types, all of them related to social movements
that remain important and relevant today. The three main social movements in
which Erickson invested were those advocating on behalf of homosexuals, those
advocating on behalf of transgendered (specifically, transsexual) people, and those
developing what might now be called the “New Age” movement. He also funded a
wide range of philanthropic projects outside of these major categories, such as the
Interplast (International Plastic Surgery) project, which provided corrective plas-
tic surgeries at no charge to impoverished children in Latin America and Africa.35

Because the EEF was run almost exclusively by Erickson, his personality
was decisive both in the projects that the EEF supported and in the relationship
between the EEF and ONE. Considering that his personal wealth sustained so
many progressive projects, it is surprising that his vast contributions have not been
more widely recognized. His fascinating life story bears on his interaction with
ONE Inc. in important ways. Thus a biographical sketch is in order.

Reed Erickson was born as Rita Mae Erickson in El Paso, Texas, on Octo-
ber 13, 1917. Erickson’s early years were spent in Philadelphia with his mother,
father, and younger sister. After graduating from the Philadelphia High School for
Girls, Erickson enrolled in a secretarial course at Temple University. Soon after,
the family moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Erickson’s father, Robert B.
Erickson, had transferred his lead smelting business. In Baton Rouge, Erickson
attended Louisiana State University and became the first woman graduate from its
School of Mechanical Engineering. Erickson then returned briefly to Philadelphia
to work as an engineer and lived as a lesbian in an intimate relationship for sev-
eral years. There Erickson and a romantic partner took part in Henry Agar Wal-
lace’s 1948 campaign for presidency on behalf of the Progressive Party and were
part of a liberal social group that included many gays and lesbians, as well as civil
rights activists and theater people. Their political involvement led to harassment
by the FBI, and Erickson is rumored to have been blacklisted from several jobs as
a result. By the early 1950s Erickson had returned once again to Baton Rouge to
work in the family companies. At that time Erickson also started an independent
company, Southern Seating, which produced and distributed stadium bleachers.

After Erickson’s father’s death in 1962, Erickson inherited the family busi-
nesses, Schuylkill Products Company Inc. and Schuylkill Lead Corporation, and
ran them successfully for several years before selling them to Arrow Electronics in
1969 for around five million dollars. Erickson eventually amassed a personal for-
tune of over forty million dollars.

In 1963, as a patient of Harry Benjamin, Erickson began the process of

186 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

masculinizing his body and living as Reed Erickson. That year he also married for
the first time. Over the next thirty years he would marry three more times and
become father to two children. In 1972 he moved with his wife and children and
his pet leopard, Henry, to Mazatlán, Mexico, where he had built an opulent home,
which he dubbed the “Love Joy Palace.” Later he moved to southern California.
By the time of his death in 1992 at the age of seventy-four, he had returned to
Mexico, addicted to illegal drugs and a fugitive from U.S. drug indictments.

Before his tragic death Erickson had funded countless researchers and
organizations in the fields of homosexuality, transsexualism, and “New Age” spir-
ituality. While this article’s focus is his contribution to the field of homosexuality,
the EEF was also responsible for many projects in other fields. For example, it
funded Harry Benjamin, John Money, Richard Green, and other pioneers of treat-
ment and research connected with transsexualism. The EEF also provided its own
services, acting as a referral agency, publicizing news about transgender issues,
and giving support to isolated individuals throughout the United States and
around the world. The EEF worked with local and national news agencies to make
information about transgenderism available to the public. In addition, it provided
information for college classes and sent speakers to lecture about their personal
experiences of gender. As a clearinghouse for transgendered and transsexual infor-
mation, the EEF was an essential community resource for transgendered people
and their supporters, all of whom lived and worked in isolation during those years.
The EEF’s work was so valuable to those it benefited that many people have kept
copies of the informational pamphlets produced by the EEF for decades after its
demise. Working in still other fields, Erickson sponsored workshops and research
in spirituality and funded the first printing of A Course in Miracles, a three-volume
set of channeled spiritual guidance that has been translated into nine languages
and has sold over one and a half million copies worldwide.36 He also encouraged
and funded John Lily’s work in dolphin communication.

One of Erickson’s initial interests was to have the EEF work with those in
the field of homosexuality, presumably because of his experience as a lesbian and
because in those early days of trans activism, Erickson would no doubt have seen
the fights for gay and trans rights as naturally allied. The partnership with ONE
was the first one undertaken by the EEF. Eventually, Erickson’s long-standing sup-
port of ONE enabled it to embark on much more elaborate projects than it other-
wise would have been able to do. Further, the patterns of his philanthropy evi-
dence an uncanny ability to pinpoint individuals and organizations who, although
still near the beginnings of their long careers, would later become highly success-
ful at their endeavors. His relationship with ONE was no exception.

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 187

ONE and the EEF: Building a Relationship

By the time ONE Inc. and the EEF came together in 1964, the former had already
established itself as an educational center, whereas Erickson was just starting his
own organization and looking for substantial projects to fund. ONE could help
Erickson do both, and Erickson could help ONE with much-needed financial
resources. Further, both Reed Erickson, the man behind the EEF, and Dorr Legg,
the driving force of ONE, had strong personalities that challenged and stimulated
each other. As such, their partnership had the potential to be highly productive.

ONE Inc. had taken the unprecedented step of opening a business office in
downtown Los Angeles in 1953, and the place had soon become a de facto gay
community center and hotline. The staff answered thousands of calls from people
all over the United States asking for help with problems ranging from housing
to arrests to psychological distress. Such requests came from gay men; lesbian
women; bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual people; parents; and teachers.
Thus ONE, moving toward the fulfillment of its stated goals, had taken steps to
obtain property and to promote the integration of homosexuals into society, but
when its landlord put the building that housed the organization’s offices up for sale
shortly after ONE had moved in, all that ONE had achieved seemed at risk.37

It was through the financial appeal that went out to ONE’s mailing list that
Erickson saw his first potential major funding project. Having spent a frantic year
finding the space at 2256 Venice Boulevard after an earthquake had rendered the
organization’s original offices on Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles unsafe, the
staff at ONE had panicked. Not wanting to be out on the street again so soon, they
decided that they needed to buy the building themselves and sent a request for
donations to their entire mailing list. Few responded, partly because ONE, having
sold ONE Magazine, had lost its nonprofit status and could no longer offer chari-
table tax receipts to donors, and partly because many potential donors feared
being identified with ONE’s high-profile homosexuality.38 Erickson was one of
those few, and his offer of assistance with ONE’s larger mission stood out as both
generous and eccentric.39

According to Legg, “[The] first response was from someone named Reed
Erickson. He made numerous phone calls for extended conversation with me. This
was in 1963 but went no further at the time.”40 Then in July 1964, only days after
the EEF had been incorporated, Erickson asked Legg to see him in Baton Rouge.
Legg remembered that “the people here had said, in regard to going down there,
‘this is just a Southern queen who wants a date for the weekend and was willing to
send an airplane ticket.’ ”41 Nevertheless, Legg bought a new suit to wear in the

188 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

stifling heat and humidity of Baton Rouge in July and boarded an airplane headed
east. Legg recalled:

I was to change in New Orleans and I got on this ancient flapping plane
which just barely cleared the tree tops, flapping on to Baton Rouge from
New Orleans. I got to the airport which was no kind of an airport at all, it
was just a little shanty really with a wire fence. Eight or ten people got off.
Here on the other side of the wire fence was what looked to me like a
blonde high school kid. I said, “Are you Reed Erickson?” and he said,
“Yes.” I just said, “I was expecting somebody older.” And I thought, “Uh-
oh, maybe they were right.” And so we went out and got into this very large
car with a built-in telephone. Well, those weren’t all that common in 1964.
So I thought, “Well there’s money here.”42 . . .

During the drive into town I learned I would be put up at a motel.
The room turned out to be a veritable presidential suite. Once seated there
he said, “Tell me about ONE.” After hours of talk with only an occasional
question from him he said we would now go over to his house to meet his
lover. Entering an old fashioned frame house by the kitchen we went through
rooms with bare floors, Southern summer style. Here was what might be a
Brancusi, there what might be a Matisse. Now we would meet Henry, his
lover. Turning on the lights of a large glassed in porch revealed what looked
to me like a ten foot leopard. My host went in and the two proceeded to
tumble and roll around with great gusto. I was invited to pat the leopard’s
head which I most gingerly did. Back to the motel for a few more questions,
then a laconic, “I’m very glad you have come.” He would return in the
morning for more talk. Still no inkling as to why I was there.

Around noon the next day he said, “We have a small foundation
and have been observing your ONE Institute Quarterly with interest. Do
you have any projects you would like funded?” Did we have projects?
However, I knew that “consulting engineer” on the letterhead meant that
he was not interested in projects as a category but a project capable of
being presented in detail right then. Fortunately the best talked over [proj-
ect] had been our long desired bibliography of homosexuality. If this was to
be funded by him, I was told, I must go back to my board and set up a
foundation for which he would pay. When I reported back to ONE’s board
their skepticism may well be imagined. A blonde high school student who
wrestled with leopards? Clearly the heat in the South had got the best of
me. After some weeks of their amused dismissal of my wild story reluctant

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 189

approval was given to go ahead with the foundation. I flew to New York to
complete the details in his beautiful apartment hard by the United Nations
building. Thus the “Bibliography Project” was then put in motion, and
eventually completed as a two-volume opus of more than 12,700 entries,
by far the largest of its kind even yet [in 1993].43 For the next twenty years
other projects were funded. One day without any special reason the scales
fell from my eyes and I realized that our benefactor, the small blonde boy,
was a female to male transsexual, ONE’s first large contributor.44

A savvy businessperson, Erickson suggested a solution to ONE Inc.’s tax
problem. Under his direction and at his expense, the Institute for the Study of
Human Resources (ISHR), a nonprofit corporation, was founded in August 1964, a
short six weeks after his first meeting with Legg, for the purpose of accepting char-
itable donations. It could then donate the money to ONE Inc. or the ONE Institute
as it saw fit. Legg chose ISHR’s name in recognition of the human resources lost
when repressive social attitudes toward homosexuality stifled the human spirit.45

The title also reflected what the EEF described in an early brochure as the EEF’s
aim: “to assist where human potential [was] limited by physical, mental, or social
conditions, or where the scope of research [was] too new, controversial, or imagi-
native to receive traditionally oriented support.”46 ISHR’s mission greatly resem-
bled the EEF’s, reading in part: “to promote, assist, encourage and foster scientific
research, study and investigation of male and female homosexuality and various
other types of human behavior; to advance education.”47 ONE Inc.’s research,
social service, and educational work now shifted to ISHR, which allowed ONE
Inc. the freedom to work unabashedly for homosexual law reforms.48 ISHR’s act-
ing directors were Legg (who was also the secretary), Tony Reyes, and Don Slater,
all of whom had been among ONE Inc.’s founders. Erickson was named president,
and his soon-to-be wife, Aileen Ashton, was made a founding director, a position
she held until 1975.

While Erickson was interested in promoting homosexual law reform and
ONE’s specific goals, he had his own ideas about the programs that should be
offered and the ways that EEF projects and ONE projects could function together.
Since he controlled the lion’s share of the funding, he greatly influenced ONE’s
direction during these crucial developmental years. His first $2,000 donation went
toward the cost of incorporating ISHR, and by October 1964, even before its
bylaws had been drawn up, he had sent another $1,000.49 In December 1964 a
check for $10,000 arrived at ISHR as a first installment on a “Research Study
Project in the Bibliography of Homosexuality.”50 By January 1965 ISHR was

190 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

receiving $1,000 a month from the EEF.51 From 1964 to 1976, and again from
1980 to 1983, Erickson’s foundation provided 70 – 80 percent of ISHR’s operating
budget.52 In total, ISHR recorded having received over $200,000 in direct grants.53

These monies were channeled through ISHR to ONE Institute’s educational pro-
grams, to the development of the Blanche M. Baker Memorial Library, and to var-
ious other educational and research projects.

Thus the establishment of ISHR allowed Erickson a vehicle through which
to make tax-exempt charitable donations to support the activities of ONE. There
were other donors to ISHR and to ONE, but without Erickson’s extensive, commit-
ted, and regular support, many of ONE’s activities, and perhaps even ONE itself,
would not have been possible to the extent that it was with EEF money.

The projects undertaken by ONE after its partnership with the EEF make
it clear that Erickson had a significant influence over the direction of ONE. While
he may not have been involved in its day-to-day operations as was Dorr Legg, his
financial support encouraged the direction those activities would take. For exam-
ple, one of the first ONE Institute projects, and the lengthiest, that the EEF funded
was the bibliography that Legg had mentioned to Erickson at their first meeting.
Almost from its inception ONE had had plans to address the dearth of positive
information on homosexuality by compiling an annotated bibliography on it, but
the project could not get off the ground until Erickson came on the scene. He
agreed to fund it for three years, and work began in late 1964 under Slater, later
succeeded by Julian Underwood. By 1966 ONE had published the first version of
An Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality.

In 1970, after Underwood’s untimely death, Vern L. Bullough, professor of
history at California State University, Northridge, and vice president of ISHR,
assumed responsibility for the bibliography.54 Bullough had already gathered over
a thousand entries on his own, and he also brought with him an additional several
thousand entries that he had received from Gershon Legman. As an editor, he was
joined by Legg and Barrett Wayne Elcano and by James Kepner Jr., who assisted in
the editing process. A two-volume Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality was
published in 1976 by Garland Press. The completed work contained 12,794 entries
and constituted an unprecedented contribution to the study of homosexuality.55

While the bibliography project came to Erickson for funding preconceived,
several other projects involved Erickson’s own particular interests. For example, in
June 1974 a widely publicized three-day “Forum on Variant Sex Behavior,” orga-
nized by Vern L. and Bonnie Bullough, took place in Los Angeles under the aus-
pices of ISHR.56 The goal of the meeting was to “give physicians, social workers,
psychologists, counselors, clergy, teachers and other professionals a concentrated

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 191

overview of up-to-date information and recent developments concerning some of
the less well known types of behavior.”57 Research findings, workshops, and field
trips covered issues concerning transsexualism, incest, transvestism, sadomaso-
chism, and male and female homosexuality. The speakers included Vern L. Bul-
lough; Zelda Suplee, director of the EEF; Virginia Prince, editor of Transvestia
and widely recognized pioneer of transgender activism; Laud Humphreys, author
of Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places; Christopher Isherwood, widely
acclaimed author; and Evelyn Hooker, author of the revolutionary 1957 study
“The Adjustment of the Male Overt Homosexual.”58 Attendees remembered fondly
how they were moved by Isherwood’s warm and deeply emotional introduction of
banquet speaker Evelyn Hooker.59

In March 1975 a second event, “Sex, Role, and Gender,” took place, with
similar goals and format. This event was particularly innovative in that one could
receive one credit-hour from California State University, Northridge, in return for
attending, making a field trip to a homosexual or transvestite establishment, and
writing a report. The speakers at this event included a panel of people identified
as transvestites and transsexuals. Perhaps the highlight of the event, which drew
several hundred people, was the keynote speech, in which Christine Jorgensen
spoke of her own experiences in changing her sex and gender.60

Clearly, the two events encompassed both the interests of ONE and the
EEF, but the increased presence of transgender and other sexual minority topics
on the agenda was undoubtedly related to Erickson’s influence. The organizations’
other collaborative projects focused on strictly homosexual topics while also rep-
resenting an overlap of the goals and methods of social reform that both organiza-
tions outlined. For example, the social scientific study of homosexuals by homo-
sexuals was unprecedented at the time. Through an ISHR grant from the EEF,
ONE Institute developed a questionnaire that it distributed to its five-thousand-
person mailing list and analyzed during several semesters of ONE Institute Soci-
ology courses (1965 – 69). A first report of the results was presented by Under-
wood at the February 1969 Mid-Winter Institute, and commentary was provided
by a sociology professor, a psychiatrist in private practice, and Richard Green,
director of UCLA’s Gender Identity Clinic. Oddly, although one thousand ques-
tionnaires had been returned, they were winnowed down, for Underwood’s presen-
tation, to four hundred completed by gay men.61

In another significant, although more oblique, contribution to homosexual-
ity research that was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health
(NIMH), Hooker tested expert clinicians to see if they could distinguish between
the psychological projective test results of a nonclinical sample of homosexual

192 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

men and those of a nonclinical sample of heterosexual men. Hooker’s results,
which showed that the clinicians could not distinguish between the two groups,
laid the groundwork for a profound change in professional and public opinion
about homosexuality.62 It was the first empirical evidence that homosexual men
were just as psychologically healthy as heterosexual men. In 1967 Hooker accepted
a request to chair the NIMH’s Task Force on Homosexuality. But the NIMH did
not immediately publish the results of the task force’s study. Hooker had delivered
many lectures for ONE Institute over the years, and the organization was anxious
to see her groundbreaking work made public. With Erickson’s funding, ONE Insti-
tute published the “Final Report of the NIMH Task Force on Homosexuality”
before it was officially published by the U.S. government.63

Although Erickson’s interest and participation in projects such as the pro-
fessional forums on sexual variance and the publications of prohomosexuality
research varied, ONE’s and the EEF’s goals and methods overlapped significantly,
which indicates the importance of their relationship to the development of both
organizations. For example, both were interested in creating social change by
addressing legal inequities. Erickson fully funded a one-month speaking tour of
the United States by the British homosexual legal activist Antony Grey in 1967.
Grey had been a key figure in the campaign to legalize homosexuality in Britain
through the Albany Trust and the Homosexual Law Reform Society, of which he
was secretary (1962 –70). When these organizations were formed, male homosex-
uality was illegal in Britain; male homosexuals were liable for up to two years’
hard labor for engaging in any act of “gross indecency,” whether public or private,
consensual or not. The report of the Wolfenden Committee, released in 1957 (hav-
ing been commissioned in 1954 in response to a series of scandalous court cases
concerning homosexuality), had recommended the legalization of homosexual acts
between consenting adults in private. The Homosexual Law Reform Society had been
set up in the spring of 1958 to pressure the government to act on the recommen-
dation. The Albany Trust, a nonpolitical charitable arm of the society, had been
established “to promote psychological health through research, education, and appro-
priate social action.” Grey was widely acknowledged as a key player in spearhead-
ing the campaign that culminated, almost ten years after the Wolfenden report, in
the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which legalized homosexuality.64

Legg met Grey in England in 1966, shortly before the Sexual Offences Act
was passed.65 A visit from Erickson and his wife soon followed. Then, shortly after
the act had passed, Legg invited Grey to visit the United States. Erickson had
agreed to sponsor a one-month coast-to-coast speaking tour so that the U.S.
homophile movement might benefit from Grey’s knowledge of effective law reform

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 193

tactics.66 Grey arrived in New York City in late October 1967 and was immediately
set to work by Zelda Suplee, an unforgettably dynamic woman who had become
Erickson’s indispensable adviser as well as the public face of the EEF and who
acted as Grey’s press secretary during his visit. During the next four weeks Grey
spoke at more than twenty-five lecture, television, and radio events during what he
later described as “the most hectic four weeks of my life.”67 He also met with edi-
tors, lawyers, psychologists, clergy, police, and homophile groups in New York
City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, and with various
professional groups, including researchers at the Kinsey Institute for Research in
Sex, Gender, and Reproduction in Bloomington, Indiana; the psychologist Wardell
Pomeroy (who worked closely with Alfred Kinsey); the endocrinologist Harry Ben-
jamin (who had brought transsexualism to the attention of the medical commu-
nity); and the lawyer Morris Ernst (who had defended the work of both Havelock
Ellis and James Joyce against censorship charges). Grey was accompanied on this
exhausting but comfortably appointed tour by Dorr Legg, and the entire mission
was funded by Erickson’s EEF through ISHR.68

Both ONE and the EEF were interested in providing educational materials
for social change. For ONE, this interest had led to a sharp focus on formal edu-
cational opportunities in homophile studies, which the EEF eagerly and gener-
ously supported. Perhaps ONE’s proudest accomplishment came in August 1981,
when it received authorization from the state of California to be the first U.S. insti-
tution of higher learning to offer master’s and doctoral degrees in homophile stud-
ies. Courses began in October, and the first degrees were awarded on January 30,
1982, at the thirtieth-anniversary celebration of the founding of ONE Inc. On this
auspicious occasion, over six hundred people gathered in the Wilshire Room of
the Los Angeles Hilton Hotel saw Erickson and Isherwood awarded honorary doc-
torates.69 Remarkably, although Erickson was already a degree holder, this was the
first and only college degree that Isherwood had at that time yet received.

Soon after the creation of the ONE Institute graduate school, Erickson sug-
gested that a campus should be found to house the school, its libraries, ONE’s
business and “community center” offices, and the EEF’s offices. The foundation’s
offices in Baton Rouge and New York City, like ONE’s business offices, played a
key role as a place to which transgendered and transsexual people could go for
education and support. The EEF also had mailing addresses in El Paso, Texas;
Los Angeles and Ojai, California; Phoenix, Arizona; and Panama City. Thus the
idea of having one centralized location from which to run all these operations
(including ONE and its projects) seemed timely. The idea was attractive to ONE
because, among other reasons, the owner of 2256 Venice Boulevard had neglected

194 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

the building, and its maintenance problems were becoming desperate.70 Late in
1982 Legg met with real estate agent James Dunham, who then helped Erickson
negotiate the purchase of an impressive property called “the Milbank Estate,”
which Erickson had seen only in photographs.71 Dunham recalled Erickson telling
him, “I am buying this property for ONE; we will show the straight world what we
can do.”72 Elizabeth Clare Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant, which
occupied the estate at that time, was planning to move its headquarters to Mon-
tana. After some wrangling, a sale price of $1.9 million was agreed upon. However,
as the completion of the deal neared, there was some concern that the church
would not go through with the sale if it knew that the property would be used by a
homosexual organization. For this reason, and also because of tax considerations,
the ownership of the property was made out to the EEF.73 A down payment of
$95,000 was made, with $1.4 million due at the closing on February 17, 1983,
and another $400,000 to be paid out by Erickson over the next four years.74

A few days before the closing, the EEF’s secretary informed the Church
Universal and Triumphant that the $1.4 million would not be available until Feb-
ruary 26, nine days later than agreed. The church threatened legal action if the
payment was late.75 So Erickson retrieved $1.4 million in South African kruger-
rands he had stashed in a bank vault. On February 17 representatives from the
church came to his home in Ojai in two cars and a recreational vehicle, accompa-
nied by security guards and a large dog, to collect the krugerrands. For more than
three hours, two of the men counted the gold coins and brought them to other men
waiting outside in a camper, who weighed them and put them into plastic coin
holders. When everyone was satisfied that the amount was correct, the people from
the church, the security guards, and dog all went to a Wilshire Boulevard coin
dealership, where the coins were delivered and commemorative photographs were
taken.76 At this point the deal between Erickson and the church was complete, and
the coins were the property of the church. However, the coin dealership would
accept only a limited amount of gold per day, so a week passed before all of it had
changed hands. At the beginning of that week gold was selling at $508 an ounce,
but by the end of the week the price had dropped to $368. The church lost a con-
siderable sum of money as a result, and Erickson, who took some pleasure in his
business acumen, claimed to have personally driven the price of gold down
through this one transaction.77

Over the next six weeks, a crew of people from ONE unearthed and moved
its library, archives, and other possessions out of the building on Venice Boule-
vard, where the organization had been located for twenty-two years. ONE proudly
proclaimed: “A landmark event will be celebrated here May 1 [1983] when ONE

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 195

Institute announces its occupancy of the historic Milbank Estate as its permanent
campus for Homophile studies, the first such campus of its kind in the world.”78

Eight months later, on January 29, 1984, ONE Institute held an open house and
convocation ceremony at the Milbank mansion during which they awarded one
master’s and two doctoral degrees in homophile studies, the world’s first in that
discipline.79

ONE and Erickson: The Unraveling of a Relation

Unfortunately, it seemed that no sooner had the ink dried on the contract for the
Milbank purchase than the first signs of trouble in the relationship between Erick-
son and ONE began to surface. The deed to the property was supposed to have
been turned over to ONE at a gala event on May 1, 1983, but the transfer was post-
poned until June 1, and then Erickson apparently abandoned the idea altogether.80

The problems between ONE and Erickson resulted partly from the intrusion of
Erickson’s personal problems into the business partnership, partly from long-
standing concerns about the relationship between trans and gay politics in the col-
laborative efforts of ONE and the EEF, and partly from Erickson’s desire to use
ONE to support projects unrelated to homosexuality.

Like many others, Erickson had experimented with illegal drugs during the
previous decade. In the beginning, his use was purely recreational and did not
interfere with his ability to conduct his business interests effectively. However, by
the early 1980s he had developed a serious drug dependency. Erickson became a
regular user of ketamine, a veterinary anesthetic that produced hallucinations in
humans, and of cocaine.81 In addition, he used other recreational drugs, although
less extensively. By the time of the Milbank Estate purchase, the cumulative
effects of Erickson’s drug use were profound. He was frequently difficult to deal
with and was often highly distrustful and suspicious of others, particularly those
closest to him. He had become uncharacteristically inattentive to his business
interests, forgetful, and increasingly unreliable.82 This trend culminated in a
series of arrests for drug offenses during the 1980s. Erickson’s subsequent failures
to appear in court eventually resulted in the forfeiture of several pieces of real
estate and of large sums of money.83 He was also suffering from bladder cancer,
which left him unable to walk and semiconscious for days at a time.84

At the same time, tensions were increasing among ONE’s leadership con-
cerning the direction in which Erickson’s funding was taking them. Jim Kepner
later placed more of the blame for the break between Erickson and ONE on Legg
than on Erickson. He recalled that Legg “went a little ways off of his rocker” when

196 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Erickson refused to turn over the deed to the Milbank estate. But the trouble had
started even earlier:

When ONE got the degree-granting privileges . . . Reed immediately
wanted several of his metaphysical and other of his acquaintances, and
probably some people involved with dope, to be given degrees. And Dorr
flatly refused. Well, under the circumstances, since Reed was paying the
bill, I would say Dorr made a serious blunder. Or he should have at least
tried to keep negotiations open in some way. . . . It [also] reached the point
where I began to get kind of nervous: is ONE primarily a homophile orga-
nization, or is it a transsexual organization? I felt it got kind of out of bal-
ance. I felt that we support these people on our borders. If transsexuals
define themselves as gay, well then, they’re part of our community; if they
define themselves as straight, well, we’ll counsel them or help them or so
on, but they’re not really part of our community, by their own definition.85

Clearly, Erickson’s ideas about who was “on the borders” were markedly different
from Legg’s and Kepner’s. Additionally, Erickson’s drug use and increasingly con-
trolling support of ONE led to a growing confusion among ONE’s leaders about
ONE’s role in relation to other EEF projects.

Less than two weeks before ONE was to hold the convocation and open
house at Milbank, and three weeks after Erickson’s first arrest for possession of
illegal drugs, ONE received a letter from Erickson in which his growing mental
instability was evident. In that letter he stated: “I find I can no longer support one
of my long-time favorite projects. If you do not find funding within two weeks from
today (I already discussed this with you about a week ago), I must sell the prop-
erty.”86 Attempts to negotiate a tenancy for ONE quickly failed. By May 1984
Erickson was trying to evict ONE from the premises and had filed suit against
ONE in state court.

In light of Erickson’s aggressive actions (and of those whom he hired) and
after having moved from a low-rent location on Venice Boulevard to the expensive
Milbank property, ONE faced possible ruin. Losing Erickson’s support was devas-
tating to the organization. To protect its interests, ONE obtained a series of restrain-
ing orders and injunctions against Erickson and the EEF. The effort of defending
their hold on the Milbank estate effectively paralyzed much of ONE’s public oper-
ations.87 By 1986 ONE Institute had ceased to be an authorized degree-granting
institution under California State law.88 It did, however, continue to publish the
ONE Newsletter, keep the library open for researchers, and offer the ONE lecture
series.89

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 197

The battle for Milbank raged from 1983 to 1993. At times, Erickson called
in armed guards to restrict access to the grounds. He admitted other tenants to the
upper two floors of one of the houses that ONE was not occupying. Members of his
family also became resident. ONE’s files were rifled, and items went missing.
ONE’s leaders presumed that it was Erickson’s doing. Legg and Erickson filed suit
against each other. Seventy years old and increasingly disabled by his medical
conditions and drug problem, Erickson then fled to Mexico to escape arrest on
drug charges. Legg, himself eighty years old, still proved an able fighter. He later
recalled with great enthusiasm the various altercations between Erickson and him-
self in the battle for control over Milbank, claiming that on one occasion he had
been trapped inside the estate when the gates were welded shut and that on
another Erickson had directed contractors to weld Legg’s hands to the gates if he
refused to move them.90

Late in 1988, Erickson’s daughter Monica, then twenty years old, was
appointed conservator of his affairs due to Erickson’s ill health. In conjunction
with her mother, Erickson’s ex-wife Aileen, she continued the fight for possession
and ownership of the Milbank estate. But on April 4, 1990, the title to Milbank
was conveyed by court order to ONE and ISHR. That order was overturned by an
appellate court and a new trial was ordered.91 Appeals launched on behalf of the
EEF and Erickson, who died early in 1992, continued until October of that year,
when Monica Erickson, now his executor, agreed to a settlement. The property was
to be divided between Erickson’s heirs and ISHR. Monica Erickson took posses-
sion of the Milbank house, the tennis courts, and the surrounding lands, whereas
ISHR received the McFie house, also known as the Arlington house; the chauf-
feur’s quarters; a meditation sanctuary; and a few smaller service buildings. ISHR
agreed to but never mounted a plaque on the Arlington house that was to acknowl-
edge it as a gift from Reed Erickson and rename it Erickson House.92 In 1992 the
assessed value of the property received by ONE was over one million dollars.93 By
August 1, 1993, ONE had vacated the portion of the estate awarded to Monica
Erickson and had turned the keys over to her.94

ONE Inc. after Erickson

As the relationship between Erickson and ONE deteriorated, so too had the abil-
ity of ONE to function at full capacity. For a decade most of ONE’s human and
financial resources had been engaged in the fight for the Milbank property. More-
over, the organization’s primary source of income, the EEF’s grants to ISHR, had
ceased. For the first few years, Dorr Legg, Professor Walter L. Williams of the Uni-

198 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

versity of Southern California, and a few others had continued to provide courses
to a handful of graduate students, but by the late 1980s only Legg still taught at
the ONE Institute graduate school. Although he continued to do so until his death
in 1994,95 the institute granted no more degrees.

ONE’s monthly lecture series continued at the Milbank property during the
dispute. At first, the lectures were presented on the main floor of the Milbank
house. When that building passed out of ONE’s possession, the series moved to
the Arlington house. In March 1995 ONE sold the Arlington house both to repay
debts incurred after Erickson’s funding had stopped and to pay back taxes on the
portion of the Milbank property that ONE had received in the settlement.96 The
lecture series then moved to the chauffeur’s quarters. After that too was sold in
early 1997, the University of Southern California agreed to sponsor the lecture
series, but the response on campus was sporadic. In 1998 the series was incorpo-
rated as “Community and Conversation Groups” into the Los Angeles Gay and
Lesbian Center. Meanwhile, ONE’s library also moved from the Milbank house to
the Arlington house to the chauffeur’s quarters and finally to the University of
Southern California.97

In January 1995 ONE regained prominence by merging with the Interna-
tional Gay and Lesbian Archives (IGLA) under the name ONE Institute.98 ISHR,
which still functions as a separate entity, supported the move with a donation of
thirty-five thousand dollars and has continued to provide grants to ONE Insti-
tute.99 The process of amalgamation was initiated and shepherded to completion
by Walter L. Williams, who worked with ONE, IGLA, ISHR, and the University of
Southern California to broker a deal that would strengthen all parties concerned.
The newly reconstituted ONE Institute dedicated itself to several projects: the
lecture series, educational outreach, ONE Institute Press, the new Center for
Advanced Studies, and the maintenance of the combined ONE library and the
IGLA collection.100

Currently, the main work of ONE Institute Press is the production of an
online journal, the International Gay and Lesbian Review, which has published
hundreds of book reviews of special interest to gay and lesbian readers.101 ONE
Institute Press also established the ONE Institute Web site, which provides valu-
able research resources. Finally, it publishes some of the work of the scholars sup-
ported by the ONE Institute Center for Advanced Studies, and other related items.

The Center for Advanced Studies supports scholars of lesbian, gay, bisex-
ual, and transgendered studies from around the world while they use ONE Insti-
tute’s library collections. For example, between 1994 and 1998, under Williams’s
direction, the institute provided research grants and housing to visiting scholars in

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 199

a nineteen-unit residence at the University of Southern California. Similar grants,
provided through ISHR twice a year, are funded with the interest on monies
gleaned from the sale of ONE’s portion of the Milbank property and from generous
bequests made to ISHR or ONE by Hall Call, David G. Cameron, and others.102

ONE Institute’s extensive library and archival collection is the largest col-
lection of gay and lesbian resource material in the world.103 It is itself the result
of the merging of two collections. The first, the International Gay and Lesbian
Archives, was built on a collection that Kepner started in 1942 and worked on
until his death in 1997. In 1971 Kepner first opened the collection to the public
as the Western Gay Archives. Over the years it was also known as the National Gay
Archives and as the Natalie Barney/Edward Carpenter Library of the International
Gay and Lesbian Archives.104 The second component of the present library origi-
nated with ONE’s collection. The combined collections house over twenty thou-
sand books, pamphlets, and scripts; over three thousand videos of films and tele-
vision programs; over six thousand periodicals; clippings files with over one million
items; hundreds of audio recordings; and a small museum of ephemera.105 After
extensive negotiations spearheaded by Williams, a building at 909 West Adams
Boulevard on the University of Southern California campus was extensively reno-
vated, largely with the university’s financial support, to house the library. In May
2001 a gala opening took place.106

Thus, although ONE had encountered both great support and great diffi-
culty in its uneasy collaboration with Reed Erickson and the Erickson Educational
Foundation, it has regrouped and joined forces with other organizations that share
its vision. Further, it has found a new benefactor in the University of Southern Cal-
ifornia. However, while ONE Institute continues to accrue public recognition, the
work of Erickson and the EEF has gone virtually unnoticed. The proceeds from
Erickson’s philanthropy quietly continue to fund gay and lesbian research almost
forty years after he saw the need for this support and offered his wealth and his
expertise to provide it. The custodians of his donations, ISHR’s board of directors,
have conservatively invested the profits from the sale of the Milbank property and
use the income to make small grants in support of gay and lesbian research con-
nected to ONE Institute.107 In this way Erickson’s contributions continue to pro-
vide support quietly behind the scenes. ONE Institute thrives once again because
of the hard work of dedicated individuals and the financial contributions of many.
Yet without the generosity of one crucial benefactor, ONE’s success would most
likely now be only a chapter in the history of gay and lesbian activism.

200 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Looking Back, Moving On

The relationship between ONE and Reed Erickson and the EEF ultimately ended
in dissolution. A combination of factors was responsible, but several important
points should be remembered. Both ONE and the EEF had common goals. They
both sought to create social change through education, publicity, and the support
of marginalized people. Both fostered research that contributed to the social accept-
ability of marginalized people and that was grounded in fact rather than in preju-
dice. Both recognized the need for substantial financial support of organizations
working on such issues. Leaders of both organizations, mindful of their own expe-
riences, strove to make the world a better place for others. Perhaps most signifi-
cantly, both organizations recognized the need to work together as communities of
marginalized people to effect significant and lasting change.

The story of the organizations’ relationship is thus an important one not
only for historians but also for activists and community members. The partner-
ship, its problems, and its lessons provide us with valuable insights into the fac-
tors that can contribute to effective (or dysfunctional) relationships between trans-
gender and homosexual groups. Since ONE has continued as an institution after
the collapse of the EEF, the evidence we are left with and the versions of the story
that remain in circulation are mainly from the perspective of ONE and its mem-
bers. Erickson’s personal and professional papers are much more difficult to trace
than those of ONE, and many of his closest friends either are guarded in their
comments or have died. It is thus unfortunate, both for Erickson and for gay, les-
bian, bisexual, and transgender history, that a significant portion of the story
remains as yet untold, and it is imperative that the contributions of transgendered
and transsexual activists of the past do not go unnoticed.

Although ONE was a relatively unusual organization in the 1950s and
1960s, by the 1970s gay and lesbian social activism had proliferated rapidly.
Other individuals and organizations had taken up the work of education and
research about homosexuality; courses and programs of gay and lesbian studies
had sprung up at many colleges and universities in Europe and North America. As
of this writing, however, there are still no other U.S. institutions that offer graduate
degrees in an area comparable to ONE’s homophile studies.108

Much of the recent growth of gay and lesbian pride was built on an ethnic-
like gay identity that necessarily defined inclusion by the exclusion of others. Gay
and lesbian pride has been created at least partly to counteract a society that
taught gays and lesbians to be ashamed of who they are.109 As gays and lesbians
have found their pride, many have retreated in shame from the transgendered and

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 201

transsexual people who had always been among them. This shunning of transgen-
dered and transsexual people remains a dark corner in the struggle for gay and
lesbian rights. Transgendered and transsexual people have understood the need
for alliances and have made many important contributions to the fight for lesbian,
gay, bisexual, and transgendered rights.110 Reed Erickson was only one of the
untold numbers of unsung transgendered and transsexual people who have given
generously to a movement that has not always appreciated their gifts. By making
more people aware of this one transsexual man’s tremendous contributions to the
growth and development of a vital arm of the gay and lesbian movement, we hope
to have contributed to a reappraisal of the value of a united lesbian, gay, bisexual,
and transgender movement. The story of the relationship between ONE and the
EEF reminds us of the challenges of creating and maintaining a unified move-
ment. It is important that we recognize the need to work together toward common
goals and that as we do so we remember that, as Erickson (and Carlyle) so rightly
recognized, we are all one.

Notes

1. Joshua Gamson, “Must Identity Movements Self-Destruct? A Queer Dilemma,” in Queer
Theory/Sociology, ed. Steven Seidman (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 395 – 420;
Steven Seidman, “Introduction,” in Seidman Queer Theory/Sociology, 1– 29.

2. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (Lon-
don: Longman, 1981), 96 –121.

3. Ray Blanshard, “The Case for Publicly Funded Transsexual Surgery,” Psychiatry
Rounds 4, no. 2 (2000): 4 – 6; Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With
Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York:
Stein and Day, 1965), 186 – 307.

4. Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest, “J. Allen Gilbert Papers,” home.
telport.com/~glapn/ar03012.html (accessed November 5, 2003).

5. Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,”
Signs 9 (1984): 557–75; Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsex-
uality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 135 – 69.

6. Donna Minkowitz, “Love Hurts,” Village Voice, April 19, 1994, 24 – 30; Kathleen
Chapman and Michael Du Plessis, “ ‘Don’t Call Me Girl’: Lesbian Theory, Feminist
Theory, and Transsexual Identities,” in Cross Purposes: Lesbians, Feminists, and the
Limits of Alliance, ed. Dana Heller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),
169 – 85; Brigitte Eriksson, “A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial
Records,” Journal of Homosexuality 6, nos. 1– 2 (1981): 27– 40; Nan Alamilla Boyd,

202 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

“The Materiality of Gender: Looking for Lesbian Bodies in Transgender History,” in
Lesbian Sex Scandals: Sexual Practices, Identities, and Politics, ed. Dawn Atkins (New
York: Haworth, 1999), 73 – 81. The Lesbian Herstory Archives listed transman Bran-
don Teena as among “lesbians” who had recently died in “In Memory of the Voices We
Have Lost,” Lesbian Herstory Archives Newsletter, January 1995, 7.

7. The Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF) provided a panoply of support services for
transgendered and transsexual people but did not frame itself as a political organiza-
tion. Rather, it was constituted, as its name suggests, as an educational organization.
Transgendered people were organizing as early as 1967 in San Francisco. See Members
of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California, “MTF Transgender
Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966 –1975: Commentary and Interview with
Elliot Blackstone,” GLQ 4 (1998): 349 –72. By 1971 the EEF was funding some of the
work of San Francisco’s National Transsexual Counseling Unit, which had grown out of
earlier activism. For current organizing of female-to-male transgendered people see
FTM International, www.ftmi.org. For general transgender information see Gender Edu-
cation and Advocacy, www.gender.org; and the International Foundation for Gender
Education, www.ifge.org.

8. Dallas Denny, “You’re Strange and We’re Wonderful: The Relationship between the
Gay/Lesbian and Transgendered Communities,” TransSisters, Autumn 1994, 21– 23;
Chryss Cada, “Issue of Transgender Rights Divides Many Gay Activists,” Boston
Sunday Globe, April 23, 2000, posted on Gender Advocacy Network News, “News
Remail,” April 26, 2000, www.tgender.net/news/gain.html.

9. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993).
10. Gamson, “Self-Destruct,” 408 –11.
11. “One of the first things I told them [Olivia Records] when we had our initial meeting

and got to like each other very much,” Stone says, “was that I was a transie. What I
didn’t tell them was that I was still in transition . . . simply because I felt it was per-
sonal information and I wasn’t ready to share it. So at the time I started working at
Olivia, I was actually preoperative. They didn’t know that, and I didn’t know it was
volatile. I figured I would tell them at some point when we got to know each other bet-
ter” (Davina Anne Gabriel, “Interview with the Transsexual Vampire: Sandy Stone’s
Dark Gift,” TransSisters, Spring 1995, 17).

12. “To the best of my knowledge,” Stone recalls, “there was never a faction within Olivia
that wanted to oust me. . . . When the boycott began to be threatened, we had to sit
down and do some serious thinking. And there was a point where the collective said,
‘Sandy, the reality of the situation is that if you don’t leave, there’s real danger.’ And so
I left” (Gabriel, “Interview,” 18).

13. Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Bea-
con, 1979), 129, 5.

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 203

14. The Transsexual Empire was reissued in 1994 by Teachers College Press with no
changes other than the addition of a new introduction on transgenderism. See also Ann
Cvetkovich and Selena Wahng, “Don’t Stop the Music: Roundtable Discussion with
Workers from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival,” GLQ 7 (2001): 131– 51.

15. Nancy Jean Burkholder, “A Kinder, Gentler Festival?” TransSisters, November–
December 1993, 4 – 5; Davina Anne Gabriel, “Mission to Michigan II: Exiles at
Mecca,” TransSisters, November–December 1993, 19 – 24, 27; Gabriel, “Mission to
Michigan III: Barbarians at the Gates,” TransSisters, Winter 1995, 14 – 23; Gabriel,
“Mission to Michigan IV: No Room at the Information Table,” TransSisters, Autumn
1995, 20 – 29; “InYourFace News Interview with Riki Anne Wilchins,” August 25,
1999, www.camptrans.com/stories/interview.html.

16. Candice Elliot Brown, “The Gay, Lesbian, and Feminist Backlash,” www.transhistory.org/
history/index.html (accessed March 13, 2000).

17. National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “NGLTF Adopts New Mission Statements; New
Board Co-Chairs and Members Named,” September 23, 1997, www.ngltf.org/news/
release.cfm?releaseID=105.

18. Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, “PFLAG Votes ‘Yes’ Overwhelm-
ingly to Include Transgender in Mission,” September 23, 1998, www.pflag.org/press/
releases/923b.html.

19. The involvement of transgendered people in the Millennium March for Equality did
not occur without difficulties. Much of the planning took place without their inclusion,
and the transgendered speakers, Jamison Green, Dana Rivers, and Riki Anne Wil-
chins, were not allowed to speak for the agreed-on length of time (Penni Ashe Matz,
editorial, posted on Gender Advocacy Network, “News Remail,” listserv, May 10,
2000, www.gender.org/news/gain.html).

20. Human Rights Campaign, “HRC and Gender Identity,” March 2001, www.hrc.org.
21. W. Dorr Legg, introduction to Homophile Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. W. Dorr

Legg et al. (Los Angeles: ONE Institute Press; San Francisco: GLB, 1994), 1– 6.
22. C. Todd White, “Dale Jennings (1917– 2000): ONE’s Outspoken Advocate,” in Before

Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context, ed. Vern L. Bul-
lough (New York: Harrington Park, 2002), 85.

23. Legg, introduction to Homophile, 2.
24. Ibid., 3; ONE Inc., “Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws, 1953,” in Legg, Homo-

phile, 339.
25. The articles of incorporation state that ONE’s purposes were “1. To publish and dis-

seminate magazines, brochures, leaflets, books and papers concerned with medical,
social, pathological, psychological and therapeutic research of every kind and descrip-
tion pertaining to sociosexual behavior. 2. To sponsor, supervise and conduct educa-
tional programs, lectures and concerts for the aid and benefit of all social and emo-
tional variants and to promote among the general public an interest, knowledge and

204 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

understanding of the problems of such persons. 3. To stimulate, sponsor, aid, supervise
and conduct research of every kind and description pertaining to sociosexual behavior.
4. To promote the integration into society of such persons whose behavior varies from
current moral and social standards and to aid the development of social and moral
responsibility in all such persons. 5. To lease, purchase, hold, have, use and take pos-
session of and enjoy any personal or real property necessary for the uses and purposes
of the corporation.”

26. The first out-of-state subscription check came from Alfred C. Kinsey (W. Dorr Legg,
“Exploring Frontiers: An American Tradition,” New York Folklore 19 [1993]: 228).

27. “40-Year Dedicated Activist Dorr Legg Dies at 89,” ONE-IGLA Bulletin, Spring 1995,
www.usc.edu/isd/archives/oneigla/bulletin/articles/LeggBio.html; Legg, Homophile,
17.

28. David G. Cameron, “ONE Institute” and “Architecture Notes” (flyer prepared for the
Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College on the occasion of the Chamber of
Music in Historic Sites concert, March 25, 1984), International Gay and Lesbian
Archives (IGLA) collection. At its height ONE Magazine had a circulation of eleven
thousand (ONE, “ONE 1952 –1982: Thirty Year Celebration; Program of Events,”
1982, collection of Aaron H. Devor).

29. Legg, Homophile, 52 – 53; Walter L. Williams, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape
recorded via telephone to Palm Springs, CA, May 12, 2000.

30. Legg, Homophile, 18.
31. Ibid., 32 – 50; ONE, “Program.” According to Legg, the lectures in New York were

given in 1968 (Homophile, 50); according to the “Program,” they were given in 1966.
32. Reid Rasmussen, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recorded via telephone to Los

Angeles, April 20, 2000; Walter L. Williams, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape
recorded via telephone to Palm Springs, CA, April 23, 2000. According to Legg, the
lecture series began in 1958 (Homophile, 50); according to the ONE “Program,” it
began in 1956.

33. Legg, Homophile, 21– 22.
34. Erickson Educational Foundation, brochure, collection of Aaron H. Devor.
35. Erickson Educational Foundation Newsletter, Spring 1983, 5.
36. “Introduction to a Course in Miracles,” www.acim.org/about_acim_section/into_to_

acim.html (accessed November 7, 2003).
37. Legg, Homophile, 16.
38. W. Dorr Legg to Evelyn Hooker, February 8, 1968, IGLA collection.
39. W. Dorr Legg, interview by Vern L. Bullough, Los Angeles, December 15, 20, and 29, 1993.
40. W. Dorr Legg to Thomas Hunter Russell, January 24, 1989, IGLA collection.
41. Legg interview.
42. Ibid.

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 205

43. Vern L. Bullough et al., eds., An Annotated Bibliography of Homosexuality, 2 vols.
(New York: Garland, 1976).

44. Legg, “Frontiers,” 233.
45. Ibid., 232.
46. Erickson Educational Foundation Newsletter, Spring 1972, 1.
47. ISHR, “Articles of Incorporation and By-Laws,” n.d., IGLA collection.
48. W. Dorr Legg to “Mort,” February 14, 1968, IGLA collection.
49. William Kraker to Reed Erickson, October 15, 1964, IGLA collection.
50. W. Dorr Legg to William Kraker, December 23, 1964, IGLA collection.
51. Taylor, Porter, Brooks, Fuller & Phillips to Chester A. Usry of the Internal Revenue

Service, in response to Usry’s letter of March 31, 1965, n.d., IGLA collection.
52. David G. Cameron, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recording, Los Angeles, May 14,

1996; James Kepner Jr., interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recording, Los Angeles,
May 13, 1996.

53. “A year by year listing of EEF funds received by ISHR and purpose for which they
were spent,” enclosure, Legg to Russell, IGLA collection. Kepner (interview) recalled
that Legg had received additional checks made out to him personally and that other
individuals who worked for ONE had received money directly from Erickson or the
EEF, in addition to the grants listed by Legg as having been issued to ISHR.

54. From 1964 to 1976 Bullough received sixty thousand dollars from Erickson for this
project and for his other early work on (homo)sexuality (Vern L. Bullough, interview by
Aaron H. Devor, tape recording, Los Angeles, May 30, 1996).

55. Legg, Homophile, 53 – 56.
56. Bullough interview.
57. Legg, Homophile, 384.
58. Laud Humphreys, Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (Chicago: Aldine,

1970); Legg, Homophile, 384 – 85; Evelyn Hooker, “The Adjustment of the Male Overt
Homosexual,” Journal of Projective Technique 21 (1957): 18 – 31.

59. Legg, Homophile, 47.
60. Ibid., 48, 386 – 87.
61. Ibid., 128 – 30.
62. Hooker, “Adjustment,” 18 – 31.
63. Legg, Homophile, 159.
64. Antony Grey, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recording, London, August 23, 1999.
65. Legg, Homophile, 60.
66. Grey interview.
67. Erickson Educational Foundation Newsletter, Spring 1968, 2, collection of Aaron H.

Devor; Antony Grey, Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation (London:
Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992), 142.

68. Grey, Quest, 142 – 60.

206 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

69. Legg, Homophile, 74 –77; Legg interview. According to the ONE “Program,” presenta-
tions at the banquet were also made by Lisa Ben, Del Martin, and Phyllis Lyon. Ben
was publisher of Vice Versa, “the earliest known American periodical especially for
Lesbians. Nine typewritten issues were privately distributed, June 1947–Feb 1948.”
Martin and Lyon in 1955 had founded the Daughters of Bilitis, “the earliest lesbian
emancipation organization in the U.S. . . . dedicated to understanding of, and by, the
lesbian” (Legg, “Frontiers,” 235).

70. Legg interview.
71. The 3.5-acre property known as the Milbank Estate was named after Isaac Milbank,

who had commissioned its creation in 1913. In that year Milbank, who had been a
vice president and the general manager of the company that later became Borden
Milk, was president of the corporation that developed the Country Club Estates area
of Los Angeles, so named for its previous use as the Los Angeles Country Club. The
Mediterranean-style twenty-seven-room mansion, designed by G. Lawrence Stimson,
cost the then huge sum of thirty-five thousand dollars. It was joined by a smaller, but
still grand, Georgian-style residence for Milbank’s daughter Phila and his son-in-
law Lyman McFie and by several lesser buildings used for recreation and service
purposes. The Milbanks and the McFies lived in these homes until their deaths in
1976.

72. Erickson v. Legg, C 499 120 (c/w C 520 792, C 541 097, C 693 216) U.S. p. 4 (n.d.).
Trial brief and related cross-actions and consolidated actions, IGLA collection.

73. Legg wrote to Erickson that “the idea of putting the Milbank property temporarily in
the name of Erickson Educational Foundation seems to make good sense.” W. Dorr
Legg to Reed Erickson, January 14, 1983, IGLA collection; Erickson v. Legg, C 499
120 (c/w C 520 792, C 541 097, C 693 216) U.S. p. 5 (n.d.). Trial brief and related
cross-actions and consolidated actions, IGLA collection; Walter Williams recalled that
Legg objected to this arrangement but that Erickson insisted that it was the best way to
proceed (Williams interview, May 12, 2000). Monica Erickson recalled that it was
never her father’s intention to give title to ONE (e-mail message to Aaron H. Devor,
October 21, 2003).

74. James Dunham, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recording, Los Angeles, June 12,
1996.

75. Edward L. Francis to Reed Erickson, February 14, 1983, IGLA collection.
76. Dunham interview; Helen Kleinstiver, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recording,

Baton Rouge, LA, July 25, 1997.
77. Kleinstiver interview.
78. W. Dorr Legg, press release, April 20, 1983, IGLA collection.
79. Legg, Homophile, 413.
80. Zelda Suplee to W. Dorr Legg, August 17, 1987, IGLA collection; Zelda Suplee to

Antony Grey, June 1984, quoted in Grey interview.

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 207

81. Ketamine has more recently become a popular street and “club” drug also known
as K, Ket, Special K, Vitamin K, and Kit Kat. For more information see the National
Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information, www.health.org/pubs/qdocs/ketamine/
index.htm.

82. Monica Erickson, interview by Aaron H. Devor, tape recording, Los Angeles, June 3,
1996; Suplee to Grey, June 1984, quoted in Grey interview.

83. Zelda Suplee to Antony Grey, September 26, 1985, quoted in Grey interview.
84. Monica Erickson, handwritten declaration, April 25, 1984, IGLA collection; Califor-

nia v. Erickson, FY15759 U.S. 1 (1984). Declaration of Michael S. Pratter, IGLA col-
lection.

85. Kepner interview.
86. Reed Erickson to ONE Institute, January 3, 1983 [sic], stamped received January 9,

1984. In January 1983 the Milbank property still belonged to the Church Universal
and Triumphant. The correct date of the letter therefore is probably January 3, 1984.

87. Erickson v. Legg, C 499 120 (c/w C 520 792, C 541 097, C 693 216) U.S. p. 8 (n.d.).
Trial brief and related cross-actions and consolidated actions, IGLA collection.

88. Jack L. Housden, of the State of California Council for Private Postsecondary and
Vocational Education, to W. Dorr Legg, March 18, 1992, IGLA collection.

89. Williams interview, May 12, 2000.
90. Legg interview.
91. Erickson v. Legg, B0 51473, CA LASC No. C 499 120, consolidated with C 502 792,

C 541 207, C 693 216, CA2/7 4 (1991). Respondents’ brief, IGLA collection. That the
court order was overturned and a new trial ordered was confirmed by Monica Erickson,
e-mail message to Devor.

92. Thomas Hunter Russell to Michael S. Pratter and Alfred R. Keep, October 21, 1992,
IGLA collection; Monica Erickson, e-mail message to Devor.

93. County Assessor’s Records, “Data Concerning the Milbank Estate,” IGLA collection.
94. W. Dorr Legg to Monica Erickson, August 1, 1993, IGLA collection.
95. Williams interview, April 23, 2000.
96. Westland Escrow, amended escrow instructions, March 8, 1995, collection of ISHR.
97. Williams interview, April 23, 2000; Rasmussen interview.
98. “ONE and IGLA Merge,” ONE-IGLA Bulletin, Spring 1995, www.usc.edu/isd/archives/

oneigla/bulletin/articles/ONE_IGLA_Merge.html.
99. “ISHR Awards $35,000 to General Fund,” ONE-IGLA Bulletin, Winter 1998,

www.usc.edu/isd/archives/oneigla/bulletin/articles/ISHR.html; Rasmussen interview;
Walter L. Williams to Aaron H. Devor, May 12, 2000.

100. “ONE and IGLA Merge”; Ernie Potvin, “ONE Institute Organization and Activities,”
January 25, 1998, www.usc.edu/isd/archives/oneigla/organization_and_activities.htm.

101. See International Gay and Lesbian Review, www.usc.edu/isd/archives/oneigla/
onepress.

208 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

102. Williams interview, April 23, 2000; Rasmussen interview.
103. Williams interview, April 23, 2000.
104. Ernie Potvin, “A Brief History of ONE Institute and the International Gay and Lesbian

Archives (IGLA),” January 25, 1998, www.usc.edu/isd/archives/oneigla/background.
html. According to Williams, Kepner provided the archives with an alternative name,
the Natalie Barney/Edward Carpenter Library, as early as 1979. By 1985 that name
was rarely used, and it was formally abandoned in 1994 (Williams to Devor).

105. Potvin, “ONE Institute Organization”; www.oneinstitute.org.
106. ONE Institute and Archives, “ONE’s Grand Opening, May 6, 2001,” www.usc.edu/isd/

archives/oneigla/grandopening/page1.html (accessed July 25, 2001); Williams inter-
view, April 23, 2000.

107. Williams interview, April 23, 2000.
108. John G. Younger, “University LGBT Programs, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,

and Queer Studies in the USA and Canada plus Sibling Societies and Study-Abroad
Programs,” March 28, 2000, www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/lgbprogs.html.

109. Sally R. Munt, “Introduction,” in Butch/Femme: Inside Lesbian Gender, ed. Sally R.
Munt (London: Cassell, 1998), 1–12.

110. Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul
(Boston: Beacon, 1996), 90 –99.

THE UNEASY COLL ABORATION OF GAY AND TRANS ACTIVISM 209

PHYSIQUE PIONEERS: THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY
CONSUMER CULTURE

By David K. Johnson University of South Florida

While growing up in a small town in Missouri in the 1950s, Bill Kelley learned
from reading the best-selling paperback Washington Confidential that the nation’s
capital was teeming not only with prostitutes, gamblers, Communists, and drug
dealers, but also “fairies and Fair Dealers.” Like millions of Americans who read
tabloid journalist Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s exposé, he learned that police ef-
forts to eliminate the moral degenerates from the city focused on Lafayette Park.
The reporters alleged that so many gay men congregated in this “garden of pansies” that
it created “a constant soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.” Lait and Mor-
timer had hoped to warn their readers of the dangers in Washington, D.C., but Kel-
ley was more intrigued than repulsed. While on a high school trip to the nation’s
capital for the National Spelling Bee, Kelley made a surreptitious visit to Lafayette
Park. He had only a limited time away from his chaperones, and as he later re-
called, “I wasn’t taking any chances of being misunderstood.” In order to identify
himself to other gay men, he went to a nearby newsstand, bought a copy of a
physique magazine, and carried it with him as he walked around the park.1

Bill Kelley’s Lafayette Park story has been used to illustrate the ways in which
cold war era anti-gay propaganda functioned as a virtual tour guide to the gay sub-
culture. And because he would later move to Chicago and become involved in
the early homosexual rights movement as a member of the Chicago chapter of the Mat-
tachine Society, one of the first gay political and social service organizations, Kelley has ap-
peared in a number of histories of the gay rights movement. But one aspect of the story has
been overlooked: For a young man like Kelley from middle-America at mid-cen-
tury, the purchase of a consumer item acted as means of sexual self-identification
and served as an entryway into the gay community. 2

This study outlines a history of gay patterns of mass consumption from 1945
to 1969—an examination of the production, sale, and consumption of physique
magazines, paperback novels, greeting cards, and other items available through
gay-oriented mail order catalogs and how these consumer networks fostered a
sense of community. I examine how the magazine publishers, in their struggles
with censorship laws, marshaled a rhetoric of legal rights and collective action
and, therefore, how the first gay judicial victories were for the right to produce and
purchase such commodities. I argue that before there was a national gay political

journal of social history868 summer 2010

community there was a national gay commercial market and that the develop-
ment of that market by a small group of gay entrepreneurs was a key, overlooked
catalyst to the rise of a gay movement in America.

This project sits at the intersection of two historiographies—that of consumer
culture and that of gay and lesbian community and identity formation. The his-
tory of consumer culture has become a hotly debated topic in the field of U.S.
history, as demonstrated in a recent roundtable exchange in The Journal of Amer-
ican History.3 From prominent colonialists studying the American Revolution to
scholars specializing in the post-World War II “Affluent Society,” historians are
demonstrating the importance of individuals’ relationships to consumer goods as
a key to understanding their sense of self, community, and even national identity.
Many scholars see the rise of mass consumer culture as an oppressive force limit-
ing the agency of individuals. William Leach and Susan Strasser portray the rise
of national brands, department stores, and advertising agencies as the imposition
of an alien corporate culture on local, autonomous agents. Leach calls the culture
of consumer capitalism “among the most nonconsensual public cultures ever cre-
ated.”4 Other scholars emphasize the potentially libratory aspects of consumer
society—highlighting how it became a catalyst to group identity formation and
collective action. For example, T.H. Breen argues that it was the rise of consumer
goods in the colonial era that first tied the American colonists together as an
“imagined community” and provided an arena of political protest against their
colonial oppressors in the form of product boycotts. Lacking from this discussion
is an examination of how minority groups were able to use the marketplace to
mobilize themselves and gain political power. Scholars of the black civil rights
movement have begun to emphasize the importance of the right to “buy a ham-
burger” to that movement’s origins. This work also emphasizes how post-war
American consumer culture—despite many limitations based on income, gender,
and race— opened up a space for a sexual minority group to define itself.5

Twenty-five years ago, in his ground-breaking work on the making of the gay
and lesbian community in postwar America, historian John D’Emilio gestured to-
ward the significance of a gay consumer market when he pointed out that mem-
bership in the Mattachine Society—the first sustained gay political organization
in the U.S.—numbered less than a thousand while physique magazines were sell-
ing in the hundreds of thousands. But writing one of the first scholarly works in
the American history field on a gay topic, D’Emilio kept his focus within tradi-
tional definitions of “politics” and formal gay political organizations. Building on
D’Emilio’s work, Martin Meeker has highlighted the importance of the broader
communications networks that gay men and lesbians established as early as the
1940s, including the use of hobby magazines, pen pal clubs, and what he calls “do-
it-yourself” bar guides and other publications. As he argues, “the narrative of a
communications shift is tantamount to the history of a homosexual identity form-
ing into a collective sense of itself.” Despite his insistence on the importance of
mass circulation periodicals and the “politics of communication” in the forma-
tion of a gay identity, Meeker focuses on San Francisco-based magazines and the

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 869

tiny homophile press. He dismisses the myriad of physique entrepreneurs as “pub-
lishers of pornography” and insinuates that their circulation figures have been
wildly exaggerated, even as his own analysis suggests their importance to gay cul-
ture. Indeed Meeker shows how even within the classified sections of Popular Me-
chanics and The Hobby Directory gay men established contact with each other by
signaling their interest in “physical culture” and “art photography.”6

Art historians and film studies scholars have pioneered the study of physique
magazines in the pre-Stonewall era. In Hard to Imagine, Thomas Waugh called
physique magazines the “richest documentation of gay culture of the period” and
argued that “our most important political activity of the postwar decades . . . was
not meeting or organizing or publicly demonstrating but consuming.” 7 Despite
their important contributions, art historians focus on the visual content of
physique magazines and largely ignore the non-visual evidence, what Waugh dis-
misses as “unrelated editorial content.” This focus on photography and film ex-
cludes the rise of mail order catalogues like Vagabond out of Minneapolis or Guild
Press out of Washington and the host of gay consumer goods they offered, in-
cluding greeting cards, musical LPs, pulp novels, bar guides, lingerie, cologne, and
jewelry. Expanding on this work, I outline a social and political history of how
these products were marketed by the producers and consumed and used by gay
men. Engaging with the considerable body of work on consumer culture and the
way in which consumption mediates the production of social identities will sig-
nificantly alter the way in which we conceive the history of modern gay subcul-
ture in America.8

Scholars that have examined gay consumer culture assume it was a product
of the post-Stonewall generation. They dismiss 1950s and 1960s physique maga-
zines and their associated mail-order catalogs as peripheral to gay history because
they were not explicitly gay. Rodger Streitmatter, for example, in his compre-
hensive history of the gay and lesbian press, ignores physique magazines because,
he argues, “they never identified themselves as targeting gays, although their
physique photographs attracted a large gay readership—or at least viewership.”
Katherine Sender’s Business, Not Politics, the first book-length scholarly exami-
nation of the formation of a “gay market” devotes only one sentence to physique
magazines and suggests that direct-mail marketing to a gay audience began in the
1980s with catalogs such as Shocking Gray, Tzabaco, and International Male. In
their recent history of gay Los Angeles, Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons
briefly discuss how Bob Mizer began selling Physique Pictorial in the 1950s at the
same time Ah-Men was selling clothes to gay men in West Hollywood, but dismiss
this as part of an “underground” or local market that only became overt and na-
tional in the 1970s.9

But nearly everyone who encountered these consumer items in post-war
America grasped what scholars like Meeker, Streitmatter, Sender, Faderman and
Timmons have not—that physique magazines and mail-order houses of the 1950s
and 1960s were making a fortune within an already burgeoning national gay mar-
ket. The U.S. postmaster general saw a proliferation of obscene literature and

journal of social history870 summer 2010

launched a widespread cleanup campaign to thwart it. Congress held hearings on
the immoral impact these magazines were having on juveniles by enticing them
into a life of degeneracy. One leader of the anti-pornography movement called
muscle magazines “house organs for homosexuals.”10 District attorneys around
the nation argued that despite physique publishers’ claims to be serving a market
of artists, sculptors and photographers, they were knowingly pandering to homo-
sexuals and promoting homosexuality in American society. Federal and local
judges acknowledged that these publishers were reaching a gay market, even as
those judges defended their right to serve it. Magazine publishers who were losing
business wrote scathing editorials against the new “homo” magazines. Body-
builders and physique models complained that their fan mail came from gay men.
Most importantly, gay men themselves—particularly young, isolated gay men like
Bill Kelley, living beyond major cities—saw them as a lifeline to a larger world.
Countless men who came of age in cold war America vividly remember their first
encounter with physique magazines as part of their journey to self-identification
as homosexual. As A.R. from Los Angeles wrote in 1967, “I have [physique model]
Glenn Bishop to thank more than any other individual for my becoming homo-
sexual.”11

Studies of the gay consumer market assume that it was a byproduct of the gay
rights political movement, rather than a catalyst for its development. Indeed
many scholars tend to pit gay activism and gay consumerism against one another,
constructing a declension narrative where gay activism—along with the other
Leftist movements from the 1960s—has been co-opted by the superficial allure of
gay consumerism and gay visibility in American popular culture. As Faderman
and Timmons summarize, “It is ironic that, in L.A. as elsewhere, gay radicals, who
prided themselves on their anti-materialism, were actually responsible for the in-
ception of a new gay consumerism when they made the gay community widely
visible.” Even scholars such as Alexandra Chasin who highlight the connection
between identity formation and consumption limit their focus to the later use of
boycotts, such as one in 1977 that politicized the national lesbian and gay com-
munity against Florida orange juice in reaction to the blatant homophobia of its
spokesperson, Anita Bryant.12 But it was the very rise of a gay consumer market
that helped provide the rhetoric and construct the networks that fostered gay po-
litical activism. Content analysis of brochures, catalogs, magazines, and pulp fic-
tion in the 1950s and 1960s shows not only that physique magazine publishers
explicitly targeted a gay consumer market, but also that consumer items provided
a means for gay men to understand themselves as belonging to a larger community.
The ability to purchase these items validated their erotic attraction to other men
and provided particular class-based models for what it meant to be gay. By bring-
ing not only stories of the gay culture of Greenwich Village but also the opportu-
nity to purchase the fashions available in Greenwich Village stores, these mail
order catalogues created, in Benedict Anderson’s phrase, an “imagined commu-
nity.” At the same time, some of the producers of these catalogs—particularly
Lloyd Spinar and Conrad Germain, the little-known founders of Directory Serv-

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 871

ices, Inc, in Minneapolis—used an explicit language of freedom and rights in their
open challenge to censorship laws that was more anti-establishment and less as-
similationist than the mainstream political groups of the time. Not surprisingly,
the movement’s first legal victories were for the right to consume these products.

The Physical Culture Movement

Physique or fitness magazines were an outgrowth of the turn-of-the-century
physical culture movement, which many historians have seen as the result of a
crisis in masculinity in a rapidly urbanizing and industrializing America. As tra-
ditional markers of masculinity, such as land or independent business ownership,
became less accessible to white, middle-class men, new markers of masculinity
took hold. Among these was an emphasis on playing sports and developing the
muscular male body. By the turn of the twentieth century, college football reached
a mass audience, the Olympic Games had been revived, and Bernarr McFadden
had begun building a health and fitness empire publishing Physical Culture maga-
zine. Such sporting activity served to assuage fears that that the new conditions
of urban industrial life weakened men, particularly white “native-born” men, and
caused new nervous diseases such as “neurasthenia.” Eugene Sandow, known as
“the perfect man,” became the first international bodybuilding superstar. Photo-
graphs of his nearly naked body circulated in magazines and postcards all over Eu-
rope and North America.13

By the 1930s a host of physique magazines, such as Bob Hoffman’s Strength &
Health and Joe Weider’s Your Physique, catered to and profited from this interest
in developing the male body. Anecdotal evidence suggests that men within the
burgeoning gay subcultures of European and North American cities were early
participants in this network of photographs, magazines, and gyms. Yet it was an un-
easy alliance. Early on Bernarr Macfadden expressed anxiety that his advocacy of
muscular development might provide fodder for male sexual fantasies, denounc-
ing “painted, perfumed, . . . mincing youths . . . ogling every man that passes.”14
But in the back of magazines such as Strength & Health, amongst the advertise-
ments for barbells and supplements, gay photographers such as Lon of New York
and Bob Mizer of the Athletic Model Guild in Los Angeles offered more explicit
“physical culture studies.” (

Figure 1

) By responding to their ads, artists could ob-
tain nude photographs of the male body to use as models for their line drawings.
Soon these gay photographers realized there was a vast market for their nude and
nearly nude photographs, and they began to offer entire magazines and studio cat-
alogues catering to gay men.15

By the mid-1950s, entrepreneurs grew bolder in their efforts to reach a gay
male audience and thereby attracted the attention of competitors as well as gov-
ernment authorities. In 1955 an advertisement appeared in VIM—a physique
magazine published out of Columbus, Ohio—heralding “Something new for the
Physique World.” (

Figure 2

) Subscribers were asked to join a sort of fraternal

journal of social history872 summer 2010

order—the Grecian Guild. As the founders explained, it was
more than a magazine. . . It is a Guild—the only association of its kind in the
entire world. It has established itself through its magazine as the rallying for a
unique fraternity. It has fought for its ideals, for human rights, and for freedom
for itself and its members.

Members could buy a Grecian Guild pin to wear “proudly,” allowing easy identi-
fication of like-minded men. The Guild had plans for regional chapters, national
conventions, membership directories, and other opportunities for members who
shared these ideals to meet. Indeed, the Guild had its own creed for members to
uphold, one that invoked the perceived ideals of ancient Greece, “the most in-
tellectual and artistic society the world has ever known,” a place where “they be-
lieved that the body of a muscular, graceful, well proportioned youth was among

Figure 1

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 873

the most admirable of all things.” 16 This invocation of ancient Greece had a long
history in the gay community, dating back to the 1920s, as a way for gay men to
create a folklore of a collective past and a way to legitimize and naturalize male
admiration for the male body. The “classical alibi” became a dominant theme in
the physique world. Many photo studios and mail order businesses highlighted this
connection by adopting names such as Apollo, Athens West, Plato, Spartan of
Hollywood, Trojan Book Service, Vulcan and Young Adonis.17

Membership in the Grecian Guild grew rapidly, and the magazine quickly
stepped up publication from a quarterly to a monthly, causing alarm among its
mainstream competitors. Just three months after the launch of Grecian Guild Pic-
torial, VIM editors, claiming to be “nauseated” and “disgusted,” ran a two-page at-

Figure 2

journal of social history874 summer 2010

tack against the new magazine they parodied as the “Gilded Greek.” Noting the
models’ lack of muscular development, the editors compared them to “under-
nourished prisoners in a concentration camp.” They also raised their collective
eyebrows over Grecian Guild’s plans for national conventions, which they pointed
out would permit members to “indulge in the various activities that bound mem-
bers together, whatever those activities might be.” Nine months later, VIM ran
a four-page satirical diatribe against the upstart, calling it “Rollicking Romans Pic-
torial.” This time the editors were even more explicit about their moral objec-
tions, which they signaled in the article’s subtitle—“Art(?) and Bawdybuilding.”
(

Figure 3

) VIM saw the attributes of ancient civilizations differently than did Gre-
cian Guild. Rather than the ideals of masculine beauty, VIM saw “debauchery,
promiscuity, corruption, and moral pollution.” VIM parodied the Grecian Guild
membership application, where members were asked to identify themselves as
bodybuilders, artists, or students. To this list VIM added a fourth option—“just
looking.” They changed the categories “married” and “single” to “married?” and

Figure 3

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 875

“whatever for?” VIM even printed a page of angry letters from readers who de-
nounced the editors for their cowardice in attacking the other magazine, canceled
their memberships in high dudgeon, and warned that VIM was “on the way out.”
VIM claimed to be happy to see them go. This spat within the pages of VIM
demonstrated that these new, more openly queer, magazines were not hiding any-
thing. The two tropes they used to legitimize male admiration for the bodies of
other men—the appeal to the traditions of ancient civilizations or the appeal to
bodybuilding—were both transparent. To VIM it was all perversion.18

VIM was not the only old-line, mainstream fitness magazine to denounce
these queer upstarts. By 1957, Strength & Health, one of the oldest fitness maga-
zines—where many gay physique photographers ran their first advertisements—
launched its own attack on what it called “the flood” of new magazines “aimed
at the homo trade.” In an article entitled “Let me Tell You a Fairy Tale,” the
editor wrote:

Under the guise of wholesome physical culture, these dirty little books are aimed
directly at a very profitable market, the homosexual or “fairy” trade. They are
on the stands for one reason only—to make a profit. Circulation figures show
they do just that, because they outsell the regular physical culture journals.

Strength & Health objected not only to the moral character of these maga-
zines but also to what they were doing to its bottom line. Although both genres
of physique magazines claimed to be serving particular communities—
whether legitimate bodybuilders or cultural heirs of Greek civilization—
they were also market competitors. Strength & Health sought to warn readers of
these new magazines that “the cause of clean physical culture is threatened by
peddlers of pornography.” 19

Other magazine publishers sought to exploit rather than denounce this new
market. In 1958 Canadian Joe Wieder launched The Young Physique, where “the
world’s handsomest young bodybuilders greet you each month,” featuring homo-
erotic drawings by George Quintance. By 1959, even VIM, after a change in own-
ership, changed its editorial approach, began to offer a pen pal club for “Males
Only!” and printed an article defending homosexuality as normative. The homo-
sexual is simply “different” in his sexual expression, the author noted, not
dangerous, contagious, or pathological. But the author warned that ho-
mosexuals and, increasingly, readers of physique magazines, were being
used as scapegoats for the perceived increase in juvenile delinquency.
This same issue included a suggestive piece on the bachelor using “power
tools,” a Playboy -like male centerfold, and a campy picture of Rock Hudson with
a camera focused on the young man on the next page. Pointing out how the youth
had captured his “pictorial attention,” the editors comment, “Wouldn’t it be nice
to have Rock as your cameraman?” Supplementing their physique photographs
with fashion spreads, cosmetic advertisements, and positive editorials, publishers
such as Wiedner targeted a gay male audience.20

journal of social history876 summer 2010

Fighting Censorship

The commercial competition between these more openly queer magazines
and their mainstream counterparts was not the only struggle that reveals the cul-
tural shift these magazines represented. Almost all of the publishers and photog-
raphers connected with physique magazines were arrested by the police and tried
in court at some point in their careers. Bob Mizer, Lynn Womack, Al Urban, and
John Barrington spent time in jail. Others, such as Chuck Renslow, Alonzo Hana-
gan, Bob Anthony, Lloyd Spinar, and Conrad Germain successfully fought pros-
ecution.21 Even many consumers were arrested for possessing obscene materials.
As George Whitney recalled,

In 1955, when I entered Yale University as a freshman, I was called in to the FBI’s
office in New Haven. They had been intercepting my mail for about a year and a half
before, mainly because I had been ordering material from the AMG [Athletic Model
Guild] in L.A. I was 18, so naive, and scared out of my wits. I was required to write
a letter to my parents explaining what I had done. Otherwise they threatened me
with an indictment. It was the most humiliating experience of my life.22

Newton Arvin is perhaps the best known physique magazine consumer to
have been prosecuted. A Smith college professor, noted literary critic, and former
partner to Truman Capote, Arvin was arrested in 1960 for possession of muscle
magazines such as Adonis, Tomorrow’s Man, and Physique Pictorial, along with some
stag films, as part of a coordinated sting operation by the Massachusetts State Po-
lice. He fell victim to President Eisenhower’s postmaster general, Arthur Sum-
merfield, who was engaged in an anti-pornography campaign which Congress had
invigorated by passing the Granahan Bill, allowing the U.S. Postal Service to seize
the mail of anyone suspected of trafficking in obscenity. Much in the news, Sum-
merfield had recently launched a new cancellation stamp for all U.S. mail that
read “REPORT OBSCENE MAIL TO YOUR POSTMASTER.” (

Figure 4

) Ac-
cording to the Post Office’s own records, the campaign was effective. Between
1961 and 1968, they recorded 4,979 arrests and 4,095 convictions for “obscene”
mail. But in his biography, The Scarlet Professor, Barry Werth portrays Arvin as
shocked by the arrest and quite isolated in his plight. “He had been locked in a
sphere by himself his entire conscious life,” Werth wrote of Arvin’s reaction to
his arrest, ignoring both how Arvin shared his muscle magazines with a coterie of
men in Northhampton and how the magazines themselves connected him to a
national homosexual network that was actively and aggressively challenging cen-
sorship laws.23

Most of the gay physique magazines ran lengthy and frequent editorials about
the growing danger of police and postal inspectors, and the language they used
called for a collective response. As early as 1955, Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial
began a series of editorials denouncing censorship and supporting the efforts of
the American Civil Liberties Union to defend the rights of a “cultural minority”

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 877

that enjoys art that some label obscene. In 1963, The Guild Press’s MANual ran
an “Urgent Appeal to our Readers,” alerting them to the plight of Al Urban,
whom it labeled the “dean” of American physique photography. Although Urban
had been acquitted on several occasions on obscenity charges, the New York City
police were harassing him by holding hundreds of confiscated negatives, thereby
depriving him of his livelihood. MANual was confident that the collective it la-
beled “the American Physique Audience” would not sit by and let this “arbitrary
injustice” happen. A few months later, Manorama, another Guild publication,
warned of “DANGER AHEAD!” in describing the arrest of John Paignton (a.k.a.
Barrington) in Great Britain. “This case is not John Paignton’s alone, it is the case
of everyone of us.” That this prosecution was in a foreign jurisdiction, under
Britain’s newly enacted Obscene Publication Act, did not seem to matter. These
cases, the editors insisted, “concern you, no matter where you live,” highlighting
the international dimension to this community. Imploring readers to send money
to a Paignton defense fund, the editors called on readers to man the barricades and
“FIGHT CENSORSHIP—NOW!”24 Using the language of justice and rights, the
magazines called on their constituency to send money, which would be rewarded
with credit toward copies of the threatened images. Their plea underscored how
buying a magazine or supporting a photographer helped strike a blow against cen-
sorship—how consumer choices were political acts. The appeal imaged a com-
munity of consumers at risk of losing their ability to consume unless they engaged
in collective action.

In 1963 Grecian Guild Pictorial ran a lengthy article denouncing cen-
sorship as “perverse” and a leading cause of sex crimes—a reversal of the
usual argument of moral reformers. “The sight of someone else’s body
may interest you (and this is only natural) but it does not tempt you to com-
mit an immediate crime” the editor argued, using pointedly gender-neutral lan-
guage that suggested either a same-sex or different-sex attraction. If a fight over
censorship breaks out in “your city,” he recommended political action. “Don’t

Figure 4

journal of social history878 summer 2010

just lie down . . . write to the papers—spread the truth around. Insist on your
rights at all times.” The magazine received an overwhelmingly positive response
and published many reader comments, but most insisted on anonymity. In a fol-
low-up piece the editors lamented, “This is understandable, BUT—we will not
make any progress until more people have the courage of their convictions. This
is what I wish readers would think about.” This was a call for readers to publicly
assert their admiration for images of other men—what gay leaders within the
decade would call “coming out.”25

While many physique magazine publishers were politically involved in the
struggle against censorship, Directory Services Inc. (DSI) became the most ag-
gressive supporter of freedom of expression. Lloyd Spinar and Conrad Germain,
two twenty-something partners, founded DSI in 1963 in Minneapolis and quickly
turned it into a veritable gay mail-order empire. Recently discharged from the Air
Force, Germain was on his way from his native South Dakota to relocate in New
York City when he stopped in Minneapolis to visit relatives. He met Spinar in a
Minneapolis gay bar and decided to stay. Spinar was a commercial artist for a
local newspaper, but was already experimenting with a side business he called “the
vagabond club.” When his employer discovered his other interest, he lost his job,
giving him more time to devote to mail-order. One of the first items the two part-
ners offered for sale was a directory of gay bars throughout the U.S. “In mail-
order, if you get a five percent response rate, you are a big success. But eighty
percent of the people we offered this directory to bought it,” recalled Germain in
a recent interview. “That’s when we knew there was a real need for this stuff.”
Over the next decade, DSI sold books, records, jewelry, clothing, greeting cards,
and other items to thousands of gay men around the United States and abroad.
They called their first catalog Vagabond — “the unusual catalog.” (

Figure 5

)
Soon they were offering a directory of physique photographers, magazines, and
clothing; another directory of books that “deal with the homosexual way of life”;
and a third travel guide to “279 Places to Go for a Gay Time.” DSI even offered
a pen pal service, a credit card for making catalog purchases, and a prepaid film
development mailer, a service that allowed customers to avoid embarrassment or
even arrest at local photo labs. “We made millions,” Germain confessed. By 1967
the two partners had fourteen full-time employees, making them arguably the
largest gay-owned and gay-oriented enterprise in the world. 26

The heart of the DSI enterprise was the publication of an extensive series of
physique magazines featuring the first male frontal nudes. With the cover of each
of their magazines revealing more male anatomy, Spinar and Germain sought to
challenge American censorship laws. Their very first issue of Butch in 1965 (Fig-
ure 6) featured both male nudes (minus the usual posing strap found in all previ-
ous magazines) and a “Publisher’s Creed” that boldly asserted that “all of us have
a common ground to defend”:

Those concerned with freedom have the responsibility of seeing to it that each in-
dividual book or publication, whatever its contents, is given the freedom of expres-
sion granted to it by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States
of America.

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 879

A string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions had loosened definitions of ob-
scenity, including a 1962 decision affirming photographs of men in posing straps
were not “patently offensive” and therefore protected by the First Amendment. In
MANual v. Day, the Supreme Court found that “these portrayals of the male nude
cannot fairly be regarded as more objectionable than many portrayals of the female
nude that society tolerates.” 27 Such decisions gave the DSI publishers cause for
hope. By 1966 DSI was printing 50,000 copies of each issue of Butch as well as
50,000 copies of a second, full-color magazine called Tiger.28

But in 1967 two assistant U.S. district attorneys, several postal inspectors,
and several members of the U.S. Marshall’s office appeared at DSI’s 5,700-square-
foot Minneapolis publishing plant. They arrested Spinar and Germain and
charged them with twenty-nine counts of sending lewd materials through the
mail. Without a warrant, they seized financial records, mailing lists, postage me-
ters, and 15,000 magazines—a seizure that depleted the entire inventory, accord-
ing to DSI attorneys, and amounted to illegal restraint of trade. The government
confiscated so much material that they had to order a second semi-trailer truck to
haul it away. The U.S. district attorney claimed his office had received 1,400 com-

Figure 5

journal of social history880 summer 2010

plaints from individuals receiving unsolicited DSI materials. If found guilty on all
charges, Spinar and Germain faced 145 years in prison and $145,000 in fines. This
was only the first in a series of harassing lawsuits filed by federal authorities that
would eventually leave Spinar and Germain virtually bankrupt.29

During the two-week trial, covered extensively in Minneapolis newspapers,
DSI’s attorneys maintained the now long-established alibi that their intended au-
dience was “artists, photographers and sculptors,” assuming this would bolster their
First Amendment claims. But the prosecution argued that homosexual men were
the intended “recipient group” and that by “pandering” to this group, Spinar and
Germain were seeking to “promote homosexuality in our society.” Assistant U.S.
Attorney Stanley H. Green introduced testimony from a physique photographer
that 80 per cent of the 15,000 names on the mailing list he sold to DSI were those
of “homosexuals.” He called gay male customers of DSI as witnesses—many of

Figure 6

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 881

whom had been forced to testify under threat of losing their jobs—to try to es-
tablish that looking at magazines such as Butch and Tiger encouraged them to go
out cruising for men and effectively caused homosexuality. To drive home the
danger, he put two teenage boys on the stand who had allegedly received unso-
licited DSI advertisements in the mail.30

Judge Earl R. Larson of the US federal district court agreed with the prose-
cution that the intended market was this “deviant group.” But to the amazement
of the prosecution, he still found Spinar and Germain not guilty on all counts.
Larson ruled that “the materials have no appeal to the prurient interests of the in-
tended recipient deviant group; do not exceed the limits of candor tolerated by the
contemporary national community; and are not utterly without redeeming social
value.” But Larson went further, acknowledging that these were gay magazines tar-
geting a specifically gay market, and defending the rights of those consumers.
“The rights of minorities expressed individually in sexual groups or otherwise must
be respected. With increasing research and study, we will in the future come to a
better understanding of ourselves, sexual deviants, and others.” Spinar and Ger-
main were so proud of this landmark legal achievement that they published sto-
ries about the decision in their publications headlined “A Major Victory” and
included photographs of themselves—an unprecedented public display for publishers
continually threatened with arrest. (

Figure 7

) In subsequent issues of the maga-
zines seized in Minneapolis, they published full frontal nudes with the prominent
caption “This photo was declared NOT obscene in a Federal Court.” 31

DSI’s victory in federal district court was recognized at the time as a water-
shed moment, but today has been almost forgotten both by historians of pornog-
raphy and obscenity and by historians of the gay movement.32 After 1967, the
artistic, bodybuilding, and classical alibis that had been used to justify male nudity
fell away. Within a year publications appeared with cover photos of naked men
in bed, the sexual connotations no longer even thinly disguised. Made aware of
the victory thru Spinar and Germain’s own publicity, new photographers and pub-
lishers entered the business and many existing studios quickly turned to offering
sexually explicit materials. Two months after the Minneapolis verdict, Don
Michaels began publishing a small, openly gay publication called The Los Angeles
Advocate. Its first cover story highlighted the DSI legal victory and the magazine’s
own contents clearly drew on the physique model, with sexy photographs of
“Groovy Guy” beauty pageant winners, a “Body Buddy” fitness column, and an all-
male personal ad section, “Trader Dick.” Lou Rand Hogan, author of The Gay Cook-
book—which DSI and other gay mail-order book services had promoted—offered a
cooking column. Its first major advertisers were mail-order businesses. Renamed
The Advocate, by the 1970s it became a prominent national gay and lesbian news
magazine, but with a circulation still less than DSI’s Butch a decade earlier.33

Homophile Sexual Politics

One of the prime witnesses for DSI in their 1967 Minneapolis obscenity trial
was Hall Call, head of the Mattachine Society in San Francisco. Call had a close

journal of social history882 summer 2010

personal relationship with Conrad Germain, who he had solicited for financial
support for his fledgling homophile organization. Call was instrumental in find-
ing other expert witnesses to testify on DSI’s behalf, including Ward Pomeroy
from the Kinsey Institute. Call’s support for the physique publishers was unusual.
The early gay or “homophile” movement—consisting of a handful of chapters of
the Mattachine Society, One, Inc. in Los Angeles, and chapters of the lesbian
group, the Daughters of Bilitis—were concerned with middle-class respectability
and largely antagonist toward gay bars and graphic sexual imagery. Hall Call was
one of the few homophile leaders who saw a connection between sexual freedom
and gay rights and therefore supported gay commercial interests. With friend Don
Lucas, Call owned Pan-Graphic Press, which published the staid Mattachine Re-
view, a series of gay pulp novels, and an early gay bar guide which became Bob
Damron’s Address Book and continued to be published well into the 1990s. In 1960 they
began publishing the Dorian Book Service Quarterly, which offered mail-order books along

Figure 7

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 883

with news on censorship issues and an explicit agenda of supporting the “freedom
to read.” According to Call, these commercial enterprises provided the financial
support for Mattachine at a time when “we didn’t have a pot to piss in.”34

Hall Call’s Pan-Graphic Press demonstrates the complex, overlooked rela-
tionship between homophile movement leaders and physique publishers. Al-
though physique magazines are often derided for hiding behind the bodybuilding
or artistic alibis, Mattachine and ONE also hid behind the mask of being mere “re-
search and education” institutions. Like their physique counterparts, early ho-
mophile leaders used references to classical Greece and Rome “as models on which
to base claims for gay rights.”35 When called upon to make judgments in obscen-
ity trials, judges often conflated the two genres. Arguing that the fictional stories
in ONE magazine “are obviously calculated to stimulate the lust of the homosex-
ual reader,” a federal district court rejected ONE’s claim to provide information
about a societal problem and effectively classified it’s rather tame fiction with pho-
tographs of naked men. ONE editors made a similar comparison. When they
tried to get newsstands to carry their magazine, they naturally approached those
that sold muscle magazines. As Martin Block remembered arguing, “The maga-
zine stands that we went to in Los Angeles all had gay customers . . . they carried
the physique magazines that had photographs of men in jock straps and posing
straps. They knew they had customers for the physique magazines, so why not sell
ONE magazine as well?”36

The homophile political movement benefited from and was intricately con-
nected with the more entrepreneurial physique world. As early as fall 1956, Bob
Mizer offered readers of his widely popular Physique Pictorial the addresses of ONE
and the Mattachine Review if they wanted “factual information” on the topic of ho-
mosexuality. According to historian Craig Loftin, readers of ONE, The Matta-
chine Review, and even the lesbian-oriented Ladder had long pleaded for pen pal
advertisements, gay bar listings, and photographs, but the editors believed such of-
ferings would involve them in encouraging criminal activity. Despite the popu-
lar demand that homophile publications become more like physique magazines,
homophile leaders increasingly distanced themselves from publications they con-
sidered tawdry and possibly illegal. When Clark Polack, a homophile leader in
Philadelphia, began in 1964 to publish Drum, a magazine that combined gay news
and commentary with physique photography, other homophile leaders attacked
him as a threat to the movement. The Mattachine Society of Washington de-
nounced such “combination” magazines and cut all ties with publications that
“contain both articles of serious homophile interest and photographs of naked
teenage boys in provocative poses.”37 This stance failed to acknowledge the in-
creasingly explicit political content of the physique editorials and the huge gay fol-
lowing they commanded. By combining commercial, sexual, and political
interests, Drum represented not a threat to the movement, but its future. As even
Del Martin, a lesbian leader notoriously antagonistic to the bar scene, had to ac-
knowledge by 1966, “there has been a growing emphasis upon homosexuals as
consumers and a drive to support homosexual merchants.” 38

journal of social history884 summer 2010

A Gay Consumer Rights Revolution

Despite opposition from traditional fitness magazine publishers, the U.S. post
office and even fledgling gay political organizations, physique publishers flour-
ished and allowed gay men to form connections—both imagined and real. By of-
fering photographs of men gazing at other physique magazines, publishers
encouraged their readers to identify with the models and see their homoerotic in-
terests as natural. They invited readers to buy posing straps and books on photo-
graphing the male nude, enter drawing contests, submit fiction or photographs,
and write letters. Readers responded in droves, sending in photographs of them-
selves—stylized to conform to the physique look they saw in the magazine—ask-
ing to be included in an upcoming issue.39 Readers also incorporated physique
photographs into their everyday lives. Though they may have arrived in the mail
in the proverbial brown paper envelope, as early as 1962 these catalogues offered
wall posters and calendars intended for public display. Men used physique pho-
tographs to decorate kitchen match boxes that could not only be used in the home
but also could serve as “get-acquainted devices” when someone on a street cor-
ner asks, “Hey buddy . . . got a match.” Both DSI and Grecian Guild sold pins and
rings with their company logos as another, and more profitable, way for gay men
to identify themselves to one another as members of the physique world.40

Far from being mere objects of secret enjoyment or private reading, physique
magazines tried to create an interactive experience with multiple opportunities for
readers to become a part of the physique world and simultaneously spend more
money. Readers could join pen pal clubs, exchange photographs, and order slides
or movies to be displayed at parties. (

Figure 8

) Everett Jones, a fifty-nine year old
chef and DSI customer from Menlo Park, California, recalled receiving flyers in
the mail every two or three weeks offering new products and services. He pur-
chased several DSI directories, slides of nude men, and phonograph records. He
subscribed to its Reader’s Service and had responded to some of its personal ads.
He also was a member of the DSI Collector’s Club for the purchase of individual
photographs. John Raymond, a forty-two year old engineer from Akron, Ohio,
had placed an advertisement through DSI’s Reader’s Service and, according to his
sworn testimony, received over one hundred responses.41

Physique magazines were not the only element of early gay consumer culture.
Campy and sexually suggestive greeting cards were another common item, one
that underscored and fostered the interconnectivity of this growing network. (Fig-
ure 9) By the 1960s a number of clothing stores, such as Ah-Men on Santa Mon-
ica Boulevard in West Hollywood, had a thriving mail-order business. The photographs and
models in its catalogs showed the influence of the physique world, as did the store’s
title, a campy refrain that suggested a worshipful, even religious, devotion to the
male body. Even some of the clothing came directly from the physique world. In
the 1965 edition of the catalog, in addition to shirts, pants, and shoes, one could
purchase posing straps for “figure studies.” As one anonymous gay man remem-
bered in an on-line posting in 2000, “As a teenager I discovered the mail order cat-

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 885

alog Ah-Men out of California in the mid 1960’s. . . To me, Ah-MEN catalog was
a link to my awakening of my sexuality.” Another man, underscoring the pivotal
role these pieces of consumer culture played in his self-understanding, wrote,
“would you believe that I STILL have every catalog I ever received from Ah-
Men—probably some of the earliest—and boy, do they ever exude sex! . . Ah-
Men catalogs [were] a catalyst for awakening the hormones deep inside.”42 That
the owner of Ah-Men later opened one of the most popular gay bars in West Hol-
lywood underscores how these early sites of consumption were important precur-
sors to the more widely recognized ones of the post-Stonewall generation.

As important as they were, the connections and sense of collective identity
created by this consumer network of physique magazines and other mail-order
items were severely limited by gender and to a lesser extent race. Women were
completely absent from the physique world and their only participation in the
larger world of gay consumer culture seems to have been limited to lesbian pulp
fiction. Even more than the political groups that would follow, these early con-
sumption-based communities were largely male. In a consumer-driven market,
men’s higher disposable income undoubtedly played a role. So, too, did the field’s
roots in a male tradition of physical culture magazines that gay men, alone, were
able to co-opt. Although by the 1970s lesbian feminists would critique the male-
dominated movement for its superficial and sexist focus on bodies and bars, some
lesbians in the early 1960s envied the access to a consumer culture that gay men
had created. One small-town lesbian wrote to the Daughters of Bilitis, the first les-
bian rights organization, imploring them to supply a list of places “where one gal
can meet another gal of her interest.” As she pointed out, “The men have this di-
rectory already—put out by a ‘Mr. Larry’ of Directory Services” and a female equiv-

Figure 8

journal of social history886 summer 2010

alent was “badly needed.” Unfortunately, she would wait nearly a decade for the
first commercially available lesbian bar guide. The Daughters of Bilitis did offer
a Book and Record Service between 1960 and 1964 as a fundraising tool, but of-
fered mostly lesbian literature and non-fiction.43

On the issue of racial equality, the physique movement looks slightly better.
One scholar has taken the publishers to task for their furtherance of Jim Crow, de-
riding the entire genre as “pages of whiteness.” But after a systematic survey of
physique magazines, even she had to admit that they featured one black male
image in nearly every issue, often more.44 In June 1960 Vim featured a black model
on its cover. If the numerous images of Latino or mixed-race men are included,

Figure 9

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 887

the representation of minorities in physique magazines appears significantly bet-
ter than most mainstream news or fitness magazines in 1950s and 1960s America.
Even while excluding women and marginalizing men of color, these magazines
and related consumer items created a sense of an imagined nationwide, even
global, community of like-minded men with an interest in the male body. But it
also helped to solidify at a very early stage an association between the white male
body and gay rights.

Recent scholarship on gay consumerism has tended to focus on the limitations
of commercial interests in furthering a civil rights agenda. Lisa Dugan and other
scholars lament how a gay movement with origins in a Leftist coalition from the
1960s has narrowed into a corporate-dominated arm of neoliberal politics.45 Al-
though corporate America and Hollywood may court the gay market, they point
out, the mirror they hold up to the community reflects back a very narrow version
of that community—one that is largely white, male, affluent, and partnered. But
the origins of the gay rights movement do not fit neatly within a golden age of so-
cial radicalism bent on destroying hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Many of
the early leaders who helped create this national culture were free-market capi-
talists who leaned toward supporting Republican candidates for president such as
Senator Barry Goldwater in 1964. Because of Goldwater’s support for limited gov-
ernment—at a time when that government was likely to tell you what you could
read, publish, and receive in the mail—Clark Polack suggested Goldwater was his
preferred candidate, had it not been for his stance against pornography. “Gold-
water’s stand for the good old morality,” Polack wrote in the first issue of Drum,
“is in direct contradiction to his basic concept of freedom for the individual.”
Spinar and Germain at DSI also printed editorials in defense of the virtues of the
“free enterprise system” and envisioned themselves as part of a new generation of
entrepreneurial Americans who were “finally starting to lay the organization man
to rest.” These young gay leaders saw limited government and a free consumer
market as allies in their fight for sexual freedom. Their position highlights the
contradiction within modern American conservative ideology that defends a free
consumer market while simultaneously decrying the results of that very market.
Conservatives who lament the prominence of gay culture in modern American life
should wag their fingers less at sixties radicals and identity politics and more at
Adam Smith and the free market.46

The link between consumption and a sense of identity and community is ex-
ceedingly hard to document. But the story of a small circle of gay friends in Pen-
sacola, Florida, is suggestive. They came up with a novel way to deal with the
postal authorities’ habit of opening “plain brown” envelopes that were addressed
to single men. According to historian John Loughery, they had all of their mail-
order books, magazines, and films sent to a mythical “Emma Jones” at a local post
office box. They got a sympathetic straight woman to pick up the mail. In 1966
those men decided that “Emma Jones” would host a beach party on the Fourth of
July weekend. Though “Emma” sent out twenty-five invitations to her first beach
bash, fifty people showed up. Attendance grew to 200 people in 1967 and to 400
in 1968. By the early 1970s “Emma Jones” was hosting “the largest gay gathering

journal of social history888 summer 2010

held in the South,” according to Loughery, one that included lesbians and gay
men of color. Thanks to Emma, “innumerable friendships had been made, an ex-
ample of gay economic clout had been established, and an exuberant gay pres-
ence had asserted itself on the Florida Panhandle that, whatever the setbacks
ahead, would never disappear entirely.” 47

It is impossible to know what was on the minds of the men and women who
resisted arrest at the Stonewall bar at the end of June 1969. Surely they were in-
spired by the acts of civil disobedience of the civil rights movement, the Black
Power movement, and the New Left. But their collective act of resistance—com-
memorated in cities around the world every year in gay pride celebrations—was
fundamentally about the right to consume. The riots were not the beginning of
a movement—as they are often portrayed in the popular media—but the culmi-
nation of a gay consumer rights revolution begun by the purveyors of physique
magazines, solidified by larger mail order houses, and then taken to the streets by
the Stonewall patrons. If they had won the legal right to view gay images, buy gay
books, and join gay correspondence clubs all over America, why could they not
frequent a gay bar in the heart of Greenwich Village and buy a drink with others
like themselves?

Department of History
Tampa, FL 33620-8100

ENDNOTES

I would like to thank some of the many colleagues and institutions who have supported this project,
including Phil Levy, Robert Ingalls, William Zewadski, Gary Gebhardt, the Phil Zwickler Memorial
Research Grant at Cornell University, the University of South Florida Office of Research, and the Uni-
versity of South Florida History Department’s Faculty and Graduate Research Seminar.

1. John Loughery, The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century His-
tory, (New York, 1998), 198; author’s correspondence with Bill Kelley, January 22, 2007.

2. I met Kelley in researching my study of the cold war origins of the gay rights movement. David K.
Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Persecution of Gays and Lesbian in the Federal Government (Chicago,
2004). See also Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay
Rights Movement in America (New York, 1999), 288; Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York, 1993),
222-229; Andrew Davis, “Talking History with Longtime Activist Bill Kelley,” Windy City Times, June
22, 2005.

3. David Steigerwald, T.H. Breen, and Lizabeth Cohen, “Exchange: American Consumerism,” Jour-
nal of American History 93 (September 2006): 385-414.

4. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New
York, 1993); Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market (Wash-
ington, D.C., 1989).

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 889

5. T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence
(New York, 2004); Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Post-
war America (New York, 2003); Robin Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class
(New York, 1996); Robert E. Weems, Jr., “The Revolution will be Marketed: American Corporations
and Black Consumers During the 1960’s” in Lawrence Glickman (ed.), Consumer Society in American
History: A Reader (Ithica, 1999), 316-325; Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and
Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Chicago, 2007).

6. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the
United States 1940-1970 (Chicago,1983), 136; Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian
Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (Chicago, 2006), 9, 24, 56; One of the few articles to
engage these two literatures is from a marketing perspective, but the focus is almost exclusively on
mainstream advertisers in the post-Stonewall era. See Blaine J. Branchik, “Out in the Market: A His-
tory of the Gay Market Segment in the United States.” Journal of Macromarketing 22, no. 1 (2002): 86-
97. There have also been some specific studies of individual entrepreneurs or artists, such as Jackie
Hatton, “The Pornography Empire of H. Lynn Womack,” Thresholds: Viewing Culture 7 (Spring 1993):
8-32 and Reed Massengill, The Male Ideal: Lon of New York and the Masculine Physique (New York,
2004).

7. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings
to Stonewall (New York, 1996), 217-219.

8. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 253; Other scholars that have discussed the images of physique photog-
raphers include Michael Bronski, Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston, 1984) and
Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American
Art (Boston, 2002).

9. Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Boston, 1995),
xi; Katherine Sender, Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market (New York, 2005), 38; Lil-
lian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lip-
stick Lesbians (New York, 2006), 74, 234. Other examinations of the gay press that completely ignore
physique magazines include Amy Richlin, “Eros Underground: Greece and Rome in Gay Print Cul-
ture, 1953-1965,” Beert C. Verstraete and Vernon Provencal (eds.), Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-
Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West (New York, 2005), 422.

10. U.S. Congress, House, “Obscene Matter Sent Through the Mail,” Hearing, Subcommittee on
Postal Operations, Committee on Post Office and Civil Service, 86th Cong., 1st sess., 1959; On the
anti-pornography movement, see Richard Kyle-Keith, The High Price of Pornography (Washington,
D.C., 1961), 47; In Manual v. Day, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harlan wrote, “(1) the magazines are
not physical culture or “body-building” publications, but are composed primarily, if not exclusively, for
homosexuals, and have no literary, scientific merit; (2) they would appeal to the “prurient interest” of
such sexual deviates, but would not have any interest for sexually normal individuals; and (3) the
magazines are read almost entirely by homosexuals, and possibly a few adolescent males; the ordinary
male adult would not normally buy them.” MANual Enterprises v. Day, 370 U.S. 478 (1962).

11. On model complaints, see Richard Alan, “Bodybuilding 1958,” Iron Man 17, no. 6 (April-May
1958), 24-27, quoted in Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 433; A.R. quoted in “Dear Drum,” Drum, August
1967, 37

12. Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (New York, 2000),
159; Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., 232.

13. Gail, Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United
States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, 1995); John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White
Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York, 2001); David L. Chapman, Sandow
the Magnificent: Eugene Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (Urbana, 2006).

journal of social history890 summer 2010

14. Bernarr Macfadden, Superb Virility of Manhood (New York, 1904), 176, quoted in George
Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940
(New York, 1994), 116, 179.

15. On the history of Bob Mizer’s Athletic Model Guild, which began publishing Physique Pictorial as
an advertising booklet for photographers in 1951, see Winston Leyland, ed. Physique: A Pictorial His-
tory of the Athletic Model Guild (San Francisco, 1982) and F. Valentine Hooven III, Beefcake: The Mus-
cle Magazines of America 1950-1970 (Koln, 1995).

16. Grecian Guild advertisement in VIM, August 1955, 49; “What’s in a Name,” Grecian Guild Pic-
torial, Autumn 1955, 4-5. Many physique publisher and photographers used the word “guild” to sug-
gest the collective nature of their endeavor, including Athletic Model Guild, Western Photography
Guild, Underwood Guild, and The Guild Press.

17. Chauncey, Gay New York, 283-285.

18. “There are Grecians in the bottom of my garden. . .,” VIM, November 1955, 44-45; “Rollicking
Romans Pictorial,” VIM, September 1956, 7-10; “Variations on a Scream,” VIM, November 1956, 36.

19. Harry B. Paschall, “Let me Tell You a Fairy Tale . . .,” Strength & Health, June 1957, 17.

20. Jack Walters, “Males, Morals, & Mores,” Vim, July 1959, 2; Jack Zuideveld became editor of VIM
in the spring of 1959 and obtained publishing rights in August. See United States v. Zuideveld 316 F.2d
873 (7th Cir. 1963). On the complicated way in which representations of Rock Hudson both con-
cealed and revealed his homosexuality, see Richard Meyer, “Rock Hudson’s Body,” in Diana Fuss (ed.),
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York, 1991), 258-88.

21. “Womack Jailed Anew in Obscenity Crackdown,” Washington Post, January 28, 1961; People v.
Robert H. Mizer, Jack O’Neil and William Petty, C-14164, Superior Court of California, County of Los
Angles, March 18, 1947, Library of the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduc-
tion; Rupert Smith, Physique: The Life of John S. Barrington (London, 1997); Massengill, Lon of New
York, 33-34; Joseph W. Bean (ed.) Kris: The Physique Photography of Chuck Renslow (Las Vegas, 2008),
9-11; Interview with Chuck Renslow, Chicago, May 25, 2008.

22. Email correspondence, George Whitney to David Johnson, February 21, 2005.

23. Berry Werth, The Scarlet Professor: Newton Arvin: A Literary Life Shattered by Scandal (New York,
2001), 196; Post Office figures quoted in Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and
Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago, 2000), 239.

24. “An Urgent Appeal to Our Readers,” MANual, February, 1963, 37; “DANGER AHEAD!,”
Manorama 12, July 1963, 33; “Danger Ahead!”, Grecian Guild Pictorial, September 1958; Smith,
Physique: The Life of John S. Barrington, 116-123.

25. Jack Wills, “Perverse Nonsense!,”Grecian Guild Pictorial 37, March 1963, 7-10; “Perverse Non-
sense—The Aftermath,” Grecian Guild Pictorial 39, July 1963, 40.

26. Most of the gay-oriented bars at this time were not gay-owned. Interview with Conrad Germain,
West Hollywood, California, June 6, 2008; Vagabond Catalog, 1963, DSI Folder, Lynn H. Womack Pa-
pers, Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University;
U.S. vs. Spinar and Germain, Transcript of Trial, National Archives—Chicago Branch, RG 21, US Dis-
trict Court, Fourth Division of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Criminal Case Files, 1966-1969, Box 11,
Case 4-67CR 15.

THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE 891

27. MANual Enterprises v. Day, 370 U.S. 478 (1962); Rodger Streitmatter and John C. Watson, “Her-
man Lynn Womack: Pornographer as First Amendment Pioneer,” Journalism History 28 (2002): 56-66;
Joyce Murdoch and Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. The Supreme Court (New
York, 2001), 65-88.

28. Testimony of Joseph Rosen, manager of Rosen Printing Company, Buffalo NY in U.S. vs. Spinar
and Germain, Transcript of Trial, National Archives—Chicago Branch, RG 21, US District Court,
Fourth Division of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Criminal Case Files, 1966-1969, Box 11, Case 4-67CR
15, 226; Given under oath in a federal court, these are the most reliable circulation figures available
for any physique magazine. Lynn Womack claimed circulation figures of 30,000 for his magazines in
1963 (Womack to Krysalka, June 11, 1963, Lynn H. Womack Papers, Human Sexuality Collection,
Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University). Given that there were more than
twenty such magazines in circulation at the time, the monthly sales figures for the entire industry were
easily in the hundreds of thousands.

29. Brief in Support of Motion to Suppress, US v. Spinar and Germain, Folder 13, Box 1, H. Lynn
Womack Papers, Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell
University; On subsequent lawsuits, see “Jury Convicts DSI owners of obscenity,” The Advocate, vol
4, no. 12 (August 5, 1970), 1; DSI Sales v. US, US Court of Appeals, 8th Circuit, 440 F2d 1241 (April
1, 1971).

30. U.S. vs. Spinar and Germain, Transcript of Trial, National Archives—Chicago Branch, RG 21, US
District Court, Fourth Division of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Criminal Case Files, 1966-1969, Box 11,
Case 4-67CR 15.

31. US v. Spinar and Germain, Decision, US District Court, Minneapolis, Case 4-67 CR 15, July 26,
1967; Finlay Lewis, “Homosexuals Called Chief Buyers of Male Pictures,” Minneapolis Tribune, July
14, 1967; Interview with Mickey Robins, Santa Monica, California, June 12, 2007; “A Major Victory,”
Butch 9 (1967), 7; “A Major Victory,” Galerie 3 (1967), 7.

32. Thomas Waugh, Hard to Imagine, is one of the only scholars to discuss the DSI case. F. Valentine
Hooven, III, Beefcake: The Muscle Magazines of America 1950-1970 (Berlin, 1995) fails to mention DSI
and wrongly attributes the emergence of full frontal nudity to an alleged Supreme Court Case in-
volving Drum magazine.

33. On the founding of the Advocate, see Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., 159-161 and Streit-
matter, Unspeakable, 87-88, 96-98; Lou Rand Hogan, The Gay Cookbook (New York, 1965).

34. Interview with Conrad Germain, West Hollywood, California, June 6, 2008; Interview with Hall
Call in Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Rights 1945-1990, An Oral His-
tory (New York, 1992), 65-69; Martin Meeker makes a similar and more developed argument about the
commercial side of Mattachine in Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community,
1940s-1970s (Chicago, 2006).

35. Richlin, “Eros Underground: Greece and Rome in Gay Print Culture, 1953-1965,” Verstraete
and Provencal (eds.), Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity, 422.

36. One Inc. v. Olesen, 355 U.S. 371(1958); Murdoch and Price, Courting Justice, 27-50; Streitmat-
ter, Unspeakable, 35; Interview with Martin Block in Marcus, Making History, 41.

37. “Homosexuality and Bodybuilding,” Physique Pictorial, Fall 1956, 17; “Physique Photography,”
Eastern Mattachine Magazine, Nov-Dec 1965,18; Craig Loftin, “Passionate Anxieties: McCarthyism
and Sexuality in the United States, 1945-1965” (Ph.D. diss. University of California, Irvine, 2006),
34. By 1963 Grecian Guild Pictorial was offering reviews of gay books and advertisements for The Ho-
mosexual Dictionary and The Guild Guide to the Gay Scene. By 1966 it featured a “Newsfront” section
that included news of gay legal and cultural notes from around the world. See Grecian Guild Pictorial,
No. 59, November 1966.

journal of social history892 summer 2010

38. Del Martin, “History of S.F. Homophile Groups,” The Ladder, October 1966, 9.

39. Based only on his reading of Physique Pictorial, Daniel Harris argues that physique magazines ed-
itors encouraged gay male readers to feel “self-contempt” by emphasizing the heterosexuality of their
models. I found that most model descriptions were pointedly ambiguous about the sexuality of the
models, encouraging a feeling of identification. See Daniel Harris, The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture
(New York, 1997), 86-90. For original copies of letters from readers, see Folders 48, 49, 56 and 57,
Box 1, H. Lynn Womack Papers, Human Sexuality Collection, Division of Rare and Manuscript Col-
lections, Cornell University and Thor Studio Correspondence, 1953-1955, Kinsey Institute for Re-
search in Sex, Gender and Reproduction.

40. Young Physique, January 1963, 30-31; the back cover of Young Physique, April 1962, offered “life-
size” posters “ready for framing for your bedroom or den!”

41. U.S. vs. Spinar and Germain, National Archives—Chicago Branch, RG 21, US District Court,
Fourth Division of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Criminal Case Files, 1966-1969, Box 11, Case 4-67CR
15, 82, 177.

42. Forum Postings from “Tanline” and “Rick2206” January 23, 2000 on http://atkol.com/; Faderman
and Timmons, Gay L.A, 233-4. Although Faderman and Timmons acknowledge that Ah-Men began
in the late 1950s, it does not appear in their history of gay Los Angeles until the chapter on the 1970s.

43. “Jan Sheeler” to The Ladder, July 21, 1964, quoted in Meeker, Contacts Desired, 104; Marcia M.
Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Move-
ment (Emeryville, 2006), 59-60.

44. Tracy D. Morgan, “Pages of Whiteness: Race, Physique Magazines, and the Emergence of Public
Gay Culture,” Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason (eds.) Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender Anthology (New York, 1996), 280-97.

45. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality?: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democ-
racy (Boston, 2003).

46. “Liberty in the Defense of Vice is No Extreme,” Drum, Vol 4, No. 9 (November 1964), 1; “A New
Era is Upon Us,” Bronco, #1, no date. Although Bronco contains no publication information, its for-
mat, font, and Publisher’s Creed all indicate it is a DSI publication; on the relationship between wage-
labor capitalism and gay identity, see John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity” in Powers of Desire:
The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York, 1983),
74-87, and Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism (New York,
2000).

47. Loughery, The Other Side of Silence, 273-5. Emma Jones’s legacy continues as a Memorial Day
weekend series of circuit parties in Pensacola. See Mickey Weems, “Southern Comfort: Interview
with Promoter Johnny Chisholm,” Boston Edge, May 22, 2007.

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Fortieth anniversary of Compton’s Cafeteria riot, June 22, 2006. Photo by Philipe Lonestar.

Reprinted by permission of the photographer and the San Francisco Bay Area Independent

Media Center

InterventIons

Transgender History, Homonormativity,

and Disciplinarity

Susan Stryker

The current attention to homonormativity has tended to focus on gay and lesbian
social, political, and cultural formations and their relationship to a neoliberal politics
of multicultural diversity that meshes with the assimilative strategies of transnational
capital. Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics,
and the Attack on Democracy (2003), which describes a “new homonormativity that
does not challenge heterosexist institutions and values, but rather upholds, sustains,
and seeks inclusion within them,” is generally acknowledged as the text through
which this term has come into wider currency.1 There is, however, an older formula-
tion of homonormativity that nevertheless merits retention, one closer in meaning
to the “homo-normative” social codes described in 1998 by Judith Halberstam in
Female Masculinity, in accordance with which expressions of masculinity in women
are as readily disparaged within gender-normative gay and lesbian contexts as within
heteronormative ones.2 It is this earlier sense of homonormativity that is most perti-
nent to the thoughts I offer here on homonormativity and transgender history, both
as an object of scholarly inquiry and as a professional disciplinary practice.

Terminological History
Homonormativity, as I first heard and used the term in the early 1990s, was an
attempt to articulate the double sense of marginalization and displacement experi-
enced within transgender political and cultural activism. Like other queer militants,

Radical History Review
Issue 100 (Winter 2008) doi 10.1215/01636545-2007-026
© 2008 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc.

145

transgender activists sought to make common cause with any groups — including
nontransgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals — who contested heterosexist privilege.
However, we also needed to name the ways that homosexuality, as a sexual orienta-
tion category based on constructions of gender it shared with the dominant culture,
sometimes had more in common with the straight world than it did with us.3

The grassroots conversations in which I participated in San Francisco in the
first half of the 1990s used the term homonormative when discussing the relation-
ship of transgender to queer, and queer to gay and lesbian. Transgender itself was
a term then undergoing a significant shift in meaning. Robert Hill, who has been
researching the history of heterosexual male cross-dressing communities, found
instances in community-based publications of words like transgenderal, transgen-
derist, and transgenderism dating back to the late 1960s.4 The logic of those terms,
used to describe individuals who lived in one social gender but had a bodily sex
conventionally associated with the other, aimed for a conceptual middle ground
between transvestism (merely changing one’s clothing) and transsexualism (chang-
ing one’s sex). By the early 1990s, primarily through the influence of Leslie Fein-
berg’s 1992 pamphlet Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,
transgender was beginning to refer to something else — an imagined political alli-
ance of all possible forms of gender antinormativity. It was in this latter sense that
transgender became articulated with queer.5

This “new transgender” marked both a political and generational distinction
between older transvestite/transsexual/drag terminologies and an emerging gender
politics that was explicitly and self-consciously queer. It began for me in 1992, when
the San Francisco chapter of Queer Nation distributed one of its trademark Day-
Glo crack-and-peel stickers that read “Trans Power/Bi Power/Queer Nation.” The
transsexual activist Anne Ogborn encountered someone on the street wearing one
of those stickers, but with the words “Trans Power” torn off. When Ogborn asked
if there was any significance to the omission, she was told that the wearer did not
consider trans people to be part of the queer movement.6 Ogborn attended the next
Queer Nation general meeting to protest transphobia within the group, whereupon
she was invited, in high Queer Nation style, to organize a transgender caucus.7 As
a result, Transgender Nation, of which I was a founding member, came into being
as the first explicitly queer transgender social change group in the United States.
The group survived the soon-to-be-defunct Queer Nation and became, in its own
brief existence from 1992 to 1994, a touchstone in the transgender inclusion debates
then raging in San Francisco’s emerging Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
(LGBT) community.

In a contradictory environment simultaneously welcoming and hostile, trans-
gender activists staked their own claims to queer politics. We argued that sexual
orientation was not the only significant way to differ from heteronormativity — that
homo, hetero, and bi in fact all depended on similar understandings of “man” and

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Stryker | transgender History 147

“woman,” which trans problematized. People with trans identities could describe
themselves as men and women, too — or resist binary categorization altogether — but
in doing either they queered the dominant relationship of sexed body and gendered
subject. We drew a distinction between “orientation queers” and “gender queers.”
Tellingly, gender queer, necessary for naming the minoritized/marginalized position
of difference within queer cultural formations more generally, has stuck around as
a useful term; orientation queer, naming queer’s unstated norm, has seemed redun-
dant in most contexts and has not survived to the same extent.

When San Francisco gays and lesbians who were active in queer politics in
the first half of the 1990s were antagonistic to transgender concerns, we accused
them of being antiheteronormative in a homonormative fashion. The term was an
intuitive, almost self-evident, back-formation from the ubiquitous heteronomative,
suitable for use where homosexual community norms marginalized other kinds of
sex/gender/sexuality difference. Although I do not recall specific instances where
the term homonormative was used, or who used it, the general discussions in which
the term would have been deployed were playing themselves out in any number of
places in which transgender inclusion was being contested: within Queer Nation
and ACT-UP and AIDS agencies; at community meetings to organize for the March
on Washington in 1993 and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising
in 1994; at town-hall meetings about gays in the military and domestic partner-
ships during the hopeful early days of the first Clinton administration; during policy
discussions about including gender identity in the proposed federal Employment
Non-Discrimination Act; in catfights over who could attend the Michigan Women’s
Music Festival; at meetings of the Harvey Milk and Alice B. Toklas Democratic
Clubs; at Pride Parade meetings; at membership meetings and board meetings of
practically every lesbian and gay nonprofit organization in the city; at the San Fran-
cisco Humans Rights Commission committee on lesbian and gay issues; in flame
wars in the letters-to-the-editors columns of the Bay Times and the BAR (Bay Area
Reporter); and in coffee shops, bars, dance clubs, dungeon spaces, and bedrooms
throughout the city.

The homonormative accusation tended to be leveled against a handful of
favorite targets: gays and lesbians who saw transgender issues as entirely distinct
from their own and who resisted any sort of transgender participation in queer
politics and culture; lesbians who excluded male-to-female transgender people
but nervously engaged with female-to-male people, on the grounds that the for-
mer were really men and the latter were really women; and, putting a somewhat
finer point on the matter, those who conceptualized “T” as an identity category
analogous to “GLB” and who advocated for a GLBT community on that basis. In
the first instance, homonormativity was a threat to a broadly conceived politics of
alliance and affinity, regardless of identity; it aimed at securing privilege for gender-
normative gays and lesbians based on adherence to dominant cultural constructions

of gender, and it diminished the scope of potential resistance to oppression. In the
second instance, homonormativity took the shape of lesbian subcultural norms that
perversely grounded themselves in reactionary notions of biological determinism as
the only legitimate basis of gender identity and paradoxically resisted feminist argu-
ments that “woman” and “lesbian” were political rather than ontological categories.
The third instance requires a more subtle and expansive explication.

In this case, homonormativity lies in misconstruing trans as either a gender
or a sexual orientation. Misconstrued as a distinct gender, trans people are simply
considered another kind or type of human than either men or women, which leads
to such homonormative attempts at “transgender inclusion” as questionnaires and
survey instruments within GLBT contexts that offer respondents opportunities for
self-identification structured along the lines of

__ Man

__ Woman

__ Transgender (check one)

Misconstrued as a sexual orientation category, trans appears as a desire, akin to
kink and fetish desire, for cross-dressing or (more extremely) genital modification.
The “T” in this version of the LGBT community becomes a group of people who
are attracted to one another on the basis of enjoying certain sexual practices — in
the same way that gay men are attracted to gay men, and lesbians are attracted to
lesbians, on the basis of a shared desire for particular sexual practices. “T” is thus
homonormatively constructed as a properly distinct group of people with a different
orientation than gays, lesbians, and bisexuals (or, for that matter, straights). In this
model of GLBT intracommunity relations, each identity is happily attracted to its
own kind and leaves the other groups to their own devices except in ceremonial cir-
cumstances (like pride parades and other public celebrations of diversity), or when-
ever political expediency calls for coalitional action of some sort.

In either homonormative deformation, “T” becomes a separate category to
be appended, through a liberal politics of minority assimilation, to gay, lesbian, and
bisexual community formations. Trans thus conceived of does not trouble the basis
of the other categories — indeed, it becomes a containment mechanism for “gender
trouble” of various sorts that works in tandem with assimilative gender-normative
tendencies within the sexual identities.8 Transgender activism and theory, on the
other hand, tend to treat trans as a modality rather than a category. Trans segments
the sexual orientations and gender identities in much the same manner as race and
class — in other words, a transsexual woman (someone with a transsexual mode of
embodiment who lives in the social category woman) can be a lesbian (someone
who lives in the social category woman and is sexually oriented toward women), just

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Stryker | transgender History 149

as a black man could be gay, or a bisexual person could be poor. In doing so, trans-
gender theory and activism call attention to the operations of normativity within
and between gender/sexual identity categories, raise questions about the structura-
tion of power along axes other than the homo/hetero and man/woman binaries, and
identify productive points of attachment for linking sexual orientation and gender
identity activism to other social justice struggles.

A decade before homonormative became a critically chic term elsewhere,
I thus suggest, transgender praxis and critique required an articulation of the con-
cept of homonormativity. The border wars that transgender activists fought within
queer communities of the 1990s had important consequences for shaping contem-
porary transgender politics and theorizing, and for charting a future path toward
radical activism. Transgender relations to gay and lesbian community formations
necessarily became strategic — sometimes oppositional, sometimes aligned, some-
times fighting rearguard actions for inclusion, sometimes branching out in entirely
different and unrelated directions. Central issues for transgender activism — such
as gender-appropriate state-issued identification documents that allow trans people
to work, cross borders, and access social services without exposing themselves to
potential discrimination — suggest useful forms of alliance politics, in this instance
with migrant workers and diasporic communities, that are not organized around
sexual identity. One operation of homonormativity exposed by transgender activ-
ism is that homo is not always the most relevant norm against which trans needs to
define itself.

Antihomonormative Transgender History
As important as queer identitarian disputes have been for present and future trans-
gender politics, they have been equally important for reinterpreting the queer past.
I first started researching the transgender history of San Francisco, particularly
in relation to the city’s gay and lesbian community, while participating in the Bay
Area’s broader queer culture during the early 1990s. In 1991, during my final year
as a PhD student in U.S. history at the University of California at Berkeley, the
same year I began transitioning from male to female, I became deeply involved with
an organization then known as the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of North-
ern California. That organization, now the GLBT Historical Society, houses the
preeminent collection of primary source materials on San Francisco Bay Area gay,
lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities, and one of the best collections of
sexuality-related materials anywhere in the world. I started there as a volunteer in
the archives, joined the board of directors in 1992, and later became the first execu-
tive director of the organization, from 1999 to 2003.

Through my long and intimate association with the GLBT Historical Society,
as well as through two years of postdoctoral funding from the Sexuality Research
Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council, I had ample opportu-

nity to exhaustively research the status of transgender issues within gay and lesbian
organizations and communities in post – World War II San Francisco. I was able to
scan all the periodical literature, community newspapers, collections of personal
papers, organizational records, ephemera, and visual materials — tens of thousands
of items — for transgender-related content. This research was motivated by several
competing agendas. It was first and foremost a critically queer project, one informed
by theory, guided by practice, and framed by my historical training at Berkeley in
the decade between Michel Foucault’s death and Judith Butler’s arrival; I wanted
to account for the precipitation of new categories of personal and collective iden-
tity from the matrix of possible configurations of sex, gender, identity, and desire;
trace their genealogies and modes of discourse; and analyze the cultural politics
of their interactions with each other and society at large. It was also a project to
recover the history of transgender experience specifically, in a way that resisted
essentializing transgender identities, and to make that knowledge available as con-
tent for transgender-related social justice work. Only those who are “crushed by a
present concern,” and who want to “throw off their burden at any cost,” Friedrich
Nietzsche wrote in “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” have “a need for a
critical . . . historiography.”9 And finally, I was motivated by polemical and par-
tisan considerations; I wanted to offer an empirically grounded account of trans-
gender history that recontextualized its relation to gay and lesbian normativity and
countered the pathologizing, moralizing, condescending, dismissive, and generally
wrongheaded treatment of transgender issues so often found in gay and lesbian dis-
courses of that time.

Over the course of my research, gender-policing practices came into focus
as an important mechanism for shaping the landscape of sexual identity commu-
nity formations described in the major historiographical accounts.10 As homosex-
ual communities in mid-twentieth century San Francisco redefined themselves as
political minorities, they distanced themselves from older notions of “inversion”
that collapsed gender transposition and homosexual desire into one another; they
simultaneously drew their boundaries at least partly in relation to new and rapidly
evolving scientific discourses on transgender phenomena and related medico-legal
techniques for changing sex. Homophile groups such as the Mattachine Society and
the Daughters of Bilitis were not initially antagonistic to transgender issues; they
sometimes fielded queries from people questioning their gender or seeking a com-
munity in which to express a transgender identity, but they tended to redirect such
queries elsewhere.11 Transgender issues tended to be seen within the homophile
movement as parallel rather than intersecting, at least partially due to the central
role that gender normativity played in the homophile movement’s public politics of
respectability in the 1950s and early 1960s. In lesbian contexts this took the form of
class-based criticisms of butch-femme roles, while in the gay male world it expressed

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Stryker | transgender History 151

itself through the condemnation of the hypermasculine styles found in the leather,
motorcycle, and cowboy subcultures, as well as in the femininity of “swish” styles
and public female impersonation. Drag remained an important subcultural idiom,
especially for gay men and working-class lesbians, but one typically confined to clubs,
bars, and private parties; street drag was almost universally condemned and largely
relegated to territories coextensive with prostitution, hustling, and other economi-
cally marginalized activities. Thus, from the outset of the post – World War II gay
rights movement, transgender practices and identities marked communal boundar-
ies between the normative and the transgressive.

One particular archival discovery seemed so perfectly attuned to all my
research motivations, however, and so seemingly significant yet almost entirely
unknown, that I initially questioned whether it could possibly be true. In the cen-
terfold of the program for the first Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco, held in 1972,
I found a description of a 1966 riot in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, in which
drag queens and gay hustlers banded together at a popular late-night hangout called
Gene Compton’s Cafeteria to fight back against police harassment and social oppres-
sion. The key text reads as follows:

In the streets of the Tenderloin, at Turk and Taylor on a hot August night
in 1966, Gays rose up angry at the constant police harassment of the drag-
queens by the police. It had to be the first ever recorded violence by Gays
against police anywhere. For on that evening when the SFPD paddy wagon
drove up to make their “usual” sweeps of the streets, Gays this time did not go
willingly. It began when the police came into a cafeteria, still located there at
Turk and Taylor, Compton’s, to do their usual job of hassling the drag-queens
and hair-fairies and hustlers setting at the table. This was with the permission
of management, of course. But when the police grabbed the arm of one of
the transvestites, he threw his cup of coffee in the cop’s face, and with that,
cups, saucers, and trays began flying around the place, and all directed at the
police. They retreated outside until reinforcements arrived, and the Compton’s
management ordered the place closed, and with that, the Gays began breaking
out every window in the place, and as they ran outside to escape the breaking
glass, the police tried to grab them and throw them into the paddy wagon, but
they found this no easy task for Gays began hitting them “below the belt” and
drag-queens smashing them in the face with their extremely heavy purses. A
police car had every window broken, a newspaper shack outside the cafeteria
was burned to the ground, and general havoc was raised that night in the
Tenderloin. The next night drag-queens, hair-fairies, conservative Gays, and
hustlers joined in a picket of the cafeteria, which would not allow drags back in
again. It ended with the newly installed plate glass windows once more being
smashed. The Police Community Relations Unit began mediating the conflict,
which was never fully resolved, which ended in a group called VANGUARD

being formed of the street peoples and a lesbian group of street people being
formed called the STREET ORPHANS, both of which later became the old
GAY LIBERATION FRONT in San Francisco, and is today called the GAY
ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE.12

The story seemed important in several respects. First, what reportedly happened at
Compton’s Cafeteria bore obvious similarities to the famous Stonewall uprising in
New York in 1969, where the militant phase of gay liberation is commonly supposed
to have begun, but reputedly preceded it by three years. How the San Francisco
gay activist community positioned the Compton’s story vis-à-vis Stonewall in their
first commemorative Gay Pride Parade was clearly intended as an early revisionist
account of gay liberation history. Furthermore, the inciting incident of the riot was
described as an act of antitransgender discrimination, rather than an act of discrimi-
nation against sexual orientation. At the time I came across this source in 1995, the
role of drag queens in the Stonewall riots had become a site of conflict between
transgender and normative gay/lesbian histories — transgender activists pointed to
the act of mythologizing Stonewall as the “birth” of gay liberation as a homonorma-
tive co-optation of gender queer resistance, while homonormative gay and lesbian
commentators tended to downplay the significance of antidrag oppression at Stone-
wall — and whatever I could learn about the Compton’s incident would certainly
inform that debate. The 1972 document also related a genealogy of gay liberation
activism at odds with the normative accounts — one rooted in the socioeconomics
of the multiethnic Tenderloin sex-work ghetto rather than in campus-based activism
oriented toward countercultural white youth of middle-class origin. For all these
reasons, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot became a central focus of my research into
San Francisco’s transgender history and its intersectional relationship to the history
of gay and lesbian communities.

Although the 1972 document proved factually inaccurate in several particu-
lars (the picketing happened before the riot, for example), I was ultimately able to
verify its basic account of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot, and to situate that event
in a history of transgender community formation and politicization that both com-
plemented and contested homonormative gay and lesbian history. Most important,
I was able to connect the location and timing of the riot to social, political, geo-
graphical, and historical circumstances in San Francisco in ways that the Stonewall
story had never connected gay liberation discourse to similar circumstances in New
York — thereby opening up new ways to think about the relationship between iden-
tity politics and broader material conditions. The 1966 riot at Compton’s Cafeteria
took place at the intersection of several broad social issues that continue to be of
concern today, such as discriminatory policing practices in minority communities,
the lack of minority access to appropriate health care, elitist urban land-use policies,
the unsettling domestic consequences of foreign wars, and civil rights campaigns

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that aim to expand individual liberties and social tolerance on matters of sexuality
and gender. A fuller treatment of this material exceeds the space limitations of this
essay, but it can be found elsewhere in works cited below.

Homonormative Disciplinarity
Although the history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot provides a productive point
of critique and revision for homonormative accounts of the recent history of sexual
identity communities and movements, most knowledge of this event has circulated
through works of public history (most notably the 2005 public television documentary
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria), work by nonacademic writers,
and in community-based publications, rather than through professional academic
channels.13 In those few instances in which this history has been examined in peer-
reviewed journals, the articles have been placed, as this one has been, in sections of
the journals set aside for uses other than feature articles. In the one instance where
this has not been the case, the article was written by another (nontransgendered)
scholar who interviewed me and made use of primary source documents I directed
her to, in order to relate the Compton’s Cafeteria riot to her own research interest in
the sociology of historical memory.14 I point this out not as a complaint — it was my
own decision to pursue the public history dissemination of my research findings; I
actually guest-edited a journal issue that put my own research into the back matter
and anonymized my authorship, and I have eagerly collaborated with other scholars
who have never failed to accurately and appropriately cite the use of my research
in their own projects. My aim, rather, is to call needed attention to the micropoliti-
cal practices through which the radical implications of transgender knowledges can
become marginalized. Even in contexts such as this special homonormativities issue
of Radical History Review, which explicitly called for transgender scholarship that
could generate “new analytical frameworks for talking about lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer history that expand and challenge current models of identity
and community formation as well as models of political and cultural resistance,”
transgender knowledges are far too easily subjugated to what Michel Foucault once
called “the hierarchies of erudition.”15

In my original abstract for this issue, I proposed not only to recount the
little-known history of the Compton’s Cafeteria riot but also to call attention to the
multiple normativizing frames of reference that kept the Compton’s story “hidden in
plain sight” for so long — the confluence of class, race, and gender considerations, as
well as the homonormative gaze that did not construct transgender subjects, actions,
embodiments, or intentions as the objects of its desire. I wanted, too, to make meth-
odologically explicit the critical role of embodied difference in the practice of archi-
val research. As a range of new scholarship on the recent so-called archival turn in
the humanities begins to make evident, embodiment — that contingent accomplish-
ment through which the histories of our identities become invested in our corporeal

space — not only animates the research query but modulates access to the archive,
in both its physical and its intellectual arrangement. Discussing how my transsexual
embodiment figured into reading a gay and lesbian archive against the grain served
the larger purpose of calling critical attention to homonormative constructions of
knowledge embedded in the content and organization of the archive itself. My goal
was to offer a radical critique not just of historiography but of the political epistemol-
ogy of historical knowledge production.

Because the tone of what I proposed was deemed “personal,” however, due
to how I situated my own research activities as part of the narrative, and because,
I suspect, I tend to work outside the academy, I was invited to contribute an essay
to either the “Reflections” or “Public History” section of Radical History Review,
rather than a feature article. I felt some reservations in doing so because my intent
had been to do something else. “Reflections” are not as intellectually rigorous as the
documented arguments expected in feature articles, and “Public History,” as distin-
guished from what academic historians do, can come off as a form of popularization
in which knowledge produced by specialists is transmitted to the consuming masses
through less intellectually accomplished intermediaries. The journal’s own division
of knowledge into “less formal” and “more formal” categories, and the positioning
of my work within this two-tiered economy, would replicate the very hierarchies
I had set out to critique by containing what I had to say within a structurally less
legitimated space.

The most basic act of normativizing disciplinarity at work here is not directly
related to the increasingly comfortable fit between gender-normative homosexuality
and neoliberal policy. It is rooted in a more fundamental and culturally pervasive
disavowal of intrinsically diverse modes of bodily being as the lived ground of all
knowing and of all knowledge production. In an epistemological regime structured
by the subject-object split, the bodily situatedness of knowing becomes divorced
from the status of formally legitimated objective knowledge; experiential knowl-
edge of the material effects of one’s own antinormative bodily difference on the
production and reception of what one knows consequently becomes delegitimated
as merely subjective. This in turn circumscribes the radical potential of that knowl-
edge to critique other knowledge produced from other bodily locations, equally par-
tial and contingent, which have been vested with the prerogatives of a normativity
variously figured as white, masculinist, heterosexist, or Eurocentric — as feminism,
communities of color, and third world voices have long maintained, and as the dis-
abled, intersexed, and transgendered increasingly contend.

The peculiar excitement of academic humanities work at this moment in time
lies, in my estimation, in the potential of interdisciplinary critical work to produce
new strategies through which disruptive knowledges can dislodge the privileges
of normativity. Breaking “personal voice” away from the taint of “mere” subjective
reflection, and recuperating embodied knowing as a formally legitimated basis of

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knowledge production, is one such disruptive strategy. Deploying disciplinary dis-
tinctions that foreclose this possibility is not. But that is precisely why the oppor-
tunity provided by the editors of this volume for my words to occupy these pages
under the heading of an “Intervention” was ultimately such a welcome one. In the
end, it has enabled the critique I intended to offer all along, albeit not in the form or
manner I initially proposed, while opening up the space to push the argument one
turn further.

Homonormativity, I conclude, is more than an accommodation to neoliberal-
ism in its macropolitical manifestations. It is also an operation at the micropolitical
level, one that aligns gay interests with dominant constructions of knowledge and
power that disqualify the very modes of knowing threatening to disrupt the smooth
functioning of normative space and that displace modes of embodiment calling into
question the basis of authority from which normative voices speak. Because transgen-
der phenomena unsettle the categories on which the normative sexualities depend,
their articulation can offer compelling opportunities for contesting the expansion of
neoliberalism’s purview through homonormative strategies of minority assimilation.
And yet, even well-intentioned antihomonormative critical practices that take aim
at neoliberalism can fall short of their goal when they fail to adequately account for
the destabilizing, cross-cutting differences within sexual categories that transgender
issues represent. Such critical practices can function in unintentionally homonorma-
tive ways that circumvent and circumscribe, rather than amplify, the radical poten-
tial of transgender phenomena to profoundly disturb the normative — even in so
seemingly small a thing as where an article gets placed in a journal. Creating a
proper space for radical transgender scholarship, in the double sense of scholarship
on transgender issues and of work by transgender scholars, should be a vital part of
any radically antinormative intellectual and political agenda.

Notes
1. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on

Democracy (Boston: Beacon, 2003), 50.
2. Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 9.
3. I posted an earlier version of these observations on the genealogy of homonormative on

qstudy-lL@listserv.buffalo.edu, November 7, 2006.
4. Robert Hill, personal communication, October 6, 2005; see also Robert Hill, A Social

History of Heterosexual Transvestism in Cold War America (PhD diss., University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor, 2007).

5. I have made this argument elsewhere; see Susan Stryker, “The Transgender Issue: An
Introduction,” GLQ 4 (1998): 149 – 53; Susan Stryker, “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s
Evil Twin,” GLQ 10 (2004): 212 – 15; and Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An
Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader, ed. Susan Stryker
and Stephen Whittle (New York: Routledge, 2006), 4 – 8. On Feinberg’s use of “transgender,”
see Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come (New
York: World View Forum, 1992); reprinted in Stryker and Whittle, Transgender Studies

Reader, 205 – 20. On page 206, Feinberg, after listing a variety of what s/he terms “gender
outlaws,” that is, “transvestites, transsexuals, drag queens and drag kings, cross-dressers,
bull-daggers, stone butches, androgynes, diesel dykes,” notes that “we didn’t choose these
words” and that “they don’t fit all of us.” Because “it’s hard to fight an oppression without
a name connoting pride,” s/he proposes “transgender” to name “a diverse group of people
who define ourselves in many different ways.” While acknowledging that this term itself
may prove inadequate or short-lived, s/he intends for it to be “a tool to battle bigotry and
brutality” and hopes that “it can connect us, that it can capture what is similar about the
oppressions that we endure.”

6. Ann Ogborn, interview by the author, July 5, 1998, Oakland, California.
7. Gerard Koskovich, an early member of Queer Nation – San Francisco, recalls “lively

critiques regarding the group’s awareness and inclusiveness regarding transgender and
bisexual issues.” He writes: “I recall a telling incident at one of the earliest QN meetings
that I attended: A lesbian in her early 30s made comments to the general meeting to the
effect that she didn’t appreciate gay men wearing drag, an act that she portrayed as an
expression of misogyny — in short, she offered an old-school lesbian-feminist reading. This
led to a group discussion of the uses of drag as a critique of gender norms — a discussion
that ultimately changed the woman’s mind. That early anti-drag moment quickly gave way
to Queer National celebrating personal styles that transgressed gender norms in various
ways — a phenomenon that fit well with the in-your-face politics of representation that drove
many QN actions.” Personal communication, December 8, 2006.

8. David Valentine, “I Went to Bed with My Own Kind Once: The Erasure of Desire in the
Name of Identity,” Language and Communication 23 (2003): 123 – 38; David Valentine,
“The Categories Themselves,” GLQ 10 (2003): 215 – 20.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” 1874, trans. Ian C.
Johnson, www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/history.htm (accessed May 12, 2007).

10. John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority
in the United States, 1940 – 1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Elizabeth
Armstrong, Forging Gay Identity: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950 – 1994
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A
History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
Martin Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community,
1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Marcia Gallo, Different
Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights
Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).

11. Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 176 – 85.

12. Raymond Broshears, “History of Christopher Street West — SF,” Gay Pride: The Official
Voice of the Christopher Street West Parade ’72 Committee of San Francisco, California,
June 25, 1972, 8.

13. Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, dir. Victor Silverman and Susan
Stryker (Independent Television Service/KQED-TV, 2005); Susan Stryker, “The Compton’s
Cafeteria Riot of 1966: The Radical Roots of the Contemporary Transgender Movement,”
Critical Moment, no. 12 (2005): 5, 19. Susan Stryker, “ ‘The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria:
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You!” Transgender Tapestry, no. 105 (2004): 46 – 47; Mack
Friedman, Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture (Los Angeles: Alyson,
2003) 129 – 33; David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New
York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 109 – 10.

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14. Members of the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society, “MTF Transgender Activism in
San Francisco’s Tenderloin: Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone,” GLQ 4
(1998): 349 – 72; Elizabeth Armstrong and Suzanna Crage, “Movements and Memory: The
Making of the Stonewall Myth,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 724 – 51; see also
Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed, 229.

15. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975 – 1976,
trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 7 – 8.