Before Stonewall

Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context

Vern L Bullough

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317766278
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Explore the early history of the gay rights movement!In the words of editor Vern L. Bullough: "Although there was no single leader in the gay and lesbian community who achieved the fame and reputation of Martin Luther King, there were a large number of activists who put their careers and reputations on the line. It was a motley crew of radicals and reformers, drawn together by the cause in spite of personality and philosophical differences. Their stories are told in the following pages."Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context illuminates the lives of the courageous individuals involved in the early struggle for gay and lesbian civil rights in the United States. Authored by those who knew them (often activists themselves), the concise biographies in this volume examine the lives of pre-1969 barrier breakers like Harry Hay, Henry Gerber, Alfred Kinsey, Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Jim Kepner, Jack Nichols, Christine Jorgensen, Jose Sarria, Barbara Grier, Frank Kameny, and 40 more. To anyone with an interest in the history of the gay/lesbian rights movements in the United States, these names will be familiar, but did you know that in addition to their groundbreaking activism:

• Prescott Townsend was a Boston Brahman
• Dorr Legg was a Log Cabin Republican
• Harry Hay was at one time a member of the Communist party
• Jim Kepner was a boy preacher
• Troy Perry was removed from the ministry of his church for homosexuality--and then founded the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church
• Reed Erickson--a transsexual millionaire who gave millions to the cause--kept a pet leopard called Henry
• Barbara Gittings set up a kissing booth at the American Library Association convention and urged attendees to kiss a gay or lesbian!

Before Stonewall is a perfect ancillary text for any gay/lesbian studies course, but more to the point, no one interested in these heroic figures and the movements they ignited should be without this book, which received an honorable mention in the 2004 Stonewall Book Awards.

PART I
PRE-1950

Probably the most influential force in changing attitudes toward homosexuality was the Kinsey report issued in 1948. As C. A. Tripp writes in his biography of Kinsey, homosexuality became front-page news, and much of the hostile criticism toward the report was due to its data on the same-sex experiences of American males. Although the report on women did not come out until five years later and faced even more hostile criticism, the revelation of same-sex activity among women did not raise the stir that the report on men did. Because, as Tripp indicates, Kinsey was determined to force Americans to face up to the existence of homosexuality, he must be regarded as a pioneer in the gay movement. This point should perhaps be emphasized, because changing public attitudes toward homosexuality was crucial and Kinsey played a large part in this. He made not only the public but also those who were gay and lesbian realize that a lot of people were homosexual.

Yet no matter how much research is done, the political battles necessary for gay men and women to be recognized have to come from the gay community. This section includes a discussion of a number of individuals from the then mostly secretive gay community. Henry Gerber, whom authors Jim Kepner and Stephen Murray call the grandfather of the American gay movement, emphasizes that the American gay movement did not appear from nowhere but was influenced by developments in Europe.

One who attempted to communicate some of these developments was Edward Irenaeus Prime-Stevenson, who wrote under the name Xavier Mayne. He was the first American to write extensively about homosexuality, first in a novel and then in a long scholarly monograph, both of which were published in Europe and eventually smuggled into the United States. He has rightly been called the father of American homophile literature. Somewhat more open about his homosexuality was the Boston Brahmin, Prescott Townsend, who traced his ancestry back to the Mayflower. He was a fixture in Boston who publicly advocated for homosexuals. During World War II, while working in a shipbuilding yard, he was arrested and served time in jail for the “abominable and detestable crime against nature,” an event which he reported on in his Harvard class report for that year. He later went on to organize Mattachine Society in Boston. Somehow he managed to retain his leadership in the arts community of Boston. Few gays, however, had the savoir faire of Townsend, or the money and family connections that allowed him to be somewhat different.

Not quite so open about her own lesbianism but very willing to fight for the cause of homosexuality was Pearl M. Hart. She had as one of her missions in life the representation of the underserved in court, and she defended literally thousands of male homosexuals as part of her practice. She was an early closeted member of the Daughters of Bilitis, lived openly with another woman, and was a major force in the Chicago gay community even though she was not public about her own sexual preference.

Lisa Ben is an interesting paradox. She published and distributed an early gay newsletter in the 1940s under her pseudonym. As of this writing, she is still alive and was very reluctant to use her real name in this book. Since, however, she is identified online as Edyth Eyde, it seems permissible to so identify her here. Her biography emphasizes that it takes a variety of people and attitudes to make a revolution, and sometimes a very small step can, in retrospect, seem to have been quite influential and daring.

Berry Berryman was more of a fighter than Lisa Ben but her pioneering study was not published until after she died. Scholarly journals simply did not accept studies such as hers and there was no gay press to publish it. She also lived in Utah, a state that might seem unlikely to have spawned a gay activist, but her case again emphasizes that a lot of gays and lesbians were doing their best to improve the conditions for their compatriots and whose contributions have not yet come to public attention.

Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956)

C. A. Tripp

Photo by C. A. Tripp

For many, “pre-Stonewall” versus “post- Stonewall” defines the decisive turning point in the fight for gay liberation. At the time of the 1969 Greenwich Village riots, however, few anticipated that Stonewall would go down in history as the dividing line between radically different eras; in fact, the riots barely penetrated the consciousness of the public, gay and straight alike. This stands in sharp contrast to another major turning point that had seized widespread attention some twenty years earlier, in 1948. Almost overnight it created a divide between radically different eras of sexual understanding: pre-Kinsey versus post-Kinsey. It brought homosexuality out in the open, and Kinsey’s willingness to do so marks a major step in gay liberation.

The publication of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, popularly known as the Kinsey Report, ignited a firestorm among scientists, psychiatrists, clergy, moralists of every stripe, and, not least, the general public. Indeed, the report raised a furor the likes of which had not been seen since the debut of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the senior author (and writer of the report’s every word), rocketed from obscurity to international prominence, the nature of which ranged, depending on point of view, from sublime distinction to what struck some as shameful notoriety. The report’s 804 pages of dense prose, replete with 335 graphs and tables charting the activities of 5,300 male subjects, put under the microscope a world of sexual experience that never before had received rigorous scientific scrutiny. In the process it demolished many myths about sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular.

Such a text demanded a great deal of the casual reader, of course. But then, many readers had no need to crack Kinsey’s tome for themselves. The popular press, which knew a hot story when it saw one, trumpeted the central findings throughout the world.

The findings included astonishing statistics: 37 percent of adult males at least once had experienced sex with another male to the point of orgasm; fully 50 percent of adult males had acknowledged occasional sexual attraction to other males; and although “only” 4 percent were exclusively homosexual, 10 percent of married males in their twenties had made overt homosexual contacts after getting married. Kinsey expected this to be his biggest bombshell, and was much surprised when no reviewer or commentator even noticed it. Instead, all eyes focused on his next comment: “This [37 percent] is more than one male in three of the persons that one may meet as he passes along a city street” (p. 623). Later in the report, in a discussion of demands from some quarters that homosexuals be “institutionalized and isolated,” Kinsey noted that “there are about six and a third million males in the country who would need such isolation” (p. 665).

The figures rocked the boat of conventional wisdom, to put it mildly, for it had been widely assumed that homosexuality arises from rare diseases, or from impaired maleness, or from immaturities that thwart heterosexual development. But the report made it plain that male-male attractions were woven into the fabric of ordinary, everyday life. In that light, notions of rarity, illness, impaired maleness, and immaturity suddenly were subject to challenges which, pre-Kinsey, had lacked scientific substantiation. (A terminological note: “Gay” will be used sparingly because few of Kinsey’s homosexual subjects thought of themselves as gay in the identity-group sense of the term.)

The report presented several lines of evidence that showed that homosexual males, far from exhibiting “impaired maleness,” fully measure up to or even exceed the maleness of ordinary straights. One such indication emerged from some remarkable discoveries about the timing of puberty in boys. Although it is perhaps obvious that, regardless of sexual leanings, early puberty signals a certain hot-to-trot virility—a rush into sexual maturity— Kinsey’s examination of that reality uncovered a major difference between homosexual and heterosexual males.

Kinsey found that boys who reach puberty early (by age eleven) are much more sexually active than boys who reach puberty late (after age fifteen), not only during adolescence but, in fact, for the rest of their lives. This link between early puberty and high lifetime sexual activity was a discovery with far-reaching implications. It took on even more significance when coupled with another Kinsey finding: Boys who mature early are much more likely to engage in homosexual behavior than boys who mature late. By age sixteen, for example, 31.9 percent of the early-pubescent boys in his sample had had sex with another male, whereas only 12.3 percent of the late-pubescent boys had experienced homosexual contact. One could suppose that this disparity might flowfrom the early-maturing boys having had more opportunities to experiment, simply by virtue of their head start. But the trend persists: By age twenty-seven, 42.2 percent of the early-pubescent males had had homosexual contact, versus 22.2 percent of the late maturers— a ratio of almost two to one.

In other words, homosexuality looms very large indeed among males whose sex drives kick in early and continues to stay strong. Early puberty, of course, by definition, is a fairly rare occurrence in the male population as a whole. But Kinsey’s data made it clear that for homosexual males, early puberty very nearly approaches the norm. To put it plainly: Gays tend to want and get sex sooner and have more of it than straights, from adolescence all the way through to old age.

Furthermore, the data revealed that boys strongly inclined to homosexual activity tend to attain puberty at an especially early age. Indeed, to his amazement, Kinsey found that the greater the homosexual inclination, the earlier the puberty, and the greater the lifetime sexual experience—by a very large margin! A converse finding is equally striking: Boys who arrive at puberty late not only tend to be less sexually active throughout their lives, but also are highly prone to an exclusively heterosexual orientation.

Initially, the findings seemed compatible with conventional psychological or sociological explanations. The day these findings first poured from the Kinsey lab’s IBM computer-card sorters, someone hypothesized that a boy who matured at ten or eleven was ready for sex long before he had sufficient heterosexual opportunities, and thus may get into pattern-setting homosexual experiences. It was tempting, that is, to dismiss the association between early puberty and homosexual behavior as an almost accidental byproduct of timing combined with having all-male playmates. But another researcher present that day, Dr. Frank Beach, a distinguished experimental psychologist who chaired the psychology department at Yale, was more cautious and wanted to check it with experimental data in his animal lab. Months later, Beach established that the same basic trends prevail in rats: The first to mature are “champion mounters” strongly inclined to homosexual behavior. This confirmed that Kinsey had uncovered a deep, previously unsuspected connection in the biology of sex.

But that wasn’t quite all. Previously, laypeople and sex researchers alike had assumed that homosexual males suffer from a deficiency of sex hormones. The report shattered that theory by pointing out that although injections of male sex hormones do amplify sex drive, they do not change the direction of sexual interest; they simply intensify preexisting attractions. Many researchers also assumed that “inversion,” the capacity to switch back and forth between male and female sexual roles, stems from impaired virility. Building on Frank Beach’s research, the report found quite the reverse: A propensity for inversion implies not a “weak” sexuality but an especially robust hormonal situation. The report quotes Beach’s findings on lower mammals: “[M]ales who most often assume the female type of behavior are the ones who ‘invariably prove to be the most vigorous copulators,’ when they assume the more usual masculine role in coitus” (p. 615). Translation: Males who readily switch from being a top to a bottom are kings of the hormonal hill—and deliver performances to prove it!

Among the other myths the report exploded was the old chestnut propagated by Boy Scout manuals and the like that masturbation robs the young of their future ability to perform sexually. Kinsey’s data indicated exactly the opposite: Sexually precocious boys, the ones most prone to “self-abuse,” are destined to enjoy the lustiest adulthoods. Moreover, the folklore that masturbation brings on such calamities as blindness and hairy palms did not square with the report’s finding; irksome in the extreme to guardians of purity, the report found that at least 95 percent of males engage in the practice.

Beyond showing that long-standing stereotypes of gays were ludicrously wrong, the report also presented surprisingly high figures on premarital and extramarital sex among heterosexuals in a context that suggested that the prohibition of such activities does far more harm than good. Many found this all the more alarming because of the prestige of Kinsey’s backers: Indiana University, the National Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and a roster of consultants that read like a cross-section of mainstream science.

Yet the substance and value of the Kinsey research lay elsewhere than in what seemed sensational. Then, as now, its great value flowed from the establishment, for the first time, of reliable baseline data on sexuality. Since the Kinsey data now are more than fifty years old, a question arises: Have the figures significantly changed in the intervening years as a result of the sexual revolution and other social forces?

Some certainly have changed. The average age at first intercourse is clearly down from age seventeen, where it once was, just as the amount of premarital intercourse is decidedly higher than it was in Kinsey’s time. The proportion of homosexual individuals in the population, which Kinsey found to be stable for five generations, has probably remained so. At least, judging from several subsequent studies, nothing indicates it has either increased or decreased significantly.

* * *

The marked originality of Kinsey’s work frequently raises the double question of how he came to sex research, and how he was able to make such a fresh start. The standard answer (true as far as it goes) is that when Indiana University instituted its first marriage course in 1938, Kinsey was elected to teach it. As his students began asking far-ranging questions about sex, he would try to answer them or look them up in the existing literature. What he found in the literature appalled him: a general lack of evidence and rigor.

Kinsey quietly decided to collect his own data. He began to interview people, to ask basic questions about their sex lives, and to polish and greatly expand his questions. Out of both generosity and a desire to learn more about “the reality,” as he liked to call it, he provi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Editor
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Pre-1950
• Part II Organizational Activists
• Part III Movers and Shakers on the National Scene
• Part IV: Other Voices and their Influence
• Index