Homosexuality in America - 1964

Decoy officer and partner lead handcuffed homosexual away in Hollywood.  When arrested for soliciting, he burst into tears. 

--Life magazine, June 26, 1964


Found this over on Box Turtle Bulletin, a link to the 1964 Life magazine article "Homosexuality in America."  While we are celebrating Pride and enjoying the afterglow of victory for equal marriage in New York, it's important to remember just how far we've come. 

Do the homosexuals, like the Communists, intend to bury us?  Yes indeed, suggested a startling front-page story in the New York Times and other newspapers last month.  A committee of the highly respected New York Academy of Medicine had come to the conclusion that American homosexuals want far more than to be merely tolerated and even more than to be grudgingly accepted.  Their true goal, said an Academy report, is to convince the world that homosexuality is a "desirable, noble, preferable way of life" - the secret of the greatness of Ancient Greece and "a perfect answer to the problem of the population explosion."

To its credit, Life did try to dispel the outright hysteria:

The Academy committee was dead wrong.  Only a tiny minority of U.S. homosexuals would ever beat the drums so sensationally for their way of life.

But then, as was usual in that pre-Stonewall period, the article went on to dwell relentlessly on the hopelessness of those sick, pathetic, messed-up homos:

Far more of them regard their homosexuality as an affliction.  The lot of the homosexual, as the photographs and article on the preceding pages have shown, is often furtive, hazardous and lonely.  Many homosexuals have gone to psychiatrists begging desperately for help in escaping a life that they had decided was utterly intolerable.

Notice the effect of the subordinate clause here:  they had decided.  Like some confused, childish soul who tries this and tries that, and dislikes all the choices, for no good reason.

But hell, who wouldn't feel that life was intolerable, being labeled night and day not only insane, but also a criminal, and a literally god-damned, hellbound sinner?  Because that is exactly the way it was, living back then in the good old Mayberry days.  I know.  I was there.

So it's somewhat startling to be reminded by this article that notwithstanding all the hatred and hysteria, some big cities had very lively gay communities - with all the very same types of people we still have:  drag queens, leathermen, preppies, long-term couples, hustlers, activists, and so on.  Plus ca change . . . .

But sometimes things do change, for real.  In the context of the above committee report, it's ironic that 47 years later, the American Medical Association has come out for marriage equality.

Then again, some Barneys are stuck back in the kitchen with Aunt Bea:




Bonus: Joe.My.God. has posted the original 1969 report by the New York Daily News on the Stonewall riots. This long, thoroughly homophobic article, titled "HOMO NEST RAIDED - QUEEN BEES ARE STINGING MAD," drips with mockery and sneering condescension at the girly guys who made trouble for the police one hot night in the Village. The unwittingly ironic kicker comes at the very end, though:

The men of the First Division were unable to find any humor in the situation, despite the comical overtones of the raid.

"They were throwing more than lace hankies," one inspector said. "I was almost decapitated by a slab of thick glass. It was thrown like a discus and just missed my throat by inches. The beer can didn't miss, though, it hit me right above the temple." . . .

The police are sure of one thing. They haven't heard the last from the Girls of Christopher Street.

As Joe says, they sure fucking haven't.