Frank Kameny and Mattachine Society of Washington members marching, 1970. Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections

Out of the Closet

The LGBTQ Community in American History

12.06.18

Brian, Nathan and Joanne explore the history of the LGBTQ community in the U.S., from tales of gender fluidity in the Old West to early gay liberation, and from the political career of Harvey Milk to the barrier breaking career of one SFPD cop.

LGBTQ rights; queer history

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Segments

Milk For Supervisor

Today Harvey Milk is remembered as the first openly gay person to be elected to public office in the U.S. His legacy as a gay rights activist and politician helped open the door for future generations of LGBTQ people. But before he became a national icon, he ran a camera shop in San Francisco that became a meeting place for the city’s gay community. Brian talks with LGBTQ historian Lillian Faderman about Milk’s political rise and enduring message.

Music:

Memory Wind by Podington Bear

Harvey Milk; queer history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Speaker 1: Nature funding for BackStory is provided by anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman: From Virginia Humanities, this is BackStory.

Nathan Connolly: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Nathan Connolly.

Joanne Freeman: I’m Joanne Freeman.

Brian Balogh: And I’m Brian Balogh.

Nathan Connolly: If you’re new to the podcast, the three of us and Ed Ayers are all historians, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history.

Brian Balogh: Let’s start today in a camera shop. It’s 1973 in San Francisco, and an elementary school teacher walks into a store called Castro Camera. They have a simple request.

Lillian F.: She wanted to rent a projector so she could show her kids some slides.

Brian Balogh: That’s LGBTQ historian Lillian Faderman, she says the teacher spoke to a man behind the counter at Castro Camera. That person happened to be a guy named Harvey Milk. And well, Milk wasn’t too thrilled with the teacher’s order.

Lillian F.: And Harvey said, “You mean to tell me that your school doesn’t have a projector?” And the teacher said, “Well, they do have a projector but there are just a couple of projectors and so many teachers want to use those projectors that you have to put your name on a list to reserve them a month in advance.”

Brian Balogh: Today Harvey Milk is remembered as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. His legacy as a gay rights activist and politician helped open the door for future generations of LGBTQ people. For example, next year there’ll be at least 10 LGBTQ members of congress. That record number is in part, due to Harvey Milk’s work in San Francisco 40 years ago. But before he ran for the San Francisco board of supervisors and became a national icon, Harvey Milk ran Castro Camera with his partner Scott Smith. And Faderman says this moment when the school teacher came in asking for a projector, this was one of the things that first motivated Milk to get into politics.

Lillian F.: And Harvey thought that that was just disgraceful that the city could not afford enough projectors for elementary school kids but they could afford to hire policemen to harass gay men on the street of San Francisco or entrap gay men in the bars of San Francisco. And I think those things made him decide that it was time for him to run for political office, that he could do things differently, that he could make sure that San Francisco’s budget went to the right things instead of hiring police to harass the gay community. He would fight for getting rid of corruption in governments so that things such as Watergate on a local scale couldn’t happen.

Nathan Connolly: So Watergate pushed Milk to dive into politics too then?

Brian Balogh: Oh yeah, this is San Francisco in the early 1970s, so Watergate was still on everybody’s mind, specially Harvey Milk’s.

Lillian F.: They lived upstairs from Castro Camera in an apartment that was upstairs. Every morning Harvey would take their little black and white television downstairs into Castro Camera and instead of waiting on the customers, he would put the television on one chair, he would sit on another chair and all day long he would watch the Watergate hearings and he would swear at the television sets over and over again, and Scott Smith said that customers would come in and they would see this guys with long hair and dark circles under his eyes swearing at the television set, they would run off.

Brian Balogh: So in 1973 Harvey Milk said enough is enough, and he decided to run for office, but he was still pretty new in town so things were anything but easy.

Lillian F.: There was a gay democratic club in San Francisco called the The Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club, he went to the head of the club, a man by the name of Jim Foster and said, “I’m running for the board of supervisors and I hope your club will support me.” And Jim Foster took one look at this guy that he’d never seen before with a New York accent and looking like a hippie, he had long hair and a big mustache and Jim Foster told Harvey Milk, “You know, in the democratic party we have a saying, ‘You don’t get to dance unless you put up the chairs.’ I’ve never seen you putting up the chairs.” And so he informed him that the Alice B. Toklas Memorial Democratic Club would not be supporting him. But Harvey Milk took Jim Foster’s advice very seriously and he began to put up the chairs. So he lost the 1973 election but he made himself very well known in the gay community for the two years that followed.

Brian Balogh: He became known as the mayor of Castro Street, right?

Lillian F.: He did, yes.

Brian Balogh: So how did he earn that name?

Lillian F.: Well, in a number of ways. He wrote for the gay papers in San Francisco, he really put himself in the forefront in defending gay people against the police. Castro Camera also became a meeting place for the gay community as he used to tell his partner Scott Smith, he often put on his shrink robes because people came to Castro Camera to ask his advice, or to talk about their problems and Harvey Milk happily advised them about how to proceed with their life and how to function as a gay person in a homophobic society.

Joanne Freeman: Well it definitely sounds like milk’s activism and popularity in the city was on the rise by the mid ’70s. But how did he do in the voting booth?

Brian Balogh: Well, he ran again for supervisor in 1975 and he lost again, but he did better this time thanks in part from support from labor unions. So Harvey Milk pressed on, and finally in 1977 he made history.

Brian Balogh: “Harvey Milk says his election as a San Francisco supervisor Tuesday was a victory for all US homosexuals. Milk captured 30.5 percent of the vote in the fifth district, to become the first known homosexual office holder in San Francisco. ‘The victory will give hope to minorities, hope to the disenfranchised and to people who always felt the government didn’t work.’ Said Milk. ‘They feel if a gay can do it, they can do it. Gays and youth all over the nation will be watching me as a potential role figure.’ Milk said, ‘And I’ll be it.'” The Times, San Mateo California, 1977.

Brian Balogh: But Milk’s life tragically ended less than a year after he took office. On November 27th 1978, former police officer and city supervisor Dan White shot and killed Harvey Milk and the city’s mayor, George Moscone. Last month marked 40 years since the assassination.

Lillian F.: He had only served for 11 months and during those 11 months he did remarkable things but that in itself wouldn’t have been enough to memorialize him, I think. Many of his ideas are things that we take for granted today, but in his days they were absolutely unique. Ideas such as everyone had to come out, that we couldn’t become first class citizens if we fought for our rights from the closet, and Harvey was right. I think that the community has made the progress that it’s made in recent years in good part because so many of us are now out and the rest of America has to realize that we’re your children, we’re your brothers and sisters.

Harvey Milk: But mostly importantly, most importantly, every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people in the stores you shop in. And once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for all. And once you do you will feel so much better.

Finding Gender Fluidity In The Old West

A stereotypical snapshot of the Old West usually features rugged frontiersman and dainty damsels. But historian Peter Boag says people in the Old West did not always fall into these binary gender identities. Brian talks with Boag about men and women who cross-dressed as a way to determine their own gender and sexual identities.

Music:

Poor Wayfaring Stranger by Podington Bear

Peter Gray by Podington Bear

Driftwood by Podington Bear

American West; queer history; transgender

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Joanne Freeman: Today on the show we’ll be exploring the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer folks in the United States.

Nathan Connolly: We’ll hear from a San Francisco police officer who broke barriers through a lifetime of service and activism.

Joanne Freeman: We’ll be learning how the roots of the gay right movement go back long before the Stonewall uprising.

Brian Balogh: And we’ll talk more with Lillian Faderman about Harvey Milk’s road to becoming an LGBTQ icon and the hostility endured leading up to his death.

Joanne Freeman: Imagine for a moment the Old West. It’s a vast and rugged terrain with some tumbleweed rolling by. Maybe some cowboys with a striking resemblance to John Wayne roaming the plains. This is a stereotypical snap shot of the Old West, or at least how it’s presented. Many of the stories we hear usually depict the same kind of character. A frontiersman, that John Wayne type. He’s self sufficient, he’s white and he’s strictly heterosexual.

Brian Balogh: It’s estimated that in 1880 most of the American West had at least 20 percent more men that women. But gender and sexuality in the Old West was much more diverse than we might see in the movies.

Peter Boag: There were numerous people who dressed in ways that according to society didn’t comport with their biological sex.

Brian Balogh: That’s historian Peter Boag. He’s researched sexuality in the Old West, including stories of people cross dressing. He looked at old arrest records, news paper articles and other documents and found there were many reasons why somebody might done clothing of the opposite sex.

Peter Boag: This was specially the case for women because women were more marginalized people in society and they might dress as a male in order to take advantage of better paying jobs or types of work that were only available to men.

Brian Balogh: Boag says it’s very possible these people were what me might regard today as transgender, but back then this wasn’t even a concept, let alone socially acceptable.

Peter Boag: That wasn’t a term used then, I don’t find it anywhere in the documents so I try to understand the people according to how they identify themselves or how their society identified them. So sometimes some people that we today might consider transgender if they were arrested they might actually use any number of excuses that were common for people who might not be transgender and who are caught dressing as the opposite sex. But it was very difficult I think for people who were transgender to be transgender, and I’m not exactly always sure how they really felt as far as comfort in their own skins.

Brian Balogh: One of this people was Mrs Nash, a laundress from Mexico who worked for Lieutenant Colonel George Custer, 7th Cavalry. That’s the regimen infamously remembered for its defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Boag says Mrs Nash spent about a decade with the Cavalry and even married some of the military men.

Peter Boag: She found three husbands so in this sense she was very much integrated into that community. She also worked very important jobs, not only as a laundress but she also worked as a midwife delivering children for many of the officers’ wives. And so Elizabeth Custer, the wife of George Armstrong Custer writes about these types of activities that Nash participated in, making it appear that she very much was part of this community and that seems to be the case. But Elizabeth Custer also racializes Nash in these stories too and writes in a way that is somewhat condescending and smirking of Nash and so there are questions then to what degree Nash actually is accepted in this community.

Joanne Freeman: Poor Miss Annie shuttered when I spoke of her, for the women was a Mexican and like the rest of that hairy tribe she has so corse and stubborn a beard that her chin had a blue look after shaving in marked contrast to her swarthy face. She was tall, angular, awkward and seemingly coarse but I knew her to be tender hearted. In days gone by I had found when she told me of her troubles that they had softened her nature.

Peter Boag: When she was stationed at Fort Lincoln and what was then Dakota territory, she died and when she died it was discovered that she had the body of a male.

Joanne Freeman: Her past life of hardship and exposure told on her in time and she became ailing and rheumatic. Finally after we left Dakota we heard that when death approached she made an appeal to the camp women who surrounded her and had nursed her though her illness. She implored them to put her in her coffin just as she was when she died and burry her at once. They thinking such a coarse would not be paying proper attention to the dead broke their promise. The mystery which the old creature had guarded for so many years through a life always public and conspicuous was revealed. Old Nash years before becoming weary of the laborious life of a man had assumed the disguise of a woman and hoped to carry the secret into the grave.

Peter Boag: She was married when she died. She was married to Corporal Noonan. It was out in the field doing reconnaissance work when his wife died from acute appendicitis, and when he came back, of course the story was out that Mrs Nash actually had the body of a male so seemed to be a man. And so John Noonan came back to this not only word that his wife whom he had been married to and lived with for a number of years was dead, but he also is facing a perplexed public and other soldiers who start making jokes about him and joshing him in very mean spirited ways about this relationship he had carried on for a number of years.

Joanne Freeman: After enduring the jibes and scoffs of comrades for a few days, life became unbearable to the handsome soldier who had played the part of husband in order to gain possession of his wife’s savings and very the plain fare of the soldier with good suppers. He went into one of the company’s stables when no one was there and shot himself.

Brian Balogh: Like Boag said, the story of Mrs. Nash became a big one in the press, and Mrs. Nash wasn’t the only person who was featured in the news columns. Boag says a sensational story about a cross dresser wasn’t rare during this time.

Peter Boag: There were lavish romantic stories created to try to take account of why somebody would do this sort of thing.

Brian Balogh: “Has women male soul? Does dead live in her? Is professor Eugene Deforest, women who mascaraed as a man for 25 years the reincarnation of her dead brother? Or is her queer condition of male mentality in a female body due to parental influence? These are the questions which scientists are to solve and on which lawyers may base their defense of the women’s mascaraed, unless she is permitted to wear men’s clothes as she desires and continues her life as she will. The law may not prevent her for so doing but it will prevent her marrying again either as a man or a woman.” Oakland Tribune, September third, 1915.

Brian Balogh: Peter, I Confess much of my knowledge about the West comes from movies and old television shows, but certainly the image of the West is one that I’ve never heard a discussion of transgender, I’ve never seen it. It doesn’t appear in any of the John Wayne movies that I’ve watched.

Peter Boag: Yeah well, I began to wonder why is it that these people that I found to be so numerous and so many historical records about them, why they have been largely forgotten from our Western past. It’s a little bit easier to try to figure out why things are remembered but how do you ever forget why someone or a culture works to forget something.

Brian Balogh: So what’s the [inaudible 00:19:50], Peter?

Peter Boag: At the end of the 19th Century is a very important transitional moment in American history, and it’s at this time that crystallizes the romantic story about America’s frontier past. And the belief that the frontier pass, the queath to America all sorts of positive characteristics and attributes that make it into the best democracy in the world. You know, at the very time that this frontier romantic idea of America’s frontier past was crystallized and this is also when American sexologists start to study what they think is a new phenomenon, the appearance of sexual inversion. And they identify the appearance of sexual inversion with Eastern urban areas in particular. They made the argument that frontier living conditions prevented sexual perversion from appearing, and it could only appear in a moldering context, people living too close together, overstimulation of nightlife, bad hygiene.

Brian Balogh: So how do this fascinating stories shed light on our contemporary conversation about gender identity?

Peter Boag: When we look at our myths about the frontier foundations of the United States and what this country has been and what this country is as far as a democracy. The myths that we have about this country were created purposely in juxtaposition of transgender people. So I think that’s one of the things that we have to keep in mind today about transgender people specifically. There is this ongoing attempt to sideline them in our history and in our society when in fact our history and society is really constructed in opposition to them.

Brian Balogh: Peter Boag is the Columbia Chair in the History of the American West at Washington State University. He’s also de Author of Re-Dressing America’s Frontier Past.

Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

While the Stonewall Uprising is considered the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, the origins of the movement can be traced back to the Mattachine Society. Founded in Los Angeles in 1950, it was one of the first activist organizations to advocate on behalf of the gay community. Eric Marcus, creator and host of the Making Gay History podcast, brings us an interview he conducted in 1988 with a man named Hal Call – former President of the Mattachine Society and leading figure of the gay rights movement.

Music:

Midnight by Ketsa

Mattachine Society; queer history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly: In 1969 police raided a gay bar in New York city called The Stonewall Inn. Fed up with police harassment, a riot broke out as members of the gay community clashed with law enforcement. The 1969 Stonewall uprising in largely regarded as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement. But that movement goes back even further to something called the Mattachine society.

Joanne Freeman: Established in Los Angeles in 1950, the Mattachine Society was an activist organization that advocated on behalf of the gay community. Although the society started on the West Coast, it eventually expanded nationally gaining chapters all over the country. This national infrastructure built by the Mattachine Society proved vital for organizing the gay right movement after the Stonewall uprising.

Brian Balogh: I sat down with Eric Marcus, creator and host of the Making Gay History podcast. In 1988, he was commissioned to write an oral history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. As part of that project he interviewed a man named Hal Call former president of the Mattachine Society and central figure of the gay rights movement. Hal Call was a colorful character who uses some vivid and explicit language in this segment. And when Eric arrived at Hall’s office for the interview, Eric knew he was in for much more that he had bargained for.

Eric Marcus: The original Mattachine was founded in 1950 by five men in Los Angeles and many of them had come out, had been communists at one time, and it was a secret society, had to be. The times were such that it was very dangerous for people to be out. Hal Call objected to the secrecy of the organization. He’s someone who used his real name, he didn’t use a pseudonym, and he was concerned that if anyone found out that the people who had founded the organization, who are running the organization were former communists that it would cast a bad light on all gay people.

Eric Marcus: So he led a coup against the founders of the Mattachine society and he took over the organization in ’53, moved the headquarters to San Francisco and the early founders were furious with him and accused them of turning their beloved Mattachine society into essentially a sex club. And the accusation came from Chuck Rowland who was one of the original founders who was extremely upset to hear that Hal Call was showing porn films in the library of the Mattachine society. But Hal Call’s reason for doing that was to get the men out of the bushes and out of the bathrooms so they weren’t getting arrested. Hal’s focus really, he was an early gay sexual liberationist which explains why when I went to interview him in 1989 I had to go to the porn theater that he owned and ran to interview him.

Brian Balogh: And what happened when you showed up?

Eric Marcus: Well I did two interviews with Hal and I don’t know, people probably assume that all gay men go to porn theaters, I had never been to a porn theater in my life. I was 30 years old, and so to get to Hal’s office I had to go into this porn theater called the Circle J, you can fill in the rest of that and I walked in and there it was in the back of the theater and it had pews instead of seats, I guess for so people to have easy access to each other, and there was a porn film on the screen. And I went upstairs to the office and there was Hal, there’s a big bank of video monitors showing lots of porn films and a white Naugahyde sofa and shelves filled with.

Brian Balogh: Was it authentic Naugahyde?

Eric Marcus: I didn’t check the label Brian.

Brian Balogh: All right. I will let you go on that one.

Eric Marcus: I was a little rattled already.

Brian Balogh: I can imagine.

Eric Marcus: It was the second interview with Hal that was a real surprise because I arrived at his office so I already knew what to expect walking through the porn theater. But I got to his office and there was Hal sitting on the sofa with a white shirt and black shoes and black socks and no pants. And on the table, in front of us on the cocktail table was a bottle of lube and a towel. And next to Hal was a video camera pointed in the direction of where I would be sitting on the couch. So Hal had gotten confused and thought I had come there for to be taped for one of his jack off films.

Brian Balogh: So let me ask the million dollar question, what made Hal so different? Why was he willing to be open? This obviously had huge implications for gays who would follow in his footsteps, and obviously at the time, but what made him different?

Eric Marcus: Among many of the people I interviewed they said they knew from the start there was nothing wrong with them, that it was society that was wrong. Hal was more extreme in that, in that he really didn’t care what anyone else though at a time when people thought a lot of very negative things about gay people.

Eric Marcus: He had moved to San Francisco, he started out as a journalist who had gone in trouble in Kansas City because he has been found at a car with two other guys and then fired from his job. So this happened to a lot of people I interviewed who became activists, something bad happened to them and they lost their job or they lost their family and they had nothing else to lose. And they were angry and they were radicalized. So Hal is somebody who took a leading role because of who he was and because of what his experiences were. You know, if he had been a straight guy he would probably have gone on to be an editor at The Kansas City Star and we wouldn’t know who he was. Instead, he had this very colorful career as a leading gay rights activist and a pornographer.

Eric Marcus: There was a point in which you were arrested in ’52.

Hal Call: August, yes. I was in a very small automobile, it was two seater but it was a two door two seater Chevrolet or something. At about 1:30 in the morning about 50 feet from the police station in Lincoln Park in Chicago.

Eric Marcus: How many people where there in the car?

Hal Call: There were four of us. We had gone from a gay bar and they were gonna drive me home but they stopped in the park. As soon as the ignition in the car was turned off they were flashing lights on us. Three of them though that if they made accusations it would let them get off scot free and it would put the honest of guilt on another person. Those three knew each other and I didn’t know them. And they thought they’d walk off scot free but they got busted too, see all four of us did. And the attorney that we got and he was in with the system and at that time 1852, 800 dollars bought off the arresting officer, officers and the judge and included attorney’s fees so that one court appearance bought a dismissal, there was no conviction, to accused us to be guilty. And in that time I dumb enough that I didn’t see that there was any harm in telling my supervisor in The Kansas City Star but it happened. He said, “Well, we can’t have anybody like that working for The Kansas City Star.” And I said well that’s maybe so okay but I said, “If you fired all the homosexuals on The Kansas City Star you wouldn’t get the newspaper out.” Told him that. I mean, you couldn’t even set the liner type at the time.

Hal Call: I decided then that instead of going where the job took me, I was going to go where I wanted to and find my own career. So my lover and I drove to San Francisco with all of our possessions and I’ve been here since. In February 1953 I heard that something called the Mattachine Society out of Los Angeles was having meetings and discussion forums in Berkeley near the University of California Campus and they were getting together to figure out things they could do to help resist this awful thing that we had to face. And that was cops were chasing us and playing cat and mouse with us all the time and at will.

Eric Marcus: You became deeply involved in Mattachine very early on.

Hal Call: Yes I did.

Eric Marcus: It was first a secret organization, why did it have to be secret?

Hal Call: That came about because of fear. The core of it was a secret organization and the Senator Joseph McCarthy in Washington DC was going around with a handful of names and addresses of so many people, there were in the senate or in the government in Washington. These are homosexuals and this are communists. And he was putting the fear of god among homosexuals and among all kinds of people and having lots of time on television and the light and equating the condition of homosexuality with communism. And of course communism at that time was an ogre, was a specter, a demon that we can’t even imagine today.

Eric Marcus: Now it’s [crosstalk 00:31:36].

Hal Call: So we knew that some of the founders of the Mattachine movement, or the inner circle of the Mattachine foundation had been rumored to have some communist leanings and maybe connections elsewhere. Particularly one or two, one of them Chuck Rowland and another man, and those were among the six or seven people who founded the Mattachine foundation along with Harry Hay. We met in 1953 in Los Angeles at [inaudible 00:32:05] [Crenshaw 00:32:06]. We had two meeting there and a month apart and on the second meeting we sort of took it out of their hands. They had bitten our teeth with it and we were running away with it almost.

Eric Marcus: How were you doing that? Was it your idea is different from theirs or?

Hal Call: No, we want it to see it become an organization and expand and spread, but we wanted to know who is who in at, what our background were so that we couldn’t find we had a person in our midst who could be revealed with some kind of ulterior motives and so on and disgrace us all.

Eric Marcus: A communist for example. A communist infiltrator.

Hal Call: Communists was the fear.

Eric Marcus: Several of you disagreed in terms of the philosophy of the organization.

Hal Call: We did [crosstalk 00:32:50].

Eric Marcus: Can you tell me what that was about?

Hal Call: I felt that the foundation people were sort of up high in the sky, erudite and artistically inclined. Harry Hay you could never talk to him very long that he didn’t go back, way back in history, generations and centuries to the [brigage 00:33:10] or to some Ancient Egyptian cult or something of that sort, and he was always making Mattachine and the homosexual of today a parallel to some of those things that were in his studies, in research. We saw the need for Mattachine as a here and now practical thing because we were a group of cocksucker in a society that the police were chasing and they were assassinating character at will and causing all kinds of mischief and expense and damage to us as individuals. And we wanted to see changes, wrote about changes in law, changes in public attitudes, research and education done. We were wanting to see those goals achieve and by evolutionary methods, not revolutionary methods.

Eric Marcus: So your plan wasn’t to go out and lead protests or?

Hal Call: No, not at all. Not at all. We wanted to see it done by holding conferences and discussions and becoming subjects for research and telling our story and letting people in the academic or behavioral science world get the word out about these realities because we were so god damn dumb as people about the realities of human sexuality.

Hal Call: Early in our days we had the Mattachine phone number in our telephone book here in the city of San Francisco and it wasn’t long before the police knew about us because through gay bars that we had in San Francisco back then, not as many by any means as we have now, but we had maybe eight or ten gay bars in 1950, 1953. And the cops were making arrests there and then we were getting calls from a lot of the people they busted to arrange for an attorney and even to arrange for a Biel Bondsman and things like that, Mattachine was doing those things in those early days. And so the cops found out there was a Mattachine Society, a group of queers that was during the stand up and work on behalf of other queers the police were busting. And the courts and all founded out, and the attorney founded out, Biel Bondsman knew it and so on. That started the spread of knowledge of the existence of Mattachine in San Francisco.

Eric Marcus: There was a statement that I read and I’m not trying to [inaudible 00:35:35] “Mattachine urges homosexuals to adjust to a pattern of behavior that is acceptable to society [crosstalk 00:35:37] and compatible with the recognized institutions of home church, and state.”

Hal Call: We did.

Eric Marcus: What did you mean by that, I’m not sure I understand that.

Hal Call: We knew that if we were gonna get along in society it was out feeling at the time we were going to have to stay in step with the existing and predominant mores and customs of our major society and not stand out as [inaudible 00:36:04] too much because we didn’t have the strength of tissue paper to descend ourselves. Keep your sex like very much to yourself, very much in private and it also meant don’t go waring your heart on your sleeve. We didn’t have sex symbols and gay flags and those kind of things, wouldn’t dare having hold hands on the street. And you couldn’t even put your hand on another person’s shoulder in a gay bar without it being lewd conduct. We had drag people in drag that would come out on Halloween, [inaudible 00:36:36] they knew better but they dared to do it. They knew their chances were that they were gonna be busted and the cops could do any damn thing they wanted and chase us around little quail out on the brush, you know. Where all we had to do was run them high.

Eric Marcus: You were advising people in a way to help them avoid getting arrested.

Hal Call: Help avoid getting in trouble. But goes, if you got arrested and your name gone in the paper you were gonna lose a job if you had one. And in those days the Examiner printed in bold type on the front page the names of every gay person arrested. His age, his address, his marital status, his employment status and his professional status if any. When those things happen, divorces, suicides, wrecked careers, the loss of rental spaces where you were living an all kinds, loss of credit and all kinds of things resulted from it. By the day standards we were a bunch of limp wrist pussy foots. But yet for us we were out of the closet and it was a very courageous thing because there were not very many of you that was there.

Brian Balogh: Eric Marcus is the creator and host of the Making Gay History podcast, which brings the voices of queer history to life through intimate conversations which LGBTQ champions, heroes and witnesses to history.

“Gotta Give ‘Em Hope”

Brian continues to talk with Lillian Faderman about the roots of Milk’s activism, the spark behind his political charisma, and the legacy he left behind after his assassination 40 years ago.

Music:

Sincerely Yours by Podington Bear

gay rights movement; leadership; queer history

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Joanne Freeman: Earlier in the show we mentioned that last month marked 40 years since the assassination of Harvey Milk. Today, Milk is remembered for passionately speaking up for equal right in the 1970s.

Brian Balogh: I talked some more with LGBTQ historian Lillian Faderman about the man behind the megaphone. She says Milk’s activism stemmed from his Jewish upbringing.

Lillian F.: During the 1930s on Long Island where he grew up the German American Bund, which was a Nazi organization held huge rallies, his parents of course would’ve been very aware of those rallies and he would’ve been aware of them as well. In 1943 the Warsaw Ghetto fell and he was 13 at that time, it was just before is Bar mitzvah in fact, and he talked about the fact that the adults around him told him that of course the Jews of the ghetto knew that they were fighting a losing battle but he said that they had said if something so evil descends on you, you have not choice but to fight back. And I think that that influenced him always in fighting against homophobia, even at times when it looked as though it might be a losing battle he fought, he gave it everything he had and he was victorious in so many cases.

Brian Balogh: Well he ended life as a politician but he had a lot of other careers, right? Did any of them influence his approach to politics?

Lillian F.: I think every single one of them influences the kind of politician he became. He was a jock when he was in high school and college. He was able to get the endorsement of the San Francisco Firefighters and San Francisco unions because he really knew how to put on a very butch persona and talk to those groups. He was an actor off of Broadway and of Broadway and I think he really learned as an actor how to deliver a speech. He had a speech writer during the ladder part of his political career, but the speech writer said that Harvey would take the lines that were written for him and he knew about repetition, he knew about emphasis, he knew about how to deliver a sentence for its major impact and that’s what he learned in his career as an actor.

Lillian F.: He was a securities analyst on Wall Street for five years and through that he learned something about budgets and so he could present himself to his constituency as being knowledgeable in finances and he took all of those experiences and they became a whole for him when he ran for office. He integrated them into various parts of his political persona, it was brilliant.

Brian Balogh: I don’t think our` listeners will be surprised to hear that Harvey Milk was a Democrat, but he was not exactly a fall in line Democrat, is that correct? Could you give us a sense of the variety of his political views?

Lillian F.: Yes, in 1964 he was actually an avid Barry Goldwater supporter.

Brian Balogh: Wow, how is that?

Lillian F.: Well, Goldwater was a Republican but he was also what we would now a libertarian, the word hadn’t yet been coined in 1964. But one of the things that Goldwater believed was that the government had no place in people’s private lives, no place in people’s bedrooms and of course Harvey believed that too. Harvey fought avidly against this sodomy laws in California. And I think he remained in many ways a middle of the road Democrat.

Lillian F.: Once he changed parties, once he became a Democrat he was not in any sense a radical except perhaps for his support of gay rights and for his support of minorities and the poor. At one point he was asked where he stood on the political spectrum and his response was that those on the right think he’s on the left, those on the left think he’s on the right, it all depends on where they stand. I don’t think he was in any sense radical other than his support for gay rights and for minority rights as well.

Brian Balogh: How did he do with the lesbian community for instance?

Lillian F.: Well, for a long time San Francisco’s lesbian community, very strongly lesbian feminists in those years were suspicious of him, thought that he had no interest in promoting their rights, and so he understood that he had to somehow change the message, convince them that he would be a representative for the entire gay community and for other minority communities as well.

Lillian F.: And so what he did was in his last run for office, his successful run, he hired a lesbian feminist, a woman by the name of Anne Kronenberg and he told her that he really wanted her to pull his coat whenever he did anything that was offensive to the lesbian community, and he told her he wanted her to help him figure out how to serve the lesbian community. And so for instance he became a huge supporter of the equal right amendment which was a burning issue in the 1970s. She also helped him realize when he fought against the Briggs Initiative, a California initiative that would have made it illegal for anyone who was gay or lesbian to teach in the public schools and Harvey was in the forefront of that fight. It was Anne Kronenberg that made him realize that he had to have a lesbian on the stage with him when he debated John Briggs and Harvey did that.

Brian Balogh: Well I can certainly see why Milk was considered to be a figurehead. How did he feel about being a figurehead?

Lillian F.: I think Harvey Milk from his childhood on loved the limelight.

Brian Balogh: So he liked being a figurehead.

Lillian F.: He loved it, yes. He was certainly very sincere in his political positions but he loved being in the limelight. He also understood though that as the first out gay male politician in the country, he had a target on his back and soon after he was elected to public office in November 1977, he made three tape recordings that he distributed to three close friends. He called the recordings his political will and he began each of them by saying that these were to be listened to only in the event of his death by assassination.

Harvey Milk: Knowing that I could be assassinated any moment of any time, I feel it’s important that some people know my thoughts.

Lillian F.: His assistant Anne Kronenberg told me that during the 1978 gay pride parade in San Francisco, Harvey rode an open vehicle, it was a Volvo with a sunroof and so he sat on top, his legs tangling down. Anne Kronenberg said that at one point in the course of the parade Harvey bent down and suddenly said to her, “Anne, do you know the way to the nearest emergency hospital? You better figure that out.” Suddenly thinking this is scary. There’s a huge crowd and anyone could take a pot-shot at him, so he was always aware of that. I don’t think he realized that his assassin would be someone that he knew very well, a fellow member of the board os supervisors, but he knew that he was in a dangerous position.

Brian Balogh: Why should people care about Harvey Milk today?

Lillian F.: Harvey Milk was a revolutionary and a prophet. He was the first elected politician anywhere to say that society had a moral responsibility to help gay youth, not to change them but to help them. And he told gay adults that they had to stop worrying about the ridiculous stereotype that homosexuals where those people who lurked in the shadows ready to pound some adolescent kid and begin to take moral responsibility for the young people in their community. Harvey said that gay adults had to show gay youth that there was a good life in store for them even if they were gay. That they would be able to function in society.

Harvey Milk: I ask for the movement to continue because last week I got that phone call from Altoona Pennsylvania and my election gave somebody else, one more person, hope. In the after all that’s what it’s about. It’s not about personal gain, it’s not about ego, it’s about giving those young people out there hope, you gotta give them hope.

Brian Balogh: Lillian Faderman is an LGBTQ historian and author of the book Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death.

From Policing Queerness to a Diverse Force

Historian Timothy Stewart-Winter tells us about a time when gay and black communities came together to fight the state violence they both faced and reflects on the state of the coalition today. Then, Lt. Stefan Thorne shares his experience as a trail-blazing out police officer and discusses his work to make the San Francisco Police Department more inclusive.

Music:

Late Afternoon Light by Podington Bear
Rain on Glass by Podington Bear

police; queer history; queer identity; transgender

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

View Transcript

Nathan Connolly: Before it was even conceivable that LGBTQ people would openly run for office, serve in the military, or legally get married, just living life as a gay person was a threatened precarious experience. Historian Timothy Stewart-Winter tells us about a time when gay and black communities came together to fight the state violence they both faced. In the 1950s and 60s, police raids on gay and lesbian bars and clubs were a constant threat.

Timothy S. W.: One of the techniques that police would use was sending undercover officers in to kind of witness illegal behavior which could include even serving a drink to a homosexual. In many states it was against state liquor regulations for gay people, just to be in an establishment serving liquor. You know, they might just intimidate folks or they might round everybody up and cart them off to jail, typically charging them with something like disorderly conduct or other kind of catch all charges. At the same time there’s also individual level policing. So cops are picking up gay men who are cruising on the street. They are also arresting lesbians just for wearing men’s blue jeans if you can believe it.

Nathan Connolly: Now, were there any instanced or how might you describe the interaction between racist policing and anti-gay policing. Specifically, how did gay or working class African Americans were the brunt of police brutality during this period?

Timothy S. W.: For African Americans the risk of harassment from policy officers or brutality at the hands of police officers were present whether you were gay or straight. At the same time the sort of growing carceral state of the post World War II decades took some of its harshest actions against queer people of color. So for instance there’s a guy I’ve written about in Chicago named Ron Vernon who was a gay activist in the early ’70s who described growing up on the south side of Chicago, going to an all black high school and being sort of, essentially sent before a judge in youth court as a result of his flamboyance, his visible gayness, queerness. And in a hearing his father was asked by the judge, “Are you aware that your son is a homosexual?” And Mister Vernon said, “Yes.” And the judge sort of said, “Well, then we’re gonna send him to Galesburg mental institution to correct that.” And Vernon went on to spend much of his teen years kind of in and out of the ambit of youth justice system, I guess you would say.

Nathan Connolly: And I as I understand, some of your work has actually revealed that you have gay activist and black nationalist join in coalitions in American cities.

Timothy S. W.: Yeah, it’s a different type of policing that’s affecting white gay folks, you know, cruising or going to gay bars. And yeah, this are both forms of state violence, they’re both forms of state control and partly because they’re both so aggressive. In Chicago there is a coalition that develops to respond to both, to fight both.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m curious about how you understand that cooperation, how deep it went and how we can understand, it’s history, that link between gay politics and black nationalist politics.

Timothy S. W.: The link really has to do with a shared enemy in the form of the police. In December of 1969 Illinois Black Panther Party leaders were killed while sleeping in their bed. There’s a backlash and a kind of widespread sense on the political left that the police were totally out of control. And at the local level this led to a kind of umbrella civil libertarian group called the Alliance to End Repression which oversaw a bunch of different kinds of efforts to reign in the police over the course of the ’70s and into the ’80s, which included both trying to end police raids on gay bars as well as secured concent decrees kind of reigning in the police red squad.

Nathan Connolly: Give me some sense of the strategies that gay activists used to confront these kinds of excesses of state power.

Timothy S. W.: So beginning in the early 1970s there’s kind of an effort to monitor the monitors, or police the police. They actually send undercover people into busy gay bars so that they could serve as witnesses later if the police did conduct a raid. They also began to publicize to try to tell to the press, “This is what’s happening to the gay community.” You know, before the late ’60s there are very few gay people who are willing to come forward publicly and have their name associated with the cause. You know, there were no gay celebrities, there were very few people lining up behind this cause and that stumbling block is the reason that coming out of the closet, which was really invented after Stonewall at the turn of the 1970s kind changed the game a little bit in that people were willing to come forward publicly to accuse individual cops or fight charges rather than just accept be bargained for a lower charge.

Timothy S. W.: Even at the most local level you don’t have any openly gay elected officials in the US until the 1970s. You know, gay people were the opposite of law abiding citizens, they frequented illegal places, they were engaged in illegal acts in most states, they couldn’t hold jobs as teachers or government officials pretty much anywhere, and being outed would mean that you would lose any public sector job.

Nathan Connolly: The 1980s are obviously a huge watershed for a number of reason in the history of gay politics and gay activism. And not the least of which being that you have the election of a mayor in Chicago that you know well, Harold Washington, and Washington was very explicit in trying to continue to bridge this relationship between gay politics and African American politics, again understood as different communities that have overlapping interests.

Timothy S. W.: I think this is a great example of what we miss when we only look at the federal level of politics. You know the story of the 1980s at the federal level is about Ronald Reagan. But in Chicago and in many other big cities you have African American led liberal political coalitions that win power and that are trying to defend the gains that were won by the civil rights movement. And also were kind of trying to defend public spending at a time when it’s being slashed.

Nathan Connolly: How might we understand the 80s and 90s as a time when you have gay activists, we’re thinking about employment and really mainstream their issues, and African Americans who because of their concerns about HIV/AIDS are still sometimes not responding as forth fully to gay issues that are certainly part of the political calculus there.

Timothy S. W.: In the 1970s the routine police harassment of predominantly white establishments, gay establishments pretty much drops off by the early 80s. This is no longer routine in most cities. The gay movement starts to take up a different issue which is protection from job discrimination which they are usually seeking from city councils, and so this is more of a kind of insider kind of politics, brand of politics. You have AIDS which comes along and really radicalized the gay movement, but not specially around policing, but instead around health care.

Timothy S. W.: And so the gay movement is shifting away from a focus on the carceral state at the same time that the carceral state is expanding. And so the kind of tension between those two dynamics over the course of the ’70s and ’80s I think has been overlooked as a key aspect of what was going on in the United Stated in that period and the AIDS crisis adds another layer in that there’s this awful respectability politics. You have one really vivid anecdote, a young man who tells his mother, African American that, “The bad news is I have AIDS, the good news is that I’m a drug addict.”

Nathan Connolly: And why is that good news?

Timothy S. W.: The idea being that he is not gay, that he didn’t become HIV positive as a result of having sex with a man. And so the AIDS crisis along with the crack epidemic and the raise of homelessness and poverty in the ;80s, you have multiple extremely stigmatized communities that are kind of wanting to distance themselves from each other in a sense of gay men and injecting drug users and that makes forming political coalitions more complicated. You know, it also exposes the vast gulf in resources in a segregated city like Chicago between white run gay institutions and organizations which are located in increasingly white parts of the city and meanwhile the south and west sides of Chicago don’t have the same kind of access to resources to respond to AIDS with, and that creates a lot of tensions among activists among the course of the ’80s.

Nathan Connolly: When last decade or so we’ve seen a number of movements even coming from queer activists about the carceral state and trying to deal with the problem of mass incarceration. Where do some of these coalitions hold up under that issue?

Timothy S. W.: I think we’ve seen certainly the gay movement moving towards a more critical stands towards policing and certainly towards the prison system. We’ve had the high the profile case of Chelsea Manning drew attention to some of the very serious health problems facing incarcerated LGBTQ folks. And at the same time we have had Black Lives Matter which is a genuinely intersectional movement with a lot of visible queer leadership articulating the ways in which these systems of oppression interlock and in which state power operates through classifying people by gender and sexuality. I think the sort of gay movement has been a little bit resistant in some ways and we’ve seen in the last couple years controversies over whether out gay police officer groups can march in pride parades which have really led to some serious controversies in a number of cities and I think next year during the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion I think that that’s very likely to be even more controversial. I think we’re gonna see more conflict whether law enforcement should be kind of visible in queer spaces and what that should look like.

Nathan Connolly: Timothy Stewart-Winter is Associate Professor of US history at Rutgers Newark and the author of the book Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics.

Nathan Connolly: As you’ve just hear relations between the police force and the gay community have often been strained. During his service as a police officer, Stefan Thorne saw the issue from the inside as a ground breaker. As one of the first out lesbian officers and then as the first officer to transition while serving in the San Francisco police department. Here’s how he responded when I asked him what it was like coming out as a lesbian teenager in Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1970s.

Stefan Thorne: You mean, what was it like being a criminal? Yeah, it was challenging, that would be the word that I would use. It was against the law to be a homosexual at the time. We were outlaws. I didn’t really know anyone else that I knew was a lesbian or a gay man that was in my own social circle and my sister, my older sister, she’s about six years older than I am, she happened to know a gay man, he was very flamboyant, he was a hairdresser and I really needed to find someone that I could confide in. So I don’t remember exactly how I asked or got a hold of his number from my sister and I asked him to meet me and I was able to tell him that I was like him. And I recall the feeling just almost a physical sensation of a weight being lifted from my shoulders, it was amazing.

Nathan Connolly: When did you first apply to work in law enforcement?

Stefan Thorne: Actually I applied to the Omaha Police Department. They have a physical agility test and a written test and I did all of that and I was their highest scoring female candidate, but they had a polygraph exam. And during that polygraph exam they asked about my sexuality, which I tried to hide. So he kept, you know, I was in there for over three hours in the polygraph exam, hooked up to machines. And you know, finally the [inaudible 01:03:40] yes, so I told the truth and I was not hired, I didn’t get a job.

Nathan Connolly: Tell me about what it was like moving to San Francisco in the late 1970s and how different your experience was there applying for Bay Area Police Forces.

Stefan Thorne: A world away. When I came to San Francisco it was just spectacular and I though, “This is it, I’m gonna move.” You know, the first thing that I did was to pick up one of the gay rags, there were at least two that were free weekly newspapers, and when I opened one of those papers, or both of those weekly papers, lo and behold there was a nice big ad from the SFPD reaching out, and it was recruitment ad for out lesbians and gay men.

Nathan Connolly: Talk about a contrast from Omaha.

Stefan Thorne: Talking about a contrast from Omaha. And that was it. It was like, “Oh my god. I can do this here.” So that’s what I did and I applied. And the other thing that has occurred, the previous November a couple of months before that was the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco so it was certainly a very charged time. I wanted to be here very, very much. Even with everything, maybe specially with everything that was going on. The movement being so strong here, I was certainly aware of Harvey being the first openly gay person elected to public office and that he’d been murdered. So I knew work needed to be done.

Nathan Connolly: Right. And now, you have the experience of coming out not onc but twice, and coming out as a trans officer in San Francisco. How was that experience comparatively and just on its own?

Stefan Thorne: Well it was different. It was froth with fear for me as an adult transitioning from female to male. A couple of the fears I had of loss was that either I could be fired from my job potentially. I didn’t think there were any kinds of protections over gender identity at the time, or if they didn’t outright fire me or didn’t feel that they could do that, that they’d try to make my life so miserable at work that I would want to quit. And the final or most severe fear that I felt was what if officers fail to back me up in the field. And I’m so happy to day that I really grossly underestimated not only the professionalism but the compassion of the people that I worked with because none of my fears were realized. Was it easy? No. Were there people who made it very apparent to me that they disliked me and disliked that I was a member of the department? Yes. But there were many more, many more officers who were respectful and compassionate and kind and tolerant.

Nathan Connolly: And once you’re on the police force you’re actively developing training programs that are meant to make the police force even more responsive and responsible to members of the LGBT community.

Stefan Thorne: Well I was, yes. Jamison Green and I who was a very well known trans activist and educator, I had met him in the FTM support group that he was involved with in San Francisco at the time and he and I wrote curriculum for law enforcement training, and we began teaching it together in June of 1995 to San Francisco police academy recruits. And I continued to do that until I retired and now even in my retirement I actually train law enforcement personnel still, anti bias and gender awareness education and training.

Nathan Connolly: From your advantage point as a retired officer now, what advice would you give a young LGBT person who’s potentially interested in a career in law enforcement, how would you explain why you continue to do this training and remain committed to these issue, and what is it you think that could be improved overall about policing given your experience?

Stefan Thorne: Well, to other LGBT people and any other marginalized group in our society, I can do nothing but encourage you to go into law enforcement. The most powerful change that has occurred in law enforcement has been integration. Having racial minorities and women, and lesbians and gay people and now transgender people included in that, has really changed the culture, certainly from when I joined law enforcement back in the late 70s. It’s very different now, it is not a completed process however as people are, well certainly racial minorities are well aware that just because there are laws on the book that protect you doesn’t mean that discrimination vanishes. So there’s a lot more work that needs to be done, but doing it from the inside is just as important and just and significant and moves us further than only being able to do it from the outside. So anybody who’s considering a career in law enforcement, please go for it, participate and do it well, and so I with consciousness.

Nathan Connolly: Lieutenant Stefan Thorne served for over 30 years In the San Francisco Police Department.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, Joanne, I wanna know whether there were any gay founders.

Joanne Freeman: So here’s a thing about that question, Brian, and that is it’s hard to draw lines and impose labels. People wonder and there’s talk of was Alexander Hamilton gay or not? Did he have a relationship with his close friend John Laurens or not? And I think it’s hard to say either way, you certainly can’t say no, but it’s unclear what that relationship was. It might have been a romantic friendship, it might have been more than that. I think there are whole categories of same sex relationship in this time period that precisely because they weren’t labeled we’re in the realm of possibility.

Joanne Freeman: A lot of the dividing lines and labels that we take for granted now didn’t really exist in early America. So although there were all kinds of same sex relationships, although there were even same sex relationships that were treated like a marriage, people at the time wouldn’t have identified themselves necessarily as gay, although they might have understood that something about their identity shouldn’t be made public. It’s a very fuzzy way of saying that I think in early America there was a continuum of ways in which people understood their sexuality and I think that over time we’ve imposed worders and definitions and dividing lines that didn’t exist in that early period.

Brian Balogh: Well, in early America were there any terms used at all? I understand your point and it’s a good one about a continuum, but were the ends of that continuum labeled?

Joanne Freeman: Certainly in the early 19th century sometimes they use phrases like female husbands or wedded bachelors. They were using a lot of kind of like language to not define things but certainly to indicate that there was an understanding of what kind of a relationship there was.

Brian Balogh: So Nathan, what does it mean that we managed to found and run a country for a century or so without having terms that are just so familiar to us today?

Nathan Connolly: Right. It’s relatively recent in American history where we get so caught up in these questions, actually as recent as the 20th century. By the time you get to the late 30’s the policing of gay people in American cities increases as the cities themselves begin to grow. And it really isn’t until the 1940s and 50s that you begin to see what we would now call the closet, which is the space where gay men and women have to basically begin to conceal their identities for reasons of employment or having other kinds of opportunities.

Nathan Connolly: I wanna say one other thing though about that which is that there are other kinds of categories, like for instance transgender, that people are experiencing as identities in this period, the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s that only has political meaning by the time you get to the late 20th century. My favorite example of this is Pauli Murray, a really critical legal mind on civil rights, an African American woman for most of her life. She is a student at Howard who helped to frame what becomes the fight against Jim Crow through the courts.

Nathan Connolly: Well she actually lives most of her life believing herself to be a man, or feeling as if she’s a man in a woman’s body, but there is no gender corrective surgery that she can draw from, there’s no debate about that it means to be a transgendered man. And so there becomes a point where her own alienation and disconnect from the broader body politic drives her politics on civil rights, drives her mission to basically correct and try to make American society more equitable and more open. And so it provides a really singular example of people who would totally see themselves in one side of a political debate in the late 20th century if they had that ability to belong to that community 50 years, 60 years earlier.

Brian Balogh: So Joanne, I want you to train you skilled cultural social political historian’s eye on this raft of categorization or lack of categorization in the case of transgender and tell us what this means. I mean, what does this look like from the perspective of early America? What’s going on?

Joanne Freeman: Well, here’s what I find interesting in the realm of categories and borders and boundaries and labels. I talked a little bit about how in early America I think there was more of a continuum. So I think that the borders or differences were much more fluid and there weren’t labels being stamped on people in the way that they are now. But what’s interesting, and I would like actually to hear what you two guys think abut this, feels to me like right now we’re at a moment where there is more fluidity being introduced and where some of those labels are being cast off or new ideas are being introduced. So are we in a different kind of a period when it comes to gay identity?

Brian Balogh: You read my mind because I had in mind this Washington Post article that says a third of millennials now say that they’re, “Less than 100 percent straight.” Which first sounded like the way I park my car, but when I started thinking about it I realized you know, this is the kind of fluidity that I associated and now you’ve confirmed with early America, where there aren’t this stark boundaries. But we all know that at least in the second half of the 20th century, one of the reasons that language changed and homosexuality and then transgender, bisexuality, queer became more acceptable is that the very people who lived these lives advocated for this, they came out. So I’m curious to know know any changes were made in the 19th century when people didn’t even have a language for identifying who they were.

Joanne Freeman: Well I mean, I think there is a reason why, there are many reasons why but there’s certainly one main reason why, as we’ve been talking about on the show today, their political activism is a mid and late 20th century phenomenon because I think you need a sense of groupness, right? You have to have a sense of yourself as part of a group.

Brian Balogh: And ironically Joanne, part of that sense of groupness comes from being discriminated against, from being labeled in a pejorative way.

Joanne Freeman: Right.

Nathan Connolly: So I think it’s not all about identity but it’s about a meeting place of identity and opportunity, and I think this is really important because you have your examples. Even going back to the colonial period where so-called cross dressing or women who are mascaraing as men or vice versa. But there are ways in which people are looking for openings of one kind or another. This is true of so many different passing accounts, whether it’s black to white or what have you. And so I think it’s really important to look at what the society of a given moment offers. And so I think it’s really critical when you look at the ability of the government or of private sector business to still allow people to be whole people, while adopting their gender identity that tends to determine who and how people identify openly when it comes to these questions of sexuality and identity.

Joanne Freeman: So I want to add a third word then, you talked about identity and opportunity so I want to throw a third word in that goes right along with what you’re saying Nathan, and that is possibility, which is a slightly different thing and in a way is the hardest to define and maybe in some senses the most important, that you can understand the possibilities for becoming who you are, who you think you are, who you want to be. That’s something that’s hard to define but that’s something that obviously is immensely important.

Nathan Connolly: That’s gonna do it for us today, do get in touch. You’ll find us at backstoryradio.org or send us an email to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Brian Balogh: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities and the environment.

Speaker 12: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is the Professor of History and American studies at Yale university. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities