Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary

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.