Facing Fear: 1940-1963 15) 1941: World War II/growing gay community Gay men and lesbians become part of the massive mobilization for World War II, transforming lesbian and gay life in the United States. (Source: Berube, D'Emilio, Meyer) Historian John D'Emilio has called World War II "a nationwide coming out experience." Men and women from all over the country moved from farms and small towns into sex-segregated environments in the military and war industries, away from the supervision of family and community, and into urban centers like New York and San Francisco. Gay and lesbian communities in these cities were booming. For some men and women, it was their first contact with gay men and lesbians and their first chance to explore their own homosexual feelings. One gay veteran who settled in New York after the war described how many people's sense of their own identity was forever changed by their wartime experience. Some men, after having an experience in the service with another man would try to go home and get married and return to "normal" life, he said, but when it didn't work they'd keep returning to New York. He and his friends would tell them, "You can go back all you want, but it won't work. Because you're gay ." Nearly 300,000 women joined the newly-formed women's branches of the military. For male and female veterans alike, the wartime experience created a sense of their rights to the freedoms that the United States claimed to be fighting for in the war. One officer from the Women's Army Corps wrote to the military magazine, Yank, describing the "bitterness" of the lesbian experience and arguing that gay men and lesbians should be able "to take their rightful places in the brotherhood of mankind." Unfortunately, this wartime visibility also led to a growing backlash. (Source: Berube, Faderman 1991) 16) 1947: Witch-hunts and military discharges State Department begins firing suspected homosexuals under President Truman's National Security Loyalty Program. By 1955, anti-gay witch hunts will have cost more than 1,200 men and women their jobs with the federal government. (Source: Miller, Hogan/Hudson) The increased visibility of the wartime years left gay men and lesbians vulnerable to a postwar reaction. In 1947, as Cold War fears increased, President Truman instituted a "loyalty program" intended to keep Communists and other subversives out of jobs with the government. However, this policy coincided with a growing cultural unease about sexuality and the stability of the nuclear family, and the program soon began targeting gay men and lesbians as subversive and undesirable as federal employees. In 1950, a State Department official testified before Congress that of the people who had lost their jobs due to the new policy, "most were homosexuals." His testimony ignited a panic over "perverts" and "deviates" in federal employment, and over the next year and a half, more than sixty people a month lost their jobs due to suspected homosexuality. These figures for the postwar witch hunts do not include men and women purged from the U.S. military. Immediately after the war, the military began discharging gay men and lesbians at higher rates than during the wartime years. Between 1947 and 1950, an average of 1,000 men and women a month were being discharged for alleged homosexuality. In 1953, President Eisenhower revised the loyalty-security program to explicitly prohibit the employment of "sexual perverts," and many state and local governments soon followed suit. (Source: Berube, D'Emilio, Miller) 17) 1950: The Mattachine Society The Mattachine Society, a "homophile" organization aimed at promoting tolerance of homosexuality, is founded in Los Angeles. (Source: Miller) Founded by Communist Party organizer Harry Hay and others, the Mattachine Society began with a radical program: to promote a sense of solidarity and group identity among homosexuals. The Mattachine's charter stated that homosexuals constituted "one of the largest minorities in America today," and were a group "victimized daily as a result of our oppression." According to Hay, the name Mattachine derived from a medieval French society of unmarried townsmen who performed during the Feast of Fools wearing masks. Their performances were always thinly disguised protests against the aristocracy. Hay said he chose the name because homosexuals in the 1950's were also a "masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others." The society published a magazine, One, which eventually sold about 2,000 copies a month, and helped bring in new members. In the context of the anti-Communist crusade of Senator Joseph McCarthy, moderate Mattachine members became suspicious of the organization's radical founders, and, by 1955, had gained control of the society. The moderates rejected activist tactics and quietly maintained that homosexuals were really no different than heterosexuals. To this end, they sought out heterosexual allies - sociologists, psychologists, and legal and medical "experts" - to endorse the view that homosexuals were "normal." The group came to be known as a "homophile" organization. By the 1960s, working with the women's organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine Society chapters all over the country had begun a steady push for greater rights for homosexuals. (Source: Miller) 18) 1955: Allen Ginsberg Allen Ginsberg gives a public reading of Howl - an explicit poem about gay male sex - in San Francisco. The police charge him with obscenity but lose in court. (Source: Hogan/Hudson) Nearly a century after Whitman wrote his Calamus poems, in October of 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his long poem "Howl" to riveted audiences in San Francisco. The poem defied the staid conventions of the 1950's and established Ginsberg as the voice of a generation of non-conformists -- the Beat Generation. "Howl" extolled the pleasures of gay male sex in a graphic, completely unapologetic way. The Beat Generation it inspired came to reject conservatism and heterosexual hegemony. Ginsberg's anthem set the stage for the coming social upheaval and sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies. 19) 1958: Daughters of Bilitis Barbara Gittings forms the first East Coast chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis. A "homophile" organization like the Mattachine Society, the DOB challenged the idea that lesbians and gay men were sick, and argued instead that homosexuals were an oppressed minority. The organization was founded in San Francisco in 1955, as a social alternative to the lesbian bar scene, and as a base for activism. Most of the eight founders' names remain confidential, but it is known that the founding group included a Chicana and a Filipina, and four blue-collar and four white-collar women. The name was taken from "Songs of Bilitis" a lesbian love poem published in 1894: DOB founders felt that the name sounded like a sorority, a literary society, or a women's organization like the Daughters of the American Revolution. During the 1950s, informants infiltrated the organization and reported the names of members to the FBI and the CIA. Official harassment and women's fear of exposure kept membership low, but DOB chapters eventually formed in other cities. In 1956, the DOB began publishing its magazine, The Ladder, which spread the word about the organization's work. (Sources: Faderman 1991, Hogan/Hudson)