The Legacy of Antigay Discrimination

The place of lesbians and gay men in American society has dramatically changed in the last half century. The change has been so profound that the harsh discrimination once faced by gay people has virtually disappeared from popular memory. That history bears repeating, since its legacy shapes today’s debate over marriage.

Although most people recognize that gay life was difficult before the growth of the gay movement in the 1970s, they often have only the vaguest sense of why: that gay people were scorned and ridiculed, made to feel ashamed, afraid, and alone. But antigay discrimination was much more systematic and powerful than this.

Fifty years ago, there was no Will & Grace or Ellen, no Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, no Philadelphia or The Hours, no annual Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) film festival. In fact, Hollywood films were prohibited from including lesbian or gay characters, discussing gay themes, or even inferring the existence of homosexuality. The Hollywood studios established these rules (popularly known as the Hays Code) in the 1930s under pressure from a censorship movement led by Catholic and other religious leaders, who threatened them with mass boycotts and restrictive federal legislation. The absolute ban on gay representation, vigorously enforced by Hollywood’s own censorship board, remained in effect for some thirty years and effectively prohibited the discussion of homosexuality in the most important medium of the mid-twentieth century, even though some filmmakers found subtle ways to subvert it.1

Censorship extended to the stage as well. In 1927, after a serious lesbian drama opened on Broadway to critical acclaim — and after Mae West announced that she planned to open a play called The Drag — New York state passed a “padlock law” that threatened to shut down for a year any theater that dared to stage a play with lesbian or gay characters. Given Broadway’s national importance as a staging ground for new plays, this law had dramatic effects on American theater for a generation.2

Fifty years ago, no openly gay people worked for the federal government. In fact, shortly after he became president in 1953, Dwight Eisenhower issued an executive order that banned homosexuals from government employment, civilian as well as military, and required companies with government contracts to ferret out and fire their gay employees. At the height of the McCarthy witch-hunt, the U.S. State Department fired more homosexuals than communists. In the 1950s and 1960s literally thousands of men and women were discharged or forced to resign from civilian positions in the federal government because they were suspected of being gay or lesbian.3 It was only in 1975 that the ban on gay federal employees was lifted, and it took until the late 1990s before such discrimination in federal hiring was prohibited.

Fifty years ago, countless teachers, hospital workers, and other state and municipal employees also lost their jobs as a result of official policy. Beginning in 1958, for instance, the Florida Legislative Investigation Committee, which had been established by the legislature in 1956 to investigate and discredit civil rights activists, turned its attention to homosexuals working in the state’s universities and public schools. Its initial investigation of the University of Florida resulted in the dismissal of fourteen faculty and staff members, and in the next five years it interrogated some 320 suspected gay men and lesbians. Under pressure from the committee, numerous teachers gave up their jobs and countless students were forced to drop out of college.4

Fifty years ago, there were no gay business associations or gay bars advertising in newspapers. In fact, many gay-oriented businesses were illegal, and gay people had no right to public assembly. In many states, following the repeal of prohibition in 1933, it even became illegal for restaurants and bars to serve lesbians or gay men. The New York State Liquor Authority, for instance, issued regulations prohibiting bars, restaurants, cabarets, and other establishments with liquor licenses from employing or serving homosexuals or allowing homosexuals to congregate on their premises.5 The Authority’s rationale was that the mere presence of homosexuals made an establishment “disorderly,” and when the courts rejected that argument, the Authority began using evidence gathered by plainclothes investigators of one man trying to pick up another or of patrons’ unconventional gender behavior to provide proof of a bar’s disorderly character.6 One bar in Times Square was closed in 1939, for instance, because the Liquor Authority alleged it “permitted the premises to become disorderly in permitting homosexuals, degenerates and other undesirable people to congregate on the premises.” A Brooklyn bar was closed in 1960 because it became “a gathering place for homosexuals and degenerates who conducted themselves in an offensive and indecent manner” by, among other things, “wearing tight fitting trousers,” walking “with a sway to their hips,” and “gesturing with limp wrists.” A bar in upstate New York was closed in 1963 after an investigator observed “two females, one mannish in appearance, [who was] holding the hands of the other female.”7

Any restaurant or bar that gained a gay reputation faced constant harassment and police raids until the police shut it down for good. Some bars in New York and Los Angeles posted signs telling potential gay customers: If You Are Gay, Please Stay Away, or, more directly, We Do Not Serve Homosexuals. In the thirty-odd years between the enactment of such regulations by New York state in 1933 and their rejection by the New York state courts in the mid-1960s, the police closed hundreds of bars that had tolerated gay customers in New York City alone.8

Fifty years ago, elected officials did not court the gay vote and the nation’s mayors did not proclaim LGBT Pride Week. Instead, many mayors periodically declared war on homosexuals — or sex deviates, as they were usually called. In many cities, gay residents knew that if the mayor needed to show he was tough on crime and vice just before an election, he would order a crackdown on gay bars. Hundreds of people would be arrested. Their names put in the paper. Their meeting places closed. This did not just happen once or twice, or just in smaller cities. Rather, it happened regularly in every major city, from New York and Miami to Chicago, San Francisco, and LA. After his administration’s commitment to suppressing gay life became an issue in his 1959 re-election campaign, San Francisco’s mayor launched a two-year-long crackdown on the city’s gay bars and other meeting places. Forty to sixty men and women were arrested every week in bar sweeps, and within two years almost a third of the city’s gay bars had been closed.9 Miami’s gay scene was relentlessly attacked by the police and press in 1954. New York launched major crackdowns on gay bars as part of its campaign to “clean up the city” before the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. During the course of a 1955 investigation of the gay scene in Boise, Idaho, 1,400 people were interrogated and coerced into identifying the names of other gay residents.10 Across America, homosexuals were an easy target, with few allies.

Fifty years ago, there was no mass LGBT movement. In fact, the handful of early gay activists risked everything to speak up for their rights. When the police learned of the country’s earliest known gay political group, which had been established by a postal worker in Chicago in 1924, they raided his home and seized his group’s files and membership list. A quarter century later, when the first national gay rights group, the Mattachine Society, was founded, it repeatedly had to reassure its anxious members that the police would not seize its membership list. The U.S. Post Office banned its newspaper from the mails in 1954, and in some cities the police shut down newsstands that dared to carry it. In 1959, a few weeks after Mattachine held its first press conference during a national convention in Denver, the police raided the homes of three of its Denver organizers; one lost his job and spent sixty days in jail. Such harassment and censorship of free speech made it difficult for people to organize or speak on their own behalf and for all Americans to debate and learn about gay issues.11

Fifty years ago, no state had a gay rights law. Rather, every state had a sodomy law and other laws penalizing homosexual conduct. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, municipal police forces began using misdemeanor charges such as disorderly conduct, vagrancy, lewdness, and loitering to harass gay men.12 In 1923, the New York state legislature tailored its statutes to specify for the first time that a man’s “frequent[ing] or loiter[ing] about any public place soliciting men for the purpose of committing a crime against nature or other lewdness” was punishable as a form of disorderly conduct.13 Many more men were arrested and prosecuted under this misdemeanor charge than for the felony charge of sodomy, since misdemeanor laws carried fewer procedural protections for defendants. Between 1923 and 1966, when Mayor John Lindsay ordered the police to stop using entrapment by plainclothes officers to secure arrests of gay men, more than 50,000 men had been arrested on this charge in New York City alone.14 The number of arrests escalated dramatically after the Second World War. More than 3,000 New Yorkers were arrested every year on this charge in the late 1940s. By 1950, Philadelphia’s six-man “morals squad” was arresting more gay men than the courts knew how to handle, some 200 a month. In the District of Columbia, there were more than a thousand arrests every year.15

Fifty years ago, more than half of the nation’s states, including New York, Michigan, and California, enacted laws authorizing the police to force persons who were convicted of certain sexual offenses, including sodomy — or, in some states, merely suspected of being “sexual deviants” — to undergo psychiatric examinations. Many of these laws authorized the indefinite confinement of homosexuals in mental institutions, from which they were to be released only if they were cured of their homosexuality, something prison doctors soon began to complain was impossible. The medical director of a state hospital in California argued that “Whenever a doubt arises in the judge’s mind” that a suspect “might be a sexual deviate, maybe by his mannerisms or his dress, something to attract the attention, I think he should immediately call for a psychiatric examination.” Detroit’s prosecuting attorney demanded the authority to arrest, examine, and possibly confine indefinitely “anyone who exhibited abnormal sexual behavior, whether or not dangerous.”16

Fifty years ago, in other words, homosexuals were not just ridiculed and scorned. They were systematically denied their civil rights: their right to free assembly, to patronize public accommodations, to free speech, to a free press, to a form of intimacy of their own choosing. And they confronted a degree of policing and harassment that is almost unimaginable to us today.

Starting a Conversation: Respond to “The Legacy of Antigay Discrimination”

In the text boxes below, consider how Chauncey responds to his writing situation by answering the following questions: