The Lavender Scare - PBS

Has anybody seen this documentary on PBS? Glenn Close narrates it.

It's a history of how Homosexuality became a big issue after WW II in many western governments and led to purges. (Homosexuals were perceived as being highly likely to be blackmailed into spying for that other scourge of right-thinking Americans, ie, the Reds under all the beds.)

From today's Point-of-view Eisenhower is not the hero he is normally seen as. He is on film launching the purge.

It's said in the documentary that there was not a single case of an American gay person being found to have actually spied for the Communists. (BTW Some of the better known Soviet agents in Britain actually were gay, but acted from conviction that socialism was the future.)

Of course, the fact that there really was a climate of hostility to homosexuals was what led many of them to have secret lives, which is what then might have made them vulnerable to blackmail.

The documentary has some strange things in it - one of the agents in charge of purging homosexuals is interviewed and seems to have no regrets about his role. There is no reference at all to J Edgar Hoover.

The most interesting thing to me was that much of the progress in reducing homophobia seems to be attributable to a man I had never heard of before - Frank Kameny.

 

I'll have to check it out, thanks. Of course the man who was most responsible for cracking the Nazi's ENIGMA encryption, Alan Turing, was gay and was chemically castrated and apparently driven to suicide by way of thanks.

 

I saw a piece on it on CBS Sunday Morning a few weeks ago and ended up recording the documentary on PBS. I’ll have to watch it this weekend.

 

Caught the tail end of it the other night while flipping through the channels. Will have to find when it next airs.

 

Being Gay in America wasn't so great before the 50s either. America's first Gay rights group, founded in the 20s, had to close because the police kept raiding it. And Harvard University had their own Gay purge around the same era, I think.

 

That's what I thought. The documentary almost suggests that things were hunky-dory before the 50s.

 

Pre WWII things were fairly loose as far as the acceptance of gays. My area of Brooklyn was known as a gay mecca both for living here and cruising before the war. Lots of gay bars, burlesque houses, hotels, all catering to a gay clientele which was made up of a lot of servicemen and otherwise "straight" people. The demarcation between straight and gay as far as sexual behavior didn't really come into play until after the war, when everything got a lot more conservative. As the Lavender Scare says, being gay was looked at as being vulnerable to blackmail, and the entire country started to look at gays that way, as vulnerable and undesirable. There were also some flawed psychiatric studies done that flagged homosexual behavior as deviant.
There's an amazing book called "When Brooklyn Was Queer" by Hugh Ryan that gets into all of that and it was a real eye opener as far as how open NYC and Brooklyn especially were when it came to LGBTQ folk.
Frank Kameny is a gay rights hero. He was one of the founders of The Mattachine Society, launched a campaign in 1963 to overturn sodomy laws and was the first openly gay candidate to run for Congress , among other things.

 

But even in the 30s, the play THE CHILDREN'S HOUR suggested that being a Gay Woman wasn't something you wanted most people to think you were, even if you were, and the production code for films forbade Gay references from 1934 on-and before '34, when you saw "Gay" characters, it was to laugh AT them, not with them(Being a Female Impersonator like Julian Eltinge of course didn't make you Gay, though I think Eltinge was, but "Drag" on stage was also banned in LA in the 30s). Meanwhile, back to the 50s, in Hollywood it stayed the same as before-as long as you kept your Homosexuality a secret(and married a "beard")you kept working. There was a Communist(and fellow traveler)purge in the 50s, but not a Gay one; just the usual Gay hush-up. And what was it like before the War in places that weren't like NYC or Brooklyn, say, Oshkosh?

 

You're 100% correct, as one reading of a book like "The Celluloid Closet" would prove.
The point I somewhat ineptly was trying to make was that there was a fundamental shift in how gay people were treated/accepted after WWII. There were a multitude of factors involved, mostly to do with an embracing of post war conservatism. The world of Hollywood is very different from the world at large, with it's own set of standards ,and I was talking about regular work-a-day folks. Of course, cities have always been meccas of freedom for the marginalized, and I wasn't thinking about small town America. But people from those small towns (especially young men) were in the service, and those people, because of their travels, were a lot more open about defining sexual desire than the world at large. Plus, because of the proliferation of gay hangouts in cities, it was a lot easier for married men to indulge their same sex desires before the crack down.
The upside of all this is that it paved the way, in the 50's, for groups like Mattachine society and Daughters of Bilitis to form, and they in turn helped foster the gay right movement that has brought us to where we are now.

 

Watched it and it was dam interesting, not surprised at it, it was just the way it was thought back then and some dam brave people that are still around to tell the story

 

It also sounds like in 30s NYC and Brooklyn, Gays had to stay on their side of the fence. I wonder if the logic during the cold war was similar to that in Britain(were Homosexuality was a long time against the law, and was dealt with far more harshly than in the US)where they feared that not punishing Gays would "weaken" the country, in the case of the US rendering us helpless before Stalin.

 

That could be. There are so many variables as to what happened/could have happened, and as the people who actually remember die off, and because a lot of this was undocumented, piecing the whole thing together is difficult if not impossible. I tend to agree with you that gays were looked at as a weakness, especially those who were in the government/military and closeted.

 

Here is a very detailed write up about Harlem and homosexuality in the 1920's and 30's and how it was portrayed in Jazz and Blues songs at the time.

A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/blues/garber.html

 

And according to the New York Times, Police harassment of Gays in New York began in 1923 after an anti-sodomy law was passed, and intensified in the late 30s.

 

Just a sign of the times

 

Robin Williams had the great line about the Gay Mafia. "The Mauve Hand". Is it me or do most problems come down to just leaving people alone? What consenting adults do in the privacy of their homes falls under "nunyabidness". So do it.

 

I know it's a little off topic, but other than the flick in question, can anyone recommend some good documentaries about pre-war gay life.

@ralphb mentioned a book that I would like to check out.

I've got a good friend who is 95. He remembers about 1930-31, that he and his mom took the train from Queens over to Manhattan. They were going to catch the ferry to Staten Island.

Anyway, my friend is like 5 or 6 years old at the time, and he remembers these group of guys standing against the wall. They had couifed hair, what would be called capri pants today, stripped shirts, and some of them wore lipstick.

He didn't know the deal then, but looking back he knows now. They might have been cruising or just hanging out, smoking cigarettes, but what struck him was the near uniform look that they had. Almost like a gay gang. I always thought that was a neat story, but obviously there's another story behind it. That was like 88 years ago.

 

Interesting story. The article I posted earlier detailed how gay people were "accepted" in the Harlem underworld. I guess when your sexuality is illegal, you can end up congregating with some shady characters.

The mafia owned a lot of the gay bars in New York City (including Stonewall).

Here's an article about that history.
How the Mafia Muscled in and Controlled the Stonewall Inn

One interesting excerpt

There may well have been gay gangs. This is all reminding me of the movie, The Warriors. The all-female gang had the very unsubtle name of The Lizzies.

 

That's very interesting. Now, of course I don't know if they were actually a gang or not, because they dressed similarly. It might have been that they were associated with a club, or a "house." I'm not sure. When I think of a gang, yeah, I think of something like The Lizzies, who would fight over turf. I have no idea if that went on.

Anyway, today I purchased the book, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940.

I'm hoping that this sheds some light on some fascinating history.

 

Haven't read that, but from what I understand it covers a lot of the same ground as When Brooklyn Was Queer (which has a timeline that ends just before Stonewall) , one of the conclusions being that pre WWII same sex liaisons between what were otherwise considered "straight" people were not unusual and somewhat accepted as the norm. Let me know what you think of that book.

 

@Wayne Hubbard, too. I just had to share this, as I've been reading Gay New York (I guess this isn't wildly off topic, given the subject of the thread).

So, talk about coincidence, on pg. 89 it reads, "The seaman's interest in punks and fairies was not unusual, nor were such interactions kept carefully hidden. The investigator accompanied the man to Battery Park, where benches were filled with young men waiting to be picked up by sailors."

The year? 1931. The place, Battery Park, which is exactly where my friend was with his mother in 1930 or '31. What a cool coincidence, huh? Though I imagine if it was any year around that time it still would have fit my friend's experience as a little kid.

The last time I went to NYC was about 3 years ago and when the wife and I went to Battery Park I looked around at the curved, short "sea walls" (for lack of a better word), which still borders the area, having gaps in the wall, probably about 7ft apart where people can walk through and stroll to where boats used to moor. I told her the story my friend related to me and I could just picture it in my mind's eye, because you can still lean against the walls there. Now, if I remember correctly, there are tables just outside (or maybe it was inside) the short walls where you can sit and play chess or eat your lunch.

Yeah, it's a good book. It's a little dry in places, but it's very much a scholarly study, and what's cool is that it doesn't draw conclusions that doesn't exist. In other words, the author admits when a certain subject needs more attention that he can provide, and that one day future scholars might provide those answers if more original sources come to light. The book was published in 1995, so maybe more study has been done since then.

I don't know about the book that you read, Ralph, but this one attributes the non-acceptance of a middle-class gay culture to the rise of women in the workplace and the woman's right to vote. It's not putting the blame on women. In fact, it doesn't blame anyone, yet middle-class men, both "queer" and "normal," took umbrage to the rise of what many men viewed as the "lesser sex" (women) as a loss to their masculinity and rule. That just wouldn't do, so who took the hit? The "third sex" did, starting in the middle-class and then trickling down to the working-class where any sexual congress was considered normal and acceptable.

Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly) queers, fairies, or what-have-you, was nearly as accepted among the upper-class as it was in the working-class. It was the middle-class that invariably grew, and out of it the need to protect an unnecessary sense of masculinity for fear that women would take over.

Of course I'm giving a high-level view and it goes much deeper than that. I'm only on pg. 114 of 361 pgs. Nevertheless, that's the gist of where I am now, for what it's worth.

I wanted to discuss the places in New York that still remain, and those that don't, but I fear that I'm too off-topic as-is, so I'd better end hear and continue reading. Perhaps I should put more of my thoughts in the pride thread, yeah?

 

I got the feeling it was more of a scholarly study, but I'll definitely read it, if only to compare his take to Hugh Ryan's. I think there were a lot of reasons for the change in attitude to LGBTQ people, partly what you mention and partly due to the rise of J. Edgar Hoover and The Cold War. Any sign of weakness, or any chance that you could be blackmailed by outside forces would cause you to be released from military duty, so the flow of queer service members was slowly cut off. Then there were flawed psychiatric studies. The outward migration to the suburbs caused all the bars and clandestine speakeasys in Brooklyn to shut down. Just a tsunami of events that led to all the change.