Originally appeared October 2, 2002, in the Chicago Free Press.
OCTOBER'S OBSERVANCE of Gay History Month provides a welcome opportunity to notice a fascinating new article in "The Journal of the History of Sexuality" revising earlier notions about the history of the Mattachine Society, "Behind the Mask of Respectability" by Martin Meeker.
The orthodox view of Mattachine is that in 1950/51 a group of gay men influenced by leftist ideology and led by Communist Harry Hay, founded the Mattachine Society to promote gay equality and a radical critique of oppressive heterosexual norms.
But, the story goes, in 1953 more conservative Mattachine members forced out the radicals and embraced a more respectable politics, encouraging gays to work within the existing society, leading to a decline in membership, influence, relevance, and eventual dissolution in the mid-1960s.
This view is substantially misleading, says Meeker. Based on interviews with surviving Mattachine members, neglected early gay publications and recently opened archives, Meeker says the actual history was in some ways the reverse of the old story.
Meeker argues that the ideology and the methods of early Mattachine conflicted with each other, inhibiting effectiveness, and the later, more moderate Mattachine posture enabled it to promote gay equality in practical ways while evading public hostility. "Daring and successful politics emerged from an apparently conservative ideology," Meeker says.
To begin with, early Mattachine was not so radical as some historians assumed on the basis of Hay's and other founders' political sympathies. Equal rights and self-esteem for gays may have seemed "radical" in the early 1950s, but they were in principle already the birthright of all Americans. (It was the Soviet-controlled U.S. Communist Party that asked Hay to withdraw after Mattachine was founded.) And many gays were already aware of oppressive mainstream norms based on their experience of prejudice.
Second, early Mattachine also sought bourgeois respectability. Its letterhead listed only mothers and sisters of the founders as Directors, including Harry's own mother. Responding to one member concerned about leftist associations, Mrs. Hay wrote, "Personally I have been a Republican for over fifty years. Incidentally, my husband once was a partner of Herbert Hoover and we often visited the Hoovers in New York."
Third, early Mattachine's Communist-inspired organizational cell structure, secret leadership, figurehead heterosexual Directors, and members' own frequent use of false names fostered mistrust and hampered--actually undermined--Mattachine's ability to challenge gay invisibility and bring gays and lesbians into the public sphere as equals.
Fourth, early Mattachine's emphasis on private, home discussion groups led members to feel that it had little relevance to the problems gays and lesbians faced daily. As later Mattachine leader Hal Call said, "I felt that (Mattachine founders) were sort of pie-in-the-sky, erudite and artistically inclined. Take Harry Hay ... You could never talk to him very long without going way back in history to some ancient Egyptian cult or something of that sort."
Despite some early Mattachine activism such as candidate questionnaires and support for a member entrapped by police, members' unease with the secrecy and the theoretical emphasis led to a 1953 rebellion in which new leadership was democratically elected--initially Hal Call, Don Lucas, and Ken Burns, using their real names and promising more openness.
The new leaders based in San Francisco sought to use the media to put a wholesome public face on homosexuality, involve sympathetic professionals in religion, psychology and sex research, and develop a semi-professional social service agency to help gays and lesbians with their problems.
Former journalist Hal Call became adept at working with mainstream media to counter the "conspiracy of silence" about gays. In 1955 Call founded "Mattachine Review" to reach gays around the country. Together Call and Lucas started Pan Graphic Press to publish the Review, later (after national Mattachine disbanded in 1961) expanding to pamphlets, bar guides, and an early gay newspaper, "Town Talk" (1964).
The work with legal, psychological, religious and sex research professionals has often been misread, Meeker argues. Mattachine did try to involve them when possible in order to bolster its respectability, but the aim was just as much to educate the professional--who inevitably learned a good deal from interacting with ordinary gays and lesbians. The tactic worked: increasing numbers of professionals participated, even soliciting Mattachine members expertise on homosexuality.
Finally, as Mattachine became better known, more gays sought its help. By the late 1950s, in another innovation in gay thinking and gay activism, Mattachine leaders realized the enormous need for a social service agency and began providing legal help, counseling, medical referrals and job placements for gays, In 1958, 300 people sought Mattachine help. By 1964 San Francisco's caseload alone approached 3,000 per year.
So the moderately positioned, post-1953 Mattachine Society was able to conduct more widely varied, aggressive activism than Mattachine's "radical" founders, fostered the ideal of a gay community of healthy individuals, and managed to do so openly and entirely apart from any suspect ideological baggage.