A Different World

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Writing at the Huffington Post, Charles Francis reminds us how very different things were 50 years ago today (Aug. 8, 1963), when Rep. John Dowdy (D-Texas) held hearings on his bill to revoke the nonprofit status of the “society of homosexuals” organized by Frank Kameny.

7 Comments for “A Different World”

  1. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    Things were very different in the 1960’s.

    Two of my classmates were summarily (as in gone by morning) dismissed from the liberal arts college I attended.

    Sodomy was illegal in every state except Illinois, and the cops used it as a weapon. At one point, another student and I were questioned by the police for hours, separately, in an attempt to crack us after we got picked up drunk. I’ve never forgotten my fear that the college would find out and we’d be booted. It didn’t happen.

    When he was killed in a car crash at the end of my senior year, I had to mourn in private, not telling anyone. It was the longest summer of my life, having no one to talk to, period, not even my closest friend, who was straight.

    I was actually glad to go into the Army after that summer. But the military was locked down, too, with dire consequences if you were found out. Two men from my unit were discharged after being found out. We heard of others. We had to be very careful. A dishonorable discharge meant no chance of a professional career.

    Even without a discharge, gays faced a glass ceiling in the professions. In the law firm in which I practiced, gays and lesbians didn’t make partner and were moved out of the firm. It was just understood. I gather it was the same way in business. Very few people were out to anyone straight.

    All the information about homosexuality (at least that available to me) was negative. We were psychological misfits, and treated as sociopaths.

    What social life I knew about then went on in private, in homes for the most part. Gay bars didn’t exist in Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee. The police routinely raided the two or three bars Milwaukee, and both Milwaukee newspapers routinely published the names of anyone picked up. It ruined them.

    I could go on. I don’t have to. In a nutshell, it was ugly.

    If you listen carefully to what hard core social conservatives are saying, it becomes clear that they would like to return us to that world. It won’t happen, but it took us a long time, and a lot of sacrifice, to get to where we now are.

    By the mid-1970’s, things began to improve, and little by slowly we’ve made progress.

    I’m glad that younger gays and lesbians are coming up in a better world than I did, but I hope that they won’t lose sight of how difficult it was to take the first steps toward equality. I know men and women who lost their careers and a lot more early in the struggle, and I don’t want their sacrifices forgotten.

    Without them, we’d still be cowering.

  2. posted by Walter Olson on

    Good comment, Tom. It’s important that we not forget this grim history, and Charles Francis’s preservation efforts help ensure that it will be remembered.

    • posted by Tom Scharbach on

      A number of efforts seem to be underway. Some, like Wisconsin’s GLBT History Project (undertaken in cooperation with the University of Wisconsin) and Francis’s Kameny Papers Project, are formal efforts. Others, like the oral histories collected by Will Fellows in connection with his book, Farm Boys, are more informal. Some focus on the lives of men and women of national importance (Frank Kameny, Harvey Milk, Bayard Rustin), others on ordinary men and women.

      All are useful. We need to preserve our history, if for no other reason than to avoid repeating it.

      The legal and cultural oppression of the 1950-1970 era was pervasive and deadening, It warped it warped the lives of those of us who came of age during that era, or, more accurately, shaped our lives in ways that straights can’t imagine for the most part.

      In many areas of the country (including rural Wisconsin, where I live), it has lessened to the point where it is possible to live out in the open, without fear of serious repercussion. In other areas of the country (think Small Town Gay Bar), that is not yet true. Our children remain at risk — depression, substance abuse, homelessness and suicide rates are out of proportion among gay and lesbian teens.

      So we have to keep the fight going at all levels, and I hope that younger adult gays and lesbians, living in relative safety and comfort, don’t forget that much remains to be done.

      What I find striking is the recent resurgence of vitriol among the religious right as we are finally, I hope, nearing the end of our struggle for legal equality. I thought, for a time in the early years of the last decade, that these folks were calming down and becoming more rational. It turns out that the supposed moderation was just sugar-talk masking irrational hatred that has everything to do with fear and loathing, and next to nothing to do with theology. We are now seeing the true face of the religious right, unmasked, and it is about time.

      I recently turned over leadership of the DPW’s LGBT Caucus to a man in his early thirties. He grew up in a different world than I did, and working together over the last few years, I came to realize how our different experiences coming up shaped us in different ways.

      I am a one-trick-pony compared to him. All I know how to do is fight the bastards, straight on, hammer and tong, no holds barred. He knows how to work with younger, pro-equality straights very effectively, employing a subtle and nuanced approach to the politics of equality that I (and many others of my age who were engaged in the political battles) simply don’t possess.

      The difference between men my age and men his age, each of us shaped by the world in which we came of age, may be the greatest indicator of progress we can measure.

  3. posted by Houndentenor on

    Since the article (follow the link) reference Chief Justice Roberts, I’m reminded that if Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas had had their way, we would have made a lot less progress. Thank you for reminding me why I voted for President Obama (and John Kerry and Al Gore). I rather doubt that a McCain appointee would have voted to overturn Section 3 of DOMA.

    • posted by Tom Jefferson III on

      Yes, the appointment of Anthony Kennedy was probably a fluke. I would love to read something about how that happened and how the Bush (sr.) administration got a nominee who has voted with the liberals on gay rights and reproductive rights.

      Yes, one of Kennedy’s appointments turned out to be a right-wing loony. But, I don’t think that much vetting happened about what the justices might say about social issues until the late 1970s and 1980s.

      Although I do not always agree with what the Democratic-appointments have said about other policy issues that have come before them.

      • posted by Tom Scharbach on

        Justice Kennedy’s appointment came before Republican conservatism became unrelentingly hostile to individual, personal liberty.

        His nomination came in the wake of the Robert Bork and Doug Ginsburg disasters (Bork was an ideologue, and Ginsburg, a classmate of mine at the University of Chicago Law School, withdrew his nomination after his history of marijuana use was revealed).

        Kennedy’s nomination was an attempt to steer clear of both ideological extremism (Bork) and personal idiosyncrasy (Ginsburg). Kennedy’s judicial record and his writing reflected a balanced judicial conservatism, and his nomination, like that of Chief Justice Roberts, received strong bipartisan support.

        Kennedy’s judicial outlook has been described as libertarian, but that view has been disputed by most legal scholars. My view of him is that he is a careful jurist, conservative in outlook, but deciding cases on a case-by-case basis.

        The sodomy cases are a good example of how Kennedy’s thinking works.

        In an address to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Legal Studies, titled “Unenumerated Rights and the Dictates of Judicial Restraint.”, Kennedy had this to say about Bowers:

        One can conclude that certain essential, or fundamental, rights should exist in any just society. It does not follow that each of those essential rights is one that we as judges can enforce under the written Constitution. The Due Process Clause is not a guarantee of every right that should inhere in an ideal system. Many argue that a just society grants a right to engage in homosexual conduct. If that view is accepted, the Bowers decision in effect says the State of Georgia has the right to make a wrong decision — wrong in the sense that it violates some people’s views of rights in a just society. We can extend that slightly to say that Georgia’s right to be wrong in matters not specifically controlled by the Constitution is a necessary component of its own political processes. Its citizens have the political liberty to direct the governmental process to make decisions that might be wrong in the ideal sense, subject to correction in the ordinary political process.

        Contrast that statement, if you will, to his opinion in Lawrence. Kennedy’s opinion in Lawrence did not “switch sides”, but looked at changed circumstances during the period between Bowers and Lawrence, and new knowledge about homosexuality garnered during that period.

        The contrast between the two illustrates Justice Kennedy’s respect to common law, judicial restraint, and the way in which the law moves forward, case-by-case.

        I don’t think that Justice Kennedy is “socially liberal” in any meaningful sense of the word. His opinions do not reflect that, in any event.

        The key to his constitutional philosophy with respect to individual, personal, liberty, I believe, can be found in a statement made during his nomination process. Discussing Griswold, Kennedy said that the Constitutional guaranties “a zone of liberty, a zone of protection, a line that’s drawn where the individual can tell the Government, ‘Beyond this line you may not go.'”

        Well said. That’s what conservatism used to be about.

  4. posted by Tom Jefferson III on

    Yes, things have certainly gotten better — its harder for younger folk like myself to fully appreciate it –, but thankfully LGBT history is being saved and researched much more.

    In terms of two-party politics, it took lots of hard work on the part of Democrats to get to the ‘equal means equal’ state of mind. I wish that a similar thing happens with the Republican Party, but that remains to be seen.

    In terms of the IRS and non-profit status, their are legit reasons to ask certain, sometimes detailed, questions about what an organization does, where it gets in funding and what-not.

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