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.