California Crucible. Jonathan Bell

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СКАЧАТЬ economic citizenship in a state in which the established channels of political patronage were being closed off, allowing the party to harness forces for economic and social change that were demanding greater representation.

      When Harry Hay, Bob Hull, and Chuck Rowland first met in Los Angeles in 1950 to discuss the potential formation of a new organization to promote understanding of homosexuality, something other than their sexuality united them. All three had been members of the Communist Party.⁶⁶ By the early 1950s Marxism to these former party members was a God that had failed, and a combination of McCarthyism and a growing realization that individual sexual freedom was incompatible with communist doctrine helped men like Hay shake off any vestiges of fellow traveler status from Mattachine. Anyone who “espouses political philosophies which abrogate basic rights of the individual as set forth in the Constitution of the United States will hardly find the principles of social and moral responsibility as set forth in the aims and principles of the Society to his purpose,” the committee assured Mattachine's current and potential membership in 1954.⁶⁷ Much of the new organization's early publicity material avoided discussion of ideology or political partisanship lest it become tainted by association with communism at an inopportune time. “Politically, the Mattachine Society is strictly nonpartisan,” one statement read. “It espouses no ‘isms' except Americanism, for it realizes that such a program is possible only in a free nation such as the United States.”

      In addition to the fear of political persecution homophile activists harbored at a time of McCarthyite purges of suspected gay men from public service in the early 1950s, they also faced more mundane problems of political identification that stemmed from their lack of a coherent ideological world-view into which their sexuality could fit.⁶⁸ British-born author Christopher Isherwood, who during the war had settled in Los Angeles and become a key figure in the city's gay demi-monde in these years, later recalled that by the time of his emigration to the United States he had “lost my political faith—I couldn't repeat the left-wing slogans which I had been repeating throughout the last few years. It wasn't that I had lost all belief in what the slogans stood for, but I was no longer wholehearted. My leftism was confused by an increasingly aggressive awareness of myself as a homosexual and by a newly made discovery that I was a pacifist. Both these individualistic minority- attitudes kept bringing me into conflict with the leftist majority-ideology.”⁶⁹ When a Los Angeles journalist in December 1953 wondered openly about the political intent of the new fledgling group in his newspaper column, the reply was forthright: “There is no political aim of the Mattachine Foundation Inc. other than to fight for the rights of man. IT IS DEFINITELY AND ABSOLUTELY NON-PARTISAN…. They are concerned with the problems of the homosexual and only that!”⁷⁰ These “problems” for the Mattachine Society of the 1950s concerned the rights of individuals to conduct their private affairs as they wished without unwarranted legal impediment and the education of wider society to accommodate sexual difference. Chuck Rowland went as far as to say that “it was society which created our culture by excluding us,” suggesting that the extent of political engagement on the part of early Mattachine members was to gain unrestricted entry to existing social structures, not to change those structures as any socialist would advocate. As the slogan of the 1954 convention put it: “evolution, not revolution.”⁷¹

      As the gay rights movement grew and evolved it was clear that the membership's analysis of social exclusion was predicated upon something more than just individualism, and that they faced internal pressure to take an interest in mainstream politics. To Rowland, political activism, a belonging to a concrete organization of people determined to advance the cause of social acceptance of gay men and women, provided “a pride in participating in the cultural growth and social achievements of my people, the homosexual minority.” In this he claimed kinship with those advocating civil rights for different racial groups, trying to open avenues of employment and housing to all without discrimination. The Society's magazine, Mattachine Review, was launched in 1954 to promote “permanent advances in integration, education, understanding, civil rights, elimination of unfair practices and discrimination, and abolishment of false ideas about human sexuality.”⁷² Even in its very early days the founders of the organization recognized that theirs was a lobbying group with political goals, however muted and tentative they may be: “Once it has been conclusively demonstrated that variants can be unified in their own behalf, and when the time is agreed to be right for such a move,” they asserted, “it is considered imperative for the Society to move into the realm of political action to erase from the law books discriminatory legislation presently directed against the sexual variant minority.”⁷³ At the Society's 1954 convention in San Francisco the chair of the newly established legislative committee noted that no legislation of use to gay Californians had been passed in the Republican legislature, and that 1954 was an election year: “The chief factor here is the exercise of every American's basic franchise—that of voting…. THIS NEED FOR US TO ASSUME THIS RESPONSIBILITY OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP CANNOT BE OVERSTRESSED, FOR UNLESS WE VOTE, WE AS INDIVIDUALS AND AS AN ORGANIZATION HAVE NO REAL RIGHT TO CRITICIZE OFFICIALS AND THE LAWS THEY ENACT.”⁷⁴

      The involvement of Mattachine in electoral politics began with the organization's creation, when the committee sent various candidates for office in Los Angeles a questionnaire soliciting their opinions on the question of making material on homosexuality available in schools. The accompanying letter attempted to demonstrate the potential electoral power of gay Angelenos, suggesting that if even only “a conservative percentage of Dr. Alfred Kinsey's testimony before the 1951 California State Legislature's Interim Committee is conceded, there are at least 150,000 such persons in the Los Angeles area alone.”⁷⁵ LA Mirror journalist Paul Coates saw as early as December 1953 that gay rights activism had the capacity to shape the way in which political parties conceptualized social change in the postwar age. Pointing to the forthcoming midterm elections in California, Coates observed the Mattachine questionnaire gambit, describing it as a “broadside from a strange new pressure group. An organization that claims to represent the homosexual voters of Los Angeles is vigorously shopping for campaign promises.” Mattachine, he noted, “pointedly hints it has the potential support of 150,000 to 200,000 homosexuals in this area.”⁷⁶ It would be some time before homophile politics gained general recognition in mainstream political debate in California, and throughout the 1950s a system of legalized repression of gay bars and political meetings relating to homophile activism kept sexuality out of the political lexicon of all elected politicians. Yet Coates was right to perceive the potential for gay rights to gain electoral traction at the same time as it struck a chord with a political class developing a new program for gaining and maintaining power in the 1950s and 1960s.

      The language of rights deployed by both the racial and sexual equality movements contained similar cadences and perspectives to the intellectual debate that underpinned the Stevenson campaign in California. The development of civil rights organizations set up as lobby groups to press for political rights and representation in the halls of power mirrored the establishment of clubs and societies based around the advancement of the Democratic Party in California, a state in which the terms of political debate had been set in particularly narrow terms and in which existing channels of legislative action had proved to be inadequate when questions of civil rights came into play. The years between 1952 and 1958 would see the rapid rise not only of the Democratic Party in California politics, but also a concomitant rise of the influence of grassroots political organizations that would play a role in dramatically reshaping the ideological agenda of Democratic liberalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

      CHAPTER 4

      A Democratic Order

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