100 Years of 100 Things: The Fight for Gay Rights

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things, and we are almost done. We began the series on WNYC's actual 100th birthday. That was July 8th last year, and we committed to exploring 100 years of 100 different things over the course of a full year, not 100 things about the radio station. We used it as an excuse to book guests and take your oral histories about 100 different things, from 100 years of freedom versus fascism on the very serious end, to 100 years of ice cream, and maybe we can say 97 things in between.

Today, as they say when introducing Aaron Judge at Yankee Stadium, it's thing number 99. This one is for Pride Month, which is not canceled here. It's 100 years of the Fight for LGBTQ Rights. As it happened, the first documented gay rights organization in the United States was launched just about 100 years ago in 1924. We'll begin there as we welcome who I think will be our final historian guest in this 100-year series.

It's Marc Stein, professor of History at San Francisco State University, director of the OutHistory website, author of Queer Public History: Essays on Scholarly Activism, and editor of The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History and the Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America. Thanks for coming on for this. Professor Stein, welcome back to WNYC.

Professor Marc Stein: Thanks very much for having me back.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, as we have throughout this series, we want to invite your oral histories today. Who has a really old gay or otherwise LGBTQ rights story that's been handed down from family or friends? Did you have a gay grandparent, a trans great uncle who your parents only told you about when you grew up, or anything like that? 212-433-WNYC, and on the politics, was anyone listening now involved in gay or other LGBTQ rights activism in an earlier era, or hear stories of people who were from family members or anyone else? 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. Call or text. Professor Stein, want to start with that gay rights organization in 1924? I see it was in Chicago. What was that, and why then and there?

Professor Marc Stein: Well, the 1920s were a really interesting decade for LGBTQ history, both in Europe and in the United States. A German American immigrant named Henry Gerber had been in Europe during World War I, came back informed by the nascent European gay movement, and tried to form an organization in Chicago. It was very quickly suppressed via postal surveillance and censorship, and he did manage to put out a few issues of a newsletter. We don't have, actually, many surviving copies of that, but we date the gay rights movement in the United States to that moment.

Brian Lehrer: I see that newsletter that only lasted two issues was called Friendship and Freedom, which was a translation to English from an existing publication in Germany, and you said this was from a member of the German-American community. Was Germany ahead of the US in a gay rights sense?

Professor Marc Stein: Yes, it absolutely was, as were a number of other European countries: the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria. The very term homosexuality in German was invented in the 1860s. There was a sex law reform movement that started in the late 1800s, and by the early 1900s, there was a network of homosexual gay activists in multiple European countries, and the cultural aspects of that really developed dynamically in Weimar Germany and in other European cities, and ultimately that would be suppressed during the fascist era in Germany.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, suppressed and worse, right? Maybe we can establish nomenclature or vocabulary a little more here. Right at the outset, near the beginning of the 100 years' timeline. Today, we say LGBTQ or even LGBTQIA+. When did 'gay' come into usage as opposed to simply 'homosexual'? How would you trace some of the lineage of how people within the community referred to themselves?

Professor Marc Stein: There was a diversity of terminology in the early 20th century in the United States. All sorts of terms that have gone out of use today: pansy, fairy, stud, and a whole range of others, invert, sexual variant. 'Homosexual' came to be the term favored by--

Brian Lehrer: Wait, were all of those that you just said basically slurs? Did anybody call themselves a fairy or a pansy?

Professor Marc Stein: They did, actually, yes. It was a kind of dynamic process of it being imposed negatively by anti-queer forces in society, but also claimed and reclaimed by members of the community. 'Homosexual' turned out to be the term favored primarily by the scientific and medical establishment as they began to study this phenomena. Over time, it was claimed by a number of people, but the subculture generally did not use 'homosexual.'

By World War II, 'gay' was really coming into much more common use, and certainly in the 1950s and 1960s. The movement in the '50s and '60s adopted a new term, which was 'homophile,' meaning 'love of the same' or 'love of homosexuality,' and in part, it was an effort to reduce the sexual aspects of homosexuality, so homophile love instead of homosexual, which placed emphasis on the sexual, and then, meanwhile, there was a parallel debate about the terminology for lesbians, and there, the nascent movement of the 1950s and 1960s began to favor using lesbian specifically rather than homosexual for the entire community.

Brian Lehrer: 1940s and '50s, in the timeline, you were just talking a little bit about the '40s. We saw the Kinsey Report and books like The Homosexual in America and James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room to break out in certain respects. Can you talk about the Kinsey Report briefly?

Professor Marc Stein: Sure. Well, World War II was a really important moment for LGBTQ history, with so many people traveling overseas and settling in port cities, including San Francisco, and a real repressive apparatus developing in the military that hadn't existed before. Psychiatric screening in the military, which hadn't existed before, and then that was followed by what we now know as the Lavender Scare.

In the midst of that, scientists were doing more studies of homosexuality and transgenderism. Kinsey was an Indiana University biologist, and he was teaching a course on human sexuality. He began doing a quantitative study of sexual behaviors, and his first volume on males came out in 1948, the volume on females, 1953, and his argument was that we should think of homosexuality as a behavior, not as an identity.

He also emphasized how common it was, and he argued that anything that was natural or common, the way homosexuality was as a behavior, should not be suppressed by the law, so it was a liberal argument. It was a scientific argument, and it was definitely a behavioral argument rather than an identity-based one.

Brian Lehrer: Did that argue against or come to be refuted by the movement argument that gay rights are deserved because it is an identity, because it's a status that you're born with, rather than a behavior that you choose that people in power can choose to judge?

Professor Marc Stein: Well, it's actually been a long-running debate within LGBTQ rights circles, and while, yes, the dominant position in the movement of the '50s, '60s, '70s was focused on the idea of innate biological factors, there always was a minority position that picked up on the Kinsey studies that emphasized homosexuality and transgenderism as more behavioral.

Then the gay liberationists, after the Stonewall riots of 1969, believed that everybody could potentially be gay. They called for everybody to come out, not just gay people or people who were closeted, but they thought that all human beings are polymorphously perverse, to use the Freudian term, and that it was society that repressed everybody's same-sex desires.

Brian Lehrer: If you're just joining us, we're in 100 Years of 100 Things series, thing number 99, 100 years of the Fight for LGBTQ Rights, with Marc Stein, professor of History at San Francisco State University, and with your oral history stories and other calls. 212-433-WNYC. Veronica in Manhattan, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Veronica: Good morning. Nice for you to take my call. Yes, I had an open grand uncle. He was gay in the '20s. I met him in the 1950s. He had a lifelong partner that we called Uncle Ray. They were beyond handsome. They were beyond kind. They were nothing flamboyant. They, at that time in the '50s, were taking care of my great-grandmother and treated her like the queen that she was.

She was the belle of old Yorktown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now this is Pittsburgh. By the 1960s, they were already in their early 60s, early 70s. They moved to Florida, and I have such wonderful memories of them. They'd come to visit at my grandparents' house. I was so happy to be able to talk with them, and then I learned that when I had gone to college, I'd found out that they had indeed moved to Florida, and they had been so bonded that when my Uncle Jerry died, my Uncle Ray killed himself.

They had been so bonded. I remember them so distinctly, and they were definitely open. My Uncle Jerry had an upholstery business. He was very well-known in Pittsburgh for the beautiful upholstery work that he did.

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry that story ended the way that it did. Veronica, thank you very much for it, and we're going to go on to Megan in Nyack. You're on WNYC. Hi, Megan.

Megan: Hi, Brian. Longtime listener, first-time caller. I'm calling because my grandmother's brother, Vincent, I called her she, though, to respect her, but she was born Vincent. She served in the Navy. She got married, had a child, got divorced. In the '60s, she went to Casablanca, they said, to get a sex-change operation. I think she just got her breasts done. She wanted to live as a woman, and she identified as that.

Because of her, I really respect the transgender movement. If I didn't have someone in my own family who went through this, I might think differently. Anyway, someone very nicely made a Wikipedia page of her, Deborah Hartin, and she was featured in the 1970 documentary Let Me Die a Woman, which I bought a copy off Amazon. I have yet to see it, though.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for a wonderful call, Megan. Professor Stein, two really interesting callers, and you know what Megan there brings up, I'm sure, is true for so many people, at least at the outset. They don't understand trans unless maybe they've had some personal contact with a trans person, like that caller did very early on, who had a trans activist from the 1950s as an aunt who was born her uncle.

Professor Marc Stein: Yes, and we know that family associations or social associations with people in your home or your neighborhood are really associated with greater levels of tolerance and acceptance and understanding, so I think that that really confirms that. I think most of us have experiences of transing, which is a term that I think is really useful. That is a moment or a person who we know is not behaving aligned with the gender that they're assigned at birth.

I think the vast majority of those moments are just dismissed, right? I think most people actually have some experience or exposure to that, and obviously, it's different if it's something that's enduringly felt by the person and enduringly perceived by others. I think it's a really common experience.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who else has an oral history story related to 100 years of LGBTQ rights? 212-433-WNYC, if you have one to call in or to text, 212-433-9692 for Professor Marc Stein from San Francisco State. The first caller talked about their gay relative moving from Pittsburgh to Florida, and she didn't say it was because there was a more welcoming community, but it does seem like, historically, there have been a few centers of gay life. You are in one, San Francisco; I am in another, New York. I wonder if you can talk about the development of that at all.

Professor Marc Stein: Yes. Well, I think, in a sense, both things can be true. There's a vibrant and dynamic, and interesting history of LGBTQ life now that we understand better, that takes place in rural places, in small towns, small cities, because, as the saying goes, we're everywhere, but it is also true that there's a concentration of activity in major cities and in specific major cities, as well as in a set of tourist destinations.

Provincetown, Gunkwit, Rehoboth Beach, those are the east coast ones, and today, arguably, Fort Lauderdale, right? Those places where there's a congregation of gay businesses, often bars and clubs and restaurants, bookstores, there's an associated residential neighborhood in many of those big cities, right? Say Greenwich Village and Harlem in New York City. Historically, in San Francisco, it was the Tenderloin and North Beach, and South of Market, later Polk Street, and even later, the Castro. The neighborhoods don't always stay in the same place, but a concentration of residential neighborhoods as well as businesses, and those then become the foundation for the movement.

Brian Lehrer: This is Primary Day in New York City in the election for mayor. I don't know if you're aware of that out in San Francisco, but maybe you are. A listener is texting something that may be related to both that and our segment here on the fight for LGBTQ rights, and slurs and language that people can use. Listener writes, "Ironic that New York City rejected Mario Cuomo's homophobic tropes in his campaign against Ed Koch way back when."

Now it was the 1977 primary for mayor in New York City, which Ed Koch won over Andrew Cuomo's father, Mario Cuomo. Mario went on to be governor of New York in an election five years later, but I'm looking at a Gothamist story here from when Ed Koch died in 2013. Ed Koch held decades-long grudge against Cuomo's over, I'm just going to say what was out there on these posters at the time, "Vote for Cuomo, not the homo."

I don't know if that was directly from the Mario Cuomo campaign or if it was some people playing dirty pool who just supported him. We just saw, in this campaign, the candidates around Mamdani, some pro-Cuomo, anti-Mamdani flyers, kind of lengthening Mamdani's beard to make him look more exotic or more Muslim or more other or something, but it apparently did not come from the campaign itself. I don't know if that did or not in 1977, but I'm just curious if that's a footnote to LGBTQ rights history.

Professor Marc Stein: Well, absolutely, and first, I have to say I'm from the New York suburbs. I grew up in Shrub Oak, which is part of Yorktown in Westchester County in northern Westchester. You're describing my teenage years when you're talking about the '70s, and I know the whole cast of characters you're discussing, and now, of course, I study them as a historian.

There's a long, long history of this. There's a historian, Kevin Murphy, who talks about the mugwumps in New York City at the turn of the 20th century, who, because they resisted clearly identifying with the Democrats or the Republicans, were called third sexers, or there were all sorts of gender and sexual allusions to their failure to pick a side and to conform to the binary.

There were aspersions cast on presidential candidates, Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s, some even of Franklin Roosevelt's cabinet members. There's a really long history of this. Then, finally, we get LGBTQ people, first gay and trans people running for office. Jose Sarria, running for the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, and then more candidates running in the '60s and '70s.

Whenever they do in those early years, if they're out, then there's issues in some portions of the electorate, and if they're not out, then there's just what you're describing: images or terms that are used to suggest what isn't stated openly, and I think that's very much what happened at Koch. Koch is such an interesting figure. I came to know him as an AIDS activist in the 1980s, where he was not doing the right things.

As a historian, I've studied his early support for gay rights legislation along with Bella Abzug when he was in Congress, so he's a really interesting figure in terms of his evolving positions. Ultimately, well, it doesn't surprise me at all to learn more about the mobilization of anti-gay sentiment against a closeted politician like Koch.

Brian Lehrer: Jerry in Paramus has an oral history question. Jerry, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Jerry: Oh, thank you very much for accepting my call. I just wanted to ask the guest about the development and the origin of so called Log Cabin Republicans. It was my understanding at that time that these were gay individuals, and they were identifying themselves with the Republican Party.

Brian Lehrer: Jerry, I'm going to leave it there for time, but yes, that's an actual Republican organization, or it was, of primarily gay and lesbian people who were part of the Republican Party, right?

Professor Marc Stein: Yes, absolutely. Log Cabin picking up on Abraham Lincoln, right? One of the early leaders of the Republican Party. Right that there have long been gay conservatives. Some of the leading gay activists of the 1950s and 1960s identified with the Republican Party. Sometimes that was actually connected to their libertarian political philosophy, small government. "Get the government out of our bedrooms. Get the government out of other aspects of social and political, and legal life," right?

In a sense, it's understandable. We might not agree with it, but it's understandable why some gay people would find that aspect of Republican political philosophy admirable. Of course, then, as the Republican Party increasingly turned in an anti-LGBTQ direction in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, and the Democratic Party began to see gay voters as part of their electoral coalition, I think that's where Log Cabin Republicanism began, came to be seen as so unusual and so troublesome because it seemed to ignore the evolving Republican position on gay rights.

Brian Lehrer: That's a really interesting piece of history. I want to touch on the 1990s. Under President Clinton, there was "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," that policy in the military. Gay and lesbian Americans were allowed to serve as long as they stayed in the closet. Was it that direct?

Professor Marc Stein: Yes, basically, and it's classic Clintonianism, his effort to find a middle road that ended up satisfying nobody, right? It served. It was a liberal progressive move from the standpoint of an outright ban on gay people in the military. It allowed gay people to--

Brian Lehrer: Which had come before.

Professor Marc Stein: That's right, exactly, and with origins very early and then escalating in and after World War II. Right, it very quickly came to be seen as terribly compromised, as unwilling to fully embrace this constituency that was increasingly Democratic and ultimately would be rejected when the military began accepting gay and lesbian service members.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I remember asking at the time when I heard about "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," like, if you're a gay guy and your army buddy comes up to you and says, "Let's go out to a bar tonight and pick up some girls," but you're gay, you couldn't tell them that. Did it go that far?

Professor Marc Stein: [laughs] No, absolutely. That's right. Actually, the foundation for the policy was rooted in immigration law because there was a similar dynamic at play. There were laws on the books first that referenced psychopathic personalities and then that referenced sexual deviance, and that was a basis for excluding and deporting non-citizens, and there evolved the position in the 1970s by the government, essentially a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," that in the Carter administration, the Public Health Service began refusing to provide the medical certificates needed to exclude or deport gay immigrants or gay visitors.

Instead, INS, the Immigration Naturalization Service, adopted essentially a "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and then the ban was only enforced if you literally were wearing a gay rights button or if you declared yourself as gay at the border or had some other visible sign that you were gay. Of course, that covered very, very few people, but there were activists who were committed to challenging that practice, and so did, in fact, declare themselves at the border, and we have several court cases that played out for those people.

Brian Lehrer: One more family story, Phil in White Plains. Phil, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Phil: Oh, yes. [clears throat] Excuse me. Good afternoon. Great topic. It's a very close topic in my family. I went to NYU. I was living in Mount Vernon at the time, and I shared an apartment building with my uncle and his family, and my uncle had three kids. He was a cop. I came home one night, and there was this guy covered in makeup head to toe, and it turns out he was a pretty elaborate, secretive cross-dresser.

He always denied, of course, whatever the manifestation of that was, but as an aside, turns out one of my younger brothers was gay. He unfortunately died of AIDS in 1990, but we would always reference my Uncle George, and my brothers actually made a song about it. Fast forward, I went to Catholic schools, and you bring up Kinsey, because they would always describe that you had to learn these behaviors, that they weren't natural, and et cetera, et cetera.

In addition, not to tell any family secrets, but I have another brother who has a gay son, and he's obsessed with this transgender issue. It's beyond understanding, but that array in our history, Kinsey is kind of like in the more modern era, that he really kind of brought that stuff out. I don't really have a question, but the idea of cross-dressing, sexuality, all this sort of stuff as we go forward, but I do think, just as a comment, "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" made a lot of sense because the having seen what happens to people when they are accused of this and this is in the '60s and '70s.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, it was, maybe in the context of the times. Phil, I have to leave it there because we only have like 30 seconds left in the show, and I want to get a last comment from our guest. There's so much, of course, Professor Stein, in addition to what we have discussed, that we could have discussed, so many laws, sodomy laws that were finally ruled unconstitutional in 2003 that had criminalized gay sex, even in private. Obviously, the gay marriage Supreme Court ruling. Who knows if that's threatened now? I guess in the five seconds that you have, it's not a straight line, this arc of history, right?

Professor Marc Stein: Yes, and that's a good turn to phrase, after all, for this topic. It's a very queer twist and turning line.

Brian Lehrer: Marc Stein, professor of History at San Francisco State University, editor of books, including the Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America. Thanks for joining us on 100 Years of 100 Things, number 99.

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