Fluent Essays

PROMPT: The closet has often been described as a strategy to resist the anti-queer and anti-trans violence of American culture in the period after the Second World War, and the culture of the LGBTQ closet has often been seen in complex terms--both as an accommodation of homophobia/transphobia, as well as a more subtle form of resistance to homophobia/transphobia. In your responses this week, explore the ways in which the culture of the closet both reinforced AND challenged the homophobia and transphobia of US culture in the 1940s-1960s. As you look at the readings for Week 10 by Johnson and Stryker, and view the film about the Comptons Cafeteria Riot (*via libraries.rutgers.edu, select the Kanopy database), you might also consider the ways in which gender created new ways to think about LGBT self-image. In particular, you might concentrate on the ways in which gender identities converged based on masculinity and femininity, as well as trans and cisgender identity. You might also think about the importance of race and class in addition to gender differences. For example, did “Liberation” mean something different for cisgender gay, lesbian, and bisexual people and transgender members of the community? Was “Liberation” more complicated for working-class people and/or people of color? What was the closet, and how was Gay, Lesbian-Feminist, and Trans Liberation a movement to liberate people from the institutions of oppression known as “the closet”? How do you see different institutions of the “closet” in our readings from the past three weeks (choose one or two examples from Weeks 7-9), and how do you see manifestations of subversion and political liberation in the readings in Week 10 (choose at least one example)? The first four files upload are readings from week 7-9, and the last two are from week 10. Guidelines: As you develop your answers to the Discussion Board, remember to focus on naming specific people, locations, terms, etc. from the readings. Remember to cite page numbers. You should write about 350-500 words (or about a page to two pages in double spaced, 12-point font), but you may write as much as you wish.Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Franciscos Gay Bars, 1950-1968 Author(s): Christopher Agee Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep., 2006), pp. 462-489 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4629672 Accessed: 09-03-2017 17:54 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University of Texas Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Sexuality This content downloaded from 165.230.225.117 on Thu, 09 Mar 2017 17:54:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Gayola: Police Professionalization and the Politics of San Franciscos Gay Bars, 1950-1968 CHRISTOPHER AGEE University of California, Berkeley JOHN MINDERMANN ENTERED THE San Francisco Police Depart- ment (SFPD) as a patrol officer in 1959. Born and raised in San Francisco, Mindermann was the son of a cop, and although he had graduated from college with the intention of becoming a teacher, he eventually followed in his fathers footsteps. The hulking, six-foot-plus young man sought a life of adventure in the SFPD. Years later and after he had retired, Mindermann explained his attraction to police work: I had interests in apprehending bad guys, in getting guns and knives off the street. Like a lot of police officers who were young and physically engaging, I enjoyed physical confrontations. I mean we used to kid among one another, I mean, physical confrontations could actually be good therapy. But when the young Mindermann was temporarily assigned to San Franciscos Polk Gulch neighborhood and he encountered his first gay bar, the Cable Car Village, the rookie officer smarted with confusion rather than excitement and pride. I walk into the Cable Car Village, Mindermann remembered: and I stopped as I go inside the front door. And Im shocked because I see nothing but men down the bar, and in the back theres a jukebox, and theres I guess a small dance floor, because I never quite got back that way-its maybe forty feet. And I see men dancing with each other back there, and whoa! and I stopped. Ive never seen anything like this. I look in there and I go wha-could this be a-a-a, in the parlance of SFPD, could this be a fruit joint? Well maybe it is. And everything John Mindermann interview, 29 March 2004 and 14 April 2004. This article is based on the research from Gayola: The San Francisco Police Department, the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Contri.!:i:=: i.:-<:. :,. ,i-,j l:,= -.-:?.:; E =:=-nr ,iP i=!i-a :!:.:!! ,=,: ii-., 1 ) :=i..- : E :r::1:i :,:. E .. = -:-, -:. i!.. -t.. :;.;=:;-,= :: -. .-,,.: :- :=::.;1.:;=:r: ;i ,:; = . .-:. -jl=:= - --- >-- >__-.iga:ii iijigiiiiii E :riE r:iiiiaii*E i i a liii i i iE E i€ti iiE ifi E iB iiii* iE E i; i; t;E i;:E ,i ;tff : iiii;ii;i:ii;ifi ir :t i * t * zE -Zl:t a E . 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GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, pp. 179-209 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article Access Provided by Rutgers University at 03/18/11 4:50PM GMT http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v010/10.2devor.html http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/glq/summary/v010/10.2devor.html ONE INC. AND REED ERICKSON The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964 –2003 Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte People who are today known as transgendered and transsexual have always been present in homosexual rights movements. Their presence and contributions, how- ever, have not always been fully acknowledged or appreciated. As in many other social reform movements, collective activism in gay and lesbian social movements is based on a shared collective identity. Homosexual collective identity, especially in the days before queer politics, was largely framed as inborn, like an ethnicity, and based primarily on sexual desires for persons of the same sex and gender.1 However, such definitions make sense only when founded on clearly delineated distinctions between sexes and genders. It becomes considerably harder to delin- eate who is gay and who is lesbian when it is not clear who is a male or a man and who is a female or a woman. Like bisexual people, transgendered and transsexual people destabilize the otherwise easy division of men and women into the cate- gories of straight and gay because they are both and/or neither. Thus there is a long-standing tension over the political terrain of queer politics between gays and lesbians, on the one hand, and transgendered and transsexual people, on the other. These boundary issues, with which recent gay and lesbian social move- ments have struggled, have been intrinsic to definitions of homosexuality since the concept of homosexual identity was first consolidated at the turn of the last cen- tury.2 Early sexologists and their contemporaries commonly assumed that homo- sexuality was epitomized by females who seemed to want to be men and by males who seemed to want to be women.3 For example, J. Allen Gilbert’s 1920 article in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, which described the 1917 gender transformation of Lucille Hart into Dr. Alan Hart, was titled “Homosexuality and Its Treatment.”4 Similarly, Radclyffe Hall’s book The Well of Loneliness (1928), about a (transgendered) female who yearned to be a man, almost single-handedly GLQ 10:2 pp. 179 – 209 Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press defined lesbianism in the popular imagination for much of the twentieth century and is still widely acclaimed as a classic of lesbian literature.5 It is not surprising, then, that many gays and lesbians who are not transgendered have been eager to makPHYSIQUE PIONEERS: THE POLITICS OF 1960S GAY CONSUMER CULTURE By David K. Johnson University of South Florida While growing up in a small town in Missouri in the 1950s, Bill Kelley learned from reading the best-selling paperback Washington Confidential that the nation’s capital was teeming not only with prostitutes, gamblers, Communists, and drug dealers, but also “fairies and Fair Dealers.” Like millions of Americans who read tabloid journalist Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s exposé, he learned that police ef- forts to eliminate the moral degenerates from the city focused on Lafayette Park. The reporters alleged that so many gay men congregated in this “garden of pansies” that it created “a constant soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.” Lait and Mor- timer had hoped to warn their readers of the dangers in Washington, D.C., but Kel- ley was more intrigued than repulsed. While on a high school trip to the nation’s capital for the National Spelling Bee, Kelley made a surreptitious visit to Lafayette Park. He had only a limited time away from his chaperones, and as he later re- called, “I wasn’t taking any chances of being misunderstood.” In order to identify himself to other gay men, he went to a nearby newsstand, bought a copy of a physique magazine, and carried it with him as he walked around the park.1 Bill Kelley’s Lafayette Park story has been used to illustrate the ways in which cold war era anti-gay propaganda functioned as a virtual tour guide to the gay sub- culture. And because he would later move to Chicago and become involved in the early homosexual rights movement as a member of the Chicago chapter of the Mat- tachine Society, one of the first gay political and social service organizations, Kelley has ap- peared in a number of histories of the gay rights movement. But one aspect of the story has been overlooked: For a young man like Kelley from middle-America at mid-cen- tury, the purchase of a consumer item acted as means of sexual self-identification and served as an entryway into the gay community. 2 This study outlines a history of gay patterns of mass consumption from 1945 to 1969—an examination of the production, sale, and consumption of physique magazines, paperback novels, greeting cards, and other items available through gay-oriented mail order catalogs and how these consumer networks fostered a sense of community. I examine how the magazine publishers, in their struggles with censorship laws, marshaled a rhetoric of legal rights and collective action and, therefore, how the first gay judicial victories were for the right to produce and purchase such commodities. I argue that before there was a national gay political journal of social history868 summer 2010 community there was a national gay commercial market and that the develop- ment of that market by a small group of gay entrepreneurs was a key, overlooked catalyst to the rise of a gay movement in America. This project sits at the intersection of two hiFortieth anniversary of Compton’s Cafeteria riot, June 22, 2006. Photo by Philipe Lonestar. Reprinted by permission of the photographer and the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center InterventIons Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity Susan Stryker The current attention to homonormativity has tended to focus on gay and lesbian social, political, and cultural formations and their relationship to a neoliberal politics of multicultural diversity that meshes with the assimilative strategies of transnational capital. Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (2003), which describes a “new homonormativity that does not challenge heterosexist institutions and values, but rather upholds, sustains, and seeks inclusion within them,” is generally acknowledged as the text through which this term has come into wider currency.1 There is, however, an older formula- tion of homonormativity that nevertheless merits retention, one closer in meaning to the “homo-normative” social codes described in 1998 by Judith Halberstam in Female Masculinity, in accordance with which expressions of masculinity in women are as readily disparaged within gender-normative gay and lesbian contexts as within heteronormative ones.2 It is this earlier sense of homonormativity that is most perti- nent to the thoughts I offer here on homonormativity and transgender history, both as an object of scholarly inquiry and as a professional disciplinary practice. Terminological History Homonormativity, as I first heard and used the term in the early 1990s, was an attempt to articulate the double sense of marginalization and displacement experi- enced within transgender political and cultural activism. Like other queer militants, Radical History Review Issue 100 (Winter 2008) doi 10.1215/01636545-2007-026 © 2008 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. 145 transgender activists sought to make common cause with any groups — including nontransgender gays, lesbians, and bisexuals — who contested heterosexist privilege. However, we also needed to name the ways that homosexuality, as a sexual orienta- tion category based on constructions of gender it shared with the dominant culture, sometimes had more in common with the straight world than it did with us.3 The grassroots conversations in which I participated in San Francisco in the first half of the 1990s used the term homonormative when discussing the relation- ship of transgender to queer, and queer to gay and lesbian. Transgender itself was a term then undergoing a significant shift in meaning. Robert Hill, who has been researching the history of heterosexual male cross-dressing communities, found instances in community-based publications of words like transgenderal, transgen- derist, and transgenderism dating back to the late 1960s.4 The logic of those terms, used to describe individuals who lived