Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers (64 page)

16
. “Past Times: Unearthing the History of Gay G.I.s,”
Chicago Reader
(June 18, 1982) 11:36.

17
. Personal interview with Mac, age 63, San Francisco, August 11, 1987.

18
. Pat Gozemba and Janet Kahn, presentation given at the session, “Love and Friendship in the Lesbian Bar Communities of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s,” Berkshire History of Women Conference, Wellesley College, Mass., June 19–21, 1987, and Berube, “Coming Out Under Fire,” p. 20.

19
. Information on Lucky’s in “Harlem’s Strangest Night Club,”
Ebony
(Dec. 1951), 7:80–85. Information on the 181 Club from personal interview with Lyn, age 64, now living in San Diego, July 28, 1987. Information on the Music Hall from personal interview with Elizabeth, cited above. See also description of Boston bars during this period in Bob Skiba, “Pansies, Perverts, and Pegged Pants,”
Gay and Lesbian Guide to New England
(n.p., 1982), pp. 2–5, in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1950s.

20
. 
Yank,
November 16, 1945, p. 18, quoted in Berube,
Coming Out Under Fire,
p. 253.

21
. Personal interview with Betty, age
66,
Omaha, Neb., October 11, 1988.

22
. Lisa Ben,
Vice Versa,
September 1947, pp. 4–5.

23
. Freud’s antifeminist attitudes have been frequently discussed in feminist writing since the publication of Kate Millett’s
Sexual Politics
(New York: Doubleday, 1970). Hannah Lerman’s
A Mote in Freud’s Eye: From Psychoanalysis to the Psychology of Women
(New York: Springer, 1986) is a book length study of Freud’s blind spots with regard to feminism. Sigmund Freud, “The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
ed. James Strachey, vol. 18 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), pp. 147–72.

24
. Clara Thompson, “Changing Concepts of Homosexuality,” in Patrick Mullahy, ed.,
A Study of Interpersonal Relations
(New York: Hermitage Press, 1949), pp. 249–61.

25
. Caprio, p. 143.

26
. Charles Berg and Clifford Allen,
The Problem of Homosexuality
(New York: Citadel Press, 1958), p. 53. Edmund Bergler,
Homosexuality: Disease or Way of Life?
(1956; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1962), p. 9.

27
. Thompson. Albert Ellis, introduction to Donald Webster Cory,
The Lesbian in America
(New York: Tower, 1964), p. 13. Charles W. Socarides,
Homosexuality
(New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 60.

28
. Sigmund Freud, “The Sexual Aberrations,”
Standard Edition,
18:556. Prison populations have also been used to help establish a picture of the homosexual, e.g., Samuel Kahn,
Mentality and Homosexuality
(Boston: Meador, 1937). Kahn based his discussion of homosexuality on his examination of homosexuals in prison without attempting to discover whether homosexual prisoners were different from heterosexual prisoners or whether they were similar in any way other than their sexual orientation to homosexuals outside of prison.

29
. Cornelia Wilbur, “Clinical Aspects of Female Homosexuality,” in Judd Marmor, ed.,
Sexual Inversion: The Multiple Roots of Homosexuality
(New York: Basic Books, 1965), pp. 268–81.

30
. Vicki Owen, “A Story of Punishment,” in Margaret Cruikshank, ed.,
The Lesbian Path
(Tallahassee, Fla.: Naiad Press, 1981).

31
. Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia Farnham,
Modern Woman: The Lost Sex
(New York: Harper and Row, 1947), pp. 143, 296. Caprio, p. 133. The popular press shared these ideas and promulgated them to the masses. See, e.g., William G. Niederland, “‘Masculine’ Women Are Cheating Love,”
Coronet,
May 1953, pp. 41–44.

32
. Freud, “The Psychogensis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,” and “Historical Notes: A Letter from Freud” [to an American mother about her homosexual son, written 1935, uncovered by Alfred Kinsey],
American Journal of Psychiatry
(April 1955), 108:787–89. Cf. letter from William J. Fielding to Mr. James Cissel, December 21, 1923, in New York Lesbian Herstory Archives, file: 1920s; Aaron J. Rosanoff, “Human Sexuality, Normal and Abnormal, from a Psychiatric Standpoint,”
Urologic and Cutaneous Review
(1929), 33:505–18; and Helene Deutsch, “On Female Homosexuality,”
Psychiatric Quarterly,
(October 1932), 1:484–88 +.

33
. Albert Ellis, “The Effectiveness of Psychotherapy with Individuals Who Have Severe Homosexual Problems,”
Journal of Consulting Psychology
(1956), 20(3): 191–94. Bergler,
Homosexuality,
p. 178.

34
. Richard C. Robertiello,
Voyage from Lesbos: The Psychoanalysis of a Female Homosexual
(New York: Citadel Press, 1959), pp. 27, 76, 234–35, 239, 246.

35
. Caprio’s
Female Homosexuality
is also a particularly good compendium of myths about lesbian murder, suicide, etc. See, e.g., pp. viii, 146, 148. Cannibalism statement by Paula Heimann and Susan Isaacs (1952), following the 1948 theory of Edmund Bergler that homosexuality was a defense against the acute anxieties connected with oral and cannabilistic fantasies, quoted in Berg and Allen, pp. 145, 149. This insane idea was taken literally in 1977 in Anita Bryant’s hate-filled antihomosexual campaign. Bryant wrote: “Oral sex, where the tongue is used to stimulate the clitoris producing an orgasm, is a form of vampirism or eating of blood. Such degeneracy produces a taste and craving for the effects, as does liquor and narcotics.” Quoted in Sarah Schulman, “The History of the Commie-Pinko-Faggot,”
Womanews
(New York), July/August 1980, p. 1 +. “Curable Disease?”
Time
(Dec. 10, 1956), 68:74–76.

36
. Allison in Marcy Adelman, ed.,
Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians
(Boston: Alyson, 1986), pp. 60–61.

37
. Thomas Szasz, “Legal and Moral Aspects of Homosexuality,” in Marmor, pp. 124–39. Bergler, p. 271. For a similar position see Caprio,
Female Homosexuality,
pp. 285–86.

38
. Written communication from Harriet, age 68, Los Angeles, May 28, 1988.

6. The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name

1
.  Alfred Kinsey et al.,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1953), pp. 474–75; also, Alfred Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948), p. 623. Kinsey also found that 37 percent of all males and 13 percent of all females had had homosexual experiences to orgasm. Edmund Bergler, “Homosexuality and the Kinsey Report” (1948; reprinted in Aron M. Krich, ed.,
The Homosexuals As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities
[New York: Citadel Press, 1954], pp. 226–50. Kinsey pointed out what many Americans did not want to recognize—e.g., “Such a high proportion of the females and males in our population is involved in sexual activities which are prohibited by the law of most of the states of the union, that it is inconceivable that the present laws could be administered in any fashion that even remotely approached systematic and complete enforcement,”
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female,
p. 20. M. S. Guttmacher,
Sex Offenses
(New York: Norton, 1957).

2
.  Dismissal figures quoted in “Report on Homosexuality, with Particular Emphasis on this Problem in Governmental Agencies, Formulated by the Committee on Cooperation with Governmental (Federal) Agencies of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry,” report no. 30 January 1955, p. 5. McCarthy’s charge of the State Department reported in
New York Times,
March 9, 1950, p. 1. Regarding the homosexuality of McCarthy’s aides see Nicholas von Hoffman,
Citizen Cohn: The Life and Times of Roy Cohn
(New York: Doubleday, 1988).

3
.  
New York Times,
April 19, 1950, p. 25.
New York Times,
May 5, 1950, p. 15.
New York Times,
May 20, 1950, p. 8.

4
.  “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government: A Report Submitted to the Senate Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments by its Subcmmittee on Investigations, December 15, 1950,” reprinted in
Government vs. Homosexuals
(New York: Arno Press, 1975). John D’Emilio estimates that by the mid-1950s 20 percent of the labor force faced security investigations, “The McCarthy Era,”
The Advocate,
December 3, 1982, pp. 25–27.

5
.  E. M., “To Be Accused Is to Be Guilty,”
One
(April 1953), 1(4):3~4.

6
.  
New York Times,
December 20, 1951, p. 1. All the cliches to be found in psychiatric writing of the period were reiterated in government writing on all levels: e.g., Judge Morris Ploscowe argued that homosexuals must not be employed by government: “There is no real permanence to homosexual relationships. The quality of emotional instability encountered in homosexuals, both male and female, makes them continually dissatisfied with their lot. Many of them are continually on the prowl, looking for sexual partners”: “Homosexuality, Sodomy, and Crimes Against Nature,” (1951); reprinted in Donald Webster Cory, ed.,
Homosexuality: A Cross Cultural Approach
(New York: Julian Press, 1956), pp. 394–406.

7
.  
New York Times,
December 16, 1950, p. 3. Wherry discussed in Max Lerner,
The Unfinished Country: A Book of American Symbols
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 311–19. See also Max Lerner, interviews with Kenneth Wherry,
New York Post,
July 11, 17, 18, 1950.

8
.  Personal interview with M.K., age 79, San Francisco, October 22, 1988.

9
.  The text of this Executive Order was reprinted in the
New York Times,
April 28, 1953, p. 20+. For an example of state harassment see the Florida report, “Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida,” which was begun by an interim committee established in 1955 to investigate homosexuals in government employment. Homosexual teachers were especially singled out for attack. Reprinted in
Government vs. Homosexuals.

10
. Audre Lorde,
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
(Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1982), pp. 149, 198.

11
. “The ACLU Takes a Stand on Homosexuality,”
The Ladder
March !957> pp. 8–9. The ACLU did, however, protest when two San Francisco State College coeds were arrested that year in a gay bar and charged with wearing men’s clothes. See “ACLU Clashes with San Francisco Police on Vagrancy Arrests,”
The Ladder,
March 1957, p. 19. In the early 1950s the ACLU refused to help lesbians who were discharged from the military because “the ACLU held that homosexuality was relevant to an individual’s military service.” In responding to a discharged Air Force woman who asked for help in 1951, the ACLU staff counsel advised her to submit herself to medical treatment that would enable her to “abandon homosexual relations”; quoted in Allan Bérubé and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians During the McCarthy Years,” in Estelle Freedman et al.,
The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 290–95. More recently the ACLU has been very active in gay rights and has even published a gay rights manual, Thomas B. Stoddard et al.,
The Rights of Gay People
(1975; rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1983).