The History of Sexuality in the United States

1900 1950 1970/2000

Romantic Friendship
I wanted so to put my arms round my girl of all the girls in the world
and tell her . . . I love her as wives do love their husbands, as friends
who have taken each other for life--and believe in her as I believe in my
God. . . . If I didn’t love you do you supposed I’d care about anything
or have ridiculous notions and panics and behave like an old fool who
ought to know better. I’m going to hang on to your skirts. . . . You
can’t get away from my love.
Mary Hallock to Helena, September 23, 1873

Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that she loved me
almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so. Don’t you
wonder that I can stand the sight of you.
Mary Hallock to Richard, December 13, 1873
1874 Foote’s Cabin at Leadville

Mary Hallock Foote, 1847-1938

Romantic Friends, ca 1900
Your words respecting my beloved friend touch me
deeply. Evidently . . . you comprehend and appreciate,
as few persons do . . . the nature of the relations which
existed, which exists, between her and myself. Her
only surviving niece . . . also does. To me it seems to
have been a closer union than that of most marriages.
We know there have been other such between two men
and also between two women. And why should there
not be. Love is spiritual, only passion is sexual.
Mary Grew to Isabel Howland
April 27, 1892
M. Carey Thomas 1857-1935 Mary Elizabeth Garrett
Dean and then president of Bryn Mawr College 1854-1915
1885-1922
 1870s 1890
ca 1869

Whitman and Peter Doyle Whitman and Harry Stafford Whitman with Warren Fritzinger

M.P. Rice, Washington , D.C. Dr. John Johnston, Bolton, England

Edward Carpenter Collection. Taken on Camden wharf
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
1989-1920
Fairies and Normal Men
Postcard ca 1918 Postcard ca 1910
Distributed by the Navy YMCA The red tie is a sign of the fairy.
OK Not OK

normal men queers / queens

decoys fairies / cocksuckers
trade pogues
husbands / friends ?? two-way artists
From
Pictures of Life and Character in
New York
a book published in 1878 to
familiarize visiting Latin
American businessmen with New
York’s neighborhoods.
The social figures it shows
populating a section of lower
Manhattan include the prostitute
(upper left), the shoeshine boy,
the beggar, the cop on the beat,
and the fairy (upper right).
The Fairy
detail from Pictures of Life
and Character in New York
(1878)
Paul Cadmus
The Fleet’s In (1934)
Female Inverts
Butch/Femme
The Moonshine Club, 1908
Gladys Bentley, ca 1930

Bentley was a much-discussed

local celebrity, known for her
risque lyrics and for having married
her white girlfriend in a civil
wedding ceremony.
Havelock Ellis 1895, Sexual Inversion

The brusque, energetic movements, the attitude of the arms,

the direct speech, the inflexions of the voice, the masculine
straightforwardness and sense of honor. . . will all suggest the
underlying psychic abnormality to a keen observer. In the
habits not only is there frequently a pronounced taste for
smoking cigarettes, often found in quite feminine women, but
also a decided taste and tolerance for cigars. There is also a
dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework and other
domestic occupations, while there is often some capacity for
athletics.
Butch femme couple
ca 1910
Babe Bean

from The Evening Mail, Stockton, California, 1897

What Do These People Have in Common?
 How Were They Classified ca 1900?

Normal Men and Women Queers / Inverts

Dominant Sexual Regime ca 1900, and well into the 20th Century

Gender conformity or nonconformity, not “sexual orientation,” is the major

criterion of distinguishing normal from deviant. Two main classes:

Normal Men and Women

gender conforming: feminine women, masculine men
does not preclude marriage: most will have been married
does not preclude sex with others of same sex
romantic friends, decoys, husbands, wolves, femmes
includes discreet middle-class men and women with exclusive same-sex interests

Inverts/Fairies/Queers/Passing Women
gender nonconforming: masculine women, feminine men
sex with others of same sex is consequence of gender nonconformity
butches, passing women, mannish women, fairies, queers
Heterosexuals
and
Homosexuals

circa 1950
“The Heterosexual Counterrevolution”

The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence; the viragint who

would sit in the public highways and lift up her pseudo-virile voice,
proclaiming her sole right to decide questions of war or religion, or the
value of celibacy and the curse of women’s impurity, and that disgusting
anti-social being, the female sexual pervert, are simply different degrees of
the same class—degenerates.

William lee Howard, “Effeminate Men and Masculine Women” New York
Medical Journal 1900

Note: Already in 1900 there was an effort to move the independent woman,
perhaps politically active fighting for the right to vote, into the same class
with the invert, pervert, and degenerate.
Remember the
Episcopal clergy from
Newport ?
There too there was an
effort to move gender-
conforming single men
(clergy) with close
attachments to other
men (sailors) from the
“normal” category to
that of the deviate.
Charles Tomlinson Griffes M. Carey Thomas Mary Elizabeth Garrett
 Alfred Kinsey 1894-1956

Time August 23, 1953 Photo by George Platt Lynes

David Cauldwell
“Psychopathia Transexualis”

Sexology, December 1949

Christine Jorgensen

New York Daily News Arriving in back in the United States after
December 1, 1952 sex change in Denmark.
 Normal Men and Women Queers / Inverts

Decoys Queer / Invert

Husbands

Femme Butch

Romantic Friends

Where Were These Folks in 1952?

Passing Invert
Heterosexual Homosexual Transsexual
A QUEER NOTION

The belief that human beings can be classified as

heterosexuals and homosexuals—and in difficult cases,
bisexuals—on the basis of the sex of the partners they
desire is a very recent development in a very small part
of the world.
What was Different about Mid Century?

Exclusive heterosexuality becomes essential for normality.

first in college educated, then middle class, then everywhere
correlate: exclusive homosexuality, less same-sex behavior

The decoys, the “husbands,” many romantic friends become homosexuals--

unless they become heterosexuals
gender-conformity is no longer guarantee of normality
Carey Thomas is no longer possible.

The most committed cross-gender identifications find a place in the new category of the
transsexual.

It becomes possible to imagine a same-sexual orientation exclusive of gender deviance at the

same time it becomes possible to imagine cross-gender identification independent of same-sex
attractions.

Deviance becomes invisible, must be discovered: psychiatry

Gender nonconformity continued, of course: in queer communities and in the popular

imagination as a source of fears and slurs. But it is no longer the principal criterion of
classification.
Communities
An advertisement for the famed
Greenwich Village Ball
1926
The Howdy Club, a lesbian bar on 3rd Street in
Greenwich Village in the 1930s and 40s, had its own
football team, pictured here.
 Don Dickerman's Pirate's Den on Christopher Street

This bar advertised "clanking chains, clashing cutlasses,

ship's lanterns, and patch-eyed buccaneer waiters."
Gladys Bentley, ca 1930

Bentley was a much-discussed local

celebrity, known for her risque lyrics
and for having married her white
girlfriend in a civil wedding ceremony.
Fire: Devoted to Younger
Negro Artists, 1926

In the summer of 1926, the

leading lights of the Harlem
Renaissance edited and
published the first (and only)
issue of a literary magazine,
Fire!! The magazine included
Bruce Nugent's "Smoke, Lilies
and Jade," an erotic narrative
poem that was probably the first
published work about
homosexuality by an African-
American author.
Butch-Femme Bar Culture, circa 1940s
 World War II

1943
Women’s Army Corps
South Post Office Gang
Blue Discharge, 1943

From 1941- 1945, nearly ten

thousand enlisted men and
women received “blue
discharges,” so named because
of the distinctive blue paper
on which they were printed.
Oppression and Resistance
The Lavender Scare

Joseph McCarthy / Roy Cohn

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Alan Dunn Cartoon from The New Yorker, June 17, 1950
Mattachine Society Christmas Party

1951 or 1952
Left to right: Dale Jennings, Harry Hay, Rudy
Gernreich, Stan Witt, Bob Hull, Chuck
Rowland, and Paul Bernard.
One Magazine 1953-69
Daughters of Bilitis, founded in San Francisco, 1955

Del Martin 1921-2008

and
Phyllis Lyon 1924-
The Ladder
Journal of the Daughters of Bilitis
The Politics of Invisibility

Mattachine Society Membership Pledge

Members pledge themselves, among other things, “to try to observe the generally
accepted social rules of dignity and propriety at all times . in … conduct, attire, and
speech.”

Daughters of Bilitis Statement of Purpose

The Statement of Purpose committed the organization to educate “the variant
[woman]…. to enable her to understand herself and make her adjustment to society
in all its social, civic, and economic implications.”
This education was to be accomplished in a number of ways, among them “by
advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society.”

Christine Jorgensen
Unlike other women I had to become super-female. I couldn’t have one single
masculine trait.
I as much good publicity as possible for the sake of all those to whom I am a
representation of themselves.
1965

Homophile
organizations
march in front of
the White House
to protest federal
government’s
treatment of
homosexuals.
 Harry Benjamin
Reed Erickson Publications of the Erickson The Transsexual
1917-1992 Educational Foundation Phenomenon 1966
What was Different about Mid Century?

It becomes possible to imagine a same-sexual orientation exclusive of gender

deviance at the same time it becomes possible to imagine cross-gender identification
independent of same-sex attractions.

This means deviance becomes invisible, must be discovered.

You can’t reliably identify either the homosexual or the transsexual by looking
as you could the fairy or the butch lesbian
Psychiatry becomes major factor in identifying homosexuals

This is the period in which homosexuality becomes seen as a threat

the homosexual as child molester
the homosexual as security threat to the nation
the fact that the homosexual can’t be easily recognized is important

It is also the period of greatest oppression

But there are actually two faces to the invisibility of homosexuality / transsexuality
1. the government tries to expose the homosexual
2. the homo- or transsexual can disclose their deviance: coming out
Christine Jorgensen, the organizers of Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis
San Francisco Los Angeles New York
August 1966 Winter 1967 June 1969

Compton’s Protesting police The Stonewall Inn

Cafeteria Riots harassment outside after three nights
the Black Cat bar of rioting.
 Sylvia Rivera 1971
1970
Stonewall Veteran and Hollywood Boulevard
Gay Liberation
Trans Activist Men in Gender-fuck Drag
Front Flier
Gay Pride Parade 1991
Lesbian and gay couples, early 1970s
A New Public Face

Note the lesbian and gay male couples. Each comprises two people of the same sex
who look more or less the same. They are not butch-femme. They are not fairies
and decoys. They are not young and old. The are homo (“the same”) to a degree
never before seen. This becomes the public face of the lesbian/gay movement for
several decades: gender conforming men and women loving others of the same sex
and “coming out”--declaring their minority identity even though they might
otherwise not have attracted notice.

As for the gender conformity: don’t be deceived by the short-haired women and the
long-haired men. The women were affected not only by the gay liberation movement
but also by the women’s movement: their short hair is much more likely a sign that
they have thrown off traditional, oppressive notions of femininity than that they
want to present themselves as masculine. The men’s long hair is simply the standard
for politically active, anti-authoritarian young white men in the 1960s and 70s.

The gender non-conformers are gradually pushed to the sidelines, both in the
popular imagination and in the emerging lesbian/gay civil rights movement.
Crawford Barton Two Men Kissing, San Francisco, 1970s
1970 Woman Identified 1976 DYKE Magazine
Woman Manifesto
1972 1976

Original placard carried by Early Poster for the

Jeanne Manford, founder of National Gay Task Force
PFLAG, in the NY Gay Pride
Parade, June 1972
AIDS Activism
Time

April 14,1997 Ellen DeGeneres, Ad for American Express

From Carey Thomas to Ellen DeGeneres.

At the beginning, samesex without crossgender was unmarked: samesex-loving men

and women who conformed to gender norms were normal men and women. By mid
century they are assimilated into the class of deviants. Insisting on their gender
conformity we have become nearly normal again—though hardly invisible. This is a
trememdous political achievement. We did what the homophile leaders wanted, and
it worked. Gender conforming samesex does not lead to loss of status.

Please note: this is a tremendous political achievement. It does not represent the
revelation of some truth about homosexuality. It represents the self-fashioning by a
group of people faced with certain historical pressures and certain historical
opportunities in a way that enabled them to enjoy middle class privilege.

And it came at a price.

Riki Wilkins 1995

Vigil at the Courthouse, Fall City, Nebraska where

Brandon Teena’s murderers were being tried
The Year 2000

The emergence of queer and especially transgender activism in the 1990s bring
gender non-conformity back into the picture to an extent not seen for 50 years.
Queer activists challenged the “homonormativity” of middle class lesbian and
gay assimilationists and their dominance of national organizations. Transgender
activists fought on many fronts--to organize a movement of their own, to
counter violence against trans people, to gain access to medical technologies they
needed, and also to force established lesbian and gay organizations to accept
trans issues as their own.

The result--at least from the perspective of an optimist--is that cross-gender

behaviors and identifications, the history of which is inextricable from that of
same-sex sexualities, have regained their rightful place, not only in the form of
transgender activism and organizations, but also in the greater willingness to
acknowledge the importance of cross-gender in lesbian and gay histories and
lives. Butch, femme, drag, and camp have returned from exile.
Around the Year 2000: Queer Solidarity?

Gay Pride Parade, New York, 1995