BEFORE STONEWALL.
The Mattachine Society: the American gay rights movement that pre-dates Stonewall.
Every culture has its origin myth – a story explaining how a new reality came into existence. Often these moments take on a pseudo-religious dimension, an untouchable line in the sand which divides the world into two times – before and after. The gay rights movement is no different. The 1969 Stonewall Riots in New York are considered the birthplace of the modern movement, a moment which brought about the world we now live in. Pride was born, people began living openly gay lives, and society eventually began to disavow its ingrained homophobia. But events rarely exist in a vacuum, and while the Gay Liberation movement which emerged out of those riots undoubtedly changed the world – in North America and across the West – it did so by building on the work of its forebears, in this case the little remembered Mattachine Society.
The Mattachine Society was formed in 1950 by Communist Party organiser Harry Hay. Although not the first gay rights movement in America – Chicago postal employee Henry Geber had founded the short-lived Society for Human Rights in 1924 to promote homosexual law reform and public education – it became the first nationwide movement and helped organise isolated individuals into a shared identity and mass movement for the first time.
Like the Homosexual Law Reform Society in the UK, the Mattachine Society emerged after the Second World War in what would become a decisive phase in the historical process which saw homosexuality move from an act to an identity. Before the gay rights movement could begin, it first needed a group of people who recognised themselves as homosexuals with a shared identity, and shared experience of oppression. The creation of this constituency had its origins in the work of nineteenth century sexologists who began defining homosexuality as a pattern of behaviour for the first time (rather than just as isolated acts). This was followed by some individuals using the books and research produced by those sexologists to construct their own identity, and then by the influence of the Second World War in helping ferment the beginnings of collective homosexual identity and community.
In 1951, the Mattachine Society produced a statement of “Missions and Purposes”, in which it called for a movement of gay people to challenge discrimination and create a community: “Mattachine holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a consequence of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow-minorities – the Negro, Mexican, and Jewish peoples.” In a world which saw homosexuality as little more than a sickness, this call for the construction of a community along the lines of other identity politics was revolutionary – reflecting the Communist Party background of the founding members of the society – and later proving instrumental in the response to the Stonewall Riots the following decade.
The society took its name from a medieval French troupe of unmarried men who performed dramas and ballads in the countryside whilst wearing masks; their dances sometimes
turned into peasant protests against the aristocracy. “We took the name Mattachine,” Harry Hay said, “because we felt that we 1950s Gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through stru¦le, to move towards total redress and change.”
Organised in a secret and cell-like structure to protect the identity of members, each group was independent of the other and overseen by the leadership, replicating revolutionary groups like the Communist Party which its founders came from. In a country which criminalised sodomy, this was a sensible precaution, and reflected the increased persecution of homosexuals (and communists) in the McCarthy era during the 1950s. In a country gripped by the fear of Soviet invasion, Communism was demonised as anti-American, and anyone with a perceived Communist sympathy was purged from the government, the entertainment industry, education,
and labour unions. After the Cambridge spy scandal in the UK, suspected homosexuality also became a reason to purge gay people, as they were considered security risks, susceptible to blackmail by foreign governments.
The Mattachine Society began by hosting discussion groups in members’ homes, with the time and location spread by word of mouth. But it was after the police entrapment and trial of one of their founders, Dale Jennings, in 1952 – where he pled not guilty but admitted to being homosexual – that the group began to grow. The jury in the trial deadlocked and Jennings was set free, and the society proclaimed victory. A monthly magazine followed – and then a trial which went all the way to the US Supreme Court when the US Postal Service refused to mail it, claiming it was obscene. The magazine won, and continued publication until 1967, combining scientific articles on homosexuality with personal and psychological ones.
After the society sent questionnaires to candidates for the Los Angeles city council and school board asking for their views on police harassment and sex education, a journalist, playing on the fear of communism, su¦ested that the group may be controlled by Communists (which it was). This provoked a leadership crisis, which saw the founders resign and be replaced by elected members who rejected the radical policies attacking police entrapment and sodomy laws. Instead, they focused on public education, and became more conservative. As the 1950s moved on, and McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee gained power, this move away from the Communist Party may have ensured its survival. Over time, the Mattachine co-sponsored events with the Daughters of Bilitis – America’s first lesbian organisation – and worked hard to ensure their survival in the face of increased government persecution.
Ironically, it was this conservative agenda – which had seen the group invite anti-gay speakers who expounded a “gay is sick” theory – that in turn led to more militant figures challenging the leadership. The election of John F. Kennedy and the mobilisation of the Black civil rights movement convinced many that social protest was a legitimate way to achieve change.
Franklin Kameny and Jack Nichols established a chapter of the society in Washington D.C. in 1961 and challenged its national leadership to categorically condemn the “gay is sick” theory. Kameny later coined the slogan “gay is good” and began focusing on government policies. At the same time, Illinois became the first state to abolish its anti-sodomy laws, followed by Connecticut in 1969. Mattachine gradually became more assertive in challenging
government discrimination, focusing on entrapment and liquor laws which forbid bars from serving homosexuals, but it wasn’t enough. They still appeared too respectable when compared to the student protests against the Vietnam War and the emergence of the feminist movement. When the Stonewall Riots took place at the end of the sixties it marked the final nail in the coffin for the homophile movement – characterised by conservatism, caution, and respectability – and was overtaken by Gay Liberation and the radicalisation of the gay movement.
The idea, then, that Gay Liberation started the gay rights movement, or that it emerged fully-formed within an isolated community doesn’t stand up. Instead, Gay Liberation needs to be understood as having its roots in the groups and individuals that came before it. The Mattachine Society helped create the circumstances necessary for Gay Liberation, through education, social networks, and by beginning the conversation on what it meant to be a gay man or woman when little was understood about the subject. Every generation needs to acknowledge the work of the generation that came before it, and avoid the origin myth that their identity and community is the result of one moment, at the expensive of all others.