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S01E06 - VICE PATROL: The Policing of Queer Nightlife & Gay Activism in 20th Century America
67 Plays4 months ago
From the 1930s through to the 1960s the regulation of Queer nightlife in America was permanently on the agenda of the police authorities. Persecution by local police ran parallel to the activities of the State liquor authorities, newly empowered in the years following the Repeal of Prohibition to shut down licensed bars and clubs where there was any indication of Gay activity therein. The draconian manner in which the liquor boards targeted Gay clientele prompted a form of activism fed into the nascent Gay Rights movement. We are spending the next few episodes examining the history of how this activism, specifically around New York and San Francisco, led to legal reforms that would be fundamental to the development of Gay social life and, more specifically, nightclub culture in the Pre-Disco era of the early 1970s. This period, which followed the Stonewall Riots of 1969, saw an acceleration in Gay social culture that dovetailed with technological developments in music production and presentation. The network of underground clubs in Downtown New York operated by Gay promoters (like David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, and Michael Brody) and supported significantly by the LGBT population of the City (including The Sanctuary, The Loft, The Gallery and later the Paradise Garage) would serve as the incubators for Disco and modern electronic dance music. Often not exclusive to an LGBT crowd, these venues were nonetheless sustained by a sense of underground identity and solidarity that had developed in the face of severe aggression and discrimination on the part of Governmental authorities against Queer people throughout the 20th Century in America.
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Transcript
Challenges Faced by Gay Communities in the 1960s
00:00:00
Speaker
Although the 1960s saw greater sexual permissiveness across American society and more relaxed attitudes to casual sexual activity for straight people, this was not immediately the case for gay people in the United States.
00:00:12
Speaker
Police actively sought to entrap and arrest openly gay men and women. Open displays of gay activity in bars and nightclubs, especially same-sex dancing, were actively discouraged. The Botel, a popular gay club during the 1970s on Fire Island in the Hamptons outside New York City, had employees take turns sitting at the top of a ladder ten rungs high to be ready to flash a torchlight in the eyes of anyone engaged in the illegal behaviour of dancing together or even facing each other while dancing.
00:00:39
Speaker
Such was the level of concern about surveillance and intervention by the local authorities.
Regulation and Activism in Gay Bars
00:00:44
Speaker
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the regulation of gay nightlife was permanently on the agenda of police forces in the United States. Persecution by local police ran parallel to the activities of the state liquor authorities, newly empowered in the years following the repeal of prohibition to shut down license bars and clubs so where there was any indication of gay activity therein. The draconian manner in which the liquor boards targeted gay clientele prompted a form of activism that fed into the wider and but nascent gay rights movement. We're going to spend the next few episodes examining the history of how this activism, specifically around New York and San Francisco, led to legal reforms that would be fundamental to the development of nightclub culture in the pre-disco era of the early 1970s.
00:01:28
Speaker
This period, which followed the Stonewall Riots of 1969, saw an acceleration in gay culture that dovetailed with technological developments in music production and presentation.
Rise of Underground Clubs and Dance Music
00:01:38
Speaker
The network of underground clubs in downtown New York, operated by gay promoters and supported significantly by the gay population of the city, including the loft, the gallery and eventually the Paradise Garage,
00:01:49
Speaker
would serve as the incubators for the components of modern electronic dance music, often not exclusive to an LGBT crowd. These venues were nonetheless sustained by a sense of underground identity and solidarity that had developed in the face of severe aggression and discrimination on the part of governmental authorities against gay people throughout the 20th century.
Historical Roots of Policing Homosexuality
00:02:08
Speaker
The project of policing same-sex activity had been a centuries-long project in Anglo-American societies, rooted in the ill-conceived conservative belief that homosexuality was somehow an offence to the natural order and a front to establish domestic structures. Paranoia over homosexual behaviour increased from the 1930s onwards, with sensational media reporting of predatory sexual psychopath stories and sweeping legislation in relation to sex crime offences which served to exacerbate the mischaracterisation of homosexual people as being intrinsically harmful to American society. The 1950 Lavender Scare resulted in large numbers of gay employees of the federal government being fired from their jobs on the grounds that their sexuality allegedly made them a risk to national security. Those persons' fear of being outed supposedly made them more vulnerable to blackmailing and espionage by Russian spies intent on bringing down the American government.
Impact of Vice Squads on Gay Communities
00:03:04
Speaker
campaigns to professionalise. Municipal police forces led most large and mid-sized police departments by the early 1950s to create vice squads that focused primarily on policing sex-related offences. These units were charged with suppressing any public manifestation of queer culture. They availed of changes in legislation that expanded their powers and introduced harsher punishments for adult gay men and women engaging in consensual sexual activities.
00:03:29
Speaker
These punishments included indefinite confinement and involuntary medical treatment such as electroshock therapy. The vice squads also relied on liquor licensing laws that prohibited bars from serving gay patrons or even permitting them on the premises, along with disorderly conduct and anti-solicitation laws that empowered police to arrest men and women who sought sexual partners in public.
00:03:52
Speaker
The common perception of gay people is threatening to society, fueled the public appetite for enforcement action by the vice squads, and encouraged harsher treatment of individuals charged by the fences, effectively legitimising the harsh and aggressive tactics employed by the police.
00:04:07
Speaker
The activities of the Vice Squads was considered by many to be a concerted encroachment on the civil liberties of queer communities. Nonetheless, there was internal friction between the various arms of the US law enforcement system, being the police, the judiciary, and the state legislatures regarding the policing of same-sex activities that underlines the competing attitudes towards policing and the moderation of state power in the 20th century.
Visibility and Suppression of Gay Culture
00:04:32
Speaker
Ironically, the suppressive activities of the vice squads and anti-homosexual policing enabled gay people to gain greater public visibility. American society was forced to recognise, by way of public hearings and the court system, the existence of a gay culture outside of the Broadway and Hollywood musicals, and to address the inequalities faced by that culture.
00:04:53
Speaker
in how it experienced the kind of social life that mainstream society would take for granted. If the 1926 cabaret laws which we discussed in episode 1 were an authoritarian hammer to black jazz artists and mixed race venues, New York slicker licensing authorities were the stealth governmental method of suppressing gay social activity within the city. When prohibition in the US s was repealed in 1933, state legislatures created new agencies with powers to license the profitable new business of selling alcohol.
00:05:21
Speaker
Some states relied on pre-existing agencies such as the taxing boards, as was the case with California State Board of Equalization. Other states created new agencies such as New York State Liquor Authority, the SLA, and New Jersey's Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the ABC. These organizations were charged with ensuring that bars and restaurants did not become havens for supposedly undesirable elements like drug addicts, prostitutes, and homosexuals.
00:05:47
Speaker
Enforcement by the liquor boards against the presence of homosexuals and bars to maintain the, quote, moral character of urban nightlife was more emphatic in the East Coast cities such as New York and New Jersey, where the conservative temperance lobby was more influential. Essentially, gay people and those harbouring them in their premises were to be treated as criminals when they presented themselves as such in
Backlash Against LGBT Visibility and Culture
00:06:08
Speaker
public.
00:06:08
Speaker
The dance floor had long been contested territory and nightlife establishments that served sexual minorities in New York during the first half of the 20th century. Social purity organizations such as the Temperance and Prohibition Movement committed to fighting vice were often a bigger thorn in the side of these businesses than local police. Intervention by these organizations was often contrary to the wishes of club owners who were more concerned about maintaining the profitability of their business, and who were not overly concerned with the presence of gay people in their establishments. The prominence of gay men on dance floors during the pansy craze of the Roaring Twenties ultimately led venues setting limits on permissible gay activity.
00:06:45
Speaker
Dancing was often a flashpoint and for a period between the 1920s and 1930s cities including Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco saw huge popularity in drag balls hosted to cabarets and speakeasies where drag queens would perform for straight audiences.
00:07:01
Speaker
This was a period of increased visibility for what would become known as the LGBT community, even to the extent that a number of the most famous performers such as Jean Mallon appeared in Broadway shows and Hollywood movies. The period of the Great Depression beginning in 1929 saw organised campaigns by Christian conservatives in the United States to erase the representation of gay men and women in theatre, cinema and live entertainment venues.
00:07:26
Speaker
This was exemplified by the development of the Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the Hayes Code, in the early 1930s, which effectively prohibited any depiction of same-sex activity or relationships in cinema.
Systematic Regulation of Gay Nightlife
00:07:39
Speaker
Restrictions on gender conformity and any public displays of homosexuality were imposed generally, and the policing of the gay night world did not become systematic until the 1930s when prohibition was repealed. What had been largely unpoliced became highly regulated by the state liquor authorities.
00:07:54
Speaker
New Jersey's ABC Liquor Authority prohibited the seal of alcohol to persons of ill repute, lumping female impersonators. Afree is intended to refer to transvestites but deemed by state authorities to include effeminate homosexuals in with criminals, gangsters and racketeers.
00:08:11
Speaker
The New York State Liquor Authority was given power to revoke liquor licenses for disorderly premises, the presence of gay people automatically equating to disorderly activity in the eyes of the SLA. New York nightlife, which had been largely underground and policed, again became highly regulated.
00:08:29
Speaker
The SLA systematically targeted gay-friendly establishments. Bar owners deemed to be in breach of liquor licensing regulations were summoned to hearings by the regulatory authorities, which were rarely subject to oversight by the court system itself. Bar owners charged with breaching the liquor codes by serving gay customers could request an independent review of the decision, but the delays and prohibitive expense of doing so meant that few availed of this option.
00:08:54
Speaker
To gather evidence, the liquor authorities used their own investigative agents, often ex-policemen and detectives, who staged repeated visits to the premises suspected to be in violation of the liquor regulations. However, active police officers were often the primary source of information. Police patrolled neighbourhood bars and gave warnings of prosecution to offending bar owners. The liquor boards collaborated with these policemen, and later more specialised vice squads, who often gave evidence at the hearings of the liquor board.
00:09:23
Speaker
There was often a divergence of approach with police frequently more concerned with more urgent and criminal matters than preventing gay men and women from socialising and drinking in bars, especially when there was no evidence of any genuine civil disturbance.
Liquor Laws and Their Impact on Gay Bars
00:09:35
Speaker
When the ABC brought charges against Club Delight in New York, New Jersey, its owner had protested the charges, saying that the local police advised him he could continue serving queer customers, quote, so long as they didn't act up.
00:09:47
Speaker
Liquor agents would visit bars alone or in groups, order drinks and converse with the bartenders and other patrons, watching for anything in their view which departed from the standard image of an orderly establishment. However, agents often let themselves be drawn into more intimate conversations with patrons they suspected of being homosexual. Agents often encouraged sexual advances, asking patrons to buy them a drink, dancing with male customers or suggestively asking to be taken care of. This method of deliberate enticement would become a standard approach for vice squads.
00:10:17
Speaker
operating to suppress gay activity in public spaces well into the 1970s. The level of surveillance by liquor agents and police prompted bar owners to discourage any romantic displays of affection, to break up dancing same-sex couples, and to prohibit customers from using the bathroom at the same time, often scolding their customers for speaking to strangers.
00:10:37
Speaker
The bar owner's liquor license was at risk by the actions of their customers, and bar owners were often put in the ludicrous position of having to prove they were unaware customers were gay, requiring them to challenge the public misconception, at least between the 1930s and 1950s, that all homosexuals were easily identifiable as such from their appearance and mannerisms.
00:10:55
Speaker
The state liquor laws following the appeal of prohibition effectively conscripted private business owners into the work of policing their own customers and imposed a burden on those owners to maintain a certain level of knowledge about what traits supposedly characterised homosexuality, all for the sake of their own livelihoods.
00:11:13
Speaker
As with the Times Square Garden and Grill in 1938, some bar owners actively sought the assistance of the liquor boards and police in removing gay customers who had been displaced by the closure of a more favourable bar in the vicinity. Often such owners were nonetheless charged with breaching the liquor code, their knowledge of gay customers on the premises, evidenced by their own comp complaints to the police and liquor authority.
00:11:35
Speaker
Sensing the commercial potential in appealing to the gay market, many establishments advertised themselves as havens for queer men and women, and altered their properties accordingly to maintain secrecy from the police. Backrooms were reserved for same-sex dancing. Secret locks and light signals were installed to flash warnings in the event of police inspections.
00:11:53
Speaker
Examples include the Paddock Bar in New Jersey and Gloria's Bar and Grill in Manhattan, a self-styled port of call for the city's sexual underground in the 1930s, welcoming gay people and straight tourists alike. Many owners of these establishments were grateful for the well-paying and uniquely loyal clientele. For that reason, in cities like New York and Chicago, operating gay-friendly bars became a popular venture for criminal syndicates who were in a position to rely on their network of police protection to corner a profitable market The influx of gay men and women to America's urban centers following World War II, many of them fresh from military service, saw a boom in businesses which care to a queer clientele. According to writer Martin Duberman, the experience of gay men and women during that war went a long way towards creating the needed critical mass of consciousness.
00:12:42
Speaker
in the United States that could eventuate in an organized political movement. Gay bars became the primary social institutions for gay men in general and for working class lesbians, allowing for increased social contact and cooperation. The state liquor authorities responded accordingly.
00:12:59
Speaker
expanding their operations in terms of funding and personnel, and developing their tactical approach to adapt to the evolving patterns of queer life. One such evolution was the emergence of lesbian bars. By the mid-1950s, American women had begun playing a more prominent role in their city's professional and commercial worlds. Queer women, especially among the working class, began to frequent bars in greater numbers as a new centre for their social lives. While those spaces were often initially shared with gay men,
00:13:27
Speaker
Some lesbian communities managed to sustain a broad network of bars catering primarily for gay women. New Jersey had the Blue Room in Elizabeth, the Speedway Inn at Waterford, Edna's Rendezvous in Patterson, the Clover Leaf Inn at Mez Landing and the famous bar in Atlantic City.
00:13:42
Speaker
Pelican Bar, Latin Quarter and Club Delight were all situated in New York. There was less police scrutiny for lesbian bars than gay or mixed bars, and generally less attention from the liquor authorities. However, harassment, raids and violent confrontations were common, particularly for women in working class areas who were more likely to be arrested, particularly those from ethnic minorities.
00:14:03
Speaker
West Coast states, including California, seemingly considered lesbian social activity to be less of an issue compared to gay male spaces, usually focused their attention only in venues where suspected criminal activity was taking place. This was not the case for the more traditionally puritanical East Coast authorities.
00:14:19
Speaker
especially in New Jersey where the police and liquor boards prided themselves on rigorous enforcement action. Inoffensive characteristics such as how women held their drinks or how they flicked their cigarettes soon became contentious if they were deemed to be insufficiently feminine in the eyes of the authorities. Standard masculine behavior suddenly became subversive and therefore disorderly once performed by gay women. There seemed to be a conservative anxiety about reinforcing traditional femininity that's apparent in societal attitudes towards lesbian women around the 1950s and onwards, and their treatment by the vice squads and the liquor boards.
00:14:53
Speaker
Another challenge to the police and liquor board's codification of gay male behaviour was the increasing tendency of gay men to shed the more effeminate associations of gay nightlife as the 20th century progressed. Many adopted fashion and behaviour that was more conventional, often as a natural progression, but also in many cases as a method of avoiding state surveillance and harassment. The liquor board investigators soon determined that chinos and sneakers were determinate of of gay customers in a licensed premises.
00:15:21
Speaker
These clothing items were features of a preppy fashion style appropriated from the so-called Ivy League universities, popular among young collegiate men in the late 50s and early 60s. Many of the preppy straight men from these universities may have been confused as to why the liquor authorities considered their style to be indicative of homosexuality. It was a gradual narrowing of the margins between what was deemed to be an acceptable or unacceptable level of masculinity for the authorities.
00:15:50
Speaker
From the early 1950s, the problem of plainclothes police officers became a concern among gay rights activists, who were part of what was at this stage known as the Homophile Movement. Undercover officers charged with patrolling their city's queer nightlife converged on bars, parks and public bathrooms throughout the country.
00:16:08
Speaker
Their cynical and generally pointless practices included elaborate and time-consuming surveillance methods. The Gay Magazine I was started in 1953 by members of one of the earliest gay rights organizations, the Mattachine Society. The magazine ceased publication in 1968.
00:16:25
Speaker
It began its run with an exposé of the methods used by plainclothes police officers to entrap gay men soliciting sex. Police men would loiter in gay bars, but also public parks and bathrooms, present themselves and often flirt to gain the confidence of men in the vicinity. Once an offer of sex was deemed to have been accepted, an arrest was made. ah Evidential thresholds introduced by the judiciary tempered the ability of the vice squads to achieve convictions, but gay men were harassed and pursued in this way well into the 1960s.
00:16:56
Speaker
The Mattachine Society was founded in Los Angeles in 1950. A small group of left-wing gay men formed the organization around the leadership of an activist named Harry Hay. At that time, it was necessary to keep organizational activity secret in the paranoid Cold War climate.
00:17:12
Speaker
Their motivation was to champion the idea that gay people were a legitimate social minority, quote, living within a hostile mainstream culture. Mattachine suggested that the false consciousness, as they called it, of gay people, of suffering from some pathological illness had been internalized based on society's negative judgment. Its members believed that political struggle was the proper vehicle for challenging this notion, to recalibrate the place of gay people in American society.
00:17:40
Speaker
The early radicalism of the Mattachine society would be modified in favour of a more conformist and assimilationist approach as the 50s and 60s progressed. Tensions with some of the new young radical gay activists would be a persistent feature of the gay rights movement during this period.
00:17:56
Speaker
The early publications of the Mattachine Magazine I had involved several female collaborators, including activists Anne-Carol Reed and Joan Corbin, but the Mattachine Society consisted predominantly of white male members. In 1955, a group of women led by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon launched the Daughters of Bledis, the D.O.B. in San Francisco, one of America's first lesbian organizations.
00:18:20
Speaker
Its initial focus was on addressing social needs, including attempts to end the isolation and and invisibility of lesbian women. The DOB initially provided an alternative social space to the lesbian bar scene, which was constantly subject to police and liquor board raids, but its focus eventually shifted to education and political reform. The organization would remain active for over 40 years.
00:18:44
Speaker
How anti-homosexual policing was conducted as the 20th century progressed was influenced by a shifting understanding of homosexuality within the legal system, by way of lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, prosecutors and the defendants themselves. Among the most popular and contentious paradigm was the presentation of homosexuality as a medical or psychological illness.
00:19:05
Speaker
Although the opinions of psychologists had been utilized by governmental authorities to help create some of the more draconian legislation of the 1950s, the use of psychiatric evidence was often helpful to defendants in later years where judges in many cases were seen to grant more lenient sentences or take a more sympathetic view of those charged with offences relating to homosexual activity.
00:19:28
Speaker
Psychiatric evidence was often submitted with a view to convincing the courts that the relevant defence was somehow beyond the control of the defendants. Psychiatrists often, problematically, portray homosexuality as a psychological problem to be cured with sufficient discipline and medical treatment.
00:19:45
Speaker
It's understandable that defendants charged with offences relating to homosexual activity would seek to invoke any available defence to counter charges brought by the police, including in situations involving pressure from the liquor boards. However, the use of psychiatric evidence is a defence strategy.
00:20:01
Speaker
seen retrospectively as having effectively endorsed the pathology of homosexuality, the engagement of psychiatrists signified a kind of collective agreement that homosexuality was a mental illness traceable to a psychological root cause, therefore best left to the management of the medical authorities, as opposed to the police or the judicial system.
00:20:22
Speaker
Decades before homophile activists and progressive medical authorities had moved to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness, gay people had utilized psychiatric experts in the court system as champions of greater social tolerance for queer communities.
00:20:38
Speaker
The stigmatizing effect of their medical theories was effectively treated as the cost of their support in defending criminal charges, a means to an end. And the purpose of this support was to undermine a regulatory regime enforced by the police and the state liquor authorities that was grounded on the public's false presumptions about gay people.
00:20:57
Speaker
The necessity of engaging this type of psychiatric defense would wither away to a large extent with greater understanding of gay culture through increased media exposure moving through the 60s and into the 1970s.
00:21:10
Speaker
With greater visibility of gay life in the 1960s, partly due to this wider media coverage, the publicisation of the nefarious tactics employed by the vice squads put pressure on governmental authorities to limit their powers. In New York, complaints by homophile activists that police impersonated gay men to entice solicitations for sex came to the attention of the progressive mayor John Lindsay, who we've mentioned in previous episodes. The first gay rights bill was introduced in City Council in 1971,
00:21:39
Speaker
during the Lindsay administration and assigned to the City Council's General Welfare Committee. Repeatedly rejected at council level on an almost annual basis for decades after, the bill, ultimately adopted in 1986, was intended to amend the law that created the Commission on Human Rights by adding the words sexual orientation to the existing grounds on which discrimination was not permitted, which were race, creed, colour, national origin or sex,
00:22:08
Speaker
The bill would have banned discrimination in housing, employment, places of public accommodation or amusement and commercial space based on a person's sexual orientation.
00:22:20
Speaker
Critical to this type of political pressure was the New York Civil Liberties Union, which had been a vocal critic of the and NYPD's enticement tactics and, oddly, the New York Post, which was and remains a conservative tabloid. Activists Randy Wicker from the Homophile League and Dick Leach, president of the New York Mattachine Society, invited a Post reporter named Joseph Kahn to take calls one evening from various gay men who had been arrested by the police.
00:22:49
Speaker
The post then ran stories denouncing the Vice Squad's medieval harassment, as they called it, of gay men in the city, decrying the wastefulness of their enforcement efforts and criticizing the squandering of police manpower on flirting with gay men in bars.
00:23:05
Speaker
Challenges to the use of the New Jersey and New York liquor licensing laws as a repressive means of controlling gay congregation in the city were built on the incremental achievements of activists in California, most significantly San Francisco. In the first decades following repeal, the liquor authorities relied on stereotypes of outward gay appearance to prosecute gay friendly bars. The shift towards what could be described as a conduct based system began in the 1950s.
00:23:33
Speaker
The years following World War II saw a massive growth in the gay population of the Bay Area and the numbers of licensed premises that sought to cater for them. One such premises, the Black Cat, which attracted a gay and bohemian crowd, including many of the city's beat poets, was targeted by California's Board of Equalization for that reason.
00:23:53
Speaker
Saul Stoneman, the black cat's heterosexual proprietor, had his liquor license revoked in 1948 on the basis that his disorderly house was frequented by persons of known homosexual tendencies. Stoneman issued legal proceedings to challenge this action by the ABC on the basis that the mere evidence of his patrons of feminine mannerisms failed to establish any legal violation.
00:24:16
Speaker
Although an appellate court upheld the suspension, Stoneman was ultimately successful in contesting the decision taken by the ABC, and his liquor license was restored in 1951. Stoneman v. Riley, heard in the California Supreme Court, established that members of the public have the right to patronise a bar, so long as they are acting properly and not committing any illegal or immoral acts.
00:24:39
Speaker
The Chief Justice invoked a deep-seated principle against excluding disfavored groups from places of public accommodation. He insisted the charges of being a disorderly house required actual evidence of improper behavior on the premises. Mere proof of patronage by even the most avowedly homosexual men, without some further proof of the commission of an illegal or a moral act, was not sufficient to violate the relevant legislation.
00:25:03
Speaker
Stoneman versus Riley was a milestone in the history of gay civil rights, being the first case to uphold the rights of queer men and women to exist openly in the public sphere. Its rationale was soon echoed on the east coast.
00:25:16
Speaker
In 1954, New York State Liquor Authority revoked the liquor license of Bernard's Bar and Grill based on testimony that men had been using endearing terms to each other at the bar. The owner argued that the SLA's evidence had failed to establish that the bar was disorderly and therefore in violation of the relevant liquor code.
00:25:33
Speaker
The magistrate here in the case, Judge Ringell, was swayed by this argument and commented that the charge of operating a disorderly establishment required some proof that the defendant's patrons had engaged in illicit or disreputable conduct such as lewd or indecent acts.
00:25:49
Speaker
In the following years, the higher courts echoed Judge Ringell's reasoning, agreeing that the mere congregation of homosexuals at a bar did not suffice to violate the liquor codes. The victory of Stoneman and Riley was temporarily undermined by Californian legislation, which in 1955 allowed for liquor licenses to be revoked if the license premises was deemed to be a resort for prostitutes, pimps, panderers, or sexual perverts.
00:26:13
Speaker
Same-sex kissing and dancing were grounds for revocation. However, in the subsequent case of Valerga v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control in 1959, the Californian Supreme Court ruled in favor of the first and last chance bar in Oakland that the 1955 law was unconstitutional.
00:26:31
Speaker
But, again, there was an emphasis on preventing sexual behaviour that was deemed to be contrary to public welfare or morals. It seemed that if the law would not fully change, then the public perception would have to, in order for gay people to be free to socialise and express themselves romantically to the same extent as their heterosexual friends or neighbours.
00:26:50
Speaker
Jose Saria, a regular drag queen performer and cocktail waiter at the Black Cat, ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1961, becoming the city's first openly gay candidate for public office. His 6,000 votes was not enough to get him elected, but the process kickstarted a new form of gay activism that would eventually see Harvey Milk elected as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California.
00:27:18
Speaker
In 1962, José Saría, together with other gay bar owners and employees, formed the Tavern Guild of San Francisco, the nation's first association of gay businesses. During the 1960s, the guild devoted its efforts to challenging police raids and ABC crackdowns. It would also help in the formation of the Society of Individual Rights, which in 1963, sponsored both social and political functions, and published its own magazine, Vector.
00:27:47
Speaker
In association with the Tavern Guild, the SIR r printed and distributed pocket lawyers. These were pocket-sized guides which offered advice on what to do if you were arrested or harassed by the police. Both organisations were unfortunately unable to stop the black cat from closing after losing its liquor license on 30th October 1963.
00:28:08
Speaker
In New York, the SLA continued to bring charges solely based on the presence of gay people in bars. In 1959, in the case of Fulton Bar and Grill, investigators testified that its patrons wore tight-fitting trousers, spoke in effeminate tones, and walked with a sway in their walk. This was supposedly deemed sufficient evidence that the bars' customers conducted themselves in an offensive and indecent manner.
00:28:32
Speaker
Unlike California, a disorderly conduct was not a requirement for liquor license to be revoked, and the mere presence of gay people was grounds for the designation of the bar as a disorderly premises.
00:28:44
Speaker
By 1960 in New York, resistance by gay activists was building. Activists Randy Wicker and Craig Rodwell were concerted with others in their efforts to challenge the conservatism of New York's madachine leaders, who would continue to dominate the leadership of that organization for the decade that followed.
00:29:01
Speaker
Frank Kameny's leadership of the Washington DC chapter of Mattachine had in the early 1960s led to radical statements and actions that reflected the civil rights struggle, heralding the rejection of apologetics that would subsequently typify the gay movement.
00:29:16
Speaker
Due to internal division, the Mattachine Society had dissolved as a national organization in 1961, leaving local chapters to chart their own course. In late 1962, Frank Kemeny had proposed that the East Coast homophile groups form some kind of affiliation, and in January 1963, the New York Daughters of Bilitis and former Mattachine chapters in Philadelphia, New York and Washington DC formed ECHO, the East Coast Homophile Organization.
00:29:43
Speaker
young activist Craig Rodwell joined ECHO soon soon after, along with others who inclined towards greater militancy began to plan strategy for securing more aggressive homophile leadership. One area of internal conflict between the younger activists and the older more conservative members was the extent to which gay rights activists should associate themselves with other activist groups such as anti-draft and anti-Vietnam war protesters.
00:30:11
Speaker
Craig Rodwell started the Mattachine Young Adults organization. Even by the mid-1960s, his advertisements for membership in the Village Voice were objected to at various points due to his use of the word homosexual and homophile. Craig later leafleted around Greenwich Village to attract attendees to their meetings. In his view, visibility was crucial to ending oppression, and he spent his energy on searching for ways to crow the ranks of the openly gay.
00:30:38
Speaker
He appeared in public radio stations with his friend Randy Wicker, and by mid-1965, Mattachine Yogg-Arles was comprised of 500 pair-up members. By 1965, Madison, New York was still controlled by conservative members who believed in gradualism and quietism, in modifying gay comportment to coincide with middle-class notions of proper behavior, and to find sympathetic experts and allies in straight religious and psychiatric circles. Where conservatives emphasized the need for homosexuals to adjust to society, the younger activists, taking their inspiration from the black civil rights campaigners, argued that it was mainstream society that should be required to make the adjustment
00:31:18
Speaker
Internal conflicts would boil over at elections within the organization, with many of the older members leaving when younger activists were elected to leadership positions. Activist Dick Leach was invited to Madison, New York by Craig Rodwell and eventually became its president. He was relentless in his opposition to the state liquor authority's persecution of gay bars and challenged newspapers such as the Suffolk County News that printed the names and addresses and occupations of gay men arrested by police in their sweeps of the Fire Island Gay Resorts. In 1965, when John Lindsay was elected Mayor of New York, his plans to clean up Times Square in Midtown were criticised by Dick Leech as effectively infringing on these civil rights of those patronising the area. This led to a meeting between Mayor Lindsay, Leech and others which resulted in the Mayor ordering the and NYPD to cease all activities that had seen homosexuals entrapped and arrested by the police during their nightly patrols.
00:32:14
Speaker
The new frankness about homosexuality in public discussions was part of a wider upheaval in society. The conformity and dutiful reference to authority that held sway in the fifties gave way to a more rebellious counterculture during the period of 1963 to 1965. As exemplified by the acceleration of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the 1964 Harlem riots, and the 1965 race riots in Watts, Los Angeles.
00:32:43
Speaker
In San Francisco in 1964, police harassment of gay bars and other social congregation led to the formation of the Society for Individual Rights, which by 1966 counted thousands of members. In May of 1964, a-day conference between gay activists and progressive Protestant ministers led to the formation of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual.
00:33:07
Speaker
to raise funds and awareness for this new organisation. Years Eve Dance was organised at the California Hall on Park Street. Police stipulated that any anyone attending in drag was to be whisked inside out of view. On the night 500 gay men and women found they had to pass a gauntlet of police photographers to gain access to the host venue.
00:33:27
Speaker
Police inspectors entered the hall every 20 minutes on the pretext of carrying out fire inspections. When these continued police interruptions were challenged, scuffle ensued and police set about arresting everyone in attendance. The following day, local church ministers held a press conference to denounce the conduct of the police the night before. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the story in its cover.
00:33:49
Speaker
When the case reached court, the judge threw out all charges against the gay defendants and reprimanded the police for what they saw as a dereliction of duty at California Hall. This marked a turning point for gay activism in America. The heterosexual ministers had spoken out to defend the humanity of the gay people involved. The courts sided with the gay defendants. The police had been reprimanded for the brutality of their approach. The people involved had learned that organized defiance yielded positive results.
00:34:17
Speaker
The success of activists in fighting police crackdowns at gay venues in 1964-65 swelled the ranks of gay activist groups. and By 1966, politicians began to recognise the political potential of gay voters and began to appeal for their support in seeking election. There were also demonstrations in Californian cities against the exclusion of gay people from applying to join the armed forces.
00:34:42
Speaker
In August 1966, police attempts to remove transgender customers from Jean Compton's cafeteria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco were resisted, sparking a riot and three nights of protests by trans people and other members of the LGBT community who returned to the cafeteria to picket when its owners refused to permit their reentry to the establishment.
00:35:03
Speaker
The demonstration ended with the newly installed plate glass windows being smashed once again. The cafeteria business declined over the years after the riot and the venue finally closed in 1972. Transgender activists channeled the energy created by the protests into creating a number of community-based support services, most successful being the National Transsexual Counselling Unit, or the NTCU, established in 1968.
00:35:28
Speaker
Back in New York, the 21st of April 1966, saw the first Sippen protests organized by members of the Mattachine Society, including Craig Rodwell, Dick Leach and John Timmons. The plan was for gay men to attend bars known for refusing service to get customers, to order drinks and then out themselves, presenting bar owners with a prepared statement explaining they were gay men who demanded service.
00:35:52
Speaker
where service was refused, owners were warned a complaint would be made to the state liquor authority, and legal proceedings would be issued against the bar for violating their constitutional rights to free assembly and equal accommodation.
00:36:05
Speaker
Launching this strategy initially proved difficult when a number of the bars visited by the activists served them without question. At a bar named Julius on 10th Street, where several arrests had been made by plain close police officers by entrapping its gay customers, they were finally denied service. The New York Mattachine members immediately announced they would be filing a comp complaint with the SLA against the owners of Julius for unconstitutional discrimination against homosexuals.
00:36:30
Speaker
in violation of their rights to free assembly under the First and Fourteenth Amendments. They did however communicate to the owners that the New York Mattachine Society would pay any legal costs incurred because of the complaint, the intention of which was to achieve progressive reform of the law rather than to simply punish the bar owners who were themselves being placed in a difficult position by the regulatory authorities.
00:36:51
Speaker
After receiving the complaint, the SLA promptly determined they would be taking no action against the owners of Julius on the basis they had refused service to homosexual customers. William H. Booth, the black chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, intervened. Booth was a former New York City judge who challenged racial discrimination in employment, housing, education and other fields as a civil rights leader and as Chairman of the City's Commission on Human Rights in the late 1960s where he was appointed by the then Mayor John Lindsay. He also served as President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP. Booth commented on the SLA decision by stating that it was the Commission that had jurisdiction over events of discrimination based on sex and that he would challenge the SLA policy on denying services to gay people if the matter was referred to as office.
00:37:42
Speaker
The Mattachine Society then took the necessary action and filed its complaint with the Commission on Human Rights. The Sippin protests, supported by Chairman Booth's position on the matter, catalyzed two landmark rulings in New Jersey and New York that partially legalized the open operation of gay bars.
00:37:59
Speaker
The New Jersey case of 111 wines and liquors incorporated versus de Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control 1967, consolidated the Stoneman and Valerga Californian law cases, a significant legal precedent. In deciding 111 wines, the court cited the Californian cases.
00:38:17
Speaker
but also notable US Supreme Court cases. Relating to the protection of civil liberties such as Griswold versus Connecticut which dealt with the issue of access to contraceptives and Pierce versus Society of Sisters which enshrined parental rights to educate children without state intervention. The New Jersey Supreme Court was linking the gay rights movement to past struggles for individual liberties in the United States. The experience of gay men and women was being considered for the first time within a conceptual framework of what would become known as intersectionality This in turn underlined the necessity of enduring civic activism and an engaged judiciary to address matters of societal change.
00:38:56
Speaker
In the case of 111 wines, the owners of the 111 wines in Liquor Incorporated in New Brunswick had their liquor license revoked for permitting GE customers to congregate in their bars, a decision which was successfully overturned on appeal. The New York Mattachine Society had submitted an amicus curi, friend of the court brief in the case, underlying the growing credibility of GE rights organisations at this point in time.
00:39:19
Speaker
The Supreme Court of New Jersey recognised for the first time the right of well-behaved, apparent homosexuals, as they put it, to congregate in bars. The ban on gay people visiting bars together was deemed to be legally unsupportable.
00:39:34
Speaker
In contesting the appeal, the New Jersey Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission commented that the state liquor authorities had historically been tasked with regulating activity at licensed premises, supposedly to prevent backsliding into the type of debauched behaviour that had led conservative America to call for statutory prohibition.
00:39:52
Speaker
on the sale of alcohol in the first place back in 1920. Its argument for maintaining the revocation of the liquor license was essentially that, by banning gay people from social congregation in licensed premises, it was maintaining the public welfare and preventing a potential descent into the hysteria of the past that had led to prohibition.
00:40:12
Speaker
Thankfully, it was pointed out in the Court's decision that, in the context of decisions taken by the state liquor authorities from the 1930s onwards, the interests of the patrons in question were given little consideration, and were, in any event, overwhelmed by the then highly felt transitional need for sweeping restraint. Now, in the 1960s, the transitional need as such is long past, and it is entirely appropriate that full sweep be given to current understandings and concepts.
00:40:42
Speaker
This commentary from the court reflected a liberalizing view and a growing tolerance for marginalized groups such as gay gay men and women in public life. The court emphasized the public's growing liberality to sexual difference and the self-contained nature of gay life.
00:40:58
Speaker
A growing commitment to personal privacy, specifically sexual privacy, as a fundamental right in a democratic society, was constitutionalised by the Supreme Court in Griswold v Connecticut 1965. This decision emboldened organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union and individual Americans to launch new legal challenges against sodomy laws in the United States.
00:41:21
Speaker
one month after of 111 wines. The New York City Court of Appeal in Kerma Restaurant Corporation v. State Liquor Authority ruled that the mere presence of a homosexual would not per se constitute a disorderly premises. A liquor license could not be revoked unless there was substantial evidence of a breach of the peace. Increasing numbers of gay bars began to open. Gay people could be legally present, but the viability of those bars was dependent on patrons not outwardly expressing their homosexuality.
00:41:52
Speaker
Dancing or other physical expressions of gayness were still, even by this point, deemed to represent disorderly behaviour. Activist Craig Rodwell left the Mattachine Society with the plan of opening his own bookstore to cater for gay customers. To save money, he started working at the Pines Resort on Fire Island, an almost exclusively gay holiday location.
00:42:13
Speaker
He joined the staff of the Bowtail Nightclub in the summer of 1966. At that time, plainclothes policemen were still coming from the nearby Long Island town of Seville to conduct raids at the Mead Rack, an area famous for gay cruising, and to entrap unsuspecting single-game men on the boardwalks of the Fire Island resorts of the Pines and Cherry Grove.
00:42:33
Speaker
Police would take arrested men and chain them together to a telephone pole in the middle of the Pines Harbor. This process would be repeated until the police had gathered around 30-40 men, at which point those arrested would be taken to a Long Island kangaroo court where steep fines were regularly handed out.
00:42:49
Speaker
The terrified young men would rarely report what was essentially organised extortion by the local police authorities. On the dance floor of the hotel, staff were trained to shine a flashlight in the eyes of any men dancing together or even facing each other while dancing. The requirement was that all male eyes were to be focused on either the dance floor itself or one of the few female dancers in attendance.
00:43:12
Speaker
Lesbian friends and occasionally straight women from the docks were persuaded to perform this function to make the nightclub a viable business and for those in attendance to avoid being arrested by undercover police. Two summers' work at the boat hotel enabled Craig Rodwell to save the funds required to open the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop at 291 Mercer Street in Greenwich Village, which operated until 1973 when Craig relocated. it He was adamant that the bookstore would serve a social need, and unlike many other gay bookstores, he deliberately chose not to stock pornography of any kind. The advertisement Craig placed in the Village Voice for the bookstore carried the slogan,
00:43:49
Speaker
gay is good
00:43:52
Speaker
The Oscar Wilde bookstore was created as a vehicle for promoting a more positive view of homosexuality. The store carried booklets and pamphlets relating to the homophile movement and would be used as a clearinghouse for those promoting progressive reform of laws relating to homosexuals in New York State. The bookstore would become the base for a new gay rights organization launched by Craig himself, the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighbourhood, or HYMN.
00:44:17
Speaker
The first issue of the organization's magazine, the New York Hymnal, Greg wrote an article denouncing mafia control of GED bars in New York City. By 1966, GED people were legally permitted to drink alcohol in New York bars, but this was heavily contingent on queer identity being concealed. Kissing, dancing and sexual advances were still classifiable as disorderly conduct that could potentially lead to bars having their liquor licenses revoked, and two arrests being made by the police vice patrols.
00:44:46
Speaker
Gay existence was basically tolerated, but gay behaviour was essentially still deemed to be criminal. The pressure imposed by state authorities on licensed premises to indirectly control the behaviour of gay patrons forced those same willing customers to attend locations where the enforcement of those restrictions could be avoided.
00:45:04
Speaker
The turbulent events of 1969, including the assassination of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and the ongoing discord over America's involvement in the Vietnam War created an environment of widespread protest in the United States. Martin Duberman, in his 1993 book Stonewall, writes of how this beaver escalation gave heart to those on the left who believed that confrontation was a necessary precursor to substantive change. Out of polarization, the argument went, would come realignment. Out of realignment, shifts in power.
00:45:36
Speaker
In this confrontational context of anger and defiance, the assimilationist policy of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, NACCHO, based on the model of the black civil rights struggle, seemed old-fashioned.
00:45:49
Speaker
The long-standing belief that homosexuals were an a oppressed minority with legitimate grievances, chimed with the newly widespread resistance to traditional authority at the end of the 1960s, inspired by clashes between police and anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Many gay activists called for an alliance with the Black Panthers and anti-war radicals.
00:46:11
Speaker
These activists also denounced what they saw as the timid apologetic approach of the older, more conservative homophile activists. Similarly, there was a concerted effort within the Daughters of Politis and its publication, The Ladder, to convert the organization to a feminist perspective, and in doing so, teenied with heterosexual feminists. The subsequent fight for control of the D.O.B. would culminate in the latter ceasing publication and the dissolution of the D.O.B.'s national structure.
00:46:39
Speaker
The push for a modern, intersectional approach to their cause would create severe, sometimes irreconcilable, internal conflict in America's gay rights organizations. In New York, the Student Homophile League was formed at Columbia University in 1967. Despite initial opposition to the university facilitating gay representation, several other New York universities formed separate chapters.
00:47:02
Speaker
In 1968, the Columbia Medical School hosted a panel discussion with a number of prominent psychiatrists known for encouraging the view of homosexuality as a pathological illness. The Student Homophile League interrupted the meeting and publicly demanded that in future the discussion about homosexuality be placed in its proper setting as a sociological problem of deeply entrenched prejudice and discrimination against a minority group.
00:47:26
Speaker
That evening, the campus erupted in student protests over US incursions overseas and the university's expansion into neighbouring areas that were occupied by its black neighbours near Harlem. Many members of the Student Homophile League joined in the occupation of campus buildings that accompanied the protests.
00:47:41
Speaker
For a detailed account of the activities of the vice patrols in policing gay nightlife during the 20th century, I would highly recommend Harvard Law Professor Anna Lovsky's excellent 2021 book, Vice Patrol, Cops, Courts, and the Struggle Over Urban Gay Life Before Stonewall, for a much broader analysis of the challenges faced by gay people in American society since its very inception. Michael Bronsky's A Queer History of the United States is essential reading.
00:48:07
Speaker
In the next episode we're going to take a detailed look at the Stonewall riots of June 1969, where events at this west village gay bar contributed to a fundamental shift in the policing of gay people within New York City. The Stonewall uprising, as it became known, prefigured a new celebratory attitude amongst gay people throughout America that would be clearly evident in the rapid expansion of gay bars and nightclubs in New York City in the early 1970s, where As with the jazz lofts and experimental electronic arts venues we discussed earlier in this season, the abandoned lofts of downtown Manhattan were seized on to create new forms of musical and cultural expression.