Mattachine: unmasking a ‘masked people’
Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 38
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Jun 13, 2005 8:12 PM
“We sat there, with
fire in our eyes and far-away dreams, being Gays.”
That’s how Harry Hay described the first meeting on Nov. 11, 1950, of what
would become the Mattachine movement.
The five founders--Harry Hay,
Rudi Gernreich, Dale Jennings, Chuck Rowland and Bob Hull--formed a leadership
core that met weekly. They took seriously the historic task of building what
they hoped would become a homosexual emancipation movement.
Hay
stressed that at the start of their organizing they “felt that if we made
bad mistakes and ruined the thing it might be many, many years before the
attempt to organize Gay people would be tried again. So we had to do it right,
if possible. That’s why we operated by unanimity and were very slow
moving.” (“Gay American History”)
Social
oppression leveled against same-sex love and gender variance was so great, and
political repression was becoming such an audible drumbeat, that the task
appeared daunting.
One Mattachine founder explained to Stuart
Timmons, Hay’s biographer, “It was dramatic because anyone in the
early fifties who was gay had a strange feeling of fear. Everyone had
experienced something. For instance, picture walking into a bar you’d been
going to for some time, not a gay bar but one where gay people had been welcome
to drink. Drinks were a quarter there, but one day the bartender says,
‘That’ll be a dollar to you.’ You’d realize with a shock
that he didn’t want you there. That’s a minor
example.”
Timmons added, “The laws and customs of the
era were stringently anti-homosexual; in California, as in most states, any
sexual act except the missionary position between a heterosexual couple was a
crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Anyone caught doing anything else
could be made to register as a sex offender. Repeat offenders and those whose
partners were minors were often sent to Atascadero state prison and given
electroshock ‘therapy,’ or even subjected to castration. Since any
public mention of homosexuality was equated with scandal, few workplaces would
retain an employee whose involvement with such an organization became
public.” (“The Trouble with Harry Hay”)
As the
Mattachine founders met to discuss organizing, the “Lavender Scare”
was becoming a sensationalized propaganda component of the McCarthyite
anti-communist witch hunt. The Senate was making public its report rooting out
“sexual perverts” from government employment.
The
deep-freeze Cold War climate was meant to have a chilling effect on all
progressive and revolutionary organizing. And the Mattachine founders, as young
revolutionaries, understood the powers of the state that the capitalist class
could unleash. They were well-aware that the German Homosexual Emancipation
Movement and communists were early targets of the Nazi state capitalist regime.
Gernreich had been forced to flee fascism in Vienna. Jennings had
worked to defend Japanese-Americans detained in U.S. internment camps during
World War II. Anti-communism had forced Rowland out of his job as an organizer
with the American Veterans Committee.
“Above all, Hay was
acutely conscious of the growing climate of repression. With much of his party
work centered on cultural activities, he was aware of the targeting of leftists
in Hollywood by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). California,
moreover, had its own anti-communist investigating committee whose head, Jack
Tenney, came from Lost Angeles, and which held highly publicized hearings
throughout the postwar years. The two organizations in which Hay was most
active, People’s Songs and the People’s Educational Center, had
already come under its scrutiny.” (“Making Trouble,” John
D’Emilio)
This inhospitable political environment shaped the
organizational form of Mattachine—the first sustained gay liberation
organization in the United States.
Clandestine
organizing
Hay revised his original 1948 plan for an above-ground
“Bachelors for Wallace” model of political organizing. Instead, he
proposed an underground organization.
“The first thing we did
was set up a semipublic-type discussion group,” Hay explained to
interviewer Jonathan Katz, “so you didn’t have to reveal yourself if
you didn’t want to. Only certain persons would be invited at first, but
later they’d be invited to ask some friends.” (“Gay American
History”)
Katz asked Hay where the idea of the underground
organization came from. Hay replied, “In July 1950, I was still a
well-sought-after teacher of Marxist principles, both in the Communist party and
the California Labor School. I was teaching a course in music history at the
Labor School, and was dealing with the Guild System and the Freemasonry
movement, particularly at the time of [Austrian Hapsburg Queen] Maria Teresa,
when to be a member of the Freemasonry was to court the death sentence. Both
Mozart and Haydn had been Freemasons, courting punishment.
“This is also the way the Communist party had moved as a
political organization in 1930-37, when it had been truly underground. I thought
of the Freemason movement and the type of Communist underground organization
that had existed in the 1930s, which I had known and been part of.
“So I began to work up the structure specified in the
prospectus from the old left and, interestingly, was not too different from that
structure employed by Algeria in its successful liberation struggle with France
in the sixties.”
Hay described how his thinking had changed
in the two years since he’d written his original 1948 prospectus for
homosexual organizing. “At first I had not been so concerned with planting
the organization underground. The goals and ideology never changed particularly;
I felt that what we had to do was to find out who we were, and that what we were
for would follow. I realized that we had been very contributive in various ways
over the millennia, and I felt we could return to being contributive again. Then
we could be respected for our difference, not for our samenesses to
heterosexuals. To a large extent that’s what the whole movement was
about.
“The 1948 prospectus outlined the basic idea. The 1949
version described how we would set up the guilds, how we would keep them
underground and separated so that no one group could ever know who all the other
members were and their anonymity would be secured.”
The
founding members created a centralized organization with five levels—known
as “orders”—of leadership, “with increasing levels of
responsibility as one ascended the structure and with each order having one or
two representatives from a higher order of the organization,” wrote
historian John D’Emilio.
“As the membership of the
Mattachine Society grew, the orders were expected to subdivide into separate
cells so that each layer of the pyramid could expand horizontally. As the number
of cells increased, members of the same order but in different cells would be
largely unknown to one another.” (“Sexual
Politics”)
‘A masked
people’
Hay described the first organizational attempts.
“We talked about the prospectus of the foundation, made our contacts with
a fighting lawyer, who had defended one of us in court on a Gay charge, applied
for a preliminary charter for a nonprofit corporation, and began (as of late
November 1950) to have our discussion groups.” (“Gay American
History”)
In the spring of 1951, the leadership
core—the “fifth order”—formally changed the interim name
of the organization from “Society of Fools” to the Mattachine
Society.
“One of the cultural developments I had discussed
and illustrated in my Labor School class on ‘Historical Materialist
Development of Music’ was the function of the medieval-Renaissance French
Sociétés Joyeux,” Hay recalled. “One was known as the
Société Mattachine. These societies, lifelong secret fraternities
of unmarried townsmen who never performed in public unmasked, were dedicated to
going out into the countryside and conducting dances and rituals during the
Feast of Fools, at the Vernal Equinox.
“Sometimes these
dance rituals, or masques, were peasant protests against oppression—with
the maskers, in the people’s name, receiving the brunt of a given
lord’s vicious retaliation.
“So we took the name
Mattachine 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 struggle, to move toward total redress and change.”
Fear of police raids, Timmons emphasized, required that the
Mattachine founders meet in secret. “When the occasional guest was
invited, it was a standard security process for him to meet a Mattachine member
at some public landmark, then to be driven around for a few blocks before being
taken to the meeting place.”
Rowland said, “We did not
want to lead the police to our meetings, so we did not give guests the
address.” They changed locations regularly and kept the shades and
curtains drawn—men meeting together in one room would appear suspicious.
Timmons added, “Because they had read that telephones could
be used to bug a room, Rowland always put the phone in a dresser drawer and put
a pillow over it. When people left the meetings, they kept their voices
down.”
‘People were able to
bloom’
In April 1951, Konrade Stevens and James Gruber became
the last new members of the fifth order—affectionately dubbed
“Parsifal,” after the operatic knights on a quest to find the Holy
Grail.
Neither Stevens nor Gruber had any experience with
communism or knowledge of Marxism. After several months of meetings, Gruber
related, “We would meet in various homes, and once, when we met at Chuck
and Bob’s, I was sitting on the couch and innocently picked up a
newspaper. It was the Daily Worker. I thought it was a gag and made some sort of
funny reference to it. Bob just took the paper. He didn’t find it
funny.”
When other founding members took the opportunity to
talk about their communist beliefs and activism, they discovered that neither
Stevens nor Gruber proved to be very anti-communist.
The
fifth-order founder drafted the “Missions and Purposes” of
Mattachine in April 1951 and ratified them on July 20. The stated goals were as
follows:
“To unify” homosexuals who were
“isolated from their own kind,” and to create a principle from which
“all our people can … derive a feeling of
belonging.”
“To educate” all of
society—homosexual and heterosexual alike, by developing an “ethical
homosexual culture … paralleling the emerging cultures of our
fellow-minorities—[African American], Mexican, and Jewish
Peoples.”
“To lead,” providing leadership of more
“socially conscious homosexuals” to the whole mass of the homosexual
population.
The goals included the “imperative” need
for “political action” against “discriminatory and oppression
legislation.” And they concluded with the need to assist “our people
who are victimized daily as a result of our oppression,” terming this
group “one of the largest minorities in [North] America today.”
(“Gay American History”)
By summer of 1951, the number
of discussion groups began to grow. The first participants were drawn from those
courageous enough to sign the anti-Korean War petition Hay and Gernreich had
circulated on southern California gay beaches. (“The Rise of a Gay and
Lesbian Movement”)
The fifth-order group drew up a
questionnaire to facilitate the discussion about first-hand experience with
discrimination or encounters with police and courts, meeting sexual partners and
going to bars, and coming out to family and co-workers.
“Few
participants had ever before been asked such questions systematically, and the
questionnaire fueled extended discussions,” historian John D’Emilio
explained. “Group members speculated on causes of homosexuality, reasons
for social hostility to it, and where sexual ‘deviants’ could lead
well-adjusted lives. They described the pain of discovering their sexual
identities and the surrounding tragedies, as well as the strengths that survival
in a hostile society had produced. Together they imagined how life might be
different, how a gay subculture might emerge to provide emotional sustenance,
and how homosexuals and lesbians might act to change social attitudes.”
(“Sexual Politics”)
Hay noted, “The meetings were
mostly male. A few women came and protested that they were not included, and
after that more women came.”
At first, Mattachine leaders
adopted noms de guerre. Rudi Gernreich was referred to as “X” or
“R”; his role in Mattachine was not revealed until after his death.
Those who took part in the discussion groups were “petrified
that the government might get a list” of participants and feared that
“the cops would come barging in and arrest everybody.”
(“Sexual Politics”)
“But as time passed and no
raids materialized, men and women dropped their defenses, friendships formed,
and the meetings took on the character of intimate gatherings,”
D’Emilio continued.
James Gruber described the experience:
“All of us had known a whole lifetime of not talking, or repression. Just
the freedom to open up … really, that’s what it was all about. We
had found a sense of belonging, of camaraderie, of openness in an atmosphere of
tension and distrust. … Such a great deal of it was a social climate. A
family feeling came out of it, a nonsexual emphasis. … It was a brand-new
idea.”
Geraldine Jackson, who became active in Mattachine,
said that “people were able to bloom and be themselves. … [It] was
something we didn’t know before.” She added that, finally, there was
the chance to “say what you wanted to say and feel accepted.”
She concluded, “You felt that you were doing something
terribly worthwhile for our people.”
Next: Impact of Black civil rights struggle on pre-Stonewall gay
liberation.
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