Alfred Kinsey Reports
In 1948 and again in 1953, zoologist, taxonomist, and sexologist Alfred Kinsey shocked Americans when he published his respective reports on male and female sexuality and reported that people had sex—lots of it, and in many different configurations. With massive quantities of data, the Kinsey reports documented the wide gap between what Americans did and what they said they did.
Kinsey argued that sexuality was best defined as a continuum with his zero to six scale, with exclusive heterosexuality at one end, exclusive homosexuality at the other, and shades of bisexuality in between. His studies showed that same-sex sexual behavior and fantasies were, if not common, at least significantly present among both men and women in the American population.
Kinsey’s zero to six scale and the 10 percent figure loosely describing the instances of homosexual expression, desire, and fantasy (alone or as well as heterosexual expression, desire, and fantasy) in the general population were among the reasons that the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders in the DSM in 1973.
Kinsey popularized conversations about sex and sexuality at a time when there was a calculated targeting of lesbians and gay men as sexually subversive (known as the “Lavender Scare”), the continuing listing of homosexuality as a mental illness in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), and an uneasy silence on broader questions of what was “normal.”
The two decades following the World War II period were a study in contrasts between highly visible dominant cultural norms and ideals, the lived experiences of many Americans, and the emerging social movements that formed resistance to many of these norms. The 1950s witnessed the emergence of the lesbian and gay homophile movement, through organizations such as the Daughters of Bilitis (lesbians) and the Mattachine Society (gay men). The chapters of each of these that formed in a variety of places across the country established themselves as a counterpoints to the military purges of LGBTQ people after World War II.
The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950 by Harry Hay and others in Los Angeles, California. Early meetings were held at his homes in the Hollywood Hills and Silver Lake neighborhoods. The Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) were formed in 1955 after a meeting of women including Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon (often credited as founding the DOB) at the home of Filipina Rose Bamburger in San Francisco. In the 1950s and 1960s, the DOB and the Mattachine Society had offices in the Williams Building, 693 Mission Street, San Francisco, California. The building also housed the offices of Pan Graphic Press, one of the first small gay presses in the United States, who printed (among other things) the monthly Mattachine Review and the DOB monthly, The Ladder.
Those organizations took hold at the height of what is commonly referred to as the Lavender Scare: witch hunts and mass firings of homosexuals who, as potential traitors and communists, were seen as moral and political subversives that had to be contained lest they undermine the American ideal of the white, middle class, heterosexual nuclear family. In other words, the 1950s political and popular rhetoric directly linked the survival of democracy to the suppression of LGBTQ life and visibility.
The Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) supported LGBTQ people through those difficult times by lobbying with local government officials for equal rights, creating spaces where people could come together and discuss the issues most pressing to them, and by publishing newsletters and other mailings to communicate relevant information to the community.
Guides to gay tolerant and gay friendly bars, restaurants, and hotels appeared in the 1950s. In the 50s and 60s they carried explicit warnings about entrapment and potential violence.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover is reported to have met his long-time male companion, FBI Associate Director Clyde Tolson, at the Mayflower almost every workday for almost forty years. Upon Hoover’s death, Tolson inherited his estate, including Hoover’s home in the Forest Hills neighborhood of Washington, DC. While Tolson and Hoover were acknowledged to be very close, historians debate whether Hoover had sexual relationships with men.
Actor Rock Hudson, leading man and heartthrob of postwar America was one of many semi-closeted gay men, bisexuals, and lesbians in Hollywood (insiders knew who was gay, but the general public did not). In 1955, Hudson married his agent’s secretary, Phyllis Gates, just as Confidential magazine threatened to publicly expose Hudson’s homosexuality. They divorced three years later. When Hudson revealed in July of 1985 that he had AIDS, he was the first public figure to do so; he died less than three months later. His disclosure sparked an immediate national discussion about AIDS and HIV—something that had, until then, been missing.
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