Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers

by Lillian Faderman

  When I was arrested and being thrown out

  of the military, the order went out: don’t anybody

  speak to this woman, and for those three

  long months, almost nobody did; the dayroom, when

  I entered it, fell silent til I had gone; they

  were afraid, they knew the wind would blow

  them over the rail, the cops would come,

  the water would run into their lungs.

  Everything I touched

  was spoiled. They were my lovers, those

  women, but nobody had taught us to swim.

  I drowned. I took 3 or 4 others down

  When I signed the confession of what we

  had done together.

  No one will ever speak to me again.

  —Judy Grahn on the military in the 1950s,

  “A Woman Is Talking to Death”

  The social upheaval occasioned by the war was more than many Americans could bear. The years after became an age of authority, in the hope that authority would set the country back in balance. The pronouncements of those in charge, not only in the medical profession but in government as well, were virtually sacrosanct. There was little challenge to their notion that “extreme threats,” such as the encroachments of the Soviets, required extreme solutions to weed out those who did not accept the reigning views. A breaking point in American rationality, justice, and common decency ensued. If political conformity was essential to national security, sexual conformity came to be considered, by some mystifying twist of logic by those in authority, as no less essential. In a decade of reaction, while women were sent back to the home, dissidents of every kind were deprived of their livelihoods and even packed off to jail.

  Twentieth-century American witchhunts began not long after the war. Those accused of Communism were their first target, but persecution quickly spread to other unpopular groups. Despite figures that Alfred Kinsey gathered during these years, which showed that 50 percent of American men and 28 percent of American women had what could be considered “homosexual tendencies” (that is, homoerotic interest in the same sex at some point in their adult lives), the statistical normality of same-sex love was now denied more fiercely than ever. The “homosexual” became a particular target of persecution in America. He or she presented an uncomfortable challenge to the mood that longed for obedience to an illusion of uncomplicated “morality.” Even Kinsey was suspected of being a subversive, merely because he said that so many people in his studies admitted to same-sex attractions and experiences. Dr. Edmund Bergler angrily wrote in the Psychiatric Quarterly about Kinsey’s statistics on widespread homosexuality in America that Kinsey had created a “myth of a new national disease.” That “myth” would be “politically and propagandistically used against the United States abroad, stigmatizing the nation as a whole in a whisper campaign.” Homosexuality was a detriment to the country’s image and standing in the world. As far as those who spoke for mid-twentieth-century heterosexual America were concerned, homosexuality was a love that had better not dare speak its name. The heterosexual majority tyrannized. As one writer expressed it in 1951, if homosexuality was condemned by most people in a society, then loyalty to the society demanded that good citizens support condemnation of homosexuality and the laws against it.1

  By commonly accepted (though statistically erroneous) definition, the demarcation that separated “homosexual” from “heterosexual” was now more clear than ever. Between 1947 and 1950, 4,954 men and women were dismissed from the armed forces and civilian agencies for being homosexual. In 1950, the persecution escalated. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, whose barbarous tactics set the mood of the era, began by attracting attention as a Communist witchhunter but soon saw an opportunity to broaden his field. Ironically, McCarthy’s two aides were flamingly homosexual, even flitting about Europe as an “item,” but that did not stop him from charging the State Department with knowingly harboring homosexuals and thereby placing the nation’s security at risk.2

  The Republicans decided to make political hay out of the issue. Republican National Chairman Guy George Gabrielson wrote in the official party newsletter early in 1950 that “perhaps as dangerous as the actual communists are the sexual perverts who have infiltrated our government in recent years.” By April of that year ninety-one homosexuals were fired from the State Department alone. In May 1950, New York Republican Governor Dewey accused President Truman and the Democrats of tolerating not only spies and traitors in government service, but also sexual perverts. Soon after, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee joined the attacks, recommending that homosexuals be dismissed from government jobs since they were poor security risks because of their vulnerability to blackmail.3 Just as the number of women who dared to live as lesbians was increasing during the postwar years, their persecution was increasing as well—not just because of personal prejudices against them, but as a result of national policy.

  Despite the general pretense, the concern about homosexuals in government was not primarily that they constituted a security risk because they were vulnerable to blackmail: that could have been obviated if the government simply declared that no one was to be fired on the ground of homosexuality. The concern was actually caused by discomfort with whatever was different. In fact, the Senate subcommittee admitted that there were two reasons why homosexuals should not be employed in government; that homosexuals were a security risk was only the second reason. The first was that “they are generally unsuitable,” which was explained to mean that homosexuality “is so contrary to the normal accepted standards of social behavior that persons who engage in such activity are looked upon as outcasts by society in general.” Official policy therefore became to persecute “outcasts.” That the matter of security risk was only of secondary interest is demonstrated through the committee’s recommendation that homosexuals be dismissed not only from the State Department, the military, and Congress, but also from occupations such as caretaker at the Botanical Gardens.4

  One woman who was affected by the Senate Subcommittee recommendation recalls that she was fired in 1951 from a job that had absolutely nothing to do with “national security.” She had been doing social relief work in Germany for a private agency. Like all organizations operating in occupied terrritory, the agency had to be approved by the State Department and was subject to all its regulations. Through a “security check” of her past, it was discovered that not only had this woman gone to a psychotherapist in the 1940s, but she had discussed lesbianism with him. Though she had had no lesbian experiences since she took the job in Germany and was even trying to live a heterosexual life, she was nevertheless found undesirable because of her “homosexual tendencies.” She had no recourse against her accusers. As she later observed of U.S. government tactics, “to be accused is to be guilty.”5

  The Senate also justified the government policy of harassment of homosexuals by claiming that they must be fired from government jobs because of the “lack of emotional stability which is found in most sex perverts and the weakness of their moral fiber.” The cross-fertilization of ideas between government and the medical establishment was apparent. Both were bent on sexual conformity, and neither accepted any responsibility for establishing the truth of their allegations against homosexuals. Homosexuals were condemned by the most obvious of begged questions: they were by definition perverts, which meant that they were emotionally unstable and their moral fiber was weak.6

  While homosexual men bore the brunt of sexual witchhunting by the governement, women who loved women and who dared to live lesbian lifestyles became more than incidental victims. Although statistically they lost fewer jobs than their male counterparts since there were fewer women than men employed by the government, lesbians realized that for the public “homosexual” was a scare-term: it was horrifying whether it referred to men or women. Lesbians believed, with plenty of justification, that whatever opprobrium was expressed for gay males would apply to them also and their livelihood and community stan
ding would be just as endangered if their secret were known.

  By 1951, federal agencies were using lie detectors in loyalty investigations of men and women in supposedly “sensitive” government jobs to determine whether they were either Communists or homosexuals. It was clearly the intent of the Senate, whose recommendations justified such measures, to include lesbians among those that were to be dismissed from government jobs, since the report on which the recommendation was based pointedly specified that 4 percent of the female population in the United States was lesbian. Republican floor leader of the Senate Kenneth Wherry, who was the coauthor of that report, declared that he was on a “crusade to harry every last pervert from the Federal Government services.” Under the influence of such thinking, the head of the Washington, D.C., Vice Squad requested increased appropriations, not only to hunt down male homosexuals but also to establish a “lesbian squad” to “rout out the females.” Senator Wherry explained, with some confusion, the rationale for such actions to the New York Post:

  You can’t hardly separate homosexuals from subversives…. Mind you, I don’t say every homosexual is a subversive, and I don’t say every subversive is a homosexual. But [people] of low morality are a menace in the government, whatever [they are], and they are all tied up together.7

  Such convictions about the connections between leftists and homosexuals were apparent in the nature of the interrogation that women who were under suspicion were forced to undergo. M.K., who held a high ranking civil service job in Albany, New York, tells of having been summoned to New York City by the U. S. Civil Service Commission in 1954 and being put through a four day ordeal. For the first three days she was confronted with “evidence” of her communist leanings, such as having danced with a (male) U.S.S.R. liaison officer in Seoul, Korea, when she served there a few years earlier, and having applied to visit a North Korean university. On the fourth day she was asked directly, “Are you a homosexual?” After her denial, she was informed that the government had unearthed evidence that she had lived with several women in the past and had gone overseas with one. With no better proof against her she was barred from federal government employment “for security reasons, on the grounds of moral turpitude.”8

  “Are You or Have You Ever Been a Member of a Lesbian Relationship?”

  The Senate Subcommittee report led finally to an Executive Order signed by President Eisenhower as one of his first acts in office. That Order mandated the investigation for homosexuality not only of persons in “sensitive” positions, but of any government employee and of all new applicants for positions. It permitted no judicial review. An employee who felt she was dismissed unfairly would have no recourse beyond her department. She could be fired merely on the basis of anonymous accusations. Homosexuals in state and local government jobs were harassed as well. Lesbians were particularly affected. Since so few women could become doctors or lawyers or business leaders during the 1950s, because professional schools by now generally discouraged females, middleclass lesbians were forced into those professions that were more available to them as women. They made careers in teaching and social work—government jobs in which, by virtue of sexual orientation, a lesbian broke the law every day she came to work, regardless of how good an employee she was.9

  Psychoanalysts and the government had done such a thorough job in promoting the irrational fear of homosexuality that even groups that should have seen themselves as allies because they were persecuted in the same way, and should have wanted to form a coalition to fight injustice, denounced homosexuals. Instead of banding together with homosexuals—as reactionaries accused them of doing—leftists were almost as bad in their homophobia as the government. Black lesbian poet Audre Lorde says that when in 1953 she worked on a committee to free Julius and Ethel Rosenberg she realized that the one taboo among those socially liberated people remained homosexuality:

  I could imagine these comrades, Black and white, among whom color and racial differences could be openly examined and talked about, nonetheless one day asking me accusingly, “Are you or have you ever been a member of a homosexual relationship?”

  To leftists, homosexuality was reason for suspicion and shunning not only because they deemed it—through myth and prejudice equaled only by the right—“bourgeois and reactionary,” but also because it made an individual more susceptible to the FBI.10

  Not even the bravest bastion of liberalism, the American Civil Liberties Union, dared to offer a strong defense on the lesbian’s behalf during those years. As astonishing as it may be in retrospect, the ACLU National Board of Directors affirmed in January 1957 that “homosexuality is a valid consideration in evaluating the security risk factor in sensitive positions” and made clear that unless it was an issue of entrapment or denial of due process, the ACLU was not going to fight battles on the side of homosexuals: “It is not within the province of the Union to evaluate the social validity of the laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals,” the Union declared. Although it took a liberal stand on all other issues, it literally advised lesbians that the best thing they could do would be to “abandon” their lesbianism and become heterosexual.11

  Although Sen. Joseph McCarthy was censured by the Senate in 1954 for his overly zealous witchhunting, the spirit he helped establish lived on through that decade and into the next. Homosexuals in all walks of life, not just those who worked for the government, were hunted down. Not even young college students were safe. In 1955 the dean and assistant dean of students at UCLA published an article in the journal School and Society lamenting the “attraction of colleges, both public and private, for overt, hardened homosexuals” and recommending that all “sexually deviate” students be routed out of colleges if they were unwilling to undergo psychiatric treatment to change their sexual orientation. Students entering state supported universities were obliged to take a battery of tests in which thinly veiled questions on sexual preference appeared over and over. What the authorities expected such tests to reveal is unimaginable, since homosexuals who were smart enough to get into those institutions were surely smart enough to realize that they must dissemble. The 1950s mandated that women learn to lead a double existence if they wanted to live as lesbians and yet maintain the advantages of middleclass American life such as pursuing higher education and the careers to which it led. As one midwestern woman recalls, “If anyone ever asked if you were a lesbian you knew that you needed to deny it to your dying breath.”12 They understood that if they could not develop the skill of hiding, if they were not wily enough to answer “no” to any form of the question “Are you or have you ever been …,” they would not survive as social beings.

  The popular press saw nothing objectionable in the ubiquitous harassment of homosexuals. In fact, stories of lesbian conspiracies and the dangers posed by those who were sexually “abnormal” were treated with great relish. In their scandalous Washington Confidential, for example, Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer announced that psychologists and sociologists who had “made a study of the problem” in the D.C. area believed “there are at least twice as many Sapphic lovers as fairies” and reeled off the names of several bars where lesbians sported with homosexual men, observing “all queers are in rapport with all other queers.”13

  Mass circulation magazines presented homosexuality as a chief cause of American ills in articles with titles such as “New Moral Menace to Our Youth,” in which same-sex love was said to lead to “drug addiction, burglary, sadism, and even murder.” Lesbians were presented in those magazines as “preying” on innocent “victims.” As Jet, a black magazine, characterized the lesbian in 1954, “If she so much as gets one foot into a good woman’s home with the intention of seducing her, she will leave no stone unturned … and eventually destroy her life for good.”14

  Such sensationalism was not limited to National Enquirer-type trash literature. For instance, Human Events, a weekly Washington newsletter that purported a readership of “40,000 business and professional leaders,” declared, e
choing the insanity of Senator Wherry, that homosexuals must be hunted down and purged because “by the very nature of their vice they belong to a sinister, mysterious, and efficient International, [and] members of one conspiracy are prone to join another conspiracy.”15

  If a magazine attempted to present homosexuality in a better light it was subject to censorship. In 1954 when the newly established homophile magazine One published a short story about a woman chosing to become a lesbian, “Sappho Remembered,” the Postmaster General of Los Angeles confiscated all copies of the issue that had been mailed and demanded that the publisher prove that the story was not “obscene, lewd, lascivious and filthy.” With blatantly homophobic reasoning, the federal district court upheld the Postmaster General’s decision, arguing about “Sappho Remembered”:

  This article is nothing more than cheap pornography calculated to promote lesbianism. It falls far short of dealing with homosexuality from a scientific, historic, or critical point of view…. An article may be vulgar, offensive and indecent even though not regarded as such by a particular group … because their own social or moral standards are far below those of the general community…. Social standards are fixed by and for the great majority and not by and for a hardened or weakened minority.16

  Obviously what the Court meant by “dealing with homosexuality from a scientific, historic, or critical point of view” was simply supporting the prevailing prejudice that homosexuality was diseased or sinful.

  That pulp novels with lesbian subject matter should have been permitted to proliferate during this period is not as surprising as it may seem at first glance, since they were generally cautionary tales: “moral” literature that warned females that lesbianism was sick or evil and that if a woman dared to love another woman she would end up lonely and suicidal. On the surface, at least, they seemed to confirm social prejudices about homosexuality. But despite that, many lesbians read those novels avidly.