Gay Rights in the 1960s
In honor of Pride Month, I'm publishing this guest essay written by my 82-year-old friend, Karla Heuer.
On this last day of Pride Month, I’m sharing a beautifully researched piece by my client (and now dear friend), Karla Heuer. Karla, 82 years young, is a spitfire of wisdom and kindness. I aspire to be like Karla in every way.
For the past several months, Karla showed up here at Writers’ Haven with her laptop and determination, climbing to a small office on the 3rd floor and getting down to work.
I didn’t know the details of her project, but I saw the dedication and commitment she brought to her research and her writing.
All I knew was that she was preparing to deliver a presentation to The Pierian Club — now in its 133rd year. The club, founded in 1891, was created to “provide women an opportunity for ‘mutual self-improvement’ through literary study and intellectual discourse at a time when higher education for women was not readily available.”
Karla and her granddaughter, Tessa (another client) often come to Writers’ Haven together to work on their personal pieces. Tessa’s been working on a novel, and Karla’s recent efforts focused on the presentation below: Gay Rights in the 1960s.
I asked Karla if I could see her presentation when it was complete — and I’m just blown away. In honor of Pride Month, and with Karla’s permission, I’m sharing her presentation here.
Gay Rights in the 1960s
by Karla L. Heuer
Presented at the Pierian Club Meeting, May 13, 2024*
There were no Gay Rights in the 1960s. Persons who were sexually or romantically attracted to people of their own sex or gender—homosexuals—were forbidden by law to convey their sexuality in words or gestures and conduct. They, along with bisexual, transgender, and other “queer” people, were subject to public hostility and legal prosecution. They routinely suffered humiliation, harassment, violence, arrest, and jailing. They were widely denied protection against discrimination in employment, housing, the military, and public and private services.
In fact, the word “gay” to refer to homosexuals was not used. Words like “deviant,” “pervert,” “faggot,” that expressed contempt for and disgust with homosexuals were more common. The United States Government introduced terms for homosexuals that included "moral weaklings," "sexual misfits," "moral risks," "misfits," "undesirables," and “persons with unusual morals.”
Two mid-century events had significant negative effects on the lives and security of homosexuals in the United States. These were the definition of homosexuality as a mental illness and the Lavender Scare.
APA DEFINITION OF HOMOSEXUALITY
In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) published the first Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Because of its classification of certain types of sexual behaviors as mental disorders, the DSM became a “fairly reliable map of the current moral hierarchy of sexual activities.”1 Reflecting the popular moral views of the time, the first edition of the manual classified homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance.”
In the second edition, published in 1968, the DSM reclassified homosexuality as a sexual deviation, continuing to label homosexual types of behaviors as abnormal. Because it was supposedly based on scientific findings, the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder by the APA had a huge impact on the homosexual community as well as on the general public’s view of homosexuality.
THE LAVENDER SCARE
The Lavender Scare was “a moral panic about homosexual people in the United States government which led to their mass dismissal from government service during the mid-20th century.”2 It contributed to and paralleled the anti-communist campaign, known as McCarthyism. Many assumptions about homosexuals mirrored common beliefs about communists. Both were thought to be morally weak or psychologically disturbed, both were seen as godless, both purportedly undermined the traditional family, both were assumed to recruit, and both were shadowy figures with a secret subculture.
The Lavender Scare attack on homosexuals was based on the unfounded fear that homosexual men and lesbians posed a threat to national security. As communists or communist sympathizers and persons of weak moral character, they were vulnerable to blackmail.
In 1953, President Dwight D, Eisenhower signed Executive Order 10450, which set security standards for federal employment and barred homosexuals from working in the federal government. The restrictions set in place were cause for hundreds of gay people to be forcibly outed and fired from the State Department initially. In addition, the executive order caused the firing of approximately 5,000 gay people from throughout the federal government. This included private contractors and military personnel. Not only did the victims lose their jobs, but they were also forced out of the closet and thrust into the public eye as lesbian or gay.
The ousting and outing of homosexuals happened through open Senate hearings, which eventually reached into all agencies of the federal government. The first inquiry was under the auspices of a two-man Senate subcommittee of the Subcommittee on Appropriations for the District of Columbia. The second, larger investigation was assigned to the Investigation Subcommittee of the Senate's Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments.
The committees first contacted a wide range of federal agencies to ascertain the number of suspected homosexuals investigated or removed from employment and to inquire about the agency's related policies and procedures and its general stance on the suitability of gay employees. A questionnaire went out to all branches of the military plus 53 civilian departments and agencies, ranging from the large and prominent—for example, State, Treasury, and Justice—to the small and obscure—for example, the American Battle Monument Commission and the Philippine War Damage Commission. Committee investigators then interviewed agency officials and summarized these conversations in memoranda to the Senate.
In the course of their subsequent open hearings, the senators heard testimony from the head of the DC Metropolitan Police Department's vice squad. He claimed that 5,000 homosexuals lived in DC and that about 3,700 of them were federal employees. These figures were highly speculative but dramatic and widely reported by the press.
To survey how same-sex offenses were being handled elsewhere, the committee sent questionnaires to police and prosecutors in 10 of the nation's largest cities. It also held conferences with police officials in Baltimore, New York City, and Philadelphia.
In all, as many as 10,000 people suspected of being homosexual were fired or resigned under threat. An untold number of homosexual men and women committed suicide under the shame and fear of being labeled homosexual.
In the wake of the well-publicized sweep of homosexuals from federal employment and with the weight of the United States Congress behind it, the Lavender Scare normalized persecution of homosexuals through bureaucratic institutionalization of homophobia. The public followed the federal government, and homosexuals regularly lost their jobs in the private sector. Another result of what has been called the “Pervert Elimination Campaign” was the shift in attitudes towards intolerance and criminalization of homosexual women and men, along with bisexuals, transexuals, and others, in public spaces.
This period in history, which continued with the Cold War throughout the 1960s, has been called “the worst time to be queer in the United States.”3
GAY BARS
Shunned as they were by the broader culture, LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and/or questioning) people were eager for any spot where they could come together. “Historically, gay bars played a central role in helping queer individuals find friends, lovers and a sense of community, according to Lucas Hilderbrand, in The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After.4 He explains:
For generations, they were more than just bars; they represented a rite of passage. Coming out meant going out, and gay bars provided the space for affirming identities and forging connections with kindred strangers. They also became sites to address critical political issues, from police harassment to sexism and racism.5
At the same time that gay bars were convivial gathering spots, places of refuge where patrons could express themselves openly and socialize, they were flashpoints for the criminalization of same-sex conduct.6 Gay bars were essentially illegal because the mere gathering of homosexuals was considered disorderly.
Like all other bars, gay bars were also subject to state liquor authorities. These government bodies in most states penalized and shut down establishments that served alcohol to known or suspected homosexual individuals. Not until the second half of the 1960s—1966 in New York state, for example—did states begin to permit the sale of alcohol to homosexuals. Bars were frequent targets of police raids, and a liquor license might be revoked if officers caught patrons in certain acts.
With 50 states came as many as 50 different laws and many more local ordinances. For example, in 1967, Miami prohibited issuing liquor licenses to establishments that employed homosexuals, sold liquor to homosexuals, or allowed two or more homosexuals to congregate on the premises. This ordinance was upheld in a court ruling, which declared that it functioned to prevent “persons likely to prey upon the public”7 from recruiting other people for illegal acts.
Police raids on gay bars were frequent and perilous. It was common for police to punch, kick, shove, beat, and otherwise rough up and aggressively manhandle patrons in the process of arresting them. In addition to allegations related to sodomy laws, homosexuals could be charged with vagrancy, loitering, lewd acts, and wearing a disguise—that is, dressing in drag. Those arrested often had personal information, such as their pictures, names and addresses, and places of employment, published in local newspapers, leading to the loss of jobs and relationships.
Sodomy laws were still on the books in 49 states (Illinois became the first to decriminalize homosexuality in 1962), so a group of gay people in public was practically a criminal conspiracy. People engaging in gay behavior in public—holding hands, kissing, or dancing with someone of the same sex—was illegal in every state. Consequently, police harassment of gay bars continued throughout the 1960s.
RESISTANCE
The decade of the 1960s was one of the most tumultuous and divisive in world history. The decade was one of military, ideological, and social revolution. It was a time of sweeping movements. The era in the United States was marked by the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and antiwar protests, and countercultural movements. Protesters demanded women's rights, racial equality, justice for all, and world peace. A climate of “enough is enough” prevailed on many fronts.
Finally, homosexuals burst out with their own enough is enough. All the years of discrimination and vilification, all the firings, all the humiliations, all the name callings, all the raids and beatings and arrests and publication of personal information in the local press, and all the public scorn were enough. Here and there they couldn’t and wouldn’t take it anymore.
A few examples follow.
In August 1966, a group of transwomen in San Francisco stood up to police inside Gene Compton’s Cafeteria.8 The cafeteria was an all-night restaurant in the Tenderloin neighborhood and a favorite hangout of transgender and gender nonconforming residents of the district. The riot was a response to the violent and constant police harassment of drag queens and transpeople, particularly transwomen.
Fed up with the intimidation, persecution, and abuse, a transwoman threw a cup of coffee in an officer’s face, sparking a chaotic uprising that was an unprecedented moment of trans resistance to police violence. Over two days the rioters smashed all the window of a police car, set fires, and picketed the restaurant for its collusion with police. The Compton's Cafeteria riot marked the beginning of transgender activism in San Francisco but it did not spread beyond the city.
Another incident, this one in Los Angeles, mobilized activists in response to police raids on gay bars. Their frustration came to a head following a raid on a New Year’s Eve ball on January 1, 1967, and the Black Cat bar became the site of what was, at the time, the largest documented LGBTQ+ civil rights demonstration in the nation. The demonstration took place on Feb. 11 in response to the New Year’s Eve raid. Like the raid, the demonstration attracted significant media coverage.
According to a local gay newspaper Tangents, Black Cat was “happy and hopping. . .. There were colored balloons covering the ceiling. . .and three glittering Christmas trees." Moments later, "all hell broke loose."9 Undercover officers from the LAPD arrived and started beating patrons as they were ringing in the New Year, exchanging celebratory kisses and embraces.
During the struggle, patrons were pummeled with night sticks and dragged out of the bar and into the street. Two bartenders were beaten unconscious. The officers mistook the manager, a woman named Lee Roy, for a man (named "Leroy") wearing a dress, and beat her severely. Some patrons fled to another nearby gay bar, but the police chased and arrested them. The officers ultimately arrested 14 patrons for assault and public lewdness—that is, kissing.
At the demonstration the next month, 400 activists gathered outside the bar in peaceful protest of police brutality and discriminatory laws and procedures. The demonstration again attracted the media, garnered heterosexual support, and is credited with galvanizing local activists.
That demonstration played a role in the founding of the leading national LGBTQ+ magazine, The Advocate. The associated court case related to the baseless lewd conduct allegations of patrons from the New Year’s Eve raid is legally significant as the first time in U.S. history that gay men were defended in a court case as equal under the Constitution, though the courts disagreed at the time.
While the Black Cat demonstration garnered support from heterosexual activists for Chicano and Black civil rights, no further coordination occurred, and the event was not commemorated. Its anniversary passed without remembrance.
An unrelated case in Los Angeles was a vigil held on the one-year anniversary of the night the LAPD police beat a gay man to death in front of the Dover Hotel, but this 120-person-strong rally and march to the police station was not repeated on the next anniversaries or inspire activists in other cities.
When police descended on another Los Angeles nightclub, The Patch, patrons struck back immediately, marching to city hall to lay flowers, singing the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” It was August 1968 and the bar was packed with gay men and women when vice squad officers burst in, followed by a phalanx of six LAPD officers, demanding IDs and making several arbitrary arrests. For the owner Lee Glaze it was an enough-is-enough moment.
Outraged, Glaze impulsively leapt on stage, grabbed the microphone, and yelled "It's not against the law to be homosexual and it's not a crime to be in a gay bar!" He called for the patrons to chant, "Fight for your rights" and "We are Americans too!" He told them that he and The Patch management would underwrite the cost to bail anyone arrested out of jail and pay their attorney fees. Glaze then led the crowd to the flower shop up the street and he bought out all the flowers (excluding pansies) and gave them out to all the demonstrators before he led them on a 3:00am "flower power" demonstration at the Harbor Division Police Station.
The Rev. Troy Perry was present during the raid, and it inspired him to form the Metropolitan Community Church, LA’s first house of worship with ministry for LGBTQ+ people.
But its anniversary passed without remembrance.
Activists were busy on the East Coast too. In Washington, DC, LGBTQ+ veterans chose the Pentagon as their place to picket, making it onto national television with signs reading, “Homosexual citizens want to serve their country too.” Subsequent demonstrations targeted the White House and the offices of Federal agencies.
In New York City in 196610, three men walked into a bar. In Julius, a cozy bar in Greenwich Village, they approached the bartender, proclaimed they were homosexual, and requested a drink. They were promptly denied service. Their “Sip-In” had begun. The trio had accomplished their goal; they demonstrated that bars in the city discriminated against LGBTQ+ people. The practice of refusing service to gay people in bars was common, although it was more veiled than discriminatory legislation like Jim Crow laws in the South that forced racial segregation.
Using the successful model of the sit-ins of the civil rights movement, the leadership of the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society decided to stage a “Sip-In.” Once identified homosexuals were denied service, the Mattachine Society—with the support of the American Civil Liberty Union in New York—could move forward with action against the State Liquor Authority.
As expected, the State Liquor Authority denied the discrimination claim, responding that the decision to serve or refrain from serving individuals was up to bartenders. Soon after, the Commission on Human Rights got involved, claiming that homosexuals had the right to be served in bars, and the discriminatory policy by the State Liquor Authority no longer viewed homosexuals as “disorderly.” Afterwards, gay patrons were allowed a freedom that they hadn’t experienced before.
None of these actions inspired commemoration, locally or in other cities, however.
STONEWALL
And then there was Stonewall.
The Stonewall Inn was an abysmal, third-rate, mob-owned bar in New York’s Greenwich Village where “Enough is enough” galvanized its patrons and neighborhood residents into furious action. Unlike all previous rebellions and demonstrations, it became the catalyst for the full-blown Gay Rights Movement.
Yet another police raid caused the revolt at the Stonewall Inn. At 1:20am on Saturday, June 28, 1969, four plainclothes policemen in dark suits and two patrol officers in uniform arrived at the Stonewall Inn and announced, "Police! We're taking the place.”11 A few patrons began to run for the door and even the windows in the bathrooms. The police barred these escape routes.
Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any people appearing to be physically male and dressed as women would be arrested.12 Those dressed as women that night refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification. The police decided to take everyone present to the police station. They forcefully pushed or kicked some patrons out of the bar.
Outside a large crowd—most of whom were homosexual— had gathered. More people and more people joined The original spirited mood began to sour. A scuffle broke out when a woman in handcuffs was shoved from the bar to the waiting police wagon several times. She escaped repeatedly and fought with four of the police, swearing and shouting. One officer clubbed her on the head and another officer picked her up and heaved her into the back of the wagon. In that instant, the crowd became a mob and spun into violence. Within minutes, a total riot involving hundreds of people began. Some police officers, a few prisoners and a Village Voice writer barricaded themselves in the bar, which the mob soon set on fire after breaching the barricade repeatedly. Bricks, rocks, garbage, and garbage cans were hurled at the building. A parking meter was uprooted and used as a battering ram on the building.
Reinforcements had arrived and a full-on battle developed. Garbage was set on fire and lobbed about. As projectiles flew at them, the police lashed out. The throng, which totally outnumbered the police, fought back. As the police tried to scatter the crowd, they turned and chased the police through the streets. Later a column printed in Screw, declared that "massive crowds of angry protesters chased [the police] for blocks!”
The total chaos continued for nearly three hours. Eventually the fire department and a riot squad were able to douse the flames, rescue those inside Stonewall, and disperse the crowd. But the protests, sometimes involving thousands of people, continued in the area for four more nights.
Multiple accounts of the rebellion assert that there was no preplanning or apparent cause for the riot; it was completely spontaneous.
We all had a collective feeling like we'd had enough. . .. It wasn't anything tangible anybody said to anyone else, it was just kind of like everything over the years had come to a head on that one particular night in the one particular place. . .. Everyone in the crowd felt that we were never going to go back. It was like the last straw. It was time to reclaim something that had always been taken from us ... All kinds of people, all different reasons, but mostly it was total outrage, anger, sorrow, everything combined. We were really trying to break free. And we felt that we had freedom at last, or freedom to at least show that we demanded freedom. We weren't going to be walking meekly in the night and letting them shove us around—it's like standing your ground for the first time and in a really strong way and that's what caught the police by surprise. There was something in the air: freedom a long time overdue and we're going to fight for it. It took different forms, but the bottom line was, we weren't going to go away. And we didn't.13
During the siege of the Stonewall, The New York Times, the New York Post, and the Daily News all covered the riots; the Daily News placed coverage on the front page.
A NASCENT MOVEMENT
Immediately after the Stonewall Uprising in 1969 several gay liberation groups formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) to provide a voice for the newly out and newly radicalized gay community. The GLF also provided a meeting place for many activists who would go on to form other groups. The GLF borrowed tactics from and aligned themselves with black and antiwar demonstrators with the ideal that they "could work to restructure American society.” Birth pains plagued the GLF, which disbanded after a few months.
In December 1969, several people who had visited GLF meetings formed the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). The GAA was to be more orderly and entirely focused on gay issues. Their constitution began, "We as liberated homosexual activists demand the freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings."
Within six months of the Stonewall riots, activists started a citywide newspaper called Gay; they considered it necessary because the most liberal publication in the city, The Village Voice, refused to print the word “gay” in GLF advertisements seeking new members and volunteers.14 Two other newspapers were initiated within a six-week period: Come Out! and Gay Power; the readership of these three periodicals quickly climbed to between 20,000 and 25,000.
These immediate actions showed the continuing resolve born of the Stonewall Uprising. However, the most influential and lasting consequence of Stonewall and its place in launching the gay rights movement in the United States and across the world was its commemoration in New York City and beyond.
Six months after Stonewall regional activists broke with the respectable image of the Philadelphia “Annual Reminder,” which was coordinated by activists in New York, Washington, and Philadelphia. Started in 1965, LGBTQ+ activists had staged an annual picket of Independence Hall on the Fourth of July to protest state treatment of homosexuals. Soberly dressed men and women with carefully worded signs walked solemnly in front of the building where the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution had been signed.15
At a meeting in November 1969, the organizers vowed to secure a parade permit for the anniversary of the raid on the Stonewall Inn, calling it Christopher Street Liberation Day. They reached out to groups in Los Angeles and Chicago to join with parades in their cities. On June 28, 1970, the first Gay Pride marches in U.S. history were held in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Descriptions of the march in New York state that more than 2.000 people traveled 51 blocks, from Christopher Street to Central Park, and attracted national media attention. Despite fears of walking through the city with gay banners and signs, the marchers encountered little resistance from onlookers. All the New York City gay and lesbian groups participated as well as sympathetic New Yorkers, visitors, and tourists. The more than 2,000 people who joined in “transformed American public discussion of homosexuality that day.”16
The next year, Gay Pride marches took place in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Milwaukee, London, Paris, West Berlin, and Stockholm.
A true Gay Rights Movement was finally, firmly in place.
*A note from Karla Heuer: Because this paper was researched and written to be presented orally at the meeting, I did not cite sources in the paper. For inclusion in the Writers’ Haven Substack, I have gone back and tried to locate sources to create the notes found below. They are definitely incomplete.
Writers’ Haven by Christine Wolf welcomes guest contributors. Please get in touch!
Social Perspectives in Lesbian and Gay Studies: A Reader, 1998. Edited by Peter M.Nardi and Beth L. Schneider. London: Routledge.
“Lavender Scare.” Wikipedia, 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavender_Scare. Accessed June 18, 2024.
“Re-examining the 1960s, Part One” on Learning for Justice, https://www.learningforjustice.org ›queer-america. Accessed June 20, 2024.
Lucas Hildebrand, The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2023.
Ibid.
Gay Bars and Gay Rights." Jstor Daily. June 25, 2021. Daily.jstor.org. June 25, 2021. Accessed June 2024.
Case, Mary Anne, “Couples and Coupling in the Public Sphere: A Comment on the Legal History of Litigating for Lesbian and Gay Rights,” Chicago Unbound, 1993.
Compton’s Cafeteria Riot: a Historic Act of Trans Resistance.” The Guardian.com, 2019. www.theguardian.com › lifeandstyle. Accessed June 20, 2024.
“Black Cat Tavern.” Wikipedia. 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cat_Tavern. Accessed June 20, 2024.
Avery, Daniel, “LGBT Uprisings Before Stonewall.” Newsweek.com. June 23, 2019. https://www.newsweek.com/before-stonewall-riots-1445365.
“The Riot That Changed the Gay Rights Movement Forever.” The Guardian.com, 2019. www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/19/stonewall-50th-anniversary-night-that-unleashed-gay-liberation. Accessed June 21, 2024.
“Stonewall Riots.” Wikipedia, 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots. Accessed June 21, 2024.
Sullivan, Emily, “Pride and Prejudice: A History of LGBTQ+ Civil Disobedience and Protest.” History Associates, Inc.www.historyassociates.com/pride-and-prejudice. Accessed June 21, 2024.
Op. cit. Wikipedia, 2019.
Cox, Savannah. “How The Stonewall Riots Changed the Course of The Gay Rights Movement.” All That’s Interesting. Nov. 7, 2021. allthatsinteresting.com/stonewall-riots.
“Christopher Street Liberation Day 1970.” The New York Public Library. web-static.nypl.org ›exhibitions › christopher. Accessed June 21, 2024.
Writers’ Haven by Christine Wolf is a reader-supported publication. It’s published by memoir-writing coach Christine Wolf, author of Politics, Partnerships, & Power: The Lives of Ralph E. and Marguerite Stitt Church. Learn more about Christine at www.christinewolf.com.
So interesting. Thank you. I cannot imagine how awful it would have been to cope with the discrimination and criminalisation back then.