HOMOPHILE MOVEMENT DEMONSTRATIONS

Over the course of the twentieth century, LGBT people led and participated in countless political demonstrations in the United States (including the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which was organized by Bayard Rustin). The first documented demonstration for LGB rights, however, occurred in New York City on 19 September 1962, when, according to Martin Duberman, Craig Rodwell and Randy Wicker organized a picket line in front of the military draft board on Whitehall Street. (Some sources date this demonstration as having taken place in 1963 or 1964, but Duberman indicates that it took place in 1962.) The purpose of the demonstration was to protest the board's policy of releasing information on sexual orientation to employers. Eight people picketed: Rodwell and Renee Cafiero, who were members of the Mattachine Society of New York, a local homophile group; Cafiero's lover Nancy Garden; Wicker, the founder of the Homosexual League of New York; Wicker's lover Peter; Jefferson Poland, the founder and leader of the New York League for Sexual Freedom; and Poland's girlfriend and her baby. After walking back and forth in front of the building, handing out flyers to passersby in the rain, and receiving minimal attention, the group of three gay men, two lesbians, one straight man, one straight woman, and one child concluded the first known LGB demonstration.

Rodwell and Wicker organized the 1962 demonstration against the wishes of the Mattachine Society of New York, which was concerned about negative public reaction, police backlash, and political repression. In 1965, however, some segments of the national homophile movement, frustrated by the slow pace of change, influenced by the militant politics of the civil rights movement, and led by Washington, D.C., activist Frank Kameny and Philadelphia activist Barbara Gittings, began to support the adoption of direct action tactics (including pickets, demonstrations, and sit-ins). John D'Emilio writes that on 17 April 1965, following reports that the Cuban government was rounding up gay men and imprisoning them in labor camps, the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., sponsored a small demonstration at the White House to protest both U.S. and Cuban anti-LGB policies. On 18 April, a similar demonstration, sponsored by Mattachine New York, was held at the United Nations building in New York. Soon thereafter, on 29 May, Mattachine Washington held a demonstration at the White House. In June, East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO), made up of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) New York chapter, the Janus Society of Philadelphia, and the Mattachine Societies of New York and Washington, voted to organize a series of demonstrations, including one at the Civil Service Commission building in Washington on 26 June and one at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July. Marc Stein writes that 44 people, about one-quarter female, participated in the latter. According to D'Emilio, similar demonstrations took place later that year at the Pentagon (31 July), the State Department (28 August), and the White House (23 October).

As the locations of the demonstrations suggest, the main targets of these actions were anti-LGB government policies, and specifically discrimination in federal employment and the military. But as Duberman and Stein have argued, the homophile demonstrators criticized government policies not by attacking American values but by affirming them. Signs such as the one that read "Civil Service Commission is Un-American" and references in press releases and flyers to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution, and the Founding Fathers presented the homophile protestors as American patriots. What is particularly striking about this is that this was precisely the moment in history when black power, student, and antiwar protests in the United States were increasingly adopting anti-American rhetoric. Duberman and Stein have also called attention to the conservatism of the dress code imposed by organizers on the picket lines: women were required to wear dresses, men were required to wear business suits, white shirts, and ties. Attempting to challenge stereotypical views of mannish lesbians and feminine gay men and receive maximum favorable publicity in the mainstream press, homophile leaders such as Kameny and Gittings insisted on conformity with conventional gender values as they deployed strategies of what Stein has labeled "militant respectability."

While initial public reaction was minimal, in large part because of a lack of press coverage, homophile activists criticized the demonstrations from various perspectives. Some (including Rodwell) objected to the primary focus on federal employment; others (such as New York's Dick Leitsch) were critical of the dress code. While DOB New York members such as Ernestine Eckstein supported the demonstrations, the DOB national leadership did not, thinking that this was a premature step. Within days of ECHO's June decision to organize demonstrations, DOB withdrew from the regional federation. Nevertheless, militantly respectable homophile demonstrations continued.

Meanwhile, LGBT people began adopting other, more confrontational direct action tactics. On 25 April, after 150 people, many LGBT and many "wearing nonconformist clothing," were refused service at Dewey's restaurant on 17th Street in Philadelphia, two teenage boys and one teenage girl staged an impromptu sit-in. The three were promptly arrested by police, as was local homophile leader Clark Polak, who had come to their assistance. After the four were found guilty of disorderly conduct, the Janus Society, defending the rights of the "masculine woman and the feminine man," organized a five-day demonstration, which culminated in another sitin on 2 May. Janus claimed that it helped achieve "an immediate cessation of all indiscriminate denials of service" (Stein, pp. 245–246).

After 1965, homophile and transgender protests continued. In 1966, the July Fourth demonstration at Independence Hall became the "Annual Reminder." About 50 conservatively dressed homophile activists marched in 1966, 25–30 in 1967, 75 in 1968, and 45–150 in 1969. Nationally coordinated homophile demonstrations protesting the exclusion of homosexuals from the military took place on Armed Forces Day (21 May) in 1966. Although the details remain murky, in August 1966 another type of confrontational demonstration occurred when transgendered youth, queens, gay hustlers, and others rioted to protest police arrests at Compton's cafeteria in San Francisco's Tenderloin. In the same year, homophile activists in San Francisco who had been denied permission to set up an information booth at the state fair in Sacramento distributed 10,000 leaflets outside the entrance. In 1968, San Francisco LGB people picketed the city's federal office building to protest federal employment discrimination, military discrimination, and laws against private consensual sex. In the late 1960s, Los Angeles picketers protested rules prohibiting entertainers from cross-dressing during performances. The final Annual Reminder in Philadelphia took place just a few weeks after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which launched a new era in LGBT history.

Bibliography

D'Emilio, John. Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983.

Duberman, Martin. Stonewall . New York: Dutton 1993.

Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. "MTF Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966-1975." GLQ 4:2 (1998): 349-372.

Stein, Marc. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Suran, Justin David. "Coming Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam." American Quarterly 53:3 (September 2001): 452-488.

Thompson, Mark (editor). Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate History of the Gay and Lesbian Movement . New York: St. Martin's, 1994.

see alsoantiwar, pacifist, and peace movements; homophile movement; janus society; new york; philadelphia; rights of association and assembly.