#pre-stonewall

[uptownlowdown]

black butch lesbian ira jeffries (far right) next to her femme girlfriend snowbaby, her mother bonita jeffries, and other friends, 1948.

source: dressingdykes

[femmepathy]

Stormé DeLarverie singing "There Will Never Be Another You" in Michelle Parkerson's "Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box" (1987)

full doc available now on the internet archive!

[hootenanie]

covers from gay spy genre spoof pulp series The Man From C.A.M.P., illustrated by Robert Bonfils

written by "godfather of modern popular gay fiction" Victor J. Banis (under the pen name Don Holliday) between 1966 and 1968, the nine book series follows the adventures of globetrottering superspy Jackie Holmes as he solves mysteries, seduces men, and faces off against C.A.M.P.'s militantly homophobic archenemy organisation B.U.T.C.H.

[california-slow-take]

Legendary Author John Rechy Recalls L.A.'s Oft-Forgotten Gay Uprising

According to the 88-year-old, LGBTQ history is more complex than pre-Stonewall and post-Stonewall

Rechy was born in El Paso, Texas, to parents who had migrated from Mexico. A veteran of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, he graduated from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) on a journalism scholarship, and then moved to New York to pursue his studies in creative writing. He discovered Times Square, and chose to pursue the vagabond life of a hustler, telling The L.A. Review of Books that he wanted to be known as “a writer with a unique life who has transformed that life into literature.”

In City of Night, Rechy recounts the history of what he called the “world of Lonely-Outcast America.” The novel doubles as a lightly fictionalized chronicle of L.A.’s gay history. It is a firsthand account, written in a streetwise stream-of-consciousness style of a lost world of gay bars, hotels, and meeting places of all kinds, a community ominously referred to as a “homosexual underworld” whose existence was as ubiquitous as it was rarely acknowledged in print.

In a recent phone interview in advance of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, Rechy spoke about a life lived on the brink of panic on the streets, gay pride, the constant threat from LAPD and its vice squad, unheralded acts of gay resistance, and why he still bristles at the term post-Stonewall.

[pierrotwrites-hc]

“Charles, what in the world’s happening at your college? Is there a circus? I’ve seen everything except elephants. I must say the whole of Oxford has become most peculiar suddenly. Last night it was pullulating with women. You’re to come away at once, out of danger. I’ve got a motor-car and a basket of strawberries and a bottle of Château Peyraguey—which isn’t a wine you’ve ever tasted, so don’t pretend. It’s heaven with strawberries.” Evelyn Waugh giving us all a master class in queer-coding.

[outweek30]

Many Days of Courage

I want to talk about courage this afternoon — as we gather here today to commemorate that special courage that has come to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion. But before that explosive night in Greenwich Village 20 years ago, gay people were not just a silent people, were not just a submissive people. I know this from my own gay life, which started in the late ’50s, and from the voices that I live with in the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

Being a lesbian in this city in the ’50s challenged all my fears and shaped all my liberation politics. Whether it was taking my allotted amount of toilet paper in the bathroom line at the Sea Colony, or walking past the Women's House of Detention on a hot summer night and hearing the desperate cries of incarcerated lesbian lovers, or holding on to my butch's arm in the back room of a bar so she would not be goaded by the police taunts into a battle that would leave her bloody, I was deeply educated in the power of the state to control and dehumanize our lives. But in the face of this constant police surveillance and social bigotry went a thousand acts of lesbian courage.

Listen to this pre-Stonewall lesbian voice: "Things back then were horrible, and I think that because I fought like a man to survive I made it somehow easier for the kids coming out today, I did all their fighting for them. I'm not a rich person; I don't even have a lot of money; I don't even have a little money. I would have nothing to leave nobody in this world, but I have that, that I can leave the kids who are coming out now, who will come out in the future, that I left them a better place to come out into. And that's all I have to offer, to leave them. But I wouldn't deny it; even though I was getting my brains beaten up I would never stand up and say, ‘No, don't hit me, I'm not gay, I'm not gay.’ I wouldn't do that."

This is not the voice of a so-called famous lesbian woman, it is the voice of our everyday courage before Stonewall. It is a voice preserved because of the gay and lesbian history movement in this country, in this case the work of Liz Kennedy and Madeline Davis of Buffalo, New York. The Lesbian Herstory Archives is alive with stories of daily resistance from the ’50s and before: the butch woman who sewed lace on her socks so she would not be arrested for impersonating a man, the fem who took her lover's arm in the street marking them both as homos, the masculine looking woman who would not change her appearance even though no one would ride with her in the elevator of her early ’60s New Jersey housing project, the gay lovers who rode the subway to Riis Park and faced the taunts and fists of outraged spectators as they played in the sun, the early members of the homophile organizations that took on the McCarthy witchhunts, the early bar goers who carved out public territory for their own kind, and so many more small stories of a huge bravery.

But you know these stories because every step of coming out that each of you has taken in your lives — these are all Stonewalls, all moments of courageous resistance to homophobic tyranny.

We are not a people of one great moment of history, we are a people whose courage has been tested through the generations. Stonewall is a marker for a movement, a public political stance, and as such it heralded all the braveries of the ’70s and now. But gay courage was not born that day, and its form was not fixed that day; our history of courage is a complex thing, as complex as our lives and the conditions under which we live them. In the coming years, we will be called upon to find our courage time and time again, not just the courage of our public spokespeople, or ACT UP members, or our cultural workers, but every one of us who pursues the dignity and pleasure of our same sex touch.

An understanding of this rich and varied heritage of resistance will create bonds between us that their fists and laws cannot subdue; it will strengthen our alliances between ourselves as we work in different ways for sustained political and cultural change; it will guide us as we build our own institutions. Our courage, both individual and communal, is not the legacy of just one day nor of one decade; it has no single voice or face, no one membership card and because of this, we all can be creators of our history of liberation.

The one demand that is made on us is to be seen and heard for what we are — women who make love with women and men who make love with men. As we gather in greater and greater numbers so do those who hate us, those who would watch us die rather than touch our bodies, those who call our art a moral pollutant and want it pulled from their museums, those who want us to be sexually controlled and domesticated and yet declare our relationships illegal. Our most courageous answer to this barrage of exclusion is to go on living our lives without betrayal of our diversity, of our knowledge of our people's history and our way of loving. You are the spirit of Stonewall; you, your faces, words, touches are the living legacy of our people's history. "But I wouldn't deny it; even though I was getting my brains beaten up I would never stand up and say, ‘No, don't hit me, I’m not gay, I'm not gay.’ I wouldn't do that."

— Joan Nestle, speech given at the Celebration 20! pride rally in Central Park on June 24th, 1989, as printed in OutWeek Magazine No. 3, July 10, 1989, p. 28.

[makingqueerhistory]

So you said queer history didn't start with Stonewall, which is not even surprising at all. However, that's all I've ever been told, so I don't know anything about the time before Stonewall. Do you have a tag, a masterpost, or some articles or something for me to read so I can learn about queer history before Stonewall? And I'm sorry if this comes off as rude or anything; I just genuinely want to learn the untold history of the community I'm a part of. Thanks 😊

First, thank you for coming to us, you didn’t come off as rude at all. 

Well, we don’t have a tag or masterpost, but I can create a list of articles we have up at this point (May 14, 2018) that focuses on queer subjects from before Stonewall.

Sappho, the Poetess

Kristina, King of Sweden

Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, and Occam's Razor

Josephine Baker, a Woman with Eclectic Talents

Queer Women and AFAB People During the Holocaust

Magnus Hirschfeld, the Founder

Institute of Sexology, a Place of Learning

San Domino, Gay Island

The Bitten Peach and the Cut Sleeve

The End of the World War 2 Series

Vita Sackville-West: Creating a Legacy

Langston Hughes: the Poet

The Marriage of Jane and Paul Bowles

Bjornstjerne Bjornson, the Advocate

Osh-Tisch, the Warrior

The Trials of Oscar Wilde

Sir Ewan Forbes, the Doctor

Frida Kahlo: Lover of Self and Others

Albert D.J. Cashier

The Golden Orchid

Queen Christina, Queer Codes and Queer Coding (Part 2)

Queen Christina, Queer Codes and Queer Coding(Part 1)Different from the Others, the Beginning

The Story of the Ladies of Llangollen

Wilfred Owen: Dating Your Heroes (And Writing Through Hard Times)

Virginia Woolf: Struggling (And Never Being Perfect)

Tamara de Lempicka's Legacy

Tamara de Lempicka's Life

Federico Garcia Lorca: Words that Scared a Country

Bricktop, and the Happy Ending

Bricktop, the Fabulous

Frank Kameny

Sophia Parnok, Russia's Sappho

Annemarie Schwarzenbach

Alan L. Hart, Part 2

Alan L. Hart, Part 1

Defining Identities in North America, Part 2

Defining Identities in North America, Part 1

Alan Turing

Hatshepsut

Hamish Henderson

Elagabalus, the Empress

Billy Tipton and the Question of Gender

Takatāpui

Yukio Mishima

Kitty Genovese

Catherine Bernard: A question in studying asexual history

György Faludy

Edward Carpenter

Dawn Langley Hall

Zimri-Lim, King of Mari

Coccinelle

Lesbia Harford

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Frieda Belinfante Part 2 

Frieda Belinfante Part 1

Eleanor Rykener

Redefining the Dandy: The Asexual Man of Fashion

I hope this helps! 

[baldwinpdf-archive]

this week: lesbians (1965)