#the deviant's war

[onebluebookworm]

30 Days of Literary Pride - June 10

The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America - Eric Cervini

[benedictusantonius]

[2021|027] The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America (2020) written by Eric Cervini

[sanguineswanqueen]

~gwen reads~

The Deviants War: The Homosexual vs The United States of America 5/5 ⭐

By Eric Cervini

A very important book detailing the history of the American gay rights movement. This book focuses primarily on Frank Kameny, one of the biggest figures in the gay civil rights movement. One of my favorite things to watch was how gay people and the gay culture want from feeling ashamed, but still needing to work and saying they should be treated well despite their deviance to realizing that being gay was good and moral and fuck everyone who says otherwise. It also touches on early conflicts such as respectability politics as well as ties between the Civil rights movement and conflicts between the women's rights movement. Clocking in at a thicc 500+ pages, this isn't a book that you can sit down with for some light reading, but I can't overstate it's importance in terms of gay cultural history.

Next up: Such a fun age by Kiley Reid

[woman-loving]

The FBI’s Sex Deviates Program

Selection from The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.

In 1933, a few months after the attorney general appointed him director of the new Division of Investigation in the Department of Justice, J. Edgar Hoover read an appalling description of himself in Collier’s magazine. Hoover, the leader of America’s “secret federal police system,” was “short, fat, businesslike,” and walked with a “rather mincing step, almost feminine.” It marked the first time anyone had put the rumors in print. The thirty-eight-year-old, unmarried Hoover still lived with his mother, and he had never been seen with a woman. The Bureau responded quickly, planting a story in Liberty magazine—the same publication delivered by a young Franklin Kameny in Queens—that described him as “170 pounds of live, virile masculinity.”

Despite the rumors, America’s growing preoccupation with sexual deviance helped Hoover grow his personal empire of surveillance, which would ultimately last forty-eight years and eight presidents. In 1935, the division became the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and its director began throwing fuel onto America’s concern about sex crimes. The “sex fiend, most loathsome of all the vast army of crime, has become a sinister threat to the safety of American childhood and Womanhood,” warned Hoover in 1937. His Bureau opened a Sex Offenders file, and across the country, police roundups of sexual deviants became the norm. The director’s “War on the Sex Criminal,” meanwhile, helped him justify a larger, better-funded Federal Bureau of Investigation.

On April 10, 1950, two months after Senator McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, a special messenger arrived at the White House to deliver a confidential letter to one of President Truman’s top advisors. The FBI, wrote Hoover, had obtained a list of 393 federal employees who had been arrested on charges of “sexual irregularities.” Within days, the FBI’s “Sex Deviates” program came into being. From then on, when the Metropolitan Police made a homosexual arrest, the department automatically forwarded the deviant’s fingerprints to the Bureau, which checked them against its files. The FBI then forwarded its information to the Civil Service Commission or the employee’s federal agency, which promptly purged the homosexual from its ranks.

Hoover’s Sex Deviates program grew from a simple clearinghouse of arrest information to a mammoth apparatus of homosexual surveillance. In June 1951, the director ordered his subordinates to begin forwarding not only arrests, but also mere allegations of homosexuality to the CSC. If federal employees had suspicions about a coworker’s sexuality, they could simply inform the FBI. The suspected homosexual would be in an interrogation room—and often without a job—within days.

The Bureau kept track of Washington’s homosexuals through a simple, elegant system. If a Bureau supervisor noticed an allegation of homosexuality in a file, the director held him “personally responsible” for underlining the deviant’s name with a green pencil. The Records section, when it saw the green underline, indexed the name accordingly, and Hoover gained one more homosexual for his vast collection of secrets.

Hoover also used the purges to strengthen his reign. To ensure that the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket won the 1952 election, he leaked allegations—that Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson had twice been arrested for homosexual activity—to Nixon, McCarthy, and the press. Sometimes, if the Bureau learned that a public official was closeted, the FBI refrained from telling that official’s agency. Instead, the Bureau stayed quiet if the official agreed to become a “listening post” for Hoover, giving the director one more set of ears to spy on political adversaries within the government. By maintaining this regime of blackmail, Hoover did not need further proof that homosexuals threatened national security. Indeed, if it was so easy for him to blackmail homosexuals, why would the Soviets not blackmail them, too?

When Hoover learned of the Mattachine Society in 1953, he ordered an investigation of the homosexual organization. The investigation yielded an extensive report, which relied upon twenty-one different informants and ultimately concluded that Communists did not control the Mattachine. But the Bureau’s list of homosexuals grew. After the Society organized its blood drive to demonstrate the upstanding nature of homosexuals, the FBI easily acquired the names of those who had donated. Over the next five years, the Bureau forwarded its fifty-three-page Mattachine report—and the names contained within—to at least ten federal agencies, which could then appropriately administer their own purges.

On July 28, 1961, two FBI agents appeared at the offices of the San Francisco Mattachine to speak with Hal Call, the organization’s chairman. Call had dissolved the Society’s national structure only weeks earlier, partially because of the rumormongering Mattachine chapter in New York. He had been in the Mattachine since the days of the Fifth Order, and he had joined Marilyn Rieger’s openness faction in 1953.

Call agreed to hand over information about other homophile activists if it would be of interest to the police. He agreed to add the Bureau to the Mattachine Review’s mailing list. And yes, Call told the special agents, the San Francisco Mattachine “would be willing to cooperate with the FBI in assisting and locating homosexuals whether they are members of the Society or not.”

[woman-loving]

First Organized Gay Demonstration at the White House

Selection from The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.

ON APRIL 15, 1965, Cuba’s state-run newspaper, El Mundo, announced that Fidel Castro’s Communist government intended to impose “revolutionary social hygiene” to address the “rampant” and “abominable” vice of homosexuality. The next day, on April 16, The New York Times carried the news. “This was understood,” it concluded, “as a warning that homosexuals would be rounded up and sent to labor camps.”

That night, [Frank] Kameny received two phone calls. First, from Dick Leitsch. In two days, on Easter Sunday, New York homosexuals would gather at the United Nations to protest the Castro regime’s announcement, said Leitsch.

Then, a call from Jack Nichols in Washington. This is the moment, the precipitating event to galvanize both homosexuals and the American public, Nichols argued. It was time for the Mattachine Society of Washington to march. [...] The Society would picket the White House, in Washington’s first organized demonstration of homosexuals, the following day. [...]

Lilli Vincenz picked up the telephone on the evening of Friday, April 16, and agreed to become the first lesbian to march at the White House for homosexual equality. [...] In April 1965, she had grown unhappy with her job and wanted to quit. The government already knew of her sexuality, so she had nothing to lose. Vincenz agreed to march.

That Friday night, seven others agreed to join Vincenz, Kameny, and Nichols. Judith Kuch, a bisexual woman, and Gail Johnson, the straight secretary who succeeded Vincenz in the role, brought the female tally to three. Jon Swanson, Paul Kuntzler, and two men with security clearances—Perrin Shaffer and Otto Ulrich—also agreed to march. Jack Nichols brought his coworker Gene Kleeberg. The Society’s president, Robert Belanger, did not attend.

Kameny disseminated the rules that night, which he summarized later that month for San Francisco’s Guy Strait. “By strict instruction, the pickets were conservatively dressed—the men in suits, ties, white shirts; the women in dresses; all well groomed.” He permitted the marchers to make their own signs, which, “of course, were cleared in advance.” Kameny’s reasoning for the dress code was simple. If you’re asking for equal employment rights, he told Nichols, look employable.

With only hours before the demonstration, Kameny contacted the Washington papers, inviting them to cover the first demonstration by a group of homosexuals at the White House. [...]

The Vietnam marchers had disappeared by 4:00 p.m., when the ten Mattachine marchers arrived to Lafayette Park. On that warm and sunny day, approximately fifty thousand tourists visited the National Mall, viewing Washington’s cherry blossoms in their fullest bloom. Late that afternoon, many were still passing by the White House.

Lige Clarke drove a borrowed convertible to drop off his boyfriend, Jack Nichols, at Lafayette Park. He then continued to the Pentagon for an afternoon shift in the Office of the Army Chief of Staff. Gail Johnson, tense and wearing high heels, arrived on the back of her boyfriend’s motorcycle. Perrin Shaffer and Otto Ulrich, the security clearance holders, arrived wearing sunglasses to conceal their identity from the press and federal investigators.

Kameny immediately began choreographing the event. The marchers would silently walk in a circle before the White House, he explained. They agreed that Jack Nichols would lead the procession.

“I was tall and an all-American sort,” Nichols later explained. Kameny would follow him.

The former astronomer ensured that the signs were logically ordered. First, Nichols carried the group’s thesis:

FIFTEEN MILLION U.S. HOMOSEXUALS PROTEST FEDERAL TREATMENT.

Next, the connection to current events.

CUBA’S GOVERNMENT PERSECUTES HOMOSEXUALS, U.S. GOVERNMENT BEAT THEM TO IT.

Then, the homosexuals’ demands.

WE WANT: FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT; HONORABLE DISCHARGES; SECURITY CLEARANCES.

GOVERNOR WALLACE MET WITH NEGROES; OUR GOVERNMENT WON’T MEET WITH US

JEWS TO CONCENTRATION CAMPS UNDER NAZIS; HOMOSEXUALS TO WORK CAMPS UNDER CASTRO

IS THE U.S. MUCH BETTER?

At 4:20 p.m., the marchers moved to a portion of the sidewalk, allocated by the police, in front of the White House fence. Tourists seemed to be everywhere. What if Nazis or regular, outraged Americans attacked the marchers? What if the police officers arrested them once they saw the messages on their signs? And the Secret Service?

For an hour, until exactly 5:20 p.m., the Mattachine Society of Washington marched in silence.

“Only a very few hostile remarks were passed by the throngs of tourists flocking and driving by,” wrote Kameny in a press release. “Much interest was shown; many pictures of signs and demonstrators were taken.” The police’s behavior was “fully satisfactory,” he continued. The Nazis never appeared.

One newspaper reported on the picket. The Washington Afro-American, on page eighteen of its April 20 issue, cited the “Governor Wallace” sign and concluded with a quote from the group’s founder. “We’re being just as much discriminated against as the colored citizen has been,” said Kameny.

Nothing had happened, and for the marchers, that was enough.

“HISTORY IN THE MAKING,” Kameny told Gittings. “I’m writing this, very very wearily, and very very contentedly, after returning home following a 10-person picketing.” Yes, Scarberry had picketed the White House first, he admitted, but that day’s march constituted Washington’s first demonstration by a homosexual organization.

They pledged to picket again, and next time, the marchers would be “immunized against fear,” as Jack Nichols later put it.

“We were going to change the world,” remembered Vincenz.

[woman-loving]

Ernestine Eppenger: A Black Homophile and Lesbian Activist

Selections from The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020.

Below is a selection about Ernestine Eppenger, who became the vice president of the New York branch of Daughters of Bilitis. While DOB is often remembered as a more cautious and respectable lesbian organization, this passage reveals that alternate visions and strategies were promoted by some members.

I also included a passage that touches on the failure of the white Mattachine Society of Washington to build meaningful solidarity with gay/bi and straight black people. This was in spite of the fact that MSW members frequently used analogies to anti-black racism and antisemitism to condemn discrimination against (white) homosexuals, and used the black freedom/civil rights movement as a model for homophile activism.

When Ernestine Eppenger moved to New York, her college best friend came out to her. Ernestine, do you know that I’m gay? he asked. Do you know the term gay?

“All of a sudden, things began to click,” she later explained. She knew others like her existed. As a black lesbian woman, she reasoned there must also exist a movement for homosexuals, something like the black freedom movement.

She had already left the NAACP in favor of the more militant, demonstration-friendly Congress of Racial Equality. “I always had the impression that the NAACP’s chief aim was to create a sort of pad for outstanding Negroes that they could get ahead,” she admitted to Barbara Gittings for a Ladder interview. It did not seem to care about the black man or woman on the street.

Eppenger soon found the DOB and joined it immediately, choosing “Ernestine Eckstein” as her pseudonym. But the DOB, she soon realized, cared too much about the individual lesbian, focusing only on social and educational events. The group had a ridiculous name, and it even eschewed picketing, which she believed to be a relatively conservative activity. After growing frustrated, Eppenger even considered starting her own lesbian organization.

But she had faith that the DOB would evolve. Someday, the DOB would embrace picketing and legal battles. Then, once all homosexuals were fighting properly for themselves, they could turn to “the question of transvestites,” as she explained to Gittings.

“I’m surprised you threw that in,” responded Gittings. “The transvestites. You mean we should think about their right to dress as they please without discrimination?”

“The homophile movement is only part of a much larger movement of the erasure of labels,” explained Eppenger. “And I think the right of a person to dress as he chooses must necessarily follow when we expand our own philosophy of bringing about change for the homosexual.”

When Eppenger learned of a homosexual picket in Philadelphia on Independence Day [1965], she agreed to march, thus becoming the first lesbian of color to march in a homophile demonstration. In October, when she learned the MSW planned to host a final picket of the White House, she agreed to march there, too. [...]

On October 23, only forty-five homophile picketers—thirty men and fifteen women—marched in a large oval outside the White House, stepping on the fallen autumn leaves. Eppenger arrived from New York wearing chic white sunglasses. DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL, said her sign. Gittings, wearing aviators, arrived from Philadelphia and carried her sign, SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT.

CBS, still shooting its documentary on homosexuality, attended the picket, as did two FBI agents. And, for the first time, the picketers encountered a counterdemonstration. Two teenaged males, separated from the homosexuals by the police, carried their own signs:

ARE YOU KIDDING?

GET SERIOUS.

After the march, the picketers walked one block to the Chicken Hut, where they ate in the restaurant/bar’s upstairs section. They discussed tactics, gossiped about the upcoming national conference, and drank.

The next month, Ernestine Eppenger won the vice presidency of the DOB’s New York chapter, gaining office as part of a militant, pro-picketing ticket. She immediately invited Kameny and Gittings to speak to the DOB-NY’s members, with the hope of getting “these people to realize there is such a thing as the homophile movement.” [...]

For two years, Barbara Gittings had worked full-time in the movement, surviving on a modest inheritance. By the summer of 1966, The Ladder looked little like the publication she had begun editing three years prior. She gave the magazine a subtitle, “A Lesbian Review,” which became larger and larger beneath The Ladder until the title and subtitle were exactly the same size. Gittings had featured three more lesbian faces on The Ladder’s cover during her editorship, including a smiling Lilli Vincenz marching at the CSC, another close-up of Vincenz, and a close-up of Ernestine Eppenger in June 1966.

That same month, the DOB’s governing board fired Gittings. Her magazine had become too militant, too pro-picketing, too provocative for the education and information-focused Daughters of Bilitis. For the first time in nearly a decade, she was cut loose from the DOB, free to take projects of her choosing. Ernestine Eppenger, frustrated in her efforts to bring militancy to the DOB chapter in New York, quit that month, too. [...]

---------

Only days after demonstrated against the war, MSW members received an “ANNOUNCEMENT OF SPECIAL SPEAKER(S) AT DECEMBER MEMBERSHIP MEETING.”

R. D. Carter Jr., a representative of the Committee for Black Economic Determinism, had written to the Society. “Our philosophy and struggle for liberation identifies with yours. We are fighting the same enemy, the value system. Values which are warped yield job discrimination, pressure on individuals because of their ideology, and oppression.”

Article II of the Society’s constitution, after the prodding of Jack Nichols in 1961, declared that the MSW would “cooperate with other minority organizations which are striving for the realization of full civil rights and liberties for all.” It was a promise “we have never meaningfully put into action,” admitted Kameny. The Society, after all, had always been white. From the beginning, Kameny had noticed the entirely white faces at the Society’s meetings, which took place in a city with a majority black population.

The executive board discussed how the Society could attract more black members, and in the early years, its members even distributed a flyer at black gay bars, titled “THE NEGRO AND THE HOMOPHILE MOVEMENT.”

“The white homosexual has only one burden. The Negro homosexual has two,” it began. “Do you know that there is someone to work with you and something to work for? You are invited specifically to join the homophile movement, composed of Negroes and whites, which is trying to improve the social status of the homosexual—of all homosexuals, black and white.” It provided the Society’s address and phone number, and it came attached to the group’s statement of purposes.

Black homosexuals never joined the MSW. “While Blacks were struggling to obtain jobs and status, Gays were struggling to maintain jobs and status,” explained one black bisexual man who lived in Washington during the 1960s. “No one was trusting anyone for fear of losing everything or never being able to obtain anything.” If African Americans risked damaging their pursuit of racial equality by attaching themselves to the homophile movement, why would they join? Black homophile activists like Ernestine Eppenger were outliers, and even she had abandoned the DOB for the black freedom movement, where she saw true progress being made.

Except for the flyer, the MSW made no major effort to attract African American members, no outreach to black organizations or civic groups, no invitations to its homophile conferences. Once, when a black man appeared at a public MSW meeting, sitting alone among a sea of white, the other members stared at him, wondering if he was a federal agent.

With the 1969 letter from the Committee for Black Economic Determinism, a straight black organization spurred the once-passive group of homosexuals to meet the constitutional promise it had made in 1961. “Let’s open some doors far too long closed!” Kameny urged his members.

On December 4, 1969, Carter spoke on behalf of his organization in the homosexuals’ St. Marks basement meeting space. “We the Committee,” he wrote, “vow our support to you in any campaign you might wage in the future.” Though Kameny had been emulating the black freedom movement for nearly a decade, a formal alliance between the two minorities, two identities that often overlapped, seemed possible at last.

After the meeting, however, Carter never heard from the homosexuals again.

[woman-loving]

As a child, [Barbara] Gittings had wanted to become a nun. Steeped in her family’s Catholicism and wealth, she glided between Mass and white-gloved debutante balls. While studying theater at Northwestern, she excavated the university’s written materials on homosexuality beneath the imposing stone buttresses and stained glass of the university’s neo-Gothic library. The books she found were anything but reassuring. Pathology, disturbance, maladaptation, arrested development, they said. The studies compared the measurements of various body parts—earlobes, fingernails, hips—of homosexuals and heterosexuals. They analyzed homosexuals’ favorite color (green). And, overwhelmingly, they discussed only men. ( The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, by Eric Cervini, 2020)

Didn’t realize homosexuals had a favorite color.

[thebookbin]

The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs the United States of America

Eric Cervini

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Genre: nonfiction, queer theory Year: 2020

I just finished The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs the United States of America, a nonfiction account of Frank Kameny, Harvard educated astronomer and gay rights activist.

This book is such an important read. The focus of this book is strictly regarding the legal battle of the queer community in the 50s and 60s, and it really did teach me a lot about my own history, even as an avid history reader.

Kameny was fired from the US government for being gay in the middle of the space race—a time when astronomers were sorely needed and it shaped his entire life. All he wanted was to work in the field in which he earned his doctorate, but that opportunity was denied him most his life, which he spent penniless. He taught himself law and spent the next four decades suing the government on behalf of himself and any other queer person he could help, with the end goal of allowing homosexuals, or homophiles as they called themselves at the time, clearance to work for the government.

Frank founded the Mattachine Society, one of the first activist groups for the homosexual community. (It’s so hard to talk about this because the language they used to describe themselves then, we would take issue with but they would absolutely despise the word queer, which I wholeheartedly love).

As someone who is interested in law and government, I liked the framing of this book, although I wouldn’t recommend it to the beginner of queer history. The point of this book is to strictly focus on the law, and Frank is one vehicle to do that as a founder of the Mattachine Society and an early member of the NCACLU. But it is not an entire picture of the queer history: Frank’s focus was firmly focused on himself and his own goals: working for the government. Although he supported the civil rights movement, and learned lessons from the black activists who had more experience than him, the concept of queer people of color clearly eluded Frank.

This book is clearly meant to be a juxtaposition to the queer theory a lot of people are familiar with: the trans women of color who started the movement. Frank’s idea of changing the minds of the public was entirely different: he required dress codes and numbered their signs and they had to stand in order.

The few snippets of lesbian history are also a delight and I drank them up so readily. The book is written entirely from first person accounts, citing letters, legal documents, newspapers, and magazines. My absolute favorite part was reading Frank’s notes from when he represented 4 lesbian women suspected of being homosexuals from their WAC (military) superiors and they were able to keep their jobs.

I think this is an important book, but not for the baby gay historian. For someone who doesn’t know a lot, and I’ve seen in other reviews people complain about it’s focus on Frank as a white Jew, but I think the framing of this specific book as a history of the legal battles of the queer community is so important—but not even close to the whole picture, and as important as Frank’s work was, he wasn’t nearly as impactful as other historical figures. This book is such an invigorating mix of queer theory, civil rights, women’s rights and lesbian history, politics and space that I was enthralled for the entire book.

Make sure you check out Eric Cervini's website, or sign up for the Queer History 101 newsletter for some of the most insightful academic queer history delivered directly to your inbox.

storygraph | bookshop.org | local houston

★★★★★ would recommend for people interested in the subject, but not anyone new to queer history.