Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies: The Construction of Homosexuality before the 1969 Stonewall Riots


FAERIES, MARIMACHAS,t QUEENS,
AND LEZZIES: THE CONSTRUCTION
OF HOMOSEXUALITY BEFORE THE
1969 STONEWALL RIOTS

Elvia R. A rriola*

INTRODUCTION

The Stonewall Riots erupted on a hot night in June 1969 in New York
City, when an unlikely group of revolutionaries, a few Black and Puerto
Rican drag queens and butch lesbians, turned a routine bar raid into a street
fight with the local police. The latter had just taken a payoff from the
unlicensed bar owners and arrested the most obvious looking
homosexuals.' A motley crew of effeminate queers resisted what would
otherwise have been a routine raid on a bar that catered to gay people.2

The conflict attracted an angry crowd of onlookers and supporters who
fought into the night with coins, beer bottles, and sticks, and whose
struggle ultimately came to symbolize the overthrow of decades of official
harassment, repression, and degradation. A simple street fight on June
27th, 1969, changed history and breathed life into the then dormant and
internally conflicted homophile movement.'

In recent years, gays and lesbians have staked out their deserved place
in the annals of American legal, social, and political history4 with a

t The term marimachas is Mexican slang for lesbians. The gay male counterpart
is maric6n which is a play on the term Maria, a typical woman's name throughout
Mexico and Latin America. Macho is a term that is used to describe hypermasculine
behavior. Thus the term marimacha suggests "woman with masculine tendencies."

* Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Texas at Austin; J.D. University
of California at Berkeley (1983); M.A. History, New York University (1991); B.A.
California State University, Los Angeles; former Assistant Attorney General, New York
State Department of Law Civil Rights Bureau (1984-89).

For a general description of the events, see John d'Emilio, Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States,
1940-1970 231-33 (1983) [hereinafter Sexual Politics]; Paul Berman, Democracy and
Homosexuality, New Republic, Dec. 20, 1993 at 23-24. See also infra part III.A.3.
for discussion on the practice of "gayola" (accepting bribes from "gay" bar owners in
return for lax enforcement of vice or health and safety laws).

2 Sheerly out of convenience, I will at times intentionally collapse several terms
used to identify the diverse membership of the non-majoritarian sexual population into
either "gay," "queer," or "gay people."

3 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 233.
4 See, e.g., Lesbians, Gay Men and the Law (William B. Rubinstein ed., 1993)



Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

growing body of social and historical accounts of the Stonewall Riots' and
of the pre-Stonewall gay world.6 Typically, these revisionist histories
briefly mention the constant threat of raids and harassment that dictated the
closeted lifestyle of most gays and lesbians before the riots. References to
the police raids, or to the Riots themselves, however, do not often examine
the various social forces converging on that moment when a seedy
working-class bar in Manhattan's West Village, which openly served
homosexuals and outrageously dressed Black and ethnic drag queens,
became the focal point of a conflict that instigated a national gay civil rights
movement."

This commemorative Article, written in honor of the 25th anniversary
of the Stonewall Riots,' is driven by my interest in the infiltration of
prejudicial attitudes into the daily operation of the legal system. Rather
than simply adding to other historical accounts of the Riots, this Article has
two major interpretive concerns. The first stems from my interest as a
feminist in how culture is shaped by law and how law, in turn, shapes
culture, in particular through attitudes about gender.9 By examining
various social elements that constitute the character of the Riots themselves,
such as attitudes about sex, race, class, homosexuality, and gender roles or
gender identity, I put the Riots in a context for seeing how the legal culture
of enforcement,' 0 especially that of the fifties and sixties, reflected

[hereinafter Rubinstein]; Sexuality and the Law: An Encyclopaedia of Major Legal
Cases (Arthur S. Leonard, ed., 1993) [hereinafter Leonard]; Martin B. Duberman, et
al., Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (1989) [hereinafter
Hidden from History].

I See, e.g., Eric Marcus, Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian
Equal Rights, 1945-1990 180-202 (1992); Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 231-33.
See generally Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (1993) [hereinafter Stonewall].

6 See, e.g., Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of

Lesbian Life in Twentieth Century America (1991); Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy &
Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian
Community (1993); Allan B3rub, Coming Out Under Fire (1990); George Chauncey,
Jr., Gay New York (1994).

7 See, e.g., Stonewall, supra note 5; Marcus, supra note 5. The point here is not
to suggest that this is a failure in the existing scholarship. The room for interpretation
of landmark events is only now available because of the appearance of historical
documentation, written and oral, previously completely absent from mainstream
historical literature.

8 The 25th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots was celebrated on June 26, 1994.

9 See Elvia Arriola, Gendered Inequality, Lesbians, Gays and Feminist Legal
Theory, 9 Berkeley Women's L.J. 103 (1994). See also Joan Wallach Scott, Gender
and the Politics of History 2 (1988) (arguing for the use of gender as a category of
analysis when "gender" is understood as knowledge of sexual difference in the
Foucauldian sense, as the "understanding produced by cultures and societies of human
relationships, in this case of those between men and women.").

to 1 mean by "legal culture of enforcement" not only statutory and decisional law

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society's contemporaneous gendered value system." An extraordinary
aspect of pre-Stonewall gay social and legal history is the devotion of
massive resources by the state to the elimination of gay life, an axiomatic
but usually unhighlighted fact.' 2 My goal here is to show how various
strands of social attitudes about sex and gender-moral, medical,
popular-shaped the fifties and sixties legal culture of enforcement and
supported sometimes violent methods of police harassment, conduct that in
turn constructed the image of the homosexual as a threat to the American
social order. My emphasis on examining the social significance of the
Riots for gay political and legal histories, by surveying society's changing
attitudes about sex, gender, and homosexuality up to the night of the Riots,
induced me to rely less on standard gay legal history and more, when
possible, on unofficial accounts of an individual's contact with the legal
culture of enforcement. 3

governing homosexuality, but also police enforcement techniques, the allocation of
resources, and the "extralegal practices" and values of police, prosecutors, and judges,
especially as these reflect the demands of mainstream gender attitudes. See Project:
The Consenting Adult Homosexual and the Law: An Empirical Study of the
Enforcement and Administration in Los Angeles County, 13 UCLA L. Rev. 643, 652
[hereinafter Project]; see also Roxanna Thayer Sweet, Political and Social Action in
Homophile Organizations 180 (1968), reprinted (1975) [hereinafter Sweet]. Sweet
points out that:

[tihe law enforcement officer's bases of judgment concerning particular cases
are less determined by the letter of the law than by his judgment of popular
morality. When there is a conflict between [the two], it is the latter that takes
precedence in the police officer's mind .... [Tihe training of a police officer
is such that he learns to respond to signals of danger to the community ... he
accepts those judgments which describe homosexuals as being a danger to
society.

Id. at 137-40.
An educational course administered to the St. Louis Police Department in 1949,

cited as a model for other cities, demonstrates the degree of exposure fifties-era police
had to the specific content of popular moral views: the course opened with a reading
of the Biblical chapters 10-20 of Leviticus and proceeded to address current social
morality on the subject of homosexuals. Val B. Satterfield, The Education of a
Metropolitan Police Department Respecting Sex Molestation, 42 J. Crim. L.,
Criminology and Police Sci. 403, 403-06 (1951).

" See Elvia R. Arriola, I Feel Like A(n) (Un)Natural Woman: Transgenderism
and Antidiscrimination Law and Theory, Presentation at Lavender Law IV, Portland,
Or. (Oct. 23, 1994) (on file with author).

2 One community in Los Angeles County in the mid-sixties devoted 50% of its
vice crime resources to "operations against homosexuals." See Project, supra note 10,
at 687 n. 12.

3 See supra note 10. See also Rhonda Rivera, Our Straight-Laced Judges: The
Legal Position of Homosexual Persons in the United States, 30 Hastings L.J. 799
(1979); Patricia Cain, Litigating for Lesbian and Gay Rights: A Legal History, 79 Va.
L. Rev. 1581 (1993); Leonard, supra note 4.

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This Article also grew out of my interest in the re-telling of the story
of the Riots. Thus, a second interpretive concern in this Article is a
depiction of the Stonewall Riots as a snapshot of the rich diversity in this
country of those considered sexual minorities, as, in a moment of apparent
anarchy, a colorful mix of individuals of different backgrounds took on the
New York City Police Department (NYPD) and its institutionalized lack of
respect for the homosexual. As the 25th anniversary of the Riots drew
near, I often encountered people who knew little about the Riots or about
the outrageousness in dress and behavior of the Black and Puerto Rican
drag queens who had been targeted for harassment by the NYPD. To
paraphrase one historian of Stonewall, the danger of myth-making exists if
one repeatedly leaves out essential details.14 My own concern about the
re-telling of this legendary event was the apparent failure by many gay
people to acknowledge how race and class dynamics affected people's
lifestyles and potential exposures to harassment in the pre-Stonewall gay
world. These dynamics were visibly displayed by the cross-dressing attire
and behavior of Black and ethnic drag queens and butch-looking lesbians,
the people, not coincidentally, most often targeted in the gay bars for police
harassment. 5 Because their sexual identities posed such a contrast to the
largely closeted, white and middle-class pre-Stonewall gay world, their
neglected perspective in the story of the Riots is a continuing reminder of
the need to include race, gender, and class within any concept of a "gay
and lesbian community." With these two interpretive concerns, this Article
explores how the legal culture's implementation of specific social attitudes
about sex, gender, race, and class shaped the technology of enforcement
used by the police against homosexuals during the fifties and sixties.

Part I briefly addresses the cultural attitudes about sex and gender that
served as an historical foundation for the 1969 Stonewall Riots. After a
short background description of the colonial experience with homosexuality
and gender identity, I focus on the ways in which pre-20th century culture
defined gender roles and addressed expressions of sexuality that did not
conform to these roles. I use women's experience with cross-dressing or
masquerading to point out the rigidity of the gendered value system, which
has conditioned social approval on conformity to rigid notions of
masculinity and femininity. Notions of sexual deviance developed by
doctors beginning in the late 1800s constructed homosexuality as a disease
and as a social vice. I argue that the diagnosis and treatment of
homosexuality evidences the cultural support of the sex/gender binary
system and the masculine/feminine split.

14 See Stonewall, supra note 5, at xv.

'5 See infra part III.

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Part II connects the developed social and medical views of
homosexuality by the thirties with the rise of a pre-political consciousness
or "gay identity" in the decades preceding the Stonewall Riots. I argue that
the appearance of a gay identity in the forties and fifties is inseparable from
the effects of two other postwar phenomena-the cultural campaign to
reinforce traditional gender roles by encouraging working women to return
to their roles as wives and mothers, and the rise of anticommunist hysteria.

Part III leads up to the events at Stonewall with a preamble that
reconstructs the gay bar culture of the fifties and sixties by drawing heavily
from one of the few comprehensive histories of a lesbian community that
addresses the racial and economic dynamics of pre-Stonewall gay life. 16

This is followed by a survey of the technology of police harassment against
homosexuals, including descriptions of some methods police officers
typically abused in accordance with their personal prejudices. This part
also explores the emergence of a pre-political middle-class gay
consciousness and the weak efforts of pre-Stonewall gay organizations to
halt the common gay bar raid. The ineffectiveness of pre-Stonewall
political groups evidences the powerful role the state played in the
systematic and intentional harassment of gays and lesbians and in the
selective targeting of women and men who most threatened contemporary
values regarding sex, race, and gender.

Thus, from the invisibility of gay people in past centuries (e.g.,
women who passed as men), through the emergence of gays in the cities,
which paralleled medical diagnoses of homosexuality by drawing on
prevailing gendered attitudes (e.g., making cross-dressing a symptom of
sexual diseases), to gays' greater postwar visibility, the stories of how
cross-dressing emerged as the symbol of gayness illustrate society's
persistent cultural urge to have people conform to rigid notions of
masculinity and femininity. By the mid-20th century, cross-dressing had
become a target of vice crime enforcement, an overt symbol of gay identity,
and a trigger of repressive police behavior aimed at the suppression of
gender role noncomformity.

16 See Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6.

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I. GAYS AND THE GENDERED VALUE SYSTEM IN
PRE-STONEWALL HISTORY: THE INVISIBLE AND THE

DEVIANT

A. The State and the Queer Individual in Colonial
America

The Stonewall rioters had accumulated feelings of oppression stemming
from at least two decades of open harassment of homosexuals by agents of
the state.' 7  Yet the rioters' frustration had its origin in the older
foundation of historical disgust for same-sex eroticism. Of course, a main
difference between the contempt for homosexuality in the forties, fifties,
and sixties, and the opprobrium in earlier times is that earlier generations
did not bother with terms or categories for identifying the kind of individual
who offended society by having same-sex lovers. Same-sex eroticism was
historically perceived as an isolated experience, rather than as an identifying
characteristic of a person. In the colonial experience of homosexuality, for
example, "sodomy" was included in the litany of potential moral crimes
against the community and the church. 8 If anyone like the "gay person,"
a person who knew that sexual orientation formed an essential aspect of
her/his identity, existed in earlier times, s/he was invisible. As one of
America's first openly gay historians, Jonathan Ned Katz, put it, queers
have been "the silent minority, the silenced minority- invisible women,
invisible men."' 9 Along with other historians, Katz has argued that it is
possible to imagine gay people as having existed in different cultures and
in distant times, and that gays probably existed in the same numbers
throughout American history.2'

'7 See infra part III.
18 See Jonathan N. Katz, Gay/Lesbian Almanac: A New Documentary 44-45

(1983) [hereinafter Almanac].
'1 Jonathan N. Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A.

1 (1978) [hereinafter Gay American History].
20 The debate among gay and lesbian scholars focuses on whether the pervasiveness

of homosexual behavior among varied cultures is sufficient evidence to support the idea
of self-conscious "gayness" within those cultures or historical periods. It is one thing
to say that there were people who had homosexual orientations. It is quite another to
suggest the existence of a sexually-identified social group. Compare John Boswell,
Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality 42-46 (1980) with Sexual Politics,
supra note 1; see also John Boswell, Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,
21-26, in Rubinstein, supra note 4.

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The history that Katz rediscovered in his germinal studies2 paints a
sordid picture of homosexuality as a misunderstood experience, appearing
in the mind of the religious fundamentalist as an "abominable" crime
against society, nature, and God.' 2 In 1625, when Virginia colonists
hanged shipmaster Richard Cornish for sodomizing one of his stewards, a
witness at the trial decried the homosexual act as an overthrow of both
"soul and body." '  Reverend John Cotton, an early colonial legislator,
re-interpreted the English sodomy laws, which had never included
lesbianism, in order to apply the death penalty to the carnal relations
between two women. 24

Colonial legal authorities were not always completely inflexible in their
attitudes towards same-sex eroticism and departures from expected
gender-role behavior. The case of Thomas Hall' suggests that colonial
judges confronted the difficulties of defining gender. In 1629, the General
Court of Virginia heard testimony indicating that one Thomas Hall was
rumored to be a man but wore women's clothing. Hall was examined by
both men and women of the community and found to be "a perfect man."
Suggesting he had female genitalia, he responded, "I have a piece of a
hole."26 Ultimately finding the relation between his gender and his dress
murky and ambiguous, the court declared that "hee is a man and a
woeman" and sentenced him to go about in men's clothing plus a "coif,"
a "cross-cloth," and an apron.27

Generally, however, neither colonial nor post-colonial Americans dealt
comfortably with the subject of same-sex eroticism,2" a fact confirmed by

21 See Almanac, supra note 18; Gay American History, supra note 19.
22 See Almanac, supra note 18, at 44-45.
23 Gay American History, supra note 19, at 26-30.
24 Id. at 31-32. Lesbian legal theorist Ruthann Robsen argues that this historical

commitment to expressions of male sexuality in sodomy statutes and their vague terms
(e.g., "crime against nature") makes it impossible to know what aspects of lesbianism
are covered by sodomy statutes. This vagueness allows biased judges and lawyers to
impose their own interpretations of prohibited activity by resorting to such terms as
"deviance" or "unnatural." See Ruthann Robsen, Lesbian (Out)Law 47-57 (1992).

25 In re Thomas Hall, Minutes of the Council of the General Court of Virginia
(1629), reprinted in Almanac, supra note 18, at 71-72.

26 Id. at 72.
27 Id. These are pieces of women's clothing; the ruling in the Hall case provides

a curious historical twist on the "three garment rule" that evolved by the 20th century
as an aspect of vice crime enforcement against pre-Stonewall gays and lesbians. Under
that rule, homosexuals who cross-dressed as either "butches" or "queens" could avoid
harassment and prosecution if they demonstrated to the police that they wore three items
of clothing appropriate to their gender. See infra note 157 and accompanying text.

28 The term "homosexuality" is distinctly modern and does not neatly fit any
historical period, thus my reference to same-sex or same-gender eroticism. Similarly

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the survival of the death penalty for sodomy well into the 19th century. 29

Post-colonial American decisionmakers were more inflexible than the Hall
case towards the confusion of gender identity created by individuals who
cross-dressed.

B. Surviving in an Unequal World: Nineteenth Century
Women and the Masculine Masquerade

The phenomenon of passing women, women who are known to have
dressed and behaved like men,3' is best understood as a reaction to the
rigidity of the gendered value system. In the nineteenth century,
cross-dressing as a man allowed women to do what other women, socialized
by the middle-class dictates of the separate spheres ideology, could not
do.3 A woman born into the leisured classes was destined to live in a

the colonial term "sodomy" included everything offensive to a particular world view
which abhorred sex outside of the proper bounds of marriage, whether with same-sex
individuals, animals, or objects. See John D'Emilio & Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate
Matters: A History of Sexuality in America 1-38 (1988) [hereinafter Intimate Matters].

29 Reformists like Thomas Jefferson had proposed the more "civilized" penalty of
castration as early as 1776. See The Papers of Thomas Jefferson 325 (Julian P. Boyd,
ed.), reprinted in Gay American History, supra note 19, at 23. Pennsylvania was the
first colony to revoke the death penalty for sodomy in 1786. But other colonies or
states did not revoke the death penalty until after the Revolution or the War of 1812.
Id. at 130-31.

30 The practice of women passing as men dates at least to Biblical times.
Historically, they were severely punished upon discovery. See The San Francisco
Lesbian and Gay History Project, "She Even Chewed Tobacco": A Pictorial Narrative
of Passing Women in America, in Hidden from History, supra note 4, at 183-94. Male
masquerading also existed, but the evidence suggests that it was not as pervasive as it
was for women. See Gay American History, supra note 19, at 317-22.

"' Historians use the term "separate spheres" to characterize the value system that
responded to the rise of industrialism and the transportation revolution. The term
"separate spheres" describes the patterns of economic specialization in manufacturing,
finance, and industry that transformed America into an industrialized nation and that
affected every aspect of traditional social institutions, including the family and gender
roles. In the midst of rapid social changes, the traditional gender role expectations of
an agrarian economy were irrelevant. In particular, the middle-class housewife changed
from an essential producer of household goods into a dependent caretaker of the home
and husband. The term "separate spheres" is also associated with the phrase "cult of
domesticity" which describes the Victorian value system that cast women as naturally
pious, domestic, submissive, and pure, and as weaker and less intelligent than men and
thus dependent. In this paradigm of femininity, a good woman was supposed to cater
to men's sexual and emotional needs and be responsible for raising the next generation
of good moral citizens. The male was cast as physically and intellectually superior to
the female but as her inferior in the areas of morality and the control of sexual urges.
See Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (1977); see also Barbara Welter, The Cult
of True Womanhood, 1820-1860, 18 Am. Q. 151 (1966). The separate spheres

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golden cage; her entire upbringing was geared towards achieving a good
marriage. As a wife, she would depend on a husband who, under the
ancient doctrine of coverture, became the owner of her property, her
earnings, her children, and her identity.3" Thus by masquerading as a
man, a woman might be freed to work, keep her earnings, own a business,
get an education, join the army, vote, and even take a wife. Some women
did just that, defying the social values of the day by fighting in the Civil
War,33 attending university concerts,' and even becoming effective
political organizers who carried a reputation for being "sweet on
women. "

35

The historical evidence suggests that some women effectively passed
as men for lengthy periods of time, even though the consequences were
obvious should the charaders be exposed. The phenomenon of passing
women36 illustrates two important concepts relevant to the history of the
Stonewall Riots: first, in North American culture, gender has usually been
viewed as binary and unambiguous; second, the two "genders," male and
female, are absolute and non-negotiable.37

ideology did not describe the social and economic reality of non-white and/or
working-class women. See generally Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The
Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America 41-44 (1984); Christine Stansell,
City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789-1860 (1987).

32 The Married Women's Property Act of 1848 grew out of the early feminist
struggle in this country over the "civil death" experienced by women upon marriage.
The intent of these state laws was to empower married women to keep property they
owned before marriage, to keep earnings and gifts, and to be responsible only for those
debts they had agreed by contract to share. See Mary Becker et al., Feminist
Jurisprudence 7-8 (1993).

3 See Gay American History, supra note 19, at 212-14 (describing the case of
Deborah Sampson who, disguised as a man, enlisted in the Continental Army as
"Robert Shurtlieff"); The Personal Memoirs of Union Army General Philip H.
Sheridan, reprinted in Gay American History, supra note 19, at 227-28 (account of
female transvestite Civil War soldiers).

I See "Scandal" at Cornell University, reprinted in Gay American History, supra
note 19, at 230-31 (in 1879, a woman dressed up in a man's suit to attend a concert
with another woman).

11 Murray Hall Fooled Many Shrewd Men, N.Y. Times, Jan. 19, 1901, reprinted
in Gay American History, supra note 19, at 235.

36 It appears that the range of potential motivations (money, love, freedom, fun)
continued in 20th century examples of the opposite sex charade. See A Gay Deceiver
of the Feminine Gender, Cal. Police Gazette, Apr. 27, 1967, at 3 (courtesy of Lesbian
Herstory Archives Education Foundation, Brooklyn, N.Y. [hereinafter Lesbian
Archives]) ("Miss Mary Walker, a fast young lady of Richmond, Va., took it into her
head . . . to don male attire, and be engaged as a barman. Somehow the breeches seem
to have put bad notions into her head, for she went making love to the pretty girls who
came after the family beer.").

3' The exception in North American history is the experience of the aboriginal

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C. The Medical Profession from 1880-1930 as a
Clearinghouse of Information about Homosexuality

Gay bar raids in the fifties and sixties were orchestrated as clean
sweeps of crime and filth. Proper society, doctors, and the legal system
labeled the kind of people who patronized a "dive"3 like the Stonewall Inn
as socially queer, "perverts,"3 9 and "homosexual offenders."' By the
time of the Stonewall Riots, law and medicine were joined in a tight
alliance; judges and police departments could turn to massive sources of
official and unofficial medical-legal rhetoric about the nature and status of
the homosexual offender. This alliance between law and medicine
originated in two phenomena of the last century-Victorian gender attitudes
and the movement to professionalize the medical sciences in late nineteenth
century Europe and America.4'

Beginning around the 1880s, doctors in Europe and America began to
serve as clearinghouses of information on matters of marriage, sex, and
intimacy.42 They also began to record their observations and treatment of
men and women who struggled with the experience of same-sex attraction
in a society that only approved of heterosexual relationships.43 For
example, in 1884, a Dr. James G. Kiernan treated a twenty-two-year-old
woman he diagnosed as having an asymmetrically-shaped cranium and a
neurotic ancestry. These facts formed part of his assessment that his patient
had an untreatable condition of sexual interest in other women. The best
he could recommend was the asylum. Dr. Kiernan cautioned society not

Native-Americans known as the "berdache." The berdache received social sanction
among such tribes as the Mojave, Sioux, and Navajo to assume the gender role opposite
to that which they were originally assigned. See Suzanne J. Kessler & Wendy
McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach 24-29 (1978).

3 Patrons of the Stonewall used this term to describe such bars which often
operated without licenses, were small and stuffy, served watered down drinks, and
depended on either organized crime for survival or on a payoff system to the police.
See Marcus, supra note 5, at 199-200.

a0 See, e.g., Nickola v. Munro, 328 P.2d 271, 273 (Cal. Ct. App. 1958) ("the
tavern had a general reputation in the county as a place where homosexuals were
gathering for dancing and entertainment, and as a place catering to sexual perverts.").

I See, e.g., Paul H. Gebhard, Sex Offenders (1965).
41 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 184-94

(1975).
42 See, e.g., George H. Napheys, The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the

Maiden, Wife and Mother (1890) (courtesy Lesbian Archives, supra note 36). See also
Jeanne Achterberg, Woman as Healer 140 (1990).

43 See generally Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (1980) (studying the
social construction of the homosexual as a separate identity in the consciousness of
Western civilized societies).

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to waste sympathy on such men and women, who, he said, would only use
that concern to avoid seeking a cure for their perverted ideas.'

The emergence of a specialized science about homosexuality was
crucial to later constructions of both social and internal concepts of
homosexuality. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, medical reports began
to categorize people as sexual perverts or "homosexuals" and to compare
them to presumptively healthy "heterosexuals." 45 Homosexuals were
associated with low mental ability and perversion and were prescribed
castration, imprisonment, and psychiatric treatment.' Drawing from the
value system of a society which accorded them the privileged status of
experts, sexologists and researchers in the infant field of psychiatry used
contemporary Victorian codes of sexual morality to judge a condition they
associated with mental illness and/or social vice.47

Questions of gender identity and behavior formed a critical aspect of
the medical assessments of homosexuality during the late nineteenth
century. In earlier eras, reports of masquerading had simply taken a
community by surprise.' In this era, cross-dressing surfaced as a specific
medical anomaly and a symptom of the disease of homosexuality. For
example, in 1914, Dr. Bernard S. Talmey wrote about "transvestism" as an
abnormal desire of a male to dress like a woman and vice-versa.49 Many
of his patients appeared "normal" in all respects in that they married, ran
businesses, had children, and joined literary societies. Yet they seemed
capable of evincing their attraction for people of their own sex only with an
intense desire to cross-dress or be like the other sex.' Victorian
gender-role expectations had relaxed to the extent that more and more
women went to college, ran businesses, and sought the right to vote.5 '
However, in matters of sexual intimacy, neither a woman nor a man was
free to explore same-sex eroticism. The medical wisdom of the day
indicated that same-sex attraction bore the signs of lunacy and/or

44 See James G. Kiernan, Sexual Perversion, Detroit Lancet 1884, reprinted in Gay
American History, supra note 19, at 134-35.

45 See Almanac, supra note 18, at 143.
41 See Kiernan, supra note 44, at 208-37; see also Almanac, supra note 18, at

153-55.
47 See, e.g., George Shrady, Conditions Once Considered Criminal Are Really

Pathological (1884), reprinted in Almanac, supra note 18, at 197 (arguing that
homosexuality would lead to insanity and suicide).

4 See supra notes 33-35 and accompanying text.
41 See Bernard S. Talmey, Transvestism (1914), reprinted in Almanac, supra note

18, at 344-48.
50 Id.

51 See generally Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman's Rights
Movement in the United States 302-03 (1959).

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abnormalcy. s2 Doctors warned that a person's rejection of treatment for
such a condition threatened the foundations of social order.53

In the pressing milieu of contemporaneous social purity campaigns
against such social evils in the cities as liquor, crime, and sexual vices,'
early twentieth century doctors pinned down a new category of mental
illness. The symptoms were deviance from the expected range of feelings,
behaviors, and attitudes of the typical heterosexual man or woman. Older
moral views of sodomy55 as a sinful crime meshed easily with emergent
views of homosexuality as, at best, a form of insanity. Furthermore,
questions of gender identity frankly constituted a critical element of the
medical diagnosis of same-sex attraction. Afflicted individuals purportedly
"fell in love" with people of their own sex, sought the identity of the
opposite sex, or worse, openly took on the dress, emotions, and behaviors
of the opposite sex.56

In 1921, a Boston court arraigned twenty-nine-year-old Ethel Kimball
on charges of falsifying an application for a marriage license and for
pretending to be a man.57 She had courted her intended "bride" for two
years and even fooled the girl's parents. The court ordered a medical
diagnosis by a foreign expert who declared that Kimball was "sane but

52 See Gay American History, supra note 19, at 576.

5 Few sexologists viewed positively the conditions of what was then being labeled
"homosexualism" or "similisexualism." Defenses of homosexuality were rare. In
1908, one solo defender documented, in a massive social science treatise, the emerging
subculture of homosexuality, arguing that homosexuality was no more than an inborn
instinct capable of being lived out in various ways. Edward Prime Stevenson recorded
social networks among male homosexuals in certain atmospheres for the "initiated,"
such as universities, "smart clubs," restaurants, and steambaths. Stevenson's report
further noted the existence of marriages of convenience (with accepting wives) and of
extensive gay social networks in "homosexual capitals" like Boston, New York, St.
Louis, Milwaukee, and numerous other American cities. Edward Stevenson, The
Intersexes (1908), reprinted in Almanac, supra note 18 at 326-32; see also Chauncey,
Jr., supra note 6, at 276-78.

4 Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900-1918, at 14-15
(1982).

5 See supra notes 19-27 and accompanying text.
56 Thus the condition of "masked homosexuality" purportedly displayed itself as

women falling in love with effeminate men or men being drawn to women with marked
masculine traits (e.g. bicycle riding). Wilhelm Stekel & S.A. Tannenbaum: Masked
Homosexuality (1914), reprinted in Almanac, supra note 18, at 352-53. Masked
homosexuality was also presumed the trait of "androphobics" (men-haters), most often
"old maids." Kiernan, Androphobia (1916), reprinted in Almanac. supra note 18, at
366.

17 Ethel Kimball/John Hathaway, N.Y. Times, Dec. 16, 1921, at 5:3, reprinted in
Almanac, supra note 18, at 404.

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Faeies, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

abnormal. "58 In defense of the masquerade, Kimball stated that she had
dressed like a man in order to approach life from a male perspective,
particularly in the area of employment. She also claimed that her fianc6e
knew all along she was really a woman.59

In the generations that followed, the legal system continued to rely on
medical expertise to determine the sanity of people who acted like Kimball.
Like earlier passing women, Kimball's masquerade afforded her freedom
from her socially assigned identity. Thus she defied a society that insisted
she marry and depend on a man' and that especially disapproved of
same-sex eroticism.

By the forties, doctors invoked the paradigm of criminality to judge
homosexual behavior even more harshly. For example, in 1941, a writer
for the Journal of Criminal Psychopathology urged newspapers to give up
the practice of minimizing the details of prosecutions for sodomy or lewd
conduct out of respect for the victim's reputation. The author urged that
one should not be indifferent to these "crimes against nature" as one might
be to a "simple assault or robbery."61 Consequently, the author felt that
the community needed more detailed reports about homosexual offenses.62

D. Law and the Trouble with Sex: 1900-1940

The seeds of the vice crime legislation and attitudes that inspired the
police conduct at the Stonewall Riots were also sown in the nation's history
of Social Progressivism. Long before law enforcement officials in the
fifties and sixties enforced their understanding of the mental illness model
of homosexuality, the medical profession played a significant role in driving
the resources of the state toward the persecution of homosexuals as
offenders of society's sexual moral codes. While sexual morality issues had
escaped close scrutiny in the 19th century,63 by the dawn of the 20th

58 Id.

59 Id.
0 See supra notes 31-36 and accompanying text.
61 F.A. McHenry, Homosexuality, Crime and the Newspapers, 2 J. Crim.

Psychopathology 533, 533-548 (1941), reprinted in Almanac, supra note 18, at 569.
62 Id.
63 Historians of sexuality have described most of the 19th century, a period of

rapid changes brought about by urbanization of former agrarian communities, as a
period of expanded male sexual freedom. This characterization suggests that
post-colonial Americans were too busy with becoming urban citizens to regulate, as in
earlier times, all aspects of a community's social and sexual behavior. The expanded
male sexual freedom is attested to by the virtual absence, in places like New York, of
prosecutions for consensual sodomy. For example, between 1796 and 1873, there were

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century a new middle-class social order radically shifted its attention
towards strict governance of sexual morality.' For example, prostitution,
once deemed a "necessary evil" in the value system of the separate
spheres,65 now became one of the primary social evils targeted by social
reformers.' Vice commissions were set up in many cities. Members
worked with public and private bodies to study the impact of
industrialization on urban social conditions. An increasingly impersonal
and anonymous urban life appeared to contrast negatively with earlier
agrarian lifestyles in which the watchful eye of the family and the
community had enforced society's codes of sexual morality.67

The Progressives' social purity crusades and the growing medical
discourse on sexual degeneracy complemented each other."R The
middle-class reformer could rally around the unlivable aspects of city life,
which ran the gamut from tenement housing and underpaid women and
child workers69 to women victimized by prostitution, white slavery, and
the licentious sexual behavior of men.7' Evoking an image of municipal
housekeeping, social reformers and medical experts used the rhetoric of
social purity to track down prostitutes in need of institutionalization in
reformatories,7 and perverts who could now be identified by their
gendered behavior, attitudes, and dress.72

Consistent with these visionary quests, social reformers expected
politicians and courts to do their part to uphold idealized Victorian

fewer than two dozen prosecutions under the New York sodomy law. The historical
evidence also suggests that beneath the rhetoric of Victorianism there lay an intense
culture of sensual pleasure and of expanded opportunities for same-sex romanticism and
intimacy, many of which included male-male relationships. See Rosen, supra note 54,
at xii; see also Intimate Matters, supra note 28, at 121-24.

64 Gay American History, supra note 19, at 136.
65 Rosen, supra note 54, at 14-15; see also supra notes 30-31 and accompanying

text.
6 Id. at 39-40.
67 See id. at 3, 38-46.
6 The language of these purity movements was that of Victorian social morality,

committed to curbing vice and enforcing sexual norms. See William E. Nelson,
Criminality and Sexual Morality in New York, 1920-1980, 5 Yale J.L. & Human. 265,
268-70 (1993).

69 Cases illustrating the impulse for Progressive social reform in the legal system
are Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905) (invalidating on substantive due process
grounds states' right to regulate working hours); Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412
(1908) (upholding on paternalistic grounds the right of a state to improve conditions of
employment for women).

70 See Rosen, supra note 54, at 114.
7' See id. at 21, 26-27.
72 See supra notes 53-54 and accompanying text.

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Faeries, Marinachas, Queens, and Lezzies

standards of social decency. Judges displayed their own discomfort with
the subject matter of sex as they enforced laws directed at sexual deviancy,
such as prostitution and sodomy statutes. 73 In the area of prostitution, for
example, gender biases and sexually repressive attitudes surfaced in cases
where judges viewed a boy's problem with sexual deviancy as a short-term
threat that would be straightened out with parental control or probation.
Meanwhile a young girl's single sexual transgression, which landed her in
a reformatory, was deemed a true offense to how both the courts and
society defined proper ladylike sexual conduct.74 Quite often, adolescent
female defendants from racial and ethnic minorities were chastised and
lectured by judges as "fallen women" who had "sinned" against society.75

Repressive cultural attitudes about sex were similarly displayed in the
law pertaining to homosexuality. In prosecutions for sodomy, judges felt
the need to enforce strict codes of sexual morality and social decency. For
example, in 1897, the Supreme Court of Illinois urged that "sentiments of
decent humanity" amply justified the phrase "crimes against nature," and
that the court's records "need not be defiled with the details of different acts
which may go to constitute it. "76 In a 1910 prosecution under a sodomy
statute, a South Dakota judge opened an opinion with an apology for
actually discussing the matter of abnormal sex. He wrote that he regretted
"soil[ing] the pages of our reports with a discussion of a subject so
loathsome and disgusting as the one confronting us."'

Throughout the twenties and the thirties, judges' opinions in sex crime
trials were afflicted with a vagueness bred by the enormous discomfort of
having to address the subject matter of sex. As William Nelson has argued,
by using the law to create social underclasses of individuals and to enforce
the moral code of the day, judges simply reflected contemporary sexual
attitudes .7 Thus a 1923 court wrote that "it can hardly be necessary for
us to say that the subject of this opinion has been distasteful. . . . An
adequate consideration of it seemed to require a somewhat full discussion,
and we have endeavored to meet this requirement without unnecessary

71 See Rosen, supra note 54, at 19-20.
74 See id.
71 See id. While laws against sexual misconduct applied to both women and men

in colonial America, historians note that by the 19th century there was a stricter code
of sexual morality for women; this stricter code accounted for the higher representation
of women in this category of criminals. See Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters'
Keepers: Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930 13-14 (1981).

76 Honselman v. People, 48 N.E. 304, 305 (Ill. 1897).
77 State v. Whitmarsh, 128 N.W. 580, 581 (S.D. 1910).
78 See Nelson, supra note 68, at 265-68.

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Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

indelicacy of expression . . . ., These judicial attitudes about sex were
shared by most of society and announced that desires for same-sex intimacy
should be abhorred, feared, and repressed at all costs.

As the nation moved into the twenties and thirties, increasing social
discourse on Freudianism combined with the legacy of the Progressive Era
began to affect popular attitudes toward the increasing presence of
homosexuality in the cities.' Professor George Chauncey's pathbreaking
history, Gay New York, documents the widespread and visible existence of
metropolitaa gay subcultures since the turn of the century and the
appearance of specific gay identities such as the "faerie" and the
"queer."s Gays' visibility could not be denied, yet conflicting attitudes
towards their acceptance by society at large appeared in popular culture.
Some theatre and book reviewers, for example, criticized an author's or
playwright's use of what were called "intermediate type" (homosexual)
characters, while others saw their appearance as a sign of the times." In
1929, successful efforts to prevent the banning of Radclyffe Hall's germinal
novel on lesbianism, The Well of Loneliness, constituted a small victory.83

In the 1930s, the Catholic Church developed a long list of indecent and
proscribed literature with homosexual themes.' The motion picture
industry matched this action by prohibiting the depiction of
homosexuality.'

By the time the nation entered the forties and prepared for World War
II, the collective forces of medicine, religion, social reform, law, and
popular culture had forged a cultural mindset of negative attitudes about
homosexuality. Social values included the notion that men and women are
entirely different from each other yet ultimately destined for sexual

19 Wise v. Commonwealth, 115 S.E. 508, 511 (Va. 1923).
80 See Chauncey, Jr., supra note 6, at 237 (arguing that the presence of gay and

lesbian social networks was firmly established in New York City's Greenwich Village
by the early 1920s).

81 See id.
82 See, e.g., Edward Carpenter, My Days and Dreams (1916), reprinted in

Almanac, supra note 18, at 367-68; Dr. Constance Long, A Sign of the Times for
Those Who Can Read Portents, reprinted in Almanac, supra note 18, at 385; see also
Elvia R. Arriola, Coming Out and Coming to Terms with Sexual Identity, (book
review) 68 Tul. L. Rev. 283 (1993).

83 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 19.
See id. at 19-20.

85 Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet 30-31 (1981). Although popular demands for
the guarantee of better films had surfaced as early as 1919, through the organized
efforts of the women's club movement, the first public signs of a movement to purify
the movie screens emerged in 1933 at a convention of the Catholic Charities in New
York City. See Ruth A. Inglis, Freedom of the Movies 64, 120-21 (1964).

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

attraction and intimacy only with each other. Other sexual options
remained non-negotiable in a paradigm which constructed heterosexuality
as normal and homosexuality as either criminal, immoral, or sick. 8 At
the forefront in creating this paradigm were doctors who, in seeking the
status of professionals, found a rich source of expertise in the diagnosis and
treatment for homosexuality." In the forties, the doctor interested in
sexology could even resort to a handy glossary of homosexual slang for use
in detecting the problem of homosexuality among his patients. The breadth
of Dr. Handy's dictionary, part of a study on sex variants, suggested not
only that the homosexual subculture was growing, but also that its increased
size, diversity, and visibility necessitated more detailed scrutiny by social
institutions.88

II. POSTWAR GAYS AND LESBIANS AND THE DAWNING
OF MINORITY CONSCIOUSNESS: 1940-1960

A. Gays and the War, or "Do You Like Girls?"

As an act of rebellion against the presumed wrongfulness and
criminality of gay sexual love, the Stonewall Riots furthered the social
construction of the gay identity. For decades before the Riots, a sense of
group homosexual identity had been slowly developing.8 9 However, at the
beginning of World War II, the individual discovering a homosexual
orientation in himself or herself inherited the earlier generation's silence
about sex and homosexuality.

Social constructions of homosexuality underwent a great transformation
in the 1940s culture of war preparation. Homosexual behavior, previously
seen as a symptom of mental illness, became the identifying characteristic
of a deviant personality. Not surprisingly, rigid gender attitudes found their
way into the issue of military service by homosexuals. Allan Bdrubd has
noted that a few influential psychiatrists, who subscribed to the widely held
belief that homosexuality was a mental disorder, assisted the Draft Board
in screening draftees.' While induction officers looked for prior arrests,

16 See Russo, supra note 85, at 16.
87 See generally Foucault, supra note 41.
88 See Gershon Legman, The Language of Homosexuality, in George Henry, Sex

Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns 1149 (1941), reprinted in Almanac, supra
note 18, at 571.

89 See generally Chauncey, Jr., supra note 6 (documenting gay culture in the fifty
years between 1890 and World War II).

o See Brub6, supra note 6, at 14-15.

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military doctors tested a draftee's knowledge of homosexual slang and
scanned his body for signs of effeminacy that would classify him as "4-F."
In addition to being checked for obvious disqualifying traits, such as a
slight build, a high voice, or a limp wrist, male inductees were asked how
they felt about girls.9" But in the rush to qualify as many soldiers as
possible, the military failed to detect many gays and lesbians who did not
conform to the gendered stereotypes of homosexuality.' Meanwhile, less
patriotic draftees tried to avoid service by answering "yes" to the questions
aimed at excluding homosexuals.93 Consequently, military medical
personnel turned to medical experts for advice on how to distinguish the
authentic sexual deviant from the soldier who simply aped homosexuality
in hopes of being discharged and sent home.'

The fixation on gendered stereotypes as the key to identifying the
homosexual person made it impossible for the military to rid itself of all
homosexuals during the war years. Individuals who escaped detection, like
navyman Paul Hardman, recall a tremendous amount of sexual activity
during wartime, including some activity that was treated as if it "never
happened. "I Sergeant Johnnie Phelps, who served directly under General
Eisenhower, believes that ninety-five percent of the 900 women in the
Women's Auxiliary Army Corps battalion were lesbians.' Meanwhile,
the slightest transgression of traditional gender behaviors resulted in a
quick, efficient discharge. One man, who was questioned after he patted a
sailor on the shoulder and told him he was good looking, was given a Blue
Section 8 discharge after admitting that he was a homosexual.' The
Section 8 discharge, which indicated insanity, was part of the military's
program to keep out people whose habits and traits were deemed unsuitable
for military service, including homosexuals. 9

Despite the harshness of military policies, the sex-segregated
environments of war made it possible for gay individuals to meet others like

See id. at 24-25.
9 See id. at 23 (of 18 million men screened during the war, only 4,000-5,000

were rejected because of homosexuality).
93 See id. at 20.
9 See A.C. Cornsweet & M.F. Hayes, Conditioned Response to Fellatio, 103 Am.

J. Psychiatry 76 (1946), excerpted in Almanac, supra note 18, at 608.
9 Mary Ann Humphrey, My Country My Right to Serve: Experiences of Gay

Men and Women in the Military, World War II to the Present 19-28 (1988); see also
B6rub, supra note 6, at 102-05 (describing gay dating practices during the war).

91 See Humphrey, supra note 95, at 40.
7 See id. at 33 (blue indicated that the discharge was neither honorable or

dishonorable).
98 See id. at 34.

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themselves. John d'Emilio argues that the increased gay social contacts and
homosexual experiences of those who served in the military played a
significant role in the postwar renewal of the cities' gay subculture. 99

Postwar urban gays in the cities created a sense of community through
socializing in the relaxed environments of bars and private clubs.1' °

However, they also faced danger, for the old "crimes against nature" laws
were still in force when they returned from the war.

B. Homosexuality and Anticommunist Fervor: The
Gendered Politics of Postwar America

In the forties and fifties, amidst the social and political conservatism
fed by the rising fear of the Soviet Union, an intense drive to repress all
signs of the thriving gay subcultures emerged.' 0' One usually thinks of
the fifties as a time of threats to the civil liberties of writers, actors, labor
leaders, and government employees whose loyalty was questioned by
self-appointed crusaders.0" Much of the political history written to date
ignores the role that anticommunist politics played in creating the systematic
oppression of homosexuals which eventually sparked the riots at the
Stonewall Inn. 103

1. Gender and the Homosexual Menace

During the McCarthyist fifties, the decade of the "homosexual
menace,"104 anticommunist politics converged with the fear of betrayal by
sex perverts, whose stereotyped weak-willed nature was linked to the fear
of Russian spies. 05 As historian Elaine Tyler May has argued, postwar
anticommunist politics and social attitudes were driven by the fear that an
outsider ideology threatened the fundamental principles of Americanism.
United States containment policies of communism abroad, therefore, also
entailed the containment of anything and everything that threatened
American home life, viewed by many as the cornerstone of American

9' See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 31-32.
See id. at 32-33.

101 See Chauncey, Jr., supra note 6, at 360 (number of men in New York arrested
for homosexual activity rose sharply during postwar years).

1o2 See generally Stanley Kutler, The American Jnquisition (1982).
103 But see Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 40-43 (describing the Cold War as a

"sustained attack" on gays and lesbians).
104 Id. at 43.
"0S See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 41-42.

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strength and character."°6 The "Red" was anyone who supported radical
changes in family, work, or gender roles. The war had upset traditional
gender roles when middle-class wives became working women; it was now
time to return America to its prewar state of normalcy, which included
reconstructing "the family" in terms of procreative heterosexual values.1 7

Communism appeared to threaten the non-equalitarian, traditional
nuclear family, where the husband was deemed superior in matters of
wages, sex, and domestic control. Demobilization brought with it a firm
commitment, by both government and industry, to reestablishing prewar
patterns in the relationship between the sexes.10 8  Employers were
encouraged to purge women from the thousands of men's jobs they had
taken during the war. °9 Government and industry jointly engaged in
widespread propaganda campaigns aimed at getting women to return to their
traditional roles as financially dependent wives and mothers."0  Many
women willingly returned home, but those who enjoyed working found it
harder and harder to keep a job. Others were able to stay with an employer
only if they accepted a lower-paying menial job."'

Not surprisingly, the homosexual was marked as a grave threat to the
resurging strength of the American way of life." 2  A national hysteria
erupted when members of the House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) discovered, by chance, that several federal employees had been
dismissed because of their homosexuality." 3 The shocking information
that homosexuals had been on the federal payroll triggered a highly
publicized national campaign to search out men and women in government
jobs whose polluted lifestyle forced them to hide their true identities. The
fear of disclosure purportedly made gays easily susceptible to extortion and
blackmail, and thus presumptively disqualified them for work involving
national security. '

14  From the equation of homosexuality with

"0 See generally Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the
Cold War Era (1988).

11 See Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex
During World War II 99-127 (1987).

'o See id.
109 See id. at 101, 113.
11 See id. at 99.
m See id. at 108.
" An irony of blaming gays for threatening the American way of life is that,

arguably, the expansion of capitalism actually created the social conditions which
allowed people to explore same-sex eroticism. See generally John d'Emilio, Capitalism
and Gay Identity, in Rubenstein, supra note 4, at 26.

" See id. at 30.
114 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 40-44.

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

communism, there emerged the specter of a communist takeover by
homosexuals who "by the very nature of their vice . . . belong[ed] to a
sinister, mysterious and efficient International."" 5

2. Postwar Social Awareness of the Gay Identity (or the
"Sex Pervert")

Using rhetoric that cast traditional heterosexual values as the source of
American strength, conservative demagogues like Joseph McCarthy fed the
nation's panic with charges against homosexuals. McCarthy claimed that
gays threatened national security by infiltrating the halls of government."l 6

The homosexual scapegoat was shown as vulnerable to blackmail." 7 Any
threat to society's traditional gender role expectations, such as that posed
by men and women who were "immature, unstable and emotionally
enfeebled by the gratification of their perverted desires," had to be
eliminated."' McCarthyism's homosexual panic thus carried the taint of
a gendered politics. In promoting a certain brand of Americanism,
conservative politicians strove to preserve their image of normalcy,
epitomized by the traditional white, middle-class, and heterosexual family.

The link between communism and homosexuality had been
strengthened, albeit unwittingly, by the 1948 publication of Alfred Kinsey's
neutral and bland treatise, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, 11 which
was followed in 1953 by a similar study of female sexuality." To

R.G. Waldeck, Homosexual International, Human Events, Sept. 29, 1960,
reprinted in Martin Duberman, About Time: Exploring the Gay Past 199 (1986)
[hereinafter About Time].

116 See Roger S. Mitchell, The Homosexual and the Law 56 (1969). The reasoning
behind this persecution was that homosexuals were emotionally unstable perverts who
had weak moral fiber. See Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in
Government, Sen. Doc. No. 241, 81st Cong., 2nd Sess. (1950), reprinted in About
Time, supra note 115, at 152, 154.

117 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 42-43.
118 Id. at 43.
1.9 See Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). This

study challenged widely held beliefs concerning male sexuality. Kinsey concluded that
"37 percent of American men had at least one post adolescent homosexual experience
leading to orgasm, 4 percent were exclusively homosexual throughout adulthood"; thus,
homosexuality was much more widespread than anyone had ever imagined. Sexual
Politics, supra note 1, at 35.

120 See Alfred C. Kinsey et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953).
This study concluded that the incidents of female homosexuality, though fewer than
those of male homosexuality, were nonetheless extensive. Twenty-eight percent of
women responded erotically to other women, while 13 percent had experienced orgasm
with another woman. See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 35.

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postwar Americans, the most shocking information that surfaced from
Kinsey's work was that homosexuality was not an isolated
phenomenon. 121 Such data aided the construction of homosexuality as a
threat to the American social order. The idea that gays existed in great
numbers shocked a society in which many people still lowered their voices
when discussing sexual topics, particularly homosexuality. Any suggestion
that homosexuality might be common undermined dominant American
values.

An irony of the homosexual panic is that the fifties were actually a
period of conflicting social attitudes towards sex. People were beginning
to talk more openly about sex in general, but gay sex remained a taboo or
kinky subject. The earlier generation's Victorianism was giving way to a
culture in which themes about sex were boldly portrayed in plays, including
A Streetcar Named Desire by gay playwright Tennessee Williams."2

Nevertheless, the paradigm of normal sexual behavior continued to be the
procreative heterosexual lifestyle. The dominant images of fifties culture
memorialized the idealized heterosexual family in the television sitcoms of
the period, such as Leave it to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father
Knows Best. On the whole, these shows depicted normalcy as stable,
heterosexual, nuclear all-American families living in clean and orderly
suburban homes." Against the background of these powerful idealized
images, the fifties culture perceived the homosexual as a social and sexual
deviant who deserved neither the status of federal employee nor the
privileges of basic American citizenship.

By the fifties, society had radically reconstructed its perception of
homosexuality. Homosexuality went from being an aberrant social behavior
to being a characteristic of a social identity known as the "sex pervert,"
who lurked in one's workplace or neighborhood.' 24 In turn, the

121 See David Halberstam, The Fifties 277 (1993).
122 See id. at 254-56 (discussing Streetcar's struggles with censorship).
123 See id. at 508-14 (summarizing fifties television shows).
124 For example, in 1955, Boise, Idaho was swept into a maelstrom of panic and

suspicion over rumors of a large homosexual underground in the city. In an editorial
entitled "Crush the Monster," The Idaho Daily Statesman declared that:

[dlisclosure that the evils of moral perversion prevail in Boise on an extensive
scale must come as a distinct and intensely disagreeable shock to most
Boiseans. It seems almost incredible that any such cancerous growth could
have taken roots and developed in our midst.

It's bad enough when three Boise men. . . are reported to have confessed
to violations involving 10 teenage boys; but when ... the court announces that
... an investigation . . . has only scratched the "surface," the situation is one
that causes general alarm and calls for immediate systematic cauterization.

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construction of the homosexual as scapegoat gave birth to gay
self-awareness, the seed of gay minority consciousness, as the very people
targeted for persecution sought each other out for support and comfort.'15

John d'Emilio, who has dated the emergence of a gay minority
consciousness to postwar America, argues that social contacts in bars,
clubs, and house parties encouraged the rise of pre-political social
networks.1 26  In their landmark study of a working-class lesbian
community in Buffalo, New York, historians Elizabeth Kennedy and
Madeline Davis have noted the stability of lesbian bars that emerged right
after the war. 7 They also argue that the gay bar culture and gay house
parties created social networks critical to the emergence of a gay political
consciousness. 1'2

A gay minority or political consciousness could not emerge until
homosexuals were aware that they were the objects of fear and prejudice
and that they could only reveal the details of their private lives at great risk
to their social and economic security. The cultural hysteria bred by
anticommunist politics accomplished this task. Gay men and lesbians,
surrounded by the rhetoric of the "homosexual menace," needed to identify
with others who were also feeling the weight of the campaign to eliminate
their very existence.

C. Sexual Vigilantism in the Halls of Justice

The resounding antihomosexual rhetoric that issued from the halls of
Congress was heeded by state and local guardians of law and morality who
instituted their own campaigns for antihomosexual vigilantism. For
example, Stoumen v. Reilly, 9 decided in 1950, the first year of the
homosexual panic, illustrates the attitude some lower court judges had

Reprinted in John DeGrassi, The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice, and Folly in an
American City 3 (1966).

123 A sign of the impact persecution had on the formation of the gay identity
appears in the organizational goals of Eann MacDonald's Bachelors Anonymous, a
group devoted to the interests of the "androgynous minority": "encroaching American
Fascism . . . seeks to bend unorganized and unpopular minorities into isolated
fragments . . . government indictment of Androgynous Civil Servants . . . [legally
establishes] GUILT BY ASSOCIATION." Eann MacDonald, Preliminary Concepts
(1950), reprinted in Gay American History, supra note 19, at 409. Eann MacDonald
was the pseudonym of Henry Hay, one of the founders of the Mattachine Society. See
id. at 406-07.

126 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 31-32.
127 See Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6, at 4.
128 See id. at 3; see also infra part III.
129 Stoumen v. Reilly, 222 P.2d 678 (Cal. App. 1950).

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towards bar owners who let their establishments become homosexual
meeting places. The issue in the case before Judge McWilliams was
whether Sol Stoumen, the owner of the Black Cat Restaurant, had violated
the California Alcohol Beverage and Control Act (ABC) by letting his
premises become a "disorderly house" under the terms of the statute.13

0

Stoumen's attorney argued that persons with homosexual tendencies should
be able to congregate in restaurants and bars.' Judge McWilliams saw
the matter differently: he suspended the restaurant's liquor license and
stated that "for a proprietor of a restaurant knowingly to permit his
premises to be regularly used as a meeting place by [homosexuals] ...
with all of the potentialities for evil and immorality drawing out of such
meetings ...justifies action. "12 Without any clear language in the law
aimed at the congregation of sex perverts in an ordinary bar, the State's
case against Stoumen was thin.

Although petitioner Stoumen prevailed on appeal, the California
Supreme Court's decision, one of the first to distinguish between
homosexual status and homosexual conduct, 33 virtually invited the
legislature to amend the law (the ABC) to reach the immoral conduct of
"sex perverts." The California legislature responded in 1955 and made it
possible for the state to shut down gay bars throughout the fifties and
sixties. 11 Kershaw v. Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control35

illustrates the social and jurisprudential developments after Stoumen.
There, a California appellate court ruled that, under the new ABC Section
58, a bar might be shut down upon proof that same-sex patrons danced,
touched, hugged, and kissed. The new law forbade a bar from catering to
drug dealers, panderers, or sexual perverts. 36 Justices Peters and Bray
also took pains, as they interpreted the meaning of "perversion," to express,

'3o Id. at 682.
131 Id.
132 Id. (emphasis added).

"I' The California Supreme Court, which reversed the lower appellate decision,
stated in the relevant provision of the Alcoholic Beverage and Control Act that "mere
proof of patronage, without proof of the commission of illegal or immoral acts on the
premises, or resort thereto for such purposes, is not sufficient to show a violation of
Section 58." Stoumen v. Reilly, 234 P.2d 969, 971.

"3 The law was amended in 1955 to require the Board of Equalization to suspend
a liquor license when "the premises of the licensee are a resort for prostitutes, pimps,
panderers, or sexual perverts." See Leonard, supra note 4, at 193. Most courts
interpreted Stoumen to mean that the law prohibited immoral conduct; thus, immoral
conduct constituted a ground for suspending the license.

133 318 P.2d 494 (Cal. Ct. App. 1957).
136 Id. at 497.

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as bluntly as their discomfort allowed, their view of homosexuality
according to contemporary values:

Seeking and obtaining sexual satisfaction with a person of the
same sex is considered an aberrant method by the great majority
of people. The methods of copulation available to two persons
of the same sex would certainly be so regarded. No more precise
definition is necessary for the purposes of this case.'3 7

Underlying the legal system's view of the homosexual bar culture was
a distinct desire that private citizens, such as the owners of bars and
restaurants, also enforce the social and moral codes of proper gender
behavior. A homosexual was a sexual pervert. In sentiment and behavior,
and sometimes also in dress, he or she defied the majority's value system
and, therefore, threatened the stability of social order. The danger was so
clear that the state had an absolute right and duty to prevent homosexual
behavior from taking place both in private and in public. Although there
was no victim to complain, offending society's morality was enough to
make displays of gay affection criminal.

III. MISERY LOVES COMPANY: THE RISE OF
HOMOSEXUAL IDENTITIES IN THE FACE OF

SELF-RIGHTEOUS PERSECUTION BY THE STATE

By the end of the fifties and through the sixties, society knew and
talked about homosexuality openly but in distinctly derogatory terms.
Supported by the public view of homosexuality as a form of antisocial
behavior, the legal culture of enforcement took the task upon itself to
maintain the norms of social decency. In some cases the individual
prejudices of police officers and prosecutors determined whether a person's
conduct was acceptable under socially prescribed gender roles. The legal
culture's main targets for persecution were the people who patronized bars
that openly catered to a homosexual clientele.

137 Id.

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A. The Role of the State in the Enforcement of Moral
Values

1. Gay Bar Culture as a Means of Survival

One of the more ironic details of the history of gay bar raids in the
fifties and sixties is that many, if not most, of these establishments had a
mixed gay/straight patronage. As pioneer historians Elizabeth Kennedy and
Madeline Davis found in their study of Buffalo's lesbian community, in the
fifties there were no strict "lesbian" versus "gay male" or straight versus
homosexual bars. 3 8 A 1966 empirical study of the vice squad practices
in fifteen city police departments in Los Angeles County similarly
determined that, frequently, the bars targeted for surveillance for sex crimes
had a mixed patronage.' 39 Yet the frequent police patrolling and raids did
not prevent gay bars from becoming an important aspect of the prepolitical
structure of many metropolitan homosexual communities. For example, for
Buffalo's pre-Stonewall lesbian community, Kennedy and Davis concluded,
after interviewing forty-five older lesbians over a fifteen-year period, that
many lesbians viewed the bars as a second home."4  Lesbian youth
particularly benefitted from the social contacts made in the bars, for many
had already been rejected by their families and high school peers because
of their sexual orientation. The bars were more than a place to drink or
socialize with a date or lover. They were sources of important friendships
and connections, a means of creating a meaningful life despite society's
open hostility to the lesbian sexual identity. 4'

A characteristic feature of the working-class bar culture in the fifties
and sixties was the extensive use of butch-femme roles.' 42 The gay male
counterpart was the image of the queen or "camp. "'11 As Kennedy and
Davis have theorized, each of the identities and specific behaviors identified
with butch-femme roles was a unique way of mocking society's rigid
sex/gender value system. Most lesbians understood the social significance
of going out in public as a butch or of dressing as a femme and being in the
company of a butch. For the lesbian butch, the masculinized dress of pants

138 Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6, at 72-74.

1 See Project, supra note 10, at 721 n.213.
,4 See Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6, at 38, 52.
141 See id. at 44-49.
142 See id. at 151-90.
141 See id. at 383.

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

and men's shirts, and the shortened genderless nickname, communicated a
"to not deny who I am" attitude to the rest of society. The butch was likely
to be openly harassed as a "homo" or "queer." The femme received less
ridicule when alone, but, in the bars and in a butch's company, she would
also be harassed and ridiculed.'"

Kennedy and Davis's study noted a little discussed but clear difference
between the identity of the gay male queen and that of the lesbian butch.
Queens developed the phenomenon of "camp," a theatrical, incongruous,
and humorous behavior which lets people know that one is a man who is
acting like a woman. The identity of the queen and his (her) camping is
generally associated with the building of gay male consciousness and,
through his (her) shocking behavior, increased societal awareness of
homosexuals.'45 The butch lesbian, however, never developed camp;
humor was never an element of her persona. Rather, the butch's
effectiveness was based, within the lesbian community, on a usurpation of
society's male prerogatives, including pursuing female love and serving as
the protector of women's space.' Thus, the butch role, especially in the
pre-Stonewall years, carried a heavy burden-that of women's struggle for
the right to function independently of men in the public world, especially
in the dangerous environment of the bar. "'

These unique interpretations of the dominant and rigid sex/gender
value system, and the persistent way in which lesbian and gay working-class
individuals adopted butch, femme, and camp roles despite the systematic
harassment they provoked are essential to an understanding of the
working-class lesbian or gay bar culture. At the cost of ridicule, abuse, and
sometimes illegal violence, such persistence communicated a willingness to
be themselves, to carve out safe space, and to defy society's rejection of
their need for love.

2. Don We Now Our Gay Apparel: Police Harassment in
Gay Bars in the Fifties and Sixties

Pre-Stonewall gay bars differed from each other in their sociological
make-up. Using the Buffalo lesbian experience as a prototype,'4 it
appears that the bars reflected the race and class tensions of society at large.
Middle-class bars were mostly populated by closeted white professionals,

See id. at 169-70.
141 See id. at 383.
1'6 See id.
141 See id. at 185-86.

See id. at 113-50.

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people who were generally uncomfortable with the openness of the
working-class crowds. Because the middle-class bar might serve the more
closeted upwardly mobile homosexual patron, an owner might be more
strict about the dress and conduct of the bar's patronage. Working-class
bars could be either mostly black or white. Fifties American culture was
more openly racist and discouraging of integration than contemporary
culture; thus, black lesbians tended to stay close to their own communities
in their search for welcoming bars and clubs. House parties in the black
neighborhoods also provided a place for black lesbians and gays to
socialize.'49 The working-class white bars were also likely to serve as
points of experimentation for racial desegregation of public
accommodations."5  However, it was the largely working-class and
racially integrated bar, such as the Stonewall Inn, which catered to men and
women who adopted camp or butch-femme roles, that was most likely to
be the subject of systematic harassment.

Kennedy and Davis observed, from their study of the Buffalo lesbian
community, that by the 1950s there were lesbian butches who were not just
adopting masculinized dress and behavior on their weekend social outings
but were making it a larger part of their identity. 5 ' By defying society's
gender role expectations, the masculinized dress and behavior of the butch
or the feminized dress of the gay male drag queen could draw extreme
negative attention not only from a vice officer, but also from the broader
reaches of an underground gay social network, especially from the closeted
middle-class. Middle-class homophile organizations like the Mattachine
Society had specific policies against blatant effeminacy by men or butchness
by women.'52

Homosexual men and women had continuous contact with each other
primarily in the gay bar culture. But the gay bar culture also brought gays,
lesbians, and others who defied society's gendered norms (in dress or
behavior) into continuous contact with the law. In the social context of
antigay prejudice, to hint at the fact that one had departed from traditional
gender role expectations only invoked suspicion and oppression. To
socialize at an underground bar meant risking the pain of a handcuff or the
possibility of an undercover vice cop's hand at one's collar. Men and
women, caught without warning in the middle of a raid, suddenly found

149 See id. at 123-31.
130 See id. at 113-23.

'5' See id. at 68.
12 See infra part III.A. 1; see also The Purposes of the Daughters of Bilitis, The

Ladder (May 1957) (courtesy of Lesbian Archives, supra note 36) (asserting Daughters
of Bilitis' intentions for "the integration of the homosexual into society by . .
advocating a mode of behaviour and dress acceptable to society").

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

themselves tossed into a paddy wagon and hauled off to jail. In working
class bars, the seeds of the 1969 revolution were sown by the systematic
violence of vice officers doing their job to raid the gay bars so as to clear
the city of "moral filth."

The selective prosecution of cross-dressers and homosexuals illustrates
not only the state's blatant disregard for gays' civil rights, but also its
intention to maintain a rigid and gendered social order. The personal
testimony of a lesbian named "Peg B." in a Greenwich Village bar in 1964
shows how an experience as the victim of a gay bar raid became an
unforgettable memory of pain, shock, and humiliation:

We had barely ordered a couple of beers and had a dance to the
jukebox, when suddenly a large man appeared in the doorway
and yelled, "This is a raid." Everyone froze; then, like a bunch
of sheep, we all trooped downstairs and into the waiting paddy
wagons, about 43 of us. . . . In the paddy wagon, a woman
panicked and ate her driver's license.... After what seemed like
hours, we were taken, two at a time, into a small room and
searched by police women. We had to pull down our underwear
and bend over. It was very humiliating. 3

A fictionalized autobiographical account of the selective harassment of
female cross-dressers caught in a bar raid is provided by author Leslie
Feinberg, who identifies herself as a butch who came out as a lesbian
during the late fifties:

None of us saw the red light flashing.

The music died and everyone groaned. Then the police flooded
into the club. I held my hand up to shield my eyes from the
spotlight, but I still couldn't see what was happening. I heard
shouting and tables and chairs overturning. I remembered there

'" Peg B., Description of a Raid on a Lesbian Bar Called Maryangelas on 7th
Avenue South in Greenwich Village, NYC (courtesy of Lesbian Archives, supra note
36).

"'1 Some readers may question the usefulness of fictional literature to illustrate a
historical point. First, many of these incidents of sexualized violence are difficult to
document and constitute painful memories, which the victims often feel are better left
unrecorded. Second, where such evidence exists, it is scarce; the singular written
account by "Peg B.," supra note 153, emerged from a scouring of over one dozen fully
packed archival folders at the Lesbian Herstory Archives over a three-week period.
Third, the work of novelists who positively portray lesbian characters can be a rich
source of insights into the plight of lesbians whose lives intersect with the legal system.
The fictionalized accounts of lesbians often are a concerted effort by the author to
undermine the unfavorable stereotypes of lesbians and to tell her own story through the
veiled protection of a fictional character. See Anne B. Goldstein, Representing
Lesbians, 1 Texas J. of Women and the L. 301 (1992).

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Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

was only one door-there was no escape this time. At sixteen
years old I was still underage.

I slowly took off my new blue suit coat, folded it neatly, and put
it on the piano at the back of the stage. For a moment I
considered taking off my tie, thinking somehow it might go
easier for me if I did. But of course, it wouldn't have. In fact,
the tie made me feel stronger in order to face whatever lay ahead
of me. I rolled up my sleeves and stepped off the stage. A cop
grabbed me and cuffed my hands tightly behind my back.
Another cop was smacking Booker, who was sobbing."

Police harassment in and out of the gay bar raids was gendered,
misogynist, and racist.'56 The gendered aspect of the enforcement was
displayed by the concerted effort to penalize the "obvious" queers, the
individuals who cross-dressed. A common harassment technique involved
enforcing the rule that an individual had to wear at least three pieces of
clothing appropriate to his or her gender.'57 The rule seems humorous
now, 5 ' but in the pre-Stonewall years gay and lesbian bar patrons
adhered to these rules in the hopes of fending off not just ridicule by vice
officers, but often grossly violent treatment from these guardians of
society's gendered value system. Feinberg writes:

I looked over at Ed. The cop was patting her down and running
his hands up her thighs. He pulled her wallet out of her pocket,
took out the money, and stuffed it in his own pocket.

'5 Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues 61 (1993).
116 Feinberg's character "Booker" is a black lesbian who forms a friendship with

the white lesbian butch "Jess."
137 The source of the three-garment rule remains unclear. There are recorded cases

of prosecutions against individuals for violating the masquerading laws. See, e.g.,
People v. Archibald, 260 N.E. 2d 871 (N.Y. 1970) (man dressed as a woman and
standing on subway platform); People v. Gillespi, 202 N.E. 2d 565 (N.Y. 1964) (man
dressed as a woman). Oral historical accounts confirm that in New York the police
harassed drag queens and butch lesbians by invoking Section 887(7) of the Code of
Criminal Procedure which forbade wearing a disguise except in cases of masquerade
parties or by special permission. The statute was not enforced on Halloween night.
See Stonewall, supra note 5, at 299 n.39. Personal experiences with the three garment
rule are also recorded in Faderman, supra note 6, at 185, and Marjorie Garber, Vested
Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety 141 (1992). See also The When and
Now of It Nab 43 Women, Girl in Bar Raid, Impact (Nov. 1980 New Orleans)
(courtesy Lesbian Archives, supra note 36) at 13.

118 In one East Coast city on New Year's Eve, police patrolled lesbian bars for
violators of gendered norms, arresting women wearing "fly-front pants." An observer
of this phenomenon viewed this pattern of police behavior as arbitrary enforcement
based on regional attitudes about looking "straight." For example, on the West Coast,
women had long been accustomed to wearing "man-tailored" or fly-front pants. See
Sweet, supra note 10, at 180.

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Faeries, Marinachas, Queens, and Lezzies

"Eyes straight ahead," the cop behind me had his mouth close to
my ear.

The other cop began shouting at Ed. "You think you're a guy,
huh? You think you can take it like a guy? We'll see. What's
these?" he said. He yanked up her shirt and pulled her binder
down around her waist. He grabbed her breasts so hard she
gasped.159

"C'mon Jesse," a cop taunted me, "let's have a pretty smile for
the camera. You're such a pretty girl. Isn't she pretty, guys?"
They snapped my mug shot. One of the cops loosened my tie.
As he ripped open my new dress shirt, the sky blue buttons
bounced and rolled across the floor. He pulled up my T-shirt,
exposing my breasts. My hands were cuffed behind my back.
I was flat up against a wall.... My knees were wobbling. Lt.
Mulroney, that's what his badge read. He saw me looking at it
and slapped me hard across the face. His hand clamped on my
face like a vise. "Suck my cock," he said quietly. 160

3. Vice Squads, Homosexuals, and the Technology of
Enforcement

Throughout the fifties and sixties, the police departments of virtually
every major city of the United States served as the state's agents for the
systematic enforcement of moral values by regulating public and private
homosexual conduct.' 6' Gays and lesbians of that period usually view the
history of police regulation of parks,' 62 bathhouses, parked cars,
restaurants, bars, and home parties frequented by homosexuals as a tale of
intentional harassment. Social change came about in the late sixties only

159 Feinberg, supra note 155, at 56.
l60 Id. at 62.
161 The entrapment technique of sending undercover police officers into bars to

identify illegal behavior was criticized in the San Francisco Examiner as unnecessary
and as a waste of resources-many people felt that the police would be better used in
the transit system where attacks on riders were increasing. Cited in Special Cops for
Gay Bars, 7 The Mattachine Review, Nov. 1961, at 4-8.

162 See, e.g., Calling Shots, 6 Mattachine Review, Oct. 1960, at 22 (reporting the
arrest of nine men, one a priest and another a college official, in a raid on Waukesha,
Wisconsin's Frame Park). See also Atlanta Police Launch Drive in Parks, Use
Cameras, 3 The Advoc., Aug. 1969, at 12.

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Columbia Journal of Gender and Law

after the gay and lesbian communities of certain cities began to manifest
long overdue political resistance.

Many details of the abuses done in the name of the enforcement of
such vice crimes as loitering, vagrancy, lewd conduct, solicitation, sodomy,
oral copulation, and molestation never appeared in official records. This
documentary gap has several explanations, the first being the obvious
cultural taboo that prevailed during these decades about discussing
homosexuality. Thus, although an occasional newspaper might have printed
a sensational headline about a massive raid on a gay bar, 63 the regular
course of police regulation, which in some cities constituted weekly visits
to selected locales by vice officers, was not written up. Second,
homosexual conduct constituted a victimless crime. Without a complaining
victim, the sex offender's crime was only against society's dominant values;
a vice cop had the discretionary authority either to charge an individual or
to issue a warning. As the Supreme Court of the United States would
rationalize a generation later in Bowers v. Hardwick,"6 the state invoked
an historical right and duty to regulate homosexuality based on the
reflection of Judaeo-Christian values in "moral" legislation." Third, the
same cultural taboo and prejudice that could be triggered by one's alleged
involvement with homosexuality discouraged harassed victims of vice law
enforcement from filing civil rights complaints for fear of exposure and the
consequent damage to one's career or community and family relations.
Fourth, a complaint of abuse at the hands of the state was a futile gesture,
given the prevailing view that homosexuality constituted a mental illness or
immoral crime.'11

Despite this paucity of technical data about ways in which the police
departments of cities regulated and harassed homosexuals at beaches,
bathhouses, parks, parked cars, and even private parties, social historians
have recovered some of the details of the impact of basic law enforcement
techniques used by the police to regulate consensual homosexual conduct.
The gay and lesbian oral history provided by pre-Stonewall "old-timers" is
consistent with the few studies of law enforcement techniques being used
in the sixties against homosexual women and men. 67 One 1966 study,

163 For example, the New Orleans States ran a headline on September 12, 1953
reading "43 Women, Girl in Bar Raid" and described the arrest of 43 women and a
juvenile girl in a downtown bar that apparently had signs stating "no men allowed."
See The When and the Now of It, supra note 157.

164 Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).

165 In that value system, the argument goes, the law secularizes the belief that
homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, and its practice justifies both social and moral
opprobrium. Id. at 196-97 (Burger, C.J. concurring).

"I Seymour Pollack, The Sex Offender and the Law, 446 (1972).
167 Project, supra note 10. Steven A. Rosen, Police Harassment of Homosexual

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

for example, comparing the police practices of the City of Los Angeles with
the police practices of other major cities, found that one Los Angeles
community devoted as much as fifty percent of its vice enforcement
resources to the regulation of homosexual cruising and socializing
locales. 6 s  Also, the consensual aspect of most crimes related to
homosexuality required that police officers be trained in the use of
surreptitious techniques in order to apprehend offenders. Standard
operating techniques included plainclothes police decoys and clandestine
operations, routine police patrol, warnings, and raids which purported to
enforce fire codes. 69

The study further found that police vice officers typically resorted to
the standard operating technique of the decoy to enforce antihomosexual
vice laws. The decoy practice is the best example of the exercise of
discretionary authority by a vice officer. In a typical situation, the decoy
would set up the context through conversation, observation, gestures, or by
simply waiting in a public restroom for the suspected homosexual to engage
in some responsive touching or solicitation. Once the suspect had uttered
an invitation or performed a hint of a gesture, the decoy would encourage
the performance of the suggested act in a different location, such as a
parked car, at which point the decoy's partner would apprehend the
homosexual. According to the authors, because the consensual nature of
the alleged crime typically called for whispering or close touching,
enforcement with the decoy technique was very difficult. Nevertheless, it
served as the standard practice of the Los Angeles Police Department
throughout the fifties and sixties.17  The discretionary aspects of the
enforcement technique led the authors to question both the decoy practice
itself and the courts' reliance on evidence provided by a decoy officer.' 7 '
Various practices suggested the potential for abuse or the interjection of a
police officer's personal prejudices into the enforcement of vice laws. For
example, decoys were known to engage in entrapment techniques such as
"swishing" of the hips or affecting other effeminate behavior. 72 Three

Women and Men in New York City 1960-1980, 12 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 159
(1981) [hereinafter Police Harassment].

'6' Project, supra note 10, at 687 n. 12 (other cities allocated resources specifically
toward regulating homosexual socializing, but a comparatively small amount).

69 See id. at 719-20 (in a fire code "raid," the police would make people file out
of the bar, supposedly so they could be counted to see if the bar exceeded its legal
capacity).

'70 Id. at 691 n.30.
171 Id. at 695-96.
172 Id. at 692 n.37.

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police departments followed the practice of permitting the targeted
homosexual to touch the decoy's genitals before effecting an arrest.'

Routine patrol and harassment constituted the most standard aspects of
the regulation of homosexual conduct during the fifties and sixties in public
places. The UCLA project, after interviewing at least fifteen different city
agencies, defined official harassment as active police conduct intended
either to eliminate public congregations of homosexuals when there was no
sign of illegal activity or to discourage patronage of establishments via
arrests for trivial offenses. 74  Harassment constituted those practices
intended not to arrest but to drive homosexuals out of a town or an
establishment. Typical techniques included a plainclothes officer checking
identifications of patrons every half hour, running a check on their history
of traffic violations, or charging an individual with jaywalking.' 7  An
outrageous 1956 magazine article aimed at the heterosexual middle-class
male titled, How the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis got De-Fagged"
exemplifies the existence of unofficial harassment. The author invoked the
full range of contemporaneous terms that referred to gay men
derogatorily- "pests, pansies, queers, fairies and fawning fags" as he
recounted how a hotel hired a private investigator to sit in the bar and, over
the course of a few days, take photos and fingerprints off of drink glasses,
a scheme that effectuated a quick and permanent dispersal of the
patrons. 

176

Bars were targeted for health and safety code violations such as
exceeding maximum patronage numbers. The UCLA Project documented
that, in the sixties, regulation or shutdown of a bar that catered to
homosexuals was possible under either one of two California state laws:
the Red Light Abatement Act, 77 which enjoined as a nuisance any
building used for lewdness or prostitution, and the Department of Alcoholic
Beverages Control, 78 which allowed the revocation of licenses for
"disorderly" premises. 79 The practice may have been technically legal,
but as a part of homosexual vice crime enforcement, the laws were

171 Id. at 696.
174 Id. at 718.
175 Id. at 719-20.
176 Stonewall, supra note 5, at 191-93.
177 Cal. Pen. Code § 11225 (West 1969).
178 See Project, supra note 10, at 727 n.234 (the Department of Alcoholic

Beverages Control acted under Cal. Const. art. XX, §22); see also supra notes 129-137
and accompanying text.

"' Project, supra note 10, at 726-27; see also Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6, at
41 (in the 1940s in Buffalo, the mere presence of homosexuals in a bar was interpreted
by the New York State Liquor Authority as disorderly conduct).

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

selectively enforced in locales where there was suspected homosexual
patronage.

The dry studies of enforcement techniques never capture the blatant
and arbitrary discrimination that frequently accompanied a vice officer's
exercise of his discretionary authority." The police officer who could
simply observe illegal behavior without a decoy did not need to exercise his
discretion. In contrast, one contemporaneous study revealed that police
officers who had no observable conduct to sanction typically went ahead
with harassment techniques based only on their personal interpretation of
the moral values of the day.' 81

As previously discussed in connection with the Stoumen case," s the
attempted shutdown of a gay bar could encourage judicial concern that
displays of homosexual affection offended society's basic gendered
values.'" In some cases, however, regulation of bars arose from the
state's effort to enforce federal tax laws. For example, Mafia-run bars
were the targets of raids not only because they catered to gays but also
because the owners of these establishments did not pay federal liquor
taxes.'8" Homosexual patrons were both burdened and benefitted by this
nefarious arrangement. On the one hand, the bar connected to organized
crime might be the only establishment in a community willing to serve
gays. On the other, the Mafia connection encouraged the owners to charge
their patrons high prices for drinks and food." The practice of
"gayola," or the passing of money between a bartender and a police officer,
further illustrates the web of hypocrisy surrounding the pre-Stonewall
homosexual bar patron. Gays' membership in a social underclass exposed
them to prosecution for vice laws, while the enforcers themselves engaged
in illegalities with a sense of impunity that grew out of the low social status
accorded to homosexuals."8

B. Viewing Pre-Stonewall Homosexual Politics Through
the Lenses of Gender, Race, and Class

Generally viewed as the high mark of resistance in gay history, the
Stonewall Riots have been seen as a moment of anarchy, when the members

180 See supra text accompanying note 163.
'8' See Sweet, supra note 10, at 137-40.
182 See supra part II.C.
113 See supra note 137 and accompanying text.

' See Police Harassment, supra note 167, at 174-75.
18 See id. at 172.
186 See Sweet, supra note 10, at 145.

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of an openly despised social underclass fought back and questioned the
state's power to systematically abuse their civil rights. Doubtless, as an act
of defiance and direct confrontation with the state, the story of the Riots is
one of the most important stories in gay history. But some gay historians
have noted the problems of mythmaking generated by ahistorical retellings
of the story of the Riots. 11 The Riots can be too easily blended into the
birth of the gay civil rights movement, a perspective that often fails to
separate instigators from later mass organizers. A more accurate
perspective asks: who was actually there?

The perspectives of gender, race, and class are equally critical to the
retelling of the story of the Stonewall Riots. With sensitivity to those
elements of the story, historians can tell a story of the Riots that evokes
today's concerns about sensitivity to the diversity of the gay and lesbian, or
transgendered, community."S One should look back on the Riots with an
eye to the fact that the typical raided bar was probably working-class and
somewhat racially integrated, with patrons who publicized their sexual
identity through butch and femme role playing. A perspective sensitive to
issues of gender attitudes, as well as race and class, would also recognize
the state's violent harassment of the butch-looking lesbian who appropriated
male prerogatives and of men in drag who undermined the tenets of male
supremacy by dressing in female garb. Such perspectives encourage
examination of the critical role that police contact played in the formation
of pre-Stonewall sexual identity and in the infiltration of prejudice into the
legal system. The social conditions for prejudice existed in cultural
attitudes-social, medical, and moral-while the instruments for expressing
those prejudices existed in the vaguely worded laws which allowed law
enforcers to define vice crime according to the values of a heterosexist
culture. 89

The meaning of the Riots for gay history, and for the largely white
middle-class values that define the gay movement of today, is changed by
the perspectives of gender, race, and class. Indeed, the Riots cannot be
attributed to the homophile politics that flourished in the sixties. 11 For

187 See, e.g., Stonewall, supra note 5, at xv-xvi.
188 See Steven Seidman, Identity and Politics in a "Postmodern" Gay Culture:

Some Historical and Conceptual Notes, reprinted in Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer
Politics and Social Theory 105 (Michael Warner ed., 1993) (discussing the diversity of
the contemporary gay community).

"9 A 1968 sociological study of the homosexual culture noted that "the police may
be one of the few heterosexual elements with which [homosexuals] come into contact
as homosexuals .... [Tihe reaction of police officers to homosexuality is doubly an
important factor in the development of self-definitions for individual homosexuals who
are questioned and/or arrested." Stonewall, supra note 5, at 161.

"9 See generally Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 231.

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

the organizations that grew out of the McCarthyist-fueled homosexual
panic, the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis (D.O.B.), were
largely governed by a politics of respectability and of accommodation to
society's fear of homosexuality.' 9'

1. In the Closet: The Middle Class Politics of
Respectability

Pre-Stonewall literate middle-class organizations like the Mattachine
Society and D.O.B. offered some homosexual men and women an abstract,
yet real, sense of community. Mattachine was formed in 1950, at the
height of the McCarthyist terrorism that began with the House Committee
on Un-American Activities' questioning of the loyalty of homosexuals
working for the federal government." Some Mattachine members,
including Henry Hay, one of its founders, were members of the Communist
Party in Los Angeles; their radical politics led them to see themselves as an
oppressed cultural minority.' 93  Unlike the politically motivated
Mattachine, D.O.B., founded in San Francisco by Del Martin and Phyllis
Lyon, started as a way for lesbians to socialize outside the gay bar
scene." Over time, Mattachine and D.O.B. worked closely with each
other during the repressive 1950s.' Through meetings in people's
homes and discreet mailings of newsletters, Mattachine and D.O.B.
members learned that other gay people existed."' For individuals living
in small towns, knowing that gay communities existed probably brought a
sigh of relief."97

191 See id. at 125. Two studies performed in the sixties provide exhaustive and

careful treatment of pre-Stonewall homophile groups. See Edward Sagarin, Structure
and Ideology in an Association of Deviants (1965); Sweet, supra note 10.

'9 See supra part II.B. 1.
9 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 63-74 (describing the founding of

Mattachine); see also Marcus, supra note 5, at 26-36 (biography of Chuck Rowland,
Mattachine founder); supra notes 104-118 and accompanying text.

'9 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 101-02.
'9 See id. at 103-04; Marcus, supra note 5, at 70-80.
'g Many people isolated from other homosexuals and from the gay community

were brought into the national network through the publications ONE and The
Mattachine Review. See Wayne R. Dynes, Encyclopedia of Homosexuality 782 (1990).
Subscribers to The Ladder, the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, wrote, "Our
neighborhood is not at all oriented to gay life, nor is there any gay socializing nearby,
most of our friends are straight .... [The newsletter] is our only link to a chain too
far away to get to." A Letter to D.O.B. (1969) (from D.O.B. Archives, courtesy of
Lesbian Archives, supra note 36).

197 See, e.g., A Letter to D.O.B., supra note 196.

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Publications like D.O.B. 's The Ladder and Mattachine's ONE tried to
keep up with relevant legal and social developments, in particular the latest
sex research on the subject of homosexuality. "I By the sixties, it was
clear that psychiatry, in particular, displayed a tight alliance with the legal
system, serving as a resource of expertise in treating the sexual sociopath
or "sex offender.' The alignment between law, psychiatry, and
psychology carried a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the medical
model of deviance affirmed the belief that homosexuality was a form of
mental and emotional pathology. On the other, an occasional sex
researcher advocated greater tolerance from majoritarian society. Thus, not
surprisingly, some homosexuals willingly participated in sex research
projects devised with the purpose of discovering the level of social
adjustment and "normalcy" in the average homosexual.

Mainstream society's lack of sympathy for homosexuals encouraged
most middle-class homosexuals to go into the closet, to hide their true
identity. They survived in a heterosexual charade of marriage or in the
identity of a bachelor or spinster. In some parts of the country there
appeared to be no other choice. A 1955 crisis in Boise, Idaho illustrates the
hostility and waves of panic that could take over a community on the
suspicion that one might be the unwitting neighbor or co-worker of a
homosexual. The arrest of three men on charges of consensual sodomy and
seduction of minor boys led to a publicized witch hunt for members of a
"homosexual ring" that had infiltrated the most respectable comers of the
community. As stories of the search for alleged homosexuals, largely
instigated by political rivals in local politics, hit the newspapers, some
homosexuals simply packed up and left for other cities. The dramatic
episode of the "Boys of Boise" became a year and a half long political
fiasco that depleted government resources and divided the Boise
community.200

Not surprisingly, the potential for a homosexual panic in any
community encouraged the middle-class Mattachine Society to adopt a

198 The Mattachine Society "wanted only collaboration with the professionals
-established and recognized scientists, clinics, research organizations and
institutions-the sources of authority in American Society." Dynes, supra note 196, at
781.

M99 See, e.g., Seymour Pollack, The Sex Offender and the Law (1972) (compiling

reports and studies performed in the 1960s for various segments of the judiciary,
prosecutors, and members of the bar who had to deal with the punishment phase of sex
offender cases). This study focuses on the aspect of sex crime prosecutions referred
to as the "psychiatric-legal consultation." Id. at 1.

200 See DeGrassi, supra note 124; see also Anonymous Interview with a Victim
Witch Hunt in Boise, Idaho, reprinted in Gay American History, supra note 19, at
109-19.

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

"don't rock the boat" political stance. Early attenders of Mattachine
meetings recall that "almost all the people who came to discussion groups
were very conformist. "'20 Middle-class conformism also encouraged
adherents of the politics of respectability to disassociate themselves from
effeminate queens and "stalking butches" who openly defied society's
gendered role expectations in dress.2 2 To the conformist, such physical
demeanor invited suspicion and prying into her private life, which
threatened the loss of significant connections within a community and the
economic security of one's job. Photographs of pre-Stonewall
demonstrators on behalf of fired federal workers display the conservative
tone of pre-Stonewall middle-class homosexual politics: looking no
different from the typical heterosexual, men in suits and women in dresses
and heels marched with placards in front of Congress. 3

The conformism of the middle-class groups also made them ineffective
in bridging the race and class gaps that existed within the gay and lesbian
worlds. A black lesbian activist from the early sixties remarked that she
and another black friend once attended a DOB meeting and were repelled
by it. The white women had been uncomfortably cool, shocked, or
inhospitable.' 4

2. Out of the Closet: Dressing in the Mental Illness Model
of Homosexuality

By organizing from the premise that homosexuals were "pathological
sex offenders" who at best deserved tolerance from the rest of "normal"
society," the middle-class segment of the homosexual population was
destined to depend on the straight community's changing political moods to
get anywhere in their search for respect, tolerance, and acceptance. The

201 Marcus, supra note 5, at 49.
202 Id. at 48. See also The Purposes of the Daughters of Bilitis, 1 The Ladder 2

(1957) (courtesy of the Lesbian Archives, supra note 36). The drive to conformism in
some groups extended beyond dress to behavior: Eann MacDonald, later known as
Henry Hay (a.k.a. Harry Hay), set out to "regulate the social conduct of our minority"
in his objectives for the group Bachelors Anonymous. See MacDonald, supra note 125,
at 410.

203 See, e.g., Stonewall, supra note 5, at 137 (picture from May 21, 1965).
204 See Stonewall, supra note 5, at 234. This occurrence attests to the enduring

problem of black lesbian invisibility resulting from persistent homophobia in the black
community and racism in the lesbian and feminist communities. See Home Girls: A
Black Feminist Anthology xli (Barbara Smith ed., 1983); see also Kennedy & Davis,
supra note 6, at 115-23.

20 MacDonald, supra note 125, at 2.

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internalization of the medical model 20 6 came from a sense of
unworthiness, of an inevitable succumbing to the dreadful truth of being an
outlaw and a social outcast. 207

However, one cannot entirely dismiss the political changes that were
being effected in and out of the courts, sometimes with the help of middle-
class homophile organizations or an occasional sympathetic radical
lawyer.2 °" Middle-class gays turned to the homophile organizations for
education and support. In some cities, by the mid-sixties, the presence of
these organizations gave members and non-members a sense of community
empowerment. Some organizations began to employ the rhetoric of liberal
democracy to argue for civil rights as a victimized social minority,2 9

which represented a more positive integration of the medical model. The
sixties milieu also fostered increased public discussions of homosexuality,
which were a byproduct of the lifting of censorship rules that had prohibited
the mention of homosexuality in the movies.2 0 Thus, as film historian
Russo notes, images of homosexuality abounded, but, influenced by the

206 Organizations as early as 1950 would incorporate the perspective of a need for

healing and integration into straight society of "handicapped" persons into their charters.
Another of Eann MacDonald's goals for Bachelors Anonymous was to handle the
problem of "profligacy" as an "emotional diseas[e] to be treated clinically." Id.

207 The contemporary sex research treatises illustrated the intense role that

psychiatry played, not only in the evaluation of the level of dangerousness displayed by
sex offenders, but also in gays' perceptions of themselves and their self-worth.
Knowing that social and legal experts relied on the printed categories of sexual deviancy
makes these treatises ironic documentors of later common stereotypes of gays. People
convicted solely on the ground of consensual sodomy with another adult were lumped
together in these analyses with incestors, child molesters, exhibitionists, and rapists.
See, e.g., Gebhard, supra note 40; Pollack, supra note 199. This grouping is almost
certainly an artifact of the earlier complete submersion of all of these offenses in the
older term "crimes against nature." See generally Morris Ploscowe, Sex and the Law
198 (1951).

The judicial rhetoric in Boutilier v. Inmigration and Naturalization Service, 387
U.S. 118 (1967), one of the first "gay rights" cases of the 1960s, marks the dubious
contributions of the medical sciences to the question of whether someone who admitted
his homosexual orientation was worthy of American citizenship. In Boutilier, the Court
determined that the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act employed the term
"psychopathic personality" to refer to all homosexuals, including Clive Michael
Boutilier, whose sexuality was described by psychiatrists as unfixed. Id. at 119. See
generally Leonard, supra note 4. The Court ruled in favor of the government, which
desired to exclude Boutilier on medical grounds.

208 See Marcus, supra note 5, at 147-65.
209 See Sweet, supra note 10, at 45-70.
211 Censorship rules in the film industry dated from 1921 when the National

Association of the Motion Picture Industry adopted a plan of self-regulation,
condemning the production and exhibition of certain kinds of pictures and themes. The
most frequent targets of censorship were sex and moral vice. See Ruth Inglis, Freedom
of the Movies 83-84 (1947).

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

mental illness model, most of them were filled with negative and degrading
stereotypes such as the tortured and raging schoolteacher. 2

1

By the late sixties, internal policy conflicts had prevented many of the
city-based homophile organizations from effectively thwarting the impact
of the routine police raid. The progress of the literate gay middle-class was
painfully slow and largely futile against the more blatant abuses being
committed by the state. The politics of respectability not only produced
small gay rights groups but also created a large gap between those groups
and the homosexuals who bore the greater weight of state oppression. 2

'
2

As Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy have argued, the seeds for a
strong political movement did not lie in the activities and interests of the
closeted middle-class. 21 3 Rather, the social settings of the working-class
homosexual population, such as the butch-femme and butch-queen bar
culture, laid the structural foundations for the post-sixties civil rights
movement.2 4

Despite the growth of dozens of chapters of Mattachine, DOB, and
other human rights groups, not one had been able to stop police raids of
socializing locales like bars or even home parties.1 5 Without a strong
base of support in the gay community, one could not expect that the middle-
class gay politics of respectability would ignite an effective challenge to the
state's intrusions on gay socializing.

C. Makers of a Revolution: The Stonewall Riots

By all accounts, the visit by the officers of Manhattan's Sixth Precinct
to the Stonewall Inn was standard operating procedure. In the midst of a
mayoral reelection campaign, agents of the state set out to clean up the city
and raided several gay bars. 21 6  Given the systematic nature of the
harassment that had evolved by the late sixties, the patron of a gay bar
faced the constant threat of being charged with lewdness or solicitation. It

2 See Russo, supra note 85, at 139.
212 In 1968, Roxanna Sweet observed the independence of organizations formed in

response to the harassment from earlier groups which barely addressed the problem by
noticing that these groups were "isolated organizations which spent far more time
fighting among themselves than in dealing with the injustices of the 'outside' world."
See Sweet, supra note 10, at 169-70.

23 Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6, at 138-45.
214 But see Kennedy & Davis, supra note 6, at 43 (discussing lack of integration

in various lesbian groups).
215 See, e.g., Terror in the Tubs: The Raid that Wasn't, Advoc., June 1969, at

3 (detailing a police raid on a private bath house session in Los Angeles).
216 See Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 50.

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did not take much to provoke an arrest by an undercover vice cop. For
example, an observer recalled a set-up involving a man who reached into
his pocket for a packet of cigarettes, which an ABC agent characterized as
an attempted groping of the man sitting next to him.21 7 Such police
conduct generally intimidated its victims." ' The relationship between
gays and the culture of enforcement changed radically, however, in the
small hours of the morning of Saturday, June 28, 1969.

The events of Stonewall unfolded with the participation of individuals
like Rey "Sylvia Lee" Rivera, a Puerto Rican gay man who dressed in
female drag and who knew that looking "like a faggot" was an invitation to
go to jail. Multiple arrests characterized Rivera's life as a former
streetwalker. At age ten, he had even attempted suicide, feeling alone in
his preferences for sewing and cooking over traditional boys' games and
knowing he disappointed his grandmother by his desire to be a girl. By
adulthood, Rivera had embraced his identity as an ethnic effeminate gay
man. Unable to hide his racial difference from dominant white middle-class
America, his identity as a drag queen made him even more noticeable
amidst his mostly closeted and "respectable" homosexual peers in the
1960s.219

A visit to the Stonewall Inn was a risk for someone like Rivera because
the owners catered to an eclectic crowd of students and young
businesspeople as well as gays and lesbians. In that atmosphere it was not
easy to spot the undercover detective who might use any gesture between
people of the same sex as the basis of a charge of lewd conduct or
solicitation.' Socializing in semi-drag that fateful night, Rivera recalls
the visit by the eight police officers who purportedly were looking for a
payoff from the Mafia-connected bar owners. In New York City, virtually
every gay bar had connections to organized crime." The corruption
survived on a payoff system.' 2 There was an unspoken agreement to
arrest transvestites and lesbian butches; the police would shut down gay
bars that allegedly permitted their patrons to flirt, hold hands, kiss, hug,
and dance with each other, all in violation of lewd conduct and solicitation

217 See Marcus, supra note 5, at 64.
218 See id. at 81-86, 115, 173.
29 See id. at 187-96.
220 See id. at 64.
221 See Police Harassment, supra note 167, at 170-71.
222 See supra part III.A.3 (discussion of "gayola").

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

statutes.2 3 Not surprisingly, Rivera's outfit made him one of the first
escorted out of the unlicensed Stonewall Inn.

Rey Rivera didn't know if it was "the customers or if it was the police,
but that night everything just clicked. "24 The officers got their payoff,
called in the paddy wagon, and began escorting out patrons, including
Rivera, who displayed his gayness by wearing face make-up and women's
blouses even when he wasn't in full drag. But something in the circus-like
mood shifted as some of the exiting customers struck starlet poses for the
gathering crowd. Shouting began as the officers used their billy clubs to
beat a lesbian into submission and pushed her into the paddy wagon, only
to be pushed back out by a drag queen who thrust herself onto the police
and the crowd. Within seconds, the crowd was throwing bottles and coins
as they yelled, "You got your payoff, here's some more." With only eight
officers and no backup, the NYPD was forced back into the Stonewall Inn,
only to be met with a firebomb. This outburst marked the beginning of a
fight that lasted through the entire weekend.'

By the next day, people like Rivera, wise from their civil rights
activism, knew something different had happened. Rivera had experienced
the stigma of growing up as a poor Puerto Rican-Venezuelan in the Bronx,
and, as an adult, suffered harassment for being obviously queer with a
masculine body in a too-tight dress. He knew that like the members of
other civil rights movements, gays and lesbians were angry and eager to
dismantle the power structure and value systems of a state that harassed,
intimidated, and jailed men and women who stepped out of society's
scripted gender roles. With the first American gay riot, restless and
frustrated gays and lesbians took their place among the era's other liberation
movements-angry feminists, anti-war protesters, and black civil rights
activists.

223 See Marcus, supra note 5, at 64, 75-76, 184; see also Police Harassment, supra
note 167, at 171.

224 See Marcus, supra note 5, at 191.
225 The New York Times reported that four policemen were hurt and 13 people

arrested, and that hundreds of youths rampaged around Greenwich Village after
plainclothes officers raided the Stonewall Inn. See A Gay News Chronology: Jan.
1969-May 1975, at 6 (Jonathan Katz, ed., 1975) (entry for June 29, 1969).

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IV. CONCLUSION: THE STONEWALL RIOTS: A
RADICAL RESPONSE TO THE LEGAL CULTURE OF

ENFORCEMENT

Labeled by society as sex perverts or deviants, stereotyped in the
popular culture as pansies and faeries or bulldaggers and dykes, the patrons
of the Stonewall Inn knew their place in society. Their dress and
mannerisms signalled their departure from traditional gender role
expectations. While cross-dressing liberated elements of one's identity, the
obviousness of the act also communicated one's membership in a social
underclass. The historical context of police harassment makes the history
of the Stonewall Riots an essential aspect of feminist history. The queer
threatened the very foundations of patriarchy and the meaning of gender
roles and family relationships in American society-issues that were the
focus of the sixties and seventies feminist politics.

The race and class aspects of the harassment at the Stonewall Inn link
the Riots to other forms of civil rights activism. Individuals' stories, like
that of Rey Rivera, who was targeted for harassment both as a cross-dresser
and as a black Hispanic, remind gay historians and activists of the need for
a responsible retelling of the story of the Riots, one that acknowledges the
diversity of the gay and lesbian, or transgendered, community. Through
such stories, historians can learn of the defiance of black and Puerto Rican
drag queens and butch-looking working-class homosexuals, the message
they communicated by crossing society's gendered boundaries, and the
reactions their behavior could trigger from socially conservative enforcers
of the law.

The events at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 remind gay people of the need
to be wary of goals and strategies that ignore the realities of racism,
classism, and sexism in the lesbian and gay worlds. When we aspire to be
accepted by the dominant heterosexual culture, we risk making ourselves
over in its image, thus failing to confront the total diversity of the
homosexual community. In 1969, the Riots at the Stonewall Inn were an
unprecedented, yet not unexpected, event-a night in which working-class
gender-transgressive gays and lesbians challenged the middle-class politics
of respectability. A rare moment of anarchy created the opportunity for
dozens of men and women to protest state oppression. United, they took
a forceful step towards awakening the dormant homophile movement and
overthrowing the tyrannical heterosexual value system.

A story of the Stonewall Riots grounded in the perspective of radical
diversity offers historians a complex picture of self-acceptance, oppression,
prejudice, victimization, and frustration. Pre-Stonewall enforcers of the

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Faeries, Marimachas, Queens, and Lezzies

vice laws were brutal, yet ultimately ineffective in ridding society of people
who mocked rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity. Those
individuals who openly cross-dressed defied the dominant value system and,
in so doing, carved out safe spaces in city bars, helping to forge the basis
for post-Stonewall political growth. One can understand why, against the
backdrop of repressive attitudes, modern medical "wisdom," and law
enforcement techniques, a group of effeminate queers on a hot June night
at the Stonewall Inn decided to fight back. They rebelled against the
stereotype of themselves and threw off "the wounded look that fags [and
lesbians] all had ten years ago. ,226 The group of gays and lesbians at the
Stonewall Inn spontaneously decided not to tolerate one more night of
routine harassment by agents of the state. As Feinberg put it, in the words
of her character Jess:

There are times, the old bulls told me, when it's best to take your
beating and hope the cops will leave you on the ground when
they're done with you. Other times your life may be in danger,
or your sanity, and it's worth it to try to fight back. It's a tough
call.

2 27

226 Sexual Politics, supra note 1, at 232 (comment on Stonewall Riots by poet Allen

Ginsberg).
227 Feinberg, supra note 155, at 56 (emphasis added).

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