BackStory; Out of the Closet: The LGBTQ Community in American History

Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Dama for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornel Memorial Foundation. From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory. Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly. I'm Joanne Freeman. And I'm Brian Ballot. If you're new to the podcast, the three of us and Ed Ayers are all historians, and each week we explore a different aspect of American history. Let's start today in a camera shop. It's 1973 in San Francisco. In an elementary school teacher walks into a store called Castro Camera. They have a simple request. She wanted to rent a projector so she could show her kids some slides. That's LGBTQ historian, Lillian Faterman. She says the teacher spoke to a man behind the counter at Castro Camera. That person happened to be a guy named Harvey Milk.

And, well, Milk wasn't too thrilled with the teacher's order. And Harvey said, you mean to tell me that your school doesn't have a projector? And the teacher said, well, they do have a projector, but there are just a couple of projectors and so many teachers want to use those projectors that you have to put your name on a list to reserve them a month in advance. Today Harvey Milk is remembered as the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States. His legacy is a gay rights activist and politician helped open the door for future generations of LGBTQ people. For example, next year, there'll be at least 10 LGBTQ members of Congress. That record number is, in part, due to Harvey Milk's work in San Francisco 40 years ago. But before he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and became a national icon, Harvey Milk ran Castro Camera with his partner, Scott Smith.

And Faterman says this moment when the school teacher came in asking for a projector. This was one of the things that first motivated Milk to get into politics. And Harvey thought that that was just disgraceful, that the city could not afford enough projectors for elementary school kids, but they could afford to hire policemen to harass gay men on the streets of San Francisco or in trap gay men in the bars of San Francisco. And I think those things made him decide that it was time for him to run for political office, that he could do things differently, that he could make sure that San Francisco's budget went to the right things instead of hiring police to harass the gay community. He would fight for getting rid of corruption in governments so that things such as watergate on a local scale couldn't happen. So watergate pushed Milk to dive into politics too then?

Oh yeah, this is San Francisco in the early 1970s. So watergate was still on everybody's mind, especially Harvey Milk's. They lived upstairs from Castro Camera in an apartment that was upstairs. Every morning Harvey would take their little black and white television downstairs into Castro Camera and instead of waiting on the customers, he would put the television on one chair, he would sit on another chair, and all day long he would watch the watergate here in San. He would swear at the television sets over and over again in Scott Smith said that the customers would come in and they would see this guy with long hair and dark circles under his eyes swearing at the television set and they would run off. So in 1973 Harvey Milk said enough is enough and he decided to run for office but he was still pretty new in town so things were anything but easy. There was a gay democratic club in San Francisco called the Alice B. Tockless Memorial Democratic Club.

He went to the head of the club a man by the name of Jim Foster and said I'm running for the Board of Supervisors and I hope your club will support me. And Jim Foster took one look at this guy that he'd never seen before with a New York accent and looking like a hippie he had long hair and a big mustache and Jim Foster told Harvey Milk you know in the Democratic Party we have a saying you don't get to dance unless you put up the chairs. I've never seen you putting up the chairs. And so he informed him that the Alice B. Tockless Memorial Democratic Club would not be supporting him. But Harvey Milk took Jim Foster's advice very seriously and he began to put up the chairs. So he lost the 1973 election but he made himself very well known in the gay community for the two years that followed.

He became known as the Mayor of Castro Street, right? He did, yes. So how did he earn that name? Well in a number of ways he wrote for the gay papers in San Francisco. He really put himself in the forefront in defending gay people against the police. Castro camera also became a meeting place for the gay community. As he used to tell his partner Scott Smith he often put on his shrink robes because people came to Castro camera to ask his advisor to talk about their problems and Harvey Milk happily advise them about how to proceed with their life and how to function as a gay person in a homophobic society. Well it definitely sounds like Milk's activism and popularity in the city was on the rise by the mid 70s. But how did he do in the voting booth? Well he ran again for supervisor in 1975 and he lost again.

But he did better this time thanks in part to support from labor unions. So Harvey Milk pressed on and finally in 1977 he made history. Harvey Milk says his election as a San Francisco supervisor Tuesday was a victory for all US homosexuals. Milk captured 30.5% of the vote in the 5th district to become the first known homosexual office holder in San Francisco. The victory will give hope to minorities, hope to the disenfranchised and to people who always felt the government didn't work said Milk. They feel if a gay can do it, they can do it. Gays and youth all over the nation will be watching me as a potential role figure, Milk said, and I'll be it. The Times. San Mateo, California, 1977. But Milk's life tragically ended less than a year after he took office.

On November 27, 1978 former police officer and city supervisor Dan White shot and killed Harvey Milk and the city's mayor George Moscone. Last month marked 40 years since the assassination. He had only served for 11 months and during those 11 months he did remarkable things but that in itself wouldn't have been enough to memorialize him I think. Many of his ideas are things that we take for granted today but in his days they were absolutely unique. Ideas such as everyone had to come out that we couldn't become first class citizens if we fought for our rights from the closet. And Harvey was right. I think that the community has made the progress that it's made in recent years in good part because so many of us are now out. And the rest of America has to realize that where your children, where your brothers and sisters.

Most importantly, every gay person must come out. And as difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family, you must tell your relatives, you must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends, you must tell your neighbors, you must tell the people you work with, you must tell the people the stories you shop in, you... And once they realize that we are indeed their children and we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and for. And once you do, you will feel so much better. Today on the show we'll be exploring the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer folks in the United States.

We'll hear from a San Francisco police officer who broke barriers through a lifetime of service in activism. We'll be learning how the roots of the gay rights movement go back long for the Stonewall uprising. And we'll talk more with William Faterman about Harvey Milk's road to becoming an LGBTQ icon and the hostility he endured leading up to his death. Imagine for a moment the Old West. It's a vast and rugged terrain with some tumbleweeds rolling by, maybe some cowboys with a striking resemblance to John Wayne roaming the plains. This is a stereotypical snapshot of the Old West or at least how it's presented. Many of the stories we hear usually depict the same kind of character, a frontiersman that John Wayne type. He's self-sufficient, he's white, and he's strictly heterosexual.

It's estimated that in 1880 most of the American West had at least 20% more men than women, but gender and sexuality in the Old West was much more diverse than we might see in the movies. There were numerous people who dressed in ways that according to society didn't comport with their biological sex. That's his story in Peter Bogg. He's researched sexuality in the Old West, including stories of people cross-dressing. He looked at old arrest records, newspaper articles, and other documents and found there were many reasons why somebody might don clothing of the opposite sex. This was especially the case for women because women were more marginalized people in society, and they might dress as a male in order to take advantage of better paying jobs or types of work that were only available to men. Bogg says it's very possible these people were what we might regard today as transgender, but back then this wasn't even a concept, let alone socially acceptable.

That wasn't a term used then. I don't find it anywhere in the documents, and so I tried to understand the people according to how they identified themselves or how their society identified them. Sometimes some people that we today might consider transgender, if they were arrested, they might actually use any number of excuses that were common for people who might not be transgender and who are caught dressing as the opposite sex. But it was very difficult, I think, for people who were transgender to be transgender, and I'm not exactly always sure how they really felt as far as comfort in their own skins. One of these people was Mrs. Nash, a laundress from Mexico who worked for Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's Seventh Cavalry.

That's the regiment infamously remembered for its defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Bogg says Mrs. Nash spent about a decade with the cavalry and even married some of the military men. She found three husbands, so in this sense she was very much integrated into that community. She also worked very important jobs, not only as a laundress, but she also worked as a midwife delivering children for many of the officers' wives. Elizabeth Custer, the wife of George Armstrong, writes about these types of activities that Nash participated in, making it appear that she very much was part of this community, and that seems to be the case. But Elizabeth Custer also racializes Nash in these stories, too, and writes in a way that is so much condescending and smirking of Nash, and so there are questions then to what degree Nash actually is accepted in this community.

Poor Miss Annie shuddered when I spoke of her, for the woman was a Mexican, and like the rest of that hairy tribe she had so coarse and stubborn a beard that her chin had a blue look after shaving, in marked contrast to her swarthy face. She was tall, angular, awkward, and seemingly coarse, but I knew her to be tender-hearted. And days gone by I had found when she told me of her troubles that they had softened her nature. When she was stationed at Fort Lincoln, and what was then decoded territory, she died, and when she died it was discovered that she had the body of a male. Her past life of hardship and exposure, told on her in time, and she became ailing and rheumatic.

Finally, after we left Dakota, we heard that when death approached, she made an appeal to the camp women who surrounded her, and had nursed her through her illness. She implored them to put her in her coffin, just as she was when she died, and bury her at once. They, thinking such a course would not be paying proper attention to the dead, broke their promise. The mystery which the old creature had guarded for so many years, through a life always public and conspicuous was revealed. Old Nash, years before, becoming weary of the laborious life of a man, had assumed the disguise of a woman, and hoped to carry the secret into the grave. She was married when she died, she was married to Corporal Noonan. He was out in the field doing reconnaissance work, when his wife died from acute appendicitis. And when he came back, of course the story was out that Mrs. Nash actually had the body of a male, so seemed to be a man.

And so, John Noonan came back to this not only word that his wife, whom he had been married to and lived with for a number of years, was dead, but he also is facing a perplexed public and other soldiers who start making jokes about him and joshing him in very mean-spirited ways about this relationship he had carried on for a number of years. After enduring the jibes and scoffs of his comrades for a few days, life became unbearable to the handsome soldier who had played the part of husband in order to gain possession of his wife's savings and vary the plain fair of the soldier with good-suppers. He went into one of the company's stables when Noonan was there and shot himself. Like Boke said, the story of Mrs. Nash became a big one in the press, and Mrs. Nash wasn't the only person who was featured in the news columns.

Boke says a sensational story about a cross-dresser wasn't rare during this time. There were lavish romantic stories created to try to take account of why somebody would do this sort of thing. Has woman male soul? Does dead live in her? Is Professor Eugene DeForest, woman who masqueraded as a man for 25 years, the reincarnation of her dead brother? Or is her queer condition of male mentality in a female body due to parental influence? These are the questions which scientists are to solve, and on which lawyers may base their defense of the woman's masquerade, unless she is permitted to wear men's clothes as she desires and continues her life as she will. The law may not prevent her from so doing, but it will prevent her marrying again, either as a man or a woman.

Opened Tribune, September 3, 1915. Peter, I confess much of my knowledge about the West comes from movies and old television shows, but certainly the image of the West is one that, well, I've never heard a discussion of transgender. I've never seen it. It doesn't appear in any of the John Wayne movies that I've watched. Yeah, well, I began to wonder why is it that these people that I found to be so numerous and so many historical records about them, why they have been largely forgotten from our Western past. It's a little bit easier to try to figure out why things are remembered, but how do you ever forget why someone or a culture works to forget something? So what's the answer, Peter?

At the end of the 19th century is a very important transitional moment in American history, and it's at this time that crystallizes the romantic story about America's frontier past, and the belief that the frontier past bequeath to America all sorts of positive characteristics and attributes that make it into the best democracy in the world. You know, at the very time that this frontier romantic idea of America's frontier past was crystallizing, this is also when American sexologists start to study what they think is a new phenomenon, the appearance of sexual inversion, and they identify the appearance of sexual inversion with Eastern urban areas in particular. They made the argument that frontier living conditions prevent it sexual perversion from appearing, and it could only appear in a modern context people living too close together over stimulation of night life, bad hygiene. So how do these fascinating stories shed light on our contemporary conversation about gender identity?

When we look at our myths about the frontier foundations of the United States, and what this country has been and what this country is as far as a democracy, the myths that we have about this country were created purposely in juxtaposition of transgender people. So I think that's one of the things that we have to keep in mind today about transgender people, specifically there's this ongoing attempt to sideline them in our history and in our society. When in fact our history and society is really constructed in opposition to them. Peter Bogue is the Columbia chair in the history of the American West at Washington State University. He's also the author of Redressing America's Frontier Past.

In 1969, police raided a gay bar in New York City called the Stonewall Inn, fed up with police harassment, a riot broke out as members of the gay community clashed with law enforcement. The 1969 Stonewall uprising is largely regarded as the beginning of the modern gay rights movement, but that movement goes back even further to something called the Matachine Society. Established in Los Angeles in 1950, the Matachine Society was an activist organization that advocated on behalf of the gay community. Although the society started on the West Coast, it eventually expanded nationally, gaining chapters all over the country. This national infrastructure built by the Matachine Society proved vital for organizing the gay rights movement after the Stonewall uprising. I sat down with Eric Marcus, creator and host of the Making Gay History Podcast.

In 1988, he was commissioned to write an oral history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement. As part of that project, he interviewed a man named Hal Call, former president of the Matachine Society and central figure of the gay rights movement. Hal Call was a colorful character who uses some vivid and explicit language in this segment. And when Eric arrived at Hal's office for the interview, Eric knew he was in for much more than he had bargained for. The original Matachine was founded in 1950 by five men in Los Angeles, and many of them had come out of, had been communists at one time. And it was a secret society. He had to be. The times were such that it was very dangerous for people to be out. Hal Call objected to the secrecy of the organization. He's someone who used his real name. He didn't use a pseudonym. And he was concerned that if anyone found out that the people who had found to the organization who were running the organization were former communists, that it would cast a bad light on all gay people. So he led a coup against the founders of the Matachine Society, and he took over the organization in 53, moved the headquarters to San Francisco.

And the early founders were furious with him and accused him of turning their beloved Matachine Society into essentially a sex club. And the accusation came from Chuck Rowan, who is one of the original founders, who was extremely upset to hear that Hal Call was showing porn films in the library of the Matachine Society. But Hal Call's reason for doing that was to get the men out of the bushes and out of the bathroom so they weren't getting arrested. Hal's focus really, he was an early sexual liberationist, which explains why when I went to interview him in 1989, I had to go to the porn theater that he owned and ran to interview him. And what happened when you showed up? Well, I did two interviews with Hal. I don't know. People probably assumed that all gay men go to porn theaters. I had never been to a gay porn theater in my life. I was 30 years old. And so to get to Hal's office, I had to go into this porn theater called The Circle J. You can fill in the rest of that. And I walked in and there I was in the back of the theater and it had pews instead of seats.

I guess for some people kind of easy access to each other. There was a porn film on the screen. And I went upstairs to the office and there was Hal. There's a big bank of video monitors showing lots of porn films and a white Nogahide sofa and shelves filled with... Was it authentic Nogahide? I didn't check the label Brian. All right. Well, let you go on that one. I was a little rattled already. I can imagine. It was the second interview with Hal that was a real surprise because I arrived at his office. So I already knew it to expect walking through the point theater. But I got to his office and there was Hal sitting on the sofa with a white shirt and black shoes and black socks and no pants. And on the table and front of us on the cocktail table was a bottle of lube and a towel. And next to Hal was a video camera pointed in the direction of where I would be sitting on the couch. So Hal had gotten confused and thought I had come there for to be taped for one of his Jack Off films.

So let me ask the million dollar question. What made Hal so different? Why was he willing to be open? This obviously had huge implications for gaze who would follow in his footsteps and obviously at the time. But what made him different? Among many of the people I interviewed, they said they knew from the start there was nothing wrong with them, but it was society that was wrong. Hal was more extreme in that in that he really didn't care what anyone else thought. At a time when people thought a lot of very negative things about gay people, he had moved to San Francisco. He started out as a journalist. It got in trouble in Kansas City because he had been found in a car with two other guys and then fired from his job. So this happened to a lot of people I interviewed who became activists. Something bad happened to them and they lost their job or they lost their family and they had nothing else to lose and they were angry and they were radicalized. So Hal is somebody who took a leading role because of who he was and because of what his experiences were.

If he had been a straight guy, he would probably have gone on to be an editor at the Kansas City Star and we wouldn't know who he was. Instead he had this very colorful career as a leading gay rights activist and a pornography. There was a point at which you were arrested in 52. August, yes. I was in a very small automobile. It was a two-seater, but it was a two-door two-seater Chevrolet or something. About 50 feet from the police station in Lincoln Park in Chicago. How many people were there in the car? There were four of us. We had gone from a gay bar and they were going to drive me home but they stopped in the park. As soon as they got ignition and the car was turned off, they were flashing lights on us. Three of them thought that if they made accusations, it would let them get off scot free and it would put the owners of guilt on another person. Those three knew each other and I didn't know them and they thought they'd walk off scot free but they got busted too. They all four of us did. And the attorney that we got, he was in with the system and at that time 1952, $800 bought off the arresting officer, officers and the judge and included the attorney's fees.

The court appearance brought a dismissal and there was no conviction. It would be accused of guilty. At that time, I was dumb enough that I didn't see that there was any harm in telling my supervisor in the Kansas City star what had happened. He said, well, we can't have anybody like that working for the Kansas City star and I said, well, that's maybe so okay but I said, if you fired all the homosexuals on the Kansas City star, you wouldn't get the newspaper out. I told him that. I mean, you couldn't even set the line of type at the time. I decided then that instead of going where the job took me, I was going to go where I wanted to and find my own career. So my lover and I drove from to San Francisco with all of our possessions and I've been here since.

In February 1953, I heard that something called the Mattishein Society out of Los Angeles was having meetings and discussion forums in Berkeley near the University of California campus and they were getting together to figure out things they could do to help. Resist this awful thing that we had to face and that was a cops that were chasing us and playing cat and mouse with us all the time and that will. You became deeply involved in Mattishein very early on. It was first a secret organization. Why did it have to be secret that came about because of fear. The core of it was a secret organization and Senator Joseph McCarthy in Washington DC was going around, you know, with a handful of names and addresses of so many people that were in the Senate or in the government in Washington. These are homosexuals and these are communists and he was putting the fear of God among homosexuals and among all kinds of people and having lots of time on television and the like and equating the condition of homosexuality with communism.

And of course communism at that time was an ogre, was a specter, a demon that we can't even imagine today. So we knew some of the founders of the Mattishein movement or the inner circle of the Mattishein foundation had been rumored to have some communist leanings and maybe connections elsewhere. Particularly one or two of them Chuck Roland and another man and those were among the six or seven people who founded the Mattishein foundation along with Harry Hay. We met in 1953 in Los Angeles at 8th and Crenshaw. We had two meetings there and a month apart and on the second meeting we sort of took it out of their hands. We had a bit in our teeth and we were running away with it almost. How are you doing that? Were your ideas different from theirs? No, we wanted to see it become an organization and expand and spread.

But we wanted to know who was in it what our backgrounds were so that we couldn't find that we had a person in our midst who could be revealed with some kind of ulterior motives and so on and disgrace us all. A communist for the communist and for the communist was the fear. Several of you disagreed in terms of the philosophy of the religion. Can you tell me what that was about? I felt that the foundation people were sort of pie in the sky, aridite, aridite and artistic artistically inclined. Harry Hay, you could never talk to him very long that he didn't go back way back in history, generations and centuries to the Burdosh or to some ancient Egyptian cult or something of that sort. And he was always making Mattishein in the homosexual of today, apparently all to some of those things that were in his studies and research.

We saw the need for Mattishein as a here and now practical thing because we were a group of cocksuckers in the society that the police were chasing and they were assassinating character at will and causing all kinds of mischief and expense and damage to us as individuals. And we wanted to see changes brought about changes in law, changes in public attitudes, research and education done. We were wanting to see those goals achieved and by evolutionary methods, not revolutionary methods. So your plan wasn't to go out and we protest not at all, not at all. We wanted to see it done by holding conferences and discussions and becoming subjects for research and telling our story and letting people in the academic and behavioral science world get the word out about this. The word out about these realities is because we were so goddamn dumb as a people about the realities of human sexuality.

Early in our days, we had our, the Mattishein phone number in our telephone book here in the city of San Francisco. And it wasn't long before the police knew about us because through the, through gay bars that we had in San Francisco back then, not as many by any means as we have now. But we had maybe eight or 10 gay bars in 1950 or 1953. And the cops were making arrests there. And then we were getting calls from a lot of the people they busted to arrange for an attorney and even to arrange for a bail bondsman and things like that. Mattishein was doing those things in those early days. And so the cops found out there was a Mattishein society, a group that, of queers, it was during to stand up and work on behalf of other queers the police were busting. And the courts and all found it out and the attorneys found it out.

Bill bondsman knew it. So on that started the spread of knowledge of the existence of Mattishein in San Francisco. There was a statement that I read and I'm not trying to study. Mattishein urged homosexuals to adjust to a pattern of behavior that is acceptable to society and general and compatible with the recognized institutions of home church and state. What did you mean by that? I'm not sure I understand that. We knew that if we were going to get along in society, it was our feeling at the time we were going to have to stay in step with the existing and predominant more as and customs of our major society. And not stand out as sore thumbs too much because we didn't have the strength of tissue paper to descend ourselves. Keep your sex life very much to yourself, very much in private. And it also meant don't go wearing your heart on your sleeve. We didn't have sex symbols and gay flags and those kind of things wouldn't dare have whole hands on the street. And you couldn't even put your hand on another person's shoulder in a gay bar without it being glued conduct. We had people in drag who would come out in Halloween where they knew better but they dared to do it.

They knew their chances were that they were going to be busted. And the cops could do any damn thing they wanted and chase us around like little quail out on the brush, you know. Or all we I could do is run and hide. So you were encouraging people, you were advising people in a ways to help them avoid getting arrested. Help avoid getting in trouble because if you got arrested and your name got in the paper, you're going to lose a job if you had one. But in those days, the examiner printed in bull type on the front page the names of every gay person arrested his age, his address, his marital status, his employment status. And his professional status, if any, when those things happened, divorces, suicides, wrecked careers, the loss of rental spaces where you were living. And all kinds of things resulted from it. By today's standards, we were a bunch of limp risk pussyfuts. But yet for us, in those days, we were out of the closet and it was a very courageous thing because there were not very many of us there.

Eric Marcus is the creator and host of the Making Gay History Podcast, which brings the voices of queer history to life through intimate conversations with LGBTQ champions, heroes and witnesses to history. Earlier in the show, we mentioned that last month marked 40 years since the assassination of Harvey Milk. Today, Milk is remembered for passionately speaking up for equal rights in the 1970s.

I talk some more with LGBTQ historian Lillian Faderman about the man behind the megaphone. She says Milk's activism stemmed from his Jewish upbringing. During the 1930s on Long Island where he grew up, the German American Bund, which was a Nazi organization, held huge rallies. His parents, of course, would have been very aware of those rallies and he would have been aware of them as well. In 1943, the Warsaw ghetto fell and he was 13 at that time. It was just before his Bar mitzvah, in fact. And he talked about the fact that the adults around him told him that, of course, the Jews of the ghetto knew that they were fighting a losing battle. But he said that they had said, if something so evil descends on you, you have no choice but to fight back. And I think that that influenced him always in fighting against homophobia, even at times when it looked as though it might be a losing battle.

He fought, he gave it everything he had, and he was victorious in so many cases. He ended life as a politician, but he had a lot of other careers, right? Did any of them influence his approach to politics? I think every single one of them influenced the kind of politician he became. He was a jock when he was in high school and college. He was able to get the endorsement of the San Francisco firefighters and San Francisco unions because he really knew how to put on a very butch persona and talk to those groups. He was an actor, off, off Broadway and off Broadway. And I think he really learned as an actor how to deliver a speech. He had a speech writer during the latter part of his political career, but the speech writer said that Harvey would take the lines that were written for him. And he knew about repetition. He knew about emphasis. He knew about how to deliver a sentence for its major impact. And that's what he learned in his career as an actor.

He was a securities analyst on Wall Street for five years. And through that, he learned something about budgets. And so he could present himself to his constituency as being knowledgeable in finances. And he took all of those experiences. And they became a whole for him when he ran for office. He integrated them into various parts of his political persona. It was brilliant. I don't think our listeners will be surprised to hear that Harvey Milk was a Democrat, but he was not exactly a fallen line Democrat. Is that correct? Could you give us a sense of his the variety of his political views? Yes, in 1964, he was actually an avid Barry Goldwater supporter. Wow, how is that? Well, Goldwater was a Republican, but he was also what we would now call a libertarian. The word hadn't yet been coined in 1964. But one of the things that Goldwater believed was that the government had no place in people's private lives, no place in people's bedrooms. And of course, Harvey believed that too.

Harvey fought avidly against the Sodomy laws in California. And I think he remained in many ways a middle of the road Democrat once he changed parties when he became a Democrat. He was not in any sense a radical except perhaps for his support of gay rights and for his support of minorities and the poor at one point he was asked where he stood on the political spectrum. And his response was that those on the right think he's on the left, those on the left think he's on the right. It all depends on where they stand. I don't think he was in any sense radical other than his support for gay rights and for minority rights as well. How did he do with the lesbian community, for instance? Well, for a long time San Francisco's lesbian community very strongly lesbian feminist in those years were suspicious of him thought that he had no interest in promoting their rights.

And so he understood that he had to somehow change the message, convince them that he would be a representative for the entire gay community and for other minority communities as well. So what he did was in his last run for office, his successful run, he hired a lesbian feminist, a woman by the name of Anne Cronenberg. And he told her that he really wanted her to pull his coat whenever he did anything that was offensive to the lesbian community. And he told her he wanted her to help him figure out how to serve the lesbian community. And so, for instance, he became a huge supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, which was a burning issue in the 1970s. She also helped him realize when he fought against the Briggs Initiative, a California initiative that would have made it illegal for anyone who was gay or lesbian to teach in the public schools. And Harvey was in the forefront of that fight.

It was Anne Cronenberg who made him realize that he had to have a lesbian on the stage with him when he debated John Briggs and Harvey did that. Well, I can certainly see why milk was considered to be a figurehead. How did he feel about being a figurehead? I think Harvey milk from his childhood on loved a limelight. So he liked being a figurehead. Yes, he was certainly very sincere in his political positions, but he loved being in the limelight. He also understood, though, that as the first out gay male politician in the country, he had a target on his back. And soon after he was elected to public office in November 1977, he made three tape recordings that he distributed to three close friends.

He called the recordings his political will, and he began each of them by saying that these were to be listened to only in the event of his death by assassination. Knowing that I could be assassinated any moment of any time, I feel it's important that some people know my thoughts. His assistant Anne Cronenberg told me that during the 1978 gay pride parade in San Francisco, Harvey rode an open vehicle. It was a Volvo with a sunroof, and so he sat on top his legs dangling down. And Anne Cronenberg said that at one point in the course of the parade, Harvey bent down and suddenly said to her, and do you know the way to the nearest emergency hospital, you better figure that out.

Suddenly thinking, this is scary. There's a huge crowd and anyone could take a pot shot at him. So he was always always aware of that. I don't think he realized that his assassin would be someone that he knew very well. I fell a member of the board of supervisors, but he knew that he was in a dangerous position. Should people care about Harvey Milk today? Harvey Milk was a revolutionary and a prophet. He was the first elected politician anywhere to say that society had a moral responsibility to help gay youth, not to change them, but to help them. And he told gay adults that they had to stop worrying about the ridiculous stereotype that homosexuals were those people who lurked in the shadows ready to pounce on some adolescent kid and begin to take moral responsibility for the young people in their community.

Harvey said that gay adults had to show gay youth that there was a good life in store for them, even if they were gay, that they would be able to function in society. I asked for movement to continue because last week I got that phone call from out 200 Pennsylvania in my election gave somebody else one more person hope. After all, that's what it's about. It's not about personal gain, not about ego. It's about giving those young people out there hope. You've got to give them hope. Lillian Faterman is an LGBTQ historian and author of the book Harvey Milk, His Lives and Death.

Before it was even conceivable that LGBTQ people would openly run for office, serving the military, or legally get married, just living life as a gay person was a threatened precarious experience. Historian Timothy Stewart Winter tells us about a time when gay and black communities came together to fight the state violence, they both faced. In the 1950s and 60s, police raids on gay and lesbian bars and clubs were a constant threat. One of the techniques that police would use was sending undercover officers in to kind of witness illegal behavior, which could include even serving a drink to a homosexual. In many states it was against state liquor regulations for gay people just to be in an establishment serving liquor. You know, they might just intimidate folks or they might round everybody up and cart them off to jail, typically charging them with something like disorderly conduct or other kind of catch all charges.

At the same time, there's also individual level policing. So cops are picking up gay men who are cruising on the street. They are also arresting lesbians just for, you know, for wearing men's blue jeans if you can believe it. Now, were there any instances or how might you describe the interaction between racist policing and anti gay policing, specifically how did gay or working class African Americans bear the brunt of police brutality during this period? For African Americans, you know, the risk of harassment from police officers or brutality at the hands of police officers was present, whether you were gay or straight. At the same time, the sort of growing carceral state of the post-World War II decades took some of its harshest actions against queer people of color. So, for instance, there's a guy I've written about in Chicago named Ron Vernon who was a gay activist in the early 70s who described growing up on this outside of Chicago, going to an all black high school.

And being sort of essentially sent before a judge in youth court as a result of his flamboyance, his visible gainess, queerness. And in a hearing, his father was asked by the judge, you know, are you aware that your son is a homosexual? And Mr. Vernon said, yes. And the judge sort of said, well, then we're going to send him to Galesburg Mental Institution to correct that. And Vernon went on to spend much of his teen years kind of in and out of the ambit of youth justice system, I guess you would say. And I understand some of your work is actually revealed that you have gay activists and black nationalists drawn coalitions in American cities. Yeah. It's a different type of policing that's affecting white gay folks, you know, cruising or going to gay bars. And yet these are both forms of state violence. They're both forms of state control. And partly because they're both so aggressive in Chicago, there is a coalition that develops to respond to both to fight both.

And I'm curious about how you understand that cooperation, how deep it went and how we can understand its history, that link between gay politics and black nationalist politics. The link really has to do with a shared enemy in the form of the police in December of 1969 Illinois Black Panther party leaders were killed while sleeping in their bed. There was a backlash and a kind of widespread sense on the political left that the police were totally out of control. And at the local level, this led to a kind of umbrella civil libertarian group called the Alliance to End Repression, which oversaw a bunch of different kinds of efforts to rein in the police over the course of the 70s and into the 80s, which included both China and police raids on gay bars as well as secure consent decrees kind of reigning in the police red squad. Give me some sense of the strategies that gay activists use to confront these kinds of excesses of state power.

So beginning in the early 1970s, there's kind of an effort to monitor the monitors or police, the police, they actually send undercover people into busy gay bars so that they could serve as witnesses later if the police did conduct a raid. They also began to publicize to try to tell to the press, this is what's happening to the gay community. Before the late 60s, there are very few gay people who are willing to come forward publicly and have their name associated with the cause. There were no gay celebrities, there were very few people lining up behind this cause, and that stumbling block is the reason that coming out of the closet, which was really invented after Stonewall at the turn of the 1970s, kind of changed the game a little bit in that people were willing to come forward publicly to accuse individual cops or fight charges rather than just accept Lee bargain for a lower charge. Even at the most local level, you don't have any openly gay elected officials in the US until the 1970s.

You know, gay people were the opposite of law-abiding citizens, they frequented illegal places, they were engaged in illegal acts in most states, they couldn't hold jobs as teachers or government officials pretty much anywhere. And being outed would mean that you would lose any public sector job. The 1980s are obviously a huge watershed for a number of reasons in the history of gay politics and gay activism, and not the least of which being that you have the election of a mayor in Chicago that you know well, Harold Washington, and Washington was very explicit in trying to continue to bridge this relationship between gay politics and African American politics. I think this is a great example of what we miss when we only look at the federal level of politics. You know, the story of the 1980s at the federal level is about Ronald Reagan.

But in Chicago and many other big cities, you have African American led liberal political coalitions that win power and that are trying to defend the gains that were won. And also are kind of trying to defend public spending at a time when it's being slashed. How might we understand the 80s and 90s as a time when you have gay activists who are thinking about employment and really mainstreaming their issues and African Americans who, because of their concerns about HIV-AIDS, are still sometimes not responding as forcefully to gay issues that are certainly part of the political calculus there. In the 1970s, the routine police harassment of predominantly white establishments, gay establishments, pretty much drops off by the early 80s. This is no longer routine in most cities. The gay movement starts to take up a different issue which is protection from job discrimination, which they are usually seeking from city councils. And so this is more of a kind of insider kind of politics, brand of politics.

You have AIDS, which comes along and really radicalizes the gay movement, but not especially around policing, but instead around health care. And so the gay movement is shifting away from a focus on the carceral state at the same time that the carceral state is expanding. And so the kind of tension between those two dynamics over the course of the 70s and 80s, I think has been overlooked as a key aspect of what was going on in the United States in that period. And the AIDS crisis adds another layer in that there's this awful respectability politics. You have one really vivid anecdote, a young man who tells his mother, African American, that the bad news is I have AIDS, the good news is that I'm a drug addict. And why is that good news?

The idea being that he's not gay, that he didn't become HIV positive as a result of having sex with a man. And so the AIDS crisis along with the crack epidemic and the rise of homelessness and poverty in the 80s, you have multiple, extremely stigmatized communities that are kind of wanting to distance themselves from each other. The gay men and injecting drug users. And that makes forming political coalitions more complicated. And so it also exposes the vast gulf in resources in a segregated city like Chicago between white, run, gay institutions and organizations, which are located an increasingly white parts of the city. The South and West sides of Chicago don't have the same kind of access to resources to respond to AIDS with. And that creates a lot of tensions among activists over the course of the 80s. Within the last decade or so, we've seen a number of movements even coming from queer activists about the carceral state and trying to deal with the problem of mass incarceration.

Where do some of these coalitions hold up under that issue? I think we've seen certainly the gay movement moving toward a more critical stance toward policing and certainly towards the prison system. We've had the high profile case of Chelsea Manning drew attention to some of the very serious health problems facing incarcerated LGBTQ folks. At the same time, we have had Black Lives Matter, which is a genuinely intersectional movement with a lot of visible queer leadership, articulating the ways in which these systems of oppression interlock and in which state power operates through classifying people by gender and sexuality. I think the sort of gay movement has been a little bit resistant in some ways. And we've seen in the last couple of years controversies over whether out gay police officer groups can march in pride parades, which have really led to some serious controversies in a number of cities. And I think next year, during the anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, I think that that's very likely to be even more controversial. I think we're going to see more conflict over whether law enforcement should be kind of visible in queer spaces and what that should look like.

Timothy Stewart-Winter is Associate Professor of US History at Rutgers Newark and the author of the book, Queer Cloud, Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics. As we've just heard, relations between the police force and the gay community have often been strained during his service as a police officer. Stefan Thorne saw the issue from the inside as a ground breaker, as one of the first out lesbian officers, and then as the first officer to transition while serving in the San Francisco Police Department. Here's how he responded when I asked him what it was like coming out as a lesbian teenager in Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1970s.

You mean what was it like being a criminal? Yeah, it was challenging. That would be the word that I would use. It was against the law to be homosexual at the time. We were outlaws. I didn't really know anyone else that I knew was a lesbian or a gay man that was in my own social circle. My older sister, about six years older than I am, she happened to know a gay man. He was a very flamboyant. He was a hairdresser. I really needed to find someone that I could confide in. I don't remember exactly how I asked or got a hold of his number from my sister. And I asked him to meet me, and I was able to tell him that I was like him. And I recall the feeling just almost a physical sensation of a weight being lifted from my shoulders. It was amazing. When did you first apply to work in law enforcement? Actually, I applied to the Omaha Police Department. They have a physical agility test and a written test.

I did all of that. I was their highest scoring female candidate, but they had a polygraph exam. During that polygraph exam, they asked about my sexuality, which I tried to hide. I kept, you know, I was in there for over three hours in a polygraph exam hooked up to machines. And, you know, finally, it's like, well, yes. So I told the truth. And I was not hired. I didn't get a job. Tell me about what it was like moving to San Francisco in the late 1970s and how different your experience was there applying for Bay Area police forces? Oh, world away. When I came to San Francisco, it was just spectacular. And I thought, this is it. I'm going to move. You know, the first thing that I did was to pick up one of the gay rags. There were at least two that were free, weekly newspapers. And when I opened one of those papers or both of those weekly papers.

Low and behold, there was a nice big ad from the SFPD reaching out. And it was a recruitment ad for out lesbians and gay men. Talk about a contrast from Omaha, talking about a contrast from Omaha. And that was it. It was like, oh, my God, I can do this here. Right. Right. So that's what I did. And I applied. And the other thing that had occurred, you know, the previous November, a couple of months before that was the assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone in San Francisco. So it was certainly a very charged time. I wanted to be here very, very much, even with everything, maybe especially with everything that was going on. The movement being so strong here, I was certainly aware of Harvey being the first openly gay person elected to public office.

And, and then he'd been murdered. So I knew work needed to be done. Right. Now, you have the experience of coming out not once but twice and coming out as a trans officer in San Francisco. How was that experience comparatively and just on its own? Well, it was different. It was, you know, it was fraught with fear for me as an adult transitioning from female to male, you know, a couple of the fears I had of loss was that, you know, either I could be fired from my job potentially. I didn't think there were any kinds of protections over gender identity at the time. Or if they didn't outright fire me or didn't feel that they could do that, that they try to make my life so miserable at work, that I would want to quit. And the final or most severe fear that I felt was what if officers failed to back me up in the field. And I have to, I'm so happy to say that I really grossly underestimated not only the professionalism but the compassion of the people that I worked with because none, none of my fears were realized.

Was it easy? No, were there people who made it very apparent to me that they disliked me and dislike that I was a member of the department, yes. But there were many more, many more officers who were respectful and compassionate and kind and tolerant. And once you're on the police force, you're actively developing training programs that are meant to make the police force even more responsive and responsible to members of the LGBT community. Well, I was, yes, Jamison Green and I, who was a very well-known trans activist and educator, I had met him in the FTM support group that he was involved with in San Francisco at the time. And he and I wrote curriculum for law enforcement training. And we began teaching it together in June of 1995 to San Francisco police academy recruits. And I continued to do that until I retired.

And now even in my retirement, I actually train law enforcement personnel still, anti bias and gender awareness education and training. Your vantage point as a retired officer now, what advice would you give a young LGBT person who's potentially interested in a career in law enforcement? How would you explain why you continue to do this training and remain committed to these issues? And what is it you think that can be improved overall about policing given your experience? To other LGBT people and any other marginalized group in our society, I can do nothing but encourage you to go into law enforcement, the most powerful change that has occurred in law enforcement has been integration. Having racial minorities and women and lesbians and gay people and now transgender people included in that has really changed the culture from when I, certainly from when I joined law enforcement back in the late 70s. It's very different now. It is not a completed process. However, as people are well, you know, certainly racial minorities are well aware that just because there are laws on the book that protect you doesn't mean that discrimination vanishes.

So there's a lot more work that needs to be done, but doing it from the inside is just as important and just as significant and moves us further than only being able to do it from the outside. So anybody who's considering a career in law enforcement, please go for it, participate and do it well and do it with consciousness. Lieutenant Stefan Thorn served over 30 years in the San Francisco Police Department. Nathan, Joanne, I want to know whether there were any gay founders? Well, so here's the thing about that question, Ryan, and that is it's hard to draw lines and impose labels.

People wonder and there's talk of was Alexander Hamilton gay or not? Did he have a relationship with his close friend, John Lawrence or not? And I think it's hard to say either way. You certainly can't say no, but it's unclear what that relationship was. It might have been a romantic friendship. It might have been more than that. I think there are a whole categories of same sex relationship in this time period that precisely because they weren't labeled were in the realm of possibility. A lot of the dividing lines and labels that we take for granted now didn't really exist in early America. So although there were all kinds of same sex relationships, although there were even same sex relationships that were treated like a marriage. People at the time wouldn't have identified themselves necessarily as gay, although they might have understood that something about their identity shouldn't be made public.

It's a very fuzzy way of saying that I think in early America there was a continuum of ways in which people understood their sexuality. And I think that over time we've imposed borders and definitions and dividing lines that didn't exist in that early period. Well, in early America, were there any terms used at all? I understand your point and it's a good one about a continuum. But were the ends of that continuum labeled? Certainly in the early 19th century, sometimes they used phrases like female husbands or wedded bachelors. They were using a lot of kind of like language to not define things but certainly to indicate that there was an understanding of what kind of a relationship there was. So Nathan, what does it mean that we managed to found and run a country for a century or so without having terms that are just so familiar to us today?

It's relatively recent in American history where we get so caught up in these questions actually is recent as the 20th century. By the time you get to the late 30s, the policing of gay people in American cities increases as the cities themselves begin to grow. And it really isn't until the 1940s and 50s that you begin to see what we would now call the closet, which is this space where gay men and women have to basically begin to conceal their identities for reasons of employment or having other kinds of opportunities. But I want to say one other thing though about that, which is that there are other kinds of categories like for instance transgender that people are experiencing as identities in this period, the 30s, 40s and 50s, that only has political meaning by the time you get to the late 20th century. My favorite example of this is Pauli Murray, a really critical legal mind on civil rights of an African American woman for most of her life. She is a student howard who helps to frame what becomes the fight against Jim Crow through the courts.

Well, she actually lives most of her life believing herself to be a man or feeling as if she's a man in a woman's body. But there's no gender corrective surgery that she can draw from. There's no debate about what it means to be a transgendered man. And so it becomes a point where her own alienation and disconnect from the broader body politic drives her politics on civil rights, drives her mission to basically correct and try to make American society more equitable and more open. And so it provides a really signal example of people who would totally see themselves on one side of a political debate in the late 20th century if they had that ability to be long to that community 50 or 60 years earlier. So, Joanne, I want you to train your skilled cultural, social, political historians eye on this raft of categorization or lack of categorization in the case of transgender and tell us what this means. I mean, what does this look like from the perspective of early America? What's going on? Well, here's what I find interesting in the realm of categories and borders and boundaries and labels. I talked a little bit about how in early America, I think there was more of a continuum.

So I think that the borders or differences were much more fluid and there weren't labels being stamped on people in the way that they are now. What's interesting and I would like actually to hear what you two guys think about this feels to me like right now we're at a moment where there's more fluidity being introduced and where some of those labels are being cast off or new ideas are being introduced. So are we in a different kind of a period when it comes to gay identity? I read my mind because I had in mind this Washington Post article that says a third of millennials now say that they're quote less than a hundred percent straight, which first sounded like the way I parked my car. But when I started thinking about it, I realized, you know, this is the kind of fluidity that I associated it now you've confirmed with early America where there aren't these stark boundaries. But we all know that at least in the second half of the 20th century, one of the reasons that language changed and homosexuality and then transgender, bisexuality queer became more acceptable is that the very people who live these lives advocated for this.

They came out so I'm curious to know how any changes were made in the 19th century when people didn't even have a language for identifying who they were. Well, I mean, I think there's a reason why there are many reasons why but there's certainly one main reason why as we've been talking about in the show today, their political activism is a mid and late 20th century phenomenon because I think you need a sense of groupness. Right, you have to have a sense of yourself as part of a group. And ironically, Joanne, kind of that sense of groupness comes from being discriminated against from being labeled in a pejorative way.

Right. So I think it's not all about identity, but it's about a meeting place of identity and opportunity. And I think this is really important because you have your examples even going back to the colonial period where so-called cross-dressing or women who are masquerading as men or vice versa, but there are ways in which people are looking for openings of one kind or another. And this is true of so many different passing accounts, whether it's black to white or what have you. And so I think it's really important to look at what the society of a given moment offers. And so I think it's really critical when you look at the ability of the government or of private sector business to still allow people to be whole people while adopting their gender identity that tends to determine who and how people identify openly when it comes to these questions of sexuality and identity. So I want to add a third word then you talked about identity and opportunity.

So I want to throw a third word in that goes right along with what you're saying Nathan and that is possibility, which is a slightly different thing and in a way is the hardest to define and maybe in some sense is the most important that you can understand the possibilities for becoming who you are, who you think you are, who you want to be. That's something that's hard to define, but that's something that obviously is immensely important. That's going to do it for us today. Do get in touch. You'll find us at backstoryradio.org or send us an email to backstory at virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter at backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Backstories produced for junior humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Johns Hopkins University. Additional support is provided by the tomato fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Brian Ballow is Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connelly is the Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.