Gay American history / Jonathan Katz

Some sort of radio. It's about 10 o'clock once again and it's time for fruit punch. California's oldest and most widely heard gamins radio show tonight through pants focuses on Jonathan Katz author of gay American history. This is a paper read at their medical society of Virginia at Allegheny

Springs in September 1892 and Dr. Ross spoke on perversion of the new genetic procreative instinct. Ross was a professor of nervous diseases at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and he warns of big wide whopping wide prevalence and spread of sexual crime on animals as well as human beings. He says I have observed the common instances of sexual perversion in dogs and turkeys. I only only a few days ago to escape a shower I took refuge in the elephant house in the Washington Zoo a logical garden where I can find two male elephants Dunc and gold dust. To my

astonishment they and twined their proboscis cases together in a caressing way. Each had simultaneous erection of the penis and the act was finished by one animal opening and allowing the other to tickle the roof of his mouth with his proboscis. After the manner of the Osceola call them being no mention by the way and some of the old theological writings and prohibited by the rules have at least one Christian denomination. I guess you I guess you expected those elephants should have read those theological tracts. That is a serious medical journal. That was Jonathan Katz author of gay American history lesbians and gay men in the USA. Mr. Katz recently appeared in San Francisco free punch recorded his lecture in which Mr. Kast discussed gay American history.

Tonight we give you excerpts from that lecture. In addition I will be reading sections from the introductions to each of the chapters of gay American history. I'd like to just go through my book and pick out some of the documents that I think represent him like him. Tell you about the book at the same time I think section of the Firth of trouble that is a section on gay life in American cities. I think the first one of 1894 and goes up to the right. Trouble 15 66 to 1966. Introduction during the 400 years documented here American homosexuals were condemned to death by choking burning and drowning. They were executed jailed fined court martialled prostituted fired framed blackmailed disinherited declared insane and driven to insanity to suicide murder and self hate which hunted in Trout stereotyped mocked insulted

isolated pitied castigated and despised. When simply working living and loving homosexuals have been condemned to invisibility the present documents of trouble indicate that homosexuals like heterosexuals have sometimes made new it's of themselves. But unlike heterosexuals gay people have been burdened by a pernicious myth equating homosexuality per se with its most negative manifestations. These documents of homosexuals in trouble are those which have fed anti homosexual myth particular homosexuals and difficulty have been taken to represent homosexuals in general. Heterosexuals in difficulty have represented only themselves. Yet for history to ignore the plight of gay people in trouble would be to ignore what can now be seen as a major aspect of homosexual oppression. 1:3 do a little bit of this sort of thing. 915 Havelock Ellis It is a read rights in

American correspondent himself inverted that has become almost a synonym for sexual inversion and not only in the minds of inverts themselves but in the popular mind to wear a red necktie and the street is to invite remarks from newsboys and others remarks that that have the practices of inverts for the theme. A friend told me once that when a group of street boys caught sight of the red necktie he was wearing. They sucked their fingers in imitation of the Leisha male prostitutes and walked the streets of Philadelphia and New York almost invariably with red neckties. It is a badge of all that tried in the rooms of many in my and the rooms of many of my inverted friends have read is the prevailing color in decorations among my among my classmates at the medical school. If you ever had the courage to wear a red tie. Those who did never repeated the experiment.

Feel so good to wear all my jewelry and BP for a gay audience you know I dress down a little bit when I'm on t. In the trouble section also as material about the witch hunting of gay people and Communists during the 1950s in the United States. It's a really important period for us to study and know about. It was also the period that the magazine society was getting started in Los Angeles. The very same years with. And in the match in society there were communists. People had party background in the leadership there in the first early stages and there in the witch hunt period you have hints that McCarthy was gay and that other people very closely associated with him were gay which I'm quite sure of. And it's a can of worms which I don't really go into in the book but it needs to be analyzed You have

got gay people witch hunting and gay people which hunted commie queers. Well now I'm a commie queer and proud of it. There was let's say one document in this witch hunting section that I conclude from. It's an interesting thing from one magazine April 1953. It's a one magazine was one of the first homosexual magazines started in Los Angeles. And a Miss E. M. wrote to them about her personal experience of the witch hunting and provides a rare glimpse into how the witch hunts affected one particular lesbian inclined woman. She it's quite ironic it's she says that she had never had any homosexual acts experience or known any homosexuals but she knew that she was one and had gone for psychiatric or

psychological help and had that on her record. And. Then she got a job with the government I guess during the war doing war relief and someone reported who had known her in her past that she had this on her record so she was called in and it was she describes it as a very shocking experience she didn't know what what was happening she thought she was being called in to be told how well she was doing her work and suddenly she found herself sent back to the United States and been told she was an abomination and had to be you know they couldn't keep her in the in the United States employ anymore. And the ironic part is that it led her to seek out her lesbian community in the bars and try to make contact with them. And she did find them and she says she's now much happier than she ever was in her life. So in that case it worked out I guess for the better. A second section in the book is about the treatment of gay people lesbians and

gay men by psychiatrists and psychologists a history of horrors sexual surgery castration critturs removal ovary removal are discussed I haven't been able to actually document them. There is documents suggesting that I think if we do more research will quite easily find them. The bottom A is his documented vasectomy. Shock Treatment electric and chemical aversion therapy chemical electric and verbal hypnosis LSD treatment hormone treatment which we now know might have cancer be cancer related. Individual psychoanalysis group therapy psycho drama and on and on. I guess I sort of I do in the introduction to this section. I do it an attempted sort of a Marxist analysis of doctors as a group of sort of petty bourgeois businessman who is stock in

trade it is to be allegedly the experts on us and who have invested economic ego interests status interests in remaining the experts. And I think that's what makes them impossible to talk to. This survey of treatment history is based largely upon doctor's reports of their own work. Excerpted from medical journal the treatment of homosexuality by medical practitioners is of relatively recent origin. From the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th at that time doctors unselfconsciously invoked morality. God country family in describing their treatment of homosexuals. More recent documents usually replace such overt moralizing with quiet or often unspoken hidden evaluations expressive of a technocratic consciousness focused on getting a job done. A new heterosexual created doctors have increasingly turned to technical language in jargon to disguise and suppress

their own in the oceans and underlying values. In 1976 psychologist and psychologist are among the major ideologues of homo sexual oppression. Just an example of one of one treatment document that's brief. This is a re British report dating to 1964 a version treatment summarized simply by Weinberg unveiling the bibliography on homosexuality. This is what they say aversion therapy was conducted with a male homosexuals who had a heart condition. The particular form of aversion therapy involves creation of noise by means of an emetic a chemical accompanied by talking about his homosexuality. The second part of the therapy involved recovery from the nausea and talking about pleasant ideas and heterosexual fantasies which was sometimes aided by a list surge of acid. In this case the patient died as a result of a heart attack brought on by the use of the emetic period.

That sums up our treatments. There's a third section in my book called passing women. These are women who dressed as men and lived as men and worked as men and had intimate passionate relations with other women. And I analyzed these women as having being women who were early pushing against the very limited traditional female role that was allowed for women. And I found a way of working doing male work by dressing as a man in a most dramatic way these documents reveal with what absolute intellectual certainty and passionate emotional rigidity certain kinds of work behavior and costume are once considered masculine or feminine. Certain occupations or activities which in present day America have become sex neutral. Earlier felt to be male or female in the same essential sense in which a vagina is made female a penis male. The lives of these women

throw into social historical perspective that masculinity and femininity customarily assumed as natural by locating such sex role assumptions in a particular social and temporal context by placing them in historical perspective. The study of these lives can help free us from our own still prevalent preconceptions. For however much the development of labor equalizing in highly industrialized means of production are at present breaking down the traditional sexual sexual division of labor the old sexually polarized worldview still commonly held sway over our minds. That's from passing women 700 to 219 to any introduction. There's a feminist theme running through all of these documents sometimes it's not overt but I was amazed at the times when it did become overt. For instance I was able to find which one of my really important research

discoveries the documents concerning Lucy and La Belle. I started out with a medical journal article dating to eighteen eighty three I think it is or at 84 it's the first reference to lesbian ism in a medical journal and and medical journal turned out to be ironically it wonderful source of attitudes towards homosexuality it was one place where they were actually writing about us early and directly. So what the book was is her autobiography written published in 1855. And I found in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress I sent her a microfilm that I rushed out to the library and looked at Lucy and loved Bell's photo biography and it turned out to include a explicitly feminist appeal as part of it. This was eight hundred fifty five just a few years after the first Seneca Falls meeting where women American women first got together to discuss them in Islam.

And so I said oh my God she's a feminist you know is what I wanted her to be turned out to be that way. It's nice when history turns out the way you want it. I'll read you a little bit of. From another document in this series. This is about Cora Anderson who passed as Routh Kerwin E.O. and had married. She had lived with one woman and she actually married another. And so Cora Anderson writes her this is supposedly by four of them in a 1914 day book. She says This world is made by man for man alone. I have lived I who have lived as a man among men and realize that I have talked with men as a man and know it down deep in their hearts men interpret that old prophecy about inheriting the earth and the fullness thereof. As for themselves alone some people and reading these articles may think I am very bitter against them then this is not so.

I'm only bitter against conditions conditions that have grown up in this manmade world. You cannot blame anyone who makes anything from making it to suit the maker. Power is always a roofless up to date notwithstanding all our reforms our votes for women our women in the industrial field. It is still a man made world made by man for man. Do you blame me for wanting to be a man free to live life as a man in a man made world. Do you blame me for hating to again resume a woman's clothes and just belong. These were women who couldn't see beyond the male the traditional male female polarity has been today. But these were I think very heroic and really interesting women. Yeah.

There was a fourth section of my book is called Native Americans gay Americans

and it contains the earliest document in the book dating to 15 28. Which is an observation of homosexuality one among one particular tribe and the last document in the book goes to 1976 and the report of the formation in San Francisco of the first group of Native American gay Native Americans. It's a nice way to end that section. Native Americans gay Americans 15 28 to 1976 introduction the existence of homosexuality among the people who originally inhabited the United States will no doubt hold a certain special fascination for those lesbians and gay men who are today beginning to repossess the national and world history of their people part of their struggle for social change and to win control over their own lives. One fact that emerges clearly here is that the Christianisation of Native Americans and the Colonial appropriation of the continent by white western

civilization included the attempt by the conquerors to eliminate various traditional forms of Indian homosexuality as part of their attempt to destroy that native culture which might fuel resistance a form of cultural genocide involving both Native Americans and to gay people. Today the recovery of the history of Native American homosexuality is a task in which both gay and native peoples have a common interest. These documents record their areas forms of homosexuality among different tribes and material have to be worked on and analyzed I think. It's hard to say I think that these people were accepted much more than in our own society. Often the observations by military men missionaries some explorers doctors say much more about the feelings of the people themselves the observer than they do about the particular form of native homosexuality being discussed in 1889 a medical doctor writes of the

boat. One type of American Indian homo sexual. And he says he was in a medical journal The practice of the book A among civilized races is not unknown to specialists but no names suited to ears polite even though professional has been given to it. The practice is to produce the sexual orgasm by taking the male organ of the active party in the lips of the BO tape. The BO tape probably experiencing orgasm at the same time of the latter supposition I have not been able to satisfy myself but I can. But I can in no other way account for the infatuation of the act of the riot is of sexual perversion this it seems to me is the most debased that could be conceived of showing there is no bottom to the pit into which the sexual passion was perverted and debased. May sink a creature once he has become a slave.

History can be fun you see the bear dashes the cross-dressing Native American and very often homosexual and the most often commented upon variety of native american homosexuality. I suspect that there is a huge skewing of observations toward talking about examples of cross-dressing. It would be as if some stupid anthropologist came to Greenwich Village where I live and observes that you know all of the most obvious Queens and said you know that was open homosexuality in New York City. You know I don't have much faith in anthropology. There also it's interesting that in 1964 one magazine from Los Angeles was one of the few places to carry an interview somebody actually thought of talking to a Native American homosexual that oh brilliant new idea. And they got a wonderful interview with Elmer Gage a 35 year old six foot

mom who lived on the Corolla Colorado River Reservation. I'll just read you a little bit of what he said and remember this is 1964. He says. As for me being gay has its disadvantages but I don't think I would like to change. I guess I'm just on my own personal little war path. I'm not against whites but against heterosexuals who think everyone should be like them. I'm not always happy but I'm always me. And they can like it or lump it. Life's too short to spend your time being something you don't want to be. I'm true to myself and my own nature. I think that's all anyone has a right to ask of me. It's pretty good for 1964. You were listening to Free time gamins radio tonight Jonathan Katz discusses and reads excerpts from his new book gay American history lesbians and gay men in the USA. Fruit punch tape Mr. Katz when you recently spoke in San Francisco

the section of my book is about resistance to the oppression of gay people. American gay history includes a long and little known tradition of resistance this resistance has taken varied forms from the isolated acts of lone individuals from the writing of letters poems essays books defending homosexuality or novels presenting homosexuals as human beings to the consciously political organ organizing of a group united for action against anti homosexual bigots and institutionalized persecution. The documents gathered here demonstrate the existence of an American tradition of resistance to homosexual oppression. A history going back far beyond the Stonewall Rebellion a Jew not thousand sixty nine when lesbians and gay men in New York actively fought police harassment. The event marking the birth of the recent gay liberation movement from resistance 1859 to 972 introduction.

I trace the world Whitman's influence and direct important influence on the too early English homo sexual emancipation pioneers Edward carpenter and John Addington Symonds men who began in the eighteen nine days to write homosexual propaganda pamphlets in and in England then distribute them first privately among their friends and telling them to be careful and don't let them get into the wrong hands and then actually publishing them. Carpenter in 1894 published his first homosexual pamphlet called home agenda love that was his word for homosexuality and carpenter especially interests me he was socialist and a feminist and a gay liberationist. And if you look at the there's a bibliography on all the works that he's written and it's absolutely amazing because he wrote on every single possible topic that's become of interest to people today.

I just I mean everything you can think of. There's one title that I remember that's a pain on one plane is a pleasure and in another as about S&M. Yes. There's a really interesting California history in the fact of the magazine being started in Los Angeles by Henry Hay who made it his. I'll just tell you about it this way. He picked up a man when he was he was 17 and he picked up a man an older man of about thirty three in Los Angeles and Torrie at Pershing Square and that was the first person that he had ever slept with. And that person happened to have been a lover of someone who had been involved in the first known gay liberation organization in America the Chicago Society for Human Rights.

And so Henry Hay was told about a group which they had tried to form in Chicago in 1924. I was tell you a little bit about that Chicago group was founded by a man named Henry Gerber who later when one magazine began started being published and he wrote letters to one telling about this early organizing. And there's a couple of letters and actually there's some there's a whole manuscript collection of his letters which is one of the most valuable collections that will ever be found I think of of the original manuscript materials relating to history. And in the letters that he wrote to one he says we had a charter from the state of Illinois and we put out a newspaper called Freedom friendship and freedom which was and the name of the organization and the paper were both named after German the homosexual emancipation groups which had been in contact with in Germany during World War One or before. And so there's a tie up there between

the German how the sexual emancipation movement and the and the earliest attempt to form a gay group in the United States they were all arrested by the way and put in jail and Gerber gave up the attempt. But so anyway I'm going back to Henry hey hey was an interest in a very interesting man and maybe some of you have heard him speak. You can Los Angeles. He was a Communist Party member for 18 years and that's one of the reasons the story hasn't been told up to the present. He got the idea for a gay organization the first idea came to him at a gay party in Los Angeles at the University of Southern California in August 1948. And at the time Henry Wallace was running on the progressive party ticket for president of the United States against Truman and Wallace was a New Deal Democrat who was supported by communists and left liberals and all sorts of progressive people and hey got for us at this party of everybody was sort of a little high I got the

idea for a group called bachelors for Wallace and that eventually turned into the international bachelors fraternal order for peace and social dignity sometimes referred to as bachelors Anonymous which. Rich Rich later turned into the maddest society in about 1950 it just seems amazing to me that people were you know doing anything at that time. And there's a whole interview I managed to do an interview with Henry Hey I was working on a shoestring budget on a very small advance from my publisher and on a little money that my mother gave me to live on while I was working on this book. And I had to figure out how can I interview this guy got to talk to him. Well a friend of mine. Worked for a certain very large monopoly. And one Sunday afternoon we we went to a little office of this

very large monopoly. And I was able to tape an interview in New Mexico to New Mexico from New York you know with hay and that's how the interview I used in my book. It was. It was ripped off. I include also a selection from a lesbian periodical named to lead the latter who was being published here in central Cisco had been started by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon and Lorraine Hansberry the black playwright wrote very early in 1957. Some encouraging letters to the latter anonymous letters but they were later identified her Hansberry as marriage her husband has never owned up to the fact that she I mean you know that these letters exist or anything but I'm sure that they're hers. I checked it out. I'll just read you what she writes in 1957.

She says I'm glad as heck that you exist. You are obviously serious people and I feel that women without wishing to foster any strict separatist notions homo or hetero. Indeed have a need for their own publications in organizations our problems our experiences as women are profoundly unique as compared to the other half of the human race. Women like other oppressed groups of one kind or another have particularly had to pay a price for the intellectual impoverishment that the second class status imposed on us for centuries created and sustained. Thus I feel that the latter is a fine elementary students step a rewarding direction in another anonymous letter a hands free connect anti-homosexuality in anti-feminism 957. She says I think it is about time that equipped women began to take on some of the ethical questions which a male dominated culture has produced and to sect and analyze them quite to pieces in a serious fashion. It is time that half the

human race had something to say about the nature of its existence. Otherwise without revised basic thinking without. Without revised basic thinking the more the woman intellectual it's likely to find herself trying to draw conclusions moral conclusions based on acceptance of a social moral superstructure which is never admitted to the equality of women and is therefore in Marley itself. As per marriage as perceptual practices as per the rearing of children etc.. In this kind of work there may be women to emerge who will be able to formulate a new and possible concept that homosexual persecution and condemnation has at its roots not only social ignorance but a philosophically active anti feminist dogma. But that is but a kernel of a speculative embryonic idea improperly introduced here. She was hence very is really an interesting woman bright woman who died very

early. She was a Communist also. So there's another commie queer on outside. That is rather. Sad. And in.

Your. FACE. Though the stick section in my book is called Love and it's about Internet passionate

relations between people of the same sex. And it sort of came to me to do the section late in my research I felt something was missing. I was doing you know research on oppression research on resistance to oppression. I don't know some of my gay intuition told me something was missing and I thought what do I want to know that I'm not doing everything. And I decided it was the subject of intimate relations and how they've been expressed and how we felt about each other. 1779 to 1930 to introduction the history of same sex loving tryst in the following text is the study of the quality of human lives at a particular time in a particular society. This study is of interest because to many of us today the possibilities and limitations of human intimacy within our own lives and society have become profound and pressing personal and political questions. Those of us dispossessed of all but our ability to work know we have only our short time here only our feeling for

ourselves and others. We need to know more about the possible forms of intimacy between women and women between man and man between the sexes and among all the dispossessed. If we want to learn what kind of society and social change might make friendliness the rule instead of the exception. The study of the history of human intimacy may help us define and struggle to create that radically new and revolutionary political economy of love. I'll just read you a bit of these letters that I really like. These are letters that made us very wrote to Emma Goldman in 1912 and the Goldman was the very dynamic anarchist leader. Thousands of people came to hear her speak when she spoke in public and she spoke on feminism and the new drama which was its own. And she was quite a she was on picket lines I was in jail. Always she always carried a book with her so when

she was arrested she'd have something to read. I always carried a book and she was constantly arrested. And she was one of the very early people in America who I think she was basically heterosexual to defend gays publicly and she writes about that she says she defended Oscar Wilde very early in public in her lectures and she says she was warned by her anarchist comrades not to do it don't you know that anarchism has a bad enough name already. Down down talk about queers You know emma. But she went ahead nevertheless it made her more determined to talk about us. So and then in 1915 on a speaking tour in Portland Oregon she talks about talking about homosexuals and she describes how very moving it was and how moved she was when lesbians and gay men came up to her afterwards and said you know this is the first time we've ever heard anybody talk about us in public or even heard who we were identified at all.

So that's Emma Goldman. I was able to find through the help of a woman a couple of women historians these manuscript love letters which you know had not been published before too and the Goldman It's not clear what the relationship was in terms of activity but it definitely appears that this woman was madly passionately in love with him and Goldman. Made us very there's not too much known about her she was had been a socialist and was at 19 was in 1912 an anarchist. She was living in a small town in Pennsylvania and she was on picket lines and there and on various working class activities against the males and she was married heterosexually so she was bisexual I guess. In one letter she writes to Emma Goldman. I have shown you the secret places of my soul thinking if I did so without any reservation that it would help the cause along. I would not care

if you told my story to the public or even use my name from the platform. I think that she would just kind of dig the use of her letters in my book. Writing of a woman friend Sperry says you know she has all burned hair and I motored made a poem about it. It goes into the glowing mass. I thrust the thin line of my crimson lips thrilling with lust. The rest I don't remember. You know that that isn't poetry. It's just the way I felt. This is the letter that she replies to Goldman's questions about about her relations with men she says I have absolutely no reciprocation as far as passion is concerned for a man who pays me for sex. Nearly all men try to buy love if they don't do it by marrying. They do it otherwise and that is why I have such contempt for men. Love should be worth the worship but love seems to be with most people ejaculate I fear I shall never love any man. I've seen I've seen too much and I'm no

fool. Referring to the possibility of leaving her husband she tells Emma Goldman. I think I still have him somewhere in the background always. Habit is even stronger than love and it is nice to sleep with someone so that when a person wakes up in the middle of the night why one can touch the other person and not feel so alone. And then too in the winter time when the wind howls. If I were alone then I'd ask the nearest male who had any kind of health to sleep with me just for the sake of his animal warmth. My word I've no civilisation have I. The inner part of me is untamed. It's never been licked. I am a savage and a wild wild savage and they can't tame me with their pure willing conventions their stinking houses nor that damned religion. And it is. And it is the untamed part of me that loves you

because you don't want to put leading strings on it. If you did I would tell you that you are a liar and your book is a lie and it is the wild part of me that would be unabashed in showing its love for you in front of a multitude or in a crowded room. My eyes would sparkled with love and I'd love to gaze upon you always and every part of my body would be replete with satisfaction of its expression of love. GOD GOD GOD GOD. After the preceding discussion I've been reading from his new book gay American history. Mr. Katz honored the audience with a few selections from his documentary play of 1972 entitled coming out. We now share with you a section of that reading.

For too long we have been your laughing stock for too long. We laughed with you and played the fool for so long for so many of us it was something truly unspeakable about ourselves a deep and secret shame. We wore the mask. Well the masks are coming. Go free. Coming out fighting to face he went all out on natural beauty like those proud blacks with their pushy naturals. We unnatural together coming out to fiercely assert and joyfully celebrate our natures fully openly. Without shame another person past shame we are at last learning. Come from out of the blue it was your contempt which we accepted internalized and made very much our own when we have finally realized that the depth of contempt in which we have held ourselves is a true measure of the depth of hate in which you hold us. Our action our anger will

be uncheckable our actions against you will burn with rage. So in the words of a newfound comrade watch your step on me. In the past. We came to you quietly with the proper air of deference begging for acceptance toleration and a little sympathy. Well you have missed your chance. They'll be no more sympathy no more happened when we no longer need your sympathy. They'll be no more back. We'll we're invisible. Now walking in the streets hand-in-hand smiling at each other openly at long last in public proudly we dared to speak our name not speak shot we've been silenced too long together we will work and shout and fight until we have our rights. Until all gay people are free until the society is

changed. Thank you. And now you say I am. A man. I mean you. And me. Man.

Hands. Down. With our. Hands. Hand in hand. Come out. Come out. Now. Meet the people.

Man. It's northern California. We welcome your comments and criticisms. You can write food plans care of KPFA Berkeley California 9 4 7 0 4 1. This is me with Kevin Andy Roland guy and Susan on the board for the entire food plan's collective good.