LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
This is going to be a slightly different edition of LGBT Literature. But first, I’ll explain how we got here: This morning, as I usually do before I sit down to write an LGBT Literature diary, I perused my bookshelf looking for inspiration. And I got it! An idea for for a diary topic formed almost immediately, and I spent the morning working on it. But I soon realized that I’d bitten off more than I could chew, because the project I had undertaken was much more than one day’s work. I’m not admitting defeat—that diary will happen, but it is not ready for publication tonight.
So off to the archives I went...the LGBT Literature archives, that is. I try to avoid doing “reprints” as much as possible, because I know our readers come here expecting original content each month. However, sometimes there are diaries posted for the series that just do not receive much of a readership that month. These are diaries that were posted years ago, when the LGBT Literature audience was quite different—those diaries are sometimes worthy of being republished.
This diary “reprint” will be a little unique, because I am actually including two old LGBT Literature diaries, both of which were posted years ago and did not get that many eyes. I’m republishing both of them in the same diary because they complement each other well. They are both diaries dealing less with historical writing and more with the historical sources themselves. One diary covers the foundational (and radical, for its time) 1976 book Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., by LGBT history pioneer Jonathan Ned Katz. It is not an exaggeration to say that Katz helped launch the field of LGBT history with this collection of gay and lesbian historical documents. The other diary covers the 1997 collection We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, compiled by Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan. Both of these books have places on my coffee table, and I regularly come back to them when I am in need of some original source content. Although one may think of them more as reference books, they are absolutely worth reading cover to cover. There is a multitude of fascinating and important documents in each, some of the most interesting of which I tried to highlight in my diaries.
Everything below will be from those older diaries, although I did lightly edit some of the original text and leave out content that is not as relevant anymore. If you want to read the original diaries in full, you can find them here and here. Without further ado, Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History, which will then be immediately followed by my diary on We Are Everywhere:
At some point when I was wrestling over which book to write about this month, I realized that the answer was (literally) under my nose. A tattered 1985 copy of Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. has been sitting on my coffee table for as long as I can remember. More than one visitor has picked it up and thumbed through it, and without fail, they have always found something interesting to stop and read. If you're an avid reader of this series, you may indeed already be familiar with the book. First published in 1976 in the wake of the gay liberation movement, this breathtaking collection of primary documents truly paved the way for future historians to continue to uncover the deep, vast, subterranean gay and lesbian world of which Katz scratches the surface in the book. The word "foundational" comes to mind, and perhaps that is an understatement given what Katz accomplished. Remember, this was 1976, and writing about gay history was not exactly in vogue. Needless to say, this is not an academic work. As Katz writes in the introduction:
Only recently have the first two Ph.D. theses on homosexuality been permitted in the history and political science departments of American universities. The writers were both warned that they were risking their academic careers by taking up this topic; both went ahead nevertheless. I know of two other recent instances in which a history department and an English department did not allow theses on homosexual subjects; another German department Ph.D. candidate was discouraged from writing on homosexual literature because the topic would impair future teaching prospects. Researching the present work without capitalization from academia took considerable ingenuity, and could not have been accomplished without the valuable voluntary assistance of a number of Gay people and a few heterosexuals, all named in the acknowledgments. This book is significantly not a product of academia; it does not play it safe; it is rough at the edges, radical at heart.
Radical indeed, and a trailblazer. While Gay American History is more a collection of documents than a narrative-driven history, it is a book you will want to read cover to cover. With bits of analysis from Katz, the sources mostly speak for themselves and poignantly (and oftentimes bluntly) provide their own narrative.
Katz begins Gay American History with the following state of both the field of LGBT history (hint: it doesn't exist) and of the gay and lesbian struggle:
We have been the silent minority, the silenced minority--invisible women, invisible men. Early on, the alleged enormity of our "sin" justified the denial of our existence, even our physical destruction. Our "crime" was not merely against society, not only against humanity, but "against nature"--we were outlaws against the universe. Long did we remain literally and metaphorically unspeakable, "among Christians not to be named"--nameless. To speak our name, to roll that word over the tongue, was to make our existence tangible, physical; it came too close to some mystical union with us, some carnal knowledge of that "abominable" ghost, that lurking possibility within. For long, like women conceived only in relation to men, we were allowed only relative intellectual existence, conceived only in relation to, as deviants from, a minority of--an "abnormal" and embarrassing poor relation. For long we were a people perceived out of time and out of place--socially unsituated, without a history--the mutant progeny of some heterosexual union, freaks. Our existence as a long-oppressed, long-resistant social group was not explored. We remained an unknown people, our character defamed. The heterosexual dictatorship has tried to keep us out of sight and out of mind; its homosexuality taboo has kept us in the dark. That time is over. The people of the shadows have seen the light; Gay people are coming out--and moving on--to organized action against an oppressive society.
Phew! Katz does not mince words. Of course, he's absolutely right. By 1976, no other major work in American queer history existed. Katz clearly had his work cut out for him. Most of the documents he includes had never seen the light of day before the book's publication. And have I mentioned that he is covering the period from 1566 to 1976? Katz sees the gay liberation movement of the 1970s as being connected to a much larger gay and lesbian struggle that has existed all throughout this vast period of time (and even before). I'm reminded of Vincent Harding's similar argument about the African American struggle being like a mighty river in There Is a River.
Gay American History is divided into six easier-to-digest thematic sections: "Trouble: 1566-1966," "Treatment: 1884-1974," "Passing Women: 1782-1920," "Native Americans/Gay Americans: 1528-1976," "Resistance: 1859-1972," and "Love: 1779-1932."
The first section on "Trouble" is all about the different ways in which gays and lesbians have been oppressed throughout history, stretching from the first known case of a homosexual being executed in America through the Cold War anti-gay witch hunts of the 1950s and 1960s. Again, Katz does not mince words:
During the four hundred years documented here, American homosexuals were condemned to death by choking, burning, and drowning; they were executed, jailed, pilloried, fined, court-martialed, prostituted, fired, framed, blackmailed, disinherited, declared insane, driven to insanity, to suicide, murder, and self-hate, witch-hunted, entrapped, stereotyped, mocked, insulted, isolated, pitied, castigated, and despised...Homosexuals and their behavior were characterized by the terms "abomination," "crime against nature," "sin," "monster," "fairies," "bull dykes," and "perverts." The vicious judgments such terms expressed were sometimes internalized by Lesbians and Gay men with varying results--from feelings of guilt and worthlessness, to trouble in relating to other homosexuals, to the most profound mental disturbances and antisocial behavior. External judgments internalized became self-oppression; reexternalized this might result in behavior destructive to the self and others. Heterosexual society conditioned homosexuals to act as the agents of their own destruction, to become victims of themselves. But always, finally, they were oppressed, situated in a society that outlawed and denied them.
The documents are both fascinating and horrifying. Take, for example, this excerpt from John Winthrop's 1646 History of New England (Winthrop, of course, was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony):
Mr. Eaton, the governour of New Haven, wrote to the governour of the Bay, to desire the advice of the magistrates and elders in a special case, which was this: one Plaine of Guilford being discovered to have used some unclean practices, upon examination and testimony, it was found, that being a married man, he had committed sodomy with two persons and England, and that he had corrupted a great part of the youth of Guilford by masturbations, which he had committed, and provoked others to the like above a hundred times; and to some who questioned the lawfulness of such filthy practice, he did insinuate seeds of atheism, questioning whether there was a God, etc. The magistrates and elders (so many as were at hand) did all agree, that he ought to die, and gave divers reasons from the word of God. And indeed it was horrendum facinus [a dreadful crime], and he a monster in human shape, exceeding all human rules and examples that ever had been heard of, and it tended to the frustrating of the ordinance of marriage and the hindering the generation of mankind.
The "Treatment" section might well belong under "Trouble" given the disastrous results of the treatment of gays and lesbians by psychiatrists and psychologists, which Katz calls "one of the more lethal forms of homosexual oppression." "Treatments" discussed in the documents of this section include castration, hysterectomy, vasectomy, surgical removal of the ovaries and clitoris, the administration of hormones and sexual stimulants/depressants, hypnosis, shock treatment, aversion therapy, among others. Truly a house of horrors, this section.
For example, here is an excerpt from a paper presented at an international medico-legal congress in 1893 by Dr. F.E. Daniel of Austin, Texas. The paper is titled "Should Insane Criminals or Sexual Perverts Be Allowed to Procreate?" I'm sure you can guess what his answer to that question is.
In lieu thereof [execution], and as a solution to the most difficult problem in sociology which confronts the learned professions today, and as a measure calculated to fulfill all the ends and aims of criminal jurisprudence, castration is proposed. I say "castration" and not "asexualization," because that applies as well to women; and in sexual perversion the woman is usually passive; she can not commit a rape, at all events (though she can practice sexual abominations that shock morals, wreck health, and worse, can transmit her defects to posterity)...
...I would substitute castration as a penalty for all sexual crimes or misdemeanors, including confirmed masturbation.
I'm sure Dr. Daniel never masturbated in his entire life.
I'm not going to go through all of the sections (the titles of which are self-explanatory), but I would like to conclude by visiting the "Resistance" section. Katz casts a wide net with a broad definition of resistance encompassing not only the overtly political of the twentieth century, but also the letters, poems, and book-length treatises that came long before. Katz couldn't be more spot-on here. Even acts of resistance that were seemingly unsuccessful are important to the broader arc of our history.
When I gave a lecture a couple of semesters ago, I took a multiple-choice poll of the students and asked when they thought the first American gay rights organization was formed. Very few guessed 1924, and there were audible gasps when I revealed the answer. But yes, the Chicago Society for Human Rights (which I wrote about here), founded in 1924 by German-American Henry Gerber, was the earliest documented gay emancipation organization in the United States. They even had a publication, Friendship and Freedom, which only saw one issue.
The charter states that the organization's purpose is
to promote and to protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness which is guaranteed them by the Declaration of Independence, and to combat the public prejudices against them by dissemination of facts according to modern science among intellectuals of mature age. The Society stands only for law and order; it is in harmony with any and all general laws insofar as they protect the rights of others, and does in no manner recommend any acts in violation of present laws nor advocate any matter inimical to the public welfare.
Unfortunately, the organization came to an end in the summer of 1925, when the wife of one of the organizers called the police, who shut the society down. The headline in the next day's Examiner read: "Strange Sex Cult Exposed."
Another interesting document in this section is an interview from 1974 with Barbara Gittings, a founder and the first president of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), a lesbian homophile organization first formed in 1955 (which I wrote about here). Gittings recalls the founding of the New York chapter:
DOB had its four-part statement of purpose printed inside the front cover of The Ladder, and that, supposedly, provided guidelines for us. The Daughters of Bilitis was definited as "A Women's Organization for the Purpose of Promoting the Integration of the Homosexual into Society..." The word Lesbian was not used once. Four purposes were listed:
1. Education of the variant...to enable her to understand herself and make her adjustment to society...this to be accomplished by establishing...a library...on the sex deviant theme; by sponsoring public discussions...to be conducted by leading members of the legal, psychiatric, religious and other professions; by advocating a mode of behavior and dress acceptable to society.
2. Education of the public...leading to an eventual breakdown of erroneous taboos and prejudices...
3. Participation in research projects by duly authorized and responsible psychologists, sociologists, and other such experts directed towards further knowledge of the homosexual.
4. Investigation of the penal code as it pertains to the homosexual, proposal of changes,...and promotion of these changes through the due process of law in the state legislatures.
"Education of the variant," not even the word "Lesbian!" "Adjustment" became a major controversy phrase later on. The idea of having Gay people speak was totally foreign to us at the time.
Really fascinating stuff, both for those who know LGBT history and those who don't. Like I said, this is a book well worth reading from cover to cover. At just over 550 pages of text, it's a doorstopper, but it's a page-turner at the same time.
If you haven't read Gay American History yet, it belongs on your shelf, so pick up a copy. And, if you're hungry for more primary documents, you can visit OutHistory.org, which Katz founded and currently directs.
Over a year ago, I wrote an LGBT Literature diary on another book from my coffee table, Jonathan Ned Katz's 1976 Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. Katz's annotated collection of gay and lesbian historical documents stretching from the 1500s to the gay liberation movement is a bedrock of what has become the field of LGBT history. As I noted in the diary, Katz assembled the book at a time when "serious people" did not even have a conception of gay history. Indeed, it was a dangerous time for academics who even flirted with the idea of pursing it as a serious path of study. As Katz explains in his introduction:
Only recently have the first two Ph.D. theses on homosexuality been permitted in the history and political science departments of American universities. The writers were both warned that they were risking their academic careers by taking up this topic; both went ahead nevertheless. I know of two other recent instances in which a history department and an English department did not allow theses on homosexual subjects; another German department Ph.D. candidate was discouraged from writing on homosexual literature because the topic would impair future teaching prospects. Researching the present work without capitalization from academia took considerable ingenuity, and could not have been accomplished without the valuable voluntary assistance of a number of Gay people and a few heterosexuals, all named in the acknowledgments. This book is significantly not a product of academia; it does not play it safe; it is rough at the edges, radical at heart.
Gay American History was indeed radical and far from academic. Katz nevertheless laid important groundwork for the academic study of LGBT history. Over time, really beginning in the early 1980s (particularly after the publication of John Boswell's 1980 Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century and John D'Emilio's 1983 Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States), the "serious" field of LGBT history took shape. Today, fewer question the legitimacy of the topic, and Gay American History looks less radical and more foundational. Katz's work and other sourcebooks are now an important resource for scholars, in addition to being an excellent place to start for laypeople wishing to learn about LGBT history.
The book I'm writing about today is, like Gay American History, a historical sourcebook: We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics (1997), edited by Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, both political theorists. And, like Katz's book, it deserves a place on your shelf (or coffee table) if you are interested in LGBT history.
As the title suggests, We Are Everywhere takes a broad look at gay and lesbian politics and assembles a wide variety of writings--organization pamphlets, essays, speeches, newspaper articles, polemics, and many more--that present a chronological view of the ways gay and lesbian people have conceptualized themselves socially and politically. The authors describe the book in the introduction:
We Are Everywhere provides a record of the issues and ideas surrounding the politics of homosexuality. It is not, strictly speaking, a history of lesbian and gay politics; it is, rather, a largely chronological presentation of the ways in which people whose primary sexual attraction to others of the same sex have understood their social and political position. Our goals are to provide readers with some tools to grasp our contemporary situation, to understand who we are by looking at how we came to be who we are; and to involve readers in the activity of theorizing in order to better inform their political action. We do this by presenting historically and theoretically important statements representing the diversity of lesbian and gay politics.
How is this book different from Gay American History? Well, first, the obvious: Katz's book was published in 1976, and We Are Everywhere came out in 1997. Clearly, a great deal happened between the gay liberation movement and the age of queer. Second, breadth: Katz covered gay American history (as is obvious from the title), and while Blasius and Phelan do maintain a heavily American focus, they also give a good amount of attention to gay and lesbian politics in Europe. The American gay movement, after all, did not occur in a vacuum, and in some ways we can trace our history to the movement that arose in Europe (and especially Germany). Third, many documents not available in 1976 have been uncovered, some of which make their first translated appearance in We Are Everywhere. While it is far from comprehensive (and the editors freely admit this--a comprehensive work would be much longer than the 800 pages that comprise this book), We Are Everywhere richly expands upon the foundation Katz built in the 1970s.
The book is divided into six chronological sections: gay and lesbian "pre-history" (1700s), the beginnings of a gay and lesbian movement (late 1800s to mid-1900s), the homophile movement (1950-1969), gay liberation and lesbian-feminism (1969 through the 1980s), the politics of AIDS (1980s-1990s), and "the present moment and the future of desire (1988-1994). Within each section, attention is paid to international (mostly European) context and diversity (to the editors' credit, this is not simply a white history). Included are documents from the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the German homophile movement, the Soviet Union, in addition to more familiar American sources. What is missing? Well, as the editors admit, not much is included outside of the United States and Europe. Transgender people, as evidenced by the title, are also missing and would have made for an important addition to what, by the 1990s, should have been an LGBT history. While lesbians are included in later sections, earlier sources do not reflect gender diversity, but this says less about the editors and more about the male-centric sources in earlier centuries. It is easy to dwell on what is missing in this 800-page door-stopper, but taken for what it is and what it claims to be, We Are Everywhere has much to offer.
Like I did for Gay American History, I would like to highlight a few sources, just to give a taste of the diversity in the book.
Take, for example, an excerpt on "the crime against nature" from Montesquieu's 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws:
God forbid that I should have the least inclination to diminish the public horror against a crime which religion, morality, and civil government equally condemn. It ought to be proscribed, were it only for its communicating to one sex the weaknesses of the other, and for leading people by a scandalous prostitution of their youth to an ignominious old age. What I shall say concerning it will in no way diminish from its infamy, being levelled only against the tyranny that may abuse the very horror we out to have against the vice.
[...]
I may venture to affirm that the crime against nature will never make any great progress in society unless people are prompted to it by some particular custom, as among the Greeks, where the youth of that country performed all their exercises naked; as amongst us, where domestic education is disused; as amongst the Asiatics, where particular persons have a great number of women whom they despise, while others can have none at all. Let there be no customs preparatory to this crime; let it, like every other violation of morals, be severely proscribed by the civil magistrate; and nature will soon defend or resume her rights. Nature, that fond, that indulgent parent, has strewed her pleasures with a bounteous hand, and while she fills us with delights she prepares us, by means of our issue, in whom we see ourselves, as it were, reproduced--she prepares us, I say, for future satisfactions of a more exquisite kind than those very delights.
Moving ahead to the Soviet Union (I'm going to be jumping around a lot), here's an excerpt from the entry "homosexuality" in the state-produced Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1930):
HOMOSEXUALITY [Gomoseksualizm]--unnatural sexual attraction to persons of one's own sex (the opposite of the normal--heterosexuality). According to M[agnus] Hirschfeld, about 2 percent of people (more commonly men) suffer from H. H. occurs in all races and social classes and in various professions; homosexuals have included many outstanding people (Socrates, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and others).
[...]
The prognosis for H. is relatively poor. Only a very few cases have been cured, and then usually among those with bisexual tendencies.
[...]
From this it is clear that the Soviet evaluation of the peculiarities and distinctive features of homosexuals completely diverges from that prevalent in the West. In acknowledging the homosexual's mistaken development, society does not and cannot blame these peculiarities on those who have them...In stressing the causes of this anomaly, our society goes beyond prophylactic and curative measures to create the indispensable conditions under which the everyday interactions of homosexuals will be as normal as possible and their usual sense of estrangement will be resorbed in the new collective.
Jumping across the pond and and ahead several decades, here is an excerpt from the Radicalesbians' 1970 flyer "The Woman-Identified Woman":
What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. She is the woman who, often beginning at an extremely early age in accordance with her inner compulsion to be a more complete and freer human being than her society--perhaps then, but certainly later--cares to allow her. These needs and actions, over a period of years, bring her into painful conflict with people, situations, the accepted ways of thinking, feeling and behaving, until she is in a state of continual war with everything around her, and usually with herself. She may not be fully conscious of the political implications of what for her began as personal necessity, but on some level she has not been able to accept the limitations and oppressions laid on her by the most basic role of her society--the female role. The turmoil she experiences tends to induce guilt proportional to the degree to which she feels she is not meeting social expectations, and/or eventually drives her to question and analyse what the rest of her society, more or less accepts. She is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her "straight" (heterosexual) sisters about the essential aloneness of life (which the myth of marriage obscures) and about the reality of illusions. To the extent that she cannot expel the heavy socialization that goes with being female, she can never truly find peace with herself. For she is caught somewhere between accepting society's view of her--in which case she cannot accept herself--and coming to understand what this sexist society has done to her and why it is functional and necessary for it to do so. Those of us who work that through find ourselves on the other side of a torturous journey through a night that may have been decades long. The perspective gained from that journey, the liberation of self, the inner peace, the real love of self and of all women, is something to be shared with all women--because we are all women.
One more, from 1989, and it's a relevant piece considering our current LGBT struggle: gay rights lawyer's Thomas B. Stoddard's "Why Gay People Should Seek the Right to Marry."
Today no American jurisdiction recognized the right of two women or two men to marry one another, although several nations in Northern Europe do. Even more telling, until earlier this year, there was little discussion within the gay rights movement about whether such a right should exist. As far as I can tell, no gay organization of any size, local or national, has yet declared the right to marry as one of its goals.
[...]
Nonetheless--and here I will not mince words--I would like to see the issue rise to the top of the agenda of every gay organization.
Why give it such prominence? Why devote resources to such a distant goal? Because marriage is, I believe, the political issues that most fully tests the dedication of people who are not gay to full equality for gay people, and also the issue most likely to lead ultimately to a world free from discrimination against lesbians and gay men.
Very relevant words, now that marriage equality does top the priority list of our gay rights organizations--and now that, as we face a likely Supreme Court decision in June extending us the right to marry, we still have no federal civil rights protections in employment or public accommodations.
Okay, one more, which responds to the above piece: Paula L. Ettelbrick's 1989 "Since When Is Marriage a Path to Liberation?"
So why does this unlikely event [same-sex marriage] so deeply disturb me? For two major reasons. First, marriage will not liberate us as lesbians and gay men. In fact, it will constrain us, make us more invisible, force our assimilation into the mainstream, and undermine the goals of gay liberation. Second, attaining the right to marry will not transform our society from one that makes narrow, but dramatic, distinctions between those who are married and those who are not married to one that respects and encourages choice of relationships and family diversity. Marriage runs contrary to two of the primary goals of the lesbian and gay movement: the affirmation of gay identity and culture; and the validation of many forms of relationships.
Obviously, there is a great deal of interesting stuff in We Are Everywhere, and these few excerpts do not do the book justice. Taken as a whole, the documents Blasius and Phelan have assembled paint a rich, diverse picture of gay and lesbian politics in Europe and the United States. If you don't yet have it, I do recommend it as an addition to your shelf. You might even find yourself reading this tome cover to cover.
LGBT Literature Schedule:
August 26: OPEN
September 30: OPEN
October 28: OPEN
November 25: OPEN
December 30: OPEN
As always, we are looking for writers! Either comment below or send Chrislove a message if you’d like to contribute to the series and fill one of our open dates.
Readers & Book Lovers Series Schedule: