LGBTQ Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBTQ themes is welcome in this series. LGBTQ 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 message to Chrislove.
When I was around 16 or 17 years old, I was struggling with my sexuality in a very intense way. I knew, by that point, that I was gay. Whether or not I could change myself, as the church in which I was raised insisted was possible, was still an open question. But my attraction to other boys was undeniable, and I’d finally accepted that this wasn’t some kind of “phase,” as I’d long hoped.
This was in the early 2000s, and the introduction of the Internet into our home was what had led me to this conclusion. Beyond being able to search for information on homosexuality (as helpful as that was), I’d also made connections with other people from around the country and world who identified as gay. My online friendship with a Canadian boy—who was very open with me about his own sexuality—was what pushed me into the stage of acceptance. (Sadly, we’ve long since fallen out of touch, and he’ll likely never know what a difference he made in my life.)
One day, for reasons that are still somewhat unclear to me, I created a profile on a site I’d come across called Manhunt. I’m sure that most gay men who read this have memories of Manhunt, a gay dating and hookup site that was quite popular during this period. A Google search confirms that it’s still around—although it’s safe to say that it has largely been replaced with apps such as Grindr, Scruff, Growlr, and others. I remember setting my location to Pittsburgh (a city two hours away), since I didn’t want local people to see me. I was definitely underage at the time, so I lied about my age, but I did upload a real picture of myself (dumb). This profile sat for at least a few weeks, until one day at school, one of my female friends approached me. She told me that she’d been hanging out with one of her friends, who was gay and soon moving to Pittsburgh, and they decided to mess around on Manhunt to see what kinds of men he may be able to meet. She found somebody who looked just like me. Knowing I’d been found out, I quickly came up with a rather unbelievable lie: The profile was a terrible prank on me by somebody who must not like me very much! I don’t think she was convinced, but she did drop the subject. I deleted the Manhunt profile shortly after this encounter, and we never spoke of it again. (I’m sure she wasn’t very surprised when I came out a few years later.)
I have wondered, from time to time, what I was doing on Manhunt. I know I wasn’t looking for sex (at least, not the physical kind)—I’d set my location to a city two hours away, after all, and at age 16 I would have been terrified of meeting an adult man for sex anyway. I think what I was ultimately looking for on that site was to find other connections. I knew so few gay people (almost none in “real life”), and I was starved for interactions with other people like me. People like my Canadian online friend, for example, who validated what I was feeling and could offer some kind of advice or guidance. (And if somebody sent me a dick pic in the process, I’m sure I wouldn’t have complained!) Manhunt was probably not the best way to find those connections, but I guess I must have thought it was worth a try.
I was reminded of all of this while I was rereading Martin Meeker’s Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s, which was published in 2006 (if not the exact year the above incident took place, pretty close!). I’ve often looked back at the Manhunt incident as an embarrassing episode from my youth, but it occurred to me while rereading this book that what I was looking for on that site was not all that different from what gay men and lesbians have been looking for all throughout our history. Seeking out connections with other likeminded people is a very human thing, after all, and no gay community could exist today were it not for people who sought out those connections. In his introduction, Meeker retells a story from the youth of Harry Hay, one of the founders of the homophile movement of the 1950s:
The story, which he loved to tell, goes something like this: at fourteen, Hay had exaggerated his age and landed himself a job on a steamship heading south from San Francisco Bay to Los Angeles. Late one evening while in port, when the rest of the crew was being entertained at a brothel, Harry found himself in the company of a handsome young man named Matt who also had avoided the nighttime diversions. A knowing connection was made as the men gazed in each other’s eyes, and they agreed to explore a remote beach during the next port of call. While strolling on the beach, “Harry was swept up by bracing physical sensations,” Hay’s biographer Stuart Timmons tells. “His mouth was dry, his flesh tingled, Matt’s hand dangled next to his. When he clasped it, he momentarily feared that the sailor would respond violently. Instead, Matt pulled him close and kissed him.” Within a moment the two headed for a grove of trees, and soon Hay was having his first adult sexual experience. In the afterglow of their encounter, Matt shared with the young and inexperienced Hay the idea that men like them were members of a “silent brotherhood” that existed throughout history and spanned the globe; that at times he will feel isolated, but even in “that frightening and alien place” he will look across a street or square and “see a pair of eyes open and glow at you . . . at that moment, in the lock of two pairs of eyes, you are home and you are safe!”
Of course, there are plenty of differences between Hay’s sexual encounter and my own attempt at finding a connection online, not the least of which is the context. Hay came of age at a time when communications between gay men were largely hidden, coded, and unstable, whereas by the early 2000s, communications between gay men were becoming more public, open, and stable. Whereas Hay had precious few resources describing homosexuality and giving language to his feelings (such as Edward Carpenter’s 1908 The Intermediate Sex, which Hay claimed to have read at an early age), even the early Internet granted me a wealth of information about homosexuality.
Contacts Desired is, in a nutshell, about the transition from a world in which language about homosexuality and communications between gay people was hidden and underground to a world in which that language and communication became much more open and accessible:
The emergence of gay male and lesbian communities in twentieth-century United States was in very large part the result of massive changes in the way that individuals could connect to knowledge about homosexuality. As homosexuals have struggled to claim an identity, build communities, map out their world, and secure equality, they have had to overcome many hurdles including but not limited to the actions of police, the diagnoses of psychologists, the sermons of ministers, the sentences of judges, the stamp of censors, and the surveillance of parents. But perhaps the most stubborn problem faced by homosexuals over the course of the twentieth century has been one of communication. Before people who erotically and emotionally preferred the same sex could organize to confront and challenge their antagonists, they have had to coalesce around an identity and gather themselves into collectivities, into communities, into specific places, and around certain ideas. The projects of articulating identities and building communities, however, are not ones that many homosexuals chose with purpose or foresight. Indeed, the entire process was fraught because for the boys, girls, men, and women who desired contacts there was neither innate knowledge nor a handbook given to them that shared the steps that must taken to achieve an identity and find a community. Yet, a connection had to be made, and throughout the twentieth century an apparently increasing number of individuals possessed a burning desire to connect. This desire to connect and in effect reproduce homosexuality is a central yet woefully neglected current in the century’s long history of homosexuality. But while the desire to connect has been a relative constant, found in the diaries of American colonials, in the letters of twentieth-century bohemians, and in the oral histories of contemporary queer activists, the desire and the ways in which it has been expressed have a long and complex history.
Meeker goes on to reveal one of the book’s central arguments:
Furthermore, Contacts Desired seeks to recover communications as a central, perhaps the central, thread that makes queer history a recognizable and unified phenomenon.
Other gay historians have dealt with the importance of communication—it would be difficult to write about gay history without dealing with it. But Contacts Desired is the first real book-length examination of the importance of communications methods and networks to queer history. In particular, Meeker looks at three innovations that took shape in the midcentury that completely changed the landscape for gay people and made community-building and social movement organizing possible. The book has three parts, each devoted to one of the major innovations:
Part 1 explores the interventions of 1950s homosexual activists and their drive to create candidate, stable, and authoritative networks. Part 2 examines the process by which the mainstream mass media “discovered” homosexuality in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which helped to usher in a new era of mass-mediated networks. Part 3 details the development of a do-it-yourself commercial and activist ethic among gay men and lesbians and the consequent building of a complex and extensive subcultural network in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Part 1 examines the work of homophile activists (such as Harry Hay) in the 1950s and 1960s to end the isolation many gay people felt at the time and bring gay people into contact with each other, building a kind of national community in the process. Although other historians have looked at this early activism in detail, Meeker places the importance of building communications networks at the center of homophile work:
Within a few years of its founding, the leaders of the movement decided the most important contribution they could make to improving the situation of gay men and lesbians in the United States was to build new communication networks as well as reinforce the more precarious and small-scale networks that already existed.
And that is just what organizations such as the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis did, bringing gay men and lesbians together across geographic space through publications such as the Mattachine Review, ONE Magazine, and The Ladder. We often look back at these early organizations as being too timid or “respectable” compared to organizations that emerged in the gay liberation years and beyond. When I teach gay history to my students, I often remind them that we have to consider the context and constraints under which these early activists operated. I particularly appreciate how Meeker dismantles these wrongheaded critiques of homophile activists and reminds us that these activists helped create the gay world in which later organizations would thrive:
Described by some historians as unwisely wed to a stifling strategy of progress through respectability, homophile activists, I argue, knowingly used respectability as a mask to hide a much more daring and creative approach. Moreover, historians have repeatedly used the term “assimilationist” to describe homophile activists and thus critique them as insufficiently proud of their sexuality and all too willing to conform to the dominant ethos. However, this book argues that such critiques rest on an incomplete understanding of homophile activism and assimilation. The concept of assimilation, developed by scholars early in the twentieth century to describe what they considered to be the virtual surrender of unique cultural characteristics among immigrants as they became American, has long since been abandoned by historians of ethnicity in favor of concepts that reveal how dominant cultures are influenced often as much as minority ones. Aside from being an outdated sociological concept, assimilation in its precise formulation is the wrong term to describe the motivations and goals of the homophiles who, like immigrant ethnic groups, sought to change American culture as much as they expected that culture would change them. Finally, this book argues that previous scholars have attempted to place homophile activists within a post-gay liberationist / lesbian-feminist model—or, more generally, a post-1960s social movement model—of political activism. This book shows that homophile activists developed a grounded understanding of the source of the problems they experienced and a theory of how and why society discriminated against them and subsequently developed an activist agenda to address those issues directly. The fact that the approaches they developed did not look like the activist strategies that became popular later in the 1960s does not mean that the homophiles were apologetic or without vision. Rather, they were practical and committed to organizing where it would be most immediately effective and useful.
And Meeker also reminds us that this homophile project of ending isolation and invisibility and forcing these already existing gay networks out into the open was a radical idea that fundamentally asked gay people at the time to “change their way of being queer.”
In Part 2, Meeker specifically looks at the ways in which the mainstream media began to pay much greater attention to homosexuality and gay people in the 1960s and 1970s. This media coverage wasn’t exactly positive, of course, but it did greatly expand knowledge of homosexuality to people who weren’t gay—and, inevitably, served as a resource to people who were gay. There are many examples of this kind of media coverage, but one famous example that Meeker points out is the 1964 article “Homosexuality in America,” published by Life magazine:
Once the magazine hit the newsstands it immediately became a media event. Word of its publication spread fast, and people rushed to purchase the magazine. According to a number of sources, the issue sold out in less than two days in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and other large cities. The issue sold nearly 7.3 million copies to a substantially wider readership nationwide and gained even wider circulation when it was published almost simultaneously around the globe in Life International and Life en Español. Recognized by homophile activists at the time and historians subsequently as a watershed event in the representation of homosexuality in the mass media, the feature at once symbolized the end of the conspiracy of silence and marked a real milestone in the content and scope of media coverage about the subject.
[...]
The combination of forces surrounding and creating Life’s “Homosexuality in America”—the editors at Life, homophile organizations, gay bar managers and patrons, and Life’s millions of readers—further influenced a shift in the national imaginary that included differentiating the gay populations of various places, from New York’s Greenwich Village denizens to Los Angeles’s beleaguered and hunted homosexuals to San Francisco’s citizens of what was heralded as the nation’s “gay capital.” With detailed stories about homosexuality starting to appear in family publications like Life, individual gay men and lesbians could expect to begin receiving regular, stable, and increasingly reliable information in the mass media not only about homosexuality in generally but about specific homosexual communities and organizations. For many men and women who considered themselves homosexual though isolated from others like themselves, this explosion of information invited them to think about the relationship between their identity and place, and it allowed them to imagine places where homosexuals lived and where inward identifications could be expressed publicly in a community. Moreover, the article introduced to a wider audience the idea that identity and community could be built upon same-sex attractions and sexual experiences. As the national imaginary about sexuality shifted and a growing number of individuals became enmeshed in newly mass communication networks, the contours of an American sexual geography were drawn in sharper relief.
Finally, Part 3 examines the ways in which gay people began to reject the mainstream press in the 1960s and 1970s, in favor of a complex underground press in which they could share information and build connections on their own terms.
In the 1960s, just as the first homophile publications were beginning to gray from middle age, a new generation of gay male and lesbian do-it-yourselfers emerged on the scene. These young gay men and lesbians produced a whole variety of publications, from bar guidebooks to arts journals, from resource directories to explicit pornography, and they did so in a manner that both borrowed from as well as rejected elements of the new mass media coverage of homosexuality. Although produced by hand, with the labor of friends and family, and on a shoestring budget, these publications blended publicity, commerce, and activism in a very forthright manner, largely without the complications the affected the homophile organizations whose nonprofit status and lofty goals made the element of commerce an uncomfortable fit with other motivations. And though these publications were begun with very modest means and almost entirely unstated or vaguely ambitious goals (in contrast to the clearly articulated agenda of the homophile movement), they grew into extremely popular and long-lasting forms of communication and media upon which homosexual communication networks could be built and could grow.
Meeker argues that these three major changes in gay and lesbian communications in the midcentury had profound consequences for how gay men and lesbians formed their identities, built their communities, mapped out their community geographies, and built their social movements. I’ve only scratched the surface in this diary. Contacts Desired is densely packed with information about how gay people forged their communications networks and sought out connections during the twentieth century. Although it may not be as well known as classics such as Gay New York (upon which Meeker builds), Contacts Desired is a foundational book that deserves to be in the library of anybody interested in LGBTQ history.
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