Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities by John D'Emilio

Author:John D'Emilio [D'Emilio, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Minority Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, Gay Studies
ISBN: 9780226922454
Google: 2dRotF250NwC
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-04-26T02:40:29+00:00

IV

In New York, meanwhile, where tensions between the militants and the old guard had reached the breaking point, battle lines were being drawn in preparation for the Mattachine Society’s May 1965 elections. The contest promised a clear test of the respective strength of the two factions as they struggled for control of the organization. Each side presented a slate of candidates, and the campaign revealed the sharp differences in perspective between the camps. The militants pledged themselves to “a program of action” and vowed to transform the society into the “champion of the homosexual community.” The old guard faction, on the other hand, based its campaign on “helping the individual homosexual adjust to society.”37

Julian Hodges headed the militant slate. A member of a prominent North Carolina family, Hodges had originally been a protegé of Curtis Dewees, but Kameny’s hard-hitting address in the summer of 1964 influenced him profoundly and won him over to militancy. At the October 1964 ECHO convention, Hodges delivered a speech that urged gay activists to plunge into the political arena. His conversion to the civil rights–direct action perspective of Kameny earned him the enmity of his old guard sponsors.38

Running with Hodges were Dick Leitsch, Kameny, and Dr. Hendrik Ruitenbeek. Leitsch too had been swayed by Kameny’s philosophy. By his own admission, he had read the Washington activist’s speech “about fifteen times” until convinced that if Mattachine did not become a “social protest organization,” it was “useless, silly, and [had] no reason to exist.” As editor of the organization’s newsletter, Leitsch played a critical role in transforming it into an organ for the militants’ views. Kameny and Ruitenbeek were seeking positions on the board of directors. A psychoanalyst and a faculty member at New York University, Ruitenbeek had supported the movement’s drive against the medical model and had lent his prestige to the Washington militants’ efforts to adopt an antisickness policy statement.39

The oldtimers in Mattachine found the accelerating shift toward a civil rights orientation distressing. Older than most of the militants by a decade or more, they remembered the atmosphere of heightened anxiety engendered by the McCarthy era and found it difficult to cast off their fears of the repression they believed militancy would provoke. Leaders of the old guard faction had also experienced more years of living “discreetly,” and the openness of younger activists threatened their ingrained habits. Finally, to accept the positions espoused by the militants required that they repudiate as ineffective their own ideas about strategy and acknowledge their ambivalence about homosexuality. Undoubtedly, wounded egos contributed to their intransigence.

The old guard seized upon the elections as a last-ditch attempt to stop the militants. Early in 1965 some of them constituted themselves as “the committee” and began holding strategy sessions. Four past presidents and two current members of the board of directors were represented. As its candidates the committee put forward David Goldberger, who ran the Mattachine’s West Side discussion group, Donald Webster Cory, and Curtis Dewees and aggressively sought proxies from inactive members of the society.

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