Wide-Open Town by Boyd Nan Alamilla

Author:Boyd, Nan Alamilla [Boyd, Nan Alamilla]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780520204157
Goodreads: 7912885
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

THE CONTEXT OF HOMOPHILE ACTIVISM

Three important gay and lesbian civil rights organizations emerged in the United States during the 1950s: the Mattachine Society, ONE, Inc., and the Daughters of Bilitis. While ONE was located in Los Angeles, by 1955 both the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis called San Francisco their home.6 Both the Mattachine Society and DOB relied on the volunteer labor of a small coterie of friends and like-minded activists. Both had monthly meetings open to the public, and both worked toward the integration of homosexuals into mainstream society.7 The Mattachine Society and DOB were not the first homosexual emancipation organizations in the United States.8 They were, however, the first to develop a national identity and help shape the formation of organizational chapters in other large cities. Both were able to bridge the gap of geographical separation that had previously isolated queer communities across the United States. In other words, through the 1950s and early 1960s these remarkable organizations were able to introduce the necessary fiction of national community into the lesbian and gay world. Through press releases, monthly publications, and the effective use of social and scientific experts to speak on their behalf, homophile organizations projected themselves as the voice and public representation of homosexuals in the United States.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, however, San Francisco’s queer communities inhabited a contradictory space on the cusp of private and public social worlds. Pockets of lesbian and gay life flourished in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, where a culture of sex and race tourism fed the popularity of bars such as Mona’s and the Black Cat. Lesbians and gay men also gathered in private homes for parties and meetings, and a host of public spaces like parks and beaches served as meeting places for social events as well as sexual encounters. The territory lesbians and gay men occupied bordered the public/private world of social articulation in that while many homosexual activities took place in the public sphere, they did so most often as a hidden society—outside the perusal of dominant society. No lesbian or gay newspapers or journals existed in San Francisco prior to the mid-1950s, and while pulp novels and popular science books addressing homosexual subjects were available nationwide, most of these were marketed to heterosexual (male) audiences. They relied on formulaic endings that reinforced stereotypical images of homosexuals and homosexuality.9 As a result, prior to the formation of homophile organizations, a queer-generated discourse about the meaning of homosexual subjectivity most often took place within the sanctions of homosexual subcultures. Beyond a legal discourse about homosexual crime, a scientific discourse about homosexual illness, and a religious discourse about homosexual immorality, there were few ways for homosexuals to talk publicly about their relationship to the state.10

Jürgen Habermas defines the public sphere as “a sphere mediating between state and society,” and as state institutions worked to regulate and discipline San Francisco’s public culture, they helped shape the formation of a queer public sphere.11 For instance, the

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