Pre-Gay L.A.: A Social History of the Movement for Homosexual Rights

Preface

Preface The anthropologist engages in peculiar work. He or she tries to understand a different culture to the point of finding it to be intelligible regardless of how strange it seems in comparison with one’s own background. This is accomplished by attempting to experience the new culture from within, living in it for a time as a member, all the while maintaining sufficient detachment to observe and analyze it with some objectivity. This peculiar posture—being inside and outside at the same time—is called participant observation. It is a fruitful paradox, one that has allowed anthropologists to find sense and purpose within a society’s seeming illogical and arbitrary customs and beliefs. . . . Working with one’s own society, and more specifically with one’s own ethnic and familial heritage, is perilous, and much more difficult. Yet it has a certain validity and value not available in other circumstances. —Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days, p. 18 This book, part ethnobiography and part social history, is the result of my eight-year exploration of the origins and history of the movement for homosexual rights, which originated in Los Angeles, California, in the late 1940s and continues today. My ambition was to construct a detailed and accurate accounting of the history of this movement as manifested through the emergence of four related organizations: Mattachine; ONE, Incorporated; the Homosexual Information Center (HIC); and the Institute for the Study of Human Resources (ISHR), which is currently doing business as ONE, Incorporated (the two organizations having legally merged in December 1995). As such, this is a chronicle of how one clandestine voluntary association emerged as a powerful political force that spawned several other organizations over a period of more than fifty years. The story of the founding, ascension, and dissolution of the original Mattachine Foundation and of ONE, Incorporated, has been published several times, most famously by John D’Emilio (1983), Eric Marcus (1992, 2002), and Jonathan Ned Katz (1992). Although these histories have been properly lauded and deservedly serve as bedrocks for the study of the origins of the viii . preface contemporary lesbian and gay movement, they suffer from two significant disadvantages. The first is a lack of proximity. None of these scholars spent substantial time perusing the original corporate records of the early Mattachine or ONE, Incorporated. Second, some of these scholars interviewed only one or two of the key people involved, thereby obtaining only a cursory understanding of the underlying complexities and nuances—the philosophical and emotional convection—rumbling beneath the fissures and fusions that repeatedly manifested in the California-based organizations during the first thirty years of the movement. Other scholars interviewed many of the movement’s pioneers but were unable to spend the time necessary to cross-check and validate the perspectives they had heard. The biases of the subjects have thus often become the biases of the scholar, and slanted or fragmentary information—even falsehoods—are still being perpetuated, however unwittingly. For example, gay historian Charles Kaiser, in his widely read The Gay Metropolis (1997, 100–101), reports that the Mattachine Society published ONE Magazine, and this error is frequently repeated in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) press. The ethnographic approach, with its emphasis on extended life-history interviews and years of participant observation, is highly effective in teasing out “reality”—not necessarily to prove one false and the other correct so much as to first reveal and then explicate the differing truths expressed in historical narratives and documents in an attempt to reconcile them. This study emerged from two independent research projects. Soon after moving to Los Angeles in the fall of 1998, I set out to learn more about the life history of Jim Kepner. The result of that study, a short documentary film honoring Kepner that I directed and edited for a course in documentary filmmaking, was subsequently broadcasted by Trojan Vision in December 1999. The second project began when Dale Jennings died on May 11, 2000. HIC president Jim Schneider and University of Southern California (USC) professor Walter L. Williams recruited me to help distribute a press release and assist with Jennings’s memorial service, the first public event hosted by ONE Institute and Archives in its newly acquired facility near the USC campus, at 909 West Adams Boulevard. I continued to learn more about Jennings and was surprised to discover that he was one of the original founders of Mattachine, the first successful homosexual organization in the United States. I had...