Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, and: Behind the Mask of Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation (review)

In the fall of 1952, openly gay journalist Hal Call migrated to California, a journey that he would facilitate for many other men in the next decades. Although Call was, by all accounts, a difficult and contradictory person (and, in the opinion of some, mean and ruthless), he campaigned relentlessly for the openness and sexual freedom that would allow other men and women to come out in the 1960s. Seeking out Harry Hay’s Mattachine Society when he arrived on the West Coast, Call instantly disliked its secrecy and left-wing leadership. As James Sears argues in Behind the Mask of Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation, Call saw his service in World War II as a personal commitment to American democracy that was consistent with gay civil rights but not Communism. He viewed Hay, Jim Kepner, and other founders as “unpatriotic” and “naïve,” and in 1953 he deposed them in an internal coup (183). However, as Martin Meeker argues in Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, Call and his contemporaries were more than skilled organizers: homophiles created a communications revolution that made queer communities coherent and visible and gave them a voice they were denied in mainstream publications until the 1970s.

Together, Sears and Meeker contribute to the long history of radical queer politics.¹ Scholars interested in media and mass culture outside GLBTQ studies should also be interested in Meeker’s route to understanding how reading, writing, and publishing created “sexual communication networks” that have “gone through a radical transformation throughout the course of the twentieth century.” These transformations, Meeker contends, have had an effect on everything we mean when we say the words gay community: in other words, “identity formation, community building, geography making, and social movement organizing” (9–10). For his part, Sears supplies the reader with lively interviews and documents that evoke rich debates within the homophile movement and is liberal with the occasional quirky fact that you rarely get from scholars. (Who knew that pornography photographers escaped obscenity prosecutions in the 1960s by holding erect penises down with tape?)

As Meeker’s earlier work has argued, the radicalism of the homophiles has been obscured by the more confrontational politics they enabled, and queer people challenged social convention and the law long before Stonewall.² Mattachine, Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), ONE Institute, and the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) adapted swiftly to the changing needs of the people who turned to them for help and prided themselves on delivering practical aid: jobs, housing, and medical care. As part of this agenda, they seized opportunities both to create and to make a case for gay citizenship. Queers who lacked civil rights armed themselves with information instead.

We have had little empirical understanding of how urban centers of GLBT activism knitted together a national community in webs of information. A key premise of Contacts Desired is that queers did not acquire identity upon meeting others “like them” in cities.³ Rather, they knew what they were, what they desired, and often what to call themselves. But they did not necessarily know how to make contact with others who shared their desires. It was publishing that gave them the knowledge they needed to plan their lives; subsequently, community organizers and institutions associated with these publications helped them activate their plans.

Homophile publishing was also part of a national civil rights story. When ONE Magazine was labeled obscene by the United States Postal Service in 1954, ONE Institute sued successfully as a codefendant in the landmark Roth v. United States (1958) and won the right to mailing privileges...