The Homophile Is a Sexual Being: Wallace de Ortega Maxey’s Pulp Theology and Gay Activism

When the Universalist minister Wallace de Ortega Maxey published his magnum opus, Man Is a Sexual Being, in late 1958, he pulled few punches. Religion as practiced in the United States, he declared, “must be discussed and exposed as a decadent force in its present guise.” A key reason for Maxey’s critique was the theological impulse to sacralize sex, abstracting it from its earthy human qualities and situating it within an imposed moral rubric. “At least the Greeks and Romans took their sex seriously which we in America refuse to do,” he wrote. “Frankly we are afraid to take it seriously.” Instead of the coy American hypocrisy of sexual regulation combined with a fetishistic consumer culture, Maxey advocated an existentialist approach to sexuality in which nothing that happened between consenting adults could violate God or nature. In perhaps his most forthright moment, he proclaimed the “basic concrete fact” that “there is never anytime I am not a Sexual Being.”¹

None of this placed Man Is a Sexual Being beyond the pale of contemporaneous existentialist theology or post-Kinseyan sex radicalism in the United States. Other thinkers offered similar critiques, often more substantive and better argued. One place Maxey’s bold, even strident, tone would not seem to fit, however, was the early homophile movement, which placed great priority on a politics of respectability that favored seeking accommodation within existing systems and belief structures. “The discursive limits of assimilationist or integrationist strategies,” Nan Alamilla Boyd has noted, necessitated the downplaying of “the sex in homosexual subjectivity.”² The membership pledge of the Mattachine Society (initially established as the Mattachine Foundation in late 1950), for example, adopted in July 1951, required members to affirm that they would “try to observe the generally accepted social rules of dignity and propriety at all times—in [their] conduct, attire, and speech.”³ In his book, Maxey aggressively rejected those governing concepts. Yet Wallace de Ortega Maxey played a central role in the Mattachine Society from its very early stages through its decline in the mid-1960s. Indeed, considering the upheaval surrounding the much-observed 1953 schism in Mattachine leadership that saw many of its founders ousted by a new guard, Maxey may provide the single most continuous thread of core Mattachine activism. It is therefore striking that in the now-voluminous historical scholarship on the homophile movement he appears in only the briefest of roles and is often entirely ignored. Among historians, only James Sears (in his biography of Mattachine leader Hal Call) and David Hughes (in an excellently researched biographical profile) have devoted sustained attention to Maxey.⁴

When Maxey published Man Is a Sexual Being, he was on the brink of being formally elected the Mattachine’s director of research. Though the book did promote the Mattachine Society, nowhere in it did Maxey acknowledge the extent of his involvement in the early gay rights movement. Instead, he published it as something of a stealth homophile, in the vein of the parahomophile publishing efforts Martin Meeker has located in the Dorian Book Service and Pan-Graphic Press, run by homophile activists who held themselves at arm’s length from the movement proper.⁵ Further contributing to Man’s obscurity, Maxey issued it from his own press, Fabian Books, housed in Fresno, California, where he had been running a local Universalist-Unitarian church. Of the couple hundred books Fabian and its sister press, Saber, released, Man Is a Sexual Being was the only work of nonfiction; the entire rest of their collective list consisted of tawdry pulp fiction, with such titles as Violent Surrender, Beach Maverick, and The Third Bedroom. The title of Maxey’s book surely drew at least some contingent of pulp fans whose prurient interests were thwarted by his dry prose, but being published by Fabian also prevented it from reaching the wider audience he sought. Man Is a Sexual Being received very little attention and was quickly forgotten, but its location in the catalog of a disreputable pulp press serves as a...