|
|
|
SECTION I
ISSUES OF IDENTITY AND GENDER
UNACCEPTABLE MANNERISMS: GENDER ANXIETIES, HOMOSEXUAL ACTIVISM, AND SWISH IN THE UNITED STATES, 1945–1965
| By Craig M. Loftin |
University of Southern California |
| American historians often describe the years following World War Two as an "age of anxiety." Fears of communism at home and abroad unleashed a host of anxieties onto the American cultural landscape, including gender-related anxieties over women remaining in the workforce, waning masculinity, and homosexuality.1 Perhaps no social group in the U.S. experienced this postwar anxiety more viscerally than homosexuals. Gay men and lesbians became entangled within a growing postwar anti-communist hysteria when the U.S. Senate held hearings in 1950 on homosexuals "and other sex perverts" working for the government. These hearings spurred the purge of thousands of gay men and lesbians working in government agencies, and they exacerbated police surveillance of homosexual communities nationwide during the 1950s and into the 1960s. The penalties of homosexual visibility were often severe during these years. Homosexual discharges from the military and police arrests for homosexual offences, for example, destroyed careers and ruined many individuals' future job opportunities. In such a climate, many homosexuals decided that passing as heterosexual was an important way to avoid detection. At the same time, the severe penalties of homosexual visibility prompted a number of homosexuals, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco, to launch the first gay civil rights movement in the United States. This movement was known as the "homophile movement."2 |
1
|
|
As a growing number of homosexuals, especially middle-class homosexuals, felt pressure to pass as heterosexual in order to remain employed, they increasingly resented gay male "swishes:" gay men who appropriated female gender mannerisms as visible markers of their sexual identity. In 1955, gay novelist James Barr Fugaté commented, "A growing malady among American homosexuals today, as we are forced into a more closely united group, seems to be a particularly irrational snobbery directed against our more effeminate members."3 As homophile organizations such as the Mattachine Society and ONE, Inc., both founded in Los Angeles, and the Daughters of Bilitis, located in San Francisco, struggled to coordinate a civil rights agenda, a contentious and bitter debate emerged within the movement over gay male swishes. |
2
|
|
Using the extensive and largely unexplored archives of the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives records in Los Angeles, this essay examines postwar homophile debates over swishes and swishiness as well as the ways these debates fit into the larger gender issues of the era. I argue that homophile anxiety over swishes and swishing reflected broader gender anxieties in American society during the 1950s and early 1960s. Passing gay men in the homophile movement held attitudes about gender that were consistent with the rest of the American public, and they replicated many of the same patterns of hostility towards swishes that heterosexual society leveled at homosexuals. At the same time, the homophiles broadened the meaning of masculinity in postwar American society by declaring that masculinity and male homosexuality were not incompatible. |
. . . |
There are about 9105 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
