[On January 9th,
1978 Harvey Milk
was inaugurated to a seat on San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, making him
one of America’s first openly gay
elected officials. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Milk and other
historical moments and events in the early history of the Gay Rights Movement,
leading up to a weekend post on an impressive visual exhibit on the movement at
Fitchburg State University.]
On two horrific
1950s decisions, and whether we can find light in such dark moments.
The longstanding
and widely-accepted narrative of the 1950s as a particularly conservative
period in American society and culture has been challenged
somewhat by historians and commentators in recent years, and for good
reason: decades don’t tend to break down quite so cleanly into singular
identities. While of course such narratives are generally based on particular
starting points—such as American society’s return to a post-war status quo in
the ‘50s, especially when contrasted with the radical cultural, social, and
political changes that would come in the following decade—they also depend on
eliding or minimizing all of the layers
and contradictions that are present and significant in any moment. So while
it would be easy to see the 1950s as entirely opposed to any acceptance (or
even tolerance) of homosexuality in American society, the truth, as historians
have long worked to remind us, is that many identities
and communities flourished in the decade, despite various prominent forms
of cultural conservatism or oppression.
Yet at the same
time, we can’t swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, minimizing
those oppressions and their striking and horrific effects. And the early 1950s
saw too particularly ugly official decisions that not only oppressed but quite
literally attacked gay Americans. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association
published the first edition of its seminal Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual (DSM-I), and in it classified homosexuality as a
“sociopathic personality disturbance”; that deeply offensive classification
would be partly
revised in 1973 but only fully removed in the 1980s, meaning that its
painful and destructive effects for gay Americans lasted for nearly three
decades. And in April 1953, shortly after taking office for his first term as
president, Dwight D. Eisenhower signed Executive
Order 10450, which not only banned gay and lesbian federal employees but
encouraged both private contractors and allied nations to fire their own such
gay employees; this horrific federal action led directly to the so-called Lavender
Scare, during which countless Americans were fired and persecuted due
solely to their perceived sexuality. Taken together, these two official
decisions reflect an early 1950s institutional culture extremely and
aggressively hostile toward gay Americans.
Remembering
these horrific decisions and oppressions is important, not because they embody
the entirety of the decade but because they certainly illustrate a pervasive
set of attitudes (in the supposedly scientific community just as much as the
bureaucratic one) toward gay Americans and their fitness as members of society.
Moreover, such darker memories shouldn’t and don’t make it impossible to focus
as well on the kinds of individual and communal progress on which the
historians to whom I hyperlined in the first paragraph above (among many other
pioneering gay/queer studies scholars) have written. Indeed, recognizing some
of the darkest sides to 1950s America for gay Americans makes the commitment
and courage of those Americans that much more apparent and admirable still. In
my most recent book on History
and Hope in American Literature, I focused one chapter on the 1980s
AIDS epidemic, and images of both those dark histories and of hard-won hope for
gay Americans (and all Americans) through them. But the same could certainly be
said of these 1950s oppressions, and of the ways that gay Americans and their
allies fought for their rights and identities in the face of such horrific
decisions and hostilities.
Next history
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories or stories you’d highlight?
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