Today In History, 1964: “Homosexuality In America”

Jim Burroway

June 26th, 2016

Life Magazine: Homosexuality In America

“These brawny young men in their leather caps, shirts, jackets and pants are practicing homosexuals, men who turn to other men for affection and sexual satisfaction. They are part of what they call the “gay world,” which is actually a sad and often sordid world. …

“Homosexuality shears across the spectrum of American life — the professions, the arts, business and labor. It always has. But today, especially in big cities, homosexuals are discarding their furtive ways and openly admitting, even flaunting, their deviation. Homosexuals have their own drinking places, their special assignation streets, even their own organizations. And for every obvious homosexual, there are probably nine nearly impossible to detect. This social disorder, which society tries to suppress, has forced itself into the public eye because it does present a problem — and parents especially are concerned. The myth and misconception with which homosexuality has so long been clothed must be cleared away, not to condone it but to cope with it.”

The opening paragraphs and the accompanying photo described the Tool Box, a San Francisco bar that was popular with the leather crowd. Over the next fourteen pages, Life magazine explored that so-called “sordid world”: in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, “which rates as the ‘gay capital’ [with] 30 bars that cater exclusively to a homosexual clientele.” The articles provide interesting vignettes and photos of gay life in the pre-Stonewall era, but reading through them today probably tells us more about society’s revulsion towards gay people than it does about gay people themselves.

For the first part of the article describing gay night life in San Francisco, Life turned to Hal Call (Sep 20), who had taken over the Mattachine Society in a coup against the Society’s founder in 1953 (Apr 11). He also was the publisher of the Mattachine Review, which, owing to the Mattachine’s disbanding as a national organization in 1961, had effectively become Call’s personal property. Life worked with Call to document two gay bars in San Francisco. As Call later explained:

In January of that year, people from Life magazine contacted us and wondered if we could help them get a photographic representation of the homosexual community in the San Francisco area. It had to be authentic news, not staged, because Life was a news magazine. But the identity of the people in the photographs had to be protected because in those days you could’d just go out and photograph a bunch of gays and them label them without being subject to lawsuits.

We chose two bars two bars, and they were both reluctant. One of them was the Tool Box. We chose it because it had a particular black-and-white mural of macho, leather cowboy times. We got a number of regular customers to come in. For the photo shoot, the place was lighted by opening the door wide to allow daylight to flood in on one side. Most the the people inside were shown in silhouette. Plus, there was smoke haze in the air. One or two faces were somewhat identifiable after the picture was taken, so Life did an air brush job on them.

When the article came out in June, the owner of the Tool Box said, “Jesus Christ, Hal Call, we shouldn’t have done that. Now the ABC (Alcohol Control Board) is going to close my bar.” I said, “Don’t you worry. You’ve got a black-and-white double-page ad in Life magazine.” … Anyway, he was pacified, especially when business picked up. My God, every gay that came two San Francisco wanted to see the Tool Box and see that mural!”

JumpingFrogThe other bar featured in Life was called the Jumping Frog. Located on Polk Street (then the heart of San Francisco’s gay night life about a decade before the Castro grabbed that distinction), the Jumping Frog showed old Hollywood films using a sixteen-millimeter projector. For the Life shot, they were showing Some Like It Hot. 

Call praised the article as “the first time a national magazine had ever treated the subject of homosexuality with any sensitivity or understanding.” But it wasn’t all movies and a few beers. In what passed as “fair and balanced” for its day, Life also documented a Los Angeles police officer acting as a decoy, entrapping gay men into propositioning him. Even if the proposition involves going to a private home for the evening — the same type of invitation being made in straight bars all across Los Angeles that very same night — it would end badly with an arrest and possible lifetime registration as a sex offender. LGBT activist Dale Jennings’s 1952 arrest in the privacy of his own home and the city’s embarrassing failure to secure a conviction in a well-publicized case (Jun 23) had still done nothing to stem police harassment twelve years later.

One educational pamphlet compiled for Los Angeles police warned that what gay men really want is “a fruit world.” Life continued: “Although the anti-homosexual stand taken by the Los Angeles police is unswervingly tough, it reflects the attitude of most U.S. law-enforcement agencies on the subject.” Three years later, gay Angelenos would reach their breaking point and the Black Cat riots would become the high water mark — though not the end — of police harassment in Los Angeles (Jan 1), more than two years before the Stonewall rebellion in New York.

Life also printed a second article in which “scientists search of the answers” about what purportedly causes homosexuality. For this article, Life broke no new ground, although it did include some friendly voices from the Kinsey Institute. But it also included conjectures by some of the leading anti-gay psychologists and therapists of the day, including psychoanalyst Sando Rado (it’s “hidden but incapacitating fears of the opposite sex”) and Irving Bieber, whose 1962 book proposed the smothering-mother-distant-father theory (“Babied and demasculinized by his mother, despised by his father, he arrived at adolescence ‘beset by feelings of inadequacy, impotence and self-contempt’.”) It did however included a brief comment on Dr. Evelyn Hooker’s research (Sep 2), which found, according to Life, that “homosexuals can be just as healthy as anybody else” (Aug 30). Although, in that fair-and-balanced-for-1964 thing, Life cautioned that her research might have only proven that “personality tests are unreliable, as many scientists suspect.”

[Sources: Paul Welch. “Homosexuality In America.” Life 26, no. 26 (June 26, 1964): 66-74. Available online via Google Books here.

Earnest Havemann. “Scientists search for the answers to a touchy and puzzling question: Why?” Life 26, no. 26 (June 26, 1964). 76-80. Available online via Google Books here.

Eric Marcus. Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990: An Oral History. (New York: HarperCollins, 1992): 65-66.]

Frank DeFrancesco

June 26th, 2016

That LIFE Magazine article played a significant role in my life. It was frightening to me as a 16 year old. It was also both a powerful force to keep me in the closet and a stimulus for coming out. I wrote extensively about how it effected me in my memoir, “Did You Ever See A Horse Go By? A Coming Out Memoir” – Frank DeFrancesco

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