Jonathan Ned Katz: Resistance: 1859-1972

Introduction to "Resistance" from Jonathan Ned Katz's Gay American History

Copyright (c) by Jonathan Ned Katz 2008. All rights reserved.

The persecutor desires the victims to remain ignorant of their oppression. But even less does the oppressor want these victims to imagine the possibility of resistance. The victims' awareness of oppression may, by itself, lead only to fatalistic resignation before what seems an overwhelming force. Knowledge of resistance suggests that even under conditions of extreme persecution there exists the possibility of struggle. Knowledge of past and forgotten rebellion, large or small, successful or unsuccessful, is nourishment for the hungry spirits of the dispossessed; it provides food for present survival and energy for renewed struggle. It is exemplary.

American Gay history includes a long and little-known tradition of resistance. This resistance has taken varied forms, from the isolated acts of lone individuals, from the writing of letters, poems, essays, book-length treatises defending homosexuality, or novels presenting homosexuals as human beings-to the consciously "political" organizing of a group united for action against antihomosexual bigots and institutionalized persecution.

In its more individualistic forms, this resistance may today not always be immediately recognizable as such. From the perspective of a Gay liberation or Lesbian feminist consciousness, some acts and writings which in their own time constituted resistance may now appear to be reactionary and oppressive. An early novel appealing to the sympathy of heterosexuals may have been a daring act in its day, while to a contemporary Gay liberationist it appears useless and even repugnant. Thus, it is important to study each act of resistance in the context of its time.

Whitman, Symonds, Carpenter, and Others

In this section, Walt Whitman's direct and profound influencer on two leading English pioneers of homosexual emancipation, John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter, is for the first time set in the perspective of American and English Gay liberation history. This chronologic survey presents some of those homosexually relevant writings of Whitman which inspired Symonds and Carpenter, their letters of response, and Whitman's comments on the two Englishmen, as recorded by Horace Traubel. Also cited are Symonds's and Carpenter's own major homosexual emancipation writings, and Symonds's successful attempt to enlist in his crusade for homosexual liberation two Americans) Thomas Sergeant Perry and a professor named Peirce(?), of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The reaction of American novelist Henry James to Symonds's emancipationist efforts is also recorded. These documents begin to suggest some of the complex interconnections among the English-speaking homosexual emancipation pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, throughout which Whitman's influence can now be traced as an original and motivating force. These documents establish the existence of an international homosexual resistance in which the American poet played a primary, initiating role.

This section also includes four groups of documents relating to the development of an organized homosexual emancipation movement in the United States.

Cercle Hermaphroditos

If the words of the pseudonymous Earl Lind can be trusted, the Cercle Hermaphroditos was formed in about 1895 by "androgynes" ("femininet'-identified male homosexuals) "for defense against the world's bitter persecution." Although in Lind's description the group appears to have been a casual social gathering, the Cercle may be considered an early precursor of later homosexual emancipation organizations.

Chicago Society for Human Rights

The first well-documented emancipation organization of American homosexuals is the Chicago Society for Human Rights, founded by Henry Gerber and chartered by the state of Illinois in 1924. The society, named after the Bund fur Menschenrecht, demonstrates the early influence in America of the organized German homosexual emancipation movement. Documents on the Chicago society include Gerber's published descriptions of its founding and history, as well as the group's official charter, discovered in the research for the present book and here reprinted for the first time. Also included are several newly discovered writings by Gerber on homosexuality, originally published in 1934 in a short-lived mimeographed literary periodical. In an interview with the present author, Henry Hay for the first time describes his conception, in August 1948, of a homosexual rights organization which, a few years later, became the first Mattachine Society. Here, in the words and from the viewpoint of. its founder, is the history of the original Mattachine, a story that, because of Hay's radical political associations, has not before been told.

Daughters of Bilitis

The first organized and successful Lesbian liberation organization in the United States, the Daughters of Bilitis, was founded by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in 1955. In 1958, with the encouragement of Martin and Lyon, Barbara Gittings founded the original New York chapter of DOB. In an interview, Gittings describes this group's early years. In following years Gittings would become one of the editors in chief of the DOB magazine, The Ladder, published continuously from 1956 until 1972-this publication itself being one of the single most important manifestations of the organized American Lesbian resistance movement.

Miss S, Emma Goldman, F. W. Stella Browne, Radclyffe Hall, Ella Thompson, Alma Routsong

The American resistance to lesbian oppression as traced in this section also includes such diverse phenomena as "Miss S's" defense of her "divine gift of loving," published in 1897 in Symonds's and Ellis's Sexual Inversion; Emma Goldman's public lectures in 1915 defending homosexuality, including her description of these lectures' positive effect on one particular Lesbian; F. W. Stella Browne's argument, published in the United States in 1923, against the repression of active Lesbian relations; Radclyffe Hall's appeal for sympathy from the American public, via the 1929 publication of The Well of loneliness; Ella Thompson's legal appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court, whose decision of 1939 established that two females could not be prosecuted under the fate's sodomy law; Alma Routsong's fictional recreation in the 1960s of the love between two American women of the early nineteenth century-her expression in the novel Patience and Sarah of a developing Lesbian-feminist consciousness.

The documents gathered here demonstrate the existence of an American tradition of resistance to homosexual oppression, a history going back far beyond the StonewaIl Rebellion of June 1969, when Lesbians and Gay men in New York actively fought police harassment, the event marking the birth of the recent Gay liberation movement.

Index of Content for Resistance, 1859-1972

Whitman, Symonds, Carpenter: "In paths untrodden," 1859-1924

Earl Lind: The Cercle Hermaphroditos, c. 1895

Dr. K: "A Note on Sexual Inversion" in Women, 1897

Miss S: "This divine gift of loving," 1897

Professor X: "a natural, pure and sound passion," 1897

Emma Goldman: "a great injustice," 1900-1923

Homosexual Emancipation in Germany: 1897

Otto Spengler: "People just faint," 1906

George Merzbach: "We have won a great battle," March 1907

Anonymous: Letter from Boston, 1907

F. W. Stella Browne: "Studies in Feminine Inversion," 1923

Chicago Society for Human Rights: December 10, 1924

Henry Gerber: "I wanted to help solve the problem," 1920-1925

Hall's "Well of Loneliness" in the U.S., 1929

Henry Gerber: "In Defense of Homosexuality," June 1932

Henry Gerber: "Hitlerism and Homosexuality," September 1934

Henry Gerber: "More Nonsense About Homosexuals," December 1934

Ella Thompson v. J. C. Aldredge, Sheriff: 1939

Harry Hay: Founding the Mattachine Society, 1948-1953

Lorraine Hansberry: To "The Ladder," May, August 1957

Barbara Gittings: Founding New York Daughters of Bilitis, 1958

Alma Routsong: "Patience and Sarah," 1962-1972

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