Read an Excerpt
Part One
Before
At the close of the nineteenth century, more than fifty years before the gay civil rights movement took root in the United States, the first organization for gay people, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, was founded in Germany. The then-radical goals of the committee included the abolition of Germany's antigay laws and the promotion of public education about homosexuality. The committee also set out to encourage gay people to take up the struggle for their rights. The rise of the Nazis brought a brutal end to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, and for decades after, Germany's gay civil rights movement would remain dormant.
In the United States, it wasn't until 1950 that the gay rights effort really got its start, with the founding of an organization called the Mattachine Society. But the stirrings began years before, and included the Society for Human Rights, a very short-lived gay rights organization founded by Henry Gerber in Chicago in 1924, and the Veterans Benevolent Association, a gay veterans social group founded in New York City in the 1940s.
The years immediately following World War II proved to be an especially fertile time for those gay men and women who dared to imagine that something could be done to improve the challenging conditions under which many of them lived. A handful did more than just imagine. Among them was a young man named Sam From, who was a student in one of psychologist Dr. Evelyn Hooker's introductory night classes at UCLA in Los Angeles, California.
Dr. EvelynHooker
It became clear almost immediately that Sammy From was the most outstanding student in the class. He talked with me at intermission. He asked questions. There was just no doubt that he was the bright and shining star. You know, when a teacher finds a person like that, you fall for it hook, line, and sinker.
When Sammy discovered that I was taking the streetcar home after class, to save gasoline -- this was during the war -- he began driving me. Sammy had all the gasoline he wanted because he was writing million-dollar contracts between the Army Air Corps and the aircraft industry in this area. He had a high school education. His father was a junk dealer.
Our friendship developed gradually, but I had an idiotic policy then. I thought instructors should not fraternize with their students. It wasn't until he had finished my course that Sammy called me and asked if he could come over. We spent the evening talking. When he left, my husband Don turned to me and said, "Well, you told me everything else about him, why didn't you tell me he was queer?" I said, "How could you possibly tell? You're crazy!" To which Don replied, "He did everything but fly out the window."
Sammy was very eager to get to know us. He and his lover, George -- a much older man who was introduced as Sammy's cousin -- invited us to dinner, and we went. (It was a delicious dinner.) They wanted my approval so much that they were afraid to let me know they were gay.
I don't remember a time when Sammy or George said, "We're gay." They just gradually let down their hair and became very good friends of ours. They adored Don, who was very handsome, a marvelous talker. He was a sort of freelance writer in Hollywood and also worked on radio and did some painting. He liked them very much and wasn't bothered by the fact that they were gay. It wouldn't have occurred to him to be bothered by things like that because he had lived in Hollywood for a long time.
I didn't know much about homosexuality before I met Sammy, George, and their friends. As a matter of fact, when I was in college at the University of Colorado, The Well of Loneliness was circulating quietly. I remember reading it and thinking, Oh, gee. I wouldn't like to have to live my life with all that secrecy. But it has always made a lot of sense to me when gay people say, "I had to have been born this way because almost from the very beginning of my sexual consciousness I was interested in men" or "I was interested in women." I was interested in men from the time I was an adolescent, and there was never any question about that. I think that that understanding, together with the rather extraordinary cross section of society into which I was introduced by Sammy, made the difference.
In 1945, after I had known them for about a year, Sam and George invited us to join them on a Thanksgiving holiday in San Francisco. We had an absolutely marvelous time. Sammy was one of these people I described as an "if" personality. If all the restraints were off, if he didn't have to behave like a businessman or a manager, then he was funny, funny, funny! He was dramatic and campy.
On the first night we were in San Francisco, Sammy insisted that we go to Finocchio's to see the female impersonators. My eyes were wide! I'd never seen anything like that. Besides the dance routines, there were two old bags from Oakland who did a lot of female patter. It was funny, funny, funny! You absolutely believed that these female impersonators were the real thing. Then all of a sudden, they took out their breasts and bounced them up and down on the stage! The whole house just came down.
After the show, we came back to the Fairmont Hotel on Nob Hill for a snack. I was unprepared for what came next. Sammy turned to me and said, "We have let you see us as we are, and now it is your scientific duty to make a study of people like us." Imagine that! This bright young man, somewhere in his early thirties, had obviously...
Making Gay History. Copyright © by Eric Marcus. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
