_
United we stand,
or divided they'll catch us, one by one.
Division is the fastest way that they can wedge in,
divide you, and win the battle.
June 28, 1969, will forever be remembered
as the beginning of the LGBTQ rights movement.
Six days and nights of violent riots
rocked New York City,
and the Stonewall uprising gave birth
to a revolution that had been building for decades.
If any group loses its rights, we all lose our rights.
For far too long, the LGBTQ community had been persecuted,
hunted, and beaten down
by a society unwilling to recognize their equality.
The road to this revolution was paved by many unsung heroes.
Meet the warriors, the organizers,
the artists and agitators who came before,
who built community through secret societies,
who spoke out when it mattered most,
and who rioted when they got pushed too far.
Why don't you guys do something?
Papers would publish the name and address and where they worked
like they were mass murderers.
They figured they were guilty for being gay.
You may not know all their names,
but these are their stories.
And this is our history.
Because other people joined them, a movement was forged.
Gay rights now! Gay rights now!
What do you say?
Revolution now!
www.subtitulamos.tv
A hundred years ago, lesbians and gays
could find their fun together in the underground world.
We're talking the Roaring Twenties
and the Dirty Thirties.
You know, prohibition, speakeasies, and the like.
It was still on the down-low, but you could find the gay life
if you knew where to look for it.
But by the 1950s, queer love was forbidden love.
A conservative chill set in across postwar America.
What few freedoms we had evaporated
in an atmosphere of Cold War hysteria.
FBI agents swoop down on Communists...
Gay people were linked to Communism.
We were scapegoated, criminalized, and hunted.
Led by some radical gays and lesbians,
two secret societies emerged to fight back.
They were the men of the Mattachine Society...
I would not pretend. I would not pull a mask over myself.
I tend not to lose my wars.
and the Daughters of Bilitis.
Well, we met up in Seattle.
We're talking 1949, and "gay" was not a word then.
This is the story of how their actions would pave the way
for the modern gay rights movement.
You can't force us into your boxes anymore.
We are not going.
At the top of this very hill in Silver Lake in Los Angeles,
five men came together to form a secret society
to improve and protect the rights of homosexuals
through covert action and grassroots organizing.
They were the Mattachine Society.
One of them was Harry Hay, considered by many
to be the fairy godfather of the gay rights movement.
Another, a slightly more unsung hero,
was this handsome devil, Dale Jennings.
Their stories stretch back before World War II
and well into the 1950s.
Even if there were only one Communist in the State Department,
that would still be one Communist too many!
The Stonewall riots of 1969 are more than a generation away...
Gay power! Gay power!
But here they stand at the dawn of a new movement.
Harry Hay usually gets all the credit,
but I was there at the founding of the Mattachine Society.
We took the name Mattachine
from secret societies in medieval France
because we felt that we, 1950s gays,
were also masked revolutionaries,
hidden and ready for change.
And to understand what the Mattachine Society was
and why we needed to organize,
you need to know what it was like to be gay in those days.
I need to take you further back to where our stories began.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1935.
I'd been married twice, to women.
Admitting to being gay back then was suicidal.
But I knew what I was.
I had founded a theater troupe,
started moving in leftist circles.
Believe it or not, it was cool to be a Commie back then.
I also started meeting other men like me.
Then in 1952, something happened to me
that had happened to a lot of my friends.
A lonely stroll and a stop at a public restroom turned into a nightmare
when an undercover vice cop tailed me,
attempted to seduce me,
tried to trick me into making a pass,
forced himself on me,
and then arrested me.
Straight vice cops played gay
and were always on the lookout for prey.
Gay guys were targets.
Entrapment was a tool they used to ruin us,
emotionally and financially.
Some gay sex acts could get you 15 years to life.
If you weren't arrested, you could be beaten
and left for dead in the gutter.
I had no idea what was going to happen to me.
Cops would contact our employers,
publish our names and addresses in the paper.
We'd lose our jobs, our families...
I've known men who were driven to suicide.
That night, I was charged with vagrancy and lewd conduct.
It was happening to all of us,
but we were starting to fight back.
I was booked at 11:30 but wasn't allowed to send a message out
till 3:00 the next morning.
I called Harry.
I called on my brothers of the Mattachine Society.
The whole Mattachine Society is going to support you, Dale.
And we're going to fight this.
And this was just the sort of fight
Harry was waiting for to put our cause on the map.
He was a bit older than we were,
and the roots of his radicalism
were planted even earlier than mine.
In the height of the '30s,
when the heterosexual world was very, very straight,
very uptight, very sort of macho,
very unemotional,
it is in this period that we had the lilies and the pansies,
when all the queens, for instance,
would have chiffon four miles long,
all slightly lavender.
When it wasn't a question of a limp wrist,
it was practically a limp arm.
Everything was limp.
I could play the strutting macho if I wanted to
and I could drop my wrist when I felt like it.
When Dale and I met and formed the Mattachine Society,
my wife and I were active in the Communist party.
Oh, yeah, I was married at the time with two kids.
I knew more married gays than unmarried gays in those days.
It was a way to hide. It was a good cover.
And sometimes it could be exciting to have a secret.
A big change in America's gay life
started back during World War II.
Isolated gays from small towns across the country
were thrust together in large numbers for the first time.
And when the war was over,
they naturally settled in the big port cities...
New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Then in 1948,
Dr. Kinsey came out with his book on male sexuality.
It became an overnight bestseller
by claiming that 37% of males
have had a homosexual experience.
Now there was proof that there were thousands of us
in every city and town across the country.
Can you imagine?
Now you could walk down the street
knowing that one out of 10 people
might be having those same feelings,
those same experiences.
You might finally meet someone and fall in love.
And speaking of love,
another love that dare not speak its name is about to be born,
which in turn will birth yet another secret society,
the Daughters of Bilitis.
It is now time for the sisters to do it for themselves.
I guess my first question is, how did you meet each other?
Oh, we met up in Seattle on the job.
And...
Phyllis tells this story better than I.
Well...
I was working for a trade magazine up in Seattle.
We heard that the boss
had hired a divorced woman
from San Francisco to come up
and take over the daily construction paper they had.
All of us girls were really excited about this new person.
The day that she arrived,
we were all sort of peering out of our little office doors,
and she came putzing in
in her little suit and her high heels
and carrying a briefcase.
And I think that was the first time ever in my life
I'd ever seen a woman carrying a briefcase.
We're talking 1949, right,
and "gay" was not a word that I knew.
So, I had a party for the whole staff to meet her.
And she sat out in the kitchenette with all the men
drinking whiskey and smoking cigars,
trying to learn how to tie a tie, which she never did.
I didn't know anything about lesbians till I met Del.
Sure, I had thoughts of other girls when I was in high school
but didn't think anything could happen, so I dismissed it.
At the end of the night,
I really had to make a move or forget it.
So I made sort of a half pass.
And she completed it.
And that's how we met.
_
One night in 1949, I'm at a party with a bunch of gay guys,
and all the talk is about Kinsey
and the homosexual witch hunt going on in the U.S. government.
This would later be known as the Lavender Scare.
On the president's order, the State Department
had already fired hundreds of gays and lesbians
on the basis that they were security threats.
We were scared.
It seemed at that time
that we were moving towards a fascist corporate state.
"Something's gotta be done," I said.
As I learned as a Communist organizer,
there was strength in numbers.
I pulled an all-nighter writing "The Call,"
a manifesto to organize homosexuals.
We needed to establish a gay group
to fight back against police entrapment and discrimination.
Problem was, the idea was just too dangerous.
Absolutely no one would touch it,
except for my wife, who read it
and promptly asked for a divorce.
Can you blame her?
Soon after, when I was teaching a music course
at the California Labor School,
my boyfriend, Rudi, suggested that I pitch my idea
to a couple of my students who I suspected to be gay.
They were totally behind it, and we got together to discuss.
We were just a few guys.
One of them was Bob Hull.
His boyfriend was Dale Jennings.
We viewed homosexuals as part
of an oppressed cultural minority.
Harry ran with the idea,
and it became the foundation of the Mattachine Society.
This was about real brotherhood, real change.
The possibility of a police raid
meant our meetings had to be held in secret.
We were more than a little afraid.
Before every meeting, we'd draw the curtains,
shove the phone in a dresser drawer
and put a pillow over it,
just in case there were FBI bugs in the room.
It was exciting to be a part of something so new and progressive.
By day, we were ordinary people,
but by night, we became wild radicals,
determined to change the world.
When Del and I first came to San Francisco in 1953,
it took us two years to make contact with another lesbian,
not because we didn't see them, but it took us a while
to get up nerve enough to say hello to them.
We were very shy, and so we sort of sat more like tourists.
We did find some lesbian bars later
and found that they were being constantly raided.
You never knew when the paddy wagon was going to show up in front,
officers come in and load you all in.
And the charges were absurd,
like something like visiting a house of ill repute.
We were so happy when somebody suggested we should get involved
with starting this new group
because we figured we'd finally meet some more lesbians.
It started out as a very secret social club.
And we were meeting in each other's homes
and having parties at home where it was safe
as compared to the gay bars.
One of the women said, "We've got to have a name.
We can't just keep meeting and not call ourselves anything."
And she said, "Look, here's this book
called 'The Songs of Bilitis, '"
and Bilitis was a contemporary of Sappho, at least in this book,
and nobody would ever know what it meant,
and none of us knew what it meant.
She was the only woman who ever read the book.
Anyway, that's where the Daughters of Bilitis came from,
and had we known in 1955,
we would have called it the Lesbian Activist Group
or something like that and never had to explain it once more.
One of the things Daughters of Bilitis did
was to begin to let us have a support group,
to say, "Hey, I care that you're in trouble."
Because before then, it was every person for themselves.
Build your own safe little world and try to...
you know, hide in it.
You're on your own, toots.
So I think that's why Daughters of Bilitis helped so much
the beginning organizations, that said,
"Let's try to be kind to each other.
Let's try to figure out how we can help."
Mattachine started in Los Angeles in 1950.
So close was the conspiracy of silence in the press and everywhere
that when DOB started in 1955,
we had no idea that Mattachine existed.
And it wasn't until after we started operating
that we eventually discovered these essentially men's groups.
It's probably difficult to understand
how alienated everybody was then,
because it was so scary to ever try to make contact.
The beginning of the Daughters of Bilitis was so fragile
that Del and I were like peer counselors to every member.
There were so few of us, and it was so scary.
Those times, there was nothing but fear out there.
You could get arrested for dressing wrong.
You could go to jail, lose your apartment.
Could certainly lose their jobs, and they had.
They could be thrown out of their churches.
If your family found out you were gay,
you were thrown out of the house.
A lot of women came to Daughters of Bilitis
because they had been abandoned by their families
or their families had thrown them into institutions
where they'd be given shock therapy.
So Daughters of Bilitis became sort of a self-help group.
Our statement of purpose is to educate the public
to accept the lesbian into society,
and our motto became "Qui vive,"
which is French for "stay vigilant."
Qui vive!
By now, the Mattachine Society was firmly established,
but it was still a dangerous time.
Gay bars were constantly being raided.
We weren't safe on the streets,
barely safe in our own homes.
One night at a Mattachine meeting in Los Angeles,
a disgruntled ex-vice cop was invited to speak.
He dished the dirt on a sting operation at local beaches...
decoys coming on to gay guys and the cops entrapping them.
The men were furious,
determined to blow the cops' cover,
to strike back with information
and unite gay men all across the country.
So they decided to launch a magazine.
Dale Jennings and others branched out from Mattachine
and formed One, the first of its kind.
It became known as the voice of U.S. homosexuals.
And that's exactly what it was.
We weren't going to go out and say,
"You should be gay," and do all of that.
But we all say you can be proud of being gay.
You can be proud of being yourself.
You can look yourself in the mirror and say, "I'm me, and isn't that nice?"
That in itself was radical.
There were letters, articles, stories.
Anything which was of interest to homosexuals
was printed in there so that it became a forum.
It began to acquaint the American public
with questions regarding homosexuality,
both in United States and abroad.
And now the FBI really was on our ass.
On May 19, 1953,
confidential informant of known reliability
who is a sex deviate made available
a copy of a publication entitled One.
Review of the publication indicates it's written for sex deviates.
I got a tip from Miss Romayne Cox,
the secretary treasurer of the Mattachine Society,
telling me that those flatfoots over at the FBI
were building a legal case against One Magazine.
Well, if they were going to play games with us,
then we were gonna play games with them.
So we wrote an article suggesting everybody knows
that J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director,
and Clyde Tolson, his close partner,
were lovers.
It was common knowledge that they lived together
and that their mothers lived on either side of them.
I mean, obviously they were queers, right?
We know Hoover sent a memo to Tolson saying,
"We should take this crowd on
and make them put up or shut up."
FBI agents showed up at One's offices
not long after the issue was mailed out,
wanting to know who wrote the article.
We told them Hoover's mother wrote the article
and that they should kindly get the fuck out.
Most of its officials and those associated with the publication
have immoral and subversive backgrounds
and have been quite sarcastic
upon contact by our agents
relative to their slanderous words about the FBI.
I became editor in chief of One Magazine
and also a contributor.
I wrote the story of my arrest and my trial
in the first issue of One,
which was published in January 1953.
After my arrest, I was humiliated and depressed,
but Harry and the others were there to remind me,
I was not alone.
The members of the Mattachine raised money
and hired a notorious labor lawyer on my behalf.
George Sibley was always on the side of the underdog,
and I knew he was the best man for the job.
Also, he was the only lawyer who would take my case.
"The trial was a surprise.
The attorney engaged by the Mattachine Foundation
made a brilliant opening statement to the jury."
Homosexuality and lasciviousness
are not identical.
And the only true pervert in the courtroom
is the arresting officer.
When I took the stand, I declared under oath
that I, Dale Jennings, was admittedly homosexual.
At the time, it was a bold thing to admit in a court of law.
Order in the court!
The judge told me not to use that word.
"That word is not used here."
But he would not silence me.
I was there because I was an avowed homosexual,
and I wasn't ashamed of it.
And after 40 hours of deliberations and a hung jury
with just one holdout against me,
we argued that the city move for dismissal of the case,
and it was granted.
Mattachine, through our Citizens' Committee to Outlaw Entrapment,
had raised funds for my case from all across the country.
In this sense, a bond of brotherhood
is not mere blind generosity.
It is unification for self-protection.
Dale and the Mattachine were homosexual heroes.
They had challenged the police, and the police backed down.
Not surprisingly, nobody covered the trial,
but the word spread,
and membership in the Mattachine Society exploded.
Hundreds of new chapters sprang up all over the country,
but it grew so fast,
Harry, Dale
and the founding members lost control.
A new wave of conservative gays were spooked
by ties to the Communist sympathizers,
and the old rebels got voted out.
Hal Call became the new face of the Mattachine Society.
On the second meeting, we sort of took it out of their hands.
We wanted to see changes brought about by evolutionary methods,
not revolutionary methods.
We had dedicated ourselves so utterly to this.
This was our lives, and suddenly it was gone.
Simply gone.
The Mattachine went on without us.
It was a signal that the gay movement was in transition
and not just for us.
He's right.
A new generation was coming up,
new ideas and new voices.
And one of them belonged to a young woman named Barbara Gittings.
It should be in the air in the society
that homosexuality is perfectly alright
and that it's to be just as much valued and desired
as a heterosexual orientation.
In '56, I was living in Philadelphia.
I had left home and I started to try to find my people.
First I found them in books.
You look yourself up in little sections
in the book on abnormal psychology.
You try to find yourself in legal books.
You try to find yourself in encyclopedias.
It was very clinical.
It didn't speak of love.
They were talking about some kind of condition,
an alien condition that was a departure from the norm.
And one day I found out about an organization
called Daughters of Bilitis.
So I arranged to take a plane out to, uh... to San Francisco.
And I called, I guess, Del, Phyllis, somebody.
And for the first time, I found myself in a living room
in a normal social setting with 12 other lesbians.
And it was a marvelous experience.
Here she was,
a little curly haired girl in a shift and sandals.
I never saw anything like it or her.
She was younger than we were.
Little did we know what we or the gay movement was in for.
Many women were afraid to come to an actual DOB meeting
or didn't live in a city that had a DOB chapter.
So it became increasingly clear that we needed
to find a secret way to connect with isolated lesbians.
So we began to publish "The Ladder" in 1956.
The first issue we mailed to everybody that anybody knew.
I think we printed 185, and then the machine broke down.
Gradually, we branched out and expanded the newsletter into a magazine,
which included news, book reviews,
letters to the editor, short stories, and so on.
The magazine landed on newsstands in big cities,
but most of our readers received our publication through the mail
in a plain brown envelope.
The response we got over and over again from women was,
"I'm so glad to know I'm not the only one."
I cannot tell you what a source of both inspiration and pleasure
"The Ladder" contained for me within its pages.
I, as an introvert,
can only know of what momentous importance
such a movement as yours can mean
for the ultimate good of us all.
Like so many others,
I am living a completely repressed existence.
One of the insertions in "The Ladder" caught my attention
and I could not help but muse over it with some irony.
The part about coming out of hiding,
what a delicious invitation,
but, oh, so impractical.
If I were to come out of hiding, I should lose my job
and all chance of finding work.
I would be blackballed all over the city.
They somehow got passed around from hand to hand,
and they got mailed from one subscriber to another
in some other part of the country,
who then sent it on to someone else.
And the organization's little offices,
they'd have letters and phone calls from isolated gay people
sometimes too afraid even to give a name on the telephone,
who would say things like, "I'm just grateful for your existence,
for the sheer existence of groups
of my own kind that I can turn to."
I am interested, very much interested
in becoming a member of the Daughters of Bilitis.
Although at present, discretion prevents me
from making any moves to help the cause,
there is one very effective weapon we,
who must fight from a hiding place, still have...
the fountain pen and the typewriter.
I suppose we were dimly aware of the fact
that there really weren't very many women of color,
at least not in the DOB meetings that I was associated with.
We had only the one in the New York chapter,
and that was Ernestine.
I think we cannot be as radical
as homosexuals as we can,
as we could, as we do as Negroes,
because the Negro cause is already widely accepted.
You know, the homosexual cause is not yet accepted.
And I think this has to come first, the acceptance,
then you can push as far and as often
and as hard as you like.
At the start of the '60s,
gays and lesbians were still a repressed minority.
Government, churches, and doctors
still saw us as illegal, immoral, and sick.
One of the biggest problems I think is police harassment,
unequal treatment under the laws.
For instance, the surveillance of gay bars
is much more strict than that accorded to heterosexual bars.
It seems strange, but gay people would be arrested.
They didn't know they couldn't be arrested.
They figured they were guilty for being gay,
and so they got arrested.
Very few, if any, fought back.
At that time, as far as the police were concerned,
gay people were unapprehended felons,
and lawmakers were too concerned about re-election
to try to do anything about it.
Del and Phyllis decided the best way to sway public opinion
would be to get the church on our side.
So the Daughters of Bilitis teamed up
with other gay rights leaders
and some of San Francisco's most influential ministers
to create the Council on Religion and the Homosexual.
This was a big step because the ministers were going to try
to convince the bigots in their pews
that Jesus didn't hate gays.
That was in 1965,
and it's still a tough sell today, okay?
One of their most significant events
was the now-infamous New Year's costume ball
to raise funds for this new group,
which may seem like a fun night out by today's standards,
but at the time, it was a dangerous and radical move.
At that time, the police took the position
that the only time you could dress up in drag was on Halloween.
And this was going to be a gala affair
in which if you wanted to go in drag, you could.
- And it wasn't Halloween? - It wasn't Halloween.
The evening of the ball, the ministers were there
with their wives, receiving everyone.
There were paddy wagons out front,
and the whole place was flooded with lights.
The cops were taking pictures
of everyone going in and out of the building.
In those circumstances,
which is like passing a picket line of cops,
over 500 lesbians and gays, including teachers,
including people we knew who were in sensitive positions,
crossed that picket line of cops into the building.
We were the attorneys there at the door
and we were there to make sure
that everything was on the up and up
so that there couldn't be any reason to make any arrests.
And then the police went back on their word.
I heard one of the cops say to a minister,
"Well, if you're not going to uphold God's law, then we will."
Then all of a sudden, there were a whole bunch of police in uniform came.
They grabbed me, one on each side,
and then they put us in jail.
Once the cops arrested Evander and Herb,
they barged in and then they had to arrest somebody
to justify what they had done.
And so they charged these guys with fondling each other.
They hadn't been fondling each other!
The whole situation at the dance Saturday night
was a situation of police harassment.
The next day, seven angry ministers
held a press conference.
They were outraged by what they had witnessed.
Before that, they had just heard our stories.
This time, they lived through it.
They began to see lesbians and gays in a new light.
And from then on, public opinion really did start to change.
It was significant.
Boy, it galvanized the gay community into action.
Absolutely.
That was our Stonewall.
It had just as much confrontation.
It didn't have the violent overtones,
but we stood up and were counted.
Both Del and Phyllis had been editors of "The Ladder,"
but then they were both getting tired.
They wanted to do other things.
They had responsibilities on the board of directors,
it was getting to be a burden,
and they figured that I could take over the magazine for a short term.
Well, that's what happened. I only intended to help out for a few months.
Well, 3 1/2 years later...
You see, I found I liked being editor.
I liked the power.
I could do a lot of things that I thought were important.
We tried to upgrade the fiction.
We tried to upgrade the poetry,
and we certainly tried to upgrade the covers.
The covers were mostly drawings when we first got the magazine,
and some of them were perfectly awful.
Great many pictures of cats, drawings of cats.
We kept making the "for adults only" smaller and smaller.
The subtitle, "A Lesbian Review," got larger and larger.
We tried not to politicize "The Ladder."
There are lots of approaches to changing society
and how we fit into it.
I told Barbara we'd welcome those
with a more radical militant stance
but that she needed to understand
that not everyone was ready for that.
Oh, there was always tension of one kind or another,
but that's partly because I think any social change movement
attracts strong-minded people.
It's necessary to get things moving.
Cue Mr. Frank Kameny,
fabulous founder of Mattachine D.C.
Check it out.
He is about to kick the gay rights movement up
a few notches.
Fired from his government job in 1956 for being gay,
Frank did not go quietly.
The movement of those days was a very unassertive,
apologetic, defensive structure,
not taking strong positions.
Drivel! That didn't suit my personality.
And the Mattachine Society of Washington
was formed around my personality.
Frank Kameny was a big influence on me
because he had such a clear
and compelling vision
of what the movement should be doing.
And that was that we should be standing up on our hind legs
and demanding our full equality and our full rights.
We started picketing, which first created the mind-set
which allowed for gays doing public demonstration as gays.
As much publicity as possible.
That was the whole idea, to crack that shield of invisibility
that had always made it difficult for us
to get our message across.
You know, you knew you were doing something momentous.
Once isolated and separated,
Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis got together
and started to mix it up.
Gay and lesbian groups came out of hiding
and got together, dressed to the nines,
and picketed to show the world that, yes, honey,
we are just as good as you.
They may look tame and orderly,
but in 1965, gays on the picket line
were a shock to the system.
In the '60s, there was a distinct change in the temper
and the tempo of the gay movement,
partly as a result of the...
the black civil rights movement militancy.
We characterized ourselves within the movement
as an activist militant organization.
Well, those were very dirty words in those days.
And every 4th of July for the rest of the decade,
Barbara and Frank led a march
in front of Philadelphia's Independence Hall
in what came to be known as Reminder Notices,
a reminder that gays and lesbians
were still without rights and protections
afforded other U.S. citizens under the Constitution.
It was a new show of unity,
a new show of strength.
Although the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society
would fade from view following the youthquake of the 1970s,
the entire queer rights movement
is built on the foundations they set down.
And how's this for a happy ending?
Del and Phyllis became the first same-sex couple
to legally tie the knot in 2008.
- With this ring... - With this ring...
- I thee wed. - I thee wed.
Before celebration, we needed organization.
They taught us how to work together,
to come out of hiding, and to fight the power.
We have come this far, but the fight is not over.
We must stay vigilant.
- Qui vive! - _
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