FEATURES

1946-1956

ANTI-GAY NONSENSE:

By Codger

I sing of brickbats and the male homosexual this month, for our topic is that sudden and strong upsurge of anti-gay activities which took place soon after World War II and continued throughout the nineteen forties and well into the nineteen fifties.

I am referring to the "McCarthy Era," which was a grand search for spies and saboteurs, in which practically everyone in the U.S. saw fit to personally take part in. Those days of witch-hunts were bad days, indeed, for gays.

Homosexuals, you see, were proclaimed to be "security risks." We were fired from U.S. government jobs; then defense industry firms; and finally, all kinds of strictly consumer industries closed their doors to us.

One department store in Cleveland even had a "gay purge" in order to improve its public image.

Most of the above shenanigans started well before the rise to prominence of Sen. Joseph McCarthy in 1950 and continued long after his disgrace. McCarthy was merely a good noisemaker who uncovered only one Communist;

the gay fallout, we must take a look at the early days of the post-war witch-hunt.

Credit for the opening kickoff, I suggest, must go to a West Coast matron named Leila Rogers, another hearty noisemaker.

Mrs. Rogers, mother of Ginger, was a board member of the Screen Actors Guild; she had long been horrified at certain films (Song of Russia, Mission to Moscow, North Star, etc.) that Hollywood had produced during World War II, which depicted our ally, Russia, and its citizens in a "favorable" manner. I recall those movies as being innocuous flicks: Mission to Moscow, for instance, told us how Russian cosmetics firms were a great morale builder (Note: Another horrified spectator was avid film-goer Joseph Stalin, who prohibited the U.S. films from being shown in the U.S.S.R.).

Mrs. Rogers not only loathed. the pro U.S.S.R. movies, but was firmly convinced that Hollywood was in the grip of some sort of giant Communist plot. Unable to convince the majority of the Screen Actors' board, she decided to take her cause to the newspapers and radio. In her

HIGH GEAR/APRIL 1977

hue and cry, she was soon joined by actors and fellow boardmembers: George Murphy and Ronald Reagan.

Well, I tell you, not only did the Cinema Vahalia catch fire, but so did the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in Washington, which subpoened a trainload of screenwriters and actors, but no producers or other industry bigwigs.

The Hollywood phase ended with the imprisonment of a couple of screenwriters for contempt of Congress and with the entertainment industries placing the names of twelve writers and a few actors-actresses (Lillian Hellman, Larry Parks and Gale Sondergaard among them) on a blacklist (Note: Blacklists were not new to the entertainment world. Mae West received such a comeuppance from the radio networks for behaving like er... Mae West on a family-hour show during the late nineteen thirties).

Curiously enough, Lucille Ball, who had registered CP in an election primary, was overlooked by the blacklisters, for she had the most popular show on the tube and hence the opportunity to corrupt millions of viewers by that subliminal method used by pinko thespians.

"Good grief!," the nation exclaimed. "If lovable Lucy is pinko, what about that grumpy librarian down the street? Probably planning to poison our drinking water with strychnine or flourides!" And so it started up.

The real importance of the Hollywood caper is that it popularized the phrase, "fellow traveler" a person who has

belonged to organizations or causes which had been infilitrated by genuine Communists.

It was a short step from "fellow traveler" to "security risk." And FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, had his own ideas on who they were: Homosexuals mainly gay employees in the U.S. Department of State.

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Hoover, as a matter of fact, had compiled over many years lists of gays at State, for he considered us plump pigeons for blackmailers. He had approached both Presidents Roosevelt and Truman with the idea of dismissing gays from the State department, but both were unimpressed. Truman, it is reported, remarked that he thought alcoholics and straight family men who played around a bit were both greater risks.

Hoover disagreed: He thought many gays would divulge the nation's most precious secrets rather than let "Mother find out."

Hoover. as it turned out, was wrong about the gays at State. There were, indeed, a couple of traitors in the foreign service, but neither one of them were gay. In fact, no known gay anywhere in the U.S. was brought to trial for treason or perjury concerning espionage:

Yet, the FBI director was correct about a couple of other a

Communist espionage network was preparing to blackmail them.

Reasons for the many gays in State are easily understood: Salaries were comparatively low, and the frequent re-locations among foreign service personnel would tend to make such a career unattractive to a family man of talent. So gays were welcomed. Indeed, a gay (Sumner Welles) rose to be Undersecretary during the Roosevelt administration. Sometimes certain posts had quite a number: Gore Vidal remarks that in 19461947 some residents of Rome speculated aloud that the U.S. Embassy building some evening might flutter aloft only to land on the Via Venito..

As to blackmail for homosexual activity, there is a long history of this in international espionage. Czarist Russia, for example, successfully gained most of the important secrets of the AustroHungarian Empire at the turn of the century by blackmailing that nation's gay chief of intelligence.

And, as Hoover feared, the Communist network was setting up "homosex squads;" young, dedicated Communists were taught homosexual acts to be used on foreign diplomats all to be photographed through peep holes. In the late nineteenforties, a British Navy code clerk, named Vassal, was successfully blackmailed by a Russian "homo-sex squad" member, while Vassal was with a delegation in Moscow. And, according to a Soviet intelligence officer who defected to Canada, the Communists in Japan also had such a squad. A U.S. diplomat, who had sex with a champion swimmer, a Japanese Communist, was presented with photographs of the act. But our U.S. Envoy coolly requested his blackmailers to send his superior officer a set of proofs for his own enjoyment. Disgruntled, the Japanese "homoxsex squad" disbanded.

Back to J. Edgar. Unable to inoculate President Truman with homophobia, the FBI director decided as did Mrs. Rogers-to take his cause to the U.S. public. For this, he enlisted the aid of Drew Pearson, a Washington newsman whose columns were syndicated nationwide.

Pearson, not only used the data given him by the FBI, but did a little investigative reporting on his own (A Pearson aide, for instance, for all of five hours, sat in a stall of a public washroom, a famous T-room, which was located across from the State Department.) Pearson's aide, however, was unable to ascertain whether any of the conversationalists he overheard were State employees It seems that nobody talked office. politics. But the fact that this Troom was across the street from

State was enough for Pearson's readers. And, as did Hollywood, the State Department caught fire. A cartoon in The New Yorker magazine has a job applicant say to an employer: "Yes, I was dismissed from the

an army dentist at Fort Dix American public via the things. There was quite 2 num late department, but surely for

New Jersey. So, to understand

ber of gays at State, and the

incompetence.".

PAGE 16

Employers, Civilian as well as governmental and defense, were getting the homophobic message. I mentioned that one Cleveland department store fired its gay employees; well, another large store tried a "gay purge" but were thwarted by a straight, but kindly, woman who was its personnel manager. She I made the rounds of the bars (before the store detective assigned to do it got going) and told any store employees she found to "get the hell out."

Cleveland police, previously only mildly hostile to gays ("They don't bother us, so we don't bother them," said the chief of Cleveland's vice squad to a graduate class in sociology) got the homophobic fever and upped their arrests of gays. It was then that vice-squad members started infiltrating the one gay bath (on Frankfort Ave.); where they once proudly snared, none other, than the superintendent of the Akron public schools.

Even City Council tried to do its bit by outlawing impersonators, and hence, bankrupt the gay bars. So Council decreed that "no performer may appear in the clothes of the opposite sex. Red-faced lawmakers rescinded the directive in its next session, for the Metropolitan Opera was bringing Der Rosencavalier to town and it might not look good, nationwide, to cart Ms. Rise Stevens off to the pokey..

Homophobia also spread to our universities in Cleveland. One college removed chairmanships from two tenured professors. Another fired an untenured teacher for "moral turpitude," although no one could prove it. Gay students in the medical school were flunked out because they were not "mature enough" to be doctors. One gay graduate student in psychology, I know, was ordered to change his major from clinical to experimental, also for lack of "maturity." And so it went.

Today, things are certainly better for gays (or "perverts" as the newspapers used to call us. "Homosexual" was a taboo word in the Cleveland dailies). Now many of us are coming out on the job. We are presently protected from homophobia in U.S. Civil Service jobs. Even the State Department announced recently that it will once again employ open gays. The witchhunts are long over, though Anita Bryant is trying her best to revive them. Hoover is dead, and so are Welles and Pearson. I have no idea where Vassal is today. But Mrs. Rogers is alive and according to daughter Ginger "a very active ninety three years of age." You may write Mrs. Rogers c/o The Screen Actors Guild, Burbank, California.