Homophiles and Leather Daddies: Postwar Conformism and Defiance in Consolidating Middle-Class Gay Male Subjectivity

• In Event: Comparative-Historical Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Comparative-Historical Roundtable 5

Abstract

The post-WWII homophile movement is an oft-forgotten precursor to the LGBTQ movement we know today. Those who know about it often dismiss it as a conformist precursor to Stonewall militancy. But many homophiles were more radical than is often understood, until external repression and internal conflict brought assimilationism to the fore. Conversely, the seventies revealed that many Stonewall militants were far more willing to embrace conformity they initially let on. Looking at how the homophile movement came to embrace respectability offers valuable lessons for organizers today. To that end, this paper situates homophile movement identities, goals, and tactics as reactions to the defiantly feminine “fairy” subcultures of pre-Depression US cities. Where early gay community spaces allowed for more productive relationships across lines of gender, class, race, and sexuality, escalating repression of the 1930s led middle-class gays to flee to the suburbs and dissociate themselves both from effeminate fairy subculture and straight working-class influences. Over a decade of isolation produced a generation of gay men fundamentally detached from blue-collar, feminine, and BIPOC influences. Where homophile organizers would cling jealously to the American Dream of white-collar domestic bliss—underwritten by neocolonial extraction and Cold War brutality—another subset of professional-class gays would seek to reconnect with gruff, working-class masculine influences by way of a leatherman subculture of leather jackets, motorcycles, and rough, kinky sex. In different ways and to different extents, both homophiles and leathermen would construct themselves as “gay male moderns” in opposition to the fetishized “authenticity” of straight, blue-collar workers, the fetishized “exoticism” of BIPOC others, and the fervent rejection of effeminate “swishes” and “fairies.” I thereby trace US gay male self-conception to a foundational distinction from poor, racialized, feminine, and transgender people.

Author

• Andrew J. Shapiro, CUNY Graduate Center