Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications
and Community, 1940’s-1970’s
by Martin Meeker
University of Chicago Press. 320 pages, $75 ($25.00 paper)
Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation
by James T. Sears
Haworth Press. 540 pages, $34.95
READERS of the Hobby Directory, a typewritten newsletter for “men and boys” published in the 1940’s, occasionally placed ads seeking correspondence with like-minded “Navy men” who shared their interests in physical culture, ballet, and sunbathing. Such requests, which appeared under the innocuous heading “Contacts Desired,” help Martin Meeker rethink the contacts that gay and lesbian Americans desired between the late 1940’s and the early 1970’s. By placing “the politics of communication” at the center of his story, he offers an interpretation of postwar America more nuanced and textured than earlier accounts that focused solely on politics or sex. And yet, as James Sears’ biography of gay activist Hal Call shows, “contacts” are difficult to separate from “desires.”
Meeker turns to the pages of the Mattachine Review and the Ladder, the pioneering publications of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. While the histories of these early homophile organizations have been well told before, Meeker asserts the centrality of their publications. He reminds us, against conventional wisdom, how daring the Mattachine Review was when it appeared in 1955. Masked by pseudonyms, its authors pled for tolerance and never wrote of liberation or revolution. Yet in an age of allusive hobby directories and furtive physique magazines, it unapologetically and candidly addressed issues of homosexuality. Editor Phyllis Lyon hoped the appearance of the Ladder in 1956 would offer lesbians “exactly what the name implies, a way up.” Unlike in Mattachine, though, personal networks predominated; the editors “chose a path in which they could maintain greater control over the messages distributed as well as the avenues through which such messages could travel.” Neither strategy worked very well. Both publications struggled with the contradictions inherent in pursuing openness while insisting on privacy. By the early 1960’s, both had chosen greater publicity. With that publicity came visibility, as Meeker examines in the book’s second section. In exposés such as Jess Stearn’s The Grapevine: A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian (1964), journalists told of lesbian bar life and political activism; Life, Look, Time, and Esquire each “discovered” the male homosexual and featured him in photo spreads. Such accounts, even if lurid or distorted, helped lesbian and gay readers communicate—but now they did so not directly with one another, but abstractly, with an emerging gay world whose geography Life and Look had helped map for them. A mixed blessing, to be sure, because of the mass media’s tendency, as critic Leslie Fiedler noted at the time, to “reduce all events through the camera lens to … the monotone of spectacle.” Contacts Desired ends after Stonewall, and shows how activists of the 1970’s battled over the terms of representation rather than pursue the mere fact of visibility. The resurgence of small-scale, do-it-yourself publishing efforts—whether gay male bar guides or the explosion of lesbian-feminist magazines—suggests to Meeker an overlooked facet of 1970’s politics. Writers and readers of The Lavender Baedeker and the Amazon Quarterly corrected the distortions of a mainstream press that no longer had any problem talking about homosexuality; they resisted “the monotone of spectacle” Fiedler had bemoaned; they continued to use print culture to map a gay world, and find their way toward it. In Contacts Desired, Martin Meeker draws on years of research in community archives and dozens of oral histories he conducted with activists, pulp authors, and bar patrons. While Meeker’s prose occasionally falls flat (the introduction really drags), Contacts Desired is a valuable and enduring work of scholarship, surely the best book in gay and lesbian history this year. It is worth reading together with Behind the Mask of the Mattachine, James Sears’ biographical study of Hal Call, the group’s sometime president and the first editor of the Mattachine Review. Born in Missouri in 1917 and trained as a journalist, Call embodied Meeker’s politics of communication. “I felt that education and getting the word out was the best thing we could do,” Call once noted, “so the whole society could ultimately say, ‘Homosexuals are human beings in our midst.’” As that vision shifted from pseudonymous and respectable in the 1950’s to visible and confrontational in the 1970’s, Call’s own focus changed to sexual liberation. He repeatedly insisted that gay men were “fighting for sexual freedom, so why not have some?” By the early 1970’s the Mattachine Society had become a hardcore porn distributor housed in a San Francisco sex club. The transformation of the Mattachine Society into Cinemattachine has typically been told as a story of decline, but James Sears will have none of that. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine makes the case for linking Hal Call’s political and erotic activism. This is no typical biography, but a “chronicle,” marked by extensive quotations from oral history interviews conducted before Call’s death in 2000, along with fictionalized dialogues Sears assembled from his letters and diaries. The narrative experiment, frankly, doesn’t work: its structure will surely confuse readers and confound scholars, and Sears’ skills as a historian outrun his gift for dialogue. But Sears succeeds in rescuing the Mattachine generation from the one-dimensional cartoon characters, what he calls “cardboard eunuchs,” found in most histories. Presented in his own words and with enormous detail, Call emerges as a complex, deeply human figure. Looking back on the early years of the Mattachine Society, Hal Call told an interviewer that “even bad press was good to have.” On one level, Martin Meeker confirms that: his accounts of the heart-wrenching letters of a lonely lesbian in Vancouver who in 1958 begged the Daughters of Bilitis to introduce her to just one other woman like her, or those of a small-town gay man informing the Mattachine Society that he’d taken a job as a night janitor to avoid all human contact, show how precious communication could be. But Contacts Desired also makes clear that if Call was right about bad press in the 1950’s, the struggle over the terms of representation long ago replaced it. To the activist publishers of the 1970’s and to readers today, the coded messages of the Hobby Directory and the Ladder must seem embarrassingly furtive, almost tragic. But progress can’t be measured in column inches, and freedom can’t be seen through Life magazine’s lens. Christopher Capozzola teaches American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
