TO HEAR AND TO RESPOND
The Quakers’ Groundbreaking Push for Gay Liberation, 1946–1973
by Brian T. Blackmore
Brill. 108 pages, $84.
THE QUAKERS, a Christian sect founded in 17th-century England, are known for their belief in nonviolence and the equality of men and women, as well as their work for the abolition of slavery and for prison reform. But what led the liberal strain of Quakers to become champions of gay rights is their trust that each one of us is guided by an Inner Light that shows us the right thing to do even if it contradicts established religious and civil authority. They understood that gay men and women are responding to their Inner Light when they embrace their sexual orientation.
Brian T. Blackmore begins To Hear and to Respond, his history of Quaker support of homosexuals, in the years following World War II, when the U.S. was engulfed in a wave of homophobia. Police entrapment of men seeking sex with men filled prisons with convicted sex offenders.
In 1946, Quakers in New York City opened a clinic in their meetinghouse run by the Quaker Civilian Readjustment Committee working in conjunction with the Magistrates Court. Instead of prison, some accused sex offenders were sent to the clinic for counseling, not to change their orientation but to help them manage their compulsion to seek sex with other men in public. The clinic saw hundreds of men each year and documented that rearrests were few. But it lasted only until 1951. The Quakers closed it when the director was arrested for seeking sex with an undercover policeman. They could extend compassion to nonmembers, but the Quakers were not yet ready to accept homosexuality in their midst. Blackmore is frank in describing the failure of liberal Quakers to fully support the rights of homosexuals in the 1950s. Like many, they were concerned about the threats postwar social changes posed to marriage and the family. Although they championed heterosexual monogamy, liberal Quakers never condemned people just because they were homosexual. Blackmore uses the tragic story of Bayard Rustin and a novel by Christopher Isherwood to convey the paranoia of this period. Before he became identified with the Civil Rights movement, Rustin was a nationally recognized Quaker pacifist and community organizer. He was also openly gay. In 1953, he was arrested for performing public sex with two men. The Quakers immediately distanced themselves from Rustin and removed his name from their most famous statement on nonviolence. Years later, Rustin would be similarly betrayed by the Civil Rights movement when he was not allowed to take part in the 1963 March on Washington, which he was instrumental in organizing. Blackmore’s use of Isherwood’s The World in the Evening as evidence of his thesis is less convincing, because he misses the novel’s complexity. Published in 1954 but set in the years before World War II, the novel is best known for its depiction of a happy union between two gay men, one of whom is a Quaker, and for a brief discussion of the role of camp in gay culture. Stephen, the narrator and central character, is neither gay nor a Quaker, but he was raised by one and spends time in a Quaker community in Philadelphia. Stephen is dismissive of the Quakers’ lack of style and their smugness about proper sexual behavior. Blackmore misreads a passage from the novel to indicate that Stephen fears censure from the Quakers for past sexual encounters with men. Actually, Stephen calls Quakers hypocrites because they would condemn his many liaisons with women while secretly envying them. No character in the novel explicitly condemns homosexuals. By the end of the 1950s, Quaker attitudes toward homosexuals had advanced. In 1963, after five years of work, a group of British Quakers published a pamphlet that Blackmore calls the earliest “public evaluation of gay sexuality from a Christian group in the twentieth century.” They were responding both to the 1957 Wolfenden Report that recommended the decriminalization of homosexual acts and to an alarming number of suicides by closeted gay students at Cambridge University. “Toward a Quaker View of Sex” stated boldly that laws, moral codes, and theological doctrines that condemned homosexual behavior could not be defended because homosexuals were doing what they believed to be right. It was surprisingly well-received, selling 500,000 copies in England. The pamphlet also influenced the gay rights movement in the U.S. Blackmore traces Quaker involvement in this movement by focusing on activism in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago. In these cities, gay Quakers found each other through underground networks and soon began to come out in their meetinghouses. Liberal Quakers were now being asked to accept gay people among their members. Overwhelmingly, they did. Gay Quakers formed special interest committees. With minimal opposition, they received permission to appear on the programs of the Yearly Meeting of liberal Quakers and raise the issue of gay rights. In Chicago, Mattachine Midwest was led for decades by a charismatic, openly gay Quaker. Quakers were present at the Stonewall riot and trained marshals in nonviolence for the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March the next year. In 1973, Mary Calderone, a Quaker and nationally prominent sex educator, gave the keynote address at the Friends General Conference, the annual gathering of liberal Quakers from around the country. Her eloquent words on behalf of homosexuals bring this well-documented history to an end. Most Quakers today are conservative Evangelicals who are ambivalent about gay rights or condemn homosexuality outright. Blackmore’s important book tells for the first time the story of how belief in the Inner Light led a minority group of liberal Quakers, in Calderone’s words, “to hear and to respond,” to stand up for the rights of all gay women and men.
Daniel A. Burr, a frequent G&LR contributor, lives in Covington, KY.
