IN STRIKING DOWN the Texas law that made consensual sex in private between members of the same sex a criminal act, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, speaking for the majority of the Supreme Court, wrote that the Texas law “demeans the lives of homosexual persons … entitled to respect for their private lives.” By emphasizing the word “respect,” Justice Kennedy was not only upholding the right of privacy, he was asserting human dignity. For many, it is difficult to feel grateful. That the matter came up at all is disgraceful to every concept of human decency. For veterans of not-so-long-ago battles for equal rights, the decision will stir memories of outrages survived.
In the late 1950’s, the McCarthy hearings aimed at identifying Communist sympathizers had spread their poison to ferreting out homosexuals in the government. That created an exodus to California, a state always known for its liberal attitudes. Perhaps it was that new wave of homosexuals into the state that intensified entrenched prejudices—and what occurred in California was reflected in varying degrees throughout the country.
A series of sweeps on Hollywood Boulevard by police netted hundreds of homosexuals, who were stopped, harassed, even taken into police stations for further interrogation. A scurrilous Hollywood newspaper trumpeted the news: “100’s of Deviants Detained, Warned.” The arrests were for “loitering.” Any two men sitting in a parked car on streets near the Boulevard risked being ordered out by the police, separated, and grilled with questions about each other. Such questioning was meant to determine whether or not they had just picked each other up, a signal of lewd intent. That tactic was so widespread that gay men together, on sensing the presence of the police, whether in bars or on the street, would hurriedly exchange names and brief backgrounds to suggest a friendship, as opposed to a quick connection.
Throughout the 50’s and 60’s, and even into the 70’s, being in a gay bar was dangerous. At any moment a bar could be flooded with light from a squad car. A bullhorn ordered all “queers” to march out in a single line, ostensibly to be checked for ID. Gay men would be insulted, mauled, and in some instances beaten. As many men as could be fitted into a squad car or wagon were taken to headquarters for questioning. Anyone who protested would be threatened with being held on “open suspicion” for 48 hours, released, rearrested, and held again.
Since it was illegal for members of the same sex to dance together (heterosexual women were exempted), a “private” club in Topanga Canyon adopted a system of lights to signal a hostile presence. Bulbs would blink and partners would shift, with gay men dancing with lesbians. The illegality of gay men touching each other even while dancing produced the Madison, a dance during which lines of gay men faced each other, not touching, just going through the motions of a dance.
In 1968, the murder of silent film star Ramon Novarro by two young drifters resulted in the trial not only of the killers but of the star’s life. Newspapers all over the country routinely quoted the defense lawyers’ reference to the silent-film star as “an old queer.” The fact that his murder was brought to trial and the killers convicted was exceptional, occurring mainly because of Novarro’s one-time fame. Other incidents of violence against gay people, even murder, were left uninvestigated, even unreported, since it was known that in courtrooms, if the perpetrator of violence against a gay man claimed he had responded in anger at having been the object of a homosexual pass, he would be assured a not guilty verdict.
Plainclothes cops would sit in cars outside gay gathering places in order to trail men leaving together. Without warrants, they pushed their way into private homes, just as, years later, the Texas police would invade a private home and arrest two men in the Lawrence case. Men caught in such situations often went to prison; a sentence of up to five years was not rare.
Entrapment was rampant. Vice cops dressed in the tight white pants popular at one time might, while hanging out in a gay bar or on the street, court or accept an invitation for sex at someone’s home, and then arrest the gay man for solicitation. In 1965, a man attempting his first gay encounter was arrested in 29 Palms, California, after a plainclothes cop struck up a conversation that led to a mutual agreement to go to a motel. The gay man was sentenced to six months in jail, where he remained incommunicado, the judge claiming he was “insane” and needed to be “scrutinized.” After he managed to get out, he became a recluse, petrified for life by the incident.
Countless lives were destroyed by such arrests: men lost their jobs, were ostracized by their families, were threatened with electric shock treatment, ordered to stay away from any place catering to “perverts”—in effect sentenced to a life of loneliness, away from their own kind. All men convicted of a gay sex offense had to register for life as “sex offenders.” As such, they were frequently summoned out of their homes at night to participate in lineups for unrelated offenses, heterosexual rape, or child molestation.
Fledgling political groups, such as the Mattachine Society, met in secret, their blinds drawn. Their newsletters—mimeographed sheets—were confiscated by the Post Office even though they had no erotic content. Such a fate awaited the first gay activist magazine, One, which was entirely non-erotic.
In 1973, hundreds of gay men in Griffith Park were rounded up, not on hidden trails where sexual encounters occurred, but simply as they walked along on open roads or gathered publicly around their cars, a traditional gay practice on a warm Sunday afternoon. Suddenly a helicopter, a fleet of squad cars, and more than a dozen police on horses launched an invasion, proceeding to herd dozens of gay men into a wired compound at the foot of the roads. The routed men were kept in the compound for several hours, names and addresses were checked out, and 39 were taken to police headquarters for booking. Those who were released from the compound had to trudge up the miles of road to their cars. Those taken to the station had to abandon their cars along the darkening roads. The Advocate (at that time a small newspaper) described the maneuver as “a full scale military operation, with command post, detention buses, jeeps, a helicopter, marked and unmarked cops, uniformed and vice police … and a contingent of mounted cops,” concluding that it was “a new harassment strategy.” The Los Angeles Times reported only that “39 men … were cited … for possible prosecution under city ordinances, prohibiting sections designated as hazardous. … They could face penalties of up to one year in jail and a $500 fine.”
On an early evening in 1977—four years after the repeal of California’s anti-sodomy laws—while driving home from UCLA, I saw muggers fleeing from a man they had assaulted on the street as he walked home with his groceries along a non-gay area. I stopped to be sure that the man was okay: he was bruised and shaken. With him in my car, I attempted to flag down a squad car in the area. Hands readied on their revolvers, the cops got out. The muggers would still be in the area, I told them. Glancing at the wounded man, who was clearly gay, they drove off. I took the bruised man to the police station to report the crime. The desk sergeant studied him knowingly. “What did you try to do with those guys?” he asked.
After I wrote an account of that night for The LA Times, and an investigation was ordered because the matter was now public and no gay context had been indicated, I became the object of retaliation, culminating in an attack by baton-swinging cops in Barnsdall Park, a cruising area I often frequented. As I got out of my car, two cops rushed at me with batons raised. I was able to get back into my car and speed toward them. As I drove past, they swung their batons in an action intended for me. I heard the sickening strikes on my car, leaving deep dents. For months afterward, I received threatening anonymous calls.
In 1983, a vice cop and his plainclothes partner, having made an entrapment arrest for lewd conduct in Griffith Park, lingered along the main road with a handcuffed gay man as a trophy until other gay men had gathered. Summoning a park ranger, the arresting cop asked loudly: “Think anyone would mind if I set fire to this part of the park to burn these faggots?” Intending to bring that statement into the court hearing as indicative of the cop’s vengeful intent to entrap, the city attorney prosecuting the case said he did not believe that an officer would say that, nor would any judge or jury accept it. The statement was not introduced, and the entrapped gay man was convicted.
There was resistance throughout those years in Los Angeles, however. As early as 1958, as the cops pursued a routine, hour-long harassing tactic of checking IDs at a crowded after-hours gathering place for gay men, Cooper’s Donuts on Main Street, the men inside pushed en masse past the cops, and a violent rumble ensued. After the notorious raid on the Black Cat Bar in 1967, riotous disruptions against the police spread to LA, where 200 gay men marched against a line of heavily armed cops. In early 1969, the nearly fatal beating of a gay man in downtown LA created skirmishes and demonstrations sporadically for days.
But the same prejudices that allowed myriad outrages against gay people caused these acts to be ignored by the mainstream press. Unacknowledged, their insurrectionary power was curbed.
Although the history of gay oppression is long, its recorded history is brief. For many gay men, history begins with the moment of their last sexual conquest. Many younger homosexuals have no knowledge about what occurred not so long ago—and still occurs away from relatively safe havens, those deceptive gay ghettos. It could all have returned ferociously as long as repressive laws like the one in Texas existed.
On the memorable day of June 25, 2003, in decent, moving words, Justice Kennedy and the four justices who joined him in effect denounced those past horrors as inconsistent with the respect and dignity owed to all human beings. Without in any way belittling the decency of those justices in their opinion—and the courage and commitment of those who fought to bring it about, especially the Lambda Legal Defense Fund and its attorneys—many gay people might view the decision as a vastly imperfect apology for the lives devastated by cruel laws that made possible the myriad humiliations of gay people, the verbal and physical assaults, the screams of “faggot!”—the muggings, the suicides, the murders, trumped-up arrests, incarceration—still occurring even during this time of victory.
The flagrant dissent by Justice Scalia and two of his colleagues—in an effort to uphold the Texas law—will help to keep fertile the atmosphere of hatred that recently allowed three men to mangle Trevor Broudy in West Hollywood and two others to butcher Matthew Shepard in Wyoming. A great battle was won on June 25, but the war continues.
John Rechy’s latest novel, The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens, has just been published by Grove/Atlantic.
