THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB used in warfare was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. The explosion, which had the force of more than 15,000 tons of TNT, instantly vaporized the center of the city and eventually killed some 100,000 from the blast and radiation poisoning. Working under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientists who developed the bomb, having undergone rigorous security clearances, did so in isolation and secrecy. One of the men who toiled away at the task was a handsome thirty-something chemist named Claude René Schwob, and as it turned out he was keeping more secrets than most of his coworkers. He not only had to keep silent about the job he was doing for the war effort, but he also had to avoid drawing undue attention to himself, because he was homosexual.
But despite the need for secrecy, Schwob refused to deny or be ashamed of his sexuality, which was unusual in this pre-Stonewall era. He was fortunate to be a brilliant scientist at a time when the government needed such men, and while he had to be discreet, he was determined never to live a furtive or frustrated existence even in that intolerant age. In this way, he demonstrated that it was possible for a gay man to lead a happy and productive life without compromising his values—or foregoing an active sex life.
Claude Schwob was born in the small Hudson River town of Dobbs Ferry, New York, in 1910. Both of parents were immigrants to the U.S., his father Jules having come from Switzerland and his mother Suzanne from France. Soon after he was born, the family moved to New York City, where they lived in several residences. Between 1924 and 1930, Schwob took at least four summer trips to France. It’s not clear what he was doing there, surely visiting his mother’s family, undoubtedly improving his French, and perhaps enjoying the delights of gay Paree. According to one of his friends, it was in Paris, at age fifteen, that Schwob began collecting erotic photographs. He seems never to have had any serious doubts about his sexual desires or the means to satisfy them. What’s certain is that he was a precocious student: in 1926, at the age of sixteen, he enrolled at Fordham University, the famed Jesuit institution in the Bronx. He stayed there until 1933 when he earned his doctorate in chemistry (at age 23). It is also highly probable that the young man found time between his scientific experiments to experiment with the delights of man-to-man sex. A university that was restricted only to men may have been a perfect spot for such dalliances.
The San Francisco GLBT Historical Society archive holds a large selection of Schwob’s papers. In it, there’s a very curious, undated letter written by Aloysius J. Hogan, the Jesuit priest and president of Fordham from 1930 to 1936. It is curious for several reasons: first, Schwob chose to keep this missive until his death; second, one has to wonder why the president of a large, prestigious institute would take an interest in the problems of an undergraduate; and finally, the vague reference to “the matter” sounds like a way to avoid naming whatever it is that Schwob is concerned about, while the reference to “rehabilitation” adds to the suspicion that he was caught with another boy.
My Dear Claude:
I wish to thank you for your letter of May 31st, relative to the matter which we have already discussed.
Let me assure you that there is no need for any worry in this matter, since I have investigated and have discussed the matter in a very impersonal way. Hence, you must not feel that there is any necessity for rehabilitation of yourself in my estimation.
I am confident, dear Claude, that everything will succeed in your case, and for this I pray and hope most earnestly.
With very kind personal greetings to you, I am
Very sincerely yours,
Aloysius J. Hogan, S.J.
After earning his degrees from Fordham, it was time to get a job, and with his sterling academic record, Schwob soon found one. He taught chemistry at St. Peters College (now University) in nearby Jersey City. World events, however, would soon overtake the young man’s career path. Hitler and Tojo were on the march, and the U.S. would soon be drawn into another world war—a horrific development, but it would also provide scientists like Claude Schwob with an opportunity to contribute to humanity’s most ambitious scientific undertaking to date, the development of the atom bomb.
Schwob was inducted into the Army in April in 1944, and he was soon assigned to the top secret Manhattan Project. In 1944, project scientists were in desperate need of additional trained personnel in chemistry, and Schwob was one of the best. At first he worked at the University of Chicago, where he helped solve the problem of extracting impurities from plutonium. When those issues had been settled, he was transferred to the more famous laboratory at Los Alamos, where he worked as a radiochemist in conjunction with some of the most important scientists of the age, including Enrico Fermi and J. Robert Oppenheimer. In a later report, Schwob stressed that his work on the Manhattan Project “involved entirely new and extremely delicate techniques and a high order of scientific ability.” This was undoubtedly a colossal understatement. Schwob was also chosen to assist in testing the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Of course, all of this work was top secret, and although few individuals knew the entire scope of the project, just about everyone was aware that they were working on a bomb that had a great potential for destruction. The secret was out in August, 1945, when the device was dropped on Hiroshima. The full impact of the explosion and its geopolitical implications would not be apparent until much later, but the team had achieved its goal. Oppenheimer was so pleased with Schwob’s work that he sent him a special thanks on October 1, 1945, acknowledging his contribution to the project: “You worked extremely hard in the preparation and development of a novel method of testing the atomic bomb and subsequently helped carry through this test with eminently satisfactory results.”
Schwob had been granted a high-level security clearance by the government, which gave him access to some of the most highly classified materials. But developing the bomb was not the only secret that Schwob was harboring. There was also the matter of his sexuality, which was something of an open secret. The government needed his expertise, and his superiors were willing to look past his personal foibles. He had a steady boyfriend while working on the Manhattan Project, but no one seemed to mind. Nevertheless, it was during World War II that the U.S. military began to bar homosexuals from active service. Draft boards began to screen out homosexuals from the rank-and-file recruits, but people with specialized skills deemed critical to the war effort continued to serve—at least until after the war was over. It was this double standard that allowed an openly gay man like Schwob to continue on in the Army. It also helped that, in addition to his brilliance as a scientist, he was a conventionally masculine man, which made it easy for people to conveniently forget that he was gay.
Schwob was discharged from the Army in September 1945. The next month, he was offered a post as assistant professor of chemistry at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. There he remained for a brief period, resigning “for health and personal reasons” just two years later, at which point he headed to San Francisco. In 1948, he applied for a position at the U.S. Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory in San Francisco, where he spent the remainder of his working career. He became one of the nation’s foremost experts on radiation and human health, focusing on the detection, prevention, and response to radiation exposure, which remained the central focus of his research for the rest of his professional life. When he left the institute in 1964, it was probably because his security clearance had been revoked.
But this was not the last time he would have to deal with the FBI and its campaign against “sex deviates.” The next time it happened would be more horrific.
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One advantage of this forced retirement was that Schwob had time for the things he enjoyed even more than radiochemical science. These included photography and sex, and often he was able to combine the two. His interest in photography began when he was a young man in New York. There he’d been employed by the early bodybuilder and physique photographer John M. Hernic. People would send nudes and physique photos to Hernic, and he would then copy and sell them. Schwob learned how to develop photographs for Hernic, and as payment he got to keep the prints for his own collection. This experience stayed with him for the rest of his life, and over the years he enjoyed taking photographs of his boyfriends, These were often frontal nudes, which he must have developed and printed on his own. The photos in the GLBT collection are remarkable for this reason alone. Unfortunately, Schwob was not a first-rate photographer; his images are often marred by poor lighting and clumsy posing. They were probably preserved as pleasant reminders of his many sexual encounters.
Since Schwob enjoyed a regular and healthy sex life, he saw no reason to stop dating as he advanced in age. He liked younger men, and they seemed to be drawn to him. He loved going to the San Gregorio nude beach in the summer and to the Russian River, where he could enjoy his young friends’ beauty in the open air. From the 1960s to the ’80s, he took dozens of 8mm home movies of these adventures, and many of these films have been preserved. The films were first taken in Schwob’s apartment, but later he took his cine camera to the beach and other places. These films recorded a slice of midcentury gay life as he filmed happy (and often horny) groups of young men who are unselfconscious with their nudity and their affection for one another. Schwob was also good friends with the photographer, publisher, and sometime gay pornographer J. Brian [Jeremiah Brian Donahue], and since one of Brian’s auxiliary enterprises was running a gay escort agency (until it was shut down by police in 1972), there were always plenty of good-looking young men in his orbit. Both Schwob and Brian appear in some of Schwob’s home movies as they swim, sunbathe, or generally horse around with the boys on the beach or at the river.
It was also in the late 1970s that Schwob was harassed by the FBI. This time it was for producing pornography featuring under-age models. Schwob often copied photos and films for himself and others, and an acquaintance from Seattle asked him to make a copy of a movie. As his friend Trent Dunphy recalled: “I don’t know what was in the film, but Schwob made the copy and sent it back to the guy through the mail.” What Schwob did not know was that this man was under surveillance by the authorities, and when he sent the film back to Seattle, it crossed state lines, at which point the FBI became interested. Schwob was drawn into the affair when the film was seized and they identified the sender. They arrested Schwob and made his life very unpleasant while the investigation was going on. They came into his apartment, seized all his photographs, and kept them for about a year. Male nudes were no longer illegal by this time, but child porn still was (and is). In the end, he was not prosecuted. Dunphy later contacted the lawyer in the case, who said that Schwob escaped being arrested and tried by the skin of his teeth. The prosecutor said that because San Francisco was so politically liberal, he could never have gotten a conviction there, so the district attorney decided not to waste time on a trial.
It’s not clear whether the FBI was justified in pursuing Schwob or not. There were no reports of the affair in the newspapers and no records kept by the authorities and obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, so perhaps we’ll never know. The only thing that’s certain is that the G-men seized images and papers in the house, and they could find nothing overtly incriminating. It was undoubtedly a harrowing experience for Schwob, and when the photos and other materials were finally returned, they were completely disorganized, having been unceremoniously dumped into boxes.
As his photos and films show, Schwob always seemed to have a bevy of handsome boyfriends circulating in and out of his life, though a few were more long-lasting. Since he liked young men between twenty and 25 years of age, their “use-by” dates kept expiring, but he was a kind, generous, and loving person, so he never lacked for companionship with handsome young men. Even when he was in his eighties, Schwob had a 24-year-old boyfriend. They were devoted to one another, but the fly in the ointment was that the soon-to-be nonagenarian’s health was failing; he was suffering from congestive heart failure. Schwob had to break up with the boyfriend since he could no longer make love or do much of anything that required physical stamina. He fell into a deep depression and began to contemplate suicide. On July 24, 2000, he went into his bedroom and shot himself in the head. Later, some of his young friends went to the house and took anything of value they could find. Fortunately, they left all of Schwob’s papers and photographs. These he had bequeathed to Trent and his partner Robert Mainardi, who in turn donated these items to the GLBT Archives in San Francisco.
By moving to the Bay Area, Claude Schwob had been a participant in a shifting geography of homosexuality. Like many gay men of the postwar era, he was drawn to a large city that promised the freedom to live openly as gay. He chose to come to San Francisco at a time when that city was just starting to receive waves of LGBT people who wanted to make a new life for themselves. He once told a friend, photographer Dave Martin, that he believed there were two types of people who were living in San Francisco in the 1950s, those who fought for freedom and put their lives on the line, and those who “sat back and didn’t say anything, obeyed the laws and went about their business.” While Schwob was not exactly a firebrand, he was a revolutionary in his determination to live openly as a gay man—and to have a happy and successful life. As the ancient saying goes, “Living well is the best revenge.”
Perhaps the highest tribute to Schwob came from Trent Dunphy, who remarked that his friend “was always very comfortable with his sexuality—never ashamed. He became a role model for others because he showed them that gay people don’t always have to be depressed or live tragic lives. We take it for granted today, but when Schwob was living an open gay life, happiness was not always an option. There was too much guilt, but Schwob never seemed to feel anything but joy when it came to his sex life.”
A note on sources: The information used in this biography came mostly from Claude Schwob’s collection of papers in the San Francisco GLBT Society archives, interviews with Trent Dunphy and documents in Ancestor.com. I also found material in two books, E.G. Crichton (ed.), Matchmaking in the Archive: 19 Conversations with the Dead and 3 Encounters with Ghosts (Rutgers University Press, 2023) and John Ibson’s excellent work, Men without Maps: Some Gay Males of the Generation before Stonewall (University of Chicago Press, 2019). I also consulted Schwob’s 8 mm films, which are held at the Bob Mizer Foundation, San Francisco.
David L. Chapman, based in Seattle, is the author of over a dozen books on male photography and bodybuilding, including The Kings of Wrestling (2024).
