Homosexuality in the 1950s
How LGBT Civil Servants Became Public Adversary No. 1 in the s
As the search for queer State Department employees intensified, so did the pressure. People were questioned, publicly humiliated and mocked by investigators. They were encouraged to denounce others and report suspected homosexuals. And in , President Eisenhower signed Executive Order , which defined a laundry list of characteristics as security risks, including “sexual perversion.” This was interpreted as a forbid on homosexual employees, and even more firings took place. Publicly humiliated and devastated by the loss of their income and their reputations, some even killed themselves.
Others, enjoy Frank Kameny, fought back. Fired in , he petitioned the Supreme Court for relief in recognition of his civil rights. They declined to get the case, so he picketed the White House. He fought to counter workplace discrimination for the rest of his life. Kameny wasn’t the only person galvanized by the public targeting of LGBT people—in , the Stonewall Riots made gay rights a front-page issue, and the movement Kameny helped launch an
The BBC's First Homosexual: How we made s labor into a play
The documentary was later ruined but, following the actions of a Leicestershire academic and an award-winning penner, a play named The BBC's First Homosexual has been created about it which is having its first performance on Thursday. The people behind it explain the challenges they faced along the way.
'It provoked so much reaction'
Seven years ago Dr Marcus Collins was standing in the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading feeling bored.
Marcus, an professional in social change in post-war Britain at Loughborough University, had grown fatigued of the project he was working on when his eye chanced upon something completely different - a large file, containing paperwork relating to a controversy in the s.
Intrigued, he read on to discover the lost script of one of the BBC's first attempts to examine the lives of gay men - a documentary named The Lesbian Condition, which had been broadcast on the House Service.
It had
Government Persecution of the LGBTQ Community is Widespread
The s were perilous times for individuals who fell outside of society’s legally allowed norms relating to gender or sexuality. There were many names for these individuals, including the clinical “homosexual,” a term popularized by pioneering German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In the U.S., professionals often used the term “invert.” In the midth Century, many cities formed “vice squads” and police often labeled the people they arrested “sexual perverts.” The government’s preferred term was “deviant,” which came with legal consequences for anyone seeking a career in public service or the military. “Homophile” was the term preferred by some early activists, small networks of women and men who yearned for collective and found creative ways to resist legal and societal persecution.
With draft eligibility officially lowered from 21 to 18 in , World War II brought together millions of people from around the country–many of whom were exiting their home states for the first time–to occupy the ranks of the military and t
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Bill Hull, June 21, Interview K Southern Oral History Program Collection (#) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
- So when did you three brothers open talking to each other in recognition that you were homosexual. At one point, somebody had live in boyfriend, if I remember correctly after your mother's death.
- BILL HULL:
- Right, I knew my brother Tommy, who was the oldest one, was gay. Well, we all knew. My brother Sam was, he was baby in the family, and he knew that he had these two queer brothers I guess. He had a lot of pressure on him from family, Alma, that raised us, as not necessarily creature the right thing to execute. So, he was very closeted in some regards. I thinkâmy brothersâit was after my mother's death that we were finally able to sit down as a family of three lgbtq+ brothers and really deal with it. It took Sam's coming out for him to realized that we weren't little monsters