42. Rainbow Rising: Homo-Feels about Homophiles, Part 1
/We return with another episode in your podfeeds today, this time from our long-since visited mini-series, Rainbow Rising! Leigh is joined by guest host Tyler Albertario to talk about pre-Stonewall gay rights and the rise, heydey, and subsequent fall of the Homophile movement and how the fight for gay civil rights evolved into the struggle for queer liberation. In this first episode of a two-parter, Leigh and Tyler discuss the birth of the homophile movement and some of the main players – gay civil rights organizations in 1950s-1960s America who dared to gather together amid communism moral panic, FBI raids, and spurious homomedicalist points of view about queer identity. Scandalous tales found within, including secret identities and anonymous cells, the gaslighting J. Edgar Hoover himself, fake “ancient Greek” lesbian poetry, and more!
Next time, we’ll come back in Part 2 to discuss how all these groups came together at regional and national conferences to organize, including all the juicy drama and disagreements, and the decline of homophile-style organizing post-Stonewall.
Outline
0:00 – Introduction and Announcements
5:34 – Socio-Historic Context
6:41-7:44 – Content Warning: Mention of anti-gay medical treatments
17:16 – Main Topic: The Rise of the Homophile Movement
15:20 – Mattachine Foundation/Mattachine Society
16:00 – Word of the Week
39:21 – ONE, Inc. 52:49 – Daughters of Bilitis
1:17:38 – Mattachine Society of Washington & Frank Kameny
1:21:03 – Pop-Culture Tie-In
1:22:31 – Main Takeaways and Conclusions
1:25:15 - 1:27:22 – Content Warning: Mention of pederasty/NAMBLA
1:27:24 – How Gay were They?
1:31:36 – Closing and Where to Find us Online
