Stonewall (25 page)

When it came time for the conference to turn its attention to the possible creation of a national homophile organization, it voted, not surprisingly, “against considering the item.” Yet the militants did win support in Kansas City for the establishment of a national legal fund, for a nationwide day of protest in May against the military's policy of excluding homosexuals, for a “cooperative exchange of ideas and information among homophile groups,” and for another conference to be held in August in San Francisco—all of which gave the militants considerable grounds for optimism. They felt hopeful that in San Francisco five months hence, a national organization with real powers could be established.

Foster played a backseat role at the convention. Sensitive to the fact that he was still “a complete novice” in the movement, and modest by temperament, he kept out of the more heated debates. But he was eager to learn more and to meet people, and on all three nights of the conference he hosted a “hospitality suite” that went from eleven
P.M.
to four
A.M.
He had already met several movement leaders at ECHO conferences and during the 1965 White House demonstration, and came away from Kansas City admiring Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Kay Tobin all the more. (“My mind runs in the same track with Kameny's,” Foster wrote; “we both instinctively lean toward formalisms.”) Of those homophile movers and shakers whom he now met for the first time, he expansively decided that he “liked most everyone.”

Yet within that ecumenical embrace, he allowed for some gradations. He was especially taken with twenty-two-year-old Bill Kelley of Chicago's Mattachine Midwest, who served as recording secretary of the convention, awarding him the highest Gunnison virtues: “tactful, sincere, solid reasoning, good detail man.” And at first, he found a few of the more celebrated movement figures less than endearing. He thought Don Slater, the head of L.A.'s Tangents, “wispy, waspy” and temperamental; was intimidated by “butch” Shirley Willer, the president of New York DOB; considered Clark Polak, the leader of
Philadelphia's Janus Society, “brash and brassy”; and thought Guy Strait, editor of the
Citizens
'
News
, his “temperamental opposite”—“a rank individualist opposed to anything that smacks of discipline, order or authority … a living symbol of all that is wrong with the movement.”

But basically Foster was thrilled with being in the thick of things and felt inspired by the presence of so many dedicated people. If a few of them had rubbed him the wrong way, and if the conference had not talked as much as he would have liked about concrete actions and the need to create a new national structure, he nonetheless came home from Kansas City convinced that “the importance of the movement and the happiness to millions of suffering persons that it will bring in the long run easily overshadows the pains of growing.” Resolving to devote himself to the homophile cause, he immediately began to disengage from some of his organizational work with barbershop quartets.

And he began to put some of his thoughts to paper. Within a few weeks after returning from Kansas City, and apparently influenced by the militants there, he wrote a compelling essay for
The Homosexual Citizen
(Washington Mattachine's monthly) entitled “The Agony of the Mask.” In it, Foster—the least self-promoting of men—made a strong plea for ending secrecy and openly avowing one's homosexuality. It was the only way, Foster argued, that gay people could “help repair the damage done to them by others”—a phrasing that reflected the militant view that an oppressive society, and not bad genes or character, had produced whatever disabling aspects were present in the homosexual life-style.

Yet Foster's cautionary side remained. He was not advocating, he hastened to make clear in the article, any form of “disconcerting melodrama,” any belligerent “exhibitionism.” His goal was social acceptance, not social upheaval; he wanted the homosexual to gain entry into mainstream institutional life, not, as later radicals would, to press for revamping the institutions themselves along more egalitarian lines. Indeed, Foster argued against secrecy precisely in order to win “institutional support,” convinced that the emergence of a legion of well-behaved, well-dressed homosexuals would contradict the view that all gay people were “far-out types and professional nonconformists.” Once that stereotype was contradicted, Foster believed, experts and institutions of “caliber” would rally to the homosexual's support.
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This was a complex appeal, not simply a call to conformity. Foster personally found “far-out types” distasteful, but in calling on homosexuals
who did not fit “the storybook caricatures” to publicly declare themselves, he was working on a track somewhat parallel to that of the psychologist Evelyn Hooker. Starting in the late fifties, Hooker had published several pathbreaking articles—which Foster had read—that used a nonclinical sample of gay men (previous studies had. been drawn from patient and prison populations) to demonstrate that the psychological profile of the “healthy” gay men in her study differed in no essential way from her control group of heterosexual men.

In other words, Hooker had shown that at least
some
homosexuals existed who were not “maladjusted” or unhappy with their lives, and did not fit the dominant psychiatric view that equated their “condition” with pathology. Though Foster had thought Hooker's work “hardly immune to criticism,” he, like her, was trying to increase the pool of publicly visible homosexuals whose lives were similar to those of other middle-class Americans (and thus could be validated as “normal”)—even if, unlike Hooker, he was personally uncomfortable with any nonconforming behavior
other
than homosexuality.

At the “Ten Days in August” conference, which convened in San Francisco in the summer of 1966, Foster got a chance to share his views with a wider audience, having been chosen as one of five speakers scheduled to give major addresses. And he spoke to a crowd double the size of that attending the Kansas City gathering some five months before—though it had fewer than a dozen women among some eighty delegates. Indeed, the San Francisco conference proved to be the largest homophile gathering ever held in the United States, and its offerings ranged from a panel discussion of law reform (with an impressive roster that included California state legislators Willie Brown and John L. Burton), to a theatrical presentation, “Gay 90's Night,” to a picnic that one gay paper claimed more than six hundred people attended.
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The increase in numbers produced the usual corollary: heightened tension. This was a gathering worth fighting over. There was contention, even before the convention opened, about which organizations should be accredited and how many votes should be delegated to each. And the convention itself produced such a proliferation of resolutions—and of arguments for and against them—that many delegates felt more numbed than enlightened. Perhaps because one of his own resolutions was voted down, and he was unable to get the floor as often as he wanted (which was often), Guy Strait—a flamboyant San Franciscan whose penchant for youthful partners got him in periodic trouble with the law—later wrote that “never before in
the history of mankind has so much time been wasted by so few people in order that they may hear their own voices.”

The disgruntled also included two of the West Coast's legendary activists, Harry Hay and Dorr Legg. Hay was the convener of that small group of gay men who had founded the Mattachine Society in 1950, but now, in 1966, his interest had veered to his newest creation, the Circle of Loving Companions, a group meant to function according to Whitmanesque principles of comradely love. The Circle did occasionally broaden out to include a few friends, but it was usually made up solely of Hay and his lover, John Burnside. The two attended the San Francisco conference as representatives of the Circle, and Hay came away from it more confirmed than ever in the splendor of his chosen isolation: No one else was evolved enough to share his vision—“conservative” Easterners, with their attraction to assimilation, least of all.
⁵

Dorr Legg arrived at the conference already bruised. In the spring of 1965, the ONE, Inc. mini-empire over which he presided with an acerbic voice and iron hand, had come apart. Don Slater, a disaffected board member of ONE, simply packed up the organization's thousand-volume library one weekend and hauled it to his own quarters. “The Heist,” as it became known, produced years of litigation and decades of ill feeling. Long rumored to have ice water in his veins, Dorr Legg frostily impaled almost everyone who took a prominent role at the San Francisco gathering—and especially the militants.

Legg used
ONE Confidential
, the newsletter he edited under the pseudonym “Marvin Cutler,” to skewer the keynote speakers one by one. Frank Kameny, described as “somewhat fanatic and doctrinaire,” had given, according to Legg, a typically “belligerent, militant paper.” The speech by William Beardemphl, president of SIR, was said to contain “so many inaccuracies” as to be very nearly worthless. Shirley Willer, recently elected national president of the Daughters of Bilitis, was chastised for “a booming delivery that took some listeners aback”—a putdown that went a long way toward corroborating the central contention in Willer's speech that DOB should be wary of participating in homophile coalitions, since they were dominated by gay men patronizingly insensitive to their lesbian sisters.
⁶

Not that Legg, for one, was any more sensitive to his gay male brethren. He characterized Clark Polak, president of Philadelphia's Janus Society and the fourth keynote speaker, as an “arrogant and insufferable boor,” whose “conduct throughout the entire Conference … alienated most of the delegates.” Polak had indeed spoken strong
words, accusing some of the leaders in the movement of failing to “rid themselves of their own anti-homosexual sentiments” and of caring only for the welfare of the “good” homosexual—attitudes Polak had labeled “Aunt Maryism.”

Of the five keynoters, only Foster escaped Dorr Legg's bitter tongue. This was the more surprising because Foster had all his life been terrified of public speaking and was a despised Easterner—and Legg had announced that “the loudest noises and most extreme behavior seem to be coming from the East Coast” (a view directly counter to Harry Hay's that the East Coast was more conservative than the West). Legg did not regard Foster's arguments in favor of a national organization as “conclusive,” but did feel that “in the main” Foster had argued his case “reasonably” well—and for Dorr Legg, that was remarkably high praise.

Foster deserved it. His speech cogently argued that the homophile movement had reached a point where only a national organization could advance it to the next stage. In the name of gaining greater prestige, security, publicity, and stability, he pressed the case for ending the confused duplication of disparate local efforts. “When homosexuality finally hits No. 1 topic of the day—and I think the day may be approaching fast,” Foster argued, “it would be well to be prepared.… If we don't define ourselves—they will. If we don't state our aims—they will.”
⁷

Foster went on in his speech to reiterate the view that homosexuals had to abandon secrecy—or accept the fact that their image would continue to be constructed with data taken from psychiatric patients alone. But in a spasm of conservatism that drew him away from militants like Kameny, he did call for continued reliance on well-placed, sympathetic “experts”—on the physicians, judges, legislators, clergy, et al., who Foster confidently felt, despite the experience of recent decades, would rally to the homosexuals' side once a more “substantial” image had been presented.

Foster also recoiled in his speech from any suggestion that he was advocating “flamboyant” direct action. “It won't be necessary,” he predicted, “to trot down to city square, climb up on the statue of General Sheridan, and wave a banner”; such behavior, “violating the law,” would not do anything “constructive” to effect change. And yet in nearly the same breath—convulsing back again to a position
beyond
anything that Kameny and other militants had suggested—Foster proceeded to champion “public displays of affection.” This, he felt, could “demonstrate to the public, as in no other manner, the futility
of its laws and perhaps its attitude.” It could further demonstrate, he argued—perhaps with his own situation in mind—“that there is more to homosexuality than sex.”

Somehow Foster felt that this could be done without crossing the line to “exhibitionism” and without becoming “intentionally provocative.” All that he was advocating, he insisted, “was physical expression of genuine affection under prevailing ethical norms and accepted rules of propriety and good taste that govern heterosexual behavior.” But the “accepted norms” of the mid-sixties could never tolerate
any
open expression of gay affection. And for Foster to hold out hope that it would, reflected an innocent, unwarranted faith in the American way.

When it came time for the conference to set up a national organization, the final product was closer to Shirley Willer's blueprint for a loosely structured federation—what Foster called “a sort of U.N.type forum for ideas”—than to the more centralized organization he and others had argued for. Named the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), the new grouping was bound by an Articles of Confederation, as it were, not a Constitution. Even so, a number of prominent lesbians, led by Del Martin (the cofounder of DOB), were wary of it and insisted on the primary importance of maintaining DOB's autonomy. Martin and others had begun to shift their energies into the emerging women's movement. They distrusted the ability or willingness of their gay male associates to understand feminism, let alone the special needs and perspectives of lesbians.
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