“Three or four days in each month, the homosexual’s instinct [for moral decency] breaks down, and he is driven into abnormal fields of sexual practice.”

—Dr. Arthur Lewis Miller, as quoted in The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, by Lillian Faderman

To start this queer history month off right, I want to offer a brief bit of context around what the political situation for queer people looked like before the social movement we know as “the queer rights movement” kicked off in earnest. It’s important to note that this is not the beginning of queer activism, in America, let alone the world, but we have to start somewhere. So today we’re going to talk about the beginning of the twentieth century, and the problems facing queer people at the time.

To start off, let’s talk about this asshole Dr. Arthur Lewis Miller. He was a senator from Nebraska, and before that, he was a physician, state health director, and legislator in the Nebraska legislature. He was Pretty Sure he had that whole Queer Thing figured out. You see, queer people were just mentally ill people who couldn’t control their sexual impulses, and needed psychiatric help. In 1948 he authored the Sexual Psychopath Law for the District of Columbia. This law, also known as Public Law 615, expanded the laws prohibiting sodomy in DC in hilarious (I love that there’s an official government document asserting that “any penetration, however slight” counts as sodomy) but terrifying (this was absolutely done to make it easier to prosecute queer people) ways.

Sodomy laws and laws trying to legislate what queer people did in the privacy of their homes were nothing new; by 1960, 21 states had laws on the books that any solicitation of “degeneracy”, “lewdness”, or “crimes against nature” were illegal, whether they happened in public or in your home. Meaning suggesting to your life partner that you have sex is breaking the law.

But anyways, back to that asshole Dr. Arthur Lewis Miller and his Act. The Act didn’t just expand sodomy laws, it also defined a “sexual psychopath”–someone who was repeatedly found to be queer–and set up a special process for them. See, what Supreme Asshole Dr. Arthur Lewis Miller thought was a good plan was if someone was accused of being a “sexual psychopath”, that’s not a criminal charge, but they should be examined by two psychiatrists, and if the psychiatrists determine, in their very scientific opinions, that person definitely has a case of The Gay, they tell that to a court. And the court has a hearing. And the person accused of being Totally Sick With The Gay can have a lawyer, and can even demand a trial by jury, but this was set up specifically as a non-criminal procedure to avoid that pesky “innocent until guilty” thing. And if the court decides that the person has a case of The Gay, that person would be remanded to the care of Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in D.C., until such a time as they were cured. At which point, they’d be released to the courts, to be tried for the crimes, which would presumably then lead to more imprisonment for them.

Unfortunately, this being the 50s and “gay” being considered an illness and all, mental health treatments were so close to torture that most people would prefer to be in jail, thanks.

In 1962, Eldridge Rhodes and Thomas Earl were walking in San Diego and, unbeknownst to them, being followed by a couple of assholes from San Diego’s Vice Squad. Vice Squads and Morals Squads had arisen in the 40s and 50s, and their power grew as Americans worried more and more about protecting “The American Way of Life”, which didn’t really include queer people. Vice Squads’ one job was to enforce sex and drugs laws, and their productivity was judged by the number of arrests they made. They spent a lot of time and taxpayer money trying to rid America of queer people.

But anyways, so these assholes are tailing two men. Maybe because someone called in a tip that “two Negro males” were trying to pimp prostitutes to sailors. And Eldridge Rhodes was black, and the officers insisted–in a twist that will shock black people everywhere–that the black guy matched the description of one of the two black men supposedly committing a crime. And Thomas Earl could have been a sailor wearing civvies. So yeah, they follow them to a hotel, and see them go to a room. So the assholes go listen at the door, and hear a bed squeaking and “kissing-type” noises coming from the room, at which point they conveniently discover they can peek through the transom, and there was a gap in the molding they could peek in. Eldridge Rhodes and Thomas Earl were having oral sex, and so they arrested them.

It being Quite Some Time since the horrific involuntary-commitment thing happened, America came to its senses and got rid of those laws. Kidding! They had expanded around the country and facilities had been built. So Eldridge Rhodes and Thomas Earl got to an indefinite stay at one of the most infamous and oldest infirmaries for Having The Gay, Atascadero State Hospital. Atascadero had the state of the art for treating The Gay: lobotomies, electric shock therapy, hormone injection, and the administration of a muscle relaxant that gave the sensation of choking or dying while a doctor informed you that if you didn’t change your ways, you’d die.

Thomas Earl tried to get a retrial because the assholes didn’t have a warrant, but the court ruled that no warrant was necessary to listen in, peek through the transom or the crack, and once the officers saw the blatant crime of two adult, consenting men having sex, they were absolutely right to break down the door and arrest them. I can’t verify, but feel in my heart, that this verdict was delivered with a “fuck you, go back to getting tortured, homo” tacked on the end.

What makes this even more galling to me is that Alfred Kinsey published his famous reports in 1948 and 1953 that found, and I’m paraphrasing, “basically everyone’s at least a little gay”. So this psychiatric “care” wasn’t even operating with that decade’s psychiatric developments. But hey, the DSM still listed Having The Gay as a mental illness, so what can you expect, really.

Of course, psychiatry didn’t really corner the market on Sciences Eager to Be Horrible to the Queers. In 1909, F. W. Hatch, the secretary of the State Commision in Lunacy for California, got a law passed that granted medical superintendents of asylums and prisons the authority to “asexualize” (also known as “castrate”) a patient or inmate to improve their “physical, mental, or moral condition”. In 1917, the law was expanded and clarified. You see, it wasn’t a penal measure, it was just intended to weed out “mental disease which may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants.” Which you may recognise as “eugenics”, which was kind of The Whole Deal of the Nazis and has since been recognised to be Probably a Bad Idea. But in the pre-Nazi era, eugenics was a science, and it was very eager to help with The Queer Problem. By 1921, over 2000 people had been sterilised in California. And California definitely led the way on being awful in this specific regard, but it certainly wasn’t alone. Castration has always been a fashionable way to deal with queer people, even decades later, as Alan Turing found out. In fairness, the United Kingdom did apologise for that. In fairness, that doesn’t bring Alan Turing back from his castration-induced suicide, and an apology 70+ years after the life-destroying fact does feel a bit like too little, too late.

Anyways, before I got distracted talking about how a war hero was murdered, we were talking about life before The Movement. And honestly, before The Movement, everyone just kind of… did the best they could to get through life. There were activists, but most people, when charged with crimes that essentially amounted to “being queer”, just pled guilty and hoped their public shame would pass quickly. It rarely did, and was often life-ruining, involving getting disowned and/or loss of employability, depending on how rich you were. You were broken, and everyone knew it. And if everyone didn’t know, entire government bodies funded with taxpayer dollars would make it their life’s mission to ensure everyone knew it. But that’s another story for another day.

For today, let’s leave it on “getting charged with gayness was life-ruining” and “everybody just pled guilty”, which sets us up nicely to talk about Dale Jennings and The Mattachine Society tomorrow.