Unwritten History

“Unwritten history: Gay press in America,” The Daily Cardinal, October 13, 1998

Vice Versa, “America’s gayest magazine,” never quite made it to the newsstand. Yet its importance as progenitor of the gay and lesbian press is indisputable.

Published during nine months of 1947 and 1948, Lisa Ben, using a pseudonym created by scrambling the word lesbian, was the magazine’s founder, publisher and editor. She distributed the monthly publication in lesbian bars and through the mail in Los Angeles, limiting the circulation to only a dozen copies per issue — the copy machine was not yet a reality and procuring the services of a printer was a fiscal and social impossibility.

“Its impact obviously had to be limited,” said gay and lesbian press historian Dr. Rodger Streitmatter in a recent interview. “But it sort of set the standard and established the editorial mix of the kinds of things that would appear in gay and lesbian publications for the next several decades.”

Ben ceased publishing Vice Versa when she changed jobs at RKO Studios in early 1948. Her new position precluded the clandestine enterprise from continuing, as Ben had performed much of the work for the periodical during business hours using RKO’s supplies. And the gay and lesbian press had seen its first, though certainly not its last, casualty.

During the 1950s, gays and lesbians experienced critical setbacks while President Dwight D. Eisenhower held office, most notable among them, Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order barring homosexuals from federal employment and military service. Compounding the harsh sociopolitical climate was the Cold War and the pervasive conformism and suspicion it engendered.

“The society was really very hostile toward gay men and toward lesbians,” said Streitmatter. “If anyone was identified as being gay, that person could immediately be fired from his job or from her job. So that was certainly a very hostile atmosphere for anyone to even think about publishing any kind of periodical.”

However, a small group of gay and lesbian men and women did more than think about it. Between 1953 and 1956, two gay publications and one lesbian publication, based in Los Angeles and San Francisco, were founded. ONE was the first, adopting an editorial stance that set it quite apart from not only mainstream society but from its progeny as well.

“I would say ONE was more assertive in the idea that homosexuals were a legitimate part of society and should be recognized as so, and that the difference also be recognized by the larger society,” said Streitmatter.

Mattachine Review offered an alternative to ONE’s insurgent platform, endorsing a moderate position that favored assimilation. “They didn’t really think they were going to be able to revolutionize society, [but] that it was going to have to be a very slow evolution over a longer period of time,” Streitmatter said.

Just as Mattachine Review was spawned to resist its contentious precursor, ONE, so was The Ladder borne of a similar impluse. The Ladder espoused an “accomodationist” point of view as well, but sprung, more significantly, fromMattachine Review’s refusal to report on lesbian issues.

Though ONE emerged as the clear leader in circulation and influence, it was not immune to the same struggles that undermined its gay/lesbian press rivals. There were formidable obstacles in the paths of these three publications during the 1950s: FBI surveillance; difficulty finding advertisers, printers, distributors, and newsstands willing to alienate straight patrons; and readers unwilling to risk exposure.

But the most imposing hindrance was presented by the United States Post Office. When the October 1954 issue of ONEwas confiscated by postal officials, the editors of that publication began a four-year legal battle that ultimately resulted in a landmark Supreme Court ruling allowing gay-oriented material to be distributed through the mail. Additionally, the court concluded, in Streitmatter’s words, that “homosexual orientation of material, per se, did not mean that it was obscene.”

“I think [this was] probably the most important stride forward during the 1950s with the gay press,” said Streitmatter.

The 1960s marked a pronounced shift toward militancy, even by ONE’s increasingly dated standard, and the use of confrontational and very public tactics became routine.

“By the 1960s,” explained Streitmatter, “there seemed to be much more interest in carrying [the movement] to the next step of changing things not on an internal basis but on an external basis. That meant confronting society and confronting the major institutions in society, such as the White House, where the first public demonstration by gay people was held.”

That demonstration in May 1965 garnered little mainstream media attention. But the gay and lesbian press, now piloted by vibrant new publications like Philadelphia-based Drum Magazine, The Homosexual Citizen in Washington, D.C., and a revamped Ladder, offered extensive reporting of that event and many others that followed.

By decade’s end, a large counterculture, reflected in the gay and lesbian press, had coalesced around opposition to the Vietnam war, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and, most significantly, sex.

“More than anything else,” said Streitmatter, “[what] really linked the counterculture movement with the gay and lesbian movement was sex, and the fact that there was a much more liberal view of sexual activity among members of the counterculture. This included bisexuality and it included sex between people of the same sex. So, along with the idea that no longer did people think that the only sexual activity that was valid was that [which] led to procreation, it sort of opened the whole door to the idea of sex for enjoyment.”

Rodger Streitmatter is a professor of journalism in the school of Communication at American University in Washington, D.C. He is in Madison today to deliver the Seventh Annual Lecture of the Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America. The lecture is called “Before Stonewall: A History of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America.” Dr. Streitmatter’s book, Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Faber and Faber, 1995), is the basis for his lecture and for the preceding article.