GLR July-August 2022

BOOKS

The Incubator Decade

I T HAS BEEN almost thirty years since David Halberstam published The Fifties, a highly readable portrait of a dreamily hopeful and brutally discriminatory decade. Now comes a new book, a compact “underground history” of this era of postwar contradictions. The for mer managing editor of Time magazine and author of several previous books,

English family, who grew up in California and spent most of his life there. By the time he founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950, he was a married man, a father of two adopted daughters, and an ac tive member of the Communist Party USA. More than ready for a fresh start, Hay left the homophobic CPUSA and a dishonest marriage to concentrate on the nascent gay

H ILARY H OLLADAY

THE FIFTIES An Underground History by James R. Gaines Simon & Schuster. 288 pages, $28.

rights organization. Looking back on its early years, he re marked: “[T]here were no guideposts to go by. We felt we couldn’t make a mistake, because if we did, we might possibly deter the movement from developing for years to come. After all, we were facing McCarthyism. ... So we operated by una nimity, which meant, among other things, the meetings over weekends would often last sixteen to eighteen hours.” In the beginning, the society

James R. Gaines argues that gay liberation and three other so cial movements took hold in the 1950s, thanks to activists who refused to lie back and let a rapacious decade have its way with them. Each chapter introduces a movement through the lives of several figures whose contributions have mostly slipped through the sieve of our nation’s short memory. In his chapter

on gay rights, Gaines tells the sto ries of Harry Hay and Frank Ka meny, leaders of the Mattachine Society. The chapter on feminism chronicles the careers of legal scholar Pauli Murray, women’s studies founder Gerda Lerner, and civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer. The civil rights chapter weaves together the stories of Black veterans who became ac tivists, primarily Medgar Evers and Robert F. Williams, and the closing chapter on ecology, in an unusual pairing, links environ mentalist Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring , with MIT mathe matician-philosopher Norbert Wiener, author of The Human Use of Human Beings . In his introduction, Gaines cites the theory that “change hap pens not by winning hearts and minds but by changing the law, after which hearts and minds will follow.” But, as his book demon strates, “there is an earlier moment in the process of change, when a

was divided into local groups, somewhat like communist cells, that had little contact with each other as a means of self-protec tion. An early mission statement declared that the organization would help its members stop being “bewildered, unhappy, alone, isolated from their own kind and unable to adjust to the dominant culture.” The society also sought to expand the litera ture on homosexuality and do what it could to “erase from our law books the discriminatory and oppressive legislation presently directed against the homosexual minority.” As so often happens when a new organization’s goals are unas sailably noble, discord broke out quickly. Mattachine’s flamboyant “street queens” were louder and prouder than the pinstriped con servatives, who were all about playing it safe. Hay was in the bolder group, though his com

Harry Hay

ments don’t sound all that radical now: “We were talking about the right to self-respect ... and to appreciate that we are strong, not weak people—that a sissy means a stubborn person who’s put up with an awful lot of stuff and who comes through being exactly what he is.” But Hay was off and running, no matter who was or wasn’t following him. Gaines describes how Hay helped his friend Dale Jennings beat a “vag-lewd” (vagrancy-lewd) charge in L.A.—an early success that encouraged the founding of nu

few variously driven people set out to win over the hearts and minds of those who make the laws. Though isolated by their personal histories, idiosyncrasies, and gifts, they have in com mon a need, a vision, and the blind courage to fight for change in their time and for the future.” That is certainly true of Harry Hay, the son of a privileged Hilary Holladay is the author of The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography .

The G & LR

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