GLR July-August 2022

merous Mattachine Society groups across California. In 1953, the society’s first convention drew a crowd of 150 to 200 peo ple, which caused Hay to exult in retrospect: “[Y]ou looked up and all of a sudden the room became vast— well, you know, was there anybody in Los Angeles who wasn’t gay ? We’d never seen so many people.” Alas, the meeting exposed the rift within the group when founding member Chuck Rowland, the principle author of the society’s proposed constitution, addressed the crowd. Rowland buoyantly predicted a future “when we will march arm in arm, ten abreast down Hollywood Boulevard proclaiming our pride in our homosexuality.” The audience’s response? Gay crickets. “People were more in shock than anything else,” Rowland re called. “One of my friends in Mattachine said he almost had a coronary at such an outrageous thought.” During that fateful convention, Gaines writes, word arrived “that a Senate committee was scheduling hearings in L.A. to in vestigate nonprofit advocates for left-wing causes, and the dou ble trouble of former communists leading a gay-activist society could make it a very large target.” With that, Hay and the other founders realized they had to step down. The conservative ele ment took over and the Mattachine Society brought in “sexolo gists, psychologists, and psychiatrists” who pathologized gay men and snuffed out the stirrings of self-respect that Hay had tried so hard to promulgate. After the disastrous convention, Hay “seemed to disappear” from activist circles for a time. Like wise he disappears from Gaines’ discussion until returning for a bow in the chapter’s closing pages.

Throughout the book, just as I became invested in one valiant figure’s life and travails, that person would drop out and another would pop up. So it was when Hay exited and Frank Kameny arose. I was interested in Kameny’s brilliant academic career, his military service, his determined restart of the Matta chine Society, and the public recognition he received late in life, but I wondered what happened to Harry Hay. We later learn in a passing comment that Hay went on to cofound the Radical Faeries, “an anarchistic, communitarian, back-to-the-land movement,” in the late 1970s. I found this book frustrating in other ways. More than once, I flipped pages back and forth in search of key dates, only to find that they weren’t provided, and the narrative in any given chapter does not hew closely to chronological order. In a book about the history of a certain era, dates and the sequence of events are paramount. However, The Fifties does vividly remind us that the brave activists chronicled in this book started out as preternaturally smart, motivated young people with a broad streak of wildcat in them. Now that the 2020s are emerging as a vicious decade drenched in all manner of hate, we can take a cue from this earlier time. In the face of political oppression and draconian laws, these activists read everything, networked endlessly, pro tected each other, and then pounced when the time felt right. As Gaines writes on the last page of his book, “[T]hey ac complished what few of us can claim and more than we could ask of them: a little more distance down the path to a less im perfect union.”

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July–August 2022

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