Sexuality and Socialism. Sherry Wolf

in close proximity with other women, many had a chance to socialize in all-female environments. Despite persistent anti-homosexual bias in society, the unprecedented mobility afforded to many working-class women during the war loosened previous sexual constraints. As D’Emilio argues,

      The war temporarily weakened the patterns of daily life that channeled men and women toward heterosexuality and inhibited homosexual expression…. For men and women conscious of a strong attraction to their own sex but constrained by their milieu from acting upon it, the war years eased the coming out process and facilitated entry into the gay world.⁴⁵

      The social upheaval created by the Second World War has had a long-lasting impact on gay life in the United States. Some men and women who had been pulled from small-town life at an early age were attracted to port cities, such as San Francisco, which presented the opportunity to be openly gay among a community of others like themselves. San Francisco in particular became a gay mecca toward the end of the war, when fighting was most intense in the Pacific, and official military policy turned up the heat on gays, discharging gay men by the hundreds into the picturesque port town. Denver, Kansas City, Buffalo, and San Jose, California, among other cities, opened their first gay bars after the war and developed the beginnings of gay enclaves. During the postwar period, there was a flood of new gay-and lesbian-themed books in which, unlike past works, gay characters accepted their sexuality, even if these books still portrayed gay and lesbian characters as tragic figures. Like many Black soldiers who were emboldened to fight against racial segregation at home after their participation in a war they were told was about fighting for democracy, gays returned from the war with a greater sense of entitlement to rights and benefits.

      Tellingly, while the U.S. government attacked the barbarism of the Nazis, it managed to avoid any discussion of Adolf Hitler’s treatment of homosexuals. While gays were “coming out under fire” in the American armed forces, the Nazis went on a campaign of terror against homosexuals in Germany. Beginning in 1938, gays and lesbians were sent to concentration camps and were forced to wear pink triangles. Berlin, which had been home to one of the world’s largest gay subcultures, became a nightmare for gays. “Indecent activities” between two men or two women—a touch, a kiss, or handholding—were enough to be sent to the camps. The head of Hitler’s storm troopers, Heinrich Himmler, said, “We must exterminate these people root and branch…the homosexual must be entirely eliminated.”⁴⁶ The Nazis claimed to be doing all of this in the name of the sanctity of the family and motherhood. In Germany, a country wracked by unemployment and destitution and gearing up for war, Hitler imposed a complete lockdown on dissent of every kind, including the implied dissent of homosexuality.

      Among the many crimes of the United States in that war, one crime that has remained largely hidden from history is the decision by the U.S. occupying forces to continue the imprisonment after the war of gays and lesbians who were found in Hitler’s concentration camps.⁴⁷ Of the estimated fifteen thousand gays sent to the camps, one-third survived, many of whom were forced to remain in prison in American-occupied West Germany through the 1960s, when the Nazi-era anti-homosexual law, Paragraph 175, was finally stricken from the books.⁴⁸

      While the number of homosexuals thrown into Hitler’s camps is far outnumbered by other targeted groups, accounts from survivors leave no doubt of the universality of barbarism meted out to all of the Third Reich’s victims. Of the non-Jewish prisoners in the camps, homosexuals had the highest death rates, 53 percent, three-quarters of whom died within a year of their imprisonment.⁴⁹ Pierre Seel’s memoir of his experiences in the camps describes vividly the recollection that decades later still awakens him shrieking into the night. He was ordered along with others of his barracks to watch in indescribable horror as his eighteen-year-old lover was stripped naked and torn to shreds by German shepherds while his lover’s final screams echoed inside a tin pail placed over his head.⁵⁰

      Cold War crackdown

      Nothing shook up the sexual consciousness of postwar American society like the release of the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey Reports on American male and female sexual behavior. Fifty percent of ten thousand men surveyed admitted erotic feelings at some point toward other men; 37 percent had had sex with men; 4 percent claimed to be gay. Of the women surveyed, 28 percent admitted erotic feelings toward other women, while 13 percent said they’d had sex with women; about 2 percent said they were lesbians.⁵¹ Alfred Kinsey commented at the time that, given the predominance of homophobia, his results indicated “such activity would appear in the histories of a much larger portion of the population if there were no social constraints.”⁵² Kinsey’s studies gave public expression to the reality of a growing gay minority in the United States. This was to have a profound impact on gays’ ability to mobilize for their rights. In the immediate postwar period gays in the United States went from complete isolation to developing an awareness of themselves as an oppressed class of people.

      As groundbreaking as these studies were in revealing the widespread presence of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in U.S. society after the war, it is important not to take Kinsey’s figures as permanent and suprahistorical. Instead, what Kinsey’s studies and others since suggest is that LGBT people are not a fixed proportion of any society, but instead their ability to come out or for anyone to explore alternative sexual possibilities are largely shaped by fluctuating social and economic conditions. D’Emilio again sums up well the implications of this perspective:

      I have argued that lesbian and gay identity and communities are historically created, the result of a process of capitalist development that has spanned many generations. A corollary of this argument is that we are not a fixed social minority composed for all time of a certain percentage of the population. There are more of us than one hundred years ago, more of us than forty years ago. And there may very well be more gay men and lesbians in the future.⁵³

      If the war opened up a vast space for the development of a gay community, the postwar period witnessed concerted attempts to close that space. The shifting needs of the American Empire, which emerged from the war a superpower, did in fact create both the conditions for heightened repression and sowed the seeds of opposition.

      There were strong economic and social incentives for ratcheting up harassment and legal discrimination against gays after the war. With U.S. industry churning out more than 60 percent of all manufactured goods in the world, the need for a higher birth rate to staff the labor force and military raised the idealization of the nuclear family to new levels. America’s new industrial prowess brought household appliances and a marketing blitz unknown to previous generations of workers.

      Women were driven out of the industrial jobs they held during the war. White women were told to go back home, put on housedresses, and make babies, while Black women were meant to return to their prewar jobs as low-wage domestic servants. Gone were women’s practical, square-shouldered, androgynous fashions of the 1940s; in came the frilly dresses with exaggerated busts and hyperfeminine lines of the 1950s.

      Unlike the previous image of the working-class male—who in the thirties and late forties unionized, took political action, and went on strike—a new masculine domesticity was encouraged. Sociologists like C. Wright Mills dissected Corporate America’s drive to create “organization man,” an obedient team player who assiduously followed the rules of the corporate structure, bowed to authority, and sought domestic security while eschewing confrontation and struggle. The new medium of television was used to help promote a suburban family man and avid consumer in shows like Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver, and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. As one historian put it, “Cold War political discourse tended to position Americans who protested the rise of ‘organization man’ or who rejected the postwar American dream of owning a home in the suburbs as homosexuals and lesbians who threatened the nation’s security.”⁵⁴

      This heightened emphasis on the nuclear family was part and parcel of an era of political reaction in the United States. The launching of the Cold War with the Soviet Union brought with it an anticommunist witch hunt at home, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. Gays were among McCarthyism’s many targets. Liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger, both reflecting and promoting the twisted conflation of communism and homosexuality of the time, equated