- Sara Phillips: Today we are ple
ased
to introduce Dick Wagner
as part of the Wisconsin Historic
al Museum's
History Sandwiched In lecture ser
ies.
The opinions expressed today are
those of the presenter
and are not necessarily those
of the Wisconsin Historical Socie
ty
or the museum's employees.
Scholar and activist Dick Wagner
was the first openly gay member
of the Dane County Board of Super
visors,
where he served for 14 years.
In 1983, he was appointed by Gov
ernor Tony Earl
to co-chair the Governor's Counc
il
on Lesbian and Gay Issues, the fi
rst in the nation.
In 2005, he joined the board
of Fair Wisconsin
to fight the constitutional amend
ment
against marriage equality.
Wagner has served on the Wisconsi
n Arts board,
the Wisconsin Humanities Committ
ee,
the Board of Downtown Madison In
c.,
the Madison Plan Commission,
the Madison Urban Design Commi
ssion,
the Madison Landmarks Commission
, Historic Madison,
the Madison Trust for histor
ic preservation,
the board of the Olbrich Botanica
l Gardens,
and the board of the Friends of U
W Libraries.
He is also the author of the book
we're talking about today,
We've Been Here All Along:
Wisconsin's Early Gay History
published recently by the
Wisconsin Historical Society
Press
which uncovers previously hidden
stories
of gay Wisconsinites.
Please join me in welcoming
Dick Wagner.
[audience applauding] - Thank yo
u.
Thank you.
I have so just a screensaver
slide here
from my postcard collection, whic
h is quite extensive,
which I use to illustrate som
e talks.
And it's an old sort of "greetin
gs from Wisconsin."
If you look at it, you notice you
have beer, cheese,
milk, cranberries.
You have fishers, hunters, b
eer servers.
Deer, what you don't have, you do
n't have women,
you don't have minorities,
you don't have any LBGT folks.
So this kind of stereotype o
f Wisconsin
needed some correction,
which is part of the reason why
I wrote the book,
We've Been Here All Along: nWi
sconsin's Early Gay History.
As Sara mentioned, it's part of
a two volume series.
This goes up to 1969, the Stonew
all period
and next volume is gonna follow
after the post Stonewall period.
Now, some of the things that a
re sort of assumed
with the 50th anniversary of Sto
newall.
The book is sort of counteri
ntuitive about,
sort of if you think of Stonewall
and how it's being presented.
It's like there was no gay hist
ory before Stonewall,
and if you think of it,
all the history happened on the
coast
in California or New York, not mu
ch in flyover country.
All wrong, which is why the book
is
NWe've Been Here All Along.
Stonewall is used as a marker for
gay liberation
in the discussions that are occur
ring.
But you need to be broader about
this.
Wisconsin LBGT individuals
figured out their own identi
ties,
they expressed those identities
in non-normative ways.
They built networks and they
, by own agency,
liberated themselves in this pre
-Stonewall period.
And so that's what I wanted to t
alk about in the book.
But I also thought about what if
you were doing a title,
sort of the glass half empty
about this book.
And if you did that kind of a ti
tle,
the book would be, "Wisconsin's R
ampant Homophobia
"and Its Occasional Failures as
Some Lesbian,
"Gay Men, and Trans Persons Resi
st."
Because you had national cri
minal law,
you had medicalization as a s
ickness.
And you had a cultural suppressi
on,
that amounted to almost total
ignorance.
And so that's the basis of t
he homophobia,
you get negative perceptions,
such as this sort of twisted demo
nic kind of a figure,
you get girlie men or fairies be
ing presented,
you get women cross dressing in
men's clothes,
all of these kinds of negative
attributes were common.
Where to begin such a history?
My thought was, let's look at Os
car Wilde,
who has become the most famous
homosexual in the world,
in the late 19th century.
And what I settled on was lookin
g at the coverage
of the Oscar Wilde trials of 1985
, in the Wisconsin press.
And they gave you a lot of b
ase attitudes,
basically a poll about homosexual
ity in Wisconsin,
at that time, at the end of the 1
9th century.
And homosexuality as a term,
it's really only coined in the l
ate 19th century,
actually by a Hungarian of G
erman descent,
and then starts to become more u
nderstood as a term
in the 20th century.
So, but the Wilde case,
they really knew that it was abou
t male on male sex,
even if they didn't necessarily
use the term homosexuality.
There were themes in the Wisconsi
n press
that got covered.
And it's amazing that some of the
Wisconsin papers
carried 30 stories about the Osca
r Wilde trial.
There were actually three ju
dicial actions.
And that was just the same numbe
rs
such as the New York papers as
The WorldorThe Sun.
So there was a lot of coverage,
tens of thousands of words
were written in terms of headline
s and in editorials
about the Wilde matter.
So this is what you find if
you look at that press survey.
Criminality is the proper context
.
Penury, loss of home and goods is
totally appropriate.
Cultural suppression, withdraws
plays,
suppresses books, take them out o
f the library.
He was a sick and weak individua
l,
and that there's an otherness ab
out this kind of activity
that's un-American.
So these are the themes that
come up in the base attitudes.
And they get expressed a litt
le bit later,
not as much because it wasn't thi
s quite a sensation
in the lesbian novel, Well of
Loneliness,
which comes out in the 1920s,
which was also shunned and su
ppression
was urged of it as well.
So the apparatus of homophobia i
n Wisconsin.
You have laws, you have police,
you have courts, you have prisons
,
you have investigations, you have
military rejections,
witch hunts, postal suppression,
discipline structures.
All of these worked against LBGT
people
in this pre-Stonewall period.
Now, you can go back to the begi
nning of Wisconsin,
when Wisconsin territory in 1836,
was separated from Michigan.
Michigan had a three year penalty
for sodomy,
wasn't enough for the Wisconsin
territory,
they upped it to five years.
So, we began with sort of a h
arsh attitude
right at the beginning.
And they used the Tudor era de
finition of
crimes against nature for the
definition of sodomy.
Then they added in the late 1
9th century,
this was also following Engl
ish law,
lewd and lascivious behavior.
In 1913, there was an anti-v
ice investigation
against all kinds of immorality
led by Senator Teasdale.
They replaced the old law with t
he penal law reform
in the 1930s, and choose the term
sexual perversion
rather than crime against nature
.
Perhaps this was an improvement,
perhaps not.
As late as 1950s, they passed
new legislation
denying driver's licenses to any
body convicted
of those kinds of sexual offense
s.
Then the police they of course,
were the enforcers,
the Milwaukee Police Station sh
own here.
Some of the data from police.
In 1910, Milwaukee averaged s
even arrests,
they hit a high of 17 in 1919 an
d this is just for sodomy.
There were many other arrests th
at would have been related.
In 1930, they had averaged more i
n the earlies,
with a high of 19 in 1931.
In the Madison police reports,
they included all the sodomy a
rrests
among the important crimes like m
urder and major theft,
just so you know where we rank, d
oesn't matter.
And then in 1931, the Madison re
port had this unusual case
that the chief of police reporte
d on,
of two women who were arrested f
or sodomy.
One got sent to a state sanatori
um
and the other was sent home to he
r home cities.
In this period for police arrest,
Oshkosh was often thought to be
a hotbed of homosexuals.
They had a large number of inm
ates up in Waupun.
Juneau Park in Milwaukee had a no
torious reputation
early on and even later.
In 1908, a book came out that lis
ted Milwaukee
as one of the eight homosexual
capitals of America.
And so they didn't quite wear thi
s as a badge of honor
at that time.
There was also a case of Ralph K
erwineo,
also known as Cora Anderson,
clearly an early transperson who
was arrested in 1914.
Her expression was, "My heart an
d soul are more those
"of a man than a woman."
The Milwaukee press noted that s
he had masqueraded
in men's clothes for 10 years.
She actually married a woman.
And then she began an affair wit
h another woman
and that woman ratted her ou
t to the police.
You know, personal affairs can be
so difficult.
But clearly here was a case
of a cross-dressing individual
that was played up in the Milwau
kee press at that time.
Now, the law and its enforcement
had another ally
in the state Supreme Court,
which made very harsh expres
sions in several
sodomy decisions that were appeal
ed to that court.
Here's some of those things in 19
05,
the justices wrote, "We are unwi
lling to soil the pages
"of our reports with lengthened d
iscussion
"of the loathsome subject."
In 1928, "The crime itself is so
repulsive and detestable
"that one's loath to believe the
defendant guilt."
And in 1935, where there was
an alleged school of sodomites
in Waukesha County.
"There was ample evidence,
"the defendant's association with
boys about 18 years of age
"suggesting a disposition to
indulge
"in the practice complained of."
The difficulty that prosecutors
had in some of these cases
was that you only had two indivi
duals
who were actually witnesses to a
sexual act,
which would have been the two in
volved.
So to get more than just one witn
ess testimony,
which some courts were relucta
nt to,
not all, but a few, convict on,
they portrayed the individual as
a known homosexual
as corroborating evidence.
And so the fact that they were k
nown to hang around
with boys of 18 years of age
was thought as corroborating evid
ence for the act
that might or might not have
been committed.
Well, if you got caught, here's w
here you went,
generally Waupun, the state pris
on.
And the usual sentence, one
to five years,
they followed that law going back
to the territorial days.
There was some research done
on the sodomites
in Waupun in the 1930s.
The Wisconsin Prisoner, a St
udy in Crimogenesis
was done by this gentleman, Prof
essor John Gillin,
a UW sociologist.
And he showed how the crimin
al justice system
worked back at that point in the
1930s.
There were bench trials by judg
es for the most part,
no juries, generally there were n
o defense attorneys,
and well, most were sentenced to
Waupun Prison,
some were also sent to the Centra
l State Hospital
for the Criminally Insane, re
flecting the
sickness diagnosis or assumption.
In World War II,
you had the military begin screen
ing homosexuals.
This began the medicalization of
homosexuals.
Allan Bérubé has done tremendous
research on this.
But it also shows that such scre
ening
was terribly ineffective and pr
obably thousands,
if not tens of thousands of Wisco
nsinites
actually served who were LBGT fol
ks in the war.
Following the war, you had the wi
tch hunts of the 1950s.
Leader from our own state, Joe
McCarthy,
and it's often forgotten now,
but there was both a Red and a La
vender Scare.
Most of the talking about the 50
s
would talk about the Red Scare,
but almost never about the La
vender Scare.
David K. Johnson, who has extens
ively researched this,
has shown that they were actuall
y more
gay and lesbian people fired by t
he federal government
than there were communists
in the period of the 1950 witch h
unts.
The FBI was doing surveillance o
f gays.
And there's some particular Wisc
onsin dimensions
of the Lavender Scare.
Tom Coleman was the Republican b
oss in the state.
He wrote a strategy memo on behal
f of various
Midwestern Republican leaders,
praising McCarthy's work
exposing homosexuals in gover
nment.
He pushed it for the National Rep
ublican Party
as a winning issue to think abou
t for their strategy.
John Wyngaard, who was a very not
ed
Wisconsin political journalist,
wrote, "More rank and file inter
est and concern
"about the revelation about homo
sexuality
"in government circles than
about the more explosive issue
"about communist sympathizers."
3/4 of McCarthy's early mail w
as about the gays,
not about the Reds.
McCarthy's own words on sex devia
nts,
"All are considered security ris
k."
And McCarthy made a comment, if y
ou're against him,
you're either a Communist or an
expletive
which I won't go into.
So, here we were subjects to the
witch hunts.
Another Wisconsin senator, Alexa
nder Wiley,
also led attacks on gay medi
a during this time,
one homosexual magazine came o
ut of Los Angeles.
It's closely supervised by the
U.S. Post Office.
And somehow Wiley was sent a cop
y,
and he complained to the Post
Office
that it needed to be suppressed.
And in fact, he was willing to i
ntroduce law changes
if present laws did not cover it
.
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a one
sentence decision,
overruled the Post Office suppre
ssion of one magazine.
So Wiley would have needed to do
it in the law.
After the war, you had a huge exp
ansion
at the University of Wisconsin
due to all the veterans
returning to campus.
And the UW used therapeutic disc
ipline, was their term.
Following the war, there was a hu
ge outbreak
in homosexuality as it's talked a
bout, and other deans
at other universities exchanged
information
with the deans here in Madison
about that reality as well.
There's actually 50 case files
of various student discipline mat
ters.
It's all amongst male students.
There are no lesbian case discipl
ine files
at the university.
And the practice was that they
will suspend a student
until a doctor says they're cured
.
They would also out them to thei
r parents
and to future employers, or to th
e military.
They restricted such individuals
from professions
like teaching and medicine.
Amazing in these files, there's
25 police interrogatories
that are still existing.
I was just amused, that the poli
ce asked the question,
"Have you committed the homose
xual act?"
Clearly, the police imagination
was not as good as perhaps
some of the gays they were asking
the questions about.
[audience chuckling]
And the university had particular
ly vigorous efforts
in 1948 with a minor purge in 196
2,
with a much more major purge.
In the latter following the
McCarthy practice,
there was naming of names, studen
ts were called in
and asked to name other know
n homosexuals
that they were aware of on campus
.
Supposedly lists of hundreds of h
omosexuals were compiled
by the dean of students
trying to rid the campus of homo
sexuality.
So what are the responses to this
Wisconsin homophobia?
Ways of resistance.
You could fly the state,
or you could counter the forces o
f repression.
You could hide, or you could live
your identity,
you might think you're alone
in the struggle,
or you would be together with l
ike-minded folks.
So I'm gonna look some examp
les of that.
And you have to understand,
as I gave you all that background
on the repression
and the homophobia, to under
stand
the courage of these folks
and what they decided to do
with their lives.
This is Glenway Wescott.
He was born near Hartford, Wiscon
sin.
He grew up, he became a famo
us literary figure.
He wrote an early novel,
which had some latent homosexual
ity in it.
And he went off to France, met Co
cteau and Gide
and very other famous French hom
osexuals.
And then he wrote a short story,
which was also the title story fo
r this book,
Goodbye Wisconsin.
So he was one of those who fl
ed the state.
InGoodbye Wisconsin, he
talks about
coming back for a visit.
He's very lyrical about the
beauty of the state
and its people.
But basically, he decides he
can't stay.
He has a Basque beret
which he wears, and his brother
asks him not to wear it into tow
n.
In the story, he has talks of cit
ations to Ganymede
and to Gide and others
so that if you knew what he was t
alking about,
you knew clearly this is a gay ma
n,
who by his codes was signaling th
is,
but he was saying Wisconsin had
become too provincial
for him to stay here.
He goes on and becomes very acti
ve in New York gay society.
His partner Monroe Wheeler was
at the Museum of Modern Art.
And actually, this drawing was do
ne by Paul Cadmus,
a gay artist and it shows Wheele
r and Wescott
along with George Platt Lynes,
who three of them were together
for quite a while in New York as
well.
So later on, Wescott and Wheeler
will bring the novel Maurice
, written by
E.M. Forster, to be published in
America,
and actually lived long enough
to be active in some of the
early gay rights movements activi
ties in New York.
But I wanna switch now to the vi
llage of Cooksville
in Rock County, Wisconsin.
This is a very lovely Federal-
style house
built in Cooksville.
It's a very historic house,
became known as The House Next D
oor.
When this gentleman, Ralph Wa
rner,
who I've also dubbed the first
out gay man in Wisconsin,
bought it because he taught in R
acine.
But he had a friend there who al
so taught, Susan Porter,
who was a native of Cooksville,
and he came and visited her
and the porterhouse is still the
re,
and Ralph ended up buying the ho
use next door,
which was the house that's how,
the name by which it was known.
And I think you can call him the
first out gay man.
He did travel abroad like Wescot
t
and found some of those free
r European models
that expatriates sought when
they were abroad.
He did some scrapbooking,
you find little gay items includ
ed in scrapbooks,
fairy poems, a clipping, "Is it M
anly to Eat Salad?"
which is clearly about a Nancy bo
y.
He was featured repeatedly by lad
y journalists
in local and national magazines.
These are likeHouse Beautiful
, nLadies' Home Journal,
and things like that as well
as in Milwaukee
and Madison press and Wisconsin
magazines.
All of those articles describe
non-normative behaviors.
He's cleaning, he's cooking, he'
s decorating.
He's entertaining, he's dishwas
hing.
In his restored house, he would
take people on garden tours,
show them antiques and if he
felt like it,
he would cook a meal for them.
And so he really entertained at T
he House Next Door.
As a result, he not only preserv
ed the house
and these early antiques,
but much of early Yankee culture
of the area.
And he was acclaimed for that,
near the end of his life.
But clearly, all of the clue
s are pointing to
he was not your usual man.
They talked about how he was dif
ferent
from all the farmers in that are
a of Rock County.
And so one of the people who
wrote him up
was Betty, a journalist,
I call her sort of a godmothe
r to the gays
in this period,
because not only did she write up
Ralph Warner,
she was a big fan of the gay cou
ple
Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum,
who restored Pendarvis shown here
.
Bob Neal was again one of those
people who went abroad,
he worked for Syrie Maugham,
the divorced wife of Somerset Ma
ugham, the novelist.
Somerset was by then, was living
on the French Riviera
with his male lover.
But Syrie ran an antique shop fir
st in Chicago,
where Bob worked for her, and th
en in New York,
and then in London.
While in both Chicago and New Yo
rk,
Bob clearly participated in gay c
ircles.
When he went to London,
he talks about meeting various
gay figures in that city,
and various gay sites that he vi
sited as well.
Edgar Hellum interestingly enough
,
had a connection to Ralph Warner
in Cooksville
since he had helped Ralph, and s
o he knew
the Cooksville model of restorat
ion and entertaining.
And so that's what Bob Neal and
Edgar Hellum did in the 30s.
They started with an antiques
business and a little tea shop
that became more of a restau
rant in the 50s,
got recommended by Duncan Hines.
But the two of them were referred
to as partners.
It was never sort of business par
tners in this 30.
But it was partners, so they w
ere getting codey.
And they also use the term art
istic.
And they described them as young
men,
even though were they were clear
ly middle aged
by the life expectancy of the
period.
So all of these code words,
they also use the term pixies,
which was another sort of code w
ord used as well.
So clearly, they were leading th
eir lives.
Now another pair, of women in thi
s case, who led
their own lives fairly out
were Charlotte Partridge and Miri
am Frink.
They met at Milwaukee-Downer Col
lege,
which was a female college in Mil
waukee.
The female colleges around the c
ountry
were hotbeds of places for lesbi
ans
to meet and establish domestic f
riendships.
And they went on to found
the Layton School for the Ar
ts in Milwaukee.
And shepherded that through many
decades of activity.
And at that point, their domestic
friendship,
and that was an earlier term
we often use
for the lesbian relationships.
They were described frequently
together,
they built a studio on Fox Point
,
it was a one room studio,
and clearly that's where they liv
ed
when they were at the studio.
They later built a house together
out in Thiensville
in suburban Milwaukee.
Partridge was the main artist,
Frink actually had a degree
in English from Smith College;
it was observed that more than h
alf of her class
at Smith had never married.
So some of those women's colleges
were sort of indeed places
that generated non-normative
behavior.
But Partridge brought life model
s
to her progressive teaching of ar
t.
This was thought slightly scandal
ous
over in conservative Milwaukee,
particularly nude life models.
For a trip out west, Frink packed
a revolver,
y'know, going out in that Badland
s territory,
you gotta be armed,
and so she was not reluctant to b
e a strong woman.
They hired various gay faculty at
the Layton School.
And they were very close to Meta
Berger,
the widow of the socialist co
ngressman.
They were involved, Frink, excus
e me.
Partridge initially was involved
with the arts programs for the Ne
w Deal in Wisconsin.
When she had to take a leave, he
r partner Frink stepped in
temporarily, did the job
and then turned it back to Partri
dge when she was done.
So clearly, they had a very a
ctive partnership
in so many ways that were ver
y non-normative
for that period in Milwaukee.
Another gentleman who I've actual
ly met over the years
was Ted Pierce,
sometimes termed Madison's Af
rican American Boulevardier.
His family was from Louisiana, a
nd its roots.
And so he always pretended to tak
e a slight affectation
of the French.
And here he is shown with a bunch
of gay folks
enjoying some social time.
He lived most of his life on Wil
liamson Street,
in a family home.
His father was made messenger fo
r Wisconsin governors
for a whole series of Wisconsin
governors,
and when his father passed away
in the 1930s,
he also was made executive messen
ger
for a number of governors.
He ended up his career at the Mem
orial Library.
But I had dinner with him,
and he would tell very many tale
s
and actually some of the images
that I have here
are from Ted passing them on.
He describes sexual services
at the Lorraine Hotel in the 193
0s.
His family had a tailor shop
in the hotel.
And this was part of a sexual u
nderworld
that was operating in Madison ev
en in those days.
But let's go back to Waupun,
and I talked about it as a place
of repression.
But there's also a whole theory o
f emancipatory science,
whereby gays and lesbians,
by participating in these studies
,
and we talked about Professor Gi
llin's study,
tried to wrench the narrative aw
ay
from the normative kinds of thing
s
that were being talked about gays
and lesbians.
They tried to present their own
lives in a way
that would say something differen
t.
And so about 20 gays who were in
Waupun
participated in Gillin's study.
One of them was an African Amer
ican.
And before television,
you had lecture circuits like A
fricans on Stage.
This was a gentleman known as LoB
agola.
He's shown here sort of in Afri
can drag.
Most often when he lectured,
and he lectured at Madison Centra
l High
and various other churches i
n the state.
He presented more conventional a
ppearance,
though sometimes he wore a fez a
s well.
And he would lecture on French Su
dan.
He talked about a child being
abducted from the French Sudan
on board a ship, taken to Scotlan
d
where he was raised by a peer,
and then came to America and went
on the lecture circuit.
His book, autobiography,
was published in New York in the
1930s.
And-- excuse me-- and he actuall
y got arrested
and went to Waupun.
One of the things that Gillin di
d
was that if the inmates were
literate,
he'd let them write their own na
rratives,
and Lo'Bagala wrote a 68-page au
tobiography
while he was in Waupun.
And in it he relayed all those th
ings
that were in the published 1930s
autobiography
about being from French Africa
and going to Scottish lord,
and all that sort of stuff, b
ut he interlaid
a whole sexual history along
with it.
He talked about how the Scottish
lord's son seduced him.
And then he talked about
a number of other sexual esc
apades.
So you had a whole complete hist
ory of a very active man.
He tried to sign up for the Amer
ican army in World War I,
but they turned him down
because of one of those sexual a
rrests.
Instead, he enlisted in the Briti
sh army,
which was recruiting in the Unite
d States,
because they were very manpo
wer starved.
And he served over in the Middle
East with the British army.
And he observed in the 68-page hi
story,
that he didn't seem to disrupt th
e British military
by having been there with a man
who had a prior sexual convictio
n.
Keeping with the military thing,
Truax field back in the war days
was set quite apart from Madison
,
they actually ran buses into tow
n.
So the Army Air Force soldiers
could get into town for some r
ecreation.
And there was a study done in 19
45
of homosexuals soldiers at the ba
se.
Again, about 20 soldiers wer
e studied.
This was a professor who had an
endocrine theory of homosexualit
y at the university.
Professor Servinghouse,
and he took urine samples and tr
ied to compare 'em
to people who were assumed to
be straight
to see if there was a theory abou
t why gays were there
because of an endocrine imbalanc
e, didn't pan out.
But meanwhile, he took case hist
ories of some of these men.
One of the things revealed in tho
se case histories
was that there was a very active
gay world
going on at the Truax Army Air F
orce Base.
I'm showing the dining hall here
,
because Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum
,
who were down in Mineral Point, h
ad to close up
during the war because of gas
rationing.
Faculty-wise from Madison co
uldn't come down to have tea
in their tea room.
So they volunteered to go beca
use they couldn't serve
in the military for various
other reasons,
not because they were gay.
Just work at the Army Air Fo
rce base at Truax
and they ran the kitchen, worked
in the kitchen there.
And Bob Neal was very successful
at that.
Even at the base,
you had a little bit of the stran
geness
of the skirt and wig culture.
Here you have the woman with
the long nose,
who was answering soldiers' requ
est for information,
sort of cross-dressing that wa
s going on during the war.
And some of the things found out
in those stories
of those gay soldiers was the Ca
pitol Square at night
was a cruising area.
So it was good they had those bu
ses coming downtown.
And the study showed and made th
ese kinds of conclusions
and statements about these soldie
rs.
That all these cases were extre
me types,
had been aggressively homosexual
but actively and passively
since late childhood.
Had participated without conflict
in a wide variety of homosexual p
ractices.
The cases would be considered ex
tremely questionable
from the standpoint of profiting
from any therapy.
In fact, therapy was not requeste
d
or desired by any of them.
This is a clear rejection on the
medicalization model
that they were sick.
And in further, one of the do
ctors cooperating
with Servinghouse in the study wa
s a psychiatrist,
in none of these cases was their
true
neurotic type of conflict over h
omosexuality as such.
And then the last sort of little
sidebar comment
that really blew me away was,
four of them were known to be
members of an organized group.
1945, in Madison, Wisconsin
you had an organized group of hom
osexuals.
This is well before Stonewall.
So clearly, these folks were
building networks
for support in this time.
Now, one of the other things tha
t was happening
at the University of Wisconsin b
esides
the therapeutic discipline,
was that progressives were also f
ighting on campus
on various issues.
This is Lorraine Hansberry, wh
o was at the university
for two years, '48 to 1950,
and she was head of the Young
Progressives Club.
While she was here, she was al
so involved in journalism,
theater, arts, and some of the
productions that she was in
when you cross check them na
mes of some of the other men
who were in those productions,
match up with those
in the discipline files at t
he university.
So clearly, she was meeting some
of the gay men
who were part of theater world he
re in Madison.
Hansberry, even though she left M
adison
and went on to marry in New York,
would later come more out
as a member of the Daughters of B
ilitis in New York.
And within less than 10 years,
she wrote her play Raisin in th
e Sun
which was performed on the N
ew York stage.
And supposedly she visited back i
n Madison at one point,
visited some of the lesbians in
town
who she happened to know.
Now, one of the things also goin
g on at the university
besides that therapeutic discipli
ne, was Haresfoot,
which is a theatrical group,
and it had cross-dressing men in
it.
The group started out as a regula
r theater company,
but they wanted to travel the s
tate.
And the university didn't want me
n and women
traveling together on special tra
ins.
And so they decided all the fe
male parts
would have to be performed by men
.
And so this cross-dressing tradit
ion began.
It wasn't really very good drag.
They were pretty obviously th
ey were men
and playing in women's clothes.
But it turns out, it also attrac
ted a lot of gay men.
And there was an investigatio
n in 1948,
with the university trying to fi
gure out,
like it was not rocket scienc
e as to why some gay men
should be attracted to such a
cross-dressing theater troupe.
After the war, Wally Jordan, who
was a soldier
who'd served in the war.
He went to the beaches of Anz
io in Italy,
but he also served in North Afric
a.
He was from Rhinelander.
He described in letters, ther
e's some 40 letters of him
during World War II, of a wide
open homosexual scene
in the northwoods of Wisconsin
up around Rhinelander.
And after the war, he returned
and went up to Hurley,
where he found that this wide op
en town
also include wide openness for
homosexuals as well up there.
There was this Madison poet
and decorator Keith McCutcheon
and around his house with his pa
rtner Joe Koberstein.
In the 1960s, there was a very
active Jenifer Street gangs
I've called them.
This was Little Wayne, a memb
er of that gang,
and they had lively literary disc
ussions and at homes.
It was an integrated group,
Ted Pierce was part of that group
in the 1950s.
Lesbians in this period also foun
d their way into sports,
Doris Hanson, an early softball p
layer, which became
a very eponymous sport for lesbia
ns in this state.
And Wisconsinites wrote to
ONEmagazine,
which was the national homose
xual magazine.
This cover "I Just Had to Wri
te" talked about
how the isolation of gays of
ten was overcome by writing.
There's a certain playfulnes
s aboutONE,
here you see the December issue
with Santa in high heels kickin
g up.
[audience chuckling]
But some of the Wisconsinites
who wrote to ONE talked about,
"Though everyone in this small
town is convinced
"that I'm queer, I have a huge pr
actice,
"my lover comes up often enough
to be recognized
"and greeted on the streets, no o
ne seems to mind."
A Green Bay writer talked about
"some are discreet
"and some otherwise," in his hom
etown.
And grateful friends sent some mo
ney
to "facilitate investigation in s
elf-discovery.
"Those afraid and alone need suc
h an organization
"asONEto guide their se
lf-understanding."
There were other connections that
Wisconsinites
made in the 50s and 60s to the n
ational gay world.
There was also out in Mount Horeb
,
Betty Sebenthall who was an a
uthor and poet.
She wrote mainly mystery novels
under male names
because it was much easier t
o get published
than as a female author.
But she wrote a couple poems,
a book of poetry under her own na
me,
Acquainted With a Chance o
f Bobcats,
in which she presents some themes
of lesbian relationships
with her partner Mary Locke,
who she met in New York in 1940.
The two are buried together
in a joint grave in the Moun
t Horeb Cemetery.
Gays also found a geography in
bars,
the Indian Room here at the Mon
ona Hotel
was known to be popular.
The Three Bells on University A
venue
was in various gay guides.
And then in 1966,
you have the Young Democrats conv
ene in Manitowoc,
and they adopted a sex plank.
This grew out of a resolution tha
t was passed
by the Madison campus Young Dems,
which caused for freedom of actio
n for homosexuals.
At the state convention,
the Young Dems merged that w
ith another plank
out of UW-Milwaukee,
and basically adopted a plank
that called for repeal of laws
limiting sexual acts among consen
ting adults,
would have repealed the stat
e sodomy statute.
This caused quite a controversy,
conservative Democrats complained
about the Young Democrats.
It even madeTheNew York
Times, Republican Governor
Warren Knowles complained that
you had homocrats
against democrats and that w
as just too much.
Ody Fish, who was the Republican
State Chairman at the time,
argued you shouldn't have sex in
politics.
Yet of course you had all thes
e laws
decrying what sex should do so.
So you know no, no, no sex in po
litics.
But this gets us to the stor
y of volume one,
it got better.
And then the end of volume one
leads us to the volume two.
And by their own agency,
some of these Wisconsin LGBT folk
s asserted the reality
of their lives, they liberated th
emselves,
and following Stonewall, they wou
ld claim citizenship.
In 10 years after the Young Dems
,
the full Wisconsin Democratic Par
ty
had adopted a similar position t
o the Young Dems.
And in 1982, with bipartisan sup
port,
the Wisconsin legislature passed
the first in the nation's gay rig
hts bill,
thanks to David Clarenbach, wh
o's sitting there in the back.
And during the rest of the de
cade of the 80s,
there were five major legislativ
e victories
for LBGT issues
that occurred in the state an
d were upheld in the courts.
These were remarkable achievemen
ts
that you'll have to wait for vol
ume two for,
so I hope you'll look forward to
it.
And with that, I'll be glad to ta
ke any questions.
[audience applauding]
Thanks.