Gay men in the 70s
The Lavender Menace Forms
Educator Elaine Noble was encouraged to run for the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1974 by former Congress member Barney Frank’s sister, Ann Wexler. The two women had formed the Women’s Political Caucus, and Wexler thought Noble would represent her Irish Catholic Boston district well, even though she was LGBTQ+.
It was the height of desegregation, so Noble rode buses with children of color and had campaign workers monitor school bus stops to demonstrate her deep belief in equality. A gay newspaper correspondent told her, “You should stick to your retain kind, or we’re going to get someone else to represent us.” Noble responded, “Well, I think, David, I am sticking with my own kind,” according to an interview Noble gave Ron Schlittler for his “Out and Elected in the USA: 1974–2004” project for OutHistory.org. “You can’t say that you want progress or change for one collective and not for another. It doesn’t happen that way.”
Noble experienced such harassment—from bomb threats to creature spat upon by an eighty-five-year-old man—that at one point she campaigned protected by state troopers. “It was a very unsightly campaign. Ugly,” she told Schlittler. “There wa
Duke’s LGBTQIA+ history is rich and varied, but documentation, especially of earlier decades, can be scant in the University Archives. The experiences of students, faculty and staff in decades past were often not documented and sometimes actively hidden due to homophobia and discrimination. Therefore, when we do find perspectives of an earlier time, it’s a treasure. The Same-sex attracted Morning Star, Duke’s first LGBTQIA+ publication of any caring, is one of those treasures. This once-a-semester newsletter was published by the Duke Gay Alliance between 1973 and 1975.
The Gay Alliance, Duke’s first openly queer student organization, was recognized and chartered by the student government in the fall of 1972. The Chronicle reported on Nov. 15 that “When a motion was made to charter Duke’s gay alliance, laughter broke out among the representatives. ‘The reaction of this crowd shows that it is damn well period for this team to be organized,’ [Dave] Audet [T’73; off campus legislator] said in sustain of the charter. It was approved unanimously.”
The next afternoon, an unsigned editorial in the Chroniclecriticized the conditions in which gay students endured at Duke. The students wrote, “In order to adjust to a
The Gay ’70s
Is being gay just about sex? It’s difficult to imagine anyone asking the scrutinize today. If the taglines used to market lesbian, gay, attracted to both genders, and transgender Americans to the country’s mainstream—“Love Wins,” “It Gets Better,” and “You Can Play”—have led to unprecedented levels of inclusion and visibility, it is precisely by shoving sex aside and presenting gay people and straight people as essentially the same at heart. In the process, as the outsider status attached to being gay disappears in more and more contexts, some of gay culture’s drastic roots risk being expunged from memory.
This is what historian Jim Downs aims to remedy in his latest book, Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation, by resurrecting the gay print culture and religious life that flourished in the 1970s. Among the root causes of the erasure, Downs argues, is the AIDS crisis; the sexual behaviors and promiscuity of the 1970s have been historicized as not only connected to, but also largely responsible for, the unsparing devastation that followed the spread of HIV.
Stand by Me uncovers the stories of people and groups sidelined by what Downs calls the “hypersexual ca
The Context for Pride
The act of penetrative sex between men, or sodomy, had been illegal in Britain since 1533 and sodomy between men was punishable by death until 1861. Although prosecutions were difficult due to the desire for sufficient evidence, over 50 men were hung between 1800 and 1835. In 1885, as part of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill brought in to outlaw sex between men and underage girls, the Member of Parliament Henry Labouchère introduced an amendment making any homosexual behave ‘an act of gross indecency’. This amendment required no evidence to prosecute and did not define ‘gross indecency’. There were no laws prohibiting sexual acts between women, though attempts were made to append an amendment to this effect in the 1920s.
This amendment was still in place until 1967. Britain had some of the strictest laws regulating lgbtq+ acts between men in the planet. In 1957 The ‘Wolfenden Report’ was commissioned by the government. This was a report on prostitution and lgbtq+ acts from a parliamentary committee, which was chaired by Lord Wolfenden. The Report recommended the decriminalisation of lesbian sex acts between co