>> Hello, and a very warm welcome
to National Book Festival Presents,
brought to you by the Library of Congress.
My name is Marie Arana, and I'm the
Literary Director at the Library of Congress.
And now that we're here on the
verge of Gay Pride Month, June 2020,
we'd like to mark the 50th
anniversary of the first celebration
of this landmark moment in American history.
We're very fortunate to have with us
today Eric Cervini, who is a distinguished
and accomplished scholar who has done his
research actually at the Library of Congress.
And it's a special thrill to see somebody
through the process of writing a book
and publishing a book and then bringing
it to us in a broadcast moment like this.
So, we want to welcome Eric.
His book is called The Deviant's War: The
Homosexual vs the United States of America.
And interviewing him today is Roswell
Encina, my very talented colleague,
who's a former journalist, but is now the Chief
of Communications at the Library of Congress.
Roswell, over to you.
>> Well, thank you, Marie,
and good to see you, Eric.
Happy pride.
>> Happy pride.
Thank you so much for having me.
>> And congratulations on this book.
I should say it's a very hefty
book, as Marie mentioned.
It did do a research here at the library.
And thank you for sending me an advanced copy.
It was truly a wonderful thing to
be reading the past couple weeks.
I was able to be educated myself
by everything that's in that book.
And we are very excited that you did, of course,
all your research at the Library of Congress.
>> Oh, well, thank you so much
for making this book possible.
And I should assure viewers that a
big chunk of the book are endnotes.
So, and a big portion of those endnotes
come from the Library of Congress.
I truly couldn't have done all of that
research without all of y'all's hard work.
>> And, of course, that's music to our ears.
Now, as Marie mentioned, this year we
are celebrating the 50th anniversary
of pride in this country.
It happened in 1970, a year after
the Stonewall Riots of 1969.
So, I know we have a lot to talk
through here in our very limited time.
So, the title of the book is The Deviant's War.
Who are you referring to as the deviant?
>> Haha. So, you would assume that
it's primarily Frank Kameny, and it is.
I mean, the book is told through the eyes of the
grandfather of the modern Gay Rights Movement.
And, you know, I chose a word that was
ambiguous because even though he is a deviant
as classified by the United
States federal government,
which was purging alleged homosexuals from its
rank during the McCarthy era, and they would use
that word taken from psychiatrists.
But, you know, the book is telling a
larger story about America in the 1960s,
and especially the Homophile Movement as the
pre Stonewall Gay Rights Movement was called.
And were using Frank and his
eyes and experiences as a lens
to really understand a larger phenomenon of not
just him as a white gay guy creating change,
but also other deviants throughout the
entire country who were influencing him,
and also were influenced by him, whether
they were trans activists, lesbian activists,
people within the Black Freedom Movement.
So, I certainly use the term
deviant as a broad [inaudible].
>> Now, there's some statistics
here that are quite alarming
that I think many people are unaware this was
happening in the U.S. in the mid 20th century.
You write in your book, after World War II,
homosexual arrests, including those for sodomy,
dancing, kissing, or holding
hands occurred at the rate
of one every ten minutes each
hour every day for 50 years.
And some one million citizens
found themselves persecuted
by the American state for sexual deviation.
Your book does portray a nice landscape, I won't
say nice, but a good description of gay life
in the United States in the 50s and 60s.
And as you mentioned, you were talking
about Frank Kameny, are there a lot of men
and women before Stonewall that came before
that riot, and did their part for LGBTQ rights?
Who is Frank Kameny?
>> Well, Frank Kameny was, first
and foremost, an astrophysicist.
He was a Ph.D. graduate from Harvard University
studying in their phenomenal astronomy program
and was becoming an astronomer at
the very launch of the Space Race.
He started his government job as an astronomer
within weeks of the launch of Sputnik.
So, you could not have chosen a better
profession within the sciences at a better time.
But unfortunately the government
found out that he was gay.
And so he became one of the
victims of the gay purges,
or what other historians
called the Lavender Scare.
And he essentially was the first to fight back,
taking his case against the
government to the Supreme Court.
And when that didn't work, he kept fighting,
as he would for the rest of his life,
and essentially constructed
what we now know as gay pride.
>> You mentioned, you know, the landscape then,
the federal government or your employer found
out you were gay, or even just suspected
of being gay, you'd be fired or laid off.
It's kind of obscenely, if people look back,
the reasoning why they were doing this.
They were assuming that you were gay.
You could either easily be blackmailed, or they
could assume that you are a Russian spy even.
When did that thinking come from?
And I know that there's, in your
book, you even list the 13 reasons
that the CIA mentioned why you can't trust
a homosexual in the federal government.
>> Yeah. Thirteen reasons why
governments are, or sorry, rather,
homosexuals should not be in the government.
So, yeah, that logic of persecution
I think is really understudied.
And understanding, we all know that
homosexuals and sexual deviants were persecuted
because they were discussing to those in power,
and they were also useful to those in power.
And you see at the exact same time
that Joseph McCarthy begins his crusade
against alleged communists in the government,
well, of course those claims are very flimsy.
So, what does he do?
He looks for a way to bolster his
numbers, his ever shifting numbers
of how many security risks
there are in the government.
And one of the ways that he and his
allies do that are by saying, well,
it's not just actual communists, or those who
are fellow travelers, who are security risks.
We have a whole other group of
security risks who are sexually deviant
and are necessarily secretive about their
sex life, their second life, and, therefore,
they're susceptible to blackmail
by communist agents.
So, that reasoning allowed, that national
security rationale allowed the gay purges
to continue for decades.
And so that is what Kameny really was up
against, and having to debunk and disprove
that rationale and show that
it was unconstitutional,
arbitrary, and rooted in prejudice.
>> Set the scene for us.
I mean, the federal government and
the metropolitan police here in D.C.,
and maybe police departments across the nation,
are going through big lengths pretty much
of just trying to arrest both gay
and lesbian citizens of this country,
like staking out at parks, or here
in D.C. I was at Lafayette Park,
which is the park across the White House
right now, could you explain that for folks
who don't understand what
was going on at that time?
>> Well, you have to remember that in almost
every single state, homosexual activity,
especially sodomy, was illegal at the time.
And even if sodomy itself wasn't
the charge against sexual deviants,
then there was public indecency or loitering or
vagrancy often, and so there really was a regime
of police departments working
in tandem with the FBI,
working in tandem with the Civil
Service Commission where, you know,
they're in all public spaces and public
parks, public restrooms, train terminals.
Most cities had a morals
division or advice squad.
And those police officers were specifically
assigned wearing tight fitting clothes,
usually young, good looking men standing at
urinals in restrooms, or in Frank Kameny's case,
literally hidden in the ceiling above
him watching through a ventilation grill,
simply there to catch affixes
legend homosexuals.
And that essentially created a second
class citizenry within the United States,
because once you were arrested, that
followed you for the rest of your life.
>> When did it click for Frank Kameny?
I know he, you know, he didn't really seek
out to be, you know, an activist here.
He was an astronomer.
He went to Harvard.
Then he got fired.
What made him click to realize,
I've got to do something?
>> I think he, for the people who
knew him, he was a very eccentric man.
He had a very, he was very passionate
about what he believed was right.
And he would always say that, you know, I
know what is right, and if society disagrees,
then I will continue fighting
for what I know is right.
In society, it will eventually catch up with me.
And so that was rooted really in him
being such a devoted follower of logic.
And, you know, he was trained as an
astronomer at studying astrophysics.
He believes in what was logical and rational.
And for him, you know, at the beginning of
his experience when the government found
out about his, his gay arrest, when
it removed him from the service,
it was a matter of him disproving
the reasoning of the government.
So, when they would say, you know, you're a
homosexual, therefore, you're a security risk,
you would say, well, how am I a security
risk if the entire world knows that I'm gay?
Or if you want to claim that I'm
morally bad, I know as a scientist,
as an atheist, that is arbitrary and illogical.
So, I'm going to prove that fact by making
my own arbitrary claim, which was to be gay,
homosexual activity was morally good.
And that is what I argue is
one of the first iterations
of what we now celebrate each
year, each June, as pride.
>> He had the big responsibility of
explaining that homosexuals were, you know,
just not folks that went
into parks, but, you know,
were average people who work in the government.
I think the two big things that he wanted
to stress that was, he had a kind of,
he distinguished respectable homosexuals.
And he wanted to make sure that people
knew that homosexuals were not sick.
And why were those two sticking
points very important to you?
>> Well, respectability is a big theme that
runs throughout the book, because, you know,
five years before Stonewall, gay organizations,
these homophile activists were marching,
and they did so dressed very much like
we're dressed now, in suits and ties,
and women wore dresses and high heels.
And they did so to make a point.
As Frank would say, you know,
if you want to be employed
by the government, you should look employable.
And for him, it was just a very
concrete strategy of we just want to be
like any other straight federal
employee who doesn't have to live
in fear about their life being ruined.
And so that's where the respectability
came from.
But eventually, you know, as the 60s progressed,
and as you have a new generation of activists,
especially after Stonewall who
said that's self defeating.
If you're just trying to fit in and assimilate,
even if it's for strategic
reasons, then what's the point?
What is even the point of, of fighting?
And so that's the conflict you start to see.
And it unravels through the book.
And as for the medical side of things, very
similar to the National Security Rationale,
the reason that the government
was able to say that gays
and other sexual deviants shouldn't
be allowed in the government was
because they were mentally unstable, right?
So, there was yet another layer
to their reasoning where part
of why gays were susceptible to blackmail
was because they were psychiatric
or psychologically unstable, right,
or untrustable, untrustworthy.
And so you see all these different, you know,
reasons for why the government is
looking for ways of persecution.
>> Now, Frank was the leader for most,
for the most part of the Mattachine
of Washington Association here in D.C.
And there are a couple other
several organizations popping up all
across the east coast and on the west coast.
But there was a time that they
were really not getting along.
Why was that the case?
Is it because everybody wanted to
approach it differently, and, you know,
Frank was very, you know, strict about it.
As you mentioned, he wanted people in
suits and ties while they were picketing,
but not everybody saw it that way.
>> Exactly.
And it really was a regional
difference as well, especially the,
that divide within the Homophile Movement,
prior to Stonewall, and even after,
was along the lines of west
coast versus east coast.
And what you see in the west coast, which was
very important, and you see in the numbers
of how large these organizations
were, the Mattachine Society
of Washington only got a few
dozen members at its peak.
But then you have organizations like SIR in
San Francisco that have thousands of members
because they say, well, it's not just about
lobbying or just about lawsuits or just about,
you know, really dignified demonstrations.
It's also about providing
community, providing social events.
And then once we provide that community, we can
use those numbers to attain political power.
And so you see these two different philosophies.
And there are pros and cons of each.
And I think Frank eventually saw the benefits
of having sheer magnitude, sheer numbers.
And you see that in 1970 at the
very first pride celebration.
>> And Frank was very busy, I should say.
And he had a he struggled financially
because he couldn't find a full
time job because of what happened.
But aside from being the head of the
Mattachine of Washington, he was also taking
and helping other federal employees who
were fired or let go from their jobs.
And, you know, he was acting like a lawyer,
even though he wasn't trained as a lawyer.
Why do you think it was very important for him
to be representing other federal
employees who were let go?
>> Well, you have to remember at the time, the
American Civil Liberties Union, beginning in,
you know, as soon as they had their first
case of someone coming to them saying,
I have been fired from my job for being gay,
will you take my case, they would say no,
and they had a strict policy
saying we will not help gays
or security risks fight the government.
And Frank was really the first one
to persuade the Washington chapter
of the ACLU to start taking these cases.
But one of the ways he was able to do that
was by handling the administrative side,
because you can't really take a case
to court unless you've exhausted all
of your administrative possibilities
of fighting it.
So, appealing it to the highest levels of the
Pentagon, of the Security Clearance Office,
and rather than waiting for someone who was
a trained attorney to take these cases, and,
you know, whether they had time or
the bandwidth to actually fight them
within the federal bureaucracy, which, as you
find out from the book, is a very [inaudible],
he was the one to do this
and lay the foundations
for the attorneys to then take into the courts.
And it was really, really impressive
to see how he was able to infuse some
of his legal argumentation with some of the more
personal publicity style strategy of having some
of his plaintiffs, I call them the
proud plaintiff, that is his invention,
convincing them to publicly
declare their homosexuality.
Going to having press conferences
in the hallways of the Pentagon.
That was just completely unheard of.
And for Frank, it was solely to disprove
that the rationale of the purges,
because if you have a gay man or woman
standing before the Associated Press
and other outlets declaring their homosexuality,
how could a communist ever blackmail them?
And so that also helped develop
and expand his idea
of homosexuality being a moral
good that eventually caught on.
>> So, Frank is right in the middle
of American history right now.
There's two big names that pop up in your
book that people will recognize immediately.
J. Edgar Hoover.
And the other one is President
Johnson's Senior Advisor Walter Jenkins.
We'll get to J. Edgar Hoover here shortly.
Who is Walter Jenkins?
And what happened to him?
And this really kind of put I
should say Mr. Jenkins' experience,
the gay rights position,
really in the forefront.
>> Right. And a lot of people know
or might have heard about his story.
And Walter Jenkins was really
President Johnson's right hand man.
Ever since meeting him in Texas, he had been
with him for, for decades, and was, you know,
there is a quote from, you know, someone in the
Washington Post saying, Walter Jenkins knew more
or had more access to classified
material than anyone in the White House.
And one night, days before the 1964 election,
he was arrested for homosexual activity
in the basement restroom of the YMCA.
And so then the question arises.
If you have someone who has access to all the
classified material available to the president,
who is arrested for homosexual activity, does
that mean that he was susceptible to blackmail?
Was he a security risk?
But the problem with that with that J. Edgar
Hoover, if you were to grant that as a fact,
then that would have meant that
he and his bureau had failed.
And so it put the government, including LBJ,
including the FBI, and the Secret Service,
into a very awkward position where they had to
eventually declare, well, yes, he may have been,
you know, susceptible to these homosexual
activities, but he wasn't a security risk.
He was okay.
And so people like Frank Kameny, and even
the Washington area ACLU, they leap upon that
and say, well, if he's not susceptible to
blackmail, then why are you still claiming
that all these other people who
are openly gay and who have less
to hide are susceptible to blackmail?
So, just further debunking
parts of the rationale
that the government kept using
to justify its persecution.
>> So, your book does a great job of
going through the 50s and the 60s,
and maybe the very small baby steps that
they were able to do through marches
and picket lines from, you know, from
California to D.C. to Philadelphia to New York.
But it kind of all changed overnight
after the riots at Stonewall.
How did that how was that the tipping
point that changed everything?
>> Yeah, and I love that
you said changed everything,
because what I told everyone is Stonewall didn't
start everything, but it changed everything.
And really, like we talked about
earlier, it was a matter of numbers.
So, you had these organizations
that were organizing, you know,
maybe a few more than a dozen
organizations across the country,
were organizing in the early 60s,
and those numbers grew slightly.
But then you have this moment of
violent resistance in June 1969
that actually gets media coverage.
And suddenly a new generation of
activists who had already been very active
in women's liberation, in the anti war movement,
suddenly seeing, oh, this is another outlet
for us to start fighting for
structural revolutionary change.
And so you see the rise of new groups, like
the Gay Liberation Front, and then after that,
the Gay Activist Alliance in New York,
and you start to see a bit of a struggle
of not just power, but also philosophy, with
organizations like the Mattachine Society
of Washington and individuals who previously
had been able to really get their way through,
you know, just sheer force and
personality, like Frank Kameny,
and suddenly that's not enough anymore.
And you see big changes within the movement.
But a lot of the rhetoric, you know, you
hear gay is good constantly after Stonewall.
But Frank Kameny and other activists
had already been using that phrase.
So, it was a big change, but those changes
were possible because of people like Frank.
>> Yeah, finally in 1975, Frank
finally got some good news.
Let me just read something from your book.
On July 3, 1975, the general counsel of
the CSC called Frank Kameny with the news.
Later that day, the CSC would announce
that homosexual conduct no longer disqualified
American citizens for federal employment.
I mean, that took, what, almost 30 years.
So, Frank got fired from his job, then
had to [inaudible] a little bit more
when President Clinton signed
Executive Order 12968.
And finally it all culminated when
President Obama signed into law as well.
I would like you to sign, read,
rather, this letter that was given
to Frank Kameny almost 50 years from
the time he started his, or deal,
I should say, of trying to get his job back.
>> Sure. And this was in June 2009, he
got a letter saying, Dear Dr. Kameny,
in what we know today was a shameful action,
the United States Civil Service Commission
in 1957 upheld your dismissal from your job
solely on the basis of your sexual orientation.
With the fervent passion of a true
patriot, you did not resign yourself
to your fate or quietly endure what's wrong.
With courage and strength, you fought back.
Please accept our apology for the consequences
of the previous policy of
the United States government.
>> How do you think Frank felt at that moment?
>> Well, the next line, for the people who
were there, sadly, I never had the chance
to meet Frank, but a lot of people were in that
room, and Frank stood up and said very simply,
he was usually not a man of few words, but
in this case, he just said, apology accepted.
>> I do have some questions that we
gathered through the library's social media.
So, let me just ask a couple.
I've got a question from the Senate
GLASS Caucus, which is an association
of LGBTQ Hill staffers who work at the Senate.
Their question is as LGBTQ Capitol Hill
staffers, how can we continue the legacy
of gay rights activism from the
50s and 60s while persuading folks
with various political, social,
and religious beliefs?
>> I think that's a great question, and I think
it is investigating and exposing and fighting
against policies that currently
exist that continue.
So, even though, you know, President
Obama ended "Don't ask, don't tell,"
a lot of people think the fighter is over.
But trans Americans currently
can't serve in the military.
Twenty eight states have no
comprehensive protections
for sexual orientation or gender identity.
There are, there is currently
a war against trans children
by the Republican part in
states across the country.
And the fight that Frank Kameny
and others started continues.
And I think a big thing that we should
remember this pride season, this month,
is that pride is synonymous with resistance.
And the very first pride march exactly 50
years ago, marchers were terrified of marching.
And they thought, you know, they were
advised not to wear glasses or necklaces
because they were worried about getting
strangled or harassed by the police.
And they marched.
And they were resisting very, very
explicitly the policies of New York City,
New York State, and the federal government.
So, I think we need to bring
that spirit of resistance back,
especially now when the parades are canceled and
people are looking for ways to still celebrate.
I think it's do your research, find
where persecution continues day,
find which organizations, just
like Frank Kameny's organization are still
fighting, are still filing the lawsuits.
The ACLU is still filing suits in Idaho.
The Sylvia Rivera Law Project is
still protecting trans immigrants
who are being persecuted right
now during this pandemic.
So, I think finding those organizations
that are doing the work and supporting them,
that's how you can make that change.
And you can do that as a federal worker.
You can do that as someone who is unemployed.
You can find out, ask the
questions, how can we help?
>> Now, Teddy from Bowie, Maryland asks,
what do historians need to do differently
to recognize the contributions of people
other than white gay men and their recounting
of the Homophile and early
Gay Liberation Movement?
I know, he also says, I know there
are only a handful of women remembered
like Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson.
Do you think some of the other activists are
forgotten or even minimized when we look back?
>> Yes, 100%.
And I think it is the moral obligation of not
just historians, but anyone who identifies
as a [inaudible] white gay man, or any one
of those things, to be doing the research,
because it's easier to erase people.
As a historian going into an archive, going
into Frank's papers, for example, yes,
he did a lot of amazing work,
but he was privileged enough
to keep a lot of those materials.
He had somewhere to put them.
Sylvia Rivera, slipping in and out
of homelessness throughout her life,
had nowhere to keep all the records of
her activism throughout her entire life.
So, it's much harder for
historians to tell her story,
but we still have the obligation
to do that extra work.
And there are ways of telling the stories.
So, even though this book is told
largely through Frank's eyes,
you can still make the connections as a
historian and do the work of saying, all right,
let's see, where does Sylvia Rivera's
name come up in other contexts?
And then you see actually Sylvia was responsible
for rejuvenating the legal action committee
of the Gay Activist Alliance, singlehandedly.
She was the one who and that is, we have
the receipts, we have the archival documents
in the New York Public Library
saying, because of Sylvia,
we have reestablished the legal committee.
That legal committee became Lambda Legal.
Lambda Legal was the first organization
to fight in Hawaii for gay marriage.
So, we have gay marriage
literally because of Sylvia Rivera.
And so those kinds of lines, even
though they're difficult to find,
you have to go through the papers
and literally search for her name,
we have that obligation to do that work.
>> We were talking about J.
Edgar Hoover earlier now.
As we were talking about, you know, even
the Metropolitan police will actually have
to call the FBI and report if they
arrested someone or was taking anyone in.
So, I have a question from Ericson
of Washington, D.C. He says,
you mentioned J. Edgar Hoover
a lot in your book.
During the course of your
research, what did you find
out about Hoover's sexuality
and his right hand man?
>> Ha ha ha.
So, I defer to other scholars on
their evaluations of his sexuality.
And I keep my hands off from that.
But I will say this.
He was obsessive about protecting his image
more than anyone I've ever researched,
and combatting any instance of
the press or even individuals,
of organizations questioning his sexuality.
And there's, in a thousand page plus FBI
file on the Mattachine Society alone.
And remember, the Mattachine Society
had a few dozen members in the 60s.
So, the fact that there was this personal
obsessive, vindictive focus on this organization
that was claiming, because at the time,
these rumors were existing, right,
they were already well aware of, you know,
this wasn't after the fact
historians saying maybe he was gay.
People at the time were making these innuendos.
So, the fact that he was so
obsessive I think is more important
than whether he was or was not actually gay.
I think seeing how actually invested he was
in maintaining this regime of surveillance
and blackmail essentially, because he would
be blackmailing anyone who was allegedly gay
in order to get more power for
himself and more information,
because, of course, information is power.
>> Well, I'll end it with one question
that's close to home from Elsy Globe.
It's the Staff Association of LGBTQ
staff members of the Library of Congress.
Their question is, your book introduces
us to a man activist named Otto Ulrich,
who it turns out worked at
the Library of Congress.
Can you tell us a little bit more
about Otto from your research
and his role in the U.S. Homophile Movement?
I believe he was part of the first
march, right, outside the White House.
>> Yes, he was one of the first
10 outside of the White House.
And he was one of the first proud
plaintiffs, plaintiffs who were willing
to sue the federal government
because of the gay purges.
He was a victim himself of it.
And what's so amazing about him
is he was, had so much to lose.
He knew something like six languages.
He had a very high level position, but he was
willing to take to the government to the court.
And he, along with a couple other plaintiffs,
like Benny Wentworth, actually won.
They were really the first case with the help
of the ACLU to win at the district court level.
And so he really demonstrated to the
entire country, and to other attorneys,
that there was a legal path to
success in fighting the gay purges.
And very quickly, you start to
see, you know, because of Otto,
other ACLU chapters advising their attorneys
to say, okay, you should, if you have a case
like this, you should tell your plaintiff
to come out, to come out of the closet.
And so this, this fusion of legal
strategy and sexual identity
and political power I think is so, so important.
And I think it's important
today now more than ever.
>> We'll have to leave it at that.
We could talk here all night long,
Eric, about your book and the history
of LGBTQ rights here in this country.
But I encourage everyone to grab his book,
it comes out next week, The Deviant's War.
And we want to thank Eric Cervini.
And happy pride.
>> Happy pride.
Thanks so much for having me.
>> Take care.