Mattachine Society

I mean, the joke is it was this misconception slash, you know, this government conspiracy that, that queers were necessarily gonna be, be communists.

But the real tea is that, you know, the, the modern gay rights movement arguably, you know, the very first Mattachine Society, founded in 1950 in, in Los Angeles, was founded by a group of communists-

[laughs]

[laughs] ... by applying, like, Marxist principles-

And he says, "Screw this.

I'm gonna sue you guys," and he takes it, even after his lawyer drops him, all the way to the Supreme Court.

That gets denied, and then he decides to, to create the Mattachine Society of Washington.

That became really the first gay lobbying group.

Because the sexual outlaw, again, revels in the things that you're supposed to hide.

I can't imagine somebody who was in the Mattachine Society in America liking this book.

This is reinforcing our negative stereotypes that we're oversexed, that all we do is cruise.

that we're, you know, limp-rested and so on.

Gay rights.

The early Mattachine Society asked members to dress conservatively and blend in.

My mom got fired once, by the way, for wearing, uh, pants to a work event instead of a skirt in, like, 1970.

That's not gay rights related, but it just made me think of that.

Anyway, the early Mattachine Society asked members to dress conservatively and blend in, and then after Stonewall, the Gay Liberation Front totally rejected that.

So decades later, the fight over marriage equality repeated this split, with critics saying that marriage was a mainstream goal that left the most vulnerable behind.

Couple more.

Bill addressed homosexuality in the church.

He was the attorney for the George Henry Foundation and the Mattachine Society, which were both sort of preliminary to Stonewall, where the movement began in a lot of ways.

But he would give talks and not self-identify.

Yeah.

...

Mattachine Society of Washington first distributed the Gay Blade.

Hold on.

[laughs]

Yeah.

Because it started off as the-

Mattachine Society.

Bad gay.

And through that process, Learned so much.

And I was just so blown away, specifically in the history side of things, that in Los Angeles, a city that I had lived in for like, I think, seven or eight years at that point, even longer maybe, and that it was like the epicenter, some say, of the queer rights movement with like dating back to the 60s of the Black Cat Riots and the Mattachine Society and just... with the baby gay, I'm really trying to emphasize history as a part of our, one of our tenants.

And so just felt like no one was really talking about our history.

And so my goal is to share queer history through our platform and, and doing it, as you had mentioned, you know, we, we shoot our home bases at the black cat in Los Angeles, which is our biggest partner and ally here in Los Angeles.

There was the early half.

the time of white shirt and tie-wearing political activists, civil rights marchers, SDS, the Mattachine Society, and the latter half of the 60s, which is what most people mean when they say the 60s, the time of tie-dyed shirts and bell-bottoms.

of Woodstock and Grateful Dead tours, of hippies, BNs, and psychedelic drugs.

My memory is that 1967 was the breakthrough year of widespread drug use, which I call the Sgt. Pepper's summer, when psychedelia went mainstream.

But Rodwell's forward-looking rallying cry fell on deaf ears amongst older, more conservative segments of the gay community.

The Stonewall demonstrations drove a generational wedge between the spirit of the youthful activists on Christopher Street and the cautious assimilationist approach of groups like Mattachine and its overwhelmingly white leadership.

Some Mattachine members had been out of town the weekend of the Stonewall demonstrations.

They returned shocked and appalled.

They scorned Stonewall, calling it a riot, a regrettable action brought on by, in their own dismissive phrasing, "a group of stoned, tacky queens." A Mattachine sign even appeared on the boarded-up facade of the Stonewall, pleading for peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village.

But Mattachine's appeal was too little too late.

The wheels had already begun to turn.

Young LGBTQ activists were energized by Stonewall, and they were impatient to directly confront oppressive traditions, even those of their own leaders.