Stonewall (26 page)

Though NACHO had not been given the extensive powers Foster thought necessary, he felt optimistic about the organization's future and left the conference full of high spirits. He had had “a great time” and had been delighted at being appointed chairman of the Credentials Committee—even though one disgruntled young delegate had told him that he exemplified the “pompous, midaged, overweight men” who held leadership positions in the movement. Foster good-naturedly acknowledged the need of each generation to cannibalize the preceding one and, on his return to Hartford following the conference, contentedly applied himself to his new duties. It would be essentially his responsibility to decide who should or should not attend the next NACHO conference, to be held in Washington, D.C., in August 1967.
⁹

The month after returning home from San Francisco, Foster decided to try psychoanalysis. As part and parcel of his excitement at linking up to the homophile movement, his juices had apparently
started to flow again and he wanted to see if he couldn't do something about his now entrenched pattern of celibacy. The therapist told him that treatment would require four visits a week (at twenty-five dollars per visit) for three years, and Foster nonchalantly embarked on it. But he “kept falling asleep on the couch,” and after less than a year, he “gave it up as a bum deal.”
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In the postconference period, he also turned to writing. Utilizing his academic skills, he embarked on an extended essay, “An Introduction to the Homophile Movement.” Over the following year, the essay would turn into a thirty-seven-page pamphlet, which Foster published at his own expense in time to distribute at the 1967 Washington conference. Dorr Legg (under his pseudonym, Marvin Cutler) had ten years earlier published
Homosexuals Today
—
1956
, a comprehensive guide to the contemporary movement; but that was no longer up-to-date and, besides, it lacked the comprehensive historical overview that Foster attempted.
¹¹

In the first line of his preface to the pamphlet, Foster announced that “homosexuals are getting themselves organized to challenge a society that rejects them,” and he went boldly on to describe the goals of the new movement as “not rehabilitation, not cure, not acceptance of homosexuals as persons in distinction from their acts, nor restriction of their acts to a special privacy.” Rather, flatly rejecting such “fatuous” aims and “false distinctions,” Foster characterized the emergent homophile movement as “a struggle for equal rights and, eventually, equal social status.”
¹²

As always with Foster, one vigorous step forward was followed by a cautious step backward. Having sounded a militant note in the opening section of his booklet, he went on to urge homosexuals—even as he acknowledged that they were rightfully angry at organized religion and the psychiatric profession for reinforcing oppressive views—
not
to abandon the hope of a beneficial rapprochement with both. In Foster's view, “many homosexuals who have associated themselves with the movement … if not always in actual need of psychiatric treatment could nonetheless benefit extensively from it, as they could from religious counselling.”

Moving on in the pamphlet to a historical discussion, Foster drew a portrait of pre-nineteenth-century efforts at homosexual solidarity as “highly secretive and cult-like” and characterized the common purpose of these early groups as “debauchery” and their few clandestine publications as “pornographic.” These early attempts were not, in Foster's view, constructive, did not appeal to homosexuals on a “high
enough plane.” He looked far more favorably on late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century efforts, reserving special praise for Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Weimar Germany and Edward Carpenter's intellectual circle in England. Gone was the old secrecy, he exulted, and gone, too, the unfortunate previous concentration on “orgies, pornography, magic and ritual.” The new groups aimed to create a unified movement with well-defined grievances and strategies for reform (in other words, a movement in Foster's own image).

When he turned in the pamphlet to the United States, Foster showed surprising awareness of some early attempts to organize that remain poorly documented even to this day: Henry Gerber's shortlived Society for Human Rights, in Chicago in the 1920s; the Veterans Benevolent Association, which formed after World War II in New York City; and two possibly apocryphal groups, the Sons of Hamidy and the Legion of the Damned, whose existence Foster accepted at face value, as have most historians since. When his chronology came to the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society of the 1950s, Foster gave generous credit to both for their pioneering efforts, but lamented how much time they had wasted on trying to figure out the
why
of homosexuality—what its origins were in the individual.
¹³

He applauded the recent shift of energy into promoting social reforms and challenging long-standing discriminatory practices. The old emphasis on “How did we get here?” was giving way to the new: “Here we are, let's take it from there.” Understandably, Foster reserved his fullest enthusiasm for the contemporary movement in which he was himself active; he welcomed the emerging sense of homosexuality “as in no way inferior to its counterpart” and the growing expectation “that society will eventually come around to a similar view.”

Foster was particularly proud of the determination of those (including himself) who, in gathering to plan for the 1967 Washington conference, decided that homophile organizations would be judged as qualified to participate only if they agreed to the central aim of establishing the homosexual in society as “a first class human being and a first class citizen.” He was proud, too, of his call for “concrete action programs,” with new initiatives for “injecting our views into the planning of sex education programs” and for a large scale fund-raising effort to finance a national legal defense fund.
¹⁴

But as he himself realized, not everyone agreed that the organization should be strengthened. Mattachine New York continued to
stand entirely aloof, with Dick Leitsch privately characterizing “the so-called ‘homophile movement' [as] … too often an albatross around the necks of those who are trying to be effective in the cause for which we are all supposedly working.” Leitsch was determined to avoid the rest of the movement “as much as possible.… If this means MSNY is isolationist, so be it. I believe it is better to be alone and effective than to be part of an ineffective crowd.”
¹⁵

To get a clearer sense of the divisions within the homophile movement, Foster went out to the West Coast during the summer of 1967 and had a round of talks with representatives of various groups. He concluded that there was a decided regional difference of opinion. Many on the West Coast preferred to put their energies and limited resources into a new regional network; and they tended to be
somewhat
less single-mindedly certain than were many Easterners that their way was the
only
way and that anyone disagreeing was either stupid or evil. The Western leaders were therefore inclined, for the time being anyway to hold a national organization “to a consultative rather than a legislative level” and to confine it largely “to communications problems and projects.”

Stopping off in Chicago to see Bill Kelley of Mattachine Midwest, Foster listened to the puzzlement of the “in-between” region. “What's all the controversy about?” Kelley asked. “Why all the in-fighting? Why all the legalistic technicalities?”—especially since most of the participating organizations had made it clear that no vote would be binding on them. Foster basically agreed with Kelley; he was eager to get beyond regional fears and jealousies and to set up a national organization with real teeth in it. But, a conciliator by nature, he was prepared to advise patience. “We all know,” he wrote in summarizing his trip, “that cooperation amongst homophilers is going to come very hard. It's going to take time. The nationals may really be serving little more purpose at present than ‘group therapy'”—a channel for venting “hostile feelings, fears, [and] individualistic … personalities.” Besides, Foster felt, “it is perfectly natural that cooperation should be sought first in one's ‘neighborhood' before taking on the country as a whole.”

The 1967 homophile conference met in Washington, D.C., in mid-August and received decidedly mixed reviews. The new West Coast publication,
The Advocate
, hailed the conference as “the most productive and beneficial” of the meetings thus far, and quoted the pioneering activist Jim Kepner, among others, as pleased with the impressive presence of delegates from seventeen organizations and
the improved communication that developed between East and West Coast groups.
¹⁶

But that was putting the best face on matters. New York Mattachine had again refused to participate; indeed, Leitsch had begun to toy with the idea of forming a “meaningful” national association of his own. On the West Coast, Dorr Legg had persuaded ONE to boycott the convention (Don Slater's rival L.A. group, Tangents, did attend) out of the growing conviction that the “eastern generals” were intent on a legislative body aimed at displacing the valuable variety of Western organizations, with their diverse aims and memberships.
¹⁷

At the root of the problem was Foster's Credentials Committee. The Westerners and Midwesterners were on the whole committed to the principle of inclusiveness and objected strenuously to Foster's “extremely meticulous nosing” (in Jim Kepner's words) into every aspect of an applicant group's structure, purpose, and membership—especially since Foster himself had no real organizational affiliation, other than his own one-person creation, the Institute of Social Ethics. Dorr Legg, among others, fumed over Foster making final judgments about which organization was or was not a legitimate part of the movement, when he himself was an unaffiliated Johnny-come-lately.

Jim Kepner was the only Westerner to remain on the Credentials Committee in the face of Foster's meddlesome ways. He thought it was important for
someone
to fight a rearguard action in favor of a diverse movement (“I favored, as many Westerners did, a conference open to anyone willing to attend”) against Foster's tendency to homogenize it into respectable conformity. But even Kepner—who liked Foster personally—joined the angry protest when it was discovered that Foster, in consultation with Kameny, had peremptorily barred the critic Leslie Fiedler (an avowed heterosexual who nonetheless had wanted to “observe” the proceedings, for a possible essay). “I didn't have any idea who the hell he was,” Foster confessed, “I thought he was a bum off the streets.” The mistake led to a volatile general discussion of the Credential Committee's policies, and only a timely, public apology from Foster averted a vote of censure.

Fiedler was ultimately admitted to the conference, but the performance of the Credentials Committee continued to be excoriated in postconference discussions. One of the committee's own members angrily denounced its “power-hungry” ways, insisting that some organizations with what he termed little or no evidence of actual existence—such as Pursuit and Symposium (Los Angeles) or the Society
Advocating Mutual Equality (Rock Island, Illinois)—had been given voting privileges, while more substantial groups (like Craig Rod-well's HYMN
*
) had been turned away. In the past year, the dissident committee member charged, “the movement has created an
establishment
,” and in protest he resigned.
¹⁸

In arguing against admitting the “motley hordes,” Foster had been especially concerned about unaffiliated “leftwingers” who might (as one of the articles later written on the conference put it) “jeopardize the social acceptance necessary to put into constructive action the expressions of the group's needs.” In 1967, few such left-wing radicals were present at the national planning conference, but by the following year, at the gathering in Chicago, Foster's annoyance at what he called “infiltrators” would increase—and at the 1969 conference in Kansas City would become pronounced.
¹⁹

Foster also opposed the view that “prejudice against homosexuality is but one manifestation of an unhealthy attitude on the part of society toward sex in general, and that this attitude must be attacked in its totality before homosexuals can hope to improve their status.” Foster called such a view “speculative” and, “from a public relations standpoint, risky.” Similarly, he argued against the notion that “anything goes so long as no one else is being ‘harmed,'” characterizing that attitude as “an implied rejection of the authority of convention.” Such doctrines, he wrote, “have not yet received official sanction by the homophile movement,” and he expressed the personal hope that “they will not.”
²⁰

Though later a defender of the women's movement, Foster also had trouble dealing with emerging feminism. He felt in 1967 that homophile and feminist concerns should be kept separate (though within two years he
would
be able to recognize their linkage), and he saw the small group of women who had affiliated with the national planning conference as “becoming very defensive,” and some of them downright “disruptive.” The “problem,” like that of left-wing “infiltration,” would grow over the next few years, exacerbated by the—yes—“defensive” attitude of gay men like Foster.

As the activist lesbian leader Del Martin put it in specifically singling out Foster's Credentials Committee for condemnation, it was (she wrote) “a debating society, an exercise in self-aggrandizement of self-proclaimed leaders of an unrepresented minority.” Del Martin did not advocate that lesbians withdraw entirely from participation in the
homophile movement—“for there are many worthy mutual endeavors demanding and deserving the support of female homosexuals.” But she did insist that “consuming and costly” participation should be limited to areas where there is “some semblance of cooperation, or at least some hope thereof”—and she did not see any such semblance in the national conference.
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