Homosexuality in the 50s
Exhibition dates: 14th May &#; 11th October,
Curators: Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent for the Cherry Grove Archives Collection and coordinated at New-York Historical by Rebecca Klassen, associate curator of material culture
Weekend Guest at Warm House
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley
During the s, Cherry Grove provided gay individuals a much-needed flee from the homophobia and the legal and social persecution that many experienced in the era of McCarthyism following World War II. Homosexuals faced physical assault, verbal attacks, family rejection, decrease of employment, imprisonment, and even involuntary psychiatric hospitalisation. In the Grove, they could openly socialise and experience a joyful and rare freedom of sexual expression.
I seem to be on a roll at the moment with a series of exhibitions that this archive loves to highlight: human beings who picture, capture, depict, image, or photograph the subversive, marginalised, disenfranchised, hidden &#;Other&#; in society – as an act o
The BBC's First Homosexual: How we made s work into a play
The documentary was later lost but, accompanying the efforts of a Leicestershire academic and an award-winning writer, a perform named The BBC's First Homosexual has been created about it which is having its first performance on Thursday. The people behind it explain the challenges they faced along the way.
'It provoked so much reaction'
Seven years ago Dr Marcus Collins was standing in the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading feeling bored.
Marcus, an maestro in social adjust in post-war Britain at Loughborough University, had grown fatigued of the undertaking he was functional on when his eye chanced upon something completely distinct - a big file, containing paperwork relating to a controversy in the s.
Intrigued, he study on to detect the lost script of one of the BBC's first attempts to analyze the lives of gay men - a documentary named The Homosexual Condition, which had been broadcast on the Home Service.
It had
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Bill Hull, June 21, Interview K Southern Oral History Program Collection (#) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- CHRIS MCGINNIS:
- So when did you three brothers start talking to each other in recognition that you were male lover. At one point, somebody had live in crush, if I remember correctly after your mother's death.
- BILL HULL:
- Right, I knew my brother Tommy, who was the oldest one, was gay. Adv, we all knew. My brother Sam was, he was baby in the family, and he knew that he had these two queer brothers I guess. He had a lot of pressure on him from family, Alma, that raised us, as not necessarily being the right thing to execute. So, he was very closeted in some regards. I thinkâmy brothersâit was after my mother's death that we were finally able to sit down as a family of three gay brothers and really deal with it. It took Sam's coming out for him to realized that we weren't little monsters
Government Persecution of the LGBTQ Community is Widespread
The s were perilous times for individuals who fell outside of society’s legally allowed norms relating to gender or sexuality. There were many names for these individuals, including the clinical “homosexual,” a term popularized by pioneering German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In the U.S., professionals often used the term “invert.” In the midth Century, many cities formed “vice squads” and police often labeled the people they arrested “sexual perverts.” The government’s preferred term was “deviant,” which came with legal consequences for anyone seeking a career in public service or the military. “Homophile” was the term preferred by some early activists, small networks of women and men who yearned for people and found creative ways to resist legal and societal persecution.
With draft eligibility officially lowered from 21 to 18 in , World War II brought together millions of people from around the country–many of whom were disappearing their home states for the first time–to stuff the ranks of the military and t