LGBT Literature is a Readers and Book Lovers series dedicated to discussing literature that has made an impact on the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. From fiction to contemporary nonfiction to history and everything in between, any literature that touches on LGBT themes is welcome in this series. LGBT Literature posts on the last Sunday of every month at 7:30 PM EST. If you are interested in writing for the series, please send a kosmail to Chrislove.
The scene is a naval training station in Newport, Rhode Island, just after World War I came to an end in 1919. The assistant secretary of the navy—a man you may have heard of named Franklin Delano Roosevelt—was in the midst of a scandal involving “immoral conditions” in the military. The problems started when Chief Machinist’s Mate Ervin Arnold, while being treated for rheumatism at the naval training station’s hospital, became aware of “homosexual activity” and other “immoral” acts taking place on and off the base. John Loughery explains the underworld Arnold became exposed to among the “Ladies of Newport,” as the sailors called themselves. Prepare yourself:
What Arnold discovered during the ensuing days was the eclectic world of fairies and trade, of cross-dressers and party-givers, cocaine addicts and heavy drinkers, for whom mobilization had been a wildly social experience. Thomas Brunelle’s “steady,” Billy Hughes, was nicknamed “Salome” and had recently appeared in drag as the female lead in a musical at the naval station. Military men in drag for theatrical purposes raised few eyebrows at the time (or even later, during World War II), but Brunelle boasted that Hughes paid him regularly for sex. Arnold also met “Theda Bata,” as hospital corpsman Fred Hoage was known, and “Ruth” (John Gianelloni), who were both praised for their oral skills, much like their friend Jay “Beckie” Goldstein, who had, everyone agreed, “a nice chin to rest a pair of balls on.” Frank Dye was so good, Arnold was told, that he could draw your brains out through your penis. The Ladies of Newport were often joined in their partying at apartments at Whitfield Court and on Golden Hill Street by an assortment of civilians that included waiters, an area librarian, and a salesman from Providence. As “fairies,” or flamboyant or more obvious homosexuals, especially when they were among their own, they were always happy to find interested “trade,” or those masculine men who saw themselves (and were seen by the fairies) as free from the stigma of effeminacy or perversion. Trade did the fucking; trade never sucked. Trade wasn’t queer. Determined by demeanor and the role assumed during sex, rather than the gender of one’s partner, these sexual demarcations remained in play to one degree or another until the end of Stonewall.
(Probably true for the most part, although “trade” is still in use today, at least in the cruising subculture. And I think any gay male who has sought out “straight” men knows that similarly strict sexual demarcations still exist, even if the terminology isn’t used.)
Apparently Arnold found himself a little obsessed with the “homosexual scene” in Newport. He reported the situation to his superiors, leading to a court of inquiry being established to investigate the “immoral conditions,” which was sanctioned by FDR, who was acting as the head of the navy department. An undercover operation was soon underway, targeting popular cruising locations such as the YMCA:
[The ex-detective in charge of the operation] wanted no one over thirty, he said, on the well-known assumption that homosexuals never bothered with men that old. His ideal volunteer was in his late teens or early twenties, handsome, none too intellectually inclined, and willing to put himself in awkward situations for the good of the service. . . .
The specific duties the recruits were charged with fell into three areas: to gather information about “cocaine joints” and the sale of liquor; to gather information “pertaining to cocksuckers and rectum receivers” and any network of “said fairies”; and to gather information about prostitutes in the area.
And the arrests started happening, from March of 1919 through the summer. But it turned out that the “operatives” carrying out the investigation might have been enjoying themselves a little too much:
From the perspective of the 1990s, the unnerving aspect of the Newport undercover operation isn’t the risks taken by the Salomes and the Theda Baras, who has no reason to assume that their “dates” weren’t what they pretended to be, but the amount of consummated sex that seems to have taken place between these self-identified homosexual men and the partners who would have emphatically rejected such a label for themselves. Yet from the outset it was clear, or strongly implied, that the “operatives,” as they were called, weren’t being relieved of their duties merely to document immoral propositions and lewd gestures; they were being sent by the Navy’s own Comstock to record the nitty-gritty, complete to climax, and that they did. . . . In at least two instances, operatives later admitted to having had anal sex to orgasm with their delighted partners. Transcripts indicate that others slept the night through in the same bed once the deed was done, with one operative even paying for his room with “Beckie” Goldstein. (The only aversion that remained an absolute for the sailors was kissing, something that trade could never engage in without jeopardizing the distinction between him and his queer partner.) James Goggins, a new recruit in the summer—when the number of operatives swelled to over forty—and one of Arnold’s busiest young men, acknowledged a midnight tryst on the grass near Forty Steps on Cliff Walk in which he was fellated but then failed to get the name of the sailor who “did” him. They met again. A second time Goggins neglected to return with a name for the record. Many of the operatives, when recounting their pre- or postcoital conversations, also seemed especially gratified at being told by the fairies that they had large penises. The screen of disinterest grew rather thin at times.
It’s all I can do not to quote literally all of this chapter from Loughery’s book, as you can imagine. You’ll have to read the rest for yourself.
Anyway, when the court of inquiry was finished, fifteen sailors were court-martialed, and some of them went on to serve time in prison. But Arnold and other obsessed officers were not finished, and they pressed on with their investigation, this time targeting civilians as well. FDR also sanctioned this investigation and saw to it that they had the money to carry it out. It culminated with the arrest of an Episcopal minister named Samuel Neal Kent. The ensuing trial is what turned the whole thing into a quagmire for the entire department:
Kent’s trial necessarily brought out all that Arnold had labored to keep secret. Young men of seventeen had been sent out into the night like streetwalkers, taught to dissemble, paid to spend their time in rooms where liquor and drugs were available. Men in their late twenties, who could certainly have declined the assignment, had allowed their bodies to be used “in unspeakable ways.” When one befuddled operative left the stand, having acknowledged that he understood his instructions were to let the minister “play with my penis and allow it until [I] had an emission,” reaction in town set in against the Navy and its tactics: Kent was found innocent.
The government pursued the matter further by trying him a second time in a federal court. That trial went just as badly for the Navy. In the aftermath, the Providence Journal went after the Wilson administration and blew the scandal wide open as a national story. Soon, there was a Senate investigation. FDR was interviewed, as was Arnold and many of the operatives, some of whom “were suddenly developing what one senator described as suspiciously convenient memory lapses.” The Senate committee decried FDR’s actions as “reprehensible,” but most surprising, perhaps, were the senators’ feelings on how to deal with homosexuality (undoubtedly influenced by the increased medicalization of homosexuality by the turn of the century):
“Perversion is not a crime,” Senator Keyes maintained, “but a disease that should be properly treated in a hospital.”
By the time FDR ran for the presidency, this scandal had long been forgotten by most Americans—although, not by the people most directly affected, of course.
This anecdotal story is how John Loughery’s 1998 book The Other Side of Silence: Men’s Lives and Gay Identities—A Twentieth Century History begins. A deeply fascinating story, to say the least, but Loughery suggests that it is indicative of something deeper:
It strains credibility to think of [the Ladies of Newport] meeting one another aboard ship and only then evolving the styles with which they were comfortable. Their flagrant use of the YMCA lobby as a pickup area, their willingness to talk with Arnold in the naval hospital even though he must have appeared an outsider, their gait on the street, and their success in impersonating women in the Navy’s theatrical revues, which carried over into their private parties, is evidence that implies they had long since formed their ideas about what they wanted and what they thought they could get away with. They weren’t inventing a way of life in the nineteen months of the American involvement in the war; they were more likely bringing it, ready-formed, into a new community from the disparate cities and towns they came from. What the war provided for them was what large-scale military conflicts often provide: a sense that their number was larger than they thought, that their sexual and social world was not a small one.
And therein lies one of the major points of Loughery’s book: the dynamic nature of identity, in this case gay male identity:
The subject of this book is that still-unfolding process, whereby men who have made other men the focus of their romantic and erotic lives attempt to define themselves (to themselves and to society), wrestle with the narrow images society continues to foist on them, and decide to what extent they should view their sexuality as a defining characteristic of their lives.
In my last LGBT Literature diary, I mentioned that I intended to cover less specialized and more “survey” history books in upcoming editions. In other words, more books that readers unfamiliar with LGBT history can use as launching pads for learning more. From that diary:
I have reviewed a wide variety of books in the LGBT Literature series, covering many different topics—from queer men in the South to gays and lesbians in World War II to the Cold War persecution of homosexuality, among others. But it occurs to me that, as much history as I have covered here, I have not written that much about survey narratives of LGBT history. I know that many longtime readers of this series are probably well versed in LGBT history, but many others probably know little about it. That is not a judgment—indeed, even in 2018, it takes a certain amount of effort to learn about LGBT history, since it is so poorly taught (and, more often, not taught at all). For some readers, it might be good to offer a starting place rather than a deep dive into this or that historical episode. From time to time, I have spoken with students whose interest was piqued by the LGBT history I cover in class, and there are a few books that I tend to steer them toward as a beginning point for learning more. I would like to spend a little more time covering those kinds of books here at LGBT Literature, in addition to the more specialized monographs.
With that in mind, I wanted to cover another survey book in this month’s diary, and I was alternating back and forth between two of my favorites. I finally settled on Loughery’s book, which is definitely a survey, but a very particular kind of survey, covering gay male life and identity as it evolved through the twentieth century. Much of early gay historiography, starting with Jonathan Ned Katz’s Gay American History (1976) and then John D’Emilio’s Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), struggled to push back against the narrative that gay history “began” with Stonewall, and I would place The Other Side of Silence in that category as well. By 1998, several other books and articles had been written in the same vein, including George Chauncey’s landmark Gay New York (1994), which covers gay male life from 1890 to 1940 (which I really should cover in this series sometime, but the idea intimidates me). Loughery recognizes and is in conversation with these earlier works:
But these explorations are only beginnings. Even more to the point, just as earlier summary statements about “the homosexual” have given way to a wider, deeper sense of the variety of gay lives, so the idea of a “gay community” or a “gay lifestyle” looks increasingly out-of-date. Most observations about gay Americans will apply to only a small segment of those man who identify as gay. That said, the corollary that gay men lack any version of a shared past, any cultural, psychological, and philosophical bonds spanning the decades, seems to me mistaken, and it is with those aspects of experience—of differing relevance to different groups—that this book deals.
In the introduction, Loughery details his own experience growing up in the midst of shifting identity labels, and then he lays out the book’s argument in a way that is clearly a product of the 1990s and yet still relevant to a certain extent today:
This book will argue, though, that homosexuals are in a peculiarly difficult situation in modern America in terms of their public and private identity and that the difficulty has to do with our inability to articulate to ourselves the potential value of those labels—and the history, bonds, and challenges that go with them. . . . “I am not a ‘professional gay,’” more than a few gay men interviewed for this book commented, and a standard heterosexual response has always been, “Why must you people make an issue of what you do in private? Why do you have to talk about it?” The naïveté of the heterosexual query means less, ultimately, than the defensiveness of the gay pronouncement, which is tied to several factors: principally, the lack of concreteness or lack of consensus that plagues the word gay, and a fear of an openness from which there is no turning back.
How one reacts to loving or sexually desiring members of one’s own sex does matter in twentieth-century America because society has made it matter by means of repressive laws, by condoning violence and discrimination, by its own incessant style of classifying and naming. It matters because we are all, always, ready to lose sight of the cultural and spiritual richness to which difference and uncertainty can lead. A more fully embraced gay identity—a question of nouns as much as adjectives—matters even if the homosexual impulse exits (as modern gender theory reminds us again and again) along a continuum and as a universal potentiality in a way that religion, race, or ethnicity does not. It matters today even if it might be shed later, in a less sexually divisive future in which homosexuals no longer feel the need to form social and political ties based solely on their same-sex orientation. The moments at which gay men have been cognizant of that truth, and the more frequent periods in which they have lost sight of it, are elements of this book.
There’s a lot to chew on there—and while in some areas I can see where we have made substantial progress, it is clear that we are not even close to that hypothetical “less sexually divisive future,” if such a future is even possible.
The Other Side of Silence is an extremely impressive survey of gay male history from the end of World War I to the 1990s. It is a unique kind of survey, however, in that not only does it synthesize the existing historical literature, but it also adds a great deal of original research, including many interviews that the author did himself. Beginning with the Newport scandal, the book fills in holes (sorry for the pun) where they exist in the historiography as of the 1990s, while also interacting with and masterfully weaving all of the historical works at his disposal. It’s really an incredible work, and it is also helpful both to those just starting to learn about gay history and to those who are well-read but need to put it all into perspective. (It was especially helpful to me as I was preparing for my comprehensive exams, I’ll note, and I often recommend it to others who ask about LGBT history.)
The first chapter, as mentioned, is on the Newport scandal. There are also chapters on the 1920s, the Great Depression, McCarthyism, World War II, gay liberation, and AIDS. Those are just a few of the major topics—as I noted above, Loughery adds a great deal of original content, including fascinating looks at the roles of literature, theater, and film. At over 400 pages, it is a doorstopper of a book, but the pages turn quickly. Even twenty years after its publication, you will find a lot of information you had no idea about, making it worthwhile even for those who have a deep knowledge of LGBT history.
I’ll end by linking to a 1998 New York Times book review on The Other Side of Silence that I found while researching this diary and thought was interesting, mainly because it is sort of a time capsule itself:
For many otherwise well-meaning Americans, homosexuality and its attendant controversies -- gay marriage, military service, AIDS policy, sex education curriculums -- make us think or talk about things we would rather treat with benign neglect. Even though most straight Americans oppose overt discrimination against homosexuals, 7 in 10 think sex between members of the same sex is wrong. A majority viscerally opposes teaching tolerance for a ''homosexual life style'' and seems happiest with a ''don't ask, don't tell'' approach to the entire subject.
''The Other Side of Silence,'' John Loughery's provocative history of gay male life in the United States from 1919 to the early 1990's, will have none of it. His title (from the name of a short-lived gay theater workshop in the 1970's) refers both to the millions of gay lives that have been lived according to a kind of omerta, as well as to those who refused to follow the code and thereby risked their livelihoods and, as in the case of Supervisor Harvey Milk of San Francisco, their lives. But the other side of silence (or discretion) is also speech. By using blunt, nonacademic Anglo-Saxonisms, Loughery, the art critic of The Hudson Review, insures that readers cannot pretend not to know exactly which sexual acts were being practiced, forbidden or celebrated.
[...]
By giving voice to those who have been too often silenced in the past, by engaging them in a serious dialogue, by placing their words and their lives in front of modern readers, Loughery has rescued their experience from (in E. P. Thompson's memorable phrase) the enormous condescension of posterity. This extraordinary book will shame anyone who still wishes that gay issues would just go away. Loughery has added a powerful voice to the chorus making sure that speech triumphs over silence.
Some of that is pretty dated, in particular the overwhelming opposition to homosexuality that the reviewer cites. In other ways, however—despite the monumental progress our movement has made since the 1990s—much of what Loughery has to say in his book is still highly relevant, especially in this Trump era in which bigotry is emboldened and civil rights are threatened. Loughery’s closing words about “gay life” in the last chapter ring true in 2018—and for a lot more people than gay males:
a past in which little has come easy, a vital and contentious present, and a future that is anything but clear
LGBT Literature Schedule:
October 28: Clio2
November 25: OPEN
December 30: OPEN
January 27: OPEN
February 24: OPEN
As always, we are looking for writers! Either comment below or send Chrislove a message if you’d like to contribute to the series and fill one of our open dates.
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