Libby Bouvier and Stephen Nonack: Libby Bouvier and Stephen Nonack are active with The History Project: Documenting Lesbian and Gay Boston. This review originally appeared in the Newsletter of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, issue 15/2(Fall 2001), and is reprinted with the permission of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, at www.usc.edu/isd/archives/clgh
In 1945 Philadelphia was the third largest city in the country. Marc Stein has chronicled in impressive detail lesbian and gay Philadelphia from the end of World War II up to 1972, and in so doing has written an invaluable history of a complex urban community. Based largely on oral history interviews supplemented by extensive research in community and mainstream publications, government documents, and secondary sources, Stein's work places the relationships between lesbians and gay men at the center of his study rather than treating lesbians, gay men (and people of color) as separate communities.
Stein wisely chooses to begin the book with a look at the geography of lesbian and gay Philadelphia: the parks, streets, and alleyways of Center City where people met and mingled. Public gathering places, like Rittenhouse Square, were contested spaces, with police routinely attempting to sweep such popular cruising areas of so-called "deviants." Bars, bathhouses, restaurants, bookshops, and other businesses owned by lesbians and gay men are represented on an interesting demographic map compiled by the author. As homosexuals became more visible, one of the most prominent public spaces in the city, by the Liberty Bell, became the site of an annual Fourth of July demonstration for homosexual rights. As Stein recounts, this Day of Remembrance featured lesbians in dresses and gay men in jackets and ties as these activists employed a strategy of "heterosocial respectability" to win support.
The rise of early homophile groups in Philadelphia — long before 1969's Stonewall uprising in New York City — is elaborately plotted. Although groups like the Mattachine Society and the Janus Society existed as viable organizations for a few years only, their impact on the developing lesbian/gay politic was enormous. The Philadelphia chapter of the Mattachine Society was formed in 1960 in the aftermath of a police raid on an organizational meeting in the suburb of Radnor that sparked widespread outrage among lesbians and gay men; the chapter had a woman as its first president. Ultimately, conflicts with the national leadership led to the reorganization of the Philadelphia chapter as the Janus Society. The theme of Stein's book is reflected in the case of the Daughters of Bilitis. Seeing that there was more strength in unity, activists involved with the DOB reorganized as the Homophile Action League in order to be able to work alongside gay men.
The author interestingly notes how Philadelphia activists influenced the liberation movement through national publications like Drum (1964-9), produced by the Janus Society with Clark Polak as editor, and The Ladder, the lesbian review published by the Daughters of Bilitis, which was edited by Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen. The intersections between gay and straight Philadelphia are also well documented by the author. In particular, Stein's coverage of the now almost forgotten controversy that erupted in the mid-1950s over naming the new bridge to Camden after poet Walt Whitman makes for juicy reading.
City of Sisterly & Brotherly Love is so detailed and so encyclopedic one is hard pressed to compare it with any other existing community history. Serious and scholarly with a wealth of ancillary information packed into the footnotes, this work appears to stand alone. But is Stein's delineation of the struggles of Philadelphia's activist community specific to Philadelphia itself, or, for instance, similar to Boston, a city that shares similar demographics and similar social and economic dynamics? Of course, like Philadelphia, Boston shrank dramatically in the post-war period. Stein challenges lesbian and gay historians to reexamine homophile activism more broadly to look at the interdependence and alignments between lesbian and gay organizations and the ways in which lesbians and gay men joined together in common effort.
commenting closed for this article