Gay men in the 1950s
Exhibition dates: 14th May – 11th October, 2021
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 Hot House
1958
Cherry Grove Archives Collection, Gift of Harold Seeley
During the 1950s, Cherry Grove provided gay individuals a much-needed escape 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, loss 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, secret ‘Other’ in society – as an act of resistance against living lives of conformity, against the prejudices of p
Gay Men's Dress in the 1950s
For most gay men, the 1950s were characterised by the very concrete fear of exposure, blackmail and arrest. The police were conducting a virtual witch-hunt of gay men, exemplified by cases such as the Montagu trials. The legal position was such that dressing to announce one’s sexual liking could lead to the loss of job or home, and could even lead to imprisonment. Therefore, most homosexual men followed the accepted dress rules of the day wearing "dark suits, three pieces, very quiet shirts." To the majority of same-sex attracted men it was crucial to remain invisible. Clothes were conventional and only small signals were given to indicated sexuality, for example the wearing of a pinkie (little finger) ring or suede shoes (143).
Dudley Cave remembers the clothes he was wearing when he met his partner in 1952: "I was wearing grey flannels, a sport coat and an extremely butch belt, an ex-army belt, a tie. I wouldn’t contain dreamt of going into town in those days without wearing a tie and usually a sports jacket. Bernard was wearing a suit. Generally speaking we kept our heads down and tried to avoid being seen as what we were." John Ha
The journalist Peter Wildeblood may not be a domesticated name in Britain today, but he was in 1954. Along with the wealthy Lord Montagu and Michael Pitt-Rivers, Wildeblood was sent to prison for homosexual offences in a case that shocked Britain. His case is the subject of Against The Law, a film premiered at the BFI Flare film festival and aired on BBC2 to stamp the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality.
The post-war period saw a major upswing in the number of such cases coming before the courts in the UK and the US. This was not because men were having more sex with other men, but because the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were acting with increased vigour to catch them. In 1948, the American biologist Alfred Kinsey and his team of scientists had published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, with its shock findings that homosexual incidents were widespread across the population.
Panic reactions, including attempts to identify covert homosexuals hiding in the closet, were spurred by fears that the Soviet Union was using facts about private lives to blackmail individuals into spying for them.
Speaking out
Wildeblood’s importance in re
Government Persecution of the LGBTQ Community is Widespread
The 1950s 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 mid-19th 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 collective and found creative ways to resist legal and societal persecution.
With draft eligibility officially lowered from 21 to 18 in 1942, World War II brought together millions of people from around the country–many of whom were vanishing their home states for the first time–to load the ranks of the military and the federal workforce. Among them were gays and lesbians, who quietly formed kinships on m
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