US Post Office, censorship, sex and gender - Comstockery

First published March 2013.

Most countries use their postal systems to censor correspondence and publications.   This is in addition to censorship though the court system.  The usual excuse is that of security, but once censorship is in place it often extends to sex and gender topics.   And of course this censorship means that somebody at the post office opens your parcels to check inside.

Anthony Comstock

This article is just about the US.

1872.  Post Office Act, §148 made it illegal to send any obscene or disloyal materials

1873.  The Comstock Law.  An amendment to the Post Office Act of 1872 made it illegal to send any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials “or any drug or medicine, or any article whatever, for the prevention of conception, or for causing unlawful abortion, or shall advertise the same for sale, or shall write or print, or cause to be written or printed, any card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement, or notice of any kind, stating when, where, how, or of whom, or by what means, any of the articles in this section…can be purchased or obtained, or shall manufacture, draw, or print, or in any wise make any of such articles”.  The law was named after Anthony Comstock who became postal inspector,  He was also head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.  He prohibited the sending of anatomy books to medical students.  Comstock bragged in 1913, two years before his death, that he had been responsible for the criminal conviction of enough people to fill a 61-coach passenger train -- over 3,600 people.  He was responsible for the destruction of 160 tons of literature and pictures.

1876. A pamphlet by Edward Bliss Foote, inventor of the rubber diaphragm, was the first US publication on birth control to run afoul of the Comstock law. Foote was fined $3,000 for publishing his pamphlet, Confidential Pamphlet for the Married; Words in Pearl for Married People Only.  Birth control information went underground: even in medical textbooks, contraception was unmentionable.

1895. The English playwright, George Bernard Shaw wrote an editorial for the New York Times making fun of Comstock's rules, and mocked them as 'Comstockery'.

1897.  Henry Addis and Abner J. Pope, publishers of a Portland, Oregon anarchist newspaper, Firebrand were arrested and their paper closed for sending an allegedly obscene poem by Walt Whitman through the mail.

1901.  Lois Waisbrooker of Home, Washington (an anarchist colony) was fined $100 for The Awful Fate of a Fallen Woman.  The postmistress for Home, was also charged for mailing it, but was acquitted.

1902.  Discontent: Mother of Progress also printed in Home, Washington, an article written by James W. Adams defending free love and criticizing formal monogamous marriage as hypocritical. Federal officials charged the editor, James E. Larkin, the printer, Charles L. Govan, and Adams with mailing obscene literature.   However the judge deemed the article to be, though radical, not obscene.

1903.  Home, Washington, being ‘a settlement of avowed anarchists and free lovers, the members of which society on numerous instances, with the apparent sanction of the entire community, have abused the privileges of the post office establishment and department’ lost its post office and did not get it back until 1958, but even then was not allowed its traditional name.

1911.  A report by the Chicago Vice Commission, headed by Dean Summer of the Episcopal Church, was banned from the mails.

1915.  Architect William Sanger was charged under the New York law against disseminating contraceptive information.  Anthony Comstock, at the height of his power, appointed by President Wilson as the International Purity Congress delegate in San Francisco, testified at his trial. Sanger died shortly after on September 21st.

1916. Ricardo Flores Magón, anarchist and Latino activist, arrested on charges of defamation and sending indecent materials through the mail. He was sent to USP Leavenworth. In 1922, he died in his cell, maybe murdered by a guard.

1918. Sanger’s wife, Margaret similarly charged.  On appeal, her conviction was reversed on the grounds that contraceptive devices could legally be promoted for the cure and prevention of disease.

1920.  The US Post Office seized and burned four issues  of The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, that contained excerpts from James Joyce’s Ulysses. The next year, they were tried and found guilty of obscenity, fined $100 and forced to discontinue serializing the book.

1921.  William Hays appointed new Postmaster General.  He was quoted in The New York Times:  “It is no part of the primary business of the Post Office Department to act as censor of the press. This should not and will not be”.  Mary Ware Dennett met with Hays who implied that he would recommend to congress that contraceptive information be removed from the definition of what is obscene.

1922.  William Hays quit as Postmaster General without keeping his promise to Mary Ware Dennett.  He became president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America.

Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier, a tale of a cross-dressing woman,was cleared of obscenity in the 1922 case Halsey v. New York.

Mary Ware Dennett’s pamphlet, The Sex Side of Life-An Explanation for Young People, after having been in circulation over four years, was declared unmailable as obscenity.

1927.  The Post Office and the Customs Bureau issued a list of 739 books and pamphlets to be banned by department officials. The arbitrary list included many foreign books that had been published in the US in English for years without prosecution. “Other volumes were passed in the English version and excluded in the French or Italian; or excluded in Spanish while being passed in French or Italian.”  However the list was withdrawn in 1930 after pressure from a New Mexico Senator.

H.L. Mencken, editor of The American Mercury was arrested for selling obscene literature. His April contained “Hatrack”, a chapter from an upcoming book about a prostitute by Herbert Asbury, and “The New View of Sex”, an editorial essay by George Jean Nathan. Mencken was tried and acquitted two days later. The day after the trial and after all the April issues were mailed to subscribers, the Solicitor of the U.S. Postal Service Department, Horace J. Donnelly, decreed the issue obscene and unmailable.

1928.  Mary Ware Dennett was fined $300, for distributing her pamphlet. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), appealed her conviction and won a reversal, in which the judge ruled that the pamphlet's main purpose was to "promote understanding".

1929.  Radclyffe Hall’s pioneering trans man novel, The Well of Loneliness, was published in the US after already having been banned in the UK. It was seized in New York.  This was successfully challenged in court.

1930. Ex-Postmaster General, William Hays, introduced the Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hays Code, which removed most adult representation of sex and gender for the next few decades.

1932.  Margaret Sanger arranged for a shipment of diaphragms to be mailed from Japan to a sympathetic doctor in New York City. When U.S. customs confiscated the package as illegal contraceptive devices, Sanger helped file a lawsuit. In 1936, a federal appeals court ruled in United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries that the federal government could not interfere with doctors providing contraception to their patients.

1933. The Nudist was banned even though genitals were airbrushed.  The US Supreme Court disagreed.

1935.  Ban on contraceptives declared unconstitutional.

1938.  A Catholic Group, The National Office for Decent Literature, was founded with a list of topics including homosexuality and transvestism that were to be proscribed. To avoid trouble most publishers and editors engaged in self censorship, and avoided such topics.

1953.  The August issue of ONE Magazine, a homophile publication, was confiscated by the Los Angeles postmaster.  However the Federal Solicitor General determined in 3 weeks that the issue was not obscene, and the confiscated copies were returned.

1954.  ONE Magazine October issue was seized because of “Sappho Remembered”, an advertisement for a Swiss magazine, Der Kreis “with beautiful photos”, and a poem about homosexuality in England.

1957.  Samuel Roth’s American Aphrodite, containing literary erotica and nude photography was convicted.   The Supreme Court upheld the ruling.

Attorney Eric Jilber refused help from the ACLU, and lost ONE’s case in the Court of Appeal.  The three judges deemed the issue “morally depraved and debasing”

520 copies of Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, being imported from a printer in London, were seized by US Customs.  Then the manager of City Lights Bookstore and publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, were tried for publishing and selling the book. The ACLU  supported the defendants and nine literary experts testified on the book’s behalf.  It was acquitted on appeal.

1958. The US supreme Court ruled, re One Magazine, in its first ever case involving homosexuality, that the Post Office was discriminating and denying equal protection.  Hence homosexual content is not obscene simply because it is homosexual.

1959. The US publisher of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover won his case and its appeal against the US Post Office’s censorship.

1960. Nan Gilbert in New England, a publisher of petticoat-punishment fantasies, had his mail stopped and was fined $500.

1961. H Lynn Womack, gay erotica publisher, successfully sued the post office for confiscating Grecian Guild magazine.

Susanna Valenti was summoned by postal officials. Two of her correspondents had been charged with mailing obscene materials, and Susanna’s name had come up. Tito, her male persona, pleaded respectability and denounced the obscenities.

Virginia Prince was actually arrested re personal correspondence to another transvestite, thought to be a woman, who was already under investigation. Prince pleaded guilty in a plea bargain to sending obscene material through the mail. With a five-year probationary sentence, he was liable to be imprisoned if caught cross-dressed in public. However his lawyer persuaded the court to include educating the public about cross-dressing as part of the probation order.

1963.  Sanford Aday & Wallace de Ortega Maxey, mail-order erotica publishers, both of the homophile Mattachine Society, indicted on 18 counts of Interstate Transportation of Obscene Material, convicted of 5.  Of the 8 books named, only Sex Life of a Cop was found obscene. They were fined $25,000 each and sentenced to 25 years in prison (although the conviction was reversed by the US Supreme Court a few years later).  There is now a Sanford Aday collection at California State University, Fresno.

1965. The U.S. Supreme Court case Griswold v. Connecticut struck down one of the remaining contraception Comstock laws in Connecticut and Massachusetts. However, Griswold only applied to marital relationships.

1972. Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) extended its holding to unmarried persons as well.

1973.  Abortion became legal under privacy laws

1996.  The Comstock Act was revived into Title V of the Telecommunications Act.

2023.  Mifepristone, an abortion pill was subject to litigation, and the never-repealed Comstock laws were cited to ban its mailings.  If the right wing succeed in banning mailings of  mifepristone, will viagra, the drugs used by gay men and hormones for trans persons be likewise banned?

• Darrell Raynor. A Year Among the Girls. New York: Lyle Stuart, 1966. New York: Lancer Books, 1968: 74.
• Lori Klatt Maurice.  Stamping Out Indecency: The Postal Way. March 8, 2004.   Online
• Richard F Docter. “Battles with the Postal Authorities”.  Chp 12 in From Man to Woman: The Transgender Journey of Virginia Prince. Docter Press, 2004: 109-112.
• Jed Birmingham. “Obscenity and the Post Office”.  Reality Studio, 18 May 2006.  Online.
• Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons. Gay L. A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. New York: Basic Books, 2006: 116-120.
• Susan Stryker.  Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press.  2008: 52-3.
• Stephen J Gertz.  ““Sex Life of a Cop” Chows Down Big Donuts at Paperbacks Show for Record $”.  Seattle PI, 2010/03/22.  Online.
• Tanya Lewis. "This 19th-Century Obscenity Law Is Still Restricting People's Reproductive Rights". Scientific American, April 28, 2023.

EN.Wikipedia(Postal_censorship.  Comstock_laws)

Chris Moore (1920 - 1975) sailor, performer

Chris, originally from California, was four and a half years in the US Army, and then was a merchant seaman. He lived a year in east Asia. He then settled in New York.

In the mid 1960s, he took up female impersonation, and appeared with Frank Bennet in the Follies Mantisque. This led to work with the Jewel Box Revue, at first doing a comedy strip. However it was discovered that he could impersonate Ethel Merman rather well, and started singing songs from Gypsy. He then added Marlene Dietriche and Bette Davis to his repertoire. He used a special heavy makeup to hide the tattoo on his upper arm. He was also partially blind and required thick glasses.

He met Lee Brewster and Vicky West in the Mattachine Society, and left with them to found the Queens Liberation Front. In 1971 Chris won the Most Outstanding Performance at the April in Paris Ball, and again at Lee's Mardi Gras Ball.

Chris was a constant at QLF parties, but after a few years she was diagnosed with cancer. She was able to fight it for over five years. Lee Brewster put on a special ball for Chris so that she could perform and be the star, and Vicky drew her for the cover of Drag magazine.

• Avery Willard. Female Impersonation. New York: Regiment Publications, 1971: 26-9. Online
  
• “Six Foot Chris Moore”. Female Impersonators, 2, Summer 1969: 18-21. Online
  
• Cover. Drag, 3,11, 1973. Online
  
• “Chris Moore Revue”. In Lee G Brewster's Mardi Gras Ball, 1974: 4-7. Online
  
• Veronica Vera interviews Bebe Scarpe about the late Vicky West. “Forever Mardi Gras”. Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 32-43. Online
  
• “The Kurt Mann Story”. Queer Music Heritage. http://www.queermusicheritage.com/fem-mann1.html.
• "The Glamorous Chris Moore Dead at 55".  Drag, 5, 19, 1975. Online. 

Vicky West (1935 - 2005) artist.

Dirk Luykx was born in New Jersey, the youngest of four boys, and wanted to be a girl since childhood. He went to Cornell University to do Civil Engineering. In 1955 he interrupted his studies to serve in the US Army. He was in Japan and Korea for three years, and then five years in the Army Reserves. He returned to Cornell and completed his engineering degree in 1961.

Dirk moved to California and worked in engineering design, city planning, and public works. He was also the art director of The Los Angeles Youth Theater. During this time Dirk as Vicky discovered and participated in Virginia Prince's Hose and Heel Club.

Preferring art to engineering, Dirk returned to New York, and studied Fine Arts and Graphic Design at Cooper Union. In 1967, while still a student, Dirk was hired by publisher Henry N. Abrams, Inc. where he continued to work until retirement. In addition to the books listed below, Dirk later worked on behalf of the publisher on Morris Louis: The Complete Paintings, The Art of Walt Disney, Windows at Tiffany’s, The History of Modern Art, Impressionism.

At this time Vicky was living with a woman, but also investigated the homophile  Mattachine Society. Here he met Lee Brewster who had been organizing drag balls as fund raisers, and also Chris Moore, the Jewel Box Revue performer. When Lee grew tired of the Mattachine Society's disinterest in drag issues, and founded the Queens Liberation Front, Vicky was a founding member.

Lee initiated a newsletter which evolved into Drag magazine with Vicky doing the covers and illustrating stories in the magazine. The first issue credited Dirk for the cover, but from the second issue, Vicky was listed as Art Director. Initially the cover illustrations were Vicky's versions of herself in different situations, but then she started doing other people. “I was hoping for another Vogue – images of transvestites enjoying themselves, trying on clothes. All the expression was positive.”

Drag Magazine also evolved into Lee's Mardi Gras store. Vicky was often to be found there, but always as Dirk. After a while, Lee became bored with editing the magazine and Bebe Scarpinato took over.

At Mardi Gras 1978 in New Orleans, Vicky was with a Lee's Mardi Gras contingent when she met cis photographer Mariette Pathy Allen who was impressed by her posture: “who focused straight back at me. As I peered through the camera lens, I had the feeling that I was looking at neither a man nor a woman but at the essence of a human being”. As it turned out they lived 20 blocks apart in New York. Together they went to parties at Lew Brewster's Mardi Gras Boutique, to various clubs that put on drag shows, and to Fantasia Fair in Provincetown.

In the early 1980s, Vicky was an extra in a film, maybe New York Nights, 1984, in a scene in a drag bar with International Chrysis.

Vicky was featured in Mariette's 1989 book, which was brave of her in that Dirk was still working at Henry N. Abrams. Like Bebe Scarpinato, Vicky sometimes did a striptease on stage. Vicky's female lover became uptight about the parties, imagining all sorts of sex, and after ten years they separated.

Later, in the AIDS-ridden 1980s, Vicky lived with gay lovers. “With the AIDS epidemic, guys are doing drag as something else to do.” “I'm not political, but I very much admire those who are, and I believe that transvestites should be proud and should be honored for what they've accomplished.”

When he retired from Henry N. Abrams, Inc in 2000, Dirk Luykx was the Executive Art Director. Dirk died at age 70 of cardiovascular disease, and was interred at the US Military's Arlington National Cemetery.

The Winter 2006/7 issue of Transgender Tapestry was largely dedicated to Vicky with several reminiscences and reproductions of her art: “to remain completely faithful to her work, we decided to print this tribute issue of Tapestry in black and white. We didn’t want the rich subtlety of Vicky’s charcoal sketches to be drowned out in a cacophony of color.”

• Marc Edmund Jones, with charts and diagrams by Dirk Luykx. How to Learn Astrology. Sabian, 1970. Webpage.
  
• Drag, 1,1, 1971. editor: Lee G Brewster, Cover: Dirk. Online. 
• Drag, 1,2, 1971. editor: Lee G Brewster, Art Director: Vicky West. Online. 
• Darlene Geis, Margaret Donovan & Dirk Luykx. Walt Disney's Treasury of Children's Classics. Henry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1978.
  
• Lory Frank, Darlene Geis & Dirk Luykx. Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow. Harry N Abrams, 1982.
  
• Anne Edwards, with design by Dirk Luykx and photographs by Louise Kerz. The Demilles: An American Family. Harry N Abrams, 1988.
  
• Mariette Pathy Allen. Transformations: Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them. New York: Dutton, 1989: no pagination – Introduction and penultimate profile.
  
• Cena Williams. “Vicky West – An Icon is No More”. Transgender Tapestry, 110, Fall 2006: 25. Online
  
• Mariette Pathy Allen. Vicky West: Full Circle” Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 25-9. Online.
  
• Veronica Vera interviews Bebe Scarpe about the late Vicky West. “Forever Mardi Gras”. Transgender Tapestry, 111, Winter 2006/7: 32-43. ibid
  
• Mariette Pathy Allen. “Momentum: A Photo Essay of the Transgender Community in the United States Over 30 Years, 1978–2007”. Sexuality Research & Social Policy, 4,4, December 2007: 92. Online at: http://www.deanspade.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/pathyallen.pdf.

Edward Sagarin (1913 – 1986) sociologist

Edward Sagarin was the youngest of eight children born in Schenectadty, New York to Russian-immigrant Jewish parents. His mother died in the 'Spanish' Influenza epidemic in 1918, and his father remarried and moved the family to New York City. After high school, Sagarin spent a year in France where he met André Gide, the author of Corydon.

Despite his interest in men, he married and they had one son. After a variety of jobs Sagarin established himself in the cosmetics industry and became an expert on the chemistry of perfumes. In 1951, just three years after Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Sagarin published the ground-breaking book, The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach, using the pen-name of Donald Webster Cory (constructed from Gide's Corydon – Gide died in 1951). This was the first non-fiction book to describe what it was like to be homosexual in the US at that time, and argued boldly for homosexual rights. The book was reprinted seven times in hardback, translated into French and Spanish, and issued as a mass-market paperback in 1963.



Sargarin's employer somehow found out that he was the author, and fired him. Nevertheless, several more books on the topic were issued under Cory's name.

From 1955 Cory was active in the New York branch of the Mattachine Society.  In 1958, Sagarin returned to college. He completed a BA at Brooklyn College in the same class as his son. He followed this with an MA thesis on 'dirty words', which was published as a book, and the author photograph outed him to members of the Mattachine Society as the same person as Cory. He went on to do a PhD at New York University in sociology.

He became associated with the psychologist Albert Ellis, and co-wrote books on incest under his own name. Donald Cory and John LeRoy (a sex partner whom he helped out financially) issued The Homosexual and His Society which claimed that there is no such thing as a 'well-adjusted homosexual', and also discussed hustlers, and challenged the then common assumption that homosexuals were security risks.

Sagarin was increasingly at odds with the new activists in the Mattachine Society including LeRoy who were advocating for civil rights and liberation for homosexuals. In 1965, after a bitter fight for control. Sagarin quit the Mattachine Society. The conflict, expressed with some bitterness, appears in his PhD thesis, Structure and ideology in an association of deviants, that he submitted in 1966.

He secured an academic position at the Baruch College campus of the City University of New York, where he became known as an excellent teacher, and a specialist in deviancy.

In 1968, he wrote a paper "Ideology as a Factor in the Consideration of Deviance" for The Journal of Sex Research, in which he made the commonplace observation that scientists are not always as objective as they should be. In the section he named "Normal Necrophiles and Transsexuals", he quotes Harry Benjamin finding "no evidence of serious mental illness", and replies:

"Benjamin describes a condition in which 'the male speaks of his female counterpart as of another person,' but to label this schizophrenia would constitute social condemnation, rather than diagnostic realism" and "One need only read the case histories, written by Benjamin or his collaborators, to note how disturbed are the patients".

The Journal allowed Benjamin to reply:

"My criticism of Sagarin's contribution is that his own ideology leads him to draw unwarranted conclusions in some (not all) instances, and his tendency to generalize too much".

Sagarin worked with George L. Kirkham, another sociologist who had worked as a policeman in the cause of research. They produced a paper that was reprinted in Saragin's 1969 book, Odd Man in; Societies of Deviants in America, mainly about Change: Our Goal (COG), the San Francisco transvestite/transsexual group and its then unique experiment of co-operation with the police force via the efforts of Officer Elliot Blackstone (whom they do not mention or name). Sagarin & Kirkham fail to see this as a step forward, and in what is closer to journalism than to sociology deride the COG members as fantasists.

"Transsexuals may be divided into two groups: those who have had sex reassignment surgery performed, and those who desire it. The former generally prefer not to mingle with the latter. Convinced (or hoping to convince themselves) that there is no difference between a man-made and a 'God-given' vagina, they view themselves as real girls who can share nothing with men who only wish to become women. ... the second transsexual category – those who desire sex reassignment surgery – is harder to define. It consists of people (for the moment, call them homosexuals) who live in the fantasy world of attempting to accept, and of forcing the acceptance of, the view that they are members of the other sex." (p119) "In the case of the transsexual, this self-image is doubly unacceptable: on the one hand, he suffers from being labeled homosexual, and on the other from being ultrafeminate." (p 122) "In fact, the transsexuals are constantly faced with the problem of explaining the presence in their midst of individuals who are clearly either neurotic or psychotic." (122)

In 1975 Sagarin reviewed Being Different: The Autobiography of Jane Fry, edited by Robert Bogdan. He starts by attacking Bogdan's normal politeness in using female pronouns for Fry:

"There had been (and at the time of writing this had remained the case) no sex-reassignment surgery, so that we are dealing with an anatomic male who claims to be a woman trapped in a man's body. For scientific purposes, no question can arise as to the gender: this is a male, and the words 'she' and 'her' constitute a travesty, a playing of the game of someone deeply disturbed."

Sagarin justifiably points out a silence in Bogdan's commentary:

"Nonetheless, unbeknown to Bogdan and probably to Jane Fry as well, there will be found here some of the most penetrating descriptions of transsexuals in the literature. No one has portrayed these people with as much contempt as has Fry: his hatred and anger know no bounds. The scene is a doctor's office in Brooklyn (the name has been changed, but most readers of this journal will recognize the people – [Dr Wollman's almost certainly]), and those present are described by Jane as a bunch of screaming, catty drag queens not the sort of a person that he would ever associate with or want to be linked with. I wonder what Bogdan would have said had this reviewer written the description of that scene?".

Through the early 1970s Sagarin became a noted critic of the gay liberation movement, while at the same time pursuing an active sex life with hustlers whom he met in Times Square and similar places. He argued for decriminalization, but at the same time characterized gays and trans persons as pathological and disturbed.

In 1974 he attended the convention of the American Sociological Society in Montreal. In a panel on "Theoretical Perspectives on Homosexuality," he proceeded to attack the liberationist scholarship as special pleading. Also present was Laud Humphreys, likewise a married homosexual who had come to academia late in life. Humphreys slyly referred to Sagarin a few times as Dr Cory, which resulted in Sagarin withdrawing. He then avoided controversies about gay topics.

Edward Sagarin died of a heart attack at age 73.

• Edward Sagarin. The Science and Art of Perfumery. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc, 1945.
  
• Donald Webster Cory. The Homosexual in America: A Subjective Approach. New York: Greenberg, 1951.
  
• Sagarin, Edward. The Anatomy of Dirty Words. MA thesis, Brooklyn College, 1962. L. Stuart, 1962.
  
• Donald Webster,Cory & John P. LeRoy. The Homosexual and His Society; A View from Within. New York: Citadel Press, 1963.
  
• Edward Sagarin. Structure and ideology in an association of deviants. PhD thesis New York University, 1966. Arno Press, 1975.
  
• Edward Sagarin. "Ideology as a Factor in the Consideration of Deviance". The Journal of Sex Research, 4,2, May 1968: 84-94.
  
• Harry Benjamin. "Comments to E. Sagarin's Article". The Journal of Sex Research, 4,2, May 1968: 95.
  
• George L. Kirkham & Edward Sagarin. "Transsexuals in a Formal Organizational Setting". The Journal of Sex Research, 5,2, May 1969: 90-107.
  
• Edward Sagarin. Odd Man in; Societies of Deviants in America. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969.
  
• Edward Sagarin. "Typologies of Sexual Behavior". The Journal of Sex Research, 7,4, November 1971: 282-8.
  
• Edward Sagarin. "Review of BOGDAN, ROBERT. Being Different: The Autobiography of Jane Fry. The Journal of Sex Research, 11,2, May 1975: 163-4.
  
• Martin Duberman. "The 'father' of the homophile movement'. Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, 4,4, 1997: 7-14.
  
• Stephen O. Murray. "Donald Webster Cory (1913 – 1986)". In Vern Bullough (ed) Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context. Routledge, 2002. Online at: www.williamapercy.com/wiki/images/Donald_webster.pdf.
  
• James T. Sears. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation. Harrington Park Press, 2006: 356-7, 374n15n20, 378n55, 397, 407n59, 529
  
• Rick Valelly. "The Conflicted Gay Pioneer". The American Prospect, October 8, 2013. http://prospect.org/article/conflicted-gay-pioneer.
  
• Barry Reay. "The Transsexual Phenomenon: A Counter-History". Journal of Social History, 47,4, Summer 2014: 1047.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA   GLBTQ   WorldCat(Sagarin)   WorldCat(Cory)

Elliot Blackstone (1924 – 2006) police officer, trans ally.

From Chinook, Montana, Elliott Blackstone served in the US Navy during the Second World War. In 1949 he joined the San Francisco Police Department.

In 1961-2 there was a 'gayola' scandal about police taking payoffs from gay bars. One reaction to this was that José Sarria set a precedent by running for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Another was that Blackstone was assigned as the police department's first liaison officer with the homophile community. He worked with the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, he helped to end entrapment in public toilets, he trained police recruits by bringing in gays, lesbians and trans people to talk about themselves.

In 1965 the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) had negotiated with Blackstone so that they could hold a gay New Year's ball; however others in the police force had different ideas and it was raided anyway. Even Mrs Blackstone was taken to be a drag queen and shoved about.

In August 1966 there was a riot at Compton's Cafeteria, and Blackstone attempted to moderate between the queens and the security people. Later Blackstone met Louise Ergestrasse (Durkin), the first transsexual to use that term to him. She got him a copy of Harry Benjamin's The Transsexual Phenomenon, and he began to arrange help. He persuaded the Center for Special Problems, part of the city Department of Public Health, and they began to offer hormones, counseling and referrals. Benjamin came and trained the staff, and worked with Blackstone. Blackstone gave lectures to fellow police officers.

He encouraged transsexuals to organize as Change: Our Goal (COG) and attended their meetings. With Blackstone's support COG dissuaded the police from arresting people for using the 'wrong' toilets or being cross-dressed. He helped to establish an anti-poverty office that employed transsexuals. He collected donations at his church to pay for hormones for transsexuals who could not afford them. The office provided ID cards that enabled trans persons to open bank accounts and obtain employment. After Reed Erickson's EEF funded the National Transsexual Counseling Unit (NTCU) in San Francisco, Blackstone managed its office as part of his police liaison role. EEF provided funds so that he could attend professional development and criminal justice conventions across the US and in Europe to give his views on police mistreatment of transsexual minorities. In the office he worked with individuals who were having problems with the law or their employers. He gave a presentation to every San Francisco Police Academy Class.


However in 1973 a police agent persuaded an NTCU employee to bring cocaine on to the premises, which were then raided. Drugs were also planted in Blackstone's desk. He was then assigned to another job. Within two years Blackstone had retired and NTCU was no more.

Blackstone had been 26 years with the force. He was presented with a plaque: "Many thanks, The Transsexual Community of San Francisco". At age 81 he became the first retired officer to receive a commendation from the Police Commission, and was a grand marshal at the 2006 San Francisco Pride parade. He died a few months later of a stroke.

* Not the mountaineer.

• "Police Liaison". Life, 31 Dec 1971. http://bit.ly/gkBA9p.
  
• Antony Grey. Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation. London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1992: 144-5.
  
• Gay and Lesbian Historical Society of Northern California. “Mtf Transgender Activism in the Tenderloin and Beyond, 1966-1975: Commentary and Interview with Elliot Blackstone”. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. The Transgender Issue edited by Susan Stryker. 4,2 1998: 349-372.
  
• Nan Alamilla Boyd. Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. University of California Press 2003: 196, 198.
  
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 229-30, 231, 232, 257.
• Kevin Davis.  "Retired SF cop to help lead parade". The Bay Area Reporter, 6/22/206.  www.ebar.com/pride/article.php?sec=pride&article=33.
• Wyatt Buchanan. "Pride parade salute for an unlikely ally: Police officer who reached out in 1960s to be grand marshal". San Francisco Chronicle, June 23, 2006. www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/06/23/BAG7KJILMR17.DTL.
• Susan Stryker. Transgender History. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2008: 75,76,81,92.
  
• Josh Sides. Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco. Oxford University Press, 2009: 101.
• Suzan Cooke. "HBS? Count me out". Women Born Transsexual, 8/25/2009.  http://womenborntranssexual.com/2009/08/25/hbs-count-me-out.
• Suzan Cooke. "Compton’s Cafeteria: Transsexual and Transgender People’s Stonewall". Women Born Transsexual, 08/28/2012. http://womenborntranssexual.com/2012/08/28/comptons-cafeteria-transsexual-and-transgender-peoples-stonewall.
  
• Stephen. "Born On this Day – November 30^th … Elliot Blackstone". Post Apocalyptic Bohemian, November 30, 2012. http://nopoboho.blogspot.ca/2012/11/born-on-this-day-november-30th-elliot.html.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA.
____________________________________________________________

Joanne Meyerowitz says (p257) that the two trans women arrested in 1973 were Suzan Cooke and Janice Maxwell who were there running NTCU. However Suzan's own account does not say that. Cooke: "Elliott Blackstone remained a constant, a supporter who was too often paternalistic and too often clueless but nonetheless stood by us."

Lee Brewster (1943 - 2000) retailer, activist.

++revised October 2015 to incorparate material from Cohen's  The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York.

Lee was raised in the coal mining areas of West Virginia. As a young man he worked in finger-printing for the FBI, but was fired when it was suspected that he might be gay.

Lee Brewster with tiara and sign.  Cohen p143.

On moving to New York, he organized drag balls as fund raisers for the Mattachine Society. However they were disinterested in drag queens and other transies, so in 1970 he and thespian Bunny Eisenhower, the future Barbara de Lamere, founded the Queens Liberation Front, and Brewster began publishing Drag, one of the more political transgender publications of the 1970s, which ran for 10 years.

++They campaigned and hired lawyers to de-criminalize cross-dressing in New York, which was achieved in 1971. Previously, under city ordinances a bar or club could be closed and patrons arrested, simply because a single person, deemed to be crossdressed, was present.  Furthermore the words "homosexuals, lesbians, or persons pretending to be ..." were also struck, thus decriminalizing gay clubs and parties.   In addition, the still extant 1965 Anti-Mask: New York Penal Law criminalizing "the wearing of mask or disguises by three or more persons in a public place" was found inapplicable to those in drag.


They organized with Sylvia Rivera.

The balls he organized continued until 1973 – the last one was attended by the real versions of Jacqueline Susann, Carol Channing and Shirley MacLaine.

Lee was the proprietor of the drag emporium Lee's Mardi Gras – in business for 30 years at various locations around Manhattan, carrying a large stock of clothes, prosthetics and books. In addition to individual clients, the shop supplied costumes for Broadway, television and movies, in particular To Wong Foo and The Birdcage.

In 1999  Lee donated his extensive library  to the Wollman Archives of Transgender History and Culture, curated by Rusty Rae Moore at Transy House.

He continued to answer to ‘Mr’ in the style of old-time drag performers.

Lee died after a battle with cancer.

• Holly Brubach. Girlfriend: Men, Women, and Drag. Random House, 1999: 133-8.
• Jack Nichols. “Lee Brewster Dies at 57: Pioneering Transvestite Activist”. Gay Today. 2000. Online. 
• Douglas Martin. “Lee Brewster, 57, Style Guru For World's Cross-Dressers”. New York Times May, 24, 2000.  Online.
• Susan Stryker. “Brewster, Lee”. Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History in America. 2005. 
• Stephen L. Cohen. The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail. Routledge, 2007: 91, 94, 142-3, 149, 151-2, 160, 246n28, 254n251,

 Matt & Andrej Koymasky    Queer Music Heritage