Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights
by Marcia M. Gallo
Carroll and Graf
How to order Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual ...
by James T. Sears
Harrington Park Press
How to order

Two new books on gay history illuminate fracture-lines persisting in American gay life today by looking at groups and battles of the 1950s that until now have been mostly ignored.

It's a sign of how much work still needs doing in the field that only just now has someone gotten around to writing a history of Daughters of Bilitis-- the foundational lesbian group that was the template for lesbian organizing in the US, and whose effects are still being felt today. Luckily, that someone is Marcia Gallo, and her book Different Daughters is a stunning, readable account of how in 1955 Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin started a grassroots political and social group that would eventually grow nationwide and touch the lives of probably hundreds of thousands of lesbians for the next three decades.

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ittle has been written on the specifics of lesbian organizing in the US-- and DOB in particular-- so Gallo had her work cut out. She succeeds in placing DOB in the context of the early male homophile groups, such as Mattachine Foundation (founded in 1950). As well, she explores how the conservative social climate of the era affected women and especially lesbians. Gallo has done great research here-- she tracked down most of the living original membership of DOB-- and writes sensitively of the internal social and political divisions, which would often be manifested in lesbian culture writ large. Ann Aldrich (yet another pen name of Marijane Meaker, already known as the lesbian pulp write Vin Packer) would write paperback nonfiction works about lesbian life that overtly attacked DOB, which responded in kind.

Gallo writes at length about DOB's magazine, The Ladder, and how the organization used images and stories to counter the more prominent images of lesbians-- usually butch/femme-- that appeared on pulp covers. Gallo unearths the complexity of lesbian social organization in the earliest roots of the movement-- before second-wave feminism and gay liberation gave women more varied political options. But she's at her best here tracing the roots of Daughters of Bilitis and showing its tensions and growing pains.

Before the ball

John T. Sears's Behind the Mask of the Mattachine is not as consistently masterful, but it's still among the most exciting, engaging, and sometimes confounding books on the LGBT history bookshelf. It is a magnificent mess: the sort of book that doesn't mind overloading you with seemingly contradictory details and that sends you scurrying to check its (extensive) endnotes. For all this, Sears pushes the boundaries of how we think about gay history and organizing.

While the book details the life of Hal Call-- the man who split from Harry Hay's original Mattachine Foundation to form his own, more conservative version of the organization-- Behind the Mask is really about the tensions and divisions that existed in the early years of the homophile movement and that still echo today.

When Harry Hay founded Mattachine in 1950 it was a progressive political group with Communist roots. At the group's 1953 convention, Hal Call essentially redirected the philosophy and direction of Mattachine to repudiate links to politics not related directly to homosexuality. Call's idea was that gay men are no different than anyone else except in their sexual orientation. While Mattachine founders such as Chuck Rowland argued that "The time will come when we will march down Hollywood Boulevard arm and arm proclaiming our pride and our homosexuality," conservatives such as Call preferred to court social respectability-- to the point of inviting homophobic psychiatrists and lawyers to speak at meetings. Call's camp aimed to avoid conflict, and even opened membership to heterosexuals. This major political schism is still with us today-- think of all the controversy that surrounds the Human Rights Campaign's agenda.

While Call is virtually unknown today, and Behind the Mask of the Mattachine is, in part, a reclamation of his life and times, this book is no panegyric. Call comes across here as mostly unlikeable: rambunctious, self-promoting, and at times pigheaded. He is also brave, valiant, visionary, and occasionally, proven right. Call's view of the important place of sex in gay life is far closer to contemporary ideas than more strictly political foundation embraced by the original Mattachine.

The great thing about Sears's book is not just that it understands that there aren't easy answers-- it presupposes that there aren't any easy questions. When you finish Different Daughters or Behind the Mask of the Mattachine you will have a greater sense of the complexity of Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, Harry Hay, Hal Call and the world in which they lived-- and a new take on our own today.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com