In 1952 an American man named Dale Jennings was arrested for soliciting a police officer in a LA park.
The ensuing trial brought national attention to the secret group he was a part of at the time: the Mattachine Society, one of the first homosexual rights groups, operating in a time when homosexuality was illegal. US writer/director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Shortbus) and friends bring their ‘Mattachine’ party to London, as we trace the history of this esoteric but pioneering movement in LGBT freedom.
By Patrick Cash
Mattachine as a name was inspired by the medieval French order known as ‘Société Mattachine’. These were secret fraternities who would conduct dances and rituals in masks against the fierce oppression of the feudal lords. In the mid-twentieth century, the founders of the Mattachine Society felt the moniker to be appropriate to them, for, according to Jonathan Gatz author of Gay American History, ‘gays were also a masked people, unknown and anonymous, who might become engaged in morale building and helping ourselves and others, through struggle, to move toward total redress and change’.
Harry Hay, a political aide, was the man with the vision for gay equality, conceiving the idea for a homosexual activist group in August 1948. Alongside working on various legislative proposals to bring homosexual equality closer, he spoke with other gay men at a party about his idea.
They reacted with raving enthusiasm, inspiring Hay to write his first ideological pamphlet, ‘The Call’. In the morning however, ringing around each of these attendees, this enthusiasm for putting themselves at risk for the sake of their sexualities had rather died down. But Hay, not to be deterred, held on to his idea and developed it over the next two years.
It was when Hay met Austrian-born fashion designer Rudi Gernreich in 1950 that the Mattachine Society really began to bridge the gap from concept to reality. Gernreich and Hay became lovers, and in this bond of trust Hay showed Gernreich ‘The Call’. Gernreich declared The Call to be ‘the most dangerous thing he had ever read’ and gleefully got involved. Finally on November 11th 1950, Hay, Gernreich, and a group of other gay men set up the first meeting of the Mattachine Society, designed to bring homosexual equality into 1950s American society, under the name ‘Society of Fools’.
Closely associated with the Communist party, itself under intense persecution by Senator McCarthy (‘it’s better to be dead than Red’) at the time, the group operated through many esoteric levels of secret oaths and hierarchies of membership where the founding members constituted the highest; the ‘Fifth Order’.
Yet it was in 1952 that the group came to national prominence and really began expanding its memberships when founding member Dale Jennings was arrested in a Los Angeles park for soliciting sex by an undercover police officer. Rather than simply lie back and accept the charge the Mattachine Society decided to challenge the police entrapment of homosexual men.
When the jury deadlocked, Mattachine declared a victory. Although their support and their founding members’ waned over the following few decades, many account the significant and pioneering work of Mattachine, standing up for its members inalienable rights, as an important precursor for the Stonewall riots of 1969, which lead to the legalisation of homosexuality.
John Cameron Mitchell, the writer and director behind modern gay classics like Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Shortbus, chose the name Mattachine for his NYC gay party, as a nod to this ethos: ‘the original Mattachine was about ‘promoting ethical homosexual culture’, which in those days was about conforming to the mainstream. For us, ethics is more about being kind and present in a harsh and lonely digital world. Grindr culture has reduced sex to transaction. At Mattachine, it’s not ‘What are you into? What am I into?’ It’s: ‘What are we into?’
So if you fancy a club night that gives you old-school friendliness on the contemporary gay scene, you may want to check out Mattachine when it hits London. For, as Mitchell says: ‘LGBT acceptance should be about treasuring the uniqueness of queerness: questioning of the status quo, artistic innovation, empathy for the spat-upon. Queers were always the healers, the witch doctors, the DJs.’
• MATTACHINE London is at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club (42-46 Pollard Row, Bethnal Green, E2 6NB) on Friday 12th September.
