The Great Mirror of Same-Sex Love - Prose - 89. Martin Curtler - An appeal for Justice for the Gay minority

This letter to the editor was printed in the June 4th, 1949, issue of the Saturday Review of Literature (New York), p. 25.

And there are kids -- college-educated, well-read Gay kids -- who will smugly inform you today that "queer consciousness" arose out of some vague, nebulous social cloud of the late 1980s! Ha 

Ten years ago, these kids' predecessors would tell you the same thing; only, they "know" it happened in the late 1970s! Double-Ha

June 1949… this appeal to every person to walk in the shoes of gay persons must have been a brighter note in a the minor-keyed days when Joe McCarthy was ginning up hysteria. So there must be more of us to write and speak while the engines of hatred conspire to confine and erase us. 

3 hours ago, Parker Owens said:

June 1949… this appeal to every person to walk in the shoes of Gay persons must have been a brighter note in a the minor-keyed days when Joe McCarthy was ginning up hysteria. So there must be more of us to write and speak while the engines of hatred conspire to confine and erase us. 

This was a very interesting era in American history. Since 1944 and first Black sit-down strike, at Stix, Baer and Fuller department store in Saint Louis, asking to be served at the lunch counter, and the horror generated by the Holocaust films and pictures from Europe starting in 1945, two of the many minority groups in the U.S. had rapid progress. Soon, being anti-Jew was unacceptable. And Black people redefined their oppression from the white label of the "N*gr* problem", to the Civil Rights Movement. 

The late '40s were progressive, and LGBT+ groups were forming in several cities (one in Chicago, in 1948, even specifically addressed hatred against mixed Black-white same-sex couples.) If we think of the '50s as an awful time for Queer folks, it was -- after January of 1953 when the Gop dominated Congress and White House began rolling out specific, draconian homophobic acts and legislation. The condition of American Jews continued to improve under Eisenhower, but not so for Blacks and Gays.