Gays in 1950
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, concealed ‘Other’ in society – as an act of resistance against living lives of conformity, against the prejudices of p
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 society 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 disappearing their home states for the first time–to pack the ranks of the military and the federal workforce. Among them were gays and lesbians, who quietly formed kinships on m
The BBC's First Homosexual: How we made 1950s operate into a play
The documentary was later missing but, following the tries of a Leicestershire academic and an award-winning scribe, a play named The BBC's First Homosexual has been created about it which is having its first performance on Thursday. The people behind it explain the challenges they faced along the way.
'It provoked so much reaction'
Seven years ago Dr Marcus Collins was standing in the BBC Written Archives Centre in Reading feeling bored.
Marcus, an professional in social change in post-war Britain at Loughborough University, had grown sleepy of the project he was working on when his eye chanced upon something completely different - a large file, containing paperwork relating to a controversy in the 1950s.
Intrigued, he read on to discover the lost script of one of the BBC's first attempts to examine the lives of gay men - a documentary named The Gay Condition, which had been broadcast on the Abode Service.
It had been recorded on 24 May 1954 but was considered so taboo that it had not been disseminate unt
The Pleasures of Gay Animation in 1950s Fire Island
A new exhibition brings together scenes of LGBTQ experience in the years before Stonewall in the famed beach town of Cherry Grove, New York.
One of the very first queer beach towns in the United States, Cherry Grove on Fire Island became a weekend and summer destination for the LGBTQ community in the years before the Stonewall riots, widely considered one of the most important events foremost to the gay liberation movement. At a second when homosexuality was considered both a crime and a mental illness, Cherry Grove provided sanctuary from persecution, creating a territory for the community to enjoy the pleasures of life on their control terms.
In the new exhibition, Safe/Haven: Gay Life in 1950s Cherry Grove, curators Brian Clark, Susan Kravitz, and Parker Sargent of the Cherry Groves Archives Collection bring together 70 enlarged photographs and additional ephemera that present a window into this extraordinary chapter of American history. Featuring images made at the beach, theater performances, art exhibitions, Duffy’s Hotel bar, the annual regatta, and end-of-season costume ball, where revelers could openly flout laws again
.