ABSTRACT
despite the advances in gay community formation encouraged by the dislocations of World War II, for lesbians, the 1950s and early 1960s in the United States were a difficult time. Dominant culture sought a return to a mythical pre-War, pre-Depression “normality,” visioned in ideologically conservative terms in which “men were men and women were housewives” (Whitfield 43). This, alongside increased public discourse on homosexuality as a psychological disease and the Cold War notion that homosexuals were a pressing political threat, made the fifties, as Lillian Faderman writes, “perhaps the worst time in history for women to love women” (Odd Girls 157). Despite their benign Father Knows Best image, the 1950s and early 1960s were, to some extent, an age of paranoia, fed by deep fears of the bomb and communism. Both assuaging and mirroring such anxieties was a general atmosphere of voyeurism; for example, in popular culture Hugh Hefner began Playboy—displaying scantily clad women for the man who looks—and James Bond's “license to look” (at women) was more important to the success of the Ian Fleming thrillers than his license to kill (Denning 102). On a political front, visual technologies of spying and surveillance dominated public life and discourse as the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss spy trials threatened every all-American boy's (and girl's) presumed innocence. Indeed two potent American fears—fear of the communist conspiracy and the fear that a member of one's family might be homosexual—were linked in the perceived threat that homosexuals could be blackmailed into becoming communist spies (Epstein; Whitfield 43). As a result, even extremely closeted homosexuals and lesbians were barred or dismissed from federal jobs and the military; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began broad surveillance of homophile organizations and gay gathering places; and urban police heightened their harassment of homosexual citizens (D'Emilio 60).
