Gay Bar

Front matter

| The Fabulous, True story of a Daring Woman and Her boys in the 1950s

—

Will Fellows and Helen P. Dranson

Preface

A MERICAN LIFE IN THE 1950s was vastly more complex and fascinating than popular imagination would suggest. Of particular interest to me, it was the period in which homosexuals emerged from the shadows, the crucible within which the modern gay rights movement originated. My chance discovery of Helen P. Branson’s long out of print Gay Bar opened an illuminating window into those fretful, hopeful times.

Breakfasting in Saint Paul in 2006, my playwright friend Dean Gray and I discussed a script he was working on. The story centered on his Uncle Irvin, who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s on an Iowa farm and moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s in pursuit of a music career. Irvin killed himself there in 1963. Dean asked if I knew of any books or other materials that might provide insight into what it was like to be a gay man in Los Angeles in the 1950s.

About the only thing that came to mind was Gay Bar, a book that I had never seen but had noticed among the results of an online book search. Its snappy title and intriguing description had lodged in my mind. That same morning, Dean and I were delighted to find a copy of Gay Bar at Quatrefoil Library in Saint Paul. So began this foray into the long-gone Hollywood world of Helen Branson and her boys.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Womgpn-and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org, 16 3368/APPL1440, Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

After Dean Gray’s play, Uncle, had been staged in New York, Dean and I began to discuss creating a play based on Gay Bar. He would take the lead on playwriting, and I would try to find out more about Helen Branson. We knew from her book that Helen had been born in the mid-1890s, possibly in Nebraska, and that she had a grandson. I hoped to locate her grandson, though my chances for success seemed meager. I didn’t know if he was still living, or if it was his mother or his father who was Helen’s child.

Through the Social Security Administration, I obtained a copy of Helen’s 1937 application. It indicated that she was born in Almena, Kansas, to Leo and Fannie Pyle, on December 17, 1896. At the time she filled out the form she was 40 years old, unemployed, living in Los Angeles. This was a compelling start, but what next? My friend Kim Karcher suggested that I do some research on Ancestry.com. To my astonishment I was soon looking at a 1930 U.S. Census form that detailed a household of three in Glendale, California: Helen P. Branson, 33, born in Kansas; Zebulon S. Branson, 35, born in Nebraska; and Helen C. Branson, 10, born in Idaho.

Zebulon! Also via Ancestry.com, Los Angeles County voter records from 1924 through 1948 gave biennial snapshots of the Branson family’s home address and Helen’s occupation. She went from a “housewife” in Glendale in 1924 to an “entertainer” in Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s. About 1933 a separation occurred: Zebulon moved to Orange County, and Helen and her daughter stayed in West Hollywood. Helen’s grandson still eluded me, but these were exciting discoveries. A picture of Helen’s life in Los Angeles was beginning to emerge.

The online California Death Index revealed that Helen Pyle Branson died in Sacramento on January 7, 1977. Sacramento County supplied a copy of the death certificate, which confirmed that Helen had been divorced. Caroline B. Hammond of Sacramento was listed as the “informant” on the death certificate. I wondered who that person might have been— neighbor, friend, care provider?—but I did not pursue it. And then the crematorium provided the thrilling breakthrough, a copy of the cremation certificate on which Caroline B. Hammond was identified as “daughter.” Of course! Helen C. Branson Hammond went by her middle name, Caroline, because her mother’s name was Helen. Why hadn't I thought of that?

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring gman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://ddilotg/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

I was soon having lively conversations with Caroline, 88, and her son, Russell, 59. Both seemed stunned and delighted to have been discovered as Helen’s descendents fifty years after her obscure little book was published. They were generous and candid in sharing their memories of the remarkable person they knew as Mother and Granny.

I concluded my quest to find living links to Helen Branson by trying to locate any gay man who had been acquainted with Helen or her bar. Success seemed unlikely. Helen used only pseudonyms in her book, for obvious reasons. Helen’s daughter could not recall the names of any of her mother’s gay pals, and none of the archival materials related to the book revealed their identities. Helen’s bar was a tiny place in a very large and rapidly growing city with a highly transient population. More than fifty years later the youngest of Helen’s boys would be about eighty years old and could be living far from Los Angeles. Posting my research notice in the senior services area of the L.A. Gay and Lesbian Center brought no response. My inquiries to Prime Timers chapters around the country brought several sketchy recollections of various L.A. gay bars, mostly in the 1960s and later, but nothing about Helen's.

Toiy one might regard Helen Branson as a woman ahead of her time, but for the homosexual men she befriended, she was there at just the right time. Reading Helen’s observations on gay men’s lives in the 1950s, I sometimes wondered what the men themselves would have said. I was thrilled to discover in two homophile periodicals, ONE magazine and Mattachine Review, a rich trove of contemporaneous commentary that amplified and complemented Helen’s views. In voices authentic to the 1950s, gay men expressed their opinions, fears, pleasures, and hopes. And so the idea of this new edition of Gay Bar emerged, an interleaving of the book’s original text with related writings from the same period, including a fuller portrait of Helen herself.

Gay Bar is a homespun memoir by a woman who enjoyed the company of homosexual men and deplored their plight. What the book lacked in literary quality, it more than made up for in audacity. Helen Branson's informal but earnest book appeared at a time when most books on “the

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Wome and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org470.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor homosexual problem” were written by male authorities, especially psychiatrists who viewed homosexuality as neurosis. Highlighting the buoyant and recently appropriated word “gay” was an edgy move, but Gay Bar was truly something new and startling. It was the first book by a heterosexual to examine the lives of homosexuals with admiration, respect, and love. And it was published under the author’s real name at a time when homosexuality was anathema to most Americans, including many homosexuals themselves.

Gay Bar was also noteworthy as the first book published by Pan- Graphic Press in San Francisco. Co-owned by Mattachine Society members Harold Call and Donald Lucas, Pan-Graphic was itself a bold enterprise. It did printing for Mattachine and two other homophile groups, Daughters of Bilitis and ONE, Incorporated. That all three of these pioneering groups originated in California in the 1950s reflects the fact that, especially after World War II, Los Angeles and San Francisco were major destinations for American gays and lesbians in search of community, tolerance, and opportunity.

Helen Branson started writing Gay Bar in 1955, a year rife with witch hunts and other antihomosexual initiatives. It was only ten years after the end of Hitler’s frenzy, in the midst of a growing civil rights movement, with many Americans intent on demonizing Communists and homosexuals. Moreover, many homosexuals themselves were inclined to see homosexuality as indeed a problem. A Mattachine Review writer described the threatening but not hopeless scenario: “So long as ‘omniscient’ psychiatry is a veritable Babel on what homosexuals are, public acceptance will be slow. Perhaps acceptance is not what awaits us. Psychiatrists may make good their aim to cure us all. Or they may decide variety is not without advantages.

“Two possible directions face us; one, a sort of 1984, a world of deadening conformity and regimentation, with psychiatrists for police, and the other, a more liberal, ‘open’ society, in which all would have latitude for working out their own destinies. And between these two chief possibilities, a number of middle roads open, offering greater or less freedom for social variants.”

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Koman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://do¥org/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

A thoroughgoing nonconformist herself, Helen wrote her little book in support of variety and freedom. To appreciate what Gay Bar represented when it appeared in 1957, it is essential to recognize that an enormously conformist conservatism pervaded American life at the time. Mattachine Review remarked in 1957 on “the creeping scourge of mediocrity that is becoming all too commonplace in our social structure today. Conformity— the tendency to avoid thought, discussion and action on unpopular subjects (the homosexual problem is only one of them)—is becoming a fashion. It hangs like a thread-suspended sabre over the heads of those who dare to speak out.”

It is impossible now to comprehend the intensely conformist character of American culture in that time. But it is enlightening to consider that, in its current usage, the word “conformity” has pejorative connotations that did not exist until the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s reshaped the American mindset. Until then, conformity was widely understood as a personal achievement in social adjustment, not as a failure in selfexpression. To be like others was to do one’s part in fostering social harmony and national strength.

In some ways this conformist imperative was as central to the sensibilities of homosexuals in the 1950s as it was of heterosexuals’. With gender roles part of the bedrock of conformity, blending in with the mainstream of regular Joes and Janes was tremendously important to many gay men and lesbians. Homophile organizations endorsed gender-role conformity as key to winning acceptance by “normals.” But this chronic masquerading exacted a toll that was sometimes devastating. Homophile activist Bob Bishop of North Hollywood remarked on this in a letter to Mattachine Review in 1958: “In our culture, the spiritless homosexual is soon beaten down to the ground and forced to conform to a pattern for which he is completely unsuited. He soon learns to pass under the guise of masculinity and of course this role demands that he be critical of all overt homophile activity.”

Gay Bar provides glimpses of an important and neglected aspect of gay American life in that era: Gays were often obsessed with conforming to mainstream gender norms themselves and demanding the same of others.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Moman nd Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.orgN0.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Helen Branson makes observations that pertain to this topic, as does Dr. Blanche Baker in the book’s introduction. But this phenomenon is most richly documented in the words of gay men who were trying to navigate the hazardous cultural terrain of the 1950s.

This masculinity mania among homosexual men represented a huge change in American gay culture. In fact, the dominant mode of self-presentation among American gay men underwent a complete inversion from the first several decades of the 1900s to midcentury. An attitude of embracing, accentuating, even exaggerating one’s femininity was replaced by an attitude of fleeing femininity and accentuating, even exaggerating, one’s masculinity. Mr. B. of San Francisco described the feminine attitude in a letter to ONE: Homosexuals in the 1920s “all pretended to be more effeminate than we were to attract attention. Most people thought we were harmless, amusing clowns.”

Donald Vining elaborated in the 1980s: “Many of today’s gays .. . might well run into their closets and pull the door shut if they encountered a flock of their predecessors, who were often much gaudier and bawdier than most contemporary gays. Some of us did indeed avoid their flamboyant company, wince at their behavior, and try to merge indistinguishably with the run of humanity. Most, however, did not. We did not see ourselves as set apart from straights only by our sexual orientation. We conceived of ourselves as far superior beings—wittier, quicker to appreciate everything cultural, more sensitive, and if nature gave us the slightest assist, more stunning to look at.” Gay people, Vining said, “didn’t make themselves conspicuous to attract only the attention of their peers; they wanted straights to notice too—to notice and envy. They wanted society to notice and realize that this bright and beautiful being was one of those whom they derided as “queer.”

Psychotherapist Albert Ellis was obviously familiar with this pattern of gay self-appreciation. In a paper titled “How Homosexuals Can Combat Anti-Homosexualism” he advised that homosexuals should “abhor all feelings and actions which would tend to show others that they, the homosexuals, consider themselves in any way superior to . . . non-homosexuals.” Ellis revealed his awareness of tight-knit gay communities when he said that gays

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Yaman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://do}.0rg/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor should “avoid being over-clannish,” should “resist in-group favoritism,” should “refuse to help other homosexuals economically, socially, vocationally, or otherwise JUST because these others are inverts.”

Ellis went on to advise that homosexuals “try to refrain from flaunting their homosexual tendencies in public, and should reserve their use of other-sex dress, mannerisms, vocal inflections, etc. to private gatherings.” And whether in mixed company or among their own kind, Ellis believed that homosexuals “should avoid undue sentimentalism, superromanticism, and self-pity and should accept the realities of everyday living. By the same token, they should avoid exaggerated cynicism and despair and grant reality its valid, if at times sombre, due.”

Doc Ellis was just no fun at all. By the early 1950s, changes in American culture had made the gaudy, bawdy homosexual an endangered species. The reverencing of psychiatry, the disconcerting impact of Kinsey’s sex research findings, the mindset of the postwar return to normalcy, the vilification of nonconformists and Communists—as a result of these and other influences, homosexuals were not likely to be regarded as harmless, amusing clowns.

Central to the demotion of the pansy was a broadening in the range of male types who identified as homosexual and chose to live accordingly. In the first several decades of the 1900s, men who were largely homosexual but not markedly effeminate were often quite likely to marry women and rear children, leading lives that were largely indistinguishable from those of normals. By midcentury these types of predominantly homosexual men who could have managed to pass quite convincingly as heterosexual were increasingly choosing not to do so. But effeminate self-presentation was not for them. Though living in ways that accommodated their homosexuality, it was important to them to accentuate and spotlight their masculinity.

This inversion of dominant self-concept among American homosexuals was a messy process. The clash of opposing sensibilities contributed to the severe “bitchery-butchery” that pervaded the 1950s homophile arena. “One of our headaches is the screaming, feminine-type homosexual,” a Mattachine member told a reporter. “Most of us can’t stand them and we have little luck persuading them to conform.” A fellow who resigned

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring womg nd Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor from the Mattachine Society in 1954 offered a different view, lamenting that the organization was intent on excluding from membership not only Communists but also “the so-called ‘swish.”” He remarked sarcastically that, compared to determining Communist Party connections, the identification of swishes was requiring more subtle approaches, “for only the holiest of holies have dared to judge where their behavior patterns end and the ‘swish’ begins.”

Thus did the homophile world of the 1950s come to be dominated by masculinist values. By the early 1960s, homosexuals with more masculine self-presentation seemed to be stealing the spotlight from the pansies, perhaps even outnumbering them. “People still think in terms of the effeminate stereotype,” said Donald Webster Cory, “but it is becoming widely known that this image represents only a small minority of the minority.”

The lingering effects of the butch makeover driven by America’s hyper-conformist culture of the 1950s persist in the self-presentation of gay men today. Helen Branson and Blanche Baker would hardly disapprove, nor would Helen’s boys. But they would all recognize it as a mask worn by uncommon men who from boyhood have special affinity with their mothers and grandmothers, sisters and girlfriends, gal pals and divas and golden girls. Helen’s observations make it clear that she understood her own rapport with gay men to be rooted in this psychic resonance. By operating her bar during America’s most antigay decade, Helen fostered safety, connection, and hope for her beloved boys. And because she chose to write a book in their behalf, we have this illuminating sketch of gay men’s lives in a period of momentous challenge and change.

WILL FELLOWS Milwaukee, Wisconsin

February 2010

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Darine man and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://ddilorg/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

From the Dust Jacket of the Original Edition

Casting a spotlight on one of those gathering places found in every large city . . . written by a woman who knows her subject from the inside out, GAY BAR tells the humor, the heartbreak, the piercing reality of the lives of people in and about a bar which caters to homosexuals.

But make no mistake about it. The people who are Helen Branson’s customers are not the depraved and sinister characters so often presented as typical of the homosexual. Instead they are responsible, well-behaved human beings no different from anyone else except in the direction of their loves.

While GAY BAR is entertaining reading, its purpose is a serious examination of a pressing social problem. Few serious-minded persons will find it possible to disagree with the author’s forthright advice when she says that if more parents understood their sons, then perhaps fewer homosexuals would find it necessary to seek companionship in the gay bars across the land. And if that happened, Helen is quick to admit, she wouldn't have so many customers!

Straight from the Shoulder...

“You wont find any statements in parentheses in my book,” said Helen P. Branson as she turned in the final manuscript for publication. “I typed this

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Womgn,and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.orgA0.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Helen Pyle Branson, Hollywood, 1957. Courtesy Caroline Branson Hammond and Russell Hammond.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor myself on a Polish model typewriter. It had no parentheses marks on the keyboard. So I made all of my statements direct—just as if I were talking to you.”

That same directness has characterized Helen’s life throughout her sixty years, with a great deal of variety of living included. She was graduated from high school in 1914, then took voice lessons for two years while she taught school in Nebraska. Not satisfied with her singing, she entered a new field. She became a bank teller during World War I, after which she moved to a ranch in Idaho, and finally settled in California. Today she operates a bar, does all the work herself, and every week visits her aged mother, whom she helps support.

“Tve had more ups and downs than I care to tell about,” she says. “But all my life I have had an interest in the occult and the unseen, the hard to explain things about me,” she says. “I was a student of astrology and became a palmist years ago. In fact I made my living entertaining in this field for several years.”

Her study of astrology led to an interest in reincarnation, which she says she explored for her own satisfaction.

“All of this led me to a recognition of the biggest word in my vocabulary today,” Helen says. “That word is WHY. Trying to find that answer is the main reason for my interest in people and what they do.”

“My first intentional contact with homosexuals as a group was to determine if there was a pattern in their palms. My gradual integration with such groups has come through mutual affection and respect. I am at home with them.”

Homosexual or not, everyone, it seems, has an immediate reaction to Helen. No in-between regard for this intensely active and perceptive woman is possible; it is a case of love her a lot or not at all. But readers of her book, “Gay Bar,” will see at once what the reaction of the majority is.

“Everybody loves Helen,” say those who know her. It’s a safe prediction that sons and daughters, as well as mothers and fathers, will be infected with the same feeling for her after they read the book, too.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman. and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.orWb13368/APPL1 440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

THE WOMAN WHO WROTE A LITTLE BOOK about her experiences running a Hollywood gay bar in the 1950s was born Helen Pyle in 1896. She graduated from high school in Hastings, Nebraska, where she played basketball and performed in choral and theatrical productions. Accompanying her photo in the senior yearbook: “She’s all right but likes to chatter. If nothing worse, what does this matter?”

Helen Pyle, Hastings, Nebraska, 1915. Courtesy Caroline Branson Hammond and Russell Hammond.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a paringi an and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https:// 1ebr10.3368/APPL 1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

While Helen was singing with a band several years after high school, she met Zebulon Branson, a World War army veteran, and they married in 1918. They soon left Nebraska to work on an Idaho ranch owned by Zeb’s father. Their only child, Helen Caroline, was born there in 1920. Among other chores, Helen found herself cooking meals for the seasonal help.

Both ranch life and married life proved to be a trial for the couple, leading Helen to make a break for California, where her brother, Eddie, was working in Hollywood as a camera operator. One day in 1922 Helen set out from the ranch, pushing a milk-can cart loaded with luggage and child. A couple of miles down the road, she and Caroline reached the railroad line and headed for Los Angeles. Helen worked as a bank teller there, putting Caroline in a care home during the workweek and taking her out on weekends. Zeb joined them before long, employed as an engineer in the telephone industry. In the late 1920s Helen’s widowed mother moved from Nebraska to Los Angeles to be near her daughter and son.

Helen Branson in winter hat on a Sunday stroll with her daughter, Caroline, at Westlake Park, Los Angeles, about 1925. Helen wrote on the back of the snapshot, “Best kodak I ever had of myself but that isn't saying much.” Courtesy Caroline Branson Hammond and Russell Hammond.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Worr ind Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.or; .3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Zeb Branson’s income sustained the household comfortably until the early 1930s, when he got involved with another woman and told Helen that he wanted a divorce. “She was so upset about him going off and leaving her, she wouldn't take any money from him,” Caroline recalled. “And thus we didn't have any money!” Uncle Eddie came through with gifts of cash and little luxuries that made a big difference for Helen and Caroline. Then a fashion-minded teenager at Hollywood High, Caroline remembers Eddie’s gifts of five-dollar gold pieces and a good-looking sweater. “Td never had any clothes,” she said. “Times were tough; my mother couldn't earn a good living—she was always on the edge of something.” In 1937 Caroline dropped out of high school to work as a stock girl in an upscale Hollywood dress shop, the start of her career in the fashion industry.

With her freethinking ways and longstanding interest in the occult, Helen was very much on the edge, even by Hollywood standards. By the late 1930s she found work as a palm-reading nightclub entertainer. In gypsy costume she drifted among tables at Lindy’s on Wilshire Boulevard, taking the hands of late-night diners and explicating their features in the glow of her small flashlight. So began her gradual convergence with gay men. Eventually she was working as house mother and cook in a gay rooming house, then managing several gay bars owned by others. In 1952, a year after the California Supreme Court declared it legal for homosexuals to congregate in bars, Helen took over a small neighborhood tavern at 5124

Melrose Avenue and began operating her own gay bar in her own way.

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring yoman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doh.drg/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org/10.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Introduction

Judge not that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam in thine own eye?

The Great Physician in Matthew 7: 1-3

In Gay Bar Helen Branson strikes a new note in homophile literature, for in it she accepts and appreciates homosexuals. When we discussed the book together, we were pleasantly surprised to find how thoroughly we agreed on so many points concerning this controversial subject. Therefore I am pleased and happy to set forth some of my views to accompany her book.

Homosexuals are human beings, too. They are interesting, real, unusual, creative, beauty-loving people, if one can get behind the mask of camping pretense and sham so many of them feel compelled to wear to protect their sensitive souls from the condemnation and hate leveled at them by a hostile, prejudiced, and uncomprehending society. It is my firm belief, based on years of experience working with many types and varieties of the clan in a psychiatric practice, that homosexuals have a definite place in society today as in the past, but they, themselves, must demonstrate their true worth by coming to know and accept themselves, thus releasing their potentials which are all too often blocked by their lack of self-confidence and reflected hostility. To my way of thinking, homophiles, both male and female, are really not so different from the rank and file of humanity except in their preference for a love object belonging to the same sex. It seems to me it is a matter of taste such as, “Do you prefer your coffee with cream and sugar or do you take it straight?”

Fellows, Will, and Helen P Branson. Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Womap and Her Boys In the 1950s. E-book, Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010, https://doi.org/0.3368/APPL1440. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Stereotyped thinking blocks progress in understanding these “different” people. Attempts to describe a “typical” homosexual become highly amusing because they appear in so many forms and, outside of the obviously exaggerated “swish” types, they are very difficult to detect, even among themselves. There are countless homophiles who are well-adjusted members of society, doing excellent work in many fields of art, business, industry, and the professions. They have skillfully masked their own “deviation” and pass undetected as accepted members of that very society which looks down the nose with scorn upon their more insecure and maladjusted brethren. Such shining examples of the brotherhood need never find their way to a psychiatrist’s office but may be met socially and will reveal themselves only to someone they trust, someone who is wise. They often lead lonely lives and long for the good companionship of others who speak their own versatile language with so much quick repartee. Frequently they are as intolerant of their more maladjusted brothers as are heterosexuals. They shudder at the vulgar mannerisms of “gays” and “Nellies” as much as do “straight” people. The vast problem of alcoholism probably has its roots in homosexuality. There is a great need for homosexuals to understand themselves as well as to have heterosexuals understand them. Too many homosexuals court rejection.