Free Labor of Love by Moira Weigel

public space. The institutions of dating have often excluded many people. In the decades that followed, daters would use semiprivate places to create new social movements.
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    After World War II, gay daters began gathering in places that they slowly made their own. It started in just a few cities and a few neighborhoods. But the energies that it unleashed would eventually change laws across America.
    During the war, the armed forces had been eager to enlist recruits, and many young gays and lesbians who felt isolated in their hometowns saw military service as a chance to escape. In the 1978 documentary Word Is Out , the lesbian actress Pat Bond recalled the determination she felt as a teen growing up in Davenport, Iowa, to join the Women’s Army Corps. “I was in love with this woman who wasn’t in love with me,” Bond said. “So the thing to do was to go into the Women’s Army Corps, and go to Paris, where Gertrude Stein had been.”
    Bond never made it to France. But in the WAC she did find an environment that welcomed lesbians. Everyone knew it. Girls showed up at recruitment centers wearing short haircuts and corduroy suits; they winked their way through interview questions.
    â€œHave you ever been in love with a woman?”
    Wide-eyed. “What’s a woman?”
    On paper, the WAC discouraged homosexuality. But in practice, it also discouraged persecution. A training manual assured officers that lesbians “are exactly as you and I, except that they participate in sexual gratification with members of their own sex.” Many WAC officials had no need to be reminded. Pat Bond could tell at once that the officer who enlisted her was gay, even though she wore a skirt, stockings, and high heels.
    â€œShe looked like all my old gym teachers,” Bond exclaimed, “but in drag!”
    That was during the war, when the army needed people. As the war wrapped up, it started purging hundreds of gay men and women. Five hundred lesbians were expelled from the WAC in Tokyo. Most received a shameful “blue” discharge, which was given for “psychiatric problems,” including “sexual deviance.” Pat Bond returned to the port of San Francisco. Like many other gay men and women, she stayed. Soon others started showing up, drawn by rumors of new kinds of freedom.
    Some came from Washington, D.C., where many gays and lesbians had worked in the State Department and developed a thriving nightlife scene. On April 27, 1953, President Eisenhower signed an executive order demanding that all homosexuals working for the government be purged. The justification was that the dark secret of their lifestyle made them susceptible to blackmail by Communist agents. Although it drew far less media attention than the witch hunt being led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, to the people it targeted, the “Lavender Scare” was just as devastating as the Red one. Finding their professional lives ruined, many men and women cast out of the government looked for oases in friendlier cities.
    Pat Bond recalled that in the 1950s, on Broadway in San Francisco, there were at least five bars where women could flirt with one another without being expelled or harassed by management. Every night, she hopped among the five, gathering gossip from old friends and scanning the crowd for new faces. She never worked nights and she never stayed in. Otherwise, she said, she “might miss something.”
    These were not quite “lesbian bars.” During this era, the police still mixed many different kinds of “vice” together; they treated homosexuality and drag like sex work or drug deals. Drunken GIs who had recently returned from overseas and sailors on shore leave crowded into them. These men stared at and pestered the regular patrons for dances. But the women had the power to say no. In the 1920s, Ellin Mackay had written that one of the joys of going out to a