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The courts might punish a man with a fine or 30 days in jail. Both families and employers had the power to impose more intimate and exacting punishment on people who refused to conform to heterosexual norms than the law did. Above all, these men feared that their families or their employers would learn they were gay if word of their arrest reached them, as sometimes happened when the police or court officials contacted them or, more rarely, a newspaper published the man’s name. While the arrests themselves left some men in tears and others furious, almost every man taken into custody feared the possible extralegal consequences more than the legal process itself. In the 1940s and 1950s, police surveillance was only the linchpin of a broader social system that punished people who were discovered to be gay. The tens of thousands of New Yorkers who were arrested for cruising in the 45 years before Stonewall have been even more thoroughly forgotten than the movement that fought on their behalf.
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At the same time, the movement’s extraordinary-if incomplete-success in changing American society in the 50 years since Stonewall makes it all too easy to forget the scale of anti-gay policing the movement faced.
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Yet the courage, boldness, and success of those activists risk being forgotten in this summer’s sustained celebration of Stonewall as the event that launched the modern LGBTQ movement. In January 1948, Payne’s application was rejected because of “two arrests and convictions for degeneracy,” which the Cabaret Bureau considered prima facie evidence that he was, in fact, a homosexual.īetween 1923, when the New York state legislature specifically criminalized male homosexual cruising as a form of disorderly conduct (“degenerate disorderly conduct,” or simply, in police lingo, “degeneracy”), and 1966, when a loose coalition of pre-Stonewall gay activists, civil libertarians, café owners, and bohemian writers persuaded newly elected Mayor John Lindsay to end the police department’s use of entrapment to arrest men on this charge, more than 50,000 men were arrested for cruising in bars, streets, parks, and subway washrooms in New York City alone.Įnding the use of entrapment was one of the signal victories of New York’s militant pre-Stonewall gay activists. But the bureau’s regulations prohibited the employment of anyone who “was or pretended to be a homosexual,” an expansive rule designed to prevent queer-themed entertainment, including the so-called pansy acts that had been all the rage in New York clubs near the end of Prohibition, as well as homosexual entertainers themselves. Like any performer, he had to secure a cabaret card from the New York Police Department’s Cabaret Bureau before he could start work. Young, African American, and estranged from his family, Payne was especially vulnerable as he sought to make a life for himself. The Salle de Champagne, a Greenwich Village cabaret, which stood on Macdougal Street next door to the Provincetown Playhouse and was popular among the sophisticated theater crowd, offered him a steady job that he very much wanted.
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Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series about the gay-rights movement and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.Īaron Payne, a music student and aspiring performer from Trenton, New Jersey, got his big break near the end of 1947, when he was 23.