This past August marked the 50th anniversary of LGBT movement activism in Philadelphia. As I recounted in my book “City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972” (originally published in 2000), the “Radnor Raid” launched the gay and lesbian movement in the region. In this extraordinary incident, Main Line police and postal officials raided a meeting held to discuss forming a gay and lesbian rights group for Greater Philadelphia. Apparently tipped off by publicity fliers about the meeting, the police arrested more than 80 people, including Jack Adair, who had arranged for the use of the Main Line estate where the meeting took place, and “Albert J. De Dion,” a New York activist who led that city’s chapter of the Mattachine Society, a national “homophile” group. Eventually everyone arrested in the Radnor Raid was released, the charges were dropped and, in the coming months, Greater Philadelphians founded their own Mattachine chapter, initiating local LGBT movement advocacy.
Historical memory is often more complicated than it may seem, and the uses we make of the past can vary greatly. When I first learned of the Radnor Raid, I regarded it as an important example and symbol of the political repression experienced by LGBT people and LGBT rights advocates then and now. I also thought it significant that the raid took place in the suburbs, which haven’t received much attention as sites of significant developments in LGBT history. Most of all, I thought the story of the Radnor Raid was important as a story of resistance, of LGBT people struggling against oppression in ways small and substantial.
In the 10 years since my book was published, I haven’t changed my mind about any of these aspects of the history of the Radnor Raid. But to mark the raid’s 50th anniversary, I’d like to add another layer to the story, which centers on how I came to learn about some of the episode’s most revealing details.
I can’t remember exactly how I first learned about the Radnor Raid, but I know that very early in my research, I read contemporary reports about it in the gay press and in local newspapers. I was particularly struck by the language used in the first newsletter of the Philadelphia Mattachine Society, which declared that there was “no reason to believe” that such a raid “need ever occur again.” The newsletter continued: “This was the first time the police have ever disrupted any Mattachine meeting, and we have confidence it will be the last.” I also took note of a report by the New York activists who had been helping to organize the Philadelphia group: “Due to a misunderstanding, we were visited by the local police, who, under the misapprehension that we were showing obscene films, took the entire crowd to the police station for questioning.”
Was it the defensive tone of the New York report — the insistence that the meeting did not feature the showing of obscene films — that caught my critical eye? I can’t recall now, but I know my suspicions increased when I began to hear rather formulaic and defensive language about pornography in the oral interviews I conducted with activists who remembered being at the raid or hearing about it around the time it occurred. At least five people made a point of emphasizing to me that there was nothing obscene about the movies and other materials shown at the organizing meeting in Radnor.
Now of course I knew it was possible the reason they all took pains to mention this to me was that the police had tried to justify the raid on obscenity-based grounds. And it made a certain sense that the police would emphasize this rationale for the raid; otherwise, there might have been constitutional problems with denying LGBT people’s rights of speech and assembly. But those of us who are professional historians are trained and encouraged to look critically at all of our sources of information. This is typically easier to do when reading a government report, a newspaper account or a court transcript than when listening to a set of courageous activists generously sharing their memories with a younger member of their community. Nevertheless, I found something suspicious about the stories I was hearing, and began wondering if the accounts were based on strategic narratives activists constructed to defend their actions to themselves, to their friends and allies, and to potentially hostile public authorities. There’s also the possibility that people are remembering the memories, rather than the events that served as the basis for the memories. Many of us have to admit that when we have told a particular story about our lives over and over, we remember the story more than the experiences that first led us to construct the story. I wondered if this was happening with the Radnor Raid.
Several years after I first learned about the raid, I caught a lucky break. While doing research in the extraordinary collection of gay movement materials housed at the New York Public Library, I came across an exchange of correspondence in 1960 and 1961 between Mattachine New York leaders and Thomas Brandon of Brandon Films. In one of the letters, Brandon emphasized that he and his company were “opposed to government censorship” and the actions of the Radnor police. Nevertheless, he would hold Mattachine responsible for misusing a film booked for a showing in New York and failing to notify the company immediately about its seizure. Mattachine responded with relief that since the district attorney had finally returned all the films seized in the raid, Brandon’s film could now be returned to its rightful owners. Fortunately for me, Mattachine’s response named the film: “Muscle Beach.”
I remember chuckling when reading the name of the movie, and later I identified the film as a 1950 amateur short by Joseph Strick, described in one source as “a satire on the ‘labors of relaxation’ of exercise devotees.” I also knew that one of the other films shown at the Radnor Raid was Kenneth Anger’s homoerotic avant-garde “Fireworks” (1947), which an oral-history narrator took pains to emphasize was “a film about homosexuality which had previously been cleared by the courts.”
What was significant to me was not the question of whether “Muscle Beach” or “Fireworks” were obscene, but why the written accounts and the oral-history testimonies emphasized, over and over again, that they were not. No one suggested that sexually provocative, risqué or erotic materials might have been strategically useful for attracting an audience at the Mattachine organizing meeting. No one argued that the movement had sexual aims and that, in this context, sexual films were entirely appropriate to show at an organizing meeting. No one argued that sexual films were understood to be a tool that could stimulate erotic bonds and passions, which in turn could motivate political activism.
For my book, my thoughts about this became the foundation of an argument I made about the politics of respectability in the homophile, gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements of the 1960s and ’70s.
Denying the sexual content of the films that inspired the Radnor Raid was in keeping with the politics of respectability adopted by many (though certainly not all) activists in this period. At the same time, the very fact that activists planned to show sexual films on the night they launched the local homophile movement reminds us there has always been more to queer politics than the politics of respectability.
Fast-forward 50 years to our ongoing discussions about the politics of same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage is a complicated and contested issue in LGBT communities, as it should be. Here I only want to use the story of the Radnor Raid to make one small point. When I hear proponents of same-sex marriage insist there is nothing sexual about their agenda, that marriage is about rights and not sex and that the legalization of same-sex marriage will not affect the politics of sex in general and the politics of sex education in particular, I hear echoes of the stories about the Radnor Raid. Without a doubt, these stories are strategically smart in political environments marked by hostility toward LGBT sexual expression. But it’s worth thinking more about what we lose when we tell and listen to these stories and what happens when we forget about or deny the importance of sex in our movement and our society.
Marc Stein’s latest book, “Sexual Injustice: Supreme Court Decisions from Griswold to Roe,” will be published in October by the University of North Carolina Press.