Clay Howard, "The Closet and the Cul de Sac: Sexuality and Culture War in Postwar California"

 

           Taken together, the Religious Right and Gay Liberation represent two of the most important and controversial social movements in the last fifty years. My project uses a case study of the San Francisco Bay Area and the methods of urban historians to interrogate the origins of this pair of polarized political camps. Coming of age together in the 1970s, both gay and socially conservative politics share a common foundation in the massive reordering of metropolitan regions in the first two decades after the Second World War. As the national government steered financial aid to married couples with new infants through reconstruction projects such as the 1944 GI Bill, real estate developers scrambled to build entire communities dedicated to the twin ideals of parenting and childrearing. By 1960 most of the newly built suburbs of Santa Clara County, CA boasted that over 80% of their populations consisted of either married couples or children under the age of 14. Churches, along with schools, represented some of the crucial nodes of community formation within these new sprawling municipalities, and over time many of them would host a sexual politics based around strict notions of marriage and parenting.

 

           This colossal migration of straight people to postwar suburbs eventually facilitated the growth of specifically gay neighborhoods in city districts deserted or circumvented by their married counterparts. The Second World War itself represented the first time that the military actively screened recruits for homosexual conduct, and over the course of the mobilization and subsequent decades San Francisco accumulated a growing reservoir of lesbians and gay men. Throughout this period these new residents consistently battled against police actions bent on denying them visibility in the postwar metropolis, and they gradually built collective identities around institutions such as bars and churches. By the early 1970s, two distinct queer neighborhoods, the Castro and the Tenderloin, stood as the wellsprings of a new political culture dedicated to gay, lesbian, and transgender rights.

 

           My dissertation will begin with descriptions of the larger economic and state structures that enabled the mass migration of people across the country and dispersed them throughout the San Francisco metropolitan area. I then will outline the various meanings straight and queer residents ascribed to their surroundings. And I conclude with an analysis of several key political struggles in California, including debates over sex education in suburban schools, the passage of a Consenting Adults Law that effectively legalized homosexuality, and controversies over a 1978 attempt to ban gay teachers across the state.