PIONEER DAYS 21 July 2005 Volume 2 Issue 15 Salt Lake Metro

Pioneer Days

Homosexuality in Utah was a furtive lifestyle fraught with perilous and clandestine conduct; in much of rural Utah, it still is. Before the Gay civil rights movement of the late 20th century, homosexuality was an illicit behavior in Utah, ranging from a felony to a misdemeanor offense. Gays were the sexual outlaws of the wild west.

In Utah’s pioneer theocracy, adultery was a capital offense. Many a pioneer journal recorded that heads of women were found in isolated ravines, cut off for wayward offenses. Wayward men, however, were more likely to be simply castrated by bowie knife or primitive tourniquet.

Nothing happened to aficionados of male on male sex, generally. The most common practices, group and dual masturbation, were perennial pulpit denouncements, but one could live, (and keep ones balls), with that. Gay Gentile men were left alone, unless they diddled with underage Mormon priesthood holders, and then they were often assassinated.

Masturbation, frottage, and vaginal and anal intercourse were, before the days of better penile and vaginal hygiene, the preferred sexual practices over oral sex. Crotch odors from people who bathed infrequently and generally wore temple undergarments until they rotted off, made keeping one’s nasal organs and taste buds away from such a pungent region paramount. Oral sex is a by-product of modern plumbing. It is a matter of taste.

I have this theory that descendants of Mormon polygamous families inherited a “horny gene” from their stud ancestors. It’s simple really. The more a man copulated, the more children he had, and therefore more likely to pass on his ability to have prodigious amounts of sex. Mormon men who were not as potent, or were not driven by a desire for copious amounts of sex, obviously had fewer descendants. Someone should do a study on the Mormon sex gene. After all, these were the days before Viagra.

Joseph F Smith fathered 43 Children

Brigham Young's Consorts

Some others proposed a theory that “socialized homosexuality” was dominant in Utah because of the lack of a sexual outlet for males with females. While the ratio of males to females was pretty similar in polygamy days, access to the female population was limited to the whims and dictates of Brigham Young as holder of the keys of who could marry in Utah. When one man married 26 women, it is obvious that 26 other men went without connubial bliss. Penalties for straying from marriage vows were severe in Mormon pioneer Utah. See above.

The only hard records of homosexuality found in Utah archives, from the 19th and early 20th century, are criminal records. Sodomy was a felony and men, usually non-Mormon transients, were sent to prison for up to 20 years. True, many of these cases involved male rape, but many others were of a consensual nature which had the misfortune of being caught flagrante delicto.

Liberty Park

Homosexuals were not simply being arrested for engaging in sexual conduct in barns, stables, public parks and public toilets—they were also being spied on by vice officers in private spaces. Homosexuals were pursued in hotels and motels, sneak-peeked on in parked vehicles, and even arrested in their own homes. Until the early 1980’s, many landlords even had the legal right to refuse to rent one bedroom apartments to more than one person of the same gender. This was hardly conducive for building a relationship with a partner. Hetero-controlled society pushed homosexuals into areas of semi-public places to “hook up” and then pointed to these practices as examples of homosexuals being perverted. 

Most homosexuals did not dare live with a partner even if they could find an accommodating landlord. People were expected to marry and raise families or stay home with their parents as “old maids” or “confirmed bachelors.” Those who did not were subject to all forms of scurrilous speculation.

Martha contemplating suicide

Rumors and innuendos of being homosexual ended careers, and often drove people to despair, self-loathing and suicide. Lillian Hellmann’s 1930s classic play, The Children’s Hour, was made into a Hollywood movie in the late 1950s. In the film, Shirley MacLaine is driven to suicide simply because of her desire for Audrey Hepburn. “I feel so damn dirty!” she agonized. Homosexual lust alone, especially for the angelic heterosexual Audrey, it seemed to Hollywood, was justification enough for Shirley McLaine to kick a chair out from beneath her.

In the 1970s it was a good thing that Laverne DeFazio never told Shirley Feeney how much she loved sharing an apartment with her in Milwaukee, or the sitcom Laverne & Shirley would never have been so funny. Imagine Lenny and Squiggy pulling Laverne down from the rafters, dangling from her pasted-on letter ‘L.’ Of course the ‘L’ was for “lesbian!”

Some today are upset that much of Gay culture is identified with tavern life, but they have no concept of history. Gay bars have never been about getting an alcoholic beverage, especially in Salt Lake City. While Gay bars were never safe, due to police raids, blackmail, or assault on queers by heterosexuals, they were, however, the wellsprings of modern Gay culture, where the beginnings of homosexual consciousness bubbled up. They were, in effect, pseudo-community centers. In these places we knew we were not alone. We were not an aberration, for there were simply too many of us to be simply freaks of nature.

Red Ties code for being Gay

Also, the bars were the only semi-secure place homosexuals could meet, even if discreetly. But yet there still we often had to speak in code. “Do you have a light . . . dear?” “Do you know Dorothy?” “I have a red tie at home just like yours,” and other antiquated phrases. The "red necktie" was used as a symbol by Gay men prior to the 1950's to let other Gay men know of their identity.  And as sad as some of these places were, they were safer than being arrested or beaten up in public toilets and parks.

Gay bars and gay-friendly bars were mostly associated with the red light districts of Commercial and Regent Streets in old Salt Lake City in the early half of the 20th century. Later after the brothels closed, 200 South in Salt Lake City became the predominate place for homosexuals to meet and cruise. In Ogden, being a railroad town, the place was wide open. There appears to have even been a gay bar in the basement of the county courthouse called the Court.

Horny heterosexual males often made little distinction between “loose women” and “sissy men” and used each for personal sexual gratification. Frequently, sissy men were preferred because they didn't charge and would perform oral sex—which the women sometimes loathed to do.

In fact, to many older homosexual men the word “gay” always had a semi-sexual connotation. The term “gay blade” did not connote a happy fellow but rather a person who was “randy” and usually frequented houses of prostitution—male or female. In the 1930s the term “gay cat” was a man who would punk for another man.

For a good number of police officers, before Stonewall the words homosexual, whore, and prostitute were all synonymous. Homosexuality was simply a vice that plagued cities and had to be controlled. Moralists called for regular city sweeps of the dens of Sodom and Gomorrah. Mothers protect your children! Paddy wagons were used in Salt Lake City to empty out saloons and bars, wholesale, of suspected prostitutes and homosexuals. Same gender dancing was completely illegal.

 In Utah, a fortunate few homosexuals had cliques that functioned as a social gathering place outside the bars and parks, but unless initiated into such a group, you were out of luck. These cliques jealously guarded their privacy, knowing that exposure could destroy lives. But Mildred Berryman, a lesbian, kept a private journal in the 1920s and 30s of her clique of Gay friends in Salt Lake City, for a master’s thesis.

Mildred Berryman

http://www.connellodonovan.com/berryman.pdf

The lucky lesbians had their softball leagues in the 1940s and were always allowed to be more “Tom Boy-ish.” Lesbians were historically divided between “fems” and “butches.” The butches were allowed to wear sporty men’s clothing, with slicked-back or short-cropped hair, to distinguish themselves from the fems, who were attired in party dresses and lipstick.

Several individuals who were practicing homosexuals prior to Stonewall tell me that much of the “gay” scene was conducted at such private parties, at private residences—much like what is still happening today in Utah. Invitees often brought acquaintances or “initiates” to these top-secret parties that were very much middle class soirees, only with the curtains drawn and the shades pulled down. People dressed up, coats and ties for men, dresses and makeup for women. Drag was not even a remote possibility. Cocktails were served, and small talk made. These parties tried to imitate the cosmopolitan air of similar chic parties on the east and west coasts.

If one had not “come out” to himself and did not consider himself a homosexual, which was considered one step worse then being a Communist in the 1950s, then the dangerous world of illicit sexual encounters in semi-public places were all that was available. Quick anonymous sex was sometimes addicting—an adrenaline rush, as was the fear factor of being caught. But anonymous sex afforded the luxury of returning to whatever “normal” life one was leading. It wasn't really real sex after all . . . just fooling around.

Make Love Not War

The 1960s “free love” movement never caught on in Utah. Utah was not a place to “Drop Out, Tune In and Turn On.” Hippie communes and such radical concepts as sexual freedom and control over one’s own body, were just plain “crazy talk” for all but the young. Utah hippies and advocates of free love generally decided that California or Oregon “was the place,” not the barren Great Basin.

As strange as it seems today, it was only a few decades ago that police could issue citations for not wearing enough clothing appropriate for one’s gender. Shirtless men in public parks could also be ticketed. Often in public lavatories, police officers initiated sexual behavior to make an arrest, using enticing young decoys to entrap people. No one protested. How could they?

When I first moved to Utah in 1973 at the age of 21, I was amazed how easy it was to have sex here with nearly any man as long as you did not talk about it . . . . or kiss. Some temple-going elders told me that they did not feel they were violating their oaths of chastity by having sex with men because the oath, at that time, only pertained to having sexual intercourse with the “Daughters of Eve.” I guess the Sons of Adam were fair game, or so it seemed. And of course lesbian sex was not even sex according to Utah patriarchy. Where’s the penis? No penis, no sex. That simple.

When I attended Brigham Young University, from 1973 to 1976, there was nary a bathroom stall that did not have some homosexual graffiti on it. I remember one in the Smithfield House that pleaded, “I really need a BJ. I am so desperate.” I bet he was.

 When I was cast out into outer darkness in 1976, I soon discovered a local phenomenon—and it wasn't City Creek’s “Gravity Hill.” It seemed to me that the closer one got to Temple Square the cruisier the bathrooms became. There was a direct correlation between the amount of homosexual bathroom graffiti and the distance from Main and South Temple. Maybe it was gravity hill after all. 

Gravity Hill City Creek Canyon Salt Lake City