I’d only been to a porn theater once before and that was for a bachelor party for a straight high school friend. Here’s the scene and it was quite a scene because Hal Call’s office was above the Circle J Cinema, which was a sex club and porn theater he owned and ran in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. But he was also at the forefront in the fight for gay rights and he has an important story to tell. He uses hateful language about women that’s explicit and offensive and some of what he says about the challenges faced by lesbians in the 1950s and ‘60s was simply wrong. But before you listen, I want you to know that some of what Hal says shocked me at the time I interviewed him and is still shocking to me now. And I guarantee that Hal will speak for himself.
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If you’ve listened to our earlier episodes, you know I let the people we feature speak for themselves. That’s where we’ll pick up the story.īut first, a warning about language and content.
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He served in the Army in World War II and then went back to Missouri, got a degree in journalism, and went to work for the Kansas City Star. He knew he was gay from the time he was twelve and wasn’t shy about chasing after farm boys. He was born in 1917 in north central Missouri. I’m Eric Marcus and this is Making Gay History. The Bay Area Reporter chronicles the history of Hal’s Circle J club in San Francisco at the time of its closing in this 2005 article. Click here for a description of what’s in Hal Call’s collection. Hal’s Purple Heart (received when he was wounded in World War II in the Pacific theater) is part of the largest repository of LGBT materials in the world at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. Hal helped Life magazine with a landmark article: “ Homosexuality in America ,” which was was published on J. It’s breathtaking! From the opening page of “Homosexuality in America.” This is a must-see documentary, which you can watch here. Read about the documentary here and here. In 1961, San Francisco public television station KQED aired a groundbreaking documentary, “The Rejected,” in which three members of the Mattachine Society were featured, including Hal Call. And you can read Hal Call’s and Chuck Rowland’s oral histories in Eric Marcus’s book Making Gay History. You can also learn much more about the formation of the Mattachine Society from our Making Gay History episode on Mattachine co-founder Chuck Rowland. Credit: San Francisco Bay Area Television Archiveįor an in-depth look at the Mattachine Society and Hal Call, have a look at Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation, by James T. Hal Call (at right), president of the Mattachine Society and Don Lucas, Mattachine’s executive secretary. Still from “The Rejected,” a 1961 documentary about homosexuals. And he references Mattachine Society co-founder Harry Hay and Daughters of Bilitis co-founders Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin. Hal also references the Dykes on Bikes, an organization founded in San Francisco in 1976, which you can read about here. Johnson called The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government. The Lavender Scare is chronicled in a 2004 book by David K. In this episode, Hal makes reference to what’s become known as the Lavender Scare, which was the gay analog to the 1950s Red Scare, both of which were led by Senator Joseph McCarthy and, as Hal put it in his interview, the two “fairies without wings,” Roy Cohn and Gerard David Schine (better known G. For a more detailed overview of Hal Call’s life click here and here.