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Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation (Haworth Gay and Lesbian Studies) | 
 enlarge | Author: James T. Sears
Publisher: Routledge
Category: Book
List Price: $34.95
Buy New: $20.33
You Save: $14.62 (42%)
New (19) Used (10) from $16.96
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 1218448
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 586
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.9 x 1.6
ISBN: 1560231874
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.766092
EAN: 9781560231875
ASIN: 1560231874
Publication Date: October 30, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A 19th Annual Lambda Literary Awards Finalist! Take a revealing look at gay history--and the man who helped kickstart gay activism in today's society The Mattachine is the origin of the contemporary American gay movement. One of the major players in this movement was Hal Call, America's first openly gay journalist and the man most responsible for the end of government censorship of frontal male nude photography through the mail. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation, the Hal Call Chronicles travels back to the times before Stonewall and its aftermath, to the beginnings of the modern homosexual movement and the lesser-known individuals who started it. This stunning chronicle gives the unexpurgated history of the activists who organized homosexuals--using the biography of the controversial Hal Call as its springboard. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine provides a revealing illustration of gay life in the past through an intergenerational history of the early gay men's movement. Noted author James T. Sears generously weaves oral history, seldom seen historical documents, and rare photographs to provide a rich behind-the-scenes look at the first wave of Mattachine activists and the emerging gay pornography industry. This historical chronicle of a previously neglected era is packed with details of Call's personal struggles, his celebration of the phallus, and his assertion linking homophobia and heteronormativity to our culture's sex-negative tradition. The reader is transported to the underworld of youthful hustlers, porno kingpins, spurned lovers, sex clubs, cruising grounds, secretive societies, and personal in-fighting over the direction of gay activism. This enthralling narrative is impeccably referenced. Behind the Mask of the Mattachine examines: The origins of the Mattachine Society
The Mattachine Foundation of Harry Hay and others of the "Fifth Order"
The Weimar Republic in Germany--the roots of the modern homosexual movement
Networking of homosexuals through correspondence clubs and speakeasies in Depression-era America
The intense rivalries between San Francisco and New York City Mattachine groups
Censorship of books, magazines, and films
And much more! The book explores the lives of three generations of pre-Stonewall gay activists: Magnus Hirschfeld and Benedikt Friedländer
Henry Gerber and Manual boyFrank
Harry Hay and Hal Call Behind the Mask of the Mattachine puts a needed spotlight on a time in lesser-known gay history, and makes illuminating reading for historians and gay persons interested in the history of the gay men's movement.
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| Customer Reviews:
Sex, Politics and Desire September 1, 2007
Sears, James. "Behind the Mask of the Mattachine: The Hal Call Chronicles and the Early Movement for Homosexual Emancipation", The Haworth Press, 2007.
Sex, Politics and Desire
Amos Lassen
The Mattachine Society is what began the movement for gay rights long before Stonewall. James Sears takes us back to the beginnings of the modern homosexual movement and to those unfamiliar names that were the early heroes of our movement. This is the first history of the activists that organized gay people and Sears looks at one in particular, Hal Call who was the consummate early activist. "Behind the Mask of the Mattachine Society" is a vivid history and Sears manages to create a wonderful book about an organization that we should know about but don't. Here is the genesis of the gay movement and it is examined richly and in great depth.
Using interviews, documents and analysis, Sears brings history to life, Hal Call was a "hard-nosed, self-sacrificing genius who energetically saved the movement" and with the study of Call the man, we have a history that has been hidden for all too long. At almost 600 pages in length, we get our history which reads like a living document. Sears looks at the debates with in our community all the way back in the nineteenth century and gives a penetrating look at those who made waves. We go up to the 60s and we watch Hall Call wrest power of the Mattachine Society from its founder Harry Hay and then save the movement from the probes of McCarthy.
The Mattachine Society was visionary both in its agenda and its self sacrifice. Hal Call was the first openly gay journalist in America and crusaded against government censorship of male sexual imagery. He was the leading conservative voice in the entire gay movement and his influence was great but largely unnoted. When he "stole" the leadership of the Society in 1953 he ruined the image that it had once had and it became a front for his own commercial enterprises. Yet the truth of the matter is a great deal more complex than this and this is what Sears finds. Even though he was contradictory, he was not only a political conservative but a sexual libertine and realized that sex was the single factor that brought all gay men together and it was sex that built a community.
The research that Sears did to write this work is monumental. He puts a whole new spin on everything, By doing so he lets us see those men that have been regarded as Communists--the founders of the Mattachine.
The book is interesting on every page and by reading it we learn what it was to be a gay man in the 1940s and 50s. The behind the scenes stories are fascinating and the new biography of Hal Cal fills in a lot of what we did not know.
Behind the Mattachine Mask July 30, 2007
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I'm not sure what Sears thinks he is doing but lumping together profiles of three generations of gay rights activists into his enormous, authoritative study, but if you ask me, I could have done without those heaping helpings of Hirshfield and Manuel Boy Frank.
Be that as it may, nothing will prepare you for the depth of research Sears has performed on the most interesting and still controversial years of gay liberation, the Mattachine Society and its series of constitutional conventions in 1953. After all the scholarship in the last 20 years on the subject, you'd think there would be no more to say, and yet Sears has found a way to put a new spin on everything but approaching the controversy from a completely different angle. This book doesn't treat Harry Hay as a sacred cow or some kind of Joan of Arc angel; indeed as the subtitle shows, Sears is here placing front and center Harry Hay's worst nightmare, the San Francisco printer and porn impresario Hal Call as the hidden master of the Mattachine.
It's an unconventional stance but it causes us to view anew our prejudices towards the original, "communist" founders of the Mattachine and to probe into a delicate area, to what extent did the "tainted" pasts of these leaders pre-doom the movement early on. Even to pose the question carries a thrill of transgression, and Sears winds up backing off from the implications of some of his answers. I had the funny feeling while reading the book that, as often as Sears speaks of Hal Call's heroic iconoclasm, his man's man stance towards sex and war and everything in between, that he (Sears) wound up not liking Call very much as a human being.
Much has been made of the unusual collage and enjambment methods Sears employed, almost like a novelist of the Dos Passos stripe, while putting together the multiple narratives of BEHIND THE MASK OF THE MATTACHINE. The effect is as hard to describe as to analyze, but sometimes entire chapters are worked up out of people's letters in a way that looks like a two-character play, as though they are speaking back and forth; sometimes Sears takes these quotes from actual correspondence between two people, but just as often there is no direct link between the speakers, and Sears is using them as a sort of point-counterpoint way to make us scrunch up our scalps and sigh over the unreliability of any one person to tell the truth about a complex social event.
His notes are generous and detailed; the problem is thatm in at least the one collection I'm familiar with, the Hal Call Papers at Los Angeles' One Institute, the papers themselves are barely organized rendering it impossible for Sears to actually be able to direct you into the right container, so it has been difficult for me to replicate all of his findings--the material is in what my dad used to call a shambles. Nevertheless I must say that Sears has done amazing work making sense, for example, of the poet Jack Spicer's role in Bay Area Mattachine affairs, and he gives us example after example of the ways in which Spicer served in multiple capacities in the Oakland Area Chapter, not just as a dilettante or looker-on, but getting his hands dirty in every conceivable way, far beyond what any of us had previously imagined.
 A vast compendium July 12, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Of an early British historian it was said that "he makes a heap of all he knows." So too James T. Spears in this vast, sprawling volume. However, much of what is in the heap is intensely interesting. The detailed quotations, revealed by Spears' archival research, help us to realize what it was like to be a gay man in the forties and fifties, an era that now seems almost prehistoric.
The blurb says that Hal Call saved the gay movement. I don't think that that is the story this book tells. Instead, it shows how one man pioneered in turning the purposes of the gay movement to a commercial porno enterprise. This was far from the noble vision of Harry Hay, Dorr Legg, Don Slater and the other Los Angeles pioneers. Call's legacy is an ambivalent one, but it proved influential.
The REAL Story--Finally! January 1, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a GREAT book! Full of behind the scenes stories of the early gay movement that other historians have been too timid or lazy to uncover. Sears does a terrific job in not only writing the biography of Hal Call, one of the key leaders of the Mattachine Society, but of integrating that story with the real story of 70 years of gay organizing before Stonewall. To top it off he does a brilliant job documenting the connection between gay activism and gay sexuality. This book belongs on the bookshelf of any person who really wants to know about our gay history and heritage!
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