1961
The NSA purges 26 employees as “sexual deviates”
On July 29, 1961, The New York Times ran the headline “U.S. Security Unit Ousts 26 Deviates.” The National Security Agency had dismissed twenty-six employees as sexual deviates, adding the clarification that not all of them were homosexuals - a sentence that tells you exactly how elastic the category was, and how little evidence was required to be placed inside it.
The purge had a cause. The previous summer, two NSA cryptologists, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, had vanished and reappeared at a Moscow press conference in September 1960, handing the Soviet Union the worst security humiliation in the agency’s history. Someone had to explain how it happened. Homosexuality was the explanation reached for - men with something to hide could be blackmailed, the reasoning went, so the men with something to hide had to go.
Martin and Mitchell were not gay. The agency’s own investigations found their sexuality had little to do with why they went.
Twenty-six people lost their careers for a theory about two men that was not true.
Salon: “Before Edward Snowden - sexual deviates and the NSA”
1973
We Shall Overcome
San Francisco’s gay church is burned down, and the congregation marches anyway
The Metropolitan Community Church was founded in 1968 by Troy Perry, a Pentecostal minister who had been thrown out of his own denomination for being gay, and by 1973 it had congregations across the country. That year four of them were set on fire.
The San Francisco church was on Guerrero Street. On Friday July 27, 1973, somebody broke in and used the congregation’s own prayer books to start the fire. The building was gutted. Nobody was hurt, which was luck rather than design, and it came a month after the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans was set alight during a Sunday MCC gathering and thirty-two people died.
The congregation had nowhere to worship. Mission United Presbyterian, at 23rd and Capp, offered them its building.
On Sunday July 29 they took it, and they did not go quietly. More than five hundred people - the congregation, most of gay San Francisco, and city and state politicians - walked from the burned-out shell on Guerrero to the doors of Mission United Presbyterian, with a police escort, singing We Shall Overcome. Then they held their service.
MCC San Francisco is still going.
SFist, the gay San Francisco church that was torched in 1973
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