Seth Anderson discusses the history of Utah's LGBTQ+ (Season 1, Ep. 15 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:10)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Dept. of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting and the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience.
My guest today is historian J. Seth Anderson, author of LGBTQ Salt Lake City, published by Arcadia as part of their Images of the Modern American Series, published in 2017
In our last session, Seth explained a little bit about the history of our communities here in Utah, the documentation that is at the University of Utah and elsewhere, and we were describing the 1970s, how it was a vibrant time of lots of different things that evolved and congealed for the LGBT community in Utah. Now, when we left off, we talked about the Salt Lake Stonewall.

**J. Seth Anderson** (1:13)
Yeah.

**Brad Westwood** (1:14)
Tell me some concerns that you have about just how Stonewall is both a blessing and a curse.
Yeah. To this study.

**J. Seth Anderson** (1:23)
A lot of historians of sexuality and gay and lesbian history, LGBT history, are kind of ambivalent about the Stonewall narrative. It's become this really big and I'm going to get hate mail for this but it's become this mythologized moment. It's become this marker of the beginning of something when it really isn't. My concern with this is that it erases so much history that happened before that was essential. What happened at Stonewall wasn't unique in the sense of gay people fighting back against the police. It actually had happened several times before in the 1960s.
At the time that it happened, it wasn't national news, it wasn't a big deal, it has its own history of becoming quote-unquote Stonewall.
And then there's just all these various accounts of who was there and who did what, and none of it's actually accurate. And I've even had scholars tell me, well, you know, it doesn't matter if that's not true. You know, as long as it's, they didn't say this, but what they meant was that as long as it's in service of the political agenda, then that's okay. And as a historian, I'm like, no, I don't like, I don't know.

**Brad Westwood** (2:34)
It's got to be accurate. Yeah, it's got to be lots of sources confirmed.
But in a sense, though, it is popular and it is known. And most people, no matter where they fit politically or otherwise, they know the phrase.

**J. Seth Anderson** (2:47)
Sure. Yeah, they do now. And that took time, though, right? Like even in 94, if you said Stonewall, somebody would be like, what is that? But over the past five, ten years, I think it's really taken on this mythical importance.
And in my opinion, overly, just too much. There's other things that are important.
I think the Stonewall story actually misses a much more important lesson, which is that change doesn't happen when you get mad and break stuff. Change occurs very slowly over the course of many years with lots of people who are never recognized, who don't get any credit for anything they do. That is actually how change is made.
I fear sometimes that when we say Stonewall was a riot, yes, but that didn't create legislation.
That didn't lead to, some people would argue that it did, but I disagree. I think it just focuses on the wrong aspects of a movement and of politics. My biggest concern is that it just erases so much history beforehand. We don't talk about, the public doesn't talk about, historians do. The Mattachine Society that was founded in the 1950s, we don't talk about the first national publications, one magazine and the Mattachine Review, which actually went to the Supreme Court. There was a case that challenged what was considered obscenity. This included Playboy magazine of what was allowed to be sent through the mail. The Supreme Court rules, well, gay people have a right to publish and send information through the mail. That happened in the 50s. That's a big fight. The itty-races, there's a woman from the 30s who I find her fascinating. Her name is Gladys Bentley. She was a Harlem Renaissance star.
She was what we would probably call today a drag king in her day. So she dressed in masculine clothes and performed. She was a big star actually. She married a woman in the 30s in New Jersey. Her star fades the 30s and 40s. She reappears though in the 50s in a magazine where she's basically in this. This is why I know her because it connects to my dissertation. She'd gone to what we could probably call conversion therapy.