In the mid-1960s, a group of Democratic politicians and welfare policy advocates used a major expansion of the welfare state in California to widen the reach of the party’s electoral coalition and to set the stage for the identity politics of the 1970s and beyond. The coming to power of a liberal Democratic administration in California in 1958 heralded a period of social policy experimentation that, in conjunction with the increasing power of a left-liberal movement within the party, provided welfare experts and politicians with the political language through which they would later expand the boundaries of what constituted normative social behavior in areas such as sexuality and individual freedoms. This article explores how liberal politicians like Phil Burton of San Francisco joined with welfare rights lobbyists and bureaucrats to embrace late twentieth-century notions of sexual and gender equality though a broader reconception of economic equality brought about by the expansion of the California welfare state in the early 1960s. These politicians leapt into a local political milieu dominated by individual personalities and cliques in which there was space for a new generation of political entrepreneurs who used appeals to the socially marginalized to help them challenge existing power structures. At the same time, homophile activists were seeking to tie their sexual equality agenda to mainstream political debates over economic and social citizenship. A study of how mainstream liberal politics and the sexual equality movement interacted in San Francisco in a period of rapid social and political change sheds light on the processes through which mainstream politics adapted to changing conceptions of society, including attitudes toward welfare and the “deserving” poor, sexuality, individual rights, and the regulation of capitalism, often before the generally accepted shift in social attitudes in the later 1960s.

Historians who have focused in recent years on welfare politics in the postwar years have tended to stress the inability of liberal politicians to surmount corporate and conservative obstacles to any expansion of the welfare state.Footnote ¹ These studies all take the weakness of a leftist tradition in the United States as a given, whereas I will argue that the ability of liberals to reconfigure their ideological worldview in the 1960s set the stage for policies predicated on a new vision of American society that presaged the emergence of identity politics later in the century. There is also a rich literature charting the emergence of a gay rights movement in the United States and specifically in San Francisco, though this tends to focus on the internal workings of the movement and represents the state mainly as an organ of harassment and repression prior to the 1970s.Footnote ² In this article, I ask how homophile activists and mainstream liberal politicians in the City by the Bay sought political power and influence using similar ideological appeals to social rights in order to effect a major transformation of the city’s political scene between the late 1950s and the 1960s. Though I give due attention to the important themes of the lobbying know-how of California homophile activists and to the particular urban political geography of San Francisco, the principal focus of this article is the use of a shared language of social and economic citizenship that united welfare rights specialists and San Francisco gay rights activists, and that provided the latter with an entrée into straight, and mostly Democratic, politics before sexual rights per se became accepted in mainstream party politics in the early 1970s.

It is true that San Francisco was in many ways unique, as the newly founded Society for Individual Rights’ secretary Mark Forrester noted in a letter to members in November 1964: “Due to peculiarities in San Francisco—size, population, political structure and its long history of accepting the unique—the homosexual living here has a good chance to do something particularly effective for himself.”Footnote ³ San Francisco provided a well-established network of gay and lesbian activists, a large number of gay-friendly meeting places, and local politicians used to community politics and a rich variety of local interest groups. Nan Alamilla Boyd in her deeply researched study of San Francisco gay and lesbian life in the postwar years described the city’s “overlap of cultures and communities, foreign and native born,” which “contributed to a live-and-let-live sensibility, but it was the city’s early history of lawlessness, boss politics, and administrative graft that solidified its reputation as a wide-open town.”Footnote ⁴ It is also true that a number of the most important left-wing Democratic Party politicians gained their seats in the legislature and in Congress from the city: Phil Burton, his brother John, and Willie Brown, all champions of gay rights much earlier than most of their peers and hugely powerful figures in the state party. Yet their ability to use their behind-the-scenes legislative skills to circumvent their colleagues and to pass groundbreaking welfare and individual rights legislation in effect forced California into a position of supporting the development of a generous state government that was a trailblazer in establishing a relationship between economic rights and civil rights.Footnote ⁵ A study of this link between social welfare and individual rights also highlights the very real tensions between a mainstream political discourse that remained wedded to heteronormative notions of society and a sexual rights movement struggling to reconcile its individual rights agenda with the racial, gendered, and class implications of the rights revolution of the 1960s. An analysis of sexual rights through the prism of welfare policy allows us to advance at least a partial historical explanation of why an enduring coalition of the socially marginalized never fully materialized in these years, a fact that has important implications for our understanding of the fortunes of liberal interest-group politics in the United States in recent decades.Footnote ⁶

MAKING SAN FRANCISCO LIBERAL: THE POLITICAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP OF THE BURTON COALITION

San Francisco was a city ripe for political upheaval in the mid-1950s. Its politics, like those of California as a whole, had been shaped by the legacy of Hiram Johnson’s Progressive Era governorship. The reforms of Johnson’s administration in the 1910s that had been designed to break the power of organized factions and lobbyists over the state’s political system by the 1930s had had the opposite effect, and had calcified political activity into an organized chaos of individual candidacies, one-party dominance over the legislature, and a lack of serious mainstream public debate about the ideological direction of the state and the country. Political scientists such as David Mayhew and James Q. Wilson have described this phenomenon, leading Mayhew to go so far as to assert that there is “no point dwelling” on California’s political system insofar as it is “the last place anybody would look to find traditional party organizations.Footnote ⁷ In San Francisco, the lack of any serious relationship between party politics and a coherent issues-based agenda was particularly clear: elections for city offices were nonpartisan, and party politics revolved around a series of competing clans centered on individual kingmakers. “How not to win with Democratic candidates is better demonstrated in the state of California than any state in America,” complained the African American San Francisco Sun Reporter in October 1956 during Phil Burton’s successful run for the Assembly against a pro-labor Republican supported by virtually the entire city establishment, including many senior Democratic power brokers. “Without fail whenever a political campaign starts one can find people who pose as Democrats forming a committee to support some Republican candidates. … On the local scene we read of a group of these hybrids giving the business to Phillip Burton. … Some of the leaders of the party seem afraid of their own shadows or either they seem to think that if they raise their voices too high they might disturb the serenity of the Republicans who dwell on Nob Hill.”Footnote ⁸

The fact that California politics consisted of a nonpartisan political marketplace in which interest groups from chambers of commerce to labor unions gravitated toward the forces deemed to have the most power had two contradictory consequences for political organizing in the 1950s. On the one hand, it blunted the capacity of forces of social change to influence the political process. The California State Federation of Labor’s pre-primary endorsement convention in San Francisco in April 1952 endorsed candidates for the state legislature of both parties seen to have the best chance of victory, prompting one delegate to complain bitterly that “in very few instances are we going to do battles with the Chamber of Commerce or the Merchants and Manufacturers. In many instances I think we are going to be in the same corner with them. … I think we are going into a placation program. ‘If we just don’t kick you hard, will you please be kind to us next year?’”Footnote ⁹ Similarly, the Committee for Fair Employment, formed in the early 1950s to push for antidiscrimination legislation in the State Legislature, found itself forced to beg for favors from a state GOP establishment that saw little need to engage with interest groups it perceived to wield little electoral power. Bay Area civil rights campaigner C. L. Dellums impressed upon California GOP national committeeman McIntyre Faries that his campaigners were “very conscious of the fact that this is a Republican state and that this bill can only be put through by the Republicans, and they shall receive full credit for what is done.”Footnote ¹⁰ Unfortunately for the fair employment movement, the issue was a matter of party politics: both Republican senators refused to intervene, and the Committee on Governmental Efficiency and Economy of the State Assembly, in which the FEPC bill was bottled up, was dominated by conservative Republicans, all but two of whom were from wealthy, white districts of Los Angeles. The chairman of the committee, Albert I. Stewart, represented Pasadena, not an area in which FEPC ranked high on his constituents’ wish list.Footnote ¹¹

Yet the fact that the world of California politics, dominated by personalities and media-focused campaigning, was in many respects a performative space in which ideas could be marketed and new electoral forces could potentially be identified and recruited rendered the Golden State a laboratory of liberal entrepreneurship in the 1950s. In San Francisco, a new generation of liberal figures saw that they could stand out from the crowd and gain office by espousing an ideology of social inclusion that would mobilize voters previously ignored in political campaigns. Phil Burton is the best-known example of this new group, taking on the city’s Democratic and Republican hierarchies in an unsuccessful run for the legislature in 1954 and a successful challenge to a pro-labor Republican in the working-class Twentieth District in 1956. His campaigns spelled out in both printed campaign literature and face-to-face meetings on doorsteps and in union halls a commitment to a range of post–New Deal policies that emphasized the importance of an economic safety net as the way of ensuring equal access for all to the rights of citizenship. Burton’s 1954 campaign material stressed the need for a public works program to eliminate unemployment, increased pensions and the elimination of relatives’ responsibility laws and means tests, universal access to health care, public housing, the regulation of loan sharks, the provision of child care and adult education facilities, tax relief for working mothers, and a variety of other measures that linked economic rights to social harmony.Footnote ¹² He explicitly portrayed his wing of the Democratic Party as the vehicle through which the dispossessed and socially marginalized could gain a voice in local and state politics. Burton’s strategy consisted of a door-to-door sales campaign, not just as a way of selling himself but also as an ideology, one that associated his candidacy with universal human rights. “The campaign emphasized addressing the voter by name and using quarter cards and bumper stickers in abundance,” reported a Burton worker on the campaign on Potrero Hill in 1956. “The theme of the campaign was entirely positive. … The precincts which were intensively worked for Burton showed huge changes in the voting pattern.” A piece in Frontier magazine after Burton’s unexpected triumph noted the correlation between his message of social rights for the poor and marginalized, his personal appearances on the doorstep, and his mobilization of new voters in his district.Footnote ¹³

The emergence of a network of political actors in San Francisco determined to win power through the advocacy of a message of social equality centered on Burton but was not limited to his campaigns. Willie Brown later recalled the frenetic excitement of a new alliance of liberal entrepreneurs in the city in the late 1950s, “enough of us willing to invite the old people living in the flop house hotels in under our umbrella, enough of us to invite the black community to come under our umbrella and enough of us to invite and understand the need to have the labor movement, which had the only resources.”Footnote ¹⁴ The same year that witnessed Burton’s win in the Twentieth District also saw the challenge of Delbert Barnett to incumbent conservative Democrat Bernard Brady in the Twenty-second District, centered on the more prosperous Richmond area of the city. Barnett’s appeal was predicated on the same issues as Burton’s: his appeal to local labor organizations stressed his credentials as “a liberal in the Roosevelt-Truman tradition,” who advocated increased social welfare benefits and unemployment insurance payouts, state health insurance, and civil rights laws. “Our country must be free from economic and social injustice, and racial or any other type of discrimination.” He tied labor’s desire for improved pay and working conditions with a broader commitment to “the extension of civil rights and civil liberties to all our citizens.”Footnote ¹⁵ His campaign was unsuccessful, but it formed part of a wide-ranging liberal Democratic challenge to existing channels of political patronage in San Francisco that would launch the careers of many who would go on to dominate city politics in later years. Frank Brann, for instance, ran for the Assembly in the same district in 1958 and 1960 and then became one of the key figures running Willie Brown’s campaigns for the legislature in 1962 and 1964. His strategy mirrored those of Burton and Barnett in framing his electoral appeals in terms of social welfare policies tied to the Democratic Party banner. His platform in 1960 played on the legislative successes of the gubernatorial administration of Pat Brown, arguing that Brown’s program of civil rights legislation and the defense of the rights of labor and consumers added up to an effort to “extend human rights to all,” noting his commitment to a Human Rights Commission for the city as well as social welfare for the poor and aged.Footnote ¹⁶ George Moscone launched his career in 1960 in a race against liberal Republican Milton Marks in the Twenty-first District. Although the case of liberal Marks reminds us that ideology never mapped onto party allegiance in a clear-cut way, the Burton group’s ambition was to use party allegiance and an ideological program to challenge existing power structures and to market a social democratic worldview in electoral campaigns. As the senior Republican figure in the city, Caspar Weinberger, later put it, Burton’s group “was put together largely on the basis of political expediency. I think they sense that registration figures in the areas in which they run call for a very pronounced liberal set of views, and they have espoused these.”Footnote ¹⁷

The particular social context of the Bay Area and California at the end of the 1950s made Burton’s strategy resonate strongly in West Coast politics at the time. As elsewhere in the country, a business-led challenge to the labor relations compact of the New Deal era that had been building since World War II found an outlet in a right-to-work initiative on the California ballot in 1958 and formed the principal focus of conservative Republican William Knowland’s run for the Senate that year. The right-to-work issue mobilized organized labor and its allies to abandon the timid patronage politics of earlier times and to commit themselves solely to supporting politicians who actively opposed anti-union legislation. The labor campaign against right-to-work cast its crusade as a defense of inalienable human rights to a decent life against their opponents’ perceived endorsement of social discord and economic chaos. “Professional agitators are now seeking to turn California employers and unions against one another in hateful, bitter combat. … They’re out to destroy union negotiated health and welfare and pension programs which now protect more than a million men, women and children in California,” warned a California State Federation of Labor leaflet headed “A moral look at Right-to-Work laws.” Union members were portrayed in a major advertising drive on Bay Area television and radio in the fall as ordinary people who were being unfairly labeled as alien and undesirable by their right-to-work opponents. One television spot, entitled “Every Other House,” panned across “an imaginary block in a typical Bay Area community” as the narrator reminded viewers that “labor unions are people—people working together to accomplish desirable goals. And the people are your neighbors, the man living next door, the girl across the street.”Footnote ¹⁸ The defeat of right-to-work in the November election was important not just because it demonstrated the increasing bifurcation of California politics between left and right over the control of economic power and the continued capacity of labor to influence the political process, but also because the framing of labor’s campaign as a defense of the economic rights of “ordinary” people placed the relationship between economic rights and individual freedoms at the center of debate just as a new generation of liberal politicians was building a power base in San Francisco. Questions of economic security provided the basis for a broader consideration of what constituted the rights of citizens.

At just this moment when liberal politicians and organized labor were wrestling with the question of individual rights at a time of political turmoil over the future of the New Deal social compact, the 1959 mayoral campaign in San Francisco pushed the question of sexual difference into the limelight. The manner in which representatives of the homophile organization the Mattachine Society framed a defense against attacks on sexual “vice” during the campaign demonstrated both the capacity of homophile discourse to dovetail with the broader rights discourse of the liberal insurrection gaining strength in the city and also the potential of that message to reinforce normative assumptions of social cohesion that still dominated mainstream political debate. Republican incumbent mayor George Christopher was up for reelection in late 1959. His administration had increased the wages of city employees, had signed into law the city’s Fair Employment Practices Commission, had reduced the working week of city transit workers to forty hours on the same pay, and he had the endorsement of most labor locals and the city’s establishment. The only serious challenger in the election, city assessor Russell Wolden, had only converted to the Democratic Party the previous year and had no real power base in the city. While Christopher had refused to support Proposition 18, the right-to-work initiative of the previous year, Wolden had not joined labor’s campaign against it.Footnote ¹⁹ In October, Wolden found his issue: the city’s News-Call Bulletin reported that Wolden “took to the airwaves last night to charge San Francisco is a city of vice and homosexuality. He laid the blame at the doorstep of Mayor George Christopher, in a blistering, mud-slinging attack rarely seen in modern politics. … He flatly charged Christopher has opened wide the Golden Gate to sex deviates from all parts of the country.”Footnote ²⁰ The charges were bizarre: Christopher had sanctioned regular police crackdowns against gay bars and meeting places, and his administration’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Board (ABC) subjected city social spaces to a rigid regime of regulation and repression. Acting police chief Al Nelder assured citizens that his force had “always had a special squad to check on sex deviates. They are doing a good job. Since the first of January they have made over 150 arrests.”Footnote ²¹ In addition, Wolden’s charge that the Mattachine Society had praised Christopher for his enlightened attitude toward gay men and women was quickly exposed as untrue, and the actual author of the resolution praising Christopher was notorious political operator William Brandhove.Footnote ²²

More significant in the long run than the baseless charges of a desperate and unsuccessful candidate for office was the significance of the affair in the politicization of sexuality in San Francisco at a crucial moment in the city’s political development. Nan Alamilla Boyd has argued that “Wolden’s tactics pushed homosexuality into mainstream politics and, in doing so, stimulated a shift in gay and lesbian political consciousness.”Footnote ²³ In the sense that homophile activists saw the need to vote and to defend themselves from baseless charges of “deviancy,” the Wolden campaign was clearly crucial: Mattachine sued Wolden for slander and complained officially to media outlets like KNBC that had broadcast his charges, the organization’s secretary Don Lucas claiming that Wolden’s attacks had caused Mattachine “damage in the matter of income and support needed to conduct its stated program of education, research, and social service in the lawful manner outlined in its corporate charter.”Footnote ²⁴ Yet Lucas’s words here emphasized the thorny question of how to politicize the question of sexual identity: since it was obvious in 1959 that the mainstream political consensus was that homosexuality was marginal and rightfully illegal, articulating a homophile agenda based purely on reeducating society seemed an uphill task, made more problematic still by an emphasis in Mattachine on an agenda of respectability that attempted to erase or elide the rich variety of homosexual experience in San Francisco in order to gain wider political acceptance. The vital missing link that would transform the relationship between homophile politics and wider liberal political organizing in San Francisco between 1959, when no politician really mentioned homosexuality except to decry it, and 1964, when numerous politicians gingerly started reaching out to gay rights organizations, was the coming together of both groups over the issue of economic citizenship as a guarantor of individual freedoms.

LIBERAL POLITICS AND THE WELFARE STATE IN THE EARLY 1960s

In California, a number of factors coalesced in the early 1960s to put the welfare state at the center of the political agenda. First, the passage of several federal bills, ranging from Social Security for the disabled in 1956 to the Kerr-Mills Medical Assistance to the Aged bill in 1960, offered federal funds on a matching basis to states that implemented new state programs of categorical assistance. Second, the election of President Kennedy ushered in a period of high political expectation that new entitlement programs would be on the agenda, and the president’s temporary allowance of AFDC benefits to unemployed parents as an economic stimulus measure raised the possibility that a major expansion of entitlements at the state level would not necessarily cause ructions in Washington. Third, the early years of the Brown administration had witnessed a dramatic enlargement of the state government, and an increasingly ambitious and influential State Department of Social Welfare sought to capitalize on the favorable political climate and enlarge its control over a multilayered and bureaucratically complex welfare apparatus. Fourth, the state legislature was by the early 1960s solidly under Democratic control, and the chair of the Social Welfare Committee was the extraordinarily talented and driven champion of the poor and dispossessed, Phil Burton, who possessed such powers of legislative legerdemain and singularity of purpose that he would almost single-handedly revolutionize California’s welfare state without arousing the suspicions of many of his opponents until it was too late. Finally, the reelection of Pat Brown in 1962 gave the political green light to the most enthusiastic supporters of a more generous welfare system, and gave Brown the electoral capital he needed to throw his weight behind one of the biggest spending sprees in the history of any single state.Footnote ²⁵ While the story of the major amendments to California’s welfare system in 1963, usually referred to under the umbrella Assembly Bill 59 that brought them about, is important in itself, the underlying story of the ideological impact of welfare state building on liberal politics in San Francisco is a less-understood narrative that had a major influence on politicians’ understanding of how society did and should function in later years.

The passage of AB 59 and the dramatic expansion in California’s welfare state in the early 1960s represented a marriage between a rapidly growing army of state welfare employees and consultants and legislators like Phil Burton, who were determined to use an antipoverty discourse to advance their political careers and cement their electoral coalition. Jacobus tenBroek, a California welfare policy expert who would become a key witness in the state’s successful effort in 1963 to expand assistance to needy children to two-parent families, was a policy thinker who bridged the divide between government adviser and intellectual.Footnote ²⁶ In 1959, he and a co-author published Hope Deferred: Public Welfare and the Blind, which argued that the “blind as a group are mentally competent, psychologically stable, and socially adaptable; and that their needs are therefore those of ordinary people, of normal men and women, caught at a physical and social disadvantage.” The key question for tenBroek was that of “whether [welfare] provides services as rights due to citizens or as the charity bounty due to wards and indigents. … The welfare of the blind is a social responsibility. … It underscores the obligation which exists in any democratic society to assure equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all its members.” Crucially, the “shift in the economic setting from depression to prosperity” was one factor that had widened the debate over public welfare from one of ameliorating conditions of pauperism to one of reintegrating the disadvantaged and socially marginalized into civic life: “The principle that the recipient [of aid] is free to conduct his own life and manage his own affairs must be maintained at all costs against caseworkers whose advice becomes direction, whose services are supplied with a sanction, and whose investigation and handling of recipients’ problems become psychoanalysis and treatment.” The debate over the welfare state was to the authors a universal question of individuals’ rights as citizens “to be free to make their own decisions with respect to spending, living arrangements, and personal matters.”Footnote ²⁷ As with the debate over aid to two-parent families, amendments to aid to the needy blind to liberalize entitlement and attempt to lessen bureaucratic interference with lifestyle choices forced political actors to reconfigure the relationship between the individual and the state even as their struggles to expand the welfare state and state oversight of civil rights continued to meet with widespread opposition.

AB 59’s authors attempted to take out anachronistic notions of deserving and undeserving poverty from liberal policymaking, and to limit the extent to which government could dictate how welfare recipients lived their lives. The biggest change to the state’s needy children program removed the provision that the male in the household had to be absent before a family could qualify for relief; after 1963, the unemployment of a child’s “parent or parents” was sufficient, a clause that both allowed for the notion of a female breadwinner and also gave rise to the notion of a “living wage,” providing relief if a family’s earned income was below a certain threshold even if either parent was in work. These provisions embedded in law the notion that the provision of government funds, rather than the withholding of them, could promote better integration of the poor into wider society: the Governor’s Welfare Commission concluded that the lack of “suitable provision for maintenance of decent living standards” of California’s unemployed “has strong and direct tendencies to promote family disintegration and moral degradation.”Footnote ²⁸ Section 1523.7 of the new Act took the principle of welfare as a right rather than an emergency stop gap to another level: it established criteria that constituted “good cause for refusal” of employment. No longer would a welfare recipient have to take any job that was on offer to remove them from the relief rolls: the employment had to offer a wage higher than the relief payment; the relief recipient had to be fit to undertake the job; he or she could refuse the employment if the vacancy was caused by a labor dispute; and, most controversially, the job could be refused if acceptance “would be an unreasonable or inconsistent act because of hardships imposed upon the person or his family due to illness, hours and working conditions, or remoteness or inaccessibility; interruption of a program for permanent rehabilitation or self-support; or conflicting with an imminent likelihood of re-employment at his regular work.”Footnote ²⁹ The bill also attempted to ameliorate the burden on the welfare applicant of the intrusive and stigmatizing eligibility process by requiring counties to apply a rule of “presumptive eligibility,” speeding up considerably the process of granting welfare checks. Welfare was no longer defined as a port of last resort, but was now a legitimate secondary source of income for families through which the state protected its citizens from arbitrary working conditions in the private sector.

The ideological underpinning to all these changes was clear: the state should play an active role in the welfare of its citizens and not merely act as a prop for carefully compartmentalized categories of the destitute.Footnote ³⁰ Equally important was the underlying assumption of the new law that the socially marginalized should be recognized as full citizens and have their “economic rights and welfare protected.”Footnote ³¹ This theme had implications for politicians’ understanding of gender and race that would extend beyond the subject of welfare. The engagement of Burton and his allies in legislative politics with welfare experts and their sponsorship of complex welfare reform allowed them to stitch together a political program that they would take to the doorsteps in electoral campaigns, using a vocabulary that implicitly associated economic rights with what Phil Burton’s brother John termed “dignity” in his 1964 campaign to take over his brother’s seat in the Assembly after Phil went to Washington. The “dignity” heading in his campaign literature included social welfare legislation, the abolition of capital punishment, collective bargaining for teachers, increases in Social Security, and consumer protection laws. The Department of State Employees Local 1100 passed a resolution endorsing Phil Burton for his run for Congress in the February 1964 special election in his downtown San Francisco district for his “record of being in the forefront of every fight to advance the program of organizing labor, human rights and social legislation to protect the unemployed, the disabled and the impoverished.”Footnote ³² There was nothing explicit about sexuality in any politician’s campaign that year, but the language of rights and the association of political action with the protection of the vulnerable, with all the attendant problems of definition and normative assumptions about social behavior implicit in this vocabulary, would provide a meeting place for politicians like Burton and gay rights activists in the mid-1960s.

It was mainly Phil Burton’s skill at manipulating the legislature’s arcane procedural rules that got the omnibus bill through to gain Brown’s signature. He knew that he could introduce a relatively uncontroversial bill, one that initially provided that aid recipients’ earned income and interest on savings would not be deducted from their grants. He would then sneak amendments in, knowing that although they were highlighted in strike-through text and in italics, those highlighted sections disappeared in subsequent amended versions, making it easy to hide controversial sections, confident that most legislators would not have the patience to keep track of everything that was going on. He organized lobby groups that included Catholics, farm groups, and disabled charities to come to Sacramento and put pressure on legislators. He manipulated key members of Assembly and Senate committees to quietly push the bill past chairmen hostile both to the provisions of AB 59 and to Burton personally.Footnote ³³

His cunning and persistence, together with the key support of legislative allies and the staff of the State Department of Social Welfare, paid off in spectacular fashion: a massive welfare bill that many had thought would take years to bring to fruition was passed by large majorities, 30–9 in the Senate and 56–19 in the Assembly.Footnote ³⁴ An overriding factor in addition to that of Burton’s skill was the fact that although welfare expenditures would increase dramatically, for the first time federal funds would take up a large proportion of the burden and county expenditures would actually decrease. The State Department of Social Welfare estimated that in 1964–65 counties would save some $27 million, while the state would pay out an extra $17.3 million on welfare and the federal government an extra $52.6 million to California.Footnote ³⁵ Even Ronald Reagan’s tenure in the Governor’s Mansion would not see a repeal of the state’s new enlarged welfare system. The ideological premise that welfare should not reinforce outdated notions of normative social behavior would come under sustained attack in the decades that followed, but its legacy was to force welfare’s proponents to engage with the varieties of social experience in new ways.

The sheer scale of the new law touched off a passionate debate over the purpose of welfare that set the stage for a larger public discussion over the structure of society. On one side, the emboldened State Department of Social Welfare saw the welfare state in a post-AB 59 world as providing social stability and ensuring the economic productivity of the socially marginalized. “For many Californians,” stated Director Jack Wedemeyer in the department’s newsletter in December 1963, “AFDC is the difference between lingering and marginal starvation and the basic necessities of life … until the economy can use these people productively so that they can earn their own way, they must not be permitted to languish without food, shelter, clothing, and hope. Most important, the children in these families deserve the opportunity to improve their circumstances. … The state cannot be guilty of stunting their growth.”Footnote ³⁶ On the other side of the debate was a collection of interests headed by the California Taxpayers Association, which saw the new law as prohibitively expensive, with a distorting impact on the labor market and an incitement to delinquency. “Welfare costs in California are already prohibitive and the state’s Give Away program over the years has attracted too many moochers already,” wrote one angry taxpayer to Brown. “Probably a majority of unemployed parents would be unwilling, undesirable or unqualified to hold other than the most simple jobs.”Footnote ³⁷ The Kern County Board of Supervisors stated in January 1964 that it “vigorously opposes any moral abuses which reportedly occur in some AFDC homes.”Footnote ³⁸ As in the case of fair employment or fair housing, the economic debate masked a bitter public contest over the right of the state to regulate and influence social relationships, and this controversy had embedded within it value judgments about the marginalized. These were not new debates, but they gained new power with the dramatic enlargement of government in the early 1960s, forcing state welfare advocates to reach for ever more ambitious arguments in favor of the welfare state and establishing the parameters of the rights liberalism that would gain ground in later years.

In the mid-1960s, it was far from clear in California that the rights of welfare recipients would form an inviolable part of the political landscape: Republican members of the Assembly social welfare committee, and some Democrats, were too wedded to a paralyzing fear of the “dole” to allow a reconfiguration of welfare policy into a genuinely universal and redistributive system. In addition, the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in November 1966 forced left-leaning members of the legislature to spend much of their time opposing and watering down attempts to roll back the welfare state.Footnote ³⁹ Yet the intellectual and political maturation of liberal thought on citizenship and the state between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s led to the joining of questions of social entitlement and universal human rights, with important consequences for other areas of American life outside the scope of actual welfare policy. California liberals were increasingly embracing a universalist concept of lifestyle choice earlier than is commonly assumed; the ideological evolution of liberalism since the popular front days was all but complete by the end of the 1950s, and the significance of this can be seen by looking at the relationship between the welfare rights movement and the nascent gay equality movement.

QUEERING THE WELFARE DEBATE

Since the groundbreaking work of John D’Emilio in the early 1980s, numerous studies have historicized the experiences of gay men and women in the United States.Footnote ⁴⁰ We now know a huge amount about the steady growth of homophile organizations in the 1950s, the fight of these early activists for respectability, campaigns in San Francisco against police repression of gay bars and spaces, the growing pressures on established homophile organizations from a new generation of queer activists with a more radical, nonconformist ideology, and the eventual integration of queer political interests into local mainstream politics through the successful campaign of gay politicians like Harvey Milk for city office in the late 1970s.Footnote ⁴¹ The emphasis of this historiography is on the agency of gay men and women in shaping their civil rights agenda, and the interface of homophile activism with other political organizing is often portrayed, not inaccurately, as troubled.Footnote ⁴² Yet the story of how gay rights came to interact with liberal politics more widely is an important theme in helping to conceptualize why the gay rights agenda took the form that it did. Crucially, it was just at the moment that the Burton alliance was mounting its bid for political supremacy in city and wider state politics through its espousal of a left ideology that the struggle in San Francisco for gay rights entered a new and dynamic phase. In 1964, the Society of Individual Rights (SIR) was created in San Francisco, the brainchild of key figures in Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s, including Don Lucas, Phyllis Lyon, and Del Martin, and together with the Tavern Guild and the Committee on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) formed a group of interrelated new organizations that placed sexuality at the center of a burgeoning rights discourse in the state.Footnote ⁴³

The formation of SIR coincided with the establishment of a Human Rights Commission for the city and with Life magazine’s sudden discovery of homosexuality as a way of life in an influential feature article in June 1964 entitled “Homosexuality in America,” which emphasized the issue of sexuality for society at large. Although this article, and two small precedents in the New York Times and Harper’s the previous year, retained a traditional notion of gay men and women as a “problem” with which wider society had to engage, all three accepted that sexual difference was not a pathology and, in the words of the New York Times piece, while “homosexuality is not the preferable condition, … there’s nothing morally wrong with it … [and] one has to make the best of the situation” and that “out of this desire to make the best of it grows a gay community with a social structure specially adapted to homosexual needs.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This separation in public discourse of the “moral” question from the question of the right of individuals to be accepted as members of society was a way in which the politics of sexuality resembled the politics of welfare: proponents of the rights of welfare recipients and the rights of gay men and women both attempted to shift the focus of debate away from questions of sex and relationships and onto the terrain of economic and civil rights.Footnote ⁴⁵ In so doing, both welfare organizations and groups like SIR actively sought to engage mainstream party politics in order to gain greater recognition in public policy as equal citizens. The political committee of SIR was designed to “be in charge of political activities which shall include the liaison with political parties and organizations, and with politicians; specific political funds; campaigning; political organizations workers; political propaganda and connected surveys; voter registration and voting; letter writing campaigns on political issues to public officials; obtaining political speakers for SIR meetings; legislative and law changes.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The purpose of SIR’s political activities was to lobby for the greater acceptance in law of the idea that “homosexuality is as necessary, just and desirable as heterosexuality, that human beings, all of them, are of value intrinsically, and that the question is not the act, it is the man. … At no time is it contemplated that such a statement deal with or contain the usual flaky do’s and don’ts, the noisy and pointless proscriptions or mechanics, or the inevitable sexual modalities.” This was an implicit attack on the overcautious and uncertain politics of the society’s forebears in the 1950s, reinforced by the SIR committee’s attempt to articulate a vision of political power that transcended mere understanding and tolerance of sexual difference.Footnote ⁴⁷

Emboldened by the Tavern Guild’s successes by 1964 in protesting police persecution of gay businesses and by the political scandals of the Wolden affair, the Gayola revelations of police corruption, and the proliferation of new organizations devoted to gay civil rights, leaders of the movement faced the thorny question of how to stake a claim on wider political debate.Footnote ⁴⁸ An obvious way to do this was to follow the rhetorical strategy of the broader civil rights movement, which had been gathering support over the previous decade and emphasize the human rights of all individual citizens. An early form letter from SIR’s president and secretary to solicit support for the new organization argued that “there are certain freedoms connected with being a man which are, despite peculiarities of color, of creed or of sexual orientation, guaranteed to all men.” In calling for an end to discrimination against gay people in their private sexual relationships and in their access to jobs and their freedom of association, SIR’s leaders framed their demand for a “political mantle” in terms of the “guaranteeing to the homosexual the rights so easily granted to others.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The organization’s statement of purpose attempted to plug into the constitutional language of freedom and democracy that had so often formed the linchpin of successive campaigns for citizen rights in the United States: “The outline of directions for SIR in 1965 is based on the realization that we are fortunate to live in a society which has a history of consistent statements of belief in the premise that Society must give heed to the needs and aspirations of the individual.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The founding conference of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual at the end of May 1964 also conceptualized the problem of sexual freedom in terms of human rights that related, as in the case of many appeals against racial prejudice at the time, to the notion of the individual human being’s value in the eyes of God. As CRH founder Del Martin wrote in a summary of a group discussion at the conference, it was “felt that homosexuality is not unnatural, that the homosexual is a human being who is not excluded from God, that he is entitled to the same rights and freedoms as other citizens of the larger community.”Footnote ⁵¹

This discourse of individual rights had dominated the agendas of homophile organizations since the creation of Mattachine in 1953, but it was becoming clear that such a strategy had limitations for a movement interested in raising its political profile in the city at a time when few recognized homosexuality as a natural state of being that could be legitimized through recourse to an appeal to civil rights. SIR’s leadership realized this early on, discussing the issue of whether “SIR is to become an exclusively homosexual organization, composed of homosexuals only, and concerned with only those problems and interests related thereto, or whether it is to attempt to keep its membership and concerns broadly based and well within the mass currents of change in our society.” Mindful of the pitfalls of the assimilationist strategy of Mattachine in the 1950s, the SIR briefing document asked “whether SIR is to assume a public image of studied middle-classism, a posture of ‘We’re just like the rest of you Philistines, so why not get off our backs,’ or whether we are to redefine our positions and rediscover alternatives to this uneasy state of hypocrisy and double dealing.”Footnote ⁵² The fourth annual convention of the Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco on August 20, 1966, was structured around the theme of “San Francisco and Its Homophile Community—A Merging Social Conscience,” and the different sessions of the one-day conference attempted to paper over the emerging divisions over identity and strategy within the gay rights movement by emphasizing the broader relationship of the sexual equality struggle to other social movements. One session was entitled “The Homophile Community and Civic Organizations—How They Relate,” and speakers included Robert Gonzales of the Mexican American Political Association and Bernard Mayes of San Francisco Suicide Prevention. This was followed in the afternoon by “The Homophile Community and Governmental Agencies—Can They Relate?” at which the speaker was Dr. Joel Fort of the San Francisco Center for Special Problems.Footnote ⁵³ The convention represented an attempt to define a political agenda for gay activists that had resonance in the wider polity at a time of considerable social and political upheaval.

The importance of finding some sort of entrée into mainstream liberal politics that was predicated upon more than just individualism and civil rights was highlighted by the attempts by gay civic leaders to canvass support from candidates for office in the city. SIR quickly immersed itself in political lobbying after its formation, sending a questionnaire to candidates for state and federal office in San Francisco before the November 1964 elections asking their views on matters relating to the right to sexual privacy and police harassment of gay bars and businesses. Three Democrats responded to the questionnaire, but the response was hardly overwhelming. John Burton, who had succeeded his brother Phil in the Twentieth District after Phil Burton had taken a seat in Congress in early 1964, wished to “go on record as being for individual rights and ‘wants the boys to know that he is always available for discussing ‘problems’ along these lines.’” In the solidly Republican Twenty-first District, Democratic candidate John Davids was praised in SIR’s voting guide for his “excellent response to our questionnaire and [he] expressed a deep concern for the rights, legal and moral, of our group. ‘When you deny the rights of any individual, you deny the rights of all individuals,’ said Mr. Davids.” His Republican opponent, assemblyman Milton Marks, did not respond to the questionnaire, and clearly politicians in safe seats without a natural affinity for civil rights issues did not need to concern themselves with SIR in 1964. Willie Brown, heading for victory in the Eighteenth District after unseating the incumbent in the primary, was “unavailable,” even though he would play a crucial role in pushing a bill decriminalizing gay sex through the legislature in the early 1970s. Phil Burton, himself safely entrenched in his congressional seat, did not wish to comment specifically on the questionnaire, but did point out he had voted against House Resolution 5990, which had sought to change the definition of charitable status in the District of Columbia to stop Mattachine from being able to solicit for funds.Footnote ⁵⁴ The politics of sexuality were not central to any politician’s electoral prospects in 1964, but it was clear that gay rights activists were developing into an increasingly organized interest group that could, with the right strategy, push for political recognition in city politics. In a November 1964 speech to SIR, Rev. A. Cecil Williams of the Glide Memorial Foundation, an important center of community activism in San Francisco, and whose members such as Phyllis Lyon formed the backbone of the Council for Religion and the Homosexual and SIR, argued that homophile organizations “must find ways to deal with the people who can effect change, basically: the power groups which really make the decisions in our society.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Beginning with the campaigns of the Burton brothers in 1964, SIR involved itself heavily in electoral campaigns in San Francisco, running candidates’ nights, promoting candidates and issues in its monthly newsletter, Vector, and coordinating its activities with those of CRH. “The goal of our committee,” stated a report on the new SIR political committee in January 1965, “is to organize a substantial block of at least 50,000 votes so that, in the future, we will be able to elect those people to office that will be most effective in helping us to realize our aims.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Nancy May, head of SIR’s political committee, reported in September 1965 in advance of the group’s candidates’ night for those seeking election to the Board of Supervisors that the year had “brought a markedly increased interest in politics among the members of the community. Several organizations have volunteer deputy registrars who will be registering voters until the close-off date on September 9. Among the represented organizations are Daughters of Bilitis, Tavern Guild, Mattachine Society, and of course, SIR.”Footnote ⁵⁷ SIR held a candidates’ evening in April 1966 that was attended by State Senate candidate and Burton protégé George Moscone and Twenty-third District hopeful Everett Hedrick, both of whom gave talks and answered questions before a discussion was held concerning a putative protest against the treatment of gay servicemen in the Armed Forces.Footnote ⁵⁸

The crucial conduits into mainstream channels of political patronage were the Burton brothers. Phil Burton had started turning up at meetings of the key gay organizations since their inception, and he befriended Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon in the early 1960s.Footnote ⁵⁹ He and his brother John sent positive messages to CRH candidates’ nights if they could not attend themselves, and in 1967 Phil sent someone from his office, who according to Martin had done “such a marvelous job for Phil” when she spoke on his behalf. Yet in the same letter applauding Phil Burton’s support for gay causes, Martin bemoaned the difficulty of getting to meet one of the biggest power players in the city, who in late 1967 had bigger fish to fry as he worked unsuccessfully to elect his brother to the State Senate and fought endless turf wars with Joseph Alioto and Leo McCarthy for control of local politics.Footnote ⁶⁰ Furthermore, John Burton’s appearance on a radio program, a debate over the decriminalization of same-sex relationships and the adoption of SIR’s Model Penal Code, which would erase many of the criminal statutes relating to sex in California law, demonstrated the difficulty of making sexual acts the centerpiece of a civil rights agenda for gay Californians prior to the 1970s. “Up until last night you had the wholehearted support of the San Francisco homophile community in your bid for the State Senate,” wrote Martin to Burton. “Last night you were asked if you were in favor of changing the law with respect to homosexuals. In replying you committed the worst of all sins by equating homosexuals with child molesters, even as you tried to deny it. You displayed abysmal ignorance of the Model Penal Code provisions which you claimed to favor.” Martin continued that because of “a long association with your brother, Phil, and because you both have excellent civil rights records … I would like to offer my services to you in briefing you on the issues affecting the homophile community.”Footnote ⁶¹ It was clear to activists like Martin that they needed to frame these “issues” broadly if heterosexual politicians like the Burtons were to translate their basic empathy with minority causes into full-scale support.

A crucial factor in establishing homophile activism as a political force in San Francisco much earlier than in many other parts of the state and nation was the fact that in the mid-1960s the movement acted as a meeting ground in the city between civil rights and economic rights. This was the language that reformers like the Burtons and their allies in organized labor and left-liberal circles in San Francisco had been using to provide an ideological framework for their campaigns for office, and it formed part of gay rights activists’ attempt in the mid-1960s to hitch their flag to the same mast. A briefing paper for SIR in 1965 promoted the use of what the author termed “sensible ideologies, acceptable and pertinent to the realities of the new cultural, political, legal and economic forces now emerging in our society.” The arrival on the national scene of the Great Society and the increase in tempo of civil rights as a federal issue heightened pressure on San Francisco activists to integrate issues of social justice into their program. “Special action projects like a halfway house, a homophile community center, cultural programs, events and contests, grants and scholarships” were viewed in the report as useful tools for raising the profile of sexual freedom. Keeping up with economic and social programs framed by Great Society liberalism would help ensure that “pressure may be exerted on the dynamics of these processes to alter and mold them to human exigencies,” a clear indication that the leadership of SIR had become alert to the capacity for a discourse of social inclusion as espoused by liberal politicians to expand to include those marginalized by reason of their sexuality.Footnote ⁶²

The idea of a halfway house, promulgated by Williams of the Glide Memorial Foundation, an interracial church and centerpiece of CRH, in collaboration with SIR and Mattachine, was formulated explicitly to tie gay rights to the notion of social inclusion. A briefing letter from SIR stated that the House would be “a place where a man, specifically a homosexual man, who is jobless, broke, hungry, dirty, tired, emotionally sick, on dope or drink, in short who is out of it by conventional standards” would be fed and looked after on a temporary basis “just because he is a man” by charity workers who “believe that all men should have at least a few of these comforts once in a while during a lifetime.” The halfway house would “help the homosexual take care of his own, the first step he must take if he is ever going to reaffirm his place in society.”Footnote ⁶³ Thus the focus of the search for respectability was shifted toward the dispossessed, seemingly a more politically palatable subject in Great Society America, and away from the individual rights of gay people generally: if gay activists could harness the language of social inclusion, it was argued, they would adopt the language of mainstream liberalism as a means of legitimizing their cause.

The campaign in San Francisco in 1965 and 1966 to establish a halfway house soon expanded into a push for the inclusion of the central city and the Tenderloin as a target area of the local Economic Opportunity Council’s antipoverty funding. From the moment of their arrival in the city, the Great Society programs had exhibited many of the tensions often ascribed to the schemes nationally: the areas targeted (Hunters Point, Chinatown, Western Addition, and the Mission district) were chosen on the basis of the assumption of an association between poverty and race, and there were overlapping and rival programs and administrations.Footnote ⁶⁴ A coordinated effort by members of the local Mattachine Society, the Society for Individual Rights, and an umbrella organization, the Central City Citizens’ Council, forced the local Office of Economic Opportunity to consider the Central City as a target area for funds.Footnote ⁶⁵ The Citizens’ Council was composed of prominent homophile activists as well as antipoverty campaigners, and represented an important example of the growing linkage between antipoverty and antidiscrimination discourses in San Francisco politics. Central City campaigners included Hal Call and Don Lucas, founding members of Mattachine, Mark Forrester, founder of SIR, and Phyllis Lyon, the prominent lesbian activist.Footnote ⁶⁶ A report entitled “The White Ghetto,” with Forrester as one of the authors, argued that the Tenderloin, a crime-infested neighborhood downtown, demonstrated “a terrifying need for some sort of program directed toward helping these outcasts of society, these young people who are unloved and unwanted because they don’t seem to fit into society’s general idea of productive citizenship.” The report linked social dislocation caused by poverty with issues of sexual difference: “If [Tenderloin youth] feel it impossible to be adequate as an adult in our society, they may feel compelled to be adequate in their sexual relationships with their partners, their peers.” The argument set out a program of education, social outreach, halfway houses, and employment schemes that entwined questions of sexual and economic marginalization. The Mattachine Society also submitted a separate report on similar themes to the local Economic Opportunities Council (EOC) in early 1966.Footnote ⁶⁷

These reports, and the arguments that framed attempts in San Francisco to widen the debate over poverty and its alleviation, formed the culmination of a gradual process of the enlargement of the parameters of economic and social citizenship in left-of-center discourse in California since World War II. Although the EOC dragged its heels over the integration of the Tenderloin and Central City into its San Francisco program, the campaign was ultimately successful, and Don Lucas became a member of the EOC in San Francisco.Footnote ⁶⁸ Just as significant is the similarity of the rhetorical strategies of those fighting for the inclusion of Central City and those wishing to widen the safety net of the AFDC program: the sponsors attempted to argue for the moral worth of the poor and for the potential of government aid to allow them to live productive lives, as the authors of “The White Ghetto” stressed when they stated that “it will have to be recognized that a majority of these young people are homosexuals who either will not or cannot change their sexual orientation. This must not become a barrier to a helping relationship. As in every case, the effort should be made to help them become more self-accepting, happy, affectionate, spontaneous and creative persons—in short, to help each person to become the best he is able to become.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Like the campaign to widen the scope of the state’s welfare program, the Central City campaign harnessed a coalition of local interest groups, a central state bureaucracy (in this case the city’s Office of Economic Opportunity [OEO]), and local politicians to effect a far-reaching legislative change. Both campaigns attempted to highlight economic marginalization and the putative economic value of assisted integration of welfare recipients into active economic life. Both campaigns provided a political strategy for politicians seeking to tie their fortunes to a multifaceted coalition of social groups that seemed to hold the balance of power in San Francisco politics. One hopeful for a seat on the Board of Supervisors in 1965 credited SIR with “at least 20,000 votes of the 30,000 which he received.”Footnote ⁷⁰

The debate over the fate of the socially marginalized, whether unemployed parents or underprivileged gay youths in downtown San Francisco, brought up serious questions about the coherence and durability of the joining of questions of poverty and sexuality. A broad political debate over the social rights as citizens of the poor and disenfranchised empowered liberals in certain areas and showed the potential for questions of class and economic rights to highlight other forms of social marginalization, including the issue of sexual difference. In so doing, however, a serious cleavage in state politics was becoming apparent, with those who stressed the moral degradation of society through activist government policies gaining a new wedge issue that would gain momentum during the violent social upheavals of the mid-1960s.Footnote ⁷¹ In addition, the debate within liberal circles over social and economic citizenship highlighted the fragility of the diverse range of interests with a claim on policymaking. The Central City Citizen’s Committee, for instance, was an almost all-white group with an explicit goal of spreading the resources of the OEO more thinly across the city, directly challenging the race-centered priorities of the Great Society program in San Francisco. Over 80 percent of residents of the Central City target area were white, and nowhere in the citizen’s committee lobbying material was race mentioned.Footnote ⁷² It may have been true that the aim of the citizen’s council was to attempt a race-blind approach to tackling poverty, as in Calvin Colt’s question to the Economic Opportunity Council of whether the Great Society was “a program which enables all the poor to lift themselves out of poverty, or is this a program which further isolates men from one another in blocks of power built on hatred?”Footnote ⁷³ Yet the question of race, the fact that the issue of the distribution of economic resources remained controversial and limited, and the tentative nature of the liberal left’s hold on power all suggested stormy times ahead for those seeking to advance a reformist agenda in San Francisco and California in the mid-1960s. Colt attempted to cast his group’s ability to secure the support of established local antipoverty organizations like the Mission Community Action Board for the Central City project as a demonstration “to attackers of San Francisco anti-poverty programs that there is unity among the city’s poor,” and that they were “dedicated to eradicating poverty wherever it exists in San Francisco, not in just a few specialized locations.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet the Central City project was diverting limited funds and aggressively entering into the patronage network of competing community organizations all jostling for the attention of federal aid agencies, hardly the basis for a coalition of the socially marginalized.

Just as problematic was the question of how gay rights activists in the Central City Citizens’ Council, SIR, CRH, and Mattachine were making the connection between sexuality and social marginalization. As in the case of welfare reform, a debate on economic rights threw up issues of political power and the moral worth of the dispossessed that intersected uneasily with the rights of individuals to live their own lives. The intended targets of Central City antipoverty funding were youths of the Tenderloin, often homeless or living in overcrowded walk-ups, and the idea that countercultural gay youths were somehow “compelled to be adequate in their sexual relationships with their partners, their peers” because of their economic and social marginalization practically pathologized their sexuality, hardly a helpful strategy for organizations ostensibly interested in the legalization of gay sex.Footnote ⁷⁵ The organizations that sponsored the Central City project remained wedded to a normative construction of sexuality that stressed respectability and assimilation into mainstream society, just as welfare recipients could in 1966 still describe social workers as “mostly young dictators who are trying to run other people’s lives and tell them what to do as adults and grownups. They are very ill-mannered, nosey, and ask too many questions about private lives. … That is why poor people are fed up. It is not Welfare at all. It is Hellfare.”Footnote ⁷⁶

Divisive, too, was the dominant concern of gay activists with male sexuality, which by 1970 prompted CRH founding member and the Daughters of Bilitis activist Del Martin to announce her disillusionment with the gay rights movement in the wake of that year’s North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, a gathering that had, in Martin’s words, “displayed vividly our divisions rather than our unity.” The idea of a united family of gay organizations was, she argued, a sham: “Families usually include women, and they usually include youth—both of whom are integral parts of the homophile community, both of whom were ignored in the grand gesture of unity that closed the festivities. … Goodbye to the male chauvinists of the homophile movement who are so wrapped up in the ‘cause’ they espouse that they have lost sight of the people for whom the cause came into being.”Footnote ⁷⁷ This idea of homophile activism, at least in its early stages, as a middle-class interest group uncommitted to broader movements of class, race, and gender dovetails with the argument that pressure for broader social acceptance eventually became pressure for freedom as consumers in a burgeoning world of bars and shops tailored to a gay market.Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, Martin highlighted the fact that the battle for same-sex sexuality so easily slid into a defense of commercialized male sexual practices, with SIR’s periodical Vector attacking police harassment “of wash room sex and pornographic movies. That was never my bag anyway.”Footnote ⁷⁹

The emergence of gay liberation in the wake of the Stonewall riots in 1969 in Greenwich Village further distanced the politics of sexual identity from the assimilationist rhetoric of the Central City Citizens’ Council. The Gay Switchboard in Berkeley mimeographed a radical screed by Martha Shelley entitled “Gay is Good.” It demonstrated the extent to which groups like the Gay Liberation Front were placing identity, not social welfare, at the heart of their analysis of the body politic. Shelley declared herself “sick of liberals who say they don’t care who sleeps with whom, it’s what you do outside of bed that counts. … Well, it’s too late for liberalism. Because what I do outside of bed may have nothing to do with what I do inside—but my consciousness is branded, is permeated with homosexuality. … We are the extrusions of your unconscious mind, your worst fears made flesh.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Identity politics in the early 1970s had little concrete to say about socioeconomic structures as radical activists struggled to make their voices heard amid a cacophony of rival groups and interests. In 1970, at the crest of a wave of gay liberation activity often associated with the tail end of new left politics, a Berkeley homophile group was one of many gay rights groups that published Students for a Democratic Society member Carl Wittman’s article arguing that gay liberationists had not yet “figured out what kind of political/economic system is good for us as gays. Neither capitalist nor socialist countries have treated us as anything other than non grata so far.”Footnote ⁸¹ One lesbian activist arrived at “a confrontational meeting of Gay Liberation Front and the Women’s Liberation” in 1971 to find GLF radicals defending “the male chauvinist, anti-homosexual bias” of Black Panthers because they were “oppressed, so they have the right to be as they are.” Barbara Stephens declared herself appalled and “very skeptical on the future of the Gay Liberation Front. There are too many divergences politically, and too much naïvete about totalitarian organizations. … The New Left, frankly, is fucked up; their positions are scarcely different from the Minute Men or the Birch Society when they advocate racial separation, abolition of gun control laws, male chauvinism, sexual fascism, and champion Sirhan Sirhan as their great leader.”Footnote ⁸²

Stephens concluded her report to Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon with an attempt to drag the debate over sexual freedom back into an engagement with mainstream politics, stating that “regardless of whether we like or dislike the Democratic Party, we should actively support such good cats as Willie Brown, and John Miller of Berkeley.”Footnote ⁸³ Brown, together with State Senator George Moscone, both Burton allies in the state legislature, were sponsoring the legislation that would in 1975 finally amend the California penal code to eliminate legal penalties for homosexuality. From the perspective of liberal politicians experimenting with a reconfiguration of the relationship between the individual and society, it was inevitable that discussions of social marginalization in the 1950s and beyond would allow a widening of the left-of-center political lexicon that could be responsive to homophile activism. By the end of the 1970s, this process was obvious: the Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, one of several Democratic clubs based on sexual orientation to be founded in California in the 1970s, stated that it was dedicated “to involving lesbians and gay men in the political process, to advance the rights of gay people, women, workers, and minorities … and to strive for economic and social justice.”Footnote ⁸⁴ One of Harvey Milk’s earliest successes as a leading gay activist in The Castro in 1973 was to help the Teamsters extend a boycott of Coors beer into gay bars, linking gay rights to economic issues and in a sense bringing San Francisco politics back to the image of labor’s “Every Other House” broadcast in 1958, which had portrayed union members as part of a broader social fabric in their fight against right-to-work.Footnote ⁸⁵

Significantly, however, this association between welfare liberalism and homophile issues dated from a time before the clear association between the two after gay liberation in the early 1970s. The early reconfiguration of liberalism in San Francisco around questions of community rights directed liberals like Phil Burton to sexuality politics before it was fashionable, and set up the terms of political debate in the United States in a way that would establish a cleavage between left and right on the basis of the early linkage between civil rights and economic rights. Jacobus tenBroek underlined this idea in a tribute to Burton at a welfare achievements luncheon in 1963, shortly before Burton’s election to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he would vote in 1964 for HR 5990 to legalize individual sexual choice. “No less vital to welfare than to democracy itself is a sensitive regard for the personality, the personal rights, the inviolable privacy of the individual—for his prerogative to live his own life and to manage his own affairs free from arbitrary restraint or oppressive surveillance.”Footnote ⁸⁶ It was a determination to achieve this in economic legislation that led to a broadening of civil rights discourse among liberal city politicians just as a determination to oppose the widening of economic rights for the poor hindered the ability of the right to allow civil rights to shape their own worldview.

The symbiotic relationship between debates over economic power, lifestyle choice, the widening of access to consumer goods, and questions of racial and gender discrimination helped to shape liberal attitudes toward the proliferation of interest groups later in the century. Historical scholarship on postwar liberalism has tended to see economic redistribution and civil rights liberalism as two separate strands, with the latter superseding the former.Footnote ⁸⁷ Certainly race was a central factor in shaping the shifting fortunes of postwar liberalism in California and elsewhere, as even a cursory investigation of fair housing legislation will show. And certainly the invigoration of a robust private-sector capitalism, together with the rise of right-wing activism in local communities, limited the scope and extent of the Burton group’s influence over the wider political scene. It is also true that the debate over welfare within gay organizations pointed up the difficulties of reconciling social respectability and individual freedom at a time when numerous interest groups were staking a claim on political patronage in a polity in which social change was hard to bring about. The “studied middle classism” that gay activists of the early 1960s fretted about did in the end provide a reason why they found it hard to adapt to the radicalization of the queer agenda later on. Yet the convergence of intellectual reconfigurations of democratic leftist thought in the postwar years and the emergence of a new generation of liberal entrepreneurs from San Francisco set the stage for a redevelopment of American liberalism. The power of the private sector and the continued suspicion of “handouts” and “the dole” across the political divide suppressed the economic redistributive element of the liberal renaissance after 1958, but it did not prevent the growing identification of liberal politics with the marginalized and dispossessed in a way that helped to fashion the left-right cleavage commonly dated to the radical social changes of the 1960s and later, but which in fact can be traced in California to the maturation of left-of-center thought in the welfare debates of the early 1960s, when liberals wished to reconfigure the left to include an element of both redistribution and civil rights.Footnote ⁸⁸ Their greatest political success arguably came in the 1958–1964 period, when the party remained wedded, at least in theory, to both, and suggests that questions of interest-group political advancement are best attempted when predicated upon a broad mainstream party platform that considers society as a whole in its ideological agenda.