JANUS SOCIETY

Founded in 1962, the Janus Society was an influential, Philadelphia-based homophile organization that remained active until 1969. Janus featured participation and leadership by lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men; published Drum, the most widely circulating homophile magazine of the 1960s; and developed political positions that were among the most militant, radical, and sexually liberated in the LGBT movement of its era. In these respects, Janus challenges histories of the homophile movement that concentrate exclusively on the male-dominated Mattachine Society and the exclusively female Daughters of Bilitis; histories of the homophile press that focus only on the Mattachine Review, the Ladder, and ONE magazine; and histories of pre-Stonewall LGBT organizing that overemphasize the movement's conservatism.

Years of Respectability

The Janus Society was established after the national Mattachine Society, for a variety of financial, administrative, and political reasons, revoked the charters of local Mattachine groups around the United States in early 1961. Philadelphians had just organized a local Mattachine group, not yet officially recognized as a chapter, and in the wake of the national Mattachine's decision these local activists renamed their group the Janus Society of the Delaware Valley (after the two-faced Roman god of beginnings, endings, and doorways). Mae Polakoff, who had led the local Mattachine group, served as the president of Janus in its first two years.

In 1962 and 1963, Janus held regular meetings and social events for its several dozen members; organized public lectures by local psychiatrists and national homophile activists, including Donald Webster Cory; opened an office in Center City Philadelphia; worked with the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU); and published a monthly newsletter that featured articles critical of anti-LGBT psychiatrists, psychotherapists, police, and politicians. In this period Janus members also promoted positive media coverage of LGBT people by appearing on local radio programs and speaking with local journalists, including the author of "The Furtive Fraternity," a groundbreaking article on the local gay world that appeared in Greater Philadelphia Magazine in December 1962. In 1963 Janus joined together with three other homophile groups (from New York City and Washington, D.C.) to form East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Janus hosted ECHO's first convention, which was held in August 1963 at the Drake Hotel in Philadelphia.

In most of its public activities Janus members, like the vast majority of homophile activists in this period, promoted a politics of respectability. To challenge popular negative stereotypes of LGBT people as masculine women and feminine men, Janus encouraged lesbians to embrace femininity, gay men to embrace masculinity, and lesbian and gay activists to embrace heterosocial culture (when presenting themselves to the straight world). For example, at the ECHO conference female participants were encouraged to wear appropriate feminine clothing and male participants were encouraged to wear appropriayte masculine clothing. To challenge popular views of LGBT people as excessively focused on sex, Janus downplayed the sexual aspects of LGBT cultures. When they thought it served LGBT interests, Janus members also cultivated ties with respectable scientific and legal experts. While the extent of homophile accommodation to dominant social norms should not be exaggerated, the respectable strategies used by Janus in its early years risked excluding many LGBT people from the gains the group hoped to make.

Years of Militancy

In late 1963 Clark Polak was elected the new president of Janus, quickly taking the organization in new directions. Rejecting the politics of sexual respectability and embracing the values of sexual liberation, Polak transformed the group's monthly newsletter into Drum magazine, which offered male physique photographs, the comic strip Harry Chess, humorous parodies, news highlights, and aggressively pro-gay and pro-sex editorials and features. For this, Janus was rejected by many homophile leaders elsewhere who feared that Drum would provide ammunition for the enemies of the LGBT movement. Some lesbian activists also criticized the male focus of Drum. Antagonism to Drum led ECHO to expel Janus in 1965 (and welcome instead a new Mattachine Philadelphia group, founded by several Janus lesbians alienated by Polak). But the same features that antagonized many homophile leaders attracted unprecedented numbers of LGBT readers, and Drum 's circulation soon was larger than that of all other homophile publications combined. Reflecting the national reach of Drum, in late 1964 Janus renamed itself the Janus Society of America.

Meanwhile, in other contexts Janus embraced a politics of militant respectability. In April 1965 Janus organized five days of demonstrations to support a sit-in that teenagers had organized at Dewey's Restaurant in Philadelphia to protest denials of service to gay, cross-dressing, and nonconforming customers. On the Fourth of July in 1965, Janus members participated in an ECHO-sponsored picketing demonstration at Philadelphia's Independence Hall to protest denials of LGBT rights. (The Independence Hall demonstration became the first of five Annual Reminders held each year on the Fourth of July on the same site.) On Armed Forces Day in 1966, Janus held a LGBT rights demonstration at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. In each of these demonstrations, male homophile activists in jackets and ties and female homo-phile activists in dresses and skirts were as militant about their respectability as they were about their LGBT rights agenda. The politics of militant respectability were also on display as Janus attracted hundreds of people to public lectures held at downtown Philadelphia hotels. The lectures featured, among others, national homophile leaders Cory and Frank Kameny, Kinsey associate Wardell Pomeroy, and psychiatrist Albert Ellis. Meanwhile, Janus supported LGBT people with legal advice, aid, and referrals; intervened on behalf of LGBT people with police and politicians; criticized raids on LGBT bars, clubs, and other LGBT spaces; lobbied for LGBT law reform; and promoted pro-LGBT messages in the local and national media (gaining attention, for example, in Sexology, Playboy, the New Republic, and the Wall Street Journal ). Janus also established the Homosexual Law Reform Society (HLRS), which supported LGBT rights cases around the country. HLRS's most significant victory was a 1967 New Jersey Supreme Court case, Val's Bar v. Division of Alcoholic Beverage Control (commonly known as Val's ), that affirmed the right of gay people to assemble in bars. Although HLRS lost when the U.S. Supreme Court, in Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service (1967), upheld a law that labeled gay immigrants "psychopathic personalities" and left them subject to exclusion and deportation, simply reaching the Supreme Court at all and winning three of nine votes did constitute a victory of sorts.

Because of its association with Drum, Polak, and Polak's various sex and pornography businesses, Janus activists in Philadelphia and elsewhere were subject to an escalating campaign of surveillance, harassment, and investigation by local, state, and federal law enforcement officials in the late 1960s. After Polak was arrested on federal obscenity charges in 1969, he accepted a 1972 plea bargain that involved closing down his sex businesses. Meanwhile, when Polak relocated to Southern California in 1969–1970, he resisted efforts by some of his former allies to continue Janus's work. Ceasing operations just weeks before the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the Janus Society was soon forgotten and ignored by the post-Stonewall LGBT movement, contributing to the historical amnesia that associates LGBT militancy, radicalism, and sexual liberationism only with post-Stonewall LGBT politics.

Bibliography

Stein, Marc. "'Birthplace of the Nation': Imagining Lesbian and Gay Communities in Philadelphia, 1969–1970." In Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories. Edited by Brett Beemyn. New York: Routledge, 1997.

——. City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

——. "Sex Politics in the City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves." Radical History Review 59 (1994): 60–92.

Marc Stein

see alsodrum; homophile movement; homophile movement demonstrations; mattachine society; polak, clark.