Lawrence D. Mass

Firstly, I really want to apologize for the lack of articles this month (Pride month of all months!), my job has been insanely busy lately and, unfortunately — I’m sure you’ve all noticed and are probably upset by this too — queer people still have to work in June. So, while I was really trying to get this post up three weeks ago….I’m doing the best I can right now. (And honestly, this could have — maybe should have — been a lot longer but…life is getting in my way.)

Anyways, you all probably noticed earlier this month a lot of attention being paid to the 40th anniversary of the official beginning of the AIDS crisis in the United States. And while its certainly true that June 5th was when the CDC published its first report, it wasn’t the first time the growing epidemic had been publicly written about. Dr. Lawrence D. Mass had covered it nearly a month earlier.

Lawrence D. Mass was born in Macon, Georgia on June 11, 1946. I can’t really find anything about his childhood, so I assume it was pretty uneventful — which is pretty good considering he was growing up gay and Jewish in Georgia in the late 1940’s and 50’s. He graduated from the University of California at Berkley in 1969 with a B.A. and then attended the Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine at the University of Illinois, graduating with his M.D. in 1973. Following that, in association with Harvard Medical School, he completed a residency in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

In 1973, the American Psychiatry Association changed its classification of homosexuality, so it was no longer considered a mental illness. Unfortunately, that didn’t change the homophobia of many of the people practicing psychiatry at the time. Mass went up for a residency in psychiatry in Chicago, but mentioned in the interview that he was gay — and the response was, well, not good. It was the first of multiple interviews over several years where this happened. So Mass changed his whole career trajectory — he moved into activism and journalism. (And, not to be grateful for a bunch of homophobic jerks in Chicago or anything, but that turns out to have been a good thing for all of us.)

With homosexuality’s declassification as a mental illness, that did mean that gay practitioners could come out of the closet. Before long, the Gay Caucus of Members of the American Psychiatric Association was formed (now called the Caucus of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Questioning/Queer Psychiatrists.) Lawrence Mass became the editor of their newsletter. He was not afraid to feature politically charged articles in that newsletter — the first issue featured the article “Psychoanalytic Statute Prevents Legal Entry of Gay Aliens,” which exposed public policies that relied on out of date theories for justification. At the same time, he began contributing to a number of newspapers and magazines catering to the LGBTQIA+ community — using his expertise in medical fields to better inform his writing. His first piece was published in Boston’s Gay Community News.

Using his medical background and his insight into the American Psychiatric Association (through the caucus), Mass became — as he would put it — “a chronicler of a critical shift in scientific thinking about sexuality.” But he wasn’t just looking at how psychiatry was viewing homosexuality, he was watching shifts in a whole bunch of fields — not just medical science, but social science and political science. He interviewed a lot of leaders in the shift occurring across numerous fields of research, including Judd Marmor, Mary Calderone, John Boswell, Martin Duberman, and many others. Most of these interviews would go on to be compiled in his Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution collections. They provide important insight into the major cultural shift that was taking place in the USA in the decade following the Stonewall Uprising.

Mass also brought his medical background to discussions about sexual health in the gay community during the 1970’s in these same publications, covering the spread of STDs and even topics concerning fetish and kink — like 1979’s “Coming to Grips With Sado-Masochism” in The Advocate.

After a few years of that, it’s little wonder that rumors about an unusual illness afflicting gay men were brought to him. His best efforts to investigate met with little success — he’d talked to a friend who worked in a New York City emergency room, and learned of eleven cases (albeit only five or six of the patients were gay men). While that was promising, both the New York State Health Department and the Center for Disease Control assured him the rumors he was pursuing were baseless. Though he didn’t have all the information he was looking for, Mass went to print — hoping that laying out the facts as he had learned them would help keep his community informed and keep the rumors from starting any kind of panic. On May 18, 1981 his article “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” appeared in the pages of The New York Native which was, at the time, the most influential gay newspaper in the country. Although no one knew it at the time, it was the first published document about AIDS (at least in the US — though I haven’t found anything published earlier anywhere else either). The story would get picked up by the L.A. Times in June, with hardly any more answers that Mass had already gotten (as the L.A. Times article was published the same day as the CDC’s report.)

Mass’ article stressed that there was no reason to believe that whatever was (or was not happening) was linked to the gay community. One theory put forth in his research was that it was a new virulent strain of a fairly common microscopic organism, and such a thing obviously wouldn’t be tied to just one community. As Mass continued to publish articles as the epidemic unfolded, he stood by this — it was not a gay illness. While it certainly had a profound impact on the gay community, it’s true that we were not the only ones afflicted. Diseases don’t discriminate, and Mass was well aware of that.

By 1982, it was becoming increasingly clear as HIV/AIDS was found in more people than just gay men. Nevertheless, he joined Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Paul Rapoport, Paul Popham, and Nathan Fain in formally founding Gay Men’s Health Crisis (or GMHC) he was the last hold out on the organization’s name — insisting it was not a gay disease. He was overruled, something for which he later said he was grateful because the name works for the organization, even if it isn’t just a gay man’s disease. To this day GMHC remains one of the biggest and most important AIDS organizations in the world. Mass wrote all four editions of GMHC’s Medical Answers About AIDS.

Mass committed himself to providing up to date and accurate information about the AIDS epidemic and combatting AIDS denialism, but early in his research he was confronted with an incident of overt anti-Semitism — the first he’d experienced as an adult. The event was traumatic, and led him to realize that he’d been surrounded by anti-Semitism his whole life, and even internalized a lot of it. Ultimately, this led to his publishing an autobiographical collection of essays in 1994, entitled Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite. (“Wagnerite” because Mass was a big fan of Wilhelm Richard Wagner, the German composer. As Mass began to broach more subjects in his writing during the 90’s, his love of music became one of his chosen topics.)

The years of research into anti-Semitism helped give Mass a unique insight into the subject of his next major publication: We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacy of Larry Kramer, published in 1997. Mass was an editor for the book, taking contributions from notables like Anthony Fauci and Tony Kushner, but his own contribution — at the beginning of the book and entitled “Larry vs. Larry” — details a tumultuous friendship, but also recalls how inspiring Mass found Kramer’s personal voice in his writing was.

About that time, the late 90’s, Mass also found himself writing regular articles for gay publications about public health issues facing the gay community other than HIV/AIDS — crystal meth addiction, anal cancer. As the decade came to a close, he began writing specifically regarding bear subculture, publishing articles in American Bear Magazine and in A Bear’s Life Magazine.

Much of Lawrence Mass’ work has been collected and archived by the New York Public Library. That said, Mass is still listed as a contributor on the Huffington Post, but all of his most recent writings have been on Medium. He is presently living in New York City with his partner, activist Arnie Kantrowitz. Sounds like a happy ending, and after everything he (and Arnie, but that’s another story) have done for our community, I think that’s very well deserved.

Queers in Comics: The Code

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have spent a whole lot of time this past year of lockdown enjoying some nice escapism in fictional worlds with fictional people. A lot of what I’ve delved into has been comic book shows — catching up on those Arrowverse shows on the CW, and — of course — watching Wandavision. And while those universes aren’t real and the people in them aren’t real, the representation of queer people in those universes is very real. So I’ve decided to do a series on the history of queer representation in the media — starting with comics. (As a disclaimer, comic books exist all over the world, and they all have histories as they relate to our community. For the purposes of this post, at least, I’m focusing on the United States.)

So, when comic books really began to be a thing in the United States, they were just collections of strips that had been run in newspapers. As a result, pretty much all comic books were kind of mainstream — and that meant any queerness was only going to be implied. The exception to that was the Tijuana bibles which were small, illegal books which depicted major comic characters (we’re talking Donald Duck, Betty Boop, Dick Tracy, Popeye, etc) in explicit sexual situations of every kind — including homosexual ones. These started appearing in the early 1930’s — incorrectly believed to be smuggled in from Mexico (hence the name). While these were the not hiding any homosexual activity in them, the characters weren’t actually queer characters — they weren’t even characters belonging to the people who made these books. It was basically just erotic fanart.

Meanwhile, the Golden Age of Comics was taking off for the mainstream comic world. And although it was sometimes tough to see, a handful of actual queer characters were hiding in plain sight — like we’ve done everywhere else throughout history, right? One particular strip, Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff, featured a cross-dressing villainous French woman named Sanjak — who was pretty heavily implied to interested in the protagonist’s girlfriend April. Though the strip began running in 1934, Sanjak didn’t show up until the strip published on February 12, 1939. She’s widely considered the first lesbian in comics even though it was never blatantly stated.

While transgender representation was utterly nonexistent, comics discovered that they loved to tell stories about crossdressing or genderswapping, genderbending, etc. In 1940, the crimefighting Madam Fatal was introduced in Crack Comics #1 — her alter ego was a man named Richard Stranton. This appears to be the first time comics did something like this, but they sure jumped on the bandwagon. Months later, an ongoing supporting cast member from All-American Comics and the comedy series Scribbly — Mrs. Abigail Mathilda “Ma” Hunkel began cross-dressing as the parody superhero Red Tornado. (Later, more serious, incarnations of Red Tornado would go on to be quite successful — Ma Hunkel’s incarnation is mostly forgotten despite possibly being the first female superhero.) That same year, Superman’s enemy the Ultra-Humanite — typical mad scientist type — had his brain transplanted into a woman’s body. A movie star, actually, so that worked out really well for him. (And then his brain was transplanted into an albino gorilla, of course.) It wouldn’t be comic books if there wasn’t something ridiculous like that happening, right? Even Wonder Woman had her own gender-reveal plot twist in 1946 when her enemy Blue Snowman turned out to be a woman. They really learned to love this trope but still managed to have no transgender characters.

The closest that comics actually got to an actual transgender character was in Space Adventures #3, published by Charlton Comics in 1953. This issue included a story called “Transformation,” said to be inspired by Christine Jorgensen, in which a Dr. Lars Kranston and his girlfriend/assistant Betty crash on the planet Mars. They’re separated, and each thinks they are the only survivor. Dr. Lars, thinking he’s going to go insane without something to occupy his time, goes digging through the wreckage of the ship and discovers and experimental gender reassignment process. Which he undergoes to irreversibly become a woman…because — and I cannot stress enough that this is the actual reason in the story — because he needs something to do with his time or he will lose his mind from boredom. Let me repeat that: Dr. Lars Kranston transitions to life as a woman to avoid being bored. Meanwhile, Betty fights her way through the hostile terrain of this inhospitable desert planet to get back to the ship only to discover that her lover became a woman instead of looking for her. Someone thought this was a good story to tell. Someone thought this was how people we would want to read about would behave. Someone thought this story wouldn’t make me shout obscenities at my computer screen while I was researching this post. Someone was deeply mistaken. I’m still shouting.

Anyways, there’s no need to worry about comics latching onto this “become a woman so you won’t be bored” thing — there was no time. See, while all of this was going down, a man/possible real life supervillain named Dr. Frederic Wertham was campaigning against the comic book industry. He had a whole bunch of, ahem, “research” to prove that they were corrupting the young people of the country, that they were leading to the moral degradation of the United States of America, that Batman and Robin were homosexual lovers, Wonder Woman was a lesbian (though to be fair, early Wonder Woman books had a lot of bondage imagery between women), and — most importantly — that the comic book industry were such fascists that they made Adolf Hitler look like an amateur. I know that’s offensive, and I wish I was exaggerating but he actually said that. And, honestly, I think it’s important that we all know he was that outlandish and that people still believed him. A lot of people. People actually believed that Captain America — Nazi-punching Captain America — was a tool for fascist propaganda. And Dr. Wertham put this all in a book called Seduction of the Innocent which came out in 1954. (As a side note, in 2013 Professor Carol Tilley went through Wertham’s research and found that almost none of it was up to scientific standards and a whole bunch of it was straight up falsified. Utterly unsurprising, if you ask me. But no one knew that yet.) He was promptly called before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency who he managed to convince of his findings. They said, basically, that the comic book industry could regulate themselves to get their “morality” on track… or the government would step in and do it for them.

And so the major comic book publishers banded together and created the Comic Code Authority (CCA) — or, as it was more often called: The Code. Now, the Code was not some authoritative set of rules that publishers were obligated to follow — but comic book stores would not sell books that did not bear the CCA stamp of approval. And this is an era before the Internet — you couldn’t download a book from the publisher’s web site. You had to go somewhere to get it. So even though the Code didn’t have any real legal authority of any kind, it was absolutely in the best interests of publishers to adhere to it if they wanted to make money.

That was easier said than done, of course. The Code was SO over the top — like SO SO SO over the top. First and foremost, virtually anything sexual was out. Anything outside of the strict gender binary was out. No more cross-dressing Red Tornado (although Jimmy Olsen was allowed in drag on a couple of occasions in the 60’s, but I don’t know the details of how that was permissible.) No more lesbian pirates. But also, no more sympathetic villains — this is why the “moustache-twirling evil villains” became such a thing in comic books — and no villains that were sexy or glamorized being a criminal. So, that meant….bye bye Catwoman! (They may have had a point there — I mean, have you ever seen a Catwoman you didn’t want to be?) There could be no swears or bad language and words like “flick” (where the ink from the “L” and the “I” might run together to make it look like a “U” to accidentally create a naughty word) were also completely forbidden. Love interests for heroes had to be wholesome, of the opposite sex, and model citizens. Romances were meant to “emphasize the value of home and the sanctity of marriage.” And there were so so so so so so many more rules, even stating what could and could not appear in titles — and they also had a rule stating that anything they found was not in the spirit of the Code could be prohibited at their discretion. Here is a good list of the entire Code if you’re interested.

And thus ended the Golden Age of Comics.

Ace the Bat-Hound….in the mask that protects his secret identity…..of Ace…the dog…

Mainstream publishers like DC Comics were working hard to undo the damage Wertham had caused, and so characters were axed and new ones were created. While getting rid of Catwoman certainly helped with some things, she was the female love interest for Batman….who was already being accused of being too gay. First, they gave him a dog to make him more family friendly — Ace the Bat-Hound. It wasn’t enough to curb the rumors. And so, a year later, in 1956, Kathy Kane came on the scene — acting as his sidekick and love interest Batwoman! Her neice Betty Kane became the first Batgirl and a love interest for Robin. And so they became the official Bat Family. (A term still used for Batman and his cohorts — who I promise we’ll get back to later on!) This didn’t stop speculation — particularly about new characters. The character Element Lad, created in 1963, spent decades having fans interpret him as gay despite the best efforts of his creators. We’ll talk more about him later on too.

The point I’m trying to get to here, really, is that the Code wasn’t just bad for queer representation is was bad for comic books in general. But, yeah, it was also really bad for queer representation….unless you weren’t particularly concerned about profit. The Code also created an entire underground or alternative comic book industry — known colloquially as “underground comix.” Small independent publishers, or independent people just publishing their own work and passing it around or selling them in stores that weren’t actually comic book retailers — like smoke shops. These comics often explored complex social issues and political issues. But sometimes they were just erotic or trying to thumb their nose at Code itself. Queer artists like Tom of Finland and Bill Ward were relegated to drawing pictures for bodybuilding magazines like Physique Pictorial — a good way to show off homoerotic art, but not a great venue to tell a story in. Queer artist Joe Brainard self published two anthology books entitled C Comics — the first in 1964 and the second the following year — but neither featured any overtly queer characters or content. I’m inclined to think, because of this, that even in underground comics it was believed that LGBTQ+ content simply wouldn’t have an audience.

As a result, comics were pretty much devoid of queer content until 1964 with the introduction of Harry Chess, created by Allen J. Shapiro. Harry was introduced in a one-shot comic appearing in Drum, a magazine for gay men. For months later, Shapiro began publishing a strip in each issue of Drum entitled “Harry Chess: That Man From A.U.N.T.I.E.” The comic strip was spoof of the popular The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series, but also parodied political issues of the time and dealt with serious issues facing the gay community. These strips only lasted until 1966. While Drum was running those strips, The Advocate attempted to get some strips of their own running — their first effort was with Joe Johnson penning strips about his characters Miss Thing and Big Dick.

The success of these characters seemed to make it a little bit more acceptable to start having homosexual content in comics. In 1968, Zap Comix #3 included a story by Steve Clay Wilson called — and I swear I’m not making this up — “Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates” which included explicit homosexual sex scenes in an effort to make underground comic artists deal with more culturally taboo topics — which, after all, was the entire purpose behind underground comics! Ultimately, it wasn’t Captain Pissigums that spurred underground artists into creating gay content but it was about to happen.

It was actually the Code itself. By 1971, the Stonewall riots had come and gone and virtually every area of LGBTQ+ culture had changed as a direct result — we were inspired to start standing up for ourselves, being loud, taking up space. But not in comics, not yet. Due primarily to mainstream publisher’s pushing the envelope in the late 60’s, the Code was revised in 1971. Some of the restrictions were loosened up, a few were done away with entirely. This spelled the beginning of the end for the Code — and the actual beginning for queer comic books.

Stay tuned for the explosive next chapter!

Ewa Kłobukowska

260px-halina_gc3b3recka_and_ewa_kc582obukowska_1964 In more recent years, many governments and organizations have worked to undo the injustice that’s been committed against LGBTQIA+ people throughout history — pardoning those convicted of homosexuality or cross-dressing when those were crimes, writing obituaries for notable queer people in history, etc. But there’s some glaring instances where an injustice clearly could and should be rectified — but no justice has been forthcoming. One egregious example of this is that of Ewa Kłobukowska.

Ewa Kłobukowska was born on October 1, 1946 into a family of intellectuals in Warsaw, Poland. She grew to become an incredible athlete, competing as a sprinter in the Olympics in 1964. She won a gold medal in the 4×100 meter relay with a time of 43.6 seconds — breaking the world record she had set only a month before with a time of 44.2 seconds, as well as earning a bronze medal in the 100 m sprint.

The following year, she graduated from the Technical School of Economics No. 6 and set a new world record for 100 m sprint, with a time of 11.1 seconds. In 1966, she competed in the European Championships and — although she didn’t set any new world records, she still managed to earn a two gold medals and one silver medal. Not bad, right?

In 1967, Ewa took a traditional gender verification test for the European Cup track and field competition in Kiev, administered by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF). She failed the test — Ewa had an intersex condition that even she was wholly unaware of. The Polish Federation decided to send Ewa to compete anyways — which the IAAF did not appreciate. In response, they publicly announced that Ewa had “one chromosome too many.” A medical journal published her results — a chromosome makeup of XX/XXY. Ewa was labeled as a “hermaphrodite” in the media. She disappeared from sports completely.

In 1968, instead of competing in the Olympics, Ewa got pregnant and had a son. I guess that’s a pretty worthwhile use of the time. Meanwhile, also in 1968, the standard gender verification test that was previously used was abandoned in favor of the “Barr Body Test” — a gender verification test that, incidentally, Ewa would have passed. (This starts getting into like genetics and science stuff I don’t really understand so I can’t explain really why she would have passed, but she would have.) That’s right, if she’d been tested just one year later all of the humiliation she suffered — and would continue to suffer — would have been avoided.

But that didn’t stop the IAAF from erasing all of her world records in 1969. They allowed the Polish team to keep the medals she had helped them earn in the relays. How gracious, right? Ewa has done her best to stay out of the public eye since then, though she graduated from the Warsaw School of Economics in 1972. Gender verification tests were abolished in sports altogether 1999.

She’s still alive and kicking at 72 years old. And yet, Ewa’s records still have not been restored to the record books. At this point, it doesn’t seem that there’s any reason they shouldn’t be.