The Republican Radical Who Helped Launch the Gay Rights Movement

One winter night in 1924, a 19-year-old named Dorr Legg snuck away to a “charming park,” where he had his first sexual experience with another man, something he had been desiring—and studying—for several years.

Born in a large home overlooking the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Legg came from a long line of Republicans: His family had been active in the GOP since its first convention in their state in 1854. Like many Midwestern Republicans, his father deplored Wall Street and the fat-cat bankers of the Northeast, even if they largely belonged to his political party; he taught his son that prosperity grew out of self-reliance and individual endeavor, not collusion and backroom deal-making. As for the Democrats, his father added, they ran corrupt machines in the big northern cities and used violence and intimidation to deny blacks their rights down south.

An autodidact from a young age, Legg had been spending time hidden away in the University of Michigan’s library stacks, secretly reading everything he could find on homosexuality in books of medicine, psychiatry, criminology, witchcraft, and Sigmund Freud. The readings showed Legg that he was not alone. They also convinced him that he was the expert on his own condition. When medical doctors deemed homosexuals sick and religious leaders called them sinners, Legg shrugged it off.

But the law, which counted homosexuals as criminals, was another matter: The threat of arrest and imprisonment required that homosexuals live a double life. Sometimes haughty, always self-assured, Legg resented the fact that he couldn’t live freely as he pleased. As Legg faced arrest by the police and harassment by the FBI through the years, his general Republican leanings hardened into what one historian called an impassioned “libertarian distrust of government.” The government, he believed, was the homosexual’s enemy.

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In 1928, Legg moved to New York City. He’d just finished a master’s degree in landscape architecture, and he arrived just in time for the tail end of the city’s boom. The Great Depression meant his design work disappeared, so Legg then found employment with the new public urban planning projects in the city and on Long Island. But the Republican in him could never bring himself to support the New Deal, even if it had kept him above water.

New York was an electrifying place for homosexuals in the 1930s, and Legg dove right in. He met like-minded men at Child’s, a restaurant underneath the Paramount Theater that served as a boisterous and freewheeling homosexual hangout. Even in the relative freedom New York afforded, he kept tight control of himself, always dressing in a conservative suit and tie and maintaining a masculine manner. Legg had little patience for the effeminate and flamboyant “queens” who were part of New York’s gay underworld. He wouldn’t “send up flares,” as he described the way some men signaled to each other, and he detested the “unseemly whoops” some groups of homosexuals brashly made as they paraded down the streets. He worried that their shenanigans and gender-subversive behaviors risked detection by law enforcement.

Those concerns didn’t keep him from attending a handful of drag balls in Harlem, where he met several black friends and lovers. Their accounts of the prejudice and discrimination they experienced gave Legg new insight into his own condition. “I too was a member of a stigmatized group,” he realized.

Legg’s careful self-presentation was not enough to keep the eyes of the law off him. When he returned to Michigan in the mid-1940s to care for his ailing father and manage the family business, his public outings with attractive black men drew police attention. The Detroit cops began surveilling Legg, and they finally arrested him on a charge of “gross indecency” two years after Legg’s father died in 1947. Legg the libertarian was outraged that the police would spy on a law-abiding citizen and was furious that the government would interfere in his private life. “Did not the ‘Don’t tread on me,’ of the rattlesnake flag,” he fumed, “mean anything anymore?”

When the news of his arrest got out, Legg’s church suspended him and his landlord threatened to kick him out. Legg didn’t wait around to see what else was coming. He packed his bags for Los Angeles, joining hundreds of thousands of Americans who had been moving into Southern California for the previous two decades, drawn by its cheap land and plentiful jobs. Like many of his fellow transplants, Legg looked to California as a place where rugged individualism could flourish. He hoped Los Angeles’ tolerant and relaxed reputation meant he would be left alone—by the cops, anyway.

After 1945, L.A.’s already large homosexual population ballooned as thousands of returning gay servicemen and women decided to stay in their port of entry, just as others did farther north in San Francisco. Yet Los Angeles’ gay boom coincided with the federal government’s crackdown on homosexuals, and Legg soon found that Los Angeles wasn’t all that different from Detroit. Nowhere was in the 1950s. L.A.’s new chief of police, “Wild Bill” Parker, directed his department to “clean up” the city’s bustling streets. The police department’s head criminal psychiatrist provided medical justification for rounding up homosexuals: They were pathological degenerates, he argued, who preyed on anyone, especially children. Los Angeles’ police department quickly racked up a list of 10,000 “sex offenders,” made up almost entirely of the homosexual men and women who had been arrested during raids of gay bars and public parks or even while just walking down the street. L.A.’s politicians joined in the attack, passing laws meant to shut down the bars, restaurants, and other establishments where homosexuals gathered.

California’s Supreme Court would strike down several of the laws—on the grounds that the businesses should be able to operate, not as an endorsement of homosexuals’ right to congregate. Either way, the city’s robust anti-gay regime had its intended chilling effect, driving gay men and women even further underground.

On the federal level, both major political parties increased the government’s power to target homosexuals. In 1950, Harry Truman’s Democratic administration began rooting out suspected homosexuals from the federal government. Three years later, Republicans upped the ante: President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued Executive Order 10450, which banned homosexuals from working in the federal government, officially codifying the witch hunt into law.

Yet even in this oppressive era, a handful of homosexuals began planting seeds of resistance that would eventually grow into gay liberation. They called their cause the “homophile movement,” a term consciously chosen to emphasize the “love of fellow man”; they felt that society used “homosexual” to focus attention on the sexual acts it condemned. These l

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