Queer, There, and Everywhere

by Sarah Prager

  And there was no time like the present to get started.

  Bayard stood up, walked forward, and took a seat in the whites-only section. At every stop the driver told him to move, but Bayard said later, “my conscience would not allow me to obey an unjust law.” The situation went from bad to worse when the driver called the police.

  Four officers boarded the bus thirteen miles north of Nashville, and when Bayard still refused to get up, the first blows came. They beat him in front of the other passengers, trying to teach him his place.

  After the ride in the back of the police car, Bayard was forced to walk between two rows of policemen facing each other on his way into the station. He was tossed from side to side, his clothes ripped, his body bruised. In response, Bayard did something the police had never seen before: nothing.

  Bayard was practicing nonviolent disobedience: with each push and hit, he refused to respond with force and instead explained he wouldn’t meet violence with violence.

  One of the policemen shouted at the calm and defiant resister: “N—, you’re supposed to be scared when you come in here!”

  But if Bayard was, he certainly didn’t show it.

  America’s Gandhi

  * * *

  Bayard had always been the kind of guy who saw the glass as half full, no matter how many times life knocked the glass over. He believed with all his heart in the big ideas of peace and justice, and he’d spent his whole life trying to fill the world with a bit more of each. As a black man who loved other men, he’d known discrimination all too well during his own life, and he was determined to change that for others.

  In 1948, six years after the incident on the bus, Bayard traveled to India to study Gandhian nonviolence. He was convinced it was the way forward for the civil rights movement in the United States. But it was a hard sell, since the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) thought the tactics were weak. Even without the organization’s support, Bayard kept practicing his nonviolent protest techniques, though it meant getting arrested regularly for civil disobedience. He didn’t need the NAACP or anyone else to agree with him—he was going to do what he thought was right, no matter what.

  Of course, it can be difficult to follow your moral compass when the law thinks your sexual identity makes you inherently immoral. . . . Bayard was arrested for hooking up with another man in the back of a car in Pasadena. He pleaded guilty to “sex perversion” and spent two months in jail. When he got out, he was fired from his job at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith peace organization. It seemed no one was willing to stand by him despite all he’d done for racial civil rights.

  Bayard had known from an early age that he was attracted to men, and he didn’t hide it. He was true to himself through and through—from politics to personal relationships. The prison psychiatrist’s final evaluation of him at the end of his two-month sentence says it all: “This man impresses me as a confirmed homosexual whose conceit is so extreme and whose homo traits are so deep in the personality, that combining the two features he could not refrain from further homosexual acts.”

  Bayard had a couple of long-term relationships but claimed he was more into sex than connection and commitment. He didn’t have time for things like that—he was already married to the cause.

  Free at Last

  * * *

  Bayard eventually resumed his fulfilling work as an organizer and became an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. Through his passion he convinced Dr. King to make the movement nonviolent. Dr. King would have to give up the armed guards protecting his family’s home (an understandable precaution, given the threats MLK received). Bayard convinced him to leave the guns out of it. Nonviolence meant nonviolence. Period.

  Even with the shadow of the California arrest looming large and dark in his past, Bayard was still chosen as a leader of the most important organizing project of his life: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Bringing together such a huge number of people in a time before the Internet was an astonishing feat. Still, when the day arrived—August 28, 1963—no one knew how it would go. Bayard wasn’t even sure how many people would really come. That morning, with just the first few hundred people trickling in, the press asked Bayard where the promised big crowd was. Bayard carefully consulted a piece of paper and told the reporters that everything was going according to plan. . . . Never mind that the paper was blank and he was just bluffing. Secretly, he was terrified that the thousands he hoped for wouldn’t turn up.

  Bayard needn’t have worried.

  It wasn’t just thousands who showed up; a quarter million people arrived to participate in the march. And even with a huge crowd in attendance and racial tensions so high, Bayard’s push for a peaceful gathering held strong. He stood right behind Dr. King at the Lincoln Memorial during the now-famous “I Have a Dream” speech and read the demands of the march—including civil rights legislation to end school segregation—to the crowd himself. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.

  Finally, Bayard was given his due. He was featured in Time and Newsweek and became an internationally respected name. He went on to consult for the US government and worked for peace and social justice globally, from the Middle East to Africa.

  At Last, Love

  * * *

  At age sixty-five, Bayard met Walter Naegle, a fellow idealist. The relationship was the first serious romance for both men; they settled down in New York City and spent the final decade of Bayard’s life together. Walter encouraged Bayard to apply his lifetime of civil rights experience to the queer cause.

  Walter was thirty-eight years younger than Bayard, and since same-sex marriage wasn’t anything more than a distant dream at the time, they had no way to protect their relationship and ensure Walter could inherit Bayard’s home when he died. So they did what many other same-sex couples did to create a legal tie between them: Bayard adopted Walter as his son. Sounds weird, but before marriage equality, this was one of the only ways two men could circumvent laws that prevented them from doing married-couple things, like leaving each other a family inheritance. Even this legal roundabout didn’t help in the last moments of Bayard’s life, when Walter was denied entry to his beloved’s room at the hospital.

  Bayard wasn’t able to see the incredible progress made for queer rights after 1987, but Walter witnessed it for him. Reflecting on his late partner, Walter said: “Being black, being homosexual, being a political radical, that’s a combination that’s pretty volatile and it comes along like Halley’s Comet. Bayard’s life was complex, but at the same time I think it makes it a lot more interesting.”

  ALAN TURING

  1912–1954

  tl;dr A STEM prodigy invents the modern computer to save lives during World War II

  How had things gotten so mixed up?

  Less than three weeks ago, Alan had reported a burglary to the police. He had been the victim of a crime in his own home. But after a short investigation, detectives were quick to decide that it was Alan who was the criminal: The last man Alan had let into his house was a guy named Arnold, and Alan admitted it hadn’t been a professional or, ummm, totally platonic visit. And guys having sex with guys in 1950s England? Illegal. So illegal, in fact, that getting convicted meant up to two years in prison.

  Once the cops found out Alan had committed “gross indecency contrary to Section 11,” they dropped their burglary investigation and set their sights on a bigger crime: prosecuting Alan for his homosexuality. When they confronted Alan about the nature of his relationship with Arnold, he spilled everything. The police were shocked by his lack of shame: “He was a real convert,” said Detective Wills. “He really believed he was doing the right thing.”

  A Love of Science . . . and More

  * * *

  Alan had lived relatively openly—taking a risk by doing so—as a gay man in Britain up until his arrest in 1952. He wasn’t ashamed of who he was. But for all of Alan’s brilliant cal
culations as a mathematician, he had severely underestimated how seriously the police would take his admission of “indecency.”

  His own sexuality might have seemed like no big deal to Alan because he’d been comfortable with his attractions from a young age. He had fallen hard for a guy named Christopher Morcom in high school. They had a geeky romantic relationship built on stargazing and chemistry experiments and a mutual love of math and science. Seventeen-year-old Alan was crushed when Christopher died suddenly of tuberculosis. As a kind of dedication to his lost first love, Alan devoted himself to STEM studies. Math and science were his only other true loves for the rest of his life.

  As time went on, Alan began to wonder if there was a way to make a machine that could house the human mind—almost as a way to get Christopher back, even though his body was gone. Next thing Alan knew, he was publishing groundbreaking papers on artificial intelligence and theoretical computer science; he even went abroad to get his PhD from Princeton. Those who studied and worked with Alan recognized they had a genius in their midst (albeit an awkward, strange genius). Alan’s heart was closed once Christopher was gone, but his brain never stopped going.

  Machine vs. Machine

  * * *

  In Alan’s time, “computer” was a job title for a person who literally computed by solving math problems. He believed there could be a machine that could compute anything—not just math but an infinite diversity of tasks. His idea for a “universal machine” would serve as the basis for computers as we know them today, but it was radical in the 1930s. While his papers on the topic were well received, the idea of a universal machine was as theoretical as time travel.

  Alan wasn’t destined to spend his life theorizing about the future. War was looming, and Alan was recruited by the British government to use his brain for a different goal. He reported to Bletchley Park, the government’s HQ for code-breaking work, in 1939—the day before Britain declared war on Germany. He and the other analysts got along, though they thought Alan was odd because he did things like wear a gas mask while riding his bike to protect against the pollen. He always looked like he had just rolled out of bed, and he had the funny habit of running everywhere—even going to places like London from Bletchley (a distance of more than fifty miles). And ultimately, running did become more than a hobby; Alan qualified to run the marathon in the 1952 Olympics.

  At Bletchley, Alan wasn’t secretive about his sexual orientation and no one seemed to have a big problem with it. He hit on a couple of guys while working there, but neither was interested. Fortunately, everyone was more focused on Alan’s ideas than his personal life. The Brits hoped Alan and his team could do the impossible: crack the Enigma code the Nazis used to communicate where and when their U-boats would go. Nazi U-boats were blowing up Allies’ naval vessels at an alarming rate. These submarines were nearly undetectable in the water, and their torpedoes were taking down hundreds of Allied ships.

  Others at Bletchley Park were skeptical about Alan’s “universal machine” idea, but after months of trial and error, the “Bombe,” as the computer was called, was eventually able to decode Enigma messages . . . really, really slowly. At first it took weeks to translate a transmission; by the time Alan decoded a message, the ship in question had long been sunk. He persisted, though, and managed to cut the time down from weeks to days until the day in May 1941—one year and eight months after he arrived at Bletchley—when the team began being able to read the Germans’ dispatches almost instantly. For the second half of 1941, U-boat attacks weren’t half as effective as they’d been during the first part of the year, and Alan’s genius saved countless lives.

  Alan was crushing the code-breaking game, but 1941 heralded considerably less success in his romantic life. That year, he made his one and only attempt at a serious relationship after Christopher. He proposed to coworker Joan Clarke, who said yes. He then told her about his “homosexual tendencies”; she was accepting and continued the engagement anyway. But Alan eventually broke it off because he felt he couldn’t force himself or Joan to go through with a sham marriage.

  The Invisible Man

  * * *

  More code-breaking complications came up throughout the remaining years of the war, and Alan worked tirelessly on all of them. But his contributions to the Allied victory in World War II were dismissed as soon as he was convicted of “gross indecency” after the burglary brought his sexuality to light in 1952. Being a criminal meant he lost all his security clearances and couldn’t work in code-breaking for the government again.

  For his official sentence, Alan was given a choice: prison or chemical castration. To continue his work as best he could, he chose the latter. This punishment involved being forced to take estrogen for a year, with the goal of dulling his libido and therefore “curing” his homosexuality. Though the treatment caused Alan to become impotent and grow breasts, it didn’t change the way he felt about men.

  With his career in shambles and his life’s work stunted, Alan committed suicide by cyanide poisoning in 1954 (though some believe his death was accidental). Since his code-breaking work had been top secret, Alan wasn’t publicly recognized for his contribution to the war effort until records from Bletchley were declassified decades later. Queen Elizabeth II officially pardoned him for his “crime” in 2013, but it was too little too late for one of Britain’s greatest minds.

  JOSEF KOHOUT

  1915–1994

  tl;dr One of the only gay survivors of the Holocaust ever to share his story

  Every day of Josef’s life in the concentration camp had been a nightmare—and today looked like it would be even worse. Earlier, Josef had nearly collided with a homophobic camp commander in the common room, and the commander outrageously accused Josef of hitting him. Josef’s punishment? Tree hanging, one of the most-dreaded abuses inflicted on prisoners. It involved tying a man’s hands behind his back, then stringing him up on a hook attached to a pole. The victim’s body weight pulled on his shoulders and put him in excruciating pain. Now, here was Josef: trapped in the barracks with his hands bound behind his back, his mind racing with fear.

  Just at the moment Josef was about to be strung up on the hook, one of the camp officers walked over and whispered into the ear of the man carrying out the sentence.

  Everything stopped. The rope around Josef’s hands was cut and he was let go. He walked away still shaking, grateful that his not-so-secret former lover had used his power to save him.

  Grabbed by the Gestapo

  * * *

  Part of a close Catholic family, Josef had led a happy life in Vienna before World War II started. He was nineteen when he came out to his mother. “It’s your life and you must live it,” she replied. “I’ve suspected it for a long time anyway. You have no need at all to despair. . . . Whatever happens, you are my son.” With such a loving, accepting attitude from his family, Josef was never afraid to be himself.

  Even once Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, Josef still didn’t think he had anything to fear, so he was confused when the Gestapo showed up at his home one day and told him to come to their headquarters. Had something happened at his college? Students were always getting in trouble with the Gestapo for various protests and resistance demonstrations. But when twenty-two-year-old Josef arrived for his meeting at Gestapo headquarters, the man there asked him flat out: “You are a queer, a homosexual, do you admit it?”

  Josef denied it, shocked at the accusation (not because it was untrue, of course, but because he’d been discreet—or so he thought). But the Gestapo had proof: a photo of Josef and his boyfriend, Fred. The picture showed them smiling at the camera with their arms around each other’s shoulders, like friends. But it was Josef’s writing on the back of the photo from Christmas 1938 that sealed his fate: “In eternal love and deepest affection.”

  Josef was arrested and quickly convicted of violating Paragraph 175 of the German criminal code, which stated “a male who commits lewd and lascivious acts wit
h another male or permits himself to be so abused for lewd and lascivious acts shall be punished by imprisonment.” Josef was branded a “175er,” like all those accused of violating Paragraph 175. He wouldn’t see home again for six years.

  Sachsenhausen

  * * *

  As part of the effort to dehumanize prisoners in the concentration camps, Nazis classified people with tattooed numbers and colored badges corresponding to each person’s crime. The crime of being Jewish, for example, meant wearing a yellow star, while the crime of homosexuality was designated by a pink triangle.

  Josef was put into a pink-triangle barracks at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, Germany, where the rules were different from those in other barracks. Men there were treated like sexual deviants; they had to sleep with the lights on and with their hands over the covers to make sure nothing sexual went on. None of them were allowed to go near other barracks. As an introduction to camp life, they spent six days shoveling snow with their bare hands, moving it from one side of a road to the other. The slogan on the camp gate reminded them: “Work will set you free.”

  Josef was then assigned to what was known as “the death pit” for his work detail, which involved pushing wheelbarrows of dirt up a steep incline and out of the pit. Since the workers were so starved and weak, every day several would collapse midway up the hill. Their wheelbarrows would roll back and crush them, then careen into the others below—giving the death pit its name.