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By Paul D. Cain Photos: One Institute
“We're fighting for sexual freedom. Lets have some.”
 "Political correctness” (or “political passion,” as gay singer Paul Phillips describes it) often seems a prerequisite to action for today's gay male and lesbian activists. One must “toe the line” philosophically, slavishly adhering to or eschewing certain dogmas appropriate for the time.
But Hal Call would have none of that. Clearly a member of the gay male “old guard,” Call was an unyielding dinosaur, irrevocably set in his ways. Yet, for all that, I liked him. It was rather refreshing to meet a man who knew exactly what he believed, and could discuss it in such passionate (albeit non-“P.C.”) terms. His life's experiences and his valor as a leader of the nascent gay movement (such as it was) in the 1950s and 1960s surely formed (and calcified) his beliefs. And unlike some of his peers who grew and changed with the times, Hal refused to be swayed by the fickle winds of political correctness. Call was born in north-central Missouri in September 1917, the eldest of three sons. While Hal “never was taught anything about sexuality at all from Mother and Dad,” he discovered his sexual attraction to males during the onset of puberty. Hal told me in our 1994 interview: “I tried to have a love affair, and fall in love, and even become sexually attracted to a girl when I was 19 at the University of Missouri. … I had always been homosexual. I tried not to be; it didn't work.” Call served in the U.S. Army from 1941-46, and rose to the rank of Captain. Following his service stint, he obtained his journalism degree from the University of Missouri in 1947, and worked for the Kansas City Star. After living briefly in Chicago in the early Fifties, Call and three other men were arrested in a car on morals charges in August 1952; after paying $800 to have his case dismissed, he promptly left the Great Lakes for the Pacific Ocean. As he told Eric Marcus in Making History: “I decided after my arrest that instead of going where the job took me, I was going to go where I wanted and find my own career. So my lover and I drove from Chicago to San Francisco with all of our possessions in the autumn of 1952, and I've been here since.” The Mattachine Foundation, created in 1950, was one of the first U.S. pro-gay organizations since Henry Gerber's short-lived Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924. After moving to San Francisco, Hal attended a Mattachine discussion group in Berkeley in February 1953, and quickly took a leadership role in the organization; within just three months, he and three other relative newcomers transformed Mattachine from a Communist-inspired secret society into a more open, democratic entity (while effectively ousting the organization's founders in the process). As Call told Rodger Streitmatter in Unspeakable, before Mattachine “went public, we had to make sure we didn't have persons in our midst who were Communists and would disgrace us all. The Reds had to go.” Hal explained to me that: “Harry Hay and Chuck Rowland [two of Mattachine's founders] and those boys, in the Fifth Order of the secret Mattachine Society, they had the idea for the Society, but they had not the slightest grasp of public relations, or how to promote something, or how to sell an idea! It was their idea, and I'm the one that developed the sales of it. … “I have been quoted, sort of derisively at times, I've said, 'We have to ride on [professionals'] shirttails.' Well, God damn it, we did! … We had to get the recognition from established elements in the total society that we were human beings, different mainly only in our choice of a sex object. And there was nothing that anybody else had to fear.” In contrast, gay entertainer and Call contemporary Jose Sarria recalled for me a conversation he had with Hal: “He said, 'You know, Jose, you're attacking the problem wrong.' And he said, 'You should be talking to the educators. The professional persons.' And I told him that the professional person was not getting arrested. They weren't the ones that needed the help.” Mattachine founder Rowland told Marcus: “In retrospect, it was a terrible, terrible time after I left Mattachine. We should never, never have given Hal Call our name, never have let him take our name. I became absolutely suicidal. This was my life. I was prepared quite literally to devote my life to the Mattachine, and here this bright glory was all gone. It all turned to shit.” But after taking control of Mattachine, Call recognized the daunting task that lay ahead, telling Marcus: “We were doing a $300,000-a-year – in 1950s dollars – public relations job on $12,000 a year income with three or four people doing the work. And what we needed to do was a $3 million-a-year PR job. We were overwhelmed by what we needed to do. So we had to pick out what we could do with the resources that were available.”
Curiously, the January 1956 issue of Mattachine Review described Mattachine as: “An incorporated organization of persons who are interested in the problem of the sex variant – especially the homosexual – and its solution. … This is NOT an organization attempting to create a 'homosexual society' but rather an organization seeking the integration of the homosexual as a responsible and acceptable citizen of the Community.” In Unspeakable, Call added: “We wanted to show people that homosexuals were the products of ordinary, average families – that we weren't pariahs. The Review wanted to educate people so they would treat homosexuals with decency. We worked through evolution rather than revolution.”) Hal revealingly told me that when he came to San Francisco, “and got into Mattachine, and started publishing the Mattachine Review, I put Mom on the mailing list. And as I went back home to visit Mother, I had conversations with Mom, and we talked about what was published in the Mattachine Review. I told her that if I came back home and found that that little magazine was hidden, and was not read, she would never see me again! If she wanted to see me, she was gonna read the magazine, and we were gonna talk about it! I said, 'Mom, you're gonna learn something!'” Despite its desire to fight for equality for homosexuals, for the most part Mattachine remained an organization for gay men. Call's antiquated opinions about lesbianism likely didn't help matters any, and may have been the impetus behind the continuation of the third member of the gay organizational triumvirate of the Fifties, the Daughters of Bilitis, under the able hands of San Franciscans Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon. Hal acknowledged to me that the gay men's community was for the most part as ignorant about the lesbian community as was society at large. And despite his exalted position in Mattachine for many years, Call also often felt a sense of isolation from the other national bigwigs, telling me that “Mattachine never did have the resources for us to travel and communicate with each other. That's one of the things we always lacked.” Call also expressed to me his understandable fear about the “Johnny-come-latelies” of gay activism (a concern that still echoes today): “You know, the gay movement is filled, from the beginning to this present day, with all kinds of individuals who come into the scene with a lot of spunk and spit and Shinola, and all that. And they want to organize the gay community. And they all – their technique for doing it is always to create a new organization and place themselves at the head of it. Yeah, we're gonna have unity, and we'll get all the gay people together, and they're gonna come together under my organization! And do what I say! … [N]evertheless, there has been a diaspora, you might say, of organizations that [Mattachine] created.”
Ever resourceful, Hal switched his focus from gay visibility and respectability to sexual liberation. In the Sixties, Hal took credit for a federal court victory that “opened the door for the male nude to go through the United States mails.” He also opened the Adonis Bookstore, and later directed the remains of San Francisco Mattachine into Cinemattachine, which evolved into the Circle J Cinema at 369 Ellis Street. Chuck Rowland referred to this period in Making History as the time when: “This rotten son of a bitch turned our sacred Mattachine into a cock suck-off club. It made me sick to my stomach when I first heard about that. And he simply used the Mattachine all these years as a device for supporting himself.” Perhaps Call's motives weren't as noble as Rowland's (Hal admitted to me, “I'm a sexualist. I've always said, 'We're fighting for sexual freedom. Let's have some'”), but he developed a healthy income base as a result (unlike few gay activists before or since), and as a result was perhaps the most well-to-do financially of the first wave of gay activists I met in 1994-95. Hal decried to me the (in)actions of ONE's business manager, Dorr Legg, in failing to ensure its financial success: “I'm a trustee of ONE. But ONE, Inc. is not going to get off the dime. They're going to have problems, and crises, from now on. And when Dorr's gone, I don't know what's going to happen. Unless they can create something that brings in a daily cash flow. Be it a thrift shop, or start a bookstore, or whatever. It's gonna have to be some kind of a thing that brings in some cash every day … or it is going to collapse. And that fabulous collection – and God knows what will happen to it.” Nevertheless, in 1994 Call quietly donated $50,000 to ONE to shore up its precarious financial condition, and did so again in 1998 to endow the Hal Call/Mattachine Scholarship Fund for graduate students. (ONE merged with the International Gay and Lesbian Archives in 1995, and the conjoined entity now operates at the University of Southern California.) It was only one of several philanthropic uses of the money Circle J earned, good works Hal refused to trumpet that increased my admiration for him. And while only a couple of weeks ago Randy Wicker muted his comments about Call for this publication, telling Jack Nichols that “Hal Call was a true pioneer. His hand, at an early point in time, rested on one of the two principal power levers of the gay movement,” when I tried to defend Call in my interview with Wicker in 1994, he scoffed: “I'm glad to see that this sleazy Hal Call has snowballed you, because he sure hasn't snowballed me. And believe me, I know what the man's like. The man is a crook. I'm embarrassed that he's even in the history of the movement. I remember riding in a cab with him, and hearing him talk, was just, to me, just was disgusting. There was no idealism. What I can say about Hal Call is I knew him, and met him personally, and this was a relaxed, social moment. Other activists would talk about, 'What are we gonna do to improve things, and what are we gonna --,' you know, there was a dream we had. I never had one iota of that from Hal Call. Hal Call was always, like, who he's gonna seduce, or some hustler, or some – I mean, I should talk. But, you know, some silly porno business he had going. And also a tackiness. Maybe part of my reaction to him is that I am a little bit puritanical for all of it. … I mean, maybe it was the crassness. I mean, I'd never been with someone that would tell off-color jokes, and have a certain kind of tackiness.” But much of the foregoing factual information may not help you understand the person behind the actions. When I interviewed him at Circle J in 1994 (while ten video screens simultaneously displayed hard-core male erotica; it took all my concentration to focus on Hal!), Call very proudly pointed out to me on his office wall the original banner of the Mattachine Society (“made by a heterosexual woman … it's faded a lot, because that was very rich blue and silver, and a very rich golden 'M'”). No matter that many early activists felt he “sold out,” Call took great pride in his Mattachine efforts. Hal was also a great traveler; he told me in 1994 that he was one of only a quarter-million people who had visited Antarctica, and that during his lifetime he had visited all seven continents and every U.S. state capitol, putting him in an even rarer category. Reviewing my transcript of our 1994 conversation for this article, I noticed that I had the audacity to tell him that fellow gay pioneer Jim Kepner “told me to get a few drinks under your belt, that you'd talk more freely that way.” Hal nonchalantly responded, “Well, I probably do, and I probably have. I've never been a teetotaler, but I don't think I've been a drunken exponent. [Laughs]” I also asked him, Paul: Do you think it's fair to say that you were the founding father of San Francisco's organized gay community? Hal: I think so. It probably is. Paul: I think it's a fair statement. Hal: I have – if it had to be one person, I think it would come down to me. I don't think I've gotten credit for it, exactly. And I don't think I've been out seeking it. Paul: Right. Hal: I've not been out making it appear that I – that I am, no. Paul: And I think there are a lot of people who would say that, what we're dealing with here, sort of tarnished your reputation. Now, I don't feel that way. Because, you know, because – Hal: You mean the erotic side, erotica. Paul: Right. Hal: Yes, that is – Paul: That you should have put it away. Hal: It has tarnished me, yes. That made it so that I was a little too far-out, because I've been in erotica. And I've been – well, I've been a strong advocate of jerking off. Fine.
“Harry Hay also had the idea that I was abrasive, and so on. The trouble is, one of their problems is that I can get to the nitty-gritty of things right away, when they can't! And I can see the phoniness in a lot of 'em when they don't.” When I asked Hal how he would like to be remembered, he responded: “I would like to be remembered as one of the P.R. people who helped spread the word in the early days. “About the plight of the homosexual, and endeavored to ease the problems of the homosexual in our midst, and bring him an opportunity to, you know, to come to grips and live with himself, understand himself better. “And also, I would like to think that I contributed to – some to the erotica scene, with kind of a glorification of the male member. [Laughs]” Clearly, toward the end of his life, Hal had made peace with his varied role as a gay pioneer, even if many who knew him could not. And I think that's an admirable quality, political correctness (or lack thereof) be damned. |
The Dorian Book Quarterly was one of Call's business ventures 
And while Call's language in my transcript could accurately be described as “salty,” he took umbrage at those who believed he spoke inappropriately in public gatherings where his message was to advocate homosexuality:
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