2024 Theses Bachelor's

“A Prototype for the Nation”: Early Gay Coalition Building in the 1965 New York Review Board Conference

Park, Joanne

On October 12, 1965, members of the Mattachine Society, the oldest homosexual emancipation organization in the United States, attended the New York Review Board Conference. The conference's aim was to reform the city's Civilian Complaint Review Board: the municipal body that would review police misconduct complaints. This thesis argues that, through the Civilian Complaint Review Board campaign, the Mattachine Society legitimized its status as a minority civil rights organization—and homosexuals as a minority group. The conference would be the earliest instance of gay activists working in a unified coalition with established civil rights organizations.

Though the reforms proposed by the conference were quickly shut down by Mayor John V. Lindsay's administration, the coalition's strategies—especially its consideration of anti-gay police harassment and entrapment—had a lasting impact. After October 12, the NAACP, Puerto Rican Bar Association, Urban League, and other participating organizations had a more robust understanding of how lesbians and gay men were uniquely harmed by policing. I argue that the Civilian Complaint Review Board campaign was not a mere failure, and that the Mattachine Society of New York was not merely a passive predecessor to gay activism. Between 1964 and 1966, the Mattachine joined a noteworthy coalition that confronted both anti-gay and anti-Black police misconduct while simultaneously transforming itself into a fully-fledged advocate for gay rights—years before Stonewall and "Gay Power" and far earlier than most historians have imagined.