Witness From the Persecution: How One Gay Soul Lived to Tell

by Lawrence D. Mass

Banned from California: -Jim Foshee-Persecution, Redemption, Liberation…and the Gay Civil Rights Movement by Robert C. Steele, Wentworth-Schwartz Publishing, 2020, 361 pages

Over the last half century there have been many notable exhibits on LGBT history and culture. A capstone of this legacy was “Stonewall 50” at the New York Public Library in 2019, commemorating and celebrating the 50th anniversary of the gay liberation movement sparked by the Stonewall Inn bar rebellion in Greenwich Village in 1969.

Typically, these exhibits are meticulously annotated and lovingly showcased. They tell of a history largely expurgated, ignored and otherwise denied us. They tell of the lives and times, the organizings and uprisings of generations past. We come away from these exhibits with a more informed sense of who and how we were and an enriched sense of the possibilities of who and how we are becoming.

But what of the devoted, tireless, mostly anonymous individuals whose painstaking work in collecting, cataloguing and preserving historical documents and artifacts made these exhibits possible? What do we know about them?

My papers and those of my life partner Arnie Kantrowitz are among the collections of NYPL So we have our own sense of these heroes, individuals with unique knowledge and skills, like Melanie Yolles, a specialist in rare books and manuscripts, and Jason Baumann, who directed and coordinated the Stonewall 50 exhibit.

A number of notable LGBT historians have mined collections and archives. Of my own acquaintance, several come to mind: John Boswell, Martin Duberman and Jonathan Ned Katz. Though Duberman’s work is often also autobiographical, few of these histories explore the interface between gay archives and the actual lives of the archivists.

An exception is Banned from California, Robert C. Steele’s biography of a previously little-known gay archivist and activist, Jim Foshee. Foshee (pronounced Fo-SHAY) survived considerable abuse and oppression as a gay man — including being literally tortured by the sadistic evangelical preacher who became his stepfather, and having to do hard labor in a Texas prison — to become a gay archivist and activist of distinction.

In the course of his travails through lands and times of unremitting ignorance and bigotry, from the 1950’s to the early 2000’s, Jim’s life in the Western US — in Idaho, Texas, Arizona but especially in Colorado and California — unfolds with details that illuminate and expand a history of liberation too easily appreciated as a consequence of the Stonewall riots. Banned’s detailed history of gay community events and activism in Denver and Los Angeles gives dimension and breadth to this movement as emerging from a much broader confluence of individuals and events in localities across the country.

This history is not entirely new, of course. But for all that we already knew about such precursors as ONE magazine and the Mattachine Society, Banned tells us more. Especially notable is its painstaking detailing of the more complex role of gay bars and their relationships with the alcohol industry, local politicians and the local media in Denver. With its history of behind-the-scenes mafia and police corruption, the Stonewall Inn rebellion might be re-considered through the lens of what Steele documents as the complex interplay of bar ownership, advertising, operations and community relations. As Banned verifies, the devil — but also the divine — is often in the details.

Banned is handsomely assembled, has many vintage black-and-white pictures of locales and individuals and is written with economy and clarity. Not surprisingly and though easy and comfortable to read, it is meticulously annotated.

Banned from California is inspiring and edifying. When I attend a gay exhibit or visit a gay archives in the future, I will look for the names, if they’re listed, of those who did the gathering and assembling and try to imagine them as three dimensional people, like Jim Foshee and others Steele brings to life in Banned. Instead of their usual anonymity or just listing their names in small print on the last page, future catalogues or brochures might add a sentence or two of biographical information about them and include their pictures, as is done for authors.

Steele is characteristically modest. His work is meant to be appreciated primarily as historical. It’s hard to imagine that he’d be supportive of any revisionism for more personal recognition for archivists and researchers. But perhaps this book will spearhead a new and greater consciousness of doing for them what their work has done for us — giving recognition and thanks to largely unsung, pioneering heroes of their own and our lives, cultures and times. Where would we be and who would we be without them?

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Lawrence D. Mass, M.D., is a cofounder of Gay Men’s Health Crisis and was the first to write about AIDS for the press. He is the author of We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. He is completing On The Future of Wagnerism, a sequel to his memoir, Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite.