Outlaws to Inlaws: Same-Sex Marriage in the 50s, 60s and 70s

This past week I met with Vancouver's queer seniors writing collective Quirk-e to talk about a draft of an article I recently completed with the title: “Freak Wedding! Marriage as Postwar Lesbian Pleasure Practice.” The article was inspired by the headline of a 1957 tabloid story about a butch and fem lesbian wedding in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

The question I ask in the article is simple enough: how can we make sense of butch and fem lesbians' highly conventional marriage practices when everything else about them was highly unconventional? There are extraordinary parallels between working-class butch and fem lesbian bar culture and the culture of early twentieth century circus freaks, so I use the critical studies understanding of late 19th and early 20th century circus "freaks" to deepen our understanding of butch and fem culture in the 1950s and 1960s.

Margot Dunn, a Quirk-e collective member, made a brilliant comment during our discussion. "There is nothing freakier than a wedding ceremony," she said. People dress completely out of the ordinary, they say things that are out of the ordinary, and the day is spent in a very unordinary way.

Everyone agreed, myself included. Margot could see something so obviously freaky, but made so ordinary by its status in our culture as “normal,” that no one else could see.

The wonderful thing about the word "freaky" is that it can mean different things. Something can be freakishly weird or freakishly wonderful. The challenge in writing Outlaws to In-Laws is to make the story of same-sex marriage in the 1950s, '60s and '70s as interesting to people who see marriage (gay, straight, or otherwise) as freakishly weird as we might expect it to be for those who see it as wonderful.

I am one of many who see same-sex marriage as weird and wonderful. Since the late 1800s marriage in Western culture has increasingly come to be a public celebration of love, intimacy, and commitment between two people. In the 1950s, '60s and '70s, mainstream American society insisted lesbians and gays were incapable of authentic love, intimacy, or commitment. That same-sex couples married each other anyhow makes these weddings freakishly wonderful. On the other hand, as a cultural institution marriage typically reinforces gender stereotypes. When Daisy de Jesus performed wedding ceremonies in New York’s Broadway Central bar in the late '60s, she asked: "Do you take so-and-so to be your butch, to love and protect you? Do you take so-and-so to be your fem, to love you and to be faithful?" Daisy would come to reject this kind of gender differentiation as she became more and more involved in the women's liberation movement in the early 1970s.

What guides my exploration of this topic is the largely forgotten gay liberationist argument that love outside the bounds of society's prescriptive norms is a radical action. To truly embrace other human beings as having a value, a dignity, and a humanity equal to you and everyone else, they claimed, is the most direct path to uprooting of social and political inequality.

People do not always marry for love, and it is certainly not the only way to express love, but the couples I am writing about loved radically. At the time, most Americans thought such love to be so freakishly weird it was perverted; in this context how can it be anything other than freakishly wonderful?

What do you think?

crossposted to fromoutlawstoinlaws


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The headline says it all. In the 1950s, lesbians were “freaks.” This was especially true of butch women who adopted a masculine working-class style. Their style alone communicated volumes: I will not conform to society’s rules; I will not be a “proper” woman; I am a sexually desiring being, and my desire is directed toward women, especially feminine women.


When I first uncovered this image, I was stunned. It is rare to see photographs from this period. Few working-class women had cameras, few could afford to take photos, and most moved so often that photos tended to get lost, misplaced, or thrown out.

But even more than that, I was surprised to learn that these women, whom historians have always characterized as rebels, as heterosexual refuseniks, as the political predecessors to the lesbian and feminist liberationists who denounced marriage and romance as major sources of women’s oppression, got married. Not only that, they did so in the most conventional of ways. As the image of Ivy and Gerry shows, they wore conventional wedding attire. My research is showing that this was only the beginning. Women arranged for an officiant – sometimes a friend, and sometimes a Christian minister sympathetic to same-sex lovers – and exchanged heartfelt vows. Afterwards, many couples celebrated with a multi-tier wedding cake. There was no marriage license, of course, but what did that matter?

How does lesbian marriage fit with the image historians have constructed of butch and fem culture as a rebel culture? Was marriage in this case an act of resistance against heterosexual norms or was it, as some queer critics of today’s marriage equality movement argue, conformist and conservative?

I have been exploring this question in archives and interviews with people who married in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and found that men engaged in the same practice. I have learned that then, as now, “homosexual marriage” was a topic of heated debate among gays and lesbians. Some wondered why anyone would want to give up the freedom from life-long monogamy that lesbians and gays enjoyed. Others thought that such practices made homosexuals look ridiculous and undermined any hope of winning civil rights.

From Outlaws to In-Laws explores the history of same-sex marriage in the United States from the 1950s up to the present-day marriage equality movement. Some have argued that weddings in the 1960s and 1970s were acts of resistance and acts of conformity, but after two years of reflecting on my research findings, I suggest that “resistance” as a category of analysis is not particularly useful in understanding marriage as a cultural practice among lesbians and gays. Without abandoning an understanding of marriage as a political institution, in From Outlaws to In-Laws I want to explore the way love, pleasure, desire and affection are given expression, and how these feelings and their public expression contribute to forming and building community.

If you have a story to share about same-sex marriage before 1980, get in touch with me. I am still collecting histories and artifacts for this project. And if you have a question or comment, I hope you’ll share it below. Thanks for reading, and please share this blog with your friends.

crossposted to fromoutlawstoinlaws, a community for sharing and discussing same-sex marriage before 1980.

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