Conservatives seem willing to engage in ever more extreme actions to win the culture wars that permeate American life in 2021.
From sweeping attacks on the rights of trans kids to Texas’s new almost total ban on abortion, enforced through private action, Republican legislators aim to restore “family values” from an idealized post-World War II era. Picture the life depicted on family sitcoms like “Ozzie and Harriet”: a heteronormative, White suburban family that seemingly flourished before the “revolution” in American attitudes regarding sexual matters including pornography, birth control and premarital sex, and before the emergence of the feminist and gay liberation movements in the 1960s.
Yet the reality of this world was more complicated than modern conservatives imagine it to have been. Nowhere is this contrast clearer than in the misconceptions that have emerged about marriage during this period. Yes, the national marriage rate reached an all-time high of 16.4 per 1,000 people in 1946 — just short of three times as high as it was in 2018 — while the divorce rate tumbled between 1946 and 1963.
But high marriage rates and low divorce rates did not mean that the traditional nuclear family — with a male breadwinner and household head, and the woman taking charge of the house and children — was always as it appeared. Instead, within the institution of marriage, many Americans found opportunities to act on same-sex desires and to engage in broader queer communities. For married women, in particular, who were less likely to be harassed by police for engaging in public sex or criminalized under state sodomy laws, balancing marriage and same-sex relationships was far more common than we might expect.
During the post-war period, federal policies, medical practices and cultural norms all worked to push Americans — regardless of their sexual histories, intimate desires and romantic attachments — into seemingly heterosexual unions while severely stigmatizing those who refused to conform. Yet marriage did not stop many wives from acting on their feelings for other women.
These wives could be found across the nation in suburban enclaves, small rural towns and large urban centers alike. While some felt guilty about their relationships or feared the repercussions they might have, others were surprisingly content to balance marriage and sexual relationships with women. As one wife and mother of two from New Orleans wrote to the Daughters of Bilitis, the nation’s first lesbian rights organization founded in San Francisco in 1955, “Let us not deny ourselves the right to seek happiness where we may — so long as we can strive to be discreet and cautious in our actions.”
While this writer took pains to hide her lesbian relationships from her husband, other men knew full well what their wives were doing. In 1945, after 15 years of marriage and the births of their two children, noted novelist Dorothy Baker informed her husband Howard about her persistent same-sex desires and the true nature of her relationship with a close female friend. Rather than divorcing her, Howard consented to what they called “the Arrangement,” granting Dorothy four full weeks of “vacation” alone with her lover each year. This arrangement lasted until Dorothy’s death in 1968.
Other men, though similarly aware, were more reluctant to discuss their wives’ sexual activities. Virginia Morton, a working-class mother from St. Louis, later recalled how in the early 1960s her husband would drop her off at the local gay bar where she went to meet other women, but they never talked about what she was doing. “I think he knew,” she remarked mildly decades after the fact, “he knew I was queer from the beginning.” Despite her relationships with women, Virginia and her husband never divorced.
Some women who were aware of their same-sex desires decided to marry their gay friends, using the institution of marriage to overcome harassment and discrimination.
Legendary lesbian performer Pat Bond, for example, was serving in the U.S. Army in Japan in 1947, when she was caught up in the Army’s witch hunt for suspected homosexuals. This military-wide attack resulted in thousands of women and men being undesirably discharged and thus unable to access the veterans’ benefits that they had earned.
But Bond gamed the system. In 1945 she married a gay male friend on a whim and their marriage provided her with protection. “I didn’t see him again for 10 years. Or 15 maybe. It saved my life. … That’s why I wasn’t dishonorably discharged.” Even as she went on to lead an openly lesbian existence, Bond’s marriage license secured her access to veterans’ benefits for the rest of her life.
Beginning in the late 1960s, the transformation in laws and attitudes governing divorce and the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements made it more likely that these wives would leave their marriages. As one lesbian feminist activist declared, “some of the most ardent anti-straight women,” had been “1971’s HOUSEWIVES!”
Other women experimented with open, bisexual or group marriages to more transparently make space for their lesbian relationships. As recent celebrity stories suggest, even today, wives continue to find ways of combining marriages to men and sexual relationships with women.
Nonetheless, women could still face legal consequences for these relationships. In the 1970s, and 1980s, for example, as more openly lesbian and bisexual women departed marriages, they faced tremendous legal discrimination, with many losing custody of their children. In 1975, lesbian mother Mary Jo Risher lost custody of her 9-year-old son in Dallas. Because of her sexuality, a jury awarded full custody to Risher’s ex-husband, a man who had allegedly physically abused her and impregnated the daughter of a co-worker.
In other cases, family court judges prevented mothers from living with their lovers, seeing their lovers in their children’s presence or participating in gay and lesbian activism to retain custody or visitation rights.
That’s why the Supreme Court rulings in Lawrence v. Texas, in 2003, which outlawed sodomy laws across the country, and in Obergefell v. Hodges, in 2015, which legalized same-sex marriage, were so important. These rulings challenged the idea that gay, lesbian, bisexual and queer people are immoral, that their relationships are inferior to those of straight couples and thus undeserving of the same rights and protections.
Unsurprisingly, however, some conservative leaders are now looking to reverse Lawrence and Obergefell as well as Roe v. Wade. Overturning these decisions would criminalize consensual sexual behavior, and strip legal and medical benefits from more than 1 million Americans, myself included. And it would undeniably bestow greater power and privilege on outwardly heterosexual couples and families, while naturalizing the stigmatization and subordination of all others.
But recalling the queerness of marriage in the post-World War II era reminds us that the seemingly straight world those on the far right admire and hope fervently to restore was never more than surface deep. Beneath the cover of traditional nuclear families, countless husbands and wives — sometimes with the knowledge and consent of their spouses — found ways to form queer relationships and to connect with queer communities.
In short, queer people have long found ways of turning marriage to their own ends. Overturning Obergefell would be a tragedy, but it would not magically make American marriages straight, because, in truth, they never were.