LEE LAWSON
- August Bernadicou
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
SOCIETY ADVOCATING MUTUAL EQUALITY
While gay liberation was a revolution that was triggered by the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969, there were people active before this radical part of LGBTQ+ history. There was not a worldwide movement at this time, but there were interesting and isolated moments. We know little about these groups because many people used fake names and organized behind closed doors. We must give them respect. They were brave, and they were in the room.
Lee Lawson reached out to us online, saying he started his activism in 1966, three years before Stonewall and 60 years ago. He helped launch SAME (Society Advocating Mutual Equality), a pre-liberation homophile organization founded in the Quad Cities region of Iowa and Illinois in 1966. Lee served as the treasurer and later as president. Other members included Dan Devillon (president), Dale E. (vice president), John Gale, Joe Gunther, and others. The group emerged as gay people in the area faced oppression and the loss of employment because of their identity. SAME sought to build visibility, community, and acceptance through meetings, dances, radio appearances, and a newsletter simply called The Challenger. Its work offers a rare firsthand glimpse into LGBTQ organizing in the Midwest before Stonewall.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I grew up in Davenport, Iowa. We call it the front porch of Iowa, and if you know anything about maps—it's the only place where the Mississippi River flows from east to west, makes a big hump in Iowa, and Illinois is on the other side. It was about 300,000 people on both sides of the river when you put them together.
I went to the largest high school in Iowa at the time, which had well over 3,000 students, and there was everything. We had Blacks, and we had wealthy kids and everybody. Just everything was there. Everybody, women and men, and we had in those days, why they had home economics classes for the girls, and I even took a typing course so I could learn how to type. They had shop mechanics classes and this sort of thing. You could get into sports if you wanted. Everyone was big on sports. It was just pretty typical.
After high school, I joined the military. I'd had enough of school and didn't really want to go to college right away, so I figured I'd join the military, and the GI Bill would provide me with money to go to school after I got out. This sort of thing—I flew to Germany, landed in Shannon, Ireland, on the 17th of March, 1960, which is St. Patrick's Day, spent a couple hours there, and then flew on to Germany. I spent a night, and then I ended up—I was stationed in Heidelberg, which was the U.S. Army Europe headquarters. I spent nearly three years in West Germany. It was divided then. I traveled around. That's where I found out that German men would play, and would pay to play with GIs. I got it when I started.
Our pay was $92 a month in the military, and so a few extra dollars here and there were always very nice, and German marks were roughly a quarter each. Four marks to one dollar was the exchange rate at the time, so if I went on leave and traveled around, I always did it alone, and I found myself going to big cities like Cologne and other places. They had everything by train, and so you spent a lot of time sitting in railroad stations, and I noticed activity in the restrooms there. The same people were going in and out, so I got curious. As a young GI, I found everything interesting. So I assumed I was straight and thought I was straight even when I came back after the service and almost got married, and I finally decided that I really liked the boys better. I wasn't a virgin, and I had a clear preference.
In Illinois, there is a city called Rock Island, and it has a military facility. It's a very large compound, and they had cemeteries there from the Civil War and the First World War. They had 13,000 employees manufacturing equipment. So some people were starting to get fired from the Rock Island Arsenal for being gay, and that's when a group of us decided to form and start trying to inform people who we were and what was going on. So we formed the group, Society Advocating Mutual Equality (SAME). So that's how we got started. It was 1966. We decided we needed to speak up and have our presence recognized. Gay people had to hide. We did not want to hide. We were considered the Young Turks.
We had to be cautious because we could lose our jobs and positions. But I did lose one job because of it. I worked for Dun & Bradstreet at one time, and that's a major financial organization. When they found out I was gay, they said, ‘Well, we can't allow that because of the reputation of the company.’ I was young and kind of precocious. Then I worked at the Oscar Mayer plant, then for Bendix Corporation, and eventually for International Harvester Company, which had major manufacturing facilities, and they didn't care what you did as long as you did your job.
I was a bit of a hippie. I didn't go to any of the big hippie things. I didn't go to New York or any of the big events, but I had long, shoulder-length hair, and I grew a beard. This was a form of rebellion. You were not supposed to have long hair.
There was a park on the riverbanks with a cruising area. We had to chase off the ‘fruit beaters.’ The young kids out of high school, the seniors would all come out. They would start coming out in the spring, and they’d say, ‘Oh well, they're squares. Let's go down and beat them up.’ So we had to organize and chase them off, and so we beat up the fruit beaters, so they didn't come back. There was one person who very well may have drowned because he was gay, but that was all just supposition. He fell off a boat in the Mississippi, and people suspected that maybe it was because he was pretty out and open.
The government was doing a mass campaign to purge the government of homosexuals. We saw this happening and decided we needed to start getting the word out and talking to people, so we did. We did interviews on the radio station WOC, which was talk radio, and might have done some on WHBF. I don't remember for sure, but I know WOC was talk radio at the time, and it was the first commercial radio station west of the Mississippi. We’d go on there and talk and discuss things, trying to show that we were decent people, and then of course there were a few protests in Washington, D.C., and in Pennsylvania, in 1967 and 1968. We sent a couple of representatives to the march on the Pentagon one year, and then the next year it was the march on the White House, and of course they were all there in suits and ties, very respectable, marching and carrying signs. This was before 1969, when Stonewall happened.
Most of us used fake names so we weren't really exposing ourselves. I remember we had one person who was involved in Iowa City, and there was an organization there called Lavender in Pink in Iowa City. Well, lavender, of course. We kind of shut them out real tight because we didn't want to get involved with anything potentially communist. We were loyal American citizens, so we weren't looking to overthrow the government. We just wanted to have acceptance, and we had monthly meetings and organized various things. We had dances and get-togethers. We published a newsletter, which included interesting articles as well as some very gossipy content. Then there was the Unitarian Church, which was very open. We used to go into their basement on Saturday nights and have dances, and we sold alcohol and that sort of thing. And then in the wee hours of Sunday morning, when everybody went home, we had to clean up.
The Challenger was our newsletter—10 cents per issue, $2 per year. John Gale and his lover eventually moved to Phoenix, Arizona, and I lost total contact with them and the homophile movement. We had some meetings, group meetings in the Midwest. We went to visit Phoenix Society in Kansas City, Missouri, which was founded in March 1966 by activist Drew Shafer and others. There were also the homophile organizations, the Mattachine Society, and the Daughters of Bilitis. We went to a conference in Kansas City in 1966. We were there for that, and there were a couple other cities that were involved.”
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The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives and the QueerCore Podcast.
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