Joseph Hansen Quotations

Morris Kite was the chairman. I remember the first meeting of that committee, out in an abandoned Victorian mansion that was the first location of the Gay Community Services Center in Los Angeles, which Morris helped to found.

If we do not drastically change, there will be no labor movement in this country,

He did not draw me into the movement, but he was in it from the start. He and I had met at my twenty-second birthday party, in 1945. So we knew each other for a long, long time. And although Martin, a few years later, became very active and became the first editor of ONE Magazine, he didn't draw me in.

I think it just showed homosexuals that being bold, being brave, coming out, you know, was not going to have the awful results that everybody always feared. That those days were passed, they were behind us. And that was a thrilling day; that was a thrilling day.

I think marriage is a civil contract. I don't know what they're raving about. We should all have the right to marry whomever we wish, whether it be male or female. That's what the 14th amendment provides: equal protection of the law.

When the parade began, Lloyd came out of the bookstore and was standing on the sidewalk. And when he saw me he called out in a very loud voice: "JOE! Isn't this wonderful! Isn't this a marvelous day! Can you imagine this ever happening?

So people didn't want to destroy themselves, and they didn't; and so only a very few brave hearts, not always the brightest or the sharpest knives in the drawer, stepped forward and did the best they could to bring about change and to make known how bad the situation was - the social situation, the legal situation, the employment situation, and so on - for homosexuals.

Probably a sense of awareness, bringing to homosexuals of those far-off times a sense that they were not alone, that there were others who shared their predicament.

Oh God, there were a thousand limitations to the movement. The main thing was that people who might have financed the magazines and people who might have had more business sense and been cannier publishers, people with a sense of public relations and publicity and all kinds of things like that, didn't step into the movement.

The removal of the sodomy laws. That really was the biggest achievement. Because while many states had already done that, there were many that had not. And once the Federal Government said NO to such laws, that was the coup de grace - that was the principle thing so far as I'm concerned.

It was hard to ask anybody to take part in something that would get you stigmatized and make earning a living tough for you, not to say create friction with your family and so on.

It was hard for people to step out and say "I am homosexual" in those times, which is what they would have done were they to associate themselves with the movement by pitching in and working for it, because you had to start swimming against the current, and a very cold current it was - and very swift.

It was hard for people to step out and say ""I am homosexual"" in those times, which is what they would have done were they to associate themselves with the movement by pitching in and working for it, because you had to start swimming against the current, and a very cold current it was - and very swift.

I just think that the people involved had as much talent and brains as they had, and they went as far as they could go, swimming as I say against the current. Trying to make over an entire society, trying to get people to act decently toward each other, is a big job.

Because Don Slater was here, and the rest of these guys, Harry Hay, and other, let us say eccentric people were here and were willing to bet their all on an impossible long shot.