When the Gays Turned Back the Nazis
The incident that rocked an early homophile conference, and the audio recording of it that’s wasting away
On October 11, 1964, in Washington D.C., the second annual conference of the East Coast Homophile Organizations bore witness to attempted disruption by a member of the American Nazi Party. For decades now, an audio recording of the confrontation has been collecting dust, first in a private collection, and now in an LGBTQ+ archive in Philadelphia. With time running out to convert and digitize it before it becomes useless, this is the story of what is on that tape, and what happened 57 years ago today, on an autumn Sunday in Washington.
Established in Philadelphia in 1962, the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) represented the first serious effort on the part of local organizations advocating for the legal rights of LGBTQ+ people to coordinate their efforts and establish a national organizing structure. After months of planning, the first official ECHO Conference was held in Philadelphia during Labor Day Weekend of 1963.
It was a landmark event in the history of the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and provided the basis for further coordination and development of the movement in the run-up to the Stonewall Rebellion in 1969. As such, following the first conference in 1963, opponents of the nascent-but-growing “homophile” movement began to take notice.
In the Summer of 1964, as planning for the second ECHO Conference in Washington, DC was well underway, the event drew the attention of none other than George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi Party. On July 15th, he proclaimed that homosexuality was, “The MOST unhealthy, most unwholesome cancer in any civilization…” Rockwell’s words, along with the Party’s platform which proclaimed, “we shall ruthlessly suppress all forms of vice, such as…homosexuality…” incited the Party’s limited but devoted membership to action.
Following Rockwell’s statement, as the conference approached, ECHO leaders began to receive threats. American Nazi Party members began calling ECHO’s suite at the Sheraton-Park Hotel threatening to disrupt of the conference, and two members of the Mattachine Society of Washington reported having recognized two known local Nazis at a gay bar who were holding ECHO conference literature. These incidents in mind, the organizers of ECHO had notified DC police who, for the protection of (and also very likely a desire to surveil) the conference, sent several plainclothes officers to monitor the proceedings.
During the first day of the conference, ECHO leaders were on watch for the officers the DC police had promised to send. Although officially undercover, one ECHO member pointed out one of the attendees on the first day as Officer Ronald L. Graham of the Washington, D.C. police department’s Morals Division. Unbeknownst to the leaders of ECHO, Officer Graham had only days earlier arrested longtime LBJ aide and confidant Walter W. Jenkins on charges of disorderly conduct after he and another officer discovered Jenkins engaged in sexual conduct with another man in the bathroom of a Washington YMCA, a scandal that days later was to erupt into the national press and temporarily upend the 1964 presidential election campaign.
With the presence of Graham and the other plainclothes officers, the first day of the conference proceeded without a hitch. Throughout the day, with multiple national and international reporters present, various speakers ranging from leaders of homophile organizations to civil liberties lawyers railed against all manner of legal discrimination against gays and lesbians. As the attendees retired for the night and to prepare for the following day’s panel discussions, it seemed firmly as though the Nazi threats had been all for show.
However, on October 11th, the second day of the conference, just as an afternoon panel of religious leaders was about to get underway, a young blonde man in full Nazi attire strode into the conference hall, carrying a box wrapped in pink with a red bow and labeled “QUEER CONVENTION.”
An audio recording was made of the confrontation that ensued, and a transcription of the recording was published in the January 1965 issue of The Ladder. After a brief moment of deafening silence in the conference hall in response to his presence, the young Nazi bellowed out:
“Would somebody call Rabbi Lipman, please? Is Rabbi Lipman in the house? I’ve got 24 quarts of vaseline here to deliver to Rabbi Eugene Lipman. I believe all you queers will be able to make use of it.”
Immediately, as planned, a phalanx of ECHO leaders and attendees surrounded the Nazi disruptor, linking arms and moving slowly in unison towards the exit in an attempt to push him out of the hall. Officer Graham was observed exiting the hall to call for backup. Robert King, a leader of the Mattachine Society of Washington and the keynote speaker of the conference, responded over the microphone, “You must either pay admission or get out, you are trespassing.” The Nazi began pushing back and attempting to provoke the attendees, hurling all manner of homophobic and anti-Semitic slurs at them and the other ECHO members.
As he pushed back against the line, one of the ECHO leaders, Shirley Willer, President of the New York Chapter of Daughters of Bilitis, admonished the Nazi for stepping on her foot:
“Sir, you’re stepping on my foot. Would you please move?”
“I believe you’re trying to kick me, aren’t you, lesbian?” he retorted. A camera crew for WTOP-TV began filming the encounter. Willer, for her part, remained unfazed by the Nazi’s provocations:
“Please, sir, you’re stepping on my foot, would you mind leaving?”
The Nazi ignored her request and demanded again to see Rabbi Lipman. It was at this point that Ronald Graham re-entered the conference hall and informed the Nazi that he was a police officer, presented his badge, and escorted him out of the hall to a round of applause from the ECHO attendees. In the span of less than five minutes, the Nazi’s incursion into the conference had ended, and business as usual was restored. It is unknown if there was any actual vaseline in the box the Nazi was attempting to deliver, and if so, its fate is not known.
The ECHO attendees would later learn that the Nazi who caused the disruption was booked for disorderly conduct, and would also later learn that it was the same exact charge Graham had arrested Walter Jenkins for only four days prior.
The WTOP-TV video footage of the incident was never aired. The audio recording of the conference and the Nazi disruption covered in this article, as well as audiocassette recordings of other ECHO and early homophile conferences throughout the 1960s, are currently on file at the John J. Wilcox, Jr. LGBT Archives at the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia, but have yet to be converted from their original format.
Bob Skiba, the curator of the Archives, had the following to say about the importance of making sure these tapes are properly digitized:
“Video and audio recordings of LGBTQ historical events are rare. The recordings themselves are fragile; they degrade over time from wear and tear and age. The information stored on these analog audiotapes needs to be migrated to a digital format if it is to remain accessible. Digitization services are widely available, but they are time consuming and expensive.”
On the subject of what members of the public can do to assist with the process of digitizing these recordings, he also offered:
“Donating to organizations like the John J. Wilcox, Jr. LGBT Archives ensures that rare recordings of queer history will remain available to the community for years to come.”
For more information on how to donate to the John J. Wilcox, Jr. Archives to aid in the preservation of essential LGBTQ+ historical materials like those described in this article, please call (215) 732-2220, email info@waygay.org, or donate directly at this link.
