Confusion on different Mattachine chapters, Mattachine Society on 'The Playboy Club'
That is a good reason to urge our media to urge all groups to put their material online. I am not sure how many people would want to see ONE/HIC minutes, but it can't hurt-some historians should want to glance at it to get perspective. I think Ken Burns is giving us too much in his documentary showing on PBS this week (Prohibition), BUT then it shows how historians CAN go back and find lots of information that lets us know how something happened and the consequences.
NACHO met in Kansas City in February 1966 (the organizing meeting) and in San Francisco in August 1966 (the annual meeting). It met in Chicago in 1968. I took the minutes at all three of those meetings. Somewhere I have a copy.
However, the minutes wouldn't shed any light on Mattachine Midwest's name choice. If anywhere, that would come from Mattachine Midwest minutes, but unfortunately, after many years of my keeping them, I think they were lost by someone who shouldn't have taken custody of them.
Records of Mattachine Society, Inc. of New York from 1951 to 1976 (which I assume include records of the New York chapter of the Mattachine Society, Inc., before the independent existence of Mattachine Society, Inc. of New York) are listed in the collection of the International Gay Information Center at the New York Public Library and have also been microfilmed. Copies of the microfilm are listed as being held by NYPL and by a Connecticut library.
ONE also had a chapter, briefly, in Chicago and New York-and even later in Long Beach (which still exists as a center under a different anme) . And with Kameny and Jack Nichols, et al, I think they helped found either Mattachine or something in Florida. (Was it with Inman?)
Hal feared the other chapters messing up his brand, so tried to get rid of them-but New York of course kept going, but also had the Westside Discussion Group and then Stonewall and GAA and GLF, etc.
Mattachine Midwest, founded in 1965 as an independent Chicago organization, and in which I was involved from the start, did have a few women in leadership positions in its early days, notably Pearl Hart (who was never a member but provided legal advice), Renee Hanover (who was a member and also provided legal advice), and the author Valerie Taylor-- though later in the organization's 20-year history it became all-male. The organization wasn't a part of the nominally national Mattachine Society, Inc., which was then headquartered in San Francisco, but borrowed the Mattachine name with the "national" society's acquiescence.
In this respect, it was like Frank Kameny's Mattachine Society of Washington, which was always an independent organization and never part of the national Mattachine Society, but used the name.
The ca.-1961 Mattachine group depicted in the "Playboy" series--there called "Mattachine Chicago"--would have "been" a pre-Mattachine Midwest chapter of the Mattachine Society, Inc. One or more short-lived chapters of that Mattachine Society were organized in Chicago in the 1950s and early 1960s. I wasn't around at the time or was unaware of them.
By the way, Billy – yes, both the man and woman were at the meeting. He organized it and was leading it. She snuck in by what looked like a back stairway.
The feeling in the scene was amazing – these people were just beginning to realize that they might be able to chance the world ….
No Playboy Bunnies, though.