Queer Connections Before Craigslist 

In 1946 Bois Burke, a resident of Berkeley, California, placed a personal advertisement in a new magazine called The Hobby Directory. He identified himself as a forty-one-year-old, college educated office clerk who was interested in internationalism, politics, and chess and who was looking to correspond with other “single members who are lonely.”

But he was hoping to do more than initiate the sort of platonic exchange that was the norm for pen-pal clubs and correspondence societies of his day. Instead, Burke and the other members of The Hobby Directory, which included an overabundance of “florists,” “hair stylists,” and “male nurses,” desired a decidedly queer sort of contact: They wished to connect with others they perceived to be like themselves but whom they had difficulty locating in the regular passage of their everyday lives. Many members of The Hobby Directory were gay men. They desired to contact other gay men in a world in which those attempts were prohibited by law and, thus, the venues for exchange were fleeting and few.

In Burke’s day the options for connecting with other gay men were extremely limited, but resourceful men, hungry for contacts, improvised. They placed ads in publications like The Hobby Directory that were carefully disguised to appear benign to heterosexuals but coded to attract other gay men. They gathered in certain parts of big cities and slipped into bars or bathhouses whose reputation was spread by word of mouth. They spent weekends attending house party after house party, which many preferred to bars because dancing was allowed and police intrusion unlikely. However they connected and wherever they met, their contacts were enabled and supported by a comparatively small social network. It was kept this way by censorious pressure from the outside and a desire for self-preservation from within. While culturally robust and probably increasing in population, the gay world of 1946 was relatively fragmented, locally centered, and focused on the immediate rewards of “finding a friend” in the reserved argot of the day.

Today, if a gay man is asked where he goes to look for sex and, possibly, friendship or a relationship, he is likely to mention any number of websites that feature chat rooms often explicitly linked to particular tastes and geographic areas. With the passage of sixty years from Burke’s Hobby Directory to today’s Gay.com, surely much has changed in the realm of queer communications, but just what are the nature of those changes and what, if anything, has remained the same?

Surprisingly, perhaps, there is much to link Burke’s Hobby Directory with today’s queer Internet. A persistent quality of the contact ads today, as in the past, is the apparent fact that men have predominated. Although the historic use of pen-pal clubs by lesbians (or quasi-lesbians) needs more study, the tendency to look for sex or friendship in magazines or on the Internet, with few exceptions, appears to be a male pursuit. Like the methods employed by Bois Burke, today’s gay men often look beyond what is immediately within reach in the quest to find that person who suits a particular desire or resides in a specific place.

One of the unexpected continuities is found in the persistence of euphemisms and codes in queer communications. In Burke’s day, gay seekers often would evoke a nonmasculine profession to attract attention. For example, a 1958 ad in the San Francisco Chronicle apartment classifieds (preserved by Burke in his records) read, “young man, hair stylist, share house now with intelligent man.” And while Internet profiles may be devoid of clever euphemism, there is no shortage of codes, detailing information ranging from body size and shape (e.g. “HWP” or "height weight proportional") to use or non-use of narcotics during sex (e.g. “PNP” or “party and play”). Even though the ultimate reason for using codes likely differs in these contexts—fear of discovery in the ’ 50s, convenient shorthand today—there appears to be a continued desire to communicate information better left unsaid or inexplicit.

A Bigger and Better World

Since Burke’s time, the options for gay men to locate and then connect with one another have expanded to an almost unimaginable degree. Scale of communication is surely the most important transformation since Burke’s age. While there may have been a few hundred members of The Hobby Directory’s correspondence club, today the active membership of the largest gay Internet communities, such as Gay.com, tops a million. In the 1940s the magazines similar to The Hobby Directory were few; today there are tens of thousands of Internet chat rooms that facilitate connections. The Hobby Directory was distributed to thousands of readers through subscriptions and sales at hobby stores and it was advertised to readers of large circulation magazines such as Popular Science; moreover, The Hobby Directory was available in not only the United States, but also, through the mail, in western Europe as well. Today, the Internet is used by an estimated 1.1 billion people worldwide and is accessible to the vast majority of Americans, even though some gay-related websites and, especially, chat rooms are not available in many libraries and other places where the general public connects.

The words and images used to communicate desires and describe oneself have become increasingly explicit. In U.S. v. Zuideveld and Zuideveld (1963), a U.S. Court of Appeals decided that the owners of the Adonis pen-pal club were guilty of trafficking in obscenity not because they ever sent pornography through the mail, but because they should have presumed that is what their gay clientele would do. The arrests preceding this decision were widely known and dissuaded others from establishing similar venues for connection. While recent litigation has compelled some sites to prevent users from posting sexually explicit images (which generally does not include plain nudity), the U.S. Supreme Court, in ACLU v. Janet Reno (1999), declared the strict and potentially antigay Child Online Protection Act unconstitutional. (Free speech advocates feared that certain COPA provisions would censor or block access to nonpornographic, informational websites that contain references to “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexual,” and so forth.) The legality of Internet chat rooms seems assured, and sites such as Gay.com are unlikely to close for any reason other than lack of profit.

The Evolution of Queer Communications

The queer Internet, of course, did not emerge in a vacuum. And though The Hobby Directory is certainly one antecedent to today’s websites and chat rooms, a whole variety of important innovations in queer communications were introduced over the last four decades. One of the best known innovations in the 1950s came with the birth of the homophile press. A series of magazines, including One, Mattachine Review, and The Ladder, published by related but unaffiliated organizations, set the standard for intra-queer communications: gay folks communicating with other gay folks on a large, impersonal scale. These magazines, which are timid by today’s standards and fairly modest by those of the 1950s, were quite different than The Hobby Directory in their goals and content. The publishers of Mattachine Review and the rest were not interested in facilitating personal contacts. Rather, their goals included speaking about homosexuality to the public at large and, to a lesser extent, fostering some sense of homosexual community (albeit one that was integrated within, rather than separate from, the larger society).

More in line with The Hobby Directory, a whole series of gay bar guidebooks published beginning in the 1960s sought to facilitate personal connections, but on a much larger scale than a hobby magazine limited by its tiny distribution and its use of arcane codes in its text. Although not the first of such guidebooks, Bob Damron’s Address Book (later called the Damron Guide) was certainly early to the market and has thus far outlasted its initial competitors. Situated halfway between The Hobby Directory and the queer Internet with regard both to time and content, the Address Book helped expand the scale of distribution of information about gay people and places. Also, in responding to a changing legal context in which bars that attracted homosexuals no longer were by definition illegal in many places, the guidebooks by the late 1960s began naming the sites explicitly as gay. Still, the use of special codes continued for information that the publishers knew should remain hidden or vague, such as where male prostitutes might be found or where folks interested in sado-masochism gathered. (SM was translated in one guidebook as “some motorcycle.”)

What would Bois Burke think if he were to log on to one of the many chat rooms that populate today’s queer Internet? As a lifelong and enthusiastic pen-pal to many, he surely would have relished the opportunity to connect with so many gay men, and to do so easily. And he almost certainly would have appreciated the technological advances that allow one to transfer photographs immediately and even chat in real time.

But he might not see the march of technology and the resultant ease to connect as a story of unmitigated progress. The restrained eroticism and the clever euphemisms necessary in his era encouraged one to develop subtle skills of communication. The contextual limitations mandated by law left room for the imagination to roam while alone and things for the eye to discover when a connection was finally made.

Whatever Burke’s opinion of the changes that have transpired and whatever remains relatively unaltered over the decades, clearly there has been sweeping and vast change to the ways in which gay men discover one another and communicate among themselves. These changes, which continue to happen today at seemingly increasing speeds, are impossible to comprehend outside of the social, cultural, political, and legal contexts in which they transpire.

We have Bois Burke and his kind, then, to thank not only for preserving their own queer communication media by donating the items to archives but also for helping us to think more clearly about what is happening today, to place it in a longer story of transformations in queer communication networks.

Martin Meeker is an academic specialist with the Regional Oral History Office at The Bancroft Library of UC Berkeley. His book Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2006. Copies of The Hobby Directory as well as the papers of Bois Burke are available to researchers at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.