His resignation provided Carrier the opportunity to return to school to study anthropology. Homosexuals a security risk and subject to dismissal however Carrier negotiated his departure from the company without admitting Homosexual affair with a Vietnamese Air Force officer to his superior in the Santa Monica office. In 1968, upon returning to the United States after performing field research as a counterinsurgency specialist in Vietnam,Ĭarrier was told of his pending dismissal for "economic reasons." In fact, his fellow employees in Saigon had reported a suspected He then relocated to California where, after a brief stint at North AmericanĪviation, he joined the Rand Corporation, for whom he worked from 1956 to 1968 as a research analyst on various projects. Taught geography at the University of Miami. He researched the economic effects of energy resource distribution in the northeastern region of the country. The following year Carrier traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to India, where In 1952, he receivedĪn MA in Economics from Purdue University. Of Miami in 1950, he was recalled by the Marines for fourteen months and completed his tour as a sergeant. After earning a BA in Geography from the University Was still in boot camp when World War II ended, and was discharged early. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1945, but
READ MORE: How the Great Depression Helped End Prohibitionīy the post-World War II era, a larger cultural shift toward earlier marriage and suburban living, the advent of TV and the anti-homosexuality crusades championed by Joseph McCarthy would help push the flowering of gay culture represented by the Pansy Craze firmly into the nation’s rear-view mirror.ĭrag balls, and the spirit of freedom and exuberance they represented, never went away entirely-but it would be decades before LGBTQ life would flourish so publicly again.Joseph Michel Carrier, Jr., was born on December 23, 1927, in Miami, Florida. This not only discouraged gay men from participating in public life, but also “made homosexuality seem more dangerous to the average American.” In the mid- to late ‘30s, Heap points out, a wave of sensationalized sex crimes “provoked hysteria about sex criminals, who were often-in the mind of the public and in the mind of authorities-equated with gay men.” The sale of liquor was legal again, but newly enforced laws and regulations prohibited restaurants and bars from hiring gay employees or even serving gay patrons. Each gay enclave, wrote George Chauncey in his book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, had a different class and ethnic character, cultural style and public reputation. In addition to these groups, whom social reformers in the early 1900s would call “male sex perverts,” a number of nightclubs and theaters were featuring stage performances by female impersonators these spots were mainly located in the Levee District on Chicago’s South Side, the Bowery in New York City and other largely working-class neighborhoods in American cities.īy the 1920s, gay men had established a presence in Harlem and the bohemian mecca of Greenwich Village (as well as the seedier environs of Times Square), and the city’s first lesbian enclaves had appeared in Harlem and the Village. “In the late 19th century, there was an increasingly visible presence of gender-non-conforming men who were engaged in sexual relationships with other men in major American cities,” says Chad Heap, a professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940.