Chuck Rowland
(1917 - December 27, 1990) U.S.A.
LAVORO
Charles "Chuck" Rowland said in an interview:
At ten I fell in love for the first time with this beautiful boy. This was no puppy-love affair. I would have killed or died for that boy. I knew it was the real thing. I knew I was in love. And I knew, of course, that this was strange, but it was so clear to me that I wasn't crazy.
It also helped that around that time I came across a series of articles on homosexuals in a magazine called Sexology, which I found in my father's drugstore. His drugstore had the only newsstand in town, a little rural village called Gary, South Dakota, population 535 at that time. I remember very distinctly snatching a copy as soon as it came in and reading that if one was homosexual, he shouldn't feel strange or odd, that there were millions of us, that there was nothing wrong with it.
As soon as I read that there were millions of us, I said to myself, Well, it's perfectly obvious that what we have to do is organize, and why don't we identify with other minorities, such as the blacks and the Jews? I had never known a black, but I did know one Jew in our town. Obviously, it had to be an organization that worked with other minorities, so we would wield tremendous strength.
Unlike most gay and lesbian people of his generation, Chuck Rowland accepted his sexual orientation without a struggle and without any sense of guilt.
... we're not like everybody else. I don't think or feel like a heterosexual. My life was not like that of a heterosexual. I had emotional experiences that I could not have had as a heterosexual. My whole person, my whole being, my whole character, my life differed and differs from heterosexuals, not by what I do in bed
When Chuck left the army, at the conclusion of World War II, became an organizer for the American Veterans Committee (AVC), a left-liberal World War II veterans organization. At that time he became also a Communist.
The American Veterans Committee was a wonderful idea. We had just won the war. We had rid the world of fascism, except in Spain. We came back and were going to save the world. That's what I was dedicating my life to by joining the AVC.
The AVC was a New York outfit, and I was made organizer for North and South Dakota, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, and Wisconsin. A modest little territory. My job was to travel throughout this empire and organize new AVC chapters. I had an incredible record; I was the only organizer in the country who was actually making his own salary from dues.
This was the Truman era, a wonderfully liberal period. Organizing was so easy. I was making speeches and advocating all the leftish things. We did some very daring things in the AVC. To start with, we were interracial-and I was organizing chapters in places like Missouri and southern Iowa. I didn't know of any other interracial organizations at the time. Plus, women were admitted on an equal basis.
There were some Communists in the AVC, and they seemed like fine people to me. I had a dear friend, Henry, who had also started as an AVC organizer and was working with the Omaha chapter. His parents were Communists, but he thought that that was kind of old-fashioned. I loved him dearly. We never had an affair, but I think we could have very easily. We were too busy saving the world.
Henry and I started discussing very seriously this whole Communist business. He said, "Dad seems to make more and more sense." So in 1946 Henry and I joined. I became head of the youth division of the party-which was called the American Youth for Democracy-for both Dakotas and Minnesota.
To most Americans, Communists were wicked, horrid people. Even to liberals. But the so-called liberals sat around and talked about socialized medicine, integration, and the rights of women. The Communists, on the other hand, were out there on the barricades or picketing or closing down something-doing something about it instead of just talking.
We were more American than most Americans. The idea that we had studied in Russia or some idiotic thing like that was ridiculous. The Communist party was never conceived of here or in the Soviet Union as a mass party. It was a small group that liked to "infiltrate" other liberal organizations to try to push them a little further.
I left the Communist Party in 1948, not because I was kicked out, not because I disagreed with anything, but because I just wanted out. Joining the Communist Party is very much like joining a monastery or becoming a priest. It is total dedication, twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year.
I thought I wanted that, and I did for a while, but I realized that I was getting very little sex and I didn't have a lover. I decided that I needed more out of life. I also decided that I wanted to do something-this was kind of in the back of my mind-with organizing gay people.
I guess I was a born organizer. That's what Dr. Evelyn Hooker said. I was part of her study of gay men. She gave me all those crazy tests. And I said, "Can you tell me anything about it?" And she said, "No, they would question my objectivity if I discussed the results with you." But, she said, "I will tell you one thing, you have an absolute genius for organization."
 Chuck Rowland's "genius for organization" would soon be put to the test as he and a handful of men launched a new group dedicated to improving life for the nation's homosexual citizens.
Rowland was working in a production-control job at a furniture factory. In November 11 and 13, 1950 in Los Angeles, he met Harry Hay and with a group of other gay men, they started what would become the Mattachine Society. The Mattachine Society of New York, Inc. was an early gay rights organization. In 1951, the founders were Harry Hay, Rudi Gernreich, Bob Hull, Chuck Rowland, and Dale Jennings in attendance, but was not incorporated until 1961.
Given the fearful political climate, Mattachine Society meetings often took place in secret with members using aliases. Like the Communist Party, the organization was organized in a cell structure that was non-centralized so that should a confiscation of records occur only limited information would be available to the authorities. In 1951 the group of five was joined by two other members, Konrad Stevens and James Gruber, and together they created the Mattachine Society Missions and Purposes statement and held their first conference.
Rowland, in his article "The Homosexual Culture" which he contributed to ONE Magazine in May 1953, strongly defended the proposition that homosexuals constitute a minority with a distinctive culture.
Rowland also started Los Angeles' Celebration Theatre. In 1956, after leaving the Mattachine in 1953 with all the other founders, he founded the Church of ONE Brotherhood - although lasting only a year, it is the first documented gay church. He died of prostate cancer, at the age of 73.
Source: the interview with Chuck Rowland in Eric Marcus, ed., Making History: The Struggle for Gay and Lesbian Equal Rights, 1945-1990: An Oral History, New York: HarperCollins, 1992, pag. 26-36. - et alii
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