Where Else but Greenwich Village?: Love, Lust, and the Emergence of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Sexual Rights Agenda, 1920–1931

Abstract

“ T h e p e r f o r m a n c e wa s T h o r o u g h l y vulgar and indecent,” the report began, “as most burlesque shows ordinarily are. While women wore tights . . . other parts of the body were naked, suggestive dancing was frequent, sexual jokes were common, all the usual stunt appeals to sex interest and feelings were there.” The disapproving tone and graphic description of this account echoes those compiled by early twentieth-century moral reformers. This one, though, was produced in 1931 by the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Roger Baldwin, who sent it to Boston’s commissioner of licenses. Why would the director of the ACLU criticize a burlesque show to a license commissioner? historians of the ACLU might not find this anecdote surprising enough to question it, because they have assumed that the organization’s founders were, as two prominent scholars have put it, “extremely puritanical” and