In doing so, I came across a great read, Leigh Ann Wheeler's How Sex Became a Civil Liberty.  From it, one may glean two interesting points about Baldwin's sentiments on sexuality:

• Baldwin's attitude toward the state was partly radicalized by Emma Goldman – a notorious anarchist and leader of the Free Speech League.  While he had always considered the state a means of achieving social reform, she considered it a "tool of coercion and repression – an entity that persecuted its opponents, repressed labor, prohibited birth control, and punished sexual nonconformists" [Chapter 1].  Baldwin grew enamored of Goldman and her free love agenda and more disillusioned with democracy.
• "Baldwin was not alone; many men who helped lead the ACLU or were involved with female ACLU leaders imported their ideals about individual freedom into their sexual and romantic relationships and did so frankly.  In many ways, their private lives became laboratories for experimenting with sexual civil liberties"  [Chapter 1].

Further, Wheeler goes on to describe women's rights activist Harriet Pilpel and her proposal at a 1964 ACLU conference to "protect all private sexual behavior between consenting adults" [page Ixvi].  Baldwin argued that this definition was too narrow and failed to "recognize the unique problems faced by 'bi-sexuals,' especially married fathers charged with committing a homosexual act" [page Ixvi].

Indeed, privacy itself was a contested topic within the sphere of sexual civil liberties.  According to Robert Cottrell, in his book Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union, Baldwin contended that "Private sexual life should be private, not in public places.  You don't have public fornication or public homosexuality.  Some things you don't do in public view.  The Puritan ethic had something to be said for it" (166).

So, my questions are:  How might a man like Roger Nash Baldwin have reconciled his views on civil liberties, civil disobedience, and sexual nonconformity – heterosexual free love versus homosexuality?  Was he aware that a number of people in his own movement (like HWLD) were homosexual?  How would he feel about the tool of civil disobedience used in movements for sexual liberation and modern LGBT rights in parallel to its use in pacifist protest?

     "[...] I regret for many reasons seeing pacifism and anarchism so closely associated in the popular mind.
     Can we not guide our young enthusiasts, whose sincerity I appreciate and value, into wiser associations and lines of conduct?"

I've recently come to learn that anarchist writers helped defend and promote the hybrid notion of leftist sexuality in the United States — a fact upon which I've built my thesis.  With that in mind, I find irony in the fact that Dana — a gay man with socialist and pacifist affiliations — received a letter from Virginia Gildersleeve — the Dean of Barnard College, who was herself quite radical in her own right — about a student's controversial affiliations (please see next post).

As a point of curiosity, then, how is it that socialism and anarchism have both historically found affiliations with pacifism?  Was this a general lumping of all subversive ideology, or could pacifism somehow be conceived of as a bridge between the two political philosophies?

Is pacifism a part of some larger missing link that would help explain the way "third sex" socialists in Europe corresponded with American anarchists?  Or was the only thing the two activist groups had in common their investment in free love and sexual liberation — and with it, an interest in a peaceable (perhaps Utopian) society that would allow it?

In connection to my last post, it seems there was a divide between conscientious objectors who still followed the rule of law and those who practiced civil disobedience (perhaps sullying the law-abiding image of the pacifist movement that the former worked to maintain).