How a Gay Teen Runaway Became LGBT History’s Pivotal Researcher

When Robert C. Steele met Jim Foshee in Denver, Colorado in the early 1970s it was a dynamic and exciting time to be gay in America. Denver was a progressive urban outpost in the Midwest defined by growth and tourism rather than ideology — allowing gay activism to flourish. Both men were volunteers for the Gay Coalition of Denver and produced a widely broadcast gay radio show every week.

Stonewall had unleashed optimistic and seemingly limitless expectations for gay men across the USA, and the excitement was palpable. Steele describes it as something novel — a previously unseen gay militancy and unapologetic identity was being widely discussed by diner patrons and in the media. Queer liberation was flourishing, but so too was Black, feminist and sexual liberation, and various activist groups freely borrowed, exchanged and rejected ideas, strategies and language among themselves. In his book, Banned from California, Foshee becomes something new, a character who bestows an understanding of what America represents — like Huckleberry Finn or Forrest Gump — an unassuming everyman and solitary survivor who finds himself at the crossroads of pivotal moments in gay American history. Foshee, like many other gay men, suffered some of his most painful memories as a victim of persecution and violence at the hands of his own family — sparked by their ire and disgust.

If being gay was a stigma, it was one that drove a wedge where warmth should have dwelt. Abuse, both mental and physical, is a common trait even today, and Foshee was not spared the trauma. He was a target of both his sadistic stepfather and holy roller mother. That abuse would become the impetus that drove Foshee to escape from his Idaho upbringing and run away to the relatively cosmopolitan milieu of 1950s Los Angeles. In L.A., Foshee lands in the midst of a thrilling homosexual underground that would form the blueprint for future queer culture. Foshee unwittingly becomes an eyewitness to the beginnings of what we now call LGBT civil rights. Bearing that witness later inspires his pivotal role in contributing to the gay research he would undertake that supported and footnoted LGBT history in America.

Foshee’s life is more relevant than ever nowadays. If queer existential identity now in the early 2020s is fraught and anxious, in the 1950s it was categorically illegal. Sodomy laws made gay sex a felony everywhere. Even progressive bastions like the ACLU refused to entertain the idea that civil rights extended to the homosexual. Law enforcement operated and maintained an institution of vice squads intent on entrapping gay men. Sodomy convictions carried long prison sentences in addition to ostracization. Gay America operated in the shadows — a patchwork subculture with its own clubs and code words.

Living his truth as a youth in the 1950s effectively made Foshee a criminal. Yet by doing so he became a social mediator and an agent of redemption in a divided time. Indeed, he embodied everything we admire about the American character: honesty, bravery, loyalty, and a heart of gold.

Steele says that Foshee’s placement in a mental hospital during his teenage years for “sexual deviation and sociopathic personality” was another factor that led to him becoming a ward of the institutional state — including oscillating between an orphanage and reform school. Incarcerated and forced into agonizing, backbreaking work on a chain gang in his early twenties — by the time he moved to Denver at 30 years old, the world had changed.

Foshee’s future fit in with a new robust national discourse about homosexuality. The Stonewall uprising occurred a month after he arrived in Denver. The counterculture movement was growing, and gay rights groups were organizing across the USA. Foshee decided to get involved in the movement and found a cause worth living. No longer at the mercy of the persecution that had nearly consumed his upbringing — he turned his life around. Foshee became an architect and foot soldier in the gay liberation movement. It was as though all of his experiences had prepared him for this calling. He effectively took control of his own life by putting his destiny in his own hands.

It is in Foshee’s life as a queer “everyman” — a person who lived in anonymity — that the profundity of his life can be understood. He never aspired to be a gay leader — he preferred to work in the background of the LGBT civil rights movement. Yet his story is extremely important — he serendipitously seemed to always be in the right places at the right times in the gay movement of the 20th century.

His lived experiences engender empathy, making his story a very easy and captivating read. His poignant story is equal parts coming-of-age and political biography. Foshee’s experience brings alive LGBT history and the oppression of the 1950s and beyond. We feel the weight of the price that queer people paid for breaking society’s rules and norms and laws. That’s what inspired and drove Steele to tell Foshee’s important story before it got lost to history.