Book Review: Robert C. Steele’s ‘Banned from California’

Reviewed by: Nicholas Villanueva, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
University of Colorado Boulder

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “deviant” as straying or deviating significantly from an accepted norm. The dominant group in society constructs what is acceptable or, in other words, what is right or wrong. The dominant group, the group with most of the cultural capital and power in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, was mostly white, male, Christian, and heterosexual-identifying.

Being LGBTQ was criminalized. Robert Steele examines the life of Jim Foshee, who unapologetically lived an openly gay life as early as his youth. I applaud his deviancy for breaking the rules and laws that LGBTQ people do not have to live with today.

In the spring of 1954, 15-year-old Jim Foshee left Ketchum, Idaho on foot and hitchhiked his way through Utah and Nevada to reach Los Angeles, a place that his church parishioners believed was full of “queers and fruits.” Jim thought, “That’s the place for me.”

Banned from California—Jim Foshee—Persecution, Redemption, Liberation… and the Gay Civil Rights Movement by Robert C. Steele is a fascinating biography about the life and journey of, as Ramon Silverstre of the GLBT Historical Society of San Francisco called, a “defiant and resilient, flawed, and complicated” man. Foshee lived an openly gay life when doing so was seen as criminal behavior, when Christians believed they were sinful, mental health officials saw them as sick, capitalists believed them to be unemployable, and the nuclear family mistook them for a congenital disability.

Steele draws on archival research at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries, personal interviews, letters, oral histories, newspapers, and LGBTQ periodicals such as OUT FRONT, and, of course, ONE The Homosexual Viewpoint, which was the first continuous, queer publication of its time.

Steele begins by saying that when Foshee arrived in Los Angeles, “he had arrived in the Land of OZ,” and reveals what was behind the metaphorical curtain for Jim Foshee, as he set out on a 50-year journey that placed him at the center of the civil rights movement for the LGBTQ community of Denver.

Steele frankly describes how Foshee’s childhood was defined by the physical abuse, marital hypocrisy, and morbidly puritanical beliefs of his ‘God-fearing’ mother and stepfather. The abuse by his stepfather, a preacher, drew authorities’ attention but garnered few results. With each attack, Foshee journeyed to neighboring towns and grew increasingly comfortable with hitchhiking in the 1950s.

This author’s retelling of Foshee’s childhood is creative, descriptive, and impressively recaptures events that occurred 60 to 70 years in the past. Readers will have a clear image of a boy, defiant and flawed, innocent and rebellious, a complicated protagonist reminiscent of Holden Caufield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. Jim Foshee’s story continues and transitions to his young adult years. However, a reader would not truly understand Foshee without intimately getting to know him as a youth.

Related Article: Dr. Eric Cervini’s “The Deviant’s War”

Banned from California places his story within the context of the gay civil rights movement and U.S. society during the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the rise of an LGBTQ print culture. At times, Foshee was poetically cynical. For example, when discussing that as “straight” society learned more about gay culture through publications like ONE, their fear of anything LGBTQ replaced their fear of Communism: “Now instead of finding a Communist under every bed, they were finding a queer there.”

Providing this insight into Foshee’s personality is a credit to Steele’s writing. He tells a vivid story of the modern gay civil rights movement with court cases and uprisings long before the well-known Stonewall riots, providing readers more depth into this history. Moreover, this book tells the history of gay rights and the gay liberation movement in Denver.

Yet, before readers can reach this moment in the book, the author chronicles Foshee’s time spent in prison for theft, and, once again, he writes a detailed account of this experience, which at times is quite graphic, and focuses on how an effeminate man that weighed only 134 pounds maneuvered the harsh reality of the Texas State Prison System.

Once released from his six-year sentence, a sordid life continued, until he found his true identity in Colorado. As Steele writes, “The 1970s was a watershed period for Jim in the sense that he found a purpose in life—becoming an architect and foot soldier in the gay liberation movement (p. 277).”

Jim Foshee is honored in Banned from California. Steele found a way to demonstrate all that Foshee achieved without delicately discussing, or even omitting, his flaws—a true biographical skill. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of gay liberation in Colorado, or anyone, like myself, who appreciates reading about people who did their part for social justice.

Banned from California—Jim Foshee—Persecution, Redemption, Liberation … and the Gay Civil Rights Movement is available on Amazon. For more information, visit bannedca.com.