John Waters
Washington D.C.
Wolfenden committee recommends the decriminalization of gay sex between consenting adults over 21, except in the armed forces.
National
John Waters shoplifted a copy of the Little Richard song "Lucille", at the age of 11, Waters asserted, "I've wished I could somehow climb into Little Richard's body, hook up his heart and vocal cords to my own, and switch identities.”
National
Trim the muscle magazine starts circulation. Trim was a vintage gay muscle magazine that hid the fact is was geared for homosexual men. Trim is a beefcake magazine that was published from 1957 until 1968.
The main audience of beefcake magazines was gay men. However, Beefcake magazines were designed to appear as fitness and health magazines rather than erotic magazines, because of censorship and homophobia.
Herman Lynn Womack (1923–1985) was the publisher, and the founder of Guild Press, a Washington, D.C. publishing house that catered almost exclusively to a gay male audience and played a major role in expanding the legal protections for gay publications against obscenity laws in the United States.
National
In the intriguing short story “THE MAN WHO STEPPED OUT FROM A CLOUD” in OUT OF THIS WORLD #5 (Charlton, September 1957) an alien takes a shy, introverted boy to his home planet, which seemingly only consists of men, until he has grown to maturity and can decide for himself the kind of life he wants to lead, there or on Earth.
Oregon
Oregon becomes the second state (after California) to enact a law prohibiting anyone convicted of sodomy from being a public school teacher.
National
Liberace appeared on the cover of confidential with speculation that he was gay. He never publicly admitted that he was gay despite being sued by one of his lovers for palimony.
Washington D.C.
Frank Kameny was fired from his job with Army Map Services. This action starts the first political legal action as a result of being dismissed for being homosexual.
United States LGBT History for 1957
California
The case results in a landmark ruling, People v. Ferlinghetti, in which San Francisco Municipal Court Judge Clayton W. Horn finds that, rather than being obscene, Allen Ginsberg work the Howl has “redeeming social importance,” and therefore is protected by the First Amendment. This ruling is in keeping with a previous U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Roth v. United States, which found that the First Amendment protects literature, but not obscenity.
National
TOM OF FINLAND’s homo-erotic drawings begin to appear in physique magazines beginning with the cover of Physique Pictorial.
National
Ann Bannon publishes Odd Girls Out a lesbian pulp fiction novel that becomes the first in a series eventually known as the Beebo Brinker Chronicles.
State equality and discrimination bills
Little Richard
Washington D.C.
American Civil Liberties Union approves a policy statement saying laws against sodomy and federal restrictions on employment of lesbians and gay men are constitutional.
President Dwight Eisenhower
Washington D.C.
Captain S. H. Crittenden chairs a U. S. Navy Board of Inquiry that issues a report concluding there is “no sound basis for the belief that homosexuals posed a security risk.”
Frank Kameny
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