"Yes, Helga Crane. My mother was his sister, Karen Nilssen. I've been away. I didn't know Uncle Peter had married." Sensitive to atmosphere, Helga felt at once the latent antagonism in the woman's manner.
"Oh, yes! I remember about you now. I'd forgotten for a moment. Well, he isn't exactly your uncle, is he? Your mother wasn't married, was she? I mean, to your father?"

-Chapter 5 of Quicksand

Apparently the delineations of race and class supersede those of family.

As a result of such press campaigns, the long-standing public image of the queer as an effeminate fairy whom one might ridicule but had no reason to fear was supplemented by the more ominous image of the queer as a psychopathic child molester capable of committing the most unspeakable crimes against children. The fact that homosexuals no longer seemed so easy to identify made them seem even more dangerous, since it meant that even the next-door neighbor could be one. The specter of the invisible homosexual, like that of the invisible communist, haunted Cold War America. The new image was invoked to justify a new wave of assaults on gay men in the postwar decade. As police efforts to control homosexual activity intensified, the number of reported "sex crimes" surged dramatically. This provoked yet greater public alarm and thus further escalation of police efforts. The number of men arrested for homosexual solicitation in Manhattan alone rose from about seven hundred a year in the 1930s to more than three thousand a year in the late 1940s.

-p 359, Gay New York

Protests

Not particularly pertinent to what we're studying at the moment, but an interesting piece nonetheless:



From the Economist