Josiah P. Marvel papers

Josiah P. Marvel (1896-1959) was a Quaker, born in Indiana and a graduate of Earlham College. He moved to New York City in 1929 and married Elinore Jacobs Strettenheim in 1941. He worked with the AFSC in France in 1940-41 and in 1942 became the chairman of Quaker Emergency Services in New York City. The Quaker Emergency Service was founded in January 1942 by members of the combined Peace and Service Committees of the two New York Monthly Meetings. Offering alternative service for conscientious objectors, it was authorized by the New York Office of Civilian Defense. Among its domestic programs in New York, QES provided volunteers for nurseries and hospitals; offered pragmatic training courses in topics such as first aid, and therapeutic courses in recreation and papercrafts for underpriviliged and "war-shocked" children and adults; and organized a series of discussion groups on post-war problems. QES also operated programs abroad, notably the Spears Mobile Clinics in Syria, operated with the help of the Friends Ambulance Unit.

After the war, the group formed the Civilian Readjustment Committee in order to provide an alternative to sentencing people to prison for for "degenerate disorderly conduct." The Committee opened a clinic in the 15th Street Quaker Meetinghouse in New York City which offered psychiatric services, particularly to men arrested for soliciting sex with other men in public spaces, as well as other people designated as sex offenders. Historian Brian Blackmore describes this effort as the "the first social service organization for gay people" (PhD diss., 2023, p. 53). After a couple of years, the clinic was renamed the Civilian Readjustment Committee and was relocated to the magistrate's court.

In 1951, Josiah Marvel was himself arrested for soliciting sex from a male plainclothes police officer, and in the aftermath of that scandal the Civilian Readjustment Center quietly wound down. Quaker Emergency Service continued to operate other programs. In 1959, Marvel was found dead by suicide, and shortly afterwards, in 1961, the Quaker Emergency Service began the process of liquidation, allocating its remaining funds to other charitable causes.