Gay liberation

The gay liberation movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person. In this period, annual political marches through major cities, usually held in June (to commemorate the Stonewall uprising) were still known as "Gay Liberation" marches. It wasn't until later in the seventies (in urban gay centers) and well into the eighties in smaller communities, that the marches began to be called "gay pride parades." The movement involved the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in North America, South America, Western Europe, and Australia and New Zealand.

While the movement always included all LGBT people, in those days the unifying term was "gay," and later, "lesbian and gay," much as in the late eighties and early nineties, "queer" was reclaimed as a one-word alternative to the ever-lengthening string of initials, especially when used by radical political groups. Specifically, the word 'gay' was preferred to previous designations, such as homosexual or homophile, that were still in use by mainstream news outlets, when they would carry news about gay people at all. The New York Times refused to use the word 'gay', insisting on 'homosexual' up until 1987.

Gay liberation is also known for its links to the counterculture of the time, to groups like the Radical Faeries, and for the gay liberationists' intent to transform or abolish fundamental institutions of society such as gender and the nuclear family; in general, the politics were radical, anti-racist, and very anti-capitalist in nature. In order to achieve such liberation, consciousness raising and direct action]] were employed.

While HIV/AIDS activism and awareness (in groups such as ACT UP) radicalized a new wave of lesbians and gay men in the 1980s, and radical groups have continued to exist, by the early 1990s the radicalism of gay liberation was becoming eclipsed in the mainstream by newly-out, assimilationist, white gay men who stressed civil rights and mainstream politics.

It should be noted that although the term gay liberation may in certain contexts refer to the activities of radical gay advocacy groups during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, often the term refers more broadly to the movement to free gay men and lesbians (and often closely associated social groups such as bisexual people or transgender people) from social and legal oppression. Sometimes the term gay liberation movement is even used synonymously or interchangeably with the term gay rights movement. Thus, when used in this way, "gay liberation" refers to a universal and ongoing social movement not limited to any particular time or place.

Origins and history of movement

Although the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York are popularly remembered as the spark that produced a new movement, the origins predate these iconic events. Certainly, militant resistance to police bar-raids was nothing new — as early as 1725, customers fought off a police raid at a London homosexual/transgender molly house. Organized movements, particularly in Western Europe, have been active since the 19th century, producing publications, forming social groups and campaigning for social and legal reform. The movements of the period immediately preceding gay lib, from the end of World War II to the late 1960s, are known collectively as the homophile movement. The homophile movement has been described as "politically conservative", although their calls for social acceptance of same-sex love and transgender people were seen as radical fringe views by the dominant culture of the time.

1960s

Early 1960s New York, under the Wagner administration, was beset with harassment against the gay community, particularly by the NYPD. Homosexuals were seen as the subject of a drive to rid the city of undesirables. Subsequently, only the Mafia had the power and financial resources to run gay bars and clubs. By 1965, influenced by Frank Kameny’s addresses in the early 1960s, Dick Leitsch, the president of the New York Mattachine Society, advocated direct action, and the group staged the first public homosexual demonstrations and picket lines in the 1960s. Kameny, founder of Mattachine Washington in 1961, had advocated militant action reminiscent of the black civil rights campaign, while also arguing for the morality of homosexuality.

The New York State Liquor Authority did not allow homosexuals to be served in licensed bars in the state under penalty of revocation of the bar's license to operate. This denial of public accommodation had been confirmed by a court decision in the early 1940s. A legal study, commissioned by Mattachine New York on the city’s alcohol beverage law concluded there was no law prohibiting homosexuals gathering in bars but did prohibit disorderly behaviour in bars, which the SLA had been interpreting as homosexual behaviour. Leitsch announced to the press three members of Mattachine New York would turn up at a restaurant on the lower east side, announce their homosexuality and upon refusal of service make a complaint to the SLA. This came to be known as the "Sip In" and only succeeded at the third attempt in the Julius Bar (New York City) in Greenwich Village. The "Sip In", though, did gain extensive media attention and the resultant legal action against the SLA eventually prevented them from revoking licenses on the basis of homosexual solicitation in 1967.

In the years before 1969, the organization also was effective in getting New York City to change its policy of police entrapment of gay men, and to rescind its hiring practices designed to screen out gay people. However, the significance of the new John Lindsay administration and the use of the media by Mattachine New York should not be underestimated in ending police entrapment. Lindsay would later gain a reputation for placing much focus on quelling social troubles in the city and his mayorship coinciding with the end of entrapment should be seen as significant. By late 1967, a New York group called the Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN), essentially a one-man operation on the part of Craig Rodwell, was already espousing the slogans "Gay Power" and "Gay is Good" in its publication HYMNAL.

The 1960s was a time of social upheaval in the West, and the sexual revolution and counterculture influenced changes in the homosexual subculture, which in the U.S. included bookshops, publicly sold newspapers and magazines, and a community center. It was during this time that Los Angeles saw its first big gay movement. In 1967, the night of New Years, several plainclothes police officers infiltrated the Black Cat Tavern. After arresting several patrons for kissing to celebrate the occasion, the officers began beating several patrons and ultimately arrested 16 more bar attendees including three bartenders. This created a riot in the immediate area, ultimately bringing about a more civil demonstration of over 200 attendees several days later protesting the raids. The protest was met by squadrons of armed policemen. It was from this event that the publication The Advocate and organization Metropolitan Community Church (led by Pastor Troy Perry) was born.

Few areas in the U.S. saw a more diverse mix of subcultures than Greenwich Village, which was host to the gay street youth. A group of young, effeminate runaways, shunned by their families, society, and the gay community, they reflected the countercultural movement more than any other homosexual group. Refusing to hide their homosexuality, they were brutalised, rebellious tearaways who took drugs, fought, shoplifted and hustled older gay men in order to survive. Their age, behaviour, feminine attire and conduct left them isolated from the rest of the gay scene, but living close to the streets, they made the perfect warriors for the imminent Stonewall Riots. These emerging social possibilities, combined with the new social movements such as Black Power, women's liberation, and the student insurrection of May 1968 in France, heralded a new era of radicalism. After the Stonewall riots in New York City in late June 1969 many within the emerging gay liberation movement in the U.S. saw themselves as connected with the New Left rather than the established homophile groups of the time. The words "gay liberation" echoed "women's liberation"; the Gay Liberation Front consciously took its name from the National Liberation Fronts of Vietnam and Algeria; and the slogan "Gay Power", as a defiant answer to the rights-oriented homophile movement, was inspired by Black Power, which was a response to the civil rights movement.

Vanguard 1965–1967

In the fall of 1965, Adrian Ravarour and Billy Garrison founded Vanguard, an LGBT gay liberation youth organization in San Francisco, California. Joel Williams asked Ravarour as an educated adult and former priest to help the Tenderloin LGBT youth who suffered discrimination. Seeing their conditions, Ravarour asked the LGBT youth if they were willing to demonstrate for equal rights to end discrimination. But Billy Garrison thought it was dangerous, so they developed two proposals: Garrison proposed peaceful co-existence; and, Ravarour proposed demonstrations for LGBT rights. Since Ravarour was a staff member of Intersection, he asked its director Reverend Laird Sutton for the use of the Intersection as a venue. Reverend Sutton recalled that Adrian asked about “using Intersection as a meeting place for a proposed new organization of LGBT youth of the Tenderloin…I knew that the proposal which Adrian and Billy had, while having great merit was not directly in keeping with the purpose of Intersection…therefore I said no…but urged them to take it to Glide.”. In “Beyond The Possible,” Janice Mirikitani confirmed that Reverend Laird Sutton was the person who had sent the youth who started Vanguard at Glide.

Since they were not affiliated with Glide, Phyllis Lyon provided Glide's community meeting room for the first meeting. Reverend Cecil Williams welcomed Ravarour and Garrison and offered the use of Glide as a venue for as long as needed. On the third meeting Ravarour and Garrison presented their proposals to the LGBT youth, who chose Ravarour's plan. As the adult leader and founder, Ravarour named Vanguard and led the Vanguard meetings throughout the fall 1965 into spring 1966. Ravarour realized the best chance to succeed would be through unity, so he taught the LGBT youth philosophical and historical principles of their rights to equality and the examples of Gandhi, and Dr. King, so they would gain a philosophy to act from and to become a force of its own. Decades later Reverend Larry Mamiya recalled his own role as Glide’s Advisor to Vanguard’s in his “Memoir” that, "Vanguard was the first group of largely gay young people in the nation organized by Adrian Ravarour (later the Rev. Dr. Ravarour). He would always be introduced at Vanguard events as the “founder.” At that time, I did not know about the background of Adrian’s founding philosophy, which included Mohandas Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. among others. But it certainly was in harmony with my own views about the role of nonviolence in social change movements. In retrospect, Vanguard can be seen as the spearhead of a nonviolent social change movement of young gay people, the first in the nation dedicated to bringing about social justice and equal rights."

During the first phase of Vanguard, Fall 1965 to Spring 1966, the prominent members of Vanguard were Juan Elorreaga, Dixie Russo, Billy Garrison, Joel Williams, January Ferguson, plus transient youth intrigued by the idea that the LGBT tenderloin youth deserved respect and equal rights. Since Glide did not as yet advise Vanguard, it contacted Glide's minister Ed Hansen with a request to use Glide’s basement for the 1965 Vanguard Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners- that he attended. Reverend Hansen remembered his contact with Vanguard as minimal, “Rather than being "assigned" to meet with Vanguard...I don't remember how many times I met with Vanguard, except that it was certainly more than once and likely only a few times before I left to return to Claremont.”

In the spring of 1966, Vanguard members picketed small business that refused to serve the LGBT youth. When others asked Vanguard to demonstrate their causes, Ravarour insisted Vanguard maintains its focus on LGBT rights. In April Glide requested an official Vanguard representative meet with them, but Ravarour declined a title. And so, Vanguard advertised elections that attracted JP Marat who joined Vanguard and was elected president and firebrand spokesperson. With Marat’s election Ravarour ceased in his leadership role. On May 30, 1966 Reverend Hansen visited Vanguard with Glide’s offer to sponsor Vanguard, and the Vanguard members voted in approval and accepted Glide’s sponsorship.

Glide began to sponsor Vanguard in June 1966. Glide encouraged Vanguard to apply for non-profit status. Reverend Hansen began to attend meetings and walked them through the non-profit application engendering enormous gratitude. JP Marat was unanimously re-elected for the non-profit application. Reverend Larry Mamiya was appointed as Glide's first Advisor to Vanguard and he was recognized and loved for his selfless generosity and astute handing of any problems that he navigated on behalf of Vanguard youth. Reverend Mamiya founded the popular and lucrative weekend Vanguard Dances that added social dimensions and transformed Vanguard.

Vanguard was open-ended to which everyone added their talents. A consultant, Mark Forrester assisted it to apply for War on Poverty EOC funds. Joel Roberts, joined in June, and he assisted consultant Mark Forrester. In June, Vanguard briefly responded to minor complaints about Compton’s; but in July, Roberts and Forrester organized a major picketing of Compton's Cafeteria for LGBT rights. Hundreds of LGBT people attended the weekend Friday and Saturday Vanguard dances that Mr Friday contributed his talents as the DJ. Once Vanguard was sponsored, Reverend Larry Mamiya identified Reverends Louis Durham, Vaughn Smith and Cecil Williams as the ministers overseeing Vanguard. And, he witnessed numerous times that Ravarour was “called the founder of Vanguard by the DJ at the dances and JP and the kids.” Despite hundred attending the dances, the individuals in the membership remained relatively the same, with only small gains.

In August, the Doggie Diner Stand-off and Compton’s Riot occurred. In the morning of the Compton’s Riot, Dixie Russo- who headed Vanguard’s street queen coalition- ordered coffee, and when refused service, broke the sugar container. For the next five hours, seventeen police in riot-gear surrounded Russo, Williams, Ravarour and others. When the police finally withdrew it felt as if new freedom had been won. Word spread throughout the day that diminished fears of reprisal and gave hope for freedom. It seemed that many people were emboldened by Dixie’s confrontation and victory. That night when one of the Tenderloin street queens was insulted inside Compton’s Cafeteria, all Hell broke loose as they revolted in their demand for respect, which is historically known as the Compton’s Riot.

Vanguard protested several times in the fall; but the last months of 1966 were problematic as Marat’s requests for a salary were denied, so he lessened his activities. When he resigned as magazine editor, a new member Keith was elected editor in November. Finally, Marat withdrew Vanguard from Glide, but it fell apart. During January 1967, Vanguard was granted non-profit status and its incorporation papers arrived so Glide attempted to revive Vanguard. But in a few months the magazine stated that Vanguard was dysfunctional, and that the magazine no longer represented the defunct organization. Dixie Russo initially led some of the Vanguard members to form the short lived Gay and Lesbian Center. The WOP monies earmarked for The Vanguard Tenderloin Youth Organization went on to form The Hospitality House that exists today as Vanguard’s progeny and heir.

1969

On March 28, 1969 in San Francisco, Leo Laurence (the editor of Vector, magazine of the United States' largest homophile organization, the Society for Individual Rights) called for "the Homosexual Revolution of 1969," exhorting gay men and lesbians to join the Black Panthers and other left-wing groups and to "come out" en masse. Laurence was expelled from the organization in May for characterizing members as "timid" and "middle-class, uptight, bitchy old queens."

Leo Laurence then co-founded a militant group the Committee for Homosexual Freedom with Gale Whittington, Mother Boats, Morris Kight and others. Gale Whittington a young man who had been fired from States Steamship Company for being openly gay, after a photo of him by Mother Boats appeared in the Berkley Barb, next to the headline "HOMOS, DON'T HIDE IT!", the revolutionary article by Leo Laurence. The same month Carl Wittman, a member of CHF, began writing Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, which would later be described as "the bible of Gay Liberation". It was first published in the San Francisco Free Press and distributed nationwide, all the way to New York City, as was the Berkeley Barb with Leo's stories on CHF's gay guerilla militant initiatives and Mother Boats' photographs. CHF was soon to become renamed as Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The GLF's statement of purpose explained their revolutionary ambitions:

We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society's attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature.

Gay Liberation Front activist Martha Shelley wrote, "We are women and men who, from the time of our earliest memories, have been in revolt against the sex-role structure and nuclear family structure."

In December 1969 the Gay Liberation Front voted a cash donation to the Black Panthers, some of whose leaders had expressed homophobic sentiments. Prominent GLF members were also strong supporters of Fidel Castro's regime. These actions cost GLF, a numerically small group, popular support in New York City, and some of its members left to form the Gay Activists' Alliance. The GLF virtually disappeared from the New York City political scene after the first Stonewall commemoration parade in 1970.

Mark Segal, a member of GLF from 1969–71, continues to push gay rights in various venues. As a pioneer of the local gay press movement, he was one of the founders and former president of both the National Gay Press Association and the National Gay Newspaper Guild. He also is the founder and publisher of the award winning Philadelphia Gay News which recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. In 1973 Segal disrupted the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, an event covered in newspapers across the country and viewed by 60% of American households, many seeing or hearing about homosexuality for the first time. Before the networks agreed to put a stop to censorship and bias in the news division, Segal went on to disrupt The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, and Barbara Walters on the Today show. The trade newspaper Variety claimed that Segal had cost the industry $750,000 in production, tape delays and lost advertising revenue. Aside from publishing, Segal has also reported on gay life from far reaching places as Lebanon, Cuba, and East Berlin during the fall of the Berlin Wall. He and Bob Ross, former publisher of San Francisco's Bar Area Reporter represented the gay press and lectured in Moscow and St. Petersburg at Russia's first openly gay conference, referred to as Russia's Stonewall. He recently coordinated a network of local gay publications nationally to celebrate October as gay history month, with a combined print run reaching over a half million people. His determination to gain acceptance and respect for the gay press can be summed up by his 15-year battle to gain membership in the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association one of the nation's oldest and most respected organizations for daily and weekly newspapers. The battle ended after the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette joined forces and called for PGN's membership. In 2005, he produced Philadelphia's official July 4 concert for a crowd estimated at 500,000 people. The show featured Sir Elton John, Pattie LaBelle, Bryan Adams, and Rufus Wainwright. On a recent anniversary of PGN an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer stated "Segal and PGN continue to step up admirably to the challenge set for newspapers by H.L. Mencken: to afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted."

1970s

By the summer of 1970, groups in at least eight American cities were sufficiently organized to schedule simultaneous events commemorating the Stonewall riots for the last Sunday in June. The events varied from a highly political march of three to five thousand in New York and thousands more at parades in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. While groups using the Gay Liberation Front name appeared around the U.S., in New York that organization was replaced totally by the Gay Activist Alliance. Groups with a "Gay Lib" approach began to spring up around the world, such as Campaign Against Moral Persecution (CAMP, Inc.), and Gay Liberation Front groups in Australia, Canada, the US and the UK. The lesbian group Lavender Menace was also formed in the U.S in response to both the male domination of other Gay Lib groups and the anti-lesbian sentiment in the Women's Movement. Lesbianism was advocated as a feminist choice for women, and the first currents of lesbian separatism began to emerge.

In August of the same year, Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers, publicly expressed his support for gay liberation, stating that:

Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women (and I speak of the homosexuals and women as oppressed groups), we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion.

[...]

Some people say that [homosexuality] is the decadence of capitalism. I don't know if that is the case; I rather doubt it. But whatever the case is, we know that homosexuality is a fact that exists, and we must understand it in its purest form: that is, a person should have the freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants.

This was in contrast to previous comments made by leaders of the Black Panthers party, as well as in contrast to various feminist movements of the time. Although a short-lived group, the Comite Pederastique de la Sorbonne, had meetings during the student uprising of May 1968, the real public debut of the modern gay liberation movement in France occurred on 10 March 1971, when a group of lesbians from the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR) disrupted a live radio broadcast entitled: "Homosexuality, This Painful Problem". The expert guests, including Ira C. Kleinberg, Herman Kleinstein, a Catholic priest, and a dwarf, were suddenly interrupted by a group of lesbians from the audience, yelling, "It's not true, we're not suffering! Down with the heterocops!" The protesters stormed the stage, one young woman taking hold of the priest’s head and pounding it repeatedly against the table. The control room quickly cut off the microphones and switched to recorded music.

Sources

• Hoffman, Amy (2007) An Army of Ex-Lovers: My life at the Gay Community News. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1558496217.