July 4, 1969, one week after the start of the Stonewall riots: In Philadelphia, in front of Independence Hall, about forty lesbians and gay men marched in an oblong single file, just as they had every Fourth of July since 1965. It was the Annual Reminder Day Demonstration, sponsored by the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO), which included the Janus Society and the Homophile Action League of Philadelphia, the Mattachine Society New York and New York Daughters of Bilitis, and Frank Kameny’s Mattachine Society Washington. The name of the event itself, “Annual Reminder Day,” hinted at the infinite patience of these homophile groups. Yet again, they were reminding the country that things were still not right for some of its people.
As usual, the picketers handed out leaflets that decorously stated that July 4 was “a day for serious, solemn, and probing thought . . . a day to properly ask if we are guaranteeing to all our citizens [the promises inherent] in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.”1 As usual, too, they were dressed, as Len Lear, a reporter for the Philadelphia Tribune described them, to “look like they were going to church.”2 And they marched in silence, as usual. Except that something had changed.
The forty homophiles were joined by about thirty-five young demonstrators from New York. No one had told the young people that there was a dress protocol at the Annual Reminders—and they probably wouldn’t have given up their jeans and T-shirts anyway. They’d come to Philadelphia because they’d seen circulars posted on the streets of Greenwich Village or an ad in the July 3 Village Voice. The announcements had been paid for by Craig Rodwell in the name of his Homophile Youth Movement in Neighborhoods (HYMN), a small group he hadn’t before been able to get off the ground: “Gay Is Good,” the announcements began and promised that HYMN would be chartering buses to Philadelphia so that New York gays and lesbians could support the Fifth Annual Reminder Day Demonstration. Round trip $5; for students only $4.3 The young people who showed up in Philadelphia with Rodwell were a different breed from the homophile picketers.
When Frank Kameny saw sandaled, bearded, and Zapata-mustachioed homosexuals jump down from the buses and run to join the picket line, he restrained himself from commenting other than to shout at them that the rules were “No talking or chanting!” and “Walk in single file!” They obediently got in line with the homophiles, a rag-tag band trailing the mirror image of Middle America.
The older homophiles didn’t know it yet, but the parameters of daring had been expanded exponentially by the events of June 28 to July 2. After thirty minutes or so, two T-shirt-clad lesbians broke out of single file. Not only did they walk side by side—they held hands. Kameny could no longer hold his tongue. Screaming, “You can’t do that! You can’t do that!” he rushed over to them and slapped their hands apart. That gesture triggered an uproar. Nineteen-year-old Bill Weaver found a black marker, crossed out the meek “Equality for Homosexuals” message on the sign he was carrying and wrote in its place “Smash Sexual Fascism!” Craig Rodwell, who’d been walking just behind the two women, was so furious with Kameny that he pulled his group into a caucus and got twenty of the young people he’d brought with him from New York to break ranks and march in couples, holding hands.4 Frank Kameny may have fathered “Gay Is Good.” He may have fought Uncle Sam and squeezed crucial concessions from the US Civil Service Commission. But he was a product of the repressive midcentury, and he was stodgy in his dress and manner. He hadn’t experienced the joyful intoxication of the Stonewall riots. He didn’t understand that what happened there had already changed the world—or at least the world of urban gays. As far as Rodwell and the young people were concerned, the ways of the father were dead.5
• • •
Most of New York Mattachine Society was as bemused as Frank Kameny about what had suddenly made homophiles irrelevant. “What did the young ones mean by ‘gay power’ and ‘gay liberation’?” “Price Dickenson,” the pseudonymous editor of the New York Mattachine Newsletter, demanded to know. He concluded that what young gays were asking for was nothing more than what “us doddering oldsters who had been working quietly and steadily in the homophile movement for lo these many years had been striving for”: Full equality for homosexuals. Repeal of sodomy laws. Municipal, state, and federal laws to prohibit discrimination. Laws that prohibit discrimination in private employment. Investigation of the police and other government officials for harassment. Prohibition of such harassment.6 But in style and substance, “gay power” seemed to be beyond the understanding of Mattachine’s newsletter editor with his heavy-handed “doddering oldsters” quip and his naivete in imagining that what these militant young people wanted could be reduced to a simplistic list of civil rights demands.
Yet Dick Leitsch, the executive director of Mattachine (who sometimes wrote under the name “Price Dickenson”), seemed to understand how Stonewall had changed the meaning of gay. He’d said as much the day after the first riot, when he coined the campy moniker “the hairpin drop heard round the world.” Leitsch had on occasion seen himself as much more radical than his fellow homophiles. He’d been critical from the start about the style of Frank Kameny’s orderly tactics. They won’t get the attention of newspaper reporters and television cameras, Leitsch had warned Kameny in July 1965. “We need something to catch the public’s imagination . . . The Negroes have King to talk, and that haunting ‘We Shall Overcome.’ . . . The suffragists dramatically chained themselves to lampposts . . . We’ve got to find something,” Leitsch concluded—astutely presaging Stonewall by four years.7
He also told Frank Kameny to stop pretending all gays wanted to meet the criteria of middle-class respectability and their only problem was that the federal government wouldn’t give them security clearances. At a San Francisco meeting of homophile leaders in September 1965, Kameny had lectured about the importance of “packaging a good image” of the homosexual. Leitsch didn’t like that either. “What is a good image? Young, attractive, well-dressed people who are almost no different than anyone else?” Leitsch lectured the older man. “The homosexual’s concerns are wider. What about ‘cruising,’ ‘drag,’ and other issues which do not fit? [What about] sodomy charges in men’s rooms and other ‘distasteful’ matters? “THEY ARE OUR PROBLEMS [sic],” he wrote, sounding very much like post-Stonewall gays in his disdain for anything that smacked of the conventional or careful.8 “The homosexual freedom movement,” he insisted (coining a phrase that augured “the gay liberation movement”), “is an attack on conformity.”9
But by 1969, Dick Leitsch was in his midthirties, and he wore suits and ties, as all middle-class men of his generation did. A contemporary described him as looking like a “dependable Cartier salesclerk.”10 To young gays, he was indeed one of the “doddering oldsters.” Craig Rodwell, who’d sat at Leitsch’s side during the 1966 sip-in at Julius’, now even accused him of being less interested in supporting militant tactics to empower gay people than in becoming “a mere politician”11 toadying up to Mayor Lindsay—whose signed picture, which showed him to be as handsome as John Kennedy, Leitsch kept on his office wall.
Yet one young gay radical briefly saw Dick Leitsch differently. Michael Brown had been part of John O’Brien’s group who’d met at Alternate U and had tried to get some radical gay action going in the weeks just before the explosion at the Stonewall. Now Brown read “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World” and came to Leitsch’s Mattachine office with praise—and an idea. “Mattachine needs to build on the energy of the Stonewall riots,” he told Leitsch, and offered to distribute copies of “The Hairpin Drop” all over the Village. The twenty-eight-year-old Brown, an activist with proud left-wing credentials, had spent years in the black civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. He told Leitsch he would help bring into Mattachine young gays and lesbians who’d honed their skills, as he had, by working for left-wing causes and who would apply what they’d learned to the homosexual movement.
His radical spiel about how gays needed to aid in a complete overhaul of society made Leitsch uncomfortable. Despite Leitsch’s own dabbling on the Left,12 for him Mattachine had only one purpose: to procure the rights of homosexuals. Nevertheless, Brown’s idea of bringing energetic new blood into Mattachine had obvious appeal. For years Leitsch had thought that the movement needed to find dramatic ways to make homosexual demands known.13 For that reason, he agreed: Michael Brown would bring together young activists like himself and start a group called the Mattachine Action Committee, which would meet at Freedom House, where all Mattachine meetings were now held.
Brown invited his friends, people in his own image. One of them was Martha Shelley—a self-described “red-diaper baby,” given to wearing owl-eye eyeglasses and looking not at all like the “blue-eyed, blond stewardess” she thought you had to be to find a girlfriend in the bars. Shelley had joined Daughters of Bilitis to meet other lesbians, but the group was never a good fit for her. She was much more comfortable with her fellow workers in the antiwar movement and the feminist movement. Shelley loathed Dick Leitsch after she overheard him referring to the women in his presence with a silly remark that passed for wit among some homosexual men at the time: “Who opened the tuna fish can?”14
Lois Hart, another of Brown’s invitees to the Mattachine Action Committee, was a former nun and then a follower of Timothy Leary and the Indian mystic Meher Baba. Pixie-ish in appearance, with light, bright eyes (but so tough that the drag queens of Greenwich Village called her “Louie Hard”),15 Hart was an articulate, staunch feminist. She shared Shelley’s intense dislike of Dick Leitsch, bitterly accusing him of male chauvinist piggery. Another friend whom Michael Brown invited to join the Mattachine Action Committee was Robert Martin, a bisexual who took the pseudonym Stephen Donaldson because his disapproving father, a naval officer, was also called Robert Martin. Donaldson had briefly been Martha Shelley’s lover16 and was now her political ally, even calling the cerebral Shelley his “political mentor.” In 1967 he’d had an angry exchange with Leitsch over whether Donaldson had the right to use the Mattachine name for a homophile student group—the first of its kind—that Donaldson was starting at Columbia University. Because Mattachine’s bylaws prohibited members under twenty-one, Leitsch vehemently opposed the Columbia group appropriating his organization’s name.17 Forced to name his own group the Student Homophile League, Donaldson never forgave Leitsch.
So, distrust and dislike of Mattachine’s executive director was built into the Mattachine Action Committee; and other young radicals absorbed those opinions. The young people agreed that the committee should use Mattachine’s paper and mimeograph machine, but they should have nothing else to do with the decrepit organization.18
If Leitsch suspected that Brown’s group was brewing something inimical to Mattachine,19 he tried to ignore it. He had visions of expanding Mattachine through a great influx of the gay youth who’d been excited by the riots, and he planned to use the next Mattachine “Town Meeting” to reel them into his organization. Flyers were distributed all over the village announcing a “Homosexual Liberation Meeting” on July 9 and touting the “new spirit” that had been born out of Stonewall. The flyers invited all the “homosexual community” to “come to this meeting and express yourselves about what we can do to secure our rights.”
The meeting room in Freedom House was packed with 125 young people (and two police informers).20 As Mattachine’s executive director, Dick Leitsch ran the meeting. Things went south quickly when Michael Brown announced that gay people needed to show up in “power-to-the-people solidarity” at a forthcoming Black Panther demonstration. Leitsch blanched. Mattachine was formed to fight for the rights of the homosexual—period; and whether or not Leitsch was sympathetic personally to the struggles of other minorities, they were absolutely not the concern of Mattachine Society New York. When Martha Shelley raised her hand, Leitsch knew he had reason to worry again. She’d glowered at his attempts at humor in the past, and she was clearly of Brown’s political bent.
Shelley waved her hand in the air until Dick Leitsch finally called on her. She was thinking as she waited for him to recognize her, “What kind of danger am I getting myself into? What if the kooks out there shoot at us?” But she was remembering too the courage of Martin Luther King, whose framed picture hung on her wall, and she forced herself to proceed.21 She stood up and proposed a “Gay Power” rally in Washington Square Park to protest police treatment of homosexuals. It would be followed by a march to Sheridan Square Park, across from the Stonewall.
Leitsch had himself called for “dramatic action” on behalf of the movement a few years before—but was a march and rally the right sort of action now? Hadn’t he been making fine headway in the last years by cultivating liberal alliances in the “Establishment” who gave him an “in” at city hall? Under his leadership, Mattachine had gotten the police commissioner Howard Leary to order his officers to cease entrapping homosexuals.22 He’d gotten the State Liquor Authority to reverse its policy of prohibiting licensed bars from serving homosexuals. With the help of the New York Civil Liberties Union, he and Mattachine had forced the Department of Social Services to reverse its decision against hiring two homosexual men as welfare case workers; and because of Mattachine’s hard work, just two months earlier, in May, the New York Civil Service Commission had agreed that homosexuality “was no longer a barrier for all jobs under its jurisdiction.”23 Leitsch’s methods had been undeniably effective for the last three years.
He had great misgivings about Shelley’s proposal—yet he had no choice. “How many are in favor of a march and rally?” Dick Leitsch asked the crowded room.
Martha Shelley looked around and saw that every single person there was holding a hand up in the air.24
Dick Leitsch suggested that those interested in organizing a march and rally go off into a back room of Freedom House and come up with a plan. Perhaps Leitsch had hoped thereby to get a disruptive element out of the meeting. But it was the beginning of the end for homophile organizations.
The people who congregated in the back room—all in their twenties and all radicals—were of one mind. Just as Leo Laurence had concluded months before in San Francisco, they thought the homophiles were like the NAACP, and as gay radicals, they preferred to emulate the Black Panthers. To begin, they wanted to give themselves a title that would truly characterize them: something bold—something as politically confrontational as the “National Liberation Front,” a name that had been used by revolutionary socialist and Communist movements all over the world since World War II.
Someone blurted out, “Gay Liberation Front!” Martha Shelley, perched on a table because there weren’t enough chairs in the small room, cried, “That’s it! That’s it! That’s it! We’re the Gay Liberation Front!”25 her palm banging the table on which she sat. It was a hot summer afternoon, and several people had brought their soda or beer bottles into the room with them. A bottle cap was lying on the table that Shelley pounded over and over as she shouted, “That’s it!” She was so excited about the new name she didn’t even feel it when the cap cut her hand. She bled profusely.26
• • •
Dick Leitsch put as good a face on things as possible. Mattachine, together with Daughters of Bilitis, placed an ad in the Village Voice announcing (in language not at all characteristic of either organization) that they were sponsoring a “Gay Power” march and rally in July to commemorate the one-month anniversary of the Stonewall raid.27 Of course, neither organization had control over the tenor of the event. A crowd of about two thousand showed up that day in Washington Square Park. It was the largest planned congregation of gays and lesbians to that date.28 Gay Liberation Front members ran around distributing lavender ribbons and arm bands. They’d brought no sound system because that would have required a permit from the NYPD, and all agreed that the less they had to deal with the police the better.
In tune with the burgeoning women’s liberation movement, the Gay Liberation Front practiced gender parity. Martha Shelley was the woman chosen by the GLF to speak. Just five foot four, Shelley stood on a fountain rim to be seen better, and she spoke loud. “We’re tired of being harassed and persecuted. If a straight couple can hold hands in Washington Square Park, why can’t we? . . . Socrates was a homosexual! Michelangelo was a homosexual! Walt Whitman and Richard the Lion-Hearted were homosexuals!” Shelley shouted and was answered by energetic applause and whistles and cheers.29
Marty Robinson, the male rally speaker, proudly called himself “a hard hat”:30 a journeyman carpenter, though in hippie garb. The son of a doctor, Robinson had dropped out of Brooklyn College because, he said, he “couldn’t find in books what he wanted to learn.”31 But he theorized and orated better than anyone among the Gay Liberation Front crowd. Robinson had been present at the Stonewall riots, and for him, this rally and march was step two—the necessary next move. “Gay power is here! Gay power is not a laugh!” he shouted to his Washington Square Park audience. “There are one million homosexuals in New York City, and we will not permit another reign of terror. Let me tell you, homosexuals: We’ve got to get organized. We’ve got to stand up. This is our chance!”32
The fired-up crowd marched toward Sheridan Square behind a big lavender banner decorated with both double male sex signs and double female sex signs. A young gay led a cheer for gay power: “Give me a G! Give me an A! Give me a Y! Give me a P! . . .” Traffic ground to a halt on Sixth Avenue as the marchers passed. Facing the Stonewall Inn, they bellowed out the words to “We Shall Overcome.” New York had never yet seen anything like this.33
• • •
“Do You Think Homosexuals Are Revolting? You Bet Your Sweet Ass We Are!” was the headline of a flyer calling gay people to a meeting at Alternate U. Dick Leitsch had not yet fully understood that this new group (that promised in the same flyer, “We’re going to make a place for ourselves in the revolutionary movement”) had severed itself totally from Mattachine, and that in good Freudian fashion, the homophiles—fathers and mothers of gay libbers—had to be killed off.
The next month, August, the Gay Liberation Front showed up in Kansas City at the annual meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations. The homophiles had no notion that Stonewall had been the gays’ storming of the Bastille and their Boston Tea Party all wrapped into one. The GLF-ers were there to let them know it. In 1968, the NACHO conference made a gesture toward militancy when it adopted the slogan coined by Kameny, “Gay Is Good.” But that baby step of defiance was nothing to what Gay Liberation Front members were demanding.
GLF’s Stephen Donaldson34 presented to the forty other NACHO delegates at the Kansas City meeting a scathing criticism in the form of a manifesto that let the doddering oldsters know just how antediluvian they were. “The Homophile Movement Must Be Radicalized!” the manifesto was titled. The homophiles’ long and dogged fight for homosexual rights was ineffectual and naïve. “Our enemies”—organized religion, business, and medicine were specifically named—“will not be moved by appeasement or appeals to reason and justice, but only by power and force,” the manifesto lectured the homophiles. “If the detention camps are filled tomorrow with blacks, hippies, and other radicals, [homosexuals] will not escape that fate,” no matter how hard the homophile organizations try to “dissociate” themselves from “other victims of oppression and prejudice.” “A common struggle, however, will bring common triumph,” the manifesto promised. Furthermore, it informed NACHO, the homophile movement had the responsibility to “totally reject the insane war in Vietnam and refuse to encourage complicity in the war and support of the war machine, which may well be turned against us.”35 Every part of “The Homophile Movement Must Be Radicalized!”—even the language in which it was couched—was over the top and insulting to NACHO. Members refused to adopt the radicals’ position.
But by the following year, there were radical gay groups, inspired by Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Front, all across the country. At the 1970 NACHO convention in San Francisco, the “radical caucus” decided that the time had come simply to declare that it was NACHO—and to take over the organization. A rumor circulated among the homophile delegates that one of the radicals had a gun and swore to use it if the radicals’ resolutions were not adopted. On the third day of the convention, the radicals marched into the plenary session waving banners with gay-power-to-gay-people messages. Most of the homophile delegates walked or ran to the nearest exit, and NACHO’s chairman, Bill Wynne, adjourned the conference. The radical caucus took over the gavel and continued anyway.36 The first motion from the floor was that NACHO officially declare its support for the Black Panther Party.
The motion passed. But that 1970 meeting was NACHO’s last one. The 1971 convention was canceled, and in 1972 NACHO disbanded.
Radical gays also descended on the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. Jim Fouratt, a colorful twenty-four-year-old GLF-er with a leonine mane of blond hair, was their most hostile spokesman. He was disgusted with the fogeys. (The feeling was mutual.) Fouratt, who was given to wearing leather pants, snakeskin boots, and a cowboy hat, was described by an Esquire writer as looking like Billy the Kid.37 He’d been a rioter at Stonewall. He’d also been arrested in a 1965 Times Square antiwar protest. He’d dreamed up a 1967 antiwar agitprop action on Wall Street: Yippies, which he’d helped found, threw dollar bills from the balcony down onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to show their disdain for the capitalist-financed war machine.38 To Fouratt, there was not much difference between Wall Street types and the ERCHO bunch. “Lackeys of the Establishment!” and “Dinosaurs!” he bombastically dubbed ERCHO’s chief leaders Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings.39 (Kay Tobin, Gittings’s partner, had small stuffed dinosaurs made up as soon as possible, which the trio displayed with glee.)40
A scathing battle ensued when the radicals tried to get ERCHO to go on record as urging all homosexuals to participate in the antiwar Moratorium March on Washington. Homophiles popped up to the microphone to shout, “We can’t do that! No group can dare speak for all homosexuals!” “ERCHO deals with the problems of homosexuals, not the problems of the world!” “Homosexuals are just like other people! We range from the most conservative to the most radical, and that’s our right!” ERCHO would not take a stand on the Moratorium.
But one radical resolution did get passed at the ERCHO convention. It was drafted at a little dinner party in the Greenwich Village apartment that Craig Rodwell shared with his lover Fred Sargeant. A young lesbian couple, Linda Rhodes and Ellen Broidy, who’d made Rodwell’s Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop a regular hangout in between classes at New York University, had been the dinner guests; and over dessert and coffee, the four wrote a resolution to be presented at ERCHO.
Rodwell had spearheaded the writing of the resolution, but he knew that by now he’d made himself so controversial among the homophiles that if he were the one to bring the resolution to the floor they’d see only the messenger and be deaf to the message. So he asked Broidy, an attractive, dark-haired twenty-three-year-old, to stand up and present the resolution as her own.41 There on the floor of the convention of the eastern region homophiles, Broidy called for an official end to the Fourth of July Annual Reminder Day demonstration in Philadelphia. “Reminder Day has lost its effectiveness,” she proclaimed, “because it’s become just one of many demonstrations held at Independence Hall on that day.” In its place, every year on the last Saturday of June there should be “Christopher Street Liberation Day” demonstrations nationwide to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots. And—very important to the four radicals who wrote the resolution—“no dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.”42
Not even those four could have predicted their resolution’s enduring power, which would still be working decades later to mobilize hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gays in Pride Parades across the country every year, and to pull them out of the closet.
ERCHO, however, soon disbanded.
• • •
By the end of July 1969, Gay Liberation Front members formulated a statement of purpose whose tone mirrored the uncompromising militancy of groups such as the Black Panthers, with whom many of the GLF-ers, especially the men, had a spiritual romance.43 GLF defined itself as a “revolutionary group of men and women” that had formed with the realization that “sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished.” GLF would do that, the statement of purpose declared, by creating new social forms based on “brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality.” But those peaceable forms couldn’t be realized yet because “Babylon” (that is, “Amerika”) was corrupt. So for the time being, GLF would be “forced to commit ourselves to one thing: revolution!”44
Every week, GLF-ers sat in a circle—GLF lesbians who admired the circle tradition among Native American cultures demanded that formation45—and they raised one another’s consciousness about other groups who suffered oppression at the hands of Amerika, and about their own oppression as gays. Nikos Diaman had just been passing through New York, a San Franciscan on his way to Paris, where he’d planned to live for a year. The gay life he’d known before was in bars and bedrooms, and as a Catholic, he’d felt he was being eaten up by guilt. But after a New York friend took him to GLF, Diaman canceled his Paris plans. For the first time in his life, he found himself sitting with a group of gay people who were talking not about their cowering fear of police busts but about fighting police and being out and proud and guilt free. The personal part of consciousness raising was ecstatically empowering for Diaman and for many GLF-ers like him.46
But GLF had a stern sense of who belonged and who did not. One evening, a strange-looking couple showed up at a GLF meeting: a man and a woman who were older than the mostly twentysomethings. The couple stuck out, too, because they weren’t dressed in unisex jeans, the uniform of GLF, but instead they wore bougie male and female clothes. The couple was Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, who’d come to New York to check out this new group that had taken over the homophile organizations, which Kameny and Gittings had so lovingly birthed and nurtured.“Who are you?” a GLF-er asked them. Kameny was taken aback that political gays didn’t recognize him. “What are you doing here?” another GLF-er asked after he and Gittings gave their names. “I’m here because I’m a homosexual,” Gittings said,47 as though the mere fact of sexual identity should make her and Kameny welcome in GLF. It didn’t.
To avoid hierarchy and hegemony, which GLF-ers despised, there were no official leaders of the Gay Liberation Front. The group grew quickly, but there were no membership rolls. Anyone who showed up (and wasn’t dressed bougie) was a member in good standing and had a voice in making decisions. The plethora of voices at general meetings—the passionate pontificating, endless theorizing, disputatious debating—produced chaos.48 Lois Hart, the Meher Baba devotee, argued that the group’s “many mentalities, disparities, and persuasions” needed to be accommodated. That could be done, she suggested, by creating “cells,” a structure based on the Communist model of carrying out tasks in small working groups. The cells would tap the best of its members’ energies and talents by being attentive to their “needs, goals, and philosophies,” and thus promote harmony. Everyone agreed.49
But then the cells fought one another ferociously. Lois Hart suggested that GLF try Communist-style “self-criticism” to hold in check the criticism that was directed at others. Everyone would sit in a circle and analyze aloud what he or she had done wrong.50 But the hostility and paranoia didn’t stop. Members of the Third World Revolutionary Cell told members of the 28th of June Cell, which produced the GLF magazine Come Out!, “You’re running a white racist paper,” and they issued a “nonnegotiable demand” that sections of the paper be devoted to them. Perry Brass, a usually mild-mannered poet who’d taken on the job of editor, agreed. But he asked that the Third World Revolutionaries help to sell Come Out! in the streets, since there were few stores that would distribute it. The Third World Revolutionaries thought that sales should not have to be their job—that’s what the Come Out! cell was for. “That’s insane!” Brass said. “You’re a racist!” the TWR said.51
There was contention between affiliated GLF groups, too. The Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which was formed by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, couldn’t be in the same room with the Radicalesbians. STAR stood up for the rights of effeminate street kids to be as girlie as they pleased, but Radicalesbians complained that their girlie-ness mocked women because they flaunted the worst stereotypes of femininity—and that violated GLF’s supposed principles to fight against sexist oppression.
Harmony reigned, however, at GLF dances—at least for some. Perry Brass first heard about the Gay Liberation Front through an ad that advertised a “Gay Community Dance.” He’d never before seen the word gay coupled with community—and that there should be a dance for the gay community was beyond his happiest dreams.52 A grungy Mafia bar was no longer the only game in town because now every Saturday evening you could go up to the third floor of Alternate U. There you paid your mere buck fifty and walked into a paradise of wall-to-wall writhing muscled bodies, hundreds of them, shirtless and sexy and free, dancing to acid rock played on a tape deck in a huge room lit by swirling psychedelic light-show slides. And when you were thirsty, a beer was twenty-five cents, not the gauging prices of the bars. And your coat was checked for free. And when you were standing alone and lonely, a GLF “host” came around and encouraged you to grab a partner and dance.53 What better way to build community and spread the word about the Gay Liberation Front and even raise a bit of money for the movement?
Except that lesbians felt excluded. About 15 percent of the attendees at the Alternate U Saturday nights were female, and, they objected, the Gay Community Dances did not make them feel they were part of the “Gay Community.” Ellen Shumsky had thought she was a good fit with the Gay Liberation Front. She’d been to Cuba as a volunteer to work on a coffee plantation in 1968, a year before the Vinceremos Brigade brought other young leftist Americans to Cuba to help pick the harvests. Then she’d gone to Paris to study photography, and she’d interrupted her studies when she heard about Stonewall: Shumsky returned to New York to be the photographer of the gay revolution. But she resented that the dances “were conducted with a male sensibility.” There was no place women could dance in groups, no place to talk. “Just bodies packed in and a lot of skin and a lot of contact.” Most of the other lesbians of GLF agreed. They fought with the men until they finally managed to get money from GLF coffers to hold their own dance.54
• • •
Despite such dissensions, the idealistic image of revolutionaries banding together caught the imagination of young gays and lesbians who were brought up on the nightly news of civil rights and antiwar struggles. Gay Liberation Fronts sprang up not only in the coastal areas of the east and west but also in places such as Iowa City, Louisville, Atlanta, and Tallahassee (and in England, Germany, Denmark, and New Zealand, too). Some of the groups, less theoretical and philosophical than the parent GLF, were more focused as they went about the job of creating a more just world. The Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, enraged by both the Vietnam War and the armed forces’ mistreatment of gays in the military, encouraged all gay service members to get out as quickly as possible. “You Are Not Wanted in the Military,” a GLF pamphlet announced, prodding gays to righteous anger because they “constitute the only minority against which the government and the military practice open and flagrant discrimination.” Tragedy lurks if gays remain in the military, the pamphlet warned: “You are vulnerable to prosecution for being your loving self. You have only one alternative, and that is to see your local Gay Liberation Front.”55
Gay Liberation Front groups around the country fought serious battles, but not always in serious style. John Singer had been a member of Homosexuals Intransigent! when he was a student at City College in New York; in 1970, after he moved to California, he joined San Francisco GLF. He changed his name to Faygele (the Yiddish word for “little bird” but also slang for faggot) ben Miriam (son of Miriam). Faygele ben Miriam did agitprop scenes on behalf of GLF, like the one at Macy’s department store in San Francisco, where the SFPD had been entrapping gay men in the restrooms. Faygele and another GLF-er, wearing elaborate women’s hats with huge feathers, started at the top floor of Macy’s. They walked up to employees and offered to sell them a newspaper—Gay Sunshine—and when they got kicked off that floor, they peddled Gay Sunshine one floor down until they were asked to leave. And then they worked the next floor and the next, until employees on every floor of Macy’s understood that the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front was incensed that Macy’s management had let the police come into the store to arrest gay men.56
The next year, Faygele moved to Seattle and joined a Gay Liberation Front there. He was especially riled at Seattle police chief George Tielsch’s practice of sending “pretty, young cops” to the parks for the old sting. If gays hit on them, they’d be arrested for propositioning a police officer. Faygele and Paul Barwick, another GLF member, organized a weekly agitprop protest that would turn out a crowd of participants who came at least partly “because it was fun.” Through a friend who worked at the telephone company, Faygele and Barwick found Chief Tielsch’s address. Through another friend who had a livery service, they procured an old stretch limousine, which they loaded up with GLF activists, many in “scag drag” (dresses and beards). And they went in style to have a party—every weekend for two months—in front of Chief Tielsch’s house, until they won a sweet victory: Tielsch admitted to the newspapers that he was taking a job in Garden Grove, California, “because of the situation that’s arisen with the gay community.”57
The mother of all GLF agitprops, the Alpine County prank that came out of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, sent a message much more global than the usual protests against police harassment. The prank shined a giant spotlight on the silliness of antihomosexual hysteria. It was played out with the same mix of gleeful mischief and wrath as the Stonewall queens’ game of outrunning their NYPD pursuers only to show up at their backs and torment them with a can-can dance. But the Alpine County agitprop got more immediate media attention than did the Stonewall riots. In 1970 and 1971, it brought word of the Gay Liberation Front into newspapers all over America and abroad, too. It apprised homosexuals everywhere that myriad gays and lesbians had come out and were fighting the good fight, and those still in the closet ought to join them. And that was the primary goal of the prank’s organizers.
LA’s Gay Liberation Front had begun three months after the New York group. Morris Kight, the man who was a midwife to its birth, was fifty, older by decades than the New York founders. But Kight had cut his activist teeth in 1967 by forming the Dow Action Committee against the chemical company that made the napalm and Agent Orange used in Vietnam, and he resonated with New York GLF’s radical position that the gay revolution had to be tied to a revolution of all the oppressed.58
Harry Hay—the man who’d been the founder of Mattachine, the group that pioneered the idea in 1950 that homosexuals were a legitimate minority and needed to organize—was the nominal first leader of the leaderless LA Gay Liberation Front. But less than a year after the Los Angeles GLF started, Hay and his lover, John Burnside, moved to San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico, where they eventually formed Radical Faeries, a queer spirituality group. Morris Kight donned Hay’s elder statesman mantle and never took it off.
Kight’s dazzling white hair and aristocratic nose; his erudite, polysyllabic, and excessively formal language (thieves were “brigands,” men were “sir,” women were “dear lady”)—all made him seem an unlikely leader of a radical group. His critics thought him not only pompous but also egomaniacal for his trick of jabbing an elbow into other activists to grab the spotlight for himself at least as much as for the movement.59 But he was almost always the guy with the most interesting ideas, and his followers followed.
Kight’s Alpine County prank began as a serious plan after a Bay Area gay, Don Jackson, read Carl Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” which was published in the San Francisco Free Press in December 1969. Jackson was inspired to imagine a “Stonewall Nation,” run by gays and for gays. By the time he presented a proposal to a Gay Liberation Conference at Berkeley, Jackson had his plan down to specifics. He’d been thrilled to discover that Alpine County, a wonderland of pine forests and crystalline lakes nestled in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, had only 384 registered voters; and a new California law mandated that residency requirements for voters be reduced from one year to ninety days. If a mere four hundred gay people took up residency in Alpine County, within ninety days they could outvote the mountaineers, woodsmen, and fisherman who were its present residents. The entire local government could be recalled, and in its place, gays could put in a gay sheriff, a gay judge, gay council members—even a gay postmaster. Alpine would become “a national refuge for persecuted homosexuals.” They’d live in utopian separatism. They’d create “a world center for the gay counter-culture and a shining symbol of hope to all gay people in the world,” Jackson declared very solemnly in his Berkeley presentation.60
He teamed up with the head of the Psychedelic Venus Church, Jefferson Fuck Poland (the same Fuck Poland who’d helped swell the ranks of Randy Wicker’s 1964 picket at New York’s Whitehall Induction Center), and together they started the Alpine Liberation Front in Berkeley. The Front’s primary purpose was to find a way to make the dream of the great gay migration to Alpine a reality. Jackson permitted an underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, to reprint his proposal in the hope it would attract future gay Alpiners. “Brother Don Has a Dream,” the essay was called.61
That was when Morris Kight first heard of the Alpine plan. Kight had been exceedingly frustrated because for months the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front had been conducting an agitprop a day to call attention to mistreatment of gays and lesbians in Los Angeles—but with the exception of underground papers, there’d been no media coverage. “You have to hit them over the head with a two-by-four before they’ll pay any attention to our issues,” Kight always complained.62 A gay and lesbian takeover of a whole county: now, that would certainly be a two-by-four! “Alpine is freezing. It’s no place where anyone gay would want to live,” he told three of his most trusted henchmen with whom he shared a house. “But we’ll pretend to be serious.” Then he got on the phone to call the members of the press and inform them about what the Gay Liberation Front was “planning.”
The media showed up as they never had before. “The Gay Liberation Front met and voted unanimously to take over Alpine—farms, ranches, crafts shops,” Kight announced to reporters and rolling cameras. “And there’ll be a university where gay and lesbian studies will be taught, too!” Yes, Alpine County would soon become a gay and lesbian “citadel of intellectual and activist activity,” Kight promised.63 He showed them a flyer GLF had printed up: “Come to Alpine County! The New Gay Mecca!”—and buttons in the spirit of the forty-niners, to be distributed to gay pioneers everywhere: “Alpine County or Bust!”
Gay became a household word as it never had been before: NBC Television News sent a crew out to Alpine. A star reporter, bundled to the nose but still shivering in the snow, announced, “We’re standing on the land bought by the Gay Liberation Front [untrue, of course], and here they’re going to build their homes.” Time magazine sent a crew to interview Los Angeles GLF leaders. “We’re doing what Governor Reagan and Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew told us to do”—Kight had to swallow a chortle to say it—“If you’re unhappy with the system, use your vote. It’s the American way.”64 When Kight told newsmen that about a dozen Gay Liberation Front members would be on the steps of the Alpine County courthouse in Merkleeville to meet the sheriff, the chairman of the board of supervisors, and the postmistress, the Associated Press reported the story faithfully. “We already have applications from over a thousand homosexuals,” Kight added with a poker face. “Our goal is to have six hundred located in the county by June 28, 1971!”65
The downside of the prank was that some gay people took the Alpine plan very seriously. Craig Schoonmaker, founder of Homosexuals Intransigent!, who’d called for homosexual separatism as a necessity in a homophobic world, thought that the takeover of a large piece of land like Alpine was exactly what was needed. It would be a homosexual homeland where gay men (lesbians would be excluded) could be “open and honest and take pride in themselves.”66 Don Jackson, the Alpine plan’s first proponent, devoted himself night and day to the dream—which grew larger and larger to match Kight’s reports of the multiplying numbers of (fictional) would-be pioneers.
Of course, Kight couldn’t tell many people that as far as he was concerned, the Alpine takeover was a giant hoax. Someone might leak the truth to the press, and that would be the end of all the delirious attention that a gay issue was finally getting. So a split developed even in the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front. Some wore their “Alpine or Bust” buttons as a huge joke. One elderly gay man came to every meeting with knitting needles and yarn, urging others to join him in knitting: “It’s going to be cold in Alpine County,” he said.“We’ll need blankets to keep our brothers and sisters warm.”67
Los Angeles GLF-ers who were in on the hoax were relishing the stick-it-to-’em pleasure. GLF member Don Kilhefner told the media, “Eventually Alpine County will become a mecca for homosexuals from all nations.”68 An Associated Press article reported that Herbert Bruns, an Alpine farmer and chairman of the board of supervisors, was beside himself with worry. “We have a real nice county here,” Bruns lamented. “We don’t know what we’re going to do if they succeed. We’ll try anything.”69 But the days of gays tolerating insults and intimidation were gone. Gay spokesman Lee Heflin apprised reporters firmly, “We plan to do this as peaceably as possible. But if there is vigilante action, we will defend ourselves in any way necessary.”70 A United Press International reporter, almost as jittery as Supervisor Bruns, reminded readers that “a district attorney, sheriff, and judge elected by a gay majority could determine which laws would be enforced.”71
The prank was too delicious to be terminated. At Thanksgiving, three GLF members decided to picnic up at Alpine, and Kight was sure to inform the press that the three were a “scouting party,” getting things ready for the gay invasion. UPI sent a photographer. He took pictures of Steve Beckwith, a Los Angeles accountant and spokesman for the “scouts,” standing at the county courthouse door with Rod Gibson and June Herrle, the two bearded men flanking the petite lesbian, all three decked out in heavy winter jackets and smiling broadly.72 “Thousands of gays have rallied to our cause [the number got bigger with every press coverage], and now we have international support,” Beckwith proclaimed.73
Never before had the word homosexual or gay gotten so much media attention; never before had gays and lesbians in little towns all over America—Carroll, Iowa; Big Spring, Texas; Kingsport, Tennessee; Anderson, Indiana—been able to pick up their local papers and read that gay people were answering years of mistreatment with gay power. And when Kight thought the Alpine prank had gotten all the press coverage it was going to get, he moved on, announcing to the media the following year that though the gays and lesbians he represented were still considering a takeover of Alpine, they were now also planning to buy an entire Southern California town and seven Sacramento River villages. In fact, he said, homosexuals are already there: “They have quietly moved into those villages in considerable number and are gradually colonizing them.”74
The resolution presented by Ellen Broidy at the final meeting of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations in 1969 had killed the Annual Reminder Day pickets in Philadelphia and replaced them with a march in New York to commemorate the Stonewall riots. June 28, 1970, was the first march. It was to start at Christopher Street and end up at Sheep Meadow in Central Park. The organizing committee had no idea what to expect. Would anyone show up? Would the marchers be beaten or spat at? Craig Rodwell’s partner, Fred Sargeant, was at the front of the march, and as the parade began to move up Sixth Avenue, he looked back. As far as he could see, solid throngs of marching gays and lesbians. So many that no one would dare beat them or spit at them. To get a better perspective, Sargeant shinnied up a light pole. Stretched out to infinity, it seemed, were marchers, thousands and thousands, like a powerful army. Never in history had so many gay and lesbian people come together in one place and for a common endeavor. The Tactical Police Force that menaced gays on the night of the Stonewall riots were there too—at the tail end of the parade, three busloads of them, assigned to protect the marchers.
For the fifty-one blocks of the route, the marchers screamed the same chant over and over: “Say it clear! Say it loud! Gay is good! Gay is proud!”75 It was a talisman to drive away the years of hateful propaganda, when the church, the cops, the priests, the government all colluded to tell homosexuals they were pariahs. It was a message to the straight world that gay people weren’t buying that disinformation anymore. It was nose thumbing at the dozen Bible-thumpers who gathered on the route with signs that shouted “Sodom And Gomorrah” or proclaimed that homosexuals were going to hell.76 It was a call to other homosexuals to come out of the closet and help fight the lies.
Craig Rodwell—who’d been waiting for years for the spark that would light the fire and who recognized immediately that the riot at Stonewall was what he’d been waiting for—had hoped there’d be sister parades all over America. Rodwell called gay leaders in big cities everywhere imploring them to commemorate Stonewall. But only media-savvy Morris Kight jumped on the idea. “Christopher Street West,” the parade in Los Angeles would be called. At the same time as New York gays and lesbians marched down Sixth Avenue, Los Angeles gays and lesbians would be marching down Hollywood Boulevard, sending the same message to the straight world and making the same call to other homosexuals to come out.
But the Los Angeles parade almost didn’t take place. The parade committee was obliged to obtain a permit from the Los Angeles police commissioner. They sent Reverend Troy Perry—who’d recently founded the gay Metropolitan Community Church—downtown to request it. Decked out in his clerical garb, Perry hoped for respect for the collar at least. He didn’t get it. Chief of Police Ed Davis—“Crazy Ed,” he was called by homosexuals for his rabid use of the LA Vice Squad in bar raids and entrapment—snarled at Reverend Perry: “Do you know that homosexuality is illegal in the state of California?”
It wasn’t—only certain sexual acts were illegal, and the reverend told the police chief so. They argued the point, until Davis, fed up with the facts, looked for an insult. “Well, I’d sooner give a parade permit to a bunch of robbers and thieves than to a bunch of homosexuals,” he grumped.77
The police commissioners were just as hostile. “There’ll be violence if homosexuals parade,” one of them said. The others agreed and decreed that Christopher Street West would have to put up a $1 million bond to cover the “personal damages” that would result from the riots, and a $500,000 bond to cover property damages. Plus, before a parade permit would be given, they’d have to put up the money it would cost to hire extra policemen to protect the homosexuals from the anticipated outrage of the citizens.
Perry immediately got in his car and drove to the office of ACLU attorney Herb Selwyn, a heterosexual who’d been helping gay men fight unfair arrests since the early 1950s. Selwyn knew that after the Watts riots in Los Angeles, black nationalists had gotten city permission to hold a black parade and festival every summer, and they weren’t assessed $1 million bonds and fees for extra policemen. It was good precedent. With only a few days left before the parade was scheduled to happen, Selwyn took Christopher Street West’s case before Superior Court judge Richard Schauer.
At noon on Friday, two days before the parade, the judge lit into the police commissioners for their glaringly discriminatory double standards. No, Christopher Street West would not be obliged to post any bond nor pay any monies that were not required of other groups, Judge Schauer decreed. And yes, the police must protect the marchers. Because homosexuals are citizens of the state of California, and all citizens are entitled to equal protection under its laws.78