CHAPTER 10: THE HOMOSEXUAL AMERICAN CITIZEN TAKES THE GOVERNMENT TO COURT
1. The circumstances of Scott’s arrest and his response are detailed in Bruce C. Scott v. John W. Macy, Civil Action no. 1050-63, US District Court for the District of Columbia, 1963: Mattachine Society Project Collection, box 9, folder 38, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries; Bruce C. Scott, Appellant v. John W. Macy, Jr., Chairman of the Civil Service Commission, et al., Appellees, 349 F. 2d 182 (1965), US District Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, argued December 17, 1964; and Bruce C. Scott, Appellant v. John W. Macy, Jr., Chairman, Civil Service Commission, et al., Appellees, 402 F. 2d 644 131 U. S. App. D. C. 93, no. 20841, argued October 23, 1967; decided September 11, 1968.
2. Scott v. Macy, 1963.
3. “Cross-Currents,” Ladder, August 1963, p. 19.
4. In Scott v. Macy, 1963.
5. For example, in 1951, in responding to a woman who’d asked for help after being discharged from the air force, the ACLU staff counsel declared that the ACLU believed that homosexuality was relevant to an individual’s military service, and advised her to seek medical treatment that would enable her to “abandon homosexual relations”: quoted in Allan Berube and John D’Emilio, “The Military and Lesbians During the McCarthy Years,” in The Lesbian Issue: Essays from Signs, eds. Estelle Freeman et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 290–95. In January 1957 the ACLU National Board of Directors affirmed that “homosexuality is a valid consideration in evaluating the security risk factor in sensitive positions,” and “It is not within the province of the Union to evaluate the social validity of the laws aimed at suppression or elimination of homosexuality”: reported in “The ACLU Takes a Stand,” Ladder, March 1957, pp. 8–9.
6. Jerry Kluttz, “Names of 200 Perverts Listed for Firing by U.S. Agencies,” Washington Post, May 9, 1950, p. 1.
7. “Misplaced Morality,” Washington Post, April 24, 1963.
8. Scott v. Macy, 1963.
9. King’s real name was Robert Belanger, but he continued to use a pseudonym, even as Mattachine’s president.
10. Johnson, Lavender Scare, p. 194.
11. David Rudenstine, The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 391.
12. Franklin E. Kameny, “U.S. Government Clings to Prejudice,” Ladder, January 1966, pp. 22–24.
13. Washington Post, June 17, 1965, p. 3.
14. Scott v. Macy, 1967.
15. John W. Macy Jr., oral history interview with Fred Holborn, May 29, 1964, p. 67, John F. Kennedy Library, Oral History Program.
16. John W. Macy, “A Citizen’s Rights,” speech delivered on May 22, 1968, to the Federal Bar Association, in Vital Speeches of the Day 34, no. 20 (August 1, 1968): p. 621. See also John W. Macy Jr., Public Service: The Human Side of Government (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).
17. Franklin Kameny, “U.S. Government Hides Behind Immoral Mores,” Ladder, June 1966, pp. 17–20.
18. “Our President Speaks,” Gazette (Mattachine Society Washington), Winter 1964, p. 6.
19. John Macy letter quoted in Franklin E. Kameny, “MSW Meets with Civil Service Commission,” Homosexual Citizen, May/June 1966, pp. 7–8.
20. Ibid.
21. Picket photograph with Lilli Vincenz, cover of Ladder, October 1965.
22. Lilli Vincenz to Lawrence Meloy and Kimbell Johnson, “A Statement from a Member of the Mattachine Society Washington,” 1965. I thank Charles Francis for sharing this statement with me.
23. Eva Freund, a Mattachine member who attended several of the meetings with government officials, said that Kameny orchestrated what would be said and who would speak: Freund, interview with Meinke.
24. Quoted in Lilli Vincenz to Lawrence Meloy and Kimbell Johnson. “A Statement from a Member of the Mattachine Society Washington.”
25. “U.S. Government Hides Behind Immoral Mores.”
26. John W. Macy Jr. to the Mattachine Society of Washington, letter, February 25, 1966, reprinted in Homosexual Citizen, May/June 1966, pp. 4–5. Macy’s compendium of antihomosexual prejudices was so apt an illustration of historical discrimination against lesbians and gays that it was cited almost a half century later as an example of the blatant unreasonableness of such attitudes, in US District Court judge Vaughn Richard Walker’s 2010 decision overturning California’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage: Kristin Perry, et al. v. Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al., No. C 09-2292, “Findings of Fact,” p. 96.
27. Editorial, “To Exist or Not Exist,” Homosexual Citizen, May/June 1966, p. 3.
28. Clifford L. Norton, Appellant v. John Macy, et al., Appellees, US District Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, No. 21625, January 13, 1969, 417 F. 2d 1161.
29. Clifford L. Norton, Appellant v. John Macy, et al., Appellees, US District Court of Appeals, District of Columbia Circuit, No. 21625, 417 F. 2d 1161, argued January 13, 1969; decided July 1, 1969; petition for rehearing denied, October 20, 1969. The Sexual Revolution was well under way by now. In a few years, the United States Census Bureau would have to coin the term POSSLQ (persons of the opposite sex sharing living quarters) because cohabitation was so rife among unmarried heterosexual couples.
30. Clifford Norton to Frank Kameny, letter, July 6, 1969, Frank Kameny Collection, box 29, Norton folder, Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
31. Donald Rogers to Frank Kameny, July 7, 1969, ibid.
32. Frank Kameny to Clifford Norton, July 11, 1969, ibid.
33. Norton to Kameny, July 6, 1969.
34. Kameny to Norton, July 11, 1969.
35. Clifford Norton to Frank Kameny, letter, July 22, 1969, ibid.
36. US District Court of Appeals, Norton v. Macy.
37. David K. Johnson, Lavender Scare, p, 207.
38. Bulletin and Regulations quoted in John F. Singer v. United States Civil Service Commission, 530 F. 2d 247 Ninth Circuit, No. 74-2073, January 12, 1976.
39. Reported in “Rusk Probed on Picketing,” Ladder, October 1965; and Clark Mullenhoff (syndicated column), “Homosexuals Charge Bias in Loss of Government Jobs,” Des Moines Register, April 9, 1966.
40. “Rusk Probed on Picketing.”
41. Kameny, interview in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 101.
42. Eva Freund, interview with author, Vienna, Virginia (telephone), February 9, 2013.
43. Frank Kameny, “Security Clearances for Homosexual Citizens,” Homosexual Citizen, March 1966.
44. Colonial governor Benning Wentworth also granted large tracts of land to those who would become the founders of Vermont. Bennington was named after him. He was the subject of a scandal in 1760 when, at the age of sixty-four, he married his twenty-three-year-old housekeeper.
45. Frank Kameny to Don Slater, letter, December 9, 1967, Frank Kameny Papers, box 9, folder 7, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
46. Wentworth v. Laird, Secretary of Defense, et al., 348 F. supp. 1153 (D.D.C. 1972); Wentworth v. Schlesinger, Secretary of Defense, et al., docket no. 71-1934, 490 F. 2d 740 (DC Circuit 1973); Charlayne Hunter, “Homosexual Seeks to Retain Security Clearance,” New York Times, August 20, 1969.
47. Kameny to Slater, December 9, 1967.
48. Kameny, interview in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 106.
49. Associated Press, “Deviate, 31, Confesses in Bid to Retain Job,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 25, 1967.
50. Ibid.
51. Frank Kameny to Don Slater, December 9, 1967.
52. The hearing, Kameny’s questions, and Wentworth’s responses are recounted in Frank Kameny to Don Slater, December 9, 1967.
53. Department of Defense hearing (Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense), transcript, docket 67-32, Federal Plaza, New York, August 19, 1969.
54. Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 134.
55. Wentworth v. Laird. Judge Pratt ordered that Richard Gayer’s and Otto Ulrich’s clearances too must be restored.
56. Wentworth v. Schlesinger, op. cit. This court also found in favor of Gayer and Ulrich.
57. Ed O’Keefe, “Eye Opener: Apology for Frank Kameny,” Washington Post, June 29, 2009. When Berry was confirmed by the Senate in 2009, he became the highest-ranking openly gay federal official in US history.
CHAPTER 11: THE RIOTS
1. Jim Fouratt, interview with author, New York (telephone), July 16, 2013.
2. Robert L. Pela, interview with Tony Coron, “Stonewall’s Eyewitnesses,” Advocate, May 3, 1994.
3. The Stonewall riots have been described extensively by eyewitnesses. Among the primary sources I used in this account are Dennis Eskow, “3 Cops Hurt as Bar Raid Riles Crowd,” Daily News (New York), June 29, 1969; Lucian Truscott, IV, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square,” Village Voice, July 3, 1969; Howard Smith, “Full Moon over Stonewall (View from Inside),” Village Voice, July 3, 1969; Jerry Lisker, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad,” Daily News (New York), July 6, 1969; Dick Leitsch, “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, July 1969; Dick Leitsch, “Gay Riots,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, July 1969 Dick Leitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, August 1969; “The Night They Raided the Stonewall,” Gay Activist 1, no. 3 (June 1971); interviews with eyewitnesses by David Isay, on “Remembering Stonewall,” Weekend All Things Considered, NPR, July 1, 1989; interviews with eyewitnesses on “Stonewall Uprising,” American Experience, PBS, 2011; and my own interviews with Jim Fouratt, John O’Brien, Perry Brass, Dick Leitsch, Frank Galassi, and Martha Shelley. Two full-length books devoted to the riots are Martin Duberman’s Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993) and Carter’s Stonewall.
4. The term transgender didn’t yet have currency in 1969. See note on the history of changing terminology, p. xix. See also David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), introduction.
5. Carter, Stonewall, p. 141.
6. A later raid at the Snake Pit, in March 1970, became a cause célèbre when an Argentine national, Diego Vinales, jumped from a window to escape the raiding police and was impaled on a fence below. Vinales survived, but the incident led to a massive gay march through the streets of Greenwich Village: see Jonathan Black, “The Boys in the Snake Pit: Games ‘Straights’ Play,” Village Voice, March 19, 1970, p. 62.
7. Teal, Gay Militants, p. 20. There had also been a raid at the Stonewall the previous Tuesday, when the bar had fewer patrons: Eskow, “3 Cops Hurt as Bar Raid Riles Crowd.” The police came back on a weekend night knowing that the bar would be packed. However, Inspector Seymour Pine and his assistant inspector Charles Smythe visited the New York Mattachine office on July 3 to discuss why the riot happened and to explain that there “had been no harassment of legitimate gay bars,” but only an attempt to “go after places that serve liquor without a license. This has nothing to do with who forms the clientele of the place”: “The Stonewall Riots: The Police Story,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, August 1969.
8. In a 2004 talk for the New York Historical Society, Inspector Pine claimed that the real reason for the raid was that the police had received a tip that the Mafia was somehow involved in stolen European bonds, and the police believed that “after-hours clubs like the Stonewall were in on the operation. If we could close them down, we’d see what would happen to the bonds that were surfacing.” However, he also admitted that the Public Morals Squad described gay bar raids as “We’re going down to grab the fags”: Pine’s speech reported in Lincoln Anderson, “ ‘I’m Sorry,’ Says Inspector Who Led the Stonewall Raid,” Villager, June 16–22, 2004.
9. Lisker, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.”
10. Lucian Truscott, “The Real Mob at Stonewall,” New York Times, June 25, 2009. Truscott resigned his post at Fort Benning after a few months and wrote full-time for the Village Voice until 1975.
11. Though Truscott’s and Smith’s accounts were the most thorough of those in the straight media, they were often mocking of the gay rioters. Truscott, for example, writes of “the forces of faggotry” and says the rioters’ “wrists were limp [and] hair was primped.”
12. Smith, “Full Moon over Stonewall” and Truscott, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square.”
13. Fouratt, interview with author. Police records of the Stonewall arrests (which were not opened to the public until 2009) identify a “Marilyn Fowler” who was arrested that night. Fowler has been thought to be the woman in the police car: Sewall Chan, “Police Records Document Start of Stonewall Uprising,” New York Times, June 22, 2009. Jim Fouratt, who witnessed the riot and who knew Marilyn Fowler, claims, however, that she was a slight woman and definitely not the “two-hundred-pound butch” who triggered the riot. In recent years, an urban legend has spread that African American butch lesbian Stormé DeLarverie, who’d been a professional drag king, was the woman in the police car. She’s been dubbed the “Rosa Parks of the gay revolution”: for example, Jim Luce, “Gay Community’s Rosa Parks Faces Death, Impoverished and Alone,” Huffington Post, May 25, 2011. But as David Carter points out, DeLarverie was well known in the community and would have been recognized immediately; the woman who triggered the riot was unknown to those eyewitnesses whom Carter interviewed. Also, Carter says, DeLarverie’s age, height, ethnicity, and physique do not match eyewitness descriptions of the lesbian who set off the riot: Carter, Stonewall, p. 309, and author’s email correspondence with Carter.
14. The Berkeley Barb’s comment on the woman’s participation was, “Ironically, it was a chick who gave the rallying cry to fight”: Leo E. Laurence, “Gays Hit New York Cops,” Berkeley Barb, July 4–10, 1969.
15. Truscott, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square.”
16. Smith, “Full Moon over Stonewall.”
17. Duberman, Stonewall, p. 204.
18. Quoted in Duberman, Stonewall, p. 198. Stonewall historian David Carter does not give credence to Rivera’s claim that she was at the riots: author’s email correspondence with Carter, April 5, 2015.
19. Leitsch, “Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World.”
20. Raymond Castro, interviewed in “Stonewall Uprising,” American Experience.
21. John O’Brien, first interview with author, Los Angeles, July 25, 2012.
22. Ibid.
23. Martha Shelley, interview with author, Portland, OR (telephone), February 16, 2012.
24. Leitsch, interview with author.
25. Ibid.
26. New York Mattachine Newsletter, July 1969.
27. In Pine’s speech, quoted in the Villager.
28. Smith, “Full Moon over Stonewall.”
29. L. Craig Schoonmaker, interview with author, Newark, NJ (telephone), May 21, 2013; and L. Craig Schoonmaker, “Why Homosexuals Intransigent!?” Homosexual Renaissance: Newsletter of HI!, November 12, 1969. The charter for the group was approved April 1, 1969.
30. Schoonmaker, interview with author.
31. L. Craig Schoonmaker, “Homosexuality and Lesbianism: Parallel but Not the Same,” HI!, October 1971. Schoonmaker’s ideas were very much like those of Adolf Brand and Benedict Friedlaender, founders of the early-twentieth-century German homosexual group Gemeinschaft der Eigene (Community of the Special), with its cult of hypermasculinity. Schoonmaker had considered starting a branch of the Student Homophile League, which began at Columbia in 1967 and expanded to NYU and Cornell, but he decided finally to found Homosexuals Intransigent! because Homophile Student League included lesbians: Schoonmaker, interview with author..
32. Quoted in Jesse Monteagudo, “The Dream of a Gay Nation,” Gay Today, September 13, 2004.
33. “Homo Revolt: Don’t Hide It,” Berkeley Barb, March 28–April 3, 1969.
34. “Militant March by S.F. Homosexuals,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 10, 1969.
35. In addition to being fired from Vector, he was also fired from his paying job at KGO radio, an ABC affiliate in the Bay Area.
36. “Homo Revolt Blasting Off on Two Fronts,” Berkeley Barb, April 11–17, 1969. Laurence repeated his accusations about SIR in a Vector article, in which he exonerated the organization’s president, Larry Littlejohn, who wanted SIR to be more militant but was impeded by his “middle-aged uptight conservative” officers: Leo E. Laurence, “Gay Revolution,” Vector, April 1969. In this prophetic article, Laurence declares, “1969 is our year. It’s time to move, to be militant, to demand our rights.”
37. Laurence, quoted in Teal, Gay Militants, p. 39.
38. “Homo Revolt Blasting Off on Two Fronts.”
39. Ibid.
40. Leo E. Laurence, JD, interview with author, San Diego (telephone), May 31, 2013. Laurence says that when a carload of toughs drove by to menace the “faggot” picketers, he informed them he was calling the Panthers, with whom his group was tight, and the toughs zoomed off.
41. Leo E. Laurence, “Gay Strike Hits Southern California,” Berkeley Barb, May 2–8, 1970, p. 11.
42. Ibid.
43. Laurence became increasingly confrontational and radical. At a West Coast Gay Liberation conference held at UC Berkeley, December 26–30, 1969, he predicted that as soon as “gay power” made itself felt, “the pigs will be after us,” and he thought that gays would soon need to stockpile ammunition—“We have to defend ourselves”: quoted in Teal, Gay Militants, p. 110.
44. Wittman’s essay was finally published in the December 1969 issue of the San Francisco Free Press.
45. Seymour Pine, interview with Isay, “Remembering Stonewall.”
46. Pine and others have estimated the crowd at two thousand or more. The New York Times estimated four hundred.
47. It was never definitely determined why each call was immediately disconnected, though Inspector Pine later suggested that the Sixth Precinct was unhappy with the First Division for not having informed them that they would be conducting a raid in their area that night. Pine didn’t inform the Sixth Precinct because he suspected that policemen in the Sixth Precinct were taking payoffs from the Mafia owners (Arthur Bell, “Skull Murphy: The Gay Double Agent,” Village Voice, May 8, 1978). Pine was also critical of the Sixth Precinct’s effectiveness “in keeping these bars properly controlled”: Anderson, “ ‘I’m Sorry,’ Says Inspector Who Led the Stonewall Raid.”
48. Smith, “Full Moon over Stonewall.”
49. Ibid.
50. David Isay interview with Howard Smith, “Remembering Stonewall.”
51. In his interview for “Stonewall Uprising,” on American Experience, Martin Boyce recalled that a “drag queen” who went by the moniker Miss New Orleans was prominent in tearing up the parking meter; but John O’Brien (interview with author) recalls that only butch men participated.
52. “Full Moon over Stonewall.” Pine had invited reporter Howard Smith to come inside the Stonewall with him and his officers. Smith’s account is thus, as he subtitles his Village Voice article, the “View from Inside.”
53. Anderson, “ ‘I’m Sorry,’ Says Inspector Who Led Stonewall Raid.”
54. “Gay Riots in the Village,” New York Mattachine Newsletter, August 1969.
55. Eyewitness account by J. E. Freeman to “Datebook,” letter, San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 2009.
56. Howard Smith interview, in “Stonewall Uprising,” American Experience.
57. In “Stonewall Riot Police Report,” June 28, 1969: OutHistory.org.
58. Chan, “Police Records Document Start of Stonewall Uprising.”
59. Eskow, “3 Cops Hurt as Bar Raid Riles Crowd.”
60. “Four Policemen Hurt in ‘Village’ Raid,” New York Times, June 29, 1969.
61. Frank Galassi, interview with author, Los Angeles, April 22, 2013.
62. Ibid.
63. Marcia Chambers, “Ex-City Official Says He’s Homosexual,” New York Times, October 3, 1973. Because Brown resigned, Pearson never outed him.
64. Howard Brown, Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives: The Story of Homosexual Men in America Today (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), p. 20. Brown died of a heart attack in 1975. His book was published posthumously.
65. Brown’s speech quoted in Randy Shilts’s introduction to Brown, Familiar Faces, Hidden Lives, p. viii.
66. Dick Leitsch, though he was president of Mattachine in 1969, denied categorically that he was involved in posting the sign and pointed to his July 1969 article “The Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World” as evidence that he recognized the significance of the riot immediately: Leitsch, interview with author.
67. When Rodwell first used the words, he might not have intended their combative connotation: he’d coined the term in conjunction with a proposal for a directory of businesses friendly to gays, to be compiled by New York homophile organizations “as a significant step to unify the homosexual buying power”: according to a February 1969 article in a Mattachine Society Washington newsletter, The Insider (eds. Dick Schaefer and Eva Freund). The September 1967 issue of the Advocate had a front-page article about a Washington, DC, meeting of the National Planning Conference of Homophile Organizations. It was headlined “U.S. Capital Turns on to Gay Power.”
68. Craig Rodwell, interview in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 66.
69. Craig Rodwell, interview with Tina Crosby, in “The Stonewall Riot Remembered” (unpublished paper, January 16, 1974), Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
70. Carter, Stonewall, p. 178.
71. Leitsch, “Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World.”
72. Edmund White to Ann and Alfred Corn, letter, July 8, 1969, in David Bergman, ed., The Violet Quill Reader: The Emergence of Gay Writing after Stonewall (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994).
73. Eyewitness J. Marks, quoted in Leo Laurence, “Gays Hit New York Cops,” Berkeley Barb, July 4, 1969.
74. Ibid.
75. Leitsch, “Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World”; and Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols, Homosexual Citizen column, Screw, July 25, 1969.
76. Perry Brass, interview with author, New York, March 6, 2013.
77. Robert L. Pela, “Stonewall’s Eyewitness,” Advocate, May 3, 1994, p. 54. David Carter questions the veracity of this story: author’s email correspondence with Carter.
78. Leitsch, “Hairpin Drop Heard Round the World.”
79. White, letter to Ann and Alfred Corn.
80. Truscott, “Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square.” Truscott kept reminding the reader that he wasn’t sympathetic to homosexuals with snide statements such as “It was the first time I had heard this crowd described as beautiful.”
81. Fouratt, interview with author.
82. Leitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.”
83. “Hostile Crowd Dispersed Near Sheridan Square,” New York Times, July 3, 1969.
84. Leitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.”
85. Flyer, “Get the Mafia and the Cops Out of Gay Bars” (1969), in Stonewall Collection, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
86. Leitsch, “Gay Riots in the Village.”
87. Jerry Lisker, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad,” Daily News (New York), July 6, 1969.
88. Lige (Clarke) and Jack (Nichols), “N.Y. Gays: Will the Spark Die?” Los Angeles Advocate, September 1969.
CHAPTER 12: SAY IT PROUD—AND LOUD: NEW GAY POLITICS
1. FBI file, “Demonstrations of Homosexuals, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania”: Philadelphia Office, file 145-686.
2. Bello, interview with author.
3. Ad: “ ‘Gay Is Good’: Support the 5th Annual Reminder,” in Village Voice, July 3, 1969, p. 53. The Village Voice became the target of the Gay Liberation Front’s first protest because, though the paper accepted this July 3 ad, publisher Ed Fancher refused to accept subsequent ads with the word gay or homosexual in them, claiming that such words were “obscene” and that the Voice had a policy against printing obscenities. GLF picketed the Voice on September 12, 1969, carrying signs such as “Village Voice Won’t Print ‘Gay’ in Ads but Calls Us ‘Dikes’ and ‘Faggots’ ”—referring to the Voice articles on the Stonewall riots. Fancher called the protestors inside and capitulated immediately about running “gay” ads: “Village Voice Goes Down,” Come Out!, November 14, 1969, p. 9.
4. Teal, Gay Militants, pp. 30–31; and Carter, Stonewall, pp. 216–17.
5. Renée Cafiero, who’d been at all the Reminder Day pickets and most of Kameny’s DC pickets, remembers that she and many others among the old picketers were actually relieved to see the new gays and lesbians challenging the stiff style that Kameny had insisted upon: Cafiero, interview with author.
6. Price Dickenson, “What Is Gay Power?” New York Mattachine Newsletter, September 1969, pp. 1–2.
7. Dick Leitsch to Frank Kameny, letter, July 9, 1965, Frank Kameny Papers, box 6, folder 11, Library of Congress.
8. Dick Leitsch to Frank Kameny, letter, September 30, 1965, Frank Kameny Papers, box 6, folder 11, Library of Congress.
9. Leitsch to Kameny, letter, July 9, 1965.
10. Tom Burke, “The New Homosexuality,” Esquire, December 1969, pp. 178ff.
11. Rodwell quoted in Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton, 1993), p. 181.
12. In his September 30, 1965, letter to Frank Kameny, Leitsch claimed it was his involvement in the “New Left” that taught him “political savvy.”
13. Leitsch to Kameny, letter, July 9, 1965.
14. Shelley, interview with author.
15. According to fellow Gay Liberation Front member Perry Brass: Brass, interview with author.
16. Shelley, interview with author.
17. Dick Leitsch to the Clearing House Newsletter, letter, directed to “All Homophile Organizations,” September 12, 1967, in New York Mattachine Newsletter, file, 1964–67, ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. Leitsch also wrote a scolding letter to Frank Kameny because he and Barbara Gittings had encouraged Donaldson to found a student Mattachine Society at Columbia: May 14, 1967, Frank Kameny Papers, box 6, folder 11, Library of Congress. Donaldson’s Student Homophile League was accredited by the Columbia University Committee on Student Organizations in April 1967. When accreditation was reported in the university paper, readers thought it was “an April Fool hoax.” The New York Times considered it so controversial that there should be such an organization on a university campus that the story was given front-page coverage: Murray Schumach, “Columbia Charters Homosexual Group,” New York Times, May 3, 1967, pp. 1ff.
18. Eighteen-year-old Mark Segal quoted in Teal, Gay Militants, p. 32.
19. Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), p. 26.
20. Duberman, Stonewall, p. 217.
21. Shelley, interview with author.
22. Eric Pace, “Policemen Forbidden to Entrap Homosexuals to Make Arrests,” New York Times, May 11, 1966.
23. “City Lifts Job Curb for Homosexuals,” New York Times, May 9, 1969, pp. 1, 23.
24. Shelley, interview with author.
25. Shelley says she doesn’t recall whether or not she was the one to suggest “Gay Liberation Front”: Shelley, interview with author. Others who were there recall that she was indeed the one who came up with the name: Fouratt, interview with author.
26. Shelley, interview with author.
27. Village Voice, July 24, 1969.
28. The Village Voice estimated the crowd at five hundred: Jonathan Black, “Gay Power Hits Back,” Village Voice, July 31, 1969—though people who were there, like Shelley, claim it was at least four times that number.
29. Ibid.
30. In Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 167.
31. In Arthur D. Kahn, AIDS, The Winter War: A Testing of America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 5.
32. Black, “Gay Power Hits Back.”
33. Ibid.
34. Donaldson also chaired NACHO’s Committee on Youth that he’d started in 1967.
35. “A Radical Manifesto: The Homophile Movement Must Be Radicalized” (North American Conference of Homophile Organizations, Committee on Youth, 1969).
36. “N.A.C.H.O. ’70—San Francisco,” New York Mattachine Society Newsletter, September 1970, pp. 9–12.
37. Fouratt, interview with author; and Burke, “The New Homosexuality.”
38. Fouratt, interview with author.
39. Years later, Fouratt apologized to Gittings, saying, “Now that I’ve become an older gay man to whom young gays won’t listen, I realize I was too hard on the homophiles”: Fouratt, interview with author.
40. Author’s second interview with Kay (Tobin) Lahusen (telephone), Kennett Square, PA, May 12, 2013.
41. Ellen Broidy, interview with author, Santa Barbara, CA (telephone), June 2, 2013.
42. ERCHO convention reported in “ERCHO Fall Meeting,” New York Mattachine Society Newsletter, December 1969, pp. 17–18.
43. What was seen as “Panther-style self-defense” was emulated literally by the Lavender Panthers, a San Francisco group started by gay Pentecostal Evangelist Reverend Ray Broshears. The Lavender Panthers patrolled the streets of the Castro, San Francisco’s gay ghetto, armed with chains, billy clubs, and karate training in order to fight young toughs who invaded the area intending to “queer-bash”: “The Sexes: The Lavender Panthers,” Time, October 8, 1973.
44. GLF’s Statement of Purpose, printed in Rat (underground New Left newspaper), August 12, 1969.
45. Fouratt, interview with author.
46. Nikos Diaman, interview with author, San Francisco (telephone), July 24, 2013.
47. Author’s third interview with Kay (Tobin) Lahusen, Kennett Square, PA (telephone), May 29, 2013.
48. Karla Jay, who began attending GLF meetings in July 1969, gives her impression of the chaos as well as the exhilaration that she experienced at the meetings in Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Gay Liberation (New York: Basic Books), pp. 79ff.
49. Lois Hart, “GLF News,” Come Out!, January 10, 1970, p. 16.
50. Lois Hart, “Some News and a Whole Lot’A Opinion,” Come Out!, April/May 1970, p. 3.
51. Brass, interview with author
52. Ibid.
53. GLF dances described in Black, “Boys in the Snake Pit,” p. 62.
54. Ellen Shumsky, interview with author, New York (telephone), March 13, 2013.
55. Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, pamphlet: Military Resistance for Gays, Dan Siminoski Collection, box 7, folder 19, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
56. Faygele ben Miriam, interview with Ruth Pettis, Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project, January 10, 2000.
57. Ibid.; and Paul Barwick, interview with Ruth Pettis, Northwest Lesbian and Gay History Museum Project, January 20, 2000.
58. Statement of Purpose, in Gay Liberation Front Los Angeles Records, Collection 2012.031, ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
59. John O’Brien, who became involved in the LA gay movement as soon as he moved west from New York, told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 that Kight came across as “a nice sweet old man, but if you turn your back you might find a knife through it”: Paul Ciotti, “Morris Kight: Activist Statesman of L.A.’s Gay Community,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1988.
60. GLF’s Alpine County prank is discussed at length in Mary Ann Cherry, The Kight Affect: The Liberating Life of a Gay Revolutionary, forthcoming; Jacob Carter (University of Massachusetts, Boston), “Researching Stonewall Nation: Interdisciplinary Considerations for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Research” (unpublished), Second Annual History Graduate Student Conference, March 9, 2013; and Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 177–79.
61. Don Jackson, “Brother Don Has a Dream,” Los Angeles Free Press, August 14, 1970.
62. Del Whan, interview with author, Long Beach, CA (telephone), May 24, 2013.
63. Kight on “1989 Gay Day Celebration: 20 Years of Gay Liberation,” IMRU (Pacifica Radio).
64. Ibid.
65. Associated Press, “Gay Front Alpine Visit,” Reno (NV) Evening Gazette, November 26, 1970.
66. L. Craig Schoonmaker, interview with author, Newark, New Jersey (telephone), May 21, 2013.
67. Carolyn Weathers, interview with author, Long Beach, CA (telephone), May 24, 2013.
68. Associated Press, “Gays’ Plan of Takeover Confirmed,” Long Beach (CA) Independent, October 21, 1970.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. United Press International, “County Vows to Resist Gay Takeover,” Argus (Fremont, CA), October 19, 1970.
72. UPI photo, Nevada State Journal (Reno), November 27, 1970, p. 24.
73. United Press International, “Alpine County Residents Shrug at ‘Gay’ Invasion,” Nevada State Journal (Reno), November 29, 1970, p. 14.
74. Associated Press, “Gay Liberationists Plan to Buy Town,” Bakersfield (CA) Californian, April 1, 1971.
75. Fred Sargeant, “1970: A First-Person Account of the First Gay Pride March,” Village Voice, June 22, 2010.
76. Diaman, interview with author; and Arnie Kantrowitz, Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay (New York: William Morrow, 1977), p. 154.
77. Reverend Troy Perry, interview with author, Los Angeles, June 20, 2012.
78. Morris Kight, “How It All Began,” CSW Programme, ONE Subject File: Stonewall, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
CHAPTER 13: LESS TALK AND MORE ACTION: THE GAY ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE
1. O’Brien, first interview with author.
2. Bob Kohler, quoted in Randy Wicker, “The Wicker Basket: GLF Gives $500 to Panthers and Bails Out Young Lords,” Gay, August 24, 1970; and Diaman, interview with author. Gay radicals in other cities as well made common cause with the Panthers. In Washington, DC, for example, the newly opened gay bookstore Lambda Rising became the home of the Black Panther Defense Fund in 1970; in California, Leo Laurence reported that he was permitted to distribute gay liberation leaflets at a Black Panther rally in Oakland’s Bobby Hutton Park: “The Panther official who okayed distribution of our leaflet said, ‘Our Board of Control hasn’t endorsed this, but we’re for anyone who wants freedom, so go ahead’ ”: in Tangents, August/September 1970.
3. Joseph P. Fried, “East Harlem Youth Explain Garbage Dumping Demonstration,” New York Times, August 19, 1969.
4. Jim Owles, quoted in Teal, Gay Militants, p. 106.
5. Eugene McCarthy, Democratic senator from Minnesota, ran for president in 1968 on an anti–Vietnam War platform.
6. Jim Owles, interview in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 32.
7. Lois Hart, quoted in “Bob Kohler Recalling: Collecting Oral Histories with a West Village Legend,” in The Middle of the Whirlwind, eds. Team Colors Collective (Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2008). Hart was somewhat disillusioned with the Panthers when she attended the Panthers’ Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in September 1970 and asked from the floor whether there was “receptivity to women’s and gay liberation.” She was told, “We’ll tolerate that crazy talk about thirty seconds, and you’ll be asked to leave”: Lois Hart, “Black Panthers Call Revolutionary People’s Convention: A White Lesbian Responds,” Come Out!, September/October 1970. GLF-er Nikos Diaman recalls other examples of Panther hostility to gays at the convention: for example, when GLF-er Anna Sanchez, seated in the orchestra of the auditorium, kissed her girlfriend, she was startled at a voice from the balcony yelling, “You sick lezzie dykes!”: Nikos Diaman, interview with author. The dramatic conflict between Panthers and lesbians at the convention is covered at length in “The Days Belonged to the Panthers,” Off Our Backs, September 30, 1970, pp. 4–5.
8. Huey Newton, “A Letter from Huey to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters on the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” Black Panthers Newsletter, August 21, 1970. The letter was delivered as a speech the previous week.
9. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, p. 49.
10. Arthur Evans, quoted in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 196.
11. Arthur Bell, Dancing the Gay Lib Blues: A Year in the Homosexual Rights Movement (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 13.
12. Ibid., p. 14.
13. Arthur Evans, quoted in Linda Hirshman, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 116.
14. Ibid.
15. (Tobin) Lahusen, interview with author.
16. Bell, Dancing the Gay Lib Blues, p. 17.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 19.
19. The John Birch Society was a far-right, Christian, racist, anticommunist group that was in the news at the time. Kohler quoted in Teal, Gay Militants, p. 106.
20. Arnie Kantrowitz, who became an officer in the Gay Activists Alliance, characterizes the diversity of the membership as “long-haired radicals and short-haired conservatives”: Under the Rainbow, pp. 128–29. But the “short hairs” were “conservative” only by contrast with the “radicals.” Even the “short hairs” were militantly challenging homophobia in 1970.
21. Within a year or two, in other cities also, such as Washington, DC, Chicago, and even Louisville, Kentucky, and Columbus, Ohio, there were splits between flaming-radical Gay Liberation Front groups and more “moderately radical” organizations: for example, “Gays in Louisville Choosing Sides Over Liberation Groups,” Advocate, October 14–27, 1970; and “Gay Lib: New Name and New Policies,” Ohio State Lantern, October 28, 1971.
22. Evans, platform speech quoted in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, p. 190.
23. GAA Constitution (December 21, 1969), GAA NY Collection 2010-002, box 1, folder 1, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. A later GAA pamphlet, The GAA Alternative, declared, contrasting itself with Mattachine style, “We dress as we please, without any regard for ‘respectability.’ No member of the group can be asked to stay behind the scenes because of his or her style of dress”: GAA NY Collection 2010-002, box 1, folder 1, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
24. Gittings was brought into GAA New York through her partner, founding member Kay (Tobin) Lahusen.
25. As GAA president, Jim Owles sounded very much like Frank Kameny. Urging New York State legislators to pass a Homosexual Bill of Rights, for instance, Owles declared, “What we are demanding is our basic rights as American citizens and human beings. We do not ask for any respectability or sympathy from straight people. Their private opinion of us as individuals or as members of a group are [sic] of no interest to us except to the extent that these private bigotries are allowed to become public policy. We have been waiting almost 200 years for the reality of the phrase ‘equal before the law’ ”: Jim Owles, president, Gay Activists Alliance, to “Dear Legislator,” letter, February 1, 1971, appended to “A Homosexual Bill of Rights Presented to the New York State Legislature by the Gay Activists Alliance,” in GAA New York Collection, 2010-002, box 1, folder 7, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
26. Lambda leaflet in GAA NY Collection 2010-002, box 1, folder 2, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. In a later GAA leaflet, it was explained that lambda was chosen to represent the organization because “The Greek letter lambda is a scientific symbol for activism.”
27. Pamphlet, “What is GAA?” in Barbara Gittings Collection, box 1, folder 27, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
28. Gay Activists Alliance, The Fight for a Gay Civil Rights Law in New York City, 1975, in GAA New York Collection 2010-002, box 1, folder 8, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
29. Ibid.
30. Greitzer quoted in Gay Activist: Newsletter of the Gay Activists Alliance, April 1971.
31. Ibid.
32. Carter, Stonewall, pp. 248–49.
33. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, p. 54. Rivera quit GAA when the group refused to include “transvestites” (people now called transgender) in its civil rights agenda: David W. Dunlap, “Sylvia Rivera, 50, Figure in Birth of the Gay Liberation Movement,” New York Times, February 20, 2002.
34. Despite her promise that night at the Village Independent Democratic Club, Greitzer delayed doing anything about the bill. In late 1970, two other members of the city council, Eldon Clingan and Carter Burden, were convinced by GAA’s Fair Employment Committee to sponsor a gay rights bill. It did not pass. Gay rights bills came before the New York City Council almost yearly before one finally passed in 1986.
35. Leitsch, interview with author; and Gay, May 15, 1970, p. 144.
36. Lindsay’s order was hardly “behind closed doors,” since it was announced in the New York Times. In response to the order, the gratified Leitsch called Lindsay a “tremendous man” and promised that “homosexuals would vote 100%” for him the next time he ran: Eric Pace, “Policemen Forbidden to Entrap Homosexuals to Make Arrests,” New York Times, May 11, 1966.
37. Bell, Dancing the Gay Lib Blues.
38. GAA also used more conventional methods to demand gay civil rights. The GAA Ad Hoc 1970 Elections Committee sent questionnaires to candidates running for positions in state and federal legislatures and elective state executive officers, reminding them that “in certain areas of New York City close to thirty percent of the electorate is homosexual or bisexual,” and asking questions such as “Would you work to oppose governmental collections of data on the sexual preference of individuals?” and “Do you favor total repeal of the New York State Sodomy and Solicitation laws?” The following year the GAA State and Federal Government Committee dispatched volunteers to gay and liberal neighborhoods, armed with voter registration forms and leaflets that explained the need for gay civil rights legislation. “Vote with the consciousness that we can be a bloc,” the leaflets urged gays and gay sympathizers: “Gay Registration Drive,” Gay Activist: Newsletter of the Gay Activists Alliance, September 1971.
39. Ron Gold, interview with author, New York, March 24, 2014.
40. Nathalie Rockhill, interview with author, Kirkfield, Ontario (Canada) (telephone), May 20, 2013.
41. Jack Nichols, unpublished autobiography, p. 138. I am grateful to Stephanie Donald for sharing this manuscript with me.
42. Gay Activists Alliance, “The Fight for a Gay Civil Rights Law in New York City.”
43. Ibid.
44. Rich Wandel, interview with author, New York, March 12, 2013.
45. Flyer, “Total War on John V. Lindsay,” in GAA New York Collection 2010-002, box 1, folder 10, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
46. Ibid.
47. “GAA Finds a Home,” Gay Activist: Newsletter of the Gay Activists Alliance 1, no. 2 (May 1971).
48. Wandel, interview with author; and Allen Roskoff, interview with author, New York (telephone), May 23, 2013.
49. Gold, interview with author.
50. Wandel and Roskoff, interviews with author.
51. Martin Tolchin, “Thousands of City Employees Attend Lindsay Benefit,” New York Times, January 26, 1972.
52. Gold, interview with author.
53. Perrotta, along with another lesbian, Gale McGovern, and three GAA men, Jim Owles, Morty Manford, and John Paul Hudson, were arrested for zapping New York City’s Board of Examiners for discriminatory policies against homosexual teachers: “Five Arrested in GAA Zap,” Gay Activist: Newsletter of the Gay Activists Alliance, May 1970, pp. 1ff. Perrotta was again arrested, along with drag queen Sylvia Rivera and Charles Burch, and given a suspended sentence of fifteen days in jail plus a $250 fine for a zap at the office of the district attorney, protesting police harassment in a gay bar: Charles Burch, “Gay Lib and the Police: Bad Day at Hauppauge,” Village Voice, May 4, 1972, pp. 12ff.
54. Fair Employment Committee of the Gay Activists Alliance, “Employment Discrimination Against Homosexuals,” Supplement 1, February 3, 1971: GAA New York Collection 2010-002, box 1, folder 6, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
55. Tolchin, “Thousands of City Employees Attend Lindsay Benefit.”
56. Roskoff, interview with author.
57. Press release, Gay Activists Alliance News and Media Relations Committee, October 4, 1972: GAA New York, Press Releases, 1972–1980, box 1, folder 4, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
58. “Homosexuals in Revolt: The Year That One Liberation Movement Turned Militant,” Life, December 31, 1971, pp. 62–73.
59. Gillen, quoted in Ruth Simpson, From the Closet to the Courts (New York: Viking Press, 1976), p. 123.
60. Wandel, interview with author; and “Employment Discrimination Against Homosexuals,” supplement 1.
61. Simpson, From the Closet to the Courts, p. 124.
CHAPTER 14: A PARALLEL REVOLUTION: LESBIAN FEMINISTS
1. Del Martin, “DOB Speaks for Lesbian,” Ladder, October 1959, p. 19. With the rise of the feminist movement, Martin severed herself and DOB from all associations with the male homophiles. She declared in a 1967 editorial in The Ladder that “The Lesbian, after all, is first of all a woman [sic],” and the National Organization of Women [sic] is more pertinent to her than the male-dominated North America Conference of Homophile Organizations: “The Lesbian’s Majority Status,” June 1967, pp. 23–25. Her strongest farewell to coed organizations was her 1970 essay, “If That’s All There Is,” in which she rejects even her beloved Council on Religion and the Homosexual as “a bastion of male privilege . . . Be warned, my sisters, CRH spells only purgatory for you”: Ladder, December 1970/January 1971, pp. 4–6.
2. The name of a popular feminist essay by bisexual writer Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” first appeared in February 1970, in the underground paper Rat, which radical feminists had “liberated” from leftist males the month before. (Good-Bye to All That was also the name of poet/scholar Robert Graves’s 1929 autobiography.)
3. Arlene Kisner, interview with author, New York (telephone), March 7, 2013.
4. Radicalesbians, “GLF Women,” Come Out!, December 1969/January 1970, p. 10.
5. Shumsky, interview with author.
6. Ibid.
7. Martha Shelley, “Stepin Fetchit Woman,” Come Out!, November 1969, p. 6.
8. Several GLF men were sensitive in the extreme to women’s oppression. In 1972 ex-GLF-ers Kenneth Pitchford (then husband of bisexual radical feminist Robin Morgan), Steve Dansky, and John Knoebel started a group called the Effeminists, whose purpose was to fight misogyny and “effemophobia”: Kenneth Pitchford, interview with author, Flushing, NY, March 4, 2013; and Steven Dansky, “The Effeminist Moment,” in Smash the Church, Smash the State, ed. Tommi Avicoli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009).
9. See discussion of the controversy on pp. 210–11.
10. Flavia Rando, interview with author, New York (telephone), May 18, 2013.
11. Kisner, interview with author.
12. Jean O’Leary, interview with Jan Holden, in Lesbian Nuns: Breaking the Silence, eds. Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan (Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1985), pp. 231–40.
13. Jean O’Leary, interview with author, Los Angeles, February 18, 2004.
14. O’Leary, interview with author.
15. Jean O’Leary, interview with Eric Marcus, in Making Gay History: The Half-Century Fight for Lesbian and Gay Equal Rights (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), p. 157.
16. Rockhill, interview with author. Rockhill did join the Lesbian Liberation Committee and later Lesbian Women’s Liberation, though she didn’t drop out of GAA.
17. For example, Arthur Bell, “Sylvia Goes to College: Gay Is Proud at NYU,” Village Voice, October 15, 1970.
18. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, p. 171.
19. Rita Mae Brown, “Take a Lesbian to Lunch,” A Plain Brown Rapper (Oakland, CA: Diana Press, 1976).
20. Rita Mae Brown, interview with Tina Crosby, in “The Stonewall Riot Remembered” (unpublished paper, January 16, 1974), in New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division; and Rita Mae Brown, interview with author.
21. Brown, “Take a Lesbian to Lunch.”
22. Ibid.
23. Edda Cimino, interview with author, Miami, October 14, 2012.
24. Rita Mae Brown, interview with author.
25. A blueprint for consciousness raising, “Radical Feminist Consciousness Raising,” was laid out by Redstockings member Kathie Sarachild (pseudonym of Kathie Amatniek) at the 1968 National Women’s Liberation Conference in Chicago. An expanded version appeared as “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” in Redstockings, Feminist Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), pp. 144–50.
26. Brown, “Take a Lesbian to Lunch.”
27. Ivy Bottini, interview with author, Los Angeles, August 19, 2004; and Barbara Love, interview with author, New York (telephone), August 14, 2014.
28. Shumsky, interview with author.
29. Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified-Woman,” reprinted in Notes from the Third Year: Women’s Liberation, ed. Anne Koedt, 1971.
30. Vivian Gornick, “Lesbians and Women’s Liberation: ‘In Any Terms She Shall Choose,’ ” Village Voice, May 28, 1970, p. 5.
31. Ti-Grace Atkinson, “Strategy and Tactics: A Presentation of Political Lesbianism,” January 1971; reprinted in Amazon Odyssey: The First Collection of Writings by the Political Pioneer of the Women’s Movement (New York: Links Books, 1974).
32. In 1970 the essay became chap. 2 of her book Sexual Politics.
33. Ti-Grace Atkinson, “Lesbianism and Feminism: Justice for Women as ‘Unnatural’ ” (December 1970, reprinted in Amazon Odyssey). Atkinson had written this piece as an op-ed for the New York Times after a December 14, 1970, article in Time magazine had exposed Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics, as a “bisexual.” Millett had been catapulted to fame when Time put her portrait on its August 31, 1970, cover. But the December article speculated that Millett’s sexuality would “reinforce the views of those skeptics who routinely dismiss all liberationists as lesbians.” Prominent feminists such as Atkinson, Flo Kennedy, and Gloria Steinem called a press conference at the Washington Square Methodist Church, where they strongly defended Millett and lesbians in general: Judy Klemesrud, “The Lesbian Issue and Women’s Lib,” New York Times, December 18, 1970.
34 Radicalesbians, “GLF Women,” Come Out!, December/January 1970/71, p. 10.
35. Betty Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor,” New York Times, March 4, 1973.
36. Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor.” Friedan saw it as ironic that she’d been the one to “push forward” Atkinson as a NOW officer because “her ladylike blond image would counteract the man-eating specter” with which antifeminists tried to put down the women’s movement.
37. Ibid.
38. Susan Brownmiller reiterated Friedan’s Lavender Menace remark in The New York Times Magazine, announcing it to the world: “ ‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’: A Member of the Women’s Liberation Movement Explains What It’s All About,” New York Times Magazine, May 15, 1970.
39. Donna Gottschalk, email correspondence with author, New York, November 14, 2013.
40. Ellen Broidy, interviews with author, Santa Barbara, CA (telephone), June 2, 2013, and November 11, 2013.
41. Love, interview with author.
42. Shumsky, interview with author; and Rita Mae Brown, interview with author.
43. Quoted in Teal, Gay Militants, p. 179. The demonstration is also described in Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality: How Lesbians and Gay Men Have Made Themselves a Political and Social Force in Modern America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), pp. 248–49. After Lavender Menace disbanded, there were few all-lesbian direct action groups. Lesbian Avengers, the most prominent of them, was started twenty years later, in 1992, by activists Sarah Schulman and Maxine Wolfe: for a history of Lesbian Avengers see Kelly J. Cogswell, Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
44. Shumsky, interview with author.
45. Karla Jay, Tales of a Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 143.
46. Radicalesbians, “The Lavender Menace Strikes,” Come Out!, June/July 1970.
47. Shumsky, interview with author.
48. Friedan, “Up from the Kitchen Floor.” Friedan repeated her allegations at the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference in Mexico City, alleging that the CIA was acting as “agent provocateurs,” pushing “pseudo-radical agendas” in the feminist movement to discredit it; and she warned against feminists becoming “anti-male,” which, to her, signified “lesbian”: “Betty Friedan Fears CIA Movement Role,” New York Times, June 23, 1975.
49. Rita Mae Brown, “Take State Power!,” Lesbian Tide, June 1974, p. 3.
50. Rita Mae Brown, “The Shape of Things to Come,” Women: A Journal of Liberation, January 1972.
51. Brown, “Take State Power!”
52. Rita Mae Brown, Rita Will: Memoirs of a Literary Rabble-Rouser (New York: Bantam, 1999), pp. 253–54.
53. Charlotte Bunch, interview with author, New York (telephone), December 17, 2013; and Charlotte Bunch, “Learning from Lesbian Separatism” (1976); reprint, Lavender Culture, eds. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York: Jove/HBJ, 1979), pp. 433–44.
54. Bunch, interview with author.
55. Furies: Lesbian/Feminist Monthly 1, no. 1 (January 1972): p. 1.
56. Charlotte Bunch, “Lesbians in Revolt: Male Supremacy Quakes and Quivers,” Furies 1, no. 1 (January 1972): pp. 8–9; Barbry (Barbara Solomon), “Taking the Bullshit by the Horns,” Furies 1, no. 3 (March/April 1972): pp. 8–9; Jennifer Woodul, “Darers Go First,” Furies 1, no. 5 (June/July 1972): pp. 2–3.
57. Alix Dobkin, interview with Laurel Galana and Gina Covina, in The New Lesbians: Interviews with Women Across the U.S. and Canada (Berkeley, CA: Moon Books, 1977), p. 41.
58. Joyce Cheney, ed., Lesbian Land (Minneapolis: Word Weavers, 1985).
59. A 1973 national lesbian conference, held on the UCLA campus, was organized by Jeanne Córdova, who hoped to develop a “national lesbian agenda,” which would include fighting for the rights of lesbian mothers in custody cases and for civil rights protection for lesbians in employment and housing. The conference was attended by two thousand lesbians, but as Córdova observes, the “cultural impact” of the conference was much more significant than the political impact: author’s first interview with Jeanne Córdova, December 22, 2012, and email correspondence, February 24, 2014.
60. The term and concept were popularized by Jill Johnston, Lesbian Nation: The Feminist Solution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974).
61. Katherine English, “Lesbians Talk About Self-Help Law: Can We Create Our Own Courts?” Pearl Diver, May 1977, pp. 16–18.
62. Ibid.
63. Peter Stark, “Legal Row Over Son of Lesbian,” Age (San Francisco), January 17, 1978.
64. Guy Gifford and Mary Jo Risher, By Her Own Admission: A Lesbian Mother’s Fight to Keep Her Son (New York: Doubleday, 1977).
65. Risher v. Risher, no. 19067, Court of Civil Appeals (Dallas, Texas), 547 S.W. 2d 292 (1977).
66. Sue Levinkind, interview with author, Oakland (Skype), April 19, 2012.
67. Shan Ottey, interview with author, Seattle, May 10, 2012.
68. Anna Schlecht, interview with author, Olympia, WA, May 28, 2012.
69. “Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), reprint, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983).
70. Chirlane McCray, “I Am a Lesbian,” Essence, September 1979.
71. Corky Culver, interview with author, Melrose, FL, October 25, 2012.
72. Bunch, “Learning from Lesbian Separatism.”
73. See Bonnie Morris, Eden Built by Eves: The Culture of Women’s Music Festivals (Los Angeles: Alyson, 1999).
CHAPTER 15: DRESSING FOR DINNER
1. Quoted in Robert S. Allen, “Inside Washington” (syndicated), Clovis (NM) News-Journal, July 3, 1972.
2. Bruce Voeller, “Notice: Elections ’72 Strategy Meeting,” GAA New York Collection, box 1, folder 11, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
3. Voeller, “Notice: Elections ’72 Strategy Meeting.”
4. Morris Kight, “Gay Rights Plank,” Morris Kight Collection, box 6, folder 21, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
5. Fouratt had recently reminded GAA of its “rampant” offenses with regard to “chauvinism, sexism, and racism” by flyers he distributed at GAA meetings: for example, “GAA Effective But a Bummer Trip” (February 3, 1972), Morty Manford Papers, box 11, subject files: Jim Fouratt, Manuscript and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
6. A founding member of NACHO—bow tie–wearing, cigar-smoking, middle-aged Foster Gunnison—had remarked in 1966 on the necessity for a national organization, and how it would “prevent fringe elements, beatniks, and other professional nonconformists” from getting all the press: quoted in David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), p. 48.
7. Official Minutes: Strategy Planning Session, Washington, DC, May 5–7, 1972, National Coalition of Gay Organizations Papers, Gay/Lesbian Collection, Shields Library, UC Davis.
8. Allen, “Inside Washington.”
9. National Political Affairs Committee, “Gay Presidential Politics: The Time to Act is Now,” prepared by Steve Hoglund, National Coalition for Gay Organizations Papers, Gay/Lesbian Collection, Shields Library, UC Davis.
10. Mike Balduf, “Gays Want Representation at Democratic Convention,” Ohio State Lantern, February 16, 1972.
11. On July 10 about five hundred demonstrators—veterans, SDS members, Yippies, and radical gays—marched from Flamingo Park to the convention hall. They tried to tear down a metal fence that separated them from the convention hall. According to an FBI report, “A group of fifty policemen persuaded the demonstrators to remain outside.” There was one slight injury—a portion of the fence fell on one of the officers: FBI memo, July 31, 1972, Dan Siminoski Collection, box 2, folder 7, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. Edda Cimino, who was the cocoordinator, with Morty Manford, of the radical gay and lesbian protests during the Republican National Convention that was held in Miami Beach the following month, recalls that the police were far less tempered at that convention. She witnessed police helicopters flying over Flamingo Park with regularity, and several incidents in which the police came into the park, beat up gay men, and used tear gas and pepper spray on them: Cimino, interview with author.
12. Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “McGovern’s Compromises” (syndicated), Syracuse (NY) Post Standard, June 28, 1972.
13. United Press International, “Dems Nix Abortion, ‘Gay Lib’ Planks,” Capital Times (Madison, WI), June 27, 1972.
14. Virginia Payette, “Parties Need ‘Sorting Out,’ ” Lubbock (TX) Avalanche-Journal, July 5, 1972.
15. Allen, “Inside Washington.”
16. “The Protestors: Zippies, Arabs, Poor, Gay, Etc.,” San Antonio (TX) Express, July 11, 1972.
17. “Gay Presidential Politics: The Time to Act Is Now,” prepared by Steve Hoglund.
18. Allen, “Inside Washington.” Frank Kameny also finagled a few minutes in front of the Republican Platform Committee’s subcommittee on Human Rights and Responsibilities, before the Republican National Convention, which was to be held in Miami Beach on August 21–23. Kameny knew it was an exercise in futility, as he wrote Morty Manford: “Needless to say, we should not have expected much of a response from the Republicans.” But, he admitted, his real purpose was to make gays visible to the media and to the “hundreds of gays who were there and had an important experience to share with other gays all around the country. A call to action”: Frank Kameny to Morty Manford, September 13, 1972, Frank Kameny Papers, box 7, folder 2, Frank Kameny Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
19. Robert S. Allen, “McGovernites Divided on ‘Gay’ Rights Plank,” (syndicated) Charleston (WV) Daily Mail, July 7, 1972.
20. Allen, “Inside Washington.”
21. Associated Press, Odell Hanson, “McGovern Personally Lures Iowa Support, Visits Hawkeye Delegates,” Oelwein (IA) Daily Register, July 10, 1972; John Lauritsen, “Gays to Demonstrate Against McGovern,” Militant, July 28, 1972 (copy in FBI file, August 4, 1972; classification: 100-16589-94); and Gold, interview with author. Gold, who’d been a writer for Variety, recalls being rescued from the clutches of the McGovern aides by a convention delegate, the actress Shirley MacLaine, whom Gold had interviewed a few weeks earlier. MacLaine saw Gold being manhandled, demanded the aides release him, and went back with him to the room where the South Dakota delegation had been meeting; but by then the delegates had adjourned. MacLaine had been on the platform committee and had signed the petition demanding that gays be given time on the convention floor: Allen, “Inside Washington.”
22. Shilts describes the witch hunt of Foster in Conduct Unbecoming, pp. 167–68.
23. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, p. 132.
24. United Press International, “Delegates to Ballot Tonight,” Weirton (WV) Daily Times, July 12, 1972.
25. Cronkite became a defender of gay rights soon after the convention, when he was zapped on his CBS Evening News program by nineteen-year-old gay rights activist Mark Segal; Cronkite showed up at Segal’s trial and asked the young man to educate him about gay rights: Mark Segal, interview with author, Philadelphia, March 8, 2013. The incident is also discussed at length in Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013).
26. Foster’s speech may be heard in its entirety at sfspankycakes.tumblr.com/archive.
27. Madeline Davis, interview with Michel Martin (transcript), Tell Me More, NPR News, 2012.
28. Davis speech in transcript, Martin, Tell Me More.
29. Michael Ziegler, “City Woman Gives Report to Democrats,” Findlay (OH) Republican Courier, July 13, 1972. Jim Foster and John Howard of New York GAA got to Mrs. Wilch soon after the speech and made her understand how hurtful it was to the gay community. The following day she issued an apology to gays, saying, “I was not aware the speech would imply homosexuals are child molesters,” and she blamed the platform committee staff lawyer for the statement. Her apology was virtually absent from the mainstream press, though the Advocate printed it: “Text of Wilch Apology,” Advocate, August 16, 1972, p. 3.
30. “Angry Gay Leaders Lie Down in McGovern Hotel Entrance,” Advocate, August 2, 1972.
31. United Press International, “Dems Reject Homosexual Bid by Men, Women,” Lubbock (TX) Avalanche-Journal, July 12, 1972; and “Opposition Speaker Says Women, Children Threatened,” Advocate, August 2, 1972.
32. Associated Press, “Ohio Delegates Squabble,” Dover (OH) Times-Reporter, July 12, 1972.
33. Official Minutes: Strategy Planning Session, Washington, DC, May 5–7, 1972. Demonstrations in Miami were minor, and none was reported anywhere else: “McGovern Gays Badly Shaken Up,” Advocate, August 2, 1972, p. 3.
34. Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), p. 698.
35. Albert Riley, “Former Gov. Griffin Plans to Vote for Nixon,” Thomasville (GA) Times-Enterprise, August 11, 1972.
36. Perlstein, Nixonland, p. 695.
37. Associated Press, “McGovern Is Demo Nominee,” Hutchinson (KS) News, July 13, 1972.
38. Wandel, interview with author.
39. Randy Shilts, “Political Lion or Paper Tiger,” Advocate, May 31, 1978.
40. O’Brien, second interview with author.
41. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, p. 189. Ronald Gold, Voeller’s confidant, also mentions other former GLF members, such as Brenda Howard and Jim Fouratt as triggering Voeller’s anger and disdain: Gold, interview with author.
42. See p. 183 for my discussion of Howard Brown and the Stonewall Riots.
43. Chambers, “Ex-City Official Says He’s a Homosexual.”
44. Carlos A. Ball, The Right to Be Parents: LGBT Families and the Transformation of Parenthood (New York: New York University Press, 2012), p. 62.
45. Ralph Blumenthal, “Homosexual Civil-Rights Group Is Announced by Ex-City Aide,” New York Times, October 16, 1973.
46. The name was dreamed up in the kitchen of Voeller’s SoHo apartment by another former GAA member, Greg Dawson, who became NGTF’s financial officer. Gold, Nathalie Rockhill, and Tom Smith, one of GAA’s few black members, were also present at this first meeting: Gold, interview with author; and David Eisenbach, Gay Power, p. 244.
47. Rockhill, interview with author; and Gold, personal collection, speech at NGTF 10th Anniversary Bash, 1983. I thank Ronald Gold for sharing this material with me.
48. Murdoch and Price, Courting Justice, p. 181.
49. John D’Emilio, The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 101.
50. “Rights Struggle Shifts to Capitol Hill,” Advocate, July 31, 1974.
51. “News from NGTF,” February 7, 1975, National Gay Task Force Collection, box 1, folder 9, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
52. Rockhill, interview with author.
53. Associated Press, “Bill Would Give Gays Equal Rights,” Corpus Christi (TX) Times, March 26, 1975.
54. Rockhill, interview with author.
55. Marianne Means, “Viewpoint: Homosexuals out of the Closet” (syndicated), Thomasville (GA) Times Enterprise, April 7, 1975.
56. Ibid.
57. The organization’s name wasn’t changed to the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force until 1986. In 2014 it was changed again, to the National Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Task Force.
58. Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, p. 168.
59. Jean O’Leary and Bruce Voeller, PhD, coexecutive directors, NGTF, “Five Year Goal Proposal” (1976), National Gay Task Force Collection, box 1, folder 1, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
60. D’Emilio, The World Turned, p. 103.
61. Secretary of the American Bar Association to Bruce Voeller, letter, December 21, 1973; and American Medical Association, letter of February 25, 1976; unprocessed, Botts Collection of LGBT History, Houston. I am grateful to archivist Larry Criscione for bringing these materials to my attention.
62. “News from NGTF,” February 7, 1975, NGTF Collection, box 1, folder 9, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries.
63. Steve Endean, Bringing Lesbian and Gay Rights into the Mainstream: Twenty Years of Progress, ed. Vicki Lynn Eaklor (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2006). This is Endean’s posthumously published autobiography. In 1985 the Gay Rights National Lobby merged with the Human Rights Fund to become the Human Rights Campaign. A couple of decades later, HRC was claiming six hundred thousand members and $30 million in donations: Sarah Wildman et al., “Tough Times at HRC,” Advocate, February 29, 2005, p. 30. See also Bruce Bawer, A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
64. The Advocate’s circulation in 1974, when Michaels sold the publication to David Goodstein, was about forty-five thousand.
65. See p. 120; and Steve Ginsberg, “Pride Organizes Homophiles: New Group Wants Militant Civil Rights Drive,” Los Angeles Free Press, 1966 (clipping), in PRIDE file, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries. See also Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 155–57, 159–62.
66. Editorial, “The Destroyers Strike!,” Advocate, February 28, 1973, p. 36. When the National Gay Task Force was formed that year, Dick Michaels declared it “one of the most exciting developments in recent years . . . a national, professional, full-time gay civil rights organization” to replace the unprofessional, loose-cannon radicals: editorial, “Exciting News,” Advocate, November 7, 1973. See also Michael Bronski’s discussion of the Advocate’s opposition to radicalism: Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility (Boston: South End Press, 1984), pp. 148–51.
67. “Homosexuals in Uniform,” Newsweek, June 9, 1947.
68. “Queer People,” Newsweek, October 10, 1949.
69. “For the Emotionally Ill,” Newsweek, December 26, 1955.
70. “Homosexuals: To Punish or Pity,” Newsweek, July 11, 1960.
71. “Are Homosexuals Sick?” Newsweek, May 21, 1973.
72. Jerrold K. Footlick and Susan Agrest, “Gays and the Law,” Newsweek, October 25, 1976.
73. Virtually Normal is the title of Andrew Sullivan’s 1995 book, hugely controversial at the time, in which he argued that gays and lesbians would not be first-class citizens until they won the right to marry and the right to serve in the military.
74. Jim Foster to Frank Kameny, letter, September 1972, box 3, folder 8, Frank Kameny Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
75. Jim Foster to Frank Kameny, letter, January 29, 1974, ibid.
76. See p. 81.
77. Michael Grieg, “Gay Aide on City Staff,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 27, 1975. In 1977 Feinstein even officiated at a lesbian commitment ceremony in the garden of her home, “wedding” Jo Daly to Nancy Achilles, a wealthy donor to Feinstein’s campaigns. Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were invited to be official witnesses. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), p. 181.
78. Quoted in Eskridge, Dishonorable Passions.
79. “Dymally Returns to Break Tie: Sex Liberalization Bill Ok’d,” Bakersfield (CA) Californian, May 2, 1975.
80. David Mixner, interview with author, New York, March 4, 2013.
81. MECLA members Dana Hopkins and Jake Jacobson, interviews with author, Los Angeles, September 3, 2012, and August 25, 2012, respectively.
82. Hopkins, interview with author.
83. Roberta Bennett, interview with author, Los Angeles, December 18, 2004; and Diane Abbitt, interview with author, Los Angeles, October 17, 2005.
84. MECLA is also discussed at length in Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., pp. 218–23.
85. Scott, quoted in David DeVoss, “Los Angeles: A Movement Sees Its Leaders Fall,” Los Angeles Times, January 11, 1988.
86. Mixner, interview with author.
87. Jacobson, interview with author.
88. Irv Burleigh, “Ideological Root in Religious Belief,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1975; and Dean Murphy, “Mr. Gibson: A Councilman of Deep Faith, Hard Work,” Los Angeles Times, April 26, 1987.
89. Mixner, interview with author.
90. Sid Bernstein, “City Council Race Turns Bitter,” Los Angeles Times, May 23, 1977.
91. In 1981 Ferraro engineered the election of his successor to the presidency: Joel Wachs, who was a gay man. See Greig Smith, “If City Hall’s Walls Could Talk”: Strange and Funny Stories from Inside Los Angeles City Hall (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2010), pp. 43–48. In 1985 Councilman Wachs was responsible for the writing and passage of the first anti-AIDS-discrimination bill in the country.
92. Doyle McManus, “Gay Rights Group Displays Power,” Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1979.
93. Pokey Anderson, interview with author, Puget Sound, Washington, May 31, 2012; and Pokey Anderson, interview with Erin Graham, July 25, 2006, Houston Oral History Project, University of Houston.
94. Anderson, interview with Graham.
95. Hugh Crell, “Point of View,” Pointblank Times (Houston), October 1975, p. 3.
96. Frank Michelle interview with Fred Hofheinz, February 11, 2008, Mayor Bill White Collection, Houston Public Library.
97. “Fred,” Pointblank Times, November 1975, pp. 1–2.
98. Associated Press, Linda Kramer, “Gays View Their Gains,” Oakland Tribune, October 5, 1975.
99. Anderson, interview with Graham.
100. Quoted in John Goins, “Forging a Community: The Rise of Gay Political Activism in Houston,” Houston History Magazine, March 25, 2010, pp. 38–42.
101. “Gays Seek to Gain Acceptance,” Houston Post, July 1, 1975.
102. Fan Snodgrass, “Gays Form Political Caucus; Voter Registration Drive Set,” Daily Cougar (University of Houston paper), July 3, 1975.
103. Quoted in Van Ooteghem v. Gray, 654 F. 2d 304, US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, August 24, 1981.
104. “Homosexual Vs. the Air Force,” New York Times, June 1, 1975.
105. Murdoch and Price, Courting Justice, p. 217.
106. There were some members of HGPC opposed to Van Ooteghem’s conservative style, such as Ray Hill, a street-smart, longtime Houston gay activist: Ray Hill, interview with author, Houston (telephone), April 16, 2012. James Sears discusses Hill at length in Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), chap. 20.
107. “GPC Ballot,” Pointblank Times, November 1975, p. 8.
108. Goins, “Forging a Community.”
109. Quoted in “GPC Ballot.”
110. The Houston Post report was based on a survey in the Advocate, cited in Goins, “Forging a Community,” p. 40.
111. William K. Stevens, “City Controller Expected to Unseat Mayor in Houston Election,” New York Times, October 21, 1981.
112. Mayor Jim McConn to Gay Political Caucus, letter, October 11, 1978, unprocessed files: folder, GPC-Houston, 1978, Botts Collection of LGBT History, Houston.
113. William K. Stevens, “Houston Accepts New Political Force,” New York Times, November 2, 1981.
114. See chapter 20.
115. Anderson, interview with author.
116. Ibid.
117. Flyer, “Frank Mann Is at It Again,” October 27, 1979, unprocessed files: folder GPC-Houston, Botts Collection of LGBT History, Houston.
118. Steve Shiflett speech, November 20, 1979, unprocessed files: folder GPC-Houston, Botts Collection of LGBT History, Houston.
119. Stevens, “Houston Accepts New Political Force.”
CHAPTER 16: HOW GAYS AND LESBIANS STOPPED BEING CRAZIES
1. Brass, interview with author; and Perry Brass, “Gay May Day,” Come Out!, Spring /Summer 1971, pp. 6, 14ff.
2. Jack Baker was the newly elected (and very out) student-body president at the University of Minnesota. The panel also included Larry Littlejohn, president of San Francisco’s Society for Individual Rights; Del Martin of DOB; and Lilli Vincenz of Mattachine Society Washington.
3. “GLF and Women’s Lib Zap Shrinks,” Gay, June 8, 1970, p. 3.
4. Poll cited on Alix Spiegel, “81 Words,” This American Life, NPR, January 18, 2002.
5. Barbara Gittings, “Preface: Show-and-Tell,” in American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History, ed. Jack Drescher and Joseph P. Merlino (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2007), p. xvii. DC GAA had been formed to support Frank Kameny’s run for Congress in 1971.
6. Ronald Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis (New York: Basic Books, 1981), pp. 102–3. Starting in 1970, radical gay groups began staging such zaps whenever “mental health” professionals convened. In November 1970, for instance, the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front descended on the Biltmore Hotel en masse—in bell-bottoms, army shirts, and roach-clip necklaces—to invade a session by Dr. M. P. Feldman, author of numerous articles on aversion therapy for “sexual deviation.” Feldman was showing his fellow psychologists a film about his use of electroshock in curing homosexuality. As the screen flashed pictures of a male homosexual being given shocks while looking at the image of a naked man, the GLF-ers who were scattered among the 150 psychologists rose, stamped their feet, and shouted “We’re not taking this anymore!” GLF member Don Kilhefner scuffled with Feldman for the microphone and won. Only one psychologist stormed out—“a pipe-smoking caricature of the profession”—GLF member Carolyn Weathers recalls. The rest let themselves be organized into small groups and actually listened to what the homosexuals had to say: Weathers, interview with author.
7. Spiegel, “81 Words.”
8. Frank Kameny interview with John-Manuel Andriote, Andriote Collection, 1128, box 2, folder 31, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
9. Mark Meinke, “Zapping the Shrinks: May 3, 1971,” Rainbow History Project, Washington, DC.
10. Reported in Newsweek, August 23, 1971, p. 47; and Bayer, Homosexuality and American Psychiatry.
11. Frank Kameny to Morty Manford, May 10, 1971, letter, Frank Kameny Collection, Library of Congress, box 7, folder 2.
12. Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). In The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), Szasz was directly critical of the profession’s misguided “preoccupation with the disease concept of homosexuality” and how it punishes homosexuals with a “stigmatizing label” that is nothing more than “a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced,” pp. 168, 170.
13. Jack Nichols, letter, October 14, 1963, quoted in Nichols’s unpublished autobiography, p. 50.
14. Frank Kameny statement, July 8, 2006, Rainbow History Project, Washington, DC.
15. Nichols’s unpublished autobiography, p. 70.
16. Wicker, interview with author; and Kay Tobin, “ ‘Expert’ Challenged,” Ladder, February/March 1965, p. 18.
17. “Cross Currents: The Homophile Community Versus Dr. Charles W. Socarides,” Ladder, September 1968, pp. 29–30.
18. Kameny, interview in Tobin and Wicker, Gay Crusaders, pp. 98–99.
19. Frank Kameny, “Civil Liberties: A Progress Report,” in New York Mattachine Newsletter, July 1965, pp. 7–22.
20. Frank Kameny, “Does Research into Homosexuality Matter?” Ladder, May 1965, p. 15.
21. Barbara Gittings, interview with John-Manuel Andriote, Andriote Collection 1128, box 2, folder 5, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.
22. Kameny, “Does Research into Homosexuality Matter?” pp. 14, 20; also Frank Kameny, “Emphasis on Research Has Had its Day,” Ladder, October 1965, pp. 10–14.
23. Ibid.; and Florence Conrad’s answer to Kameny’s rejection of “expert” opinions on homosexuality: “Research Is Here to Stay,” Ladder, July/August 1965, pp. 15–21. Some Mattachine members were as cautious as Conrad was on the issue. The New York Mattachine Newsletter, for instance, published an article about Irving Bieber’s 1962 book Homosexuality that criticized Bieber as “an abuser of behavioral science” and a perpetuator of lies about homosexuals. But an editor’s note that followed the article disclaimed its bold views and called for “more research in the field of sexual deviation.”
24. (Tobin) Lahusen, interview with author.
25. Spiegel, This American Life.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Lawrence Hartmann, interview with Jack Drescher, in Jack Drescher and Joseph P. Merlino, eds., American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Press, 2007), pp. 45–60.
29. Spiegel, This American Life.
30. Gittings, interview with Andriote.
31. Robert Seidenberg, “The Accursed Race,” in Homosexuality: A Changing Picture, ed. Hendrik Ruitenbeek (London: Souvenir Press, 1973).
32. (Tobin) Lahusen, interview with author.
33. Gittings, interview with Andriote.
34. David L. Scasta, “John E. Fryer, M.D., and the Dr. H. Anonymous Episode,” in Journal of Gay and Lesbian Psychotherapy 6, no. 4 (2003): pp. 73–84.
35. (Tobin) Lahusen, interview with author.
36. Ibid.
37. Fryer’s speech is reprinted in “Dr. H. Anonymous Speaks,” Philadelphia Gay News, May 17–23, 2002.
38. Press release by New York Gay Activists Alliance, “Gay Liberationists to Address Behaviorist, Psychiatric Conventions,” October 12, 1972: in ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, University of Southern California Libraries, GAA NY Collection, box 1, folder 4; and flyer, “Heterosexual and Unhappy? Free Brainwashing Here,” ibid.
39. Gold recalls that it had been agreed among GAA members that their president, Rich Wandel, would lead the protest; but Wandel was absent, and the role fell to Gold: Gold, interview with author.
40. Ibid.
41. Robert L. Spitzer, interview with Jack Drescher, in Drescher and Merlino, eds., American Psychiatry and Homosexuality, pp. 99–100; and Gold, interview with author. Charles Silverstein also describes the Behavior Therapy zap in For the Ferryman: A Personal History (New York: Chelsea Station Editions, 2011), pp. 47–48.
42. Robert Jean Campbell, interview with Richard O. Hire, in Drescher and Merlino, eds., American Psychiatry and Homosexuality, pp. 63–80.
43. Robert L. Spitzer, interview with Jack Drescher, in Drescher and Merlino, eds., American Psychiatry and Homosexuality, p. 100.
44. Charles Silverstein, interview with author, New York (telephone), May 3, 2013. The group decided it would present a two-pronged approach. Mental health professionals Silverstein, Ray Prada, and Bernice Goodman would talk about scientific evidence that challenged the sickness theory, and Jean O’Leary and Ronald Gold would talk about how the sickness theory affected gays and lesbians: Gold, interview with author.
45. Gold, interview with author.
46. I am grateful to Charles Silverstein for sharing a copy of this speech with me.
47. Spitzer, interview with Drescher in American Psychiatry and Homosexuality, p. 100.
48. Irving Bieber, “A Symposium: Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?” printed in American Journal of Psychiatry 130, no. 11 (1973): pp. 1207–16; and Gold, interview with author.
49. Gold, interview with author. Irving Bieber later repeated to the New York Times the absurdly false point about there being no homosexuals in kibbutzim: “A.P.A. Ruling on Homosexuality: The Issue Is Subtle, the Debate Still On,” December 23, 1973.
50. Judd Marmor, in “A Symposium: Should Homosexuality Be in the APA Nomenclature?”
51. Gold, interview with author. Drs. Robert Stoller and Richard Green, who were also on the panel, were “agnostics” on the subject of whether “homosexuality” belonged in the DSM.
52. Campbell, interview with Richard O. Hire.
53. Spitzer, interview with Jack Drescher.
54. Spiegel, “81 Words.”
55. Spitzer, interview with Jack Drescher.
56. Robert Spitzer, “A Proposal About Homosexuality and the APA Nomenclature,” in “Homosexual Orientation Disturbance: Proposed Change in DSM-II, APA Document,” reference number 73008; Kay (Tobin) Lahusen attests to Kameny’s authorship of the document: (Tobin) Lahusen, interview with author; and Memo, “Subject: Victory!!!! We have been cured!” December 15, 1973: Frank Kameny to “Those who contributed to my May 1973 trip to Honolulu to attend the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.” I am grateful to Ms. Lahusen for sharing with me her copy of this memo.
57. Spitzer, interview with Jack Drescher; and Gold, interview with author.
58. Ronald Bayer, in his book Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, suggests that the APA decision to declassify homosexuality in the DSM was “not a conclusion based on the approximation of scientific truth as dictated by reason, but was an action demanded by the ideological temper of the times” (pp. 3–4). It is surely true that “the ideological temper of the times” played a role in the APA’s decision to declare that homosexuality is not an illness; but it is equally true, as Thomas Szasz has suggested, that the “ideological temper of the times” was responsible for the APA’s original decision to declare that homosexuality is an illness.
59. Quoted in Silverstein, For the Ferryman, p. 45.
60. “A.P.A. Ruling on Homosexuality,” New York Times.
61. The APA vote did not convince psychiatrists such as Bieber and Socarides to cease promulgating their theories, nor did it convince all medical professionals to stop listening to them. In 1976 the New York Academy of Medicine presented a panel, “Psychodynamics of Male Homosexuality,” that included Bieber, Socarides, and Lionel Ovesey, the latter of whom, like his copanelists, had long proclaimed that homosexuality was pathological but could be cured by psychotherapy (Homosexuality and Pseudohomosexuality, New York: Science House, Inc., 1969). But organized gays did not tolerate such meetings. They invaded, shouting “Bigots!” and “No more shit!” They sat down on the conference room floor and refused to move even when the police arrived. They yelled out stories of the psychiatric oppression of gays. The meeting was adjourned before Bieber and Socarides had a chance to say a word: James Zepp, “S.O.B. Zap,” Gay Activist, April/May 1976. The classification “ego-dystonic homosexuality” was finally removed from the DSM-III-R in 1987, but that did not prevent Socarides from founding the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality in 1992.
62. Frank Kameny to Jack Nichols, letter, April 24, 1975, Frank Kameny Papers, box 7, folder 10, Library of Congress.