christopher de la Torre

John-Manuel Andriote’s “Victory Deferred” collection is currently showing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, as part of a display dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising. The exhibit is based on his 1999 book of the same name. Andriote’s many interview subjects for the book include AIDS activist and author Larry Kramer.

Forty years after Stonewall, I sat down with Andriote to talk about his interview with Kramer, the early years of AIDS activism, and why gay in the mainstream may actually be a good thing for the modern Gay Rights Movement.

CD: Your 1999 book, Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America, takes a historical look at the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Tell us about it.

JMA: Victory Deferred opens in the 70s, looking at gay life in America at that point. It was after Stonewall and before AIDS – the disco years. Right after Victory, I wrote a history of disco. The two were not altogether coincidental. From there, I look at how AIDS really transformed or brought many things – if not to fruition – to a whole new level. Organizing nationally gave people a sense of their own power.

The New York Times, in its recent article, claimed [the gay movement] has no moral leader because the movement was about the right to be sexual. That seems so retro. It goes back to sexual liberation in the 70s. It’s hard to relate to that now. The movement is about the right to love whomever you love. Sex is a subcategory of that. To most people, the love part has been left out of the equation. And you see that in the movement for marriage. [The gay rights movement] is all about wanting equal rights, but it boils down to the right to love.

CD: And it seems as if the preoccupation with sex always gets in the way. Sex is important to relationships but on the other hand, it’s just sex. Why the need for society to get hung up on it?

JMA: Gay people fall in love. They commit their lives to their partners. They want to raise children and create a loving home. If it’s really only a movement about the right to be sexual, that really leaves out a big part of the spectrum of LGBT people we’re talking about.

CD: Your work was unanimously accepted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History this year. “Victory Deferred” (taken from your book of the same name) is a collection of interview tapes, transcripts and other materials related to your research for the book. That’s huge.

JMA: As a writer, when you’re young and selling articles for peanuts while building a portfolio, you’re doing it because someone somewhere validated you – they told you you’re a good writer and that maybe you should think about doing it as a living. It takes a lot of faith in yourself, talent and intelligence, to pursue that. At this stage in my career, to have Smithsonian people say the work that I’ve done is really worth having other people access and draw from it in their own work, is gratifying.

CD: Would you share a few things in the exhibit that you’re especially fond of?

JMA: Well, the exhibit includes all of the tapes – the verbatim transcripts. I spent many hundreds of hours transcribing, word-for-word, the interviews I’ve done for Victory Deferred. The people I interviewed are basically a “who’s who” of the gay movement – both in the community and government – key people who shaped this country’s response to the AIDS epidemic. The exhibit also includes correspondence between my editor and I and between various gay activists. Many of them are no longer alive, which makes their voices (now archived at the museum) that much more precious. Then there are also these files of now historical articles I clipped from newspapers and magazines back in the 80s.

CD: And your early career as a journalist?

JMA: I started writing about AIDS when I was at Northwestern, doing my master’s in journalism in 1985. It was late that year – I was doing an internship for Medill School of Journalism’s Washington program – when I met Bill Bailey. He became my boyfriend. Bill was a longtime volunteer buddy at Whitman-Walker Clinic. He encouraged me to write about AIDS. He told me I should devote my career to it.

CD: 1994 was a difficult year for you.

JMA: Bill died in ‘94. We hadn’t been together for that entire time, though. He had a partner – David Wolf – for the last five years of his life. Bill and I remained very close friends. He told me something at the hospital, during his final illness – I said, “gosh we’ve been through so much together” (in terms of AIDS history, so much had happened in such a short time), that we’d been friends for so long. And he said to me, “and colleagues.” You have to know Bill, because he was the ultimate Washington animal. When he became a lobbyist for HIV prevention for the American Psychological Association (that was the last 8 years of his life – most of the time I knew him), he was Mr. HIV Prevention. During Bill’s memorial service on Capitol Hill, Tom Sheridan described Bill as the father of the HIV prevention lobby in Washington. That was huge. Here was a man who had HIV and who ultimately died from AIDS-related causes, spending his energy and amazing passion trying to help ensure that other people didn’t get infected with HIV. I thought that was really quite a testament to his character. For him to say that we were colleagues meant a lot. We had worked together and stood together on things we were really passionate about.

CD: So, you devoted your career to writing about HIV/AIDS?

JMA: It was sort of the perfect storm. Friends of mine were starting to get sick and die from AIDS. I was 26 years old. As a journalist, I was reading five newspapers a day (this was before the Internet, of course), along with magazines; I was keeping up with what was going on in the world. [AIDS] was a big unfolding story in 1985. Rock Hudson announced he had AIDS, people were terrified, there was a lot of hysteria. It hadn’t yet exploded in terms of the understanding that this was a global issue. Africa had been written about, but it wasn’t nearly on the scale of the pandemic it later became. AIDS affected me personally. It was affecting my community. And I had engaged as a journalist. It sank its teeth into my imagination. And so it was worth pouring myself into. And because of that I became very aware of injustices people with AIDS were experiencing. That’s the first time I discovered my passion about social justice – about fairness and unfairness – so it captured me on a spiritual level as well.

CD: Flash forward a bit. When compared to other movements like black civil rights or women’s rights, the gay rights movement seems fundamentally different. LGBT is different. First of all, to be gay isn’t considered innate to most of society. But my question is, why do we feel the need to conform to society at all?

JMA: That’s a fundamental issue that’s never been resolved to the satisfaction of Joe Six Pack – whether or not being gay is a choice. Even if it is a choice, why shouldn’t it be protected? Protected like so many other choices, like which religion you practice or if you don’t practice any religion? Those are choices. And if you do see being gay as a choice, there’s this thing about how you play the hand you’ve been dealt. Do you want to get married and have children? Do you want to have a similar life to what’s considered the norm for heterosexuals? What does it mean to be gay? It hasn’t been satisfactorily answered.

CD: I feel that much of that stems from the human need to categorize. I feel fortunate to be of a generation in which most of those traditional labels are beginning to dissolve. But it’s a catch 22 because, as they dissolve, people forget what those labels are. We’re not yet fully integrated into society. When I say integrated I mean that we are unable to go about our lives without experiencing unjust criticism and other forms of discrimination simply because we are different.

JMA: And when we talk about “we” who exactly are we talking about? Larry Kramer has been a critic forever about that idea of “what does it mean to be gay?” and for whatever reason I find myself agreeing with him. Kramer says sex is a strange thing to base a community on – this sort of priapic brotherhood. That goes back to the 70s – this whole idea about gay liberation as sexual liberation – the freedom to have sex wherever, whenever and with whomever you want. Not all people who consider themselves gay are comfortable with that idea, certainly not with that public representation of what it means to be gay. I’m not comfortable with it.

CD: How so?

JMA: From the time that I came out in the early 80s (I was in my early 20s), I was very aware of those gay men who were affluent and upper-middle class – the ones who lived in nice apartments, went to Rio, had nice clothes and rented a house on fire island in the summer. That, to me, was a very specific experience of being gay. Often after dinner parties the same men would put on their leather and go to the Mineshaft [1]. There was this juxtaposition of upper middle class, St. Thomas, Fifth Avenue, Episcopalian respectability, but also this raunchy and promiscuous side of gay life. I had very mixed messages coming at me as a young gay man about what it was to be gay.

Entrance to Mineshaft, NYC. Photo by Lenny Waller.

I hadn’t necessarily related to either one of those things; neither sat well with me. I’ve always felt that tension within myself. What does it mean to be gay? What do I mean by it? I mean, I didn’t come out of a closet and embrace my homosexual nature in order to fit into another closet other gay people define for me.

CD: You worked for the American Psychiatric Association in the mid-1990s.

JMA: I worked for the American Psychiatric Association from 1991, when I started as a temp, until the middle of 1995 when I was working in the aids education office. We organized training programs for psychiatrists and psychologists and other mental health providers all over the country. The association changed its classification of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1973. The American Psychological Association and the Therapeutic Association, I believe, followed suit.

CD: You interviewed Larry Kramer.

JMA: My interview with him was so many years ago. I recently contacted Larry about interviewing again, actually, for the revised paperback edition of Victory Deferred that I’m working on now. The first interview for Victory was back in 1995. Meeting with Kramer – going into his apartment on Fifth Avenue, right next to Washington Square – is a momentous thing. Historic things took place there. The meetings that led to the founding of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) took place there.

Larry had recently reconnected with this man who he demonized in his 1978 novel Faggots as “Dinky” – the boyfriend who couldn’t be faithful because he was caught up in the whole sexual subculture. The Fred Lemmish character (the Kramer character) wanted to move on from that. Well, Dinky and Lemmish reconnected years later and they’ve been together ever since as partners.

The New York Times in 1995 had just done a story about Larry called “When A Roaring Lion Learns to Purr” – that was the headline (it was fantastic) – so one of my questions [to Larry] was, “is it true you’ve learned to purr?” [laughs]

CD: His response?

JMA: For a man who was notorious for being a “roaring lion” – for blasting people in high-decibel pitches, in histrionic terms – one-on-one, sitting in his living room, he was more like a purring cat than a roaring lion. I think that I wrote how he seemed kind of sad. That’s the part of Larry people have missed. They only hear about the histrionics – the anger, the outrage. They don’t look beneath that to realize why he’s been so angry – the terrible loss, the disappointment, the disillusionment that he’s experienced as he’s lost so many people, as he’s watched the U.S. government and its scientists not doing everything it seemed they could do – and it was affecting his friends. It affected him in a personal way.

Larry Kramer, April 2007. Photo by David Shankbone.

As we’ve seen with ACT UP (which Larry was instrumental in starting and inspiring with his speech at the gay and lesbian community center in New York), is that when people are afraid and grieving, it’s a very vulnerable thing to show the world your sadness an grief. So anger and rage and hostility are put out there as a shield to protect your broken heart. That’s what people haven’t wanted to see. Just how deeply his heart’s been broken. They don’t see the man. That’s what I was interested in and ultimately that’s what changed how I thought about Larry.

CD: That’s closer to Larry Kramer than I ever imagined I’d get. I met him briefly several years ago at the Center in New York – my friend Andrew Holleran had just released his novella Grief and was reading there. After that day, I always describe Kramer as a hurricane because he seemed to walk through the room with an entourage of people swirling around him. Like a hurricane, he had that energy, and he still can command a room. It was just incredible. What do you think of this notion that the gay rights movement needs one person – an iconic “moral” figure – to represent it?

JMA: There is a difference between organizations like Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) and the Gay Movement – I wrote about this in the final chapter of Victory Deferred – When Elizabeth Birch was first hired as director of HRC, she was quoted as saying something like, “how would you feel if you woke up and found the movement had been handed to you?” Think about that. To a movement that for years had lamented the absence of a galvanizing leader – someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. – to have someone like Elizabeth Birch appoint herself to that role was breathtakingly arrogant and astounding. The point is that any of these people who are paid executive directors of gay rights organizations – their job is to organize politically. But that’s not the same as being a moral figure like King or Gandhi or someone like that whose authority to lead comes from something other than being a director of some organization.

CD: I agree. For someone to be that galvanizing iconic moral figure people look for to really move them, spirituality has got to come in. Perhaps similar to the spirituality you experienced when you found your passion. Not to confuse the word, but I’m not sure our movement has had the chance to be “spiritual” – in any mainstream sense of the word, anyway. We’ve been limited with regard to our identity. And that identity right now to many people is nothing more than sexual.

JMA: The real point is that each of us has opportunities in our lives – within our organizations and our families – to help create change. What it means to me to be “gay and proud” is that who I am, who I love – the issues of concern to gay people and certainly gay America’s experience in the AIDS epidemic – is that this is part of the mainstream. This is a part of human life. I always felt like I wanted to write about this in mainstream publications, that I wanted my books to be published by mainstream publishers. The University of Chicago Press published Victory Deferred, and that was intentional. I never seriously considered going to a gay publishing house because, to me, that’s like singing to the choir. And the choir already knows the song, although they don’t really know it. Most gay people don’t really know our community’s history.

I’ve often said that if older gay men did the job they should do in transmitting what we have experienced – telling the stories of our struggles in the AIDS epidemic and how hard we fought and how proud we were to be out in the streets, if we really preserved our history and passed it down to younger people – I think that’s something to tremendously proud of. And I think that part of creating and sustaining a gay community is preserving our history and our wisdom and keeping our stories alive. That’s why the Smithsonian exhibits and panels at the New York Public Library are important, because they help preserve and transmit that history and wisdom.

But ultimately it’s about making sure that we’re represented in places like the National Museum of American History. That’s why it was so gratifying to me to have my work collected there and not just in a gay history project. It says that this is a part of American history.

—

Photo of John-Manuel Andriote by Tracy Powell, 2007.

[1] Once a premier New York City members-only club, the Mineshaft (at Washington St. and Little W. 12th) was open around the clock from Wednesday night through Monday morning, featuring a roof deck, clothes check, dungeons and other amenities. The S&M free-for-all opened in 1977 before the AIDS era, and was finally closed by the city’s Department of Health in 1985.

INTERVIEW FRIDAY, JULY 10: LAMBDA LEGAL EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR KEVIN CATHCART

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I first met Perry Brass in October of 2007. He emailed me to express his thanks for a review I’d written about J. Louis Campbell’s biography of gay rights activist Jack Nichols. Campbell ended his book with a memorial poem Perry had written for Nichols. “[Y]our life took on doubt and pushed it away like a faulty raft,” Perry writes in his farewell. Fifty of the GLF veteran’s poems have been set to music, and his work has been included in 25 anthologies. He continues to be a mentor through his words — a fearless literary voice that has pushed away its own doubtful demons.

In our interview, Perry Brass talks about his childhood in a less than forgiving South, a definitive stint with Gay Liberation Front’s controversial newspaper, Come Out!, and explains why the gay community has bought “beautifully” into the great American suburban dream.

Perry Brass, 1971 – photo by  J. LaRue

CD: 1969. 2009. What has changed? What hasn’t?

PB: Everything has changed, and too much hasn’t changed. I grew up in the Deep South, in the late 50s and early 60s, in a world where you could not even use the word “homosexuality” in any public form of conversation or writing. I had a college dictionary that did not have it in it: it was considered too obscene for college students. I came out at 16, and was really out (sneaking into gay bars) at 17. And I had nowhere to learn anything about who I was or what I was. My biggest feeling was that being gay, I would, naturally enough, be murdered. I heard kids in the South talk about the properness of killing people like me all the time, while of course they were not aware that one of those very same “queers” was in the room.

All that has changed. There is now a lot of information about people who lead non-straight lives, whether they are gay, lesbian, bi, trans, or a combination of them. None of this has come about accidentally, through passive osmotic social changes, etc. It’s come about basically because of activism, and actively confronting prejudices and stupidity — although the cataclysm of AIDS certainly sped things along. It became impossible to hide when your friends were dying. And maybe you were as well. So AIDS was the Gay Holocaust, and like the Holocaust, it has activated people in ways that were impossible to predict. One of the things I love about this period of time, besides the amazing candor about the body, its joys and illnesses, is that people, especially young people, can imagine huge changes. Without this imagining of change, ideas like gay marriage and true gay equality could never have surfaced and actually flowered.

I was in GLF from 1969 to 1972. During that period, the same sense of imagining change was also working big time. In the Gay Liberation Front, we dared to imagine change in ways, on scales, that most of the world at that time never dared to do. We could dare to do it, and in very radical ways. It was a wonderful time to be alive and to be working for change.

(left to right) Steve Grossman, Ronald Hellman, Miles Brown, and Perry Brass.
photo by Dave Healey.

But, on the other hand, that sense of imagining change is still barely working in a lot of people, especially LGBT people who are still frightened of coming out, letting people see that being different does not mean the end of life, and who are frightened because of ingrained violence in their own communities. So I’d love that to change. I’ve said that I would know we have really experienced change when someone like Derek Jeter can come out. And when I can see gay couples walking down the street holding hands in any American city and being treated casually, but with respect. When gay people don’t have to feel that constant sense of being self conscious, having to hold back their own sense of tenderness and closeness because of defensiveness, when we can feel as unselfconscious as anyone else. I would love to see that. And of course I’d love to see us smile a lot more at each other. I remember that first Gay Pride Parade, which was actually called the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, in June of 1970, when we all smiled at each other, and we were hugging and kissing when we got to the Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park, and I felt that I now had about 5,000 friends, because that was about as many as there were there, and all of them, for that moment, were my brothers and sisters.

CD: How would you compare the GLF, back in the day, to the modern gay rights movement? How have we moved forward? And are there ways in which we’ve collectively moved backward? How much of the GLF’s original vision, would you say, has survived?

PB: I think that the gay movement has evolved somewhat evolutionarily: it has adapted to the times, which is a good thing in some ways and a terrible, ugly thing in other ways. One thing that most people don’t take into consideration, and that we, as gay liberationists from GLF understood from the get-go, is that almost dyed-in-the-wool prevalence of internalized homophobia, that insidious repugnance queer men, especially, feel toward each other. No other minority group has it to the degree we have, and for good reason. As Harry Hay said, “Because our parents rejected us, we reject each other.” Therefore, we now see a gay movement (and I don’t say “gay liberation movement,” because I feel that gay liberation pretty much died about 1974) infected with celebrity worship, that denies the real importance of LGBT leaders who come out of the movement (in other words, we must be recognized by the straights before we’ll recognize each other), that is totally money oriented, that goes from crisis to crisis with very little history or foundation behind it. GLF had none of that. We wanted to create an authentic gay culture, a real gay media, and a gay world that was part of the bigger world and yet distinct enough from the mainstream for us to survive intact in it.

What has survived from GLF? An understanding that gays are a natural part of human existence; that we can heroically work with each other (GLF proved that, before GLF this idea was ridiculed. As Mart Crowley said in The Boys in the Band, “Show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse.”); that there is a real foundation to homophobia that is not predicated on our being sick, sinners, or whatever: homophobia is a useful tool of a society that crushes people for being different; that patriarchy and its main product, sexism, can be seen, defined, and understood — so we can work against sexism.

Mart Crowley – copyright © Stathis Orphanos. all rights reserved.

What did not come out of GLF? An understanding of what is the male role in society and life, and how that role can be enriched, be made more wonderful to participate in. Also, GLF had a poor understanding of transgenderism. That would come later.

CD: Tell us about your involvement with the GLF publication Come Out!

PB: I joined GLF because of the paper, truly. I had been writing gay material before, and had finished a gay novel when I was 19 years old. I was told there was no way in hell I could get it published. Which was probably the truth. So when I heard about GLF and the paper, there was this instant attraction to me. I joined the paper in its 3rd issue, and published poetry in it under the name Mark Shield, although my name appears on the masthead. By the 4th and 5th issues, I was writing regularly for it. At the end of the 5th issue, the paper had to find new leadership and a new “office.” Our office had been a bedroom in an apartment in the East Village. So I agreed to publish the paper out of my Hell’s Kitchen walk-up apartment, and became, basically, the leading force on the paper, keeping it together and both guiding it and taking a lot of heat, since the paper was always extremely controversial. We published the next 3 issues from my apartment.

Here is a brief excerpt from a talk I’ve given about Come Out! It says a lot about the paper and my involvement with it:

My first intention on joining GLF was to work with Come Out! the first paper with a political mission of gay liberation in the world. I officially joined the paper in its third issue. It was then being produced out of Lois Hart and Suzanne Bevier’s loft on 6th Avenue near 38th Street, across the hallway from Sue Nagrin’s Times Change Press, another “movement” publisher. The guiding light of the paper at the point was Lois, who is now deceased. Although the paper was conceived as a collective, Lois was purely its leader, and Lois definitely had a point of view from that period of that first wave of lesbian feminism. I got along fairly well with her, and she used to refer to me as her “favorite male chauvinist.” To Lois, all men were male chauvinists, and all men oppressed all women.

Lois came from a Catholic background, and this became the guiding catechism of the collective. It did in fact, alienate her from the street queens, or the STAR girls whom Lois thought aped women without being them, and some women found Lois to be rather heavy handed and bridled against her. But she had a huge passion for the paper and she used every resource she had to get it out. She and Suzanne had a house painting business, and we used their van to pick up the bound copies of the freshly printed paper from the Movement printers who often printed Come Out! on the sly, after their regular jobs at commercial printers were done. One of my favorite stories was the whole collective coming out in the van to pick the paper up at 1 o’ clock in the morning after it had been run on very clickety off-set presses in Brooklyn by a team of hippy printers who to make “bread,” or money, ran advertising circulars during the day. We had to jump over fences to get into the back of the print shop, and finally, by 3 AM the paper was piled up in the back of Lois’s VW van. On the way back to Lois’s loft, where we would bring the bales of Come Out! up 4 flights of stairs, Lois announced that all of the printers had been tripping on LSD while they printed Come Out! Aw, those were the days!

CD: You participated in Gay May Day in 1971, the protest in Washington, D.C., and shared a brief account in Come Out!

PB: It would be hard to describe those events in a short paragraph, but what May Day in 1971 showed was a willingness of a huge, mass movement, the Peace Movement of the 60s and early 70s to embrace LGBT people as co-participants and allies. Contrast that with the Democrats (forget the Republicans), religious organizations, etc. The Women’s Movement had already embraced lesbianism by this time, which led the way for the Peace Movement to do so. How this event differed from today was the personal connection everyone felt to everyone else. People instantly talked to each other, felt close to each other, linked with each other. There was not that constant digital alienation we have now, with everyone locked into his/her own little Blackberry screen, texting their brains out.

Perry Brass in the Heritage of Pride Parade, NYC, 2008. photo by Noa Baak

CD: How do you feel about marriage for same-sex couples? Any reaction to President Obama’s recent take on the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA)? Would you say that the gay community is galvanized behind this issue?

PB: I am totally for the rights of marriage for same-sex couples and am delighted that this issue has taken off so fast, because married couples get perks in America that single people can’t approach. In my GLF youth, the idea was ridiculous: we wanted to do away with marriage, monogamy, bridal registries, and the whole edifice and industry of marriage and married life. We wanted communal housing, communal marriages, communal child care, etc. There is some vestigial enthusiasm for this still, but on a personal human basis, communal marriage and communal childcare is extremely difficult and requires a lot of discipline. How this would be arranged can be severe, so we get right back to a one-on-one marriage ritual. Obama is still woefully inadequate about LGBT situations. I think a lot of it is ignorance: he hasn’t been educated about them, but I really think he is open to being, as compared to the Republicans before him. He is very much a political person, but not in the vein of Bush, Jr., and the Republican thugs who took over the White House for 8 years.

I think that the community is very much behind gay marriage, but unfortunately the reason is that gay marriage is very palatable to many Americans: it is so perfectly aligned with American consumerism and corporatism. Numbers of corporations are hugely behind gay marriage, and why shouldn’t they be? You get two now for the price of one: two extremely hard-working people joined to work for a necessary salary by the obligations of marriage. GLF wanted to do away with those obligations so that you could have a life that would create real world change. Who can change the world when they’re working 10 hours a day for MicroSoft or Disney, have a mortgage to pay off, are raising kids, and have no nourishing outside connections except their own couplehood? That is the American suburban dream, and queers have bought beautifully into it.

CD: What comes to mind when I say “separate but equal”?

PB: Of course what was going on in the South of my youth. In my lifetime I have gone from segregated drinking fountains at the Sears & Roebucks in Savannah, Georgia, to a black president. So, of course we may come to the same turn of events in the gay and lesbian struggle, although there are big differences.

CD: Looking back on your life, is there anything you wanted to do but didn’t? Any regrets?

PB: It’s very hard for me to have regrets because I believe that to change things you have to change the cards you were dealt in the first place, and my hand had a lot of difficult cards in it. But I would have wanted to learn more from the people who were there to teach me — all kinds of people, some of whom my GLF brothers and sisters really looked down upon as not being P.C. enough at the time. And I would have tried to carry Come Out! much further than I did, but at that point in my life I had very little organizing, promotion or personal skills. My greatest skill was just being able to survive. It’s extremely difficult though to go back; you have to understand that what we did in GLF was really earth-shaking, and that is the only word for it. Most of it was about 15 years ahead of its time, at the least.

CD: Who or what would you say, in 2009, is your greatest enemy in the fight for equality? Your greatest ally?

PB: The greatest enemy is always passivity and inertia. It is no longer coming from the Christian Right, although they are always there, just waiting for their turn again, and they will get it. Our greatest allies are young people all over the world who will not be murdered anymore, not be put down and put back, who want to be a part of their own liberation, who have come to realize their own value. I am grateful to have been a part of this struggle, and grateful for all the men and women who sacrificed so much. I have loved all of them.

INTERVIEW TOMORROW, JULY 8: JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR JOHN-MANUEL ANDRIOTE

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In Tales of the Lavender Menace: a Memoir of Liberation, Karla Jay describes her early days as a feminist and gay liberation activist. Her political life started several years before the Stonewall Riots, and by 1969 she was a leader in the newly formed Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City, Jay has written for Ms Magazine, the Village Voice and the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. I recently caught up with the GLF founding member to discuss lesbians and the women’s movement, and why a national leader for the gay movement might be unnecessary after all.

CD: First of all, thank you so much for doing this interview, and welcome. How was life different immediately following the Stonewall Riots?

KJ: There was a great feeling of exaltation. We knew that we were making history when the GLF started to meet. We organized dances — before that, we had to go to mafia-run bars in NYC. We met other people who shared our goals of political, social, and cultural change.

CD: 1969. 2009. What has changed? What hasn’t?

KJ: Many, many things have changed, including civil rights for our communities in some U.S. states and other countries. Some corporations are queer-friendly, and most colleges have a group for students. On a sadder note, many members of our community are still afraid to come out entirely, or even in part.

CD: In your 2000 memoir Tales of the Lavender Menace, you share detailed accounts of New York City, sex, family and gay activism during what many regard a “turbulent” era in which you came of age. Tell us about the Lavender Menace. How close were you to Rita Mae Brown? Have you maintained relationships with any original GLF/Menace members?

KJ: I’m assuming that you don’t need details of the Lavender Menace action, which is recounted in my memoir. To write that book, I interviewed several members of the Lavender Menace, including Michela Griffo and Ellen Shumsky. Rita Mae Brown and I went to the same graduate school (NYU), and we both belonged to Redstockings and the Lavender Menace, and later Radicalesbians. However, after she left New York and moved to Washington, D.C., we stayed in touch only sporadically. Allen Young and I met in GLF. We worked on four books together, and we remain close friends.

CD: How were you involved with the National Organization for Women (NOW)? How would you say Betty Friedan viewed the alliance between “butch” or “militant” lesbians and the feminist movement at the time?

KJ: Like many feminists, I attended NOW meetings, but I was turned off by its traditional structure and turned to more radical groups like Redstockings.  I don’t think that Friedan distinguished between types of lesbians — she saw all of us as a threat to the women’s movement.  She felt that we would give it a bad reputation, and it was she who coined the term “lavender menace.”

CD: Is there an intersection between the Gay Rights and the Feminist Movements? If so, when did you first realize it? How would you describe your experience in both of those worlds, either separately or combined?

KJ: Again, I can’t give a capsulated version here of what I had to explain at great length in my memoir. I think that both LGBTQ people and women are oppressed by heterosexism, but that doesn’t mean that we are the same. That connection was obvious to me early on.  The women’s movement was to a large degree anti-lesbian, and some men in the GLF didn’t like women or were simply sexist, so I felt that I didn’t entirely fit in either camp, but I believed in the liberation efforts of both groups.

CD: HIV/AIDS made an indelible mark on the LGBT community. We lost a generation of doctors, lawyers, artists and activists, and young people are sometimes left without mentors because of it. What would you say HIV/AIDS did for the Movement?

KJ: I have to disagree with the premise of your question. There are many mentors and heroes all around us, most of whom volunteered their time and money without ever getting any credit. The most serious loss was among African-American male writers and filmmakers — there was really quite a toll taken in that community. The struggle to cure HIV/AIDS did bring together many lesbians and gay men, who had gone their separate ways over the years. What the struggle against HIV most contributed was the idea that individuals — not the government — were going to have to organize, raise money, march, lobby, and fund research for cures.  The breast cancer walks are a great example of a lesson learned.

CD: In the recent New York Times article “Why the Gay Rights Movement Has No National Leader”, Jeremy Peters claims that “another reason for the absence of a nationally prominent gay leader is the highly local nature of the movement,” adding that “unlike the civil rights and the feminist movements, the gay movement lacked a galvanizing national issue.” Your response to this?

KJ: The assumption that we need a national leader is ridiculous. The reality is that we are not one people and do not share race, gender, class, sexual preferences, or a common upbringing. Queers constitute many communities, and it is more fruitful for us to address the issues we want to tackle rather than thinking we all have to support one issue — like marriage.

CD: What was the most difficult thing for you as you came into womanhood? How did your identity as a lesbian change you, and did you find the need to reconcile your “feminism” with being a lesbian?

KJ: I don’t see any conflict between being a lesbian and a feminist. The feminist movement would be much weaker without the contributions of lesbians. Rather than seeing coming out and struggling for feminism and LGBTQ rights as something difficult, I realize how strong that initial struggle has made me.

INTERVIEW TUESDAY, JULY 7: FOUNDING GLF MEMBER PERRY BRASS

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Author Kevin Kopelson wrote the following essay, ironically enough, just a few days before the Iowa Supreme Court marriage decision in April of 2009. He had no prior knowledge of the pending decision, and neither could have taken into account the pro-gay-family sentiments that would later define the victory.

BRIGHT ONE: by Kevin Kopelson

When asked last week, by the co-editor most aware of my autobiographical work hence also aware that, in real life over the past ten years, I’ve co-parented three bright, beautiful, now twenty-something-year-old “boys,” to write, for some possible post-feminist collection, a personal essay “on academic father-hood,” I told him, as usual, that I’d sleep on it. The unconscious, at such times, is smarter than you. It’ll show, in dreams, what to write or maybe not write. This time, it showed: I’m the perfect fifties housewife, devoted to my not three but two kids: teenage son, teenage daughter. Unlike Adam, Seth, and Sam, though, they’re brats. They don’t appreciate anything I do, for them, nor feel sorry for me. Think: Donna Reed on The Donna Reed Show plus Divine, in Polyester, as “Francine Fishpaw.” Today, for example, when I try without success to make a rather hard cake, the two just mock me. Losing it, I punch no, not the boy, the girl – punch her hard, in fact, and right in the face: bam bam bam. I also, as it happens, punch our mattress – bam bam bam – waking both David and me. He’s the biological and to them more masculine father of Adam et al. – making me, I’ve joked, a combination of “Uncle Charley,” on My Three Sons, plus Auntie Mame.

This, I mused, can’t bode well. I can’t write on abuse, by me, or on beating students, especially girls, in relation to whom, on some level and as one or more genders – masculine and/or feminine – I may feel parental and also, oddly, misogynist. For of course I don’t beat them. Nor am I aware – not that I would be were the level unconscious – of having ever wanted to. I love most students, especially girls. My own folks, moreover, never abused me, whether physically or even just – even worse – verbally. Nor did my two oldest, pseudo-parental siblings – sixteen years older than I – twins Eric and Maureen. Teachers, though, were another story. One, in grade school, said, or at least implied, that I’ll never measure up to brother Bob, a concert pianist who, while thirteen years older, had also had her. Another said so as to brother Steve, just two years older. Nor, needless to say, did I ever abuse Adam, Seth, and Sam – not as their Uncle Charley / Auntie Mame nor even, sometimes, as Peter Pan / Mary Poppins, nor even, more frequently, as myself alone. Instead, I’d teach them to cook, to clean, to read, to write – to read literature, that is, and write essays. I’d also knit sweaters – rather hard ones, in cable-stitch. Nor would David abuse them. Nor would their biological mother, Julie, which is why, for the most part, they are so bright and beautiful.

I say by me, though – “I can’t write on abuse, by me” – because I have, in fact, as some readers here will know, so discussed those school marms (Mrs. Graa, Mrs. Keaton). I’ve also discussed ones that another David had. David Sedaris, I’ve written in Sedaris, had just awful teachers in both elementary and middle school. Marcel Proust, I’ve written there, did not. His, Sedaris’s, third grade teacher, a Miss Chestnut, tried to shame him – abusively and in public – out of obsessive-compulsive behavior like licking “her” light switch. The attempt, of course, was unsuccessful. His fifth-grade speech therapist, Miss Samson, tried – in private – to shame him out of a lisp. (I too lisped.) The attempt, once again, was unsuccessful. (I, thanks to a good such therapist, no longer lisp.) I’ve also, more to the point, discussed the man’s father – Lou Sedaris – an horrendous role model who’d use shame abusively: a weapon to wound, punish, maybe even destroy. These deployments, too, were public, plus sarcastic, aggressive, sometimes hateful. They might, for example, target some semi-competent but totally innocent waitress. Worse yet, they might target daughters Lisa, Gretchen, Amy, and Tiffany. Even more to the point, they’d target David – although not his younger by eleven years yet non-gay son Paul.

A fairly benign such instance occurred whenever he, David, did something stupid. “As a child,” writes Sedaris, “I’d always harbored a sneaking suspicion that I might be a genius. The theory was completely my own, corroborated by no one, but so what? Being misunderstood was all part of the package. My father occasionally referred to me as ‘Smart Guy,’ but eventually I realized that when saying it, he usually meant the opposite.”

“Hey, Smart Guy – coating your face with mayonnaise because you can’t find the insect repellent.”

“Hey, Smart Guy, thinking you can toast marshmallows in your bedroom.”

That kind of thing. A mainly malign instance occurred when, after dropping out of college for the second time and then traveling across the country, he found himself back home, in North Carolina, and also living at home. Loafing, really. After six months spent waking at noon, getting high, and listening to the same Joni Mitchell record over and over again, he was called into Lou’s den and, not surprisingly, told to get out. “I felt,” writes Sedaris, “as though he were firing me from the job of being his son.” Surprisingly, this eviction – this termination, in effect – had nothing to do with laziness. “I wouldn’t know it until months later, but my father had kicked me out of the house not because I was a bum because I was gay.”

Our little talk was supposed to be one of those defining moments that shape a person’s adult life, but he’d been so uncomfortable with the most important word that he’d left it out completely, saying only, “I think we both know why I’m doing this.” I guess I could have pinned him down, I just hadn’t seen the point. “Is it because I’m a failure? A drug addict? A sponge? Come on, Dad, just give me one good reason.”

Who’d say that?

As far as we readers know, Lou never apologized. (I, as more than just a reader, suspect he’d also beat David – and publicly.) But Sharon Sedaris, their now dead mother, did apologize, at the time, and more or less for Lou. “‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’” Sharon, of course, was the boozy, chain-smoking, and virago-like master/mistress of neither abusive nor sarcastic but ironic, nurturing, constructive shame. She’d use words not to wound, punish, or destroy, but to cure. Unlike Lou, that is, she’d make kids realize both how foolish or vicious they were being and that they could do something about it. In particular, she’d make them realize how selfish or snobbish they were – how non-benevolent, non-egalitarian. (Sharon, unlike Lou, was a terrific role model, with benevolence and egalitarianism – if not the drinking and smoking – her two best virtues.) Such fostering of self-consciousness, though, required the suspension – for just the right amount of time – of what Sedaris, meaning some kind of love, calls “attention.” The kind of love, that is, that Sharon just couldn’t – or wouldn’t – verbalize:

“Of course you love Ya Ya,” [Lou] would say. “She’s your grandmother.” He stated it as a natural consequence, when to our mind, that was hardly the case. Someone might be your blood relative, but it didn’t mean you had to love her. Our magazine articles and afternoon talk shows were teaching us that people had to earn their love from one day to the next. My father’s family relied on a set of rules that no longer applied. It wasn’t enough to provide your children with a home and hand over all your loose change, a person had to be fun while doing it. For Ya Ya it was too late, but there was still time for my father, who over the next few years grew increasingly nervous. He observed my mother holding court in the bedroom and wondered how she did it. She might occasionally snap, but once the smoke cleared we were back at her feet, fighting for her attention.

Maternal love, that is. Other kinds, Sharon would verbalize – if, that is, flushed with wine and pounding the tabletop. “Love?” she’d ask in such condition. “‘I love a good steak cooked rare. I love my cat, and I love …’ My sisters and I leaned forward, waiting to hear our names. ‘Tums,’ our mother said. ‘I love Tums.’”

I, however, was both physically and verbally abused – up until when he hanged himself – by brother Steve. He’d bash me against walls, stab me with pens, deride my intellect. “Hey, Bright One,” he’d say, “thinking Wittgenstein played piano.” (Ludwig, of course, did not. Older brother Paul did, with just the one arm.) Or again: “Hey, Bright One, thinking Julia Child is French.” He’d also, all the while, mock our own mother, Ida, as, I’m afraid, would Dad. “Hey, Bright One,” they’d both say to her, “thinking toast should burn.” Or again: “Hey, Bright One, using ketchup as soup.” I, though, would not. I’d just watch Julia, as The French Chef, then read cookbooks, and then at thirteen, to Mom’s relief, take over the kitchen.

After Steve’s death, plus ten years later that of Dad, Bob took over, verbally, from both of them. Mom, he’d call a freak. Me, a pseudo-intellectual narcissist, which, in truth, to my own dark kettle, was really rather pot-like. Losing it, I then told or rather wrote him off – a letter never answered. Shame on him. Nurturing shame.

Older siblings, it seems, can act like parents: either male or female, good or bad, di- or I suppose monozygote. Teachers, then, can act like either parents or parent-like siblings: either male or female, good or bad. As such, moreover, we might also identify with students, female ones, perhaps, especially – if, that is, we’re either women of whatever sexuality or gay men. (In my dream, then, I’m not just Donna-Francine but that abused daughter as well. That son, I suspect, is both Steve and Bob – as, again, is the daughter. The cake, there, represents not my own cooking, of course, but Mom’s.) And if, in the classroom, we’ve also learned, if only consciously, to channel not the abusive parents, parent-like siblings, or parent-like teachers but rather the nurturing ones – an Eric or Maureen, not Bob or Steve – then students of ours should both survive and thrive. Better Sharon there, in other words, than Lou Sedaris. Better yet, be David Sedaris, who himself, in print, channels Sharon. Even better, channel yourself there – or yourself at home – being or rather ironically doing either avuncularity, as Charley and/or Mame (“Life’s a banquet, kids!”), or magic: Poppins and/or Pan.

Proust, though, when as young as my own David’s kids have been, for me, reminds us that it may be even better yet for us not to so “channel” – or role-play – anyone else at all. In answer, at age fifteen, to the question “If not yourself, who would you be?” on the now famous, if mislabeled, “Proust Questionnaire,” young Marcel wrote:

Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.

Just five years later, though, at twenty (also Steve’s age when he died), the man now wrote: “Myself – as those whom I admire would like me to be.” First Dad, for me, then Steve: so bright, they were; so beautiful, in fact; so admirable.

—

Kevin Kopelson is Professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer’s Desk; Sedaris; Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics; Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire; and The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky. (photo courtesy Kevin Kopelson)

INTERVIEW TOMORROW, JULY 5: FOUNDING GLF MEMBER KARLA JAY

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photo courtesy Brandon Wallace

FOR THE BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY: by Brandon Wallace

I had just left the rigid environment of the Deep South when I began my master’s program at Purdue University in 2003. I knew  what it meant to live in a conservative environment. I also knew what it was to be defined as “other.”

I am grateful that I had a foundation rooted in progressive values.  I had a family that loved reading, so I was encouraged to read early. I also came from a family that read everything-encyclopedias, dictionaries, Pushkin and Jackie Collins, Harlequin series and historical narratives by Lady Antonia Fraser. Part of the value system instilled in me was purely a result of being born and reared in Chicago in the early 1980s, under the auspices of Harold Washington and Jesse Jackson and their shouts for change. I had the entire progressive Black political machine at my doorstep and was exposed to it on the street, on the television, over the radio, through the very air I breathed. I also had ready access to different cultures. I could partake in these cultures, blend with them, learn from them, and appreciate them.

These values of openness, tolerance, and embracing difference helped me through my transition from Chicago to Alabama – from an open atmosphere to one that was closed and oppressive. In Alabama, I endured obligatory performances of “I’m Proud to be an American, Where at Least I can be free” at fifth grade music recitals ( I don’t remember the words ever coming out of my mouth. I believe I just mumbled them or hummed), compulsory pledges of allegiance (I used to pledge to a different country every day). These things I chalked up to a bad turn of fate and yearned for the time when I’d make my exit.

My first perceptions when I arrived at Purdue University were that it lacked diversity even more than Alabama. Indiana has more whites than Alabama in terms of its population density. There are reasons for this. Up until the late 19th Century, there were laws on the books that prevented Blacks from settling in the state of Indiana. The homogeneity of thought was much the same as what existed in Alabama, but the degree to which Purdue lacked diversity was much greater. Tolerance among whites for racial, cultural, or gender diversity was abysmally low. The generally held perceptions of Blacks in that community were racist and stereotypical.  Many Blacks at Purdue, myself among them have felt the spite and hatred that permeates that campus. Purdue has a history of racial incidents.

While  racial tolerance and diversity were rare at Purdue, tolerance for gender and sexual diversity were harder to come by. The white, gay male population at Purdue was extremely racist.  There were gay organizations on campus and some of them did operate around progressive agendas. Some of the gay men on campus formed a fraternity. The organization was merely a replication of the established Greek system at Purdue , sending the message that  “we can be just as heteronormative as you can.” Heteronormativity was universally embraced at Purdue.

The lack of tolerance for the queer community underscored the absurdity of this. I remember an incident where a queer activist, participated in the National Day of Silence. He was lying on the steps of the Stewart Center inside a chalk circle he had drawn around himself while being taunted by  a group of boys. The boys feigned kicking him and erased his chalk line. They continued this abuse until the boy got up and moved to another place. No one stopped to help him or to admonish the ones who taunted him.

Having received a teaching fellowship  in the English department, I decided to help dispel the racism on campus.  As a graduate instructor, I taught rhetoric and composition, building a curriculum around a progressive agenda. I incorporated concepts of gender, racial, sexual and cultural diversity into my lesson plans. I used clips from Oprah’s “Women of Brewster Place” to discuss ideas of economic status and sexual orientation. I showed the films , “ Paris is Burning,” “The Crying Game,” “Stonewall,” and Marlon Rigg’s “Black is Black Ain’t” to discuss ideas of diversity ( in terms of sexual orientation ) and the fluidity that exists in orientation and identification. I also built lesson plans around such topics as historical definitions of race in the United States , bringing such voices into my classroom as Nina Simone, June Jordan , Jane Fonda, Angela Davis, Adrienne Rich, and James Baldwin. Perhaps the most fundamentally valuable idea that I incorporated into my lesson plan was to give my students a general introduction to Jacques Derrida’s concept of Deconstruction. I offered this tool for analysis with which they could dispel the hegemony or structures of oppression that they were likely to encounter throughout their lives.

For five years I taught at Purdue University. I sought to inspire thought, openness, a love of diversity, and tolerance among my students. My hope and faith exists in the betterment of humanity.

Activist Brandon Wallace completed his master’s degree in American Studies at Purdue University in 2005. A native of Chicago, Wallace has also lived in Indiana and currently resides in Alabama. He writes regularly at his blog, Julius Speaks.

TOMORROW, JULY 4: AUTHOR KEVIN KOPELSON

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Ellen Shumsky, a photographer, documented the Gay Liberation Movement from 1969 – 1972. Her images were published (under the name Ellen Bedoz) in many underground newspapers and counterculture anthologies of that time including COME OUT! and RAT. She was a founding member of Radicalesbians and a co-author of the Lesbian Feminist Manifesto “The Woman Identified Woman.”

PORTRAIT OF A DECADE: a note from Ellen Shumsky

This collection of 116 Black and White images captures the transformtional spirit of this tumultuous decade through my personal odyssey. It follows me from the serene timelessness of Southern France where I first studied photography, through the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the Women’s Liberation movement, my experience in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade, and most centrally my membership in the Gay Liberation Movement and the Lesbian Feminist organization, Radicalesbians.  From 1969 – 1972 I dedicated myself to the self-chosen mission of documenting these Gay and Lesbian Liberation movements from a privileged insiders perspective.

It was through my participation in this revolutionary community that I healed my divided self – the closeted teacher, activist, American expatriate photographer in France; and the out lesbian comfortably embedded in the New York City gay subculture. The Gay Liberation Front and Radicalesbians were liberation experiences that spoke directly and immediately to my need to discard a shroud of shame and secrecy and to empower integrity, authenticity, resourcefulness, dignity and pride.

By the end of that decade, I was feeling constrained behind my camera. My photos had always been up close and personal portraits and I was now feeling the need to come out from behind the walls of glass (viewfinder and lens) for more intimate personal engagement. When my cameras were stolen, I took it as a sign. I embarked on training to become a psychotherapist. For the past thirty years I have been a psychotherapist in private practice, a psychoanalytic teacher and writer. My work as an agent for change now happens on the most personal level – one on one – as I help people to become their most empowered selves.

Ellen Shumsky, June 2009

The following images are from
PORTRAIT OF A DECADE: 1968 – 1978, PHOTOGRAPHS BY ELLEN SHUMSKY
Introduced and Edited by FlaviaRando, Ph.D. (Graea Press 2009)

Havana Airport, 1968
copyright Ellen Shumsky. all rights reserved.

Gay Pride March, N.Y.C., June 25, 1972
copyright Ellen Shumsky. all rights reserved.

Women’s Day, N.Y.C., August 26, 1970
copyright Ellen Shumsky. all rights reserved.

Washington Square Park, N.Y.C. 1970
copyright Ellen Shumsky. all rights reserved.

The “Portrait of a Decade: 1968 – 1978″ photography exhibit is now showing 45 of Shumsky’s images at the NYC LGBT Center, located at 208 W. 13th Street. The exhibit runs through the summer of 2009. For your copy of “Portrait,” contact ellshumsky@aol.com.

LATER TODAY: ACTIVIST BRANDON WALLACE

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Noble is as Knoebel does. Member of the “Femmes against Sexism” and “Gay Male Group,” New York City transplant John Knoebel wasn’t a virgin to rebellion for long. The Gay Liberation Front member recalls co-authoring “The Effeminist Manifesto,” the early days of anti-war activism, wrestling with Panthers, and the blood and sweat behind the ink that made the revolution.

CD: First of all, welcome. And thanks so much for doing this interview. You’re the VP of Consumer Marketing for the nation’s two largest LGBT magazines, The Advocate and Out. How does it feel to have a bird’s eye on what young gay people are reading?

JK: I am not sure where you get the opinion that any of the national gay press today is read by young gay people. Print media in the gay community is encountering the same fate as that in the nation at large, namely, it is read faithfully by an older generation of readers. The average age of the readers of most magazines and newspapers in the US is over 45. Hence the necessity for today’s gay publications to have robust online counterparts that, for better or worse, are needed to attract the younger reader. The gay print media is another area of gay life today with a clear division between an older “Stonewall Generation” and the newer generation of younger gays and lesbians. Gay people who came to adulthood in the heady days after 1969 feel strongly about the importance of a gay identity, the gay press and the many gay political, arts, sports, and other community organizations that they worked so hard to form.  Although there are exceptions, it’s more and more clear that today’s youth generation finds the importance of gay identity far less compelling, if not totally passé.

CD: 1969. 2009. What has changed? What hasn’t?

JK: Here we go on familiar territory again. The difference between 1969 and now is the incredible move from invisibility to visibility. When I moved to New York City in 1969, here — as in other cities — the gay and lesbian bar was the central institution of gay life. No choruses, no softball leagues, no internet sites, no gay publications. We were still largely cut-off from ourselves and from other gay people — on our knees in the confessional, on our backs for shock therapy, herded into paddy wagons by the police, totally closeted at work. Rejected by our families, or at least estranged from them, we came to New York as refugees from all the many small towns and cities across America hoping that the anonymity of the big city might provide some measure of freedom within which to live our gay lives.

CD: You moved to NYC to attend NYU Graduate School in July of 1969 — one week after Stonewall. How did you get involved with Gay Liberation Front?

JK: That first weekend I was walking in the Village and someone handed me a leaflet about a gathering in Washington Square Park to protest the police action at the Stonewall Bar. My first reaction was honestly to wonder how the guy knew I was gay. I didn’t go to that event, but within a few short months I did find my way to a gay bar, came out sexually, and learned about this new gay organization, GLF, that my new friends said I had to check out. Already something of an anti-war activist from my college days in Madison Wisconsin, I did feel immediately drawn to the radical energy of GLF and started attending meetings in November 1969. To my surprise, two of my classmates at NYU were also at the meetings. One of them, Karla Jay, was actually the chairperson of the month, which meant calling on speakers and keeping order by pounding a baseball bat on the wooden floor of the meeting hall. I shortly moved in with Karla and Allen in the apartment they shared on the upper west side.

For the next few months, I became a student of gay politics, participated in numerous street demonstrations and very energetically “came out” in the movement. I looked forward eagerly to our first really major public action, the Gay Pride March, to be held on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall on the last Sunday in June of 1970. However on the Friday night before the March, I was gay bashed in the Village with four of my friends, and ended up in Bellevue Hospital getting 14 stitches on my face. Nonetheless, on Sunday we made the March, pushing our friend Peter Ruffit, who had suffered a broken ankle in the attack, in a wheel chair all the way to Central Park. At the next GLF meeting, I rose to give the details about our attack — my first time speaking at a meeting. Afterward, members of a newly-formed GLF living collective came up and asked me if I would be interested in moving in with them on West 95th Street.

The nine months I spent in the 95th Street Collective marked my true immersion in the gay liberation movement. In the collective, we took seriously our goal of finding new ways to live as gay men in a communal environment. We worked hard at being equals, sharing money, ideas, cooking and cleaning at the same time taking on many responsibilities for GLF. We emerged as an unofficial meeting place for GLF consciousness-raising groups and other meetings. We set-up the first GLF phone in our apartment and took turns taking the hundreds of calls per week that it soon generated. We set up a GLF speaker’s bureau and spoke at numerous high schools and colleges in the area. We became an information center about GLF actions and helped build the phone tree system that we used to alert members about demonstrations. By each member calling 5 to 10 other members, we were able to mobilize street actions within a few hours to respond to events, such as the police raid on the Snake Pit bar where a frightened illegal immigrant among those arrested jumped out of the second story window of the station house and impaled himself on an iron fence below.

We ran a gay coffee house/drop-in center on Sundays on West 82nd St. We helped organize and acted as monitors for an August 1970 demonstration against police harassment in Times Square, an action that ended with two nights of major street riots in the Village. We organized transportation for GLF members to the two sessions of the Black Panthers “Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Conventions” in Philadelphia and Washington DC in the Fall of 1970. We helped locate and then clean and paint the space for the first GLF Community Center which opened on West 3rd Street in the Village in early Dec 1970. All of these items have long and interesting stories associated with them that the space of this interview unfortunately doesn’t allow me to cover.

CD: Do you keep up with any other original members of the GLF?

JK: Many of my male friends and colleagues from the early days died of AIDS. Those remaining are now a very scattered tribe. I still remain close to my best friend from those days, Steven Dansky.

John Knoebel, Sheep Meadow NYC, 1970

CD: What would you say characterizes the age gap between younger and older gay men in 2009? Do you see any differences in attitudes toward age now, as compared with during the early Gay Rights Movement?

JK: No real difference. Then as now, we live in a gay culture that values youth and beauty. This is human nature.

CD: In Karla Jay’s 2000 memoir Tales of the Lavender Menace your younger self is described by one of the characters as a “grub.” Did you read the book and, if so, what was your reaction to your portrayal? Did you contribute to the book in any way?

JK: I don’t remember this comment in the book, but I don’t think I could ever have been described as a “grub.” Karla gave me an early look at the book and I gave her lots of positive feedback. She remembered a lot of actions we worked on together that I had forgotten about and it was joy to read about them again.

CD: Are you wearing horn-rimmed glasses right now? I have to ask, because it’s a good look for you. Am I ingratiating myself?

JK: Yes and yes.

CD: You’re a member of the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus.

JK: I’ve been singing with gay choruses in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York since 1980. I love singing and have had some of the most satisfying experiences in my life singing in these choruses. People may not be aware of this, but the gay and lesbian chorale movement has commissioned hundreds of pieces of new music in the past 30 years. When we perform inspired repertoire that expresses our lives and our politics we truly change the lives of our audiences. This is a legacy that will live on. In recent months, The NYC Gay Men’s Chorus has had the opportunity to sing at events like the recent Defying Inequality fundraisers in support of gay marriage.

CD: Would you say you’re a rebel at heart?

JK: I’d say that I was an incredible rebel in my youth. I sometimes scare myself when I think of the risks I took with my life in those first five years of gay liberation. I still feel passionately about gay identity. I love being with gay men and lesbians. I am very proud of what we have accomplished.

CD: The early GLF days were rife with revolutionary publications – Red Butterfly, Gay Flames, Faggotry, Off our Backs and RAT, to name a few. It’s as if rebellion was both in the air and in the ink. The evolution of the gay publication from The Ladder to the present could be an interview in itself, but can you abbreviate for us?

JK: Of course, The Advocate predates Stonewall by two years, as it was started in 1967 and continues to this day in its role as the national gay and lesbian news magazine. But if you limit this discussion to only “revolutionary” publications, then GLF’s own newspaper started in the Fall of 1969, Come Out!, was the first to see itself as a political journal for wide circulation. Published by GLF’s Come Out! collective, its eight issues contained important articles on the issues of gay and lesbian liberation, gender, activism, outreach to other radical movements, racism and much more. As the outgrowth of the leftist cell within GLF, Red Butterfly published many leaflets and position papers. Gay Flames was started by GLF member, Allen Young, as a series of leaflets, but became more of a magazine as the months went by. A compilation of Gay Flames, called the Gay Flames Packet, was the first real anthology of important gay writings.

Although a few important articles by gay and lesbian activists were published in Rat, such as Steven Dansky’s “Hey Man!” it was not a gay publication, but rather a newspaper produced by leftist community organizers on the lower east side. Faggotry was a single-issue magazine edited and written by Steven Dansky, who subsequently joined me and Kenneth Pitchford in publishing Double F: a Magazine of Effeminism, which gave voice to our politics about gay men in support of feminism — that’s where we published our important document, “The Effeminist Manifesto.” Other periodicals outside New York that gave voice to radical gay politics included Boston’s Fag Rag and an important early lesbian feminist newspaper, Off Our Backs, published in Washington DC.

CD: GLF convened a meeting with Black Panther co-founder and leader Huey Newton at Jane Fonda’s penthouse. You were there. Give us the scoop.

JK: Shortly after his release from prison in 1970, Huey Newton released an important essay entitled, “A Letter from Huey Newton to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” which is considered the first pro-gay, pro-woman proclamation to come out of the black civil rights movement.

In it, Huey Newton asked Panthers to confront their prejudices and re-examine their attitudes towards women and homosexuals. He stated, “We [Panthers] have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.”  Later in the letter, he said, “there is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying that “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.” Quite the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.”

These were powerful sentiments to come from a leader of the Black Power movement at this time. GLF’s support for the Panthers had long been a contentious issue within GLF, ever since a consensus of sorts to support the Panthers in November of 1969 had been largely responsible for the split off of GAA. The essay received wide attention among gay liberationists after its release in August of 1970 and was highly influential in providing a perceived new basis to work more closely with the black movement, despite the known homophobia of so many Panther members.

In New York, the Panthers had a highly influential spokeswoman in Afeni Shakur (future mother of rap artist, Tupac Shakur), who was responsible for developing a genuine rapport between the Panthers and GLF at this time. In September of 1970, Afeni contacted GLF with the news that, while he was in New York City to do press engagements, Huey Newton would like to meet with members of GLF to discuss possible joint demonstrations with gay liberation.  Some GLF members objected to the meeting, either doubting its sincerity or questioning the idea of an alliance with the Panther movement. Others were interested in attending, but could not do so on such short notice. In the end, GLF put forward three members to go: myself, Nikos Diaman and a transgender journalist, Angela Douglas. We were not particularly qualified to go, but we all were well aware of GLF’s politics, past history with the Panthers and its generally positive attitude toward Huey’s recent letter.

The meeting was to take place in connection with a press conference being held at Jane Fonda’s Upper East Side penthouse, and we were told to get there on the early side. Books now say that Jane Fonda and Huey Newton were having a brief affair and the location that day was no accident. When we arrived, the elevator opened directly into Fonda’s apartment and we were greeted by her daughter, Vanessa, who was screaming, three years old and innocently naked. Jane Fonda herself appeared, gave us a gracious hello and quickly pulled her daughter back into a further room to get dressed. Afeni came out to host us for the rest of the event. Camera crews arrived and we sat in the back of the large, very crowded living room as Huey Newton gave an eloquent speech, answering questions from the national press corp.

As the cameras were being broken down, Afeni told us to be patient, as Huey wanted to speak with us after he took a shower. Within minutes, Huey arrived shirtless, still drying himself with a bath towel. I remember him as a very attractive individual, well-built and with particularly striking eyes. We wondered later if he’d been intentionally showing off. The conversation wasn’t long. Huey clearly had a few things he wanted to tell us.  First off, he referred to his recent letter concerning gay liberation. He said that while in prison he had become acquainted with gay brothers who had talked to him at length and were largely responsible for a change in his thinking about gay people. He said that when he returned to Oakland, he intended to move the headquarters of the Black Panthers to Harlem, as he felt they should be located in the historic home of urban black Americans. Finally, as Afeni had alerted us, he proposed that we organize joint demonstrations between GLF and the Panthers in the months ahead. We then spent a few more minutes commenting on his letter, asking for more details about how he saw us working together. We tried to ask more about his experiences in prison, but the conversation wasn’t easy and Huey excused himself rather quickly. Not a whole lot had been accomplished. The move to Harlem never became a reality and, after his return to Oakland, Huey quickly became involved in trying to regain some of the leadership role that had been taken over by others during his stay in prison. None of the proposed joint demonstrations were ever held in New York.

Nonetheless, our reports of this meeting did a lot to further positive sentiment within New York GLF to accept the Panther’s invitation to participate in the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention — a Panther-inspired idea for radicals from many different movements to gather to write a new people’s constitution. Two sessions were held, the first in Philadelphia in early September 1970 and another over Thanksgiving weekend in Washington DC. I estimate a group of 40 or so New Yorkers attended the first session in Philadelphia. We were joined by dozens of other gay and lesbian GLF delegates from cities across the nation, including many from Boston, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Chicago, Lawrence KS, Tallahassee FL, and other places in between. In fact, an important side outcome of the Philadelphia convention was the opportunity it provided for what was in effect the first national gay liberation gathering. The weekend convention was poorly organized, and so included many hours waiting for Panther events. As a result, GLF members had large meetings with long discussions of gay liberation politics that energized the movement in the months to follow.

In Philadelphia, the seemingly omnipresent Afeni Shakur again acted as the Panther’s main representative to GLF and provided logistics around meetings and events connected to the convention held at Temple University. I attended sessions where our group prepared a position paper on behalf of the “male homosexual workshop” for inclusion in our section of the proposed constitution. A discussion ensued when Afeni unexpectedly told the gathering that, before we could present our statement, we would have to vote as group to approve the statement that “the Black Panthers were the vanguard of the revolution.”  Some GLF members felt offended to have to vote for a revolutionary pecking order. Dan Smith from New York was particularly eloquent in describing the revolution as a multi-pronged movement with many groups working towards a revolution in equally important ways. In the end, a spirit of pragmatism prevailed and the group voted for the statement, just to move ahead with the process.

Elsewhere, the lesbians from GLF were not fairing as well. Incidents between the women and individual Panthers ensued. A long-scheduled lesbian workshop was dropped from the Panther agenda at the last minute. After more of the same, the lesbians departed telling us to stay behind and deal with Panther sexism on our own. The men of GLF did get to read their demands on the convention floor and an enthusiastic coterie of GLF delegates who had somehow managed to squeeze into the vastly overcrowded hall, greeted the gay speakers with cheers and gay power chants.

Over Thanksgiving weekend in Washington, D.C., the work of the convention proceeded. Although originally scheduled at Howard University, it was instead held at several smaller churches, including St Stephen’s and Trinity Church. GLF held long sessions to finalize our plank which had morphed into a platform from the Third World Gay Revolution caucus. On Saturday night, a delegation of 15 or so GLF members, under leadership of third world members, went to St. Stephen’s church to attempt to present our 16-point program to the Panthers, but the chaos and crowd at the church made any such presentation impossible.  We left the weekend with a sense of frustration. No one was quite sure how much further we would be involved in this process.  Once again it seemed that the most productive outcome of the weekend for GLF were the vigorous sessions we held among ourselves to discuss gay liberation issues.

Perhaps another small side incident, however, would prove to be a little more interesting story of that Washington weekend. I was part of a large contingent of about 75 of the GLF members from around the country. We were housed for the weekend under Panther protection at the chapel on the grounds of American University. Security for convention delegates was much more in evidence in Washington, as there was clearly a larger perceived threat of violence against the convention by police in the nation’s capitol. Intimidating, probably armed Panthers, all of whom seemed to us particularly tall and burly, patrolled the grounds around the chapel where we were bedded down on the floor for the night.  I recall the group made some attempt at discussions about the next day’s sessions until around 10pm, but we were all rather subdued as they told us we could not leave the building until the next morning. Then at about 11pm, Panther guards came in and announced that, due to a change of plans, someone they called “Big Man” would need to stay at our facility that night. A rumor went around that this was possibly the editor of the Black Panther newspaper. In any event, we were given 20 minutes to go through our belongings and hand-in any drugs or weapons we had in our possession “to avoid any potential problems with the police.”

After some initial resistance, rustlings through backpacks began and small dime bags of grass and plastic bottles with stray blue and yellow pills began to be handed in. However, no one was expecting what happened next. One of us—a thin, black kid from Philadelphia — produced a handgun, which he dutifully placed on the pile. To say we were shocked that one of us actually had a gun would be an understatement. “Big Man” never did show up, but a warm glow of being true revolutionaries spread throughout GLF that night.

CD: John, that is the truly the singular most amazing gay story I have ever heard. What would you say is the one lesson or moral to leave for future generations?

JK: While there are many important civil rights for gay people that I want now, and will work towards — including marriage — I still believe that sexism is the core issue. Gay men’s ultimate fate is tied to transformation of the position of women in society. The struggle against male supremacy will take a very long time.  It’s a road with many turnings, false starts and disappointments. It’s much too soon to feel complacent about what we have achieved.

TOMORROW, JULY 3: FOUNDING GLF MEMBER ELLEN SHUMSKY AND ACTIVIST BRANDON WALLACE

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Self-Portrait, 2008, Steven F. Dansky

Longtime political activist Steven F. Dansky was a founder of the modern gay liberation movement. His work has been cited in nearly every book on early gay liberation, spanning more than three decades from the Gay Militants (1971) to American Social Movements: Gay Rights Movement (2003).

Dansky had been involved during the HIV pandemic for more than 15 years. Lecturing on AIDS throughout the country, he is the author of two books on HIV, Now Dare Everything: Tales of HIV-Related Psychotherapy (Haworth Press, 1994) and Nobody’s Children: Orphans of the HIV Epidemic (Haworth Press, 1997). Dansky is a retired psychotherapist who had practices in New York City and Albany, New York.

As a photographer, Dansky’s work has been exhibited in New York City and Las Vegas, and he curated the current photographic exhibit, Gay Liberation Front (1969-1971: A 40th Anniversary Retrospective, at the LGBT Center, New York. As part of a nationwide 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, Dansky reunited with other members of the Gay Liberation Front in San Francisco earlier this month and in New York City this week.

CD: Steven, first I want to thank you for talking with me today, and welcome.

SFD: My pleasure.

CD: A quick-and-dirty primer for our readers: how would you describe the Gay Liberation Front?

SFD: Within weeks of the Stonewall Uprising in 1969, Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was founded.  It was the first post-Stonewall Uprising lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) organization. Although homophile rights activists had been organizing for decades, the Stonewall Uprising ushered in a new militancy. The entrance of GLF was onto the most turbulent stage in this country’s history, within a historical continuum, an era marked by a vigorous civil rights, an emergent second wave of feminism, and at the height of aggressive anti-Vietnam War movement. The wellspring for a LBTG movement was overflowing, and GLF was poised to develop from sexual urgency to political activism.

GLF forged the roots of activism with particular audacity, staging activist demonstrations in Times Square and Greenwich Village; at sites of institutional bigotry such as St. Patrick’s Cathedral; against media homophobia at the offices of Time and The Village Voice; at dehumanizing porn palaces; and the group Radicalesbians staged a Lavender Menace challenge to the women’s movement. In addition to activism, a great deal of queer theory began with GLF thinkers and writers who compelled a shift in perception of reality so persistent that it radically altered assumptions about gender and sexuality.

CD: 1969. 2009. What has changed? What hasn’t?

SFD: The progress in forty years is unimaginable and extraordinary. The right to assemble guaranteed by the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution was violated by the State with bar raids and arrests, which ignited the Stonewall Uprising. Remember, in 1969 same-sexuality was illegal and punishable in many states. In 1986, in Bower vs. Hardwick, the U.S Supreme Court upheld a Georgia anti-sodomy law allowing criminal prosecution for private homosexual acts. This ruling was overturned by the Court in 2003. Scalia warned in his dissenting open that this would lead to opening the floodgate for same-sex marriage. Only in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association reversed its designation of same-sex relatedness as pathology. It became known as the quickest “cure” in history.

I was married in 2004 in Williamstown, Massachusetts, on the first day that same-sex marriage became legal, and now in addition to MA, there is Iowa, Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut with 
Maine, Maryland, Washington, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York considering same-sex marriage. And let’s not forget there are 18,000 legal same-sex marriages in California. This is extraordinary progress in 40 years from pathology and legality to front-ant-center in the global human rights debates.

CD: You’re described as an avid profeminist, and have done considerable work with HIV/AIDS. The bond between the Gay Rights Movement and the HIV/AIDS pandemic has been central to the gay American identity since the early days of Larry Kramer activism and the creation of Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York. You write that “during the 1980s, the pandemic was about inevitable death, with few exceptions,” explaining how you “attempted to transform loss into a moral lesson, aligning with the body of literature that demonstrates our pathos as nurturers and caregivers.” With regard to the pandemic and the early gay rights movement, how did the need for health care affect activism? How did it help shape the identity of the movement?

SFD: My political trajectory completely changed in the 1980s with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. I became a caregiver, as well as an activist. I learned caregiving helping to raise Blake Morgan. And activism from Gay Liberation Front. So many of us were helpless in the face of an unknown and fatal retrovirus. I remember a brief telephone conversation with Larry Kramer in 1986. I was a social work intern at Beth Israel Hospital in New York, and Kramer was going to give a lecture at the hospital. As it turned out, I was unable to attend, but I telephoned Kramer and said, “I can tell you a lot about homophobia at this hospital.” I believed that homophobia, whether unconscious or not, affected the delivery of quality health care to patients with HIV/AIDS. Kramer said, “I don’t care about the homophobia.  I’m coming to speak to the staff to make sure we get the care we need.”  You see, all activism became focused on health care.

And ActUp was the most audacious gay group in the history of the gay movement, taking it’s tactics from GLF and GAA in its confrontation of any institution that was homophobic. I’ll always remember ActUp for the human scaling of the walls of the FDA in Washington for its lack of attention and urgency during the first phase of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Self-Portrait, 1970, Steven F. Dansky

CD: Now, 40 years after Stonewall, the concept of marriage for same-sex couples sits heavy in the collective social consciousness. Six states have legalized marriage for same-sex couples. For many in the LGBT community, wanting marriage is a no-brainer. For others, fighting for marriage is giving in to an oppressive “heterosexual status quo.” In “Our Critical Direction” you suggest that the gay and lesbian community must “re-vise our critical direction.” How would you say lesbian and gay Americans should go about doing this as they institutionalize their commitments?

SFD: When Barry Safran and I married in 2004, of course, we loved each other and wanted to extend our commitment, but we did so because it was the right side of history. In the five years of our marriage, we received no benefits of any kind, none, nada, but we present ourselves to the LGBT community and the larger society as two men in a loving relationship. Many in the LGBT community see marriage as an oppressive institution, true the history of marriage is about property exchange with women as chattel. I think lesbians and gays can reformulate marriage.

CD: Would you say that terrorism is a byproduct of the disequilibrium between what you refer to as “female” and “male principles”?

In my article, “Our Critical Direction,” I wrote, “As we promote our right to marry, let us be guided by life-giving, creativity, and mutuality.  I define this as the female principle, as caregiving and concern and foremost the generative power, rather than the male principle of action and overcoming.  Actually, humans embody both principles.  As complements, each principle necessitates balance, without which there is disequilibrium manifested most by power dominance, violence, and all forms of terrorism.”

CD: How would you define terrorism?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a terrorist as “anyone who attempts to further his views by a system of coercive intimidation.” Terrorism is by nature political because it involves the acquisition and use of power for the purpose of forcing others to submit, or agree, to demands. I think one of the definitive books on the issue of terrorism is “The Demon Lover,” by Robin Morgan. As one reviewer noted about Morgan’s book, “there is no distinction between ‘state violence’ and ‘terrorism,’ ‘revolutionary’ and ‘terrorist,’ ‘justifiable violence for the cause’ and ‘unjustifiable violence.’ They are all products of a self-perpetuating cycle of power and domination. Violence is an ultimate kind of power and although men have suffered its effects, the majority of them endorse it, validating it as a legitimate political tool. Women’s experience is much different.”

CD: Dudley Clendinen, co-author and Johns Hopkins University professor recently said this: “The gay movement has always had a problem of achieving a dignity or a moral imperative that the black civil rights movement had, or the women’s rights movement claimed… Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue.” Your thoughts on this?

SFD: The gay movement was never solely about the right of same-sex-sexuality. Heterosexists have often proclaimed this to be the cases, making false arguments, at best that go something like, “What you do in the bedroom is your business.” This is an attempt to reduce the far-reaching implications of rethinking gender, sexual roles, identity, power dominance, alternate communities, relatedness, aesthetic sensibility, changed marriage and families. The LGBT vision isn’t about sex—we went from the urgency of being able to have sex, despite its illegality last century when we burst onto the stage in 1969 declaring “we will be who we are.”

INTERVIEW TOMORROW, JULY 2: FOUNDING GLF MEMBER JOHN KNOEBEL

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Photo: Copyright Peter Hujar. All rights reserved.

June 28, 1969 transformed the social landscape of our nation — and the world. But despite forty years of progress, “[it] is still difficult for the average American to empathize with the struggles of gay people.”  Just a week ago, The New York Times offered this as a partial explanation for the anomalous vacuum that prevented one singular voice from leading the gay rights movement after Stonewall — a voice that could have given the years that followed a deeper sense of solidarity, a voice strong enough to inspire martyrdom.

This blog series is, in part, a response to that article. I don’t worry myself with why the gay movement has no national leader. I do, however, think about how — whether via judges and legislation or in the court of public opinion — we continue to make remarkable progress with respect to equality despite sailing a ship with no apparent mast.

Before Stonewall, social evolution for most LGBT people was defined as a matter of winning the empathy of “average” Americans. Following the riots, it was more a matter of breaking from traditional definitions of sexuality, femininity and masculinity. One model depended on perceptions from the outside; the other drew on thoughtful introspection and the understanding of self.

There is something to be said about revolutions. One might say the angst in Manhattan’s West Village that year had been percolating for some time. The massive wave of riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 may have inadvertently set the clock for our own initiation into organized chaos. Widespread unrest in Europe and the Middle East and a senseless war raging in Southeast Asia most-likely aggravated the situation further. The summer air was ripe for rebellion.

The first organization to form after Stonewall in June, 1969, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), was considered radical. The oppression of gays and lesbians, the GLF believed, stemmed from patriarchy and sexism. Only by revolting against patriarchy, sexism and capitalism simultaneously could society’s negative attitudes toward women, lesbians, gays and other minorities be changed.

According to founding GLF member Steven Dansky, “in addition to activism, a great deal of queer theory began with GLF thinkers and writers who compelled a shift in perception of reality so persistent that it radically altered assumptions about gender and sexuality.”

But at some point during the gay movement timeline, there appeared a conundrum. Peters writes:

The gay movement has always had a problem of achieving a dignity or moral imperative that the black civil rights movement had, or the women’s rights movement claimed.

Because this movement is fundamentally about the right to be sexual, it’s hard for the larger public to see that as a moral issue. [1]

Was the revolution really about sexuality? Or was it more about the prejudices that had surrounded it? I was determined to find the answer, and tapping into history was the only way for me to know for sure. My quest for real voices on the subject led me to an inspiring, talented and ambitious group of activists who refuse to take “no” for an answer.

The fact that we’ve made remarkable progress in the years since Stonewall is a testament, not to the existence of one leader, but to the perseverance of many. It is important, now more than ever, to put a face (or faces, as it were) on the modern gay rights movement. These are the stories of a few leaders who emerged from Stonewall’s aftermath.

If you’d like to be alerted whenever a new feature is published, subscribe via RSS. Thank you for reading, and I hope that these interviews and essays enlighten you as they did me. —Christopher

Series schedule after the jump

Image courtesy Gay Liberation Front

40 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL: TEN-PART SERIES SCHEDULE

PART 1 TUESDAY, JUNE 30: 40 YEARS AFTER STONEWALL: EMERGING VOICES

Christopher de la Torre is a New York-based journalist and civil rights activist. A former scientist, he endeavors to take scientific discourse to a new level with the re-launch of his online publication, Urban Molecule, later this year.

PART 2 WEDNESDAY, JULY 1: STEVEN F. DANSKY INTERVIEW, FORMATIVE GLF MEMBER

Longtime political activist Steven F. Dansky was a formative member of the modern gay liberation movement. His work has been cited in nearly every book on early gay liberation, spanning more than three decades from the Gay Militants (1971) to American Social Movements: Gay Rights Movement (2003).

Dansky had been involved during the HIV pandemic for more than 15 years. Lecturing on AIDS throughout the country, he is the author of two books on HIV, Now Dare Everything: Tales of HIV-Related Psychotherapy (Haworth Press, 1994) and Nobody’s Children: Orphans of the HIV Epidemic (Haworth Press, 1997).

Dansky is a retired psychotherapist who had practices in New York City and Albany, New York.

As a photographer, Dansky’s work has been exhibited in New York City and Las Vegas, and he curated the current photographic exhibit, Gay Liberation Front (1969-1971: A 40th Anniversary Retrospective, at the LGBT Center, New York.

Via Steven Dansky

PART 3 THURSDAY, JULY 2: JOHN KNOEBEL INTERVIEW, FOUNDING GLF MEMBER

An active member of the Gay Liberation Front beginning in November 1969, John Knoebel participated in many demonstrations as well as the first Gay Pride March in June 1970. As a member of the GLF 95th Street gay men’s living collective from June 1970 through January 1971, Knoebel helped form numerous gay men’s consciousness-raising groups and spoke at colleges and other venues with the GLF speaker’s bureau.

Along with many other GLF groups from around the county, the collective attended both sessions of the Black Panther’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Conventions in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. The collective also helped to organize the August 1970 Times Square demonstration that ended with several days of riots in the Village, as well as helped to establish GLF’s first community center on West 3rd Street.

A member of the cells, “Femmes against Sexism” and “Gay Male Group,” Knoebel eventually founded the Effeminists, a group of gay men who opposed sexism, and co-authored “The Effeminist Manifesto” with Steven Dansky and Kenneth Pitchford which originally appeared in Double F: a Magazine of Effeminism (published from 1972 to 1976).

Knoebel’s writings have appeared in the GLF newspaper, Come Out!, and were published in numerous early gay liberation anthologies. He is currently the Vice President of Consumer Marketing for the nation’s two largest LGBT magazines: The Advocate and Out.

PART 4 FRIDAY, JULY 3: ELLEN SHUMSKY PHOTO RETROSPECTIVE, FOUNDING GLF MEMBER

Ellen Shumsky, a photographer, documented the Gay Liberation Movement from 1969 – 1972. Her images were published (under the name Ellen Bedoz) in many underground newspapers and counterculture anthologies of that time including COME OUT! and RAT. She was a founding member of Radicalesbians and a co-author of the Lesbian Feminist Manifesto “The Woman Identified Woman.”

A book of her photographs, “Portrait of a Decade: 1968 – 1978,” Photography by Ellen Shumsky, Introduced and edited by Flavia Rando  (Graea Press) was published in June 2009. A show of 45 of her images is on display at the LGBT Center in New York City through the summer of 2009.

PART 5 FRIDAY, JULY 3: BRANDON WALLACE ESSAY, SOCIAL ACTIVIST

Activist Brandon Wallace completed his master’s degree in American Studies at Purdue University in 2005. A native of Chicago, Wallace has also lived in Indiana and currently resides in Alabama. He writes regularly at his blog, Julius Speaks.

Via Julius Speaks

PART 6 SATURDAY, JULY 4: KEVIN KOPELSON ESSAY, AUTHOR

Kevin Kopelson is Professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of Neatness Counts: Essays on the Writer’s Desk; Sedaris; Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics; Beethoven’s Kiss: Pianism, Perversion, and the Mastery of Desire; and The Queer Afterlife of Vaslav Nijinsky.

Via glbtq.com

PART 7 SUNDAY, JULY 5: KARLA JAY, FOUNDING GLF MEMBER

Karla Jay has written, edited, and translated ten books, most recently: “Tales of the Lavender Menace: a Memoir of Liberation.” She has also written for Ms Magazine, the Village Voice and the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide. Ms. Jay is Distinguished Professor of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Pace University in New York City.

From The Gay Liberation Front Live, NYPL (Jason Baumann, moderator)

PART 8 TUESDAY, JULY 7: PERRY BRASS INTERVIEW, FOUNDING GLF MEMBER

Perry Brass was born in Savannah, GA, but reborn in New York City in November, 1969 when he joined the Gay Liberation Front and the GLF newspaper Come Out! He has since published 14 books including How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, his work has been included in 25 anthologies, and 50 of his poems have been set to music.

From The Gay Liberation Front Live, NYPL (Jason Baumann, moderator)

PART 9 WEDNESDAY, JULY 8: JOHN-MANUEL ANDRIOTE INTERVIEW, JOURNALIST AND AUTHOR

Items from journalist and author John-Manuel Andriote’s “Victory Deferred” collection (based on his 1999 book of the same name) are currently showing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History as part of a display dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.

The book jacket of Victory Deferred notes, “Andriote, who has been at the center of national advocacy and AIDS politics in Washington, is judicious without being uncritical, and his account of the political maturation of the gay community is one of the most stirring civil rights stories of our time.” [2]

Andriote’s many interview subjects include AIDS activist and author Larry Kramer.

PART 10 FRIDAY, JULY 10: KEVIN CATHCART INTERVIEW, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF LAMBDA LEGAL

Kevin M. Cathcart, Executive Director of Lambda Legal since 1992, is a leading strategist and spokesperson in the movement to achieve full recognition of the civil rights of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgender people and people with HIV. Cathcart has made Lambda Legal an unparalleled national force through its far-reaching litigation and public education.

A longtime leader in the lesbian and gay community, Cathcart served from 1984 to 1992 as executive director of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) in Boston, New England’s lesbian, gay, and AIDS legal organization. Prior to GLAD, Cathcart was a staff attorney at the North Shore Children’s Law Project. He also serves on the Steering Committee of the LGBT Executive Director’s Institute.

Via Lambda Legal

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