Perry Brass, founding GLF member

Perry Brass 1971 | image: J. LaRue

I met Perry Brass in October of 2007. He thanked me for a review I wrote about J. Louis Campbell’s biography of activist Jack Nichols. Campbell ended the book with a memorial poem Brass had written for Nichols: “…your life took on doubt and pushed it away like a faulty raft,” went the farewell. Brass is a genre-defying writer whose work has been included in 25 anthologies, and he continues to mentor with his words; 50 of his poems have been set to music.

Chris Delatorre: 1969, 2009. What’s changed? What hasn’t?

Perry Brass: 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’d be murdered. I heard kids in the South talk about the properness of killing people like me all the time, while they weren’t even aware 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.

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.

Steve Grossman (L), Ron Hellman, Miles Brown, Perry Brass | image: Dave Healey

Delatorre: 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?

Brass: 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 | image: Stathis Orphanos

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.

Delatorre: How were you involved with the GLF publication Come Out!

Brass: 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!

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

Brass: 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, NYC 2008 | image: Noa Baak

Delatorre: 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?

Brass: 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.

Perry Brass | image: Jack Slomovits

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

Brass: 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.

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

Brass: 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.

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

Brass: 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.

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© Chris Delatorre 2009. When citing this interview, reference the editor and website and link to the article. For permission to use longer excerpts for educational purposes, contact the editor.

Karla Jay, founding GLF member

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.

Courtesy Karla Jay

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 caught up with the GLF founding member to talk about lesbians in the women’s movement, and why we might not need a national leader for the gay movement after all.

Chris Delatorre: What was life like just after the riots?

Karla Jay: 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.

Delatorre: 1969, 2009. What’s changed? What hasn’t?

Jay: 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.

Delatorre: 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 or Menace members?

Jay: 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.

Delatorre: 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?

Jay: 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.”

Delatorre: 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?

Jay: 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.

Delatorre: 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?

Jay: 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.

Delatorre: 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?

Jay: 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.

Delatorre: 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?

Jay: 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.

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© Chris Delatorre 2009. When citing this interview, reference the editor and website and link to the article. For permission to use longer excerpts for educational purposes, contact the editor.

Portrait of a Decade: note from Ellen Shumsky

Photographer Ellen Shumsky documented the Gay Liberation Movement from 1969 to 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.” The Portrait of a Decade exhibit is now showing 45 of Shumsky’s images at the NYC LGBT Center through the summer of 2009.

Havana Airport, 1968 | Ellen Shumsky. All rights reserved.

Ellen Shumsky: This collection of 116 Black and White images captures the transformational 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 to 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.

From PORTRAIT OF A DECADE: 1968–1978 (photographs by Ellen Shumsky; introduced and edited by Flavia Rando, PhD; Graea Press 2009):

Gay Pride March, NYC, June 25, 1972 | Ellen Shumsky. All rights reserved.

Women’s Day, NYC, August 26, 1970 | Ellen Shumsky. All rights reserved.

Washington Square Park, NYC, 1970 | Ellen Shumsky. All rights reserved.

For your copy of PORTRAIT OF A DECADE, contact ellshumsky[at]aol[dot]com.

John Knoebel, founding GLF member

John Knoebel | Photograph by Steven F. Dansky

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. 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.

Chris Delatorre: 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 view of what young gay people are reading?

John Knoebel: 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.

Delatorre: 1969, 2009. What’s changed? What hasn’t?

Knoebel: 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.

Delatorre: You moved to NYC to attend NYU Graduate School in July of 1969 — one week after Stonewall. How were you first involved with the Gay Liberation Front?

Knoebel: 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.

GLF picketing at the Time Life Building, New York City, 1969, Linda Rhodes (L), Lois Hart, Ellen Broidy, Jim Fouratt | copyright: Diana Davies

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.

Delatorre: Do you keep up with any other original GLF members?

Knoebel: 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.

Delatorre: What characterizes the age gap between young and old gay men in 2009? Any differences in attitudes toward age now vs. during the early gay rights movement?

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

Delatorre: 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 this portrayal? Did you contribute to the book?

Knoebel: 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.

Delatorre: Are you wearing horn-rimmed glasses right now? Because it’s a good look for you. Am I ingratiating myself?

Knoebel: Yes and yes.

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

Knoebel: 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.

John Knoebel, Sheep Meadow NYC, 1970 | image: John Knoebel

Delatorre: Are you a rebel at heart?

Knoebel: 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.

Delatorre: The early GLF days were rife with revolutionary publications—Red Butterfly, Gay Flames, Faggotry, Off our Backs and RAT, to name a few. Rebellion was in the air and in the ink. The evolution of the gay publication from The Ladder could be an interview in itself, but can you abbreviate for us?

Knoebel: 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.

Gay Liberation, published on February 13, 1970, was the first of four mimeographed pamphlets produced by The Red Butterfly. It went through five printings, each of 1000 copies. [source] [view pamphlet PDF]

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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.

Delatorre: GLF held a meeting with Black Panther leader Huey Newton at Jane Fonda’s penthouse. You were there.

Knoebel: Shortly after his release from prison in 1970, Huey Newton released an important essay titled, “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.

Huey Newton | photo: courtesy H.P. Newton estate

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, D.C. 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.

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The Black Lesbian Caucus, 1972, NY Gay Pride | via Autostraddle

The Black Lesbian Caucus was created as an off-shoot of the Gay Liberation Front in 1971, and later took the name of the Salsa Soul Sisters, Third World Wimmin Inc. Collective, which was the first “out” organization for lesbians, womanists and women of color in New York (source: Autostraddle).

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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.

Delatorre: Reflecting on all of these amazing experiences and on your life, what’s the one lesson for future generations?

Knoebel: 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.

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© Chris Delatorre 2009. When citing this interview, reference the editor and website and link to the article. For permission to use longer excerpts for educational purposes, contact the editor.

Steven F. Dansky, formative GLF member

Longtime political activist Steven F. Dansky was a founder of the modern gay liberation movement. His work is 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).

Self-Portrait, 1970, Steven F. Dansky

Having been involved during the HIV pandemic for more than 15 years, Dansky lectures 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 Las Vegas and New York City, where he curated the current photographic exhibit, “Gay Liberation Front 1969-1971: A 40th Anniversary Retrospective,” at the LGBT Center. 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.

Chris Delatorre: Explain the Gay Liberation Front.

Steven F. Dansky: 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.

Delatorre: 1969, 2009. What’s changed? What hasn’t?

Dansky: 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.

Delatorre: 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.” Regarding the pandemic and the early gay rights movement, how did the need for health care affect activism? Did it help shape the identity of the movement?

Dansky: 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, 2008, Steven F. Dansky

Delatorre: Forty years after Stonewall, the concept of marriage for same-sex couples sits heavy in the collective consciousness. In “Our Critical Direction” you say the gay and lesbian community must “re-vise our critical direction.” What should same-sex couples consider as they institutionalize their commitments?

Dansky: 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.

Delatorre: Is terrorism a byproduct of the disequilibrium between what you describe as “female” and “male” principles?

Dansky: 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.”

Delatorre: How do you define terrorism?

Dansky: 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.”

Delatorre: Johns Hopkins University Professor Dudley Clendinen 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.” Thoughts?

Dansky: 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.”

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© Chris Delatorre 2009. When citing this interview, reference the editor and website and link to the article. For permission to use longer excerpts for educational purposes, contact the editor.