Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 28 April 1997

Gays and Lesbians often agonize because our movement doesn't move directly toward that ultimate goal they're sure all of us want. But -- is our goal clearly agreed on? It is not, and nothing has so hampered our movement as our failure to understand our legitimate differences regarding goals. We'll continue to rip our movement apart unless we clearly understand this diversity and its consequences. Our movement's history suggests that our diversity is more than just something to be tolerated.

That history shows how religious Gays and atheists, conservatives and radicals, feminists, radical faeries, transsexuals, boy lovers, minorities and PWAs have built up the debate about our movement goals. Not until the late '60s did many activists admit that such differences are legitimate, and begin to see that our diversity has some advantages. Note that I generally use the terms Gay, Homophile and homosexual as Gay men and women did then, to include both (or all) genders.

I don't like lazy speeches that take an hour to say what can be said in a few sentences, so I'm going to cover a lot of ground -- and jump around a bit. I hope you'll all jump when I jump.

I knew I was different by age four, but had a long search to define that difference and to relate my perceptions to the group I would seek out to share with. I define myself differently today from when, from age 12 to 17, I planned to be a Presbyterian missionary to the Congo. I came out in San Francisco in 1943, but took side trips through pacifism, militant atheism, science fiction fandom and the Communist Party before I found my way to our fledgling Gay movement in 1953. These "side trip" identities with other groups and causes helped shape my perceptions on who we are and what we might become. Memories of my former beliefs, and the emotional residue each has left in my gut, help me appreciate the diverse ways in which other Gays and Lesbians define ourselves and our goals.

ULRICHS AND HIRSCHFELD

Most founders of the first stable U.S. Gay organization didn't know in 1950-51 that our movement was born in Germany in 1896, after 30 years of pioneering by Karl Ulrichs -- and a few earlier persons who'd argued in our behalf. Many of our goals were first defined in the pre-Nazi German movement for homosexual rights.

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs responded to an immediate threat: the several independent German states were being swallowed by Prussia, which had a severe anti-homosexual law. Ulrichs, a civil servant in Hanover, opposed the unification which would criminalize all German homosexuals. He informed his relatives of his nature, and of his plan for a public campaign for education and justice, then appealed for justice for what he called "Urnings," at a Jurists' conference, where he was shouted down. He said that having gone public, he and his cause could never turn back.

He took the term Urning from Plato's Symposium, mentioning Uranus as God of same-sex lovers. Ulrichs' first goal was to work out a theory as to Who are we? How do we get this way? And does nature have a reason for so regularly producing us? -- an idea revived by Sociobiologists today. He was a prophet, but no organizer. The German movement got its real start the year after he died.

The first group was Der Eigene (community of the special), founded by Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedlander and publisher Max Spohr. Their goal was to build a separate and idealized male Gay culture, on the old Greek model. A radical German women's movement also started that year, and a hippie-like back-to-nature youth movement, rejecting bourgeois values and emphasizing erotic friendship. Socialism, spiritualism and health fads also blossomed until the Nazi takeover.

In 1897, the Der Eigene leaders joined Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld to form the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which Hirschfeld led. SHC goals were scientific research to show that the "intermediate sex" (which Hirschfeld compared to being crippled) was inborn, and a campaign to solicit influential people to reform the law, arguing that homosexuals can't help being the way they are, and that the law encouraged blackmail. Friedlander and some women's leaders scorned the comparison to cripples, whom society might tolerate, but never accept as equals. They also spurned Hirschfeld's and Ulrich's view that male homosexuals were by nature womanish.

Five thousand illustrious persons ultimately signed the law reform petition: Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Socialist leaders August Bebel and Karl Kautsky, Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, George Grosz, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Carl Maria von Weber, Stefan Zweig, Gerhardt Hauptman, Reiner Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, even Berlin's police chief and the Prussian and Federal Ministers of Justice -- but no publicly identified homosexuals.

In 1898 the issue came before Germany's Reichstag -- supported only by minority Social Democrats. In 1907 a right-wing newspaper attack on Prince Eulenburg and other Gay intimates of the Emperor killed the reform, and hurt the movement, as Hirschfeld testified against the defendants as a police witness. Hirschfeld, frustrated by the failure of influential Gays to help the cause, had discussed the controversial strategy revived by some AIDS activists recently -- of forcing such persons out of the closet.

The reform bill was diverted in 1914 by World War I, and in 1923 by runaway inflation. It passed the Reichstag's Criminal Justice Committee but not the whole Reichstag -- just before Hitler's takeover signaled the quick, total destruction of the German gay community.

Gay groups had diversified greatly. The law hadn't changed but police pressure had relaxed, so before the Nazi takeover, there were Gay and Lesbian cultural, pen pals, health, political, religious and social groups. Novelist Sinclair Lewis, in Dodsworth, described Gay neighborhoods in major German cities patrolled by friendly policemen. Hirschfeld, emphasizing education, published his thick Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types and build a massive library and school in Berlin, which the Nazis burned. With actor Conrad Veidt, he starred in the first Gay rights film, Different From the Others, and collected massive research to prove that homosexuality was inborn and that homosexuals, though effeminate, were fine citizens, even fine soldiers in World War I. He thought this information would end discrimination. Just when Hirschfeld and others thought they stood on the brink of victory, the holocaust swept them away. Untold thousands were worked to death in concentration camps. The Nazis saw Hirschfeld -- Jew, homosexual, socialist and feminist -- as their ultimate enemy.

Homophile leader Kurt Hiller had said that homosexuals must free themselves, not wait for others to do it. He was sent to a concentration camp, ransomed out, taught in England during the war, and came back to lead the German law reform campaign to success in 1968-69.

OTHER COUNTRIES

Similar groups were started in other countries. Dutch and Czech SHC groups started in 1911, the Dutch interrupted only by World War II's Nazi occupation. The COC, now called the Dutch Society for Integration of Homosexuals, provided a safe meeting place and worked to lower age-of-consent laws. Most European groups assumed that homosexuals were middle or upper class, who sought boys or lower class men as partners.

Edward Carpenter, George Ives, Havelock and Edith Ellis, A.E. (and) Laurence Housman, Radclyffe Hall and others tried starting an English movement during the fearful years after Oscar Wilde's trial -- aiming mainly at sex education. England's real movement came only in 1970 after massive witchhunts and 16 years debate on the Wolfenden law reform proposals. The Homosexual Law Reform Society during the 1950s and 60s had argued that homosexuals couldn't help being that way, and ought not be imprisoned -- implying that homosexuals would gratefully become invisible once the law changed! Anglican, Catholic and British Medical Association reports supported this. Only the Quaker Report said that homosexuals were potentially as moral as heterosexuals.

A Zurich woman, Mammina, started the Swiss Friendship Bund in 1932 to provide social outlets, and work modestly on law reform. The name became Der Kreis or The Circle in 1943, after she handed the group over to prominent actor Karl Meier, a.k.a. Rolf. The only magazine and club to survive through World War II, Der Kreis added French and English sections during the fifties. With its Oktoberfests and other social activities, it was international center for a select circle of Gay men, many of them American.

There was a small movement among intellectuals in pre-Communist Russia. Leo Tolstoy, a guiltily repressed homosexual, castigated Gay rights advocates in his 1899 novel Resurrection, but he signed Hirschfeld's petition. By 1905, Gays like poet Mikhail Kuzmin had produced a small body of Gay advocacy literature. The Bolsheviks removed Czarist anti-homosexual laws, and Gays became briefly more open. Lenin and Trotsky stayed homophobic, but initially viewed the traditional family as a bulwark of reaction. Most open Lesbian and Gay poets hailed the Revolution, but most of them soon came under house arrest. Kuzmin issued his Gayest work after 1918 -- but in Amsterdam, not Russia. Some like the great poet Anna Akhmatova stood by their friends, until each was sent to Siberia. To survive, she had to publish fawning lines about Stalin.

At World League Congresses for Sexual Reform led by Hirschfeld from 1921 until 1930, Russian Health Minister Grigorii Batkis called the USSR a model of homosexual freedom, until he was silenced. The Soviets briefly promised a Gay homeland, in the far reaches of Siberia near Birobijan, the forgotten Jewish "homeland." The communists soon reverted to hetero conformity and ended talk of sex liberation. Gays were branded a sign of bourgeois decadence. Communists blamed fascism on homosexual excess, while the Nazis blamed us for the decadence of democracy.

Around 1913, anarchist Emma Goldman and Edith Ellis each lectured on homosexual rights to large responsive American crowds, according to contemporary press reports, and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger reportedly tried to set up some sort of organization. Hirschfeld toured the U.S. later, his talks enthusiastically reported for the Hearst press by pro-German Gay writer George Sylvester Viereck.

Lesbians, prominent in several artistic and literary circles, such as that around Margaret Fuller in early 19th century Boston, Charlotte Cushman later in Rome and Margaret Anderson in Chicago about 1913, seemed less likely than men to organize politically -- except in the 19th century abolitionist, prohibition and women's rights movements, where women-loving-women played leading roles but never publicly raised Lesbian issues. Few even defined themselves that way. They focused on freeing women from the worst tyrannies of marriage, endless childbearing and alcoholism, while opening to women social roles previously reserved for men.

Women fought to be able to attend and teach school, serve as nurses or foreign missionaries, dress more comfortably, build settlement houses to educate and assist immigrants, crusade for child labor laws, sanitation, etc., but most affectional relations were hidden behind "convenient" hetero marriages, or "Boston marriages" which were presumed to be romantic but sexless. The woman artists and writers who wanted to openly flout heterosexual expectations either moved to Europe or disguised themselves as men.

GERBER AND FRIENDS

Bavarian-born Henry Gerber, forerunner of America's movement, served in the U.S. World War I army in the Rhineland, discovering the thriving Gay movement there. Back in Chicago in 1924 he recruited eight ordinary guys for his Society for Human Rights, though he tried to win support from such leading sex reformers as Margaret Sanger. His group was all arrested and undistributed copies of their paper Friendship and Freedom were seized (two copies were recorded in European Gay periodicals.) After two trials, Gerber returned to the army, ran Contacts, a pen-pals club, for ten years from New York, and in '34 wrote for Chanticleer, a mimeographed atheist publication in which at least half the space went to Gay concerns -- the earliest U.S. periodical of which copies exist.

When Gerber folded Contacts in 1939, member Monwell Boyfrank pestered him to start some group through which like-minded men could meet. For some, that remains the primary goal of our movement. Gerber, Frank McCourt and Boyfrank corresponded for years, arguing how to organize and to what purpose. Their sharply differing views on the nature of homosexuality and of society left little room for them to agree on goals or tactics.

They hoped to educate opinion-makers about human sexuality, assuming that problems will vanish when people are informed of the truth. Gerber felt there always had been homosexuals and heteros, with undecided fools making things dangerous; yet he always cruised straight-looking servicemen. Convinced that religious superstition shackled sexuality, he advocated atheist propaganda as a prerequisite to homosexual freedom.

Boyfrank assumed that most men were drawn toward other men or boys, unless snared into providing for women's domestic needs. He sought sex with masculine-type men, but also argued to fathers (successfully, even in small towns) that their sons need a kindly older gent to provide the considerate love and guidance which fathers rarely have time for. He was proud when his boys grew up hetero. His atheism was milder than Gerber's. He saw marriage as the enemy. Later, recognizing the family's financial advantages, he urged men to form Federated Families, to save their property from relatives' clutches. (His own property went to his sister.)

McCourt held prayer meetings in a large Riverside Drive house during World War II for Gay soldiers about to be shipped over the submarine-infested Atlantic, Gerber raged at this arrant pandering to superstition. But it had to be comforting to Gay servicemen who weren't getting family support as they headed to the war many would not return from. McCourt studied Gay history and literature and worked to build circles of Gay friends with shared interests. All three viewed women as the source of sexual repression.

In 1944, after homophobic press coverage of a murder case, they started answering press slurs as the Society Skirting Sexual Superstition, a name they used only among themselves. Their overlong letters were often printed. Gerber's In Defense of Homosexuality was one of the first articles I found in 1942 -- in a freethinking magazine.

In Los Angeles, Edith Eyde, whom I'd known earlier, typed out her carbon-copy magazine Vice-Versa - America's Gayest Magazine in 1947-48, to inform Gay women about the subject. She hand-delivered them, mostly in a Lesbian bar, for fear of postal snoops who often seized or opened mail then. Two women readers later became editors of ONE Magazine. Edith later sang campy Gay folksongs at bars -- as she did in the film Before Stonewall.

THE EARLY MATTACHINE

In Los Angeles' Pershing Square in 1930, a friend of Gerber's told young Harry Hay about the Society for Human Rights, inspiring Hay to imitation -- even though the friend thought Gerber was a damned fool for trying to organize. But to start a group, you need at least one other person, and it took Hay 20 years to find that other -- the later famed fashion designer Rudy Gernreich. Hay had gained valuable organizing experience in the Communist Party, plus unique views on the nature of homosexuality from his study of the musical expressions of peasant religions, in which he searched for Gay influences.

Having discovered the American Indian Berdache, Hay followed Edward Carpenter's view that in tribal and medieval societies, we had been outsiders with special roles, and if we today seek assimilation, we sell our birthright for a mess of hetero pottage. He hoped to form underground mystic guilds, to reawaken ourselves to who we are and what we are for. In late 1950, he met three more men who shared his dream of Gays working openly in a socialist-led united front.

He showed a prospectus he'd drawn up earlier to Bob Hull, a student in his Social History of Music class. Bob brought his friends Chuck Rowland and Dale Jennings to Hay's Silverlake house. Chuck, a former American Veterans Committee midwest organizer, supposedly ran up the hill waving the prospectus, saying, "I could have written this myself! When do we start?" (Chuck later denied that story.)

The fear-ridden society they faced was very different from that we live in today. People were being hounded, even arrested, for being different in any significant way. "Perverts" and subversives were considered largely the same -- both threats to everything America stood for. Committed to making a socialist revolution, Hay and his new friends had to figure out how to make Gays part of that.

They began seeking consensus on how to create a movement where none had seemed possible, arguing every idea to agreement, lest they risk setbacks. They were groping in the dark, exchanging what little they knew about homosexuality before they could even think of social action. Two young motorcyclists joined five months later, brought in friends, such as photographer Ruth Bernhard, and chose the name Mattachine -- from 11th century guilds of wandering actors Hay had described in his class.

They were painfully aware that America was in a dangerous, witch-hunting mood, and that Gays were a prime target. Hay's music class had unwittingly involved a search for Gay roots and roles. Communists had devoted attention to the minority question, so Hay proposed the radical notion that homosexuals were an oppressed minority, needing to build a sense of community. Most new members wildly resisted this idea, wanting only to be like-everyone-else.

Then Dale Jennings was charged with propositioning a vice cop. Since Gays and other minorities were angry about entrapment, they launched a Committee to Outlaw Entrapment, to raise defense funds and to hold public discussion groups, from which they could hunt for promising recruits. They soon drew crowds of 20 to 150 Gay men and a few Lesbians to weekly groups all over town, with topics very few Gays had ever before felt free to discuss in public:

Should I tell my parents, or my boss?

Can a Gay person still be religious?

Do we need a Gay ethics for special conditions in our lives?

Do we have a group purpose, a special way of serving society?

How can I meet nice responsible friends?

Why aren't there more women here?

Are swishes and bulldykes the cause of prejudice against us?

Few of the new recruits shared the founders' vision. Most of them saw homosexuality as just a sexual habit. They wanted nothing to do with other minorities, or with communists. In early '53, just as Mattachine reached San Diego, northern California and Chicago, with inquiries coming in from all over, Chuck Rowland and others, realizing the creakiness of the old lodge-like structure, called a constitutional convention to devise new structures.

100 of us, hot with optimism, certain that we were going to win our battle against bias soon, met at a Universalist church in Los Angeles. Few of us in those two weekends understood the bitter issues which ripped us apart. While we voted on dozens of confused proposals for a new organizational structure, the conservative-conformist newcomers generally routed the founders.

Anything remotely radical-sounding was knocked out, such as a Statement of Purpose clause: "... we hold it necessary that a highly ethical homosexual culture be integrated into society." The new leaders saw this as viciously communistic -- I never understood how. One insurgent threatened to report us all to the FBI (saying that he'd already turned in hundreds of traitors.) The resulting constitution proved extremely contradictory, unstable and incomplete.

Optimism vanished and membership declined, though new chapters began in time in New York, Detroit and Denver. The Los Angeles council soon folded and headquarters moved to San Francisco. But there were also gains. The secretiveness was gone. Mattachine Review, several local newsletters and Dorian Book Quarterly along with ONE Magazine, brought an increasingly positive message to many isolated Gays. The most creative Mattachine chapter and newsletter was Denver's. Their 1959 national convention was our first professional-type event, the first to get fair, daily newspaper coverage.

ONE INCORPORATED

The idea for a magazine, called ONE, came up at a Mattachine discussion group, but the magazine committee quickly chose to be independent. Too feisty for most timid Mattachinos, ONE soon began to balance male and female contents. The women of ONE felt that women had a different sensitivity, but didn't yet envision "women's issues" as such. Most staffers felt ONE Incorporated existed only to produce a magazine "dealing with homosexuality from the scientific, historical and critical point of view," but business manager Dorr Legg had written in broader purposes ("to sponsor educational programs, lectures and concerts for the benefit of social variants and promote among the general public an interest, knowledge and understanding of the problems of variation ... to sponsor research and promote integration..." etc.) He saw it as ONE's goal to create all the social service, cultural and educational institutions necessary for a well-rounded community.

Legg as a youth had seemed alone in looking for a community, not just a lay or a lover. He chose Los Angeles as the place to share life with a black lover -- not easy then. Before joining Mattachine, he'd helped launch the short-lived interracial club, Knights of the Clocks. He exercised iron control over ONE Incorporated until his death in late 1994.

By early 1956, though we meant to concentrate on the magazine, counselees were coming to ONE desperate to escape the Hell they felt St Paul had condemned them to. Ann Carrol Reid and I proposed kicking off a series of Sunday morning events, where ex-ministers or metaphysicians who were part of our circle could do whatever seemed appropriate to them: pray, preach, hold seances, hear confessions, meditate or lead singalongs. Chuck Rowland, head of our promotions committee, broke away and organized the Church of One Brotherhood. It grew steadily for a year, despite our angry scorn, and collapsed suddenly. They did help Gays suffering religious guilt, and ambitiously proposed to start a retirement home, a university, a hospital, etc., "as soon as they'd raised $100." What they tried was brought off successfully a dozen years later by Troy Perry. Several Gay Orthodox clergy branching out from the late Bishop Mikhail Itkin, claim descent from a reported 1945 Gay church in Atlanta.

In '56 we at ONE organized America's first Gay studies, surveying the academic fields of biology, anthropology, sociology, history, literature, religion, law and philosophy, asking what each could contribute to understanding how Gays fit into the nature of things. In 1958, I produced ONE Institute Quarterly of Homophile Studies, the first U.S. Gay scholarly journal. Issue #8, based on court cases defending the Right of Association in Gay bars, was widely used as a text in British law schools.

Don Slater, ONE's chief editor and librarian after 1957, was a cantankerous individualist, denying that the state has a right to exist, much less to curb our behavior in any way. His sharp, campy style fit well with that of art editor Eve Elloree.

MY COMING OUT

From age four I was looking for a special friend, the brother I never had -- in place of the marriage everybody said lay in wait. Not effeminate, I was uncomfortable with what a boy was supposed to be, and felt a common bond with tomboys. At 19, I first heard the word homosexual, loathesomely defined. With unusual luck, I found relevant books, which were rare and mostly awful then. I started the collection which ultimately grew into the International Gay and Lesbian Archives. It took me a year to find the Gay crowd, but because of a burst of police pressure, and because Gays expected one another to act effeminate, I later retreated back to the closet.

In science fiction fandom, my closeted Gayness caused a minor scandal. From the radical movement, I was expelled in 1948 for being Gay. After several attempts to convince friends to join me in starting a Gay magazine or organization, I joined Mattachine in 1953 and ONE a bit later, helping edit ONE Magazine and other ONE publications through 1960. I helped start ONE's classes, teaching Gay studies off and on since then in several cities.

At inter-group panels at annual meetings of ONE, Mattachine and the Lesbian Daughters of Bilitis during the late fifties, I likened the latter two to the cautious National Urban League, which sought quiet ways to up-grade Black social status. I compared ONE to the militant National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mattachine aimed to convince opinion makers that we were just like everyone else, so they would stop persecuting us. One Mattachine officer said their goal was to help cure us all. DOB aimed to provide nicer Lesbian meeting places than bars, urged members to avoid dress or behavior which might inflame bias, later argued that we must recognize that we are sick before society can respect us. ONE urged Gays to respect and understand themselves, to build the communal strength needed to win our rights. We looked for the social roots of prejudice, seeking tools to counter it.

In January '61, ONE planned a Constitutional Convention to write a Homosexual Bill of Rights. We mailed a questionnaire to subscribers. Dorr Legg and I agreed that some rights are general and some conditional. I'd hoped to analyze what Gays wanted. But Dorr, who despised the term Gay, composed a questionnaire whose answers couldn't be interpreted clearly or tabulated, and that asked irrelevantly (I felt) "what kind of sex acts do you prefer?" By conference time, I had left ONE for a complex set of reasons, and the DOB came down angrily opposed to even thinking about claiming any "special rights." The "Constitutional Convention" was a disaster.

After leaving ONE, I spent six years at cab driving and two at junior college, finding time to consider some general questions:

People often asked, "Why did Gays take so long to organize? I recalled responses I'd had earlier when asking others to join me in organizing. Most Gays felt homosexuality was a sickness, a sin or both. Either way, organizing seemed inappropriate. Some longed for the conditions of ancient Greece, but without time machines, had no idea how to get back to that blessed state. Very few saw our problems as political, i.e., amenable to organizing, and most felt that while other social problems might be helped, society will always hate us. A few saw a need for organizing, but were fearful and unlikely to agree on a specific clear course. It was virtually a miracle that people came together for the original Mattachine as well as for the original DOB who could agree on the need to do something, and on what to do. That agreement was rather shortlived in both cases.

MID-SIXTIES GROUPS

In the early sixties, old groups stagnated and new ones brought new goals and strategies. After TV game shows were rocked in 1960 by payola scandals, the long-time habit of cops taking pay-offs in Gay bars backfired. San Francisco cops and state Alcoholic Beverage Control agents busted each other for taking protection money. After nearly every Gay bar in town was closed and reopened, bar owners formed the Tavern Guild, a mutual defense league which launched a revolution beyond their hopes.

They began doing community-building, with appeals to patrons, social outings and voter registration. Then several S.F. Mattachine members, tired of their volunteer time being used for one officer's private business, walked out. In '64 a second walkout produced SIR, the Society for Individual Rights. SIR was creative and aggressive, with jargonless practical programs to cultivate genuine Gay community consciousness. They built special interest groups, registered voters, helped elect candidates to public office, staged dances, plays and picnics, worked with the Tavern Guild and helped launch the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. They studied community organizing tactics (how to reach the corridors of power and influence those people who can move things) and helped create a National Conference of Homophile Organizations, or NACHO, aiming to coordinate U.S. and Canadian groups.

A Hollywood Citizen-News campaign to "drive 'Sex Deviates' out of town." created a flurry of new Los Angeles activity. The campaign, conceived ironically as a newspaper sales gimmick by a Gay staffer, eventually put the daily paper out of business -- our first successful boycott.

PRIDE was a 1966 Los Angeles attempt to imitate SIR -- but aside from one fine street protest against police brutality, and launching the newsletter which became The Advocate, PRIDE was torn apart by contrary goals and tactics -- S.D.S.-like militancy competing with respectabilism and toadying to cure-peddlers.

Vanguard was started on San Francisco streets in 1966 by hustlers, some as young as 11, using Anglo-Saxon language, radical slogans and psychedelic art like later Gay Liberation Fronts. Until then, all NACHO groups, on strong legal advice, had refused to deal with minors, but these angry minors demanded we deal with them. We did.

An east coast coalition led by Dr. Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings and Jack Nichols, began picketing the White House and Independence Hall annually to demand equal justice. Nichols had called for rejecting the negative, Uncle Tom, attitudes many movement leaders had, and had approached Churchmen to deal with the subject. Dick Leitsch and Craig Rodwell held sip-ins at bars, protesting state regulations that bars can't serve known homosexuals. The DOB turned to general women's issues after 1970, objecting to the homophile movement's focus on men's arrests for public sex (though that was not an exclusively male problem.) A few Gays began criticizing some homophile groups' ties to cure-peddling shrinks.

Dr. Franklin Kameny of Washington planted Mattachine clone groups from New England to the Niagara Frontier. He insisted that we had no time for social activities, education and social service: "Until we get the law off our backs, we can't take time to pick up the flotsam and jetsam of a rotten society." Yet he was often charitable. He, Nichols and Gittings implacably fought military and civil service discrimination cases. Gittings later worked to get better images of Gays and Lesbians in libraries.

Not all Gays approached military counseling the same way: some used it to protect the right of privacy, some to oppose the war in Vietnam. Some began telling draft boards that they were Gay, whether they were or not. In some cities, Gays started VD clinics to halt the disease's spread. Others felt that VD couldn't be a special problem for us since Gays-are-just-like-everyone-else, and besides, they argued, VD tests served only to give police our names. These arguments resurfaced at higher pitch early in the AIDS crisis 20 years later.

Craig Rodwell, founder of the pioneering Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore, Randy Wicker and Bob Martin of Columbia University's Student Homophile League (a first), became militant young Turks on the east coast, upsetting the prissy conservative leaders. In San Francisco, young radicals attacked SIR and took the Black Panthers as models -- Constantine Berlandt, who'd come out while editing UC Berkeley's Daily Californian; ABC reporter Leo Lawrence, radicalized when cops gassed him at Chicago's 1968 Democratic Convention; Vanguard veterans and the unstable Rev. Ray Broshears.

NACHO's founders in Kansas City and in San Francisco in 1966 tried to adjudicate between two factions claiming to represent ONE. Insurgent Don Slater (who'd moved everything of value from ONE's office in May '65) insisted that all homosex acts are perverted, but we have a right of privacy. (Even today, many see defending our Privacy as our only legitimate goal.) The lesbian DOB, outnumbered in a mostly male movement, wanted their several city chapters separately represented. ONE loyalists then claimed to have previously unmentioned chapters in four cities.

In NACHO, most Easterners aimed to bar groups which they felt might tarnish our image, and to enforce a common strategy, emphasizing court appeals, for all homophile groups. They refused to admit prominent hetero friends to our conferences, and barred metaphysically-or-sex-oriented groups lest they hurt our image. It was proposed that groups receive representation proportionate to their membership, but the Credentials committee couldn't validate membership claims, so each certified group got five votes, whether it had one member or 1,000. Kameny insisted that small, dedicated groups were more effective anyhow. NACHO sunk in the endless struggle on credentials.

Every hot-shot leader in NACHO tried to steam-roller the six successive conferences to legislate the entire movement into doing things his or her way. Easterners wanted every participant group to be bound by any resolution the conclave passed. Eastern leaders demanded focus on litigation to end discrimination. "I don't give a damn if people don't like me," Dr. Kameny shouted, "so long as they can't discriminate against me." Most westerners were pluralists and emphasized education, community-building, and building Gay political clout. One narrowly-passed resolution canceled another, until, in 1970, Gay Liberation crazies recruited by Morris Kight and others from the streets trashed and destroyed NACHO. The debates between NACHO's East and West blocs paled in comparison with the post-Stonewall, hippie-counter culture-New Left radicalism. Here was real diversity!

Patrons led by bartender Lee Glaze, had responded to an August '68 raid at Wilmington, CA's Patch II bar, by pelting police at the station with flowers. Three new-type groups, Metropolitan Community Church, SPREE and HELP resulted. MCC, founded by recently excommunicated Pentecostal minister Troy Perry, was presented as a church open to Gays (they didn't dare say Gay church.) Perry catered to his parishioners' mixed denominational backgrounds, and took a lead in new militancy. Few leaders then were as skilled as he at building Gay pride and community feeling. MCC's growth from the first 12 who showed up in Troy's Huntington Park apartment was phenomenal. Even Gay skeptics and heteros found it inspiring. But the prime goals of MCC, to get Gays to heaven or to improve our conditions on earth, came in for years of debate. Cleaning out the sexism and racism from traditional religious liturgy were later and more difficult goals.

HELP was for ten years a sort of legal insurance club mostly for the leather crowd, with added social and legislative goals. It tried to establish an Los Angles Tavern Guild and to improve legal service delivery to Gays.

We started SPREE to honor film-maker Pat Rocco, who'd given us our first glimpse of Gay romantic films. For ten years as a film, theater and social club, SPREE was well represented in most Los Angeles Gay demonstrations. Though often operating at the giggly-Gay level, we worked to encourage others to make Gay films and plays, providing a warm social climate for (mostly older)s sentimental Gay men and a few women.

San Diego priest Pat Nidorf organized DIGNITY for Catholic Gays in early '69. It got rolling in Los Angeles and spread, with hierarchy support in some cities. It worked to heal Gays damaged by clerical homophobia, and to alter the church's anti-Gay stance, making much progress among theologians and priest's and nun's associations before the shocking 1986 letter from Nazi-trained Cardinal Ratzinger, exiling open Gays from church support. Dignity however had made a generation of Gay Catholics strong enough to stand up against that.

THE GAY LIBERATION PHASE

Soon after the June, '69 police raid on New York's Stonewall Inn, where customers angrily fought back, precipitating a weekend of revolt, the Gay Liberation Front started our movement's wildest transformation, previewed by San Francisco's Vanguard and its Committee for Homosexual Freedom and by Minneapolis' FREE. Where we had mostly focused on middle class values, new liberationists had vastly different mindsets -- different goals and tactics.

The respectability drive gave way to wild self-indulgence. From suit-and-tie, we went to every costume extreme. From asking authorities to define us more nicely, we said we'd define ourselves -- and the rest of society as well. Our movement burst out of the three coastal cities that had largely dominated it. In the months after Stonewall, groups started in Billings, MT, Gainesville, FL and Lawrence, KS. The "zap" was invented, a strategy of invading straight offices and meetings to angrily confront homophobes.

Meetings were often exercises in anarchy. Where Roberts Rules of Order had intimidated those unskilled at using them, now any call for orderly procedures was labeled elitist. A few Blacks began making demands, often getting pained silence even from Gay Civil Rights movement veterans -- though virtually all GLF's took radical positions in support of minority rights. Some new activists hoped to use Gay lib to advance other causes, such as sectarian left parties -- and some socio-political conservatives joined GLF but would have been more at home in the older groups.

There was a flurry of experimentation with new social forms, rejecting the theory of monogamy, rejecting private property, building rural and urban communes, hoping their new life styles would alter all of society. Many Gay liberationists intended the total restructuring of society, thinking that if we all dropped out, the Establishment would topple and we could live in freedom. Our conferences often passed resolutions banning the military-industrial complex, the educational system, profit-making business, the churches and monogamy. Those institutions failed to lie down obediently and die.

New issues came forward which seemed essential to some, quite bothersome to others: sexism, racism, ageism, looksism; but sexism the most. Part of this wasn't new (racism surely wasn't) but its ramifications and its jargonizing were. Radical Lesbians and male Effeminists announced that oppression of women is the basis of all oppression; homophobia is merely an aspect of that; liberation for men requires surrendering male privilege, and supporting whatever radical women say they want. Being male became a cardinal sin. Many men resisted the idea that sexism is rooted in language, battling over words that had long been in usage. Can we retain the organic integrity of our language and still remove the biases built into it?

RECOGNIZING OUR DIVERSITY

The post-Stonewall era made it more essential to recognize that our differences were more than mere personality clashes, or temporary impediments to be brushed aside. The often clashing goals of Lesbians and Gay men became intense, separating us for awhile. Still, many Gays, male or female, just wanted society to let us alone; just wanted to have a good time or find that perfect lover; wanted to be just-like-our-neighbors; to feel that our hope lies in putting on a good front, a polished image; to feel that if people only knew how many of us there are in important places, our troubles would go away -- this last gambit did not work for German Jews.

A few talked about taking arms against the establishment -- ignoring the fact that the other side has the heavy artillery; and some wanted to destroy all old Gay groups and businesses.

There are vast strategic differences (and many fail to distinguish between goals and the strategies we use to achieve them): there are those who are convinced we must get non-Gays to front for us, while a few Gays play power brokers. This strategy is regularly subverted by the fact that so many influential Gays stay deep in the closet. Some would throw all our problems on Jesus. Happily few Gay religious leaders are so naive. Others are convinced that a Marxist revolution would end all our oppression -- but China, Cuba -- and Russia and Eastern Europe until 1989 -- threw doubt on that. Some see Gay liberation as solely a sexual freedom issue, as in John Rechy's angry novel, Sexual Outlaw. A few feminists in the era of the "Political Lesbian" began to regard almost all sexuality as a form of male rape.

Many felt sure that if we all dropped out, smoked pot, chanted OM and joined the New Left or Counter Culture (which were never quite the same thing), the so-called Establishment would collapse quickly and our troubles would end. Many hope to build a rainbow coalition of minorities -- always half negated by rampant respectabilism and prejudice in our own and other minorities. Most of these conflicting goals have at least partial validity, but none of their partisans will give up their views easily, if at all. Certainly, short term goals are easier to agree on -- and the larger the city, the more pronounced the conflicts on goals and tactics are. We unite to picket an outstanding homophobe, or to push a specific piece of legislation, but the unity seldom outlasts a week.

Finally, there are those special interests, minorities within our minority: boy lovers, Lesbian separatists, drags, leather and kinky sex groups, transsexuals, ethnic groups, tearoom cruisers, punks, dopers -- some of whom scandalize or scare many mainline Gays and Lesbians. Some of these often get excluded from our parades or centers, but if we exclude them today, we discard large parts of our history and of our integrity. We become guilty of the same discrimination we have so long suffered. At any rate, the goals of these special groups introduces even more angry diversity into the mix. Not all of us defend the right to have whip-and-chain parties, or to have sex with minors or in the bushes, especially unsafe sex. Not all of us agree on abortion, though I think most Gay men support women's right to self-determination.

The joyous parades and other events held in many cities each June drew us together and sharpened our differences at the same time. Some wanted celebrations of freedom or diversity, others angry protests, public relations shows or Mardi-Gras-like parties. Many wanted drag queens kept out of the parades, ignoring the drags who kicked things off at Stonewall and the charity fund-raising that drag-ball groups have done for years. Some objected to right or left wing political slogans, or to religious or anti-religious groups - or to AIDS protests "spoiling the fun."

By 1971, Gay service centers were operating in several cities, and a year later, we organized the first heavily staffed multi-service agency in Los Angeles, which, despite most of its founders' apocalyptic anti-establishment ideas, was soon funded by several levels of government. Much radical energy in the movement was felt by some to be drained from confronting the powers-that-be, to providing consciousness-raising, jobs, housing, substance-abuse guidance, counseling for prisoners, the handicapped, transsexuals, seniors and youth. Radical staffers in 1975 nearly destroyed L.A.'s Center, feeling that the "Band-Aid approach" was draining off revolutionary energy.

Gays were starting softball and bowling leagues, ski clubs, choirs and professional caucuses and women's music was beginning to bloom. Gay and feminist bookstores (separate from "adult" stores) began in many cities, also Gay and women's publishing companies, Gay theaters, special interest caucuses, hiking and running clubs, choruses and bands. Gay publications diversified, some becoming very fancy by earlier standards. Many complained that the movement had sold out to consumerism.

THE CHIMERA OF UNITY

In our desperation to escape the bind of ignorance and bias, we often scream out: "Why can't Gays get together?" We blame our disunity on some defect in Gay character. This is naive. Wishing doesn't make it so -- it more often leads to sideswipes at those who disagree with what others of us take for granted.

Anita Bryant's 1977 Miami attack on us (calling a Dade County Human Rights ordinance a threat to the nation's children) was a thunderbolt. Self important Gay power brokers converged on Dade County to run the campaign, driving out everyone whose strategy differed. They had their way, and the defeat was tidal. They blamed everyone but themselves. When Anita promised to take her campaign on the road, allied with anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafley, the shock half emptied the nation's middle-class closets. Towns too small to have had a gay group before staged outsize anti-Anita rallies. It was as big a turning point as Stonewall. Human Rights Coalitions cropped up in many cities, and became arenas for every sort of Gay extremist and power-grabber. We ripped each other apart.

In crises, we can often come up with a patchwork unity for fighting homophobic attacks or dealing with AIDS. Yet we rarely see eye-to-eye, and California's 1978 Briggs campaign showed surprising virtue in that. Because attempts failed to organize one big committee in each part of the state to carry out the "best" strategy, we won an election we'd probably otherwise have lost.

While the biggies raised the most money, paid one another lavish salaries and bought a few expensive TV spots, Gay radicals reached labor unions and ethnic minorities. Gay Catholics and other religious groups reached local hierarchy, which promised benevolent neutrality, a gain over other cities. By our usual practice, all would have been organized from Los Angeles and San Francisco, with most of the state overlooked. Instead, anti-Briggs groups started in many virgin areas. Each group reached its own constituency, swinging many voters which a unified committee would have ignored. The prime virtue of our diversity is that it gives us a chance to build bridges to every sector of the vastly diversified non-Gay community we come from. The Briggs fight taught us that, but the lesson was forgotten in later campaigns, which we lost.

Ex-stockbroker turned hippie, Harvey Milk, had come to San Francisco and run for office three times, building a half wacky, grass roots organization, and bucking the Gay establishment led by Jim Foster and Advocate publisher David Goodstein. In 1978 Milk was elected Supervisor and became a national symbol. After he'd worked against the Briggs initiative, and called for a national Gay March on Washington, Milk and pro-Gay Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by ex-Supervisor and ex-cop Dan White.

The White verdict set off a large Gay riot outside San Francisco city hall. The massive 1979 March on Washington was partly a memorial for Harvey, but many older leaders had opposed that march, and efforts to follow it with a grass roots National Organization of Lesbians and Gays bogged down over the same credentials questions that had buried NACHO.

New national organizations emphasizing professionalism sidestepped the question of being representative, avoiding extreme disagreements by setting up self-perpetuating boards which undertook to speak for the entire Gay community in lobbying and public relations. They aim to do for us what they feel needs to be done, and the rest of us just have to send in our bucks.

In 1979, Harry Hay, Don Kilhefner, Mitch Walker and others launched the Radical Faerie movement (actually, it was already a few years old), exploring the spiritual dimensions of being Gay. Faerie gatherings, in rustic settings, became excited exercises in new consciousness, a mix of guerrilla theater, Hindu mysticism, mud baths and splendiferous costumed dancing in the moonlight, making magic to restore childhood fantasies and the mystic brotherhood of tribal shamen, in an anti-masculine context. Could we recapture our primitive birthright and make it meaningful, or vital, for today's world? The diverse women's spirituality movement was far ahead of them, though both male and female seekers after spirituality were at times quite weird.

To Gay activists shaped by the sixties, it seems that our community has abandoned the fight and sold out for establishment norms, for buttering up elected officials, for rampant consumerism and respectability, for using the movement as a pool in which those on the make can fish for big salaries. Perhaps. But being on the winning team is often a temporary thing. Recent setbacks in the Democratic Party, where we had seemed to have it make, are a hint of that.

The rise of AIDS after 1981, agonizingly killing thousands of our brothers and some sisters radically altered the styles and goals of our movement. Some felt that it made all other issues irrelevant, at least for the duration.

Wishful thinking aside, there is almost no single course that will get all Gays and Lesbians marching in unison for long -- though the '87 and '93 Marches on Washington were incredible highs -- for almost a week each. Even on AIDS, some refuse to believe that sex contact has any part in spreading the disease, or that we should limit our sexual behavior in order to slow the plague. A few still think the whole AIDS crisis is, "a media hype." And AIDS organizations differ on whether to focus on lambasting inadequate government response and pharmaceutical prices, on research, or on helping people with AIDS. They do focus on raising astronomical funds and paying extravagant salaries to executives. I think we need closer examination of alternate cause and treatment theories -- even if only to lay them to rest. With our lives at stake, we must ask the unaskable questions. Many Lesbians feel, understandably, that too little attention is paid to health problems that kill women.

And there's intense disagreement as to whether the tactics of ACT-UP groups help or hurt our overall cause -- though ACT-UP's "bad manners" have undeniably gotten results.. Here especially, we need to discuss our disagreements, to try to iron them out.

I don't think politics is our natural game, and I'd gladly let the heteros have it all back -- except as a minority, we always stand on the brink of holocaust. Many Gays think that, except for AIDS, we've already won the brass ring, and never have to fight anymore. Not true. While Gay rights ordinances have passed in many unexpected places, while an increasing number of Gays and Lesbians have won public office in many areas, while we've helped elect many friendly officials, many victories still elude us, and none of our victories are written in stone. Any or all of our gains could be erased overnight. So we always will have to do the political thing, if only to protect our tails. I'd rather see us devoting full time to exploring our spirits and building our community -- but we must play the straight world's game also.

FINDING OUR COMMON CORE

We needn't leave this discussion with the assertion of our total diversity. We MUST give diversity proper attention, but after doing so, we can hope to understand better the things that draw us together, the threads of commonality in our experience and to bridge some of our differences. Commonality is not the same thing as homogeneity or unity. It won't press us all into one mold, or into the same political campaign, or get us to agree on which are the right tactical moves for today. It won't erase all our disagreements, or the anger that goes with them. But it should draw us into one river, even if it has diverse streams and eddies.

Many think we have only our sexuality in common. Others say we are tied together only by the persecution we suffer. I suspect we are hung up on these ideas because of how our own society defines the difference. Our commonalties lie deeper, but I can't define them. I can only give suggestions.

Growing up often with a feeling of being outsiders is an important element. Gays aren't the only outsiders in this society, but our estrangement goes deep and starts very early, often in our own family. From infancy on we struggle with social expectations about gender. This sets up in each of us various lines of accommodation, resistance, resentment or rebellion, shaping our characters by how much we resist, go along with, or deny. Our first goal was self-understanding, trying to figure out why and exactly how we differed from what our parents, peers and teachers expected, seeking others of our kind, and trying to understand what we shared with them.

This gives us some potential advantages, though many Gays fail to develop that potential: an ability for empathy with others; an ability for non-linear thinking; a tendency to relate to others on an "I-Thou" basis, rather than treating others as objects; and an ability to see around corners erected by the straight world; to bridge all the differences in the world.

The first time I was Gay-baited in print, I was called "the man with the grasshopper mind," because I didn't stick to "A-leads-to-B-leads-to-C" thinking. I finally gave up apologizing for not having a straight mind, locked into the belief that everything has a beginning, turning point, and an end, that every effect has a single cause. I like to think we have a potential for holistic thinking, though our hetero education tries to beat it out of us.

Like Near Eastern Gnostics just before and after Christ, who believed that some people were born with a unique Spark which was a tiny fragment from the God of Light, who'd been shattered in a war with the god of this material world, and who worked to reunite each of its scattered Sparks into a Great Light, I feel that Gay love tends toward expansiveness, inclusiveness, and that our Gay love can eventually bind us together, and bridge all the diversities in our own community and in the whole world.

RECAP

Those who feel in their gut that we all want the same thing won't be satisfied. They'll still say we all want only to be able to live without prejudice, oppression or undue restriction.

Let me recapitulate:

Some feel that society will accept us if we behave like straights, if we convince them that we are just like them. Some want only to organize to fight discrimination or to win gay political clout.

Others feel we must educate the public about the varieties of affectional expression or sexual practice, so that prejudice will vanish and we'll be free to behave as our natures dictate. This group seeks more freedom than the first would care for. Some seek the right to have any kind of sex at any time or place with as many partners as we wish.

Others like Harry Hay feel we must earn social acceptance and respect by convincing society that we provide needed services which heteros can't provide. I don't feel we can permit ourselves to be dependent solely on the goodwill of non-Gays. Radical Faeries aim to cast off hetero conformity, and reawaken the shamanistic spirits that they feel are central to our nature; to revive the talents of witches and such, so we can heal the wounds of hetero society.

Other Gays and feminists believe our society is founded on oppression, and cannot help but oppress us until society itself is turned upside down. Restructuring goals differ endlessly, some seeking only a more peaceful and equitable society, others seeking to end capitalism, religion, racism, inequality, monogamy, gender roles and much else that distinguishes our society now.

Others feel we can't be free unless we get right with God. For some, that involves giving up our sexuality -- or at least giving up non-monogamous sex.

Some of you may dismiss most of these differences of opinion as nonsense, but the differences won't go away easily, if at all. If we hope to work on some things together, we must try to understand these radically differing goals, and be aware that each goal dictates a unique line of strategies and tactics. So don't be surprised the next time another Gay or Lesbian starts saying or doing something which you are convinced will defeat "our goal." Take our diversity as a rich treasure and try to find ways to work with it. It ain't easy. Lord, it sure ain't easy!

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Jim Kepner, acclaimed and loved by Gay and Lesbian scholars as an international treasure, is the Founder of ONE Institute's International Gay and Lesbian Archives. Living in Los Angeles, Kepner has spent an extraordinary fifty years in the Gay and Lesbian Movement as an historian, activist, journalist and archivist. His incisive and carefully considered thoughts appeared in nearly every groundbreaking U.S. gay publication, including ONE Magazine and The Mattachine Review. His pioneering contributions to journalism will be published at the year's end by the Haworth Press, Inc. and will be titled "Rough News--Daring Views: 1950's Pioneer Gay Press Journalism."

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