CAROLYN WEATHERS
- August Bernadicou
- 3 days ago
- 9 min read
LOS ANGELES GAY LIBERATION FRONT, GAY WOMEN'S LIBERATION
Gay liberation was a revolution. Yes, you heard it from us: it was a revolution. How? After the Stonewall riots on June 28, 1969, LGBTQ+ people everywhere began fighting back openly and collectively for the first time. Before Stonewall, there had been important but isolated moments of resistance. Gay liberation changed the methodology. It was no longer about societal acceptance; it was about self-acceptance. We are who we are. Get with it or get out of the way.
In July 1969, the Gay Liberation Front was founded in New York City. Shortly afterward, Gay Liberation Fronts began appearing across the United States. We may be preaching to the choir, because we have already brought you countless interviews with Gay Liberation Front activists from around the country. Now we are taking you to sunny Los Angeles, California, 1970. You already know some of the major figures in the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front: Don Kilhefner, Llee Heflin, and Jon Platania. You can also hear their stories on the QueerCore Podcast here.
Carolyn Weathers was one of the first LGBTQ activists helping reshape what it meant for queer people to live openly in America. In the early 1970s, she was an active member of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front and Gay Women’s Liberation. She marched in the first Pride parade in Los Angeles and participated in the Biltmore invasion protest against psychiatric “cures” for homosexuality. She also represented the Los Angeles gay liberation movement at the Black Panthers’ Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in 1970.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“In 1957, I would visit my sister, Brenda, in Dallas, Texas. There were gay parties—gays and lesbians—I was getting familiar with this world. My great-aunt Belle was a lesbian and marched in the suffragist parades in the early 1900s. My gay cousin, Ralph, was also gay and was a soldier on D-Day.
Brenda lived with many eccentric people. Some were gay, some were lesbians, some weren't. They were just really eccentric, wonderful people. The house they lived in: depending on their mood, they called it either the ‘Old Gay Palace’ or the ‘Old Gay Barn.’ I would visit there, and it was my first time to really be around gays and lesbians, and I loved it—they were so nice. I hadn't come out yet. It was just so much fun. There would be a big pot of spaghetti on the stove, and beer on ice in the bathtub, and everybody would bring their dogs—it was this wonderful group of interesting people living together and celebrating life.
I remember sitting at a bowling alley one time with two friends of mine: one was a butch, and one was a femme, and I told them, ‘I'm attracted to both of you sexually,’ and they kind of got outraged—‘Oh no, no, no, you, you just haven't found the right butch yet.’ ‘You just haven't found the right man yet.’ It was the same thing to me. It's just so limiting, so silly. I didn't like it.
One of the things I loved when I came to Los Angeles was what we called ‘woman-loving-woman:’ you weren't in any kind of box. So my sister and her lover, Anita Ornelas, moved to Los Angeles around 1963. I was in Fort Worth working as a librarian at the Fort Worth Public Library. Things were starting to change—the counterculture. It started with the civil rights movement, and you could just feel an electric excitement at the beginning of something big. Still, it wasn't happening in Texas, where I was; it was happening out in Los Angeles and places like San Francisco and New York, and my sister said, ‘You know, Carolyn, don't waste away in Texas, come out here. You’ll like Venice—they have places for poets and writers, you could do all these wonderful things.’ So I moved to Los Angeles in my little Volkswagen Bug.
In the Gay Liberation Front, my sister and some others were part of our speakers' group for lesbians, raising awareness of our issues. At the same time, we joined the Gay Women's Liberation over in Crenshaw, as well as GLF, because there were these two aspects with the gay men. We had to get together to fight this bigotry. The feminist movement was starting, so we joined it too. We had these connections with these groups.
In October 1970, Morris Kight, who's an icon of the movement here in LA, and I were representatives of the Gay Liberation Front on a Regis Philbin show, and that was quite an experience. I was the first out lesbian on a Los Angeles talk show, but I wasn't supposed to have been. We were in the studio when another woman who was supposed to have done it started crying and said, ‘I can't do this, I can't do this.’ So the others looked at me and said, ‘Carolyn, you do it, okay?’ I was very nervous, not because I was coming out as a lesbian all over Los Angeles, but because of stage fright.
I was also nervous because I wasn't prepared. The show was live, and they put this mic on me, the size of a banana, and I was so scared. I always talked with my hands, so I was sitting on my hands the whole time, saying, "Don't move, don't move.’ Regis Philbin and the woman were really, really nice to me because they could tell how nervous I was.
Morris, of course, was relaxed and a great public speaker, as I later became. One of the things he talked about was how some of the people in the Black Panthers and the Gay Liberation Front wanted to unite. Well, there were a lot of people in the Black Panthers who really wanted to do that, and there were a lot of people in the GLF who also wanted to, but there were more on each side who did not want to do it. Morris and Huey Newton, the leader of the Black Panthers, really wanted to do it. I didn't say anything, but Regis got into a big argument. I don't remember exactly what they said about it. I don't remember the denouement, but they got into a big argument over Regis trying to get a clear explanation. ‘Are you really going to do this?’
Later in November, this is how I ended up on Thanksgiving weekend as the lesbian delegate to the Black Panthers' Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention in Washington, D.C. When GLF was talking about who should go, my sister, who was standing next to me, raised my hand and said, ‘We have a volunteer.’ Oh God, Brenda, I'm not good at political nuts and bolts. I'm really not. I tell great stories and do stuff like that. My sister's great at nuts and bolts, but she had a job, and I really wasn't a good delegate, but it's okay, because that convention was a chaotic mess anyway.
There had been this kind of constitutional convention in Philadelphia a few months earlier, a big success, a huge success, but the one that was in Washington, D.C. was disorganized. The places where we were supposed to do this work ended up not being available. The women were housed way across town in a gymnasium. It was spread far apart. It was supposed to be all these groups from Native American, Hispanic, Asian, white, Black, gay, straight, poor, disabled—everyone who needed visibility—to come together to rewrite the Constitution of the United States.
Huey Newton was supposed to have announced the new constitution, but we really didn't have one. He apologized that we don't have this constitution and said we'll do this at the next convention, but there wasn't a next convention. I rode to Washington and back with Jon Platania and his lovers, one was Ralph Schaefer, who was later murdered at a thrift store in Los Angeles, and Bill from San Francisco. They talked constantly about politics, from its history to who said what, and this and that. I would just kind of look out the window and just wanted to shut my ears. It's not my kind of talk. They didn't shut up. We had a wonderful time. I liked them.
On October 17, 1970, the Biltmore invasion took place. The American Psychiatric Association was having a conference at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It's a 1920s building with beautiful tapestries, fountains, and statues—one of the programs at this conference—Dr. Philip Feldman, a psychiatrist, was going to show a film showing how to cure homosexuals with electric shock aversion therapy. About 30 or 40 of us went to the Biltmore. We interspersed ourselves among the psychiatrists, sat down, and Dr. Philip Feldman started to show this hideous film. There was a gay man hooked up to, I mean, serious, serious electrical machines—he was shown a photograph of a young woman, no zap—a photograph of a young man, and he was given an electric shock.
I'm not talking little shocks. I'm talking big, and this happened over and over. It was supposed to be a behavioral modification to make him straight. If he had been a lesbian, it would have been reversed. She would have been shown a photo of a woman, and so on. So some of our members suddenly stood up and yelled, ‘Are we going to stand for this shit?’ We all stood up and said, ‘Hell no.’ So we ran up to the stage—Don Kilhefner had a lot to do with this. He's the one who made Dr. Feldman sit over in a little chair at the side of the stage. At first, he and Dr. Feldman got into a mic fight, and Don said what we all wanted to hear: that we are tired of listening to you all these decades. It's time you sat down, shut up, and listened to us for a change.
Well, the audience was so mad, they were really mad, and there was a lot of tension. I heard that other people who were in the hotel at the time went outside and stood outside the ballroom, said, 'What's going on? What's going on? And the police were there too. Someone called the police, and I don't know how, but some influential person told them to back off, so they were waiting there, but they didn't come in to arrest us, and the funny thing to me is the audience again, they were so mad, and they were yelling at us, screaming at us. One of them was saying, ‘We came here: we paid to come here to learn how to cure you,’ stuff like that. We would all start stomping our feet on the stage, and stomping on a wooden floor makes a lot of noise. It's a racket, and they would shut up, and we'd start talking again, and then they would start yelling at us again. So we would start stomping our feet on the stage again, and they'd shut up, and finally, they learned to shut up, so we successfully performed behavioral modification on them.
What we wanted to do was have them break up into little groups: one or two gay men or lesbian to five or six psychiatrists, and have a dialogue to sit here and talk. It was amazing. We didn't really expect, we didn't know what to do, what we would expect. We certainly didn't expect a successful outcome. Once we started having this dialogue, they began to see us as these humans, these people. They had only seen gays and lesbians who had come in because they wanted to commit suicide because of the vilification that came through. One of the shrinks said to me, ‘I've never met a happy homosexual,’ really. So it was amazing. It was the first such dialogue, and it had such a profound positive effect.
A few days later in October, we decided to organize around Alpine County in northern California. Morris Kight and some others came up with the idea to start a community there and take over the town. The Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front decided to have gays and lesbians move up there, set up a community, and turn Alpine County into a gay and lesbian community. The population was small enough that if enough of us moved up there, we could take over the town.
When people started to quit their jobs in preparation to move up North, Morris said, ‘No, no, we can't do this.’ He had suggested it as kind of a happening because this was just something to draw attention to ourselves. So he called off the plans because people really believed we were going to do that. I knew we weren't. All these poor people were getting ready to turn Alpine County into a gay and lesbian commune.
This era was full of raw energy and excitement because we had never come together like this before. It was thrilling. It was like the whole counterculture that was going on at that time, like the world was changing. We finally planned to change things. Things were moving. We were forming our own community, where we knew ourselves and cared for ourselves—we hadn't before. It was an electric jolt, and a lot of anger at the world, a lot of joy in our get-togethers again. It was exciting. My God, look what we're doing. Wow, it's about time. This is wonderful, so exciting, and mixed up with the everyday political aspects. Things were changing, things were changing.”
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About The LGBTQ History Project
The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives, and the QueerCore Podcast.
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