DAVE HAYWARD

WASHINGTON, D.C. AND ATLANTA GAY LIBERATION FRONT

Dave Hayward as Prince Elmwood the McRoyal Oak in A Saturday Afternoon in Take Me There Park by unknown, 1973.

Dave Hayward is dead. I interviewed him on the Monday before he died from a heart attack. He seemed healthy, and we were coordinating to meet during his December trip to New York. I met Dave through Georgia's LGBT History Project. I wrote to them asking for an introduction to activists from the gay liberation revolution. Dave called me and introduced me to Lorraine Fontana, who was part of the Atlanta, Georgia Gay Liberation Front with him. I am glad we got your story, Dave. Thank you for your service!

Dave’s odyssey through early gay liberation traces a road from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, where he helped organize that city’s first Pride marches. Dave came of age right as the country was waking up to sexual and political revolution. While a student at George Washington University, he decided to contact the pre-gay liberation homophile group, the Mattachine Society, and spoke with Frank Kameny. Later, he joined the Washington, D.C., Gay Liberation Front. He took this activism with him to the South, where he began working on creating community in a region still dominated by conservatism. In our conversation, Dave reflected on the struggle between assimilation and revolution, between those who sought to lobby in boardrooms and those who tried to march in the streets. His story is an important reminder that gay liberation came not only from protest, but from the drive to define what it meant to be free.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“I was born in Newport, New Hampshire, on August 29, 1949. My whole family is from that area, including my grandparents. I grew up there and remained until I went to college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1967.

I used to date girls, and then I realized that I was also definitely attracted to boys. Before I went to college, I went to a prep school for three years, and that was mostly boys, but that was hard because I was basically very closeted.

One of the main reasons why I wanted to attend George Washington University was to come out. I remember what was really great for me was to read about the Greeks and the Romans, and they were, you know, just sexual. It was sort of polyamorous, polymorphous, and perverse. That was what I could find in terms of anything positive, or anything that was same sex—the gods and the goddesses were very indiscriminate.

All these organizations emerged directly as a result of the Stonewall Riots, and the Washington, D.C., Gay Liberation Front was subsequently formed. I remember reading about Stonewall in the newspaper, and it was somewhat buried. I remember thinking, well, about damn time, finally, finally—we are long overdue for something like that. Finally, there was a movement—it was essentially Frank Kameny before, and then a couple of other people, but now it was exciting. It was exciting for me when I attended my first D.C. Gay Liberation Front meeting. It was in this ballroom with all these gays and lesbians, and it was so exciting.

We were tired of being tired, and we needed to stand up. We were not in the shadows anymore. There was so much guilt at the time. I got totally involved with the Gay Liberation Front. You know, Alice in Wonderland dancing as fast as you can to stay in one place. I remember campaigning on Capitol Hill at Eastern Market for Frank Kameny when he ran for Congress as the first openly gay person. I saw a straight couple from George Washington University who were there. I remember I hid until they went away. I didn't want them to see me proselytizing. Even though I was active and engaged, I was only half out, but that totally changed.We had a big debate in the D.C. GLF about aligning with the Black Panthers. Several people who attended the meeting said, ‘Listen, we don't really have anything to align with—we're just trying to get ourselves together and organize our group.’ We were considering it because they were radical, and we were radical. We wondered if we should support each other.

Dave Hayward (right) with Greg James and Elizabeth Monahan at the 1996 Olympics by unknown, 1996.

We picketed a bar on Capitol Hill called the Plus One. They had multiple carding policies, targeting people of color and women. It took a lot of courage. It was a bar that I went to all the time, so that was sort of like, 'Oh, this sucks that they're discriminating.' I remember I picketed the bar. The next week, I went there as a patron. This was the first action I remember. We wanted to be in solidarity with people, and to say, ‘We have no business discriminating against one another when we are so obliterated ourselves.’ Have you ever heard of consciousness raising cell groups? That's what we had. We would talk through our feelings and experiences. We had that going on in D.C. and also when I came to Atlanta.

What I wanted was equal rights. We tried to get rid of all the sodomy laws and also to be represented in groups. I was never attracted to anything violent, such as the Weather Underground or similar groups. Some other people were. I wanted human and civil rights, and essentially, I aimed to emulate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

I knew some people in D.C., and I had a friend who had many friends in Atlanta. So, we took a trip down there. I was figuring out what I wanted to do after I graduated, which was in June of '71, so I scoped it out. I kind of wanted a change. One of the things about D.C. is that it doesn't have a distinct identity of its own. It’s very transient, and I was interested in being somewhere that really had a strong sense of identity, and Atlanta certainly did. It's basically the New South. The New York of the New South.

I vividly remember attending my first Georgia Gay Liberation Front meeting. I met someone named Bill Smith, and I tried to impress him by telling him about all the things I had done with the D.C. Gay Liberation Front. He was not impressed. He said to me, ‘David, if you go down to the Five Points neighborhood and shout out Sherman’s name, you will be torn limb from limb.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ He told me about the Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman—this was over 100 years later. Bill was interesting because he was sort of an anomaly. He was essentially a person of the old South and the New South, and a very active individual, who also founded the Georgia Gay Liberation Front and its associated organizations.

In Atlanta, the Gay Liberation Front hosted dances and fundraisers to support its efforts. We would go into the bars and we would leaflet. I remember being thrown out of two gay bars in 1972 for leafleting about Atlanta Pride. The owner of the Cove, the bar we were leafleting, said, ‘We don't want any of that radical shit in our bars.’ I remember he got his goons to escort us off the premises, and then it got really violent, and one of our brothers was thrown through the air in the parking lot. It was like, ‘Oh my God.’ There was quite a reaction—that was interesting to me because I didn't really see that element in D.C. It wasn't really seen as being threatening, unlike in Atlanta.

I would like to acknowledge our late friend Charlie Saint John, who took it upon himself to apply for the permit for our first permitted Pride march in 1972. He was successful in getting them to issue a permit, which they had not done in 1971. They didn't even attempt to hold a march in 1970, and what I heard was that they were afraid no one would show up, so they didn't. They didn't do that in 1970, but they did have a march on the sidewalk in 1971. It was hard and scary. We were always being discriminated against, and now we were in public.”