DON KILHEFNER

LOS ANGELES GAY LIBERATION FRONT, RADICAL FAERIES

Morris Kight, unknown, Don Kilhefner, Stan Williams by unknown, 1970.

I have nearly 3,000 emails in my inbox from Dr. Don Kilhefner. We communicate frequently, and I have 200 recordings of him talking on the phone. Don is from the gay liberation revolution that swept the United States in the late 1960s early 1970s. He is still going. He did not retire and move to Palm Springs. He actively writes and engages the community. He is as feisty as ever, pushing the envelope, calling out, and calling to action. Thank you, Don.

Don Kilhefner is a pioneering LGBTQ activist, psychotherapist, and community organizer who has played a transformative role in shaping the modern gay liberation movement. Born in Pennsylvania, Don moved to Los Angeles, where he co-founded the Gay Community Services Center (now the Los Angeles LGBT Center) in 1971, one of the first organizations of its kind to offer support, health services, and advocacy for the LGBTQ community. In 1978, he co-founded the Radical Faeries, a queer spiritual movement that blends countercultural values, earth-based spirituality, and LGBTQ liberation, fostering community and self-expression through rituals, gatherings, and a rejection of societal norms.

As a devoted champion of intergenerational mentorship and spiritual exploration, he has integrated his training in Jungian psychology and his interest in Native American and Eastern spiritual traditions into his work. Over the decades, he has remained at the forefront of activism, challenging mainstream narratives and advocating for preserving gay history, culture, and identity. His dedication to fostering community and supporting emerging leaders has solidified his legacy as a cornerstone of LGBTQ advocacy.

The following are two interviews with Don, labeled “Don 1” and “Don 2.”

—August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

August: You are writing a book with Christopher Phillips. Can you tell me more about that?

Don: Yes, we've known each other ever since 1973. He graduated from Yale. The gay liberation movement was happening, and he was looking around. He wanted to get involved somewhere, and he focused on Los Angeles. He thought that the most important gay liberation work was happening in Los Angeles, and he came out. He and I and seven other gay men lived in a gay commune together for several years, and it was out of that commune that the Gay Community Services Center was founded. Now called  the Los Angeles LGBT Center, it is the largest in the world. It was out of that commune that a lot of the organizing happened.

August: Did you think Los Angeles was the most important city for gay liberation?

Don: Yes, and there’s a reason for that. We, as gay people, never had a national newspaper, and in 1967, the Advocate came into being, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with today's Advocate—.

August: It always comes up in these interviews.

Don: Okay, got it. It comes up because it was originally a newsletter of a pre-gay liberation organization here in Los Angeles called Pride. That was going out of business, that organization, and someone by the name of Dick Michaels, who was a Republican entrepreneur, bought it and developed it as the Advocate, which was at first just a Southern California, very primitive newspaper. Then it became a national gay newspaper. By 1969, when Stonewall happened, the Advocate was a national newspaper with a circulation of somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers, which might even be high.

It was located here in Los Angeles, and Dick Michaels and his one reporter were able to observe gay liberation up close. He was initially opposed to it, but he was able to observe it first hand and saw the effects of what was happening, and every issue of the Advocate reported on gay liberation in Los Angeles. Throughout the country, those with the Advocate read about what was happening in Los Angeles. For that reason, it had a disproportionate effect on the development of the gay liberation movement here in Los Angeles.

The Advocate was a radical militant gay liberation organization here in Los Angeles. In cities like New York, Boston, a little later Washington, DC, a little later Atlanta, but in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Chicago, it was one of our major ways of contact. We're talking about pre-internet. We're talking about a time when you wanted to discover what was happening. You were in a newspaper, or you made a phone call, or you stuck a piece of paper in an envelope and put a stamp and address on it.

So the Advocate for gay liberation, for maybe about three or four years, became the flagship of gay liberation in this country. That's why you hear the Advocate mentioned a lot.

August: By national magazine, do you mean it was actually in stores?

Don: No, initially, it was distributed in the handful of gay bars that existed in LA. They'd actually go into the bars and sell it to individual people for 25 cents. Then it was also carried by Colonel bookstores, where the early gay publications were sold. The only place they could be sold was in adult bookstores. It was there, and by subscription. By 1968 and '69, the subscription started to build up because it was our only news source without our support. That was halfway positive. At that time, it never appeared in a legitimate bookstore or newsstand.

August: Weren't the Ladder and One magazine before those, or were those just smaller?

Don: They were before that, but they were organizational newsletters, so that they had a membership, and the members got a hold of them, the members received them. With the gay material, they might appear in an adult bookstore. The first time I came across, for example, the publications of ONE, Inc., was when I was a high school teacher in Wilmington, Delaware, right out of college. I went into an adult bookstore and picked up a copy of their magazine, One, among the naked bodies.

That was considered pornography at the time. Even though there were no naked bodies, even though it didn't talk about sex, it was considered pornography. That's where you came from.

August: How did growing up in rural Pennsylvania prepare you as a homosexual?

Don: It didn't prepare me, except in one way. In ninth grade, I fell in love with a fellow ninth grader. For the first time, my heart opened. In that way, Pennsylvania didn't know it was preparing me, but something was happening. We remained best friends throughout high school. In our high school yearbook, we wondered what they would say about us because we were always together. In our high school yearbook, under his picture, it said, "Glenn is inseparable from Donny." I was always Donny at that time.

Under my picture, it said, "Donny is inseparable from Glenn." I think it was the way it was said at that time. Anyways, these two young men like each other. I grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in southeast Pennsylvania. It is ground zero for Amish and Mennonite culture. I grew up in an environment where there was a whole lot of hell-and-brimstone condemnation of gay people going on. There was certainly heterosexual supremacy. For example, a classmate in my high school class, Bobby Betts, was extremely feminine. I never heard anybody make any disparaging comments about him. It was just, that's Bobby.

August: Were you Amish?

Don: I come out of a German-Irish, Amish-Mennonite brethren background. My relatives are like Noah's Ark, a host of rural religions in Pennsylvania at that time.

August: After high school, did you go to the Peace Corps?

Don: No. Glenn came from one of the wealthiest families in the area. His father was the owner/manager of a company that made all the JCPenney underwear. They became very wealthy. Glenn was prepared to go to college. I came from a poor working-class family, so the idea of going to college, even finishing high school, was considered a major achievement. Then being around Glenn and his sisters and his family, and because of that relationship and other things, beginning to get very good grades in school always, I began to see college as a possibility.

By the 11th grade, I wanted to become a history teacher. I loved history. I went to a branch of the Pennsylvania State University Higher Education System. There were quite a few state colleges across the state at that time. One of them was called Millersville, which was maybe about 20 miles from where I lived. In my family, a very large family, with 16 aunts and uncles on my mother's side and a handful on my father's side, no one had ever gone to college. I majored in history and minored in German.

I got a BA in history and German, and when I graduated in 1960 from Millersville, I got a job at a high school, a very good high school, in Delano, Pennsylvania, where I taught history and German for two years. Then in 1962, when the Peace Corps began, I applied for that and was accepted. I was sent to Ethiopia, where I taught history.

August: You were there for a few years?

Don: I was there. Peace Corps volunteers go for two-year terms. I was enjoying myself so much that I re-upped for a third year. I was there from 1962 to 1965 in a provincial town. The province was Wollo Province, and the little town was Dessie. At the most, probably 8,000 people, 6,000 people living there. It had the only secondary school in the province. If you can imagine a province as large as New York State with one secondary school?

That secondary school was like Harvard to the people there. It was part of the Ethiopian educational system. At the end of the eighth grade, you took an examination. Every eighth-grade student in the empire. It was then called an empire, and Emperor Haile Selassie was the ruler of it. If you passed that exam, you could enter high school. At the end of the 12th grade, you took an exam. If you passed that, you were allowed to attend Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa. In 1975, that university was renamed Addis Ababa University. So, the expectations of students were fairly high. Education was free, even at the university level. 

Most students going to college today are accumulating incredible debt. I think it's criminal what's happening to young people today around college. It's criminal. If you want to get a master's degree, sometimes you have to spend $100,000. A patient recently graduated from the nursing program at UCLA with a master's degree. He's in debt now of over $100,000—two years of study. In any case, I taught history. I was fortunate in the fact that I loved history, number one. Number two, I had the same students for those three years. I had them for history in 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. Over the three years, I got to know them really well.

Of the 20 or 22 students, five of them were girls. It was unusual in many African countries for girls to get an education. The secret was in the classes themselves; the educational system was so poor that there weren't any textbooks. Try to imagine teaching chemistry, physics, mathematics, history, or geography without textbooks. Notes had to be written on the blackboard. Students would write down the notes and memorize them, because that was the only way they could get the knowledge.

One of the things the Peace Corps did was provide my location with a mimeograph machine. Do you remember mimeograph machines?

August: I know it was like a primitive version of a Xerox copy machine.

Don: Yes. You typed on a stencil, put it on the drum on the machine, and then cranked the drum around. With each revolution of the drum, the stencil would get inked and then transfer the image of the words to a sheet of paper that was simultaneously fed through the machine. It was the office version of a simple printing press. When it came to subjects like the Reformation, the causes of the French Revolution, and things like that, I had notes I could give the students that they could read, study, and memorize. All 20 or 22 of those students, however many there were, by the time they took their 12th-grade exam, they passed the history exam. All of them with flying colors because they had the same teacher for the three years, and they had a book, which was my mimeograph notes, and they were highly motivated. 

When a teacher enters a classroom in Ethiopia, all the students stand up in respect until the teacher asks them to sit down. There was never, once in three years, any kind of discipline problem. The idea of a discipline problem for a student was simply unthinkable. In fact, if I were walking home in the evening—I lived about a half mile from the school—and I was carrying something, a bag or something, a student would come and carry it for me.

It was that kind of respect for teachers. Anyway, I spent three years there. It was a transforming experience for me, because while I was in Dessie, two people and two other teachers were there. One of them was a man named Yohannes Admasu, a university student who became one of Ethiopia's leading poets. Yohannes had been kicked out of the university, because he had written a poem that could be construed as critical of the emperor in Semitic languages, like Arabic and Amharic, which was the language of Ethiopia.

Some Hebrew words have layers to them, so a word can, on the surface, mean one thing, and if you have a deeper understanding of that word, it can mean just the opposite. Yohannes wrote a poem for the emperor's birthday, and people thought that he was actually criticizing the emperor. So he was sent into exile by the emperor and sent to exile to Dessie, where I was, and he taught Amharic there. He was one of the best-educated Ethiopians I've ever met. Yohannes was there, and he and I became the best of friends.

In South Africa in 1962, Nelson Mandela was found guilty of treason and was sent to prison. The African National Congress, which he founded, was in disarray; some members were arrested and sent to prison, and others escaped to other countries. Emperor Haile Selassie invited many of those South Africans to come to Ethiopia to become teachers, because they needed teachers in the school system. In my village, in my town, there was a man—an African National Congress member—by the name of Vel Nongauza, and he and I also became the best of friends.

At the time, I was about 22 or 23 years old, and these men, who were a little older but not too much older than me, became my teachers. I was learning about Ethiopian history, I was learning about African history, I was learning about a non-US-centric view of the world, and how people in third-world nations see the United States, see Europe as colonial powers. I got a profound higher education in politics, history, and culture that transformed my life because I began to see the world differently than I'd seen it before. 

August: After that, did you move back to Pennsylvania or go to Delaware?

Don: When I left Ethiopia, I started working on a master's degree in African studies at UCLA. I was there for a semester, and I was just so unhappy. Coming from a village of 8,000 people, spending three years there, where people knew me and I knew them, et cetera. I landed on the UCLA campus, where there were 45,000 people. I felt very isolated and invisible. This was 1965. The courses I was taking were taught largely by white men and women, and having had the experience with Yohannes Admasu and Vel Nongauza in Africa, I thought, these UCLA professors see things through an American lens, they don't see things through an African lens, a Black lens.

I dropped out of UCLA, didn't go back for the second semester, and applied to Howard University in Washington, D.C., one of the traditionally Black universities in this country, and got a master's degree there in Black history, because I wanted to be taught African and African-American history by Black people, not white people. It was 1966, the height of the Black power movement, the Black liberation movement in this country. I was in a place that was incredibly intellectually and spiritually stimulating.

I got my master's in three semesters, and then I was invited to go back to Ethiopia again as a part of a Peace Corps training program, where we tried to give the Peace Corps trainees a taste of what it means to live in a third-world country. We spent a week training in Philadelphia, where volunteers and trainees lived among poor Black families. Then we moved to the Virgin Islands where we put students and poor families on different islands in the Caribbean, again, to get a feeling for the worldview of a Black person and the survival struggles they go through.

Then we took them to Ethiopia, where they spent two weeks with one or two people in a fairly remote village, so they would begin to get the idea of what Ethiopian life is like.  They would have the opportunity to see through the eyes of a poor Ethiopian person, learn about their lifestyle, and see what living in a person's home is like. Then we brought them back to Addis Ababa, where we said, "Now you have to decide whether you want to be in the Peace Corps or not. We don't decide, you decide." That was from maybe February until about maybe May.

Then I spent from May until August back in Dessie totally immersed in language study. I studied and achieved maybe a third-grade or fourth-grade level of speaking and writing and reading. I needed to develop that. I had been awarded a full fellowship for a doctorate at UCLA and at the London School of African and Oriental Studies. I wanted to know whether I wanted to go to Los Angeles or London.

They kept writing me saying, "We need to have a decision." Finally, as I prepared to leave Ethiopia in August, I flipped a coin. Heads, I go to Los Angeles, tails, I go to London. It came up heads, and so I bought a ticket to Los Angeles. I've spent the next, whatever, 55 years here.

Now, one other thing I wanted to mention since we're talking about the Peace Corps.  One of the things that terrified me when we did our Peace Corps training at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., four months of fairly intense, vigorous training. They would decide at the end of those four months whether we were accepted into the Peace Corps or not. One of the things they eliminated was homosexuals, who were, at that time, seen as inferior people and would be immediately eliminated, so no homosexuals were allowed to be in the Peace Corps. We were there in droves. I'm telling you, extremely large numbers.

I was afraid that somehow they would find out. There was nothing in my past that would indicate that, but they were giving us psychological exams. I didn't understand what a sham those exams were at the time, but I was terrified that somehow it would show up in one of those psychological tests. Right up until the last day, I was living in anxiety and fear. Then, I was accepted and I went to Ethiopia. The number of gay people in the Peace Corps is incredible, a large number. If a person was found out in Ethiopia to be gay, they were immediately sent home, as several Peace Corps volunteers were.

It was not at all gay friendly. It was a very homophobic environment for a gay man or a lesbian. It is not today. Today, you can be openly gay and go into the Peace Corps. I have had several people that I have mentored and some people who were patients that have done that, young gay men. There are even cases where gay married couples can join the Peace Corps. It was very different at the beginning of the Peace Corps in 1962. Any questions you have on any of that?

August: The word homophobic didn’t exist then, did it?

Don: No, it didn't. I wish it didn't exist now.

August: Did the word homosexual exist back then, either?

Don: The word homosexual developed in the late 19th century with the development of "scientific sex," where sex, for the first time, became a subject of scientific inquiry because it was the scientific age. Everything was being studied so-called scientifically. If there was a heterosexual, then there were homosexuals, people who are attracted sexually to somebody of the same sex. Since we were living in a culture that practiced heterosexual supremacy, homosexuals were deemed—well, you know the story—were deemed sinful, were deviant, were defined as psychologically defective, were described as illegal, as a crime against nature, on and on and on and on.

The term came into usage in the late 19th century with the development of scientific sexuality. Later on, when we talk about revisioning gay identity, I make the argument that our primary defining characteristic is not sex, but something else. I don't know if you've read the essay that I sent you on Gay Identity: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog?

That's the essay where I begin to make the case for looking at gay intellectual history and seeing that there are two streams in that, the assimilationist, sexual orientation model of being gay and the essentialist/contribution model of being gay. Anyway, I don't want to get ahead of the story.

August: I can't believe you're worried about not having enough to talk about in your book.

Don: That's fine. That's what Christopher said after the first day. He said, "Oh, anyway, it's the same thing." I've been involved in this stuff for over a half-century on the front line. It's not like this is something I visited on a vacation. It's something that has been my life for the last 50 years.

August: You might've realized this in the Peace Corps, if not, we're flashing ahead. Do you think love or hate is a more powerful motivator, and do you think love or hate is more powerful for accomplishing what you need to accomplish?

Don: Oh, that's an interesting question because I was reading in the Sunday New York Times before you called—Roger Stone who got indicted on Friday. In an article about him, he says—he's talking about political manipulation and dirty tricks and stuff. He said, "From a politician's point of view, hate is a much greater motivator than love is." That's interesting. Did you read the article? If you ask Roger Stone, he'll say hate. That's the way you can manipulate. If you ask Jesus, he'll say love.

August: Roger Stone said, "It's much better to be talked about than not talked about, whether it's good or bad."

Don: Yes. Gossip Girl says the same thing. One day, I was driving in L.A. I looked up at this huge billboard, and it said, "Gossip Girl says you're nobody until you're talked about." 

August: You mentioned earlier that some of these groups were considered militant and radical, so do you think that, in that sense, hate and using that passion from the hate was more powerful?

Don: Now we're getting into philosophical and maybe even theological discussions, but I don't spend much time thinking about these things. I have a life. There is a spirit in me, a consciousness, something that I don't know what it is that guides me and intuitively lets me know what I need to do. The idea of love or hate, I think love is a nice idea. I think hate is an interesting idea, and both have been present in the evolution of our species.

August: Does this relate to what Harry Hay mentioned about the subject-SUBJECT consciousness?

Don: What that is about is something where gay people are different, carry a different consciousness than straight people do. That idea starts with Walt Whitman.

I don't want to dominate this interview, so I'm trying to take my cues from you. I can go in almost any direction around this. I don't know if you want to get into subject-SUBJECT consciousness now, which I know quite a bit about and was close to Harry, or what do you want to chronologically wait until later?

The idea of subject-SUBJECT consciousness largely originated with John Burnside, who was Harry's lover for decades, half a century. John Burnside is a very interesting person. I lived with him also for several years, with him and Harry. He was very intellectually curious. The idea that there's a consciousness that certain people carry that's different from the consciousness of other people started with Whitman. In his poetry, he talks about emotive people, which we would call heterosexuals, and adhesive people, which today we would call gay, or a different consciousness.

If you want to explore this, get a hold of Robert Martin's book called The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. There's a chapter in there on Whitman, where Martin, for the first time, begins exploring this, that Whitman is talking about a different consciousness. I'm blocking on the name right now, at 80 years old. There are a lot of names on my computer, and sometimes, it takes a little while for me to access some of these names. Edward Carpenter, who was briefly a lover of Whitman, he's an Englishman, English socialist, wrote a book published in 1922 called The Intermediate Type among Primitive Folks, where, for the first time, he begins laying out that in any culture where gay people are found, there are certain roles that we play.

Again, now here's a consciousness that we have, a different consciousness. Here are different roles that gay people play in much larger proportions to their numbers in the population. Then along comes Harry, who takes this information and starts talking about, again, subject-SUBJECT consciousness, subject-object consciousness. That we, as gay men, in our relationships are alike with like, much like the curing powers of homeopathy. On the basis of that subject-SUBJECT consciousness, we move in the world differently, and we can be found doing certain things in certain occupations, which are different from the occupations in subject-object relationships, heterosexuals, where it's based on difference.

Because of that difference, there is much more tension and struggle in hetero relationships and hetero consciousness than in subject-SUBJECT consciousness.

August: When did this idea develop, or was it always spoken about or understood?

Don: Harry and John developed it while living in New Mexico. I visited Harry on my way to Colorado in 1973 or 1974. They were still living there. Harry and I stayed up all night talking about gay liberation and the role of gay people in society. At that time, he did not mention subject-SUBJECT consciousness. When I went to visit him again in New Mexico in the spring of 1978, he was just beginning to say it. It was sometime in the late '70s that he began developing that. He was talking and writing about it when we had the first Radical Faeries gathering. I'd say during the '70s, it incubated.

He continued refining it as long as he lived, so that it isn't an idea that is set in stone. It's an idea that continues to evolve.

August: Did that ever occur with you personally or just in the history of gay liberation?

Don: If you get a chance to read the essay Gay Identity: Is the Tail Wagging the Dog? you will see that I talk about the two major streams of gay intellectual history in the last century and a half. Assimilation of sexual orientation is one stream. The other stream is essentialism, contribution, and fleshes it out for you. August, I'm not avoiding your questions. It just seems like the question you're asking, I've talked about a lot before. It has a history, and it might take me an hour just to go through that.

August: Okay, well, I thought that's more so what the early movement, like the Mattachine or the more conservative ones, described.

Don: To understand that, again, gay history becomes important. It sounds like you have a fairly good grasp of gay history, much more than any 24-year-old that I've ever met. Let me just say that. When Harry and the other six men founded the Mattachine Society, Harry called them together, but seven of them created it. It was a fairly radical idea that what they put was what homosexuals represent. I use that term because that's the term that was used. What homosexuals represent is a minority group. The term minority group, the idea of conceiving us as a minority group, was a very radical concept at that time.

Rather than seeing us as a pathology, an illness that needed to be cured, or as the church would have it, a sin that needed to be eradicated. Burning us alive at the stake in front of the church or required to be arrested as the government would see it, needed to get us off the streets and to prisons and to mental hospitals. The idea of calling us a minority group was an extremely radical concept. We don't understand. We often don't understand that today, and we just take it for granted, but in 1950. Have you ever read the Mattachine Manifesto?

August: I have not.

Don: If you can get a hold of Will Roscoe's book on Harry Hay called Radically Gay, they have a copy of it in there. To see us as a minority group and to see us as having a culture. They mention that in there, having a culture that is our own. Those are extremely radical ideas. The Mattachine Society, first of all, was organized like the French Resistance during World War II. There were layers of membership. No one layer knew who was in the layer above them. If the police struck, if the SS struck in Paris, or if the police struck in Los Angeles, they could only get the people on one level.

That's the environment and atmosphere in which Mattachine was being born into. They started to have discussion groups initially in Los Angeles, where on a certain night, gay men and lesbians would get together in someone's home or living room, and they would discuss what their lives are like. They came to these meetings as men and women as couples, male-female couples, because they didn't want anybody to get the idea that homosexuals were meeting. They tried to disguise it as much as possible so they wouldn't get arrested. That happened during the '50s, '52, '53.

It began to spread outside Los Angeles to San Francisco, Seattle, and New York. It was always a very small, largely invisible presence. In 1953, a very important meeting of the Mattachine took place here in Los Angeles at the First Unitarian Church on Crenshaw. At that time, the conservatives took over control of the Mattachine. You're talking about two phases of gay organizing here in Los Angeles. There were the Mattachine from 1950 to 1953 and the homophiles from 1953 to 1969. The Mattachine is represented by the Mattachine Manifesto, minority groups, oppressed groups, our own culture, and we need to talk to each other.

Then in 1953, as a result of a newspaper article that had been written that says that all of the Mattachine people were communists, and this was a communist front group, et cetera, et cetera, the conservatives took control of the Mattachine, and the conservatives were the assimilationists. From '53 until '69, it was a conservative assimilationist orgnization. "If we're good and we behave, they will accept us." It was based on getting acceptance by heterosexuals, and it was led largely by Republicans. The leaders were conservative Republicans. Then when gay liberation came along in 1969, gay liberation was the antithesis of that early Mattachine homophile consciousness.

Mattachine homophile, in the time it existed, was a step forward. Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking it. It was a step forward, and I bow deeply three times in their direction, but it wasn't gay liberation. Gay liberation didn't say, "We want heterosexuals to accept us." Gay liberation said, "Self-acceptance is what it's for. We need to accept ourselves. Fuck the heterosexuals. We need to accept ourselves," and, as one of our sayings was, "We're queer, and we're here. Get used to it." It wasn't like we were asking them to somehow emancipate us. It was not an emancipation movement. That's what the Mattachine and the homophiles would moralize, it was an emancipation movement.

You'll see we're just like you are. We're no different than you are. We do a few different things in bed, but otherwise, we're just like you are. The gay liberation movement said, "Oh, no, no. Self-acceptance, we don't care whether you accept us. We accept ourselves. Because we accept ourselves, society changes. The power focus is shifted from them to us." Out of that comes one of the great revolutions of the 20th century: the gay liberation revolution, a social revolution.

August: Can you talk about the Radical Faeries?

Don: There were faerie circles that Arthur Evans had started in the Bay Area. We didn't want them to be like that because what he was doing was trying to recreate the faeries as they come out of faerie history and lore in the Middle Ages. We were thinking about something more contemporary, more about gay consciousness. What is the consciousness that we carry, and what is the contribution we're making? Harry and I played volleyball back and forth. One day Harry called, and he said, "How about Radical?" I said, "Bingo. That's it."

We didn't want people to become spectators of this. We wanted it to be an exploration where we get together and talk to each other—that people bring their gifts with them and share those gifts with the other gay men there. There was a group called Louisiana Sissies. One of the Louisiana Sissies was doing a workshop on crochet lacemaking. Somebody else might be doing a workshop on gemstones, somebody else on auto-fellatio. Somebody else was doing a workshop by a pool, another night at the baths—how do we bring sensuality into a relationship rather than just orgasmic sex? Then there were general meetings, where we would be discussing gay consciousness, gay centered spirituality, et cetera. These workshops were happening each day, with the content being created by the participants.

All we talked about was a gathering of gay men to begin revising gay liberation and begin revisioning what it means to be gay. Why are we here? Why the fuck are there gay people? In terms of evolutionary biology and socio-biology, why do we keep reappearing? While our oppressors go down the drainpipe of history, why do we keep reappearing? Gay people wouldn't be there for thousands of years unless we're contributing to our species’ evolution. The question for us is what are we doing—not how do we become heterosexuals.

August Bernadicou: February 3rd, nine o'clock Eastern Time, interview with Dr. Don.

Don Kilhefner: Good morning.

August: Hi Don. It's August.

Don: I knew it was you. I just knew. My psychic powers just knew it was you.

August: Such good intuition.

Don: Good morning to you.

August: How are you doing?

Don: I am alive again. I'm awake again, in both the literal and metaphorical sense. I was just having a conversation with my nephew about life. It's raining in LA. It rained yesterday. It's raining today. It's supposed to rain all day. I'm looking forward to going to IMAX this afternoon to see the documentary Free Solo. Do you know that film, documentary—about the man who climbed El Capitan Mountain in Yosemite Park, just himself, just climbing up the rocks?

August: Wow.

Don: Anyway, if you ever get a chance. I haven't seen it, but I've read about it a lot. That's a documentary I want to see. And it's on IMAX in Hollywood. How are you?

August: I'm doing well. Doing pretty good. Can't complain, or try not to.

Don: You know there's the old Zen Buddhist story of the young novice at the monastery in Japan, at a Buddhist monastery. The roshi is dying. He's lying on his deathbed. The young novice creeps into his room and says, ''Roshi, roshi.'' The roshi opens his eyes. ''Tell me. You must tell me some wisdom before you die. I need to have some learning from your wisdom before you die.''

The old roshi says, ''When you're hungry, eat. When you're tired, sleep.'' I don't know if that has relevance in your life, but you're the alpha, I'm the beta. What do you want today?

August: That's good. I appreciate that story. In your blog post, you mentioned the wisdom of Sappho. What does that mean, and what is the biggest takeaway from Sappho?

Don: I was glad to get your email saying she's your favorite poet.

August: By far, yes.

Don: Let me do what I do a lot with young people, is turn it around and say, ''Why is she your favorite poet?' What do you learn from Sappho?" Elders do that. They want to pull it out of you.

August: What do you like about her?

Don: I like the fragments. I like the fact that it's a dyke talking to us, an old dyke talking to us. A heterosexual would always say, ''The wisdom of Solomon.'' Solomon was wise, but that's more a heterosexual take on things. I like to see what gay people and lesbians have to say about things.

August: Who's your favorite translation by?

Don: I don't think I have a favorite translation. I haven't approached Sappho academically. I approach her by, ''Oh, here's a bit. Oh, look at Sappho. There's a bit.'' It doesn't happen so much these days, but particularly in the late '60s, '70s with the second stage of the feminist movement. A lot of women were quoting and reading Sappho, so I got it kind of secondhand. It was a lesbian, I forget her name right, who wrote a book called Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. I always liked that. Sappho Was a Right-On Woman. 

August: That's interesting. Where we last left off, you were talking about the Mattachine Society, the end of the '60s, and overlapping with your group and gay activism. One thing that has come up in some of the New York interviews I did was that transgender people weren't really accepted in the early gay movement, and they thought of them as possibly being a burden to try to accomplish their rights. Was that like that in California and Los Angeles?

Don: First of all, you’ve got to see that there was—the homophile movement, the Mattachine, the homophile movement was from 1950 to 1969. From what I know of the homophile effort here in LA—let me not comment on that right now. I wouldn't say it was trans-unfriendly. It was more like trans people weren't visible.

Now, the person who financed the homophile effort here in LA was Reid Erickson, who was himself a transsexual, female to male transsexual, very wealthy man who lived in Santa Barbara and owned real estate here in LA. He largely underwrote the efforts financially of the homophile effort here in LA.

With gay liberation, it depends on the city that you were in around the trans. I think maybe in New York what you said was true. Here in LA, from the very beginning, transsexuals were involved in the Gay Liberation Front. I'm thinking of Angela Douglas and others, who were full and essential members of the Gay Liberation Front. There was no anti-trans attitude here.

It was seen as part of the large umbrella of which there were many different people. Some men would come to the meetings in dresses. Some men would come to the meeting in full leather. It was a range.

When Gay Liberation Front here in Los Angeles developed, the next stage of gay liberation developed into the creation—focusing on the creation of the gay community, which never existed before, through the Gay Community Services Center. At the Gay Community Services Center, we always had a transsexual, transvestite desk. It was always there. There was always a service for transvestites, transsexuals. It was part of what we were doing. It was not something that was alien to us. I don't know if that addresses the question.

August: Yes, it does.

Don: No, it depends on the city you're in. It wasn't true for Los Angeles. It's not true today.

August: I don't think so either.

Don: I think in that way, Los Angeles might have—I know New Yorkers hate to hear this, but in that way, I think Los Angeles was a little more advanced than gay liberation in New York.

August: Can you talk about Reverend Troy Perry, who founded the Metropolitan Community Church?

Don: It's interesting with Metropolitan Community Church because MCC did not grow out of gay liberation. MCC was started in 1968 here in Los Angeles by Reverend Troy Perry. It was an outgrowth of something called the Society for Individual Rights in San Francisco, SIR, was what they were called. SIR was a somewhat conservative, assimilationist, middle-class, upper-class organization in San Francisco.

I'm not knocking it; it did good work for the time it was in, the late '60s, but it was not part of the gay liberation movement. MCC comes from a different place in history than, let's say, the Gay Liberation Front or the Gay Community Services Center here, the work that I was doing. It came from a different place in history. It was more SIR in San Francisco that generated it, and that Troy related much more comfortably than he did gay liberation.

Somebody told me. I have not heard him say this or seen it in his writing, but somebody told me that Troy said that he was not a gay liberationist. He was not a radical. I am not putting him down. I like Troy. We're friends, but he’s much more conservative. He would have fit in very nicely with the homophiles.

August: That's interesting. I just started a new book. Have you heard of Drummer magazine or do you remember it?

Don: Of course, I do. Of course, I knew John fairly well.

August: I'm going to interview Jack, but I'm trying to read his book.

Don: He's still alive? How old is he?

August: He's in his 70s, but I need to read this book.

Don: Oh, he's older than that.

August: I think late 70s. Oh, I am referring to Jack not John.

Don: If I am 80—he was older than me at the time. He's in his 80s, regardless of what he tells you. I would suggest that respectfully.

August: I have to do the math because it said he was 34 in 1977. Anyway, the book is 500 pages, so I have to knock it out. It just talked about how Reverend Troy Perry hosted a charity slave auction. That sounds pretty radical, or no?

Don: Troy Perry did not host it. It was being held at a gay bathhouse. When the police raided it, Troy Perry, Morris Kight, the Gay Liberation Front, came to the help of those who were arrested. I don't think it was hosted by MCC. I could be wrong there, but I don't remember that.

There's a lot of remembering, rewriting of gay history. ONE, Inc. tried to make us believe that the period from 1953 to 1969 was really gay liberation, and it simply wasn't. It was very conservative. It was assimilationist. It was led by conservative Republicans. It was based on a whole different principle. I talked about that last week, a whole different principle than the gay liberation movement.

Now, people are rewriting history to make it something else. The LA LGBT Center here in LA, for example, when it tells its history now—which I'm the co-founder—it doesn't mention anything about it growing out of the Gay Liberation Front. It just says, "Well, there is a group of gay people who got together and organized this center." That's not true.

It grew out of a radical revolutionary effort by gay men and lesbians to radically change, restructure society. It was not an assimilationist gay rights organization. It was a revolutionary organization. The reason it was started was to create a gay community where none existed because we saw that what we were trying to accomplish couldn't happen unless it was a visible, strong gay presence in the city, community in the city.

August: What are the origins of the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles?

Don: As Stonewall happened on June 28th in 1969, by August, two months later, Morris Kight called the meeting for the Gay Liberation Front. I got involved in September, so that almost immediately, Stonewall set off what was like a prairie fire across the country, especially in Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Almost within months, there were radical Gay Liberation Fronts or organizations that were like that. Some of them had different names. Am I answering your question?

August: What are your origins?

Don: I often mention somebody by the name of Frantz Fanon. He was a black psychiatrist from Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean. He worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria when the Algerians were rebelling against French control. Through his work there, he developed several critical theories and his books The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks. He created the idea of ontology resistance: that oppressed people will try to imitate their oppressors’ culture.

​I took those theories, and I put them within the context of what happened to gay people. It wasn't that we were a country that got colonized; our minds got colonized by hetero supremacy. We began to believe and internalize what they said about us—that we were freaks, that we were inferior, that we were sick, we were sinful. In the process, we began to idolize hetero-culture. Part of gay liberation was fighting back against the colonization of our minds. The self-loathing that we'd internalized, the self-hatred we'd internalized, and how we thought about ourselves.

August: Yes, that's exactly it. How did you hear about it, or was it so close to your circle?

Don: I was a doctoral student. I think I told you. I was a doctoral student in African and Islamic History at UCLA in my final year of coursework. It was in the newspapers. Up until that time, I was involved in what some people would call a leftist radical organization. While I was at Howard University in Washington, I was involved in the early days of the student mobilization against the Vietnam War.

When I relocated to Los Angeles, I became involved with something called the Peace and Freedom Party in Venice, California, out by the ocean, which was a radical organization. When Stonewall happened and I began reading about it in the LA Times and New York Times, for the first time, I began to see, oh my God, I understand there is a consciousness that I must develop about myself as a gay man being oppressed. It's not just about liberation of poor people or Black people or brown people or women, it has to include gay people.

I've talked with many of the founders of these gay liberation organizations around the country, and still do, that it was like a wake-up call that most of us didn't have as part of our liberation struggle. What that did for us, it put us, as gay people, in the trajectory, in the social ferment of the time, the cultural, socio-political ferment of the time, of the anti-war movement. Black civil rights, social justice, it put us right in there like other groups.

We had never been like that before because most of these radical social justice, anti-war, all these movements were anti-gay. We felt like we weren't able to come out as gay people in them. All of a sudden, Stonewall made that possible because now, we had a history of fighting back. The homophile movement from the Mattachine through the homophile effort through 1969 was not about fighting back. It was about becoming like they were behaving. If we behave, they would give us our freedom. Most of us couldn't identify with that.

Now, all of a sudden, we had a model. That's what Stonewall did, it provided a model of what we needed to do. It was like a wake-up call. It was like somebody putting on a new pair of glasses and seeing the world differently as a gay man.

Like I said, I was at UCLA. At that time, your generation doesn't have that today, but we had what was called alternative media at the time, which were movement newspapers in all the major cities that reported on all the social protests and social change that was taking place in the country. You have social media, which is largely apolitical, largely self-centered.

At the time, there was a newspaper in Los Angeles called the Los Angeles Free Press. It came out every Thursday. We who were involved in the counterculture, we who were involved in social change movements, ate it up because it had news of the anti-war movement and things we were interested in.

One day, I saw in there a notice for a meeting of the Gay Liberation Front at a certain place here in Los Angeles. I went. That was in late September of 1969, maybe early October. It was organized in August of 1969. I was involved with GLF from that point on. And GLFs were popping up all  over the country.

As I told you last week, the Gay Liberation Front here in Los Angeles had an advantage that others didn't inthat the Advocate newspaper was published here. It was the only national gay newspaper. There was no other. It was the Advocate where we got our news nationally. The Advocate covered, since it was in LA, it covered primarily the activities of the Gay Liberation Front in Los Angeles.

Later on, it enlarged its scope. What we were doing here in Los Angeles took on an importance that many other Gay Liberation Fronts didn't have, and that is that we set a model for what militant activities could be.

August: It sounds like you came in pretty hot and heavy. Was that the case?

Don: Hot and heavy would be good words. 

August: Then what do you think that initial excitement pushed you into doing? 

Don: What it was is it was about our liberation as gay men. Up until that time, it was for many gay men, not all, but for most gay men, our gayness was a shadow issue. We kept it in the closet, literally. We kept it in the closet. People wouldn't know. There was nobody at UCLA who knew that I was gay. There was nobody in the Peace and Freedom Party who knew that I was gay. They might have suspected it since I never dated women and walked a different way than they did. It was a shadow issue.

What Stonewall did was open the closet. One of our slogans here in Los Angeles, and we even had a pin that we manufactured that said, "Out of the closet, into the street." That is what it was about for us. It was out of the closet, into the street. All of a sudden, what we had kept hidden, or we didn't talk about, or we did privately, or we did when we weren't at the movement office, was now out in the open. This is who I am.

August: Did any people in the early version of the group use fake names, or was everyone out with their true identity, or in the publications?

Don: I would say 95%, 96% used real names. That's an interesting issue because that was one of the ways that we were different from the homophile effort. In the homophile effort, they were fake names. Dorr Legg, who was the head of ONE, Inc., that was a fake name. They all had fake names.

One of the things that differentiated us was who we are. There's an interesting story in this. In the spring of 1970, within the spring of 1970, maybe a little later—anyway, it was in 1970, maybe early 1971, the public television station here in LA, KCET, ran the first program on gay liberation of any television station here in LA.

It had an hour-long program around city events, and it focused on the gay liberation movement. I was a guest. Morris Kight was a guest. Jon Platania was a guest. Dick Nash, who was a Unitarian minister who had been arrested by the police and fought the case in court and won, was there. There were four of us.

We show up at the television studio and have our makeup. We're sitting on the set, but nothing happens. The host said, "Just a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes." Backstage, people were staring around. After a while, it was a half an hour after the taping should start. Then it was 45 minutes, and I went up to the host. I said, "What's happening?" She said, "The technical people and the cameramen are refusing to film this unless we black out your faces or we get you to use false names."

Finally, at the call in, the union rep had to come in and tell the men that in their contract they couldn't do that. They had to film this. They had no right to demand anything about the content of the program. We said, "We would not do something like that, blacken our faces or use false names." That would be anti-gay liberation.

Finally, the show was filmed and went on. It made quite an impact just because people had never seen anything like homosexuals with real names, not having their faces blacked out, talking about social justice, and restructuring the nature of our society, as well as the oppression of gay people. There were times—I don't know if you can ever get a hold of it, but there's a documentary film called Some of Your Best Friends. If you can't get a hold of it, I think I have a DVD here that I'd be glad to share with you.

It was made by a professor at the USC Film School. It was a filming of the early gay liberation movement. It was filmed in the spring of 1970. It was primarily focused on Los Angeles. It filmed many of our activities here in LA: gay-ins that we had, protests in front of the police station, taking over an international conference of behavioral psychologists, the first Gay Pride parade in Los Angeles.

It had a section in New York. In the New York section of the film, people had their faces blacked out. The contrast between what we were doing here in LA and what was happening in New York was dramatic, to say the least. There were some people who would not use their real names, but part of that was our oppression as gay people. People would lose jobs. People would sometimes lose family. Sometimes people would lose wives or husbands.

People would be ostracized. It was not that they were doing something wrong, but it was a symptom of the oppression of these gay people. We couldn't be ourselves. Now, with your generation, that must seem like the Middle Ages, but it wasn't. It was true in the 1960s, as late as 1960. As I said, KTET television refused to film us unless we blackened our faces.

August: That was probably one of the first times in America that that kind of thing happened on TV, right?

Don: Yes, it didn't happen often. There were news shows of gay liberation demonstrations. Of course, the Stonewall uprising was covered by television. It was a news event. Heterosexual media called it a riot. We, as gay people, called it an uprising. You get the difference between those two terms?

August: Yes.

Don: A riot as to mean we're out of control and we're just causing trouble. An uprising means it's the oppressed people who are rising up against their oppression. Recently, the editor of the Gay and Lesbian Review sent me a copy of a book they published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. The Gay and Lesbian Review called it the Stonewall Riots. They weren't riots; they were uprisings. This was an insurrection. It wasn't a riot. Why am I saying this? What did you ask me?

August: Oh, yes, that this was one of the first times something like this was on TV.

Don: Yes, it was on TV as a news item. This was in Los Angeles. It was the first time there was a show that took it seriously. They really asked us—the hostess, was really serious about why is this happening. Tell us about the history of gay oppression. Tell us about what your goals are. Tell us about—a big part of that interview was telling them about the Gay Community Services Center that we were organizing and how we were attempting to create a gay community, a community where we assumed responsibility for each other, a community that would change the society, a community that would be strong and visible and that people could get involved in, not something where you had to hide away. It was a social revolution in the making.

August: Can you talk about the first Pride?

Don: Ed Davis, who was Chief of Police, denied our permit to march down Hollywood Boulevard. He said it would be like allowing a group—you know, it sounds like Donald Trump—allowing thieves and perverts to march down Hollywood Boulevard. We went to the ACLU, they took the case, took it to court, and the Friday before the Sunday it was supposed to happen, a judge said there is no reason to deny us a permit, and that the police department had to issue it.​

ONE, Inc. was there with a car—like beauty queens sitting in a car with ONE, Inc. on its side. Reverend Troy Perry was there with the Metropolitan Community Church and rode in a convertible. The Gay Liberation Front was there doing guerilla theater. We had someone dressed as a policeman and five or six members of the Gay Liberation Front dressed as fairies. The cop had a baton and was chasing them, saying, "I'm going to get you fairies. I'm going to lock you all up. You fairies are a..." To us, this was guerilla theater. Another contingent of the Gay Liberation Front made a huge papier-mache Vaseline jar. At that time, Vaseline was the major lubricant used by both heterosexual and gay people. It outraged people that we had that Vaseline jar because they thought that was brash and unheard of—lots of people who had read the article in The Los Angeles Times about the march came and joined.

August: One thing that I read about the early services you provided was a 24-hour hotline. Is that true? Can you just tell me about that and maybe some of the phone calls you got?

Don: Sure. From the very beginning, we wanted to have 24-hour access to the Gay Community Services Center. We trained people. The volunteers, it was all volunteers. We didn't have any money to have a staff. It was all people doing it because of the importance of what was happening. We would train them to be able to take crisis calls at night. The center would close at 10:00 PM. There would be somebody who would spend the night, sometimes two people, sometimes one person, who would spend the night at the center, taking any phone calls that came in.

We advertised widely that there was a 24-hour hotline there if people needed it. Calls came in. Some nights there were no calls, sometimes there would be 10 calls. They were trained in how to deal with suicide prevention. They were trained in resources, how to get people to the resources. It was primarily getting people to the center because something happened to people when they came to a center, which in the front of it had a sign hanging Gay Community Services, a big sign, and could walk into a space where there were all gay and lesbian, trans people. We were acting normally. We were asking them, "How can we help you? What do you need?"

There was something healing in being able to do that because we as gay people had never before in history, as far as I'm concerned—that might not be true for the Weimar Republic in Germany and sometimes in France and England, but largely speaking in the United States, that had never happened before. Where you walk into a community center, a social service agency, staffed by gay people, and you are a gay or lesbian, and somebody asks, "How can we help you?" Rather than, "Call the police or call the reverend or call a shrink," it was like, "How can we help you?

Treating each other as normal humans, treating each other in a humane way, not as sick people, sinful people, or criminals.

That grew out of the Gay Liberation Front. The Gay Liberation Front also had a 24-hour hotline staffed by me. What happened when I decided in—let me back up on that. The Gay Liberation Front in LA didn't have a home base. Our meetings would change from week to week depending who would have us. Sometimes we'd have a meeting for two weeks in a row at an anti-war center, and sometimes then it would be at a bar and et cetera, et cetera. I realized that there was something about that that couldn't happen. I had some knowledge as a community organizer.

As a community organizer, you have to have a base out of which you can operate that is stable, that has an address, and has a phone number. We had none of that. One of the things I did in November of 1969 was an election here in California. The Peace and Freedom Party candidate, Eldridge Cleaver, a radical, later fugitive, who ran for, I think it was either governor or senator of California, and obviously wasn't elected. The election was over, and because I was working in the Peace and Freedom Party in Venice, where we had an office, the person who rented the office in Hollywood called me up and said, "Don, we have this small office in Hollywood. Do you know anybody who'd be interested in renting it?"

I said, "Well, I think I do." I brought it up at the next Gay Liberation Front office about us getting an office, and it was approved unanimously. In January of 1970, we moved into that office. It was on 577 1⁄2 North Vermont in East Hollywood. It was in a fourplex. We had the part of the fourplex that was upstairs on the southwest part of the building. Somebody had an apartment. It was a large apartment. A man who had a lease to it used the back part of it, the kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom, and he rented us the rest of it. There was a stairway back entrance that he used, so he never interfered with us.

We had this huge living room with a fireplace. Next to it was a small room that we used as an office. We had a space for our meetings. We had a space for an office. We decorated in a revolutionary way. There was a picture of Huey Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, hanging over the fireplace. There were other images of people fighting back all over the place. We had, in one corner, 30 demonstration signs that we could use for any occasion. If we needed a quick demonstration somewhere, we had the signs already made, and we could be on the picket line in an hour, two hours, so that it was that kind of place.

It was very active, open from 9:00 in the morning until 10:00 in the evening. One of the features it had was a 24-hour hotline with the name Gay Liberation Front listed as its name. We were up front and open in everything that we did, and in your face. 

What happened with me at UCLA, I was on a full fellowship at UCLA, but when I decided to take what I thought was going to be a semester off, the winter semester of 1970, my fellowship stopped, so I had no money coming in. I owned a really old Ford automobile that I would sleep in. I was homeless, basically.

I worked in the office from 9:00 AM until 10:00 PM, and then I went to my car, which was parked somewhere in the neighborhood, and would spend the night sleeping in the backseat. Finally, my car wouldn't start anymore. What I would do is I would have to move it from place to place, so there would be no harassment from the neighbors or the police or anyone. It worked well for about maybe three weeks, four weeks. Then it stopped working. I couldn't start it. It was so old that there was no hope to get it going, and I had no money. I was homeless and penniless.

At a meeting at the Gay Liberation Front, there was a sofa in the office. I said, "If I would be allowed to sleep at night on the sofa in my sleeping bag, I would be open to managing the office," meaning I'd get it open at 9:00 AM, and I would staff it during the day, and at night, I would answer the hotline. There would always be someone there, and they thought that was a great idea because homelessness in 1969, 1970 meant something very different than what homelessness means today. Then there was an edge to society where people could live somewhere. There were communes. There were apartments with many people in them, et cetera, et cetera.

They thought that was a great idea, and so I took on managing the Gay Liberation Front. What would happen is I would go to my sleeping bag, sleep on the sofa, and, oh, sometime about midnight, telephone calls would start coming in. From the East Coast, they would move to the West Coast because there was no other listing in the country that I knew of, or apparently the phone company knew of, that had the word “gay” in it. When somebody called, no matter what they were, and said, "I need help, I'm a gay person, blah, blah, blah," they were given our number.

Throughout the night, there would be telephone calls coming. Some nights there were no calls, and I could get a good night's sleep. Sometimes there were one or two. On weekends, there would be many times seven or eight calls during the night. One, I was, what, 28 at the time, 29, who knew a lot about history, but knew nothing about human service. I didn't know what to tell people. People would call up and say, "I need help. I'm an alcoholic, and I live in East Jesus, Iowa, and I need help with my alcoholism." I just listened and talked to them. I tried to be as compassionate as I could be. I didn't know it at the time, but even then, there was a helper inside of me.

"My girlfriend and I, our landlord is trying to throw us out of our apartment in San Diego because we're lesbian, and we don't know what to do. He's ripped the screen door off the door, and we're afraid that he's going to attack us." She said, "What am I going to do?" I gave the best advice I could give, but calls like this, "My boyfriend and I are having a problem. We need some help with our relationship." Throughout 1970, a year, that's when I did it. I took these 24-hour phone calls.

By about March, I realized that this can't go on because what I was hearing was, gay people were having problems, basically caused by their oppression. Not something they were causing, but something because they're gay, or people suspect they're gay, or because of circumstances. They were in crisis. About March of 1970, April of 1970, I called a meeting at the Gay Liberation Front, called the Gay Survival Committee. Just think of those words, “Gay Survival Committee,” what we were dealing with in 1970. It wasn't, "Let's have a parade." It was basic fundamental society survival. Some didn't survive. Many didn't survive.

I chaired that committee and got some people together, and started talking about how we can begin to provide a program of human services for people. That committee evolved in early 1970 into organizing the Gay Community Services Center, which would provide services specifically designed for gay and lesbian people. Back to your question, 24-hour hotline, it really started out with a hotline in the Gay Liberation Front office that I staffed.

It was because of my experience there that I suggested—I knew that we needed to build in a 24-hour hotline, because that's when some people would call. They would call during the day, they would call at 1:00 AM.

August: Did you come up with the term oppression sickness?

Don: No, I won't take credit for that. Somebody did. It might have been me. It might have been somebody else. It was a term that was in the air at the time.

August: You spoke about some of the different organizations and protests and actions like that. Can you speak about the behavioral science one that you protested?

Don: In the October 1970, in Los Angeles, there was an international meeting of behavioral psychologists. We learned that one of the presentations that was going to be given there was how to cure homosexual men based on aversive conditioning, which was basically they watch a slideshow. When there's an attractive picture of a woman, seductive, nothing happens. When there's a picture of an attractive man in a seductive pose or maybe semi-nude, the person gets a shock. It's a type of electro-conditioning. Obviously, we weren't sick. We felt that this was a barbaric treatment of gay men.

We contacted the person at the University of Southern California who was hosting this. We said, "We heard about this happening." He said it was happening. We said, "We will do something around this." He got nervous and said, "What are you going to do?" We said, "We don't know yet. We will book something." I suggested to the Gay Liberation Front that we go to the meeting, which we did. There were about maybe 30, 35 of us. We go there and we sit in the audience.

Don Kilhefner (left) at the Biltmore Rebellion by unknown, 1970.

When Dr. Feldman—that was his name—from  the University of Warwick in England, got up to start his presentation, I walked up to the microphone and took the microphone from him and said, "I'm from the Gay Liberation Front of Los Angeles. We will not let this presentation go on until we have a discussion about the professional ethics in doing what you're doing here." What we proceeded to do was divide the audience of maybe, I don't know, 150 people into about maybe 10 groups with two or three Gay Liberatiobn Front members in each group. We asked them to debate, discuss with us the ethics and morality of what they were doing.

First of all, creating a category of sick people, psychopathology, which wasn't true. It was manufactured, but we're not sick, and that they are trying treatments which are barbaric, trying to heal something that is not a problem, and they need to look at the ethics of what they're doing. After we had that discussion, maybe about, I don't know, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, we said, "Now, go on with your meeting. Dr. Feldman, go on with your presentation. We just wanted to raise the issue of what you're doing here. As gay people, we want to register our protest that this is inhuman, it's immoral, it's on and on and on."

They did continue, but people walked out on Dr. Feldman. Dr. Feldman was so flustered that, while his presentation went on, it was a dud. Now, unknown to us at the time, across the street in Pershing Square, the Los Angeles Police Department's SWAT team, S-W-A-T, had formed, and they were ready to interrupt Gay Liberation Front and arrest us. The chair of the psychology department said to the police, "No, no, no, no, everything is going to be okay. Just go away. Don't interfere. We don't want you to interfere." Thank goodness they didn't interfere, or we would have been all arrested, I think brutally, because the SWAT team is not known for their sensitivity.

Fortunately, the whole thing was filmed. If you get a hold of the film, documentaries, Some of Your Best Friends, you'll see what I'm talking about. Some of Your Best Friends, if you can't find it, let me know. I'm sure it's on the internet somewhere. The whole thing was filmed. There was a reporter there from a radio network. I forget what it was. One of the radio stations: CBS, NBC—one of the radio networks. By the afternoon of that Saturday, it was being broadcast all over the country about the Gay Liberation Front—what we did there. It was one of the actions. We call it the Biltmore Rebellion because it happened at the Biltmore hotel in downtown Los Angeles. The Biltmore Rebellion was being reported all over the country.

I say that not from a self-centered, ego-centric point of view. That's not how I move in the world. It really was an important event because it had a ripple effect throughout the behavioral psychology profession that what they were doing and trying to cure gay men was immoral and ethically incorrect. It really did have a change. When I was in graduate school of psychology, some years later, a decade later, I picked up a behavioral psychology textbook. The last chapter of the book was about the ethics of trying to convert homosexuals.

It was written by a professor at USC, who was at the Biltmore Rebellion that day. I know that it had an effect. That was the sort of thing that the Gay Liberation Front would do. We would be in your face. We didn't care whether we were invited or not. We didn't care whether we got arrested or not. We were going to fight back against heterosexual supremacy wherever we found it. It was no different than what Black people were doing, Latinos were doing, the Chinese Americans were doing, poor people were doing, women were doing, anti-war people were doing. It was a culture in which social justice became very important.

We were shaped by the idea that we could have a better society. We had to assume the responsibility for making that happen.

August: Who was Ralph Shafer?

Don: We called and called and called, and we couldn't get a hold of Ralph Shafer, the volunteer who was working that shift at the Gaywill Funky Shop, the thrift store that came out of the Gay Liberation Front. Late on that Monday, Morris and I went over together—went over to the Gaywill Funky Shop. It was closed. We had a key—we got in. As soon as we got in—I don't know if you know this, but a dead body gives off a certain smell. As soon as we stepped in, both Morris and I looked at each other said, "Oh no." We called his name, and we looked around. In the bathroom, we found him dead. Someone had executed him. There was a shot in the back of his head like an execution. We thought, "Oh, no, robbery. Ralph is dead.” But the money was there. Nobody had taken any money, so it was an execution. This was a gay murder. In those days, gay murders were not a high priority. Many times the attitude to it was, "Well, it's one less of them."

August: Did you ever not feel safe?

Don: All of the death threats I got were in connection with organizing the Gay Community Services Center. Probably the threat that concerned me the most was somebody called me up at the Center and said, "I know where you live, Don Kilhefner," and gave me the address of the commune that I lived in. Then he said, "I know which room you live in because I can see it from—" and then he gave the name of the street. I thought, "Holy shit. This guy has specific information." I lived in fear for about a month. Then, as happens with fear many times, it can't maintain itself forever.

When you consider that we're going to be celebrating in June the 50th anniversary of Stonewall—I don't know if you're tapping into that celebration in New York City. It's in your city where there's going to be a big celebration. I know the Gay Men's Chorus of LA is going to New York in June because at Carnegie Hall, there's going to be a huge concert of Gay Men's Choruses from around the country. It's going to be a big celebration in your city and for good reason. It ignited the fuse that caused the revolution to happen and people like me to be transformed in my lifetime. He transformed in a matter of a couple of years.

That wouldn't have happened, I don't think, otherwise. Your generation has a task also to complete, but we'll maybe talk about that later.

August: What's the task? 

Don: I think the task of your generation is having a gay-defined definition of who we are. We now have a clearing in the forest. Gay liberation provided a clearing in the forest for gay people to breathe without being afraid of being killed or beat up or arrested, or what have you. I think we did a pretty good job of changing the idea of a homosexual from a negative to a positive image. Now, the question becomes—we need to be able to move beyond the definition of us as sexual beings and revise who we are as gay people. It's not anti-sexual, don't get me wrong. I'm a sexual liberationist. I enjoy sex. I did. I don't have it now, but I did at one time.

It's not anti-sexual, but it is saying the tail is wagging the dog. It's the essay that I sent you. The tail is wagging the dog, and we don't pay any attention to the dog. Who or what is this dog? What's this dog doing? Why are there gay people that keep appearing generation after generation, for centuries, millennia? What are we doing in terms of evolutionary biology that keeps us reappearing and reappearing all the time? That's a different question than which orifice are you sticking it in? ​

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