GARY ALINDER, TAHARA
- Jan 3
- 30 min read
Updated: Jan 30
BEREKELEY GAY LIBERATION FRONT, COCKETTES, ANGELS OF LIGHT
This oral history is from a live event titled The Gay Liberation Revolution, which took place at Queer Arts Featured in San Francisco on December 14, 2025.
After the Stonewall Riots on June 28, 1969, activists began to create new ways of living, organizing, and performing together. These changes affected the entire world, and a revolution briefly followed. In this article, we will be hearing from Tahara and Gary Alinder. Tahara was involved with the pioneering activist group the Berkeley, California, Gay Liberation Front, as well as the Cockettes and Angels of Light, two radical queer performance groups that incorporated politics, theater, and gender rebellion into their communal efforts toward liberation. Gary was one of the founders of the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
August Bernadicou: Can you talk about your childhood and how that impacted you as a gay activist?
Tahara: My father was a rodeo clown in Texas in the '50s and '60s. We lived in Henrietta, Texas, a little town. When I was seven years old, in 1957, he decided I should be in the rodeo clown act and play his midget drag queen wife. It was long before grooming. I did that for 10 years, 11 years until I was 17. We played in rodeos all over Texas and Oklahoma. My brother was also in the act. He played my grandfather. He was six. Then we had mules, and we had chickens in the act and all kinds of skunks and everything. I grew up doing this.
Then he was also a fundamentalist Christian. There was a lot of heavy stuff. When I was 15, we moved to Dallas, Texas. I met a gay boy in high school. He was 14. His mother didn't mind that he was gay. He and I became friends. I could go over to his house. He had gay friends, so I met them. Then my mother found out and threw a huge fit. That was the end of that friendship. Then I went back to being a rodeo clown fundamentalist Christian again. Then, after that, I came to San Francisco. I had to get out of Texas. My God, all my exes live in Texas. That's why I live in California.
I left there, and I came here. It was '69. As you know, Texas was very hot. When I came here, the weather was like winter. We arrived on the 4th of July. It was winter. I moved over to Berkeley, and it was warmer. One of the founders of that group is here tonight, also in Berkeley. We began protesting and standing up. This was probably, I think, a month after Stonewall, maybe. I don't remember. This is Gary Allender, who's going to also talk about gay liberation.
Gary Alinder: September.
Tahara: September. Oh, okay, September. Sounds like a song. September of '69, at the University of California, Berkeley, we started a Gay Liberation Front. The first thing we did was a play. We decided to write a play about being gay.
We were all young and just full of sex drive, and so we wrote this play. I had a line in it. It was, “I raped the entire Vienna Boys Choir.” What was your line, Gary?
Gary: I can't remember.
August: What was the play called?
Tahara: I don't remember that either. It was published in a book, though. They later published it. Do you remember the name of the play? Was it Pookie, You Better Not Take My Ding Dong or something? Anyway, it was fun.
August: How did you find out about the Gay Liberation Front?
Tahara: I went around the corner, and there it was. Actually, it found me. Gary found me first. It's a little bit of a story about how I found it. I was only in it for, I think, six, seven, eight months. Then I joined a group called the Cockettes. It was what was happening. All that stuff was happening. Black women, the Vietnam War, everything was happening, and so there were a lot of protests. Plus, the Stonewall thing had happened also. It was in the air, was what was happening. Being young, we all—and nobody wanted to go to Vietnam. It happened. I'm glad. Then the second thing we did, we had a kiss-in. We all went up on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and made out for two hours.
People, they were like, "Oh God, oh God, oh Elvis." Of course, we were all on drugs and alcohol, LSD, and whatever. I was 18. There were other people, about 15 of us, I think 20 of us. Later on, there were 100 of us. I think our biggest demonstration was when the San Francisco Examiner, which is a somewhat conservative newspaper, wrote an article about us. They said we were just pathetically sick.
What is the world coming to? The church hated us. Oh, God. We protested there. I think there were 100 of us. During the protest, somebody came out. The printers came out on the roof and dumped a 50-gallon drum of purple ink on us. Everybody was covered in ink. We put our hands in the ink and put the handprints on the newspaper wall. That became the first gay liberation symbol that I knew of. Then, after that, I think we continued protesting the bars and stuff. After that, I got out of gay liberation.
August: What were the gay liberation meetings like?
Tahara: The gay liberation meetings, what were they like? Here, I'll have to tell you what they weren't like. There was a group at that time. I don't know if I should mention names, but they were— oh, fuck, they're gone. The Committee for Homosexual Freedom. That was before the Gay Liberation Front. I went to some of their meetings in San Francisco even though I lived in Berkeley. It was mainly these older queens, men, silver hair. I remember at one meeting, a couple of us people from Berkeley Gay Liberation Front went, and we wanted to have a protest somewhere. This one old queen raised her hand, and she said, "Couldn't all of this be done by letter?"
They weren't ready for us. Anyway, the meetings at GLF—God, it was always interesting, whatever was going on. What came out a couple of months later, after we formed gay liberation, they rented a space. I don't know how they did it. I didn't have any money. I don't think most of us had any money. They rented a space and called it Sherwood Forest. It was right across the street from the university headquarters and central campus and everything. It had a big sign out front, gay liberation and all that stuff. They rented that space. There, they had parties and planned protests. They had people singing.
It was really quite a happening, community center-type place. What was really hilarious about it was the people who ran it, the staff. I was on the staff. I answered the phone. There was quite a crazy crew of people that were there. We had transgenders there also. There was a couple of transgender. One of them was Sandy, who later joined the Cockettes. Then she was there.
She was always in her clothes. Also, there was— do you remember that lesbian woman that was short and fat and played the—I shouldn't say fat. What should I say? I remember her. She was there all the time. What I'm basically trying to say, it was a raging queen scene. Just raging queens. We were all answering the phone, all that stuff. We ate food, et cetera. That was fun. That was a lot of fun.
August: What did people say on the phone when they would call?
Tahara: Oh, we had all kinds. We got a lot of dirty calls. Then there were people calling up, threatening suicide. Then there were people wanting to know when the next party was. It just went on and on. Do you remember any of the calls, Gary?
Gary: I don't remember taking calls, actually.
Tahara: I did. I remember I got a suicide call once. I don't remember what happened. God, you're asking me stuff that happened almost 60 years ago, so it's a little tough. What happened, finally, with me and GLF, was that I had met this man named Hibiscus. He was interested in starting a theater group called the Cockettes. I met him at Altamont, the Rolling Stones concert in '69. He asked me if I'd join his theater group. I said okay, and then I left gay liberation to go to that.
With me went Sandy, the transgender from gay liberation, and also a black man named Lendon Sandler, and then a Berkeley College student, John Flowers. We were all gay, and we joined the Cockettes. Then, after that, I think I went to a few demonstrations, but I had somehow decided in my mind that there was more political liberation for me in an evening gown than there was holding a protest sign. That was what I did.
August: How did those other people, Sandy, for example, join the Cockettes as well? Were you all talking about it?
Tahara: Oh, how did they join? Nobody had a job in those days. Sandy actually was working as a secretary. She was living a heterosexual woman's life, and she was married to this man who knew she was a transgender. They'd been married a couple of years, and she was working as a secretary. I think in those days, it's illegal, but you could order a birth certificate and get a woman's birth certificate or something. I don't know what it was. Anyway, I knew her before gay liberation. She and I met on the street because in those days, it was a hippie period, and a lot of people were hanging out on the streets. You'd just meet people, and she and I met.
John Flowers, how did he come in? He was a college student in Berkeley. I think he was a friend of yours or Konstantin Berlandt, who was an important figure in the movement. I don't remember, but I didn't know him until he came into the gay liberation. The other one was Lendon Sandler. Same. I think he was a college student also. I didn't know him until he joined. Does anybody have a question for a brief break from me yakking? Are we all on the same page, or have I—.
August: You're doing great.
Tahara: Have I wandered off into Satanism?
August: What did it mean to be radical in 1970?
Tahara: Oh, well, you have to ask a lot of people that because everybody was involved. Oh, it was liberating, of course. It was very liberating. Of course, I think at that time, it was very unpopular. I think people saw hippies and gays as deviants or misguided or something. It wasn't always we're winning, but that's pretty much changed a lot now, I would say. It's not quite as shocking to see people with long hair, for example, men with long hair, women with long hair.
Plus, everybody was doing it, and it was happening. The Vietnam War, I think, was a huge stimulus in being radical because you had a choice. You either join the army or you go to jail. Plus, it was not a nice war. Supposedly, the whole war was fought over the rice crop. That was what was behind it all. I've heard that. I don't know.
August: How did you get out of the draft?
Tahara: How did I get out of the draft? I'd been bullied all through school. The last thing I was going to do was go to Vietnam and be bullied in Vietnam, talking about pussy all day. I was like, "This is not me." I went down to the draft board over in Oakland—all these tough Marines, all flexing their muscles and everything. They said, "Are you gay?" I said, "Yes." Anyway, I went down to the draft—I need a joint. I went down to the draft board. I hope some of you here are high tonight. I'm a little—oh, good. I like people to be high, not too high. I went down to the draft board, and the sergeant, he said, "We'll see. I don't believe you." I thought, "What am I going to do? I didn't believe me either. I thought I had an idea." Anyway, I knew I had to do something desperate, so I broke the hearing aid machine. I told them I was deaf, so then they said, "Okay." What really happened was I moved. As soon as I left that place, I moved, and I never got a letter from them, so I don't really know what happened. I didn't look back either.
August: What did it mean to check the box?
Tahara: They weren't supposed to take you, but this guy said, "I don't believe you," so I didn't know what to do. If you did check the box—I knew a couple of gay men that actually went to Vietnam. I don't know if they checked the box, but I think they did. What's that? I don't know, but I thought that would get me out, but I had to get desperate. If you did check the box, of course, it was humiliating. You were like, "Oh, here's another one, John." You were like that. It was very funny. I hate those people.
August: Something that makes this a revolutionary time is that you had the gay liberation movement, you had women's lib, you had anti-war, you had Black rights. You had all these different groups coming together. Can you talk about the energy, spirit, or uniqueness of that time?
Tahara: There's a whole interesting scenario with all of that. I can't speak about the whole huge picture because I was only in one place at a time. I can talk very much about the scene in San Francisco. Of course, we had Vietnam War protests and all that stuff. I'm sorry, I'm halfway through your question now.
Honestly, I was basically looking for a husband during all this time. I was concerned about going to Vietnam. Of course, I supported women's rights and Black rights, all that stuff. My family in Texas didn't support any of that, so I had my family against me. Plus the fact that I was gay and then I was a hippie—they disowned me. At the same time, it was exhilarating to finally have freedoms and people talking about freedom, and of course, you're young.
It was just great. It was amazing because we did it at a time when America was economically wealthy. I'm not talking about Black wealth, but white wealth was very—most average families had jobs and careers and all that stuff. People were going to college, at least in my white world. It was a good time. Nowadays, it's more difficult because everything's so expensive. There's less of everything. If you didn't have any money, people would take you in.
August: How did you get involved with the Angels of Light?
Tahara: Oh, that goes back also. Do any of you not know who the Cockettes are? Oh, you don't go back there? Oh, hi, Uncle Harry. Anyway, they were this theater group that started in 1970 here in San Francisco. It was a bunch of friends. They'd been a bunch of friends. They were all into dressing up for parties and all that. There was this charismatic guy at that time. He went by the name of Hibiscus. He was a theater person from New York City.
His parents had been on Broadway in New York. He'd been raised on Broadway, so he loved theater and wanted to do theater. He started this group of friends. He called them the Cockettes, after the Rockettes from New York. It was the hippie period. These were gay men, so they all had beards and mustaches, but they dressed in women's clothing. It was a whole fresh take on drag from the old—before you had to pass as a woman. It was illegal. If you didn't pass, you went to jail. Now they have beards and mustaches, thanks to these Cockettes.
Here's a funny story—there's a film about them called The Cockettes documentary, made in 2002. If you want to see that, that'll give you an idea. There's a funny story about one of the Cockettes, Hibiscus, who founded them. He was, as I said, on Broadway. He had huge dreams of fame and all that stuff in the entertainment world. He was very interested in that. He used to love to do imitations of the Hollywood movie star Jayne Mansfield. That was his favorite. Before Jayne Mansfield, he was dressing in the hippie mode. That was in '69, early '70. Dressing in a hippie mode with robes and feathers—beautiful, angelic.
Then, the Cockettes had done two shows, and he'd dressed in hippie mode. Then the third show, we decided to have our first script. It was going to be about showboats on the Mississippi River. We all made hoop dresses and curls and all this stuff. Hibiscus decided to play Marilyn Monroe, playing Jayne Mansfield. He was going to sing Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man of Mine. He made these little tits for the breast, I should say, for the female character, even though he had a beard and a mustache and a hairy chest. He made these little tits, and that was fine. That was in the show.
Here's the thing, the women's liberation movement was happening then, and it was huge. The women's liberation, they didn't really say anything. The next show, he decided he was going to play another woman. This time, his breasts were this big. Gigantic beach ball things. The women's lib movement went crazy. They went crazy. They were protesting everything, and there was just a hideous, vulgar display of sexism and anti-women. That didn't stop Hibiscus. Each show, they got even bigger until finally—he wore beachballs.
The women's liberation movement hated it. What happened was, he was in a show finally. We were in the Angels by this time. It was a few months later, Hibiscus was in a show, and we were in it, and he had these enormous breasts. The women's liberation movement at that moment, they were in the crowd. It was at San Francisco State College out here. I think it was in the cafeteria—Hibiscus comes out in these massive breasts. These women's liberation, they'd had enough, and they said, "Girls, get him."
They all jumped up and ran up on stage, threw him on the stage, beat him, smashed his breasts. Hibiscus is screaming. Then he jumps up, he gets away, runs to the audience. 40 irate lesbians chasing him, screaming, screaming. Finally, he's screaming back, "Help, the lesbians are attacking."
Finally, he goes out the side door and loses them in the parking lot. That was the end of the big breasts at that point for a while.
We lived in a commune. Do you know what a commune is? It was a big thing in the hippie days. It was a big thing in the hippie days to live in a commune. Kaliflower was the name of it. Irving Rosenthal was the guru of the whole group. Kaliflower broke up the Cockettes, and the Angels came out of the Cockettes and started doing communal theater and trying to get back to the garden, so to speak.
August: What was the Angels' philosophy, and what can people learn from that mindset today?
Tahara: Oh, there's a book published called Kaliflower Volume Five. Kaliflower was the newsletter that was published at that time, from '69 to '71. They took all the best articles from that and published them in a magazine. You can see some of it online, Kaliflower Volume Five. There's a whole—what was your question again?
August: The mindset of the Angels, their philosophy, and what people can learn from it now.
Tahara: What they can learn, but what they have learned. The whole society is different now. You've got gay marriage. You've got vegetarians. You've got a lot more vegetarians. It's not such a big deal now to not be married. All this new stuff that you can do now that you couldn't do back then. Go ahead.
If you went back, though, there was a predecessor, which was, I think, for Kaliflower called the Diggers in the 1500s in England. They were a free community that went back to the earth. A lot of those things we were doing were based on this group called the Diggers.
August: I would like to ask Gary Alinder to come on stage. He co-founded Berkeley Gay Liberation Front. We'll do a few questions with Gary.
Tahara: Do you want to take a short intermission for a few minutes? People can go to the bathroom. I certainly wouldn't mind having a toke off of a joint. You can smoke out front, pot, if you want. Would five minutes be okay?
August: You can go. We're going to keep going.
Tahara: Oh, good. Oh, I see the camera's running.
August: The camera is running.
Tahara: I forgot all about that. Thank you. Do you want me to come back up later?
August: Absolutely.
Tahara: Oh, okay. I'm going to kill myself. I'm joking. I'll be right back. I have to go to the—.
August: Be right back.
Tahara: —bar. Hold on. Okay. Let me get this bag. Also, my throat is like cotton at this point.
August: I think Berkeley Gay Liberation Front was the second Gay Liberation Front in the country?
Gary: Might have been.
August: Can you talk about the origins of GLF?
Gary: Yes. The first GLF, of course, was New York after the Stonewall riots. I don't know exactly what the second one was, but certainly Berkeley GLF was started in probably September, October '69. Berkeley, of course, had this history of political radicalism. If you want to know about the history of Berkeley radicalism, there's a film called Berkeley in the Sixties, which runs you through the Free Speech Movement, women's liberation, and the Black Panthers. It ended, unfortunately, just before gay liberation began. Gay liberation is not in that, but it gives you the background of what Berkeley was like.
The reason I came to Berkeley, in a way—Berkeley had the reputation of being the farthest out, best political radical place in the entire country. That's the background. I was living in New York and decided I really needed to come to the West Coast to settle in Berkeley. I met Konstantin Berlandt. He had been the editor of The Daily Cal, and he was quite knowledgeable of what was going on in Berkeley. He had lived in Berkeley and gone to Cal. He dropped out of Cal and started doing gay liberation stuff. He was writing in the Berkeley Barb. I came to Berkeley in September of '69. I saw some of the stuff he was writing in the Berkeley Barb, and I said, "I got to know this guy."
There was a notice for a meeting of a gay theater group. I went to that, and there he was. From my way of thinking, the gay liberation grew out of the gay theater, which, as Tahara was saying, we only did one—it was on the Berkeley campus. I think it was during orientation week. A lot of stuff went—Telegraph Avenue and Sproul Plaza were all very busy in those days. Telegraph Avenue was a scene up and down Telegraph Avenue near the campus. It was just a whole scene there. It was incredible. Something going on all the time. People setting up tables, demonstrations, and happening—I don't know. It was something going on all the time.
Konstantin, I think, he just knew what was going on in Berkeley more than any of us. I had just arrived in Berkeley. Oddly enough, I think it was a Methodist church, which was no longer using this social hall space right across from the campus. He arranged for us to have that space. I'm not sure where the first Berkeley GLF meeting took place. I just remember meeting there, as Tahara referred to it, Sherwood Forest. I recall the first meeting being there, but that may not have been the case. I'm not sure. Anyway, by October of '69, we were taking off.
Communication was very hard in those days compared to nowadays, before social media. I wrote some articles and sent them to the Liberation News Service in New York. In New York, they would make packages of news and send them to underground and radical newspapers all around the country via mail. You can imagine how long it would take. You write an article, it'd be two or three, four weeks before it got published around the country.
I was looking online, and I came across an article I had written. I wrote a review of the original Boys in the Band, which came out in 1970. It was a scathing review. That was in a newspaper, oddly enough, I think called—the one I found had been published in a newspaper in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, called The Kaleidoscope. I don't know where else. It could have been published in dozens of places for all I know. Communication in those days was hard. We were on our own for a while, at least.
We got inklings of what was going on elsewhere. New York GLF, it seemed to me, was very politically right on and radical, and from our point of view, a little bit uptight. As you may have gotten the impression from Tahara, we were more the hippie cultural end of gay liberation. That was my take on it. As Tahara was mentioning—when I lived in New York, I was involved in the peace movement. I went to countless demonstrations. I was at the sit-in at the Pentagon in 1967 when Jerry Rubin and people tried to levitate the Pentagon. We sat overnight. It did kind of levitate the Pentagon.
It was a profound change in my life because that was the first time I'd ever put my body on the line. We were sitting there, and the troops were all around. Every now and then, they advance into the group of protesters with their rifle butts on their backs. Fortunately, I managed to escape that. A friend I was with and I sat in overnight. To us, our obligation was to stay overnight. Then we left and went back to New York in the morning.
All that stuff was on our mind. I participated in the Yippies in 1968. We were at the Democratic convention outside in Chicago. That was a scene. I really hung back on that scene because Mayor Daley said, shoot to kill, and I believed him. Some of us came from New York. I remember we stayed with some lesbians in an apartment on the north side of Chicago. I don't know how we got there. We had no money. We did everything with no money in those days or minimal money.
That was where I was coming from. I actually knew a few of the people in the Yippies who actually were very early instrumental in gay lib. I knew Jim Fouratt and a few other people who were actually in the Yippies. He was one of the first out gay political people I'd ever met. Jim Fouratt, he was out and young. He was in the music scene. He was everywhere. You probably know Fouratt.
August: Do you remember a specific thing that radicalized you or was it—.
Gary: Well, this was the Vietnam War era, and I was of the age to be drafted. Everybody was eligible for the draft, basically. I had a college deferment. As soon as I was a senior in college, I was called for your—it was called a pre-induction physical. You took the physical, then you were inducted into the Army. That was the plan. That was never my plan. I knew the Army, and I wouldn't—kind of like oil and water would not mix. My history was that I was the most femme guy in my rural school. I knew I was not going into the Army, but I didn't know how I was going to not go into the Army.
It turned out that my blood pressure was always too high when they took a physical. The threat of having to go into the Army and be sent to Vietnam to kill people who were not our enemies, I think it radicalized a whole generation of college students. I came to GLF with all of that background, and I was just so angry about this whole country. I was really, really. The president I most hated my entire life was Lyndon Johnson, actually, because he wanted to draft us all and send us off to be slaughtered in Vietnam. That was so off the wall and so unbelievable. Thank the draft for radicalizing a whole generation of young people, I think, really.
August: Something that made gay liberation unique is that you all used your real names. Can you talk about that, putting yourself out there?
Gary: Well, I never considered anything else, I guess. I don't know. I had the advantage of living far from—my family was in rural Minnesota. I grew up on a farm, and they were good folks. The culture they grew up in was extremely conservative. It wasn't so politically conservative. It was just culturally conservative. They went to church, and they were believers. You didn't step off the line.
Boys were boys, and girls were girls. It was very clear. You were supposed to fall into your role and get married and have your children. I knew I wasn't going to do that, so I decided the only option for me was to live far away from that. I originally went to New York and then eventually San Francisco or the Bay Area. It was easier for me because I didn't think even if I was on the local news accidentally, they weren't going to see it. I felt safer in that way. I was out to all the people in the Bay Area, but I didn't come out to my parents until 1984, which was 15 years later.
August: How did they not find out?
Gary: They were very oblivious to anything like that. Anything gay was so far away from the consciousness. It just didn't exist where I grew up. It was not a possibility. It was not an option. No one knew about it. No one talked about it. It did not exist.
Tahara: It was unheard of. I’m back.
Gary: Everything related to anything gay or anything like that was completely censored. It was like there was a glass ceiling over the whole Midwest. It felt like, to me, that nothing could get in. Of course, things did, but as far as my parents knew—when I came out to them, it was obvious to me that they should have known, but they said, "No, we had no idea."
August: Homosexuality was classified as a mental illness by the American Psychiatric Association until 1973. One of the most visible actions you all did was storming an APA convention in 1970. Can you talk about that?
Gary: This was in the days when Berkeley Gay Liberation Front was alive and doing stuff. Someone found out about this convention and got us press passes, I guess. There was much less security around things like that in those days. If you had some piece of paper, you could walk in. There were all kinds of breakout groups, symposiums. San Francisco didn't really even have a decent convention center in those days. It was held in Brooks Hall, which was near City Hall. There were various meeting rooms and so on.
A bunch of us from San Francisco and Berkeley decided just to go to this convention and disrupt these things. One of the things we disrupted was this poor young psychiatrist from Australia who was giving a lecture on how you do aversion therapy. Of course, they thought they were doing us, gay people, a favor. This is true that quite a few gay—I can't speak for gay women, it's a lot of gay men, really didn't want to be gay because they couldn't see any option that seemed like it could lead to any possible decent life.
All the propaganda was, in the end, you're going to be lonely and have a sad, lonely life. I suppose there were gay men who really did want to change, but we thought this was torture as far as we were concerned. Conversion therapy is they'd show you a slide of a woman, and they wouldn't shock you. They'd show you a slide of a man, and they'd give you an electric shock. That was supposed to change you, but I don't think it was ever proven to have worked. That was one thing. Then there was Irving. Irving Bieber was a psychiatrist whose mid-20th-century research framed homosexuality as a mental illness. He shaped decades of medical, legal, and cultural stigma against gay people. Pandemonium broke out, basically. There was shouting and arguing. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun.
August: Looking to 2026, what would a modern, effective Gay Liberation Front look like? What does the 2026 queer liberation revolution look like?
Gary: Oh, man, I don't know. Gay liberation at that time was so a product of its time that it would have to be completely different. It's just that we live in such a weird time now. I'm glad I'm on my way out, in a way. I don't know. God, that's a hard question. It would have to be extremely inclusive of all genders and all races and all religions. I don't know. To me, it would have to have a large—I'm wary of the word, but it would have to have a large spiritual component, I think. To me, at base, there was a spiritual base to it. I thought gay liberation was actually male gay liberation.
Women in Berkeley were already so far advanced that they had—the Gay Liberation Front was basically a male group, and the women were already way ahead. They had their own groups, and they were far more effective and more organized and everything you could say about it. I lost my train of thought.
August: What approaches do you think would be most effective?
Gary: Well, it just seemed to me that out, happy, creative gay men just had a lot to offer as role models for all men because I thought men seemed to be stuck in very rigid roles at that time. I thought that even then, and I think that's very true now. I'm just happy to see that all the sites would have gay families, and women can raise children, men can raise children. All kinds of people can be a family and can be effective in contributing and loving people in a culture.
I just think the culture is so much better when everybody can have a place in it where they're respected and honored and valued. I grew up in a culture where it just wasn't—where to be a gay person was just the worst thing you could be. We have to get way beyond that and get into a much more positive mode.
August: Tahara, do you want to say anything about that? Same question. Do you want me to repeat it?
Tahara: Okay, repeat it. It was something about gay liberation. I remember that.
August: Yes, 2026 queer liberation revolution. What's it look like? What would the new Gay Liberation Front look like?
Tahara: Well, I think you have to ask yourself, what do we need to do? Right now, we've got Adolf Trump in charge, telling us who we are, so there's that. As to what exactly is a gay person, say, in a million years, I can't answer that. All I can do is predict they'll still be there and they'll have evolved into the species. Susan B. Anthony, she was a great woman, and she said, even if you win, there's always a struggle. I think those are very true words.
August: Were you aware of the gay community center that was here in San Francisco that the Society of Individual Rights, SIR, ran starting in 1966? Also, did you go to San Francisco bars?
Gary: Yes. There was quite a fair amount of cross-fertilization between San Francisco and Berkeley. Yes, there was SIR. The leader of SIR at that time was Larry Littlejohn. We talked to him. We thought SIR was very conservative, actually. They were doing good work, honestly. We were just in a different space. They were the normal activists, and we were the street activists. It was just a different cultural space, although, of course, there was some overlap. The only bar I was aware of at that time in Berkeley and Oakland was the White Horse. We had a whole thing with the White Horse, famously.
August: Can you talk about that?
Tahara: I was at that also. Go ahead. Go ahead.
Gary: We started the newspaper called Gay Sunshine. It was the radical political gay newspaper. It was called Sunshine after the famous acid called Sunshine. We hoped that this newspaper would have the same radicalizing effect that LSD had on people's minds. It was called Gay Sunshine.
Tahara: It did.
Gary: It did. We hoped to blow people's minds editorially. Konstantin, probably dressed in a red dress, was selling newspapers in the bar. The bar owners threw him out. We said, "No, no, no, this can't pass." We started picketing the bar. That was a lot of fun, too, wasn't it?
Tahara: It was this really uptight heterosexual couple in their 60s or something. It was in the '60s, '70s. The wife had this hairdo up to here. They had a gay bar, but they were very uptight about being gay. You couldn't dance together. Men couldn't dance. They couldn't touch each other. They threw them out. Also, they didn't let Black people into the white gay bars in those days.
They were doing that. All the college boys at Berkeley, the gay ones, I guess, went there. It was just a mile from the college campus. They all went there. They were all frat boy types. We protested there, and they didn't like it at all. We protested at a lot of gay bars. They didn't like us at all. We were too radical. They wanted to stay closeted, I think. Don't you think so?
Gary: One of our demands was that we'd be able to sell the newspaper, Gay Sunshine, and a few other things like that. We actually won those demands because we were picketing. Most gay men at that point were so uptight that they didn't want to get near some trouble like a picket line. It was radically decreasing their business at the bar. That was very effective in that regard.
At least we won a few little points with that tactic. I don't know. I went to bars in the city a little bit more than that. That bar was too straight for me. I went to the early Stud on Folsom Street, and I went to the Capri, which was a bar on Grant Street in North Beach. That was a teeny little bar, but it was packed with people. You'd walk in, and all you could see was this blue haze of cigarette smoke.
Tahara: It was the hippie gay bar.
Gary: It was the hippie gay bar, yes. That's where I went. The Capri.
Tahara: The Stud later became the place to go south of Market. It had been a leather bar, and then it went hippie gay bar. It was at the Stud that the bartenders there first came up with the idea of having the Pride parade. That was in '70. They were talking about it. I went to one of the meetings they had, and then they did, although I think then it wasn't quite called the Pride parade. Anyway, in '70. The other thing was that—I forgot what I was going to say.
August: White Horse?
Tahara: The Stud. North Beach. That was the Capri. It was all gay hippies. There were some women there, but not lesbians.
We were actually all on welfare. That's how we supported ourselves.
August: Does this life exist anymore?
Tahara: This whole type of life doesn't really exist anymore. It's all from the '60s and '70s and during the social revolutions. Nowadays, we have Trump and all that kind of stuff, our present situation to deal with.
Gary: If anybody can remember the summer of '69, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, there were major riots, and big portions of cities all over the country were burned down. It seemed like maybe a revolution was actually going to happen. We were living in a space where we thought maybe some kind of revolution was going to happen.
Tahara: We really did. We really thought everybody's going to do this. It's definitely going to happen.
August: What did the revolution look like in 1970?
Tahara: Overthrow the government, stop the Vietnam War, get rid of the military, live together, look each other in the eye, peace, and all that.
Gary: Yes, it was a little bit vague, but we had ideas.
August: Gary, where were you during the Summer of Love?
Gary: I was living in New York that summer. We tried to do something like that. We did, I think, for part of the time that summer, we did a free meal out of Saint Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery. We were emulating that to some extent. New York was way harder and much more uptight to do things like that. San Francisco was, in my view, way ahead in that regard at that time.
Tahara: San Francisco has always been pretty liberal and all that. It was the right place to do the Cockettes and the Angels.
Gary: Actually, speaking of the being, we in the Berkeley gay liberation, when June of 1970 came along, it wasn't yet established how you were going to celebrate the anniversary of Stonewall. There were people who organized some kind of parade on Polk Street, but we organized a gay-in in Golden Gate Park. We came over to San Francisco numerous times. We tried to leaflet every single bar in the city, of which there were a lot at that time.
That was an eye-opener because I had never been to these leather bars or lesbian bars or sweater bars. It was a trip. We had a good time leafleting all these bars. After all our work, I think maybe 200, 250 people showed up, but it was something. We had a gay-in in Golden Gate Park to celebrate Stonewall.
Tahara: I wanted to say just one other thing about the Angels of Light. I think it's important to notice. The Pride flag, the gay rainbow flag, came out of the Angels of Light. One of the ladies in the Angels of Light made that flag and made two huge ones and got Gilbert Baker and a couple of other people to help her. They made the first Pride flag. She had done, in the last Angel of Light show she was in, I think she had done a whole scene of everybody dressed as rainbows. Is that true, or is that a rumor? I'm talking about Faerie Argyle Rainbow.
August: I think it was Cyclones.
Tahara: Oh, yes. Her name was Faerie Argyle Rainbow.
August: If you want to know more, I put out a three-part podcast series on the hidden origins of the rainbow flag.
Gary: Oh, wow.
August: We were on Apple's homepage, and it's all about how Faerie Argyle Rainbow, aka Lynn Segerblom, didn't get the credit she deserved, even though she was known as the “rainbow artist.”
Tahara: She was also a heterosexual woman. That may have had something to do with it. I don't know.
August: It's called the Queer Core Podcast, queercorepod.com.
Back then, were there any connections between gay liberation and healthcare?
Tahara: Well, anyway, the bathhouses and all the club sex scenes didn't really get started until around '71 or a little later. What happened in San Francisco, because of the gay explosion, about 50,000 gay people moved to San Francisco by '73, '75, or something. The bathhouses and all that exploded. Back in those days, the period you're talking about, there weren't as many sexually transmitted diseases, but when the clubs and the public sex and all that started, with so many people, it exploded. I don't know, what was your point again? I didn't know anything about it. I never got it.
The gay people came here not for the Summer of Love and a bowl of soup. They came here to have a new life in San Francisco because they could. It was a different crowd.
What happened was that everything just became more and more open, and then the gay people saw a chance to survive, and they came. It's funny because the sort of free-love idea started with the Summer of Love, but at one point, it seemed like it was the Summer of Death. There were so many unfortunate, horrible problems.
Gary: Among hippies, among the clothing, it was more androgynous than the average American. You could be gay and look like a hippie and not necessarily be noted as gay, particularly. There was a lot of crossover, I think, actually.
August: What can you pass on to the new generation?
Tahara: Don't do it.
Gary: Don't do what? Don't do it? Don't do what?
Tahara: Do you want to answer?
Gary: Oh, I don't know. No, I would say it's like creating a life for yourself and not because your parents want you to have that life, or some corporation wants you to have that life, or some church wants you to have that life. Find a way to have that life.
Tahara: We're up against a huge problem. Trump is not going away anytime soon if he can help it. Also, they've got billions and trillions of dollars and big money. That's the problem, you ask about the ethos. Back then, it was a little easier because everybody was involved, but now America's so divided that you can't get anything major done. Little pieces here and there happen. What do you do with a narcissist who won't stop? You can't deal with him. You can protest. He's very unpopular, and they just stopped so much with vaccines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to get rid of more vaccines. It just goes on and on.
He'll be gone sooner or later. You're always going to have to fight, and you're going to have to decide what the fight is at that time and how you're going to deal with it. There'll always be people who are on both sides. They hate you. They love you, all that. You need to get on the right side and then fight back as best you can. It's difficult now because money is a problem. Back then, we didn't have money. We could do what we wanted pretty much. People took care of you, but nowadays you can't do that. What, are you going to live in the streets or something? I don't know. It's always going to be a problem. You're always going to have to work it out.
Related Stories
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.
Comments