JOEY CAIN

BUFFALO GAY LIBERATION FRONT

Joey Cain by Barry Linkner, 1975.

Joey Cain and I have been emailing for a while now. A long time ago, he told me he was in the Buffalo, New York, Gay Liberation Front. I forgot and never interviewed him. We reconnected when he replied to my newsletter on the recently departed Llee Heflin. He told me about how Llee played a pivotal role in reviving the Ordo Templi Orientis in the United States by giving Grady McMurtry LSD, sparking a transformative experience that led Grady to act on Aleister Crowley’s directive to restart the order after its long dormancy.

In our interview, Joey discusses being a gay liberationist, a Radical Faerie, and a San Francisco activist. During this time, movements for civil rights, sexual freedom, and anti-war resistance came together to change American consciousness. Joey, who was born in Buffalo, New York, remembers growing up during industrial decline, student protests, and the early signs of gay liberation. These experiences led him to the Gay Liberation Front, anarchist organizing, and eventually to the Radical Faeries.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“In seventh grade, or sometime around then, I started to become more my own person. I grew up in a Catholic family and attended a Catholic grammar school. Actually, the Catholic church and the grammar school I went to were right down the street from where I lived. I was mostly raised in a lower-middle-class family. We grew up in an Italian and Irish neighborhood called Kenmore. It was comfortable. My father worked as a civil engineer. My mother was a housewife. By seventh grade, I was arguing with my parents all the time. They supported the Vietnam War. I didn't. It was a cultural revolution that, from a very early age, I had the luck to be able to participate in.

I didn't know what sex was till I was 14, and when I had my first orgasm, everything became clear. It was like I knew who I wanted to have sex with. I now knew why I was falling in love with other boys so often. I kind of knew what gay was before then, but I didn't know what it meant. Does that make sense?

I had been aware of Martin Luther King and the struggle for Black equality since I was a young child, and I knew about the anti-war movement, but I didn't really know much about it. I started to attend anti-war demonstrations, weirdly enough, in eighth grade, because the grammar school I went to—the nuns. The nuns had been talking about the anti-war movement and the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott. In grammar school, I attended a picket outside a grocery store around the United Farm Workers’ struggle. We were definitely aware of the anti-war movement. We were definitely aware of the Black movement in America. Buffalo had major Black riots in 1968—major, major riots. The University at Buffalo was often called the Berkeley of the East, and it had major student riots that shut the campus down for like five months. It was one of the largest, longest campus shutdowns. This news was in our local newspaper. It was on our TV. So, absolutely, I was aware of these larger social issues.

These two guys from the Buffalo Gay Liberation Front were handing out flyers and leaflets, and that was my first encounter with organized gay activists. I went to a meeting with a friend of mine; we had sort of come out to each other. We weren't boyfriends or anything. He was hitchhiking one day and got picked up by a guy who wanted to have sex with him. The next day he came to school, and over lunch, he was saying, ‘Oh, this happened to me last night.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I don't think those folks are that bad,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, neither do I.’ That’s when I came out, literally over lunch in ninth grade at a Jesuit Boys High School.

Joey Cain by Barry Linkner, 1976.

I started going to GLF meetings in 1971-1972. We were definitely the youngest folks there because I was still in high school. GLF was mostly a university thing-–college folks, with a few locals. I was a local, so to speak. We hosted dances, which were one of the major things GLF did—putting on gay dances at the Student Union Norton Hall.

GLF was really focused on consciousness raising. It was essentially people talking about their lives and sharing what was happening in their lives as a form of raising people's consciousness about what it is to be gay, what it means, and what the experience is—realizing that this isn't bad. You know, this is who you are. Stop denying it. When you internalize self-oppression, it can lead to you then oppressing your own people, identifying heavily with the oppressor, and working along with them. It can also lead us to think we have to clean up our act. We have to be nice boys, or the straight people won't like us.

One of the reasons for any of the organizing was also like looking for sex, which I think is often left out of the history of gay movement activism. People were looking for boyfriends. People were looking to have sexual encounters outside of the bathrooms and the bars. At that point, I was too young to be able to get into the bars, if I even knew about them. That was like a year or so later. The whole thing really impressed me—the idea that you can understand your own life and that it has meaning, and that is part of the consciousness raising methodology. Consciousness raising, of course, was also used in the women's movement to help women understand their lives, their oppression, and possible ways out of that oppression.

For me, radical means a transformation of the social structure. We all wanted that. But in terms of violence, certainly, riots were instigated by police action. People never just started rioting on their own. It was always a police response, generally, police brutality. Every group was definitely kind of rioting and burning things down at that point. I should also add part of the background to this whole thing: While I was involved with GLF, there had been a homophile group, the Mattachine Society, in Buffalo, probably, since the early 60s, maybe even since the 50s, that was actually still operating in the 70s and and they eventually opened a gay community center. Now we, of course, in GLF, thought the Mattachine people were just old fogies, and we were working for the new revolution, and they were just trying to do piecemeal legislation. We felt we conflicted with them. We, of course, were ridiculous and wrong, but we didn't know that until much later.

Buffalo GLF organized the first gay action I ever went to, and it was at a bar. This was when you couldn't dance together in a gay bar. The state would come in and pull the bar’s liquor license. Two members of GLF were at the bar, started dancing together, and got thrown out. So GLF organized a picket in front of the bar, protesting these people being thrown out, banned, and the bar not allowing people to dance together.

The police started to entrap gay men in the bathroom in the basement of one of the buildings that was a tea room. It was basically a gay cruising room, and the police started to entrap people, and GLF organized a campaign to stop the police from doing that. We publicized, and we picketed. Leslie Fielder taught at the University at Buffalo, and he came to GLF and said, ‘Hey, if you want me to, I'll go and get busted in the bathroom, if that will help your cause.’ He wasn't gay, but he was coming in support of what was going on. We didn't end up having to do that because the police stopped targeting and busting men in the tea room on the campus. So there was another action GLF organized.

A lot of the activity focused on creating a cultural and social revolution rather than on political activities. At that point, sodomy was still illegal in New York State, but no one really paid attention to that. We were interested in what Llee Heflin was—talking about the cultural revolution, the cultural social revolution—politics almost seemed secondary or irrelevant to what was happening in people's lives and in the streets.

I want a less authoritarian culture. I want a culture that's not so fucking stuck on podcasts, TV, or cell phones—more decentralized. The tech revolution has somehow decentralized us. It really has. The whole economic issue: you can't really have freedom until you have health care, a place to live, food—the basic economic elements of life. Too often, some of the movements kind of forgot that, forgot the economic component. We’re just going for whatever—gays in the military, gay marriage, which, again, are economic issues. I think that would be my major wand-waving: that we would actually adopt a more socialist approach—not necessarily governmental socialism—but a better economic distribution of wealth than what we're evolving towards.

I think something's being lost with the term ‘queer.’ I don't know if young queer people are really looking inside themselves to understand who they are and recognize the differences that the queer boy, the gay boys, have from the trans girls, and I think that's to the detriment of every group. I'm a big believer in unity through diversity. I believe in real diversity—we’re all queer, which I think is kind of a shallow ideology. I think queer is, as of now, a shallow ideology.”