KEVIN MCGIRR

BOSTON GAY LIBERATION FRONT

Kavin Mcgirr by unknown, circa 1971.

Kevin McGirr came of age in the heart of Greenwich Village, long before it became shorthand for queer visibility. Born into a working-class Catholic family in Manhattan, he knew from an early age that he didn’t fit the mold expected of boys in his neighborhood. It wasn’t until he left New York for college—and then detoured to San Francisco in 1969—that he began to step into his identity. By 1970, he was living in Boston, Massachusetts, and co-founding Fag Rag, one of the earliest gay liberation journals. He became deeply involved in the Gay Liberation Front and later in mental health work, where his politics and profession merged. Kevin spent decades providing support for the LGBTQ+ community—especially during the height of the AIDS crisis—while remaining grounded in the radical spirit that first brought him to activism.

He doesn’t romanticize the past, but he doesn’t sugarcoat the present either. Kevin speaks with clarity about how movements fracture and evolve, how wealth can dull radical edge, and how trans and working-class people continue to bear the brunt of oppression. Still, he sees continuity in resistance—from the early consciousness-raising circles to today’s intersectional protests. His reflections are shaped by both personal risk and institutional experience, by protest and public health, and by the fierce conviction that coming out, in whatever form it takes, remains a revolutionary act.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“I grew up in New York City's Greenwich Village, arguably one of the country's prime gay neighborhoods. My childhood was kind of normal. The whole issue of sexual preference, sexual orientation, intersects very tightly for me with gender and gender identity. I grew up in a working-class community. I wasn't a typical boy. I perceived in my community that the way you succeeded, the way you achieved, was to be physical, to be athletic. I was not that. I tended to be more on the intellectual side of things. So I kind of receded from the interaction with my peers. For better or worse, I attended an all-boys high school located on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which was considered a good school. I was fortunate to have gotten in. For me, the lack of the other gender really stifled me. During those years, it was challenging, and I worked a great deal. I had to work to pay my way through high school. My parents weren't able to do that, so that was actually a refuge for me, the fact that I could work and not have to socialize with my peers.

Christopher Street didn't exist then as it does today. I would walk up and down Greenwich Avenue, which is where, particularly in the summer, gay men would be hanging out. I was very aware of the kind of homosexual, gay orientation of Greenwich Village, but I had to get away from New York to come out. It was too threatening to come out in that kind of context.

I went to San Francisco in the middle of college in 1969, and I was able to do sex, drugs, and rock & roll. So that was kind of my entree into really having any experience of the gay community. Of course, San Francisco was San Francisco, so it was different. It was hippies and alternative, and there were be-ins in Golden Gate Park.

When I returned to college, I essentially went back into the closet, although I kind of identified as bisexual at that point. I acquired a female partner for about a year before I moved—we sort of moved to Boston together, and then that's really when I began to deal with my coming out, in the context of the late 60s: civil rights, anti war, and women's movements, all of this political upheaval. What was happening for gay people at that point?

I was coming out of this relationship with a woman, and we separated because I recognized that I was gay, and I knew I needed to address that more directly. I feel like I had the good fortune of this happening in Boston. It was 1970, and the larger movement was not equally everybody, but the larger movement was fairly gay sympathetic, so there was comfort in terms of my coming out. I didn't have to essentially parcel out my identity from the rest of my ideas and beliefs.

We called our group the Gay Liberation Front, GLF. Of course, there had been gay activists well before us, the most recent being the Mattachine Society. Still, we were very much devoid of and divorced from that group’s particular politics, and we were very much in your face in terms of how we thought and our gay identities. We tried to mirror the group to the National Liberation Front, which consisted of North Vietnamese individuals who were fighting against the South and the US government. GLF basically was trying to mirror, in that spirit of resistance, the NLF in Vietnam. It was important for us as gay people to identify and advocate for ourselves, as gay people are not just part of this mass of other movements. Lesbian women took the same approach and attitude, but they separated from us. As gay men, we weren’t happy with that, but we recognized that that was important for women to do. Before I co-founded Fag Rag, there was a newspaper in Boston called Lavender Vision, and the very first issue of Lavender Vission was both men and women. Then, with the second issue, it got separated. This was the impetusfor us to start Fag Rag.

Kevin Mcgirr (right) with friend by unknown, circa 1971.

I remember going to a restaurant where drag queens would show up after the bars closed, and then we would amp up the perceived outrage. With our in-your-face kind of attitude and approach, we were challenging what we called homophobia. With the drag queens, we challenged our gay brothers to come out, challenging them to let go of their privilege of being in the closet.

I would conjecture that some gay men still feel the need to hide their sexual orientation, hide their affection, and hide who they might be partnered with. I think homophobia is still—well, it has changed, but I think it's still very, very deep in the culture. I also believe that trans people are really experiencing the brunt of that animus at this point in history.

When we were active in the Gay Liberation Front, there was a book that the mental health professionals used, called The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The history of classifying homosexuality as an illness goes way back. The psychiatrists were on top of the mental health professional pyramid. They were the ones who dominated the field and expressed hostility. But they weren’t just hostile, they defended that there was something inherently disordered with same-sex attraction.

Behavioral psychologists would use shock treatment on homosexuals. A gay man would be shown a photo of a nude man, and then receive a mild shock to reassociate his brain and try to require it to have a negative reaction to his ‘more natural’ attraction to other men. I want to add that it was clearly activism that changed this perspective. I don’t take any credit, but not long after we protested, they made homosexuality no longer a mental illness.”