LORRAINE FONTANA

ATLANTA GAY LIBERATION FRONT, ATLANTA LESBIAN FEMINIST ALLIANCE

Lorraine Fontana by unknown, 1971.

I found Georgia's LGBT History Project on Instagram and wrote to them asking for leads for any OGLs (original gay liberationists). A couple of weeks later, I received a call from Dave Hayward. He told me his name and then just started talking. I had no idea who he was or why he was calling. He later revealed that he was part of the Washington, D.C. Gay Liberation Front and, after moving to Atlanta, joined the Atlanta, Georgia Gay Liberation Front. Remember: the early 1970s gay liberation revolution swept the world.

In an email, he introduced me to Lorainne Fontana. She is a lifelong activist whose work connects the civil rights, feminist, anti-war, and LGBTQ liberation movements. After moving to Atlanta in the early 1970s and attending Gay Liberation Front meetings, she co-founded ALFA, the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance. This group was one of the South’s most influential lesbian organizations. It operated from 1972 to 1994, a significantly longer period than nearly every other gay liberation group.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“I was born in Astoria, New York, which is in Queens, New York City. I was in New York until I graduated from college, basically. I would dream about being a man, and I was in love with a woman, stuff like that. And I would write about it in my journals, oh, I just had a weird dream, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. I also had crushes on women celebrities, including stars from TV and movies, and even the traditional ones, like a gym teacher. And so this all was happening, but I had absolutely no sense that that meant something about my sexual identity. It was like, ‘That's interesting.’ You ask, 'How could that happen?' I don't know.

Everything changed when junior high hit, because that school was near public housing projects, which, although they had some white people in them—I had some family members that were living in public housing—they were mostly Black and brown folks. The school was very mixed. This is the late 50s. There were like four really strong communities within the school, based on where people lived and the conflicts that were happening over racial issues. There were Black students, Latino students, mainly Puerto Rican, and white students.

There were very few people who were able to form friendships across the lines, because white kids all seemed to end up in the same classes in the higher grades at this school. So anyway, what it was like was coming out after school, and sometimes having to see one gang or another with weapons. There were no guns at that point. It was as if they had weapons, something to hit or throw at someone. There was stuff like that going on. I also saw diversity through watching TV and being alive, but it's also evident every day, now that I'm in this diverse setting. We were very divided and not really invited to make friends with many people. You're not going to live near them. You're not in the same classes they are. I started going into Manhattan—great diversity.

The teacher of my art class was a Black woman. As I began learning more, through reading and the Civil Rights Movement that had been ongoing during my childhood, I started to piece things together. It was really interesting. I started realizing what institutional racism is and how the class system works with that overall history. By the time I got to the end of college, I had become a leftist. In my mind, capitalism wasn't a system that worked for everybody, because some people owned the work of other people. Some people had the money. Some people were kept where they were, and therefore I had some sense of capitalism versus socialism, anti-racism.

While working as a VISTA in Atlanta in 1968 and 1969—I loved the people I met and worked with. I liked the low pace of the city. I loved Atlanta. After VISTA, I returned to New York for a few months while waiting for responses to my graduate school applications. I decided to attend Emory and returned to Atlanta. You know, that's how my connection with other people who were involved in social justice and the New Left movement began. I ended up living in the Little Five Points area and Midtown, both of which were very populated by people who needed affordable housing. Yes, it was very cheap back then in these neighborhoods.

I know exactly when I first came out publicly to anybody, which was at a May Day conference in Atlanta in 1971. It was more than just an Atlanta conference. It was like a national thing. I attended that, and the day before the main conference, they had a day specifically for women and the gay movement. When you filled out a form, you had to put out whether you were gay or straight. That was the wording. And that was the first time I remember checking ‘gay.’

Lorraine Fontana by unknown, circa 1980.

It was very surprising to me that a lot of the women involved with these women were people who came from the student movements, Students for a Democratic Society, that kind of thing, even a couple of women who were in the Weather Underground. Some were from anti-war and peace movements and also from the Civil Rights Movement. This is the kind of background that the people who formed the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance had. A lot was happening politically in Atlanta at the time, and I realized I couldn't continue being politically engaged while attending grad school.

Quite a few of them had gone to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade. They supported the Cuban Revolution. Cuba would invite people from North America who were supportive of them to come down. They would have to go through a third country to travel to Cuba. They would learn about what was really happening there, meet people, and also help with, in this case, the sugar cane harvest, which was the reason most of these women made the trip. So, they worked with the harvest, working in the fields—they were also shown different aspects of the country and how it operated. These were the women I was in touch with. I was in a group called the Atlanta Anti-Imperialist Coalition. Some of the sisters in it also started a lesbian press called Sojourner Truth Press.

Women were leaving mainstream activist groups, because, in most cases, they were finding out that they wouldn't be allowed to hold leadership positions. They weren't going to be allowed to speak for movements. They were going to be the supportive people in the group.

This was a time when the Furies Collective was active in Washington, D.C. They were another kind of radical lesbian feminist community. They found out that they couldn't get their newspaper printed in D.C. by anybody they approached. When the printers found out what was in the newspaper, they did not want to print it, because they didn’t want to be perceived as radical, revolutionary types, supporting the same causes as those we all did—anti-imperialist. We were supporting all the liberation struggles in the countries that have been colonized. People here were also forming organizations that seek international connections with liberation struggles. Cuba is an example, of course. Sojourner Truth Press ended up printing the Furies’ paper.

I would say things like, ‘any means necessary,’ like Malcom X. Now I think back and I go, yeah, were you ready to pick up guns and start killing people? No, but I said that because it was that feeling of, there's no other way. Even when you have a successful movement of some sort, you only get so far. The very foundation of the countrycreated a patriarchy structured around race and class.So, I don't think there's going to be an armed revolution, and I think if somebody tried it, they'd be again smashed. I don't want to kill other people. I definitely believe in the idea of doing everything you can do to disrupt and to diminish the power of the people who think they know what they're doing. They have it all.

We wanted to make sure that people knew that because your sexual orientation was different from the norm didn’t make it bad. It didn't mean sick. It didn't mean disturbed. It meant you were different, and that was okay. Basically, that was what being in that lesbian organization was: we wanted to say to the country, ‘We’re not ashamed of who we are, because this is one part of human sexuality, and there's nothing wrong with that.’ That's how people who did a lot of work early on brought about significant changes, like making the American Psychiatric Association remove homosexuality from their Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. That was a huge accomplishment. That was one aspect that I consider more political. We are who we are now. The other thing was, of course, getting community, feeling like you could be with other women and be out and be proud of it and be okay with it and enjoy your life and not only work together, but also sing together and celebrate together, and dance together, and support gay-friendly entertainers. That was the social, cultural part, and then there was the political part, doing actions, going to speak at places where you would be asked probably some terribly embarrassing and fucked up questions, but being willing to say, ‘No, we are not unhuman because we are queer.’”