MARK HORN
- August Bernadicou
- 1 day ago
- 9 min read
NEW YORK CITY GAY YOUTH, NEW YORK CITY GAY LIBERATION FRONT, NEW YORK CITY GAY ACTIVISTS ALLIANCE
The Gay Liberation Front and the gay liberation era changed the world. Yes, it was a fascinating moment in history. Stonewall in New York City (June 28, 1969). The Gay Liberation Front in New York City (July 1969). Countless Gay Liberation Front chapters and groups all over the world (1969–197X). That was quick.
It all started in New York, and today we are bringing you Gay Youth, a pioneering gay activist group loosely associated with the New York City Gay Liberation Front.
Mark Horn has actively supported LGBTQ+ people for decades. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and joined Gay Youth and the Gay Liberation Front in 1970. He later served as chairperson of Gay Youth. Through his activism, he helped establish youth outreach programs, organize dances, and provide educational opportunities for young LGBTQ+ people while having participated in many early gay rights, anti-war, and civil rights actions.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“My father was offered a job once as a real estate agent in Brooklyn by a friend of his who was a blockbuster. Blockbusters were people who would go into entirely white neighborhoods and find someone who would sell to a Black family. Then they would manipulate people's fears about Black people moving into the neighborhood, so that other people in the neighborhood would sell their houses at bargain prices. They wanted to get out because they were afraid the Black people were moving in, which is in fact what the blockbusters did—as the prices dropped, they bought these properties cheap, they sold them at a profit to the Black people who moved in, and it led to sort of a churning. Blockbusing was part of what led to the white flight out of certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn in the 50s and the 60s. I always thought that was insane. My father refused to do this. He said, ‘I'm not going to contribute to the fear mongering of this.’ I wouldn't say he was particularly liberal, but he wasn't into the time's fear-mongering.
Every minority was oppressed in New York in 1962. When you get down to it, depending on where you went and what neighborhood you went to—there were gangs in neighborhoods, youth gangs that had territory. The gangs were often ethnically based, so there were neighborhoods you didn't want to go to because you knew that's not state oppression, that's not discrimination. It is ethnic hatred, basically. Puerto Ricans and the older white groups, or the Europeans, the Puerto Ricans and the Poles, the Puerto Ricans and the Italians, right? The Puerto Ricans and the Irish, the Irish and the Italians, the Irish and the Poles. They all fought each other, right? The neighborhood you lived in determined the gang you were in, and that's what people did.
You could get beaten up, you would have no friends, and you would be insulted regularly. There were two really openly gay guys when I was in high school. One was the son of the local Mafia boss, so nobody teased him or attacked him because everybody was afraid of what might happen if they did—his family's reputation protected him. Then there was another guy who was the lead musician—he was an excellent pianist. He was relentlessly made fun of in very nasty ways, but everybody also understood that he was essential if they wanted to win the musical competitions.
Around the time I was 14, I started going to Manhattan by myself. I remember that a teacher from my junior high school took us to Greenwich Village to see an art show he thought would be very bohemian, but it was definitely not that at all. My teacher was from Minnesota, and he had this romantic idea of what the art fair would be. It was not that, it was paintings of the Kennedys on velvet and other sorts of cheap stuff, but it was Greenwich Village, and so I wandered down MacDougal Street. All these stores sold political stuff and buttons, and actually, I remember that was the first place I saw anything about homosexuals. There was a button in one of these stores that read ‘Equality for homosexuals.’ I still have it. I bought it when I was 14. I hid it, but I had it because I knew I was gay when I was 14.
Then I thought, ‘Oh, there must be something about this neighborhood I need to know.’ So I started coming more regularly, and around the time I was 16, I discovered a store called the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village. I went in and met Craig Rodwell, a pioneering gay activist and the owner, as well as his boyfriend and the other people who worked there. I bought my first gay history books there, and they sent me to the bar Julius’, even though I was 16.
I said, ‘Where do I go? What do I do?’ I went, and everybody there was much older than me—like over the age of 25 at least. I fled, and I didn't return to anything like that for a couple more years.
I remember there were two TV shows late at night—I wouldn't call them talk shows, but they were all talk—it was not like the late-night talk shows today. There was one host and one guest, and it was kind of debate-like. There was a guy named Alan Burke, The Alan Burke Show, and there was The Joe Pyne Show, and they were kind of like the shock jocks of today on the radio. They were kind of conservative, and they had people with all kinds of views, and they'd like to argue, and the audience would come up and ask questions as well, and it was always very argumentative. One day, there was an interview with the gay poets Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky on The Alan Burke Show—they were referred to as a married couple, and I thought, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’
Then I read an article in Look magazine about the hustlers on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. I actually went there to sort of suss out the scene, but I knew it wasn't my scene; I was just too innocent, but I wanted to look. In fact, I started going into the bookstores on 42nd Street, and in the front of the bookstore, they would actually have regular books, and in the back, they had porn, and there was a lot of gay porn. I would go in and try to see what I could, but I was always chased out because I was under 18. They would get in trouble if I were in there, so they chased me out regularly, so I learned these things sort of by hook and by crook, as it were. By the time I was 17, I'd read the transcripts of the trials of Oscar Wilde, and had been reading all of the Mary Renault novels about Ancient Greece, and understood that there was a whole world that I didn't know anything about and that I needed to learn more about.
When I was 18, I went to an anti-war demonstration in Manhattan. Behind me in the demonstration, some people were carrying a Gay Liberation Front banner, and one of them was Mark Segal, who was also carrying some stuff from Gay Youth. Immediately I struck up a conversation with him, and the very next week I was at my first Gay Youth meeting.
The first meeting I went to was actually a Gay Liberation Front meeting, because the GLF and Gay Youth met the same day, and Gay Youth met after the GLF meeting. Later, they began to meet on different days and at different times, but back then, they were still connected, and they both met at Alternate U., a countercultural school and center for leftist organizing on 14th Street.
I went to the GLF meeting, and that's where I got my radical political education. I mean, I had already gotten some education as an anti-war activist. I joined some anti-war groups in my last year of high school and my first year of college, but it was GLF that really gave me a much broader radical framework, which I was more interested in.
GLF was sort of interested in the wider world, and going to a Gay Youth meeting, where there was a greater diversity of people than I'd ever known—very wealthy kids, kids living on the street, Asians, Blacks, Latinos, whites, drag queens, transgender people—really opened my eyes. Everybody was in this room, and so I was exposed to all of this, and it was terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Within a very short amount of time, I was active.
I felt right at home. A major part of my activism focused on youth because I felt that, for people my age, there were very few places to go, we were all sort of isolated, and we didn't have many sources of information.
The only time we invited people over 21 to a Gay Youth meeting was when Marsha P. Johnson asked if she and Sylvia Rivera could come by shortly after they had established Street Tranvestite Action Revolutionaries to ask for a loan. Gay Youth raised money through dances to fund our newsletter, Village Voice ads, leaflets, and other activities, and some of that money also went to members who were homeless. Marsha and Sylvia wanted a loan from the Gay Youth treasury so they could hold their own dance and raise funds. I told them I couldn't make that decision by myself and that the membership would have to vote on it, so I invited them to a meeting. They were good cop, bad cop. Sylvia was always the bad cop, saying, ‘You owe us this money. Stonewall wouldn't have happened but for us,’ which was not true, but no matter. Marsha would say, ‘We want to help young gay people who are living on the street, just as you do. You have members here who are trans people.’ And it was true. We had members who were drag queens, transvestites, or cross-dressers; this was a time when we didn't think about gender identity in quite the same way. Marsha and Sylvia said, ‘We're helping your members too, and we want to create something called STAR House. We want to give people a place to stay.’ The members voted to lend them the money. We felt a little pressured, no question about it, but we also wanted to help the people they were helping, so we made the loan. I didn't really expect we would ever get the money back, and we never did.
The important thing was to hand out leaflets at local high schools and colleges to let people know we were there. We did this regularly. It was scary because we didn't know whether we would be attacked outside any of these high schools or colleges. Once or twice, we were run off—people called us names, but most of the time it was safe. I remember while we were handing out the leaflets, one of the guidance counselors came out of the school and said, ‘We have a sex ed class here. Would you like to have some of your people come and speak at one of the classes?’ I said, ‘Sure,’ so we ended up speaking at this high school in Queens, and then speaking at a couple of colleges, and it was really great.
I remember in GLF there was a discussion about how men's facial hair was oppressive to women. This was the late 60s, early 70s, and there was a lot of wild hair. The very next week, many of the men with beards shaved. I thought this was insane, but there it is.
One of our major actions was holding dances. Why was holding dances an action? Because there was no place to go dancing. At discotheques in New York—two people of the same sex couldn't dance together. It was against the law at the time. Bars or discotheques could get raided if they allowed same-sex dancing. Also, for people under 21, you couldn't go into bars anyway. So it was a radical action to create social spaces for gay youth to celebrate, dance, and get to know each other in a way that also kept us in a place where there weren't a lot of older people who might want to take advantage of us. It was considered a youth safe space, and for me, that was the most important thing.
There were other actions I took. I always went to anti-war demonstrations and civil rights demonstrations. There was a demonstration outside City Hall when Intro 475, the first gay rights bill introduced in the New York City Council, was being considered. I was also at the hearings.
There was another action involving a Daughters of Bilitis meeting that had been raided in Brooklyn. The Daughters of Bilitis was a lesbian homophile organization that predated the gay liberation movement. A call went out for supporters to show up at the courthouse when the case was heard, so we held a demonstration outside. Then we went inside for the hearing. When the case was called, and the couple was brought in, everyone who was there as a supporter stood up in the courtroom. The judge banged his gavel and asked the bailiff, ‘Who are these people? Why are they standing?’ It was explained that we were supporters of the couple. The judge dismissed the case. It was totally ludicrous to have brought it in the first place, but that kind of police harassment was fairly common.”
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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.
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