MICHAEL BRONKSI
- August Bernadicou
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
NEW YORK CITY GAY LIBERATION FRONT, BOSTON GAY MEN'S LIBERATION
Michael Bronski is a historian, writer, and longtime activist whose life reflects the journey of modern queer liberation from its early stages. Born in New York and raised in New Jersey, he grew up with one foot in suburbia and the other in the vibrant cultural scene of Greenwich Village, where he first saw a visible queer community. He got involved in politics through the anti-war and civil rights movements and joined the gay liberation movement shortly after the Stonewall Rebellion of June 28, 1969.
Michael stresses that it was the organizing efforts, not just the Rebellion, that changed history. In New York, he attended Gay Liberation Front meetings, absorbing its radical spirit, before moving to Boston. There, he became heavily involved in Gay Men's Liberation and the influential underground newspaper Fag Rag, helping to shape a politics that combined sexuality, anti-authoritarianism, and cultural rebellion. Michael sees this period as one of collective experimentation, where activism, writing, and everyday life merged into a shared quest for freedom. Over the decades, and as a current academic, he has continued to question power, sexuality, and history, always returning to the radical roots that sparked his political awakening.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was Catholic until I was in my early 20s. I understood completely that the Church considered us a sin. I had somehow thought they were—that it didn't affect me somehow. I never felt bad about it, the way—I'm sure there are plenty of people who grew up Catholic, who are told masturbation was a sin, but they kept on doing it. I really think in retrospect that I understood it was socially unacceptable and prohibited in many ways, and that it was dangerous because people could get arrested, and I understood there were laws. I really never thought it was bad for me or even for other people, although I did understand that you could be ridiculed for it and could lose your job for it. When I was growing up, everybody suspected that I was gay, but no one ever really said it, because half of the religious faculty at my high school was gay. If anybody had called me a ‘fag,’ they would have been punished for bullying.
My first year in college at Rutgers in New Jersey was in 1967, so it was two years before Stonewall. Even though we all found each other pretty quickly—we were all discussing sexuality, and I was involved in a very political scene—I was involved with Students for a Democratic Society. I had been since high school. I worked on anti-Vietnam War protests and civil rights protests. I was fairly politically involved. So when Stonewall happened, at the end of my sophomore year, I immediately got involved with the Gay Liberation Front in New York.
It felt very necessary. I had been following international and United States politics since high school, and I was against the war. I went on marches. We were quite conscious that we could have been drafted to serve in the war the minute we turned 18. Most of us had college deferments, which would last until 21, but the threat of going to Vietnam was actually quite visceral. My Students for a Democratic Society chapter was fairly small and vaguely connected to the national chapters. We did local events, but I went on larger marches, like in Washington, D.C.
In the Gay Liberation Front in New York, there were people like Jim Fouratt, Martha Shelley, and Allen Young, all of whom talked more and were far more confident and self-assured than I was. I was fascinated with them. I was sort of intimidated by many of the people. GLF had an open forum where anybody could talk, which I totally approved of as a sort of artistic principle for a meeting. The bad part is that people who feel really comfortable talking talk more than other people. I wouldn't say that they would monopolize the conversation, but they certainly talk more than other people. Many of the people in GLF, myself included, came out of the anti-war and civil rights movements. Allen Young came out of the New Left. Jim Fouratt had been involved in anti-war demonstrations. Karla Jay had been involved, and Martha Shelley, of course, had been involved with feminist organizing. These were the basic principles for political organizing. Political principles were already present in other movements, and people like Allen Young, who wrote for Liberation News Service, were very articulate in discussing issues. I found the meetings exciting. It was very sexy to see lots of other gay people who were openly gay, people in one room talking a lot and not hiding themselves in any way. I also found it intimidating because, as I said, I was more of a quiet person, and in a room of really articulate people who talk a lot, I don't talk much.
We all knew about Mattachine Society, the homophile assimilation group that preceded the Gay Liberation Front. There was never any inclination to—they seemed rather old, although, very, very brave people. It seemed very old-fashioned in some way. I think that the revolutionary part of gay liberation, or the gay revolution, was that the first mandate was to come out and to claim your place in society and to have a voice. It was also a way for people to meet one another outside of the bar scene. Even though people still went to bars—in New York, there was still lots of cruising in parks, by the trucks and warehouses, and in other places. I think the revolution part was just using the word gay and not homosexual. The revolution part was actually being able to say ‘gay is good,’ which older groups like Mattachine or more local groups on the West Coast had never really said.
We were also part of a larger revolution. We were part of the cultural revolution. It was hippies, drug sex, and rock and roll. It was part of the anti-war movement. People forget, or they don't realize, that GLF, when it started, embraced the Black Panthers; they were anti-capitalist. They were pro-reproductive rights. In a way, gay liberation was simply adding gay liberation on top of all these other liberation movements. Interestingly, the Gay Liberation Front took its name from the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, which, in turn, was also the name of the Algerian uprising years earlier, when Algerian revolutionaries rebelled against France. The revolution was about adding gay to other revolutions, all of which were very important.
In 1971, I moved to Boston and got involved with Gay Men’s Liberation and the periodical Fag Rag. I became much more involved in gay liberation on a day-to-day level. Although I was a member of GLF in New York, I didn't have that much to do with it.
Gay liberation in Boston was smaller because Boston is much smaller than New York. I think one of the reasons why GLF in New York was so exciting was that it brought together people from all over the city. People of different experiences, people of different career tracks, people who were from many different classes and environments. Because Boston was smaller, it really drew from a crowd of recent college graduates. It was much more manageable for me. I would say that in many ways, the difference between New York and Boston is that New York can be intense and very competitive. Boston was much more about being in a collective.
With Fag Rag, we describe ourselves as essentially sort of anarchist—people often disagreed. We would actually print articles that people disagreed with and criticized in the same issue.
We didn't have leaders, but nothing would have happened without Charlie Shively being the organizer in some way. John Mitzel was also important. Fag Rag was essentially an offshoot of Gay Men's Liberation. There is a huge overlap. People like Kevin McGirr and John Kyper were involved at some level. Allen Young wrote some things, though I don't remember him coming to many meetings. We were all about the same age. We were probably all born somewhere between 1947 and 1951. I actually moved to Boston to go to Brandeis University for graduate school. So many of the people were involved.
We cared a great deal about putting out the paper. We actually cared about discussing politics and enacting politics. We were all doing this during those early years. We were very connected to the anti-war movement. We cared about feminist theory. The collective was self-described as being anti-racist and pro-feminist, even though it was only for men, or only men wrote for it. We cared about discussing sexual politics. A great deal of early Fag Rag is literally discussing what it meant to be a sexual person and what it meant to be sexual within the gay liberation movement. We challenged authority.
We were passionate about being non-conformist, anti-conformist, or hostile to conformity. We were also hostile to what was evolving to be a sort of more mainstream gay politics, like we thought people running for office as openly gay people were sort of ridiculous. We actually took extreme positions, which I think was the right thing to do for us at that point. There was a famous series of 12 articles by Charlie Shively titled Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution.
The paper often emphasized sexual poetry. Also, the illustrations were quite explicit. I remember I was teaching a class at Dartmouth College, and we discussed gay liberation. At one point, I brought issues of Fag Rag, and the paper scandalized the class. Many of the people thought it was sort of pornographic, just because there were pictures of people with erections or people getting fucked, or often not very good poetry: ‘I love it when my lover fucks me hard,’ sort of poetry. We also had issues about the state of queerness in the Soviet Union and other countries around the world. There were articles about queer organizing in Latin America. There were articles about hustling. Along with Gay Sunshine from San Francisco, we had an active interest in gay men in prisons and in prison abolition, which you'd never find in any of the other gay publications. At one point in Fag Rag, we had a prison column where people could write to prisoners, and prisoners would actually write in to the paper. The early issues had lots of articles about Vietnam and about the draft.”
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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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