REGINALD BROWN

LAWRENCE GAY LIBERATION FRONT

Reginald Brown by unknown, 1971.

In the early 1970s, at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, a young man named Reginald Brown helped shape a moment of quiet but powerful rebellion. As President of the University’s Gay Liberation Front, Reginald stood at the center of a fight for legitimacy that rippled far beyond the campus. In 1971, the group sued the university after being denied official recognition—a bold act that made them only the second student organization in the country to do so. The first had been the Society for Homosexual Freedom at Sacramento State just a year earlier, in 1970. Unlike Sacramento State, the University of Kansas lost its suit. 

What follows is an excerpt from an interview with Reginald Brown, who reflects on coming of age in the conservative Midwest, the power of community and visibility, and the radical joy of simply existing as himself at a time when that alone was revolutionary.

—August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and, get this, at Queen of the World hospital. I lived in Kansas City, Kansas: a river and a street separate Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas.

I attended church. It was just something that I did. But I was a precocious child. I didn't get along with my peers because they were interested in things I was bored with, and they couldn't understand where I was coming from. So, during the church service, I was the only young person who did not sit with the others. I sat in the front row, right in front of the preachers. I wanted to see what was going on. I was constantly asking questions. Why? Why? Why? Why? 

It was not liberating. It wasn't. It wasn't. How would I say this? It was oppressive. Now, my spirituality is my core. In fact, my spirituality informs my activism. Jesus was a revolutionary, and I realized that when I took a course about ten years ago. I realized that everything Jesus did was against the established order, but I did not hear about that Jesus in church. I heard about the Lamb of God. The fact that when Jesus went into the temple and turned all the tables that were disrupting business as usual and shutting shit down, that was some major, major stuff. He talked to people whom nobody wanted to be around. His very life was an antithesis of what was going on. He met with people. Jesus was a revolutionary, and Jesus is my role model. 

At any rate, I attended the church because I had no choice. I heard about Hell and damnation and abomination. I thought, ‘What do they mean by that?’ I never felt that I was an abomination. I never felt that anything was wrong, but I kept hearing this. I never heard anything about love. So when I was about 16, I told Mom. I said, ‘Mom, I'm not going anymore’ because I just couldn't. I wasn't being fed like—I was an old soul. I was very old for my age, and I thought, ‘I'm not getting fed here, so I don't need to come here anymore.’’ My mother agreed.

I never stood for the Pledge of Allegiance that entire year. I could not say those words, ‘and freedom for all,’ because it's not true. I sat down. I refused to stand up. I mean, to do that at that time, I realized—my mother always told me to stand up for what I believe, to challenge everything. I said, 'I'm not new.' So, in my senior year, I never stood for the Pledge of Allegiance.

There's never been a time that I did not think I was different. I always knew I was different. I did not know what it was called until one morning when about five or six older boys from my neighborhood surrounded me on the way to school. They started calling me ‘sissy,’ ‘fag’ and ‘punk,’ and one of them stuck his middle finger up my butt and hit a spot that felt good, and I kind of squirmed, and he said, ‘Oh, you like that, don't you?’ But the point is, I realized from their look and voice that it probably had something to do with my attraction to males. So I thought, ‘Okay, well, I'm attracted to males.’ I never considered marriage, I never considered children; the things people talked about were things I said I'm not interested in, that don't interest me at all. I just—I could not relate to many of the things that were going on. So I just created my own little world.

I had a very good sense of right and wrong. I trusted people until they gave me a reason not to. I was very, very strong. I don't like that word ‘moral’—I had a very strong foundation of being humane to other people. Treat people the way you want to be treated. At the same time, I had the distinction of being Black in an all-white school. I was in white schools from elementary school all the way to undergraduate school. So I was always primarily around white people, and, yes, it was conservative. It was conservative, so I hid who I was. I tried to live. I tried to live a double life. I said, ‘I know that I'm faking it because I'm not who they want me to be.’

I actually heard about Stonewall in Chile. In 1969, I was a foreign exchange student, and my brother Mario said, ‘You know what? The queers are rioting in New York City.’I was curious, but I did not know the details. In Chile, it was the first time I was around a nationwide strike, a strike against the United States. That was when I first realized the United States is not what it claims to be. It was because we were in Chile—a country that chose not to support the people but to protect financial interests—that really turned my political thinking around. From the vantage point of Chile, I was able to look at the U.S. from outside, and I realized that what we know about the U.S. is only what we’re allowed to see. I realized there are a lot of things that we didn't see that are going on. This was between my junior and senior years of high school. I was in high school in 1969. I graduated in 1970.

I wanted to start some summer courses at the University of Kansas. That’s when I joined the first student mass demonstration against the Vietnam War, supporting the Kent State Four, students gunned down by the National Guard. During that demonstration, I was shot at with tear gas, and Nick Rice, the guy behind me, fled and was killed. My country is in Vietnam, doing the same thing. I thought my country was willing to shoot me, to kill me. It politicized me to a point that I said, ‘Oh, well, fuck this shit.’ This is not right. It made me even more radical. 

It was after this that I met Tony Sears, a graduate student from San Francisco, in the john, because the Student Union john was a hookup place. I hooked up with him again, and he said, ‘Well, I want to take you to a Gay Liberation Front meeting,’ so I went. I must have been the youngest person there, because most of the people were graduate students, like John Bolin and Michael Stuubs, and almost everybody was much older than I was. Still, I was there, and that's when I just sat and listened. The next year, in 1971, I was elected President.

I remember walking into a room and for the first time in my life, not having to justify my existence, not having to explain my thinking—‘Oh, wow, I'm not the only one.’ It was like I was able to breathe. I was good at being a different person with different people, but that takes a psychological toll, you know, trying to be other people at various times. So to be able to be myself and not to have to explain or justify my existence—wow!

There was a draft going on then, but my number wasn't called. I remember my first act of creative civil disobedience was—in that time, it was illegal to destroy your draft card. I burned my draft card and used it to smoke my first joint. Yes, I burnt that bitch and smoked my first joint, two things that I was not supposed to do, but I also had made up in my mind, because I still have my past where I said, ‘If I am drafted, I'm going to Canada.’ I said, ‘There's no way.’ Like I said, after having been in Chile and after being shot at, I said, ‘Fuck this shit, I'm not going to go.’

Our Gay Liberation Front dances were the bomb. Everybody came. Everybody came. We didn't really need the funding, because we were able to make money from the dances we had. ‘Hot to trot.’ ‘Love the one you're with.’ Those were some of the themes. It was revolutionary for us to have a dance that everyone could attend.

One of our issues was getting recognized by the university. If we got recognized, we could get student funding from the Student Union and get office space. We sued the university to get recognized as an official student group. One of the things—I wrote as an op-ed in Newsweek when we lost our case. I listed all the groups that got funding, and my last sentence was, ‘the only reason we didn't get funding is because we're queer.’ That was it, because all these other groups got funding. It was just a matter of principle. We didn't really need their money. One thing about faggots and queers is that we can figure out how to do shit. We don't need anybody else. We can. We can. We're very creative. Very, very creative.

John Bolin, who went by Crystal at this time, changed my life. I remember him holding my hand in public. And that had never happened before. I remember that he held my hand on campus in public, and I had not really thought about that until you said that, but yeah—to hold hands with somebody in public, and he was the one that I did that with. It was also—to see this freedom of being ourselves. It's something I always wanted, but I didn't think it could happen.”