RICK LANDMAN

BUFFALO GAY LIBERATION FRONT

Rick Landman by unknown, 1970.

I first met Rick Landman at a New York University Pride party, which I wasn’t exactly invited to—I snuck in with a friend, and within minutes, Rick was telling me how he had founded the Gay Liberation Front at the University at Buffalo in Upstate New York. I knew right then I wanted to interview him. It took a while to finally sit down and record our conversation, but in the end, I’m glad I waited. We talked for nearly two hours, and I only asked about five questions the whole time. Those are my favorite kinds of interviews—the ones where the stories just keep coming.

Rick’s life stretches across decades of queer history. He was raised in Queens, New York, by parents who escaped Nazi Germany, came out before Stonewall, and by 17 was founding one of the first gay student groups in the country. Over the years, he survived brutal anti-gay violence, helped shape early LGBTQ legislation, and marched in nearly every Pride since the very first one. In our conversation, he opens up about love, violence, survival, and why remembering the past is key to protecting the future.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

“Almost everyone in my family was dead by 1942, since America told them to wait until their quota number came up. I grew up in New York City, in Queens, before the Brown v. Board of Education decision, when ‘separate but equal’ was the law of the land. My neighborhood was segregated into Italian and Irish Catholics and Jews, no one with any darker skin, and no one with any Protestant background. So in a way, I was sheltered, but also I had the freedom to be who I am because of what my parents went through. My parents' experience was quite different from everyone else's on the block. The other thing you can't really tell because I'm sitting down, is that I'm tiny. I was always the shortest kid in my class. I was also always the youngest.

I graduated from high school at the age of 16. I knew I was gay in second grade. I had a crush on this guy called Joe Dallesandro, who was going to junior high school when I was in second grade, but I had to pass the junior high school to get home, and he would pick me up and tickle me, and try to throw me in the mailbox. How could you tell everybody? It's the thing I looked forward to every day. I hoped that I would bump into him. Andy Warhol discovered him about 20 years later, and Joe Dallesandro was in the movies Flesh and Trash.

I raised my hand when we were learning how boys and girls got married, and asked if there was something for two boys to get married, because they didn't want to marry a girl. So once you say things like that, it's very hard to go back into the closet. Coincidentally, my Bar Mitzvah was the last Saturday in June, which we now refer to as Gay Pride Shabbat, although it was four years ahead of the Stonewall riots. Then, when I turned 13, I told my summer camp counselor for the first time that I had a crush on this boy named Wayne. I'm coming out to people more and more. I didn't tell my parents then, but within a year or two, I finished high school. I received a Westinghouse scholarship to attend NYU, which was located in the Bronx at the time, for medical engineering.

I could use my bus pass, and I would have to go up on Wednesdays. When I finished class, I'd go to West Fourth Street so I could hang out in the Village and meet homosexuals. Now, of course, I'm less than five feet tall, and I'm not talking about cruising, but I began understanding and making friends in the Village back in 1968. Then came June 1969, Stonewall. I was 17. There was no way I was going to bars or anything like that. I was not at Stonewall on the nights of the rebellion, riots, revolution.

It was time for me to go to college. I picked Buffalo, New York. Number one, it was the farthest away from home. Additionally, they were planning to build the world's largest university in downtown Buffalo. They ended up building it in the suburbs, but I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I thought that would be a good environment. That July, right after Stonewall, I went up to first-year orientation in Buffalo, and this gorgeous man was lying on the grass, and I walked over to him, and I said, like, 'Do you know where Merrimac Street is? I have some friends whom I'm supposed to meet.’ He looks at me, and he goes, 'I live at the corner of Merrimac, and you don't call it Merrimac Street, it's just Merrimac, and I'll walk you over to your friends.' I had such a crush on him, and his girlfriend was one of the freshman orientation sponsors. We spent the entire time orientation. Everyone else was drinking wine, because they were all over 18, which was the legal drinking age in New York. I joined in–it was the first time I drank wine.

Buffalo was considered a radical school at that time. I began making friends, and I went with my friends to Washington for the first time to attend an anti-Vietnam War rally. I knew about Stonewall when I went there, and I had a Gay Liberation Front poster that was hanging over my bed in Buffalo. People didn't like me for a lot of reasons, and I had no place to live. So that guy, who was the first person I met, who I had a crush on, and who I would still see, and everything like that, he said there was a dormer in the two-story little house on Main and Merrimac that, for $25 a month, I could move into.

There was an apartment right next door, owned by the same landlord, and it housed five women. They called themselves feminists. At that time, Madeline Davis started Radicalesbians. The five women were very much into reading and talking. They would have book readings and stuff, and some of them I participated in. One night, I would say, probably in January of 1970, Madeline Davis is there, and they're having a book reading. She says, 'All men get out of here.' I figured it doesn't mean me. I live next door, and I know all the women there; we're all close friends. I said to her, 'I'm a gay man.' She goes, 'I don't care. If you want to start a group, start your own group. Get the hell out of here.' So I left, and then I said, 'Well, all right, I'll start a group.'

I went to the Student Association. I said, ‘I'd like to pass a motion. I would like to start a Gay Men's Liberation Front at the University at Buffalo, whereupon people first started laughing. I did get someone to second the motion, and then they thought I wasn't serious. So then I got up and I spoke, and I said, ‘No, I'm officially asking to start a Gay Men's Liberation Front.’ So they said, ‘Okay, here's what we're going to do. Do you have any members?’ I didn't know anybody who was gay. That was part of the reason I started the group—to meet people. I was a virgin who just turned 17. I was not hip, really, with the gay social life.

They said, ‘You're going to have to find a vice president, secretary, and treasurer, you're going to have to write a constitution and fill out all these forms. So we'll give you a time. You can come back like next month with it all.’

So, I officially started the Gay Men's Liberation Front, copying the name from the Manhattan GLF. I took a table from the Student Union and set it up next to the candy vendor. There was a guy behind a booth that you could buy candy from, and because I was, like, sort of nervous doing it, being next to the candy vendor felt like a little bit of protection. I set up my table with a sign that just said ‘Gay Men's Liberation Front.’ People would walk by and smirk. Some people would throw paper or stuff at me. Then I began noticing some guys who my gaydar was sort of saying might be gay. They were walking by several times. I had a sign-up sheet. I needed a vice president, secretary, treasurer, and members for the group.

I finally found a gay person who was willing to join the group. I started putting it all together. Then, a woman named Wendy came by. She said that she wasn't getting along well with the Radicalesbians group. She asked if it would be okay if she joined my group. That’s how we officially became the Gay Liberation Front. We dropped the word men, and Wendy joined.

I would put flyers on the windshields in the parking lot to advertise our dances. Now, when you think of it, it was like, ‘Hey, I'm a freshman at UB, and we're having a dance in Haas in Norton Hall. Would you like to come to our dance?’ I don't remember the exact pay scale. Still, it was something like this: if you were a matriculated UB student, you paid, say, 50 cents, and if you were a member of the overall gay community, you paid, like, either $1 or $5 because that's how we were raising money to to hire bands for our dances. I was essentially copying whatever I saw happening around me.

I'm going to talk about the first march. I finished my first semester, and then I came down to Queens for the summer. I give my parents credit for letting me do it. I took the bus from almost Nassau County to Queens Boulevard, and then I had to take the E train to West Fourth Street. Then, I walked over to the Stonewall. I was standing at Stonewall, and I didn't know anybody. I was looking for people I knew. In front of Stonewall, people were unraveling posters and other materials, getting ready for the March. I thought we were going to walk up Seventh Avenue, but there were a whole lot of police officers standing on Seventh Avenue. I saw the people with the Gay Liberation Front banners: the red, white, and black flag. I walked over to them, and I said to them something like, ‘Hey, I'm your cousin from Buffalo. I started a group called Gay Liberation Front in Buffalo, and I copied your name.’

I remember walking on the sidewalk on Christopher Street when we left Stonewall, and we started walking toward Sixth Avenue. We turned and got onto Sixth Avenue. I'm still on the sidewalk. Then I think as we got closer to 14th Street, people started shouting, ‘Off of the sidewalk and into the streets! Off of the sidewalks and into the streets!’

So I got off the sidewalk and walked into the street, looked back, and got a sense of assurance that there were still people. I had no idea if this would be 100 people or 1,000 people. I had no idea if the police were going to start arresting people, but it gave me a sense of assuredness or confidence. People were still walking down Christopher Street to turn onto Sixth Avenue when we reached 14th Street.

This was in the beginning. There were no floats, and there were no balloons. Certain groups had banners. Now I'm walking with the actual March. All of a sudden, I saw someone I knew. I ran over to speak with that person, and then I joined a different group. It wasn't like today, where you have Heritage of Pride and a list of groups, and you have to stay within your group and everything. This is more like a demonstration that we were doing. So I walked up to Central Park. We had a rally farther up, in Sheep Meadow, Central Park.

Now, I am becoming increasingly concerned that people are not studying history. I'm reading a book on Gandhi. Santayana said, ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ It's really true, and there are nasty people who want to repeat it because they still want to push their minority viewpoint. I truly believe in Eleanor Roosevelt's universal human rights, which we should have worldwide—every human being should not have to flee or be repressed. That would be the best thing. I'm not big on nationalism or church and state being together, and I think all of those are the reasons why LGBT people are having so many problems. It’s that history is coming back again. The South will rise again, hello, and we still have to organize. We have to work together.”