GARY ALINDER, PERRY BRASS, KEVIN MCGIRR, MARTHA SHELLEY, ALLEN YOUNG

GAY SUNSHINE, COME OUT!, FAG RAG, RAT, LIBERATION NEWS SERVICE

Martha Shelley by unknown, circa 1970.

A gay liberation revolution swept the world after the June 28th, 1969, Stonewall Rebellion. The following oral history is about the underground press that was published during this era. 

We have Gary Alinder from the Berkeley, California, Gay Liberation Front, who helped start Gay Sunshine. Also with us is Perry Brass, a member of the New York City Gay Liberation Front, who worked on Come Out! and has published over 20 books. We also have Kevin McGirr from the Boston Gay Liberation Front, who went on to be involved with the periodical Fag Rag. Joining them is Martha Shelley, who co-founded the pioneering gay activist group, the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. She also worked on their paper, Come Out!, the magazine Rat, and hosted a radio show. Finally, we have Allen Young, who was also in the New York City Gay Liberation Front, wrote for several publications, and was involved with the Liberation News Service.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

August Bernadicou: I'd like to start with you, Martha. How did you find the gay movement, or did it feel like something you had to invent because it didn't exist yet?

Martha Shelley: Well, no. Actually, what happened was when I was 23, I joined the Daughters of Bilitis, which was, they called themselves, the homophile movement—the gay and lesbian organizations before Stonewall. The whole attitude of those organizations was, "Oh, America, please let us in. We're just a little bit different, like being left-handed instead of right-handed, and we just want to be part of society." I was, again, 23. I didn't have a career that I would jeopardize by being out, so I ended up being made the public speaker for our New York chapter.

Then came Stonewall. The night of Stonewall, I was taking two women on a tour of Greenwich Village, and we just passed by this bunch of young people throwing things at cops. I was wondering, what the heck is that? It must be an anti-war demonstration, so we wandered on. I'd been in a lot of anti-war demonstrations, and again, I was taking these women on a tour. Monday morning, I found out what it was, and I called the woman who was running Daughters of Bilitis and said, "We have to have a protest march." Next, she says, "Call Mattachine Society," which was the homophile organization composed primarily of men. I did. Basically, both groups agreed to jointly sponsor a protest march.

A few of us formed a committee to organize the march, and in that committee, the name Gay Liberation Front came up, and that was it. We became the Gay Liberation Front—our little committee. Then more people joined, and we reached out. People started forming Gay Liberation Front groups all over the country and in England, and I forget where else. We reached out to other radical groups because we were not asking, "Please, America, let us in." We were saying we wanted to change the whole system. We were anti-war. We were anti-capitalist. We were anti-racist. We reached out to all kinds of groups that the homophile movement didn't want to have anything to do with because they wanted to be, again, part of the society as it was. That was how we started.

August: Come Out! newspaper just didn't report. It declared something new. What were you trying to make real, Martha, with Come Out!?

Martha: I don't know if I can answer that question exactly, but what happened was we were an anarchic organization. If you wanted to do something, you just found other people within the group. You didn't need everybody's permission to do it. Some people wanted to do gay dances, other people wanted to form little communes, and some of us wanted to do a newspaper. That's what we did.

August: What issues did you care about in 1970?

Martha: Feminism, obviously. The war that was going on. My first political action—at the age of 19—was to go on an anti-war march. Racism. I'd been furious about racism ever since I found out about segregation in the South, and my best friend, who I was in love with, was a Black girl that I met in the fifth grade. You name it, all of those. The one thing I didn't know about, and only recently, in historical terms, got involved with, was climate change, but everything else, economic inequality, all of those issues mattered to me.

August: Can you talk about Rat magazine and how you all took it over, and what changed?

Martha: What happened was there were women working on Rat. It was what they called "an underground newspaper." Of course, it wasn't underground the way the samizdat were in the Soviet Union. It was very sexist. The women who were working there said, "We wanted to do an issue to show what we could do that was not sexist." I think it was Robin Morgan who called me and asked if I would be willing to join this. I said, "Sure." Again, I'd been working on Come Out! for a while already.

We did our first issue. My contribution to that issue was a cartoon with several panels about how we took over Rat. Then, once we got our hands on it, we didn't let it go. We continued doing it. Let me back up a little on Come Out! I want to say that besides writing articles and occasionally covering stories as a reporter, I also typeset the thing. My job at the time was typesetting in this little place in Greenwich Village. My boss was a radical herself. She would let me stay after hours and typeset the paper. Then I would sell it on the streets. I'd just walk around the streets and say, "Get your copy of Come Out!, newspaper of the Gay Liberation Front." That was my involvement with Gay Liberation Front newspaper, Come Out!.

Perry Brass: We all did that.

August: Did people ever give you hate on the street?

Martha: No, they did not. I do remember being a brat myself. This young couple walked by, and they looked at me like I was some weird creature from another planet. They were pushing a stroller. I yelled at them, "Get your copy of Come Out! newspaper of the Gay Liberation Front. Find out what your kid's going to be like when he grows up." They jumped. 

August: Allen, I have some questions for you now. At the Liberation News Service, you were connecting movements before the internet. What did that actually feel like on the ground?

Allen Young: Liberation News Service started in Washington, DC, in 1967 and then moved to New York City. I became involved with it in Washington and moved to New York to maintain my connection. We sent packets of news and graphic materials, photographs, and cartoons to hundreds of these so-called underground newspapers all around the country. We covered primarily, I would say, the Vietnam War, racism, and drug issues, because a lot of us believed that the drug laws were wrong because we enjoyed marijuana and sometimes LSD or mescaline. We felt these laws were very repressive and needed to be combated. These newspapers covered all of those issues. Martha really covered most of them.

Gay issues and issues around gender and sexuality were not part of the underground press until our movement began and brought this message to the whole country through our activities on the West Coast. Gary will say more about it. There was a group called the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, which predated Gay Liberation, predated Stonewall. That was related to one of the underground papers in California, the Berkeley Barb, because it came out that a man who was writing for the Berkeley Barb was a gay man, and his boyfriend or partner was fired from a job at the state steamship company, and people started picketing the Committee for Homosexual Freedom.

Little by little, we were becoming more active, and we needed to get the news out, but I think at the Liberation News Service, we didn't cover the Stonewall Rebellion. I was still pretty closeted at that point, and I needed to get poked out of the closet myself to play a role as an openly gay man at Liberation News Service, which I did for the first time when the New York Gay Liberation Front, along with the Gay Activists Alliance, protested the New York police for a raid on a bar that had the lovely name of Snake Pit. When that raid took place, and people were arrested, and a very unfortunate gay man from Argentina jumped out of a window and impaled himself on a fence—Diego Viñales—and went to a hospital—that motivated me to write about that incident for the Liberation News Service. That was the way that I came out to the colleagues there. Then we started publishing news on a regular basis about the gay liberation movement. I started writing for the Advocate, which was a gay newspaper published in Los Angeles, and then later for Fag Rag and the Gay Community News in Boston, and other gay periodicals like The Gay Liberator in Detroit.

August: Can you talk about the relationship between all the different movements, like women's lib, gay lib, black lib, anti-war, hippies?

Allen: I think the relationships varied. Sometimes they were warm and friendly, and sometimes there was hostility or disagreements on the emphasis of things. People had different points of view. I remember one time there was a member of the New York Gay Liberation Front who imitated something that came from the Black Panther Party. The slogan was, "Go left, go gay." The Panthers said, "Go pick up the gun! Off the pig!" This was very violent. I didn't approve of the violence, but this other fellow did. He liked that chant, and he modified it to a gay thing, and that was upsetting to me. I didn't agree with it.

We had a lot of internal disagreements about things, but we certainly agreed that we were against racism. We were for gender equality, but some of the men were male chauvinists. Some of the men looked at homosexuality in Ancient Greece and marveled at it. Ancient Greece was a very male chauvinist society. We gay men, we had a lot to learn. I know I certainly, at GLF meetings where I met articulate, well-informed lesbians, and I'll put Martha Shelley on the list of those lesbians, I could name six or eight of them off the top of my head. Lois Hart was one. There were so many that I learned from. They didn't allow us gay men to behave badly because they called us out on it. Some man, I guess, had said that the women should make the coffee. That was not going to go over very well, as you can imagine.

I learned a lot. I loved that I learned a lot. I remained friends with lesbians from the Gay Liberation Front. One of them, Karla Jay, who was also a writer and was familiar with the publishing world, became my companion in collecting articles that were being written. We co-authored three anthologies, starting with Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation. The second one was called After You're Out. My friend, Kevin McGirr, who's here with us today, wrote an article about alcoholism in the gay community. He was the first person to cover that topic. That article was published in a different paper and then published in our anthology.

There was a lot of what's sometimes called intersectionality today that was going on back in those days. We had a considerable awareness about the injustice of the American involvement in Vietnam, awareness about racial segregation and racial inequality, and all these issues. The environment—Earth Day eventually happened, and the Gay Liberation Front had a presence there. That was later, but it still happened. We touched on those things, but we tried to focus primarily on issues that were relevant for gay men and lesbians, bisexuals, and to a small extent, transgender people. There was such a thing as transgender, but more often, we heard the term transvestite.

People like Sylvia Lee Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson were transvestites who became very well-known. To a certain extent, there's a lot of mythology that's grown up around them, such as the fact that transvestites and transsexuals were the ones who made the Stonewall Rebellion. That's not really true. The majority of the people at Stonewall were young, white gay men, as you can see from many of the pictures that were taken that night. There's a lot of complications. There's mythology. The fact is that we were all committed to social justice and peace, and social change and cultural change as well. We mixed political movements with the counterculture.

August: Perry, what did New York feel like, and what was New York like after Stonewall?

Perry: Stonewall changed things. It really did, especially things Downtown. It changed things for a lot of people, but then a lot of people were not changed by it. Some of them were actually infuriated by it. There was this whole pre-Stonewall world, this gay world that I was a part of, also. I described it as when you came to New York, and you were gay at that point, it was like joining a private club. The club was striated class-wise and race-wise, and they wanted to keep that private club.

For a lot of people, especially younger people, Stonewall changed things hugely and very fast. Certainly, the first summer after 1969, the summer of 1970, I noticed, and I joined them, that people were just starting to congregate on Christopher Street in the Village. Without hesitation, I joined them. People would sit on the stoops, talk to each other, talk to strangers. It was like love suddenly started to happen. We could actually, really, genuinely like each other. That was very hard pre-Stonewall when your very existence was a taboo, was against the law, could get you thrown out of your family, or even murdered. Stonewall changed a lot.

August: Can you talk more about the consequences of being gay during this time?

Perry: There were a lot of consequences. Certainly, people who were, let's say, five years older than I was, they would know that even more than I did. I had really come out at the age of 17 when I just decided this was who I was. I attempted suicide at 15 and just came out of that and realized that I had to liberate myself. The thing is, I can speak for New York, and I can speak a little bit for the West Coast because I spent basically a year on the West Coast at that point. The West Coast was much further ahead than New York was.

New York was in the middle of a crackdown on gay bars at the time of Stonewall because of the New York World's Fair in 1964 when the mayor at that point, Robert Wagner, had decided to close all the gay bars so that tourists wouldn't amble into one and realize that there were queers in New York. He closed all the gay bars, virtually every fucking one of them. The only ones that remained open were ones that were way below the radar. They also had constant raids on gay bars. I was in a raid once. They were very unsettling.

For a lot of gay men at that point, if you were out enough to go to a bar, you just accepted the fact that the bar could be raided. Just like the fact that at that point a lot of gay men would carry with them $40 when they went out cruising because that's what you had to offer a cop if the cop tried to arrest you. Just offer him $40, and you could get off. You had these kinds of strategies for your own survival. The thing that was so amazing was that we recognized each other.

There were so many occasions where I would be in a situation where I would know that these guys were gay. It was like some sort of gaydar thing happening, but you knew they were your brothers. Sometimes they were your sisters. You could just feel this little crackle in the air and this sense of gay tribalism. I really miss that now. I miss that sense of gay tribalism.

August: Were people ever scared to go to a bar?

Perry: Oh, yes. Lots of people were scared. They had, I guess you'd call it, another institution at that point, and that was street cruising. A lot of men would not go to bars. They had the kind of jobs where if they were ever caught in a bar raid, it would be the end of them. They were terrified of this happening. They were terrified of losing their jobs and also losing their families because there was so much prejudice against us. They would cruise the streets. I knew guys who would tell me that in the course of a night, they'd be walking two or three miles because at certain places, you would suddenly see some guy and the two of you would connect eye to eye, and then you would have a partner for the night. Some guys would do this two or three times in a night.

It's very interesting. E.M. Forster wrote a very famous book called Howards End. One of the characters in the book is this married man. Forster talks about the fact that he would walk all night. He would spend the night going out and walking for miles and miles. I thought Forster was trying to talk about street cruising right there in London. Howards End was published in 1910—guys in London were street cruising.

August: With Come Out!, were you speaking to a community or trying to create a community, or both?

Perry: I think both. We already felt that there was a community. There was this community that wanted to liberate itself and that would listen to what we were saying. Also, it’s what we were putting into Come Out! that made it really historic. It was revolutionary. Some of Martha's pieces, even at that point, back then, just knocked my socks off. She wrote a piece called “Subversion in the Woman's Movement: What Is To Be Done?” She wrote an account of that incredible action in August of 1970 when the gays and the cops in New York had a physical confrontation with each other. Most people would never even imagine that queers could physically confront big New York City cops. She wrote an account of that.

I wrote a piece called “Games Male Chauvinists Play,” which looked at cruising as a political situation—the politics of internalized homophobia and cruising. It got out all over the place. Our brother Steven Dansky wrote this fabulous piece called Hey Man, in which he said that too many queers internalized the qualities of their enemies. They were trying to be as butch as their enemies and alienating themselves from themselves. We had these incredible pieces. One of the most amazing ones was the one called “Woman Identified Woman,” which just rocked the world. It threw lesbianism right into the face of the women's movement and actually all movements.

August: Were you fearless or ignoring fear?

Perry: Both. I did have some fears, but I had nothing really to lose. I was so alienated from my family that the idea of losing my family meant nothing to me at all. I didn't have any kind of real job or profession. I was living on the skin of my teeth in New York, as a lot of us were. A lot of us in GLF were living just these marginal lives, which allowed us a huge amount of freedom. We supported each other emotionally and financially at times. You would bring people into your house. God knows how many people stayed with me, crashed with me. I had a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Hell's Kitchen, the rent of which would make people gasp today. I was paying something like $73 a month rent for a four-room apartment. The New York real estate situation was subsidizing the movement.

August: What was it like the first time that you realized your words had affected someone?

Perry: It was marvelous. I was very happy about it. I really was. I think we all were. One of my brothers in the Come Out collective was a guy named Steve Gavin. I still remember when the paper would come back from the printers, tied up in bales of 100 copies each. Steve picked up a bale of Come Out!, and he said, "This is history." I thought, yes, he was right. This is history. It was.

August: Being such an early newspaper, how did distribution work?

Perry: That's a great question. We distributed the paper ourselves. We did not have a distributor. It was very easy in those days. We would drop the paper off at newsstands in the West Village. We would sell the paper ourselves. Like Martha said, I would sell the paper on the streets. All of us in the collective would sell the paper. We sent it out to libraries. Probably about a dozen or so public libraries and university libraries picked it up. There were all kinds of places that would get Come Out!

We would print only about 4,000 copies of the paper, but it had a readership of about 20,000 people. It had what they call a big pass-around rate. People would just pass it around. Articles in Come Out! would end up being republished in London. I remember some Italians started republishing articles in Come Out! in Italian. Martha's article, “Subversion of the Women's Movement,” was translated into Italian.

Allen Young by David Fenton, 1969.

What was so amazing at that point was there was so little real media going on that if you could break into media, you could have an amazing effect. Now with millions of websites, unless you've got big-ass corporate money behind you, it's very hard to make a ripple on the public face anymore. Although it does happen, sometimes the result is banal crap. Here in the age of Donald Trump, banal crap can really work.

Allen: I think I'd like to make a comment about just the name of that publication, Come Out! Come Out! was such an important message. One of the most important chants when we were marching was, “Out of the closets, into the street!” This was a very big statement about gay identity. I had been a very deeply closeted gay man since I was a teenager, and most gay people were in the closet. Our message was: If you stay in the closet, you're going to continue to be repressed. You're going to be basically continuing your own oppression.

A newspaper that calls itself Come Out!, a slogan that says, out of the closets into the street, was directly addressing the whole issue of the closet and trying to get people to come out and be more open about our lives as gay people. We felt that the more that we could be open about ourselves, the more our enemies, like the psychiatrist and the clergy that oppressed us, the more that we would be victorious and they would be defeated. By the very name Come Out!, this publication is of great significance.

August: Amen. Gary, how did you find gay liberation?

Gary Alinder: I lived in New York during the time of Stonewall, but I wasn't at all out then. The gay scene in New York actually frightened me. It was just too much. The bars, street cruising, I could not be comfortable with that. I had been very involved in radical politics in New York City when I lived there in the late '60s. I was involved in the Yippies, and I knew such characters as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Also, Robin Morgan was a friend of mine for a little while. I remember going to her apartment. Also, Jim Fouratt, who became a gay activist, but he was involved in the Yippies at that time.

I had been involved in the peace movement for years. I was very convinced of the need for radical change, and I was very much in the left politically. Actually, the gay liberation movement was how I came out. When I moved to New York, I was only two years away from the farm in rural Minnesota. I had been to the University of Minneapolis, but the transition from where I grew up to living in New York was such a leap I couldn't quite make the coming out part. I thought, wouldn't it be easier and less scary, and more politically right to be in California?

In September of '69, I moved to California. I was reading the Berkeley Barb. Berkeley Barb was writing some of this stuff before most people were. I read this article by Konstantin Berlandt in the Berkeley Barb, and I thought, "I've got to know this guy." I saw an advertisement for starting a gay guerrilla theater group. They were going to do a performance during orientation week on the UC Berkeley campus. I went to the first meeting, and there was Konstantin Berlandt. I fell in love with him, not so much physically as politically.

Perry: We all did.

Gary: You can have political love affairs. I was very much in love with Konstantin in one way or another all through his life, really. I participated in the gay guerrilla theater group, and we performed on the UC campus. I think it was shocking. Nobody threw stones or rocks, or tomatoes at us or anything. It was October of 1969. Out of that group formed the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front, in which Konstantin was also very influential.

He was really the key to starting that because most of us had just arrived in Berkeley or in California, but he had gone to high school in Berkeley. He had been the editor of the Daily Cal, the student newspaper on the UC campus. He was connected in Berkeley in a way that very few of us were. I really came out and got into Gay Liberation at exactly the same time. It was remarkable.

Gary Alinder in the San Francisco Free Press by unknown, 1969.

August: One event that's really well documented, at least on the West Coast, is the Friday of the Purple Hand action. Allen touched on it. Can you talk about that protest?

Gary: Yes. The Examiner was one of the major daily newspapers in San Francisco at that time. It was published by the Hearst Corporation, which had a notorious reputation. They had some columnist who—I think, he was an alcoholic and also blatantly homophobic. You can imagine what he wrote. He wrote an obnoxious article about what was going on. We went to the outside of the Examiner building, and we were out there protesting with a picket line. People from upstairs were throwing purple ink at us. We just put our hands in the purple ink and put our handprints all over the walls of the Examiner building. That was symbolic.

I don't remember too much more about it than that. A few people got arrested. I think we left before that could have happened. It made an impression. I guess it was written about in the local newspapers. I don't think I wrote about it, but other people did. We did a lot of things which were actually a lot of fun as well as being potent and politically useful, shall I say.

August: What space was Gay Sunshine opening that didn't exist, or what were you expanding on?

Gary: I just want to say something about the name of Gay Sunshine, which is important too. It has a double meaning, of course. The point was to put light and openness to something which had been hidden and shameful, to bring it out into the light, into the sunshine, of course. Also, Sunshine was the most popular kind of LSD which was circulating in the Bay Area at the time. We hoped that the newspaper would be like an acid trip, opening your mind to a different kind of consciousness. We were very much interested in having it just be this aha moment where you say, "Oh, that's what life is really about, instead of what I thought it was about."

I think there were established institutions like the Society for Individual Rights, which published a magazine, and Martha was talking about it, how the homophile movement was basically asking, “How can we make the establishment a little bit better so we can get along better?” Those of us who got together for Gay Sunshine were very much like the people who got together for Come Out! We had been involved in other movements or other projects.

I think the difference between the East Coast and the West Coast was that I always thought the West Coast was a little more culturally radical, and the East Coast was a little more politically radical. I actually enjoyed West Coast politics. Other people might disagree with that. We had Janis Joplin and all the San Francisco sound of the '60s. Of course, everybody was dropping acid. I say everybody, that's probably an exaggeration, but it seemed like everybody.

Martha: I did.

Gary: It was very much a total cultural milieu of sex, rock and roll, drugs, and then politics too. Politics was just part of that. It wasn't the major part, I would say, in some ways.

August: Did publishing radical stuff ever feel dangerous?

Gary: To me, no, not really. That was not a danger I worried about, at least. I went to gay bars in San Francisco, and nobody ever felt like a gay bar in San Francisco was going to be raided at that time. I don't think so. That wasn't an issue. It had been dangerous to be against the war for years, in a way. You just had to be out of the way and be very street-smart as to when the police were going to do something. That was one of the reasons I moved to Berkeley, because it had such a history of leftist agitation, so we say.

If you're interested in the movement, there's a whole movie called Berkeley in the Sixties, which details the free speech movement, the Black Panthers, the women's movement. It completely leaves out Gay Liberation, which, of course, only got started at the very tail end of the '60s. I guess I can forgive them for that. It gives you a very good detail of the milieu in which we were operating in Berkeley in the late '60s.

August: In any way, or maybe not, do you think it was freer back then, even though you had oppression, but with the hippies and the music, did you feel more free?

Gary: Maybe in some ways, yes. I think overall, no. At least young people in the Bay Area were more on the same wavelength. You could stick out your thumb and get a ride to San Francisco with some hippies who had a van and would hand you a joint while you were driving across the Bay Bridge. They didn't care if you were gay. They were just long hair—of course, there were some who were homophobic, I assume, and misogynistic and all that stuff. There were a lot of people who came to California at that age who really came there specifically to be free and to get away from where they'd grown up. That was me, and that was most of the people I knew. In that sense, I wouldn't try sticking up my thumb and getting a ride to San Francisco now. There were some things about it which were great, but I wouldn't say overall it was more free, no.

August: Was there a moment in this where you realized we're not going back, or you're not going back?

Gary: As soon as I made the decision to be out and political, I figured that was it. Once you're out and political, you're not going to get an establishment job. I never did have an establishment job in that sense. Some people who were more established in San Francisco would say to us, “You have nothing to lose.” They had jobs, and they thought they had something to lose. I said, "We all have the same thing to lose, and that's our lives." I didn't like the argument. You could choose to be out, or you could choose not to be out. Once I was out, I was never going to go back. No.

In certain situations at certain times, the fear came into me. There's no doubt about that because sometimes you can feel alone and scared even after you've been out for a decade or more. Overall, no. I was out. My friends knew I was out. I didn't come out to my family formally for a long time, but I didn't spend much time with my family. I didn't see them, and it wasn't that much of an issue when I did come out to them. That was that. There was no turning back from that either.

August: Kevin, I’ve got some questions for you. You were involved with a publication called Fag Rag. What did it mean to claim that word, “Fag?”

Kevin McGirr: How the name came about is a bit controversial. I always claim that I made up the name, and other people in the founding group claim that they made up the name. When I was growing up, I distinctly remember no one ever called me queer. Queer was almost a polite term for people who were gay or lesbian. Fag was a word that actually stung. If someone called you a fag, that really punctured your psyche.

My memory is that I proposed we take the word “fag” and turn it around and claim it in the same spirit that “queer” has been turned around in the LGBTQ+ community. Of course, since we were founding a newspaper, sometimes referred to as a rag, we would then call it a Fag Rag. Those of us, also, since most of us are men on this panel, after sex, you might grab a rag to wipe yourself clean after you cum. That was really the significance of that term from my perspective. Even if I didn't make it up, I think there was a collective understanding of why we were using that particular name.

August: Were other people at that time trying to reclaim the word, too, or change the word?

Kevin: I don't know any other publication or organization that used the term fag in terms of describing themselves. I do remember some Republican or right-wing person referred to what was going on as a “freaking fag revolution.”

Perry: Ralph Hall, who was a GLF member, he started a zine called Faggots and Faggotry, which was fabulous, but he only did about three issues of it.

August: Fag Rag was a little bit later in the movement, 1971. What were you trying to stand for, and were you doing anything that wasn't existing at that point?

Kevin: I think a lot of people have already basically expressed that what was happening in the late '60s, early '70s, really set the context, from my perspective, for gay liberation. I'm not sure who used the term intersectionality, which has become much more commonplace in the vocabulary. I think that was very much happening in the late '60s and early '70s, and that really gave the boost to gay liberation. Of course, there was Stonewall, which clearly was very important in the movement. Again, that happened in a larger context having to do with the war, having to do with women's liberation, having to do with Black liberation, all those movements which preceded ours. Of course, there was a gay movement prior to Stonewall, but there was a great leap forward at that particular time.

In Boston, there were a lot of consciousness-raising groups. Out of the consciousness-raising groups, what rose to the top was a Gay Liberation Front movement. Even the name Gay Liberation Front was trying to mirror the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. Again, homage to what was happening to oppressed and subjugated people in another part of the world. The spirit was very much in your face. We were not kind to gay men or lesbians who wanted to remain in the closet. We would take various kinds of actions—going into bars and almost embarrassing people and urging them to come out. It was not always kind. There was a deli in Boston called Ken's Deli, and we'd go in and do actions in there and basically try to be very much out there pulling people out of the closet and being very, very confrontational.

I'm sure everyone on this panel remembers when Charley Shively burned the Bible and when ACT UP went into St. Patrick's Cathedral. These are things that really were designed to confront and make people feel uncomfortable about what was happening. That was very much the spirit of what we were doing. This also just came up. In addition to being enabled by what was happening in the larger left-wing, liberal context in the US, we were empowered by our youth. Most of us were in our early 20s, I'm going to assume, maybe a little bit older. We didn't necessarily have a lot to lose.

We were coming out of college, or maybe still in college. We were envisioning a new world. We were making the revolution. We were not into neoliberalism; that term hadn't even been invented at that point. We were anti-capitalist. We were not concerned about money. I had a cheaper apartment than Gary or Perry, whoever talked about their apartment, $40 a month. Material was not important to us. We were willing to take a lot of risks.

I got beat up by the police in an anti-war riot, got fired because I protested a young man on a drug unit that I was working on, because he was receiving electroaversion  therapy for his homosexuality. It was very easy, at least for me, to do those things. I was not invested in society. That spirit which brought us together fostered an imperative to give more voice to what was happening. 

I don't think there was any gay press in Boston back in 1970. Gay Community News came a couple years later. The Student Homophile League maybe had a newsletter. There were probably newsletters, the Homosexual Union of Boston existed—there was no gay press at that particular time. Giving voice to all these ideas and sentiments that we had was very, very, very important.

We were able to do it because the adult in the room was Charley Shively. Charley was a tenured professor at a local college. Not that he was wealthy by any stretch, but he had more money than any of us. He really bankrolled getting Fag Rag together. Again, people obviously, I'm assuming, know Fag Rag was not a newspaper. It was more of a perspective or opinion journal.

August: Did the name Fag Rag turn off gay people?

Kevin: That's an excellent point, August. Yes, it did. As we were giving it out, like other people have described, most of our distribution was by those who had cars and delivering it to wherever it could be delivered. We definitely got some hostility from people when we would bring the paper into the bars. They did not like the term "Fag Rag." Of course, that just egged us on even more. That just proved to us that we needed to be more confrontational and not make nice with people who weren't willing to come out.

I think in many ways, and I'll say this about myself, we were immature. We were not cognizant that people didn't come out in the same way and in the same time, and that because people may have invested in a job they had, that was important to them. Again, it's that age division, and I think it is largely about age. We didn't have the same investment. We were very much pre-professional, pre-career. We were able to take a lot more risks than most of the people in the community.

August: Was there much circulation of these publications in the South at that time? 

Perry: There actually was an underground paper in Atlanta called the Great Speckled Bird, and it republished stuff from Come Out! In fact, I think the Great Speckled Bird republished Allen Young's interview with Allen Ginsberg, and it continued. It had more support. It had actual advertising. It was more like the Atlanta version of the Village Voice, but not as sexist and homophobic as the Village Voice. I think Nashville also had an underground paper, a gay paper. There was some media in the South.

August: Did anyone get feedback from places like the South about your publications?

Perry: Yes. The last three issues of Come Out! were published out of my apartment in Hell's Kitchen in New York City. I would get phone calls because my phone number was listed in Come Out!. I had people from the South call me and just thank me and say, this is really wonderful that you're doing that. I also got heavy breathers. I got those, too.

I wanted to say, we put this thing out called The Come Out! Reader that was edited by Steven Dansky, John Knoebel, and myself. It has all the issues of Come Out! in a format that is very usable. It's published on a platform called Blurb. If anyone wants to get The Come Out! Reader, you could see the entire span of this fabulous paper.

Allen: Karla Jay and I collaborated on what was called Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation. We were invited by a Southern group that was having a conference in Chapel Hill in North Carolina. It was very much oriented towards the South. These were gay liberation groups that existed throughout the South, and they planned this gathering in North Carolina.

We would get speakers. It was a wonderful experience. People in the South have their own subculture. Completely aside from the racism aspect of it, there's a certain Southern sensibility, so to speak. Just like there's a New York sensibility or a San Francisco sensibility. It was a lot of fun being there. There was a lesbian chorus called the Her Chorus. They were very funny. They sang beautifully, and they were funny.

Perry: Do you remember what year that was?

Allen: I think it was 1973 or 1974, which is when our first anthology was published. It was in the early '70s. Things were really cooking. The gay movement was growing. Papers like the Great Speckled Bird that Perry mentioned. There was also the NOLA Express, NOLA being New Orleans, Louisiana. That was an important underground paper.

Little Rock, Arkansas, I know was the headquarters for a pacifist organization. I don't think the pacifist organization was openly gay as such. I can name off the top of my head several important gay people who were involved in the pacifist movement. Barbara Deming was one. There were just a number of gay men and lesbians involved in the pacifist movement.

Maybe a little bit of a connection to Arkansas particularly. The word was traveling everywhere. It took some time for word to get out. There were radio programs that were being started by gay people at that time. You could subscribe to publications and have them come to you through the U.S. mail. One of the first important legal cases involving gay people, and this was during the homophile movement, was a free press case because the post office wouldn't allow a gay newspaper that came out of the Mattachine Society to be sent through the U.S. mail. They went to the court, and the court ruled that the post office had to deliver the newsletter.

Perry: I think that was in 1963.

Allen: There is history before Stonewall that has to do with gay liberation issues. I think what's very important that we should focus on a little bit more are the articles that were in these newspapers that focused on our issues. For example, the issue of who oppressed us? We were oppressed by the police. We were oppressed by the laws. We were oppressed by the psychiatric establishment, by the religious establishment.

A lot of the articles that were being written and which appeared in all of these newspapers were dealing with that. Some of the fight was not just with words. We went to psychiatric conventions and disrupted them, and forced the psychiatric profession to change its view of us, which was very important. I grew up thinking that I was sick. I actually went to a psychiatrist to be "cured" of my homosexuality. This happened when I was in Brazil on a scholarship, and I had to do it in Portuguese.

I sat down on a couch and talked to the psychiatrist. It took me about a half a year to realize that, no, this is stupid. I said, I'm a gay man. It helped that at that time, when I was in Brazil on a scholarship, it helped that I made gay friends, that Rio de Janeiro had a gay community. It wasn't a liberation community, but there were gay bars. There were cruising areas. I made friends, and I realized that I wasn't the only one. I think a lot of times, gay people would come into the enlightenment about their desire, their sexual desire, and say, oh my God, am I the only one? I'm supposed to want to be with someone of the opposite sex, but that's not where my desire lies.

August: Martha, can you talk about your radio show?

Martha: Yes. What happened was there was a nonprofit listener-supported radio station in New York City—a Pacifica station—connected with the Pacifica stations, I think, in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The station finally got a woman station manager, Nanette Rainone, and she asked me if I would do a lesbian radio show. I did one. I called it Lesbian Nation. I think it was the first lesbian radio show anywhere. It went on for two years, '72 to '74. I even hitchhiked around the country, interviewed women from different parts of the country, and brought the stuff back and put it on the air, as well as interviewing people in New York and that sort of thing.

At the end of that, I left New York, moved to the Bay Area, and got involved with the Women's Press Collective. That wasn't a newspaper. They were printing books. We were printing books with feminist and lesbian information. What started out with underground newspapers became also a small publishing industry. It wasn't just the Women's Press Collective. There were women all over the country publishing. I'm sure there were gay men doing the same thing.

Perry: You already had lesbian feminist bookstores opening. That was the beginning of what became the gay bookstore phenomenon. A lot of gay bookstores came out of the lesbian feminist bookstores. I think by 1990, there were something like at least 40 gay or lesbian feminist bookstores in America. In about the next five years, the numbers swelled to about 60 of them. You had this amazing burgeoning of gay bookstores.

Martha: What happened in the beginning was that the Women's Press Collective started printing stuff on a tiny little press that they bought. This was before I joined them. They got a bigger press because the printing companies wouldn't print our stuff. Then, once it became more accessible, it was easier to get stuff printed by larger printing companies. In the beginning, we had to print it, collate it, staple it together, or glue it together, and do all the distribution ourselves, mail it out to places. What started with us, with newspapers, also became book publishing. Then, of course, radio shows as well.

Allen: This is a good place to mention Craig Rodwell, who was the owner of the Oscar Wilde bookstore in New York. A lot of the periodicals, such as Come Out! and Fag Rag were sold in that bookstore. Many gay people knew: you go to the Oscar Wilde bookstore and buy that. Craig was active in the old homophile movement. He also was one of the principal organizers of the first Gay Pride March, which we call the Christopher Street Liberation Day March. There was a certain shift from the older, more conservative homophile movement into the newer, more radical gay movement.

Perry: The bridge for that shift was Ellen Broidy. Ellen was a friend of Craig's. Actually, Ellen and Craig together had this idea that why don't we commemorate Stonewall a year later with this march. Then they brought the idea over to, I think it was called ECHO.

Martha: Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. Yes, I was there.

Perry: Good. The people at ECHO went crazy for it. They really liked the idea. Therefore, that first march happened, which brought out 5,000 people.

Martha: The first march happened exactly one month after Stonewall. I organized it.

Perry: I'm sorry. I keep forgetting this. Thank you, Martha, for reminding me. I should be reprimanded for this. Martha and Marty Robinson organized the first gay liberation march in the fucking world. Was that in July of '69?

Martha: It was exactly one month after Stonewall.

Perry: It was in July of '69. It went from Washington Square to Sheridan Square.

Martha: Right. Then what happened was, again, in the beginning, I called the woman who was running the Daughters of Bilitis, who was very much in the closet, for various reasons. She said, “Call the Mattachine Society.” The guy who was running Mattachine said, come to a meeting. There were 400 gay guys there and me. I proposed this march. That was Dick Leitsch.

He asked, “Who wants to do a march?” Everybody raised their hand. Everybody in that room. Then we formed a little committee. Marty Robinson from Mattachine was there, and a few other guys. I don't remember who else. We had a little meeting one week after Stonewall. We were all tipsy drinking beer on a hot early July day. Somebody said the words “Gay Liberation Front.” I went, "Yes, yes, that's it. We're the Gay Liberation Front." That's how we formed the Gay Liberation Front. Then we organized that march.

Perry: Did this come out of the Mattachine Action Committee?

Martha: No.

Perry: It did not. Okay.

Martha: It did not. This was just our little group. We became the Gay Liberation Front—one month after Stonewall was when we had the march. According to the undercover cops who were there, or one undercover cop, it was about 400 people attending. According to a Village Voice reporter, it was about 500 people. We marched around the Village. Marty Robinson jumped up, that's prearranged, on the water fountain at the park across the street from the Stonewall and made a speech. Then I jumped up and made a speech. That was the first one.

Perry: Do you remember what you said?

Martha: I don't. All I can remember, I don't remember what he said. I don't remember what I said, except at the end when I looked out and I saw all these faces. I'm asking, what am I going to do with all these people? I said, "We're not here to start another riot. We're all going to go home in peace. This is not the end. This is just the beginning. We will be back." That's all I remember.

August: The gay movement pre-Stonewall sought acceptance by society. By contrast, the gay movement after Stonewall sought societal change. Then marriage equality seemed to bring the movement back to societal acceptance. How much has the gay movement changed society? How much have we adapted to society?

Kevin: I'll just jump in and say something. I'm not a historian or political scientist. I think it's both true. I was not someone who was waving flags to gays in the military, nor was I waving the flag for gay marriage. Those are part of our society. I certainly recognized that it was important for those opportunities, for that access, for people who wanted that. I think that was really the accommodation that, if I can say, the left and the more conservative elements of the gay community, lesbian community came to at some point.

I think there have been incredible changes that happened, not because of politics, not because of laws, but because of a growing acceptance. I think the education that we've done—the sermonizing, preaching, the studying, the advocacy that doesn't necessarily get tied to politics—has changed people's attitude about homosexuality. If I think about, in my own family, nieces, nephews, great nieces, great nephews, and I come from a very working-class background, homosexuality is not an issue. It's just not an issue. I think that is indicative of how society has changed. I think that's been very important. That's my perspective.

Gary: Yes, I would agree with that. In my family, too. For me to come out to my family was a huge thing and a huge step. According to my parents, it was quite shocking. I have a grandnephew who came out a couple of years ago, and has a boyfriend. He participates with his boyfriend at all family events. I won't say there was no upset around it. There was because he grew up in a conservative Lutheran family. He's been embraced. The boyfriend's been embraced.

Certainly, it was easier for him than it was for me. Very starkly easier. I'm sure he has internal struggles. He's going through it still. We haven't reached nirvana yet. I think that's just a symptom, an indication. There's so many other aspects we could look at. When I see gay young men now, I think they don't have the kind of angst that we had to go through. They have their own of some kind. The mountain they have to climb is smaller, as far as I can tell. That's huge.

August: What do you think is something in the present gay activism and publications that should be improved? Can you talk about how all the major gay news outlets are corporate-owned and conglomerates?

Perry: They're too commercialized, that's my feeling. They're extremely commercialized. We now have this cult of gay celebrity. Anyone who is a celebrity, who is vaguely out is just absolutely lionized, whereas the people who are really important politically to our community are made secondary. The only exception to that is Pete Buttigieg, who just because of his own personality has become a gay celebrity. As far as actual politics are concerned, politics has become a dirty word in the gay culture. I really dislike that.

Martha: I think it started earlier. We started having these marches. There was our little one a month after Stonewall. There was the Christopher Street Liberation Day March one year after Stonewall and so on. Then they became corporatized. Corporations started putting in their floats, saying, we have a market here.

Perry: They’re co-opted—very co-opted, yes.

Allen: I'm not as negative or as critical as some of you might be. For example, if the employees of Delta Airlines want to have a float in a gay pride march, and those employees want to be on a float, and it may bring a little good publicity to Delta Airlines, I have no objection to that at all. I applaud those Delta Airlines employees that want to do that. I think it's been a little unfair to criticize the corporate presence in gay pride marches. When I think from the point of view of employees of those companies, it's a positive thing.

They've been able to communicate with the management and with their fellow employees. I think it's part of the progress that we've made in this world. We have not done away with capitalism. We do have a capitalist system here. Will it someday go away? I don't know. While it's here, I think we need to work with it and not just be waving a red flag and be basically forcing those Delta Airlines employees to not be able to have a float.

Perry: I don't think we should force them to do anything. Actually, that corporate involvement with June gay pride is really tapering off. It's just surrendering to Trumpism. We may not even see it in the next year or so, or see very little of it. What I would wish—I wish two things. I've been saying this for decades. Number one, that when we do the June gay pride thing, that people talk to each other more and smile. I want that. Number two, that all these corporations actually do something for our community. There are community centers all over the country that are barely surviving. The one in New York is close to going under. That's how bad things are. It barely survived COVID. There are lots of avenues for these corporations to help our community. They're not doing it.

Martha: What I see with some of these floats is I don't see ordinary employees out there marching. What I see a lot of is corporate floats with very buff, half-naked young men dancing. I don't think these are the employees. I think these are people who are hired as part of the marketing thing.

Perry: I agree, but I always agree with Martha.

Kevin McGirr by unknown, 1971.

Allen: Regarding gay periodicals, I'm not familiar with a lot of them. I believe that the Philadelphia Gay News, whose publisher is Mark Segal, a member of the New York Gay Liberation Front, is very committed to the work that he does. I think that publication has maintained very good standards. Then there's a magazine published in Boston called Spirit Magazine. I feel that the magazine covers Boston and the rest of New England quite well, with a focus on local gay organizations and what they're trying to accomplish.

There may be some publications that have this corporate quality or just promote celebrities, but I don't think that we should dismiss all of the current gay publications. Going back to Fag Rag, there were things that were in Fag Rag that were very much directed in a way to a lot of the changes in culture. I remember co-authoring an article when the former head of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, died. The title of the article was “Hoover Goes Underground,” which was humorous. Adding humor was typical of Fag Rag. Charley Shively wrote a series of articles, one of which was “Cocksucking as an Act of Revolution.”

Perry: It was a revolutionary act.

Allen: Yes. Then, getting back to what we wrote, we tried to point out that J. Edgar Hoover, who was known to be a closeted gay man, talked about the role of closeted gay men in society and how we were not in favor of that, we were opposed to that type of closeted behavior that used repression. That's just a fact. “Freaking fag revolution”—Thomas Foran, who was a federal official who said, "We're losing our kids to the freaking fag revolution.” That's where that quotation comes from.

Perry: Yes. It didn't happen enough. They didn't lose enough kids.

August: If everyone could maybe just name one person from the gay liberation era you want to give visibility to that people don't necessarily know about or people don't talk about, someone who maybe impacted your life or you want to give a shout out to. Maybe we can start with you, Gary.

Gary: It would have to be Konstantin Berlandt. I suppose people who are deep into the movement know about Konstantin. He was relentless. He had his difficulties, and his problems, and his particular devil. He had his own internal things which he had to deal with. He was certainly the animating force in the early days of the gay liberation in Berkeley and so forth. He really gave a lot of his life to that movement. I would say Konstantin Berlandt for sure.

August: Was he doing this full-time? Was he like a full-time activist?

Gary: Well, at times, yes. He managed to get on some kind of welfare where he got a fair amount of money for a while. Then, later on…

Perry: He spent a year in drag, didn't he?

Gary: He did do drag sometimes. Quite amusingly. Sometimes with a full beard.

Perry: I thought Konnie did that. He spent a year in drag. I met him in New York when he was in drag and didn't recognize him.

Gary: I don't know if he was ever in full drag for a year. Not that I'm aware of, but he was in drag periodically for sure. He liked to outrage people. He didn't mind outraging people at all.

Perry: He was fabulous.

August: How radical was he like one through ten, one through armed revolution?

Gary: 12. He didn't have a gun. I don't think he was into armed rebellion, but anything short of that probably.

Allen: In the anthology that I co-edited with Karla Jay, Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, there's a lovely article written by Konstantin Berlandt. I think there's one that Gary Alinder wrote called “My Gay Soul.” I think that was published in Gay Sunshine. Yes. I would like to call out the name of Karla Jay. She was my companion for several books. She became a professor of women's studies and comp lit at Pace University. She's written a lovely memoir called Tales of the Lavender Menace. I certainly would recommend Karla Jay as someone who produced a number of books. If Martha Shelley weren't here today, I would certainly also recommend her and her memoir, which is also a very insightful and more recent publication.

Perry: There's someone whose name I would like to bring back alive. His name was George Thomas Finley. He and I were in the GLF together. He was like my GLF brother. I had many brothers, ancestors in GLF, but he was part of my GLF family. He tragically died of AIDS early on, and his loss just still pains me. His name was George Thomas Finley.

Kevin: One issue that came up for me consistently, and this was part of a tradition that we had or that we began with Fag Rag, and perhaps not the only publication that did this, was having an outreach to people who were inside prisons. If we think about a group of people, men and women who are subjugated and ostracized in any significant way, and in perhaps significant danger by virtue of their sexuality, their sexual orientation, I think the work that was done and the impetus for that work need to be honored and acknowledged.

August: What happens with people in jail? Especially with trans, too, what happens if people are in a different jail than how they identify, particularly trans women?

Allen: I'm not going to be able to answer your question, August, because I'm not familiar with it. I do want to say there's one very common bit of humor that I detest. That's when a young man is going to go to jail and people would say, “Oh, they'll take care of him in jail.” It's a reference to rape in jails. There's nothing funny about rape in jails. We must not make jokes about that. We should not allow straight people to make jokes about that. Rape of any kind, whether it's a man being raped or a woman being raped, is wrong, and it's not funny. 

August: Martha, would you like to speak about a person?

Martha: There was one person we do not have in our history, but who was a very influential person in my life, and her name was Marion Youers. She was my mentor when I was in Gay Liberation Front. She came over to the United States from France, although she was originally English. She had tremendous courage. She wasn't out here because she would have been deported because of her job and stuff, but she gave me books to read, and she inspired me in my work and defended me when I was being attacked.

My wife and I invited her after her partner died. She came to visit us in Portland, Oregon. Then she decided to stay in Florida for a while because she could swim all year round there. She was recovering from heart surgery. Then later she developed cancer. We brought her here and took care of her until she died. She died in 2016. Oh, my God. I wrote a poem to her. It might be a little, I don't know if I have time to read it, but I'll just read you the last few lines.

"My elder, my mentor, you who advised me on actions and elections, and the minor troubles of marriage, now I ask for another gift from you wherever you are. You left a hole in my heart. Fill it with your courage."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayRXU_u7F4Q

Related Stories

• Perry Brass, the New York City Gay Liberation Front, and Come Out! Oral History

• Martha Shelley, the Mother of Gay Liberation in New York City and the World Oral History

• Allen Young Gay Liberation and the Liberation News Service

• Gary Alinder, Berkeley Gay Liberation Front, Gay Sunshine and Beyond Oral History

• Gary Alinder and Tahara (Cockettes, Angels of Light) Oral History

About The LGBTQ History Project

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.