WARREN BLUMENFELD, PERRY BRASS, TAHARA

WASHINGTON, D.C. GAY LIBERATION FRONT; NEW YORK, NEW YORK GAY LIBERATION FRONT; BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA GAY LIBERATION

If there is one thing I want to be clear about, it is that, after the Stonewall Riots, a gay liberation revolution occurred worldwide. For the first time in history, LGBTQ people of all types fought back. The first liberation group was the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. After its formation, Gay Liberation Fronts popped up everywhere: Tallahassee, Florida, Lexington, Kentucky, Laurence, Kansas—everywhere. In the early 1970s, it was estimated that there were over 100 gay liberation groups. Zero to one hundred in a matter of moments.

In this oral history, we have Warren Blumenfeld (Washington, D.C. Gay Liberation Front), Perry Brass (New York City Gay Liberation Front), and Tahara (Berkeley, California Gay Liberation). This all-star cast discussed untold actions and forgotten comrades from the revolution. Stories need to be told because people were there and fought.

—August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

August Bernadicou: I'm going to start with Tahara. Tahara, what was the relationship between theater and gay liberation in Berkeley?

Tahara: Oh, you're already jumping way ahead of me. I was going to start by mentioning what it was like without gay liberation. I was raised in Texas. My father was a rodeo clown, and he was also a fundamentalist Christian. When I was seven years old in 1957, my father decided to put me into his rodeo clown acts, and I was to play his midget wife. I was seven years old. This is 1957, I started dressing in drag in the rodeo acts. I did that till 1968 when I was 17. We performed in hundreds of cities all over Texas, little towns all over Texas and Oklahoma in the rodeo act.

As a fundamentalist Christian, he hated gay people. Thought it was an abomination—Christian. I had two personalities in me. One was this closeted gay person that could never talk about it, never could act on it, wasn't allowed to show any feeling that way. Then this enforced heterosexual side where I had to show interest in girls and do things like play sports and stuff like that. I wanted none of that.

I had a secret life and a fake life, and I wasn't happy. I was living in Henrietta, Texas, a little tiny town. It was all cowboys, what they now call toxic masculinity. We moved to Dallas when I was 13, and there I met a boy in high school who was gay. His mother did not mind that he was gay. This is 1965, I think. His mother didn't mind that he was gay. He was so bullied in school, he almost never came to school. He missed a lot of school.

He and I met and became friends. He lived near me, so I used to go visit him. Like I said, his mother didn't mind that he was gay, so he had gay friends. That's when I first began to meet other gay men and see. It was a very small scene in Dallas, the gay scene, it really was. I was only 15. There was this whole element of underage and all that stuff. My mother found out somehow that I was involved with these men. My father, being a fundamentalist Christian—I had to go to Christian, what do they call it when they want to convert you away by praying the gay away stuff? What is that called? Christian conversion. I had to read the Bible four hours a day and answer questions. If I didn't get the religious questions right, I was beat and all that stuff. There was nothing, absolutely nothing gay at all in the world other than occasionally meeting somebody. It was nothing in the media unless it was a crime. It was a very dark life for gay people. Plus, I was  constantly bullied in school. Constantly. Sometimes quite severely.

Anyway, so I met him, and then I had to give him up. My friend, his name was Gary, the gay boy I met in high school. I had to give him up and start becoming heterosexual, dating girls and all that stuff. Finally, the Summer of Love happened. This is in '67. I said, "Oh, I got to go there. What am I doing here?" I left, went out to California. Within a couple of weeks after I got here, they formed a Gay Liberation group in Berkeley. I came to San Francisco. You've probably heard of the famous San Francisco summer. “The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer in San Francisco.”

To me, coming from Texas, in hot weather, summer in San Francisco was like winter. I moved to Berkeley. It was warmer over there. It was across the bay. I got into gay liberation, and I was really nervous. I wasn't out of the closet. I was a theater person. We wrote a play. We had meetings at one of the gay people's house. It was mainly the college boys, college students. It was, I think, 8, 10 of us, something like that. Most of them were going to U.C. Berkeley.

We wrote a play at our meetings. It was a gay play about being gay. It was based on Laugh-In, which was a popular TV show. You tell jokes and stuff. We performed it at the University of California, Berkeley on campus in the main square. There was a lot of protest in Berkeley in those days against the Vietnam War. At first, everybody came. They were excited, oh, another protest. When they heard it was gay, and we were talking about fucking ass and—there was dead silence. You could have heard a pin drop, and it was like 500 people there. Everybody was just like, "Oh, God, what is this?"

I was embarrassed. I had a line that said I had raped the entire Vienna Boys’ Choir. After the performance, everybody just walked away in dead silence. It was very strange, except I think there was a woman that liked it a lot. She was happy. That was the first thing we did in the gay liberation. We continued. We had protests. I can't remember how many times a week, but we had a lot of protests. We were protesting the bars, the gay bars at that time did not allow men to touch, or dance together, or anything. You had to pretend it was a straight bar, and it was just men in a heterosexual bar, something. We protested those places.

We also protested a lot. The gay bars in those days were still racist. They segregated. They did not allow black people into the white gay bars. We protested there. Of course, everybody pretty much hated us. The radicals liked us, but the, oh, God, it was, you could get beat up and stuff like that. Finally, The Examiner wrote an article about us. The Examiner, San Francisco's major newspaper, wrote an article about gay liberation and said it was all perverts, and it was sick, and the churches were outraged.

We protested there, and I was wearing drag. I was dressed up in Tibetan clothing and dancing. These guys on the roof, the printers of the newspaper, went up on the roof with a 50-gallon drum of purple ink, and they dumped it onto the sidewalk. There must have been a hundred of us there protesting, and it got all over everybody. 

There were some people in gay liberation, I should just mention them because they were such enormous figures. Pat Brown was one of them. He was one of these extremists, radical gay people. He wanted to burn everything, and the government needed to be overthrown. He was that one.

Then there was Gary Alinder, who August has interviewed. He was the leader of the group, and he was a college student at Berkeley. He was very practical about what we needed to do and what the focus was. Then the other one was Konstantin Berlandt. He was the vice president. I don't know if you've heard of him or not.

Perry Brass: Yes, we became close friends.

Tahara: He was a nice guy. I liked him a lot.

Perry: Most people loved him. He started Gay Sunshine, the paper Gay Sunshine.

Tahara: That's right. He was also very radical, another burn everything down person. We protested at The Examiner. Pat Brown screamed, "Put your hands in the ink and touch the handprints to the newspaper wall." People did, and it was soon covered with purple handprints. That was, as I recall, the first—I don't know about the East Coast, but the West Coast, that was the first symbol of gay liberation—the purple handprint. Then we protested some more and did all kinds of stuff, met a lot of people, a lot of interesting people.

Then after that, I got into theater with a group called the Cockettes. I won't go into all that. That's another story.

August: We have to keep it going…

Tahara: Wait. I'm just about finished. I promise. I just wanted to say all this because I think the prehistory is a little important, and what really happened in gay liberation other than just the historical dates and stuff. When I was in gay liberation, I was 18 years old. I had a hard time. Gay liberation was great. It was very liberating, and I felt free for the first time in my life.

I had an interior struggle with gay sex in that it was very difficult for me to have gay sex because every time I had sex, I would begin shaking horribly. It was all a reaction to the oppressive bringing up anti-gay I had to deal with. I don't think that was really discussed. It was discussed in psychiatric books. The gay liberation people, we never talked. We were too happy to talk about stuff like that.

Later on, I learned if I drank, I could relax during having sex and stuff. I started drinking then. That was one of the problems I had was intimacy. Also, I wanted a boyfriend, and it just didn't happen. Nobody was into me. I don't know why. You'd think you'd find a boyfriend, but no. Anyway, I'm sorry I took so long. I just wanted to explain a little bit. If other people want to talk for a while, I don't mind. I pretty much will just listen.

August: We'll go to Perry next in order. What did New York look like organizing on the ground, and what strategies did you utilize? 

Perry: Well, the organization that we had in the Gay Liberation Front was very much a person-to-person organization in the fact that we very quickly divided the GLF into consciousness raising groups. Each CR group had about eight people in it. There were guys' CR groups, women's CR groups, and then a couple of mixed CR groups. If you had eight people in a CR group, it meant that if you had to get something out, you would have these eight people, and they would talk to, let's say, each one would talk to five people. You'd have 40 people to deal with, to talk to, or they'd talk to maybe 10 people. You'd have 80 people to talk to.

Anyway, as far as organization, we didn't have the internet. We had almost no media except underground papers; although they were flourishing. I used to say that we did a lot of organizing between the sheets. You'd go out to bars and leaflet. People, because you were involved with gay liberation, a lot of people in New York were interested in what we were doing. There wasn't as much pushback in New York as I gather there was in San Francisco and Berkeley, especially in Berkeley.

You had people who were too repressed to come to us, but sometimes we would go to them. We did these amazing things. We started doing political organizing at the baths. We figured, this is a way to get guys who are not going to be coming to a meeting, who are often in the closet, but they want to know what we're doing. We'd do political organizing in the baths, we'd do it in the bars, we'd do it outside the bars. It was very much a physical connection with people. 

August: Can you talk about the protest in August that was at Times Square and worked its way down?

Perry: Yes, that's what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about an action that GLF was involved with that took place on Saturday, August 29th, 1970. What it was, it was a reaction to, here we were basically one year and two months after Stonewall, and the cops in New York were licking their chops again. They figured that there were going to be ways for them to make money, for them to do payoffs. There were a number of hustler bars in Times Square. They started going into these hustler bars and arresting people in the hustler bars for either male prostitution or consorting with prostitutes. This was really going on.

We heard from a number of guys who'd been arrested in the bars. There was a very famous bar called Blue, and they had arrested probably 80 people at Blue. A week before this action happened, some people came from Blue and they talked to the people in GLF and said, "We're really feeling it from the cops." The cops had slowed down a bit in their activities, certainly in the summer before, during, I should say, the earlier part of that summer. They had slowed down their activities because right after the first march, the Christopher Street Liberation Day march in June, it was like they couldn't be shits anymore for a while, so they were slowing down.

Then we're in August and the machinery's going back again. I'm sure a lot of this was they wanted more payoffs. The Gay Liberation Front, the Gay Activist Alliance, the women's group Radicalesbians, and I think also the Gay Youth group that was involved with GLF, we came up with this idea that we would do a big demonstration in Times Square on 42nd Street.

I went down there with my GLF family, which was basically a wonderful man named Tom Finley whom I lost to AIDS, and about three other guys I was very close to, for physical and moral support. There were, I would say, 300 people in this demonstration. What we did was we just walked up and down one block of 42nd Street, which I'm sure was between Broadway and 8th Avenue, with signs. There's a piece in the GLF newspaper, Come Out! about it. This shows the cover of Come Out! you can see.

Martha Shelley, who was one of the leading voices in GLF and at Come Out!, wrote this wonderful piece called Gays Riot Again. It was about what happened at this demonstration. We were picketing up and down this block of 42nd Street. You have to remember, at that time, 42nd Street was considered the cesspool of New York. It was filled with porno shops, with prostitution, all those wonderful, oh, legit theaters that had once had spas in them had become like third-run movie theaters with a lot of sex going on in the balconies.

I mean, 42nd Street had become a place that you didn't bring kids anymore. It was also—the cops were always on the move in that area in Times Square because it was a good area for them to nab people. It's like if you want money, you go rob a bank. If you want to arrest people, you go to Times Square. We did this for, I would say, an hour, and then the cops started to literally circle us and mash us, letting us know that if we didn't get the fuck out, we were going to be arrested.

The word got around, we've got to leave and quick. We all started, I would say, walking at a fast trot Downtown. I was with, like I said, my GLF family, these guys I was very close to. We walked Downtown, and another word got out that at the same time that we were having this demonstration in Times Square, they were busting a hustler bar in the West Village. A lot of the protesters went to that hustler bar in the West Village to protest, and then the cops from the West Village precinct started to swoop down on them.

Basically, what happened was a lot of people from GLF ended up at 6th Avenue and 8th Street. You probably don't realize that there's a part of 6th Avenue that's very wide when it hits 8th Street. The cops had stopped the traffic, so that became this theatrical ground for something to happen. The cops brought in what they called the tactical police force, which was their anti-riot, anti-demonstration squad.

The tactical police were hated all over New York. They were the ones who usually beat up peace demonstrators, threatened gay demonstrations. They brought them in by the busload. All these tactical cops were there. They started grabbing us, literally grabbing anyone who looked gay, anyone who was out on the street. The GLF people, and there were women involved too, started to really fight back, just fight back physically. I was away from the main action, but I could see it. I was witnessing this action. The cops had brought out their riot lights, so there was a lot of light going on there.

I saw several guys that I knew from GLF physically opposing the cops. One of my GLF brothers, a marvelous guy named Bob Bland, who had recently come out and had been involved in heavy duty anti-war activities, confronted a cop and scissor kicked him in the face. This did not go over well, and they grabbed Bob Bland. They got him and led him away.

I was just in this state of heavy duty anxiety and euphoria. It's like, "My God, we're really doing it here." I didn't expect that things would reach that level, that some of us would physically confront the cops. There was blood on the street. The cops were doing things like cracking skulls with their nightsticks. It was real, people had to be hospitalized. One of my gay brothers, he ended up putting the blood on the streets on his cheeks and face.

He went back into the West Village screaming, "Look at me. I've got the blood of my brothers on my face!" This brought lots of people towards him—he was on Christopher Street. It was just this demonstration that we were now serious. This was a life and death blood situation with the cops. It made what happened at Stonewall look prissy actually. I think about 16 people from GLF were arrested. I was not one of them. Luckily, my friend Tom Finley—I don't think he was one of them. Tom later got arrested at May Day in Washington in 1972 when we had the May Day, was it three?

Warren Blumenfeld: '71.

Perry: '71. That was just the next year. I went down to Washington for the May Day demonstrations. I will say nothing I saw in Washington was like what I saw on 8th Street and 6th Avenue in that August. As I was saying, Tom got arrested in Washington. A number of my GLF brothers got arrested in Washington, but I did not get arrested. I think that this action in August of '70, which was two months after what we call the Pride March, the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, it really showed a lot of people how serious the activists in New York were, how serious the guys and women in GLF were, how serious GAA was, the fact that we were going to stand up for ourselves.

The thing that's interesting about this also is that GLF was very much against hustling and prostitution. We just felt that as an anti-capitalist organization, prostitution was at the apex of the capitalist group of sins, of what was wrong with capitalism. Forcing people, especially Third World people, into prostitution. We were very much against that. Whereas the guys from the Gay Activist Alliance, who were much more libertarian, their attitude was, "Okay, so you want to sell your body? That's your business."

Our attitude in GLF was that you shouldn't be forced to sell your body. You shouldn't ever have to do this. We were very much against hustling and prostitution. We also felt that a lot of the men who were the real victims of prostitution were guys who were in the closet, and we had to do something for these men. We had to fight their being arrested. We had to have some empathy for them. I think that was part of the genius of GLF, that we could go outside of our own comfort range and say, "We will put our bodies on the line for people who would probably never support us because they're in the closet, but we have to have empathy for them."

August: Who's one person you would like to highlight? I know you mentioned a couple names already, but is there anyone from those days that you want to highlight and give visibility to?

Perry: I mentioned Bob Bland, who died fairly, well, I'd say, at this point, he probably died about eight years ago. Bob is somebody who I wish would be more remembered. The person that I always want to remember is Michael Brown. Michael Brown was one of the first people to get involved in GLF. He came from a working-class union background. He became a voice of the Gay Liberation Front. In fact, The New York Times used to have what they called the quote of the day in every edition of their newspaper. They had a quote from Michael Brown that said something like, that after Stonewall, the world will never be the same. I'd love to remember Michael Brown. He was one of my favorite people from that first year of GLF.

August: Thank you, Perry. 

Tahara: I just say, Perry, thank you. Stonewall inspired GLF in California. That's what got Berkeley. Those college guys got that from you and Stonewall.

Perry: It inspired GLF in London.

Tahara: Thank you.

August: All over the world.

Perry: Can I just mention one other thing? That is that, now in New York at a gallery called Printed Matter, there is a show about the Gay Liberation Front, Third World gay revolution, and other aspects of gay radicalism in the late '60s, early '70s. I don't know if you're going to get over to see the show, but it's a fabulous show. It's at a place called Printed Matter, 231 11th Avenue, which is 11th Avenue at 26th Street. On Wednesday, August 29th, Flavia Rando and I will be talking with you, with August, about GLF from six o'clock to eight o'clock PM.

August: Everyone who can go needs to be there. We'll go to Warren now. In DC, you had the Gay Liberation Front, in some ways, under the shadow or so close to the federal government. Can you talk about the relationship between gay liberation and being in the nation's capital? Then, of course, we can talk about the APA convention.

Warren Blumenfeld (left) by David Aikens, 1971.

Warren Blumenfeld: Eventually, I will be talking about the American Psychiatric Association conference demonstration we had in May of 1971. We were in the nation's capital, the bowel of the country at the time. Richard Nixon was President, which was very difficult in many ways. I just want to first pick up on something that Tahara talked about, about the public discourse about us, the hegemony that the society had perpetrated about who we are and who we were.

I came up with this saying a while ago that a major tenet of liberation is having the power and the freedom to define oneself. We didn't have the power to define ourselves at that time. Tahara was talking about religious institutions calling us sinners, heretics, and God-haters. Politicians and the law consider us to be criminals, subversives, and anti-American. They called us perverts.

The thing that I'm going to be concentrating on mainly today is how the medical and psychological professions defined us as physically different, as sick, as deformed, as insane, mentally ill, neurotic, pathological, abnormal, deranged, and subhuman. It was very difficult, as Tahara was talking about, not to internalize societal notions of ourselves. In the Gay Liberation Front in Washington, D.C., in the early '70s, we did a lot of work on ourselves to try to get these tapes that we had learned about ourselves within the society, and change those tapes. Erase those negative tapes of ourselves and try to have some positive tapes.

One of the things, we had these consciousness-raising groups. Basically, the Gay Liberation Front in Washington was based on second-wave feminism. Feminists taught us so much about society, about how we had internalized our own oppression. We used what second-wave feminists called consciousness raising groups. We didn't have a leader, but these were self-therapy groups that we would sit around, and discuss how we had inhibited our ability to be a real person.

As Harry Hay would say, "We pulled ugly green frog skin of heterosexual conformity over us, and that's how we got through school with a full set of teeth." Harry Hay probably would be the person I would say we need to know more about. Harry Hay. He started the Radical Faeries out of Gay Liberation. He was also a member of the Homophile League.

Tahara: He was there before we were.

Warren: Yes, before us. His shoulders, we stood on, and Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, the Homophile League. We can't look at the Gay Liberation Front without the context of who came before us as well. In these consciousness-raising groups, we started to deal with our own internalized oppression. Tahara was talking about how it was difficult to have sex with someone of our own sex because we had been raised hearing how it's perverted, how it's sick, how it's dirty.

We read this wonderful book, a wonderful essay, which I think was from Gay Sunshine. I'll say it here, How to Get Fucked and Like It. We never learned in our sex education class, which was basically a high school class that taught us not to have sex until we get married to someone of the opposite sex and blah, blah, blah. We never were taught how to have anal intercourse. We read this article from Gay Sunshine, How to Get Fucked and Like It.

We handed around this article, and we discussed it in our consciousness raising class, in our Gay Liberation Front meetings in Washington, D.C. To me, one of the major tenets of liberation is having the freedom and the power to define ourselves. Before going into Gay Liberation Front, we were considered a diagnosis. Through Gay Liberation Front, we became an identity.

That, to me, was so freeing. We went from a medical, or a political, or a legal diagnosis to a verified identity. The whole thing about being homosexual, or heterosexual, or bisexual is a social construction. There were no homosexuals before the mid-19th century. One of the preeminent queer historians, John D'Emilio, talks about how the whole notion of homosexuality was invented in the 19th century in the capitalist industrial age. Before then, we had same-sex sexuality, but then, the medical profession invented the homosexual. They invented it. It's a social construction.

In the mid-20th century, were this diagnosis. We started to deconstruct these notions within a gay liberation, within a feminist, within a Radicalesbian space. We contested these definitions, and we formed these bona fide identities. The issue I wanted to talk about today is that I lived in D.C., and we said the revolution came to us. It was great.

We joined with Vietnam Veterans Against the War to protest the Vietnam War in front of the Capitol Building. We demonstrated against the Venceremos Brigade, which was this group in the United States supporting the dictatorship of Fidel Castro, who put queer people in prisons. We demonstrated against them. During the May Day demonstrations in 1971, I was a member of the Gay May Day Coordinating Committee. We coordinated housing for other queer people who were coming to Washington. Our major demonstration was we slept in a church, a free church in Georgetown.

Perry: I think I was in that church. I slept there with you.

Warren: I think that's where we met each other.

Perry: Could have been. I was so much younger. I'll tell you.

Warren: No, I'm 78. How old are you?

Perry: So am I, so much younger.

Tahara: I'm 75. August, you're how old?

Warren: He's 78, too.

August: 31.

Tahara: 78?

Warren: Oh, no, August. August is 31.

Tahara: All right. How old are you, August?

August: 31.

Warren: We slept in that church. We got up at dawn. We snuck to Rock Creek Parkway. Our demonstration was, we sat in Rock Creek Parkway was a major thoroughfare that brought workers into Washington. We sat on the parkway and stopped traffic until the police came. We got up and then we sat in another place on the parkway. During that time, coincidentally, right before May Day, May 1st, 1971, was the American Psychiatric Association's national annual conference at the Shoreham Hotel. At this time, the American Psychiatric Association had defined in their diagnostic and statistical manual—.

Perry: DSM-III, I think.

Warren: Let me see. I have it right here. Let me see back there. Okay. In 1952, in their diagnostic and statistical manual one, homosexuality was called a sociopathic personality disorder. 1968, in their diagnostic and statistical manual two, it was a sexual orientation disorder. I have a lot of background stuff on that, but I'm not going to go through that right now.

Basically, we found out they were meeting at the Shoreham Hotel. We were planning to do a demonstration there because the year before, in San Francisco, at the annual conference, there was a gay liberation protest there, and some of the protesters actually got in. There was a compromise. The organizers of the next year said that they would allow a panel discussion in a small workshop dealing with non-therapied, LGBT people who were not in therapy, who would give a workshop on feeling good about being gay.

There were three people who were chosen for that workshop. Barbara Gittings, who was the chair of the Daughters of Bilitis in Philadelphia, Jack Baker, who was the first out university student body president in the University of Minnesota, and our good friend and mentor in many ways, Frank Kameny, from the Mattachine Society in Washington, D.C. They were our Trojan horse.

I had spoken a few times on a panel with DOB, so I knew Barbara. I knew Franklin. We were friends, basically, and I just met Jack Baker. We negotiated with them that they would be in the main plenary where only members of the Psychiatric Association and their guest speakers would be present.

We went to the Shoreham Hotel the night before, and we went through the parkway. We put this book of matches in the locked door, and we put it in there so it wouldn't lock. There were many of us from Gay Liberation Front in Washington, D.C., and also many people from out of town who were there for the May Day demonstrations. We had all these people dressed up, slumping. It's better to be flagrant than latent.

Perry: I was there also. I had no idea what was going to happen then. The idea that you'd have Gay May Day, first, all of May Day, this huge demonstration, Gay May Day, with guys and women from all over the country coming into Washington, and then the shrinks, it was spectacular.

Warren: Spectacular. We went in there. We came in the back door through the parkway. We went into the lobby. At a certain time, our Trojan Horse, Barbara Gittings, and Jack Baker, and Franklin Kameny, opened wide the doors to this grand ballroom in the Shoreham Hotel, and in walked the queens. We just overtook the place. We demonstrated in the front row of the plenary session with these old white men with these medallions around their chests, gold medallions, for their 93 years of service and blah, blah, blah. They were being honored.

We walked right in front of them, and they started hitting us, "You're sick, you're sick," with their medallions, with their gold medallions. You're sick. "We're sick? You're hitting us with your medallions, and we're sick?" I yelled at them, "That's projection." They're psychiatrists. They should know what projection means. We get towards the stage. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark is on stage giving the plenary address. The Secret Service grabbed him.

Franklin Kameny jumps to the stage, and gets to the microphone before they shut it off. He said, "We are here to declare war on the psychiatric profession. We're here to declare war." Then they shut the microphone off, and then the police started coming in. We joined hands so they wouldn't whatever. They finally got us out of there. I don't remember any arrests. This was big news in the queer journals.

Steven Grossman (left), Ronald Helman, Miles Brown, and Perry Brass (right) by unknown, 1973.

Tahara: Can I just ask, how many of you were there?

Warren: Oh, probably 40, maybe 50. There were several members of GLF at the time. There were probably 40 members of GLF. Not all of them were able to come. Also, we did have the LGBT people from around the country joining us for May Day. This is where I met a lot of people because we coordinated the Gay May Day demonstration. I don't know if Perry, you were in the tents on the mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Perry: I was in the tent.

Warren: We had a Gay Liberation Front tent that was set aside for people who wanted to have sex in front of Lincoln. It was outrageous.

The next year, the conference was in Dallas, Texas, again with Frank Kameny and Barbara Giddings. There was an out psychiatrist who wore this Nixon mask. He was Dr. Henry Anonymous. He talked about being within the American Psychiatric Association. One year later, 1973, the subcommittee of the body of the American Psychiatric Association voted that we were no longer sick if we felt comfortable with who we are. One day, I was sick. The next day, this panel votes, I'm no longer sick. Not only are we discussing the social construction of identity, we are looking at the social construction of disease as well.

Tahara: Beautiful. That's a wonderful story. That story, I think, should be called the Battle of the Psychiatric Association. It's famous. Thank you.

August: Do you mind spending a moment just talking about one person from back in that time you want to give visibility to?

Warren: Bruce Pennington, who is a primary member of the Gay Liberation Front. We had a house, 1620 S Street, in Northwest Washington. When I first moved to Washington, the house had already been established. I walked in and he was there dressed with his full beard, makeup, and dress. He looked at me and said, "Welcome to the gay milieu of Washington." If I ever wanted to have a smile put on my face, Bruce Pennington understood that right away. He seemed not to have internalized a lot of the crap that I had internalized. Also, my good friend Michael Ferri. Michael Ferri, he's still alive in Washington State. Brilliant.

He was the editor of—August, I gave you a copy of the Motive magazine. Michael Ferri was the editor of Motive magazine. It's an Episcopal magazine that their last issues were a gay men's liberation, and a lesbian double issue. Michael edited the gay men's issue that has Perry Brass's poetry in it. It has an article I wrote. I was also the director and founder of the National Gay Student Center in D.C. I went around the country helping student groups on campus form LGBT chapters around the country. Bruce Pennington and Michael Ferri I would really like to single out.

Perry: I wrote this big account of Gay May Day for Come Out. I think it may be the only written-down account of Gay May Day. Unless, Warren, you know of another one.

Warren: Yes, we wrote some. Also, the Stonewall Project in D.C. has a whole website. We were interviewed by the Queer History Project in D.C. There's a whole website on Gay May Day in Washington.

August: Don Kilheffner, who is in the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, says it's important not to call it homophobia, but heterosupremacy. Can you talk about the difference between those two, and if you agree or not?

Warren: I call it heteronationalism. Homophobia, as we know in psychology, a phobia is irrational fear. This is not irrational. It's taught. It's learned. It's not like being afraid of spiders or elevators. That's not what we're talking about.

Perry: Yes, I agree with you.

Warren: Heteronationalism, it's like white supremacy. It's like Christian nationalism. We have to put it in the same context as a form of oppression, not as an irrational fear.

Perry: One of the first things I learned in GLF was that at the top of all of this was patriarchy. You have this isosceles triangle. At the top of it is patriarchy. On the left corner of it is sexism. On the right corner of it is homophobia. It's because we're considered traitors to patriarchy. Sexism was one of the main ways of preserving, keeping, and encouraging patriarchy. Queers and lesbians are traitors to this form of enforcement that men will always be on the top, women will be on the bottom.

People who don't define themselves through the traditional roles, we have to be eliminated. I think the elimination was incredibly thorough through most of certainly American history. We got this, I think, from the English. I really think we got so much of it from the English because the French had already legalized homosexuality through the Napoleonic Code, which the English would never go near. England was just hell on us.

Warren: We can't take out Christianity from this.

Perry: Absolutely. Totally.

Warren: From the third century in Rome, when Christianity became the major state-supported religion—I put it all together. Patriarchal, heteronational, Christian, white supremacy. It's all interconnected.

Perry: I agree. Wonderful.

August: Tahara, do you see the rights attack on trans people to be the entryway to oppressing all LGBTQ people?

Tahara: Look who's in charge. We've got Adolf Trump telling us who we are now. They took those transgender off the Stonewall monument. I'll be honest, I just still haven't quite figured out what cisgender is. I think I've got transgender down okay. I think now you can say trans. You don't have to say the whole thing transgender. That's where I'm at. What did you call it? Homophobia versus heterosexual normalcy or something?

Warren: Before trans people lately have been attacked, I think it came about earlier by going after women and reproductive freedoms. It's all connected. The same person that wants to own a woman's body is the same person who wants to own my body, who wants to own a trans body. All of these are really the same people who want to own a person of color's body, an  immigrant’s body. We can't pull out one particular form because hypocrisy functions on making internal enemies.

The woman who wants to control her body is an internal enemy. The gay person who wants to have sex with someone of their same sex or other sexes, that's the enemy. Trans people are the enemy. Immigrants are the enemy. People of color are the enemy. People with disabilities are the enemy. Now they're going after trying to cure autism. Just don't take ibuprofen, and you won't have any more of those weird autistic people. It's all the same. It's the embodiment of ourselves that they have vilified.

Tahara: It's nothing new. They had it in Nazi Germany. They had it in Cambodia. They had it in Rwanda. It's all the same. It's still happening. It's just happening to us now. We're paving. We're moving forward. Look at what GLF was in the days we were in it when we had so little, and now how it is. You've got all over the world pride parades.

Perry: I think we gave them permission. We were the models who gave them permission.

Tahara: The inspiration we had. We were tired of it. Why not? One thing, August, I'd like to mention, which I feel is important, talking about gay liberation, this is 1969 in Berkeley. It was mostly men. The women didn't join. Lesbians didn't join the gay men very much. It was mostly gay men, and then the lesbians did their own thing. At the demonstrations, they would come together. There were not a lot of lesbians, mostly gay men in the Gay Liberation Front. All the people that came were struggling, like I was, dealing with their sexuality, what it meant, how it worked.

Of course, all these men, most of them, I would say, had been rejected by their families. They had nobody they could fall back on. They had given up friends and things like that. The big thing at that time in Berkeley gay liberation was you have to come out. Come out, come out, be who you are. It was very difficult to come out. It was very difficult. I told friends I was interested, but I didn't tell my family at all. I didn't tell them until I was 20 years old. It was very difficult to come out. Some people didn't seem to have as much trouble. They had parents that did not hate them or anything. There were some people in gay liberation.

There was one man named Mother Boats. Everybody called him Mother Boats. Have you heard of him? He's not very well known. He was a fun guy, though. He decided to come out. Everybody said, "Write to your mother and tell her you're gay." He wrote to her. She wrote back this three-page handwritten letter. It was as dark and as betrayed—abomination as you could get. They had gay liberation, Gary Alinder, and Gay Liberation were publishing Gay Sunshine by that time. They published her letter in an issue of Gay Sunshine. A week later, he killed himself.

Perry: I think I remember that story. Was the letter called something like Letter from a California Mother?

Tahara: I think that was it. It was in Gay Sunshine. Nobody expected his death. There was another man in gay liberation, too. His name was Preston. He was studying psychiatry, I think, a young guy. When he came out, he became despondent, and he hung himself. The only reason I'm saying this is because gay liberation wasn't just a lot of fun. We're here, we're queer, everybody loves us. It was a lot of difficult times. I never went to jail. Did either of you go to jail? You did?

Warren: I went to jail. In the gay liberation group, we were marching towards the South Vietnam Embassy during May Day. We were holding hands, walking in the middle of the street, and the police arrested us, called us all these names, before we even got to the embassy. We were six people put in a two-person cell. 98 degrees all night. I have claustrophobia. We just held each other in this really hot, stuffy cell all night. That's one of the risks you take when you do a demonstration.

Tahara: Were you naked?

Warren: No, I'm sorry. I had a T-shirt on and shorts, but I was hot.

Tahara: Oh, it was hot. It was really hot.

Warren: No, I was hot.

August: Perry, back in the day, how did you respond to people who thought you were too radical, or was your entire world just radical people?

Perry: There were people who thought I was too radical, and they were what we used to call bougie. My main feeling was, give these people about five years, and they'll be on my side. A lot of the time, that did happen. Mostly, what I did was, I just felt like, I felt like, why wasn't everyone doing what we were doing? It wasn't so much that we were too radical. It was like, why the hell were they holding on to their own oppression? Then I told people this, it took me about 30 years to understand. It wasn't so much that they were holding on to their own oppression. They were holding on to everything else that they had.

They were holding on to their paychecks, their fear that they'd never be employed again, their own fears. They had become just controlled by their own fears. They had this huge fear of what was going to happen if they did come out, if anyone knew about them. They would be rejected by their families. I had no problems with that. I had no problems with being rejected by my family because I had rejected them by the time I was 15 or 16 years old. I decided that what I was was too significant to be controlled by my family.

Tahara: Did they put you in a psychiatric hospital?

Perry: Are you joking? I would have bit their balls off. I tell you, I was a pesky kid. I was not going to allow shit to happen to me. I tried to kill myself at 15. Once I recovered from that, it was like, "Okay, all bets are off. I'm going to be in control now."

Tahara: Were you living in New York then or…

Perry: No, I was living in Savannah, Georgia.

Tahara: Oh, my God.

Perry: Which was an extremely segregated, totally segregated society.

Tahara: How are y'all doing?

Perry: How are y'all doing? Yes, exactly.

Warren: I've gone around the country at workshops, doing workshops specifically on internalized oppression for minoritized peoples who have incorporated those messages from society. Many people at those workshops don't understand how much they've internalized. Sometimes I don't have enough Kleenex boxes. People are just weeping when they start to see—in some ways, we come out, we're activists, we're out there doing it. We've got to do the internal work as well. We can't just do activist work. When I was four years old, my parents sent me to see a psychologist. Four years old until I was 13. Twice a week, I was taken out of my classes, brought to the psychologist for the express purpose of making sure that I did not grow up to be gay. I was "effeminate" at age one and a half, they said. They thought I was gay at age one and a half. Basically, for nine years, I was taken to the psychiatrist. When I got there, he told my parents, "Don't let him wash the dishes… only take out the garbage," because garbage is manly. Doing the dishes is feminine.

They were such binary gender roles. Then, when I didn't even know why I was there, and I didn't talk to the guy, he said, "Okay." He took down a model airplane or a boat, or a truck, and for the next 50 minutes, we would construct this model toy, whatever, which was more masculine than if I play with dolls. I wanted to play with dolls. What's the thing? When you are brought up in a family that thinks you are the symptom, it's hard not to internalize that.

Perry: Absolutely.

Tahara: You're coming out gay on top of it.

Warren: It was like, what else is new when I came out to them?

Tahara: Why were they so anti-gay? That's just really weird to think of a one-and-a-half-year-old child, they can tell it's gay. It sounds really weird. It's like a cult. 

Warren: This was 1949, 1950.

Perry: Absolutely.

Warren: That was the norm at the time.

Perry: The funny thing was that they completely conflated homosexuality with communism when no group of people hated queers more than the communists. It's like whatever they didn't like, they all put them together, like communism, queers, Blacks. If you were for integration, you had to be a communist.

Tahara: It's in the Bible. It's an abomination.

Warren: Communists didn't believe in the Bible.

Tahara: They believed it after a while.

Warren: It was a matter of bourgeois capitalist degradation. It was a sign of communism from the capitalists.

Perry: Exactly.

Tahara: The thing they don't understand is the Republicans at that time wrote it and put it in the Bible. That's why it's there. They had Republicans in those days. They were some other name, but it was the same group.

Warren: I tell my students, this is everything Jesus ever said about homosexuality right there.

Tahara: Right there. They didn't say anything.

August: When you look back, is there anything you would do differently in the gay liberation movement? Anything that comes to mind?

Perry: Yes. I think we should have embraced more working people. We should have seen, not looked at, people simply by their attitudes. I was approached by gay cops, and I was just horrible to them about how you can be a cop and be gay? I should have been more supportive of them. This was a long time back. We should have worked more to realize that the human struggle to survive is so difficult that we were in a privileged position, that we could do what we did and still survive. A lot of people just didn't have that privilege.

Warren: Very well said, Perry.

Perry: Thank you.

Tahara: You were very brave, also. All of us were very brave, but what did we have to lose?

Perry: Absolutely.

Warren: That's it.

Tahara: It was the time for it, too. Everybody wanted more freedom. Black, women. It was a beautiful time, but I think now it's a little more frightening. I don't know. What do you think nowadays?

Warren: What I would have changed is that we were trying to defeat binary thinking while also practicing it. The way that I practiced binary thinking is that if you were in the military and supporting the war, that you were against us in many ways. I learned I was wrong marching alongside Vietnam vets against the war. I started seeing them as allies. I started seeing them no longer the enemy. They were mainly working-class people who didn't have any other options in society than to join the military. They taught me a lot about non-linear, non-binary thinking.

Perry: I think things are scarier now because so many people are under economic duress that it's hard for us even to imagine it. There's something like 30 million people in America who are three paychecks away from being homeless. There are another 30 million who have no health insurance at all. A trip to the emergency room would bankrupt them.

Tahara: Me included.

Perry: Things are black, white, and horrible for a lot of people.

Tahara by unknown, circa 1970.

Perry: We were also a lot younger. You have to understand that the whole movement, most of the people in the movement, certainly in my time in GLF, were under 30. The horrible health consequences that come on later were just completely foreign to us. I had no health insurance. I didn't care. I just put a Band-Aid on anything. Food and rent in New York—New York at that point was probably the cheapest of all the world cities. It was cheaper than living in London. It was cheaper than living in Paris, cheaper than living in Rome. Of all the great world cities, New York was the cheapest, so you could live in this great, sophisticated world city under a money situation that allowed you to do what you wanted to do.

Warren: I slept under my desk in the…

Tahara: It was a lot of fun, too.

Warren: Yes. I slept under my desk in the National Student Association, or I crashed on the floor of the GLF house. The thing that I'm grateful for is that it was still a time that people connected personally. We didn't have cell phones. We didn't have the internet. We didn't have social media. People went to each other's homes. We talked with one another face-to-face. That really created a more unified sense of community. We were in the community literally. We weren't in it virtually.

Tahara: I came to California, to Berkeley in '69. At that time, the hippies were there. They had a thing called crash pads. If you were from some other place, you'd meet some people, and they'd say, "Stay with us." It'd be seven or eight people in a room, all in a house. There was bedding. They were stable. You could go back night after night, and you got to be roommates. Nobody had much money. It'd be somebody that would pay the rent. The rents were cheap then. I stayed in that one mostly when I was in gay liberation.

Then, after I'd been out here seven or eight months, I finally got into a house with a group of people who were not crash pad people. Crash pad people are always coming and going. I'm surprised we didn't have crabs all the time. We never had crabs. I don't remember any of that. I moved into a house where it was just a regular group of people. I still didn't have any money. Somebody paid the rent, and then I lived there. That's how I survived until panhandling. Did either of you ever panhandle?

Perry: No, I never did that. I did enough other things, but I didn't do that.

Tahara: I had to live by panhandling. Then, finally, I got on what they called Aid to the Totally Disabled. It was a government program, federal government, with California input for people who were insane. They decided I was insane. Anyway, they gave me that.

Perry: They used to call it Crazy Welfare.

Tahara: That was only three years after I came here. During the whole time, I lived in group housing with other people. Somebody paid the rent. We all were doing theater, so we had a common purpose. That was the reason. It was a lot easier to survive in those days. I think then it wasn't as expensive—young people, especially living together in groups, could cut down expenses, all that stuff. It was fun. Frightening. I had a couple of freak-outs on LSD when I was in gay liberation. Those were horrible.

August: This is multi-part, but what would you say to all of the people who are younger who aren't awake right now?

Perry: I would say just wait a year and see how it's going to affect you. That's what I'd say—but don't wait a year because it is going to affect you. The other thing is, we have this terrible conflict between anxiety on one side and complacency on the other. People are very economically anxious, but our media-saturated culture makes people very complacent. There's nothing I can really do about this. It's overwhelming to me. That's a road to your own destruction and ruin.

I would say to people, don't get caught up in that. You've got to become active. You've got to do something for yourself and for others you care about.

Warren: I'd like to take the other side of it. I'm a college professor, and I'm around young people. They have given me this optimism with their feisty resistance, with their refusal to follow the binary stereotypes of male, female, cisgender, transgender. They're teaching me all the time about the real changes that are happening even within this fascist government that we are living in. They gave me the language to self-define. I no longer call myself gay. I've never felt male and I've never felt female, but I was always in this—considered to be a gay man. They gave me the language to call myself, I just came out like five years ago, out of another closet, as an agender person.

I don't relate to the concept of the social construction of gender, that we are put in these boxes of male or female. I've never felt either, so why do I have to claim either?

Tahara: That is defined, they believe, by your testicles or your vagina.

Warren: They taught me that that doesn't have to be, that I don't have to define myself because I have a protrusion instead of the other way between my legs. It doesn't define me, it never really did, and I don't have to claim that anymore.

Tahara: If you did not tell them that, they would define you by your sex organ. They don't know that themselves, but you tell them that now.

Warren: I tell them that, and if they still want to consider me male, my parents consider me effeminate. What is effeminate? What does that mean? It means that I'm not living up to the expression of masculinity.

Perry: Expectation.

Warren: Expectations, really. It's like I put on what I feel like I want to put on that day. I don't think about it, do I want to look butch today? I couldn't anyway, but do I want to look butch today, or do I want to look femme today? I just put on what I feel comfortable. Young people…

Tahara: America is obsessed with sex.

Warren: Young people, I think, are helping me, anyway, get out of those binaries. I see a bright future because of the young people today.

Perry: I agree about—there are a lot of young people who are amazing, absolutely amazing. I'm learning a lot from them myself. You also have the young Republicans, the young militias, but they are amazing. Yes, I agree.

Warren: We stood on the shoulders of the Homophile League. They stood on the shoulders of people in Germany in the 1890s, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. They are standing on our shoulders now.

Perry: Absolutely.

Warren: In some ways, we never had to think about pronouns. We wanted to stay alive. We wanted to not get killed. We've given them the luxury of thinking about mispronouncing, which is great. That is because we have paved a way for them now to fight for being correctly pronounced.

Tahara: I was talking to one of these people that didn't like all the transgender stuff. She said if they were as conservative as Caitlyn Jenner, she would be okay with them.

Warren: My answer to that, it's not your privilege to be against trans people. You're not going to define what a trans person is. Get over it. Grow up.

August: My thing, though, is I know a bunch of people who are woke, but they're not doing anything.

Perry: I agree.

August: They have these ideas, like you're talking about, Warren, and it's all nice and helpful, but they're just talking and not doing anything. Of course, there's…

Warren: I'm a Holocaust scholar. My grandfather lost his entire family, and he lived with us.

Tahara: I’m sorry.

Warren: I was named after my great-grandfather, who was murdered by the Nazis. One of the things we learned about the Holocaust, it's not so much those who are against us, but it's the people who know what's going on and do nothing. The bystanders have the balance of power within any republic, any country, and any kind of a trauma. If the bystanders become active, we can stop all this crap that's going on in the world. Many of my students, once or twice a week, I get these letters from the health center at my university saying, "I'm sorry, but blank won't be able to complete their assignment for the next few weeks because she's in a mental hospital.”

I get this all the time. We're amongst a traumatized generation from COVID, from what's going on in our country right now. For those who want to do something, you can't do something until you have something to give. If people don't have something to give and aren't doing anything, that's fine. You do it when you have something to give. Some people right now are so in a state of anxiety and trauma, I get why they're not being kind.

Tahara: Those who can should do something, not just sit quietly. Here's the problem. I know a lot of people, they don't like to get involved in politics. They lose friends. They don't get invited. They feel guilty about going to places and stuff like that. A lot of young people also have jobs, which, when I was young, nobody had a job. It's changed a lot. They have to work. To rent a place now is thousands of dollars. It's not cheap anymore. These people that don't do anything, at least here in San Francisco, even if they don't do anything, they're on the right side. At least if they vote or something, I'm not saying voting is the answer because you know how that is.

San Francisco is a very liberal city. We have a lot of support. New York's also very liberal, I believe, isn't it?

Perry: Yes, somewhat.

Tahara: I don't like it. I'm still very rebellious and very open-mouthed about it, especially on Facebook. I've been kicked off nine times for insubordination. I had a good friend who was an early gay pioneer, also, a little bit after me, but he was one of the creators of the rainbow flag, the pride flag, the rainbow, back in those days. He would always say, "Do it on their dime." He'd say, "If you get kicked off, go back and post more radical stuff. Do it on their dime." Instead of getting offended and saying, "I'm not going to…" I kept doing it. I've learned how to do it now. They don't throw you off anymore.

Now everything's okay to say on Facebook, as long as you don't threaten anybody directly. I've been protesting a lot on Facebook, all this radical stuff constantly, because of the situation. Nobody else wants to do that. I have 400 friends on Facebook, and only two people who speak to me. I don't know. I think all the people I am friends with, I know what side they're on. I get a lot of these people in Colorado, Oklahoma, Virginia, places like that, that are fanatic Trump guys. I noticed a lot of them are ex-military. Their wives, a lot of them, for some reason have long blonde hair, but as their wives get older, they become more frizzled and frazzled looking and wrinkled.

A lot of the men wear camouflage hunting jackets. Their passions are guns, sports, cars, boats, and hunting. Hunting is huge. Bag a deer.

Warren: There's two things that I would recommend, though. One, for the queer people out there, even if you're not out there active, take your emotional temperature. Try to think of the ways that you've internalized some of those negative notions of who you are within yourself to try to heal. Number two, learn our history. I really want to thank August for specifically focusing on the Gay Liberation Front. You are getting into the nuances. You're bringing out the people and the events that happened. I'm really grateful to you and your project, that is saving our history. The older I get, I realize I have a history. I was a part of queer history.

I really admire the history projects who are resurrecting this history so it's not lost to old times.