On 27 June 1969, New York City police raided the Stonewall bar on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village. The gay men inside didn’t meekly comply, but fought back. John Lauritsen looks back to a seminal moment in gay and social history.

Several police were injured during that raid forty years ago, and a dozen or so men were arrested. Two days of intermittent rioting ensued, and the Gay Liberation movement was born.

The day after the arrests, my lover and I walked over to the Village, to see what was happening. Police prevented us from going west of Seventh Avenue. The only sign of rioting we could see were a couple of burning trash barrels.

John Lauritsen
(By Robben Borrero)

Many myths have arisen over Stonewall. Many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people now claim to have been involved in the original altercation, whereas most of them (if not lying outright) were probably just in the neighbourhood, as were tens of thousands of residents.

Contrary to myth, the Stonewall was not a bar for drag queans; a few went there, but Stonewall was a typical gay bar of the time, with a diverse clientele, in which the “Ivy League” look predominated: chinos, button-down Oxford cloth shirts, Shetland sweaters, loafers, etc. Nor did drag queans spearhead the original resistance or the subsequent riots. Media photographers picked out a few drag queans, who enthusiastically postured for them, because this is the image they wanted: gay men should look like drag queans, not college men.

My movement

When I attended my first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in July, the new group had not yet decided on a name, and a fierce debate was taking place over whether it should align with the antiwar movement. Being a veteran of the antiwar movement, with my own battle scars (literally), I sided with the antiwar faction. We prevailed, and the name we chose, Gay Liberation Front, was taken from the National Liberation Front of North Vietnam. It ensured that GLF would be a radical organisation concerned with many movements for social change.

Anti-war rally,
Bryant Park,
NYC 1970
(Photo by John Lauritsen)

From the beginning I knew that this was to be my movement. I was thirty years old at the time, and had attended meetings of “homophile” groups in Boston and New York City. The older groups were brave for their time, but GLF was a giant step forward. No more semi-clandestine meetings. No more (as in Mattachine) obediently listening to “friendly” shrinks, who told us we should be tolerated and treated rather than imprisoned. No more special pleading or apologies. No more crap!

The first year in GLF was the most intense of my life: hundreds of hours discussing the theory of gay liberation; demonstrations; putting out Come Out!, gay liberation’s first publication; antiwar conferences; rallies.

At some time in the fall, the fateful decisions were made that GLF should have no structure, but rather consist of totally independent cells; that decisions should never be made by voting, but only by consensus.

As might have been expected, the result was chaos. Unable to make decisions in an orderly and democratic manner, GLF could never be a viable political organisation. Since officers could not be elected by voting, de facto leadership passed to those who were most skilful at behind-the-scenes manipulation and at shouting down others.

Since GLF kept no membership roster, anyone who attended a meeting could consider himself or herself a member of GLF, and could speak in its name. Anyone could form a cell, of any kind whatsoever, and could act under the GLF banner. In retrospect, the cells-but-no-structure decision may not have been entirely negative in its consequences. With the hippie slogan “Do your own thing” as the guiding principle, GLF at least provided a certain anarchic freedom.

Mimeographs

Since everyone had to belong to a cell, I and a few co-thinkers formed our own cell, which we whimsically named the Red Butterfly. In a nutshell, our approach was that of historical materialism: changed men are the products of changed circumstances. We believed that the potential for same-sex love exists in everyone, and can be liberated only though fundamental changes in society.

The Red Butterfly produced four mimeographed pamphlets. The first one, Gay Liberation, published on 13 February 1970, went through several printings – thousands of copies were sold in only a few months. The second pamphlet was a reprinting of Carl Wittman’s A Gay Manifesto, with comments by the Red Butterfly. The third was Gay Oppression: A Radical Analysis, and the fourth was my translation of a 1928 speech by the German philosopher Kurt Hiller: “Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform for the Benefit of an Oppressed Variety of Human Being”. (My revised translation of the Hiller speech is on my Gay Liberation page.)

(Photo by John Lauritsen)

Dissension grew within GLF until, in late November of 1969, several members split to form the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). Fed up with the chaos and bickering in GLF, and horrified by a donation GLF had made to the Black Panther Party, they wanted a single-issue organisation that would be run in an orderly and democratic way. In many ways I agreed with them, but nevertheless remained in GLF, loyal to its radical spirit and vision.

A very heterogeneous group, GLF included intellectuals such as the late Warren Johansson (then known by his birth name, Joseph Wallfield), perhaps the most important gay scholar in the second half of the twentieth century. I can still remember his taking me to my first Indian restaurant in 1969. For two decades, until he moved to Boston, he and Wayne Dynes and I met every week for dinner in either an Indian or a Chinese restaurant. (Our critiques of John Boswell’s pro-Christian apologetics are archived on the Pink Triangle Trust (PTT) website: see here, here and here.)

I was very fond of Bob Mellors, who, after his stay in New York City, co-founded the London Gay Liberation Front. Over the years, we corresponded with each other and exchanged publications. In the 1990s, I saw him again in London, where we attended a performance of Timon of Athens at the Royal Court Theatre. He moved to Warsaw, and seemed happy there – then his letters stopped.

A few years later, I learned that on 24 March 1996 he had been stabbed to death in his apartment. He was only 46 years of age, a lovely, gentle man.

First gay pride march

I was on the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee (CSLDC), which planned the first gay pride march. When the day of the march came, 28 June 1970, thousands of people from all over the country showed up – dozens of groups with banners. For the first few blocks, as we marched from Sixth Avenue to Sheep’s Meadow in Central Park, there were perhaps two thousand people, but, as the march proceeded, thousands more joined us from the sidewalks.

(Photo by John Lauritsen)

All along the way, people cheered us from the sidewalks or from windows and terraces of apartment buildings. I’ll never forget the joy and exuberance of the gathering in Sheep’s Meadow – of people who had come out of darkness into a glorious summer day.

These are some memories of the first year of Gay Liberation. Of course there is much more to be said: the disintegration of GLF in 1971; the emergence of GAA as the world’s premier gay organisation, roughly from 1970 to 1974; the proliferation of gay publications (Come Out!, Gay Liberator (Detroit), Gay (New York City), Gay Sunshine (California), Gay News (London), Fag Rag (Boston), Gay Community News (Boston), and many others); and the growth of gay scholarship, reflected in hundreds of books and articles and formation of the Gay Academic Union (GAU).

Gay Today

GLF and GAA deserve their place in history. Their full histories have never been written, and probably cannot be now, since too much time has passed and most of the important figures have died. The best account of the early years is still the first one, Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants (1971); Teal was on the spot, and was a founder of GAA. Joe Kennedy wrote an excellent history of GAA’s later years, Summer of ’77: Last Hurrah of the Gay Activists Alliance. Two founders of GAA, Marc Rubin and Arthur Evans, wrote articles on GAA history for the electronic publication, Gay Today.

Gay Today was edited from 1997 to 2004 by the legendary homophile activist Jack Nichols, who died in 2005. Nichols initiated the Gay Today History Project, which published many important articles.

Nikos Diaman maintains a website for GLF.

Links to the GLF website, to the Gay Today History Project and to the writings of Joe Kennedy, Marc Rubin and Arthur Evans are on the GLF and GAA websites listed below.

Forty years of gay liberation

Further reading