Gay Liberation in New York: Year One
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THE 1960’S IN AMERICA, when I was an adolescent, was a dark time for gay men. A man’s life could be ruined if it were known that he harbored homoerotic desires, even if just in the head. In the political hysteria fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, gay men people were purged from government jobs and driven to suicide. Men who loved other men were incarcerated in mental asylums, castrated and given electric shock treatment.

Realizing what I wanted and was, I read all the available literature on homosexuality, most of which was ignorantly and viciously anti-gay. In college, my outlook was forever changed by reading Plato’s Symposium (assigned in two different classes in my freshman year) and John Addington Symonds’ A Problem in Greek Ethics. I came out sexually, and a lot of things happened. I got to know intimately the gay underground in Europe as well as in Boston and New York City. I attended a few meetings of homophile groups in Boston and New York, and I threw myself into the anti-war movement.

When the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) formed in July 1969 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots, I was ready and waiting. The photographs reproduced here are from the first year after the GLF’s founding. In retrospect, I only wish I had taken more, but when you’re young and immersed in a radical cause, you tend to neglect Posterity.

During my first few months in the GLF, much of my time was spent working on Come Out!, the first publication of the group. The photo here shows some of the original Come Out! staff. I was on the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee (csldc), which planned the first gay pride march, which took place on June 28, 1970. For the first few blocks, as we marched from Sixth Avenue to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, there were perhaps 2,000 people, but as the march proceeded, thousands more joined us from the sidewalks. All along the way, people cheered us from the sidewalks and from windows and terraces of apartment buildings. I’ll never forget the joy and exuberance of the people who had come out of darkness and into the sunlight to gather in the Sheep Meadow on this glorious summer day.

One photo shows a counter-demonstrator on Sixth Avenue at which a “Sodom & Gomorrah” sign is held, but it looks like a few organizers in search of an audience. Several photos were taken in the Sheep Meadow, where we gathered after the march. In one, a little boy is trying to hold up a “Gay Pride” sign much taller than himself; I like to think his mother or father was among the marchers. In another photo, the slogan “Suck Cock to Beat the Draft” on a T-shirt reminds us that in 1970 all young men had to register for the draft and, if called, there was a good chance that you’d be sent to Vietnam and killed or maimed, while one way to beat the draft was to admit to having homosexual tendencies, which got you the coveted 4F classification (unfit for service).

The photo of two black men by the “Gay People Support All Oppressed People” sign was not posed; I just happened to push the shutter at the right time. The good-looking blond in the tree holding the GLF banner is “Jackie Hormona” (a street name, needless to say), who was a major participant in the Stonewall Riots. The occasion on which this photo was taken was an anti-war rally in Bryant Park in the spring of 1970.

Mention should also be made of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), founded by GLF members who split off in November 1969, though unfortunately I have no early photos. The complete stories of GLF and GAA 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 scene from the outset and was a founder of GAA. Joe Kennedy has written an excellent history of GAA’s later years, Summer of ’77: Last Hurrah of the Gay Activists Alliance. Other books of interest are Toby Marotta’s The Politics of Homosexuality (1981); editor Vern L. Bullough’s Before Stonewall: Activists for Gay and Lesbian Rights in Historical Context (2002), and David Carter’s Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (2004).

Two founders of GAA, Marc Rubin and Arthur Evans, wrote articles on GAA history for the electronic publication, Gay Today (which was edited from 1997 to 2004 by the legendary homophile activist Jack Nichols, who died in 2005). Nikos Diaman maintains a website about the GLF. Links to the GLF website, to the Gay Today History Project, and to the writings of Joe Kennedy, Marc Rubin and Arthur Evans, can be found at paganpressbooks.com.

Scenes from the Sheep Meadow in Central Park following the first Christopher Street Liberation Day March, June 28, 1970. All photos by John Lauritsen.

John Lauritsen’s books include A Freethinker’s Primer of Male Love (1998) and The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (2007). He maintains a website at paganpressbooks.com, where more information on the GLF and GAA can be found.