Picture this: You and the co-chair of your organization are sitting in the office of the President of your College requesting full status as a student group on campus. The College President says several times, “Do you have to call it the Gay Liberation Front?” while using the scissors in his hands for emphasis. Every time he made a point the scissors did too. This was creepy and, Hayakawa was a conservative Republican. But we insisted. After a while he put the scissors down, gave up, and finally agreed to the name, sighing loudly.
This was about a year after Stonewall, and we were feeling the need to do something. It was not an easy time to organize the queer community on campus. Most people were still afraid to come out. It was San Francisco before Harvey Milk’s wonderful take-off on “Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are”. And the United States was still embroiled in the Vietnam non-war war. Those of us who were queer and on the left politically, wanted to emphasize political commonalities with the Liberation Front name. Even the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society thought we were just a bunch of naive young upstarts. Well, perhaps we were!
We were certainly young and surely upstarts, but I don’t think we were so naive. Hopeful, maybe. But young people always seem to see things in a small, clear light, often missing the dark but illuminating other side of the picture around it, the dark side if the moon. At the time we were brash, gay, hopeful and proud.
Time passed, the non-war war in Vietnam went on, we demonstrated against Nixon and the war. San Francisco became an LGBT mecca and a safe haven for lefties. Eventually young people in the country didn’t seem to care any more if somebody was queer. Well, not all, but enough to notice. The 1970’s for the lesbian and gay community was mostly a party interrupted by some wild and intense politics. Still organizing, but in a different way, I’d decided to play music. With the power and effect of music it seemed possible to get to people’s hearts about an issue.
But then it all came crashing down. In 1978, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another Supervisor. He was a man who embodied the future Trump supporter, angry, afraid and prejudiced. White was prosecuted and found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, despite the fact that he snuck into City Hall through a window that day so the weapon he was carrying wouldn’t set off the metal detectors at the usual entrance.
Just a few years later, when AIDS hit, people around the country were all too happy to blame the whole pandemic on the people who were dying from it. Gay men lost businesses because nobody would come to places they knew were Gay-owned. Predominately Gay neighborhoods, like the Castro in San Francisco, started to feel more and more like ghost towns.
But somehow the Gay community survived the horrific epidemic. And while AIDS is not gone yet, medical achievements, in part spurred on by the Gay men whose lives were at risk in the beginning, have made it possible to live with AIDS.
As usual, just when you think you are actually getting somewhere, the backlash happens. The LGBT population survived through sick and sin, as my co-chair at the GLF at San Francisco State used to say. It had even become legal to get married. I didn’t expect that. But the current nasty streak in these United States has brought hatred and prejudice in the old scary way back into our lives. There are more than 500 anti-gay bills up in State legislatures all over the country right now. How has this hatred come back with such a vengeance? Well, as I once wrote in a song: “Who am I to have answers?”
Thx for the reminder of the ground breaking history in SF. I’m reminded of some of the excitement when
I fly out odfthe Harvey Milk terminal at SFO. It is an extraordinary celebration of Milk, but also
the history. Every one should see it, not just people on their way to where ever. DH
Rehearsing this history is painful but necessary. I lived it. Was drafted and spent all of 1970 in Vietnam, with a Specialist 4 rank, six months compiling mortality and morbidity statistics in the 58th Medical Battalion and six months as a helicopter medic in the 45th Air Ambulance Company. What a senseless war, and I was ashamed of how my fellow soldiers treated the Vietnamese civilians. Fast-forward to 1987, when my lover, Charley, died of AIDS. Such a scary time. Nobody knew anything. Paranoia ran rampant. Could you catch it from a toilet seat? Did you have to give up your dog to friends (as we did) because you feared every possible source of infection? Some of our closest friends just ghosted us (although that term was not in use then). But for all the friends that abandoned us, unexpected friends (especially lesbians) crawled out of the woodwork offering help. A life lesson I will not soon forget. As dark as some of those days were (and I don’t deny the happy times, too), I see dark clouds now as well. First, the specter of climate change, an existential crisis that we whistle by as we walk along the graveyard. Second, the hijacking of our democracy by a lunatic fringe. But we are not helpless, and we are in a better position now than we were then. We’ve learned how to size up the opposition and resist. Fight back, brothers and sisters. Run for office, especially school boards. A lucha continua, AP
How often the powerful decide that that hopeful are naive. Well, if hope is naive, I’m in.
You are such a good writer, Betty. So evocative of the events that quickened our lives. Your history at SF State (then College, now University) is an important moment in LGBTQ history. Have you located any archives at the library’s Special Collection department related to GLF in 1970?
Currently, I’m researching the Committee for Homosexual Freedom in San Francisco in 1969. Leo Laurence was the recently installed editor of Vector, the magazine of S.I.R. In the April, 1969 issue of Vector, Leo called for “Gay Revolution”:
[Since becoming editor, I’ve watched our so-called gay leadership in hundreds of meetings all along the west coast. Most of them are their own worst enemy, afraid to become militant, afraid to put personal conviction behind their hypocritical mouthings that Gay-Is-Good. / Only about one per cent of the homosexual leaders I’ve interviewed are willing to publicly say: “I’m gay and I’m proud!” About the only people with that kind of courage are the new breed of young gay kids. And that’s just why organizations like SIR keep them out. The old-timers are scared that these kids will come in and really create a gay revolution.]
That same week, the Berkeley Barb ran an article that reported favorably on the Vector editorial under the headline, “Homo Revolt: ‘Don’t Hide It.” After the Barb’s article hit the streets, it was off to the races. The young companion of Laurence who appeared in a shirtless photo in the Barb article (Gale Whittington) was fired the next Monday from his job as a clerk working for the States Steamship Line in downtown San Francisco. This led to the founding (by Laurence and Whittington) of the Committee for Homosexual Freedom and the daily picket line outside the Steamship Company headquarters on California Street.
Here’s a poster that the Free Print Shop (publishers of Kaliflower) printed in April, 1969, announcing the picket line. Note the psychedelic lettering of the poster, a sign of the blending of the gay and hippie communities.
Whoops. Doesn’t seem as if there’s a way to attach images. …