Gay power circa 1970: Visual strategies for sexual revolution

GLQ

Volumn 12, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 441-464

  Meyer, Richard ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 33744797957     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2005-011     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. On the marginalization of the gay liberation movement from cultural and historical accounts of 1960s radicalism, see Terence Kissack's indispensable essay, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York's Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971," Radical History Review, no. 62 (1995): 104-34.
2. Among the books cited by Kissack that either minimize Stonewall or ignore it altogether are James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: from Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Bantam, 1987);
3. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; and the otherwise wide-ranging anthology The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayres, Aders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Frederic Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
4. See Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Button, 1993);
5. Donn Teal, The Gay Militants (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), 17-23.
6. The New York Times, by contrast, published a one-column article without illustrations in its June 29 edition with a shorter follow-up, again without pictures, on June 30. See "Four Policemen Hurt in 'Village' Raid," New York Times, June 29, 1969;
7. "Police Again Rout 'Village' Youths," New York Times, June 30, 1969. Notice that the Times's headlines narrate the event from the perspective of the police rather than from that of the rioters.
8. As the cultural historian Scott Bravmann has noted, "Though obviously staged for the camera rather than a 'live action' shot, the ... photograph provides the closest approximation of an on-the-scene visual image of the riots, its campily posed subjects continuing to garner anonymous fame with recent republications of the picture" (Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]. 76).
9. The graffiti on the brick wall above the front window to the bar reads "To fight for our country, they invaded our rights."
10. Robert Taylor, for instance, mentions "two hundred or so patrons" of the Stonewall bar who helped initiate the riots and adds that "soon their numbers doubled, then tripled. . . . The riots continued the following night, when about four hundred policemen ended up battling a crowd of more than two thousand" ("Gay Rights in America," in Gay Pride: Photographs from Stonewall to Today [Chicago: A Cappella Hooks, 1994], xxii).
11. Lillian Faderman similarly estimates that "two hundred working-class patrons - drag queens, third world gay men, and a handful of butch lesbians-congregated in front of Stonewall and . . . commenced to stage a riot" (Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America [New York: Columbia University Press. 1991], 194).
12. Duberman estimates that "two hundred or so people . . . were inside the Stonewall" when the police raid began. Many of these patrons joined the "growing crowd and mounting anger" outside the bar, a crowd that ultimately "swelled into a mob" (Stonewall, 193, 197, 198).
13. The GLF described itself as "a militant coalition of radical and revolutionary homosexual men and women committed to fight the oppression of the homosexual as a minority group and to demand the right to the self-determination of our own bodies" ("What Is Gay Liberation Front?" flyer, spring 1970, cited in Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries," 107).
14. Come Out. January 10, 1970, 2.
15. The founding of gay liberation newspapers such as Come Out, Gay Flames, and Gay Power (in New York City), San Francisco Gay Free Press and the Berkeley Tribe (in the Bay Area), Fag Rag (in Boston), Killer Dyke (in Chicago), and Gay Liberator (in Detroit) between 1969 and 1972 marked an unprecedented degree of visibility - and self-generated press coverage - for the radical gay movement. On the flowering (and rapid decline) of gay liberation newspapers, see Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995).
16. According to press reports, four police officers (and an unrecorded number of rioters) were injured on the first night of the confrontation.
17. Lucian Truscott IV, "Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square (A View from Outside)," Village Voice, July 3, 1969.
18. Lucian Truscott IV, "Gay Power Comes to Sheridan Square (A View from Outside)," Village Voice, 1969 Ibid.
19. Martha Shelley, "Gays Riot Again: Remember the Stonewall!" Come Out, September-October 1970, 3-5.
20. Jill Johnston, "Of This Pure but Irregular Passion," Village Voice, July 2, 1970.
21. This first anniversary of the Stonewall riots marked the inauguration of the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, which evolved into the Gay Pride Parade first in New York City and then in cities and towns around the world.
22. Allen Young, "Out of the Closet: A Gay Manifesto," Ramparts Magazine, November 1971, 8;
23. rpt. as a pamphlet by the New England Free Press and in Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (1972; rpt. New York: Jove/HBJ, 1977).
24. Like their counterparts in Black Power and Women's Liberation, gay liberationists viewed the city streets as a key site of political contestation. Urban gay visibility symbolized the liberationist insistence that homosexuality was not simply a private matter but one of public defiance and collectivity. Thus the popular gay liberation slogan, "out of the closets and into the streets" or, in a more pointed critique of psychiatry, "off of the couches and into the streets."
25. See John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
26. Duberman, Stonewall.
27. On the rhetorical strategies of the homophile movement, see Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
28. See Duberman, Stonewall, 112.
29. Duberman, Stonewall Ibid., 111.
30. Duberman explains Hujar's staging of the photograph: "Ultimately, some fifteen people showed up to be photographed. And Hujar had them run back and forth, back and forth, down the deserted street, shouting and laughing in triumph. ... In the final poster, the fifteen [sic] marchers crowd the center, and it only gradually becomes clear that the sidewalks behind them are empty; these ebullient troops seem to have no backup forces. What also becomes apparent is the nearly equal number of men and women - though in GLF itself the women were far outnumbered" (Stonewall, 273-74).
31. According to D'Emilio, "Lesbians were active in both early gay liberation groups and feminist organizations. Frustrated and angered by the chauvinism they experienced in gay groups and the hostility they found in the women's movement, many lesbians opted to create their own separatist organizations. Groups such as Radicalesbians in New York, the Furies Collective in Washington D.C.. and Gay Women's Liberation in S.F. carved out a distinctive lesbian-feminist poetics" (Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities. 236). This split was indicative of larger divisions between gay male and lesbian subcultures at the time, divisions that would become deeper and more ingrained throughout the 1970s.
32. According to Young. "By the Spring of 1970, many of the GLF women began a separate caucus, and before long this turned into a new. separate group, the Radicalesbians. The lesbians were responding to a situation in which they were wasting their energies pointing out sexist attitudes to men. They decided to respond to their unique situation as pay women, and they were joined by many lesbians from the feminist movement who had not previously associated with gay liberation" (Allen Young, "Out of the Closets, into the Streets," in Jay and Young, Out of the Closets, 26).
33. Martha Shelley, "Gay Is Good," Rat, February 24, 1970.
34. rpt. in Jay and Young, Out of the Closets, 31.
35. Bevier's poster appears in the foreground of a memorable photograph of a GLF meeting in 1970 by Diana Davies. For a reproduction, see Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman. Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Penguin, 1998), 163.
36. The name of the Gay Liberation Front was loosely modeled on the National Liberation Front, the formal title of the Vietcong. See Robert Ridinger, The Gay and Lesbian Movement: References and Resources (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 64.
37. Gay Revolution Party Manifesto in Jay and Young, Out of the Closets, 344.
38. According to Streitmatter, the commercial version of Gay Power "was published by a straight entrepreneur interested only in exploiting the gay community for financial gain" (Unspeakable, xi).
39. See, e.g., the letters to Gay Power printed in the first several months of the run of that journal.
40. See Richard Meyer. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Boston: Beacon, 2004), 168-83.
41. Duberman, Stonewall, 274.