Butterflies, whistles, and fists: Gay safe streets patrols and the new gay ghetto, 1976-1981

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 100, 2008, Pages 61-85

  Hanhardt, Christina B ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 38849094663     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2007-022     Document Type: Article

References (144)

1. "Notice of Public Hearing, City of New York," Community Board 2, Manhattan, New York. Author field notes, May 6, 2002.
2. The Stonewall Inn was a popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. On June 28, 1969, patrons challenged a police raid, then a routine feature of gay bar life. The riot continued for three days and included innumerable arrests. It is also credited for inspiring the gay liberation movement. Scholars and activists tend to agree that those arrested at Stonewall were a mix of transsexual women, gay men, street kids, and lesbians. There is less of a consensus about how many were people of color and about the significance of a butch lesbian who resisted arrest and inspired the militancy of others. The elision of people of color, women, and the gender nonnormative from the story of Stonewall is often cited to support arguments that those at the center of the now mythical riot have been left out of the consolidation of a mainstream movement. For different versions of the Stonewall riots, see Donn Teal, The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation Began in America, 1969-1971 (1971; New York: St. Martins, 1995);
3. Toby Marotta, The Politics of Homosexuality (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981);
4. Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1993);
5. David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin's, 2004);
6. and John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the University States, 1940-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
7. For discussions of the treatment of Stonewall as myth, see Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
8. Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Susanna M. Crage, "Meaning and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth," American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 724-51;
9. and John D'Emilio, "Stonewall: Myth and Meaning," in The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002),146-53.
10. Terence Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York's Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971," Radical History Review 62 (1995): 104-34.
11. "A Report To Our Neighbors," flyer, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Records, 1970-2000, Collection 7301, Box 48, Folder 4, Human Sexuality Collection, Kroch Library, Cornell University; "Police Pay Respect to Angels," The Villager, March 2-8, 2005. The San Francisco Street Patrol was a project of the Queer Nation focus group DORIS SQUASH (Defend Our Rights in the Streets / Super Queers United against Heterosexism). In their newsletter they listed New York street patrols with which they were associated, including the Christopher Street Patrol and OutWatch (paper insert, San Francisco Street Patrol Newszine, July/August 1993, and paper insert, San Francisco Street Patrol Newszine, September 9993 sic, Box 1, Folder 1, San Francisco Street Patrol Records, 98-17, 1991 - 1993, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society [GLBTHS).
12. For further discussions of the approaches taken by the San Francisco Street Patrol, the Christopher Street Patrol, and the Pink Panthers (an offshoot of New York's Queer Nation), see Edward Elhauge, "San Francisco's Queer Street Patrol," Ideas & Action, no. 16 (Fall 1991): 24 (included in Box 1, Folder 10, San Francisco Street Patrol Records, GLBTHS),
13. and Sara Miles, "The, Fabulous Fight Back," Out/Look 17 (Summer 1992): 54-59.
14. John Voelcker, Nina Reyes, and Andrew Miller, "Panthers and Angels Arrive on Christopher Street," Outweek 60 (1990): 18.
15. Residents claimed that the neighborhood had been taken over by "the Bloods and the Crips" and "the dealers, the hookers, the pimps, the johns" ("Notice of Public Hearing, City of New York," Community Board 2 [CB2], undated document faxed from CB2 office on April 24, 2002); "vicious drug dealers and hostile transgender prostitutes" and "rowdies" (Wendy Dixon, "Alice Certainly Doesn't Live Here," Greenwhicb sic Village Block Association News, flyer, CB2); and "an army of occupation" (Albert Amateau, "Queer Youth and Residents Still at Odds on Park Use," The Villager, December 14-20,2005).
16. For a discussion of the racial and sexual politics of the neighborhood, see Martin F. Manalansan IV, "Race, Violence, and Neoliberal Spatial Politics in the Global City," Social Text 23, no. 3 (2005): 141-55;
17. Fenced Out! (video), dir. Paper Tiger Television with the Neutral Zone and FIERCE! (New York: FIERCE, the New Neutral Zone, and Paper Tiger Television, 2001). That their targets are people of color is not only coded by geography; in 2006 a neighborhood resolution explicitly named the "problems" as LCBT African American and Latino youth. It read: "Whereas problems have arisen involving noise and also involving some rowdyism resulting from large crowds of young people, mostly lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth of African-American and Hispanic origin leaving Pier 45 at 1:00am on Friday and Saturday nights."
18. Quoted in Duncan Osborne, "Piers Fears Go Racial: With No Christopher Street Solution, Community Board Faults LGBT Youth of Color," Gay City News, March 9-15, 2006.
19. For background on quality-of-life policies in New York City, see Tanya Erzen, "Turnstile Jumpers and Broken Windows: Policing Disorder in New York City," in Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York City, ed. Andrea McArdle and Erzen (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 19-49.
20. Counteractivists, primarily representing nonresident LGBT youth of color, also attend these meetings, demanding that they, too, should be eligible to give input, insisting that their safety is also at stake, and defining the area's violence in terms of police brutality, race- and gender-profiling, inflated property values, and resident vigilantism. The primary activists are members of FIERCE! (Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment), representing transgender, lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirit, queer, and questioning youth of color in New York City. See www.fiercenyc.org (accessed May 18, 2007).
21. It is useful to note that Greenwich Village, like much of New York City, is primarily a renter economy. Participants at community meetings include a mix of renters and home owners, yet they all unite behind property value. But not all of them stand to gain from a rising tax base and an inflated rental market; for them, property may be something other than their home. As of 2000, the residents of Community Board 2 were 74.8 percent white; in addition, the two census tracks along the waterfront boast median incomes Of $125,295 and $72,418 versus the two relevant areas of the neighborhood core at $58,202 and $57,567. Thus whiteness may be a value added to real estate, but it may also be, following Cheryl Harris's argument, a kind of property unto itself. See Cheryl L. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement, ed. Kimberlé Crenshaw et al. (New York: New Press, 1995), 276-91.
22. A few examples of the immense literature on post-1960s urban politics include David Boesel and Peter H. Rossi, eds., Cities under Siege: An Anatomy of the Ghetto Riots, 1964-1968 (New York: Basic Books, 1971);
23. John Mollenkopf, The Contested City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983);
24. Roger Friedland, Power and Crisis in the City (London: Schocken, 1983);
25. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996);
26. Rhonda Williams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
27. Valerie Jenness and Kendal Broad, Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997);
28. Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet, Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001); Gregory M. Herek and Kevin T. Berrill, eds., Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992);
29. David M. Wertheimer, "The Emergence of a Gay and Lesbian Antiviolence Movement," in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, ed. John D'Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), 261-78.
30. Many of these sources also theorize the relationship between sexuality and race in the law and thus are particularly relevant to my analysis. See Judith Butler, "Burning Acts, Injurious Speech," in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 43-69;
31. Kendall Thomas, "Corpus Jurís (Hetero) Sexualís: Doctrine, Discourse, and Desire in Bowers v. Hardwick," in A Queer World: The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Martin Duberman (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 438-51;
32. Siobhan Somerville, "Queer Loving," GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11 (2005): 335-70.
33. The dominant literature on gay gentrification has focused on how the professional structure, economic activity, and electoral politics of white, upper-income gay men have transformed local neighborhood markets. See Manuel Castells, "Cultural Identity, Sexual Liberation, and Urban Structure: The Gay Community in San Francisco," in The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-Cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 138-70;
34. Damaris Rose, "Rethinking Gentrification: Beyond the Uneven Development of Marxist Urban Theory," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2 (1984): 47-74;
35. Lawrence Knopp, "Some Theoretical Implications of Gay Involvement in an Urban Land Market," Political Geography Quarterly 9 (1990): 337-52;
36. Lawrence Knopp, "Sexuality and Urban Space: A Framework for Analysis," in Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, ed. David Bell and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1995), 149-61;
37. Stephen Quilley, "Constructing Manchester's 'New Urban Village': Gay Space in the Entrepreneurial City," in Queers in Space: Communities/Public Places/Sites of Resistance, ed. G. Brent Ingram, Anne Marie Bouthillette, and Yvette Retter (Seattle: Bay, 1997), 275-92.
38. Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
39. Christopher Swope, "Chasing the Rainbow: Is a Gay Population an Engine of Urban Revival? Cities Are Beginning to Think So," Governing, August 2003, www.governing.com/textbook/gays.htm (accessed August 1, 2007).
40. Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, 256. "Canaries of the creative age" is Gates's term, and the "last frontier" is Florida's. In his follow-up to Rise of the Creative Class, Florida cites Lower Manhattan as a prime area for development using his theory of creativity.
41. See Richard Florida, Cities and the Creative Class (New York: Routledge, 2005), 155-70.
42. In Rise of the Creative Class, Florida concludes, "It appears that the Creative Economy does little to ameliorate the traditional divide between the white and nonwhite segments of the population. It may even make it worse" (262-63).
43. In an article penned by Christopher Street Patrol members in 2005, they described a series of criminal acts from the area and concluded: "What have been the Village's greatest assets - its acceptance and diversity - have become its greatest liabilities." Dave Poster and Elaine Goldman, "Gay Youth Gone Wild: Something Has Got to Change," The Villager, September 21-27, 2005.
44. For a history of bohemianism in Greenwich Village, see Maurice Stein, The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960);
45. and Sally Banes, Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performance and the Effervescent Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
46. For a discussion of bohemianism and urban renewal, see Richard Lloyd, Neobohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006).
47. See D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities;
48. and Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
49. For discussions of informal resistance to state violence, see Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community (New York: Routledge, 1993);
50. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994);
51. John Howard, Men Like That: A Queer Southern History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
52. Safe streets patrols popped up and almost as quickly disappeared across San Francisco and New York during the 1970s. All were short-lived, and many were more stunts than sustained vigilance. The two discussed in this essay featured members and strategies that became central to the antiviolence movement that followed.
53. The focus on New York and San Francisco is not incidental. These cities were home to the two antiviolence projects that became the anchors for the national antiviolence movement, Community United against Violence in San Francisco and the New York Anti-violence Project.
54. Both the feminist antirape movement and the LGBT antiviolence movement grappled with debates about the role of the state in combating violence. Both were majority white movements that were slow, and often resistant, to including people of color. Both tried to balance social service provision with grassroots activism, and to better understand their relationship to crime victims in general. Both movements also experienced tension between the ethos of local organizing and the visions of national movement building, the legacies of post-1960s radicalism and the pressures of immediate reforms. See Nancy A. Matthews, Confronting Rape: The Feminist Anti-rape Movement and the State (New York: Routledge, 1994);
55. Maria Bevacqua, Rape on the Public Agenda: Feminism and the Politics of Sexual Assault (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000). These commonalities existed despite that fact that many lesbian and women of color activists were taking a different approach to violence during these years, often refusing police collaboration, Lesbians against Police Violence in San Francisco and the Combahee River Collective in Boston are but two examples.
56. Penalty enhancement is a key goal of much hate-crime legislation, which itself has been a top priority of the national antiviolence movement. For a critique, see the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), "In a Time of Broken Bones: A Call to Dialogue on Hate Violence and the Limitations of Hate Crime Legislation," and "AFSC's Position on the Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act (LLEEA)," www.afsc.org/lgbt/fighting-violence.htm (accessed May 15, 2007).
57. This conflict is not restricted to New York. A similar debate erupted over the placement of housing for homeless queer youth in San Francisco's Castro in the early 2000s. See Jennifer Beck, "Be Queer ... But Not Here! Queer and Transgender Youth, the Castro 'Mecca,' and Spatial Gay Politics" (PhD diss., University of California at Santa Cruz, 2005);
58. Amy Donovan, "Telling Me Different: An Ethnography of Homeless Youth in San Francisco" (PhD diss., New School University, 2002).
59. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston, Beacon, 2003), 50-51.
60. Alexandra Chasin, Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market (New York: St. Martin's, 2000).
61. For an analysis of the function of retail commerce in gay enclave history, see Michael Warner, "Zone of Privacy," in What's Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2000), 75-113.
62. Duggan, Twilight of Equality, 46-47.
63. See "On the Frontlines with Howard Wallace," Political Affairs.Net: Marxist Thought Online, April 2004, www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/113/1/29.
64. For a discussion of the differences between the gay liberationism as represented by the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and break-off organizations like the GAA, see Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries." On BAGL, Arra Miller, "BAGL," Gay Sunshine: A Journal of Gay Liberation 24 (1975): n.p. (Xeroxed copy in Gay Sunshine, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS);
65. Hal Often, "Gay Liberation Growing with BAGL, "Voice of the Gay Students Coalition, April 18, 1975 (Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS). Elizabeth Armstrong is among those who names gay liberation to be "over" by 1971.
66. Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Forging Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 81.
67. "Can Gay People Get It Together in San Francisco?" Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS. Also see Hal Offen, "Gay liberation Growing with BAGL."
68. Randy Alfred, interview by the author, San Francisco, August 11, 2004.
69. "Second BAGL Birthday Party," flyer, nd., Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS.
70. "Progressive Gay Caucus - Principles of Unity," Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS.
71. "Gay Action Statement of Purpose," Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS; Hal Offen, "From the Left," San Francisco Sentinel, November 18, 1976. A year following, in August 1977, the Richard Heakin Memorial Butterfly Brigade broke off from Gay Action into an autonomous organization (letter, August 31, 1977, Butterfly Brigade subject files, Folder 1, Randy Alfred subject files and sound recordings, 1992-24, GLBTHS). Gay Action was later renamed Lesbian and Gay Action (Lesbian and Gay Action, flyer, n.d., Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS).
72. Ron Lanza, "Butterfly Brigade: Love and Rage," San Francisco Sentinel, June 30, 1977.
73. Randy Alfred, "From the Left [column]," San Francisco Sentinel, December 16, 1976.
74. My description of the Butterfly Brigade is culled from interviews I conducted with three former members during the summer of 2004 in San Francisco: Randy Alfred (August 11, 2004), Hank Wilson (August 9, 2004), and Ben Gardiner (August 16, 2004). Alfred's papers are held by the GLBTHS. He also helped organize a panel about the Butterfly Brigade in June 2002 at the San Francisco Public Library, which is on a video held by GLBTHS. Alfred continued his journalism and support of local gay activism. Hank Wilson did health and housing advocacy and was an original member of CUAV in the 1980s. He was also a cofounder of CUAV in the 1980s. Ben Gardiner became a vocal and contentious activist in response to AIDS. Although my analysis of the implications of the Butterfly Brigade may differ from theirs, I admire the passion and longevity of their commitments. They were also very generous in their time with me. Also see Hank Wilson and Harley Kohler, "Butterfly Brigade: Not About to Disband,"San Francisco Sentinel, July 14, 1977;
75. Randy Alfred, "Patrolling the Streets," San Francisco Sentinel, December 16, 1976;
76. Steven Rubinstein, "CB Patrols Protects S.F. Gays," San Francisco Examiner, January 24, 1977;
77. "San Francisco Police Approve Butterfly Brigade," California View, August 10 - September 1, 1977.
78. "Gay Action: Notice of Anti-gay Conduct," Butterfly Brigade subject files, Folder 1, Randy Alfred subject files and sound recordings, 1991-24, Box 1, GLBTHS.
79. This may also suggest that members of the brigade considered race irrelevant. Yet, as I discuss later, the Butterfly Brigade emerged around the same years that the gentrification of the Western Addition began. This was joined by a public and activist discourse that cast gays as white and local black residents as homophobic. Because the group failed to note the racial identities of those attacked, violence against gay people of color was either subsumed under the single category of antigay or risked nonrecognition. The cards and letters are filed in Butterfly Brigade subject files, Folder 1, Randy Alfred subject files and sound recordings, 1991-24, Box 1, GLBTHS.
80. Wilson, interview.
81. "Opinion: Self-Discipline in Gay Community," Editorial, San Francisco Examiner, June 27, 1977.
82. Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin's, 1982), 175.
83. Despite Shilts's own investment in the patrol's masculinity, its members often disavowed it, See Ron Lanza, "Butterfly Brigade: Love and Rage," San Francisco Sentinel, June 30, 1977.
84. This association was less troubling to Manuel Castells, who wrote in a footnote: "A typical gay around the Castro may be characterized as having short hair and a moustache, and dressing in a t-shirt, jeans, and leather jacket. This 'code' serves to increase visibility and communication amongst gays as well as helping to identify intruders and potential attackers" "Cultural Identity, Sexual Liberation and Urban Structure," 410.
85. Alfred, interview.
86. Gardiner, interview. Gardiner described the perpetrators as largely from the suburbs, but he also highlighted a separate problem of economic violence committed by African American men from the Western Addition. Alfred described threats as coming from a racially diverse group of young men, primarily between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three. He noted Dolores Park (a divider between the two areas) to have been a historically dangerous area and added that lesbians, rather than gay men, encountered verbal harassment in the Mission. This was in opposition to Randy Alfred's descriptions that he published in the San Francisco Sentinel that more systematically noted white assailants. See Randy Alfred, "Antigay Violence: Any Time, Any Place," San Francisco Sentinel, June 30, 1977.
87. Emphasizing that developers were the main motor of a real estate industry that excluded, among others, low-income gays, Gayle Rubin wrote that "in San Francisco, competition for low-cost housing has exacerbated both racism and homophobia and is one source of the epidemic of street violence against homosexuals." Rubin, "Thinking Sex," in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove et al. (New York: Routledge, 1993). In an article discussing the range of positions gay activists were taking in response to the problem of violence (from a call for increased policing to decriminalization to police diversification), Alfred also responded to the media coverage about the "gay invasion" of San Francisco, writing that "throughout April and May, anti-gay hostility rankled in some black neighborhoods as a portion of that community's leadership openly expressed their homophobia at a series of meetings dealing with the city's housing crunch." Randy Alfred, "Why the Lid Blew Off," Berkeley Barb, May 24-June 6, 1979.
88. "I Left My Home in San Francisco," Tony Van Witsen, producer, NBC Late Night, May 17, 1980, GLBTHS.
89. David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 7.
90. Ibid., 129.
91. Judith Butler discusses how pornography and antigay language have been asserted as hate speech, speech acts that both lead to an effect and are the effect in itself. Butler explores the rhetorical and political limits of advocating for the legal regulation of speech as violence. Here I am most interested in Butler's brief analysis of how Catherine MacKinnon, in arguing for the regulation of pornography, constitutes the visual field of pornography as an injurious speech act that promises and realizes the threat it carries. This provides a link between safe streets patrols' response to the antigay threat and new anticrime theories. See Butler, Excitable Speech, 4, 47-52, 68.
92. See Susan Brownmiller, In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution (New York: Dial, 1999).
93. Butler also discusses how lawmakers have treated rap music as an imperative to urban violence. See Butler, Excitable Speech, 22.
94. Marge Piercy, preface to Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: Morrow, 1980), 7.
95. George Kelling, "Police Field Services and Crime: The Presumed Effects of a Capacity," Crime and Delinquency - Hackensack, NJ 24 (1978):173-84.
96. This article is cited by Kelling in his essay "'Broken Windows' and the Culture War: A Response to Selected Critiques," in Crime, Disorder, and Community Safety, ed. Roger Matthews and John Pitts (London: Routledge, 2001).
97. Activists followed MacKinnon's primary understanding of pornography as conduct that orders those addressed to do as it shows. Butler critiques this for misunderstanding the work of "visual depiction" and attaching to it the power of a verbal imperative: "Do this." As Butler explains, rather than a willful act that then constitutes women's subordination, pornography might be considered an "allegory" that "repeatedly and anxiously rehearses its own unrealizability." In the case of quality-of-life laws, the open drink is like the broken window, which due to their appearance command crime. Here the drinker is substituted for the drink, and the allegoric conduct of the drink is literalized in the person drinking. Deviant city street culture might be best described as "periperformative," Eve Sedgwick's term to describe that nearby the explicit speech act. She uses this concept as a way to "spatialize" the performative; it captures the everyday and signals that which acts out of place. See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
98. "Speculators Get Out of Our Neighborhood!" Bay Area Gay Liberation, Ephemera Collection, GLBTHS.
99. "What Hotel Fight Means to Gays," San Francisco Sentinel, February 24, 1977. See also James Sobredo, "From Manila Bay to Daly City: Filipinos in San Francisco," in Reclaiming San Francisco: History, Politics, Culture, ed. James Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy J. Peters (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1998), 273-86.
100. See Meg Barnett Papers [Lesbians against Police Violence], 89-5, GLBTHS, and Horacio N. Roque Ramirez, "'That's My Place!' Negotiating Racial, Sexual, and Gender Politics in San Francisco's Gay Latino Alliance, 1975- 1983," Journal of the History of Sexuality 12 (2003): 224-58. This was also the case in New York, and during the 1980s organizations like Dykes against Racism Everywhere (DARE) responded to what was increasingly perceived to be a set script. Although many of these activists flipped what had become a popular story about the violence of gentrification in which gay communities were involved, they often failed to elaborate the clearly racist overtures of such pronouncements. More to the point, they repeated the assumption that gays were white and people of color straight. Glaringly absent from both activist and mainstream accounts were the gay-identified (and nongay same-sex-oriented) experiences of people of color. This dynamic was made most manifest in discussions of San Francisco's Western Addition, in which white gay activists read critiques of gentrification as antigay invective.
101. "Brutality - Suffolk Style," Gay Activist 1 (1971): 1, 8-9, 13.
102. Chauncey, Gay New York.
103. Manhattan Community Board 4 and the City Planning Commission Documents, www.manhattancb4.org/Planning_Items/1969_Plan.html (accessed May 15, 2007).
104. The description of SMASH is based on several sources: an article by Michael Shernoff, "Early Gay Activism in Chelsea: Building a Queer Neighborhood," LGNY 57 (1997);
105. Michael Shernoff, interview by the author, New York, September 13, 2004; a video in which the founders of SMASH, Louis Weingarden and Larry Durham, were interviewed by Myron Berger (a journalist for The Villagern)
106. on the short-lived gay public access television program Emerald City (Tape 1 76/00/00, Summer Final Pilot "A" 59:04, Emerald City Tapes [Television program] 1976 to 1979, National Archive of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center, New York);
107. and a series of articles including Myron Berger, "Gays Organize Vigilante Action," The Villager, August 12, 1976;
108. Myron Berger, "SMASH and Kids at Summit," The Villager, August ig, 1976;
109. Myron Berger, "Friendly Persuasion Works," The Villager, August 26, 1976. Shernoffs article from 1997 and the interview in 2004 place SMASH in the summer Of 1978;
110. all other sources suggest it was active in the summer of 1976. As with the members of the Butterfly Brigade, Michael Shernoff was generous with his time and encouragement. My interpretation of SMASH does not detract from my admiration for the longevity and depth of his commitment to gay politics. A psychotherapist with a practice in Chelsea, Shernoff is also the author and editor of many books addressing gay men's health issues.
111. Emerald City, tape 1 76/00/00;
112. Shernoff, "Early Gay Activism in Chelsea."
113. Another patrol of leathermen called the Surveillance Squad existed in the industrial South of Market District of San Francisco in 1978 soon after the end of the Butterfly Brigade. They were identified more as an anticrime than a gay safe streets patrol. Although they expressed concern about antigay violence, they were vehement that they were there to protect the gay and straight and were not identified in conjunction with any local gay organizations. See Birney Jarvis, "Volunteer Squads: The Gay Crime Fighters," San Francisco Chronicle, June 5, 1978;
114. "Citizen Squad Patrols Folsom," Bay Area Reporter, June 11, 1978.
115. Emerald City, tape 1 76/00/00.
116. Berger, "Gays Organize Vigilante Action";
117. Shernoff, "Early Gay Activism in Chelsea." Shernoff, interview.
118. A teacher was quoted as saying that the boy's crowd had "'a thing' against blacks and Puerto Ricans." Quoted in Dan Oppenheimer, "Aftermath of a Tragedy," The Villager, June 24, 1976. The article also described the other members of the gang and band to which he belonged as white. Additionally, I am assuming that the youth was white due to the complete lack of reference to race in every article covering this event. This is most certainly not the case in media representations of violence purportedly done by people of color.
119. See also Dan Oppenheimer, "Youth Confesses to Fatal Stabbing," The Villager, June 17, 1976.
120. Earl Jay Perel, "Police Manipulations," The Villager, September 16, 1976.
121. Steve Simon, "Washington Square Tragedy," The Villager, September 16, 1976.
122. Also see the response to the perpetrators' conviction: Adam Blumenthal, "Angry Rally Follows Riot Convictions," The Villager, March 23, 1978. Their comments about the "disorder" wrought by visitors to Washington Square Park almost exactly match those of present-day residents discussing the West Side piers. And it was during the 1980s that the ball scene moved from Washington Square Park to the piers because of police pressure.
123. See Jerald Podair, The Strike That Changed New York: Blacks, Whites, and the Ocean Hill - Brownsville Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002);
124. Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II (New York: New Press, 2000).
125. Berger, "Friendly Persuasion Works," 4. Shernoff, interview.
126. Ellen Herman, The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 219-20.
127. See Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (New York: Harper, 1965).
128. See E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), 39-124.
129. Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967).
130. See Cathy Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" GLQ 3 (1997): 437-65;
131. Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo' Mama's Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997);
132. and Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
133. K. T. Smith, "Homophobia: A Tentative Personality Profile," Psychological Reports 29 (1972): 1091-94;
134. George Weinberg, Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York: St. Martin's, 1972). There is some debate as to who coined the term, since both claim to have first started using it in the late 1960s.
135. Daniel Wickberg, "Homophobia: On the Cultural History of an Idea," Critical Inquiry 27 (2000): 42-57.
136. For example, the Mattachine Society organized an event with Weinberg in the early 1970s, and an affiliate of the Chelsea Gay Association (which shared members with SMASH) was a founder of the gay psychology association Identity House. Weinberg's book was reviewed by Charles Choset, Gay Activist 1 (1972): 19.
137. On April 18, 1972, the Mattachine Society held a public forum with Weinberg called "Society and the Healthy Homosexual," which was reported in the May/June 1972 issue of New York Mattachine. "Report on Our Mettings [sic]," New York Mattachine, May/June 1972, p. 15.
138. Carl Wittman, "A Gay Manifesto," 1970, in Out of the
139. The National Gay Task Force later became the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Violence Project later became the Anti-violence Project. See John D'Emilio, "Organizational Tales: Interpreting the NGLTF Story," in D'Emilio, Turner, and Vaid, Creating Change, 469-86; "The NGTF Violence Project," booklet, n.d., Papers of Larry Bush (Collection 7316), Box 5, Folder 14, Human Sexuality Collection, Kroch Library, Cornell University.
140. See Markus Dirk Dubber, Victims in the War on Crime: The Use and Abuse of Victims' Rights (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
141. Martin D. Meeker, Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communication and Community, 1940s-1970s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
142. See Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
143. For an analysis of when homonormativity meets metronormativity, see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
144. In addition to some of the antigentrification organizations named earlier in this essay, one might also look at the Combahee River Collective's work to end violence against women of color in the 1970s (see Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005]) or the present-day activism of INCITE: Women of Color against Violence, www.incite-national.org (accessed May 15, 2007). Some local antiviolence projects pursue alternatives to policing programs, especially the San Francisco-based Community United Against Violence.