HISTORY
The Radical Roots of LGBTQ Activism
In the immediate post-Stonewall era, “turning a moment into a movement”
BY DUNCAN OSBORNE
As some in the LGBTQ
community were considering
the movement
in the days following
the 1969 Stonewall riots, those
who had roots in the anti-war
movement, in radical groups, and
in organizations that were battling
economic inequality saw an opportunity.
“Coming back to the city on
Monday, June 30, felt markedly
different,” said Ellen Broidy during
a panel discussion of former members
of the Gay Liberation Front
(GLF) held at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual
& Transgender Community
Center in June of last year. “It was
as if lightning had struck.”
While the Mattachine Society of
New York (MSNY), the leading LGBTQ
group in the city at that time,
was calling for calm, those who
had experience organizing and
protesting with far left groups “understood
the possibility and the
necessity of turning a moment into
a movement,” Broidy said.
The actions these radicals took
over the next few years fundamentally
altered the LGBTQ movement
for decades.
During the 2019 event, panelist
Karla Jay said she was in
Red Stockings, a radical feminist
group; John Knoebel had “very extensive
interactions with the Black
Panthers;” and Jason Serinus
participated in the Students for a
Democratic Society (SDS) and the
Venceremos Brigade, a pro-Cuba
group that organized trips to
Cuba.
“None of us who were in that
fi rst brigade, none of us really
knew what happened to gay people
in Cuba,” Serinus said, referring
to the Cuban LGBTQ citizens who
were imprisoned by that government.
“My parents were communists
with a capital C,” said Allen Young,
who was also in the SDS. “I was
not. I was part of the New Left.”
The New Left was a broad movement
that sought to engage in what
today is called intersectionality or
QUEEN’S QUARTERLY: THE MAGAZINE FOR GAY GUYS WHO HAVE NO HANGUPS
Images from the fi rst anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the 1970 Christopher Street Liberation Day
March.
a way of analyzing and organizing
multiple movements so they are
more allied. Stonewall marked a
signifi cant change.
“The post-Stonewall movement
did something entirely new,” Young
said. “We didn’t do it quietly.”
As was and remains common
on the left and on the right, among
the fi rst actions these new movement
members took was to effectively
overthrow the existing organizations
and to give the LGBTQ
movement greater visibility.
While there had been public actions
by LGBTQ groups in the New
York City since at least 1963, they
were sporadic and small. Mattachine
had been holding nearly
monthly meetings with an impressive
list of speakers since 1957. The
highest profi le actions were the
Annual Reminder Days that were
pickets that took place at Independence
Hall in Philadelphia every
4th of July from 1965 to 1969.
At a July 9 MSNY meeting held
to discuss previous month’s riots
at Stonewall — a meeting that
police surveillance estimated was
attended by 125 people — Martha
Shelley, who would become a GLF
member, was in a group tasked
with organizing a demonstration to
respond to the police actions. That
group created the Gay Liberation
Front name that borrowed from the
National Liberation Front of North
Vietnam. Dick Leitsch, the head of
MSNY who was proprietary about
the movement in New York, burst
into the room where the group was
meeting.
“He was really upset,” Shelley
said in David Carter’s “Stonewall:
The Riots That Sparked the Gay
Revolution,” the defi nitive account
of the riots. “He thought we were
going to have another organization.
There were seven gay organizations
in New York, some consisting only
of two people and a newsletter. He
wanted there to be one organization,
with him at the head of it.”
On August 2, some GLF members
joined a rally and march produced
by the SDS, the Fifth Avenue
Vietnam Peace Parade Committee,
and groups associated with the
Workers World Party (WWP), a
group that spilt from the Socialist
Workers Party in 1959. Their banner
had the interlocked female/ female
and male/ male symbols that
were GLF’s symbol. The NYPD’s
political surveillance unit shot a
nine-minute fi lm of the protest.
But it was in November of 1969
that the new force in the LGBTQ
movement won its most signifi -
cant victory and the one that has
lasted the longest — the annual
Pride March. Members attending
the Eastern Regional Conference of
Homophile Organizations (ERCHO)
in Philadelphia moved and passed
a proposal to replace the Annual
Reminder Days with a march on
the last Saturday in June to commemorate
the Stonewall riots.
In October, Broidy, Linda Rhodes,
and Fred Sargeant met at
Craig Rodwell’s home where they
crafted the resolution that Broidy
would introduce, according to “The
Deviant’s War: The Homosexual
vs. The United States of America,”
Eric Cervini’s biography of Frank
Kameny, the founder of the Mattachine
Society of Washington and
the original organizer of the Annual
Reminder Days. Rodwell and
Sargeant are credited with being
the primary organizers of the 1970
march. Broidy, Michael Brown,
Marty Nixon, Marty Robinson, and
Foster Gunnison, who was not a
radical, also contributed.
They met for dinner and “within
a minute, Craig had a pad and
pen ready and we began drafting a
resolution,” Broidy said during the
GLF event.
The ERCHO gathering was tense
and some GLF members were aggressive
in arguing for the changes
they wanted. Kameny had to witness
the demise of his event. MSNY
abstained on the motion to replace
the Annual Reminder Days.
“The reason we went was that
we believed the politics of the homophile
movement were at a fi nish,”
Jim Fouratt, the longtime LGBTQ
activist, told Gay City News
last year. “The single issue politics
of the homophile movement was
rejected by the men and women in
the Gay Liberation Front.”
The new, radical voices had
quickly broken with the past and
announced a new form of activism
in the LGBTQ community.
“We were the fi rst organization
to have the word ‘gay’ in its name,”
Perry Brass said during the 2019
GLF panel.
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