Truly Queer History
Tommi Avicolli
By Doug Ireland
June 27, 2009
http://www.gaycitynews.com/articles/2009/06/26/gay_city_news/arts/doc4a43d0fdbc87b662881033.txt
A review of SMASH THE CHURCH, SMASH THE STATE!
THE EARLY YEARS OF GAY LIBERATION, edited by
Tommi Avicolli
303 pages; $18.95
Myth has it that the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in
against discrimination. Not so. In 1965, the first
queer sit-ins on record took place at a late-night
Dewey's, which was a popular hangout for young gays and
lesbians, and particularly drag queens and others with
gender-variant attire. The establishment had begun
refusing service to this LGBT clientele.
As an April 25 protest rally took place outside
Dewey's, more than 150 patrons were turned away by
management. But four teens resisted efforts to force
them out and were arrested, later convicted on charges
of disorderly conduct. In the ensuing weeks, Dewey's
patrons and others from
set up an informational picket line protesting the
lunch counter's treatment of gender-variant youth. On
May 2, activists staged another sit-in, and the police
were again called, but this time made no arrests. The
restaurant backed down, and promised "an immediate
cessation of all indiscriminate denials of service."
In August 1966, there was a riot at
Cafeteria, a 24-hour
drag queens and other gender-benders (this was long
before the word "transgendered" was in use), hustlers
(many of them members of Vanguard, the first
organization for queer youth on record, founded some
months earlier), runaway teens, and cruising gays. The
this non-conformist clientele, and one night a drag
queen precipitated the riot by throwing a cup of coffee
into the face of a cop who was trying to drag her away.
Plates, trays, cups, and silverware were soon hurtling
through the air, police paddy wagons arrived, and
street fighting broke out. Some of the 60 or so rioting
drag queens hit the cops with their heavy purses, a
police car was vandalized, and a newspaper stand was
burned down. The
appointment of the first police liaison to the gay
community, and the establishment of the first known
transsexual support group in the
These are just two of the many nuggets of little-known
or forgotten queer history to be found in "Smash the
Church, Smash the State: The Early Years of Gay
Liberation," the new anthology edited by Tommi Avicolli
struggles, and today an activist, gender-bending
performance artist, and writer well-known to
By the time of the Stonewall riots in June 1969,
rebellion and radicalism were in the air. The country
had been riven in two by the mass agitation against the
war in
was being replaced by the Black Power movement, the
Black Panthers had been born four years earlier, and
black underclass. Feminists had begun to articulate
their own liberationist ideology and burn their bras.
Stonewall and the militant gay liberation movement to
which it gave birth arose out of this '60s turbulence,
and cannot be properly understood separated from this context.
If the first night of the Stonewall riots was
spontaneous, and led principally by drag queens like
the legendary Sylvia Rivera, a street hustler who
always claimed she'd thrown the first beer bottle at
the cops, the ensuing nights of protest benefited from
some more consciously activist participation. As Mark
Segal, who for 32 years has been the publisher of the
Philadelphia Gay News, puts it in his contribution to
this anthology, "Marty Robinson recruited me into the
'activist group,' a subgroup of Mattachine
there were organizers of the demonstrations on the
nights following the [first] Stonewall riot, it was us.
After the first incident in which cops raided the bar,
Marty had the brilliant idea to have us write in chalk
on
three more nights, we gathered and protested."
What made Stonewall the much-evoked milestone in queer
activist history that it's become was that it was
followed in the ensuing weeks by the launch of a
concrete and militant political organization, the Gay
Liberation Front, into which Robinson and his
Mattachine action group merged. Many of the 37 men and
women who participated in the founding meeting of GLF,
and others who later joined, were youthful veterans of
other '60s struggles, and GLF's radical politics were
multi-issue. Within two years, imitators of the New
Liberation Front cells across the country. At GLF
demonstrations, one frequently heard the chant
"2-4-6-8, Smash the Church, Smash the State!" -- hence
the title of Avicolli Mecca's collection of articles,
largely first-person reminiscences of the earliest and
most radical wave of gay liberation struggles, the bulk
of them specifically written for this volume.
As Nick Benton, a founder of the
Liberation Front and of its offshoot, the seminal queer
newspaper Gay Sunshine, writes, for him and his fellow
GLF activists "gay liberation was part of the larger
struggle of human beings for liberation, in solidarity
with the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and Third
World liberation struggles." The first editorial of Gay
Sunshine proclaimed that gay liberation would represent
"those who understand themselves as oppressed --
politically oppressed by an oppressor that not only is
down on homosexuality, but equally down on all things
that are not white, straight, middle class, pro-
establishment... It should harken to a greater cause --
the cause of human liberation, of which homosexual
liberation is just one aspect -- and on that level take its stand."
GLF supported the Black Panthers -- and were rewarded
with a much-publicized "Open Letter to the
Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters" by the Panthers'
charismatic theoretician, Huey
this anthology, proclaiming that homosexuals "might be
the most oppressed people in the world," and adding
that "we should be careful about using those terms that
might turn our friends off. The terms 'faggot' and
'punk' should be deleted from our vocabulary, and
especially we should not attach names normally designed
for homosexuals to men who are enemies of the people, like Nixon."
Early gay liberation saw itself as a cultural paradigm
shift from the stultifying atmosphere of the Nixon
years. As the first editorial in the
newspaper, ComeOut!, proclaimed, "We will not be gay
bourgeoisie, searching for the sterile 'American dream'
of the ivy-covered cottage and the good corporation
job, but neither will we tolerate the exclusion of
homosexuals from any area of American life."
The personal testimonies collected for "Smash the
Church, Smash the State!", augmented by manifestos and
documents of that early period and biographical
sketches of important movement figures, help recreate
those heady, joyously rambunctious days of "sex, drugs,
and rock 'n roll" as queers, influenced by the hippies,
Yippies, and Zippies, built their own radical wing of
the prevailing youth counterculture, and created their
own influential publications -- like
in which a notorious Charlie Shively article proclaimed
"??????????? As an Act of Revolution."
There are numerous contributions by women who tired of
the male domination of GLF and founded groups like
RadicalLesbians, RedStockings, and Dyketactics. There
are also accounts both of radical gay liberation's
earliest and often campy direct actions and of the
factional fights that eventually destroyed GLF and led
to its replacement by the much larger -- and single-
issue -- Gay Activists
months after Stonewall.
Avicolli Mecca has not abandoned the anarchic
radicalism of those early days. He writes in his
introduction, "In many ways, the new millennium gay
movement is the antithesis of the early '70s gay
liberation. It cavorts with politicians who may be good
on gay issues, but not on concerns affecting other
disenfranchised communities. It is in bed with the
Democratic Party establishment that gave carte blanche
to George Bush to wage two illegal and immoral wars in
the
gala events, even its pride parades, which used to be
protest marches and celebrations of the Stonewall
Riots. Now those marches seem more of a market than a movement."
On this 40th anniversary of Stonewall, that's a
critique that deserves to be heard.
A complete collection of the Gay Liberation Front's
newspaper, ComeOut!, has just been posted on the
excellent OutHistory website, founded by pioneering gay
historian Jonathan Ned Katz, along with a collection of
the original police reports on the Stonewall riot.
Tommy Avicolli Mecca's web site is at
avicollimecca.com/. Doug Ireland can be reached through
his blog, DIRELAND, at http://direland.typepad.com/.
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