Top Quotes: “The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle” — Lillian Faderman

Discrimination

“Midcentury civil rights organizations, wanting to take the emphasis off the “sexual” of homosexual, coined the term homophile.

“Gay became an underground synonym for “homosexual” in the early twentieth century, encompassing men who were attracted to men, lesbians, people who’d later be called transgender, and bisexuals when they were acting homosexually. The first literary use of gay appeared in Gertrude Stein’s short story “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” written in 1908, about the tumultuous lesbian relationship between two of her acquaintances, Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire. When Stein published the story in Vanity Fair in 1922, few readers would have known the underground meaning of gay, though homosexuals active in the burgeoning subculture would have recognized that Stein’s story, which plays with the word gay throughout, was an in-joke. The Stonewall generation, which preferred to describe itself as “gay,” brought the term from the underground into popular consciousness in the 1970s.”

“He extolled the state of Illinois’ treatment of “homosexualist psychopathic individuals” and recommended it be adopted everywhere. In Illinois, convicted “homosexualists” could be held as psychiatric prisoners until they they “recovered.” If they “recovered,” they were then tried for having committed sodomy, which was punishable in that state by up to ten vears in prison.”

“Because the homosexual can’t control himself, the doctor told the Nebraska State Medical Association, science must step in. “Large doses of sedatives or other treatment” were what Dr. Miller recommended to help the homosexual “escape from performing acts of homosexuality.”

When Dr. Miller was elected to the US Congress, he brought his ideas with him to Washington. As Congressman Miller, he authored a Sexual Psychopath Law for the District of Columbia. The Miller Act, as it was called, passed both the House and the Senate without difficulty. It made sodomy punishable by up to twenty years in prison. It also mandated that anyone accused of sodomy (defined as either anal or oral sex) had to be examined by a psychiatric team. The psychiatrists would determine whether the accused was a “sexual psychopath”-one who through “repeated misconduct in sexual matters” had shown himself to be unable to control his sexual impulses. If a man were picked up several times by the DC police for cruising in Lafayette Park, for instance, the psychiatric team could diagnose him to be a “sexual psychopath,” and he could be committed to the criminal ward of the District of Columbia’s St. Elizabeth’s psychiatric hospital, even before being allowed his day in court. Under section 207 of the bill, he would remain there until the superintendent of St. Elizabeth’s “finds that he has sufficiently recovered.” The Senate Committee on the District of Columbia called the Miller Act a “humane and practical approach to the problem of persons unable to control their sexual emotions.””

“The California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control had actually been created because of homosexuals. Before 1955, there was only an Alcoholic Beverage Commission, under the Board of Equalization. In 1951 the California Legislature authorized and pledged to finance a four-year study on “Sexual Psychopath Legislation” in twenty-three states and the District of Columbia. Four years later, horrified (as they’d expected to be) by what the study told about homosexuals and their “victims,” the legislators passed a constitutional amendment that created a Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and added a section to the Business and Professions Code that said that a liquor license could be revoked if a place was a “resort” where “sexual perverts” congregated.

The newly created ABC was charged with maintaining public safety in establishments that served alcohol — and homosexuality, the legislature and most of America agreed, was intensely injurious to the public. Undercover agents and vice squad police were sent out on fishing expeditions, to find any evidence that the ABC could use to close the doors of homosexual bars. In San Francisco, by the late 1950s, there were so many undercover officers and agents that some nights they made up 25 percent of the people in the bar. For several months in 1959, for instance, agents were sent to a small, sedate bar on Geary Street.”

“By now in many states, facilities had been built and mechanisms put in place. In California, there was Atascadero State Hospital, constructed in 1954 at the cost to taxpayers of over $10 million (almost $100 million in today’s money). Atascadero was a maximum-security psychiatric prison on the central coast where mentally disordered male lawbreakers from all over California were incarcerated. Inmates were treated at Atascadero by a variety of methods, including electroconvulsive therapy, lobotomy, sterilization, and hormone injections. Anectine was used often for “behavior modification.” It was a muscle relaxant, which gave the person to whom it was administered the sensation of choking or drowning, while he received the message from the doctor that if he didn’t change his behavior he would die.

Earl and Rhodes were found guilty of violating Penal Code section 288a, which made oral copulation a crime in California that was punishable by up to fifteen years in prison.”

“FDR had a chance to vent his rage on William Bullitt. Sometime later, when the former ambassador to France was hoping to make a run for the job of mayor of Philadelphia, he asked for the president’s endorsement. FDR famously responded to the outrageously tone-deaf request, “If I were the angel Gabriel, and you and Sumner Welles should come before me seeking admission into the Gates of Heaven, do you know what I’d say? I would say, ‘Bill Bullitt, you have defamed the name of a man who toiled for his fellow man, and you can go to hell.’ And that’s what I tell you to do now!” To the Democratic leaders in Philadelphia, Roosevelt said, “Cut his throat!” Bullitt lost the mayoral race by a wide margin.”

“The State Department stepped up its homosexual hunts; the Civil Service Commission pitched in. Together they scrutinized the files of the FBI, the vice squad, and the DC Park Police, and they created a master list of homosexuals to be purged. “Panic on the Potomac” New York Post writer Max Lerner called it in a multipart series in July 1950.

By November 1950, five hundred more federal employees, not just in DC but in offices all over America, had been fired or forced to resign. That was only the beginning. In December Senator Hoy and his subcommittee issued their report: a spectacular conglomeration of pseudoscience, circular reasoning, moralism, prejudice, and scapegoating.”

“Investigations for homosexuality spread far outside the Beltway.

Tens of thousands of people lost their jobs. The firing of homosexual workers from nongovernmental positions was so ubiquitous, and their chances of being hired after losing a job so slim, that by 1956 the incipient homophile press was lamenting the “tragic plight” of many of its readers. They’d come to the end of their unemployment benefits, their savings had run out, and no matter their talents or training or work experiences, they couldn’t get a job because “their character investigation didn’t stand up.

Investigation fever seized even small businesses that had not the slightest connection to the government. National companies sprang up whose sole function was to serve employers by snooping into the background of employees or would-be employees and reporting anything that hinted at homosexuality or other undesirable traits such as drunkenness and dope addiction.”

“The American military had been homosexual hunting since 1919, when the assistant secretary of the navy, thirty-seven-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt, assigned special investigators to the Intelligence Office at the Naval Training Station in Newport, Rhode Island. Roosevelt had gotten complaints that sailors were engaging in “scandalous conduct” with male civilians at the Newport Art Club and the YMCA, and he ordered the investigators to ferret out homosexual behavior by conducting “a most searching and rigid investigation,” in which the very zealous investigators didn’t scruple to entrap the homosexuals by indulging in sex acts with them, to the point of ejaculation. This was the first massive “sexual pervert” witch hunt in America.”

“A mass hysteria hit Boise, Idaho, in fall 1955: almost 10 percent of the male population — bank vice presidents, high school teachers, shoe repairmen — were accused of having seduced young boys! It was symptomatic of bogeyman fears all over America. An article in the popular Coronet magazine titled “New Moral Menace to Our Youth” warned, “No degenerate can indulge in his unnatural practices alone. Each year thousands of youngsters of high school and college age are introduced to these unnatural practices by inveterate seducers.”? Professors and teachers whose jobs threw them into regular contact with “youngsters” were suddenly being scrutinized for degeneracy. After E. K. Tohnston’s arrest, the witch hunts at the University of Missouri expanded even to students — dozens were kicked out to prevent “contagion.” Witch hunts spread to colleges and univerities across America: [including] UCLA.”

“In January 1964 the committee spent $720 to print a few thousand copies of a booklet titled Homosexuality and Citizenship in Florida. It came to be called “the Purple Pamphlet” because of its contents as well as the color of its paper cover. “Although this report has been prepared . .. primarily for the benefits of state administrators and personnel officers, it can be of value to all citizens,” the Purple Pamphlet declared. “[E]very parent and every individual concerned with the moral climate of the state should be aware of the rise in homosexual activity noted here, and be possessed of the basic knowledge set forth.”The pamphlet’s price as stated on the front cover was 25 cents; but bulk discounts were available for orders of one hundred copies or more.

The fetching picture on the cover of the booklet was of two buff young men in a lip-lock, both naked to the pubes. Inside was a picture of a handsome blond boy, sporting nothing but a piece of black silk over his genitals, arms akimbo, and muscled chest bound loosely with a rope. There were pinup pictures of pretty young boys glancing seductively at the camera. And there were sexually graphic tales about homosexual misdoings, and a glossary of gay argot, with terms such as “69 queen” and “browning queen.” FLIC hoped to demonstrate that Florida needed to pass a Homosexual Practices Control Act because homosexuals engaged in disgusting practices, like looking at pictures such as those reproduced in the booklet.

The Dade County state attorney, Richard Gerstein, threatened to sue for obscenity if the booklet was distributed anywhere in his area. $2 “State-sponsored pornography,” the media called the Purple Pamphlet. It was reprinted by a homosexual book club in Washington, DC, and became a bestseller on the homosexual streets of New York.”

The Mattachine Society

“Still married, two things happened to cause Hay to question both the life he’d made for himself and the party’s view of homosexuals as a dangerous handful of degenerates who must be expelled and ostracized. He’d been one of sexologist Alfred Kinsey’s 5,300 interviewees, and when Sexual Behavior in the Human Male came out in January 1948, he purchased a copy immediately. He was elated to realize that based on Kinsey’s statistics, there must be many millions of homosexuals in America. He carried the Kinsey Report with him everywhere, like a religious zealot carrying around a Bible. Then, a few months later, in the summer of 1948, he heard that a purge had begun of homosexuals who worked in the State Department. “These are the next scapegoats, to replace Negroes and Jews,” he thought. Negroes were being integrated into the armed forces and labor organizations. Truman and the United Nations had recognized the new Jewish state of Israel, and news of the horrors perpetrated by Hitler had put an end to anti-Semitism for the time being. Both Negroes and Jews had defenders. But no one would stand up for homosexuals, and they couldn’t stand up for themselves because they lived isolated lives. They were the one group of disenfranchised people who didn’t even know they were a group.

Hay had spent years agitating for minorities and underdogs. Now he realized that despite his dutiful attempts to blend into society, he too belonged to a minority; and its members were underdogs, just as surely as were racial and ethnic minorities. He would make the multitudes of homosexuals like him understand who they were: a minority that must band together and struggle against the outrageous persecution of their tribe.”

“Harry Hay’s wife divorced him. She’d accepted from the start that he was a homosexual; but Mattachine was beyond acceptance. “It’s inimical as far the children are concerned” she told him. As long as he’d kept his homosexuality a secret, the children couldn’t be harmed. But everyone would know about it now because he’d started an organization for homosexuals. News of such a bizarre group would surely make the papers; the girls would be ostracized. Hay didn’t contest the divorce, nor did he protest when the court awarded sole custody of their daughters to Anita Platky. He agreed to alimony and child support. He divorced himself from the Communist Party too. He would not endanger the party by his homosexual activities, nor would he be hindered by the party’s hostility to homosexuality. He was also free now to lead the personal life he’d always known was most natural to him, and to lead the organization he’d birthed.

In July 1950 — when Mattachine was still only a glint in Hay’s eye — he concocted a complex plan. The group would be a secret society, a cross between the Masons and the Communist Party cell structure of the 1930s. There’d be five degrees, Hay decreed, each having its own insignia, from the first, Order of Fools, to the highest, Order of Pharaoh (later named the Order of Parsifal). He described that Fifth Order as “the historic personification of the Androgynous Ideal.” The cell structure would not only optimize secrecy but also define the working groups. There would be study groups, welfare groups, even first-aid squads (sort of hotlines--”to provide therapy, guidance, or counsel on a 24-hour basis to members in emotional or psychological distress”). People would use made-up names, too. That way, everyone would be kept safe. When Mattachine was born the next year, it adopted a lot of its parent’s guidelines.

To throw hostile forces off the track even further, when members of the Mattachine Society’s Fifth Order decided to register the organization with the state of California as a non-profit corporation, they changed its name to Mattachine Foundation Inc. and listed as its board of directors three heterosexual women. The president of the board was Mrs. Henry Hay, the name of Harry Hay’s widowed mother, Margaret-who loved her son unconditionally and never gave a thought to the sexuality of “homophiles.” Mrs. D. T. Campbell and Romayne Cox, Konrad Stevens’s supportive mother and sister, were the other “board members.” The three women had no role at all in the group other than to help mask its membership and purpose. Mattachine Foundation Inc.’s official address was for several months Margaret Hay’s home address.”

“Hay went on. They’d demand a jury trial. Jennings would admit he was a homosexual. But he would contest the charge that he’d made advances to the undercover officer. He would argue that the officer tried to entrap him. Hay had every step figured out. They’d try to get the American Civil Liberties Union to take the case. But if the ACLU wouldn’t, Mattachine would do something that had never been done before: ask other homosexuals for money to support a homosexual cause. Mattachine would point out that in the past it had been impossible to find a homosexual with courage and conviction who would stand and fight. But such an opportunity was now being offered: Jennings was ready to fight for the sake of them all.

Jennings, suspicious as always of Hay, nevertheless said yes.

“Okay!” Hay jumped to his feet. “I’m going home and calling an emergency Fifth Order meeting, eight o’clock, your apartment,” he told Jennings.

Not a man of them missed the meeting. Jennings would be a test case, they agreed. They would form a Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment. They would print leaflets and distribute them in homosexual bars and anywhere else homosexuals went. They would send them to homosexuals they knew all over the country. They’d raise the necessary legal fees, and, even more important, they’d get the word out that Mattachine was fighting to make clear to the world that homosexuals were not ipso facto lewd and dissolute.

“NOW Is The Time To Fight,” the leaflets proclaimed. “The issue is CIVIL RIGHTS,” they declared. Almost nobody ever fore had dared to suggest that homosexuality might have anything to do with “civil rights.” The leaflets emphasized that what had happened to Jennings could happen to anyone. “How will YOU prove your innocence when a friendly stranger strikes up a conversation with you and turns out to be a member of the vice squad arresting you for lewd and indecent conduct?” the leaflets inquired provocatively before making the “ask”: “funds are urgently needed at once to conduct the trial in the local courts and eventually, if need be, in the higher courts. When had homosexuals ever read such fighting words? Pledges of funds poured in. Mattachine hired George Shibley, a liberal lawyer from nearby Long Beach, who’d defended labor unionists and a dozen young Mexican Americans in the famous Zoot Suit murder case in the 1940s.”

“It had been universally true: when a man was arrested under “vag-lewd,” he would plead guilty or nolo contendere. Then he’d pay his fine and walk out of the police station with the fervent hope that he’d put the awful incident behind him. But not this time. “Yes, my client is a homosexual,” attorney Shibley said in his opening statement to the jury on June 23, 1952. “But homosexuality and lasciviousness are not the same thing.” He declared that his client was innocent of lasciviousness.“The only true pervert in this courtroom is the arresting officer, Shibley proclaimed, and he described Jennings’ version of the man’s bizarre attempts to get Jennings to have sex with him. The trial went on for three days. Shibley called one witness after another to tell the jury at length what it was like to be a homosexual in the sociopolitical climate of 1952.

The jury deliberated for thirty-six hours and ended in deadlock. Eleven jurors found Jennings innocent. The chairman of the jury (“The bastard of the ballad,” Hay called him) dissented. Jennings was without a doubt guilty, the chairman insisted, and vowed that he’d “hold out till hell freezes over.” The city attorney — frustrated by the hung jury and reluctant to put the city through the expense of another trial — declared he would not continue prosecuting so trivial a case, and he moved for dismissal, which the judge granted.

But the case was not trivial: Jennings had actually admitted to a court to being a homosexual-and still he went free. It was the first time in California history that an admitted homosexual was exonerated after being charged as “vag-lewd. Mattachine knew it must use that fact to make political hay immediately, and it worked. Hundreds of people began attending Mattachine discussion groups. Many were selected to be Mattachine members. Groups sprang up all over Southern California, and then Northern California, and then Central California. Homosexuals in Saint Louis, Chicago, and New York wrote to Hay to say they were interested in establishing Mattachine discussion groups there, too. They wrote to ask for help with their own entrapment cases. In early 1953, when Bayard Rustin (who would become Martin Luther King’s chief strategist a couple of years later) was arrested by the Pasadena police and charged with having sex with two men in a parked car, his defenders immediately turned to Mattachine: Might it have been entrapment? they wanted to know, and “Is there any way he can be saved.”

“The Jennings’s win and Mattachine’s mushrooming fame had whetted the Fifth Order’s appetite. They decided to take another unprecedented step. They’d remind politicians that homosexuals were legion, and that they were voters, and that they wanted their rights as citizens. During campaign season for the 1953 Los Angeles city elections, Mattachine Foundation sent letters to city council candidates to introduce the organization and ask them about their views on civil rights for homophiles. They sent letters to school board candidates, too, to tell them that “the sexual hygiene programs in City Schools must be modernized to meet the needs of potential sexual deviates.” Those plucky (and touchingly foolhardy) moves were the beginning of the end.”

“The progressive ministers of LA’s First Unitarian Church had always welcomed people that the rest of the world judged outré, so it wasn’t astonishing when Reverend Steve Fritchman opened the church’s grand Renaissance-revival-style building to Mattachine’s constitutional convention. April 11–12, 1953, was the first time in America that a hall full of homosexuals came together for political purposes. Harry Hay was at first tickled by the numbers of homophiles who showed up: five hundred, he estimated. (Jim Kepner, a new member, who’d saved the vote tallies, said there were actually fewer than 150) But the fate of the old order was soon sealed. Ken Burns was elected chair of the constitutional convention by acclamation; Marilyn Rieger was eventually elected secretary.

Chuck Rowland was the convention’s first speaker. Tattooed and wearing a crew cut, he stuck out among the many male delegates who were dressed in business garb and sported man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit-type haircuts. Rowland adhered still to the theory that had gotten everything started in Harry Hay’s Silver Lake home in 1950. He compared homosexuals to Negroes, Jews, Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans: “Whether we like it or not, we are a minority!” he proclaimed with a tremor in his voice, because he knew that new members had no interest in being part of a “minority culture”, they wanted only that homosexuals be allowed to integrate with the straight world. His passionate oratory prefigured gay militant rhetoric by fifteen years:

“I say with pride, ‘I am a homosexual!’” Rowland shouted. He was eerily prophetic, too: “The time will come,” he declared, “when we will march down Hollywood Boulevard arm in arm, proclaiming our pride in our homosexuality!” But the majority of the middle-class convention delegates were not roused.

In 1953 they, like most homosexuals, couldn’t imagine ever marching to proclaim homosexual pride. Their homosexuality was no more something to have pride in than it was something to be ashamed about.”

“Harry Hay went through a period of deep depression. He withdrew from those with whom he’d “been through hell and paradise,” as Chuck Rowland described their three-year journey. In 1970, in the wake of a radical gay revolution, Hay founded the Radical Faeries, which, to this day, embraces “faerie culture” and resists the notion that homosexuals are “no different from anyone else.’ “But he never got over the hurt of having been cast out by the organization he’d fathered with such love; he almost gloated that Mattachine had not amounted to much after the old order left. Those who remained, he said, “were interested in being middle class. They were all going to rush up to Sacramento and pound on the doors and tell the legislators to change the law — but otherwise be respectable. So the moment they became as good as the middle class, the dream was gone, and the movement died. And nothing was reborn until the late sixties.

The riots at the Stonewall Inn, the birth of the radical Gay Liberation Front, Hay’s Radical Faeries — those were to him beloved heirs to what he’d started. He disdained, to his death in 2002, the “assimilationist” goals of the successors to Mattachine.”

The Daughters of Bilitis

“ The Bureau went into high gear in 1964, when, informed by “a member of the Cleveland chapter of Citizens for Decent Literature” that Daughters of Bilitis, which by now had a few small chapters on the East Coast and in Chicago, was planning a national convention in New York. Memos, classified “Secret” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, flew back and forth from the Cleveland office to the DC office to the New York office to the San Francisco office, as agents tracked convention plans. But intelligence faltered: FBI agents in New York reported that the Hotel New Yorker had refused to host the “Daughters of Beletis [sic] convention.” Where were the lesbians planning to go? Agents checked with the New York Convention Bureau, which reported “no knowledge as to where the Daughters of Belitus (sic) were to hold their convention.” All signs of the lesbian convention had vanished. Apparently neither FBI agents nor their informants read the New York Times, which covered in some detail the June 21–22 conference of “Homosexual Women” (as attendees were called in the Times headline). One hundred of them, the newspaper announced to anyone who had the twenty-five cents to buy it, were at a two-day meeting in New York’s Barbizon-Plaza Hotel. The FBI, oblivious to its agents’ fumbles, continued to keep track of DOB, as best it could, into the 1970s.”

“From the beginning, Gittings was bothered by DOB’s stated goal to “educate” the lesbian to “adjust” to society, as though the lesbian were an unruly child that needed correction – a scolding-teacher approach,” she thought. She hated The Ladder’s use of the term “sexual variant,” as though lesbian needed a euphemism. She was against providing the “experts” with lesbian guinea pigs. And she became dismayed that “experts,” usually straight people, were being invited to speak at DOB meetings about the “problems” of homosexuality. None of what DOB was doing had much to do with Donald Webster Cory’s electrifying exhortation that homosexuals must demand their civil rights. But she hadn’t any idea how to lead Daughters of Bilitis in a more meaningful direction, yet.”

ONE

“As a writer for ONE, Kepner was “Lyn Pederson, ” “Dal McIntyre, “Frank Golowitz,” and sometimes “Jim Kepner.” He used pseudonyms to make readers think there were a lot more people writing for the magazine than there actually were.”

“For four years, Eric Julber had taken nothing but an occasional small retainer fee from ONE. But, as he told Legg, he sincerely believed in ONE’s right to publish and the homosexual’s right to read. He also felt that if he could make something of this case his reputation as a civil rights lawyer would be made. With his own money, he bought a plane ticket to Washington, DC, and he filed a brief on behalf of ONE in the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court had never in its history considered a case that dealt with homosexuality. It accepted Eric Julber’s petition. The justices read his brief and declared they needed no further arguments. On January 13, 1958, five justices, led by Felix Frankfurter, voted to reverse the lower courts’ decisions. ONE’s major topic was homosexuality, but that didn’t mean the publication was obscene or indecent, they concluded; and the Post Office had no right to confiscate the magazine. Though Julber didn’t get to plead, the Supreme Court’s reversal was a huge victory for him, and for Dorr Legg and all the ONE staff. Even more important, it made a remarkable social statement, tacit as it was. Homosexuality was not unspeakable.”

Evelyn Hooker

“Evelyn Gentry Caldwell Hooker was almost six feet tall, a strong-looking woman with a chiselled face. She had a deep voice and a hearty laugh and liked to wear tailored suits. All that plus her professional interest in homosexuals made some in the community think she was a sister. She was careful to make it clear she was “hopelessly heterosexual” She married twice.

In 1932 she received a PhD in Experimental Psychology from Johns Hopkins with a specialty in animal behavior – “rat psych- ology,” she called it. The UCLA Psychology Department, where she’d hoped to teach after receiving her doctorate, wouldn’t hire her because they already had three women professors, and most of the men in the department thought that quite enough. It took years before she even got a job teaching classes at UCLA Extension. During the war, her brightest and most personable night-class student was Sammy From, who worked by day writing contracts between the air force and the Los Angeles based aircraft industry. One evening, when her then husband, freelance writer Donn Caldwell, was unable to fetch her after class, Sammy From offered her a lift home, and they became friends. He eventually told her, “You have a moral responsibility to study my condition.” “What’s your condition?” she asked. “Homosexuality,” he said. She told him she was “morally neutral” on the subject, but she didn’t know anything about homosexuality. “In which case, you’ll have to learn,” he said.

Sammy From introduced her to George, his partner of ten years, and to his friends, including two lesbians who threw gay parties in a big ramshackle house in the bohemian Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, not far from where Harry Hay would hold the first meeting of the group that became Mattachine. She thought these homosexuals were an impressive bunch. She was all the more intrigued by Sammy From’s exhortation to study the homosexual “condition,” because they seemed to have no “condition” at all in the usual sense of the term.

When she mentioned to a psychologist friend – Bruno Klopfer, a preeminent Rorschach expert – what Sammy From had suggested, he said, “You must do it! We don’t know anything. What we know about are the sick ones.” She began her study by administering Rorschach tests to all the male homosexuals with whom Sammy From and his circle of friends could hook her up. But her project wasn’t well conceived. She hadn’t even thought about a control group. She was off to a false start and she stopped. She also divorced Donn Caldwell and left LA.”

“In 1953 she applied to the National Institute of Mental Health for a grant to study homosexuals. The head of the grants division, John Eberhart, flew to Los Angeles from Washington, DC, to eyeball Hooker. NIMH had been established four years earlier, and Eberhart wanted to make no mistakes about who got funding. She introduced him to her husband. Her putative heterosexuality helped her “pass the test,” as she acknowledged. Eberhart approved her grant; but even at the National Institute of Mental Health, homosexuality was so derided that Hooker’s proposal was dubbed the “Fairy Project.” Hooker never studied lesbians, she later admitted, because “a woman researcher – even a married one – could be undermined by critics who might question her sexuality.”

Hooker’s project involved thirty homosexual men who were a 5 or 6 on the Kinsey scale – exclusively or predominantly homosexual – and thirty heterosexual men who were a 0 or 1. None of them was ever to have been in psychotherapy. She would give each subject an IQ test and then the three standard psychological projective tests: the Rorschach inkblot test; the Thematic Apperception Test (the subjects had to make up stories about human images); and the Make-a-Picture-Story Test (the subjects had to place cut-out figures in various settings and tell a story about them). Next, she would match homosexual with heterosexual for education and IQ. Then she would assign each subject a number and remove from his test all identifying information. Finally, she would get psychologists who were experts in each of the tests to try to distinguish between the matched pairs of homosexuals and heterosexuals. If the experts were able to discern from the tests who the homosexuals were, then homosexuality was legitimately a “diagnostic category.” But if they couldn’t discern – it wasn’t.”

“It was harder to get the heterosexuals. She went to the personnel directors of labor unions. They wanted nothing to do with homosexuals, they told her. Her straight friend Herb Selwyn, a liberal lawyer who’d lectured to Mattachine on Homosexuals and the Law, offered himself." But she still had twenty-nine heterosexuals to find. She asked maintenance men and a fireman who came to her home. (“No man who walks through these doors is safe,” her husband teased.) She asked the policeman on the corner. She was studying the ways the average man functions, she told them as vaguely as she could. With great difficulty, she found her thirty heterosexuals.”

“The judges’ accuracy in discerning who was the homosexual and who was the heterosexual was no better than it would have been had they flipped a coin.”

“To the midcentury mental health professionals whose livelihoods depended on the notion that homosexuals were sick Hooker’s research made not one whit of difference. They continued with their prejudices intact, as did vice squads and McCarthyites – to whom all homosexuals were monsters and moral weaklings. But to those homosexuals who were beginning to challenge the prejudices, Hooker’s findings were potent ammunition. Her work demonstrated clearly that none of the standard tests that showed who’s mentally sick and who’s mentally healthy could show who’s homosexual and who’s heterosexual. Here was concrete evidence that the mental health professions were wrong about homosexuality as an illness. It would be another two decades before the American Psychiatric Association would finally remove “homosexuality” from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – but Dr. Judd Marmor, an American Psychiatric Association president who participated in the APA discussions, recalled that Hooker’s research was “the reference point to which we had to keep coming back.””

The First Gay Revolutions

“To raise money for all that the Council on Religion and the Homosexual hoped to do, the clergymen and the homosexuals agreed they’d hold a Mardi Gras ball on the first evening of 1965. The ministers were taking no chances: Ted McIlvenna and Cecil Williams requested a meeting with the chief of police, Thomas Cahill.

Despite their clerical collars, after they announced they were hoping to discuss a New Year’s dance that would be sponsored by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual they didn’t get to see Chief Cahill. They were told they could meet instead with the SFPD’s Sex Crimes Detail.

On December 28, a roomful of vice squad officers listened with growing incredulity as Williams and Mcllvenna announced their business: they were talking about a costume ball for homosexuals? Sponsored by churches? “What are the homosexuals going to do at the ball?” a detective wanted to know.

“We’re going to have a party” Reverend Mcllvenna answered.

One detective, observing that both ministers wore wedding rings, said, “I see you’re married. How do your wives accept this?”] Another said, “I don’t understand why you ministers are interested in sex.”

“We’re interested because we want our brothers and sisters to fully participate in their rights as citizens,” Reverend Williams answered patiently. The officers looked stony faced, disgusted, flabbergasted.”

“It was the type of police conduct that homosexuals knew well; but before this night the police had never played their hand in front of average citizens. When the police had pronounced someone lewd and lascivious, a sanctimonious public had never questioned it. But now the clergy, who’d seen what went on, told the newspapers and TV reporters and even delivered sermons about it. They told the whole city that the SFPD had squandered a wad of public money in a major “criminal” operation which involved no criminals.

Mayor John Shelley received more mail the week following the ball – almost all of it protesting police bullying and insane misuse of resources – than he’d gotten cumulatively in the several months prior. As a result of all the bad publicity, Chief Thomas Cahill felt obliged to form a community relations board, to demonstrate that the police were willing to listen to the clergy, and to the homosexuals who were under church protection.”

“Downtown Philadelphia, around Rittenhouse Square, April 1965: Dewey’s coffee shop was a favorite hangout for gay teens who were too young to get into the bars. But when the manager decided that the campy boys and butchy girls were driving away straight business, he ordered the staff not to serve them. That wasn’t the first time gays were eighty-sixed from a favorite hangout, but the Woolworth’s protests and Martin Luther King’s Selma march were inspiration for two boys and a girl. When they were refused service, they sat; they wouldn’t leave the coffee shop. The manager called the police, who dragged the three teens out. They were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The Janus Society, Philadelphia’s homophile organization, sprang to life as it never had before. Members mimeographed 1,500 leaflets about the discrimination at Dewey’s and the arrest of the teens. Parading up and down in front of the coffee shop for the next five days, they handed out the leaflets to anyone about to go through Dewey’s doors.

Dewey’s manager, seeing how gay ire could really mess up business, reversed his policy. Drum, Janus’s monthly magazine, called the gay teens’ protest “the first sit-in of its kind in the history of the United States.”

But, unlike the black sit-ins and other black protests, the Cooper’s revolt went unrecorded, and the Philadelphia story was noticed only by a couple of low-circulation gay magazines. The media blackout about gay protests permitted straight people to continue in their head-in-the-sand ignorance of gay grievances, Clark Polak, the frustrated chair of the Janus soci-ety, complained. “We must make our protests unavoidable as news,” Polak, himself a journalist, told a conference of homophiles in 1966. “How?” he asked. He answered his own question: “By civil disobedience and encouraging not so civil protests!” Gays needed to riot, to tear things up a bit, like black people were doing. Then the media would have to take notice. “In newspaper terms, no news is bad news; good news is no news; and bad news is good news. How about the movement becoming bad news?” Polak suggested.”

“Leitsch and two other Mattachine officers, John Timmons and Craig Rodwell, planned their noontime sip-in at the Ukrainian American Village Restaurant in the East Village. They chose the place because of the sign displayed in the window: “If You’re Gay, Please Go Away.” The three men showed up at the restaurant respectably dressed, just as the black Woolworth’s protestors always were: conservative somber suits, starched shirts, tasteful ties. Leitsch even carried a black attaché case — “the picture of a Madison Avenue executive,” as the Village Voice reporter described him. They were ready to ask for service and be refused. But one of the newspaper reporters arrived at the restaurant before the three men and announced he was there to cover a homosexual demonstration. The restaurant’s manager cleared everyone out and closed down the place for the day.

Leitsch moved on to plan B. At a second bar, Howard Johnson’s, he and his posse sat down, ordered, and then informed the bartender they were homosexuals. “I don’t see you doing nothing homosexual,” the bartender said and placed three bourbon- and-sodas down in front of them.

Success finally came at Julius’, which had been raided a week earlier after a minister was accused of soliciting sex there from an undercover officer. Dick Leitsch and his friends knew they’d come to the right place when they saw that Julius’ window even displayed the requisite shaming sign that warned the public that there’d recently been a raid of the premises. The young Mattachine members sat down at the bar and ordered. The bartender had already placed two of their drinks in front of them when Leitsch handed him a note on Mattachine stationery. It said, “We are homosexuals. We are orderly. We intend to remain orderly, and we are asking for service.” Just as Leitsch had hoped, the bartender told the men that the State Liquor Authority forbade him from serving homosexuals, and he covered their glasses with his hand to prevent them from taking a drink. A Village Voice photographer obligingly captured the moment in a picture that Mattachine used in court.

Thomas Johnson, writing the story for the New York Times, was just as snide about the homosexuals’ efforts as white Times reporters had always been when writing about homosexuals. Johnson had made his name reporting on black civil rights protests. He abhorred the insinuation that a homosexual sip-in was as serious as a black sit-in. The headline of Johnson’s back-page story announced his contempt: “Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” His article mocked the gay men for having to visit several bars before they succeeded in being turned down for service.

But to Dick Leitsch, the sip-ins were no different from the black lunch-counter sit-ins. Both were about a First Amendment right, freedom of assembly. The right was supposed to be granted to all American citizens. He brought his complaint against the State Liquor Authority to both the New York Commission on Human Rights and the New York State Appellate Court. And to everyone’s astonishment, he won. The commission declared that city ordinances against sex discrimination meant that homosexuals had a right to be served in any licensed bar in the city. The judge of the New York State Appellate Court said that the Constitution supported even the homosexual’s right to peaceful assembly, and the State Liquor Authority can’t prohibit homosexuals from congregating in bars. Leitsch’s sit-in-inspired sip-in thus cleared the way for openly gay bars in New York to obtain state liquor licenses – though police harassment and gay bar raids didn’t stop.”

“The Homophile Action League was one of the few homosexual action organizations founded by lesbians that succeeded in attracting gay men, though their numbers were never large. The League’s presidents were always lesbians, and — unusual for the times — two of the presidents, Ada Bello and Lourdes Alvarez, were Latinas. They helped tackle politicians such as gubernatorial candidate Milton Shapp and make them pay attention. Though Shapp had initially refused to speak at their community forum, HAL’s persistence got to him. As governor, he made Pennsylvania the first state to establish a Governor’s Commission on Sexual Minorities, to recommend ways to end antigay discrimination. Shapp couldn’t get his legislature to vote in favor of gay rights laws that he supported, but Pennsylvania became the first state to have any sort of pro-gay decree when he issued an executive order that ended discrimination against gays and lesbians in state employment. He was also the first governor to proclaim a Gay Pride Week, in 1976, though he had to battle the Pennsylvania Legislature again in order to do it.”

“No one gay leader of the past has been widely chronicled as having had the most foresight, the most spirited plans, and the most critical triumphs, without which contemporary LGBT people couldn’t have won their own decisive civil rights victories. But if any one person deserves such credit, it is Frank Kameny.

Kameny didn’t seem much like a militant with his conservative suits and ties, his precise speech, his penchant to intellectual elitism. But in his demand that the root causes of gay problems be attacked and that sweeping change be made, he was utterly radical.”

“After being fired from the Army Map service, he never again held a secure paying position. A couple of times in the years that followed he was hired for jobs in which he could use his training as an astronomer, but as soon as a security clearance check was run on him, his arrest record came up and he was fired. He depended mostly on his mother, sister, and friends for support. The struggle for equality became his occupation and his life.

It didn’t take him long to conclude that neither Mattachine Society New York nor any of the other homophile organizations that were around in 1961 were models for waging the collective battle he had in mind. He had to invent a new model. His horrific experiences with the federal government had radicalized him. What the homophile movement lacked and must develop, Kameny declared every chance he got in the early days, was “strong and definite positions, unequivocally held.”] His organization’s statement of purpose promised to challenge every federal law that kept homosexuals from full equality. Mattachine Society Washington would “act by any lawful means to secure for homosexuals the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” its constitution announced. Kameny sent copies of the document not only to all the DC papers, but also to President John Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, the entire cabinet, all the Supreme Court justices, and every member of the US Congress. Most of the recipients didn’t deign to acknowledge receipt. A few did. The congressman from Missouri, Paul C. Jones, sent the document back with a handwritten note, angrily scrawled: “I am unalterably opposed to your proposal and cannot see how any person in his right mind can condone the practices which you would justify. Please do not contaminate my mail with such filthy trash.” The congressman from Michigan, Charles Chamberlain, was livid. “In all my six years of service in the United States Congress,” he wrote Kameny, “I have not received such a revolting communication.”

But no one in Washington would escape Mattachine’s “communications.” Mattachine Society Washington published a newsletter, Gazette, which was distributed not only to Mattachine members and the executive and legislative branches of government, but also to the justices of the Supreme Court and Attorney General Robert Kennedy — who did not answer but sent the newsletter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be slipped into its “Mattachine Society Washington” file. Attorney General Kennedy need not have bothered because the FBI was already on Kameny’s mailing list. Every month, J. Edgar Hoover received a copy of the Gazette, which Kameny himself ran off, working far into the night, on a mimeograph machine in the basement where he lived. Hoover sicced one of his agents on him. The FBI agent told Kameny that his boss “took a grave view” of being bombarded with the objectionable newsletter and demanded that he stop sending it immediately. Kameny informed the agent that the First Amendment protected his right to send public officials anything he pleased, as long as it was not threatening; and unless Hoover agreed to stop keeping an FBI file on Mattachine Society Washington, he would continue to be a recipient. Hoover received copies of the Mattachine newsletter until his death in 1972.

Kameny became adept at tweaking the noses of the authorities to get them to duel. In July 1962, he decided that Mattachine Society Washington would apply to the District of Columbia Superintendent of Licenses and Permits for a “charity” license to enable the group to raise money. His application was explicit: Mattachine Society Washington intended to solicit funds to be spent on helping to procure for the homosexual equal status with his fellow man.

The moment Superintendent C. T. Nottingham read it, he knew he was in a tough spot. The District of Columbia was under the direct jurisdiction of the US Congress, and there would be hell to pay if he granted the license, since Congress wholeheartedly sanctioned keeping homosexuals in pariah status. But the superintendent of licenses and permits had no legal grounds on which to refuse a license to Mattachine. As long as the organization avowed it would not engage in illegal activity — and raising money for the purpose of seeking civil liberties was not illegal — Nottingham had to grant the license. He did. “Group Aiding Deviates issued Charity License,” the Washington Star announced. Kameny welcomed the stir. It gave him a platform to put civil liberties laws to the test. Despite Kameny’s impassioned arguments, the House sided with Dowdy, and Mattachine’s “charity license” was revoked.

But Mattachine had gained more than it lost. Not all DC newspapers were swayed by the congressman’s fulminations. A surprising editorial in the Washington Post titled “Piety by Fiat” mocked “the oddly inept little bill by that Master of Morality, Rep. Dowdy, Mattachine members were elated. The Washington Post had just helped spread the word about the homophile cause more widely than they could possibly have done. Mattachine established an award for the public official who’d “done the most to advance the cause of homophile organizations.” Congressman Dowdy won hands down.

Nor was Mattachine Society Washington thwarted in its fund-raising by the Dowdy incident. Kameny discovered that a charity license was unnecessary for organizations that raised no more than $1,500 a year, which was far more than Mattachine had been raising. He claimed the last word by writing to the Washington Post to announce, “We will actively continue to solicit funds.””

“April 28, 1963: Kameny and five other white men stood among 250,000 other people, mostly black, at Martin Luther King’s March on Washington and held up signs that identified them as members of the Mattachine Society — an act less brave than it might seem since few would have known what “Mattachine” was. The men didn’t realize, of course, that the march was important for the cause, he encouraged a heterosexual and a bisexual woman to march along with Lilli Vincenz, the lone lesbian.

Kameny planned the picket to coincide not only with the height of the tourist season, but also with a major anti-Vietnam War demonstration to protest the bombing in Southeast Asia — which, as he guessed, would attract an additional fifteen thousand to twenty-five thousand people to DC. On April 17, 1965, the day before Easter Sunday, tourists who came to gaze at the White House stared in astonishment at the unaccustomed sight of homosexuals carrying signs: “Cuba’s Government Persecutes Homosexuals: U.S. Government Beat Them To It,” “U.S., Cuba, Russia: United to Persecute Homosexuals”: “U.S. Claims No Second Class Citizens: What About Homosexuals?””

“Kameny was furious. The year before, in 1968, he’d coined the slogan “Gay Is Good,” which he would come to think of as his biggest contribution to the gay movement--even bigger than his victories over the federal government- because it had the power to make gays and lesbians strong.”

“The commission agreed to pay Norton $100,000 for wrongful termination and to provide him with a lifetime pension.

And that was not the greatest victory of Norton v. Macy. As a direct result of losing this case in 1969 and the Scott v. Macy case the year before, the Civil Service Commission came to understand that it needed to give up on refusing to hire homosexual applicants and witch hunting homosexual employees. On December 21, 1973, the commission issued a bulletin to provide a guideline to all the agencies over which it had jurisdiction: “You may not find a person unsuitable for federal employment merely because that person is a homosexual or has engaged in homosexual acts; nor may such exclusion be based on a conclusion that a homosexual person might bring the public service into public contempt.” The statement was a direct refutation of Chairman Macy’s 1966 declarations that “homosexual” is not a noun, and that homosexuals should be barred from federal employment because their presence would offend the public.

In 1975 the guideline was formally codified in the Civil Service Commission’s Regulations Relating to Suitability Disqualification. A quarter-century-old policy of federal persecution of gay people who worked for, or hoped to work for, the US government, had come to an end. Frank Kameny, grandiose and bellicose, declared in inimitable Kameny style, “The US government surrendered to me on July 3, 1975.””

Stonewall

“About one in the morning on June 28, 1969, the bouncer was summoned to the peephole. He looked out and saw “Lily Law, Betty Badge, and Peggy Pig,” as policemen were called by campy Village queens, and police shouted, “Police! Open up!””

“Regardless of the reasons for a raid, the history of police harassment of gay bars was old enough so that gay people knew what to do. If they were so lucky as to be shooed outside instead of carted off to the police station and booked, they quickly skedaddled.

But on this night, they didn’t. As patrons were released by the police, they stood on the sidewalk in front of the bar waiting to see if friends still inside would be set free; and as each new person came through Stonewall’s door, those who waited applauded and cheered. The unexpected limelight proved irresistible to many of the liberated who made devil-may-care assertions of dignity by prancing out diva-style, striking a pose, curtsying and bowing, blowing kisses to the throng. “The whole proceedings took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night,” an unfriendly and thoroughly baffled eyewitness reporter for the New York Daily News observed. The festive crowd was soon swelled by Greenwich Village weekend tourists who came to see what the excitement was about.”

“A few onlookers booed the policemen. But the real turning point, Smith and Truscott agreed, came after several policemen dragged a butch lesbian out of the bar. They’d handcuffed her because she’d struggled with them. The paddy wagon was full, so the officers pushed the hefty, dark-haired woman who was wearing a man’s dress suit into one of the squad cars that were lined up on the street. But she wouldn’t stay put. Three times she slid out the driver’s-side back door and tried to run back into the Stonewall, perhaps to a lover still being questioned. The last time, as a beefy policeman wrestled her back toward the squad car, she yelled to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?”

It was as though her question broke the spell that had, for generations, held gays and lesbians in thrall. “The crowd became explosive,” Truscott jotted in his notepad. IS “Police brutality!” “Pigs!” they shrieked. I° They pelted the police with a rain of pennies (dirty coppers). Someone threw a loosened cobblestone. Beer cans and glass bottles followed. Bricks from a nearby construction site were hurled at the squad cars with baseball player skill. A black drag queen, Marsha P. (for “Pay It No Mind”) Johnson stuffed a bag with the bricks, then shinnied up a lamppost despite her high heels and tight dress. Taking aim at the windshield of a squad car parked below, she let fly and heard the satisfying shatter of glass. I Gays surrounded the paddy wagon and shook it as though they would rescue the prisoners trapped inside by pulling it apart. If some among the crowd suggested it was time to cut out, others answered — as purportedly did drag queen Sylvia Rivera-”Are you nuts? I’m not missing a minute of this. It’s the revolution!”

A white policeman grabbed a Puerto Rican man who was striking campy poses; the man struggled and the policeman raised his billy club to subdue him. “How’d you like a big Spanish dick up your little Irish ass?” the man screamed, and the policeman hesitated just long enough for his prisoner to slip away in the mass of rioters. I? Two officers handcuffed twenty-eight-year-old Raymond Castro and pushed him into the paddy wagon. Hyped by the crowd’s shouting, “Let him go! Let him go!” Castro sprang back and knocked both policemen down, superhero style.? A butch fellow set a fire in a nearby trash can, and when it blazed red and gold, he threw it through one of the Stonewall’s plate-glass-and-plywood-backed windows. People rushed to phone booths to call other gays to join the fight; or they ran through the streets like Paul Revere, drawing gays and straights alike — and especially the Village radicals who had long been hoping and waiting for this night.”

“He’d gotten the City University of New York to give approval to his student organization, Homosexuals Intransigent!, a name that was to appear always italicized and with an exclamation point, young Schoonmaker insisted. He scoffed at the “stupid, cowardly euphemism ‘homophile’” that older organizations hid behind. He scoffed, too, at the closet, and declared that anyone who wanted to join his group must be openly homosexual. Using City College student body funds, he mimeographed defiant flyers and posted them all over the campus. “Gay is a groove [as in “groovy”),” they announced, “not a rut or ditch!”

Schoonmaker considered himself a “homosexual separatist” (cf. Black separatist), and to nongays, even bisexuals and sympathetic straights, he declared, speaking for Homosexuals Intransigent!: “Fuck off! Stay out of my life! I view you with disgust.” Nor did he spare lesbians: “I want to live my life among men and manly things! You don’t belong!” He hoped to convince masculine gay men to band together in all ways, but especially politically, to take over Manhattan’s Nineteenth and Twentieth Districts, to vote “our own people in.” “Blacks did it,” he exhorted. “Puerto Ricans, Italians, Irish, others too. It works!”

“Inspector Pine had been in the Battle of the Bulge in World War I; he’d written a well-respected training manual on the subject of hand-to-hand combat. “But there was never any time that I felt more scared than I had that night,” he later admitted. There were only five other policemen and two policewomen with him at the Stonewall, and the mob had somehow grown to maybe a thousand. More bad actors needed to be arrested as soon as possible, Pine thought, or the police would not regain control. He needed backup. He used his police radio to call Sixth Precinct headquarters, only a few blocks away — but inexplicably his calls would not go through. It seemed he had no choice about what to do next. He dispatched the three squad cars and the paddy wagon packed with prisoners. “Hurry back!” he ordered the drivers. “Just drop them off at the Sixth Precinct and hurry back!” The officers turned the squad car sirens on to shriek. Rioters pounded on the cars’ hoods and screeched “Pigs!” as the police vehicles drove off.

The eight officers were left alone on the street with a mob that kept growing. “Let’s get them!” somebody screamed. “Back inside! We’ll lock ourselves inside!”Pine ordered his officers, and they beat a hasty retreat into the gay bar. Now they could hear the crowd screaming, “Kill the cops!” “Police brutality!” “We’re not going to take this anymore!” “Let’s get ‘em!”

A nearby parking meter had been loosened from the concrete sometime earlier by a bad driver. John O’Brien, together with a shirtless, buff man with curly brown hair, and a couple of other gays, rocked it till they pried it up. Then they ran with the phallic battering ram toward the Stonewall and crashed open its door. Hurled beer cans and garbage followed. Blood spurted from under Patrolman Gil Weisman’s eye when he was hit by a flung coin. The other officers grabbed their guns from their holsters. “We’ll shoot the first motherfucker that comes through the door!” Inspector Pine yelled. No one entered, and he pulled the broken door closed. A couple of the policemen went from room to room looking for a safe exit. They found a vent that opened out to the rear of the building. Only the more petite of the two women officers could slip out. She ran to a nearby firehouse, where she could call the Sixth Precinct for backup.

But before backup arrived Pine and his crew may as well have been in a war zone. A hand reached in through the Stonewall’s broken window, squirted lighter fluid that had been liberated from the United Cigar Store on Seventh Avenue, and dropped a match. Flames whooshed. A trash can, stuffed full with burning paper, landed inside with a thud. “Cook the pigs!” someone yelled, The policemen grabbed the emergency hose from the back wall of the bar and put out the fires. Then three officers wedged the hose through a crack in the door and turned it on full force, hoping to douse the crowd and disperse them. A cold spray shocked the front-row rioters, but it didn’t last long. The hose was old and frayed, and when it split the water turned the Stonewall Inn into a small river, and police officers found themselves slipping and sliding on the concrete floor. Miserable and desperate, a couple of policemen again drew guns. Inspector Pine saw disaster looming. He walked up to each one of his officers, looked him in the eye, called him by name, and said, “If you fire that gun without me saying your name and the word ‘fire,’ you’ll be walking a beat on Staten Island all alone for the rest of your career. Do you understand me?”

Finally, at 2:55 a.m. police buses arrived carrying the Tactical Patrol Force, whose major job had been to quell New York City’s race riots and out-of-control antiwar protests. Wearing riot helmets with long visors and carrying shields, they formed a phalanx like a Roman army. They were met by a Rockettes-style chorus line of queens who linked arms, kicked high, and to the tune of “Ta-ra-ra Boom-de-ay” bellowed sassily, “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We don’t wear underwear / We show our pubic hair / We pick up lots of tricks / That’s how we get our kicks / We wear our dungarees / Above our nelly knees.” Officer Andrew Scheu of the Tactical Police Force tried to arrest one man, Wolfgang Podolski, who struck him in the left eye with a rolled-up newspaper. In the scuffle, Scheu fell down and broke his wrist — which, ironically, went limp. Another officer, Charles Holmes, was bitten on the wrist when he tried to make an arrest, and he had to be taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital for a tetanus shot. But the rest of the Tactical Police Force cracked heads up and down Christopher Street until the rioters were finally dispersed at about four in the morning.

The next day, the New York Times — not as astute as Sylvia Rivera claimed to be about the meaning of the night’s events (“It’s the revolution!”) — reported the unprecedented melee on page 33 in a short article that bore the headline, “Four Police- men Hurt in ‘Village’ Raid.””

“The older homophiles didn’t know it yet, but the parameters of daring had been expanded exponentially by the events of June 28 to July 2. After thirty minutes or so, two T-shirt-clad lesbians broke out of single file. Not only did they walk side by side — they held hands. Kameny could no longer hold his tongue, screaming, “You can’t do that! You can’t do that!” he rushed over to them and slapped their hands apart. That gesture triggered an uproar. Nineteen-year-old Bill Weaver found a black marker, crossed out the meek “Equality for Homosexuals” message on the sign he was carrying and wrote in its place “Smash Sexual Fascism!””

“There on the floor of the convention of the eastern region homophiles, Broidy called for an official end to the Fourth of July Annual Reminder Day demonstration in Philadelphia. “Reminder Day has lost its effectiveness,” she proclaimed, “because it’s become just one of many demonstrations held at Independence Hall on that day.” In its place, every year on the last Saturday of June there should be “Christopher Street Liberation Day” demonstrations nationwide to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall riots. And — very important to the four radicals who wrote the resolution — ”no dress or age regulations shall be made for this demonstration.”

Not even those four could have predicted their resolution’s enduring power, which would still be working decades later to mobilize hundreds of thousands of lesbians and gays in Pride Parades across the country every year, and to pull them out of the closet. ERCHO, however, soon disbanded.”

The Stonewall Nation of Alpine County

“Kight’s Alpine County prank began as a serious plan after a Bay Area gay, Don Jackson, read Carl Wittman’s “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” which was published in the San Francisco Free Press in December 1969. Jackson was inspired to imagine a “Stonewall Nation,” run by gays and for gays. By the time he presented a proposal to a Gay Liberation Conference at Berkeley, Jackson had his plan down to specifics. He’d been thrilled to discover that Alpine County, a wonderland of pine forests and crystalline lakes nestled in the Sierra Nevada Moun- tains, had only 384 registered voters; and a new California law mandated that residency requirements for voters be reduced from one year to ninety days. If a mere four hundred gay people took up residency in Alpine County, within ninety days they could outvote the mountaineers, woodsmen, and fisherman who were its present residents. The entire local government could be recalled, and in its place, gays could put in a gay sheriff, a gay judge, gay council members — even a gay postmaster. Alpine would become “a national refuge for persecuted homosexuals.” They’d live in utopian separatism. They’d create “a world center for the gay counter-culture and a shining symbol of hope. to all gay people in the world,” Jackson declared very solemnly in his Berkeley presentation.

He teamed up with the head of the Psychedelic Venus Church, Jefferson Fuck Poland (the same Fuck Poland who’d helped swell the ranks of Randy Wicker’s 1964 picket at New York’s Whitehall Induction Center), and together they started the Alpine Liberation Front in Berkeley. The Front’s primary purpose was to find a way to make the dream of the great gay migration to Alpine a reality. Jackson permitted an underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, to reprint his proposal in the hope it would attract future gay Alpiners. “Brother Don Has a Dream,” the essay was called.

That was when Morris Kight first heard of the Alpine plan. Kight had been exceedingly frustrated because for months the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front had been conducting an agitprop a day to call attention to mistreatment of gays and lesbians in Los Angeles — but with the exception of underground papers, there’d been no media coverage. “You have to hit them over the head with a two-by-four before they’ll pay any attention to our issues,” Kight always complained. A gay and lesbian takeover of a whole county: now, that would certainly be a two-by-four! “Alpine is freezing. It’s no place where any- one gay would want to live” he told three of his most trusted henchmen with whom he shared a house. “But we’ll pretend to be serious.””

“The media showed up as they never had before. “The Gay Liberation Front met and voted unanimously to take over Alpine — farms, ranches, crafts shops,” Kight announced to reporters and rolling cameras. “And there’ll be a university where gay and lesbian studies will be taught, too!” Yes, Alpine County would soon become a gay and lesbian “citadel of intellectual and activist activity,” Kight promised. He showed them a flyer GLF had printed up: “Come to Alpine County! The New Gay Mecca!” — and buttons in the spirit of the forty-niners, to be distributed to gay pioneers everywhere: “Alpine County or Bust!””

“The downside of the prank was that some gay people took the Alpine plan very seriously. Craig Schoonmaker, founder of Homosexuals Intransigent!, who’d called for homosexual separatism as a necessity in a homophobic world, thought that the takeover of a large piece of land like Alpine was exactly what was needed. It would be a homosexual homeland where gay men (lesbians would be excluded) could be “open and honest and take pride in themselves. “ Don Jackson, the Alpine plan’s first proponent, devoted himself night and day to the dream — which grew larger and larger to match Kight’s reports of the multiplying numbers of (fictional) would-be pioneers.

Of course, Kight couldn’t tell many people that as far as he was concerned, the Alpine takeover was a giant hoax. Someone might leak the truth to the press, and that would be the end of all the delirious attention that a gay issue was finally getting.”

“Never before had the word homosexual or gay gotten so much media attention; never before had gays and lesbians in little towns all over America — Carroll, Iowa; Big Spring, Texas; Kingsport, Tennessee; Anderson, Indiana — been able to pick up their local papers and read that gay people were answering years of mistreatment with gay power. And when Kight thought the Alpine prank had gotten all the press coverage it was going to get, he moved on, announcing to the media the following year that though the gays and lesbians he represented were still considering a takeover of Alpine, they were now also planning to buy an entire Southern California town and seven Sacramento River villages. In fact, he said, homosexuals are already there: “They have quietly moved into those villages in considerable number and are gradually colonizing them.””

The GAA

“Bob Kohler had come to the gay movement after being a Freedom Rider with the Congress for Racial Equality. He often told with relish about the time he, a young black woman, and a young black man jumped into an all-white public swimming pool in the South. The fifty whites who’d been enjoying a swim emptied out as though alligators had just dived in — and then the lifeguards rushed to drain the pool while the trio stood there, bathing suits dripping, arms clasped, singing emphatically “We Shall Overcome.””

“The founding members chose as the Gay Activists Alliance symbol the Greek letter lambda. “The Lacedaemonians, or Spartans, bore it on their shields, a people’s will aimed at common oppressors,” they explained bellicosely in a GAA leaflet. Enemies of gays and lesbians, like Sparta’s enemies, would cease to sleep peacefully in their beds at night. Homophobes in power would learn that they’d met their match. The Gay Activists Alliance would use “confrontation politics” to win civil rights: sit-ins, demonstrations, street theater, and especially meaningful monkey shines.”

“Marty Robinson came up with another key idea: GAA would do agitprop, like the radical feminists did in the 1960s, when they invaded the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City and brought with them “Freedom Trash Cans” into which they tossed bras, high heels, Playboy magazines, and cooking utensils. They held an “ogle-in” on Wall Street, dozens of women scrutinizing male butts, whistling, and catcalling. They released cages of mice at a bridal fair in Madison Square Garden. They “occupied” tables in restaurants that wouldn’t seat unaccompanied women.”

“Of course, they couldn’t come up with hundreds of dollars to buy tickets for Lindsay’s fund-raiser (nor would they have spent their money that way even if they’d had it). But Ron Gold had a connection: the head of the projectionist union (who never knew what Gold was up to) gave the former Variety reporter a small stack of complementary tickets to the evening’s event.

Now, how to present themselves at such a gala? Rich Wandel had been in the news too recently as president of GAA; he’d have to be disguised. “Okay, a dark suit and an Abraham Lincoln beard,” Wandel promised. And the others would have to spiff up enough for this formal affair so they wouldn’t call attention to themselves too soon. No lambda T-shirts here.

The event that evening began with cigar-smoking comedian Alan King, who told New Yorker jokes for ten minutes, then introduced Lindsay’s campaign manager, Richard Aurelio, with the prophetic quip, “That’s like being the navigator on the Ti-

tanic.” Then King grandly introduced “the next president of the United States, John Lindsay!” Thunderous applause as the tuxedoed mayor walked onstage.

He’d barely opened his mouth before Morty Manford, stationed in the balcony where he’d affixed a sturdy rope, swung on it, Errol Flynn style, down to the orchestra, screaming, “Justice for homosexuals!” Cora Perrotta, a petite, vivacious Puerto Rican lesbian, veteran of many GAA zaps, and used to being arrested for them, stood up from her seat in the orchestra and shouted, “Why are you contributing to homosexual oppression, Mr. Mayor?” She held up a siren that would sound an ear-splitting screech when the pin was pulled-and she pulled the pin. Then she threw pin and screech machine over the heads of the audience, as far as she could, and in opposite directions. She sat down again-and handcuffed herself to her chair, so that when the police arrived, there’d be an extra stir because they’d have to cut the handcuffs.

Then Roskoff stood up from his seat in the balcony, shouting, “There are twenty million gays in this country. Lindsay cannot run for president!” and he, too, held up a siren, pulled the pin, and threw siren and pin in opposite directions. He also flung hundreds of Gay Activists Alliance flyers down on the audience seated in the orchestra. “There are twenty million gays in this country. Lindsay cannot run for president!” the flyers proclaimed. Just as Perrotta had done, Roskoff quickly handcuffed himself to his chair. Then Wayne Sunday, another veteran zapper, and then Rich Wandel-one after another, they popped up from their seats in the orchestra or balcony, shouted their slogans, pulled the pins of their sirens, and chained themselves to their chairs. The noise of sirens and homosexuals barking and bellowing slogans ended Lindsay’s speech. The candidate retreated from the stage. As the bemused audience filed out, the zappers kept yelling, “There are twenty million gays in this country. Lindsay cannot run for president!” and “Justice for homosexuals!” When the police finally arrived, they cut the zappers loose from their handcuffs, ushered them into a paddy wagon, and took them to the Midtown North Precinct Station for booking.

The next day, Mayor Lindsay, understanding that Wandel and GAA really would give no quarter in the war they’d declared on him, capitulated. He signed an executive order that said that the sexual orientation of city employees and job applicants for city jobs must be considered irrelevant. The executive order was not as good as a comprehensive gay rights bill that would give gays and lesbians fair treatment in employment, housing, and public accommodations, but it was a step in the right direction.”

“They informed Swearingen that they could not approve him for work unless he got a letter from a psychiatrist stating that his sexual orientation would not interfere with his job performance. Of course, Mayor Lindsay had issued an executive order six months earlier demanding that city agencies stop discriminating against homosexuals — and the bureau’s insistence that Swearingen get cleared by a psychiatrist was certainly discrimination. But clearly not all agencies were taking Lindsay’s executive order seriously.

The head of the Taxi and Limousine Commission was Michael Lazar (known as the “Taxi Czar”). He’d been in the audience at Radio City Music Hall when the Gay Activists Alliance zapped Mayor Lindsay off the stage, so he’d already had a demonstration of the group’s no-holds-barred tenacity. Now nine GAA members descended on his Wall Street headquarters, seven of them trailing Allen Roskoff and Arthur Bell, who carried a couch onto the freight elevator and got out on Czar Lazar’s floor.

“We didn’t order a couch!” Commissioner Lazar’s startled secretary shrieked. “Who are you?” Allen Roskoff was decked out in a doctor’s white smock, a stethoscope slung around his neck. “We are here to psychoanalyze Mr. Lazar. We must see if he is sane enough to be the taxi commissioner,” a poker-faced Roskoff told her. Three days later, Lazar announced that the Taxi and Limousine Commission’s policies had been reversed. Homosexual applicants would no longer be required to submit psychiatric certification, and homosexuals who had been given licenses would no longer be required to undergo semiannual psychiatric evaluations in order to keep them. With no further ado, Geoffrey Swearingen received an unconditional license to drive a cab.”

Radicalesbians

“Finally, though, O’Leary’s request to start a lesbian group in GA was given a reluctant nod: she could hold her meetings and women-only dances and film nights at the GAA firehouse headquarters. But it didn’t work. GAA men kept subverting the new “committee.” Some of them showed up at the lesbian meetings and conspicuously sat. The women demanded they leave. Entertainment committee members were supposed to clean the kitchen or set up the movie projector. For lesbian events, they didn’t.

Members of the Lesbian Liberation Committee were also unhappy that GAA allowed transvestites such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson into the organization. Arthur Bell, a journalist and founder of GAA, wrote articles in the Village Voice that depicted them as heroes and took seriously the organization they started, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. Lesbian Liberation Committee members, like most feminists of the seventies, loathed that women were imprisoned in fashions such as high heels and short skirts that made them vulnerable; or tight dresses that revealed sex characteristics; or lipstick and eye shadow that encouraged frivolity. As lesbian feminists saw it, transvestites were mocking women by mimicking what demeaned them.”

“They gathered at Rita Mae Brown’s apartment-Lois Hart, Cynthia Funk, Ellen Bedoz (née Ellen Shumsky), Artemis March (née March Hoffman), and Barbara XX (née Barbara Gladstone) and they brainstormed. Each one would write out her ideas, they decided, and then they’d hash them over together. They agreed the manifesto must say that lesbians are just like other women, but more so. “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion” would be their opening line. They’d say that heterosexual women become feminists when they finally understand that society doesn’t allow them to be complete and free human beings — but lesbians had always understood that. Feminists are finally realizing that sex roles dehumanize women — but lesbians had always understood that; they’d always refused to accept the limitations and oppressions imposed by the womanly role.

March Hoffman, who’d just graduated from Vassar College, volunteered to take all their notes and the ideas that came up when they brainstormed, and compose the manifesto in a unified voice. They’d call it “The Woman-Identified Woman.” And since it was a group effort, they’d say it was written “by Radicalesbians.””

“Their fervor was nothing short of evangelical as they tossed around ideas. They’d call for women who’d been heretofore heterosexual to emulate lesbians by ceasing to be “male identified” in their heads. Women must become “woman identified.” They’d say that women who had feminist aspirations must stop denying one another the value and love (even sexual love) that they readily accorded to men. “Our energies must flow toward our sisters, not backward toward our oppressors,” they’d declare.

Straight radical feminists had been thinking along similar lines. The very heterosexual Village Voice writer Vivian Gornick declared in a 1970 article that lesbians “have more to teach Feminists about Feminism than has any other single category of human being. Ti-Grace Atkinson, a onetime southern belle who’d become a leading feminist theoretician, was speaking of lesbians as the “front-line troops” of the women’s movement. Lesbianism, she said, was a “political choice” and a “political strategy” — redefining “politics” (with a nod to Kate Millett’s 1968 essay “Sexual Politics”) to refer to the manifold conflicts between the sexes. For the first time since the sexologists emerged in the nineteenth century, lesbians were being championed and admired as bold political heroes instead of being deprecated as sickies and criminals. “Can you imagine a Frenchman, serving in the French Army from 9 AM to 5 PM, then trotting ‘home’ to Germany for supper and overnight? That’s called game-playing and collaboration, not political commitment, “ Ti-Grace Atkinson chided.”

“The Second Congress to Unite Women was held on May Day 1970, in an auditorium of a junior high school on West seventeenth Street. Three hundred women sat waiting for the congress to be called to order and the scheduled panel to begin.

Seven fifteen: the lights went out. Women sitting in the dark heard a rebel yell, led by Rita Mae Brown, and then a stampede down the aisles, people running to the front of the auditorium. Then lights again. (One of the Radicalesbians, Michela Griffo, knew where the light switches were.) Rose-colored signs had been plastered on the auditorium walls and in front of the podium. “Superdyke Loves You,” “Take A Lesbian To Lunch,” “You’re Going To Love The Lavender Menace,” “Women’s Liberation IS A Lesbian Plot.” Seventeen young women were standing onstage, all looking androgynous, like pretty teenage boys — short haired, clad in bell-bottom blue jeans, smiling happily and defiantly. They wore lavender T-shirts with the words Lavender Menace stenciled on their front. (About twenty incognito Lavender Menaces were planted in the audience to help steer a discussion in the right direction.) National Organization for Women officials tried in vain to restore order amid nervous laughter, whooping and hollering, general chaos. “I object to your coming in and taking over this meeting! You’re acting like men!” one of the NOW organizers yelled into the microphone.

Rita Mae Brown seized the mic and roared, “This conference won’t proceed until we talk about lesbians in the women’s movement.” A few women got up and stormed out. Most were intrigued by the sauciness of the zap. Karla Jay, one of the Radicalesbians planted in the audience, stood up and yelled, “Yes, yes, sisters! I’m tired of being in the closet because of the women’s movement!” Then she ripped off the long-sleeved red blouse she was wearing to reveal a Lavender Menace T-shirt underneath.

The straight women at the Congress listened to what lesbians had to say about how heterosexual women were complicit with the male power structure, how that structure oppressed lesbians, how it oppressed heterosexual women even more. They mostly agreed. The Lavender Menace had put a collective finger on some hard truths. Straight women stood in line at the open mic to pour out their own grievances about the sex roles that limited and dehumanized them, and the rage they felt.

An apoplectic Betty Friedan later speculated that the Lavender Menace T-shirt wearers were CIA-trained operatives, intent on destroying the women’s movement.”

“She proposed that women organize their own political party. The math said it could be done. Women were a majority in America, and everywhere they were unhappy with male rule. Of course, the work toward overthrow would have to be conducted subtly first, underground. But by 1977 — maybe it might take as long as 1979 — a woman’s party could “break overground.”

To begin such serious business, Rita Mae Brown moved to Washington, DC. She would find out how power operated on a large scale, so that when the time came, she’d be ready. Brown haunted the halls of Congress. The only clothes she had to her name, she later wrote, were a pair of white sneakers, a couple pairs of jeans, a few T-shirts, and a peacoat. But she was rich in chutzpah. Her disarming guise got her entrée into the offices of leading government liberals. “What do you think about job security for gay people?” she asked Senator Ted Kennedy. (“He didn’t bat an eye.”) “I’m an underground reporter, here to see how government works,” she told Senator Hubert Humphrey. Caught by the wide-eyed street-urchin charm that Brown cultivated, the Minnesota Democrat let her follow him around for the entire day; he even gave her lunch money because she looked hungry.

But the next step toward Brown’s grand goal was unclear. The number of women in Congress in 1970 could be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

“The cold reality was different. If they had no civil rights as lesbians, they were powerless when hauled into “the man’s” courts. Child custody cases were the most heartbreaking. Even lesbians off in the most remote mountain or forest communes couldn’t escape news of the Mary Jo Risher case. The thirty-eight-year-old nurse, described by the media as “a handsome, quietly spoken, former Texas Sunday school teacher” (she’d been PTA president, too), had divorced her husband, Doug Risher, in 1971 because in a drunken rage he’d beat her and broken her nose. He’d also been arrested for drunk driving; and when he got the daughter of a coworker pregnant, he’d procured an illegal abortion for her. Mary Jo Risher had been awarded custody of their three-year-old adopted son at the time of the divorce. Doug Risher hadn’t protested.

But when she began living with another woman three years later, he demanded that the child be taken from her and given to him. He’d remarried, he told the Dallas jury of ten men and two women, and he could give the boy a normal family life. “A child shouldn’t be used as a guinea pig for someone else’s social experiment,” his lawyer proclaimed. It worked. The jury members discounted the son’s plea to stay with his mother; they ignored evidence that the child was flourishing; and that he was living in a stable, loving family with his mother, her woman partner, and the partner’s eleven-year-old daughter. They gave custody of the boy to Doug Risher, despite his history of drunkenness and violence and breaking the law. An appeals court turned down Mary Jo Risher’s request for a retrial, and the jury’s decision was upheld.

Having no faith in a struggle to procure civil rights, lesbian separatists determined to be creative to avert tragedies such as Mary Jo Risher’s. The Wing Family (a separatist commune named after the members’ affinity for birds) had settled outside of Northampton, Massachusetts. One Wing Family member was about to give birth. She’d never been married. She’d gone to New York to have sex with an anonymous man because she wanted a baby, but she wouldn’t be raising it alone: the Wing Family would share with her the jobs of diapering, reading bedtime stories, putting mercurochrome on scraped knees. The Wings agreed they’d take no chances; they’d keep secret from the hostile “system” what they hoped to do. They were afraid even of a hospital record or a birth certificate. If the patriarchal court could rule that a violent, drunken, philandering lawbreaker was a better parent than law-abiding and conventionally employed Mary Jo Risher, it would certainly not respect the wishes of a bunch of lesbian separatists. The baby would be delivered there on the commune, with the “volunteer mothers” assisting.

They called in a lesbian lawyer, Sue Levinkind, and asked her to witness the woman giving birth and then take signatures from all commune members who were witnesses. In lieu of a birth certificate — which could have alerted the patriarchs that a child had been born out of wedlock, to a lesbian, and was being raised on a separatist commune by a “pretend family,” they asked Levinkind to produce an affidavit that quietly documented the birth, so no one in the future might challenge who the mother was.”

“Chirlane McCray, a bright young black woman with deep-set eyes and hair styled in cornrows, had been a junior at Wellesley College in 1974, when the black lesbian-feminist Combahee River Collective was formed. She joined, and along with Audre Lorde, Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, and Barbara Smith — the most salient figures in the black lesbian-feminist movement — helped write the group’s manifesto, the “Combahee River Collective Statement.” Its sentiments were consistent with most radical lesbian-feminist thought of the era, calling for “the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy.” In 1979

McCray, a serious writer now, penned an article for Essence, a mass circulation magazine for young black women. The article was groundbreaking — the first one ever written for a black magazine by an openly black lesbian. “I Am a Lesbian” the title stated baldly, and in the piece itself, McCray called herself “fortunate because I discovered my preference for women early, before getting locked in traditional marriage and having children.”

McCray went on to become a speechwriter for New York’s first African American mayor, David Dinkins. In 1991 she fell in love with Dinkins’s white aide, who’d been an avid supporter of the Communist Sandinistas of Nicaragua. The aide was Bill de Blasio, and they married three years later.”

“Charlotte Bunch, who remained a lesbian though her role as Brown’s lover didn’t last long, wrote seminal essays of lesbian-feminist theory. She also brought the sexual-politics insights of the Furies into the larger world. Bunch founded UN Women, a United Nations body that promotes gender equality and empowerment of women everywhere — no more “bound feet and cut-off clitorises.”

Rita Mae Brown never did manage to launch a women’s party that would overthrow the patriarchy. But her autobiographical novel Rubyfrait Jungle, which came out soon after she left the Furies, vies with the morbid and depressing Well of Loneliness as the most famous lesbian novel ever written. Rubyfruit Jungle presents the lesbian as a gorgeous, cheerful, and triumphant hero. It became a cross-over book, selling well over a million copies, to straights as well as lesbians.”

The National Gay Task Force

“She shouted it out to her convention audience and to whatever night owls were watching on TV. The gay rights plank would be a wedge! Next would come the repeal of all the laws against prostitution, pimping, and pandering, even the repeal of the Mann Act, which prohibits white slavery. Gay rights would destroy the laws that protect the young, the innocent, and the weak. Age of consent laws would be struck down and young boys would be sexually molested by grown men. At this point, the Reverend Troy Perry and seven other gays sitting with him jumped up and raised clenched fists, chanting, “No! No! No!”

“If we approve this plank, we would invite the ridicule of the nation!” Mrs. Wilch concluded with tearful passion.

When a voice vote was called, the exhausted delegates roused themselves. The roar of no made it unequivocally clear that as far as the Democratic Party was concerned, gays and lesbians would remain the untouchables of American society.

Gay radicals who’d infiltrated the convention hall had expected nothing different. They’d already made lavish plans for how to respond: three days of “National Shame” protests with picketers “wearing lavender and black armbands of Gay Rage, stationed at all the party headquarters across the county.” But now, two gay men in purple T-shirts emblazoned with the logo GAY POWER! were too enraged to wait for the National Shame protests. They ran to an aisle and staged a kissing bout, to demonstrate their contempt for the Democratic National Convention.”

“Even without the kissing zap, simply that Madeline Davis and Jim Foster had been allowed to speak was--as Mrs. Wilch feared enough to make the Democratic Party bleed votes. Marvin Griffin, Georgia’s former governor who’d been a lifelong Southern Democrat, announced he’d be voting Republican this time around: “I am not a member of the Gay Liberation movement . . . I am not a hippie or a Yippie. “The Democratic Party Convention has something for everybody but me,” he complained indignantly. And it wasn’t just Southern Democrats who’d been repelled. Since their inception, labor unions had always endorsed the Democratic candidate for president; but not long after the convention, George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, told a group of steelworkers that his powerful federation of trade unions wouldn’t be endorsing anyone for the 1972 election. Because, he said, “The Democratic Party has been taken over by people named Jack who look like Jills and smell like Johns.”

Yet despite the clear rejection of the gay plank, the vituperative rhetoric, and the defections, something important had taken place in the wee hours of July 12 that made a dent in American consciousness. “I was a bit shocked about the homosexual giving a speech,” Mrs. Theda Brown, delegate from Hutchinson, Kansas, told an Associated Press reporter. “It was a good speech, but it did shock me. I think it shocked us all,” she said, reeling with confusion and ambivalence.”” Shocked, perplexed, resentful, or sleepy, the delegates in the convention hall and those who’d been watching from their living rooms saw homosexuals on a national political stage. It would no longer be possible to imagine that such a thing could never happen.”

“Dr. Brown was already well known to the press and the public because he’d been the New York City Health Commissioner. What wasn’t known was that in 1967 New York Times columnist Drew Pearson had planned to write an exposé on high-placed homosexuals in the Lindsay administration, and he’d intended to begin with Dr. Brown. The only way to avoid disgrace, Brown had thought, was to resign. But six years later, the former health commissioner let himself be outed in the same newspaper. A front-page headline on October 3, 1973, declared, “Ex-City Official Says He’s a Homosexual.”

Dr. Brown was a friend of Bruce Voeller, and had even testified in court about Voeller’s stability and good influence as a parent when Voeller fought for better visitation rights with his children. And now Dr. Brown and his homosexuality were front-page news: Voeller saw that here was a way to get major media attention for the organization he was starting. Brown agreed to help. About two weeks after the New York Times announced Brown’s homosexuality, he and Voeller called a press conference. As Voller was sure it would, the New York Times published another headline about the doctor — and Voeller’s fledgling organization: “Homosexual Civil Rights Group is Announced by Ex-City Aide.” The fattest wallets couldn’t buy such good publicity.

The group would be called the National Gay Task Force, Brown and Voeller told the Times reporter (who made sure to note the doctor’s dark blue suit, British-gentry-style tie, and Lambda button on his lapel). The National Gay Task Force would be the coordinator of all the 850 (they exaggerated a bit) gay organizations in the country.”

“Gold explained that “Gay liberation has become a nine-to-five job.” There was no room for amateurs. The National Gay Task Force would be run by professionals who knew how to work within the system.”

“NGTF would be run by the board of directors, like a corporation, they said. NGTF would represent a new concept in gay organizations: Off the street and into the boardrooms — and courthouses and Congress, too.”

Anti-Discrimination Laws

“With her brassy Dolly Levi style and her trademark electric blue or raging red wide-brimmed hats, Bella Abzug could’ve been mistaken for a drag queen. She was a New York City politician and Greenwich Village resident who’d been elected to the US House of Representatives in 1970. She knew where her votes came from. She’d gotten wild cheers and standing ovations when she campaigned in the gay spots. Her campaign stop at the Continental Baths had become legendary. Her gay and lesbian constituency wrote checks and voted in a bloc for her. She owed them one.”

“This time twenty-two other Congress members agreed to be their cosponsors on an extended bill, called the “Civil Rights Amendment of 1975.” Bruce Voeller took on the job of organizing a press conference on Capitol Hill, in the Gold Room of the Rayburn Office Building. He invited the heavies who supported the bill, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which had refused to take Dale Jennings’s case in the fifties but had transmogrified in the sixties into zealous gay defenders; and the National Organization for Women, which had become avid advocates of lesbian and gay rights, despite the organization’s still-recalcitrant founder. Nathalie Rockhill was invited to sit next to Congresswoman Abzug and introduce her while reporters stood at the ready.

Ten percent of Americans are gay, the congresswoman said. Her bill would extend the 1964 and 1968 civil rights acts to protect them in housing, jobs, federally assisted programs, public accommodations, and education. It was a “hate crimes” bill, too, stipulating penalties for anyone who harmed a person because of his or her sexual preference. Into a bank of microphones, Bella Abzug elaborated that the bill was needed to “guarantee that all individuals, regardless of differences, are entitled to share in the fruits of society.” (Gay wits later teased her about her Freudian-slip word choice.)

Of course, the bill didn’t pass. Not even Nathalie Rockhill, who was so thrilled to be chosen to introduce its author, ex pected it to. Nineteen seventy-five was too close to the years when gay people had been universally regarded as pariahs. As nationally syndicated Hearst newspaper columnist Marianne Means observed in her column, the present Congress was “reform-minded,” but there were limits: few Congress members were “ready to embrace the homosexual cause.”’ More time needed to pass. Abzug and her supporters realized that, too. They introduced the bill knowing it was destined to fail this time around. But, as Means wrote, “For the very first time, twenty-four congressmen and women agreed to openly support equal rights for gays. That indicates that the gays have made considerable progress in their fight for acceptance” It was a message that Americans, homosexual and heterosexual, in big cities and small, couldn’t ignore.

Voller put together a twenty-two-person board of directors, with Dr. Howard Brown at the head and as many professional types as he could find. But to blunt any criticism from the detested radicals in GAA, he made the board “LGBT” before LGBT was a concept.”

“It took them no time at all to form a lesbian caucus and demand that the board be 50 percent lesbian; and within six months, it was.

Voller didn’t object. He may have been a genuine feminist; or he may have thought — as Frank Kameny and Jack Nichols had — that a way to short-circuit the image of homosexuality as unnatural sex acts between men was to push a presentable-looking lesbian out front. Whatever the case, Voeller definitely wanted women in prominent places in his organization. He was happy to hire high school English teacher Ginny Vida, who’d been a GAA vice president, to be NGTF media director and lead national protests against homophobic images on TV and in the movies. (On the popular series Marcus Welby, M.D., kindly Dr. Welby, played by Robert Young, had just helped catch a homosexual junior high school science teacher who’d raped a fourteen-year-old boy in an episode called “The Outrage”; an NBC movie, Born Innocent, had featured a bunch of reform school girls raping a newbie in the shower with a mop handle; and Angie Dickinson as Sergeant Pepper Anderson on Police Woman had collared lesbian murderers.)”

“The secretary of the American Bar Association had written NGTF to say that the ABA was urging state legislatures to repeal sodomy laws. The House of Delegates of the American Medical Association wrote to say they, too, were supporting repeal. NBC, which had produced the movie about the lesbian shower rape, and was also home to Angie Dickinson’s Sergeant Pepper Anderson, capitulated; the network president and vice presidents met with Voeller and members of the NGTF board and pledged “positive gay images to appear in all areas” of the network’s programming. NBC also promised there’d be no discrimination against gay and lesbian employees or in hiring. AT&T had made that promise the year before. Clearly there were more effective ways to win rights than setting off sirens at Democratic fund-raisers or dressing in duck suits to shame the homophobes, O’Leary thought.”

“By now other “big-league” national organizations were cropping up. Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, founded by lawyer Bill Thom who wanted it to be a sort of gay and lesbian NAACP, began operations in New York a month after the inception of NGTE.”

“The middle-brow media was a barometer of Middle America’s changing views of homosexuals. For instance, in the forties and fifties, Newsweek writers presented homosexuals as “undesirable soldier material,” “committers of “the most dastardly and horrifying crimes,” and “disgusting and unnatural.” By the sixties and early seventies, Newsweek was less melodramatic in its language, but it asked whether homosexuals should be “punished or pitied,” or whether homosexuality was a sickness.

By 1976, the National Gay Task Force and Lambda Legal had made a big dent in Newsweek’s perceptions. An article titled “Gays and the Law” dismissed the militant homosexuals’ tactics of confrontation as alienating to most people — but a new breed of homosexuals has appeared, Newsweek marveled, and they’ve learned “the merits of lobbying and legal stratagems.””

Anti-Sodomy Laws

“Whitman-Radclyffe (named pointedly after both a male and a female homosexual, Walt Whitman and Radclyffe Hall) hoped to dangle the prospect of hefty campaign contributions before the noses of California politicians and to use media advertising to alter perceptions of gay people from radical scruff or “boys who look like girls, and girls who look like boys” to men and women who were and looked more like Middle America. They believed that once that happened, once America was made to see gay men and lesbians who were “virtually normal,” civil rights were sure to follow.

But such an ambitious goal could only be achieved by raising big bucks — Or, as Jim Foster confessed in a letter to Frank Kameny soon after the 1972 Democratic National Convention, by “professionally [sic) organizing the community” and “luring out the ‘fat-cats,’” instead of “nickel and diming each other to death as we’ve done since the year one.” As Foster knew, Kameny — who’d long endured the frustrating chore of collecting nickels and dimes for the cause — could certainly understand the goal. “It’s amazing how politicians respond when you start spending money” Foster underscored. By 1974, he was able to report to Kameny that the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation had become “proficient in locating affluent Gay people.”

Foster took it as glorious proof of his theory about the efficacy of money and expert organizing when 1975 brought a major coup. Homosexual groups had been trying and failing for years to get rid of sodomy laws. It had been a top priority of the homophile movement back in the 1950s; Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon had even pushed the Daughters into the battle. In 1961 one state, Illinois, expunged the law from its books. Connecticut enacted repeal in 1969. The same year, Reverend Troy Perry and Morris Kight, the gay radical activist from Los Angeles, convinced the dapper San Francisco assemblyman Willie Brown to introduce a bill for repeal of the California sodomy law. Brown’s own district was already very gay, though “gay political power” was still oxymoronic. The bill failed, but Willie Brown, who was a black liberal committed to righting social inequities and serving his constituency, kept reintroducing it — for five more years.

Serendipitous things happened in 1975. Brown’s bill, AB 489, passed the assembly, then went on to the California State Senate. The Democratic majority leader of the Senate was George Moscone, a hard-drinking, rather dashing figure, spotted often speeding up and down the San Francisco hills in his Alfa Romeo. He’d just declared himself a candidate in that city’s mayoral race. The size of the San Francisco gay population was by now guesstimated at 100,000 in a city of 715,000. They were organizing. “Gay political power” was no longer an oxymoron. Moscone’s Democratic opponent in the primary election, board of supervisors president Dianne Feinstein, had assiduously curried favor among San Francisco gays and lesbians.”

“It wouldn’t be easy, Senator Moscone knew, to match Dianne Feinstein’s good deed for gays. His liberalism and passion for social justice were authentic. As a legislator he pushed through a school lunch program for needy kids, he promoted bilingual education, he strengthened the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs. Yet he was also a pragmatic politician. Without gay help he had no hope of winning the San Francisco mayoral race. Willie Brown’s bill to repeal sodomy got to the California Senate six months before the mayoral primary. It was now called the Brown-Moscone bill.

The day the bill came to the senate, George Moscone stood beneath a carved Latin motto on the Senate chamber wall, pointed up at it, andtranslated for his fellow politicians: “Senators must guard the liberty of the Republic.” The sodomy law violated the liberty of the Republic because it created opportunities for police abuse and blackmailers, Moscone argued. Heterosexuals, too, would benefit by repeal because the law, a vestige of pervasive puritanism, prohibited anal and oral copulation between opposite-sex couples, too; and it also made “adulterous cohabitation” illegal. (A point that must have unnerved at least a few senators sitting in the chamber.) A long debate followed. Those who rose to speak in support of the bill pointed out it would strengthen the right to privacy for all Californians. Opponents contended it would be fatal for public morality. Finally, a vote was taken. It was 20 to 20.

California law said that the lieutenant governor could break a tie vote in the Senate. But the lieutenant governor, Mervyn Dymally — like Willie Brown, a liberal black politician — was at a political dinner in Denver, where he was to be the evening’s speaker. And a proxy vote was not acceptable under the law.

George Moscone had an assistant run out to find a telephone number where Dymally could be reached. The senators were growing restive for their dinner. Moscone, fearing he’d lose his quorum, asked the president pro tem of the senate, Democrat James Mills, for permission to have the doors locked. It was granted. Dymally was soon boarding a jet for San Francisco. At San Francisco International Airport, a police helicopter waited, its rotor blades spinning. It whisked Dymally to the senate chamber in Sacramento, where he broke the tie. California’s sodomy law was no more.

Jim Foster made sure that gay donors and the members of the Whitman-Radclyffe Foundation, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club-all chock-full of gung-ho get-out-the-vote volunteers- knew the story of George Moscone’s role in the repeal of the California sodomy law. Moscone defeated Dianne Feinstein in the November mary, and the next month, he won the tight mayoral election against conservative city supervisor John Barbagelata.”

“In 1973 the state decided that sexual puritanism was outdated, and that it needed to get out of people’s bedrooms. The sodomy law was abolished — for heterosexuals. At a time when the media was filled with stories about agitation for gay rights in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, Texas legislators vowed, “It will not happen here.” To make sure all homosexuals stayed in their closets, they added to the criminal code a new section 21.16 — the Texas Homosexual Conduct Law, which not only specified that anal and oral sex between men was illegal, but also — for the first time in Texas law-that oral sex between women was illegal.

Houston voters had just elected a thirty-two-year-old state representative, Craig Washington, a black man who was a criminal defense lawyer and an eloquent speaker on the subject of civil rights. Members of the newly formed Texas Gay Task Force, which Pokey Anderson had joined, met with Washington and asked him to try to get the Homosexual Conduct Law repealed. He was amenable, but he knew he’d better get his bearings before he dived into something so controversial. Washington held off until 1975, when he authored an omnibus bill into which he sneaked a clause that would repeal the sodomy law. His fellow legislators immediately detected the ruse. A congressman from Dallas called out to Washington as he presented his bill to the venerable House of Representatives, “Only a homosexual would make such a proposal!” That set off sniggers and catcalls and preadolescent hijinks. One congressional wit grabbed a purse off the secretary’s desk and pranced with it, swishing and twirling, all around the stately chamber. Craig Washington’s repeal clause went down with a thundering 117 nays to 14 ayes. News of the Austin debacle infuriated Anderson. It was bad enough to be a second-class citizen, she thought, but it was really outrageous to be laughed at by elected representatives.”

“They invited candidates to an October 21 rally in Cherryhurst Park in the Montrose district, to be screened for the upcoming November 1975 election. Not all accepted, but quite a few had read the Associated Press article about the new strength of the gay vote, and they happily submitted to the questions the caucus fired at them in front of an audience of five hundred gays and lesbians: “Will you support an ordinance banning discrimination in housing, private employment, and city employment?” “Will you support a police chief who won’t harass gay people who are lawfully gathered?” “Will you hire a qualified gay person for your own staff?” The caucus scored the candidates 0 to 100 depending on their responses. Then they printed tens of thousands of little cards and mailed them, had volunteers walk the precincts to distribute them, left them in all the gay places. The cards told Houston’s lesbians and gays which candidates deserved their vote and urged them to the polls.

As it turned out, Pokey Anderson had gotten it right: Houston, America’s fifth-largest city, had a huge gay and lesbian population, and as the Houston Post reported, 95 percent of them were registered to vote, and 86.9 percent of them cared enough about gay causes to contribute money to them. They cared about supporting public officials with whom they resonated, too: 73.9 percent had made a contribution to a political candidate within the preceding two years.

1978: Houston’s bluff and hearty new mayor, Jim Mcconn, who looked as though he might once have played defensive tackle for his alma mater, Notre Dame, wrote a letter to the Houston Gay Political Caucus. It was in appreciation for its assistance in helping him win the 1977 election, and in the hope they’d do it again in 1979. Mayor McConn congratulated the caucus for “its commitment to the cause of human and equal rights.” The letter was particularly remarkable because when McConn, a businessman and president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce, had been a city councilman five years earlier, he’d objected publicly about the growing number of homosexuals in Houston: “What are we doing wrong?” he’d wailed. But by 1978, the caucus had become a force to be kowtowed to by Houston politicians.

Those who didn’t know that, or didn’t care, eventually got a rude awakening. Councilman Frank Mann, blinded perhaps by Anita Bryant’s triumphant antigay campaigns in other cities, had not understood just how powerful the caucus had become. Mann had been a councilman since 1960. In 1974 two brave souls from a short-lived gay group appeared at an open council meeting to say that the police were harassing the gay community. Mann shouted them down, screaming, “You’re abnormal! You need to see a psychiatrist instead of the city council!” Five years later, in 1979, Mann was running for his tenth two-year term, and he foolishly compounded the gay community’s anger at him. He ranted against his opponent, Eleanor Tinsley — a genteel, pearl-necklace-wearing southern lady (with a backbone of high-carbon steel) — that she was supported by “odd-wads and homosexuals.” The Gay Political Caucus could not let that pass. This race was the true test of its power. The caucus printed fifty thousand endorsement cards in favor of Tinsley. It produced T-shirts proclaiming, “Oddwads and Homosexuals for Tinsley, which gay people and their friends sported all over the city. It distributed thousands of flyers that presented side by side a statement issued by Eleanor Tinsley saying, “Every Houstonian has a right to expect fair and equal treatment at the hands of city officials, departments, agencies, and commissions, regardless of sexual orientation”, and one by Frank Mann reiterating his “oddwads and homosexuals” wisecrack.

Eleanor Tinsley won with over 54 percent of the vote. Women had never before served on the Houston City Council — nor had an incumbent councilman ever before lost his seat.”

The APA

“On a bright Saturday morning on the first day of May 1971, fifty thousand protestors calling themselves the May Day Tribe converged on Washington, DC. The government would not shut down the war in Vietnam, so they had come to shut down the government by using their bodies, tree limbs, rubbish bins, nails, tires – any barricades they could devise – to foul up traffic and prevent all federal offices from functioning. Of course, government workers would not be going to their jobs on Saturday or Sunday, so the May Day Tribe spread out over the meadows of West Potomac Park, in view of the Washington Monument, set up tents, and partied. Their scheduled rock concert went on all through the night. Early Sunday morning, the US Parks Department canceled their permit to congregate. Because the May Day Tribe did not clear out immediately, the park police donned riot gear, invaded the encampment, and succeeded in dispersing them with billy clubs and tear gas and pepper spray; but the May Day Tribe found refuge on DC college campuses and in sympathetic churches.

At the start of the workweek, they mobilized to shut the city down. The Washington Metropolitan Police Department again descended on them in riot-control phalanxes. For police backup, President Nixon summoned the marines, the army, and the National Guard, which came armed with bayonets. Over twelve thousand people were hauled off to DC jails in the largest mass arrest in American history. The timing of the May Day protest was serendipitous for out-of-town Gay Liberation Front members. They had made the trip to DC to do double duty.

Their second shift was on the evening of May 3, the first day of the annual American Psychiatric Association convention. Euphoric about their May Day exploits, twenty GLF members, male and female, donned “Gay Is Good” or “Gay Revolution” T-shirts; a dozen more GLF males dressed in drag – fabulous wigs; high, high heels; glittering lamé dresses; outrageously bright lipstick and eye shadow; and then they all piled into VW vans or cars and headed up Connecticut Avenue to the Omni Shoreham Hotel in northwest Washington. There, in the Regency Ballroom, two thousand psychiatrists had gathered for a Convocation of Fellows, at which several psychiatrists were to be honored for their lifetime achievements, and US Attorney General Ramsey Clark would deliver a keynote address.

Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Jack Baker had already grabbed seats in the front row. They’d been given guest passes because they were to be speakers on a panel, “Lifestyles of Non-Patient Homosexuals” which had been scheduled as a concession to protestors at the APA conference in San Francisco the year before: the San Francisco Gay Liberation Front, outfitted with radical gay uniforms of jeans and T-shirts, or with drag makeup and women’s feathered hats, had stormed into a room crowded with staid psychiatrists. Dr. Irving Bieber was speaking. Bieber, the author of the 1962 book, Homosexuality: A Psychoanalytic Study of Male Homosexuals, had been the zappers’ target because he was a chief propagator of the idea that male homosexuality was a mental disease caused by “close-binding” mothers, and it needed curing by the shrinks. Most APA members agreed with him. A poll of psychiatrists taken that same year showed that 90 percent of them believed that homosexuality was pathological.

“Sadist!” the zappers called to Bieber. “Motherfucker!” “If your book talked about black people the way it talks about homosexuals, you’d be drawn and quartered and you’d deserve it,” one yelled. Many of the psychiatrists in the audience fled the room in horror, and the session was shut down. From there the zappers went to an auditorium packed with five hundred psychiatrists listening to a presentation by a young Australian doctor on the use of aversion therapy to cure homosexuality. One of the DC GAA insurgents seized the mic to scream, “Stop talking about us and start talking to us!”The others were not as reasoned in their exhortations. “Vicious!” “Torturer!” “Where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?” they yelled. The psychiatrists yelled back, “Paranoid fool!” “Stupid bitch!”.?

To ward off a repeat of the 1970 debacle, the APA had agreed to let gays and lesbians have their own panel in 1971, scheduled for nine o’clock on the last evening of the convention. But even if it had been scheduled for prime time, it wouldn’t have made a difference to the activists, because they understood by now that as attention getters, outrageous tactics were indispensable.”

“Gay Activists Alliance moles located a path that went directly from the Rock Creek Park woods to the fire doors that led into the Regency Ballroom where the convocation would take place. They sneaked inside and inserted wedges so that the fire doors wouldn’t close. Then they advised their fellow infiltrators how to dodge security via the park path and the ballroom fire doors.

Ramsey Clark had gotten midway into his speech. He never finished. The fire doors burst open and the zappers flooded in, chanting “Psychiatry is the enemy!” Mayhem ensued, with psychiatrists physically attacking the invaders, shouting, “Get out!” “You sick faggots!” “We don’t want you people in here!” Gays linked arms and plopped on the ballroom floor, resisting attempts to eject them. As more gays tried to force their way in, two psychiatrists, screaming execrations, locked the fire doors, but not before they’d managed to push back out a few of those who’d already squeezed in.

Among those pushed out was Cliff Witt, the Washington GAA leader who’d organized the zap. The plan had been that Witt would seize the microphone and give a speech about the horrors perpetrated on homosexuals by the psychiatric profession. But with Witt locked out, the invaders were at a loss about what to do next. Frank Kameny didn’t hesitate. He jumped up and seized the microphone from the moderator, who was trying to restore order. “We are here to denounce your authority to call us sick or mentally disordered,” Kameny shouted amidst psychiatric boos and jeers. Someone pulled the microphone’s plug, but Kameny only shouted louder. “For us, as homosexuals, your profession is the enemy incarnate. We demand that psychiatrists treat us as human beings, not as patients to be cured! You may take this as a declaration of war against you!” Pandemonium reigned. The convocation was over.

But some doctors in that large ballroom had listened, and after Kameny’s tirade, a few of them came to him and Barbara Gittings with a promise: they would get the program managers to give Kameny and Gittings permission to do an exhibition at the 1972 APA conference. “We’ll have our own gay booth at next year’s conference,” he reported with glee to New York gay leader Morty Manford. “Gay, Proud, and Healthy: The Homosexual Community Speaks,” it would be called.””

“Ronald Gold concluded his presentation, which he called “Stop It, You’re Making Me Sick!” with the rousing demands that the APA take homosexuality out of the nomenclature, work for the repeal of sodomy laws and for civil rights protections for gays, and tell the world that gay is good. He got a standing ovation.

Gold had been such a hit that members of the GayPA discreetly came up to him after the symposium and issued a quiet invitation to their annual party, which was still a very secret affair. Pumped by his success, yet frustrated that section 302.0 of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders remained intact, Gold settled on a daring ploy. He knew that Robert Spitzer had been given an assignment by the Nomenclature Committee to research and report back the “scientific findings” about homosexuality. What happened next with 302.0 would hinge on Spitzer-and though Spitzer had held the door to the Nomenclature Committee open so that gays could step in, his own position thus far had not gone beyond “Gee, that’s an interesting idea.” What’s more, he admitted to having been trained by psychoanalysts who “took it for granted that homosexuality was not only an illness, but it was a very severe illness.” Spitzer had never knowingly mingled with homosexuals, Gold knew, and he was acquainted with no homosexual colleagues. It was time to educate him.

Gold told Spitzer about the secret group and his invitation to their get-together; then he invited him to come along. Spitzer was curious. “But you can’t let on you’re not gay,” Gold warned him nervously. “Just don’t say anything. Just observe.” Spitzer agreed. The GayPA party was held in a campy Honolulu gay bar with grass-skirted waitresses; a multipage list of drinks that were colored red, blue, purple, green; and island-themed geegaws and bamboo furniture. But Spitzer saw little of that. He was too busy being flabbergasted at how many faces he recognized among GayPA members: prominent APA officers, heads of APA affiliates, heads of prestigious university psychiatry departments. He kept neither his promise not to stare nor his promise not to speak, and he gave himself away by asking GayPA members what Gold thought were “absolutely dim-witted questions” such as “How long have you known you were a homosexual?” As Spitzer went around talking to one man after another, it was obvious that he wasn’t a candidate for GayPA membership. The panicked head of the group pulled Gold aside and told him to get Spitzer out of there. Now. “Get rid of him!”

“No! He’s willing to help us,” Gold answered, but he went to tell Spitzer to cool it.

Just then a man in an army uniform walked in. He recognized Gold from the symposium earlier that day. Then he looked around and recognized psychiatrists he’d seen in the audience, and he threw himself on Gold and burst into tears. He told Gold that he was an army psychiatrist. This was the first time in his life he’d dared go to a gay bar, and it was Gold’s speech that had given him the courage to do it.

“Let’s go,” Spitzer said to Gold. He’d seen and heard enough.”

“That night, Spitzer sat at his hotel room desk, Ronald Gold prompting at his elbow, and wrote an APA resolution removing homosexuality per se from the DSM. It was Frank Kameny who later helped Spitzer draft the justifying letter to the Nomenclature Committee: “The only way that homosexuality could be considered a psychiatric disorder would be the criterion of failure to function heterosexually, which is considered optimal in our society and by many members of our profession. However,” Kameny wrote in Spitzer’s voice, reiterating the theories he’d promulgated for years, “if the failure to function optimally in some important area of life as judged by either society or the profession is sufficient to indicate the presence of psychiatric disorder, then we will have to add to our nomenclature the following conditions.” The list included celibacy (failure to function optimally sexually), religious fanaticism (dogmatic and rigid adherence to religious doctrine), racism (irrational hatred of other groups), vegetarianism (unnatural avoidance of carnivorous behavior), and male chauvinism (irrational belief in the inferiority of women).”

“Spitzer’s resolution stated specifically that “homosexuality per se implies no impairment in judgment, stability, reliability, or general social or vocational capabilities.” But his resolution did not go far enough to satisfy gay activists because section 302.0 was not entirely deleted from the DSM: “Homosexuality” was replaced by “Sexual Orientation Disturbance,” a category for those who were “ego-dystonic”--that is, “disturbed by, or in conflict with, or wishing to change their sexual orientation.” It was a necessary strategy, Spitzer believed. There was no way the APA would have approved of getting rid of all references to homosexuality. Psychiatrists could still “cure” those who wanted “curing”; there was still money to be made by their “services.”

The Nomenclature Committee approved the change, and in November 1973 the proposal passed to the APA Reference Committee and the assembly and was endorsed by both bodies. In December, the eighteen-member board of trustees voted: two were absent, three abstained, and thirteen voted aye. The resolution had passed overwhelmingly.”

The White House Lesbian

“Margaret “Midge” Costanza, daughter of Sicilian immigrants who owned House of Costanza, a sausage factory in Rochester, New York, was the only female in the upper echelons of Carter’s staff. She’d been the highest vote getter when she was elected to the Rochester City Council in 1973. She met Jimmy Carter the following year, when she ran, unsuccessfully, to be representative to the New York State Congress and he was the Democratic National Committee campaign chair for congressional elections. When Carter ran for president Costanza, still a councilwoman, became the first New York Democrat with an official-sounding title to endorse him. He was grateful because at the time hardly anyone in New York knew who he was. Costanza became his New York State campaign coordinator. On Christmas Day 1976, president-elect Jimmy Carter called to offer her the public liaison job in his White House. The emotional Costanza burst into tears and accepted.

Carter was charmed by Costanza. She was a character. Her work uniform was a tailored pantsuit and three-inch high heels that masked her elfin stature (five feet, 109 pounds), to which her outsized hexagonal-shaped eyeglasses and pixie haircut called attention. Her puckish look allowed her to carry off a cheeky sense of humor. She’d stride into the White House, calling out, “Tell the president I’m back so he can feel secure again!” Once she placed hand on hip, lowered her voice to husky, and quipped to White House visitors about Carter’s guileless admission that, being human, he’d committed adultery in his heart many times: “When you see me, you know what the president meant when he talked about lust in his heart.”?

Costanza had begun work on the meeting with lesbians and gays almost as soon as she started her job in the White House. The official word for the press was that the meeting had come about because Jean O’Leary and Bruce Voeller, cochairs of the National Gay Task Force, had contacted Midge Costanza to request it. And because her job was to meet with representatives from all sorts of diverse groups – veterans, blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, senior citizens, the disabled, vegetarians – why would she say no to this one? Costanza and O’Leary left a careful paper trail of correspondence, in which the National Gay Task Force requested a meeting; O’Leary and Bruce Voeller went to the White House for a preliminary discussion; and Costanza confirmed that she and her staff would indeed meet with a group of gay and lesbian representatives, whom she asked O’Leary and Voeller to appoint.

But, in fact, the meeting had come about through pillow talk. Throughout her career in politics, Costanza had cultivated image of a young woman too committed to her work to have amorous relations. When she took the job at the White House, at the age of forty-four, she told the press she’d lived with her parents all her life. She continued to be secretive about her love life all the time she was Carter’s assistant. “I date, but not steadily,” she said to a People magazine reporter, adding that she was “happily buried in White House work.” But the seductive Jean O’Leary (once the heartthrob of a half dozen Sisters of the Holy Humility of Mary) had already made a conquest of Midge Costanza.

They’d met in 1976, when O’Leary and the National Gay Task Force were trying to get the Democrats to add the words sexual orientation to an antidiscrimination plank in the party platform. Former congresswoman Bella Abzug had failed to make headway with the gay rights bills she’d introduced in 1974 and 1975. But she knew Midge Costanza and suspected she’d want to be helpful to O’Leary. She was right. Costanza was on the Democratic Platform Committee, and she agreed to do what she could. She couldn’t do anything. Democrats remembered all too well the 1972 convention where two homosexuals were allowed to speak, and the colossal defeat of George McGovern that followed. Costanza’s motion to add “sexual orientation” to the antidiscrimination plank failed by two-thirds of the vote; but she and O’Leary became lovers. Their affair was carried on all during Midge Costanza’s White House tenure. Very secretively, of course. In 1977 there was no way an assistant to the president could have let it be known that she had a same-sex lover-one whose great desire was to take a delegation of lesbians and gays inside the White House.

Costanza was realistic and even somewhat cynical about the extent and meaning of her power. As she once admitted about another official meeting, with a visiting foreign dignitary, “What can I do for him? Probably nothing, but he got to see me. He can go home and say he was heard at the White House, and that’s what really matters.” Gays and lesbians would be heard at the White House.

The fourteen people at the meeting were handpicked by Jean O’Leary and Bruce Voller. They were on the NGTF board, or they’d founded a gay or lesbian organization back home. They also filled a particular demographic. There were representatives from the east, west, north, and south. There was a black woman (Betty Powell) and a Hispanic man (George Raya). There were young people (Raya, in his twenties, fit a double demographic; as did Pokey Anderson, the twenty-seven-year-old Houstonian who’d started the Gay Political Caucus two years earlier); and there were much older people (Frank Kameny and Myra Riddell, both in their fifties). There was nobody too wild-looking or too politically radical.

O’Leary and Voller had asked each of the invitees to give a ten-minute presentation on a particular area in which lesbians and gays were discriminated against. Almost no one was an expert on the topic to which he or she had been assigned; they scurried to libraries before the meeting to do their homework.”

“The White House meeting generated more mail – much of it hate mail – than any other single issue during the Carter administration.”

“The Office of the President of the United states had been duped into blessing their abnormal lifestyle, “dignifying them with a serious discussion on their alleged ‘human rights,’” Bryant howled to the press. She vowed to “lead such a crusade to stop homosexuals as this country has not seen before.

The following year, Carter demoted Midge Costanza to special assistant for women’s affairs and domestic human rights. He also cut her staff of more than a dozen down to one and moved her office to the basement. She resigned in August 1978, out the door after twenty months in office.”

Anita Bryant

“Right-wingers in Des Moines, Iowa, piled into the state meeting to make sure a young woman who was an active Republican and an avid pro-lifer was elected to the lowa delegation. They got fooled. At the national conference, the woman did vote against the abortion plank as she was supposed to, but she wasn’t reliable about the rest of the pro-family slate. Christine Pattee, the only lesbian on the Iowa delegation, was surprised to see the pro-lifer stand when the aye vote was called for the sexual preference resolution. “Well, I’m a teacher,” the young woman later told Pattee when the Iowa delegation gathered for cocktails back at the hotel, “and my best friend is another teacher, a gay man. I voted yes for him.””

“Even former First Lady Betty Ford, a Republican, had endorsed the lesbian plank, they said. (Betty Ford would tell the media, “It’s not lesbians’ fault that they happen to be born with different genes, and they shouldn’t be discriminated against.””

“Gay people all over America began to take the struggle against Anita Bryant far more seriously than did gay Miami. Gay bars everywhere – even the only gay bar in Idaho – took screwdrivers off the drink menu and replaced them with concoctions such as vodka and apple juice, called an “Anita Bryant” in her “honor” or for the sake of the cause, they made screwdriver but of vodka and Tang, a sugary chemical-tasting powder that hinted only vaguely of orange flavor.

T-shirts with sassy boycott messages became fashion statements among gays all over the country: “Anita Sucks Oranges, “Anita Bryant Eats Lemons,” “Suck a Fruit for Anita.” In New York, they picketed supermarkets, chanting, “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Florida Citrus Got to Go” and ‘”O.J. No Way!” Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church, which by now had scores of congregations across America, was on a plane from Los Angeles to New York when the stewardess placed glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice in front of all the business-class passengers, including the reverend in his clerical collar. “Take it away. I can’t drink it!” Perry shouted. “I’m a homosexual!”Author Barbara Love and her partner, founders and sole members of Gay Guerrillas, invaded New York supermarkets and surreptitiously punctured every carton of Florida orange juice in sight. At the time, Love happened to be an editor for Supermarketing magazine, which reached eighty thousand supermarket retailers.”

“It’s ironic that it was Anita Bryant who pumped vital energy into a renewed battle for gay and lesbian civil rights. She created fervent activists out of those who’d previously been content simply to enjoy their new found freedoms – which now, they realized, could easily be taken away. She made them fighting mad. They were ready to do what Bob Basker had once hoped in vain Miami gays would do: wage war against an enemy that denied them first-class citizenship. Eric Hoffer famously observed in the 1950s that a mass movement can get along fine without a god, but it won’t get along at all without a devil. For gay people all over the country, Anita Bryant became that devil.

In the gay pride parades of 1977 and 1978, Bryant figured prominently. Marchers, carrying placards that displayed her image side by side with images of Hitler, Idi Amin, and Joseph McCarthy, shouted denunciations of her until they were hoarse. As parade sponsors told the New York Times, the parades in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Kansas City, Atlanta, and Seattle were far bigger than they’d ever been because of the “spreading resentment caused by the efforts of Anita Bryant.” The San Francisco parade attracted two hundred thousand more people even than had participated in the anti-Vietnam War march of the sixties, which to that date had been San Francisco’s largest demonstrations.”

“Gay people were soon waiting for Anita Bryant everywhere. Three days after the Dade County vote, she performed at a Tidewater Religious Crusade in Norfolk, West Virginia. Five hundred gays and lesbians were scattered among the crusade crowd of two thousand. They sat quietly, as though they were part of the faithful, until Bryant read her favorite antisodomy passage from Leviticus. Then chanting “Two! Four! Six! Eight! Gay is just as good as straight!” they rose as a group, hoisted placards with messages such as “Save Our Children: Defend Lesbian Mothers,” and stormed out as noisily as they could; they joined a picket with four hundred more protestors, some in drag, who were marching outside the arena. Onstage Bryant burst into tears.

A few days later in New Orleans, she was performing with a Summer Pops Orchestra at the Municipal Auditorium, which bordered the French Ouarter. Activists hung huge banners from French Quarter buildings that spelled out in big black block letters: “A DAY WITHOUT RIGHTS IS LIKE A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE.” Inside the auditorium, Bryant received a standing ovation for her performance; but outside the auditorium, hundreds of protestors kept vigil with flaming candles in their hands. The following day they rallied in Jackson Square and marched through the French Quarter streets. The police were on hand, videotaping marchers in order to intimidate them. But gays were not in the mood to be intimidated. Frank Kameny, who’d flown in from Washington, DC, told the press, “This is only a preliminary. We intend to do protests all over the country wherever she’s performing.

And that is what they did. In Atlanta, when Bryant wa invited to speak and sing at a Southern Baptist Convention 1,800 gays picketed. 33 In Washington, DC, when she was invited by the National Association of Religious Broadcasters to help launch a campaign to rid TV of sex, violence, and homosexuality, 2,000 gays held a service in a nearby church, accusing Bryant of “perverting the Christian message of love to one of hate.” Then, as Bryant sang hymns to the broadcasters, gays marched in a candlelight protest around the Washington Hilton Hotel. The Shriners invited Bryant to Chicago, to star in a Flag Day program, and 2,000 gays were waiting for her there, too.40 In Houston, she was invited to entertain the Texas Bar Convention at the Hyatt Regency. More than 3,000 protestors, organized by the Texas Gay Political Caucus, paraded around the hotel carrying signs comparing her to Hitler. When The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality was published, Bryant and Bob Green called a news conference at the New York Hilton to publicize the book, but the hotel management was informed that 5,000 to 10,000 gays were planning to march on the Hilton in protest. Gays had already burned her in effigy in a bonfire big enough to cause the NYPD to rush over and stomp out the flames. Claiming fear for her life, Bryant and Green canceled the news conference, dropped all plans to publicize The Anita Bryant Story in New York, and scurried back to Florida. “Why don’t they just kill us and get it over with!” an exhausted Bob Green lamented as they hurriedly departed the hotel.

Activists staged zaps against Bryant, too. Most famously, as she sat at a televised press conference in Des Moines, Iowa, Bob Green at her side, gay activist Thom Higgins ran onto the set and smashed a banana cream pie in her face. The cameras kept rolling. Bryant burst into tears, and then she and her husband bowed their heads and prayed for the assailant, “God forgive him for his deviant lifestyle” – but not before she indulged in a catty quip: “At least it was a fruit pie.”

Gays and lesbians didn’t protest alone. In the fifties, sixties, and through much of the seventies, gay and lesbian activists attracted few straights to their cause. Though the Sexual Revolution made hip, young heterosexuals neutral about homosexuality, homophobia was not their battle, and they usually stayed on the sidelines. But Anita Bryant’s Bible-thumping took away their neutrality. The sexual sanctimoniousness of Bryant and her ilk were a threat to heterosexual freedoms, too, and straight hip culture began reflecting antipathy. A country-rock band, Gravel, produced a 45 record, “(Lord Knows) I Don’t Need Anita,” ridiculing Bryant: “She was Miss Oklahoma, 1958 / Now she’s usin’ God and Country to make everybody straight.””

“The protests of gay and lesbian activists and their friends had their desired effect: Bryant’s career was decimated. She recorded a single that referenced her antigay crusade in its title, “There’s Nothing Like the Love Between a Woman and a Man,” but she could get no record company to distribute it. Bob Green was at his wits’ end about his wife’s failing career. Her show business earnings dropped 70 percent in the first months after her Dade County campaign. “Conventions have been totally inhibited from booking us,” Green lamented. “We just want to get back to leading normal lives. This is no fun and games. The homosexuals are haunting us wherever we go.

Bryant was reduced to performing almost entirely at revivals, where she was paid only whatever was dropped in the cardboard buckets that were passed around.”

“To raise money, she and Green established Anita Bryant Ministries, the purpose of which, they claimed, was to “seek help and change for homosexuals, whose sick values belie the word gay, which they pathetically use to cover their unhappy lives.”

“The shock of penury, Bryant’s failing career, the constant emotional strain she was under (reduced often to tears by gay protests) – all of it together overwhelmed the marriage. In 1980 she divorced Green and announced that she was returning to Oklahoma. Many of her fundamentalist fans shunned her because their church did not believe in divorce. “Rotten apples have gotten into the American pie,” they complained. Gays beat the devil.”

“In Redding, California, Hollibaugh was invited to debate Pastor Royal Blue, founder of Shasta Bible College and a local Christian radio station. A buddy of Jerry Falwell, Pastor Blue took credit for prodding Falwell to establish the Moral Majority. He himself was active in Californians for Biblical Morality, through which he lobbied the legislature in Sacramento on issues such as school prayer, abortion, and homosexuality. A few days before the debate he’d conducted a rally attended by twenty-five hundred people. It had been a patriotic, homophobic spectacle – fifty children on stage waving little American flags in front of Statues of Liberty whose eyes blinked green lights as the pastor preached hellfire. The debate with Hollibaugh was held at Pastor Blue’s North Valley Baptist Church, and much of it was devoted to his spouting the biblical condemnations of homosexuality. During the question-and-answer session, a member of the audience asked the pastor, “Do you think homosexuals should be imprisoned if they’re that unsafe?”

“Well, let me put it this way,” he answered, smiling all the while. “I think Hitler was right about the homosexuals. I think we should find a humane way to kill them.”

Hollibaugh sized up the audience and saw that many there were over fifty, and she realized how she could isolate the pastor. “Well, you know, Reverend Blue,” she said, “my guess would be that most of the people in this audience fought against someone who had that position in World War Il, and my guess is that the audience does not support genocide. I may be wrong, but I suspect that most people don’t feel that mass murder is an answer to a sexual question.” She’d made the audience chagrined by Blue’s horrifying “final solution,” and a small crowd came up to her to apologize for their pastor. Neither Goodstein with his expensive ad campaigns nor Milk with his army of volunteers stood a chance of getting these fundamentalist Christian voters on their side. Hollibaugh reached at least some of them.”

“They scrambled to find big money to kick off the kind of anti-Briggs campaign they hoped to run. Reverend Troy Perry was the first to come to their rescue. In 1970 the reverend had used dramatic means to challenge the abuse of gay people by the Los Angeles Police Department. He’d sat himself down in front of the LA Federal Building and commenced a fast and prayer vigil, taking no sustenance but water for over a week, until he got commitments from city attorney Bert Pines, and city councilmen Bob Stevenson and Tom Bradley (the future mayor) to pressure the LAPD to clean up its act. Now, seven years later, when David Mixner came to Perry to say that the anti-Briggs campaign needed money to begin its operations in Southern California, the reverend promised to raise $100,000 by reprising his successful 1970 performance.

Perry called a press conference to announce that he’d go on a hunger strike in order to raise the money and simultaneously to educate the American public about “the harm done by bigots like Senator Briggs and Anita Bryant”: “I am preparing to fast to death if necessary,” he declared. Then he sat on the steps of the Federal Building and fasted and prayed once again. He subsisted on water and vitamin capsules. The LA police drove their patrol cars by to be annoying; they kept sounding their sirens late at night to deprive him of sleep. But Reverend Perry would not budge. Throngs came to keep him company, and money came pouring in like the abundant loaves and fishes. A couple of weeks into the fast, a Metropolitan Community Church parishioner in Kansas City telephoned Perry’s office to ask how he was doing. When told the reverend was very weak, the parishioner sold two thousand shares of stock in her business and sent him $20,000, which put the total Perry had raised to $107,000. On the sixteenth day of fasting, the reverend, twenty pounds lighter, packed up his water bottles and vitamin vials and went home.”

“Gayle Wilson, a lesbian Realtor, was a familiar and glamorous image in West Hollywood, driving around town in her Corniche Rolls-Royce convertible, wind blowing through her stylishly bobbed blond hair. “The pioneer of the lipstick lesbians,” David Mixner dubbed her. The closest she’d gotten to gay politics had been to join the West Hollywood Community Guild – a sort of gay Chamber of Commerce – because it was good for business. But now Mixner and Scott came to her to say that if Briggs succeeded, all lesbians and gays would be victims of the fanatical Right, and she had to use whatever clout she had to help defeat him. Wilson tapped her client list, which included wealthy Hollywood heterosexuals as well as gays; and then she tapped her wealthy lesbian acquaintances, most of whom had never before given even a dollar to a lesbian or gay cause. Then Wilson organized a luncheon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. She invited her entertainer friends Chend Donna Summer to sing, and Midge Costanza, who’d just left her White House post, to speak about the snowballing threat that would eventually hit all lesbians if California should fail to stop Briggs.

Probably for the first time in the history of the world, hundreds of lesbians, dressed to the nines, drove up to a posh hotel in their Mercedes and BMWs and Cadillacs, asked the doorman the way to the dining room where a lesbian luncheon was being held, and there joined an overflowing crowd of other affluent lesbians for a public lesbian event whose purpose was to raise money for a gay and lesbian cause. They donated about $50,000 that day, which was used to help run the New AGE campaign office and to pay for anti-Briggs ads.

The appearance of hundreds of lesbians of means at a public event was not the only first that day of the Beverly Hills luncheon. It was also the first time that Hollywood celebrities had let themselves be seen at a fundraiser whose express purpose was to support a lesbian and gay cause; and it was the start of a series of such celebrity events in LA. At the next glittering fund-raiser for the anti-Briggs campaign – a black-tie and chic-pantsuit dinner attended by one thousand gays and lesbians- Burt Lancaster, John Travolta, and Lily Tomlin appeared. They raised $150,000 for the war chest.”

“A few weeks after the meeting, Reagan echoed Mixer and Scott’s statements almost exactly to the press: “What if an overwrought youngster, disappointed by bad grades, imagined it was the teacher’s fault and struck out by accusing the teacher of advocating homosexuality?” He pointed out that the Briggs initiative was not needed to protect children because current laws already protected them from molestation, and that Proposition “has the potential for real mischief.” It turned the tide. The Briggs initiative’s 10-percentage-point lead evaporated soon after Reagan declared himself to be against it. On November 7, 1978, Proposition 6 was defeated by a margin of over a million votes – 58.4 percent to 41.6 percent. Even Orange County, John Briggs’s hometown and the area he represented in the State Senate, voted against his initiative.”

Politics

“In 1974, three years before Milk’s election, Kathy Kozachenko, an out lesbian student at the University of Michigan, won a seat on the Ann Arbor city council. Kozachenko, round-faced and with an eager smile, perpetually sporting a worker’s cap like her immigrant Ukrainian forebears might have worn, ran for election in Ann Arbor’s Second Ward. Kozachenko’s party had originally been called the Radical Independent Party, but when members decided to put up candidates for the city council, they renamed themselves with the less confrontational moniker, “Human

Rights Party.” They probably needn’t have bothered. Kozachenko’s major constituency was student radicals at the height of radical chic. They loved her platform: no fine over $5 for possession of small amounts of marijuana (which effectively made pot smoking legal), and a rent control law that placed a ceiling on the amount of profit a landlord could make from rents on a building.”

“The same year that Kozachenko was elected, Colburn’s Boston counterparts who loathed “hippies and faggots” suffered an even greater affront: Elaine Noble, an out lesbian, won a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. An energetic young speech professor with an open Irish face (she’d kept her half-Jewish parentage secret), Noble had wanted to get involved. volved in gay issues after reading about the Stonewall riots.”

“Her rival, who ran as an Independent, was Joseph Cimino, a suave young assistant district attorney. Cimino also owned two upmarket Boston saloons – Gatsby’s and Daisy Buchanan’s – but he wasn’t beyond gutter tactics. Just a few days before the election, Cimino sent all registered voters in the district a “Dear Voter” letter: “I urge that no one vote against my opponent because of her homosexuality. it said – which, of course, very pointedly called attention to the fact that Noble was a homosexual. But Cimino’s tactic fizzled. Noble had announced from the beginning that she was a lesbian, and that homosexuality was not the only issue with which she was concerned. The little old ladies who dominated her district loved her. She was gifted in convincing her listeners of her utter sincerity--and she promised that as their representative she’d fix streetlights and potholes, improve mass transit, and make sure heir rent didn’t keep going up. Noble won the election by a vote of 1,730 to 1,201,

Her campaign headquarters was inundated by thousands of congratulatory letters and telegrams from elated gays and lesbians all over America, all over the world. But as an out lesbian politician – at a time when almost all gay politicians hid their gayness deep in a dark closet – Noble wore a bull’s-eye on her back. The thirty-year-old woman was hardly a threatening personage. The first subject she brought up in an interview with for the Advocate was not gay rights but revenue sharing. A few months later, she told the same gay periodical that her biggest concern was “the educational crisis in Boston. But newspapers around the country manufactured a more sensational story. Elaine Noble, a “self-proclaimed lesbian,” they said, “won on a gay liberation ticket.”

Noble did eventually author legislation to prohibit discrimnation against gay people in public employment. She earnestly introduced her bill on the House floor and spoke about it at length. Then she returned to her desk, sat down, opened the drawer to reach for a pen, and found a little pile of human feces. She was still looking for help to get the mess cleaned up when a fellow Democrat, William Connell of Weymouth, took the podium. He implored his colleagues not to vote for Noble’s bill. “These lesbians, these faggots and queers, are after your sons and daughters,” he railed. Then Democrat Thomas Lopes jumped up. Lopes represented New Bedford, a town whose liberalism went back to the nineteenth century, when it had sheltered many a runaway slave, including Frederick Douglass.

“These people are like the emotionally disturbed and mentally retarded,” Lopes cried out. “They should not be given such rights! This bill would water down civil rights for the rest of us!” Lopes concluded, without bothering to explain how. No matter that the bill’s opponents made little sense – it failed. The. Massachusetts Legislature would not pass a gay rights bill until 1989. By then, Noble was long out of politics. She’d started receiving death threats and bomb threats as soon as she declared her candidacy. They didn’t let up at all during the time she was in office. The plateglass window of her small storefront campaign headquarters was shattered by bullets the middle of the night. LESBIAN was spray painted on the trunk of her Chevy Vega. Sugar was poured into its gas tank. She was in a relationship at the time with the ubiquitous Rita Mae Brown. Brown was trying to finish her novel Six of One, but an incessantly jangling telephone interrupted her concentration- hate callers with obscene messages. She tried to convince Noble to move, or at least to get an unlisted telephone number but Noble refused. She wanted her constituents to be able to reach her whenever they needed something. The coup de grace to their relationship came when the living room window was shot out with a pellet gun one day, and Brown’s Audi was riddled with bullet holes the next. Noble wouldn’t heed Brown’s pleas to get out of Boston. She was needed by the little old ladies in her district, she said. Brown called a moving company and announced to her politician-lover, “I’m out of here, honey.” Elaine Noble believed for the first time that someone was seriously trying to murder her when she discovered that the lug nuts of one of the wheels on her car had been loosened and the hubcap replaced to hide what had been done. She heard a racket as she was driving three nuns to a meeting and puiled off to the side of the road, just before the wheel separated from the axle.

That was the start of her premonitions that something horrendous would happen to her in office. Noble’s second and last term ended in 1978. Something horrendous did happen before that year was over, but it was to another openly gay politician.”

Harvey Milk

“Though Elaine Noble was out when she ran for election, she didn’t campaign as a gay person. Harvey Milk did. Milk, a businessman, was finally elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977, after failed runs in 1973 and 1975 (and another defeat in 1976, when he ran for the state assembly). He won in 1977 because that year San Francisco replaced citywide elections with district elections. The strong gay voting bloc of the newly created District 5, which included the Castro and the hippie Haight-Ashbury area, chose Milk as an out, proud, and very voluble gay who could be trusted to push gay interests. He was not the only new supervisor demographically representative of his or her district. For the first time, the board included a black woman, Ella Hill Hutch; a Chinese American man, Gordon Lau; and from the progressive South of Market area, an unwed mother who was an outspoken feminist and former Freedom Rider, Carol Ruth Silver. Dan White, a fireman, was elected that year in a white working-class district. The SF Board of Supervisors, made up historically of well-to-do or well-known politicians, was changed dramatically.

The following January, Harvey Milk walked arm-in-arm with his lover Jack Lira from the Castro to City Hall, where he was sworn into office. Then he asked his 22-year-old leather-clad lesbian campaign coordinator to take him on her motorcycle to the victory party back home.”

“[White] left the military after six years of service with an honorable discharge; but he was at a loss about what to do next. He had vague ideas about becoming a writer. He went to Alaska, where he found a job as a school security guard. Then he quit and went back to San Francisco, where he got accepted at the police academy. He became a policeman, but he quit that, too. Then he became a fireman, like his father had been. He’d married and his wife was expecting a baby when he was elected supervisor; but he quit his job at the fire department, though the salary for a supervisor (supposedly a half-time position) was only $9,600 a vear. The median annual household income in the United States at that time was $13,570; so to supplement his salary, White got a Hot Potato franchise and set up a stand at Pier 39. His wife had to find a babysitter for their infant son or take him along with her when she worked the stand.”

“He knew little about politics aside from what he’d learned in high school civics class. At board of supervisors meetings, he sometimes exploded when he felt wronged – jumping to his feet, flailing, glaring fiercely.

He’d hoped finally to prove that he knew what he was doing as a politician when some of his Portola constituency asked him to halt the building of a home for disturbed and delinquent juveniles in a residential neighborhood by blocking its rezoning. White invited them to come to city hall and sit in on the meeting. He was confident of victory because he was sure he’d lined up six votes on the eleven-person board, including Harvey Milk’s. But White was humiliated and livid when his motion, which he’d argued for with all the debating-class skills he could muster, went down in defeat. Harvey Milk had decided that a home for troubled adolescents was, after all, more important than pleasing residents who opposed it, and he cast the deciding vote in favor of rezoning. Whatever quiet antipathy White had felt for Milk stopped being quiet.”

“April 1978: Press cameras captured a grinning Harvey Milk handing Mayor George Moscone a lavender-blue pen to sign a sweeping San Francisco gay rights bill. A few weeks earlier the bill, cosponsored by Milk and Carol Silver, had been endorsed by ten of the supervisors on the board. “This will be the strongest gay rights law in the country,” Milk declared in triumph over Bryant, Briggs, and their henchmen. “This one has teeth. A person can go to court if his rights are violated.” The lone vote against it came from Dan White. “This bill lets a man in a dress be a teacher,” White said to the media. “People are getting angry!”

By then, White had repledged himself in earnest to his campaign promise: Hadn’t he been elected to fight against the blight of “social deviates”? He complained to an interviewer about the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade that June (in which Milk, in his element, rode joyously in an open car): “It’s not proper, all those naked men and women.” The parade should be stopped, he said. Nor did White and his constituency approve that Harvey Milk got the board of supervisors to officially honor Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon for “twenty-five years of living together, of working together, of collaborating together; twenty-five years as leaders and pioneers against bigotry.’ White was disgusted too, by all the transvestites in San Francisco – and that Milk insulted the dignity of his office by accepting endorsements from them. He even let himself be photographed with people such as Jose Sarria and the full-drag female impersonators of Sarria’s Imperial Court.

There were, in fact, board of supervisors issues on which Milk and White could have been allies. Harvey Milk was interested in a lot more than gay rights. From the start of his political ambitions, he’d liked to cast himself in the role of “little guy fighting the big political machine” and as a supervisor he worked on many “little guy” issues – such as an ordinance to hinder real-estate speculators from pricing the working-class out of San Francisco. Dan White, who represented a populist, working-class district, might have appreciated such efforts – had not his hatred of Milk, as bitter and bizarre as lago’s toward Othello, trumped all for him.

Twelve months after both men were elected to the board of supervisors, a series of events finally sent Dan White over the edge. The first event may have been triggered by the resounding defeat of the Briggs initiative, for which Harvey Milk could claim much credit. Of the more than nine hundred San Francisco precincts, only four had voted in favor of booting out of public school jobs anyone who was homosexual or said anything nice about homosexuals. All four of those precincts were in Dan White’s District 8. Three days after the vote, White went to Mayor Moscone’s office and turned in his resignation from the board of supervisors.

He said he was leaving the board because the $800-a-month salary a supervisor received wasn’t enough to feed his wife and kid. But he was uncertain, tormented – he’d campaigned so hard to get his seat on the board. A couple of days later, he showed up again in Mayor Moscone’s office. He wanted to retract his resignation, he said. Those who’d supported him were disappointed that he’d resigned. He looked anguished and confused, and Mos- cone felt sorry for him. “A man has a right to change his mind,” the mayor said, and he promised he would figure out the legal steps he needed to follow in order to reinstate White. “Will you let me know as soon as you know anything?” White asked anxiously. Moscone said he would. But when Harvey Milk, who’d been delighted at the news of White’s departure, heard that Moscone had promised he’d try to give White’s seat back to him, he called the mayor, incredulous.

“George, what are you thinking?” Milk asked. Gays would never again vote for Moscone if he reappointed the rabid homophobe who was totally out of sync with the sentiments of most of the city. Moscone remembered how he got to be mayor-and that he had to run again the following year.”

“Sunday evening, November 26: Dan White’s wife, Mary Ann, had put Charlie, the baby, to bed and was trying to cheer her sullen husband. He’d been on tenterhooks waiting for the mayor to call and tell him he was reinstated. He’d hardly slept for nights; he was nervous, and fuming, too, that Moscone seemed to be taking his own sweet time about it. It had been two weeks already since he’d told George Moscone he wanted to retract his resignation.

At ten thirty, the phone rang. It was a reporter, Barbara Taylor, who worked for KCBS, a local radio station. She’d just gotten a scoop on Moscone’s decision. She wanted to know what White thought about it. The mayor was giving White’s old position on the board of supervisors to Don Horanzy, a former federal housing official. Horanzy was a neighborhood activist working with some progressive group called the All People’s Coalition.

He lived in Visitacion Valley, a run-down corner of White’s District 8.”

“Monday, November 27, ten thirty in the morning: Moscone had invited his friend Assemblyman Willie Brown, who’d be in city hall for a trial that day, to come witness the swearing in of Don Horanzy. The press would also be there, due at eleven thirty; but the trial judge had called a recess and Brown decided to go down to the mayor’s office early. On his way, he passed the mayor’s reception room. A beaming Don Horanzy was waiting there with his family, all of them decked out in the traditional Hungarian and Filipino ceremonial garb of their ancestors. Willie Brown went on to Moscone’s inner office, where he and the mayor sipped coffee and talked about sports for twenty or so minutes. But a little before eleven o’clock, Brown received a call from his assistant saying that the judge had ended the recess. Brown had to return to the fourth-floor courtroom. On his way out of Moscone’s office, Willie Brown ran into Dan White, who was on his way in.

White had entered the building through a basement window and climbed up to the second floor by the back staircase. He’d first gone to the main entrance on Polk Street, but the policeman assigned to the metal detector at the entrance that morning wasn’t someone he knew. That meant White wouldn’t be waved on – he’d have to pass through the detector. Before leaving home, he’d oiled his .38 Smith & Wesson service revolver and filled it with five cartridges.”

“Moscone, awkward as he must have felt to have Dan White standing in his office at that moment, tried to mollify him, offered him something to drink, expressed interest in his plans for the future. White pulled the gun from its holster and fired five bullets into George Moscone. The last two he shot directly into the back of the mayor’s head as he straddled his fallen body.

Then he put the gun back in its holster, buttoned his vest to hide it, and walked quickly west, down the block-long marble corridors of city hall, to the other side of the second floor, where the supervisors’ chambers were. Milk was outside his office, talking to aides. White went into his old office and reloaded the gun. Then he went out again. “I need to speak to you,” he said to Harvey Milk. Milk looked surprised, but he followed White into his office. Again, this time at 11:10, White fired five shots, three into Milk’s chest and two into his brain.

Then the ex-supervisor ran from city hall. He called his wife from a pay phone and told her to meet him at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption on Gough Street. They huddled together in the empty church before Mary Ann White went with her husband to the Northern Station of the SFPD, where White knew he’d find his old friend, Officer Paul Chignell, vice president of the Police Officers Association. In a dramatic gesture that White seemed to think would explain all, he pulled something from his jacket pocket and threw it down on Chignell’s desk. It was a book cover that had been ripped from the Leon Uris novel Trinity, which had recently come out in paperback. Trinity was about the struggle of Irish Catholics against British who’d taken over their country_just as “deviates,” in White’s mind, had taken over San Francisco.

After White was booked, he gave his weeping confession to Police Inspector Frank Falzon (who’d been White’s baseball coach when he was a boy and a buddy when White was on the police force), saying he’d murdered Milk and Moscone because he saw the city going kind of downhill.”

“In 1974 Harvey Milk and the teamster truck driver and gay activist Howard Wallace had visited all the gay and lesbian bars in the Bay Area, about one hundred of them. They asked the bar owners and customers to boycott Coors beer. The teamsters union wanted the boycott because Coors was refusing to let the workers unionize. Not only was Milk sympathetic to the union – he’d also found out that prospective employees of Coors had to take lie detector tests that nosed into their sexual orientation. Soon after the Harvey Milk and Howard Wallace visits to the gay bars, Coors’s market share in California dropped precipitously, from 43 percent to 14 percent.”

“Jones had rallied gays and lesbians by repeatedly screaming into the bullhorn, “Civil Rights or Civil War!”But on the night of November 27, Jones didn’t need the bullhorn. Around seven o’clock, gay people, and straight people too, spontaneously began to gather at Castro and Market Streets. Most brought candles. They marched silently toward city hall, thousands of candles, as far as the eye could see, illuminating the dark streets. The only sounds that night were those of people crying. Future supervisor and state assemblyman Tom Ammiano held his candle aloft along with the other marchers as he passed a black man standing on a corner watching, incredulous because the only emotion people showed was grief. “Where is your anger?” the man yelled at Ammiano and all of them. “Where is your anger? Where is your anger?” But the marchers were too overwhelmed by sadness. Anger would come six months later.”

“In 1977 the California Legislature passed a statute that reinstated the death penalty, which had been suspended since 1972. Execution again became a possible punishment for first degree murder under “special circumstances,” which included murder of multiple victims and assassination of a public official. Dan White had confessed to just those crimes.

District Attorney Joe Freitas pulled out as prosecutor on the trial because he’d known Moscone, Milk, and White personally. He assigned the job to Assistant District Attorney Thomas Norman. Norman, who’d argue that White be given the death penalty, inquired of all potential jury members whether they were opposed to capital punishment. He dismissed outright anyone who said yes, unwittingly getting rid of all the liberals – who would have been most troubled about the murder of a gay man and a man who supported gays.

Defense attorneys Douglas Schmidt and Steve Scherr were also picky about who they would permit on the jury. They were far better chess-players than Norman. One promising potential juror, who came from a family of policemen (which might have made him sympathetic to White, the former cop), was asked by Douglas Schmidt where he lived. “With my lover,” the young man said.

“A woman?” the thirty-two-year-old Schmidt pursued.

“No, a man.”

Attorney Schmidt dismissed him summarily

The jury that was thus seated was comprised largely of conservative, working-class people – seven women and five men – who were very much like Dan White and his family: housewives, clerical workers, a saleswoman, a retired beauty supply businesswoman, a security officer, a couple of printers, a mechanic. Several were Irish Catholic. The most educated person, a construction engineer, was chosen foreman. There was not one person of color and, needless to say, not one gay person among them.

All through the eleven-day trial, White sat in the courtroom looking catatonic – a pathetic shell of a once handsome and vibrant young man was what the jury saw. It was what White’s skillful defense attorneys wanted them to see. Prosecuting attorney Norman, intending to establish that White was without a doubt guilty of the two murders, played the twenty-four- minute tape of his confession to Police Inspector Falzon. It was another wrong move. Dan White, weeping audibly on the tape as he “confessed,” talked a lot about the money worries he’d had, how it had been so hard to support his wife and little baby. They had no time to be a family together. He hadn’t intended to kill the mayor and the supervisor; he’d just gone to city hall to talk to them. And then “I got kind of fuzzy; my head didn’t feel right,” he said with ingenuous Huck Finn diction. Yes, he’d brought a loaded gun with him, but many supervisors, even Dianne Feinstein, carried loaded guns around – for self-protection. (Never mind that White stored ten extra cartridges in his pants pocket or that he walked to the other side of city hall and went into his old office to reload before he asked Milk to come in there with him.) He’d been an idealist, fighting political corruption, trying to keep the city from deteriorating, the jury heard White weeping into the tape recorder. And Milk had smirked at him when he was already feeling so bad about himself. He loved his wife; he loved his little son; he’d just wanted to provide for them and take care of them, and take care of the city he loved. By the time the taped “confession” was finished there wasn’t a dry eye in the jury box.

The defense also outwitted the prosecution in the witnesses they called. Four psychiatrists and a psychologist testified that the financial and emotional pressure Dan White had been under had been too great for him, and that when Harvey Milk defeated and humiliated White, he cracked.”

“Defense attorney Schmidt jumped on Blinder’s theory. That’s exactly what pushed White over the edge, he explained-

-depression that led to sugar poisoning. “Good people, fine people with fine backgrounds, simply don’t kill people in cold blood.”

The jury deliberated for six days. The verdict came down on May 21, 1979, a day before Harvey Milk’s birthday – had he lived he would have been forty-nine. In a packed and emotion-charged courtroom, the jury foreman handed the written verdict to Anne Barrett, the court clerk. Several jurors wept as she read aloud: the jury found Dan White guilty on two counts of voluntary manslaughter for shooting George Moscone five times and then shooting Harvey Milk five times, Dan White was given the maximum penalty for manslaughter: seven years and eight months in prison.

“Well, no one could come up with any evidence that indicated premeditation,” the foreman later told the press.”

“Most gay liberals and radicals were categorically opposed to capital punishment. But the grieving community had been vehement that Dan White should be sentenced to life in prison, without parole.

“We’re gonna raise hell!” some said from the beginning of the trial, certain that the all-straight jury wouldn’t make the punishment fit the crime. And when it turned out they’d been right, the slap on the wrist the jury gave Dan White felt like a slap in their collective gay faces.”

“They’d have another candlelight march, he thought as he shouted over and over into the bullhorn, “Out of the bars and into the streets! Out of the bars and into the streets!” A crowd of about five hundred appeared almost immediately. As they marched, the numbers swelled to thousands. By the time they got to Civic Center Plaza, it was almost eight o’clock, and darkness was falling. This would be no candlelight vigil. A mob was massed in front of the Polk Street entrance to city hall. Those standing closest to the building, looking up to the second floor where Milk and Moscone had been murdered suddenly couldn’t contain their fury. They started ripping apart the building’s ornate grill work, using the pieces as makeshift battering rams, smashing the glass doors.

Then others picked up chunks of pavement or broke rocks off the new aggregate trash containers that lined the streets and hurled them at city hall windows. In minutes, the sidewalks were covered with glass. “We want justice!” the rioters screamed. “He got away with murder!” “Avenge Harvey Milk!” Gay rage, lulled for ten years after the Stonewall riots, was spreading through the huge mass. They uprooted parking meters and newspaper vending racks and used them as javelins to shatter ground-floor windows. They broke the windows on parked police cars and hurled burning shrubs and newspapers looted from the vending racks into them. The sirens of the torched cars shrieked into the night, till meltdown shut them up. A radical lesbian activist yelled to Cleve Jones, “Hey, I think we ought to do this more often!” She and three or four other lesbians ran around to the basement window into which Dan White had crawled six months earlier, pushed through as he had, and used looted newspapers to set fires inside.”

“Civic. Center Plaza turned into a battlefield. Hundreds of rioters broke limbs from the plaza’s trees and used them to smash every car window in sight. Squads of police cars arrived, officers suited up in riot regalia. The crowd was too big and unruly to control. They needed more men. Dianne Feinstein, mayor since Moscone’s murder, peeped at the throng gone wild from behind her office curtains in city hall. She called in every off-duty San Francisco police officer. That wasn’t enough. She called for police backup from Marin, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Oakland. Scores of policemen massed in wedges, Roman style, holding big shields on which they pounded with their batons, advancing on the mob, trying to drive them away from city hall and out of the plaza.

“Don’t run! Slow down! Turn around! Fight back!” Cleve Jones and others shouted. And the crowd did. “Skinny little queens in tank tops and blue jeans hurling themselves against the police!” Jones marveled and exulted. Bottles and rocks bounced off riot shields and helmets. The police fired tear gas till the plaza was hazy with it.

Hundreds of rioters moved north up to Larkin Street, setting fires in trash cans, making burning pyres of looted tires, smashing all the plateglass in sight, looting clothing stores, pharmacies, liquor stores. “Political trashing,” they named their looting for a San Francisco Chronicle reporter. “Make sure to put in the paper that I ate too many Twinkies!” one rioter screamed as he helped torch another police car.

By one in the morning, fifty-nine police officers had been injured, most cut by flying bottles and rocks. Seventy demonstrators had to be treated for injuries from police billy clubs. Twenty rioters were arrested. The cost of the damage was over $1 million. Harry Britt – the man Harvey Milk had chosen to succeed him as supervisor “in the event” that he was assassinated – told the media the morning after the riot, “Now the society is going to have to deal with us not as nice little fairies who have their hair dressing salons, but as people capable of violence. This was gay anger you saw. There better be an understanding of where this violence was coming from.””

The March on Washington

“A week before Harvey Milk’s death, he’d issued a press release. He was calling for a massive gay march on Washington in sum- mer 1979, to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Stonewall. It would be a spectacular sign of gay unity and expression of gay demands, like Martin Luther King’s 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom was for black people.”

“The drama of Harvey Milk’s death sped it up. On the afternoon of November 27, the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights had just opened a meeting to talk about the feasibility of a march when a call came from San Francisco: Milk had been killed. Joyce Hunter, a black Jewish woman who was a leader in the group, broke through the stunned silence to say, “Now we have to do it. For Harvey.” Days later, in San Francisco, Milk’s assistant Anne Kronenberg told a large grief-stricken crowd who’d gathered to mourn Harvey Milk that a march on Washington had been “Harvey’s dream.” They must make it come true. “The time is now,” she urged them. The crowd rose to its feet and cheered. Milk’s death had to have purpose. The city supervisor, who’d been in elected office less than eleven months would become a much-needed national icon. A martyr. The gay movement’s Martin Luther King. What could be more appropriate than a march on Washington to honor his dream?”

“On the first four points of the platform there was general agreement. All antigay laws must be repealed. Congress must pass a comprehensive gay rights bill. The president must sign an executive order banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in federal government, the military, and federally contracted private employment. Discrimination against lesbian mothers and gay fathers must be prohibited. But the fifth demand that was the sticking point. Members of NAMBLA, the North American Man/Boy Love Association, proposed that the marchers demand the repeal of all age-of-consent laws. Joyce Hunter called it disgusting and exploitative. Lesbian Feminist Liberation leader Eleanor Cooper (who ran an extermination company called “Lady Killers”) protested that it was exactly what Anita Bryant was saving gays wanted: to have sex with children. Another Lesbian Feminist Liberation leader Dotty Santore was ready to stage a walkout. The NAMBLA proposal was finally replaced by the innocuous demand that lesbian and gay youth be protected from harassment.”

“Over a hundred thousand marchers streamed for several hours down ten blocks of Pennsylvania Avenue. They carried signs that made proclamations to America such as “We Are Everywhere” and “Lesbians and Gay Men of Tidewater, Virginia.” (About thirty men and women marched behind that one.) They carried banners memorializing Harvey Milk as martyr and hero; and telling their archenemy: “Eat Your Heart Out Anita!” They carried individual signs too, such as “I Served My Country as a Gay American USN / I Demand My Rights.” Elderly women held signs that said “My son is gay and that’s okay” and “I am not a closet mother.” The speakers at the Washington Monument rally told their elated listeners (and even more to the point, Washington) that there were 20 million gays and lesbians in the country and they were moving from “gay pride” to “gay politics.”

It was years before the federal government took their “move to gay politics” seriously enough to pay attention to the marchers’ list of demands for civil rights. To anyone who’d expected quick results, the march must have seemed a failure. But, in fact, it served as a crucial building block. It was the occasion for gay people to formulate what they needed to ask for from their government. It brought out gays and lesbians into the daylight from the boonies and hinterlands of TN, ID, and OK, and it alerted many more gays in those places to the knowledge that they weren’t alone. it dramatized the fact that there was a national movement. It encouraged gay people to think in terms of a national consciousness. It was a catharsis, too, uniting them in claiming emotional victory over the woman who’d become an iconic enemy and mourning the death of a man they’d made an iconic hero.”

AIDS

“The disease appeared out of nowhere. In June 1981 a thirty-three-year-old physician and assistant professor of medicine at UCLA, Michael Gottlieb, reported in the Centers for Disease Control’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report that between October 1980 and May 1981, there’d been five cases in Los Angeles hospitals of previously healthy young men whose biopsies had confirmed a rare illness, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, which, he wrote, had been seen before only in severely immunosuppressed patients. All the young men were active homosexuals. By the time Dr. Gottlieb wrote the report, two had already died.

The following month, the Centers for Disease Control reported that twenty-six homosexual men had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma, a rare cancer that shows up as skin lesions.”

“The Far Right did not waste the shock value. Paleoconservative Patrick Buchanan gloated in his syndicated column that AIDS was a sign that “Nature is exacting retribution”; but now, he wrote, not only were these homosexuals a “moral menace, they were a “public health menace,” too. Buchanan reported that policemen were so worried about getting AIDS and bringing it home to their families that they had to don masks and gloves when dealing with homosexual lawbreakers; landlords were so worried about the spread of AIDS on their premises that they had to evict infected homosexuals from their property. Because of homosexuals’ morally irresponsible and unhealthy sex practices, they were the spreaders of a host of other diseases, too, that could affect innocent heterosexuals, such as hepatitis. Therefore, Buchanan ranted, they must not be allowed to work in restaurants or any job in which they handled food.” “Gay rights” – homosexuals’ demands to live and work wherever they wanted – were dangerous to heterosexuals.

In his column, Buchanan called for the total undoing of the bits of progress that gays and lesbians had been slowly making toward civil rights, and the undoing of the Democratic Party along with them. At the last Democratic National Convention, in 1980, seventy-seven of the seated delegates had been openly gay or lesbian and had agitated for the adoption of a gay plank. To get a hearing on the convention floor, they nominated for vice president Melvin Boozer, a young African American PhD from Yale who was then a sociology professor at the University of Maryland. Boozer was also the head of the DC Gay Activists Alliance, and in that role he won a court battle with the Washington Transit Authority for the right to place an ad on buses proclaiming “Someone you love is gay.” He also won a battle with the US Army for the right to place a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in honor of gays and lesbians who died in military service. In his stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden, Boozer said he wouldn’t accept the vice presidential nomination, but he pleaded for the adoption of a gay rights plank to help the “twenty million Americans who love this country and long to serve it in the same freedom that others take for granted.” He dared compare the struggle for black civil rights to the struggle for gay civil rights: “I know what it means to be called a ‘nigger’ and I know what it means to be called a ‘faggot, “ Boozer’s voice rang out in the huge auditorium that August night. “And I understand the difference in the marrow of my bones. I can sum up that difference in one word: none.”

The delegates were a lot more receptive to his speech than they’d been to the speeches of Foster and Davis eight years earlier. The Democratic National Committee started making sympathetic noises about adding gay rights to the next platform. The three leading contenders for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, Walter Mondale, Alan Cranston, and Gary Hart, all promised to support such a plank.

Buchanan used their pledges to jibe at both Dems and gays. In light of the threat homosexuals now presented to the health of the whole nation, Buchanan asked incredulously in his column, “Does the Democratic Party still maintain its solemn commitment to federally protected civil rights for active homosexuals – equal access to jobs, housing, and public accommodations?””

“Despite his decisive role in defeating the Briggs initiative in 1978, Ronald Reagan, who’d win almost 59 percent of the popular vote over Walter Mondale, had cultivated ignorance or worse about AIDS. His press secretary, Larry Speakes, represented the president’s attitude in an October 1982 press conference. “Larry, does the president have any reaction to the announcement from the Centers for Disease Control that AIDS is now an epidemic and there have been over six hundred cases?” a reporter wanted to know.

“What’s AIDS?” Speakes asked.

“Over a third of them have died. It’s known as ‘gay plague. Speakes and others laughed.

“No, it is. I mean it’s a pretty serious thing that one in every three people that get this has died. And I wonder if the president is aware.”

“I don’t have it,” Speakes, a Mississippian, drawled jocularly. “Do you?” More laughter.

“In other words, the White House looks on this as a great joke?” the reporter asked.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Speakes answered, impatient now, and he called for other questions.

Reagan himself wouldn’t even utter the word AIDS until his good friend from Hollywood days, Rock Hudson, died of it in 1985. The year before, however, when three hundred thousand Americans had already been diagnosed with the disease and Ronald Reagan was running for reelection, he told a group that kept tally of a “presidential Biblical scoreboard” that his administration would continue to resist all attempts to “obtain any government endorsement of homosexuality.” That seemed to include any effort to help save homosexual lives.”

“AIDS could easily have meant the end of the movement for gay civil rights--not just because extremists were calling for its end but also because gay people were paralyzed by confusion and fear. “Gay power” and especially “gay pride” had come to seem oxymoronic. Even the more sophisticated newspapers were reporting gay “contrition” in Moral Majority language: “As they waste away, many AIDS patients begin to reflect on their lives, sometimes feeling they are being punished for their reckless, hedonistic ways,” a journalist for the New York Times Magazine announced.”

“Family and friends were deserting those with the disease. In the hospitals, people with AIDS were pariahs. They often sat for days in emergency rooms. If they were finally admitted, terrified orderlies would let them lie in their own excrement and urine, refusing out of fear even to enter their room. They left the patients’ food trays piled up in the hallways. When a patient with AIDS died, he’d be put in a black trash bag. Many funeral parlors were refusing to handle the dead. Kramer had called his influential friends together, he told them, because they needed to do something to help. They agreed. They’d start a group called the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, which would do everything for people with AIDS that the rest of New York was refusing to do.

Gay Men’s Health Crisis advertised in the gay papers for “buddies” to pay visits to people with AIDS and hold their hands, clean their apartments, walk their dogs, shop for groceries, cut up their food and feed them, take them to doctors, read to them in hospitals. Five hundred volunteer buddies – gay men, lesbians (many who’d been lesbian separatists in the 1970s but found their grudge against males to be irrelevant in the face of such devastation), straight women – all flocked to give succor to the sick. Gay Men’s Health Crisis also established a twenty four-hour hotline so that people all over the country who were panicking could call in for moral support and solid information. GMHC volunteers ran therapy groups for people with AIDS and their partners. They got lawyers to work gratis to help the sick make wills or fight landlords who wanted to evict them. The old Chelsea brownstone on Twenty-Second Street that GMHC rented for its headquarters was soon cluttered with volunteers’ desks and bulging file cabinets. Telephones rang continuously; computers and typewriters were always in use. To keep it all going, GMHC held benefits and parties in gay bars. Within the first year, the group raised $600,000. The state and the city gave GMHC $200,000 more.”

“One of GLLU’s members, Mexican American Frank Mendiola, had been a farm worker as a child and was still active in the United Farm Workers, America’s most powerful Latino political group. Mendiola, a short, slight young man, was a dynamo of energy with remarkable political know-how. Though only twenty-three, he’d led a fight to unionize the LA Gay Community Services Center, which was a flourishing institution by the early eighties. Soon after Mendiola joined GLLU, he went to the United Farm Workers’ president, Cesar Chavez, and asked him to make a public statement in support of Latino gays and lesbians. Chavez agreed to do that and more. In 1983 Assembly Bill-1, which would ban job discrimination against gays and lesbians, was pending in the California Legislature. Chavez paid visits on GLLU’s behalf to Democratic assemblymen and even the president pro tempore of the Senate, David Roberti, to tell them that he and the United Farm Workers were urging passage of the bill. That June, Chavez and United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta marched beside Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos in the Los Angeles pride parade. The strong Catholicism of the Latino community had always encouraged its members to see homosexuals as sinners, but Chavez told them, “You can’t demand equality for yourself while tolerating discrimination against anyone else.” Frank Mendiola and his friends were euphoric.

But many of the men in Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos, including Frank Mendiola and Jose Ramirez, were by now beginning to show symptoms of the virus. In a few years, the group was decimated by death. GLLU’s lesbians, the group’s Mexican American president Oscar de la O, Roland Palencia, and the few other GLLU men who were still healthy thought it crucial to form an AIDS Education Committee. The old ambitions of Gay and Lesbian Latinos Unidos were put on a back burner. GLLU morphed completely into Bienestar, a service organization for gay Latinos with AlDS. This was the story of gay rights groups around the country: no matter their initial goals, the biggest enemy in the 1980s was AIDS, and before they could fight any other war, they had to fight that one.”

“The largest festive gathering of gays and lesbians in big American cities had been the pride parades; but the parades these days were led by contingents of gay men with AIDS, some already so weak they had to be pushed in their wheelchairs. Instead of their usual carnival-like hilarity, the parades became funereal. As Phil Miller, a San Francisco man who’d never missed a parade since they started mourned, “People are dying, dying, dying. We’re lucky we’re still alive, but there’s nothing anymore to celebrate.” If gays didn’t already know they were pariahs – even in a city like San Francisco where they’d recently seemed to have genuine clout – they were reminded at the 1983 Gay Freedom Day Parade by the policemen wearing rubber gloves as they diverted traffic around the marchers. And the city crew assigned to sweep up the trash after the parade was issued surgical masks and disposable paper suits. Who could be sure that you couldn’t catch AIDS through street litter? Gay depression made action impossible.”

“Three years later: Some alarmist estimates claimed that a million Americans had already been infected. Homosexuals weren’t just the victims of the plague, people were saying – they were also the spreaders of the plague. In June the US Justice Department declared that businesses had the right to discriminate against people with AIDS if they believed such discrimination would prevent the spread of the disease; employers could fire those with AIDS, merely on the grounds that their presence might make other employees feel discontent or emotional distress. Brutal attacks on gay men were up everywhere. That same month, June 1986, in what used to be gay-friendly San Francisco, there were sixty beatings of gay men horrific enough to be reported to the police.

It seemed that society was again agreeing it was all right to hate gay people. Conservative pundit William F. Buckley proposed in his syndicated column that to prevent the spread of AIDS, infected gay men should be tattooed on the buttocks, so potential sex partners would know and stay away. In California, a multimillionaire demagogue, Lyndon LaRouche, took a pause from advocating war with Russia to form the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee (PANIC); he paid for a petition drive that gathered seven hundred thousand signatures. His initiative qualified for the November 1986 ballot: California voters would go to the polls and decide whether to put people with AIDS in quarantine camps. Such things had happened before – homosexuals been had put in camps in Nazi Germany; even in America, during World War II, American citizens of Japanese descent had been sent off to camps. It had been terrifying enough that the lives of gay men were threatened by AIDS; but now it seemed their liberty was also being threatened.”

“For six hours, demonstrators scattered pink paper triangles like confetti. They sang “America, the Beautiful” and “We Are a Gentle, Angry People,” emphasizing the lines “and we are singing, singing for our lives.” They chanted “Equal justice under the law, that’s what it says on the wall!” pointing to the words carved above the entrance to the court. Wooden barricades blocked off the steps that led up to the Supreme Court building, and signs on the barricades warned the protestors not to go any farther. But wave after wave of the protestors did anyway, holding hands, pushing through the barricades, running up to the building’s plaza, where it’s illegal to hold a protest. “Shame! Shame! Shame!” they shouted at the marble edifice and the austere justices inside. Six hundred protestors were arrested, the largest mass arrest in Washington since the Vietnam War protests.

But it was anger and grief about the AIDS epidemic that drew most of the huge crowd to the March on Washington. More than forty-one thousand people had already died of the disease. There was no cure in sight, and the government wasn’t spending much money to find one. At sunrise on the day of the march, an AIDS quilt was unfurled at the Washington Mall – thousands of rectangular three-foot-by-six-foot handmade panels, each in memory of a person who’d died of AIDS. The quilt was the brainchild of Cleve Jones, whose grandmother in Indiana had been a quilter. Jones conceived of the quilt as a political statement that would sidestep the issue of gay male sexuality to focus on the larger message that these people who died of AIDS belonged to the American family and had been loved. Each panel was embroidered with a message, such as “Our Son, Our Brother, Our Uncle, Our Friend”, “I pray that mothers and fathers will stand by their gay children,” signed “A mother who’s glad she did”; “James, you silly boy, you weren’t supposed to leave yet. Love ya, Douglas”; and “Dear God, I pray that soon this plague, too, shall pass. Be with us and those departed. Amen.” The names of the dead were read by volunteers, as a sea of gay people and those who loved them walked along the fabric borders, wiping tears from their cheeks and clinging to one another.”

“Elchberg had recently discovered he was HIV positive. He and O’Leary came up with an idea that would take Avram Finkelstein’s “Silence = Death” slogan a step further: all gays and lesbians must exit the closet and let the straight world see their familiar faces, huge numbers, and collective power. O’Leary and Eichberg proposed that October 11, 1988 (the near-anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington), be the first “National Coming Out Day.”

ACT UP-ers loved the idea. They agreed that the most effective way to celebrate the day would be to congregate in Rockville, Maryland, at the headquarters of the Food and Drug Administration.”

“At seven thirty in the morning on that first National Coming Out Day, a thousand ACT UP-ers from twenty different states descended on the FDA. On the manicured lawns in front of the sprawling seventeen-story building, hundreds of ACT UP protestors lay down beside the cardboard tombstones they’d brought with them – tombstones with bloody handprints and epitaphs that said, “Killed by the FDA” and “Killed by the system.” Others wore their message on their backs. “If I Die Of Aids, Forget Burial. Just Drop My Body On The Steps Of The FDA,” one young man’s leather jacket proclaimed. Protestors plastered the FDA building with banners and posters: “We Die and They Do Nothing!” “One AIDS Death Every Half Hour.” “Forty-two Thousand Dead of AIDS! Where was the FDA?” They screamed angry chants at the bureaucratic government administrators who were just arriving for their workday: “We need the drugs now!” “Drugs into bodies!” “Act up! Fight back! Fight AIDS!” They blocked the doors so that FDA workers couldn’t enter the building. “Seize control! Seize control! Seize control!” some ACT UP-ers yelled. ‘4 Two glass doors were broken. New York ACT UP member Peter Staley, a former Wall Street bond trader (who’d quit his job when his boss, who’d also been his mentor, remarked that people with AIDS deserved to die), set off colored smoke bombs. Other ACT UP-ers hung a sign identifying the place as the “Federal Death Administration.”

ACT UP had choreographed much of it beforehand. Marty Robinson, who’d had plenty of experience being arrested from the old GAA days, and Amy Bauer, a lesbian who’d perfected direct-action techniques through her work in radical peace organizations, had trained ACT UP-ers about what to do when the cops came. The entire Rockville, Maryland, police force and every police bus they could commandeer showed up. They padlocked the doors of the building so ACT UP-ers couldn’t storm inside – which meant that ACT UP succeeded in shutting the FDA down for the whole day since the workers couldn’t get in either. For six hours the Rockville police, wearing clear plastic surgical gloves, tried to keep the peace. They dragged protestors off to waiting police buses and to jail. One hundred seventy-six were arrested, though the Rockville police had been told to be restrained and arrest as few as possible, so the protest wouldn’t be turned into a media circus.

But it was. ACT UP’s media committee made sure that every major newspaper and TV station was alerted that there’d be mayhem at the FDA. The protest got international coverage. United Press International and Associated Press articles appeared with exactly the headlines ACT UP had hoped for, such as “Demonstrators Demand Easier Access to AIDS Drugs.” HIV-positive writer and film historian Vito Russo was quoted in papers around the country saying that there were drugs out there that could help people like him, but the FDA wouldn’t let those drugs get to market. In Europe it takes nine months to make sure a drug doesn’t have “bad side effects” – why does it take the FDA five to ten years to do the same thing? Russo wanted to know. “The side effect of AIDS is death!” he declared.”

“Ann Northrop felt in her element again, taking to the streets to protest injustice. Now she could also teach those with whom she protested valuable things: How to work the media to get maximum coverage. How to dangle an event in front of reporters so that they’d think it irresistible, and imperative that they be there. How to do a five-second sound bite so that if a microphone is pushed in front of an ACT UP-er’s face, he or she will say something that will make the six o’clock news.

“Talk in brief spurts that are usable as quotes,” Northrop instructed them. “Remember, you’re not speaking to the media but through the media. You’re using them to get to the general public. It was urgent to get to the general public. If people were allowed to forget about AIDS, the government could forget to put money into helping to end it.”

“Sunday, December 10, 1989: Hundreds of ACT UP-ers, men and women sedately dressed in go-to-church clothes, went to church at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. There’d been a meeting of the Roman Catholic bishops under Cardinal O’Connor, at which the ecclesiastics agreed to make public declarations reiterating to the faithful that Catholic doctrine deemed the use of condoms uncatholic. “Good morality is good medicine,” the cardinal declared. It didn’t make a difference that the New York Health Commission said that the Church’s continued prohibition would bring on a worse public health disaster. To the Church, it was irrelevant even that condoms could prevent the spread of AIDS to women through infected bisexual men. Abstinence was the only AIDS preventive that the Catholic leadership would condone. “Cardinal O’Condom,” some ACT UP-ers rechristened him. The cardinal, for his part, reiterated that “to the end of time,” the Church would be teaching that homosexual activity is sin.

Before the ten o’clock morning mass, ACT UP infiltrators, smiling like church ushers, handed out “church programs” to the faithful as they entered St. Patrick’s. The “programs” were flyers that told why ACT UP would be disrupting the service. Cardinal O’Connor had been apprised that ACT UP-ers would be in his church. “Pay no attention to them,” he announced from the pulpit and began a homily. Despite the bitter cold outside and inside the church (worshippers kept their heavy coats on and held their hymnals in gloved hands), scores of infiltrators lay down on the marble floor of the main aisle of St. Patrick’s and staged a die-in. Parishioners glared at the prone bodies. Two gay leather men who were an ACT UP couple chained themselves side by side to a pew. Ann Northrop chanted to the faithful, “We’re fighting for your lives too!” The cardinal kept on with the mass while several ACT UP-ers stood and read a statement about how Church policies were making the AIDS epidemic worse. Michael Petrelis, who’d worn the concentration camp uniform at the Lavender Hill Mob’s CDC zap, was by now suffering from herpes, gastrointestinal amoebas, and a host of other opportunistic infections; he hadn’t been up to wearing a suit and tie to get into St. Patrick’s, but he sneaked in through a side door. Petrelis thought the activists weren’t being heard over the cardinal’s amplified homily; so he stood on a pew and blew a whistle over and over. Then he shrieked as loud as the whistle, “O’Connor, you’re killing us! Murderer! We will fight O’Connor’s bigotry!” The policemen who’d managed to squeeze through the huge crowd out front pulled Petrelis down off the pew, handcuffed him, and marched him out to the waiting paddy wagon as he kept up a banshee screech.

At the call to take communion, ACT UP-er Tom Keane, who’d been an altar boy and whose mother still taught catechism classes, went to the front of the church and knelt with the rest of the worshippers. By now the cardinal had stepped down from the altar and was sitting dramatically on his gilded throne, head cradled in hands, an image of despair. A dark-skinned priest was giving communion. Keane, dressed in a dark blue suit, looking like a young Republican stockbroker, held his mouth open as the priest intoned with a Spanish accent, “the body of Christ,” and then placed the wafer on Keane’s tongue. In a gesture large enough for all to see, Tom Keane spit the host out, crumbled it, and dropped the crumbs to the ground. That’s what started a near riot. The police had their hands full.

They had their hands full outside, too, with over four thousand protestors. The ranks of ACT UP had been swelled by abortion activists from Women’s Health Action and Mobilization, WHAM. Some ACT UP demonstrators lay “dead” in the middle of the street; others blocked the sidewalk and the entrance to the cathedral. Many carried signs: “Public Health Menace: Cardinal O’Connor,” “Condoms Save Lives.” “Papal Bull,” and the most popular one: beneath the word SCUMBAGS, a picture of the chubby Cardinal O’Connor side by side with a big condom, and underneath the condom the message, “This one prevents AIDS.” The police came out of the church carrying the “dead” on stretchers because they wouldn’t walk. All told, 111 protestors were arrested. Ann Northrop was ecstatic. The zap “made headlines all over the world for weeks.” ACT UP chapters were started in Moscow, Cape Town, and big cities all over Europe.”

““We’ve got to call a spade a spade and a perverted human being a perverted human being,” Helms had told the Senate when he proposed an amendment adding “sexual abstinence only” to a $300 million appropriation bill for AIDS education. (The Senate supported him, 94 to 59) Later, Helms also tried to block a $600 million AIDS bill, telling his fellow senators that the government should not spend money on “a disease spread through immorality.””

“They stayed overnight at a cheap motel; then early the next morning they alerted the local and national media, and they went off to Helms’ two-story redbrick colonial house. There, with clockwork precision (they’d practiced), they scurried up the ladder to the roof, draped the parachute material to cover the roof and front of Helms’s house, and inflated it.

If anyone missed the meaning of the oblong object that covered the house, the message printed on it informed them what it was: “A Condom to Stop Unsafe Politics: Helms Is Deadlier Than a Virus.” “What does this mean?” an Associated Press reporter superfluously asked Peter Staley. The newspapers quoted him faithfully: “We’re saying if you mess with us, you’re going to wake up one morning to find a condom on your roof.”

“ACT UP’s most serious use of bad cops and good cops was on May 21, 1990, when ACT UP-ers from all over the country paid a visit en masse to the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The name the activists knew best at the NIH, because he’d published a lot about AIDS, was Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of NIH’s Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci had read Michael Gottlieb’s June 1981 article about the five mysterious pneumonia cases of gay men in Los Angeles. The following month, he’d read that twenty-six gay men had been diagnosed with Kaposi’s sarcoma. As an infectious-disease specialist, he’d always been something of a detective, and the stories intrigued him. He dropped his old research interests and turned his full attention to the new disease.

Fauci, as chief officer of the Institute that studies infectious disease, had a significant influence over what drugs would be tested and what protocols would be followed. Now the ACT UP activists were targeting him, yelling beneath the window of his office, “Fauci, you’re killing us!” “The whole world is watching, Fauci!” When they set off smoke bombs, the National Institutes of Health police showed up right away. He told the police to ask five or six of the protest leaders to come in, to meet with him in a conference room.

Peter Staley, Mark Harrington, and the other Treatment and Data experts who met with Fauci lectured him on the inappropriateness of lengthy drug testing trials in the midst of a plague. Some of those at the meeting, like Peter Staley, knew they were HIV positive. “We don’t have the years to wait while new drugs are tested,” they said. They talked about the ethics of using placebos in tests instead of real drugs, which might save people who were dying. The amount of information they had was astonishing to Fauci. Everything they said made great sense, as he told his NIH colleagues: “These guys are extremely valuable. They can give us input into how to design the trials and the kinds of needs they see in their community. We have to listen to them. How can we work in partnership with them?”

The “partnership” started a revolution in the way things were done at the National Institutes of Health. It brought about major changes in how the federal government tests and distributes experimental drugs, beginning with the Accelerated Approval process that the Treatment and Data Committee demanded. As a result of that “partnership” NIH advisory committees and counsels always include activists from communities that are directly affected by NIH’s policy decisions. ACT UP changed America’s “scientific culture” to profit everyone.

Big Pharma, also shamed by the activists, eventually listened too. When Burroughs Welcome first put a drug on the market that sounded promising, AZT, the cost to the user was between $8,000 and $10,000 a year. ACT UP zappers embarrassed the company by infiltrating its headquarters and inviting the media to come take pictures of a sign they hung from a second-floor window that accused the company of having blood on its hands. Burroughs Welcome still wouldn’t lower the price of AZT, so ACT UP infiltrated the New York Stock Exchange, sneaking up to the VIP balcony and unfurling a “Sell Wellcome!” banner. They also staged a “die-in” in the street in front of the exchange. Five days after the Wall Street zap, the company cut the price of the drug to $6,400 a year.

ACT UP’s more cerebral Treatment and Data Committee also worked its magic to persuade Bristol-Meyers-Squibb to put its promising drug DDI on accelerated approval. Even more important, Treatment and Data (which broke away from ACT UP in 1992 and became the independent Treatment Action Group) guided Roche, Merck, and other companies in developing the most potent protease inhibitors and designing and speeding along the trial process for them.

Protease inhibitors were made widely available in 1996. In that first year, deaths from AIDS in the big cities dropped about 50 percent. Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions melted away. Michael Petrelis, who’d screamed at the CDC conference in 1987. “Drugs into bodies now!” began taking protease inhibitors when his T cell count dropped below 100. Like so many who’d been inches from the end, he went into remission.”

“Gay men stared their mortality in the face, concluded they had little to lose, that silence equaled death, and they made a giant collective leap out of the closet. Many who didn’t leap were shoved out by the terrible telltale signs of the disease. The coming out of so many meant that millions of heterosexuals who might have mocked gays before as “those weirdos” were forced to acknowledge that sons, brothers, friends, even idols they’d revered, were gay.

Gay men also achieved an incredible victory over enemies who wanted to brand and banish them during the plague years. Gays remembered their history — that not too long ago, the law, the medical experts, and the Church were determining the dialogue about them and controlling their fate; they knew that all the progress that had been made in the 1970s could be reversed and history could easily repeat itself. So they fought with all their might against that happening, and they won. They took control of the public discussions about AIDS; they made their own voices heard. They even determined what their sick would be called: not passive and powerless “AIDS patients” or “AIDS victims,” but “people with AIDS” who could fight for what they needed.

It’s an irony that despite the horrors of the plague, the late eighties and early nineties was also a period of some collective healing in the gay community. Gay people learned to work together a little better than they had before because their overwhelming purpose didn’t permit a plethora of petty arguments. The times were “full of deaths, but one of the most beautiful moments the gay community ever experienced,” Peter Staley later said of those years. “To be that threatened with extinction and not lay down. To stand up and fight back. The way we did it. The way we took care of ourselves and each other. The goodness we shared. The humanity we shared.” It was excellent preparation to bring to the renewed struggle for civil rights, which had been on hold while tens of thousands were dying. Those who survived were ready to resume the war and win it.”

Redefining Family

“Putting homosexuals to death would be one way to “restore a world where homosexuality is not taught and accepted but is discouraged and rejected at every level,” which was the chief mission of the Family Research Institute.”

“Miguel Braschi said that he and Blanchard had been a family, and under New York’s rent-control laws a member of the lease’s family couldn’t be evicted. He sued to stay. His motive wasn’t financial — he was the primary heir to Blanchard’s $5 million estate. But he’d agreed to serve as a test case.

By now the American Civil Liberties Union had made a 180-degree turn from the days when it declared that the government was justified in firing homosexuals because they were a threat to the nation’s security. William Rubenstein, a brilliant young lawyer fresh out of Harvard Law School, was working for the ACLU’s Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, specizing in fighting for the rights of people affected by the AIDS epidemic. Rubenstein was assigned the Braschi case. A lower court had already decreed that the landlord had a right to evict Miguel Braschi because “family” meant only people related by “blood, marriage, or adoption.” William Rubenstein took the case to the New York Court of Appeals, where he argued that “family” begged for a new definition because over the last decades families had become remarkably diverse. The Ozzie and Harriet family was rare, a minority.

The appeals court agreed with Rubenstein. By a vote of 4 to 2, the judges overturned the decision of the lower court. The majority opinion, written by Judge Vito Titone, established new criteria — along the lines Rubenstein suggested — for determining what a family is. The exclusivity and longevity of a relationship were central, as was the level of emotional and financial commitment. How a couple conducted their everyday lives and held themselves out to society were also relevant in the court’s definition; and so was the reliance the couple placed on each other for daily family services. In the court’s definition of family, there was not one reference to biological sex or a marriage license. “New York Court Defines Family to Include Homosexual Couples,” the stunned editors of the New York Times announced when the case was settled in 1989.”

Amendment 2

“Amendment 2, as the Colorado for Family Values initiative came to be called, would change the state constitution to prohibit Colorado and all its municipalities and school districts — now and in the future, into perpetuity — from adopting any laws or regulations permitting the right to claim discrimination on the basis of “homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation, conduct, practices or relationships.” In all of Colorado, only gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, singled out in a constitutional amendment, would never have the right to complain to their government of grievances and demand rectification. Amendment 2 would create a class of untouchables.

Will Perkins’s sales tactics were propped up by propaganda literature from Colorado for Family Values. A headline of one CFV leaflet announced with ostensible fairness, “Equal Rights-Not Special Rights.” The same leaflet told parents to imagine that their child was a student at CU-Boulder (which had gay rights protections), and his roommate was living an objectionable “gay lifestyle” right under his nose. “What can you or your child do about it?” the leaflet asked. “According to the ‘law’ in Boulder, nothing!” Another leaflet with an “Equal Rights-Not Special Rights” headline propagated panic by attributing to the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) the motto, “Sex by eight, or it’s too late” and citing reports that 73 percent of homosexuals had had sex with minors. “Vote yes on Amendment 2 for the future of our children.” the leaflet beseeched hysterically, CFV placed eight hundred thousand such leaflets on voters’ doorsteps.”

“Eva McGeehan, a Colorado Springs resident whose son Patrick was gay, had founded a PFLAG chapter a couple of years earlier, right there in the heart of “the Vatican of the Evangelicals.” Because of Amendment 2, her little FLAG chapter grew practically overnight from twelve to one hundred members. McGeehan told the media that Amendment 2 was the best thing that ever happened to the gay and lesbian movement in her town: the Right had shown its nasty hand, and parents of gays and lesbians saw clearly what those they loved were up against. They wouldn’t be closet parents. Amendment 2 also brought many more gay and lesbian Coloradans out of the closet. There’d been activist gay groups in Colorado since the Gay Coalition of Denver was formed in 1972 to fight police harassment. Now in response to an even greater threat, new groups cropped up ready to fight.”

“On November 3, 1992, Coloradans went to the polls. They gave Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton all eight of the state’s electoral votes; 53.4 percent of them also ticked yes on Amendment 2, agreeing to deny gays and lesbians any and all legal protection by the government of their state, forever.

While the gay community in Colorado despaired, gay communities outside of Colorado had reason to despair, too. Colorado for Family Values’ easy victory reenergized the religious right all over the country. Copycat campaigns were immediately under way.”

“Jean Dubofsky argued that Amendment 2 had no rational basis and was motivated by impermissible bias. The plaintiffs she and her team called to testify were a contrast to Perkins’s Reaganesque calm. They couldn’t hold back emotions. Paul Brown, a gay man who worked in a Colorado government job told about one of his coworkers painting “Paul Is A Fag” in large letters on the wall facing the employees’ parking lot. He’d been so harassed at work that he’d considered suicide. “There has to be a clear message from someone in authority that this is not okay,” he told Judge Bayless. Angela Romero, a forty-two-year-old police officer, wept as she told the judge about how she’d finally gotten to fulfill her lifelong dream of serving as a school resource officer, a job in which she could be a role model for Latino children; but after someone reported to her supervisor that she’d been seen in a lesbian bookstore, she was transferred to the domestic violence detail. Now she worried that some of her hostile fellow officers might jeopardize her life — she couldn’t depend on them to give her backup.

The solicitor general of Colorado argued on behalf of the state that Amendment 2 was meant mostly to send a message to gays saying “Enough!” It wouldn’t, and wasn’t supposed to, have any “real impact.” But dark as the courtroom was, Judge Bayless saw, as he said, that Amendment 2 had the potential to “cause real, immediate, and irreparable damage.” He issued the injunction Jean Dubofsky requested.

Attorney General Gale Norton appealed to the Colorado State Supreme Court to get the injunction lifted. (The issue was so heated that the proceedings were broadcast live on Court TV.) That august body backed Judge Bayless: Amendment 2 was dubious, the judges said. “Fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote,” one judge argued. Amendment 2 “fenced out” homosexuals from the political process; it singled out one group that could not get legal protection,” another judge argued. “That was contrary to the notion of “We the People,” another said in an eloquent recognition that gays and lesbians were indeed part of the American family. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed that the state simply hadn’t demonstrated a “compelling interest”: it would have to show why such an amendment was needed before Amendment 2 could go into effect.”

“Amendment 2 would support the family and the well-being of children and keep at bay “militant gay aggression” — that was the “compelling interest” Attorney General Norton provided on behalf of the state.

It did not fly with Judge Bayless. “If one wished to promote family values,” he declared, “action would be taken that is pro-family and not anti some other group.” And to Norton’s argument that Amendment 2 served “the physical and psychological well-being of children,’” Bayless responded that all the evidence suggested that heterosexuals are more likely than homosexuals to be pedophiles. The judge ruled Amendment 2 to be unconstitutional.

Attorney General Norton appealed the case again to the Colorado Supreme Court-who again, by a vote of 6 to 1, showed little sympathy. Chief Justice Luis Rovira wrote the majority opinion: “The measure denies homosexuals equal participation in the political process by saying they can have no redress if they feel discriminated against.” It was the first decision by the highest court in any state to rule that the denial of rights to homosexuals was unconstitutional. But the best was yet to come.”

“Attorney General Gale Norton and her solicitor general, Timothy Tymkovich — as reliably conservative (antiabortion, anti gun control, pro-”religious liberty”) as his boss — appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States. Though Roy Romer had been opposed from the start to Amendment 2, as governor he was obliged to support the state’s laws. But he was surely chagrined when his name led in the Supreme Court appeal: Romer v. Evans.

If the US Supreme Court refused to hear Romer v. Evans, the state court’s edict would stand, and Amendment 2 would be dead. But the justices didn’t refuse. They put it on the SCOTUS calendar for October 10, 1995. Will Perkins and Colorado for Family Values were jubilant: SCOTUS had apparently found something troubling in the state court’s decisions. Jean Dubofsky’s heart sank.”

““I’ve never seen a case like this,” Kennedy remarked disapprovingly, echoing almost exactly Laurence Tribe’s sentiment in his amicus curie brief. Jean Dubofsky couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Anthony Kennedy had just revealed his feelings about Amendment 2. A few minutes later, Justice Ginsburg jumped in to second Kennedy’s disapproval: “I would like to know whether in all of US history there has been any legislation like this that earmarks a group and says, “You will not be able to appeal to your state legislature to improve your status’?”

“So, a public library could refuse to allow books to be borrowed by homosexuals, and there would be no relief from that?” Sandra Day O’Connor wanted to know (to the incredulous relief of all who were there to oppose Amendment 2). Tymkovich fumbled and couldn’t make sense. “Would a homosexual have a right to be served in a restaurant?” Justice Stevens wanted to know.

The sea change had clearly affected judicial thought.

“Think of a public hospital that has a kidney machine,” Justice Ginsburg jumped in again, sharp sword at the ready. “And the hospital says, ‘We have to limit this. We’re not going to have any gay or lesbian use this facility’ — under the amendment that’s okay, right?”

“We don’t know,” the ruffled Tymkovich had to admit.

The Supreme Court’s decision came down on May 20, 1996. It was a breathtaking 6–3.”

Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell

“Led by General Colin Powell, the first African American chairman, the Joint Chiefs threatened to resign en masse if Clinton “forced the gay issue” upon them.”

“Congressman Barney Frank came up with a more plausible proposal. “On base, off base,” he called it. “On base, while you’re on duty, you don’t talk about your homosexuality and you don’t let it show. Off base, you live your life,” he proposed to General Powell.”

“It’s ironic that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell had its genesis in Bill Clinton’s good intentions to get rid of military witch hunts and to include gays and lesbians in his vision of a just America. Under the policy that he accepted as a compromise to his initial brave impulse, well over 14,000 service members were discharged — most of them not because they “told” but because the military found out, in one way or another. Taxpayers spent more than $1.3 billion for investigations to help the military find out and to justify the discharges. Despite the gains the gay and lesbian movement had made in shifting public opinion, even into the twenty-first century, military leaders, hardly the most progressive thinkers, continued to regard gays and lesbians as disruptive to their mission, just as their predecessors had in the 1950s when, without a shred of evidence, they accused homosexuals of being a threat to the nation’s security. The discharges peaked in 2001, when 1,273 service members were booted out that year through the policy. The shibboleth was “unit cohesion threat” instead of “security threat” — but Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was applied as viciously as the old regulations had been.

However, not even the military could hold out indefinitely against court decisions and the social change effected by years of gay and lesbian activism. The Gallup News Service announced in spring 2007 that its latest poll had found that “tolerance for gay rights” was “at a high-water mark.”That same year, twenty-eight retired generals and admirals signed a letter urging Congress to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. There were over a million gay and lesbian veterans, the generals and admirals pointed out; 65,000 gays and lesbians were presently serving honorably; and the “current generation” of young people entering the military were much more accepting of gays and lesbians than earlier generations had been. The next year, 104 retired admirals and generals came forward to say the same thing. (Perhaps not so coincidentally, the military was being stretched thin by continued deployments in the Middle East and, as General John Shalikashvili, who’d been a chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff pointed out, “We must welcome the service of any American who is willing and able to do the job.”) The year after that, in 2009 — after a Washington Post poll announced that 75 percent of those polled agreed that gay people should be allowed to serve openly — Colin Powell, who’d headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff when DADT was adopted, declared to the media, “Sixteen years have now gone by, and I think a lot has changed with respect to attitudes within our country.” It was time to reconsider the old policy, General Powell said.”

“Get Equal’s first action, on March 18, 2010 — planned out by Choi like he would plan a military mission in the army — was a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell protest. McGhee alerted the news media; then she, Choi, and Pietrangelo went down to Pennsylvania Avenue. “Will you do the honors?” Choi asked McGhee. “Yes, I’d be honored,” she replied, and as cameramen clicked away, McGhee chained the two discharged servicemen to the White House fence.

“I shouldn’t have to be doing this. I should be at home with my kids, watching them grow up!” McGhee shouted to the press. She was a Middle America PTA mom, she informed the media. (That would be her persona throughout her activism.) She was different from other PTA moms only because her spouse was a woman, and she was engaging in dramatic civil disobedience only because the government hadn’t listened to less histrionic pleas to honor families like hers. Twenty Secret Service agents quickly descended with guns pointed. The police had to use bolt cutters to remove the handcuffs from the fence. McGhee, Choi, and Pietrangelo were arrested by the US Park Police. McGhee spent six hours in jail and was fined $35 for disturbing the peace. Choi and Pietrangelo both refused to pay the $100 fines levied on them. They were brought to court in leg shackles and cuffs. When the judge asked, “How do you plead?” Dan Choi shouted so the press and everyone in earshot might hear, “Not guilty, not ashamed, and not finished!”

As soon as McGhee was released, she got on a plane back to California and her family. But she was in DC again in April and in May to repeat the chained-to-the-White-House-fence zap. She did it again in November, joined this time by a slew of ex-servicemembers who did the chaining honors for one another. Miriam Ben-Shalom, the drill sergeant who fought the army and won in the 1980s, was among them. Sixty-two years old by now, dressed in army fatigues and combat boots, Ben-Shalom announced to the media before she and the other protestors were unfastened from the fence and dragged off to jail that, though seventeen years had passed, she was still forced to protest the “injustice and hypocrisy of a failed law.” Dan Choi, also in military fatigues, shouted at the TV cameras, “We have served our country valiantly to defend our freedom and justice, and now it is time for our leaders to do the same.” He called the president a “silent homophobe.””

“Kameny, in his usual spirited style, sent letters to the three top law-enforcement officials in DC. He invited them to engage in sodomy with him — and he demanded they arrest him for his invitation. “If you do not arrest me, that would be setting a precedent,” he wrote, “since if I could with impunity solicit you, then anyone could solicit anyone.” Two of the officials never answered. The DC chief of police responded with a note saying, “Sorry, I can’t accept your invitation because my wife would never stand for it.””

“More recently, rookie law officers in Nebraska have had to view and discuss the documentary The Brandon Teena Story as part of their training, which also includes instructions in dealing with sexual assaults on gay as well as straight victims. Today there are mechanisms in place in Richardson County, Nebraska, to assure that someone like Brandon Teena would be put in a safe house if he complained that his life was being threatened. He’d even be given a cell phone that has a direct line to the sheriff’s office. Randy Houser, the man who was elected sheriff of Richardson County the same year the federal hate crimes bill was passed, arranged for his sheriff’s department, as well as the local police and a neighboring sheriff, to attend LGBT sensitivity training sessions given by Nebraska PFLAG.

Houser recalled that one of his deputies asked him, “What is the definition of a transgender person?” “A transgender person is whatever he or she says they are,” the Richardson County sheriff told him.”

“[He commented on] Ronald Reagan’s propensity to fall asleep at cabinet meetings, for instance, he quipped in 1984: “I don’t begrudge him an occasional nap. We must understand it’s not the dozing off of Ronald Reagan that causes us problems. It’s what he does in those moments when he’s awake.” Frank became known as Congress’s wise man/wise guy. He was a familiar figure on the national news, dressed almost always in a rumpled suit.”

Same-Sex Marriage

“The state of Hawaii had failed to show “sufficient reason” to prohibit same-sex marriage, Judge Chang said and declared the ban on such marriages unconstitutional.

It was looking like a sure thing. Hawaii was set to make same-sex marriage legal. But the State announced it would appeal to the Hawaii Supreme Court. Judge Chang granted a temporary stay on his judgment.”

“South Dakota, whose state motto is “Under God, the People Rule,’ panicked. There were only seven hundred thousand South Dakotans; but what if some of them were homosexuals, and they’d go off to Hawaii to get married — and they’d come back to South Dakota and say that Article IV of the US Constitution, the “Full Faith and Credit” Clause, meant that South Dakota had to recognize their marriage? On February 2, 1995, the South Dakota House of Representatives made a preemptive strike. Bill 1184, which declared that “any marriage between persons of the same gender is null and void,” passed 54 to 13.

South Dakotan homosexuals had been mostly closeted. Now they leaped from the closet and formed the state’s first activist group, the South Dakota Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Federation. Evan Wolfson advised them on lobbying senators and testifying in the Senate.” They seemed to be succeeding — the first time around the bill failed to get enough votes. But conservatives politicked, sent it through again, and it passed.

An avalanche followed. Utah passed a similar bill in March 1995; then Alaska. By early 1996, thirty-seven states were considering bills to “defend marriage.”

In Hawaii where it all started, 74 percent of those polled in 1996 on what they thought of gay marriage said they disapproved. The state legislators, obedient to their constituents’wishes, amended the state constitution in 1997 to say, “The legislature shall have the power to reserve marriage to opposite sex couples.” In 1998, 69 percent of the voters ratified the amendment. That trumped the Hawaii Supreme Court declaration that “freedom to marry is one of the basic civil rights.””

“Barr’s bill said that no state had to recognize a same-sex marriage performed in another state; that the federal government’s definition of marriage was “a legal union between one man and one woman”; and that that definition would determine the meaning of any federal law or regulation related to marriage. It passed the House in July, 342 to 67. The House Report explained that the Defense of Marriage Act was needed “to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment about human sexuality [which] entails moral disapproval of homosexuality.” In September DOMA passed the Senate, 85 to 14.”

“Vermont seemed a good choice for a marriage case because in 1994 Vermont’s Supreme Court had approved second-parent adoptions for same-sex couples. In July 1997, she and Vermont lawyers Beth Robinson and Susan Murray sued on behalf of two lesbian couples and a gay male couple for the right to marry. In trial court, they lost for the usual reason. Marriage was for making babies and rearing them, the judge declared. That two of the couples were rearing children, or that their families were suffering without the protections of marriage, was irrelevant.

As she’d hoped to do from the start, Bonauto appealed to the Vermont Supreme Court; and as she predicted it would, that court, like Hawaii’s Supreme Court, found that the plaintiffs had been treated unfairly and the state owed them remedy. However, instead of declaring that now same-sex couples must be allowed to marry, the Vermont Supreme Court justices left it up to the General Assembly to figure out how to fix the wrong. Vermont’s state senators and representatives decided that the remedy was to allow gay and lesbian couples “civil unions.” The state would give them all the rights of marriage — except the name.”

“It was a lucky coincidence that in June, three months after the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts listened to Bonauto’s pleading in the Goodridge case, the US Supreme Court handed down its Lawrence v. Texas decision. There was no longer anything criminal about being gay. Lawrence had a profound effect on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision in the Goodridge case, which was announced the following November. The court’s chief justice, South African-born Margaret Marshall, appointed to the Supreme Judicial Court by one Republican governor and named chief justice by another, wrote the 4-to-3 majority opinion. Marshall quoted Lawrence v. Texas liberally. The government may not intrude “into the deeply personal realms of consensual adult expressions of intimacy and of one’s choice of intimate partner,” SCOTUS had affirmed in Lawrence. “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.” Same-sex couples, Justice Margaret Marshall declared for the Massachusetts Court, had the same right as had opposite-sex couples to marry.”

“That same year, Knight’s gay brother was dying of complications from AIDS. The family-values politician cut ties with him. That same year, too, Knight’s son David — who’d made his father proud when he’d followed in his footsteps, graduating from the Air Force Academy and flying fighter planes in the Gulf War came out to his father as gay. Knight senior threw David out of the family. When a San Francisco paper spilled the son’s story two months before the 1996 election, Pete Knight countered by coolly telling the press, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s his business. His sexual preference has no consequence to my work as a state legislator.”

Knight kept his promise to his constituents by introducing a “California Defense of Marriage Act” into the legislature.”

“A generation earlier, in 1993, only 22 percent of Americans claimed to have a close friend or family member who was gay or lesbian. By 2011, the number had practically tripled because gays and lesbians were exiting the closet en masse.”

“What the vice president didn’t know, or didn’t acknowledge, was that Will and Grace would never have been possible without the long war that gay rights organizations had been waging on multiple fronts — including a battle with the networks that began in 1974, when the National Gay Task Force media committee made its anger known to ABC executives about the episode of Marcus Welby, M.D. that equated homosexuality with pederasty. Stop showing gays as villains, rights groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance against Defamation (a full-time media watchdog since 1985) had demanded; start showing gay people who have the human dimension of their straight counterparts. Their phenomenal success in educating the networks was evident by 1997 when fresh-faced Ellen DeGeneres was allowed to admit she was gay on her Ellen sitcom and even to lock lips with Laura Dern. The next year, lovable and gay. “Will Thurman” began appearing weekly in America’s living rooms. The country was clearly opening up. By 2012, even the wife of Mitt Romney was saying that her favorite TV show was Modern Family, whose major characters included Cameron and Mitchell, a longtime gay couple raising a little girl they adopted from Vietnam, and getting married in front of a dozen million television viewers. A 2012 poll by The Hollywood Reporter, one of the TV industry’s main insider publications, found that TV series such as Modern Family, Glee, and The New Normal were driving voters to favor same-sex marriage--”even Republican voters,” the article reported.”

“The interviewer, Robin Roberts-handsome, tailored, African American, a coanchor on ABC’s Good Morning America – was chosen with careful consideration to reaching a recalcitrant demographic: a Pew Research Center poll in 2011 said that only 36 percent of blacks approved of same-sex marriage. (The ploy--two smart, good-looking black people rationally discussing same-sex marriage as just and fair – worked. After the May 9 interview, a Pew Research Center poll found that 51 percent of African Americans favored same-sex marriage.)”

“The denouement came on August 4, 2010, when Judge Walker rendered his verdict. Dismissing Blankenhorn’s testimony as “inadmissible opinion,” he declared that a private moral view concerning homosexuals “is not a proper basis for legislation, and that Proposition 8 had done “nothing more than enshrine in the California constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.” Judge Walker ruled that Proposition 8 violated same-sex couples’ due process and equal protection rights, and was unconstitutional.”

“But this climax was not the end. A small twist in the plot came in April 2011. Two months after the white-haired, white-goateed Judge Walker retired, he announced he’d been partnered for the last ten years with a physician, who was a man. He let it be known that since he was fourteen years old, he’d had homosexual feelings, which his parents had discovered through an adolescent diary. He’d been made by them to undergo Christian “conversion therapy” and continued to be “treated” on and off even into his thirties, but he never got “cured.” When ProtectMarriage.com leaders learned that the judge who’d ruled against them was a practicing homosexual, they tried to get his decision overturned. But as a judicial panel recognized, black judges were permitted to rule on civil rights cases, women judges were permitted to rule on abortion rights cases, and there was no evidence that Judge Walker had been biased. His decision would stand.

ProtectMarriage.com urged the state to appeal the case. Jerry Brown, a progressive who’d succeeded Schwarzenegger as governor, refused. Gail Knight and the others went back to the ProtectMarriage.com donor base for more money. They’d carry on by themselves.

The first sequel, played out in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, was called Perry v. Brown (though Brown, of course, was on the side of Perry). The appellate judges, citing the US Supreme Court’s 1996 decision in Romer v. Evans, ruled that voters can’t decide to “single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment.” Proposition 8 served no purpose other than to “lessen the status and human dignity of gays and lesbians.” In a 2-to-1 decision, they upheld Walker’s finding that Prop 8's amendment to ban same-sex marriage was unconstitutional.”

“The final sequel, called Hollingsworth v. Perry, was set in the US Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing the majority opinion in a decision issued June 26, 2013, said that to have “standing” it wasn’t enough to be “concerned bystanders” or to claim a “keen interest” in a case; the petitioner “must have suffered a concrete and particularized injury. ProtectMarriage.com had no standing and therefore no claim in the Supreme Court. They shouldn’t have been granted a hearing in the federal appeals court either, Roberts declared and rendered that decision void. The decision SCOTUS upheld was that of Judge Vaughn Walker of the district court, who’d said that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional and same-sex couples in California must be allowed to marry.”

“But the federal Defense of Marriage Act still said that lesbian and gay couples, even if married in their state, were single as far as the US government was concerned.”

“Then talking to Edie Windsor – hearing from the lips of an octogenarian the story of her forty-four-year love affair with someone who’d been paralyzed for thirty of those years, the diamond brooch, the wheelchair dancing, the 24/7 ministrations, the passion that didn’t stop almost to the day Thea died, and seeing Windsor’s charisma and charm and intelligence – Kaplan knew this was a case she wanted to take. She’d take it pro bono. She wanted to help Windsor get her money back, so Windsor wouldn’t be homeless after four years. Only as she started working on the case did Kaplan realize it could and should go far beyond Edie Windsor’s money.

It was section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act that had caused the trouble for Windsor: it said that as far as all US agencies were concerned, “marriage” meant only heterosexual unions, and “spouse” meant only a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or wife. So even if a same-sex couple had gotten married in a state where same-sex marriage was legal the federal government wouldn’t recognize the marriage. Robbie Kaplan filed Windsor’s suit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York. On June 6, 2012, Judge Barbara Jones declared in her decision that Section 3 of DOMA violated the plaintiff’s rights of equal protection under the Fifth Amendment. The judge ordered the IRS to give Edie Windsor all her money back – plus interest for the time that the IRS had kept it.”

“On June 26, 2013, Justice Kennedy delivered the majority opinion. “DOMA writes inequality into the entire U.S. Code,” he declared. It singles out a subset of people and makes them unequal. It disparages and injures those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity. It humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex couples.”

What the decision meant was that not only would married same-sex couples be treated by the IRS as their heterosexual counterparts were treated, but also that they could get social security and veteran’s survivor benefits, they could hold on to their homes when widowed, they could get green cards for an alien spouse, they were eligible for over a thousand other benefits that only straight couples had enjoyed before.”

“In early spring of 2015, something astonishing happened. On March 25, Indiana legislators passed a “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” (RFRA). Such an act was suddenly necessary, the Republican-dominated Indiana Legislature decided, because the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit had recently made same-sex marriage legal in the Hoosier State. Indiana gay and lesbian couples couldn’t be stopped from getting married, but under RFRA, florists, wedding-cake bakers, and gown- and tuxedo-makers wouldn’t have to serve them; they could claim their religion didn’t allow it. On March 26, Indiana governor Mike Pence signed the bill into law.

He and the Legislature were caught off guard by the immediate firestorm of protests. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, which had recently spent $2.5 billion in Indianapolis buying a software company, set off the conflagration by declaring he would “dramatically reduce” investment in Indiana because of his “employees’ and customers’ outrage over the Religious Freedom Bill.” Then Angie’s List, headquartered in Indianapolis, threatened to halt a big expansion project. Then the National Collegiate Athletic Association, also headquartered in Indianapolis, protested that the legislation would have a bad effect on “our student-athletes and employees.” Gen Con, the gaming convention that drew 60,000 people annually to Indianapolis, threatened to relocate. City and state governments threatened to prohibit official business travel to Indiana. The Indianapolis Star, the state’s biggest and most influential newspaper, demanded of Governor Pence, in a massive front-page black-boxed headline, “FIX THIS NOW,”

Meanwhile, the Arkansas Legislature, afraid that same-sex marriage would soon be the law of the land, passed a copycat RFRA. Governor Asa Hutchinson, who’d announced his certain intention to sign the bill into law, was as surprised as his Indiana counterpart had been by the thunderous uproar of protest. It was led by the top Fortune 500 company, Arkansas’s largest private employer-Walmart.

Big business, reliably Republican, had spoken. On April 2, 2015, both governors “fixed” their “religious freedom” bills by removing the possibility of discrimination, the sole raison d’être for the bills. Fortune 500 companies were, in fact, following the lead of most Americans, who by now were firmly opposed to discrimination against LGBT people. Polls taken in April 2015 showed that 61 percent of Americans approved of same-sex marriage.

A few weeks after the Indiana/Arkansas debacle, on April 28, 2015, SCOTUS heard oral arguments for the Sixth Circuit same-sex marriage cases, consolidated under the name Obergefell v. Hodges. The lead plaintiff, James Obergefell, was an Ohioan whose partner of twenty years, John Arthur, had been dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease when the couple chartered a private plane, flew to Maryland – a same-sex marriage state – and were married on the plane as it sat on the tarmac of the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. But despite the couple’s dra- matic efforts, after John Arthur died, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Ohio’s right to refuse to list him as “married” on his death certificate.”

“June 26, 2015, the twelfth anniversary, to the day, of the Lawrence v. Texas decision and the second anniversary of the United States v. Windsor decision: Again Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority in the 5–4 vote. He did not disappoint. The plaintiffs, he declared, “ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.” And with these momentous words, marriage equality was made the law of the land.”