Here Because We're Queer

Inside the Gay Liberation Front of Washington, D.C., 1970-72

Brian Miller

• Publisher: Brian Miller
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780578728711
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A year after the Stonewall riots in New York, the Gay Liberation Front of Washington, D.C., held its first meeting on June 30, 1970.

GLF-DC's activities included protests, publications and communal living experiments.

Although the group faded quickly, in part because ofdisorganization and divisiveness about goals, activities and actions, its attendees established openly gay community organizations, including some long-lasting institutions in Washington-Capital Pride, Whitman-Walker Health, the Metropolitan Community Church and Lambda Rising bookstore.

The book is based on interviews with more than 50 participants.

The first chapter describesWashington in the Mattachine Society era, before GLF.

A chapter is devoted to GLF meetings: the heated discussions, especially the division between radical and liberal members, withradicals opposed to war, sexism, racism and homophobia as part of liberationist beliefs, while more liberal members wanted achievable goals such as public education efforts and achieving civil rights; developing a legal case against D.C.'s sodomy law; protests against gay bars that discriminated against women, blacks and others; why women disappeared from meetings; and concerns over the group's failure to attract many blacks.

What life was like inside the GLF commune, a mixed-race household thatquickly became a meeting place and social hub for GLF: where skag drag was explored, a Christian chapel was established, and consciousness raising groups were encouraged.

A chapter describes public GLF actions: distribution of gay literature; a zap on a conference on homosexuality and religion at Catholic University of America; participation in the Black Panther-sponsored Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention; helping Frank Kameny in his campaign for nonvoting delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives; May Day antiwar activities; and a zap on the convention of the American Psychiatric Association.

In a second gay group house, the Skyline Faggots collective: how six men tried a mutually supportive experiment in living according to radical gay principles; their would-be alignment with the separatist women's collective the Furies; their production of an issue of Motive magazine; their conflict with the Venceremos Brigade; and personal attacks from an even more radical collective, the Effeminists.

The gay community grows as GLF fades: with organizations and social activities, a demonstration against police entrapment at the Iwo Jima Memorial, visits to local high schools; the first Gay Pride Week; the origins of a standalone gay bookstore, the origins of Whitman-Walker Health in a gay men's VD clinic, the start of the D.C. congregation of the Metropolitan Community Church, and the development of the Gay Men's Counseling Community.

CHAPTER 1

Washington Waits for GLF

SITTING UP STRAIGHT as I could in front of a huge, old Underwood in June 1969, fingers poised on the keys and staring at a practice booklet of typing exercises, I didn’t hear the distant thunder of Stonewall. A disturbance in a New York gay bar was not news in Baltimore. The only sounds I heard were the erratic tapping noises I was making.

At 24, and without fully understanding why, I needed change, and I set about making it happen—in short order I was preparing to move to a new city and a new job, and so a new life. I’d found work as an editorial assistant at an association in Washington, and I spent the summer before the move teaching myself how to type, which was a condition of getting the job. Within a year of my move, I fell in with the argumentative men and women of the Gay Liberation Front of Washington, D.C.

There had been signs early on in my development that my suburban Baltimore parents’ expectations about producing a proper young man were not going as planned. As a child, I fell into giggling fits when my father tried to teach my brother and me how to hit a baseball, until finally he walked away in disgust. In first grade, I enjoyed going to a classmate’s house after school, where we would play with her dolls; but mothers conferred, and the play dates ceased. Around age 14, I enjoyed styling my mother’s hair, teasing it out of its outmoded 1950s bob and into a bouffant 1960s look. One evening she displayed my creation to her visiting girlfriend, who smiled too brightly and commented, “Maybe he’ll turn out to be a hairdresser.” In an instant, I understood the essence of her message, and my fun turned to shame.

When I eventually became aware that I was attracted to boys, I responded as any normal abnormal boy would do in the conformist 1950s: I suppressed and hid. I stumbled through the required dating rituals of the time, but with anxiety, lies, hurt feelings, ignorance and passivity. Increasingly, I felt trapped in an unhappy existence.

Silence cloaked the topic of homosexuality in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was simply not something one discussed in polite company. Of course, I heard and even repeated jokes about homosexuals. And I learned the ugly words to describe them—queer, fairy, fruit, pansy, fag, cocksucker—and dreaded being associated in any way with this category of humanity. But the hurtful names I learned on the street and in school could at least be attributed to immaturity and ignorance. Beyond the street was a steady drumbeat of acceptable name-calling, but here the words were abnormal, decadent, immoral, unnatural.

Such labeling was done by experts, and their loaded language was everywhere. Magazines and newspapers made it clear that I was at best a problem in search of a solution, at worst an evil menace to society. Or I was diseased, a pathological condition for which there was no real cure. I figured I was somewhere part of the mix of transvestite queens, compulsive sex psychopaths and “sadie-mashies,” as a nominally empathetic Washington Post writer described the range of homosexuals in 1965.¹ I couldn’t confide my confusion and anxiety to anyone. And how had this happened to me?

The various answers to this question came through loud and clear. Time magazine declared in 1953 that homosexuality is “a symptom of an underlying emotional disorder.” Parents who notice signs of homosexuality in their son should take him to a psychiatrist who will show the boy how his “emotional growth has been stunted or twisted,” and thus resolve the problem.²

But resolving the problem wasn’t that simple. In 1956, a New York psychoanalyst posited that the adult homosexual “wallows in self-pity and continually provokes hostility to ensure himself more opportunities for self-pity…he is generally unreliable, in an essentially psychopathic way.”³ The same year, the British Medical Journal reported on research conducted on homosexual patients at a British mental hospital. Amazingly, what they found was that almost every male subject was no different physically from a normal man: “They were not unusually hippy, did not have overdeveloped breasts, their pubic hair grew in the normal male pattern.”⁴ (This research was the late flowering of a line of professional declarations that homosexuals were physically abnormal, for instance that lesbians had prominent clitorises and gay men had doglike penises.)⁵ And in the late 1960s, psychiatrist Charles Socarides offered the theory that most homosexuals “show evidence of a ‘screaming phenomenon’—screaming for an inordinately long time and beyond the age of 3 whenever their mother disappeared from behind the baby carriage or at night.”⁶

Even months after Stonewall and the beginning of a more understanding era, Time magazine assured readers that despite the common misconception that homosexuals were all alike, there were in fact six categories of homosexual: blatant, secret lifer, desperate, adjusted, bisexual and situational-experimental. That tidy assortment seemed authoritative, but also confusing. Where did I fit in? The same issue of Time concluded, “While homosexuality is a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment, research has made clear that it is no longer necessary or morally justifiable to treat all inverts as outcasts. The challenge to American society is simultaneously to devise civilized ways of discouraging the condition and to alleviate the anguish of those who cannot be helped, or do not wish to be” [italics mine].⁷

And let’s not forget to add in the scorched-earth teachings of major religions.

Since the experts presented such a wide range of theories about homosexuality, I feel entitled to my own equally reasonable theories about a few of the many possible causes of my gayness—experiences that stirred changes inside me, enlarged my worldview, provided models, nudged me onward:

Hearing tenor William Tabbert’s impassioned high notes in the song “Younger Than Springtime” on the South Pacific Broadway cast LP. Reading the novels of Mary Renault, with their re-creation of ancient Greek life and love. Steeping myself in the camp satire of Patrick Dennis’s novel Auntie Mame. Seeing the dust-jacket portrait of Truman Capote on Other Voices, Other Rooms, looking like a 12-year-old being punished for misbehavior in Sunday school and gazing longingly into the reader’s eyes for help.

Or maybe the movies did it, with their distinctive stars. Recessive, awkwardly sensitive young Anthony Perkins seemed a reflection of my misunderstood self. The subtle, sibilant presence of Vincent Price crept into my psyche; was I destined to be the suave, amused gentleman or the hideous monster lurking behind his crumbling façade? Was I the dazzling Blonde Venus that slowly emerges from inside a menacing gorilla suit in the form of serenely languid and androgynous Marlene Dietrich?

Certainly, the intended message of the movies, as they began to tackle the subject of homosexuality in the late 1950s, was more cautionary than tea and sympathy. The ads for one 1959 film cried, “Suddenly, Last Summer, Cathy knew she was being used for something evil!” Which meant, as audiences were to learn, that her doomed cousin was using her to attract boys for his own pleasure. (My perhaps prescient mother recommended the movie to me—and when I saw it, I didn’t consciously understand it!) In The Children’s Hour (1961), a suspected lesbian hangs herself. In Advise and Consent (1962), a former homosexual kills himself. In The Fox (1967), a lesbian is killed by a falling tree. In The Sergeant (1968), a closeted military man shoots himself. Incredibly, each new release, however dire its message, gave me more of the information I was hungry for and somehow felt to me like a brick in the foundation of a slowly emerging homosexual world. The price of progress—death—somehow seemed acceptable.

As a young man in college, and now clearly understanding myself to be homosexual, I knew of no way to find others. There was a hidden gay world, I was sure of it, but I knew of no way to reach it. Aside from the occasional acknowledging glance from a passing stranger—what did that mean?—all I knew was that a subculture existed, but you had to know the password, or break the code, or find a bar to go to.

Others, I later learned from Gay Liberation Front, had a wide range of experiences breaking into the gay world:

Stephen looked up “gay” in the phonebook and found the Gayety Buffet. It turned out to be just the ticket.

Peter in the suburbs decided not to go to college a virgin, so he went to Dupont Circle because he heard queers went there; he got picked up and had his first gay sex.

Kent’s idea of gay life came out of a 1960s Life magazine article that included photographs of gay men on the street wearing big, fluffy sweaters; he bought a couple of huge sweaters to identify himself to others.

Bill discovered “correspondence clubs” through male nudist magazines. The subscription-based clubs were basically privately mailed personal ads. You wrote a letter, then met for sex. After a number of hookups, he started thinking about suicide.

I didn’t even know where any gay bars were until, on a visit to Washington, a college friend happened to point out the Georgetown Grill. The Grill sat right on busy Wisconsin Avenue in the heart of Georgetown, not on some dark back street. The windows were discreetly shuttered at night. Staring at the bar that day, at age 21, I knew I would have to make the desperate passage into the gay world, and here.

One cold night, visiting D.C. from College Park, Maryland, I worked up the courage to go to the Grill. Terrified of being sexually assaulted yet needing to be in this milieu, I entered, then strode from the front door straight to the bar without looking right or left at the men sitting at tables or in banquettes. I ordered a beer and sat drinking for about 10 minutes, glancing nervously into the bar mirror to see if anyone was eyeing me. No one seemed to notice me. Then I did an about-face and marched to the front door. I made it out alive! I was not tempted to go to bars again for a few years.

But having crossed over, however clumsily, and having settled down a bit after college with a good job, I did start exploring Baltimore’s gay bars, though with little success. Nothing seemed to work out. One brief relationship with a man who told me he was straight—but whose private behavior gave every indication otherwise—ended one evening after we’d dined at a downtown restaurant and were contentedly strolling the summer streets. I was talking about being gay, and he suddenly asked me not to talk so loudly. Passersby might hear. “But I’m queer!” I shouted in my own little pre-Stonewall explosion, amazed that he could think anyone on the anonymous city streets would care what we were. (It would be many years before my self-loathing “queer” would be reconditioned for more positive general usage.)

I began to realize just how discontented I’d become. I had passively followed an academic path to a career. But now a deep-seated resistance began to assert itself. Life was passing me by. I was a middle-class adult, but I’d already missed the Summer of Love. I’d already started to assemble the right home furnishings, with a black leather sofa and stark white Formica cube tables, but part of me wanted a mattress on the floor. Instead of coat and tie, I wanted long hair and jeans, just like the students who were occupying college presidents’ offices. I had missed some vital period of growth, and I would have it. I was willing to work for less money if it meant I could be free, and somehow Washington seemed the answer to my problems. Soon I found my first job there and began learning to type. I arrived in D.C. on the very weekend that young people were sliding around in the mud of Woodstock, N.Y.

A YEAR AFTER THE RIOTS that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a still-tense and socially uneasy Washington was heaving itself toward wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 ~ Washington Waits for GLF
• Chapter 2 ~ Argument and Purpose at GLF Meetings
• Chapter 3 ~ A Breather on the Coast
• Chapter 4 ~ Inside the GLF Commune
• Chapter 5 ~ Action!
• Chapter 6 ~ GLF Sings Backup
• Chapter 7 ~ Wanderjahr
• Chapter 8 ~ A Fresh Start at the Skyline Faggots Collective
• Chapter 9 ~ A Community Blossoms
• Timeline
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index