by Cleve Jones
The ideology of the new gay liberation movement was articulated in 1969, when members of the Gay Liberation Front in New York published a statement in Rat, the newspaper of Students for a Democratic Society:
We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society’s attempt to impose sexual roles and definitions of our nature. We are stepping outside these roles and simplistic myths. We are going to be who we are. At the same time, we are creating new social forms and relations, that is, relations based upon brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality. Babylon has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing—revolution!
Howard worked for the labor movement but remained closeted for decades even though he knew he was gay at an early age. Straight lefties, and particularly labor activists, were notoriously homophobic back then. In the early days of the anti–Vietnam War protests, gay people were often excluded from demonstrations and marches, sometimes violently.
Claude, by contrast, came out when he was 15 years old and ran away from home to join the movement. Claude and Howard met in San Francisco and began a friendship that would lead to some of the most important organizing by gay and lesbian people on the West Coast in the 1970s.
I started attending BAGL meetings sometime in 1975 or early 1976. Often the meetings seemed endless; sometimes they were exhilarating. Regardless, there were always handsome young men of all races, many with long hair, wearing blue jeans and black leather bomber jackets over hooded sweatshirts. We had consciousness-raising discussion groups where men and a few women from many different places and backgrounds would share their experience, fears, and aspirations. We had action planning groups that would dream up the creative, and often hilarious, confrontations for which the new movement was rapidly becoming known.
We talked about everything: race, class, gender, sexual roles, S&M, socialism, anarchy, and capitalism. As the war in Vietnam wound down, everyone on the left was going through a period of reevaluation and reflection. But within the nascent gay and lesbian communities of the United States, it was a time of explosive growth and relentless self-examination.
The Equal Rights Amendment passed the Senate in 1972 and was sent, with President Nixon’s endorsement, to the states for ratification. To become law, the amendment required ratification by thirty-eight states within seven years. Thirty states signed on in 1973, but in 1974 the pace slowed dramatically, with only three more states passing ratification. The following year, there would be none.
For many feminist women, the focus of political action for the next few years would remain the ultimately doomed effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Lesbians had a tenuous relationship with many of their heterosexual sisters during the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in 1971 with a purge of sorts within the National Organization for Women that pitted early leaders like Betty Friedan, who stepped down from the NOW presidency in 1970, against lesbian activists. I don’t know how many lesbians actually left the organization then, but the divisions were deep enough that women I knew would still speak of the hurtfulness of it decades later. In 1975, however, the National Organization for Women made lesbian rights one of its top four priorities.
Few lesbians attended meetings of BAGL or any of the other gay organizations, which remained dominated by men well into the 1980s. Del Martin had excoriated gay male activists in her 1970 essay “If That’s All There Is,” in which she described fifteen years of attempting to work with gay men as an “act of masochism” and declared she had “no brothers within the homophile movement.” Del and other lesbian feminists said they were tired of defending gay men arrested on sex charges when women faced such overwhelming discrimination, degradation, and violence.
At Maud’s bar in Cole Valley and the Full Moon Café in the Castro, at Amelia’s and the Artemis Café on Valencia, the old guard butch/femme couples of the 1950s and ’60s interacted with their younger sisters who’d come to feminism via Haight Street, rock and roll, and radical politics, and began to create a vibrant, separate lesbian community centered primarily in San Francisco’s Mission District, with rural outposts in Sonoma and Mendocino Counties.
There was a puritanical streak among some of the women and a doctrinaire style of leadership that was often, in my view, cruel—especially to other lesbians. There was enormous hostility to transsexual women, who were sometimes physically barred from “women-only” spaces. Women who engaged in sexual practices that didn’t appear on the leadership’s list of approved behavior were ostracized and even called out in public for offenses like using a dildo (dangerously phallocentric) or experimenting with S&M. One prominent lesbian theorist of the time condemned orgasms, demanding that lesbian sexuality include only touching and rubbing and cuddling and fondness.
Sometimes the differences were very problematic. Feminists in general, and lesbians in particular, tended (understandably) to be repulsed by heterosexual pornography that so often displayed women forced into subservience or degraded with sometimes explicitly violent imagery. Women began campaigning against violence against women in the media and pornography. For some gay men, especially those who came of age when gay sexual behavior was seriously illegal, the feminist focus on porn was alarming. In many countries and US states, any discussion or reporting of homosexuality in any way, no matter the context, would often be characterized as “pornographic” by the authorities, providing the legal justification needed to shut down publications or file charges against people who mailed such materials across state and international lines. In addition, decades before the Internet, the personal advertisement sections of gay publications provided one of the very few alternatives to meeting people in the bars or baths, and the only means of communication for many living outside the urban centers.
In the eyes of some gay men, the feminists were censors, little different from some of the preachers and politicians who were making names for themselves by crusading against any depiction of any form of sexuality, especially ours.
Within the gay and lesbian left there has always been a strong tradition of decision making by consensus, a concept brought to our movement and others from the very Quaker tradition that I embraced as a youth.
In the gay community, trying to achieve consensus is like trying to herd cats. In 1927, early German homosexual rights advocate Magnus Hirschfeld complained, “With the exception of a few minor groups, homosexuals have almost no feeling of solidarity; in fact, it would be difficult to find another class of humanity that was so unable to organize itself to ensure its elementary rights.”
Part of the problem is easy to understand: Our people do not necessarily have anything in common aside from their sexual orientation or gender identity and the social consequences of that orientation or identity. We are born into every sort of family, from impoverished to wealthy; into black and brown and white skin; into Hindu, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim, Buddhist, and Jewish faith traditions; into liberal families and conservative, Marxist and Libertarian; we come from every race and nationality and faith and ideology.
During the early years of the movement, and in the decades before, the overwhelming social stigma against homosexuals, and our illegal status—regardless of race, class, or gender—encouraged some degree of solidarity across these and other social boundaries. Even white Protestant males from privileged or middle-class backgrounds faced severe social, legal, and economic disadvantages if they came out or were exposed. In the earlier years of the movement, class differences were mitigated to some extent by the reality that if you were openly homosexual, no matter what color you were or what kind of money your family had, you were a member of a despised, derided, and criminal class of people, and vulnerable to extreme violence and other forms of persecution.
Beyond the obvious barriers of class, race, gender, faith, and national origin also lies a vast divide that is peculiar to our community,
one that was evident well before the Stonewall rebellion of 1969 and the advent of the modern gay liberation movement. In fact, the single most divisive issue facing our community was first addressed head-on in the United States in 1953, and it remains every bit as divisive and controversial and relevant today.
Here is a simplified and inadequate recollection of how Harry Hay used to state it: Some gay people want to believe that we are just like heterosexuals in every way except for what we do in bed. Others of us believe that what we do in bed is not very different from heterosexuals, but that we are different in many other ways.
Of course, the vast majority of gay and lesbian people have never consciously participated in any of these discussions; they don’t read social theory, enroll in gender studies programs, or attend political conferences. But the ideas that were being debated, the concepts over which we fought, the ideologies we attempted to create, all had a profound effect on the way ordinary homosexual people viewed themselves and the world in which they lived. And they are the same ideas, concepts, and ideologies that ordinary gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people continue to debate and discuss today, whether they know it or not.
Harry Hay started the Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles. He wrote of the need for such an organization two years earlier, and by 1950 had found six other men willing to join him in launching the new organization. In 1951 Mattachine was sponsoring regular discussion groups where, for the first time, gay men had an opportunity to meet and talk about their lives in a political context and outside of the bar scene.
The new organization drafted a mission statement that was almost certainly the first call for gay people to create a grassroots political movement and to engage in community building: “Mattachine holds it possible and desirable that a highly ethical homosexual culture emerge, as a consequence of its work, paralleling the emerging cultures of our fellow-minorities… the Negro, Mexican and Jewish peoples.”
Hay was a Marxist who had been a member of the Communist Party for twenty years. Mattachine’s early political work—defending gay men from entrapment by the vice squad—soon expanded to include publishing newsletters and printing leaflets. And in 1953, the group questioned Los Angeles candidates for public office on their beliefs and positions about homosexuality.
Hundreds and then thousands of people participated in Mattachine discussion groups, social events, and political meetings. During this same time, Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against communists and “deviants” was in full swing and, inevitably, the Mattachine society attracted unfavorable press. Conservative members of the organization freaked out and called for discussion. Two conventions were organized, and anticommunist resolutions were introduced but failed to pass.
The conservatives (including FBI informants) opposed the idea that gay people were a minority. Mattachine founders, including Hay, fought back: “We must disenthrall ourselves of the idea that we differ only in our sexual directions and that all we want or need in life is to be free to see the expression of our sexual desires.”
In the spring of 1953 the Mattachine Society was taken over by the conservative faction. Historian Will Roscoe writes in Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder, “Unfortunately, the new leadership shared none of the vision or experience of the original founders. They drastically revised the goals of the organization, backtracking in every area. Instead of social change, they advocated accommodation. Instead of mobilizing gay people, they sought the support of professionals, who they believed held the key to reform. They stated, ‘We do not advocate a homosexual culture or community, and we believe none exists.’”
Mattachine collapsed soon after. The central conflict that drove its members apart remains very relevant sixty years later, and every generation that has followed Harry Hay’s has had to address it. Each has employed a different vocabulary, but the issue remains essentially unchanged: are we a queer and distinct people, with revolutionary potential born from our experiences—or are we really just like everybody else except for what we do in bed?
One night after a political meeting I returned home to find another postcard from Scott. He was back in Europe, on the Greek island of Crete, working at a youth hostel in Sitia. The photo on the card showed the ruins at Iraklion, legendary site of the Minotaur. I showered and walked all the way from our flat to the Stud and drank and danced until the bar closed, then walked all the way back home. I tried to sleep but couldn’t so I put my clothes back on and walked up to the top of Buena Vista Park and climbed shivering into the tree house to watch the sun rise over Mt. Diablo across the bay. It had only been two years since I first crossed the Bay Bridge into San Francisco but I was getting restless.
Everything that was happening, everyone I met, everything I saw led me to believe that a revolution was coming. Perhaps it would not be a revolution like the ones I’d read about, not a violent political upheaval. But a revolution, at least for gay people, was coming. I could sense it, sometimes so strongly that my skin would tingle. There were many of us, I now understood, all across the planet. And wherever we were, whatever our circumstances—the word was out. Our time was coming, time to find each other, time to rise.
CHAPTER 6
Going to the Tubs
THE YEAR 1975 BEGAN WITH THE CONVICTIONS OF JOHN MITCHELL, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, found guilty in the Watergate cover-up. In Hanoi the North Vietnamese military leadership began to plan the final offensive against South Vietnam; and in Washington, DC, the Weather Underground bombed the State Department offices. Down at the Mind Shaft we were dancing to David Bowie’s “Fame” and Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Shining Star.”
It was a cold, dry winter and my room had no heat. Some nights, Silas would warm things up for me, but not nearly often enough. I loved his crazy ways and the sparks in his dark brown eyes. We stayed up all night so many times, talking about politics, drinking wine, and smoking.
Every two weeks, I cashed my paycheck from Time Life and put twenty-five or thirty dollars in my savings account. It was beginning to add up: by January I had saved over eight hundred dollars, a lot of money for a 20-year-old street kid back then.
The next postcard from Scott came from Munich. He had rented a room in what he described as an old, falling-down house with pockmarks from World War II bombs, a toilet in the hallway, and a bathtub in the kitchen. He was living with a couple named Rico and Rosemary. Rico, he wrote, was a handsome Brazilian, Rosemary a beautiful German woman. Also living in the building were an American draft resister named Richard, his girlfriend Mary, and another American boy, named Ted, who’d run out of money while hitchhiking across Europe.
In Vietnam, two and a half years after direct US military involvement ceased, the war ground slowly and brutally towards the final battles. Millions of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had been killed or wounded, as well as hundreds of thousands of Cambodians, tens of thousands of Laotians, and 58,220 US service members. The war had torn the United States apart, created divisions between the American people that remain to this day, and permanently changed the way our country and our people would be perceived by the rest of the world.
Silas knocked on my door one evening. “It’s too cold in here, let’s go to the tubs.”
This made me very nervous. I had never been to a bathhouse before. Truthfully, I would have preferred a night at home snuggled up in the warmth of Silas’s smoothly muscled arms.
“Really?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’ve never been before.”
Silas drove us down south of Market Street to the Ritch Street Baths, located in an old brick building in an alley off Third Street between Townsend and Brannan Streets. I was scared, but Silas took the lead and showed me how it worked. You paid the entrance fee and placed your wallet and ID and any other valuable items like wristwatches or jewelry into a lockbox that the attendant closed and locked, handing you the key on a plastic band and a towel, and buzzing open the security door. We walked in and the
door shut behind us. Silas took my hand and guided me to the lockers. I felt so unattractive and awkward; it was almost like being back in high school with the old dread of stripping in front of the other boys.
Silas kissed me lightly. “Relax, you look good.” We got naked, put the key bands around our ankles, and wrapped the skimpy towels around our waists.
“First, we shower,” said Silas. I could tell he was enjoying himself and my nervousness. We walked into a large shower room, full of steam and naked men.
I almost turned to run but Silas put his hand on my chest and said again, “Relax.” He started soaping my back.
We stayed under the shower for a long time. At home, in our old Victorian flat with six guys and only one bathroom, our showers were necessarily brief and often chilly. It felt so luxurious to dawdle under the heavy blast of hot water in the billowing steam.
“Quit stalling, Betty Blender,” Silas laughed, and took me by the wrist. Within moments I would receive compelling evidence that I apparently did, in fact, look good.
The baths became one of my favorite pastimes, especially on cold foggy nights when the damp settled into the old wooden walls of our house. At first I went to Ritch Street, later to the Club Baths at 8th and Howard Streets. There were several other bathhouses in the city, but I didn’t go to all of them. The baths back then were really pretty great. The only diseases we had to worry about were easily treated with a shot or a handful of pills, and it was a point of pride for all of us to go down to the City Clinic at 4th and Mission to get tested every month. We’d get a ticket with a number and wait for a bit in the lobby. One of the staff would call your number and take you back for a swab and blood test and quick exam. Everyone saved their City Clinic exam tickets and you’d see them on refrigerators and bathroom mirrors, taped up as proof of responsible behavior and reminders for one’s next visit.