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Imagining alliance: queer anti-imperialism and race in California, 1966-1990

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Imagining alliance: queer anti-imperialism and race in California, 1966-1990

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IMAGINING ALLIANCE:
QUEER ANTI-IMPERIALISM AND RACE IN CALIFORNIA, 1966-1990

by

Emily K. Hobson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Emily K. Hobson

ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to many people for their provocation, guidance, and support.
First, I want to express my deep thanks to all of the activists whose passionate
commitment, work, and ideas I have sought to capture in this dissertation. I am
profoundly grateful for their interventions in the world, for what they have made possible
in my life as a queer woman, and for what they have created within the projects of queer,
anti-racist, and anti-imperialist activism. I want to especially thank Margaret Randall,
Max Elbaum, and Bob Siedle-Khan, who discussed my research with me, shared their
insights, and pointed me towards important sources. Our conversations have left me
tremendously excited for future research, especially oral histories.
While at USC, I have been supremely fortunate to have George Sánchez as my
graduate advisor. George’s guidance began the moment he urged me to apply to
American Studies & Ethnicity at USC and continued as he shepherded me through my
work towards the PhD. George has offered me not only his extensive historical insight
and scholarly guidance, but also his trust. He lent me the courage to push forward when
my energy flagged and continues to inspire me through his dedication to community-
based history and activist scholarship. I am so honored to have been his student.
Two other faculty at USC have been especially central to my education and dear
to my heart. David Román taught me to theorize an archive, encouraged my sense of
freedom in my work, and lived out his commitment to critical generosity. I cannot
imagine having developed this dissertation without him as either teacher or friend. I am
equally at a loss to imagine my trajectory without Ruthie Gilmore, who has taught me,

iii
above all else, to search for the right questions. In heavy moments, I think of Ruthie’s
laugh and am restored to recognizing how beautiful the world can become.
In addition, I am deeply thankful to Robin D.G. Kelley for his enthusiasm for my
research, his invaluable scholarship, and the breadth and imagination of his political
memory; and to Bill Deverell for his confidence in my work, his questions, and his work
to open up the Huntington Library to junior scholars.
The faculty, staff, and students of the Department of American Studies and
Ethnicity at USC are tremendous, and I am enormously proud to be an ASE alumna.
Beyond my own dissertation committee, I want to extend particular thanks to faculty
members Laura Pulido, Sarah Gualtieri, Macarena Gomez Barris, Jane Iwamura, Jack
Halberstam, Roberto Lint Sagarena, John Carlos Rowe, Kara Keeling, Karen Tongson,
María Elena Martínez, Lanita Jacobs-Huey, Viet Nguyen, Janelle Wong, Leland Saito,
Lon Kurashige, and Shana Redmond for their scholarship, their work to build the
department, and their engagements with my work. Sandra Hopwood, Kitty Lai, Sonia
Rodriguez, and Jujuana Preston are incredibly effective and wonderfully welcoming
departmental staff. They have been critical in sustaining the ASE community, and I will
miss them. Thanks, also, to the larger network around ASE, especially Craig Gilmore for
pointing out why I should not get a French press.
I am truly grateful to all the graduate students and alumni who have invested time,
thought, and energy into building a productive, joyful environment at ASE. I especially
appreciate Laura Barraclough, Hillary Jenks, Michan Connor, Dan HoSang, Ulli Ryder,
Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, Nicole Hodges-Pearsley, and Reina Prado for setting the

iv
stage; Imani Johnson and Perla Guerrero, who welcomed me as first-year mentors; and
Carolyn Dunn, Laura Fugikawa, Abigail Rosas, Sharon Luk, Terrion Williamson,
Anthony Rodriguez, Margarita Smith, Mark Padoongpatt, Margaret Salazar, Thang Dao,
Adam Bush, Genevieve Carpio, and Kiana Green for keeping the community going.
My dissertation fellowship in the Department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa
Barbara has been invaluable in my development as a teacher and scholar. I am
particularly grateful to Eileen Boris, Leila Rupp, Mireille Miller-Young, and Jacqueline
Bobo; to my comrade in the dissertation fellowship, Laurel Westbrook; and to the
department’s staff, especially Lou Anne Lockwood, Christina Toy, and Blanca Nuila.
Also at UCSB, I want to thank Horacio Roque Ramírez for his collegial scholarship in
queer history and Chicana/o Studies; Elizabeth Robinson for her sustenance of campus
and community activism; Monica Lopez for her friendship and beers; and Sarah
Fenstermaker, Lisa Slavid, and Tania Israel for giving me places to call home. I also
want to thank my students at UCSB, as well as those I have taught at USC and Antioch
University Los Angeles, for their enthusiasm for studying queer history, race and
ethnicity, and the activist past.
A number of archivists made my dissertation research not only easier, but also
intellectually richer and a lot more fun. I want to especially thank Rebekah Kim, Dan
Romesburg, and Jacob Richards at the GLBT Historical Society; the inimitable,
irreplaceable Claude Marks at the Freedom Archives; and Rukshana Singh at the
Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. Special thanks, also, to

v
Blake Ulveling, Rebecca Meyer, and Ann and Dickran Tashjian for providing me homes
away from home during research trips.
I have learned a great deal from colleagues at conferences and workshops,
especially everyone who has responded to my work at the UCSB Women’s Center
(2009); Dartmouth College (2009); the American Studies Association (2008, 2005); the
UCSB Department of Black Studies (2008); the Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar on
Gender History, “Sequels to the 1960s,” at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
(2008); the CLAGS International Conference on GLBT Archives (2008); the California
American Studies Association (2008); the Western Regional Queer Conference (2008);
the Duke Feminist Theory Workshop (2007); the Huntington-USC Institute on California
and the West (2006); the Graduate Student Conferences of Ethnic Studies in California
(2007, 2006); and the Los Angeles Queer Studies Conference (2005). I owe special
thanks to Annelise Orleck, Nancy Hewitt, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Ian Lekus, Sherie
Michelle Randolph, Kara Keeling, Chela Sandoval, John Ibson, Richard Meyer, Jennifer
Doyle, Ricardo Montez, Huey Copeland, Dan HoSang, Roberto Tejada, Eric Avila, and
Karen Halttunen. In addition, I want to thank Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and
Wendy Cheng for involving me in the People’s Guide to Los Angeles, and Jess Hoffman
and Daria Yudacufski for bringing me into the pages of make/shift magazine.
I could not have functioned as a student or completed my dissertation without
funding from multiple sources, including a Final Summer Fellowship, Beaumont
Fellowship, Academic Professionalization Grant (shared with Stefanie Snider), College
Summer Supplement, and Provost’s Fellowship from USC; a Dissertation Fellowship

vi
from the UCSB Department of Feminist Studies; a Dissertation Fellowship and a
Huntington Library Fellowship and the John R. Haynes & Dora Haynes Foundation; an
Outstanding Achievement Scholarship from the USC Lambda Gay & Lesbian Alumni
Association; Travel Grants from USC’s Center for Feminist Research; and a Humanities
Practicum Grant from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, which allowed me to
gain valuable experience at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics.
For their mentorship and comradeship in organizing and activist work, past and
present, I am especially grateful to Gina Acebo, Rinku Sen, Francis Calpotura, Gary
Delgado, Nicole Davis, Evette Brandon, Mary Beth Maxwell, Rhoda Linton, Diana
Onley-Campbell, Rahdi Taylor, Abdi Soltani, Yvonne Paul, Mike Chavez, Shash Yhazi,
Rona Fernandez, Carmen Iñiguez, Cathy Rion, Blake Ulveling, Janelle Ishida, Mariela
Gomez, Jeremy Lahoud, Sharon Martinas, Mickey Ellinger, Chris Crass, Karla Mejía,
Mayra Sirias, and Penn Garvin – as well as, collectively, everyone I have learned from at
Harvard-Radcliffe’s Education for Action and the First-Year Urban Program, the Center
for Third World Organizing, the Women & Organizing Documentation Project, the
Challenging White Supremacy Workshop and the Catalyst Project, Californians for
Justice, and Creating Just Communities at USC.
Among the best pleasures of academia are the new friendships created through
sharing scholarship and ideas. I am particularly glad to have found Christina B.
Hanhardt, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, and Emily Thuma through these contexts.
For laughter, dialogues, and distractions; meals, alcohol, and coffee; walks, beach
days, and backpacking trips; shoulders, safety nets, and out-of-town couches – for

vii
friendship in recent years and over decades – I extend loving thanks to Wendy Cheng,
Laura Fugikawa, Nisha Kunte, Perla Guerrero, Imani Johnson, Jesus Hernández,
Michelle Commander, Jason Goldman, Stefanie Snider, Viet Le, Araceli Esparza,
Micaela Smith, Cam Vu, David Román, Roberto Lint Sagarena, Hillary Jenks, Dan
HoSang, Jake Peters, Alexis Lothian, Margarita Smith, Sarah Miller, Lisa Sedano, Rosina
Lozano, Jerry Gonzalez, Orlando Serrano, Mark Padoongpatt, Anthony Sparks, Sharon
Luk, Adam Bush, Margaret Salazar, Helena Kim, Kimi Lee, Janko Roettgers, Berlin Lee,
Sophie Fanelli, Dave McGrath, Harout Dimijian, Stephanie Arellano, Erin O’Brien,
Karla Zombro, Susan Goldberg, Rebecca Solomon, Jason Salkind, Blake Ulveling,
Rebecca Meyer, Cathy Rion, Gina Acebo, Cheryl Mejia, Lisa Russ, Mark Engler,
Rosslyn Wuchinich, Nisrin Elamin, Jen Soriano, Shoshana Uribe, Joseph Barretto, Kate
Rabb, Erica Gatts, Jason Warriner, Kerstin Svendsen, and last but always first, Hannah
Tashjian. The list is long and carries no particular order, but each of you is uniquely dear
to me. Very special thanks to Wendy, Laura, and Michelle for keeping me sane, happy,
and full of cake over the past five years. Words are not enough to thank my oldest and
dearest friend, Hannah, but I am grateful to you for loon calls, for staying with me
through adolescence, for dress shopping, and for getting me running again.
I recommend that anyone writing a dissertation get a pet – pronto. While I can
best thank my dog Biscuit with a dried strip of beef tendon, I can tell the people reading
this that she calmed my spirit, made me smile, and got me out of the house during even
the most hard-fought and enervating stages of writing.

viii
My brother, Jeff Hobson, is a tremendously generous older sibling and a deeply
ethical man. I am proud to be his sister and so grateful for his love and support – as well
as that of my sister-in-law and sister-in-feeling, Kim Seashore, and my nephews,
Benjamin and Nathan. Many thanks, also, to Sharon Calhoon, Bekki and Neil Bergeson,
Patricia Decker and Jack Delay, my late grandmother Dorothy Hobson, and to the Perez
family, especially Phyllis Perez, Lena Perez, Michaela Perez-Kelley, Eva Marie Perez,
Eva and Francisco Villegas, and Aunt Loly.
My parents, Wayne and Nancy Hobson, taught me to love history, justice, and
words – all in close proximity to each other. My father was my first professor of
American Studies and my mother my first English teacher. Their parenting has always
extended well beyond those roles: I am also deeply grateful to them for guiding me to
love cooking and hiking, appreciate tools, and have faith in myself. Still, I suspect that
only they can understand how much I have appreciated their roles in my life as educators.
Together and individually, my parents have taught me to see learning as boundless and
boundary shattering. I extend my profound thanks to both of them for their guidance, for
their faith in my activism and my scholarship, and for their sustained and sustaining love.
Finally, I extend my deepest thanks to Felicia Perez – my sweetheart, girlfriend,
wife, partner, lover, the president of my fan club, and my best friend. Since my first year
of graduate school, Felicia has kept me laughing, buoyed my confidence, and taught me
to listen to myself. She has enthusiastically talked through my findings in the archives,
coached me through my first conference paper and earliest lesson plans, and inspired me
through her creativity and dedication as a history teacher and union activist. Ultimately,

ix
and often most importantly, Felicia has been there to remind me to put the work away for
the day. Her intelligence, empathy, honesty, and passion are deeply imprinted on this
work, and on me. Thank you for everything – I love you.

x
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii
List of Figures xii
Abstract xiii
Introduction 1
Historical Markers and Memory 4
Multiple Genealogies 12
Anti-Imperialism 14
Queer 17
Alliance 19
California 20
Archives and Methods 21
Chapter Overview 23
Chapter One
The Long 1960s, Queer of Color Critique, and Postwar California 27
Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the “Long 1960s” 27
Thinking Through Race, Space, and Empire in Queer Studies 44
Queer History in California 56
Chapter Two
Internal Colonialism, Racial Analogy, and the Sites of Gay Liberation 82
The Theoretical Model: Internal Colonialism 87
The Groundwork of California Gay Liberation, 1966-1969 93
The Vietnam War and the “Common Enemy” 106
The Black Panthers and Racial Analogy 109
Alpine County and Gay Nationalism 120
Cuba and Gay Socialism 132
Conclusion: Imagining Alliance, Mapping Division 143
Chapter Three
Connecting the Struggle: Building a Gay and Lesbian Left 147
The Contexts of “Gay and Lesbian” and “Left” 155
Theorizing Contradiction in Los Angeles 173
Desegregating Community in the Bay Area 189
Building a Multi-Issue Movement 207
Conclusion: Mobilizing a Radical Past 229

xi
Chapter Four
“Si Nicaragua venció”: Queer Solidarity in the Reagan Years 233
Understanding Nicaragua 238
Solidarity as a Transnational Force 249
Forging Lesbian and Gay Solidarity 255
The Meanings of Difference 264
Somos Hermanas 279
Conclusion: Multiple Genealogies and Historical Gaps 293
Conclusion 298
Bibliography 317

Appendix: List of Archives 337

xii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Gay Liberation Front (GLF) flier 103

Figure 2: Third World Gay People’s News 115 

Figure 3: “Alpine County, or Other Appropriate Destination” 122 

Figure 4: “Wanted for Seeking Refuge and Freedom” 125 

Figure 5: “We Are All Fugitives” 128 

Figure 6: The Lavender & Red Book 185 

Figure 7: Third World Gay Caucus 195 

Figure 8: “A gay landlord is still a landlord” 197 

Figure 9: “Gay Liberation Through Socialist Revolution” 212 

Figure 10: Workers’ Conference Against the Briggs Initiative 221 

Figure 11: “No Apologies!” 227 

Figure 12: Gays for the Nicaraguan Revolution 257 

Figure 13: “Embracing Our Sisters in Solidarity” 283 

Figure 14: Somos Hermanas logo 286 

xiii
ABSTRACT
Imagining Alliance considers the meanings that radical critiques of empire carried for
queer activism in California from the high Sixties through the Reagan Era. A social
movement history, the dissertation draws on organizational archives, periodicals,
memoirs and collected oral histories, and ephemera to closely consider queer radicals’
political language, ideological debates, and activist work. Moving across an era marked
at its outset by the founding of the Black Panther Party (1966) and at its end by the defeat
of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1990), the study reveals the transformative meanings that
racial militancy, national liberation, and international solidarity held for radical sexual
politics in the latter half of the Cold War.
Queer radicals drew ideas and inspiration from sources including the Third World
Left and Marxist-Leninism, socialist feminism and women of color feminism, and the
Latin American left. They used anti-imperialism to define sexual liberation, build activist
coalition, and remake local queer community. More broadly, they used anti-imperialism
to construct a politics of alliance and a discourse of lesbian and gay space. But queer
anti-imperialism also held contradictions. Claims on space carried implicit ties to white
and U.S. privilege; calls for alliance rested on solidarity with national liberation projects
that often rejected queer identities.
Imagining Alliance details how activists understood and sought to resolve these
contradictions within the local landscapes of California and during three successive
phases of queer politics: the gay liberation era (1966-1973); the gay and lesbian left
(1973-1980); and lesbian and gay solidarity with Central America (1979-1990). Queer of

xiv
color activists, especially lesbians of color, became central actors in critiquing both gay
and straight nationalisms and in analyzing the intersections of sexuality and race in
structures of global capital and U.S. power. Imagining Alliance identifies the story of
queer anti-imperialism as central in narrating a more multiracial and transnational queer
history, as well as for fully integrating questions of sexuality into analyses of the “long
1960s” and their legacies through the 1980s and today.

1
INTRODUCTION
In October 1969, actors in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Theatre staged an
intriguingly named performance: “No Vietnamese Ever Called Me a Queer.”
1
Two years
later, activists writing in the Bay Area lesbian paper Mother explained that “As
Radicalesbians who are rejecting colony-status in our life-style, we identify with the
struggle for liberation of all colonized people… we are creating what is an essential
condition to destroying the male-supremacist racist capitalist imperialist system.”
2
A gay
liberation caucus at the 1971 Black Panther Party Revolutionary People’s Constitutional
Convention reported new protest chants: the anti-establishment “2, 4, 6, 8 – Gays Unite
to Smash the State”; the Maoist-inflected “Go Gay, Go Left, Go Pick up a Gun.”
3

Where did these sexual politics come from, where did they go, and why does their
history matter? These are the fundamental questions motivating my dissertation, which
considers the multiple and generative meanings that anti-imperialism held for queer
politics in California across the latter half of the Cold War. Drawing on activist archives,
Imagining Alliance explores how lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender activists in
California adapted anti-imperialist thought to transform the meanings of sexual

1
One performance was staged on UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza; another disrupted a meeting of the Society
for Individual Rights, a more accommodationist gay group. See report by Stevens, San Francisco Free
Press Vol.1 Number 4, November 1-14, 1969 (collected at Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender
Historical Society, hereafter GLBTHS); undated flyer with same slogan, Charles Thorpe file, GLBTHS;
and discussion by Justin David Suran, “Coming Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization
of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam,” American Quarterly 53.3 (2001): 452-488. The performance’s
title echoed Muhammed Ali’s explanation for refusing the draft: “No Vietnamese ever called me a nigger.”

2
San Francisco Radicalesbians, “Lesbianism is Revolution,” Mother 1:2, July 1971.
3
Mike Silverstein, “RPCC…”, Gay Sunshine #5, 1971.

2
difference, construct radical alliance, and build community. Queer anti-imperialist
activists drew ideas and strategies from multiple sources, particularly the Third World
Left, socialist-feminism, and women of color feminism. They drew on racial and
national liberation, left internationalism, and feminist and anti-capitalist critique to define
a revolutionary potential for queer identities, and to critique oppressions of sexuality,
gender, and family fostered by the U.S. state.
First expressed in the gay liberation moment of the late 1960s, queer anti-
imperialism inspired a politics of alliance and a discourse of gay and lesbian space.
These two inspirations pulled activists in quite different directions. Though the concept
of gay and lesbian space offered potential to center organizing around of sites of cruising,
sex work, and other so-called vice, the longstanding impulse to disavow these locations
and their racial, class, and gender marginalization led most activists towards expressions
of separatism and “gay nationalism,” conceived as allowing freer, more self-determined
sexual and gender identities. The concept of gay and lesbian space posited sexual
difference as parallel to – not interwoven with – race, class, and nation, and it implicitly
tied gay and lesbian identities to white and U.S. privilege.
In contrast to a language of space, the principle of alliance proposed queer
freedom through solidarity with national and racial liberation projects working to counter
U.S. global power. This alliance was troubled and difficult to achieve because other
liberation projects generally referenced queer identities as foreign, white, and bourgeois –
in other words, as not proper subjects of Third World, anti-imperialist revolution. Queer
activists committed to anti-imperialist goals found themselves compelled to organize

3
autonomously, to challenge existing and emerging structures of gay and lesbian
community, and to craft new modes of theory and practice that could explain the
articulations they sensed between the oppressions of sexuality and gender and those of
global inequality, class, and race.
The politics of alliance offered far greater power to realize queer anti-imperialism
than did the language of gay and lesbian space. Thus, I place my focus on activists who
imagined and worked towards alliance, and consider how these activists countered both
left homophobia and the assimilationist potential of single-issue queer politics. I trace
what factors encouraged or discouraged queer anti-imperialism, including activists’
personal political histories, their ties to queer of color and transnational queer
community, and how they understood the queer past. I highlight ideas that fostered queer
anti-imperialist analysis, including internal colonialism theory from the Third World
Left; Marxist and Marxist-Leninist though; and a feminist of color framework of
revolutionary movement-building rather than nation-building. I consider why multiracial
activist coalitions appeared stronger in the Bay Area than in Los Angeles, and I highlight
the critical role of multiracial community building in critiquing both gay and straight
nationalisms and helping to sustain anti-imperialist commitment.
My work bolsters scholarship on the social movements of the long 1960s;
mobilizes the theoretical contributions of queer of color critique to analyze activist
history; and illuminates larger political economic structures of queer life in postwar
California. I emphasize California’s significance in radical history generally; examine
the state’s rhetorical meanings as a destination for sexual freedom; and consider how

4
sexual politics became understood in relation to California’s multiracial and transnational
character. Bridging the fields of American Studies, history, queer studies, and ethnic
studies, my dissertation analyzes the ideas, organizations, campaigns, and internal
tensions of queer anti-imperialist politics, and considers the larger lessons that a history
of queer anti-imperialism offers for radical activism today.

Historical Markers and Memory
Queer anti-imperialist politics are rarely acknowledged within historical
scholarship or popular memory. To an extent, this reflects a series of generational shifts
during which the growth of queer activism and communities, tied to limited gains within
the market, media, and neoliberal state, have moved many queer people towards an
increasingly professionalized, legalistic, and single-issue politics. This trend has been
especially apparent among people with relative economic and racial privilege, but it is
also facilitated by an ideological investment in homosexuality as peaceably minoritarian
rather than subversively universalistic (to recall Eve Sedgwick).
4
At the same time, this
turn towards rights rather than liberation is not only queer; it is a broader pattern within
our political life, tied to the shrinking of the global left since the close of the Cold War.
As gay cultural critic Michael Bronski reflects, “I entered the Gay Liberation Movement
from a background of doing leftist, anti-war and community organizing. Thirty years ago

4
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, University of California Press, 1990.

5
this was a common experience for gay politics – now it is an anomaly.”
5
Bronski’s
observation points not just to a loss of queer multi-issue politics, but to a containment of
radical, multi-issue, anti-capitalist and internationalist politics generally.
This broader narrowing of both activism and political memory make the historical
markers of this study – 1966 to 1990 – unexpected for queer history. Neither date
summons any well-known event of queer activism; the most visible such event remains
the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 in New York City’s Greenwich Village. While I do not
discredit Stonewall’s meaning, I also do not posit the riots as the origin story that popular
representation makes them out to be. Like many movements, gay liberation bubbled up
over a period of years; Stonewall was not less, but also not more, than a widely reported
expression of an already developing politics of gay liberation. Well before Stonewall,
gay liberation had been seeded through many other sources, including many with no
obvious link to homosexuality or gender transgression.
Rather than 1969, I begin this study in 1966, a year when U.S. radicals began to
(re)turn to anti-imperialist politics on a wide scale. In 1966, the Black Panther Party for
Self-Defense was founded; calls for Black Power became widespread; and activists began
to mobilize in large numbers against the escalating war in Vietnam. 1966 also marks a
transition in queer politics, as a movement organized for “homophile rights” began to
give way to militancy inspired by the New Left, Third World Left, global anti-
colonialism, and emerging feminist activism. The first glimmer of queer anti-

5
Michael Bronski, Biographical Note, ZSpace Webpage,
http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/michaelbronski. Accessed April 6, 2009.

6
imperialism in California became visible in the summer of 1966, when transgender
women and gay radicals in San Francisco’s Tenderloin rioted against police abuse and
claimed neighborhood power. These militants compared the marginalization of queer
street life to the spatial segregation of communities of color, which were themselves
coming to be described through concepts of internal colonialism.
In coming years, queer engagements with anti-imperialist politics proliferated
rapidly, inspiring many gay and lesbian radical activists to craft a new political culture of
“gay liberation.” As a subject in the 1978 gay and lesbian documentary Word is Out put
it, gay liberation emerged “on this other side of 1968” – the year when North Vietnam’s
Tet Offensive presented U.S. defeat as a serious possibility; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated and the Democratic Party fielded a pro-war
candidate; and activists around the world staged increasingly militant confrontations
against racism, war, and state repression.
6
In the aftermath of 1968, the Gay Liberation
Front named itself after the National Liberation Fronts of Algeria and North Vietnam,
and the organization Third World Gay Revolution held that “the only true army for
oppressed people is the people’s army, and Third World, gay people, and women should
have full participation in the People’s Revolutionary Army.”
7

Thus, in a political moment in which large numbers of people in the U.S. forecast
imminent revolution, gay liberationists – with that term then including lesbian feminists

6
Roger Harkenrider quoted in Word is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives, Mariposa Film Group, 1976.
7
Third World Gay Revolution, “What We Want, What We Believe,” in Karla Jay and Allen Young, eds.,
Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation (Douglass, 1972): 363-367.

7
and transgender radicals – turned to anti-imperialist language to craft a new sexual
politics. They extended the principles of self-determination to ever more intimate scales,
including the places where they sought sex and community and the ways they dressed
and carried their bodies; witness “famous Yippie, famous Gay” Jim Fouratt performing
his politics by “turning a militant macho fist into a queen’s finger snap.”
8
Queer radicals
in this era analyzed their oppression by the police, military, and other institutions as
interwoven with racism, sexism, global poverty and war, and suppression of dissent.
They urged other queer people to “come out” – in multiple senses – against the Vietnam
War and for the Black Panthers, and they believed sexuality would only be fully liberated
through a revolutionary alliance against capitalism, racism, and empire. Gay
liberationists of various colors and genders used anti-imperialist language to identify a
“common enemy” oppressing queer people simultaneously with people of color, women,
workers, Vietnamese peasants, and U.S. soldiers. Distinct from both the preceding and
succeeding politics of homophile and gay rights, “gay liberation” was catalyzed by and
ideologically dependent upon a broader shift towards anti-imperialist radicalism.
Bridging sexual liberation and anti-imperialist critique was not easy, and both the
appeal and the challenges of this politics remain under-discussed. Throughout the Cold
War, many Marxist and anticolonial projects both within and outside the United States
conceptualized homosexuality as a capitalist decadence and a “white man’s disease.”
9

8
Konstantin Berlandt, “Konstantin Berlandt in FANTASYLAND,” Gay Sunshine 7 (June/July 1971), 14.
The article was a report on Berlandt’s trip to the Austin (TX) Gay Liberation conference in 1971, and
extensively discussed questions of gender and gender presentation.
9
See Ian Lekus, “Queer Harvests: Homosexuality, the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to

8
While homosexuality had been decriminalized under Lenin in 1917, Stalin had re-
criminalized it in 1934, and other communist and socialist nations followed this lead.
10

Further, anticolonial and racial liberation projects generally mobilized a rhetoric of
normative manhood, womanhood, and the national “family” in order to redress the sexual
violence and gendered insult of colonial and imperial regimes.
11
This was why, within
the contexts of 1960s and early 1970s radicalism, what we term “homophobia” took the
form of assertions that homosexuality and homosexual identities were
counterrevolutionary – or simply not “political” at all. While inspired by the Black
Panthers, the Cuban Revolution, and Third World and Marxist projects generally, many
gay liberationists quickly distanced themselves from these projects in the face of left
homophobia. Yet others believed that left homophobia could be undone, and insisted that
anti-imperialist and queer politics could support rather than undermine each other. These
radicals used anti-imperialism to reimagine homosexuality as neither sin, decadence, nor
pathology, but as another proof that the established U.S. order could not stand.

Cuba,” Radical History Review 89 (Spring 2004); Terrence Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New
York's Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971,” Radical History Review 62 (1995); and Trinity Ordona, Coming
Out Together: An Ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander Queer Women’s and Transgendered
People’s Movement of San Francisco, PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2000.
10
Peter Drucker states that "from the 1930s to the 1980s, the Stalinist, Maoist, and Castroist currents that
dominated the international anti-capitalist left fostered anti-gay prejudice rather than lesbian/gay identity."
Importantly for my discussion of Nicaragua in Chapter 4, Drucker argues that outside Cuba, Latin
American LGBT organizing in the 1970s was strongly tied to the socialist left. See Drucker, “Introduction:
remapping sexualities,” in Drucker, ed., Different Rainbows (Gay Men’s Press, 2000), 34.
11
See M. Jacqui Alexander, “Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality and
Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas,” Feminist Review 48 (Fall 1994).

9
In most narratives of U.S. queer history, the radical politics of “gay liberation” is
described as fizzling out between 1971 and 1973, with the gay and lesbian organizing
that continued throughout the 1970s curtailed – or brought back down to earth, depending
on the writer’s perspective – into an agenda of pragmatic gains. Gay and lesbian
community from 1973 forward is described as markedly segregated by both gender and
race, with gay men’s culture dominated by a masculinist “clone” ideal, lesbians focused
on separatist community, and both of these social formations overwhelmingly white.
This transition is often cited through the trajectory of the Gay Liberation Front in New
York, which by 1971 had begun to dissolve into more and less radical factions, the
strongest offshoot being the militant, but dramatically more single-issue, white, and male
Gay Action Alliance.
12
The narrative of an early 1970s closure of multi-racial, multi-
gender, internationalist queer politics dominates a broad array of histories, both those that
welcome the rights-based agenda and those that mourn the loss of “liberationist”
radicalism; those embracing gender separatism and those recuperating transgender
history; those centering white queer people and those highlighting the experiences of
queer people of color.
13
The perceived closure of a liberationist queer politics at 1973 fits

12
As discussed by Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries”; Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York:
Penguin, 1993); and David Deitcher, ed., The Question of Equality: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America
Since Stonewall (New York: Scribner, 1995).
13
For example, Randy Shilts, in The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (St.
Martin’s Press, 1982) argues for similar timing as Susan Stryker, Transgender History (Seal Press, 2008) or
Trinity Ordona, Coming Together. Stryker cites 1973 as a year with notorious anti-transgender politics, as
at the West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference. John D’Emilio has described the 1970s as a “gendered”
decade, in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970 (University of Chicago Press, 1983); Trinity Ordona adds that this era was racialized,
and states that after 1973, “What remained was a white gay men’s movement again” (Ordona 15).

10
into a larger history of the end of the “long 1960s,” since even the “long” version of that
historical era is widely seen as coming to a close with the Paris Peace Accords,
Watergate, and the onset of economic recession.
However, while a “liberationist” queer radicalism did lose ground in the early
1970s, it certainly did not disappear, nor can its transitions be reductively attributed to
differences of race and gender. Following Audre Lorde, it was not difference as such that
divided late 1960s and early 1970s gay and lesbian activists, but activists’ inability to
understand, acknowledge, and organize through their experiences of race, class, gender,
and national position. Ideological differences did not track neatly by color, gender, or
sexual expression. Lesbians and gay men of color critiqued nationalisms of all types,
both within gay politics and on the Third World Left. Groups of white gay men and of
lesbians fractured along gay nationalist and internationalist, Marxist, and Marxist-
Leninist lines. Struggles over how – not just whether, or among who – to use anti-
imperialist politics were instrumental in shaping queer activism.
Further, queer anti-imperialism did not turn off like a faucet in one particular year
or depend on one organization. This politics survived in a number of different networks.
Against the notion of a clear rightward turn at 1973, that year saw many gay and lesbian
radicals beginning to engage more deeply with Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, and socialist-
feminist critique. In the Bay Area, these activists saw their politics begin to gain new
ground by 1976, when gay-straight coalitions were forged in organizing protests for a
“Bicentennial Without Colonies.” Anti-imperialist activism became critical in
galvanizing political campaigns often assumed to be “single-issue” fights, including the

11
1978 defeat of California’s Briggs Initiative, where rights-based and liberationist politics
reinforced and strengthened one another. Reports of the death of “gay liberation” were
greatly exaggerated. For some activists, even the term “gay liberation” retained currency
as late as the early 1980s. More importantly, the radical orientation associated with gay
liberation survived, even as it took on new language and new forms. By the mid 1970s,
queer radicals consciously sought to build a “gay and lesbian left,” and used Marxist and
Marxist-Leninist analysis in efforts to build multiracial queer community and to work
against the constraints of global monopoly capital.
Queer anti-imperialism also survived and gained new energy and meaning in the
late 1970s through late 1980s through activism in solidarity with a target of U.S.
intervention: Nicaragua and its Sandinista Revolution. Nicaragua held appeal for U.S.
queer and feminist activists because the Sandinistas embraced women’s leadership,
incorporated women’s rights and, by the end of the 1980s, began to acknowledge lesbian
and gay rights as well. One particular organization, Somos Hermanas (“We Are
Sisters”), offers particularly important insight into this story. Active from 1984 to 1990,
Somos Hermanas was a multiracial organization of lesbian and straight women who
worked to support the Nicaraguan Revolution and to build networks between women in
the U.S., Nicaragua, and elsewhere in Central America. Somos Hermanas situated
lesbian and gay freedom within a broader revolutionary movement and drew on a long
genealogy of women of color feminism, having been seeded by the Alliance Against
Women’s Oppression (1980-90), itself an offshoot of the Third World Women’s Alliance
(1970-1980), which was in turn a descendant of the Black Women’s Alliance (1968-

12
1970) of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Further, Somos
Hermanas used their location within San Francisco’s Mission District to foster the
leadership of lesbians of color and to map a transnational queer geography bridging local
and hemispheric sites.
By moving between 1966 and 1990 – from the Compton’s Riot to the closure of
Somos Hermanas, the founding of the Black Panther Party to the defeat of the
Nicaraguan Revolution at the end of the Cold War – this dissertation links the long 1960s
with its understudied echoes in the Reagan Era; underscores the racialized politics of
homosexuality throughout the period; and argues for the persistence, flexibility, and
value of queer anti-imperialist critique.

Multiple Genealogies
Queer anti-imperialist politics have grown out of many different sources, with a
history structured not through linear descent but rather multiple, overlapping affiliations –
not biological descent but rather networks of care that bring together aunts and uncles,
friends, lovers, godparents, cousins, and other kin. Still, these genealogies are not
uniquely queer in a way that would suggest the genealogies of other social movements
are “straight” – imaginable through an unbroken chain of nuclear families, producing
sexually and racially “pure” pedigrees. Rather, queer anti-imperialism shares sources,
and heterogeneity, with many other radical politics.
The same holds true of my own scholarly debts. I draw my conceptualization of
multiple, overlapping genealogies from Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty’s

13
theorization of “feminist genealogies,” a term they use “not… to suggest a frozen or
embodied inheritance of domination and resistance, but an interested, conscious
rethinking of history and historicity, a rethinking which has women's autonomy and self-
determination at its core.”
14
Alexander and Mohanty use the plural genealogies to reject
the narrative that describes feminist history narrowly through first, second, and third
“waves” led by white women with only limited interventions by women of color.
Thinking through multiple genealogies can highlight the impact of anticolonial thought
on feminists of all colors throughout the 20
th
century, particularly in the postwar era; help
us visualize feminist organizing beyond any one organization, political tendency, or
demographic; and allow us to incorporate immigrant histories within a U.S. narrative, as
well as to challenge the supremacy of the U.S. in global feminist history. Further, this
concept can move us away from a narrowly racialized model of movement history, while
reminding us that racial exclusion and self-assertion operate within broader fields of
social relations and function as forms of ideological work.
I take Alexander and Mohanty’s framework for the study of multiple, multiracial,
and transnational feminisms as a model for my study of queer politics. My work is
heavily informed by insights identified with women of color feminism, particularly
efforts towards intersectional or “integrated” analyses of sexuality’s articulations with
race, gender, class, nation, colonialism and empire. I also draw heavily on the field of
queer of color critique, particularly this scholarship’s mobilization of feminist of color

14
M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, eds., Feminist genealogies, colonial legacies,
democratic futures (New York: Routledge, 1997), xvi.

14
thought and Marxist and materialist analyses of the history of sexuality. Within the field
of social movement history, I reject the notion of the “good” versus “bad” 1960s, and
situate my work instead within analyses of the “long 1960s,” the Third World Left, and
radical transnationalism. I detail these and other scholarly debts and interventions within
my first chapter, expanding on them throughout the dissertation. Meanwhile, the
remainder of this Introduction contextualizes my project’s key terms, archives, and
methods, and closes with a brief overview of all chapters.

Anti-Imperialism
Queer anti-imperialism varied and changed within the activist contexts that I
study, and it did so in part because “anti-imperialism” itself varied and changed. Various
modes of theory occupied greater and lesser prominence and the places, social
formations, and relationships that demanded anti-imperialist solidarity shifted.
Speaking broadly, I define anti-imperialism as a politics that places global
equality at the center of theory and practice; that views group autonomy, sovereignty, and
self-determination as basic human rights; and that approaches culture and national
belonging as valuable, though alterable, modes of group identity through which
autonomy, sovereignty, and self-determination have been denied, and through which they
might be (re)gained. Within the postwar era, I identify anti-imperialism as centered in
and inspired by the political project of the Third World, which has proposed collective
action and consciousness among African, Asian, indigenous and Latin American peoples
and their respective diasporas, and which has sought to organize international networks

15
that move beyond the legacies of European and U.S. empire and the paradigmatic
divisions of the Cold War.
15
Finally, I approach anti-imperialism as an expansive politics
capable of drawing on multiple other analyses, including anti-capitalist, anti-racist,
feminist, and diasporic practices. Among other contributions, these modes of knowledge
help us to critique how empire functions at more intimate scales and social relations than
those usually referenced in struggles for national sovereignty, culture, or land and
material resources – for example, at the scales of the home and the body, or in
relationships of kinship and of memory.
16
This expansiveness of anti-imperialist thought
has made it compelling for queer people who find themselves alienated, or even
experience displacement, on the basis of gender and sexuality.
I identify three major modes of anti-imperialist thought that queer activists drew
on between 1966 and 1990. First, queer activists were inspired by concepts of internal
colonialism, especially as developed and taken up by activists of the Third World Left,
who theorized people of color as colonial subjects within the U.S. and often as part of the
global Third World. One of the most important legacies of internal colonialism theory
was to define anti-imperialism as a means of opposing inequalities inside, not just

15
See Nikhil Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard
University Press, 2004); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New
Press, 2007); and discussion in Chapter 1.
16
See Neil Smith, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics,” Social Text 33: 55-81; Anne McClintock, Imperial
Leather: Race, Gender, and the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Amy Kaplan, “Manifest
Domesticity,” American Literature vol. 70, no. 3 (September 1998), 581-606 and work in Amy Kaplan and
Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of U.S. Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993); and others.

16
outside, U.S. borders. I explore how gay liberationists used internal colonialism theory,
as well as how these uses led to debates that split gay liberationist groups.
Second, various modes of Marxist analysis, especially Marxist-Leninism and
Marxist and socialist feminisms, shifted queer activists’ engagements with anti-
imperialism. Marxist and Marxist-Leninist thought had also shaped internal colonialism
theory, but by the mid through late 1970s queer activists began to engage more
intensively and openly with anti-capitalist critique. Discussions of monopoly capital, the
capitalist state apparatus, and the “contradictions” of the global proletariat pushed gay
and lesbian radicals to craft more complex explanations of how alternative sexual
identities are both formed within empire and provide a means to resist it. Informed by
these discussions, activists came to define queer of color community-building as a central
task of anti-imperialist resistance.
Third, in the late 1970s through 1980s lesbian and gay radicals found a new
source for anti-imperialism through activism in solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution
and against U.S. intervention in Nicaragua. Lesbian and gay radicals looked to
Sandinismo as a model for achieving a socialist revolution through a broad, multi-issue
social movement, one that they believed offered queer people a fully realized place
within a revolutionary political agenda. Lesbian and gay solidarity with Nicaragua also
provided became a means to highlight transnational queer networks connecting Central
America with the U.S., and thereby, to counter persistent assumptions of queer identities
as white and U.S.-centered.

17
Queer
I use the term “queer” advisedly; it is an anachronistic term for much, if not all, of
the period I study. “Queer” was not reclaimed for self-definition until the very late
1980s, and even then, gained greatest currency among a younger generation of radicals
and within academic scholarship. Most of the activists I examine considered themselves
gay or lesbian and most, to the extent I am aware, still prefer those terms. Some of the
individuals and organizations that I follow also took up more specific terminology – for
example Third World gay, faggot, dyke, lesbian of color – that referenced their gender
expressions, their racial and ethnic identities, and their search to define a radical sexual
politics. A few identified as bisexual, though most only publicly declared their
bisexuality in the 1980s or later, as bisexual activists came to insist on the validity of
bisexuality as a mode of queer identity rather than, as it had previously been discredited,
a false consciousness or mere phase in the coming out process.
A small number of the activists I study placed themselves in a transgender
category (all or nearly all of them male-to-female identified). Activists did not use the
term “transgender” until the 1990s, but I do use it as an umbrella term, alongside my
subjects’ own more specific terms of street queen, transvestite, and transsexual.
Transgender subjectivities appear most commonly in this dissertation, however, through
their disavowal by most gay and lesbian activists. From at least the early 1970s through
the early 1990s – and still in some settings today – gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists
rigorously excluded transgender people and transgender activism. I consider some of the
ways that these exclusions limited gay and lesbian activists’ political imaginations,

18
particularly their ability to identify the conjoined resistance and marginalization of
locations of queer of color and working class queer life.
I use “queer,” then, in part to reference a critique of the boundaries of gender
performance, race, and class that have structured the terms “lesbian” and “gay.” While
no one word fully captures the diversity of identities of sexual and gender difference that
people have created for themselves across time and space, queer makes some effort to
recognize this diversity, and to indicate a long history of militancy, gender transgression,
and sexual dissent. And while queer also stands at some odds to the categories of lesbian
and gay, its usage also builds on lesbian and gay activists’ longstanding efforts towards a
political category that might bring together – and build the social power of – a broad
array of minority sexualities and non-normative modes of gender and sexual expression.
Thus, queer can remind us of how, from the mid 1960s through the early 1970s, “gay”
was used to indicate both male and female homosexualities, as well as how by the mid
1970s, many lesbian women pushed gay men to conceptualize a broader “lesbian and
gay” movement. Such efforts at naming set the stage for a set of ever expanding terms
used today, including not only queer or LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender), but
also the consciously unwieldy acronyms LGBTQQA, LGBTQQTSPI, or
LGBTTSGNC.
17
Throughout my study, I generally adhere to my subjects’ self-
identification as gay or lesbian, and refer “gay and lesbian” politics and community.

17
The latter three terms add the categories of queer, questioning, ally, two-spirit, pansexual, intersex, and
gender non-conforming. Two-spirit is a Native American term reflecting many Native American peoples’
longstanding acceptance of people who combine masculine and feminine traits and/or express homosexual
desire and behaviors.

19
However, I also exchange the terms gay and lesbian with “queer” in order to
acknowledge the gaps I have named above.

Alliance
A language of revolutionary alliance – tying various groups of people, and
various political concerns, together within a shared social movement – has been
fundamental to defining and expressing queer anti-imperialism. I examine how activists
have taken up the work of “imagining alliance” through discussion and debate, in
working to create new political language, in formulating organizations and campaigns,
and in the production of radical culture.
Speaking practically, alliance has helped queer activists win an audience in a
heterosexually masculinist left. Aspirationally, alliance has connected sexual freedom
with anti-racist, feminist, and anticolonial goals. It is important to think critically about
alliance, and to note the problem of white leftists, both queer and straight, seeking a kind
of embodied validation in the presence of people of color (rather than working to
understand and apply anti-racism as a set of ideas achievable within policy or social
relations). Alliance can also indicate a loss of political power, requiring unwanted
compromise, or else becoming attractive only under political threat. Still, alliance has
remained a goal among a wide range of queer people, including queer people of color in
straight racial justice groups; queer people of color organizing Third World or other
multiracial queer coalitions; lesbians of all colors fighting homophobia in women’s
groups; efforts to build bridges between gay men and lesbians, and for transgender

20
recognition; campaigns for just immigration policy inclusive of LGBT people; and so on.
Alliance responds to a conflict and imagines a resolution. It imagines an ever-broadening
category of social belonging, joining people together and proposing collective work
towards a shared goal.
While hanging on to this vision of alliance, I explore how queer engagements
with anti-imperialism have been articulated in ways that both create and oppose ruptures
along race, class, gender, citizenship, and ideology – that both inhibit and to foster
alliance. Further, I consider how the principle of alliance came to stand in tension with a
discourse of gay and lesbian space.

California
California was not the center of queer anti-imperialist activism, nor would I argue
that any particular center for this politics existed. Rather, California provides a lens to
consider what contexts helped to produce, or inhibit, queer anti-imperialist politics, and
how activists worked to express anti-imperialist alliance at both local and global scales.
Not only has California been a prominent site of queer activism and community building
across the 20
th
century, but also, existing perceptions of California’s meanings in the U.S.
nation have shaped politics and identities of sexual freedom. San Francisco has been
termed a “refugee camp for homosexuals” and a “gay mecca”; rural Alpine County has
been imagined as “open land” for a gay colony; and politics have been identified through
geography, with the Bay Area placed to the left of Los Angeles. Transnational immigrant
and political circuits tied to California have fostered efforts at international queer

21
solidarity as well as at domestic multiracial alliance. Internal colonialism, revolutionary
nationalism, and women of color feminism – among other ideas and ideologies – have
been used both to justify and to critique concepts of the gay ghetto and so-called gay
nationalism as evidenced within California. Queer anti-imperialist activism has also
responded to urban disinvestment and gentrification in Los Angeles and the Bay Area; to
demographic shifts, especially rising immigration from Latin America; and to a rising
conservative movement that made California a key battlefield for affirmative action and
social service cutbacks, along with gay and lesbian rights.
I find that the San Francisco Bay Area was more productive of queer anti-
imperialist activism than was Los Angeles. As a result, I focus this study on the Bay
Area while also seeking to explain its differences with Los Angeles. Some reasons for
this difference include the smaller size and greater density of San Francisco, Berkeley,
and Oakland as compared to Los Angeles, which made it more likely that activists from
various racial and ethnic communities would rub shoulders and form working
relationships; the Bay Area’s stronger, or at least more concentrated, history of radical
activism, notably including the 1968-9 Third World Strike at San Francisco State; and the
high concentration of Central American immigrants in San Francisco, which proved
particularly important for facilitating lesbian and gay solidarity with Nicaragua.

Archives and Methods
My primary methodology is historical, drawing on original archival research,
published primary sources, and secondary literature. In addition to tracing organizations,

22
community networks, and key activists’ political biographies, I draw on a keywords
analysis inspired by the work of Raymond Williams and others.
18
Thinking through
keywords allows me to track the meanings that accrue around particular terms; to trace
how queer radicals borrowed terminology and concepts (e.g., internal colony, liberation)
from non-queer sources; and to explore ideological formation and theoretical debate, as
well as organizational relationships and direct action. This methodology also provokes
me to consider how sexuality itself has come to be understood within the realm of
culture, so that sexual politics have risen in importance as part of the broader “cultural
turn” of the postwar era.
Imagining Alliance is grounded in extensive archival research in queer, left, and
university archives (see Bibliography). Within these archives, I have analyzed
organizational records, periodicals, memoirs, fliers and brochures, photographs and other
images, oral history transcriptions, and radio broadcasts. Through these sources, I closely
examine the political language activists took up within their own time, consider how
discourse and ideas became circulated through radical media and ephemera, and trace
organizational histories. My archival research has also allowed me to contrast the
breadth of queer activism between 1966 and 1990 against a far narrower popular memory
of queer life and politics.
Established archives do carry some significant gaps, particularly occluding
activism among queer people of color during the late 1960s through 1970s (this archival

18
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. New York: Oxford, 1976;
Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler, eds., Keywords for American Cultural Studies, New York: NYU, 2007.

23
gap become less acute from the 1980s on). While the archives I have examined reveal a
number of queer of color organizations that were well known in the late 1960s through
1970s, they do not actually hold the organizational records of many key groups, which
include the Third World Gay Caucus, Black Gay Caucus, and Gay Latino Alliance. This
gap both suggests exclusions in established archives, and evidences choices that many
lesbian, gay, and other queer radicals of color from that era made to maintain authority
over the historical narratives of their activism. Oral histories are essential for tracing the
histories and ideas of activism among queer people of color, and oral history research
remains my primary goal for future expansion and revision of this manuscript.

Chapter Overview
Chapter 1, “Rethinking Queer History: The Long 1960s, Queer of Color Critique,
and Postwar California,” contextualizes this project historiographically, theoretically, and
in the broader contexts of queer postwar California. I challenge dominant narratives of
1960s social movements; explain my engagement with queer of color critique; and use
that critique to provide an overview of queer history in California, particularly between
World War II and the mid 1960s, just before the growth of gay liberation. I describe
economic and racial divisions structuring queer life; explore how practices of policing
and urban renewal constructed racial and sexual identities in Los Angeles and the Bay
Area; and consider how homophile activists of the 1950s and early 1960s might have
built, but largely failed to seek, multiracial and multi-class alliances.

24
Chapter 2, “Imagining Alliance, Mapping Race: Anti-Imperialist Debates in Gay
Liberation,” details how gay liberationists mobilized concepts of internal colonialism and
Third World alliance. I compare uses of internal colonialism theory in the 1966
Compton’s Riot in San Francisco with a 1967 protest at the Black Cat in Los Angeles,
consider how Bay Area and Los Angeles queer politics came to differ, and detail how
“gay liberation” became articulated in California months before to New York’s Stonewall
Riots. I then examine debates that circulated between 1969 and 1972 among gay men,
specifically regarding the Vietnam War, the Black Panthers and Black Power, a “gay
nationalist” project in California’s rural Alpine County, and the Cuban Revolution. I
explain how principles of alliance and gay space came to stand in tension. Throughout
these debates, I examine how gay white men mobilized through figures of Black and
Third World revolution; consider how Black and other gay men of color challenged
racism among gay white men; and describe how gay liberationists came to disavow
marginalized, working class sites of urban queer life.
Chapter 3, “Connecting the Struggle: Building a Gay and Lesbian Left,” examines
gay and lesbian engagements with 1970s Marxist, Marxist-Leninist, socialist, socialist-
feminist, and feminist of color thought. I find that gay and lesbian radicals drew on these
other social movement formations and their ideas to self-consciously construct a “gay and
lesbian left.” I analyze how two Los Angeles gay and lesbian Marxist-Leninist groups
theorized homosexuality as a “contradiction” of capitalist society, and also how these
groups elided questions of sexuality’s intersections with race. I then explore a wide
range of Bay Area organizations that sought to redefine queer “community” from more

25
multiracial perspectives and that worked to build multi-issue coalitions to fight the right,
especially in the campaign against the Briggs Initiative in 1978, and in activism around
gentrification and police abuse at the decade’s end.
Chapter 4, “’Si Nicaragua venció’: Queer Solidarity in the Reagan Years,” details
lesbian and gay solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution, explaining the Revolution’s
model of expansive social movement building; the leadership that lesbians of color,
including Nicaraguan and other Latina immigrants, played within solidarity work; and
how solidarity activists made transnational queer meaning of San Francisco’s Mission
District. While focusing most strongly on the ideas and contributions of the group Somos
Hermanas, I explore more generally how President Reagan’s proxy war on Nicaragua
consolidated queer solidarity with the Revolution and helped queer anti-imperialists
understand links between Nicaraguan solidarity, cutbacks in social services and
affirmative action, the culture wars, and AIDS.
Finally, my Conclusion considers how queer anti-imperialist activism has been
forgotten or remembered in contemporary activism; explores the impact of the Cold
War’s end on queer anti-imperialist politics; and highlights the value of writing
intersectional histories of social movements.
I argue that queer anti-imperialist activism is crucial for narrating a multiracial
and transnational queer history. Such history deepens our knowledge of how inequalities
of race, class, and nation are constructed through heteronormative power; further, it helps
us move towards more expansive, egalitarian visions of citizenship and community.
Imagining Alliance is inspired by the belief that activism and scholarship centering queer

26
sexualities, identities, and political critiques hold real power to counter the oppressions of
race, empire, and nation. Though queer lives are continually represented through tropes
of economic, racial, and global privilege, a host of activist archives reveal powerful
alternatives to this vision. I mobilize these archives not only to commemorate, but also to
sustain, the right to reimagine the meanings of sexuality and sexual difference.

27
CHAPTER ONE
The Long 1960s, Queer of Color Critique, and Postwar
California
This chapter examines the existing scholarship and broader historical context that
inform and provoke my archival study. First, I address the historiography of radical
social movements in the “long 1960s,” challenging assumptions about the place of sexual
and gender politics within the era’s radicalism. Second, I consider how scholarship in
queer studies, particularly the field of queer of color critique, helps historians analyze the
construction of queer community and activism in relation to race, empire, and class.
Third, I offer an overview of queer community and activism in 20
th
century California
before the gay liberation era, particularly in late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Exploring these three topics grounds my analysis of the
political language, activist campaigns, and community geographies of queer anti-
imperialism in California from 1966 to 1990.

Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the “Long 1960s”
My work begins from and contributes to a growing body of scholarship that
analyzes “gay liberation” and succeeding queer politics in close relationship to the anti-
racist, anti-war, anti-imperialist and other radical activism of the late 1960s and early
1970s moment. Scholars in this field – including the historians Martin Duberman,

28
Christina B. Hanhardt, Terrence Kissack, Ian Lekus, Trinity Ordona, Horacio Roque
Ramírez, Marc Stein, Susan Stryker, and Justin David Suran – push past generic citations
of a radical milieu to examine the specific ideological concerns that underlay gay
liberation’s transformations of sexual identity: police harassment and urban renewal; the
Vietnam War and the draft; Black Power and economic survival; the search for global
solidarity.
1
Together, we trace genealogies for gay liberation not only from a younger
generation’s contestations of “homophile” rights leadership, or the inspirations of
Southern-based civil rights, but also from the New Left, Third World Left, and women of
color and socialist feminisms.
2
While fully appreciating the importance of the June,

1
See Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Penguin, 1993); Christina B. Hanhardt, “Butterflies,
Whistles, and Fists: Gay Safe Streets and the New Gay Ghetto, 1976-1981,” Radical History Review 100
(Winter 2008): 61-85 and “Safe Space”: Sexual Minorities, Uneven Urban Development, and the Politics
of Violence (PhD Dissertation, New York University, 2007); Terrence Kissack, "Freaking Fag
Revolutionaries: New York's Gay Liberation Front, 1969-1971,” Radical History Review 62 (1995): 104-
134; Ian Lekus, "Queer Harvests: Homosexuality, the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to
Cuba” (Radical History Review 89 (2004): 57-91, and Queer and Present Dangers: Masculinity, Sexual
Revolutions, and the New Left (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming); Trinity A. Ordona,
Coming Out Together: An Ethnohistory of the Asian and Pacific Islander Queer Women’s and
Transgendered People’s Movement of San Francisco (PhD Dissertation, University of California, Santa
Cruz, 2000); Horacio Roque Ramírez, “’That’s My Place!’: Negotiating Racial, Sexual, and Gender Politics
in San Francisco’s Gay Latino Alliance, 1975-1983,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12:2 (2003): 224-
258, and Memories of Desire: An Oral History from Queer Latino San Francisco, 1960s-1990s (University
of Chicago Press, under negotiation) and Communities of Desire: Memory and History from Queer
Latina/Latino in the San Francisco Bay Area, from the 1950s to the 1990s (PhD Dissertation, University of
California, Berkeley, 2002); Marc Stein, “’Birthplace of the Nation’: Imagining Gay & Lesbian
Communities in Philadelphia,” in Brett Beemyn, ed., Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian, Gay, &
Bisexual Community Histories (Routledge, 1997): 253-288; Susan Stryker, with Victor Silverman,
directors, Screaming Queens (Independent Television Service, 2006); and Justin David Suran, "Coming
Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam"
(American Quarterly 53:3 (2001): 452-488). Also see KC Diwas, “Of Consciousness and Criticism:
Identity in the Intersections of the Gay Liberation Front and the Young Lords Party” (M.A. Thesis,
Department of Women’s History, Sarah Lawrence College, 2005); Regina G. Kunzel, “Lessons in Being
Gay: Queer Encounters in Gay & Lesbian Prison Activism,” Radical History Review (100, Winter 2008):
11-37; and ongoing work by Alice Y. Hom and Kevin Mumford.
2
The “Third World Left” is a contemporary term used as to describe Marxist radicals of color active in the
late 1960s through 1970s: for example, the Black Panthers, the Young Lords Party, East Wind, El Centro
de Acción Social y Autónomo (CASA), Third World Newsreel, I Wor Kuen, and so on. See, particularly,

29
1969 Stonewall Riots, we displace Stonewall and its Greenwich Village location from the
center of the gay liberation narrative, examining a broader range of places,
circumstances, and local meanings for queer politics. Participating in a broader turn
towards transnational social movement histories, we work to overturn a dominant
narrative of the “good” versus “bad” 1960s, in which the power and energy of civil rights
and antiwar activism appears to disintegrate as activists turned towards radical
internationalism and self-determination.
The concept of the “good 60s/bad 60s” has become a shorthand for the widely
circulated view – disseminated broadly in popular media and mainstream politics, as well
as academic histories – that the decade’s social movements began with unity but ended in
fragmentation; began with hopeful vision but ended with angry rebellion; began with a
populist radicalism but ended in a sectarianism that undermined broad-based support and
opened up space for years of conservative backlash.
3
This narrative is deeply flawed for
many reasons, not least being its work to obscure the U.S. state’s role in sabotaging and
repressing dissent. Three major flaws in the “good 60s/bad 60s” story are important to

Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow, & Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles (University of California
Press, 2005), and Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World
Left (Duke University Press, 2006); see also Jason Ferreira, All Power to the People: A Comparative
History of “Third World” Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968-1974, PhD Dissertation, UC Berkeley
(Ethnic Studies), 2007. In addition, Trinity Ordona’s and Horacio Roque Ramirez’s work are especially
useful for understanding relationships between queer people of color and the Third World Left.
3
Paul Buhle coined the term “good sixties/bad sixties” to summarize Todd Gitlin’s argument in Gitlin’s
Years of Protest, Days of Rage (Bantam, 1993). See Buhle, “Madison Revisited,” Radical History Review
57 (1993): 242-249 (248). Gitlin is not solely responsible for this framework, however; it has also been
developed by James Miller, Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
(Harvard University Press, 1987); David Farber, The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s (Hill and
Wang, 1994); and throughout popular memory.

30
examine in order to fully understand the emergence of gay liberation and succeeding
forms of queer radical activism.
First, this narrative of declension has overemphasized the primarily white New
Left as the principle vehicle for radical activism, and overlooked or actively disregarded
the Third World Left of people of color. Too often, “the 1960s” is told through the story
of the best-known New Left organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS, 1960-
1969). Though the good/bad 60s narrative also incorporates Southern-based civil rights
organizing (firmly “good”) as well as Black Power (firmly “bad”), in this narrative the
best potential for revolution in the U.S. ends with SDS’s implosion at its 1969 national
conference. Because SDS fell apart at the calendared close of the decade; because
several influential historians of the era were SDS members; because SDS divided into
factions that a wide range of people find reason to dismiss (Progressive Labor Party
versus Revolutionary Youth Movement/Weather Underground); because many white
women’s liberationists were members, leaders, and/or married to SDS men and SDS’s
history has shaped histories of “second-wave” feminism; and because SDS organized
among the usual historical agents in a majoritarian history of the U.S. (white, middle
class men), SDS’s story has come to predominate in the history of 1960s radicalism.
While SDS imagined a unified “Movement,” did critical work to oppose the
Vietnam War, and built important alliances (including with SNCC and the Black
Panthers), its placement at the center of the era’s movements reproduces the flawed
universalism of its overwhelmingly white, mostly male leadership. This placement also
obscures a far more multiracial and more complex network of radicalism during – and

31
stretching before and after – the decade of the 1960s. Even anti-war work, one of SDS’s
most central concerns, can only fully be understood if historians look past 1969 and
beyond SDS. Historian Andrew Hunt emphasizes that Vietnam veterans’ activism began
in the late 1960s but proliferated most in the 1970s.
4
Hunt further argues that the concept
of the “death of the 1960s” continues because it emphasizes “exceptionalism and
obscur[es] the continuity between then and now,” and because it dovetails with the story
of 1970s conservative victory.
5
Thus, the good/bad 60s narrative holds power because of
ideological work it does today; it sacrifices historical accuracy and complexity while
downplaying the breadth and staying power of the era’s radicalism. SDS did collapse in
1969, but this does not mean all aspects of the “Movement” disintegrated. Indeed, like
the G.I. anti-war movement, feminist, Chicana/o, Native American, Asian American,
environmental and New Communist movements – along with queer activism – all
developed greater strength and made bigger impacts in the 1970s than they had in 1960s.
The second major flaw of the good/bad 60s story is its assumption that Black
Power represented an aberration from civil rights efforts. This concept is remarkable not
only for its hostility to Blackness as a political idea, but also for its ignorance of
internationalist, Marxist, nationalist, and self-defense currents within Black activism over
several decades. Searching for an alternative way to conceptualize Black, as well as
other racial, radicalisms of the era, historians have for several years been moving to

4
Andrew Hunt, “’When Did the Sixties Happen?’ Searching for New Directions,” Journal of Social
History 33.1 (1999): 147-161.
5
Ibid, 157.

32
identify a “long 1960s.” This period is frequently dated from 1955 to 1975, from the
Montgomery Bus Boycott to the “fall of Saigon”; alternatively, it is sometimes dated as
beginning in 1954 (Brown v. Board) or 1957 (Ghanaian independence) and ending in
1973 (the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam and the OPEC oil embargo). While scholars
may vary in their timing of the period, however, they increasingly agree that the
framework of the “long 1960s” provides a critical way to analyze many different activist
currents within a shared historical context.
6
The long 1960s also fit well alongside
Nikhil Pal Singh’s conceptualization of a “long civil rights era,” stretching from the New
Deal to the Great Society, in which anticolonialism and Black “Americanism”
overlapped. Singh offers the long civil rights era as an alternative to the more traditional
“short” chronology of legal civil rights change. He holds that a shorter chronology of
civil rights struggle obscures the political heterogeneity, especially the radicalism, of
midcentury Black politics, as well as the intensity and longevity of white, urban anti-
Black violence and Cold War repression.
7

The “long 1960s” is a distinct category from the “long civil rights era”; the long
1960s are historically later and include anti-war, feminist and gay and lesbian, and
Latina/o, Asian American, and Native American radicalisms. However, these two

6
Some also date the long 1960s from 1954 with the Brown v. Board ruling; from 1956 with the Soviet
invasion of Hungary (which provoked a turn from “Old” to “New” Left); or from 1957 with Ghanaian
independence. The period is also often cited as closing in 1973, with the U.S. withdrawal of troops from
Vietnam, the CIA-sponsored coup in Chile, and the OPEC oil embargo. See Young, Soul Power, 7 for a
discussion of these periodizations, including Frederic Jameson’s theorizations of the era.
7
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Harvard
University Press, 2004); see also Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical
Democratic Vision (University of North Carolina Press, 2003), and Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie:
Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

33
frameworks inform one another. The long 1960s places Southern-based civil rights
activism within a longer, more geographically dispersed Black freedom struggle, and
identifies transnational relationships stretching as early as the 1955 Bandung conference
and as late as the 1975 liberation struggles in Angola and Mozambique. My study moves
beyond 1973 or 1975 into what we might term the first phase of the “long 1980s.”
However, I embrace the long 1960s as a way to think about the fluidity of social
movements, and in particular, as a way to examine the emergence of gay liberation and
new iterations of queer politics that continued into the mid 1970s and later. The long
1960s allows us to acknowledge, rather than downplay, the early 1970s growth of the
antiwar movement and of multiple modes of feminisms. Its timeline opens up an analysis
of the full timeline of U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and the longer history
of federal civil rights policy. Further, the long 1960s opens space to explain the Third
World Left, meaning Marxist radicals of color active in the Black Panthers, the Young
Lords Party, Third World Newsreel, I Wor Kuen, and other groups. This formation was
critical in both Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and was especially fueled by the 1968-
1969 Third World Strike at San Francisco State College.
8
All these developments proved
critical in galvanizing queer activism and specifically queer anti-imperialism.
Thus, the long 1960s also helps us move away from a third major problem in the
“good 60s/bad 60s” narrative, namely the ways that this narrative misreads the

8
See in particular Pulido, Young, and Ferreira (previously cited); as well as work by Lorena Oropeza,
Diane Fujino, Robin Kelley, Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, George Mariscal, Max Elbaum,
Steve Louie and Glenn Omatsu, Andrés Torres and José E. Velázquez, William Wei, and others.

34
relationships between gender, sexuality, and racial politics. Acknowledging little beyond
white women’s liberation, the “good 60s/bad 60s” framework offers little to no insight
into the growth of feminisms of color, or many other feminisms, especially socialist and
Marxist feminisms. A good 60s/bad 60s history terms feminism and gay liberation as, in
James Miller’s words, “smaller single-issue” movements, concerned primarily with
sexism and homophobia inside radical groups, not seeking to address inequalities
structuring broader society.
9
Alternatively, it describes feminist and gay and lesbian
activism only as movements for equal protection and other “rights.” Thus, John
D’Emilio locates the primary inspiration for both homophile activism and gay liberation
within what Singh would term the short, primarily Southern, civil rights movement.
10

Here, D’Emilio fails to contend with late 1960s shifts to a more internationalist, anti-
imperialist agenda in his accounts of either Black or gay and lesbian politics.
11

Many of the gaps in scholarship around late 1960s gender and sexual politics
grow out of the assumption that women’s and queer self-assertion stood at inherent,
fundamental odds with a politics of race. Politicized Black, Latino and Chicano (though
importantly not so much Native American or, especially, Asian American) identities

9
See James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1994; original publication 1987), 317. See also Farber.
10
John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the
United States, 1940-1970. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983.
11
In contrast to D’Emilio, David Churchill observes that by the mid 1950s, homophile political culture had
turned decisively away from left internationalist inspirations, embracing an assimilationist language of U.S.
nationalism, exceptionalism, and positioning Arab, Polynesian, and other Third World sexualities within a
developmental past. Churchill, “Transnationalism and Homophile Political Culture in the Postwar
Decades,” GLQ 15:1 (2008): 31-66.

35
remain widely perceived as intrinsically masculinist and hostile to feminist and gay and
lesbian concerns. In obverse, feminism and gay liberation have been understood as
intrinsically white and unconcerned with, even discomfited by, racial or postcolonial self-
assertion. Tensions around race, gender, and sexuality reverberate through contemporary
historiography as sources of movement “failure” or disintegration. Far from being
inherent, however, these tensions have been actively resisted as well as constructed
within radical rhetoric and culture.
Within his queer history of the New Left, Ian Lekus identifies white activists’
constructions of a racialized “radical masculinity.”
12
Lekus notes that New Leftists
imagined a nationalistic Black or Latino man as the agent of revolution and then
emulated that symbolic portrait, employing sexist and homophobic language to signify
revolutionary credentials. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu has examined a complementary dynamic
in early women’s liberation, a “radical Orientalism” that constructed the potential for
women’s revolutionary leadership through images of Vietnamese and other Southeast
Asian guerrilla women leaders.
13
Wu examines materials from women’s antiwar
activism, particularly the 1971 Indochinese Women’s Conference that brought Southeast

12
See Lekus, Queer and Present Dangers (forthcoming); and presentation at the Schlesinger Library
Summer Seminar on Gender History: “Sequels to the 1960s,” Cambridge, June 2008 (unpublished paper).
Also useful here are Kobena Mercer, “’1968’: Periodizing Politics and Identity,” in Lawrence Grossberg,
Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds., Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1992): 424-438; Angela Davis, “Afro
Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia,” Critical Inquiry 21 (Autumn 1994), 37-45; and Van Gosse,
Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (Verso, 1993).
13
Judy Wu, “Journeys for Peace and Liberation: Third World Internationalism and Radical Orientalism
during the U.S. War in Vietnam,” Pacific Historical Review November 2007 (76:4): 575–584; and Wu,
“Rethinking Global Sisterhood: Peace Activism and Women’s Orientalism,” Schlesinger Library Summer
Seminar on Gender History: “Sequels to the 1960s,” Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 26, 2008.

36
Asian women together with both women of color and white women from the U.S. and
Canada. She finds that activists brought together notions of exotic femininity and 19
th

century “politics of rescue” with images of guerrilla struggle, adopting as icons the North
Vietnamese leader Madame Dinh, as well as a Viet Cong mother carrying a baby in one
arm and a rifle in the other.
Icons of “radical masculinity” and “radical Orientalism” shaped gay and lesbian
politics as well. Certainly, masculinist iconography within the New Left was imbued
with an implicit homoerotic reminiscent of blackface minstrelsy.
14
Terrence Kissack has
argued that leftist gay men, both white and of color, drew on this homoerotic to develop a
revolutionary gay identity; Wu’s work compels us to ask whether practices of radical
Orientalism may have also inspired lesbians on the left.
15
At the same time as this
homoerotics operated, however (and granting all its problems), we also know many
straight radicals’ virulent homophobia fractured gay men’s and lesbians’ involvement in
New Left and Third World Left organizations. Lekus has traced an illustrative example
of how this problem played out within the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba.
Drawing activists from across the U.S., with especially strong bases in New York
and the Bay Area, the Venceremos Brigades began in 1969 as an attempt to rejuvenate

14
This homoeroticism was apparent enough to lead many mainstream observers to view white male
radicals as abandoning their manhood through political dissent. As Lekus notes, in 1969 Thomas Foran,
the U.S. Attorney prosecuting the Chicago Seven, sneered “damn fag” at defense witness Allen Ginsberg,
and later declared, “we’ve lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution.” Lekus, “Losing Our Kids: Queer
Perspectives on the Chicago Seven Trial,” in John McMillian and Paul Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited
(Temple University Press, 2003): 199-213. On homoeroticism and blackface more broadly, see Eric Lott,
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford, 1993).
15
Kissack, 107.

37
SDS. They echoed Freedom Summers by bringing North American activists to support
the Cuban Revolution; as Lekus notes, brigadistas “looked to learn from Cuba’s
experiences building el Hombre Nuevo, the New Man.”
16
However, when Gay
Liberation Front members joined the Brigades in 1970, debates exploded over the politics
of homosexuality. Through prison camps and other measures, revolutionary Cuba sought
to end homosexuality – restricting it as both sexual economy (male prostitution had
flourished under Batista, generally serving U.S. businessmen) and as an affectional
subculture. While GLF members reported that some Cuban officials came out as gay to
them, straight leaders of the Brigades defined U.S. gay liberation as a culturally
imperialist imposition against the revolution. By 1972, the Brigades instituted an explicit
ban on gay and lesbian participants.
17
Many gay and lesbian liberationists cited Brigades,
and Cuban, policy when explaining their own alienation from the straight left.
Yet activist archives make it clear that many gay and lesbian radicals found the
Brigades, the Cuban Revolution, and other formations inspirational for gay liberationist
politics, despite these formations’ apparent hostility to queer people. Anti-imperialist
politics seemed to provide deep meaning for goals of sexual freedom and queer
autonomy. Queer activists, of color as well as white, used anti-imperialist and other
radical language to contest the notion that gay liberation was a “white” movement or one
inevitably wedded to U.S. citizenship. Thus, anti-imperialist politics were central in

16
Lekus (2004), 61.
17
Ibid, 78.

38
inspiring, dividing, and shaping radical gay and lesbian politics and in helping activist
construct queer community.
Within all the scholarship on the long 1960s era, histories of feminisms of color,
and anti-racist white feminisms, offer a key model for analyzing the impact of anti-
imperialism on queer politics. These histories insist on the multiplicity and plurality of
women’s activism, positing simultaneous, intermingled currents of “feminisms” against a
more rigid history of first, second, and third “waves.”
18
Histories of multiple postwar
feminisms note a groundwork laid in the 1950s and early 1960s, one extending well
beyond individual “bridge” figures to larger community debates and organizations.
19

Thus, Danielle McGuire documents a 1959 African American community campaign in
Florida to bring white men who assaulted Black women to trial; McGuire argues that
discussion of rape helped to shift the politics of respectability in Southern civil rights
organizing.
20
Marisela Chavez traces the history of the League of Mexican American
Women, founded in 1966 by a cohort of women active from the 1950s forward; these
women organized for jobs and economic rights for Mexican American women in the mid
1960s, and in 1970 allied with the younger, Chicana-identified Comision Feminil

18
See Nancy Hewitt, “Not Our Mothers’ Movement: Historical Amnesia and the Attenuated Legacy of
Feminist Struggles,” presented at the Schlesinger Seminar, June 26, 2008.
19
Two frequently cited “bridge” figures are Pauli Murray and (for gay activism) Bayard Rustin. See Susan
M. Hartmann, “Pauli Murray and the ‘Juncture of Women’s Liberation and Black Liberation,’” Journal of
Women’s History 14.2 (2002): 74-77; and John D’Emilio, “Homophobia and the Trajectory of Postwar
American Radicalism: The Career of Bayard Rustin,” Radical History Review 62 (Spring 1995): 80-103.
20
See Danielle L. McGuire, “’It Was Like All of Us Had Been Raped’: Sexual Violence, Community
Mobilization, and the African American Freedom Struggle,” The Journal of American History 91:3
(December 2004): 906-931.

39
Mexicana Nacional.
21
Similarly, Barbara Ransby approaches Ella Baker as an organizer
who built networks across a wide range of activist circles and worked to prioritize
women’s leadership, and Black women’s experiences, in all of them.
22

Clearly, however, feminist activism among both women of color and white
women did accelerate in the later 1960s and 1970s as anti-imperialist critique and
revolutionary and cultural nationalisms gathered force. Issues including the Moynihan
report and welfare rights, the draft, reproduction and childrearing, and the feminized
labor of “Serve the People” programs (such as the free breakfast programs offered by the
Panthers and others) carried gendered complexity for the meanings of self-determination
and racial pride. While “women’s liberation” “gay liberation,” and “lesbian feminism”
were widely coded as white movements, women of color crafted autonomous
organizations and modes of thought. Benita Roth argues that Black, Chicana, and white
feminisms emerged simultaneously, though centering around distinct concerns and
functioning through largely separate organizations and networks.
23
Key efforts among
Black and Latina women in the late 1960s and early 1970s included the Third World

21
Marisela Chavez, “’We have a long, beautiful history’: Chicana Feminist Trajectories and Legacies,”
paper at Schlesinger Library Summer Seminar, June 24, 2008.
22
Ransby, Ella Baker.
23
Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism: Black, Chicana, and White Feminist Movements in America’s
Second Wave (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). See also Kimberly Springer, Living for the
Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980 (2007); Jennifer Nelson, Women of Color and the
Reproductive Rights Movement (NYU, 2003); Annelise Orleck, Storming Caesars Palace: How Black
Mothers Fought Their Own War On Poverty (Beacon, 2005); Wini Breines, The Trouble Between Us: An
Uneasy History of White and Black Women in the Feminist Movement (Oxford, 2006); and many personal
accounts collected in Rachel Blau Duplessis and Ann Snitow, eds., The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices
from Women’s Liberation (Rutgers, 2007).

40
Women’s Alliance, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and Las Hijas de
Cuauhtémoc. Feminist of color critique also developed through multiracial, international
conferences, including the Indochinese Women’s Conference in 1971.
24
Some co-gender
revolutionary nationalist groups, including the Young Lords Party in New York City,
became venues for co-gender consciousness-raising and saw their platforms significantly
transformed by women’s leadership and feminist (as well as gay liberationist) agendas.
25

Both during and since the long 1960s era, queer activists have faced similar
challenges as (straight) feminists when engaging with anti-imperialist politics. Critiques
of empire have most commonly been articulated through national liberation projects;
nationalisms have generally turned to normative understandings of gender and the family
to recuperate land, power, and community identity. Many anti-racist women (and not a
few feminist men) have responded to this problem by explaining oppressive gender,
family, and sexual roles as legacies of empire or, at least, as obstacles to full liberation
from empire. They have argued that overturning gender oppression is critical for racial
and/or ethnic self-determination, and questioned the importance of the “nation” as a
vehicle for liberated collectivity. These thinkers – activists, scholars, and both – have
understood racism and imperialism quite differently than those white feminists of the so-
called “second wave,” who tended approach race and empire as mere analogues to

24
Wu, ibid.
25
See Jennifer A. Nelson, “’Abortions under Community Control’: Feminism, Nationalism, and the Politics
of Reproduction among New York City’s Young Lords,” Journal of Women’s History 13.1 (2001): 157-
180; Diwas; and work by Martha Arguello, PhD Candidate, UC Irvine, presented at the Schlesinger
Summer Seminar, June 2008.

41
women’s inequality.
26
While feminist efforts among white women – radical, socialist,
cultural, and mainstream – are certainly critical to study, displacing white women from
the center of feminist history, both as subjects and as agents, opens up a more expansive
critique of gender writ large.
As Kimberly Springer and Becky Thompson both observe, some Black and anti-
racist white women initially avoided “women’s liberation” or “feminist” organizations in
the late 1960s, yet nonetheless developed a feminist consciousness.
27
These women
rejected a feminism that saw itself as “organizing around gender unencumbered by
thinking about other oppressions,” as Benita Roth puts it.
28
Roth notes that because they
rejected a deracinated notion of gender, many women of color activists in the late 1960s
and 1970s used the label “feminist” strategically – in some settings and not others – as
they worked to integrate feminist and nationalist thought. These concerns also
contributed (in perhaps more muted ways) to schisms within and between primarily white
feminist groups, particularly dividing socialist from non-socialist white women. Roth
argues that while the idea of “organizing one’s own” was broadly shared by radical

26
Some of this language has been suggested and analyzed by Alice Echols in Daring to Be Bad: Radical
Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota Press, 1989). For example, Echols describes
radical feminists analyzing women as the “Fourth World.” See also Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The
Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and New Left (New York: Knopf, 1979), and
Anne Valk, “Living a Feminist Lifestyle: The Intersection of Theory and Action in a Lesbian Feminist
Collective,” Feminist Studies 28:2 (2002): 303-332.
27
Springer, ibid. See Becky Thompson, “Multiracial feminism: Recasting the chronology of second wave
feminism,” Feminist Studies 28:2 (2002), especially 338-341, for discussion of anti-racist white women
who opted not to join “women’s liberation” groups they felt did not address racism or imperialism.
28
Roth, 8.

42
women across race and ethnicity, how women understood “their own” varied depending
on the other movements and communities they claimed.
Thus, radical women of various racial and ethnic communities during the long
1960s developed distinct feminist ideas and tactics based on their racially specific
experiences of gender as well as the “nations” (and movements) with which they
identified. Most obviously, Black radical women saw their gender oppression structured
through Moynihanian images of black matriarchy and family pathology, as well as
political uses of masculinism among many Black nationalists. They expressed deep
frustration with white women who analogized their own experiences of sexism to Black
men’s experiences of racism. By contrast, Roth suggests that many Chicana women
found it easier to blend feminism into cultural nationalist rhetoric regarding the Chicana/o
family, both because they did not face an ethnically specific Moynihan report and
because they were relatively ignored by white women (for example, few if any white
feminists claimed that they were made “brown,” versus “Black,” by sexism).
29

Scholarship on women’s leadership in the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party (YLP)
in New York City also helps to elaborate this picture of the specific racial and ethnic
contexts shaping multiple feminisms. Due to the long history of coercive birth control
and sterilization policy both on the island and in New York City, women in the Young
Lords constructed a reproductive justice platform supporting the right to abortion while

29
Roth, 165; 198. Kimberly Springer and Marisela Chavez’s work provide further comparative analysis.
See also Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico (UC
Press, 2002).

43
passionately opposing sterilization policies. Reflecting their critique of U.S. imperialism
in Puerto Rico, the YLP took up the slogan “End all genocide. Abortions under
community control.”
30
They advocated for sufficient anti-poverty programs to support
families of whatever size Puerto Rican women preferred. Additionally, women in the
Young Lords actively struggled to change the consciousness of the Party’s men, making
significant strides to overturn men’s sexism and in the process critiquing separatism
among white women’s liberation. Martha Arguello and Jennifer Nelson suggest that both
women and men in the Young Lords may have found it easier to integrate a gender
analysis into ideas of community self-determination because they already understood the
Puerto Rican nation as multiracial – Black, Afro-Indian, and mestizo – and thus were less
concerned with maintaining normative lines of reproduction.
31

Histories of the multiple feminisms of the long 1960s provide a key model for
studies of gay liberation and other queer activism because they help to highlight how
politics of gender and sexuality developed in both fraught and generative relationship to
race, class, and national liberation. The very concept of “multiple feminisms”
emphasizes overlaps between social position, identity, and ideology. Among lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender people, such overlaps have produced politics both radical
and moderate; anti-imperialist and nationalist; multi-issue and single-issue; gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgender; enmeshed in or resisting white privilege; urban or rural; upper

30
Nelson (2001), 174.
31
KC Diwas also finds significant openness to alliance with gay liberation in the YLP.

44
and middle or working class; and rooted in Black, Latina/o, Asian or Pacific Islander,
Native American, and Middle Eastern as well as white experiences.
Queer sexualities and identities are distinct from experiences of womanhood,
however, in that queerness is generally positioned outside the family or nation, and
located instead within marginalized, subcultural spaces. To consider the difference that
this experience makes, I now turn to some key ways that race, class, and geography have
been theorized within queer history and queer studies, and finally to an overview of queer
history in 20
th
century California, particularly examining Los Angeles and San Francisco
between World War II and the late 1960s.

Thinking Through Race, Space, and Empire in Queer Studies
Since the 1980s, queer history has been told primarily through local community
stories, that is, narratives based around a particular place (usually a city). While these
histories are extremely valuable, they have run the risk of uncritically celebrating
“claiming space,” or commemorating gay and lesbian neighborhoods without extensively
considering how exclusions of race or class have marked such space. Many have also
tended to assume that a particular kind of space – an urban area built on a consumption
economy – provides the natural destination of gay freedom. Such works bear a
significant influence from historian John D’Emilio, particularly his 1983 essay
“Capitalism and Gay Identity,” which describes queer communities, identities, and
politics as emerging out of urban capitalist development. D’Emilio argues that

45
industrialization in the mid to late 19
th
century created new possibilities for economic
independence from heterosexual family life, and that gay and lesbian urban enclaves
developed in the wake of this shift.
32
This historiographical model posits successive
stages of, first, the commodification of same-sex sexuality (mostly male and
transgenderal); second, the beginning of public communities; and most recently, the
growth of lesbian and gay "ghettos."
33

D’Emilio’s analysis follows the overall distinction made in queer studies between
behavior and identity. Queer identities are understood to be socially constructed and
historically specific, lending meaning to a diversity of sexual and gender behavior
apparent across historical eras, political economies, and cultural contexts. Social
constructionism opens up space for a wide range of places, times, and ways in which
people develop identities we might generally categorize as “queer.” But this theoretical

32
John D'Emilio, "Capitalism and Gay Identity." Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. C. S. Ann
Snitow and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983). D’Emilio also situates a
capitalist basis for gay identity at the root of differences between lesbian and gay male lives, arguing that
gay male sexuality has taken up greater public space because capitalism relies on a
productive/reproductive, public/private (male/female) split. He adds that while "free" labor may unleash
new freedoms to take up gay identity, capitalist society produces inequality for everyone, by situating the
privatized heterosexual family as the locus of “affectional” ties. He argues that increased sexual freedom
can be achieved through socialized family forms and an overall rejection of capitalism. As Marc Stein puts
it, D’Emilio’s work puts into play a “form of Marxist feminist social constructionism that highlighted the
effects of industrialization and urbanization on household economies, family dynamics, and relations
between the sexes" (Stein, "Theoretical Politics, Local Communities: The Making of U.S. LGBT
Historiography,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11:4 (2005), 607). See also D’Emilio and
Freedman’s Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (Harper & Row, 1988) and Allan Bérubé’s
Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two (Free Press, 1990).
D’Emilio and Freedman generally characterize movements around sexual politics as generated by moments
of large-scale social transition, perpetually tied to questions of gender inequality, and continually
confronting hegemonic uses of sex and sexuality as symbols of racial hierarchy or immigration change
33
In using the term “transgenderal,” I draw on Peter Drucker, “Introduction,” in Drucker, ed., Different
Rainbows (Gay Men’s Press, 2000): 17. By “transgenderal” Drucker indicates same-sex desire organized
around a gender axis: a masculine man with an effeminate man or male-to-female transgender person.

46
model has nonetheless often been used to assume that public identities built around
sexual and gender variance have only developed in urban, capitalist, global North
contexts. Thus, Esther Newton cherishes Cherry Grove, Fire Island, in the vacation
shadow of New York City, as "the world's only geography controlled by gay men and
women.”
34
Newton finds that the Grove has held a disproportionate impact on the image
of what it means to be gay: Grovers have been largely "young, white, male, promiscuous,
artistically inclined, and middle-class.”
35
She finds that Cherry Grove inspires lesbian
and gay politics towards what she terms “nationalist” directions. The concept of a gay
“nation” not only posits gay and lesbian people as a cultural minority, but also views
geographic concentration as the most effective vehicle for people in that culture to gain
political and social power.
Gay “nationalism” has been a powerful concept within queer activism and queer
studies, and it has privileged a universalized, implicitly white male, subject. Even as
urban gay enclaves are increasingly described as unnecessary, disintegrated, or simply
passé, concentrated “gayborhoods” remain seen as the pinnacle of gay self-expression.
36

Yet, as John Howard notes, this dominant concept of “gay community” – tied to
economic privilege, mobility, and urban or semi-urban locations – cannot describe the

34
Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America's First Gay and Lesbian Town
(Boston: Beacon, 1993): 3.
35
Ibid, 11.
36
See, for example, Patricia Leigh Brown, “Gay Enclaves Face Prospect of Being Passé,” New York Times,
October 30, 2007; and David Colman, “Rich Gay, Poor Gay,” New York Times, September 4, 2005.

47
full range of queer identities and ways of living.
37
D’Emilio’s framework for queer
history tends to imply that minoritarian sexual identities arrive in developmental stages,
and first among relatively privileged people within industrialized U.S. cities. But
assuming that queer identity develops primarily through urban enclaves and economic
freedom posits queerness as the province of middle- and upper-middle class white men;
discounts working-class and queer of color lives and cultures in the U.S., as well as
globally; ignores rural and suburban queer life; and overlooks queer life built around
something other than public consumption.
38
Scholars informed by critical race theory,
ethnic studies, and transnational feminism and cultural studies censure conceptions of
sexuality that order the world according to a racialized hierarchy of sexual liberation and
that cast alternative sexualities in the global South as either oppressively backward or
romantically premodern.
39
They observe that developmentalist assumptions leave us
without a clear understanding of “even the most basic comparative national and
transnational questions" about what queer locations are ordinary or exceptional.
40

37
John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (University of Chicago, 1999), 15.
38
For further such critique, see Charles I. Nero, “Why Are the Gay Ghettoes White?” in E. Patrick Johnson
and Mae G. Henderson, eds., Black Queer Studies (Duke, 2005).
39
See, for example, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke,
2003), and “In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational Politics and the Transnational
Dilemma,” in Lowe and Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Duke, 1997); José
Quiroga in Elisa Glick, et al., “New Directions in Multiethnic, Racial, and Global Queer Studies,” GLQ
10:1 (2003): 123-127; Joseph Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World,
Public Cultures 14:2 (2002): 361-385; and Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and
South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke 2005).
40
Stephen Maynard, “’Without Working?’ Capitalism, Urban Culture, and Gay History,” Journal of Urban
History 30 (2004), 380. See also work by Matt Houlbrook; and by Jon Binnie and Gill Valentine (1999).

48
The field of “queer of color critique” – the term has been coined by Roderick
Ferguson – offers a powerful alternative model to challenge and move past these
problems in queer studies.
41
Queer of color critique observes that alternative sexual and
gender identities are produced among marginalized as well as economically privileged
people, and holds that no one queer identity is necessarily more authentic than any other.
Ferguson cites historical materialism, canonical and Black sociology, and women of
color feminism in the genealogy of queer of color critique. He “disidentifies” with
historical materialism and canonical sociology, however, in order to critique the ways
that these fields pathologize both prostitution and Black sexuality. Here, Ferguson
(joined by many others) breaks with the notion that transgender identity is a kind of false
consciousness, imitative of sexist gender roles or predating identities built around same-
gender desire. Rather than an aberration, Ferguson presents the figure of a Black drag
queen prostitute as a "fixture of urban capitalism" – someone who typifies capitalist
relations and is central to formulations of African American culture. Ferguson suggests
that we can critique how sexual and racial norms construct one another and explain the
drag-queen prostitute without calling her pathological.
42
He views the Black drag queen
prostitute as someone constituted by, yet resisting, the U.S. political economy, which has
"implanted and multiplied intersecting racial, gender, and sexual perversions”: the
deviant Chinatown, the Black vice district, the premodern Mexican immigrant home, all

41
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique (University of Minnesota, 2004).
42
Ibid, 11.

49
of which are placed “outside the image of the American citizen.”
43
Here, Ferguson builds
on a growing body of histories analyzing the boundaries of “sexual citizenship” in U.S.
social welfare policy and immigration law.
44

Queer of color critique and the related field of transnational queer studies counter
the assumptions that the U.S. state provides the best home for queer people and that
capitalist globalization provides the most secure means for achieving sexual freedom.
Transnational queer studies critiques assumptions about an “expanding” gay and lesbian
movement, which would figure queer identity and freedom to flow North to South or
West to East; instead, it details a wider, more complex history of minority sexual and
gender identities.
45
Thus, Martin Manalansan describes a diasporic Filipino gay identity
circulating between the Philippines and New York, and contrasts bars in Greenwich

43
Ibid, 13-14. Ferguson draws on work by Nayan Shah, Kevin Mumford, George Sánchez, and Lisa Lowe.
44
See Margot Canaday, "Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I.
Bill,” Journal of American History 90:3 (2003): 935-957; Siobhan B. Somerville, “Sexual Aliens and the
Racialized State: A Queer Reading of the 1952 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act,” in Eithne Luibhéid
and Lionel Cantú, Jr., eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings
(University of Minnesota, 2005): 75-91; Susana Peña, “Visibility and Silence: Mariel and Cuban American
Gay Male Experience and Representation.” Queer Migrations: 125-144; Juana María Rodriguez, Queer
Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces (New York University Press, 2003); Jasbir Kuar Puar,
"Transnational Configurations of Desire: The Nation and its White Closets," in Birgit, et al., eds., The
Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke, 2001); Jennifer P. Ting, “Bachelor Society: Deviant
Heterosexuality and Asian American Historiography,” in Gary Okihiro, et al., eds., Privileging Positions:
the Sites of Asian American Studies (Washington State University Press, 1995); Lionel Cantú, The
Sexuality of Migration: Border Crossings and Mexican Immigrant Men (NYU, 2009); Eithne Luibhéid,
Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (University of Minnesota, 2002); Nayan Shah, “Policing
Privacy, Migrants, and the Limits of Freedom,” Social Text 23 (3-4): 275-284; GLQ 14:2-3 (2008) on
“Queer/Migration”; Marc Stein’s ongoing work on immigration law; and work by M. Jacqui Alexander.
45
Key work in transnational queer studies includes Manalansan, Gopinath, and Massad (above), as well as
Licia Fiol-Matta, A Queer Mother for the Nation: the State and Gabriela Mistral (University of Minnesota,
2002); Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV, eds., Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and
the Afterlife of Colonialism (NYU, 2002); and the special issue of Social Text 23:3-4 (Fall-Winter 2005),
“What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”

50
Village or Chelsea that exclude or objectify Asian gay men against queer immigrant life
in New York, as in a Latina/o bar in Jackson Heights that is straight until 7 p.m., but gay
(Latino and Filipino) after that hour.
46
Building on Manalansan, Gayatri Gopinath calls
for queer studies to transform its concept of “home,” naming “queer diaspora” as a
method for locating subjects typically deemed “impossible” in nationalist tropes,
including queer women.
47
Transnational queer studies does not ignore the reality of
homophobia around the world. Rather, it considers the ways that queer identities become
constituted across pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings.
48
This scholarship
emphasizes that while abstract analogies between sexuality to race are flawed, the politics
of sexuality and nationalism are deeply embedded in each other.
Thus, a political economic analysis of sexuality and sexual identity can be
adapted to examine multiple expressions of queerness, in disparate locations, developing
simultaneously and in transnational dialogue. As Peter Drucker suggests, we might adapt
the notion of "combined and uneven development" to analyze a "combined and uneven
social construction" of sexuality.
49
Within U.S. queer history, such analysis began to be
seeded in the early 1990s with studies of class, gender, and racial diversity within urban

46
Manalansan (2003), 71, 143; also Manalansan 1997 and Massad, who critiques a “Gay International”
imaginary that narrates gayness as transhistorical but homophobia as specific to the Third World (369).
47
Gopinath 14. Similarly, Karen Tongson calls on us to acknowledge queer of color possibility and
interventions being staged in U.S. suburbia and “retro” or red states.
48
Peter Drucker makes the useful point that many popular social movements have fostered growth in queer
community, identity, and politics (he cites examples in Nicaragua, South Africa, and the Phillippines).
Drucker adds that feminist and anti-racist consciousness tend to support public queer identities and
community while nationalist movements and especially totalitarian regimes are deterrents (Drucker 31-32).
49
Drucker, 15.

51
queer life, particularly before World War II. D’Emilio’s history of the post-World War
II, pre-gay liberation “homophile” movement describes mostly middle class, white
activists who employed a politics of respectability and stood at some odds to a bar-based
subculture. But while the homophile movement was highly influential, there have also
been other kinds of queer resistance, sustained as much through obfuscation as visibility,
though at times also expressed through violent rebellion. Further, these kinds of
resistance have constituted a diverse range of sexual identities and communities.
Beginning with Elizabeth Kennedy and Marilyn Davis and detailed by George Chauncey,
Kevin Mumford, Nan Boyd, and others, a queer politics has become apparent in which
those forging sexual politics are working class as well as privileged, people of color as
well as white, and immigrants as well as the native-born.
50

In 1930s through 1960s Buffalo, New York, Kennedy and Davis identify working
class lesbians from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds who mobilized their
difference, including their butch-fem passions, to confront police as well as individual
homophobic violence. George Chauncey traces a range of locations and meanings of
male sexual practices and identities in New York City from the turn of 20th century
through the Depression, tracing growing repression and a shift from a gender identity to a

50
Elizabeth Kennedy and Marilyn Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian
Community (Routledge, 1993); Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and
New York in the Early Twentieth Century (Columbia University Press, 1997); George Chauncey, Gay New
York (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Nan Alamilla Boyd, Wide Open Town: A History of Queer San
Francisco to 1965 (UC Press, 2003); and Howard 1999 (cited above).

52
sexual identity system.
51
One of the strengths of Chauncey’s work is the sheer range of
sites he examines, from the Bowery to Harlem to Greenwich Village, from baths and
speakeasies to private apartments and a political “underground.” Chauncey grounds his
analysis in material conditions among immigrant and working class men, including a turn
of the century working class population of more single men than women and tenement
housing that made public baths critical for hygiene yet also invited sexual pleasures.
Though Chauncey finds that men of means found it easier than working-class men to
construct “gay” community and politics as anti-homosexual repression increased, he does
not imply that working-class queer settings or people were unconscious or apolitical.
Chauncey’s study dovetails with Kevin Mumford’s history of vice districts and
interracial sexuality in 1910s through 1930s New York and Chicago. Mumford shows
that the increasing sexual regulation of this era was inseparable from racial regulation,
particularly urban segregation. Anti-vice campaigns not only created vice districts but
also moved them into predominately African American areas; homosexuality became
coded as tied to interracial (hetero)sexuality; and so-called gender “inversion” was
mapped along racial lines, with African Americans generally situated as the abnormal
person in a same-sex pair (that is, the effeminate male or the butch woman). Even
libraries contained what Mumford terms racial and sexual “interzones.”
52
Chauncey adds

51
Chauncey finds that gay life during this era shifted from a gender identity system, in which effeminate
“fairies” paired with masculine “trade,” to a sexual identity system that joined men in a shared identity of
gay or same-gender desire. He notes that gender identities were also marked through ethnicity.
52
For example, “In several rental libraries, proprietors placed… homosexual novels in the so-called colored
section.” Mumford, 74.

53
that the policing of gay men became more pervasive by the 1930s as moral reformers
came to see homosexuality and the crossing of racial and class boundaries as interrelated
urban problems. As policing of queers intensified, middle class and white men with better
access to private space came to dominate a gay subculture that carried less distinct gender
roles and was more markedly white than homosexual life at the turn of the century.
53

This occurred as a series of national sex crime “panics,” between the 1930s and 1950s,
drew the focus of anti-vice policing away from heterosexual women and towards male
and female “deviance” – a term that collapsed consensual adult homosexuality with child
sexual abuse.
54
Cold War rhetoric increasingly linked male homosexuality, political
dissent, and criminality, leading not only to a 1952 ban on homosexual immigration but
also to a “Lavender Scare” blacklisting gay men and lesbians from government jobs.
55

Looking beyond a West Coast/East Coast and urban frame, John Howard has
examined gay history in 20
th
century Mississippi, and provided particularly useful lessons
for theorizing queer identities outside urban enclaves. Howard argues that up through the
gay liberation era, Mississippi gay male life “more often consisted of circulation rather
than congregation,” with sexual contacts in cars, at highway rest stops, and in other

53
See Chauncey 1994, Chapter 9 and page 348.
54
Janis Appier, Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD (Temple
University Press, 1998):154-155; also Chauncey, “The Postwar Sex Crime Panic,” in William Graebner,
ed. True Stories from the American Past (Mc-Graw-Hill, 1993) and David K. Johnson, Lavender Scare:
The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (University of Chicago,
2004). And see Derek Coleman, “When Homosexuals Kill!”, Men’s Life (11/55), or Stephen Nash case,
Clippings File, ONE. Nash was a homosexual convicted in 1957 of killing 10 men and one boy.
55
Chauncey 1993: 160-78 and Johnson. Also see Robert J. Corber, Homosexuality in Cold War America:
Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity (Duke, 1997).

54
locations.
56
He views such contact as everyday, even ordinary, with male-male sexuality
occurring at home with friends and boarders, as well as in churches, schools, and the
workplace. Howard insists that queerness has not been foreign to the South, not rare, and
not primarily urban. Yet he observes that homosexuality became increasingly defined as
“outside” Mississippi through discourse about the African American civil rights
movement. He finds that anti-gay repression in Mississippi increased not in the 1950s,
but the early 1960s, not only because queer Mississippians were present in the Black
freedom movement, but because the movement more broadly "questioned sexual
normalcy" between white and black. White supremacist language came to locate
queerness through the figure of the "dirty beatnik" and "outside agitator" – a Northern
white male with effeminate traits.
57
As Lisa Duggan argues, John Howard’s work shakes
up the field of queer history not only by challenging the community “enclave”
framework, but by also thinking through “homophobic rhetoric and stepped-up policing
as state tools for imposing racial norms."
58

56
Howard, Men Like That, 15. Communication and circulation are key ways to understand queer
geography and queer history. As Howard (joined in this broad analysis by Nayan Shah) observes, paths of
migration and networks of communication have provided viable means of finding sex, relationships, and a
sense of shared identity. In turn, modes of communication have also helped to construct more traditional
gay geographies. Martin Meeker insists on the importance of postwar print culture and other
communication networks in activist conceptions of a national queer geography mapped not only by
“capitals, but meccas, retreats, outposts, hinterlands, borderlands, and colonies.” Meeker, Contacts
Desired: Gay and Lesbian Communications and Community, 1940s-1970s (University of Chicago, 2006),
11. Against Nan Boyd, Meeker argues that "the drawing of the national gay geography with San Francisco
as a, or even, the capital is not something that was predetermined by San Francisco's history as an instant
city or even its reputation as a frontier town wide open to vice... [but was caused by] changing networks of
communication, networks that placed San Francisco near the center" (16).
57
Howard, xv and 148.
58
Lisa Duggan, “Down There: The Queer South and the Future of History Writing.” GLQ 8.3 (2002), 385,
emphasis in original.

55
Thus, queer life both illuminates and is illuminated by histories of racial and
economic hierarchies. Understanding the wide variation of queer experiences sheds new,
more critical light on assumptions about gay “community,” including the assumptions
that gay enclaves tend towards gentrification, and that gentrification naturally expands
queer freedom. Samuel Delany describes a vibrant homosexual world in New York’s
Times Square before its 1970s and 1980s “cleanup,” and notes a wide range of cross-
class contacts among men in pornographic theaters, in all-night diners, and on the
streets.
59
He insists that, against popular belief, such contacts can make an area safer and
more socially stable, versus the decimation seen in Times Square as sex theaters were
purchased, gutted, and left empty while investors earned interest.
Likewise, Christina Hanhardt examines how 1970s campaigns against anti-gay
violence in Chelsea (New York) and the Castro (San Francisco) conceptualized
gentrifying neighborhoods as “gay territories.”
60
What Hanhardt terms a “racialized
culture of poverty thesis based on ideas of wounded masculinity” positioned young men
of color as the key agents of homophobia, leading gay activists to construct “gay
territories” in ways that excluded queer people of color, particularly queer youth.
61

Hanhardt’s points are also underscored by Gayle Rubin’s study of San Francisco’s 1950s
through 1980s South of Market district. In Rubin’s analysis, militant gay leather

59
Samuel Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, New York University Press, 1999.
60
Hanhardt, “Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists: Safe Streets Patrols and the New Gay Ghetto, 1976-1981,”
Radical History Review 100 (Winter 2008), 74.
61
Ibid, 63.

56
sexuality coexisted alongside a Filipino immigrant community, yet amidst the AIDS
crisis, both became cleared away for corporate “redevelopment.”
62
Collectively, Delany,
Hanhardt, and Rubin show that gentrification can destroy rather than produce queer
possibility, as well as construct barriers between queer identities and communities of
color. Their points prove critical to remember as we examine the geographic imaginaries
of gay liberation and other forms of queer radicalism.
Cognizant of the insights of queer of color critique and transnational queer
studies, I turn now to an overview of 20
th
century queer California. Here, I draw on
scholarship on San Francisco and Los Angeles – while awaiting the as yet unwritten
histories of other important California sites, particularly Oakland, Berkeley, and the
wider Bay Area; San Diego and the border area; and Fresno and the Central Valley. I
open with a survey of San Francisco’s queer history and then turn to explore the impact
of policing, including the policing of race, on postwar queer Los Angeles.

Queer History in California
Queer history from the late 19
th
to mid 20
th
century provides a powerful corrective
to the idea of inevitable, progressive historical change – that is, the idea that things
always get better. Over this period, people expressing minority sexualities and modes of
gender expression faced increasing restriction, frequently tied to efforts to contain racial

62
Gayle Rubin, "The Miracle Mile: South of Market and Gay Male Leather, 1962-1997,” in Brook,
Carlsson, & Peters, eds., Reclaiming San Francisco (City Lights Books, 1998). South of Market is now
populated by Costco and other “big box” stores, expensive loft apartments, and some of the most
vulnerable homeless people in the city.

57
hierarchy, national boundaries, and political dissent. Homosexuality and transgender
identity saw increasing regulation, both nationally and in the state of California. San
Francisco and Los Angeles passed city ordinances against cross-dressing in 1863 and
1898; California made “homosexual sodomy” a crime in 1872; and following a Long
Beach scandal of men’s “orgy clubs,” the state made oral sex a felony crime in 1916.
63

Vagrancy, lewd conduct laws, and recurrent police harassment and raids structured queer
life, and amidst this regulation, queer identities grew rather than faded. In Los Angeles,
Daniel Hurewitz traces contexts for homosexual male identity from vaudeville
impersonation and the “fairy paradigm” of the 1900s and 1910s to a more hounded – but
also politicized – subculture shaped by anti-left “sex crime” panics in the 1930s.
San Francisco’s long history of queer cultures included gay male and transgender
life dating to the mid 19
th
century and lesbian community from at least the 1930s
forward. Historian Nan Boyd names tourist economies in San Francisco as well as
national and transnational migration as generating these subcultures’ development,
including their location at the “intersection[s] of sexualized and racialized entertainment
zones.”
64
San Francisco gained a friendlier reputation for queer life than most other
cities, including Los Angeles and New York, both during and after Prohibition, because
the city not only resisted implementing Prohibition but also did less to drive “vice”

63
See Daniel Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics, University of
California Press, 2006. LA City Ordinance 5022 (in 1936, becomes 52.51) banned “masquerading”
following a masquerade ball, All Fool’s Night. Masquerading was more heavily enforced against men until
World War II when butch women or ”hard dressers” became targeted.
64
Boyd, 69-70.

58
underground while the law was in place. After Prohibition’s end, the city regulated
alcohol through a tax board rather than a vice board.
65
These factors fostered greater
room for queer life in post-Prohibition, pre-World War II San Francisco, as female
impersonators and other queer performers, many of them Asian and Latino, moved from
the vaudeville stage to smaller nightclubs and bars. In the postwar era, the city’ become
home to multiple queer cultures: working class, racially mixed lesbian bars in North
Beach; a transgender and gay male scene in the Tenderloin, often expressed through
street hustling and including many people of color; Latina/o queer community in the
Mission District; leather bars in the South of Market; and more exclusive gay male bars,
as well as cruising sites, sprinkled throughout the city.
World War II is widely understood as a critical turning point in the development
of U.S. queer culture and politics. Queer life expanded in cities where war industries and
port jobs grew – including both the Los Angeles area and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Gay and lesbian gathering sites fed not only off of cities’ growing size but also arrivals’
youth and the relative anonymity provided in a place of newcomers.
66
Lesbian cultures
especially grew, as new jobs made it possible for more women to live independently or at
least with one another. Yet the argument for World War II’s meaning goes beyond the
economic “boom,” which would seem to replicate the idea of capitalist growth
unproblematically feeding queer identity. As Allan Bérubé and Margot Canaday argue,

65
Here Nan Boyd disagrees with George Chauncey’s analysis of New York.
66
Bérubé and Boyd find this expansion to be especially strong on the West Coast. Bérubé argues that "gay
bars moved closer to the center of gay life" during the war and that military policy facilitated female
impersonation; responses to vice control also brought many soldiers “out.” Bérubé, 13.

59
the military itself helped to expand queer cultures both because it created large-scale
same-sex environments for men in service and women in the Women’s Auxiliary Corps
(WAC), and because its “blue discharges” compelled many gay men and lesbians to
confront their homosexuality publicly.
67
Inconsistency in military policy also fueled
community-building and political consciousness. Because draft regulations against
homosexuals (as well as against women, and against African Americans in the Marines
and Army Air Corps) were relaxed following Pearl Harbor, more gay men and lesbians
served and began to find one another as lovers and friends. Military police crackdowns
on “vice” in summer 1942 produced growing bar-based resistance that united civilians
and service people, as well as brought gay men and lesbians to gather together to make
their gathering places appear more straight. In negotiating military policing, gay men and
lesbians moved towards a more shared sense of purpose that helped to seed the
“homophile rights” movement following the war.
Persecution of queer life increased not only during the war as the military police
established control over “vice,” but especially following the war as both Los Angeles and
San Francisco established more punitive policing practices. On streets and in bars, gay
men and lesbians faced arrest for a wide range of behavior – from a public sexual
encounter to walking in or near a cruising area, flirting with someone of the same sex,
being present in a gay bar, or simply accusation of any of these. Police increasingly
turned towards tactics of entrapment practices and raids, basing arrests on state laws

67
See previous cites for Bérubé and Canaday.

60
against vagrancy and lewd conduct, as well as prostitution, “sodomy,” and oral sex.
Because businesses serving homosexuals were so likely to be raided and because
prejudice against homosexuality was strong, gay and lesbian bars and other sites tended
to be concentrated in low-income neighborhoods with other forms of “vice” and heavy
police presence. Lesbian women were increasingly targeted in the postwar period, and
lesbians, especially butch women of color, were often falsely charged through
prostitution statutes.
68
This policing was bolstered by anti-communist rhetoric that
situated homosexuality as a threat to the nation. In 1952, the United States formally
excluded homosexuals from immigrating, formalizing a restriction suggested by 1917
immigration law excluding the “immoral.”
69
The same years saw a “Lavender Scare” in
the federal government and sex-crime hysterias in local cities.
70

All this harassment prompted spontaneous resistance at sites of police abuse as
well as more organized activism for legal rights. The homophile rights movement that
presented the most well documented challenges to these problems held its most
concentrated base in California; the movement’s most prominent organizations and
influential publications were founded in Los Angeles and San Francisco. These included
Vice Versa, the first lesbian publication in the country, circulated by a Hollywood

68
See Stuart Timmons and Lillian Faderman, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and
Lipstick Lesbians (Basic Books, 2006) for anecdotes of this process, and Nan Boyd for a deeper analysis.
69
This exclusion was not ended until 1990 – though asylum law was inconsistent; for example gay men and
lesbians were granted asylum from Cuba during the Mariel, but gay men and lesbians from states friendly
to the U.S. found their asylum cases rejected. Here, see work by Juana Maria Rodriguez and Susan Peña,
cited above.
70
See Chauncey 1994, Johnson, and Corber.

61
secretary in 1947 and 1948. In 1948, Los Angeles resident and onetime Communist
Party member Harry Hay founded Bachelors for Wallace, ostensibly to support the
presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, but effectively to bring together leftist gay men.
This group became the seed of the much more well-known Mattachine Society, begun in
1950 in Los Angeles – in the same year and place as Knights of the Clock, an interracial
gay men’s group.
71
In 1953, activists (mostly gay men) in Los Angeles founded ONE
and the One Magazine; in 1955, lesbians in San Francisco founded Daughters of Bilitis
and began the publication The Ladder.
72

The homophile movement generally prioritized privacy rights over public
deviance, and for this reason has often been described as sharply divided from queer
street life and subcultures. Certainly, this division can be overblown; homophile groups
also drew on the energy developed within bars, where, as Boyd puts it, “queers learned to
resist police harassment and to demand the right to public assembly.”
73
Boyd also
suggests that the homophile movement may also have blended more easily, and earlier,

71
More purely social organizations formed in this period as well, including the Satyrs, a predominately gay
motorcycle club begun in 1954 in the Los Angeles area, instrumental in the development of leather culture.
72
Amidst this organizing, a transsexual man, Reed Erickson also brought ONE into relationship with
incipient transsexual and transgender organizing. See Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte, “ONE Inc. and
Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964-2003,” GLQ 10:2 (2004): 179-
209. Important histories of homophile activism more broadly include John D’Emilio, Sexual Politics,
Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970 (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1983); Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and
the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Carrol & Graf, 2006); Stuart Timmons, The Trouble With Harry
Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Alyson Books, 1990); Molly McGarry and Fred Wasserman,
Becoming Visible: An Illustrated History of Lesbian and Gay Life in 20
th
Century America (Penguin Group,
1998); Rodger Streitmatter, Unspeakable: the Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in America (Faber &
Faber, 1995); and previously cited work by Bérubé and Meeker.
73
Boyd, 146. In the 1978 film Word Is Out, George Mendenhall describes the powerful community ritual
of singing “God Save Us Nelly Queens” in San Francisco’s Black Cat bar, led by Jose Sarría.

62
with day-to-day queer life in San Francisco as compared to other cities, due to a series of
key events from 1959 to 1961.
74

First, major public dialogue about homosexuality and homosexual rights began to
circulate in the city.
75
In 1959, the opponent in Mayor George Christopher’s 1959
reelection campaign cited homosexuality as a special problem in the city, and declared
Christopher (who had actually enacted harsh anti-vice policing in his first years in office)
to be soft on vice. The opponent’s tactics backfired and succeeded mainly in galvanizing
homophile activism. In early 1960, several gay bar owners filed complaints against San
Francisco police officers and a liquor board investigator, charging them with seeking
payoffs in exchanged for reduced harassment at bars. The so-called “gayola” scandal
brought several officers to trial and provoked months-long discussion of homosexual
rights. In 1961, a police raid at the Tay-Bush Inn sparked further coverage in which
journalists began to question anti-vice policing.
As a second trend, laws began to change. In 1959 the California Supreme Court,
in Vallerga v. ABC, declared it unconstitutional for the Alcoholic Beverage Control to
revoke a bar’s liquor license simply for having “pervert” (or prostitute) clientele. This
decision was bolstered in 1961 by the California legislature’s repeal of vagrancy laws
that had served as some of the primary justifications for arresting gay men, lesbians, and
bisexual and transgender people. Though homophile organizing helped to produce these

74
Boyd, 202.
75
Ibid, 204-218.

63
shifts – the Daughters of Bilitis testified in support of the Vallerga case, for example –
activism also broadened as public queer life became more secure. Thus, the third major
development of the early 1960s saw queer activism in San Francisco not only growing,
but forging stronger links between bar-based and homophile cultures. In fall 1961, Jose
Sarría, a well-known drag queen and host at the gay Black Cat Bar, made a serious run
for city supervisor (he campaigned in a suit and tie). Sarría’s campaign helped to bring
bar patrons into homophile rights efforts and led to the formation of new, long-lasting
organizations, including the Society for Individual Rights or SIR – a group that, while
harshly criticized as too moderate during the gay liberation era, was more broad-based
and activist-oriented than previous homophile groups. In 1965, SIR, the Tavern Guild (a
gay bar owners’ association), and other homophile groups came together under the
umbrella of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH). The CRH also
involved left religious leaders, whose outcry following a police raid at the organization’s
1965 New Year’s Day Ball helped to further legitimize the presence of gay and lesbian
life, and activism, in San Francisco.
Meanwhile, queer community and activism also developed in Los Angeles. Gay
activists gained less influence locally, however, and bifurcations between “homophile”
and “bar-based” cultures, as well as divisions of race, class, and gender, proved more
difficult to change. Within the early postwar era, gay men’s, transgender, and lesbian
gathering sites were concentrated in Los Angeles’s heavily policed downtown, in
Westlake (contemporary Macarthur Park) and Echo Park, and on Central Avenue. The
first two of these areas were racially mixed, primarily including Latino, white, and

64
Filipino residents, while Central Avenue stood as the main artery of Black life in L.A. In
addition to these areas, queer life was also noticeable – though less heavily policed – in
two mostly Anglo areas, Hollywood and West Hollywood; the latter of these proved
welcoming because the Sheriff’s Department, rather than the city police, controlled the
area.
76
Silver Lake and Echo Park also held gay cruising spots, bars, and queer residents.
In their southern half, these neighborhoods were relatively mixed, Latino and white; in
their northern half, these neighborhoods were more affluent and primarily white, while
also drawing a number of leftists and artists.
77
From 1938 to 1951, onetime Communist
Party member and later homophile activist Harry Hay lived in Silver Lake, and Hay’s
home hosted early meetings of the Mattachine Society.
78
Echo Park’s boathouse and
bathrooms offered cruising sites, and nearby Griffith Park also became a cruising zone,
particularly in the later 1960s. Beyond these concentrated locales, locations as diverse as

76
Moira Rachel Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics (Temple University
Press, 2001): 23 and 80-82. While Sheriff Department policies were inconsistent, the idea of West
Hollywood as less heavily policed is pervasive in queer archives and scholarship. In the mid 1980s, gay
activist and archivist Jim Kepner declared that beginning in the Prohibition era, West Hollywood “drew
people wanting to escape the corrupt Los Angeles police” and enjoy “nightlife, some of it gay.” See
Kepner, “Gays in West Hollywood” (c. 1985), West Hollywood File, ONE National Gay and Lesbian
Archives (hereafter ONE). Further, Kepner writes that by the gay liberation era, “West Hollywood’s
sheriff’s… wanted a saner approach than the LAPD” to handle male prostitution, and helped to move the
Gay Community Services Center from an initial site in downtown L.A. to West Hollywood. Though
Kepner celebrated downtown’s Pershing Square as a longtime center of gay life, by the 1980s he
reminisced, “The park is still there, but it’s hardly Pershing Square anymore, not the place they talked
about… Along with most of the gay community, I’ve moved west.” See Kepner, “Goodbye to Pershing
Square” (c. 1980), Pershing Square File, ONE.
77
The 1500 block of Altivo Way, near the former Chavez Ravine and contemporary Dodger Stadium,
anchored a neighborhood “where unmarried couples, interracial couples and homosexuals could live with
acceptance” (Ursula Vils, “Folk History of a Neighborhood: Altivo Way Residents Chronicle a Changing
Landscape,” Los Angeles Times November 2, 1983). Hurewitz also describes this neighborhood in depth.
78
Hay’s Cove Avenue home is well-cited in Timmons. He lived at Cove Avenue during his marriage but
was sexually active with men, as well as politically active with homophile rights work, during this time.
He left the home upon his divorce.

65
North Hollywood, Baldwin Park, and Pico Rivera were all home to lesbian bars;
Wilmington and the Hollywood Hills hosted gay men’s bars as well.
79

The “multicentered” geography of queer Los Angeles, as Moira Kenney terms it,
reflected both the construction of sexual identities within the city’s racial hierarchy, and
the city’s overall geography of numerous smaller cities and neighborhood centers within
a metropolitan whole. But by the mid 1960s, policing, urban renewal, and the homophile
movement’s own gains were already working to relocate the most well-known gay bars
and cruising grounds from the multiracial and largely working-class East Hollywood,
downtown, and Eastside areas and towards the more Anglo and affluent Westside. Queer
gathering sites became pushed out of downtown and Central Avenue in the 1940s, 1950s,
and early 1960s by practices of both policing and urban renewal. Organized queer
politics increasingly prioritized “becoming visible” and “claiming space” in Hollywood,
West Hollywood, and Silver Lake.
80

This shift west across Los Angeles can and should be analyzed through movement
rhetoric, considering the ways that middle-class, mostly white-led organizations became
the most recognized face of “gay rights,” and how dominant gay and lesbian politics
imagined power and rights through a spatially concentrated, implicitly white identity.
Yet queer communities developed in significant part through both organized and
everyday responses to policing, and the policing of queer sexuality was always tied to the

79
Eric Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2002), 47; Kenney 5, 123.
80
The same pattern is tracked, but not analyzed, by Timmons and Faderman in Gay L.A. (2006).

66
policing of communities of color. A brief analysis of Los Angeles police practices during
the early postwar era helps to illustrate some of the structural problems that gay liberation
came to confront across California, while also beginning to explain differences between
queer San Francisco and queer L.A.
Like other policing, “vice” enforcement in 20
th
century Los Angeles – addressing
heterosexual prostitution, gambling, and illegal sale of alcohol, as well as homosexual
behavior – was driven by, furthered, and helped to map racial hierarchy in the city.
81
In
the Progressive era, the city’s anti-vice campaigns had been fueled by middle class
concerns over white female propriety; these concerns cast interracial and working class
sociality as potentially illicit, produced disproportionately higher arrests of Black and
Latina girls and women than white women, and pushed sex work deeper into
neighborhoods of people of color.
82
As gay male, transgender, and lesbian life grew in
Los Angeles during the 1930s and World War II, it became concentrated within
communities of color and working class areas, thus including Central Avenue,
downtown, and Westlake.
83

81
Joe Domanick analyzes this enforcement through its corruption; see To Protect and to Serve: The
LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (Pocket Books, 1994), especially 96. Domanick also finds
that anti-vice campaigns of the 1900s and 1910s planted “the seeds for the invasive philosophy of policing
that would dominate” in years to come (Domanick 33).
82
Appier 125; see also Mark Wild, Street Meeting: Multiethnic Neighborhoods in Early Twentieth-Century
Los Angeles (UC Press, 2005) and Douglas Flamming, Bound For Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim
Crow America (UC Press, 2005), especially 275.
83
Or what Moira Kenney terms “the urban periphery – warehouse districts, red-light districts, and other
transitional neighborhoods” (23). See also Timmons (1990), 60.

67
The Los Angeles Police Department was a powerful agent of postwar
resegregation in Los Angeles, and its policies proved fundamental in structuring both the
actual and the imagined geography of queer Los Angeles. Chief William Parker led the
LAPD throughout the majority of the postwar, pre-gay liberation era (1950-1966).
Parker was appointed Chief in the wake of a 1948 scandal that revealed LAPD officers
had received payoffs from a heterosexual prostitution ring.
84
Parker carried out his
agenda through a “professionalism” model that hardened practices of harassment and
brutality against people of color, resting on three main tactics: internal control rather than
public oversight; centralization of department power; and the use of crime statistics to
explain criminality by race.
85
Alternately termed “crime control,” “pro-active policing,”
or in Parker’s formulation, “the thin blue line,” this model envisioned the police as an
embattled group protecting society against barely contained forces of chaos.
86
Under
Parker, officers moved off the sidewalk and into technologically equipped cars; they

84
Joe Domanick, To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams (Pocket
Books, 1994), especially 68, 96. See also Tom Sitton, Los Angeles Transformed: Fletcher Bowron’s Urban
Reform Revival, 1938-1953 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005).
85
Edward J. Escobar, “Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police
Department, Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s,” Pacific Historical Review 72:2 (2003),
178; and Escobar, Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los
Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 (University of California Press, 1999), 105 (for discussion of race
and criminal theory).
86
Janis Appier, Policing Women: The Sexual Politics of Law Enforcement and the LAPD (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1998), 139; Daryl F. Gates with Diane K. Shah, Chief: My Life in the L.A.P.D.
(New York: Bantam Books, 1992), 34; Domanick 85.

68
heightened their focus on “street life” – particularly meaning Black and Chicano young
men gathering on street corners and in other public sites – as the key vectors of crime.
87

Brutality complaints against the LAPD increased through the Parker era,
reflecting the department’s accelerating focus on containing Black and Chicano
communities, as well as dissident social movements. A series of controversies over
police brutality towards people of color erupted well before the 1965 Watts Rebellion,
importantly including two scandals – the “Bloody Christmas” and Tony Rios beatings of
late 1951 and early 1952 – that occurred just before and during the first homophile efforts
to challenge police entrapment of gay men.
88
In responding to the Bloody Christmas and
Rios cases, Parker seized the moment to legitimize his philosophy of autonomy and
internal control. He prevented the civilian police commission from investigating these
beatings, and implied that communist groups instigated or even falsified allegations of
police brutality.
89
Such rhetoric isolated leftist organizations, particularly the Civil
Rights Congress, and worked to diminish multiracial coalition building.
90

87
Domanick 110-111. See Martin Schiesl, “Behind the Shield: Social Discontent and the Los Angeles
Police Since 1950,” in City of Promise: Race and Historical Change in Los Angeles (Claremont: Regina
Press, 2006), 138, for a discussion of these changes in police technology.
88
Escobar 1999, 17 and generally Escobar 2003; Schiesl 141-142, 149. See also Kenneth C. Burt, “Tony
Rios and Bloody Christmas: a Turning Point Between the LAPD and the Latino Community,” Western
Legal History 14:2 (Summer/Fall 2001).
89
Escobar 2003.
90
Gerald Horne makes this argument in his history of the Watts rebellion, adding that “the repression of the
left created an ideological vacuum that would be filled by black nationalism.” Horne, Fire This Time: The
Watts Uprising and the 1960s (University Press of Virginia, 1995), 6.

69
Historians of Los Angeles suggest that both homosexuality and interracial social
contact became increasingly important targets of the LAPD in the Parker era. Doug
Flamming and Eric Avila find that Chief Parker’s administration worked to shut down
interracial nightlife, especially those sites, such as Central Avenue jazz clubs, that drew
Anglos along with people of color.
91
Later LAPD Chief and Parker protégé Daryl Gates
remembers Parker as more concerned than his predecessors with addressing vice in
general and homosexuality in particular. Gates states that because officers were
generally uncomfortable with handling homosexual arrests, Parker instituted policies that
required them to investigate every vice call.
92
The LAPD’s Annual Report for Parker’s
first year as chief presented “sex perversion” (homosexuality) as a dramatic new threat to
the city: officers made 84.9% more arrests for sex perversion during 1950 than they had
each year on average in the 1940s.
93
Meanwhile, other vice arrests (including
prostitution, pornography, and gambling) all decreased in 1950. Further, 52.1% of 1950
“sex perversion” arrests occurred in the LAPD’s Central Division, meaning the
downtown area and much of Westlake.
94
Throughout the early postwar era, this area was

91
Flamming 377. See also Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in
Suburban Los Angeles (UC Press, 2004), 54.
92
Daryl Gates with Diane K. Shah, Chief: My Life in the L.A.P.D. (Bantam Books, 1992), 42.
93
These statistics are my tabulations from the Los Angeles Police Department, Annual Report of the Police
Department (Los Angeles: LAPD, 1950), 29.
94
The next highest concentration of “sex perversion” arrests was in Hollywood Division (17%). From at
least 1950 until 1970 (when the Rampart Division was formed from its northwestern portion), Central
Division spanned east to the L.A. River, west to Vermont, north to Los Feliz Boulevard, and south to Pico
Boulevard. Maps were reproduced in the Annual Reports of the LAPD.

70
racially mixed – largely Mexican American and Anglo, but also home to Black, Filipino,
Native American, and other Angelenos of color.
95

Generally, while men of all racial and ethnic groups constituted the overwhelming
majority of “sex perversion” and other “sex offense” arrests in 1950, white men were
disproportionately less likely to be arrested compared to their population; Black and
Latino men were about twice as likely to be arrested compared to their population; and
Black women experienced the overwhelming majority of arrests for providing sex for
pay.
96
Arrest figures should be read critically because they conflate accusation with acts:

95
See Philip J. Ethington, Anne Marie Kooistra, and Edward D. Young, Los Angeles County Union Census
Tract Data Series, 1940-1990, Version 1.01. (University of Southern California, 2000). For histories of
these areas more broadly, see Don Parson, Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the
Direction of Modern Los Angeles (University of Minnesota Press, 2005), and Linda España-Maram,
Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles’s Little Manila: Working Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920-
1950s (Columbia Press, 2006).
96
These are my tabulations from the LAPD’s Statistical Digest, 1956 (arrest figures by race and ethnicity
were not printed in the 1950 report). White men were 75.9% of 1956 male sex arrests versus 87.9% of men
in the 1950 census; Black men were 12.7% of 1956 male sex arrests versus 5% in the 1950 census; Latino
men were 10.1% of 1956 sex arrests versus 5.8% of the 1950 census. Black women experienced the
overwhelming majority of female arrests for prostitution (62.6%) and the largest proportion of all such
arrests regardless of sex or race (42.3%). White women were disproportionately underarrested for
prostitution, while Latina women and Japanese men were both slightly more likely to face such arrest than
their populations would warrant.
Compared to downtown, the Hollywood Division was the secondary center of “sex perversion”
arrests in 1950, while the primarily African American Newton Division was the city’s secondary center of
arrests for (primarily heterosexual) prostitution. The difference between prostitution arrests in Newton
Division (covering South Central) and 77
th
Street (covering the then-middle class area of Watts, to which
middle-class African Americans were moving, leaving more working-class South Central) is also striking.
This suggests a polarization in which Black neighborhoods became targeted as centers of prostitution while
being isolated from the most heavily policed sites of queer sexuality. This should not be read to suggest
that queer Black life did not exist. Rather it may suggest that Black queer people at times sought gay life in
“non-Black” areas (much as all queer people sought out some level of anonymity), while at the same time
private venues (such as house parties) within Black neighborhoods offered important zones of safety from
police harassment on public streets. For further reflection on this pattern of Black queer life, see Roderick
Ferguson, Aberrations in Black; also see E. Patrick Johnson, paper given March 9, 2006, University of
Southern California, in the “Mediating Subcultural Deviance” panel of the scholarly series “The Politics of
the Body.” Similar points are also observed in Buffalo by Kennedy and Davis, 1993.

71
many Black lesbians interviewed in queer oral histories, for example, describe being
frequently arrested for prostitution even though they had never been involved in sex
work. Regardless of how far they distorted actual behavior, however, arrest rates reveal a
sexualized and gendered aspect of how the LAPD enforced racial hierarchy in the 1950s.
Further, these figures suggest that gay life was more harshly policed in racially and
ethnically mixed areas already seen as threats to the city’s social order.
97

In downtown Los Angeles, Pershing Square – on Olive Street between 5
th
and 6
th

– was a key place for men to meet for sex, as well as a frequent site of political protests
and “free speech” activity of many kinds. Gay archivist Jim Kepner and novelist John
Rechy have memorialized Pershing Square as the center of gay male life until the mid-
1960s, with Kepner noting “the singalongs, the political and religious debates (I got very
involved in these), the chess games… a shifting group of people who weren’t afraid to be
different.”
98
The Square also helped to support numerous surrounding businesses with
gay clientele, including bars, baths, restaurants, and newsstands selling physique
magazines and pornography. This concentration was such that, in Kepner’s words, “Fifth
and Sixth Streets from the Park east to Main Street’s bus terminals were known as
‘queen’s row.’”
99
Queer life downtown was continually policed, but diverse by race,

97
George Sánchez, “’What’s Good for Boyle Heights is Good for the Jews’: Creating Multiculturalism on
the Eastside during the 1950s,” American Quarterly 56:3 (September 2004), 633-661.

98
Kepner, “Goodbye to Pershing Square,” Pershing Square file, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.
Undated.
99
Kepner, “Goodbye to Pershing Square.”

72
class, and gender expression. A group of Asian gay men interviewed by Eric Wat in the
1990s remember Main Street as a place where “drag queens could go into the street in
drag. This was in the mid to late 1960s… Downtown was really vibrant.”
100
The racial
and ethnic makeup of gay bars’ clientele varied: Moira Kenney records Maxwell’s
(Second Street at Hill) as “seedier” and often raided, in contrast to the Crown Jewel
(several blocks south) which required a driver’s license and discrete behavior.
101

During the 1950s, downtown also became the site of community defense and
“homophile” political organizing. Gladys Root was a defense attorney often hired by gay
men and, according to the Los Angeles Times – in language that intriguingly linked Root,
a straight woman, with male effeminacy – “the civic center’s most flamboyant figure.”
102

The first homophile organization in the postwar U.S., the Mattachine Society, located
their first office in downtown’s Bunker Hill in 1951. According to Los Angeles gay
activist Morris Kight, in the 1950s and 1960s “gays were drawn to the decaying Bunker
Hill and Westlake neighborhoods by cheap rents created by the evacuation of wealthier
residents… [and] the relative anonymity of the new neighborhood, with its mix of
immigrants and workers.”
103

100
Wat 48.
101
Kenney 84. Wat’s interviewees describe the Crown Jewel as Latino and white; see Wat 56.
102
“Sex Deviates Can Be Cured, Says Attorney,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 1959. Clippings 1950-
1959 File, ONE. Timmons (164) also mentions Root “and a man still practicing today” as defense
attorneys for sex offenders. Notably, activists did not seek either of these attorneys out when they began to
confront entrapment tactics in the courts; they instead went to George Shibley, a civil rights lawyer who
had helped in the Sleepy Lagoon defense of Mexican American youth.
103
Kenney 84.

73
This transition may appear reminiscent of recent patterns of gay gentrification, but
the similarities only stretch so far. Bunker Hill met with growing police assaults on queer
street life during the 1950s; Pershing Square faced police sweeps in 1959 and 1964. The
departure of wealthier residents was followed by “redevelopment” that demolished
Bunker Hill housing in order to clear space for the Harbor Freeway and commercial
development. These plans displaced low-income, particularly Filipino, residents, as well
as multiracial queer life.
104
Though the California Supreme Court’s 1955 Cahan decision
– limiting illegal trespass by police – temporarily stemmed vice arrests, the LAPD
renewed sex offense arrests in the late 1950s and 1960s amidst urban renewal.
105
As
George Chauncey observes, the era’s “sex crimes” panic was statistically unfounded but
fueled anti-gay feeling.
106
Fears of sexual vice also became intertwined with tropes of
racialized criminality. Eric Avila finds that Los Angeles area real estate brochures named
African Americans and sexual “deviants” as two criminal groups that would reduce
property value, and observes that the genre of film noir – often shot in and depicting
Bunker Hill – coded “a racial dimension to its perverse portrayal of sexual relations.”
107

104
For the history of Bunker Hill redevelopment, see Parson; for the history of Filipino community more
broadly, see España-Maram.
105
“Restrictions Let Crime Laugh at Law,” Mirror-News May 31, 1955. Police Methods File, ONE.
Despite Cahan, the LAPD increased their sex offense arrests in 1960, nearly doubled them in 1965; these
arrests then began to decline by 1970; all these jumps and declines were particularly noticeable in the
Central/Rampart Divisions and in Hollywood. Fewer arrests in 1970 may have reflected police
acquiescence to public gay identity, just as a spike in 1965 may have helped to provoke militant gay
activism.
106
Chauncey 1993, 175-177.
107
Avila 80-81.

74
Thus, in 1950s and early 1960s Los Angeles, queer life appeared as an excuse for,
rather than another means of, urban renewal. The city drastically changed Pershing
Square in 1964, ripping out dense bushes, removing most benches, installing brighter
lighting, and transforming the Square’s previous network of greenery into an easy-to-
police (and hard-to-cruise) concrete zone. The “primary consideration,” reported the Los
Angeles Times at the time, “was to create a park site less attractive to the deviates and
other undesirables who regrettably were drawn to Pershing Square.”
108
The bolder Daily
News named “perverts” among the targets of 1964 arrests and the park redesign, and
reported repeated police sweeps during that year.
109
As Don Parson notes in his history of
public housing in Cold War Los Angeles, the Community Redevelopment Agency
represented Bunker Hill as saturated with deviant sexual predators and “moral offenders
of both sexes” in order to justify demolition.
110

Amidst urban renewal, queer life grew just west and northwest of downtown, in
the Westlake (MacArthur Park) area, contemporary Koreatown, and Echo Park.
111

108
“Revised Plan for Pershing Square,” Los Angeles Times (hereafter cited as Times), January 20, 1964.
Pershing Square file, ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives. Compare this to “Pershing Square Bums
Hauled In,” Los Angeles Mirror-News, November 18, 1959. Elsewhere the Times cited “darker and less
desirable interests,” “loiterers,” “panhandlers, deviates, and criminals” – see “Reformation Slated for
Pershing Square,” Times August 19, 1963; “Pershing Square Folk Switch to City Hall,” Times September
13, 1964; “Pershing Park Plan Adopted by Commission,” Times January 17, 1964.
109
“Round up 150 in Pershing Sq.; jail 11,” Daily-News, undated but clipped with other 1964 events in
Pershing Square File, ONE.
110
Parson, 153.
111
Kepner in “Goodbye to Pershing Square,” Kenney, Timmons, and the Gay & Lesbian Map all report this
shift. This neighborhood was becoming less Anglo and more Latino during this time. It was also known
for arts and cultural institutions (Kenney, 85).

75
Across the street from MacArthur Park, a bar known alternately as Geri’s and 666 drew
gay men; the If Club and Open Door, two lesbian bars with mostly Black and white
working class clientele, were located at the corner of 8
th
and Vermont; and the nearby
Redwood Room behind the Ambassador Hotel is remembered as a favorite of Asian drag
queens.
112
This area also began to be notable as the city’s most concentrated base for gay
rights organizations and something of a gay residential enclave. After he divorced and
fully embraced a gay identity, Mattachine founder Harry Hay lived in Echo Park in the
early 1950s; he returned again in 1965 with his lover John Burnside. Two other gay
activists, Dale Jennings and Jim Kepner, also lived in Westlake and Echo Park during this
era.
113
Nearby, at 8
th
and Crenshaw, the progressive First Universalist Church hosted the
first Mattachine Society convention in 1953, and welcomed meetings of gay youth in the
early 1960s. South of Westlake near the University of Southern California, Troy Perry
established the first Metropolitan Community Church in 1969, geared specifically to the
LGBT community. From 1969 to 1971, the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front held
meetings at activist Morris Kight’s home on West 4
th
Street, just east of Alvarado in the

112
See, respectively, Kenney; Timmons & Faderman; and Wat. In addition LAPD Annual Reports show
that by 1970, the heaviest portion of sex offense arrests in what had been Central Division were
concentrated in the newly formed Rampart Division, which encompassed Westlake, Echo Park, and the
southern edges of Silver Lake.
113
Timmons 182, 214 for discussion of Hay’s moves; Timmons 165, 205 for Jennings and Kepner. In
1954 Hay moved to Beverly Hills with his then lover Jorn Kamgren; the relationship was a controlling one
and Hay was much less involved in political work until their breakup in 1962. His social and political
isolation during that time seems evident in his Beverly Hills location; on leaving Jorn, Hay stayed for a
while at Jim Kepner’s home in Echo Park (Timmons 205), Hay and Burnside’s home together was on
Edgeware Road. Dale Jennings lived on Lemoyne Avenue and Kepner on Baxter Street.

76
center of Westlake; the city’s Gay Community Center was established nearby in 1971.
114

Within this period, Westlake and Echo Park served as a bridge between the fading bar
and cruising scene of downtown and the newer, generally more elite networks of Silver
Lake, Hollywood, and West Hollywood.
115

While homophile activists had lived through downtown’s “cleanup,” they
generally did not attempt to engage with questions of racism and class inequality in their
new – and increasingly Mexican American and working class – stomping grounds. This
can be illustrated by comparing two cases in 1952 that centered around the policing of
homosexuality in Westlake and Echo Park. One of these cases is well known in histories
of the homophile rights movement. The other is relatively unknown and reveals how
homophile activists failed to challenge the overlaps between the policing of sexuality and
the policing of race.
In the first – and relatively well-known – case of 1952, an undercover vice
detective in the Los Angeles Police Department followed Dale Jennings from Westlake
Park in February as he walked towards his home; the officer then arrested Jennings for
seeking homosexual sex. Jennings was an Anglo man in his 30s who had helped found

114
Kenney and ONE records; see also my entry in People’s Guide to Los Angeles (manuscript in process).
As I will discuss in later chapters, lesbian life in this area continued to develop in the early and mid 1970s:
the Gay Women’s Service Center and the lesbian-focused Alcoholism Center for Women both opened their
doors in Echo Park and the northern border of the MacArthur Park neighborhood.
115
It should be noted, however, that Hollywood was known as a site of male prostitution through the 1970s.
Jim Kepner recalls that in the early 1970s, “The LAPD was working to expel male hustlers from the Selma
Ave. [Hollywood] turf they’d staked out after being driven from Pershing Square downtown” (Jim Kepner,
“Neighborhoods Project: Gays in West Hollywood,” West Hollywood file, ONE.) In 1971, LAPD Chief
Ed Davis noted the “Selma Ave. ghetto created by the homosexual” and the department’s effort to shut
down prostitution there. (Ed Davis, letter; Homophile Effort for Legal Protection (HELP) Folder 2, ONE.)

77
the Mattachine Society, and he decided to turn his arrest into a test case. Under the
auspices of the Citizens Committee to Outlaw Entrapment (a Mattachine front group),
Jennings demanded a jury trial. In court, he publicly declared he was homosexual but
denied he had been soliciting sex, and argued that police entrapment was simply a
method of harassing gay men for gathering in public sites. All but one member of the
jury voted to acquit; the city dismissed the case, and in the course of case publicity, the
homophile rights movement in Los Angeles grew.
116

As the Jennings trial took shape, another case developed, this one involving both
police entrapment and police brutality against Mexican American youth. On the evening
of January 27, 1952, LAPD officers shot at, beat, and arrested five young men at the
Echo Park boathouse. Victor and William Rubio, Horace Martinez, Frank Canales, and
William Arnold were all 17 to 19 years old; the first four were Mexican American while
Arnold was white. Though arrested in an LAPD vice detail, the teenagers described
themselves as hostile to gay men. Horace Martinez stated that he believed a homosexual
man had approached him for sex when he went to use the boathouse toilet. When
Martinez asked what the man was looking at, the man struck him, and Martinez ran
yelling “help, a queer!” The apparent “queer” was plainclothes LAPD Officer Ted
Porter, who then began beating Martinez outside the bathroom. When Martinez’s friends
ran to help defend him against this un-uniformed assailant, Officer Porter pulled his gun
and shot William Rubio in the chest. Officers then arrested all five teenagers on

116
For an overview of this case, see Walter L. Williams and Yolanda Retter, Gay and Lesbian Rights in the
United States: A Documentary History (Greenwood Press, 2003), 74-75.

78
suspicion of robbery, trying to have them state they were at the park to “roll [rob] a
queer.”
117
Victor Rubio and Arnold were released; Martinez and Canales were beaten in
custody and found guilty in juvenile court of striking an officer, with Canales released to
his mother and Martinez sentenced to two weeks in a youth psychiatric facility (this
suggests that the judge may have believed Martinez actually was homo- or bisexual).
William Rubio recovered in the jail hospital from his gunshot wounds but was charged
with assault, ultimately pleading guilty and serving a five-day sentence.
118
A short while
later, in April 1952, the LAPD suspended Officer Porter for a separate incident: Porter
had beaten a Westlake resident named Ramon Castellanos during an arrest for “vagrancy-
lewd” – another charge frequently applied to homosexual behavior.
119

This complicated case, featuring a white LAPD officer with an apparent pattern of
assaulting gay or possibly gay Latino men, survives not in any queer archives but in the
files of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), a multiracial left organization well known in
Los Angeles radical history. The CRC sought to link the events at the Echo Park
boathouse to the issue of racially motivated police brutality already being raised by the
Bloody Christmas and Tony Rios cases. The Mexican American Community Service
Organization (CSO), which disavowed the communist sympathies of the CRC, had

117
Echo Park Case folder, Civil Rights Congress of Los Angeles (CRC) Files, Southern California Library
for Social Studies & Research (hereafter cited as SCL). The bathrooms at Echo and Westlake Parks were
especially monitored; former Chief Daryl Gates recalls monitoring the Echo Park’s toilets from an attic
space perch. (Gates 42-43). See also Daniel Hurewitz’s brief discussion of the case in Hurewitz, 231 –
oddly, Hurewitz does not discuss the fact that this beating resulted from anti-gay police entrapment.
118
See Echo Park Case folder, SCL.
119
From an article retyped from Times April 9, 1952, Echo Park Case folder, SCL.

79
relatively more success in addressing the Bloody Christmas and Rios cases at this time.
120

But the CRC was becoming politically marginalized by anti-communist rhetoric, and
perhaps because it had little political capital to lose, chose to denounce practices of both
police entrapment and brutality as they organized to defend Horace Martinez, William
Rubio, and Frank Canales.
121
Further, the CRC contacted the homophile Citizens
Committee to Outlaw Entrapment for support. The groups exchanged information, and
the Citizens’ Committee declared: “SO LONG AS ONE MINORITY GROUP… IS
THUS HARRIED AND HOUNDED, NO MINORITY GROUP OR COMMUNITY
GROUP IS SAFE…Attempted entrapment can become attempted murder as it did on the
night of January 27
th
, 1952 against five Mexican-American Youths in Echo Park.”
122

A spokesperson for the Citizens’ Committee criticized the CRC, however, for that
group’s uncertainty over how to address homosexuality. “We were a little non-plussed to
hear that your outfit didn’t seem to know what to do with the entrapment case,” wrote the
Citizens’ Committee representative, Joseph Harrison, to the CRC. He added that
“Groups like yourselves, while stoutly maintaining (correctly) that the equations
concerning Mexican-Americans and Negroes are filthy mythical slanders and distortions,
will apathetically allow that the… equation concerning the Homosexual Minority is

120
See Escobar 2003, Burt.
121
“Information Bulletin (1): To the People of the Echo Park Community,” Echo Park Case folder, SCL.
122
“AN ANONYMOUS CALL TO ARMS,” open letter by the Citizens’ Committee to End Entrapment,
Echo Park Case file, SCL. Undated. Emphasis in original. See also “NOW is the time to fight—“ flier
produced by Citizens’ Committee to End Entrapment, Echo Park Case file, SCL. Undated.

80
true.”
123
Despite this rather patronizing tone, the CRC reader seemed to take Harrison’s
lecture to heart, studiously drawing his or her pen under Harrison’s explanations of why
homosexuals constituted a minority group and why stereotypes about homosexual
deviance were no more correct than those about the criminality of people of color.
124
In
the end, however, the two groups forged no lasting relationship. The CRC did not
discuss the Jennings trial in its literature and the Citizens’ Committee swiftly ignored the
Echo Park case, abandoning the chance to enlarge their activism, despite having claimed
that “the issue here is not whether the man is a homosexual, but whether the Police
Department is justified in using such methods.”
125

Between World War II and the gay liberation era, police practices, urban renewal,
and homophile rhetoric converged to move queer people and, even more dramatically,
gay politics away from the militant, multiracial potential of downtown and apart from any
close connections with leftist, racial justice organizing. Though a former Communist
Party member, Harry Hay, had founded the early Mattachine Society in 1950, by 1953
the leadership dramatically shifted, and the organization moved towards a far more
moderate, assimilationist politics. Homophile activism in Los Angeles became focused
primarily on creating periodicals and coordinating public education events, often with

123
Letter by Joseph Harrison of the Citizens’ Committee to Outlaw Entrapment to Miss Meyers of the Civil
Rights Congress, April 28, 1952, Echo Park Case file, SCL. Undated.
124
Notably, these explanations of why homosexuals constituted a minority echoed Marxist characteristics
for a national minority. Several men active in the early homophile rights movement (including Harry Hay
and Jim Kepner) were former Communist Party members. Daniel Hurewitz observes that Mattachine’s
conception of homosexual rights was closely tied to Communist Party rhetoric of people of color as
“subject nations” – anticipating the appeal of the “internal colonialism” thesis discussed in Chapter 2.
125
“NOW is the time to fight—“ flier. Emphasis in original.

81
legal and medical professionals.
126
This work broadcast homophile activism and thought
nationally, but did less to directly challenge structures of power within the city of Los
Angeles. Bifurcations between homophile activism and bar-based, street-level queer
culture, already riven by divisions of race, class and gender expression, appeared far less
easily challenged in Los Angeles than Nan Boyd suggests for San Francisco. This
difference carried lasting influence into the gay liberation era, as well as beyond.
Across the United States, and throughout California, gay and lesbian organizing
shifted dramatically in the latter 1960s as activists embraced anti-imperialist politics. Yet
the rhetoric of overturning empire, breaking free of a colonized sexuality, and forging
revolution – while sometimes productive of coalition – did not easily resolve divides of
race and class, either as they existed among queer people or as they were believed to
structure queer and straight modes of activism. In the chapter that follows, I explore
early attempts to imagine transformative gay liberationist alliance, and consider how
these attempts both succeeded and failed.

126
Here, see Meeker.

82
CHAPTER TWO
Internal Colonialism, Racial Analogy, and the Sites of Gay
Liberation
Throughout 1970, an unusual scheme for gay liberation circulated among activists
in California. Don Jackson, a leader in the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, wrote: “I
imagine a place where gay people can be free… A place where a gay government can
build the base for a flourishing gay counter-culture and city… The colony could become
the gay symbol of liberty, a world center for the gay counter-culture, and a shining
symbol of hope to all gay people in the world.”
1
But rather than imagining this city on a
hill in a well-known site of gay or lesbian life, Jackson proposed a new location:
California’s sparsely populated Alpine County, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains south of
Lake Tahoe. Jackson, joined by others, called for gay men and lesbians to move by the
hundreds to Alpine and create a “gay colony,” “Gay homeland,” or “Stonewall Nation.”
2

Only about 500 people lived in Alpine County in 1970, including only about 150 in
Markleeville, the largest town and county seat. Roads into Alpine crossed mountain
passes that were 7-8,000 feet high and frequently snowbound in winter.
3
But as gay

1
“Brother Don Has a Dream,” undated flier, Charles Thorp Papers, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transgender Historical Society of Northern California – San Francisco Public Library holdings (hereafter
Thorp Papers). In all quotes, I have retained original spellings and grammar without use of [sic].
2
“Brother Don Has a Dream” and “Help Build the Stonewall Nation,” undated fliers, Thorp Papers. “Help
Build the Stonewall Nation” calls for September 20, 1970 meeting in Los Angeles.
3
This population and geography information was reported in the Alpine Liberation Front information
packet, Thorp Papers. This packet also states that the county’s total population included 298 Washo Indian

83
activists noted, California’s Supreme Court had recently cut the residency period for
voter registration to 90 days, which meant that a few hundred gay migrants could
constitute the majority of voters, hold a recall, and take over the county as a base for
political power and sexual freedom.
4
More than just a block of bars, Jackson stated,
Alpine would mean “gay territory… a gay government, a gay civil service, a county
welfare department which made public assistance payments to the refugees from
persecution and injustice.”
5

In countercultural newspapers, Jackson cited the Alpine project as fulfilling Black
Panther Eldridge Cleaver’s call for liberating territory, and held that founding a gay
colony in Alpine would work to “undermine straight society.”
6
In implicit and explicit
ways, Jackson and other Alpine project leaders described gay people, regardless of race,
as the Black Panthers and others were then describing U.S. people of color: a colonized
group within the U.S., a group whose liberation could overthrow the establishment from
within. This comparison implied both building nationalist power and forging global
alliance. Thus, a San Francisco State-based group within the Alpine project proposed

people. However, the California census for 1970 (which counted 484 total residents, similar to the total
reported by the ALF) reported that 367 residents were white, 97 Native American, 19 Filipina/o (mostly
men), and 1 African American (a man) (http://countingcalifornia.cdlib.org). It is certainly possible that
Washo people were undercounted in the census, but it is unclear from what source ALF activists took the
figure of 298 Washo people.
4
See for example “The Great Gay Conspiracy,” San Francisco Examiner October 18, 1970; “Brother Don
Has a Dream,” and “Alpine Liberation” flier, Thorp Papers.
5
“Brother Don Has a Dream,” Thorp Papers.
6
Paul Eberle, “Gays plan to liberate a county,” LA Free Press October 25, 1970, Alpine County Project file
I of II, ONE Gay and Lesbian Archives (ACP I); Don Jackson, “Pro Alpine,” Berkeley Tribe November 6,
1970, ACP I.

84
“setting up a Gay underground government with various officials, the most important of
which will be the ambasador of Stonewall Nation to Algeria.”
7
But while comparing
their effort to Black liberation and global revolt, Alpine project spokespeople also
described potential gay migrants as “pioneers,” local residents as “hostile natives,” and
the mountain county as “open land.” Led by and almost exclusively involving white
men, the Alpine project employed the language of global decolonization — liberation,
homeland, and revolutionary nation — alongside that of white empire — colony, pioneer,
and open land. Alpine project leaders took up anti-imperialist and anti-racist language
while simultaneously implying that gay space was white space. They imagined gay
people not only as colonized, but also as potential colonizers in the U.S. West.
The Alpine story reveals that gay liberationists used anti-imperialist politics in
complex, even contradictory ways. This chapter examines some of the diverse meanings
that anti-imperialist politics carried for the growth of gay liberation. Tracing an
intellectual history of activist debates, I ask how gay liberationists responded to the
tensions and contradictions that emerged as they attempted to use anti-imperialism to
craft a new sexual politics. I open by explaining the concept of “internal colonialism,”
which developed within the Black Power movement and other elements of the Third
World Left, which was used to explain institutional racism within the U.S. as a form of
colonial control, and which fostered a critique of U.S. empire both at home and abroad.

7
Don Jackson, reporting on BAGFUN proposal, to Stan Williams and Gay Nationalists, Alpine County
Project file II of II, ONE Gay and Lesbian Archives (ACP II). Jackson also noted that “Strangely, it is the
most radical blood-in the streets papers that are friendly to us, papers which are controled by the
Weathermen and Maost. These papers have never been friendly to Gay Lib.”

85
I then trace key events in the development of gay liberationist politics in California
between 1966 and 1969, exploring how this new movement explained its inspirations
from the Third World Left and how activists began to take up elements of internal
colonialism theory. The remainder and bulk of the chapter then examines gay
liberationist debates between 1969 and 1972, particularly as they circulated in the San
Francisco Bay Area and the periodical Gay Sunshine, but also extending to Los Angeles.
I focus on gay liberationist debates over four topics: the Vietnam War and the anti-war
movement; the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense and Black Power more generally;
the Alpine County “gay colony” scheme; and the Cuban Revolution. These topics raised
difficult questions regarding the meanings of gay male gender expression; the
relationship between gay identity and capitalism; and how gay liberation in the U.S.
should relate to politics, including queer politics, in the rest of the world.
In discussing the Vietnam War, Black Power, Alpine County, and Cuba, gay
liberationists sought to explain both where and how they might achieve sexual freedom
and why sexual freedom might be tied to other radical goals. Gay liberationists
concluded from the anti-war movement that they and the Vietnamese people shared a
“common enemy” with the military; the concept of the “common enemy” helped activists
describe how anti-gay oppression was connected to other forms of social control.
Through discussions about the Black Panthers, gay liberationists drew analogies between
racism and anti-gay oppression. At the same time, they began to debate whether such
analogies were valid; further, gay, lesbian, and transgender people of color began to form
their own organizations and move towards what we now term a more intersectional

86
critique of how sexual and racial oppression are woven together. Other activists
conceived of a more single-issue understanding of gay identity and community, and
expressed this goal through the Alpine County project. Debates over Alpine produced
ideological splits that, to some degree, fell out as regional conflicts between Los Angeles
and the San Francisco Bay Area, but which more broadly pulled apart two warring
impulses within gay liberationist uses of anti-imperialist thought – one centered around a
politics of alliance, the other around a discourse of gay and lesbian space. These splits
also became apparent as gay liberationists discussed solidarity with the Cuban Revolution
– contentious due to anti-gay policy on the island. Amid debates over Cuba, however,
some activists began to conceive of a “gay socialism” that could integrate gay liberation
into global anti-capitalist revolt.
The archives I examine in this chapter almost exclusively center leftist gay men,
primarily white gay men. While these men could fit neatly into an abstract conception of
gay identity as divorced from questions of race, class, or gender inequality, many of them
sought to craft a multi-issue sexual politics. They held that they could only realize their
own liberation through domestic and global anti-imperialist alliance. At the same time,
however, many who argued that multi-issue, anti-imperialist alliance was fundamental to
gay liberation undercut the possibilities for this alliance by mapping fixed boundaries
between locations of sexual freedom and those of racial or national liberation – and
between new places for liberated gay identity and longstanding sites of multi-racial,
multi-class queer experience. Problems of racism, sexism, and class privilege appeared
not only apart from, but also within, gay liberationist efforts towards anti-imperialist

87
sexual politics. Though anti-imperialist politics were central catalysts for the gay
liberation movement, many gay liberationists inspired by these causes imagined sexual
freedom and racial justice developing in different places and through different bodies.

The Theoretical Model: Internal Colonialism
The shift from civil rights to Black Power as the dominant rhetoric of the Black
freedom struggle; the rising militancy of the antiwar movement and New Left; the
emergence of new forms of Chicano, Asian American, and Native American radicalism;
radical women’s liberation, including women of color and socialist feminisms; and, by
the early 1970s, the drive for a “New Communist movement” have all been recognized as
expressions of and contributors to a height of anti-imperialist radicalism within the U.S.
Out of both deep despair about the potential for change in the U.S., and strong faith in the
promise of global decolonization, an assortment of radicals – ideologically diverse, only
ever utopically realized as a common “Movement,” yet working in conversation –
collectively rejected the idea that the U.S. nation-state set the horizon of equality and
freedom. They reactivated a radical internationalism circulating before the Cold War, yet
gave this internationalism new, more race-conscious meaning: less Soviet, more drawn to
China, Cuba, and the Non-Aligned Movement; less Old or even solely New Left, more
Third World Left. They read Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and
Mao Tse-Tung, among others; they looked to Latin American, African, and Asian
liberation movements to critique institutional racism; and they re-imagined their own

88
identities by identifying with targets of the U.S. state. A growing wealth of scholarship
explores the development of this politics during the long 1960s, often starting from the
global ferment of 1968, but also tracing anti-imperialist activism well before that year.
8

Among the most important contributions of anti-imperialist critique was the concept
of internal colonialism. This theory held that institutional racism could be best
understood as the result of the ongoing domestic colonization of people of color by a
white power structure. Internal colonialism theory explained the geographic, political,
and economic isolation, as well as cultural subjugation, of people of color. U.S. radicals
of color made especially powerful use of the concept of internal colonialism to
understand their oppression and articulate revolutionary nationalist goals. Increasingly,
historians use the term “Third World Left” to describe a movement of Marxist activists of
color who defined their politics through their identification with anticolonial, national
liberation movements across Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
9
Internal colonialism
theory guided the Third World Left and reverberated loudly on the New Left and among
feminist groups – particularly among radical women of color (for example, the Third
World Women’s Alliance) and socialist white feminists (for example, Cell 16).
10

Internal colonialism theory had overlapping academic and activist sources. An
academic treatment first arrived through Latin American and African dependency theory,

8
As discussed in Chapter 1. I rely most on work by Pulido, Young, Roth, Springer, Elbaum, and Singh.
9
Here see especially Pulido, Young, and Kelley 2003.
10
See Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975 (City Lights Press,
2001); Nelson, “’Abortions under Community Control’”; Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism; and Springer,
Living for the Revolution.

89
becoming particularly well known within work by Andre Gunder Frank, a German
expatriate to Latin America, and by Guyanese Pan-Africanist Walter Rodney.
11
Frank,
Rodney, and others sought to explain how European and U.S. capitalist markets
demanded the “underdevelopment” of Latin American and African national economies.
12

Challenging Walter Rostow’s theory of progressive “stages” of capitalist
industrialization, dependency theorists argued against the view that capitalism had simply
failed to reach certain sectors of national economies, requiring only further expansion of
markets to broaden prosperity. Rather, they found that capitalism had already reached to
all corners, but constructed some social sectors to become and remain poor, keeping them
easily exploited for labor and natural resources, while explaining their poverty as the
result of supposed biological or cultural deficits.
13

This argument offered a new way to discuss structural inequality within capitalist
nations. It also provided a model to examine how economic divisions became structured
through racial hierarchies, and vice versa. Ramón Gutiérrez argues that the term
“internal colonialism” was most likely first introduced into scholarship by Mexican
sociologist Pablo Gonzalez Casanova (1963), who used it to describe the racialized class

11
As in Frank, The Development of Underdevelopment (1966) and Capitalism and Underdevelopment in
Latin America (1967); and Rodney, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast (1970, from dissertation in 1966)
and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).
12
For a useful overview of Frank and Rodney’s contributions to internal colonialism theory, see Ramón
Gutiérrez, “Internal Colonialism: An American Theory of Race,” Du Bois Review 1:2 (2004): 281-295.
Gutierrez argues that Frank was “largely derivative” but influential (285).
13
Importantly, this same debate was extended to the study of slavery in U.S. context (in questions over
whether slavery was or was not part of capitalist or industrialized economies).

90
relationship between mestizo and indigenous people in Mexico.
14
In U.S. scholarship,
the concept of “internal colonialism” was taken up most prominently by sociologist
Robert Blauner (1969), and then by Blauner’s student Tomas Almaguer (1971), who
applied the concept to studies of the Chicano community.
15
The theory maintained
significant power within studies of race and ethnicity up until the late 1980s, when it lost
favor in significant part due to Chicana and Black feminist challenges to masculinist
idealizations of pre-colonial national identities.
While many activists encountered internal colonialism theory through academic
scholarship, the concept was also developed in a wider set of contexts, including through
social movement writings and popular rhetoric (which themselves, of course, also
influenced scholarly work). The idea that people of color in the U.S., particularly Black
people, were a “colony” drew on the longstanding Communist Party analysis that African
Americans in the U.S. South were a “subject nation.”
16
The Black Panther Party for Self
Defense reactivated this notion in their founding platform (1966), stating: “We want land,
bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political
objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony
in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of

14
Gutierrez, 286.
15
Blauner’s classic piece is “Internal colonialism and ghetto revolt,” Social Problems 16.4 (1969): 393-
408; the theory is further elaborated in Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York: Harper & Row,
1972). See also Tomas Almaguer, “Toward the study of Chicano colonialism,” Aztlan 2 (1971): 7-21.
Almaguer is best known for his study Racial Fault Lines: the Historical Origins of White Supremacy in
California (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994).
16
As discussed by Pulido, 142.

91
determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.”
17
The Panthers
significantly reworked the earlier Communist Party idea, however. First, the Panthers –
founded in Oakland, California – relocated the focus of the “black colony” from the U.S.
South to Northern and Western cities. Second, rather than locating the revolutionary
vanguard in the traditional working class, the Panthers looked to the lumpen proletariat
(“surplus” workers, un- and underemployed), who formed a growing segment of urban
Black communities due to the postwar flight of jobs from the city core.
18

A year after the Panthers’ founding, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) activists Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) and Charles Hamilton
elaborated the internal colonialism concept at length in their widely read volume Black
Power (1967). Here, Ture and Hamilton analogized white supremacy in the U.S. to
European systems of colonial control, and argued that Third World decolonization
offered the most powerful model to guide the Black freedom struggle in the U.S.
19
They
described Black people in the U.S. as colonized politically through indirect rule;
economically through low wages and the denial of housing loans and affordable goods;
and socially through denial of full citizenship and the perpetuation of self-doubt.
Meanwhile, Chicano activists articulated an internal colonialism thesis through the idea

17
“The Black Panther Party: Platform and Program; What We Want, What We Believe,” in Judith Clavir
Albert and Stewart Edward Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade (New
York: Praeger, 1984): 159-164. Reprinted from The Black Panther, July 5, 1969. Emphasis added.
18
See Pulido, 142.
19
Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. New York: Vintage,
1992 (1967).

92
of Aztlán, the legendary Aztec homeland, located in lands the U.S. conquered in the
Mexican War. By 1969, Chicana and Chicano activists were using Aztlán to broadcast a
call for justice and self-determination across the Southwest.
20
The same year, the
American Indian Movement reclaimed Alcatraz Island as Native land. Critiques of
internal colonialism energized calls for sovereignty among multiple communities of color
and were articulated by a range of organizations in the Third World Left.
The idea that racial inequality in the U.S. functioned as a system of internal
colonialism gained such currency that mainstream politicians used the term to express
their views and garner support: in 1966 New York Mayor John Lindsay compared
Harlem to an “underdeveloped nation”; in 1968 Eugene McCarthy made routine
reference to African Americans as colonized people in his bid for the Democratic Party
Presidential nomination.
21
Such references were often thinly elaborated and largely
metaphorical, much like the romantic images of Third World guerrilla fighters illustrating
the pages of the underground press.
22
But they nonetheless reflected the broad impact of
the Third World Left’s politics and a search for more than merely psychological or
legalistic explanations of racism and poverty.
Internal colonialism theory not only conceived of the U.S. as a colonial state, but saw
that control operating through racialized inequality inside the state’s centers of power –

20
Thus, in March 1969 the National Chicano Liberation Conference adopted “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán”
(The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán) which termed “La Raza” (the race, or Chicana/o people) unified by an
ideology of nationalism. See Pulido, 115.
21
Linday’s comment was printed in the New York Times, March 27, 1966, as cited in Gutierrez, 287.
22
Elbaum, “What Legacy…,” 44.

93
its cities. This analysis suggested to many that imperial control operated simultaneously
at what geographers term multiple “scales”: not only the globe or nation, but also the
urban neighborhood.
23
Gay and lesbian liberationists inspired by the Third World Left
extended this analysis, adapting internal colonialism critique to describe the ways that
gender and sexuality felt “taken over” at the scales of the home and the body, as well as
in urban, national, and global relationships.

The Groundwork of California Gay Liberation, 1966-1969
Between 1966 and 1969, queer activism transitioned from a relatively moderate,
domestic, and small “homophile rights” movement to a more militant, internationalist,
and far larger movement for “gay liberation.”
24
In California, this transition was
catalyzed by activists who drew explicit comparisons between gay and Black liberation
and who called for alliances with Black and antiwar activism. This new politics also
began to be visible within efforts to claim queer self-expression in urban space.
25

Homophile activists had sought political change through a language of privacy rights, or
pursued rights to public assembly and inclusion by emphasizing gay and lesbian people
as essentially normative rather than deviant.
26
Gay liberationists embraced a more

23
On scales, see Neil Smith, “Contours of a Spatialized Politics,” Social Text 33 (1993): 55-81.
24
See especially D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, and Duberman, Stonewall.
25
This expressed, but also went beyond, what Moira Kenney terms “place-claiming” as a strategy of LGBT
politics. Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics (Temple, 2001).
26
For a useful discussion of this dynamic, as well as an overview of homophile organizing in San
Francisco, see Boyd, Wide-Open Town.

94
countercultural self-definition that held potential to knit together the distinctions that
homophile activists proposed between their own social worlds and more gender-
transgressive, subcultural, street-level queer life. At the same time, however, gay
liberationists crafted a new set of gay and lesbian norms that managed to maintain
divisions of race, class, and gender transgression within queer life. These divisions
overlapped with tensions that made gay and straight radical alliance difficult.
Two stories help to begin to illustrate these dynamics and explain the
development of gay liberation in California more broadly. The first is the 1966
Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and related organizing in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district;
the second a 1967 protest at the Black Cat bar in Los Angeles’s Silver Lake
neighborhood. The Compton’s story has begun to be better known thanks largely to the
research of Susan Stryker; the Black Cat protests are acknowledged locally in Los
Angeles, but drastically under-analyzed within queer activist histories. Contrasts
between these two stories become even more clearly apparent in gay liberationist
language that began to circulate in the Bay Area in 1968 and 1969, and then in debates
over the Vietnam War, Black Power, Alpine County, and Cuba between 1969 and 1972.
Throughout the postwar era, San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood was
known as a red-light district featuring both gay and straight bars and street prostitution.
The neighborhood was also one of the few places in the city that transgender women and
self-described “street queens” (openly dressed in drag) could find housing and work,
including sex work. The area’s meaning became heightened in the mid 1960s as San
Francisco undertook several slum clearance projects that destroyed large segments of the

95
city’s housing stock, leaving the Tenderloin as one of the last remaining places where
trans women and street queens could either afford, or be allowed, a place to live. As
Stryker recounts, many drag queens and trans women gathered each night for food and
companionship at Compton’s Cafeteria, an all-night diner; despite frequent police
harassment there, the diner became an important community site.
27
In the summer of
1966, the neighborhood’s queer community began to be further served by Glide
Memorial Methodist Church, where Cecil Williams was a young African American
pastor trained in civil rights activism and committed to experimental ministry. Williams
worked with homophile groups, including the Daughters of Bilitis, to establish gay social
services at Glide and in the neighborhood. Meanwhile, a New Left-inspired gay
organization, Vanguard, began to meet at Compton’s Cafeteria and soon organized a
picket of the restaurant for discriminatory practices. The picket produced no immediate
results, but when the police raided Compton’s on an August night, drag queen and
transgender patrons reacted in a riot, throwing coffee cups at police and destroying a
police car and a newsstand.
Stryker and others argue that the Compton’s riot, while prompting the cafeteria to
close at midnight, sparked ongoing transgender activism that won greater access to city
services and, over time, improved relationships with city police.
28
What stands out as

27
Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria, directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman.
Independent Television Service, 2005, and Stryker’s Transgender History (Seal Press: 2008). Also see
Christina Hanhardt’s paper at the 2005 American Studies Association conference, “’The White Ghetto’:
Sexual Minorities, Police Accountability, and the War on Poverty in 1960s San Francisco.”
28
Following the conflict, San Francisco Police officer Elliot Blackstone began to serve as a liaison between
city programs and the growing network of transgender activists and allies; transgender people were able to

96
particularly compelling about the Compton’s story in relation to broader transitions in the
long 1960s, however, is that both Glide Church and Vanguard approached the oppression
of queer people as tied to their spatial concentration in the Tenderloin. Both institutions
joined an effort to qualify the area for War on Poverty funds, arguing that sexual
minorities – like people of color – stood in special need of social aid, and that such aid
could most effectively be concentrated through localized economic opportunity.
29
This
approach offered a sharp contrast to homophile calls for civil liberties, psychological self-
help, or full inclusion in the military. Rather than seeking inclusion into normative
political citizenship, transgender and gay activists at Compton’s sought an expanded
social, including economic, citizenship that redressed prejudices against gender
transgression and minority sexualities.
30

Approximately six months following the Compton’s riot, a Los Angeles conflict
with police produced a similar claiming of a neighborhood as gay space. In this case, the
events centered on Silver Lake, a longtime “bohemian” area located between downtown
and Hollywood.
31
Though not a red-light district like the Tenderloin, Silver Lake was
known for several gay bars, including the Black Cat and New Faces, located adjacent to

obtain city ID cards reflecting their chosen gender identity and local laws against crossdressing began to be
overturned. Stryker, narration to Screaming Queens.
29
See Youth in the Tenderloin, March 1967 report by The Tenderloin Committee, Inc., Ephemera –
Subjects, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society (GLBTHS). The Committee was
headed by Minister Vaughn Smith at Glide Church and Don Lucas of the Central City Anti-Poverty
Program. Also see Daniel Bao, interview with Joel Roberts, December 28, 1989, Oral Histories File,
GLBTHS; Stryker, Screaming Queens; and Hanhardt, “’The White Ghetto.’”
30
In distinguishing political and social citizenship, I draw on Margot Canaday, “Building a Straight State.”
31
See discussion in Chapter 1, and broadly, Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles.

97
each other on Sunset Boulevard. A few minutes into New Year’s Day, 1967, after seeing
men kiss each other at midnight, undercover LAPD officers began beating patrons of the
Black Cat, and soon also raided New Faces; they severely injured several people and
arrested sixteen. Officers charged thirteen people with lewd conduct, two others with
drunkenness, and one with assault on an officer. Six weeks later, on February 11, 1967,
approximately 200 people gathered in front of the Black Cat and protested police
harassment of gays. While earlier, more spontaneous riots against police abuse are
recorded in Los Angeles, the Black Cat protest was the city’s first organized, public
demonstration for gay rights.
32

More than just being an historic “first,” however, the Black Cat action was
notable for the ways in which protestors marked a specific location as “gay” in a way that
compared sexuality to race. The countercultural and gay-friendly Los Angeles Free Press
reported that February 11 saw a coordinated set of protests against police harassment,
planned not only in Silver Lake by gay people, but in Watts by African Americans, in
East Los Angeles and Pacoima by Chicanos, and in Venice and the Sunset Strip by
hippies.
33
These protests defined sexual difference, counterculturalism, and racial

32
ONE Confidential 12:4 (April 1967); “CRISIS Police Lawlessness Must Be Stopped!!” flier, and other
materials, Black Cat File, ONE. See also Belinda Baldwin, “L.A., 1/1/67: The Black Cat Riots,” The Gay
& Lesbian Review (March-April 2006), 28-30; and Kenney, 165-166. The Los Angeles bar had no
apparent relation to the longtime San Francisco gay bar with the same name. The Black Cat site still hosts
a gay bar, Le Barcito, whose sign includes a black cat’s face. New Faces is now the location of Circus
Books, which boasts a large stock of gay porn. Unplanned queer riots include one in 1959 at Cooper’s
Doughnuts, in downtown, commemorated by John Rechy.
33
The Right of Assembly and Movement Committee (RAMCOM) helped to coordinate these events. See
“Monster of a Protest Set for Saturday,” Los Angeles Free Press February 10, 1967; “Pickets Greeted by
Opposition Backing ‘Their’ Police, Drive-In,” Times February 16, 1967; ONE Confidential April 1967; all

98
otherness as connected by the problem of police abuse. While only the Silver Lake and
Pacoima protests are recorded to have occurred, the broader mapping of each protest
articulated various group identities – gay, Black, Chicano, hippie – as geographically
distinct, parallel with but separate from one other. Further, by leaving gayness and the
counterculture racially unmarked, the protests implicitly designated both as white.
Both Tenderloin organizing in 1966 and the Silver Lake protest in 1967 marked
gender and sexual difference in urban geography.
34
Activists identified specific areas of
San Francisco and Los Angeles as queer and began to conceive of control over space as
critical to queer freedom and power. These claims to space marked early expressions of a
politics of gay liberation, which compared gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender
oppression at local scales (the urban, the home, the body) to colonialism or empire
around the world (scales of the globe and the nation).
35
But Tenderloin and Silver Lake
queer politics were also different. Though activism in both places analogized sexuality
and gender expression to race, organizing in the Tenderloin was led by and prioritized
transgender people, while the Black Cat protest was not. Moreover, Tenderloin queer
activists drew on the resources of Glide Church, Cecil Williams, and social welfare

in Black Cat File, ONE. Records show that protests did occur in Pacoima and the Sunset Strip, but not in
the other locations.
34
By contrast, homophile comparisons to African American civil rights had focused largely on legal non-
discrimination, privacy, and a right to assembly but not control over the economy or geography of a space.
An early, rare use of the concept of a “gay ghetto” had challenged the idea of the homophile movement
(not a gay bar or neighborhood) as a “ghetto,” and used as its main reference point Jewish ghettos and the
state of Israel. See Leo Ebreo, “A Homosexual Ghetto?” from The Ladder (1965), reprinted in Mark
Blasius and Shane Phelan, eds., We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics
(Routledge, 1997): 340-343.
35
This link was also suggested by Herbert Marcuse, particularly in “The End of Utopia” (1970).

99
policy, while the protest at the Black Cat seemed to more starkly segregate Los Angeles
into white gay and countercultural, versus Black and Chicano working class, political
neighborhoods. A few years later, Los Angeles became the central organizing base for
the Alpine County project, while anti-racist critiques of the Alpine scheme were most
loudly heard from Berkeley and San Francisco.
To some extent, contrasts between the Tenderloin and Silver Lake events suggest
broader differences between San Francisco and Los Angeles queer political cultures.
Intriguingly, Jason Ferreira also argues that the Third World Left developed in a less
cultural nationalist direction in San Francisco than it did Los Angeles.
36
While rooting
this argument in San Francisco’s more internally diverse Latino community, longer labor
history, and most importantly, the 1968-1969 Third World Strike at San Francisco State
College, Ferreira also suggests that San Francisco’s denser and smaller geography
provided more frequent opportunities for interaction across different communities of
color, compared to Los Angeles which grew ever larger and more segregated. Though
comparisons like Ferreira’s should not be overdrawn, they are worth exploring, including
by further exploring the history of queer Oakland and the East Bay.
However, the distinctions between Tenderloin and Silver Lake queer organizing
in 1966 and 1967 also speak to larger tensions and differences within the nascent gay
liberation movement, differences that can be observed within Bay Area activism, not
simply between the Bay Area and Los Angeles. Ferment at San Francisco State helped to

36
Ferreira, All Power to the People.

100
catalyze gay liberation, just as it did Latino, Asian American, Native American, feminist
and other left radicalisms in the Bay Area.
37
But one of the most prominent gay
participants in and veterans of the Third World Strike, Charles Thorp, was a white gay
men who tended to define gay sexual politics through rather simplistic comparisons to
Black liberation.
38
In an October 1968 speech to the Glide Foundation (connected to
Glide Church), Thorp stated that when he began to realize he was gay at the age of 15, “I
became in substance a Negro… I was a ‘white Negro’ and proud of it… I want to
question the homosexual community. The Negroes are saying, ‘I’m black and I’m
proud,’ and ‘Black is beautiful.’ Well, what are our people saying?”
39

Analogies like Thorp’s became more frequent in San Francisco gay politics
during a series of events in March and April of 1969 which one observer later insisted
made San Francisco – not the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village – “the place where
Gay Liberation began.”
40
On March 28, the countercultural Berkeley Barb published an

37
The Strike also helped to network all this activism across the city, as suggested by Strike veteran Sharon
Gold (Martinas), who in the 1980s reflected that “Every single organizing project in the whole city by the
spring of ’68 had an SF State student as their organizer.” As quoted in Elbaum, 17, drawn from Ronald
Fraser, ed., 1968: A Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 196.
38
Thorp was a San Francisco State student and supporter of the Third World Strike who came to lead the
SF State chapter of the Gay Liberation Front and an overlapping group called Bay Area Gays for
Unification and Nationalism (BAGFUN). He also helped to form the Committee for Homosexual Freedom
in March and April of 1969 (predating the San Francisco, San Francisco State, and Berkeley Gay
Liberation Fronts, which formed in late 1969), and later supported the Alpine County project. See Thorp
Papers, GLBTHS.
39
Charles P. Thorp, “What It’s Like to Be a Teenage Homosexual,” pamphlet (Hollywood, California:
Prosperos, 1969), Committee for Homosexual Freedom, Ephemera – Organizations, GLBTHS. The
pamphlet states that Thorp originally presented this statement to a Glide Foundation symposium in San
Francisco on October 27, 1968.
40
Morgan Pinney, “Gay Liberation: a movement without a model,” undated manuscript (c. 1971), 3.
Berlandt File, San Francisco Public Library San Francisco History Center (also held in Thorp File,

101
article in which a white gay man named Leo Laurence – editor of the Vector, published
by the San Francisco homophile group the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) –
challenged SIR to join a broader left movement. The Barb told readers that Laurence
“used much of the terminology of the Black Revolution as he rapped,” and noted that he
was part of the network working with Cecil Williams’ Glide Church. Laurence added
that “it’s the same as ‘Black is Beautiful’” and added, “By understanding the black
revolution, I saw the parallel and what could be done” for homosexual people.
41
He
called for a gay alliance with the Black Panther Party and the antiwar movement.
Building on preceding rhetoric, the Barb article established the basic tenets of gay
liberation: a break with existing homophile groups, a rhetorical parallel between the
“black revolution” and freedom for homosexuals, and a call for alliance with Black and
antiwar activism. But the article’s most immediate impact was its public outing of
Laurence’s boyfriend, Gale Whittington, who in an accompanying photo was shown
shirtless and embraced from behind by Laurence. The piece ran under the unmistakable
headline “Homo Revolt: Don’t Hide It!” As a result of this article, Whittington was fired
from his job at San Francisco’s Steamship Lines Company. His friends and allies swiftly
launched a new organization, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF), which
began to picket the Steamship Lines and received wide, though generally mocking, local

GLBTHS). Pinney was an assistant professor of accounting at SF State, fired for supporting the strike and
never rehired. See Morgan Pinney resume, Konstatin Berlandt File, GLBTHS; and Thorp Papers.
41
“Homo Revolt: ‘Don’t Hide It’”, Berkeley Barb March 28-April 3 1969, 5. The article is illustrated by a
photo of grinning Laurence hugging a shirtless Gayle Whittington (his boyfriend) from behind. This photo
got Whittington fired from his job at the Steamship Lines Company, sparking a picket of Steamship Lines
as the first defined “gay liberation” action in San Francisco. Barb article in Charles Thorp File, GLBTHS.

102
coverage. A lunchtime picket lasted for weeks that spring, expanding to target Tower
Records, Safeway, Macy’s, and the Federal Building.
42
Throughout its spring 1969
organizing, the CHF circulated fliers asserting that the gay cause was “like the struggle of
other oppressed people – Blacks, Chicanos, Orientals, etcetera – in our decade,” and that
“our condition is a part of the oppression which blacks, chicanos, and – yes – the
Vietnamese have known.” One broadside urged readers to attend an upcoming rally for
jailed Black Panther Huey Newton, and added that the “CHF is in the vanguard of
homosexuals who know they must form coalitions with the Movement.”
43

The CHF expanded throughout spring 1969; by late summer, it had bloomed into
both San Francisco and San Francisco State chapters of the Gay Liberation Front.
44
The
first group using the term “Gay Liberation Front” had been founded in New York in July
1969 following the Stonewall Riots of late June. Within months, however, loosely
affiliated chapters had sprung up around the country. In California, the largest and most
consistent GLF groups worked in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Los Angeles, with
smaller, more sporadic efforts in San Jose, Sacramento, and Fresno. By October 1969,
Bay Area activists who had previously spent weeks picketing Steamship Lines, and who
now organized through the GLF, decided to picket the San Francisco Examiner to protest
the newspaper’s use of anti-gay slurs.

42
Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco
Bay Area (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1996), 53.
43
CHF newsletters, one dated April 29, 1969, another undated. Thorp Papers.
44
Stryker and Van Buskirk, 53.

103
Figure 1: Gay Liberation Front (GLF) flier.
45

These activists called for a protest on October 31 with a flier that layered the
words “Gay Liberation Front” against an outline of three figures standing with raised
fists, two wearing Afros, who symbolically evoked Black Power (Figure 1, above). On
the left side of the flier, a heavyset, balding white man – seemingly “the” man – held two
weapons; one was a rifle or bayonet, while another held two ends, one a fountain pen and
the other a spiked club. This figure of “Establishment” violence and media power
threatened the masculinity of two younger, racially ambiguous men; he stood on the

45
Gay Liberation Front flier, San Francisco, 1969. Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) folder,
Ephemera – Organizations, GLBTHS.

104
genitals of one, while the other was silenced by a gag around his mouth and shielded his
crotch with his hand. The flier visually represented gay liberation through references to
radical Black protest and racialized masculinity, including discursive fears of
emasculation. (Incidentally, the protest promoted in this flier became well known in San
Francisco queer activism, commemorated as the “Friday of the Purple Hand.” Watching
the protest from windows above the street, Examiner staff had thrown purple printer’s ink
on gay activists, who responded by marking the Examiner building with purple
handprints, only to meet with violent assault from the police.
46
)
While broadly comparing gay liberationist to Black radical masculinities and
calling for coalition between gay and Black, Chicano, and anti-war causes, Bay Area
GLF chapters also critiqued what they termed an existing “gay ghetto” run through
collusions between police, organized crime, and the gay “Establishment” (including the
Tavern Guild, an association of gay bar owners). The San Francisco and Berkeley Gay
Liberation Fronts jointly called for a picket of gay-run drag bars on Halloween and New
Year’s, arguing that true freedom would be won not by limiting drag to a special occasion
or private event, but by performing gay identity “in the road, in the streets.”
47
They
added, “These balls are being promoted by the same Gay Establishment who promote the
‘Gay Bars’ and other Ghettos.”
48
Another GLF flier compared “Homosexuals in the

46
CHF newsletters, Thorp File, GLBTHS.
47
“Gay…Gay?” flier, undated, Thorp Papers. Emphases in original.
48
Ibid.

105
Tenderloin…[to] Black children in the Hunters Point Ghetto.”
49
Further, gay
liberationists sought to describe how selfhood itself felt taken over, subject to external
control, through the pressure to deny homosexual feelings and conform to gender norms;
they began to analyze the requirements of conventional heterosexuality as part of a sexist,
racist, capitalist, and imperialist order. Thus one short-lived gay liberation publication,
The Effeminist, reprinted the “Fourth World Manifesto” from a women’s consciousness
raising group in Detroit, which stated: “Fanon and the whole black liberation struggle
have recently extended the dictionary definition of imperialism or colonialism to mean a
group which is prevented from self-determination by another group – whether it has a
national territory or not… All of the above definitions apply to women, as a sex.”
50

Promoting male effeminacy as an expression of feminism, The Effeminist adapted
comparisons already being applied to “women, as a sex” to describe anti-gay oppression
as a kind of imperialism.
Through all such comparisons, gay activists proposed that anti-imperialist
liberation could produce a revolutionary gay identity, the basis for sexual self-
determination. This concept became more clearly defined, as well as more fiercely
contentious, in reference to three possible allies of gay politics – the antiwar movement,
the Black Panthers, and the Cuban Revolution – and through one proposed site for gay
political power, Alpine County. By discussing these four topics, California gay

49
“Fuck the ‘Human Rights Commission’!”, flier calling for GLF meeting on March 12 [1970]. Thorp File.
50
The Effeminist #2 (c. 1969-1970), 1. Periodical held by the GLBTHS.

106
liberationists both theorized alliances across, and mapped separations between, the
politics of sexuality and of race.

The Vietnam War and the “Common Enemy”
Opposition to the Vietnam War was in some ways the least contentious issue in
gay liberation, even as it defined gay liberation’s break from the more moderate politics
of “homophile rights.” As late as 1966, amidst only minor dispute, the National
Conference of Homophile Organizations had approved the issue of gay and lesbian
inclusion in the military as the homophile rights movement’s central agenda.
51
But a
younger generation was coming to view the military as, even apart from its treatment of
homosexual behavior, an inherently oppressive institution. In his March 1969 Berkeley
Barb article, Leo Laurence explicitly challenged the older homophile group the Society
for Individual Rights (SIR) over the issue of the war and military inclusion. The draft
made the war’s meanings especially laden for young gay men, and helped to politicize
“coming out” as an anti-war stance.

As Justin David Suran describes, since openly gay
men were barred from the armed forces, both straight and gay men began to claim
homosexuality in order to evade the draft; the military then instituted stricter standards of
proof, including effeminate behavior and letters from lovers and psychiatrists. Thus, both
the U.S. military and the anti-war movement compelled many gay men to examine and

51
See Suran, “Coming Out Against the War…”

107
publicly declare their sexual identity for the first time, such that “being gay in 1969,
1970, or 1971 meant being out of the closet and against the Vietnam War.”
52

During this time, the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front published a pamphlet on
“Revolutionary Homosexual Draft Resistance,” advising young men on how to escape
the “war machine” without putting themselves or others at the mercy of anti-gay civilian
laws.
53
Through their opposition to the Vietnam War, gay liberationists came to
understand themselves and the Vietnamese people (whether that meant solely civilians, or
also the Viet Cong) as sharing “common enemies”: the U.S. military and, more broadly,
“imperialism” and “sexism.” The argument here was that military culture not only
demanded normative, heterosexual masculinity within its ranks, but also defined
heterosexual masculinity through the ability to perpetrate imperialistic violence against a
people. Articles in the new gay periodical Gay Sunshine, published in San Francisco,
frequently criticized the war as an expression of male violence, citing the rape of
Vietnamese women and the forced masculinity of violence among U.S. G.I.s.
54
They also
suggested links between the oppression of gay men and lesbians in the U.S and the
subjugation of Vietnamese people: “Whether we’re called ‘native boys’ and ‘gooks’ in
Asia or ‘Gay boys’ and ‘aggressive, maladjusted’ women here, it’s the white straight men
in control who define us as inferior in order to justify their continued subjugation of

52
Suran, 463.
53
Thorp Papers.
54
See for example Vince Muscari, “Gay Brigade,” Gay Sunshine 11 (February/March 1972), 10.

108
us.”
55
As a result, gay liberationists argued that they shared a common goal with the
people of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia: “a culture and space of our own.”
56

Gay liberationists were actively, even openly involved in Vietnam Veterans
Against the War and other anti-war work.
57
Indeed, by July 1971, gay liberationists
described the anti-war movement as a place to be publicly “blatant.” Writing in Gay
Sunshine, Oakland activists Mark Turner and Al Crofts noted that gay men and lesbians
were usually compelled to “blend in” during the day and were left with only nights to
spend with “our own.” But they held that antiwar marches allowed gay people to come
out in broad daylight, even stating that:
this bright Saturday afternoon, marching under the many banners and a
transformed lavender and purple Viet Cong flag… we demonstrated to ourselves
and everyone else that we are no longer hiding and apart, and by our numbers that
we are, next to blacks, the largest minority in this country.
58

Significantly, Turner and Crofts contrasted the freedoms of the march with what they
implied was a more alienated queer culture in the Tenderloin, where they spent a night
trying to drum up protest support. The two men reported “leafleting the solitary figures
pacing the sidewalks in the drizzle still searching for someone to spend the rest of the
night with,” and noted that some people they talked to wondered if a “‘March Against

55
Mark Turner and Al Crofts (Roger Casement Collective, Oakland), “Gays Against War: April 24 San
Francisco,” Gay Sunshine 7 (June/July 1971).
56
Ibid.
57
Vince Muscari was a leader within VVAW; see Andrew Hunt, The Turning: A History of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War (New York: NYU Press, 1999).
58
Mark Turner and Al Crofts (Roger Casement Collective, Oakland), “Gays Against War: April 24 San
Francisco,” Gay Sunshine 7 (June/July 1971), 5.

109
War and Sexism’ – meant that we’re against sex.” The chant that Turner and Crofts
quoted from the day of the march – “Vietnam for the Vietnamese, S.F. for Gays!” – not
only drew parallels between Vietnamese and gay self-determination, but suggested
changes in the meaning of the San Francisco gay landscape itself.
While describing a “common enemy” faced by Vietnamese and gay people, gay
liberationists generally assumed “Vietnamese” and “gay” identities to be radically
separate. For example, the Palo Alto lesbian magazine Mother reported that a North
Vietnamese spokeswoman – responding to questions posed by North American feminists
– had termed homosexuality “not [a] Vietnam problem.”
59
But this statement did not
produce significant debate, as similar rhetoric did in reference to Cuba. Activists left the
question of North Vietnamese policy towards homosexuality basically unexamined,
interpreting Vietnam’s meanings primarily through the anti-war movement and a sense of
shared experience of oppression by the U.S. military and military culture.
60

The Black Panthers and Racial Analogy
Many gay liberationists viewed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense not only
as a potential ally, but also as a leader in a multifaceted revolution. As Morgan Pinney,

59
“Homosexuality not Vietnam problem says gynecologist,” Mother 1:3 August 1971, 3. Periodical held in
Gay Liberation Microfilm, GLBTHS. The article bases its report on a discussion with Nguyen Thi Xiem, a
female gynecologist who met with a North American women’s liberation delegation.
60
Some gay liberationists may have also assumed stereotypes of Asian and Asian American male
effeminacy, and interpreted antiwar work as a gay male issue because of this. Eric Wat holds that the U.S.
defeat in Vietnam helped to produce the “rice queen” phenomenon in gay male culture, in which white gay
men express racialized desire for Asian men they see as subordinate. See Wat, The Making of a Gay Asian
Community.

110
an activist in San Francisco’s Committee for Homosexual Freedom, the Gay Liberation
Front, and a writer for Gay Sunshine, put it in his national assessment of the gay
liberation movement: “We looked to the Black Panther Party as a leader in the
revolutionary struggle.”
61
Solidarity with the Panthers took the form of protesting in
support of the Party causes and jailed leaders; attending both national and regional
gatherings of the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention; communicating with
Panther chapters; and speaking positively about the Party’s efforts in the press. The
Panthers’ own coalition work set a model by which gay liberationists around the country
worked in support of other Third World Left organizations – the Young Lords, Chicano
moratorium groups, and similar organizations.
Gay liberationist support for the Panthers reached a high point following Huey
Newton’s August 1970 statement addressing gender and sexual politics in the Party and
urging the Panthers to work together with women’s and gay liberation groups. Newton’s
statement stood in sharp contrast to rhetoric taken up by Black Panther leader Eldridge
Cleaver and more broadly suggests the complexity and variability of the Panthers’ gender
and sexual politics.
62
Newton spoke forcefully about the revolutionary potential of gay
liberationist groups and stated that he “rather doubt[ed]” that homosexuality was caused

61
Morgan Pinney, “Gay Liberation: a movement without a model,” 4.
62
Cleaver’s homophobia and misogynistic views have been widely discussed, especially in reference to his
1968 volume, Soul On Ice. For broader discussion of the Panthers, including their gender politics, see
Jeffrey Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004); Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds., Liberation, Imagination, and the
Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy (New York: NYU Press, 2001); and
Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

111
by the “decadence of capitalism.”
63
Gay activists responded enthusiastically to Newton’s
call for alliance; the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front issuing a press release saluting his
letter as a “vanguard revolutionary action” and terming the Panthers, because of this
letter, the vanguard of the revolution.
64
Many looked towards the Panther-led
Revolutionary Peoples’ Constitutional Convention (RPCC), held over Labor Day
weekend, 1970 in Philadelphia, as a venue where both gay liberationists and Panthers
could imagine a new, post-revolutionary world.
65

The National RPCC has been widely cited as evidence of Panther sexism and
homophobia; most notably, a Radicalesbians caucus was prevented from addressing the
conference’s plenary session.
66
However, the Bay Area Regional Conference of the
RPCC, held in Berkeley on November 14 and 15 of 1970 (following the National
conference), appears to have allowed a fairly wide discussion of gender and sexuality and
may have produced some local reconciliation of Philadelphia events. Berkeley’s regional
conference included several workshops on sexual politics, including women’s and men’s
workshops on “Sexual Self-Determination,” a workshop on the nuclear family, and

63
Titled “Letter from Huey,” the article was written while Newton was in prison and published in The
Black Panther. It was reprinted widely, including in The Gay Liberation Book, edited by Len Richmond
and Gary Noguera (Ramparts Press, 1973).Newton also made a similar statement verbally on KPFA, the
Berkeley radio station.
64
GLF Los Angeles Press Release (Don Kilhefner and Tony de Rosa), October 6, 1970, Thorp File,
GLBHTS.
65
Pinney, 9.
66
See Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975 (University of Minnesota,
1989). For further discussion of gay involvement in the Philadelphia RPCC, see Marc Stein, “’Birthplace of
the Nation.’”

112
another on “Self-Determination for Gay People.”
67
The last of these drew GLF members
who proclaimed themselves “a revolutionary movement of people who recognize that it is
the same social reality which wages war and promotes sexism, racism, and other forms of
oppression.” Workshop participants stated their solidarity with the Radicalesbians’
grievances in Philadelphia; called for “Autonomy” in sexual behavior; “Self-
Determination” apart from the state, including reparations for all oppressed people; and
“Human Development” by ending state recognition of the nuclear family form.
68
These
demands suggested a Marxist-feminist analysis that provided a basis for incorporating
gay liberation into Panther goals.
However, many gay liberationist discussions of alliance with the Panthers ignored
materialist or structural analysis in favor of psychological arguments about racialized
masculinity and macho styles. These arguments rhetorically constructed a queer of color
silence and a queer of color dependence on white gay leadership. For example, Morgan
Pinney reported from a Midwestern conference on gay liberation that the “super-
masculinity (which includes mandatory heterosexuality) of the black movement had
made black homosexuals severely alienated from the black community… black
homosexuals look to white gay sisters and brothers for alliances they cannot yet hope for

67
The Regional Conference included 29 workshops listed in all, including Self-Determination for Women;
Self-Determination for Street People (relevant due to advocacy of free love and countercultural relationship
models); Self-Determination for Oppressed National Minorities; Birth Control, Abortions, and
Sterilization; Rights of Children; Welfare Rights; Internationalism – Relationship to National Struggles
Around the World; and several others. See Bay Area Regional Conference RPCC, Bertelson File,
GLBTHS.
68
Bay Area Regional Conference RPCC, Bertelson File.

113
in the black community.”
69
Pinney, who was white, noted that African American
participants protested racism by white gay men at the conference, but he argued that
white gay liberationists had met gay Black activists’ demands while administrators
during the recent Third World Strike at San Francisco State had not. This was a specious
comparison, however; San Francisco State administrators were power brokers in the
“system,” whereas white gay liberationists were theoretically comrades with Black gay
people. With this comparison, Pinney implied that white men would be the true decision-
makers of the gay liberation movement.
Analogies between race and sexuality moved attention away from the Party’s
political platform and to overemphasize the Panthers’ masculinism, as well as Black
masculinity in general. Clearly, these analogies had already been evoked locally by
Charles Thorp’s self-definition as a “white Negro,” Leo Laurence’s declarations in the
Berkeley Barb, and the GLF flier that visually superimposed gay liberation on silhouettes
of Black Power. San Francisco’s particular meaning in a language of racial analogy
became more clearly defined, as well as nationally circulated, through a widely reprinted
essay titled “Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,” written by Carl Wittman, a
former labor organizer as well as member of SDS. Wittman wrote the piece just before
the Stonewall Riots and published it later in 1969; by 1971, the article became widely
circulated in gay liberation periodicals and book anthologies.
70
He opened with the

69
Pinney, 8.
70
Wittman, “A Gay Manifesto,” Reinhart file, GLBTHS. Unpaginated and undated copy. The article was
reprinted in several periodicals as well as book volumes, both during the movement (Out of the Closets)

114
declaration that “San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals,” while adding that
existing spaces of gay community constituted “a ghetto rather than a free territory
because it is still theirs.” He then called for liberated gays to work together with
“Women’s Liberation… Black liberation… Chicanos… White radicals and ideologues…
Hip and street people… [and] Homophile groups.” While noting his perspective as a
white, middle-class, and leftist gay man, Wittman generically compared sexuality to race
and gender: “Chick equals nigger equals queer. Think it over.”
71

Wittman declared women, Black people, and queer people as subordinated in
parallel ways; from this he concluded that alliance was necessary even if difficult. On the
one hand, Wittman suggested shared structures for oppression: gay and Black (as well
as, he noted, Chicano) people had “common enemies… police, city hall, capitalism.” On
the other hand, he fell back on a pseudo-psychological notion of wounded racialized
masculinity: work with Black and Chicano radicals would be “tenuous” due to the
“uptightness and supermasculinity of many black men (which is understandable).” His
language effectively claimed San Francisco as a white, gay city, while making it difficult
to consider that Black and gay “ghettos” could be different, even if overlapping, places.
Further, his proposal that gay was like Black identity forestalled the evidence that gay

and later (We Are Everywhere). Interestingly given his argument about small-town and rural oppression,
Wittman founded a gay commune in Oregon in 1974 and later published RFD, a magazine on rural gay life.
71
Ibid. Allan Bérubé also powerfully critiqued such language in his essay "How Gay Stays White and
What Kind of White It Stays,” in R. Birgit et al., eds., The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness (Duke,
2001).

115
could exist in Black bodies, overlap with Black experience, and be part of a Black
liberation agenda.
Figure 2: Third World Gay People’s News.
72

A rare female contributor to Gay Sunshine, Varda Ono, offered a more complex
analysis that Wittman, warning that multi-issue alliances would be difficult to maintain if
activists failed to develop a more subtle analysis of gay liberation’s articulations with

72
Gay Sunshine #5, January 1971.

116
race, gender, and class. Ono found that “naming revolutionary groups – blacks, chicanos,
Indians, women, gays – in this linear fashion” suggested that “the revolution is straight
and male,” and made it difficult to discuss women’s and queer peoples’ multiple
identities and political agendas. In addition, she argued that the concept of the “gay
ghetto” overstated apparent similarities between queer urban enclaves and communities
of color. She stated that gay and lesbian life in cities made “unity demonstrations” with
multiple groups possible, but described gay “segregation” as far less widespread than that
structuring Native American reservations, African American ghettos, or Chicano
barrios.
73
While Ono’s article may have grown out of sustained conversations within
movement circles, however, her writing was not widely distributed, nor did Gay Sunshine
print any responses from readers to her statement.
In January 1971, however – a month after Ono’s article – a broader critique of
racial gaps in the gay liberation movement appeared through a new organization in
Berkeley, Third World Gay People. Gay Sunshine announced this group’s formation on
a page headlined “THIRD WORLD GAY PEOPLE NEW’S let’s get it on together!” and
illustrated with images of Mao Tse-Tung, Huey Newton, Che Guevara, Angela Y. Davis,
a cartoon of a black man holding a gun, and a fist with twinned female and male symbols
(Figure 2, above). As compared to the 1969 GLF flier, this page employed direct visual
citation, not stylized or metaphoric representation, of Black Power and global revolt.
Accompanying text stated that the Third World Gay People were a group of gays and

73
Varda Ono [One], “Come Together Right Now Over Us: Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation: An
Alliance for the Seventies,” Gay Sunshine 1.4 (December, 1970), 3.

117
lesbians of color, mostly gay men, and noted dissatisfaction with the white-dominated
Berkeley GLF: “we aren’t a part of Berkeley Gay Liberation Front because at this time
we feel it isn’t a true ‘Liberation Front.’ We have been established for the purpose of
dealing the oppression of Third World Gay People by the pig establishment.”
74
This
page of Gay Sunshine also reported on a similar organization in Chicago, Third World
Gay Revolution, as well as protests around two cases in New York in which Black men
faced criminal charges for acts of self-defense against anti-gay violence.
75

Beyond including a page on “Third World Gay People’s News,” the January 1971
issue of Gay Sunshine concentrated heavily on a police shooting at the Stud. This was a
gay bar that was patronized by both white and Black men and located in San Francisco’s
South of Market neighborhood, which was generally known for its gay leather scene. At
closing time on December 11, 1970, police had surrounded the bar and fired on a young
white man trying to drive away. Articles on adjacent pages revealed that uproar over this
shooting had revitalized the Gay Liberation Fronts in both San Francisco and Berkeley.
But a member of Third World Gay People, Michael Robinson, described the shooting as
perhaps more shocking to white gay men than gay men of color. Robinson termed the
Stud shooting a police effort “to show the white gays that they were to DIE just like the
Black, poor white, North Vietnamese, and white revolutionaries. Because you have been

74
“Third World People Unite!,” Gay Sunshine #5, January 1971.
75
The issue reprinted a clip from the New York-based Gay Flames on Raymond Lavon and William
Maynard. Lavon was a gay Black man charged in an incident in which he defended himself from anti-gay
violence. Maynard was a straight Black man who was charged in an event in which he was intervening to
help a gay friend. Gay Flames, importantly, described Lavon as “gay” and Maynard as “Black.”

118
found in contempt by rich ruling class America.”
76
Competing commentary in Gay
Sunshine also suggested that even outside the context of the shooting, Black and white
gay men experienced the bar’s atmosphere differently. On page one of the magazine, a
white writer described the Stud as “packed with cowboy-hip white and Black bodies
pushing and rubbing against one another… The sexual tension is electric.” But on page
two, Robinson called it an “80% white Gay bar” where racism still existed: “The Stud is
one of the most liberated gay bars in the Bay Area, but at the same time most of the white
freaks that go there have failed to deal with their racism.”
77

In the same issue of Gay Sunshine, another article asked, “Where are the Gay
Black Panthers?” Here, a white gay man named Gary Alinder answered this question by
critiquing gay involvement in the Panthers’ RPCC. Alinder stated that:
Macho Black males make me as uptight and perhaps more uptight (is that
racism?) as macho white males… I can perhaps relate to Sol, or Michael or Ken
or Richard or any of my Gay Third World sisters and brothers as people. And
that’s how I think we should “deal with racism” – by relating within the Gay
community.
78

But unlike Alinder, Michael Robinson and others in Third World Gay People suggested
that white gay men ought to “deal with their racism” both by relating in new ways to gay
men of color, and also by rallying in support of the Black Panthers and other groups.
Robinson urged white gay readers not only to rally for the cause of the young man shot at
the Stud, but also to support “Bobby Seale, [the] Seattle 7… John Cluchette, or any of the

76
Robinson, “The Stud Shooting: From a Black Viewpoint,” Gay Sunshine #5, January 1971, page 2.
77
“Showdown,” Gay Sunshine #5, January 1971, 1-2.
78
Gary Alinder, “Where are the Gay Black Panthers?” Gay Sunshine #5, January 1971, 15.

119
powerful Indians of Alcatraz”; he argued further that white gay people needed “the
people of the world fighting with them” to achieve liberation.
79
Certainly, some gay
liberationists, both white and of color, invested in both personal self-critique and more
public actions of solidarity. The next issue of Gay Sunshine printed photos of white,
Black, and Asian gay men with the tagline “Which one are you most attracted to?” above
a short article exploring racialized beauty standards. The same issue reported San
Francisco and Berkeley GLF members attending “solidarity days” for Bobby Seale, Erika
Huggins, Angela Davis and Russell Magee.
Still, perceptions of Black radical masculinity, pervasive throughout U.S. culture,
were difficult to shake. Analogies between Black and gay identities suggested an implicit
contrast between white gayness and straight Blackness as twinned (though warring)
modes of male gender. Amidst these analogies, white gay men – much like lesbian
feminists were also doing at the time – increasingly struggled over the politics of
feminine versus butch gender expression. Some radical gay men began to define acting
“butch” as a problem, creating groups such as Fems Against Sexism and publications
such as The Effeminist.
80
As reported in Gay Sunshine, transgender activists formed
Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) and Transvestites and Transsexuals

79
Michael Robinson, “The Stud Shooting…”
80
Two months after the shooting at the Stud, some activists sought to “liberate” that bar through “circle
dancing and togetherness” – rejecting what they saw as the alienated habit of cruising for one-on-one dates.
This represented one expression of the critique of butch styles. But the “liberators” faced resentment from
regular bar patrons, many of whom – both Black and white – favored a harder, leather style. This showed
that effeminacy could be viewed as intrusion. I am interested to explore how this action and the bar’s
overall leather atmosphere intersected with its racial dynamics. See “Gay Action at the Stud Feb. 28,” Gay
Sunshine #6, March 1971, inside page.

120
(TAT) in New York City; the Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization (TACO) in
Los Angeles; Radical Queens in Milwaukee; and the Cockettes, a drag performance
troupe, in San Francisco.
81
These organizations primarily mobilized “queens” of color
and responded to anti-trans bias among gay men as well as to police mistreatment.
Debates over gender expression played out against a backdrop of racial and geopolitical
meanings, as in regards to solidarity with Cuba, where pasivo (passive) male sexuality
had been targeted as particularly threatening to the revolution. These debates also played
into discussions of the Alpine County project, which envisioned a new gay enclave built
on “pioneer” butch, white masculinity. The Alpine project borrowed freely from anti-
imperialist rhetoric while breaking from the substance of that political commitment and
solidifying a politics of “gay nationalism.”
82
In the process, it sparked schisms within
California gay liberation, particularly between Bay Area and Los Angeles groups.

Alpine County and Gay Nationalism
From January 1970 through early 1971, activists promoted the Alpine County
project through gay, countercultural, and left periodicals; through Los Angeles, San
Francisco State, and Berkeley chapters of the Gay Liberation Front; and through San

81
“Translib” and “Transvestite and Transsexual Liberation,” Gay Sunshine #5 (January 1971).
82
This term was not heavily used, but it was cited as one tendency within the movement by Morgan
Pinney, and used by both Alpine supporters (as in their reference to “Stonewall Nation”) and by critics (see
below).

121
Francisco’s Sexual Freedom League, the Psychedelic Venus Church, and the rather
creatively named Bay Area Gays for Unification and Nationalism (BAGFUN). In
November 1970 this coalition became the Alpine Liberation Front (or ALF). The project
reported hundreds of potential migrants – 479 signups from Los Angeles, as many as
1,179 overall.
83
Leaders claimed they had 128 financial backers offering over $250,000
in capital; they sought consultations from LA architectural and financial firms.
84
Don
Jackson recruited well-known Los Angeles gay activist Morris Kight to support the
project, and proposed the colony could generate income through the tourist trade.
85
The
project won significant press, not just in countercultural and gay papers like the Berkeley
Barb or Gay Sunshine, but also the mainstream San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle,
Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Time magazine, and the London Observer. Gay
men (and a few women) from around the country wrote into project leaders asking to join
the migration; some supporters called for a dual strategy of urban-rural Gay Power.
86

Even establishment politicians and right-wing figures took note: Governor Reagan’s staff

83
Charles Foley, “The Gay Front plans a takeover,” London Observer November 29, 1970, ACP I.
84
Lee Dye, “Claim 479 to Move In: Homosexuals Describe Plan to Take Over Alpine County,” Los
Angeles Times October 21, 1970, ACP I; “gaycity,” Berkeley Tribe, October 30, 1970, copied in Alpine
Liberation Front packet published as a fundraising tool (most likely January 1971), Thorp Papers;
investments as reported by the Alpine Message Center, cited in “AlpLib for Washos Too,” Berkeley Barb,
December 11-17, 1970, page 4, Thorp Papers; proposals from Economics Research Associates and Ladd &
Kelsey, Architects in ACP II, ONE.
85
“Brother Don Has a Dream,” Charles Thorp Papers.
86
Letters to the Los Angeles GLF are collected in ACP file II of II, ONE. Internal project letters in the
same file (for example, Don Jackson to Stan Williams of the LA GLF) mention a combined strategy with
New York City activists.

122
stated they could not stop a legal recall, while Dr. Carl McIntire, a radio evangelist and
pro-war organizer, called for “missionaries” to stop the homosexual takeover.
87

Figure 3: “Alpine County, or Other Appropriate Destination.”
88

Yet Alpine County as a location was never as important as the gay colony idea.
When they first introduced the project, activists neglected to name the site, promoting
only the outlines of a gay migration and county takeover.
89
One publicity photo taken by
Los Angeles project members featured a long-haired, barefooted young man with a guitar

87
McIntire called for right-wing “missionaries” to keep gays out of Alpine County. Noted in “GAY vs
GOSPEL,” San Francisco Good Times, October 30, 1970, reprinted in ALF Packet, Thorp Papers.
88
Publicity photo, c. 1970. Alpine County File, ONE. Courtesy ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.
89
See for example Don Jackson, “Help Build the Stonewall Nation,” which calls for a September 20, 1970
meeting, Thorp Papers; and “Planning the City of Gay,” Spokane Natural September 18-October 2, 1970,
Don Jackson file, ONE.

123
case and small dog, hitching a ride from a freeway entrance and holding a sign reading
“Alpine County – or other appropriate destination” (Figure 3, above). Further, project
leaders suggested that Alpine could not only follow but also even supersede models for
racial liberation. In the Berkeley Barb, Don Jackson claimed that while slavery had
ended for Black people, “Gay people are still slaves today… Huey Newton spoke truth
when he said that Gay People are the most oppressed minority of all.”
90
This was a broad
overstatement of Newton’s August 1970 letter, but just as he had used Eldridge Cleaver
to legitimate taking land, Jackson used Huey Newton to declare homophobia worse than
chattel slavery, and gay more radical than black liberation. Meanwhile, Kilhefner termed
the Alpine project “a scheme every oppressed minority could latch on to – there’s an
Alpine County in every state in the union.”
91
This reversed the analogy to race, positing
Alpine as the model for radicals of color – rather than suggesting an equal exchange.
Alpine leaders declared that gay liberation could realize its goals by colonizing
the U.S. West. Again and again they described project recruits as “pioneers,” in language
suggesting pioneering would make gay men tougher, stronger, and more united. One
article by Alpine supporters stated, “There will be hostile natives. Chopping wood,
drawing water from a stream, severe Alpine winters, living in tents and Quonset huts… A
Gay city will rise from the huts and tents… [with] camaraderie and brotherhood.”
92

90
Don Jackson, “Gay Say They Ain’t Guil-Tay!” Berkeley Barb, October 23, 1970, no page marked, Don
Jackson File, ONE Archives.
91
GLF spokesman Don Kilhefner quoted in “Alpine County Hopes for Snow,” San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday October 22, 1970, no page marked (Thorp Papers).
92
“gaycity,” Berkeley Tribe October 30, 1970, no page; in Alpine Liberation Front packet, Thorp Papers.

124
Kilhefner compared it to the TV western Death Valley Days (perhaps appealing to the
show’s onetime host, Governor Ronald Reagan!). Kilhefner described project
participants as “a new breed of hardy, outdoor homosexuals,” a phrase some recruits
echoed in letters.
93
This new “breed” might theoretically include people of color and
white women; one project flier showed three white men, one white woman, and one black
man, all dressed in hippie style (Figure 4, below).
94
This image also mobilized
metaphors of this Wild West, including through its headline “Wanted: for Seeking
Refuge and Freedom. ‘The Alpioneers.’” Jackson declared rural life would naturally
attract lesbians, since “Gay women… would really prefer to live in the small town or
country where they can have a house and yard.”
95
(Thus, the female pair was
domestically arranged with one woman wearing a hat and holding a gun and the other
seated at her feet with a dog.) Yet Alpine signups were almost entirely men, the
leadership was entirely white men, and the language of pioneer was all but explicit in its
racial and gender meaning.
96
This is not to forget how many lesbians were drawn to
rural separatism in this time, nor to ignore the whiteness of most such separatist projects.
But separatist lesbians generally described their efforts as a return to anti-capitalist

93
GLF spokesman Don Kilhefner quoted in “Alpine County Hopes for Snow,” San Francisco Chronicle
Thursday October 22, 1970, no page marked (Thorp Papers). For an example of a letter referencing this
phrase, see letter from San Francisco men Tom, Doug, and Mel in ACP II, ONE.
94
“Alpioneers” flyer, ACP II.
95
Don Jackson, “Mountain Women,” no source or date cited but most likely Berkeley Barb (based on font),
ACP II, ONE Archives.
96
See ACP II for lists of signups from Los Angeles. I have not been able to locate Bay Area signup lists.

125
matriarchy. Alpine positioned gay liberation as forward progress, achieving an implicitly
white and butch masculinity through pioneer hardship and overtaking land.
Figure 4: “Wanted for Seeking Refuge and Freedom.”
97

It is worth noting that Don Jackson’s other major activism during the early 1970s
centered on extending gay liberation to prisons, jails, and mental institutions, including
California’s notorious Atascadero State Hospital. He wrote a lengthy article for the

97
Publicity flier, c. 1970. Alpine County File, ONE. Courtesy ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives.

126
August 1972 Gay Sunshine decrying the practice of shock treatments and isolation holds
for gay prisoners, illustrated through a cover image titled “We Are All Fugitives” (Figure
5, below).
98
This cover presented a disjointed collage of fences and surveillance, prison
guards, skeletons, and concentration camp numbers, with two embracing men rising out
of the montage and a female angel flying just above. In his article’s text, Jackson
described gay men and lesbians as beset by sodomy laws and other proscriptions, and
called for establishing “half-way houses” for released gay convicts, particularly youth.
99

Jackson’s work on gay prison issues adds depth to his descriptions of gay oppression and
contextualizes his desire for refuge in Alpine County. Yet, even in his writings on
imprisonment, Jackson failed to note any intersections between homophobia and racism
or class inequality. While his attention to gay and lesbian prisoners is compelling, it only
further highlights the racial limits of the Alpine project’s proposal for gay freedom.
Charles Thorp of BAGFUN concluded about Alpine that “Anywhere else, we
would have to create from the ruins of heterosexual society… but here is open land.”
100

Project files featured photos of seemingly deserted spaces, including an empty street in
Markleeville and a snowy highway leading into the county. Yet Alpine was “open” only
in project leaders’ imaginations. Alpine was already home not only to white people, but

98
Don Jackson, “We Are All Fugitives,” Gay Sunshine #14 (August 1972), 4. For an excellent discussion
of this and other gay liberationist prison activism, see Regina Kunzel, “Lessons in Being Gay: Queer
Encounters in Gay & Lesbian Prison Activism,” Radical History Review (100, Winter 2008): 11-37.
99
Indeed, there was a halfway house like this in Seattle, called Stonewall; there was also a chapter of GLF
in the Walla Walla State Prison in Washington (referenced in Gay Sunshine).
100
Untitled clipping from Daily Californian October 21, 1970, Thorp Papers.

127
to between 100 and 300 members of the Native American Washo tribe.
101
Alpine leaders
called themselves both pioneers and friends of the Washo – enacting a version of white
Americanism that many have termed “going Native.”
102
Notably, by the later 1970s, the
impulse to “go Native” became realized in the Radical Faeries, a sexual and affectional
subculture among gay – mostly white – men. Don Kilhefner, an Alpine project leader,
was a key founder of the Faeries, key in shaping the group’s embrace of pagan and
Native American spiritualities as means towards self-realization.
103

In 1970, “going Native” became apparent as Charles Thorp compared the Alpine
project to the American Indian Movement: “It’s like the Indians, if they take Alcatraz and
stay, it’s theirs.”
104
This ignored the key point that Native people had seen land already
under their control stolen by conquest. Alpine leaders attempted to acknowledge Native
claims yet also conquer Alpine themselves. Through the fall, articles sprang up in the
gay and countercultural press with titles including “AlpLib for Washos Too,” “Gay
Radical Says Alpine Indian Turf,” and “Treaty With Indians.”
105

101
See footnote 3 for an explanation of the uncertain population.
102
For discussions of “going native” generally, see Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (Yale University Press,
1998); and Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2001).
103
For a thoughtful discussion of the Radical Faeries, see Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Arrival at Home:
Radical Faerie Configurations of Sexuality and Place,” GLQ 15:1 (2008): 67-96.
104
“Gay Lib in Alpine County,” Daily Californian (UC Berkeley), October 22, 1970. Clipping in Thorp
Papers.
105
“Gay Radical Says Alpine Indian Turf,” Berkeley Barb, no date, Alpine Liberation Packet, Thorp
Papers. The article stated that “Gay Liberation is somewhat embarrassed at their omission of the Washoes
from their plans to liberate Alpine,” but quotes activist Mother Boats as blaming the absence on “typically
racist establishment records” and henceforth calling for a “gay-native coalition.”

128
Figure 5: “We Are All Fugitives.”
106

The project sent a group to visit Alpine County over Thanksgiving of 1970, in one
account terming the group the “Alpine County Penetration Committee.”
107
Amidst this
trip, the San Francisco Examiner quoted Kight as saying: “The Washoe Indians have a
private alliance with us.”
108
But no evidence suggests any meeting ever took place

106
Cover, Gay Sunshine #14, August 1972.
107
“No One to Listen: Gays’ Outline for Invasion,” SF Examiner Friday, November 27, 1970, Thorp
Papers.
108
Ibid.

129
between Washo people and the ALF. Less than two weeks later, the Bay Area ALF
overwhelmingly passed a resolution in support of the Washo. The same resolution called
for the majority of the Alpine County Board of Supervisors to be people of color –
amended to mean gays and lesbians of color.
109
ALF added details on Washo culture to
their information packet, but emphasized peyote use and pine-nut harvesting since
“health food people and hippies dig pine nuts.”
110
While some sought to turn Alpine
towards an anti-racist agenda, their efforts were stymied by racism among project leaders.
In an internal letter, Don Jackson proposed a meeting with Washo people, saying:
they are a primitive tribe… we can make no presumptions until we study them. It
would be an immense asset if we could find a couple of Gay Indians to take
along, but caution must be used that they are not from a tribe that is an ancient
enemy… The underground press will eat up a story of peace talks between Gays
and Indians with photos of gift exchange etc.
111

Jackson’s comments reveal that his interest in “exchange” was driven by a cynical
interest in press, and suggest his ignorance of the radical Pan-Indian politics of the time.
The Alpine project invited a barrage of criticism from other gay radicals,
particularly in the Bay Area. Just before Thanksgiving, the Berkeley GLF – termed by
some the biggest gay radical group in the Bay Area – voted by two-thirds to oppose

109
Paperwork on the resolution is included in the Alpine Liberation Front Packet, Thorp Papers.
110
Alpine Liberation Front Packet, Thorp Papers. Pages 18-23 in packet focus on Washo people and
culture. Information here includes a list of books, a list of “possible moves for ALF” regarding the Washo
(ranging from legalizing peyote to teaching Washo in schools); a reprint of a traditional Washo story; and
an essay noting practices of interest to the counterculture and sexual liberation, including peyote and
women’s roles in religious practice. These pages were added by Jefferson Fuck Poland, leader of San
Francisco’s Sexual Liberation League and Psychedelic Venus Church (two majority heterosexual groups),
who introduced the resolution in support of the Washo and a Third World majority.
111
Don Jackson to Stan Williams and Gay Nationalists, ACP II.

130
Alpine.
112
The national gay magazine the Advocate termed this vote “the first major
split…of the West Coast Gay Liberation Movement.”
113
Activist Nick Benton explained
the reason for the ruling in San Francisco Chronicle and Gay Sunshine editorials:
Berkeley GLF saw the project as “racist, sexist, impractical and counter-revolutionary
nationalist.”
114
Here, the Berkeley GLF seemed to directly critique Jackson’s earlier call
to “Help Build to Stonewall Nation.” The Berkeley GLF meeting’s chair, Ed Luckin,
stated that the proposed gift exchange and treaty suggested a strategy of “buying people.
And I think it would be a much better approach if someone asked the Indians how they
felt about our coming up there.”
115

Other critics said that the project, by claiming space through existing political
economic structures, would reproduce the gay ghetto – making Alpine a site of isolation
and exploitation rather than a utopia. Thus, an article in Gay Flames stated, “Even if we
seize the county, we cannot outlaw private property or keep out the Tavern Guild or the
money of organized crime,” which would continue to exploit gay people drawn to the
county.
116
The unsigned article termed it impossible to achieve liberated sexuality
without transforming society as a whole. In this vein, Gay Sunshine added: “Among Gay

112
“Gay Unit Rejects Alpine Takeover,” Los Angeles Times undated; Nick Benton, Berkeley Tribe
November 6, 1970; “Berkeley GLF opts out,” The Advocate November 25-December 8, 1970, page 9. All
clippings collected in ACP I.
113
Ibid.
114
Nick Benton, Berkeley Tribe November 6, 1970; the page notes this editorial was reprinted from the
Chronicle.
115
“Berkeley GLF opts out,” The Advocate November 25-December 8, 1970, page 9, ACP I.
116
“From Gay Flames,” on “Alpine Page,” Gay Sunshine 3, Thorp Papers.

131
people there is resentment and fear of… Jackson and Kight, who somehow have the Gay
world by the balls, who somehow understand the Establishment ‘mysteries’ of County
government, mass media manipulation, and land financing and development.”
117
The
Alpine project worked through rather than against the “system”; in so doing, it seemed to
betray many of the goals of gay liberation.
Alpine leaders responded to their critics with a shallow vision of racial diversity:
Alpine would be for “gays and straights, men and women, black and white and red and
brown and yellow, young and old alike in a spirit of peace and fellowship. It is, indeed, a
gay project for spreading freedom all over the world and to all kinds of people.”
118
But
this response ignored the substance of critics’ opposition, who said the project drove
away the support of anti-racist gay men and lesbians. Don Jackson privately described
this opposition as driven by petty jealousy.
119
More publicly, however, he acknowledged
privileges among Alpine project leaders: “I don’t think the same thing will happen to us
that has happened to Angela Davis, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton, or the Los Siete
brothers.”
120
Indeed Alpine proposed a version of gay liberation that owed debts to, yet
could isolate itself from, anti-imperialist commitment.
Facing criticism on the one hand, and freezing winters on the other – not to
mention fraud charges against Los Angeles fundraisers – the Alpine County movement

117
“off the snow pigs,” Gay Sunshine page 4, no date, Thorp Papers.
118
Front Lines (LA GLF newsletter), ALF Packet, Thorp Papers.
119
Don Jackson to Stan Williams and the Gay Nationalists, GLF of Los Angeles (undated), ACP II.
120
Leo Laurence, “A Gay County?” Berkeley Barb October 16, 1970, ACP I.

132
lost steam.
121
No band of gay liberationists ever moved in, and project records hold little
after spring 1971.
122
But the Alpine philosophy, termed “nationalism” by both
proponents and critics, stood as one backdrop for the formulation of a different concept:
gay socialism. While the Alpine project mobilized through images of butch, white,
pioneers, gay socialism began to be articulated through debates about alliance with Cuba,
as well as discussions about effeminacy and gay male gender roles.

Cuba and Gay Socialism
The gay liberationist goal of revolutionary alliance was directly and forcefully
challenged when the U.S.-based Venceremos Brigade, which organized work and
political education trips to Cuba in open violation of the U.S. travel embargo, instituted
an anti-gay policy for participants.
123
As Ian Lekus has discussed, in the third Brigade to
Cuba in August 1970, a caucus of participants was openly gay or lesbian, and following
this trip the Brigades voted to ban out homosexual people from participating in the trips.
In instituting this policy, leaders of the Brigades saw themselves as following Cuban
revolutionary policy, and defined “homosexuality [as] a social pathology which reflects

121
“L.A. judge finds Alpine fund raiser innocent,” Advocate June 23, 1971, ACP II. The article states that
Robert Humphries, Mike Haggerty, and Donald Dill were found “not guilty of misdemeanor fraud charges
resulting from street solicitation of funds last fall for the Alpine County gay colonization project.”
122
Voter registration and absentee voting swelled in the 1972 election, suggesting that straight vacation
home owners themselves registered to vote in Alpine to forestall the threatened gay colony. See “Alpine
taking no chances?” Advocate December 6, 1972, ACP I.The
123
See Lekus, “Queer Harvests: Homosexuality, the U.S. New Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to
Cuba” (Radical History Review, 2004).

133
left-over bourgeois decadence.”
124
They argued that homosexual life in pre-revolutionary
Cuba had been inextricably tied to an exploitative tourist economy, which included both
heterosexual and homosexual prostitution serving U.S. businessmen and travelers.
Castro’s anti-gay policies represented homosexuality – in particular, anal penetration and
effeminacy – as inherently threatening to the revolutionary woman and man; thus pasivo
Cuban gay men stood out as culprits of collusion with empire. Cuba’s UMAP work
camps for homosexuals, though shut down by 1968, had targeted pasivo men and
attempted to restore normative masculinity through nation-building labor.
Given this context, the New Left-trained leaders of the Brigades interpreted U.S.
gay liberation as an imperialist intrusion.

In discussions held on Venceremos Brigades
boats to Cuba in 1970, members of the GLF were challenged about the “material basis”
of their oppression, with some straight brigadistas terming gay identity a capitalist
decadence. Gay and lesbian brigadistas of color hesitated to come out because of
straight radicals’ views of homosexuality as a white phenomenon. Meanwhile,
individual Cubans expressed support for gay liberation; a few Cuban officials came out to
GLF leaders, and officials did not shut down GLF discussions (though they did bar
Cubans from attending a GLF workshop).
125
Yet straight Brigadistas held that gay
Brigadistas “show[ed] more interest in Cuban homosexuals than Revolution” and joined
“a cultural imperialist offensive against the Cuban Revolution, carried out by US

124
Brigada Venceremos Policy on Gay Recruitment, undated (c.1972), Race-Class Articles folder, Sally
Gearhart Papers, GLBTHS.
125
Ibid, 71.

134
imperialism in an attempt to discredit the Revolution and alienate Northamericans from
it.”
126
After the 1970 trip, Brigades leaders rejected from the Brigades an African
American gay man involved in GLF, the Panthers, and antiwar organizing by claiming he
was “not political enough.”
127
In 1972, the Brigades formally banned out gays or
lesbians from participating, stating that homosexuality was a form of cultural
imperialism.
128
Gay men and lesbians could participate in the Brigades only if they
remained closeted and silent about sexual politics while in Cuba.
Gay Sunshine addressed the issue of Cuba and the Brigades from its first issue in
August, 1970, stating, “It is precisely the contradiction between the promise of that
revolution and its practice towards homosexuals that convinced us of the need for GLF in
this country to confront both capitalist society and the movement which hopes to change
it.”
129
The magazine became an important venue for discussions of Cuba, in fall 1971
publishing a commentary by the Gay Committee of Returned Brigadistas denouncing the
Brigades’ anti-gay policy.
130
Another year later, Gay Sunshine published a statement by
gay Cubans who condemned Cuba as pseudo-socialist due to its persecution of

126
Brigada Venceremos Policy, Gearhart Papers.
127
Ibid, 79.
128
IbidIbid, 78.
129
“Venceremos,” Gay Sunshine #1, August, 1970.
130
Gay Committee of Returned Brigadistas, “North American Gays Protest,” Gay Sunshine 9
(October/November 1971), 2.

135
homosexuals.
131
A June 1972 article by Allen Young, a former member of both SDS and
the Brigades and the most prominent voice on Cuba within the U.S. gay liberation
movement, initiated a more extended discussion of Cuban and Venceremos policy in the
magazine. Young is best known today as the co-editor, with Karla Jay, of the seminal
gay liberation volume Out of the Closets (1972) and the gay and lesbian studies
anthology Lavender Culture (1978). He first traveled to Cuba in 1969 and became the
treasurer of the Venceremos Brigades organizing committee before leaving the
organization due to differences over how to incorporate gay liberation into a politics of
Cuban solidarity.
132

In his opening salvo in Gay Sunshine, Young declared that while “this stage of
anti-imperialist struggle” demanded solidarity with Cuba, anti-gay policy – which he also
termed “sexism” – would “retard and even negate” the Cuban and other revolutions. He
further argued that “the concept of the nation is becoming more and more obsolete” and
“the ‘new left’ has wrongly projected third world revolutionary countries as models for
our own struggle.” Instead of simply following national models, gay liberation should
hew to a broader “internationalism” that dissented from both capitalist and socialist or
communist regimes.
133
Finally, Young suggested that gay liberation might become a
positive export of the U.S. and that Cuba could “import from an oppressed people inside

131
“Letter from Cuba,” by anonymous gays in Cuba, reprinted from Come Out! January 1972, in Gay
Sunshine 15 (October/November 1972), 13.
132
See Lekus, 59-60.
133
For example, Young suggested capitalist Brazil and socialist North Korea as both deserving critique.

136
the U.S. such developments as feminism, gay liberation and black liberation,” just as it
imported technology. In ironic parallel to the Venceremos Brigades policy, Young
established a gay “we” that was separate from or unlike “our oppressed brothers or sisters
in [Cuba or] places like Cuba”; this presumably North American “we” could “be openly
gay as we fight against imperialism and capitalism, as well as sexism.”
134

Just below Young’s article, Bay Area activist Nick Benton – who several months
earlier had termed the Alpine project “racist, sexist, and counter-revolutionary
nationalist” – published a harsh reply. Bay Area activists (and Gay Sunshine readers)
knew Benton as the host of a gay dance party, The People’s Alternative, held every week
at his apartment in south Berkeley and intended as a countercultural response to gay
bars.
135
He was also a proponent of “effeminism,” a current of gay liberation that sought
to counter sexism both as it was expressed by men against women, and “among
‘masculine’ gay males over effeminate gay males.”
136
The effeminist project called for
communal childcare and the abolition of marriage as ways to incorporate gay people into
new family forms.
137
Benton used his effeminist perspective to declare that Young clung
to a “white male” perspective by failing to distinguish between the existence of

134
Allen Young, “¿Cuba Si?”, Gay Sunshine 13 (June 1972), 13.
135
Morgan Pinney shows a widespread interest in such alternatives, describing one gay community center
“as an alternative to the ‘mafia-run bars and pig-run streets’” (18).
136
Pinney 11.
137
Statement of Committee to Abolish Sexual Slavery, back of Benton’s “Sexism, Racism…” pamphlet.

137
“homosexuality” and gay liberationist politics in Cuba.
138
As another writer in Gay
Sunshine, Zack Mansfield, put it, Benton’s reasoning was rather “obscure.”
139
Yet
Benton’s ideas are worth lingering over for a moment because his response to Young
dramatically shaped discussions within Gay Sunshine regarding Cuba and gay socialism.
As an effeminist, Benton defined “homosexuality” as based in unequal relations
of power, while “gay liberation” revolved around egalitarian sexual relations. He saw the
missionary position in heterosexual intercourse as the equivalent of Western imperialism,
and a same-sex 69 (that is, mutual oral sex) as its opposite.
140
Benton extended his
critique of homosexuality to a metaphor of “political homosexuality,” which he defined
as any imbalance of power between men. Metaphorically, this inequality involved
“older/powerful males fucking young/powerless males in the ass.”
141
Overlooking the
fact that many people find penetration pleasurable, let alone that people can imbue power
imbalances with egalitarian erotic meaning, Benton termed racism, empire, and
capitalism as all forms of “political homosexuality.” He used this argument to object to
Young’s argument that “gay liberation” could add to Cuba’s “homosexual subculture,”
because he defined gay liberation and “homosexuality” as fundamentally at odds.
142

138
Nick Benton, untitled letter, Gay Sunshine #13, June 1972, 11.
139
Letter by Zack Mansfield, Gay Sunshine #14, August 1972, 13.
140
Benton, “gay is the most,” Gay Sunshine #2 (October 1970).
141
Benton, “Sexism, Racism…”, 4.
142
Young, “¿Cuba Sí?”

138
Responding to Benton, Young emphasized that oppression of homosexuals not
only existed worldwide, in both capitalist and socialist nations, but that it affected gays
and lesbians whether they had a politicized understanding of their sexuality or not.
Young believed that effeminists ought to support all “people (Cubans, North Americans,
or anyone) who are being persecuted for ‘homosexuality.’”
143
Another reader, Perry
Brass, responded more harshly to Benton, reading him as “sexist” for implying that
“Cuban faggots” were not really “Cuban”; Brass added angrily: “There are a hell of a lot
of Black and Brown and Yellow faggots and dykes walking around and also a great many
of them are sick to shit of macho third world politics.”
144
Young agreed with Brass that
“Benton totally ignores the experience and feelings of third world gay people,”
emphasizing that Benton failed to see that through anti-gay policy, “the values of
capitalism… re-emerged in a so-called socialist regime.”
145
The figures of “third world
gay people,” already made visible in Gay Sunshine through the Third World Gay
People’s News, became central reference points in Young and Brass’s responses, cited to
critique Benton’s view that “political homosexuality” made straight men of color into
“faggots,” and to point out that gay liberation necessarily involved Black, Latino, Asian,
or Native American queer people.

143
Allen Young, Letter, in “Male Supremacy and Cuba: 3 views,” Gay Sunshine 15 (October/November
1972), 13.
144
Perry Brass, Letter, “Male Supremacy and Cuba: 3 views.”
145
Allen Young, Letter, in “Male Supremacy and Cuba: 3 views.”

139
The debate over Young’s article and Benton’s response set the stage for a more
detailed exploration of “gay socialism” in fall 1972, written by Zack Mansfield, a
member of the Gay Sunshine editorial collective. Mansfield termed Young’s
internationalism merely “humanitarian,” that is, politically vague and uncommitted. Like
Young, Mansfield believed “sexual reform” should be more deeply integrated into the
Cuban revolution, but as he did so he distinguished a gay Marxist analysis from anti-gay
Stalinist directives. Mansfield cautioned readers not to confuse Marxism or socialism
with Stalinism, and he argued that only a classless society would provide room for
unalienated sexuality and the end of sexual labels.
146
Out of all the pieces in Gay
Sunshine on Cuba, Mansfield’s analysis came the closest to the contribution the magazine
reprinted from a group of gay Cubans themselves, who stated that persecutions such as
the UMAP camps “denie[d] fundamentally the postulates of the social and political
movement in Cuba.”
147
That is, Mansfield suggested that gay liberation and socialism
reinforced one another, and that anti-gay prejudice undermined a Marxist project.
Mansfield’s article reflected the growth of a “gay socialist” critique beginning to
emerge nationally among several groups, many of them Trotskyist (and thus, anti-
Stalinist). Red Butterfly, a gay socialist group in New York City, and two predominately
straight national groups – the Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers’ Party – were

146
Zack Mansfield, “The Gay Soul of Socialism,” Gay Sunshine 15 (October/November 1972), 4.
147
“Letter from Cuba,” Gay Sunshine #15, October/November 1972, 13.

140
particularly critical in shaping these discussions.
148
As part of these shifts, Gay Sunshine
and gay liberationist groups in Detroit in August 1972 adopted a call for a “new mass
party” that would reject Democratic Party power.
149
Though little discussion of this effort
appeared in later issues of Gay Sunshine, the 1972 declaration foreshadowed Marxist,
especially Marxist-Leninist, gay organizing that blossomed from 1974 forward, and
which I explore at length in the next chapter.
Generally, early gay socialists emphasized gay liberation’s concrete demands,
such as those that a GLF chapter presented in May 1971: “1) Repeal of all sodomy laws;
2) Repeal of the solicitation laws; 3) Repeal of the impersonation laws; 4) Fair
employment laws for Gays; 5) Fair housing laws for Gays.”
150
By making such demands,
activists placed material demands on the state; they suggested gays and lesbians needed
socialism for their own liberation and not only because they supported the liberation of
others. Thus, Red Butterfly described themselves as “an association of gay men and
women who as revolutionary socialists see their liberation linked to the class struggle.”
151

A socialist group of queer people of color, Third World Gay Revolution, enacted a
“thirteen point program [that] repeatedly states, ‘socialism is the answer’… Their

148
See “SF News,” Gay Sunshine #12, April 1972, page 2; Karen Bancroft, “On Gay Liberation,” Young
Socialist Discussion Bulletin #15 (7), 1971 (Reinhart Papers, GLBTHS); Laura Miller, “Gay Liberation
Task Force,” Young Socialist Organizer, April 1971 (Reinhart Papers); and Socialist Workers Party
Discussion Bulletins (Reinhart Papers). The Gay Sunshine article reported that SWP not only welcomed out
homosexuals but had endorsed gay rights in its platform.
149
“New Mvt. Strategy,” Gay Sunshine # 14, August 1972, 4.
150
See Bancroft article, Young Socialist Discussion Bulletin, Reinhart Papers.
151
Red Butterfly, “Gay Liberation” (1970), Reinhart Papers, GLBTHS; back page.

141
demands include traditional minority demands… militant third world demands…
women’s demands… and radical gay demands” all combined.
152

This sense of interlocking interests rested not only on the concept of a common
enemy, but also on a critique of “roles” and the goal of a labelless society. Morgan
Pinney, who had also commented on other elements of gay liberation nationally,
observed that Red Butterfly “maintain[ed] that the word ‘homosexual’ will be
meaningless in a post-revolutionary society.”
153
Red Butterfly’s vision was expressed in
an essay first written in February 1970 and then circulated nationally. The group defined
homosexual behavior as transhistorical and transcultural; declared the criminalization of
homosexuality and the development of gay identity as phenomena of industrialized
capitalism; and argued for the “malleability of human nature and the variety of human
experience.”
154
Yet – echoing Herbert Marcuse – they found that capitalism restricted
human life, “not conducive to the kind of social flexibility and spontaneity which could
make liberation a reality.” Capitalism produced not only labor exploitation and poverty,
environmental crisis, and imperialist wars, but also the constriction of sexuality into

152
Pinney 22.
153
Pinney 26.
154
Red Butterfly, “Gay Liberation,” 7. Indeed, gay socialists contributed a great deal to the development of
lesbian and gay, now queer, studies. This is most obvious in the wide circulation of John D’Emilio’s essay
“Capitalism and Gay Identity” (1983), which has had significant impact on the field even as its argument
has been critiqued.

142
nuclear family forms, and contemporary “Labels, such as homo-, hetero-, and bi-sexual,
indicate the rigidity of the forms of relating under which we live.”
155

Red Butterfly’s critique set up their understanding of gay liberation’s role in a
broader social revolution. They argued that in the contemporary U.S., homosexuality put
the individual in conflict with the broader culture, pushing her either towards “other
societies or subcultures,” or towards changing the dominant society’s “structure and
material base.” Red Butterfly argued that gay liberation should and would follow this
latter path, helping to shift family structures towards a communalism that would
reinvigorate pre-capitalist matriarchal structures. They stated that “When the leap has
been made to a freer and more human society, the old [nuclear] family structure will
wither away. And there will be no other motive left for the attachment of two people (or
more) than that of mutual inclination.”
156
In this future society, while people might live
together in relationships similar to contemporary marriage or nuclear family structures,
they would not be compelled to do so by economic need or social pressures.
Gay socialists aimed to allow homosexuals to be something different than who
they were, or in their own terms, who they were compelled to be. They expressed a
utopian impulse towards a world in which sexual diversity was alive and well, yet was
not used as a basis for social hierarchy or power.
157
Faced with the notion that, as Allen

155
Red Butterfly, “Gay Liberation,” 12.
156
Ibid, 9-10.
157
They imagined “a free, consciously controlled social life, a goal we share with all other oppressed
groups directly.” Red Butterfly, “Gay Liberation,” 12. I am interested to consider how gay socialists
interpreted sexual roles and gender norms: did they, too, shun “butch” in favor of effeminate masculinity?

143
Young put it, “the way [homosexuals] make love is inextricably linked to the evil system
of capitalism,” gay socialists argued that gay liberation would help undo capitalism, and
that a socialist society would allow for even greater sexual freedom than already being
imagined by “gay” and “lesbian” identities. Gay Marxist analysis became especially
influential within queer activism by the mid-1970s, instrumental in the creation of what
radicals increasingly termed a “gay and lesbian left.” Gay Sunshine helps to show how
this politics became seeded in the earlier 1970s through debates over Cuba and amidst
discussions of anti-war organizing, the Black Panthers and Black Power, and against the
“gay nationalism” of the Alpine County scheme.

Conclusion: Imagining Alliance, Mapping Division
In the archives I have discussed, debates over sexual politics circulated back and
forth between the domestic and the international: from theories of internal colonialism to
critiques of the gay ghetto, from the antiwar movement to the Panthers, Alpine County to
Cuba, Cuba to family forms within the U.S. Yet activists’ discussions constructed
blindspots that obscured connections they might have glimpsed between anti-gay
oppression and racism in California cities, as well as between queer life in California and
elsewhere around the world. Though gay liberationists acknowledged male prostitution
in Cuba under the Batista regime as a serious problem, they undertheorized similar
racialized “vice districts” in the U.S. They largely failed to examine how both Los
Angeles and San Francisco police pushed street hustling (gay and straight) into

144
communities of color, or how postwar urban renewal mobilized fears of “deviance” in
order to clear the way for corporate development. Indeed, they generally turned away
from existing “vice districts,” seeking not so much to capture power from within these
locations, but rather to find new, whiter and more middle-class, sites of gay life.
Though places understood as the “gay ghetto” fostered oppositional culture – as
among drag queens and transgender women on the streets of the Tenderloin, or in leather
bars on Folsom Street – gay liberationists described such queer places and identities as
totally, even totalistically, oppressed. As Morgan Pinney said of street hustling in New
York, “Matronly ladies… would probably be surprised to learn that GLF also cries about
the existence of a Forty-Second Street.”
158
Activists’ visions of gay “liberation,” while
transformative and powerful in changing sexual norms, also strengthened divisions
between the oppositional cultures of everyday queer life and the rhetoric of organized gay
politics. This, in turn, deepened bifurcations along race, class, and gender lines, because
queer oppositional cultures were already multiracial, multiclass, and multigender, yet
organized gay politics were consistently represented as white, male, and middle-class –
including by contrast to the perceived ultra-masculinity of Black radicalism.
Generally, such racialized, classed queer disavowal has been most frequently
critique in reference to lesbian feminism, especially lesbian separatism. Certainly,
lesbian feminists frequently termed women’s bodies “colonized” by sexism and sought to

158
Pinney, 17. He noted a GLF action in which, “Carrying signs saying ‘Seize Your Community,’ these
proud homosexuals implored their sisters and brothers to stop relating to sex with dollar bills (as we have
been taught to do in capitalist America).”

145
overturn this external control by building “women’s community.” Anne Enke, in her
study of feminist and lesbian life in 1960s and 1970s Minneapolis, Detroit, and Chicago,
contributes insightful critique of how efforts at women’s community marked feminist and
lesbian identities as white and middle class, especially in spaces such as women’s
bookstores, coffeehouses, dances, and other community sites.
159
Enke and other
observers have also critiqued early white lesbian feminists for rejecting the butch-femme
embodiments long embraced by women of color and working-class white women. Gay
male liberationists’ disavowal of racialized, working-class, and gender-transgressive
queer life holds many similarities to these patterns of lesbian culture, but it is also
different. Because men in general have enjoyed power at larger and more public scales,
they have been able to express their sexualities, including homosexualities, in parks, bars,
and on public streets. As a result, gay male liberationists’ disavowal of the markers of
deviance have also been expressed at larger scales, as in rejections of neighborhoods such
as San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Though gay liberationists were motivated by ideals of
transformative, revolutionary alliance, they also mapped racial divisions both within their
own movement and between the places where they could envision sexual freedom and
racial justice; through these divisions, the ideal of revolutionary, anti-imperialist alliance
began to lose its wider currency in gay men’s activism.

159
Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Duke, 2007);
see also Enke, “Smuggling Sex Through the Gates: Race, Sexuality, and the Politics of Space in Second
Wave Feminism,” American Quarterly 55:4 (2003), 635-667.

146
Despite these divisions, Gay Sunshine and other materials suggest late 1970 and
early 1971 as a highpoint of the potential for anti-imperialist, intersectionalist discussions
within gay liberation in the San Francisco Bay Area. Within this time period, the Bay
Area Regional Conference of the RPCC was held; gays and lesbians participated in anti-
war marches in significant numbers; Gay Sunshine devoted space to “Third World Gay
People’s News” and the Third World Gay People met independently of the Berkeley
GLF; and Bay Area activists rejected the Alpine County project. Gay Sunshine writers
and readers continued to discuss alliance with Cuba, as well as gay and lesbian
organizing taking place globally, especially in Latin America.
160
Debates about Cuba and
discussions of global gay life helped to contextualize definitions of gay socialism within
both gay and straight-led groups. Rather than disappearing, the queer anti-imperialist
politics circulated at the height of gay liberation became realized by the mid 1970s as a
new development: a self-consciously multiracial, multi-issue gay and lesbian left.

160
See for example the discussion of the Frente Homosexual de Liberación, “Mexico G.L.F.,” Gay
Sunshine 11 (February/March 1972), 2; “Argentina: GAY MANIFESTO,” translated by Allen Young, Gay
Sunshine 15 (October/November 1972), 7, which notes that the full Spanish text can be found in Afuera
from Gay Latins in New York, and also cites a September 1969 publication in Argentina, Nuestro Mundo;
and Allen Young, “Gays in Brazil :24/’Veado’,” Gay Sunshine 13 (June 1972), 4, in which Young posits
Brazil as the most analogous Latin American country to the U.S. due to its capitalist military dictatorship
and active gay scene.

147
CHAPTER THREE
Connecting the Struggle: Building a Gay and Lesbian Left
In June 1976, members of the Stonewall Contingent, a San Francisco coalition of
radical gay men and lesbians, reflected that:
This past year has seen a rebirth of the original Stonewall spirit. Progressive groups
of Third World gays and of lesbians, like GALA [Gay Latino Alliance], Gay
American Indians, and Lesbians Organizing have emerged. The creation of unified
alliances like the Coalition Against Supreme Court Oppression and of mass militant
gay organizations like BAGL [Bay Area Gay Liberation], have deepened our
commitment to political action against the system that oppresses all people.
1

The Contingent offered this statement in a flier calling on activists to join them at two
upcoming political mobilizations: the Gay Freedom Day parade and then, the following
week, a radical protest of the U.S. Bicentennial. At both events, the Stonewall
Contingent put forth a broad political platform: jobs an end to economic cutbacks, anti-
racism and anti-sexism “in the gay community and in society,” gay rights and freedom
for political dissent, and solidarity with racial and national liberation movements both in
the U.S. and around the world.
The dominant narrative of queer activism tells us that the coalitional impulses
apparent in early gay liberation died out nearly as soon as the movement began. Thus,
“gay liberation” is generally described as closing down between 1971 and 1973,
becoming supplanted by a movement structured on the one hand by largely white,
middle-class, and pragmatic efforts towards “gay rights,” and on the other by equally

1
“Join the Stonewall Contingent,” flier c.1976, Ephemera Organizations (S Miscellaneous), GLBTHS.

148
white and middle class, though more countercultural, gender separatism.
2
This narrative
is applied with a totality that obscures a rich and multiracial current of queer politics that
not only survived, but actually gathered steam, well past the early 1970s. Within this
current, activists saw themselves as continuing and as improving upon the inspirations of
the gay liberation moment, whose “original spirit” – in the Stonewall Contingent’s words
– “connected the gay struggle with the fight of the Third World and other working and
oppressed people for liberation throughout the world.” To carry “liberationist” politics
forward through the mid and later 1970s, queer radicals self-consciously sought to
organize a gay and lesbian left.
Across the U.S. and internationally, groups formed with names such as the “Gay
Left Collective” and the “Lavender Left.” Activists termed themselves “dyke and faggot
communists” and kept alive identities as “Third World” lesbians and gays. Gay and
lesbian left organizations and radical culture reached their height between 1973 and 1980
and carried lasting influence for years to follow. The gay and lesbian left forms a central
thread in the larger history of the queer 1970s and stand as a critical part of the era’s left
in general. While this radical formation is largely ignored in existing scholarly histories,
it was well discussed within radical periodicals of its time, both queer and straight. It has

2
Those who date this division to 1971 usually reference it through the dissolution of the Gay Liberation
Front and, in New York City, its transition into the more moderate Gay Activist Alliance. Here, see
especially David Deitcher, ed., The Question of Equality: Lesbian and Gay Politics in America Since
Stonewall (New York: Scribner, 1995); Martin Duberman, Stonewall; Elizabeth Armstrong, Forging Gay
Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950-1994 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2002). On
the timing of the rise of gendered separatism (both gay male and lesbian, but especially as tied to the
exclusion of transwomen from the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Feminist Conference), see Susan Stryker,
Transgender History.

149
begun to be explored by a few queer historians, as well as more publicly resuscitated
through practices of popular memory, notably on the internet and in discussions at sites
such as the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco.
3
The story of the gay and lesbian
left is crucial for tracing the legacies that the long 1960s held for queer and radical
politics through the Reagan Era as well as up till today.
Activists in the gay and lesbian left were motivated by Marxist, Marxist-Leninist,
feminist of color, and socialist-feminist ideas. They sought to pull the gay and lesbian
movement towards anti-capitalist, including specifically anti-imperialist, theory and
practice, and they pushed straight leftists to welcome lesbian and gay concerns. Gay and
lesbian leftists understood themselves as dissidents in multiple senses. As lesbian
socialist Judy MacLean reflected in 1979, “When I am talking to someone outside the
movement, trying to link socialism and lesbianism means combining the unpopular with
the taboo. When I get someone convinced of the justice of one, I have to take a deep
breath and wonder if I can muster the energy to start on the other.”
4
Still, by 1976, the
Los Angeles-based, Marxist-Leninist group Lavender & Red Union held that “two clear-
cut trends are emerging in Gay Liberation”: a “right-wing trend, exemplified by the
immersion of much of the movement in electoral politics, law reform and service work”

3
Most sources that reflect on the gay and lesbian left are activist memoirs. There are very few scholarly
accounts, with the important exceptions of emerging work by Horacio Roque Ramírez, Christina B.
Hanhardt, Kevin Mumford, Trinity Ordona, and Alice Y. Hom. I find this gap in scholarship fascinating
given the important role that gay and lesbian leftists played in the development of lesbian and gay studies.
4
Judy MacLean, “Lesbians and the Left,” in Gay and Lesbian Task Force of the New American Movement
(Socialist Feminist Commission), Working Papers on Gay/Lesbian Liberation and Socialism (Blazing Star,
Chicago: New American Movement, 1979): 3-6. In Ephemera (N-Miscellaneous), GLBTHS.

150
was strong, but the “socialist tendency is getting stronger and consolidating itself.”
5
This
statement was more than mere bluster. Throughout the mid to late 1970s, a small but
influential number of explicitly socialist and communist gay and lesbian groups formed,
using Marxist and Marxist-Leninist language to prefigure a more multiracial, working
class lesbian and gay movement and community. An array of more ideologically fluid
groups also placed themselves on the gay and lesbian left, expressing anti-capitalist, anti-
racist, and anti-imperialist politics through identity- and issue-based organizing. Whether
socialist, communist, Third Worldist, or nondenominationally “left,” the activists in these
groups developed theory, organized campaigns, built community, and articulated
connections between gay and lesbian freedom and broader radical goals.
This chapter traces the history of the gay and lesbian left in California, examining
major organizations, ideas, weaknesses, and strengths. I focus my analysis on how gay
and lesbian left groups incorporated critiques of empire into their sexual politics and how
they developed anti-capitalist and internationalist political agendas. Most of the groups I
examine are unstudied up to this point or only briefly mentioned in queer and social
movement histories; a very small number have begun to receive attention in work by
Horacio Roque Ramírez, Christina Hanhardt, and Trinity Ordona. I detail a few important
gay and lesbian groups in Los Angeles, but center my study in the San Francisco Bay
Area, where the gay and lesbian left was larger and more diverse – ideologically, racially

5
Lavender & Red Union, The Lavender & Red Book: A Gay Liberation/Socialist Anthology (Los Angeles:
Lavender & Red Union, April 1976): 1. A copy of this publication is held in the Gay Left/Martin
Collection, SCL.

151
and ethnically, and by gender.
Focusing on the period from 1973 to 1980, I find that while the left in general
splintered and lost power during this time, gay and lesbian left groups proliferated and
grew. Bay Area gay and lesbian left groups found particular energy during and after
1976, when multiracial, co-gender, gay-straight coalitions formed within radical protests
of the Bicentennial. From 1977 forward, queer leftists found a growing number of allies
within the straight left, as the expanding conservative movement reacted against modest
gains that had been achieved towards gay and lesbian rights, and right-wing politicians
and groups politicized homosexuality as a target for attack.
6
The gay and lesbian left
grew in significant part through organizing against the right wing, whose assaults were
crystallized in the 1978 Briggs Initiative threatening to bar gay men and lesbians from
jobs in California’s public schools. Rather than fostering accommodationist or piecemeal
politics, the mid to late 1970s became critical years for the development of a systemic
analysis that situated sexual freedom within a broader movement for social justice and
against the inequities of U.S. empire, racism, and capitalism.
Today, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and even transgender concerns are cited for inclusion
in a broader progressive agenda. Many LGBT organizations cite racial equity,
reproductive rights, and social services as important values. However, this mutual
recognition often remains shallow, functioning through a list of interest groups rather
than a systemic analysis of interrelated inequalities. Gay and lesbian leftists worked

6
This historicization is echoed by gay and lesbian left activists themselves. See for example Judy
MacLean, “Lesbians and the Left.”

152
towards something more than just a place on a list. They were socialists, communists,
and feminists who articulated the importance of Third World, Marxist, and Marxist-
Leninist critique for sexual politics, and did so in far more sustained, complex, and
sophisticated ways than queer activists ever had before. Activists in the gay and lesbian
left sought to live out anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist politics at all level of their lives,
including in political campaigns, discourse, gender expression and radical culture.
Collectively, these radicals expressed three key ideas.
First, gay and lesbian leftists insisted that lesbian and gay freedom and socialist
revolution were interdependent. They offered working-class and Third World solidarity
– in the U.S. and around the world – as means to enlarge the meanings of lesbian and gay
activism as well as build political unity with straight radicals. They theorized the Marxist
“contradictions” of gay and lesbian identities and community, and emphasized that gay
and lesbian freedom was both dependent on, and would contribute to, a society
transformed through anti-capitalist struggle. They described lesbians and gay men as
primarily “workers,” rather than inherently members of the bourgeoisie. They explained
queer community as a means of resistance to the capitalist nuclear family; and they held
that gay liberation relied on socialist revolution because only overturning capitalism
would free people from the nuclear family as an economic and social unit.
Second, lesbian and gay leftists worked to explicitly deconstruct and overturn the
sexual and racial politics that universalized “gayness” as white and male, and that
facilitated racial, class, and gender segregation within queer communities. They
confronted racism in men’s bars and women’s community institutions, ongoing left

153
discourse of queer identities as bourgeois and white, and structures of gentrification
beginning to seem characteristic of “gay neighborhoods.” Gay and lesbian leftists of
color argued against the notion that queer sexualities were foreign to Third World people
and nations, and they linked queer of color community building with their involvement in
activist campaigns. Continuing the politics of “effeminism” visible a few years prior, gay
male leftists embraced a “faggot” identity they described as “androgynous, non-
consumerist, and revolutionary.”
7
The concept of radical faggotry helped radical gay
men, especially white men, move against a masculinist “clone” style they perceived as
commodified, sexist, and politically apathetic. Meanwhile, lesbian leftists, especially
lesbians of color, came to critique lesbian separatism as non-Marxist and
counterproductive to alliance.
Third, gay and lesbian leftists worked to develop a radical culture that asserted
multi-issue politics – anti-racist, anti-capitalist, internationalist, feminist, collectively
anti-imperialist – as the true vehicle of gay and lesbian freedom. As part of this work,
they seized a memory of the Stonewall Riots and the late 1960s through early 1970s “gay
liberation” moment for their own political narrative. They adopted names such as the
Stonewall Contingent and the June 28 Union; continued to use the term gay liberation at
a time when dominant narratives would suggest it had become anachronistic; emphasized
Third World, lesbian, and drag queen leadership at the Stonewall Riots and in queer
politics more generally; and described the impulse behind gay liberation as a goal of

7
Dennis Altman, “What Changed in the Seventies?” in Gay Left Collective, ed., Homosexuality: Power
and Politics (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), 52.

154
radical unity across sexuality, race, gender, class, and nation. Finally, they began to
develop the field of gay and lesbian history through materialist analysis.
This chapter begins by considering some of the broader political influences that
shaped the gay and lesbian left, and then moves on to outline the gay and lesbian left’s
development. I explore how two Los Angeles organizations applied Marxist-Leninist
analysis to gay and lesbian identity, and how they tried but largely failed to incorporate
analyses of race and nation in their work. I then consider how several Bay Area group
worked to desegregate local queer community by building Third World gay and lesbian
organizations, confronting urban renewal and gentrification, and proposing “faggotry” as
a mode of anti-racist and anti-sexist sexual politics for gay white men. Next, I narrate
how Bay Area groups organized multi-issue activism against the rising right wing,
especially in the campaign to defeat the Briggs Initiative in 1978, and then through
protests of police violence and the light sentence meted out for Dan White’s 1978
murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. I conclude with
observations about how gay and lesbian leftists crafted a radical political culture,
including how they made use of the radical past, and what questions appear most pressing
for future research into this understudied area of queer activist history.
One gap in this chapter is important to flag from the outset. Lesbians and gay men
of color were critical participants in the gay and lesbian left; in the Bay Area, queer of
color activists formed the Gay and Lesbian Latino Alliance, Gay American Indians, the
Third World Caucus, Gente, Mujeres en Lucha, the Asian American Feminist Support
Group, and the Gay Black Caucus. Existing archives offer very little material from these

155
groups, however. Lesbian and gay activists of color placed a high value on organizing
autonomously, and generally chose to maintain separate, often private archives in order to
maintain autonomy within the field of historical memory, as well.
8
Oral histories will
likely allow a fuller history of left organizing among gay and lesbian leftists of color
during the 1970s. For now, I seek to highlight queer of color activism as much as
materials allow, while placing special pressure on how white gay and lesbian leftists
understood and organized against racism and global inequality.

The Contexts of “Gay and Lesbian” and “Left”
The gay and lesbian left grew out of and navigated between two fields: the broader
left, which was largely straight and in key instances hostile to queer people; and broader
gay and lesbian activism and political culture, which included many moderate, liberal
rather than left formations. It also emerged amidst a growing, reactionary right wing
that, by the end of the 1970s, brought former California Governor Ronald Reagan into
Presidential office. Gay and lesbian activism expanded under assault even as the broader
left dramatically diminished, with Marxist, Third World, and other revolutionary
critiques losing much of the support they captured in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and
many organizations and organizational networks splintering and falling apart. Gay and

8
Availability is affected both by what has been donated to an archive and an archive’s funding and staff
time. The Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley does contain collections donated by gay and lesbian
activists of color, but only one of these, the Hank Tavera Collection, has been catalogued and opened for
research. Further, this collection mostly speaks to activism and political culture during the 1980s, especially
around HIV/AIDS and political theater.

156
lesbian leftists gained straight allies in part as broader left groups splintered, dogmatism
lost favor, and coalitional politics appeared increasingly necessary for political survival.
The overall context of the gay and lesbian left can be dated from shifts that
coalesced during 1973, a year sometimes used to mark the close of the long 1960s. Most
critically, 1973 saw the signing of the Paris Peace Accords and the withdrawal of U.S.
troops from Vietnam, marking a victory for the anti-war movement but also curtailing its
grassroots sense of urgency. The year ushered in economic recession sparked by the
OPEC oil crisis, heightened cynicism generated by the Watergate scandal, and growing
suspicion of revolutionary, especially underground, politics. After September 11, 1973,
progressive activists around the world mourned the defeat of Chilean President Salvador
Allende’s socialist project in the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet; many saw this
moment as a victory for a global right wing gaining ground internationally as well as
across the U.S. The next year saw volatile white reaction to a busing program to
integrate Boston schools; by 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court dramatically restricted
affirmative action programs in Bakke v. Regents of the University of California.
In the field of queer history, many also cite 1973 as a moment of closure,
describing it not only as a year in which radical “gay liberation” became moderated into a
politics of “gay rights,” but as a marker for when countercultural gender fluidity and
transgender possibility became tamped down into the masculinist “clone” ideal for men
and a separatist culture among women.
9
Lesbian separatism has won critique not only

9
Again see Stryker, Transgender History and also Yolanda Retter, “Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles,
1970-79,” in Joseph Boone, et al., eds., Queer Frontiers: Millennial Geographies, Genders, and

157
for its hostility to transgender identities, but also for the ways in which a separatist
aversion to butch-femme desire has excluded working-class women, women of color, and
working-class and multiracial lesbian history.
10
In addition to these tensions, the later
1970s saw Anita Bryant, a singer and the spokeswoman of the Florida orange juice
industry, embarking on a crusade against democratic and social rights for lesbians and
gay men. Operating through her organization Save the Children, Bryant led a successful
campaign to repeal a gay rights ordinance in Dade County, Florida in 1977, and went on
to champion anti-gay policies in St. Paul, Wichita, and Eugene. In California, Bryant
helped to inspire State Senator John Briggs’ campaign to pass Proposition 6 (“the Briggs
Initiative”), which would have allowed school districts to fire gay and lesbian employees
as well as any employee who expressed support for gay and lesbian rights. (Activists
responded to Save Our Children, the Bakke decision, and Proposition 6 with chants
terming Bakke, Bryant, and Briggs the “three little pigs.”) By 1979, the political
landscape saw the founding of the Moral Majority. This organization gained significant
political influence in the Reagan administration and made opposition to gay and lesbian
rights a core part of its agenda.
At the same time, the 1970s brought several critical, though challenged, victories

Generations (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000): 196-221. It should be noted that Stryker
writes from a transgender critique of separatism while Retter identified with separatism throughout much of
her political and scholarly career.
10
Here see especially Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis, Boots of Leather, Slippers of
Gold, and Carmen Vázquez, transcribed interview with Kelly Anderson, May 12-13, 2005 and August 25,
2005 in Brooklyn, NY and Provincetown, MA, Voices of Feminism Oral History Project, Sophia Smith
Collection, Smith College. The interview is available online at
http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/vof/vof-intro.html (accessed April 18, 2009).

158
for queer people. Activists won the removal of homosexuality as a mental illness within
the DSM, the psychiatric “Bible,” in 1973; this led the state of California to end its
practices of lobotomy and electroshock of homosexual prisoners.
11
California repealed
its sodomy law in 1976, and while the Briggs Initiative presented a real threat, voters
defeated it by a solid margin in November 1978. Black and Latino queer culture gained
increasing notice through disco; “women’s music” bloomed; and pop stars including
David Bowie, Elton John, and Mick Jagger displayed gender androgyny and declared
themselves bisexual. Gay men and lesbians gained political power in several cities
during the 1970s, especially in San Francisco following George Moscone’s 1975 election
as Mayor. Moscone appointed a number of gay and lesbian people to political positions,
and his influence, together with San Francisco’s adoption of district-based rather than
city-wide Supervisorial elections, set the stage for the election of Harvey Milk. In 1977,
Milk was elected as San Francisco Supervisor; he was the first openly gay man elected to
political office in California, and one of the first openly gay or lesbian politicians
anywhere in the U.S.
12
And, while Anita Bryant and John Briggs embarked on an anti-
queer crusade, in 1978 activists defeated the Briggs Initiative through grassroots
campaigning. Though the late 1970s brought a groundswell of right-wing power, 1979

11
See Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy.
12
Milk had already made a number of unsuccessful Supervisor runs; his 1977 election was facilitated by
San Francisco’s adoption of district, rather than at-large, elections. Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk,
Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco: Chronicle
Books, 1996): 64. For further discussion of gay and lesbian political power in 1970s San Francisco and Los
Angeles, see Deitcher, ed., The Question of Equality; Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street: the Life
and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982); and Moira Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.

159
also saw the first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which drew some
100,000 people to Washington D.C. and was preceded by the first-ever Third World
Lesbian/Gay Conference, organized by the National Coalition of Black Gays.
For many, the decade’s combination of victory and defeat became epitomized in the
1978 assassination of Harvey Milk. Days after the defeat of the Briggs Initiative, Dan
White – a former police officer and, up till his resignation just a few days prior, Milk’s
colleague on the Board of Supervisors – entered San Francisco City Hall through an
unlocked window and assassinated both Supervisor Milk and Mayor Moscone with a
handgun. In May 1979, White received the light sentence of manslaughter for this double
murder, and queer anger exploded in protests on the City Hall steps. In events that
became known as the “White Night Riot,” gay men and lesbians ripped parking meters
from the sidewalk and setting fire to San Francisco Police Department cruisers.
Leading up to and amidst this complex context, gay and lesbian leftists drew on
four major, interrelated radical currents seeded by the long 1960s. These currents were
the Third World Left, the New Communist Movement, socialist and social democratic
efforts, and feminist activism. As noted previously, the Third World Left operated as a
network of organizations that, in Laura Pulido’s words, “explicitly identified as
revolutionary nationalist, Marxist, Leninist or Maoist and had a membership of at least
half people of color.”
13
Several Third World Left groups were founded in the early
1970s; one of the most important for the gay and lesbian left was Katipunan ng mga

13
Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left, 5.

160
Demokratikong Pilipino (the Union of Democratic Filipinos, or KDP).

Founded in 1973
and active until 1987, KDP was modeled on Communist-allied youth organizations in the
Philippines and led by both radicals in the Philippines and Filipino American leftists in
the United States. As described by historian and former member Estella Habal, KDP
merged anti-Marcos solidarity with the goal of multiracial unity for the U.S. domestic
working class.
14
Defining itself as a “revolutionary mass organization,” the group’s
strongest chapters organized in the Bay Area and Seattle. By the mid-1970s KDP had
become the leading group in the anti-eviction campaign at San Francisco’s International
Hotel (or I-Hotel). The struggle to defend this community institution, which was home to
many elderly Filipino men, lasted from 1968 to 1979, brought together a multiracial
coalition of activists, and galvanized the local Asian American left.
KDP stood out from most other Third World Left organizations by welcoming both
the support and the involvement of gay and lesbian people. A number of lesbian and gay
activists, including Melinda Paras, Trinity Ordona, and Syl Savellano, were members and
leaders of KDP. Ordona has more recently written a history of Asian and Pacific Islander
lesbian and transgender activism in the Bay Area and terms homosexuality a “known
secret” within KDP.
15
She states that the organization was friendly to gay men and
lesbians, although queer members chose to remain relatively closeted to protect the group
from both left and mainstream homophobia. As Estella Habal illustrates, KDP was

14
For a history of KDP and the I-Hotel, see Estella Habal, San Francisco’s International Hotel: Mobilizing
the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement (Temple University Press, 2007).
15
Trinity Ordona, Coming Out Together, 94.

161
sharply criticized by other left groups, notably including the Chinese American Maoist
group Wei Min She and the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), for welcoming
support from Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) in the I-Hotel campaign.
16
Wei Min She
and RCP justified their homophobia through assumptions that few if any working class
people or people of color were lesbian or gay, and by describing homosexuality as not
only bourgeois but also “hedonistic” – counter to principles of revolutionary self-sacrifice
grounded in heterosexual family norms.
17
They also held that KDP’s acceptance of gay
and lesbian support was tied to a broader “reformism” in the organization, critiquing
KDP leaders’ willingness to collaborate with city officials to win pragmatic housing
rights, as well as their deviance from Maoist critiques of the Cuban Revolution.
18

The tenor of this dispute was shaped by the ways that Third World Left groups
overlapped with organizations in the New Communist Movement, a radical current that
has received its most extensive analysis by former participant Max Elbaum, and which
warrants lengthy explanation here. New Communist organizations were Marxist-Leninist
and, in some cases, Maoist; they were unified by the goal of building a vanguard
communist party, though sharply divided over precisely who would claim vanguard
leadership.
19
New Communist groups’ investment in Third World solidarity and national

16
Habal, 112. RCP was a descendant of Revolutionary Union, described below.
17
Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (Verso, 2002), 139.
18
Habal, 111.
19
It is important to note that New Communist groups distinguished themselves sharply from the existing
Communist Party in the United States, critiquing the CPUSA for its adherence to Soviet policy, its hostility
to revolutionary nationalism, and its conservatism on both culture and tactics. New Communist groups did,

162
liberation marked them distinctly apart from the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) of the
time, as well as socialist, Trotskyist, and social democratic groups.
20
Many gay and
lesbian left groups drew on New Communist movement ideas, yet groups within the New
Communist Movement were markedly and almost uniformly hostile to gay and lesbian
activists and politics. Thus, New Communists offered gay and lesbian radicals key
models, but also helped to necessitate autonomous queer organizing.
Elbaum describes New Communist groups as united by Leninist thought,
especially Lenin’s formulation of imperialism as the “highest stage” of capitalism, and
cites study groups, Maoist self-critique, and a romanticization of working class culture as
characteristic aspects of the movement. Broadly, New Communist groups shared a
common goal of building the vanguard party, a goal that seemed to offer – in Elbaum’s
words –“a path for breaking down segregation within the left and building multiracial
formations on the basis of a common revolutionary perspective.”
21
New Communists
either claimed the vanguard label or saw their organizations as “pre-party formations.”
Some organizations should be understood as belonging to both the Third World Left and
the New Communist milieu, as activists in both currents cited solidarity with and drew
inspiration from the Panthers, the Cuban Revolution, and the Vietnamese and Chinese

however, celebrate the early years of the Russian Revolution and the 1930s CPUSA. The Third World Left
in general had a more mixed relationship with the CPUSA in part due to the campaign to free Angela Davis
(a CPUSA member).
20
New Communists saw the USSR and the CPUSA as pursuing “revisionist” policies, and socialists and
social democrats as reformist; they positioned themselves as “anti-revisionist” communists.
21
Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, 87.

163
Communist Parties. However, the New Communist Movement was ideologically
narrower than the looser Third World Left, as well as more fractured over the
“international line” and the “national question.”
22
These debates concerned, first, which
socialist countries or liberation movements to ally with, particularly in the context of
“anti-revisionist” critiques of the Soviet Union and tensions between the USSR and
China; and secondly, whether to perceive people of color as “nations,” and generally
what use to make of internal colonialism critique. Finally, while some New Communist
organizations were majority people of color and all New Communists viewed themselves
as anti-imperialist and anti-racist, New Communist groups remained two-thirds to three-
quarters white in their overall membership, and these groups varied widely in their ability
to carry out anti-racist commitments in practice.
Elbaum situates the upsurge of the New Communist Movement between 1968 and
1973 and locates its height in 1973 and 1974, in the wake of forums seeking to unite
several different organizations towards a coordinated party building strategy. He
identifies the first New Communist Movement organization as Bay Area Revolutionary
Union (BARU). Founded in 1968, in 1969 BARU produced the influential Red Papers I
synthesizing Marx, Lenin, and Mao, and developed a Maoist-informed strategy of a

22
Elbaum describes the movement’s energy as sustained through solidarity with Chile, the Philippines,
Latin American armed movements, and Angola and Mozambique; however, he notes that these alliances
also produced ideological splits, especially after China’s decision in 1975 to ally itself with the U.S. and
South Africa against the liberation movement in Angola, and even more conclusively after Mao’s death in
1976 and ensuing revelations about abuses under the Cultural Revolution. Maoist groups in the U.S.
generally also followed the Chinese Communist Party’s reading of the USSR as state-capitalist or
“revisionist,” even though both the Cuban and the Vietnamese Communist Parties disagreed with this
assessment. See Elbaum, 136 and 54.

164
“United Front Against Imperialism” with stated principles of national liberation, anti-
fascism, anti-sexism, and working class unity.
23
In 1970, BARU split into two groups,
Revolutionary Union (RU) and the smaller, guerilla-oriented Venceremos organization
(no relation to the Venceremos Brigades).
24
Between 1969 to 1973, many other groups,
including the October League, I Wor Kuen, the Black Workers Congress, and the Puerto
Rican Revolutionary Workers’ Organization (formerly the Young Lords Party), adopted
Maoist and Marxist-Leninist thought.
25
These organizations, together with the left paper
the Guardian, worked towards a “unified founding congress” in 1972-3.
But RU and other New Communist groups began to splinter apart at the very
moment they found their greatest influence. Revolutionary Union alienated many people
of color and anti-racist white activists when it downplayed the centrality of racism as the
organizing issue in the 1974 Boston busing crisis; in September 1975, RU disbanded and
created the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), which was dramatically more
sectarian and overwhelmingly white. (This was the same RCP that later denounced KDP
for welcoming gay and lesbian support in the I-Hotel fight.
26
) In the wake of these splits,
many New Communist groups sought new alliances. In 1978, the League of
Revolutionary Struggle formed, bringing together three Third World organizations: the

23
Elbaum, 133.
24
Ibid, 99ff. RU helped to generate the student-led Attica Brigade and was influential in turning Vietnam
Veterans Against the War towards more radical politics. Venceremos also seeded the Symbionese
Liberation Army.
25
The October League was an outgrowth of RYM II within late SDS.
26
Elbaum, 193.

165
Chinese American I Wor Kuen, the Chicano group August 29
th
Movement (ATM), and
the primarily African American Revolutionary Communist League. In 1977, the semi-
secret “Rectification Network” formed, bridging ideological boundaries by bringing
together leaders from KDP, the Black and Latina feminist organization the Third World
Women’s Alliance (TWWA), and the socialist Northern California Alliance.
Rectification created one of the largest left coalitions against the Bakke decision, and in
1980 it reformed as a more open organization, Line of March.
27
Several leaders of Line
of March were also central in the TWWA’s new iteration, the Alliance Against Women’s
Oppression, an organization I discuss extensively in the next chapter. By the mid-1980s,
Line of March also was active in the Rainbow Left wing of the Rainbow Coalition.
Speaking broadly, however, Elbaum contends that most New Communist groups
collapsed between 1978 and 1981, riven by disputes over how to respond to shifting
international alliances and revelations about abuses under China’s Cultural Revolution.
Throughout their tenure, the vast majority of New Communist groups instituted
strict anti-gay membership policies and described queer politics as liberal, individualistic,
or even reactionary. Revolutionary Union termed homosexuality an “individual response
to the intensification of the contradictions brought about by decaying imperialism,”
including the “contradiction between men and women” arising out of male supremacy.
28

27
Rectification led the National Committee to Overturn the Bakke Decision (NCOBD), which “turned out
20,000 people in Washington, DC on April 15, 1978” in the largest nationwide demonstration against
Bakke (Elbaum 243). In another signal of the dissolution of the New Communist Movement, in 1979
Guardian shifted away from a Marxist-Leninist party building orientation (Elbaum 246).
28
“Position Paper of the Revolutionary Union on Homosexuality and Gay Liberation,” attached to Los
Angeles Research Group statement, Reinhart File, GLBTHS.

166
RU further held that communists should struggle against sexism in the context of
monogamous heterosexual marriages and barred gay men and lesbians from
organizational membership because they saw gay and lesbian identity as an “escape”
from sexism. They compared homosexuality to drug addiction and held that because
homosexuality was “individualistic,” gay liberation, or “putting forth gayness as a
strategy for revolution in this country is a reactionary ideology.”
As New Communist groups collapsed and with the gift of hindsight, many activists
not only critiqued their former organizations’ homophobia but also described anti-gay
policies as interwoven with broader problems of dogmatism and “incorrect” analysis.
Elbaum terms the Rectification Network “self-consciously anti-homophobic, with one of
their founders, [Melinda] Paras [of KDP], a more open lesbian than just about any party
building leader at the time.”
29
By the early 1980s, the more public Line of March
explicitly cited feminism and lesbian and gay rights in its agenda.
30
Steve Hamilton was
an early leader of Revolutionary Union who later came out as gay and, in 1980, wrote a
critical history of RU in which he situated the group’s anti-gay policy within a broader
“economism,” or as he put it, “RU’s impatience with all but pure ‘class’ issues.”
31

Hamilton noted that RU’s anti-gay policy was developed between 1972 and 1974 as the

29
Elbaum, 243.
30
See “The Fight for Lesbian/Gay Rights in the Era of AIDS and Reaganism,” Line of March, internal
document, 1987. My thanks to Max Elbaum for providing me a copy of this document.
31
Steve Hamilton, “On the History of the Revolutionary Union (Part II),” Theoretical Review 14 (January-
February 1980), 8. Here, Hamilton observed that the RU’s discomfort with addressing sexism, in particular
its psychological effects, “contribute[d] indirectly towards simplistic, rigid abstractness” in the RU in
general.

167
group became increasingly “ultra-left” and inclined to read ideological disputes as
themselves differences of class position.
32
He also explained homophobia as bolstered
by many RU members’ desire to shed their own middle class backgrounds and fit in
within perceived working class culture. Because activists found it “nice to be like any
other worker on something” (and because, I would add, they assumed “any other worker”
was male, traditionally masculine, and culturally conservative), they acted “tough” and
rejected homosexuality as hedonistic and bourgeois.
33

Space to critique homophobia, as well as dogmatism, opened up as the boundaries
around who counted as New Communist, Third World Left, or even socialist or socialist-
feminist blurred. Not only did many activists participate in multiple different groups
simultaneously, but new political pressures brought activists together across previously
sustainable ideological divides. Coalitions developed as activists became exposed to new
thinking, as key organizations fell apart, and others struggled to stay relevant. Two
efforts in 1976 are particularly telling for tracing this shift. First, the Hard Times
Conference, held from January 30 to February 1, 1976 in Chicago, brought together a
range of groups to discuss left organizing amidst the ongoing recession: KDP, the left
newspaper the Guardian, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, the Prairie Fire Organizing

32
Elbaum points out that overinvestment in ideological purity led many New Communist activists to read
political differences along class “lines” – such that political dissent became read as itself bourgeois; he
defines this as a particularly Maoist stance (Elbaum 157). I propose that this helped to reinforce the view
that gay and lesbian politics were “bourgeois.”
33
Hamilton adds that New Communist groups also implemented anti-gay policies because their investment
in “self-sacrifice” made them resentful of all perceived “hedonism.”

168
Committee, socialist-feminist women’s unions, and gay and lesbian left groups.
34

Second, Hard Times groups coordinated “Bicentennial Without Colonies” protests in July
1976, which drew 40,000 people to Philadelphia and 10,000 to San Francisco.
Experiences of exclusion made queer radicals especially suspicious of dogmatism
and more likely to cross ideological boundaries to find one other and to craft theory. Key
gay and lesbian left organizations were founded as the New Communist Movement began
to splinter in 1973-4; members cited the Hard Times Conference and, especially, the
Bicentennial protests of 1976 as galvanizing their growth. Further, these groups gained
greatest influence during the years of New Communist dissolution, 1977 to 1981. While
the history of the gay and lesbian left cannot be traced only through the New Communist
Movement, the fragmentation of Marxist-Leninist and especially Maoist groups during
the latter 1970s is critical for understanding the growth of gay and lesbian left organizing.
The gay and lesbian left was also strengthened by the relative growth of socialist
organizing in the late 1970s, which itself drew energy from New Communist groups’

34
Founded in 1974, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC or Prairie Fire) was the above-ground
outgrowth of the Weather Underground. Prairie Fire was often denounced by New Communist groups for
being insufficiently Marxist-Leninist and overwhelmingly white (Elbaum also lambasts the organization). I
would argue, however, that Prairie Fire, especially through its volume Prairie Fire: the Politics of
Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism (1974), helped to sharpen a critique of empire and of internal colonialism
among many white activists at a time when many New Communists were occluding race behind a
universalistic class analysis. Further, many socialist-feminists (and socialist leaning feminists) received
Prairie Fire warmly (witness a strong review in the Bay Area women’s paper Plexus). Prairie Fire also
supported gay and lesbian rights while critiquing gay gentrification and racism as contrary to radical gay
and lesbian goals. While completing this chapter, I learned from a friend that a onetime organizer of the
San Francisco Dyke March was a member of Prairie Fire in the late 1970s and was briefly imprisoned
under the charge of attempting to bomb John Briggs’s state Senate office. In the late 1990s, Prairie Fire
activist Mickey Ellinger, together with former San Francisco State Strike organizer Sharon Martinas, co-
founded the Challenging White Supremacy workshop (CWS), an anti-racist study group aimed at young
white activists. I participated in CWS in 1998 through 2000. CWS also helped to produce the Catalyst
Project, which continues to do anti-racist education and attracts many queer members.

169
demise. While generally very weakly tied to the Third World Left, major socialist, social
democratic, and Trotskyist groups had already accepted gay and lesbian members and
expressed support for gay and lesbian rights.
35
The Socialist Workers Party (SWP) had
overturned its ban on gay and lesbian members in 1970 and added the defense of gay and
lesbian rights to its political platform in 1973; in 1975, SWP members were among the
founders of an important gay leftist group, Bay Area Gay Liberation.
36
The New
American Movement (NAM), a socialist organization founded in 1970 and which later
became tightly connected to socialist-feminist organizing, incorporated gay and lesbian
rights into its political principles in 1972.
37
NAM later helped to produce the Lavender
Left, an important gay and lesbian left network in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.
38

By 1979, gay and lesbian politics were welcomed as topics of discussion within the Bay
Area Socialist School, a NAM-affiliated effort that originally formed in the mid-1970s

35
Chris Phelps holds that openings for gay and lesbian recognition developed within the Young Socialists
as early as 1952. See Chris Phelps, “A Neglected Document on Socialism & Sex,” Journal of the History
of Sexuality 16:1 (January 2007): 1-13. The article reprints H.L. Small, “Socialism & Sex,” first published
in Young Socialist 5 (Winter 1952).
36
We know this mostly because activists critical of SWP or interested in red-baiting BAGL frequently
described the SWP as “poaching on” or “manipulating” BAGL. See Hal Offen, “Gay liberation growing
with BAGL,” The Voice of the Gay Students Coalition, Number 3, April 18, 1975. Ephemera –
Organizations (BAGL), GLBTHS.
37
Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy terms NAM socialist feminist and notes that the first national socialist
feminist conference, held in Yellow Springs, Ohio in 1975, was organized by the Dayton chapter of NAM.
In 1982, NAM merged with the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, producing the Democratic
Socialists of America. See Kennedy, “Socialist Feminism: What Difference Did It Make to the History of
Women’s Studies?” Feminist Studies 34.3 (Fall 2008): 497-525.
38
See Judy MacLean, “Lesbians and the Left.” Also see Peter Drucker, “The Lavender Left: An
Evaluation,” in “Spring 1981 Discussion Bulletin on Socialist-Feminism” (Solidarity: A Socialist-Feminist
Network). “Socialism” folder (Box S2), LLC, ONE.

170
and which coordinated study groups in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland.
39

Importantly, most gay and lesbian Marxist-Leninists believed that SWP, NAM, and
related socialist groups offered a shallow analysis of both race and sexuality, one that
positioned gay, lesbian, and people of color simply as “minorities” in need of democratic
rights – rather than as groups whose oppression was structured through imperialism.
40

Nonetheless, NAM, SWP, and other socialist groups, simply by welcoming gay and
lesbian activists and concerns, helped to popularize anti-capitalist analysis and bolstered
the organizing base of the gay and lesbian left.
In addition to the Third World Left, New Communist Movement, and socialist
organizing, the fourth formation critical to the development of the gay and lesbian left
was feminist activism. Two distinct though related feminist currents proved particularly
important: socialist feminism, a largely white effort, and women of color feminism,
especially among Black and Latina women experienced in the Third World Left. Gay
and, especially, lesbian leftists made significant use of feminist of color and socialist-
feminist ideas, especially the concept of autonomy; explanations of the gendered
divisions of reproductive labor; and critiques of abstract, implicitly white and middle
class, conceptions of gender and sexism.
While the histories of Black, Latina, Asian American, Native American, and
generally women of color feminisms, as well as socialist feminism, remain underwritten,

39
The East Bay chapter was formed in 1974 and the San Francisco one in 1976. See Bay Area Socialist
School folder, Ephemera, GLBTHS.
40
See for example Philip Derbyshire, “Sects and Sexuality: Trotskyism and the Politics of Homosexuality.”
In Homosexuality: Power and Politics: 104-115.

171
a few recent histories have begun to fill that gap and also offer suggestive models
towards a multiracial history of the gay and lesbian left.
41
Kimberly Springer, in her
history of Black feminism between 1968 and 1980, distinguishes between two Black
feminist trajectories: organizational growth and ideological development. Springer holds
that while many Black feminist organizations developed later than those of white women,
Black feminist thought developed along a similar timeline, as Black women activists
crafted political and social networks that they used to discuss a range of seemingly
competing ideas.
42
Springer details the creation of the Black Women’s Alliance (later the
Third World Women’s Alliance) in 1968, but finds that Black feminist organizing more
generally reached its height in the mid to late 1970s as Black women activists came to
view autonomous organizing – as distinct from separatism, seen as white – as politically
necessary.
43
Springer’s history compels us to consider the ideological work carried out
in friendship and organizing networks, as well as in more formal organizations.
In addition to Springer’s valuable points, work on the history of socialist-feminist
organizing is suggestive for explaining the growth of the gay and lesbian left over the

41
For broader analyses of socialist feminism, see Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in
America, 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Anne Valk, Radical Sisters:
Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in Washington D.C. (University of Illinois, 2008); Judith
Ezekiel, Feminism in the Heartland (Ohio State University Press, 2002); Anne Enke, Finding the
Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, & Feminist Activism; and sources in Duplessis and Snitow, ed., The
Feminist Memoir Project.
42
Springer holds that “Black feminist organizations developed later than white feminist organizations, but
Black and white feminist ideologies developed on parallel tracks.” Springer, Living for the Revolution, 4.
43
As discussed in Chapter 1, also see Benita Roth, Separate Roads to Feminism; Jennifer Nelson, Women
of Color in the Reproductive Rights Movement; and emerging work by Marisela Chavez and Sherie
Michelle Randolph.

172
1970s. Most scholars describe predominately white socialist-feminist groups dissolving
in the mid 1970s.
44
This is significant for placing white lesbians within a history of the
gay and lesbian left because socialist-feminist organizations generally welcomed lesbian
members and integrated lesbian rights into their platforms and theory. In the Bay Area,
the Berkeley-Oakland Women’s Union (BOWU), founded in 1973, included both an anti-
imperialist committee and a large Lesbian Caucus.
45
Among other activities, the Union
held a weekend workshop on lesbians’ working conditions and participated in a local
gathering for the Hard Times Conference.
46
Other lesbian groups grew directly out of
socialist feminist efforts; by the late 1970s, Wages Due Lesbians emerged as an offshoot
of the Wages for Housework chapter in San Francisco.
47
However, Elizabeth Lapovsky

44
For a useful reflection on distinctions between “socialist feminism,” “Marxist feminism,” and “materialist
feminism,” see Nancy Holstrom, “Introduction,” in Holstrom, ed., The Socialist Feminist Project: A
Contemporary Reader in Theory and Politics (Monthly Review Press, 2002): 1-12. Essays in this volume
by Sheila Rowbotham, Johanna Brenner, and Rosemary Hennessey are also helpful.
45
See “Berkeley-Oakland Women’s Union Principles of Unity,” published by BOWU, March 1975.
BOWU File, GLBTHS. The Principles themselves were originally written in June 1973 and then published
in Socialist Revolution #19, January-March 1974. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy describes socialist-feminist
organizing circles as politically fluid, with cross-pollination between social democratic, Leninist, and anti-
imperialist ideas; she argues that these differences strengthened rather than divided socialist feminist
organizations because the women in these groups saw sexism as “not the primary contradiction, rather it
was one among many.” Kennedy, “Socialist Feminism: What Difference…” Mary Ann Clawson holds that
socialist feminists moved towards an understanding of “systemic” oppression even though their theories
were weakened by universalistic notions of gender and class; Clawson, “Looking for Feminism: Racial
Dynamics and Generational Investments in the Second Wave,” Feminist studies 34.3 (Fall 2008): 526-555.
46
BOWU materials suggest that there were local conferences leading up to the Hard Times Conference in
1976 in Chicago, or that a Hard Times Conference was held more than once in cities around the country.
47
Wages for Housework, founded in Britain in 1973 by Selma James, gained chapters in San Francisco and
Los Angeles and attracted notable support from Black feminists and welfare rights activists. The
organizations Radical Women, the Workers World Party, and the All People’s Congress all expressed early
openness to queer politics. For discussions of “wages for housework,” see Mariarosa Dalla Costa and
Selma James, “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1972); Angela Y. Davis,
Women, Race, and Class (1983); and Barbara Ehrenreich, “Life Without Father: Reconsidering Socialist-

173
Kennedy holds that socialist feminism was increasingly limited to academic settings after
1976.
48
Judith Kegan Gardiner concurs, holding that “Between 1975 and 1978…The
socialist feminist women’s liberation unions dissolved, while academic women’s studies
grew.”
49
Gardiner attributes this shift to “trashing” of women’s liberation unions by
Maoists who she believes “were themselves or were influenced by FBI provocateurs,”
noting that FBI surveillance of women’s liberation groups has been well documented.
The dissolution of socialist feminist groups helped to expand the gay and lesbian left;
white lesbians who had been active in the these organizations continued to organize
independently, as well as in greater alliance with gay leftist men who had begun to
identify as feminists themselves.

Theorizing Contradiction in Los Angeles
One of the most important ideas of the gay and lesbian left was the idea that anti-
gay oppression was rooted in the contradictions of capitalist society – with
“contradiction” used to describe the mutually opposed but co-constitutive social
relationships that would demand socialist revolution. Unlike either lesbian separatists or
gay nationalists, gay and lesbian leftists did not view sexuality or gender as “primary”
social contradictions that predated the contradictions of class-stratified society. At the

Feminist Theory,” in Nancy Tuana and Rosemarie Tong, eds., Feminism and Philosophy: Essential
Readings in Theory, Reinterpretation, and Application (Westview Press, 1994): 265-271.
48
Kennedy, “Socialist Feminism: What Difference…”
49
Judith Kegan Gardiner, “What Happened to Socialist Feminist Women’s Studies Programs? A Case
Study and Some Speculations,” Feminist Studies 34.3 (Fall 2008): 558-584.

174
same time, unlike many of their peers on the straight left, they did not view sexuality as
simply a personal concern, nor did they see homosexuality as limited to the bourgeoisie
or as a result of decaying capitalism. While the distinction between sexual behavior and
sexual identity had not become widely theorized, gay and lesbian leftists moved towards
this theorization by asserting that while homosexuality had existed throughout all forms
of human society, sexism and anti-gay oppression had been created through, and bound
up in, capitalist relations. Often, they termed sexuality a feature of the superstructure of
society and insisted that this made it inseparable from a capitalist base.
50
In addition, gay
and lesbian leftists collectively contributed to the development of what we now
understand as intersectional analysis by asserting – through both theoretical statements
and activist campaigns – that gay and lesbian freedom and anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-
imperialist goals supported one another and were interdependent.
A gay socialist analysis had first been clearly expressed by Red Butterfly, a New
York City-based group that published manifestos in 1970. This group defined itself as
“social democratic” and focused its critique on how capitalism limited sexual self-
expression and ethics, holding that “The competitive drive of capitalist society forces on
all of us an ethic of accumulation and egocentrism… Sexuality too is constricted… into
the narrow channel of the nuclear family.”
51
Red Butterfly died out within its first year,

50
Here, gay and lesbian leftists seemed to move towards an analysis more elegantly theorized by Stuart
Hall, “Rethinking the ‘Base-and-Superstructure’ Metaphor,” in Jon Bloomfield, ed., Class, Hegemony and
Party (London: Lawrence & Wishant), 43-72.
51
Red Butterfly, “Gay Liberation” (page 12), c. 1970, Red Butterfly Liberation Manifestos, Anson
Reinhart Papers, GLBTHS.

175
but gay and lesbian Marxist analysis became far more widespread from 1973 on,
catalyzed by the expanding influence of other left groups.
In California, one of the earliest and most prominent organizations to develop gay
and lesbian left theory was Lavender & Red Union (known most commonly as L&RU).
L&RU formed in Los Angeles in March 1974 and described itself as a “gay
liberation/communist collective” or “a group of dyke and faggot communists.”
52
The
group was motivated by Marxist-Leninist analysis as well as critique of New Communist
groups’ anti-gay policies, and its members were almost entirely white and male. L&RU
became one of the most theoretically prolific gay and lesbian left groups in the country,
producing a magazine, publishing position papers and an anthology, and organizing study
groups and conferences. It emerged as a center of the gay left in Los Angeles, bolstering
the all-lesbian Los Angeles Research Group and the co-gender Gay Caucus of the
People’s College of Law, and playing a prominent role in local controversies including
the strike at the Gay Community Services Center in 1975. L&RU made a wide impact in
Los Angeles, across California, and even nationally. However, it offered a very shallow
analysis of race and empire. This problem – reinforced by the smaller size of the gay and
lesbian left in Los Angeles overall – led to L&RU’s demise just as the Bay Area gay and

52
The most extensive records of Lavender & Red Union/Red Flag Union are held within the Gay Left
Periodicals & Files collection at the Southern California Library, donated to the Library by Franz Martin, a
member of L&RU. These include the full run of Come Out Fighting as well as internal organizational
notes and other files. Lavender & Red Union publications are also archived at the GLBTHS and may be
held in other locations. Mark Meinke has also made key L&RU publications available online under the
“Gay Left” page at www.rainbowhistory.org.

176
lesbian left was expanding and seeing its greatest impact.
53

Lavender & Red Union offered an important though ultimately limited theorization
of the “interdependence” of gay liberation and anti-capitalist critique, an interdependence
they asserted in their slogan, “Gay Liberation is Impossible Without Socialist Revolution
– Socialist Revolution is Incomplete Without Gay Liberation.”
54
Reflecting its
emergence out of a New Communist milieu, L&RU termed itself a “pre-pre-party
formation,” not already on the verge of becoming a party, but operating with that
eventual goal in mind.
55
Though semi-secret in its membership, the group maintained a
headquarters in Hollywood and built coalitions with groups in the Echo Park and
MacArthur Park neighborhoods; held public events; and published a magazine titled
Come Out Fighting (later Red Flag), as well as a 1976 anthology, The Lavender & Red
Book. L&RU’s genealogy and legacies are suggested in the fact that the largest
collection of the group’s material is held at an archive of left and social justice activism,
the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, rather than at any of the
major LGBT archives in California.
Within its first year of work (1974-1975), L&RU held a forum titled “Gay People
Will Never Be Free Under Capitalism”; confronted Revolutionary Union and other left

53
This analysis could be bolstered by a more extensive consideration of what factors produced the racial
and gender segregation noted within Los Angeles queer politics of the 1970s; for hints of this segregation,
see Retter, “Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles, 1970-1979.”
54
See, for example, “Gay Liberation/Socialist Revolution,” report on Lavender & Red Forum, February
1976, in Lavender & Red Union, The Lavender & Red Book, 52.
55
Emphasis in original. L&RU termed itself not yet pre-party because it was not national and because its
focus was restricted to gay liberation. Eventually, they hope to become a mixed (gay and straight) pre-
party formation and contribute to building a vanguard party. L&RU, Lavender & Red Book, 55.

177
parties or party-building efforts their anti-gay policies; held study groups and a weekend
conference; opened an office and occasional bookstore; and participated in both “Gay
community events and in the revolutionary movement.”
56
L&RU undertook a sustained
project called In Defense of Gay Workers, through which it surveyed gay and lesbian
people about their experiences on the job and in workplace organizing; and sought to
build bridges between gay and workers’ organizing; and called for workers to be able to
come out as gay or lesbian without fear of firing or harassment.
57

L&RU also built a strong coalition with the People’s College of Law, a progressive
law school founded in 1974 and located in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park neighborhood.
The group worked especially closely with the People’s College Gay Caucus, but
capitalized more broadly on the school’s role as a progressive community institution, for
example holding events at the College while seeking to bar the Venceremos Brigades
from the facility (due to the Brigades’ ongoing anti-gay policy).
58
People’s College
hosted planning meetings for Stonewall ’76, a cultural event and radical march
contingent within the year’s Christopher Street West celebration. Stonewall ’76 drew
L&RU together with the College’s Gay Caucus and the Gay Students Union of Cal State

56
“Dear People,” fundraising letter, n.d., LRU file, Gay Left/Martin collection, SCL. One recent action
included organizing a gay contingent in a protest “against Corporate Terror” when President Ford hosted a
dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel.
57
See “In Defense of Gay Workers,” in The Lavender and Red Book, describing the project (26). L&RU
described this project as similar to work by BAGL in the Bay Area. Efforts for gay workers also circulated
in Britain at the time; see Bob Cant and Nigel Young, “New Politics – Old Struggles,” Homosexuality:
Power and Politics, 116-127. Interestingly, gay teachers were important to gay workers’ efforts in Britain,
as they would be in building left participation against the Briggs Initiative in California.
58
As discussed in Come Out Fighting #12/13 (c. March/April 1976).

178
Dominguez Hills, and the coalition of these groups organized around three points of
unity: “a. Full democratic rights for Gay people, b. An End to racism and sexism within
the Gay community, c. Nothing is More Precious Than Independence and Freedom.
Forge the unity of all oppressed peoples.”
59
(The wording of this third principle echoed a
quote from Ho Chi Minh.) Stonewall ’76 drew 250 people to an evening of cultural
performance, and a similarly large number to a march contingent.
L&RU developed in part by refuting the homophobia of Revolutionary Union and
related New Communist groups. In July 1974, soon after its founding, L&RU distributed
a leaflet headlined “Is Genocide the Answer to Contradictions Amongst the People?” at
an RU meeting in Los Angeles.
60
This leaflet termed RU’s anti-gay analysis “ahistoric,”
“non-dialectical and abstract,” “moralistic” rather than Marxist, and “sexist.”
61
It argued
that “RU’s analysis would lead to a superficial economistic dealing with the specific
oppression of Women and Third World people” and that it was “AN INSULT TO THE
WORKING CLASS.” The results of this flyer remain unclear, though it presumably
sparked debate (or at least critique of L&RU) at the RU meeting. In October 1974, the

59
Come Out Fighting #12/13, and Notes in Stonewall ’76 folder, Gay Left/Martin collection, SCL.
60
I have not been able to trace any specific connections between the Los Angeles Research Group and
Lavender & Red Union, though Lavender & Red did respond to the Research Group’s “Toward A
Scientific Analysis” in its Lavender & Red Book. Without interviews of L&RU members, it remains
difficult to trace any relationship that may have existed, because the Research Group was entirely
anonymous and published only under a post office box. Many communist groups during this time were
anonymous or semi-secret; even L&RU – which had a street address and held public events – tended to cite
only members’ first names in internal files. The Research Group’s greater secrecy may indicate that some
of its members chose to remain involved in RU or other straight, anti-gay communist groups, or that
perhaps that the women in the Research Group had more sensitive jobs.
61
“Is Genocide…,” flier dated July 21, 1974, LRU folder, Gay Left/Martin collection, SCL. Also reprinted
in Lavender & Red Book, 27.

179
L&RU listed the October League, the Long March, Free Los Tres, the Puerto Rican
Socialist Party, La Raza Unida Party, the Communist Labor Party, the Black Workers
Congress, and the Socialist Workers Party as other groups with a “reactionary position on
Gayness.” These groups had all rejected or stood silent on L&RU’s request to organize a
gay contingent in a Los Angeles demonstration for Puerto Rican independence.
62

Within its leaflet critiquing RU, L&RU used the term “contradiction” in two
distinct ways. First, it agreed with RU that the relationship between men and women was
“contradictory,” in that capitalism relied on a gendered division of labor within an
isolated nuclear family that made men and women dependent on one another, yet unequal
and set at odds. L&RU disagreed with RU’s views that gay or lesbian identity
represented an individual “escape” from the contradiction of “male supremacy,” and that
communists should personally work through the contradiction of male supremacy only in
monogamous heterosexual relationships. L&RU also countered RU’s view that gay
identity was inherently bourgeois, terming gay people a group with “internal
contradictions including reactionary, progressive and revolutionary elements.” They
added that gay people “are not a sick reaction to a decadent capitalist system. We have
existed throughout history, although the material base and nature of our oppression has
changed.” Here, L&RU suggested “contradiction” as a way to indicate that while
homosexuality was not itself produced by capitalism, everything about homosexuality –

62
L&RU, “PRSC Exclusion” (October 1974), Lavender & Red Book, 28. L&RU also reprinted a debate
within the Guardian, sparked by a September, 1974 letter by John Bell criticizing gay liberation and
comparing homosexuality to heroin addiction. In October, 1974, the Guardian printed 8 of the letters they
had received in response; all these letters were critical of Bell and came from leftists around the country,
many who self-identified as lesbian or gay. None were from individuals I can recognize by name.

180
gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities; homophobia; and so on – was
constructed within a capitalist system and thus, in a dialectical sense, provided a means to
resist capitalist relationships and inequalities.
This analysis of the “contradiction” of sexual diversity was made more explicit in
1975 by another organization, the Los Angeles Research Group. This anonymous group
held a post office box in Cudahy; its members described themselves as “ten communists
who are gay women.” The Research Group wrote an even lengthier rebuttal to
Revolutionary Union’s anti-gay position, titled “Toward a Scientific Analysis of the Gay
Question.”
63
The women of the Research Group (most likely all white, given that they
did not identify by ethnicity or race) sought to apply “Marxism-Leninism… dialectical
materialism” or what they termed “a proletarian world outlook” to explain the existence
of homosexuality as well as the potential for revolutionary gay and lesbian politics.
64

They emphasized that the “primary contradiction” of society was that between socialized

63
Los Angeles Research Group, “Toward a Scientific Analysis of the Gay Question,” Cudahy, California,
1975. Anson Reinhart File, GLBTHS; also in Mike Conan Collection, SCL (donated by Max Elbaum).
RU disavowed their anti-gay statement as not an “official document,” but had provided it to another New
Communist group, the Attica Brigade, to justify their own and other organizations’ anti-gay policies. The
Research Group attached the RU position paper to their own rebuttal, suggesting that the Group’s members
may have been (closeted) members of RU or other closely related New Communist groups.
Lavender & Red Union praised but also critiqued “Toward a Scientific Analysis” in The Lavender
& Red Book, 62-63. L&RU argued that the key principle ought not be membership in any one
organization, but broader movement building. L&RU also held that the Research Group was vague about
the political “importance” of gay identity, adding that this importance “has not even begun to be
understood” because of overall left “economism,” and because gay and lesbian people have had to
apologize for their own oppression. L&RU also critiqued the Research Group for seeming to defend
Stalin’s 1934 laws against homosexuality and abortion (the Research Group argued that these policies
could be justified as tools for increasing the Russian population; L&RU held there could never be any
excuse for this kind of policy).
64
Alternatively, the group may have included a few women of color who did not state their racial or ethnic
identity because doing so would have destroyed their anonymity in relationship to the primarily white RU.

181
production and private profit, and used this point both to distinguish themselves from
lesbian separatism, and to critique RU’s analysis as insufficiently Marxist. In their
words, RU – because it asserted that homosexuality was intrinsically bourgeois and that
homophobia was a working class value – relied on a non-Marxist idea of “’human nature’
in the abstract” which implied that gender and sexuality could act as primary
contradictions existing prior to class.
65
The Research Group also termed RU’s analysis
overly “economistic” in failing to recognize the importance of “superstructural” issues,
including sexism and anti-gay oppression.
The Research Group detailed multiple ways that the U.S. state marginalized gay,
lesbian, bisexual and transgender people: police abuse, castration, lobotomies, and
electric shock in prison hospitals; exploitation in jobs, housing, and schools. But while
emphasizing the materiality of anti-gay oppression, they also reiterated the mundane
presence of queer people throughout society. They balanced two ideas: gay oppression
was part and parcel of capitalist state power, and yet gay and lesbian people were “not
limited to a single race or nationality,” class, or political viewpoint. Through these two
ideas, the Research Group acknowledged that some gay men and lesbians enjoyed class
privilege, yet maintained that gay and lesbian people could be potential revolutionaries:

65
Research Group, “Towards a Scientific Analysis,” 11-12. They also stated that by assuming workers
could not reject anti-gay views as they should reject sexism or racism, RU “belittle[d] the working class”
(11-12). Similarly, L&RU, like many socialist-feminists, rejected separatism in favor of autonomy. They
held that separatism on the basis of race, gender, or sexuality “elevates” these factors above class and also
“liquidates other areas of oppression (for example, if one says that Gayness/non-gayness is the primary
contradiction in society this liquidates the race question).” Meanwhile, autonomy pushes the future
vanguard party take gay liberation seriously. L&RU, “Autonomy,” Come Out Fighting #9 (Lavender &
Red Book, 53).

182
Gays are next to you at work, at school, in the supermarket, in Mayday
committees and party-building forums, in other political work. They are
assembly-line workers, steel and rubber workers, hospital workers, students,
electricians, teachers, lawyers, unemployed, mothers and fathers. The vast
majority of gay people…are workers.
66

Further, the Research Group emphasized that “love relationships” of all kinds –
heterosexual, homosexual, as well as non-romantic – played a “contradictory” role,
masking the division of labor based in the nuclear family yet lending happiness and
meaning to people’s lives. Gay and lesbian relationships showed that household labor
need not be organized around gender roles, and that love relationships could be detached
from the nuclear family. Thus, supporting gay and lesbian rights helped to challenge
sexism in capitalist society, and a socialist revolution would help to disentangle
household labor from gender and sexual norms. Lavender & Red Union drew on the
Research Group’s analysis to describe sexual freedom as impossible without socialism, to
explain that anti-gay attitudes divided workers, and to propose that gay liberation would
be a key element of the socialist transition between capitalist and communist society.
67

While both the Research Group and L&RU explored the relationships between

66
Research Group, “Toward A Scientific Analysis,” 11.
67
L&RU, “Gay Liberation/Socialist Revolution,” from L&RU Forum February 1976, Lavender & Red
Book, 52. Generally speaking, L&RU expressed less interest in arguing against anti-gay left policies
(which they termed “basically genocidal… [and] basically the same as those of the ruling class”), and
invested greater attention to crafting new theory (L&RU, “PRSC Exclusion,” Lavender & Red Book, 28).
In the Introduction to the Lavender & Red Book, L&RU asked, “Why is it necessary to develop a
revolutionary theory of Gay liberation?... One [school of thought] says it is necessary to develop this theory
in order to convince the left that Gay liberation is worthy of their attention. The other school of which
L&RU is perhaps the most ardent advocate says that the primary reason to develop a revolutionary theory
of Gay liberation is to push forward the struggles of Gay people and of the oppressed peoples as a
whole…our desire to advance Gay liberation comes from our own oppression as Gay people and…we have
no desire to join the ranks of sectarian groups who address themselves only to other sectarian groups” (1).

183
sexuality and class at relative length, these organizations undertook very limited
discussions of race and empire. As an explicitly Leninist group, L&RU described
imperialism as “the seeking after of new markets, raw materials and cheap labor… the
highest and last stage of capitalism,” or “monopoly capitalism.”
68
It added that as Third
World independence threatened to destabilize empire, the ruling class sought to further
divide the U.S. working class, and it held that this project was made easier by a
generalized lack of class consciousness that people to see race, sexuality, age, and gender
as the “primary divisions” (that is, contradictions) of society.
69
L&RU described racism,
sexism, anti-gay bias, ageism, and anti-Jewishness as “Divisions Among the People” that
must be countered with vanguardist party-building and international solidarity.
70
It also
described both gay oppression and the gay left as international, including observations
from Chile, China, Cuba, Australia and the U.K. in its Lavender & Red Book.
L&RU also sought to put an anti-racist, anti-sexist politics to work through its
interventions within the broader gay and lesbian movement in Los Angeles, for example
in the boycott of Studio One, a gay nightclub. L&RU helped to lead the Gay Community

68
L&RU, “The Political Perspective of the Lavender & Red Union” (March 1975), 7. Gay Left/Martin
File, SCL. Thanks also to Mark Meinke for making a scan of this publication available on the Rainbow
History website (www.rainbowhistory.org).
69
L&RU, “Political Perspective,” 1. They also stated that all oppressions relate to class and no oppressions
can be understood without class/anti-capitalist analysis (4).
70
L&RU’s political strategy aimed at building “a vanguard Communist party…with participation and
leadership from the most advanced, conscious elements among Gay, women, Black, Brown, Asian,
American Indian and white workers” (L&RU, “Political Perspective,” 2). In addition, they called for anti-
revisionist solidarity (terming the USSR revisionist and extending “critical support” to socialist countries
including China; 8). Reflecting their divergence from Maoism, L&RU also included Angola and
Mozambique in a list of the many countries fighting imperialism (7).

184
Mobilization Committee that sprang up in 1975 in protest of Studio One’s racist and
sexist door policies.
71
It also supported the strike at the Gay Community Services Center
(GCSC, or the Center), which lasted from 1975 to 1978; in this strike, a group of lesbian
staff members protested sexism, hierarchical management, and racism at the GCSC.
72

Two of the men at the helm of the Center, Morris Kight and Don Kilhefner, had also been
prominent leaders of the 1970 Alpine County project. Radical lesbian and gay critiques
of Kight, Kilhefner, and the Center reflected deepening splits between a more centrist
vision of gay rights and a more avowedly leftist gay and lesbian radicalism. Yet Lavender
& Red Union, as an organization, occluded the particularities of sexist and racist practice
at the Center – and thus undermined alliance with lesbian feminists – by insisting that the
strike was, “in the final analysis,” about class rather than sexism (or race).
73
Most
women termed the Center’s complainants as the “Gay Feminist 11” rather than “strikers,”
and felt that L&RU downplayed their analysis of sexism, which helps to explain why the
strike appears to have done little or nothing to enlarge lesbian participation in L&RU.
74

71
See Dave Johnson, “Studio One Boycott” originally published in LA Free Press, 5/75, in Lavender &
Red Book. As reported by Johnson, Studio One asked men of color and women for multiple forms of ID,
and even after these ID were produced, admitted very few people of color, and only those white women
who were well-dressed and accompanied by well-dressed white men. The Gay Community Mobilization
Committee formed to protest this policy and boycott the bar till it changed its policy. A pastor of the
Metropolitan Community Church, Rev. James Sandmire, denounced both the boycott and the later strike of
the Gay Community Services Center for being led by Lavender & Red Union.
72
See discussion by Moira Kenney, Mapping Gay L.A.
73
See for example L&RU, “ADVOCATE of What?” Come Out Fighting #2 (June 1975) and reprinted in
Lavender & Red Book. This article critiques the magazine, and its publisher David Goodstein, as aligned
with right-wing politics, capitalism, and the closet.
74
See Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A., 201-4.

185
On the cover of its 1976 Lavender & Red Book, L&RU gestured at the gender and
racial diversity of queer activism (Figure 6, below). They illustrated the cover with a
photograph of several figures in a 1975 march in Hollywood; the image featured more
women than men, and appeared to include two people of color among the four central
figures (the woman in the halter top, and the man in the “FAGGOT” shirt).
Figure 6: The Lavender & Red Book.
75

Yet L&RU’s power analysis was devoid of any detailed discussion of racism.
While they held “The most powerful institutions in the Gay community are the same as

75
The Lavender & Red Book: A Gay Liberation/Socialist Anthology (Los Angeles: Lavender & Red Union,
1976). Photo by Tami Tyler, “Liberation Contingent 1975.”

186
the larger community – the corporations, the ruling class families that own them and the
state, the educational system and the media,” L&RU said nothing about how such
institutions specifically excluded queer people of color, nor did they compare these
institutions against the racial or geographic diversity of queer Los Angeles.
76

Rather, they simply identified the Metropolitan Community Church, the
Christopher Street West Association (which coordinated the annual pride parade), the
Gay Community Services Center, the Greater Los Angeles Commission to Guarantee
Fair Employment Practices, and the Advocate as run by power-hungry, anti-radical, sexist
men – “reactionaries whose power more often than not comes from attaching themselves
to the state.”
77
To counter these men within the “Gay community,” they gestured vaguely
at “the masses. The Gay masses will rise… They will defrock the opportunists and the
power brokers. They will link arms with other oppressed peoples and teach them to
overthrow their anti-gayness.”
78
This rhetoric reduced all forms of difference within the
gay and lesbian community to a traditional language of class, not only obscuring

76
L&RU, “Study of Power,” originally published in Come Out Fighting #5 (September 1975), reprinted in
Lavender & Red Book, 9-10.
77
L&RU, “Study of Power,” 10. They noted the three most powerful men at the GCSC as Ken Bartley, a
former executive with Anheuser-Busch; Morris Kight, “formerly employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs
and by the US government in China prior to the 1949 revolution”; and Don Kilhefner (9). They term
Kilhefner the “hingepin who provided…an ideology to justify the bossism and sexism of the center and
made it seem like the center was a hub of radicalism” (9). L&RU’s views of Kight and Kilhefner were also
shaped by L&RU’s participation within Greater Los Angeles Coalition to Guarantee Fair Employment
Practices, which sought a policy against anti-gay discrimination in city jobs. In February 1975, L&RU
withdrew from this coalition (while continuing to support the bill) in protest over control by Kight and
Kilhefner, whom they criticized for undermining grassroots participation and tokenizing lesbians; keeping
“police documents maligning Gay people” secret; and collaborating with City Council members by limiting
the bill to city employment, diminishing its appearance as a “gay” policy, and working in closed door
meetings (“Dear People,” letter dated February 8, 1975, LRU file, Gay Left/Martin collection, SCL).
78
L&RU, “Study of Power,” 11. L&RU also noted that Bay Area Gay Liberation held a similar potential.

187
specifically lesbian-feminist critique of the GCSC, but also closing off potential for
exploring how gay “power brokers” might be embedded with racial control in the city.
79

Even when critiquing the goals of hiring gay police officers or community control of the
police, L&RU described the LAPD simply as upholding the capitalist state apparatus,
without naming its racial repression and violence.
80

Thus, L&RU had little to say about the ways in which empire and homophobia
functioned together, other than noting generically (and presumably influenced by the
“Double Jeopardy” thesis circulating from the Third World Women’s Alliance) that “Our
Lesbian sisters and our Gay Third World sisters and brothers and other oppressed groups
suffer triple and quadruple oppression as workers, as women, as people of color and as
Gay people.”
81
Their additive list of oppressions was remarkably devoid of specifics.
Further, though L&RU acknowledged that gay “community” was not equivalent to racial
community, they held that gay and lesbian people were visibly organizing their power
within large city neighborhoods, and that generally “Gay people are a people – with a
common identity, a culture, institutions and a host of internal contradictions.”
82
This

79
See also L&RU, “The GCSC Strike,” Lavender & Red Book, 21-22 (parts of this article were originally
printed in issues of Come Out Fighting). Here, L&RU held that “Sexism was sometimes seen as the
primary contradiction in the strike” but that while sexism was a real problem, “In the final analysis, the
workers were fired because they sought to organize” (21). L&RU note that the strike leaders took their
political critiques seriously and defended the group against red-baiting. However, the strike itself does not
appear to have produced lasting lesbian leftist organizing in Los Angeles.
80
See L&RU, “Gays vs. Police,” Come Out Fighting #7, November 1975; in Lavender & Red Book, 25.
81
L&RU, “Political Perspective,” 2.
82
L&RU, “Is There a Gay Community?,” Come Out Fighting #6 (October 1975) and in Lavender & Red
Book, 3; L&RU, “Political Perspective,” 6.

188
begged the question of how could gay people have a single common identity if they were
riven by internal differences. L&RU effectively identified gay community through
white, relatively sexually normative men, terming lesbians and people of color
“subdivisions” of the larger community, and transgender people, street hustlers, and
people involved in leather and S&M as part of gay “subcultures.”
83

Importantly, L&RU may have been moving towards a more complex understanding
of relationships between race and sexuality as it broke apart as an organization. By the
end of 1976, L&RU had begun to move away from Marxist-Leninism towards Trotskyist
views and changed its name to Red Flag Union. It sponsored a Stonewall ’77 conference
at People’s College, drawing speakers from Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the New
American Movement, the Freedom Socialist Party, and the Spartacist League.
84
At this
conference, L&RU/Red Flag Union formally disbanded; a “Revolutionary Faction”
formally joined the Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL), while the remaining majority
of the group joined the Spartacist League.
85
Amazingly, the majority contingent agreed
with the Spartacists that gay liberation was “non-political”; they also adopted the

83
L&RU, “Is There a Gay Community?”: 3. They actually used the term “transvestite,” but did so at a time
when the distinctions between transvestite, transsexual, and transgender identities were generally blurred. I
do not want to argue against the concept of subculture per se, but simply to show that L&RU theorized a
community unity that could stand apart from particular “subcultures.”
84
The political biography of one L&RU member, a lesbian named Gail, suggests the broader milieu that
the group accessed through or within Peoples College: Gail had been involved in the Young Socialist
Alliance and Socialist Workers Party in the early 1960s (see below), the Los Angeles Women’s Union in
1973, the Echo Park Food Conspiracy (a co-op) from 1971-1975, and was a Peoples College Law student.
See undated political biography, LRU file, Gay Left/Martin collection, SCL.
85
Revolutionary Faction, Lavender & Red Union/Red Flag Union, “Documents of Struggle: Gay
Liberation Through Socialist Revolution,” 1978. Ephemera – Subjects (“Socialism”), GLBTHS.

189
Spartacists’ “so-called ‘public closet’ rule,” which barred members from openly
identifying as gay or lesbian.
86
The Revolutionary Faction, however, located its new
organizing model in a campaign by the Detroit branch of the RSL “to defend two Black
lesbians threatened with prison terms for the ‘crime’ of protecting themselves from a
knife-wielding anti-gay landlady. The RSL… united gay and straight workers in a
militant campaign that forced the dropping of the charges against the two.”
87
Archival
documents do not reveal precisely how observations from Detroit influenced Red Flag
Union’s theory or activism on the ground. Indeed, it remains hard to trace how the gay
and lesbian left in Los Angeles survived at all after L&RU dissolved.
88
Still, these hints
of shifted politics open up compelling questions for oral history research into both
Lavender & Red Flag Union/Red Flag Union and broader queer politics in Los Angeles.

Desegregating Community in the Bay Area
Gay and lesbian leftists saw desegregating gay and lesbian community as a critical
goal, both a means and ends of their politics. They realized this aim more fully in the
Bay Area than in Los Angeles. Several gay and lesbian leftist groups were active in San
Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, including the Stonewall Contingent, Bay Area Gay

86
Revolutionary Faction, “Documents of Struggle.”
87
Revolutionary Faction, “Documents of Struggle,” pages 2-3.
88
For example, observers from San Francisco (Ward and Freeman, cited below) and Yolanda Retter both
note that the Lesbians of Color formed in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, but the group is barely recorded
within either the ONE Archives (including in the Lesbian Legacy Collection that Retter compiled) or the
Mazer Lesbian Archives.

190
Liberation (BAGL), the Gay Latino Alliance (GALA), the Third World Gay Caucus,
Gente, and by the late 1970s, Lesbian Schoolworkers and Lesbians Against Police
Violence. These groups nurtured relationships with friendly organizations in the
overlapping milieus of the Third World Left and New Communist Movement; in
socialist-feminist and feminist of color organizations; among democratic socialist groups;
and with labor unions. By the late 1970s, Bay Area gay and lesbian left groups forged a
radical pole within the broader campaign against the Briggs Initiative, in reaction to
gentrification and in protests against police violence, and in an emerging network of
international solidarity activism. In all these settings, queer leftists pushed forward their
critiques of the intertwined functions of racism, sexism, global capital, state violence, and
homophobia. They sought a movement that would – as the Stonewall Contingent put it –
“connect the gay struggle” to other modes of resistance around the world.
One organization that was particularly critical in fostering both queer of color
activism and queer of color community was the Gay Latino Alliance (GALA,
pronounced gay-la). The history of GALA has been explored by Horacio Roque
Ramírez, who has traced it through extensive oral histories and in archives maintained by
former members. Roque Ramírez terms GALA “the foundation for a local social
movement that integrated racial, gender, and sexual politics” in San Francisco’s primarily
Latino Mission District.
89
He notes that the idea for GALA initially circulated among a

89
Roque Ramírez, “’That’s My Place!’”, 225 and 228. See also Roque Ramírez, Memories of Desire: An
Oral History from Queer Latino San Francisco, 1960s-1990s, under negotiation with University of
Chicago Press; and Roque Ramírez, Communities of Desire, PhD Dissertation.

191
small number of gay Latino men in San Francisco and San José who sought social life
with one another. These men held their first public meeting in fall of 1975, attracting
several dozen supporters, including a small but pivotal number of lesbian members.
Soon after, GALA established a political committee and began to speak out publicly
against racism and homophobia. Roque Ramírez records GALA as establishing an office
at San Francisco’s Gay Community Center, and notes that it participated in the June “Gay
Freedom Day” parade in 1976, where it marked its public presence with banners and
signs celebrating Latin American left solidarity and national identities.
90

GALA held events and organized largely within the Mission, and it worked to win
support from straight Latino organizations rooted there – in part by endorsing Gary
Borvice, a Latino man, rather than Carol Silver, a white woman, in the November 1977
race for Supervisor of District 6 (Silver eventually won). Though both Borvice and
Silver were straight, Silver was active in feminist organizing and was perceived as a
stronger ally to gay and lesbian concerns, to the extent that some former GALA members
assumed she was lesbian.
91
GALA also sought space within a local Latino community
center, according to Carmen Vázquez, a Puerto Rican lesbian who moved to San
Francisco in the mid-1970s and who, by the 1980s, became a prominent leader in
solidarity and feminist circles. In 1976 and 1977, Vázquez briefly worked at the League
of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), which ran a community center at 26
th
and

90
GALA’s participation in this event is also recorded in photographs by Daniel Arcos and Efren Ramírez
published in Magnus: a journal of collective faggotry #1, Summer 1976.
91
Personal conversation with Horacio Roque Ramírez, April 23, 2009, Santa Barbara.

192
Folsom, and where GALA requested office space. Vázquez recalls that other LULAC
staff members’ initial response was simply to make homophobic jokes; but when she
came out to her coworkers and challenged their views, they granted GALA’s request
(presumably giving GALA two locations – one at the Gay Community Center in the
Castro, the other at the LULAC center in the Mission).
92
GALA also built strong ties to
other queer of color activist groups in the Bay Area and nationally; in 1979, two leaders
of the group, Rodrigo Reyes and Rita Arauz, represented GALA at the Third World
Lesbian/Gay Conference in Washington, DC.
93

Other organizations founded at the same time as GALA or in its wake included
Gay American Indians, the Third World Gay Caucus (originally affiliated with Bay Area
Gay Liberation), the Gay Black Caucus, and the Asian American Feminist Support Group
(1977).
94
Historian Trinity Ordona describes these groups as interconnected through an

92
Vázquez, = interview with Anderson, 31-32. Vázquez records LULAC’s community center as located at
26
th
and Folsom, in the Outer Mission area.
93
While I have not been able to determine what specific goals GALA representatives expressed at the
Conference, I am interested to see how GALA, or other Bay Area organizations, may have shaped
workshop resolutions cited in “Struggles Reach New Levels,” Gay Insurgent 6 (Summer 1980), 17
(Clipping found in Third World Lesbian/Gay Conference 1979 folder, LLC (Box T2), ONE). Specifically,
Freedom Socialist Party/Radical Women demanded equivalent rights for undocumented and documented
workers, open borders with Mexico, an end to deportations, condemned the term “illegal aliens,” and called
for the total dismantling of the INS. The Immigration Workshop called for lesbians and gays to work to
abolish the exclusions of homosexuals, communists, and others excluded under the 1952 Immigration and
Nationality Act.
94
Trinity Ordona, Coming Together, names the Asian American Feminist Support Group (founded in 1977)
as the first group of primarily Asian lesbians organizing in San Francisco. For a list of Third World
gay/queer of color groups active by the late 1970s in California, see “We Are Family,” Third World
Lesbian/Gay Conference Program Book, pages 16-19. LLC (T2), ONE. Groups listed in the Bay Area
were: Gay American Indians (SF); Gay Asian Support Group and the Gay Mah-Jong Club (listed as
inactive, SF); Asian American Theatre Workshop (SF); Asian American Feminists (Oakland); Gay Latino
Alliance (known locally as GALA, SF); Third World Caucus (SF); Oakland Black & Third World Gays
(Oakland); and two mental health efforts, the Third World Gay/Lesbian Counseling Program of Operation

193
informal network that included Gwenn Craig, a Black lesbian prominent in Harvey
Milk’s successful Supervisorial campaign as well as No on Briggs; Simeon White, a
Black gay man involved in the Third World Gay Caucus; Canyon Sam, an Asian
American lesbian, member of the Asian American Feminist Support Group and the
performance collective Unbound Feet; Randy Burns and Barbara Cameron, who led the
Gay American Indians; and many others.
95
The Third World Gay Caucus is also
frequently cited in the visual archive of queer 1970s activism. Footage of activists
carrying the organization’s banner at the 1977 Gay Freedom Day march appears
prominently in the influential 1977 gay and lesbian documentary Word is Out. A similar
image from that march, taken by Japanese American photojournalist Marie Ueda, has
often been featured on the website of San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society (Figure 7,
below). The young Chinese American man holding the left side of the Caucus’s banner in
this image is Dennis Chiu, one of the 26 subjects of Word is Out.
Some Third World lesbian and gay organizations – such as the Asian American
lesbian performance collective Unbound Feet and the Third World Gay Coalition of
Berkeley’s lesbian and gay counseling center, the Pacific Center for Human Growth –

Concern (SF) and the Third World Gay Coalition of the Pacific Center for Human Growth (Berkeley). In
Los Angeles and Southern California, organizations listed were: Latinos Unidos (at the Gay Community
Services Center, LA); Gays for Black Unity (LA); Association of Black Gays (inactive, Venice); Lesbians
of Color (San Diego); Lesbians of Color (at the Women’s Resource Program, LA); Debreta’s (Inglewood);
and the Third World Lesbian/Gay Task Force (LA).
95
Ordona, Coming Together, 169.

194
developed as artistic projects or to provide social services.
96
Other networks of friends
mobilized each other and galvanized activist work without ever recognizing their
organizing with a formal name. As in any movement context, social ties grounded
activists’ engagements with political ideas. Carmen Vázquez reflects about her
introduction to Marxist and feminist theory that “what I remember is the lived experience
of conversations and dialogue and endless debate.”
97
Social networks bridged
community building and activist organizing: Gente, for example, was a group of Black
lesbians and other lesbians of color active between 1973 and 1977 which began as a
softball team, developed a singing group called the Gente Gospeliers, and also mobilized
its members for protests and organizing.
98
Vázquez describes Pat Norman, a well-known
Black feminist who in 1984 became the first out lesbian to run for San Francisco
Supervisor, as critical in sustaining her emotional health, introducing her to other lesbians
of color, and bringing her into feminist of color organizing work.
99
Relatedly, Roque

96
Ordona explores Unbound Feet in some detail. The performance group involved Kitty Tsui, Canyon
Sam, and Merle Woo. Unbound Feet split up in 1981 in the aftermath of Merle Woo’s tenure fight at UC
Berkeley’s Asian American Studies department; some women felt Woo was turning the performance
collective into a vessel for the socialist-feminist, and rather didactic, group Radical Women.
97
Vázquez, interview with Anderson, 61.
98
Ordona names Gente as active from 1973 to 1977. She also describes Peg’s Place as a San Francisco bar
that was owned by a Filipina lesbian and especially patronized by women of color (155). Also see Finding
Aid, Cathy Cade Photographs Collection (GLC 41), Gay & Lesbian Center, San Francisco Public Library.
Here, Cathy Cade cites Joanne Garrett, Anita Onang, Pat Parker, Linda Tillery, and Jay Casselberry as
members of Gente.
99
Norman was initially Vázquez’s therapist; Vázquez met her by calling Operation Concern and asking
specifically for a lesbian of color counselor. Vázquez also cites Scott’s Bar as an important gathering place
for women of color and notes Jay Castleberry, Jacque Dupree, Alli Merrero, Sue Rodriguez, Barbara
Cameron and Barbara Nabors-Glass as among her key comrades and friends. She also describes Roma
Guy and Dionne Jones as anti-racist white women with whom she became close. See Vázquez interview,
transcript pages 34-36 and 54.

195
Ramírez argues that within GALA, “Politics and dancing mutually supported one
another.”
100
Certainly, however, that community building and activism could also stand
in tension. Roque Ramírez notes that GALA’s initial role as a social network for gay
men meant that it never seriously addressed the issues or identities of Latina lesbians; he
finds that GALA dissolved between 1982 and 1983 as commercial sites of gay Latino
nightlife opened in the Mission and men could easily socialize in bars and clubs.
Figure 7: Third World Gay Caucus.
101

100
Roque Ramírez “’That’s My Place!’”, 241.
101
Gay Freedom Day, 1977. Marie Ueda Photograph, GLBTHS.

196
Beyond the groundwork that community building provided for sustaining activist
networks, the concept of “community” itself became a focus of debate over race, class,
gender and sexuality. Neighborhood gentrification – facilitated by urban renewal and
freeway construction – placed pressure on the meaning of community, especially in the
Mission District, the primarily African American Western Addition, and the Castro,
which was increasingly becoming seen as the home and playground of white, relatively
well-off gay men. Throughout the 1970s, real estate speculators – some wealthy gay men
among them – bought up new properties in these areas, often evicting prior tenants and
raising rents. Though renters included many gay men and lesbians, the fact that many
white lesbians were moving into the Mission, and the reality that many out lesbians and
gay men were young and childless and thus could afford more personal space, combined
to make gentrification be read as a “gay versus Third World” problem. This lent special
meaning to GALA’s endorsement of Gary Borvice in the 1977 Supervisorial race.
GALA told readers of the Bay Area women’s newspaper Plexus that white gay men and
lesbians’ endorsements of Carol Silver over Borvice suggested “racism, tokenism and
cultural imperialism.”
102
As Horacio Roque Ramírez has found, GALA saw Borvice as
more invested in preserving the Mission’s “familial” Latino character amidst housing
pressures.
103
GALA argued in the both the Plexus and the gay men’s paper the Sentinel

102
“Gays vs. La Raza?” Letter to the Editor, GALA, Plexus January 1977 (4:9), 3.
103
Roque Ramírez, “’That’s My Place!’”, page 245.

197
that “There is no need to convert the Mission or any other racial cultural community into
a Castro or Polk Street,” citing two areas of the city known as gay.
104

Figure 8: “A gay landlord is still a landlord.”
105

Often, white gay men and lesbians tended to read a neighborhood’s character
through a framework of personal space and safety, while lesbians and gay men of color
(and potentially anti-racist white queer people as well) approached the issues as questions
of respect and solidarity. As Christina Hanhardt has observed, some gay men in the late
1970s Castro formed “self-defense” brigades to police the neighborhood’s boundaries

104
“Gays vs. La Raza?,” Plexus, and referenced in Roque Ramírez, “’That’s My Place!’”, 245.
105
Gay Freedom Day, 1977. Marie Ueda Photograph, GLBTHS.

198
against perceived incursions from young Black and Latino men.
106
Meanwhile, in a 1979
issue of Plexus, Monica Lozano, a Chicana lesbian, complained that white lesbians were
creating “a very volatile situation” by moving into the Mission and being “very
noticeable in their presence.” Lozano added that she understood why so white lesbians
were drawn to the Mission: as women, all lesbians faced lower wages and job
discrimination, and the Mission was comparatively affordable. Still, Lozano urged
readers moving to the neighborhood to “prove yourselves to be in solidarity… Do work
around gay oppression, but do it in a progressive and sensitive way.”
107

In the next issue of Plexus, Jan Adams, a white lesbian and five-year Mission
resident, welcomed Lozano’s remarks, urging readers to understand that “When you see a
group of kids or young men lounging in front of a building, they are not necessarily
occupying the street, denying it to women and dykes – they may just be in the only place
they can find to be themselves,” given crowded apartment conditions.
108
Lozano’s and
Adams’ exchange followed a forum sponsored by San Francisco Gay Liberation on
“Housing Problems and the Gay Community: Speculation and Profiteering in Our
Neighborhoods,” at which Black lesbian Gwenn Craig and others discussed how to
organize against gentrification in ways that were both anti-homophobic and anti-racist.
109

106
Hanhardt, “Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists.”
107
“Mission Solidarity,” Letter to the Editor by Monica Lozano, Plexus July 1979, 2.
108
“Lozano Taken To Heart,” Letter to the Editor by Jan Adams, Plexus August 1979, 3. Adams is the
partner of Rebecca Gordon, whose work Letters from Nicaragua is discussed in Chapter 4.
109
Forum flyer, John Kyper File, GLBTHS. The forum was held in March 1979.

199
Organizations of socialist and communist gay men also frequently discussed
gentrification.
110
At the same Gay Freedom Day march noted for the presence of the
Third World Gay Caucus, the photographer Marie Ueda recorded a white man clad in a
caftan, holding up a fey fist, and carrying a sign reading “A gay landlord is still a
landlord” (Figure 8, above). The phrase appeared often in gay leftist materials.
Activists also cited gentrification as a tied to the political repression of lesbian
and gay life. In June 1976, the Stonewall Contingent produced a remarkable one-page
document, the “Stonewall Gay Funnies” – a poorly drawn but tightly argued critique of
monopoly capital and state repression.
111
This comic strip noted a series of “attacks”
limiting the rights of gay men and lesbians, people of color, and workers. Depicting a
Supreme Court spelling out “F-O-R-D” and “N-I-X-O-N,” and a Grand Jury populated
by the FBI, the strip detailed a Supreme Court ruling against gays and lesbians’ right to
privacy, Grand Jury indictments of radical activists (specifically “Lesbians, Latinas,
Native Americans & Blacks”), and restrictions of lesbian mothers’ custodial rights. The
cartoon situated these assaults within a broader context of economic cutbacks and layoffs,
and termed police sweeps and street violence against gay people “part of a policy to
‘cleanup’ the city for tourists and downtown banks” linked to overall job loss, high rents,

110
See for example “Gay Oppression: A Socialist Perspective,” Turnover: Magazine of Politics & Food,
August-September No. 26 (1978); and Morning Due: A Journal of Men Against Sexism: A Conference
Report: Faggots and Class Struggle, November-December Vol 2., Issue 6 (1976), both in Ephemera –
“Politics-Socialism,” GLBTHS. Also see John F. Burnett, “The Meaning of Gay Liberation: Why is the
Right Wing Attacking Us? An analysis and program for action,” June 1978, Ephemera – “White Night
Riots,” GLBTHS.
111
Attached to “Join the Stonewall Contingent” flier c. 1976, Ephemera – Organizations (“S”), GLBTHS.

200
welfare cutbacks, and urban renewal programs pushing Black and Latino residents from
the city. Holding that all “These attacks are part of a trend since World War II when big
U.S. monopolies started to try & run the world,” the Funnies described monopoly capital
as curtailing political rights and resistance. The cartoon thus descried queer people as
victims rather than beneficiaries of urban renewal, in large part by defining lesbians and
gay men as political radicals. It offered solution through radical unity, depicting an
assortment of activists with signs that stated “Free the San Quentin 6,” “Viva La Huelga,”
“Gay Rights Now!,” “On Strike for Equal Pay,” and “Puerto Rico Libre!” above the
aspirational, “Together We Will Win!”
Finally, some white gay men sought to bolster multiracial, feminist, and anti-
capitalist queer community by crafting a new identity that could help them embody their
resistance to structures of white privilege. Two groups active between 1975 and 1977,
the June 28 Union and the Magnus magazine collective, developed a distinct mode of
radical, white gay male identity, “faggotry,” that offered a distinct analysis of the
interdependence between queer, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist concerns.
This identity is hinted at, too, in Ueda’s “gay landlord” photograph, where a second man
in the image wears dangling earrings, a ponytail, a t-shirt with the words “Faggot
Revolution,” or on the cover of the Lavender & Red Book, where marchers’ t-shirts
proudly proclaim LESBIAN, DYKE, FAGGOT (see Figures 6 and 8, above). Faggotry
welcomed an androgynous, effeminate – or at least not strongly masculinist – gender
expression. But it was also a broader mode of politics, while made visibly evident in
bodily expression, clothing, and erotics. Faggotry also functioned as a complement to the

201
similarly androgynous, anti-materialistic “dyke” identity embraced by many lesbian
women. Both these identities emphasized standing out, not blending in. They
foreshadowed the emergence of “queer” politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s, yet
evaded the U.S. framework later suggested by “Queer Nation.”
In the summer of 1976, six white, leftist gay men launched Magnus: a journal of
collective faggotry. Named after Magnus Hirschfeld, the 1930s German socialist and
sexual liberationist, the journal was short-lived and folded after about a year. However,
Magnus helped to define faggotry as a mode of radical gayness that could resist
masculinism and white supremacy at the levels of both personal affect and social
power.
112
The opening article in Magnus, “On Our Identity as Faggots” drew heavily on
the analysis of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, as well as Lavender & Red Union,
the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, and the NACLA Journal (a leftist magazine on
Latin American politics).
113
Here, the Magnus collective offered that “gay liberation…
challenge[s] the very cultural, political, and economic assumptions on which our society
is based,” and also detailed how the “contradictions” of race, class, and gender divided

112
Faggotry was similar to the concept of “effeminism,” put forth in 1970 and 1971 by local activist Nick
Benton and the short-lived journal The Effeminist, discussed in Chapter 2.
113
Magnus: a journal of collective faggotry, #1, summer 1976. The journal was produced by six white gay
men: Sam Blazer, Tom Kennedy, rama (Charles Hinton), Michael Rosner, Denny Smith, and Richard
Wilson. Two Chicano/Latino gay men, Daniel Arcos and Efren Ramirez, contributed photos. The journal
was named for German socialist and sexual liberationist Magnus Hirschfeld. The issue was dedicated
Michael Krauss, a friend of the Magnus collective who was killed in a bike accident, and who was a white
gay communist noted as active in the July 4
th
Coalition (radical anti-Bicentennial protests), the Puerto
Rican Solidarity Committee, Join Hands (a network to aid gay prisoners), and in organizing gay health care
workers. The issue included poetry, an article on a bar raid in Mexico, fiction, a reflection on middle class
uses of working class culture, Gay Freedom Day photos of GALA and the Gay Black Caucus, and ads for
gay radical groups and publications.

202
both the gay movement and broader society.
114
Emphasizing that “United States society
has been built structurally on the exploitation of Third World people,” the article
summarized a history of Anglo conquest of Native American land; racial slavery; the
colonization of Mexican and Puerto Rican territory; and the ongoing maintenance and
expansion of U.S. empire through CIA intervention.
115

Markedly unlike Lavender & Red Union in Los Angeles, the Magnus collective
focused little attention on the Leninist formulation of imperialism as the highest stage of
capitalism, offering instead that “Imperialism should be looked at as a whole: an
economic, political, and cultural system achieved and maintained by violence.”
116

Further, they used their awareness of cultural imperialism not only to flesh out a more
complex analysis of racism, but also in order to situate their analysis of anti-gay
oppression. They held that while “Homosexual sex is natural, normal, beautiful, and a lot
of fun… Homophobia is a product of cultural imperialism, and consequently gay people
are culturally colonized people.”
117
However, while Magnus described gay people as
colonized, their analysis differed from gay liberationist statements of 1969, 1970 or 1971:
they shifted attention from urban space to culture, and from the analogy of the “gay
ghetto” to a systemic view of European and Anglo-American empire more broadly. They
saw gay oppression as one aspect of empire at large, not a distinct form of colonization

114
“On Our Identity as Faggots,” Magnus #1, 3.
115
Ibid, 4. Emphasis in original.
116
Ibid, 5.
117
Ibid, 8. Magnus also defined homosexuality as existing throughout history.

203
unto itself, or a form parallel to that of another “nation.” Thus, they described faggotry
as a “searc[h] for collective solutions to gay oppression,” and noted that while racism,
classism, and sexism divided the gay movement, “Faggotry means feeling the suffering
of others, and it means joining together with all oppressed people to end all suffering due
to capitalist exploitation. In a word, faggotry means revolution.”
118

Magnus stated that their formulation of collective faggotry was galvanized by the
groups they saw forming around them in the Bay Area, including Gay American Indians,
the Gay Latino Alliance, the Black Gay Caucus, the Working Class Caucus of Bay Area
Gay Liberation, and the Cynthia Forcier Defense Committee (a lesbian group organized
around a child custody case). The magazine’s first issue included a two-page spread of
photos from San Francisco’s Gay Freedom Day in 1976. Taken by Daniel Arcos and
Efren Ramirez, described in illustration credits as Chicano gay men, these photos
documented the GALA and Black Gay Caucus contingents in the Freedom Day march, as
well as a group of gay Black men relaxing in the park, members of the “Dykes on Bikes”
contingent on their motorcycles, and two gay Native American men holding a sign
reading, “Where is Marlon Brando now that I need him?”
119
At the same time, Magnus
joined the common critique of lesbian separatism as white, noting that “Third World

118
Ibid, 10.
119
Magnus #1, pages 24-25. Efren Ramirez was also the photo credit for an image of a march where
protestors’ signs included the statements “Class Unity Against Our Common Enemy” and “Stop Political
Rape.” Elsewhere, collective member Tom Kennedy was credited for a photo of graffiti reading “liberation
NOW! for women, workers, third world and gay people!”

204
lesbians… are much more likely to work in mixed organizations with men,” pointing to
women’s participation in the Gay Latino Alliance and Gay American Indians.
120

Magnus also paid credit to socialist feminist organizing.
121
Collective member
Tom Kennedy held that he and many radical gay men became exposed to socialist
feminist ideas while working in the Gay Sector of the July 4
th
Coalition, where they
worked with lesbian members of the Berkeley-Oakland Women’s Union. Similarly,
queer radical Amber Hollibaugh reflected in 1980 that she “reconnected to who I am as a
Marxist, a lesbian and a feminist” while working in the gay caucus of the “Bicentennial
Without Colonies” coalition in the summer of 1976. She explains that while she was the
only woman in a group of 11 men, that these men identified strongly as feminists, and
that she witnessed feminism “bridging gaps between lesbians and gay men” in the
coalition.
122
Kennedy, however, also noted that socialist feminism offered weak analyses
of racial and national oppression and largely failed to organize Third World or working
class white women. Kennedy warned that this was also a challenge for the gay

120
“On Our Identity as Faggots,” 8.
121
Tom Kennedy, “A Closer Look at Socialist Feminism,” Magnus #1, 26-32. Kennedy notes that he
became an activist in the anti-war movement and first had contact with socialist feminism in the summer of
1975 when he was working briefly in the New American Movement (NAM). He left NAM in part because
of “class differences” and moved to New Communist and anti-imperialist views. He states that his article
is also influenced by his time with the July 4
th
Coalition, by working with lesbians from the Berkeley-
Oakland Women’s Union in the Gay Sector of the July 4
th
Coalition, and by the rising Third World
consciousness within gay liberation. He also quotes the L&RU.
122
Amber Hollibaugh, “Right to Rebel,” in Homosexuality: Power and Politics, 212. Hollibaugh’s piece
was first published in Gay Left #9 and was later incorporated into her memoir My Dangerous Desires: A
Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home (Duke University Press, 2000).

205
movement, which he believed generally downplayed the centrality of Third World
identity, oppression, and resistance to anti-capitalist struggle.
123

Like the Magnus collective, the June 28 Union – which took its name from the
date of the Stonewall riots, and formed in 1975 – brought together anti-racist white gay
men and circulated a faggot identity. The group involved about a dozen members who
defined themselves as “a socialist, pro-feminist organization of gay men committed to
fighting imperialism and racism as well as gay oppression.”
124
Its political history moved
in reverse to Lavender and Red Union: June 28 Union initially defined itself as a socialist
group, but as its members began to embrace Marxist-Leninist and communist analysis,
they dissolved the group, breaking apart in late 1976 or 1977 (by contrast, L&RU
disintegrated as it moved towards a Trotskyist position).
125
In a self-critique written to
conclude their work as an organization, members of June 28 Union noted that they had
come to understand the basic “contradiction” of society as that between oppressor and
oppressed nations, including U.S. people of color. They understood this contradiction not
just as a relationship between the proletariat and bourgeoisie, but between global “forces
and relations of production,” which they felt made national (or racial) oppression and
women’s oppression interrelated and equally fundamental to global capitalism.
126

123
Kennedy, “A Closer Look at Socialist Feminism,” Magnus #1, 32.
124
“The Little Red Camp Songbook,” June 28 Union, Ephemera – Organizations, GLBTHS.
125
Like the Magnus collective, the June 28 Union cited the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee as key in
pushing them to center anti-imperialist analysis.
126
Emphasis in original.

206
Though June 28 Union agreed that the oppression of gay men and lesbians helped
to undergird the sexual division of labor, they added that homosexual behavior was at
times constructed as a tool of empire: ”In some situations the imperialists have
suppressed indigenous homosexuality among Third World peoples… In other cases,
oppressive relations between gay white men and gay Third World men have been
introduced.”
127
They found that gay white men, unlike either white lesbians or gays or
lesbians of color, experienced their sexuality in the context of white and male privilege:
Gay white men have a contradictory relationship to imperialism, and even to our
own oppression… We have the responsibility to materially assist the struggles for
national liberation and women’s liberation. To do otherwise is to sell out those
struggles and to fight only for a fuller share of white and male privilege. This is in
fact the actual political content…of much of the gay white male movement – to win
for gay white men the full advantages of being white men.

Here, June 28 Union positioned their politics against the most visible, white-identified,
and economically powerful expressions of gay men’s community – if not removing
themselves from the Castro as a place, then standing apart from the Castro as an idea.
June 28 Union worked against their own privilege by joining with queer of color,
feminist, and national liberation efforts – including the Gay Latino Alliance, Gay
American Indians, Gay Solidarity with the Chilean Resistance, the Puerto Rican
Solidarity Committee, the Hard Times Conference, and campaigns around the Joann
Little case and the International Hotel. They noted that that they had gained a
relationship for coalition building, but criticized their effort as “temporary and limited,”

127
“Criticism of the June 28 Union,” June 28 Union, c. 1976-1977, 12. Ephemera – Organizations,
GLBTHS.

207
rather than sustained over the long term.
128
Of course, dissolving as a organization did
not help the group sustain coalitional relationships, but individual members of June 28
Union, as well as of the Magnus collective, did continue to be active within the gay and
lesbian left at least through the end of the 1970s.
129
Drawing on the power gained from
efforts to rework and expand queer community, gay and lesbian leftists increasingly
moved to the forefront of queer activism in the Bay Area.

Building a Multi-Issue Movement
The same year that GALA formed, activists also founded Bay Area Gay
Liberation, or BAGL. BAGL began after a January 22, 1975 meeting held at Trinity
Methodist Church in the Castro, organized by a group terming itself the “Gay
Community Defense Committee” and calling for a “united effort of gay people, women
and men of all races.”
130
According to Hal Offen, a writer for the San Francisco State
gay newspaper The Voice, 250 people attended this meeting, and BAGL’s early
leadership was composed of “Gays anxious to see a union of minority groups fighting
together… without a doubt, a good deal left of center.”
131
As Offen noted, several BAGL

128
Ibid, 18-19.
129
For example, Magnus Collective member “Rama” was later involved in Bay Area Gay Liberation.
130
“Gay Pride, Gay Unity, Gay Power,” Gay Community Defense Committee flier calling for January 22
meeting (1975), Ephemera – Organizations (BAGL), GLBTHS. See also “Can Gay People Get it Together
in San Francisco?” flier by same group, also calling for January 22 meeting, same file.
131
Offen, “Gay liberation growing with BAGL,” The Voice of the Gay Students Coalition (cited above). A
byline described Offen as “a partner in a Volkswagen repair service called BUGGERY.” Offen described

208
founders had been involved in the Socialist Workers’ Party, and the group was frequently
subject to red-baiting. Queer activist Amber Hollibaugh later recalled BAGL as “a
socialist, primarily faggot organization that set the tone of struggle, maintaining links
between the gay male community and the third world communities.”
132
While it
conceived itself as a coalitional umbrella organization, BAGL’s membership was
overwhelmingly male and mostly white. By fall 1975, the Third World Gay Caucus
developed within the organization, though it soon became an autonomous group, while
working in alliance with BAGL. In its first year of work, BAGL (including participated
in UFW marches and the Coors Beer boycott; celebrated May Day, the liberation of
Vietnam (more widely known in the U.S. as the “fall of Saigon”), and Gay Freedom Day;
protested racist, anti-effeminate door policies at the gay bar the Mindshaft and the Club
Baths; demonstrated at San Francisco City Hall to protest police violence towards
lesbians and gay men; and worked with a Gay Teachers Coalition to push the city School
Board to ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.
133

BAGL also helped to bring together the Stonewall Contingent (also known as the
Stonewall Coalition or simply Stonewall), the organization responsible for the “Gay
Funnies” that analyzed anti-gay political repression under monopoly capital. Stonewall

some 100 regularly attending BAGL general meetings and held that the group could turn out at least 150
people to protests.
132
Amber Hollibaugh, “Right to Rebel,” in Homosexuality: Power and Politics, 212. I should note that
Hollibaugh’s view of BAGL may be skewed to the left; she also saw Harvey Milk as “a faggot, proud and a
socialist” (214) while most would consider Milk a left-leaning liberal.
133
See various fliers, Ephemera – Organizations (BAGL), GLBTHS.

209
first made itself known on the streets of San Francisco in June and July of 1976. While
generally acting more as a coalitional network than an organization unto itself, the
Stonewall Contingent was a potent vehicle for grassroots mobilization and movement-
building that held a presence as late as 1981, marching in annual Gay Freedom Day
Parades, as well as protesting Dan White’s manslaughter conviction and police violence
associated with the White Night Riots. At its inception in 1976, Stonewall urged a
platform including full gay rights; an end to racism and sexism in the gay community and
society at large; no social service cutbacks; solidarity with oppressed people around the
world; and it strongly opposed a proposed federal bill that would criminalize ordinary
protest, including labor strikes (Senate Bill 1). Stonewall called for gay men and lesbians
to join upcoming protests of the nation’s bicentennial, and noted the many organizations
endorsing or participating in those protests: BAGL, GALA, the Berkeley-Oakland
Women’s Union, Gay American Indians, the Black Gay Caucus, the Gay Student
Alliance at San Francisco City College, June 28 Union, the Gay Anti-Imperialist News
Service, the July 4
th
Coalition Gay Sector, the Northern California Alliance (which would
later help to form the Rectification Network), the San Francisco Unemployed & Welfare
Council, the gay radio show Fruit Punch, and even the decades-old, generally far more
moderate, lesbian organization the Daughters of Bilitis. The circulation of this list on
Stonewall’s flier, like the photographs in Magnus, functioned as a kind of living archive
itself, asserting the presence of a broad, multiracial Bay Area gay and lesbian left.
Multi-issue queer politics were clearly gaining ground, but left critique remained
contentious, and continued to divide many groups. Christina B. Hanhardt has noted that,

210
after summer 1976, Bay Area Gay Liberation began to split into two distinct factions, the
“Progressive Caucus” versus “Gay Action.” Gay Action’s central project became the
Richard Heakin Memorial Butterfly Brigade, which, Hanhardt finds, sought to ensure gay
and lesbian safety by patrolling the boundaries of the Castro against perceived incursions
from the primarily Latino Mission District and the primarily Black Western Addition.
134

Gay Action embraced a language of neighborhood visibility, police collaboration, and a
barely implicit whiteness. It ultimately did so apart from BAGL, however, as the
Progressive Caucus won out within BAGL as a whole. By late fall 1976, BAGL adopted
the Progressive Caucus’s explicitly anti-imperialist “Principles of Unity” in a 69-17
vote.
135
These Principles held sway for over two years, though the larger debate
continued to rattle BAGL, and the organization dissolved in late 1978 or early 1979.
136

During and after this internal split, those activists committed to the Progressive
Caucus drew on more multiracial, multiclass, and multi-gender understandings of queer
community and identity to bolster their expansive politics. The Principles of Unity not
only described imperialism as the source of anti-gay oppression – to wit, holding that
“THE OPPRESSION OF GAY PEOPLE IS TIED TO ALL THE OTHER FORMS OF

134
Hanhardt, “Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists.”
135
As recorded in BAGL 2
nd
Anniversary flier (front features dancing cake), Ephemera – Organizations
(BAGL), GLBTHS.
136
I have not been able to determine exactly how or when BAGL dissolved, but Christina Hanhardt, who
has also examined BAGL, concurs with me about this timing. A smaller effort, San Francisco Gay
Liberation, appears to have formed out of BAGL in 1979, primarily concerned with addressing housing
concerns and gentrification (these materials are contained in the John Kyper File, GLBTHS). A BAGL
newsletter in June 1978 referenced internal disputes within the group, but also cited a number of
committees and meetings. I have found no BAGL materials dated later in 1979 or later.

211
OPPRESSION UNDER IMPERIALISM” – but also emphasized that:
AMONG GAY PEOPLE ALL THE FORMS OF IMPERIALIST OPPRESSION
ARE FOUND. Gay people are women and men, Third World and white, workers
and middle class. We understand that unity among gay people cannot be built just
on the struggle against gay oppression. Few beyond the most privileged gay people
– white middle class men – will ever be willing to unite around that narrow a
purpose… the movement we commit ourselves to building [is] one that struggles
against all other forms of oppression as part of the world-wide struggle against
imperialism, and one that carries on the struggle within the gay community and
among ourselves.
137

Reflecting the circulation of faggot politics, the Progressive Caucus emphasized that
sexism oppressed not just women or gay people in general, but also “transsexuals, drag
queens, and effeminate men.”
The Principles of Unity proposed six main areas of work, including fighting both
economic cutbacks and “political repression” by courts, police, and prisons; working for
lesbian rights and against “rape and sexual violence against women, faggots, and sissies”;
building solidarity with liberation movements across the U.S. and internationally; and
finally “community building,” including struggling against racism, classism, and sexism
“in a spirit of trust and love.” Adopting these Principles led BAGL not only to continue
its support of the United Farmworkers and Chilean solidarity, but also to contribute a
“security force in support of the tenants in the International Hotel.”
138
In 1977 and 1978,
BAGL formed an Anti-Male Supremacy Committee that sent a small number of San
Francisco lesbians to the International Women’s Year Conference in Houston; they

137
“Progressive Gay Caucus – Principles of Unity,” Ephemera – Organizations (BAGL), GLBTHS.
138
“Second Annual BAGL Birthday Party” flier, 1977, Ephemera – Organizations (BAGL), GLBTHS.
The event was held January 29, 1977 at the Gay Community Center and included a film on working women
in Latin America, a musical performance, and a dance; childcare was provided.

212
collaborated with local anti-rape groups, spoke out against Anita Bryant’s “Save Our
Children” campaign, and began to contribute to radical organizing against the Briggs
Initiative. Throughout this time, they held that they would achieve “Gay Liberation
Through Socialist Revolution,” illustrating this slogan with an image of racially mixed,
gay and lesbian comradeship (see Figure 9, below). Here, BAGL’s language and imagery
was reminiscent of the Lavender & Red Union in Los Angeles, but its representation was
less fictive, more fully bolstered by tangible organizational relationships.
Figure 9: “Gay Liberation Through Socialist Revolution.”
139

In 1977, BAGL responded to the assaults of Anita Bryant – who continually
invoked the specter of child molestation in her campaigns – by arguing that “the real
enemies of children” were “white racism, male supremacy, imperialism, school
systems… tracking systems… courts,” and even Anita Bryant herself, given her role as

139
Image in Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) newsletter, 1978. BAGL File, Ephemera – Organizaitons,
GLBTHS.

213
representative of multinational capital. More clearly than ever before, BAGL insisted
that anti-gay laws and repression came down most heavily on “third world gays, lesbians,
the poorest gays, such as gay prisoners… gays on welfare or who can’t even get welfare
who are victims of police harassment in neighborhoods such as the Tenderloin.
Effeminate men… lesbian mothers.”
140
Here, BAGL’s attention to questions of class,
poverty, and welfare, as well as gender expression, offered a way to incorporate a
generally disavowed site such as the Tenderloin into the vision of the gay and lesbian left.
The next year, BAGL bolstered coalitions against the Briggs Initiative. But while
BAGL contributed to the campaign against Briggs, neither it, nor any other single group
led that fight. Rather, against the expected formulas of electoral campaigns, Proposition
6 became defeated by a decentralized, grassroots campaign of localized groups that
pursued multi-issue rhetoric and coalitional strategies more often than not.
The Briggs Initiative, named after its proponent State Senator John Briggs and
formally known as Proposition 6, went to California voters on the November 1978 ballot.
It asked voters to grant school boards the power to fire gay and lesbian workers as well as
any employee who supported gay and lesbian rights. While it had strong support in early
polls, the Briggs Initiative failed by a 58% to 42% “no” vote. A number of politicians
voiced eleventh-hour opposition to the measure, including President Carter, former
President Gerald Ford, and former Governor Ronald Reagan. However, these politicians’
statements arrived only after grassroots organizing had already achieved substantial

140
“Who is the Real Threat to Children?” flier, 1977, BAGL File – Ephemera (Organizations), GLBTHS.

214
success in turning voters against Briggs, as well as after anti-Briggs organizers had won
support from the California AFL-CIO.
141
As observers ranging from the queer socialist
Amber Hollibaugh to the moderate Randy Shilts agree, endorsements against Briggs from
Carter, Ford, Reagan mainly reflected these politicians’ desire to capitalize on a surge of
public sentiment against Proposition 6; while they certainly bolstered the majority vote
against the measure, they did not lay the groundwork for defeat.
142

Decentralization opened the No on 6 campaign up to significant influence by leftist
gay and lesbian groups. In fall 1977, activists rejected the efforts of the Concerned
Voters of California (CVC), founded by Advocate owner David Goodstein, to control the
campaign through what Goodstein termed a “low profile” strategy that would keep gay
and lesbian people out of public view.
143
In direct opposition to this strategy, anti-Briggs
organizers prioritized coming out as gay or lesbian to voters statewide, including
conservative, rural, and suburban audiences. Goodstein’s CVC and the lesbians-who-
lunch Southern California Women for Understanding raised money from wealthy donors
and funded the campaign’s few (very muted) TV and radio advertisements, but mostly

141
Michael Ward and Mark Freeman, “Defending Gay Rights: the campaign against the Briggs Initiative in
California,” Radical America 13:4 (July-August 1979): 19-30.
142
See Diane Ehrensaft and Ruth Milkman, interview with Amber Hollibaugh, “Sexuality and the State: the
Defeat of the Briggs Initiative and Beyond,” Socialist Review 9:3 (May-June 1979): 1-11, and Shilts, The
Mayor of Castro Street. For example, Carter only endorsed a “no” vote against Proposition 6 after being
caught on mike with then-Governor Jerry Brown telling him “it’s perfectly safe now” to oppose Briggs.
143
Ward and Freeman, “Defending Gay Rights,” 22. CVC did fund TV and radio ads and funded some
local organizing work, but was also criticized by local grassroots groups for draining funding. Randy Shilts
also discusses the Briggs fight in The Mayor of Castro Street, though he focuses solely on BACABI,
disputes between Harvey Milk and David Goodstein, and Briggs’ own statements.

215
refrained from interfering with grassroots organizing.
144
By December, activists outside
Goodstein’s CVC founded a statewide effort, the California Coalition Against the Briggs
Initiative (CACABI); like BAGL, CACABI included a significant number of activists
who were also members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP).
145

Leftists’ involvement was certainly controversial, and CACABI dissolved in March
1978, eight months before the election, over debates regarding political leadership.
CACABI’s two prominent offshoots, the Bay Area Coalition Against the Briggs Initiative
(BACABI) and Coalition Against the Briggs Initiative-Los Angeles (CABILA), also
included SWP members. Yet many other, smaller groups also formed against Briggs, a
good number of them further to the left, some viewing BACABI and CABILA as too
“single issue” in their approach. Such critique dovetailed with a Leninist-influenced view
of SWP in general as “reformist,” or as approaching gay and lesbian rights simply as a
“minority” issue – a question of social democracy rather than vanguard revolution against
monopoly capital of the Third World. The breadth of radical influence within the
campaign became evident in the fact that debates over how to focus anti-Briggs work –
whether to concentrate just on a “No on 6” vote or speak to other initiatives, what
coalitions to build, and so on – occurred largely among gay and lesbian leftists.
The absence of any one leading organization controlling No on 6 efforts meant that
a wide range of groups could tap their own local networks and political knowledge. As

144
See discussions in Retter, “Lesbian Activism in Los Angeles, 1970-1979”; Shilts, The Mayor of Castro
Street; and Faderman and Timmons, Gay L.A.
145
Ward and Freeman, “Defending Gay Rights.”

216
Michael Ward and Mark Freeman, two gay socialists from San Francisco, recalled later,
“the energetic group in Sonoma County had a strong feminist bent, while in San Jose a
coalition was headed by Libertarians and gay church members.”
146
Decentralization also
made the campaign conducive to a wide-ranging discussion of the broader impacts that
anti-gay policies could carry across sexuality, race, ethnicity, gender, and class, nurturing
what Ward and Freeman termed a radical “consensus…that the Proposition 6 fight should
be used to warn people of the dangers of the New Right and to form alliances with others
under attack.”
147
Ward and Freeman also reported that in Southern California, two
recently formed organizations, Lesbians of Color and Latina/os Unidos, did outreach
work in East L.A.; the Third World Gay Caucus were noted for doing outreach within
Oakland and San Francisco communities of color.
148
Various activists of color, both
queer and straight, used their public reputations to represent Briggs as part of a broader
agenda; Cesar Chávez, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally, and Angela Davis (who
was straight-identified as this time) spoke out against Briggs, and one of the most
prominent No on 6 organizers in San Francisco was Gwenn Craig, a Black lesbian.
149

146
Ibid, 24.
147
Ibid, 25.
148
I hope to be able to learn more about these organizations’ anti-Briggs work through future oral history
interviews; for now, I thank Ward and Freeman for noting these groups’ organizing. Later analyses
showed that both Black and Latino voters rejected Proposition 6 by large margins. Black voters had
expressed consistent opposition to the measure early on; see also Diane Ehrensaft and Ruth Milkman,
interview with Amber Hollibaugh, “Sexuality and the State.”
149
Gwenn Craig spoke about her erasure within Gus Van Sant’s film Milk in “Milk Skimmed,” a critical
roundtable on racial, gender, and political representation the film, held at the GLBTHS on February 19,
2009. Other roundtable participants included Tomás Almaguer, Joshua Gamson, and Ruth Mahaney.

217
Much of the energy against Proposition 6 was specifically feminist and implicitly,
if not overtly, mobilized a socialist or Marxist analysis of the constructions of sexuality
and gender. Amber Hollibaugh, who worked full-time to defeat Briggs through the
California Outreach Group, spoke to audiences around the state and found that she moved
many fairly conservative women to oppose Proposition 6 by linking her own experience
as a “sexual outlaw” to the broader restriction of sexual potential for all women.
150

Meanwhile, Wages Due Lesbians called on state legislators to oppose Proposition 6 as an
attack on all women’s economic independence and on all children’s access to good
schools. They argued that “Lesbian women have always been teachers, teacher’s aides,
nurses, counselors, child care workers and students,” of all races and including many
mothers, and that “Our right to make sexual choices has always been constricted by our
fear of having to give up our children and/or live below the poverty level.” They
described Briggs as a tactic to distract attention from cuts in school funding, adding that
mothers would bear the brunt of cuts in childcare and overcrowded schools.
151
Through
this rhetoric, Wages Due Lesbians linked the social categories of “lesbian” and “mother”
– an important tactic for their argument that wages for housework would help to bolster
women’s economic and sexual independence from men.
Thus, many different kinds of alliances, as well as theorizations of how sexual
politics fit into domestic and global political economies, were developed through work

150
Hollibaugh in Ehrensaft and Milkman, “Sexuality and the State.”
151
“Dear Legislator,” form letter on Proposition 6, 1978, Wages Due Lesbians file, LLC-ONE.

218
against Proposition 6. Some gay and lesbian leftists, notably the group Lesbian
Schoolworkers (which involved a small core of radical white women, only some of them
actual school employees) argued that activists should work not only to defeat Proposition
6 but also Proposition 7, an initiative to reinstate California’s death penalty. Lesbian
Schoolworkers described Proposition 6 as “connected to the attacks on Third World
people, women, and working class people in this country and internationally,” and won
support from the Ethnic Minority Educators group (including Black, Latin American,
Chinese and Filipino American caucuses) inside the San Francisco teacher’s union.
152

Moreover, they described Proposition 7 as primarily targeting people of color, while
holding that Proposition 6 would open the door to discrimination not only against gay and
lesbian teachers, but also anyone “already oppressed… Third World people, the disabled,
old people, women.” They noted that Senator Briggs backed both Propositions 6 and 7,
and insisted that the death penalty offered no solution to violence.
153

Lesbian Schoolworkers still placed greater emphasis on Proposition 6 than
Proposition 7, however.
154
As its primary campaign tool, Lesbian Schoolworkers created
a scripted slideshow for use in campaign presentations.
155
This slideshow devoted

152
“THE BRIGGS’ INITIATIVE – NOT A SINGLE ISSUE,” Flier c. 1978, Ephemera – Subjects (Briggs),
GLBTHS.
153
“Vote No on 6 & 7,” flier, Lesbian Schoolworkers, c.1978. Paula Lichtenberg Papers, Box 1 – Lesbian
Schoolworkers. GLBTHS. The flier noted that right wing politicians chose to “scapegoat” people of color,
unions, welfare recipients, gay men and lesbians, and feminists rather than fighting violence,
unemployment, or poverty.
154
Christina Hanhardt’s ongoing work on Lesbian Schoolworkers, as well as my own further research, may
allow me to deepen or complicate this argument.
155
“Don’t Let it Happen Here,” slideshow script, Lesbian Schoolworkers File, GLBTHS.

219
significantly more time to critiquing the Briggs Initiative than to discussing the death
penalty, though it approached both propositions from a clearly Marxist, anti-racist point
of view. Visually, the slideshow evoked interconnections between various identities and
social struggles, building a montage of children and adults of various racial and ethnic
backgrounds, some apparently gay or lesbian and others not, in classroom, playground,
home, and protest settings. Textually, the slideshow told viewers that the Briggs
Initiative was based on “narrow” gender roles and “limited ideas of family” out of step
with contemporary society: “What Briggs considers a normal family excludes single-
parent households, families hit by unemployment, families without children, extended
families, Gay families, and many other arrangements people create which provide the
care and support we all need in our lives.” It stated that while community and family
had been key to both Native American and Black resistance and survival, Senator Briggs’
ideal family was “white, upwardly mobile, politically conservative, and highly
traditionalist.” The text compared current right-wing efforts against racial justice,
immigrant rights, reproductive rights, and workers to the Holocaust and Japanese
American incarceration. It termed Proposition 13 an assault on schoolchildren of color,
Proposition 7 a racist measure against prisoners’ organizing, and Proposition 6 an assault
not only on teachers but also on gay and lesbian young people in schools. While the
slideshow proposed a multi-issue political unity by fighting Propositions 6 and 7
together, its focus remained centered around questions of sexuality and family.
Many, probably most, gay and lesbian leftists felt that Proposition 7 could not be
defeated. No focused No on 7 campaign existed; the measure ultimately passed with 72%

220
of the vote. But many activists who made a tactical decision to concentrate their energy
against the Briggs Initiative remained personally opposed to Proposition 7 and deeply
invested in the vision of a larger, multi-issue political movement, a goal that they
believed anti-Briggs work could help achieve. These politics were evident at the
Workers Conference Against the Briggs Initiative, held at San Francisco’s Mission High
School in September 1978. The conference was supported by some 21 different
organizations around the state, including the East Bay wing of BACABI (EBACABI),
Lesbian Schoolworkers, other gay and lesbian left groups, and also union locals,
organizations of Black unionists, and women of color feminist organizations.
156

Conference materials described Briggs as an assault on principles of union solidarity as
well as individual gay and lesbian workers, and described both Propositions 6 and 7, the
anti-affirmative Bakke decision, and the anti-tax and social-service-slashing Proposition
13, as interconnected right-wing onslaughts. The conference logo, later reprinted on a
cover of the magazine Radical America, adapted a classic image of solidarity to suggest

156
While focused on anti-Briggs work, the Workers Conference Against Briggs termed Proposition 6 and
7, as well as the Bakke decision, Proposition 13, and anti-feminist attacks as part of a coordinated effort
“scapegoating gays, along with women and minorities in order to build a network that will attack all
working people.” See “Statewide Workers Conference Against Briggs/Prop 6, for straight, gay, organized
and unorganized workers,” c.1977, Stonewall File (Stonewall organization), GLBTHS. The Conference
sponsors were the East Bay chapter of the mainline anti-Briggs coalition (EBACABI), the socialist-feminist
group Radical Women, the Progressive Caucus (presumably the offshoot of BAGL), the Gay Caucus of
HERE Local 2, Union W.A.G.E. (Women’s Alliance to Gain Equality), Lesbian Schoolworkers, Gay
Teachers and Schoolworkers, BAGL, Lesbians and Gay Men (a Los Angeles organization), Gay Teachers
(also of Los Angeles), N.E.W. (Nontraditional Employment for Women), and Join Hands (a support group
for gay prisoners). Endorsing organizations were Straights for Gay Rights; Mi Casa, Su Casa Coalition
(affiliated with the Puerto Rican Women’s Organization); the Asian Feminist Group, which Trinity Ordona
describes as the first Asian American lesbian organization in San Francisco; the Black Teachers Caucus of
San Francisco; the Gay Asian Support Group; the Committee to Defend Reproductive Rights; Sonoma
County Residents Against Prop 6 (SCRAP 6); Jews Against Briggs (a Los Angeles group); Samille
Gooden, the President of AFSCME Local 1695; the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists of Northern
California; the Gay American Indians; and Larry Gurley, chair of the National Black Caucus of the AFT.

221
the presence of gay and lesbian workers (see Figure 10, below). This logo showed the
flexed biceps and fists of several people, marked as “workers” because one held a
wrench; these arms carried various racial and gender markers, including skin tones,
bracelets, and rolled sleeves. Finally, two female symbols – denoting “lesbian” – were
drawn, as if tattooed, on the bulging bicep in the foreground. The image was captioned
with the slogan “An Attack on One Will Be Answered by All.”
Figure 10: Workers’ Conference Against the Briggs Initiative.
157

157
Logo, Workers’ Conference Against the Briggs Initiative. Reprinted as cover, Radical America #13:4
(July-August 1979).

222
Both “No on 6” and “No on 6 and 7” activists came together to support, rather than
divide, one another’s work at the Workers’ Conference and in the campaign more
generally. And while the anti-death penalty message did not gain real ground, the notion
of Briggs as a threat to workers’ power did gain strength and became critical to the
defeat. Hollibaugh observed that rank and file union members became moved to oppose
Proposition 6 as activists made them aware of the gay and lesbian workers in their midst,
and because the initiative “was right out there as an anti-gay issue, an anti-labor issue.
That’s how it was talked about in every single newspaper.”
158

A few months after Prop 6 was defeated, socialist feminists Diane Ehrensaft and
Ruth Milkman reflected in Socialist Review that the campaign had presented “a
tremendous opportunity to defend sexual freedom and talk about sexuality in an explicitly
political way and the gay left and its supporters took full advantage.”
159
In Radical
America, Michael Ward and Mark Freeman credited the defeat to the strength of a
statewide “feminist network” as well as “a community of radicals active around gay
issues” which “prodded the campaign continually to the left.”
160
Gay and lesbian leftists
viewed the campaign against the Briggs Initiative as an important movement-building
step. And in the months immediately following the Briggs defeat, many activists

158
Hollibaugh in Ehrensaft and Milkman, “Sexuality and the State,” 7.
159
Ehrensaft and Milkman, Introduction to “Sexuality and the State,” 2.
160
Ward and Freeman, “Defending Gay Rights,” 29. Carmen Vázquez also describes herself as catapulted
into lesbian and gay activism through the Briggs campaign. She attended a meeting of Stonewall and was
asked to represent the organization at a protest after the group concluded that they needed to select a
lesbian of color to speak (generally, her friend Ali Marrero would have been asked to do this, but Vázquez
notes that Marrero was gone that day, so this tokenized role fell to her!). See Vázquez, interview with
Anderson, 36-37.

223
capitalized on campaign energy – and deepened the critique of state violence nascent
within “No on 6 and 7” efforts – by beginning to organize against police violence.
Lesbian and gay activism against police violence became galvanized in large part
by Dan White’s assassinations of Mayor George Moscone and out gay Supervisor Harvey
Milk. The murders occurred just three weeks after the defeat of the Briggs Initiative on
November 27, 1978 (as well as just days after news had begun to break about the Peoples
Temple deaths in Jonestown, Guyana – chilling news in the city where Peoples Temple
had long been based). Dan White was a former officer of the San Francisco Police
Department, an institution then embroiled in a protracted affirmative action fight. Many
in the SFPD rallied to White’s defense with t-shirts and bumper stickers reading “Free
Dan White,” and lesbians and gay men began to report more frequent instances of police
harassment. Then, in February 1979, two officers of the SFPD assaulted and arrested two
women, Sue Davis and Shirley Wilson, as they left a well-known lesbian bar.
161
Within
days, over a hundred lesbian women, mostly white, came together and formed a new
organization, Lesbians Against Police Violence (LAPV).
As former LAPV member Maggie Jochild recalls, “Most of the women in LAPV
had known each other first in either Lesbian Schoolworkers or the No on 6 campaign.”
162

161
See discussion in Stryker and Van Buskirk, Gay by the Bay, and Maggie Jochild, “The White Night Riot
& Lesbians Against Police Violence,” http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-White-Night-Riot-and-L-by-
Maggie-Jochild-081116-566.html (posted November 16, 2008, written May 2008, accessed March, 2009).
162
Jochild, “The White Night Riot & Lesbians Against Police Violence.” Jochild became involved with
Lesbian Schoolworkers herself in 1978 when she first moved to San Francisco and was a leader in LAPV
from 1979 to 1981. She has also been interviewed by Christina Hanhardt, who discusses the LAPV in her
dissertation.

224
Jochild describes herself as relatively politically inexperienced compared to other
members, noting, “LAPV provided my political education… They were extremely kind
to me. I remember the silence that fell over one meeting when I asked, ‘Just what are
dialectics?’, but after they pushed closed their gaping jaws, a couple of them explained it
to me without condescension or hurry.” As Jochild’s memory suggests, LAPV leaders
were already comfortable with Marxist thought; they were also experienced organizers
with ongoing ties to several other gay and lesbian left groups, including both the
Stonewall Coalition and Wages Due Lesbians, both of which joined protests against
SFPD abuse.
163
Throughout spring 1979, LAPV organized meetings and demonstrations
to protest the police assault at Amelia’s, another attack by off-duty officers at the lesbian
bar Peg’s Place, as well as the Oakland Police Department’s recent murder of an African
American teenager named Melvin Black, and “the 38 black men shot and killed by the
L.A. police last year alone.”
164
They held that “The Murder of Moscone and Milk
encouraged attacks on gay men, Lesbians, prostitutes and third World people,” and asked,
“IS S.F.P.D. CAUGHT UP IN THE ANTI-GAY, ANTI-THIRD WORLD, ULTRA
RIGHT WING POLITICS SWEEPING THIS COUNTRY? Across the country new anti
gay laws and death penalty laws are being introduced together.”
165

163
See “Open Letter to Mayor Feinstein,” xeroxed flier, February 15, 1979, Wages Due Lesbians,
Ephemera – Subjects, GLBTHS. The letter argued that “Without a ‘man-size’ paycheck, and with
Governor Brown and President Carter cutting back on money and services for women, fewer and fewer of
us can afford a ‘night out.’ Just by being at a lesbian bar or by speaking out… we risk losing our jobs, our
homes or our children. To have the police waiting outside our bars… is an intolerable situation.”
164
Press Release, April 23, 1979, LAPV. “Police Relations, 1970s,” Ephemera - Subjects, GLBTHS.
165
Ibid.

225
On May 21, 1979, Dan White was acquitted of murder for Milk and Moscone’s
deaths, and found guilty only of manslaughter. He eventually served five years for the
assassinations. The jury’s decision and comparatively light sentencing rested on the
argument that he had suffered diminished mental capacity due to depression and a junk
food diet (this argument became notoriously known as the “twinkie defense”). A
peaceful protest march from the Castro became more aggressive at City Hall, where
lesbians and gay men broke door glass, ripped parking meters from the sidewalk, and set
fire to police cruisers, in a conflict that became known as the White Night Riot.
166

Members of LAPV, the Stonewall Coalition, and other newly forming groups sprang into
action in the days that followed, urging people who had been present at the riot not to
collaborate with police investigations seeking to hold individual activists responsible.
167

These activists pointed out that two different types of violence occurred the night of
May 21
st
: not just property destruction by gay and lesbian activists, but also violent
beatings by SFPD officers both at City Hall and in an unprovoked raid on a Castro gay
bar, the Elephant Walk. Thus, one flier held:
REAL VIOLENCE IS… Cops singling out women for special beatings Monday
night… Dan White getting special treatment while prisons are filled with Third
World people whose only crime is trying to survive. Cops murdering unarmed
Black youths like Melvin Black. Going to robot jobs every day for shit pay just to
make some fucker rich.
168

166
White’s sentencing and the White Night Riots are extensively discussed in the 1984 documentary The
Life and Times of Harvey Milk.
167
“Were you at the riot Monday night? Don’t talk to the cops” – flier by Lesbians and Gays Against
Intervention, n.d. (1979), “Protests,” Ephemera – Subjects, GLBTHS. This flier held, “Cops are not our
friends, even gay cops. Their job is to bust people.”
168
“We Got Cooled Out Tuesday, But We Rioted Monday,” Stonewall organization, GLBTHS.

226
This document listed a set of demands: no prosecutions for anyone arrested in the riot; no
Grand Jury investigation into the riot; no expansion of the SFPD; and an end to police
assaults on gay and Third World people. It was signed by evocatively named front
groups: the “Daly City Committee for the Elimination of the Ruling Class,” “People for a
Police-Free Future,” and “Your Friendly Neighborhood Revolutionary Dykes.”
169

Almost certainly, none of these groups existed; rather, LAPV and the Stonewall
Contingent were primarily responsible for this flier, as well as other militant reactions on
May 21st.
170
Other broadsides held that jury had sent a clear message: “If you’re White
you’re alright.” One widely commemorated flier simply showed a burning police car
with the date of the White Night Riot and the caption, “No Apologies!” (Figure 11,
below). In one instance, this image was reused as a color-by-numbers drawing with
possible colors including “Sissy Chartreuse,” “Pig Blue,” and “Off White.”
171

Both LAPV and the Stonewall Coalition maintained a militant presence at least two
years after the Dan White verdict, well into 1981. These groups continued to challenge
state violence and gentrification, and contributed to coalescing lesbian and gay
involvement with Southern Africa and Central American solidarity work. The Stonewall
Coalition also became increasingly co-gender after the White Night Riot; by November

169
Other names on the flier: Bardykes United Against Police Repression, Politically Correct Lesbians.
170
For example, the flier is included in the Stonewall file at GLBTHS; Maggie Jochild also describes
LAPV and Stonewall collaborating to urge people not to speak to the police after the riots.
171
“America the Beautiful???” flier, “White Night Riots,” Ephemera – Subjects, GLBTHS. This flier
features a revision of “America the Beautiful” including lyrics such as “Oh beautiful, for sissy power than
cannot be contained / We fought at Stonewall decked in drag, we want more fruited plains.”

227
1979, one supporter described it as “an organization of socialist lesbians and gay men.”
172

In early 1980, LAPV produced a musical comedy about gentrification bearing the
Marxist-inflected title “Count the Contradictions.”
173
An opening number contrasted the
image of San Francisco as a gay paradise with the reality of police violence, and the
musical explored police harassment, rising rents, and housing discrimination in the
Mission, although reflecting work still to be done to absorb intersectional lessons, the
script represented lesbians and gay men as white and Latino residents as straight.
Figure 11: “No Apologies!”
174

172
Untitled and unsigned speech, Stonewall organization, GLBTHS. The speech was given on the
anniversary of Milk and Moscone’s death – thus, November 27, 1979. The speech also held that Milk
himself had seen the gay struggle as connected to other issues.
173
“Count the Contradictions” script, Meg Barnett Papers/Lesbians Against Police Violence, GLBTHS.
See also Christina Hanhardt, “The ‘Particular Task’ of ‘Integrated Analysis’: Examining Race, Sex, and
Gender in the Politics of Urban Violence,” paper at American Studies Association, October 2008,
Albuquerque, NM.
174
“No Apologies!” flier, 1979. Meg Barnett Papers (Lesbians Against Police Violence), GLBTHS.

228
LAPV and the Stonewall Coalition were by no means the only lesbian and gay
leftist groups organizing at the end of the 1970s; indeed, the queer of color activism I
have referenced throughout this chapter gained increasing prominence as the 1980s
began. Still, LAPV and the Stonewall Coalition help to suggest a wide, messy array of
gay and lesbian left issues and a clearly vibrant, expansive radical culture that turned the
corner into the 1980s. LAPV remained involved in many different causes and events:
anti-Klan organizing, Puerto Rican solidarity, women’s self-defense cases, Mariel boatlift
refugees, gay and lesbian solidarity with the Nicaraguan Revolution, a Third World Gay
Day celebration, a professional women’s basketball game to benefit the Sue (Davis) &
Shirley (Wilson) Defense Fund. Likewise, the Stonewall Coalition’s chant and song
sheets for gay and lesbian pride parades included slogans critiquing U.S. interventionism,
asserting gay and immigrant rights, and metaphorically linking sites of ethnic genocide
and racialized, gendered, and anti-queer repression. One chant on the page was written
as a round, with lyrics stating: “Stop discrimination in Immigration/ Stop INS harassment
of foreign trained nurses... Of Mexican workers… Of gay people.” With a moving
double meaning, protestors were instructed to “listen for harmonies on this chant.”
175

175
Two call and response chants brought many locations together. One that called “Never Again” listed
responses including Auschwitz, Tule Lake, Manzanar, Wounded Knee, San Quentin, Sybil Brand (a
women’s prison), and bars where police had attacked lesbians and gay men (Peg’s Place, Amelia’s and the
Elephant Walk). Another chant’s call ranged from Stonewall to Atlanta (murders of Black children) to
Guatemala to Greensboro (murders of anti-Klan activists); the response was always “Fight Back!” See
“Stonewall Contingent Chant Sheet, 6-29-80,” and another dated 1981, Meg Barnett Papers/Lesbians
Against Police Violence, GLBTHS. The June 28 Union also produced “The Little Red Camp Songbook”
full of similar songs and chants, including “The Internationale” in English, Spanish, and Tagalog (reflecting
involvement in the International Hotel campaign).

229

Conclusion: Mobilizing a Radical Past
Over the course of the 1970s, activists in the gay and lesbian left constructed a
historical memory that bolstered their contemporary political mission. First, as reflected
by the names of groups such as the Stonewall Coalition and the June 28 Union, 1970s
gay and lesbian leftists claimed the Stonewall Riot as their own. They began to
emphasize that the riots on Christopher Street had been led by “Lesbians, Puerto Rican
street queens and other Third World gays,” and they asserted that Stonewall’s “original
spirit…connected the gay struggle with the fight of the Third World and other working
and oppressed people for liberation throughout the world.”
176
Yet the narrative of
Stonewall as a moment of interconnection served to mask the problems within early gay
liberationist thought that had, and continued to make, “connecting the gay struggle”
difficult. Celebrating Stonewall as a moment of interconnection made it difficult to
critique simplistic analogies between race and sexuality that had made queer of color
activists feel excluded from early gay liberation groups. Commemorating Third World,
transgender, and lesbian participation in the Stonewall Riots made it difficult to explain
why so many gay liberationists had disavowed multi-class, multi-racial, and gender-
transgressive queer spaces such as the Tenderloin. Though queer radicals of mid to late
1970s themselves worked towards more intersectional analyses than activists of just a
few years prior, they obscured the importance of their immediate contributions even as
they sought to seize the “Stonewall” narrative to make their own radical claims.

176
“Join the Stonewall Contingent,” c. 1976.

230
Gay and lesbian leftists also began to claim the past by working to develop the field
of lesbian and gay history. In 1979, the Bay Area Socialist School boasted a seminar on
“Politics and Gay History,” led by members of a new group, the San Francisco Gay
History Project – founded in part by Jeff Escoffier, now well-known as a scholar of gay
and queer history and culture.
177
Gay and lesbian left groups, including queer of color
groups, frequently referenced the idea that gay and lesbian oppression was rooted in the
rise of class society and colonialism.
178
Gay and lesbian leftists worked to develop a
materialist analysis of the history of sexuality, as well as to note a rich record of queer
involvement in straight-identified social movements. By 1975, Los Angeles Research
Group was already insisting that gay men and lesbians:
have participated and taken responsible roles in almost every significant
revolutionary movement in recent years, from the civil rights to Black liberation
struggles, from anti-war actions to Dump Nixon, from the revolutionary workers
movement to GI organizing, from the women’s movement to anti-repression and
prison work. They have been in study groups and work collectives… If you did
not see us or know we were there, it was not because we were deceitful or hiding
in shame.
179

Across the later 1970s, gay and lesbian leftists used historical references like these to
bolster their analysis of the diversity of queer life, as well as to rally towards their vision
of multiracial, multi-class, and feminist queer politics.

177
Bay Area Socialist School class calendar, Spring 1979, Epehemera – Organizations, GLBTHS. The
calendar noted that the members of the Project will “examine some of their original discoveries about the
everyday personal and political struggles of gay people from among the poor, the working class, minorities,
and left political activists.” Escoffier was also a member of the New American Movement.
178
See for example “Gay Oppression: A Socialist Perspective,” Turnover: Magazine of Politics & Food,
August-September No. 26 (1978), in “Politics-Socialism,” Ephemera, GLBTHS.
179
Los Angeles Research Group, “Toward a Scientific Analysis,” 15.

231
While the field of queer history has expanded tremendously through efforts to
record the everyday oppositional cultures of queer community, including queer of color,
working-class, and non-urban experience, the activism that helped to lay much of the
intellectual groundwork for this history has remained largely ignored in the scholarly
record. Certainly, gay and lesbian leftists’ successes were fleeting, conditional, and
largely defensive. Defeating an anti-gay initiative is not the same as winning new
freedoms; crafting radical analysis is not the same as changing laws, let alone relations of
production. But gay and lesbian leftists did build organizations, coalitions, and radical
culture; they moved from abstract ideas to concrete campaigns; they crafted both new
theory and new practice of sexual identity, community, and politics. A number of
questions remain for this history, particularly questions about race, ethnicity, and
multiracial coalition. For example, where did the gay and lesbian left in Los Angeles go
after Lavender & Red Union fell apart? What might former members of groups such as
the Gay Black Caucus, Gente, or Gay American Indians have to say to the history I have
detailed thus far? Will the archives of the Third World Gay Caucus or other groups
suggest that queer radicals of color were less invested in the concept of the “gay and
lesbian left” than their white peers? If so, why, and what might this have to do with the
seeming dissipation of the goal of a “gay and lesbian left” under the onslaughts of AIDS
and the Reagan Era?
While these and other questions remain, I have offered a framework to
contextualize the gay and lesbian left, a current of radicalism whose politics linger in one

232
particularly memorable chant: “Ho-Ho-Homosexual, the ruling class is ineffectual!”
180

Recorded in the June 28 Union’s “Little Red Camp Songbook,” this is a chant that I have
heard a number of older gay and lesbian radicals recall with great affection; it is also a
chant that echoes an earlier anti-Vietnam War slogan: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, dare to
struggle, dare to win.” This one chant carries layers of ideas and political memories that
taught activists about queer and other pasts. Its political lessons are not heroic or
progressive but layered and unexpected. The tenor of this chant – not pragmatic savvy
but visionary camp – evokes the gay and lesbian left.

180
June 28 Union, “The Little Red Camp Songbook,” Ephemera – Organizations (June 28 Union),
GLBTHS. The songbook also included gay additions to “We Shall Not Be Moved,” namely: “Stop police
harassment… Dykes and fags together… We will raise our children… We demand our freedom… Stop gay
exploitation.”

233
CHAPTER FOUR
“Si Nicaragua venció”: Queer Solidarity in the Reagan Years
In September 1984, eighteen women from the United States visited Nicaragua in a
delegation organized by the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression (AAWO). That a
feminist, or broadly, a leftist or progressive organization would choose to visit Nicaragua
at this time was not unusual. Throughout the late 1970s and the 80s, hundreds of activists
from the U.S. and around the world traveled to witness Nicaragua’s Sandinista
Revolution and worked to support it, or at least to halt the U.S.-funded contra war
seeking to overthrow the new socialist project. Many feminists were drawn to solidarity
with Nicaragua because of the key role women played in Sandinista leadership. But the
AAWO delegation also stood out from other efforts, staging critical interventions in the
politics of international alliance by linking anti-intervention work to domestic U.S.
conflicts, especially at the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race. The group –
which named itself Somos Hermanas, or “we are sisters” – was unique in two key ways.
First, Somos Hermanas was a consciously majority women of color, multiracial
group including Black, Puerto Rican, Chicana, Peruvian, and Lebanese, as well as white
women.
1
The delegates noted that their presence in Nicaragua at times “caused confusion

1
According to Somos Hermanas records, delegates’ affiliations in the U.S. included the International
Council of African Women, Women for Women in Lebanon, the ACLU, KPFA radio, the gay and lesbian
caucus of the Boston Rainbow Coalition, and the San Francisco Women’s Building, along with the
Alliance Against Women’s Oppression. See Somos Hermanas (50/6), San Francisco Women’s
Centers/Women’s Building Collection (hereafter SFWC/WB), GLBTHS. Carmen Vázquez notes that she,
Marcia Gallo, Loretta Ross, Roma Guy, and Lucrecia Bermúdez participated in the 1984 trip; see Vázquez,
interview with Anderson.

234
because it did not jive with the image of the U.S. as a ‘white nation.’”
2
However, Somos
Hermanas mobilized their identities as a primarily women of color group to articulate
their sense of identification with revolutionary Nicaragua. They defined themselves not
only as opponents of U.S. intervention, but also as – like Nicaraguans – victims of
President Reagan. When women in Managua welcomed the group as “international
mothers,” Somos Hermanas delegates interrupted to explain that they had not arrived
from multiple countries, but all from the U.S., and that they “represented those sectors of
women most oppressed by racism, sexism, and Reagan’s budget cuts and war policies.”
As the delegates recorded in a newsletter, this statement prompted an even warmer
welcome from their Nicaraguan hosts.
Second, in addition to identifying as primarily women of color, Somos Hermanas
explicitly included lesbian women and lesbian and gay rights in its political agenda.
Throughout the five years of its work, from 1984 to 1990, Somos Hermanas defined itself
as a “national, multi-racial organization of women, lesbian and straight, who are
committed to organizing ourselves and others to promote peace and stop U.S.
intervention in Central America and the Caribbean.”
3
At least eight of the eighteen
women in Somos Hermanas’ 1984 delegation were lesbian or bisexual, and lesbians,
including lesbians of color, were local and national leaders throughout the organization’s

2
Alliance Against Women’s Oppression/Somos Hermanas newsletter, Fall 1984. Box 35/1, SFWC/WB,
GLBTHS.
3
Somos Hermanas brochure, n.d. mid-late 1980s, Box 50/6, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.

235
tenure.
4
Somos Hermanas consistently defended lesbian and gay rights as a domestic
U.S. priority, and by the late 1980s, raised the issue as important within the Nicaraguan
Revolution as well. Guided by feminist of color networks and analysis, Somos Hermanas
constructed an understanding of solidarity that welcomed lesbian and gay identities,
refusing to exclude queerness as foreign or antithetical to a socialist and anti-imperialist
project. This understanding grew out of the multiple political histories of Somos
Hermanas members, and was further rooted through the group’s home in San Francisco’s
Women’s Building, located in the city’s heavily Latina/o and increasingly queer Mission
District. Recognition of queer, especially lesbian of color, lives formed a key part of
Somos Hermanas’s insistence on difference and multiplicity as crucial values within a
broad-based social movement aspiring to revolution.
This chapter explores the work of Somos Hermanas, and lesbian and gay
solidarity with Nicaragua more broadly, as a case study of queer anti-imperialism in the
Reagan Era. Activism in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly the Mission District,
serves to highlight the meanings that Nicaragua and the Sandinista revolution came to
hold for radical gay and lesbian politics. My chapter’s title recalls two common
formulations of the era, “Si Nicaragua venció, El Salvador vencerá” and “Si Nicaragua
venció, nosotros venceremos” – or in English, “if Nicaragua won, El Salvador will win”
and “if Nicaragua won, we will win also.” While attentive to the specificity of regional
struggles in Central America, queer radicals viewed the Nicaraguan Revolution as a

4
Vázquez interview with Anderson, 49.

236
model for transformative change inside the U.S., especially in relation to sexual politics.
As Gay People for Nicaragua, a group active in the early 1980s, put it, “The FSLN…who
led the revolution, are an inspiration to all oppressed peoples that we CAN win.”
5

To explore Nicaragua’s meanings for queer politics and trace the development
and impact of lesbian and gay solidarity, I examine solidarity organizations, protests, and
writings that were either specifically lesbian or gay or markedly inclusive of lesbian and
gay politics and leadership. Examining activism that began just before the Revolutionary
“Triumph” in 1979 and continued through the Sandinistas’ defeat in 1990, I ask why
Nicaragua inspired an explicitly gay and lesbian solidarity; what lesbian and gay
solidarity entailed; and how this solidarity developed within the queer geography of the
Bay Area. I offer an overview of the Nicaraguan Revolution and solidarity work in
general; address the specificities of the Revolution’s meanings for lesbian and gay
radicals; describe the formation of lesbian and gay solidarity networks; and take up a
more extended analysis of Somos Hermanas and how this organization situated lesbian
and gay politics within its broader agenda.
As both a target of right-wing attack and a model for revolutionary change,
Nicaragua became a key site through which queer activists expressed both alienation and
aspiration, their anger and their dreams. Through solidarity work, lesbian and gay
radicals sought ways to resolve conflicts that had structured queer anti-imperialism
during prior years, and opened up a deeper analysis of how differences of sexuality could

5
“Lesbians & Gay Men: Stand for Nicaragua, Support the Revolution – Anti-Gay Leaders Support
Somoza,” flier, Gay People for Nicaragua, early 1980s. Ephemera – Organizations (“G”), GLBTHS.

237
contribute to – rather than derail – the projects of overturning U.S. empire and expanding
human self-determination. Nicaragua appealed to U.S. lesbian and gay activists for many
reasons, not least of which being that the Sandinista revolution appeared to incorporate
the autonomous leadership of activists representing multiple kinds of “difference” –
including women, Black, and indigenous people. While the Sandinistas have rightfully
been critiqued for only partially opening up revolutionary power to subjects placed
outside a male and mestizo ideal, women and Black and indigenous communities did
make real gains within the Sandinista state. Further, these gains became widely cited
around the world as evidence of the Sandinistas’ democratic openness and mass
foundation. The Sandinistas’ apparent – even if overstated or inconsistent – support for
values of difference and autonomy garnered particular admiration from lesbian and gay
radicals who found themselves still needing to prove their relevance to the left, not to
mention to confront hierarchies of race and gender within their sexual communities.
Thus, lesbians and gay men in the U.S. looked to Nicaragua as a reference point for a
multi-issue politics that situated sexual freedom, anti-intervention, feminism, and racial
justice inside one shared agenda, a place where various oppressions might be understood
intersectionally, rather than simply as a collection of grievances set side by side.
While Nicaraguan solidarity work suggested interconnections, however, forging
these links was certainly not a simple or untroubled task. Romanticization about Latin
American cultures and politics placed obstacles in the way of egalitarian solidarity,
especially for recognizing the existence and agency of Nicaraguan and other Third World
queer people. Many gay and lesbian activists still perceived queerness as rooted in the

238
urban United States, entirely absent from Nicaragua or other Third World sites,
potentially even including U.S. communities of color. However, while I consider how
such misperceptions affected lesbian and gay solidarity, I concentrate most heavily on
those queer radicals who challenged this romanticization and insisted on the legitimacy of
Nicaraguan, and broadly Latin American, queer lives. Further, I highlight the ways in
which activists situated their solidarity work within multiple political genealogies, and
how they drew on these radical histories to address ongoing racial divisions in queer
organizing and community-building.

Understanding Nicaragua
Nicaragua has faced U.S. intervention since the mid-19
th
century, when the Polk
administration signed treaties granting the United States rights over a proposed isthmian
canal.
6
In this same era, filibusters bent on personal gain and the expansion of slavery
pursued power in the region; one of these, William Walker, ruled Nicaragua from 1855 to
1857 under U.S. diplomatic recognition.
7
As U.S. industrialization intensified following
the Civil War, Central America became a primary site of U.S. economic and political
control. By the 1890s, U.S. capitalists were heavily invested in coffee and banana
plantations, railroads, utilities, and other infrastructure, and the United Fruit Company

6
Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: the United States in Latin America, second edition (Norton,
1993), 29. See also Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule
(Duke, 2005).
7
LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 30-31.

239
emerged as the most notorious multinational in the hemisphere. By the early 1900s, U.S.
superseded European power in the region, and President Theodore Roosevelt issued the
first of many reiterations of the Monroe Doctrine by declaring the U.S. as the
hemisphere’s police force.
8
In 1910, U.S. Marines overthrew Nicaragua’s President, the
nationalist Jose Santos Zelaya. Though this action was condemned by the Central
American Court, the Marines continued to occupy Nicaragua and ensured the U.S.’s
growing economic empire.
In 1927, a guerrilla force led by revolutionary Augusto Sandino began to fight
against Yankee control, evading capture and inspiring widespread peasant support.
Sandino’s forces drove out the Marines in 1933, but the Nicaraguan National Guard –
established and trained by U.S. forces, and led by General Anastacio Somoza García –
then stepped in as the U.S.’s brutal proxy. Within months, Somoza ordered Sandino
assassinated. Somoza then took the Presidency by coup in 1936 and began a repressive
dynasty that ruled Nicaragua for forty years.
9
During this regime, the Somoza family and

8
E.g., the “Roosevelt Corollary.” See Thomas D. Schoonover, The United States in Central America,
1860-1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism & Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Duke, 1991), and
LaFeber, 38. Further iterations of this policy included the Clark Memorandum (1928) which asserted the
right to preserve U.S. “interests” against threats, including those from within Central American nations
(LaFeber 82); the Miller Doctrine (1950), a regional variation on the Truman Doctrine, demanding
collective regional intervention against communism but reserving unilateral action for the U.S. (LaFeber
96-97); the Nixon Doctrine (1969) which declared the U.S. itself would not act as the world’s police, but
would work with and arm allies who functioned as police proxy (LaFeber 202); and a statement by
Secretary of Defense Weinberger, who just after Reagan’s re-election in 1984 reiterated the U.S.
proscription on intervention in the Americas from outside the hemisphere. The U.S.’s Tobar Doctrine
(1922), which required that no coups would be recognized unless legitimized by a free election, also
became used to provide cover for U.S. interests by ensuring a veneer of free elections even for the Somoza
regime.
9
An excellent summary of the Somoza regime can be found in Maria Cristina García, Seeking Refuge:
Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada, University of California Press,
2006.

240
U.S. corporations controlled farmland and resources; the overwhelming bulk of the
population lived in poverty and illiteracy, and increasing numbers of peasants found
themselves landless.
10
Somoza’s rule was solidified from the outset by President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose “Good Neighbor” policy tightened U.S authority in
Latin America by ensuring government funding for U.S. trade, linking the hemisphere’s
militaries, and controlling diplomatic relations.
11

In the Cold War period, Central America’s economic dependence on the U.S.
grew ever deeper, swiftly bolstered by military alliance.
12
In 1949, the U.S. opened the
School of the Americas (SOA) in Panama, using it to train Central American military
leadership. By 1951, the SOA focused its attention on counterinsurgency training.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Nicaragua boasted more SOA graduates than any other
nation in the Americas. Somoza continually aided U.S. intervention, including the CIA-
engineered coup against the reformist Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, and 20,000 U.S.
troops to stem leftist revolt in the Dominican Republic in 1965.
13
Somoza García was
assassinated in 1956, but his elder son Luis stepped into the Presidency.
14
Meanwhile,
Somoza García’s younger son, West Point graduate Anastacio Somoza Debayle (known

10
García, Seeking Refuge, 14: Two percent of farm owners controlled half of arable land.
11
LaFeber 83-84.
12
The 1948 Rio Pact established Central American nations’ dependence on military alliance with the U.S.
13
For a discussion of the SOA and a chart of SOA graduates by country, see LaFeber, 96-97, 111. Also see
William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage
Press, 1995).
14
From 1963 to 1966 the Somozas maintained an illusion of open elections through titular control by Rene
Schick.

241
as Somoza Debayle, or as “Tachito”) led the National Guard. In 1967, Somoza Debayle
took the Presidency after a bloody electoral campaign that featured the Guard firing into a
crowd and killing dozens of protesters.
15
A close ally of President Richard Nixon,
Somoza Debayle tightened the regime’s repression. By the early 1970s, the Guard had
assassinated over 30,000 opponents of the regime and driven more into exile.
16

Beginning in the early 1960, the Somoza dynasty’s power faced growing
challenge from radicals who took the anti-Yankee fighter Augusto Sandino as their hero
and namesake. The Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN, or Sandinista
National Liberation Front) was founded in 1961 as a guerrilla movement with a strong
basis among urban radicals and students, among them Carlos Fonseca and Tomás Borgé,
who forged a militia with crucial peasant support. Guided by Marxist-Leninist and
nationalist thought, the Sandinistas were tied to foquista (guerrilla vanguardist)
movements across Latin America, and found allies and exilic footholds in both
revolutionary Cuba and the Mexican left.
17

By the early 1970s, the Sandinistas operated through three “tendencies”: the
Proletarian, which favored urban warfare; the Prolonged Popular War, which advocated

15
LaFeber, 163.
16
García, 14.
17
Foquismo is usefully analyzed in Josefina Maria Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the
Americas and the Age of Development, Duke, 2003. Also see Dennis Gilbert, Sandinistas: The Party and
the Revolution, (Blackwell, 1988); Salvador Cayetano Carpio, Listen, Compañero: Conversations with
Central American Leaders, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua (San Francisco: Solidarity Publications,
1983); Sandinistas Speak – Tomas Borgé, et al. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1982), and Marlene Dixon
and Susanne Jonas, eds., Revolution and Intervention in Central America (San Francisco: Synthesis
Publications, 1983).

242
long-term peasant-led conflict; and the Insurrectionist (also known as Tercerista, or Third
World), which was the most politically moderate and inclusive, and advocated armed
struggle in both urban and rural areas. By the late 1970s, the three tendencies merged
under Insurrectionist leadership to begin an all-out attack on the Somoza regime.
18
As
Josefina Saldaña-Portillo notes, the FSLN by this time:
coordinated its efforts against the dictatorship with the efforts of mass-based
social movements: the liberation church, the women’s movement, the student
movement, syndicalists, and peasant organizations… they moved, theoretically
and practically, beyond a vanguardism that saw the party as creating a mass
movement and [towards] adopting a vanguardism that saw the party in a
supporting or coordinating role for the mass movement.
19

This shift to a mass movement basis, including the space for various social movement
strands to operate with relative autonomy from the FSLN as a party, helped the
Sandinistas garner broad international support. The same structure also proved
particularly appealing for feminist and lesbian and gay allies in the U.S., as I will discuss.
Amidst this political transition, specific guerrilla tactics helped the FSLN seize
power. The Sandinistas initiated urban guerrilla tactics in 1966; in 1969, the National
Guard captured and killed five Sandinista leaders, yet Somoza inspired popular support
for the revolutionaries by broadcasting footage of the gun battle repeatedly on
television.
20
Anti-Somoza feeling – ideologically diverse and diffuse, and increasingly

18
This assault was coordinated by a National Directorate based in San José, Costa Rica and then in León
(the first Nicaraguan city to be controlled by the FSLN).
19
Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas, 111.
20
Omar Cabezas recalls this repeated broadcast in his memoir, Fire From the Mountain: the Making of a
Sandinista (New York: Crown, 1985), 21-23. See also LaFeber, 165, for the onset of urban guerrilla
tactics.

243
including political moderates and even business owners and conservatives – grew as
Guard repression and economic disparities tightened. Josefina Saldaña-Portillo cites 240
peasant land takeovers between 1963 and 1973 in León and Chinandega alone; both areas
became strongholds of Sandinista support.
21
Popular opposition to Somoza increased
dramatically following a major earthquake in December 1972. The quake destroyed
major parts of Managua, yet international aid, rather than reaching the population,
became stockpiled in Somoza’s front yard and sold for profit by the Guard.
22
Pedro
Joaquin Chamorro, editor of the moderate opposition paper La Prensa, documented this
corruption and abuse, facing frequent arrest by the dictatorship.
23

Following the quake, the Sandinistas escalated their tactics. In 1974, they
kidnapped foreign and Nicaraguan officials, gaining ransom as well as reprisals. Guard
abuses accelerated against guerrillas and suspected sympathizers. By 1977, a group of
professionals known as “the twelve” demanded that Somoza resign. In the U.S.,
President Carter and liberal U.S. Democrats began to call for human rights reform,
though on U.S. terms: Carter sought to isolate the FSLN, to maintain Somoza’s power
until scheduled 1981 elections, and to create a Organization of American States force to
intervene militarily.
24
He failed to win the diplomatic support necessary for these goals,

21
Saldaña-Portillo, 117; she describes these takeovers as resisting the “agro-export economy” in general.
22
As described on “Reflecciones de la Raza,” radio broadcast December 30, 1972 (KPFA/Pacifica Radio),
RP 052, Freedom Archives, San Francisco, CA. See also LaFeber, 226; García, 15.
23
García, 15.
24
For a critique of Carter administration policy, see Mauricio Solaún, U.S. Intervention and Regime
Change in Nicaragua (University of Nebraska Press, 2005), and LaFeber, 233-234. Carter’s failure to bring

244
and 1978 brought a bloody year in which Pedro Joaquin Chamorro was assassinated and
the Guard undertook mass killings. Meanwhile, twenty-five FSLN cadre, led by Edén
Pastora (“Comandante Zero”) and Dora María Tellez (“Comandante Dos”), seized the
National Palace. A general strike and urban uprising ensued, and the Sandinista army
ballooned from 700 to 7,000 members.
25
Venezuela, Mexico, Costa Rica, and Panama
sent supplies to the Sandinista army, and the FSLN began to take key cities. León fell
first, won by Dora María Tellez.
26

Sensing the political turn, moderates joined the FSLN to form a “National
Reconstruction” government council.
27
The FSLN began a final military offensive from
Costa Rica on May 29, 1979; meanwhile, the Guard rocket-bombed poor areas of
Managua and murdered an ABC newsman at point blank.
28
On July 17, Somoza resigned
and fled to Paraguay (he was assassinated there in 1980). On July 19, in events known as

about OAS intervention marked the first time the OAS had rejected such a proposal from the U.S. since the
organization’s 1948 founding. The Latin American states’ refusal revealed the extent of international
support for the Sandinistas, distaste for Somoza, and anger at U.S. aggression. For a discussion of U.S.
policy throughout the Sandinista struggle, see Morris H. Morley, Washington, Somoza, and the
Sandinistas: State and Regime in U.S. Policy Toward Nicaragua, 1969-1981, Cambridge University Press,
1994.
25
LaFeber 231-232; see also García on the impact of Chamorro’s assassination.
26
Margaret Randall, “To Change Our Own Reality and the World: A Conversation with Lesbians in
Nicaragua,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18:4 (1993), 908.
27
The GRN’s five-person junta consisted of Sergio Ramirez, Alfonso Robelo, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro
(the editor’s widow), Moises Hassan, and future President Daniel Ortega.
28
LaFeber 234.

245
el Triunfo or “the Triumph,” the FSLN entered Managua and claimed victory. The CIA
began reorganizing Somoza’s officers the same day.
29

The war between the Guard and Sandinista army had killed at least 40,000
Nicaraguan people, and Guard spending, the regime’s isolation in its final years, and
decades of monopoly capitalist practices left the country burdened with debt. Breaking
with the practices of the old regime, the new Sandinista-led government allowed
Somocistas (Somoza loyalists) to leave freely; they rejected carrying out any mass
reprisals or executions.
30
Despite this evidence of respect for human rights, as well as
despite the early inclusion of political moderates in leadership and open doors for U.S.
business, Nicaragua swiftly faced violent attacks by a new counterrevolutionary army
trained and funded by the U.S. (the “Contras”). The Sandinistas’ largest and most
celebrated gains, including massive literacy and health brigades and the most substantial
land redistribution reforms, all arrived in the revolution’s earliest years before heavy
Contra attacks or U.S. economic sanctions. But by 1984, Nicaragua’s military defense
spending absorbed 40% of the national budget, and polio – which had been eliminated in
early Sandinista health brigades – reappeared.
31

29
LaFeber, 242; see also Blum, Killing Hope, and Thomas W. Walker, Reagan Versus the Sandinistas: The
Undeclared War on Nicaragua, Boulder: Westview Press, 1987.
30
Most Somocistas (Somoza loyalists) who left settled in Honduras or the U.S.; many became linchpins in
organizing and funding Contra forces. The Sandinistas excluded veterans of the National Guard from
government roles, though they did create an 18-member Cabinet of businessmen and professionals,
including only one Sandinista; see LaFeber 237.
31
LaFeber, 270.

246
The Sandinistas certainly warrant critique for flawed or outright wrongheaded
policies – particularly their military control and relocation of indigenous Miskitu people
on the Atlantic Coast, their use of press censorship and election delays, and their effective
exclusion of the poorest peasants from land policy gains.
32
These policies must also be
analyzed, however, within the context of the Contra war, which presented continual
military threats to the revolution, including U.S. manipulation of Miskitu leaders. More
pointedly, international solidarity activists themselves focused on U.S. intervention as
Nicaragua’s most pressing problem. Solidarity activists believed that the Nicaraguan
people deserved the right – and had the political and ethical capacity – to work out their
country’s future without outside control. Further, they believed that the general strike
and volunteer army that produced the “Triumph” in 1979, as well as the electoral
majority that upheld Sandinista control in 1984, indicated that the FSLN was the
legitimate voice of the Nicaraguan people.
President Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, saw Central America as a key battleground
for Cold War power, and repeatedly claimed that the Sandinistas were puppets for Cuba
and the Soviet Union – though his claims were attacked by sources ranging from The
Nation to The Wall Street Journal.
33
Throughout his presidency, Reagan’s policies in

32
In response to Sandinista policy, Miskitu people, particularly refugees, split into pro- and anti-Sandinista
groups (the latter were recruited to aid Contra forces). The FSLN then split Zelaya into two zones creating
Black & indigenous self-rule in the revolution. For a leftist, but critical, account of the impact of
Sandinista indigenous policy and the transnational effort to reshape it, see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on
the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, South End Press, 2005.
33
See Walker, Reagan Versus the Sandinistas; Peter Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention:
Reagan’s War Against the Sandinistas (Washington, DC: Institute for Policy Studies, 1987); and LaFeber,
279.

247
Central America proved his biggest political weakness. U.S. public opinion polls
consistently registered poor support for military involvement in Central America.
34
Still,
U.S. intervention functioned as an open secret. As the Sandinistas gained power,
President Carter directed the CIA to fund anti-FSLN press, labor unions, and political
parties; by 1981, President Reagan directed the CIA to fund and train Contra forces,
drawing on former Guard leaders scattered to Honduras, Costa Rica, and Miami.
35
U.S.
and Contra aims were twofold: one, to block arms that Nicaragua and Cuba were sending
to revolutionaries in El Salvador; two, to overthrow the Sandinistas through a proxy civil
war. Though flooded with weaponry, the Contras were markedly ineffective, and by
1983 the CIA stepped in more directly, mining Nicaraguan harbors and guiding air
bombings of Managua.
36
Congress moved to limit Contra funding and training through
the Boland Amendments (1982-1984), yet in 1986 it approved $100 million in Contra
aid, much of which padded Miami bank accounts.
37
In addition, the Reagan
administration skirted Congressional restrictions and funded the Contras through profits
from secret arms sales to Iran (the Iran-Contra affair).
38

34
See LaFeber, 279 (for 1981 poll), 292 (1983 poll), and 304 (from January 1984 to late 1986, never higher
than 35% support).
35
Reagan formally initiated and authorized the CIA-Contra force on November 11, 1981 in National
Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 17. See also LaFeber, 242.
36
LaFeber 298, 301. The International Court of Justice ruled in The Republic of Nicaragua v. the United
States of America (1986) that the U.S. had violated international law by mining the harbors and funding the
Contras, and awarded reparations to Nicaragua.
37
Ibid, 333.
38
In the ensuing Iran-Contra scandal, Lt. Col. Oliver North took the fall on television; 11 administration
figures were convicted on various charges, with six receiving pardons by President George H.W. Bush

248
Meanwhile, other nations worked towards peace in Central America. The
Sandinistas agreed to the Contadora Peace Plan in 1983, but the Reagan administration
undermined the plan’s implementation. Nicaragua adhered to the Contadora demand for
earlier elections, moving them from 1985 to 1984; in balloting deemed free and fair,
Daniel Ortega won the Presidency by 63% and the FSLN garnered 61 of 96 of National
Assembly seats. However, the Reagan administration’s economic sanctions heightened
the impact of the war, and hunger in import-dependent Nicaragua spread. In 1987,
Nicaragua joined other Central American nations in new peace talks organized by Costa
Rican President Oscar Arias. Nicaragua pledged a ceasefire with and amnesty for the
Contras; all five nations of the region demanded an end to outside intervention, including
by the U.S. The Reagan administration again ignored this agreement, and the CIA
continued to supply Contra forces. U.S. power weakened against relative regional unity,
however, and the Arias Plan moved forward.
39
However, as inflation grew, the
Sandinistas lost political power, and were finally defeated in 1990 elections. The
opposition coalition UNO, headed by Violeta Barrios de Chamorro (the editor’s widow,
and an early member of the National Reconstruction junta) gained the Presidency.

(most going on to serve in prominent roles in the George W. Bush administration; these included Elliot
Abrams and John Negroponte).
39
In 1987, Somos Hermanas recorded that the plan “is being seen as a strong statement of Central
American sovereignty, in contrast to the US attempts to impose the Monroe Doctrine.” See
“AAWO/Somos Hermanas Summary of August 1987 Trip to Nicaragua,” Box 35/1, SFWB/WC,
GLBTHS.

249
Though declared clean, this election had also been shaped by a $9 million investment in
opposition forces by the U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy.
40

Solidarity as a Transnational Force
By the close of active fighting across Central America in 1991, 50,000
Nicaraguans and at least 160,000 people in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa
Rica had been killed, and millions more made refugees.
41
Meanwhile, activism had
surged around the world against U.S. intervention, for Central American refugee and
immigrant rights, and in support of the region’s revolutionary movements. Across the
Americas, the transnational solidarity movement grew out of three overlapping sources:
progressive Catholic and Protestant churches; the Central American diaspora and other
Latina/o immigrant communities; and the left broadly defined, including feminist, anti-
racist, peace and anti-nuclear, lesbian and gay, Marxist, and student activists.
42
Many

40
LaFeber, 352.
41
See García, Seeking Refuge (she says 50,000, LaFeber says at least 40,000; I have heard the 50,000
figure quoted more often within Nicaragua). See García especially for details on those made refugees.
42
Useful sources on the solidarity movement include Héctor Perla, Jr., “Si Nicaragua Venció, El Salvador
Vencerá: Central American Agency in the Creation of the U.S.-Central American Peace and Solidarity
Movement,” Latin American Research Review 43:2 (2008), 136-158; Van Gosse, “’The North American
Front’: Central American Solidarity in the Reagan Era,” in Reshaping the U.S. Left, ed. Mike Davis and
Michael Sprinkler (Verso, 1988); Van Gosse, “El Salvador is Spanish for Vietnam,” in The Immigrant Left
in the United States, ed. Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (SUNY Press, 1996); Sharon Erickson-Nepstad,
“Creating Transnational Solidarity: The Use of Narrative in the U.S.-Central America Peace Movement,”
Mobilization 6:1 (2001); Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Dividing the Isthmus: Central American Transnational
Histories, Literatures, and Cultures (University of Texas Press, 2009); Margaret Keck and Kathryn
Sikkink, Activist Beyond Borders (Cornell, 1998); Christian Smith, Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central
America Peace Movement (University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Clare Weber, Visions of Solidarity:
U.S. Peace Activists in Nicaragua from War to Women’s Activism and Globalization (Lexington Books,
2006); and Amanecida Collective, Revolutionary Forgiveness: Feminist Reflections on Nicaragua
(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987).

250
solidarity organizations focused their work on one national struggle, with the greatest
attention directed to Nicaragua and El Salvador. Movement activists and organizations
agreed on opposition to U.S. military policy and intervention, but differed over whether
to formally link their work with Central American groups, including the FSLN in
Nicaragua or El Salvador’s FMLN (the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberacion
Nacional, or Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, was named after a Salvadoran
hero and Marxist contemporary of Augusto Sandino).
Elements of the Central American solidarity movement in the U.S. have been
rightly criticized as overwhelmingly white and inattentive to questions of race, class, and
national origin in their priorities and leadership.
43
But, as Héctor Perla, Jr. observes,
though this is a valuable critique, relying on it too heavily can obscure the key roles that
Central American refugees and immigrants (and Latin American immigrants broadly)
played in creating the solidarity movement.
44
Perla argues that the first solidarity
organizations in the U.S. were created by "revolutionary activists from the Central
American diaspora" who reached out to Central American immigrants and refugees, first
in San Francisco and soon also in Washington D.C., New York City, Chicago, Los
Angeles, and Houston.
45

43
See especially Weber, Visions of Solidarity.
44
Perla Jr., “Si Nicaragua Venció.” García offers a similar analysis in Seeking Refuge.
45
Perla Jr., 144.

251
As in Nicaragua, diasporic organizing against Somoza and to support the
Sandinistas accelerated after the 1972 earthquake.
46
In the Bay Area, a bilingual, Latino
community radio news show aired on the progressive station KPFA was one of, if not
the, first outlets to report on the stockpiles of earthquake aid being held at the airport and
in Somoza’s front yard.
47
This radio report offered listeners the names of San Francisco
and San Jose churches where they could donate material aid as well as phone numbers to
reach family members in Nicaragua, and announced a benefit concert for earthquake
victims at a Mission District church.
48
In addition, Perla states that in 1973 or 1974
activists began to plaster “Wanted” posters of Somoza around San Francisco’s Mission
District. Roberto Vargas, a local Nicaraguan poet and Chicano movement activist, soon
formed El Comité Cívico pro Nicaragua en los Estados Unidos (the Pro-Nicaragua Civic
Committee in the United States, known as Comité Cívico). This group translated FSLN
statements as La Gaceta Sandinista and distributed them at the first recorded pro-
Sandinista solidarity march, held in San Francisco in December 1974.
49
Nicaraguan

46
CEPAD (a progressive non-denominational Protestant organization) also formed after the earthquake and
organized material aid and other activism within U.S. churches. Anti-Somoza sentiment also grew within
the U.S. after priests testified before Congress in 1975 and 1976 about atrocities by the National Guard,
including rape, electric shocks, and other torture (as discussed by both Perla and LaFeber).
47
“Reflecciones de la Raza,” radio broadcast December 30, 1972, KPFA/Pacifica Radio, RP 052, Freedom
Archive.
48
These phone numbers were provided through the help of KAGI (which I believe was Spanish language).
49
Perla Jr., 144. Perla states that this group did outreach to the local Nicaraguan community, created the
Non-Intervention in Nicaragua Committee, and pushed for Congressional hearings with Nicaraguan
opposition leaders in 1976. Other organizations he names as active beginning the late 1970s in both San
Francisco and Washington, D.C., catalyzed by Central American activists, include Casa Nicaragua,
Committee in Solidarity with the People of Nicaragua, NICA, Nicaragua Taskforce, Los Muchachos de
DC, and the Washington Area Nicaragua Solidarity Organization.

252
exiles and immigrants were also central in the 1979 creation of the National Network in
Solidarity with the Nicaraguan People, or NicaNet; Witness for Peace, the Pledge of
Resistance, and Sanctuary; as well as many smaller organizations. Perla holds that the
same patterns held true for Salvadoran solidarity and refugee organizations.
50

Solidarity activists, both U.S.-born and not, met with strong repression by the
U.S. state. The FBI pursued the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador
(CISPES), breaking into their offices and stealing files, while the CIA monitored phone
calls between Sandinistas and members of Congress. The Reagan administration
welcomed Somocistas into the U.S. while excluding leftist Salvadorans through the
McCarran-Walter Act (a 1952 immigration restriction that barred communists and
homosexuals and that maintained racialized restrictions through national quotas).
51

Strong circuits of transnational solidarity developed between Central America and
the San Francisco Bay Area, first because of the high concentration of Central American
immigrants and refugees, and second because of the region’s existing, longstanding
radical culture. San Francisco’s Mission District became a particularly important site of
solidarity organizing, including specifically feminist and lesbian and gay solidarity. This
longtime Latino neighborhood was a key destination for Central American immigrants

50
Perla contends that Central Americans provided U.S.-born activists with direct contact with the victims
of U.S. policy; information; affective ties that served to mobilize political “identity”; and “mistica,” or
revolutionary mystique (154-155). He also holds that while paternalism was widespread in the Sanctuary
movement, Central American activists showed agency by responding, opposing paternalism, and
demanding more direct roles in leadership.
51
LaFeber, 295; see also García. See also Ross Gelbspan, Break-Ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The
Covert War Against the Central America Movement (South End Press, 1991) and Smith, Resisting Reagan.

253
and refugees, as well as queer (im)migrants. In 1980, the Mission District’s meanings
became further amplified by the creation of the San Francisco Women’s Building.
Located on 18
th
Street near Valencia, the Building offered an institutional home for
women’s (including lesbian) activism, prominently including solidarity and immigrant
rights work. In the East Bay, solidarity work found a neighborhood base in South
Berkeley and North Oakland, where the La Peña Cultural Center, founded in 1975 by
leftist Chilean exiles, drew people together for Latin American performance and political
community. La Peña shared a block with the offices of the Nicaragua Information Center
(a major solidarity group) and the anti-nuclear Livermore Action Group, as well as the
folk-rock nightclub the Starry Plough and the soul food restaurant Flint’s Barbeque.
Activists could easily spend a whole day and evening on this one block, and Somos
Hermanas, among other groups, targeted not only the organizations but also the cultural
center, bar, and barbeque joint to distribute fliers and newsletters about their work.
52

Cultural work, as well as activism more traditionally defined, helped to circulate
Nicaragua’s meanings throughout the Bay Area. Radicals read memoirs and journalistic
accounts of the Sandinista struggle and encountered representations of Nicaragua in
posters, poetry, and music.
53
Nicaraguan solidarity organizations ran ads calling for
support in local gay, lesbian, women’s, and other progressive periodicals; a Bay Area

52
Somos Hermanas noted the “Berkeley Solidarity Center” as one site for organizing outreach, describing
this area as the location of La Peña, NIC, LAG, Flint’s and the Starry Plough (Somos Hermanas outreach
notes, SFWB/WC 50/11, GLBTHS). This block of Shattuck Avenue (just south of Ashby) continues to be
home to activist groups.
53
The Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles holds by my estimate several thousand
posters related to Central American revolutionary movements, including many from or about Nicaragua.

254
women’s musical group called Swing Shift sang for visiting Central American trade
unionists and were then invited to perform in Nicaragua.
54
Longtime radical Roxanne
Dunbar-Ortiz reports that she learned about Nicaraguan women revolutionaries by
reading murals in the Mission District and then saw Nicaraguan immigrants contributing
to heightened militancy in San Francisco unions.
55

Supporters also understood Nicaragua in relation to events El Salvador and
Guatemala and broadly to testimonios by relatives of the disappeared across Latin
America.
56
In 1985, two Chicano gay men – actor, dancer, and activist Rodrigo Reyes,
and Juan Pablo Gutierrez – wrote and produced El Corazón Nunca me ha Mentido (My
Heart Has Never Lied to Me), a play addressing the war in El Salvador and male gender
and sexuality, particularly homoeroticized violence. Scholar Horacio Roque Ramírez
describes the play’s production team “as an amalgamation of nationalities and
(im)migrant histories in the Mission District, with gay and non-gay, Salvadoran, Spanish,
Mexican and Nicaraguan actors.”
57
The San Francisco Mime Troupe, famous for its
summer productions in the parks, produced multiple shows about Central America,

54
See San Francisco Women’s Centers/Women’s Building Newsletter, June 1984: “Community Alerts”
advertisement from Humanitarian Aid for Nicaraguan Democracy (HAND) and small article on the
performance and upcoming Nicaraguan visit by the women’s singing group Swing Shift. Newsletters,
SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
55
Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border, 74.
56
Well-known poets and writers included Vargas, Margaret Randall, and Gioconda Belli. For an extended
analysis of Central American cultural production, as well as Central America’s meanings within U.S.
Chicano and Latino cultural production, see Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Dividing the Isthmus (2009).
57
Horacio Roque Ramírez, “Claiming Queer Cultural Citizenship: Gay Latino (Im)Migrant Acts in San
Francisco,” in Luibhéid and Cantú Jr., eds., Queer Migrations, 169. The play was based on Manlio
Argueta’s One Day of Life.

255
including Americans, or Last Tango in Huahuatenango (1982), and Crossing Borders
(1985).
58
In 1986, the Sandinista Association of Cultural Workers (ASTC) invited the
Mime Troupe to a National Theater Festival in Managua, making them the only U.S.
company to be so invited.
59
Thus, solidarity activism grew out of transnational networks
made immediate through Bay Area geography and enriched by radical culture.

Forging Lesbian and Gay Solidarity
Lesbian and gay solidarity with Nicaragua emerged along similar patterns as
solidarity work in general, albeit with a somewhat weaker base in the Christian left.
Nicaraguan, other Latin American immigrant, and Latina/o people played key roles in
creating gay and lesbian solidarity groups, galvanizing activism across multiple, often
segregated queer communities. These activists drew on networks seeded within the gay
and lesbian left, including the organizations Gay Latino Alliance (GALA), Bay Area Gay
Liberation, and Lesbians Against Police Violence. One lesbian activist and Nicaraguan
in San Francisco, Rita Arauz, particularly helped to galvanize queer solidarity work, and
is a central figure for understanding the transnationalism of solidarity circuits.
Arauz was born in Nicaragua to what she terms a “petit-bourgeois” family; her
father worked in Somoza’s diplomatic corps and was assigned to the Nicaraguan

58
The former was based on the script writer’s trip to Nicaragua; the latter on a radio series on the local
Salvadoran refugee community. See Mel Gussow, “Theater: ‘Last Tango’ from San Francisco,” New York
Times November 27, 1982; and Crossing Borders program, San Francisco Mime Troupe file, Hank Tavera
Collection (41/28), UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.
59
“Friends of the San Francisco Mime Troupe… Help Send the Troupe to Nicaragua,” flier c. 1986, San
Francisco Mime Troupe file, Hank Tavera Collection (41/28), UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.

256
consulate in San Francisco while Arauz was a teenager.
60
She moved to San Francisco
with her family in the late 1960s, completed high school there, was briefly married and
divorced, and attended San Francisco City College in the early 1970s; during this time,
she came out as lesbian and became involved in the farmworkers’ movement and in the
Puerto Rican Socialist Party. Arauz was then recruited into the FSLN’s international
support network in 1976 or 1977, which she notes as the same year that Casa Nicaragua,
a home base for solidarity work, was founded in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Further, she holds that “it was inside the homosexual community that I began to organize
a movement of solidarity with the Sandinistas.”
61

Casa Nicaragua served as the home for the earliest lesbian and gay solidarity
work in San Francisco, which began in the 1979 under the name Gays for the Nicaraguan
Revolution, was later also called Gay People for the Nicaraguan Revolution, and by 1981
referred to as the Gay and Women’s Committee of Casa Nicaragua. In one flier about
their work, this group adopted a heroic image of a female Sandinista fighter, looking
skyward as if she were a martyr; text called on lesbians and gay men to “Support the
Revolution” because “Anti-Gay Leaders Support Somoza” (Figure 12, below). In July
1981, the group used an image of a smiling, affectionate group of Nicaraguan women
literacy workers to publicize a demonstration marking the second anniversary of the

60
Arauz in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 267.
61
Ibid, 268.

257
revolution’s triumph.
62
Here, they called on activists to “March with the lesbian and gay
contingent… Wear black, red, and lavender” (thus, adding lavender to the FSLN colors).
During the same time frame, the Gay and Women’s Committee reported that “One of our
members was among the 30 official U.S. representatives to the First International
Solidarity Conference in Managua, Nicaragua in January 1981.”
63

Figure 12: Gays for the Nicaraguan Revolution.
64

62
“Celebrate – Demonstrate – March,” July 19, 1981, flier endorsed by the July 19
th
Coalition, Gay and
Women’s Committee of Casa Nicaragua, Harvey Milk Gay Democratic Club, Community United Against
Violence, Stonewall Gay Democratic Club, Solidarity, and Lesbians Against Police Violence. John Kyper
File, GLBTHS.
63
“Lesbians and Gay Men…” brochure by Gay and Women’s Committee of Casa Nicaragua, early 1980s,
Ephemera – Organizations (Casa Nicaragua), GLBTHS.
64
Pamphlet cover, Gay People for the Nicaraguan Revolution, c. 1979. Ephemera – Organizations (“G”),
GLBTHS.

258
Reflecting on the Casa Nicaragua group and related activism in 1991, Arauz
stated that the FSLN was fully aware that she was lesbian and that Sandinista
representatives welcomed openly lesbian and gay solidarity work. She noted that Aura
Lila Beteta, the first FSLN consul in San Francisco, sent her and another activist “a
strong letter in recognition of the work we’d done” to build support in the gay and lesbian
community.
65
Arauz returned to Nicaragua in 1984, continued to work within the FSLN,
and also became a leader in lesbian and gay activism inside Nicaragua. Though she
became a primary target in an incident of anti-gay harassment carried out by Sandinista
State Security in 1987, Arauz maintained that the broader revolutionary consciousness of
Sandinismo provided “the seed, the source” for popularizing lesbian and gay rights both
in international solidarity work and within Nicaragua.
66

While Arauz was a critical figure in San Francisco gay and lesbian solidarity
work, this activism was also more broadly seeded through the work of various groups
within the 1970s gay and lesbian left.
67
In a 1988 article within the gay press, white gay
leftist Tede Matthews traced the origins of lesbian and gay solidarity work as far back as
1972. He described the formation of a group called Gays in Solidarity with the Chilean

65
Arauz in Margaret Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (Rutgers University Press, 1991), 268-269.
By the time Arauz returned to Nicaragua, she had worked for nearly ten years for Mission District
Community Mental Health.
66
Ibid, 271. Arauz described the potential of lesbian and gay freedom as “eminently Nicaraguan,”
integrally tied to a broader revolutionary vision and improving on flaws in U.S. queer politics in advocating
for a more radical agenda (279). Other women interviewed by Randall agreed with Arauz, arguing against
the notion of gay identity as anti-Nicaraguan and even arguing against the idea it would be anti-rural; they
noted rich lesbian life in Matagalpa, as well as a vibrant gay male community in a peasant area.
67
As detailed by Tede Matthews, “Coming Out for Peace: Lesbians and Gays Play Major Role in Protests,”
San Francisco Sentinel April 8, 1988: 8.

259
Resistance “in the kitchen of a Castro Street collective”; he held that this group raised
awareness about the Pinochet coup among gay men and lesbians, raised funds to free
Chilean women political prisoners, and formed “a street theatre group, Mother’s Army,
with the assistance of members of the Angels of Light.”
68
Bay Area Gay Liberation also
helped to popularize solidarity with the Sandinista struggle within the queer community.
In June 1978, BAGL organized a performance titled Not So Strange Bedfellows, which
compared the colonialist leader Ian Smith in Southern Africa, Somoza in Nicaragua, and
John Briggs in California. Presented in the Mission District, this performance benefited
both the Sandinista resistance and medical work in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia). BAGL
aimed “to educate gay people about these wars, to educate the non-gay left about gay
oppression, and to develop our understanding that we are all fighting an international
ruling class enemy.”
69
Rama, a BAGL member who had been part of the Magnus
collective a few years earlier, offered a poem that mocked “Tachito [Somoza] and Ian up
in a tree/ K-I-S-S-I-N-G.”
70
The poem added that these “fascists… are the last gasp of

68
Ibid.
69
“Bay Area Gay Liberation June Newsletter,” 1978, BAGL File, Ephemera – Organizations, GLBTHS.
70
The poem in its entirety ran as follows: “Tachito and Ian up in a tree / K-I-S-S-I-N-G / First came the
British, now comes Carter / Ripping up cultures for unequal barter / ‘FASCISTS!!’ says the Front / ‘LET’S
UNITE!!’ says the Frente / ‘You can buy you some puppets / but you’ll never stop gente!!’ / Meanwhile the
Christians are all in a twitter / Freaked out by strong dykes and men who like glitter / Along comes Bryant,
then comes Briggs / Rooting up hatred like a couple of pigs / ‘FASCISTS!!’ say the faggots / ‘LET’S
UNITE!!’ say the dykes / We’ll build a movement to fight this force / And to save our tykes!! / The moral
of this story is not hard to see / Fascists are fascists, wherever they may be / They are the last gasp of
empire, and they have many faces / They exploit and oppress in many ways in many different places /
‘LET’S UNITE!!’ say all the people / ‘WE HAVE A COMMON ENEMY’ / ‘We’ll build an army to smash
this system and liberate you and me!!’” BAGL June Newsletter, 1978. BAGL File, Ephemera –
Organizations, GLBTHS.

260
empire, and they have many faces… WE HAVE A COMMON ENEMY.” Another
group formed out of the gay and lesbian left, Lesbians Against Police Violence,
frequently discussed Nicaraguan solidarity efforts, and in the early 1980s endorsed the
work by Casa Nicaragua’s Gay and Women’s Committee.
Early gay and lesbian solidarity work also overlapped with the creation of the Gay
Latino Alliance (GALA), which as Matthews recorded, played “an important role in the
creation of a dialogue on sexual politics in the Latin American liberation movements.”
71

One of GALA’s co-founders, Rodrigo Reyes, was also a scriptwriter of the play El
Corazón Nunca me ha Mentido (which, as Roque Ramírez described, addressed
homoeroticism and masculinity in the Salvadoran civil war). Rita Arauz was also
prominent in GALA for a time. And, as Roque Ramírez has observed of GALA’s street
presence, “Behind [the organization’s] red and yellow banner usually came large,
colorful flags of Latin American nations, cultural symbols alongside overtly political
positions: ‘Gay Latinos Against Somoza,’ ‘Support Affirmative Action.’”
72
Another

71
Matthews, “Coming Out for Peace.” Similarly, in the early 1980s, the Gay and Women’s Committee of
Casa Nicaragua described their work by stating: “San Francisco has one of the largest Central American
populations outside of Central America. It also has one of the largest lesbian and gay populations in the
world. Although we share some common concerns, the tensions between the two communities has been
great… Our presence in Nicaraguan solidarity work as openly gay people is one step we are taking to
combat anti-gay attitudes, not only in the Latin community but among activists in general. Gay people
have always participated in progressive struggles, but because we have been closeted, our contributions
have gone unrecognized.” In “Lesbians & Gay Men: Stop U.S. Intervention in Central America, Support
Nicaraguan Reconstruction,” brochure by Gay and Women’s Committee of Casa Nicaragua, n.d. early
1980s. Casa Nicaragua, Ephemera Collection – Organizations, GLBTHS.
72
Roque Ramírez, “’That’s My Place!’”, 240. Roque Ramírez reprints a photo showing a “Gay Latinos
Against Somoza” sign in the GALA contingent in the 1977 San Francisco Gay Freedom Day parade (241).
He observes that “GALA’s involvement in nongay causes convinced many in the Latino community that
GALA ‘belonged’” (246). He also records that GALA used American Indian Center for fundraising dances
before their success helped to establish Esta Noche, the first specifically gay Latino bar, in the Mission
District, which opened in 1979.

261
group promoting Latina/o queer solidarity was Mujeres en Lucha (Women in Struggle), a
Latina lesbian group that organized a contingent in a pro-Sandinista march winding
through the Mission District just a few days before the Sandinistas’ July 1979 victory.
73

Generally, lesbian and gay Latin American immigrants, as well as U.S.-born
queer Latina/os, found Nicaraguan solidarity work to be a powerful site for community
building. Lucrecia Bermudez, a Peruvian woman who came to San Francisco in 1980 or
1981 after leftist organizing against the right-wing regime in her own country, was
another lesbian active in Casa Nicaragua and its gay committees, as well as later in
Somos Hermanas.
74
Bermudez came out to her family while a teenager in Peru and was
involved in a leftist organization of gays and lesbians in Lima during the 1970s. Though
long aware of San Francisco’s reputation as the so-called “Gay Capital of the World,” she
records that she was only truly convinced to move to the Bay Area after learning about
the La Peña Cultural Center.
75

Bermudez describes Casa Nicaragua as led by Nicaraguan immigrants, though she
adds that its membership was primarily North American (a term often used in Spanish to
mean white). Interestingly, she recalls more tension around lesbian and gay identities
within Casa El Salvador, with which she also became active, than in Casa Nicaragua.
She notes that Casa Nicaragua’s primary goal was to “popularize the revolution,” and that

73
See Finding Aid, Cathy Cade Photographs Collection, Gay & Lesbian Center, SFPL.
74
Bermudez, oral history, “Me siento marginada [I feel marginalized],” in Juanita Ramos, ed.,
Compañeras: Latina Lesbians (Routledge, 1994): 227-231. Translation is my own.
75
Ibid, 229.

262
women’s rights and non-discrimination against lesbians and gay men could be defined as
important in that context.
76
Bermudez later became a co-founder of Amaranto, a Latin
American immigrant and Latina/o organization in San Francisco. She was also involved
with Latina Connection/La Conexion Latina, a Latina lesbian group in the early 1980s;
participated in the 1988 Bay Area Lesbians of Color conference; and was part of the
Somos Hermanas delegation in 1984, as well as occasionally helping to translate Somos
Hermanas’ bilingual newspaper.
77

Along with organizations, national and international conferences also fed
Latina/o, Latin American, and queer of color solidarity work. Reyes and Arauz
represented GALA in October, 1979 at the Third World Lesbian/Gay Conference in
Washington, DC.
78
They were joined by Simeon White, a gay Black man representing
San Francisco’s Third World Gay Caucus, who made several trips to Nicaragua and
helped to introduce lesbian and gay solidarity activists to one another.
79
At the Third
National Third World/People of Color Lesbian/Gay Conference, held in Berkeley in June
1984, presentations included a workshop on U.S. intervention in Latin America and a

76
Ibid, 230.
77
See Conference Program, June 1988 conference, Bay Area Lesbians of Color (47/27), SFWC/WB,
GLBTHS; Sponsored Projects, SFWB/WC 47/16; and translator acknowledgements, “Somos Hermanas
News: the Strength of Women Organized,” Summer 1986. Box 50/6, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
78
Arauz in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 268-269. For some of the Conference’s resolutions, see
Gay Insurgent 6 (Summer 1980), page 17, found in Lesbian Legacy Collection (LLC), Folder T2, ONE
National Gay and Lesbian Archives.
79
See “Third World Lesbian Gay/Conference 1979” program book, LLC Folder T2, ONE. White’s work
within Nicaragua is noted by Bob Siedle-Khan, personal conversation with author, June 13, 2007
(Berkeley, CA). White was elected to the San Francisco Democratic Central Coordinating Committee
(DCCC) in the late 1980s, making him the first out gay Black man elected to local office.

263
speech by Beth Brant, a leader in both Native American and lesbian and gay organizing,
who noted that she was about to travel to Nicaragua for a cultural workers conference.
80

Solidarity networks were also fostered through the Encuentros, a series of feminist and
lesbian conferences held across Latin America during the 1980s.
81

By 1985, the first specifically gay and lesbian work brigade to Nicaragua –
the Victoria Mercado Brigade – had formed in San Francisco. This group built a
community center in a poor neighborhood of Managua and met informally with
Nicaraguan gay men and lesbians.
82
The effort had itself grown out of Lesbians and
Gays Against Intervention in Latin America (LAGAI), which itself formed out of the gay
and lesbian task force within the campaign to pass Proposition N, which in 1984 divested
San Francisco from doing business with the right-wing government of El Salvador.
83

80
See conference program in Hank Tavera Collection, 16:3, Ethnic Studies Library UCB.
81
These conferences also revealed conflicts between U.S. Latina and Latin American lesbians, with Latin
American women pushing back against U.S. privilege. See Migdalia Reyes, “The Latin American and
Caribbean Feminist/Lesbian Encuentros: Crossing the Bridge of Our Diverse Identities,” in Gloria
Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation
(Routledge 2002): 463-470. Also see Ana Patricia Rodriguez, Dividing the Isthmus; and Maylei Blackwell
et al, "Encountering Latin American and Carribean Feminisms," Signs 28:2 (Winter 2002): 537-580.
82
As discussed in Randall, “To Change.” Other gay and lesbian brigades visited Nicaragua; one included
the Philadelphia Lesbian & Gay Work Brigade, sponsored by the Philadelphia American Friends Service
Committee (AFSC); this brigade visited Nicaragua in fall 1985 and helped to construct a school for
agricultural workers. It was financially supported by two gay professionals, lawyer Bob Sutton and doctor
Walter Lear. I learned about this trip through a personal interview on June 13, 2007 with Robert (Bob)
Siedle-Khan, a gay man who participated in this Brigade, later worked with Peace Brigades, and now lives
in Berkeley doing HIV/AIDS work.
83
Matthews, “Coming Out for Peace.” The Proposition N campaign was started by CISPES. Matthews
states that “LAGAI works as a gay presence in the anti-intervention community… at times having to
confront homophobia”; it works with recently arrived refugees, and “has been able to organize local
community support for the gay/lesbian movement in Latin America through such actions as sending a
delegation of Nicaraguan lesbians to last October’s first Latin American Lesbian Conference in
Cuernavaca, Mexico.” Matthews also states that the Victoria Mercado Brigade was formed by a call by
LAGAI.

264
Thus, while Somos Hermanas represented a more fully developed, and well-recorded,
effort, by the time that organization formed – in 1984 – a set of networks and ideas
sustaining lesbian and gay solidarity had already been well expressed in the Bay Area.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, lesbian and gay solidarity activists
mobilized through a few key ideas about the Sandinista revolution – ideas that can be
understood more fully in conversation with the experiences of lesbian and gay activists
inside Nicaragua. I turn now to consider why lesbian and gay activists – inside the U.S.
and inside Nicaragua – invested faith in the Sandinista revolution, what place they
imagined for queer sexuality inside the revolution, and how they responded to flaws
within the revolutionary state.

The Meanings of Difference
The Nicaraguan Revolution inspired the support of lesbians and gay men inside
the U.S. for two main reasons. Many queer Latina/o people, especially those of Central
American descent, were especially attuned to news about Nicaragua, but many non-
Latina/o gay and lesbian radicals also expressed sense of kinship with the country.
Generally, lesbians and gay men described queer people, people of color, and women in
the U.S., as well as all people in Nicaragua, as linked by the common thread of being
targets of Reagan administration policies. As the U.S. defense budget expanded, social
welfare programs shrank, social conservatives gained ground, and AIDS reached crisis
levels, queer radicals felt growing urgency to turn back right-wing attacks. They

265
understood the Contra war as fundamentally constraining domestic spending and as
restricting the broader political climate.
Queer activists also pursued solidarity with Nicaragua because they saw
Sandinismo as a model for revolutionary change inside the U.S. and around the world.
As Saldaña-Portillo has noted, by the late 1970s the FSLN positioned itself not solely as a
vanguard party and guerilla militia, but also as a force to coordinate a mass movement.
Nicaraguan women, indigenous and Black people, and lesbians and gay men themselves
drew on this vision of Sandinismo to assert themselves as revolutionary subjects.
Internationally, lesbian and gay (and straight feminist) solidarity activists celebrated
women’s leadership in the revolution and applauded the Sandinista government’s active
expansion of women’s rights. Solidarity activists also highlighted markers of indigenous
and Black leadership and revolutionary gains, citing these shifts as models for global
change. And while the FSLN offered little public discussion of lesbian and gay rights,
U.S. queer activists argued that the Sandinistas’ incorporation of women’s, indigenous,
and Black people and concerns suggested a political openness that could ultimately
transform the meanings that queer sexuality held for the left, within the U.S., across the
Americas, and perhaps elsewhere around the world.
By the time of the Triumph in 1979, Sandinista women’s military and political
leadership had already won wide recognition. The FSLN had put women’s rights on their
agenda as early as 1969; a third of the Sandinista army that defeated Somoza was female,

266
and women counted among the key military leaders in that defeat.
84
Sandinista women
altered the dominant image of both “revolution” and “feminism,” and they also counted
as a third of Sandinista government leadership positions and a full two-thirds of the
party’s community organizing committees.
85
Further, once in power the FSLN
overturned the law that gave men property rights over women and children, replacing this
with a “Law of Nurturing” that guaranteed shared parental rights, child support, and
mandated shared domestic labor. They revolutionary state also formed an Office of
Women that provided for advocacy on issues including contraception, domestic violence,
and rape.
86
Outside Nicaragua, several feminist writers, most prominently Margaret
Randall, helped to make Sandinista women and the revolution’s gains widely known to
an English-reading audience.
87

Admittedly, the FSLN’s feminist organizing was uneven; most notably, the
official Sandinista women’s organization (the Asociación de Mujeres Nicaraguenses

84
Randall, “To Change Our Reality And the World,” 908. Famous women cadre included Dora María
Tellez, the famed “Comandante Dos” and later Minister of Health; Luisa Amanda Espinoza, whose name
became celebrated through the FSLN women’s organization; Nora Astorga; and many others.
85
That is, 67% of the Sandinista Defense Committees. Norma Stoltz Chinchilla, “Revolutionary Popular
Feminism in Nicaragua: Articulating Class, Gender, and National Sovereignty,” Gender & Society 4:3
(September 1990): 371.
86
Chinchilla, “Revolutionary Popular Feminism in Nicaragua,” 380 and 385.
87
See especially Randall’s Sandino’s Daughters (1981), Sandino’s Daughters Revisited (Rutgers 1994),
and Risking a Somersault in the Air (Rutgers 1984). For further discussion of feminist and gender politics
in Nicaragua, both during and since the revolution, see Lorraine Bayard de Volo, Mothers of Heroes and
Martyrs: Gender Identity Politics in Nicaragua, 1979-1999 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991);
Jennifer Bickham Mendez, From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor, and Globalization in
Nicaragua (Duke University Press, 2005); and Roger N. Lancaster, Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and
the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (University of California Press, 1992).

267
Luisa Amanda Espinoza, or AMNLAE) lacked real independence from the FSLN.
88
As
Margaret Randall reflected after the Sandinistas’ 1990 defeat, AMNLAE “ultimately did
more to rally women around the revolution than to make women’s issues a revolutionary
priority.”
89
And the FSLN’s inconsistency around feminist – and even anti-capitalist –
commitments has become ever more apparent since the party’s 2006 return to power.
90

Still, from the perspective of the 1980s, women’s rights and political power dramatically
expanded in the revolutionary context. As a Costa Rican-born lesbian and Nicaraguan
resident, Ana V., reflected in a conversation with Randall, the revolution “opened up a
space that maybe didn’t transform things completely but it certainly didn’t close off the
possibility.”
91
To many around the world, the Nicaraguan revolution appeared to be the
most explicitly pro-feminist national liberation movement of the postwar era, one that
offered a reconciliation between the goals of anti-imperialist struggle and of women’s
liberation. And while many feminists in Nicaragua have recently abandoned the FSLN
for a new and more avowedly leftist party, the Movimiento de Renovación Sandinista

88
AMNLAE stands for Asociación de Mujeres Nicaraguenses Luisa Amanda Espinoza (Association of
Nicaraguan Women, Luisa Amanda Espinoza) and is named after a guerilla hero. My citation of the
FSLN’s 1969 statement of women’s rights comes from Chinchilla, 380.
89
Randall, “To Change,” 909.
90
See for example Hobson, “Stepdaughters of Revolution,” make/shift, and Roger Burbach, “Et Tu,
Daniel? The Sandinista Revolution Betrayed,” NACLA Report on the Americas 42:2 (March/April 2009),
33-37.
91
Ibid, 918.

268
(Sandinista Renovation Movement, or MRS), they continue to cite women’s activism as a
direct outcome of the revolutionary years.
92

During the 1980s, questions of racial and ethnic difference bore a more clearly
troubled relationship to Sandinismo than did women’s rights. Indigenous and Black
communities have long been concentrated in Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast region, which is
largely English-speaking and difficult to reach by land from the more populated, mestizo,
and Spanish-speaking western half of the country. Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues that
the Sandinistas replicated problems of other postcolonial national liberation projects by
representing indigenous and Black communities as “feminized” and implicitly
demanding that a Nicaraguan subject reject her “own particularity” in favor of a
masculine, mestizo national self.
93
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has narrated the impact of the
FSLN’s early military control of Miskitu communities: many Miskitu left Nicaragua,
becoming recruited as Contras in Honduras or being swept into Guatemala’s genocide.
94

92
Current feminist and lesbian activists whom I have met in Nicaragua continue to celebrate their coming
of age within revolution and to insist on the feminist movement as a key legacy of the Sandinista era – this
despite the personal reprisals now directed at them by returned President Daniel Ortega, his wife Rosario
Murillo, and the contemporary shell of the FSLN as a party. These reprisals are Ortega’s retribution for the
feminist movement’s support of Ortega’s stepdaughter (and Murillo’s daughter) Zoilamérica Narváez, who
has alleged that Ortega sexually abused her for several years, including during the 1980s. For an overview
of this case and contemporary Nicaraguan feminism, see Hobson, “Stepdaughters of Revolution.”
93
Saldaña-Portillo, 7. She finds that the FSLN’s cooperativist model of land reform ultimately benefited
the most well-off peasants and men rather than the most land-poor peasants or women. Though she argues
that the party eventually “reformulated” its “overall nationalist vision,” she finds that Sandinista rhetoric
viewed peasants without land as without revolutionary consciousness, and that this representation caused
the political defeat of the FSLN.
94
Dunbar-Ortiz’s interest in Nicaragua grew out of her time in the American Indian Movement, which
fostered her Indian identity despite her mixed blood heritage and lack of tribal enrollment. Dunbar-Ortiz
identifies indigenous, likewise women’s, rights as political (rather than biological) agendas that strengthen
an international movement against U.S. power, valuable not only for their individual meanings but also for
the ways they can be vehicles to broader oppositional unity. See Dunbar-Ortiz, Blood on the Border.

269
The FSLN’s stated investment in a broad-based movement served as a means to push
towards Black and indigenous rights and self-rule, but tensions remained on all sides. In
1987, leaders of Somos Hermanas recorded how Amalia Dickson, a Miskitu woman in
the government-sponsored Autonomy Project, “stressed the slow and difficult task to
learning how to organize themselves and to identify as Nicaraguans… as well as to teach
people of the Pacific Coast about racism.”
95
By the 1990s, Mirna Cunningham, a
prominent Afro-Miskitu leader highly placed in Sandinista leadership, described the
FSLN as still “ethnocentric” and riven by questions of race and ethnicity, “these
questions [around which] the whole socialist bloc began to fall apart.”
96

Certainly, some leftist critiques of Sandinista racism circulated in the 1980s.
Dunbar-Ortiz notes that she was unable to convince the African American historian
Vincent Harding, who visited Nicaragua in 1985, that the FSLN sought to end
discriminatory policies towards Miskitu people.
97
Generally, however, the Sandinista
revolution was perceived as a promising vehicle for racial and ethnic equality, and
solidarity with the revolution was promoted as an anti-racist goal. Gwen Carmen, a
Black feminist and columnist for the Bay Area women’s newspaper Plexus, linked her
faith in the Sandinistas’ support for indigenous and Black autonomy with pointed critique

95
“AAWO/Somos Hermanas Summary of August 1987 Trip to Nicaragua,” Box 35/1, SFWB/WC,
GLBTHS.
96
Mirna Cunningham in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 75-76.
97
Dunbar-Ortiz describes this encounter in depth. Harding had previously organized the first multiracial
delegation to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace in 1983. Rebecca Gordon also met with Vincent Harding
during his visit, though before Harding had become disenchanted with FSLN policy. Gordon records that
one FSLN leader told Harding that observing Black struggle in the U.S. had led him to embrace
Sandinismo. See Gordon, Letters from Nicaragua (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press, 1986), 71.

270
of the racism permeating both U.S. state policy and U.S. activist culture. In a 1985
column, Carmen mocked the ways many white solidarity activists romanticized the tasks
of revolution, telling her readers, “I wish to dispel all rumors that I’m going to Nicaragua
to pick cotton.”
98
Carmen reported that when she called one organization to ask about
participating in a work brigade, a woman she talked to “informed me I would really like
picking cotton. She did it last year and found it ‘spiritually enlightening.’ I don’t think
my ancestors…would agree.” Instead, Carmen considered traveling to the Honduran
border to volunteer with Witness for Peace, or to the Atlantic Coast “where the black
people are holding up their part of the revolution. To me, Nicaragua is a symbol of a
model government. Granted, it has its problems, but everyone should leave her alone so
that she can develop on her own.”
99

Ultimately, Carmen decided to visit Nicaragua alone. She found that the trip
further opened her eyes to the motivations for U.S. intervention: a search for easily
exploited resources and labor. From this, Carmen concluded that “The Nicaraguan
revolution is everyone’s revolution.” Offering a similar analysis, Somos Hermanas
insisted in 1985: “SOMOS HERMANAS because we oppose racism and see it as a pillar
of U.S. militarism… SOMOS HERMANAS with the women of Central America because
we share the burdens of militarism and war, of poverty, sexism and racism.”
100
Thus,

98
Gwen Carmen, “Ear to the Ground,” Plexus January 1985. Filed in SFWC/WB 35/1, GLBTHS. Carmen
had a regular column in Plexus, which was a Bay Area women’s community paper.
99
Carmen, “Ear to the Ground,” Plexus March 1985. Filed in SFWC/WB 35/1, GLBTHS.
100
Somos Hermanas, “Proposal for a West Coast Regional Network,” c. 1985, Box 50/6, SFWC/WB,
GLBTHS.

271
many solidarity activists understood an intertwined relationship between U.S. capitalism,
racism, and military power, finding that U.S. power came at the cost of people of color,
women, and workers in the U.S., as well as people at large in Central America.
If women’s rights were publicly welcomed and Black and indigenous rights
extended grudging recognition, lesbian and gay sexualities were yet more contentious in
the Sandinista years. FSLN leaders welcomed international solidarity work organized by
lesbians and gay men, including – as Rita Arauz has noted – from organizations that
explicitly named themselves as lesbian or gay.
101
Within the FSLN’s National
Directorate, Carlos Nuñez is remembered as particularly supporting lesbian and gay
rights and as actively advocating for lesbian and gay Nicaraguans’ full inclusion.
But lesbian and gay individuals and activist efforts inside the country generally
faced more mixed responses, including some outright repression. Some Sandinista
leaders viewed queerness as, in one lesbian activist’s recollection, a “political deviation,”
stating that “bisexuals and homosexuals could be easily bought by the enemy.”
102

(Similarly, U.S. lesbian feminist Rebecca Gordon describes a former CIA operative
warning that “sexual peculiarities” could threaten the work of Witness for Peace by
producing public disrespect in the U.S. or even Contra infiltration in Nicaragua.
103
)
Lupita Sequeira and Walleska Gutierrez, two lesbian women interviewed in the 1991
documentary Sex and the Sandinistas, report that women in the Sandinista army who

101
See Rita Arauz interview in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 268-269.
102
Hazel (a Nicaraguan lesbian from Matagalpa), quoted in Randall, “To Change,” 916.
103
Gordon, Letters from Nicaragua, 120.

272
were found in homosexual relationships or who publicly declared themselves lesbian
were thrown out of the military forces and even the FSLN altogether.
104
Thus, many
lesbians and gay men “were afraid of being separated from their militancy unless they
stayed in the closet” – an alienating prospect in a time and place where political militancy
provided a nearly all-consuming identity and social world.
105

Nonetheless, lesbian and gay activism began to coalesce in Nicaragua in the mid-
1980s, and was organized by people who were already Sandinista militants. One key
leader of this organizing, Rita Arauz, reflected in 1991 that:
Most of us… came out of that revolutionary process and we came to the
realization that the revolution could not be completed when we were carrying on
an internalized repression in ourselves just because of our sexual preference. So
we decided to fight for that little piece that was missing in our liberation. In the
Soviet Union, in Cuba, the gays were never ever to get completely liberated in the
revolutionary process. And we thought that in Nicaragua that we had that
historical responsibility.
106

As Arauz suggested by comparing Nicaragua to the Soviet Union and Cuba, the FSLN
never attempted any program of wholesale repression against queer people. However, an
incident in March 1987 brought Sandinista State Security down on incipient lesbian and
gay organizing, and even on Arauz herself. In this event, State Security forces

104
Sex and the Sandinistas, directed by Linda Broadbent, 1991. Distributed by Women Make Movies.
105
Carmen [no last name] in Randall, “To Change,” 918. Another respondent in Randall’s group interview,
Mary, stated that her lesbianism was always known by the party and never kept her from positions of
authority. She added (appearing to speak about a post-1990 policy) that: “In a Sandinista Assembly
they’ve even said officially that no reprisals would be taken against anyone because of his or her sexual
preference. I’m not saying that this policy has always been carried out, that there haven’t been people who
have done what they wanted. But it’s depended a lot on who happens to be in charge, on what kind of a
human being that person is, their amplitude, their vision” (919).
106
Rita Arauz, interviewed in Sex and the Sandinistas.

273
summoned some thirty lesbian and gay activists for questioning; arrested, briefly jailed,
and verbally interrogated Arauz; and demanded that the activists end their work.
107

Those responsible for ordering this harassment justified it by citing new, anti-Contra
“emergency measures” against independent organizing – measures that directly went
against the mass-movement principles of the early revolutionary years. These harsh
tactics succeeded in repressing lesbian and gay organizing for a time, as many
participants dropped out of new efforts because they feared harsher punishment.
In an interview with Margaret Randall in 1992, Arauz held that those who
remained active in lesbian and gay organizing after the State Security incident made “a
collective decision not to talk about it [publicly]… We were a country at war, in a state of
national emergency; and we were Sandinistas…We felt that talking about this incident at
that time could only hurt the FSLN.”
108
Amy Bank, a white lesbian from the U.S. and a
prominent solidarity activist, offers similar comments. Bank lived in Nicaragua for much
of the 1980s and was present during the State Security incident; she told Randall that “In
many parts of the world solidarity with Nicaragua was headed by lesbians and gay men,
and we knew that the reaction [to revelations about state repression] could be terrible.”
109

107
See Arauz in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 271-274. Sodomy was later criminalized under
the Chamorro administration in 1992 under “Article 204”; this law was overturned in late 2007, under a
FSLN-dominated government. Margaret Randall has told me that Jacinto Saurez (“Mauro”) directed the
State Security questioning; Randall was close friends with Mauro while she lived in Cuba and was
surprised that he would go after lesbian and gay activists. She states that he later apologized and was
critical of his own actions (Randall, personal interview, Albuquerque, NM, October 16, 2008).
108
Arauz in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 274. Arauz also argues that the March 1987
confrontation defending gay rights inside the revolution, and not the U.S.’s Stonewall, is the best
anniversary for the LGBT movement in Nicaragua (Arauz in Randall, 279).
109
Amy [Bank] in Randall, “To Change,” 913.

274
The incident was not publicly discussed in Nicaragua until a gay and lesbian pride
celebration in June 1991, and not widely known in the U.S. until 1993 when Margaret
Randall published an article based on interviews with lesbians in Nicaragua.
110

Further, while instances of anti-gay policy within Nicaragua went undiscussed, a
much different Sandinista treatment of lesbian and gay concerns became known. In
1988, lesbian and gay activists who had begun to conduct grassroots AIDS prevention
work in Managua found their work suddenly welcomed by the Ministry of Health, then
directed by Dora María Tellez (who was long known to be lesbian). Arauz states that the
AIDS activists then revealed the State Security incident to Tellez. Tellez chastised the
officer who had directed the harassment, and he “recognized that the whole thing had
been a terrible error.”
111
Then, with the Ministry’s support, activists developed a popular
education program on safe sex and AIDS, known as CEP-SIDA, which gained
recognition as a lesbian and gay project with the state “100 percent behind us.”
112
This
project allowed lesbians and gay men to, as one observer termed it, “put their sexual
politics in Sandinista literature”; Arauz adds that AIDS education opened up discussions

110
Ibid, and Randall, personal interview.
111
Arauz in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 275.
112
Ibid. The development of this project is also described by other women in Randall, “To Change.” Arauz
also states that: “We wanted to create a gay and lesbian movement of the Left, something that hadn’t
existed before. We didn’t want to be separatists…we didn’t want to promote the visceral divisions that exist
in the developed countries.”

275
of lesbian and gay rights within the FSLN and compelled many Sandinista leaders to
recognize that “we have a political, ideological argument for our struggle.”
113

With CEP-SIDA established, lesbian and gay organizing began to resurface,
winning public visibility in a lesbian and gay contingent in a march marking the 10
th

anniversary of the revolution in 1989.
114
Activists in the U.S. also celebrated this
popular education program. In 1988, San Francisco’s Instituto Familiar de la Raza,
Latino AIDS Project, and Amaranto (an organization of gay and lesbian Latin American
immigrants) hosted a reception to raise funds for Nicaraguan AIDS work. Their event
invitation stated that Nicaragua was “probably the first country in the world to include the
active participation of gays at every level of its AIDS program… Contrast Nicaragua’s
approach with that of our own government.”
115

Thus, while homophobic repression did exist inside the revolution, it was
inconsistent, and those who experienced it most directly chose to be silent in order to
protect the Sandinistas’ image to international activists. Supporters both in and outside
Nicaragua celebrated any hints of Sandinista recognition of lesbian and gay identities.
Both these responses suggest the significance of the lesbian and gay presence in the
solidarity movement, as well as lesbian and gay activists’ investment in the goal of
becoming actively named as agents of revolution. A Nicaraguan lesbian whom Margaret

113
Narration, Sex and the Sandinistas; Arauz, Sex and the Sandinistas.
114
Arauz in Randall, Sandino’s Daughters Revisited, 281.
115
“Can we talk? ¿Podemos hablar? AIDS Education Nicaragua Style,” Reception invitation c. 1988,
Ephemera Collection – Organization Files (Instituto Familiar de la Raza), GLBTHS.

276
Randall interviewed in 1991, Mary, stated that the mere fact that “the Sandinista Front
had known homosexuals in its ranks…made others stop and think about the fact that
homosexuals can be revolutionaries.”
116
Or, as Randall has concluded, “Sandinism
clearly opened a space for diverse freedoms even when it did not succeed in fully taking
up their causes.”
117
The potential expansiveness of “Sandinismo” as not only a party and
revolutionary government but also a larger, more unruly social movement facilitated
lesbian and gay identification with revolutionary Nicaragua.
Celebrating possibilities for sexual freedom inside the revolution also offered a
way to counter the assumption that “gay” and “Nicaraguan,” or even more broadly gay
and Latin American or gay and Latino, identities were inherently separate.
118
This
assumption was certainly alive and well in solidarity activism, including lesbian and gay
solidarity. One salient example comes through Rebecca Gordon’s 1986 memoir Letters
from Nicaragua, which Gordon termed “a love story about a revolution and a
marriage.”
119
A white lesbian feminist from San Francisco, Gordon spent six months in

116
Mary in Randall, “To Change,” 920.
117
Randall, “To Change,” 910.
118
Latino activist Hank Tavera recorded a critique of the San Francisco Mime Troupe’s 1985 show
Crossing Borders, for example, when it posed the relationship between LGBT and Central American
identity this way: “What happens… when a North American woman marries a Salvadoran refugee thereby
providing him with legal cover for his stay in the country? What happens when this same woman is a
lesbian who’s [sic] lover is neither supportive of this action nor sympathetic to the political issues
involved? And, to further complicate matters… what happens when the refugee expects his new bride to be
his wife in the traditional sense while she expects him to quietly disappear to lead his own life elsewhere!”
As printed in Crossing Borders program, San Francisco Mime Troupe file (41:28), Hank Tavera Collection,
UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library.
119
Gordon, Letters, 2. Gordon also observes, when looking at a world map, that “Nicaragua sits smack in
the center of the world” (1); she uses this as a metaphor for the nation’s importance within her own politics.

277
Nicaragua in 1984 working with Witness for Peace. Letters collects Gordon’s
communications home to friends, most especially her partner Jan Adams. The narrative
is propelled forward largely by Gordon’s self-critique of her roles as a North American
white woman. She places a high priority on anti-racist politics, marked through an
Introduction by Barbara Smith, as well as her reflections on how the solidarity movement
might build ties to domestic racial justice work, including in the Rainbow Coalition.
Yet while Gordon discusses the need to avoid romanticized and exploitative
views of Nicaraguan life, she frequently situates Nicaragua in a premodern past. She thus
references a Nicaraguan campesina woman defending “the land that is hers for the first
time in history,” a formulation seems to exclude precolonial land tenure outside the
bounds of historical time.
120
Further, in Letters Gordon conceives of her lesbian
sexuality as foreign in its modernity. Though she comes out to fellow North Americans
inside Nicaragua (and expresses a sense of relief when she can socialize with several
lesbians visiting with the Somos Hermanas delegation), she consciously remains closeted
with all the Nicaraguans she meets, even those with whom she became close friends. She
expresses doubts about whether lesbian and gay identity can be understood in Nicaragua,
and feels she must remain closeted in order to perform respectful solidarity with the
revolution. In her words, “The existence of ‘lesbianism’ as a cultural identity requires…
a certain level of consumption and urbanization”; lesbian or gay identity in Latin

120
Gordon, Letters, 134. I read Gordon in light of Saldaña-Portillo, who argues that postwar revolutionary
thought has perpetuated developmentalist concepts of “subjects-in-waiting,” even when those subjects now
wait for revolution rather than capitalism to bring them over “the verge of history” (Saldaña-Portillo, 59
and 65).

278
America is generally a “cultural import from Europe and the United States” – not
authentic to Latin American culture.
121
In making these claims, Gordon echoes concepts
suggested in gay and lesbian Marxist thought and early lesbian and gay studies.
122

Nicaraguan lesbian and gay activists were aware of, and countered, such claims
both during and after the revolution. In 1990, amidst the Sandinistas’ defeat, former
CEP-SIDA activists founded Fundación Nimehuatzín (Nimehuatzín Foundation), a non-
governmental lesbian and gay HIV/AIDS organization whose name was a Nahuatl word
meaning “lifting ourselves up for a noble cause.”
123
While the new, more conservative
Nicaraguan government was busy painting over revolutionary murals, Nimehuatzín
created a new mural representing precolonial, indigenous homosexuality.
124
As
Sandinista and lesbian Lupita Sequeira put it (speaking to her viewers in English):
This mural is about our indigenous roots. It’s about our unwritten history before
the Spanish conquest – in our indigenous society, existed homosexuality and that
is the thing we want to reclaim, that it’s not imported from San Francisco, from
England, from any other country. In Nicaragua, in Latin America, existed
homosexuality. We want to represent here a goddess of lesbians and gay men and
the triumph of the revolution.
125

121
Ibid, 42-43.
122
As discussed in Chapter 1, see D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” as well as challenges to
D’Emilio’s framework in Manalansan, “In the Shadows of Stonewall; Massad, “Re-Orienting Desire”;
Maynard, “Without Working?” and other sources.
123
Fundación Nimehuatzín was founded in 1990 and is an NGO that remains active in Nicaragua. For their
discussion of their name, see their website, http://www.nimehuatzin.org/.
124
For further discussion, see Florence E. Babb, “Out in Nicaragua: Local and Transnational Desires After
the Revolution,” Cultural Anthropology 18:13 (January 2008): 304-328.
125
Sequeira, interviewed in Sex and the Sandinistas.

279
Tellingly, by the close of Letters, Gordon suggests that she may have blinded herself to
lesbian and gay life in Nicaragua. She wonders “how closeted I really was; I spoke
constantly about my compañera the carpenter and the work she was doing at home.”
126

In an Afterword, Gordon notes that she has begun to hear about Nicaraguan lesbian and
gay organizing from contacts in the U.S., and reflects that perhaps she simply failed to
make contact with these activist networks herself. In a 1998 publication, Gordon revised
her observations further, recalling that her friend, gay leftist Tede Matthews, had
documented queer life throughout working-class revolutionary Managua.
127
She drew a
final lesson from her changes in perspective: “only by studying each other's geographies
can different groups of queer people hope to form effective political alliances.”
As I have noted, attention to queer geographies – to circuits of migration and sites
of exchange – can reveal multiple, transnational networks of lesbian and gay solidarity.
This becomes especially apparent if we examine the development, effort, and central
ideas of Somos Hermanas, and so I now turn to consider this organization at length.

Somos Hermanas
From its founding in 1984 to its closure in 1990, Somos Hermanas articulated a
political vision in which lesbian and gay freedoms were integrated into larger social

126
Gordon, Letters, 43.
127
Gordon, “The Price of Visibility: Book Review of Queers in Space: Communities, Public Places, Sites
of Resistance” (by Gordon Brent Ingram, Anne-Marie Bouthillete, and Yolanda Retter), The Women’s
Review of Books 15:6 (March 1998). Here, Gordon shifted her attention from time or “capitalism” in the
abstract to urbanization, holding that "In very real, material ways, the city... made queer lives, and
especially lesbian lives, possible in Nicaragua" (7).

280
justice movement building, grounding sexual politics within what was often termed a
“people’s struggle,” “United Front,” or “people’s power” movement. As this language
suggested, Somos Hermanas was linked to earlier Marxist-Leninist efforts – specifically
the groups Line of March and the KDP, or Union of Democratic Pilipinos. Somos
Hermanas differed from these groups, however, in prioritizing feminist critique and queer
recognition. By situating lesbian and gay liberation “in the context of building people’s
power,” Somos Hermanas intervened against single-issue, implicitly white definitions of
gender and sexuality, not to mention straight and male ideas of race and class identity.
128

Further, by placing women of color at the center of international solidarity work, by
explicitly including both lesbian and straight women, and by seeking equal exchanges
with Central American feminists (lesbians among them), Somos Hermanas insisted on the
relevance of race-conscious queer politics to work against U.S. empire. They threw their
weight against the notion of queer sexuality as inherently white, privileged, or
counterrevolutionary.
129
The group’s investment in lesbian and gay rights placed them in
sharp contrast to many other organizations, especially since Somos Hermanas expressed
an explicit commitment to queer recognition not only in the U.S. but also in Nicaragua.
130

128
AAWO/Somos Hermanas, 1984 newsletter.
129
1987 Assessment, Box 50/8, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
130
Gordon records the original Somos Hermanas delegation in Letters; she mentions two lesbians on the
trip, whose names suggest they were Latina. Gordon also notes that the Somos Hermanas delegates
attempted to ask FSLN leader Dora María Tellez about lesbian rights during a meeting (141).

281
Somos Hermanas’s political history was firmly situated in feminist of color
organizing, and the group counted many lesbians of color among its central leaders.
131

The organization’s genealogy dated back to the Black Women’s Liberation Committee,
founded in 1968 in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1970,
this group became the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), built through coalitions
between Black and Puerto Rican women in New York City. A Bay Area chapter of the
TWWA formed in 1971, led by Cheryl Perry, who was networked to the East Coast
chapter through her involvement in the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba.
As suggested by its use of the term Third World, TWWA took up an anti-
imperialist analysis of racial, gender, and class oppression.
132
TWWA has been
recognized as one of the most important organizations in the history of Black and Latina
feminisms, especially recognized through Frances Beal’s formulations of “Double
Jeopardy” and the publication Triple Jeopardy. As Max Elbaum has noted, in 1977
TWWA also became part of the Rectification Network, a Marxist-Leninist effort that also
involved the Union of Democratic Pilipinos (KDP) and the Northern California
Alliance.
133
In 1979, the TWWA dissolved and its West Coast chapter reformed as the

131
Other Bay Area lesbian leaders of Somos Hermanas included Nora Roman (Latina), who served as
national coordinator in 1988; Pam David (white); and Diane Jones (white; she represented Somos
Hermanas with Carmen Vázquez for a weeklong trip in August 1987 at the invitation of AMNLAE).
Active lesbian of color members included Bobbie Edelbrook (Chicana), Dinorah Diaz (Salvadoran), and
Lucrecia Bermudez (Peruvian, see above).
132
As Kimberly Springer describes in Living for the Revolution, some lesbians were involved in TWWA,
but the West Coast chapter decided to formally exclude lesbians while East Coast chapter issued a
statement against homophobia (Springer, 131). I am interested to investigate what this meant for AAWO.
133
Elbaum, Revolution in the Air, as discussed in Chapter 3.

282
Alliance Against Women’s Oppression (AAWO), while maintaining ties to the
Rectification Network’s more public iteration, Line of March.
134
Carmen Vázquez – a
butch-identified Puerto Rican lesbian, founding director of the San Francisco Women’s
Building, and later a leader in Somos Hermanas – participated in a Line of March and
AAWO-sponsored “Marxist-Leninist Education Project” in 1983. She holds that “this is
where my analytical skills come from,” bringing her towards a “really class-based
Marxist analysis of sexism…not the traditional Marxist-Leninist sort of way of thinking,”
yet still “an international and… class perspective.”
135

TWWA and AAWO differed in that while TWWA had been exclusively women
of color, AAWO decided to include white women and, in its members’ words, to more
centrally prioritize issues of “women’s oppression” while highlighting an “anti-racist and
anti-imperialist perspective … in the women’s movement.”
136
The decision to include
white women was controversial; some TWWA members viewed this change as a sign of
political defeat for feminists of color. Others, including Linda Burnham, defended it.
137

Burnham held that opening the group to white women would allow a stronger focus on
political economy, not only because white women members might be working class, but

134
“Orientation to the Women’s Building History of Relations with the Alliance Against Women’s
Oppression (revised October, 1988,” SFWB/WC 34/11, GLBTHS.
135
Vázquez, interview with Anderson, 40 and 61.
136
Letter from AAWO to the San Francisco Women’s Centers, Re: History, Goals & Objectives of the
Alliance Against Women’s Oppression, October 1, 1982; GLBTHS SFWC/WB, 42/10.
137
Importantly, Burnham was also already closely tied to Line of March. Springer records those who
critiqued the changed policy as a loss; see Living for the Revolution, 131.

283
because including some white women would require AAWO to more explicitly define its
ideological unity. Though maintaining a majority of women of color in a mixed group
was not easy, AAWO did succeed in this goal until the organization folded in 1990;
prominent leaders included Burnham, Miriam Ching Louie, and Myesha Jenkins. The
group now survives as the Oakland-based Women of Color Resource Center.
Figure 13: “Embracing Our Sisters in Solidarity.”
138

138
Somos Hermanas conference poster, 1984. Somos Hermanas, San Francisco Women’s
Centers/Women’s Building (50/6), GLBTHS.

284
In 1984, AAWO organized a delegation to Nicaragua at the request of the official
Sandinista women’s organization, AMNLAE. Six months later, AAWO organized the
West Coast Conference on Women in Central America, advertised with a poster featuring
an image of two women embracing below the slogan “Embracing Our Sisters in
Solidarity” (Figure 13, above). This conference brought together over 500 women on the
campus of San Francisco’s Mission High School and formally launched Somos
Hermanas. About 75 women became core members, most in the Bay Area, and most
Chicana and Latina. Somos Hermanas became one of AAWO’s most prominent
programs and focused its efforts on material aid to Nicaragua, mobilizing activists against
U.S. intervention, and organizing direct exchanges between Central American and U.S.
women. At its height, the group included chapters in New York, Boston, Louisville
(Kentucky), and California’s Central Valley. By the late 1980s, Somos Hermanas was
also advocating for human rights and non-intervention in El Salvador and Guatemala, and
beginning to turn attention to the effects of U.S. policy in the Caribbean as well.
Somos Hermanas members routinely referenced their multiple activist histories to
explain their investment in Nicaragua, explaining that they saw the Sandinista revolution
not just as a takeover of state power but also as a broad-based movement, in which
women both developed autonomous power and took part in a larger social
transformation. Thus, the group stated: “we seek to learn from our sisters [in Nicaragua]
who have refused to isolate themselves as a sector and have committed themselves to

285
struggling for freedom within the context of a people’s struggle.”
139
Members noted that
they also worked in or had histories in many other areas of activism, including “women’s
and lesbian movements, in minority communities, trade unions, churches, schools”; fights
to defend affirmative action; organizing against upsurges of the Klan; and working in
solidarity with Lebanon and African liberation, for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition;
and for lesbian, gay, and socialist-feminist leadership.
140

Somos Hermanas located their motivations for solidarity in the direct effects that
U.S. intervention carried on their lives as women of color; they held that the “Objective
basis of solidarity (not moralism) is [the] sexist impact of cutbacks and war build-up.”
141

Further, they moved towards seeing homophobia as a weapon not only of sexism (in
Suzanne Pharr’s famous formulation), but also of racism and empire.
142
Throughout the
1980s, AAWO and then Somos Hermanas criticized U.S. militarism as structuring cuts in
social services, which they observed had racist and sexist consequences; by the latter half
of the decade both groups also decried the imbalance between the bloated defense budget
and denial of funding for AIDS. By 1989, Somos Hermanas added that social service
cutbacks produced a “concurrent increase in racism, sexism, and gay-bashing, all of
which disproportionately affect poor people and women and especially women of

139
Proposal for a West Coast Regional Network, c. 1985, Box 50/6, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
140
Ibid.
141
Somos Hermanas Outreach Plan (Draft), August, 1985, Box 50/7, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
142
Suzanne Pharr, Homophobia: A Weapon of Sexism (Berkeley: Chardon Press, 1988).

286
color.”
143
Here, Somos Hermanas proposed that violence against queer people should be
understood as also racialized and gendered.
Figure 14: Somos Hermanas logo.
144

143
Mailing, 1989, Box 50/11, SFWC/WB GLBTHS. Emphasis added.
144
Somos Hermanas pamphlet, c. 1989. Somos Hermanas, San Francisco Women’s Centers/Women’s
Building (50/6), GLBTHS.

287
Somos Hermanas also saw themselves as challenging the romanticization of Third
World liberation struggle that was prevalent in solidarity activism. As they noted in
1984, “In speaking of Nicaraguan women as role models there is some danger of North
Americans romanticizing Third World women with guns… idealizing them only serves
to sever these women from [their] historical context.”
145
It is easy to conjure up the
image Somos Hermanas contested: the iconic portrait of a Latin American guerrilla
fighter with a baby in one arm and a gun in the other – reminiscent of the “radical
Orientalism” described by Judy Wu in the Vietnam Era, a Latin American and female
equivalent of what Ian Lekus sites as the racialized “radical masculinity” of the New
Left.
146
Indeed, similar imagery had been used earlier in the 1980s by Gay People for the
Nicaraguan Revolution (as noted in Figure 12). This sort of image could easily exoticize
the Nicaraguan revolution, making it seductive, yet hard to understand as a conscious
political effort of tactics, relationships, and ideology.
Visually, Somos Hermanas worked against this representation in their
organizational logo of two embracing women, which they used in their original
conference poster and then in all succeeding fliers and materials (Figures 13 and 14,
above). This logo does not portray a heroic martyr, but rather, focuses on mutual
exchange. While there is clearly affection – and potentially desire – in the women’s
embrace, it is unclear which woman is North American and which Central American; the

145
AAWO/Somos Hermanas Newsletter, Fall 1984, GLBTHS SFWC/WB 35/1.
146
See Wu, “Journeys for Peace and Liberation” and “Rethinking Global Sisterhood,” and Lekus, Queer
and Present Dangers, as discussed in Chapter 1.

288
viewer might place herself visually with either figure. The logo’s ambiguity upends a
clear designation of Central American women as other – as objects of sympathy rather
than participants in empathy. Similarly, Somos Hermanas’ 1989 fundraising calendar
juxtaposed images of women and children in Central America and the Caribbean with
photos of Latina girls on their bikes in San Francisco’s Mission District and teenage
Puerto Rican girls in Philadelphia. These visual parallels proposed links between
international and domestic communities. As they sought to reflect in their strategies of
representation, Somos Hermanas emphasized the shared context of transnational
movement-building to foster egalitarian connections between women across the
Americas. Further, by treating a “movement” as their central goal, Somos Hermanas
raised queer sexuality as an issue to take seriously inside a socialist revolution, while
moving away from the heteronormative language of a nation.
Through the language of international “embrace,” Somos Hermanas members
directly asserted their investment in lesbian and gay rights. During the 1984 trip, the
group participated in a meeting with Dora María Tellez, the famous “Comandante Dos”
who had captured the first city in the Sandinistas’ rise to power. Although not called on,
one Somos Hermanas participant attempted to ask Tellez about lesbians in Nicaragua.
147

Later, Somos Hermanas discussed issues of lesbian and gay identity more directly with
AMNLAE members. In August 1987, Carmen Vázquez and Diane Jones again visited
Nicaragua on behalf of Somos Hermanas, and again raised the issue of lesbian and gay

147
Gordon, Letters, 141.

289
rights with AMNLAE members. Though there is nothing to indicate that either Vázquez
or Jones were made aware of the State Security harassment of lesbian and gay activists
earlier that year, the two women’s notes speak carefully about the FSLN’s “official
position…that the government does not discriminate against gays and lesbians… the
question is still being treated as a ‘privacy’ question and there is no visible sign of an
official effort to politicize the issue.”
148
Still, Vázquez and Jones noted that they “had
many, many conversations” with their AMNLAE guide about topics including “the
question of lesbian/gay rights, sexuality… etc.”
The language of international “embrace” also facilitated expressions of lesbian
desire. Reflecting on the 1984 trip, Vázquez records that Tellez “did not come out to us
as a lesbian, but several of the women came out after the meeting wanting her baby, I’ll
tell you that. You know, it was just phenomenal to be in an environment like that and to
be embraced by them.”
149
Here, Vázquez makes the queer potential of “embracing our
sisters” explicit. This embrace sought to evade an exoticization of Sandinista women,
however, in that Vázquez makes it clear that Somos Hermanas participants never
imagined lesbian or other queer identities to be unknown or foreign to their Nicaraguan
hosts. The desire of their international “embrace” did not necessitate objectification.
Rather, Somos Hermanas members assumed that queer life existed in Nicaragua and

148
“AAWO/Somos Hermanas summary of August 1987 Trip to Nicaragua,” Box 35/1, SFWB/WC,
GLBTHS.
149
Vázquez, interview with Anderson, 49. Vázquez also reveals that she fell in love with her future partner
and fellow Somos Hermanas participant, Marcia Gallo, during the 1984 trip. She describes their flirtation
amidst intense political visits and discussions, an environment she terms the “wildest, most romantic scene
you can imagine… Talk about loving in the war years” (51).

290
invested faith in the potential for queer revolutionary identities. No wonder Vázquez
cherishes the 1984 trip as an event that “finally brought the… Latina activist part of me,
the socialist, communist part of me and the lesbian part of me all together.”
150

Finally, Somos Hermanas’s politics developed in tight connection to the group’s
base in San Francisco, specifically the Mission District, and even more specifically the
San Francisco Women’s Building, which was located in the Mission on 18
th
Street at
Valencia. As Vázquez notes, the Women’s Building “transformed the political
landscape” of San Francisco in the 1980s, especially the landscape of feminist
activism.
151
Throughout most of the 1970s, the strongest base for feminist work in San
Francisco were the Women’s Centers, an overwhelmingly white group. The Women’s
Centers purchased the Women’s Building property in 1979, but the Building itself
became led by and focused on women of color.
Carmen Vázquez served as the founding director of the Building from 1980 to
1984. Under her leadership, the institution began to fiscally sponsor immigrant rights,
economic justice, and racial justice groups; it made its newsletter bilingual; and it sought
to break down the notion that the lesbian, or so-called “women’s,” community in the
Mission was all white, while the Latino and Latina community was all straight. Vázquez
also shaped the political culture of the Building through her speeches and essays, notably
often addressing violence to articulate connections between race, gender, sexuality,

150
Vázquez, interview with Anderson, 49.
151
Ibid, 65.

291
immigration and empire. Thus, in a 1980 speech addressing physical attacks on the
Women’s Building (which within one year included bomb threats, a bombing, and arson),
Vazquez called for a “People’s Coalition Against Right Wing Violence.” She suggested
such coalitions could collectively fight Klan attacks on Black families, sexual assaults of
women, police brutality against both gay and straight people in the Mission, and U.S.
state violence against Nicaragua and El Salvador.
152
In this speech, she placed
Nicaraguans and Salvadorans – both in Central America, and across its diaspora – within
the Women’s Building community.
Vázquez’s directorship began at the same time that TWWA, and then AAWO,
took up residence in the Building. A Women’s Building report later cited an early 1980s
forum on Lebanon, as well as AAWO’s support of the Building’s decision to exclude
women police, as key in building coalitions between AAWO and the Building as a
whole.
153
Since AAWO was housed in the Women’s Building, Somos Hermanas took up
residence there as well, and after shifting in 1984 from the role of director to that of board
member, Vázquez became a co-founder and co-chair of Somos Hermanas (a volunteer
role). Through Vázquez and others, Somos Hermanas worked closely with Bay Area

152
Vazquez, “Talk Given at Women’s Centers/Women’s Building, December 14, 1980,” Box 34/9,
SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
153
In 1988, an internal Building assessment described AAWO’s contributions: “AAWO has influenced the
Women’s Building to grow in its internationalist perspective and its relationship to the Left… as well as in
its depth of understanding of class and race questions and their relationship to women’s oppression.”
“Orientation to the Women’s Building: History of Relations With the Alliance Against Women’s
Oppression (revised October, 1988),” Box 34/11, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS. The inclusion of women police
was also debated at the same time as Samois, the lesbian leather and S/M group. Vázquez notes that she
opposed providing space to the police group, but felt Samois should be welcomed. The Women’s Building
also chose to exclude Samois, however.

292
Lesbians of Color, or BALOC, which strengthened lesbian of color community through
conferences at the Women’s Building, as well as social events such as a dance party
benefiting BALOC and Somos Hermanas together.
154

Somos Hermanas’ files suggest that chapters outside the Bay Area (with the
possible exception of New York) may have been troubled by a dynamic in which most
women of color members were straight while most lesbian members were white. This
problem did not seem to come up in the San Francisco chapter, which remained the
largest and most stable, and maintained the largest number of lesbians of color as active
members and leaders.
155
The San Francisco chapter drew on Somos Hermanas’
institutional location within the Women’s Building, its physical location within the
Mission, and its members’ overlapping political commitments and histories to sustain
high participation and leadership by lesbians of color. Out of these conditions, Somos
Hermanas produced an intersectional and transnational vision of solidarity that rooted
queer identities within women of color feminist critique.
Somos Hermanas, and AAWO more broadly, ended their work amidst the end of
the Cold War and the political defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Their efforts slowed
by 1989 and closed down entirely in November 1990, nine months after the Sandinistas’
electoral defeat and amidst the end of the Cold War. This closure did not occur because
Somos Hermanas’ or AAWO’s leaders abandoned their radical goals; rather, it came

154
The dance party was held in June 1988; see Box 50/11, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS. LAFA was an advocacy
group with a fairly broad agenda and committed to 50% racial parity in leadership. See also BALOC 1988
conference program participant profiles, Box 47/27, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.
155
See “Draft Somos Hermanas Year Plan – 1988,” in Box 50/8, SFWC/WB, GLBTHS.

293
about as activist adapted to broader political changes in the U.S., Central America, and
globally. Somos Hermanas leaders sensed a loss of interest in solidarity work and saw a
drop in already undersized donations. As AAWO closed, Linda Burnham founded the
Women of Color Resource Center –an organization that has made major contributions to
organizing in the Bay Area and around the U.S., but which, unlike AAWO or Somos
Hermanas, is largely staff-led. This transition reflected a larger shift that had begun in
the late 1970s but increased rapidly in the late 1980s and 1990s, in which social justice
efforts became increasingly directed through formalized non-profit organizations, to the
extent that many activists now decry a “non-profit industrial complex.”
156

Conclusion: Multiple Genealogies and Historical Gaps
On March 16, 1988, President Reagan sent 3,200 U.S. soldiers to Honduras on the
premise of repelling Nicaraguan military forces that he claimed had crossed the
Honduran border. Through this action Reagan escalated U.S. intervention in Central
America, moving beyond his increasingly controversial training and funding of Contra
forces into direct U.S. military engagement. U.S. forces now stood poised to directly
fight the Nicaraguan army, with the goal of overturning the Sandinistas from power.
157

156
See especially INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded:
Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (South End Press, 2007), and Eric Tang, “The Non-Profit and
the Autonomous Grassroots,” Left Turn #18 (November 2005).
157
On this same day, former National Security Advisor John Poindexter and NSA staff member Oliver
North were indicted by the federal government for fraud and theft linked to the Iran-Contra scandal. The
U.S. eventually withdrew its forces from Honduras under widespread political pressure.

294
Anti-intervention activists across the U.S. responded swiftly to Reagan’s action.
In San Francisco, activists held nine days and nights of protests. As Tede Matthews
noted in the San Francisco Sentinel, lesbians and gay men played a prominent role in
organizing and mobilizing for these efforts.
158
On Friday March 18, some 2,000 marched
from the Castro district, with Cleve Jones (already well-known for the NAMES quilt
project) as one key organizer. On Tuesday March 22, another queer march drew an even
larger crowd of 4,000, winding from the Castro through the Mission as well as parts of
the Fillmore and Haight. Participants strategically passed the strip of Latino gay bars at
16
th
and Valencia in the Mission, and speakers at this march’s closing rally included
Fernando Arenas of Amaranto, the Latin American immigrant gay and lesbian group; Pat
Norman, a Black lesbian feminist, not incidentally a close friend of Carmen Vázquez,
who in 1984 had become the first out lesbian to run for San Francisco Supervisor; and
Guillermo Gonzalez, an AIDS educator in the Latina/o community. On Saturday March
26, a final march wove from Civic Center to the Presidio, drawing a mixed crowd of
5,000 and including lesbian and gay, as well as straight, speakers.
Citing the “magnitude” of lesbian and gay involvement in the protests, Matthews
stated that it “caught many observers, both gay and straight, by surprise. [But] This is no
overnight phenomenon.” As Matthews suggested, even though lesbian and gay solidarity
groups had established a significant presence in the Bay Area, they had remained largely

158
Matthews, “Coming Out for Peace.” Matthews was a longtime gay leftist, founder of Modern Times
Bookstore, and profiled in the 1978 film Word Is Out. He died of AIDS complications in 1993. See also
“Gays, Lesbians Spearhead Peace Demos,” Sentinel March 25, 1988, page 3 (photos and caption).

295
unknown to straight activists. In response, Matthews offered an extensive overview of
Bay Area gay and lesbian involvement in Latin American solidarity and anti-intervention
work. And he quoted white lesbian Kate Raphael’s statement to straight activists at the
March 26 rally: “Since 1980, gay men and especially lesbians have been in the leadership
of the Central America solidarity movements. We have fought with you in meetings, we
have worked with you in the fields of Nicaragua, and we have been with you in jail.”
159

Matthews also noted the more pointed critique of Guillermo Gonzalez, who observed that
lesbian and gay solidarity work was only a “surprise” if observers assumed queer
concerns were fundamentally isolated from those of Third World national liberation.
Gonzalez noted that such assumptions left queer people of color out in the cold,
demanding that they make a choice:
between a predominately white male gay movement and involvement in our own
national liberation struggles. We hoped that the national struggles would address
our positions as lesbians and gay men…[but still] gay people of color are invisible
to the left. Many of us dropped out of the straight left because of its homophobia
but still felt alienated by the one-issue focus of much of the gay movement.
160

Gonzalez’s remarks, together with Kate Raphael’s statement, and against the backdrop of
work by Somos Hermanas, underline the ways in which lesbian and gay activists used
Nicaraguan solidarity to assert their value within the left, to cite the multiple sources of
their politics, and to lift up the experiences and agendas of U.S. queer people of color.
Raphael and Gonzalez insisted that history-telling about lesbian and gay solidarity carried

159
Matthews, “Coming Out for Peace.”
160
Ibid.

296
political meaning, and that this history-telling remained an important task to promote a
radical sexual politics.
161

Lesbian and gay solidarity with Nicaragua forms a crucial part of U.S. queer
activist history, carrying continuities from gay liberation through the gay and lesbian left
into the bloom of women of color feminist culture and the first decade of AIDS. Lesbian
and gay solidarity work also carries effects within Nicaragua, remembered within the
histories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, and LGBT-supportive, groups
including Fundación Nimehuatzín, Puntos de Encuentro, and others.
162
The networks
shaping these legacies moved South to North, as well as North to South, across the 1970s
and 1980s. No one political history captures the meanings of groups such as Gay People
for the Nicaraguan Revolution or Somos Hermanas, or events such as the 1988 lesbian
and gay protests against U.S. intervention in Central America. Somos Hermanas
explained its queer solidarity in response to left homophobia, racism, and romanticization
of Latin American revolution; as a counter-narrative to racialized divisions within queer
communities dating back to the gay liberation era; as an expression of women of color
feminist, Marxist-Leninist, and socialist-feminist thought; and against the constraints of

161
Tede Matthews died from AIDS on July 17, 1993 (the anniversary of Somoza’s flight from Nicaragua).
Later that year, a benefit in his honor was held at the Women’s Building, featuring readings by Dorothy
Allison and others. The Women’s Building also chose to store its historical materials (including materials
on Somos Hermanas and AAWO) in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Historical Society of
Northern California – not in a “women’s” nor a university library, but a grassroots and explicitly queer
archive. Matthews was also active in LAGAI and before his death was seeking to write a book on gay men
and lesbians in revolutionary Nicaragua.
162
Puntos de Encuentro creates popular media on sex education, including LGBT sexuality; Nimehuatzin
works in HIV/AIDS outreach, advocacy, and health. Puntos de Encuentro was founded by two of the
lesbians featured in Randall, “To Change.”

297
Reaganism and the Moral Majority. But while Somos Hermanas was unique in clearly
naming its histories, its multiple sources exemplify a broader pattern that reached well
beyond any one organization, and in which activists dramatically expanded the meanings
of queer politics by building transnational connections with the Nicaraguan revolution.

298
CONCLUSION
On November 15, 2008, some 12,000 people assembled in downtown Los Angeles to
protest the passage of Proposition 8, the California initiative imposing a constitutional
ban on same-sex marriage. At the pre-march rally, Tori Osborne – former director of the
Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center and now an advisor to Los Angeles Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa – offered a brief account of queer activist history. She cited the 1978
campaign against the Briggs Initiative; protests following the light sentence meted out to
Dan White for the murders of Harvey Milk and George Moscone; militant street actions
by the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power, or ACTUP; and large-scale civil disobedience
in fall 1991 following California Governor Pete Wilson’s veto of AB101, a state bill to
protect the rights of gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers. Osborne told the crowd that all
these fights had built queer community and political power. But, she stated, “There was
one difference between now and then. In those years, over forty years, we stood alone.
Lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgenders, we built our own community, but we did
not have allies.”
1
Listening in the crowd, I was so stunned by this misrepresentation that
I shouted, “That’s not true!” Naturally, no one beyond my partner and our friends paid
much attention. Few in the crowd could have cited the instances of interconnection that
Osborne’s narrative of “no allies” ignored. I was enmeshed in archives of radical alliance,
but well aware of how unknown this complex history remained.

1
Osborne’s speech can be heard in a video posted to YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdIMJMwU7E4. Accessed April 17, 2009.

299
By citing a history of “no allies,” Osborne did something more troubling than
simply deny the existence of straight people who had supported queer concerns – though
her citation of the campaign against Briggs was particularly misguided, since that
campaign offers innumerable lessons in how to organize for gay, lesbian, bisexual and
transgender concerns in ways that might inspire coalition. More insidiously, Osborne’s
narrative of the past – including in her reference to a singular queer “community”
imagined as unified yet “alone” – reinforced the racialized, most particularly anti-Black,
hostility running rampant after Proposition 8’s passage. Within a day of the election, the
internet and other media had buzzed with the assertion – soon proved untenable – that
African American voters approved Proposition 8 by a margin of 70% and that high
turnout among Black voters, motivated by the Barack Obama campaign, provided the
principle explanation for the initiative’s passage.
2
Claims of a landslide “yes” vote
among African American voters followed on the heels of a No on 8 campaign whose
organizers had leaned heavily on references to civil rights history while virtually failing
to campaign within communities of color. Amidst frustration over Proposition 8’s
passage, a new slogan sprung up on protest signs, t-shirts, Facebook pages, and the cover
of the widely circulated gay magazine the Advocate: “Gay is the New Black.”
While echoing the problematic racial analogies prevalent during the rise of gay
liberation, “Gay is the New Black” drew on four distinct, and relatively recent,

2
For a useful overview of this debate and a critique of the No on 8 campaign’s handling of race, see Kai
Wright, “A Fragile Union: Why racial justice matters in the fight for gay marriage,” ColorLines March-
April 2009: 10-14.

300
assumptions about social movement history, sexuality, and race. First, the African
American freedom struggle had laid the groundwork for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and
transgender recognition, and both movements should be understood as struggles for
domestic “civil rights.” Second, anti-Black racism was basically over, while homophobia
remained as one of the “last” acceptable prejudices. Third, Black voters were straight,
while the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community was white. Fourth, although
queer people had supported racial justice, Black voters remained too beholden to their
own sense of historical grievance to “return the favor” by opposing Proposition 8. One
phrase I saw repeatedly held that “the victim has become the victimizer” – a formulation
that not only described all injustice through the language of injury, but also defined
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people as the most recent social “victims.”
3

Many progressive and radical people – Black and other people of color, anti-racist
white, queer and straight – denounced “Gay is the New Black,” sharply critiquing not
only its misreading of poll data, but also its erasure of Black queer identities; its
resentment of homogenized “Black voters” and racial justice goals; and its narrowing of
both racial justice and queer politics to a framework of legal rights. While divided over
the merits of marriage as a queer political goal, we agreed that reactions to Proposition 8
must move away from a rhetoric of competition, betrayal, and resentment and towards
intersectionalist lessons about how inequality, identity, and coalition are produced.

3
This phrase people defined both LGBT and racial justice claims through a language of what Wendy
Brown terms “wounded needs”; see Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton University Press, 1995.

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Osborne’s claim for a history of “no allies” sharply undercut this effort while
misinforming protestors about their political past.
Ironically, however, one of Osborne’s goals on the speaker’s platform that day
was to reassure her audience that straight allies, including straight allies of color, do exist
today. In the next moment of her speech, Osborne shifted from her history of “no allies”
to state, “This year has been different.” She located supporters of lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender rights “all through the Barack Obama campaign,” as well as “all over the
labor movement” and the “women’s movement.” Then she turned to introduce the next
speaker, Mayor Villaraigosa – someone, she told the crowd, who had supported LGBT
equality “decades” before other elected officials. Thus, Osborne immediately reversed
her own statement that “for forty years… we have stood alone,” most clearly by praising
Villaraigosa, and more implicitly by begging the question of how labor, feminist, and
Democratic Party support had been produced.
Despite her reversals of logic, Osborne’s speech cohered through a specific,
narrow definition of “alliance.” In her telling, there were certain people who mattered as
allies: elected officials, presidents of union locals, and others heading defined interest
groups with access to Democratic Party power. Alliance was not something built by
ordinary people in a grassroots social movement. It did not develop through practices of
radical imagination, demand working through disagreement, or prioritize a systemic,
prophetic agenda. Its U.S.-based, electoral framework was so obvious as to go unstated.
Alliance was a tool for garnering clout, a way to pull on movers and shakers. People
with demands need only vote for politicians – or support lobby groups – who would do

302
the work of “alliance” for them. Osborne’s formulation of alliance demanded no change
from protestors situating their sexual identities through a discourse of white racial
resentment. Though she implied that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people
should value “labor” and, in her somewhat archaic phrase, the “women’s movement,” she
never suggested that her listeners might already be embedded in these or other fields of
activism; never asked us to think about how experiences of racial, class, or gender
inequality were connected to those of sexuality; and never suggested that the “we” of
LGBT community contained any internal tensions, whether of race, class, gender
expression, or ideology.
Certainly, I grant that Osborne was tasked with a utilitarian goal at that November
rally. Her role was to induce the audience to cheer Villaraigosa, not to ask them to
rethink a political narrative. Osborne has gained a reputation as a dedicated coalition-
builder, and I do not doubt her personal commitment or her effort towards this goal.
Rather, my concern is with the narrow political frame has come to constrict the meanings
of “alliance” itself. For all its internal inconsistencies (“we have had no allies… please
welcome our longtime ally!”), Osborne’s speech worked because she drew on a common
sense linking a incomplete, racially exclusive interpretation of queer activist history with
larger assumptions about how politics can and should function. This common sense has
flourished in a post-Cold War climate with a dramatically diminished left, a context
notably different from that of the queer anti-imperialism I have examined throughout this
study. To underscore the meanings of this shift in historical context, I find it telling to
briefly reconsider the key contributions of queer anti-imperialist politics, and then to

303
close by examining a public discussion held among queer activists in San Francisco
immediately following my study’s formal end.
Across nearly twenty-five years of activism in late Cold War California – between
1966 and 1990, from the Compton’s Cafeteria riot and the founding Black Panthers to the
closure of Somos Hermanas and the end of the Nicaraguan revolution – queer activists
found inspiration in anti-imperialist critique. Further, they made use of this critique to
develop a transformative sexual politics, one that I have termed queer anti-imperialism.
Queer anti-imperialism both grew out of and reshaped local queer communities, and in
moments, it moved into the center of queer politics as a whole. Ultimately, queer anti-
imperialism produced three key results.
First, engagements with anti-imperialism catalyzed the emergence of the gay
liberation movement while also structuring its central tensions. By taking up anti-
imperialist rhetoric and ideas, queer radicals produced a new language for sexual
freedom. They described existing sites of queer life as “gay ghettos” to be escaped; they
used the term “liberation” to proclaim that U.S. empire was the source not only of racism,
poverty, and war, but also of anti-gay oppression. In the early events and debates
marking the emergence of gay liberation in California, activists moved away from calls
for assimilation into the U.S. nation, and towards a language of group self-determination
modeled after, and proposing unity with, national and racial liberation models standing
outside or against existing U.S. power – including in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, and
the Cuban Revolution.
However, we can also see that queer anti-imperialism became riven from its

304
inception by internal conflicts. Many early gay liberationists, particularly gay white men,
engaged with anti-imperialist thought in rather shallow ways, principally by drawing
simplistic analogies between sexuality and race. These analogies not only obscured the
experiences of queer people of color, but also, as they mobilized internal colonialism
theory, produced calls for gay and lesbian space or even a “gay nation.” Through these
calls – by deriding the “gay ghetto” as a colonized space, or by calling for a “gay colony”
in Alpine County – many gay liberationists disavowed longstanding working class,
multiracial locations of queer life and marked gay and lesbian freedom through a
geography of whiteness, class mobility, and Anglo conquest of the U.S. West.
This discourse met with sharp critique from gay liberationists of color and anti-racist gay
liberationists, yet nonetheless retained power. Thus, a discourse of gay and lesbian space
came to stand in racialized tension with a politics of radical global alliance, which was
itself made difficult by left and nationalist homophobia. While queer anti-imperialism
proclaimed connections across race, sexuality, and nation, its iterations in the gay
liberation moment constructed deep divisions between the impulses of queer space and of
alliance. Most queer histories have assumed that the aspirational alliances of gay
liberation, while perhaps admirable, quickly became abandoned within queer politics as a
whole. But I contend that if we look closer and longer, we can see that queer anti-
imperialism not only survived past the gay liberation era, but also became increasingly
sophisticated and sustainable over successive years.
Thus, the second major expression and result of queer anti-imperialism became
apparent within the 1970s gay and lesbian left. Queer anti-imperialist politics became

305
developed through, and worked to bolster, the gay and lesbian left’s growth and
successes. In particular, queer anti-imperialism prompted greater efforts towards multi-
racial, multi-class, and multi-gender queer community and provided language to explain
the importance of queer recognition in a movement to fight the right. Strengthened by
gay and lesbian left rhetoric and campaigns, Third World gay and lesbian organizations
grew and became well known, and white queer activists increasingly worked towards
anti-racism. Gay and lesbian leftists of all colors drew on Marxist-Leninist, socialist,
women of color feminist, and socialist-feminist sources, using these to challenge
assumptions that liberated gay or lesbian identities were inherently tied to spaces of
racial, national, or economic privilege – that gay and lesbian freedom must be a white
phenomenon, aligned with the U.S., or naturally aligned with trends such as
gentrification. Instead, gay and lesbian leftists held that queer community offered
meaningful alternatives to the capitalist nuclear family and that socialism could promote
sexual autonomy and choice. Moreover, they argued that sexual represssion had arisen
with the imperialist expansion of global capital, which worked to overthrow pre-colonial
cultures that accepted sexual and gender diversity, as well as to divide workers through
homophobic prejudice.
Gay and lesbian leftists challenged more moderate trends within gay and lesbian
activism and community, and by the late 1970s, began to occupy increasing space at the
center of queer politics. In 1978, gay and lesbian leftists found their largest platform
within the campaign to defeat California’s Briggs Initiative. They defined Briggs as part
of a broader global reaction against workers and people of color: an attack on teacher

306
unions and workers’ power globally; interwoven with new limits on affirmative action
and the reinstatement of the death penalty; a scapegoating tactic linked to, but deflecting
attention from, economic recession and increases in racist violence. In their work to
defeat Briggs, gay and lesbian leftists forged lasting coalitions with labor, racial justice,
and other progressive organizations. More broadly, they broadcast the importance of
defending gay and lesbian people within a broader effort to fight the growing right wing.
Certainly, the Briggs campaign was a defensive fight, an effort to reject an anti-gay
policy rather than a means to move towards a new goal. As such, many gay and lesbian
leftists located it within what understood as a moment of containment and defeat. Yet the
imagined alliances of the gay and lesbian left, while fleeting, conditional, and largely
defensive, carried significant political power. Examining the gay and lesbian left reveals
a time and social space in which queer anti-imperialism carried the capacity to speak to
large numbers of people, both straight and queer, and across race, class, and gender.
On the heels of the gay and lesbian left, and informed by its coalescence against
California’s and the nation’s strengthening right wing, a third mode of queer anti-
imperialism emerged and refocused attention the necessarily global setting of alliance
building. This mode of queer anti-imperialism found its expression in lesbian and gay
solidarity with Nicaragua. Lesbian and gay solidarity work looked to the Sandinista
revolution as a model for an anti-imperialist, socialist struggle that might incorporate
group autonomy and difference, including queer difference. Through lesbian and gay
solidarity work, queer activists crossed boundaries between local and global queer
worlds. Gay and lesbian solidarity became especially strong in the Bay Area due to the

307
large Central American community there. A number of leaders of queer solidarity groups
were Nicaraguan or Latin American immigrants, or U.S. Chicana/o or Latina/o people.
Lesbian and gay solidarity work emerged as an important venue for work to build more
multiracial and multiclass queer community, as well as to challenge left exoticism
regarding Latin American radical identities.
The most sustained and complex effort of lesbian and gay solidarity arrived through
Somos Hermanas, an organization active from 1984 to 1990 and whose history dated to
earlier feminist of color and Marxist-Leninist organizing. Somos Hermanas included
white women and straight women, yet many of its most visible leaders were lesbians of
color. Through these leaders, as well as the group’s headquarters in the San Francisco
Women’s Building, Somos Hermanas represented solidarity as a vehicle towards a
transnational political linking Central and North American women in mutual interests
and, at least potentially, egalitarian affection and desire. While not as critical – or aware
– of instances of Sandinista homophobia as they could have been, Somos Hermanas took
it as a given that lesbian and gay identities were present in and authentic to Nicaragua and
the revolution. Thus, they directly rebutted assumptions of natural divisions between
queer and Latin American, left, or people of color identities. Ultimately, Somos
Hermanas articulated a vision in which queer identities and politics became integrated
into multi-issue movement building and radical history. They not only situated lesbian
and gay rights in a language of fighting the right and gaining women’s autonomy, but
moved away from the traditional language of nationalism towards the less masculinist, as
well as more democratically open, language of a large, diverse social movement. Still,

308
like the solidarity movement in general, Somos Hermanas and other lesbian and gay
solidarity work fell apart as the Nicaraguan revolution was defeated and the Cold War
ended. Their dissolution points towards how the closure of a global left has served to
constrain queer politics towards a more domestic agenda.
Indeed, a public discussion held in San Francisco immediately following my
study’s end – on June 26, 1991 – reveal that many queer activists witnessed the closure of
the Cold War with a sense of political loss and limitation. Amidst the week’s annual gay,
lesbian, and bisexual “pride” celebrations, a group of queer and straight radicals gathered
at the San Francisco Women’s Building for a public panel titled “Queer Relations: the
Lesbian/Gay Movement and the U.S. Left.”
4
The sponsors of this event included
Lesbians and Gays Against Intervention (LAGAI), founded through Central American
solidarity work; Modern Times Bookstore, an importance resource for leftist political
education within the Mission District; and the International Lesbian & Gay Human
Rights Commission, a newly founded organization focused on winning asylum for queer
people in the U.S., as well as ending the criminalization of queer people around the
world. The audience, which numbered perhaps 50 people, was mostly queer but, as
speakers noted, also included a good number of apparently straight activists. By the close
of 1991, a transcript of the “Queer Relations” panel was published in the left magazine
CrossRoads, broadcasting the discussion more widely.

4
See event flier, Lesbians & Gays Against Intervention (LAGAI) folder, Ephemera – Organizations,
GLBTHS; and “Queer Relations” forum, edited for Crossroads 15 (November 1991). My thanks to Max
Elbaum for providing me with electronic versions of the Crossroads article. My citations of page numbers
are from my own printouts of the electronic files.

309
The “Queer Relations” panelists included some familiar names: Harry Hay, the
longtime communist, Mattachine Society founder, and Radical Faerie; Pat Norman, one
of the speakers at the 1988 anti-intervention protests noted in Chapter 4, and a linchpin of
activist, feminist, and especially lesbian of color community-building; Carmen Vázquez
of the San Francisco Women’s Building and Somos Hermanas; and Tede Matthews, the
solidarity activist, writer, and observer of queer Nicaragua. In addition, two labor
organizers, Angie Fa and José Medina, addressed the audience, and the last word went to
Arawn Eibhlyn, an AIDS activist and member of the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee.
Demographically, these panelists included three lesbians of color (Norman is Black,
Vázquez is Puerto Rican, Fa is Chinese American), three gay white men (Hay, Matthews,
and Eibhlyn) and one straight man of color (Medina, who is Mexican American). Hay
and Eibhlyn represented, respectively, the oldest and youngest ends of the political
spectrum. The other speakers had come to activism between the end of the 1960s and the
early 1980s, tilting towards what Fa termed “the lost generation that came of political age
after the end of the Vietnam War and before the start of Queer Nation [1990].”
5

Collectively, these activists discussed a history of tense alliances with the broader left,
drawing together lessons from a historical moment whose closure they were marking.
Harry Hay and Pat Norman headlined the event, with Hay recapitulating a now
familiar analogy between racial and sexual politics. He thanked “the Marxist left” for the
concept of a “political cultural minority” which he had mobilized to define a homophile

5
Fa (File 2 of 2), 1.

310
agenda in the early Mattachine Society; he acclaimed gay liberationists for making the
concept of a cultural minority “collective”; and he proposed that queer culture now
offered an “example” to straight people of color, whom he termed “Spiritually-STILL-
indentured Colonialized Minority Communities.”
6
While uniformly gracious to Hay, all
the other speakers took their comments in a different direction, emphasizing their specific
political networks and their responses not only to left homophobia, but also to problems
of racism and liberalism within queer politics. Norman emphasized the importance of
queer activists coming out within straight organizations and ostensibly non-queer fields
of activism. She held that no matter how painful or contested such coming out might be,
it remained critical to changing narratives about the past. Norman reflected that lesbian
and gay people had “been a part of each and every one of the progressive movements…
the abolitionist movement [and] the feminist movement… all of the peace movements,”
but that because straight activists had not been aware of gay men and lesbians in their
midst, they had concluded that queer people had no interested in radical alliance.
7

Norman urged her audience to see alliance as a process of building honest political
relationships, requiring continual coming out, anti-racist and anti-sexist self-critique, and
concrete action. Thus, she held that “If in fact we wanted to make absolute change with
the health care system” (a central goal of AIDS activism), “what we have to do is to go to
the Grey Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the La Raza Movement, everyone,

6
Hay (File 1 of 2), 1-4.
7
Norman (File 1 of 2), 5.

311
and say, we’re going to be on this here with you, and with us, for the long haul,” adding
that without that, “We do not have a revolution…[or] any kind of change.”
8

Responding to Hay and Norman, the other “Queer Relations” panelists repeatedly
critiqued the political and cultural pull towards what Carmen Vázquez termed “some
liberal façade.”
9
They called repeatedly for a radical, movement-based political vision
centering queer difference. Angie Fa noted her experiences of homophobia within labor
unions and social justice circles, and praised recent gains for gay and lesbian rights
within San Francisco’s HERE Local 2 (the Hotel & Restaurant Employees union). Yet
Fa also stated that she was increasingly less concerned with the longevity of left
homophobia than with the potential for queer assimilation and conservatism. Noting that
some queer people might assimilate more easily than others, she asked, “what keeps us
progressive, after assimilation, what about the rest of us?”
10
She offered telling
observations about her own and others’ diminished connection to radical activism:
As a progressive Asian American dyke in the labor movement, I can say quite
easily that my life is fragmented into lots of little pieces that don’t necessarily
relate to each other. The progressive politics I once did full time for democratic
socialism does not always mesh with my daily life today. The daily labor
organizing tasks today, the nuts and bolts of building for the next campaign or the
next action, are micro-level tasks, instead of macro-level questions… People are
caught up in grievances and contracts and workers’ committees. They don’t
always have time to think about the decline of communism, the relevance of
socialism or the New World Order.
11

8
Norman, 6.
9
Vázquez (File 2 of 2), 6.
10
Fa (File 2 of 2), 2.
11
Ibid.

312

Thus, Fa found that the weakening of the “organized left,” and the related turn away from
“macro-level” questions, made it increasingly difficult to draw connections between
seemingly disparate fields of politics. She worried that gay and lesbian politics could
easily lose their radical edge, while activists in general became increasingly “caught up”
in “nuts and bolts” work, making it harder and harder to mobilize anyone in a way that
might bridge political or community lines. In a realization of some of Fa’s fears, in the
years that followed the “Queer Relations” panel, most of the event’s speakers became
increasingly disconnected from unpaid activism, and more and more rooted in large non-
profits and local government.
12

Like Fa, Carmen Vázquez held that
the responsibility for improving these ‘Queer Relations’ rests not just with the
left… but with those of us within the lesbian/gay movement who do have a
consciousness of what progressive politics is about. That we need to be willing to
be out. To be out as we do our progressive work. To be out as socialists... And to
quit monkeying around with this business of some liberal façade.
13

Here, Vázquez urged coming “out” in two senses, suggesting that queer radicals ought to
be not only public about their sexuality in left circles, but also public about their left
politics in queer and, generally, “progressive” circles. Importantly, Vázquez described

12
In 1994, Vázquez moved back to New York, where she worked for several years with Empire Pride
Agenda, a major LGBT rights organization. Norman works for a community health agency. Fa became a
member of the San Francisco School Board and is now in the faculty of Asian American Studies of San
Francisco City College. Medina became a San Francisco Supervisor and was later appointed director of
CalTrans by Governor Gray Davis but later resigned in a scandal over a sweetheart contract. Matthews
died not long after the event, in 1993, from HIV/AIDS; Hay died in 2002, at the age of 90. Eibhlyn, while
noted as living with AIDS at the time of the “Queer Relations” panel, appears to still be alive and involved
with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, a progressive organization in Louisville, KY.
13
Vázquez, 6.

313
herself as having spent 25 years of activism “gyrating between and among the organized
left, the spontaneous left, the organized lesbian/gay community, the women’s
community,” pushed this way and that by Puerto Rican independence “comrades” who
disapproved of homosexuality, followed by “profound” racism in Bay Area feminist and
lesbian circles.
14
She noted that being a person of color or queer did not automatically
make anyone a leftist, but maintained that queer activists needed to emphasize that “we
are different,” and to mobilize this difference towards a radical analysis of “state control
and repression of sexuality.”
15

For his sake, Tede Matthews pressed on the need for a queer radical vision that
could speak to all people, while also insisting that straight activists listen for and to that
vision. While arguing that “there are no holy doctrines,” Matthews located his hope in
the (just recently defeated) Sandinista revolution and newly post-apartheid South
Africa.
16
Much as the 1976 Magnus collective had done in proposing “collective
faggotry,” Matthews urged a systemic analysis centered on common sources of
oppression, holding that the “cultural omnipotence of compulsory heterosexuality”
harmed both men and women, justified the genocide of indigenous people, and
institutionalized lobotomies of queer people in state prisons. Further, he linked the need
for sexual liberty with a critique of capitalist definitions of freedom, stating, “the society
has lied to us about what freedom is. Is it a new car? Is it a minipad? Is it a new fighter

14
Ibid.
15
Vázquez, 7.
16
Matthews (File 1 of 2), 8.

314
aircraft? Although we really don’t know what freedom is, we know that we need it,”
specifically including “Freedom from hunger, hostility, violence and fear… to make love,
and fall in love, with whom and how many we choose.”
17

Throughout the panel, speakers struggled with how to define a “left” they saw as
collapsing. As José Medina put it, “I’m glad to see that there’s still so many on the left,
left”; Norman asked, “what the hell is the left?... I know there are leftists and then there
are leftists”; and Vázquez referenced “the left…or whatever remains of that – I’m not too
sure anymore.”
18
Arawan Eibhlyn, an AIDS activist and a person living with AIDS,
stated that though attention to AIDS policy would bolster a “critique of U.S.
imperialism,” “the left” in general had recently focused more attention on Eastern Europe
than on the inequities that AIDS made apparent.
19
Yet each speaker understood the left
somewhat differently. Eibhlyn termed it the province of “straight white men,” while
Medina and Fa defined it through an increasingly immigrant labor movement; Vázquez
spoke from her experiences with Puerto Rican independence and feminist activism; and
Norman celebrated powerful, if inconsistent, coalitions with Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow
Coalition, the AFL-CIO, and the National Organization for Women. In a bit of sly humor,
Tede Matthews observed that left homophobia grew out of “a subjectively undialectical
analysis of the gay and lesbian question. Or, in other words, most straight leftists have

17
Ibid.
18
Medina (File 2 of 2), 3; Norman, 4; Vázquez, 6.
19
Eibhlyn (File 2 of 2), 8.

315
not yet gone into recovery over their irrational fear of queerness.”
20
In translating the
terminology of Marxist analysis into a language of self-help, Matthews not only
suggested his fluency in both idioms, but also suggested that a Marxist language was
falling out of favor – even if a newer politics remained unclear.
The 1991 “Queer Relations” panel occurred amidst a global transition that the
event’s speakers approached with uncertainty. Certainly, activists around the world have
seized new ideas and new modes of organizing since the Cold War’s end. Yet in the
absence of widely felt global alternatives, the largest, best-known, and most well-funded
lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations in the U.S. locate themselves firmly
in a language of U.S. exceptionalism. And while a growing number of queer activists
within the U.S. describe sexual and gender freedom as inseparable from goals of
immigrant and welfare rights, health care, and ending police violence and imprisonment –
identifying themselves strongly with a politics of racial justice and global militancy
against capitalist containment – these activists have few resources to help them
understand the histories of their own politics.
21

Though queer people and politics in the U.S. are far more welcomed by straight
activists today than in decades prior, the substance of the connections between the rights
of sexual minorities and struggles for racial equality, against poverty and war, are less

20
Matthews, 8.
21
A growing number of activists and organizations describe sexual freedom as inseparable from goals of
immigrant and welfare rights, health care, and ending police violence and imprisonment. For some insight
into to this mode of queer politics, see the “Queer Radicalism” articles in Left Turn #32 (April/May 2009),
especially profiles of Southerners on New Ground (SONG) and the Audre Lorde Project (ALP).

316
fully considered. Alliance has come to be seen in pragmatic, not visionary terms, because
the left in general is more contained, more pragmatic and less visionary, with coalitions
centered around campaigns but not about longer-term ideas. Weak analogies between
race and sexuality continue to be made, in large part because comparisons rest on
understanding race only through a narrow definition of “civil rights.” By contrast, those
queer activists who thought deeply about racial formation and global power – who
embraced an anti-imperialist analysis – arrived at more systemic understandings of
sexuality and claimed far wider political ground.
Recapturing the history of queer anti-imperialism integrates queer history into
analyses of the “long 1960s”; highlights the lasting effects that the long 1960s carried for
activism into the later 1970s and the 1980s; and offers insight towards a more multiracial
and transnational queer history, one that situates sexuality firmly in relationship to the
politics of nation, race, and class. Further, recapturing this history reminds all of us that
we can imagine worlds beyond those currently allowed by the U.S. nation. We have
more multiracial and transnational genealogies on which to draw; we have larger scales at
which we can belong.

317
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APPENDIX
List of Archives
Ethnic Studies Library – University of California, Berkeley
Freedom Archives – San Francisco
Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, & Transgender Historical Society (GLBTHS) – San Francisco
Hoover Institution Archives – Stanford University
Los Angeles City Archives – Los Angeles
ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives (ONE) – Los Angeles
Southern California Library for Social Studies & Research – Los Angeles

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This dissertation considers the meanings that radical critiques of empire carried for queer activism in California from the high Sixties through the Reagan Era. A social movement history, the dissertation draws on organizational archives, periodicals, memoirs and collected oral histories, and ephemera to closely consider queer radicals’ political language, ideological debates, and activist work. Moving across an era marked at its outset by the founding of the Black Panther Party (1966) and at its end by the defeat of the Nicaraguan Revolution (1990), the study reveals the transformative meanings that racial militancy, national liberation, and international solidarity held for radical sexual politics in the latter half of the Cold War.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Hobson, Emily Katherine (author)

Core Title Imagining alliance: queer anti-imperialism and race in California, 1966-1990

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Degree Conferral Date 2009-08

Publication Date 08/08/2009

Defense Date 06/01/2009

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag 1960s,activism,anti-imperialism,California,gay,lesbian,OAI-PMH Harvest,queer,race,radicalism

Place Name California (states)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Sanchez, George J. (committee chair), Deverell, William F. (committee member), Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (committee member), Kelley, Robin D.G. (committee member), Román, David (committee member)

Creator Email ekhobson@gmail.com,hobson@femst.ucsb.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m2554

Unique identifier UC1456595

Identifier etd-Hobson-3033 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-263861 (legacy record id),usctheses-m2554 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Hobson-3033.pdf

Dmrecord 263861

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Hobson, Emily K.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu