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Great Wall Institute: The Process of the Great Wall of Los Angeles

1970s Gay Rights Activist John Rechy 1

John Rechy was born March 10th, 1931 in El Paso to Roberto and Guadalupe (neé Flores) Rechy who were in much reduced circumstances after fleeing the 1910 Mexican Revolution. He studied journalism at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) and The New School. After serving in the Army in Germany he returned to New York where he discover the hustling scene. Rechy taught film and creative writing at the University of Southern California in the 80s and in 1997 received the PEN-USA lifetime achievement award. Rechy's novels include: City of Night, Numbers, This Day's Death, The Vampires, The Fourth Angel Rushes Bodies and Souls, Marilyn's Daughter, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, Our Lady of Babylon, The Coming of the Night, and The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens.

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2. 1970 Gay Liberation Front 2 Demonstrators are carrying signs as they parade down Hollywood Boulevard calling to end the discrimination against homosexuals, June 29, 1970, in Hollywood, Cali. Police estimations stated over 1,100 men and women participating in the march, with more than 25,000 people watching from the sidewalks. Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the name of several gay liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots. Similar organizations also formed in the UK and Canada.
3. 1970 Gay Liberation Front 3
4. 1970 Gay Liberation Front 4 GLF protests forced the owner of the West Hollywood bar The Farm to rescind the no-touching rule prevalent at gay bars at the time, 1970. The GLF provided a voice for the newly-out and newly-radicalized gay community, and a meeting place for a number of activists who would go on to form other groups, such as the Gay Activists Alliance and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in the US. In the UK and Canada, activists also developed a platform for gay liberation and demonstrated for gay rights. Activists from both the US and UK groups would later go on to found or be active in groups including ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Stonewall.
5. 1975 Christopher Street West Pride Parade The Gay Pride parade on Hollywood Boulevard in 1975. Before Stonewall, the Queer Revolution Started Right Here in Los Angeles. L.A. gays launched the movement (and the battle cry) that shook the world. Founded in 1970 and incorporated in 1976, Christopher Street West Association, Inc. is a nonprofit service organization within the LGBTQ community. The organization was responsible for organizing the world's first LGBTQ pride parade, which took place in Los Angeles. The original intent behind this parade was to celebrate LGBTQ resistance during the 1969 New York Stonewall Riots and to provide an experience in which LGBTQ individuals could feel pride in their identities, see others like themselves in a public setting, and not feel alone. The first pride parade took place on June 28, 1970, with approximately 1,000 people in attendance. Since its beginnings in the early 1970s, the parade now known as LA PRIDE has had a mardi gras-like and carnivalesque quality, presenting political platforms and viewpoints in a fun and celebratory manner. Each year, the parade reflects current social and cultural happenings within the LGBTQ community.
6. 1976 Christopher Street West Pride Parade
8. 1977 Christopher Street West Pride Parade 2
9. 1977 Christopher Street West Pride Parade 3 “Dressed in flowing gowns with Carmen Miranda-type headgear, a car load of participants in the Gay Pride Parade rolls down Hollywood Boulevard.” Photograph dated June 23, 1977. According to first-hand accounts of the first appearance before the L.A. Police Commission, Police Chief Ed Davis began by asking, “Did you know homosexuality is illegal in the State of California?” After a short debate over the issue, the chief made his position even more clear. “Well, I want to tell you something. As far as I’m concerned, granting a parade permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers.”
10. 1978 Christopher Street West Pride Parade
11. 1973 Reverend Troy Perry
12. 1973 Reverend Troy Perry stands in his burned-down church The church has also endured its share of troubles. MCC has faced anti-LGBTQ violence, particularly during what Perry terms a period of persecution in the 1970s when they lost five churches to arson—including a New Orleans gay bar called the Upstairs Lounge where MCC members were holding a meeting; it was the worst mass murder of LGBTQ persons in the U.S. until the Pulse night club massacre in 2016. According to the MCC History Project, their churches began to experience the full brunt of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s; the Rev. Elder Don Eastman wrote that by the time effective HIV treatments became available in 1996, MCC had lost one-third of its congregants. “I don’t believe that any disease, I don’t care what it is, is a gift from God to a class of people,” Perry said to the Rev. Jerry Falwell in 1983 during a televised debate. “We don’t want political games played with this issue. We want to make sure that people don’t die.”
13. 1970 Reverend Troy Perry at First Los Angeles Pride Parade Troy Perry in L.A.'s first Pride parade, 1970. In 1968, after a suicide attempt, and witnessing a close friend being arrested at The Patch Bar, Perry felt called to return to his faith and to offer a place for gay people to worship God. Perry put an advertisement in The Advocate announcing a worship service designed for gays in Los Angeles. Twelve people turned up on October 6, 1968 for the first service, and "Nine were my friends who came to console me and to laugh, and three came as a result of the ad." After six weeks of services in his living room, the congregation shifted to a women's club, an auditorium, a church, and finally a theater. In 1971, their own building was dedicated with over a thousand members in attendance.
14. 1972 Reverend Troy Perry officiates a same-sex wedding 1
15. 1972 Reverend Troy Perry officiates a same-sex wedding 2
16. 1970 The Metropolitan Community Church Ad for the MCC San Francisco, 1970. The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), is an international LGBT-affirming mainline Protestant Christian denomination. There are 222 member congregations in 37 countries, and the fellowship has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and communities. The first congregation was founded in Huntington Park, California, by former Pentecostal pastor Troy Perry on October 6, 1968. The first congregation originally met in Perry's Huntington Park home. The church first gained publicity by ads taken out in The Advocate magazine.
17. 1973 MCC New Orleans MCC New Orleans today at 5401 S. Claiborne Ave. Metropolitan Community Church of New Orleans is an LGBT-affirmative church in New Orleans. It is a member of the Metropolitan Community Church denomination. The MCC has a long history in the city of New Orleans, dating back to the 1970s. A small congregation, led by Reverend William "Bill" Larson, formed in 1971 and first started holding Sunday afternoon services at St. George's Episcopal Church run by Father Bill P. Richardson. June 24, 1973, when the UpStairs Lounge arson attack took the lives of Larson and other members of the congregation. It was one of two dozen attacks on MCC churches over the years, but it was the deadliest eventually taking thirty-two lives including both the pastor and associate pastor, the casualties included one third of the local MCC chapter.
18. 1973 MCC New Orleans UpStairs Fire 1 Firemen give first aid to survivors of the UpStairs fire, June 25, 1973, in New Orleans. The UpStairs Lounge arson attack occurred on June 24, 1973 at a gay bar called the UpStairs Lounge located on the second floor of the three-story building at 604 Iberville Street in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the United States. Thirty-two people died and at least fifteen were injured as a result of fire or smoke inhalation. The official cause is still listed as "undetermined origin". The primary suspect, a gay man with a history of psychiatric impairment named Roger Dale Nunez who had been ejected from the bar earlier in the day, was never charged and killed himself in November 1974. Until the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, i, the UpStairs Lounge arson attack was the deadliest attack on a gay club in U.S. history.
19. 1973 MCC New Orleans UpStairs Fire 2 The UpStairs Lounge in the French Quarter was gutted by a fire June 25, 1973. Most of the victims were found near the windows in the background. The club was located on the second floor of a three-story building at the corner of Chartres and Iberville Streets. Members of the MCC, a pro-LGBT Protestant denomination, were there after service. The MCC was the United States' first national gay Christian fellowship, founded in Los Angeles in 1968; the local congregation had held services in the UpStairs Lounge theatre for a while. The fire was the third arson attack to affect the MCC, following a January 27, 1973, arson at the church's headquarters in Los Angeles and another 1973 arson at an MCC church in Nashville, Tennessee.
20. 1973 MCC New Orleans UpStairs Fire 3 June 25, 1973 headline from the Times-Picayune newspaper following the UpStairs Lounge fire. Twenty-eight people died at the scene of the sixteen-minute fire, and one died en route to the hospital. Another 18 suffered injuries, of whom three, including Boggs, died. Soon after two additional memorial services were held on July 1 at a Unitarian church and St. Mark's United Methodist Church, headed by Louisiana's Methodist bishop Finis Crutchfield and led by MCC founder Reverend Troy Perry, who came from Los Angeles to participate.
21. 1972 BCC The Tolerant Temple 1 The founding of the Beth Chayim Chadashim occurred on April 4, 1972, when four Jews were attending a weekly rap group at Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles. Those present that evening were Jerry Small z”l, Jerry Gordon z”l, Selma Kay z”l, and Bob Zalkin. When Small expressed unhappiness with a church policy, he was asked why he didn’t simply object, and he said he wasn’t a church member. They quickly discovered none of them were members because all were Jewish. “We could not vote unless we accepted Christ—and that wasn’t going to happen. Then someone said maybe we should form a gay temple.” They then set out to translate their unprecedented vision into reality. They dared to dream of creating a safe place where they could affirm and integrate their identities as lesbians, gay men and Jews.
22. 1972 BCC The Tolerant Temple 2 Reverend Troy Perry sometime in the early 1970s. They turned to Rev. Perry, who hosted a meeting in his office. As Rev. Perry recalled 25 years later, “Obviously, I’m not Jewish, and I didn’t know much about Judaism or starting a synagogue, but I told them, ‘No matter what you do, make sure you make it really Jewish.’” About a dozen women and men responded to the call to an ad hoc committee meeting on May 9, 1972, to discuss what was to become the world’s first synagogue founded by and for lesbians and gay men. During the organizational meetings that followed, the new congregation began to form committees to draw up bylaws, establish membership criteria and a dues policy, and organize religious services and social events. It was decided that no dues would be charged to members; instead a hat would be passed during services to collect funds.
23. 1973 BCC The Tolerant Temple 1 L.A. Times photo of MCC fire, January 28, 1973. Shortly after midnight, Milt Jinowsky z”l, was on his way home and heard on the radio that the MCC building was on fire. “With one accord, the entire group of us, about 20 or so persons, left in our cars. We raced to the scene of the fire. There we surrounded the Fire Chief. ‘Our Torah is in that building—we have to get it out.’ We all shouted at him. The Fire Chief, overwhelmed by the sheer number of us and our almost hysterical insistence, finally asked us to select one member to go into the burning building with him. “Unanimously we turned to our new president-elect, Stu. His first act as President was to enter the burning building with the Fire Chief and rescue our Torah. He was gone such a long time, more fire trucks arrived, the flames shot skyward as the spire burned more fiercely, the firemen were pushing us back to the sidewalk—‘Where is he?’ we asked each other. ‘Has Stu come out yet?’ Then, out of the smoke, with his pants legs rolled up—came Stu— tenderly carrying our Torah in his arms! We all broke into tears! “Our Torah was water damaged, but safe. That night, we spent the entire night tenderly unrolling our Torah, both men and women, reverently weighing down the wet corners so that it might dry. Both men and women spent the night on their knees—thanking God silently for our Torah and carefully putting books, papers and weights wrapped in wax paper on the curling sheepskin. Our togetherness was never closer than at that moment…” While the Torah was rescued (although another account said that in spite of these efforts, it was later decided that the scroll was damaged beyond repair and had to be buried), the MCC building sustained $160,000 in damage, was deemed a total loss and ultimately torn down. Although the fire was initially determined to be of suspicious origin, arson was later ruled out by the Fire Department, but doubts as to the cause persist to this day.
24. 1973 BCC The Tolerant Temple 2 Cover of the first BCC newsletter, September 1973. After an eventful first year punctuated by the great fire at the Metropolitan Community Church where the fledgling congregation had met, and by the dedication of our Holocaust survivor Torah, BCC began a decade of growth and of finding its way into the mainstream of Jewish life in Los Angeles, the Reform Movement, and the emerging world community of LGBT Jews. A Pioneer in Egalitarian Worship. By its second year BCC was experiencing growing pains. Rabbi Herman, a strong supporter of BCC, wrote: “Tensions sprang up within the group, which soon found itself divided on issues of traditionalism vs. non traditionalism, acceptance or rejection of non-Jews into membership, rigid vs. fluid constitution, etc…” The “etc.” included such issues as ongoing conflicts between the congregation’s men and women (of the 60 members, less than half were women), and whether or not to accept heterosexuals as members.
25. 1973 BCC The Tolerant Temple 3 During these early years, BCC engaged with the wider Jewish community in L.A. and became an organizational member of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. Rabbis Beerman, Herman and Ragins each submitted passionate responsa in support of BCC’s application. Rabbi Herman wrote: “We responded by offering the facilities of our office for the formation of their synagogue, as we have done in the past and will continue to do in the future to any group of Jews who demonstrate to our satisfaction that they are sincerely interested in the creation of a synagogue.” Rabbi Ragins wrote: “…And what then of this Metropolitan Community Temple, this Beth Chayim Chadashim established to reach out to Jewish homosexuals? Is its existence justified? Should it receive our support and cooperation? Again, I believe the answer is clear. In principle, such a synagogue should not exist, because all synagogues should be so open that all Jews may feel fully welcome and at home in them. But clearly, this is not the way our world or our family-oriented congregations are constituted today. Until the temples we already have are able to accept Jewish homosexuals in their homosexuality…homosexuals who want their own congregations should not only be allowed to have them.”
26. 1979 BCC The Tolerant Temple Beth Chayim Chadashim in the Los Angeles Christopher Street West pride parade, 1979. BCC experienced growing pains as the congregation debated the acceptance of heterosexuals (typically the relatives of gay members) as members and as lesbian feminists questioned the male-centric services. This same year, BCC applied for membership in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (later the Union for Reform Judaism). After a heated debate among the rabbis, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations agreed to include the BCC in their group of congregations, making it the first gay congregation of any denomination to be recognized by its governing body.
27. 1970s Dignity Church 1 Dignity Church New York during at a pride march in the early 1980s. While independent Protestant ministers like Perry were able to form new LGBT-friendly churches, the more rigid and hierarchical Catholic Church, typically prevented priests from ministering to this community. A rare exception to this rule was a Catholic priest named Father Patrick X. Nidorf. In 1969, Nidorf started the first ministry for gay and lesbian Catholics that would come to be called Dignity. Father “Pat” put advertisements in the Los Angeles Free Press about the new ministry, which instructed interested parties to contact him. As a precautionary measure, Nidorf required all new members to complete an application form, and in some cases submit to a personal interview. Originally based in San Diego, the meetings eventually moved to private homes in Los Angeles, where most of the members were based. As the group grew, Nidorf, like Perry, ran ads in The Advocate.
28. 1970s Dignity Church 2 Demonstrators attend the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights in 1979. The first official branch of Dignity was formed in 1970 in Los Angeles with a draft constitution and chairman, Bob Fourier. Dignity’s first meeting on church property was in the basement of St. Brendan’s Church on Van Ness Avenue. The next year, Nidorf sent a letter to the Archdiocese asking for Dignity to be officially recognized. Predictably, and as Nidorf feared, the letter was not well received and the Archbishop asked Father Pat to cut off ties with the group. He resigned February 20, 1971. However, the departure of their founder was not a deterrent, and by 1973 Dignity was a nationwide organization with multiple chapters across the United States. Today, Dignity is still a national presence that continues to promote LGBT-rights within the Catholic community.
29. 1970 Griffith Park Gay-in 1 A crowd gathers at the “Gay-in” at Griffith Park, Los Angeles in 1970. Griffith Park was one of L.A.’s most notorious spots for men to cruise after dark. But perhaps Griffith Park is more well-known in L.A. queer history as the site of the 1968 "Gay-Ins" organized by the Gay Liberation Front. "Gay-Ins," a riff on the hippie “be-ins” at the time, were gatherings that combined education and recreation, starting with a primer on police harassment and ending with a bar crawl that ran late into the evening.
30. 1970 Griffith Park Gay-in 2 “Gay-in at Griffith Park”, Screenprint, 26 in High x 22.5 in Wide. 1970. Poster has a bright pink background with black lettering and black and green images. In the center are two men embracing each other, one has his fist raised. Both men have on dark green shirts and black jackets. In the upper left are two women. One woman has on a green shirt and the other has on a black turtleneck. The poster reads, "Gay-in at Griffith park merry-go-round April 5/ come together ... reach out and join hands with your brother and sisters."
35. 1970s Gay Urbanism 1 Dancing at Studio One in West Hollywood, Mid 1970s. Gay Urbanism might be coming to an end, a fate signaled by the recent closures of Jewel’s Catch One on Pico and the French Market Place in West Hollywood, among dozens of other historic gay establishments. Like hippies, Chicanos, and African Americans in the 1960s and ‘70s, gays and lesbians needed places to connect and gather. During this time, the LGBTQ community was transitioning from an ephemeral underground life of tearooms, parks, alleys, and private homes to brick-and-mortar establishments.
36. 1970s Gay Urbanism 2 Dancing at Studio One in West Hollywood, Mid 1970s. In Los Angeles, “white flight” had cleared older areas for gays and lesbians, creating cheap land and more tolerant zoning. The early gay-rights movement took advantage of this phenomenon, finding a place in urban America to establish itself by merging civil rights activism with place-making. In L.A., that place was West Hollywood – an island of unincorporated county jurisdiction between the municipalities of Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, and already home to entertainment establishments dating from the heyday of the Sunset Strip. While Latinos transformed East Los Angeles by painting murals (among other design interventions), gays and lesbians transformed West Hollywood by opening bars, clubs, discos, and bathhouses.
37. 1970s Gay Urbanism 3 Gay Community Services Center, 1971. Nothing brought the LGBTQ community together like dancing – especially among African-American and Latino gays and lesbians – and L.A. was the epicenter of this phenomenon. Dance clubs appeared virtually overnight, transforming warehouses, storefronts, and tiny bars – the places from which emerged the city’s DJ culture. Because the gays and lesbians of West Hollywood – like the Latinos of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles – were not then a particularly wealthy community, they had to work with the existing landscapes they inherited. West Hollywood’s cheap land, easy construction, and lack of urban design codes made possible its transformation into a gay utopia.
38. 1970s Gay Urbanism 4
39. 1970s Gay Urbanism 5 The French Market – one the most outrageous of these places that was not a dance club. As a dining establishment, the French Market faced several challenges. Diners like Arthur Jays were already popular among the gay community, and West Hollywood was not a foodie place, so gourmet food would not necessarily attract gay patrons. Instead, the creators of the French Market turned to design. The French Market’s designers transformed the shell of an old market into New Orleans’ French Quarter. The French Market Place attempted to recreate the street life of New Orleans’ Bourbon Street in West Hollywood by building outdoor seating along Santa Monica Boulevard. Places like the French Market helped West Hollywood join the ranks of San Francisco’s Castro District and New York’s Greenwich Village as a gay and lesbian tourist destination.
40. 1970s Liberation Houses 1 In addition to fliers and GCSC meetings, potential Liberation House residents could encounter the program via pornography and entertainment. October, 1974. The need for housing was one of the premier concerns that led to the 1971 founding of the Gay Community Services Center (GCSC). Founders Morris Kight, Don Kilhefner, and Jon Platania had all been affiliated with the GLF-LA in one way or another, but recognized that the need for social services within the broader queer community were becoming acute.
41. 1970s Liberation Houses 2 The Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center (GCSC), 1974. As Martin Meeker has argued, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay travel guides and pulp novels encouraged scores of queer men and women to migrate to imagined queer communities throughout the nation, including Los Angeles.16 GCSC founders estimated that “100-300 young gay men and women arrive each month in the city of Los Angeles.” These migrants appeared to be “young people with inadequate financing and few marketable job skills.” Most had either fled or “been rejected by their biological families.”Providing physical and emotional shelter for these migrants was the objective of Los Angeles Gay Liberation Houses, the first of which opened in 1970 before the official founding of the GCSC.
42. 1970s Liberation Houses 3 Contact sheet of young men at the Gay Community Services Center Liberation House, 1971. By 1975, the GCSC was operating six Liberation Houses sporadically throughout Los Angeles, mainly in the Hollywood and Downtown areas. Far from perfect, the Liberation House program faced serious obstacles that sometimes resulted in mixed results for residents. The early facilities did not have a sophisticated screening process. Notes on the residents were usually brief: one read, “Model resident; stayed for 9 months; found housing with friends.” Another read simply, “Stayed 2 days; psychotic; do not readmit.” These indicate that the Liberation Houses were often faced with complex issues, such as mental health concerns, that were far beyond the scope of the early GCSC.
43. 1970s Liberation Houses 4 Stanley Williams was the shop manager for the Gay Community Services Center Gaywill Funky Shoppe, 1972. While Liberation Houses were an effective grassroots solution to the complex issue of queer homelessness, these types of problems indicated that structural state support would be needed to enhance the organizational apparatus of the program. That being said, Liberation Houses did provide important opportunities for many queer men and women, especially those new to the city. Queer relationships, community, and politics were forged in the housing program. Moreover, the houses strengthened a discourse within the Gay Liberation movement in Los Angeles that stressed economics, housing, and family-building, all of which would become central to the organizational structure of the GCSC as it evolved.
46. 1974 San Francisco Pride Parade Marchers holding “Gay Freedom by ’76” banner at O’Farrell and Polk during Gay Freedom Day Parade, June 30th, 1974. Homosexuals had always been marginal to the culture, anomalies within it; thus, liberated homosexuals—gay men and women—had, as they saw it, a privileged position from which to observe it. In changing their own lives, they would provide a model for other gay men and women, in the generations to come; in breaking sex taboos, they would change the whole society.
47. 1978 San Francisco Pride Parade 1 Hundreds of Gay Freedom Day Parade participants march through United Nations Plaza, San Francisco, June 25th, 1978. In San Francisco, these young men had not only changed their lives but also found a community, a cause, and an intellectual endeavor, all in one. The homophile leaders had been engaged in a civil-rights struggle, but gay liberation had widened the task, for, like feminism, it offered a new perspective on the whole culture.
50. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life 1 Sunbathers hangout near a bus stop in the Castro District, San Francisco. Sometime during the mid to late 1970s. To a great degree, gay men—and, to a lesser degree, gay women—were building themselves a world apart from the rest of San Francisco. Gay men could spend days, or an entire week, going to their offices, to the cleaner, to the bank and the health club, dining in restaurants, attending political meetings, and going to church without seeing anyone who was not gay. Some, such as Bob Ross, the head of the gay Tavern Guild, said that they actually did just that on occasion. Others normally lived all but their working lives within gay society.
51. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life 2 The first large group of lesbians in the San Francisco Gay Parade, invited by Harvey Milk, 1974. Kinsey Institute researchers, for example, over half of the gay white females they interviewed said they had had less than ten sexual partners; most of the gay women they talked to rarely cruised and rarely had casual sex; they tended to be monogamous, serially. According to gay therapists I spoke with, a major problem for gay men often lay in developing intimate relationships; gay women often had the reverse of that problem their relationships were generally so close and so emotionally intense that even the unhappiest of couples would have difficulty separating. If gay-male society seemed in many ways impersonal and atomistic, lesbian society often seemed to be private and intimate to the point of suffocation. While gay men flocked to bars and bathhouses, gay women nested at home or gathered in small groups.
52. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life 3 Castro Street Fair in August 1976. The Castro was no longer poor, and in a sense it was no longer a neighborhood. Milk had railed against the city’s spending money on making San Francisco a tourist center, but now the Castro had become a mecca for gay tourists. The air shuttle between Los Angeles and San Francisco was now nicknamed the Gay Express, for every Friday night it was filled with gay Angelenos coming to town for the weekend. New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and others would spend their vacations in San Francisco, staying at gay hotels, going to gay restaurants, and shopping at gay stores. In the summertime, you could hear the accents of New York and Houston on the streets of the Castro, and also of London, Paris, and Sydney. Then, too, with many of those who came as tourists returning to settle, the Castro was becoming the hub of a vast redevelopment project. Gay people were moving into Noe Valley and the Mission district; they were moving into the Haight-Fillmore district and settling the back slopes of Pacific Heights, painting and refurbishing as they went. In some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, Victorian façades blossomed with decorator paint.
53. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life 4 Castro Street during the the 1970s. Harvey Milk, spoke of gay people as an oppressed minority and promised to make common cause with the racial-minority groups in the city and with the poor. But the gay immigrants were now calling this alliance in question. They might be refugees from oppression, but they were also mostly young white men who had arrived in town at the very moment for beginning their careers. In practice, they were taking professional and managerial jobs, or they were staffing the numerous new service industries, or they were starting businesses of their own. In many ways, they were proving a boon to the city. By pioneering the dilapidated neighborhoods, they were helping to reverse the white and middle-class flight to the suburbs, thus increasing the tax base both directly and indirectly. Since they had no children, they made no demands on the schools, and they had more income than the average family man or woman to spend both on entertainment and on housing. They were supporting the opera, the ballet, and other cultural institutions of the city. But in settling the poor neighborhoods they were pushing real-estate prices up and pushing black and Hispanic families out.
54. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life: Bath Houses 1 Advertising for a San Francisco Bath House, sometime in the 1970s. Once the Consenting Adult Sex Bill decriminalized sodomy in California in 1976, the baths increasingly functioned as cultural centers “that could both shape and respond to the rapid social, sexual, and political changes that were taking place” by providing gay men an opportunity to specifically interact with other gay men. Although men could no longer be prosecuted, they still faced harassment by police given that the privacy afforded by the baths was disputed. It was not until 1978 that the San Francisco District Attorney finally emphasized, “There’s no question this (bathhouse) was a private place,” in response to a raid at the Liberty Baths involving three arrests. However, bathhouses would soon face a new form of regulation.
55. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life: Bath Houses 2 Inside a San Francisco Bath House, sometime in the 1970s. Despite police mistreatment, bathhouses endured and grew as cultural centers for San Francisco’s gay community until 1984. However, on March 27, at a meeting of the Harvey Milk Democratic Club, Larry Littlejohn, founder of the homophile organization Society for Individual Rights, introduced a municipal ballot initiative that aimed to close down the baths as a response to the raging AIDS epidemic. Larry was a sex venue owner himself, yet he endorsed the initiative, which held particular weight in the community.
56. 1970s San Fransisco Gay Life: Bath Houses 3 Advertising for a San Francisco Bath House, sometime in the 1970s. The following morning, a local gay newspaper published an article titled “Pride Founder Will Circulate Stop Sex Petition for Ballot,” spreading panic and forcing city officials and community members to formulate a public response to the proposed closures. This editorial sparked community outrage, including a Letters to the Editor Section spanning over three pages. Many in the community resisted the initiative and particularly singled out Littlejohn as “Little Brain,” “Judas Little John,” and “the hemorrhoid on the asshole of the gay community”–with the final comment coming from the owner of another prominent San Francisco bathhouse.
57. 1978 Harvey Milk at Pride Parade 1 Harvey Milk being on top of a car during the Gay Freedom Day Parade in June, 1978. After moving to San Francisco in the early 1970s, Milk established himself as a leading political activist for the gay community. Winning a seat on the city’s Board of Supervisors, he emerged as one of the country’s preeminent openly gay elected officials, spearheading an important anti-discrimination measure. Milk was murdered in November 1978 by a former colleague, Dan White.
58. 1978 Harvey Milk at Pride Parade 2 Supervisor Harvey Milk during the Gay Freedom Day Parade in June, 1978. Born into a middle-class Jewish family, Milk had attended teachers’ college in upstate New York and then gone into the Navy and quickly become an officer. He had spent nearly four years in the Pacific, and left on his own accord. He returned to Long Island and taught high-school history and math for a few years; then he left, going to Dallas, with a lover, for no better reason than to get out of the cold weather. He soon moved back to New York. He took a job as an actuarial statistician for an insurance company, then one as a researcher for a Wall Street investment firm. Both jobs bored him eventually—as did running a camera store in the Castro. He seemed to be a hippie who had taken a long time to discover that he was one. He was, in fact, a born politician, and at the age of forty-three he had finally found his vocation.
61. 1976 Harvey Milk on the Campaign Trail 1 Harvey Milk passes out fliers at a San Francisco Safeway grocery store during his 1976 state assembly run. Harvey Milk loved campaigning; that was the real secret of his success. For months out of every year, he would let his business drift into further disarray in order to get up at five in the morning and shake hands at bus stops, to visit people in the neighborhood, to speak at every meeting that he was invited to. He organized a Castro Village business association and the annual Castro Street Fair; he persuaded gay bars across the city to boycott Coors beer in aid of a union campaign. He became a figure in the neighborhood, and, eventually, one who could get things done.
62. 1976 Harvey Milk on the Campaign Trail 2 Harvey Milk on the campaign trail in 1976. Harvey Milk is internationally renowned as an LGBTQ hero, having used his position as the first out LGBTQ elected official in California to loudly fight back against the tornado of anti-LGBTQ discrimination furiously whipping the country into a frenzy with the rise of the Moral Majority and Anita Bryant’s crusade to “save our children” in 1977. Effectively using his bullhorn on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Milk helped lead the nail-biting successful campaign to stop the Briggs Initiative, which would have permitted the firing of gay teachers and their allies in 1978.
63. 1976 Harvey Milk on the Campaign Trail 3 Harvey Milk meets Jimmy Carter, May 1976. Milk could afford to laugh, for in five years of campaigning he had become a powerful speaker—articulate, witty, and capable of pulling out the full range of rhetorical stops. On the rostrum, Briggs was no contest for him, and in November Milk’s political judgment turned out to be correct. The teachers’ associations viewed the Briggs Initiative as threatening to teachers and to the cause of civil liberties in general, and campaigned vigorously against it. The liberal politicians in the state came out against it, but so, too, did former Governor Ronald Reagan. President Carter came out against the initiative, as did former President Ford. On Election Day, Californians voted two to one against it. The defeat of the Briggs Initiative was a personal triumph for Milk.
66. 1978 Harvey Milk Elected 2 Supervisor Harvey Milk at Mayor George Moscone's desk, March 7, 1978. Milk became nationally famous for his “coming out” speeches. “Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets,” Milk said during one rally against the anti-gay Briggs Initiative. After receiving daily death threats, Milk said in his audiotaped will: “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
68. 1978 Dan White 2 On November 27, 1978, the former Supervisor Dan White crept into City Hall through a basement window, armed with a .38 revolver. White had resigned his post just months earlier, and had unsuccessfully asked that he be reinstated. Angered that his hope of returning to the Board was denied, he confronted and killed Mayor Moscone, then strode across the building to Milk’s office, where he murdered his former colleague with five shots. White was quickly apprehended, and that night, tens of thousands of Milk supporters marched to City Hall for a peaceful candlelight vigil. At the subsequent trial, the defense argued that White was operating under severe mental distress due to the loss of his job, citing his junk-food diet as evidence of diminished morale. The strategy was derided as the “Twinkie Defense,” but his situation seemed to strike a chord with the jury. On May 21, 1979, White was sentenced to less than eight years in prison for voluntary manslaughter.
69. 1978 Dan White 3 Outside San Francisco’s Hall of Justice, as Dan White was sentenced to seven years and eight months in prison (which he served 5) for the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, November 27, 1978. In 1998, Frank Falzon, the homicide inspector with the San Francisco police to whom White had surrendered after the murders, said that he met with White in 1984, and that at this meeting White had confessed that he had intended to kill not only Moscone and Milk, but another supervisor, Carol Ruth Silver, as well as then-member of the California State Assembly and future San Francisco mayor Willie Brown. Falzon quoted White as having said, "I was on a mission. I wanted four of them. Carol Ruth Silver, she was the biggest snake ... and Willie Brown, he was masterminding the whole thing."
70. 1979 White Night Riots 1
71. 1979 White Night Riots 2 Police cars on fire at Civic Center. The blurry figure in the foreground is a running cameraperson. As the crowd grew, so did the anger. Police soon arrived to try to control the situation, but that only served to enrage the crowd more. The police had raised over $100,000 for White’s defense–he was a former police officer–and many in the community believed the department had conspired to reduce White’s charges and sentencing. Although ordered to simply hold the crowd back, many officers began attacking the protestors with night sticks. Many had even taped over their badges, so as not to be identified.
72. 1979 White Night Riots 3 Demonstrators smash glass out of the front doors of the San Francisco City Hall. Thousands marched to city hall, protesting the voluntary manslaughter conviction of Dan White in the fatal shootings of Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk, May 22, 1979. San Francisco. Chaos erupted, as the crowd fought with police and destroyed a dozen police vehicles, as well as parts of City Hall itself. After three hours, officers moved in to quell the rioting for good, using tear gas in the process, and the crowd dispersed. In all, 59 officers and 124 protestors were injured, with about two dozen arrests made.
73. 1979 White Night Riots 4 A demonstrator smashes at the door of City Hall during the White Night riots. May 22, 1979 So it was with great grief — and great anger — that the city learned that afternoon White had been found guilty of voluntary manslaughter, not murder. With good behavior, he'd likely serve just five years in prison. "It wasn't planned as a riot," The Chronicle front page story later read. "It was hardly planned at all."
74. 1979 White Night Riots 5 Protesters march during the riots that took place after the Dan White verdict. May 22, 1979 "'What's wrong with San Francisco?' was being asked again yesterday, again for all the right and wrong reasons," famed columnist Herb Caen wrote. "A middle-class jury, not a bunch of kooks by any stretch, had decided one can kill, twice, complete with coup de grace, and get away with it." Shock reverberated through the city. As news spread, the gay community began heading to City Hall.
75. 1979 White Night Riots 6 Police rest on the City Hall steps after the White Night riots in the aftermath of the Dan White verdict. May 22, 1979. Hours later, several police officers gathered on their own to raid the Castro neighborhood, vandalizing a local bar and assaulting patrons. They shouted anti-gay slurs at the victims, and eventually turned their attention to attacking anyone that happened to be out on Castro Street. After two hours, Police Chief Charles Gain was made aware of the rogue officers’ activities, and he made his way to the Castro to put a stop to it. No officers were reprimanded for the attacks.
76. 1979 Harvey Milk's Legacy 1 On May 22, thousands gathered peacefully in the Castro to sing "happy birthday" to Harvey Milk, San Francisco, 1979. The day after the riot, on what would have been Milk’s 49th birthday, 20,000 San Franciscans gathered to remember him. That October, more than 75,000 people marched for gay rights in Washington, D.C., and gay rights activists from around the country were inspired to continue their fight.
77. 1979 Harvey Milk's Legacy 2 Harvey Milk outside his campaign office, mid to late 1970s. Although he spent less than a year in office, Milk’s brief time in the public eye marked an important stepping stone in the battle for gay rights. His story became known to wider audiences through Randy Shilts 1982 biography, “The Mayor of Castro Street,” and Rob Epstein’s 1984 Oscar-winning documentary, “The Times of Harvey Milk.”
78. 1979 Harvey Milk's Legacy 3 Supervisor Harvey Milk poses outside his camera shop after his 1977 election to the Board of Supervisors, September 11, 1977. Additionally, more elected officials, including Massachusetts Congressman Gerry Studds and Barney Frank, came forth to acknowledge their homosexuality during this period. In subsequent years, Milk’s name was attached to a series of schools, buildings and public centers throughout California. He was the subject of another acclaimed film in 2008, with actor Sean Penn and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black earning Academy Awards for their contributions to director Gus Van Sant’s biography, “Milk.”
79. 1970 New York Gay Liberation Front 1 Gay Liberation Front marches on Times Square, New York, 1970. In the 1960s and '70s, amid a climate of political upheaval and civil rights activism, LGBT communities across the US were uniting for visibility and change. Events like the 1969 Stonewall riots, which saw LGBT activists rise up against discrimination in New York City, helped to galvanize this movement by bringing together a generation of queer young people under a banner of pride.
80. 1970 New York Gay Liberation Front 2
81. 1972 New York Christopher Street Parade Jeanne Manford marching in support of her son 50 years ago, at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in 1972. Jeanne Manford made headlines 50 years ago when she marched with her openly gay son at the Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade – an early Pride event in New York City. Such behavior from a straight mom was unheard of at the time. The following year, Manford founded an organization for people like herself – PFLAG, which originally stood for Parents and Friends of Lesbians And Gays. Over time, PFLAG became a leader in the fight for gay rights. It was a cherished source of support for thousands of families, especially throughout the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. These days, Pride is a family event and PFLAG serves every member of the LGBTQIA community.
82. 1973 New York Gay Rights Demonstration Demonstration at City Hall, New York (from left: Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Jane Vercaine, Barbara Deming, Kady Vandeurs, Carol Grosberg, and others), 1973. Many of the people who were participating in the Stonewall riots were younger people — youths who were influenced by American counterculture, antiwar movements, and who had very different expectations of what activism was about compared to older generations. This was a different ideological framework that was much more confrontational and influenced by anarchism, Marxism, and civil rights protests.
83. 1977 New York Gay Rights Demonstration A gay-rights demonstration in New York's Greenwich Village, June 8, 1977. The decade of the 1970s, represent a remarkable period of transformation for gays and lesbians, particularly those living in America's coastal cities. At its core, that transformation was about visibility. During those years, there was the first gay television movie; a sexy on-screen kiss between two men in Sunday, Blood Sunday; and the release of Cabaret, which has been hailed as the first movie that "really celebrated homosexuality." There were gains in politics too: Edward Koch, then serving in Congress, "became one of the first elected officials to publicly lobby on behalf of the homosexuals of Greenwich Village," Kaiser writes. Gay Pride Week was established.
84. 1970 Lavender Menace 1 Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kisner, and Ellen Broidy participate in the “Lavender Menace” Action at the Second Congress to Unite Women, Chelsea, May 1st, 1970. The Lavender Menace or revolution was an informal group of lesbian radical feminists formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and their issues from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970. Members included Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo, and were mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organization for Women (NOW).
85. 1970 Lavender Menace 2 Rita Mae Brown, in Lavender Menace T-shirt, at the Lavender Menace Action, May 1st, 1970. The term "Lavender Menace" originated as a negative term for the association of lesbianism with the feminist movement, but it was later reclaimed as a positive term by lesbian feminists. The phrase "Lavender Menace" was reportedly first used in 1969 by Betty Friedan, president of The National Organization for Women (NOW), to describe the threat that she believed associations with lesbianism posed to NOW and the emerging women's movement. Friedan, and some other heterosexual feminists, worried that the association would hamstring feminists' ability to achieve serious political change, and that stereotypes of "mannish" and "man-hating" lesbians would provide an easy way to dismiss the movement.
86. 1970 Lavender Menace 3 Lita Lepie, Judy Cartisano, and Arlene Kisner storm the stage with signs reading “THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS A LESBIAN PLOT!”at the Second Congress to Unite Women, Chelsea, May 1st, 1970. Describing lesbian activist Rita Mae Brown, Karla Jay has said: "one thing that you were not going to tell Rita was to shut up." Brown suggested to her consciousness-raising group that lesbian radical feminists organize an action in response to Brownmiller's comments, and the public airing of Friedan's complaints. The group decided to target the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970, which they noticed featured not a single open lesbian on the program.
87. 1970 Lavender Menace 4 Created in 1970, "The Woman Identified Woman" was a manifesto outlining the core principles of radical lesbians that the Lavender Menace handed out at their "zap" of the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. The Lavender Menace was the pejorative name given to lesbians by feminist Betty Friedan. Friedan argued that increasingly politicized lesbians were a threat to the feminist movement and could hurt the national movement for social equity for women. Friedan was a member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and their stance was most women felt as if lesbian issues were irrelevant to them and that if they were to partner with lesbians, it would be harder to push policy makers in the right direction.
88. 1973 STAR 1 Sylvia Rivera (left) and Marsha P. Johnson (second from left) protest in a rally in New York City in 1973. Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was a gay, gender non-conforming and transvestite street activist organization founded in 1970 by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, sub culturally-famous New York City drag queens of color. STAR was a radical political collective that also provided housing and support to homeless LGBT youth and sex workers in Lower Manhattan. Rivera and Johnson were the "mothers" of the household, and funded the organization largely through sex work. STAR is considered by many to be a groundbreaking organization in the queer liberation movement and a model for other organizations.
89. 1973 STAR 2 Marsha P. Johnson, part of the “vanguard” during the Stonewall riots, was a prominent figure of the gay liberation movement. She and Sylvia Rivera created the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) house in 1970 to advocate for and provide housing, food, and clothing to LGBTQ homeless youth. Both activists faced the challenges of homelessness and through a fundraising event they were able to purchase the STAR house in 1970, a 4-bedroom apartment in the East Village. The organization is recognized as the first shelter for LGBTQ homeless youth in North America and one of the first organizations led by transgender people of color.
90. 1973 STAR 3 Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera at the 1973 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City. The term was reclaimed by lesbians within the women’s movement in 1970 who demanded inclusion and recognition. Some staff members from NOW resigned from their jobs to join the group. That same year members of the Lavender Menace disrupted the Second Congress to Unite Women, a conference sponsored by NOW by cutting the lights and changing into shirts with the name “lavender menace” on them, Lesbian rights were included in NOW’s six key issues in 1971 and in 1977, Betty Friedan apologized for her previous remarks and actively supported a resolution against sexual preference discrimination.
91. 1979 Asian Gay Rights Activism 1
93. 1977 Moral Majority 1 Singer and anti-gay activist Anita Bryant heads a crusade to nullify a local gay rights ordinance, Febuary 15, 1977. She called the group "Save Our Children" and said it represented the rights of the majority of citizens. Almost at the exact time that HIV cases first began to pop up in Los Angeles and New York, the LGBTQ civil rights struggle faced a reactionary backlash led by figures like Anita Bryant and Rev. Jerry Falwell, whose “Moral Majority” inveighed against giving rights to gay people.
94. 1977 Moral Majority 2 Anita Bryant at a “Save Our Children” campaign rally in Dade County, Florida. Perhaps piggy-backing British tabloid journalism of the 1950s and early 1960s whereby homophobia and fear mongering was published in popular newspaper media, Bryant used mass media including television, radio, newsprint, and organised political propaganda to campaign against equal rights for non-heterosexual people. The oppressive rhetoric of bigotry and homophobia replicated itself within media and flourished within dominant mainstream culture, contributing to same-sex-attracted people experiencing intense feelings of isolation and self-loathing.
95. 1977 Moral Majority 3 Fundraising card for the Save Our Children campaign. Save Our Children was based on conservative Christian beliefs regarding the sinfulness of homosexuality and the proposed threat of homosexual recruitment of children and child molestation. Bryant stated: “What these people really want, hidden behind obscure legal phrases, is the legal right to propose to our children that theirs is an acceptable alternate way of life…I will lead such a crusade to stop it as this country has not seen before.” She also perpetuated idea of the gay community 'recruiting' children through child abuse to become homosexual themselves. Bryant started promoting fear in the press to get families on her side. “The recruitment of our children is absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of homosexuality…for since homosexuals cannot reproduce, they must recruit, must freshen their ranks.”
96. 1977 Moral Majority 4 Anita Bryant reacts to being pied in the face by a gay protester during a press conference for her 1977 "Save Our Children" campaign in Dade County, Florida. During an October 14, 1977, press conference in Des Moines, Iowa, while reporters are questioning Anita Bryant about her national crusade against homosexuals, gay rights activist Tom Higgins throws a pie in Bryant's face, prompting her to pray for Higgins' salvation.
97. 1978 California Prop 6: Protest March 1 A march against the Briggs initiative in 1978. Local politicians and activists came together to oppose the Proposition 6 initiative through carefully crafted protests and media appearances. California Proposition 6, informally known as the Briggs Initiative, was a ballot initiative put to a referendum on the California state ballot in the November 7, 1978 election. It was sponsored by John Briggs, a conservative state legislator from Orange County. The failed initiative sought to ban gays and lesbians from working in California's public schools.
98. 1978 California Prop 6: Protest March 2
99. 1978 California Prop 6: Protest March 3 One sign reads,“Stop Briggs!” during an anti-prop 6 parade in San Diego 1978. The 1978 parade and the months that followed were focused on defeating the Briggs Initiative in the election. A “Save Our Teachers” movement began statewide on this task and the San Diego group became involved in planning the 1978 parade. Buttons and signs were made for the cause, and organizers worked to convince San Diego voters to cast down the Briggs Initiative. These efforts were successful and Prop 6 was defeated, a huge victory for the community.
100. 1978 California Prop 6: Protest Advertisment Advertisement against Proposition 6, an initiative sponsored by State Senator John Briggs to expel gay and lesbian teachers, 1978. The Briggs Initiative galvanized the California LGBTQ+ community, as well as state and national political figures. Harvey Milk, elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors the previous year, was arguably the most vocal and visible opponent of Proposition 6. More surprisingly, Ronald Reagan (then Governor of California) came out against it, as did both former US President Gerald Ford and current President Jimmy Carter. Anita Bryant made frequent appearances in support of Proposition 6 as part of the Save Our Children coalition. The referendum failed by a vote of 58.4% to 41.6%.
101. 1978 California Prop 6: John Briggs at Rally John Briggs at a rally support for prop 6, the measure was the first attempt to restrict gay and lesbian rights through a statewide ballot measure, 1978. The success of Anita Bryant's repeal of Dade County’s ordinance preventing discrimination based on sexual orientation sparked additional efforts to repeal legislation that added sexual orientation or preference as a protected group to anti-discrimination statutes and codes.
102. 1978 California Prop 6: John Briggs and Harvey Milk meet John Briggs and Harvey Milk meet, 1978. A coalition of activists mobilized under the slogan "Come out! Come out! Wherever you are!" to defeat the initiative. In what became the No On 6 campaign, gay men and lesbians went door to door in their cities and towns across the state to talk about the harm the initiative would cause. Gay men and lesbians came out to their families and their neighbors and their co-workers, spoke in their churches and community centers, sent letters to their local editors, and otherwise revealed to the general population that gay people really were "everywhere" and included people they already knew and cared about
103. 1978 California Prop 6: Letter from Harvey Milk Letter from Harvey Milk to President Jimmy Carter about Briggs Initiative, June 28, 1978. Gay men and lesbians came out to their families and their neighbors and their co-workers, spoke in their churches and community centers, sent letters to their local editors, and otherwise revealed to the general population that gay people really were "everywhere" and included people they already knew and cared about.
105. 1978 California Prop 6: Briggs Defeated November-December 1978 issue of ACLU News celebrating the failure of the Briggs initiative. A diverse group of politicians including Ronald Reagan, Jerry Brown, Gerald Ford, and then-president Jimmy Carter all opposed the bill. Some gay Republicans also became organized against the initiative on a grassroots level. The most prominent of these, the Log Cabin Republicans, was founded in 1977 in California, as a rallying point for Republicans opposed to the Briggs Initiative. The Log Cabin Club then lobbied Republican officials to oppose the measure. The initiative was defeated on November 7, 1978 and lost even in Briggs's own Orange County, a conservative stronghold.
106. 1970s Gay Rights Activist Kitty Tsui Around the same time, Kitty Tsui was coming out. Kitty, who like me was born in Hong Kong, but spent part of her youth in England, arrived in the U.S. in 1968. As she would later recall, when she came out at age 21 in San Francisco in the early 1970s, “the faces that surrounded me were white.” She sought visibility: “As an Asian American lesbian I am unrepresented, omitted, silenced and invisible. I write to fight erasure, to demand a voice, to become visible, to reclaim my history. I write to turn on the light.”
107. 1970s Gay Rights Activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya 1 Kiyoshi Kuromiya (front row, right) at a University of Pennsylvania anti war rally in the late 1960s. One such person was Kiyoshi Kuromiya, later to become a well-known AIDS activist. Born in an “internment” camp (Heart Mountain, Wyoming) in 1943, he grew up as a homosexual youngster in Los Angeles during the McCarthy era. An early activist in the Civil Rights Movement, he participated in restaurant sit-ins on Route 40 in Maryland at establishments that refused to serve blacks. Meeting Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1963, he would later become a family friend, caring for King children, at the King home after their father was assassinated in 1968. He also participated in anti-war protests during that period, becoming one of the 12,000 arrestees in 1972 when anti-war protestors attempted to shut down Washington, D.C.
108. 1970s Gay Rights Activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya 2 Kuromiya and an unidentified friend from Gay Dealer, 1970. Kiyoshi became publicly active in homosexual causes before Stonewall. In 1965, he was one of a dozen participants at the first homosexual rights demonstration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. And in 1970 he spoke on homosexual rights before the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. Kiyoshi noted the racism prevalent then, saying he was often kicked out of Gay Activist Alliance meetings when he spoke out against racism.
109. 1970s Gay Rights Activist Dan Tsang Dan Tsang addresses rally during Graduate Employees Organization Strike, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, February 1975. My essay, “Gay Awareness,” came out in Bridge in February 1975 It served as the first gay Asian male manifesto. A letter writer to Bridge had several years earlier written about being gay and Asian. Hung Nung’s letter was published in Bridge. He wrote in part: “I won’t pretend that I’m not gay. I’m proud to be Asian. And the two are not mutually exclusive.” I began my essay with a quote from Nung, suggesting that it was “scandalous” that the issues he raised in his letter were still not being addressed by activists in the Asian American movement.
110. 1970s Gay Rights Activist Stephen Lachs A lawyer, activist and co-founder of the nation’s first gay political action committee, Stephen Lachs was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown for an open position on the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 1979. He made history as the first out LGBTQ judge in the world as well as the first out LGBTQ appointment by Gov. Brown. In the eyes of those who sent him death threats, a criminal was adjudicating the law. Nonetheless, Lachs was elected in 1980 and thrice more times before retiring in 1999 as a well-respected judge and expert in family law.
111. 1970s Gay Rights Activist Madeline Davis Lesbian Delegate Madeline Davis Blazes Trail at DNC In 1972, Madeline Davis was the first out lesbian delegate elected to the Democratic National Convention. During the Convention, she called for the inclusion of gay rights in the party’s platform for the year. Following her speech, she became a member of the Democratic Committee and worked within the party for the acceptance of gays and lesbians. She also taught the first course on lesbianism in the U.S. at the University of Buffalo in New York. Twenty students signed up for “Lesbianism 101” which was taught again under the name “Women + Women.”
112. 1970s Gay Rights Activist John Rechy 1 John Rechy was born March 10th, 1931 in El Paso to Roberto and Guadalupe (neé Flores) Rechy who were in much reduced circumstances after fleeing the 1910 Mexican Revolution. He studied journalism at Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso) and The New School. After serving in the Army in Germany he returned to New York where he discover the hustling scene. Rechy taught film and creative writing at the University of Southern California in the 80s and in 1997 received the PEN-USA lifetime achievement award. Rechy's novels include: City of Night, Numbers, This Day's Death, The Vampires, The Fourth Angel Rushes Bodies and Souls, Marilyn's Daughter, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, Our Lady of Babylon, The Coming of the Night, and The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens.
113. 1970s Gay Rights Activist John Rechy 2 John Rechy became known in the 1960s for his partially-autobiographical novels, City of Night and This Day’s Death. Rechy was born in El Paso, Texas in 1934. Following a stint in the army, Rechy traveled across the United States through major cities such as New York, New Orleans, and Los Angeles, hustling for money. This period in his life inspired his novel City of Night, which was published in 1963 and has since become an international bestseller. This Day’s Death tells the story of a young man on trial for prostitution in Griffith Park. Of Mexican descent, Rechy has also made major contributions to Latino literature, notably in his work The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. Rechy is still living and actively writing—his most recent book was published in 2008. He currently lives with his partner in the Hollywood Hills.
114. 1970 First LA Pride Parade The first L.A. Pride Parade (originally Gay Pride Parade), organized by Rev. Bob Humphries (founder, United States Mission), Morris Kight (founder, Gay Liberation Front) and Rev. Troy Perry (founder, Metropolitan Community Church) and the Christopher Street West Association, was held on June 28, 1970 in Los Angeles. L.A.'s Gay Pride Parade permit did not come easily. No city had, until that time, ever experienced thousands of LGBTQ people marching openly and LAPD Chief Edward Davis did not hesitate to remind organizers that homosexuality was still illegal in California. Rev. Perry recounted that Davis declared to them, “As far as I’m concerned, granting a permit to a group of homosexuals to parade down Hollywood Boulevard would be the same as giving a permit to a group of thieves and robbers.” The Los Angeles Police Commission, for their part, claiming to fear violent homophobic counter-reactions, imposed excessive permit requirements, such as $1.5 million in fees. Parade organizers and the ACLU challenged the city in court, taking their fight all the way to the California Supreme Court. The court ended up ordering the city to issue a parade permit without discriminatory add-ons. L.A.’s Gay Pride Parade became the world’s first officially-permitted parade advocating for LGBTQ rights. The parade was moved from Hollywood in Los Angeles to West Hollywood in 1979.