BERKELEY GAY LIBERATION FRONT
I emailed Gary Alinder seven months ago to set up an interview. He finally got back to me on October 17, 2024, to set up a time.
Gary grew up in Minneapolis, facing the challenge of understanding his sexuality at a time when LGBTQ+ identities were all but hidden from public view. After college, he moved to New York, where he joined the Yippies and witnessed the aftermath of Stonewall, deepening his resolve to advocate for change. The city’s charged atmosphere fueled his activism, but it was California, where he relocated in 1969, that became the true hub of his LGBTQ+ work. In Berkeley, he found his community within the burgeoning gay liberation movement, co-founding the Gay Liberation Theater and the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front. With these groups, Gary helped spark a vibrant, visible gay community through guerrilla theater performances, public dances, and the launch of Gay Sunshine, a magazine that stood boldly against the era’s prevailing narratives.
Throughout his activism, Gary took a stand at pivotal moments, including protests against anti-gay reporting in the San Francisco Examiner and a groundbreaking action at an American Psychiatric Association convention to challenge the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. His work was part of a wave of cultural and political resistance that sought not only to secure LGBTQ+ rights but also to transform society’s views. Looking back, Gary’s life is a testament to the power of community, creativity, and resilience in the face of societal obstacles.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was raised in Minneapolis. At the age of four, I knew I was a city boy. Minneapolis seemed alien to me. Coming to terms with my sexuality was a slow unveiling, unwinding process. In the era and time that I grew up, all information about being gay was filtered out and eliminated from the environment. It was very difficult to form an identity. When I was in seventh grade, I was called names like ‘cocksucker,’ indicating that other people knew I was gay, but I had no idea about what it really was all about except that it was a bad thing to be called and you should be ashamed.
I wasn’t ready to come out when I was in college, but I came out with gay liberation. Right after college, between 1966 and 1969, I lived in New York. I realized the longer I lived in New York, the more I needed to come out. I thought the gay scene in New York was quite frightening and quite formidable for me at that time. The day after the Stonewall Rebellion, I walked around that part of the Village, to see what it was all about. I saw the burning trash cans.
Before I moved to San Francisco and while I lived in New York, I was politically involved. I was a member of the Yippies, The Youth International Party. The Yippies were a reaction to the more leftist politics. Abbie Hoffman, who founded the Yippies, was a genius at public relations and the media. The 1960s were overwhelming. We had the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, and, later, the gay movement. With the help of Abbie Hoffman, we were outrageous and creative.
Famously, Abbie went to the New York Stock Exchange and threw down dollar bills from the balcony of the Stock Exchange. There were also free university classes going on around the city and the country at this time. I remember Abbie was teaching a class called ‘Monkey Warfare.’ It was like, ‘be liberated, be outrageous, have fun, do it.’ Don’t do what people expect you to do. Be a little more creative and far out than your standard protest.
I was at the protests at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968. I stayed in the back because I thought, ‘I am not going to be arrested in Chicago.’ After all, Mayor Daley said he would shoot and kill anybody who was causing trouble. I took him at his word. Of course, there were violent riots, and many people were beaten. It was insane, absolutely crazy. There were thousands of protestors.
I came to California in September of 1969 and got involved with gay guerilla theater. We founded a troupe called Gay Liberation Theater. We put on a gay guerrilla theater performance on the University of California, Berkeley campus during orientation week.
Out of Gay Liberation Theater came the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front. We were doing a lot of cultural actions. We hosted dances and had symposiums where different people came and talked about various topics. We would feed people as well. We also founded the magazine Gay Sunshine and published it out of the house we rented. We did five issues before Winston Leland took it over and published it for the next 20 years. We wanted a newspaper to have the same liberation effect that LSD had on your brain.
Also, in our minds, we wanted a political voice because we felt there wasn’t any. This was before social media. There was very little being written about any aspect of anything gay. The Berkeley Barb would write things occasionally, but not too much. We were the radical left movement and needed representation.
This whole time was extremely engaging and uplifting for me. It was wonderful. There were so many gay people that I could relate to, and we were all on the same wavelength. I finally found my community through the gay liberation movement. I moved to Berkeley, knowing almost no one, and in two months, I knew hundreds of people. It was also a bit insane.
Of course, we did numerous actions. We wanted to sell Gay Sunshine in the bars. There was one bar in Berkeley called the White Horse, and they were saying we couldn’t sell our magazine. We said, well, it’s the only gay bar in Berkeley. For several weekends, we stood outside and protested. We scared away a lot of customers because many of them were closeted and didn’t want to be in some sort of scene. The owners capitulated and let us sell our magazine there. This was kind of fun.
Another time, on Halloween night in 1969, we protested outside the San Francisco Examiner to challenge the paper's anti-gay articles and its practice of publishing names and addresses of men arrested in gay spaces. Employees poured purple printer ink on us from the roof, and we used it to write ‘Gay Power’ and other slogans on the building’s walls, reclaiming the space with powerful, visible messages of resistance.
Of course, most famously, in May of 1970, the American Psychiatric Association hosted a convention in San Francisco. Irving Bieber, among other extremely homophobic psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, attended.
The APA considered homosexuality to be a mental illness. We were considered mentally ill and didn’t have any rights. It was an oppressive situation. With the convention, we got press passes and infiltrated the convention. At a certain point, we all started shouting at them, calling them out on what they were doing. This was the first disruption of an APA convention. Other disruptions later happened in Los Angeles and in Washington, D.C.
This was all so long ago. I’ve had a great life. I am very happy now. I’ve been happy most of my life. Not every day is the most joyous, but everything always works out, and I have peace. I think it's a great way to be and a great way to have a life.”
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