LLEE HEFLIN, DON KILHEFNER
- The LGBTQ History Project
- 1 day ago
- 25 min read
LOS ANGELES GAY LIBERATION FRONT
The following oral history highlights the experiences and perspectives of Llee Heflin and Don Kilhefner, both of whom were active members of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front (GLF). The GLF was a groundbreaking and radical gay activist organization that emerged in the wake of the June 28, 1969, Stonewall Rebellion—an event recognized as the catalyst for the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement.
Consisting of individuals committed to dismantling systemic oppression, the GLF challenged societal norms, fought for the visibility and dignity of queer people, and rejected assimilationist approaches in favor of direct action and solidarity with other liberation movements. As early members of the Los Angeles chapter, Llee and Don played vital roles in shaping the local fight for LGBTQ+ rights, advocating for radical change, community empowerment, and a reimagining of queer identity and politics. Their stories provide invaluable insight into the energy, conflicts, and aspirations of one of the earliest and most influential organizations in the struggle for gay liberation.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
August Bernadicou: Don, How did you hear about Stonewall? What did it stir up in you?
Don Kilhefner: I was a doctoral student at UCLA. I read about it in the Graduate Research Library one day, and then in the LA Free Press, I read about the Gay Liberation Front meeting. I went to it, and I went to every meeting after.
August: How were gay men oppressed in 1970?
Don: It's not talking about 1970. The importance of gay liberation, the gay liberation movement, is that it came at the end of 1,000 years of continuous oppression and violence against gay men and lesbians. In 1969, with the Stonewall Rebellion, a new narrative began to be formed, and that new narrative came out of Gay Liberation Fronts across the country. The Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front led that revolution. It was a gay liberation revolution, and we must understand that.
In your title for this talk, you title it “Queer Rebellion.” We haven't had a queer rebellion yet. The queer generation might have a queer liberation front. It might have its own version of a queer rebellion, but it hasn't happened yet. Therefore, we need to make a connection between what happened then and what's happening now.
August: Llee, how did you get involved with gay liberation?
Llee Heflin: I haven't any clue. I haven't any clue how it happened. In a sense, it was in the air. I had no connections like Don. It was in the air. Me and my friends—I don't know. No, I don't know how I got involved. In a way, it was a fulfillment of my drug experience. I was possibly the first LSD dealer in the gay scene in Los Angeles. I would go to the bars on Friday night, take orders, and I'd go to the bars on Saturday night and deliver. Over the course of, I don't know, six months or so, I watched the gay scene blossom in a way it had not blossomed before.
I went to hardcore biker bars, and they were probably the most self-loathing of the gay people I knew. Six months with acid, they had turned into sunflowers. I remember one of them showed up at the bar one Friday or Saturday night, and he had on a little, very thin string of beads. He was very nervous about it. I went up to him and said, "Hey, dude, really dig your beads." He just blossomed. It just all flowed into gay liberation. A fairly small contingent of us sort of hippies, kept the fire burning under GLF in Los Angeles. Don, do you remember? I don't remember the name of the bar, but in those days, even if there was a dance floor in the bar, you couldn't touch while you were dancing. There was no touching.
Don: There was also no dancing. That came later.
Llee: At this point, we a radical fag society, fuck this no touching shit. We organized a touch-in at one of the major gay bars in LA. On Saturday night, we all drifted in, and blah, blah, blah.
Don: Yes, it came from Stan Williams, and it was organized by the Gay Liberation Front.
Llee: What I remember was the experience.
Don: Truly.
Llee: At a certain point, one of us blew a whistle, and we all started embracing each other. The bar people were freaking out. "You can't." I said to them, "What are you going to do? Call the police?"
Don: No, the police did come.
Llee: No, the police did not come.
Don: There were four sheriff's cars outside. The police walked into the bar from the front to the back. Gay men kept embracing each other. The police walked out, the lights went off, the music started playing again, and history was made by that evening.
Llee: This was a long time ago for me. I remember the experience and the sense of liberation.
Don: It was an act of self-defiance. It was an act of gay defiance. It was an act of civil disobedience—one of the best things that has happened in US history in a long time. Black people were our models. First Nation people were our models. Latino people were our models. Asian Americans were our models. We did our part in that social revolution.
Llee: Don remembers it from his activist perspective. I remember it from the experience.
Don: No, I had experiences at those events as well.
Llee: I know, I know.
Don: There's both an event as it happened, and a personal experience of that event. I appreciate hearing your personal experience.
August: Don, can you talk about an action that you participated in in the Gay Liberation Front?
Don: First of all, you need to be aware of what was happening there. This was a liberation movement. This was not a civil rights movement. It was a liberation movement. In a liberation movement, you're changing the power structure of the relationship between hetero-supremacists and gay people that existed for over a thousand years in the West. Just as women were challenging male supremacy, just as Black people were challenging white supremacy, gay people were challenging hetero-supremacy. We weren't doing it just to get civil rights. We were talking about changing society, changing the economic structure, changing the social structure, changing the educational structure.
A revolution was being fomented. Now, in today's age, people forget that. They don't know what revolution means. They don't know what radical social change means. They don't know what militant action means, but the Gay Liberation Front of Los Angeles was all of them. It came about because we were able to get a Gay Liberation Front office in January of 1970. Out of that office, we organized. We organized. We organized. 1970 was filled with one GLF militant action after the other. By the end of 1970, a critical mass was beginning to develop in the gay community.
A gay awakening, a lesbian awakening, a trans awakening was taking place, and it affected the whole society, and it affected us internally. There was a revolution taking place. We no longer—we were now accepting ourselves and fighting back. Fighting back. It worked. It worked. It was effecting both external revolution and internal revolution.
August: Llee, is there an action besides the touch-in that you would like to talk about?
Llee: Our confrontation with the psychological association people at the Biltmore Hotel was radical in the dynamic change in that meeting, and, again, Don, this is how I remember it. The conference organizer said, "All right, now what do you want?" We said, "We want to educate you about us." The auditorium seating was folding chairs, so we had the meeting break up into small groups of 10 or 12, with two or more of us in each group. I can only speak from my group. My experience. It was an extraordinarily positive experience for everybody. These people had never talked to a gay person except as someone who was sick.
I sat there and said, "Look, I'm no more aberrant, no more sick than you are. My life experience is as valid as yours." Again, God, 50 plus years ago, anyway, by the end of half an hour or more, these people had a life-changing experience. There were a lot of tears—positive tears. Some of these psychologists came out during these sessions. At the end, there were just 10 minutes of hugs. We left, if this is the right word, we left heroes. We had transformed the psychological community. Within, I don't know, a year, year and a half, two years, they had removed homosexuality from their diagnostic book. It was all done through love and communication.
Don: What Llee is saying is correct. I'd love to hear that personal account of what he experienced then. It was actually organized by the LA Gay Liberation Front. I made the proposal at the Sunday afternoon meeting, and the meeting accepted it. Basically, it was based on the ideas of Frantz Fanon, a mid-20th-century revolutionary theorist. He said that in a liberation movement, you have to change the power differential between those who have the power and those who don't. That's what we brought into the room that day. It was a liberation strategy where no longer were we going to listen to them telling us who we are, but we began to tell them who we are.
To do that, we had to take over the meeting. There was a lot of resistance to it. We could have been arrested at any time.
The LAPD and SWAT team was assembling across the street in Pershing Square. It's only because of Dr. Al Marston of the University of Southern California Psychology Department's interception that they were sent away. Dr. Marston told them, "There's no problem." We were able to have the discussions. There were about maybe 15 of those small discussion groups that Llee mentioned. I went around to each one of them to listen, and it was amazing what was happening in those groups. As it turned out that day, there was the author of a book that came out called The Gay Militants that described what happened there that day.
A filmmaker from USC, Ken Robinson, was filming the event for a documentary film, the first documentary film on the gay liberation movement, and a radio reporter was in the room. An hour after the event took place, it was being broadcast all over the United States. At that time, you had to remember, radio was how we got the most up-to-date news that the country was getting it. What Llee is describing is absolutely correct. What happened was we changed the power differential in that room. We were no longer listening to them; they were listening to us. We had a dialogue, not a hetero-supremacist monologue. We were all touched by that. It was a heroic act on our part.
August: I would like to bring it to the present and the future now. Don, how are gay men oppressed in 2025?
Don: Now, first of all, I've been involved in this for 60 continuous years in Los Angeles. I never went anywhere. I stayed here working in the gay community. It became my life's work. What we need to ask young people today, queer people today, and adults and old people, as well, is how are you oppressed in the United States today? You have to remember action always comes out of oppression. If people are satisfied, there's not going to be much action. If people are oppressed in some way, they will take action.
Recently, I had the experience of talking to a really bright, young gay artist. At the beginning of our conversation, he said, "I was out walking in my neighborhood in East LA. Across the street, there were some people on the porch. One of the men on the porch started to yell hate words at me as a gay man. I quickly got out of the neighborhood," he said. 30 minutes later, I asked him, "How are you oppressed as a gay man?" He thought about that. He said, "I'm not oppressed.” You see what's happening? There is a web of oppression around us in this country as gay people. Particularly since the extreme right takeover of our country. Either people are unconscious of their oppression.
In a recent essay in The LA Progressive, I mentioned ways we might get involved today. A hybrid model is necessary today. It will be the queer generation doing that, defining that for themselves. That hybrid model came out of the 2020 George Floyd demonstrations in this country, where we had an example of new technology as a means, not an end, to organize people. Then, people on the street, their feet on the pavement, on the streets, all across this country, in a way that we hardly ever see these days.
That is the model we need to use. New technology is a means, not an end by itself. Getting people involved in some way. You got to know your history. That history is alive in you today and touches everything you're doing. You got to know your history. Right now, the extreme right-wing has come into power because it copied the methodology of the social revolutions happening in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s by grassroots organizing and keeping it up over time.
Currently, Trump did not create his movement, his base. His base created Trump, and Trump has enough of an opportunity to take advantage of that. We need to know your history, grassroots organizing, and consciousness-raising. How are you oppressed as a queer person today? Just as my generation, the Gay Liberation Revolution generation, had to ask, how are we oppressed today? We could articulate it, just as Llee was talking about. We could articulate that. We need to hear a younger generation articulate a militant plan of action. If you're not oppressed, there will be no action. If you are oppressed, there will be action.
I suggest using a hybrid model of the new technology, which I use to organize people on a grassroots level on the street. The Democratic Party and the human rights campaign, HRC, will not be the solution. Social change rarely comes from the top down. It comes from the bottom up. That's what we need to organize today. From the bottom up, it is happening. It's happening. People are doing that these days, and that will be the answer.
August: You brought up an interesting point about how people are trying to work in the system compared to back then when it was fighting the system. Llee, how do you feel about today's LGBTQ movement engaging with corporations, government, and political parties?
Llee: August, to be perfectly honest and frank, I don't think about it. It's not part of my life. I live in rural Arkansas. In my nearest little town, there's like a population of 6,000. The whole area is MAGA people. Mega MAGA. I live in the country. A county road runs in front of my house, and I walk on that road three times a day. I know, not necessarily by name, but I'm acquainted with virtually everybody that lives on the road. I think it's fairly obvious that I'm, A, probably gay, and B, not MAGA.
I have wonderful relations with these people. Underneath their self-imposed ideas, they're decent human beings. If I don't appear on the road for a couple of days, they stop at my house and say, "Are you okay?"
I want to bring up one experience I had recently at Walmart about a young customer service rep who works in the pharmacy. He's probably 25 or around there, and he's not by any means gay acting. He's not Farmer Butch, but he's not gay acting. Except for one thing: he loves the acrylic fingernails that are so popular among women. He wears inch-and-a-half acrylic nails at work in Walmart. The most recent version was robin egg blue, and they had embellishments on them. He's able to be himself at Walmart, and Walmart doesn't seem to apparently give a fuck, and none of the world people who stand there in line for 10 minutes to get their prescription when he waits on them, nobody says anything.
I, on the other hand, always go, "Hey dude, love the nails, great." He lights up, but I don't think he wants to talk about it. There are long blue fingernails in an environment where you would not think that long blue fingernails on a man would be acceptable. There's a change. At least in my environment in rural Arkansas, this is a radical change. In a sense, his putting on blue fingernails was a personal act of self-expression. "This is who I am."
Don: Self-defiance.
Llee: Don, this defiance was, or is muted. He's not, "Oh, look at my fingernails, look at my fingernails. Lucky if you don't like my—" No. He's doing his job, giving you your prescription, and whether you like—you cannot help but see his blue fingernails. In this conservative environment that doesn't cause radical feedback—to a degree, the environment has changed, and it thrills my soul that this young man can express himself outwardly in such a way.
Don: You think that's a result of the gay liberation revolution?
Llee: Don, I have actually said, I think the next town—this is Berryville, Arkansas, five miles on my right. Nine miles on my left is Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Eureka Springs is very hippie and very gay. I was chef at a restaurant there for 25 years, and we were a gay rallying place. I've actually said to a few of them, "You have no idea what me and my people 50 years ago did to make your life comfortable now."
Don: Amen.
Llee: No, they don't know, and to a certain extent, they don't give a fuck.
Don: That's why I said just a moment ago it's important that you know your history because what you're saying, Llee, is correct. At the same time, trans people are being murdered in this country. There are gay and lesbian people where there's violence shown against them, and we can't close our eyes to that. We can't close our eyes to the fact that gay men are being beheaded in Saudi Arabia. In Afghanistan, they're being hunted down and murdered. In much of the world, including the United States, there's a reaction against gay liberation taking place, and you can't close your eyes to that.
Llee: Don, I understand this. I spend a lot of time reading the news, but it's like, "Fuck Israel and Gaza." I can't do anything about that. I can't do anything about the Taliban. You can't do anything about the Taliban.
Don: There are gay people doing something about the Taliban.
Llee: You know, Don, they have to be Afghani. We can't do anything about it.
Don: We can find part of an underground network that is smuggling gay and lesbian people out of Afghanistan to safety. We can do something about it.
Llee: That does not change the Taliban that does not—Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all flowed from the same roots, and Islam was the final flower. I think Muhammad probably learned a lot from—it's hard for me not to say, fucking Peter, who created Christianity. Jesus didn't create Christianity. Jesus came to bring a message to his own people, and they rejected it.
Don: You know, Llee, recently, somebody showed me a 15-second video clip from Iraq, and he promised me that I couldn't show it to anybody else on condition of seeing it, and I promised him I wouldn't. It was a 15-second video clip of a young gay man, maybe late teens or early 20s, being stoned to death.
August: Don, do you think there's a gay liberation movement today?
Don: Today, there is no gay liberation movement. There is a need for a gay liberation movement or a queer liberation movement. Let me correct that. There's a need for a queer liberation movement. A gay liberation movement does not exist. Gay men have largely disappeared, living their own lives. Lesbians have largely disappeared, living their own lives. Nobody's tending to the store. As a result, we're now in a period of pushback. The rescinding of Roe versus Wade by the Supreme Court, that same methodology is being used today to take away same-sex marriage and recriminalize homosexual acts.
They have a game plan. Two Supreme Court justices have now jointly voiced their opinion that they have a game plan to do that. There's no gay movement. Everybody is busy watching Netflix, getting lost in their own lives. As a result, many of those advances are in the process of being pushed back. There needs to be another awakening among gay people because we can change things. What is the quality of Black people's lives? In 1960, it's very different today than what it was in 1960. Why? Because they fought back relentlessly for centuries.
Women today, their lives are very different than they were in 1960. Today, half of the admissions to medical school programs and law school programs are women. That would have been unheard of in 1960. Today, as a result of that gay liberation revolution, we, as gay people, have some self-respect. We have a clearing in the forest that we didn't have before. I would say there is a change that's possible. We've seen it in our own lifetime. We need to organize, and we need to act, and we need to ask ourselves the question, how am I oppressed today by hetero-supremacy?
August: Llee, you have mentioned that you don't want to integrate into society. What happens when gay people have a white picket fence and 1.94 children? What happens when gay men assimilate?
Llee: I don't think we assimilate. I think what assimilates is the broader society to us. Don talked about lesbians going off and living their lives and gay men going off and living their lives. I think, to a certain extent, that's what we fought for in the '60s. The oppression in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran—that was 200 years ago. They're not contemporary. They don't live in the same world that we do. Like I said, it's 200, 300 years ago.
Don: No, I would disagree. The young man I helped smuggle out of Afghanistan and get into freedom in Canada knew all about Stonewall. He knew all about pronouns because the internet had connected him. He's aware of these things all around the world.
Llee: I'm talking about the broader—I'm talking about the oppressor. The oppressor is from 300 years ago and is still active today.
Don: Yes, it is.
Llee: To a certain extent, the oppressor from 100 years ago is still active today, with people sitting on their porches hollering faggot at some kid walking by. In the news recently was a story about an autistic boy, maybe eight or nine years old, wearing rainbow-framed glasses. Some 10- or 11-year-old boy started calling him a faggot, blah, blah, blah, and told him, "Just go fucking kill yourself, fag kid." A few days later, the mother found her autistic son heading out the door with a big kitchen knife. She said, "Where are you going with that?" He said, "I'm going to go kill myself."
The autistic boy was immediately bundled off to therapy. That's how I'll use that word. Where he stayed for four or five days. During that time, the boy was obsessed with cars. During the time that he was in therapy, the mother went out on the line and said, "Anybody out there who's a car aficionado who would come to be here at my house when my boy gets out of therapy so he's got something positive to relate to, I would really appreciate it."
Somebody in the area who was a car enthusiast picked up on this, and over 150 cars showed up. The kid had some positive feedback of just an enormous kind. It's this thing, to me, where we work best. This kid will now wear his rainbow glasses. If somebody says anything, he knows, as Don would say, as much as an autistic boy could to fight back and say, "No, my glasses are okay. I'm okay." This is the important thing, "I'm okay."
Don: Do you see that as that's the way for that young boy to fight back?
Llee: It's the only way he has.
Don: You got it.
Llee: It's the only way he has. To me, gay liberation back in the '60s and '70s was an individual liberating himself or herself from the oppressors.
Don: It was both individual and collective at the same time. It was changing society and changing ourselves. I say that to you lovingly.
Llee: The root was self-realization, spreading. The more we were self-liberated, the more we were able to say, "Fuck you, I'm okay."
Don: The more we were collectively liberated, the more we could say, "I'm going to liberate myself."
Llee: Well, from my perspective, the liberation begins with the self, then it spreads into the social scene, and then it spreads from individual to individual to individual. Seeing the young man at Walmart with his blue fingernails made me feel that I had accomplished something 60 years ago.
Don: I agree with you, you did.
August: Don, what concrete steps should be taken?
Don: Now, let me just say, I've been giving you concrete steps. I said know your history. Learn something about the history of the last 60 years, the last 1,000 years, as far as gay people are concerned. I have said that, that's number one. Number two, grassroots organizing from the bottom up. Get together a group of people and do something, organize, organize, organize. There is that stream in American history, and it is said best in Howard Zinn's book A People's History of the United States, where he talks about organizing: organize, organize, organize from the bottom up. Social change does not come from the top down and never has. It comes from the bottom up.
The third thing is you have to become aware of how you're oppressed today. Anybody, any gay person, lesbian person, trans person who reads the news today and does not know how they're oppressed today, well, I wonder about them because it's very clear how they’re oppressed today. Those are three things. I want to keep it simple. Know your history, organize, organize, organize, and organize with people. A hybrid model using both new technology as a means and organizing people on the streets. Thirdly, you must ask yourself, "How am I oppressed today?" Because action will come out of oppression.
Llee and I acted in the late '60s and '70s, in my case, for 60 years because we are oppressed as gay people. Again, keep it simple. Those are three concrete recommendations I'm making.
August: Why do you think when so much of the data shows otherwise that the oppression of gay men is difficult for people to recognize?
Llee: Look, we're talking about the fucking United States. In the United States, I don't think a majority of gay people are confronting oppression in their daily lives. Don and I, 50, 60 years ago, made that possible. To me, that was a goal. I left Los Angeles, California, and San Francisco in the early '70s, and I ended up five years in Spain, five years in England, time in Morocco, time in Italy, I was in India twice, and I never felt oppressed. When I went to see my teacher the first time—I don't know, 20 years, I made my living making clothes. I went to see my teacher one day, and I was wearing a pair of pants.
It was India, Bombay, hot. I was wearing a pair of cotton drawstring pants, and the fabric was black and had little flowers on it. I'm sitting there in the meeting, and there are 20 other people, and the teacher asks me, "Why are you wearing women's pants?"
I said, "Maharaj, I was not aware that pants had a gender. They're just pants," that closed the question. Your poster for this webinar had a picture from Life Magazine with three of us in what we called gender fuck drag back then. My two companions had dressed up for the occasion of this picture being taken. The way I dressed was how I dressed all the time.
One day I said, and I don't know why I said this to myself, "I wonder if I have the balls to just put on a dress over my Levi's and cowboy boots and go to Safeway and do grocery shopping." I said, "There's only one way to find out."
I went to the thrift store and bought the kind of dress my grandmother would have worn doing chores on the farm. It was just a shapeless dress. I put that on over my Levi's, cowboy boots, beard, and long hair, and I went to Safeway and did my grocery shopping. I was astonished that there was not a ripple in the universe over this. The extension of that was that I found wearing fabric an enjoyable experience. The way it moved and flowed around you, and I thought, "I like this."
Don: I remind Llee that he was doing it in Silver Lake, liberated gay territory. In East Jesus, Iowa, he probably wouldn't have gotten away with it.
August: This is for you, Don. Oppression takes many forms. What vision do you have for a future without oppression? What would it look like for gay men?
Don: I have written about what a queer liberation movement might look like, and what the next stage might be like. It's not for me to say, it's for me to support those creating it. One of the ways we're oppressed is still by religion.
Llee: Yes, yes, yes.
Don: The Catholic Church today says in their dogma that we are innately morally disordered, and the punishment for that is we will burn for all eternity in Hell. Pope Francis makes homophobic comments and uses hate words privately. He speaks another language publicly. I don't see why the queer liberation movement isn't fighting back against that, like we did against the APA. I would say it also involves proactive organizing in the community, keeping that community alive because it is that community that has empowered us. We weren't alone anymore.
We were in a community, and by community I mean we assumed responsibility for each other over time; that's why the third stage of gay liberation in Los Angeles was the creation of the Gay Community Services Center. I would love to see a queer community creative performing arts center in Los Angeles because not only is acculturation taking place, but enculturation is taking place.
Not only are we becoming part, or there's an opportunity to become a part of the larger society, but there also needs to be a gay-centered part of that development, which involves a non-queer creative development part of that, which is based on what is inside of us that needs to come out. It's a beautiful, beautiful message.
Another thing that needs to happen with that queer liberation movement is a change in our definition. When we define ourselves solely by sexual behavior, we are adopting what the last thousand years of hetero supremacy has told us we are, nothing but a sex act. It's not wrong. That's the tail wagging the dog. We need to look at what is the content of that dog. That's why there is a need for a redefinition, a revision of who we are as gay people. I call it an essentialist/social contribution model based on breakthroughs in biological evolution theory, why people like us have been around for the last 5,000 years, at least.
What are we doing that makes us so essential that we keep reappearing from century after century to now? We must be doing something which is contributing to the evolution of our species. That's the question we need to ask, not which orifice, and I love those orifices, don't get me wrong, but something larger than what orifice we are engaged with. It has to be a revisioning and a redefinition of who we are. Those are three possible ways a queer liberation movement might evolve in the future. I hope that answered your question.
Llee: I think you answered it beautifully and fully to the last drop.
Don: It's why I carry you in my heart for 60 years.
Llee: I have one caveat to broach. I don't think we have, as gay people, a function. Homosexuality is simply a genetic variation that heterosexual reproduction throws off. Is there a reason? I don't think there is a reason. Variation doesn't happen for a reason. It just happens. I've been for the last 15 years or so involved in horticulture hybridizing. Variation doesn't have a purpose, it just is. My understanding is heterosexual reproduction throws off a variation that lacks the imperative for reproduction, that's what I see gay people are. It doesn't have a purpose.
One could say one of the purposes is that it modulates reproduction. We keep us from overrunning the planet more than we do. No, I don't think we have a purpose.
Don: Can I interject here?
Llee: Whatever objective you bring to it… Here's the difference, I think, between you and me, Don. You think of it globally, whereas I think individually, and I think individually is what the global depends on. You mentioned that—
Don: Can I interject for a moment? No, let me interject for a moment. You are getting caught up in either/or thinking, and I suggest both/and thinking. It's both the individual and the global. It's both of those simultaneously, and it's more than that. Individualism is one of the streets in American culture, I understand that, but there's also something larger going on, like that squirrel outside my window right now looking at me. There's something locally going on. Both of those are necessary for the alchemical union to take place. As Carl Jung said, it’s the mysterious conjunction for the alchemical union to take place, for something new to come into being.
August: How do you feel about straight actors playing gay people in film and television?
Don: It's a non-issue. Actors are actors, and I encourage them to do what they do best: embodying a role. It's a non-issue.
August: Given the MAGA movement, should WorldPride move its location from Washington, D.C.?
Don: What they need to do is ask the question, "How am I oppressed today?" Is that a sign of our oppression or not, and if it is a sign of our oppression, we need to figure out how to fight back. This is simple. This is not rocket science.
August: Llee, what's your reaction?
Llee: I don't know what to say. Should we take something out of Washington, D.C.? I think
Don said it. It is a non-issue, and activism, which to me is perfectly useless, achieves nothing. I don't know, but on the other hand, “Do what thy will” is the whole mantra. If you want to be active on, "Oh, we'll take something out of Washington, D.C.,” fine, do what you want. Everybody, do what you want. Do what you will. What is your involvement in life?
August: What is the organization you're working with, Don, for Afghanistan?
Don: Oh, Rainbow Underground in Canada. The underground is the above-ground mechanism. The underground—I can't talk about it because it's underground, but if you contact me by email, donkilhefner@sbcglobal.net, I will speak to you about this and connect you with who you need to be connected with, and that goes for anybody, donkilhefner@sbcglobal.net.
August: What can we learn from the past, Llee? How do we apply it to today?
Llee: Well, philosophers say, "If you don't know the past, you're almost bound to repeat it." This is life's work, and it's ongoing. Be aware of where we've come from, but here's the problem. Who's telling us where we've come from? Who's telling us what our origins are? In a certain sense, they are our oppressors. History doesn't exist except that we make it, and we make it to satisfy ourselves, and trying to extract the truth from history is extremely difficult.
August: Does either of you have any closing reflections?
Don: Could I respond to what Llee said?
August: Of course.
Don: George Orwell once said, and it's correct. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four noted, "The way to destroy people is to deny them their history." That's why what Llee is saying and what I'm saying about history is so important. Without that history, the people destroy themselves. That history is essential, and it's alive in us in our daily lives. It's not something in the past where you're reading books, it's alive in us, and we as gay and lesbian people should know that. Our liberation is only 60 years old. We should know that.
Llee: I have one question. The artwork on the wall behind you.
August: It's a painting of this lady named Bambi Lake, who was in The Cockettes and Angels of Light.
Don: Beautiful.
Llee: God, the good old days. This is what is so remarkable about that period. It was fabulous and fun. We felt no inhibitions.
Don: We felt alive.
Llee: Yes, Don. Gay people became self-liberating on every front.
Don: Amen.
Llee: Oh, my God, The Cockettes, the Angels, they were angels of light. They pushed the boundaries like the boundaries had never been pushed before. This is what was most profound about this time, we pushed the boundaries like they had never been tried before—and the world survived. This is, to me, an important thing. The universe survived. The universe did not fall apart because that person presented himself or herself to the world like that. The universe survived because I dressed up like I did. The universe survived because this young man at Walmart wears blue fingernails. We're part of the universe, and all we do is express the universe.
That picture, that person is an expression of the universe going, "Yes, yes, see me. See how beautiful I am," and the universe said, “Yes.” This is what I don't think we've said today. The universe has said yes to us. The universe has embraced us for thousands of years. Despite all of our self-oppression, the universe never oppressed us. It was us oppressing us. The universe said, "I love you," and that's what I wanted gay people to see when I was an activist.
Don: I would add to that hetero supremacy also played its role.
Llee: Oh, yes, hetero supremacy, the fucking family, the fucking Christian religion, the psychological, psychiatric, the whole science, the government, and we survived.
Don: We fought back and survived.
Llee: Yes, we fought back, and we survived. Again, we have to say, we're talking about the Western world, about the United States. The United States, the Western world, is what it is today because of what we did.
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