WHERE ARE THE WARRIORS?
The following oral history is from a webinar I hosted entitled Where Are The Homosexual Warriors, Gay Oppression in 2024.
The oral history features:
Perry Brass, a poet, author, editor, and activist, was a member of the New York City Gay Liberation Front (GLF), the pioneering group born from the fiery aftermath of the June 28, 1969, Stonewall Rebellion. The GLF marked the first time queer individuals collectively fought back against oppression in a visceral and unified way. Perry went on to co-found Callen-Lorde, a cornerstone of LGBTQ+ healthcare on the East Coast, and he served as editor of Come Out!, the GLF's groundbreaking newspaper.
Dr. Don Kilhefner, a member of the Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front, co-founded the LA LGBT Center, now the largest organization of its kind globally, with over 800 employees and an annual budget of $172 million. His visionary work extended to the co-founding of the Radical Faeries, an international network dedicated to exploring queer consciousness and spirituality.
Rich Wandel, a former seminarian turned activist, served as the second president of the New York City Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). The GAA emerged as a focused force following the GLF, advocating for singular attention to gay and lesbian rights. Rich's contributions extend beyond activism to photography and archiving, preserving the legacy of our shared struggle.
—August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
August: Perry, can you talk about coming to terms with your sexuality and coming out?
Perry Brass: I first started to realize that I was gay, just glimmers of it, in my mid-teens. I had grown up in the Deep South in Savannah, Georgia, in a totally segregated environment. Black civil rights were starting to come to the surface when I was in high school. When I looked back on it, I realized what the South had gone through, from Black hating to queer hating. There was a level of homophobia that was just razorish in my high school. I realized I was gay at about 15, and that pushed me to a suicide attempt.
When I recovered from the suicide attempt, I made a pact with myself. It was an epiphany. I decided that I would never let anyone push me to suicide again. No matter what I had to do, I would be the person I was meant to be. The next year was my senior year in high school. I graduated at 16. I just developed this incredible power and shell around me and became extremely popular. All the kids who had been taunting me and gay bashing me realized that I now didn't need them. The next year, I went off to the University of Georgia, which was worse than high school.
At 17, I left the South and hitchhiked from Savannah, Georgia, to San Francisco because I'd heard San Francisco was “crawling with queers.” I spent the next year living on the street, living off the kindness of strangers, AKA older men with money, and having a great time. I came to New York a month before I turned 19 and worked in advertising, which was, at that point, extremely homophobic.
I'd just turned 22 when I joined the Gay Liberation Front. My feelings about GLF were so intensely positive that my only question was, why wasn't everyone in GLF? Why wasn't the whole queer world in GLF? It's taken me a long time to understand why. I hope that answers the question.
August: What was the reason why?
Perry: Because of gay conservatism, fear, the desire to hold on to what people have. GLF wanted a total revolution. We wanted a complete change in behavior. On the one hand, we wanted incredible sexual liberation. Still, we also wanted a feeling of genuine community responsibility among gays and lesbians. We had a commitment to our community. This is so amazing because the idea of a gay community was literally being invented at that point. I don't think that existed during the Mattachine period. If it did, it was extremely cloistered, extremely, only a very few people used the term “gay community.”
The GLF just opened that concept up to the idea that we were all part of the gay community. We were all part of this community. The community had to take care of itself to the point that nothing else mattered. We didn't care what psychiatry felt about us, what religion felt about us, what the law felt about us, what society felt about us. The only important thing was strengthening ourselves to thrive, survive, and liberate each other.
August: Don and Rich, can you talk about how you got involved in the movement?
Rich Wandel: I was a late bloomer. I think I protected myself by not coming out even to myself until what, by today's standards, is ridiculously late. After high school, I spent six years in a Catholic monastery. I think that was partly because of the subconscious draw to the all-male environment. I do say in part. I don't think that's the whole reason. I think there were also spiritual reasons, but part of it certainly was the unrecognized homosexuality.
Even though in high school, I had sexually fooled around a bit with my best friend, I didn't define it that way. I just kept it all bottled up and denied until after I was edged out—not quite kicked out, but pushed out—of the monastery after college and very quickly after that, came out first to myself. I went into a tailspin only for about a month or so, but by then, it was 1969. It was after Stonewall. It was already, at least to a limited extent, in the newspapers. I was looking at it, not very strongly, but looking at it. I must have been to a meeting or two of the Gay Activists Alliance by then, but I was not taking part.
On my way home, I was walking through Times Square and ran into a joint demonstration of GLF and GAA protesting the police harassment in Times Square. I joined that group. That was a simple picket line, or it started as simply a picket line. It was summertime. When the picketing was finished, we went down to the precinct involved, which was a few blocks away.
After that, we all marched down to Greenwich Village. When we got to the Village, 8th Street was closed off for an open street until midnight. We were out partying, dancing, whatever. When midnight came, the cops, of course, wanted us to close it down and we didn't want to go. We had already done things like march around what was then the Women's House of Detention building. It turned into a mini-riot.
I noticed the cops were there, and I stayed in the back. I was not a brave person by any means at this point. I saw the cops just grabbing whoever looked smallest to beat the shit out of. That gave me—in addition to fear—a sense of it being a community under attack and a community together. That solidified my determination to be a part of it, which I did primarily through GAA. That was the point of commitment for me. That was, in a sense, the real coming out. It was not the first sexual experience, but the real coming out for me was into a community, I think.
Don Kilhefner: For me, there were several comings out. There was a coming out of opening my heart to boys. I had my first crush in the fourth grade, Paul Andre, who shortly moved away. I had a boyfriend from 9th grade to 12th grade. In our high school yearbook, under his name, it said, “Glenn is inseparable from Donnie.” Under my picture, it said, “Donnie is inseparable from Glenn.” That's the way it was talked about then.
Perry: Where was that?
Don: That was in Pennsylvania, rural Pennsylvania, Amish land. Then, in my early 20s, I lived in Ethiopia for three years and taught at a high school. I didn't have much chance to manifest my gayness because gay people were not allowed in the Peace Corps then. They are now, but they weren't then. There was always a fear of being found out, so I behaved more or less. Then, I returned to the United States with an intellectual life.
While I was in Africa, I was exposed to an Afrocentric way of seeing the world, a colonized, decolonized way of seeing the world. It transformed me at a certain level. That's another level of my coming out as a gay man. It's coming out as a more or less conscious gay man about what's happening in society around me. Then I got a master's degree in Black History from Howard University and a fellowship to UCLA, which is how I landed in LA. I saw a notice in the Los Angeles Free Press of a gay liberation meeting in September of 1969, exactly what I needed.
I went to my first meeting and went to every meeting after that. I took a leave from my doctoral program at UCLA and founded an office for the Gay Liberation Front. I became the office manager around the clock. Eventually, I slept there with GLF’s permission.
One thing led to another. Out of that process, there came an understanding of a sexual definition of what it means to be gay. It also started a process of understanding a political dimension, a consciousness dimension, and a spiritual dimension of being gay. I have spent the rest of my life—more than 56 years so far—pursuing that in Los Angeles, sometimes fiercely, sometimes less fiercely, but always with the best interest of myself and other gay people in mind.
It led to an understanding of creating a community, not just in concept, but in reality. With Morris Kight, I founded the Gay Community Services Center, the first and largest in the world. It was around that gay community center that a community coalesced in Los Angeles. With Harry Hay, the founder of Mattachine, I co-organized Radical Faeries at the end of the ‘70s as a means to explore the spiritual and consciousness dimensions of being gay. I've been chopping wood and carrying water in the gay forest ever since. It's given a meaning to my life that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
August: Don and Perry, what did it mean to be gay in 1970?
Perry: In 1970, it was very, very difficult, very, very hard. You still had a lot of police entrapment. You still had an incredible level of homophobia. I worked in advertising, a creative profession, when I first came to the city. The attitude was, we may be creative, but with all this client money and heightened money environment, we don't want any queers in our pool. I was fired from a job at a large, powerful agency, and I know it was for being gay. I know they couldn't possibly be open about it, but I was fired because I was gay. I was one of the few people who was out then.
This was earlier in the ‘60s, but by ‘70, you also had a real community forming, which was very sustainable. There were people who certainly by the mid-‘70s, certainly by ‘74, ‘75, you started to get young men and women, especially young men, who were beginning to come of age within the gay movement. Their consciousness of themselves aligned with their consciousness of being gay. It was very revolutionary.
Don: What did it mean to be gay in 1970? I think we need to be aware of the fact that a sexual definition of who we are, homosexual, was laid on us by our oppressors. It was not a definition we chose for ourselves. For the last at least 1,000 years in Western culture, that definition was negative. In the Catholic Church, Christian Church at that time, we were called Sodomites, and they tried to get rid of us one way or another, burning us alive at the stake—hanging us, what have you. Then, by the 19th century, late 19th century, sexologists defined us not as Sodomites, but as homosexuals. There were heterosexuals, which were the supreme race, and then there was us, homosexuals, who were inferior, according to hetero supremacy, which has ruled Western society for the last 1,000 years. By the time it got to 1970, one of the questions we were asking in Los Angeles was what does it mean to be gay? We know that there's a sexual dimension to it, sexual desire. Every human being has sexual desire in some way or another. There was something else, something more going on.
In LA, a theme that started with Harry Hay and the Mattachine and continued with gay liberation was looking at what it means to be gay. For me in 1970 and in the 70s, there was a real questioning, a real intellectual study of, a real dialoguing with other gay men. I started a consciousness-raising group called Gay Voices and Visions, where we explored the intellectual development of gay identity, Whitman, Edward Carpenter, et cetera, et cetera—Harry Hay, and subject-subject consciousness, and began not only a political revolution but also trying to seed a consciousness revolution, that a definition of who we are is much larger than a sexual definition. There is much more going on.
E. O. Wilson, the great evolutionary biologist wrote, “Homosexuals may be the rare carriers of the altruistic impulse in the human species.” That resonated with me.
Perry: That’s a very famous quote, Don.
Don: Yes. Joan Roughgarden, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford University, says we carry the cooperative principle wherever we're found in nature. Now we're talking about something much larger than our genitalia, the plumbing between our legs. We're talking about a role that we're playing. My coming out initially was through my heart, then through my genitals, and then it grew into more of a consciousness of what it means to be gay. I think that discussion is still going on today.
A young man just recently, this week, contacted me that he's doing a group here in Los Angeles for young gay men titled, What Does It Mean to Be Gay? The same question we were asking in 1970 is still being asked by a younger generation today.
August: Rich, how were gay men oppressed in 1970?
Rich: Depends on where you were. Now, the people on this panel are coastal, which is so different, maybe except Chicago. It is so different than the rest of the country. It's something that is true today, too, of course, something that we have to remember. I was, if not totally surprised, woken up, shall I say, when about 25 years ago, because of my connections with the neo-pagan community and an annual event called Between the Worlds, which is for neo-pagan gay men that takes place and was founded in Ohio, I discovered that the majority of people involved are Midwesterners.
Talking to these young people, I learned that all the horrors of difficulties in school, being thrown out of families, feeling something's wrong with them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, is still all there. It has not all gone away. We must be careful to realize that the two coasts are not the US. More than that, though, in this: for a long time, and up to and including and beyond the 70s, when we were pressing for even basic civil rights, the response in one way or another was always that this has never been heard of before. You are asking for something that's never been true. How could you possibly be correct? Humankind has always felt this other way. Of course, that's an enormous lie.
Perry: Yes.
Rich: That's an enormous lie. I have beome extremely interested and very well read in 19th century America. The things we weren't told are just legion, legion. I mean there are some obvious ones, like Walt Whitman. If you go to high school, you read, O Captain! My Captain!, his lament on the death of Lincoln. You do not hear the woman equal with the man. You do not hear our delight in the midnight orgies of young men. We have a way of saying we love this person and then ensuring we don't say anything that he or she really did.
If you look more closely, the intellect of his time is largely okay with it. Emerson advises him on publication, for example. Or suppose you look at the socialist movements of the day. In that case, they're following, some of them are consciously following Fauré, who's a Frenchman who, among other things, doesn't believe in marriage, is fine with homosexuality, is fine with all sorts of things. That part is suppressed. In our history classes, it's watered down to what is barely palatable for us to hear.
Certainly in terms of religion or spirituality, what we call homosexuality and transsexuality is also all over the goddamn place. Not only in ancient Rome or ancient Greece, where it certainly is, but much more recent and everywhere and in all cultures. It's just totally suppressed. Totally, totally suppressed.
That's what was happening in 1970. In a way, in a very, very strange way, I benefited by being in a monastery. Why? Because, unlike the guy in the pew, if you study theology, you discover that it's nowhere near as absolute as what you hear. If you study even Catholic theology, which of course is what I was learning, Thomas Aquinas and all of those people, you find out things like, for example, the subject of abortion. Yes, Thomas was against it, but what did he say? He said, “We can't be sure, therefore, we must err on the side of caution.” That's a lot different than “You're a murderer if you do this.” If you consider the medical knowledge of the time, which held that the entire new human being was in the man’s sperm, and the woman was only the place where it could grow, that makes jerking off the same as abortion.
In the breviary the priest says every night, I don't know if this is still true, but at the time, the breviaries, they pray, they pray every night before going to bed that they don't have wet dreams, they don't have, quote-unquote, pollution in the night. Anyway, so I was prepared to look at things differently.
Also, by being in the monastery, I had done some tutoring in the poor areas of Hartford, Connecticut, noticing as I talked to these young, mostly Hispanic children of immigrants, that some of them in the eighth grade could not go through the alphabet. I had to say, there's no way this could be true unless their teachers didn't give a fuck. No, there's no way this could be the fault of the children. I had seen that, along with, obviously, as a child of the ‘60s, the TV images of Black people being hosed down in the South and elsewhere, not quite wise enough yet to see the same, but more subtle stuff going on in the North, but being prepared to be able to see that. To me, that's all a whole.
Now, the Gay Activists Alliance was a one-issue organization because they took a practical, this-is-what-we-got-to-do-to-move-forward approach. The overwhelming majority of people in at least the leadership of GAA were very much aware of the wider view. Although we didn't do it as GAA, we were also going to the peace or civil rights marches or whatever. Although it was largely a white, male, middle-class organization, I believe the members understood the need to end oppression for all, regardless of demographics.
I consider my mentors Arthur Evans and Marty Robinson, both important to me for different reasons, but especially Arthur Evans, who everybody should know about.
Perry: St. Arthur.
Rich: Yes. I read his three books, including the one that nobody reads, which is called Critique of Patriarchal Reason, which is absolutely brilliant.
August: You mentioned that GAA was predominantly white, middle-class men. What was the diversity in the GLF in Los Angeles, Don?
Don: Very mixed, very mixed. It looked like Los Angeles. There were white people, black people, brown people, men, women, intergenerational. It wasn't perfect, don't get me wrong. There was much growth that happened, but we started out on the right foot and grew in consciousness as time went on.
Rich: The more you're aware of any of these areas, the easier it is to see similarities between what you’re reading about and what you have gone through or your community has gone through under a slightly different name. You say, but my God, that's the same thing. The more you look, whether it's closely at the current time, or whether it's through the lens of history, you can’t help but see the incredible connections that are there, which is why, although I defend GAA's decision at that time to take a one-issue approach, I think it would be terrible—impossible even—to attempt to function that way today.
The connection over and over again of, I prefer the word queer actually, of queer persons with spirituality is amazing. It is always there. As you look at spirituality around the world, and if you get away from the theologyand look instead simply at what is being done, what the action is, it is so much the same through all cultures, virtually all cultures and at all times. You'd have to say, well, there's something here. It doesn't matter what I call it. That's a stupid argument. It's not provable anyway. Who gives a damn? That doesn't matter. Just do it.
Perry: You have this opening of consciousness toward spirituality. You also have this consciousness of sexuality, which can be separated from you enough that you can look at it and feel it and experience it. The two of them merge very nicely with what we call queer apirituality. When I was in GLF, one of my GLF brothers who was there said to me, “Do you believe in God?” I said, “Yes, I do.” He said, “How can you believe in God and be a fairy?” He didn’t mean faerie. He meant fairy, as in the 1970 definition. I said, “How could I not? How could I not?”
The thing that I've started to experience with a lot of younger gay men who might be Generation Z is the idea that they want to break away from the older gay consciousness that saw men and women as separate. They want to go into a consciousness that we're all queer together. These gender and sexual identification ideas are no longer applicable. On a certain level, that's very nice. On another level, I think it can lead to a lot of just, I would almost say a self-castration or the idea that there are people, younger people who are still scared of the amount of emotional baggage involved with a gay identity. The gay identity itself is still scary to a lot of younger men.
Queer is easier than gay. Gay becomes too denigrated, it's too fluffy, it's too light, it's too light in the loafers. It's also too direct. I remember I was at the New York Queer Film Festival about ten years ago. We were showing a movie that I took part in called History Does Not Have to Repeat Itself. It was a French movie. This young man got up at the end of it, and he said, “I'm really glad that there was AIDS. AIDS killed off the old gay consciousness, the old gay culture. We now have a new queer culture that embraces everybody rather than the old gay culture, which only embraced gay men.”
He was a younger guy, probably in his middle to late 20s. He was wearing a dress and jeans. He was doing what we used to call just simple gender fuck. To him, this was very revolutionary. When he said that, I was just pretty much slapped in the face or the heart. The idea of saying he was glad for AIDS because it killed off the old gay culture.
Rich: I think actually one of the big mistakes that we made and is still being made, we used to talk to each other and say things like, it's only a matter of time. Once the old people die off, then that'll be fine. We'll have world peace. Gays will be okay. There'll be no racism, the whole thing. This false idea was that it was generational, and all we had to do was wait. That mistake is still being made. It wasn't true when we said it. It's not true when it's being said now. Just look at the age groups of some of the MAGA idiots in Carolina or wherever.
Perry: We still believe in don't trust anyone over 30.
Rich: Yes. That was our point.
Perry: What did we learn?
Rich: Yes.
Perry: What would we learn?
Rich: It was very foolish of us.
August: Rich, would you speak more about the GAA's decision to organize under a single issue? Could you flesh that out a little bit more for us?
Rich: Sure. All of the GAA founders were members of GLF. They looked at GLF at that time and felt that two things weren't working in GLF. One was that it was not sufficiently structured to get anything done. Also, they felt that GLF at that time and place was so busy championing other admittedly worthy causes that they could not champion their own. For those two reasons, Jim Owles, Arthur Evans, Marty Robinson—I’m missing a couple of names here—broke off and founded GAA.
They felt for practical reasons that it should be one issue, which would focus on what would be referred to as gay rights. Also that it should be democratic and structured. Indeed, they felt, and not without cause, I would say, that structure allows you to be truly democratic in a way that non-structure does not. In non-structure, they felt the loudest voice ruled. In fact, to become a voting member of GAA, you had to go to, I forget whether it was one or two sessions to learn Robert's Rules of Orders. The idea is that if everybody knows the rules, it's democratic, but if only a few people know it, then, of course, it can be controlled.
Perry: GLF did not have voting.
Don: Here in Los Angeles, it was a little different. Rather than either or, it was both and. We stayed focused on a gay agenda, and we allied ourselves with other liberation movements, Black, Latino, Native American, Asian American, so that both of them were happening at the same time. We saw a larger role and a larger community, but our primary focus was on gay people and gay liberation. Rather than either or, it was more both and.
Rich: In GLF New York, because they, I don't know what the proper terminology is, but they had smaller groups that worked independently.
Perry: Cells
Rich: Cells, right.
Rich: They all embraced the name GLF. They really were very separate in practicality, whether it was the dance committee or the Come Out! newspaper or Radicalesbians. Gay Youth started that way also.
August: How are gay men oppressed in 2024?
Don: One of the things that many times finds gay political analysis fairly shallow is it doesn't understand the concept of hetero supremacy. Just like Black people came to an understanding of White supremacy, and how from one generation to the other, that's what they were fighting. Some people said that with the passage of the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Bill, Black oppression was over.
We know that that's not true because White supremacy continues, male supremacy continues, and hetero supremacy continues. That's one of the reasons why I'm urging gay people not to use the word homophobia. It's wimpy, and it lacks any kind of depth and understanding of their oppression. First of all, one of the foundational things of organizing their political consciousness or oppression today is understanding that hetero supremacy still exists. A good example of what happened is what happened with Roe vs. Wade, where there was a campaign that started consciously about seven years ago to overturn that.
Carefully, from one minor victory to the next minor victory, it moved until they got the right Supreme Court, they got the right case that they were looking for, and Mississippi presented it first as an adjustment to abortion, and then as a decision to get rid of it, and it worked. Supreme Court Justice Thomas and others made it very clear what their agenda is, and gay people aren't paying attention to it. Thomas said publicly in a minority opinion that getting rid of same-sex marriage and recriminalizing same-sex sex are priorities of the Supreme Court, while gay people are dancing their little hearts away. There is an organized attempt, well-organized, well-financed, based on hetero supremacy to take away every right that we worked hard to gain in the last 50 years, and gay people need to be aware of that. They might not see it, but it's happening. If you pay attention to the news, you pay attention to in-depth reporting, you begin to get some idea of this.
One of the ways that gay people are oppressed today is we have no media. There's no gay journalism in the gay community. On social media, we have news sites that are curated. They're not investigated. In LA, there is no investigative reporter. Not just in LA but around the country. There is no investigative reporting. How in the fuck can you be an informed community when you have no investigative reporting? There is no local gay community news. What you have is curated sites that focus on what the elite wants you to pay attention to. A good example of this recently is Outfest, the LGBTQ Film Festival here in LA, which has existed for a half-century, foundational to the cultural life of LGBTQ people in Los Angeles.
It no longer exists. It disappeared, and people don't even know it disappeared. I talk to young people and say, "There is no film festival." Then they say, "What about Outfest?" It doesn't exist anymore, and they're dumbfounded because there's no local news. We are fed a certain kind of diet of news on these curated sites, which lacks investigative reporting and lacks local news.
We find out a lot about representative greed, but we don't even know who owns these sites. There are no editorials. We don't even know their political views, and the amount of news made available to us is carefully controlled. One of the ways gay men and the larger LGBTQ community are being oppressed today is important news is being kept away from us. There are other ways, but I'll stop there.
A second way I see gay men oppressed today is through the dominant ideology in our community, political ideology, which is gay assimilation. Gay assimilation means we're just like they are. James Baldwin said it best when he said, "Whenever a minority assimilates into the dominant culture, it always does so on the terms of the dominant culture." The dominant political strategy is that we're no different than they are and we just want to be accepted as we are because we're just like you.
In our all-night discussions I used to have with Harry Hay, Harry would say, "When it comes to sex, we're just like heterosexuals, in every other way we're different," so that gay assimilation has taken over our community. If you look at it, if you take that idea, that concept to its logical extension, it means the disappearance of the gay community. It means the disappearance of gay identity. I think that would be a tragedy for us and the dominant culture.
A third way that I think we're oppressed as gay men is the shift of power in the LGBTQ community. Many times this is overlooked, and people don't talk about it. I use the term, it's not original to me, but I use the term elite capture to describe what's going on in our community today. Looking at our history over the last 55 years and even a little longer here in Los Angeles, we have changed from a grassroots community-based community to one that's controlled by wealth, education, and an elite.
The values of the elite control these news sites and their values get inculcated in all of us, particularly our young who have never seen anything else. That's all they know. Unless we, as gay elders, step in and begin to raise consciousness about what's going on in their community. Because they don't see it because they've always been there, elite captured. I, here in Los Angeles, I usually call the year arbitrarily, 1985, as the end of the gay liberation period, and the beginning of what I call the neo-homophile movement.
Perry: Wow.
Don: What happened in 1985 during the AIDS crisis? Rock Hudson got AIDS, Elizabeth Taylor got involved, and all of a sudden, what was a grassroots effort became an elite effort with lots of money coming into it. Now let me clarify: I'm glad all hands were on deck then. We needed them. We also need to be aware that the nature of our community has changed radically from a grassroots community to one based on elite values.
Perry: Became professionalized.
Don: That might be one of the characteristics. Somehow or another it's our role as gay elders to help to communicate that to our younger people. It's basically consciousness raising. I was reading in the New York Times six weeks ago about something that touched my heart. During their encampment period, the pro-Palestinian students at Columbia reached out to Black Panther elders and said, "We need to know how did you do this? How does the occupation, how does an encampment, how does this happen? We need your help." These Black Panther elders came, and they talked. There was a dialogue between the elders and the youth.
I would love to see that in the gay community. Some place where gay elders, like the three elders that are here, how do we begin to communicate the state of being, the consciousness of our community, and educate younger people?
Rich: I think, at least in part, we do that by telling our stories, including to young people, obviously. In doing that, we also have to listen to them. All right? I love those few opportunities that I have with, I guess, you're using the word intergenerational opportunities these days, but it's a matter… This Tuesday I will be giving a talk on, I'm calling it, Tales from GAA. I tend to do it in a storytelling form. The process, of course, is going to be a lot of activism. It's going to be a lot of, we're going to go in there, we're going to totally disrupt the place, and we're going to be et cetera, and going to beat the shit out of the cops on these occasions, et cetera.
At the same time, we must listen to what the young people are telling us. I think we tend to think that, "Oh, it's so much better for them today." In many ways it is, but in other ways, it is not. It's actually harder to hide now. We have so raised the consciousness about the presence of LGBT people that they can't hide anymore. I was talking to one young person recently, and he's—I'm not sure how old he is, he's probably 13 or 14, in that area, and very shy and very withdrawn. I don't know him in-depth, so I can't say for certain, but I'm sure he's gotten the shit kicked out of him in school and continues to do so because he can't hide. We have to listen to what's going on from them too.
Perry: They're also under huge economic duress.
Rich: Oh, my God, yes. It's absurd. Absurd.
Rich: They also think it's always been this way. The same kind of lie we were told about being gay. All right? I talk to a young person and tell them, "When I was your age, I could go to college. I could get my degree for free. I could get my degree for free. No debt." They're stunned because they bought the line that it's always been this way. Therefore, it's somehow totally radical. How could I possibly think this?
Perry: It's the same thing with Jews. Jews became so acculturated that they didn't want to be known as Jews anymore, then the Nazis came along. They didn't care how acculturated you were, you were still going to be gassed.
Rich: I think that's the truth, but I think it's always been true. I don't see that as anything new or alarming in the sense that now it's happening and didn't happen before. This is one of the reasons why I like the word queer; it means different, it means I'm not running along, to me. Obviously, to different people, it means different things.
I'm not going to tell anybody else what their favorite word should be. There's always been that layer of us. First of all, in terms of gender expression, there's always been a portion of us who were unable to hide even if we wanted to. That remains true. Then there is the middle ground, which I may be in, where I probably think I'm more able than I actually am.
There's always been that range and always the majority wanting simply to fit in, get the better job, get the whatever, become CEO, or whatever. There'll always be those who have got to try something new. We call them artists, but they're not always artists, but largely true of artists, I suppose, of whatever kind. Whatever kind.
I'm by nature an optimist, I have to say this. Part of the reason why I'm an optimist is precisely because I study history. Even as bad as we are threatened now by the wave of—it’s more than MAGA, but I'll use that as a convenient terminology. We've been in such places before. Indeed, I would argue what ultimately brought around the end of slavery was the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and all that implied. They went too far. We said enough. Of course, I try not to forget that it was also four years of bloody war, but they push it too far, and it stops. You've got this back and forth. I think, if you look at the course of history, it's not a straight-line improvement, or even close to that but—
Perry: No, it closed back on itself.
Rich: —overall, it is, I think, moving forward somewhat. I don't say to be complacent; we must be active and always working. I don't mean to say, "Oh, forget about it and don't worry," but I'm always an optimist.
August: Rich, so you mentioned being active and working on it, what's the ideal movement look like?
Rich: I think there are so many things that are unjust and that need, to use a silly word, improvement in so many areas, obviously, in LGBTQ, but in race, in gender, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, taxation, whatever, guns. The list is enormous. Naturally, there will be a particular area or two that I feel must work indirectly. At the same time, without losing the consciousness of and, therefore, the support of the other areas as well.
It depends upon your own circumstances, all right? I'm already 78, I'm fucking tired. On the other hand, I go to my gay senior center. Hey, I live in New York, I have a gay senior center. I go to my gay senior center, and I certainly run into people who are anti-trans, racist, or even the occasional Trump supporter for that matter. I don't stay silent. I open my mouth, I say something. I fight back in that way. In my particular circumstances today, that is how I think it is appropriate for me to do it. Somebody else will have an appropriate way and a different way. That's the way it works. We do what we can according to what most touches us.
Perry: I would like to say that—what would the ideal movement be like? I think the ideal movement would still be very much like what we had in GLF: you had a larger movement of people. Still, smaller groups of affinities of it, but people who felt like this, would break down the alienation that so many younger gay men do feel now. I have a lot of younger gay friends, and they feel quite alienated from gay culture; actually, they feel alienated from American society, as well as what we would call the queer world or our own gay family, you could say. They feel alienated from both.
What I would think would be something that was a larger group but also had smaller components to it.
August: How can gay men specifically reclaim their place in the movement?
Perry: I think they have to, unfortunately now, you have to really plan it. It's like we're talking about being under economic duress. Also, something that we haven't really talked about so much is that the LGBT part of the movement, I should say, oh, of the LGBT and now we say Q parts of the movement. The L and the G parts have really been subsided. They've been pushed aside so that—I saw a movie the day before yesterday called Forever Stonewall. JPMorgan Chase bankrolled it.
It's actually a very good movie. It was about Stonewall and what came afterwards and stuff like that. Very slickly done, but it really more than implied that transgenderism is now the ultimate result and goal of our movement. That in order to be openly transgender and safe is what we've worked for. The gay part, the lesbian part, the bisexual part, that was all old business. The new business is now transgenderism and how that's going to work.
For a lot of gay men, once they figure out what's happening, this is really disturbing. I think that gay men have to really get together and realize our own strength. In fact, I've said this for decades, we derive strength from each other. We need to have each other. I think that gay men, and I don't know about lesbians, but I have a feeling it's the same thing. We need to have each other. That doing this alone becomes extremely difficult, if not impossible. The real question is, how can we get gay men together in a way that is really nurturing to them?
Don: Here is where I think it's important to understand gay assimilation. Gay men and lesbians weren't pushed aside. They disappeared.
Perry: Yes, I agree.
Don: They disappeared because that's what happened with gay assimilation. As soon as they got what they wanted, oh, that was enough. Again, I say that with gay assimilation is going to come diminution of the gay community and diminution of gay identity. We can't blame it on trans people. What we must do is see that gay men and lesbians on their own decided to evacuate.
Now we're in the mess that we're in because the Supreme Court is talking about taking away all those rights. Then they'll wonder, how did this happen? It happened because you as gay men, you as lesbians, you as conscious gay people disappeared. You assimilated. Because you assimilated, the wealth of knowledge you carry was not available to a younger generation. I sound like I'm preaching. Makes me giggle.
Rich: It's what we do. It's what we do. It's what we do. To use the old phrase, the man is very good at giving you a little bit so you think you've made it. This happens in every—I can't help but think of the whole thing as one movement. It happens in every facet of the movement. The smartest thing—
Perry: Human Movement.
Rich: Yes. The smartest thing the man ever did was eliminate the draft. As soon as the draft was eliminated, all that college unrest went away, almost immediately. It's come back a little bit now among graduate students who realize they're being treated almost like slaves, so there have been some organizing and strikes even of graduate assistants. As soon as it's not directly against me, it goes away. I think that's always been true. I think it will always be true, except for the minorities such as ourselves, who simply have to be out there and keep shouting. Indeed, in New York, some of it has risen again, and things like, going back to the original Pride Parade, for example, which is going on—
Perry: Yes, the Reclaim Pride March.
Rich: For several years now and things of that nature. It's there. It ebbs and flows according to how much people really directly feel that they're being attacked. Went up for a while with HIV and Anita Bryant, and then calmed down. I think those cycles will always be there, but I also think there will always be people like us who are out there, regardless of the current cycle level.
August: With the queer label—do you put out—do you have sex with people of the same gender?
Rich: There are many people I know who react to the word queer very negatively because it's been used as a weapon against them, which is why I certainly say that it is not my place to tell anybody what label they should choose for themselves. It is my place to respect whatever label they choose for themselves. I don't see it that way. I see it as meaning, yes, indeed, we are different, and that's a good thing is why I like it. You don't have to agree with that. You don't have to use it for yourself. I will respect, and to the extent that my poor brain can keep track of things, we'll use whatever label you choose for you. That is your right, just as it is my right to choose the label queer or any other one.
Don: I have learned a great deal as a gay activist, gay liberationist. I've learned a great deal from Black history. One of the things around black history in the last century was labels. Once called colored people, then colored people became Negroes, and then Negroes became Blacks, and Blacks became African Americans, and African Americans became people of color. All of them, no matter what the label we’re dealing with, is white supremacy in all of its forms.
I would say that for the last 150 years of gay intellectual history, all kinds of names have been used to describe this. Many times a certain generation can get very self-righteous about the new label. We certainly were as gay liberationists. We were a little bit self-righteous about using the word gay. Not homosexual, not homophile, but gay because that was the new word. Underneath what we're dealing with in each generation is hetero supremacy in its many forms. It's systemic, it's institutionalized in our culture. Whatever wrapping is on the gift, we need to remember what's really important is not the wrapping, but the content of that package.
The context for us as a people is very dangerous at the present moment. Very dangerous. Labels can divide us. When Black started to be used instead of Negro, there was a certain political self-righteousness about it. When African American was used instead of Black, there was a certain self-righteousness about it. That goes with the territory. Underneath, they were dealing with White supremacy. We are dealing with hetero supremacy. Women are dealing with male supremacy. It's not disappearing just because we have same-sex marriage. Indeed, hetero supremacy wants to get rid of it.
August: What can we say to gay and lesbian MAGA voters who insist their rights aren't in any danger or they're not a single-issue voter?
Perry: Wake up. Tell them to wake up.
Don: In any kind of liberation movement, the historiography of liberation movements has two stages. One is called secondary resistance, which is where you educate the people about their oppression. The next stage is primary resistance, which is about direct action. That's what gay liberation was about, primary resistance, direct action.
The homophile effort was about secondary resistance, educating the community. Right now, we have a role of educating the community on what's going on. We're not ready yet for direct resistance. That might or might not come, but it really is educating people right now. Those who are willing to learn, those who are ready, that's who we need to work with. Not those who are not ready.
Rich: When I find myself in a situation where somebody has said something, whether it's a MAGA-type person, whether it's about gays or race or women or whatever, my policy is not to let it pass without saying something because in any given group of people, you got three or four people hanging out in the office and somebody says this thing. There is a tendency for people to go with what they think is the way everybody's supposed to go.
If you leave it unchallenged, you leave the impression that this is okay. I always will say something. However, having said something, I will make no attempt to win over the person who just said that. It's a waste of my time. It's not going to happen. From my point of view, don't waste your breath. On the other hand, it's important to at least say, "No, this is not right." Silence does equal death, if you will.
Don: About 20 years ago, I was at a dinner party in honor of Howard Zinn here in LA. One of the ladies at the dinner said, "The sky is falling, George W. Bush. The sky is falling, what are we going to do, George W. Bush?" Without missing a beat, Dr. Zinn looked at her and said, "We need to do what Americans have always done. Organize. Organize. Organize. That's what we need to do. Organize."
Recently, a 25-year-old queer man was bemoaning something taking place in his life, and I said, "You need to organize around that. Get your friends and organize." He looked at me and said, "Organize, what does that word mean?" I said, "It means you get a group of people together and do something about the problem. Assimilation." He said, "I've never heard that word before." 25 years old. Organize. That's what we need to do.
Perry: It also means to get yourself into a certain direction for movement and action.
Don: Yes.
August: Can you talk about the division of gay men and lesbians from trans issues and experience, and maybe the flip side of that as well?
Perry: I can't, frankly. I have a number of wonderful friends who are trans guys, and I like them very, very much. It's very interesting that the gay male community, I think, has really accepted trans men very well. I don't know if the women's community has accepted trans women, but from a couple of women I know, a couple of lesbians I know, there's been a lot of pushback towards trans women. I guess it's just a very hard issue to deal with, especially for women. A lot of women still feel that trans women are men who still have a lot of male power, and they're now trying to use that male power within the women's community. There's a lot of pushback towards that. Whereas the gay men I know seem to be able to embrace trans guys very, very well.
Rich: There's a whole history here though, Perry. Of course, there's the famous incident at the Pride rally of Gina O'Leary versus Sylvia Rivera, which is from 1973.
Perry: That’s where the famous clip comes from.
Rich: Right. At that time, the women's movement or the modern women's movement was relatively new. What is their experience of what they would see as drag? Their experience is Milton Berle. It is Benny Hill. It is really, I think it would be fair to say, those portrayals that are actually equivalent to blackface. This is what they know. This is what they associate with trans, which, of course, is not actually what the trans person is. That's a different thing.
Quite understandably, they did not yet see that. Like many things, it's a question, I think, of education. First of all, there's a difference between theatrical drag and being a trans person. Sometimes, they're the same person, but they're two different things. There is a range of what's appropriate in terms of what they're portraying. Some of it indeed being awful, bigoted parodies, and some of it not.
Perry: I'm thinking as an instance that one of my lesbian friends said that when trans women started appearing at women's music festivals, it really upset the lesbians there so much that lesbians stopped going to them. You have this situation that when a man becomes a woman, he gives up, well, to a certain degree, gives up male power, but he also brings some of that male power with him. Whereas when a woman becomes a man, there's this idea that she's now joined the winning side. Especially for gay men, that's a lot easier for us to deal with.
Don: Here in Los Angeles, from the time of the Gay Liberation Front, trans people were involved, intricately involved with what we were doing. With the Gay Community Services Center, we had a program built into the original community center, a trans program. The trans issue isn't as loaded here in Los Angeles as I think it is in New York. I applaud what trans people are doing. It's exactly what gay men need to be doing, organizing. They organized around their oppression, and they made advances because of that. They did something right, and I applaud that.
Perry: I think that trans people—they've taught—certainly scientists have studied this now for the last, I don't know, 30, 40 years, is that what we call sexual preference is permanent. Gender itself is very obviously—
Don: Malleable.
Perry: Malleable, exactly. Gender is malleable. We've seen that historically, how our interpretation of gender really does change. It really does change. Certainly, it has changed in my own lifetime. The question as far as how do we as gay men deal with transgenderism? I think we've still got a long way to go.
Rich: Sure.
August: As it relates to Pride happening in New York, and it has happened in Los Angeles already, what should we and people who go to parties think of and remember about the original Pride March?
Don: Enjoy Pride. Remember your history. You have a history you can be proud of.
Rich: On the first march in New York, which was done without a permit, it was organized by a coalition of then existing gay organizations. Done without a permit. We started in the Village in Sheridan Square and walked up 6th Avenue, which is actually against traffic if you walk up 6th Avenue, starting on the sidewalk. As we moved along, more and more people joined us. We took over one lane and then two lanes of 6th Avenue, even though it was without so-called police protection, and walked up a good mile or so to Central Park. As we got to Central Park, to what was called the Sheep Meadow, which would more aptly have been termed Dust Bowl in those days, as we got to the Sheep Meadow, there was a little rise. I turned around and was stunned at how many people had joined us compared to how many people had started. Visibility, we always knew, was the first and most important thing to note—I forget the exact quote from Arthur. I should have brought with me the preamble of the GAA written by Arthur Evans, but we didn't say, "We want these rights." We didn't say, "We deserve these rights." We said, "We have these rights," period. End of discussion, and we took them. That's always what has to be done for any group.
Perry: I think that something Rich said really brought this to me. When we got to the Sheep's Meadow, there was the question, what will happen now? We had no roster of speakers, we had no stars, we had no leaders, we just had each other. It was so heartbreakingly wonderful because we were the stars. We were the stars of this march and of this movement. If you ask what should people today remember about this? This movement was started because we were the stars in it.
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