BOSTON AND BOULDER GAY LIBERATION FRONT
Here we have Thom Nickels, who was a member of the Boston, Massachusetts, and Boulder, Colorado, Gay Liberation Front.
Thom was born in Darby, Pennsylvania, in 1947. He knew he was different as a boy but did not have the terms to describe his sexuality. When he told a female classmate, she started crying.
Upset about the Vietnam War, Thom decided to register as a conscientious objector. Conscientious objection to military service occurs when individuals refuse to participate in war due to their religious, moral, or ethical beliefs. This can include refusing to serve in combat, register for the draft, pay war-related taxes, or otherwise contribute to war efforts.
When his conscientious objection submission was accepted, he worked at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston. Once in Boston, he got involved with the Boston Gay Liberation Front and started attending meetings in a conference hall at MIT. The Boston GLF marched as a group on the Vietnam Moratorium Day on the Boston Common on October 15, 1969. 100,000 war protesters crowded the Common. To this day, that was the biggest demonstration ever held in Boston Common. As Howard Zinn, George McGovern, and John Kenneth Galbraith spoke to the masses, the Boston GLF members carried their Gay Liberation signs through the mass of demonstrators. Most of the people looked at them with wide eyes.
Thom also wrote for various gay liberation publications such as Fag Rag, Lavender Visions, and the Homophile Action League newsletter. Currently, he is an author.
—August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I was living in Boston and wanted to find a gay bar. I learned of one called the Punchbowl in Scollay Square. I saw a young guy wearing Levis, a jean jacket, and an Andrews Sister wig. I thought to myself that he must be going to the Punchbowl, I’ll just follow him. So, that’s what I did. I followed him and wound up at the Punchbowl. This was my first Boston gay bar.
Even in the bar, the mood was anxious. My first encounter there was when somebody came up to me in a cape with a French accent. We both had a beer. He told me he was a French exchange student, and we talked about French novels we read. It was exciting! It was my first time at a gay bar, and I met a man with a cape! We were talking about Genet! He invited me back to his dorm at Cambridge.
We were out on the street waiting for a taxi, and he told me he had a confession to make. He said, ‘I lied to you in the bar. I am not French. I am from Connecticut. I am in law school.’ He didn’t want to get in trouble. This was the paranoia people were dealing with in 1968.
He eventually told me that he had to stop seeing me because he wanted to become a judge and he wanted to become a successful lawyer, and a career with so-called homosexuality in it would not work for him. He had to get married and have children, so our relationship ended—just another example of where people were in their heads.
I am a writer. I remember being upset with all of the homophobia in the underground, left-leaning newspapers. These publications were supposed to be by hippies trying to change the world. They were raging against Bank of America and the war in Vietnam, but they were still homophobic.
You had people like Mick Jagger performing androgynously. The music world was making a turn this way, and here were these old-school hippies still talking about faggots. This bothered me, and I realized I needed to align myself with gay liberation. Gay liberation could not be 24/7, but we all needed to do our part. I joined the Boston Gay Liberation Front.
The Boston Gay Liberation Front was a very, very serious group. We organized a big road trip to the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, organized by the Black Panther Party, in Washington, D.C., on November 27-29, 1970. This was after the initial Black Panther convention in Philadelphia. We stayed in a gay liberation commune when we arrived. There were a lot of men there. They were what we called ‘gender fuck.’ They were drag queens sans makeup with dungarees, a house coat, and long hippie hair.
Huey Newton was reported to be the only Black Panther who would talk to gay liberation groups. What am I going to learn? What am I going to see? We expected there to be space for gay liberation groups and us at this convention, but on our first day there, we kept receiving reports of hostility, name-calling, and other disparaging comments.
It was later revealed that the convention had been canceled. We went to breakfast at McDonald's with all these construction workers and did a zap dance. We just broke out in dance because the stereo happened to be playing some danceable tune. After our small zap, we piled back into our Volkswagen bus and went back to Boston.”
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