How to Spend That Winning Lottery Ticket; The Very Beginning of the Post Stonewall Gay Movement

Craig Rodwell in 1970, photographed by Fred MacDarrah

“Are homosexuals revolting? You bet your sweet ass we are!”
– from a political flyer in 1969 written by Charles Pitts.

A Gay Liberation Front demonstration in Times Square, September of 1969. The blond haired young man on the right is the same as in this picture from the riots, a young man who went by the street name of Jackie Hormona. Photo by Diana Davies


The Stonewall riots were a big golden goose egg of opportunity that dropped into the laps of people who were completely unprepared for it.
The post Stonewall gay movement began in great hope and raised expectations. It also began in chaos and acrimony. Many people were frantically arguing and trying to figure out how to make the best use of this opportunity, and over the shape of the changed landscape of gay life in New York. People who were completely new to any kind of political action were now flooding into a new movement. They had to have a place to go.
The new gay movement that emerged out of the riots was riven with all kinds of divisions and conflicts; ideological divisions, divisions between gay men and lesbians, racial divisions, divisions between transgenders and everyone else, class divisions, neighborhood divisions, personal divisions, etc. It was the whole modern gay movement with all of its abiding problems in its raucous infancy.
Like the movement that would follow over the next 40 years, this first generation accomplished much more than would have been expected. It accomplished much because of – and sometimes despite -- the new populist nature of gay politics.

As I mentioned in a previous post, New York was way behind other cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and even Washington DC when it came to gay movement politics. The New York gay community was largely unprepared for this sudden and massive transformation in its life.

As the New York Mattachine Society clung to its “be nice, go slow, cut deals” approach to gay activism, two new organizations were created by people who saw that the same old methods were not going to work anymore after the riots. The first was the Gay Liberation Front. The second was the Gay Activists Alliance, which split off from the Gay Liberation Front soon after the Front was founded, the first of many such splits over the decades in gay political organizations. In 1969, this was all very new, very painful, and very exciting. Both groups would pioneer new forms of confrontational activism that would be imitated by all kinds of other political movements down to the present day.

Gay Liberation Front meeting in 1970 at the Washington Square Methodist Church

The Gay Liberation Front saw itself as part of a larger left wing revolutionary movement in the United States. It thought of itself less as a formal organization than as a collective. It had no formal structure and no officers or bylaws. Its meetings could be raucous and chaotic. The problem was that much of the revolutionary left wing was not at all happy to see a mass of charged up homosexuals joining their ranks. Many groups, especially the Black Panthers, were openly hostile to them. They saw homosexuality as part of the decadent capitalist system that they wanted to replace. To a certain extent, some in the Front agreed with them. They saw the whole gay culture of bars, cruising, bath houses, and gender bending as so much capitalist decadence that had to go. Some people in the Front wanted subsume the struggle for gay rights into the larger revolutionary struggle.
Others wanted to keep the focus primarily on gay issues, and on issues very specific to the New York community, like liquor laws, police harassment, and discrimination in employment and housing. The split came when members of the Front voted to make a $500 donation to the Black Panthers after the Panthers made blistering homophobic attacks on gays and their new political movement in recent speeches. A number of people walked out and decided to start a new organization.

Gay Activists Alliance march, 1970. Its first president, Jim Owles, is on the right of the row of men linking arms. To the left is Phil Raia, Arthur Evans, Marty Robinson is behind the photographer in the foreground. To the left of the photographer is Tom Doerr who designed the lambda symbol that they are all wearing.

Those people formed the Gay Activists Alliance, a very different organization that decided to focus exclusively on gay issues. Unlike the Front which had no bylaws, and whose meetings could get very chaotic, the Alliance drew up a constitution, used Robert’s Rules of Order for meetings, and elected officers. Whereas some in the Front shunned the gay subculture, the GAA saw it as an existing network to be exploited. The Front mostly spread out of New York through college campus chapters. The Alliance spread beyond New York by way of bars, bathhouses, cabarets, and the gay grapevine.

What both groups did, together and separately, was create a new confrontational gay politics sharply different from the ever-so-polite accommodation and influence peddling of the old New York Mattachine society. It was a participatory politics in which everyone had a part in the decision-making process and everyone participated in political activity. This was no longer the leadership driven politics of the old New York Mattachine. It was political action that was frequently very loud, angry, vulgar, messy and conflict-ridden, but it was also surprisingly effective and quickly got the attention of city politicos who never before took seriously anything gay.

One of the first signs that a new day was here was an action by the Front in 1969 to confront directly the mob ownership of a bar. A Mafioso bar owner punched out a lesbian who had refused to let him cut in on her dance partner. A GLF group of women and men, lead by Martha Shelly, entered that bar en masse, began cranking up the juke box and dancing while conspicuously NOT buying any drinks. Martha Shelley confronted the bar owner. When he said, “Do you know who I am?” She replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care, but we’re the Gay Liberation Front!”

The first thing that both groups concentrated on was visibility. They were out to break down the terrified invisibility that kept gays and lesbians isolated and powerless. They both demonstrated and marched frequently. Instead of trying to conceal homosexual distinction underneath suits, dresses, and a veneer of conventional respectability, they proclaimed their sexuality and a distinct gay identity. The word “gay” was prominent in the titles of both organizations, instead of concealed behind names like “Mattachine” or “Bilitis” or “Homophile” (or “Human Rights Campaign”). Whereas the earlier organizations were very shy about going public, the Front and the Alliance loved the cameras. The more press attention (especially TV attention), the better. They were out to send 2 messages to the world through the media. First, they wanted to show that they were not afraid, not afraid of the cops, the mob, the bigots, the bashers, or the whole power structure that stood against them. Above all, they were not afraid to be publicly identified as gay. Second, they wanted to show the rest of the gay population out there in TV Land that there was a community and a movement waiting for them if they came out, that they would be safest not in the dark closet, but out in the open in the clear light of day in a community with others like them.



Marty Robinson (right) "zapping" Governor Nelson Rockefeller at a campaign event in 1970. Marty planted himself in the reception line, and when Rocky shook his hand, Marty refused to let go until the Guv heard his whole speech about the need for gay rights legislation. Security later pried Marty off the Governor and expelled him from the reception. Photo by Richard C. Wandel

One technique to achieve these ends was pioneered by Marty Robinson of the GAA. It was known as the “zap.” It was a sudden unannounced disruption of a public event, or an intrusion on the offices of a hostile business or politician. The president of Fidelifacts, a New York private investigative agency that specialized in snooping into the sex lives of prospective employees looking to smoke out homosexuals, was asked in a TV interview how he knew people were homosexual. He replied with “If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it’s a duck.” GAA activists led by Marty Robinson dressed in a duck costume descended on his offices the next day with cameras in tow, publicly embarrassing Fidelifacts executives and employees, and disrupting their business.



Marty Robinson in his duck suit at the Fidelifacts zap. Photo by Richard C. Wandel

They took on hostile businesses and politicians all the time, but they targeted liberals (especially Mayor John Lindsay) much more frequently. They put constant pressure on them to keep promises made and to remind them that this new constituency was here to stay and that it was not going away.

The GAA Firehouse in 1971

Dancing at the GAA Firehouse, 1971.
Photos by Fred MacDarrah

Another new service that both organizations provided was opportunities for gays and lesbians to come together and to socialize outside the context of bars and cruising grounds. Both organizations quickly discovered the political effectiveness of a good party. The GLF from the beginning held fund-raising dances. GAA continued that policy, and went further, opening the GAA Firehouse in 1971, one of the very first gay lesbian community centers anywhere, in an old abandoned firehouse in Tribeca. These dances and the Firehouse were opportunities for consciousness raising, organizing, providing services, and having a lot of fun together without having to pay off the mafia or the cops. Movie nights at the Firehouse were legendary. Vito Russo, the author of The Celluloid Closet organized and ran movie nights. Crowds of thoroughly baked young people in the wee hours of the morning watched, recited lines, and sang along to camp classics like Valley of the Dolls, or The Wizard of Oz. The Firehouse was short-lived. It was destroyed in an arson fire in 1974.
The dances and the Firehouse were ways of increasing visibility and building community in a population that was as isolated from each other as they were from conventional society. Some lesbian groups went even further creating communes where women would live and work together.

New York politicians, like all politicians, pay attention to numbers, especially numbers of voters. Some saw the numbers that these organizations were reaching and began to recognize that gays were a potentially very large and powerful voting bloc in city politics. Candidates began making contact with the Alliance and the Front seeking gay votes.

In 1970, Marty Robinson proposed lobbying City Council members to amend the City’s human rights laws to end employment and housing discrimination against gays and lesbians, and to end their criminalization. Jim Owles, Morty Manford, Robinson, and other gay activists met with liberal council members and lobbied them to draft a bill and introduce it. Such a bill was introduced in 1971. It did not reach the Council floor until 1974. It perished in the Council after Cardinal Terence Cooke and the Roman Catholic Archdiocese applied great pressure on Council members through their majority leader Thomas Cuite to reject it. For years afterward, the anti-discrimination bill would die in committee and never reach the Council. The bill finally passed into law with the active sponsorship and support of Mayor Ed Koch in 1986.

The police expel Jim Owles, Marty Robinson, and other GAA members from City Hall, 1970