Throughout paper on each of those articles. At least 1 single page

The American Gay Rights Movement and Patriotic Protest

SIMON HALL University of Leeds

This country claims a national basis of equalit}'. It's about time we got it. —Otto H. Ulrich, Jr., treasurer, Washington Mattachine, 1971'

Ours is a noble cause because we are engaged in a fight for the very promise of America.

—Lord L. Jean, executive director, Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center, 2000^

O N 3 0 A P R I L 2 0 0 0 S E V E R A L H U N D R E D thousand protesters as- sembled on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for the Millennium March, the fourth national gay rights demonstration to be hosted in the nation's capital. "For more than six hours, under a warm spring sun," the crowd heard speeches from activists, celebrities, and politicians; both President Clinton and Vice President Gore delivered videotaped remarks. The New York Ti'w« described the "festive" tone of the proceedings and emphasized the diversity of the marchers: "[They] were a long, ebullient parade of cops and veterans, drag queens and college students, gay parents with toddlers on their backs and heterosexual parents marching in support of gay children."

I would like to thank Patrick Michelson, Denis Flannery, and the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of the History of Sexuality for their encouraging and constructive comments on earlier drafts of this article. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support provided by the British Academy and the School of History, University of Leeds, which made the research for this article possible.

' Quoted in Myra MacPherson, "Ulrich v. the Pentagon: A Homosexual Fights Back," Washington Post, 11 September 1971, 5, in series 4, printed ephemera, box 22A, folder 1, Sorted Press Clippings, Alabama-D.C^., reel 19, The Gay Rights Movement: Gay Activists Alliance, from the International Gay Information Center, New York Public Library (microfilm. New York: Research Publications International, 1998), available for viewing at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Hereafter referred to as GAA Records.

^ Quoted in Walter L. Williams and Yolanda Retter, eds.. Gay and Lesbian Rijihts in the United States: A Documentary History (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003), 2 8 3 .

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 19, No. 3, September 2010 © 2010 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

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Patriotic Protest 537

One of the featured speakers was the father of Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming teenager who had been brutally murdered in October 1998. Dennis Shepard told the crowd to "let people know that you are a part of America . . . and you deserve the same rights."' Another speaker was the veteran activist Lorri L. Jean, executive director of the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center who explained that the "gay agetida" was the "very one upon which this nation was founded." In Jean's formulation the gay rights movement was a "fight for the very promise of A m e r i c a , . . . a patri- otic battle of the highest order, a battle to secure the principle that forms the bedrock of our society: . . . life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."* As this article will demonstrate, appeals to America's founding ideals have been at the heart of gay activists' strategy for half a century.

America's fate, according to historian Richard Hofstadter, is "not to have ideologies but to be one."'^ While John Winthrop's exhortation to his fellow pilgrims in 1630 to "be as a cit\' upon a hill" first articulated the notion of America as an idea, it was the nation's revolutionary birth that provided it with what Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal described as a national creed.** Rooted in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the ideals of self-government, liberty, equality, and justice lie at the heart of American national identity.^ Given the ideological diversity among the founding fathers themselves, it is not surprising that the precise nature of this national creed has always been fiercely contested." In some respects the long and continuing debate over just what Americanism actually is has characterized the Republic as much as the existence of the creed itself, and its malleability has enabled it to be claimed by forces from across the political spectrum. During the past two hundred years Americanism has been invoked by abolitionists, proslavery defenders, trades union organiz- ers, corporate titans, champions of imperial expansion, and crusaders for women's rights, among many others.'

' Robin Toner, "A Gay Rights Rally over Gains and Goals," Neiv York Times, 1 May 2000, 14. For Matthew Shepard, see die Matthew Shepard Foundation, available online at http://wvvw .matthewshepard.org/site/PageServer?pagename=niat_Matthews_Litè, accessed 18 April 2008.

•" Quoted in Williams and Retter, Gay and Lesbian Rights, 282-83. * Quoted in Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin, introduction to Americanism: New

Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, ed. Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 1.

' Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (Oxtbrd: Oxford University Press, 2003), 117.

' Ibid., 38, 87. See also Kazin and McCartin, introduction, 1; and George Packer, "Intro- duction: Living Up to It," in The Fight Is for Democracy: Winning the War of Ideas in America and the World, ed. George Packer (New York: Perennial, 2003), 14.

* Todd Gitlin, "Varieties of Patriotic Experience," in Packer, Eight Is for Democracy, 116. ' Kazin and McCartin, introduction, 3; and Michael Kazin, "A Patriotic Left," Dissent,

Fall 2002, 1.

538 S I M O N H A L L

For progressives, appeals rooted in the national creed have proved an ef- fective means of generating tangible pressure for social and political change. A model of patriotic dissent has emerged in which activists have sought to narrow the gap between America's lofty promise of liberty and justice for all and the actual experience of oppressed or marginalized Americans: the working classes, women, and African Americans, for example.'" Many of the protest movements that dominated the social and political landscape of the 1960s drew on this tradition. The drafters of the 1962 Port Huron Statement—a key manifesto of the early New Left—urged the building of a social movement that would re-energize the "American values" of "free- dom and equality for each individual" and "government of, by, and for the people," values they believed had become tarnished." The movement against the war in Vietnam also made use of Americanism, particularly in its early years. In a speech delivered at a rally in Washington, D . C , on 27 November 1965 Carl Oglesby, president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), drew a sharp contrast between the values of the founding fathers and the reality, as he saw it, of America's actions in Vietnam.'^

One of the best recent illustrations of the relationship between Ameri- canism and political protest comes from the civil rights movement.'' Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the movement's foremost leader, embodied the synergy of patriotism and protest that existed within the modern black freedom struggle. Throughout his public career King took great care to place demands for civil rights within a context that emphasized the gap be- tween the nation's founding ideals and the reality of segregation and black disfranchisement. In his first major speech as a civil rights leader, delivered on 5 December 1955 at a mass meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, King explained that the "great glory of American democracy" was the "right to protest." He went on to declare that "we are not wrong in what we are do- ing. . . . If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong."'* In his most famous speech, delivered before a massed crowd of 250,000 at the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, King envisioned a nation free from racial discrimination and bigotry. But King emphasized that this dream was "deeply rooted in the American dream" and that in demanding freedom

'° Kazin, "A Patriotic Left," 2; Cullen, Ameriean Dream, 38, 56. ' ' Port Huron Statement, in The New Left: A Documentary History, ed. Massimo Teodori

(Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1969), 164. '̂ Carl Oglesby, "Trapped in a System," in Teodori, New Left, 183. '•' Marisa Chappell, Jenny Hutchinson, and Brian Ward, "'Dress modestly, neatly . . .

as if you were going to church': Respectability, Class, and Gender in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Early Civil Rights Movement," in Gender in the Civil Rights Movement, ed. Peter Ling and Sharon Monteith (New York: Garland, 1999), 73.

" Clayborne Carson and Kris Shephard, eds., A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr (London: Little, Brown, 2001), 9-10.

Patriotic Protest 539

blacks were laying claim to the nation's egalitarian tradition. King and the thousands of marchers were simply calling on America to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal."'^ In a judgment that many historians have shared. New York '/Yw« columnist James Reston argued that King's ability to "invoke the principles ofthe founding fathers to rebuke the inequalities and hypocrisies of modern American life" was a major reason for the civil rights movement's effectiveness."^

According to some commentators, the 1960s mark a turning point when American leftists, frustrated by their experiences at trying to effect radical change and disillusioned in particular by their failure to end America's ongo- ing war in Vietnam, turned their back on a dissent rooted in patriotism in favor of a militant anti-Americanism.'^ Indeed, Michael Kazin and Joseph A. McCartin have claimed recently that "by the late 1960s, Americanism had become virtually the exclusive property of the cultural and political right."'" The analysis offered below ofthe gay rights movement ofthe 1960s and 1970s at both the national and local levels challenges this viewpoint. Indeed, it demonstrates the critical and continuing importance of patriotic dissent to gay rights activists and reveals that appeals to the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and "American" ideals of liberty and equality occupied a central place in the movement's tactical approach. If American progressives did indeed abandon patriotic dissent in the 1960s, then the gay rights movement stands as an important exception.

The emergence during the 1950s of what its participants dubbed the "homophile movement" marks the beginning ofthe modern struggle for gay rights in the United States. Within that story the work ofthe Mattachine Society is central. Founded in Los Angeles in 1951 by English immigrant, actor, and Communist activist Henry "Harry" Hay, Jr., the Mattachine Foundation (as it was first called) took its name ftom an all-male group of masked medieval satirists. Hosting discussion sessions, fostering a sense of community, and making early forays into public relations and legal chal- lenges, the organization grew throughout southern California and the Bay Area. Perhaps five thousand Californians had participated in Mattachine- sponsored activities by late 1952.'''

" David J. Garrow, Bearing the Crass: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (Landon: Vintage, 1993), 283.

" James Reston, "I have a dream . . . ," New York Times, 29 August 1963, 1. " Gitlin, "Varieties of Patriotic Experience"; and Kazin, "A Patriotic Left." " Kazin and McCartin, introduction, 6. " Marc Stein, ed.. Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in

America (New York: Scribner, 2004), 235; Immanuel Ness, ed.. Encyclopedia of American Social Movements, 4 vols. (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpc Reference, 2004), 4:1335.

540 S I M O N H A L L

In May 1953, amid fears about Communist control and unease over the leadership's intention to undertake more high-profile actions, the mem- bership ousted Hay and his cofounders and reorganized as the Mattachine Society.̂ " Under the leadership of journalist Hal Call and Donald Lucas, a "reserved, . . . bespectacled . . . accountant," the organization moved its headquarters to San Francisco and focused on public outreach and the provision of social services as well as publishing a journal, the Mattachine Review. Local chapters, which began to spring up across the country, hosted public lectures, organized discussion groups, and offered advice and practical help.^' Growing tension between the grassroots and the national leadership over autonomy, money, and personality led to the dissolution of Mattachine's national structure in 1961, although chapters in New York, Philadelphia (renamed the Janus Society), and Washington continued to function as autonomous units.̂ ^

During the 1960s homophile activists adopted the language and ideol- ogy of minority rights, engaged in public protest, and were increasingly unapologetic, even celebratory, about the homosexual lifestyle. '̂ In 1965 the Mattachine Societies in Washington and New York, together with Philacielphia's Janus Society and the Daughters of Bilitis (DoB, a pioneer- ing lesbian organization founded in San Francisco in 1955), staged a series of public demonstrations protesting discrimination against homosexuals.̂ "* The emergence of the direct-action phase of the gay rights movement owed something to the prevailing Zeitgeist. John F. Kennedy's legitimization of social activism, the protests of the civil rights movement, and a wider

'" Stein, Encyclopedia, 235; Ness, Encyclopedia, 4:1335-36. '̂ On Lucas and Call, see John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making

of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 7940—Í970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 89; Ness, Encyclopedia, 4:1336. See also Martin Meeker, "Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s," Journal of the History of Sexuality 10, no. 1 (2001 ): 9 1 - 9 9 .

^̂ Ness, Encyclopedia, 4:1339; Stein, Encyclopedia, 236. " D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 150, 164; Martin Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Dutton,

1993), 108-9; Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Se.vual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006), esp. chap. 5; David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An Ameriean Revolution (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006), chaps. 2—4. For the Mattachine Society of New York's cultural activities, sec, for example, "Drama Group 1965," in Records of the Mattachine Society of New York, series 2, topical file, box 3, folder 22, in The Gay Rights Movement: Mattachine Society of New York, Inc., Interna- tional Gay Information Center, New York Public Library (microfilm. New York: Research Publications International, 1998), reel 9, London School of Economics and Political Science (hereafter referred to as MSNY); and "Mattachine" leaflet, esp. 2 and 4, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, folder 15, reel 9.

" For the DoB, see Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006).

Patriotic Protest 541

flowering of activism all impacted on the homophile movement. At a Feb- ruary 1965 meeting of New York Mattachine, for example, the group's president, Julian Hodges, urged his members to "be as militant as other minorities and force the public to face honestly our just claims to equal treatment."'"^ Meanwhile, a report in the Mattachine Newsletter explained that "other social protest movements" had shown that direct action was "a potent means both of reaching the public and effecting social change."^''

Appeals to the Republic's founding ideals constituted a key feature of homophile strategy. In 1953, for example. West Hollywood activists asso- ciated with Liis Angeles Mattachine began to publish Owe, a gay-run and -edited newspaper that quickly built up monthly sales of some five thousand copies. Oie deployed the language of citizenship rights in the fight for gay equality, publishing editorials that declared that "homosexual acts bet\veen consenting adults are neither anti-social nor sinful; legal attempts to regu- late such behavior violate principles of American freedom."'̂ '̂ Founded in November 1961, Washington Mattachine's statement of purpose declared that the group was prepared to "act by any lawftil means . . . to secure for homosexuals the right to lite, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as pro- claimed for all men by the Declaration of Independence; and to secure for homosexuals the basic rights and liberties established by the word and the spirit of the Constitution of the United States."^*" In July 1965, at the first open meeting of Mattachine Midwest, the group's president, Robert Sloane, linked the struggle for gay rights with the revolutionary struggle for liberty and Abraham Lincoln's appeal at Gettysburg for Americans to continue the ft)unders' "unfinished work." Sloane concluded: "We have an appointment with destiny in our generation, just as the patriots of 1776 had in theirs."^'

Patriotic dissent also characterized the homophile movement's direct action protests, which began with a demonstration involving ten activists outside the White House on 17 April 1965. The following day twenty-nine protesters marched up Fifth Avenue to 42nd Street in New York to condemn Fidel Castro's discriminatory policies toward homosexuals in Cuba."' The

'* Memorandum, 7 March 1965, Report on February 10, 1965, Mattachine Meeting Panel and Audience Discussion, 2, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 4, folder 14, reel 12.

" Dick Leitsch and Warren D. Adkins, "Homosexuals Picket the Wliite House and the L'nited Nations," n.d. (ca. spring 1965), 4, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 4, folder 14, reel 12.

" Eisenbach, Gav Power, 2 0 - 2 1 ; Faderman and Tinimons, Gay L.A., 115-16. ^' The Mattachine Society of Washington, Statement of Purpose, in MSNY, series 2, topi-

cal file, box 3, folder 2 1 , reel 9. '̂' Introductory Address, as given by Mattachine Midwest, President Robert Sloane, at

the Hirst Open Meeting of Mattachine Midwest, July, 1965, 1-2, in MSNY, series 3, gay organizations, box 7, folder 2 1 , reel 17.

°̂ See Dick Ixritsch and Warren D. Atkins, "Homosexuals Picket the White House and the United Nations," Mattachine Newsletter (n.d., ca. July 1965), 2 - 3 , in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 4, folder 11, reel 12.

542 S I M O N H A L L

White House was picketed again on 29 May and 23 October, and there were further demonstrations outside the Civil Service Commission, the State Department, and the Pentagon." Appeals to Americanism were evident not only in the symbolic sites chosen for the protests but also in many of the slogans used. Those demonstrating outside the White House on 29 May, for instance, demanded "First Class Citizenship for Homosexuals," while placards carried during the State Department demonstration stated: "The American Way: Employment based upon competence, ability, train- ing; NOT upon private life" and "Homosexuals arc American Citizens, too."'" Gay rights activists were also conscious of how America's cold war leadership of the "free world" provided opportunities to those working for domestic change, given the increasing international attention that focused on the nation's ability to live up to its proclaimed ideals."'' In planning the Pentagon demonstration, ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations, an umbrella group formed in 1963) condemned the refusal to allow known homosexuals to serve in the military and the policy of giving a dishonor- able discharge to any member of the armed services who was discovered to be a homosexual, irrespective of his quality of service or performance. They asserted that "these policies ill-befit a nation which claims before the world to uphold the rights which this nation does and the concepts of hu- man worth and of human dignity which our nation does; a nation which champions personal freedom, individuality, the right not to conform, as our nation does."'* On 31 July 1965 a group of sixteen activists, including veterans from "various branches of the Armed Service (some with front- line combat experience)," demonstrated outside the Pentagon. Signs were carried that included slogans such as "U.S. claims no second class citizens;

" Mattachine Society of Washington, Information Bulletin, in MSNY, series 3, gay or- ganizations, box 8, folder 5, reel 18; "Pickets Demand Fair Treatment for Homosexuals," Sunday Star {Wishinffon, D.C.), 30 May 1965, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, folder 2 1 , reel 9; R. Cafiero, undated and untided report, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 4, folder 1 1 , reel 12; D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 161, 158-68; "Why Are Homosexual American Citizens Picketing the Pentagon?" MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, tblder 2 1 , reel 9; and Mattachine Society of Washington, Intbrniation Bulletin, in MSNY, series 3, gay organiza- tions, box 8, folder 5, reel 18.

" Mattachine Society of Washington, Information Bulletin, in MSNY, series 3, gay orga- nizations, box 8, folder 5, reel 18; Mattachine Society of Washington, Information Bulletin, 3, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, folder 2 1 , reel 9.

' ' The civil rights movement took advantage of the cold war context with some success; see, for example, Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Demoeraey {Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002).

" E C H O was a loose coalition of the New York and Washington, D.C., chapters of Mattachine, the Janus Society, and the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1963; see D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 161, 158-68. See also "Why Are Homosexual American Citizens Picketing the Pentagon?"

Patriotic Protest 543

what about homosexual citizens?" and "Homosexual citizens want to serve their country too." The demonstration received extensive coverage on the American television network CBS.'^

Meeting in a coffee shop after the second White House protest. New York Mattachine's O a i g Rodwell, a native of Chicago who moved to Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and became active in the homophile movement, suggested an annual Fourth of July protest outside Philadelphia's Indepen- dence Hall. Rodwell, who founded the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in 1967, envisaged the protest as "like a gay holiday. We can call it the Annual Reminder—the reminder that a group of Americans still don't have their basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.""'* The "Annual Reminder" was staged every Fourth of July between 1965 and 1969. As historian Marc Stein has noted, "demonstrating on the nation's birthday in the 'birthplace of the nation' strategically identified lesbians and gay men with the highest ideals of the United States.""^

E C H O sought a large turnout for the 1965 Reminder as a means of urging "the United States government to implement all the provisions of the Bill of Rights for all citizens, including homosexuals." They pointed out that the closing of gay bars was a denial of the right to free assembly and that the criminalization of homosexuality was a denial of the "right to the pursuit of happiness."""* Signs cartied by the forty or so demonstrators stated "Homosexual Citizens Want: Equality Before the Law" and "We Want: Equal Treatment By Our Fellow Citizens.""" Another slogan referred explicitly to the ideals that had been enshrined in Philadelphia in 1776: "Homosexual Americans Still Don't Have Our Sacred Freedoms & Rights."*" Writing in tlie DoB magazine, the Ladder., Kay Lahusan declared that "this dignified protest, which startled many a citizen into fresh thought about the meaning of Independence Day, might well have been applauded by our Founding Fathers, who were intent on making Ametica safe for the differences."*' The following year protesters outside Independence Hall sought to remind the

' ' Mattachine Societ)' of Washington, Information Bulletin, in MSNY, series 3, gay orga- nizations, box 8, folder 5, reel 18.

•'"' " O a i g L. Rodwell, 52, Pioneer for Gay Rights," New York Times, 20 June 1993, 38; and Eisenbach, Gay Power, 40. For the Oscar Wilde Memorial bookstore, see Neil Miller, Out of the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present (New York: Alyson Books, 2006), 320.

'' Marc Stein, City ofSisterly and Brotherly Loves; Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 248.

•"' E C H O , Announcement, in MSNY, serie.s 2, topical file, box 3, folder 2 1 , reel 9. '" 30 June 1965, 7:15 p.m., telephone call, Frank Kiuneny for Dick Leit.sch, message

recorded by R. W. Bracken, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, folder 2 1 , reel 9; and "Philadelphia Demonstration," in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 4 , folder 1 1 , reel 12.

•"' Stein, City ofSisterly and Brotherly Loves, 249. " Quoted in ibid., 248.

544 S I M O N H A L L

"American people of the principles of individual fteedom this country was founded upon as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights."*^ Similarly, in 1968 a flyer distributed by activists asked: "Are we guaranteeing to all of our citizens the rights, the liberties, the freedom, which took birth and first form in the Declaration of Independence?"*'

The strategy of patriotic dissent, which was designed to present the ho- mophile movement as an effort to ñilfill die nation's revolutionary promise rather than as a radical challenge to its democratic traditions, fitted neady with the movement's wider emphasis on the importance of the politics of respect- ability. Just as the early civil rights movement had placed great importance on projecting the "right" appearance, homophile organizations were conscious of public image.** ECHO's "rules for picketing" explained that demonstra- tions were not an opportunity for "an individual to express his individuality, personality or ego" and that "to gain acceptance, new ideas must be clothed in familiar garb." The need for "good order, good appearance and dignity" was emphasized, and specific instructions for participants included the wear- ing of "conservative and conventional dress" (meaning suits and ties for men and dresses for women) and refraining ftom conversing with passershy.*""

The tactical approach adopted by E C H O made a good deal of sense, especially given that there was almost no public acceptance of homosexuality and movement allies were in short supply. As historian August Meier has argued, "American history shows that for any reform movement to succeed, it must attain respectability. It must attract moderates, even conservatives, to its ranks."*'' This requirement was understood clearly by homophile leader Franklin Kameny, who was keen to ensure that the movement was not tainted by the countercultural style that was then growing in popularity. Kameny, an army veteran and Harvard PhD who had been fired from the U.S. Map Service in 1957 for being gay, helped found Washington Mattachine in 1961 and encouraged it to embrace direct action protests and challenge

*^ "2nd Annual Reminder" flyer, in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, tblder 2 1 , reel 9. •" Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 289, 2 7 2 - 7 3 . ** On the civil rights movement and respectabilit)', see, in particular, Chappell, Hutchinson,

and Ward, "Dress modesdy, neatly"; Simon Hall, "Marching on Washington: The Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s," in The Street as Stage: Publie Demonstrations and Protest Marehessinee the Nineteenth Century, ed. Matthias Reiss (Oxtbrd: Oxford University Press, 2007). For the gay rights movement, see Nadine Smith, "Three Marches, Many Les- sons," in Creating Change: Sexuality, Public Policy, and Civil Rights, ed. John D'Emilio, William B. Turner, and Urvashi Vaid (New York: St. Martin's, 2000).

*^ Committee on Picketing and Ijwftil Demonstrations, "Rules for Picketing," in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 3, folder 2 1 , reel 9.

•"• August Meier, "On the Role of Martin Luther King," in Along the Color Line: Explora- tions in the Black Experience, ed. August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 180.

Patriotic Protest 545

long-established notions that homosexuality was a sickness.*^ Kameny was also convinced that the homophile movement needed to appear "respect- able" in order to win public support. As he explained, "It is not / w h o am rejecting the beatniks: . . . it is society at large . . . who do[es]. . . . We must work with what ¿i." "All I am doing," he said, "is adopting the ow/y practi- cal approach to getting ourselves across in a way diat will get us what we want."*** Wliile this commitment to respectability would be swept aside in the maelstrom of late 1960s social activism, the movement's commitment to patriotic protest would prove more enduring.

Part "oasis and refuge" and part sleazy dive, the Stonewall Inn, located at 53 Christopher Street, was the most popular gay bar in New York City's Greenwich Village. In the early hours of Saturday, 28 June 1969, the pub's "magical" clientele, which ranged from "tweedy East Siders to street queens," had their merriment interrupted by a police raid. What followed quickly became "ife emblematic event in modern gay and lesbian history," transforming Stonewall into the birthplace of gay liberation.*' As the police began to release the bar's patrons, a noisy crowd assembled outside. Ac- cording to a report in the Village Voice, as one officer attempted to guide the last of the customers, a lesbian, to a waiting patrol car, she "put up a struggle," and almost immediately the "scene became explosive" as beer cans and bottles were "heaved at the windows and a rain of coins descended on the cops."^" Some have questit)ned the specifics of this account, and it seems more likely that, in the words of Craig Rodwell, "there was no one thing that happened or one person, there was j u s t . . . a flash of group—of mass—anger."^' Soon the bar itself was ablaze, and reinforcements from the city's Tactical Patrol Force (TPF), a crack riot-control unit, were on the scene. Still the crowd—perhaps more accurately described as a mob by this point—continued to fight back. At 3:35 a.m., some two hours after the raid began (and forty-five minutes after the riot had erupted), calm was restored. There were thirteen arrests and a number of serious injuries.^^

Media coverage of the riot helped to bring out the crowds the follow- ing day, and by early evening "something like a carnival, an outsized block part}'," was taking place outside the damaged Stonewall: "Handholding and kissing became endemic; cheerleaders led the crowd in shouts of'Gay

*' Ness, Encyclopedia, 4:1340. *" Frank Kameny to Dick Leitsch, 12 July 1965, 3 , in MSNY, series 3, gay organizadons,

box 8, folder 5, reel 18. '*'' Duberman, Stonewall, 181-82, xv; see also Terence Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolution-

aries: New York's Gay Liberation Front, 1 9 6 9 - 1 9 7 1 , " Radieal History Review 62 (1995): 105; and David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots TTiat Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin's, 2004).

''̂ ° Village Voice report, quoted in D'Emilio, Se.xual Politics, 2 3 1 - 3 2 . " Craig Rodwell, quoted in Duberman, Stonewall, 197. " Duberman, Stonewall, 199-202.

546 S I M O N H A L L

Power'; and chorus lines repeatedly belted out refrains of'We are the girls from Stonewall.'" Police, including TPF units, watched on grimly. As the evening progressed more than two thousands protesters engaged in con- frontations with the police, some of which turned ugly.""'

Stonewall has become a defining event in gay history, a "year zero" that in public consciousness and historical memory marks the birth ofthe gay liberation movement. As historian Marc Stein has pointed out. Stonewall is often seen "as the first act of lesbian and gay resistance ever.'''' This is partly due to the efforts of gay liberation activists themselves, who sought to dem- onstrate that they had broken with the past by "denying that lesbian and gay politics even had a past." According to Stein, "perhaps in no movement was the denial of prior political traditions so complete."'̂ * Of course, there are good reasons for seeing Stonewall as a transformative moment. The aftermath of the riot certainly saw an explosion of gay organizing: at the end of July activists in New York formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), while other groups began to spring up in cities and on campuses across the nation.̂ ^ The emergence of gay newspapers, speakers' bureaus, telephone helplines, churches, and bookstores in the years that followed Stonewall signaled a genuine flowering of gay culture and political activism. The fifiy gay organizations that had existed in 1969 had grown to more than eight hundred four years later, and tens of thousands of gays and lesbians became actively involved in the gay rights movement. Of course, such impressive growth was possible in part because activists were able to draw upon organi- zations, networks, and resources that had been created and nurtured by the homophile movement during the previous two decades.^" If not a decisive break. Stonewall certainly marked the movement's evolution ftom a "thinly spread reform effort" into "a large, grassroots movement for liberation," and the riot itself was of enormous symbolic importance and rhetorical power.̂ '̂ As the Mattachine Society of New York put it in language that playftiUy evoked the spirit ofthe American Revolution, Stonewall was the "hairpin drop heard round the world."'*

" Ibid., 202-5; and D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 232. " Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 289. ^' For the growth in campus activism, see, in particular, "Homosexuals Defy Campus Ta-

boos," Berkshire Eagle (Pittsfield, Mass.), 8 January 1972, in GAA Records, series 4, printed ephemera, box 22A, folder 3, reel 19.

^ On die growth of tiie homophile movement in the second half of the 1960s, see D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 173-74, 1 9 0 - 9 1 , 197, 199; Brett Beemyn, "The Silence Is Broken: A Hi.story ofthe First Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual College Student Groups," Journal ofthe History of Sexuality 12, no. 1 (2003): 2 0 5 - 2 3 ; and Eisenbach, Gay Power, chaps. 2, 3.

" D'Emilio, "After Stonewall," 24\-A4; D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 2 3 2 - 3 9 . See also Miller, Out ofthe Past, 3 2 1 ; and Beemyn, "The Silence Is Broken," 2 0 5 - 6 .

°" D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 232; and Eisenbach, Gay Power, 117.

Patriotic Protest 547

New York's GLF was the most important organization to be formed in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall riot. A product of the late 1960s cultural and polidcal milieu, it embraced revolutionary polidcs and militant language.'̂ ' The organization's name was (in)famotisly modeled after South Vietnam's National Liberation Eront, and the GLE embraced the strident rhetoric that was then in vogue (denouncing the "dirty, vile, fucked-up capitalist conspiracy," for example) and adopted confrontadonal tactics.*" The GLF also sought to forge meaningftil alliances with other radical causes, offering support to the Black Panther Party and pardcipat- ing in marches against the war in Vietnam. To some extent the search for allies was motivated by a desire to promote the gay liberation message, but the decision was also "rooted in personal experience." The GLF's found- ers mixed with and held an affinity toward antiwar campaigners and Black Power advocates; indeed, a significant number, including John O'Brien, Jim Fouratt, and Martha Shelley, had been involved in the campus-based activism of the New Left student movement.'''

Given these personal connections, it is not surprising that the GLF shared common ideological ground with leftist polidcs of the late 1960s. It believed that gay liberation was "tied to the liberadon of all peoples," and it sought to effect a radical overhaul of America's social, economic, and political system." Unlike the homophile organizations that had sought to win acceptance within American society, the GLF advocated "a complete transformadon" ofthat society.*' The GLF's statement of purpose reveals its radical political orientation as well as its embrace of revolutionary rhetoric. "We are a revolutionary group of men and women," it stated, "formed with the realizadon that complete sexual liberadon for all people cannot come about unless existing social insdtudons are abolished." The GLF intended to create new "social forms and reladons" that would be based on "brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality."

'" Miller, Out of the Past, 339. *" D'Emilio, "After Stonewall," 242. " Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, Out for Good: Tlie Struggle to Build a Gay

Rights Movement in America (New York: Touchstone, 1999), 4 1 . The same was true of other organizations that followed in the GLF's wake. Morris Kight, who founded 1^» Angeles GLF in December 1969, for example, had been head of the Dow Action Committee, which had organized protests against Dow C'hemicals, infamous for its mantifacture of napalm. See D'FLmilio, "After Stonewall," 242; and Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 36-37. Many members of Cornell University's Student Homophile League were also acdvely involved in andwar protests, several were members of the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, and the group was also infiuenced by the militancy of the university's Afi"o Amedcan Society. See Beemyn, "The Silence Is Broken," 2 1 3 , 2 1 6 - 1 7 .

"̂ D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 2 3 3 - 3 4 ; Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revoludonades," esp. 108, 1 1 3 , 1 1 5 .

"•' Miller, Out of the Past, 339.

548 S I M O N H A L L

"Babylon," the statement concluded, "has forced us to commit ourselves to one thing—revolution!""

At first glance the founding of the GLF, which symbolized the emergence of the gay liberation phase of the movement, appears to confirm the claims of those scholars who have argued forcefiilly that the end of the 1960s saw progressive movements and activists abandon strategies rooted in appeals to Americanism. However, there are good reasons to challenge this interpreta- tion. Even the GLF did not abandon patriotic dissent entirely, while many of the gay liberation organizations founded in its wake proved more than willing to appropriate the language of Americanism. Moreover, the GLF itself was quickly eclipsed by the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a group that made extensive use of patriotic dissent. While most activists in the 1970s discarded the politics of respectability tliat had been championed by earlier gay rights leaders, they were reluctant to abandon rhetorical and symbolic appeals to America's founding ideals. Patriotic protest thus constitutes an important if often overlooked continuity between the homophile and gay liberation movements.

A few weeks before the November 1969 election in New York City thir- teen members of the Gay Commandoes, a GLF cell, infiltrated a mayoral debate sponsored by the League of Women Voters at a synagogue in Queens. After being ignored repeatedly in the question-and-answer session, Marty Robinson, a twenty-six-year-old "skinny," "boyish-looking" carpenter from Brooklyn with a penchant for tight blue jeans, intervened.*^ He challenged the conservative mayoral candidate Mario Procaccino to reveal his position on gay rights—"It's 1776, Mr. Procaccino. The homosexual revolution has begun."'̂ '̂ It would be going too far to claim that this incident demonstrates the centrality of patriotic dissent to GLF praxis, but it does show that appeals to Americanism and late 1960s revolutionary politics were not mutually ex- clusive—something that is borne out when looking at a number of other gay liberation organizations that were inspired by developments in New York.

Philadelphia's GLF, for example, was founded in the spring of 1970. One of its most influential leaders was Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Kuromiya, a Japanese American who had been born in 1943 in an internment camp in Wyoming and raised in California, was a veteran of both the civil rights and anti- Vietnam War movements.*^ Writing in the Philadelphia Free Press in July 1970, Kuromiya claimed that "homosexuals have burst their chains and abandoned their closets. . . . We come battle-scarred and angry to topple your sexist, racist, hateful society. We come to challenge the incredible

" Statement of 31 July 1969, quoted in D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 234. '* Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 2 6 , 30. " Eisenbach, Gay Power, 131. '''' Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 315-16.

Patriotic Protest 549

hypocrisy of your sexual monogamy, your oppressive sexual role-playing, your nuclear family, your Protestant ethic, apple pie and Mother."*" But Philadelphia's GLF also drew on America's historic ideals in making the case for gay rights. The group's founding statement, issued the same month that Kuromiya penned his attack on "apple pie and Mother," offered a radical critique of mainstream American society and culture to be sure, but it concluded with this line: "Our fight against homosexual oppression is one with the revolutionary struggle of all oppressed peoples for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.""' A similar tension between the politics of revolution and the rhetoric of Americanism can be seen in an article that appeared in the 24 October 1970 edition of Gay Elames: A Bulletin of the Homofire Movement. Ortez Alderson, an African American activist from Chicago who was also involved with the anti-Vietnam War movement, con- demned what he termed the "pigs mentality" of the American government but also scored its hypocrisy for extolling the virtues of the Declaration of Independence while simultaneously seeking to repress homosexuals' own "pursuit of happiness."^"

Over 27-28 June 1970 the Homophile Coordinating Council of Boston organized a series of gay pride events (including guerilla theater, seminar discussions, and a religious service) to commemorate the first anniversary of Stonewall, when "members of New York's gay community threw ofF the yoke of oppression." A panel discussion sponsored by Boston's GLF and hosted at Beacon Hill's Charles Street Meeting House made rhetorical use of the city's iconic role in the American Revolution. The session was entitled "Why Can't We Have a Dance in Boston, or Does the Cradle of Liberty Rock Only One Way?"^'

That same month, inspired by the Stonewall rebellion and subsequent emergence of the gay liberation movement, a group of seven students at the University of Kansas founded the Lawrence GLF. The group's purpose was to "expose the inequities existing in this heterosexual male-dominated society and, in so doing, to dispel widespread ignorance, hostility and preju- dice" against gay people. The organization also hoped to "build a sense of community and dignity among gay people at the Universit)' of Kansas, by providing an atmosphere of sympathy and understanding so as to enable

"« Ibid., 322. ''' Harmonyville Music Festival flyer, n.d., in Robert L. Wilbur Protest Literature Collec-

tion, box 3, Gay Liberation, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, (Columbia University, N.Y. (hereafter Wilbur (Collection); and Stein, ('ifv of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 315.

™ Ortez Alderson, "The 'Disease' Fights Back," Gay Flames: A Bulletin of the Homofire Movement, 24 October 1970, 1, in Wilbur Collection, box 3, Gay Liberation.

" Love Is All You Need flyer, available online at http://vvww.lib.neu.edu/archives/voices/ gl_pride2.htm, accessed 11 April 2008.

550 S I M O N H A L L

them, as human beings, to develop and achieve their full potential and make their maximum contribution to society and to mankind."^^

In August 1970 the group applied for formal university recognition. In addition to providing a degree of public legitimacy, such status would also bring tangible benefits such as space on campus, available free of charge, for hosting meetings and events and access to student activity fees for funding. On 5 September, despite support from the executive committee of the Stu- dent Senate, Chancellor Lawrence Chalmers refused the group's request on the grounds that the authorities were "not persuaded that student activity fiinds should be allocated either to support or oppose the sexual proclivities of students, particularly when they might lead to violation of state law." After three votes by the Student Senate in favor of recognition were vetoed by the chancellor, the GLF decided to file suit against the university.̂ "' With the help of renowned attorney William Kunstler and the American Civil Liberties Union, the GLF appealed the case to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, but when the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, the legal challenge had nowhere to go.''*

In addition to its high-profile court action the Lawrence GLF also orga- nized a picket against a realtor who was accused of discriminating against homosexuals and compiled voting guides that focused on candidates' positions on gay rights.̂ ^ The group also stocked a small library of gay and lesbian literature, provided counseling, and arranged talks.̂ ^ However, the organization was probably best known for its dances, which were held in the Kansas Union Ballroom. ' Attracting people from across the region and, on one famous occasion, featuring a performance by the Village People, the dances played a critical role in "creating and consolidating a gay culture and community in Lawrence."^"

'̂ Cixil Action, GLF v. University of Kansas—^Verified Complaint, 4 - 5 , in Queers and Allies (also Lawrence Gay Liberation Front; Gay and Lesbian Ser\ices of Kansas; LesBiGay Services), series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1, folder 1 9 7 0 / 7 1 , University' of Kansas Arcliives (hereafi:er Queers and Allies).

'^ See Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Har\ard Université' Pre.ss, 1999), 1 7 8 - 8 1 ; and Civil Action, GLF v. University of Kansas—Verified Complaint, 6 - 8 .

'* Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 181-82; Emily Winerock, "Gay Civil Rights: The Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Student Organization of the University of Kansas's Fight for Funding," 3-7, in Queers and Allies, series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1.

" Gay Services of Kansas, flyer, 1981, 2, in David D. Barney, "Gay and Lesbian History at the University of Kansas: Lawrence Gay Liberation Front, 1971-1975," Gay Services of Kansas: 1976-1980 (Historical Records Project, June 1992), 121, in Queers and Allies, series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1.

'^ Winerock, "Gay Civil Rights," in Queers and M i e s , series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1. '" Jan Hyatt, "Area Gay Group No Longer Political," University Daily Kansan, 6 February

1975, 3, University' of Kansas Archives. " Bailey, Sex in the Heartland, 184-85.

Patriotic Protest 551

Despite using revolutionary rhetoric such as pledging support to "all repressed and oppressed people" and condemning "uptight, authoritar- ian, racist, sexist Amerika," the Lawrence GLF actually displayed a striking allegiance to Americanism.^' As one of the group's official statements ex- plained: "Paradox is the distinguishing characteristic of American society. Standing securely on the granite slats of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, on the professed traditions of American liberty and justice, our societ}' casts its eyes upon its sacred ideals while it holds those of whom it is afraid in a reality of hellish deception and oppres- sion.""" The Lawrence GLF believed that in a "society that professes the freedom of the individual, moral and sexual legislation has no place.""'

On 10 March 1972 the group held the "first annual CELEBRATION OF T H E FIRST AMENDMENT DANCE" in the Kansas Union Ballroom. The LGLF explained: "Wliy celebrate the First Amendment? If you're gay it's your amendment. If you have long hair it's your amendment. If you're Angela Davis it's your amendment. . . . No matter who you are, no matter what the life st)'le, orientation towards existence or sexuality, come celebrate one of the most important guarantees of human freedom.""" The Lawrence GLF's allegiance to Americanism endured. A 1981 flyer produced by its suc- cessor organization, the Gay Services <}f Kansas, explained that its purjiose was to "promote understanding of gay people among the people of Kansas and elsewhere" by "securing for gay people the rights and liberties established by the word and spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutions of the United States of America and the State of Kansas.""' Lawrence's rich association with abolitionism and antislavery agitation perhaps encouraged such appeals; in recent times gay rights activists in Lawrence have portrayed their struggle as part and parcel of the town's historic commitment to lib- erty. Writing in the University Daily Kansan in October 1997, for instance, Rob McRae argued that struggling for social equality was an integral part of Lawrencian character. He pointed out that the town, founded by abolition- ists and serving as the state's unofficial "Free State" capital during die late 1850s, had "historically supported equality and justice.""*

Gay rights activists at Stanford University in California also used patriotic appeals as part of their organizing efforts. The campus in Palo Alto had seen

" I b i d . , 176. *" Barney, "Gay and Lesbian History," 9, in Queers and Allies, series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1. *' GLF statement, n.d., in Queers and Allies, series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1, tblder Artificial, n.d. " Lawrenee GLF News, 10 March 1972, 2, in Queers and Allies, series 6 7 / 6 6 , box 1. *' Gay Services of Kansas flyer, 1981, 1. "•* Rob MacRae, "Struggle tbr Social Issues Inherendy in Lawrence," University Daily

Kansan, n.d. (ca. October 1997), in Queers and Allies, box 4, folder Scrapbook, 1 9 9 7 / 9 8 . The abolitionist influence can also be seen today: Kansas's premier gay and lesbian magazine, available in many of Lawrence's coffee shops and bars, is called the Liberty Press.

552 S I M O N H A L L

the founding of the first West Coast chapter of the Student Homophile League in February 1968. While this had proved a short-lived enterprise, the aftermath of Stonewall saw more successfial and longer-lasting efforts at gay organizing at the prestigious university. The Gay Students' Union was founded in November 1970, and in February 1972 it successfully won official university recognition as a Voluntary Student Organization and changed its name to the Gay People's Union (GPU). In 1974 GPU activ- ists organized the first of what would become annual gay pride weeks on campus. Activists, one of whom was dressed as the Statue of Liberty, posed for publicit}' shots outside the organization's Old Firehouse headquarters, carrying a "Gay Freedom" banner and a large American flag. Two years later the gay and lesbian awareness celebrations, held over 21-29 June, were entided "Spitit o f ' 7 6 : A Gay Civil Rights Event.""^

New York's GLF had always been a highly unstable organization, and it did not take very long before, wracked by internal divisions and internecine conflicts and increasingly isolated from potential allies, it went into precipi- tous decline. As the San Francisco writer Sasha Gregory pointed out, the GLF quickly became "more an idea than an actual group of people.""* At the end of 1969 four GLF activists—Jim Owles, Marty Robinson, Arthur Evans, and Arthur Bell—who were disillusioned with the GLF's lack of structure and its revolutionary multi-issue politics founded the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA). The new group's constitution, approved on 21 December, demanded "freedom for expression of our dignity and value as human beings through confrontation with and disarmament of all mechanisms which un- justly inhibit us: economic, social, and political." The GAA was "completely and solely dedicated" to furthering the gay rights cause, and it repudiated violence "except for the tight of self-defense" as "unworthy of social protest." The organization rejected "all ideologies, whether political or social," and expressly forbade forming alliances with groups that were not committed to supporting homosexual equality."^ The constitution also revealed the GAA's appeal to Americanism, with its demand that homosexuals "be die bearers of social and political rights which are guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States."*' According to journalists Dudley Clendinen and Adam

'* Gerard Koskovich, "The History of Homosexuality at Stanford University: A Brief Chro- nology," Gay and Lesbian Alliance at Stanford, 1985 GALA Week Program Book for Gay and Ixsbian Awareness Week (5-11 May 1985), 7, and GALA Week 1984 program, 8, in Gay and Lesbian Alliance at Stanford, Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas (hereafter referred to as Wilcox Collection).

*' Quoted in Eisenbach, Gay Power, 141-42. *' Stein, Eneyelopedia, 4 2 7 - 2 8 . On the founding of the GAA, see Eisenbach, Gay Power,

144-45. ** "A Glimpse at Gay Liberation on GAA's 2nd Anniversary," in GAA Records, series 2,

topical file, box 18, folder 1 1 , Gay Activist (News.sheet), reel I I .

Patriotic Protest 553

Nagourney, the "grand sweeping language" of the GAA constitution was "deliberately, almost presumptuously, evocative ofthe Bill of Rights.""'

In sharp contrast to the GLF, whose chaotic meetings have been described as "a cross between a Quaker meeting and an informal rap session," the GAA was a well-structured organization with elected officials, committees, and regular meetings run under parliamentary rules.'*" It was a single-issue interest group that, in the words of one scholar, "represented . . . a return toward the homophile movement's agenda, albeit one transformed by an infusion of countcrcultural style and sexual politics."*" The GAA repre- sented a moderated, reformist version of gay liberation. It unapologetically celebrated gay life, championed "coming out" as a liberating step, and engaged in provocative and confrontational tactics. Yet it neither sought to forge a radical multi-issue movement nor rejected American society as hopelessly flawed. Rather, much like the homophile organizations o f t h e 1960s, it demanded that homosexuals be afforded the eqtial protection of the laws and the benefits of first-class citizenship.'^

The GAA became famous for adopting and developing the "zap," which quickly became its trademark tactic. By infiltrating public events and con- fronting public officials over their stance on gay rights, the organization forced politicians to take stands, helped shape a gay agenda, generated publicity, and empowered homosexuals.' ' By the fall of 1970 GAA, with its mixture of "dead earnestness and high camp," was the "most watched—and most imitated" gay rights organization in the country.''"' It lobbied for fair employment and housing legislation, pushed for the repeal of sodomy laws, and sought an end to police harassment. The organization, like the GLF, also worked to foster a vibrant gay culture and used its headquarters (a former Victorian firehouse in SoHo) to host dances, cabarets, consciousness-raising sessions, film shows, and other cultural activities.'''

Appeals to Americanism formed a central part ofthe GAA's tactical ap- proach. During November 1970, for example, Mart\' Robinson and Arthur Evans were invited to appear on the ABC television network's TTje Dick Cavett Show after the GAA had threatened to disrupt the show's taping in protest at antigay remarks that had been aired on a previous edition by the comedian Mort Sahl. Cavett, described by the cultural commentator Clive James as "the most distinguished talk-show host in America, if sophis- tication and an intellectual breadth were what you wanted," interviewed

" Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 51. •*" Dennis Altman, quoted in Miller, Out ofthe Past, 342. " Stein, Encyclopedia, 440. " Miller, Out ofthe Past, 349. '•' Stein, Encyclopedia, 4 2 8 - 2 9 . " Clendinen and Nagourney, Outjor Good, 66. " Eisenbach, Gay Power, 145, 154—56, 1 6 9 - 7 1 ; and Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for

Good, 5 3 , 92.

554 S I M O N H A L L

Robinson and Evans, along with Dick Leitsch of New York Mattachine, for the Thanksgiving night broadcast. This provided the GAA activists with a valuable opportunity to invoke the founding principles of the nation in service to their cause. Evans, a Columbia PhD student, explained that "there is no reason why we can't be ftill people, both economically and in terms o f o u r feelings! . . . This is a matter of polidcal rights, our Consdtudonal rights, which we have under the Declaradon of Independence: 'Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.'" Turning to Cavett, Evans asked: "We should have that, too, don't you think?"'*

The long campaign for a law protecting homosexuals from discriminadon in New York City provides further illustration of the GAA's wiflingness to appeal to America's national creed. Beginning in the winter of 1970, the GAA sought passage of a municipal bill that would prohibit discriminadon on the grounds of sexual orientation in employment, public accommoda- tion, and housing. Using zaps to put pressure on politicians, including, most notably, the city's mayor, John Lindsay, the GAA quickly managed to win an important measure of political support for "Intro 4 7 5 , " the name of the proposed gay civil rights bill.'^ In the fall of 1971 Mayor Lindsay himself endorsed it and, after it was killed in committee, issued an executive order that stated that a person's "private sexual orientation" could not be used as a factor by municipal agencies when it came to making hiring and promodon decisions.'* Defeated in 1971 and again in 1974, the law was finally passed by the New York City Council in 1 9 8 6 . " In their efforts to win broader public support for the bill the GAA drew on the language of Americanism. They pointed out, for instance, that "two hundred years after the American Revolution" gay Americans still had "no protection against discrimination in such essential areas as housing, employment, and public accommodations." They also explained that, with the "Bicentennial of the American Revoludon . . . fast approaching," if the bill failed to win passage, "1,000,000 New Yorkers will still have nothing to celebrate."'""

" Eisenbach, Gay Power, 147, 149-50. For Evans, see ibid., 127, 144. For d i v e James, see James, "Dick Cavett: The Secret Art of the Talk Show Host," Slate, 9 February 2 0 0 7 , available online at http://www. slate. com/id/2159367, accessed 11 Apdl 2008.

''' See, for instance, GAA News Release, "Slepian Tdal for Harassment March 8," in GAA Records, sedes 1, committee files, box 17, folder 10, reel 8.

" Eisenbach, Gay Power, 154-56, 163-64, 173-74; and "Lindsay Orders City Protec- tion for Homosexuals in Jobs, Hiring," 8 February 1972, in GAA Records, sedes 4, pdnted ephemera, box 22A, folder 4, reel 19.

" On final passage of the bill, see Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 526-30. '"" "Equal Rights for Gay People," pamphlet (produced by GAA/Coalition in support of

a New York Gay Civil Rights Bill), n.d. (ca. summer 1975), 1, in Wilbur Collecdon, box 3 , Gay Liberadon 2. See also "March on St. Patdck's for Gay Rights! Sat., July 12" flyer, n.d. (ca. June or July 1975), in Wilbur Collecdon, box 3 , Gay Liberadon 2.

Figure 1 ; Gay rights rally, Dadc C'ouiity, Florida, 7 June 1977. The individual on the tar right is Leonard Matlovich; the others are unknown. © Bettye Lane. Reproduced by permission of the photographer.

556 S I M O N H A L L

Sometimes appeals to Americanism took on a local flavor. In October 1972, for instance, several hundred activists attended the first Pennsylvania lesbian and gay conference in Pittsburgh—which the GAA cosponsored. In endorsing a gay rights platform the delegates declared that "our states (and especially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) have always been a refuge for those who have undergone persecution for their beliefs and practices in less free environments. With the emergence of new styles of living in our time, this Commonwealth [of Pennsylvania] has the opportunity to carry on the 'holy experiment' of [its founder] William Penn by recognizing that any society is enriched by diversity of opinion and action."""

The late 1970s saw the limited but significant gains made by gay and lesbian Americans in their struggle to achieve first-class citizenship come un- der sustained attack from an increasingly potent coalition of flindamentalist Christians and conservatives.'"^ Perhaps the most high profile campaign took place in Dade County, Florida. Led by Anita Bryant (described by journalists Chris Bull and John Gallagher as a "mother, celebrity singer, former Miss America, and spokeswoman for the Florida Citrus Growers"), conserva- tives succeeded in overturning a recently passed ordinance that prohibited discrimination in housing, public accommodations, and employment on the basis of "afïèctional or sexual preference.""" In a special election held on 7 June 1977 voters supported repeal of the ordinance by a margin of more than two to one.'"* Between 1977 and 1980 voters overturned gay rights bills in Wichita, Kansas, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Eugene, Oregon.

Gay rights activists and their allies fought hard to try and preserve their hard-won advances, and appeals to American ideals constituted an important weapon in this fight. Indeed, these early skirmishes in what would later come to be called the "culture wars" represented a battle over the very meaning of Americanism. Bryant herself sought to wrap the "American flag around the anti-gay rights movement" and often ended her speeches by singing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."'"^ But gay rights activists did not abandon

"" Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 3 8 1 - 8 2 . '"̂ D'Emilio, "After Stonewall," 258. New allies, such as the American Civil liberties Union,

the National Organization tbr Women, and the American Bar Association, otïered their support tbr gay rights; in 1973 the i\merican Psychological Association removed homo.sexualitv' fi-om its list of menta] disorders; and the Civil Service Cximmission ended its blanket ban on employing homosexuals in July 1975. Meanwhile, a host of local antidiscrimination ordinances were passed in municipalities across the nation. By 1976 seventeen states had repealed their laws prohibiting sodomy. See, for example, D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, 238; and D'Emilio, "After Stonewall," 249-50.

'"^ Chris Bull and John Gallagher, Perject Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s {'Hew York: Crown, 1996), 16; and Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 29S.

"" For an account of the Miami/Dade County campaign, see Clendinen and Nagourney, 0«i/o>-Goorf, 2 9 1 - 3 1 1 .

"" Eisenbach, Gay Power, 279, 2 8 1 .

Patriotic Protest 557

this patriotic terrain to their opponents and instead responded with "a litde flag waving of their own."'"* The anti-Bryant campaign in Dade County, for instance, recruited Vietnam veteran Leonard Matlovitch (an openly gay air force veteran who successftilly appealed his general discharge) and former National Football League (NFL) player Dave Kopay as spokesmen. As historian David Eisenbach has pointed out, "Wliat could be more all- American than representatives of the U.S. military and NFL football?"'"'' When Bryant appeared at a Houston banquet, several thousand gay rights supporters took part in a candlelight march and rally that concluded with the singing of "America the Beautiftil," a Bryant favorite.'"*

Similady, duting the late 1970s in Madison, Wisconsin, supporters of gay tights deployed pattiotic language as part of their efforts to fend off attacks by conservative enemies. Widi a former student radical, Paul Soglin, in die mayor's oflice (elected in 1973, Soglin retired to practice law in 1979 before winning office again a decade later) and a proud tradition of progressive politics, Madi- son was an tmlikely environment for die new conservatism."" In Aptil 1978, however, an alliance of local conservative ministers sought to amend the city's equal opportunities ordinance, which afforded protection against disctimina- tion "on die basis of sexual otientation in employment, housing, credit, city accommodations and public facilities.""" Rev. Wayne L. Dillabaugh, a colorftil and controversial figure, viewed the campaign against gay tights as part of a broader efïort to "clean up" the city. ' ' ' Anodier leading opponent of gay tights

'"" See caption. Gay Rights Now photograph (Bettye Lane), unpaginated, in Eisenbach, Gay Power.

'"' Eisenbach, Gay Power, 282. For Matlovitch, see ibid., 2 6 2 - 6 3 . """ Ibid., 283. "America the Beautiful" was also sung by scores of gay rights activists who

were arrested during a police raid on the Snake Pit, a New York City gay bar, in March 1970. See Eisenbach, Gay Power, 104.

"" On Paul Soglin, see "Biography," available online at http://psoglin.typepad.com/ about.html, accessed 1 November 2006.

"" "Local Coalition Is Backing Homosexuals' Civil Rights," Wisconsin State-Journal, 12 May 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 1, and The United, press release, 5 February 1979, The United, box 1, folder 1, Wisconsin Hi.storical Society (hereafter WHS). See also Tom Foley, "Anti-Gay Rights Drive Will Be Started Here," Capitol Times, 28 April 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 4, WHS. See also Bill Christofïerson, "Equal Opportunity Law Attacked," Madison Press Con- nection, 17 June 1978, and Dan Allegretti, "Gay Rights I^iw Is Pritchard Target," Capital Times (Madison, Wise), 23 October 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 4, WHS. In the spring of 1975 Madison's Ec]ual Opportimity Ordinance had been amended to include ".sexual preference"; see Paul Soglin to Dade County Commissioners, 14 April 1977, in Katlileen Nichols and Barbara Constans Papers, 1975-79,b<» 1, folder 7, MCGRCorrespondence and Memos, 1977-79, WHS.

' " See Doug Mobe, "The Rev, the Dangle, the Lawyer," Capital Times, 22 March 2005, 2A; Mike Stone, "Dillabaugh Sets Three-Day 'God and Decency' Drive," Capital Times, 22 June 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 4, WHS; "Ohio Parish Can't Forget Dillabaugh," Madison Press Connection, 23 May 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 2, WHS; and Virginia Mayo, "Groups Join to Save Equal Rights Ordinance," Capital Times, 11 May 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 1, WHS.

558 S I M O N H A L L

in the city was Rev. Richard "Dick" Pritchard of Heritage Congregational Church. Pritchard, a resident of Madison since 1947, had supported the civil rights movement, even joining demonstrations in Alabama and attending tiie August 1963 March on Washington."'^ Like Dillabaugh, however, he believed that gay rights encouraged "a lifestyle that is sick and wrong" and argued that homosexuals should be "precluded ftom certain sensitive occupations . . . so long as they persist in not wanting to recover.""''

The gay rights movement organized quickly to head off this challenge, and a group called Madison Gay Men and Lesbians United (The United) was formed."* For The United, supporting gay rights and opposing dis- crimination was patriotic, and the group grounded its demand for equality within the framework of America's revolutionary promise of liberty: "It has taken this country a long time to move toward fulfilling the potential of freedom for all. But we have moved in that direction through the Bill of Rights and the federal Constitution, through state laws and through city ordinances such as the one here in Madison. We will move with determina- tion to preserve those rights—for ourselves as part of the lesbian and gay community and for all minorities and women.""^

In an open letter published by the group in early 1979 the appeal to Americanism was again evident: "Madison," the letter said, "has always been a city of high American standards, tolerant ofthe diversity of belief and lifestyle of its residents. Yet today, a few dangerous demagogues threaten the tranquility of our community.""* Lacking support among both the city's political leaders and the wider population, those seeking to roll back gay rights in Madison ultimately failed in tiieir efforts to amend the ordinance.

Some two thousand miles west in California a bitter campaign to exclude homosexuals ftom teaching in the public schools was being led by State Senator John Briggs. A combination of robust gay rights activism and die opposition of prominent conservative politicians, most notably the former governor, Ronald Reagan, saw Briggs's ballot initiative. Proposition 6, go down to defeat by more than a million votes in the November 1978 election."^ The strength ofthe gay

"^ United press release, n.d. (ca. summer 1978), in The United, box 1, folder 2, WHS; "Farewell to Rev. Pritchard," Capital Times, 1 July 1992, 9A; "People of Note," Wisconsin State Journal, 2 April 2006.

"^ Dan Allegretti, "Gay Rights Law Is Pritchard Target," Capital Times, 23 October 1978, in The United, box I , folder 4, WHS; "Reader Connection: Pritchard on Gays," Madison Press Connection, 8 June 1978, in The United, box 1, folder 2, WHS.

"* Information from the Finding Aid, The United, WHS. "^ Mayo, "Groups Join to Save." " ' "Madison Gay Group Lashes Out at 2 Ministers for Sex Crusade," Madison Press Con-

nection, 14 February 1979, in The United, box 1, folder 4, WHS. '"Williams and Retter, Gay and Lesbian Rights, xl, 144; Bull and Gallagher, Perject En-

emies, 18; and Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 377-90.

Patriotic Protest 559

rights movement on the West Coast was symbolized by Harvey Milk. Milk, a former supporter of the conservadve Republican presidendal candidate Barry Goldwater, had become involved in gay rights acdxism shortly after moxing to the city from New York in 1972. He was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1977 at liis third attempt and quickly formed an effective alliance with liberal Mayor George Moscone. Milk was a charismadc neighborhood politician who, in addidon to his support for gay liberadon, emphasized the importance of individual rights and the need for nadonal and local govern- ments that were genuinely responsive to the needs oftheir consdttients."* He championed progressive measures, including a gay rights city ordinance, and helped lead the cotinterattack against the Briggs Inidadve."' Milk's high-profile polidcal acdvism, oratorical skills, and flair for publicity made him one of the gay rights movement's most prominent national figures.

Milk's effecdveness as a gay rights leader was rooted bodi in his under- standing of pracdcal politics and his skill in crafting a rhetoric that simul- taneously inspired gay and lesbian Americans and appealed to a broader, "straight" public. For Milk the struggle for equality for gays and lesbians was part of America's unfinished democratic promise. On 25 June 1978 he spoke at the annual Gay Freedom Day parade, which was taking place that year in the aftermath of the homophobic murder of Robert Hillsborough, a thirty-three-year old San Francisco gardener, and Anita Bryant's victory in Miami.'"" In the keynote speech, delivered outside City Hafl before a crowd of 250,000, Milk urged his "gay sisters and brothers to make the commit- ment to fight. . . for their freedom, for their country."''^' Milk expertly wove demands for gay rights into a wider framework that emphasized America's historic commitment to liberty and equality and, in the dénouement, turned the bumper sdcker rhetoric of the Right firmly on its head:

Ix't me remind you what America is. Listen carefiilly. On the Statue of Libert)' it says: "Give me your dred, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." In the Declaradon of Independence it is written: "All men are created equal and they are endowed with certain inalienable rights." And in our Nadonal Anthem it says: "Oh, say does diat star-spangled banner yet wave o'er the land of die free." Eor Mr. Briggs and Mrs. Bryant . . . and all the bigots out there: That's what America is. No matter how hard you try, you cannot erase those words

"" Karen A. Foss, "Harvey Milk: 'You Have to Give Them H o p e , ' " Journal of the West 27, no. 2 (1988): esp. 7 8 - 8 0 .

' " Williams and Retter, Gay and lesbian Rights, 146-48. For a comprehensive account of Milk's life and career, see Randy Shuts, 'The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (New York: St. Mardn's, 1982). On 27 November 1978 a disgrunded former city supervisor, Dan White, shot Milk dead in San Francisco's City Hall.

"" Miller, Out of the Past, 373. '^' Williams and Retter, Gay and Lesbian Rights, 149.

560 S I M O N H A L L

fi-om the Declaration of Independence. No matter how hard you try, you cannot chip those words from off the base of the Statue of Liberty. And no matter how hard you try, you cannot sing the "Star Spangled Ban- ner" without those words. That's what America is. Love it or leave it.'̂ ^

In 1981 Michael Denneny, a founder of Christopher Street., a gay literary magazine first published in 1976, wrote of the importance that America's revolutionary promise and the ideals of the founding fathers had for the country's gay rights movement. "It often seems," he wrote, "that non- American observers simply cannot understand our feeling that as Americans it is our rißht to be faggots if we choose." Denneny argued that "invoking the ultimate principles—if not realities" of the United States was one of the gay movement's "most promising tactics."'^' As this article has demon- strated, appeals to America's "national creed" as a strategy to exert political leverage occupied a position of central importance within the gay rights movement between 1950 and 1980.

The Mattachine Society and other homophile organizations grounded their demands for gay rights within a broader context that emphasized Ametica's historic commitment to liberty and equality. They staged protests at sites of symbolic importance such as the White House and Philadelphia's Independence Hall and made frequent references to the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence in slogans carried on placards and in movement literature. On 4 July 1968, for example, a coalition of homophile groups issued a call for the "completion of the American Revolution" and demanded that the "inalienable rights of 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'" be extended to America's homosexual citizens.'^*

The emergence of tiie gay liberation movement in the aftermath of the Stonewall riot saw the rise of organizations that were dedicated to working for broader change within the United States and that used militant, anti-Ametican rhetoric. But in emphasizing Stonewall as a transformative moment in the history of the gay rights struggle, both activists and histotians have obscured important continuities between the gay liberation and homophile move- ments. One of the most important of these continuities was the persistence of

' " Ibid., 150. "' Michael Denneny, "Gay Politics: Sixteen Propositions," in We Are Everywhere: A His-

torical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan ( New York: Routledge, 1997), 4 9 1 .

' " "Homosexuals Call for Completion of American Revolution," n.d. (ca. 4 July 1968), in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 5, folder 2, reel 13. The Student Homophile League, chartered at Columbia University' in 1967 as the first gay organization on any American uni- versity campus, argued that "the homosexual has a moral right, in our pluralistic society, to be homosexual" and asserted that homosexuals were "entitled to the rights and privileges of all citizens of the United States"; see Clendinen and Nagourney, Out for Good, 64; and Student Homophile League (Columbia University), "General Declaration (Fourth Draft—not yet official)," n.d. (ca. 1967), in MSNY, series 2, topical file, box 5, folder 2, reel 13.

Patriotic Protest 561

patriotic dissent. Indeed, appeals to Americanism remained prominent even in the immediate aftermath of the Stonewall riot itself. In November 1969, when representatives of the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations (ERCHO) met in Philadelphia's Ck-nter City, a radical caucus of gay liberationists worked for the passage of a human rights statement that drew heavily on the natural rights language of the Declaration of Indepen- dence. The right to "dominion over one's body," "freedom from society's attempts to define and limit human sexuality," and "freedom ftom political and social persecution" were described as "inalienable." As historian Marc Stein has explained, "Claiming dominion over not land but bodies, freedom not from England but from dominant society, and self-determination not for the colonies but for minorities, these resolutions sexualized the founding discourse of the United States, deploying them against the state."'^^

Many of the gay liberation organizations that were founded in the af- termath of Stonewall (and inspired to some degree by New York's GLF) deployed the rhetoric of Americanism even as they promulgated radical cri- tic]ues of the nation's social, economic, and political structures. Meanwhile, the most important national gay rights organization of the early 1970s, the GAA, remained committed to patriotic dissent while it simultaneously pioneered the application of conftontational and countercultural tactics in the gay rights struggle. Indeed, the GAA was emblematic of a version of gay liberation that merged a pride in gay lifestyles, the use of militant tactics, and a belief in the radical potential of "coming out" vWth a dedication to securing equality within the framework of America's constitutional system. The GAA retained the homophile movement's commitment to using Americanism as a way t(j force change within the nation's political system, grounding their "demands for equal rights" on the basis that they were "citizens of this country."'^** In an article on gay liberation for the GAA Newssheet published in about 1971, Steve Krotz drew upon the language of Americanism when he argued that "until each and every one of us realizes that we are entided to the same rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness as any other hu- man being, we will be ridiculed and denied our own existence."

'̂ •'' Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 295, 296, 297. ' " GAA statement quoted in Lindsy Van Gelder, "'Gay Bill of Rights' Makes Progress,"

New York Post, 5 November 1970, 16, in GAA Records, series 4, printed ephemera, box 22A, folder 5, reel 19.

"^ Steve Krotz, "Gay Liberation," n.d. (ca. 1971 ), in GAA Records, series 2, topical file, box 18, folder 11, reel 11. In November 1975 GAA president David Thorstad wrote the New York State Democratic Cxjmmittee, urging the party to .support the repeal of s<xiomy laws and demanding that it endorse etforts to extend "the legal protections of the U.S. C^onstitution to . . . all citizens." Thorstad pointed out that "any party that tails to take a forthtiglit stand on fi-eedom and equal rights for all makes a mockery of the Bill of Rights"; see David Thorstad to New York State Democratic Committee, memorandum, "Re: Hearings on 1976 Democratic Party Election Plattbrm," 15 November 1975, in GAA Records, series 1, committee files, box 17, tblder 14, reel 8.

562 S I M O N H A L L

The 1960s may well mark a turning point when many on the political Left, fueled by bitterness and despair over America's war in Vietnam, abandoned an Americanism that they viewed as inherently flawed and instead embraced a rhetorical anti-Americanism, in the process forfeiting die "ability to pose convincing alternatives for the nation as a whole."'^^ Certainly, elements of the gay rights movement adopted uncompromising rhetoric and took up radical ideological positions, particularly in 1969 and 1970. Some of these groups and activists used anti-American language, denouncing the Repub- lic as "fucked up" and "rotten" or referring to it as "Amerika." They also sought to construct a broad-based multi-issue movement that would help bdng about radical changes to the country.'^" But the gay rights movement never abandoned Americanism. Although it had increasingly to compete alongside zaps, street confrontation, occasional violence, and celebrations of gay life that many, including some in the movement, considered either distasteful or counterproductive, Americanism remained important to the gay rights movement. Numerous organizations and activists placed their demands for gay and lesbian equality' within the broader tradition of America's revolutionary heritage and invoked the Republic's egalitarian rhetoric in fashioning a language of protest.'"'" From the perspective of many of its activists and leaders, the gay rights movement represented an effort to make more real the nation's democratic ideals and revolutionary promise. It was a profoundly patriotic struggle.

'^' Gitlin, "Varieties of Patriotic Experience," 119, 121; and Kazin, "A Patriotic l^ft," 2. ' " D'Emilio, "After Stonewall," 242; "Why Gay Lib on April 15th," text of leaflet writ-

ten by Bruce Gordon, in Homophile Union of Boston, May 1970, 17, in MSNY, series 3 , gay organizations, box 7, folder 15, reel 17; and Carl Wittman, "A Gay Manifesto," in Blasius and Phelan, We Are Everywhere, 382.

"" Appeals to American ideals continued to occupy a central place in the struggle for gay rights during the 1980s and beyond. One of the most high profile and moving aspects of the AIDS activism of the 1980s and 1990s was the production of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It contained thousands of individual panels commemorating those lost to the epidemic and was first displayed on the Mall in Washington, D . C , in October 1987. The use of a quilt—an American icon—was part of a deliberate attempt by the NAMES Project to capture support among mainstream Americans. See the AIDS Memorial Quilt online at http://www.aidsquilt .org, accessed 5 May 2008; and Christopher Capozzola, "A Very American Epidemic: Memory, Politics and Identity Politics in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, 1985-1993," Radical History Review 82 (Winter 2002): 91-109. A December 1987 ftindraising letter fbr Gay and Ix-sbian Advocates and Defenders (a New England-based group that sought to use litigation to defend the rights of gay and lesbian Americans) declared that those who donated money to GLAD would "be contributing to an organization that stands for an old-tashioned American value: fteedom." See GLAD questionnaire, September 1983, in Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, folder 1, Wilcox Collection; and David Jean and Don Babets, flindraising letter, 7 December 1987, in Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders, folder 3, Wilcox Collection.

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