Document – Interview with Members of the Gay Liberation Front (1970)

New York Radical Women, Principles (1968):

We take the woman’s side in everything.

We ask not if something is “reformist,” “radical,” “revolutionary,” or “moral.” We ask: is it good for women or bad for women?

We ask not if something is “political.” We ask: is it effective? Does it get us closest to what we really want in the fastest way?

We define the best interests of women as the best interests of the poorest, most insulted, most despised, most abused woman on earth. Her lot, her suffering and abuse is the threat that men use against all of us to keep us in line. She is what all women fear being called, fear being treated as and yet what we all really are in the eyes of men. She is Everywoman: ugly, dumb (dumb broad, dumb cunt), bitch, nag, hag, whore, fucking and breeding machine, mother of us all. Until Everywoman is free, no woman will be free. When her beauty and knowledge is revealed and seen, the new day will be at hand.

We are critical of all past ideology, literature and philosophy, products as they are of male supremacist culture. We are re-examining even our words, language itself.

We take as our source the hitherto unrecognized culture of women, a culture which from long experience of oppression developed an intense appreciation for life, a sensitivity to unspoken thoughts and the complexity of simple things, a powerful knowledge of human needs and feelings.

We regard our feelings as our most important source as our most important source of political understanding.

We see the key to our liberation in our collective wisdom and our collective strength.

“Homosexuals in the Movement” (1970):

Bernard: I see the Gay Liberation Movement as a process which will help liberate gay people by making them fully part of the whole liberation movement. The movement for change in the system that will eventually annihilate any form of oppression. Before GLF I was active in these movements, but anonymously – nobody was conscious of the fact that I was homosexual. I think, the only way we can gain respect for ourselves and any of the help that we need from everyone else in overcoming our oppression is by showing that we participate even though they don’t understand why we participate. I think even among a lot of our own people we have to fight for the right to participate as homosexuals.

Bob: I’ve always been active as a homosexual. Openly, but never publicly. In the past six or seven months I have suddenly found myself living the life of a public homosexual. I find resentment in many parts of the movement. When I find it, I confront it. This is very healthy for me; and it’s very healthy for the movement. We can’t hold the movement up as being any better or any worse than the rest of us. Gay Liberation to me is seeing 35 or 40 homosexuals marching as homosexuals in a vigil to free political prisoners. We have been political prisoners, and we will be political prisoners. Homosexuals are beginning to see themselves as an oppressed minority. I don’t think homosexuality is a magic tie that binds is all but in a sense there is something. It’s being proud of ourselves. And I think that’s what liberation will help us find – a pride that we can just stand up and be proud of ourselves as human beings.

Bernard: I want to bring up the past in one way. When I was among young people, we had no way of expressing this. I never felt sick, although the attitude then was that we were a sickness. I could only fight this when I talked to individuals. We had no public way of fighting it. And it’s exciting to be able to do it now, and the fight must be a very conscious fight.

Bob: Kay, do you have anything to say. Say something, we’ll have Women’s Liberation after us if you don’t.

Kay: I’m very new in GLF and I don’t have a great deal to say to people who want to know what it is. I see half of the gay liberation as a sort of attempt to try to change other people outside of ourselves – to try to make them stop oppressing us. But the half that interests me most now, at the beginning of my gay liberation, is self liberation. I was never open or public. I always felt that I had to be a secret homosexual, and I was terrified. Indeed I am now. This article is the first time I have ever come out in a public way, and I find that a great deal of the oppression is built into myself – is built into us. So I still expect when I come out, people are going to dislike me because I am homosexual. People do dislike homosexuals. On the other hand, I myself have disliked my own homosexuality, so perhaps it’s not going to be as bad as I thought.

Bernard: Although I haven’t been a public homosexual, among my friends, it was always known. What interests me now is that, although I was completely loved, for me, being a homosexual, I find that now that I’m getting active in GLF there’s a resentment. People wonder why I have to work as a homosexual in the movement. Why I can’t I take it up wherever I am in the movement. I don’t think you can take it up wherever you are in the movement. It’s only possible when we are working as a homosexual to take it up. I think that we should – those of us who can – be public as well as open.

Bob: I’ve been in the Village a long time, and I’m well known. There’s a lunch room restaurant owned by a homosexual – not an open or public homosexual – but open to homosexuals. Since I’ve been in GLF, when I’ve walked into the restaurant, he announces in a very loud voice, “Well, here comes the Gay Liberation Front.” I felt, Wow!, and heads turned, There I stood: Capt. Dum Dum, the Gay Liberation Front. I said something like, “Right on!”, and sat down and ate. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. Much of our own oppression is in our own minds.

Pat: Well, it seems that as homosexuals in the movement, we have realized that just backing other causes won’t liberate us in our particular oppression. Now we have a strange situation setting up where we find oppression in and out the movement. In terms of homosexuality, the awareness of that oppression isn’t anywhere except as that awareness develops in us.

Pat Maxwell, “Homosexuals in the Movement,” Come Out! A Liberation Forum for the Gay Community, Vol. 1, No. 3 (April/May 1970), pp. 8–9.