"People who do not preserve their history will shortly have someone else's," said Marty Robinson, quoting Lesbian Herstory Archives' founder Joan Nestle. With that statement, memories of times over 20 years ago came alive at "Revolution Recalled" at the Lesbian and Gay Community Center on Thursday, June 22 [1989], where veterans of the early gay and lesbian liberation struggle shared their experiences with both contemporaries and young activists. [...]
Martha Shelley, author and a co-founder of GLF and Radicalesbians told the group of 250 that recounted experience is the best history. For Shelley, that history began with the landmark lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis and the picketing of Independence Hall in Philadelphia "pleading for equal rights," an important step, she said, toward "splitting open the ’50s grey flannel suit mentality." She acknowledged the many others involved in the early lesbian and gay movement, for whom the first steps were the civil rights, anti-war, feminist and anti-imperialist struggles.
[...] She spoke of the early organizing efforts in Stonewall's aftermath, such as Mattachine's Town Hall meeting, the early march through the Village and rally in Washington Square, and the meeting at Alternate U, where [the Gay Liberation Front (GLF)] was born. Eschewed by much of the left, GLF also was avoided, by many lesbians and gay men still stinging from the anti-homosexual witch hunt of the McCarthy period.
Crediting GLF for saving her life, Shelley waxed nostalgic about that group's dances at Alternate U. (where beer was 50 cents as opposed to $2 dollars in mafia-run bars), the role of its newspaper Come Out, and its many coalition attempts including fundraising for the Black Panthers and helping the Young Lords in building occupation. Shelley also spoke of GLF's dissolution, as various factions left for various reasons: people of color forming their own groups in response to issues of racism, "serious socialists" becoming the Red Butterfly cell, women leaving in response to needs around sexism. In reflection, Shelley called upon the community to remember "those people who didn't make it," whether by AIDS, murder, suicide, or "therapists."
At the time of early liberationist foment, Barbara Love was a CBS executive and, a reluctant radical in a milieu where the bars and the radical groups were the "only game in town." Co-author of Sappho Was a Right on Woman and co-founder of Identity House and the National Gay Task Force (now National Lesbian and Gay Task Force), 'he was introduced to lesbian liberation through the National Organization for Women (NOW) where "that issue" was whispered about until Rita Mae Brown came in with her mini-skirt and Phi Beta Kappa pin and "actually mentioned the world 'lesbian' out loud." Love spoke of the efforts she and Sappho co-author Sidney Abbott made in getting NOW's 400,000 members to work on lesbian issues. The fight in NOW was "devastating," she said, describing the "lavender menace" purge of lesbians from leadership in that organization. Such struggles continued in efforts to gain gender parity at NGTF.
A former vice president of [Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)], co-founder of NGTF and now at the New York City Commission on the Status of Women, Ginny Vida told of her experience with the Women's Subcommittee of GAA (which later became Lesbian Feminist Liberation) where there was tension with the gay men, "but also wonderful moments of working together." One of that subcommittee's first efforts was an International Lesbian Film Festival, in which Vida credited Vito Russo with helping obtain many of the films. Vida also recounted the major victory for the early movement when, in December 1973, the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of disorders.
The police raid of an afterhours bar called the Snake Pit in the early 70s was remembered by Jim Owles, a co-founder of the GAA and the first president of that organization. An Argentinian gay man arrested in the raid, fearing deportation based on his homosexuality, jumped out a window of the 6th precinct and was impaled on the fence below. Leaflets mimeographed at Marty Robinson's apartment which called for a demonstration said: "that person could have been anyone of us." The demonstrators went first to St. Vincent's where the man was hospitalized, proceeding to the 6th precinct "to give them hell," Owles told those gathered.
— Jon David Aloisi-Nalley, “Stonewall-Era Activists Speak Out,” OutWeek Magazine No. 3, July 10, 1989, p. 24.
