All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons": Gay Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts Against Police Brutality in the Bay Area

All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons": Gay Liberation, the

Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts Against

Police Brutality in the Bay Area

Jared Leighton

Journal of Social History, Volume 52, Number 3, Spring 2019, pp. 860-885

(Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

[ Access provided at 21 Nov 2021 16:18 GMT from University of California @ Santa Cruz ]

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/716783

JARED LEIGHTON

“All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons”: Gay

Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and

Intercommunal Efforts Against Police

Brutality in the Bay Area

Abstract

This article shows how the path of the gay liberation movement in the Bay Area

was shaped by its relation ship to the Black Panther Party (BPP). Previous schol-

arship has made frequent but brief mention of the connections between the two.

However, the Black Panther Party had a greater depth of contact with and longer

lasting influence on gay liberation than previously acknowledged, as an examina-

tion of movement activism in the Bay Area reveals. Perhaps the central issue of

cooperation between gay liberation and the BPP—police brutality—has received

little mention. Emerging scholarship is seeking to place LGBT activists in the

larger movement against police brutality, and understanding their relationship to

the Panthers will be crucial to doing so. While a great range of viewpoints on alli-

ances between the Panthers and gay liberation could be observed in both camps in

1969–1970, many gay activists affirmed a united front even before Newton’s

statement on gay liberation. Foremost among the reasons for working together

was their shared identity as criminalized groups and their shared goal of combating

police brutality. Gay liberationists modeled Panther approaches to dealing with

police violence, both in armed self-defense and electoral politics, marking a clear

break with homophile reformism. In the spring of 1971, both became more mod-

erate and continued along the same path independently, with the issue of police

brutality remaining central. This work encourages readers to consider in greater

depth the intersection of gay liberation and Black Power, as well as social move-

ments more generally.

“Vice pigs in Los Angeles beat a homosexual to death a few months ago. In

Berkeley, vice pigs shot and murdered another homosexual in his own car. In

Oakland, a ‘straight’ professor the pigs thought was ‘queer’ was beaten, and later

died . . . The Homosexual Revolution is part of the whole street revolution

fighting fascism in the US. By locking arms with our brothers and sisters in the

movement, we can ALL win our freedom. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!” So

Journal of Social History vol. 52 no. 3 (2019), pp. 860–885

doi:10.1093/jsh/shx119

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read a leaflet handed out by the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) at

the Black Panther Party’s National Revolutionary Conference for a United

Front Against Fascism at Bobby Hutton Park in Oakland from July 18 to 20,

1969. The CHF leaflet reminded revolutionaries of three killings by police in

California so far that year: Howard Efland, a black gay man killed by police in

Los Angeles in March ; Frank Bartley, a white gay man killed by police in

Berkeley in April; and Phillip Caplan, a white heterosexual man police pre-

sumed to be gay, killed by officers in Oakland in June. Panther officials told

CHF activists, regarding their leaflet, “Our Board of Control hasn’t endorsed

this, but we’re for anyone who wants freedom, so go ahead.” Even before Huey

Newton’s statement on gay liberation in August 1970, and prior to Stonewall,

the Committee for Homosexual Freedom reported being accepted by the

Panthers and aligned with them because of mutual concern about poli ce

brutality.

The relationship to the Panthers was crucial to shaping the path of gay lib-

eration. Previous scholarship on the relationship between the Panthers and gay

liberation groups has made frequen t but brief mention of Newton’s statement on

gay liberation. Some scholars have explained how the issue of supporting the

Panthers split the Gay Liberation Front in New York, while others have dis-

cussed the role of gay activists at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional

Convention (RPCC) in Philadelphia, an event organized by the BPP.

This ar-

ticle does much to help contextualize Newton’s speech on gay liberation and

the Panthers’ constitutional conventions by focusing on gay liberation almost

exclusively in the Bay Area, which has been overlooked in previous scholarship

and where gay liberation and the Black Panther Party were both born and

thrived. Moreover, the relationship betw een the Panthers and gay liberationists

was perhaps stronger in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the country.

Perhaps the most crucial issue shared by the two groups—police brutality—has

received little mention, which this work seeks to remedy. Emerging scholarship

is seeking to place LGBT activists in the larger movement against police brutal-

ity, and understanding their relationship to the Panthers will be essential to do-

ing so.

Also, missing from the historiography is much discussion of the

relationship between black gay activists and the Panthers, which this article

seeks to address as well.

Though bonds were stronger in the Bay Area, the issue of an alliance be-

tween gay liberation and the Panthers remained a difficult subject in both

camps, and gay liberation was more often influenced by the Panthers than

openly collaborating and cooperating with them on shared projects. This rela-

tionship was oftentimes strained by troubled gender politics and problematic ide-

ologies of masculinity. For example, in their early years, the Panthers made

frequent use of words like “faggot” and “sissy,” particularly against their political

opponents, like the police, and, in defense of themselves, only armed men and

reserved leadership positions solely for men. However, the Panthers evolved,

and as we shall see, gay liberationists did not clearly divide based on gender

identity over whether to support the Panthers. Some lesbians rejected the

Panthers after feeling excluded from the RPCC while others supported the BPP

and formed their own armed self-defense groups; some gay men rejected the

Panthers, believing there was not a reciprocal level of support between the two

groups and that armed self-defense was suicidal, while others backed the BPP as

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the vanguard party and believed that armed self-defense was necessary to stop

the killing of gay men by police. This more complex look at gay liberationists’

views of the Black Panther Party takes us beyond the surface-level understand-

ing that supposes that Eldridge Cleaver’s antigay Soul on Ice was taken as repre-

sentative of the party and that gays must have been automatically averse to the

Panthers.

Finally, it is important to recognize that the two groups followed similar tra-

jectories. Just as the Black Panther Party was beginning to regroup as a less mili-

tant, more localized organization in the spring of 1971, so too was the gay

liberation movement. When gay activists began to abandon the notion of armed

self-defense, the Panthers did as well. The Panthers and gay liberation both

turned to more mainstream politics and continued along the same path indepen-

dently. During this process, the issue of police brutality, especially community

control of police, remained central, but some important contingents in both

camps continued to advocate armed self-defense.

The Committee for Homosexual Freedom and the Black Panther Party in

the Bay Area

Even before Huey Newton’s letter “To the Revolutionary Brothers and

Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements” in

August 1970, gay liberation activists supported the Panthers, and the Panthers

reciprocated. In the Bay Area, which was a center of both gay liberation and

Black Power activism, gay activists reported having a strong relationship with

the Panthers.

The key gay liberation group in the Bay Area was the Committee for

Homosexual Freedom, which was formed in April 1969, shortly before

Stonewall, in response to the States Line Steamship Company firing cofounder

Gale Whittington for being gay. Cofounder Leo Laurence immediately con-

nected with Black Power activism. A reporter for the Berkeley Barb said

Laurence “used much of the terminology of the Black Revolution as he rapped.”

Prior to the common use of the term homophobia, prejudice against gays was of-

ten viewed as a form of sexism. However, Laurence viewed it through the prism

of racism, often referring to “sexual racism” in his writing. Moreover, “Laurence

want[ed] gays to participate in other militant social causes. Alliances with the

Black Panthers, the Resistance, and other anti-war groups will help when com-

mon causes arise, he said.”

Part of the reason gay liberation activists saw the Panthers as their allies is

that they both believed that their “most immediate oppressors [were] the pigs.”

A writer for Gay Sunshine said, “As the laws of California stand, all of us are

unapprehended felons.” Similarly, as scholar Elizabeth Hinton has written,

“From the ashes of the Watts ‘riot’ in August 1965, a growing consensus of poli-

cymakers, federal administrators, law enforcement officials, and journalists came

to understand crime as specific to black urban youth.”

They, too, were a crimi-

nal class just awaiting arrest. Despite differences between discrimination and op-

pression based on race and that based on sexual orientation, gay liberationists

and the Black Panthers shared a common identity as criminalized groups.

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A number of murders of gay men by police put organizing against police

brutality at the forefront of gay liberation activism in California and led gay acti-

vists to identify more closely with the Panthers. On March 9, 1969, Los Angeles

vice officers “beat, kicked, and stomped a man [Howard Efland, alias J.

McCann] to death” at the Dover Hotel after he had supposedly engaged in lewd

conduct with another man in front of them. Despite the fact that the hotel clerk

reported that the other man did not even check in until Efland had been killed

and taken away—meaning it was highly unlikely Efland was engaged in lewd

conduct with another man in front of the vice officers if the other man wasn’t

there yet—the jury ruled that the killing of Howard Efland, a black gay man,

was an excusable homicide because he was resisting arrest. Murders like these

brought together moderate and radical gay activis ts. For example, even the more

conservative Advocate declared that, “McCann’s ‘crime’ was that he was differ-

ent. And for that difference he has paid dearly.” Yet, as the paper informed read-

ers, “N o civil rights organizations have expressed an interest in the matter.”

On April 18, 1969, Frank Bartley, an active member of the Society for

Individual Rights (SIR), the country’s largest homophile organization, was shot

in the head by Berkeley police after being entrapped into making a sexual ad-

vance toward an undercover vice officer at Aquatic Park. Bartley died four days

later. In reaction to the killing, Leo Laurence declared, “G ays must respond

with the same militancy that the black community showed when it fought back

against the killings of Bobby Hutton, George Baskett and Joey Linthcome.”

Though SIR believed Bartley “was executed in cold blood simply for being a

homosexual,” the group’s leaders disagreed with Laurence’s militant response.

They removed him as the editor of SIR’s Vector magazine, which intended to re-

main a more moderate homophile publication aimed at gays who were involved

“in everything from SDS to John Birch.”

The next murder at the hands of police occurred two months later. Philip

Caplan was a white man who taught at Voorhees College, a historically black

college in South Carolina. While previously teaching at the University of South

Alabama, Caplan had opposed school segregation, and state senators called for

an investigation into his background because he placed his name on a protest

letter to Lurleen Wallace, George Wallace’s wife. On June 18, 1969, Caplan

and his wife were in Oakland when two vice officers, who assumed he was gay,

“brutally subdued” him for supposedly masturbating in a public restroom.

Caplan died three days later, and his wife promised to bring his death “to the at-

tention of everyone in the United States in order to expose the corruption of

the police department in Oakland.” However, authorities decided that Caplan

died not from injuries from being attacked by police but from injuries sustained

while struggling against his handcuffs, an explanation that strained credulity.

Because these killings by police were of utmost concern to many gay acti-

vists, the Panthers seemed like natural allies. The BPP wanted to work with all

groups on the issue of community control of police and, from there, gradually

build “a people’s revolutionary movement.” Out of the Conference for a United

Front Against Fascism, described earlier, came a coordinated effort to support

the Panther petition for “Community Control and Decentralization of Police in

Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.” Gay activists hoped to es-

tablish elected neighborhood police councils and limit police jurisdiction to par-

ticular neighborhoods in which the patrol officers must live and where the

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people could decide the kind and extent of protection they desired. This revolu-

tionary unity was reaffirmed by the People’s Conference in Provo Park,

Berkeley, at the end of August, where thirty groups gathered, including the

Panthers and the CHF. Raymond Masai Hewitt said that “the Panthers perspec-

tives have broadened, and that they are working for world-wide solidarity with

all revolutionary movements.”

For gay activists, more radicalizing than hearing the Panthers speak out

against police brutality was experiencing it for themselves. Leo Laurence wrote

following the violent arrest of gays protesting the San Francisco Examiner in

November 1969, “I learned how quickly, unexpectedly, and unjustly my

Amerikan freedom can be crushed by the police. I had heard Bobby Seale talk

about fasci sm, but not until Friday did I ‘feel’ it.”

While seeking allies, the CHF also organized its own rallies, gathering two

thousand people at the University of California–Berkeley for disorientation

week and working on a ballot initiative to end discrimination against gays in

the hiring of law enforcement officers. Organizing like this was important to

maintaining unity among gay groups, who were divided on whether they should

join in common cause with the Panthers, but who agreed that police brutality

needed to be addressed. At the Bay Area March for Peace on Moratorium Day,

November 15, 1969, the Berkeley Barb reported that fifteen thousand gay people

joined in, organized by the CHF and the Gay Liberation Front–Berkeley. When

Panther David Hilliard spoke, some gays raised their clenched fists in salute

while other gays tried to shout him down. Reflecting on this event, gay church

activist Michael Francis Itkin observed that the CHF must confront three key

issues: whether it would take a stand on issues other than gay liberation, whether

it would adhere to nonviolence or engage in violence, and whether it would

support a vanguard party, like the BPP or the Weathermen. For his part, Itkin

favored uniting with black activists outside of the BPP, saying, “Far too many of

us have worked, and continue to work, with Black revolutionaries who hold a

different philosophy than the Panthers and who do not share their elitist preten-

sions of being the ‘Vanguard.’”

The year 1969 concluded with the West Coast Conference for Gay

Liberation in Berkeley. According to organizer Carl Wittman, author of the

seminal treatise Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, as well as a former

SDS activist involved in the sit-in movement in Cambridge, Maryland, one of

the central issues was “the considerable concern voiced throughout the Gay

Liberation organizations of the need to relate more closely with other revolu-

tionary groups, such as the Panthers, Women’s Lib, and the Radical Student

Union.” A CHF activist said, “Police brutality is one issue, no matter whose

skull is cracked. We get nowhere going-it-alone.” However, they disagreed to

what extent the tactics of the Panthers should be emulated in response. Leo

Laurence said gays would soon need to build up stores of guns and ammunition,

to which “disagreement was overwhelming, but not unanimous.” Gale

Whittington, also a cofounder of the CHF, responded that “[we] ought to sym-

pathize with the Black Panthers, who are being slaughtered, but not to emulate

their suicidal tactics.”

Police brutality continued to be a major concern throughout 1970. The

year began with Laurence, like Whittington before him, losing his job, wh ich he

believed was because of his support for gay liberation, as well as for “other

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revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and Women’s Liberation.” Shortly

thereafter, four San Francisco police and two military police in search of an

AWOL soldier forced their way into the home of Arthur Ornales, a Mexican

American gay man. According to reporting by Gale Whittington, an officer

pushed Ornales into his bathtub and “repeatedly, sadistically struck Art on the

face and chest, mumbling insults about Art’s sexuality, all IN FRONT OF

WITNESSES. . . . This is only one horror in a series of assaults and false arrests

being perpetrated by the police department.” In February 1970, the Berkeley

Tribe called for the formation of a people’s militia, which would include com-

munes, ecology activists, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and other groups

and would use armed self-defense against the police state and right-wing

vigilantes.

Gale Whittington acknowledged that gay consciousness of police brutality

was not a brand-new development raised by CHF, pointing out that Del Martin

and her group Citizens Alert had been trying to publicize the issue for years.

However, with the rise of gay liberation—and surely in no small part because of

its connection to the Panthers—the issue of police brutality came to the fore-

front of gay activism. As Christina B. Hanhardt has noted, “The gay liberation

organizations that arose in the aftermath of the [Stonewall] riots believed that

protection from the police would depend on their forming coalitions with other

social movements, including Black Power, radical feminists, and Third World

decolonization. This contrasted with the approach adopted by their immediate

predecessors, homophile activists who largely advocated for police accountabil-

ity through liberal reform measures.”

In March 1970, roughly 120 people gathered at the Dover Hotel in Los

Angeles to memorialize the one-year anniversary of the death of Howard Efland,

the black gay man killed by police while staying there. Shockingly, just seven

hours prior to the memorial for Howard Efland—and probably not yet known to

those in attendance—LA police shot and killed Larry “LaVerne” Turner, who

The Advocate identified as a black gay man who presented as a woman. Turner

was caught soliciting a vice officer, and police said she then pulled a .22 on

them and fired. However, witnesses who called the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black

newspaper, said Turner fired no shots. Instead, they attested, police shot Turner

as she was running away and then handcuffed her after she was dead. By the

summer of 1970, a number of gay militants had been quoted “saying police re-

pression had brought homosexuals all over the country to the verge of a bloody

uprising, and urging Gays to arm themselves and get ready.” In response to the

rise of gay liberation, the LAPD only increased its harassment and surveillance

of gay establishments.

At the same time, the relationship between the CHF and the Panthers con-

tinued to grow stronger in the Bay Area. Leo Laurence observed, “Not once did

I find hostility to the Gay Liberation movement from a Panther, even during

discussions with Brothers David and June Hilliard, and Masai Hewitt, Minister

of Education.” In March 1970, his fellow activist and partner Don Burton pre-

dicted in the Berkeley Barb that the Panthers would soon avowedly support gay

liberation. He wrote , “The Panthers haven’t supported us actively yet, but they

HAVE sat down and rapped with us. They’re getting their heads straight on it.

And I think that, once again, the Panthers will be the vanguard. I’ve a feeling

they’ll be the first to ‘Do It’ with Gay Lib.”

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By August 1970, the Panther’s petition for community control of policing,

with the support of the CHF, submitted twice as many signatures as necessary to

be on the ballot. Moreover, Stew Albert, a New Left activist prominent in the

Youth International Party, or Yippies, was running for “people’s sheriff,” criticiz-

ing police “who try to prove their masculinity by coming down hard on homo-

sexuals” and supporting armed self-defense for gays to prevent police

harassment.

Newton’s Statement on Gay Liberation

On August 14, 1970, Huey Newton went on KPFA radio and said that gay

liberation, whose relationship to the Panthers had been unclear to some, was

welcome in the struggle. At a meeting in New York, Newton would explain

that it was his experience in prison, where he met gay men and talked with

them at length, that changed his views on homosexuality. Newton declared

flatly, “We see that homosexuals are human beings, and they are oppressed be-

cause of the bourgeous [sic] mentality and bourgeous [sic] treachery that exists in

this country (and) tries to legislate sexual activity.” He concluded, “The BPP

plans in the future to have solidarity with ALL oppressed people.”

The following day, Newton gave a speech on gay liberation, calling for an

alliance. Newton declared, “Whatever your personal opinions and your insecur-

ities about homosexuality and the various liberat ion movements among homo-

sexuals and women . . . we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary

fashion. . . . We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and

feelings for all oppressed people.” Newton went on to suggest that homosexuals

might be the most oppressed and, therefore, the most revolutionary people in so-

ciety. That oppression, along with the necessity for the Panthers to have as

many allies as possible, made unity with gay liberation imperative. Roughly a

week later, his words were published as a letter in The Black Panther. Nick

Benton of the Bay Area Gay Sunshine Collective built on Newton’s statement,

writing, “It is not just because the homosexual is the most oppressed that he

would be the most revolutionary. He is the most oppressed because his capacity

is the most revolutionary, and therefore the most repulsive in the eyes of the

Western establishment.”

Benton reversed Newton’s line of causality, arguing

that gays’ revolutionary capacity produced their repression, not that great repres-

sion had created revolutionary potential.

The extent to which Newton’s position was adopted by the party members,

however, remains unclear. Historian Tracye Matthews finds that the effect of

Newton’s speech “varied both in terms of acceptance and implementation at the

local level.” Panther scholar Jane Rhodes says that while the statement worked

to bring in groups like the Gay Liberation Front, it “also alienated parts of the

Panthers’ rank and file.” Eldridge Cleaver would continue to oppose homosexu-

ality and gay rights activism throughout his life despite numerous ideological

conversions in other respects. His harsh language became more tempered over

the years, and he acknowle dged in 1986, if not earlier, that his older sister was a

lesbian and he was trying to understand homosexuality. In spite of opposition,

Newton remained committ ed to supporting gay liberation. This was likely made

easier following the Newton–Cleaver split in the spring of 1971.

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The Divided Reaction of Gay Liberationists and Divisive Issues

Just as it divided the Panthers, Newton’s statement also sharpened divi sions

among gay activists. The same month that Newton made his statement on gay

liberation, the national convention of the North American Conference of

Homophile Organizations (NACHO) was held in San Francisco. Gay libera-

tionists worked to add the Black Panther Party to a resolution in support of

women’s liberation, which intensified the split between moderates and radicals

in the LGBT movement. Cheri Matisse of GLF-LA pointed out that the

Panthers had finally addressed women’s liberation and gay liberation and asked,

“What are we doing about implementing this?” Leo Laurence responded by in-

troducing a resolution calling for NACHO to support all oppressed peoples—

the Panthers, women’s liberation, Chicanos, and more—or dissolve. This set off

“a long wrangle.” Some argued that they should support black liberation without

mentioning the Panthers specifically, which is how the final statement at the

end of the day read.

However, the following day, the letter by Newton, as well as the Panthers’

platform, was read aloud, and gay liberationists, led by Laurence, Rev. Michael

Itkin, and Sanford Blixton of GLF–Venice, worked to get NACHO to make a

statement in support of the Panthers. Madelyn Cervantes of New York

Mattachine replied, “I can’t see what these Panthers ever did for the homosex-

ual.” And homophile activists accused gay liberationists of trying to “steamroller

the convention on the Panther and voting issues and force it to adopt Gay Lib

methods and procedures.” In the end, Leo Laurence said triumphantly, “The

Gay Liberation Front invaded NACHO, forced the national conference to rip

off its racism with an endorsement of the Black Panther Party.” According to

the more conse rvative Advocate, the meeting ended with a “bruised, battered,

and radically altered NACHO.” Jim Kepner remarked, “The meeting was per-

haps a watershed in the 22-year history of the homophile movement—one of

those battles which determines the shape of our future, while seeming almost

pointless at the time.”

Beyond that dispute, groups and publications like the Society for Individual

Rights and The Advocate questioned whether Huey Newton was speaking for the

entire Black Panther Party, suggesting to him that “these alliances may be very

distasteful to your followers.” A piece in The Advocate declared, “The over-

whelming majority of Gays, we believe, do not want to destroy this nation and

replace it with—well, what are you going to replace it with? We see some virtue

in evolution. We think it is possible to change the ‘system’—to make it what it

is supposed to be. In fact, we see much more hope this way than in violence and

destruction. Sorry, Huey.”

At the same time, many in the Gay Liberation Front did not believe they

were receiving the support that Newton’s statement promised. In the fall of

1970, in San Francisco, Richard Brown, a former captain of the BPP, and other

men tried to remove twenty GLF members from the GLF commune, Children

of Paradise, because the landlord asked Brown and his men to get the GLF out.

The GLF called on the Panthers for their assistance in the dispute, but nothing

came of the promise that the Panthers would look into it. Roger Green of the

GLF said many in the group were disappointed by the lack of help from the

Panthers. He pointed out that the GLF members had held a twenty-four-hour

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vigil when the Oakland headquarters of the Panthers was threatened with a

raid, adding, “We put our bodies on the line. Had the pigs come shooting, it

might have been our lives.” The Advocate concluded, “There were indications

that the situation had badly strained the fragile new rapport between the GLF

and the Black Panther Party, which reportedly failed to respond to repeated

pleas for help from the GLF.”

Other gay activists were critical of the fact that Newton’s message on gay

liberation seemed to be a solitary instance, not making its way into his frequent

speaking appearances. A gay activist who attended a speech by Newton at

Merritt College in Oakland criticized the Panther leader for talking about coali-

tions with other revolutionary people but not mention ing gay liberation.

In an

open letter to Huey Newton, the gay man wrote,

For many people in that audience, hearing you speak affirmingly about the Gay

Liberation consciousness as you did in a letter of yours in a recent Panther

newspaper would really have been the key that would have touched them per-

sonally to identify in a new way with what you had to say. Your affirmation of

Gay Liberation then would have immediately revolutionized those people in

the audience who are living with unresolved fears about their sexuality. . . . I

know it’s got to be hard, brother, but you’ve got to get used to talking about

our movement, too, because your affirmation of it will be the decisive call to

the revolution for many of the people you will address. Power to the People!

Alternatively, many LGBT activists got behind Newton’s call for unity. A

meeting of twenty to twenty-five lesbian women in Berkeley adopted the posture

of armed self-defense, writing, “We demand training in self-defense and the use

of defense machinery. A Women’s Militia would be organized to defend the

demands, rights and interests of women struggling towards an unoppressive so-

cial system.” Likewise, the GLF of Los Angeles considered itself part of a broader

revolution. The group made a statement in support of the Black Panthers, saying

they too believed in freedom for all and considered Newton’s statement “a van-

guard revolutionary statement.” The Gay Liberation Front of Baltimore declared

their support for the Panthers as well. Created to respond to increased police ha-

rassment, the organization stated, “As a militant civil rights organization, we

support similar organizations, namely, our brother movement, the Black Panther

Party, and our sister movement, the Women’s Liberation.” Similarly, the Third

World Gay Revolutionaries of Chicago said, “We believe that third world and

gay people should have full participation in the People’s Revolutionary Army.”

In New York, it was reported that, “Buo yed by an emerging sense of community

and militancy, and by the recent pro-gay statement by Huey Newton, leader of

the Black Panther Party, gay revolutionaries in New York stepped up plans for

more activity this fall.” Finally, the Detroit Gay Liberator reported that three

Black Panthers attended the GLF’s October 8 meeting. The two groups dis-

cussed the interrelation between revolutiona ry parties, and the Panthers invited

the Detroit GLF to the RPCC in Washington, DC. In return, the GLF began to

support the Breakfast for Children Program of the BPP in Detroit.

So tied were some radical gay liberationists to the Panthers that when gay

liberationists became divided on issues, each side claimed to be following the

vanguard party. Gay liberationists on the West Coast experienced a split that

mirrored the divide between revolutionary nationalists and black nationalists in

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the Black Power Movement.

Don Burton, a gay folksinger, organized Bay Area

Gays for Unification and Nationalism (BAG-FUN) to create a gay colony in

Alpine County, which they would rename Stonewall County. The group be-

came the Northern California Alpine Liberation Front shortly thereafter. This

group allied with other gay nationalist groups: the Gay Nationalist Society in

Los Angeles, the Stonewall Nation in San Diego, and the Stonewall Nation

Society in Portland. Gay nationalists believed they were adhering closely to

Eldridge Cleaver’s principle of “liberating territory within the mother country”

and Huey Newton’s teaching that “gay people will be free when they control

the police power” because by gaining a majority in Alpine County, they would

run law enforcement. Leo Laurence responded that the Alpine plan was just like

the separatist movement of black nationalists that Bobby Seale condemned in

Seize the Time while radical Mother Boats, a gay man who led the Eastern-

influenced Psychedelic Venus Church, said gays would be colonizers themselves,

taking the land from 298 Washoe Indians. The Berkeley, New York, and

Detroit Gay Liberation Fronts—groups with strong connections to the BPP—

condemned the project while the San Francisco GLF decided to cosponsor it.

However, by April 1971, the Alpine project had been abandoned.

In an interesting turn of events, Leo Laurence, one of Huey Newton’s most

avid gay supporters, surprisingly “said goodbye to all that” in November 1970,

citing a lack of Panther support, mimicking Del Martin’s announcement the

previous month that she was leaving male-dominated homophile politics to fo-

cus on feminist organizing. Though he believed that Newton’s statement worked

to convince straight white radicals to support gay liberation and women’s libera-

tion, Laurence said he expected “more than revolutionary rhetoric from the

‘vanguard,’” and Newton’s speeches were short on even that, often failing to

mention gay liberation at all. He concluded with a call for revolutionary unity,

asking, “Don’t the people of the ‘Third World’ understand that their revolution

WON’T be total unless homosexuals are liberated along with other minorities?

Homosexual liberation is NOT a part of the DAILY consciousness of people in

Babylon today. That must change! Gay-Lib must become part of the Everyday

political and tactical strategy of our revolutionary leadership, the ‘vanguard,’ if

they mean business by TOTAL revolution.” Within the party, Laurence added,

“I’m told it’s still tough for a black homosexual to be a Panther.”

Black Gay Radicals and the Panthers

Roughly a month before Huey Newton’s statement, the Berkeley Tribe inter-

viewed two black gay liberationists, Tony Blake and John Mosher. One of the

first questions the reporter posed was whether Blake believed the Gay

Liberation Front was more important to him than the Black Panther Party.

Blake said, “For me yes, but on the whole no. I am a Black, Gay, radical, anar-

chist. All movements are important.” When pressed about Eldridge Cleaver’s

statements on homosexuality in Soul on Ice, Blake offered an exculpatory reply,

explaining, “‘Soul On Ice’ was written in anger from prison by a man who was

rebelling against society, the prison system and all it represented. Forced homo-

sexuality and the conditions that force men to this are a major part of the prison

system he was fighting against.” But perhaps more important were Blake’s some-

what prescient statements about the intersections between the two movements.

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Blake believed in the importance of “working with complete freedom in the rev-

olution.” He noted that gays and lesbians often wasted too much time hiding

their identities in other political struggles and worried about being exposed. He

added that he knew a gay Panther and said, “They are going to have to face this

issue of being a Black Gay revolutionary.”

John Mosher told the interviewer that he previously lived in Chicago and

had been a member of the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago gang, until 1966,

keeping his identity as a gay man hidden. He pointed out that “Straight

Revolutionaries fail to realize that our Gay brothers and sisters are willing to

fight for their freedom as well as others. Some radicals are just realizing that we

are in every militant and activist force.” Mosher was more critical of the Black

Panther Party, arguing, “If you are a homosexual you should NOT identify with

the Panthers’ ten point program because their program isn’t for homosexuals. In

fact they ignore the idea completely.” Mosher argued that since the BPP pro-

gram made no explicit mention of gay struggles, it was not an organization to

which gays should dedicate their revolutionary efforts. Newton’s statement on

gay liberation and women’s liberation would follow later in the summer of

1970.

Regardless of Newton’s statement, the Detroit GLF, which had previously

written of forming a strong relationship with the Panthers, or National

Committee to Combat Fascism, turned to harsh, but perhaps warranted, criti-

cism by the end of 1970. A black gay man named Ken criticized Detroit Panther

leader Michael D. for using homophobic attacks against his political opponents

and pointed out, “Those of us who are black homosexuals are painfully aware

that this is not an uncommon public statement to be made by a member of the

N.C.C.F./B.P.P. Although national Panther policy dictates an alliance with the

Gay’s and Women’s Lib movements, local Panther practices are far from alli-

ance, or even silent support.” The Black Caucus of the GLF of Detroit wrote

that they still hoped to form a relationship with the Panthers based on common

oppression, but they could not do so as long as the BPP continued to align the

GLF with their shared fascist enemies by calling the “pig establishment”

“faggots.”

On the other hand, in the Bay Area, the underground paper Gay Sunshine

reported that Newton’s statement had encouraged black gay revolutionaries to

come out. An article in October 1970 noted that more black gay men were

coming to the Stud , a bar, and the Universal Life Church. It concluded,

“Recent Gay Liberation–Black Panther communication has proven fruitful,”

and “Gay Black revolutionaries are here now to liberate themselves.”

While we know little of gay and lesbian Black Panthers, there certainly

were some, and they usually faced difficulties working within the BPP. In the

Jamaica Queens branch of the party, there was an openly gay Panther, according

to activist Omar Barbour. Barbour says this man was supported by the existing

members because of his radical commitment. However, when a new member of

the group confronted him about being gay, the two battled in a fistfight, which

the gay Panther won decisively. The gay man remained in the organization

while the other man learned that sexual orientation did not define one’s mascu-

linity. Alternatively, in the Los Angeles branch, one Panther left the group for

fear they would find out he was gay, according to Panther Roland Young.

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Ron Vernon, a black gay man, wrote in Gay Sunshine that Newton’s state-

ment on gay liberation transformed him into a revolutionary. He recalled, “I was

in jail when I first heard about the Black Panther Party, and related to it very

positively, but in a blackness sense and not out of a gayness sense, because they

were offing gay people, verbally offing gay people. . . . Finally their consciousness

has changed somehow. I don’t know how, but it did, recently, and they’ve be-

gun to relate to homosexuals a[s] people, as a part of the people. That’s when I

really became a revolutionary, began to live my whole life as a revolutionary.”

In the same issue, Michael Robinson of Third World Gay People of Berkeley

called for gays to support Newton and the Panthers, “the most revolutionary

force in this country.”

The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia

The invitation for lesbians and gays to participate in the Revolutionary

People’s Constitutional Convention at Temple University in Philadelphia in

September 1970 was an important sign that Newton and others were serious

about incorporating gay liberation into their vision of a new society. Michael

Tabor of the Panther 21, a group of New York members accused in April 1969

of a mass bomb plot to blow up department stores, subway lines, and police sta-

tions, said to the convention that the US Constitution excluded many people,

including sexual minorities, and must be rewritten. The Panthers wanted to cre-

ate “a constitution that takes into account the ethnic and pluralistic nature of

this society” and called for mass participation of all progressive forces.”

The Gay Liberation Front had made important efforts to support the

Panthers. In New York City, the first march to commemorate the Stonewall

Rebellion in June 1970 intentionally passed by the Women’s House of

Detention, where members of the Panther 21, including Afeni Shakur, were be-

ing held. Another march to protest police harassment and brutality also went

past the institution, both times with gay liberationists and prisoners shouting

support for each other.

These actions in support of the black freedom struggle

helped convert Panthers to support gay liberation. Subsequently, Shakur spoke

to the gay men’s workshop at the convention in Philadelphia. One gay man

wrote that Shakur said,

Seeing a Gay Liberation banner in the crowd [at the protest outside the House

of Detention] made her think for the first time about gay people and Gay

Liberation. She then began relating to the gay sisters in jail beginning to under-

stand their oppression, their anger and the strength in them and in all gay peo-

ple. She talked about how Huey Newton’s statement would be used in the

Panther Party, not as a party line, but as a basis for criticism and self-criticism

to overcome anti-homosexual hang-ups among party members, and in the black

community. She also helped us to formulate what we wanted to say in our list

of demands.

Jim Chesebro, a gay liberationist from Minneapolis, reported, “The Philadelphia

session demonstrated that Blacks, Women, and Gay people can be united and

can act together under one philosophical commitment to ‘human dignity’ and

‘self-determination.’”

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However, the convention went very differently for white gay men and

white lesbians. Following the RPCC, the Radicalesbians of New York, a mostly

white group with a few African American members, broke ties with the

Panthers. The group “left with the clear realization that if women continue to

struggle for their liberation within contexts defined by sexist mentalities, they

will never be free.” The group had numerous grievances following the conven-

tion. Their workshop had been cancelled, and their speaker had been denied ac-

cess. When they put together another meeting for women, the Panther woman

who spoke was surrounded by male guards, who the lesbian women believed

were intended to intimidate them.

Angela Douglas of the Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization of

Tallahassee announced that she would no longer support the BPP because it re-

fused to respond to the concerns of lesbians at the convention. Indeed, this was

not just an isolated instance. Douglas recalled attend ing a rally in New Haven

for Lonnie McLucas, who was charged with and convicted of killing fellow

Panther Alex Rackley, whom the group suspected of being an informant, writ-

ing, “[I] felt like a complete fool facing 100 tactical police armed with magnums

after hearing a Panther woman read a poem which included derogatory state-

ments about ‘white fags.’” Instead, Douglas stated, “[I] declare myself to be an

enemy of the Black Panther Party and its goals until the group as a whole devel-

ops its consciousness and ends its sexist oppression against all homosexuals of

any race.”

Alternatively, the statement of the male homosexual workshop at the

Philadelphia RPCC recognized Newton’s message to gay liberation as a

“vanguard revolutionary action.” It declared, “We recognize the Black Panther

Party as being the vanguard of the people’s revolution in Amerikkka.” These

gay men saw the acceptance by the Panthers as a major change. The Chicago

Gay Liberation Front wrote that the Panthers were “the first national organiza-

tion to give us such warm, public support, as well as official recognition.” At the

conference, the gay men added, “They treated us with respect and consideration;

not acting judgmentally toward what was unfamiliar or even strange to them.”

While the gay men recognized that the women were treated differently, they

saw actions being taken to remedy this. They observed that one male Panther

insulted a lesbian, but the Panthers subsequently removed him. They also noted

that the spokesperson for women’s liberation acknowledged that she did not

treat the lesbian women as sisters and said she would attempt to remedy the situ-

ation. According to the Philadelphia-based underground paper Distant

Drummer, the “most important” achievement of the RPCC was “the interracial

makeup of the plenary session” and “the cooperative tie forged between the

Panthers and the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements.”

At the same time, white lesbians were not the only LGBT group that had

difficulties working with the Panthers. Th ird World Gay Revoluti on, which was

formerly the Black Caucus of the GLF in Chicago, also encountered difficulties.

Between September 9 and November 11, after the first convention meeting in

Philadelphia and before the second in Washington, DC, the group revised its

Thirteen Point Platform, adding three points. Two call ed for the abolition of

capital punishment and the penal system. The third and now longest point was

likely a critique of the Panthers, though it did not mention them by name. The

group wrote, in part, “We believe that so-called comrades who call themselves

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‘revolutionaries’ have failed to deal with their sexist attitudes. ...Togain their

anti-homosexual stance, they have used the weapons of the oppressor thereby

becoming the agent of the oppressor.” The message was cl ear: While Huey

Newton and other Panthers were certainly ahead of American society in general

in their principled acceptance of gay liberation, the alliance was not fully sup-

ported by either group, and tensions persisted.

The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Washington, DC

The second Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention was held in

Washington, DC, from November 26 to 29, 1970. With the theme “Survival

Through Service to the People,” it was intended to signal the Panthers’ move

toward community survival programs and away from armed self-defense and im-

mediate revolution. According to one report from attendees, the Philadelphia

convention attracted ten thousand people, 70 percent of whom were black,

while the Washington convention attracted five thousand people, only one

third of whom were black. The convention was smaller, and there was a larger

proportion of white allies, including a significant contingent of mostly white

LGBT activists.

While the Philadelphia convention was fairly well run, the Washington

convention encountered many problems. The biggest stumbling block was that

the group was prevented from using the facilities it had reserved at Howard

University. Many were also upset when the Panthers decided to read a constitu-

tion they prepared, rather than incorporating the suggestions of all groups. This

document contained many omissions, including the struggle of LGBT peop le. In

the Panthers’ defense, though, the document was a general preamble, which did

not mention specific causes or conc erns, instead outlining general principles like

revolutionary unity and self-determination for all people. Still, one activist

wrote, “Everything came down unfortunately in the form of a directive or

command.” A report in the Berkeley Tribe stated that the panel of speakers was

male dominated and “only during the discussion period did he [Newton] seem

sensitive to the oppression of women and gay people.”

However, gay liberation groups reported a positive experience at the DC

convention, having set up their own organization, communications, and hous-

ing, which “made the convention something of a success for GLF when as a

whole it was a disaster.” The Tribe reported that “for gay people, especially gay

men, the convention formed the back drop for the largest gathering of revolu-

tionary homosexuals ever.” The Panther convention also connected gay libera-

tionists with others on the New Left. Lexa Williams of Fort Worth wrote to the

Bay Area paper Gay Sunshine, “According to the straight press, the convention

was a big flop. If any of you were there you must know it was far from that. . . .

It was an education and this will be carried back to collectives all across the

country. It was there that I had my first direct encounter with Gays . . . Your

(and all of our) problem is so huge that it just slapped me in the face. I had not

before realized or accepted it. There is just so much for all of us to do.”

As reported in the Berkeley Barb, roughly 150 LGBT people met at All

Saints Church in Washington, DC. It was mostly male, but there was also a

trans caucus that began a dialogue about antitrans discrimination. The group

also “had to confront our own racism with our third world sisters and brothers”

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and unanimously accep ted the demands of Third World Gay Revolutionaries as

the demands of the group to the Panther leadership of the RPCC. The group of

representatives they chose comprised four people of color, four white women,

and two white men. At the celebration at Malcolm X Park, thousands gathered

to hear the Panther band play, and gay men led people in dances, shouting,

“Homo, homo, homo sexual, the ruling class is ineffectual!” However, oppres-

sion at the hands of the state was also on display at the DC meeting as two black

gay men were beaten by police outside the Zephyr Bar, though they were not

arrested.

As at the Philadelphia convention, some LGBT activists remained con-

cerned about ongoing gender inequality, with the Boston GLF walking out of

the Washington conference because of continued sexism in the movement.

Similarly, Tracy Knight of the Louisville GLF announced that their group was

dissociating from the Panthers. Martha Shelley wrote in her influential 1970

piece “Gay Is Good,” “We’re gonna make our own revolution because we’re sick

of revolutionary posters which depict straight he-man types and earth mothers,

with guns and babies. We’re sick of the Panthers lumping us together with the

capitalists in their term of universal contempt—‘faggot.’” In another piece,

Shelley criticized the undemocratic structure of the Black Panther Party. She

also saw Newton’s statement as patronizing, asking, “Why did some gay people

walk so tall after receiving Good Huey’s seal of approval, as if their needs could

not be considered valid, nor they revolutionary, unless the Black Panther Party

approved of them?” An article in Gay Sunshine suggested that lesbian feminists

should break from the male chauvinist and authoritarian Panthers and continue

to focus on racism by relating to gays and lesbians of color.

Historian Anne M.

Valk concludes, “The attempt to form coalitions brought black liberation, gay

liberation, and women’s liberation groups into contact in new ways. But even

among those who shared common goals, political priorities and strategies came

into conflict; direct interaction at the RPCC exacerbated, rather than

smoothed, these differences.”

At the same time, scholars have shown there was greater complexity to gen-

der relations within the Black Panther Party than the broad view of a sexist,

male chauvinist hierarchy. In particular, Robyn C. Spencer’s recent work on the

Oakland chapter sheds greater light on the ways in which “strong manhood”

didn’t necessarily mean “submissive womanhood.” In particular, in response to

police brutality, “armed self-defense as a marker of strength and determination

[was] exemplified not just by men but by women.”

Moreover, in Emily K.

Hobson’s new work on gay and lesbian radicalism in the Bay Area, she high-

lights the group Gay Women’s Liberation, active from 1969 to 1972, which

modeled the ideas and tactics of the Black Panther Party to advance the practice

of collective defense as a strategy to oppose state violence. While the

Radicalesbians founds themselves in conflict with the BPP, Gay Women’s

Liberation created a stronger bond with the party and attended two Bay Area

follow-up meetings to the RPCC. Still, Spencer is clear in acknowledging that

the Black Panther Party had “internal debates around sexuality, gender politics,

and leadership [that] simmered under the surface because many viewed them as

deferrable at a time of political instability” in the face of state repression.

Still, while some groups did not feel the Panthers had accomplished much

and did not feel a stronger connection to the Panthers, the RPCC that the

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Panthers organized was very influential for the gay liberationists who attended, in

part because they came to realize they needed to act more independently. Mike

Silverstein, a leader of the Berkeley GLF, concluded, “We left knowing that the

time is past when we can be Panther Groupies. We still want to work with other

oppressed peoples, but nobody’s going to make our revolution for us.” An activist

named A. G. concurred, pointing out in the Berkeley Tribe that while the

Panthers remained the most advanced revolutionary group, they could not speak

for the entire revolutionary movement, adding, “[The BPP] has shown very little

understanding of the problems confronting the white communities, male, female

and gay, and very little disposition to try and deal with those problems.”

Consequently, white people should “do it in our own way, using our own methods

andideas....notallof[Newton’s]ideasareapplicableinthewhitecommunity.”

Where this left people of color in gay liberation organizations was not addressed.

Nick Benton, also of the Berkeley GLF, viewed the Washington conven-

tion as an important turning point as well, with members of the gay liberation

delegation realizing they lacked the revolutionary fervor of the Panthers. Benton

wrote of the RPCC that “Gay Liberation exposed itself to itself, a frightened,

confused bunch of kids who really came to Washington for reasons other than

revolution . . . Since then, every time a revolutionary dies, Gay Liberation dies

a little more . . . every George Jackson, every Attica drives us farther back from

our revolutionary call, back into the bars, into the suburbs.”

However, contrary to Benton’s view, the Panthers and gay liberation were not

really breaking apart so much as moving more independently in the same direction,

away from revolution and toward “survival pending revolution,” focusing on com-

munity programs, legal reform, and electoral politics. As Joshua Bloom and Waldo

Martin observe, in the spring of 1971, the Black Panther Party “implemented a

sweeping demilitarization of its image.” At the same time, they closed down chap-

ters around the country and consolidated their efforts in Oakland. The party began

“resembling a social service organization, motivated by revolutionary ideology.” The

Panthers believed that the goal of “survival pending revolution”—meeting the

needs of the people until conditions became more propitious for revolution—was

the best response to the situation of the time. However, historian Alondra Nelson

points out that “the heightened emphasis of the service program did not amount to

the Party’s complete abolition of armed self-defense.”

The influence of the RPCC on Bay Area LGBT activists continued after

the gathering in Washington, highlighting the continued energetic organizing

in anticipation of local elections in April 1971. Eight days of workshops, part of

another regional RPCC in the Bay Area following the DC convention, were

held in December 1970, with one for LGBT issues on Tuesday and another on

community control of police the following day. Out of this came the April 6

Coalition Platform, created in January 1971, which emphasized intercommunal-

ism and included the Panthers, gay liberation, and women’s liberation. The pri-

mary issue was passage of the Community Control of Police Charter

Amendment, which citizens of Berkeley would vote on come April 6.

Police Brutality and the Transformation of the Panthers and Gay Liberation

Gay activists continued to deal with the problem of police brutality follow-

ing the Washington conference. In December 1970, a private security guard at a

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gay club knocked a gay man named Kent Strever unconscious and turned him

over to police. The officers then beat Strever behind the San Francisco Mission

Station before charging him with public intoxication and fleeing. On December

12, police attempted to disperse the dozens of people gathered outside the Stud,

a gay bar, at closing time. Charles Christman, the president of the GLF at San

Francisco State, nervous at seeing people being beaten and trying to leave, was

driving out of the parking lot when police shot at his car and rammed it with a

police cruiser. As he escaped the vehicle, officers shot him in the back, elbow,

and ankle, thoug h he survived. Police charged Christman with five counts of

assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon, saying he tried to hit them with

his car. He would later testify that officers kicked and hit him in the groin after

they shot him down. Christman’s first trial ended in a hung jury, 10 to 2 against

him. Faced with the possibility of life imprisonment, he agreed to plead guilty to

two misdemeanor charges of assault and battery to avoid a retrial. He was fined

roughly $3,600 in present-day dollars and received three years of probation.

Activists who presented their report to the police commission in the imme-

diate aftermath of the Christman shooting said it was the second shooting by po-

lice in recent months and the ninth attack by police from the southern station

in recent weeks. The shooting also brought together both moderate and radical

organizations, from SIR and the Tavern Guild to the Berkeley GLF and Gay

Women’s Liberation. Mike Robinson, a black gay man, said of the shooting,

“White middle class gays are finally getting turned on to oppression. We’ve got

to start getting together to deal with oppression becau se if we want to get our-

selves liberated, then we’ve got to be willing to defend ourselves and not put

faith in pigs of any kind.” In calling for the freedom of Chuck Christman,

Robinson argued that gay activists needed to work for the freedom of all poli ti-

cal prisoners. He asked, “Why aren’t some of you helping to free Bobby Seale,

Seattle 7 (once 8, but one is alive and gone underground), John Clutchette, or

any of the powerful Indians of Alcatraz. You just can’t fight for the liberation of

white gay people, but you must fight for the liberation of ALL people.”

On April 6, 1971, the voters of Berkeley considered Amendment 1 on com-

munity control of police and voted it down, with the count at the end of the

day 9,872 in favor and 20,755 opposed. However, even before the vote, the

Panthers and their allies believed they were victorious regardless of the outcome.

Their newspaper declared, “Community Control of Police has already won. The

tremendous educational effect and the political consciousness that has been

raised in the last year and a half throughout the city, due to organizing that has

gone on around the issue, is testimony to this fact.” The Panthers pointed to the

way their campaign for community control of police exposed the undemocratic

structure of local government and that government’s support from “an extraordi-

narily expensive campaign of lies, distortions and slander.” Even if the amend-

ment failed, the organizing effort had put in place grassroots groups on blocks

around the city and “had a greater impact on Berkeley than any other issue in

the city’s history.” Furthermore, Berkeley’s newly elected and first black mayor,

Warren Widener, planned to take action. He set as his primary objective a revi-

sion of the city charter, which gave more power to the city manager than the

mayor and the city council. With greater political power, he planned to advance

a number of reforms, including community control of police.

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Gay activist and reporter Nick Benton wrote in May 1971, “Gay Liberation

has taken a big turn . . . and many consider the R.P.C .C. to have been a turning

point.” Despite the failure of Amendment 1, as the Panthers continued to

evolve, gay liberationists continued to model them. For example, gay activist

and priest Michael Itkin, though critical of the Panthers in 1969, called on gay

activists to recognize the potential for liberation through religion just as the BPP

was in 1971. He wrote, “We see, today, the Black Panther Party calling on its

membership to recognize the radical potential of Black Churches again.

Likewise, today, there is a growing Gay consciousness and demand for Gay

freedom.”

Other LGBT activists modeled the Panthers’ community programs and

requested clothing for redistribution as well as doctors, lawyers, and teachers

who would provide free medical, legal, and educational services. Newton and

the Panthers came to believe that “the vicious service-revolver of the police is

only one manifestation of violence.” Those who lacked food, clothing, and med-

icine were also victims of state violence in an affluent country and must be

defended through revolutionary intercommunal efforts that served the people.

Similarly, by January 1972, Bay Area activist Don Jackson, wh o had earlier been

an important spark for the idea of a gay colony in Alpine County, observed,

“Service organizations have replaced the old gay lib groups. The new groups are

doing practical things to alleviate poverty, unemployment, medical, legal and

psychological problems.” In March 1972, the Panthers held the Black

Community Survival Conference, which was not solely for African Americans.

Rather, they sought to “unify the black community vote, the white revolution-

ary and radical vote, around concrete survival programs.” While the group had

become more localized, they now sought to expand fifteen community survival

programs on a large scale.

In May 1971, gay liberationists in the Bay Area experienced the split that

previously fractured gay activists in New York. Gay Activists Alliance West

formed, and the “less-than-revolutionaries” broke off from the San Francisco

GLF to pursue one-issue politics through gays-only organizing using nonviolent

means. However, even the more moderate GAA had a “militant youth arm”

known as the Purple Panthers. At the same time, the Berkeley GLF disbanded

“to free gay people to do their thing in small-collective and affinity-group fash-

ion truer to the sense of what being a revolutionary gay means.”

However, the Panthers’ influence and agenda left an indelible mark on gay

liberation: gay activism on issues like police brutality continued; gay advocacy of

armed self-defense persisted; and white gay consciousness of issues of race

remained. When the Western Regional Gay Men’s Conferenc e was held in the

summer of 1971, the thirteen workshops included one focused on the experien-

ces of Third World gays and another on gay political prisoners. Following a vote

of support for Willie Brown’s consensual-sex bill, gays noticed a police crack-

down against them, with fifty arrests in two weeks. In response, at Mission

Dolores Park in San Francisco, gays began patrolling the park with cameras “to

protect brothers from police enticement trips.” Gay activists decried the fact

that they were targeted for committing victimless crimes while 87 percent of fel-

onies went unsolved.

Following harassment of gay people on Mason Street by the tactical squad

during an antiwar rally, the controversial and combative Rev. Ray Broshears

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said it was time for “returning violence for violence.” Out of the Gay Activists

Alliance Purple Panther Division, Broshears formed the Lavender Panthers in

1973, though they made no alliance with the Black Panthers. The group pa-

trolled the streets to combat violence against gays, though mostly dealing with

attacks by civilians rather than police. That summer, Broshears and two other

Lavender Panthers appeared in the San Francisco Examiner holding guns and

sawed-off pool cues. Just as the Lavender Panthers dissolved, Bay Area Gay

Liberation (BAGL) was founded at the start of 1975, advocating “Gay

Liberation Through Socialist Revolution,” with a Self-Defense Committee for

“defusing dangerous situations” and a Safe Streets Committee. BAGL also cre-

ated an Anti–Male Supremacy Committee to deal, in part, with the power,

“glamorization of physical strength,” and fighting that could come with having a

defense organization. BAGL later spawned a spinoff group, Gay Action, which

advocated armed self-defense to “resist violent attacks against individuals in our

community.”

***

The Black Panther Party had a greater depth of contact with and longer-

lasting influence on gay liberation than previously acknowledged, as an exami-

nation of movement activism in the Bay Area reveals. However, the influence

was often greater than the contact. While a great range of viewpoints on alli-

ances between the Panthers and gay liberation could be observed in both camps,

sometimes split along gender lines, many gay activists affirmed a united front

even before Newton’s statement on gay liberation, and numerous gay activists

who rejected an alliance were nonetheless influenced by Panther ideology and

action. Foremost among the reasons for working together was their shared iden-

tity as criminalized groups and their shared goal of combating police brutality.

Gay liberationists modeled Panther approaches to dealing with police violence,

marking a clear break with homophile reformism. The two groups followed a

similar trajectory, experiencing fractures and turning more toward survival pro-

grams and electoral politics in the spring of 1971. Still, both groups continued

to focus on the issue of police brutality, with important contingents of the

Panthers and gay liberation continuing to advocate armed self-defense.

In April 1969, Berkeley police killed Frank Bartley, one of the gay men

whose death was highlighted by the Committe e for Homosexual Freedom in the

leaflets they passed out at the Panther conference that summer. The following

year, a five-day memorial for Bartley was held, with activists wearing lavender

armbands and the Gay Guerrilla Theater reenacting the murder. The year after

that, in April 1971, moderate and radical gay activists again gathered to remem-

ber Bartley and continued to seek the dismissal of the officers involved in the

killing as well as the Berkeley chief of police. Indeed, concern and outrage about

the killings that led gay activists to seek out an alliance with the Panthers would

not soon be forgotten.

Like the Black Panther Party, though, gays in the early 1970s would move

their primary efforts from protest to politics. In the Bay Area, this, too, saw

some continued ef forts at cooperation. In 1973, when Panthers Bob by Seale and

Elaine Brown ran for mayor and city council representative in Oakland, they

did so advocating new laws that would prohibit police brutality and bar discrimi-

nation based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, child custody, and

other realms. The Oakland-based interracial Gay Men’s Political Action Group,

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in turn, focused their electoral energy on getting Seale and Brown into power.

The group assisted in broad political outreach that created an alliance that,

though unsuccessful, ultimately forced the incumbent mayor into a runoff

against candidate Seale. While the Gay Men’s Politi cal Action Group disbanded

after the election, the members themselves continued their organizing efforts

elsewhere.

Endnotes

The author would like to thank Matt Karush, the two anonymous reviewers for the

Journal of Social History, and Jennifer Dominique Jones for their thoughtful comments on

drafts of this article, which greatly improved it. Address correspondence to Jared

Leighton, [email protected].

1. Leo Laurence, “Gays Get Panther OK,” Berkeley Tribe, July 25, 1969.

2. Coverage of Newton’s statement on gay liberation and the GLF-NY split over support-

ing the Panthers appears in multiple sources. For work on the Philadelphia RPCC, see

Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian and Gay Philadelphia, 1945–1972

(Chicago, 2000), 331–40; Marc Stein, “‘Birthplace of a Nation’: Imagining Lesbian and

Gay Communities in Philadelphia, 1969–1970,” in Creating a Place for Ourselves: Lesbian,

Gay, and Bisexual Community Histories, ed. Brett Beemyn (New York, 1997), 265–75; and

Duchess Harris and Adam J. Waterman, “Babylon Is Burning: Race, Gender, and

Sexuality at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention,” Journal of Intergroup

Relations 27, no. 2 (2000): 17–33. For work on gender and sexuality and the Black

Panther Party, see, e.g., Amy Abugo Ongiri, “Prisoner of Love: Affiliation, Sexuality, and

the Black Panther Party,” Journal of African American History 94, no. 1 (2009): 69–86;

Steve Estes, I Am a Man: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill,

2005), 153–77; and Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender,

and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (Durham, 2016). While marginal in the historiogra-

phy, it is also often left out of popular memory. For instance, the recent Black Power 50

contains a chapter on “The Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Party, and Racial

Coalitions,” which includes discussion of predominantly white groups, like SDS, or all-

white groups, like the Young Patriots Organization, but makes no mention of the Gay

Liberation Front or Committee for Homosexual Freedom. See Jakobi Williams, “The

Black Power Movement, the Black Panther Party, and Racial Coalitions,” in Black Power

50, ed. Sylviane A. Diouf and Komozi Woodard (New York, 2016), 29–50. Similar in na-

ture, The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution includes but brief mention

of the Panthers’ connection to gay and lesbian organizing. See Brian Shih and Yohuru

Williams, eds., The Black Panthers: Portraits from an Unfinished Revolution (New York,

2016).

3. As Christina B. Hanhardt points out, there have been few studies of formal efforts by

LGBT activists to combat violence. See Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay

Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, 2013), 8. For a recent analysis of

black–gay coalitions against police harassment and the carceral state, focused on Chicago,

see Timothy Stewart-Winter, “Queer Law and Order: Sex, Criminality, and Policing in

the Late Twentieth-Century United States,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1

(2015): 61–72; Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia, 2016),

87–94. This article only contains brief mention of the Panthers, however, discussing ho-

mophile and gay liberation support for investigation into the Hampton–Clark killing and

Newton’s statement on gay liberation. While Christopher Lowen Agee discusses gay

efforts to combat police harassment in bars and artistic production in San Francisco, he

makes little mention of gay liberation or the Black Panther Party, saying nothing of their

combined efforts, and is focused on San Francisco proper, so he does not cover the police

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killings of gay men in Berkeley and Oakland. See Christopher Lowen Agee, The Streets of

San Francisco: Policing and the Creation of a Cosmopolitan Liberal Politics, 1950–1972

(Chicago, 2014). In Forging Gay Identities, Elizabeth A. Armstrong makes no mention of

police harassment in the Bay Area after 1966 and only discusses the role of the Black

Panthers to note the way in which support for the Panthers led to a divide between gay

power and gay pride perspectives on both coasts. See Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Forging

Gay Identities: Organizing Sexuality in San Francisco, 1950–1994 (Chicago, 2002).

4. Committee for Homosexual Freedom, “69—Gay Liberation—70,” ca. December 1969,

Laurence (Leo, J.D.) folder, ONE Subject Files Collection, ONE Archives, University of

Southern California, Los Angeles, CA; “Homo Revolt: ‘Don’t Hide It,’” Berkeley Barb,

March 28–April 3, 1969, 5, 23. An example of the use of the term sexism appears in a

pamphlet for FREE: Gay Liberation of Minnesota, which stated, “Many people today be-

lieve that some sexual choices and sexuality is better than someone else’s. The rewards

and benefits go to those who are heterosexual or who can act heterosexual. This is the

philosophy of

sexism. Sexism is both a cultural and institutional form of hatred. It

destroys Gay people.” See FREE: Gay Liberation of Minnesota pamphlet, Thom Higgins

Papers, Box 4, Minnesota Historical Society. Emphasis in original. For examples of

Laurence’s use of the term sexual racism , see, e.g., Leo E. Laurence, “‘Don’t Hide It,’”

Berkeley Barb, April 3–9, 1970, 9, and Leo E. Laurence, “April 15 . . . The Last Rally,”

Berkeley Barb, April 10–16, 1970, 1, 12.

5. Chicago Gay Liberation, Legal and Political Action Committee, Working Paper—

Plenary Session, Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, August 30, 1970,

Black Panthers file, ONE Subject Files Collection, ONE Archives; “Gay Community

Services Center L.A.,” Gay Sunshine 9 (October/November 1971): 12; Elizabeth Hinton,

From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America

(Cambridge, MA, 2016), 12.

6. “Death at the Dover; Witnesses Say Vice Cops Beat Man to Death,” Los Angeles

Advocate, April 1969, 1–2; “Case Dismissed Against Figure in Dover Death,” Los Angeles

Advocate, June 1969, 1; Dick Michaels, “Beating Death of Handcuffed Man Ruled

‘Excusable Homicide,’” Los Angeles Advocate, May 1969, 1.

7. Steve Haines, “Homo Death: Killer Cops at Large,” Berkeley Barb, April 25–May 1,

1969, 7; Ed Jackson, “Berkeley Vice Cops Shoot Man to Death in Park,” The Los Angeles

Advocate, June 1969, 2; “Calls Gay Death ‘Official Murder,’” Berkeley Barb, April 25–May

1, 1969, 7; “SIR Pushes for Murder Inquiry,” Los Angeles Advocate, August 1969, 10; “Gay

Split,” Berkeley Barb, May 9–15, 1969, 13; “Laurence Recall Fails at SIR,” Los Angeles

Advocate, June 1969, 8.

8. “Professor’s Wife Vows to Avenge Husband’s Death,” Berkeley Barb, June 27–July 3,

1969, 11; “Professor Dies After Vice Arrest in Oakland,” Los Angeles Advocate, September

1969, 5; “Cops Cleared in Caplan Death,” Los Angeles Advocate, November 1969, 1.

9. Stew Albert, “Anti-Fascist Meet: Panthers’ Warning ‘Unite or Perish,’” Berkeley Barb,

July 4–10, 1969, 7; Nixon, “Panthers on Move: ‘To a United Front,’” Berkeley Barb, June

13–19, 1969, 7; “Panther Police Petition,” Berkeley Barb, August 22–28, 1969, 5; “Sign

Petition: Control Your Local Pigs,” Black Panther, January 15, 1969, 6; Thomas Klaber,

“Gathering of the Tribes,” Berkeley Barb, September 5–11, 1969. The only groups who

could not attend the June conference were the Us Organization, the CIA, and the FBI.

However, following the Oakland conference, the Panthers broke with a few groups, in-

cluding Students for a Democratic Society, the Socialist Workers Party, and the

Progressive Labor Party, because they would not circulate the petition for community

control of policing and because the Panthers were “sick and tired of them trying to dictate

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to us how we should run our struggles.” See John Suiter, “A Barb Exclusive: Black

Panthers,” Berkeley Barb, August 8–14, 1969, 10.

10. Leo E. Laurence, “Gays Rising Up Angry,” Berkeley Tribe, November 7–13, 1969, 8;

Leo E. Laurence, “Didn’t Finger Gays Says City Cop,” Berkeley Tribe, November 27–

December 5, 1969, 9.

11. Wesley Hogan, Many Minds, One Heart: SNCC’s Dream for a New America (Chapel

Hill, 2007), 121–32; Don Jackson, “Gay Liberation Movement,” Berkeley Barb, October

10–16, 1969, 12; Don Jackson, “Gay Liberation Movement Invades Los Angeles,”

Berkeley Barb, October 24–30, 1969, 5; Don Jackson, “Gay Liberation Peace March,”

Berkeley Barb, November 21–27, 1969, 5; Michael Francis Itkin, “The Homosexual

Liberation Movement: What Direction?” Berkeley Barb, December 5–11, 1969, 16.

12. Leo E. Laurence, “Homogenous Homosexuals,” Berkeley Tribe, December 19–26,

1969, 11, 21; Jim Kepner, “Gay Lib Conference Attracts Hundreds,” The Los Angeles

Advocate, March 1970, 3, 7.

13. “Peaceful Demonstration at K.G.O. This Friday,” Gay Bay Newsletter, January 11,

1970, 1, folder 05300, GLBT Historical Society. Laurence had earlier stated that like “our

Black brothers and sisters . . . I, too, must be willing to sacrifice my job and my life if I am

truthfully committed to win our fight against homosexual discrimination.” And Laurence

was forced to maintain that commitment. See Leo Lawrence, “Total Commitment to Be

Gay,” Committee for Homosexual Freedom Newsletter, April 29, 1969, 2, folder 05300,

GLBT Historical Society. Gale Whittington, “Queer Killers,” Berkeley Tribe, January 30–

February 6, 1970, 7, 19, emphasis in original; Tribe Editorial Collective, “A Call to

Arms,” Berkeley Tribe, February 27–March 6, 1970, 3.

14. The Daughters of Bilitis, in collaboration with black civil rights groups and other

organizations, began Citizens Alert in San Francisco in 1966 in order to report police

misconduct.

15. Whittington, “Queer Killers”; Hanhardt, Safe Space, 1, 66–69, 71–72. As Christina B.

Hanhardt has written, Citizens’ Alert was also an interracial organization—perhaps the

only gay-inclusive interracial group in San Francisco prior to Stonewall—and included

people of African, European, Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese ancestry as well as people

from a variety of religious backgrounds. It was a twenty-four-hour hotline for reporting po-

lice brutality that began operating in 1965. See also Susan Stryker and Jim Van Buskirk,

Gay by the Bay: A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area (San Francisco,

1996), 46; Marcia M. Gallo, Different Daughters: A History of the Daughters of Bilitis and the

Rise of the Lesbian Rights Movement (Emeryville, CA, 2007), 125.

16. Jim Kepner, “Gays Remember Dover Death with Rally, March,” The Advocate, April

29–May 12, 1970, 1, 3; “Family Seeks Inquest in Man’s Death,” The Advocate, April 29–

May 12, 1970, 1–2; “L.A. Gay Lib Alive, Well,” The Advocate, June 10–23, 1970, 7;

Robert O. Self, “Sex in the City: The Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963–

79,” Gender & History 20, no. 2 (2008): 302.

17. Leo E. Laurence, “Roland Raps Leo Listens,” Berkeley Tribe, December 26, 1969–

January 2, 1970, 8; Don Burton, “Gay Head Hits Liberal Shits,” Berkeley Barb, March 20–

26, 1970, 2. Emphasis in original.

18. “Community Control,” Berkeley Tribe, July 24–31, 1970, 2; “Cop Petition OK,”

Berkeley Barb, August 14–20, 1970, 7; Leo E. Laurence, “Stew Fights On!” Berkeley Barb,

April 10–16, 1970, 6.

19. “Huey Raps on Gay Lib,” Berkeley Barb, August 14–20, 1970, 7; Emily K. Hobson,

Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left (Berkeley:

“All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons” 881

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University of California Press, 2016), 34; “Huey!” Berkeley Tribe, August 14–21, 1970, 2–

3, emphasis in original.

20. Toni Morrison, ed., To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (New York,

1995), 152–54; Nick Benton, “Gay Is the Most,” Gay Sunshine 2 (1970): 4.

21. Tracye Matthews, “‘No One Ever Asks, What a Man’s Place in the Revolution Is’:

Gender and the Politics of The Black Panther Party 1966–1971,” in The BPP

Reconsidered, 282; Reginald Major, “Cleaver’s Christian Crusade,” Straight Creek Journal,

July 14, 1977, Black Panthers folder, ONE Archives; George Mendenhall, “‘Some Truth’

That Gays Sick, Cleaver Tells GOP,” Bay Area Reporter, May 22, 1986, Black Panthers

folder, ONE Archives; Jane Rhodes, Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a

Black Power Icon (New York, 2007), 298. To some extent, Cleaver’s later homophobic

statements may have been necessary to maintain the support of his white, conservative,

Christian benefactor Arthur DeMoss, who was helping Cleaver in his legal defense and

providing him with expensive accommodations.

22. Leo E. Laurence, “Strait Gays Badrap Blacks,” Berkeley Barb, August 28–September 3,

1970, 9; Rob Cole, “Collision in San Francisco—I: Old, New Ideas Tangle at NACHO

Convention,” The Advocate, September 30–October 13, 1970, 1–2, 6–7, 12, 23.

23. Cole, “Collision”; Leo E. Laurence, “Gay Pig Nation Liberated,” Berkeley Barb,

September 4–10, 1970; Jim Kepner, “NACHO in Future-Shock,” The Advocate,

September 30–October 13, 1970, 2.

24. “Sorry, Huey,” The Advocate, October 14–27, 1970, 18.

25. Leo E. Laurence, “SF Gay Lib Commune Raided after Threats,” Berkeley Barb,

October 2–8, 1970, 7; “Black Militants Oust S.F. Gay Lib,” The Advocate, October 28–

November 10, 1970, 22. The GLF commune Children of Paradise should not be confused

with the group organized by Jim Jones.

26. “Letter to Huey,” Berkeley Tribe, October 16–23, 1970, 11.

27. “Letter to Huey.”

28. “Gay Sisters Demand Reality,” Berkeley Tribe, November 13–20, 1970, 16; Lillian

Faderman and Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics,

and Lipstick Lesbians (New York, 2006), 172; “Gay Lib Supports Panthers,” Los Angeles

Free Press, November 6, 1970, Black Panthers folder; Ron Storme, “Supports Panthers,”

The Advocate, November 25–December 8, 1970, 23; “Gay Liberation Comes to

Baltimore,” The Advocate, October 14–27, 6; “Third World Gay Revolution: What We

Want,” Berkeley Tribe, November 13–20, 1970, 8; “Untitled,” Gay Sunshine 2 (1970): 6;

“GLF Lectures Begin,” Detroit Gay Liberator, November 1970, 6; “GLF Supports Panther

Food Plan,” Detroit Gay Liberator, November 1970, 6.

29. Revolutionary nationalism, as defined by the Panthers, was grounded in Marxian and

Maoist socialism, international in outlook, and in favor of alliances with revolutionary

organizations representing other racial groups, with the BPP serving as the vanguard party

leading the way, while black nationalism was more grounded in African culture and his-

tory, black cultural unity, and black self-determination. See Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ’til

the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York, 2006), 31,

219–20.

30. Josh Sides, Erotic City: Sexual Revolutions and the Making of Modern San Francisco

(New York, 2009), 71; Leo Laurence, “A Gay County?” Berkeley Barb, October 16–22,

1970, 13; Don Jackson, “Alpine for All Swingers” Berkeley Barb, December 4–10, 1970,

4; Craig Schoonmaker, “Separatists Forming Alliance,” Gay Sunshine

4 (1970): 3; Don

Jackson, “Pro Alpine,” Berkeley Tribe, November 6–13, 1970, 5; Don Jackson, “Gays Say

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They Ain’t Guil-tay,” Berkeley Barb, October 23–29, 1970, 6; Bay Area Alpine

Liberation, “Gay! Pigs! Now! [Letter to the Editor],” Berkeley Barb, January 1–7, 1971, 4;

Leo Laurence, “Leo Bids Farewell to All This,” Berkeley Barb, October 30–November 5,

1970, 8, 12; “Gay Radical Says Alpine Indian Turf,” Berkeley Barb, October 30–

November 5, 1970, 9; “1179 Gay Libbers Sign Up to Go Up,” Berkeley Barb, November

20–26, 1970, 8; Nick Benton, “‘Alpine Liberation’—Green Gay Ghetto?” Berkeley Barb,

December 18–24, 1970, 11; “Gay Group,” Berkeley Barb, April 23–29, 1971, 2, 13.

31. Leo Laurence, “‘Leary’s Gonna Grow Now,’” Berkeley Barb, October 9–15, 1970, 7;

Laurence, “Leo Bids Farewell,” emphasis in original; Hanhardt, Safe Space, 71–72.

32. “Two-Time Winners,” Berkeley Tribe, June 19–26, 1970, 14.

33. “Two-Time Winners.”

34. Ken, “Sexism and the Panthers,” Detroit Gay Liberator, December 1970, 6; The Black

Caucus of the Gay Liberation Front of Detroit, “Untitled,” Detroit Gay Liberator,

December 1970, 7.

35. “Miracle (Oink) Mile,” Gay Sunshine 2 (1970): 18.

36. Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar, Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity

(Baltimore, 2004), 103; Laurence, “Roland Raps Leo Listens.”

37. Ron Vernon, “Growing Up in Chicago Black & Gay,” Gay Sunshine 6 (1971): 14–17;

Michael Robinson, “Living in the USA (U.S.-Gay),” Gay Sunshine 6 (1971): 17.

38. Ward Churchill, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War against

the Black Panther Party,” in Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New

Look at the Panthers and Their Legacy, ed. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New

York, 2001), 102; Donald Freed, “Huey Newton—The People Must Burn the Pig

Constitution,” Los Angeles Free Press, September 11, 1970, Black Panthers folder;

“Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Conference,” Black Panther, August 1, 1970, 17;

“Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention,” Black Panther, August 29, 1970, 11.

39. David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York, 2004),

215; Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American

Sexuality (Chicago, 2008), 191–92.

40. “Gays Discover Revolutionary Love,” report to the male homosexual workshop,

Chicago Gay Liberation members, Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention,

September 5–7, 1970, Black Panthers folder, ONE Subject Files Collection, ONE

Archives.

41. Jim Chesebro, “Revolutionary Peoples Meet,” MPLS FREE, September 1970, 2, 4.

42. “Gay Sisters Speak,” Berkeley Tribe, October 30–November 6, 1970, 8–9.

43. Angela Douglas, “Panthers Still Biased against Gays, Women,” The Advocate,

November 11–24, 1970, 20.

44. “Statement of the Male Homosexual Workshop,” Black Panthers folder; Chicago Gay

Liberation, Legal and Political Action Committee, Working Paper—Plenary Session,

Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, August 30, 1970, Black Panthers

folder; “Gays Discover Revolutionary Love”; Distant Drummer quoted in Stein,

“‘Birthplace of a Nation,’” 269.

45. Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (New York, 2012), 83; Third

World Gay Revolution 16 Point Platform and Program, November 11, 1970, Black

Panthers folder. There was also a group called Third World Gay People, which was based

in Berkeley.

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46. “Let Freedom Ring,” Berkeley Tribe, November 13–20, 1970, 4; Barbara, Karen, and

Sally, “Washington: Two Views,” Berkeley Tribe, December 12–19, 1970, 8.

47. “Rain Check,” Berkeley Tribe, December 4–11, 1970, 4; “Panther Preamble: Toward

Intercommunalism,” Berkeley Tribe, December 4–11, 1970, 5; Julian Walker, “We

Bombed in Washington,” Berkeley Barb, December 11–17, 1970, 3.

48. Mike Silverstein, “We Bombed in Washington,” Berkeley Barb, December 11–17,

1970, 2; Barbara, Karen, and Sally, “Washington”; Lexa Williams, “Letter to the Editor,”

Gay Sunshine 5 (1971): 6.

49. Silverstein, “We Bombed”; Barbara, Karen, and Sally, “Washington”; “Chaos Marks

Panther Meet,” The Advocate, December 23, 1970–January 5, 1971, 1, 8.

50. Nick Benton, “We Bombed in Washington,” Berkeley Barb, December 11–17, 1970,

2; “Chaos Marks Panther Meet”; Martha Shelley, “Gay Is Good,” 1970, in Out of the

Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation, ed. Karla Jay and Allen Young (New York, 1992),

31–34; Martha Shelley, “Subversion in the Women’s Movement,” Gay Sunshine

4 (1970): 14–15; “Where Are the Gay Black Panthers?” Gay Sunshine 5 (1971): 15.

51. Anne M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Feminism and Black Liberation in

Washington, D.C. (Urbana, 2008), 131.

52. Spencer, Revolution, 46.

53. Spencer, Revolution, 105; Hobson, Lavender and Red, 42–44, 51–52.

54. Silverstein, “We Bombed”; A.G., “Washington: Two Views,” Berkeley Tribe,

December 12–19, 1970, 8–9.

55. Nick Benton, “Anti-GLF,” Berkeley Barb, October 8–14, 1971, 9.

56. Gwen V. Hodges, “Survival Pending Revolution,” Black Panther, January 9, 1971, 3;

Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics

of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley, 2013); “Let Us Hold High the Banner of

Intercommunalism and the Invincible Thoughts of Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense

and Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party,” Black Panther, January 16, 1971;

“Statement by Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party and

Supreme Servant of the People on the Occasion of Revolutionary Intercommunal Day of

Solidarity—March 5, 1971,” Black Panther, March 13, 1971, 2; Spencer, Revolution, 154;

Hobson, Lavender and Red, 39; Alondra Nelson, Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party

and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (Minneapolis, 2013), 61.

57. “Coalition Work Shops,” Berkeley Tribe, December 18–25, 1970, 8; “April 6

Coalition Platform,” Berkeley Tribe, January 22–29, 1971, 14–15; “April Coalition,”

Berkeley Tribe, January 29–February 5, 1971, 14.

58. Nick Benton, “Gay Reveals Brutality Behind Sty,” Berkeley Barb, December 25–31,

1970, 5; Nick Benton, “Gay Shooting War Council,” Berkeley Barb, December 18–24,

1970, 4; “Retrial for Bluequeers’ Gay Target,” Berkeley Barb, March 26–April 1, 1971, 6;

“SF Pig Victim ‘Free,’” Berkeley Barb, June 18–24, 1971, 9. It should be noted that the

accounts in the underground press differed from more mainstream publications, with the

Berkeley Tribe pointing out, “The eyewitness reports, collected by the Gay Switchboard

the day following the incident, conflicted all the way down the line with the police report

as it was carried in the straight press.” See “Pigs Shoot Gay Brother,”

Berkeley Tribe,

December 18–25, 1970, 7.

59. Benton, “Gay Shooting War”; Nick Benton, “SF Gays Rally Round Wounded

Leader,” Berkeley Barb, December 25–31, 1970, 5; Nick Benton, “Sad Vibes at Gay

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Dance,” Berkeley Barb, January 1–7, 1971, 4; Michael Robinson, “The Stud Shooting:

From a Black Viewpoint,” Gay Sunshine 5 (1971): 2.

60. Kay Greaves, “Berkeley Voters Choose a Black Mayor, Turn Down Community

Control of Police,” Oakland Post, April 7, 1971, 1; “Chairman Bobby and Community

Control of Police,” Black Panther, April 3, 1971, 9; “Mayor Speaks Out,” Oakland Post,

July 22, 1971, 8.

61. Nick Benton, “His-story of the Gay Lib Movement,” Berkeley Barb, April 30–May 6,

1971, 8; M. F. Itkin, “Apology to Us [Letter to the Editor],” Berkeley Barb , June 25–July 1,

1971, 6.

62. Hobson, Lavender and Red, 34. “Gay Rap,” Berkeley Tribe, March 19–26, 1971, 15;

“Statement by Huey P. Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, Supreme

Servant of the People at the Chicago, Illinois Coliseum, February 21, 1971,” The Black

Panther, April 10, 1971, 2–4; Don Jackson, “We Are All Fugitives,” Gay Sunshine 10

(1972): 4; “Panther Chief Up Front,” Berkeley Barb, March 24–30, 1972, 2–3.

63. “Gay Lib Splits,” Berkeley Barb, May 14–20, 1971, 12; “No Straights!” Berkeley Barb,

May 21–27, 1971, 6; “SIR Sics Pigs on Rev. Ray,” Berkeley Barb, September 17–23, 1971,

4; Nick Benton, “Is Gay Liberation Revolutionary?” Berkeley Barb, June 4–10, 1971, 13.

64. Winston Leyland, “LA Gay Parley,” Berkeley Barb, July 2–8, 1971, 5; “Hogs in Drag,”

Berkeley Barb, July 16–22, 1971, 4; “Blue Queers vs. Gays,” Berkeley Barb, July 23–29,

1971, 7; “Gays May Sue,” Berkeley Barb, July 30–August 5, 1971, 10; “Dianne No-Shos

Gay Boosters,” Berkeley Barb, October 15–21, 1971, 14.

65. “Gays Liberate Mason St.,” Berkeley Barb, October 15–21, 1971, 10; BAGL Bulletin,

Vol. 1, No. 7, November 1975, 1–2, folder 02200, GLBT Historical Society; Bay Area

Gay Liberation June Newsletter [1978], p. 1, folder 02200, GLBT Historical Society; “Gay

Male Supremacy and the Cult of Masculinity,” undated, and Anti–Male Supremacy

Committee Report, undated, folder 02200, GLBT Historical Society; Hanhardt, Safe

Space, 93–100.

66. “Gay Memorial,” Berkeley Tribe, April 17–24, 1970, 11; “We Remember Frank

Bartley,” Berkeley Barb, April 16–22, 1971, 5.

67. Hobson, Lavender and Red, 40–41; Donna Jean Murch, Living for the City: Migration,

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