05.12.2025
Every year across America and the Western World, Gay Pride is commemorated with days of celebrations, parades, and an annual reminder of the revolutionary history that all gays share. Born out of the seediest gutters in America’s major cities, a riot happened in late June 1969 in Manhattan. Such a thing had happened many times in the turbulent 1960s, like Bloody Sunday, The Assassination of Dr. King and of John and Robert Kennedy, Second Wave Feminism, Black Power, The Rainbow Coalition, and the American Indian Movement. The decade was no stranger to mass upheaval and seminal cultural events, however, the one this riot would spawn would be unique among them.
It is said many times, many ways, every Pride, because of the continued controversiality of certain corners of the gay world, that Pride was a riot, begun by a transgender person of color. That Gay Lib was more tolerant and accepting, picking up the misfits and rejects that accumulated in the societal gutters that spawned in major cities. From the teenaged street queens turning tricks to get by, to people from the suburbs thrown out of their homes and disowned from their families or fired from their jobs for being an abomination. I think, that though that may be the story we tell ourselves every June, the reality is more than that simple history, no matter how much pride we take in that image of the gay movement.1
The Gay Liberation Movement was born out of the lowliest neighbourhoods in the nation, some of the only places in the country where these freaks, abominations, and subalterns could live, rent a home, or get a job without being turned away immediately. Yet despite this, the leadership of the gay movement was comprised overwhelmingly of White cisgender homosexuals. I want to know why this was. Why Black and Brown gays never took on leadership roles in any significant number. Why transgender people were consistently left out of the room. Were they specifically excluded, did it just never occur to these individuals to speak up, what happened to turn Gay Lib from Sylvia Rivera throwing bricks at cops to lily-white boardroom meetings? Because during the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s I suggest something did happen to spur that change. I argue that there was some exclusion, not just inclusion in that movement, and that this exclusion was often nuanced and almost imperceptible. This change, I believe, is why despite their early inclusion and invaluable contributions to the movement, minorities within the gay movement seemed to be exempted from major roles.
I believe though the Gay Liberation Movement of the late 1960s, 1970s, and early 80s is generally regarded as more open to social minorities than other movements of the time, its true history was more nuanced. I believe that the exceptions, exclusions, and internal rifts within the gay movement reveal a more complex and human story than the version the gay community likes to tell itself. A story of a movement still deeply influenced by personal prejudices and internal power struggles than the idealized riot revolution. I think a further understanding of these influences on the Gay Liberation Movement, its actions and its ideals, are essential to understanding that true history and its lasting impact on us, and they offer a valuable lesson to the present-day civil rights movements that seek to achieve similar ideals.
This exclusion took many forms, they were both conscious actions and unconscious prejudices and they affected people of varying races, sexes, and gender orientations. These biases were not unique to the major figures of the 1970s and were visible in gay organizations long before and remained long after the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s gutted Gay Liberation and fundamentally transformed the struggle for Gay Civil Rights. The people of the gay movement in the 1970s were, like everyone, humans living in our society.
Historians have known this. The academic history does not always portray a story of sunshine and happiness. The major pieces of literature are always willing to go places that those idealistic internet posts will not. Gay Histories are, however, new, which isn’t unsurprising for a movement that is only fifty years old. Many of these stories only began to be investigated in the past thirty years, paramount among them is Martin Duberman’s 1993 anthology history on the build-up and direct aftermath of the Stonewall Riot, aptly titled Stonewall. Duberman’s book, unlike other early histories, weaves in several stories from minority groups. Sylvia Rivera, a Latina Transwoman, Yvonne Flowers, a Black lesbian, and Karla Jay, a White lesbian are all featured prominently alongside other major figures like Craig Rodwell who ran the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, a mecca for LGBT publishing. This is more inclusive than other landmark works of literature in Gay History such as David Carter’s 2004 book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, which argues that “the presence of drag queens at the Stonewall Inn has been much exaggerated over the years,” and gives an account that often excludes transgender and gender non-conforming individuals from the events of that night.2 Many sources follow in Duberman’s footsteps, however, and do recognize that minorities had a role in Stonewall and the subsequent Gay Rights Movement.3
There is however a variable range of how historians portray this involvement and the types of issues that popped up because of it. Duberman portrays much of the very early history of the movement as one where minorities were openly accepted in the immediate post-Stonewall aftermath, stating “It did not seem, initially, that diversity had to generate disagreement,” Sylvia Rivera said, as recorded by Duberman on the same page, “I thought [Stonewall] was going to be our unity for the rest of our lives.”4 Eventually the discourse caught up to the movement in the early 70s, ending, for Duberman’s purposes, in 1973 when Rivera “quit the gay movement… over the general lack of visibility and acceptance in the movement of transvestites.”5 This is the only reasoning given in Stonewall for this decision that Rivera made, and it is not connected to any broad trend in the community when it is stated during the epilogue.
Jessi Gan in her journal article, "Still at the back of the bus: Sylvia Rivera's struggle," expands upon this, stating “the appearance of political unity soon fractured as Rivera found herself shunned on the basis of her race, class, and gender expression.”6 Founder of the Gay Activists Alliance and important figure in a later source, Arthur Bell, said that average members of the organization were scared of “street people” and this ostracization only heightened in 1973 when members of the GAA and neighbouring lesbian feminist groups denounced “female impersonators.”7 More of a break from Duberman’s concept that Rivera acted alone and for personal reasons, Gan portrays what is tantamount to a full ejection from the community. Tim Retzloff in his neighbouring article, “Eliding trans Latino/a queer experience in U.S. LGBT history: José Sarria and Sylvia Rivera reexamined,” reinforces Gan’s understanding with the following passage:8
The White, largely middle-class activists who used the Stonewall uprising to mobilize a mass political movement in ensuing years rejected the Latino/a transvestites like Rivera who played a pivotal role in the melee. The GAA simply dropped transvestites from its agenda. Outcast from the gay community by people she had thought were her gay brothers and sisters.Both Gan and Retzloff represent a shift from Duberman’s perspective in portraying a very active role certain members of the community had in distancing themselves from and rejecting minorities within the Gay Rights Movement.
Susan Stryker, a leading scholar in Transgender History, best known for her book, Transgender History, summarizes these developments succinctly, stating:9
Trans people, after early involvement with the [Gay Liberation Front] (and being explicitly excluded from the GAA’s agenda), quickly came to feel that they did not have a welcome place in the movement they had done much to inspire. As a consequence, they soon formed their own organizations.Stryker’s position in the historiography presents a more explicit rejection than even Gan and Retzloff had posited and contrasts heavily with Duberman’s decision to not dig into the entire mess, though in fairness Duberman only covers in detail the two year period before and after Stonewall, and Stryker continues her story as deep as the 1990s up to the beginning of the TERF (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) movement.
I recognize that though these sources do not follow David Carter’s argument and do present a history with a lot of involvement from minorities within the movement, these sources do heavily involve the testimonies of Sylvia Rivera. Rivera, it must be remembered, is not an infallible source, she was often unstable and abused drugs for much of her life. She was nonetheless very active in the early days of the Gay Rights Movement and lived long enough to tell the story of those early days with a decent amount of mental clarity.10 Her firsthand retelling of events needs to be viewed with a healthy amount of scrutiny, but I do not believe it discredits her account entirely and other scholars such as Duberman and Stryker clearly agree with that assessment.
Other sources continue with an argument more similar to Gan and Retzloff, such as Betty Hillman in her article “The most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage in: Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–1972.” Claiming that “individuals who failed to conform to middle-class notions of masculinity… felt alienated from the gay movement as it grew in the 1970s.”11 Hillman departs from the violent rejection portrayed by Stryker for much of her arguments, focusing rather on the intersectional nature of the liberation movements and activists, and the ideological heterogeneity between the various organizations. Other sources such as Beemyn, Ashley, and Willis also fall close to this argument, and in my own opinion it is this account of history that is the closest to reality.
I believe a good example of this more nuanced nature is when it comes to race. The 1960s and 70s saw not only the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement but also Black Power, which had a unique relationship with how its adherents interacted with Gay Lib, both as straight outsiders looking in and gay insiders involved with both groups. Gay Blacks were often forced to choose between either being a gay person or being a Black person, and both movements were spearheaded by organizations that were decidedly not made for the other one. Yvonne Flowers’ section in Stonewall describes it succinctly “[She] was Black and lesbian, but the Black movement recoiled from both her strength and sexuality, while the White gay movement had an incomplete understanding of issues relating to her color (and gender).”12
The Black Panther Party in particular was known for using a particular gay slur to describe their societal foes, something that gay people of the time were very aware of. Described here in one of the first issues of the Gay Liberation Front’s Come Out Magazine in a section by Jim Fouratt, someone also featured heavily in Duberman’s Stonewall,
Most of my brothers and sisters see red every time… the Panthers or Yippies are mentioned and are consequentially blinded to the more essential issues. It is claimed that these groups are all outspokenly anti-homosexual. And most of it revolves around the word faggot.To Fouratt, however, this was not the end of all communications, he still believed an alliance could be reached, as he continued in saying:13
The Panthers must be confronted by our community just as all other radical groups must be confronted by the sexual liberation issue, but underlining this confrontation must be an understanding of how our oppressions make us all brothers and sisters.The Gay Liberation Front, and by extension their magazine, were not centrist organizations, they were very explicitly leftist and were founded shortly after Stonewall in New York, their reckoning with Panther rhetoric and desire to see reconciliation follows closely with the prevailing anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideology that electrified the late 1960s. Later in August of the same year, Huey Newton, founder of the Black Panther Party, or BPP, released a letter titled “A Letter from Huey Newton to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” wherein he says the following:14
There is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying ‘even a homosexual can be a revolutionary.’ Quite the contrary; maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.Unlike the GLF, which had no stable leadership, merely a collection of major figures including Fouratt, Huey Newton was the founder and leader of the BPP, so though both movements were clearly hard to reconcile it seemed that the leadership of both organizations did wish to do so.
The Gay Liberation Front was not the only organization around at the time of these developments however, and though the more solidly leftist organizations were founded with clear directives on forming united fronts to combat racism, sexism, and homophobia, other organizations were decidedly more moderate – such as the Mattachine Society, which shied away from too much association from other groups outside of gay rights. This is all without noting the individuals themselves. Like we will see with sexism, racism was extremely pervasive especially paternalistic racism. Yvonne Flowers again describes it, “[She] had gone with another Black woman to a [Daughters of Bilitis] meeting… and been repelled by it. The White women reacted to the Black woman’s presence first with shock, then with a supercilious casualness that was at least as offensive.”15
However, further problems arose when the rhetoric of the BPP spread to gay organizations, as much of Black Panther rhetoric was wrapped up in reclaiming their masculinity from oppression. In that struggle they painted the oppressors and the apologists as castrated, faggots, and feminine. Fouratt relates as much in that same article from Come Out.16
The word faggot is used to describe any castrated male made impotent by the society. The Black man has traditionally been castrated by White society… It has been the Black woman who has had to play the Black man role in White society… rendering the male useless – hence, castrated; hence faggot.Soon after in the newly minted Gay Sunshine Magazine, which served the Bay Area, Allen Young says “It is straight society which tells us that to be gay is to be womanly,” describing “campy” gays as hating themselves.17 This discourse started an uproar within the community, some gay organizations started to turn their allegiance more towards that masculine reclamation, rejecting women and even some effeminate men from their organizing, others pushed back against it. The Effeminate movement, a brief stint in New York and the Bay Area during the first half of the 1970s chastised this “dominative homosexual male” mindset for perpetuating the oppressive patriarchy against both men and women. The movement also criticized “male homosexuals whose oppression had forced them into a submission-trip that is parodistic of women and based on stereotyped women’s roles, fashions, and mannerisms,” which is to say, effeminate men, drag queens, and transsexuals.18
This argument made by the Effeminists echoes the same kinds of arguments made within lesbian circles. Lesbians and Gays have always had a tense relationship, but especially during this period, where collaboration was seen as almost unthinkable by many parties. Karla Jay, a prominent columnist for The Lesbian Tide, a Daughter’s of Bilitis magazine, said in an article in 1973, that despite marching in the third Pride Parade in New York, she agreed with the Effeminists, that “yes, gay liberationists were essentially male chauvinists, and the parade was 90% male, some of whom were offensive to women.”19 Speaking at the Lesbian-Feminist Conference also in 1973, Robin Morgan said:20
Myself, I have never been able to get excited over Tokenism, whether it was Margaret Chase Smith in the Senate or Bernadine Dohrn in the Weather Underground, let alone a few women to give GAA a good front (which women, by the way, are finally getting wise to and leaving), or to serve as periodic good niggers for the cheap porn reportage of The Advocate, Gay, Gay Sunshine, and the like.Lesbians felt as though gay organizations were at best using them as mere tokens to avoid criticism, and at worst felt that the entire gay male scene was thoroughly sexist and rooted in patriarchal norms that oppressed them directly. Beth Elliot in an article for The Lesbian Tide literally says as much, stating that Sharon Chase, DOB President, reported an organizer for a San Francisco Pride Parade called their office and said “we need a token woman.”21 They saw their media as degrading and pornographic, and, as Jill Johnston related, that gay men’s conception of other people in itself was totally inappropriate with their world view. As described in an interview with The Lesbian Tide, Johnston said, “Is the goal of lesbian feminism for women to behave toward each other like most gay men do? – i.e. viewing each other as sex objects; how good looking they are, how ‘stacked’, how ‘sexy’, etc.”22
This adoption of Panther-style reclamation of traditional masculinity by gay male organizations certainly did not help the injustices that lesbians faced in continuing to organize with male homosexuals. Though many, like non-White homosexuals, did occasionally try to take action in their straight organizations, in this case, the Second Wave Feminist Movement, lesbian attempts to form their own organizations seemed to be the most successful. Lesbians nonetheless found themselves unwelcomed by many straight feminist organizations after notable figures in the feminist movement, such as Betty Friedan, leader of the National Organization for Women and author of The Feminine Mystique, described lesbians as a threat to the respectability of the movement. Most notably with Friedan calling them the “Lavender Menace.”23
A continual complaint that appears in both Lesbian and Feminist reasons for disavowing Gay organizations is the continued use of what they described as “the mockery of women,” but what we know as the art of Drag and the normal existence of Trans people. Robin Morgan explains the position thusly:24
Are we yet again going to defend the male supremacist yes obscenity of male transvestitism? …No, I will not call a male she; thirty-two years of suffering in this androcentric society, and of surviving, have earned me the name "woman"; one walk down the street by a male transvestite, five minutes of his being hassled (which he may enjoy), and then he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names and in our own, we must not call him sister. We know what's at work when Whites wear blackface; the same thing is at work when men wear drag.Trans people were truly shunned from many organizations, and unlike lesbians, they were often too small of a minority to truly sustain their own groups. The most prominent, STAR, or Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, consisted of only a couple dozen street queens compared to the large and branching arms of the GAA or DOB.25
As early as 1967, before Stonewall even, the Society for Individual Rights, a San Francisco based homophile organization, held fierce debates over non-cis presenting gays, primarily drag queens, with the majority seeing it as “detrimental to the homophile community.”26 These debates over the perceived respectability of the movement would spawn organizations like the GAA and cement more “gay rights only” attitudes in organizations like the Mattachine, who were focused on changing laws and fighting for only gay rights rather than pan-leftist dreams. An example of this “respectability politic” as it would be called, is in 1973 when Sylvia Rivera, a Latina transvestite and the founder of STAR, was nearly denied the ability to speak at a Pride event. The event, which was caught on tape and documented in many sources, saw the crowd split between those booing Rivera and those shouting for her to be allowed to speak. Such a massive rejection saw Rivera running home to attempt suicide and disavow the gay movement entirely. She wouldn’t return to gay activism until decades later.27
Sylvia Rivera as a person is a very unique character, as a Latina transwoman and hooker who was very prominent during the movement prior to her “retirement,” she embodied everything that this paper makes a point of saying was specifically excluded from the movement. Duberman writes of her time at the GAA the following passage.28
By her mere presence, she was likely to trespass against some encoded middle-class White script, and could count on being constantly patronized when not being summarily excluded. If someone was not shunning her darker skin or sniggering at her passionate, fractured English, they were deploring her rude anarchism as inimical to order or denouncing her sashaying ways as offensive to womanhood.Rivera was loud, obtuse, and usually desperately poor, which are also things that got you excluded from social events. She was a good example of a “street queen,” which I have mentioned a few times so far, a street queen was a male prostitute who presented female – some would maintain their birth sex, others, like Rivera, would become female presenting in other aspects of life. Like the difference between “actor” and “prostitute” in earlier centuries, there was only the vaguest lines delineating “drag queen” and “transvestite hooker”, hence the title “queen”. Sylvia started hooking at eleven years old, which was not that out of the ordinary for her contemporaries in 1970s New York.29 They were the poorest of the poor in the gay movement, and had been there since the first few bricks were thrown. Their lives were rough, often short, and they reflected it, Duberman again records a quote from Arthur Bell, a founder of the GAA, that “the general membership is frightened by Sylvia… They’re frightened by street people.”30
Despite this fear, much of this rejection has to do with the aim of many organizations to appear as respectable in the public eye and to make allies out of organizations who may otherwise shy away from aligning itself with an organization populated by transgender hookers, others, like the feminists were based in a more ideological opposition. Robin Morgan’s address to the Lesbian Feminist Conference was the site of an extremely volatile confrontation with that ideology where she publicly ostracized Beth Elliott, the same who had also written for the Tide mere months earlier. Like Sylvia’s story at 1973’s June Pride, Elliott’s story in April of 1973 was one of very open rejection from the movement where she had made her home.
Beth Elliott was not only a writer, but a folksinger, and she also happened to be transgender, something which was highly controversial when she joined the Daughters and remained controversial. She was ejected from the DOB in late 1972 for her identity, but still served on the board for the upcoming conference in April of 1973 and had planned to perform. Morgan in her speech decried transgenderism, as I related earlier, explicitly in response to Elliott’s performance. The crowd erupted into a riot over it, the anti-Elliott faction becoming so vitriolic that they threatened to irreversibly disrupt the convention if their demand to have Elliott removed not be obeyed. Elliott would perform but would leave the convention thereafter, physically shaking from the ordeal.31 This was not a total victory for the transgender-exclusionists, however. Elliott did perform, as the conference voted roughly two-to-one to allow them to perform, and many others voiced their support as relayed in the ensuing issue of the Tide after the conference that goes deeper into the debacle, “We have not known her as a man… She is a woman because she chooses to be a woman! What right do you have to define her sexuality?!... Anatomy is NOT destiny!”32
All aspects are not absolute, many gay organizations very explicitly came out against racism and took serious measures to prevent it in their organizations, many lesbians still saw gay males as their natural allies in the fight for civil rights, and despite a vocal minority, many still welcomed trans people in the community openly and warmly. Gay history is not a secret farce of puritanical activists continually purifying themselves by fire the same way it is not a land of rainbows and sunshine and happiness all the time forever. It is true that the impoverished street youths, trans people, and drag queens felt alienated by the gay movement, as Hillman says, that Black, Brown, and non-male gays felt alienated. But it is also true that there were places where all of those people were welcomed and defended, in July of the same year, 1973, Pete Wilson, a radio host for a small station in New York servicing the population of activists in the city, hosted a session of what he called “Gay Rage”.
Gay Rage was usually called Gay Pride, and this session would be about the treatment of certain people by Arthur Bell and the Village Voice, the local newspaper around the gay neighbourhood that housed Stonewall. Wilson said on the show the following:33
The Greenwich Village pseudo-liberal establishment… don’t like noisy, rebellious, defiant homosexuals on the streets.. nevermind that Greenwich village has been the home of ‘sweet little antique shop faggots’ for quite a long time… they feel themselves to be very threatened and they don’t like it.He defends the right of bar people to consider themselves liberationists despite not being intellectuals, despite being poor drunks and drug addicts, despite being disenfranchised people like Sylvia.
Additionally, this sort of quick shift in attitude is not unique to the 1970s, after the repeal of Prohibition there was a similar wave of exclusion as the 1970s did. As George Chauncey in his book, Gay New York, describes, “By the early thirties, a general revulsion had set in against the ‘excesses’ of prohibition.”34 Similar to the minorities within the Gay Liberation Movement of the 1970s, gay people of the 1930s that were once visible and included in the society during the years of prohibition were being suddenly excluded, removed, and persecuted. Equally, inclusion did come suddenly as well as the gay movement advanced past AIDS and into the 1990s. Susan Stryker dedicates an entire chapter of her book Transgender History to this period titled “The Millennial Wave” as “Transgender Nation erupted with a bang in late 1992.”35 Going on to describe the rapid-fire events that brought down the metaphorical ‘Berlin Wall’ that previously separated mainstream LGB and Transgender organizations, which would be effectively completed merely three years later.
While certain aspects of the Gay Lib movement were unique to its time, such as the unique strain of sexism it seemingly contracted from the Panthers, or their affinity for bell-bottoms and using the word ‘rap’ like a verb, it’s clear that this sort of change in mood is not unique. The attitudes that fermented this change have occurred elsewhere in history with similar results. After the decadence of the roaring 1920s, the desire to appear more respectable spurred the exclusion of gays from the public world, and after being hidden away and restrained by the AIDS crisis of the 1980s there was born a desire to be more open and inclusive.
I believe that it is clear that the gay movement of the 1970s became the movement it was because of this exclusion, because of this desire to become more respectable, and because of the pervasiveness of this ideology of exclusion, the same way the movement of the 1920s and the 1990s became the movements they were. After the uniting zeal of Stonewall faded, the prejudices of the community itself became more prominent, the paternalistic racism and the sexism and the deep misunderstanding of transgenderism would deepen fissures in that early unity. This change driving away the voices that would have served as leadership in the large, mainstream organizations, towards their own smaller and less known organizations, or away from gay activism as a whole, as was seen in Sylvia Rivera.
Across the entire movement this is a constant, be it from The Lesbian Tide, Come Out, or Gay Sunshine, that the movement was deprived of excellent leaders not because those voices never thought to speak up, but because they felt unwelcomed speaking. Unwelcomed by the paternalism, unwelcomed by the tokenism, unwelcomed by the contempt for who they were and were proud to be. Some stood above those judgemental eyes, but many didn’t, and many more felt that judgemental stare only to unknowingly stare back at someone else. And though the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s would force the gay community to reunify for the sake of its survival, it doesn’t undo what happened. Sylvia Rivera would not return to gay activism until the late 1990s, the same time would see the TERF movement be born. It also saw a more mainstream acceptance of gay rights as the shift to more moderate messaging begun by the GAA had paid off with the fight for marriage equality. Marriage being an idea that the leftists of the 1970s would have openly scoffed at for being too ‘square’. Many of those activists however preached an openness they never truly believed, and thirsted over a revolution that they would never see. As they drifted into retirement and middle age, many would get more long-term partners even if they couldn’t legally be married, the ones that were still around at least. These gay people made the world remember they were gay, but I think the world also needs to remember they were people. I believe that is the most important thing for us to remember, at least. Stonewall happened so long ago, and people cannot stay the same forever, a change was inevitable.
Footnotes:
1. Heather Rodriguez, “’The first Pride was a riot’: The 50th anniversary of Stonewall”, Texas A&M College of Arts and Sciences Blog, June 2019. This is not a thing I typically would cite, but not everyone is “in the know” of the LGBT+ community. I feel it is beneficial to provide some evidence that this foundational claim to this paper is one that is often made. That I am not inventing this idea that the Gay Liberation Movement was this idealized, inclusive, revolutionary riot for the purpose to argue with it, that it is out there and fairly common.↩
2. See David Carter, in Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin, 2004), quoted here in Betty Hillman, ""The most profoundly revolutionary act a homosexual can engage in": Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation in the San Francisco Gay Liberation Movement, 1964–1972." Journal of the History of Sexuality 20 no. 1 (2011): p. 154, note 7.↩
3. Martin Duberman, Stonewall: The Definitive Story of the LGBTQ Rights Uprising that Changed America. 1993 (New York: Plume, 2019).↩
4. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 302-303.↩
5. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 348-349.↩
6. Jessi Gan, “’Still at the back of the bus’: Sylvia Rivera's struggle,” Centro Journal, 2007, p. 133.↩
7. Jessi Gan, “Still at the back of the bus,” p. 133.↩
8. Tim Retzloff, “Eliding trans Latino/a queer experience in U.S. LGBT history: José Sarria and Sylvia Rivera reexamined,” Centro Journal, 2007, p. 146.↩
9. Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, 2004, p. 110.↩
10. Sylvia was a very interesting character that I will discuss in more detail later in this essay, but needless to say she was a drama queen and had an unhealthy relationship with drugs and other intoxicants. Not for decent reason, she was almost killed by her mother in a double-suicide when she was three.↩
11. Betty Hillman, “Drag and the Politics of Gender Presentation,” p. 179.↩
12. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 328-329.↩
13. Jim Fouratt, “Word Thoughts”, Come Out, vol. 1 no. 2, 1970, p. 15.↩
14. Emily Hobson, “Lavender and Red: Liberation and Solidarity in the Gay and Lesbian Left”, 2016, p. 31. Thank you, Dr. Frick, for the suggestion of looking further into the Black Panthers and their dynamic roles in the late 1960s and early 70s.↩
15. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 288. And the Daughters of Bilitis were a lesbian organization.↩
16. Jim Fouratt, “Word Thoughts”, Come Out, vol. 1 no. 2, 1970, p. 15.↩
17. See Allen Young, in "Camp Out?" Gay Sunshine Magazine, vol. 1 no. 1, 1970, quoted here in Betty Hillman, “The Most Profoundly Revolutionary Act” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 20 no. 1 (2011): p. 172, note 76. I tried very hard to find a copy of the magazine, but I believe its only available online to Penn State students, issues 2 and 3 of Gay Sunshine are available online however.↩
18. Kenneth Pitchford, in "Who Are the Flaming Faggots?" Motive, vol. 32 no. 2, 1972, p. 16-19.↩
19. Karla Jay, “The Decline and Fall of an Idealist”, Lesbian Tide, vol. 3 no. 1, 1973, p. 10.↩
20. Robin Morgan, “Keynote Address”, Lesbian Tide, vol. 2 no. 10/11, 1973, p. 33. The GAA was a successor organization to the Gay Liberation Front, it stands for Gay Activists Alliance, and was primarily focused on LGB Rights, rather than the intersectional liberation of the GLF. They disliked associating too closely with Feminists or the Panthers liked to stay as apolitical as possible.↩
21. Beth Elliott, “Brotherly Concern”, Lesbian Tide, vol. 2 no. 2, 1972, p. 12.↩
22. Nancy Robinson, “Jill Johnston: Right on Feminist?”, Lesbian Tide, vol. 3 no. 1, 1973, p. 6.↩
23. Jason Baumann, “Radicalesbians”, 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation, New York Public Library, 2009.↩
24. Robin Morgan, “Keynote Address”, Lesbian Tide, vol. 2 no. 10/11, 1973, p. 32.↩
25. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 309.↩
26. Betty Hillman, “The Most Profoundly Revolutionary Act” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 20 no. 1 (2011): p. 164, note 43.↩
27. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 291, 342, 348-349.↩
28. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 290.↩
29. Jessi Gan, “’Still at the back of the bus’: Sylvia Rivera's struggle,” Centro Journal, 2007.↩
30. Martin Duberman, Stonewall, p. 290.↩
31. Susan Stryker, Transgender History, 2004, p. 131.↩
32. Barbara McLean, “Diary of a Mad Organizer”, Lesbian Tide, vol. 2 no. 10/11, 1973, p. 36. This issue is so packed with valuable text I am very happy that I found it, and I think it’s very honorable that the Tide published this paper with so many different perspectives on this conference in its publication.↩
33. Pete Wilson, “Gay Rage: Arthur Bell and the Village Voice,” Gay Pride, WBAI, July 10 1973, 11:30-12:45. This is an extremely valuable resource due to its status as an audio recording, and I value it heavily for that, however because it is audio I understand it is more difficult to validate the claims brought against the article it is in response to. I have viewed the article by Arthur Bell in the June 28th 1973 edition of the Village Voice and can verify that Wilson is citing the text verbatim and I believe his argument to not be frivolous.↩
34. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, 1994, p. 334. Thank you, Dr. Alexander, for the suggestion of this resource.↩
35. Susan Stryker, Transgender History, 2004, p. 169. This period would also see the invention of the term ‘Transgender’ itself, as opposed to the previous term ‘Transvestite’, which is presently viewed as a slur by certain individuals.↩
Bibliography:
Aiken, David. "Dethroning the King." Motive 32 no. 2 (1972): 46-48. archive.org/details/Motive1972TheGayMaleLiberationIssue/page/n45/mode/1up.
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