by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTO: L to R: Pat Brown and Leo Laurence
“In the
mid-1960’s I led a double life,” pioneering Queer activist and Zenger’s associate editor Leo E. Laurence told members and
supporters of Activist San Diego (ASD) at the Pleasures & Treasures adult
store in North Park January 16. “By day I was a reporter for KGO-TV” — the San
Francisco affiliate of ABC — “and by night I was a writer for the Berkeley
Barb,” the Bay Area’s pioneering
“underground” paper. Laurence also led a double life of another sort — as a
closeted Gay man in an era when almost nobody was “out” in the modern sense —
until March 1969, when the firing of a friend with whom he’d appeared in a
provocative Barb photo led him to
found the Committee on Homosexual Freedom (CHF) and lead the first protests in
U.S. history against a private employer for firing a Queer employee.
In the late
1960’s Laurence was volunteer editor for Vector, a monthly magazine published by a conservative Queer organization
called the Society for Individual Rights (SIR). Laurence had met a young man
named Gale Whittington and asked him to do a photo shoot for Vector; he also invited Whittington to write a monthly
column on Gay fashion for Vector.
“He and I
arranged a photo shoot in his bedroom,” Laurence recalled, “and for some reason
I invited Ron Hoffman, a photographer for the Barb, to be at the shoot. After I got the photos I wanted
for Vector, I turned to Ron and
said, ‘You know, I’d like a shot with Gale.’ He said, ‘What do you want?’ I
just went up to Gale, who didn’t have a shirt on, put my arms around him and
said, ‘How about this?’” Hoffman’s photo was published in the Barb, illustrating an article by Laurence called “Don’t
Hide It,” and the Barb editor
cropped the photo to make it look like Whittington was naked.
In March 1969, a
few days after the Barb came out with
the photo — and three months before
the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that are commonly considered
the birth of the Queer rights movement — Whittington called Laurence at 11 p.m.
and said he’d been fired from his job in the mailroom at the States Steamship
Line after someone at work had seen the picture. Tearing up at the memory,
Laurence recalled to ASD, “I told him, ‘We have to do something big.’ I was
using the word ‘big’ in a sense that the Gay community never knew before. We
weren’t planning on launching a worldwide movement, but that’s basically what
happened.”
What they did
was mount a picket outside the States Steamship headquarters from noon to 2
p.m., Monday through Friday. Laurence recalled that his group started with 13
“core” members and ultimately grew to about 25, plus other people on a contact
list they could bring out for the States pickets and other demonstrations.
Brown recalled that he was made picket captain “because I already had
experience leading demonstrations with the anti-Viet Nam War movement.” He
sought out training from the American Friends’ Service Committee (AFSC) on how
to do nonviolent protesting, but that group — which, Brown recalled, had
“organized in the South and risked their lives for Black civil rights” —
refused to help a Queer group mount a protest. So Brown bought a dozen copies
of the AFSC’s instruction manual on nonviolent civil disobedience and the
group’s members taught themselves.
The nascent
Queer rights picket also needed an organizational name, and Laurence recalled
brainstorming one on his own, writing on a napkin at a coffeehouse at midnight.
His first thought was to call it the “Homosexual Freedom Committee” — at the
time the few Queer activists there were called themselves either “homosexual”
or “homophile” for public consumption, and the word “Gay” was private community
slang almost never used in the outside world — but then he realized the
initials “HFC” were already being used by the Household Finance Corporation, a
local Bay Area savings-and-loan. So he changed the order of the words and
called the group CHF, for “Committee on Homosexual Freedom.”
“The first
meeting was held in Leo’s house,” Brown recalled. “People had seen it announced
in the Barb. [Barb publisher] Max Scherr had been a labor lawyer, and
the Barb was distributed on the
East Coast. The protests had spread to Los Angeles, where Rev. Troy Perry [the
founder of Metropolitan Community Church for Queer and Queer-friendly
Christians] was leading pickets against the States Steamship offices in L.A.
Before we started, the only [Queer-rights] picketing going on was one time a
year outside the White House on the Fourth of July. We did the first long-term,
consistent picketing because we realized we
had to.”
According to
Laurence and Brown, it was that organizational consistency that differentiated
their activities from the Stonewall riots and marked their group as the real
founders of the ongoing Queer liberation movement. “Stonewall was a clash
between Puerto Rican drag queens and the police,” Laurence said. “What was
happening in San Francisco was a carefully planned civil-rights action.”
Indeed, Laurence said that the first he heard of the Stonewall riots was from a
friend in New York, accountant John Marks, who lived across the street from the
Stonewall Inn and, while the riots were going on, called Laurence “and said,
‘We like what you’re doing, and we’re doing it in New York.’ So it’s safe to
say the inspiration for Stonewall was what happened in San Francisco.”
“Stonewall was
the spark that set the fire, but we were the bricks and mortar,” said Brown. We
picketed every workday from noon to 2 p.m. to get the lunchtime crowd. We were
there from late March until mid-July 1969, two weeks after Stonewall. I knew we
had to maintain order on the picket line, and it was always present in my mind
that [the police] could just come in and wipe us out.”
Why didn’t they?
“The police had quite a few people on the other side of the street from us,”
Laurence recalled. “I walked up to the police sergeant — which I could do since
I had a media pass from ABC — and asked him, ‘Why are you on the other side of
the street? If this were the Black Panthers, you’d be right on top of them.’ He
said, ‘We can’t touch them. If we do, we’ll become them.’”
Whittington
never got his job back at States — and neither did Laurence when he was fired
from KGO-TV in 1971 — but according to Brown, they did win back the job of a Gay employee at Tower Records
(then the largest music retailer in the Bay Area) who, ironically, probably
didn’t deserve it. “We opened another front and picketed at Tower, and in two
weeks they buckled and took him back,” Brown recalled.
Seeking — and Finding —
Allies
Like more recent
Queer activists, Laurence, Brown and the other CHF founders realized they
needed allies — and they looked for them in the same places modern Queer
activists often do: the militant organizations of people of color. In 1969 that
meant the Black Panther Party and the United Farm Workers (UFW). Laurence and
Brown recalled how CHF joined the UFW’s pickets outside Safeway supermarkets to
get people to stop buying grapes. In addition to signs with the UFW’s slogans,
they also carried signs reading “Gay Is Good” and other messages from the new
Queer movement.
Not everyone on
the UFW picket lines liked the idea of marching with a group carrying “Gay Is
Good” messages. So, Laurence said, they went right to the top. “We called [UFW
president] César Chávez, and he said, ‘Let them picket.’”
Later Laurence
got a call from the Black Panthers, who essentially wanted him as a human
shield to forestall a police raid on their headquarters they’d been tipped was
about to happen. “They wanted some white people there,” he recalled. “I went
down and it was obvious that I was Gay. The Panthers were impressed, and they
taught us. For example, one lesson we learned from them was that when you do a
street march, do it completely legally. Don’t even jaywalk.”
Laurence said
their training and relationship with the Panthers stood them in good stead when
they started targeting Right-wingers and businesspeople within the Queer
community. “The closeted ‘homophile’ community opposed us,” he said. “There was
one very elegant Gay bar in San Francisco where one of our members was refused
service, and we decided to stage an action there. When the Black Panthers
wanted to intimidate people, they would stand with arms locked across their
chests and not look around. We went in that bar and stood there in the Panther
pose, and the bartender threatened to call the police. We emptied that bar in three
to four minutes. People did not want an
action in a bar, and before the police arrived, we were gone.”
The next day
Laurence heard through the grapevine a wildly exaggerated account of the action
in which the members of their group had supposedly entered the bar carrying
guns. “We would never think of using guns, but the Panthers would,” he
recalled. “They gave us a phone number and told us to use it. I always knew
that if this got heavy and one of us feared for their safety, they would be
there. The Panthers told us we were more revolutionary than they were, because
they couldn’t change the color of their skin — but we didn’t have to come out.”
The Forgotten History
Not
surprisingly, both Laurence and Brown are at least somewhat bitter that the
pioneering efforts of the CHF have been relegated to footnotes — or ignored
completely — in the depoliticized, New York-centric orthodox view of how the
U.S. Queer movement got started. They’re also appalled at the changes in how
the community named itself. While they applauded the abandonment of the words
“homosexual” and “homophile” and their replacement with the term “Gay” in the
early 1970’s, they haven’t supported the addition of the word “Lesbian” and are
even less enamored of the initials “LGBT” — for “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender” — that has become the standard term now.
“I remember when
the Daughters of Bilitis [the pioneering group founded by Lesbian couple Del
Martin and Phyllis Lyon in San Francisco in the 1950’s] went through the name
change, and a number of older Gay women said, ‘Aren’t we Gay anymore?’,” Brown
recalled. “This was concocted at a Socialist Workers’ Party convention in New
York, and I think it deprived Gay women of a common same-sex humanity.”
“One of the most
difficult days of the year for me is the annual Gay Pride Parade here, now,”
Laurence said. “To the local [LGBT] Center, Pat and I are invisible. The
Center’s director won’t even speak to me. There are some books which refer to
us in two to three paragraphs. One problem with Gay historians is they prefer
to print the myth, and they continue to refer to Gale and I as lovers — which
we were not. I lost my job at ABC and went through a lot of emotional hell, and
it’s difficult when Gay Pride rolls around and people won’t even acknowledge
that things happened in San Francisco before Stonewall.”
“They did eclipse everything we did, but New York City is the
center of the news and entertainment industry,” Brown ruefully added. “To call
the San Francisco Gay Pride Parade ‘Stonewall West’ is a grave miscarriage of
nomenclature. It’s just outrageous. We didn’t try to make any mileage or get
ourselves set in stone as the ‘founders’ 43 years ago. In fact, we were
relieved when Stonewall happened, fired the public imagination and spread the
movement.”
Brown said that
“we really haven’t protested” the enshrinement of Stonewall as the official
“founding” of the Queer rights movement. “I have friends who were at Stonewall,
including Jimmy Fouratt, whom I just saw for the first time in 30 years.
Stonewall had its role, but the history should show that we were the brick and
mortar, and we were completely
nonviolent. It’s easy to throw rocks and bottles at the cops, but what really
works is peaceful, consistent, continuous activity.”
