Early left-wing liberation: ‘Unity with all the oppressed’
Lavender & red, part 75
By
Leslie Feinberg
Published Oct 5, 2006 8:03 PM
The multinational left wing
of early gay liberation was defined by its struggle against racist state
repression and in defense of national liberation here and abroad. Even white
activists who lacked a thoroughgoing anti-racist consciousness or were uneven in
their understanding saw unity in the struggle against all forms of oppression as
key to gay liberation.
For example, the
Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front’s statement of purpose read in part,
“We are in total opposition to America’s white racism.” The
Los Angeles chapter also started a Gay Action Patrol to monitor the
police.
In cities from Houston to
Chicago, gay liberationists protested local bar owners’ segregationist
policies that only admitted white gay men and
lesbians.
In London, too, the Gay
Liberation Front allied itself with Black liberation, defending Black activists
like the Mangrove Nine, who were framed by police in the early
1970s.
The very first resolution from
the floor of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations conference
in August 1970 was a call from the Radical Caucus to support the Black Panther
Party—which was under state siege across the United States. The motion
passed. A later attempt to overturn the motion was decisively
defeated.
The Radical Caucus had also
won passage of a resolution that called for support of Chicano grape pickers,
who were trying to organize a United Farm Workers union in the field
factories.
The Radical Caucus program
read in part: “We see the persecution of homosexuality as part of a
general attempt to oppress all minorities and keep them powerless. ... A common
struggle, however, will bring common triumph. Therefore we declare our support
as homosexuals and bisexuals for the struggles of the black, the feminist, the
Spanish-American, the Indian, the Hippie, the Young, the Student, and other
victims of oppression and prejudice.”
The left wing of gay liberation won
demonstrations of solidarity from the left wing of the militant nationally
oppressed movements, as well.
The Black
Panther Party invited the Gay Liberation Front to take part in the September
1970 Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. Nine members of
Third World Gay Liberation and one lesbian member of GLF attended a planning
meeting for the convention that summer. At that time, Panther David Hilliard
reportedly told the lesbian participant that BPP leader Huey Newton was about to
issue a statement in support of the gay and women’s liberation
movements.
Newton issued his message in
“The Black Panther” newsletter on Aug. 21, 1970. It was titled
“A Letter from Huey Newton to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about
the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements.” (Full version
can be found at www.workers.org.)
Newton wrote, “When we have
revolutionary conferences, rallies, and demonstrations there should be full
participation of the gay liberation movement and the women’s liberation
movement.” He urged revolutionaries to excise any historically anti-gay
references to “men who are enemies of the people, such as Nixon.”
Newton concluded, “Homosexuals are not enemies of the
people.”
This message from the
Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party sent shock waves of solidarity that
reverberated throughout the progressive and revolutionary
movements.
Rivera: ‘A great moving
moment’
Lesbian and gay
delegates—Black, Latin@, Asian and white—traveled by car, bus, train
and plane to take part in the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional
Convention on the weekend of Sept. 5, 1970. At a time when the Panthers were
being rounded up, assassinated and framed by the state, some 10,000 to 15,000
people answered the Panther call to take part in the
convention.
The aim of the revolutionary
gathering was to draw up a revolutionary people’s constitution. Each
delegated group was asked to convene its own workshop to draw up its own demands
for rights to be included in the
constitution.
At least 60
self-identified gay men and some two dozen lesbians formed a delegation. They
traveled from Ann Arbor, Mich., Los Angeles and Berkeley, Calif., Boston,
Chicago, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, Philadelphia, Tallahassee, Fla., and
Yellow Springs, Ohio.
There were
problems at a gathering that size, to be sure. But here are some important
recollections and impressions.
The
publication Gay Flames wrote in its issue No. 2: “When we got there, the
women and men each got a place where they could stay together and be with gay
people from other cities. Some of the men dressed in drag the first night and
rapped to some Panthers who came
over.”
The next morning
“Panther Michael Tabor, a N.Y. 21 defendant, spoke about ‘how
we’re all in the same boat’ when it comes to facing the power of the
pigs. He talked about the oppression of gays and
women.”
Transgender Stonewall
combatant Sylvia Rivera said it was “a great moving moment to be
there.”
Rivera told me that when
she saw Huey Newton at the convention, he already knew of her: “Yeah,
you’re the queen from New
York!”
On Sunday morning, the
multinational gay men’s caucus met. Issue No. 8 of Gay Flames explained,
“Long meetings dedicated to the adoption of [the] gay platform for the
constitution were interrupted for vital discussions of racism and
sexism.”
Gay Flames No. 2
elaborated: “The most important discussion centered around the Third
World/Gay Male statement. They confronted the gay whites on our racism,
specifically on our willingness to criticize the sexism of black men but not
that of white men. They asked us to recognize Huey Newton’s recently
stated position in favor of Gay Liberation as being a tremendous advance in the
revolution and that the Black Panther Party holds the most out-front position in
terms of the struggle to give power to the
people.”
Panther 21 defendant
Afeni Shakur spoke to the gay men’s gathering. “She helped to
explain a lot about the Black Panthers to all of us. She said that all she
wanted was a farm with lots of trees and grass and a place to grow cabbage, but
that to get this for herself and her people, it would be necessary to fight.
Most of us were convinced by what she had to say. We therefore decided to
include in our statement that gay men at the Session recognized the BPP as being
presently the vanguard of the people’s
revolution.”
Many of the white
lesbians left the convention with resentments. The most often expressed
grievance—that the Panther women related to them as Black and as Panthers
rather than bonding as women—showed a low level of understanding of
national oppression by the white
women.
In the gay men’s caucus, a
revised version of the Third World Gay Revolution platform “was adopted by
the group as the basis of a national gay liberation program. ... Gay people
formed a 15-member delegation under the leadership of Third World people and
women, which attempted to present the 16-point program to the Panthers. This
delegation gave gay people the experience of women and men, Blacks, Latins and
Asians and Whites, working collectively in a practically revolutionary context,
though the chaos and crowd kept the delegation from completing its
task.”
The gay men’s
statement, read by the delegation at the convention, concluded: “We
recognize as a vanguard revolutionary action the Huey P. Newton statement on gay
liberation. We recognize the Black Panther Party as being the vanguard of the
people’s revolution in
Amerikkka.”
Next: More
solidarity: D.C. 21, Panthers, Young Lords, Cesar
Chavez.
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