Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud
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the rules of how decisions are made are known only to a few.”31
That was exactly the character of the Mayday organizing. Local affinity groups might choose their own targets and tactics, but a small group of men around Rennie Davis wrote the organizing materials, controlled the finances, called the press conferences, did the big-picture planning, and spoke for the action as a whole. Scagliotti remarked, “While Rennie and all these guys were the leaders, most of the people in the affinity groups didn’t know that, they didn’t know who the leaders were. They were just being organized in their local whatever to come to this thing.” The looseness of the overall structure gave considerable autonomy to local groups, but it also meant there was no transparency or accountability, no way for affinity groups to have input into the overall decision-making or to dispute what the informal leadership was doing.
The DC office for the actions was largely staffed by a small circle of organizers who called themselves the Gay Mayday Tribe. “Once the Mayday thing started happening, I joined the Mayday collective and lived in the Mayday commune,” remembered Scagliotti, who later produced the acclaimed Before Stonewall and After Stonewall documentaries. “There were about five of us who were gay, and we sort of ran the office. We immediately became very close and out of that was Gay Mayday.”
Gay Mayday was an intriguing political experiment in fusing the new gay radicalism with the radicalism of the antiwar movement. (It was also very much a sex-and-drugs party scene.) Since the Stonewall rebellion of June 1969—when patrons of a Greenwich Village gay and transgender bar fought back against police during an attempted raid, an act of proud defiance that sparked the gay liberation movement—some gay activists had worked to play a visible role in the movement against the Vietnam War. “Through a lot of 1970, I remember I must have gone to at least six different antiwar marches where we [gay people] were all joining hands and marching up Fifth Avenue or marching in the park,” noted Perry Brass, a Gay Mayday participant who was part of the collective that produced Come Out!, one of the few gay newspapers in existence at that time.32
There were two major gay liberation groups in 1971, the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), created shortly after Stonewall, and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), a more moderate group that broke away just a few months later. Brass and most of the hundred or so other Gay Mayday radicals gravitated to the GLF, whose name intentionally echoed that of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. GLFers very much viewed themselves as part of the broader radical landscape of the time. “GLF differs from other gay groups because we realize that homosexual oppression is part of all oppression,” explained a leaflet circulated by the group in New York. “The current system denies us our basic humanity in much the same way as it is denied to blacks, women and other oppressed minorities; and the grounds are just as irrational. Therefore, our liberation is tied to the liberation of all peoples.” Two of their chants made light of these linkages: “Ho, ho, homosexual, the ruling class is ineffectual!” and the memorable “Up the ass of the ruling class!” But the more emblematic GLF slogan was “No revolution without us!”—expressing the desire to be part of the often homophobic New Left, a desire that partly motivated Gay Mayday. Brass recalled, “A lot of the people in that contingent were very happy to be included in something like [Mayday]. We felt, well, this is our sign that we’ve been accepted as radicals … We’ve just got to prove that we are willing to go in there, get our heads clobbered and arrested and beaten up, prove that we can do this.”33
Gay Liberation Front button, early 1970s (designer unknown; courtesy Lesbian Herstory Archives)
The GLF—a primarily gay male organization with few lesbian members, as well as predominantly white in its membership base (characteristics it shared with GAA)—also saw itself as both inspired and shaped by radical feminism. The women’s liberation analysis of the linkages between personal and political concerns resonated with the experiences of these gay radicals, many if not most of whom were newly out of the closet, and their organizing focused most strongly on the inward-looking work of consciousness-raising and community building. “A lot of [GLF activism] was sensitivity groups, tea groups: meeting in church basements and storefronts and people’s homes to look at the ways we had been injured in a homophobic, racist, heterosexist, classist society,” remembered Warren J. Blumenfeld, who was part of the Washington, DC Gay Liberation Front and helped organize the Mayday action. The radical feminist influence was also felt in the GLF’s “structureless” organizational form, comprised of decentralized collectives (called, in this case, “cells”) with no formal decision-making process, membership requirements, or bylaws. “GLFers chose the rocky road of fluid cellular organization,” explained activist Lois Hart, “rather than perpetuate older, oppressive structures of Follow the Leader and passive participation by voting.”34
The Gay Activists Alliance was far more conventional in its organization and politics, and more focused on trying to achieve specific reforms than on exploring consciousness and identity. The group adopted a constitution, elected officers, and operated according to Robert’s Rules of Order. It defined itself as a “one-issue organization,” “exclusively devoted to the liberation of homosexuals,” objecting to the GLF’s activism on behalf of other radical causes. Elected officials were major targets of the GAA, which sought to influence policy and legislation by mobilizing gays as a political constituency whose interests could not be ignored. This approach seemed hopelessly establishment and uninspiring to some radicals of the time, and especially to the GLF. But GAA was consistently innovative in the means it used to seek reform, and its clever tactics and techniques were later embraced by the AIDS activist group ACT UP and its many offshoots. Borrowing from the Yippies, the late-sixties band of hippie pranksters led by Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, the GAA specialized in “zaps,” boisterous and disruptive small-scale direct actions: sneaking into political events and interrupting them with well-timed harangues; occupying the office of a magazine (Harper’s) to protest homophobic content; throwing an “engagement party” in the office of the New York City clerk after he bad-mouthed unofficial marriage services being performed in a gay church. One of the founders of the GAA, Arthur Evans, described the zap as “a unique tactic of confrontation politics, combining the somber principles of realpolitik with the theatrics of high camp,” and designed “to rouse closet gays from their apathy, direct gay anger toward oppressive straight institutions, and create a widespread feeling of gay identity.” The speed, flamboyance, and wit of zap activism would become hallmarks of highly effective directaction movements to come.35
The Gay Mayday Tribe viewed its participation in the 1971 antiwar action as more than just a matter of mobilizing gays as a constituency or contingent along the lines of “schoolteachers against the war” or “physicians for peace.” Instead, it sought to draw connections between militarism and social constructions of gender. One Gay Mayday leaflet called the Vietnam War “a straight man’s game,” created by “men who need to gain their masculine identity through the killing of women, children, and their own brothers.” A call to participation elaborated, “We know that the men running the country are very deeply sexist—they relate to each other and to situations in an uptight straight male way. These men make decisions in order to satisfy their male egos and their needs for competition with other men.” The Gay Mayday Tribe offered up an expansive vision, in which gay liberation could not only transform laws or lifestyles, but also undermine the very foundations of war. For, they promised, “an army of lovers would not fight.”36
As it happened, the central role of Gay Mayday in logistics and planning for the action brought an unexpected practical benefit. At a time when government surveillance and disruption of radical movements were both routine and highly damaging, the exuberant eroticism of the Gay Mayday Tribe doubled as a form of protection. Investigative journalist Angus Mackenzie would later reveal that the CIA had planted an agent in the center of the DC radical scene to feed information on Rennie Davis and the Mayday plans directly to the White House, but the spy, a young man named Salvatore Ferrera, wasn’t able to report anything more useful than that “Davis said Mayday is the most disorganized demonstration he’s ever seen.” To learn much more, Ferrera would have needed to go a whole lot deeper undercover: “They couldn’t