Before AIDS. Katie Batza
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the resultant antigentrification activism.
Front and Center
While gay liberation rhetoric and politics factored minimally in the creation of Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, they proved a driving, and politically radical, force in Los Angeles. In November 1969, the recently formed Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front (GLF) sublet a small office at one of the major intersections on the Silver Lake neighborhood’s western border, a space that had most recently served as area headquarters for the Peace and Freedom Party in the local political elections, for which a GLF activist had volunteered.28 The GLF sought to revolutionize society’s sexual norms through many forms of activism as well as through gay community building. The office served as a drop-in center and meeting place for gay liberationists, but also, in the smaller of its two rooms, housed a gay helpline. As the Los Angeles GLF was, in late 1969 and early 1970, one of only a handful of telephone listings in the country with the word “gay” in its name, it became a lifeline of sorts for gay people across the country. On most nights, volunteer Don Kilhefner sat in his sleeping bag in the small back room with the phone receiver pressed against his ear. He later recalled, “Starting around eleven o’clock/eleven thirty the calls would come in from [the East Coast] and just roll across the country by time zone so that by about two or three o’clock in the morning I was putting down the phone and getting some sleep. I listened for a year, thirteen months, to these calls. ‘I have an alcohol problem, I have a drug problem, I lost my job because I’m gay’ … from A to Z, there they were, every night.”29 With every call, Kilhefner saw the relationship between the oppression of gay people and “sickness” grow stronger, as their oppression resulted in physical, mental, and financial problems.
In response to the growing list of gay issues illuminated by helpline callers and reflecting the political ethos and rhetoric of gay liberation in Los Angeles, Kilhefner formed the Gay Survival Committee, along with longtime activist Morris Kight, gay antiwar and union activist John Platania, and a handful of other GLF members who lived in Kilhefner’s housing co-op. Platania later recorded his thoughts on the extent to which the issue of survival permeated the gay community at the time:
Along with all the excitement, the activity, and celebration, we also began to see, see deeply, the kind of real human need that was in our community: the starvation, literally, the homelessness, the drugs, the alcohol, the disease. You know the plague is not new. It is not a stranger to the gay community. We have been dying for years of sexually transmitted diseases! For years and years before AIDS! We were dying of alcoholism and hepatitis before that…. There were no services; that’s the point.30
During meetings of the Gay Survival Committee, Kilhefner, Kight, and Platania first theorized about the link between sexual oppression and gay health. They coined the term “oppression sickness” to better understand how the problems of the gay community were rooted in its oppression and to explore the ways in which homophobia literally made gay people sick.31 Oppression sickness encompassed physical, mental, financial, and political issues and ailments common in the gay community—issues like job loss, violence, depression, substance abuse, isolation, homelessness, medical malpractice, and self-destructive behavior. The oppression sickness concept pushed beyond the rigid boundaries of a medical understanding of health and illness and expanded gay liberation rhetoric to new terrain, blurring the lines between medical issues and political ones. From this perspective, fighting and curing oppression sickness would demand more than political lobbying and protest or doctor’s visits and medication. Rather, the gay community would have to mobilize on many fronts, provide numerous services, and address the larger systemic and societal problems contributing to their oppression.
Because oppression sickness included nearly every outgrowth of oppression gay people encountered, members of the Gay Survival Committee thought the most effective solution was to create a large social service organization that addressed all of these issues. The center would have programs attacking oppression sickness in every form possible: legal services for gay service members who had been dishonorably discharged because of their sexuality, pen pals for incarcerated gays who faced violence and injustice within prisons, employment training and placement for gays who were fired or who fled their oppression in school, numerous discussion and rap groups on coming out and raising political awareness, dances, temporary housing, substance abuse services, and a medical clinic, to name only a few programs.32 The range of services reflected the idealism and political commitment to radical gay liberation that shaped the Los Angeles political landscape. The site of the Watts uprising, home to a strong Black Panther, Brown Beret, and radical feminist contingent, Los Angeles provided a backdrop for a wide array of radical leftist politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, Los Angeles had already had a long tradition of being on the cutting edge of gay political activism, whether as the founding site for the Mattachine Society of the early 1950s or as the location of the Black Cat riots of 1967. Inspired and fueled by the political activism and liberation discourse boiling over at the local level, the concept of oppression sickness proved captivating. With the help of John Platania, who at the time was a grant writer for a local nonprofit agency, by the spring of 1971 the countless discussions of “oppression sickness” culminated in a proposal of more than thirty pages, outlining needed services, management hierarchies, organizational charts, and a preliminary budget for a gay community services center.33
A center of this size and magnitude would draw on a deep local well of gay liberation activism but would also require access to public funding and political support. Consequently, the proposed structure of the organization sought to strike a delicate balance between remaining true to the organizers’ radical politics and gaining support from the state. The resulting proposed organizational structure thus included positions common among professional nonprofits, such as an executive director, board members, and department managers. As Kilhefner recalled,
We wanted [the center] to look like nothing [funders or government officials] could challenge. We were the revolutionaries. We were the radicals. We were the people quoting Che and Mao. They did not expect that from us. We made a conscious decision that this would not be a consensus group. It would not be run like the Gay Liberation Front, where every month we elected a different leader and decisions were made by consensus. This was an organization with hierarchy, with defined positions, just like … the Red Cross.34
This hierarchical organizational structure did, in many ways, clash with the political beliefs and practices of many of the contemporary gay and lesbian groups in Los Angeles. The GLF’s gay community center came directly out of a local political movement that not only questioned heterosexist society but regularly used the rhetoric of political and social revolution to create a defiant and celebratory gay community.35 As one handout proclaimed, the Gay Community Services Center “is making it possible for heretofore largely powerless people to mobilize the power necessary to change our own lives, and, growing out of this, the larger society in which we live.”36 In short, the Gay Survival Committee was attempting to attract funds and political support from the very society it sought to challenge, not unlike the Fenway community’s use of federal funds to thwart city plans to demolish their neighborhood.
Despite the community center’s conventional structure, the oppression sickness it sought to address resonated with the radical gay liberation rhetoric and politics in Los Angeles. The center would provide a place from which the gay community could attack its oppression and the larger oppressive society from many angles, while simultaneously creating a politically, physically, and mentally healthier community.37 Armed with the lengthy proposal and the enthusiasm of other GLF members, Kilhefner and Kight rented a rickety old Victorian house at 1614 Wilshire Boulevard and formally opened the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center in the fall of 1971.38 In keeping with their vision of the organization, the men immediately began the incorporation and tax-exemption processes, which lasted over a year.39 At the same time, they remained dedicated to their radical politics by placing themselves at the forefront of public protests and actions. In describing the politics of the center once it opened and the fervor of its volunteers and patrons, Kilhefner reminisced, “We had picket signs, must have had one hundred picket signs, almost for any occasion. So somebody would call and [report instances of homophobia] and within twenty-four hours we’d