Set the Night on Fire. Mike Davis
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presented “a modern day fairy tale” that involved “good fairies and an evil, old, closet queen who saw the light and learned to live outside of her closet.” The Advocate reporter was particularly enthusiastic about the “Kiss a homosexual” booth, and by the fact that five couples were married at the Gay-In—three female and two male. The LAPD arrested only one person at the Gay-In, and not for sex-related activity: a fifteen-year-old boy with an American flag painted on his face was charged with “desecrating the flag,” and they “hauled him off in handcuffs. A large crowd followed, jeering and demanding his release.”20
Morris Kight had been born in 1919 in Comanche County, Texas, and had arrived in Los Angeles in 1958. He had been working in the civil rights movement since the early 1940s, a friend recalled, but “suddenly he found himself, like many other gays and lesbians in L.A., dealing with the brutal ways of the Los Angeles Police Department.”21 Kight himself recalled in a 1994 interview: “I was doing street organizing, street work, street counseling, one-to-one curbside counseling” with gay men. “My major goal was for gay people to be proud of themselves … Next I wanted them to live lives of usefulness and creativity … I wanted them to stay out of trouble.” And last of all, “I wanted to get ready for the revolution.”22
Kight was also an organizer against the Vietnam War, which he called “the worst of wars.” Among other things he founded the Dow Action Committee in 1967, which protested the use in Vietnam of napalm, manufactured by Dow Chemical. “As the war rose, I gave more and more time and energy into protesting,” he later recalled, “and less and less time to serving lesbian and gay people, and I felt horrible about that,” he recalled. Also, “I was red-baited by gay people constantly,” Kight said, but the Dow group also served as a training ground for gay and lesbian members, who were “seeing how to leaflet, how to organize, how to manipulate the press, how to deal with the police, how to do a sit-in, how to do civil disobedience, how to do a demonstration.”23
Kight described his move from the anti-war movement to the gay liberation movement in that 1994 interview: In October, 1969, the national Moratorium to End the Vietnam War held demonstrations across the country, and Kight was invited to speak at the San Francisco event, where he was introduced as a gay person. Of speaking before tens of thousands of people, he said, “I felt euphoria, I felt dizziness, I felt almost like falling, I felt ‘good grief, I should go home.’” He suddenly remembered seeing his father in 1926 in rural Texas plowing a field with a horse and singing a Protestant song, “I’m Going Home.” On the platform in San Francisco, he said, “I thought I would leave here and leave the antiwar movement, I’ll remain a pacifist. I’ll go home to Los Angeles and home to my people.” He left the platform, went straight to the airport, flew back to L.A., and resigned from anti-war organizations, including the Peace Action Council. “The following day I announced the founding meeting of what was to become the Gay Liberation Front in LA.”24
The GLF had already been organized in New York and Berkeley—L.A.’s group was third. Within a year there were almost 400 members. Kight later recalled that for the next few years, he spent a quarter of his time on GLF street demonstrations, and half of his time on the GLF’s social services—its “Gay Survival Committee,” which in 1971 became the LA Gay and Lesbian Community Service Center (later LGBT Center), the first and biggest in the world. The other quarter of his time he devoted to the anti-war movement, he said, “because the war in Indochina was still going on.”25
Most of what the GLF did was organize street protests about discrimination against gays—at restaurants (Barney’s Beanery, which had a “no faggots” sign), stores (Tower Records, which fired a gay clerk), and newspapers (the LA Times, which refused to run news about homosexual organizations and activities). But the GLF also did anti-war organizing and draft counseling. Support for the anti-war work wasn’t unanimous; in May 1970, after the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings, GLF leader Jim Kepner wrote in the Freep that “a few members feel Gay Lib should not be involved in other ‘movement’ issue,” but that “the group overwhelmingly voted to wire Nixon an angry protest against the illegal invasion of Cambodia and the vicious shooting of students.” The same article reported that “seventeen GLFers joined the thousands who demonstrated in Oceanside in support of anti-war Marines. We kept our own propaganda level low for the occasion, feeling it sufficient to let it be known that gays were supporting the main cause, and not seizing the occasion, as so many did, for side trips.”26
The GLF organized for an anti-war demonstration in April 1969 in San Francisco. The leaflet had two slogans: “Out Now!” and “Come Out!” Another anti-war demonstration, this one in L.A. in October 1970, was endorsed by the GLF. And in November 1970, the GLF endorsed and collected signatures for the “People’s Peace Treaty,” where individuals signed a statement declaring that “the American people and the Vietnamese people are not enemies.”27
And the GLF produced a key publication: A Guide to Revolutionary Homosexual Draft Resistance, a leaflet that declared, “The US government oppresses homosexuals in employment, military duty, tax laws, and criminal prosecutions” and asked, “Is this a system you want to die for?” The leaflet, organized as a Q and A, followed: “What is there about being gay that makes me unfit for military service?” The answer provided by the GLF was eloquent: “Nothing. All branches of the military have homosexuals, both men and women, who are serving capably and honorably.” But the US “has laws against homosexuals being inducted,” and “every year, in every branch of the service, men are dishonorably discharged and imprisoned because their homosexuality has been revealed.” Therefore, the GLF recommended that at preinduction physicals, young draftees should check the “yes” box on the question about “homosexual tendencies.” They should refuse to answer any questions about their experiences because “48 out of 50 states have criminal statutes against homosexual acts,” and the Constitution protects Americans from self-incrimination. The leaflet recommended that “if there is a better way to avoid the draft, such as a student deferment or a medical disqualification, use it”—but instructed young men to “stand your ground,” and in all cases “refuse induction.”
But the GLF position on the draft was not anti-war, nor was it anti-imperialist: “No homosexual shall be drafted against his will,” the GLF list of demands stated in 1970, “nor shall the military deny entrance or demand release of any person because of homosexuality.”28 The next year, when Congress had to decide whether to extend the draft, the GLF in L.A. took a stronger stand: “Our Gay brothers have been harassed and intimidated by this system. Now we have a chance to do away with it.”29
Finally, the GLF also engaged in electoral politics, campaigning for Robert Scheer for Senate that year and other Peace and Freedom candidates for statewide office. The Peace and Freedom platform included a plank crafted by the GLF, which declared “the necessity to work to abolish all laws” that discriminated against gays and lesbians, as well as “all forms of economic and social exploitation.” It called for the freeing of everybody who had been jailed on homosexual charges, and for sex education programs that would give “the same validity to homosexual forms of expression as to heterosexual forms.” (Scheer got 57,000 votes, about 1 percent of the total.)30
The GLF, of course, became part of a national gay liberation movement, and one of its key strategists and spokespeople was Carl Wittman, whose “Gay Manifesto” was published in the LA Free Press Gay Liberation Supplement in 1970. Wittman had been a national leader of SDS but left the organization to devote himself to organizing the gay movement. “How it began we don’t know,” he said in his “Manifesto.” “Maybe we were inspired by black people and their freedom movement; we learned how to stop pretending from the hip movement. Amerika in all its ugliness has surfaced with the war.” But gay people were doing something new: “We are full of love for each other and are showing it; we are full of anger at what has been done to us. And as we recall all the self-censorship and repression for so many years, a reservoir of tears pours out of our eyes. And we are euphoric, high, with the initial flourish of a movement.”31
Wittman’s “Manifesto” also declared that “our first job is to free ourselves.” That meant