Jared Leighton. Journal of Social History. Volume 52, Issue 3. Spring 2019.
This article shows how the path of the gay liberation movement in the Bay Area was shaped by its relationship to the Black Panther Party (BPP). Previous scholarship has made frequent but brief mention of the connections between the two. However, the Black Panther Party had a greater depth of contact with and longer lasting influence on gay liberation than previously acknowledged, as an examination of movement activism in the Bay Area reveals. Perhaps the central issue of cooperation between gay liberation and the BPP—police brutality—has received little mention. Emerging scholarship is seeking to place LGBT activists in the larger movement against police brutality, and understanding their relationship to the Panthers will be crucial to doing so. While a great range of viewpoints on alliances between the Panthers and gay liberation could be observed in both camps in 1969–1970, many gay activists affirmed a united front even before Newton’s statement on gay liberation. Foremost among the reasons for working together was their shared identity as criminalized groups and their shared goal of combating police brutality. Gay liberationists modeled Panther approaches to dealing with police violence, both in armed self-defense and electoral politics, marking a clear break with homophile reformism. In the spring of 1971, both became more moderate and continued along the same path independently, with the issue of police brutality remaining central. This work encourages readers to consider in greater depth the intersection of gay liberation and Black Power, as well as social movements more generally.
“Vice pigs in Los Angeles beat a homosexual to death a few months ago. In Berkeley, vice pigs shot and murdered another homosexual in his own car. In Oakland, a ‘straight’ professor the pigs thought was ‘queer’ was beaten, and later died… The Homosexual Revolution is part of the whole street revolution fighting fascism in the US. By locking arms with our brothers and sisters in the movement, we can ALL win our freedom. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!!” So read a leaflet handed out by the Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) at the Black Panther Party’s National Revolutionary Conference for a United Front Against Fascism at Bobby Hutton Park in Oakland from July 18 to 20, 1969. The CHF leaflet reminded revolutionaries of three killings by police in California so far that year: Howard Efland, a black gay man killed by police in Los Angeles in March; Frank Bartley, a white gay man killed by police in Berkeley in April; and Phillip Caplan, a white heterosexual man police presumed to be gay, killed by officers in Oakland in June. Panther officials told CHF activists, regarding their leaflet, “Our Board of Control hasn’t endorsed this, but we’re for anyone who wants freedom, so go ahead.” Even before Huey Newton’s statement on gay liberation in August 1970, and prior to Stonewall, the Committee for Homosexual Freedom reported being accepted by the Panthers and aligned with them because of mutual concern about police brutality.
The relationship to the Panthers was crucial to shaping the path of gay liberation. Previous scholarship on the relationship between the Panthers and gay liberation groups has made frequent but brief mention of Newton’s statement on gay liberation. Some scholars have explained how the issue of supporting the Panthers split the Gay Liberation Front in New York, while others have discussed the role of gay activists at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention (RPCC) in Philadelphia, an event organized by the BPP. This article does much to help contextualize Newton’s speech on gay liberation and the Panthers’ constitutional conventions by focusing on gay liberation almost exclusively in the Bay Area, which has been overlooked in previous scholarship and where gay liberation and the Black Panther Party were both born and thrived. Moreover, the relationship between the Panthers and gay liberationists was perhaps stronger in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the country. Perhaps the most crucial issue shared by the two groups—police brutality—has received little mention, which this work seeks to remedy. Emerging scholarship is seeking to place LGBT activists in the larger movement against police brutality, and understanding their relationship to the Panthers will be essential to doing so. Also, missing from the historiography is much discussion of the relationship between black gay activists and the Panthers, which this article seeks to address as well.
Though bonds were stronger in the Bay Area, the issue of an alliance between gay liberation and the Panthers remained a difficult subject in both camps, and gay liberation was more often influenced by the Panthers than openly collaborating and cooperating with them on shared projects. This relationship was oftentimes strained by troubled gender politics and problematic ideologies of masculinity. For example, in their early years, the Panthers made frequent use of words like “faggot” and “sissy,” particularly against their political opponents, like the police, and, in defense of themselves, only armed men and reserved leadership positions solely for men. However, the Panthers evolved, and as we shall see, gay liberationists did not clearly divide based on gender identity over whether to support the Panthers. Some lesbians rejected the Panthers after feeling excluded from the RPCC while others supported the BPP and formed their own armed self-defense groups; some gay men rejected the Panthers, believing there was not a reciprocal level of support between the two groups and that armed self-defense was suicidal, while others backed the BPP as the vanguard party and believed that armed self-defense was necessary to stop the killing of gay men by police. This more complex look at gay liberationists’ views of the Black Panther Party takes us beyond the surface-level understanding that supposes that Eldridge Cleaver’s antigay Soul on Ice was taken as representative of the party and that gays must have been automatically averse to the Panthers.
Finally, it is important to recognize that the two groups followed similar trajectories. Just as the Black Panther Party was beginning to regroup as a less militant, more localized organization in the spring of 1971, so too was the gay liberation movement. When gay activists began to abandon the notion of armed self-defense, the Panthers did as well. The Panthers and gay liberation both turned to more mainstream politics and continued along the same path independently. During this process, the issue of police brutality, especially community control of police, remained central, but some important contingents in both camps continued to advocate armed self-defense.
The Committee for Homosexual Freedom and the Black Panther Party in the Bay Area
Even before Huey Newton’s letter “To the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements” in August 1970, gay liberation activists supported the Panthers, and the Panthers reciprocated. In the Bay Area, which was a center of both gay liberation and Black Power activism, gay activists reported having a strong relationship with the Panthers.
The key gay liberation group in the Bay Area was the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, which was formed in April 1969, shortly before Stonewall, in response to the States Line Steamship Company firing cofounder Gale Whittington for being gay. Cofounder Leo Laurence immediately connected with Black Power activism. A reporter for the Berkeley Barb said Laurence “used much of the terminology of the Black Revolution as he rapped.” Prior to the common use of the term homophobia, prejudice against gays was often viewed as a form of sexism. However, Laurence viewed it through the prism of racism, often referring to “sexual racism” in his writing. Moreover, “Laurence want[ed] gays to participate in other militant social causes. Alliances with the Black Panthers, the Resistance, and other anti-war groups will help when common causes arise, he said.”
Part of the reason gay liberation activists saw the Panthers as their allies is that they both believed that their “most immediate oppressors [were] the pigs.” A writer for Gay Sunshine said, “As the laws of California stand, all of us are unapprehended felons.” Similarly, as scholar Elizabeth Hinton has written, “From the ashes of the Watts ‘riot’ in August 1965, a growing consensus of policymakers, federal administrators, law enforcement officials, and journalists came to understand crime as specific to black urban youth.” They, too, were a criminal class just awaiting arrest. Despite differences between discrimination and oppression based on race and that based on sexual orientation, gay liberationists and the Black Panthers shared a common identity as criminalized groups.
A number of murders of gay men by police put organizing against police brutality at the forefront of gay liberation activism in California and led gay activists to identify more closely with the Panthers. On March 9, 1969, Los Angeles vice officers “beat, kicked, and stomped a man [Howard Efland, alias J. McCann] to death” at the Dover Hotel after he had supposedly engaged in lewd conduct with another man in front of them. Despite the fact that the hotel clerk reported that the other man did not even check in until Efland had been killed and taken away—meaning it was highly unlikely Efland was engaged in lewd conduct with another man in front of the vice officers if the other man wasn’t there yet—the jury ruled that the killing of Howard Efland, a black gay man, was an excusable homicide because he was resisting arrest. Murders like these brought together moderate and radical gay activists. For example, even the more conservative Advocate declared that, “McCann’s ‘crime’ was that he was different. And for that difference he has paid dearly.” Yet, as the paper informed readers, “No civil rights organizations have expressed an interest in the matter.”
On April 18, 1969, Frank Bartley, an active member of the Society for Individual Rights (SIR), the country’s largest homophile organization, was shot in the head by Berkeley police after being entrapped into making a sexual advance toward an undercover vice officer at Aquatic Park. Bartley died four days later. In reaction to the killing, Leo Laurence declared, “Gays must respond with the same militancy that the black community showed when it fought back against the killings of Bobby Hutton, George Baskett and Joey Linthcome.” Though SIR believed Bartley “was executed in cold blood simply for being a homosexual,” the group’s leaders disagreed with Laurence’s militant response. They removed him as the editor of SIR’s Vector magazine, which intended to remain a more moderate homophile publication aimed at gays who were involved “in everything from SDS to John Birch.”
The next murder at the hands of police occurred two months later. Philip Caplan was a white man who taught at Voorhees College, a historically black college in South Carolina. While previously teaching at the University of South Alabama, Caplan had opposed school segregation, and state senators called for an investigation into his background because he placed his name on a protest letter to Lurleen Wallace, George Wallace’s wife. On June 18, 1969, Caplan and his wife were in Oakland when two vice officers, who assumed he was gay, “brutally subdued” him for supposedly masturbating in a public restroom. Caplan died three days later, and his wife promised to bring his death “to the attention of everyone in the United States in order to expose the corruption of the police department in Oakland.” However, authorities decided that Caplan died not from injuries from being attacked by police but from injuries sustained while struggling against his handcuffs, an explanation that strained credulity.
Because these killings by police were of utmost concern to many gay activists, the Panthers seemed like natural allies. The BPP wanted to work with all groups on the issue of community control of police and, from there, gradually build “a people’s revolutionary movement.” Out of the Conference for a United Front Against Fascism, described earlier, came a coordinated effort to support the Panther petition for “Community Control and Decentralization of Police in Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco.” Gay activists hoped to establish elected neighborhood police councils and limit police jurisdiction to particular neighborhoods in which the patrol officers must live and where the people could decide the kind and extent of protection they desired. This revolutionary unity was reaffirmed by the People’s Conference in Provo Park, Berkeley, at the end of August, where thirty groups gathered, including the Panthers and the CHF. Raymond Masai Hewitt said that “the Panthers perspectives have broadened, and that they are working for world-wide solidarity with all revolutionary movements.”
For gay activists, more radicalizing than hearing the Panthers speak out against police brutality was experiencing it for themselves. Leo Laurence wrote following the violent arrest of gays protesting the San Francisco Examiner in November 1969, “I learned how quickly, unexpectedly, and unjustly my Amerikan freedom can be crushed by the police. I had heard Bobby Seale talk about fascism, but not until Friday did I ‘feel’ it.”
While seeking allies, the CHF also organized its own rallies, gathering two thousand people at the University of California–Berkeley for disorientation week and working on a ballot initiative to end discrimination against gays in the hiring of law enforcement officers. Organizing like this was important to maintaining unity among gay groups, who were divided on whether they should join in common cause with the Panthers, but who agreed that police brutality needed to be addressed. At the Bay Area March for Peace on Moratorium Day, November 15, 1969, the Berkeley Barb reported that fifteen thousand gay people joined in, organized by the CHF and the Gay Liberation Front–Berkeley. When Panther David Hilliard spoke, some gays raised their clenched fists in salute while other gays tried to shout him down. Reflecting on this event, gay church activist Michael Francis Itkin observed that the CHF must confront three key issues: whether it would take a stand on issues other than gay liberation, whether it would adhere to nonviolence or engage in violence, and whether it would support a vanguard party, like the BPP or the Weathermen. For his part, Itkin favored uniting with black activists outside of the BPP, saying, “Far too many of us have worked, and continue to work, with Black revolutionaries who hold a different philosophy than the Panthers and who do not share their elitist pretensions of being the ‘Vanguard.'”
The year 1969 concluded with the West Coast Conference for Gay Liberation in Berkeley. According to organizer Carl Wittman, author of the seminal treatise Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto, as well as a former SDS activist involved in the sit-in movement in Cambridge, Maryland, one of the central issues was “the considerable concern voiced throughout the Gay Liberation organizations of the need to relate more closely with other revolutionary groups, such as the Panthers, Women’s Lib, and the Radical Student Union.” A CHF activist said, “Police brutality is one issue, no matter whose skull is cracked. We get nowhere going-it-alone.” However, they disagreed to what extent the tactics of the Panthers should be emulated in response. Leo Laurence said gays would soon need to build up stores of guns and ammunition, to which “disagreement was overwhelming, but not unanimous.” Gale Whittington, also a cofounder of the CHF, responded that “[we] ought to sympathize with the Black Panthers, who are being slaughtered, but not to emulate their suicidal tactics.”
Police brutality continued to be a major concern throughout 1970. The year began with Laurence, like Whittington before him, losing his job, which he believed was because of his support for gay liberation, as well as for “other revolutionary groups like the Black Panthers and Women’s Liberation.” Shortly thereafter, four San Francisco police and two military police in search of an AWOL soldier forced their way into the home of Arthur Ornales, a Mexican American gay man. According to reporting by Gale Whittington, an officer pushed Ornales into his bathtub and “repeatedly, sadistically struck Art on the face and chest, mumbling insults about Art’s sexuality, all IN FRONT OF WITNESSES…. This is only one horror in a series of assaults and false arrests being perpetrated by the police department.” In February 1970, the Berkeley Tribe called for the formation of a people’s militia, which would include communes, ecology activists, women’s liberation, gay liberation, and other groups and would use armed self-defense against the police state and right-wing vigilantes.
Gale Whittington acknowledged that gay consciousness of police brutality was not a brand-new development raised by CHF, pointing out that Del Martin and her group Citizens Alert had been trying to publicize the issue for years. However, with the rise of gay liberation—and surely in no small part because of its connection to the Panthers—the issue of police brutality came to the forefront of gay activism. As Christina B. Hanhardt has noted, “The gay liberation organizations that arose in the aftermath of the [Stonewall] riots believed that protection from the police would depend on their forming coalitions with other social movements, including Black Power, radical feminists, and Third World decolonization. This contrasted with the approach adopted by their immediate predecessors, homophile activists who largely advocated for police accountability through liberal reform measures.”
In March 1970, roughly 120 people gathered at the Dover Hotel in Los Angeles to memorialize the one-year anniversary of the death of Howard Efland, the black gay man killed by police while staying there. Shockingly, just seven hours prior to the memorial for Howard Efland—and probably not yet known to those in attendance—LA police shot and killed Larry “LaVerne” Turner, who The Advocate identified as a black gay man who presented as a woman. Turner was caught soliciting a vice officer, and police said she then pulled a.22 on them and fired. However, witnesses who called the Los Angeles Sentinel, a black newspaper, said Turner fired no shots. Instead, they attested, police shot Turner as she was running away and then handcuffed her after she was dead. By the summer of 1970, a number of gay militants had been quoted “saying police repression had brought homosexuals all over the country to the verge of a bloody uprising, and urging Gays to arm themselves and get ready.” In response to the rise of gay liberation, the LAPD only increased its harassment and surveillance of gay establishments.
At the same time, the relationship between the CHF and the Panthers continued to grow stronger in the Bay Area. Leo Laurence observed, “Not once did I find hostility to the Gay Liberation movement from a Panther, even during discussions with Brothers David and June Hilliard, and Masai Hewitt, Minister of Education.” In March 1970, his fellow activist and partner Don Burton predicted in the Berkeley Barb that the Panthers would soon avowedly support gay liberation. He wrote, “The Panthers haven’t supported us actively yet, but they HAVE sat down and rapped with us. They’re getting their heads straight on it. And I think that, once again, the Panthers will be the vanguard. I’ve a feeling they’ll be the first to ‘Do It’ with Gay Lib.”
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By August 1970, the Panther’s petition for community control of policing, with the support of the CHF, submitted twice as many signatures as necessary to be on the ballot. Moreover, Stew Albert, a New Left activist prominent in the Youth International Party, or Yippies, was running for “people’s sheriff,” criticizing police “who try to prove their masculinity by coming down hard on homosexuals” and supporting armed self-defense for gays to prevent police harassment.
Newton’s Statement on Gay Liberation
On August 14, 1970, Huey Newton went on KPFA radio and said that gay liberation, whose relationship to the Panthers had been unclear to some, was welcome in the struggle. At a meeting in New York, Newton would explain that it was his experience in prison, where he met gay men and talked with them at length, that changed his views on homosexuality. Newton declared flatly, “We see that homosexuals are human beings, and they are oppressed because of the bourgeous [sic] mentality and bourgeous [sic] treachery that exists in this country (and) tries to legislate sexual activity.” He concluded, “The BPP plans in the future to have solidarity with ALL oppressed people.”
The following day, Newton gave a speech on gay liberation, calling for an alliance. Newton declared, “Whatever your personal opinions and your insecurities about homosexuality and the various liberation movements among homosexuals and women… we should try to unite with them in a revolutionary fashion…. We must gain security in ourselves and therefore have respect and feelings for all oppressed people.” Newton went on to suggest that homosexuals might be the most oppressed and, therefore, the most revolutionary people in society. That oppression, along with the necessity for the Panthers to have as many allies as possible, made unity with gay liberation imperative. Roughly a week later, his words were published as a letter in The Black Panther. Nick Benton of the Bay Area Gay Sunshine Collective built on Newton’s statement, writing, “It is not just because the homosexual is the most oppressed that he would be the most revolutionary. He is the most oppressed because his capacity is the most revolutionary, and therefore the most repulsive in the eyes of the Western establishment.” Benton reversed Newton’s line of causality, arguing that gays’ revolutionary capacity produced their repression, not that great repression had created revolutionary potential.
The extent to which Newton’s position was adopted by the party members, however, remains unclear. Historian Tracye Matthews finds that the effect of Newton’s speech “varied both in terms of acceptance and implementation at the local level.” Panther scholar Jane Rhodes says that while the statement worked to bring in groups like the Gay Liberation Front, it “also alienated parts of the Panthers’ rank and file.” Eldridge Cleaver would continue to oppose homosexuality and gay rights activism throughout his life despite numerous ideological conversions in other respects. His harsh language became more tempered over the years, and he acknowledged in 1986, if not earlier, that his older sister was a lesbian and he was trying to understand homosexuality. In spite of opposition, Newton remained committed to supporting gay liberation. This was likely made easier following the Newton–Cleaver split in the spring of 1971.
The Divided Reaction of Gay Liberationists and Divisive Issues
Just as it divided the Panthers, Newton’s statement also sharpened divisions among gay activists. The same month that Newton made his statement on gay liberation, the national convention of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) was held in San Francisco. Gay liberationists worked to add the Black Panther Party to a resolution in support of women’s liberation, which intensified the split between moderates and radicals in the LGBT movement. Cheri Matisse of GLF-LA pointed out that the Panthers had finally addressed women’s liberation and gay liberation and asked, “What are we doing about implementing this?” Leo Laurence responded by introducing a resolution calling for NACHO to support all oppressed peoples—the Panthers, women’s liberation, Chicanos, and more—or dissolve. This set off “a long wrangle.” Some argued that they should support black liberation without mentioning the Panthers specifically, which is how the final statement at the end of the day read.
However, the following day, the letter by Newton, as well as the Panthers’ platform, was read aloud, and gay liberationists, led by Laurence, Rev. Michael Itkin, and Sanford Blixton of GLF–Venice, worked to get NACHO to make a statement in support of the Panthers. Madelyn Cervantes of New York Mattachine replied, “I can’t see what these Panthers ever did for the homosexual.” And homophile activists accused gay liberationists of trying to “steamroller the convention on the Panther and voting issues and force it to adopt Gay Lib methods and procedures.” In the end, Leo Laurence said triumphantly, “The Gay Liberation Front invaded NACHO, forced the national conference to rip off its racism with an endorsement of the Black Panther Party.” According to the more conservative Advocate, the meeting ended with a “bruised, battered, and radically altered NACHO.” Jim Kepner remarked, “The meeting was perhaps a watershed in the 22-year history of the homophile movement—one of those battles which determines the shape of our future, while seeming almost pointless at the time.”
Beyond that dispute, groups and publications like the Society for Individual Rights and The Advocate questioned whether Huey Newton was speaking for the entire Black Panther Party, suggesting to him that “these alliances may be very distasteful to your followers.” A piece in The Advocate declared, “The overwhelming majority of Gays, we believe, do not want to destroy this nation and replace it with—well, what are you going to replace it with? We see some virtue in evolution. We think it is possible to change the ‘system’—to make it what it is supposed to be. In fact, we see much more hope this way than in violence and destruction. Sorry, Huey.”
At the same time, many in the Gay Liberation Front did not believe they were receiving the support that Newton’s statement promised. In the fall of 1970, in San Francisco, Richard Brown, a former captain of the BPP, and other men tried to remove twenty GLF members from the GLF commune, Children of Paradise, because the landlord asked Brown and his men to get the GLF out. The GLF called on the Panthers for their assistance in the dispute, but nothing came of the promise that the Panthers would look into it. Roger Green of the GLF said many in the group were disappointed by the lack of help from the Panthers. He pointed out that the GLF members had held a twenty-four-hour vigil when the Oakland headquarters of the Panthers was threatened with a raid, adding, “We put our bodies on the line. Had the pigs come shooting, it might have been our lives.” The Advocate concluded, “There were indications that the situation had badly strained the fragile new rapport between the GLF and the Black Panther Party, which reportedly failed to respond to repeated pleas for help from the GLF.”
Other gay activists were critical of the fact that Newton’s message on gay liberation seemed to be a solitary instance, not making its way into his frequent speaking appearances. A gay activist who attended a speech by Newton at Merritt College in Oakland criticized the Panther leader for talking about coalitions with other revolutionary people but not mentioning gay liberation. In an open letter to Huey Newton, the gay man wrote,
For many people in that audience, hearing you speak affirmingly about the Gay Liberation consciousness as you did in a letter of yours in a recent Panther newspaper would really have been the key that would have touched them personally to identify in a new way with what you had to say. Your affirmation of Gay Liberation then would have immediately revolutionized those people in the audience who are living with unresolved fears about their sexuality…. I know it’s got to be hard, brother, but you’ve got to get used to talking about our movement, too, because your affirmation of it will be the decisive call to the revolution for many of the people you will address. Power to the People!
Alternatively, many LGBT activists got behind Newton’s call for unity. A meeting of twenty to twenty-five lesbian women in Berkeley adopted the posture of armed self-defense, writing, “We demand training in self-defense and the use of defense machinery. A Women’s Militia would be organized to defend the demands, rights and interests of women struggling towards an unoppressive social system.” Likewise, the GLF of Los Angeles considered itself part of a broader revolution. The group made a statement in support of the Black Panthers, saying they too believed in freedom for all and considered Newton’s statement “a vanguard revolutionary statement.” The Gay Liberation Front of Baltimore declared their support for the Panthers as well. Created to respond to increased police harassment, the organization stated, “As a militant civil rights organization, we support similar organizations, namely, our brother movement, the Black Panther Party, and our sister movement, the Women’s Liberation.” Similarly, the Third World Gay Revolutionaries of Chicago said, “We believe that third world and gay people should have full participation in the People’s Revolutionary Army.” In New York, it was reported that, “Buoyed by an emerging sense of community and militancy, and by the recent pro-gay statement by Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panther Party, gay revolutionaries in New York stepped up plans for more activity this fall.” Finally, the Detroit Gay Liberator reported that three Black Panthers attended the GLF’s October 8 meeting. The two groups discussed the interrelation between revolutionary parties, and the Panthers invited the Detroit GLF to the RPCC in Washington, DC. In return, the GLF began to support the Breakfast for Children Program of the BPP in Detroit.
So tied were some radical gay liberationists to the Panthers that when gay liberationists became divided on issues, each side claimed to be following the vanguard party. Gay liberationists on the West Coast experienced a split that mirrored the divide between revolutionary nationalists and black nationalists in the Black Power Movement. Don Burton, a gay folksinger, organized Bay Area Gays for Unification and Nationalism (BAG-FUN) to create a gay colony in Alpine County, which they would rename Stonewall County. The group became the Northern California Alpine Liberation Front shortly thereafter. This group allied with other gay nationalist groups: the Gay Nationalist Society in Los Angeles, the Stonewall Nation in San Diego, and the Stonewall Nation Society in Portland. Gay nationalists believed they were adhering closely to Eldridge Cleaver’s principle of “liberating territory within the mother country” and Huey Newton’s teaching that “gay people will be free when they control the police power” because by gaining a majority in Alpine County, they would run law enforcement. Leo Laurence responded that the Alpine plan was just like the separatist movement of black nationalists that Bobby Seale condemned in Seize the Time while radical Mother Boats, a gay man who led the Eastern-influenced Psychedelic Venus Church, said gays would be colonizers themselves, taking the land from 298 Washoe Indians. The Berkeley, New York, and Detroit Gay Liberation Fronts—groups with strong connections to the BPP—condemned the project while the San Francisco GLF decided to cosponsor it. However, by April 1971, the Alpine project had been abandoned.
In an interesting turn of events, Leo Laurence, one of Huey Newton’s most avid gay supporters, surprisingly “said goodbye to all that” in November 1970, citing a lack of Panther support, mimicking Del Martin’s announcement the previous month that she was leaving male-dominated homophile politics to focus on feminist organizing. Though he believed that Newton’s statement worked to convince straight white radicals to support gay liberation and women’s liberation, Laurence said he expected “more than revolutionary rhetoric from the ‘vanguard,'” and Newton’s speeches were short on even that, often failing to mention gay liberation at all. He concluded with a call for revolutionary unity, asking, “Don’t the people of the ‘Third World’ understand that their revolution WON’T be total unless homosexuals are liberated along with other minorities? Homosexual liberation is NOT a part of the DAILY consciousness of people in Babylon today. That must change! Gay-Lib must become part of the Everyday political and tactical strategy of our revolutionary leadership, the ‘vanguard,’ if they mean business by TOTAL revolution.” Within the party, Laurence added, “I’m told it’s still tough for a black homosexual to be a Panther.”
Black Gay Radicals and the Panthers
Roughly a month before Huey Newton’s statement, the Berkeley Tribe interviewed two black gay liberationists, Tony Blake and John Mosher. One of the first questions the reporter posed was whether Blake believed the Gay Liberation Front was more important to him than the Black Panther Party. Blake said, “For me yes, but on the whole no. I am a Black, Gay, radical, anarchist. All movements are important.” When pressed about Eldridge Cleaver’s statements on homosexuality in Soul on Ice, Blake offered an exculpatory reply, explaining, “‘Soul On Ice’ was written in anger from prison by a man who was rebelling against society, the prison system and all it represented. Forced homosexuality and the conditions that force men to this are a major part of the prison system he was fighting against.” But perhaps more important were Blake’s somewhat prescient statements about the intersections between the two movements. Blake believed in the importance of “working with complete freedom in the revolution.” He noted that gays and lesbians often wasted too much time hiding their identities in other political struggles and worried about being exposed. He added that he knew a gay Panther and said, “They are going to have to face this issue of being a Black Gay revolutionary.”
John Mosher told the interviewer that he previously lived in Chicago and had been a member of the Blackstone Rangers, a Chicago gang, until 1966, keeping his identity as a gay man hidden. He pointed out that “Straight Revolutionaries fail to realize that our Gay brothers and sisters are willing to fight for their freedom as well as others. Some radicals are just realizing that we are in every militant and activist force.” Mosher was more critical of the Black Panther Party, arguing, “If you are a homosexual you should NOT identify with the Panthers’ ten point program because their program isn’t for homosexuals. In fact they ignore the idea completely.” Mosher argued that since the BPP program made no explicit mention of gay struggles, it was not an organization to which gays should dedicate their revolutionary efforts. Newton’s statement on gay liberation and women’s liberation would follow later in the summer of 1970.
Regardless of Newton’s statement, the Detroit GLF, which had previously written of forming a strong relationship with the Panthers, or National Committee to Combat Fascism, turned to harsh, but perhaps warranted, criticism by the end of 1970. A black gay man named Ken criticized Detroit Panther leader Michael D. for using homophobic attacks against his political opponents and pointed out, “Those of us who are black homosexuals are painfully aware that this is not an uncommon public statement to be made by a member of the N.C.C.F./B.P.P. Although national Panther policy dictates an alliance with the Gay’s and Women’s Lib movements, local Panther practices are far from alliance, or even silent support.” The Black Caucus of the GLF of Detroit wrote that they still hoped to form a relationship with the Panthers based on common oppression, but they could not do so as long as the BPP continued to align the GLF with their shared fascist enemies by calling the “pig establishment” “faggots.”
On the other hand, in the Bay Area, the underground paper Gay Sunshine reported that Newton’s statement had encouraged black gay revolutionaries to come out. An article in October 1970 noted that more black gay men were coming to the Stud, a bar, and the Universal Life Church. It concluded, “Recent Gay Liberation–Black Panther communication has proven fruitful,” and “Gay Black revolutionaries are here now to liberate themselves.”
While we know little of gay and lesbian Black Panthers, there certainly were some, and they usually faced difficulties working within the BPP. In the Jamaica Queens branch of the party, there was an openly gay Panther, according to activist Omar Barbour. Barbour says this man was supported by the existing members because of his radical commitment. However, when a new member of the group confronted him about being gay, the two battled in a fistfight, which the gay Panther won decisively. The gay man remained in the organization while the other man learned that sexual orientation did not define one’s masculinity. Alternatively, in the Los Angeles branch, one Panther left the group for fear they would find out he was gay, according to Panther Roland Young.
Ron Vernon, a black gay man, wrote in Gay Sunshine that Newton’s statement on gay liberation transformed him into a revolutionary. He recalled, “I was in jail when I first heard about the Black Panther Party, and related to it very positively, but in a blackness sense and not out of a gayness sense, because they were offing gay people, verbally offing gay people…. Finally their consciousness has changed somehow. I don’t know how, but it did, recently, and they’ve begun to relate to homosexuals a[s] people, as a part of the people. That’s when I really became a revolutionary, began to live my whole life as a revolutionary.” In the same issue, Michael Robinson of Third World Gay People of Berkeley called for gays to support Newton and the Panthers, “the most revolutionary force in this country.”
The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
The invitation for lesbians and gays to participate in the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention at Temple University in Philadelphia in September 1970 was an important sign that Newton and others were serious about incorporating gay liberation into their vision of a new society. Michael Tabor of the Panther 21, a group of New York members accused in April 1969 of a mass bomb plot to blow up department stores, subway lines, and police stations, said to the convention that the US Constitution excluded many people, including sexual minorities, and must be rewritten. The Panthers wanted to create “a constitution that takes into account the ethnic and pluralistic nature of this society” and called for mass participation of all progressive forces.”
The Gay Liberation Front had made important efforts to support the Panthers. In New York City, the first march to commemorate the Stonewall Rebellion in June 1970 intentionally passed by the Women’s House of Detention, where members of the Panther 21, including Afeni Shakur, were being held. Another march to protest police harassment and brutality also went past the institution, both times with gay liberationists and prisoners shouting support for each other. These actions in support of the black freedom struggle helped convert Panthers to support gay liberation. Subsequently, Shakur spoke to the gay men’s workshop at the convention in Philadelphia. One gay man wrote that Shakur said,
Seeing a Gay Liberation banner in the crowd [at the protest outside the House of Detention] made her think for the first time about gay people and Gay Liberation. She then began relating to the gay sisters in jail beginning to understand their oppression, their anger and the strength in them and in all gay people. She talked about how Huey Newton’s statement would be used in the Panther Party, not as a party line, but as a basis for criticism and self-criticism to overcome anti-homosexual hang-ups among party members, and in the black community. She also helped us to formulate what we wanted to say in our list of demands.
Jim Chesebro, a gay liberationist from Minneapolis, reported, “The Philadelphia session demonstrated that Blacks, Women, and Gay people can be united and can act together under one philosophical commitment to ‘human dignity’ and ‘self-determination.'”
However, the convention went very differently for white gay men and white lesbians. Following the RPCC, the Radicalesbians of New York, a mostly white group with a few African American members, broke ties with the Panthers. The group “left with the clear realization that if women continue to struggle for their liberation within contexts defined by sexist mentalities, they will never be free.” The group had numerous grievances following the convention. Their workshop had been cancelled, and their speaker had been denied access. When they put together another meeting for women, the Panther woman who spoke was surrounded by male guards, who the lesbian women believed were intended to intimidate them.
Angela Douglas of the Transvestite-Transsexual Action Organization of Tallahassee announced that she would no longer support the BPP because it refused to respond to the concerns of lesbians at the convention. Indeed, this was not just an isolated instance. Douglas recalled attending a rally in New Haven for Lonnie McLucas, who was charged with and convicted of killing fellow Panther Alex Rackley, whom the group suspected of being an informant, writing, “[I] felt like a complete fool facing 100 tactical police armed with magnums after hearing a Panther woman read a poem which included derogatory statements about ‘white fags.'” Instead, Douglas stated, “[I] declare myself to be an enemy of the Black Panther Party and its goals until the group as a whole develops its consciousness and ends its sexist oppression against all homosexuals of any race.”
Alternatively, the statement of the male homosexual workshop at the Philadelphia RPCC recognized Newton’s message to gay liberation as a “vanguard revolutionary action.” It declared, “We recognize the Black Panther Party as being the vanguard of the people’s revolution in Amerikkka.” These gay men saw the acceptance by the Panthers as a major change. The Chicago Gay Liberation Front wrote that the Panthers were “the first national organization to give us such warm, public support, as well as official recognition.” At the conference, the gay men added, “They treated us with respect and consideration; not acting judgmentally toward what was unfamiliar or even strange to them.” While the gay men recognized that the women were treated differently, they saw actions being taken to remedy this. They observed that one male Panther insulted a lesbian, but the Panthers subsequently removed him. They also noted that the spokesperson for women’s liberation acknowledged that she did not treat the lesbian women as sisters and said she would attempt to remedy the situation. According to the Philadelphia-based underground paper Distant Drummer, the “most important” achievement of the RPCC was “the interracial makeup of the plenary session” and “the cooperative tie forged between the Panthers and the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements.”
At the same time, white lesbians were not the only LGBT group that had difficulties working with the Panthers. Third World Gay Revolution, which was formerly the Black Caucus of the GLF in Chicago, also encountered difficulties. Between September 9 and November 11, after the first convention meeting in Philadelphia and before the second in Washington, DC, the group revised its Thirteen Point Platform, adding three points. Two called for the abolition of capital punishment and the penal system. The third and now longest point was likely a critique of the Panthers, though it did not mention them by name. The group wrote, in part, “We believe that so-called comrades who call themselves ‘revolutionaries’ have failed to deal with their sexist attitudes…. To gain their anti-homosexual stance, they have used the weapons of the oppressor thereby becoming the agent of the oppressor.” The message was clear: While Huey Newton and other Panthers were certainly ahead of American society in general in their principled acceptance of gay liberation, the alliance was not fully supported by either group, and tensions persisted.
The Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Washington, DC
The second Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention was held in Washington, DC, from November 26 to 29, 1970. With the theme “Survival Through Service to the People,” it was intended to signal the Panthers’ move toward community survival programs and away from armed self-defense and immediate revolution. According to one report from attendees, the Philadelphia convention attracted ten thousand people, 70 percent of whom were black, while the Washington convention attracted five thousand people, only one third of whom were black. The convention was smaller, and there was a larger proportion of white allies, including a significant contingent of mostly white LGBT activists.
While the Philadelphia convention was fairly well run, the Washington convention encountered many problems. The biggest stumbling block was that the group was prevented from using the facilities it had reserved at Howard University. Many were also upset when the Panthers decided to read a constitution they prepared, rather than incorporating the suggestions of all groups. This document contained many omissions, including the struggle of LGBT people. In the Panthers’ defense, though, the document was a general preamble, which did not mention specific causes or concerns, instead outlining general principles like revolutionary unity and self-determination for all people. Still, one activist wrote, “Everything came down unfortunately in the form of a directive or command.” A report in the Berkeley Tribe stated that the panel of speakers was male dominated and “only during the discussion period did he [Newton] seem sensitive to the oppression of women and gay people.”
However, gay liberation groups reported a positive experience at the DC convention, having set up their own organization, communications, and housing, which “made the convention something of a success for GLF when as a whole it was a disaster.” The Tribe reported that “for gay people, especially gay men, the convention formed the back drop for the largest gathering of revolutionary homosexuals ever.” The Panther convention also connected gay liberationists with others on the New Left. Lexa Williams of Fort Worth wrote to the Bay Area paper Gay Sunshine, “According to the straight press, the convention was a big flop. If any of you were there you must know it was far from that…. It was an education and this will be carried back to collectives all across the country. It was there that I had my first direct encounter with Gays… Your (and all of our) problem is so huge that it just slapped me in the face. I had not before realized or accepted it. There is just so much for all of us to do.”
As reported in the Berkeley Barb, roughly 150 LGBT people met at All Saints Church in Washington, DC. It was mostly male, but there was also a trans caucus that began a dialogue about antitrans discrimination. The group also “had to confront our own racism with our third world sisters and brothers” and unanimously accepted the demands of Third World Gay Revolutionaries as the demands of the group to the Panther leadership of the RPCC. The group of representatives they chose comprised four people of color, four white women, and two white men. At the celebration at Malcolm X Park, thousands gathered to hear the Panther band play, and gay men led people in dances, shouting, “Homo, homo, homo sexual, the ruling class is ineffectual!” However, oppression at the hands of the state was also on display at the DC meeting as two black gay men were beaten by police outside the Zephyr Bar, though they were not arrested.
As at the Philadelphia convention, some LGBT activists remained concerned about ongoing gender inequality, with the Boston GLF walking out of the Washington conference because of continued sexism in the movement. Similarly, Tracy Knight of the Louisville GLF announced that their group was dissociating from the Panthers. Martha Shelley wrote in her influential 1970 piece “Gay Is Good,” “We’re gonna make our own revolution because we’re sick of revolutionary posters which depict straight he-man types and earth mothers, with guns and babies. We’re sick of the Panthers lumping us together with the capitalists in their term of universal contempt—’faggot.'” In another piece, Shelley criticized the undemocratic structure of the Black Panther Party. She also saw Newton’s statement as patronizing, asking, “Why did some gay people walk so tall after receiving Good Huey’s seal of approval, as if their needs could not be considered valid, nor they revolutionary, unless the Black Panther Party approved of them?” An article in Gay Sunshine suggested that lesbian feminists should break from the male chauvinist and authoritarian Panthers and continue to focus on racism by relating to gays and lesbians of color. Historian Anne M. Valk concludes, “The attempt to form coalitions brought black liberation, gay liberation, and women’s liberation groups into contact in new ways. But even among those who shared common goals, political priorities and strategies came into conflict; direct interaction at the RPCC exacerbated, rather than smoothed, these differences.”
At the same time, scholars have shown there was greater complexity to gender relations within the Black Panther Party than the broad view of a sexist, male chauvinist hierarchy. In particular, Robyn C. Spencer’s recent work on the Oakland chapter sheds greater light on the ways in which “strong manhood” didn’t necessarily mean “submissive womanhood.” In particular, in response to police brutality, “armed self-defense as a marker of strength and determination [was] exemplified not just by men but by women.” Moreover, in Emily K. Hobson’s new work on gay and lesbian radicalism in the Bay Area, she highlights the group Gay Women’s Liberation, active from 1969 to 1972, which modeled the ideas and tactics of the Black Panther Party to advance the practice of collective defense as a strategy to oppose state violence. While the Radicalesbians founds themselves in conflict with the BPP, Gay Women’s Liberation created a stronger bond with the party and attended two Bay Area follow-up meetings to the RPCC. Still, Spencer is clear in acknowledging that the Black Panther Party had “internal debates around sexuality, gender politics, and leadership [that] simmered under the surface because many viewed them as deferrable at a time of political instability” in the face of state repression.
Still, while some groups did not feel the Panthers had accomplished much and did not feel a stronger connection to the Panthers, the RPCC that the Panthers organized was very influential for the gay liberationists who attended, in part because they came to realize they needed to act more independently. Mike Silverstein, a leader of the Berkeley GLF, concluded, “We left knowing that the time is past when we can be Panther Groupies. We still want to work with other oppressed peoples, but nobody’s going to make our revolution for us.” An activist named A. G. concurred, pointing out in the Berkeley Tribe that while the Panthers remained the most advanced revolutionary group, they could not speak for the entire revolutionary movement, adding, “[The BPP] has shown very little understanding of the problems confronting the white communities, male, female and gay, and very little disposition to try and deal with those problems.” Consequently, white people should “do it in our own way, using our own methods and ideas…. not all of [Newton’s] ideas are applicable in the white community.” Where this left people of color in gay liberation organizations was not addressed.
Nick Benton, also of the Berkeley GLF, viewed the Washington convention as an important turning point as well, with members of the gay liberation delegation realizing they lacked the revolutionary fervor of the Panthers. Benton wrote of the RPCC that “Gay Liberation exposed itself to itself, a frightened, confused bunch of kids who really came to Washington for reasons other than revolution… Since then, every time a revolutionary dies, Gay Liberation dies a little more… every George Jackson, every Attica drives us farther back from our revolutionary call, back into the bars, into the suburbs.”
However, contrary to Benton’s view, the Panthers and gay liberation were not really breaking apart so much as moving more independently in the same direction, away from revolution and toward “survival pending revolution,” focusing on community programs, legal reform, and electoral politics. As Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin observe, in the spring of 1971, the Black Panther Party “implemented a sweeping demilitarization of its image.” At the same time, they closed down chapters around the country and consolidated their efforts in Oakland. The party began “resembling a social service organization, motivated by revolutionary ideology.” The Panthers believed that the goal of “survival pending revolution”—meeting the needs of the people until conditions became more propitious for revolution—was the best response to the situation of the time. However, historian Alondra Nelson points out that “the heightened emphasis of the service program did not amount to the Party’s complete abolition of armed self-defense.”
The influence of the RPCC on Bay Area LGBT activists continued after the gathering in Washington, highlighting the continued energetic organizing in anticipation of local elections in April 1971. Eight days of workshops, part of another regional RPCC in the Bay Area following the DC convention, were held in December 1970, with one for LGBT issues on Tuesday and another on community control of police the following day. Out of this came the April 6 Coalition Platform, created in January 1971, which emphasized intercommunalism and included the Panthers, gay liberation, and women’s liberation. The primary issue was passage of the Community Control of Police Charter Amendment, which citizens of Berkeley would vote on come April 6.
Police Brutality and the Transformation of the Panthers and Gay Liberation
Gay activists continued to deal with the problem of police brutality following the Washington conference. In December 1970, a private security guard at a gay club knocked a gay man named Kent Strever unconscious and turned him over to police. The officers then beat Strever behind the San Francisco Mission Station before charging him with public intoxication and fleeing. On December 12, police attempted to disperse the dozens of people gathered outside the Stud, a gay bar, at closing time. Charles Christman, the president of the GLF at San Francisco State, nervous at seeing people being beaten and trying to leave, was driving out of the parking lot when police shot at his car and rammed it with a police cruiser. As he escaped the vehicle, officers shot him in the back, elbow, and ankle, though he survived. Police charged Christman with five counts of assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon, saying he tried to hit them with his car. He would later testify that officers kicked and hit him in the groin after they shot him down. Christman’s first trial ended in a hung jury, 10 to 2 against him. Faced with the possibility of life imprisonment, he agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of assault and battery to avoid a retrial. He was fined roughly $3,600 in present-day dollars and received three years of probation.
Activists who presented their report to the police commission in the immediate aftermath of the Christman shooting said it was the second shooting by police in recent months and the ninth attack by police from the southern station in recent weeks. The shooting also brought together both moderate and radical organizations, from SIR and the Tavern Guild to the Berkeley GLF and Gay Women’s Liberation. Mike Robinson, a black gay man, said of the shooting, “White middle class gays are finally getting turned on to oppression. We’ve got to start getting together to deal with oppression because if we want to get ourselves liberated, then we’ve got to be willing to defend ourselves and not put faith in pigs of any kind.” In calling for the freedom of Chuck Christman, Robinson argued that gay activists needed to work for the freedom of all political prisoners. He asked, “Why aren’t some of you helping to free Bobby Seale, Seattle 7 (once 8, but one is alive and gone underground), John Clutchette, or any of the powerful Indians of Alcatraz. You just can’t fight for the liberation of white gay people, but you must fight for the liberation of ALL people.”
On April 6, 1971, the voters of Berkeley considered Amendment 1 on community control of police and voted it down, with the count at the end of the day 9,872 in favor and 20,755 opposed. However, even before the vote, the Panthers and their allies believed they were victorious regardless of the outcome. Their newspaper declared, “Community Control of Police has already won. The tremendous educational effect and the political consciousness that has been raised in the last year and a half throughout the city, due to organizing that has gone on around the issue, is testimony to this fact.” The Panthers pointed to the way their campaign for community control of police exposed the undemocratic structure of local government and that government’s support from “an extraordinarily expensive campaign of lies, distortions and slander.” Even if the amendment failed, the organizing effort had put in place grassroots groups on blocks around the city and “had a greater impact on Berkeley than any other issue in the city’s history.” Furthermore, Berkeley’s newly elected and first black mayor, Warren Widener, planned to take action. He set as his primary objective a revision of the city charter, which gave more power to the city manager than the mayor and the city council. With greater political power, he planned to advance a number of reforms, including community control of police.
Gay activist and reporter Nick Benton wrote in May 1971, “Gay Liberation has taken a big turn… and many consider the R.P.C.C. to have been a turning point.” Despite the failure of Amendment 1, as the Panthers continued to evolve, gay liberationists continued to model them. For example, gay activist and priest Michael Itkin, though critical of the Panthers in 1969, called on gay activists to recognize the potential for liberation through religion just as the BPP was in 1971. He wrote, “We see, today, the Black Panther Party calling on its membership to recognize the radical potential of Black Churches again. Likewise, today, there is a growing Gay consciousness and demand for Gay freedom.”
Other LGBT activists modeled the Panthers’ community programs and requested clothing for redistribution as well as doctors, lawyers, and teachers who would provide free medical, legal, and educational services. Newton and the Panthers came to believe that “the vicious service-revolver of the police is only one manifestation of violence.” Those who lacked food, clothing, and medicine were also victims of state violence in an affluent country and must be defended through revolutionary intercommunal efforts that served the people. Similarly, by January 1972, Bay Area activist Don Jackson, who had earlier been an important spark for the idea of a gay colony in Alpine County, observed, “Service organizations have replaced the old gay lib groups. The new groups are doing practical things to alleviate poverty, unemployment, medical, legal and psychological problems.” In March 1972, the Panthers held the Black Community Survival Conference, which was not solely for African Americans. Rather, they sought to “unify the black community vote, the white revolutionary and radical vote, around concrete survival programs.” While the group had become more localized, they now sought to expand fifteen community survival programs on a large scale.
In May 1971, gay liberationists in the Bay Area experienced the split that previously fractured gay activists in New York. Gay Activists Alliance West formed, and the “less-than-revolutionaries” broke off from the San Francisco GLF to pursue one-issue politics through gays-only organizing using nonviolent means. However, even the more moderate GAA had a “militant youth arm” known as the Purple Panthers. At the same time, the Berkeley GLF disbanded “to free gay people to do their thing in small-collective and affinity-group fashion truer to the sense of what being a revolutionary gay means.”
However, the Panthers’ influence and agenda left an indelible mark on gay liberation: gay activism on issues like police brutality continued; gay advocacy of armed self-defense persisted; and white gay consciousness of issues of race remained. When the Western Regional Gay Men’s Conference was held in the summer of 1971, the thirteen workshops included one focused on the experiences of Third World gays and another on gay political prisoners. Following a vote of support for Willie Brown’s consensual-sex bill, gays noticed a police crackdown against them, with fifty arrests in two weeks. In response, at Mission Dolores Park in San Francisco, gays began patrolling the park with cameras “to protect brothers from police enticement trips.” Gay activists decried the fact that they were targeted for committing victimless crimes while 87 percent of felonies went unsolved.
Following harassment of gay people on Mason Street by the tactical squad during an antiwar rally, the controversial and combative Rev. Ray Broshears said it was time for “returning violence for violence.” Out of the Gay Activists Alliance Purple Panther Division, Broshears formed the Lavender Panthers in 1973, though they made no alliance with the Black Panthers. The group patrolled the streets to combat violence against gays, though mostly dealing with attacks by civilians rather than police. That summer, Broshears and two other Lavender Panthers appeared in the San Francisco Examiner holding guns and sawed-off pool cues. Just as the Lavender Panthers dissolved, Bay Area Gay Liberation (BAGL) was founded at the start of 1975, advocating “Gay Liberation Through Socialist Revolution,” with a Self-Defense Committee for “defusing dangerous situations” and a Safe Streets Committee. BAGL also created an Anti–Male Supremacy Committee to deal, in part, with the power, “glamorization of physical strength,” and fighting that could come with having a defense organization. BAGL later spawned a spinoff group, Gay Action, which advocated armed self-defense to “resist violent attacks against individuals in our community.”
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The Black Panther Party had a greater depth of contact with and longer-lasting influence on gay liberation than previously acknowledged, as an examination of movement activism in the Bay Area reveals. However, the influence was often greater than the contact. While a great range of viewpoints on alliances between the Panthers and gay liberation could be observed in both camps, sometimes split along gender lines, many gay activists affirmed a united front even before Newton’s statement on gay liberation, and numerous gay activists who rejected an alliance were nonetheless influenced by Panther ideology and action. Foremost among the reasons for working together was their shared identity as criminalized groups and their shared goal of combating police brutality. Gay liberationists modeled Panther approaches to dealing with police violence, marking a clear break with homophile reformism. The two groups followed a similar trajectory, experiencing fractures and turning more toward survival programs and electoral politics in the spring of 1971. Still, both groups continued to focus on the issue of police brutality, with important contingents of the Panthers and gay liberation continuing to advocate armed self-defense.
In April 1969, Berkeley police killed Frank Bartley, one of the gay men whose death was highlighted by the Committee for Homosexual Freedom in the leaflets they passed out at the Panther conference that summer. The following year, a five-day memorial for Bartley was held, with activists wearing lavender armbands and the Gay Guerrilla Theater reenacting the murder. The year after that, in April 1971, moderate and radical gay activists again gathered to remember Bartley and continued to seek the dismissal of the officers involved in the killing as well as the Berkeley chief of police. Indeed, concern and outrage about the killings that led gay activists to seek out an alliance with the Panthers would not soon be forgotten.
Like the Black Panther Party, though, gays in the early 1970s would move their primary efforts from protest to politics. In the Bay Area, this, too, saw some continued efforts at cooperation. In 1973, when Panthers Bobby Seale and Elaine Brown ran for mayor and city council representative in Oakland, they did so advocating new laws that would prohibit police brutality and bar discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing, child custody, and other realms. The Oakland-based interracial Gay Men’s Political Action Group, in turn, focused their electoral energy on getting Seale and Brown into power. The group assisted in broad political outreach that created an alliance that, though unsuccessful, ultimately forced the incumbent mayor into a runoff against candidate Seale. While the Gay Men’s Political Action Group disbanded after the election, the members themselves continued their organizing efforts elsewhere.