Stephen Vider. Gender & History. Volume 27, Issue 3. November 2015.
In the winter of 1975, the Berkeley‐based magazine Gay Sunshine ran a classified ad placed by a group of men seeking others to join their urban commune: ‘FORT HILL FAGGOTS: We are creating a radicalized faggot community in Boston. Interested?’ Similar ads appeared frequently in North American gay and counterculture periodicals throughout the 1970s. A 1974 issue of the Canadian newspaper Body Politic contained four listings for communes, including one that balanced the practical and political: ‘GAY MALE COMMUNE seeks seventh person. Cooking and gay liberation politics considered assets’. An ad in Kaliflower, a Bay Area commune newsletter, read, ‘OUR GAY COMMUNE HAS ROOM FOR TWO MORE. CALL AND RAP’. Communal living could even prove a useful real estate pitch: The Empty Closet, a gay liberation newsletter published in Rochester, New York, included this ad in 1973, ‘HOUSE AVAILABLE FOR GAY COMMUNE: 3BR, kitchen, dining room, large living room’.
Although largely neglected in most accounts of 1970s gay politics and culture, communal living—sharing a house, an apartment or land—was widely discussed and practiced as a central strategy of gay male liberation. Following several nights of riots at New York’s Stonewall Inn in June 1969, gay liberation groups emerged in cities and on college campuses across the country, encouraging gay men and lesbians to ‘come out’ and come together. Gay communal living was immediately conceived as a vital component of this revolution. In his widely reprinted essay ‘A Gay Manifesto’, Carl Wittman wrote that the creation of gay liberation communes was an important step towards creating what he called a gay ‘free territory’—free from the economic exploitation that characterised many straight‐owned bars and baths in the ‘gay ghettos’ of New York City and San Francisco. In Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation, an early synthesis of gay liberation theory, Dennis Altman wrote, matter‐of‐factly, ‘The ultimate extension of gay community is the gay commune … in essence an attempt to create a new form of extended family’. And Life magazine’s 1971 article, ‘Homosexuals in Revolt’, included a photo of rural ‘communalists’ among gay liberation’s many ‘experiments with different life‐styles’.
It is impossible to say precisely how many gay male communes—or living collectives, as they were often called—formed in the 1970s. The earliest, and most self‐conscious, emerged between 1969 and 1972 out of newly formed gay liberation groups in major cities. But many more, shaped by gay liberation if not always tied to gay liberation groups, would appear in the years that followed, in urban as well as rural areas. These communes varied, in their specific goals, their size, their longevity, their spaces and their membership. Some were multiracial and cross‐class. Some lasted for a few months, others several years. What their members all shared was a belief in communal living as a vital alternative to the heterosexual reproductive household and a potential pathway towards personal and collective change.
Gay men were hardly alone in seeking to create communes. Between 1960 and 1975, communes in the US multiplied exponentially—from a few hundred to many thousand—and became a common topic of conversation, study and media coverage. Back‐to‐the‐land communes—founded by young ‘hippies’ who sought escape from contemporary technology and consumerism—were the most frequently discussed and depicted in popular magazines and newspapers. But rural communes were only the most visible manifestation of a more diverse communal movement, including religious or spiritual communities, political collectives, artist colonies, urban communes and crash‐pads, all of which were themselves part of a broadening revolt against the norms of the breadwinner‐homemaker household. By the late 1970s, the term ‘alternative lifestyles’ had come to encompass a wide variety of ‘nontraditional’ domestic relations including communes, cohabitation, group marriage, heterosexual singles, single‐parent households, ‘swinging’ and same‐sex relationships. But while gay activists drew inspiration and momentum from other political, social and sexual radicals around them, they also invested communal living with unique meaning, as a primary strategy for reinventing gay social and sexual culture.
Gay activists drew particular inspiration from radical and lesbian feminists, who sought to expose and resist culturally‐inscribed gender and sexual norms—or ‘sex roles’ as they were commonly termed at the time—and, with them, male‐dominated power structures, most centrally, the patriarchal family. Separatism from men was increasingly presented as a defining strategy for resistance, leading many women to establish collective households and communes around the country, and to redefine lesbianism as a form of political resistance. Advocates for gay male collectives frequently built upon these analyses of sex roles, arguing that communal living would allow men to better understand their own male privilege and examine the ways norms of heterosexual masculinity had impacted their relationships. In some places, gay men and lesbians formed communes together, but many more argued that combatting female and male sex roles required creating female‐ and male‐only spaces.
For many gay liberation activists, male sex roles, rooted in a heterosexist, capitalist patriarchy, were directly to blame for one of the primary problems facing gay men: loneliness—a sense of isolation and alienation from each other. Communes offered a means of resisting this psychological oppression, by encouraging and modelling new forms of connection, rooted in emotional authenticity, sexual openness and shared practices of home‐making. Gay commune members saw themselves, and were seen by others, as modelling a new kind of family, elevating social and sexual relationships among gay men as a source of intimate and communal belonging.
‘Belonging’ and ‘belongingness’ were keywords of 1950s and 60s social science and popular thought. As conceptualised by influential psychologist Abraham Maslow, the term ‘belongingness’ framed the search for love, friendship and community as a primary human need and source of motivation. For thinkers and radicals of the 1960s, ‘belonging’ emerged as the opposite of alienation, and a key path towards authenticity. As ‘A Gay Manifesto’ put it, ‘We’re all looking for security, a flow of love, and a feeling of belonging and being needed’.
Historians have paid remarkably little attention to the expanding range of home‐making discourses and practices among gay men in North America in the decades after the Second World War, focusing largely on organised political groups; acts of public resistance; expanding media access and representation; and spaces of commercial entertainment and/or public sex. The gay liberation movement, in particular, has typically been framed by activists’ own focus on visibility—a goal captured in the popular slogan, ‘Out of the closets, into the streets’. That slogan, and the liberation‐era image of the closet itself, has long aligned privacy with secrecy, and secrecy with the home. Reiterating a ‘separate spheres’ ideology, historians have tended to treat domestic spaces and practices as simply private, with little bearing on political and communal life.
Recent work has begun to question this divide. Heather Murray and Daniel Winunwe Rivers have shown how the lives of gay men and lesbians were shaped by reproductive ties—their relationships with their parents and with their children. Lauren Gutterman has shown how married women negotiated romantic and sexual relationships with other women—often within the homes they shared with their families. Earlier work by George Chauncey, Marc Stein, Daniel Hurewitz, David Johnson, John Howard and others has also demonstrated the importance of residential patterns in shaping conceptions of gay identity and community.
Communes and collective living more generally, as forms of alternative domesticity, have inspired, in contrast, a rich historiography, particularly on 1960s and 70s counterculture and the New Left—including Timothy Miller’s history of 1960s communes, as well as case studies by Tim Hodgdon and Blake Slonecker. Work from the 1990s by Dana Shugar and Gill Valentine have also demonstrated the importance of lesbian communes as a form of community building and political resistance in the 1970s and 80s—drawing especially on Joyce Cheney’s 1985 anthology Lesbian Land. Gay male communes, which emerged at the same time, have received far less attention—in part because they rarely lasted as long and were, on the whole, less well‐documented. This article reveals the unexpected centrality of communes and the home to gay male liberation, showing how activists pressed on the boundaries of private and public life—reinventing domestic practices, spaces and relationships not as a retreat from politics or community but a form of everyday political and social rebellion.
Gay Communal Living in Theory
Gay communes emerged at a moment of dramatic change for gay male communities and politics. Gay male social life of the 1950s and 60s had been shaped fundamentally by fear of persecution by the police, and exposure to friends, family members and employers. Vice squads staked out homosexuals in known gathering spots, including public bathrooms, and conducted routine raids on bars. Men who were arrested might also find their names published in local newspapers, only to be fired by their employers. Gay activists, in turn, had largely advocated for the integration of gay men and lesbians into American society as ‘normal’ middle‐class citizens, through legal reform and education—even as they sometimes, and increasingly, worked for more radical sexual and social inclusivity out of mainstream view.
A younger generation of activists, beginning in the late 1960s, took a more publicly anti‐authoritarian stance under the banner of gay liberation, positioning homosexuality as a revolutionary assault on the American socioeconomic system. Inspired and emboldened by the New Left, Black Power and Third World Liberation, second‐wave feminism and the counterculture, gay liberation brought together three major threads of 1960s social activism and social thought. The first was a revolutionary stance against capitalism and the state; the second was a belief in personal ‘authenticity’; and the third was a rejection of the nuclear family. Radical feminism incorporated all three, rejecting consumer culture and heterosexual, reproductive domesticity as obstacles to women’s self‐development. Building on Marx and Engels, feminist writers framed the nuclear family household as both the foundational unit of modern capitalism and a major force of patriarchal power, conscripting women to limited gender and sexual roles.
Gay liberation activists built on these analyses, adding heterosexuality to the list of the family’s oppressions. As Carl Wittman put it, ‘Right from the beginning we have been subjected to a barrage of straight propaganda. Since our parents don’t know any homosexuals, we grow up thinking that we’re alone and different and perverted’. Heterosexual marriage, too, was understood as a repressive institution. Wittman, who had been married briefly himself, warned gay men against mimicking marriage in their own romantic relationships: ‘To accept that happiness comes through finding a groovy spouse and settling down, showing the world that “we’re just the same as you”, is avoiding the real issues, and is an expression of self‐hatred’.
Such ideas circulated well beyond Wittman’s manifesto. Third World Gay Revolution, a group of black and Latino activists, put the point sharply in their manifesto, ‘What We Want, What We Believe’: ‘We want the abolition of the institution of the bourgeois nuclear family’, which ‘perpetuates the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality by creating sex roles, sex definitions and sexual exploitation’. Japanese‐American activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya similarly claimed in the Philadelphia Free Press: ‘Homosexuals have burst their chains and abandoned their closets … We come to challenge the incredible hypocrisy of your sexual monogamy, your oppressive sexual role‐playing, your nuclear family, your Protestant ethic, apple pie and Mother’.
Gay liberation activists also looked down on past modes of gay domesticity—particularly a mode of flamboyant ‘camp’ domesticity, which they aligned with effeminacy, inauthenticity and bourgeois capitalism. In one essay from Gay Sunshine, titled ‘The Fairy Princess Exposed’, Craig Hanson argued that an older generation of gay men had created an enclosed ‘fairyland’ in order to escape their own feelings of inadequacy—a ‘fantasy world of poodle dogs and Wedgewood teacups and chandeliers and all the fancy clothes and home furnishings any queen could ever desire’. This assessment of gay homes of the past was not without reality—some gay men of the 1950s and 60s did embrace a self‐consciously over‐the‐top domestic aesthetic. But gay activists pathologised such homes as hopeless role‐playing—a kind of minstrelsy that parroted cultural stereotypes of gay effeminacy.
Gay communes promised an alternative to both modes of domesticity—both the heterosexual nuclear family and the ‘bourgeois’ gay home. One of the earliest calls for gay male communes, Steven Dansky’s essay ‘Hey Man’, published in the gay liberation newspaper Come Out, promoted communal living as an essential means of remaking gay sexuality and sociality. As Dansky explained, ‘In order that we fight our oppressor we must band together’ in what he called ‘Revolutionary Male Homosexual Collectives’. Collective living would allow gay men to challenge the romantic norm of monogamy, and ‘begin to remould our homosexuality by developing a communistic sexuality of sharing, cooperation, selflessness and total community’. Dansky went further to suggest gay male living collectives might adopt and raise male homeless youth ‘so that they do not acquire the male supremacist ideation of manhood’.
Dansky’s discussion of sex roles was informed, in great part, by feminist critiques of male supremacy—including that of gay men. Dansky specifically cited recent articles by Robin Morgan and Rita Mae Brown from Rat—a two‐year old newspaper recently taken over by radical feminists. In ‘Goodbye to All That’, Morgan wrote, ‘No getting away, no matter how else you are oppressed, from the primary oppression of being female in a patriarchal world. It hurts to hear that the Sisters in the Gay Liberation Front, too, have to struggle continually against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers’. Rita Mae Brown wrote more pointedly, ‘Most male homosexuals I know are desperately clinging to the externals of cock privilege while secretly fearing they aren’t really men. One of the ironies that clearly demonstrates this exists within some of the political homosexual groups—they are often male supremacist’. Morgan and Brown’s critiques were just two markers of the growing rift between gay and lesbian activists and increasing advocacy for women’s separatism from men, straight and gay. Dansky redirected such critiques to call for gay men to examine sexism through intentional separatism of their own.
Dansky also presented communes as a corrective to existing gay social and sexual outlets, which he viewed as perpetuating gay male oppression and alienation. As Dansky wrote, ‘G.L.F. must demand the complete negation of the use of gay bars, tea rooms, trucks, baths, streets, and other traditional cruising institutions. These are exploitative institutions designed to keep gay men in the roles given to them by a male heterosexual system’. Dansky’s view of commercial gay spaces, cruising and public sex tapped into a broader critique of capitalism as a source of alienation—a stance shared by many gay liberation activists. It also discounted the role of commercial gay spaces in shaping gay identities, communities and politics—spaces that would become only more important in the years to come, not only through the proliferation of gay bars but also the rise of disco and dance clubs.
Nevertheless the broader message of Dansky’s article and others like it clearly resonated for many young gay men. In his essay ‘My Gay Soul’, Gary Alinder echoed Dansky’s critique: ‘I need to be together with other gay men. We have not been together—we’ve not had enough self respect for that. Isolated sex and then look for another partner. Enough of that, that’s where we’ve been. Let’s go somewhere else’. What gay men needed, Alinder argued, were new spaces that would allow for new patterns of social and sexual interaction—communes among them. Many gay liberation writers of the 1970s questioned a sharp homosexual/heterosexual binary—calling upon activists to ‘free the homosexual in everyone’. But calls for gay communes, like Alinder’s, tended to affirm same‐sex desire by essentialising and naturalising ‘gayness’—and with it maleness.
The idea of the gay commune caught on overseas as well. The authors of the London Gay Liberation Front Manifesto wrote, ‘Our gay communes and collectives must not be mere convenient living arrangements—or worse, just extensions of the gay ghetto. They must be a focus of consciousness‐raising (i.e. raising or increasing our awareness of our real oppression) and of gay liberation activity’. German filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim’s film Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (It is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse But the Society in Which He Lives), released in 1971, offered a similar critique of German gay culture. A gay picaresque, the film began with its young protagonist following another man home to his ornate Berlin apartment. It ended with a trip to a commune. In the final scene, the hero confesses the errors of his past ways—he is glad he has not become a member of the bourgeoisie, with a wife and children, but he also regrets his failure to connect with other gay men despite sleeping with so many of them. As one of the men explains, ‘You’ve become a professional fag. All you’re interested in is sex and everything that goes with it … You’ve become a whore who doesn’t even get paid. You’ve become incapable of entering into a human relationship … You live exactly like millions of other gays’.
Gay Communal Living in Practice
The exaltation of the commune was more than mere rhetoric. In the early 1970s, gay liberation groups formed communes in major cities across the United States. Within Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, Gay Liberation Front formed five gay male ‘living collectives’, known by their street: 95th, 23rd, 17th, 12th and Baltic. The spaces and membership varied: the ten members of the 17th Street Collective lived in a large loft of a commercial building, between the offices of the raunchy and radical Screw magazine and the Communist Party. In his book The Gay Militants, published in June 1971, Donn Teal wrote that the apartment ‘breathed variety’, with ‘nine or ten rugs; work tables; a sewing machine and spotless kitchen; a huge planter suspended from the roof light; a World War I helmet; a bulletin board; and posters of Che and Picasso’s Don Quixote that did not seem incompatible’. Many of the members had already been heavily involved in New Left and civil rights politics—including Allen Young, who had worked for Liberation News Service; Guy Nassberg (later known as Jason Serinus) who had worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and Jim Fouratt who had been a key member of the Yippie movement. Several members also visited and worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigades, to show solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.
The 95th Street Collective, in contrast, had fewer members—four, and later five men, all between the ages of twenty and twenty‐five—only one of whom had been heavily involved in leftist politics prior to gay liberation. The apartment itself was also smaller and more sparsely decorated. As John Knoebel recalled, the apartment was on the second floor of a twelve‐floor apartment building—two bedrooms, an eat‐in‐kitchen and a living room. He was the fourth to move in—just after the other three had discovered a sale at a local paint shop, and painted the living room and the foyer bright red, adding to the intensity. Knoebel also recalled that the only furniture in the living room were five mattresses, covered in sheets and strewn around the room—an ideal arrangement for holding larger GLF meetings and for hosting out of town activists.
The 95th Street Collective expanded further on the theory behind communal living in an article titled ‘Five Notes on Collective Living’. The accompanying photograph encapsulated both the spirit of gay liberation and the spirit of gay communalism. The five members were nude, suggesting the importance of authenticity and self‐revelation. Each one had a flower in his hand or hair, suggesting their rejection of masculine gender performance; and each one lightly touched the arm of the man in front of him, suggesting both their emotional connection and the potential for erotic contact. The article itself carefully balanced individualism and collectivity—each of the five members wrote one section, but did not sign their names. The first note began, ‘Any group which calls itself radical and revolutionary must concern itself with providing an alternative way for people to live and work together than the competitive, role‐oriented model which heterosexual, capitalist society offers us’. The revolution, they insisted, needed to account for the psychological patterns of daily domestic and work life if it were to make a lasting impact. In her work on the New Left, Wini Breines usefully distinguished strategic politics—largely characterised by ‘organization building’—from prefigurative politics—efforts to ‘create and prefigure in lived action and behavior the desired society’. Gay communalism partook of a similar prefigurative logic: the commune was a microcosm of the new society GLF envisioned.
The collective worked hard to put such ideals into practice: they held two group meetings every week—one to discuss the practical details of living together, the other to discuss their feelings and relationships. They strove to spend much of their spare time together, too, turning every apparently personal experience into a subject for group discussion. Any disagreement between members was also brought out before the entire group for resolution. Everyone was expected to function as ‘equals’ within the house—sharing all ideas, and making all decisions together, however long it took.
Such ideals of sharing extended to sexual practices as well—though not quite as successfully. John Knoebel explained, ‘We tried to be physical together: holding one another, kissing each other in greeting. We learned to be naked together, around the apartment and sitting at meetings … Several times we moved mattresses into the living room and all slept together’. Despite their efforts though, most of the sexual contact members had during their time in the commune was with outsiders. ‘[T]heory’, Knoebel wrote regretfully, ‘was not supported by our feelings’. What little sex there was within the household, far from uniting them, often led to jealousy.
Members of other GLF communes similarly hoped that collective living would enable new forms of connection and cooperation: Nikos Diaman, a member of the Baltic Street Collective, recalled the day the seven members (five of them white, two black) first moved into their three‐story house in Brooklyn: ‘Once we got everything inside, we took a break … One man undressed and lay down on a mattress. Another followed suit … One by one we each undressed and joined the pile of warm bodies. All of us laughed as we playfully rolled around on the mattress. It was difficult to tell where one body began and another ended’. They shared cooking responsibilities (even though two were far better chefs than the others); shared clothes (even though some members were bigger than others); and walked around the apartment naked or half‐naked, despite the objections of passersby who saw them through the windows. ‘Openness’, Diaman recalled, ‘was equated with freedom, the elimination of shame. Whatever we did with our bodies was natural and need not be hidden. Someone even suggested removing the bathroom door, but that never happened’. The collective found house meetings more tiresome: ‘Decisions were made as quickly as possible just to shorten the agony’. As a result, they ended up vetoing most of each other’s artworks as objectionable (a portrait of the Madonna and child, for example, was considered anti‐feminist). Some members also made decisions without consulting others: one member bought a waterbed, adopted a dog and used food stamps to purchase a kitchen clock, all without discussion.
Other gay liberation groups formed similar communes in cities across the US. In autumn 1970, in Washington DC, a group of white, African‐American and Puerto Rican gay liberation activists (including initially one woman) moved into a three‐story rowhouse near DuPont Circle—then an area known as the city’s countercultural, activist and gay centre. (The collective later divided, and formed a second house down the block). In Los Angeles, GLF members moved into a house on Hoover Street and began planning the creation of a gay community service centre. Similar collectives, tied to gay liberation organisations, formed in San Francisco; Louisville, Kentucky; Boston; Philadelphia and Chicago—though there were many more without direct ties to gay liberation groups.
By the mid‐1970s, some gay men had also formed communes in the country, inspired as much by gay liberation as a desire to get ‘back to the land’. In 1970, for example, unbeknownst to most readers of his manifesto, Carl Wittman left California for Wolf Creek, Oregon, where he eventually set up a rural commune with his lover Allan Troxler. By 1974, Allen Young, who had been in the 17th Street Collective, left New York and headed to northern Massachusetts, where he established a new commune called Butterworth Farm. And in Washington state, GLF leader Faygele ben Miriam (formerly John Singer), left the commune he helped found in Seattle and moved to the Olympic Peninsula to start a farm near the Elwha River. Many of these communes would eventually come together to launch RFD, a ‘country journal by gay men’, which frequently included reports from rural commune members.
Commune members also strived for psychological transformation—a goal epitomised by consciousness‐raising or CR, a practice borrowed from the women’s movement. CR was first named and pioneered by New York Radical Women, founded in 1967, and caught on quickly among many other radical feminist organisations. The goal was for each member of a group to talk about the ways they felt oppressed as women, as a means of reconceiving personal experiences in political terms. Gay CR groups, frequently formed out of GLF meetings, similarly sought to help members connect their individual experiences as part of a broader system of anti‐homosexual oppression—raising awareness of the problem, and at the same time encouraging a sense of identification both with the immediate group and gay people more generally.
Gay male collectives frequently built from, and incorporated, the model of CR. One of the members of the 95th Street Collective explained in ‘Five Notes’ that his entry into the living collective was, in fact, a ‘direct result of five months of consciousness‐raising’. Through CR, he wrote, ‘I learned to identify with and trust other gay men. This eased the pain I had felt as an isolated, lonely, “sick” man’. Members of other collectives similarly sought to adapt CR techniques for their group: in the 17th Street Collective, Jim Fouratt brought in a professional gestalt therapist to lead group sessions, and the various gay households at Wolf Creek held regular discussion ‘circles’.
Beyond their formal political and social activities, many gay activists also took communal living as an opportunity to experiment with, and challenge, gender normativity. One gay liberation activist, who had lived in communes in both New York City and Boston, wrote, ‘For the first time in our lives we no longer felt coerced to act as masculine as possible. We all acted out different ideas about what it meant to discard, combine or unite sex roles. I experimented with all of them, went in bearded drag from time to time, wearing a bright red dress with a Che Guevara beret with a red star’. Such practices overlapped with a broader interrogation of masculine privilege among some gay activists, though this critique of gay masculinity could prove divisive as well. 17th Street Collective member Jason Serinus recalled he had initially joined a ‘femme’ CR group, only to be thrown out and given the nickname ‘Venceremos Butch’.
The work of commune members typically extended beyond the walls of their homes as well: many of the communes saw it as a primary responsibility to advance the broader goals of gay liberation through education and outreach. In Washington DC, Gay Liberation House served as a de facto community centre, playing host to a variety of functions—including discussion or rap groups, committee meetings, religious rituals, Halloween parties, fund‐raisers and dances. In November 1970, they also hosted gay liberation activists who had travelled to DC for the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention, held by the Black Panther Party. Other collectives made similar efforts: both the 95th Street Collective and the Gay Lib House in Louisville, Kentucky set up phone lines, to connect callers to gay liberation groups. The 17th Street Collective in New York printed a series of pamphlets under the title Gay Flames, circulating key texts to an even broader audience. And the Elwha commune, founded by Faygele ben Miriam, served as a rehabilitation centre. The ideal of service also extended to communes that were not formally connected to gay liberation groups: one commune in San Francisco operated a gay bar while another operated a bathhouse.
Yet for all their enthusiasm and dedication, the practicalities of living communally could often prove challenging for members. In ‘Five Notes’, one member of the 95th Street Collective wrote, ‘We are all encumbered with all kinds of irrational habits and petty hang‐ups. Some of us are shy about sex or nudity or expressing our emotions. Some of us smoke too much, or have developed little rituals about sleeping or eating or going to the bathroom’. The authors urged patience and commitment to overcome these small differences. A Boston gay collective, which sought to run their home as both a commune and community centre, lamented the collective’s collapse in the pages of the Boston newspaper Fag Rag: ‘Our bourgeois training makes us uncooperative individualists’. An unpublished draft elaborated some of the material problems: ‘they failed to apportion “menial tasks” properly; dirty dishes were in the sinks, garbage in the hall. Many men failed to become their own servants’.
Class could also emerge as a divisive issue. In Los Angeles, a member of the Highland Park Collective wrote a letter describing the deteriorating atmosphere of the house. He came home from a trip to San Francisco only to find a note berating him for failing to wash the frying pan before he left. Meanwhile another member sat at the kitchen table explaining that he felt unhappy and bored, only to have someone else turn to him and say, ‘We working‐class people don’t have time be bored’. In 1976, Mulberry House, a commune in Fayetteville, Arkansas, sent an announcement to RFD: ‘We are white and come from working‐ and middle‐class backgrounds. We live and work together collectively not only for economic reasons, but in order to overcome our heterosexual conditioning as men’. Yet in multiple subsequent letters, members of Mulberry House wrote to criticize RFD’s ‘privileged‐class perspectives’. Looking back on one recent issue they complained, ‘Every one was white in the photos’ and ‘Sexism is depicted in a subtle way in the photos of faggots in dresses with what appeared to be stuffing to imitate breasts’. And finally, ‘Why wasn’t anything written about the privilege around photography? How many people have the free time, money and energy to take pictures especially so‐called “artistic portraits”’? Gay communes established a new set of domestic norms and a new model of personal politics, only to find that these were all difficult to maintain.
Some gay communes also encountered resistance from outside. Fort Hill Faggots, founded in Boston in 1975, actively sought to recruit black men, but attracted only a handful among the twenty residents who joined the collective over the next two years. The challenge to create racial diversity in the collective, was, in many ways, reflective of broader tensions within the city: much of the neighbourhood in which Fort Hill Faggots was located had been razed to make way for a controversial highway extension—allowing the founders to purchase several houses cheaply. Yet for the black and Latino residents who had long lived there, the commune members appeared as interlopers. One member, John Kyper, recalled that one of the African‐American residents left the collective after he was held up at knifepoint, and his house later robbed, by two men who lived down the street. As Kyper put it, ‘It seemed pretty clear that he had been singled out as a … “traitor”’.
Communes that brought a visibly queer presence to the country could also face threats: in 1976, shortly after the Elwha commune was featured in the Port Angeles Daily News, someone drove by the house at 3 a.m. and threw a Molotov cocktail into a woodpile, starting a fire. A similar firebombing incident occurred three years later at the Creekland commune in Oregon, one of several gay and lesbian communes in the area. The incident drew attention to underlying hostility between the area’s gay and straight residents. As the Oregonian put it, ‘Creekland residents consider the wearing of female clothing on occasion a political act, a defiance of sexual roles arbitrarily assigned by society. But some old‐timers in Wolf Creek—and even some recently arrived longhairs—may not have been prepared for the sight of a hairy, bearded man in a skirt or an ex‐priest dressed as a nun’.
In the end, many of the gay communes that formed in the 1970s lasted only a short time—typically six months to two years, though some, rural communes in particular, lasted longer. In some cases, personal and political conflicts led collectives to split. As John Knoebel recalled, the 95th Street Collective dissolved soon after it was discovered a founding member had been sleeping every night with a member Knoebel himself had recently brought in. This led to feelings of jealousy and resentment, as well as accusations that a monogamous sexual relationship between two members was disruptive to the functioning of the collective. Other collectives split more amicably, after individual members decided to move away, or when a lease ran up. By the early 1980s, the widescale impulse to create gay communes had largely ended.
Domestic Liberation
Even though many gay communes did not last long, the idea and the image of the gay commune circulated widely, contributing to a broader conceptualisation of the gay home as a revolutionary space. In many ways, living in a collective was not qualitatively different from living with roommates, but the discourse of gay communalism gave the practice new meaning. One man in Boston described his decision to seek a roommate this way: ‘What first needed to be done, I felt, was to change the isolation of my living situation and get into some sort of communal living arrangement with other gay people’. He invited a friend to move in, and they agreed that a larger collective might be the next step: ‘No more way stations on the road to liberation, we were looking for a liberated way to live’.
Gay men throughout the second half of the twentieth century imagined and constructed domestic spaces, lives and relationships that diverged, to varying degrees, from heterosexual, reproductive norms, but rarely would they do so with as much self‐consciousness, and as great a sense of possibility, as gay liberation activists did in the early 1970s. The gay commune offered a glimpse of an alternative future, where the home would be unbound to monogamy, to capitalism, to patriarchy and to the state, moulded only to the needs, desires and ideals of its makers. Homophile activists of the 1950s and 60s had frequently looked to legal reform to protect their privacy, while later gay activists of the 80s and 90s turned increasingly to the state to recognise and protect their relationships, in the form of domestic partnership, civil union and marriage legislation. Gay liberation activists, in contrast to both, largely rejected the state and a model of national belonging predicated on normative forms of domesticity, prioritising instead a sense of intimate and communal belonging—though still one best rooted in the home. Some gay communards struggled to balance those commitments, finding it difficult to attend equally to relationships with men in and outside the home. Nor were relations within communes ever as utopic as many members hoped—some experienced alienation and disenchantment. Still, gay communes, for their members and observers, exposed the norms of home, gender and family with new clarity, and opened up possibilities for collective creativity and revision.