Today they were here. But today this was my people, my march.
Looking ahead I saw the march was indeed breaking up into segments, crowds were bunching up at those damn intersections. Monitors were not in place. Our people were looking vacantly at one another wondering whether or not to venture into traffic.
I rushed into the hugely jammed intersection at Cahuenga and motioned the marchers to cross. Standing alone, my arms outstretched against traffic, I tried to look like an imposing figure. An aging Ford stopped in front of me, and out of it emerged a bearded, blond guy in overalls, who screamed, “The only good fag is a dead fag! Get the fuck out of my way!”
“Ladies!” I screamed at a group of feathered drag queens waiting on the corner. “Come here, I need you!”
The frenzied fags ran devotedly into battle. “What’s the matter, honey?” the group’s leader asked.
I pointed toward my Aryan. “Go kiss him. Get him back into his car so our people can cross the intersection!”
The gaggle of queens descended upon the tall, now speechless blond. One stroked his arm, another pinched his butt. The muscled straight guy shrank from the queens. The only safe place was in his car. Quickly, he jumped back in, slammed the door, raised the windows, and locked himself in. Drag-phobia had saved the day!
“Right on!” I yelled to my “sisters” as I waved our marchers through the now safe intersection.
I looked forward. As planned, the head of the march was starting to leave the sidewalks and take the street. Seeing a banner reading Out of the Closets & into the Streets, I ran forward to meet Morris, arms raised in triumph.
The Los Angeles 1971 commemoration of Stonewall was the first of many grassroots events I would organize with Morris Kight over the next decades to fight for the rights of gay men and lesbians, struggling not just with the politicians but also with other gay and lesbian leaders to keep the bourgeoning movement from straying from its grass roots or, among other morasses, into the New Left of class politics. Still, it wasn’t until 1974 that one of our particular efforts at making legislative change finally met with a cumulative success. One of the things I’d learned from my mentor was to think outside the box, to revel in the unexpected. But I was more than a little shook up that summer, when Morris called me and Troy Perry, the founder of the new gay Metropolitan Community Church, over to his McCadden Place haunt and asked us to volunteer to be arrested as sex criminals.
Morris had decided that the quickest way to bring down California’s Penal Codes against sodomy and oral copulation—PC 288a and 286—was to get a gay, a lesbian, and a straight couple to publicly confess to these sex crimes, and trick the police into arresting us. Those couples turned out to be Troy and his lover Steven Gordon, a straight couple named Jeanie Barney and her boyfriend, and me and BeJo. I hesitated about this caper, but I’d always found it difficult to say no to Morris. Finally, I’d committed us. BeJo didn’t share my readiness. She panicked when I brought the legal paperwork home for us to sign. “I haven’t come out to my parents in Iowa. You’re out of your mind.”
It was eerily quiet in our apartment that night as BeJo and I didn’t speak. I wondered if Troy’s young lover, new to the movement, was making things tense at his house too. I’d noticed that Morris hadn’t put himself forward. “I don’t have a lover,” he’d said. His role in the plan was to make a citizen’s arrest and haul us down to Rampart Division Police Headquarters after the press conference.
“I don’t suppose you have a back-up lesbian couple?” I asked Morris on the phone. BeJo still hadn’t said yes.
“No, I can’t find any other out lesbian couple willing to do this,” he said. “But don’t worry; our lawyers will be at the police station to bail you out as soon as possible.”
The evening passed like time on a broken clock. Finally, I heard BeJo call in to work saying she’d come down with a cold and needed tomorrow off.
By the time she and I arrived at the Los Angeles Press Club, BeJo was covered with anxiety-provoked sweat. With cameras flashing and microphones popping under the bright lights of the Press Club, somehow the risk felt surreal. I read aloud my carefully composed statement:
“I am here in the name of thousands of lesbian mothers who have stood before California Judges and heard, ‘This woman is unfit, and she has no right to her child because she is homosexual.’ I am here in the name of hundreds of lesbians who have been dishonorably discharged from the services, thrown out of their jobs, their homes, their churches. In the name of those whose lives have been ruined in the name of this Penal Code law, I demand to be arrested!”
Morris’s smiling face at the end of the table gave me courage. I went on to recount the case of two women in Michigan having been arrested for making love in their camping tent in the forest. One of them had just finished serving three years in the state penitentiary.
By the end of the press conference the L.A. Times had shown up, but the police had not. Morris stood up and arrested us “in the name of the good state of California.” He promptly loaded us into a bus bannered with the sign The Felons Six in which we took a slow but very public ride—waving and explaining our action to sidewalk passersby—through the major boulevards of Hollywood and downtown LA.
Once inside the Rampart Station a media savvy Commander Wise announced, “I will not take custody of these people. We did not see the crime in action.” So it was off to the District Attorney’s Office where our straight lawyer (there were no out gay lawyers in ‘74) insisted to the DA that he didn’t need to see our crime in person because there was nothing in the law exempting private or consensual oral copulation.
Assistant D.A. Jacobson met with our lawyer behind closed doors for almost an hour. We felons and our entourage waited, standing with a hopeful BeJo and young Steve, while the entire D.A.’s staff gawked at us—the self-confessed homosexuals. Finally, a much distressed Jacobson went before the gathered press cameras. “Any groups or individuals who wish to change current laws in California should take their complaint to the state legislature,” he said. “I didn’t make the law.” Then he instructed his security to escort us out of his office. Being arrested for trespassing seemed anti-climatic and not on-message. We cleared out.
Once home we printed thousands of leaflets urging gay couples to openly break these Penal Codes. Months later California Governor Jerry Brown, pushed strongly by Morris Kight and the whole damn statewide gay and lesbian movement, signed an Executive Order overturning California’s anti-sodomy laws. My mentor and I were one giant step closer to freedom for our people.
Chapter 6
Petition at Midnight
[Los Angeles]
By the middle of the 1970s the national lesbian and gay movement was at a turning point that few of us living through it could grasp. The Gay Liberation Front, a small cell of radical socialist gay men and women out of the New Left, was the first national gay organization to arise in the post-Stonewall era. But the radical politics of the GLF, which sought to lead gays into the revolutionary struggle to overthrow capitalism, had dissipated by ’75. President Nixon, a powerful Leftist organizing tool, had resigned and in his place was a floppy sort of good-natured guy, Gerald Ford, who was hard to hate. College kids were no longer being drafted out of their classes to fight a war in a country most Americans couldn’t find on a map. By mid-decade, anger from the masses was down, hope was up. An essential kind of pragmatism—how to get a bigger share of the American pie—seemed to seep into the gay and feminist and even the black and Latino movements. The boomer generation was growing up and they wanted apartments and cars, not marches and bombs. Before most of us could analyze what had happened, instead of the egg-throwing radicals of the ‘60s, omelet-makers of the ‘70s were becoming our leaders. In the gay movement, the rank and file seemed to be more committed to disco in the clubs than marching in the streets. As the editor of a national lesbian paper, I began to receive stories about the new and growing wave of women’s music and lesbian concerts. New
York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—the recognized go-first cities of the gay struggle—began filling up with a generation of mid-Western runaway teenagers and young men who came to the cities to find gay liberation. By now the gay movement had thrown the cops out of our bars. Politicians had called off the pigs because queer leaders were besieging city councils to pass housing and jobs anti-discrimination legislation. Slowly but surely the radical battle cry was shifting from revolution to civil rights.
Urban gay leaders were now looking for ways to get our kids off drugs, off the streets, and off the new lifestyle known as gay hustling. Tens of thousands of gays and lesbians were jumping out of the closet. It was now our leaders’ problem to figure out how to meet the needs of the suddenly visible gay masses.
The overthrow of capitalism was not at the top of their list. No, we had a lifetime of hiding and sexual denial to make up for. We wanted to talk and be with each other in every imaginable and intimate way. Community service centers began to spring up in dyke ‘hoods and gay barrios from Houston to Seattle, and San Diego to Vermont.
At first, these centers were no more than centrally located warehouses or cheap storefront rentals where activists could hold nightly meetings and queers-in-need could make their plight known to others. These centers began to replace the lesbian and gay bars as safe hubs for social life. The centers began to provide a base of operations for the movement and a population density substantial enough for organized fundraisers. Capitalism began to be harnessed, not overthrown, to take care of our own.
In the centers it was easy to see what our needs were as a community. Men young and old needed health care for sex-related diseases that was previously denied. Toss away boys needed homes with supportive parent figures, a jobs program to find work, and rap groups to establish a new sense of family. Everyone needed therapy to eradicate self-hatred fostered by growing up in the straight world. Lesbians had fewer runaways, mostly ‘mannish’ girls tossed out by family, but women had an even deeper sense of social isolation. We desperately needed to find one another, to talk and build family. A wide range of social groups sprang up at these community centers and gay therapists of every stripe were sought.
Into this fabric of diaspora and need, the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center was born. It was the first of its kind in the country. L.A. quickly became the national center of gay and lesbian institution building. The city’s large pro-gay Jewish population, the immense wealth of the movie industry, and the West’s notion of the importance of land ownership, were factors that shaped the development of gay L.A. Borrowing from the Jewish concept of giving to charities that took care of their own, a model prevalent in the gay-adjacent Jewish community, early LA gay leaders harnessed the financial resources of wealthy but closeted men and began to buy gay properties. The entertainment industry was also heavily populated by homosexual men and women who had relationships—both distant and immediate—with gay activists.
The Hollywood Hills were arguably the largest and richest gay closet in the world. It was no accident that The Advocate, the newspaper that would become America’s largest gay male publication, was born and raised in the Beverly Hills—adjacent barrio called Hollywood. The world’s largest and wealthiest gay church was founded here in 1968 by the intensely theatrical Rev. Troy Perry. Los Angeles, with its large sprawl of ethnic ghettos, was also home base to the Black Panthers and the Brown Berets—vital race-based social change struggles upon which gay leaders role-modeled. As early lesbian and gay leaders left college, we closely monitored the nightly news. Watching the Watts riots, the Panthers looking for ways to feed their people, and Cesar Chavez’s farm workers marching in California’s central valley, we quickly learned the skills of community organizing.
The Los Angeles’ Gay Community Services Center was the brainchild of three Gay Liberation Front founders: Morris Kight, Don Kilhefner, and John Platania. The three were radical socialists who had piled up years of activism in the anti-war, Peace & Freedom, United Farm Workers, and black civil rights struggles. Because they were older and more experienced, Kight and Kilhefner, along with our forefathers in other cities—like Frank Kameny in New York and Jim Foster in San Francisco—had watched the early and radical black liberation struggle gradually morph into middle-class acceptance. They, the first generation of gay leaders, understood much earlier than us college kids that the radical gay movement had to eventually mainstream into a civil rights movement.
The problem was, the gay and lesbian movement was being run by radicals who only yesterday wanted to overthrow the government. In 1971 middle-class gays and lesbians had not come out of the closet or into the movement. Kight and Kilhefner soon realized that to survive and gain legitimacy, their Gay Community Services Center, now known as GCSC, would have to successfully apply for government grants just like other non-profit social agencies. But to do this GCSC would need a credentialed Board of Directors who had MSW, MFCC, and PhD degrees. Morris Kight managed to scrape together five gay men and one lesbian willing to sign their professional names on the dotted line of a homosexual organization. In 1971 GCSC opened its doors as the first gay non-profit organization in America recognized by the IRS. {1} In late 1974 it became the first organization with the word “gay” in its name to receive federal funding.
Morris asked me to join him at GCSC and sit on its first Board as a byproduct of our close political relationship, and because I was the first openly lesbian activist to obtain an MSW in Social Work, and because I was Chicana. After only two years in the struggle, I’d become a feminist and had an intuitive hit that the deep rooted sexism of the older generation of gay white men didn’t bode well for women. Politely, I said no thanks to Morris: “I’m a ‘lesbian primacist.’” That meant I wanted to give my primary energy to creating a strong and independent lesbian movement. This goal and building my own institution, The Lesbian Tide, took front and center in my life. Unfortunately, Morris’s search for professionals with letters after their names did not include looking in the very new, and overly educated, feminist movement.
Morris Kight was savvy about the national political landscape and the intersections of the social change movements of our era. Intellectually he recognized that the straight world persecuted gay men because they were perceived to be men taking on a feminine role, the role of women. Yet he was too much a man of the 1950’s to make the emotional leap into accepting women as political peers. He made only a few exceptions for butches. Also, Morris wasn’t convinced that lesbian feminists were valid lesbians. This was a disconnect in his thinking, ergo in his political organizing, that I failed to realize in my early years with him. Not grasping the bedrock of his genderized mind would turn out to be a formidable lapse in judgment on my part and the cause of great conflict.
By 1975, Los Angeles’ most prominent gay organization was housed in a pair of loosely held together 1930’s Victorian houses located at the rundown end of Wilshire, the end close to downtown where street people wandered and prayed. The landlord had allowed Kight and Kilhefner to rent his buildings because they weren’t fit for up-to-code housing or business. GCSC opened its doors with hippie style beds on the floor and beads in the doorways. It was a gay rap center, sleepover pad for runaways, hotbed of political discussion, and hub of L.A.’s gay community. Perhaps the separateness of Morris’s and my own political paths was why Morris never informed me that he was making a dramatic right turn from radical activist to social service worker. And so, after years of hard fought campaigns with him—building the early movement and fighting the heterosexual world—I found myself, in the winter of ‘75, locked in a war with my political godfather. This time, our turf was personal. It was his own gay center.
Dateline: The Gay Community Services Center, January 6, 1975
“What are we gonna do if they refuse us, Córdova?”
The question came from my co-worker Pody Molina. She and I were among the two dozen staff members holding a vigil outside the Gay Community Services Center’s Board
of Directors meeting. The meeting had been called for 7:00 pm and it was now 9:00 pm on January 6th, the feast of the Epiphany on the Catholic calendar. Most of GCSC’s lesbian employees were jammed together on the second floor landing outside the Boardroom waiting for the Directors to finish their meeting so they could have their own.
It had never been part of my life plan to work for Morris rather than with him as a peer, and I had always felt the Center was, as it was named, a gay more than lesbian center, but months after our “Felons Six” ride I found myself accepting a sorely needed part-time job working as a publicist for GCSC’s Herself Health Clinic, one of the two programs for women the Center had just begun to provide. The fifteen-hour-a-week gig writing press releases paid me just enough to keep my heartfelt jobs—writing for The Free Press and my own Lesbian Tide. As a veteran activist I knew one of the cardinal rules of friendship among gay leaders was “You stay out of my creations, and I’ll stay out of yours.” I knew that my mentor was Chairman of the Board at GCSC. But, bluntly speaking, I needed the money. I was subsisting on $700 a month, and this was a gay job, not a straight place where I’d have to keep my political activist life a secret or be fired. Besides, BeJo was mostly supporting our apartment. I was desperate to contribute more.
What I didn’t know was that GCSC was a hotbed of political turmoil. When I arrived I found that lesbian staff was complaining that there were no dykes in decision making positions, the men had made women second class add-ons to bolster their power. The place was a magnet for dissonance between the left and the right of gay politics. On top of that, it brought the overly rich Westside gay male donors into volatile I-see-you range of the “underclass” gay clients. Besides sex, the two groups had little in common.
When We Were Outlaws Page 7
