5 Facts About the Gay Liberation Front
GLF Changed the Nature of the LGBTQ Rights Movement
As the first LGBT rights organization in the United States founded after the June 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, New York City’s Gay Liberation Front initiated a change in the entire nature of LGBTQ activism. Earlier homophile groups took many courageous actions in an atmosphere of almost total non-support, risking members’ jobs and livelihood to ask for acceptance of their sexuality. In contrast, as an offshoot of the late 1960s radical civil rights, feminist and anti-war struggles, GLF activists took militant public actions demanding rights for downtrodden gays and lesbians. Its iconic slogan “Out of the Closets and into the Streets” expressed its widespread insistence that LGBTQ people must “come out” and organize in order to win their freedom from societal oppression. GLF initiated a whole new political offensive targeting legal, religious, psychiatric and media discrimination against gay and lesbian people.
Taking many cues from feminist thought, GLF acted as the fireworks lighting up new understandings of LGBTQ sexuality and gender identity, defining male supremacy as the root of gay and lesbian oppression, challenging repressive gender roles and looking for radical new definitions of human interaction. Early GLF visibility brought the fight for LGBTQ rights to the national media for the very first time—reaching out to young and closeted people with a message of hope: “You Are Not Alone.” GLF was the primary organizer of the June 1970 “Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day March,” marking the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. The 5-7,000 attendees at this march represented the largest gathering of lesbian and gay people in the world up to that time. Within two years, thousands of out and proud gay and lesbian people joined several hundred newly-formed LGBTQ liberation groups in major cities and college campuses around the country.
As an outgrowth of its public activism, GLF gave birth in many ways to the very idea of the “gay community,” a concept that had not previously existed. Out gay and lesbian people began to recognize their shared lifestyles, common neighborhoods, and united political aspirations. Within just one decade, these newly emboldened LGBTQ-identified people opened hundreds of gay shops, bookstores, restaurants, resorts and other businesses, created gay newspapers and magazines, joined gay sports clubs, formed choruses, and organized non-profit political, professional and charitable groups that were in place when the AIDS crisis needed them most.
2. GLF Functioned as an Umbrella Group
Inherent in GLF’s use of the word “Front” in its name, the Gay Liberation Front was organized from its birth as an umbrella group encompassing a wide range of LGBTQ people infused with the new spirit of gay liberation following the Stonewall Rebellion. Over time, GLF functioned as a centrical force spinning off group after group representing different interests and identities who needed to create individual focus for their actions. Spin-off groups included the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), Gay Youth, Radicalesbians, Gay Women’s Liberation, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), Third World Gay Revolution, the Gay Revolutionary Party, The Effeminists and other organizations many of which made important contributions to LGBT and identity politics. While some of these group departures appeared at the time to be factional splits, they accurately represented the diversity of the original gay liberationist organization and were, in fact, organic expressions of separate identities and goals.
3. The GLF Organizational Structure Started as Non-Hierarchical and Evolved
GLF’s early-on choice of a non-hierarchical, “leaderless” structure in which actions were taken by group consensus admittedly resulted in a lack of overall continuity and accountability within the organization. Leadership responsibilities were shared by the larger group. Often members at GLF Sunday night public meetings were influenced to take actions by ad hoc leaders who best expressed the good politics and best philosophy of the members. However, sometimes discussions at meetings were swayed by those who simply spoke the loudest and longest—a process that often led to stalemate and inaction that disappointed even those who were most in favor of this organizational method. Because of this, needed organizational tasks were taken on over time by discrete action cells who on their own organized the GLF dances, published its newspaper, wrote leaflets and organized demonstrations, etc. As it turned out, this decentralized process only functioned well for the first two years of GLF’s existence. After this and many group splits, the GLF center no longer held together.
4. GLF members went on to seed the LGBTQ movement.
The average age of GLF members was around 25 and, as an iconic youth movement, GLF was filled with people of seemingly unlimited energy and passion. However, many members were cut-off from their homes and families and were existing on low-wage jobs in an expensive city in order to devote their time to non-stop political activities. Others had temporarily dropped out of college or quit early job pursuits. Eventually, after two to three years of hand-to-mouth existence, many GLF members felt the need to focus on pragmatic life issues, getting full-time jobs or returning to school. Also, in the summer of 1971, a fairly large group of long-time GLF members left NYC and moved to San Francisco. Of the members who stayed in New York City, many of them went on to found or be part of other LGBTQ organizations, such as Lambda Legal Defense, the Gay Men’s Health Project Clinic (now the Callen-Lourde Community Health Center) among others. Members who moved out of the city went on to seed or join organizations in other locations
5. Intersectionality was a core organizing principle of GLF.
GLF always defined itself as part of a large-scale process of improving social and economic justice for all people. Many of the founders and members of GLF had come to the organization after involvement in other social movements and continued to feel connected to these important causes. Thus, GLF’s active support of feminist issues, attendance at anti-Vietnam War protests and involvement in the civil rights struggle with the Black Panthers, Young Lords, and others, although often criticized at the time, represented a core value of the organization. Today, LGBTQ groups are once again actively embracing the concept of intersectionality consistent with the example of the historic GLF.