to medicine that spurred gay health activism in Chicago. The social- and services-focused gay liberation politics of Chicago allowed the clinic to draw on gay liberation activism when it made sense to propel the medical mission of the clinic forward.
Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, Los Angeles’s Gay Community Services Center, and Chicago’s Howard Brown Memorial Clinic each reflected its local politics and community much more than any national gay liberation movement. Even as each of these clinics became a gay institution that continues to thrive today, with strong ties to the gay community and national gay political efforts, they all began as precarious ideas designed to address particular local problems that were often only incidentally or tangentially related to gay liberation. From this perspective, “gay liberation” appears as a complex collage of gay people navigating a variety of local politics rather than as gay people across the country subscribing to and implementing a movement’s ideologies and tactics. The 1970s witnessed important shifts of gay physical and political landscapes across the country, but to understand these changes as coordinated or anything more than loosely connected with one another would be to misunderstand them and gay liberation more generally. While gay liberation played an important role in these clinics at times and in different, locally distinctive ways, proclaiming them an example of gay liberation oversimplifies their origins and misrepresents gay liberation. These clinics, though often cast as proud institutions of the gay liberation era, reflect a complicated time, complex people, and multifaceted local political contexts. From this perspective, the gay liberation movement is at once a cacophony of local politics, an ethos, a way of being that has gained much greater imagined clarity, uniformity, and power in the public’s hindsight than it ever demonstrated in any of these clinics.
This more dynamic, locally grounded understanding of gay liberation also allows for a decentering of gay liberation in the historical origins of gay services and institutions. While tracing the points of intersection between gay liberation and gay health activism in the 1970s is useful to understanding the local inner workings of gay liberation politics and rhetoric and health activism, looking beyond gay liberation paints a much fuller picture of the politics undergirding gay health activism. Shifting the focus away from gay liberation illuminates the many ties between gay institutions (like gay health clinics) and a wide variety of social and political movements of the period. In the light of those connections, the history of gay health activism transforms from a “gay history,” or even a history of sexuality, to a history of the 1970s and 1980s.
CHAPTER 2
BEYOND GAY LIBERATION
The language and ideas of gay health activism were less often local expressions of gay liberation than articulations shared with various social and political movements. Indeed, the activism and politics around gay health appeared to be the products of a great political cross-pollination among groups, movements, and ideologies of the period. National debates and policies related to stemming poverty and increasing access to health care expanded into gay health clinics, far beyond the desks of politicians, bureaucrats, and urban developers. Critiques of capitalism and the state it mechanized laced the politics of those who would become gay health activists. Sexual liberation and feminism, two hallmarks of this period, laid important cultural and material groundwork as they shifted societal sexual norms and created countless new community spaces, without which gay health activism could not have blossomed. While institutions that bolstered gay liberation ideals and existed alongside many other institutions inspired by gay liberation were often the end result of this activism, the historical origins of gay health activism actually decenter gay liberation, revealing a complex and politically blended landscape that essentially reflects the history of 1970s social movements.
Money Matters
Critiques of capitalism proved a driving force in gay health activism and seeped into it through numerous movements across the social justice spectrum that linked capitalism to injustice and suffering. In Boston, gentrification and urban renewal had clear ties to capitalism, posing a threat to the Fenway neighborhood and fueling the activism that ultimately provided gay health services in the city. Fenway’s dilapidated housing stood in stark contrast to some of the city’s most important cultural landmarks. The Fens, a large park created in the late 1800s by renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, lay at the heart of the area, serving as a bucolic destination on its own but also attracting other cultural landmarks to the neighborhood, including the Fenway Park baseball stadium, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the New England Conservatory of Music, and numerous college campuses.1 The desire to capitalize on the “outstanding potential” of the neighborhood, in the words of the Boston Redevelopment Authority, translated into pressure from landlords, developers, and city officials for Fenway residents to vacate and make way for “higher-income, higher-quality housing.”2 Capitalist forces drove many in real estate, development, and local government in the 1960s and 1970s to make living in the Fenway, and in countless similar urban neighborhoods across the country, uncomfortable, unsafe, and untenable. Fenway residents experienced dozens of fires, killing five people and making hundreds more homeless, as landlords and even fire marshals attempted to cash in crumbling apartment buildings for lucrative insurance payouts and kickbacks from developers.3 Between 1969 and 1974 the neighborhood saw reports of arson increase by more than 1200 percent.4 Capitalism, with its emphasis on profits and exploitation of the poor, emerged as an obvious and galvanizing enemy as area activists banded together to repel the developers and improve their neighborhood in ways that benefited existing residents, including founding the Fenway Community Health Clinic. One Fenway resident offered a telling analogy: “In the south it was sheriffs and dogs. But you look at who was the oppressor up in this part of the world, and it was the developer.”5
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