to or from the park. A volunteer doctor of the Gay Health Collective, himself a gay man, described his patients as “college kids, young adults, the bartenders … just the panoply of gay people as gay people were defined in the 70s. There definitely would be a mix of a stockbroker or lawyer, but not so many.”26 Another volunteer remembered, “I think we were caught off guard by the deluge of students and young folks that came for sexually transmitted diseases.”27 Word of the Fenway clinic’s gay-friendly services quickly spread throughout the city’s gay population via word of mouth, flyers in bars, and ads in Gay Community News. Shortly after its opening, the Wednesday night Gay Health Collective saw gay patients from all across the city and region. The clinic and its staff viewed and presented its gay services as a subsidiary to the larger mission of serving the neighborhood and providing low-cost, high-quality care, allowing it to remain a strong gay ally, but not actually gay. Regardless, it secured the Fenway clinic’s position as a new Boston gay institution among the city’s gay community.
VD screening and treatment for gay men began as one of nearly a dozen other programs run out of the clinic, aiding gay residents and quickly drawing gay clients from across the region. While the clinic quickly earned a reputation within the gay community as the gay clinic in town, it saw its services for gay clients as just another small piece of its offerings and distanced itself from close association with gay liberation or gay identity. A dozen years later, the clinic found itself on the frontlines of the AIDS crisis, on the cutting edge of gay and lesbian health services and research, and welcoming doctors and scientists from Harvard and the Centers for Disease Control in search of expert advice. While the Fenway clinic’s legacy grew from its relationship to gay and lesbian health, that relationship took nearly a decade to truly blossom, and its roots originate in the wreckage of the eastern Fenway and the resultant antigentrification activism.
Front and Center
While gay liberation rhetoric and politics factored minimally in the creation of Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, they proved a driving, and politically radical, force in Los Angeles. In November 1969, the recently formed Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front (GLF) sublet a small office at one of the major intersections on the Silver Lake neighborhood’s western border, a space that had most recently served as area headquarters for the Peace and Freedom Party in the local political elections, for which a GLF activist had volunteered.28 The GLF sought to revolutionize society’s sexual norms through many forms of activism as well as through gay community building. The office served as a drop-in center and meeting place for gay liberationists, but also, in the smaller of its two rooms, housed a gay helpline. As the Los Angeles GLF was, in late 1969 and early 1970, one of only a handful of telephone listings in the country with the word “gay” in its name, it became a lifeline of sorts for gay people across the country. On most nights, volunteer Don Kilhefner sat in his sleeping bag in the small back room with the phone receiver pressed against his ear. He later recalled, “Starting around eleven o’clock/eleven thirty the calls would come in from [the East Coast] and just roll across the country by time zone so that by about two or three o’clock in the morning I was putting down the phone and getting some sleep. I listened for a year, thirteen months, to these calls. ‘I have an alcohol problem, I have a drug problem, I lost my job because I’m gay’ … from A to Z, there they were, every night.”29 With every call, Kilhefner saw the relationship between the oppression of gay people and “sickness” grow stronger, as their oppression resulted in physical, mental, and financial problems.
In response to the growing list of gay issues illuminated by helpline callers and reflecting the political ethos and rhetoric of gay liberation in Los Angeles, Kilhefner formed the Gay Survival Committee, along with longtime activist Morris Kight, gay antiwar and union activist John Platania, and a handful of other GLF members who lived in Kilhefner’s housing co-op. Platania later recorded his thoughts on the extent to which the issue of survival permeated the gay community at the time:
Along with all the excitement, the activity, and celebration, we also began to see, see deeply, the kind of real human need that was in our community: the starvation, literally, the homelessness, the drugs, the alcohol, the disease. You know the plague is not new. It is not a stranger to the gay community. We have been dying for years of sexually transmitted diseases! For years and years before AIDS! We were dying of alcoholism and hepatitis before that…. There were no services; that’s the point.30
During meetings of the Gay Survival Committee, Kilhefner, Kight, and Platania first theorized about the link between sexual oppression and gay health. They coined the term “oppression sickness” to better understand how the problems of the gay community were rooted in its oppression and to explore the ways in which homophobia literally made gay people sick.31 Oppression sickness encompassed physical, mental, financial, and political issues and ailments common in the gay community—issues like job loss, violence, depression, substance abuse, isolation, homelessness, medical malpractice, and self-destructive behavior. The oppression sickness concept pushed beyond the rigid boundaries of a medical understanding of health and illness and expanded gay liberation rhetoric to new terrain, blurring the lines between medical issues and political ones. From this perspective, fighting and curing oppression sickness would demand more than political lobbying and protest or doctor’s visits and medication. Rather, the gay community would have to mobilize on many fronts, provide numerous services, and address the larger systemic and societal problems contributing to their oppression.
Because oppression sickness included nearly every outgrowth of oppression gay people encountered, members of the Gay Survival Committee thought the most effective solution was to create a large social service organization that addressed all of these issues. The center would have programs attacking oppression sickness in every form possible: legal services for gay service members who had been dishonorably discharged because of their sexuality, pen pals for incarcerated gays who faced violence and injustice within prisons, employment training and placement for gays who were fired or who fled their oppression in school, numerous discussion and rap groups on coming out and raising political awareness, dances, temporary housing, substance abuse services, and a medical clinic, to name only a few programs.32 The range of services reflected the idealism and political commitment to radical gay liberation that shaped the Los Angeles political landscape. The site of the Watts uprising, home to a strong Black Panther, Brown Beret, and radical feminist contingent, Los Angeles provided a backdrop for a wide array of radical leftist politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, Los Angeles had already had a long tradition of being on the cutting edge of gay political activism, whether as the founding site for the Mattachine Society of the early 1950s or as the location of the Black Cat riots of 1967. Inspired and fueled by the political activism and liberation discourse boiling over at the local level, the concept of oppression sickness proved captivating. With the help of John Platania, who at the time was a grant writer for a local nonprofit agency, by the spring of 1971 the countless discussions of “oppression sickness” culminated in a proposal of more than thirty pages, outlining needed services, management hierarchies, organizational charts, and a preliminary budget for a gay community services center.33
A center of this size and magnitude would draw on a deep local well of gay liberation activism but would also require access to public funding and political support. Consequently, the proposed structure of the organization sought to strike a delicate balance between remaining true to the organizers’ radical politics and gaining support from the state. The resulting proposed organizational structure thus included positions common among professional nonprofits, such as an executive director, board members, and department managers. As Kilhefner recalled,
We wanted [the center] to look like nothing [funders or government officials] could challenge. We were the revolutionaries. We were the radicals. We were the people quoting Che and Mao. They did not expect that from us. We made a conscious decision that this would not be a consensus group. It would not be run like the Gay Liberation Front, where every month we elected a different leader and decisions were made by consensus. This was an organization with hierarchy, with defined positions, just like … the Red
