50 states have criminal statutes against homosexual acts,” and the Constitution protects Americans from self-incrimination. The leaflet recommended that “if there is a better way to avoid the draft, such as a student deferment or a medical disqualification, use it”—but instructed young men to “stand your ground,” and in all cases “refuse induction.”
But the GLF position on the draft was not anti-war, nor was it anti-imperialist: “No homosexual shall be drafted against his will,” the GLF list of demands stated in 1970, “nor shall the military deny entrance or demand release of any person because of homosexuality.”28 The next year, when Congress had to decide whether to extend the draft, the GLF in L.A. took a stronger stand: “Our Gay brothers have been harassed and intimidated by this system. Now we have a chance to do away with it.”29
Finally, the GLF also engaged in electoral politics, campaigning for Robert Scheer for Senate that year and other Peace and Freedom candidates for statewide office. The Peace and Freedom platform included a plank crafted by the GLF, which declared “the necessity to work to abolish all laws” that discriminated against gays and lesbians, as well as “all forms of economic and social exploitation.” It called for the freeing of everybody who had been jailed on homosexual charges, and for sex education programs that would give “the same validity to homosexual forms of expression as to heterosexual forms.” (Scheer got 57,000 votes, about 1 percent of the total.)30
The GLF, of course, became part of a national gay liberation movement, and one of its key strategists and spokespeople was Carl Wittman, whose “Gay Manifesto” was published in the LA Free Press Gay Liberation Supplement in 1970. Wittman had been a national leader of SDS but left the organization to devote himself to organizing the gay movement. “How it began we don’t know,” he said in his “Manifesto.” “Maybe we were inspired by black people and their freedom movement; we learned how to stop pretending from the hip movement. Amerika in all its ugliness has surfaced with the war.” But gay people were doing something new: “We are full of love for each other and are showing it; we are full of anger at what has been done to us. And as we recall all the self-censorship and repression for so many years, a reservoir of tears pours out of our eyes. And we are euphoric, high, with the initial flourish of a movement.”31
Wittman’s “Manifesto” also declared that “our first job is to free ourselves.” That meant allying with the new women’s liberation movement, and “junking male chauvinism.” It meant recognizing that “marriage is a rotten, oppressive institution.” It meant resisting the “‘movement’ types [who] come on with a line of shit about homosexuals not being oppressed as much as blacks or Vietnamese or workers or women.” But it also meant forming coalitions, recognizing that “not every straight is our enemy. And face it: we can’t change Amerika alone … it’s not a question of getting our share of the pie. The pie is rotten.” As for the anti-war movement, he wrote, “we can look forward” to working with them “if they are able to transcend their anti-gay and male chauvinist patterns. We support [anti-war protestors], but only as a group.” Wittman’s “Manifesto” concluded that the “imperatives for gay liberation” started with “free[ing] ourselves: come out everywhere; initiate self defense and political activity, initiate counter community institutions.” That’s exactly what the gay movement in L.A. was doing.
A year and a half after the Black Cat Tavern protest, in August 1968—but still a year before Stonewall—gays in L.A. organized another, bolder, protest against the LAPD: a flower power march on the police station where men arrested in another bar raid were being held. The Patch was a gay bar in Wilmington, run by Lee Glaze, a comedian known as “The Blond Darling.” The police had told Glaze he had to prohibit “not only drag but also groping, male-male dancing, and more than one person at a time in the restrooms.” Glaze would play “God Save the Queen” on the jukebox to warn customers whenever the cops showed up. But one weekend night, when the bar was “packed with 500 patrons and the dancing was wild,” the vice squad “burst in with half a dozen uniformed policemen behind them.” They stopped the music, demanded IDs, and started arresting men they said had been dancing together. Glaze jumped up on the stage and shouted, “It’s not against the law to be homosexual, and it’s not a crime to be in a gay bar!” The raid, the Advocate reported, had become a political rally, mostly because of “the solid display of defiance … by Lee Glaze,” whose speech was “a minor masterpiece” that “infected the audience with some of his own courage.” Glaze announced the bar would pay bail and provide a lawyer for the two men who had been arrested, and a dozen marchers set out for the jail.32
The marchers stopped along the way at a flower shop run by one of the bar patrons, and, Faderman and Timmons report, they left with “all the gladioli, mums, carnations, roses, and daisies.” They arrived at the LAPD Harbor Division station bearing huge bouquets and posed for pictures under the “Los Angeles Police Department” sign. One of the marchers later recalled: “When we arrived at the police station, Lee told the officer at the desk, ‘We’re here to get our sisters out.’ The officer asked, ‘What are your sisters’ names?’ When Lee said, ‘Tony Valdez and Bill Hasting,’ the officer had this surprised look on his face—and called for backup.”33
——
There was another fruit of the protests against the LAPD raid on the Glade: two months later, Troy Perry, one of the participants, who had been a Southern Pentecostal minister, started the world’s first openly gay religious congregation—the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC). “Lee showed me you don’t have to be afraid of the police,” Perry said. “Once that happened, it encouraged me to become a gay activist.” And it started when a friend of Troy Perry named Tony got arrested by the LAPD at the Patch. The two had been dancing to “La Bamba,” when the police arrived and handcuffed Tony and another man. Both were charged with lewd conduct and hauled off to jail. Perry recalled his feeling at the time: “It was so unjust.”34
“It took me until 5:30 AM to get Tony released,” Perry recalled. “It was all due to delaying tactics by the police. The booking procedure, the mug shots, the fingerprinting, just took hours. It was part of the harassment that took place far too often against the gay community in those days.” When Tony got out, he told Perry, “I’ve never been arrested before for anything in my life. Never! And I’m 26 years old now. The police kept telling me they are going to call my employer and tell him I’m gay. I’ll probably lose my job. You know, Troy, I’ve learned one thing from this experience: People don’t really care. Nobody likes a queer.”
“I tried to be helpful,” Perry recalled, telling Tony, “Even if people don’t, I’m still convinced that God cares about you.” But Tony “just laughed bitterly. ‘Come on, Troy,’ he said. ‘God doesn’t care about me.’” Troy Perry went home alone, and prayed: “Lord, we need a special church … if you want such a church started, just let me know when.” Then, “a still, small voice in my mind’s ear spoke, and the voice said, ‘Now.’”35
Thus the MCC was founded to respond to the deeper emotional damage done by the LAPD. Starting with a group of twelve in Los Angeles in October 1968, by 2011 it had 172 churches throughout the world, including parishes in forty-six of the fifty states. It owns $100 million worth of property, and “is probably the world’s largest employer of gays and lesbians.”36
Perry announced its foundation in an ad in the Advocate, and the first gay worship service was held in his living room in Huntington Park in October, 1968. At that first service he told the gathering what MCC “was going to be”: a “three-pronged Gospel” consisting of “Salvation,” “Community,” and “Christian Social Action.” “We would stand up for all our rights, secular and religious, and we would start fighting the many forms of tyranny that oppressed us.” Thus from the first the MCC was committed to action. A parishioner later recalled, “Someone would call a protest, against … the
