by Evelyn Bailey
In last month’s Shoulders To Stand On article we looked at HOW and WHAT the Gay Liberation Front was. This month we will look at who the people involved in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) were. We need to remember the times in which the GLF was established.
The year was 1970. A Richard Nixon was President. U.S. troops invade Cambodia (May 1). Four students at Kent State University in Ohio slain by National Guardsmen at demonstration protesting incursion into Cambodia (May 4). This was the year the Beatles broke up, the year Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of a drug overdose at the age of 27, the year of Midnight Cowboy, Love Story, Airport, the year IBM introduces the floppy disk, the year Maya Angelou wrote I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and the year of the 5th Dimension’s Grammy award winning song Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In.
Onto this stage steps Bob Osborne, the original founder of the Gay Liberation movement in Rochester. Bob had a flair for revolutionary rhetoric. His early writings in the first three Empty Closets carried with them the spirit of the turbulent 1960s.
He wrote that the Gay Liberation Front “existed to create a human world, a place where people are respected because they are human beings not because they are indistinguishable from the majority or can be part of the system.” He spoke out in favor of civil rights for African-Americans and exploited workers the world over. His first article in the EC titled “Gay Power” is a testament to the political struggles of the period. Osborne had marched in the civil rights struggle at Selma Alabama. He had good organizing skills and as a meeting moderator was able to keep them interesting and exciting.
It was Bob Osborne who worked at building the membership on the campus in the first months of the movement. Patti Evans tells the story of how Osborne came into the women's bar in Rochester, the Riverview, to pass out gay literature about the formation of a new gay group that was forming. When he found out that Evans was a U of R student he invited her to attend the meeting. Evans missed that first meeting but Bob came to her dorm and “harassed” her until she joined the group.
The group of young adults that established the GLF at the University had a revolutionary attitude toward the culture that they insisted was treating them as less than human by denying them basic human rights. This attitude, seen as a reflection of the humanist movement of the 1960s with the civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam war, age of free love and other prominent issues in this decade, can be seen clearly in the three pieces written by Osborne, founder of the GLF, in the Empty Closet from January to May of 1971.
Osborne calls the birth of this new group “simply a response to the awakening needs of an extremely large oppressed group”. It is the “oppression by exploitative WASP’s” who are to blame for the misery in the world from the Vietnamese question, to industrial pollution and exploited workers. Oppressive laws instituted by an oppressive system. Osborne was the radical element within the group. He was concerned with national issues, and sought to propel the RGLF into a political organization.
The GLF commitment to educating the public and speaking out is reflected in the formation of the GLF’s Speakers Bureau. Karen Hagberg started the bureau and managed it from the opening days of the group and remained in that position for two years. She stepped down in February 1973 and was replaced by Liz Bell. The Speakers Bureau goal was to seek an accurate portrayal of homosexuality in the media by furnishing speakers for schools and community organizations
In November of 1970 the GLF published a monograph titled The Law and the Homosexual. this work reads like a dry law manual. Written by Bob Osborne, it consists of selections from the penal law of the state of New York. The pamphlet was revised and updated in 1972 to include state and local law and regulations.
These revisions contain excerpts from the municipal code of the city of Rochester. The local codes and laws range from unlawful sexual intercourse to the sale of prophylactic rubber goods to news-stand regulations. Armed with this material the Rochester Gay Liberation Front went to New York City to give testimony before the Special Committee on Discrimination Against Homosexuals held on January 7, 1971
This committee was an ad hoc committee consisting of state assemblyman Franz Leichter, Stephen Solarz and Tony Olivieri. the RGLF urged the special committee that “laws relating to sexual acts be revised”, that the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission be restricted in their powers, and for equal rights in “employment and housing for all regardless of sex or sexual orientation”. In their testimony there is an interesting reference to Vice President Agnew's claim for the backing of a large “silent majority”.
The GLF members felt that they had as much right as the Vice President to make such a claim in our efforts to free our people. The Rochester group was represented by Bob Osborne, RJ Alcala, and Marshall Goldman. Goldman says in an article in the EC that the Rochester group was the most prepaid group beer because of the work that had been done on the monograph.
As the Rochester GLF became more exposed to the down state groups through political action and marches like the one attended by members at Christopher Street June 24, 1971, the two streams of thought – one against the established order of our social norms and the other a movement for the acceptance of a way of life – that had come together to begin the gay liberation movement in Rochester, New York began to separate. A Political Action Committee was formed. The issue of women’s involvement in the organization came to a head in February, 1973 when The Gay Radical Organization for Women, GROW, was formed.
For the first 2 years of the GLF’s existence the driving force that provided the energy was Bob Osborne. He is the one who inspired and focused the movement in its early days. June has been the month for many gay pride celebrations, and so it was for Bob Osborne in 1971. “In New York City and San Francisco and Chicago on June 27 a quarter of a million people are going to take some power into their own hands for a few hours. Maybe this time they will realize what they have and won't let go. We want gay power. Political, social and economic power – and we're going to get it.” It is truly amazing that in 2009, less than 40 years later, the gay community in many ways has achieved the political, social and economic power Bob Osborne spoke of.