Peace activism and GLBT rights. Liz Highleyman
AS GAY MEN AND WOMEN have come out of the closet and achieved basic civil rights, many in the movement have focused most of their attention on gaining full equality, including the right to serve in the armed forces. But GLBT people have also played a vital role in peace and antiwar activism, speaking out against military conflicts from World War I to the current war in Iraq.
One of the earliest U.S. antiwar organizations, the War Resisters League (WRL), was formed in 1923 by activists opposed to World War I. Among its founders were Tracy Mygatt and Frances Witherspoon, two Bryn Mawr graduates who lived together in a romantic friendship for more than sixty years and devoted their lives to women's suffrage, peace, and social justice activism.
World War II was a massive coming-out experience for homosexual men and women, many of whom left their hometowns and found same-sex relationships and communities in the military. But others firmly opposed the war. Bayard Rustin, a gay African-American activist who would later organize Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington, defied a draft summons and served more than two years in prison. Arrested on a morals charge in 1953, Rustin was pressured to resign from the Christianpacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation and subsequently joined the WRL staff, a job he held for over a decade. Rustin helped launch the social justice magazine Liberation, which published works by queer pacifists such as Paul Goodman.
In the 1950's, some of the earliest recruitment for the Mattachine Society--one of the earliest U.S. homophile organizations--occurred when Harry Hay, a long-time Communist and labor organizer, and his comrades went to beaches and other gay cruising areas in Southern California asking people to sign a petition against the Korean War.
During the Vietnam War era, tension developed between older homophile leaders and young gay activists, who had radically different views about the war. Homophile activists sought the integration of homosexuals into mainstream American life and maintained that military service was inextricably connected to full citizenship rights. Many gay and lesbian veterans understood this connection on a personal level, having received less than honorable or "blue" discharges, which led to the denial of GI Bill benefits and limited their future employment opportunities.
In 1964, a protest at the Whitehall Street Induction Center in Manhattan was among the first public demonstrations for homosexual rights. In May 1966, homophile groups on both coasts staged Armed Forces Day demonstrations to protest the military ban on homosexuals. In front of the San Francisco Federal Building, marchers carried signs proclaiming "EVERY MAN HAS A RIGHT TO SERVE HIS COUNTRY" and "SEXUALITY DOES NOT DETERMINE PATRIOTISM." Although some homophile leaders personally opposed the Vietnam War, homophile organizations typically declined to take a public position on the conflict, judging that such a stance would alienate conservative members and further marginalize homosexuals.
In contrast, the new generation of young activists adopted a more vociferous antiwar stance. "The Vietnam War politicized countless gay men while polarizing homosexual politics," notes historian Justin Suran. Indeed, he argues "radical antimilitarism was central to the creation of a specifically 'gay' identity." Gay liberationists maintained that war was immoral, voiced support for Third World nationalist movements such as the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, after which the new Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was named, and asserted that the macho culture of militarism contributed to the oppression of gay people.
Antiwar activism is what brought homosexual politics "out of the closets and into the streets," Suran asserts. After the Stonewall Riots in June 1969, GLF chapters sprung up across the country, often started by individuals who were already active in the antiwar movement. Many people came out publicly for the first time at antiwar protests, and many liberal heterosexuals got their first exposure to out gay people. Gay liberationists--who often planned conferences and parties to coincide with large antiwar demonstrations--began demanding time to speak at antiwar rallies, using these occasions to call for GLBT rights and to denounce conventional masculinity. Radical gay men linked imperialism with the oppression of homosexuals, while feminists (lesbian and otherwise) made connections between military aggression and violence against women.
In San Francisco, large numbers of queer radicals first took to the streets for a Vietnam Day Moratorium demonstration in October 1969. Berkeley's Gay Liberation Theater made its debut, declaring it "queer, unnatural, and perverse" to send soldiers to Vietnam "while we torment, rape, jail, and murder men for loving their brothers here." That December, New York GLF members handed out flyers in Greenwich Village urging passersby to send gifts to GIs in the name of peace. One activist (now deceased) recalled years later how two gay men took jobs as extras with the San Francisco Opera so they could unfurl a banner onstage reading "FAGS SAY STOP THE WAR."
In April 1971, gay liberation groups in fourteen states and more than fifty cities endorsed contingents for massive bicoastal antiwar protests in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco. In what The Advocate called "one of the largest concentrations of gay power ever assembled," some 3,000 gay people sporting lavender armbands rallied at San Francisco's Union Square and Civic Center Plaza before marching to Golden Gate Park to join the 200,000-strong rally. Across the country, an estimated 10,000 GLBT people participated in the D.C. protest.
Draft resistance was a major current of antiwar activism. In deciding whether to check the final box on the military intake form asking about "homosexual tendencies," gay and straight men alike were forced to come to terms with their sexuality. Popular culture was replete with references to heterosexual men "faking faggotry" to evade the draft. Folksinger Phil Ochs's "Draft Dodger Rag" advised potential inductees to "always carry a purse," while the 1969 film The Gay Deceivers depicted two heterosexual men attempting to convince their draft board that they were a gay couple. Advised a Berkeley draft resistance flyer: "Besides flicking your wrist, move your body like chicks do--hold cigarette delicately, talk melodically, act embaressed [sic] in front of the other guys when you undress." A 1968 draft resisters' manual suggested that you "Act like a man under tight control. Deny you're a fag, deny it again quickly, then stop, as if buttoning your lip."
Some gay and bisexual men chose to "queer out" of the draft. In 1967, Sylvia Rivera--who would later take part in the Stonewall Riots--reported to the local draft board in full drag and was referred to a military psychiatrist. Asked if she had a problem with her sexuality, she replied, "I know I like men, I know I like to wear dresses. But I don't know what any [problem] is." But for many others, the decision about whether to check the box presented a serious dilemma. Inductees who divulged their sexual orientation risked rendering themselves ineligible for federal civil service jobs, and for those in small towns, declaring one's homosexuality often effectively meant coming out to one's family and neighbors.
Jearld Moldenhauer, who later founded Toronto's Glad Day bookstore, worried that a gay deferment "is gonna ruin me" (he received one anyway on the strength of an ambiguous letter from a sympathetic psychiatrist). Jonny Lerner, a leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weathermen, was so mortified by his 4-F status that he claimed his shrink had written a letter saying he was crazy. According to historian Ian Lekus, most gay people declined to register their sexuality with the government, "seeking instead conscientious objector status, other medical deferments, emigration to Canada, or other legal and illegal means of evading military service."
Allan Berube, who later wrote Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two, was among the gay men who registered their moral opposition to the war by seeking conscientious objector status. Berube worked with Chicago Area Draft Resisters (staffing the group's hot pretzel stand on the University of Chicago campus to raise money) and later as a draft counselor with the American Friends Service Committee. Lesbian author Amber Hollibaugh helped smuggle draft evaders over the border to Canada, as did then-Harvard student David Scondras, who later served as an out gay city councilor in Boston.
In 1970, Chicago Gay Liberation Black Caucus member Ortez Alderson, a flamboyant eighteen-year-old former go-go dancer from Chicago's South Side, became one of the "Pontiac Four," who were arrested for transporting stolen draft board files. He was convicted and sent to the same Kentucky prison where Rustin had been incarcerated for draft evasion some 25 years earlier. Alderson was released within a year, but not before he tried to organize a gay liberation chapter in the prison.
Numerous individuals who later became leaders in the gay movement got their start doing antiwar organizing. Lesbian-feminist foremother Barbara Deming, a poet who only became politically active in her forties, embraced Gandhian pacifism following a trip to India. She participated in the antiwar movement throughout the 1960's, traveled to North Vietnam, and was jailed following a protest at the Pentagon. After organizing against napalm-producer Dow Chemical, Morris Kight turned his energies to the gay movement, and in 1971 founded the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center. Mandy Carter, an African-American lesbian who was a member of the San Francisco WRL staff as a teenager in the late 1960's, helped coordinate the March on Washington events in both 1987 and 1993. Former Philadelphia SDS leader and GLF member Kiyoshi Kuromiya was an outspoken AIDS activist until his death in 2000. And David Mixner, a key organizer of the November 1969 Vietnam Moratorium, served as President Bill Clinton's liaison to the GLBT community.
Unfortunately, many queer activists felt they could not be open about their sexuality within the New Left, despite the movement's nominal espousal of sexual liberation and stated eagerness to smash middle-class morality. Straight male activists, feeling the need to prove they were as tough and masculine as "authentic" revolutionaries like the Black Panthers, often responded with gay baiting and macho posturing when faced with accusations that men who opposed the war were weak and unmanly. (Most notoriously, Thomas Foran, chief government prosecutor in the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, characterized the 1968 Democratic National Convention protesters--and the youth movement in general--as a "freaking fag revolution.") Such anti-gay attitudes eventually drove some activists away from the movement, including former SDS leaders Jonny Lerner, Greg Calvert, and Carl Wittman (who later wrote the influential tract, "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto").
As gay activists became increasingly frustrated with the homophobia of the New Left--and the ascendancy of socialist cadre organizations that employed Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist-Maoist rhetoric to dismiss homosexuality as a symptom of bourgeois decadence--their activism underwent major shifts. By the 1970's, Justin Suran asserts, "an independent movement focused on gay identity and pride had emerged as the primary locus of gay visibility and solidarity."
At the same time, women were growing weary of the sexism of their male comrades, both gay and straight. Lesbian activist Leslie Cagan, former chair of the New York University Committee to the End the War in Vietnam, recalled that women were marginalized within the antiwar movement because they were not subject to the draft. In response, many lesbian and bisexual women devoted themselves to lesbian-feminism. Throughout the 1970's and 1980's, lesbian and bi women played key roles in peace and social justice activism, including opposition to nuclear weapons and U.S. military involvement in Central America. Deming exemplified the shift to lesbian-feminism, although her commitment to peace never waned. In 1983, weakened by ovarian cancer, she took part in the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment in upstate New York and made a final trip to jail a year before her death.
In the 1980's, the gay movement's trajectory was tragically interrupted by AIDS, and countless GLBT people shifted their energies to AIDS activism and care-giving. New radical activist groups such as ACT-UP and Queer Nation emerged, demanding more resources for the growing epidemic and decrying the homophobia of the ascendant religious right. These groups also carried on the tradition of gay antiwar activism, with ACT-UP and Queer Nation chapters helping to organize protests against the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Members of ACT-UP/NY even managed to interrupt the CBS Evening News, appearing on camera shouting "Fight AIDS, not Arabs."
By the early 1990's, a more "assimilationist" faction had gained ground within the movement, calling for GLBT equality in all institutions of American life, including the armed forces. The ban on gays in the military was a major focus of the April 1993 March on Washington, which took place amidst a national debate that culminated months later in President Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy.
A DECADE LATER, faced with another conservative Republican administration and another war in Iraq, GLBT people are again at the forefront of antiwar activism. Among them are both longtime movement veterans such as David McReynolds, now 75 and a WRL organizer for nearly 40 years, and young activists joining their first antiwar protests.
Numerous national groups--including the American Friends Service Committee's LGBT Program, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the Lavender Green Caucus, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, Pride at Work, Al-Fatiha (a group of GLBT Muslims), and the Metropolitan Community Church--have spoken out against the current war, joined by many local progressive organizations such as Chicago's Anti-Bashing Network and the Audre Lorde project in New York City, and newly formed antiwar groups like San Francisco's Out Against the War coalition. In Chicago and San Francisco, prominent gay leaders took out full-page ads in the gay and progressive press denouncing the war, and in the latter city antiwar activist Kate Raphael was honored as a 2004 Pride parade marshal.
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), which was the sole national gay group to oppose the 1991 war and received criticism for speaking out on an issue that was not specific to gay rights, followed a deliberate decision-making process this time around despite the impatient demands of grassroots activists. In December 2003, NGLTF signed on to a statement issued by "Keep America Safe: Win Without War"--a coalition of social justice groups including the NAACP, the National Council of Churches, the National Organization for Women, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Sierra Club--which read in part, "Unprovoked war will increase human suffering, arouse animosity toward our country, increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks, damage the economy, and undermine our moral standing in the world. It will make us less, not more, secure."
Queer activists did not limit themselves to issuing statements, but participated in antiwar demonstrations across the United States and around the world. On February 15, 2003, an estimated ten million people in some 600 cities demonstrated against the Bush administration's plan to attack Iraq (reportedly earning a spot in Guinness Book of World Records as the largest political protest ever). In New York City, Cagan helped organize a march estimated at 150,000 people, while a similar number turned out in San Francisco the following day. A month before the war officially started, the movement had attained a size and scope not achieved during the Vietnam era until the war had been underway for several years. On March 20, the day after the invasion of Iraq began, GLBT people were well represented among the thousands of activists who participated in direct action and civil disobedience in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere.
More than a year after President Bush declared his "Mission Accomplished," public sentiment against the war remains strong, as U.S. soldiers and Iraqi civilians continue to die, military spending drains funds from a strapped domestic economy, and the public is shocked by revelations of abuses of Iraqi prisoners (which some commentators have blamed on the social advances of women and gay people!). Today's antiwar activism has embraced some of the arguments of the past, contending that war is immoral and that militarism promotes homophobia. "It is likely that there will be blowback against those of us who defy the sexual and gender norms with which the military indoctrinates its soldiers," asserts Kevin Weaver of Out Against the War.
This time, however, there has been a strong emphasis on the economic costs of war and its diversion of money away from social programs such as HIV/AIDS services, as well as war's chilling effect on civil liberties, particularly those of Arab and South Asian immigrants (some of whom, of course, are queer). "Without the constitutional rights and protections now being gutted by this administration, our GLBT movement would not be where it is today," said then-NLGTF director Lorri Jean. Another notable difference is that while many Vietnam era activists admired the Vietcong, no queer antiwar groups have expressed support for Saddam Hussein or Islamist fundamentalism.
While gay antiwar activism in the Vietnam era was strongly associated with young counterculture radicals, today's GLBT antiwar activists represent a broader cross-section of opinion and a wider demographic range. Exemplifying the gay movement's greater political diversity today, the Log Cabin Republican Club came out in favor of the military offensive in Iraq. "[W]e stand behind President Bush in the war on terror, including the use of military force if necessary," said Executive Director Patrick Guerriero. Meanwhile, the Human Rights Campaign, which is the largest gay rights organization in the U.S., has maintained its neutrality. "We believe such a statement would fall outside our specific mission, which is to ensure that gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people achieve equality in today's society," said HRC Communications Director David Smith. Added Rick Rosendall, former president of the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance in Washington, D.C.: "I think gay rights organizations should focus on gay rights... [I]f they think they've worked on our issues enough, then they should disband."
Gay cultural critic Michael Bronski argues that the decision by many GLBT groups to take public positions both for and against the war is a sign of the movement's maturity. After two-plus decades of focusing on gay issues and identity, he argues, the community's "new willingness to take policy stands on national issues outside a narrowly prescribed gay realm" suggests "a return to an earlier mode of organizing ... that places gay rights within a broader politics."
REFERENCES
Berube, Allan. Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War Two. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.
Bronski, Michael. "Gay Goes Mainstream: A Mature Gay Movement Returns to its Origins in a Politics of Broad Social Change." Boston Phoenix. January 16-23, 2003.
Highleyman, Liz. "NGLTF Announces Opposition to War." Bay Area Reporter 33 (1). January 2, 2003.
Lekus, Ian. "Antiwar, Pacifist, and Peace Movements" and "New Left and Student Movements." In Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender History in America. Marc Stein, editor. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 2003.
Lekus, Ian. Queer and Present Dangers: Homosexuality and American Antiwar Activism During the Vietnam Era. Dissertation, Duke University, 2003.
Shilts, Randy. Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.
Suran, Justin David. "Coming Out Against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam." American Quarterly 55 (3): 452-488, September 2001.
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Liz Highleyman, a freelance writer based in San Francisco, has written widely on health, sexuality, and politics. An earlier version of the first section of this article was originally published by Q Syndicate (www.qsyndicate.com).