Speaker 1: But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
Speaker 1: the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, it's Jordan. I wanted to
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Speaker 1: of the Year at the Glad Awards. This is the
Speaker 1: top recognition for queer media in our industry, and I
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Speaker 1: let's get into the show.
Speaker 2: Gay activism in those days was about trying to get
Speaker 2: accepted into mainstream America, you know, your little place of
Speaker 2: the suburbs with the backyard, the white picket fence or
Speaker 2: the whole thing. And the whole idea was we are
Speaker 2: just like you, only a little different. We wanted to
Speaker 2: be accepted into society, and my feeling at the time
Speaker 2: was I didn't care about being accepted into society. From
Speaker 2: the time I left home when I was nineteen, I
Speaker 2: started going to anti warmwashers and I had become pretty radicalized.
Speaker 2: I didn't want to be accepted into society the way
Speaker 2: it was. I wanted to change that society, to overturn it.
Speaker 1: As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
Speaker 1: I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
Speaker 1: ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
Speaker 1: that by seeking out our history, and what I found
Speaker 1: are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we'll meet Martha Shelley, an author and
Speaker 1: poet who helped define the goals of the first mainstream
Speaker 1: gay rights movement in the US. We'll learn what it
Speaker 1: was like to fight for gay rights in the fifties, sixties,
Speaker 1: and seventies, what's changed then, and what's still the same.
Speaker 1: For my Heart Podcast, I'm Jordan and Solve, and this
Speaker 1: is what we loved growing up. I literally knew nothing
Speaker 1: about queer history. It was never something taught in my
Speaker 1: Texas public school education. Once I got older, I learned
Speaker 1: about Stonewall, and for most of my adult life I
Speaker 1: really thought the fight for gay rights only began there
Speaker 1: before that to begin in America was considered a mental illness,
Speaker 1: a sin, and a crime. Being associated with any one
Speaker 1: of these stigmas in the fifties and sixties would be
Speaker 1: caused to stay closeted, let alone all three. But there
Speaker 1: actually were queer people at this time forming organizations protesting
Speaker 1: for equality and pushing back on discrimination. The two primary
Speaker 1: ones were called the Mattachine Society mostly for gay men,
Speaker 1: and the Daughters of Balitists for lesbians. Their goals were
Speaker 1: centered around fitting into society's molts, arguing that we're just
Speaker 1: like you, only we're gay. My next guest, Martha Shelley,
Speaker 1: was an active member of that movement. She's an author
Speaker 1: and a poet, and began publishing her provocative essays on
Speaker 1: gay rights and feminism in the nineteen sixties, which have
Speaker 1: inspired numerous generations of activists. She's eighty one now, but
Speaker 1: even as a child she felt called to activism. Let's
Speaker 1: start at the very beginning. You have this life that
Speaker 1: has been defined by standing up against injustices, and I wonder,
Speaker 1: going back to your childhood, was there a formative experience
Speaker 1: that you had growing up that sort of instilled this
Speaker 1: mentality in you.
Speaker 2: I think it came from my mother. My mother escaped
Speaker 2: before the Holocaust, She was born in Poland and her
Speaker 2: family left in nineteen twenty one. They emigrated to Cuba
Speaker 2: because at that point they couldn't get into the United
Speaker 2: States there was an immigration law. She had experienced the
Speaker 2: pogrom as a childhood, where her infant brother died, and
Speaker 2: she experienced a lot of poverty in Havana. Came to
Speaker 2: the United States and got a job in a factory.
Speaker 2: But when she told me stories about the pogroms and
Speaker 2: about the rest of her family that had been killed
Speaker 2: but by Hitler because they hadn't gotten out in time.
Speaker 2: Her stories inspired me always to think, what would I
Speaker 2: have done if I had been there? Would I have
Speaker 2: had the courage to fight? Or would I have gone
Speaker 2: along with whatever the Nazis were doing?
Speaker 1: What was your first memory of standing up for what
Speaker 1: you believe in?
Speaker 2: This was in junior high school. I was, I guess
Speaker 2: in what seventh grade, and there'd been a lot of
Speaker 2: water gun fights in the school.
Speaker 1: Water gun you mean like the toy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, toy water guns. Kids were bringing toy wa goes
Speaker 2: to school and having fights in the lunch room and stuff. Now,
Speaker 2: that was during the time that was the McCarthy era,
Speaker 2: and people were being forced, particularly teachers, to sign these
Speaker 2: loyalty oaths. The New York Times came out against it, said,
Speaker 2: if you were really a communist, a spy or something,
Speaker 2: of course you'd sign it. You wouldn't have any qualms
Speaker 2: about it, and just continue to do your subversive work.
Speaker 2: And it was nuts to have ordinary people being forced
Speaker 2: to sign these loyalty oaths. So when the principal gave
Speaker 2: an edict that all of us students had to sign
Speaker 2: a paper saying that we weren't going to bring water
Speaker 2: pistols into the school, I refused to sign it. To me,
Speaker 2: it was like a loyalty oath. I didn't even own
Speaker 2: a water pistol. And I told the teacher that. Well,
Speaker 2: they brought me down to the principal's office and they
Speaker 2: kept me there and threatened to call my parents and
Speaker 2: suspend me and so on, and finally I buckled under
Speaker 2: and signed. And I regret that to this day. That
Speaker 2: was my first sort of protest for you.
Speaker 1: It was bigger than a water gun.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just you know, forcible cow towing.
Speaker 1: And tell me the moment when you first knew you
Speaker 1: were gay.
Speaker 2: I was eighteen, and that was nineteen sixty two. I think,
Speaker 2: I think I had just recently turned eighteen, and I
Speaker 2: really wanted to live on my own. And my mother said,
Speaker 2: a girl can't live on her own. It's too dangerous
Speaker 2: in New York City. And then one day I was
Speaker 2: reading the New York Post and there was a little
Speaker 2: ad in it and it said, you know, the first
Speaker 2: old women's judo class was going to be happening at
Speaker 2: the why WCA. I thought far out, I went, that's
Speaker 2: the solution to my problem. That will enable me to
Speaker 2: leave home. So you learned how to escape from somebody
Speaker 2: grabbing you. And I used to ride home on the
Speaker 2: subway with this other woman. She was a few years
Speaker 2: older than me. We both went to City College. So
Speaker 2: one evening she invited me over to her place for dinner,
Speaker 2: and afterwards we were in the living room and she
Speaker 2: kissed me, and I knew right then what I was.
Speaker 2: I had had sex with boys before, but it hadn't
Speaker 2: felt like much of anything. There was no emotional connection there.
Speaker 2: And I went home thinking I would go through the
Speaker 2: fires of hell for kisses like this, you know, dramatic
Speaker 2: adolescent attitudes.
Speaker 1: What did the kiss feel like?
Speaker 2: It was like night and kissing a boy was just
Speaker 2: this wet thing kissing her. It felt warm and passionate,
Speaker 2: and anyone who is listening to this program will know
Speaker 2: what it feels like to have a passionate kiss.
Speaker 1: And when did you end up coming out?
Speaker 2: That was a few years later. What happened was I
Speaker 2: joined the Daughters of Belitist when I was twenty three,
Speaker 2: I believe, and after trying me on a couple of
Speaker 2: different jobs, they made me the public speaker because I
Speaker 2: was young and articulate and had some kind of crappy
Speaker 2: job that I wasn't afraid to lose. Then I got
Speaker 2: invited to be on a TV program and debating these
Speaker 2: two psychologists who were making a living out of quote
Speaker 2: straightening gaye people out. So I figured, this is a
Speaker 2: daytime TV show. I better tell my parents before some
Speaker 2: aunt watching daytime TV sees that and calls my mother
Speaker 2: up and says, do you know what your daughter has
Speaker 2: been up to? I told my father over the phone,
Speaker 2: and my father's response was, so, what what else is new?
Speaker 2: I knew that already, so I was the one who
Speaker 2: was surprised. I said, well, how did you know that?
Speaker 2: And he said, your poetry, your drawings. But don't tell
Speaker 2: your mom. She'll blame me.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: Well, I had to tell my mom, and of course
Speaker 2: she blamed my father. She blamed my kid's sister for
Speaker 2: not arranging dates with me with boys. She offered to
Speaker 2: give me a nose job, that I would look prettier
Speaker 2: for boys, and then boys would want me more. She
Speaker 2: never accepted that I was gay.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like it didn't really matter to you.
Speaker 1: You were out now.
Speaker 2: It didn't matter in the sense that it didn't affect
Speaker 2: what I did with my life.
Speaker 1: Well, tell us what is the Daughters of Belidas.
Speaker 2: The Daughters of Beliders was really the first lesbian organization
Speaker 2: in the United States. It was founded by a group
Speaker 2: of women in San Francisco, and then chapters opened around
Speaker 2: the country.
Speaker 1: And how did you find them?
Speaker 2: There was a book it was called The Homosexual in America,
Speaker 2: because of course I was reading stuff trying to find
Speaker 2: out more about gay people of what I was like really,
Speaker 2: And at the end of the book there was a
Speaker 2: little appendix and it listed these gay organizations and said
Speaker 2: that there was this Daughters of Belitis chapter in New York.
Speaker 2: And I joined the New York chapter, and that was
Speaker 2: where I was able to meet women who were more
Speaker 2: like me.
Speaker 1: And now that you're an out lesbian in New York City,
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could tell us what it was
Speaker 1: like to be out in the fifties and sixties in
Speaker 1: America as a gay person.
Speaker 2: During the fifties, gay people were being hounded out of government.
Speaker 2: The government at the McCarthy period actually pushed more gay
Speaker 2: people out that they did people who were suspected of
Speaker 2: being communists.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen fifties, the federal government began to purge
Speaker 1: employees that they suspected were gay. This was called the
Speaker 1: Lavender Scare. It was started by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Speaker 1: In the wake of World War Two and America's increasing
Speaker 1: tensions with the Soviet Union, Communism became a threat to
Speaker 1: American life, and in nineteen fifty McCarthy gave a speech
Speaker 1: convincing the American people that homosexuals were particularly susceptible to
Speaker 1: Communist recruitment because they quote lacked morality, and so began
Speaker 1: a witch hunt for the next decade to root out
Speaker 1: anyone gay in government. Within a week of McCarthy's speech,
Speaker 1: the State Department fired ninety one employees they identified as
Speaker 1: a gay and deemed them a security risk. This laid
Speaker 1: the groundwork for President Eisenhower's executive order in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three that banned gay men and lesbians from all government jobs.
Speaker 1: Upwards of ten thousand people lost their livelihoods. One of
Speaker 1: the men fired in this crusade was Frank Camedy, an
Speaker 1: astronomer working for the army. In response, he would go
Speaker 1: on to found the Mattachine Society.
Speaker 2: When I first came out, my first job was with
Speaker 2: the federal government. I was seventeen, and my father said, Okay,
Speaker 2: no more summers on the beach for you, and you're
Speaker 2: going to work. And at that point that we already
Speaker 2: knew I was a lesbian. So summertime, I'm calling my
Speaker 2: lover on the phone from the office and one of
Speaker 2: the other women picks up the extension and she turns
Speaker 2: pale green, like the color of hospital walls, and she
Speaker 2: grabs me and gets me off the phone and drags
Speaker 2: me into the bathroom and says, don't do that. You
Speaker 2: know you're going to get into real trouble. You know.
Speaker 2: She was covering for me, and I protected her because
Speaker 2: she was having an affair with the sailor and was
Speaker 2: terrified that she was going to get pregnant. I got
Speaker 2: her to the Margaret Sanger Institute to get birth control,
Speaker 2: so we protected each other.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: What I knew then was that I was an outlaw.
Speaker 2: It was illegal to have gay sex state of the
Speaker 2: Union except for Illinois. And the reason it was not
Speaker 2: illegal in Illinois was that when they revised the penal called,
Speaker 2: they simply forgot to include that. If they'd remembered, they
Speaker 2: would have made it illegal there too. So I knew
Speaker 2: I was, you know, I was an outlaw, which at
Speaker 2: that point and.
Speaker 1: A criminal, a criminal and yeah, so you know, going
Speaker 1: back to that, say more about what it was like
Speaker 1: to be thought of as a criminal in those days.
Speaker 2: My first woman lover got into therapy and she got
Speaker 2: me to go see these therapists, and the therapist was
Speaker 2: trying to get me to be bisexual, so I, you know,
Speaker 2: continued having sex with guys, although again there was no
Speaker 2: emotional content there trying to be bisexual. All I wanted
Speaker 2: was one woman to love. The therapist I went to
Speaker 2: at that point was part of this sort of cult
Speaker 2: called the Solovnians, and they didn't think gayness was mentally
Speaker 2: ill as much as sort of being stuck at a
Speaker 2: particular stage of growth, and.
Speaker 1: So if you could get to buy, then maybe you
Speaker 1: could get to straight. Yeah. Wow, It's the late nineteen
Speaker 1: sixties and Martha is officially out. The US is making
Speaker 1: a lot of social progress. Civil rights for black Americans
Speaker 1: had been signed into law, and the FDA had just
Speaker 1: approved the first ever birth control pill. But that progress
Speaker 1: hadn't extended to the queer community, which Martha was now
Speaker 1: proudly a part of. Many were still affected by the
Speaker 1: stigma left in the wake of the Lavender scare. What
Speaker 1: did queer activism like before Stonewall? Because you had started
Speaker 1: to get involved in it, So talk to me a
Speaker 1: little bit about what that activism was like in those days.
Speaker 2: Gay activism in those days was about trying to get
Speaker 2: accepted into mainstream America. And the whole idea of the
Speaker 2: Daughters of Belitis and Matterchane and so on was we
Speaker 2: are just like you, only a little different, and all
Speaker 2: we want is to be accepted into society. And my
Speaker 2: feeling at the time was I didn't care about being
Speaker 2: accepted into society. From the time I left home when
Speaker 2: I was nineteen I started going to anti war marshes,
Speaker 2: and I had become pretty radicalized. I didn't want to
Speaker 2: be accepted into society the way it was. I wanted
Speaker 2: to change that society, to overturn it.
Speaker 1: It sounds like you were part of this very unique
Speaker 1: generation that sort of on the cusp of the gay
Speaker 1: activism before stone Wall, which is about kind of fitting in,
Speaker 1: and then the gay activism after stone Wall, which is
Speaker 1: kind of about blowing everything up.
Speaker 2: Precisely in nineteen I think it was sixty eight, on
Speaker 2: Independence Day, we had this quote annual reminder demonstration where
Speaker 2: a few of us went to Philadelphia to Independence Hall
Speaker 2: where the Liberty Bell is, and we would march around
Speaker 2: with picket signs asking for homosexual rights. And the men
Speaker 2: had to wear shirts, you know, jackets and ties, and
Speaker 2: the women had to wear dresses and would walk around
Speaker 2: in a circle, and tourists were coming to the Liberty
Speaker 2: Bell would stare at us like it was a freak show.
Speaker 2: And I hated it. I did it once and I
Speaker 2: hated it. I just remember this one tea age boy
Speaker 2: standing there looking his ice cream cone, looking at me
Speaker 2: like there was something out of a circus or thing
Speaker 2: in a zoo.
Speaker 1: It sounds very different from like a Pride March today,
Speaker 1: what people would dress Pride March today.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, And you know, at.
Speaker 1: These protests at Independent Hall, what was the priority? Give
Speaker 1: me a little bit of context into what folks were
Speaker 1: kind of fighting for back then, what specifically they wanted
Speaker 1: to change.
Speaker 2: There was a push to get gay people accepted into
Speaker 2: the military. And when I think back on it, this
Speaker 2: was the height of the Vietnam War. The last thing
Speaker 2: I wanted to zoo was get into the military and
Speaker 2: go kill people in another country, people who had done
Speaker 2: nothing to me. M And instead of being proud of
Speaker 2: the people who did that demonstration, I was kind of
Speaker 2: ashamed of them.
Speaker 1: Wow. Well, Stonewall happens in ninete ten sixty nine, right,
Speaker 1: And it seems as though it's a very different kind
Speaker 1: of activism from what you described at Liberty Bell and
Speaker 1: Independence Hall. Like Stonewall is marked by rage and anger
Speaker 1: and drag queens, and it's just so different from a
Speaker 1: bunch of men and women in suits and kind of
Speaker 1: looking rather corporate. Exactly what was going through your mind
Speaker 1: and your heart when you heard about Stonewall? Where were you?
Speaker 2: Okay? I think it started on a Friday night. Saturday night,
Speaker 2: I was taking two women on a tour of Granwich
Speaker 2: Village and the lesbian bars and so on. They were
Speaker 2: from Boston. They wanted to started Daughters of Belitist chapter
Speaker 2: and they asked me if I would take these two
Speaker 2: women for a tour and I said sure. So Saturday
Speaker 2: night we're walking around and we passed by the Stonewool
Speaker 2: and I see these young people throwing things at cops
Speaker 2: and the women from Boston were taken aback. I said,
Speaker 2: what's that and I said, oh, it's just a riot.
Speaker 2: We have them all the time. I was thinking it
Speaker 2: was another anti war riot. God knows, I'd been in
Speaker 2: more than one of them. So I went home, didn't
Speaker 2: think about it. And then Monday morning I opened up
Speaker 2: the New York Times and I read you know about
Speaker 2: homosexuals rioting, and I thought, oh my god, that's us,
Speaker 2: and I was on fire. I called up Gene Powers,
Speaker 2: who was running the local chapter of Daughters of Police,
Speaker 2: and Dick Litch who was running Madchine, and he said,
Speaker 2: come to this meeting Thursday night. They were having a
Speaker 2: meeting at some downtown place that they rented, and there
Speaker 2: were four hundred gay guys and me and people were
Speaker 2: all worked out up about the riot. And when it
Speaker 2: was my turn, you know, I raised my hand and
Speaker 2: I proposed a protest march, and Dick like looked down
Speaker 2: and he said, how many of you were in favor?
Speaker 2: And everybody's hand went up, and Dick was said, Okay,
Speaker 2: those of you who want to organize it, meet over
Speaker 2: in that corner. And we get there and we're talking
Speaker 2: and we're all really excited, and it's a hot early
Speaker 2: July afternoon. We're drinking beer, and at one point somebody
Speaker 2: says the words Gay Liberation Front, and I got all
Speaker 2: excited and said, yes, yes, yes, and start pounding my
Speaker 2: hands on the table. Yes, that's it. We're the Gay
Speaker 2: Liberation Front. And then I looked at my hand and
Speaker 2: was bleeding. I had been pounding my hand on the
Speaker 2: pop top of my beer can. Oh wow, And I
Speaker 2: was feeling no pain. You were that excited, yes, excited,
Speaker 2: And you know, I'd had half a can of beer.
Speaker 1: And three weeks after Stonewall, Martha helped organize a gay
Speaker 1: march against police brutality. This would be a precursor to
Speaker 1: the very first Pride March, held a year after Stonewall,
Speaker 1: but she wasn't sure if anyone would show up.
Speaker 2: We didn't have a name for our march, and about
Speaker 2: according to the Underground cop four hundred people showed up.
Speaker 2: According to the Village Voice reporter, five hundred. We marched
Speaker 2: around the village and ended up at a little park,
Speaker 2: Christopher Park, which is right across the street from the
Speaker 2: Stonewall in And one year later we and people from
Speaker 2: other groups got together and organized that Christopher Street Liberation
Speaker 2: Day exactly one year after Stonewall. And that was no
Speaker 2: four hundred, five hundred people. That was ten thousand people
Speaker 2: marching up sixth Avenue to say Park.
Speaker 1: In other words, what you're saying is when you all
Speaker 1: held the first sort of protests march after Stonewall, right
Speaker 1: after Stonewall, you could feel in your body. You knew
Speaker 1: there was an energy that everything had changed.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Stonewall had changed everything. Many queer people wanted to break
Speaker 1: away from the model of activism set up by the
Speaker 1: Mattachine Society and Daughters of Belitis. They didn't want gay marriage,
Speaker 1: they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family. They didn't want
Speaker 1: to serve openly in the military. They wanted to abolish
Speaker 1: the armed forces. This new group of queer activists, which
Speaker 1: included Martha, called themselves the Gay Liberation Front or GLF.
Speaker 1: Earlier queer organizations sought to have a slice of the
Speaker 1: proverbial pie, but GLF didn't want a slice of the pie.
Speaker 1: They wanted to burn down the whole bakery. Tell me
Speaker 1: a little bit about your activism around that time. You
Speaker 1: were writing a lot, and that kind of was a
Speaker 1: huge element to your activism. So tell us about kind
Speaker 1: of how activism was in those days and the underground
Speaker 1: papers and all of that.
Speaker 2: I had been working on the Gay Liberation Front newspaper
Speaker 2: come out when we started the Gay Liberation Front. This
Speaker 2: was before we had the internet, So this is how
Speaker 2: we communicated with each other. We mailed these poop papers
Speaker 2: all over the country and people, would you buy them?
Speaker 2: I think we sold ours for thirty five cents. I
Speaker 2: typesett it at night. I was working as a typesetter
Speaker 2: and my boss was a radical, and so she let
Speaker 2: me use the type setting machines at night. She was
Speaker 2: type setting for the Black Panthers.
Speaker 1: So, Martha, you're writing these papers about gay liberation and
Speaker 1: feminism quite publicly and at the same time, the government
Speaker 1: is actively trying to silence gay people. I wonder, were
Speaker 1: you scared? Did you feel like you had to be
Speaker 1: extra careful?
Speaker 2: One day I came home and the woman downstairs said
Speaker 2: that the FBI had been there asking questions about me.
Speaker 2: She was an immigrant from Ukraine and a neighbor. A neighbor,
Speaker 2: and I had commiserated with her over the death of
Speaker 2: her cat, and she said she didn't tell them anything
Speaker 2: because she knew what the secret police were like in
Speaker 2: her home country, and her attitude was, don't tell them anything.
Speaker 2: And the truth is, she didn't know anything about me
Speaker 2: to tell, really, except that I lived upstairs and had
Speaker 2: a cat myself. And then during that period, this guy
Speaker 2: asked me to come talk to him his apartment in
Speaker 2: the building, in a different building.
Speaker 1: How did you meet him?
Speaker 2: What I remember is that he presented himself as some
Speaker 2: kind of radical and we're talking and he invites me
Speaker 2: upstairs and he shows me a twenty two rifle and
Speaker 2: he wants me to work with him, and we're going
Speaker 2: to put poison on bullets and shoot people and kill them.
Speaker 2: And the first thing I thought, the first thing that
Speaker 2: went into my head was, oh, my God agent, Agent, Agent,
Speaker 2: get me out of here. So I left as fast
Speaker 2: as I could. I knew right away this was somebody
Speaker 2: sent to entrap me.
Speaker 1: Like a federal agent. Basically yeah.
Speaker 2: Wow, And there were a lot of them wow. Various
Speaker 2: people got entrapped into schemes to blow things up that
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been able to do it themselves, and then
Speaker 2: got arrested and set up, you know. For However, many years.
Speaker 1: By the eighties, the Gay Liberation Front had split up
Speaker 1: into different factions based on race and gender and ideology,
Speaker 1: and the gay rights movement of the twenty first century
Speaker 1: largely moved away from glf's ambitious goals and ironically focused
Speaker 1: on gay marriage and the right to serve openly in
Speaker 1: the military. But even though the movement didn't accomplish everything
Speaker 1: it set out to do, it still changed lives, including Martha's.
Speaker 1: When was the first actual moment where you felt a
Speaker 1: sense of liberation?
Speaker 2: The first March and that summer when I realized I
Speaker 2: didn't have to even try to be bisexual anymore, where
Speaker 2: I could just be fully myself and I had found
Speaker 2: an organization, a place had really created with other people,
Speaker 2: a place where we could be exactly who we were
Speaker 2: and want what we wanted.
Speaker 1: You're eighty one now, and I've interviewed a lot of
Speaker 1: queer elders on the show, and we sometimes talk about
Speaker 1: regret looking back at, you know, a long, beautiful life.
Speaker 1: I wonder if you could summarize in this storied life
Speaker 1: of activism what you think your biggest success was, but
Speaker 1: also your biggest failure.
Speaker 2: The biggest success was starting the Gay Liberation Front. Well,
Speaker 2: actually though that was one of a chain of successes,
Speaker 2: publishing stuff, doing my radio show, which was the first
Speaker 2: lesbian radio show. We made alliances with other groups, with
Speaker 2: the Black Panthers, with the Young Lords, with the socialist groups.
Speaker 2: We turned the National Organization for Women around so that
Speaker 2: instead of being anti lesbian, they became pro lesbian. But
Speaker 2: I would say that those things led to a lot
Speaker 2: of changes in American society, all of our activism, I
Speaker 2: think the biggest failure was that we often squabbled with
Speaker 2: each other. We were young, we were angry, and a
Speaker 2: lot of the reason we were angry was that we
Speaker 2: had been oppressed. But we sometimes took that anger out
Speaker 2: on each other and squabbled over petty differences, and the
Speaker 2: anger what really important is directing the anger to the
Speaker 2: people who are oppressing you, not against each other. What
Speaker 2: we call horizontal hostility, thing it against each other, punch upward,
Speaker 2: look at the people who are causing your problems, and
Speaker 2: they're not each other.
Speaker 1: That was kind of the biggest threat to the movement success.
Speaker 2: You think, yeah, and it continues to be groups like
Speaker 2: Gay Liberation Front two get mad at each other and
Speaker 2: splinter off instead of listening to each other and trying
Speaker 2: to work things out and putting their energy into changing
Speaker 2: the whole system.
Speaker 1: What do you think young people and this next generation
Speaker 1: can learn from that failure.
Speaker 2: I think we need to listen to each other. And
Speaker 2: I know this is hard. One of the things we
Speaker 2: weren't aware of in the Liberation Front. We were aware
Speaker 2: of the economic inequality, we weren't aware of the climate
Speaker 2: problems at that point. That's the biggest thing that's facing
Speaker 2: the younger generation, because if we don't have a habitable planet,
Speaker 2: all of our rights, gay rights, black rights, whatever will
Speaker 2: mean nothing because we'll be dead. That's to me the
Speaker 2: biggest priority, and I just want to be able with
Speaker 2: the time that I have left to help in whatever
Speaker 2: way I can.
Speaker 1: But we Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
Speaker 1: episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
Speaker 1: to tell your story, email us at but We Loved
Speaker 1: at gmail dot com, or you can send me a
Speaker 1: message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore against solve this.
Speaker 1: We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and
Speaker 1: iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger.
Speaker 1: Our executive producers are me, Maya Howard and Katrina Norville.
Speaker 1: Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson
Speaker 1: and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us
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Speaker 1: and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.