Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
Speaker 1: your podcast that did not come out on Monday, but
Speaker 1: today is Wednesday, so it did come out. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my guest Daniel Goodman.
Speaker 2: Hello, thrilled to be How are you? I'm great, I'm
Speaker 2: truly great.
Speaker 1: Do you ever think about the fact that you get
Speaker 1: the words Goodman with an exclamation point tattooed on your knuckles?
Speaker 2: Wow? I should do that, And for the years at home,
Speaker 2: I literally took my knuckles and I looked at them
Speaker 2: and went, oh my god, that's yes, I should do that.
Speaker 2: I think my father will be proud.
Speaker 1: And our producer is Sophie. How are you, Sophie Swell?
Speaker 1: Do you know that Anderson would fit on your knuckles?
Speaker 2: Really?
Speaker 3: Oh? So cool? I do? I do. So. I don't
Speaker 3: have any tattoos, but if I did, I would want
Speaker 3: an innocent tattoo. But I've thought about it so much
Speaker 3: that like, I don't know how to pick what that
Speaker 3: would be. That would be like really capture her essence.
Speaker 3: She's so perfect.
Speaker 1: I know that's true. I don't know what I would
Speaker 1: I'm like every now and then I might get like
Speaker 1: Rentros's pawprint or something cheesy like that.
Speaker 2: You know, Oh, that's so cool, that's fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Renschell turns me into like a Disney mom. I
Speaker 1: got advertised on Instagram. That's like fucking like your dog's
Speaker 1: face on a Hawaiian shirt. I hate Hawaiian shirts. I
Speaker 1: have like only once in my life as an adult,
Speaker 1: worn a Hawaiian shirt, and it was because I really
Speaker 1: didn't want to, but I.
Speaker 2: Was like, oh, what if I had rentro What if
Speaker 2: I had her?
Speaker 3: Yeah, while we're recording this, not only if Anderson right
Speaker 3: next to me, but I can physically see behind me
Speaker 3: multiple photos or huge portraits Anderson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's lots of Anderson in the background and acts
Speaker 2: on display.
Speaker 3: Oh that's from Robert.
Speaker 1: Robert got me a really cool act.
Speaker 2: Of course, it is a cool ax. It's very cool acts.
Speaker 1: Oh, I will say I'm currently kickstarting a table. Actually
Speaker 1: it's that that was last week. You can buy it.
Speaker 1: You can buy it afterwards. We'll still sell it to ye.
Speaker 1: But the artist is putting a lot of us as cameos,
Speaker 1: like using us as models for different characters and stuff
Speaker 1: in the book. And the occultist has like a spectral familiar,
Speaker 1: So she drew me with Rentraw as a spectral.
Speaker 3: Rentrow is like, okay, if you haven't seen what rhyn
Speaker 3: Trow mag Pist Dog looks like, listeners. Ntrow is so handsome,
Speaker 3: it's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: He's so beautiful. Yeah, that's why he gets away with
Speaker 1: a lot I miss him speaking of handsome people who
Speaker 1: are going to get away with a lot Ian. No,
Speaker 1: we were not, okay, our.
Speaker 2: Audio engineers Ian. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Our theme music was written for us by Unwoman. And
Speaker 1: this week is part three of our three parter on Star,
Speaker 1: the Street, Transvestite Action, Revolutionaries, and the Gay Liberation Front.
Speaker 1: We talked last week about the US Gay Liberation Front
Speaker 1: and Star, but today we're going over to that land
Speaker 1: of fantasy and whimsy, the land most commonly known today
Speaker 1: as Turf Island, which wasn't always Turf Island, and to
Speaker 1: be fair, still isn't actually Surf Island. They're countless trans
Speaker 1: people and trans accepting people living in the United Kingdom.
Speaker 2: Sorry James stout.
Speaker 1: Right now, Yeah, a refugee from Turf Island. For anyone
Speaker 1: who's not caught up. There's just a lot more anti transactivism,
Speaker 1: anti trans activism is very visible in the United Kingdom,
Speaker 1: but there's also an incredible amount of work by trans
Speaker 1: people and their allies fighting there. Okay, so one person
Speaker 1: who spent some time protesting the Women's House of Detention
Speaker 1: in Manhattan was a guy named Bob Mellers who was
Speaker 1: a young gay British student. He was impressed by what
Speaker 1: he saw. What he saw was gay and political, so
Speaker 1: he was like that rules signed me up. Then he
Speaker 1: went to the Black Panthers Revolutionaries People Constitutional Convention in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy in Philadelphia, which I didn't talk about in
Speaker 1: the earlier episode but I'll talk about now, and he
Speaker 1: was even more impressed when he saw this, which was
Speaker 1: a Revolutionary People's Constitutional convention where everyone came together and
Speaker 1: had a huge New Left conference, and he was like,
Speaker 1: so the GLF is gay political and part of a huge,
Speaker 1: powerful intersectional movement that is gay accepting. I very accept,
Speaker 1: very into this. He's double signed me up.
Speaker 2: This. Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is the convention where Huey Pugh Newton from the
Speaker 1: Black Panthers came out swinging for gay rights and said
Speaker 1: that queer people are among the most oppressed people in
Speaker 1: the world and are part of the revolution and at
Speaker 1: it there was the Male Homosexual Workshop where they worked
Speaker 1: up a statement of like the rights that they were demanding.
Speaker 1: This is a big part of the glf's rights that
Speaker 1: they demanded, and the basic idea was gay rights are
Speaker 1: part of the worldwide revolution I struggle. And they had
Speaker 1: this banger slogan, no revolution without us, an army of
Speaker 1: lovers cannot lose, all power to the people. Have you
Speaker 1: ever heard an army of lovers cannot lose before?
Speaker 2: I had no. That's wow, So go ahead we have
Speaker 2: This is just a this whole series has been a
Speaker 2: a just an explosion of awesome sayings that should live
Speaker 2: forever and allowed this podcast, this series, I mean literally
Speaker 2: the entire podcast to be a series of awesome sayings
Speaker 2: to live by and to hold on to truly forever. Yeah,
Speaker 2: everything's been great.
Speaker 1: And this particular one, it's like three thousand years old
Speaker 1: as a gay thing. What so what some Greek philosophers
Speaker 1: maybe twenty three hundred years old, some Greek philosophers made
Speaker 1: up made the argument that a division entirely of male
Speaker 1: lovers could conquer the world.
Speaker 2: Awesome.
Speaker 1: Not very long after that, yeah, not that very long
Speaker 1: after that. The Sacred band of thebes formed.
Speaker 2: Huh. This is a division of three hundred men paired
Speaker 2: off into one hundred and fifty same sex couples. And
Speaker 2: they were like the specops of their army. This is
Speaker 2: the mid three hundred s BC. Wow, these are.
Speaker 1: The people who crushed Sparta.
Speaker 2: No way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and like.
Speaker 2: My god, I'm sure cool that yeah, so cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure they were like messy and bad in
Speaker 1: some way. I didn't do enough research, but like right
Speaker 1: wing fucks love being Like yeah, Sparta, right exactly, And
Speaker 1: you know who fucking beat them? Teams of gay male pers.
Speaker 2: Of gay males. I love that. Fuck. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: An army of lovers cannot lose army of lovers. So
Speaker 1: the manifesto that they came up with out of that
Speaker 1: conference that the Gay Male Organization came up with included
Speaker 1: demands for the right to be publicly gay at any time,
Speaker 1: and also importantly the right to transnis both the right
Speaker 1: to change one's gender expression and also the right to
Speaker 1: change one's body. They were like, part of our demands
Speaker 1: for revolutionary society is free access to trends of like
Speaker 1: gender firming care. This is like nineteen seventy. This was
Speaker 1: widely agreed upon within the Gay Liberation Front, except there
Speaker 1: are proto turfs for anyone who lives under the rock
Speaker 1: that I wish I lived under, but don't. A turf
Speaker 1: is trans exclusionary, radical feminist. It's this argument against transnists
Speaker 1: from a ostensibly feminist position, and so the proto turfs.
Speaker 1: A Marxist collective called Red Butterfly issued a critique saying
Speaker 1: people shouldn't mutilate their bodies, and that also that people
Speaker 1: shouldn't act gay because acting gay plays into the stereotypes
Speaker 1: like like acting effeminate or whatever is like bad and
Speaker 1: you're like helping the other side if you are a
Speaker 1: hairdresser and talk with a lisp or like whatever fucking
Speaker 1: thing you actually feel like doing, people should god forbid,
Speaker 1: people just do whatever the fuck they want, like with
Speaker 1: their own bodies and like how they carry themselves and talk.
Speaker 1: The Red Butterfly, this particular collective or sell within it,
Speaker 1: they were roundly denounced and they ended up actually leaving
Speaker 1: the movement. They you know, they've been like kind of
Speaker 1: contentious and people are disagreeing with them. But basically when
Speaker 1: they were like when this manifesto came out and they
Speaker 1: were like, wrote a critique of it and were like, no,
Speaker 1: don't mutilate your bodies and don't act gay and blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. People are like, get the fuck out of here,
Speaker 1: and they wrote a bunch of statements about how bad
Speaker 1: it was that no one would let them chastise everyone
Speaker 1: for wanting body autonomy. They were really upset that they
Speaker 1: weren't in charge of the movement. They're one of the
Speaker 1: main people I found critiques of about the structure, the
Speaker 1: structuralless structure, and it's I think because they didn't get
Speaker 1: their way because people were autonomy us. But that's the US.
Speaker 1: We're supposed to be talking about England now because the
Speaker 1: GLF is going to England like a sequel, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like.
Speaker 2: It's like Mary kayn Nashley the Alson twinses to take
Speaker 2: the UK. Yeah, yeah, hell yeah.
Speaker 1: England was kind of around the same place about gay
Speaker 1: stuff as the US was at this as best as
Speaker 1: I can figure, which is, you know, things are starting
Speaker 1: to change, but kind of slowly. And there was the
Speaker 1: Wolfenden Report in nineteen fifty seven that was the result
Speaker 1: of a government commission of the same name. This commission
Speaker 1: met for sixty two days, and they interviewed people about
Speaker 1: prostitution and gay sex. Since they were British and there
Speaker 1: were women in the room, they used code words. Instead
Speaker 1: of homosexual or prostitute. They named it after a cookie
Speaker 1: manufacturer or biscuits. If you're speaking the old tongue. There
Speaker 1: we go, Huntley and Palmer's is some brand of cookies.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, So homosexuals were called Huntley's in this serious
Speaker 1: government investigation of people's rights, and prostitutes were Palmers.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the end, they released their report which was like gays, yes,
Speaker 1: sex workers no ooh yeah, yeah, I agree, And in
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine they passed a law increasingly fucking over
Speaker 1: sex workers, and then it took until nineteen sixty seven
Speaker 1: for them to act on the fine. Yes, consenting adult
Speaker 1: men can bone yay. Yeah, But it wasn't like magically
Speaker 1: good there not just because gay rights have always been
Speaker 1: intertwined with sex workers' rights and it's a massive loss.
Speaker 1: But the gay scene included cruising spots in public laboratories
Speaker 1: and back rooms of bars since they couldn't meet in
Speaker 1: the open. Even though it was like ostensibly legal now,
Speaker 1: people were still getting beaten, fired, and generally treated like shit,
Speaker 1: and the main group fighting for rights there was the assimilationists,
Speaker 1: but I'm not even here to talk shit on them.
Speaker 1: They just happened that they're a you know, a planar organization,
Speaker 1: a less radicalanization called Campaign for Homosexual Quality. They were
Speaker 1: probably fine, and I didn't read much about them. But
Speaker 1: on October thirteenth, nineteen seventy nineteen, people met in the
Speaker 1: London School of Economics and Political Science the LC where
Speaker 1: Bob Meller was a student, the guy who had come
Speaker 1: over from the US. I think there was another one,
Speaker 1: another British person who had been at the convention in Philly,
Speaker 1: and they formed the UK Gay Liberation Front. I've read
Speaker 1: one source that says they were mostly anarchists, and another
Speaker 1: source that there were mostly Marxists. I'm guessing they're a
Speaker 1: mix of both, and, like a lot of the New Left,
Speaker 1: not specifically committed to one or the other of these categories. Ironically,
Speaker 1: usually if I read they were mostly anarchists, thing, it's
Speaker 1: because an anarchist wrote it, And if I read they
Speaker 1: were mostly Marxists, it's a Marxists. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: not what happens in this case. In this case, it's
Speaker 1: a former member who wound up in the Green Party
Speaker 1: who puts anarchists first in the list of people who
Speaker 1: were there. And it's a woman who wound up an
Speaker 1: anti transactivist and pretty conservative who said they were all Marxists.
Speaker 1: So like, I don't know, later there's gonna be a
Speaker 1: bunch of Marxist anarchists divides. It's fucking lefties. They're mostly
Speaker 1: working class, somewhere middle class. I think the UK Gay
Speaker 1: Liberation Front overall was less like we are the Revolution
Speaker 1: than the US one. It was slightly more single issue,
Speaker 1: but not really. It started to be like we are
Speaker 1: the revolution. This is you know, we're gonna overthrow global
Speaker 1: capitalist imperialism or whatever. The founders were very ideological, but
Speaker 1: soon just a lot of non political queers showed up
Speaker 1: and got involved, and this didn't water it down. It
Speaker 1: just changed its focus to be slightly more single issue.
Speaker 1: But they stayed involved in labor issues, women's rights, Irish
Speaker 1: liberation and black liberation struggles because they did all the
Speaker 1: cool things. The London Group's first protest was in November
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy one hundred and fifty queers with balloons and
Speaker 1: flares and fire works, so not rowdy showed up to
Speaker 1: protest the arrest of this straight man named Lewis ex
Speaker 1: who was a prominent liberal activist who had been convicted
Speaker 1: of cruising aka going to a place where gay men
Speaker 1: look for other gay men of consensual sex with. Okay,
Speaker 1: he wasn't even doing it. They basically, this is a
Speaker 1: thing that happens all throughout whenever gay, whenever homosexuality is illegal,
Speaker 1: you can just call anyone gay and arrest them. This
Speaker 1: happened in the Soviet Union, this happened in Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: and this happened in the United States. Have a political enemy, yeah, bullshit.
Speaker 1: If there's something that is like you can't fucking prove
Speaker 1: that you can decide someone's guilty of people will do it.
Speaker 1: And so this was a targeted arrest. Basically, they were like,
Speaker 1: we kind of hate this guy. He's an activist and
Speaker 1: he happened to They're like, haha, we caught him in
Speaker 1: the park where some gay people are also. And the
Speaker 1: GELF didn't pick this case because they were like, oh no,
Speaker 1: won't someone think of the straits, but because they knew
Speaker 1: that laws against cruising were used repression of everyone, and
Speaker 1: that all of our struggles are linked. And this is
Speaker 1: not only the golf's first protest, but at least according
Speaker 1: to one source, I read, this is the first public
Speaker 1: demonstration in the UK by lesbians and gay men. Oh wow, yeah, huh,
Speaker 1: And I I didn't find counter or the this is
Speaker 1: the kind of thing I like. The reason I say
Speaker 1: skeptically is that like this happens a lot when I'm
Speaker 1: reading history, and like, this is the first time, and
Speaker 1: I like, deer google what was the first time, and
Speaker 1: I find three years earlier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: The ukglf's main issues were the same as the GLF everywhere.
Speaker 1: They wanted to stop getting murdered, they wanted to stop
Speaker 1: getting fired and evicted. They wanted to stop being labeled
Speaker 1: as sick by doctors. And then also the laws legalizing
Speaker 1: homosexuality said that gay men the age you consent for
Speaker 1: gay men was twenty one, where straight people were allowed
Speaker 1: to fuck each other at sixteen. So like, and this
Speaker 1: isn't just like under versus over gay men are not
Speaker 1: allowed to fuck legally until they're twenty one, like not
Speaker 1: even other you know, two eighteen year old center I'm
Speaker 1: sure yea, yeah yeah, And specifically, and this is important
Speaker 1: in an era of groomer panic like we live in now.
Speaker 1: It was the Youth Group, which is only for members
Speaker 1: under the age of twenty one, who fought to lower
Speaker 1: the age of consent. So it wasn't like forty year
Speaker 1: olds writing to right right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: It was it was consenting youths wanting to not get
Speaker 2: arrested for yeah, engaging in intercourse. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like I have to like cover that so much,
Speaker 1: partly because it's like, well, I mean, people just call
Speaker 1: LGBT people groomers all the time and it's just like
Speaker 1: right fucking nonsense. But it it's like worth pointing out
Speaker 1: that is something that they were like paying attention to
Speaker 1: and working at different times.
Speaker 2: Totally totally.
Speaker 1: So they had weekly meetings the GLF with hundreds of
Speaker 1: members thousands all told were involved. But most people would
Speaker 1: show up. They'd like go to London from whatever town
Speaker 1: they're in and they'd go and then they'd be like, man,
Speaker 1: I'm going home and starting this, And so they start
Speaker 1: new chapters all over the country and members all wear
Speaker 1: GLF badges. It's like the kinds of like almost like
Speaker 1: the rule of membership as you wear the badge because
Speaker 1: the whole point is to be out and proud. I think,
Speaker 1: like more than anything else, the GLF is just like
Speaker 1: when in the US and the UK people came out
Speaker 1: of the closet, like en Mass, they threw dances, they
Speaker 1: had gay days in the park where they had big
Speaker 1: public kiss ins and spin the bottle games.
Speaker 2: Hell yeah, yeah, we love a kiss in. I know it.
Speaker 1: The photos of it just rule. It's just these like
Speaker 1: happy hippies in the park, like kissing each other. Well,
Speaker 1: like everyone's smiling it fucking ruly. Yeah, that sounds great.
Speaker 1: They made a newsletter called come Together Nice. At one point,
Speaker 1: cops told a bunch of bars or hubs in the
Speaker 1: Old Tongue, uh thanks, to refuse service to anyone wearing
Speaker 1: a GLF pin, and the bars agreed. They're like, all right,
Speaker 1: we want to serve the proofs anyway or whatever. So
Speaker 1: the queerest is sit ins and the bars relented. Hmm
Speaker 1: yeah nice.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well that feels like almost I mean, yeah, good
Speaker 2: for the bars for relenting. And it almost feels like
Speaker 2: rainbow capitalism where it's like damn, we could have your money.
Speaker 1: Maybe totally yeah, But it's also like the pub is
Speaker 1: like such an important social center, completely community. But like no,
Speaker 1: I yeah, I feel you on that. It's like it's
Speaker 1: it's a good and a bad. It's a given and take.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, we're still glad they did it. Yeah, totally totally.
Speaker 2: It's better than them being like, no, we're sticking to
Speaker 2: our guns. We'll lose money. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And so I mean it's just like the ship now right,
Speaker 1: I'm like, I've never been like hol Ray targets getting
Speaker 1: all the gay money. And then I'm like, yeah, but
Speaker 1: giving into the right wing against it, Yeah, that's even worse.
Speaker 2: Don't do that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And so Okay, there's this book that came out
Speaker 1: at the time as a pop science pop sexuality book
Speaker 1: called Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were
Speaker 1: Afraid to Ask, And it was full of disinfo and
Speaker 1: it was like totally homophobic. It had the articles about
Speaker 1: like gay men basically was like gay men just like
Speaker 1: sticking vegetables up their buttholes.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool.
Speaker 1: So the GLF shut down bookstores that carried it and
Speaker 1: like picketed the publisher. I think they also fought, same
Speaker 1: as the US the against like the psychiatric organizations that
Speaker 1: were claiming they were sick. In particular, they disrupted a
Speaker 1: lecture by a man who advocated a lecture shock therapy
Speaker 1: to cure homosexuality.
Speaker 2: Fuck that.
Speaker 1: Chapters sprung up, and a whole bunch of other cities
Speaker 1: with fake sounding UK names. I only wrote down Nodding
Speaker 1: Hill as an example, but it turns out Nodding Hill
Speaker 1: is not a city, it's a neighborhood in London.
Speaker 2: M M you dizzy correct.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's probably over by cock fusters. That's my
Speaker 1: best guess, sig, you're right there. Yeah, one more stop
Speaker 1: down the tube, you're right there. Yeah. They were radically democratic.
Speaker 1: There were three rules for joining the steering committees the
Speaker 1: steering committee. One, no one could serve on the Steering
Speaker 1: committee for more than two months. Two heterosexuals could not
Speaker 1: serve on the Steering committee, and three no one could
Speaker 1: serve on the Office Collective for more than three months,
Speaker 1: which was a separate kind of the administrative side to
Speaker 1: handle the money and stuff. And the second one was
Speaker 1: because there's actually a ton of straight members of the
Speaker 1: GLF doing all kinds of work, they weren't the majority
Speaker 1: by any stretch, and they weren't allowed to lead. And
Speaker 1: this was mostly like straight like political types like I
Speaker 1: think old activists and Marxists who came to help out.
Speaker 1: And one of the original members in Mounty Python, Graham
Speaker 1: Chapman oh Oh is already famous as shit at this
Speaker 1: point and he joins the GLF nice and he gives
Speaker 1: it a lot of money. This is yeah, this is
Speaker 1: King Arthur for Monty Pype for Monty Python, and the
Speaker 1: Holy Grail m H and Brian from Life of Brian
Speaker 1: aka the most important actor to my young sense of humor.
Speaker 1: I love that he was gay and he was one
Speaker 1: of the first UK celebrities to come out, and so
Speaker 1: they got money from him. But overall they were working
Speaker 1: class radicals and the money gaze didn't want anything to
Speaker 1: do with them because they were, you know, disrupting the
Speaker 1: everything that bade people, the assimilation that people have been
Speaker 1: building for. When they marched with the broader left, sometimes
Speaker 1: they're treated like shit. In Northern Ireland they marched against
Speaker 1: the interment of Irish independence activists, or maybe they marched
Speaker 1: in England about the interment of Irish independence activists in
Speaker 1: Northern Ireland, I don't know. But then like there and
Speaker 1: also at trade union marches, they had to like go
Speaker 1: to the back of the march because they didn't want
Speaker 1: They were like, oh, you can be here and show
Speaker 1: your support, but we don't want people. We don't want those.
Speaker 2: To be the pictures your front and center.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Women's Group forced their way into the Women's
Speaker 1: Liberation movement, who kept saying shit like you were a
Speaker 1: bourgeois deviation to them. Imagine saying that to someone like,
Speaker 1: could you imagine going to something like Oh, I'd really
Speaker 1: like to let you in, but you're a bourgeois deviation.
Speaker 2: I would bust out my bust out my silk, my
Speaker 2: silk glove and slapped them across the face immediately.
Speaker 1: Basically at one conference, after being told shit like that,
Speaker 1: GLF women stole the microphone and led a revolt because yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: as per usual, it was actually the organized, the organizers,
Speaker 1: the self styled leaders of Women's Liberation who were being
Speaker 1: shitty when they grabbed the mic and like they're not
Speaker 1: letting us come in just because we like scissoring or whatever.
Speaker 1: The rank and file were totally chill about it, and
Speaker 1: after that the conference accepted les.
Speaker 2: Nice, yeah great.
Speaker 1: Their biggest action, well, their biggest action certainly wasn't buying. No,
Speaker 1: it probably was. They love buying.
Speaker 2: Stuff, like I didn't even see it coming.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I didn't either. Years the stuff ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back, We're back, Okay.
Speaker 1: So their biggest action besides goods and services, the most
Speaker 1: impactful action at least, was there a disruption of what
Speaker 1: was called the Nationwide Festival of Light in nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: And this was this huge conservative evangelical Christian gathering and
Speaker 1: like movement that they wanted to do something about the
Speaker 1: moral decline of Britain or whatever the fuck is if
Speaker 1: Britain wasn't one of the most immoral things that's ever
Speaker 1: happened on the face of the earth. They wanted to
Speaker 1: recriminalize homosexuality. They wanted to put women back in their place.
Speaker 1: No more abortion, lock ups, sex workers, make sure that
Speaker 1: no one saw any like titties or dicks in print.
Speaker 1: No titties, no dicks. Yeah, and what a miserable life.
Speaker 2: I know, I know, certainly not someone with both.
Speaker 1: And so so there's this whole thing, it's huge thing
Speaker 1: they're trying to gather our steam to. Oh it's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing that happens all the time now too.
Speaker 1: And the action against this. They call their action zaps.
Speaker 1: So the Zap against it because they're hippies, was funded
Speaker 1: by the Monty Python guy. Nice, and they came up
Speaker 1: with literally seventeen different disruption plans in case some of
Speaker 1: them failed, because most of them failed, right, because you're
Speaker 1: trying to attack this very large gathering be very disruptive. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's a wide strategy. Yeah, some of the ones
Speaker 1: that worked. A lot of them worked. Okay, A bunch
Speaker 1: of gay men and women dressed as nuns with the
Speaker 1: noun outfits bought by the Monty Python guy started walking
Speaker 1: down the hall solemnly and then did the fucking can can.
Speaker 2: Perfect and they were That is extremely Monty Python.
Speaker 3: I know.
Speaker 1: This entire thing I'm describing is just a Monty Python
Speaker 1: sketch that happened in real life that disrupted possibly stopped
Speaker 1: Evangelical organizing it in the UK. That's so good, and
Speaker 1: the Cancan answers were beaten up for this, but the
Speaker 1: disruption was made. And honestly, we've talked about this before
Speaker 1: in other episodes. Sometimes going into the thing age and
Speaker 1: beaten up is a it's good press and it is
Speaker 1: a disruption.
Speaker 2: It is a disruption.
Speaker 1: Same sex couple stood up and started kissing. They had
Speaker 1: all like tried to get in, but they were like
Speaker 1: carefully filtering through who could get in or whatever. That's
Speaker 1: like part of the why the nuns got in actually exactly.
Speaker 1: And then the youth group dropped a banner from the
Speaker 1: balcony and then they released mice into the crowd. What yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1: A man stood up as like dressed like a bishop
Speaker 1: maybe or something, I'm not sure. He gave a sermon
Speaker 1: asking people to keep on sinning, and then they turned
Speaker 1: off at least half the lights in the building. And
Speaker 1: there's two stories about how this could have happened. One
Speaker 1: is that both are great. I don't care which one's real.
Speaker 1: One is that a group of quote butch men strong
Speaker 1: arms that air way into the church basement and turned
Speaker 1: off half the lights, which I also love, right because
Speaker 1: people are like, oh, you gays are sissy and sissy's
Speaker 1: and like, man, have you seen some of these game men?
Speaker 2: Like.
Speaker 1: The other way that it could have happened is one
Speaker 1: man pretended to be in charge and walked into the
Speaker 1: basement and ordered all the staff out and then turned
Speaker 1: off all the lights. There you go, Either way fucking great.
Speaker 1: The Guardian headline was darkness at the Festival of Light.
Speaker 2: That's a good headline. Yeah, that's a good headline.
Speaker 1: And that group the Festival of Light, this huge gathering
Speaker 1: of all these different evangelical denominations and shit, they never
Speaker 1: got anywhere. I've heard two versions of why. One is
Speaker 1: that they were a laughing stock because of like dancing
Speaker 1: nuns and mice and shit, and that the GLF specifically
Speaker 1: put them into the ground. That version's great. The other
Speaker 1: version is fine too. They just didn't get any traction
Speaker 1: because people in England were like, actually, we're okay with
Speaker 1: having sex and gayness is part of our culture and fuck.
Speaker 2: Cough, it's just part of what it is. That's good. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I like that. I like that, I like the I
Speaker 2: like the unpopular opinion just didn't have legs.
Speaker 1: Yeah, totally totally. And it's like and people just were like, no,
Speaker 1: if you do this, we're gonna.
Speaker 2: Make fun of you.
Speaker 1: You know exactly, there's gonna be dancing nuns like the
Speaker 1: most popular theater troupe in our fucking country. So in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, the GLF organized the first gay Pride
Speaker 1: March in the UK, and they had banners like homosexuals
Speaker 1: or Nature's Children and gay as proud, one sick protest
Speaker 1: sign they used maybe a lot. I think this is
Speaker 1: like one of their slogans is man as woman as people.
Speaker 1: The state makes us all angry. Oh wow yeah, and
Speaker 1: uh actually talk about why the word angry is loaded
Speaker 1: in a moment.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 1: I often say things like cops don't belong at Pride,
Speaker 1: but that is ah historical. There were cops at the
Speaker 1: UK Pride parade. There were so many cops. In fact,
Speaker 1: there was two thousand cops to one thousand marchers.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yes, overkilled, but not surprised for the cops. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So really, cops have been part of Pride since the
Speaker 1: beginning as the enemy. Their campaign against homosexuality is a disorder,
Speaker 1: one similar as it one in the US, and the
Speaker 1: London GLF had some overlap of the group I keep
Speaker 1: hinting at covering in other episodes called the Angry Brigade
Speaker 1: see our episode about people who tried to blow up
Speaker 1: Franco from a couple of weeks ago. And the Angry
Speaker 1: Brigade nineteen seventy or so was an anarchist direct action
Speaker 1: group who blew stuff up and never killed anyone. They
Speaker 1: hated the state. The state hated them right back, fair enough. Theoretically,
Speaker 1: this is why London Police developed the bomb squad. This
Speaker 1: does not make sense to me because the IRA is
Speaker 1: right the fuck there, Angry Brigade never killed anyone. IRA
Speaker 1: can't say that. Yeh, Nope, nope. They definitely killed some people, Yeah,
Speaker 1: many of whom probably deserved it, many of them probably didn't.
Speaker 2: Yes. Anyway, that's the thing about things like explosions, they
Speaker 2: don't always they're not particular. Explosions are not particular.
Speaker 1: No, they are not. Actually, the Angry Brigade specifically had
Speaker 1: like rules about and they would say this publicly. They
Speaker 1: had rules about like how much I don't remember what
Speaker 1: explosive they used, how much explosive they would use in
Speaker 1: their bombs, because they were specifically trying to make the
Speaker 1: point that they were not trying to kill anyone. And
Speaker 1: then it was like disruption things. Yeah, but they did
Speaker 1: at some point injure someone and so so the state
Speaker 1: comes after the Angry Brigade, but at the same time
Speaker 1: they come after the GLF in the same way. Basically, collectively,
Speaker 1: gay spaces are rated whenever they come after the counterculture,
Speaker 1: and to be fair, there was a lot of overlap
Speaker 1: between these two groups. Yeah, one underground newspaper had the
Speaker 1: tagline gay is good, gay is angry and not subtle
Speaker 1: reference to gay support for the Anger Brigade and probably
Speaker 1: man as woman as people the state makes us all
Speaker 1: angry is also probably a reference to this. By nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy two, the ukgolf is starting to show some cracks.
Speaker 1: People refer to their paper not as come together but
Speaker 1: as fall apart at this point, and the central issue,
Speaker 1: I'm a little bit like again, I read like five
Speaker 1: different accounts of the central issue that split it apart.
Speaker 1: All of them disagree about the particulars. But this is
Speaker 1: the best I can figure. Okay, after doing this show
Speaker 1: for so long, I get kind of grouchy at history
Speaker 1: podcasts that are like and this is the way it happened,
Speaker 1: And I'm like.
Speaker 2: How can you be sure? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And I guess it makes sense to come in with
Speaker 1: an authoritative voice and be like this is what happened.
Speaker 1: But like, all I keep writing is that, like, like
Speaker 1: there's some stuff where you can be like, look on
Speaker 1: this such and such date, the following thing blew up
Speaker 1: or someone so died or whatever. But like anyway, whatever,
Speaker 1: why the GLF split apart. The central issue is that
Speaker 1: you had the queers who wanted what was in their
Speaker 1: manifesto a radical transformation of society, and you had what
Speaker 1: were called the straight gays who just wanted to be gay,
Speaker 1: so that you had the bigay do crime versus the
Speaker 1: b gay no crime. And women eventually also split off,
Speaker 1: in particular because the straight gay men didn't want to
Speaker 1: challenge sexism, because part of the like radical transformation of
Speaker 1: society was like, we are going to destroy patriarchy, right,
Speaker 1: And so the gay men were very they at least
Speaker 1: claimed to be very invested in undoing their own like
Speaker 1: male socialization and their own like dominance patterns and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, right, But a lot of women were like,
Speaker 1: we're getting talked over at meetings and being treated like shit,
Speaker 1: we're going we're going our own way, and the straight
Speaker 1: gay men in particle, we're part of that. The straight
Speaker 1: gays split off after that and starting this thing called
Speaker 1: gay News, and their editorial was basically how they should
Speaker 1: save the nation from the screaming red queens and the
Speaker 1: fagots of gay lib It's more of that same like
Speaker 1: the don't act effeminate, don't rock the boat. You know,
Speaker 1: I'm not a big fan of this.
Speaker 2: Part of it. You'd probably figure that out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And we're going to see some echoes of this
Speaker 1: later in the way that some gay activists in the
Speaker 1: UK went hard anti trans decades later. So Gay News
Speaker 1: took over the GLF office, and they had access to
Speaker 1: the money and information services, like I think you could
Speaker 1: call a number and be like, hey, when's the next meeting,
Speaker 1: And so they just stopped giving information out about meetings,
Speaker 1: and in general, this is seen as sort of a
Speaker 1: coup against the Gay Liberation Front. This is probably a
Speaker 1: bias take. It's probably more complicated than what I read, right,
Speaker 1: but that's the best I can figure. All the while,
Speaker 1: the maoists in the organization were mad that it wasn't
Speaker 1: going their way and so they started messing things up.
Speaker 1: I actually think that they were also the straight gays
Speaker 1: running the office, based on some reflections I read about
Speaker 1: what's going to happen. So you have this coup, they've
Speaker 1: taken over the office, the straight gays have So in
Speaker 1: October nineteen seventy three, a bunch of anarchist drag queens
Speaker 1: from a collective called the Bethnal Rouge Bookshop Collective raided
Speaker 1: the office and stole back the files for the GLF.
Speaker 1: This led to a physical fight. The queens won and
Speaker 1: got the files. One participant whose account I read was like,
Speaker 1: I punched that old tanky, which is really funny to
Speaker 1: me because tanky is this very modern word for it's
Speaker 1: a pejorative word for an authoritarian communist, right, but back
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy it was like the only people who
Speaker 1: use this word were lefties in Britain.
Speaker 2: Huh, that's so funny.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because it comes from like Trotskyists versus Stalinists in
Speaker 1: fighting around that's really in fighting. But anyway, after this,
Speaker 1: gay news starts calling saying drag queens are all violent
Speaker 1: and bad and that it calls them like fascists and dresses.
Speaker 1: Yeah okay, yeah, uh.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 1: But the broader golf supported the queens over the straight
Speaker 1: gays and the drag queens, who were mostly men as
Speaker 1: understood at this time, their opponents called them radical feminists.
Speaker 1: This is the one that's like a little weird split
Speaker 1: from now because they were too radical and they cared
Speaker 1: too much about stopping patriarchy. They were a radical feminist.
Speaker 2: They were radical feminists.
Speaker 1: Yeah, whereas now a lot of anti trans people call
Speaker 1: themselves radical feminists, right right, Yeah, it's all wacky. The
Speaker 1: drag culture and their drag culture is actually different than
Speaker 1: us drag culture, and even I think different than the
Speaker 1: UK's larger drag culture. It actually grew out organically from
Speaker 1: the golf in a different way. Michael James, a participant,
Speaker 1: put it this way. Quote. It started with jealabas and
Speaker 1: kaftans and long hair and flowers. Then we discovered glitter,
Speaker 1: then nail varnish. Later some of us, a quarter of
Speaker 1: the men, i'd say, at some time or another would
Speaker 1: get a nice new frock for the next gay lib dance.
Speaker 1: Then a few people began to wear in it to meetings.
Speaker 1: It just evolved, and so it was a cross dressing
Speaker 1: culture rather than a and it evolved for street theater
Speaker 1: for the protest, but it was very quickly daily ware.
Speaker 1: These were the radical femme acid queens of London, which
Speaker 1: fucking rules.
Speaker 2: That does rule. That's a great name, I know.
Speaker 1: They lived in communes. Some of them ran a bookstore
Speaker 1: or bookshop in the old Tongue called the Bethnal Rouge.
Speaker 1: They took over the bookstore from another anarchist place called
Speaker 1: agit Prop that had been shut down due to harassment
Speaker 1: from cops over the Angry Brigade stuff. I think they
Speaker 1: raided the place and like a bunch of people had
Speaker 1: guns and shit. So I don't want to like to
Speaker 1: be fair. Yes, yeah, So the queens ran the bookstore
Speaker 1: in the coffee house and it was open most days
Speaker 1: of the week. It didn't really make much money. Radical
Speaker 1: booksellers were laid back about selling them books on credit
Speaker 1: and shit. When some homophobic kids started fucking with them
Speaker 1: from like a nearby school, they just like went into
Speaker 1: the school and mass and drag and passed out leaflets.
Speaker 2: Wow hell yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I want to read a quote about the bookshop from
Speaker 1: one of the queens, Andrew Lumsden quote. Drapes and hangings everywhere,
Speaker 1: mattresses strown around the floor, and various people came to
Speaker 1: live there and visit. We used to go to the
Speaker 1: local pub, which was staggered by these drag queens turning up,
Speaker 1: but it was a standard Cockney pub. They had a
Speaker 1: piano and they liked to have a sing song and
Speaker 1: quite a lot of the people in the commune were
Speaker 1: very good at sing songs, so that made us reasonably popular,
Speaker 1: and we spent quite a lot of dole money on there,
Speaker 1: so that was all right. I just yeah, I love
Speaker 1: the way you get accepted is just like, well, we
Speaker 1: kind of like the same shit as you. We're just
Speaker 1: also drag queens.
Speaker 2: We're all into it together. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And like and also this like culture that I don't
Speaker 1: think really exists. I don't know if it's ever exists
Speaker 1: in US bar culture, I'm not sure, but UK bar
Speaker 1: culture or pup culture or whatever has like has this
Speaker 1: thing of like everyone gets drunk and sings these songs together,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And what a good place for a bunch of
Speaker 2: theater kids. Amen, truly Yeah.
Speaker 1: And so I say were men at the time about them,
Speaker 1: because yes, they were drag queens, but they increasingly framed
Speaker 1: themselves in ways that make sense with modern transness, and
Speaker 1: they refer to the straight gays as male oppressors. Many
Speaker 1: of them went on to transition, others stayed gay male
Speaker 1: drag queens. What one write up about Bethel Rouge Queens,
Speaker 1: written by one of them, whose name I couldn't find,
Speaker 1: said about trying to nail down gender identity of the
Speaker 1: queens is quote, you can try to baptize your ancestors
Speaker 1: in your image, they may refuse to stay dead and cooperative. However,
Speaker 1: it's like, you know, it's like I see myself in
Speaker 1: these people in a lot of ways, right, But I
Speaker 1: can't be like, oh, they're just like me, you know,
Speaker 1: it's just like fair, Yeah, we all have different ways
Speaker 1: of seeing this stuff, Bethel Rouge. Unfortunately, the bookshop it
Speaker 1: died to what a lot of anarchist hippie cultures died too.
Speaker 1: More and more hard drugs came in.
Speaker 2: On the scene.
Speaker 1: Ah especially yeah, nineteen seventy or so, well, I guess
Speaker 1: it's nineteen seventy two or three at this point. Soon
Speaker 1: they were evicted and moved on to become East End squatters.
Speaker 2: East and squatters. Hell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, not you know, that's fine. So the
Speaker 1: GLF was destroyed from the inside by infighting, but a
Speaker 1: lot of good stuff came out of it. Most of
Speaker 1: the major LGBT organizations in the UK today came out
Speaker 1: of the GLF or were started by, you know, people
Speaker 1: who had been in it, including Stonewall, which is I
Speaker 1: think the most prominent LGBT organization. And then there's also
Speaker 1: like ice Breakers, the Gay Switchboard, which came from the
Speaker 1: straight gaze of the office Collective but went on to
Speaker 1: do really fucking cool and important work. I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to be like they all sucked, you know, the Brixton Fairies,
Speaker 1: gay Men's Press, a theater troup called Blue Lips Outrage,
Speaker 1: and a bunch of others. And it was the infrastructure
Speaker 1: and camaraderie from the London Golf that laid the groundwork
Speaker 1: for AIDS activism in the UK too, So so many
Speaker 1: parallels to the USGLF. A lot of these folks died
Speaker 1: in the eighties and nineties from AIDS, and those who survived,
Speaker 1: at least the one account I read from one of
Speaker 1: the queens, he doesn't carry the same kind of vitriol
Speaker 1: for the straight gaze as he used to. Even the
Speaker 1: people he was like physically fighting, they were in the
Speaker 1: end largely on.
Speaker 2: The same side.
Speaker 1: And we should do more future ads. Remember that, Remember
Speaker 1: that third pandemic of the twenty forties. Those were crazy,
Speaker 1: real bad one. I know I thought that was the
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Speaker 1: Now that you have try quarter service that tells you
Speaker 1: when the next play is coming accurate to within three
Speaker 1: decimal points of accuracy.
Speaker 2: A new feature for your Apple Watch version.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and if you don't like it, there's no other choices.
Speaker 2: There's no other choice. We've bought out every other watch company. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and in fact, this notification can only come to watches.
Speaker 2: So guess what.
Speaker 1: But it's okay because it's now it's a cooperative that
Speaker 1: all of us are members of, whether you like it
Speaker 1: or not. A and here's some other ads for whatever
Speaker 1: time you're listening to.
Speaker 2: And we're back. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the things I'm kind of like, obviously
Speaker 1: my own bias in terms of what I research and
Speaker 1: stuff is coming into this is but I didn't set
Speaker 1: out knowing this. But the GLF in the US and
Speaker 1: the UK was always trans inclusive. One of their poor
Speaker 1: demands was this right to physical transition. And it's worth
Speaker 1: talking about because there are people I'm going to talk
Speaker 1: about it a little bit who're trying to write us
Speaker 1: out of gay history and trying to write us out
Speaker 1: of gay present, and trying to write us out of
Speaker 1: gay future. But like the ghost of gayness past present.
Speaker 1: In future, these scrooges will learn that.
Speaker 2: Anyway.
Speaker 1: One member, one member of the London branch was a
Speaker 1: guy named Peter Tatchel, and he is an Australian. He'd
Speaker 1: moved to London to avoid the draft and he's given
Speaker 1: a bunch of I know, yeah, I'm like that makes sense.
Speaker 1: He's given a number of interviews on the subject, he
Speaker 1: told Pink News.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: In the GLF era, the word transgender, with its current meeting,
Speaker 1: barely existed. It was little known and rarely used. Back
Speaker 1: in those early days. Gay was for most of us
Speaker 1: an umbrella word for all lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people.
Speaker 1: GLF challenged gender norms and embraced all gender nonconformists. Trans
Speaker 1: people shared a defiance of gender rules and expectations alongside
Speaker 1: LGBs that gave us common interest in working together for
Speaker 1: a mutual emancipation. Gay Liberation Front members supported the trans fight,
Speaker 1: including protesting at a cafe near Piccadilly Circus that refused
Speaker 1: to serve trans women. We saw trans rights as part
Speaker 1: of our struggle. Alas not everyone in GOLF embraced trans people,
Speaker 1: some straight acting gay male activists were lukewarm or embarrassed
Speaker 1: by them, but their reticence was not widely shared. And
Speaker 1: another quote, this is about the US golf. This is
Speaker 1: from Leslie Feinberg, the writer I spotlighted earlier. Quote. While
Speaker 1: consciousness and attitudes towards transgender and transsexual activists was not
Speaker 1: uniform in golf, the Lesbian and Gayfront did not turn
Speaker 1: away trans people or to just quote from the time,
Speaker 1: the Philly GLF had a newsletter come out in August
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy. They wrote, quote, Gay Liberation Front welcomes any
Speaker 1: gay person, regardless of their sex, race, age, or social behavior.
Speaker 1: Though some gay organizations may be embarrassed by drags or transvestites,
Speaker 1: GLF believes that we should accept all our brothers and
Speaker 1: sisters unconditionally. And the Daughters of Bolitis the assimilationist lesbian society,
Speaker 1: the very first public lesbian organization in the US, was
Speaker 1: fucking trans inclusive. They accepted Marsha P. Johnson, a non
Speaker 1: passing black c queen from Star Nice. Yeah, so suck it,
Speaker 1: so suck it. This is exactly what they're anyway. Whatever,
Speaker 1: I'm playing into their hands, okay. And to kind of
Speaker 1: tie up with some other pieces of all of this.
Speaker 1: I'm always on about how we're strongest when we're working together.
Speaker 1: Gay rights and gay liberation has been supported by communities
Speaker 1: of faith a bunch of times. Obviously more often they've
Speaker 1: been attacked by it, right, But it's worth talking about
Speaker 1: some of the players in that and some of the
Speaker 1: things that happen in gay Christianity at the time that
Speaker 1: I'm talking about. There's this guy named Troy Harry. He's
Speaker 1: a preacher, he's gay, still alive. He was born in
Speaker 1: nineteen forty in Florida to bootleggers. His dad was gunned
Speaker 1: down by cops when he was a kid. Yeah, he
Speaker 1: had a He had a fucking rough childhood. I like
Speaker 1: cut out some of the abused stuff because I tend
Speaker 1: not to talk about that much on my show. Not
Speaker 1: because people shouldn't talk about it, you know, just no, totally,
Speaker 1: he had a rough childhood. He was always interested in preaching.
Speaker 1: At fifteen, he became a Baptist preacher. At nineteen, he
Speaker 1: was kicked out of the Baptist church for consentially fucking
Speaker 1: an age appropriate guy. He tried marrying a lady, but
Speaker 1: this didn't stick. Eventually, he started a congregation for Gay
Speaker 1: Christians in LA the Metropolitan Community Church, founded in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty eight, still around today, and they've done at least
Speaker 1: as much as any other organization in the fight for
Speaker 1: the legalization of marriage, including being the first Christian denomination
Speaker 1: to perform weddings for gay people in the US in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty eight. So right off the bat, they probably
Speaker 1: formed to be like, doesn't it suck that our marriages
Speaker 1: can't be sanctioned by God? Even though God obviously is
Speaker 1: no problem with us. What the fuck are people on about?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Exactly.
Speaker 1: And of course, most of the gay liberation folks at
Speaker 1: the time were anti marriage because they wanted no part
Speaker 1: of assimilating into straight culture. But honestly, a lot of
Speaker 1: the surviving golf members are married now, and some because
Speaker 1: their politics changed, some because they wanted to publicly celebrate
Speaker 1: their love and it didn't feel like a contradiction. Also,
Speaker 1: a lot of gay folks wanted marriage because in the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties a fuck ton of them were dying, and
Speaker 1: marriage is one of the tools available to people to
Speaker 1: let their actual loved ones be the ones who make
Speaker 1: medical decisions instead of the bigoted families.
Speaker 2: That they've fled and I don't know whatever. I get
Speaker 2: emotional thinking about some of that shit.
Speaker 1: Troy Perry. In nineteen seventy two, he wrote the book
Speaker 1: with the sick name The Lord is My Shepherd and
Speaker 1: he Knows I'm gay.
Speaker 2: That rips. Yeah, another title phrase that rips from this series. Yeah, Sadly.
Speaker 2: The reason I bring up the MCC is to mention
Speaker 2: how much repression, violence, and bigotry the gay rights and
Speaker 2: gay libration movement faced in the seventies. Lest we focus
Speaker 2: only on the kissins and parades, a lot of the
Speaker 2: characters throughout this are getting attacked right everywhere the MCC goes,
Speaker 2: people keep trying to burn their churches down.
Speaker 1: Often they succeed. In June nineteen seventy three, there was
Speaker 1: a gay bar in New Orleans that the MCC had
Speaker 1: converted into a church, or that the congregants went to
Speaker 1: drink afterwards at after church they go to this bar.
Speaker 1: Depends on your source.
Speaker 2: Either way.
Speaker 1: It's a gay bar slash church, and an arsonist set
Speaker 1: fire to it and it killed thirty two people.
Speaker 2: Awful. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Until the Pulse. Until the twenty sixteen Pulse nightclub shooting,
Speaker 1: this was the deadliest single attack on queer people in
Speaker 1: US history, and there's a bunch of weird reasons why
Speaker 1: that's worth bringing up, and I hate it, but one
Speaker 1: of them is that like the Pulse nightclub shooting was
Speaker 1: worse in terms of a number of people died, and
Speaker 1: we think back about like the past as the bad
Speaker 1: place and that we've made all this progress and we
Speaker 1: have right, but people still hate us and we need
Speaker 1: to organize. Yeah, there's one other enemy worth talking about, Okay,
Speaker 1: the anti trans stuff people are currently trying to do
Speaker 1: in the name of the GLF and gay people in general.
Speaker 1: Bev Jackson was one of the founders of the London
Speaker 1: chapter of the GLF. She was the only woman at
Speaker 1: the first meeting, so they put her on the steering
Speaker 1: committee to start. She implies that she was like on
Speaker 1: the steering committee the whole time, but as we learned earlier,
Speaker 1: no one stayed on that for more than two months,
Speaker 1: so she's just playing that up for kred.
Speaker 2: Interesting.
Speaker 1: Unlike every other founder I've listened to an interview from
Speaker 1: instead of going on to champion for the rights of
Speaker 1: LGBT people, she started a hate group called the lgb Allion,
Speaker 1: which is an anti trans advocacy group. Yeah, man, Yeah,
Speaker 1: they've got some greatest hits. They've campaigned to make sure
Speaker 1: that conversion therapy stays legal for trans kids while opposing
Speaker 1: it for gay kids. Yeah, generally doing literally everything that
Speaker 1: the anti gay world does to gay people, but specifically
Speaker 1: to trans people instead. Also campaigning against Planned Parenthood and
Speaker 1: the ACLU for being trans accepting, also campaigning against Pride Month,
Speaker 1: also comparing transsexuality to beast reality, which is again what
Speaker 1: anti gay people say about gay people. The LGB Alliance
Speaker 1: spends a lot of their time hanging out with conservatives.
Speaker 1: They gave a press badge to friend of cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Can you can you think of.
Speaker 2: I'll give you a hint? Okay, the worst possible person
Speaker 2: to give.
Speaker 1: S Portland journalist who specifically comes up a lot.
Speaker 2: Uh would it happened to be? I don't know if
Speaker 2: this person is actually from Portland, but I know that
Speaker 2: they're part of it? Is it is it? Andy? No?
Speaker 3: Yeah? That guy.
Speaker 2: Throw more silicone cylinders at Andy No. Three.
Speaker 1: So that's who they invited to their to their conference
Speaker 1: and gave a press badge too. One of their co founders,
Speaker 1: Malcolm Clark, was like, there shouldn't be LGBT clubs in
Speaker 1: schools because sex teachers will sexually pray on students, which gross.
Speaker 1: This isn't even the same thing people said about gay
Speaker 1: people but about trans people. He's literally saying it about
Speaker 1: gay people now, like they're actually just an anti gay organization.
Speaker 1: They've come out claiming that gay dance clubs spread disease.
Speaker 1: They are just far right.
Speaker 2: Your mongering nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the LGB Yeah. And then even in a country
Speaker 1: like the UK, I was like thinking about, like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm going to call them a hate group. They're probably
Speaker 1: really sue happy. But I live in the United States,
Speaker 1: where we have so better libel protections or whatever. Even
Speaker 1: in the UK, where it's really easy to sue people
Speaker 1: for libel, people openly refer to them as a hate group.
Speaker 2: Oh great, well good. If they're going to openly be
Speaker 2: a hate group, they may as well openly be referred
Speaker 2: to as one.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly one more of these things. Okay, there's a group.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, there was a group that called
Speaker 1: itself the New Gay Liberation Front. Fortunately it never really
Speaker 1: got off the ground. I suspect it was just some
Speaker 1: turfs on Twitter. It claims to be the new GLF
Speaker 1: fighting against the new homophobia, which is wait for it,
Speaker 1: the existence of trans people. The existence of trans people
Speaker 1: is homophobia. They consider being trans to be a form
Speaker 1: of conversion therapy.
Speaker 2: What And they.
Speaker 1: Also were like and one of the original GLF people
Speaker 1: is like on our side, and they like cite this
Speaker 1: particular guy who later was like, okay, you got me.
Speaker 1: I wasn't actually in the golf like. Fortunately, because there's
Speaker 1: a lot of old the GLF people are still around,
Speaker 1: the ones who made it through the eighties and shit,
Speaker 1: a lot of them are alive and they are not
Speaker 1: fucking putting.
Speaker 2: Up with this shit.
Speaker 1: Even the ones who are like all like politicians and
Speaker 1: shit now whatever, Like they're like, no, we can't. Don't
Speaker 1: fucking do this to us. So there's this guy, Mark Siegel,
Speaker 1: an original GLF firm, and uh and he wrote quote
Speaker 1: about the new GLF. He qu wrote about, well, he's
Speaker 1: talking about the old GLF.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 1: We were the first organization that allowed each person to
Speaker 1: self identify, not pit one identity against another. Are they
Speaker 1: the identity police? That was his response.
Speaker 2: That's funny, that's good.
Speaker 1: So that's the story about how when we work together,
Speaker 1: realizing our struggles are united, we win. I usually know
Speaker 1: these this like wrap up thing, but I'm doing a
Speaker 1: wrap up on this three letter.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: How queer people fought for straight people, straight people fought
Speaker 1: for queer people, lesbians fought for gay men, gay men
Speaker 1: fought for lesbians. Bisexuality was celebrated as a pure expression
Speaker 1: of queer love. Drag queens and trans people have always
Speaker 1: been part of it. How people have different faiths from
Speaker 1: secular to New Age to deeply religious, have supported each other.
Speaker 1: To how white queer supported black liberation, to how Puerto
Speaker 1: Rican queers were protected by Puerto Rican straight radicals. How
Speaker 1: even some Marxist and anarchists and social democrats and single
Speaker 1: issue non ideological folks just fucking made the world better
Speaker 1: by refusing to lay down and die. And how even
Speaker 1: the assimilationists stood by the radicals when push came to shove.
Speaker 1: So thank you Gay Liberation Front, Thank you everyone who
Speaker 1: came before. Thanks for setting the stage. There's more fighting
Speaker 1: to do. We can do it together because an army
Speaker 1: of lovers cannot lose.
Speaker 2: Yeay, thanks thanks spectacular wrap up right there? Thanks?
Speaker 1: Wow, Yeah, I got while I was writing this I
Speaker 1: was just like, usually when I research episodes, I kind
Speaker 1: of like have a friend or two that I like
Speaker 1: call and just like rant about everything that I'm writing
Speaker 1: for sure, And in this one, I'm just like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, this is just like when we fight, we win,
Speaker 1: and like even by yeah, by fighting we are winning
Speaker 1: and yes, so.
Speaker 2: One hundred yeah it is to not back down. An
Speaker 2: army of lovers cannot be beaten. Yeah. I love that.
Speaker 2: That's really wonderful.
Speaker 1: Thanks. Do you have anything that you would like to
Speaker 1: plug here at the end of all things?
Speaker 2: Oh geez, well, you know, if you've stuck around for
Speaker 2: all three parts, you've heard me plugged my twitch three times,
Speaker 2: so yeah, or twice? So what's one more? Twitch dot tv,
Speaker 2: slash DJ Underscore, Danel, Come on by. We're playing games
Speaker 2: and having fun. You can you can press buttons on
Speaker 2: my stream that make weird things happen, like zombies pop
Speaker 2: up and yell in my face. I love a jump scare.
Speaker 2: I mean I don't, but I know that you love
Speaker 2: to see me react to a job scare, so that
Speaker 2: you go come on by. It's lots of fun. Support
Speaker 2: Margaret support all of the podcasts on the network. Uh,
Speaker 2: subscribe to coolers on media, go listen to podcasts. In general,
Speaker 2: I love that the medium of podcasting is seen as
Speaker 2: this Like I'll put it this way. I love that
Speaker 2: it's a trend on TikTok, despite how horrible TikTok is
Speaker 2: in general. But I love that it's a trend on
Speaker 2: TikTok of people making fake podcasts or just like talking
Speaker 2: to a mic as if they're on a podcast to
Speaker 2: lend credence to whatever they're saying, because it doesn't mean
Speaker 2: that what they're saying is true, but it means that
Speaker 2: they think appearing on a podcast is important. And let
Speaker 2: me tell you, folks, we love that here. Podcasts are important.
Speaker 2: So enjoy podcasting. Hell yeah, helly, hell yeah, Sophie, what
Speaker 2: do you got?
Speaker 3: No, Daniel did it?
Speaker 1: I'm good, Okay, Sorry.
Speaker 2: I wasn't trying to. I wasn't trying to take your
Speaker 2: bag round.
Speaker 3: Now it's so perfect.
Speaker 1: And you've already heard me talk about all the things.
Speaker 1: And I plugged my Kickstarter up at the top. But
Speaker 1: take care of each other and de escalate all conflict
Speaker 1: that isn't with the enemy. That's what I got to plug.
Speaker 2: That's nice. Yeah, less and less in fighting, more out fighting. Yes,
Speaker 2: yeah we can.
Speaker 1: We can disagree with each other, we can have people
Speaker 1: we don't want to work with, but you know we
Speaker 1: got we've got people trying to kill us and we
Speaker 1: shouldn't let them.
Speaker 2: Amen, and we'll see you all next week.
Speaker 3: By Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production
Speaker 3: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 3: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
Speaker 3: on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 3: your podcasts.