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