Stonewall (37 page)

GLF appealed to Karla's millenarian side. She could be hardheadedly practical, but she was also strongly committed to the notion that the corrupt world should—and
could
—be cleansed. She shared with GLF the optimism essential for sustained political work: the bedrock, magical belief that if one took an action, consequences,
good
consequences, would follow, and the conditions of life would be transformed.

Karla felt she had finally come home, and she plunged into GLF with all of her formidable energy.

FOSTER, CRAIG, JIM

A
s GLF plunged ebulliently ahead in the early summer of 1969, Foster Gunnison was toiling away at the yeoman work of preparing for the August 1969 national conference. If GLF's natural habitat was heady abstraction, Foster was never happier than when dealing with
the minutia of organizational work. As head of the Credentials Committee, he had a thousand matters to attend to and he fluttered over them with chipper, efficient enthusiasm. “It's one hell of a job running this operation,” he wrote Bill Kelley of Mattachine Midwest. “I enjoy it … [but] hate to think of what it will be when we get up to 100 or 150 organizations (which of course we all nonetheless want).”
¹⁴

In the wake of the Stonewall riots, it was clear that the conference could not proceed with business as usual. For a time, it was not entirely clear that it could proceed at all. The previous year's meeting in Chicago had not gone well. Some progress could be claimed for the 1968 convention: the name North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), frequently used informally, had been officially adopted as a replacement for North American Planning Conference; an executive committee had been created to carry out business between conventions; a Homosexual Bill of Rights had been passed and—in a resolution proposed by Kameny and Gittings—the motto “Gay is good” had been adopted as NACHO's official slogan in an effort “to replace a wishy-washy negativism toward homosexuality with a firm no-nonsense positivism.”
¹⁵

These were genuine accomplishments, yet the close of the 1968 conference had seen a torrent of complaint: DOB (too “hidebound” in the view of Shirley Wilier, its ex-president, to agree to demonstrations and the like) announced that it was pulling out of NACHO for good; Bill Beardemphl and Larry Littlejohn from San Francisco's SIR (the country's largest homophile organization) had grumbled that “no action program had been discussed” and had implied that their further participation was in doubt; others had complained about the protracted speechifying, the continuing rigidity of Foster's Credentials Committee in screening applicant organizations, the scant progress in creating genuine unity, and the continuing absence of Mattachine New York. “We must be doing something wrong,” Arthur Warner, an ally of Dick Leitsch's, had groused, “if SIR, the largest organization, was unhappy and Mattachine New York, the second largest, was not even present.”
¹⁶

In March 1969, William Wynne (“Marc Jeffers”), the NACHO chair (and founding member of Kansas City's Phoenix Society), felt it necessary to assert in his interim report that “NACHO is not dead but very much alive and kicking.” But no funds were available to cover travel expenses, and at the last minute, the meeting place had to be shifted from Houston to Kansas City because the Promethean
Society, the small homophile group in Houston, had been unable to make the needed arrangements.
¹⁷

Some forty delegates—all of them white and only half a dozen women—representing some twenty homophile groups gathered at the Bellerive Hotel in Kansas City from August 23 through August 31. Each organization had an equal number of votes (five), despite the fact that some of them—including Foster's own Institute of Social Ethics—were essentially one-person organizations. This alone led to anger and conflict—to charges that a small number of “Kamenyites” were unfairly perpetuating their control over NACHO.
¹⁸

But far more pronounced conflict came from what Foster and others would call GLF “infiltration.” Initially, the dispute centered on Stephen Donaldson. He had earlier helped to form within NACHO a “Young Turks” group, which had been active in the 1967 and 1968 conferences. Foster had gotten to know and like Donaldson during those two prior conferences, even while being “continually irritated with him,” and even though he acknowledged that Donaldson's general reputation for being “devious” and “manipulative” was well deserved.
¹⁹

Donaldson chaired the NACHO “Committee on Youth,” which at its meeting of August 28—right at the midpoint of the conference—unanimously adopted “A Radical Manifesto.” The twelve-point document closely reflected the views of the GLF chapters proliferating across the country. It linked the homophile struggle to that of other minorities, declaring support for “the black, the feminist, the Spanish-American, the Indian, the hippie, the young, the student, the worker, and other victims of oppression and prejudice.” It identified the “enemy” as “an implacable, repressive governmental system,” along with “much of organized religion, business and medicine,” and declared that these negative forces would never be moved by appeals to reason and justice, “but only by power and force.” The manifesto further insisted that homosexuals develop a life-style and aesthetic that were independent of and made no reference to, heterosexual mores. And it specifically rejected “the insane war in Vietnam,” refusing all complicity with it and opposing any attempt by the gay movement to work for security clearances for homosexuals—which had been a longstanding homophile project.
²⁰

In both tone and content, the manifesto represented a significant departure from NACHO's earlier posture. The Stonewall riots had indeed sparked a new mood. Yet they had not—as GLF radicals
sometimes insisted—invented either gay pride or gay protest. Part of what outraged homophile old-timers like Foster Gunnison about GLF
was
its political platform; but antagonism also resulted from the seeming presumption of the militant young that nothing significant or worthy had preceded their own efforts.

As a man of scholarly instincts, Foster knew (and had so written in his pamphlet, “An Introduction to the Homophile Movement”) that the homosexual liberation movement had roots deep in the nineteenth century—in the pioneering publications of the German scholar Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and the German-Hungarian writer Karoly Maria Kertbeny—and had continued in the early twentieth, with Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Berlin. Not even militant rhetoric and confrontational tactics were entirely new; Frank Kameny, among others, had been spitting bullets for half a dozen years.

East Coast parochialism further fanned the generational flames. It had been on the West Coast, after all, that the Mattachine Society had been formed, and where—for more than a decade before Stonewall—a score of publications, organizations, legal challenges, and militant actions had taken place. (And, beginning with the mid-sixties, Chicago and a few other midwestern cities had seen comparable developments.)

But if the Stonewall riots did not
begin
the gay revolution (as East Coasters, younger gays, and the national media have been wont to claim), it remains true that those riots became a symbolic event of international importance—a symbol of such potency as to serve, ever since 1969, as a motivating force and rallying cry. There was enough glory for both coasts, the hinterland, and several generations—though not many could see it in 1969.

But if Foster was outraged at the radical agenda and attitude, he was also soft-hearted. He could not bear to reject young Donaldson (who, among other things, had interrupted Foster's decades-old celibacy when the two shared a room at a NACHO conference). As dislike of Donaldson's arrogance mounted, Foster continued to plead his case with detractors like Barbara Gittings, characterizing him as “a sort of diamond in the rough” despite his “tendencies toward arbitrariness and manipulation.” Indeed, after the 1969 conference elected Foster treasurer of NACHO, leading him to decline to continue as chair of the Credentials Committee, he successfully pushed Donaldson for the job—even while declaring that “it would crush me
if Steve used his committee to promote the radical views that he holds.”
²¹

In the postconference period, Foster did try to remain scrupulously fair about those “radical views”; it was his nature to be fair. At one point he even suggested that GLF “could be an asset” to the older homophile movement, could inject it with “heavy doses of militancy” that might profitably “shake things up a bit … maybe substitute a demonstration or two, or even an occasional riot, in place of paper resolutions and positions on this or that.” In the months following the NACHO conference, Foster even traveled down from his home in Hartford to sit in on several GLF. meetings in New York City in order to form a firsthand opinion of the group.
²²

But that was Foster stretching to the outer limit of his openmindedness—and the stretch soon slackened. Too much, temperamentally and philosophically, weighed against his ability to accommodate himself to the GLF agenda. Once his feelings against GLF solidified, he summed up his objections in three parts: “rudeness in personal behavior; resentment against authority and systematic procedure”; and involvement with other minority groups and their “alien issues.” The most dangerous of the three, Foster felt, was the feeling that “if the homosexual is going to make any progress he must ally his groups with every other minority group in the country” (or rather, every minority group “with a strong leftist bent”), and the corollary view that if the homosexual is to make any progress, “the entire existing social/political/economic establishment must be overthrown—possibly with force.”
²³

But it was not a matter of the homophile veterans simply wanting to confine their goals to civil rights and being unable to conceive of any strategy other than apologetics or earnest appeals for acceptance. In the month before the NACHO convention, for example, Foster had drawn up a proposed set of “aims and purposes” for the organization that did include “the firm establishment in society of the homosexual as a first class citizen,” but went considerably beyond civil rights in asserting that “the unqualified acceptance by society of homosexuality as a wholly natural personal trait, and a highly valued expression of human love” was “the chief over-all long-range aim of the movement.”
²⁴

Moreover, Foster opposed the notion that heterosexuality was somehow the norm “by which all other relationships must be judged.” He urged homosexuals “to expose themselves for what they are, and
to refrain from withdrawing from heterosexual society”—to aim instead at the “free and open public expression of homosexual affections.” And in the name of these goals, Foster declared himself in favor of “radical-militant tactics,” including confrontations, street demonstrations, “blatant and open hard-hitting assaults on social institutions practicing or fomenting discrimination,” and even welcomed, “where called for,” riots and violence.
²⁵

Foster's antagonism was to “disorderly” procedures and “alien” (nonhomophile) goals. The dangers (as he saw them) of anarchistic methods and “extraneous” involvement in other causes were made manifest at the November 1–2, 1969, meeting of ERCHO, the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. ERCHO was one of three regional divisions of NACHO, and far more active than the two others, the Midwest and Far West conferences. Craig Rodwell and Jim Fouratt were both centrally involved with what happened at the November ERCHO meeting, and although Foster would soon work closely and affectionately with Craig, he would never forgive Jim Fouratt for
his
behavior at the conference.
²⁶

Craig had some hope of utilizing ERGHO as the conduit for the planned Christopher Street Liberation Day March in June, on which he had already been working. At the same time, he was deeply sympathetic with GLF's championing of other minority causes (and would himself soon march in a Black Panther demonstration), and he happily stocked GLF flyers in his bookstore. Yet his sympathy was ambivalent. When he went to GLF meetings he felt “thrilled at the energy level, at the numbers of women present, and at the obvious dignity and pride at being lesbians and gay men—something which hadn't ever been seen before.”

Yet he never developed any strong allegiance to GLF. The lengthy discussions, in which everyone was encouraged to vent at length, turned him off—especially since the sought-for consensus often proved elusive and the meetings failed to produce the kind of clear-cut decisions Craig temperamentally required. Besides, the “rhetorical stuff” bored him, especially the “dialectical arguments,” the private “terminology and language” spouted by committed socialists like John Lauritsen and John O'Brien (who with a few others soon withdrew into the Red Butterfly, a gay Marxist study group). Craig, in turn, despite his passion and his extraordinary record for radicalism within Mattachine, tended to be viewed in GLF as that most unhip of creatures—a Midwestern Christian Scientist, the essential square.
²⁷

Due to attend the November 1969 ERCHO conference as head
of his own organization, HYMN, Craig obligingly made it possible for half a dozen staunch GLF partisans (including Lois Hart and Jim Fouratt) to attend as well. Craig and Jim had put their heads together and found a loophole in the ERCHO procedural rules that allowed any member organization to bring representatives of other organizations as guests. On behalf of HYMN, Craig forthwith invited the GLFers, furnishing them with HYMN badges for accreditation.

The November ERCHO conference took place in the immediate aftermath of the October 15 Moratorium, when millions of Americans had stopped business as usual to register their disapproval of American policy in Vietnam, and just before the gigantic November 15 Mobilization would convene in Washington, D.C., to protest the war's continuation. It was an apocalyptic time. President Nixon had been secretly and mercilessly bombing the neutral country of Cambodia for more than six months, Vice President Agnew had been denouncing the “effete snobs” and “small cadres of professional protesters” who had refused to hail the massacre of hundreds of thousands as a triumph for democracy, and in early December, the Chicago police would invade Black Panther headquarters and kill its state chairman, Fred Hampton, in his bed.