Come Together

Years of Gay Liberation

Aubrey Walter

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781788732376
• eBook ISBN:
  9781788732383
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Come Together tells the incredible story of the emerging radicalism of the Gay Liberation Front, providing a vivid history of the movement, as well as the new ideas and practices it gave rise to across the United Kingdom. Before marriage equality or military service, Come Together reminds us of paths forged but not taken by queer politics in its earliest stages.

Come Together

1

[November 1970]

Who We Are

This broadsheet has been put together by a small collective of gay sisters and brothers in the Media Workshop group of GLF. We by no means represent the opinions of all the GLF members, but hope to be able to provide a service to all those of us who have something to say about the oppression that gay people suffer. We will also attempt to keep the gay community in touch with the activities of the Gay Liberation Front and any other attempts by sisters and brothers to put an end to the physical, psychological, economic and generally all-round oppression that they suffer. Poems, drawings and any other creative things done by our sisters and brothers will be included, though try to bear in mind that we don’t really have that much space due to limited funds.

We would like to say right now that all the so-called gay mags, such as Jeremy, are just a load of absolute bullshit and an outright insult to gay people. They just try to foist a ‘closet-queen’ mentality onto us; they think that all we are interested in are the secret life of closet pseudostars and the latest in rip-off bourgeois fashions. Some of us are just about pissed-off with this shit and are beginning to say — ‘No More! From now on gay people in Britain are going to write their own history’.

We’re Coming Out Proud

We’ve probably all heard of the Louis Eakes case — the Young Liberal who was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ on Highbury Fields by the flimsiest of police ‘evidence’. No doubt many gay people thought it was just another case of police harassment and something we’re all powerless to do anything about. But at our meeting of over 200 last Wednesday (Nov. 25th), the sisters and brothers were seething with anger at this, the latest amongst hundreds of crimes committed against gay people by the police and the establishment every year. The fact that Eakes claims to be straight is beside the point, we were angry at the very fact that the police have the power to arrest and harass people on the slightest suspicion.

We therefore decided to protest the Eakes conviction by holding a ‘gay-in’ on Highbury Fields at ten on Friday evening after contacting the press and the police. So 150 beautiful gay people assembled outside Highbury and Islington station about nine o’clock; a few of us were talking to sensation-hungry reporters. We then proceeded to the scene of the ‘crime’ carrying and squeaking balloons, and shouting ‘gay power’ slogans. Assembling at the far end of the Fields we lit candles and torches, and listened to a brother reading our demands. After each demand we all responded with ‘Right on!’ which echoed around the Fields. Many of us felt that listening to our demands was not really strong enough and so decided to fulfil some of them there and then by holding each others’ hands and kissing. Of course the photographers jumped to take pictures — and we let them, we had nothing to be ashamed of. At one point a brother overheard a bunch of straight, grey reporters describe us as a bunch of ‘pooves’. So we descended on this bunch and demanded a retraction, and that they recognise our demands as just. Half of us then felt like demonstrating our power of togetherness by walking round the Fields arm in arm, kissing, shouting slogans, and with our torches, fists and heads held high.

Coming together again it was agreed that we’d demonstrated our point, and we all made our way back to the pub, stopping on the way to light each others’ cigarettes (this was all that Eakes said he did).

The next day I rushed out to buy all the papers, thinking there would be banner headlines and ‘sensational’ pictures. But after spending about four bob all I could find was one very mild report in the Times. It looks as though there had been a press boycott because a truthful report would have encouraged our sisters and brothers in the provinces and suburbs to get into militant activity. The report in the Times deliberately played down the politics of our action, and made it appear as though we were being meek and mild like CHE. They did concede the point, however, that this was the first public demonstration by homosexuals in the history of these sceptered isles.

Right On to Gay Liberation.

Jonathan

Gay Local Government Hang-Up

I am a local government officer, typically surrounded at work by round, bald, friendly conservatives, severe career spinsters, ‘dolly’ local girls, dull straight boys. In this universe I am deviant in at least one visual way: I am one of the few wearers of post-1965 fashion in suits.

But there are no problems in being gay because I never talk about it. The round friendly conservatives tell me to look forward to the day when I shall be married with two kids. The spinsters surprise themselves to find that young men go places at weekends. The ‘dolly’ girls think I have a non-stop, rave, hetero time. The boys think I do the same as them. Banging a nice bit of crumpet, they say. I am, however, well-practised in evasion, negative lying and counter-conspiracies of silence — it works.

In so far as I am successful in looking younger than I am, I am lucky, as the junior office boy is invulnerable in his position of no responsibility. But I don’t think I would get the sack if I told everybody — they wouldn’t believe me.

It is very easy to get so used to this silent oppression that it ceases to be noticed or felt. It becomes increasingly difficult to join the oppression-smashers.

I think there must be a lot of gay local government officers who will be terrified of the Gay Liberation Front. But GLF is for everybody who wants solidarity against oppresion. So Come Out and join your sisters and brothers at GLF.

Local Government Officer

Our Demands Are…

1 — that all discrimination against gay people, male and female, by the law, by employers, and by society at large, should end.

2 — that all people who feel attracted to a member of their own sex be taught that such feelings are perfectly normal.

3 — that sex education in schools stop being exclusively heterosexual.

4 — that psychiatrists stop treating homosexuality as though it were a problem or sickness, thereby giving gay people senseless guilt complexes.

5 — that gay people be as legally free to contact other gay people, through newspaper ads, on the streets and by any other means they may want, as are heterosexuals, and that police harassment should cease right now.

6 — that employers should no longer be allowed to discriminate against anyone on account of their sexual preferences.

7 — that the age of consent for gay males be reduced to the same as for straights.

8 — that gay people be free to hold hands and kiss in public, as are heterosexuals.

GAY POWER TO GAY PEOPLE
ALL POWER TO OPPRESSED PEOPLE

Come Together

2

[December 1970]

Principles*

1. GLF’s first priority is to defend the immediate interests of gay people against discrimination and social oppression.

2. However, the roots of the oppression that gay people suffer run deep in our society, in particular to the structure of the family, patterns of socialisation, and the Judeo-Christian culture. Legal reform and education against prejudice, though possible and necessary, cannot be a permanent solution. While existing social structures remain, social prejudice and overt repression can always re-emerge.

3. GLF therefore sees itself as part of the wider movement aiming to abolish all forms of social oppression. It will work to ally itself with other oppressed groups while preserving its organisational independence.

4. In particular, we see these groups as including:

a) The women’s liberation movement. The roots of women’s oppression are in many ways close to our own (see 2 above).

b) Black people and other national minorities. The racism that these peoples are affected by has a similar structure of prejudice to our own, but on the basis of racial instead of sexual difference. They are socially and economically the most oppressed group in our society.

c) The working class, i.e. all productive manual and mental workers. Their labour is what the whole of society lives off, but their skills are misused by the profit-oriented economy, and their right to organise and defend their interests is under increasing attack.

d) Young people, who are rejecting the bourgeois family and the roles and lifestyles offered them by this society, and attempting to create a non-exploitative counterculture.

e) Peoples oppressed by imperialism, who lack the national political and economic independence which is a pre-condition for all other social change.

5. We don’t believe that any existing revolutionary theory has all the answers to the problems facing us. GLF will therefore study and discuss all relevant critical theories of society and the individual being, to measure them against the test of our own and historical experience.

The Gay Liberation Front Adopts Principles

GLF has adopted a list of principles, or guidelines, and has recognised the need for a more cohesive organisational structure. We recognised that the oppression that gay people suffer is an integral part of the social structure of our society. Women and gay people are both victims of the cultural and ideological phenomenon known as sexism.

This is manifested in our culture as male supremacy and heterosexual chauvinism. Sexism is a recent concept developed by our sisters and brothers in the American women’s and gay liberation movements. It is such an insidious thing that often its victims, women and gay people, are sexist in their attitudes towards themselves and their sisters and brothers. It is sexism that produces closet queens, the rigid exploitative butch and fem roles and the self-hatred that many gay people are into. Of course most straights are also into rigid sexist roles. In fact many sisters and brothers maintain that straight men are just as much victims of sexism as are women and gay people. This is true only in the sense that sexism limits their true potential as human beings. But at the same time they do have a vested interest in sexist roles; they often use women as mere chattels and sex objects, and use gay people as scapegoats for their own sexual hang-ups.

Many of you may be disturbed by the fact that in our principles we support the struggles of social groups who themselves are prejudiced and use sexism to put down gay people. However it is important to see that no one single revolutionary change in our social structure can be achieved without the whole system being changed. We should not confuse legal changes with real structural change. Legality can always at some point be changed to illegality (witness the present government’s attack on the trade-union movement, and its legal attacks on the rights of coloured immigrants). The legalisation of public gay activity, though something we should strive for, will not really alter the fact that the deepest oppression of gay people is inflicted in the family, and is manifested in a gay person’s psyche.

C.T.—D

Gay activity is a direct threat to the existence of the nuclear family. Gay people in our Judeo-Christian culture have never been given a ‘niche’ as they have in many other cultures; they have always been regarded as pariahs and persecuted as such. The niche allotted to straight women has always been the family, in which hers has been the pivotal socialising role. Gay people, by their rejection of the nuclear family, threaten the very reproduction of the wider society. Hence their repression.

Periodically, capitalist nations in political and economic crisis have resorted to outright physical and ideological repression of the vast masses of the population. This classically takes the form of attacks on autonomous working-class organisation, the use of ethnic minorities as national scapegoats, and the enforcement of traditional familial, sexist roles (the woman in the home breeding babies and the man on the factory floor). Together with this idealisation of the traditional familial roles goes the open persecution of gay people. In Nazi Germany many tens of thousands of gay people met their deaths in the gas chambers of concentration camps. In the camps, Jews were given yellow stars to wear, homosexuals were given pink tags and other nationalities were given different coloured tags. Now it is a known fact that not one of the memorials to the concentration-camp victims say anything about our sisters and brothers who were butchered. The colours of the Jews and other nationalities and political victims are represented, but somehow the colour pink gets forgotten about. Does this mean that the people who erected the memorials think gay people d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Come Together 1
• Come Together 2
• Come Together 3
• Come Together 4
• Come Together 5
• Come Together 6
• Come Together 7 (Women’s issue)
• Come Together 8
• Come Together 9
• Come Together 10
• Lesbians Come Together (11)
• Come Together 12
• Come Together 13 (Camden)
• Come Together 14 (Birmingham)
• Come Together 15 (Notting Hill)
• Come Together 16 (Manchester)