Leo E. Laurence, “Gays Get Rise out of Delta,” Berkeley Tribe, 27 Nov. 1969, 11, 27.

“Anti-Thanksgiving March Stuns Exploiters,” San Francisco Free Press, 7 Dec. 1969, 2.

            While Morgan Pinney, Leah Schuman, and Richard Love, discussed in the previous section, forged links between gay and labor movements, SF State student Gary Weinberg promoted links between gay and antiwar activism.[1] In November 1969, Weinberg, described in regional media accounts as a “handsome senior,” attempted to board a Delta flight to Dallas, where his father recently had had a heart attack. Despite the fact that he was respectably dressed in a double-breasted blazer, golfing shirt, and blue jeans, he was refused permission to board because of “unacceptable appearance and grooming.” The ticket agent claimed that he had breached Delta’s “no sandals without socks” rule, but Weinberg believed that he was targeted for wearing a “Homosexuals for Peace” button. As the Tribe reported, “Gary is a ‘liberated’ homosexual who is finding love and beauty in the gay life-style, and is open about it. Unfortunately, his honesty kept him off the Delta flight.”[2] On Thanksgiving Day, when two hundred gay liberationists, sexual liberationists, drag queens, and male hustlers rallied in Union Square and marched to the locations of several antigay businesses, they included Delta’s downtown office on their itinerary because of what had happened to Weinberg.[3]

            Weinberg’s experiences were not covered by SF State’s student newspapers, but as the Vietnam War continued, the Phoenix linked gay and antiwar politics in several different contexts. In October 1970, the paper’s report on an upcoming antiwar march in downtown San Francisco mentioned that it would include “student, Chicano, Gay, labor, and women’s groups”; one of the scheduled speakers was “Leo Laurence from Gay Liberation.”[4] In May 1971, a Phoenix article about a recent campus teach-in on the Vietnam War mentioned an incident in which “two GI’s were caught in bed together” and discharged.[5] In the same issue, a Phoenix article about a recent antiwar demonstration noted that the upcoming Socialist Educational Weekend at SF State would include discussions about “strategies for the major radicalizing movements of today—Women’s Liberation, National Liberation, the Anti-war Movement, Gay Liberation.”[6] In November 1971, a Phoenix article about a recent antiwar march in San Francisco mentioned that some participants were delighted by the “joyous manner of the gays,” some of whom wore “beards and heavy makeup” while they “danced along arm-in-arm in see-through dresses.”[7] All of this occurred because of the broadening of the “movement of movements” that occurred in the 1970s, when LGBTQ groups were no longer excluded from broader left coalitions.

            An episode that occurred in 1974 suggests further links between gay and antiwar activism. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had seized the truck of former SF State faculty member Morgan Pinney, now working as a plumber, carpenter, and electrician, for non-payment of federal excise taxes on his telephone bill. Pinney had started withholding his tax payments in 1971 as a way of protesting the Vietnam War. After sending multiple warnings to Pinney, the IRS claimed the truck, but according to the Chronicle, the risks of negative publicity had led the IRS to release the truck from seizure and take the missing tax money (and fines) from Pinney’s bank account instead.[8]