Reverberations

The publication of Carl Wittman’s “Gay Manifesto” might be considered the end of this story but of course there is never an ending to any story even if reverberations are all that remain. Echoes of the Homosexual Revolution of 1969 would continue to reverberate for decades. This slide depicts a few of those echoes from the following year, 1970. From top left, the orange sheet was a report on Gay Commune Consciousness that was distributed with an issue of Kaliflower. The poster for the event ‘toward the counter culture’ was printed by the Free Print Shop at the Sutter Street Commune. It announced a “day long set of cultural/intellectual/social occurrences” sponsored by Free Particle to take place at Sherwood Forest. The three black and white photos are from that event. The bottom left shows the informal name Sherwood Forest hanging over the doorway of the Wesley Center. The bottom black and white photo shows Dunbar in a group discussion on the lawn and the top photo shows Tahara who would become one of the core members of the Angels of Light Free Theater commune. In the same month as this symposium, the first and only issue of Free Particle appeared, the cover of which is shown here. The publication ran 60 pages and contained a wide range of topics. One of the most interesting pieces is a script for one of the street theater skits that the Gay Liberation Theater collective performed in Sproul Plaza in October 1969. Street theater in the Sixties was so often improvisational that it is rare to find full scripts. That this was also associated with the emerging gay liberation movement makes it all the more valuable. In the lower row in yellow ink is an ad from Kaliflower announcing a Gay Coffee House and mentioning plans for another issue of Free Particle but it never happened. By that point, Dunbar was off to other pursuits. Carl Wittman was off to Oregon to live in a country commune and put his literary skills in the service of RFD magazine. Gale Whittington never got his job back and eventually left San Francisco for Colorado but not before further rabble rousing as a gay activist. Gale is seen in the lower right being interviewed by a local news station during a sit-in at the mayor’s office protesting San Francisco police brutality against gays. This was a film clip from a TV news archive that David Weissman and Bill Weber used in their documentary film The Cockettes. Little did they know who Gale Whittington was. In his memoir, Whittington proudly mentioned his appearance in The Cockettes film not realizing that his role in the rise of gay liberation had been lost to history. With this presentation, I hope to have reconnected the intersecting lives and roles that Leo Laurence, Gale Whittington, Dunbar Aitkens, and Carl Wittman played in our collective history.