The Third World Liberation Front and American Federation of Teachers Strikes
SF State was transformed by the Third World Liberation Front strike, which disrupted classes from November 1968 to March 1969, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) strike, which lasted from January to February 1969. The former, which addressed who was being admitted as students, who was being hired as faculty, and what was being taught and learned, led to the founding of SF State’s College of Ethnic Studies, the first of its kind in the United States. The latter was an important episode in the history of labor activism in higher education. Historians have produced valuable scholarship on the Third World Liberation Front strike, but have not paid much attention to gender and sexual politics at SF State in this period.[1] SF State now claims the Third World Liberation Front strike as a proud episode in its past, supporting archival exhibits, community events, historical commemorations, and oral history projects on the strike, but these generally have not addressed LGBTQ issues or people.[2] Because of this, little is currently known about the ways in which LGBTQ activists influenced, and were influenced by, the strikes, not to mention the university’s broader LGBTQ history.
In January 1969, for example, Vector magazine featured an essay titled “State College from a Homosexual Perspective.” Vector was published by San Francisco’s Society for Individual Rights, one of the country’s largest gay organizations in the 1960s. Written by accounting instructor Morgan Pinney, the article provided a sympathetic account of the strike and then continued: “So what does this all mean to the homosexual? Just this: we are a minority which knows blatant discrimination. We may hide behind various straight, respectable, conservative facades. But to the establishment we are ‘queers.’ And that establishment is currently in the process of brutally suppressing certain minorities on the San Francisco State campus. Can we expect any different treatment?” Pinney then urged gay people to support the strike, declaring, “Homosexuals could mass the numbers, they could bring influence, and certainly economic power. But first they must come out of their closets and see that there is indeed a ‘cause.’”[3]
A few weeks later, the Berkeley Barb, an alternative weekly newspaper, referenced Pinney’s essay in an article headlined “Homos Back Strike.” The article began with a clever formulation, announcing that “in an expression of solidarity, the third sex joined the Third World this week.” The article then mentioned the formation of an Ad Hoc Homophile Committee for the Student Strike. The Barb and the Los Angeles Advocate, a gay periodical based in southern California, quoted gay leader Raymond Broshears as saying, “We support all 15 of the students’ demands…. It’s about time we spoke out and stopped being closet queens.”[4] After the Advocate subsequently editorialized against this statement and criticized the strike, Broshears responded by claiming that he had been misquoted. According to Broshears, his statement should have been attributed to an “ad hoc committee to support the homophiles striking at SFSC” and it was motivated by support for gay participants in the strike. He further noted that he and others had become involved in part because right-wing political groups had attacked “long-haired” SF State demonstrators with epithets such as “queer” and “cock-sucker.”[5]
There is further evidence of LGBTQ participation in the Third World Liberation Front strike. In October 1969, The Ladder, a national lesbian magazine, mentioned that two older members of the Daughters of Bilitis, a national lesbian organization based in San Francisco, had “spent the day at San Francisco State College picketing together with the Black Students Union.” During an oral history interview conducted many years later, philosophy professor and union activist Arthur Bierman recalled “openly gay” picket leaders who exhibited remarkable “courage” in blocking garbage trucks and preventing teamsters from crossing the picket lines.[6]
All of this is especially noteworthy because some strike leaders used antigay language (including the word “fag”) and threatened to “out” gay faculty members (including the History Department chair, who was described as the “queen” of the department) for not supporting their cause. Similarly problematic language can be found in a Berkeley Barb article about the jailing of more than 100 female strike supporters, some of whom claimed that they had experienced “sexual abuse and harassment from horny pigs and lesbian-type matrons.”[7]
Notwithstanding this type of negative language, many LGBTQ people were inspired by the strikes. In a March 1969 article about the emerging “homo revolt,” for example, the Barb summarized recent comments by local gay journalist Leo Laurence, who had argued that just as African Americans had stood up when Black Panther leader George Murray lost his job at SF State, “If someone loses his job for admitting to be gay, all homosexuals should back up that person…. ‘We have to be just as militant, just as together.’”[8] Laurence’s hypothetical scenario proved to be prescient. When San Francisco gay activist Gale Whittington was fired by States Steamship Company a few weeks later, Laurence predicted that “Whittington will become to the activist Gay Community what George Murray became to the Black Community at San Francisco State.”[9] Sure enough, Whittington’s firing led to the formation of San Francisco’s Committee for Homosexual Freedom, which included SF State faculty member Morgan Pinney and student Charles Thorpe. The Committee organized months of demonstrations at States Steamship, before and after the Stonewall Riots, and contributed greatly to the radicalization of the LGBTQ movement in and beyond the Bay Area.[10] In a 1970 article published in the San Francisco Free Press, Pinney wrote that his political radicalization had been “hastened” by his “participation as a striking faculty member” at SF State and that his homosexuality was “the catalyst” that made possible his radicalized perspectives on “the American system.”[11]
In another sign of the influence of the strikes on LGBTQ activism, SF State sociology professor Sherri Cavan, author of groundbreaking scholarship on gay bars, was invited to speak about “The Black and the Gay” at an April 1969 community event sponsored by the Society for Individual Rights; the other speaker was California Assemblyman and future San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. At the event, which was covered by the Barb and The Ladder, Cavan called for gay people to follow the lead of African Americans and “become more militant.” One of her specific suggestions was for gay activists to stage a sit-in in the men’s room at Pacific Bell, the regional telephone company, to protest the company’s refusal to print advertisements in its telephone directories with the word “homosexual.”[12]
The Third World Liberation Front strike, which among other things called for ethnic studies courses to be taught by people of color, encouraged LGBTQ activists to start advocating for gay studies courses to be taught by gay faculty. In a 1969 Berkeley Tribe article that criticized SF State President (and future U.S. Senator) S. I. Hayakawa for supporting an increase in the number of ethnic studies courses but not the hiring of people of color to teach them, Berkeley gay activist Konstantin Berlandt mockingly imagined the president’s response to the idea of offering a course on gay liberation: “Certainly, we’ll offer it and put it in the catalogue. The only question mark is can we find a qualified teacher. Homosexuals, of course, are disqualified from teaching anything.” Berlandt likely was referring to California’s ban on “homosexual” teachers, which was challenged in a lawsuit that culminated in a partial victory for gay rights when the California Supreme Court decided Morrison v. State Board of Education in November 1969. Unfortunately, the Tribe used a racist headline, “Samurai Knifes Ethnic Studies,” to criticize Hayakawa, who was of Japanese descent. This type of language risked undermining the intercommunal alliances that had strengthened in the crucible of the SF State strikes.[13]
Notes
[1] On the strikes and the founding of the College of Ethnic Studies, see Jason Michael Ferreira, “All Power to the People: A Comparative History of Third World Radicalism in San Francisco, 1968–1974” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, Ethnic Studies, 2003); Fabio Rojas, From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Ibram X. Kendi (formerly Ibram H. Rogers), The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave, 2012); Martha Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); William Issel, “‘Peace with Justice’: Bishop Mark J. Hurley and the San Francisco State College Strike,” American Catholic Studies 126, no. 3 (2015): 1–23.
[2] See, for example, “Remembering the Strike,” SF State Magazine, Fall 2008, https://magazine.sfsu.edu/archive/archive/fall_08/strike.html; “SF State College Strike Collection,” https://library.sfsu.edu/sf-state-strike-collection.
[3] Morgan Pinney, “State College from a Homosexual Perspective,” Vector, Jan. 1969, 5–6, 29. For more on Pinney and the strike, see the Konstantin Berlandt Papers at the GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco, California (GLBTHS); Peter Carroll, “Eric Solomon Oral History,” 7 Feb. and 13 Mar. 1992, Labor Archives and Research Center (LARC), SFSU; Harvey Schwartz, “Peter Radcliff Oral History,” 31 May 2000, LARC (note that Pinney is misspelled Piney).
[4] “Homos Back Strike,” Berkeley Barb, 7 Feb. 1969, 9; “‘Support S.F. State Strike,’ Rev. Broshears Tells Gays,” The Advocate, Mar. 1969, 3.
[5] “Why Gays?” The Advocate, Apr. 1969, 18; Raymond Broshers, letter to the editor, The Advocate, May 1969, 24. See also Ray Broshears, letter to the editor, The Advocate, 27 Oct. 1971, 25.
[6] “San Francisco Journal,” The Ladder, Oct. 1969, 18–24; Peter Carroll, “Arthur Bierman Oral History,” 14 Jan. 1992, LARC.
[7] Carroll, “Eric Solomon Oral History”; Jon Jacobson, “Women in Jail: Damped But Not Downed,” Berkeley Barb, 31 Jan. 1969, 9. See also Rob Cole, “Radicals’ Dilemma: The Leftists They Woo Call Them ‘Faggots,’” The Advocate, 16 Sept. 1970, 12; Gregory Brueck, “Early Warning: The Department of History and the San Francisco State College Strike,” unpublished paper, 2004; Sarah R. Smith, “Organizing for Social Justice: Rank-and-File Teachers’ Activism and Social Unionism in California, 1948–1978” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 2014).
[8] “Homo Revolt: ‘Don’t Hide It,’” Berkeley Barb, 28 Mar. 1969, 5, 23.
[9] “Gay Rebel Gets Shafted by Uptight Boss,” Berkeley Barb, 4 Apr. 1969, 11.
[10] “Newsletter,” Committee for Homosexual Freedom Newsletter, 22 Apr. 1969, 1; “Gay Strike Turns Grim,” Berkeley Barb, 25 Apr. 1969, 7. For more on Whittington and the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, see Gale Chester Whittington, Beyond Normal: The Birth of Gay Pride (Booklocker, 2010); Marc Stein, “LGBT Direct Action Bibliography, Chronology, and Inventory, 1965-75,” OutHistory and Queer Pasts, Oct. 2024, https://outhistory.org/exhibits/show/direct; Marc Stein, The Stonewall Riots: A Documentary History (New York: NYU Press, 2019), 1-24; and OutHistory’s Kaliflower and the Homosexual Revolution of 1969, by Eric Noble.
[11] Morgan Pinney, “Visit With Some ‘Liberals,’” San Francisco Free Press, Jan. 1970, 6.
[12] “Hear Willie Brown,” Berkeley Barb, 4 Apr. 1969, 28; Calendar listing, “Scenedrome,” Berkeley Barb, 11 Apr. 1969, 24; “Hear Willie Brown,” Berkeley Barb, 11 Apr. 1969, 24; “Gays Flex Muscles,” Berkeley Barb, 18 Apr. 1969, 21; “Homosexual Power,” The Ladder, Oct. 1969, 31–32. Cavan wrote a groundbreaking PhD sociology dissertation on gay bars: “Social Interaction in Public Drinking Places” (University of California, Berkeley, 1965). See also two related works by Cavan: Liquor License: An Ethnography of Bar Behavior (Chicago: Aldine, 1966) and “Interaction in Home Territories,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 8 (1963): 17–32.
[13] Konstantin Berlandt, “Samurai Knifes Ethnic Studies,” Berkeley Tribe, 22 Aug. 1969, 11. For another LGBT reference to the strike, see Sandra Shevey, “‘I Think It’s Just Beginning’: Gore Vidal’s Reflections on Changes and Upheavals on the American Scene,” After Dark, Jan. 1969, 53-54. See also Morrison v. State Board of Education, 1 Cal.3d 214 (Cal. 1969).