Lesbians, Feminism, and Gay Liberation
Lesbians were key participants in many early feminist actions (and the movements that preceded them) as well as frontline workers in the development of alternative feminist institutions, though their contributions were not always recognized by fellow feminists. Many sites described as “women’s” spaces, including women’s bookstores and women’s health clinics, were substantially lesbian endeavors.[1] This reflected both the fluid nature of sexual orientation in feminist spaces and the reality that institutions with the word “lesbian” in their names were more vulnerable to legal repression, vandalism, and discriminatory treatment.
Gay liberation became influential in these same years, reflecting the radical politics of gay and lesbian people in the wake of the Stonewall riots. By 1969, a local coalition of homophile activists and Stonewall veterans began meeting as the Gay Liberation Front in New York City. GLF described itself as a “militant coalition of radical and revolutionary homosexual men and women committed to fight the oppression of the homosexual as a minority group and to demand the right to the self-determination of our own bodies.”[2] GLF opposed what it considered to be the reformist tendencies of past homophile movements and aligned itself with New Left movements that emphasized the liberation of all people rather than limited rights for some. Gay liberationists also embraced “participatory democracy and the ideal of consensus.”[3]
In the years before and after Stonewall, transsexuals and street transvestites (a label used by activists such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera) created mutual aid spaces like STAR House and political advocacy groups like the Transsexual Activist Organization (TAO) (founded in 1970 by Angela K. Douglas in Los Angeles) to further the radical demands of drag queens, sex workers, transsexuals, and others. Transfeminine print culture also surged, as magazines such as Transvestia and Drag created vibrant forums for trans-feminized people to connect and collaborate.[4]
By December 1969, more moderate members of GLF had broken off to form the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), which subsequently founded the Firehouse at 99 Wooster Street. This was one of New York’s first, though short-lived, gay and lesbian community centers—it was destroyed by arson in 1974. Both GLF and GAA, despite their radical origins, remained ambivalent—if not outright bigoted—toward trans members. To take just one example: Arthur Bell, on of GAA’s cofounders, reported, “The general membership [of GAA] is frightened of Sylvia [Rivera] and thinks she’s a troublemaker. They’re frightened by street people.”[5] Meanwhile, Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL), which split off from GAA in the early 1970s, resented the white gay male bent of GAA. LFL subsequently became one of the foremost voices in the exclusion of trans women from lesbian and feminist spaces, culminating in the infamous flyer its members passed out at a 1973 gay pride rally in Washington Square Park. The flyer denounced so-called “female impersonators” and lobbied to keep street queens like Sylvia Rivera from speaking on stage. This action caused a traumatic split between Rivera and the gay and lesbian movement for years to come.[6]
Like gay liberation, women’s liberation groups struggled with internal disagreements stemming from differences of class, race, and sexual orientation throughout the movement’s early years. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminist Mystique and co-founder of the National Organization for Women, had allegedly referred to lesbians as the “lavender menace” of the feminist movement in 1969, putting words to a feeling shared by many heterosexual feminists, who feared that overt lesbianism would give feminism a bad rap. In response to homophobic hostility from fellow feminists, a group of lesbians decided to publicly “come out” during the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970. Wearing “Lavender Menace” t-shirts, the Radicalesbians stormed the stage and distributed a tract called “The Woman-Identified-Woman,” which argued that lesbian liberation was “absolutely essential to the success and fulfillment of the women’s liberation movement.”[7] They, too, were affiliated with the Gay Liberation Front, positing lesbianism as a radical political commitment to women over men, rather than a peculiar sexual inclination.
The 1970 Lavender Menace action set the tone for lesbian feminist organizing in the 1970s, announcing an unapologetic, lesbian-centered critique of heterosexual patriarchal oppression. Groups like the Radicalesbians and Lesbian Feminist Liberation organized political actions and consciousness-raising groups for lesbians and agitated for accountability from feminist and gay organizations, many of which they had helped found. In the process, they honed their politics around key questions of race, class, and gender.
[1] Finn Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (Duke University Press, 2007); Kristen Hogan, The Feminist Bookstore Movement: Lesbian Antiracism and Feminist Accountability (Duke University Press, 2016); Judith A. Houck, Looking through the Speculum: Examining the Women’s Health Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
[2] GLF manifesto, quoted in Terence Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New York’s Gay Liberation Front, 1969–1971,” Radical History Review 1995, no. 62 (1995): 105–34, 107.
[3] Kissack, “Freaking Fag Revolutionaries,” 114.
[4] The term “trans-feminized” comes from Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (Verso, 2024). The term helps us look for historical subjects who were targeted for exhibiting trans femininity, whether or not they identified as women within their historical contexts. Since we cannot know the gender identities of the people who called the Switchboard, this terminology is especially helpful.
[5] Arthur Bell, quoted in Jessi Gan, “‘Still at the Back of the Bus’: Sylvia Rivera’s Struggle,” Centro Journal 19, no. 1 (2007): 124–39, 133.
[6] Gan, “Still at the Back.”
[7] Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified-Woman” (Know, Inc., 1970), Duke University Libraries Digital Collections.