Running head: ARTIFACT ANALYSIS WORKSHEET 1 1 Artifact Analysis Worksheet 1 Name Institute Artifact Analysis References Nimkulrat, N. (2013). Situating creative artifacts in art and design research. FormAkademisk-Research Journal of Design and Design Education, 6(2). © 2014 Laureate Education, Inc. Page 3 of 3 The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982 Kevin J. Mumford In 1985 the veteran civil rights activist Bayard Rustin joined a gay and lesbian coalition in New York City that was about to make a final push for passage of an amendment to the city's administrative code to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Rustin wrote to the city council and to Mayor Edward I. Koch, vowed to lobby the four opposing African American councilmen, and called for "the extension of freedom and justice for all Americans."' Unusual for Rustin, in this instance his activism ceremoniously concluded rather than pio- neered a social movement for change when the city council passed the bill the next year. More than fifteen years before, the first gay liberationists had introduced such a bill that was defeated by stiff opposition from conservative politicians and religious leaders. That mobilization helped spark organizing and demonstrating for similar laws in cities and towns during the 1970s and 1980s—a local political movement and discourse that remains largely unexamined. In recent writing on sexual politics, however, Matthew D. Lassiter, Robert O . Self, Whitney Strub, and others have analyzed controversies over gay visibility in the media, conflicts over the regulation of urban vice, and the political cooptation of pornography to understand shifts in American liberalism, and they suggest that the rise of gay liberation served as a foil against which liberals reconfigured the public/private divide and conservatives mobilized a rightward political turn. From another perspective, despite the rise of the New Right, the cause of gays and lesbians did advance during the 1970s, with the proliferation of community pride, new national organi- zations, and the passage of protective ordinances. Utilizing a case study of Philadelphia, this essay examines how the pursuit of equal protection led gays and lesbians to clash with reli- gious and racial conservatives who challenged not only their rights but also their legitimacy Kevin J. Mumford is a member of the Department of History at the University of Iowa He wishes to thank the following for encouragement and advice: Clarissa Atkins, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Zoe Burk- bolder, Christopher Capozzola, Matthew Countryman, Rachel Devlin, Steve Estes, Estelle Freedman, Thomas Guglielmo, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Andrew Kahrl, Linda Kerber, Scott Kurashige, Kenneth Mack, Charles Morris, David Roediger, Bob Skiba, Marc Stein, Shelton Stromquist. the audiences of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the 2009 annual mee.

1. Running head: ARTIFACT ANALYSIS WORKSHEET 1
1
Artifact Analysis Worksheet 1
Name
Institute
Artifact Analysis
References
Nimkulrat, N. (2013). Situating creative artifacts in art and
design research. FormAkademisk-Research Journal of Design
and Design Education, 6(2).
© 2014 Laureate Education, Inc.
Page 3 of 3
The Trouble with Gay Rights: Race
and the Politics of Sexual Orientation
in Philadelphia, 1969-1982
Kevin J. Mumford
In 1985 the veteran civil rights activist Bayard Rustin joined a
gay and lesbian coalition in New
York City that was about to make a final push for passage of an
amendment to the city's
administrative code to prohibit discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation. Rustin wrote
to the city council and to Mayor Edward I. Koch, vowed to

2. lobby the four opposing African
American councilmen, and called for "the extension of freedom
and justice for all Americans."'
Unusual for Rustin, in this instance his activism ceremoniously
concluded rather than pio-
neered a social movement for change when the city council
passed the bill the next year.
More than fifteen years before, the first gay liberationists had
introduced such a bill
that was defeated by stiff opposition from conservative
politicians and religious leaders.
That mobilization helped spark organizing and demonstrating
for similar laws in cities
and towns during the 1970s and 1980s—a local political
movement and discourse that
remains largely unexamined. In recent writing on sexual
politics, however, Matthew D.
Lassiter, Robert O . Self, Whitney Strub, and others have
analyzed controversies over
gay visibility in the media, conflicts over the regulation of
urban vice, and the political
cooptation of pornography to understand shifts in American
liberalism, and they suggest
that the rise of gay liberation served as a foil against which
liberals reconfigured the
public/private divide and conservatives mobilized a rightward
political turn. From
another perspective, despite the rise of the New Right, the cause
of gays and lesbians did
advance during the 1970s, with the proliferation of community
pride, new national organi-
zations, and the passage of protective ordinances. Utilizing a
case study of Philadelphia, this
essay examines how the pursuit of equal protection led gays and
lesbians to clash with reli-

3. gious and racial conservatives who challenged not only their
rights but also their legitimacy
Kevin J. Mumford is a member of the Department of History at
the University of Iowa
He wishes to thank the following for encouragement and advice:
Clarissa Atkins, Nan Alamilla Boyd, Zoe Burk-
bolder, Christopher Capozzola, Matthew Countryman, Rachel
Devlin, Steve Estes, Estelle Freedman, Thomas
Guglielmo, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Andrew Kahrl, Linda
Kerber, Scott Kurashige, Kenneth Mack, Charles
Morris, David Roediger, Bob Skiba, Marc Stein, Shelton
Stromquist. the audiences of the Charles Warren Center
for Studies in American History and the 2009 annual meeting of
the Organization of American Historians, and the
anonymous reviewers for theJAH.
' Bayard Rustin, memo, March 11, 1986, in
7^?ß/Z)iari^/?«jft«Pi7/)frj. ed. Bayard Rustin and Nanette
Dobrosky
(Frederick, 1988); Rustin to Edward 1. Koch, Feb. 2, 1985, ibid;
"Bayard Rustin's Statement on Proposed Amend.-
ments to Law Banning Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual
Orientation," April 17, 1986, ibid,; Rustin to Howard
N. Meyer, Dec. 8, 1986, ibid; Rustin to Hon. Mary Pinkett,
March 22, 1985, ibid.; John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet:
The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (New York, 2003), 489-
90; "Text of the New Bill of Rights," New York Times,
Jan. 23, 1986, p. B2; "Rights Measure Ready for Vote after 12
Years," ibid., March 20, 1986, p. Bl; "Amending the
Homosexual Rights Law," ibid.. May 3, 1986, p. A26.
doi: 10.1O93/jahist/jarl39
© Ihe Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press on
behalf of the Organization of American Historians.

4. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:
journals.permissions^poup.com
June 2011 The Journal of American History 49
50 The Journal of American History June 2011
as a minority. It also explores how they developed racial
diversity to respond to those threats
and ultimately argues that gays and lesbians reconstructed their
identities in the process of
negotiating race relations and extending the liberal impulses of
the 1960s into the 1980s.'
Perhaps more than any other field, gay and lesbian studies
concentrates on the origins
and meanings of identity, creating discussions that often evolve
into what is referred to as
the essentialism versus constructionism debate. Essentialist
scholars conceive of sexuality
as a transhistorical essence located in the self, and they tend to
see the gays, lesbians, or
homosexuals of the past as identifying and desiring in much the
same way as they do in
the present. By contrast, social constructionist scholars argue
that the very categories of
homosexuality and heterosexuality change historically in
relation to the forces of capital-
ism, the family, urbanization, and scientific knowledge. Most
historians are by nature
constructionists, and they generally agree that by the outbreak
of the Stonewall riots in
1969, when New York City police raided the gay-friendly
Stonewall Inn and patrons

5. fought back, gay and lesbian identities and communities had
formed across metropolitan
America. Even so, sexual historians entertain a variety of
interpretations about which
processes or forces most affected the dynamics of identification.
Anne Enke reconstructed
1970s civic spaces (such as dance halls and ballparks) and
Martin Meeker pointed to contact
zones of literature, periodicals, and photographs to describe
areas of popular interaction that
defined sexual subjectivities. Margot Canaday uncovered the
extensive operation of constitu-
tive regulation by what she termed the "straight state" to
illustrate the powers of government
interdiction and neglect, and Joanne Meyerowitz analyzed
paradigms of racial and sexual
knowledge to uncover changing processes of subjective
interpolation that sometimes served as
self-representations. In turn, my reconstruction of the politics of
sexual orientation in Phila-
delphia highlights the impact of intersections of race and
sexuality on identity formation.
As Matthew J. Countryman demonstrated in his study of civil
rights and black power
movements in Philadelphia, black leadership protested against
workplace discrimination,
promoted educational reform, and gained control in municipal
government. At the same
time, gay organizers, volunteers, witnesses, and audiences in
the city, along with readers of the
gay press and other media, were influenced by black political
actors and gay people of color as
they struggled for a place in the rights revolution of the 1970s.'
By the rights revolution, I not only refer to Jacquelyn Dowd
Hall's phrase the "long civil

6. rights movement" and her influential reading of racial struggle
that extended the chronology
of the movement, enlarged its scope from the South to the
nation, and stressed the role of
working-class politics, but I also incorporate what the
sociologist John Skrentny conceived
of as a minority rights revolution, or the expansion of the black
civil rights movement
^ Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in
American Culture, Society, and Politics (New York, 2002);
Matthew D. Lassiter, "Inventing Family Values," in Rightward
Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s,
ed. Bruce J. Schulman and Julian Zelizer (Cambridge, Mass.,
2008), 13-28; Robert O. Self, "Sex in the City: The
Politics of Sexual Liberalism in Los Angeles, 1963-1979,"
Gender and History, 20 (Aug. 2008), 288-311; Whitney
Strub, Perversion for Profit: The Politics of Pornography and
the Rise of the New Right (New York, 2010), 260-61 ; Josh
Sides, "Excavating the Postwar Sex District in San Francisco,"
Journal of Urban History, 32 (March 2006), 355-79;
Peter Braunstein, '"Adults Only': The Construction of the Erotic
City in New York during the 1970s," in America
in the Seventies, ed. Beth L. Bailey and David Färber
(Lawrence, 2004), 129-56. esp. 146.
' Anne Enke, Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested
Space, and Feminist Activism (Durham, N.C., 2007);
Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship
in Twentieth Century America (Princeton, 2009); Joanne
Meyerowitz, '"How Common Culture Shapes the Separate
Lives': Sexuality, Race, and Mid-Twentieth-Century
Social Constructionist "Vnon^u Journal of American History, 96
(March 2010), 1057—84; Joanne Meyerowitz,
"Transnational Sex and U.S. Wsx.ov¡^ American Historical
Review, 14 (Dec. 2009), 1273-86; Matthew J. Countryman,

7. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia
(Philadelphia, 2006), 117-52, 236-44, 312-27.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 51
to include women, the disabled, the elderly, and other groups.
His synthesis argued that
"though victimized like blacks, gays and lesbians were not
legitimate victims," in part
because they failed to demonstrate how they were analogous to
recognized groups. Historians
of the legal regulation of sexuality have focused more on the
issues of marriage and sodomy
than on antidiscrimination legislation, while the recent growth
of historiography on the
northern civil rights movement largely overlooks gays and
lesbians. Instead, the study of
sexual orientation ordinances has been taken up by social
scientists who measure discrete
variables—religiosity, population size, socioeconomic status,
and education—to explain
why some locations passed laws and others did not. Following
their lead, my analysis com-
pares the legislative failure in 1975 to the eventual legislative
success in 1982 in Philadelphia
but focuses less on why it occurred than on how it occurred, in
part because of how race
became crucial to arguments against gay rights as well as
central to their passage. Although
historians have examined the impact of race on sexuality,
particularly in studies of "misce-
genation," relatively few studies of gay and lesbian
communities have done so. My analysis

8. pursues the same sort of questions about homophobia that
historians traditionally ask
about racism: What were the dominant images and logics
presented to the public? What
did it justify? How did it respond to challenges and reform? My
work also locates a kind
of racial conflict between white gays and black gays that
undermined the movement from
within, which the historian of feminism Winifred Breines has
conceptualized as a cycle of
personal misunderstanding that troubled social movements—one
of "profound racial dis-
tance and tentative reconciliation." In Philadelphia and other
cities with significant minor-
ity demographics, sexual politics operated in some relationship
to patterns of race relations."*
Race and Gay Liberation
Since the emergence of modern discourse on gay and lesbian
identity, writers and aca-
demics have often compared the condition of the homosexual to
that of a racial minority.
•• Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "The Long Civil Rights Movement and
the Political Uses of the Past," Journal of
American History, 91 (March 2005), 1233-63; John D.
Skrentny, The Minority Rights Revolution (Cambridge,
Mass., 2002), 20, 304-5, 315, 326. On the long civil rights
movement, see Sundidata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence
Lang, "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial
Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Smd^its," Journal
of/^can American History, 92 (Spring 2007), 265-88; and
Samuel Walker, The Rights Revolution: Rights and Com-
munity in Modern America (New York, 1998), 44-48. On the
long civil rights movement and working-class politics,

9. see Nancy MacLean, Ereedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of
the American Workplace (Cambridge, Mass., 2006). For
studies of sexual orientation ordinances, see Kenneth D. Wald,
James W. Button, and Barbara A. Rienzo. "The
Politics of Gay Rights in American Communities: Explaining
Antidiscrimination Ordinances and Policies,"" Ameri-
can Journal of Political Science, 40 (Nov. 1996), 1157-78; Gary
Mucciaroni, Same Sex, Different Politics: Success and
Eailure in the Struggles over Gay Rights (Chicago, 2008), 31;
Craig A. Rimmerman, Kenneth D. Wald, and Clyde
Wilcox, Ihe Politics of Gay Rights (Chicago, 2000) ; and Wayne
Van der Meide, Legist/! ting Equality: A Review of Laws
Affecting Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered People in
the United States (Washington, 2004). On Philadelphia
gay institutions and sexual orientation rights, see Robert W.
Bailey, Gay Politics, Urban Politics: Identity and Econom-
ics in the Urban Setting (New York, 1999), 249-79. On the
impact of race on sexuality, see Peggy Pa.scoe, What
Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race
in America (New York, 2009); Renee C. Romano. Race
Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America (Cambridge,
Mass., 2003); David !.. Chappell, A Stone of Hope:
Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill,
2004), 114-18; White Interveners in Still v, Savannah-
Chatham County Board of Education, "In Defense of School
Segregation,"" in The Development of Segregationist
Thought, ed. I. A. Newby (Homewood, 1968), 146-53; Pete
Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s
(Chapel Hill, 2000), 148-75; and 1. A. Newby,//'w Crow's
Defense: Anti-Negro Thought in America, 1900-1930
(Baton Rouge, 1965), 92-95. Winifred Breines, The Trouble
between Us: An Uneasy History of the White and Black
Women in the Eeminist Movement (New York, 2006), 7. On
race and feminism, see also Sara M. Evans, Personal
Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights
Movement and the New Left (New York, 1979); and Anne

10. M. Valk, Radical Sisters: Second-Wave Eeminism and Black
Liberation in Washington, D.C. (Urbana, 2008).
52 The Journal of American History June 2011
In his influential 1951 treatise. The Homosexual Minority in
America, Daniel Webster
Cory included homosexuals in the so-called minority problem of
Jews and Negroes, as
did some of the writings of the gay black novelist James
Baldwin and brief letters by the
black playwright Lorraine Hansberry that were published in a
1957 issue of a lesbian
journal. Even so, what was known as the homophile movement
(a number of advocacy
organizations founded in the postwar era) remained largely
white and more culturally,
strategically, and personally conservative. In his classic account
of homophile politics,
John D'Emilio argued that they were influenced by the
"headline-making black civil
rights movement," but that the rank and file sought a kind of
invisible integration and
could be compared to only the most conservative of black
organizations. My own reading
of the national organizational journals—Mattachine Review, the
Ladder, and ONE—
revealed that homophiles were more involved in efforts to
achieve civil liberties and gain
public acceptance than demonstrating for rights, and they
infrequently mentioned
African Americans. Conversely, in the 1950s the black popular
periodical/i?i routinely ran
stories on homosexuality or gay sex scandals, though rarely in

11. connection with civil rights.
O n rare occasions writers observed the intersection of the two
causes. In 1962 the homo-
phile publication ONE published a review that characterized
James Baldwin as "one of a
number of current writers who is discovering a homosexual
dimension to the current
Negro revolution."'
By the 1960s, homophiles in Philadelphia had begun to adapt
what Marc Stein termed
"multiple models of African American resistance" to the
advancement of their cause, and
on July 4, 1965, they held the first Annual Reminder
demonstration at Independence
Hall to demand recognition of their rights of citizenship. Even
before the 1969 Stonewall
riots, Philadelphia gays and lesbians had formed the Homophile
Action League (HAL) to
break away from the civility of the homophiles; a week after the
riots, HAL and other
radicalized activists challenged the conventionality of the fifth
Annual Reminder by reftis-
ing to conform to its usual dress code. The new radical HAL
later discovered less rebellion
and more apathy in its ranks, however, and therefore urged
readers to follow "our fellow
victims of discrimination and oppression—blacks, women, the
poor, political dissi-
dents—[who] are fervently pressing their battles." In 1970 the
HAL announced that it had
testified for a "state Human Rights Act" before the state
platform committees of both the
Democratic and Republican parties. The league also sponsored a
booth where crowds of
supporters "filled 10 pages of the homosexual 'civil rights'

12. petition." Similarly, Martin
Duberman stressed the connections of race and sexuality in a
narrative on the Stonewall
^ Daniel Webster Cory, The Homosexual in America: A
Subjective Approach (NewYork, 1951), 4; Letter from L.
N. H.[Lorraine Hansberry], Ladder, 1 (May 1957), 26-28. On
Lorraine Hansberry's letters, see also Lisbeth Lipari,
"The Rhetoric of Intersectionality: Lorraine Hansberry's 1957
Letters to the Ladder," in Queering Public Address:
Sexualities in American Historical Discourse, ed. Charles E.
Morris III (Columbia, S.C., 2007), 233-35; and Cheryl
Higashida, "To Be(come) Young, Gay, and Black: Lorraine
Hansberry's Existentialist Routes to Anticolonialism,"
American Quarterly, 60 (Dec. 2008), 899-924. James Baldwin,
Another Country (New York, 1962); James Baldwin,
"The Male Prison," in The Price of the Ticket: Collected
Nonfiction, 1948-1985, by James Baldwin (New York, 1985),
101-05; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities:
The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United
States, 1940-1970 (Chicago, 1982), 174, 224; Chuck Stanley,
review of Another Country by James Baldwin, One,
10 (Nov. 1962), 21-22. Andrew Bradbury, "Race and Sex," ibid,
12 (Oct. 1964), 17-21; Review of "The Toilet"
by Le Roi Jones, ibid., 13 (March 1965), 16; Richard Mayer,
review o( Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin, Matta-
chine Review, 3 (April 1957), 33; 'A Moral Revolution: For
Homosexuals?," Pursuit and Symposium, 1 (March—April
1966), 31—33. On homophile ethnic analogy, see Barbara
Gittings, "Testimony for Human Relations Commission,
Philadelphia City Hall Annex," June 5, 1974, Philadelphia City
Council file, box 8, Papers of the Philadelphia
Lesbian and Gay Task Force (Samuel Paley Library, Temple
University, Philadelphia, Pa.).

13. Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 53
moment that featured black and Puerto Rican transgender
rioters. If nothing else, the riot
exposed the multicultural nature of gay community life and the
movement's sharp escala-
tion of tactical aggressiveness. Yet much of the historical
scholarship on and some of the
writings from the gay liberation era center their radical
critiques of patriarchy and the
necessity of "coming out," and they interpretively highlight the
ideological influences of
anti-imperialism, radical feminism, and the New Left, while
losing sight of race.''
In complicated and sometimes forgotten ways, the civil rights
and black power move-
ments continued to influence gay liberation. Perhaps the most
influential gay liberation
essay of the era, "Refugees from Amerika: A Cay Manifesto,"
was penned by the
white civil rights activist Carl Wittman. While an undergraduate
at Swarthmore College,
Wittman had joined the desegregation movement in Cambridge,
Maryland, and later
helped organize poor black neighborhoods in Newark, New
Jersey. He had authored a
major paper for the New Lefi: on interracial organizing that
urged activists to join multi-
cultural coalitions and to see economic inequality and racial
oppression as interconnected.
In the manifesto he argued that the black and gay movements
faced a common enemy of
"police, city hall, capitalism." He proposed that the two work

14. together, but also acknowl-
edged barriers to the revolution "because of the uptightness and
super-masculinity of
many black men (which is understandable)."''
Attempts to define black masculinity within the black power
movement became a
troubling point of conflict for gay liberationists, however. In his
controversial 1968 mem-
oir. Soul on Ice, the black radical Eldridge Cleaver wrote
scathingly of homosexuality—
declaring it "a racial death-wish," a "sickness" worse than
infanticide—and he infamously
insulted James Baldwin for his gayness. Though a reviewer for
the black leftist or nation-
alist journal the Liberator acknowledged that "Cleaver is no
[Oscar] Wilde, to be sure,"
although he did admire Cleaver's "societal convictions about
drugs, sexual appetites."
By contrast, a gay writer declared that "we are weary of
Eldridge Cleaver's put-downs
of James Baldwin on account of his homosexual leanings," and
another criticized Cleaver
for buying into the myth of American masculinity and believing
that "if the black man
would only be given back his balls," he could promise the
"collapse of the effeminate,
corrupt, impotent, and often homosexual white rules." Although
Cleaver became an
evangelical Christian and championed black female sexual
liberation, he continued
to object to homosexuality. In 1978 he appeared on a radio talk
show with the Temple
University history professor Dennis Rubini, who in 1975 had
helped pass a resolution at

15. •* Marc Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves: Lesbian
and Gay Philadelphia, 1945-1972 (Chicago, 2000),
293; C. R,"GaY Politics," Homophile Action Newsletter, 2
(May-June 1970), 1. On race coalition, see "Homosexuals
as a Minority," ibid, 2 (Nov.-Dec. 1969), 2 - 3 ; and "h.a.l.
Notes," ibid, (March-April 1970), 5, On the Homo-
phile Action League petition for a rights law, see Barbara
Berthong, "Gay Politics," ibid,, 3 (Sept. 1970), 2; and
Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall {New York, 1993), 112-14;
Terrence Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revolutionaries: New
York's Gay Liberation Front, 1969-Ï971." Radical History
Review, 62 (Spring 1995), 105-34. On anti-imperialism,
see Ian Lekus, "Queer Harvests: Homosexuality, the U.S. New
Left, and the Venceremos Brigades to Cuba," ibid.,
89 (Spring 2004), 57-91. Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly
Loves, 231-32, 291-95. C. E, "Editorial," Homophile
Action Newsletter, 2 (Nov.-Dec. 1969), 3; "In the Movement:
Gay Liberation Front," ibid., 1 (Oct. 1969), 8.
' Carl Wittman, "Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto,"
Liberation, 14 (Feb. 1970), 18-33. On the
importance of Carl Wittman's essay to gay liberation, see Rictor
Norton, "Reflections on the Gay Movement," in
Gay Roots: An Anthology of Gay History, Sex, Politics, and
Culture, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco, 1991), 9 6 -
97. On Carl Wittman, seeTomHayden, Reunion: A Memoir
(New York, 1988), 161-62; and Wesley Hogan, "How
Democracy Travels: SNCC, Swarthmore Students, and the
Growth of the Student Movement in the North, 1961-
1964," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 126
(]xy 2002), 437-70. Thaddeus Russell, "The Color of
Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality," American
Quarterly, 60 (March 2008), 101-28.

16. 54 The Journal of American History June 2011
the Organization of American Historians anntial meeting that
affirmed the rights of
scholars to study sexual minorities. On the show. Cleaver again
attacked gays, asserting "I
personally think that homosexuality is a sickness as well as a
sin" that reflects confusion
about the sexes. He reportedly added, "I look upon Dennis
Rubini as a twisted fellow."
When Rubini countered that the nineteenth-century Philadelphia
physician Benjamin
Rush believed that blackness was a "benign form of leprosy,"
Cleaver responded only
with, "I'm glad it was benign.""
Despite the fallout from Cleaver's writing and rhetoric, gay
radicals reached out to the
black power movement. In the months following the Stonewall
riots, gay men in New York
City organized the first Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and by
1971 a branch had blossomed
in Philadelphia. Prompted by the early gay rights activist Frank
Kameny, many organizers
adopted the phrase "gay is good," mirroring Stokely
Carmichael's use of the slogan "black is
beautiful." The new gay liberationists turned up the volume of
their demands with calls for
"gay power" and "gay power to gay people." At a high point of
cross-identification the New
York branch of the GLF proposed to pursue political alignment
with the Black Panther party
(BPP), and in 1970 the GLF voted to donate $500 to a BPP legal
defense fiind but a number
of members objected because of the BPP'S reputed homophobia.
The GLF did continue to

17. advertise BPP events to its membership, and in turn the BPP
chairman Huey Nevrton issued
"A Letter to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about the
Women's Liberation and Gay
Liberation Movements" in 1970. In the widely reprinted
document, Newton denounced
homophobia, instructed his comrades to "gain security in
ourselves," and, in calling for an
end to antigay epithets, even ventured the assertion that a
"homosexual could be the most
revolutionary." At one point in the text he asked, "what made
them homosexual?" When he
answered, "perhaps it's a phenomenon that I don't understand
entirely," Newton implicitly
disavowed rather than affirmed homosexuality.'
The response to Newton and the BPP varied. Some argued to
forgive their causal use of
the term faggot, while others did not; some called for a
coalition in spirit or with contri-
butions, while others found that position to be faddish.
Significant numbers of gays and
lesbians did turn out to participate in the BPP'S 1970
Revolutionary People's Constitu-
tional Convention in Philadelphia in hopes of creating an
alternative society and govern-
ment, and at least sixty attended a follow-up convention in
Washington, D.C. A white
gay activist recalled a sense of solidarity when he donned
"brightly colored, hand-
crocheted berets (like the kind the Panthers wore)" at the
Philadelphia convention. At the
Washington, D . C , convention, approximately a dozen gay
activists demonstrated against
' Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice (New York, 1968), 109-10;

18. Donn Teal, The Gay Militants: How Gay Liberation
Began in America, 1969—1971 (New York, 1971), 94. Francis
Lucas, review of Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver,
Liberator, (Oct. 1968), 19; John P LeRoy, "Eldridge Cleaver's
Missing Balls," GAY, May 11, 1970, p. 7. On Dennis
Rubini at the Organization of American Historians annual
meeting, see "Historians Aflirm Gay Studies,"
Philadelphia Weekly Gayzette, May 9-16, 1975, p. 2. "Cleaver
Slices Gays," Philadelphia Gay News, Oct. 1978.
Magdalena J. Zabotowska, James Baldwin's Turkish Decade:
Erotics of Exile (Durham, N.C., 2009), 231-32;
and Tracye Mathews, "'No One Ever Asks, What a Man's Place
in the Revolution Is': Gender and the Politics
of the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971," in The Black Panther
Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles E. Jones (Baltimore,
1998), 2 8 1 .
'' On "gay is good," see Teal, Gay Militants, 188. On Frank
Kameny, see Toby Marorta, The Politics of Homosex-
uality (Boston, 1981), 62-67. On "gay power to gay people," see
Teal, Gay Militants, 175. "The Gay Militants: A
Book of Genesis," GAY, May 24, 1971, pp. 14—15. On the Gay
Liberation Front and the Black Panther party, see
Teal, Gay Militants, 166—67; and Huey Newton, "A Letter to
the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters about Women's
Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements," in Black Men on
Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader, ed.
Devon Carbado (New York, 1999), 387-89.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 55
a restaurant for allegedly discriminating on the hasis of race.
There are scattered shards of

19. evidence that black gay men, including some who were
incarcerated, participated in some
way in the BPP, but there is little indication that Newton's
statement on gay liberation
translated into widespread inclusion of gays and lesbians in the
organization.'"
From the perspective ofthe GLF, the interchange with the BPP
exacerbated the tensions
and divisions among gay activists to a greater extent than it
ignited a broad revolutionary
coalition. Shortly after the GLF voted to approve the donation
to the BPP, opponents of
the move broke away to start the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA)
to operate as an exclusively
homosexual organization with a clearly defined structure. The
first president of the GAA,
Jim Owles, downplayed the racial overtones of the hreak, hut he
also declared that he
believed that the "Black Panthers were strongly anti-gay," and
in an interview he referred
to the gay activists as a minority within the homosexual
minority—"the most peculiar of
freaks." The new GAA did not prioritize diversity in the same
way that the GLF did, and
while the Philadelphia branch of the GLF reportedly had once
attracted significant num-
hers of people of color, hy the early 1970s it had declined.
Some radicals joined and
thrived in the GAA, at least in the heginning stages when the
organization served as a front
for diverse activities, such as newsletters, media visibility
campaigns, and study groups,
and provided enough flexibility for and openness to diversity of
race, class, and gender.
Even so, the GAA was seen as more academic, more

20. intellectual, less street oriented, and
more white—than the liberation fronts. Yet the organization
retained a revolutionary
spirit of liberation and the syntax of hlack power, proclaiming
"gay is angry!" and "gay is
proud!" in fliers and memos. The activists in the GAA
organized under a vision of civil
rights, hut they were blind to the whiteness of their ranks."
In New York and Philadelphia the GAA staged demonstrations
to educate the public
about and lobby for local and federal governmental rights, and
in 1970 the New York
City GAA specifically pressed for a city council bill (known as
Intro 475) to prohibit dis-
crimination in housing, employment, and accommodations. The
demonstrators were
known for utilizing disruptive tactics called zaps to get
attention and win support. More
than forty GAA members disrupted the taping of a television
talk show with the New York
City mayor John Lindsay and forced the mayor's staff to agree
to meet with them.
"1̂ "Gay Liberation Blooms in Philadelphia," GAY, ]uy 13,
1970, p. 12; "Gay Bar Charged with Black/Female
Bias," ihid., March 1, 1971, p. 12; "Black Panther Party
Supports Gay Liberation," ibid., Sept. 14, 1970, pp. 3, 12;
John P LeRoy, "Ball a Panther," ibid, May 18, 1970, p. 15; Hal
Tarr, "A Consciousness Raised," in Smash the Church,
Smash the State.' The Early Years of Gay Liberation, ed. Tommi
Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco, 2009), 25-26, 29. On
women's participation in the Revolutionary People's
Constitutional Conventions, see Valk, Radical Sisters, 128-29;
and Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, 334-36. On
dual black participation, see Diwas Kc, "Of Conscious-

21. ness and Criticism: Identity in the Intersection of the Gay
Liberation Front and the Young Lords Party" (M.A.
thesis, Sarah Lawrence College, 2005), 17-18.
' ' David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New
York, 2006), 140; Kissack, "Freaking Fag Revo-
lutionaries," 113, 116-17; Teal, Gay Militants, 106; "Jim
Owles," in The Gay Crusaders, ed. Kay Tobin and Randy
Wicker (New York, 1972), 35; "Where the Action Is: An
Interview with Jim Owles," GAY, Sept. 7, 1970, pp. 14-
15; "GAA-NY Wins Court Battle for Incorporation," ibid., April
3, 1972, p. 6; Jeffrey Escoflier interview by Kevin
Mumford, July 2009, notes (in Kevin Mumford's possession).
On the activities ofthe Gay Activists Alliance (GAA),
see "Gay Activists Alliance," memo, Feb. 22, 1972, folder 3,
box 2, Harry Langhorne Papers (Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.).
"Constitution of GAA," folder 3, box 2, Langhorne Papers.
On diversity in the GAA, see James Roberts, "Pre-Now," in
Smash the Church, Smash the State!, ed. Mecca, 46.
"Protest This Anti-Gay Bigotry," memo, April 1972, GAA
folder. Ephemera Collection (John J. Wilcox Jr.
Library and Archives, William Way Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and
Transgender Community Center, Philadelphia);
and "Current GAA Activities Include," ibid.; "Minutes—Gay
Media Project," Dec. 18, 1975, folder 19, box 2,
Langhorne Papers.
56 The Journal of American History June 2011
The GAA also used a zap to convince the city council
representative from Creenwich
Village to introduce the new bill and then approached the
commisson on human rights,

22. winning early support from the civil rights activist and the
chairperson Eleanor Holmes
Norton. Although the GAA retained a registered, unpaid
lobbyist, its effort to pass an
antidiscrimination bill at the state level quietly failed after a
lopsided vote. The GAA shifted
its focus back to the city amendment and mounted more
pressure on the city council. At
the same time, the members of the Philadelphia HAL wrote that
they supported the GAA
more than the GLF, in part because the GAA distrusted the
strategy of alignment with other
groups and because it emphasized the benefits of equal rights.
Alongside the GAA, the HAL
called for fair employment and fair housing, and in 1970 the
organization approached a
liberal city council member about a bill in what it termed a
"low-risk but high potential
use of the political process."'^
By the 1970s, what was popularly termed the gay rights
movement had many goals,
including raising the movement's visibility in the media,
decriminalizing sodomy, declas-
sifying homosexuality as a mental disorder and ending
harassment by police. Many of
these objectives were shared with homophiles, but the post-
Stonewall era organizations,
particularly the new GAA, evolved within a larger culture of
activism that race had deci-
sively defined. It is hard to imagine the rebellion of gay
liberationists in New York or
Philadelphia without seeing their admiration for and clash with
the black power move-
ment, and it is harder still to understand the longer history of
gay and lesbian rights

23. without reference to African Americans.
Gay Rights as Civil Rights
When the GAA began to organize for a sexual orientation law in
Philadelphia it encoun-
tered the complex of antidiscrimination codes that originated
with the Fair Employment
Practices Committee in 1941, the Philadelphia Human Relations
Commission in 1951,
and the Fair Practices Ordinance in 1962. In 1972 the GAA
activists Harry Langhorne and
Marc Segal first approached the city council to include
protection for sexual orientation
in a bill that proposed to add the category of sex to the Fair
Practices Ordinance, but they
were not successful. The following year, according to an
account by Langhorne, they
"began making the rounds" at city hall to gather support for
Philadelphia City Council
Bill 1275 for sexual orientation, but the powerful council
members Isadore Bellis and
George Schwartz reportedly considered the bill unpassable.
Even so, Langhorne and Segal
secured sponsorship promises from several other city council
members, one of whom was
'̂ "Historic Hearings Held in N.Y.C.," OîKNov. 22, 1971, p. 1;
"City Council Leader Threatens Lindsay on Cay
Bill," ibid, Feb. 7, 1972, p. 6; "City Councilmen Push Cay
Protection Bill," ibid.. Feb. 15, 1971, p. 17; Stephan L.
Cohen, The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York: "An
Army of Lovers Cannot Fail" (New York, 2008), 147-50;
Arthur Evans, "How to Zap Straights," The Gay Liberation
Book, ed. Len Richmond and Cary Noguera (San Francisco,
1973), 111-15; "Police Harassment," Activist Alliance, n.d.,

24. GAA folder. Ephemera Collection; "Protect Yourself from a
Police Crack-Down," memo, n.d., ibid.; "We Interrupt This
Program of Psychiatric Propaganda to Bring You the
Following Message from Cay Pride," flyer, Dec. 9, 1971, ibid.;
"Cay Activists Sponsor Petition," GAY, Feb. 16, 1970,
p. 3; "GAA Confronts Lindsay at Channel 5," ibid.. May 11,
1970, p. 3; "N.Y. Rights Commissioner Backs Employ-
ment Demands," ibid. May 18, 1970, p. 20; "Councilman
Creitzer Yields to Cay Activists," ibid, June 1, 1970, p. 3;
"GAA Tackles Five More Candidates," ibid, July 6, 1970, p. 1;
"Penna. Politicals Hear Gay Spokesman," ibid., Sept. 7,
1970, p. 12; "New York Assembly Votes Down Rights Bill,"
ibid., Sept. 12, 1970, p. 1; CF., "Fighting the Fun and
Games in Fun City," Homophile Action League Newsletter, 3
(Dec. 1970), 6-7; CF., "Between the Devil and the Deep
Blue Sea," ibid.; C. F., "Editorial: Cay Politics," ibid, 2 (May-
June 1970), 1; Testimony of Byrna Aronson, n.d..
Homophile Action League folder. Ephemera Collection.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 57
Marc Segal (left) and Harry Langhorne (right) founded the Gay
Activists Alliance in Philadelphia and organized the first
campaign
for a local sexual orientation ordinance, which was defeated in
city
council subcommittee hearings. Courtesy Marc Segal and the
?WIA-
delphia Gay News.
African American, and in 1974 the Law and Government
Committee prepared to hold
hearings on the bill to amend the Fair Practices Ordinance. The

25. subcommittee included
two African Americans but also reflected the whiteness of
Philadelphia—with identifiably
Italian, Jewish, and Eastern European names—and several white
senior members proved
extraordinarily hostile to the gay and lesbian witnesses. In the
early 1970s, the city's three
largest white ethnic groups were Italian Americans (with a
population of 132,630), Irish
Americans (with a population of 122, 522), and German
Americans (with a population
of 68,468); presumably, many were Catholic—a factor that
affected perceptions and val-
ues related to homosexuality. At some moments in the hearings,
attitudes undoubtedly
reflected religious beliefs, at other moments they reflected
competitive hostility to the
arrival of a faction coming up through the political machine,
and at others, personal
animus toward homosexuals. If the council members were
pressured into opposition by
their religiously conservative constituency, none of them said so
on the record. Rather,
race became the central political reference."
" Thomas J. Sugrue, "Affirmative Action from Below: Civil
Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of
Racial Equality in the Urban North, 945-969," Journal of
American History, 91 (June 2004), 141-63. On City
Council Bill 1275, see Stein, City of Sisterly and Brotherly
Loves, 362. Harold I. Lief to Isadore Bellis, June 26, 1972,
1970s folder, Philadelphia History files. Ephemera Collection;
"Gay Rights Are 1972 Election Year Issue," folder 3,
box 2, Langhorne Papers; "Ad Hoc Committee of Gay
Organizations, Including Gay Academic Union, Gay Activ-
ists Alliance, Gay Democratic Club, Gay Legal Caucus, Dignity,

26. Lesbian Feminist Liberation, Mattachine Society,
National Gay Task Force," press release, April 12, 1974,
Philadelphia City Council 1275 folder, box 8, Papers of the
Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force; "Bill No. 1275,
Introduced April 18, 1974," Records of the Office of the
City Clerk (City Hall, Philadelphia); Harry Unghorne, "Gay
Rights Bill Dies—Another in Preparation," Philadel-
phia Gay News, Jan. 3, 1976, p. A3; Marc Segal interview by
Mumford, transcript, July 28, 2008 (in Mumford's
possession); ¡980 Census of Population and Housing. Census
Tracts. Philadelphia, Pa-N.J. Standard Metropolitan
Statistical Area (2 vols., Washington, 1983), 1, 221, table P-8;
"Lobbying Office Is Essential," Advocate, April 19,
1975, p. 11; "Lobby Effort Incorporated," ibid.. May 5, 1976, p.
6.
58 The Journal of American History June 2011
O n December 19, 1974, for the first day of hearings on Bill
1275, the chambers were
full and several dozen witnesses were scheduled to testify
before the seven-man panel.
From the beginning of the councilmen's questioning, it was
apparent that gays and lesbi-
ans had to establish much more than their case of
discrimination; they had to prove their
minority status to opponents who deemed them immoral and
unlike other groups that
were traditionally protected under the umbrella of
antidiscrimination discourse. Some
witnesses therefore turned to tactics of enumeration. Harry
Langhorne estimated the
number of gays and lesbians in the city at 150,000, or
approximately 10 percent of Phil-

27. adelphia exclusive of the suburbs, and Marc Segal estimated the
homosexual population
at 200,000. When the Reverend James A. Kennedy estimated the
number at "upwards
of 250,000," several members of the council became irate, and
the councilman Joseph
Coleman objected to what he felt was an implied comparison
with blacks. He was
"troubled, even on the civil rights aspect," because "a
homosexual is a homosexual by
choice," but "one does not determine one's race or what have
you." In response to Cole-
man's objections, Kennedy argued, in a simplistic and
essentialist manner, that sexual
orientation was determined "before a person is two or three
years old" and "that is not
a matter of choice."''*
Supporters of the measure also had to overcome the association
of gays and lesbians
with criminality and sodomy. The state of Pennsylvania had
long outlawed sodomy,
charging "whoever carnally knows" animal or bird or any male
or female by the anus or
by the mouth with a felony and in 1973 reduced voluntary
deviate sexual intercourse to
a misdemeanor by adopting the model codes of the American
Law Institute. The political
theorist Wendy Brown argues that heterosexuals disavow
homosexual behavior to assert
the superiority of their group, and the legal historian William
Eskridge points out that
decriminalization of sodomy "was only possible in the states
where the issue had not been
homosexualized." In anticipation of accusations of sexual
criminality, the lesbian feminist

28. activist and attorney Byrna Aronson testified at the city council
hearings that some homo-
sexuals remained celibate and deserved legal protection; she
was not entirely convincing,
however, since others admitted to being practicing homosexuals
and nonetheless asked
for protection from discrimination. Further, the city council
president George Schwartz
grilled a witness from the state attorney general's office on why
the city council should
pass a law that condoned criminal sexual behavior, and here the
attorney argued it was
impossible to know in advance if a couple applying for a lease
to an apartment would
practice deviate and illegal sexual acts."
The Philadelphia debate appeared to be headed toward a
showdown over morality. Reli-
gious opponents had turned out in large numbers in part because
of advertisements for the
''' "Testimony of Harry Langhorne before the Philadelphia City
Council Committee on Law and Govern-
ment," Dec. 18,1974, pcc Hearings on 1275, Records of the
Office of the City Clerk; "Testimony of Mark Segal
before the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Law and
Government," ibid., 96; "Testimony of Harry Lang-
horne before the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Law
and Government," ibid., p. 14; "Testimony of the
City Council Chairman," ibid,, 100-101 ; "Testimony of James
A. Kennedy and Joseph Coleman before the Philadel-
phia City Council Committee on Law and Government," Jan. 24,
1975, ibid., 257-58.
'" On sodomy in Pennsylvania, see 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. 4501
(West 1963); 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. 3124 (West

29. 1983); and 18 Pa. Cons. Stat. Ann. 3123 (West 2000). Wendy
Brown, "SuflFering the Paradoxes of Rights," in Left
LegalismJLefi Critique, ed. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley
(Durham, N.C., 2002), 429; William Eskridge, Dishonorable
Passions: Sodomy Laws in America, 1861-2003 (New York,
2008), 197; "Testimony of Byrna Aronson before the Philadel-
phia City Council Committee on Law and Government," KC
Hearing on 1275, pp. 42—44; "Testimony of Barry Kohn
before the Philadelphia City Council Committee on Law and
Government," Jan. 24, 1975, ibid, 300-301.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 59
event in congregations and seminaries. One clergyman
presented the council with a peti-
tion containing five-thousand signatures in opposition to the
bill. The opponents argued
that legally protecting gays and lesbians with antidiscrimination
codes was tantamount to
the endorsement of a behavior that they believed to be sinfial;
that the bill compromised
their conscience; and that the Bible governed sexual behavior
and immorality. Neverthe-
less, a systematic reading of the hearing testimony from start to
finish suggests that, on the
whole, a purely religious rationale never persuaded the city
council. Indeed, many of the
witnesses who represented a particular branch of faith or an
individual church—from the
Episcopalians to the Society of Friends to gay Catholics—
testified in support of the mea-
sure. Reflecting leftward shifts in American theology since the
1960s, gays and lesbians had

30. formed churches and religious groups, and by the 1970s
increasing numbers of liberal
churches and denominations began to welcome sexual
minorities. Moreover, the Philadel-
phia city council understood itself as a governmental institution
and never asked questions
of a theological nature. On several occasions the council
members became somewhat
impatient, asked for brevity, and refrained from extended
questioning when opponents of
the bill stood to read long passages from the Bible. At one
point, the chairman chastised a
witness: "I hate to say this, but you have been repetitious."
When a black female recited
scripture. Councilman Coleman attempted to lead her toward a
more secular stance by
asking, "then you don't think this is a civil rights issue there; is
that how I understand you?"
Her answer nonetheless resisted the steering: "I just feel like it's
wrong, it's against god.""^
Even the most powerful religious witnesses, such as Fr. Charles
McGroarty who repre-
sented the archdiocese of Pennsylvania, stressed not only
Catholic teachings on the repro-
ductive purpose of sexuality and the role of family in Western
civilization but also a more
stringent definition of a minority that excluded homosexuals.
When he began a discourse
on the subject of family values, the chairman's questions led
him to speak of race and
"discrimination that took place because people were different,
whether in looks, back-
ground, et cetera." Then McGroarty pointed out that "to be an
Irishman or an Italian is
not necessarily a threat to society itself," as presumably

31. homosexuality was. When Marc
Segal stepped up to testify, the rather hostile city council
member Isadore Bellis, himself
of Italian background, reiterated McGroarty's objection: "I'm
being discriminated against
because I'm black, because I'm Jewish, because I'm Italian, what
have you, it would seem
to me that the first thing [is to discover] whether or not in fact
that person—well, it's easy
to tell a black, but it's not easy to tell a Jew or an Italian or an
Irishman." Neither gay and
lesbian enumeration nor claims to real visibility seerned to
answer the arguments that
sexual orientation was not like race as a categorj' of
discrimination.'''
"̂ Monty D. Ledford to Kevin Mumford, e-mail, Dec. 1, 2007
(in Mumford's possession). On the leftward shift
in theology, see Mark Oppenheimer, "The Inherent Worth and
Dignity: Gay Unitarians and the Birth of Sexual
Iblerance in Liberal KeVipon" Journal of the History of
Sexuality, 1 Quly 1996), 73-80; Melissa M. Wilcox, "Of
Markets and Missions: The Early History of the Universal
Fellowship of the Metropolitan Community Churches,"
Religion and American Culture, 11 (Winter 2001), 83-108;
Mary Jo Weaver, "Resisting Traditional Catholic Sexual
Teaching: Pro-Choice Advocacy and Homosexual Support
Groups," in What's Left: Liberal American Catholics, ed.
Mary Jo Weaver (Bloomington, 1999), 88-108; Andrew
Sullivan, "Alone Again, Naturally: The Catholic Church
and the Homosexual," in Querying Religion: A Critical
Anthology, ed. Gary David Comstock and Susan E. Henking
(New York, 1997), 238-50; and Elliott Wright, "The Church and
Gay Liberation," Christian Century, 89 (March
1971), 283. "Testimony of the City Council Chairman," 347;
Testimony of Miss Lillian Fields before the Philadel-

32. phia City Council Committee on Law and Government," Kc
Hearings on 1275, p. 273.
" "Testimony of Father Charles McGroarty," KC Hearinp on
1275, pp. 82-84, 88-89; "Testimony of Joel Warren,"
ibid., 352; "Testimony of Joan DeForrest," ibid, 125-27;
"Statement of Chairman [Isadore] Bellis," ibid., 99^100.
60 The Journal of American History June 2011
The Law and Government Committee of the Philadelphia City
Council meets on Bill 1275, photographed for the Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin in December 1974. Courtesy Urban Archive,
Temple
University Library.
Even as hoth experts and victims stood to tell stories of the
termination of employ-
ment, denial of rental housing, and loss of child custody due to
their sexual orientation,
the testimony of opponents raised more questions ahout the
significance of their minority
status and the discrimination they faced. By the end of the first
day of the hearings, the
door that had heen pried open hy a string of witnesses speaking
of prejudice was forcihly
closed hy the testimony of a number of hlack religious
witnesses who authoritatively
rejected the comparison of racism and homophobia. First among
them was the Reverend
Melvin Floyd, the founder of Neighborhood Crusades, Inc.
Floyd had served as a Phila-
delphia police officer for almost fourteen years, and after
entering the Baptist ministry in

33. 1966 and resigning from the force in 1972, he dedicated himself
to social uplift through
his church in Germantown. His organization attacked the gang
problem hy attempting
to reform hlack manhood, downplaying materialism and
consumerism, protesting against
hlaxploitation films, and railing against the sexual revolution.
These were the sources of
the antigay viewpoint that he brought to the city council
hearings and that caused him to
conclude: "The one thing ahout everything else that can destroy
that kind of manhood is
to come up with a generation or generations of homosexual
black males." Insinuating that
homosexuality was an essentially white phenomenon, Floyd
heckoned the council to
acknowledge the race of his allies: "As you look to the side
here, 95 percent ofthe persons
there are black," yet "100 percent [ofthe people] of any
organizations of gay rights are
white." If gay activists implied that they were heirs to the civil
rights movement, Floyd
called them out and asked, "Why did they tack it onto the civil
rights hill? Because they
wanted to make it difficult for you to say no, we won't pass
it.""*
'* Testimony of Reverend [Melvin] Floyd," I'cx: Hearings on
1275, pp. 213-14; Joseph E. Broadus, "Family
Values vs. Homosexual Rights: Tradition Collides with an Elite
Social Tide," in Black and Right: The Bold New Voice
of Black Conservatives in America, ed. Stan Faryna, Brade
Stetson, and Joseph G. Conti (Westport, 1997), 111—19;
"A Gang Symposium," Philadelphia Tribune, Feb. 12, 1974;
"Juvenile Aide Policeman Now a Baptist Minister,"
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Oct. 10, 1966, p. 1; "Honored

34. Policeman to Become Full Time 'Missionary of
Streets,'" Philadelphia Inquirer, July 16, 1972, p. 18; "Blacks to
Receive Philadelphia Award," Philadelphia Tribune,
Feb. 24, 1976; Paul E. Long, "Gang Killings Down: Three
Reasons," Feb. 8, 1977, typescript, (in Mumford's pos-
session); "Testimony of Reverend Floyd," KC Hearings on
1275, pp. 210-14, esp. 214.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 61
The Reverend Samuel Hart, another major black religious leader
who broadcast weekly
sermons on 120 radio stations, similarly stepped up to list the
reasons why he opposed
Bill 1275: homosexuality went against the "structural
foundations of our society called
the home" and betrayed what he termed the American way of
life. Like Floyd, Hart also
drew on racial authenticity to argue that "we hear much about
the violation of the civil
rights. It goes without saying I'm black, and therefore I know
what discrimination is, and
I'm not against civil rights." Although one local branch of the
National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a black labor
organization sent letters in
support, no members from either organization turned out to
testify. Almost by default,
the religious conservatives became the recognized black voice
of the race by articulating a
unified view of the issues and categorically disavowing other
views and groups.'''

35. Neither Floyd nor Hart appeared out of thin air, but rather they
reflected the historic
influence of the African American clergy in Philadelphia
society and politics. Routinely
identified as the leadership throughout the civil rights era, black
clergymen appeared in
and wrote for black newspapers and were summoned as
community representatives in
meetings with city officials, including the mayor. The
expanding leadership included the
Reverend William Banks, who did not testify at the hearings but
who had gained atten-
tion from the Philadelphia Tribune in 1973 for significantly
increasing the size of his
North Philadelphia congregation. He also wrote a weekly
column for the paper in which
he railed against the sexual revolution of pornography, birth
control, and legalized abor-
tion. He warned of "increased homosexuality and growing
divorce rate," and in another
column he provocatively asked: "What is gay?'" and "Is 'gay'
Good?" He offered the
answer, "No," gay was not good, and called for society to
"abandon attempts to legalize
degradation." He argued that legal protection could never
change God's prohibition of
homosexuality.'"
Such commentary reflected the dimensions of black opinion
about sexuality beyond the
institution of the black church. A 1977 Gallup opinion poll on
the hiring of homosexuals
showed slightly more tolerance for homosexuals among
nonwhite than white respondents,
including more acceptance of their employment in public
schools, but also reported that

36. whites were more likely to agree that homosexuals were capable
of being good Christians
or Jews (54 percent of whites compared to 48 percent of
nonwhite respondents agreed).
The survey reflected a significant distinction between objecting
to discrimination, which
African Americans may have found more troubling, and
affirming sexual identity in other
arenas of recognition. Both white and nonwhite respondents
were within several percent-
age points of each other on many questions, and yet historically
speaking it may be the case
that African American opinion reflected distinct perceptual
contexts and experiences.
Beginning with the black migration to the urban North during
the early twentieth century.
''' "Testimony of Samuel Hart," « r e / / œ r / » ^ on 1275, p.
147; James Jones to Harry Langhorne, May 8, 1974,
Philadelphia City Council folder, box 8, Papers of the
Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force; Alphonso Deal to
Councilman William Boyle, June 10, 1974, ibid.;
"Endorsements for Gay Civil Rights," n.d., memo, ibid.
C-heryl J. Sanders, "Sexual Orientation and Human Rights
Discourse in the African American Churches," in
Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious
Discourse, ed. Saul M. Oylan and Martha C. Nussbaum
(New York, 1998), 178-84; Horace L. Griffin, Their Own
Receive Them Not: Aftican American Lesbians and Gays in
Black Churches [Clevthná, 2006), 142-65; "Testimony of Doris
Neal," pcc Hearings on 1275, pp. 167-68; "Testi-
mony of Lillian Fields," ibid., 271 ; "Rev. Banks Puts New Life
in Union Baptist Church," Philadelphia Tribune, Feb.
10, 1973; Rev. Wm. L Banks, "Will Marriage Ever Become
Obsolete?," ibid, Feb. 13, 1973; Rev. W. L. Banks,

37. "Flee Fornication," ibid., April 14, 1973; "Rev. W. L. Banks
Writes, Is Gay Good," ibid.. May 29, 1973; "Rev. W.
L. Banks Writes, Wrong Rights," ibid., July 13, 1976; "Rizzo
Meets with Black Ministers," ibid., Sept. 29. 1978.
62 The Journal of American History June 2011
hlack social scientists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and E. Franklin
Frazier had penned a kind
of defense ofthe morality of black urhanites in response to
charges that they exhibited vice
and disregarded matrimony before pregnancy, revealing a
particular concern with what
historians have termed the politics of respectability. In 1965 the
leaking of the Moynihan
Report caused a steep increase both in the discourse about black
immorality and the schol-
arly defense against it. Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel
Patrick Moynihan aroused great
controversy with his conclusion that single female-headed black
families perpetually
reproduced poverty and underachievement. He borrowed the
unfortunate phrase "tangle
of pathology" from his friend, the social scientist Kenneth
Clark, to describe a black matri-
archal culture that overwhelmed the black male, and he
proposed masculine labor and an
"utterly masculine world" to combat the pathology. But popular
commentators easily con-
nected the purported deviance of the black family to the
incidence of homosexuality, dis-
persing homophobia into public debates on race. Writing in a
1966 issue of Ebony
magazine, a psychiatrist warned ofthe problems faced by "both

38. girls and boys brought up
in the matriarchal family climate," specifically how "the son
will abandon any attempt to
free himself from the tyrannical rule ofthe mother . . . and
resolve his need to be loved by
becoming a homosexual." By the 1970s the black sociologist
Robert Staples and the black
psychiatrist Alvin F. Poussaint both staunchly defended the
black family structure from the
lingering cloud of the Moynihan Report by distancing it from
the problem of homosexu-
ality. Staples linked homosexuality to diminished masculinity
and impotence, and Pous-
saint reported a "significant incidence of homosexuality,
impotence, and premature
ejaculation," but neither blamed the matriarchal family. As a
medical researcher with an
extensive library and collection of clippings, Poussaint noted
the paucity of writings on
black homosexuality. If he knew of the ongoing efforts to
remove homosexuality from the
classification of psychiatric illnesses, he appeared
unsympathetic. In the process of defend-
ing the morality of African Americans, a number of experts had,
with the disavowal of
homosexuality, answered the innuendo that the matriarchal
family effeminized the son.^'
In Philadelphia, the homosexual image in the black mind also
reflected contemporane-
ous social troubles—sex scandals, crime and prison, and
juvenile delinquency. In a major
Philadelphia scandal, the staff at a local juvenile detention
facility, the Youth Study Cen-
ter, faced charges of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse and
corrupting the morals of a

39. minor. As the story broke, two black candidates running for the
office of mayor pushed
to close the facility and characterized the alleged homosexual
conduct as "disgusting."
'̂ Alex M. Gallup, ed.. The Gallup Poll Cumulative Index, Public
Opinion, 1972-1977 (2 vols., Wilmington,
1978), II, 1137-45, esp. 1145; "The Epidemic ofTeenage
Pregnancy," New York Times, June 18, 1978, p. E6; "Sex
and the Modern Teenager," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Sept.
21, 1978, p. 24; "Sex among Teens: More Girls
Have It. but Not as Often," Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 1977,
p. 5A; "wocN Tentative Statement of Purpose,"
n.d., box 5, Women Organized against Rape Papers (Paley
Library); W. E. B. Du Bois, ed.. The Negro American
Family (Atlanta, 1908); E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family
in Chicago (Chicago, 1932); Allison Davis and
John Dollard, Children of Bondage: The Personality
Devebprnent of Negro Youth in the Urban South (Washington,
1940); Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey, The Moynihan
Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge,
Mass., 1967), 88; Kermit Mehlinger, "The Sexual Revolution,"
Ebony, 21 (Aug. 1966), 57-58; "Pettigrew,"
memo, Dec. 28, 1964, file 8, box 166, Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C.); Notes by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, n.d., file
9, ibid. Robert Staples, "The Myth of Black
Matriarchy," Black Scholar, 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1970), 8-9, 11-12;
Robert Staples, "The Myth ofthe Impotent Black
Male," ibid., 2 (June 1971), 2-6; Alvin E Poussaint, "Blacks and
the Sexual Revolution," Ebony, 26 (Oct. 1971),
112-13; Alvin E Poussaint, "Sex and the Black Male," ibid., 27
(Aug. 1972), 120; Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt
and Pity: Social Policy and the Image ofthe Damaged Black
Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill, 1997), 150-56;
Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of

40. Color Critique (Minneapolis, 2004), 124-25.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 63
In a bizarre twist, one of the aides accused of molesting the
youth was shot and killed by
two unidentified assailants in what family members believed to
be a revenge murder. The
controversy spilled into the hearings on Bill 1275 when city
council president Schwartz
argued that passage of a sexual orientation law would require
the city to implement
psychiatric examinations "in connection with employees at the
Youth Study Center,"
implicating rights claims with the sex scandal and pedophilia.
The black press also ran
sensational stories of prison sex and rape that stimulated even
more black anxiety. Prison
reform had become a major issue in African American politics,
particularly after the 1971
riots at the Attica Correctional Facility in New York and at the
Holmesburg Prison in
Pennsylvania. A study of the riots at Holmesburg (reportedly
perpetrated primarily by
black prisoners) cited the facility's failure to implement a 1968
report that recommended
more housing to remove sexual assaulters from the general
population as well as immedi-
ate, comprehensive physical examination of victims. The report
concluded that the inci-
dence of prison rape signaled a larger general failure of the
guards to assure the safety of
the entire prison community. So troubling was prison

41. homosexuality that reformers
sought to propose more furloughs, probation, and prerelease
programs in the name of
curtailing its incidence, and studies also recommended the strict
segregation of two
groups—psychopaths and homosexuals—from the general prison
population. At one
point during the hearings, a former Holmesburg inmate
testifying against the bill
recounted that "one night a man came to me wanting to take my
manhood from me. I
got on my knees and I asked God to protect me." Testifying to
his faith, he recalled
"standing up on his feet and he had to sit back down, because
greater is the spirit of God
than any man." This supposedly proved that the council should
reject the bill. In response,
the chairman spoke of̂ the reasonableness of the sexually
threatened man and declared
that "many of you all back there . . . are against it. And it's up
to you all."^^
In the face of testimony from these and other African American
opponents, not only did
the black co-sponsor of the bill, Charles Durham, speak only
three times, and even then only
on tangential issues, but Joseph Coleman appeared to drift from
mild support in the name
of civil rights toward opposition. Late in the hearings, Coleman
created a justification for
opposing the bill from the premises of the old argument often
associated with the fear that
removing legal barriers to integration led to indiscriminate
mixing and even endangered
young women. Confiasing the issue of homosexuality with
cross-dressing, he projected a

42. scenario in which a "young lady" in a dressing room would be
outraged by a "male hiding
there masquerading." His assertion that the law would increase
the incidence of unwitting
" "vD, Homosexuality among Problems at Youth Study Center,"
Philadelphia Tribune, Oct. 30, 1973; "Homo-
sexual Issues Spreads at Ysc as Six More Aides Are Arrested,"
ibid, Feb. 8, 1975; "YS.C. Aide in Homosexual Case
Shot by 2 Gunmen," ibid., Feb. 25, 1975; "President Schwartz,"
I'cc Hearings on 1275, p. 315; "Sexual Parties
Staged at Hall-Mercer Center," Philadelphia Tribune, March 8,
1975; "Racism Linked to Prison Brawl," New York
Times, July 7, 1970, p. 32; "Gov. Shafer Asks Prison Take-
Over," ibid., July 12, 1970, p. 33; "Task Force Fights Sex
Violence in Pa. Prisons," Philadelphia Tribune, March 26, 1977;
"PA. Prisons Head Blamed for Homosexual
Assaults," ibid., Sept. 11, 1976; "Homosexual Attacks Are
Serious Prison Problem," ibid., June 19, 1973; "Imple-
mentation of the 1968 Recommendations," folder 24, box 24,
Prisoner's Rights Council Papers (Paley Library);
"Homosexuality Not Part of Rehab Program, State Prison Head
Claims," Philadelphia Tribune, Aug. 12, 1976;
"Women Inmates Say Brutal Gang Rapes Common at Muncy,"
ibid, Aug. 14, 1976; "Psychopaths, Homosexuals
Are Causing Continuous Problems in Penna. Prispns," ibid,
March 6, 1972; "Testimony of Wardell Lighty," KC
Hearing on 1275, pp. 68-70; Heather Ann Thompson, "Why
Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis,
Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History"
Journal of American History, 97 (Dec. 2010), 703-58;
Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven
History of Modem American Sexuality (Chicho, 2008).

43. 64 The Journal of American History June 2011
Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald, a black gay activist who
testified
before the Philadelphia city council in 1974, poses in a college
class-
room for a photo that was published in a history of his Catholic
re-
ligious order, the Society of the Divine Savior. Courtesy
Society of the
Divine Savior.
males exposed to gay men was never explained. If the sexual
orientation law passed, he
wondered, how could heterosexuals contain the infiltration of
homosexuals into everyday
life? In his words, if "we pass this law, are we not unleashing
upon not only women but
men persons who have other sexual desires towards the
individuals in their midst. Like a
drop of black blood that threatened to mongrelize the nation,
Coleman worried about
containing the threat: we "are moving away from bathrooms and
these kind of things to
apartments."^'
Only the testimony of Brother Grant-Michael Fitzgerald
interrupted the apparent
unity of the black witnesses. Born and raised in North
Philadelphia, Fitzgerald had joined
a Catholic religious order, the Society of the Divine Savior
(SDS), in 1968 after he was fresh
out of high school. At the time that he made his perpetual vows
to poverty, chastity, and
faith at the SDS headquarters in Milwaukee, he had come out as
gay and joined the gay

44. liberation movement. He participated in the Milwaukee branch
of the Council on Reli-
gion and Homosexuality, the University of Wisconsin at
Milwaukee's Gay People's Union,
and appeared in a televised forum on homosexuality. When he
returned to Philadelphia
to testify for Bill 1275, he had honed an impressive arsenal of
rhetorical weapons.^'*
-̂' "Testimony of Joseph Coleman," I'cc Hearings on 1275, p.
280; "Ministers Differ on Gay Rights at Hearings
on Bili to Ban Bias," Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Jan. 28,
1975, p. 1. On Charies Durham, see George Corner,
"The Black Coalition: An Experiment in Racial Cooperation in
Philadelphia, 1968," Proceeding of the American
Philosophical Society (]ine 15, 1976), 178-86.
^^ "No Room in the Inn?," Gay People's Union News, Dec.
1972, p. 9; Mike Hoffman to Kevin Mumford,
e-mail, June 2, 2008 (in Mumford's possession); Gregory Baum,
"Catholic Homosextials," Commonweal, 101 (Feb.
1974), 479-82; John A. Coleman, "The Churches and the
Homosexual," America, Jan. 9, 1971, pp. 113-17; William
J. Spangler, letter to the editor. Gay People's Union News, Feb.
1973, p. 6; Jefferson Keith interview by Mumford,
Oct. 2007, transcript (in Mumford's possession).
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 65
In contrast to Coleman's formulation of the containment
argument. Brother Fitzgerald
retorted that he should have the personal right to "hold hands in
public," explaining that

45. "black people can do that. Interracial couples can do that
today." He invoked the civil
rights movement, recounting his participation in the Poor
People's Campaign of 1968,
wearing it as a badge of authenticity. But these demonstrations
had not fully expressed his
complete identity and political objectives, and so he
proclaimed, "I am also gay, and I
want that to be part of the record. I am a born-again Christian
who is black and is gay."
Some members in the audience also became enraged when
Brother Fitzgerald invoked his
religious righteousness. A voice called out, "We're talking about
sodomites," prompting
Fitzgerald to compare the antigay terminology to racist epithets,
arguing that it was
acceptable to use one and not the other. In conclusion,
Fitzgerald sought to demonstrate
his respectability by blessing his gay brothers and sisters in the
name of God.^'
After the hearings were adjourned without a public vote, it was
announced that Bill
1275 had died in committee. The press treated the hearings as a
titillating story of gay
witnesses and lurid questions, and readers of several papers
could not have guessed that
black religious opponents of the bill had even attended the
hearings, much less forcefully
argued against it. One article noted the opposition of firemen
and police to the measure
but made no reference to race. When articles talked of religious
opposition, it was in
terms of a "church-going woman" rather than black
evangelicals. One journalist even
reported that age divided the chambers and that the side

46. opposing gay rights "appeared
older." The community press did not draw such conclusions.
The black newspaper the
Philadelphia Tribune reported on the human relations hearings
that had convened in the
summer, characterizing Rev. Melvin Floyd's moral attacks on
gay rights as "absurd." In
that sense, the Philadelphia Tribune had an on-and-off
relationship with the gay commu-
nity: on occasion it printed advertisements for gay and lesbian
events and criticized some
homophobic statements, but it also ran more antigay articles and
columns than positive
ones. In the gay press, the Philadelphia Weekly Gayzette
pointed out that "the black fun-
damentalist denominations sought strenuously and repeatedly to
deny basic parallels
between the gay movement and the black civil rights movement
of the 50s and 60s," and
that "blacks, in particular, insisted that while racial identity
involves no choice on the part
of the individual, sexual orientation is a subject of free will."
Although gay activists later
specifically approached black city council members to co-
sponsor a new bill and in 1976
secured promises from black progressives, they remained
largely silent about the racial
fallout at the hearings on Bill 1275 and instead publicly blamed
its failure on Council-
man
" "Testimony of Grant-Michael Fitzgerald," K:C Hearing on
1275, pp. 370, 368-69, 364, 369, 379, 373, 383, 381.
"' "Clergy Flay, Defend Gays," Philadelphia Daily Neivs, Jan.
28, 1975, p. 5; "Gay Rights Bill Divides Church-

47. men," ibid., Dec. 19, 1974, p. 4; "Phila. Gays Confront Foes,"
Philadelphia Inquirer, Dec. 19, 1974, p. 2-B;
"Schwartz Grills Segal about Gay Activists," Philadelphia
Evening Bulletin, Dec. 19, 1974, p. 20; "Ministers Differ
on Gay Rights at Hearing on Bill to Ban Bias," ibid., Dec. 28,
1975, p. 1; "Rev. Melvin Floyd Says 'Homosexuality
Is Morally and Spiritually Wrong,' in Attacking Bill to Give
Rights to Gays," Philadelphia Tribune, June 8, 1974;
"Black Leaders Differ on 'Gay Rights' Bill," ibid., July 20,
1974, p. 3; "Council Hears Final Testimony; Vote
Expected in Two Weeks," Philadelphia Weekly Gayzette, Jan.
31-Feb. 7, 1975, p. 4; "Cay Rights Bill Dies—Another
in Preparation," Philadelphia Gay News, Jan. 3, 1976, p. 1;
"New Phila. Gay Rights Bill to Be Introduced," ibid.,
Aug. 1976, p. A3; Garry Wills, "Both Sides Oversimplify Cay
Rights Issue," Capital Times, June 8, 1977, file 7, box
1, United Papers (State Historical Society of Wisconsin,
Madison).
66 The Journal of American History June 2011
Although two African American men—the chairman of the
Human Relations Com-
mission Clarence Farmer and the activist Brother Grant-Michael
Fitzgerald—spoke elo-
quently for the bill, they were drowned out by the many black
voices against the measure,
many white religious authorities, and members of the laity—all
of whom turned out to
challenge the ideas that gays were a real minority group and
that prohibiting homophobia
was a legitimate extension of the civil rights movement. If gay
and lesbian activists had
wished to forget the racial dynamics of their defeat, addressing

48. diversity within their
movement and building cross-racial coalitions remained crucial
to their success.
Looking for the Intersection
By the mid-1970s, the increasing number of gay and lesbian
student organizations on
college campuses (reportedly between 200 and 250) developed
into a fresh source of
organizing for legal reform. In 1972 a student group at
Michigan State University helped
pass the nation's first local measure banning employment
discrimination in East Lansing,
while one progressive college town after another (including Ann
Arbor, Madison, and
Iowa City) passed sexual orientation ordinances throughout the
1970s. Protections for
sexual orientation were signed by mayors or passed by city
councils in several cities with
significant black populations, including Los Angeles, Detroit,
and Washington, D.C. The
struggle for passage of an ordinance in Philadelphia, with a
black population that had
increased from 33.6 percent to 37.8 percent over the decade, can
be compared to the pat-
terns in similar multiracial cities, such as New York and
Chicago, with sexual orientation
laws passed later. More than the local successes elsewhere,
however, or the growth of gay
politics on the national level (including attempts to pass an
antidiscrimination measure in
the House of Representatives and an employment measure in the
Senate), it was the new
visibility of the New Right that stimulated fresh activism in
Philadelphia.'"

49. In 1977 the celebrity turned activist Anita Bryant organized
Save Our Children to
finance the repeal of a sexual orientation ordinance in Dade
County, Florida, triggering
successful repeal campaigns in Eugene, Oregon; St. Paul,
Minnesota; and Wichita, Kan-
sas, while activists fought back one in Seattle, Washington.
Even progressive college
towns felt the aftershocks of Bryant's activities: in Madison, the
Reverend Wayne Dilla-
baugh started a repeal campaign, but a group of gays and
lesbians formed the United to
"affirm" their "civil rights," forcing Dillabaugh to call off his
campaign at a God and
^' "Homosexuals Gain Support on Campus," New York Times,
June 5, 1974, p. 1 ; Beth Bailey, Sex in the Heart-
land (Címhúá^t, Mass., 1997), 175-99; Brett Beemyn, "The
Silence Is Broken: A History of the First Lesbian,
Gay, and Bisexual College Student Gmyip^^' Journal of the
History of Sexuality, 12 (April 2003), 205-23. On the East
Lansing ordinance, see "Human Relations Commission Needs to
Come into Focus," East Lansing Towne Gourier,
April 12, 1972; "Midwest City Votes Job Equality for Gays,
East Lansing Mich. 1st in Nation," Gv4K May 1, 1972,
p. 1. On student politics and gay liberation, see Anthony Ralph
Smith, "College Town Radicals: The Case of the
Ann Arbor Human Rights Party" (Ph.D. diss.. University of
Illinois, 1980), 118-20, 91-92, 203-4, 208-10,
212-14, 227-28. Madison, Wis., Ordinance 4923 (March 11,
1975); Paul Soglin to Mumford, e-mail, Aug. 2008
(in Mumford's possession); Iowa Ciry, Iowa, Code 77-2830
(1977). On the Washington, D . C , ordinance, see Valk,
Radical Sisters, 147. Washington, D . C , Ordinance 75-230
(Oct. 31, 1975). On the Detroit ordinance, see Van der

50. Meide, Legislating Equality, 59-60. On the Los Angeles
ordinance, see Self, "Sex in the Ciry," 309-11. On the
antidiscrimination measure in the House of Representatives, see
"Homosexual Rights Measure Introduced by 24 in
House," New York Times, March 26, 1975, p. 6. On the Senate
bill, see Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay
Task Force, 4 (no. 2, 1976), 1, folder 4, box 16, Christian
Association Papers (University Archives and Récordes
Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia). Kenneth D.
Wald, James W. Button, and Barbara A. Rienzo, All
Politics Is Local: Analyzing Local Gay Rights Legislation
(Washington, 1997).
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 67
Decency Rally attended by approximately 150 people. Though
religious rhetoric infused
the backlash, it remained intertwined with the argument that
sexual orientation was not
like race. In her memoir, Anita Bryant recited the Bible
repeatedly but also stressed that
she taught her children never to discriminate against "anyone
because of their race or
religion." At another point, she cited editorials in black
newspapers to prove that "the
we-are-birds-of-a-feather appeal to the blacks by the
homosexuals was soundly rejected."'̂ ^
Bryant's success signaled a clear rightward political drift
throughout the 1970s, but lib-
eral institutions and radical communities also survived.
Philadelphia feminists sustained
groups such as Dyketactics, which had disrupted the

51. proceedings of the city council to
protest the failure of Bill 1275—an action for which they were
violently arrested. Another
leftist group, the Philadelphia Reproductive Rights
Organization, joined to support a new
gay rights bill. Antirape advocates engaged in dialogue with
prisoners' rights groups, and
Planned Parenthood as well as the Urban League addressed
issues of race and sexuality,
including teenage pregnancy and reproductive control.
Throughout the 1970s the number
of gay and lesbian bars and dance clubs began to peak,
including more than a dozen black
gay bars. Finally, just as so many of the initiatives for
antidiscrimination ordinances suc-
ceeded in college towns, the gay rights movement in
Philadelphia reignited at the University
of Pennsylvania. In 1975 a number of students and staff had
formed Gays at Penn and a gay
peer counseling service, both of which received funding from
the Christian Association, a
nondenominational philanthropic organization on campus. An
"Answer Anita" meeting
was advertised at the Christian Association and the
organization's annual report observed
that Gays at Penn had entered "into a new phase, emphasizing
activism and visibility."^''
In turn, conservatives on campus fought back with mockery and
physical confronta-
tion that opened the floodgates of reform. In the spring semester
of 1978, a fraternity
sponsored an initiation rite in which pledges posed as pollsters
and asked passersby if they
preferred homosexuality, while some members reportedly yelled
gay slogans and epithets

52. in close proximity to the Christian Association building. When
the association staff mem-
ber David Fair challenged their behavior, the fraternity
members bedame belligerent and
allegedly took the notes he intended to use for documentation of
their activities. When he
-" On Anita Bryant's activities, see Barry D. Adam, The Rise of
a Gay and Lesbian Movement (New York, 1995),
111; "Anita Goes North," Gay Community News, Jan. 14, 1978,
p. 2; and "Bryant Invited to Testify before Provi-
dence City Council," ibid., March 25, 1978, p. 3."Voters in St.
Paul Reject Gay Rights," Capital Times, April 26,
1978, p. 4; "Gay Rights Repealed?,*' Madison Press
Connection, May 9, 1978, clippings folder, box 1, United
Papers;
James W. Button, Barbara A. Rienzo, and Kenneth D. Wald,
Private Lives, Public Conflicts: Battles over Gay Rights
in American Communities (Washington, 1997), 69; Gary Atkins,
Gay Seattle: Stories of Exile and Belonging (Seattle,
2003), 238—57. On the repeal drive and response in Madison,
see "Local Coalition Is Backing Homosexuals' Civil
Rights," Wisconsin State Journal, May 12,1978, clippings
folder, box 1, United Papers; "Groups Join to Save Equal
Rights Ordinance," Capital Times, May 11, 1978; "Dillabaugh
Left a Mark on Ohio Town," ibid.. May 22, 1978,
p. 1; and "Preacher Halts Decency Drive," Madison Press
Connection, June 27, 1978, p. 1. Anita Bryant, The Anita
Bryant Story: The Survival of the Our Nation's Families and the
Threat of Militant Homosexuality (Old Tappan, 1977),
16,35.
-' Lassiter, "Inventing Family Values," 13-28. On Dyketactics,
see "Dyketactics! Files CD Suit," Philadelphia Gay
News, Jan. 3, 1976; "Students Protest Bad Treatment 2 Seniors
Received at Prom," Philadelphia Tribune, May 25,

53. 1976; "Testimony for Bill #1358 Submitted by Philadelphia
Reproductive Rights Organization," n.d., folder 27,
box 4, Papers of the Philadelphia Reproductive Rights
Organization (Urban Archives, Paley Library); Marc
Killinger, "Reproductive Rights and Lesbian/Gay Liberation:
Some Suggestions for a Strategic Unity," Aug. 28,
1980, folder 17, ibid.; Bob Skiba, "Some Philadelphia Bars
Listed as Predominantly Black, 1962-1986" (in Mum-
ford's possession); "Needs Memo, " folder 107, box 15,
Christian Association Papers; Christian Association Gay Task
Force to the Board of Directors, memo, folder 97, ibid.;
"Answer Anita!," flyer, folder 98, ibid.; Maurine Doggett to
Board of Directors, April 27, 1978, folder 97, ibid.; Christian
Association Gay Task Force to the Board of Directors,
n.d., ibid.; Jeremy Nicholson to StafFof the Christian
Association, March 8, 1978, folder 107, ibid.
68 The Journal of American History June 2011
challenged the fraternity's right to "abuse homosexuals," the
members replied that "Anita
Bryant won that right for us." The incident concluded with Fair
retrieving his notes, alleg-
edly to the "calls of 'Faggot,' 'cocksucker,' 'queer bastard.'" In
response, students in Gays
at Penn filed a complaint with the University Judicial Inquiry
Committee. By the opening
of the next academic year in 1978, with seed money from the
Christian Association, stu-
dents and staff founded the Philadelphia Gay Task Force, and
its first executive director,
the Reverend James H. Littrell, announced a rights campaign
and went on to press the
University of Pennsylvania to add sexual orientation to their

54. antidiscrimination code. He
reported that in his negotiations with the administration the
"Task Force learned a great
deal about organizing for civil rights." By 1980 a new executive
director, the experienced
lesbian feminist activist Rita Addessa, announced a major
rights-bill drive across the city
to be spearheaded by the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task
Force (PLGTF).^"
The founding of the PLGTF coincided with a development in
federal law enforcement
that produced an intriguing opportunity for rights activists. By
the 1970s, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation had reorganized its field offices to
implement Abscam, an under-
cover sting operation that targeted corrupt public officials, and
in 1980 the operation
won the conviction of the Philadelphia councilman George
Schwartz, who then resigned
his seat on the city council. At the same time, gay and lesbian
visibility in the elections
was the "highest ever," including a billboard in the city center
that called on gay voters to
"vote like your life depended on it." Another round of elections
brought supporters of the
ordinance, including David Cohen (whose daughter Sherrie
participated in the lesbian
activist group Dyketactics), the end of Mayor Frank Rizzo's
long reign, and the election
of a new mayor who supported gay rights."
After a decade of polarized yet inconclusive political shifts that
featured the defeat of
Bill 1275 in 1975, the rise of Anita Bryant in 1977, and the
fraternity incident at Penn

55. in 1978 but also the stunning mobilization of Gays at Penn; the
victory of the gay can-
didate for San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk; and the
founding of the PLGFT; by
the beginning of 1980, Rita Addessa prioritized racial diversity
as a strategy for organiz-
ing and increasing community visibility. In an interview, she
perceptively observed that
gays and lesbians had "absorbed the same ideas of racism and
sexism as has the larger
culture" and so suggested a politics that concerned itself with
the reconciliation of the
* Rev. Ralph Moore to Phi Kappa Sigma Fraternity, April 10,
1978, folder 107, box 15, Christian Association
Papers; "A Complaint against Phi Kappa Fraternity," April 12,
1978, ibid.; Christian Association Gay Task Force to
the Board of Directors, folder 97, ibid.; Scott Wilds to Martin
Stamm, April 12, 1978, folder 107, ibid.; "Priest
Hired to Launch Gay Rights Campaign," press release, Sept. 20,
1978, folder 3, box 16, ibid.; James H. Littrell,
"Fundraising and the 'Gay Rights' Movement," draft, folder 24,
ibid.; Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay
Task Eorce, 1 (no. 1, 1978), folder 3, ibid.; James H. Littrell,
"A Report to the Christian Association Board of Direc-
tors," April 16, 1979, ibid.; "TF Calls for Major Rights Bill in
1980," Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay
Task Force, 2 (no. 3, 1979), ibid.; Larry Gross interview by
Kevin Mumford, July 18, 2008, audiotape (in Mumford's
possession); "Congress Gets Rights Bills: Laxalt Seeks Anti-
Gay Law," Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay
Task Force, 2 (no. 4, 1979), folder 4, box 16, Christian
Association Papers.
" James Q. Wilson, "The Changing FBI: The Road to Abscam,"
National Affairs, 59 (Spring 1980), 3-14;

56. "Abscam Tapes Implicate Philadelphia Councilman," New York
Times, Sept. 13, 1980, p. 8; "Abscam Trial Shows He
Was Given 10,000 Entrapment," ibid., Sept. 14, 1980, p. 26;
"U.S. Attorney Planning to Appeal Philadelphia
Abscam Ruling," ibid., Nov. 28, 1980, p. B9; "The Future of
Prosecutions over Abscam," ibid., Nov. 29, 1980, p.
39; Button, Rienzo, and Wald, Private Lives, Public Conflicts,
68-69; Marc Segai to Mumford, e-mail, July 16, 2008
(in Mumford's possession); "Council Victories Brighten Rights
Bill Prospects," Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian
and Gay Task Force, 2 (no. 2, 1979), folder 7, box 16, Christian
Association Papers.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 69
Rita Addessa, the executive director of the Philadelphia Lesbian
and
Gay Task Force, organized the successful campaign to pass a
sexual
orientation amendment in 1982. Courtesy Rita Addessa.
struggle for rights and a recognition of the plurality of voices
engaged in that struggle.
In another sense, however, she deliberately sought invisibility.
In contrast to early gay
liberationists, who treated lobbying as a publicity stunt,
Addessa adopted a "secret" strat-
egy of internal memos, coordinated outreach, and networking.
One of the organizing
memos included the instructions, "prior to bill's passage out of
committee, no press or
publicity," including the gay press, because it "will not respect
organizers' wishes for a

57. low-key campaign." To Addessa such a strategy seemed
schizophrenic: advocating for gay
liberation, a movement premised on coming out in public, while
lobbying secretly
behind the scenes. In a long interview, she discussed the costs
of such a strategy and
wondered if the result had justified the means, or if instead she
had sacrificed an oppor-
tunity to educate the public."
But the chances for the successful passage of Bill 1358 were
enhanced not only by turn-
over in the city council and strategies of diversity but also by
two major departures in the
city's race relations: increasing black municipal power and the
development of black gay
identity politics. By the 1970s, the PLGTF had joined the
Philadelphia Coalition of Black
Gays (later known as Philadelphia Black Gays or PBG) in an
application for funding to the
Christian Association and ended up sharing meeting rooms in
the American Friends Service
Committee on Cherry Street, PBG regularly held rap or
discussion groups that Brother
Grant-Michael Fitzgerald sometimes attended. Another bridge
figure, Tony Henry, had
" "Addessa Is New Director," Bulletin of the Philadelphia
Lesbian and Gay Task Force, 2 (no. 3, 1979), folder 3,
box 16, Christian Association Papers; Rita Addessa to Dear
Friends, July 15, 1982, 1358 Organize and Strategy
folder, box 21, series 3, Papers of the Philadelphia Lesbian and
Gay Task Force; "Organized Target Groups—
Objectives," 1982, ibid.; Victoria A. Brownworth, "Passionate,
but Pragmatic;" Philadelphia Gay News, Jan. 22-Feb.
4, 1982, p. 17; Michael Tuck, "Philadelphia's Fair Practice Act;

58. It Is Time to Include Gays," memo, Dec. 11, 1981,
1358 Organize and Strategy folder, box 21, series 3, Papers of
the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force;
"Draft—Not for Publication," Oct. 1982, ibid.
70 The Journal of American History June 2011
helped found both the task force and PBG. In a tribute to Henry
it was reported that he
"began his public life as a civil rights worker during the
turbulent 1960s" in his hometown
of Houston, Texas, and that this "inspired him to ensure the
rights and dignity" of the gay
community. A coauthor ofthat piece, James Roberts, recalled
the whitening of the move-
ment from the Gay Liberation Front at Temple University in the
early 1970s to the Gay
Activists Alliance around the time of the push for Bill 1275 to a
period when his attempt
to bring up the subject of racism at a GAA meeting was deemed
irrelevant while a discus-
sion of various sexual acts was not. After withdrawing from
activism for several years, in
1979 he joined PBG in the spirit of bringing civil rights to the
gay community.'^
By the time of the hearings on Bill 1358 in 1982, the PLGTF
had carefijUy ordered the
lineup of witnesses to feature African American supporters.
They opened with Douglas Bow-
man, a cofounder of PBG, followed by the city manager Goode,
and the Episcopal priest Paul
Washington. Bowman testified to oppression's "double impact
on third world gay men and a

59. triple impact on third world lesbian women." Next, Wilson
Goode, who eventually became
the city's first black mayor, recalled his own experiences with
racism in the Jim Crow South,
and he testified that he supported the bill in the name both of
civil rights and human rights.
Reverend Washington likened the issue of gay rights to personal
preference—"some prefer
blondes, some prefer black"—and then added the support of his
diocese. If a Jesuit testified
that homosexuals were no different than heterosexuals, the
American Friends Service Com-
mittee could call for the protection of an "unpopular" minority.
When a supporter from the
Catholic diocese cited a memo in which the National Federation
of Priests Council rejected
discrimination, he referred to a document that Brother Grant-
Michael Fitzgerald had written
and lobbied for in 1974. By 1982 the religious tide had turned
toward tolerance, as the civil
rights struggle and gay and lesbian rights movements—at least
rhetorically—had overlapped.
While one black supporter compared traveling in the Jim Crow
South and being refused
service in Maryland to homophobia, another witness
representing the American Civil Lib-
erties Union (ACLU) declared, "I Have a Dream."'''
A final look at Councilman Joseph Coleman's political
evolution suggests how the
legislation gained support and passed easily. In 1982 Coleman
spoke as the first black
" Addessa to Rev. Ralph Moore, Nov. 16, 1982, folder 12, box
16, Christian Association Papers; "Black Gays
Meet Weekly at AFSC," Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian

60. and Gay Task Force, 2 (no. 4, 1979), folder 7, ibid.; "Black
Gays Plan Forum on Addiction," ibid.; "Black Gays in Philly
Getting Together," Bulletin of the Philadelphia Lesbian
and Gay Task Force, 2 (no. 2, 1979), folder 5, box 16, ibid.;
"Tony Henry Leaves Philadelphia," Bulletin of the Phil-
adelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force, 2 (no. 4, 1979), folder 7,
ibid.; Addessa to Dear Friends, July 15, 1982,
Selected Excerpts from 1358 folder, box 21, series 3, Papers of
the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force; Rita
Addessa, "Organizing Strategies and Methods—Not for
Publication," memo, 1982, Strategies and Tactics folder,
ibid.; Rita Addessa interview by Kevin Mumford, audiotape,
Dec. 10, 2007 (in Mumford's possession); James Rob-
erts interview by Mumford, audiotape, Sept. 2007, July 2008,
ibid, (in Mumtord's possession); Minutes of Phila-
delphia Black Gays, Nov. 1, 1979, Philadelphia Black Gays
folder. Ephemera Collection; Minutes of Philadelphia
Black Gays, Jan. 8, 1981, ibid
'" "Council Bill 1358," memo, July 27, 1982, Testimony 1358
folder, box 21, Papers of the Philadelphia Les-
bian and Gay Task Force; "Testimony of Wilson Goode, " PCC
Hearings on 1358, Records of the Office of the City
Clerk, 37; "Testimony of Douglas Bowman," ibid., 38—39;
Quentin Poulson to Councilman Joseph Coleman, July
20, 1982, Testimony 1358 folder, box 21, series 3, Papers of the
Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force; "Testi-
mony of Wilson Goode," 40; Wilson Goode interview by
Mumford, audiotape, Dec. 19, 2007 (in Mumford's
possession); "Testimony of Paul Washington," I'CC Hearings on
1358, p. 46; "Testimony of Reverend Jerome Coo-
per," ibid., 88; "Testimony of Father John Mazatello," ibid.,
104; "Testimony of Margaret Bacon," ibid., 109;
"Testimony of Father Vincent Inghilterra," ibid., 80; Beth
Showell, "Bill 1358," Testimony 1358 folder, box 21,
series 3, Papers of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task

61. Force; "Testimony of Beth Showell," PCC Hearings on
1358, pp. 131-52; Hilda Silverman, "Statement in Support of
Bill 1358," Testimony 1358 folder, box 21, series 3,
Papers of the Philadelphia Lesbian and Gay Task Force.
Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia,
1969-1982 71
president of the city council rather than as a junior legislator
trying to handle a racially
charged issue. More significantly, in this round of discussion
not only white but also black
activists lobbied him for support. A black gay member of PBG
wrote directly to Coleman
to refute those "who will insist that the issue of freedom of
sexual orientation is a 'white
issue,'" and to remind him that "gayness and lesbianism is alive
in the black community."
By the time of the hearings, Coleman testified that he "wanted
to come down" from his
offices and testify that everyone from the "President on down"
supported passage, and so
now the mantle of recognition had passed from the white ethnics
to African Americans to
gays and lesbians at city hall."
The rightward turn in national politics and in Washington, D.C.,
posed a threat to
recent African American political gains, and although President
Ronald Reagan often
ignored gay issues, he pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy in
racial politics that
reverberated into sexual politics. In 1982 he nominated the
Reverend Samuel Hart of

62. Philadelphia, who had testified forcefully against Bill 1275 in
1974, to serve on the
U.S. Civil Rights Commission. Despite the national push
rightward, liberal and gay
criticism of Hart rapidly materialized, including from a reporter
at the president's
news conference who suggested that Hart opposed equal rights
for women. Although
President Reagan defended his nominee, noting that he rejected
the equal eights
amendment, not women's equality. Hart's stance on
homosexuality became a flash-
point after he reportedly told a Washington, D.C., newspaper
reporter that God
made "Adam and Eve, not Ada and Eva or Adam and Steve."
Several letters to the
black newspaper in Philadelphia opposed Hart, and gay and
lesbian activists were
outraged. When opponents argued that Hart was too
inexperienced, the president
dropped the appointment. Yet an editorial in the Philadelphia
Tribune also com-
plained that in the flare of the controversy, civil rights and gay
rights were made "to
appear identical," and this was a potentially dangerous
distraction because African
Americans were "victims of an all-out attack to turn back the
hands of time to separate
but equal facilities.""'
By the summer of 1982, however, black and white supporters
shared a progay platform
in their vocal support for Bill 1358, and although the Catholic
councilmember Joan L.
Krajewski attempted a block at the last minute, she found no
firm support. Rather the