Gay Men in the Feminist Revolution: Articles, Pamphlets & Reflections on My Gay Activist Days In San Francisco, 1969-1972

Also by Nicholas F. Benton

A Short History of History of the Falls Church News-Press’ First 25 Years, in The Falls Church News-Press Front Pages, The First Five Years, BCI Books, 2016

Extraordinary Hearts, Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s

Central Role in the Progress of Civilization, Lethe Press, 2013

Berkeley and the Fight for an Effeminist, Socially Transformative Gay Identity, in Smash the Church, Smash the State, The Early Years of Gay Liberation, City Lights Books, 2009

John Avery Benton: The life of a Civil War Veteran

Transformed by the Greatness of His Times, 1987

Sexism, Racism & White Faggots in Sodomist America, 1972

God & My Gay Soul, 1971

Theology, the Church & Homosexual LIberation, 1970

Gay Men in the

Feminist Revolution

Articles, Pamphlets & Reflections

on My Gay Activist Days

In San Francisco, 1969-1972

Nicholas F. Benton

 Published by BCI BOOKS at Smashwords.com

Copyright 2019 Nicholas F. Benson. All rights reserved.

Copyright 2019 Nicholas F. Benson. All rights reserved.

Published by BCI Books, Falls Church, VA

Book design and layout by Toby Johnson and Nick Gatz

Cover by Nick Gatz

Painting: David and Goliath by Guido Reni, AD 1420

Paperback ISBN-13: 978-164633310-3

Contents

Introduction

Part 1Contemporary Reflections on the Early Post-Stonewall Era

1. My 2008 Essay on Our Struggle in the 1969-1972 Period:

2. Steven F. Dansky’s Take On the Effeminist Cause

3. Four Things I Am Credited Wit hHelping to Accomplish in That Era

4. My Notes from the Future (2019)To Myself on the Day E.M. Forster Died (1970)

5. Selections from My ‘Gay Science’ Columns, 2011-2012

OF WHITMAN, D-DAY & THE STONEWALL INN

Stonewall & the Vietnam War

Part 2 Writings from the 1969-1972 Era

1. SEXISM, RACISM & WHITE FAGGOTS IN SODOMIST AMERIKA

2. My Berkeley Barb Articles, 1970-1972

3. GOD AND MY GAY SOUL

THEOLOGY, THE CHURCH AND HOMOSEXUAL LIBERATION

2. WAS JESUS HOMOSEXUAL?

3. A STATEMENT OF FAITH

4. ATTACK ON THE INSTITUTIONAL (HOMOSEXUAL) CHURCH

Part 3 Writings from the first Effeminist 1972

The Effeminist

NOTES FOR GAY MALES IN THE FEMINIST REVOLUTION

WHAT WE ARE ABOUT HERE

DON’T CALL ME BROTHER

GAY MAY DAY

The Effeminist

About the Author

Portrait of Nicholas Benton by Don Bachardy, 2017

Introduction

Painting by Don Bachardy

It’s 50 years since the storied Stonewall Riots in New York, adopted by popular culture as the launch of the modern LGBTQ+ movement. It’s also 50 years from the time this writer was a young LGBTQ+ activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was arguably the most prolific published writer on issues of the movement in that area in that time, writing regularly for the alternative press, including the legendary Berkeley Barb, the Berkeley Tribe, various San Francisco gay bar tabloids, the Gay Sunshine, a Gay Sunshine rival, and eventually the short-lived paper created by my colleague and I, The Effeminist. All this was in the 1969-1972 period, after Stonewall and before Harvey Milk arrived on the San Francisco scene in the fall of 1972. I went by Nick Benton.

The purpose of this volume is to acquaint the reader with how activists like me in the days of seminal influence of the modern LGBTQI+ movement were thinking, not simply in terms of equality and social justice, but in terms of what it means to be the way we are from a larger, even cosmic, perspective, and how it interconnects with other factors of human existence, and the pursuit of political change. We remain in an era of revolutionary change with respect to these notions, and challenged by the forceful reactionary counterrevolution that only confirms that the deeper current is going on. This is what makes this volume relevant today.

In the 1969-1972 days covered in this volume, such were the kinds of things that were certainly what I was concerned about, and friends I tended to have around me, as well. I think the impact of our ideas, and actions, have had a lasting impact, perhaps better appreciated now since the revolution’s more recent manifestation of a new feminist wave in the wake of the Trump election of 2016 and the #MeToo movement.

To the extent that one can identify the Stonewall Inn riots of June 1969 as a turning point in the movement, in the sense of self and empowerment of us, of our tribe to be, there certainly was an explosion of organizing energy that grew out of it all over the place that wasn’t there in that same way before. But within only a few weeks into that Summer of 1969, the organizing tended to fracture into two currents, one which saw our liberation in the context of wider social currents and causes, and the other which insisted that activism be limited to striving to advance our issues, solely.

The latter current prevailed, because among other things it allowed for the incorporation of an unbridled hedonism into its agenda without the outside world having to know, freed from ways in which a more comprehensive social conscience might constrain it. This soon led to a breakdown of collaboration between the gay men and women’s movements, because the sexual and related forms of exploitation of women was rooted in male hedonistic abandon and so became almost immediately unacceptable to them. What was just gay became gay and lesbian, with only much later the addition of other categories, initially sexual-orientation related, but more recently linked to modes of self-identity showing the movement is really composed of all persons who do not conform to the militaristic male supremacist paradigm of our current culture.

But all this was not without a fight internal to post-Stonewall gay liberation, in which I and my circle held to the more socially-conscious form of liberation, and in particular with an appreciation for the comprehensive social benefits of aligning with the struggle for women’s liberation. Roughly speaking, this is the subject of the works that I wrote back then, in that 1969-1972 period, as a prolific writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area publishing in the alternative newspapers of that day and engaging in some of my own social action initiatives, as well.

It more of less culminated with the effort of my friend, Jim Rankin, and I collaborating on the publication of two editions of a newspaper we called The Effeminist: Gay Men in the Feminist Revolution.

This internal battle continues to rage in our ongoing revolution, as well, with apologists for the conventional establishment LGBT equal rights organizations pitted against those within the movement that continue, in one way or another, to insist that assimilation into the dominant straight white male dominated culture is not OK and that resisting that is at the core of our revolution. So when I published my collection of 100 Nick Benton’s Gay Science essays that were carried weekly for two years (October 2010 to October 2012) in the Washington, D.C. gay magazine, Metro Weekly, in book form as Extraordinary Hearts: Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization (Lethe Press, 2013), and it became an Amazon Gay Studies best seller three times, it was not surprising that there came a reiterated revisionist establishment narrative in its wake. Among others, it came in the form of the Lillian Faderman tome, The Gay Revolution, a tedious 700-page volume published by Simon and Schuster in 2015, which told the whole story from the standpoint of gay rights only, and notably wrote me out of it. In one place, Faderman avoided naming me, citing in a marginal footnote that The Effeminist movement was founded by New York-based others, but citing for that an essay by my friend Steven Dansky, who in his essay had credited me with an earlier more seminal role. Faderman was wrong for not only excluding reference to me, but for downplaying the vital role we Effeminists played in helping to link the gay and feminist movements in that time.

This period of my intense activism, then, began shortly after the Stonewall Riots in June 1969 and ended roughly in the fall of 1972, just about the time that Harvey Milk moved to San Francisco. My 1969-1972 gay activist period, the subject of this volume, was at a time about which it was written, as Milk’s young aide, the now senior movement leader Cleve Jones did in his 2016 memoir, When We Rise, In those days, one could probably count the number of self-described ‘gay rights activists’ on the fingers of two hands.

Well, I was definitely one of those digits, writing almost every week in one counterculture newspaper or another, mostly the Berkeley Barb, and joining the collective in Berkeley that wound up creating the Gay Sunshine newspaper (I writing the editorial for the very first edition) before it was effectively hijacked by one of our collective members, and eventually a couple editions of The Effeminist.

But by late 1972 and going into 1973, I was, as they say, burned out on the gay scene, having begun to bow out right about the time the legendary Harvey Milk arrived in San Francisco. Our paths crossed a few times. I turned my attention to what I felt were righteous socialist causes by mid-1973, and that included my running for mayor of San Francisco in 1975, on the same ballot as Harvey Milk in one of his earliest runs for county supervisor.

I didn’t win (that’s putting it mildly, I came in 11th out of 11 candidates) but it was a lot of fun, actually, and I got to know some of my opponents quite well, especially the man who won and became Mayor George Moscone, and the woman who came in third, now still U.S. Senator Diane Feinstein. I moved to Los Angeles in early 1977, so I was not around when the great tragedies that beset San Francisco in November 1978 occurred—the Jonestown massacre of transplanted mostly San Franciscans in Guyana and the murders of Moscone and Milk at City Hall.

Regrettably, my socialist commitment caused me to be lulled into what became a socialist cult that turned very sour by the end of the 1970s, a totally different story except that it’s part of my life. But my struggle in that decade to shift the focus of my life toward socially meaningful activity and away from the anarcho-hedonism that had taken over the gay movement long before I left it was intense. By the end of the 1970s I had come to hold that the biggest challenge in my life was the self-discipline required to reject excessive impersonal sex, among other things, tapping into whatever spiritual disciplines I had developed from my graduate seminary days a decade earlier, to achieve it.

It is now known that the HIV virus was circulating within the gay subcultures of major U.S. cities from the earliest days of the 1970s, days when I was most sexually active, and not, as believed until only a couple years ago, that it arrived in the bloodstream of some particularly sexually active male airline steward who carried it out of Africa in the mid-1970s.

I was aware, even in my early most sexually active days that somehow unbridled gay sex, especially when coupled, as it always was, with intoxicants, was taking an extraordinary toll on young people, myself included. I could see it with my own eyes as young, rosy-cheeked youth poured into San Francisco in those days, and found themselves quickly in compromised situations, homeless, exhausted constantly, and with no real idea of how to take care of themselves. They would become spent in a hurry, reverting to hustling at key locations downtown, like under the awning of the St. Francis Hotel across from Union Square, or in front of a shoe store by where Market Street intersected with Powell at the cable car turnaround, or along Polk Street a few blocks away.

I saw the ashen look that replaced the rosy cheeks of so many boys in that period, and it had a lot to do with what drove me out of the movement to seek a better way to advance humanity’s interest by 1973.

Still, I was close enough to all the action, even after I moved to Los Angeles in 1977, and was familiar with the goings-on of some orgy clubs, like the one in San Francisco that was nothing but a labyrinth of small cubicles with doors and glory holes on three of the interior walls. It was like a beehive in there when I went, men walking earnestly between the cubicles and slamming their doors.Looking on from a balcony above, I was frankly rather horrified by what I saw.

Orgies were regularly occurring at the 16 or so bathhouses in San Francisco, just like in other big cities, too, and a new phenomenon, fisting, was becoming the rage. Stock in Crisco was rising as men were becoming more and more addicted to extreme sexual behaviors. Yes, it was, and is, addictive behavior, addiction to the most powerful drug on the planet, the release of those hormones in the achievement of an orgasm that are many times more potent than the strongest opioid, Mother Nature’s powerful tool in her primary task to perpetuate the species. Kicking that drug habit is no easy task.

But as I frequented bathhouses in the early 1970s, after a hiatus I went one night in 1974 to the infamous Ritch Street Baths, and contracted gonorrhea from a single sexual encounter. That was enough for me. Yes, I’d contracted every one of the non-lethal venereal diseases in my younger days, some more than once. But it was clearly becoming more and more rampant, and there was absolutely no desire on anyone’s part to consider protection in those days.

I have enormous respect for two gay figures who were not afraid to speak out about this: Larry Kramer through his prescient novel, Faggots, in 1978, and, although a decade later as the AIDS epidemic was in full force, the journalist Randy Shilts, whose volume, And the Band Played On, was a ruthlessly honest account not only of the government’s lack of response to AIDS, but also of the gay establishment’s angry role in keeping the government out of the many bathhouse havens for unsafe sex even after it was well-known the role they were playing in the spread of the deadly virus. Kramer, who I’ve been honored to know, and Shilts, who I never met, were truth tellers who were hated virulently by the gay establishment for speaking the truth as I, also, had experienced it first hand. (Like them, I grew up as a truth teller first and gay second, having in the expression of some, been born with printers ink in my veins, even if the ink was a shade pink, perhaps.) Cleve Jones I’ve never met to my knowledge, though he writes about hanging out in San Francisco in the early 1970s, him being about a decade younger than me, in