In order to begin my reflections I must first recognize that while I am talking about the targeting of queer and transgender people and communities by the FBI, as well as the multiple forms of resistancethat have come out of queer and transgender communities, I in no way want to make the queer andtransgender people within other liberation movements invisible. People like Angela Davis of the Black Panther Party, Kuwasi Balagoon of the Black Liberation Army, and Sylvia Rivera of the Young Lordsare just a few queer and transgender people who were impacted by FBI surveillance and repression intheir movements for liberation. Just as whiteness and racism are major struggles of the queer andtransgender movement of today, white supremacy was a serious division within the movement of queers of the past. Many of the movements and organizations I will discuss were dominated by whitepeople. This reality reflects the racism that divides queer movements and the practice by liberationstruggles of often forcing individuals to choose between their sexuality, gender, and other aspects of their identity.I also want to mention that the division that exists today between assimilationist and radical queers andtransgender people is not a new phenomenon. This is a tension that has been a struggle within thesemovements for six decades. Before queer was a political/sexual identity, when gay only mean happy,there was a budding movement of same-gender lovers, the homophile movement. The term was coinedby a German Sexologist in 1924. Homophile, as an identity, was preferred by many early same-gender loving activists because it emphasized love, the Greek suffix, phile, rather than sex as emphasized inhomosexual. In the United States the first Homophile organization was the Mattachine Society,founded in 1950 followed by the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955. The Mattachine Society didbegin with radical and even revolutionary ideas. Harry Hay, the primary founder, was an activemember of the Communist Party. Unfortunately the Communist Party was wildly homophobic,believing that homosexuality would disappear along with capitalism, being that homosexuality wassimply a sick symptom of a bourgeios economic system. Harry Hay focused on his organizing with theMattachine Society, leaving the Party to do so. The first five years of the Mattachine Society theyfocused on growth, public education, and defense of men constantly entrapped by police for sexualcrimes like public lewdness and sodomy. After the second public meeting of the Mattachine Societythe FBI sent an informant to nearly every meeting to deeply infiltrate the organization. Their purposewas to secure information of all members of the organization and publicize it to employers, familymembers, and newspapers. The FBI worked with the US Postal Service to gain access to as manypeople as possible who received publications from the Mattachine Society or any other Homophileorganization. FBI agents would consistently show up at the work places of people they decided werehomosexuals, outed them, got them fired, and many, many times those individuals committed suicide.As the surveillance of the Mattachine Society was beginning the U.S. Senate was also convening abipartisan committee to weed out any homosexuals working within the federal government, leading tohundreds of people losing their jobs. This witch hunt was done in conjunction with the McCarthyhearings, but was quite separate as McCarthy himself was regularly under attack for likely being gay.The FBI did not only use intimidation to harass people active in the Homophile movement. Theobscenity laws of the day were blatantly used to target the growing movement and people within it.Multiple issues of the regular newspaper of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis,
One,
was declared obscene and unmailable due to work by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. FBIagents raided houses and offices to get access to newspapers and other information about theHomophile organizations. Obtaining warrants was never very difficult as homosexuality was,essentially, illegal and the public advocacy for homosexuality was forbidden under numerous decencylaws. FBI agents regularly brought Mattachine Society leadership into offices for questioning andintimidation, even setting some up with charges unrelated to their organizing, a tactic perfected later during COINTELPRO.
There is always resistance however. Even though the Mattachine Society became an assimilationistorganization in 1955, strongly coming out against Communism and even expelling all Communistmembers of the organization, they did advocate strongly for the legal rights of homosexuals within theUnited States. They were deeply fixated on appearing proper and respectable, even forcing protesterswho attended their rallies to wear professional and “gender appropriate” clothing, not unlike what theSouthern Christian Leadership Council would later require of their membership. Through their sociallyaccepted respectability they believed they would be able to secure better treatment for homosexuals andwhile the federal investigating and probing of federal employees slowed down in the 1960s, the realityof policing and surveillance of same-gender loving people was did not go anywhere.As the Civil Rights Movement was getting stronger and successes were being won queer working class,poor, and gender non-conforming people began organizing their own communities of resistance. InSan Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood many queer and transgender young people were organizingthe first organization for queer and transgender young people,
the Vanguard
. These young people andtheir older transwomen allies were regular patrons at Compton Cafeteria. At the time it was illegal for individuals to wear clothing of the “opposite” sex thus making any place transgender people gathered atarget for police harassment, Compton Cafeteria was no exception. In August of 1966 transgender patrons and their allies were fed up with the police harassment and collaboration by the businessowners and they fought back. Coffee was thrown in faces of cops, windows were smashed, and peoplefought back in the streets. The uprising went on for numerous nights until finally things settled andpatrons were able to go back to the cafeteria with less harassment. We all know the chant, when wefight, we win!We are regularly told that the Stonewall riots were the beginning of the Gay Liberation struggle, but itis far more complex than that. No one moment began the movement, rather it was a culmination of many moments including Compton, Stonewall, and a culture of resistance that reached far beyond thebars, cafeterias, piers, and parks frequented by queers and transgender people. The Gay LiberationFront formed in New York City immediately after the Stonewall Riots. Almost as immediately theGLF came under surveillance by the FBI. They were considered part of the New Left, they chose their name specifically because of its allegiance with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. GLFchapters quickly sprang up around the country, including one right here in Boston. GLF chaptersmarched in anti-war rallies, joined anti-police brutality marches, and included jails along the route of early gay pride parades. GLF folks had their own problems with race and gender but it wasn't helpedas the FBI intentionally sent racist messages from the GLF to the Panthers and sent homophobicexclusionary messages from the Panthers to the GLF. The intentional divisive tactics by the FBI onlyexacerbated the already tense relationship between the two organizations. However, on August 15,1970 Huey Newton delivered a speech calling for unity between Black liberation struggles withwomen's and gay liberation. While the government attempted to divide the movements attempted tobuild. Unfortunately the FBI did not give up with little divisive notes. From October of 1971 untilJune of 1972 Robert “Butch” Merritt was an FBI informant who infliltrated weekly meetings of theGLF in DC. He intentionally spread rumors about other GLF members that they were FBI agents. Hebroke in to offices to secure information for the FBI and informed Black groups that they would not bewelcome at GLF meetings. Due to these and other internal fractions the GLF imploded in 1972.To continue lifting up the stories of radical left queers I want to take a couple of minutes to talk aboutqueers who were part of different underground clandestine organizations including the George JacksonBrigade, the Red Guerilla Resistance, among others. I also want to highlight the resistance of somequeer communities who stood fast against the Grand Juries that supeonaed them.
The George Jackson Brigade was an underground organization based in Seattle, Washington. Differentfrom many of the other underground organizations the GJB was a mostly working class, formerlyincarcerated group of folks made up of queers and was also multi-racial. Ed Mead and Bo Brown arethe best known queer members of the Brigade, but Bruce Seidel, who was murdered by police officersas he was trying to surrender during a failed bank expropriation, had been lovers with Ed Mead for ashort while. Between May 31
st
1975 and December 24
th
1977 the GJB was responsible for 15bombings including the Washington Department of Corrections, FBI offices, and many multiplecorporations benefiting from prisoner exploitation and other worker exploitation. Members of theabove ground Left throughout Washington were regularly harassed by the FBI in attempts to gaininformation about the GJB and much of the Lesbian community was targeted to gain specificinformation about Bo Brown, considered the gentleman bank robber as she was and still is, butch andtough yet always sweet to the tellers she was requesting withdrawals from. Even with all the repressionmembers of these communities did not snitch on their underground comrades. Even as Brigademembers made the FBI most wanted list, people continued to resist.Also in the 1970s the FBI had a full task force out searching for Kathy Power and Susan Saxe who hadbeen part of a group of revolutionaries who were trying to fund clandestine anti-war resistance throughbank robberies. During a robbery here in Boston that these two women took part in along with LeftyGilday, who is still locked up in the Massachusetts DOC system, a cop was killed. The revolutionarieswent immediately underground to different places around the country. In search for the two women theFBI showed up in Lesbian communities Lexington Kentucky as well as New Haven, Connecticut as theFBI was trying to root out two of their Most Wanted. Multiple women went to prison for 18 monthsrather than cooperate with the FBI.The last underground organization I'm going to mention existed in the early 1980s. The Red GuerrillaResistance was a group of white folks organizing nationally for revolutionary possibilities. Theybombed U.S. government sites, Navy headquarters in Washington, and a police association in NewYork. Bob Lederer is the person who has written most extensively about queer struggle within theradical left. He delivered a speak as part of “Rainbow Flags for Mumia” in March of 1999 that lifts upthe struggle of the Red Guerrilla Resistance. Two out lesbians were part of the RGR, Laura Whitehornand Linda Evans. In order for the FBI to find these two women in particular they subpoenaed multiplegay and lesbian activists out of New York who all resisted the grand jury fishing expeditions.Unfortunately the FBI did eventually catch the members of the Red Guerrilla Resistance, includingLaura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, and Susan Rosenberg, who came out as a lesbian in 1990. Support for Susan Rosenberg spurred the creation of Queers United In Support of Political Prisoners. QUISPorganized in New York providing direct support to all political prisoners, queers and others. Evenbefore QUISP existed, and organizing parallel to QUISP in later years, was the organization Out of Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War. They werecomprised of mostly formerly incarcerated revolutionaries and their allies. They marched in queer parades and raised awareness within the queer community of the needs of women political prisoners.While the struggle of political prisoners in general is too often unheard by radicals, the specific needsof women political prisoners has been essentially ignored. Their organizing and resistance is anessential queer story to tell.To switch gears a little bit, while the Red Guerrilla Resistance was underground the AIDS crisis wasbeginning. Originally called GRID, Gay Related Immuno Deficiency, this disease was poising andkilling off a generation of gay men. In 1987 after many, many failed attempts at making the changesnecessary to the medical industry and the popular understanding of AIDS, organizers in New York City
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