Three - Revolutionary - Years - The - Impact - of Gay Liberation Movement

Cultural and Social History 2006; 3: 445–471
Three Revolutionary
Years: The Impact of the
Counter Culture on the
Development of the Gay
Liberation Movement
in Britain1
Lucy Robinson
University of Sussex
The gay liberation movement in Britain has been understood as

forged between reform and spontaneous revolt. The New York
Stonewall riots in 1969 offered a technicolour explosion of spontane-
ity which was then imported into the British context, whereas
Britain’s partial decriminalization of homosexuality through the
Sexual Offences Act of 1967 demonstrated monochrome manoeu-
vring through parliamentary procedure, beset with compromise.
Both events suggest that gay liberation was without a theoretical or
self-organized base. As a counter point, this article uses the Dialectic
of Liberation conference held at London’s Roundhouse in 1967 as a
way of exploring the impact of the emerging counter culture on the
development of gay liberation. The counter culture, defined against
the existing left, developed a theory of oppression that accepted the
contradictions of its constituent’s experiences – that they could be
heterosexual, white, male, and middle class, and yet still ‘feel’
oppressed. This article argues that while the gay liberation movement
went on to challenge some of these assumptions, the movement also
inherited many of the counter culture’s approaches: a distrust of rigid
structures, a focus on the experience of oppression and the
Address for correspondence: Lucy Robinson, 19 Brewer Street, Brighton, BN2 3HH, UK.
E-mail: lrobinson27@email.com
1 This article is the product of research undertaken for my DPhil at the University of
Sussex. I would like to thank Prof. Alun Howkins, Dr Selina Todd, Dr Claire Langhamer,
Ben Jones, Dr Andy Wood, Prof. Anthony McElligott, Dr Bill Osgerby, and Andy
Medhurst for their support in pulling together this research.
© The Social History Society 2006 10.1191/1478003806cs077oa

446 Lucy Robinson
politics of the inner mind, and its tendency towards fragmentation

and discord. Cultural and Social History 2006; 3: 445–471
‘We used to think of ourselves as little clumps of weirdoes, but now

we’re a whole new minority group’ – Janis Joplin2
In this article I seek to counter commonly held views that, for gay politics,
the years 1967 to 1969 were dominated by the tension between the slow
struggle for legal reform and the explosion of the gay liberation move-
ment. Instead this article will emphasize the significance of the wider
counter culture on the development of gay liberation, particularly in
terms of its rejection of the politics and style of the left. For gay history in
Britain, two events framed this period: the passing of the Sexual Offences
Act in 1967 and the Stonewall riots in 1969. These events have subse-
quently become mythologized in both popular memory and historical
study so that they become markers of the beginnings of gay politics.
However, isolating these means that the wider political context and par-
ticularly the relationship between different political tendencies is lost.
This article looks at the last three years of the 1960s in order to trace a
shift from conventional politics to cultural politics in Britain. The devel-
opment and impact of the politicized identity, and particularly of the gay
liberation movement, is pivotal in this shift. The most significant develop-
ment, both for the gay community and for wider political culture, was the
development of a gay revolutionary subjectivity that rejected traditional
forms of leftist politics. The gay liberation movement as understood in
this article was dominated by the Gay Liberation Front in London, which
essentially lasted from 1970 to 1973. The left here is taken to include
political groupings that defined themselves as representing the interests
of the working class, whether in the name of greater equity within the
existing system or of social, political, and economic revolution.
Gay liberation redefined the relationship between the public and pri-
vate, between class and identity. Shifting emphasis away from objectively
defined class and towards a more fluid understanding of political agency it
opened a space in which to conceptualize the politics of sexuality. This
meant that the oppression of lesbians and gay men could be understood in
explicitly political terms, but also that their experience of this oppression
could be developed into a revolutionary critique of capitalist relations.
The left recognized that personalized politics was a direct threat to the
rigid objectivity of class-based analysis. The relationship between gay pol-
itics and the left was both uneasy and overlapping. The shifts and machi-
nations in one impacted on the other, but more importantly gay left
politics brought the styles, shapes, and concerns of the counter culture
with it into the heart of political culture. For the gay liberation movement
2 Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties (Oxford, 1995), p. 274.
© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

Three Revolutionary Years 447
the themes that fascinated the counter culture on a theoretical level were
acts of self-defence in day-to-day life. Gay left identity tried to unite these
political goals by offering both tactics for survival in society as it stood at
the time and a model for fundamentally altering that society. During the
1960s the left seemed increasingly out of tune with this new political
energy. The politics of the personal was at odds with the rigid class-based
analysis and hierarchical structures of the parties of the left. Gay libera-
tion took on the counter culture’s rejection of both the status quo and
traditional types of political protest
Previous studies of this period have focused on areas of traditional
protest and organization, therefore marginalizing what was the central
driving energy of political radicalism at the time. New political voices were
personalizing the political and rejecting the choice between reform and
revolt. While the parliamentary left appeared far removed from a radical
agenda, the Trotskyist concept of the vanguard came to be seen as inher-
ently hierarchical and elitist. Party hierarchy appeared increasingly anti-
democratic, a metaphor for the Stalinist assumptions that had continued
into much of the post-1956 Trotskyist movement. Yet, these increasingly
discredited models of political change have been the focus of the major-
ity of historians’ studies of the late 1960s. According to Terry Anderson
these approaches can be divided into four loose categories.3 First, histori-
ans have looked at the period through the ‘leadership approach’ con-
structing types, who became the movers and shakers, the ‘superstars’.4
The second group have examined the rise and fall of organizations.5 The
third group outlined by Anderson are those who concentrate on the
importance of new left ideology. While this approach recognizes shifts in
leftist thinking, it maintains the assumed superiority of explicit academic
theory. Fourth, historians have also looked at other facets, for example
legal reform, or student activism. In so doing they concentrate on main-
stream institutions and therefore centre the politics of the moment firmly
within the establishment. Therefore these historians’ work represent the
processes that were increasingly being rejected by growing communities
of the dissatisfied.
The emergent counter culture was attempting to form non-hierarchical
groupings for whom the personal was a precursor to any politics. By plac-
ing the events of the late 1960s into a wider counter cultured history the
specificities of the development of a liberational subjectivity, a personal-
ized political, are illuminated.
3 Anderson, movement, p. i.
4 A recent example of this approach might be Dominic Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good
(London, 2005) which largely concentrates on the public impact of key politicians
combined with elite cultural producers ie from Suez to the Beatles.
5 Anderson gave the American example of historians who had concentrated on Social
Democratic Students or Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee. The British
expression of this historiographical paradigm would include the contemporaneous work
of left-wing British party activists such as David Widgery (member of International
Socialist) or Tariq Ali (from the International Marxist Group).

448 Lucy Robinson
Theodore Roszak’s definition of the counter culture highlights the

immediacy of the counter culture’s interests for lesbians and gay men. In
1968 he wrote,
The counter culture is the embryonic cultural base of New Left

politics, the effort to discover new types of community, new family
patterns, new sexual mores, new kinds of livelihood, new aesthetic
forms, new personal identities on the far side of power politics, the
bourgeois home, and the Protestant work ethic.6
The Dialectics of Liberation Conference held in London in 1967 offers a

counterpoint to the traditionally celebrated moments in gay history. It was
an international event that was experienced by its participants, both at the
time and since, as the most important counter cultural landmark. While
not immediately a ‘gay event’, the Dialectics of Liberation represented
the coming together of all of the significant factors that informed the
style, form and approach of the gay liberation movement. The counter
cultural themes that were explored at the conference, such as anti-psychi-
atry, a rejection of the agency of adulthood, communal organization, and
a political performance, can also be found in the structures and cam-
paigns of the Gay Liberation Front.
The counter culture offered a space that was denied by the left. While
distinguishing themselves from Soviet-style socialism in form and prac-
tice, the Trotskyist groups that emerged following 1956 were in no posi-
tion to challenge the left’s heterosexual bias. For example, International
Socialist (IS), a reorganized form of the (Socialist Review) Group from
1962, had an ongoing combatant relationship with homosexuality as a
political identity. In 1957 when the government’s Wolfenden Report into
homosexuality and prostitution was published, the Group reacted by
declaring that homosexuality would disappear naturally following the
rational and socialist restructuring of society, and that if it did not, med-
ical treatment would eliminate it. International Socialist’s attitude to
homosexuality took a similar ‘come the revolution’ line combined with an
attitude to homosexuals and homosexuality that it had inherited from the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). David Widgery was a maverick
IS member who, unlike his Party cohorts, frequently participated and
commented upon counter cultural events. He wrote that ‘[a]lthough
there were quite a lot of gay people involved in IS, the policy was the tra-
ditional Stalinist one: ‘after the revolution there wouldn’t be any problem
we’ll all be heterosexual’.7 This continued to cause problems for gay
activists. For example, following Bloody Sunday, IS launched the Troops
Out Movement (TOM) along with the International Marxist Group
(IMG), Big Flame, and the CPGB. The project was meant to encourage
6 Theodore Roszak, The Making of the Counter Culture (London, 1971) p. 66.
7 David Widgery, ‘The Other Love’ in. David Widgery (ed.), Preserving Disorder (London,
1989) p. 102.

unity among a variety of leftist individuals. The Gay Liberation Front car-
ried a banner on the Troops Out march that declared ‘Gay Solidarity with
the Irish Liberation struggle’ and chanted ‘Police out of gay bars – troops
out of Ireland’. Despite TOM’s attempted leftist unity, the introduction of
sexual politics onto the agenda was beyond the pale for the Trotskyist
left – a diversion from the real politics of the event. Here heterosexual
bias combined with prejudice against the new forms of liberation politics.
Organizers attempted to dissuade the GLF from marching as a group
under their own banner and instead to subsume their collective gay iden-
tity and participate as individuals within the march.8 Gay support also led
to direct physical assault, when, according to Peter Tatchell, fellow
marchers attacked GLF participants.9
IS’s workerism meant it was constantly attempting to divert political
energy away from identity politics. This only changed when the Thatcher
government’s attacks on the gains made by women’s and gay liberation
made such separation untenable. Then IS, renamed the Socialist
Worker’s Party (SWP) in 1972, turned to gay politics as a site of possible
recruitment and co-option.10
In the 1980s Keith Birch summarized the role of counter culture in the
difficult relationship between the gay politics11 and the left:
relations with the socialist left . . . were limited and tense. It was easy
to dismiss the left as heterosexual and male, and much of the left
easily dismissed us in return. GLF as a whole was perhaps more
influenced by liberationism and counter-cultural thinking than by
socialist revolutionary change. But we had borrowed many of our
concepts and ideals from socialism.12
However, the relationship was not a static one based on trading distinct
concepts and ideals. Neither group, ‘gay’ nor ‘left’, constituted coherent
wholes. Many individuals were of course both. Furthermore, both sectors
overlapped and were in an ongoing development with each other as well
as with wider shifts surrounding them.
The role of the counter culture highlights what was specific to libera-
tion politics. The left continued to be divided by the positions that had
8 Andrew Hodges and David Hutter, With Downcast Gays: Aspects of Homosexual
Self-Oppression(Toronto, 1974) p. 21.
9 Peter Tatchell, The Battle for Bermondsey, 2nd edn (GMP 1984) p. 163.
10 Duncan Blackie and Ian Taylor, AIDS: The Socialist View (London, 1987); M. Fitzpatrick
and Don Milligan, The Truth about the AIDS Panic (London, 1987); Ian Lucas, Outrage!
An Oral History: (London, 1998) pp. 9 and 42; Simon Watney, ‘Activism and After’,
paper presented at the Queery, Sussex University, 14 Oct 1998; Edward King, Safety in
Numbers: (London, 1993) pp. 245, 195; John Hartley, ‘Well Meaning Celebs, Following a
Curiously Conservative Faction’, Guardian, 5 March 1999.
11 For the purposes of this article, unless otherwise stated, GLF refers specifically to the
London formation of the organization.

12 Keith Birch, ‘A Community of Interests’ in Bob Cant and Susan Hemmings (eds),
Radical Records (London, 1988), p. 57.

450 Lucy Robinson
split it in 1956. Reactions to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the

invasion of Hungary had ongoing resonances for politics and organiza-
tional structures. This made the personal so attractive: it seemed to offer
a way of avoiding re-running past mistakes. Traditional hierarchical
structures were rejected and traditional forms of protest were replaced
with carnivalesque performance.
I. A Very British Campaign: From Wolfenden Report

to the Sexual Offences Act
The publication of the Wolfenden Report galvanized a number of

homophile campaigns aimed at reforming the law, as well as reinvigorat-
ing leftist condemnation of homosexuality as inherently bourgeois. After
a decade of prevarication a watered-down version of the report’s recom-
mendation became the Sexual Offences Act (SOA) of 1967. The SOA
only applied to England and Wales, where it decriminalized homosexual
activity between consenting adults (over 21) as long as they were in pri-
vate and participants were not members of the military services or mer-
chant navy.13
The decriminalization of homosexuality owed more to concessions
and pragmatism on the part of the ‘powers that be’ than to the demands
of homosexuals.14 Arguably, homosexual law reform was indicative of a
transition in the dominant ideological basis of parliamentary politics,
rather than of the fundamental repositioning of the homosexual subject
in British society. During the period 1957–67 law reform became a repre-
sentative site of contention between the old school of moralists and the
emergent causalistic reformers. The history of the law’s passage spoke
most of the specific shifts within the ruling party at the time – for the
Labour Party the SOA represented the ascendancy of revisionism.
The campaigns that followed the SOA were a measure of the ongoing
need to extend homosexual equality. The parameters of debate around
the limits and proposed extensions of law reform had wide-reaching ram-
ifications, not least for the age of consent.15 Beyond the age, geographi-
cal location, employment, and public restrictions to the Act, further
exclusions led to a number of contradictory positions.16 For example, it
was illegal for a third party to introduce two men to each other in order
for them to participate in legally consensual acts. Also, members of the
13 Hansard, Sexual Offences (No. 2) Bill, 5th ser. (London, 1967) p. 1403.
14 J. Weeks, Sex Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edn (London,
1989) p.156; North-western Committee, ‘Bulletin–May’ (North-western Committee for
Homosexual Law Reform, 1967); Sexual politics in Britian, 520 microfiches in 4 vols
(Hassocks, 1997) vol. 1, Antony Grey, ‘Homosexual Law Reform’, in Brian Frost (ed.),
The Tactics of Pressure (London, 1975) p. 52; USFI, SMG, and CHE, The Case for
Homosexual Law Reform (Manchester. Edinburgh, and Balygowan, 1975) passim.
15 Hansard, Sexual Offences (No. 2) Bill, p. 1403.
16 Antony Grey et al., ‘Homosexuals and the Law’ The Times, 20 June 1971; Tony Honore,
Sex Law (London, 1971) p. 91.

merchant navy could legally have homosexual relations as long as it was

not with another member of the merchant navy. Paul Crane explained
that: ‘[w]hile appearing to liberalise the legal treatment of gayness these
changes in the law in fact provided the means for tougher regulation of
homosexuality’.17 Following the 1967 Act it became much easier to bring
about prosecutions for soliciting and gross indecency and the penalties
given were increased.18 It was this context that precipitated the British gay
liberation movement and its counter cultural lineage, informed by both
the restrictions of reform and the silences of the left.
II. Cancaning into Power: Gay History and Stonewall
Silenced from mainstream history and marginalized within radical politi-

cal movements, gay politics mythologized isolated events in order to con-
struct a unity of experience. The Stonewall riots of June 1969 are the most
significant of these. They are named after the bar where they took place,
the Stonewall Inn, which was the most popular lesbian and gay venue in
Greenwich Village, New York. Its clientele was predominantly made up of
drag queens, butch lesbians, and hustlers. In June 1969, sparked off by the
emotions surrounding Judy Garland’s funeral, customers at the inn
reacted against ongoing police harassment. Images of resisters in drag can-
caning in front of the police caught the imagination of the time. From this
point gay liberation can be seen within the context of the wider struggles
of the 1960s. At the time these events were seen, at least by gay newspaper
Gay Sunshine, as part of the wider liberational movement. ‘Choosing homo-
sexuality [wa]s in itself an act of rebellion, a revolutionary stance.’19 The
Christopher Street Liberation Day was held on the first anniversary of the
riots. It developed into the Gay Pride marches in New York and San
Francisco that grew to mass levels during the 1970s. The New York Gay
Liberation Front was formed directly in response to the riots.
The riots stand at the centre of gay history’s core contradiction. Gay
activism has been constructed as simultaneously ever-present and as a
product of specific conditions. John D’Emilio expressed the tension
between these minoritizing and univerzalising models of sexuality. He
wrote that ‘this mythical history drew on personal experience, which
[was] read backward in time’.20 Jeffrey Weeks, historian and participant in
London’s GLF, also cited this textual evidence of the signification of the
riots; however, he explained that personally he was completely oblivious
to them at the time.21 The needs of lesbians and gay men to construct a
17 Paul Crane, Gays and the Law (London, [1982]) pp. 13–14.
18 Crane, Gays. Mick, ‘Shirley Temple Knows – The Harrow Witch-Hunt: Just Like the Bad
Old Days’, Come Together, 12, (1972), in Aubrey Walter (ed.) Come Together: The Years of
Gay Liberation, 1970–73 (London, 1980) pp. 172–74.
19 Winston Leyland (ed.), Grass Roots (San Francisco, 1991) p. iv.
20 John D’Emilio, Making Trouble: Essays on Gay History, Politics and the University (New York
and London, 1992) p. 468.
21 J. Weeks, Making Sexual History (Cambridge, 2000) p. 76.

452 Lucy Robinson
version of history that validates their own political activism does not nec-
essarily make for good History.
It is clear that the roots of the British gay liberation movement owed
more to their own historical context than to mythologized events in
America. Yet this tendency towards importation was perennial in the his-
tory of the liberation movement. After all, since the 1990s, this over
emphasis on Stonewall as a moment of historical genesis has been coun-
tered. In America writers such as George Chauncey have catalogued histo-
ries whose methodology and content pre-dated Stonewall.22 William
Scraggio sees Stonewall as one expression of wider tendencies and in so
doing decentres the USA in the history of homosexual politics. He
describes ‘Stonewall as just one text within a larger cultural rupture’.23 In
Britain, Joseph Bristow has pointed out that there is a danger of creating
an artificial historical divide at the Stonewall moment.24 Understanding
the liberation movement as part of a ‘larger cultural rupture’ allows the
participants credence for overtly political, rather than knee-jerk, reactions.
I argue that Stonewall’s status is less significant in the formal develop-
ment of a homosexual revolutionary subjectivity than other, perhaps less
explosive, events. When gay politics did manage to get itself onto the
agenda, whether in the Sexual Offences Act or in the campaigns of the
early 1980s, this was dictated by the needs of the dominant discourse,
straight politics. In the late 1960s, the left was searching for new invigor-
ating campaigns, and according to the pathologization of homosexuality,
lesbians and gay men were no longer inherently bourgeois, rather they
were imbued with an assumed radicalism.
When the left needed to reinvigorate and redefine itself at a point of
crisis it began to incorporate personal politics into class-based analysis.
Lesbian and gay politics was now viewed as exciting and radical rather
than bourgeois because its great success had been in redefining what con-
stituted the political. Gay politics’ significance lies in the counter culture’s
redefinition of the personal as political. In order to understand the role
of homosexuality in the years 1967–69 within the context of the history of
political identity, the counter cultural must be reinstated.
III. Personally Liberated: The Dialectics of Liberation Conference
On 3 July 1967 Leo Abse’s Sexual Offences Bill passed its third reading by
a vote of 99 to 14 and was passed into law on the 27th. In the same month
R.D. Laing and David Cooper organized the Dialectics of Liberation
Conference at the Roundhouse in London. This event acts as an alterna-
tive narrative to those genesis myths that have grown up around the
passing of the SOA and the Stonewall riots.
22 George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York, 1994) passim.

23 William Scraggio, ‘Producing Identity: From the Boys in the Band to Gay Liberation’, in
Patricia Juliana Smith (ed.), the Queer Sixties (New York and London, 1999), p. 237.
24 J. Bristow, ‘I Am with You, Little Minority Sister’ in Smith, The Queer Sixties.

The Roundhouse was well established as a counter cultural centre and

site of political performance. In 1961 Arnold Wesker’s socialist theatre
company, Centre 42, took over the building, originally owned by British
Rail, in order to create a ‘worker’s fun palace’. Wesker had convinced
British Rail to give him the site as a gesture of goodwill to both the arts
and the workers. When finances thwarted his dream, Wesker appeased his
own guilt by opening the space to the new generation.25 The venue acted
as a beacon, calling together the tribes of the counter culture. It was the
venue of the launch of IT (International Times) in 1966 and a base for
Julian Beck’s Living Theatre.26 It offered a site of a radicalism outside tra-
ditional arenas that was underplayed in leftist histories of the time.
According to David Widgery, the Dialectics conference was ignored in
the ‘rapidly rancid recollections’ of 1968. In the left’s attempts to explain
away its apparent failure, counter cultural development was marginalized.
However, the conference stands as testimony that ideas mattered outside
of the established left. Furthermore, the theoretical and organizational
legacy of the conference was wide-reaching. It crystallized the introduc-
tion of new themes onto the agenda. It ‘was a wonderful example of ide-
ological collisions which were taking place in the late’ 60s’.27 The
conference was a hybrid of the university sit-in and Arts Lab space.
According to Miles, participant and contributor to the oral history collec-
tion Days in Their Lives: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–71, which
this section relies on heavily – the Roundhouse conference was ‘a very
‘60s idea’.28 The concept was to get together all of the different factions
involved in the liberation struggle and ‘have a good talk about it’.29
Widgery explained that the aim was to link ‘the worlds of mass politics,
political economy, class struggle and national liberation to the individual
psyche and the way authority is learnt or internalised’.30 This took the
form of a ‘controlled collision’ between the factions. The factions were
built up around ‘[t]he gods of the generation – anyone who was anyone
in the counter-culture’.31 The conference brought together Stokely
Carmichael, Gregory Bateson (talking about whale language), the poets
Alan Ginsberg and Simon Vinkenoog, Emmett Grogan, (Digger and
inventor of the inverted V peace sign), Julian Beck (from Living Theatre),
and Michael X (Britain’s self-styled black activist). Unsurprisingly this
combination of a ‘[w]hole wide range of things and people [led to] some
very vicious arguments’.32
25 M. Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (London, 2001) p. 72.

26 S. Rowbotham, Promise of a Dream (London, 2000) p. 124.
27 Widgery, ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’ in Preserving Disorder, pp. 101 and 110.
28 Jonathon Green, Days in The Life: Voices from the English Underground, 1961–71 (London,
1998) p. 208.
29 Green, Days, p. 205.
30 Widgery, ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’, p. 101.
31 Green, Days, Alan Marcuson quoted, p. 209.
32 Emmett Grogan, Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps (New York, 1972) p. 256; Green, Days
p. 208.

454 Lucy Robinson
The speakers at the conference, and its very style, continued the devel-
opment of a personally identified political subjectivity and provided bea-
cons on the road to gay liberation. The counter culture’s marriage of
form and content at the Roundhouse was developed in opposition to the
hierarchical bureaucracy of the organized left that preceded it. Looking
back on traditional leftist conferences, Terry Eagleton summarized them
as ‘liturgical celebrations . . . symbolic spaces for those who speak a lan-
guage . . . unintelligible to most of their fellow-humans, and who therefore
need from time to time to relax with those of their kind’.33 In many ways
the Roundhouse directly challenged the specifics of this exclusivity.
At the Roundhouse, principal speakers and audience intermingled.
The participants in the spectacle were also the observers. Young people
took to living in the Roundhouse and took seminars into local cafes and
public places. The separation of the outside world under criticism was
blurred. The road from CND’s Aldermaston marches, with young activists
sleeping in church halls, wound through the Roundhouse before contin-
uing to the communal politics that became a central tenet of the gay
liberation movement (see below).
The movement away from a traditional revolutionary position (based
on discrete Trotskyist/Leninist or Stalinist models) was at the heart of the
conference’s political goals. The new political elite sought to harness not
just workers’ power but also the liberational potential within everyone,
regardless of their objective social, political, or economic position. The
scientific basis of the revolutionary power of the proletariat was countered
by a perceived need to free the individual from within the class. The polit-
ical became personal, not just as a motivating experiential force, but as a
liberational entity for wider society. The private would liberate the public;
without a linking of the two, it was argued over and over again, the indi-
vidual would be forever at the beck and call of the economic.
In his introduction to the collection of papers given at the
Roundhouse, David Cooper explained that the ‘cardinal failure of all past
revolutionaries has been the disassociation of liberation on the mass
social level, i.e. liberation of whole classes in economic and political
terms, and liberation on the level of the individual and the concrete
groups in which he’s directly engaged’.34 The post-56 experience of the
left explicitly informed this attempt to reassess the significance of private
and public experience. Cooper continued, ‘[o]ur talk will be meaningless
unless we effect some union between the macro-social and micro-social,
and between ‘inner-reality’ and ‘outer reality’.35
True to the conference’s aims, participants’ personal experiences heav-
ily informed their public statements, although not always in the beneficial
ways envisaged by the organizers. The constituency of the Roundhouse
was liberal, white, and predominantly middle class, and was pragmatically
33 Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (London, 2001), pp. 97–8.

34 David Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation (Harmondsworth, 1968) p. 10.
35 Cooper, Dialectics.

and ideologically informed by these positions. Despite the conference’s

attempt to reconfigure a political structure that rejected vanguardist
assumptions, the Roundhouse form replaced them with new exclusions.
Particularly noteworthy was the level of hero worship that remained and
the marginalization experienced by women at the conference.36 However,
these exclusive positions were themselves taken as signifiers of the wider
context. For example, Herbert Marcuse explained to the conference that
they were ‘faced with a novel situation in history’ whereby they ‘have to
be liberated from a relatively well-functioning, rich, powerful society’.
This left the liberationists ‘facing liberation from a society where libera-
tion [wa]s apparently, without a mass basis’.37
R.D. Laing also sought to circumvent the assumed mass nature of rad-
ical politics. Laing argued for a new understanding of the political that
had the value of experience, subjectivity, at its heart. For Laing, bringing
together individual experiences could expose hitherto invisible social
events. He argued that through a process of politicization the ‘apparent
irrationality of behaviour on a small scale takes on a certain form of intel-
ligibility when one sees it in context’.38 Laing used an example from his
own political road to Damascus, that of treating an individual psychiatric
patient, through which he came to see the inbuilt irrationality of the
family unit. In turn the family could be understood only in terms of
all-encompassing networks, which then led him to develop a critique
of society’s large organs and institutions.39 For Laing, like Cooper, society
sought to obscure the relationship between the public and private, the
macro- and the micro. Laing argued it was possible to read each through
the other and in so doing it was possible to reunite political cause and
effect. Parallel to Foucault, Laing explained that such relations do not
‘exist out there on some periphery of social space: they pervade the inter-
stices of all that is comprised by them’.40 Here Laing was replacing the
base and superstructure dialectic with a model in which the individual
and society are superimposed upon, and read through, each other. The
significance that Laing gave to the family as the institution that obscures
and executes social events combined with his critique of medical institu-
tions. This gave his analysis a particular resonance for gay liberation.
After what was for many participants a political and even a life-changing
experience, one must ask what the outcome of the conference was, both
in its own terms and in its impact on counter cultural thought. Laing
36 Emmett Grogan, A Speech: Dialectics of Liberation [speech from Dialectics of Liberation

Conference], http://www.diggers.org/digpaps68/dialib.html [cited 12 July 2002];
Rowbotham, Promise, p. 146.
37 Herbert Marcuse, ‘Liberation from the Affluent Society’ in D. Cooper (ed.), Dialectics of
Liberation (Harmondsworth, 1968) p. 176.
38 R.D. Laing, ‘The Obvious’ in D. Cooper (ed.), The Dialectics of Liberation,
(Harmondsworth, 1968) pp. 13–33.
39 Joseph Berke, ‘Anti-psychiatry: The Ethical and Practical Alternatives to Traditional
Treatment’ in P. J. Barker and Ben Davidson (eds), Psychiatric Nursing: Ethical Strife
(London, 1995) passim.
40 Laing, ‘The Obvious’, p. 15.

456 Lucy Robinson
himself was well aware of the problems that his approach brought with it.
He warned the Roundhouse participants of the contradiction that
surrounds placing all personal experiences in their social political
relations. He saw that such methodological actions were ‘often as impos-
sible as [they are] necessary’.41 After all, the fabric of society:
is an interlaced set of contexts, of sub-systems interlaced with other

sub-systems of contexts interlaced with meta-contexts and meta-meta-
contexts and so on until it reaches a theoretical limit, the context of
all possible social contexts, comprising together with all the contexts
that are subsumed within it, what one might call the total world
system.42
Furthermore, for Laing, the centrality of individual liberation came with

pitfalls. The individual’s immediate experience ensured no guarantee of
a liberational standpoint. He explained that ‘in social space one’s direct
immediate capacity to see what is happening does not extend any further
than one’s senses’.43 This was reiterated the next year in his book The
Politics of Experience. He wrote that ‘[n]o one can begin to think, feel or act
now except from the starting point of his own alienation’.44 Individual
alienation, however, was the uniting force in the Roundhouse, and this
unification of diversity was to be the central internal issue for the GLF.
While the liberation movement sought to unite a variety of individuals in
the face of their shared oppression, the practicality of finding common
ground brought significant problems with it.
The shared platforms across lines of difference developed at the
Roundhouse were unworkable as a revolutionary process. The meeting of
experiences was at cross purposes. Mick Farren, who performed with his
group The Deviants at the conference, explained that it was a ‘perfect
example of why the 60s were not famous for their quality of rational
thought or discussion. With typical 60s pre-event grandiosity . . . it
devolved into another fine mess . . . ending in misery and acrimony’.45 Its
project of developing an all-encompassing revolutionary outlook while
centring on the value of difference was inevitably impossible to maintain.
The ineffectiveness of this approach was not, however, necessarily, one of
the lessons learnt from the conference.
IV. Come Out: Gay Liberation and its Precedence
While a failure in its own terms, the Roundhouse conference brought

together a variety of experiences in an attempt to develop a shared counter
cultural approach. The GLF took on the counter culture’s concerns and,
41 Laing, ‘The Obvious’.

44 R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York, 1968) p. 12.
45 Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, pp. 102–103.

faced with the everyday and institutional heterosexual bias of the world in
which they lived, were forced to make them their own.
For gay liberation, the Roundhouse’s hidden legacy played a more sig-
nificant role than either the 1967 Act or the Stonewall riots. In pragmatic
terms, many of those who were to become involved in the GLF had been
at the Roundhouse.46 Although as a discussion point homosexuality was
only tangentially present at the Dialectics of Liberation, the form and tac-
tics expressed there became central factors in the GLF. For example, the
GLF rejected any rigid structure and tried to undermine the sanctity of
the professional expert. Internally this meant that people in the GLF were
expected to take it in turns to chair weekly meetings. Publicly this meant
that the front relished challenging expert opinion with their own experi-
ence. Alongside the conference’s playful tactics, a democratizing anti-
structure became a motif in the development of identity politics. The
conference explored approaches that were then given a new impetus by
the gay liberation movement, particularly how to theorize agency that was
not based on class position alone. GLF also inherited the problems
caused by building a collective of individual identities. The liberational
chorus rapidly grew discordant. Similarly the relationship between long-
term utopianism and short-term necessity brought participants into con-
flict. A tendency towards abstraction grew out of the tension between
what was needed to improve individuals’ lives in the world as it stood and
what the world should look like ‘come the revolution’.
As with the Stonewall riots, the GLF in Britain is often seen by its par-
ticipants as bursting out and heralding the dawn of a new decade.
According to this interpretation, one decade began and another ended
when the London Gay Liberation Front was founded in a basement sem-
inar room at the London School of Economics on 13 October 1970.
However, many of the approaches, tactics, and attitudes that the GLF
made so much its own were direct continuations of and reactions to pre-
vious counter cultural and political experiences. Gay disillusionment at
the failure of the left and the reformist movement fused with a variety of
political expressions of discontent throughout Europe and America
under the counter cultural umbrella. One of the front’s co-founders,
David Fernbach, explained that the front ‘recruited mainly from that sec-
tion of the gay population that had already been touched, to some extent
at least, by either the ‘new left’ or the counter culture’.47 Fernbach him-
self had been on the board of New Left Review until disagreements over
editorial policy on China led to his resignation in 1971.48 GLF attracted
others from the anti-Vietnam-war movement, the new left, or variations of
46 Simon Watney, ‘The Ideology of the GLF’ in Gay Left Collective (ed.), Homosexuality:
Power and Politics (London, 1980) p. 65.
47 David Fernbach, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Gay Liberation Front’, Politics and Power, 2,
(1980) p. 170.
48 Duncan Thompson, ‘Pessimism of the Intellect: The New Left Review and the,
‘Conjuncture of 1989’’, Socialist History, p. 20 (2002).

458 Lucy Robinson
liberational movements, as well as hippies, dopeheads, the underground

press, the White Panthers, the International Marxist Group, the
Communist Party, Maoists, transsexuals, and rent boys.49 The London
GLF was particularly influenced by French situationism, Black Panther
Party intercommunalism and Spanish anarchism.50 Thus the GLF com-
bined a series of identifications and alignments that appeared untainted
by the assumed failure of traditional British left, and offered diverse
political forms and strategies.
However, ultimately these complex identifications came from similar
objective positions. Like participants at the Roundhouse, the constituents
were predominantly white, male, middle class, and financially independ-
ent.51 The GLF attempted to transcend the contradictions of such relative
affluence by concentrating on the liberation of the individual within each
and every section of society. Thus the themes at the Roundhouse were
also the central interlinked concerns of the GLF. The GLF Manifesto was
collectively produced and published in 1971. It listed the family, educa-
tion, and psychiatry among the principle institutions through which les-
bians and gay men were oppressed. It also argued that the initial step
towards liberation was to ‘free our heads’.52 These concerns were repro-
duced in the organizational shape of the front. This can be seen by look-
ing at four overlapping areas which directly relate to the counter cultural
concerns of the Roundhouse. The first of these is the personal and polit-
ical significance of Laing’s anti-psychiatry. The second is the GLF’s focus
on the childlike and the child as a way of rejecting the productive adult
as the epitome of social responsibility. Third, the GLF rejected rigid struc-
tures in terms of both organization and political practice, replacing the
traditional political meeting with consciousness-raising groups, and the
political party with communes. Finally the GLF developed a particularly
performative approach to political intervention by wearing drag in public
and using theatrical demonstrations and ‘the zap’ to communicate their
message.
V. When You’re Strange: The Offensive and Defensive

Role of Anti-psychiatry
The horrors of aversion therapy meant that the GLF’s rejection of norma-
tive psychiatric models was particularly strong.53 Thus, sharing the con-
cerns of the Dialectics of Liberation, the GLF addressed the impact of
49 Green, Days Andrew Lumsden quoted, p. 321.

50 Lucy Robinson, ‘Carnival of the Oppressed: The Angry Brigade and the Gay Liberation
Front’, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, 6, (2003) p. 3.
51 Birch, ‘Community of Interests’, p. 53.
52 GLF, Manifesto (1971) p. 45, London School of Economics, Hall Carpenter archive.
53 Joy Marcus, ‘Radical Psychiatry and Community Organizing’ in Claude Steiner (ed.),
Readings in Radical Psychiatry (New York, 1975) pp. 123–41; Jack Nichols, The Very First
History of the Stonewall Era http://www.gaytoday.com/garchive/history.htm, 2002
[cited 20 Sept 2002].

psychiatry and psychology in both populist and specifically medical

realms.54 Laing extrapolated from the experiences of individual patients
in order to trace the ways in which society restricted liberational poten-
tial. Similarly GLF members were also able to do this, utilizing their indi-
vidual experiences as both patients and employees of the health service.
In this context, anti-psychiatry had a threefold significance for the GLF: it
constituted a process of self-definition, a critique of health-care provision,
and self-defence.
In terms of self-definition, gay liberation rejected the over riding view-
point that homosexuality was a ‘mental disorder’ which could be treated
with ‘long periods of analytical psychotherapy’.55 Indeed anti-psychiatry
was so central to the liberation movement that, according Margaret
Cruikshank, it was through this rejection of analytical psychiatry that
‘homosexuals’ became ‘gay’.56 This emphasis was replicated in the GLF’s
structure. The front developed a Counter-Psychiatry Group to challenge
the ‘sickness model’ of homosexuality. The passive victim, lacking ‘auton-
omy’, was replaced with the activist. After all, it was ‘better to be bad
than mad’.57
The personal directly impacted on the public through the GLF’s cri-
tique of health-care institutions. While some GLF participants, such as
Wilson and Martyn, had experienced mental health institutions in a pro-
fessional capacity, others had been treated there.58 The GLF demanded
that the powers that be listen to those who had experienced these institu-
tions first-hand. They took their case directly to the higher echelons of
medical authority when GLF speakers were included in the agenda of the
Politics of Psychology conference at LSE, which attracted 400 partici-
pants.59 The front also demonstrated at the British Psychological Society
Conference and the Christian London Medical Group.60
Anti-psychiatry was also a position of self-defence necessitated by
specific forms of attacks on the liberation movement. As Laing had
suggested, by bringing together their institutional and personal experi-
ences of psychiatric institutions, by reading the two through each other,
the GLF were able to spotlight the hidden relationship between the
public criminalization of homosexuality and personal rejection by their
own families.
However, this was not just an experiment in counter cultural theory. It
also became clear that the use of medicine to curtail a wide remit of trans-
gressive behaviour was an acute danger. Laing and his fellow anti-
psychiatrists, such as Joseph Berke, argued that social deviance was being
54 GLF, Manifesto, p. 5.
55 Gordon Westwood, Society and the Homosexual (London, 1952) p. 157.
56 Margaret Cruikshank, The Gay and Lesbian Liberation Movement (London, 1992), p. 3.
57 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘In Sickness or in Sin’ Index on Censorship, 24 (1995) p. 84.
58 GLF, Manifesto p. 7; John Hoyland, ‘The Patients’, 7 Days (n.d.) passim.
59 Lisa Power, No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles (London, 1995), p. 305.
60 Power, No Bath, p. 312; Peter Tatchell, ‘This Is How It Started’, Pink Paper, 24 Nov 1995.

460 Lucy Robinson
pathologized as mental illness.61 Throughout the late 1960s and early

1970s a number of defendants in the counter cultural trials of the time
were submitted to actual or threatened detention in psychiatric units.62
Lesbian mothers lost custody of their children on the basis of
unfavourable psychiatric readings of their potential to bring up a
‘normal’ child.63 Such medical justifications for political actions added
grist to the mill for the increasingly vocal gay activists.
The GLF’s most successful and public anti-psychiatry campaign was
against Dr David Reuben’s book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about
Sex, But Were Too Afraid to Ask published in 1971.64 The book’s accessible
style helped it become the USA’s number-one non-fiction best-seller.
However, the content of the book brought about international condem-
nation.65 In terms of both his style and in the implications of his argu-
ment, Reuben was Laing’s antithesis. Reuben characterized male
homosexuals as consumed by a desire to be feminine (and frequently to
be female), incapable of any sustained emotional attachments and with a
propensity to sexual experimentation with vegetables and kitchen uten-
sils.66 As a response the GLF demonstrated against Reuben’s book in a cel-
ebratory rejection of traditional forms of protest. Their protests were
irreverent and obscene. The participants revelled in performing their dis-
sidence and ‘zaps’ on businesses were designed to surprise and entertain
as much as to educate the public.
These zaps were the GLF’s take on a particular counter cultural style of
political process. The Yippies’ Jerry Rubin called these anti-demonstration
‘actions’, highlighting their potential for change, whereas British counter
culturalist Mick Farren called them ‘pranks’, highlighting their form over
their possibilities.67 The ‘zap’ has a particularly gay epistemology. The Gay
Activist Alliance, a New York group that took on the more radical aspects
61 Cooper, Dialectics, pp. 17 and 9; Berke, ‘Anti-psychiatry’ passim.

62 For example, Richard Neville was held for psychiatric assessment during the Oz
obscenity trial (Richard Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, London, 1995, p. 334). Similarly
Hilary Creek was held in a mental health care institution during her trial for terrorist
activity relating to the Angry Brigade bombings (Martin Bright, ‘Look Back in Anger’,
Observer Magazine, 3 Feb 2002, p. 21; Robinson, ‘Carnival’ p. 6). Wally Hope, who
organized the first Glastonbury Fair, spent prolonged periods of time in mental health
institutions and eventually died as a result of the heavy medication he was under. This
was widely believed to have been a form of state retribution for his role in counter
cultural transgression (Penny Rimbaud, Shibboleth: My Revolting Life Edingburgh, 1998,
p. 145).
63 Psychiatry and the Homosexual: A Brief Analysis of Oppression, Gay Liberation Pamphlet no.
1 (London, 1973) p. 3; Sue Allen and Lynne Harne, ‘Lesbian Mothers: The Fight for
Child Custody’ in Bob Cant and Susan Hemmings (eds), Radical Records (London,
1988) pp. 181–94.
65 Eg. Xaviera Hollander, Xaviera! (London, 1973) p. 15; Gore Vidal, ‘Doc Reuben’ in
Gore Vidal (ed.),United States: Essays, 1952–1992 (New York, 1993) p. 570.
66 David Reuben, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (London, 1971) passim.
67 Jerry Rubin, Do It! (New York, 1970) p. 20. Mick Farren, ‘Frost and Benn, the Flowerpot
Men’, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (unpublished:
http://www.arsydd.btinternet.co.uk/frostbenn.html, 2002).

of the original GLF, named their actions zaps, as did the British GLF.68
For the gay and lesbian activists, the tactic was based on ‘personally
confronting [their] oppressors, but . . . [without resorting] to violence’.69
Publicly playful attacks exposed the emperor’s new clothes of the state,
respectability, and responsibility. Using humour and theatre, these
colourful and joyous protests were politically serious in intent. Their role
was two fold, both to confront the enemy and to build up the morale and
group-identification of the allies.
In Britain, the GLF’s Counter-Psychiatry Group sent its first warning
letter to Reuben’s British publishers, W.H. Allen, on 8 February 1971. On
12 February the front presented a petition with 158 signatures to the pub-
lishers.70 The campaign gained widespread press coverage as the GLF
leafleted the book’s main stockists, W.H. Smith, destroying promotional
displays of the book and inserting bogus pages. One insert was a forged
letter from the publishers offering a full refund to anyone not satisfied
with the book. Others warned that the book was ‘poison . . . inaccurate
hysterical and dangerous’ or that the ‘book did not represent the major-
ity of medical or psychiatric opinion’.71 In reaction to the book’s assertion
that gay men performed obscene acts with vegetables, a 12-foot cucumber
was delivered to the publisher’s managing director.72 The publishers
relented and offered to publish a GLF critique of the book.73 However, in
accordance with the GLF’s fluid approach to organization, it was never
written.
VI. Freeing the Child: The Carnival Rejection of Rationality
The rejection of patriarchal authority combined anti-psychiatry with

the refusal to be co-opted into adult (hetero)sexuality. Liberationists
therefore celebrated the childlike as part of their rejection of both the
ideology and the structures of normative sexuality.
This was in many ways a particularly wilful reading of Laing’s argu-
ments. Laing had extended the hyper-individualization of the mental
health patient outwards into a far-reaching critique. His description of the
pathologized individual offered a particularly powerful and attractive cri-
tique for the homosexual activists of the early 1970s in terms of its impli-
cations for the family and for the wider context.
68 The GAA was a direct action group set up in December 1969 by members leaving the
original New York GLF because they wanted to focus on politics related directly to gay
and lesbian issues. Arthur Evans, GAA & the Birth of Gay Liberation,
http://www.gaytoday.com/garchive/history.htm, 1999 [cited 12 Sept 2002].
69 Evans, GAA.
70 Power, No Bath p. 57.
71 Power, No Bath.
72 Outrage! obituary of Martin Roger Corbett, 13 July 1999,
http://www.outrage@smml.demon.co.uk [cited 1 Sept 2002]; Tatchell, ‘This Is How It
Started’.
73 Power, No Bath, p. 59.

462 Lucy Robinson
Sue Miles pointed out this process of appropriation to Jonathon

Green. She felt that ‘[o]ne of the bad things [at the Dialectics
of Liberation Conference] was that a lot of people who preached Laing
didn’t understand him and there was this idolisation of a figure who
might be called ‘The Holy Fool’, the madman made saint’.74
The unsocialized subject became an icon at the heart of the counter
culture’s challenge to the status quo and the orthodox left. The counter
culture’s playful performativity rejected the rationality of the adult world
and the workday week, replacing it with a celebration of irrationality
through the image of the fool or the child.75 Therefore within the
counter culture generally, but especially within the gay liberation move-
ment, the holding of a position of pariah, victim, or outsider became a
political activity in itself.76
The GLF’s rejection of patriarchal masculinity was a particularly politi-
cized form of the counter cultural rejection of adulthood. Anti-psychiatry
directed itself at the politics of the inner psyche and the structures of the
state. The GLF’s rejection of adulthood was both a reconceptualization of
the politics of agency and an attack on the structures of the heterosexual
family unit. Articles in the GLF’s publication Come Together explained the
way in which the childlike bridged both the form and content of the GLF
approach:
[W]e play games which ‘adults’ are supposed to have put aside with
their school uniforms: Oranges and lemons, Throw the ball and kiss
who catches it, piggyback rides, mazes. By these games we question
ideas of adulthood, maturity, the way responsibility is supposed to be
about seriousness, and the way spontaneous feelings are supposed to
be repressed.77
This critique of adulthood had particular significance because of its

implications for the patriarchal family unit. The rejection of the family
74 Green, Days, Suemiles quoted, p. 209.

75 See, for example, Alex Trocchi and Philip Green, Project Sigma: Cultural Engineering:
Manifesto Situationiste, 2nd edn (1964); Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, p. 408;
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky(Cambridge, MA, and
London, 1968); Richard Neville, Play Power (London, 1971); Alan Ginsberg, ‘Howl’ in
Judith C. Albert and Stewart E. Albert (eds), The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious
Decade (New York, 1986) p. 71.
76 This was, however, challenged, at least partially. Elizabeth Wilson acknowledged that
ultimately it was ‘difficult to disentangle authenticity from the pose’ (although this
statement maintains a problematic existence of an authentic to be disentangled and
valued). Widgery admired Laing’s ‘speculation into schizophrenia’ but condemned the
section of Laing’s theorization extrapolated from it as a ‘retreat into irrationality’
(Neville, Hippie Hippie Shake, p. 92). This retreat into irrationality held the negative
impacts of social structures (the obscuring of agency) upon an individual to be
potentially liberating. According to one-time student of Laing and anti-psychiatry
participant Berke, this political ‘hijacking’ of Laing’s theories out of their context led
the concepts to become ‘fuzzy and confused, almost devoid of meaning’, until
eventually Laing himself disavowed ‘anti-psychiatry’ as a term (Berke,
‘Anti-psychiatry’, p. 32).
77 ‘Gay Days and GLF’, Come Together 9 (1971).

and the movement towards the anti-family was at the heart of gay libera-
tion’s aims.78 GLF queen Edsel wrote in Come Together: ‘Deny [your par-
ents] obedience, passivity, confront their goddam decaying fantasy world.
Strike your fucking parents; they and their, you and your trashy sensibility
are my oppressors’.79
In terms of practical action the GLF attempted to invert their exclusion
from the family. In December 1971 they held a children’s Christmas party
in Notting Hill Gate in order to demonstrate the GLF’s commitment to its
local community. The front also attempted to develop a model with which
to replace the family – the anti-family of the commune.80 The communal
ways in which the GLF sought to reform the private structures of the
family will be discussed below, but this cannot be fully contextualized
without looking at the ways in which the GLF attempted to intervene in
public institutions of child-rearing.
VII. Growing up Gay: Gay Liberation and

Its Educational Structures
GLF’s plans for a new social order included the form and content of an
alternative education system, albeit one that was ultimately in keeping
with the heterosexual world – after all it gave primacy of concern to
nurture of the next generation. In 1970 Jerry Rubin called for the new
revolutionaries to burn down the schools.81 In Britain they were already
building new ones. Alongside the Dialectics of Liberation Conference,
earlier counter cultural and situationist experiments had attempted to
bring such plans into fruition. For example Alexander Trocchi’s situation-
ist manifesto Sigma published in 1964 and the London Free School in
Notting Hill set up 1969 called for new forms of self-created learning.82
Although these projects show the wider context of the GLF’s concern
with education, education and childhood had particular ramifications
when read through the politics of homosexuality. The GLF sought to
restructure the family’s social role according to its own political agenda.
This necessitated new processes of raising and educating the young,
blurring traditional power structures by configuring a parity between
adult and child. In practical terms, the front included a youth group,
encouraged self-organization of young people, and campaigned for non-
heterocentric sex education.83 The GLF insisted that a free educational
78 Dennis Altman, ‘What Changed in the 70s?’ in Gay Left Collective (ed.), Homosexuality:
Power and Politics (London, 1980) p. 53.
79 Edsel, ‘We Are Always Out’, Come Together, 4, in Walter, Come Together p. 65.
80 Carolyn, ‘Fuck the Family’, Lesbians Come Together 11, in Walter, Come Together p 156.
81 Rubin, Do It!, p. 132.
82 Green, Days p. 95; Rowbotham, Promise p. 117; Trocchi and Green, Project Sigma.
83 Youth’s self-definition took the logical step when the GLF Youth Group collectively
published their own issue of Come Together, no. 8, in August 1971. The issue contained the
groups’ own set of demands, which mirrored those of the GLF as a whole, although they
concentrated on family, communal, and educational issues (Tony Reynolds et al., ‘Youth
Group Declaration of Rights’, Come Together, 8, in Walter, Come Together, pp. 101–16).

464 Lucy Robinson
system should present the entire range of human sexuality, without advo-
cating any one form or style, and that schools should not foster sex roles
and sex-determined skills.84 The GLF’s interest in education also had spe-
cific significance for some of its participants. For example, Julian Howes’s
involvement in the GLF led to his expulsion from school.85
VIII. Come Together: Awareness Groups, Communes

and Hyper-individuality
The GLF’s form and structure challenged normative models of child-

raising and the relationship between the public and private. The GLF’s
rejection of rigid organizational form was similarly a development from
counter cultural experimentations and the Women’s Liberation
Movement. The experiments in organization seemed like a solution to
the anti-egalitarian structures of the revolutionary left and incorporated
the front’s challenge to the heterosexual family unit.
The Roundhouse and liberation movements generally attempted to
democratize the form of debate. Both the academic structures of tutor
and student and the leftist hierarchy of comrade and apparatchik were
rejected. Class position was replaced with a concentration on the immedi-
acy of experience. The Trotskyist left understood the working class as the
class who had both the power to bring about revolutionary change and as
the class in whose interests that change would work. For counter cultural-
ists and liberationists, class was not the only key to change. The objectively
defined agents of social, political, and economic change were replaced by
a collection of identities that ‘experienced’ marginalization and oppres-
sion. In other words, anyone who felt oppressed could change the world.
This position politicized a variety of practices that centred on the indi-
vidual psyche: consciousness-raising, hallucinogenic drug use, and sexual
experimentation. These were lived in combination with coming out and
most commonly took two interwoven forms: the GLF’s awareness groups
and communal living.86
IX. Awareness Groups: A Collectivity of Half-formed Ideas
The GLF’s Manifesto offered three stages in the development of a libera-

tional identity–come out, come together, unite with the revolutionary
84 Male Homosexual Workshop, ‘Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention:

Statement of the Male Homosexual Workshop’ in M. Blasius and S. Phelan, (eds) We
Are Everywhere (New York, 1997) p. 402; GLF, ‘Principles’, Come Together, 4 February
1970, in Walter, Come Together, pp. 48–50; GLF, Manifesto, p. 2.
85 The struggle to end heterocentric sex education in schools became even more
pertinent in the light of the ongoing debates over Clause/Section 28. Section 28 of the
Local Government Act of 1988 stated that a local authority shall not ‘intentionally
promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting
homosexuality’ or ‘promote the teaching in any maintained school the acceptability of
homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’.

peoples of the world.87 The awareness group as anti-family opened a

space to ‘come together’ by combining anti-psychiatry’s rejection of the
authoritative therapist with grass-roots organization.88 Consciousness-raising
developed via the international Women’s Liberation Movement. As
outlined by the Danish Redstocking group in their manifesto of July 1969,
‘Consciousness-raising [wa]s not “therapy”’ it was the method by which
members could ensure that their personal was truly political.
Consciousness-raising as a political process was meant to break down
latent bourgeois consciousness.89 The groups took on American-style con-
sciousness-raising as used by the Black Panther Party and The
Weathermen.90 Thus while rejecting the leftist form of traditional meet-
ings discussing public events, the GLF’s awareness groups appropriated
the Maoist form of ‘speaking bitterness’ which they combined with a
concentration on personal (bodily) experiences.91 Awareness groups
were intended to reflect that ‘gay liberation was not something [the GLF]
did only on Wednesdays at the general meetings, it was rather a totally
lived-through experience’.92 They also expressed an obsession with
individual participants’ inner psyches.
In may cases the politicizing of the personal brought all sorts of
personal tensions to the fore. As an (anti)organizational model Sheila
Rowbotham explained that at its most successful the process of conscious-
ness-raising brought with it a ‘quietly co-operative atmosphere’ and
encouraged ‘half-formed ideas to be developed collectively’.93 This was
often a problematic process. Although designed to counter tendencies
towards ‘ego-tripping’94 the group was always just an ego away from disas-
ter. For example, Luke Fitzgerald was in a GLF group with Carl Hill,
Michael Mason, Jane Winter and Micky Sequira. They called it the ‘be-
wareness’ group.95 After all, ‘[t]he c-r approach . . . could go badly wrong,
when a consensus coalesced into a perspective which could be hard to
contest’.96 The front’s attempts at collectivity were meant to act as models
for ways of living outside of the heterosexual family unit. However, it was
impossible to wipe clean a consciousness as if it had developed in a differ-
ent, liberated, world. By blurring the public with the private, awareness
groups could justify personal animosity as political activity.
87 GLF, Manifesto.
88 GLF, Manifesto; Lucy Robinson, unpublished Interview with Luke Fitzgerald, 2000.
89 ‘Redstocking Manifesto’ in Robin Morgan (ed.) Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of
Writing from the Women’s Liberation Movement (New York, 1970) p. 599; J. Hole and
E. Levine, The Rebirth of Feminism (New York, 1971) p. 138.
90 Jonathon Lerner, ‘I Was a Terrorist’, Radical History Journal (Feb 2002) p. 24; Elaine
Brown, A Taste of Power (New York, 1992) passim.
91 Sarah Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement
and the New Left (New York, 1980) p. 214.
92 Walter, Come Together, p. 18.
93 Rowbotham, Promise, p. 230.
94 Aubrey, ‘The Importance of Participation in the Base of GLF’, Come Together, 1 (1970),
in Walter, Come Together, p. 69.
95 Power, No Bath, p. 127.
96 Rowbotham, Promise, p. 230.

466 Lucy Robinson
X. Communes: Living out a Dream
The GLF communes were where the process of awareness was most fully
experienced. They were also where the tensions around personalizing the
political were experienced most keenly. The Manifesto demanded the end
of domination of one person by another.97 The communards attempted
to realize this by sharing their living space and their lives. Through this
process they hoped to theorize a new relationship between the public and
private. The communes were a way of GLFers to form their own families,
and also to build an alternative to the family unit as the building block of
society. Carolyn, a contributor to a special lesbian issue of Come Together,
called for the GLF to ‘Fuck the Family’.98 George Lennox, a member of
the GLF’s first commune, explained the relationship between their anti-
family position and the building of ‘alternative communities within the
informal organization structure of a Gay micro-culture’: ‘[w]e intend to
work for the replacement of the family unit with its rigid gender-role pat-
tern by new organic units such as the commune, where the development
of children becomes the shared responsibility of a larger group of people
who live together’.99
A re-evaluation of private property and gender divisions followed.100
This extended to the sharing of clothes across the sexes and even offered
the possibility of gay men and lesbian women sharing sexual experiences
without undermining their sexual identification.101 Rather than rebalanc-
ing the male/female power disparity, GLF communes sought to break
down the relationships of gender altogether.
This restructuring of society through the domestic was not confined to
those for whom sexuality was the revolutionary starting point. Alongside
the ‘holy fool’ the counter cultural communards saw public retreat as a
political action. Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor explained politics’
retreat into communal living. Those who ‘abandon[ed] the world to its
own devices, . . . [attempted] to composite their whole ideology into a
viable entity capable of resisting institutionalisation’.102 From the outside
these retreats could be seen as ‘island[s] of deviant meaning within the
sea of society’.103 They became points of reference, but were inevitably
restricted by the ideological context of their own creation.104 Thus the
97 GLF. Manifesto.
98 Carolyn, ‘Fuck the Family’, p. 156.
99 George Lennox, ‘Getting a Gay Commune Together’, 7 Days, 18 March 1972.
100 GLF Notting Hill, ‘Happy Families’, Come Together, 15 (Notting Hill), in Walter, Come
Together, pp. 194–99.
101 Carolyn, ‘Fuck the Family’, GLF Notting Hill, ‘Getting Down to the Nitty-Gritty’, Come
Together, 15 (Notting Hill), in Walter, Come Together, pp. 203–207; GLF Notting Hill,
‘Happy Families’, pp. 194–99.
102 Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor, Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to
Everyday Life (London, 1976) p. 149.
103 A. Rigby, Alternative Realities: A Study of Communes and Their Members (London, 1974)
p. 65.
104 David Pepper, Communes and the Green Vision: Counter-Culture, Lifestyle and the New Age
(London, 1991) p. 32.

tensions that surrounded the utopian rehearsals were compounded by

the tensions within them.
For many the intricacies of interpersonal issues over shared living
space brought with them experiences that were far from liberating. As a
contemporaneous guide to alternative life in London explained,
[s]uddenly everyone is talking about living in communes . . . the snag

about communes, [is] that you must give up a fair amount of your
own individual freedom. . . . For all its faults, our ‘straight’ society
does provide a high standard of living compared with what one could
possibly attain in an isolated commune.105
Even more than GLF’s concentration on anti-psychiatry, these problems

exposed pre-existing inequality in the front and also raised questions
about the possibilities of living as if the world has already gone through a
liberational revolution. These attempts to restructure society from a posi-
tion that was still materially and ideologically informed by the wider world
combined with the interpersonal tensions that come with multiple occu-
pancy lifestyles.
GLF communards experienced the limits to creating a utopian oasis in
suburban north London.106 The Notting Hill commune had originally
been based in Brixton but had been forced to move after it come under
frequent physical attack.107 The new commune offered little refuge. As a
squat, it was brought under ‘virtual siege’ when the property’s owners, the
North Kensington Amenity Trust, resorted to violence in order to evict
the occuparts.108 As the bailiffs surrounded the house the squatters held
up signs that read, ‘We are twelve men. We are gay. We are a family’. The
squatters defended their rights to the home through their emotional
attachment to each other, saying that they were as close to each other as
a nuclear family. However, outside the commune the concept of a family
was not so easy to appropriate. The squatters were to be replaced by five
units for homeless families.109
Such self-defence heightened the tensions in combining life as politi-
cal protest with life as utopian expression. The tensions between levels of
collectivism based on individual experience became written into the
history of the GLF. Jeffrey Weeks wrote for Gay News:
Can freaking out, tripping and political drag really subvert society? It
might liberate many individuals from their personal hang-ups . . . But
its chief result was to turn many gay people inwards, to make them
105 Nicholas Saunders and Ann Cucksey, Alternative London (London, 1970) p. 77.
106 Bob Mellors, ‘Don Milligan: The Politics of Homosexuality’, Come Together, 16
(Manchester), in Walter, Come Together, p. 11.
107 Birch, ‘Community of Interests’, p. 54; GLF Notting Hill, ‘Happy Families’, pp. 194–95.
108 GLF Notting Hill, ‘Happy Families’.
109 ‘Charity Evicts GLF Squatters’, Gay News, 9 (1972).

468 Lucy Robinson
politically passive. Can a long individual ego trip contribute much to

the downfall of capitalism?110
These potential limits to personalized politics informed Week’s later

involvement in the Gay Left Collective, which went on to re theorize the
potential for class-based gay activism.111 The GLF Manifesto published by
the Gay Liberation Service in 1979 omitted both the section on commu-
nal living and on the family. This should not be read as an admission of
the problematic nature of the approach. When faced with the onslaught
of Thatcher’s family it seems that the GLF’s attempts to ‘fuck the family’
seemed beyond the pale to these particular editors, but a year later
Aubrey Walter gleefully included the passages.112
XI. Making a Show of Yourself: Gay Liberation

and Protest As Performance
According to the GLF’s attempt to re define the public and private it

would be inadequate to discuss the front’s politics purely in terms of its
domestic organization. The incorporation of a counter cultural approach
to performative political practice ran throughout the GLF. GLF structure
contained both a street theatre and formal theatre group. Thus, formal
theatre was utilized for, and blurred with, personal political action. As the
day-to-day was de-naturalized and challenged by rejecting respectable
adulthood, so were the traditional forms of protest, particularly the
marches of the workerist left. The two most striking examples of this for
the GLF were the marches against the Industrial Relations Bill in 1971
and for the Troops Out Movement discussed above.113
When not intervening in traditional forms of protest the GLF were
developing their own distinctive counter cultural style. The front’s alter-
native form of protest was inseparable from Laingian identification
outside of the adult world. The child/fool needed an appropriate
playground.
Alongside the campaign against Reuben’s book, notable and well-
reported zaps were carried out against Fleet Street journalists, the David
Frost Show, and the evangelical Christian movement the Festival of Light.
Women’s and Gay Liberation activists dressed up as nuns to confront
Wimpy Bar’s policy of refusing to serve unaccompanied female customers
at night. The ‘kiss-in’ replaced waving banners and signing petitions.114
Gender and identity became increasingly performed, not in the internal-
ized mechanisms as later theorized by Judith Butler, but as conscious
110 Jeffrey Weeks, ‘Ideas of Gay Liberation’, Gay News, 6 (Sept 1972).
111 Gay Left Collective (ed.), Homosexuality, Power and Politics (London, 1980). pp. 11–20.
112 Walter, Come Together, p. 21.
113 Robinson, ‘Carnival’ p. 5.
114 Power, No Bath, passim.

protest. However, just as the Dialectics of Liberation failed to revolutionize

self and society, the adoption of the child like led to a political impasse.
The GLF’s concentration on lifestyle politics ultimately came into conflict
with attempts to find a common ground with wider politics for change.
XII. What to Wear to the Revolution? Drag

and Disharmony in the GLF
The role of drag in the GLF performed society’s definition of homosexu-

als as ‘freaks’ for shock value.115 This was exemplified in a collective arti-
cle published in spring 1972 in the eleventh issue of Come Together.
Transvestites, it argued, could ‘teach the world how to have fun’.116 Mark
Thompson found this outlook in the radical drag groups that he inter-
viewed for his article ‘Children of Paradise’. Hibiscus, a member of the
Cockettes, a San Francisco collective from the late 1960s and early 1970s,
explained, ‘[i]nstead of dressing in drag, I was dressing more as gods. We
were all creating mythic figures’.117 The carnivalesque celebration of
cross-dressing as monde reversé was dragged into contemporary gender
relations. In its combination of symbolic and sexual resonances drag rev-
elled in what Simon Watney described in 1980 as ‘splendid alienation’.118
The rejection of gendered clothing was lived out to its fullest potential
and with the most far-reaching implications for the GLF by the Radical
Feminists (Rad Fems).
The Rad Fems were based around the Camden area of London and
sought to develop ‘a real attempt to explore the possibilities of an alterna-
tive sexuality in the glittering gender-fuck drag’.119 Despite later equations
of the term with feminist separatism, the Rad Fems were not necessarily
women, in reality the majority were men. In fact for the Rad Fems this
increased the authenticity of their politics. They believed that they lived
the revolution most intensely of all the GLFers. By re constructing their
own masculinity they had martyred their patriarchal privilege and were
therefore the vanguard of the liberation movement.120 As ‘gender-fuck’
communards their personal lives had completely become political action.
Keith Birch, a member of one of GLF’s non-Rad Fem communes remem-
bered the ambivalence surrounding them. He admired their ‘more chal-
lenging lifestyle’, but he was also intimidated by it.121 Despite GLF
concentration on non-hierarchical structures, Rad Fems’ actions were
115 John Phillips, ‘Coming to Terms’, in Bob Cant and Susan Hemmings, (eds), Radical
Records (London, 1988) p. 63.
116 Roz, Paula, Rachel et al., ‘Don’t Call Me Mister, You Fucking Beast!’, Lesbians Come
Together, 11 (January 1972), in Walter, Come Together, pp. 164–67.
117 Mark Thompson, ‘Children of Paradise: A Brief History of Queens’ in C. K. Creekmur
and A. Doty (eds), Out in Culture (Durham, NC, and London, 1995) p. 459.
118 Simon Watney, ‘Ideology of the GLF’.
119 GLF London, ‘Gay Pride’, International Gay News, 4 (August/September 1972) p. 9.
120 GLF Notting Hill, ‘Of Queens and Men’, Come Together, 15 (Notting Hill) (spring
1973), in Walter, Come Together, pp. 209–10.

470 Lucy Robinson
designed to intimidate. For example, the group accused editors of the

counter culture paper IT (International Times) of homophobia and
destroyed its offices.122 In the summer of 1972 The Rad Fems attacked the
launch of the Women’s Liberation Movement’s publication Spare Rib.123
Monty Python’s Graham Chapman was a supporter of the front and
provided much practical support for the group. However, he saw the in
fighting and concentration on consciousness as linked flaws. He told Gay
News that at a time when the GLF should have been ‘outreaching’ they
were looking inwards: they were ‘much too interested in themselves’.124
In contrast to the inward-looking men in the front, it seemed that for
women the front’s problems were encouraging them to look outside.
Gender apparently could unite women across differing tactical approaches
as well as across the reform/revolt binary: for example, in 1971 Liz Stanley
and Glenys Parry from the reformist group CHE (Campaign for
Homosexual Equality) co-ordinated the National Women’s Conference on
Homosexuality in Manchester. The conference produced a paper that was
structured as a dialogue between the reformist women of CHE and women
from the GLF.125 Two years later many women in the front were feeling
outnumbered and marginalized, and in January 1973 they broke away and
formed their own organization.126 For these women, separatism seemed to
represent ‘the centre, the beating heart, the essence’ of feminism and
might offer more coherence than the GLF.127 Although the women had
felt insignificant in the front, their exit had a major impact and ‘set many
people thinking of change’. They brought to a head a number of anxieties
that had been developing within the London GLF.128
Despite the awareness groups and workshops, members began to
increasingly vocalize their dis-ease with the form of GLF meetings. It was
felt that they encouraged anti-democratic (and patriarchal) tendencies.
Despite the attempt at egalitarian organization, it appeared that the per-
sonal had truly overridden the political. The personalities of certain
‘superstars’ meant meetings were taken over by the same individual obses-
sions week after week, stifling initiative and creating a passive audience.129
The Rad Fems’ vehement conviction meant that other people found it
increasingly difficult to communicate differing opinions to them.130 As
122 Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette, p. 296.

123 GLF London, ‘Gay Pride’; Denis Lemon, ‘Spare Rib Attacked – or When the
Communicating Stopped’, Gay News, 2 (July 1972).
124 Denis Lemon, Doug Pollard, and Martin Corbett, ‘Interview with Graham Chapman’,
Gay News, 4 (1972).
125 CHE, Homosexual, Bisexual, Transsexual Women Together, C.H.E Activist Paper (n.d.).
126 GLF, ‘Brotherhood’, Come Together (Camden) 13 (1972).
127 Janet Dixon, ‘Separatism: A Look Back in Anger’ in Bob Cart and Susan Hemmings
(eds), Radical Records (London, 1988) pp. 67, 73, and 75.
128 GLF London. ‘International Group’, International Gay News, 3 (May/June 1972), p. 10.
129 GLF Camden, ‘About Us’, Come Together (Camden), 13, (1972); GLF London,
‘International Group’, P. 1; Andrew Lumsden, ‘Parrot Cries’ in Bob Cart and Susan
Hemmings (eds), Radical Records (London, 1988) p. 200.
130 ‘Quaking in Our Platform Boots’ Gay News, 11 (1972).

the tensions in the front became more and more uncomfortable, many
concentrated more and more on the personal or social aspects of the
front, devoid of the political. Although GLF meetings had always been a
mixture of politics and flirtation, the personal overrode the political when
meetings increasingly became arenas for cruising and fashion display,
with the politics taking second place.131 This retreat according to gender
and away from the broadly political had specific ramifications at a time
when, not least on the back of the GLF’s successes, the wider world was
forced to confront issues of personal, sexual, and gender liberation.
XIII. Conclusion
While the Dialectics of Liberation was not a direct antecedent for the
GLF, the two shared an acute personal and theoretical relationship. The
GLF was forged through a complex series of appropriations and processes
of self-definition. The counterculturalists and the liberationists not only
overlapped in biographical terms, they shared the same concerns.
However, these concerns, such as anti-psychiatry, the family, and educa-
tion, had particular importance for the participants in the GLF. These
positions were not theoretical critiques of society, they were day-to-day
self-defence. Ultimately, the GLF foundered on the tension between the
short- and long-terms goals of the strategies that they developed.
Models of reformist and Trotskyist organization represented the legacy
of defeat and demoralization for gay activists; it was increasingly the
counter culture that offered ways of coming together and challenging the
world. The left’s failures to engage with the growth of liberational politics
for fear of diluting the importance of class brought together particular
counter cultural styles and concerns. Experience and subjectivity took over
from class agency, and a childlike performativity replaced tradition and
party structure. However, without the coherence of an overriding structure
tensions between identities overtook the counter culture. Alongside its
countercultural style and form, the GLF shared the inherent weaknesses of
a countercultural model. Like the Dialectics of Liberation Conference, the
GLF imploded around the myriad of struggling identities and agendas.
131 GLF London, ‘International Group’, p. 1.

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Cultural and Social History 2006; 3: 445–471

The gay liberation movement in Britain has been understood as

© The Social History Society 2006 10.1191/1478003806cs077oa

politics of the inner mind, and its tendency towards fragmentation

‘We used to think of ourselves as little clumps of weirdoes, but now

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

Theodore Roszak’s definition of the counter culture highlights the

The counter culture is the embryonic cultural base of New Left

The Dialectics of Liberation Conference held in London in 1967 offers a

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

London formation of the organization.

Radical Records (London, 1988), p. 57.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

split it in 1956. Reactions to Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and the

I. A Very British Campaign: From Wolfenden Report

The publication of the Wolfenden Report galvanized a number of

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

merchant navy could legally have homosexual relations as long as it was

II. Cancaning into Power: Gay History and Stonewall

Silenced from mainstream history and marginalized within radical politi-

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

III. Personally Liberated: The Dialectics of Liberation Conference

22 George Chauncey, Gay New York (New York, 1994) passim.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

The Roundhouse was well established as a counter cultural centre and

25 M. Farren, Give the Anarchist a Cigarette (London, 2001) p. 72.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

33 Terry Eagleton, The Gatekeeper: A Memoir (London, 2001), pp. 97–8.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

and ideologically informed by these positions. Despite the conference’s

36 Emmett Grogan, A Speech: Dialectics of Liberation [speech from Dialectics of Liberation

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

is an interlaced set of contexts, of sub-systems interlaced with other

Furthermore, for Laing, the centrality of individual liberation came with

IV. Come Out: Gay Liberation and its Precedence

While a failure in its own terms, the Roundhouse conference brought

41 Laing, ‘The Obvious’.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

liberational movements, as well as hippies, dopeheads, the underground

V. When You’re Strange: The Offensive and Defensive

49 Green, Days Andrew Lumsden quoted, p. 321.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

psychiatry and psychology in both populist and specifically medical

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

pathologized as mental illness.61 Throughout the late 1960s and early

61 Cooper, Dialectics, pp. 17 and 9; Berke, ‘Anti-psychiatry’ passim.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

VI. Freeing the Child: The Carnival Rejection of Rationality

The rejection of patriarchal authority combined anti-psychiatry with

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

Sue Miles pointed out this process of appropriation to Jonathon

This critique of adulthood had particular significance because of its

74 Green, Days, Suemiles quoted, p. 209.

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

VII. Growing up Gay: Gay Liberation and

© The Social History Society 2006 3 (4)

VIII. Come Together: Awareness Groups, Communes

The GLF’s form and structure challenged normative models of child-

IX. Awareness Groups: A Collectivity of Half-formed Ideas

The GLF’s Manifesto offered three stages in the development of a libera-

84 Male Homosexual Workshop, ‘Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention: