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I first learned about Stonewall in WIN, the counter-culture War Resisters League magazine, and in March 1970 I began attending Boston's Student Homophile League, whose Wednesday night political group quickly evolved into Boston's Gay Liberation Front (GLF). Boston's GLF participated in its first demonstration March 15, 1970 (against paying taxes to support the Vietnam War), organized a community center, maintained a hotline and carried on wildly. The GLF group participated in the Black Panther's Revolutionary Peoples' Constitutional Convention (RPCC). The principles put forward at the RPCC conventions at Philadelphia in September and at Washington, D.C., in November drew on gay experiences and in turn provided direction for GLFs around the country.
In November 1970, having returned from the RPCC, Boston's GLF published the first issue of Lavender Vision, with a half lesbian/half gay male collective; most of the males working on Lavender Vision went to San Francisco. The lesbians wanted to use the name Lavender Vision (issue #2 came out in April 1971); a reconstituted male publication collective then adopted the name Fag Rag. Our first issue appeared in June 1971 in time for the New York Gay Pride march to commemorate the Stonewall Rebellion.
Fag Rag was one among a whole network of GLF papers: New York had Come Out; Detroit, Gay Liberator; Toronto, Body Politic; Berkeley/San Francisco, Gay Sunshine; Washington, Furies; Oakland, Amazon Quarterly; and many more. All these publications offered a brisk brew of sexual liberation, anarchism, hippie love, drugs, peace, maoism, marxism, rock and roll, folk song, cultural separatist, feminist, effeminist, tofu/brown rice, communal living, urban junkie, rural purist, nudist, leather, high camp drag, gender fuck drag, poetry, essays, pictures, and much more. Fag Rag continues to publish today.
We realized publication could be an act of liberation, an act of publicity for those outside the centers of power. Passive consumers of the various media came suddenly both to record and to create another reality. Even now the lesbian/gay liberation viewpoint is excluded from popular consciousness. Jill Johnston of Lesbian Nation wrote that the existing media provides "more an obstruction than a channel ... somehow the incoming information is blocked or distorted instead of passed through intact or at all. The media is its own agency, or else it's a...