PBS Documentary Gay Pioneers Premieres

ilmmaker Glenn Holsten’s Gay Pioneers is premiering in Philadelphia Friday, May 4 at WHYY-TV, 150 North Sixth Street at 7:30 p.m.

Holsten’s film gives effective testimony to a little-known fact about the activist origins of U.S. gay and lesbian history, namely that prior to the Greenwich Village Stonewall uprising of 1969 there were already in progress organized public gay movement civil rights demonstrations which, Gay Pioneers reveals, took place as early as April 17, 1965.

Frank Kameny, the father of gay activist militancy, which first emerged in Washington, D.C, http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/interview/120199in.htm explains how in late Spring 1969 appeals were made to lesbians and gay men—on leaflets inviting them to picket July 4 at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Since these leaflets had circulated in Greenwich Village shortly before the Stonewall rebellion, Kameny argues persuasively, they loosed thereabouts an impetus to direct action in the struggle for equality.

In Gay Pioneers, Dr. Kameny is shown saying:

"I feel those demonstrations created the mind set without which Stonewall would have been impossible, the mind set of gay people publicly demonstrating on their own behalf, which was not thought of before."

Conservative movement critics active in the various independent chapters of both the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis were horrified by unapologetic militants such as was Kameny. Barbara Gittings, active in the gay civil rights movement since 1958, confirmed to me that the bold women and men who picketed were often regarded by conservative movement members as behaving like "unwashed rabble." My interview with Barbara Gittings:
http://www.nycny.com/columns/nichols/nichols04-30-01.html

Both Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings are celebrated and remembered in Gay Pioneers as are Randolfe Wicker, Kay Tobin Lahusen, Nancy Tucker and myself.

Seeing a 15-minute promo for this film I wasn’t surprised about its superb quality after having met Glenn Holsten, who conceived and created it. I knew almost right away that he was a very bright artist. That he had a certain genius, in fact.

Along with me, the late Lige Clarke, my lover, conceived and organized--under the auspices of the Mattachine Society of Washington--the first demonstration at the White House. Just seven men and three women took part on April 17, 1965. Clarke, who a decade later was gunned down at a mysterious roadblock, had, prior to his murder, co-authored/edited books as well as the Manhattan-based GAY, America’s first weekly newspaper. http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/people/112999pe.htm

Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen have been life partners and movement co-workers for nearly four decades. In May, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation will present Gittings with an award for her lifetime of activism. In 1972, Kay Tobin Lahusen wrote a groundbreaking book, The Gay Crusaders with details confirming the accuracy of Holsten’s Gay Pioneers. She was also the movement’s pioneering photo-journalist.

Lilli Vincenz, who, in the mid-1960s had edited The Homosexual Citizen for the Washington Mattachine Society, tells interviewer Holsten that her participation in the first picket had been one of the two proudest days of her life. My interview with Lilli Vincenz:
http://www.nycny.com/columns/nichols/nichols9-3.html

Randolfe Wicker, the present day founder of the world’s first pro-human cloning activist group, has been filmed in Gay Pioneers in his Greenwich Village antique lamp shop. Wicker was the first media whiz kid of the movement, appearing on both TV and radio in the early 1960s. My interview with Wicker is also available: http://www.nycny.com/columns/nichols/nichols02-16-01.html

Glenn Holsten’s Gay Pioneers is a very special kind of experience for me. Fate has arranged my life, it seems, so that I’ve been united—nearly 40 years later in this film—with my ‘other family’ those wonderful, interesting early birds with whom I was privileged to work, all of us enjoying a mutual esteem while struggling to build a social and civil rights movement, one that’s more than left its print on the shifting sands, I’m happy to say."

Be sure to call your local PBS-TV affiliate after May 4 and find out when Gay Pioneers will air in your neighborhood.

Oral Majority Online: www.oralmajorityonline.com

Jack Nichols is the author of The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists (Prometheus Books, 1996) Of Men’s Liberation: A New Definition of Masculinity (Penguin Books, 1975) and of Welcome to Fire Island: Visions of Cherry Grove and The Pines (St. Martin’s Press, 1976)

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