Gay Liberation in New York: year one.(PHOTO ESSAY)(Gay Liberation Front )

THE 1960'S IN AMERICA, when I was an adolescent, was a dark time for gay men. A man's life could be ruined if it were known that he harbored homoerotic desires, even if just in the head. In the political hysteria fostered by Senator Joseph McCarthy, gay men people were purged from government jobs and driven to suicide. Men who loved other men were incarcerated in mental asylums, castrated and given electric shock treatment.

Realizing what I wanted and was, I read all the available literature on homosexuality, most of which was ignorantly and viciously anti-gay. In college, my outlook was forever changed by reading Plato's Symposium (assigned in two different classes in my freshman year) and John Addington Symonds' A Problem in Greek Ethics. I came out sexually, and a lot of things happened. I got to know intimately the gay underground in Europe as well as in Boston and New York City. I attended a few meetings of homophile groups in Boston and New York, and I threw myself into the anti-war movement.

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When the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) formed in July 1969 in the wake of the Stonewall Riots, I was ready and waiting. The photographs reproduced here are from the first year after the GLF's founding. In retrospect, I only wish I had taken more, but when you're young and immersed in a radical cause, you tend to neglect Posterity.

During my first few months in the GLF, much of my time was spent working on Come Out!, the first publication of the group. The photo here shows some of the original Come Out! staff. I was on the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee (CSLDC), which planned the first gay pride march, which took place on June 28, 1970. For the first few blocks, as we marched from Sixth Avenue to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, there were perhaps 2,000 people, but as the march proceeded, thousands more joined us from the sidewalks. All along the way, people cheered us from the sidewalks and from windows and terraces of apartment buildings. I'll never forget the joy and exuberance of the people who had come out of darkness and into the sunlight to gather in the Sheep Meadow on this glorious summer day.

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