Author Archive | Martha Shelley

1970 was drawing to a close when I got the call. A woman who I knew as a member of a radical feminist group summoned me to a meeting at their office. We were to gather on New Years Eve, wearing warm clothes and bringing sleeping bags if we had them. She wouldn’t say what […]

On September 20, 1970, a pleasant Sunday evening, we were holding our regular Gay Liberation Front (GLF) meeting at the Church of the Holy Apostles when Ellen Broidy burst into the room and asked for help. Broidy was president of the Student Homophile League (SHL) at New York University. She had run the two miles […]

1970 was a busy year for me. In addition to working on Come Out!, the Gay Liberation Front newspaper, and on RAT newspaper after we women took it over, I participated in numerous actions, including three building occupations. The first of these was on April 13, 1970, when I and eight other women barricaded ourselves […]

In February 1970, I joined the small band of women who took over RAT Subterranean News, an “underground” paper.1 Meanwhile I continued to write for, typeset, and hawk Come Out!, our Gay Liberation Front newspaper. But before discussing my experiences with RAT, I should tell you what I discovered in the ladies’ room at the […]

The Gay Liberation Front broke with its forebears in two ways. First, we didn’t give a rat’s rear end about being respectable. We didn’t want to move up in a system of hierarchical cruelties, we wanted to overturn it. Second, we made common cause with others fighting the corrupt and oppressive system. Like many members […]

As I’ve written in a previous post, traditional pre-Stonewall homophile organizations worked hard to present gays as respectable citizens and plead, politely, for acceptance into mainstream America. Tactics included writing letters, dialoguing with clergy and politicians, and the annual July 4th picket at Independence Hall, where women were ordered to wear skirts and men jackets […]

Election night, 2016 We’re strolling in San Francisco awaiting the election returns not wanting to wait for the bus gawking at modern forty-niners silicon miners so young so white so tall flush with hi-tech bucks and desperation. To stay in the game, to be seen as taller, better looking, young forever, they spend: here’s a […]

Around the same time when that first gay protest march took place, shortly after the Stonewall riots, we radical members of the traditional homophile organizations and gay members of leftist organizations began to meet at Alternate U., a free school on 14th Street. I brought the name “Gay Liberation Front” to the second meeting and […]

As soon as I saw the news about the Stonewall Riots, I phoned Jean Powers, who ran the NYC Daughters of Bilitis chapter, and told her that we had to have a protest march. She suggested that I call the Mattachine Society, the gay men’s organization. “If they agree, we can jointly sponsor it.” I […]

By the time I left Barnard, at the beginning of June 1969, I already had a new job lined up. I had already done a few weekend typing gigs for a woman named Virginia Admiral. Her shop, Academy Typing and Typesetting, occupied a loft in Greenwich Village. Hers was the kind of small business where […]