Author Archive | Martha Shelley

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 […]

I knew nothing about Barnard’s history and internal politics when I fell into a secretarial job there—but over that one academic year, I learned plenty. The one thing I’d guessed correctly about Miss Palmer, my boss at the college, was that she hailed from the Midwest. She was from Omaha. During the next few months […]

This continues a story about those older women (and one young man) who encouraged me along the path to gay activism. I had no idea what I was getting into when Miss Palmer hired me. The employment agency had sent me to Barnard College, and when I landed the job, Barnard took their $300 fee […]

In the tumultuous few years before the Stonewall uprising, I met several older women who pushed me toward the gay activism that became central to my life after the riots. We may also perceive a disturbing parallel between those times and the present. By the summer of 1965 I had my B.A. and a reasonably […]

In 1953 I was 10 years old. My family lived in Brooklyn. We couldn’t see the stars there, but in the summer, when we went to the Catskills, they were glorious. In the winter my favorite weekend expedition was a trip to the Hayden Planetarium for the star show. Before and after the show, I […]

When I was 19, I disarmed a schizophrenic woman with a knife. I’m a small person, about 5’4” at that time, with no special training. If I had been trained as an officer of the law I would have shot her. It seems to me that our police departments do not require a wide vocabulary […]

This Pride Week, the New York Times published a belated obituary of a lesbian who died in 1988. It was part of a series called “Overlooked No More.” Here’s how they describe the series: Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times. This month, […]

Today I’m turning this space over to Andrea Gourdine, who lives with her wife in a retirement community in California. A mutual friend sent me this article. Ms. Gourdine doesn’t have a wide audience of her own, but what she says here is more important than anything I could say on the matter. I’m hoping […]