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CHAPTER 1

REIMAGINING GAY LIBERATION

Arising in the late 1960s, gay liberation sparked the exponential growth of gay institutions and services, including those for health. As a movement, gay liberation championed and personified a militant gay and lesbian politics that redirected the blame for homosexual oppression to society rather than to homosexuals themselves and celebrated gay and lesbian sexuality. Taking advantage of diminished policing of gay spaces and a larger political context that challenged the status quo, gay liberation embraced the concept of “gay is good,” a complete shift from earlier political and medical framings of homosexuality. The movement also witnessed the proliferation of businesses, newspapers, and social outlets by and for gay communities in cities across the country. Nevertheless, it was local politics, activists, and contexts that directed the evolution of these services and institutions more than any national gay liberation movement or politics. Indeed, the gay health activism of the 1970s demonstrates that gay liberation played, at times, only a minor role in the development of gay health services and the resulting gay institutions.

Among gay health activists and in the clinics they started, gay liberation rarely conformed to the imagined history common in today’s LGBTQ communities, which homogenizes and romanticizes 1970s gay experiences by suggesting that gay urban communities across the country acted similarly, held shared beliefs, and deployed common tactics to fight the same battles. Gay liberation as a cultural and political movement mattered as gay communities began to take on new shapes and meanings in the 1970s, and gay health activism does not discount its significance. The history of gay health activism, however, demands a reimagining of gay liberation, replacing the national movement with local examples of vaguely similar rhetoric sculpted by local contexts. This new vantage point provides a richer and more accurate understanding of the meanings of gay liberation while also revealing that many organizations and services that came to epitomize gay liberation were only gay through circumstance.

“Already Part of the We”

In Boston, gay liberation appears as only a tangential factor in the Fenway clinic’s origins and early growth. Rather, it was locally oriented opposition to gentrification that unified the neighborhood and propelled its activism. After the city approved the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s Fenway Urban Renewal Project in 1965 and began razing portions of the neighborhood in late 1967, local residents created a wide array of social services to unify the community and resist the Redevelopment Authority’s plan.¹ Along with a food co-op, a newspaper, a childcare center, and a community playground, a small clinic emerged as yet another form of resistance through community building. The thinking behind these enterprises was simple: if the Boston Redevelopment Authority wanted to redevelop the neighborhood through razing, residents sought to revitalize the neighborhood themselves, eliminating the need to raze. They took advantage of federal funding through Great Society programs and deftly used photo opportunities and political optics to make destroying the neighborhood unsavory for local politicians. Thus, on a summer evening in 1971, the first in a long line of Fenway residents in need of medical care arrived at the Boston Center for Older Americans, a senior drop-in center located on the neighborhood’s eastern edge operated by the First Church of Christ, Scientist. Clinic cofounder David Scondras had decided to use the center’s space for an after-hours community clinic despite the Christian Science church’s teachings that members should maintain their physical and mental health through the use of prayer rather than medicine. Unbeknownst to center management or church officials and with the Black Panther Clinic as a model, Scondras, with the help of nursing graduate student and Fenway resident Linda Beane, began offering health services to Fenway residents, including gay-friendly VD testing to the resident gay community.²

Scondras, a recent Harvard graduate, antiwar activist, and computer pro grammer, had come to live in the neighborhood while working as an economics instructor at Northeastern University on the neighborhood’s eastern border. In the Fenway, he continued his work in the antiwar movement that had begun at Harvard and took the job at the Center for Older Americans as a way to get to know neighborhood residents. At Northeastern, the young instructor and political activist with a bushy black beard befriended Beane, who led a student group that was dedicated to the community health movement and provided free medical care. A fellow Fenway resident and also a veteran of the antiwar movement, Beane applied her political acumen to neighborhood issues, including organizing Fenway residents at the area’s Westland Avenue Community Center.³

Tensions with the Church of Christ, Scientist and the rapidly increasing number of patients made it impossible for the Fenway clinic to operate out of the Boston Center for Older Americans for long. As a result, in early 1973, the group found and rented the basement of a small building, “a defunct antique shop,” with an alleyway entrance off Haviland Street in the heart of the Fenway neighborhood, to house a new community clinic.⁴ The basement on Haviland Street was a far cry from a clinic at the time Scondras rented it. As one activist reminisced in an interview, “They got my brother-in-law to be their pro-bono lawyer who got them their lease for a dollar a year.”⁵ Community members cleaned and painted the abandoned basement and constructed makeshift exam rooms, a filing area, a waiting room, and a lab. One remembered, “I helped with some of the physical stuff when they were building, putting some of the flooring down and things like that, which was all done by probably some people who knew what they were doing and most people who didn’t and were just helping.”⁶ They furnished the clinic with a hodgepodge of secondhand and donated furniture, including seats from a defunct movie theater on Boylston Street that served as waiting room chairs and medical equipment from a retired Back Bay doctor, and opened the clinic’s doors to the community in August 1973.⁷ Medical supplies were often “acquired” by volunteers who were also physician’s assistants, nurses, doctors, or medical students dedicated to providing free health care. A longtime volunteer physician at the Fenway clinic remembered, “I’d filch stuff from the hospital and bring it over.”⁸ Nearly everything in the clinic was borrowed, used, or homemade, but from its opening, it was busy serving the Fenway residents who oftentimes had limited or no access to other health care.

Figure 3. The initial main entrance to the Fenway Community Health Center was in an alleyway off a side street in the heart of the Fenway neighborhood. Fenway Community Health Center records, 1972–2007, M172, box 10, folder 27, Northeastern University Archives, Boston.

Far from being focused on the gay population, the Fenway Community Health Clinic, both in its nascent stage at the Boston Center for Older Americans and in its first official home in the basement on Haviland, reflected and served, according to its patient demographics, the diverse neighborhood residents. A third of the Fenway population lived below the poverty level, scraping by with a median annual income of $2,027.⁹ One reporter writing in 1977 described the area as a “low-income, low-rent neighborhood, its population of 4,000 is somewhat transient, consisting mainly of students, welfare families, young working people, and elderly people. It has long had a reputation for street crime, drugs, and prostitution and was once one of Boston’s more notorious red-light districts.”¹⁰ In a city infamous for its racial segregation and tension during the 1970s, the Fenway was a rare example of integration of not only blacks and whites but also a considerable immigrant, mostly Latino, population. Responding to the neighborhood’s needs, the clinic treated almost all nonemergency medical issues, from child immunizations, blood pressure tests, and the flu to testing and treating VD, pre- and postoperative care for most surgeries, and gynecological services.¹¹ A longtime volunteer physician described the clinic services as a “basically primary care model. If you had high blood pressure, you’d come in. If you had diabetes, you’d come in. If you needed an annual physical, you’d come in.”¹² While at the Boston Center for Older Americans, the clinic served a small but diverse population that included the elderly, women, children, and gays.¹³ After the move to the Haviland basement in 1973, there was more physical space and more volunteers to reach out to each of these groups specifically. In addition to its regular daytime operating hours, during which anyone could schedule an appointment or drop by, the clinic opened its doors to specific populations in the evening and on weekends, including a gay health clinic on Wednesday nights.¹⁴ The clinic’s services and outreach to these specific populations reflected the diversity of the neighborhood and illuminated the deficiencies in the existing health-care system of the early 1970s. However, gay liberation rhetoric and politics were just a faint background hum to the neighborhood’s chants against gentrification and for access to affordable quality health care.

Clinic board meetings, which were intended to include and galvanize the entire community, looked more like town hall meetings and easily lasted several hours, which undoubtedly made them inaccessible for some in the community with limited time.¹⁵ One resident described how meetings would last “anywhere from three to five hours; yeah, they were long. Most of us on the board with some exceptions didn’t have experience in health care, or the management of clinics or human resources … we were the blind leading the blind.”¹⁶ In the early years, anyone who was associated with the clinic (founders, volunteers, patients, or even just neighbors) was welcome to attend the meetings, create agenda items on the spot, engage in debate, and vote on any and all decisions.¹⁷ This democratic structure reflected the political approach of many young, New Left–affiliated organizations of the period and was meant to foster personal investment in the clinic and larger Fenway community in the face of the encroaching redevelopment.

The way in which services specifically for gay patients became established within this very open structure illuminates how indirectly gay liberation influenced the Fenway clinic and the tight-knit community it served. With the clinic’s dedication to serving the entire Fenway community (of which gay men were a small part), creating and maintaining a gay health collective to formalize the clinic’s already established treatment of gay men was relatively easy. A doctor at Boston’s Homophile Community Health Center, which provided gay-friendly counseling to gays from around the city, asked clinic cofounder David Scondras if the Fenway clinic could provide medical backup to his patients. Taking advantage of the open, town hall–style board meetings, Scondras pitched the idea in April 1974 and received a warm reception. The Gay Health Collective of the Fenway Community Health Clinic began offering Wednesday night sessions on May 22, 1974.

Neither the inclusion of gay services at the Fenway clinic nor their formalization in the Gay Health Collective’s weekly sessions should be mistaken for gay liberation activism. While a handful of the Fenway activists were gay, Scondras among them, few were explicitly out or active in gay liberation organizations, focusing instead on the antiwar movement or the struggle with the Boston Redevelopment Authority. In fact, those who had insisted on the inclusion of gay health services at the clinic’s founding were often not out to one another or the Fenway clinic community. According to Scondras, “It was sort of an unspoken thing. No one ever got up and said, ‘Hey, I’m gay.’ ”¹⁸ Shedding more light on the political affiliations of the Fenway clinic during this period, one activist recalled, “It never really became a gay anything, it was just a place where gay people came … you advocated for anybody who needed help … we never thought of ourselves as gay, straight, white, black.”¹⁹ From this vantage point, Fenway residents never thought the Fenway Community Health Clinic directly related to gay liberation, and neither did the clinic itself. Rather, the clinic was an embodiment of progressive New Left politics, including the antiwar, antigentrification, labor, hippie, women’s, student, and civil rights movements, which challenged oppression in all forms, including homophobia. The clinic and many of its activists appear as gay allies rather than as actually gay. In this way, the New Left political and cultural milieu appears a better political point of origin for the Fenway clinic than gay liberation. However, the existence and success of gay health services at the Fenway Community Health Clinic from its inception did make the clinic unique.

While Scondras, who couldn’t remember ever specifically disclosing his own gay identity to the Fenway clinic community, was central in creating the Gay Health Collective, Ron Vachon was, perhaps more than anyone, the “gay face” of the clinic.²⁰ Vachon was “the backbone of the thing … big, tall, strong, French Canadian, very gentle, but six foot three, bearded, probably could have been a professional wrestler if he didn’t go into medicine. He was working full-time at the Fenway clinic as a physician’s assistant and was gay.”²¹ While finishing up his degree as a physician’s assistant at Northeastern University in 1975, Vachon literally “wandered into the Wednesday night clinic for the first time because the man he was dating came in to pick up some files. There, he met then-medical director Sandy Reder, who on learning that Vachon was a physician’s assistant, put him to work on the spot. Vachon stayed to become part of the collective, and ultimately, the center’s first paid staff person.”²² He quickly became a leader at the clinic, even being considered for the position of executive director in the late 1970s, and always making sure that the clinic considered and met the medical needs of the gay community.²³ In short, because they “were already part of the we,” already part of the Fenway community, a few activists who were gay were able to use the clinic’s organizational structure and mission to shape the services of the clinic and meet the medical needs of the gay community specifically without appearing to be outspoken gay activists.²⁴ Gay health services originated at Fenway as part of the clinic’s community health activism, not because of any specific gay organizing. In this way, both the activists and the clinic itself have a very different relationship with the closet—they were more in the closet or at least downplaying their gay affiliations—than appears typical in the existing history of out and proudly vocal gay institutions of this period.

Boston’s gay population welcomed the opening of the Gay Health Collective at the Fenway for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it offered the only local, free, gay-friendly health services, which allowed gay men to avoid the ridicule they faced in many public clinics, the price gouging that was common in private doctors’ offices, and the inherent risks of using medical insurance.²⁵ Moreover, the clinic was within less than a five-minute walk from the eastern border of the Fens cruising grounds, which made it an ideal location for gay men to stop in and get tested on their way either to or from the park. A volunteer doctor of the Gay Health Collective, himself a gay man, described his patients as “college kids, young adults, the bartenders … just the panoply of gay people as gay people were defined in the 70s. There definitely would be a mix of a stockbroker or lawyer, but not so many.”²⁶ Another volunteer remembered, “I think we were caught off guard by the deluge of students and young folks that came for sexually transmitted diseases.”²⁷ Word of the Fenway clinic’s gay-friendly services quickly spread throughout the city’s gay population via word of mouth, flyers in bars, and ads in Gay Community News. Shortly after its opening, the Wednesday night Gay Health Collective saw gay patients from all across the city and region. The clinic and its staff viewed and presented its gay services as a subsidiary to the larger mission of serving the neighborhood and providing low-cost, high-quality care, allowing it to remain a strong gay ally, but not actually gay. Regardless, it secured the Fenway clinic’s position as a new Boston gay institution among the city’s gay community.

VD screening and treatment for gay men began as one of nearly a dozen other programs run out of the clinic, aiding gay residents and quickly drawing gay clients from across the region. While the clinic quickly earned a reputation within the gay community as the gay clinic in town, it saw its services for gay clients as just another small piece of its offerings and distanced itself from close association with gay liberation or gay identity. A dozen years later, the clinic found itself on the frontlines of the AIDS crisis, on the cutting edge of gay and lesbian health services and research, and welcoming doctors and scientists from Harvard and the Centers for Disease Control in search of expert advice. While the Fenway clinic’s legacy grew from its relationship to gay and lesbian health, that relationship took nearly a decade to truly blossom, and its roots originate in the wreckage of the eastern Fenway and the resultant antigentrification activism.

Front and Center

While gay liberation rhetoric and politics factored minimally in the creation of Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, they proved a driving, and politically radical, force in Los Angeles. In November 1969, the recently formed Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front (GLF) sublet a small office at one of the major intersections on the Silver Lake neighborhood’s western border, a space that had most recently served as area headquarters for the Peace and Freedom Party in the local political elections, for which a GLF activist had volunteered.²⁸ The GLF sought to revolutionize society’s sexual norms through many forms of activism as well as through gay community building. The office served as a drop-in center and meeting place for gay liberationists, but also, in the smaller of its two rooms, housed a gay helpline. As the Los Angeles GLF was, in late 1969 and early 1970, one of only a handful of telephone listings in the country with the word “gay” in its name, it became a lifeline of sorts for gay people across the country. On most nights, volunteer Don Kilhefner sat in his sleeping bag in the small back room with the phone receiver pressed against his ear. He later recalled, “Starting around eleven o’clock/eleven thirty the calls would come in from [the East Coast] and just roll across the country by time zone so that by about two or three o’clock in the morning I was putting down the phone and getting some sleep. I listened for a year, thirteen months, to these calls. ‘I have an alcohol problem, I have a drug problem, I lost my job because I’m gay’ … from A to Z, there they were, every night.”²⁹ With every call, Kilhefner saw the relationship between the oppression of gay people and “sickness” grow stronger, as their oppression resulted in physical, mental, and financial problems.

In response to the growing list of gay issues illuminated by helpline callers and reflecting the political ethos and rhetoric of gay liberation in Los Angeles, Kilhefner formed the Gay Survival Committee, along with longtime activist Morris Kight, gay antiwar and union activist John Platania, and a handful of other GLF members who lived in Kilhefner’s housing co-op. Platania later recorded his thoughts on the extent to which the issue of survival permeated the gay community at the time:

Along with all the excitement, the activity, and celebration, we also began to see, see deeply, the kind of real human need that was in our community: the starvation, literally, the homelessness, the drugs, the alcohol, the disease. You know the plague is not new. It is not a stranger to the gay community. We have been dying for years of sexually transmitted diseases! For years and years before AIDS! We were dying of alcoholism and hepatitis before that…. There were no services; that’s the point.³⁰

During meetings of the Gay Survival Committee, Kilhefner, Kight, and Platania first theorized about the link between sexual oppression and gay health. They coined the term “oppression sickness” to better understand how the problems of the gay community were rooted in its oppression and to explore the ways in which homophobia literally made gay people sick.³¹ Oppression sickness encompassed physical, mental, financial, and political issues and ailments common in the gay community—issues like job loss, violence, depression, substance abuse, isolation, homelessness, medical malpractice, and self-destructive behavior. The oppression sickness concept pushed beyond the rigid boundaries of a medical understanding of health and illness and expanded gay liberation rhetoric to new terrain, blurring the lines between medical issues and political ones. From this perspective, fighting and curing oppression sickness would demand more than political lobbying and protest or doctor’s visits and medication. Rather, the gay community would have to mobilize on many fronts, provide numerous services, and address the larger systemic and societal problems contributing to their oppression.

Because oppression sickness included nearly every outgrowth of oppression gay people encountered, members of the Gay Survival Committee thought the most effective solution was to create a large social service organization that addressed all of these issues. The center would have programs attacking oppression sickness in every form possible: legal services for gay service members who had been dishonorably discharged because of their sexuality, pen pals for incarcerated gays who faced violence and injustice within prisons, employment training and placement for gays who were fired or who fled their oppression in school, numerous discussion and rap groups on coming out and raising political awareness, dances, temporary housing, substance abuse services, and a medical clinic, to name only a few programs.³² The range of services reflected the idealism and political commitment to radical gay liberation that shaped the Los Angeles political landscape. The site of the Watts uprising, home to a strong Black Panther, Brown Beret, and radical feminist contingent, Los Angeles provided a backdrop for a wide array of radical leftist politics in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In addition, Los Angeles had already had a long tradition of being on the cutting edge of gay political activism, whether as the founding site for the Mattachine Society of the early 1950s or as the location of the Black Cat riots of 1967. Inspired and fueled by the political activism and liberation discourse boiling over at the local level, the concept of oppression sickness proved captivating. With the help of John Platania, who at the time was a grant writer for a local nonprofit agency, by the spring of 1971 the countless discussions of “oppression sickness” culminated in a proposal of more than thirty pages, outlining needed services, management hierarchies, organizational charts, and a preliminary budget for a gay community services center.³³

A center of this size and magnitude would draw on a deep local well of gay liberation activism but would also require access to public funding and political support. Consequently, the proposed structure of the organization sought to strike a delicate balance between remaining true to the organizers’ radical politics and gaining support from the state. The resulting proposed organizational structure thus included positions common among professional nonprofits, such as an executive director, board members, and department managers. As Kilhefner recalled,

We wanted [the center] to look like nothing [funders or government officials] could challenge. We were the revolutionaries. We were the radicals. We were the people quoting Che and Mao. They did not expect that from us. We made a conscious decision that this would not be a consensus group. It would not be run like the Gay Liberation Front, where every month we elected a different leader and decisions were made by consensus. This was an organization with hierarchy, with defined positions, just like … the Red Cross.³⁴

This hierarchical organizational structure did, in many ways, clash with the political beliefs and practices of many of the contemporary gay and lesbian groups in Los Angeles. The GLF’s gay community center came directly out of a local political movement that not only questioned heterosexist society but regularly used the rhetoric of political and social revolution to create a defiant and celebratory gay community.³⁵ As one handout proclaimed, the Gay Community Services Center “is making it possible for heretofore largely powerless people to mobilize the power necessary to change our own lives, and, growing out of this, the larger society in which we live.”³⁶ In short, the Gay Survival Committee was attempting to attract funds and political support from the very society it sought to challenge, not unlike the Fenway community’s use of federal funds to thwart city plans to demolish their neighborhood.

Despite the community center’s conventional structure, the oppression sickness it sought to address resonated with the radical gay liberation rhetoric and politics in Los Angeles. The center would provide a place from which the gay community could attack its oppression and the larger oppressive society from many angles, while simultaneously creating a politically, physically, and mentally healthier community.³⁷ Armed with the lengthy proposal and the enthusiasm of other GLF members, Kilhefner and Kight rented a rickety old Victorian house at 1614 Wilshire Boulevard and formally opened the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center in the fall of 1971.³⁸ In keeping with their vision of the organization, the men immediately began the incorporation and tax-exemption processes, which lasted over a year.³⁹ At the same time, they remained dedicated to their radical politics by placing themselves at the forefront of public protests and actions. In describing the politics of the center once it opened and the fervor of its volunteers and patrons, Kilhefner reminisced, “We had picket signs, must have had one hundred picket signs, almost for any occasion. So somebody would call and [report instances of homophobia] and within twenty-four hours we’d have picket signs … picketing. We were fighting back fast and instantly because this was movement building for us, community building for us, consciousness raising for us.”⁴⁰ The Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center thus navigated the difficult path of being relevant to and worthy of support from two opposing political bodies, the state and the radical gay community. It was this combination that gave the center its distinctive character.

Beyond its emphasis on gay liberation, the birth and evolution of the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center also reflects the strong radical political tradition of Los Angeles itself. In the decades immediately preceding the founding of the center, Los Angeles was a hotbed for the leftist and communist popular front and proved fertile ground for a number of radical organizations, including the Mattachine Society, the first national political organization for “homophiles” that emanated out of Los Angeles in the early 1950s.⁴¹ Starkly different from the political culture of Boston, the Los Angeles radical political tradition primed both the city and activists for the work and vision of the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center.

A focus on health was central to the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center’s success in gaining political and financial support from both the state and the gay community, just as it had been for the Fenway Community Health Clinic of Boston. Among center activists and patrons, health embodied a wide range of issues that went far beyond physical illnesses and spoke to a larger political oppression. The state, on the other hand, had a very limited notion of health wherein statistics on disease contacts and treatments carried much more weight than talk of political oppression.⁴² The Gay VD Clinic was one of the few services within the Gay Community Services Center in which these two understandings of health overlapped.⁴³ The clinic consisted of a series of three rooms. The first was a small room on the first floor in which people could wait, and nurses could conduct intake exams. The second was literally a closet that volunteers had converted, by removing its door and installing a light, into a laboratory for drawing blood and taking swabs. The third room was a screened-in porch with sheets hung up to provide privacy for exams. Despite its ramshackle appearance, the clinic passed inspection in October 1972 and immediately began offering services.⁴⁴

Figure 4. The first Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center building was an old Victorian home in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, “Gay Community Services Center Brochure,” box 3, folder 34, L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center Records, Coll2007-010, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, USC Libraries, University of Southern California.

Dr. Ben Teller, an independently wealthy “hippie doctor” who had just moved back to the United States after working with the Centers for Disease Control in West Africa, served as the main point person for the clinic’s development and subsequent operation.⁴⁵ At the request of Kilhefner and Kight, Teller agreed to share his license and liability insurance with the center and was given free rein to build the VD clinic as he saw fit. He recounted his vision in an interview:

It would be a free clinic … run on donations … where gay people [men] could come and feel totally comfortable talking about their sexuality and … sexually transmitted diseases. They didn’t have to have any shame or reservation explaining what was going on…. The waiting room would be filled with literature that would be relevant to them … it would be a place where professionals and paraprofessionals as well as patients could be totally open and honest about themselves and therefore promote good gay health…. That was the vision.⁴⁶

Upon opening in the fall of 1972, the clinic came to embody much of Teller’s vision. The clinic was furnished with a “hodgepodge” of mostly thrift store purchases from the local Goodwill with a few high-quality pieces that had been donated by a wealthy contributor.⁴⁷ Licensed gay doctors, nurses, and lab technicians volunteered to staff the clinic, which was entirely volunteer-run for the first few years.⁴⁸ Teller offered, “The effect [of being able to work in an openly gay environment] on the professionals was I think as great as it was on the patients.” The willingness of everyone to work for free “testifies to the fact that the professionals were getting something out of it.”⁴⁹

The politics of the clinic were the same as the rest of the programs housed in the Gay Community Services Center—the Gay VD Clinic was designed to challenge an oppressive heterocentric society. Teller explained that opening the clinic was “a political statement that there was a need for this and it could be easily understood.”⁵⁰ In addition to challenging a heterosexist society and ignorant mainstream medical establishment, the clinic also fostered gay community building, both among volunteers and patients. The walls were covered in posters depicting two gay men in a variety of positions that read “Don’t Give Him Anything but Love,” and informational pamphlets covered the waiting-room tables.⁵¹ Signs that Teller hung prominently around the clinic pleaded, “This clinic runs on love and money, please give some of both.” He reminisced, “It was very much hippie and inspired, Gay Liberation Front inspired, hippie, I would say leftists, chaotic.”⁵²

Despite the expense to the early radical ideal of critiquing the state, the center’s founders argued that, in order to provide the services the community needed, government funding was essential. Local, state, and federal grants allowed the entire center to grow, even though it funded relatively few of the center’s expanding program offerings. Services like the men’s VD program, the handful of alcohol and drug programs, and the interim housing program that obtained and maintained government (municipal, state, and federal) funding also brought in the most donations from community members.⁵³ Thus, while government funds benefited only a small number of programs, the donation revenue those programs generated was then shared among all the center’s programs. The many rap groups and social events offered by the center required little in the way of funding, and many survived solely on the amounts allocated from the general donation funds.⁵⁴ As a result of the center’s many programs, it quickly became, according to one person involved, “a very, very active place…. I remember being in their big living room with at least one hundred people in there at any one time in the different rooms.”⁵⁵

Government funding allowed existing offerings to grow in size, strength, and quality. Within a few short years, the center outgrew the dilapidated mansion on Wilshire Boulevard, moving in 1975 to a new and larger location at 1213 North Highland in the gay neighborhood of West Hollywood.⁵⁶ By 1978, the center provided services to 13,600 people per month and obtained roughly $750,000 in government funding. The funds came from many government sources, ranging from local to federal, including the Greater Los Angeles Area Community Action Agency, the Los Angeles County Department of Urban Affairs, the United States Department of Health, the Los Angeles Regional Family Planning Council, and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act.⁵⁷ Part of the center’s success reflected its greater access to local funding through Los Angeles County than other gay clinic counterparts in other cities, but its intentional design as an organization that would be palatable and attractive to government funding at all levels was an even more important factor.

In achieving their objective of becoming a strong institution that provided a wide array of social services to Los Angeles gays and lesbians, the center’s founders were well served by their choice to seek and accept state funding. By 1976, the center consisted of three buildings: one for a temporary residential program for gay parolees, another for the center’s residential rehabilitation program, and the third housing the actual center. In addition, the center offered a wide and growing set of more than two dozen services ranging from health clinics to rap groups to job training and placement programs to a secondhand store.⁵⁸ In 1975 the center served over one thousand people. Patron demographics show that the center attracted people of nearly every age and race with roughly 40 percent of service recipients being female.⁵⁹ By 1978, the men’s VD clinic alone accounted for more than fifteen thousand visits annually to the center.⁶⁰

The center’s combination of radical politics and conventional structure proved a potent political elixir for Los Angeles because of the local political meanings and tactics associated with gay liberation. Bolstered by a radical, robust, and preexisting politics, the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center not only emanated directly from gay liberation but also embodied the local definition and tactics of gay liberation—to radically overhaul societal sexual norms through a wide variety of protests, services, and personal interactions to destigmatize homosexuality. This political framing would not have translated well to other places because it was either too gay or too radical, illustrating the importance of local context in understanding gay liberation as a political movement and rhetoric.

Tandem Activism

Neither background nor primary force, gay liberation factored into the development of gay health services in Chicago as a social and personal awakening rather than as the larger political movement characteristic of Los Angeles. In 1965, David Ostrow began attending the University of Chicago as a sixteen year old with little interest in political activism and an internal struggle with his homosexuality, which he described as “something to be overcome in myself … it wasn’t natural.”⁶¹ Upon arriving in the city’s South Side Hyde Park neighborhood, Ostrow pursued not only his bachelor’s degree but also set out on an academic path leading to an MD as well as a PhD in biochemistry. In the wake of a failed two-year marriage to his high school girlfriend, Ostrow, then immersed in his medical school training, finally came to terms with the sexual attraction to men he had felt since early adolescence, coming out as a gay man in 1972.⁶² In his limited spare time, he began to explore Chicago’s growing gay geography, visiting bars and bathhouses in the city’s near and far north neighborhoods. In these gay businesses, he found a surprising number of other area medical students representing many different medical colleges who often complained that “a lot of what was taught to us in medical school was either homophobic or was ignorant. So, a bunch of us said … let’s form a social organization to support us.”⁶³ Thus, a gay medical students group was born. The formation of the group was in many ways typical of the period’s zeitgeist, in terms of both student activism and a vibrant and growing gay community in Chicago. Ostrow recalled, “It’s what everybody [did]…. You fe[lt] isolated from other people with whom you share[d] an interest and you fe[lt] left out at your job or school or something and you form[ed] a … group.”⁶⁴

Equal parts social and professional support, the group quickly moved from simply supporting gay medical students to also addressing the health needs of gay patients. As they set their sights on offering accurate, nonjudgmental, low-cost, and gay-friendly services, the gay medical students group had only a vague understanding of the tremendous need in the gay community and all that offering health services required. Ostrow recalled, “We had no idea of how we were going to do it.”⁶⁵ The driving force behind their goals for gay health was a deep commitment to and love of medicine, rather than a political ethos, as in Los Angeles and Boston. For many members of the gay medical students group, medicine was not simply a career path or job, but a lifelong dream that, as they finished medical school, was becoming real. For those group members who went on to be central gay health activists in Chicago, a love of medicine, research, and science propelled them. In this way, gay health activism in Chicago combined both a passion for medicine and gay liberation symbiotically.

Among their initial efforts, the gay medical students group began educating area doctors and public health officials about how to better treat and engage the gay community—a decidedly different approach than the pickets and protests in Los Angeles. They created fact sheets, a very early and primitive version of the safe sex handbooks that would become common in the 1980s, which they sent to private doctors, city clinics, and gay men who called the group’s phone number asking for more information.⁶⁶ Through these fact sheets and a few speaking engagements they arranged at local medical schools, city clinics, and professional development meetings, other organizations and gay community members learned of the group, adding to its ranks and reputation as an advocate for gay people in medicine. By the spring of 1974, as the group began to explore offering medical services to the gay community, nurses, medical technicians, and older and well-established medical professionals had eagerly joined the group. One such doctor was Dr. Stanley Wissner, who offered that the gay medical students could provide services under his medical license and malpractice insurance if they could find a space for a clinic.

In May 1974, a gay social service organization in Chicago, Gay Horizons, offered the group the space they needed to expand their services to include testing and treatment. At that time, Gay Horizons was a relatively small and new nonprofit organization with big plans for expansion. At the start of 1974, it consisted of a one-night-per-week coffeehouse, a collaborative program with the local gay teachers association to help gays and lesbians earn their GED, and a weekly business meeting open to the community.⁶⁷ Despite its relatively meager service offerings at the time, the mission and vision of Gay Horizons put the organization on a trajectory toward growth and a wide range of programs similar to the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, complete with “a Community Center and a professional Counseling Service.”⁶⁸ The stated purpose of the organization, “to promote understanding and healthy development through assistance to … Gay people in bringing about an awareness of themselves as human beings and acceptance of their individual lifestyles, and an upgrading in the quality of their lives through the active promotion and support of specific programs to meet educational, emotional and social needs,” complemented the aims of the gay medical students group in wanting to improve health care and education in the gay community.⁶⁹ While Gay Horizons and the medical students group were mutually beneficial for one another, they also had very different interests and methods. Gay Horizons was first and foremost interested in creating gay community, which its structure and programs reflected, while the gay medical students were concerned with science, health, and medicine. Despite the culture difference between these two groups, the benefits of collaboration drew them to one another. Reacting to numerous requests and the gay medical students group’s growing reputation as gay medical advocates, Gay Horizons organizers asked if the gay medical students group would offer free testing and education during an organization-sponsored weekly coffeehouse event where gays and lesbians could gather, read poetry, and mingle in a space rented by Gay Horizons. With Wissner willing to assume liability, the free coffee shop space, and a group of medical students ready to volunteer their time and services, the student group began offering weekly VD testing. Even as the two groups had different, though complementary missions, a mutually beneficial collaboration grew out of Gay Horizons’ desire to expand into a full social service organization and the gay medical students group’s plan to provide VD testing.

Like the early days in Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic and the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center, the coffeehouse “clinic” reflected the needs of the gay male community, the relaxed regulation of community health services, and the entrepreneurialism of gay health activists of the period. One of the medical students group’s most active early members (besides Ostrow) was Kenneth Mayer, a medical student at Northwestern University. In just his second year of school, Mayer jumped at the chance to work with patients and volunteered weekly to do exams and conduct testing. He commented in an interview, “In retrospect this was something we would never allow now … because my training was minimal, I was really early in my medical training and the level of supervision was really minimal but you kind of quick-study. It was a really incredible learning experience.”⁷⁰ In 1980, after finishing medical school, Mayer moved to Boston, where he became instrumental in transforming the Fenway clinic into a world-class research institution. The casual, make-do approach to staffing permeated nearly every aspect of the clinic, which consisted of “a coffee pot, a portable kitchen table, [and] a room above an old grocery market.”⁷¹ Ostrow explained how the ethos translated into the health services:

Wednesday evening once a week … We were mostly medical students and a couple of residents and maybe a couple of actually licensed MDs. So we couldn’t really officially be a treatment site, but we would try to have a doctor there every Wednesday night, and if there was a doctor there he would write a prescription for medication. But if we couldn’t get a doctor there or the patient didn’t have money for the prescription, we would actually pilfer the medications from the stockrooms at our hospitals where we were training.⁷²

Mayer concurred, “There was a lot of begging, borrowing, and stealing,” just as had been the case in Boston.⁷³

Within months of its opening the gay health clinic also began to go by its own name, which reflected the mutual medical and gay liberation roots of group members: the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic. Howard Brown had been the head of the New York City Health Services Administration in the mid-1960s, charged with managing dozens of hospitals and clinics and thousands of employees before he chose to step down rather than be outed by an investigative reporter in 1967. From there he went on to join the faculty at area medical schools before he announced his homosexuality at a lecture at one such school in 1973. His coming out made the front page of the New York Times, and he became the highest profile gay medical professional in an era in which simply being homosexual was cause for medical concern.⁷⁴ Brown embodied the changing attitude toward homosexuality within medicine that gay health activists around the country worked toward throughout the 1970s.⁷⁵ In early 1975, shortly after the gay medical students’ clinic began operation, Brown died at the age of fifty of a heart attack. The students named their coffee shop clinic in homage to the greatest gay doctor activist of their time.

The Howard Brown Memorial Clinic grew, moving from its initial space in the Gay Horizons coffee shop above the grocery store in the fall of 1975 to an office in the La Plaza Medical Center that could accommodate increased hours of operation that spilled over into two nights per week.⁷⁶ Even with its successful diagnosis and treatment of hundreds of cases of venereal diseases, the work of the clinic was reactive in nature. Though gay men came to the clinic because they were, or thought they were, infected with a venereal disease, the majority of the gay community did not frequent the clinic. With his knowledge of social medicine, gained from mentors at the University of Chicago (which included social medicine authority Dr. Quentin Young), Ostrow knew that “if you want to rob, you go to banks because that’s where the money is. So if you want to get people and test them and treat them before they pass on VD, you go to places where they’re congregating … and having sex … you have to go to where the people are rather than wait for them to come to you.”⁷⁷ In other words, to make health care within the gay community more preventative, rather than reactive, and instill a concern for sexual health among the growing gay social and sexual culture, the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic needed to provide services and build relationships beyond the walls of the new clinic space. Here again, as the clinic sought to start outreach programs with gay bars and businesses to attract new patients and conduct research, the threads of gay liberation and medicine intertwined in Chicago.

Though clearly medical in its focus, the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic relied heavily on the city’s blossoming gay businesses and institutions to bring its services to fruition at first and to expand them. Its initial affiliation with Gay Horizons, along with the personal reputations of clinic activists, gained the clinic access and permission to conduct outreach in local bars and bathhouses. Even as a subsidiary of the larger organization, the clinic was largely autonomous. The medical students scheduled their own volunteers to staff the clinic, managed patient “files,” which consisted of hundreds of four-by-six-inch index cards, and ferried blood samples to city labs.⁷⁸ As their self-sufficiency grew, with the clinic leaving the coffeehouse venue for a larger, more conducive space that could accommodate increased hours of operation, the priorities of Gay Horizons and the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic diverged from one another. The clinic focused on medical services and research, and it grew exponentially in its first two years in patient numbers, outreach possibilities, and potential for scientific study.⁷⁹ True to his training as both a medical doctor and a biochemist, Ostrow began conducting medical research, proposing large-scale studies, and, later, publishing his findings to advance knowledge about gay sexual practices, medical needs, and effective treatment methods shortly after the clinic opened.⁸⁰ Meanwhile, Gay Horizons’ interests lay in building community and providing social services to Chicago gays and lesbians. It began in 1973 by creating a gay helpline and providing meeting spaces like the coffee house that also housed the clinic. Over the course of the next three years, the organization shifted its focus from building social community to also providing social support services like a youth program, peer counseling service, and a drop-in center.⁸¹ The inclusion of VD testing in the coffeehouse in 1974 speaks to the organization’s move to provide more support services to the gay community during this period. By 1976, Gay Horizons, in its service offerings, was reminiscent of, though smaller and without a large building of its own, the Los Angeles Gay Community Services Center. By contrast, the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic edged closer to being a medical clinic and research facility. The divergent missions proved grating.

A funding dispute in 1976 allowed the clinic to break away from Gay Horizons and create a clear set of policies and procedures that reflected its allegiance to efficient, high-quality medical care as well as to the gay community. The Howard Brown Memorial Clinic employed a very structured and traditional organizational model with a set board of directors, to which people were nominated, including officer positions of treasurer, secretary, and medical director, among others. The rigid and hierarchical organizational structure chosen by the clinic contrasts dramatically with the Fenway clinic’s original structure in Boston. In fact, also unlike in Los Angeles, there appears to have been very little debate of any other structure or alternative hierarchy for the Chicago clinic, illustrating the strong medical, rather than political, roots of the clinic and its volunteers.

In the place of concern and debate over organizational structures and everyday operations, the medical students and professionals of the Howard Brown Memorial Clinic, with Ostrow at the lead, almost immediately set their sights on medical research and quickly took up the mantle as the most research-focused gay community health clinic in the country. Ostrow and other medical students and young medical professionals like Ken Mayer created an ethos for the new organization that relied on medical training and scientific research to address the medical needs of the gay community. Ostrow and others also made sure that the clinic continued to provide free and sliding-scale services as a gesture to their shared political belief in socialized medicine. This strong set of guiding principles that focused on providing low-cost, quality medical care while furthering medical and scientific knowledge, remained the driving force for the clinic as it grew throughout the 1970s. While not completely in the shadows, gay liberation clearly acted in a more complementary or supporting role to the dedication to medicine that spurred gay health activism in Chicago. The social- and services-focused gay liberation politics of Chicago allowed the clinic to draw on gay liberation activism when it made sense to propel the medical mission of the clinic forward.

Boston’s Fenway Community Health Clinic, Los Angeles’s Gay Community Services Center, and Chicago’s Howard Brown Memorial Clinic each reflected its local politics and community much more than any national gay liberation movement. Even as each of these clinics became a gay institution that continues to thrive today, with strong ties to the gay community and national gay political efforts, they all began as precarious ideas designed to address particular local problems that were often only incidentally or tangentially related to gay liberation. From this perspective, “gay liberation” appears as a complex collage of gay people navigating a variety of local politics rather than as gay people across the country subscribing to and implementing a movement’s ideologies and tactics. The 1970s witnessed important shifts of gay physical and political landscapes across the country, but to understand these changes as coordinated or anything more than loosely connected with one another would be to misunderstand them and gay liberation more generally. While gay liberation played an important role in these clinics at times and in different, locally distinctive ways, proclaiming them an example of gay liberation oversimplifies their origins and misrepresents gay liberation. These clinics, though often cast as proud institutions of the gay liberation era, reflect a complicated time, complex people, and multifaceted local political contexts. From this perspective, the gay liberation movement is at once a cacophony of local politics, an ethos, a way of being that has gained much greater imagined clarity, uniformity, and power in the public’s hindsight than it ever demonstrated in any of these clinics.

This more dynamic, locally grounded understanding of gay liberation also allows for a decentering of gay liberation in the historical origins of gay services and institutions. While tracing the points of intersection between gay liberation and gay health activism in the 1970s is useful to understanding the local inner workings of gay liberation politics and rhetoric and health activism, looking beyond gay liberation paints a much fuller picture of the politics undergirding gay health activism. Shifting the focus away from gay liberation illuminates the many ties between gay institutions (like gay health clinics) and a wide variety of social and political movements of the period. In the light of those connections, the history of gay health activism transforms from a “gay history,” or even a history of sexuality, to a history of the 1970s and 1980s.