SAN FRANCISCO GAY PIONEERS LAUNCH PROJECT HISTORY! VINTAGE PHOTOS!

August 5, 2009.
Leo Laurence, 1969 Co-Founder of the world’s first militant gay action organization, The Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF), which later morphed into the San Francisco and Berkeley Gay Liberation Front groups, just announced the inauguration of a campaign to bring together a book that will set the record straight on the true beginning of gay liberation.
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Gale Chester Whittington (front) and Leo Laurence reenacting the famous photo that got Gale fired from his job at States Steamship Company in San Francisco. We may have been angry, but we had fun! March 1969 photo

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“We love our myths, including the story that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree,” Leo told me. (None were found in archaeological digs.) “Billions of marketing dollars are involved worldwide, based on the myth that our global Gay Liberation movement began with the Stonewall Inn riots in New York in June 1969. Dozens of so-called gay history books document it inaccurately. They are produced by authors using second-hand, and often incorrect, materials.”
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The working title of the new manuscript is Changing History. Leo said that while this book is being written in an autobiographical style by Laurence, associate editor of Zenger’s Newsmagazine and a working credentialed journalist with an advanced law degree, it is really a massive community effort by homosexual pioneers long forgotten by the gay establishment in San Diego, where Leo now lives, as well as nationwide.

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Photo of the picture and article printed in the March 28 1969 Berkeley Barb for which Gale was immediately fired and Leo soon lost his own job. This photo is credited with sparking the gay liberation movement

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This first-person history book is being produced by an international team of gay pioneers, based in San Diego, called Project History. Those involved include the co-founders of CHF, Leo E. Laurence, J.D. of Hillcrest and myself, Gale Chester Whittington of Wetumka, Oklahoma. Another pioneer and original CHF member working on Project History is Pat Brown of La Jolla. Leo noted that both he and Brown were totally ignored during the recent Gay Pride events in San Diego.

In a press release issued Aug 1 2009, Leo mentioned my own writing: “Gale Chester Whittington, a semi-retired author and humorist, has already written his own autobiographical book, BEYOND NORMAL: The Birth of Gay Pride. His premier novel is The Happy Campers, which was followed by a second novel, True Chameleon, a third book of Rod Serling-inspired short stories, Whirlwinds of the Mind; and a poetry anthology, Ode to Ricardo: Love in Other Words. Whittington’s works can be found on his Web site: http://www.galechesterwhittington.com. He is now collaborating closely on Project History."

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Photo of the picket line in 1969 San Francisco in front of States Steamship Company, 320 California Street

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“Gale was pretty-boy cute, blond, smooth and slim, and my real inspiration, as we worked together and formed the militant Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) in February 1969, four months before Stonewall,” said Laurence. “He was so hot, and smart, but he wasn’t my lover, as many books have reported.”

Leo said the cover tentatively will be an on-the-scene photo of me being interviewed by the San Francisco news media. The picture by gay activist “Mother Boats” (another original member of CHF who now resides in Australia) was taken in front of the ABC-KGO broadcasting studios, Laurence’s employers, who were threatening to fire him for writing gay revolution articles for the underground Berkeley Barb newspaper, while the radical homosexuals of CHF were conducting a very loud and angry demonstration for employment rights, the core demand of the group’s militant actions.
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Laurence complained that although Gay Liberation literally grew out of gay journalism in the underground press in the late 1960’s, most notably in the Berkeley Barb, Gay Sunshine, and the San Francisco Free Press, even the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association refuses to acknowledge it. “Many NLGJA members may be shocked when they read Changing History,” Leo noted.

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Photo of rabble-rouser Pat Brown and CHF Secretary Charles Thorpe on the States Steamship Company picket line in San Francisco's financial district March 1969. The Charles Thorpe Papers are on file at the GLBT Historical Society, should anyone wish to access the facts

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Laurence, long known as a “shit-stirrer” who gets things done, said, “Changing History will be different from the usual college-level history text. It is being written in a very raw, angry style. It will intentionally be very controversial. Changing History is going to make some people very mad, especially the professional gays and lesbians who run the gay establishment.”

Photos and documents of the pre-Stonewall gay militancy in San Francisco in 1968-’69 have poured into the Project History headquarters in Hillcrest at 3907 Georgia St., Condo #15; San Diego, CA 92103-3548, phone: (619) 757-4909, fax: (619) 220-8686. Anyone with relevant materials from the period is urged to contact the project at the above address and phone, or e-mail Laurence at leopowerhere@msn.com

Many of CHF’s members have long since passed away, but the list of their accomplishments is long, beautiful, and mind boggling. Founding member Carl Wittman wrote the ground-breaking Refugees from Amerika: A Gay Manifesto while he was picketing States Steamship Company with us and member Bishop Mikhail Itkin was instrumental in getting the American Sociological Association to pass a resolution condemning gay oppression: i.e. "firing, taking economic sanctions, and other oppressive action against persons for sexual preferences,” as is noted in the most accurate book written on the movement so far, The Gay Militants, by Donn Teal.

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Original CHF member Hibiscus founded the revolutionary gender-ambiguous entertainment groups, the Cockettes and The Angels of Light. Our own Konstantin Berlandt, a founder of the Free Speech Movement, went on to become a writer for the Bay Area Reporter and the Oakland Tribune, after helping to persuade the American Psychiatric Association to recognize homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle.

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Another photo of Pat Brown (who was arrested on the CHF picket line for chanting "Suck c---k, Beat the Draft!") and Charles Thorpe (who formed the first gay student group at San Francisco State College). Partially shown on the right is firebrand Professor Morgan Pinney who taught at SFSC

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Among the many militant actions by CHF, which included solidarity campaigns with anti-war, anti-draft, Black Panther, Women’s Lib, American Indian, and Chicano movements, we held Gay Guerilla Theatre demonstrations at the Berkeley University of California’s Sproul Plaza and elsewhere and picketed Tower Records, Safeway stores, Macy's, The San Francisco Examiner, and the Federal Building, to name a few.

But perhaps the biggest contribution the Committee for Homosexual Freedom gave to the gay community was to advocate coming out publicly as the only effective path to gay liberation, highly controversial at the time but now universally regarded as the truth.

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Several Stonewall activists wrote to us after the riots in New York City to say they took inspiration from the Committee for Homosexual Freedom's militant activities in San Francisco. They said if we could do it here, they could stand up for their rights there.

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Leo’s press release ends this way: “In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a reporter discovers the truth about a legendary historical event and offers his editor the story. The editor turns it down, saying, ‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.’ The members of Project History believe that for too long the gay press has been publishing the phony legend of Stonewall as the place where gay activism began. Now, they feel, it is time to print the facts.”

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Photo of wild native pink oxalis from the author's free flower photo website http://www.freefishcaretips.com/photos49

Also visit http://www.galechesterwhittington.com/ for free humor, short stories, poems, and book excerpts from the award-winning gay author

==copyright 2009==