February 5, 2025 • 33 mins
Martha Shelley was one of the architects of the mid 20th century gay rights movement. She recalls the issues she fought against back then — and explains why they're so relevant today.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
the Outspoken Podcast Network. Hey, it's Jordan. I wanted to
share some exciting news. We've been nominated for Outstanding Podcast
of the Year at the Glad Awards. This is the
top recognition for queer media in our industry, and I
(00:21):
just wanted to say thank you so much because we
couldn't have done this without you. Your emails, your messages
to me on Instagram and TikTok, they mean so much
to me and they keep me really encouraged and fired up.
So keep sending them and keep telling me what you
think of the episodes. I love hearing from you. Now
let's get into the show.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Gay activism in those days was about trying to get
accepted into mainstream America, you know, your little place of
the suburbs with the backyard, the white picket fence or
the whole thing. And the whole idea was we are
just like you, only a little different. We wanted to
be accepted into society, and my feeling at the time
(01:07):
was I didn't care about being accepted into society. From
the time I left home when I was nineteen, I
started going to anti warmwashers and I had become pretty radicalized.
I didn't want to be accepted into society the way
(01:28):
it was. I wanted to change that society, to overturn it.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Martha Shelley, an author and
(01:58):
poet who helped define the goals of the first mainstream
gay rights movement in the US. We'll learn what it
was like to fight for gay rights in the fifties, sixties,
and seventies, what's changed then, and what's still the same.
For my Heart Podcast, I'm Jordan and Solve, and this
is what we loved growing up. I literally knew nothing
(02:43):
about queer history. It was never something taught in my
Texas public school education. Once I got older, I learned
about Stonewall, and for most of my adult life I
really thought the fight for gay rights only began there
before that to begin in America was considered a mental illness,
(03:03):
a sin, and a crime. Being associated with any one
of these stigmas in the fifties and sixties would be
caused to stay closeted, let alone all three. But there
actually were queer people at this time forming organizations protesting
for equality and pushing back on discrimination. The two primary
(03:25):
ones were called the Mattachine Society mostly for gay men,
and the Daughters of Balitists for lesbians. Their goals were
centered around fitting into society's molts, arguing that we're just
like you, only we're gay. My next guest, Martha Shelley,
was an active member of that movement. She's an author
(03:47):
and a poet, and began publishing her provocative essays on
gay rights and feminism in the nineteen sixties, which have
inspired numerous generations of activists. She's eighty one now, but
even as a child she felt called to activism. Let's
(04:10):
start at the very beginning. You have this life that
has been defined by standing up against injustices, and I wonder,
going back to your childhood, was there a formative experience
that you had growing up that sort of instilled this
(04:31):
mentality in you.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
I think it came from my mother. My mother escaped
before the Holocaust, She was born in Poland and her
family left in nineteen twenty one. They emigrated to Cuba
because at that point they couldn't get into the United
States there was an immigration law. She had experienced the
(04:55):
pogrom as a childhood, where her infant brother died, and
she experienced a lot of poverty in Havana. Came to
the United States and got a job in a factory.
But when she told me stories about the pogroms and
about the rest of her family that had been killed
(05:18):
but by Hitler because they hadn't gotten out in time.
Her stories inspired me always to think, what would I
have done if I had been there? Would I have
had the courage to fight? Or would I have gone
along with whatever the Nazis were doing?
Speaker 1 (05:36):
What was your first memory of standing up for what
you believe in?
Speaker 2 (05:42):
This was in junior high school. I was, I guess
in what seventh grade, and there'd been a lot of
water gun fights in the school.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Water gun you mean like the toy.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, toy water guns. Kids were bringing toy wa goes
to school and having fights in the lunch room and stuff. Now,
that was during the time that was the McCarthy era,
and people were being forced, particularly teachers, to sign these
loyalty oaths. The New York Times came out against it, said,
if you were really a communist, a spy or something,
(06:19):
of course you'd sign it. You wouldn't have any qualms
about it, and just continue to do your subversive work.
And it was nuts to have ordinary people being forced
to sign these loyalty oaths. So when the principal gave
an edict that all of us students had to sign
a paper saying that we weren't going to bring water
(06:40):
pistols into the school, I refused to sign it. To me,
it was like a loyalty oath. I didn't even own
a water pistol. And I told the teacher that. Well,
they brought me down to the principal's office and they
kept me there and threatened to call my parents and
(07:01):
suspend me and so on, and finally I buckled under
and signed. And I regret that to this day. That
was my first sort of protest for you.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
It was bigger than a water gun.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, it was just you know, forcible cow towing.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
And tell me the moment when you first knew you
were gay.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I was eighteen, and that was nineteen sixty two. I think,
I think I had just recently turned eighteen, and I
really wanted to live on my own. And my mother said,
a girl can't live on her own. It's too dangerous
in New York City. And then one day I was
(07:51):
reading the New York Post and there was a little
ad in it and it said, you know, the first
old women's judo class was going to be happening at
the why WCA. I thought far out, I went, that's
the solution to my problem. That will enable me to
leave home. So you learned how to escape from somebody
(08:12):
grabbing you. And I used to ride home on the
subway with this other woman. She was a few years
older than me. We both went to City College. So
one evening she invited me over to her place for dinner,
and afterwards we were in the living room and she
(08:35):
kissed me, and I knew right then what I was.
I had had sex with boys before, but it hadn't
felt like much of anything. There was no emotional connection there.
And I went home thinking I would go through the
fires of hell for kisses like this, you know, dramatic
(08:55):
adolescent attitudes.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
What did the kiss feel like?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
It was like night and kissing a boy was just
this wet thing kissing her. It felt warm and passionate,
and anyone who is listening to this program will know
what it feels like to have a passionate kiss.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And when did you end up coming out?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
That was a few years later. What happened was I
joined the Daughters of Belitist when I was twenty three,
I believe, and after trying me on a couple of
different jobs, they made me the public speaker because I
was young and articulate and had some kind of crappy
(09:44):
job that I wasn't afraid to lose. Then I got
invited to be on a TV program and debating these
two psychologists who were making a living out of quote
straightening gaye people out. So I figured, this is a
(10:04):
daytime TV show. I better tell my parents before some
aunt watching daytime TV sees that and calls my mother
up and says, do you know what your daughter has
been up to? I told my father over the phone,
and my father's response was, so, what what else is new?
(10:26):
I knew that already, so I was the one who
was surprised. I said, well, how did you know that?
And he said, your poetry, your drawings. But don't tell
your mom. She'll blame me.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Well, I had to tell my mom, and of course
she blamed my father. She blamed my kid's sister for
not arranging dates with me with boys. She offered to
give me a nose job, that I would look prettier
for boys, and then boys would want me more. She
never accepted that I was gay.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
But it sounds like it didn't really matter to you.
You were out now.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
It didn't matter in the sense that it didn't affect
what I did with my life.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Well, tell us what is the Daughters of Belidas.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
The Daughters of Beliders was really the first lesbian organization
in the United States. It was founded by a group
of women in San Francisco, and then chapters opened around
the country.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And how did you find them?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
There was a book it was called The Homosexual in America,
because of course I was reading stuff trying to find
out more about gay people of what I was like really,
And at the end of the book there was a
little appendix and it listed these gay organizations and said
that there was this Daughters of Belitis chapter in New York.
(11:54):
And I joined the New York chapter, and that was
where I was able to meet women who were more
like me.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
And now that you're an out lesbian in New York City,
I wonder if you could tell us what it was
like to be out in the fifties and sixties in
America as a gay person.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
During the fifties, gay people were being hounded out of government.
The government at the McCarthy period actually pushed more gay
people out that they did people who were suspected of
being communists.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
In the nineteen fifties, the federal government began to purge
employees that they suspected were gay. This was called the
Lavender Scare. It was started by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
In the wake of World War Two and America's increasing
tensions with the Soviet Union, Communism became a threat to
American life, and in nineteen fifty McCarthy gave a speech
(12:55):
convincing the American people that homosexuals were particularly susceptible to
Communist recruitment because they quote lacked morality, and so began
a witch hunt for the next decade to root out
anyone gay in government. Within a week of McCarthy's speech,
the State Department fired ninety one employees they identified as
(13:17):
a gay and deemed them a security risk. This laid
the groundwork for President Eisenhower's executive order in nineteen fifty
three that banned gay men and lesbians from all government jobs.
Upwards of ten thousand people lost their livelihoods. One of
the men fired in this crusade was Frank Camedy, an
(13:38):
astronomer working for the army. In response, he would go
on to found the Mattachine Society.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
When I first came out, my first job was with
the federal government. I was seventeen, and my father said, Okay,
no more summers on the beach for you, and you're
going to work. And at that point that we already
knew I was a lesbian. So summertime, I'm calling my
(14:08):
lover on the phone from the office and one of
the other women picks up the extension and she turns
pale green, like the color of hospital walls, and she
grabs me and gets me off the phone and drags
me into the bathroom and says, don't do that. You
(14:32):
know you're going to get into real trouble. You know.
She was covering for me, and I protected her because
she was having an affair with the sailor and was
terrified that she was going to get pregnant. I got
her to the Margaret Sanger Institute to get birth control,
so we protected each other.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
What I knew then was that I was an outlaw.
It was illegal to have gay sex state of the
Union except for Illinois. And the reason it was not
illegal in Illinois was that when they revised the penal called,
they simply forgot to include that. If they'd remembered, they
(15:12):
would have made it illegal there too. So I knew
I was, you know, I was an outlaw, which at
that point and.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
A criminal, a criminal and yeah, so you know, going
back to that, say more about what it was like
to be thought of as a criminal in those days.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
My first woman lover got into therapy and she got
me to go see these therapists, and the therapist was
trying to get me to be bisexual, so I, you know,
continued having sex with guys, although again there was no
emotional content there trying to be bisexual. All I wanted
(15:53):
was one woman to love. The therapist I went to
at that point was part of this sort of cult
called the Solovnians, and they didn't think gayness was mentally
ill as much as sort of being stuck at a
particular stage of growth, and.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
So if you could get to buy, then maybe you
could get to straight. Yeah. Wow, It's the late nineteen
sixties and Martha is officially out. The US is making
(16:36):
a lot of social progress. Civil rights for black Americans
had been signed into law, and the FDA had just
approved the first ever birth control pill. But that progress
hadn't extended to the queer community, which Martha was now
proudly a part of. Many were still affected by the
stigma left in the wake of the Lavender scare. What
(16:58):
did queer activism like before Stonewall? Because you had started
to get involved in it, So talk to me a
little bit about what that activism was like in those days.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Gay activism in those days was about trying to get
accepted into mainstream America. And the whole idea of the
Daughters of Belitis and Matterchane and so on was we
are just like you, only a little different, and all
we want is to be accepted into society. And my
feeling at the time was I didn't care about being
(17:33):
accepted into society. From the time I left home when
I was nineteen I started going to anti war marshes,
and I had become pretty radicalized. I didn't want to
be accepted into society the way it was. I wanted
to change that society, to overturn it.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
It sounds like you were part of this very unique
generation that sort of on the cusp of the gay
activism before stone Wall, which is about kind of fitting in,
and then the gay activism after stone Wall, which is
kind of about blowing everything up.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Precisely in nineteen I think it was sixty eight, on
Independence Day, we had this quote annual reminder demonstration where
a few of us went to Philadelphia to Independence Hall
where the Liberty Bell is, and we would march around
(18:33):
with picket signs asking for homosexual rights. And the men
had to wear shirts, you know, jackets and ties, and
the women had to wear dresses and would walk around
in a circle, and tourists were coming to the Liberty
Bell would stare at us like it was a freak show.
(18:53):
And I hated it. I did it once and I
hated it. I just remember this one tea age boy
standing there looking his ice cream cone, looking at me
like there was something out of a circus or thing
in a zoo.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
It sounds very different from like a Pride March today,
what people would dress Pride March today.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Absolutely, And you know, at.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
These protests at Independent Hall, what was the priority? Give
me a little bit of context into what folks were
kind of fighting for back then, what specifically they wanted
to change.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
There was a push to get gay people accepted into
the military. And when I think back on it, this
was the height of the Vietnam War. The last thing
I wanted to zoo was get into the military and
go kill people in another country, people who had done
nothing to me. M And instead of being proud of
(19:53):
the people who did that demonstration, I was kind of
ashamed of them.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Wow. Well, Stonewall happens in ninete ten sixty nine, right,
And it seems as though it's a very different kind
of activism from what you described at Liberty Bell and
Independence Hall. Like Stonewall is marked by rage and anger
(20:19):
and drag queens, and it's just so different from a
bunch of men and women in suits and kind of
looking rather corporate. Exactly what was going through your mind
and your heart when you heard about Stonewall? Where were you?
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Okay? I think it started on a Friday night. Saturday night,
I was taking two women on a tour of Granwich
Village and the lesbian bars and so on. They were
from Boston. They wanted to started Daughters of Belitist chapter
and they asked me if I would take these two
women for a tour and I said sure. So Saturday
(20:58):
night we're walking around and we passed by the Stonewool
and I see these young people throwing things at cops
and the women from Boston were taken aback. I said,
what's that and I said, oh, it's just a riot.
We have them all the time. I was thinking it
was another anti war riot. God knows, I'd been in
more than one of them. So I went home, didn't
(21:21):
think about it. And then Monday morning I opened up
the New York Times and I read you know about
homosexuals rioting, and I thought, oh my god, that's us,
and I was on fire. I called up Gene Powers,
who was running the local chapter of Daughters of Police,
(21:43):
and Dick Litch who was running Madchine, and he said,
come to this meeting Thursday night. They were having a
meeting at some downtown place that they rented, and there
were four hundred gay guys and me and people were
all worked out up about the riot. And when it
(22:03):
was my turn, you know, I raised my hand and
I proposed a protest march, and Dick like looked down
and he said, how many of you were in favor?
And everybody's hand went up, and Dick was said, Okay,
those of you who want to organize it, meet over
in that corner. And we get there and we're talking
(22:25):
and we're all really excited, and it's a hot early
July afternoon. We're drinking beer, and at one point somebody
says the words Gay Liberation Front, and I got all
excited and said, yes, yes, yes, and start pounding my
hands on the table. Yes, that's it. We're the Gay
Liberation Front. And then I looked at my hand and
(22:47):
was bleeding. I had been pounding my hand on the
pop top of my beer can. Oh wow, And I
was feeling no pain. You were that excited, yes, excited,
And you know, I'd had half a can of beer.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
And three weeks after Stonewall, Martha helped organize a gay
march against police brutality. This would be a precursor to
the very first Pride March, held a year after Stonewall,
but she wasn't sure if anyone would show up.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
We didn't have a name for our march, and about
according to the Underground cop four hundred people showed up.
According to the Village Voice reporter, five hundred. We marched
around the village and ended up at a little park,
Christopher Park, which is right across the street from the
Stonewall in And one year later we and people from
(23:45):
other groups got together and organized that Christopher Street Liberation
Day exactly one year after Stonewall. And that was no
four hundred, five hundred people. That was ten thousand people
marching up sixth Avenue to say Park.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
In other words, what you're saying is when you all
held the first sort of protests march after Stonewall, right
after Stonewall, you could feel in your body. You knew
there was an energy that everything had changed.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Stonewall had changed everything. Many queer people wanted to break
away from the model of activism set up by the
Mattachine Society and Daughters of Belitis. They didn't want gay marriage,
they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family. They didn't want
to serve openly in the military. They wanted to abolish
(24:41):
the armed forces. This new group of queer activists, which
included Martha, called themselves the Gay Liberation Front or GLF.
Earlier queer organizations sought to have a slice of the
proverbial pie, but GLF didn't want a slice of the pie.
They wanted to burn down the whole bakery. Tell me
(25:04):
a little bit about your activism around that time. You
were writing a lot, and that kind of was a
huge element to your activism. So tell us about kind
of how activism was in those days and the underground
papers and all of that.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I had been working on the Gay Liberation Front newspaper
come out when we started the Gay Liberation Front. This
was before we had the internet, So this is how
we communicated with each other. We mailed these poop papers
all over the country and people, would you buy them?
(25:43):
I think we sold ours for thirty five cents. I
typesett it at night. I was working as a typesetter
and my boss was a radical, and so she let
me use the type setting machines at night. She was
type setting for the Black Panthers.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So, Martha, you're writing these papers about gay liberation and
feminism quite publicly and at the same time, the government
is actively trying to silence gay people. I wonder, were
you scared? Did you feel like you had to be
extra careful?
Speaker 2 (26:19):
One day I came home and the woman downstairs said
that the FBI had been there asking questions about me.
She was an immigrant from Ukraine and a neighbor. A neighbor,
and I had commiserated with her over the death of
her cat, and she said she didn't tell them anything
because she knew what the secret police were like in
(26:41):
her home country, and her attitude was, don't tell them anything.
And the truth is, she didn't know anything about me
to tell, really, except that I lived upstairs and had
a cat myself. And then during that period, this guy
asked me to come talk to him his apartment in
the building, in a different building.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
How did you meet him?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
What I remember is that he presented himself as some
kind of radical and we're talking and he invites me
upstairs and he shows me a twenty two rifle and
he wants me to work with him, and we're going
to put poison on bullets and shoot people and kill them.
And the first thing I thought, the first thing that
went into my head was, oh, my God agent, Agent, Agent,
(27:28):
get me out of here. So I left as fast
as I could. I knew right away this was somebody
sent to entrap me.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Like a federal agent. Basically yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Wow, And there were a lot of them wow. Various
people got entrapped into schemes to blow things up that
wouldn't have been able to do it themselves, and then
got arrested and set up, you know. For However, many years.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
By the eighties, the Gay Liberation Front had split up
into different factions based on race and gender and ideology,
and the gay rights movement of the twenty first century
largely moved away from glf's ambitious goals and ironically focused
on gay marriage and the right to serve openly in
the military. But even though the movement didn't accomplish everything
(28:28):
it set out to do, it still changed lives, including Martha's.
When was the first actual moment where you felt a
sense of liberation?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
The first March and that summer when I realized I
didn't have to even try to be bisexual anymore, where
I could just be fully myself and I had found
an organization, a place had really created with other people,
(29:07):
a place where we could be exactly who we were
and want what we wanted.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
You're eighty one now, and I've interviewed a lot of
queer elders on the show, and we sometimes talk about
regret looking back at, you know, a long, beautiful life.
I wonder if you could summarize in this storied life
of activism what you think your biggest success was, but
(29:40):
also your biggest failure.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
The biggest success was starting the Gay Liberation Front. Well,
actually though that was one of a chain of successes,
publishing stuff, doing my radio show, which was the first
lesbian radio show. We made alliances with other groups, with
(30:05):
the Black Panthers, with the Young Lords, with the socialist groups.
We turned the National Organization for Women around so that
instead of being anti lesbian, they became pro lesbian. But
I would say that those things led to a lot
of changes in American society, all of our activism, I
(30:27):
think the biggest failure was that we often squabbled with
each other. We were young, we were angry, and a
lot of the reason we were angry was that we
had been oppressed. But we sometimes took that anger out
on each other and squabbled over petty differences, and the
(30:49):
anger what really important is directing the anger to the
people who are oppressing you, not against each other. What
we call horizontal hostility, thing it against each other, punch upward,
look at the people who are causing your problems, and
they're not each other.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
That was kind of the biggest threat to the movement success.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
You think, yeah, and it continues to be groups like
Gay Liberation Front two get mad at each other and
splinter off instead of listening to each other and trying
to work things out and putting their energy into changing
the whole system.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
What do you think young people and this next generation
can learn from that failure.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
I think we need to listen to each other. And
I know this is hard. One of the things we
weren't aware of in the Liberation Front. We were aware
of the economic inequality, we weren't aware of the climate
problems at that point. That's the biggest thing that's facing
the younger generation, because if we don't have a habitable planet,
(32:06):
all of our rights, gay rights, black rights, whatever will
mean nothing because we'll be dead. That's to me the
biggest priority, and I just want to be able with
the time that I have left to help in whatever
way I can.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
But we Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
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(32:49):
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Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson
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(33:12):
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But We Loved is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
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(00:21):
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Speaker 2 (00:42):
Gay activism in those days was about trying to get
accepted into mainstream America, you know, your little place of
the suburbs with the backyard, the white picket fence or
the whole thing. And the whole idea was we are
just like you, only a little different. We wanted to
be accepted into society, and my feeling at the time
(01:07):
was I didn't care about being accepted into society. From
the time I left home when I was nineteen, I
started going to anti warmwashers and I had become pretty radicalized.
I didn't want to be accepted into society the way
(01:28):
it was. I wanted to change that society, to overturn it.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
As a gay kid, growing up religious and in the South,
I thought being gay was the worst thing I could
ever be. Now, as a journalist, I'm trying to unlearn
that by seeking out our history, and what I found
are people and stories full of courage, perseverance, and love.
In this episode, we'll meet Martha Shelley, an author and
(01:58):
poet who helped define the goals of the first mainstream
gay rights movement in the US. We'll learn what it
was like to fight for gay rights in the fifties, sixties,
and seventies, what's changed then, and what's still the same.
For my Heart Podcast, I'm Jordan and Solve, and this
is what we loved growing up. I literally knew nothing
(02:43):
about queer history. It was never something taught in my
Texas public school education. Once I got older, I learned
about Stonewall, and for most of my adult life I
really thought the fight for gay rights only began there
before that to begin in America was considered a mental illness,
(03:03):
a sin, and a crime. Being associated with any one
of these stigmas in the fifties and sixties would be
caused to stay closeted, let alone all three. But there
actually were queer people at this time forming organizations protesting
for equality and pushing back on discrimination. The two primary
(03:25):
ones were called the Mattachine Society mostly for gay men,
and the Daughters of Balitists for lesbians. Their goals were
centered around fitting into society's molts, arguing that we're just
like you, only we're gay. My next guest, Martha Shelley,
was an active member of that movement. She's an author
(03:47):
and a poet, and began publishing her provocative essays on
gay rights and feminism in the nineteen sixties, which have
inspired numerous generations of activists. She's eighty one now, but
even as a child she felt called to activism. Let's
(04:10):
start at the very beginning. You have this life that
has been defined by standing up against injustices, and I wonder,
going back to your childhood, was there a formative experience
that you had growing up that sort of instilled this
(04:31):
mentality in you.
Speaker 2 (04:32):
I think it came from my mother. My mother escaped
before the Holocaust, She was born in Poland and her
family left in nineteen twenty one. They emigrated to Cuba
because at that point they couldn't get into the United
States there was an immigration law. She had experienced the
(04:55):
pogrom as a childhood, where her infant brother died, and
she experienced a lot of poverty in Havana. Came to
the United States and got a job in a factory.
But when she told me stories about the pogroms and
about the rest of her family that had been killed
(05:18):
but by Hitler because they hadn't gotten out in time.
Her stories inspired me always to think, what would I
have done if I had been there? Would I have
had the courage to fight? Or would I have gone
along with whatever the Nazis were doing?
Speaker 1 (05:36):
What was your first memory of standing up for what
you believe in?
Speaker 2 (05:42):
This was in junior high school. I was, I guess
in what seventh grade, and there'd been a lot of
water gun fights in the school.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Water gun you mean like the toy.
Speaker 2 (05:57):
Yeah, toy water guns. Kids were bringing toy wa goes
to school and having fights in the lunch room and stuff. Now,
that was during the time that was the McCarthy era,
and people were being forced, particularly teachers, to sign these
loyalty oaths. The New York Times came out against it, said,
if you were really a communist, a spy or something,
(06:19):
of course you'd sign it. You wouldn't have any qualms
about it, and just continue to do your subversive work.
And it was nuts to have ordinary people being forced
to sign these loyalty oaths. So when the principal gave
an edict that all of us students had to sign
a paper saying that we weren't going to bring water
(06:40):
pistols into the school, I refused to sign it. To me,
it was like a loyalty oath. I didn't even own
a water pistol. And I told the teacher that. Well,
they brought me down to the principal's office and they
kept me there and threatened to call my parents and
(07:01):
suspend me and so on, and finally I buckled under
and signed. And I regret that to this day. That
was my first sort of protest for you.
Speaker 1 (07:13):
It was bigger than a water gun.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yeah, it was just you know, forcible cow towing.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
And tell me the moment when you first knew you
were gay.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
I was eighteen, and that was nineteen sixty two. I think,
I think I had just recently turned eighteen, and I
really wanted to live on my own. And my mother said,
a girl can't live on her own. It's too dangerous
in New York City. And then one day I was
(07:51):
reading the New York Post and there was a little
ad in it and it said, you know, the first
old women's judo class was going to be happening at
the why WCA. I thought far out, I went, that's
the solution to my problem. That will enable me to
leave home. So you learned how to escape from somebody
(08:12):
grabbing you. And I used to ride home on the
subway with this other woman. She was a few years
older than me. We both went to City College. So
one evening she invited me over to her place for dinner,
and afterwards we were in the living room and she
(08:35):
kissed me, and I knew right then what I was.
I had had sex with boys before, but it hadn't
felt like much of anything. There was no emotional connection there.
And I went home thinking I would go through the
fires of hell for kisses like this, you know, dramatic
(08:55):
adolescent attitudes.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
What did the kiss feel like?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
It was like night and kissing a boy was just
this wet thing kissing her. It felt warm and passionate,
and anyone who is listening to this program will know
what it feels like to have a passionate kiss.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And when did you end up coming out?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
That was a few years later. What happened was I
joined the Daughters of Belitist when I was twenty three,
I believe, and after trying me on a couple of
different jobs, they made me the public speaker because I
was young and articulate and had some kind of crappy
(09:44):
job that I wasn't afraid to lose. Then I got
invited to be on a TV program and debating these
two psychologists who were making a living out of quote
straightening gaye people out. So I figured, this is a
(10:04):
daytime TV show. I better tell my parents before some
aunt watching daytime TV sees that and calls my mother
up and says, do you know what your daughter has
been up to? I told my father over the phone,
and my father's response was, so, what what else is new?
(10:26):
I knew that already, so I was the one who
was surprised. I said, well, how did you know that?
And he said, your poetry, your drawings. But don't tell
your mom. She'll blame me.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Well, I had to tell my mom, and of course
she blamed my father. She blamed my kid's sister for
not arranging dates with me with boys. She offered to
give me a nose job, that I would look prettier
for boys, and then boys would want me more. She
never accepted that I was gay.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
But it sounds like it didn't really matter to you.
You were out now.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
It didn't matter in the sense that it didn't affect
what I did with my life.
Speaker 1 (11:12):
Well, tell us what is the Daughters of Belidas.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
The Daughters of Beliders was really the first lesbian organization
in the United States. It was founded by a group
of women in San Francisco, and then chapters opened around
the country.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
And how did you find them?
Speaker 2 (11:32):
There was a book it was called The Homosexual in America,
because of course I was reading stuff trying to find
out more about gay people of what I was like really,
And at the end of the book there was a
little appendix and it listed these gay organizations and said
that there was this Daughters of Belitis chapter in New York.
(11:54):
And I joined the New York chapter, and that was
where I was able to meet women who were more
like me.
Speaker 1 (12:01):
And now that you're an out lesbian in New York City,
I wonder if you could tell us what it was
like to be out in the fifties and sixties in
America as a gay person.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
During the fifties, gay people were being hounded out of government.
The government at the McCarthy period actually pushed more gay
people out that they did people who were suspected of
being communists.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
In the nineteen fifties, the federal government began to purge
employees that they suspected were gay. This was called the
Lavender Scare. It was started by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
In the wake of World War Two and America's increasing
tensions with the Soviet Union, Communism became a threat to
American life, and in nineteen fifty McCarthy gave a speech
(12:55):
convincing the American people that homosexuals were particularly susceptible to
Communist recruitment because they quote lacked morality, and so began
a witch hunt for the next decade to root out
anyone gay in government. Within a week of McCarthy's speech,
the State Department fired ninety one employees they identified as
(13:17):
a gay and deemed them a security risk. This laid
the groundwork for President Eisenhower's executive order in nineteen fifty
three that banned gay men and lesbians from all government jobs.
Upwards of ten thousand people lost their livelihoods. One of
the men fired in this crusade was Frank Camedy, an
(13:38):
astronomer working for the army. In response, he would go
on to found the Mattachine Society.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
When I first came out, my first job was with
the federal government. I was seventeen, and my father said, Okay,
no more summers on the beach for you, and you're
going to work. And at that point that we already
knew I was a lesbian. So summertime, I'm calling my
(14:08):
lover on the phone from the office and one of
the other women picks up the extension and she turns
pale green, like the color of hospital walls, and she
grabs me and gets me off the phone and drags
me into the bathroom and says, don't do that. You
(14:32):
know you're going to get into real trouble. You know.
She was covering for me, and I protected her because
she was having an affair with the sailor and was
terrified that she was going to get pregnant. I got
her to the Margaret Sanger Institute to get birth control,
so we protected each other.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
What I knew then was that I was an outlaw.
It was illegal to have gay sex state of the
Union except for Illinois. And the reason it was not
illegal in Illinois was that when they revised the penal called,
they simply forgot to include that. If they'd remembered, they
(15:12):
would have made it illegal there too. So I knew
I was, you know, I was an outlaw, which at
that point and.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
A criminal, a criminal and yeah, so you know, going
back to that, say more about what it was like
to be thought of as a criminal in those days.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
My first woman lover got into therapy and she got
me to go see these therapists, and the therapist was
trying to get me to be bisexual, so I, you know,
continued having sex with guys, although again there was no
emotional content there trying to be bisexual. All I wanted
(15:53):
was one woman to love. The therapist I went to
at that point was part of this sort of cult
called the Solovnians, and they didn't think gayness was mentally
ill as much as sort of being stuck at a
particular stage of growth, and.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
So if you could get to buy, then maybe you
could get to straight. Yeah. Wow, It's the late nineteen
sixties and Martha is officially out. The US is making
(16:36):
a lot of social progress. Civil rights for black Americans
had been signed into law, and the FDA had just
approved the first ever birth control pill. But that progress
hadn't extended to the queer community, which Martha was now
proudly a part of. Many were still affected by the
stigma left in the wake of the Lavender scare. What
(16:58):
did queer activism like before Stonewall? Because you had started
to get involved in it, So talk to me a
little bit about what that activism was like in those days.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Gay activism in those days was about trying to get
accepted into mainstream America. And the whole idea of the
Daughters of Belitis and Matterchane and so on was we
are just like you, only a little different, and all
we want is to be accepted into society. And my
feeling at the time was I didn't care about being
(17:33):
accepted into society. From the time I left home when
I was nineteen I started going to anti war marshes,
and I had become pretty radicalized. I didn't want to
be accepted into society the way it was. I wanted
to change that society, to overturn it.
Speaker 1 (17:55):
It sounds like you were part of this very unique
generation that sort of on the cusp of the gay
activism before stone Wall, which is about kind of fitting in,
and then the gay activism after stone Wall, which is
kind of about blowing everything up.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Precisely in nineteen I think it was sixty eight, on
Independence Day, we had this quote annual reminder demonstration where
a few of us went to Philadelphia to Independence Hall
where the Liberty Bell is, and we would march around
(18:33):
with picket signs asking for homosexual rights. And the men
had to wear shirts, you know, jackets and ties, and
the women had to wear dresses and would walk around
in a circle, and tourists were coming to the Liberty
Bell would stare at us like it was a freak show.
(18:53):
And I hated it. I did it once and I
hated it. I just remember this one tea age boy
standing there looking his ice cream cone, looking at me
like there was something out of a circus or thing
in a zoo.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
It sounds very different from like a Pride March today,
what people would dress Pride March today.
Speaker 2 (19:14):
Absolutely, And you know, at.
Speaker 1 (19:16):
These protests at Independent Hall, what was the priority? Give
me a little bit of context into what folks were
kind of fighting for back then, what specifically they wanted
to change.
Speaker 2 (19:29):
There was a push to get gay people accepted into
the military. And when I think back on it, this
was the height of the Vietnam War. The last thing
I wanted to zoo was get into the military and
go kill people in another country, people who had done
nothing to me. M And instead of being proud of
(19:53):
the people who did that demonstration, I was kind of
ashamed of them.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
Wow. Well, Stonewall happens in ninete ten sixty nine, right,
And it seems as though it's a very different kind
of activism from what you described at Liberty Bell and
Independence Hall. Like Stonewall is marked by rage and anger
(20:19):
and drag queens, and it's just so different from a
bunch of men and women in suits and kind of
looking rather corporate. Exactly what was going through your mind
and your heart when you heard about Stonewall? Where were you?
Speaker 2 (20:37):
Okay? I think it started on a Friday night. Saturday night,
I was taking two women on a tour of Granwich
Village and the lesbian bars and so on. They were
from Boston. They wanted to started Daughters of Belitist chapter
and they asked me if I would take these two
women for a tour and I said sure. So Saturday
(20:58):
night we're walking around and we passed by the Stonewool
and I see these young people throwing things at cops
and the women from Boston were taken aback. I said,
what's that and I said, oh, it's just a riot.
We have them all the time. I was thinking it
was another anti war riot. God knows, I'd been in
more than one of them. So I went home, didn't
(21:21):
think about it. And then Monday morning I opened up
the New York Times and I read you know about
homosexuals rioting, and I thought, oh my god, that's us,
and I was on fire. I called up Gene Powers,
who was running the local chapter of Daughters of Police,
(21:43):
and Dick Litch who was running Madchine, and he said,
come to this meeting Thursday night. They were having a
meeting at some downtown place that they rented, and there
were four hundred gay guys and me and people were
all worked out up about the riot. And when it
(22:03):
was my turn, you know, I raised my hand and
I proposed a protest march, and Dick like looked down
and he said, how many of you were in favor?
And everybody's hand went up, and Dick was said, Okay,
those of you who want to organize it, meet over
in that corner. And we get there and we're talking
(22:25):
and we're all really excited, and it's a hot early
July afternoon. We're drinking beer, and at one point somebody
says the words Gay Liberation Front, and I got all
excited and said, yes, yes, yes, and start pounding my
hands on the table. Yes, that's it. We're the Gay
Liberation Front. And then I looked at my hand and
(22:47):
was bleeding. I had been pounding my hand on the
pop top of my beer can. Oh wow, And I
was feeling no pain. You were that excited, yes, excited,
And you know, I'd had half a can of beer.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
And three weeks after Stonewall, Martha helped organize a gay
march against police brutality. This would be a precursor to
the very first Pride March, held a year after Stonewall,
but she wasn't sure if anyone would show up.
Speaker 2 (23:21):
We didn't have a name for our march, and about
according to the Underground cop four hundred people showed up.
According to the Village Voice reporter, five hundred. We marched
around the village and ended up at a little park,
Christopher Park, which is right across the street from the
Stonewall in And one year later we and people from
(23:45):
other groups got together and organized that Christopher Street Liberation
Day exactly one year after Stonewall. And that was no
four hundred, five hundred people. That was ten thousand people
marching up sixth Avenue to say Park.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
In other words, what you're saying is when you all
held the first sort of protests march after Stonewall, right
after Stonewall, you could feel in your body. You knew
there was an energy that everything had changed.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1 (24:21):
Stonewall had changed everything. Many queer people wanted to break
away from the model of activism set up by the
Mattachine Society and Daughters of Belitis. They didn't want gay marriage,
they wanted to dismantle the nuclear family. They didn't want
to serve openly in the military. They wanted to abolish
(24:41):
the armed forces. This new group of queer activists, which
included Martha, called themselves the Gay Liberation Front or GLF.
Earlier queer organizations sought to have a slice of the
proverbial pie, but GLF didn't want a slice of the pie.
They wanted to burn down the whole bakery. Tell me
(25:04):
a little bit about your activism around that time. You
were writing a lot, and that kind of was a
huge element to your activism. So tell us about kind
of how activism was in those days and the underground
papers and all of that.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
I had been working on the Gay Liberation Front newspaper
come out when we started the Gay Liberation Front. This
was before we had the internet, So this is how
we communicated with each other. We mailed these poop papers
all over the country and people, would you buy them?
(25:43):
I think we sold ours for thirty five cents. I
typesett it at night. I was working as a typesetter
and my boss was a radical, and so she let
me use the type setting machines at night. She was
type setting for the Black Panthers.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So, Martha, you're writing these papers about gay liberation and
feminism quite publicly and at the same time, the government
is actively trying to silence gay people. I wonder, were
you scared? Did you feel like you had to be
extra careful?
Speaker 2 (26:19):
One day I came home and the woman downstairs said
that the FBI had been there asking questions about me.
She was an immigrant from Ukraine and a neighbor. A neighbor,
and I had commiserated with her over the death of
her cat, and she said she didn't tell them anything
because she knew what the secret police were like in
(26:41):
her home country, and her attitude was, don't tell them anything.
And the truth is, she didn't know anything about me
to tell, really, except that I lived upstairs and had
a cat myself. And then during that period, this guy
asked me to come talk to him his apartment in
the building, in a different building.
Speaker 1 (27:04):
How did you meet him?
Speaker 2 (27:05):
What I remember is that he presented himself as some
kind of radical and we're talking and he invites me
upstairs and he shows me a twenty two rifle and
he wants me to work with him, and we're going
to put poison on bullets and shoot people and kill them.
And the first thing I thought, the first thing that
went into my head was, oh, my God agent, Agent, Agent,
(27:28):
get me out of here. So I left as fast
as I could. I knew right away this was somebody
sent to entrap me.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
Like a federal agent. Basically yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:39):
Wow, And there were a lot of them wow. Various
people got entrapped into schemes to blow things up that
wouldn't have been able to do it themselves, and then
got arrested and set up, you know. For However, many years.
Speaker 1 (28:05):
By the eighties, the Gay Liberation Front had split up
into different factions based on race and gender and ideology,
and the gay rights movement of the twenty first century
largely moved away from glf's ambitious goals and ironically focused
on gay marriage and the right to serve openly in
the military. But even though the movement didn't accomplish everything
(28:28):
it set out to do, it still changed lives, including Martha's.
When was the first actual moment where you felt a
sense of liberation?
Speaker 2 (28:41):
The first March and that summer when I realized I
didn't have to even try to be bisexual anymore, where
I could just be fully myself and I had found
an organization, a place had really created with other people,
(29:07):
a place where we could be exactly who we were
and want what we wanted.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
You're eighty one now, and I've interviewed a lot of
queer elders on the show, and we sometimes talk about
regret looking back at, you know, a long, beautiful life.
I wonder if you could summarize in this storied life
of activism what you think your biggest success was, but
(29:40):
also your biggest failure.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
The biggest success was starting the Gay Liberation Front. Well,
actually though that was one of a chain of successes,
publishing stuff, doing my radio show, which was the first
lesbian radio show. We made alliances with other groups, with
(30:05):
the Black Panthers, with the Young Lords, with the socialist groups.
We turned the National Organization for Women around so that
instead of being anti lesbian, they became pro lesbian. But
I would say that those things led to a lot
of changes in American society, all of our activism, I
(30:27):
think the biggest failure was that we often squabbled with
each other. We were young, we were angry, and a
lot of the reason we were angry was that we
had been oppressed. But we sometimes took that anger out
on each other and squabbled over petty differences, and the
(30:49):
anger what really important is directing the anger to the
people who are oppressing you, not against each other. What
we call horizontal hostility, thing it against each other, punch upward,
look at the people who are causing your problems, and
they're not each other.
Speaker 1 (31:08):
That was kind of the biggest threat to the movement success.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
You think, yeah, and it continues to be groups like
Gay Liberation Front two get mad at each other and
splinter off instead of listening to each other and trying
to work things out and putting their energy into changing
the whole system.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
What do you think young people and this next generation
can learn from that failure.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
I think we need to listen to each other. And
I know this is hard. One of the things we
weren't aware of in the Liberation Front. We were aware
of the economic inequality, we weren't aware of the climate
problems at that point. That's the biggest thing that's facing
the younger generation, because if we don't have a habitable planet,
(32:06):
all of our rights, gay rights, black rights, whatever will
mean nothing because we'll be dead. That's to me the
biggest priority, and I just want to be able with
the time that I have left to help in whatever
way I can.
Speaker 1 (32:28):
But we Loved is hosted by me Jordan Gonsolves. New
episodes drop every Wednesday. If you want to write in
to tell your story, email us at but We Loved
at gmail dot com, or you can send me a
message on Instagram or TikTok at your underscore against solve this.
We are a production of The Outspoken Podcast Network and
(32:49):
iHeart Podcasts. But We Loved was originally developed with Pushkin Industries.
Our producers are Joey pat Emily Meronoff, and Christina Loranger.
Our executive producers are me, Maya Howard and Katrina Norville.
Original music by Steve Boone. Special thanks to Jay Bronson
and Roquel Willis. If you loved this episode, leave us
(33:12):
a rating and follow us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify,
and thank you for listening. I'll see you next week.
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