It’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month, and the 55th anniversary of the riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York, that have been promoted as the founding event of the modern movement. I was not there but was not an accidental but quite deliberate gay activist out on the West Coast when that transpired.

For me, the movement was founded by the rise of gay activism amid the general civil rights and anti-war ferment in the late 1960s, led by courageous souls like my friends the late Lilli Vincenz, Frank Kameny and Larry Kramer and my close collaborator, fellow San Francisco area Gay Liberation Front activist Jim Rankin, who co-founded with me The Effeminist newspaper in the San Francisco area in 1971. We in San Francisco were bumping along in our activism and did not learn about the Stonewall riots until months afterward, and years before the famous Harvey Milk arrived on the scene.

My “coming out” in that era involved two phases. The first was to move beyond an internal realization to making the difficult and dangerous decision to dive into the already-well established gay scene in San Francisco beginning in the early spring of 1969, three months before Stonewall. I set my stage for that by, as a graduate seminarian across the bay in Berkeley, responding to a flier tacked to a bulletin board at the Pacific School of Religion and participating as, you might say, a closeted “Doubting Thomas” for three days of well-attended events in the Tenderloin of San Francisco hosted by the Council on Religion and the Homosexual in October 1968. Activists like Larry Littlejohn and the legendary couple of Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon led panels. That memorable event culminated with an invitation to a Halloween costume ball that shook me to the core and made me want to come out.

The second phase of my “coming out” was to step up into visible, public activism, which happened probably toward the end of 1969, but I cannot recall if there was any single incident, thought or decision which caused me to do that. My public activism led me to become the first openly-gay speaker at a huge anti-war march and rally in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in 1970. Co-founding the Berkeley chapter of the GLF, my colleagues and I opted for a more radical approach to claiming our true identities for ourselves and for the world to see.

Who remembers the old Rendezvous bar on Sutter Street in San Francisco? I moved from where I had been working for three years while in seminary to a tiny efficiency room across from Union Square to be closer to the action. I often went to bed or got in as daylight began to the sound of San Francisco’s legendary cable cars passing right below my third story window, starting with the distinctive sound of the cables themselves being activated for the day, about a half hour before the first car passed below me.

Looking back, it was quite romantic in the generic sense with the large window looking right out onto Powell, just doors down from the intersection with Geary. There was a sink and a small refrigerator in the room, but the shower and toilet were down the hall and shared with others. There were a number of such apartment buildings like that in the area in those days, and I bounced around a number of them over the next few years, feeling I had really come up in the world when I got one with its own shower and toilet.
In those days, Polk Street was the center of the gay world, years before Castro Street.

While I don’t recall what incident might have precipitated my decision to bolt to the front of the line as a public gay activist, it happened in far less than a year after my first timid exploration of the Rendezvous and other gay bars around that area.

I find now that my apparent bravery then is hard to fathom, except that it happened in the context of an imperfect community of like-minded persons and in keeping with those tumultuous times, was highly appropriate.