[LINK] "How Boston powered the gay rights movement"

[rfmcdonald]

I'd read of Boston's role as an intellectual hub in Edmund White's early 1980s States of Desire, but Leon Neyfakh's Boston Globe article is the first article I've come across which explicitly references that past. Fascinating reading, this.

When most Americans think about the story of gay rights, they look back to New York’s 1969 Stonewall Riots, when gay men in Greenwich Village rose up in response to a police raid and sparked a decade of determined activism. They remember San Francisco’s Harvey Milk, the charismatic leader from the Castro who was elected to the city’s Board of Supervisors in 1977 before being tragically assassinated. Perhaps they remember the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights of 1979, when around 100,000 people from around the country gathered in the capitol to demand an end to discrimination.

Conspicuously absent in that story is Boston, a city more likely to be associated with its Puritanical past than with gay activism. But while it routinely gets overshadowed by New York and San Francisco, where the gay scenes were bigger, louder, and livelier, a closer look at the movement’s early history and tactics reveals that Boston in the 1970s was deeply important in the arrival of gay rights as a mainstream national issue, and home to a sophisticated, nationally relevant, pioneering gay community. The cause of gay liberation was taken up during those years with energy and seriousness by Boston-area college students, intellectuals, journalists, politicians, psychiatrists, and lawyers. Ultimately, the city would be the source for a significant portion of the national movement’s burgeoning intellectual firepower.

[. . . ]

The city served as a farm team for gay-rights forces across the United States—thanks in part to Gay Community News, an influential weekly newspaper with national reach that was considered the movement’s “paper of record” throughout the ’70s, and whose alumni at one point occupied so many leadership roles around the country that they were called the “GCN mafia.” Boston also helped drive the movement’s political and legal development: Not only was it home to the country’s first openly gay state representative, Elaine Noble, it was also one of the first places in the country where antidiscrimination laws were brought up for debate by politicians, and the birthplace of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, known as GLAD, whose legal advocacy led to Massachusetts’ groundbreaking gay-marriage decision.

Part of what made the city distinctive in the ’70s was that the gay community, though active, just wasn’t that big, and thus was unusually harmonious. Gay men worked side by side with lesbians—uncommon at the time—and radical gay liberationists found common cause with moderates who believed in working for political reform. But the fact that this compact scene was devoted to advances on the political, intellectual, legal, and journalistic fronts—rather than becoming known for protests or a vibrant gay social scene—meant that Boston’s role in gay life never captured the imagination as did New York and San Francisco. To look back at what was forged in Boston is to realize that sometimes the forces that drive real social change are, on the surface, less dramatic than the transformative moments and individual leaders that come to symbolize it.

“New York was sexier. San Francisco was really sexy. But Boston was smarter,” said Michael Bronski, a professor at Harvard University who spent the 1970s writing for local gay publications and is the author of “A Queer History of the ­United States.” “Boston really generated ideas.”