Friday night, June 10, 2011, I was at the West Hollywood “Dyke March.” People who don’t know me well wonder why a straight male thinks it’s important enough to show up at a “Dyke March.” Those who do know me well probably consider it perfectly natural.
Martin Luther King once said that “Any man who won’t die for something is unfit to live.” I try to conduct my life according to that ideal, as I do with something that a great feminist once said:
“Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world’s estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences…”
— Susan B. Anthony
There was a time in America when the concept of LGBTI equality was a despised and persecuted idea. In point of fact, it wasn’t too long ago when LGBT behavior was actually a crime in most jurisdictions. In California, until the so-called “Willie Brown Bill,” victimless crimes that could be prosecuted in California included just about anything that LGBT (not to mention straight people) could do in the privacy of their home.
In 1970, my political party, the California Peace & Freedom Party, became the first party in America to come out for full equality for LGBTI people and also officially aligned itself with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), then headed on the West Coast by Morris Kight and Don Kilhefner. Only 14 years old and still in junior high school, I started advocating for LGTBI rights, well before it was fashionable and knowing full well that it could sink my social standing in plenty of circles. The only popularity contest I won was when my junior high graduating class voted me “most original.”
Fast forward to 1975. Jill Raymond, a member of the Kentucky People’s Party (affiliated with the Peace & Freedom Party through the National People’s Party) was held in contempt and jailed for failure to testify before a federal grand jury investigating Weather Underground fugitives Susan Saxe and Katherine Power. The federal authorities were hauling just about every Lesbian in Lexington, Kentucky before the grand jury on a fishing expedition to see if anybody had associated with Susan Saxe when she stayed in Lexington under an assumed name. Jill held out as a matter of principle that once she’d said that she never knew anybody as Susan Saxe that delving into her private life and associations in the Lesbian community was none of anybody’s business.
Why do I bring this up? Small world story. On Friday at the Dyke March I meet a woman who’d grown up in Lexington who’d lived through that federal witch hunt and knew Jill Raymond and other significant players in that dramatic struggle. Hope I’ve made a new friend.
