4 Facts About Gay Liberation Front

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. The movement traces its roots back to the 1969, which gave rise to the noted organization  Gay Liberation Front.

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Here are four facts about the Gay Liberation Front (GLF):

GLF fought for more than just the end of homophobia.
“We shared a radical idealism – a dream of what the world could and should be – free from not just homophobia but the whole sex-shame culture, which oppressed straights as much as LGBTs. We were sexual liberationists and social revolutionaries, out to turn the world upside down,” former member Peter Tatchell wrote for the Guardian.

GLF worked with other revolutionary organizations, including the Black Panther Party.
The founders of the London Gay Liberation Front, Aubrey Walter and Bob Mellor, met in New York at the “Revolutionary Peoples Constitutional Convention” organized by the Black Panthers, according to LibCom.org. Panthers Leader Huey Newton there said “homosexuals were maybe the most oppressed people of American society, and could well be the most revolutionary,” Walter was quoted saying on LibCom.org.

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It was revolutionary that the GLF openly had the word “gay” in their name.
The New York Public Library's historical exhibit on gay rights reported that previous gay and lesbian activist organizations favored “cryptic, inoffensive names: Mattachine, Bilitis, Janus.”

Due to structural leadership issues, GLF dissipated into several other groups.

GLF operated based on consensus, so it was often inefficient when it came to decision-making, New York Public Library reported. As a result, it ended up becoming “a network of semi-autonomous cells … free from the demands of establishing an overall GLF concensus.”

Jason Baumann, the curator of the New York library’s exhibition, told The New York Times the GLF essentially operated as an incubator for the movement. Groups that split off from it include Radicalesbians, the Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, and the Gay Activists Alliance.

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