LONDON, ENGLAND — In 1969, a small group of homosexual activists formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), becoming the first to openly brand themselves with the term “gay.”
The GLF first met at the London School of Economics and served as “the incubator of the new gay and lesbian mass political movement,” according to the New York Public Library. They latched on to anti-war protests and “anti-capitalist struggles around the world.”
By 1973, the GLF had disbanded, but their ideas and contributions to their cause are evident in the current LGBTQ movement. The group’s 1970 manifesto – displaying a raised fist – remains its most enduring legacy.
THE GAY LIBERATION FRONT MANIFESTO
When stating their objectives, the group wrote unequivocally that “Gay liberation does not just mean reforms. It means a revolutionary change in our whole society.”
The activists sought “to rid society of the gender-role system” by “abolishing the family and the cultural distinctions between men and women.” They claimed that there are “no proven systematic differences between male and female, apart from the obvious biological ones.”
The manifesto asserts that the values that Western civilization was built upon – namely the “sanctity of the family, the right to property, and the worthwhileness of ‘getting ahead’” – constituted an “evil society.” It also rejects monogamous relationships – even among homosexuals – as an ideal.
The authors emphasized the importance of reaching “children and young people” with their message.
LEGALIZING PEDOLPHILIA AND POLYGAMY
Two years after the GLF manifesto called for “revolutionary change,” the National Coalition of Gay Organizations Convention in Chicago adopted the radical 1972 Gay Rights Platform.
The coalition sought to legalize pedophilia and polygamy, calling for the “repeal of all laws governing the age of sexual consent” and “legislative provisions that restrict the sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit.”
They also demanded legalized prostitution and the “repeal [of] all state laws prohibiting transvestism and cross-dressing.”
“HOMOSEXUAL MANIFESTO”
In 1987, the Boston-based Gay Community News published an article entitled the “Gay Revolutionary,” that has come to be known today as the “Homosexual Manifesto.”
The essay was attributed to Michael Swift, which may have been a pseudonym, and has since been defended as satire by LGBTQ activists. The author described the aggressive words as: “a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.”
“We shall sodomize your sons,” Swift began. “Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us.”
“We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together.”
THREATS OF VIOLENCE
Like the GLF manifesto, Swift also insisted that the nuclear family in society must be “abolished” and “eliminated.” He added that “All churches who condemn us will be closed.”
“If you dare to cry faggot, fairy, queer, at us, we will stab you in your cowardly hearts and defile your dead, puny bodies,” he wrote. “There will be no compromises. […] Those who oppose us will be exiled.”
Swift concluded with more vague threats to those who are not on board with his vision of the future.
“We too are capable of firing guns and manning the barricades of the ultimate revolution,” he said. “Tremble, hetero swine, when we appear before you without our masks.”
“A LARGE SCALE MEDIA CAMPAIGN”
Months after Swift’s “Gay Revolutionary,” Guide Magazine published Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen’s “The Overhauling of Straight America” that called for “A large-scale media campaign … to change the image of gays in America.”
Madsen and Kirk believed that television opened up “a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan horse might be passed.”
“Straight viewers must be able to identify with gays as victims. Mr. and Mrs. Public must be given no extra excuses to say, ‘They are not like us,’” the authors wrote. “First let the camel get his nose inside the tent – only later his unsightly derriere.”
Opponents of the movement were to be “vilified” and compared to Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members and “bigoted southern ministers drooling with hysterical hatred.”
“The public should be shown images of ranting homophobes whose secondary traits and beliefs disgust middle America,” the article added. “We intend to make the antigays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such types.”
In 1989, Madsen and Kirk expanded the article into After the Ball - How America will conquer its fear and hatred of Gays in the 90’s – which was published by Doubleday, one of America’s largest publishers at the time.
LEADING A REVOLUTION
There is no question that Americans have undergone a revolutionary cultural shift with respect to gender and sexuality since the beginning of the 21st century. Swift and the GLF would be pleased to know that one in four high-school aged teens now claim LGBTQ status.
As recently as 2003, anti-sodomy laws were still enforced in America. The U.S. Supreme Court’s (SCOTUS) landmark Lawrence vs. Texas ruled that laws prohibiting “sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex” were unconstitutional. The attorneys tasked with defending Texas laws cited Swift’s manifesto as one of several sources that they claimed pointed to a larger agenda behind the overturning laws prohibiting homosexual acts.
They went on to quote pedophilia advocate David Thorstad, who co-founded the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) – a group that seeks to remove age-of-consent laws.
Thorstad wrote that the “ultimate goal” should “not just equal rights for ‘lesbians and gay men,’ but also freedom of sexual expression for young people and children.” While many in the LGBTQ movement have sought to disassociate from Thorstad and NAMBLA, the 1972 Gay Rights Platform complicates those efforts.
Paula Ettelbrick, a legal activist for the LGBTQ movement who pushed to expand the definition of what constitutes a family, also appears in the defense’s argument.
“Being queer means pushing the parameters of sex, sexuality, and family, and in the process, transforming the very fabric of society,” Ettelbrick wrote in 1989. “We must keep our eyes on the goals of providing true alternatives to marriage and of radically reordering society’s views of family.”
During a 2004 debate, Illinois Senator Barack Obama declared that he believed “marriage is between a man and a woman.” Less than 11 years after making that statement, President Obama lit up the White House with rainbow colors to celebrate SCOTUS’ ruling that the Constitution protected the right for two men or two women to get married.
Today, the LGBTQ movement advocates for genital mutilation under the paradigm of “gender fluidity” and homosexual couples routinely bring their adopted children to “Pride” parades. Cross-dressing men dancing like strippers in front of kids – or reading stories to children in libraries across the Western world – are now coordinated and bordering on institutionalized homosexualized attacks on traditional values and the sanctity of children.
And of course, the de rigeuer BDSM/leather contingent brought the usual sexualized violence. It wouldn’t be PR$DE without them! pic.twitter.com/G6wksvziXG
— Belissa Cohen #NoFemaleLanguage4Men (@BelissaCohen) June 5, 2023
LGBTQ MOVEMENT AND COMMUNISM, SOCIALISM
It is not a coincidence that the LGBTQ movement looks in hindsight like a carefully executed and multi-faceted revolution. There are strong historical and ideological ties to communist and socialist leaders.
In 1972, an article in the Socialist Workers Party Discussion Bulletin notes: “We should work toward advancing the mass gay liberation movement and its confrontation with the capitalist system and its government. Gay activists will have to bring this system down and replace it before any fundamental change will occur for the benefit of gays.”
“Only our party understands the mass movements and knows how to build them,” the article continues. “Providing leadership for the movement is a part of our assuming the vanguard leadership of this radicalization as a whole.”
Four decades later, another anti-capitalist party claimed influence and ideological alignment with the LGBTQ movement.
In 2021, the Communist Party USA published an article entitled “Queer liberation’s Communist Party roots.” Story author C.J Atkins opens by making the following claim: “The modern movement for queer liberation – or gay liberation to use the as-yet less inclusive terminology of the 1960s and ’70s – wouldn’t exist without the Communist Party USA.”
Atkins continues: “The notion of gays as an oppressed minority culture was a takeoff from the Marxist analysis of the oppression of African Americans and other groups as ‘national minorities.’”
Atkins concluded by making the following claim of the LGBTQ movement’s historical underpinnings: “It tells us that winning full sexual liberation will require winning political, economic, and social liberation for all peoples – it will require socialism.”
