In the fall of 1970, as the Vietnam War raged, five guys from the New York City Gay Liberation Front took a meandering road trip through the South in a maroon-and-white Volkswagen Bus. Their mission? To inspire gay people to attend the second Black Panther–organized Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Washington, D.C., where they would join other liberationists from all around the country in writing a new American constitution.
Together, they spent six weeks on the road—Diana Ross and Mick Jagger on the radio, freedom and fear in the air. Joel was the radical; Richard, the lover; Giles, the organizer; Jimmy, the enfant terrible; and Doug, the cipher.
Before they even got underway, the government was watching them, worried about “a connection between the homosexual movement and the Black Panther Party,” a federal document shows.
The FBI was sowing discord among radicals, and it was easy for mistrust to take root. Once, these guys were lovers and comrades; now, some of them can’t even be in a Zoom with one another. But briefly, in the autumn of 1970, they saw a chance for a revolutionary future, and they struck out for it together.
Doug died of AIDS-related lymphoma in ’93, and I was never able to agree to the terms Jimmy set for an on-record interview, but Joel, Richard, and Giles were eager to share their memories.
Fifty years later, their stories are a patchwork quilt of collectives, communes, free love, coming out, getting arrested, consciousness-raising rap sessions, gun shooting, acid dropping, and trying to be macrobiotic at McDonald’s. Their versions vary widely, and reality lives somewhere unlocatable in the blurry overlap.
As a historian, I’m used to making the pieces fit, but it’s always something of a guess. Sometimes, the fragmentation is the story. Sometimes, the pieces are all we have. We’re told hindsight is twenty-twenty, but frankly, that’s bullshit. We’re fallible now, we were fallible then, and we’ll be fallible again tomorrow.
But that shouldn’t stop us from climbing mountains.