In order to begin my reflections I must first recognize that while I am talking about the targeting of

queer and transgender people and communities by the FBI, as well as the multiple forms of resistance
that have come out of queer and transgender communities, I in no way want to make the queer and
transgender people within other liberation movements invisible. People like Angela Davis of the Black
Panther Party, Kuwasi Balagoon of the Black Liberation Army, and Sylvia Rivera of the Young Lords
are just a few queer and transgender people who were impacted by FBI surveillance and repression in
their movements for liberation. Just as whiteness and racism are major struggles of the queer and
transgender movement of today, white supremacy was a serious division within the movement of
queers of the past. Many of the movements and organizations I will discuss were dominated by white
people. This reality reflects the racism that divides queer movements and the practice by liberation
struggles of often forcing individuals to choose between their sexuality, gender, and other aspects of
their identity.

I also want to mention that the division that exists today between assimilationist and radical queers and
transgender people is not a new phenomenon. This is a tension that has been a struggle within these
movements for six decades. Before queer was a political/sexual identity, when gay only mean happy,
there was a budding movement of same-gender lovers, the homophile movement. The term was coined
by a German Sexologist in 1924. Homophile, as an identity, was preferred by many early same-gender
loving activists because it emphasized love, the Greek suffix, phile, rather than sex as emphasized in
homosexual. In the United States the first Homophile organization was the Mattachine Society,
founded in 1950 followed by the Daughters of Bilitis, founded in 1955. The Mattachine Society did
begin with radical and even revolutionary ideas. Harry Hay, the primary founder, was an active
member of the Communist Party. Unfortunately the Communist Party was wildly homophobic,
believing that homosexuality would disappear along with capitalism, being that homosexuality was
simply a sick symptom of a bourgeios economic system. Harry Hay focused on his organizing with the
Mattachine Society, leaving the Party to do so. The first five years of the Mattachine Society they
focused on growth, public education, and defense of men constantly entrapped by police for sexual
crimes like public lewdness and sodomy. After the second public meeting of the Mattachine Society
the FBI sent an informant to nearly every meeting to deeply infiltrate the organization. Their purpose
was to secure information of all members of the organization and publicize it to employers, family
members, and newspapers. The FBI worked with the US Postal Service to gain access to as many
people as possible who received publications from the Mattachine Society or any other Homophile
organization. FBI agents would consistently show up at the work places of people they decided were
homosexuals, outed them, got them fired, and many, many times those individuals committed suicide.
As the surveillance of the Mattachine Society was beginning the U.S. Senate was also convening a
bipartisan committee to weed out any homosexuals working within the federal government, leading to
hundreds of people losing their jobs. This witch hunt was done in conjunction with the McCarthy
hearings, but was quite separate as McCarthy himself was regularly under attack for likely being gay.

The FBI did not only use intimidation to harass people active in the Homophile movement. The
obscenity laws of the day were blatantly used to target the growing movement and people within it.
Multiple issues of the regular newspaper of the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, One,
was declared obscene and unmailable due to work by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles. FBI
agents raided houses and offices to get access to newspapers and other information about the
Homophile organizations. Obtaining warrants was never very difficult as homosexuality was,
essentially, illegal and the public advocacy for homosexuality was forbidden under numerous decency
laws. FBI agents regularly brought Mattachine Society leadership into offices for questioning and
intimidation, even setting some up with charges unrelated to their organizing, a tactic perfected later
during COINTELPRO.
There is always resistance however. Even though the Mattachine Society became an assimilationist
organization in 1955, strongly coming out against Communism and even expelling all Communist
members of the organization, they did advocate strongly for the legal rights of homosexuals within the
United States. They were deeply fixated on appearing proper and respectable, even forcing protesters
who attended their rallies to wear professional and “gender appropriate” clothing, not unlike what the
Southern Christian Leadership Council would later require of their membership. Through their socially
accepted respectability they believed they would be able to secure better treatment for homosexuals and
while the federal investigating and probing of federal employees slowed down in the 1960s, the reality
of policing and surveillance of same-gender loving people was did not go anywhere.

As the Civil Rights Movement was getting stronger and successes were being won queer working class,
poor, and gender non-conforming people began organizing their own communities of resistance. In
San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood many queer and transgender young people were organizing
the first organization for queer and transgender young people, the Vanguard. These young people and
their older transwomen allies were regular patrons at Compton Cafeteria. At the time it was illegal for
individuals to wear clothing of the “opposite” sex thus making any place transgender people gathered a
target for police harassment, Compton Cafeteria was no exception. In August of 1966 transgender
patrons and their allies were fed up with the police harassment and collaboration by the business
owners and they fought back. Coffee was thrown in faces of cops, windows were smashed, and people
fought back in the streets. The uprising went on for numerous nights until finally things settled and
patrons were able to go back to the cafeteria with less harassment. We all know the chant, when we
fight, we win!

We are regularly told that the Stonewall riots were the beginning of the Gay Liberation struggle, but it
is far more complex than that. No one moment began the movement, rather it was a culmination of
many moments including Compton, Stonewall, and a culture of resistance that reached far beyond the
bars, cafeterias, piers, and parks frequented by queers and transgender people. The Gay Liberation
Front formed in New York City immediately after the Stonewall Riots. Almost as immediately the
GLF came under surveillance by the FBI. They were considered part of the New Left, they chose their
name specifically because of its allegiance with the Vietnamese National Liberation Front. GLF
chapters quickly sprang up around the country, including one right here in Boston. GLF chapters
marched in anti-war rallies, joined anti-police brutality marches, and included jails along the route of
early gay pride parades. GLF folks had their own problems with race and gender but it wasn't helped
as the FBI intentionally sent racist messages from the GLF to the Panthers and sent homophobic
exclusionary messages from the Panthers to the GLF. The intentional divisive tactics by the FBI only
exacerbated the already tense relationship between the two organizations. However, on August 15,
1970 Huey Newton delivered a speech calling for unity between Black liberation struggles with
women's and gay liberation. While the government attempted to divide the movements attempted to
build. Unfortunately the FBI did not give up with little divisive notes. From October of 1971 until
June of 1972 Robert “Butch” Merritt was an FBI informant who infliltrated weekly meetings of the
GLF in DC. He intentionally spread rumors about other GLF members that they were FBI agents. He
broke in to offices to secure information for the FBI and informed Black groups that they would not be
welcome at GLF meetings. Due to these and other internal fractions the GLF imploded in 1972.

To continue lifting up the stories of radical left queers I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about
queers who were part of different underground clandestine organizations including the George Jackson
Brigade, the Red Guerilla Resistance, among others. I also want to highlight the resistance of some
queer communities who stood fast against the Grand Juries that supeonaed them.
The George Jackson Brigade was an underground organization based in Seattle, Washington. Different
from many of the other underground organizations the GJB was a mostly working class, formerly
incarcerated group of folks made up of queers and was also multi-racial. Ed Mead and Bo Brown are
the best known queer members of the Brigade, but Bruce Seidel, who was murdered by police officers
as he was trying to surrender during a failed bank expropriation, had been lovers with Ed Mead for a
short while. Between May 31st 1975 and December 24th 1977 the GJB was responsible for 15
bombings including the Washington Department of Corrections, FBI offices, and many multiple
corporations benefiting from prisoner exploitation and other worker exploitation. Members of the
above ground Left throughout Washington were regularly harassed by the FBI in attempts to gain
information about the GJB and much of the Lesbian community was targeted to gain specific
information about Bo Brown, considered the gentleman bank robber as she was and still is, butch and
tough yet always sweet to the tellers she was requesting withdrawals from. Even with all the repression
members of these communities did not snitch on their underground comrades. Even as Brigade
members made the FBI most wanted list, people continued to resist.

Also in the 1970s the FBI had a full task force out searching for Kathy Power and Susan Saxe who had
been part of a group of revolutionaries who were trying to fund clandestine anti-war resistance through
bank robberies. During a robbery here in Boston that these two women took part in along with Lefty
Gilday, who is still locked up in the Massachusetts DOC system, a cop was killed. The revolutionaries
went immediately underground to different places around the country. In search for the two women the
FBI showed up in Lesbian communities Lexington Kentucky as well as New Haven, Connecticut as the
FBI was trying to root out two of their Most Wanted. Multiple women went to prison for 18 months
rather than cooperate with the FBI.

The last underground organization I'm going to mention existed in the early 1980s. The Red Guerrilla
Resistance was a group of white folks organizing nationally for revolutionary possibilities. They
bombed U.S. government sites, Navy headquarters in Washington, and a police association in New
York. Bob Lederer is the person who has written most extensively about queer struggle within the
radical left. He delivered a speak as part of “Rainbow Flags for Mumia” in March of 1999 that lifts up
the struggle of the Red Guerrilla Resistance. Two out lesbians were part of the RGR, Laura Whitehorn
and Linda Evans. In order for the FBI to find these two women in particular they subpoenaed multiple
gay and lesbian activists out of New York who all resisted the grand jury fishing expeditions.
Unfortunately the FBI did eventually catch the members of the Red Guerrilla Resistance, including
Laura Whitehorn, Linda Evans, and Susan Rosenberg, who came out as a lesbian in 1990. Support for
Susan Rosenberg spurred the creation of Queers United In Support of Political Prisoners. QUISP
organized in New York providing direct support to all political prisoners, queers and others. Even
before QUISP existed, and organizing parallel to QUISP in later years, was the organization Out of
Control: Lesbian Committee to Support Women Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War. They were
comprised of mostly formerly incarcerated revolutionaries and their allies. They marched in queer
parades and raised awareness within the queer community of the needs of women political prisoners.
While the struggle of political prisoners in general is too often unheard by radicals, the specific needs
of women political prisoners has been essentially ignored. Their organizing and resistance is an
essential queer story to tell.

To switch gears a little bit, while the Red Guerrilla Resistance was underground the AIDS crisis was
beginning. Originally called GRID, Gay Related Immuno Deficiency, this disease was poising and
killing off a generation of gay men. In 1987 after many, many failed attempts at making the changes
necessary to the medical industry and the popular understanding of AIDS, organizers in New York City
came together to start a more radical organization that would root itself in the legacy of liberation
struggles before it. They created the first chapter of ACT-UP. Between 1987 and 1990 the need for
ACT-UP became so clear and over 100 chapters sprung up around the country. However, just as they
began their organizing the FBI began its repression and surveillance. FBI documents reveal that they
believed ACT-UP activists were going to use infected blood at protests and die-ins, intentionally
infecting the leadership of the FDA, drug companies, and politicians. They sent agents to meetings and
intentionally instigated violence at multiple demonstrations simply to increase police brutality, with the
intention of scaring activists out of continuing the fight. ACT-UP as an organization did not survive in
its large form beyond the 90s and some attribute that to the role of police and FBI surveillance, I wish I
could blame the FBI and police for that, but rather it seems to me that as so many members died there
was a lack of radical fury, and those who were left had too many issues of patriarchy and racism to
maintain a united organization as the face of AIDS was changing from the white gay man to the straight
Black woman.

Another part of FBI repression that I am sure some folks here will not consider relevant to these same
movements, but I assure you absolutely is, is the violence against boy-lovers and gay intergenerational
relationships. Age-of-consent laws are state controlled and enforced and thus the FBI themselves are
not generally involved in these cases. However, when gay men are involved, especially gay men of
color, the FBI often all of a sudden becomes very interested in the case, often exaggerating their right
to be involved. In the 1950s the targeting of gay men as pedophiles took on an out-of-control fervor,
spurred by the FBI's work to root out homosexuals on a national level. The most well-known case was
that of a whole slew of men in Boise, Idaho. An essential book on the topic, The Boys of Boise: Furor,
Vice and Folly in an American City details how the lives of many men were ruined with life sentences
behind bars and others who took their own lives. These men may or may not have been involved in
sexual relationships with boys ages 15 to 19, but all of these relationships were considered consensual
by the teenagers involved in them. “Protecting of our youth” became the mantra of the police and
government authorities involved in the sting against the men, but all the teenagers involved in the case
were either getting paid off by the police to be involved or were being threatened if they weren't willing
to cooperate.

Here in Boston the hysteria around boy-lovers exploded in the 1970s. Boston was a home of some of
the most radical queer organizing in the country, often ahead of San Francisco and New York, a reality
very hard to imagine today as organizations are fighting for marriage or expansion of hate crimes
legislation and for the right to fight in imperialist wars. In the 1970s Gay Community News, one of the
most essential gay newspapers of the time, was based here in Boston and an off-shoot of GCN made up
of sex-positive anarchist gay men, FAG RAG, was also based right here. One of the realities of gay
male life at the time, which exists today but much more quietly, was the practice of intergenerational
relationships. As gay boys were coming out of the closet, gay men in their 30s, 40s and 50s would take
them under their wing and show them around. They also often developed loving, romantic, and sexual
relationships. I recognize that we are not all going to agree on whether these relationships were okay
or not, but the reality is that police and FBI forces came down upon these men and the teenagers they
were in relationships with. In 1977 15 men were rounded up in Revere, Massachusetts and that began
an all-out witch hunt of gay men. Whether gay men were in relationships with teenagers or not they
came under constant surveillance by the police in collaboration with the FBI. A hotline was established
in the District Attorney's Office that anyone could call and annonymously report a possible
inappropriate relationship, this led to the reporting on hundreds of gay men across the state of
Massachusetts, whether they were in the District Attorney's district or not. Surprisingly, queers rallied
in defense of the men accused of being pedophiles, which happened because of a myriad of
circumstances, not the least of which was the fact that the Herald printed pictures, home addresses, and
places of employment of all the men charged with everything from sodomy to assault and battery. It
should be noted that not one of the teenagers involved in the sex ring were interested in cooperating
with the government until they were threatened with incarceration themselves. However, even as they
were threatened many of the teenagers joined others at the first community gathering to discuss the
reality of the situation, this gathering later established the organization NAMBLA, North American
Man-Boy Love Association. This organization leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth, but they existed
primarily as an organization advocating for youth rights, an elimination of age-of-consent laws, and the
support of people being attacked in the media and by law enforcement for consensual relationships. It
is important to note that the FBI deeply infiltrated NAMBLA in the 1980s during the big cultural hype
on pedophiles, the time when every stranger was out to kidnap children and molest the them, or so
parents were led to believe. They reported to a special congressional panel that NAMBLA was not
actually engaged in any illegal activity and that the people involved were not a “real threat to children.”
The recently released book, Queer Injustice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States
states that, “queers are cast as a perpetual threat not only to children... but to the normalcy, promising
futures, and rigidly gendered, raced, and classed social order that those innocent lives represent.”
Protecting the children, saving the innocent, these cultural stories are used over and over again to target
queer people in the United States, regardless of what we are doing.

Where are we today? We are at a challenging place within the queer and transgender movements.
There are those, like the early Homophile movement, who are fighting full time to assimilate into the
dominant structures that oppress everyone. Success has been defined by FBI policies that do not
discriminate based on sexual orientation in hiring practices, so now queers can openly serve the FBI in
its persecution of other queers. However, there are still those organizations fighting and resisting the
assimilationist agenda with an analysis of collective liberation. The recent organizing efforts of an
organization of mostly white anarcho-punk queers, Bash Back, was a failed attempt at lifting up the
message of gay liberation, but it should be recognized that the FBI immediately took attention to them,
even inditing multiple members of Bash Back in RNC related offenses in the Twin Cities. More
relevant organizing efforts are coming from Queers for Economic Justice, the Audre Lorde Project,
Transgender Intersex Justice Project, and many others around the country fighting against police and
FBI repression in its many forms today. The “Secure Communities” initiative is going to directly harm
queer communities as it goes after gender non-conforming and queer people of color. The Real ID Act
is a disaster for transgender people as it acts as yet another surveillance tool that will harm the lives of
those transitioning their gender. The War on Terror has had an incredibly queer impact, articulated
brilliantly in Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, in which she
explores how homophobia is a direct tool of the state in oppressing Arab men, exemplafied through the
practices of torture at Abu Grahib, but noticeable throughout the media and governmental public
attacks on Arab men in particular.

The FBI is able to utilize our movements' own internalized oppressions to keep us divided. There are
queer and transgender people part of every revolutionary movement and thus FBI persecution of all
revolutionaries is a persecution of queer and transgender people. Just as the modern GLBT movement
needs to address and dismantle it's internalized white supremacy, capitalism, zionism, xenophobia,
militarism, and so forth movements for revolutionary change must also work on addressing their
internalized heteropatriarchy and transphobia/gender binarism. It is with a collective analysis that all
forms of oppression are interlinked and can be used against us that we will gain a stronger capacity to
resist state repression.
Bibliography -
“Three Decades of Queer Solidarity and Radical Struggle: A Rich History” by Bob Lederer and
“Dykes and Fags Want to Know: Interview with Lesbian Political Prisoners” by Queers United in
Support of Political Prisoners, Linda Evans, Laura Whitehorn, and Susan Rosenberg in Let Freedom
Ring: A Collection of Documents from the Movements to Free U.S. Political Prisoners and Prisoners
of War. by Matt Meyer, Adolfo Perez Esquivel, and Lynne Stewart PM Press (Oakland, California)
2008.

John Mitzel, The Boston Sex Scandal, Glad Day Books (Boston, Massachusetts) 1980

Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT
People in the United States, Beacon Press (Boston, Massachusetts) 2011

Daniel Burton-Rose, Guerrilla USA: The George Jackson Brigade and the Anticapitalist Underground
of the 1970s, University of California Press (Berkley, California) 2010

George E. Haggerty, Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia Routledge (New York, New York)
1999

Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 29, no. 4 (1995) and Gay Men and the Sexual History of the
Political Left, ed. Gert Hekma, Harry Oosterhuis, and James Steakley (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harrington
Park Press, 1995), 319–49.

David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the
Federal Government, The University of Chicago Press Books (Chicago, Illinois) 2006

ACT-UP New York http://www.actupny.org/reports/police_surveillance.html

FBI Files of the Gay Liberation Front and Mattachine Society available at
http://bitterqueen.typepad.com/friends_of_ours/2010/12/the-fbi-files-early-gay-rights-groups-not-mob-
fans.html