Discovering the Gay Liberation Front

TRANSCRIPT

I would say, I don’t know, the February or March, maybe April, 1971 that I happened to read an article in one of the Oz magazines, the old Oz magazines that must’ve been going in the 60s and early 70s, I remember it well, it was Oz 32, and an article written by Warren Haig, who’d been one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front in the United States, and it was all about the GLF, all about the Stonewall riots in New York and how GLF had started, and the idea that gay people, gay men essentially, were saying that, ‘we’re proud to be gay, we’re not going to keep quiet about it; we’re not ashamed, why should we be? We want to shout about it’ and y’know trumpet it, to shout it in the streets, if you like – and I thought this was wonderful, this really caught my imagination. I thought, ‘Yes, absolutely, why shouldn’t gay people be able to be as open about their sexualities as heterosexual people are by default’, and I know some of my gay friends were not that impressed by GLF, I think they thought we should sort of y’know just keep quiet, be very discreet, and get on with life. But I thought that GLF was a wonderful idea.