#jim fouratt

Word Thoughts by Jim Fouratt in Come Out! Magazine. Vol 1, Issue 2, page 15, Jan 10, 1970.

"Homosexual"

Later that night there were about thirty five people who went to a meeting at the Alternative U. In that room the Gay Liberation Front was founded. That was made up of men and women, people of color, drag queens. and preppie boys. The similarities between ACT UP and the Gay Liberation Front in the way that it formed and what its goals were are amazing. And then the next two nights we just went roving around the streets. [...]

People blocked traffic. They took the streets. It was very exhilarating. They were going by the bars, telling people to come out of the bars. It was the first time that gay men and gay women had really felt a sense of empowerment. For people that had been politically active in the left, and there had been a lot of closeted gay people active in the left, they didn't have to put anyone else's revolution, anyone else's cause above their own. That process is very liberating and very energizing and very exhilarating and that's what was happening.

[...]

But I'm telling you, whether it happened at Stonewall or not, it would have happened someplace. We were coming to consciousness that our struggle was as important as all the other struggles we were supporting. So it would have happened someplace.

[...]

Stonewall was the lower life of the gay community, the ones that no respectable gay person would identify with: drag queens, fifteen year old hustlers, drug addicts. And it was almost classic in the sense that the lumpen among us became the heros. That really was the cutting edge. It was the drag queens who became empowered, it was the teenage hustler who maybe didn't fight back for the right reasons but who created that moment in history from which there is no going back.

Anita Bryant certainly proved that point, and AIDS has proved that poiht also. There'S no way people can go back to what it was like before, regardless of what the social conditions are. You'd have to wipe everyone out.

I have to tell you Gabriel, I go to ACT UP and I don't try to play a leadership role. But the first time I went into that room it brought tears to my eyes, to see that many young gay men and lesbians who were not going to go back into the closet. Who were going to celebrate their humanity and their sexuality in spite of the fact that people were being told that gay is death. And that, to me, goes directly back to that moment that was not thought out, that was not planned, that just happened spontaneously.

Tom Robinson, friend of Peter Gabriel and the Kinks' Ray Davies, gained world-wide fame as an open gay man in 1979 when his upbeat rock cry for gay pride, Glad to be Gay went to the top of the charts in the U.K. and made him a radio name from Tokyo to Los Angeles. Rising to the occasion, Robinson and his band TRB delivered two albums full of 60s informed political messages clearly delivering a rock vision of a gay, feminist, non-racist, non-sexist egalitarian world. His love for Martin, and then Martin's leaving him, were upfront and clearly shared in a number of compositions. But it was an impossible position to be in and, like Icarus, he got his wings and soul singed.

Tom Robinson had to please everyone: the gay audience, the political community, the music critics...and he was answerable to the homophobes, the record, company and the gutter press.

He suffered adulation, cruel reviews, loss of privacy and developed a severe identity-crisis (the Judy Garland syndrome) and — Bowie-like — fled to the anonymity of Berlin.

[...]

While he continued to receive critical support, radio and video play and consumer response and even the occasional top 10 U.K. hit, he found himself dropped by the major labels in the US. When he delivered his first album to the newly formed Geffen Records in 1984 with a lusty Genet sex song entitled "I Want to Be Your Cabin Boy" that, remixed, could have ruled the dance floor that summer, a closeted executive paid him to get off the label and go back to London.

He did. And built his own studio and began to produce some of the most moving love songs I have ever heard. You can find the best of them on an album entitled Still Loving You recorded for Castaway records and distributed by RCA Ariola in the U.K. in 1987.

GLF and gay liberation came in 1969 after the women's movement had started. The whole issue of sexism and male chauvinism and patriarchy were very critical issues for women. Radical women and lesbians and the lesbians who were attracted to gay liberation came out of the women's movement where they suffered from homophobia. Betty Friedan was really homophobic. In the women's liberation movement there were a lot of dykes but they were supposed to be quiet, because, you know, God forbid that the men should ever think that the women's movement was about lesbianism.

So there was a lot of struggle in the Gay Liberation Front for the first ten months around sexism. You had a lot of white men who were being radicalized because of their experiences but had no history about struggling for other issues, and they didn't want to deal with racism, they didn't want to deal with sexism. They just wanted to deal with a single issue agenda.

The 32nd Annual NYC Drag March

This year's New York City Drag March was one of the largest in its 32 year history. These portraits were taken as the crowd gathered in Tompkins Square Park before their rapturous descent upon the historic Stonewall Inn — kicking off a very busy Pride Weekend.

Fussy Lo Mein & Fannie Mae B. Free

Randy Wicker, decades-long gay rights activist

Rollerena, the legendary "Fairy Godmother" of New York City's 1970s and 80s nightlife.

Jim Fouratt gay-rights activist who co-founded the Gay Liberation Front on the 3rd night of the Stonewall Rebellion, as well as co-founder of Danceteria.

IN·SPIRE: Leigh Bowery

Jim Fouratt—early member of the Gay Liberation Front and a participant in the Stonewall riots— at IN·SPIRE: Leigh Bowery hosted by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York City.