Guerrilla (excerpt)
New Left
Guerilla was an underground newspaper based in Toronto. The few pages included here from an undated issue during the early-1970s feature a portion of a reflection of "an old gay man" and an article about the recent Attica Prison massacre.
Guerilla
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
undated, ca. early-1970s
newspaper
Lavender Vision
Gay Liberation, vol. 1, no. 1
In the wake of the Stonewall rebellion in New York, gay liberation activism in Boston accelerated, including the establishment of a periodical, Lavender Vision. Initially, gay men and women worked on the newspaper together as a "69 publication," meaning half of the newspaper was devoted to gay men and half to gay women. Shortly after its initial publication, though, lesbian activists split, feeling that gay women needed a space of their own. The newspaper was relaunched as a women-centered periodical and local gay men established Fag Rag.
In this issue, divided between women and men, articles explore self-defense, tensions within the women's liberation movement, "phallic imperialism," music, poetry, definitions of masculinity and manhood, the war in Vietnam and gay community.
In the women's half of the newspaper, a section titled, "Who We Are," explains, "We are some lesbians involved in women’s liberation who feel a need for a large lesbian community that gives us ways to meet together and be together and fight together. We’re hoping that this paper can be a place to share feelings and experiences and news about what we are doing in our movement… It has been exhilarating for us as radical lesbians to come together to share work and love and skills and strength: to understand together how we’re fucked over by a society as women, as gay women: and to figure out how to stop this oppression and all oppression. Join us."
Lavender Vision
Roz Payne
ca. 1970-71
Rough Times, 1972, vol. 3, no. 2
Mental Health
RT - A Journal of Radical Therapy, was a radical, “alternate journal” of mental health that emerged initially in the early 1970s in Minot, North Dakota in the context of the New Left. It published 12 issues between 1970 and 1972 and "voiced pointed criticisms of psychiatrists during this period. The journal, originally titled, The Radical Therapist and then Rough Times, was run by a group of psychiatrists and activists who believed that mental illness was best treated by social change, not behavioral modification. Their motto was "Therapy means social, political and personal change, not adjustment.” In the 1969 manifesto that launched the journal, organizers wrote:
Why have we begun another journal? No other publication meets the need we feel exists: to unite all people concerned with the radical analysis of therapy in this society. It is time we grouped together and made common cause. We need to exchange experience and ideas, and join others working toward change. The other “professional” journals are essentially establishment organs which back the status quo on most controversial issues… We need a new forum for our views.
In the midst of a society tormented by war, racism, and social turmoil, therapy goes on with business as usual. In fact, therapists often look suspiciously at social change and label as ‘disturbed’ those who press towards it.
Therapy today has become a commodity, a means of social control. We reject such an approach to people`s distress. We reject the pleasant careers with which the system rewards its adherents. The social system must change, and we will be workers toward such change.
Those involved with this movement sought to offer and alternative to “Establishment” therapeutic approaches. Like many movements of this period, over time, ideological splits divided participants and led to numerous changes in the effort and the journal.
This issue includes an RT position paper; combat liberalism; psychiatric drugs; women’s sex education in a state hospital; impressions of a mental institution; the grief of soldiers; gynecology; beauty standards; Paddington Day Hospital in London; quaaludes; patients’ rights; mental health in China; Old People’s Yellow Pages in Boston; Mental Patients Association; transactional analysis; homosexuality and prison treatment; George Jackson, letters and poetry.
The Radical Therapist, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1972
newspaper
No More Bullshit
Electoral Politics
In 1969, at the prompting of feminist leader, Gloria Steinam, author, cultural critic and activist, Norman Mailer, made an outsider bid for mayor of New York City. His campaign ran as a ticket with Jimmy Breslin, the raucous New York Daily News journalist who was seeking to become the President of the New York City Council. At the time, New York was facing a growing list of problems, including rising crime rates, increasing poverty and deindustrialization, middle-class suburban flight, congestion, pollution and political stagnation. In response, Mailer, whose campaign slogans were “No More Bullshit” and “Throw the Rascals In,” set out an outlandishly bold set of initiatives. His primary proposal was the “51st State” plan, a scheme whereby the five boroughs of New York would secede from the rest of the state in a bid to secure more independence, greater political representation, resources and power. Once independent, Mailer envisioned a radically decentralized political order with the city “splintering into townships and neighborhoods, with their own school systems, police departments, housing programs, and governing philosophies." In addition, he advocated a ban on private cars in Manhattan, replacing them with cabs and a monorail system that would circle the island; a citywide free bicycle rental program; and policies that would eliminate pollution, reduce taxes, and establish full autonomy for public schools. According to campaign literature, at the collegiate level, the campaign promoted “vest-pocket campuses built by students in abandoned buildings” that would restore “a sense of personal involvement that is lost in the large university campuses.” In perhaps his most utopian proposal, Mailer urged the creation of “Sweet Sundays,” which would mandate, once a month, that all mechanical transportation stop and elevators close down so that New Yorkers could decompress from their hectic urban lives and avoid breathing exhaust fumes.
Campaign events were often chaotic. At one, Mailer quipped, "The difference between me and the other candidates is that I'm no good and I can prove it." At another, he called his own supporters “spoiled pigs.” After learning that bars would be closed on election day, Jimmy Breslin complained, “I am mortified to have taken part in a process that required bars to be closed.”
Many New Left activists and libertarians supported the Mailer-Breslin ticket. The Black Panther Party also endorsed the duo after they backed the release of Panther leader, Huey Newton. To some, the campaign was a lark, to other a serious challenge to the established order, and to others an outright offense.
In the end, Mailer finished in fourth place during the Democratic mayoral primary, edging out state Assemblyman, Charles B. Rangel, who would go on to be elected to Congress in 1970 and remain in office until 2017. Even in defeat, though, Mailer’s campaign was seen by many leftists and libertarians as an important attempt to move from the realm of ideas into programmatic politics.
________________
Norman Mailer first gained fame in 1948 with the publication of his now-classic war novel, The Naked and the Dead, which was based in part on his own WWII experiences. In 1955, he was a part of a small group that established The Village Voice, an influential alternative newspaper located in Greenwich Village, which continued publication until 2018. Also an influential essayist, Mailer published “The White Negro” in Dissent in 1957, a controversial analysis of the “hipster” in post-war American culture.
Mailer became a ubiquitous cultural figure in the 1960s. In 1960, he published "Superman Comes to the Supermarket," an essay in Esquire on the rise of John F. Kennedy at the Democratic National Convention. He continued to see JFK as an “existential hero” for a new era. That same year, Mailer was convicted of assault for the stabbing of his wife, Adele, and served three years of probation. Mailer was also one of 29 prominent Americans who co-founded the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which opposed the hardline anti-Castro stance of U.S. politicians and military leaders during the early-1960s. The group achieved widespread infamy in 1963, when it became public news that Kennedy assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a member. In 1967, Mailer made a mark with the best-selling political book, Why Are We in Vietnam? and played an ongoing role in the anti-war movement, including signing the 1968 “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest,” a pledge to withhold tax payments to the U.S. government as opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam. Again that year, Mailer covered the turbulent Democratic and Republican National Conventions, work that he later published as, Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1968). In that book, Mailer portrays American politics cynically as a crass and self-interested exchange of political power. Reflecting back later on the party politics of the 1960s-era, Mailer wrote, "If you played for a team, you did your best to play very well, but there was something obscene… with starting to think there was more moral worth to Michigan than Ohio State." To Mailer, there was little difference between the disgraced Richard Nixon who left the White House after the Watergate scandal and Lyndon Johnson, whose liberal Great Society was derailed by the failed Vietnam war. Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson, Mailer is also seen as a pioneer in what came to be known as the “New Journalism,” a form of creative nonfiction that used some of the style and devices of literary fiction to write fact-based journalism. His most significant work in this vein was Armies of the Night (1968), a nonfiction novel about the October 1967 March on the Pentagon. The book won both the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Mailer also wrote books about the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, a response to criticisms of him and other male authors by feminist author, Kate Millett, and an account of the 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle,” the heavyweight championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Forman in Zaire.
In 1979, Mailer published The Executioner’s Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize. The “true crime” novel focuses on the execution of Utah murderer, Gary Gilmore. His final novel, Harlot’s Ghost, published in 1991, explored the hidden history of the CIA from the end of WWII through the mid-1960s. Mailer, who also wrote drama and screenplays for films, died in 2007.
_____________________
Jimmy Breslin was an outspoken journalist and novelist who was known as a tough-talking representative of working-class residents in his hometown, Queens, New York. In 1962, Breslin wrote a best-selling book on the New York Mets baseball team, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? In 1963, he was covering southern civil rights activism in Selma, Alabama, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. While other journalists wrote stories about the fallen president, Breslin secured an interview with Malcolm Perry, the Parkland Hospital doctor who had tried to save him. He followed that up with a powerful column about Clifton Pollard, the man who dug Kennedy’s grave. As journalist David Shedden later wrote, “It’s a plainly told story -- no breathtaking sentences here -- but the style is effective in its Hemingway-esque directness. Breslin moves from the gravedigger’s perspective, to a more omniscient view of the funeral, back to the worker. We like the passage about Jackie Kennedy, its moving description of her particular, telling gestures. But the piece’s central power lies in Breslin’s juxtaposition of the cemetery workers, the small details of the scene’s sounds and sights, with the enormity of the event." From there, Breslin secured positions as a columnist for a succession of New York newspapers, gaining a reputation as a staunch opponent of corruption and injustice. Like Mailer, Breslin was seen as a pioneer of the New Journalism movement and often mixed his own experience with his journalistic reportage of political events. In 1969, he published the true-crime book, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, about mobster “Crazy Joe” Gallo and his band of bungling baddies. The book was made into a film in 1971.
Breslin continued to be an influential writer until his death in 2017. In 1973, he wrote another novel, World Without End, Amen. In 1977, Breslin again gained notoriety for a series of compelling articles on the infamous “Son of Sam” serial killer, David Berkowitz. In response to those essays and in the midst of his killing spree, Berkowitz wrote to Breslin: “Hello from the cracks in the sidewalks of N.Y.C. and from the ants that dwell in these cracks and feed on the dried blood of the dead that has settled into the cracks.” The murderer continued, “J.B., I’m just dropping you a line to let you know that I appreciate your interest in those recent and horrendous .44 killings. I also want to tell you that I read your column daily and find it quite informative.” In 1978, Breslin received a sizable advance to co-write a book about the Son of Sam murders with Dick Schaap, titled, .44. Many viewed the book as exploitative and in poor taste so soon after the traumatic events. In 1986, Breslin won a Pulitzer Prize, in part for his writing about the AIDS epidemic in New York City, as well his broader work championing the causes of ordinary people. In later decades, he published a memoir, I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me (1996), as well as a non-fiction account of a Mexican construction worker in New York who was killed on site when a building collapsed, The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez (2002), and a final book about the mafia, titled, The Good Rat (2008). Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Smith described Breslin, "like an Irish wind that has blown through Queens and Harlem and Mutchie's bar. It is a pound of Hemingway and a pound of Joyce and 240 pounds of Breslin." Following his death in 2017, Tom Wolfe called him, “incredible, the greatest newspaper columnist of my era.”
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1969
button
Fag Rag, January 1973
Gay Liberation
Fag Rag was a Boston-based gay liberation newspaper published by a group of writers and activists from 1971 through the early-1980s. This issue includes articles about a guide to bars, baths and books; an interview between a Hustler and customer"; a gay Vietnam veteran; generational differences in the gay liberation movement; homosexuals and welfare; the closet; the first international gay liberation congress in Milan; gay pride week; poetry; Miami Democratic Convention; "cocksucking" as a revolutionary act; police repression; race and homosexuality; gay experience at rest stops; homosexuality in prison; letters to the editor.
Fag Rag Collective
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
January 1973
underground press
RAT Subterranean News, May 22-June 4, 1970
New Left
RAT Subterranean News was published in New York, starting in March of 1968 and was edited by Jeff Shero, Alice Embree and Gary Thiher, who had come North from Austin, Texas, where they worked on The Rag, another important underground paper. Whereas the East Village Other represented the counterculture point of view, RAT had a left political orientation. This issue covers a wide range of topics, including media and revolution; Joan Bird and Dionne Donghi; a labor walk-out at Bell Telephone in New York; the police killing of six black men in Augusta, Georgia; police killing of two students at Jackson State; street-fighting between Puerto Rican youths and police on the Lower East Side; poetry; the role of women in the labor movement; brief reports on anti-colonial struggles in Portuguese’s African colonies; corporate repression of indigenous people in Brazil; 9 days of global activism in May; revolutionary feminism; squatting; “The Woman-Identified Woman”; How to…; emergency first aid for street warfare; ads and personals; repression against marijuana advocates; letters to the editor.
RAT Subterranean News
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
May 22-June 4, 1970
underground press
Fag Rag, June 1971
Gay Liberation
Fag Rag was a significant, Boston-based "gay male newspaper" published from 1971 and the early-1980s. In the wake of the Stonewall rebellion in New York, gay liberation activism in Boston accelerated, including the establishment of a periodical, Lavender Vision. Initially, gay men and women worked on the newspaper together as a "69 publication," meaning half of the newspaper was devoted to gay men and half to gay women. Shortly after its initial publication, though, lesbian activists split, feeling that gay women needed a space of their own. The newspaper was relaunched as a women-centered periodical and local gay men established Fag Rag. At its height, Fag Rag had between 400-500 subscribers and a print run of 4,000-4,500. Like other underground press periodicals, Fag Rag featured a mix of original journalism, opinion and graphic arts related to the gay liberation movement, as well as interviews with notable figures, including, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Isherwood, John Wieners, Allen Young, Gerard Malanga, John Rechy, Ned Rorem, and Gore Vidal. Features in this issue include: yoga; Phil Ochs; a failed attempt to establish a gay community center; psychology and homosexuality; a reflection by a gay teenager; homosexuality and military service; coming out; the anti-war movement; a critique of the May Day protest in D.C.; “Revolutionary sexism” in the Black Panther Party; Machismo and police; "gayness" and the Cuban Revolution; the objectification of the “cock”; as well as a selection of poetry.
Fag Rag Collective
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
June 1971
underground press
"Toward a Female Liberation Movement," by Beverly Jones and Judith Brown
Women's Liberation
In this 1968 essay, sometimes referred to as the "Florida Paper," Beverly Jones and Judith Brown put forth a strong, even incendiary, critique of the "Women's Manifesto," which was created by the Women's Caucus at the 1967 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) convention. This document was originally published by the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC). In the 1970 Handbook of Women's Liberation. Marlene Dixon wrote, "That started it if anything written started it. That paper just laid it on the line."
Beverly Jones and Judith Brown, published by New England Free Press
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
1968
pamphlet
The Free Press, undated
New Left
The Free Press was a short-lived publication created in 1968 by the Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Society at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It was introduced initially in 1968 as a placeholder paper for The McGill Daily while it was on hiatus. During the 1960s, The Daily and Free Press were important venues for outspoken students facing opposition from student government and the university administration. They covered issues like the War in Vietnam, women's liberation and reproductive rights, racial justice, gay liberation and the counterculture. The pages of the undated issue here focus on various aspects of the emerging gay liberation movement.
Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Society at McGill University
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s
underground press
Sexual Revolution Readings
Women's Liberation
This mimeographed resource contains selected essays and manifestos related to second-wave feminism and reproductive health, with special attention to sexuality, race, class, and gender. Essays included: “Sexuality,” by Roxanne Dunbar; “Masturbation”; “Women-Identified Woman” by the Radicalesbians; and “Abortion or Genocide?” The goal of this resource was to help women raise their consciousness about sexual health, sexuality and contraception.
In the Know, Inc.
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970
mimeograph
pamphlet
The Glass Onion
Student Movement
This newsletter advertises the organization of the Bridgeport High School Student Union based in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Protesting the organization and administrative authority in the local educational system, this newsletter underlines issues concerning high school students such as the draft board, the militarization of campus law enforcement, war spending, women’s education, and the authoritative structure of secondary education.
The High School Free Press
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
underground press
What is the Sexual Revolution? What is the Gay Revolution?
Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation
This brief leaflet provides a response to two questions: What is the Sexual Revolution? What is the Gay Revolution? The writing links sexual revolution to changing relations between men and women and gay liberation to a broader struggle for human liberation.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. late-1960s or early-1970s
mimeograph
leaflet
"Problem Pregnancy Guide: By, For and About Women"
Women's Liberation
This pamphlet includes a collection of important articles and resources from the women's liberation movement on sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, abortion, birth control and motherhood. It also includes a list of women's health resources in several northeastern states. This resource highlights the importance of women's health in second wave feminism.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. early-1970s
pamphlet
"Gay Liberation: 15 articles, plus documents, poems, photos and drawings"
Gay Liberation
This pamphlet gathers together a variety of influential articles, poems and images from the early gay liberation movement, including, ""Gay is Good"; "The Woman Identified Woman"; "What's Wrong With Sucking?"; "Gay Consciousness"; "Born to Love"; "My Gay Soul"; "A Letter from Mary"; "Gay Liberation Meets the Shrinks"; "A Letter from Huey to the Revolutionary Brothers and Sisters About the Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements"; "statement by Third World Gay Revolution"; "Hey, man"; "From the Men: Games Male Chauvinists Play"; "A Gay Manifesto"; "Revolutionary Love"; "The Flaming Faggots"; "Phoenix of New Youth"; "Bring the Beautiful Boys Home";
Gay Flames
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. ear;y-1970s
pamphlet
Gay Liberation button
Gay Liberation
Against a black field, this button shows two pink male astrological symbols side-by-side, symbolizing male homosexuality. This button represented the gay liberation movement and its mobilization in the post-Stonewall (1969) era. An important part of the emerging gay liberation movement was a heightened public profile for gays and lesbians, as well as various public expressions of gay pride.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1969
Button
Physical Object
Statue of Liberty Couple
Gay Liberation
This button features an image of two Statues of Liberty in bright pink holding hands. The image aims to forge a link between constitutional liberties and gay liberation.
unknown
Roz Payne
Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
ca. 1970s
Button
Physical Object