Gay Men in the Feminist Revolution: Articles, Pamphlets & Reflections on My Gay Activist Days In San Francisco, 1969-1972

It’s 50 years since the storied Stonewall Riots in New York, adopted by popular culture as the launch of the modern LGBTQ+ movement. It’s also 50 years from the time this writer was a young LGBTQ+ activist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nick Benton was arguably the most prolific published writer on issues of the movement in that area in that time, writing regularly for the alternative press, including the legendary Berkeley Barb, the Berkeley Tribe, various San Francisco gay bar tabloids, the Gay Sunshine, a Gay Sunshine rival, and eventually the short-lived paper created by him and Jim Rankin, The Effeminist. All this was in the 1969-1972 period, after Stonewall and before Harvey Milk arrived on the San Francisco scene in the fall of 1972.

The purpose of this volume is to acquaint the reader with how activists like Benton in the days of seminal influence of the modern LGBTQI+ movement were thinking, not simply in terms of equality and social justice, but in terms of what it means to be the way we are from a larger, even cosmic, perspective, and how it interconnects with other factors of human existence, and the pursuit of political change. We remain in an era of revolutionary change with respect to these notions, and challenged by the forceful reactionary counterrevolution that only confirms that the deeper current is going on. This is what makes this volume relevant today.