You have to read about these amazing, badass ladies. Fire eating became their symbol, here’s a blurb on its origin.
[It] grew out of tragedy. Last year, a lesbian and a gay man, Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, burned to death in Salem, Ore., after a Molotov cocktail was tossed into the apartment they shared. A month later, on Halloween, at a memorial to the victims in New York City, the Avengers (then newly organized) gave their response to the deaths. They ate fire, chanting, as they still do: “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.”
According to George Chauncey’s eponymous Gay New York, the Harlem Renaissance of the ’20s provided an opportunity for gay men to create their own social and cultural spaces within the burgeoning nightlife in the neighborhood.
im starting a gang of gays where we hunt down and knifefight transphobes reblog if u want in we’re getting matching bomber jackets
after many requests heres a quick concept of what the jackets look like
Ok lemme hitchu with some knowledge! So back in the 70’s there was obviously the Black Panthers but there was also the little known Pink Panthers. They were a group of primarily homosexual black men who would drive around in vans and tear up, roll out of the van and beat up known homophobes, and then drive off. You think this would be stopped super quickly right? In fact they had the perfect cover. You see back then getting beat up by a gay guy was SUPER embarrassing so none of the homophobes would ever report the crimes because they were afraid of being ostracized for, “letting” gay men beat them up. It was the perfect plan and I support this entirely.
If any of y'all try to say, “We survived Reagan, we’ll survive this,” expect a fucking earful from me.
Have you ever noticed that young gay men seem to vastly, overwhelmingly outnumber old gay men?
We most certainly did NOT survive Reagan.
As someone who personally survived the Reagan/Thatcher years, I’m gonna second this. The minimal margin by which some extremely fortunate and possibly privileged members of our community crawled out of the smouldering wreckage of that period is not actually a sign that ‘we’ survived. We, as a cultural group, lost so much and so many that modern LGBT+ culture is essentially reinventing the wheel as far as cultural concepts go. We didn’t survive. We started over.
did you know that in 1953 eisenhower issued an executive order which banned gay people from being employed in government
and it was specifically to root out lesbians who enjoyed the job security of government work
“To protect their careers, lesbian government workers moderated their behavior to avoid suspicion. They refused to socialize with other lesbians in public, attended social functions with gay men as their ‘dates,’ and carefully chose their wardrobes and makeup to project a feminine persona. Male employees who resented reporting to a female boss could trigger an investigation into her sexuality.” - Robert J Corber “Cold War Femme”
this era was called the lavender scare and was both a direct result of mccarthyism and the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness during ww2. over 10,000 lesbians and gay men lost their jobs and as a result the daughters of bilitis (the first ever lesbian activist group in the u.s.) formed in order to protect themselves and gay men
“I’d like to see the gay revolution get started, but there hasn’t been any demonstration or anything recently. You know how the straight people are. When they don’t see any action they think, ‘Well, gays are all forgotten now, they’re worn out, they’re tired.’” – Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, 1971. @payitnomind. Photo: Marsha P. Johnson, Christopher Street Liberation Day, New York City, c. 1974. Photographer unknown, photo c/o #WeveBeenAround (@rhysernst). #HavePrideInHistory #MarshaPJohnson (at New York, New York)
Fun fact: Though being gay in the 40s sucked, being gay in the military was easier, and pretty common. There were apparently, at one point in time time so many lesbians in the military that when they tried to crack down on it, the girls wrote back and said “Look I can give you the names, but you’ll lose some of your best officers, and half your nurses and secretaries.” And they pretty much shut up about it unless you were especially bad at subtlety. (Source: Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers. A good source for gay history from 1900s onwards.)
Sergeant Phelps worked for General Eisenhower. Four decades after Eisenhower had defeated the Axis powers, Phelps recalled an extraordinary event. One day the general told her, “I’m giving you an order to ferret those lesbians out.’ We’re going to get rid of them.”
“I looked at him and then I looked at his secretary. who was standing next to me, and I said, ‘Well, sir, if the general pleases, sir, I’ll be happy to do this investigation for you. But you have to know that the first name on the list will be mine.’
“And he kind of was taken aback a bit. And then this woman standing next to me said, ‘Sir, if the general pleases, you must be aware that Sergeant Phelps’s name may be second, but mine will be first.’
“Then I looked at him, and I said, ‘Sir, you’re right. They’re lesbians in the WAC battalion. And if the general is prepared to replace all the file clerks, all the section commanders, all of the drivers—every woman in the WAC detachment—and there were about nine hundred and eighty something of us—then I’ll be happy to make the list. But I think the general should be aware that among those women are the most highly decorated women in the war. There have been no cases of illegal pregnancies. There have been no cases of AWOL. There have been no cases of misconduct. And as a matter of fact, every six months since we’ve been here, sir, the general has awarded us a commendation for meritorious service.’
“And he said, ‘Forget the order.’
- The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America
I’ve reblogged this before but it didn’t have these comments and HOLY HOT DAMN DID IT NEED THEM.
