Martha Shelley: Gay Activism Before Stonewall

Martha Shelley is one of those names that continuously pops up in books about the early days of gay activism in the U.S.

She got her start in the 1960s in the Daughters of Bilitis, the country’s first lesbian civil and political rights organization. Then after Stonewall, Martha met with the Mattachine Society and convinced them to co-host a protest march in order to build on the momentum from the uprising. One year later, they did another march, The Christopher Street Liberation Day March. This has since become an annual event and transformed into what we know today as Pride.

“Throwing bottles or bricks or whatever at a few cops, getting arrested, going home. That doesn’t change the world. What changes the world is organizing.”

I got to speak with Martha in NYC while she was promoting her new memoir, We Set The Night On Fire: Igniting the Gay Revolution. This interview has been edited and condensed.

Jeffrey Masters: Going back to 1963, you were 23 when you joined the Daughters of Bilitis, one of the first lesbian groups and organizations in the U.S. How did you initially hear about the group?

Martha Shelley: There was a book. I think it was The Homosexual in America or something. And at the end there was an appendix, and it gave the address of the Daughters of Bilitis in New York. And so I found it, and I found out when they were having a meeting, and went there.

JM: What was your experience like at that first meeting?

MS: I was really comfortable there. I was uncomfortable in the bars. I didn’t dress right. It was a very butch/femme kind of thing. You either had to dress very femme, in a dress and makeup and stuff, or you had to dress like a man. And I would just show up in a pair of blue jeans and a plaid shirt, and people wouldn’t relate to me at all.

JM: In your book you were writing about going to lesbian bars and used a word I’d never heard before, kai kai.

MS: That they used to be the lesbian world for women who were neither butch nor femme. And it was not good to be one of those. That was looked down on very much.

JM: What percentage of women were kai kai? Less than 50%?

MS: Certainly. You couldn’t make it in that world if you were kai kai. Then there were an awful lot of people who were married to men and had affairs on the side with a woman, just like there were a whole lot of gay guys who occasionally had sex with men but were hiding within a heterosexual marriage.

JM: What sort of work was the Daughters of Bilitis doing back then?

MS: It was predominantly social, trying to help women meet each other, and also trying to improve the situation for lesbians in the world. There was a magazine called The Ladder, and it meant, was we were going to climb, what, the ladder into society, rung by rung, and be accepted into this world. So it was very much a question of pleading for acceptance.

JM: You write that they were “pleading politely for acceptance.”

MS: Yes, and I wasn’t a very polite person. At that point, I had also become politicized on the Left. Starting in the 1960s, I had been going on anti-war marches, going to Washington on buses with other friends and protesting the war. By the time the Vietnam War was happening, I had become very disillusioned with mainstream America. By the time I was in Gay Liberation Front, it was very clear to me that what I wanted was not to join mainstream America, but to completely overturn the system. I was a socialist by then.

JM: You were giving a tour of the West Village to two other women on the night of Stonewall, June 28th, 1969. What did you see and hear?

MS: We were walking along on Christopher Street, and we saw these young people. What I remember is this young white guy with blonde hair throwing things at cops. And the women that I was with were taken aback, and I said, “Oh, it’s just a riot, we have them all the time.” So we just moved on. That was Saturday night. I didn’t know more about it until Monday morning, when I read this little article in The New York Times, and, oh my God, I was on fire. I thought, this is our moment, this is our chance. And I called Jean, and I said, we have to have a protest march.

JM: And so what about the New York Times article about it signaled to you its magnitude?

MS: Because they said homosexuals who had been rioting. And that meant, to me, that was us. That was us standing up. Instead of being carted off into paddy wagons, hiding our faces behind newspapers or jackets or whatever, and being humiliated. These were young people who weren’t going to take it anymore.

JM: I brought the quote from the New York Times: “Heavy police reinforcements cleared the Sheridan Square area of Greenwich Village again yesterday morning when large crowds of young men, angered by a police raid on an inn frequented by homosexuals, swept through the area.”

MS: That’s it. That’s very neutral. It’s not positive towards gay people. It’s not negative. But I saw that, and I thought, that’s us. That was what I saw on Saturday night.

JM: And so you call Jean, head of Daughters of Bilitis in New York, and you say we need to have a protest.

MS: I said, I said we should. I said, we have to have a protest march.

JM: What was her reaction to that?

MS: She said that I should call the head of the gay men’s organization, the Mattachine Society, and if they agreed, that the DOB, Daughters of Bilitis, and the Mattachine Society would jointly sponsor a march.

JM: How much interaction did the Daughters of Bilitis and Mattachine Society have back then?

MS: I don’t know. Ours was the women’s group, and theirs was the men’s group. And I’m sure there was some communication. I hadn’t been involved with Mattachine at all.

JM: Because now the movement is one. It was very separate back then.

MS: Yes, it was very separate. Because a lot of it had to do with people getting together who wanted to meet other people like themselves, who wanted to find love.

JM: And so was it hard to convince them to do this protest march?

MS: Hell no! Dick Leitsch, who was head of Mattachine, said that they were having a meeting, I think, the next day, Thursday night, at some downtown center, and I could come and make my proposal. He didn’t sound very enthusiastic. So I showed up, and there was a lot of talk. There was like a thing about 400 guys there.

JM: That’s a huge group.

MS: Yeah, it was really huge. They rented the hall for people to talk about this thing, because it was a really new thing that there was such a riot, that gay people were actually fighting back. And people talked. And then when it was my turn, I raised my hand, and I made my proposal. And Dick Leitsch said, how many people want to have a protest march? And I looked around, and everybody’s hand was up. And he said, those people who want to organize it, meet over in that corner. He pointed to a corner. And form a committee to organize it. So that meeting was, I think, with the 400 guys, on a Thursday night, right after the riots. On Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, actually, our little committee met at Mattachine headquarters. And we arranged for that first protest march to take place exactly one month after Stonewall.

But, to me, the important thing about Stonewall is not that there was a riot, because there had been, I think, at least one other gay riot on the West Coast. But nothing happened in terms of organizing after that. The important thing about Stonewall was that we organized, that we reached out to other groups. We didn’t just have our protest march, we formed the, at that Saturday meeting, when we were organizing the march, when we first started to organize the march, we also started the Gay Liberation Front. And that group reached out to the Black Panthers, to the Young Lords, to the women’s movement, to various socialist groups, and made alliances, and changed the attitudes in those groups. The Black Panthers were pretty homophobic in their writings, in their newspaper. They would call people they didn’t like faggots. That changed, because we reached out to them. We went to their convention in Philadelphia and changed their minds. The women’s movement was really homophobic. Well, the mainstream women’s movement. The radical women’s movement was not, we had no problem with them. But National Organization for Women, they were terrified of being called, quote, man-hating dykes, and I think it was 1970, we crashed their conference in New York City as the Lavender Menace, which is what Betty Friedan called us, and we changed their minds. And after that, they changed their policy, so that they included a plank in their program for lesbian rights.

JM: So everyone is obsessed with what happened or didn’t happen on the night of Stonewall and you’re saying what matters is everything that happened right after.

MS: What mattered was the organizing and reaching out to other people. Throwing bottles or bricks or whatever at a few cops, getting arrested, going home, that doesn’t change the world. What changes the world is organizing.

JM: Describe the protest. What was the atmosphere? Was it fun and jovial? Was it serious?

MS: I mean the march that we had, it was serious. We marched around, according to the police, there was undercover police there, and I found out later, much later, that they were there. There were about 400 gay people. According to the Village Voice reporter who was there, there were about 500. And most of those people had not been out in public, in the sunshine, openly gay. I was the public spokesperson for Daughters of Bilitis at the time, because I was young and didn’t have a career to lose and was a flaming radical.

But I think in the whole United States, you could count the openly gay people on the fingers of your hands. Maybe on one hand even. And there they were. Four or five hundred people marching in the sunshine. Marched around the village. Ended up back in front of Stonewall in Christopher Park. But the first thing, Marty Robinson jumped up on that water fountain and made a speech, which we previously agreed on. He was making a speech for the boys, I jumped up and made a speech for the girls. And then I looked out and I saw these faces, and they were, like, looking up at me expectantly, and I realized we’re not going to have another riot now, and we don’t need that. So I said, okay, we’re going to go home peacefully. We’re not going to have another riot. But this is not the end. This is just the beginning. We will be back. I remember that. I don’t remember anything else I said that day.

JM: Wow. And Marty Robinson’s a pretty legendary activist. He was a founding member of the Gay Activists Alliance, Gay Liberation Front, GLAAD, ACT UP…he died in the AIDS crisis.

MS: Right, he did.

JM: His name pops up in everyone’s books.

MS: He was a total sweetheart. And I remember having, I had a meal with him at a restaurant, oh, a couple years later, and he said what he, that he was really a romantic, and what he really wanted was someone to love him.

And I felt so bad when I heard that he died, ’cause he, I don’t know if he ever got that.

JM: Wow, that’s heartbreaking. Tell me this, though. How did this first march evolve into the Prides we see today?

MS: Yes. One year later, some of our people organized the Christopher Street Liberation Day march, which, this all morphed into what we now have, the Pride parades. And there were 10,000 people marching up 6th Avenue from the village to Central Park. And boy, I could see people leaning out the windows then, looking out, smiling, waving flags, or sitting there and having a cocktail in the afternoon, or whatever they were doing. It was a really positive atmosphere.

JM: Prides changed a shit ton since this time. Do you still go?

MS: I haven’t been because of COVID. I don’t go, I really avoid crowds these days. You know, for one thing, I’m going to be 80 this year, so my immune system isn’t what it was. And my wife has a congenital heart problem, and the doctor said if she catches it, she’s most likely to die. And this is a woman who never drank, smoked, used drugs, always took care of herself, bad genes. So we’ll have to be careful. And she managed to live this long. She’s 70 now.

JM: As you said, from the planning of this march, in ’69 one month after Stonewall, from that came the Gay Liberation Front. Why was that new group necessary? Like, what wasn’t working with Mattachine and—

MS: Mattachine and DOB, overall, were not going to, they didn’t want to be associated with groups like the Black Panthers. They wanted, again, to be, quote, part of the mainstream. They didn’t want to be labeled commies. Really, they were single-issue groups. They didn’t want to link with any other issues. But it didn’t get them anywhere. It really didn’t change the society. Nevertheless, they were the pioneers who made us possible.

JM: And you learn those lessons from them. Like, we need to link up. We need to care about other causes.

MS: If it weren’t for Daughters of Bilitis, I would not have become the public speaker that I was. And I wouldn’t have had much of a lesbian life at all. I mean, because I didn’t fit into the bar scene. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have been motivated to start Gay Liberation. I would have been motivated, would not have been motivated to start that march. It was that, kind of that platform where I jumped up to the next level. North Carolina? Probably not. I don’t know what I would have done there. I might have done what an awful lot of people did, who wanted to make it big in the world, has moved to New York. If I’d still been in one of those small towns, I don’t know what I would have done.

JM: At the time, what would they’ve said that Gay Liberation Front’s goals were?

MS: We had a platform, which we essentially made up when we went to the Eastern Regional Conference of Homophile Organizations. I think that was in the fall of 1969. Yeah, definitely in the fall. And it was in Philadelphia. And our platform was the right to control your own body. And that meant the right to have sex with other consenting adults, your choice. The right to ingest the drugs of your choice. Now remember, this was at a time when people were being, like in Texas, given life imprisonment for having two joints of marijuana. So there was that whole war on drugs, where they were starting the process of mass incarceration of people, and if you wanted to smoke a joint, God forbid, you’d, you know. The right to not have your ass drafted and shipped to Vietnam to kill or be killed. And women’s reproductive rights. Yes, the right to control your own body, that was part of our platform. I knew women who’d had abortions. Illegal abortions back then.

JM: I don’t want to be insensitive, but I can imagine gay men, back then, in those days, being like, “Martha, we have a massive uphill battle to fight for gay rights, we’ll deal with abortion later,” you know? Was that a fight?

MS: No, that wasn’t, that had nothing to, that might have been true in Mattachine Society and the people who stayed there. But with Gay Liberation Front, no. The guys in Gay Liberation Front were all flaming feminists as well, besides being aware of racism, they were aware of sexism, but both in terms of the sexism against gay people and sexism against women. At that Eastern Regional Conference, there was this one guy who, when we talked about, when we added that plank about abortion rights, he got really upset, and he was furious and against that. There were two women there from Daughters of Bilitis. I was representing Gay Liberation Front, and Daughters of Bilitis, simultaneously. And there were these two older women. One of them had had an illegal abortion. She’d been raped. And they jumped up, and they were furious. And because of their fury, that whole plank passed. All of the organizations voted to accept the Gay Liberation Front plank.

JM: You know, Gay Liberation Front, I’ve often heard about the dances they’d host for all the guys. But I love that you write about the ones for just the women, and the freedom you felt.

MS: Yeah, and with summer nights, we could strip to the waist, like the guys would, because there were no men in the room. We would dance in circles, rather than, coupling up, just to celebrate all of us being together. No one was left out. And it wasn’t a question of, this particular person, it wasn’t just hooking up for sex or for possible future stuff. It was celebrating our community.

JM: With all the relationships that happening amongst the women in the groups, did that ever make things difficult and challenging? Like, when breakups would happen, or somebody would sleep with somebody else.

MS: I don’t think it affected the group as a whole. My personal affairs, affairs didn’t really affect my political actions. And I had my own breakups.

JM: You keep referring to them as affairs. Is that just a different terminology? Or are you, I consider an affair, in today’s world, you know, you’re sleeping with somebody that you should not sleep with. But you were just saying they were relationships?

MS: Yeah, this was relationships. Okay, there was Allison, the woman who I had been having a relationship with since some time, I think I went home with her one night after, drunk after a party, and we spent the night together at her place in New Jersey. And I woke up, and I thought to myself, slightly hungover, I think she said her name was Allison. But that began a relationship that only ended, I mean the sexual relationship lasted for about 8 or 9 months. She was about 40, and I was, what, 25 at the time. And then she met somebody her own age and went with her. But our friendship lasted until she died. That was maybe in 2006, 2007. And the woman that she became lovers with, they were lovers until death. That was Marion. And Marion, she’d been, she was from overseas. She came to New York. She was a member of the Parti Communiste de France. And she became my mentor in Gay Liberation Front. We used to meet for lunch near where she worked, because her day job was editor for Crowell Collier Macmillan. And she would give me books to read and became my mentor for years, and then when she was, let me think, I think it was 2015, 2016, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and my wife and I brought her to Portland and took care of her until she died.

I still miss her. I wrote a poem to her called “A Woman of Courage,” because she was courageous.

JM: You know, speaking of your poetry too, I did want to talk about the radio show you hosted, where you spoke to poets, but also writers and many other women. This was called Lesbian Nation. You write that, working there for the radio show, it changed your life, you say. How so?

MS: Well, I had, I learned some skills. I got to meet a whole lot of people, and it was a very rich experience, interviewing all these people, and then taking my little cassette recorder, which is what we used in those days, and traveling around the US and doing interviews, it was great.

JM: As we said, though, people were not out of the closet back then. They were not publicly—

MS: Oh yes, they were.

JM: Oh, so you had no trouble getting people on the show.

MS: Oh, no. I mean, I remember some of the famous people, but there were also others who were, covered a women’s softball match. Yeah, people were out very much.

JM: Oh, so, I mean, we’re talking about ’72 to ’74. So that was a quick change from the ’60s.

MS: Yes.

JM: Really.

MS: It was a very quick change from 1969. All of a sudden, more and more people were out, and people were writing books.

JM: The radio program was on WBAI. I don’t mean this in a rude way, but it’s the ’70s. Why did they want a program about lesbians? That seems unusual to me for that time.

MS: They had a lot of freedom. A program director, they had a feminist program director, I think it was the first time they had a woman doing, being the program director, Nanette Rainone. And in addition to the other feminist programming, Nanette, who was straight by the way, asked me to do this lesbian program. Because at that point I had already been involved in doing all of this newspaper stuff, the Come Out! newspaper, and Rat newspaper. And I guess she thought I could do it, so I did.

JM: And you’re 88 years old now. How much are you still involved in activism today?

MS: What I do is I write these blog posts, political stuff. Because of COVID, I cannot go to demonstrations, and I dearly wish I could. And I’ll send money to groups and try to support groups. And when I go around and do readings, what I do is, at the end of the readings, I ask people what they’re doing in terms of activism. I talk about what the current priorities are. And for me, that’s what I do. The big priorities are two. One of them is the climate, because if we all fry, then, whatever, our rights don’t mean anything. And the second is economic inequality, and those two are really connected, because the people who are very, very rich have no interest whatsoever in changing the climate, as long as they can make money out of fossil fuels. And then I ask young people what they’re doing.

What I want to do when I go out there is to encourage people to take up the torch, say, okay, I can do what I can in the little time that I have left. Now, you guys go. The older generation of gay people couldn’t write the script for us of what to do. We can’t write the script for you. But you do have to read history and find out what other people did in various times in history. What worked then, what didn’t work. And think about what you can do in your time, with the current problems that are facing you. In every generation, a new pharaoh arises to oppress us. This is something we say at Passover. And the corollary is, in every generation, we have to fight back.

A young man who interviewed me a couple of years ago asked me how I would like to be remembered. And I said, I don’t care. I will be dead. What I care about is, what am I doing today to make a better world? What am I doing to help my neighbors? What can I do today to improve things? That’s it. Day by day. And then at night, when I go outside, because it’s not like New York where I live, we have a little backyard farm, I go out to lock up the chickens, to take out the garbage, and I look up at the stars, and I remember my place in the universe. I am a little tiny dust mote on an insignificant planet that’s maybe 4 billion years old, in a universe that’s maybe 13 billion years old, if the theories are correct.

I do what I can in this life, but we’re really not that important.

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Click here to listen to the full interview on the LGBTQ&A podcast.

LGBTQ&A features interviews with the most interesting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the world. Hosted and produced by Jeffrey Masters. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@jeffmasters1⁠⁠⁠

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