GLF and the United Nations July 1970

By John Knoebel

In July of 1970, New York’s Gay Liberation Front was invited to participate in the first “United Nations World Youth Assembly.” This event was a weeklong gathering organized by the UN as part of its 25th anniversary observance in which they brought over 600 youth to New York City from countries around the world to engage them in discussions of current world affairs.

Although most meetings were held at the UN headquarters on issues of world peace, nuclear disarmament, open trade and so forth, amazingly, one evening’s event was organized to introduce these young men and women to the current radical youth movements in the U.S. In retrospect, this concept may seem strangely daring for the UN, but probably revealed an actual awareness that the political views of many of the foreign youth were far from conservative.

Speakers at the evening event included radical anti-Vietnam war activists, Abbie Hoffman and William Kunstler, as well as representatives from the Black Panthers, Young Lords, feminist and gay and lesbian groups each bringing small contingents for the evening who joined their speakers on the stage and in the audience. GLF had chosen long-time GLF member, Tom Finley, as our speaker. Although last to speak on a lengthy program, Tom spoke eloquently about the ongoing push for gay and lesbian liberation briefly discussing the broad history of anti-gay oppression in the U.S. and the accomplishments of the newly formed gay movement.

While all the other groups had been well-received by a clearly supportive audience, vocal opposition to Tom’s speech broke out as soon as he finished. Initially led by an outraged African student who stood up shouting, he was shortly joined by other men in the audience who vigorously objected to the inclusion of the gay speaker and criticized the UN for giving any credibility to “sexual perverts” who would never be accepted in their countries. The uproar in the audience became widespread. After being shouted down repeatedly, Tom and the GLF contingent on stage walked out of the hall. The UN moderator tried to return the group to order. Within a few minutes, however, the GLF group came back and Tom returned to the podium requesting to speak again. As a result, the program successfully continued for some minutes with a heated but serious discussion of gay and lesbian oppression with both positive and negative comments voiced from the audience. This was perhaps the first time gay and lesbian politics had been discussed on an international stage. The next day a report on the incident appeared in the New York Times.

A footnote from 2022: We recently received an inquiry from a graduate student at the City University of New York writing her thesis on the history of the United Nation’s participation in advocacy for international LGBTQ rights. She was asking how GLF’s invitation to participate had come about. Unfortunately, there is no extant record or memory of how this had happened. Apparently she has not been able to find any evidence of United Nations’ actions on LGBTQ rights prior to 1970. And the earliest evidence she can find at this point is this participation of the New York Gay Liberation Front in the July 1970 public forum related above.