What the Gay Liberation Front Means to Me

By Perry Brass

The essence of my feelings about GLF were in the first words that Bob Kohler, one of the “elder states-people in GLF, said at the outset of my first meeting in November of 1969. He stood up in front of the community room at Holy Apostles Church in Chelsea where we met, and began with, “Brothers and sisters.”

I never thought that I could have “brothers and sisters” who were gay and lesbian, that I could have a family of queer people, in all their diversity and rainbow splendor.  But quickly I did, becoming part of my own family within GLF. This consisted of George Thomas Finley, who had come from Ohio; his lover Lou Colca, an Italian from New Jersey; John Knoebel, now on the GLF Foundation board; and Joe Plato, a shy, beautiful Black man from New Jersey. There were other people in my more extended GLF family, and in the greater picture, we were all brothers and sisters, except that in GLF we said “sisters and brothers,” because women, as an oppressed class, came first. GLF became my bread and soul for three extremely formative years. I describe it as having a graduate school education in politics and life. The experience still colors the way I see the world, as it has remained for many of us.