Gay Revolution Networker [Three Issues] [Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, Queens Liberation Front, GLF, Third World Gay Revolution]

[New York]: [Gay Revolution Network / Gay Revolution Publicity Project / Come! Unity], 1972-1974. Offset. Two broadsides measure 11 x 17 in; single leaf folded into 4 pp. pamphlet measures 8 1/2 x 11 in. Lines from folding to each item, one broadside with three small closed tears at slight bumping to corners; all very good or near fine. Item #10324

Two striking broadsides and a pamphlet from the left wing of the early gay liberation movement in New York, these broadsheets and pamphlet were published with the goal of connecting people to the burgeoning network of grassroots and radical gay political, social, and community organizations in New York. 

 Publishing under the titles “Gay Revolution Networker,” “Gay Anarchist Survival Project — GASP!,” and “Gay Network,” the broadsides and pamphlet from this largely unrecorded group highlight social and political issues of concern to the left wing of the gay liberation movement and compile information about gay organizations, including their meeting times and locations, and contact information. Notable organizations listed include Lee Brewster’s Queens Liberation Front, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson’s Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), Gay Women’s Liberation Front, Mental Patients Liberation Project, the Gay Switchboard, and more. 

 The first “Gay Revolution Networker” broadside included in this collection, vol. 1, no. 2, was published by the Gay Revolution Network, a project of the Gay Revolution Publicity Project, likely a short-lived splinter group formed during the height of the movement’s fracturing. In the paper, the group describes themselves as a “dynamic network of small groups organized to collectively deal with specific work projects or organizational functions.” The militancy of the proposed strategy for separating the gay community from Mafia operated businesses and that it was very likely printed at the gay anarchist print shop Come!Unity suggests its origins in the left wing of the early gay liberation movement. 

The second “Gay Revolution Networker” broadside announces plans for the “Gay Anarchist Survival Project — GASP!”, a free food distribution project, and carries denunciations of Gay Activists Alliance, both written and graphic; a drawing depicts a dissenting figure being smothered by the chloroform rag of Robert’s Rules.

The pamphlet titled “Gay Network,” was published two years after the first Gay Revolution Networker. It also compiles information on gay organizations in New York City and makes a forceful case for importance of a project to develop an oppositional and gay counterculture that reaches the most marginalized people and groups of the community.

 Though these issues are uncredited, the production of a Gay Revolution Networker poster has been attributed to the gay Argentinian organizers Juan Carlos Vidal and Néstor Latrónico. Founders of Third World Gay Revolution, which grew out of the Gay Liberation Front, and poster printers for the Young Lords Party, Vidal and Latrónico were significant figures in Black and Latinx queer organizing in the period, and particularly in the hispanophone queer communities of New York. They began organizing in their native Argentina before immigrating to New York in 1969, and would also later found the organization Latin Gay Revolution.

 An invaluable resource for its contemporaries and for researchers now, documenting the blossoming of radical LGBTQ organizations in the early 1970s, including notable and under-documented organizations such as STAR, Queens Liberation Front, and the Third World Gay Revolution.

 OCLC locates one example of any publications related to Gay Revolution Networker as of October 2024, a separate issue of Gay Revolution Networker than those in this collection.

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