Fifty YEARS AGO a meeting changed my life. It was in early July 1969, shortly after Stonewall. I don't remember the exact date or where it was held, only that a heated debate was taking place over whether the newly forming group, still nameless, should ally with the antiwar movement. Since I'd been involved in the movement against the Vietnam war since 1965,1 jumped in on the side of the radicals, and we prevailed. The new group would be named the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), deliberately echoing the National Liberation Front (NLF) of Vietnam.

I was more than ready. As an adolescent I lived through the horrors of the McCarthy era, when gay men were outed, fired from jobs, and driven to suicide. At Harvard I read the few positive books that were available, including John Addington Symonds' A Problem in Greek Ethics, Gide's Corydon, and Plato's Symposium. In Boston I got to know Prescott Townsend and attended meetings of the Boston Mattachine. After I moved to New York City I attended meetings of the Westside Discussion Group. I read One and Drum magazines (and still have some copies). In 1967 the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop opened on Mercer Street, just a few blocks from where I lived, on St. Mark's Place; there I bought a copy of Wainwright Churchill's fine book, Homosexual Behavior Among Males: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Species Investigation (1971).

But the GLF was a quantum leap forward from the earlier homophile movement. No more apologies or pleading for toleration, the GLF was ready to fight militantly for our freedom, and had the political savvy from the antiwar movement to do it. For the next few months every spare...