Vanguard Revisited

In the News: Windy City Times

2012-01-18T21:32:00.001-08:00

The pleasures and perils of LGBTQ history AHA CONFERENCE by Joe Franco 2012-01-18



As part of the American History Association's recent conference in Chicago, a great deal of discussion was devoted to the emerging interest in LGBTQ history. An early-morning panel discussion Jan. 8 confronted many of the problems and the successes with LGBTQ history and its dissemination to the popular masses. Lauren Jae Gutterman, the panel's moderator and a Ph.D. candidate at New York University, started the group's discussion. Professor Kevin Murphy, with the University of Minnesota, discussed his recent tribulations when putting together an oral history of the Twin Cities, saying, "We collected over 100 oral histories of the Twin Cities LGBTQ community. Historians, sociologists, geographers and ethnologists tried working together but found it difficult to create a work that would make their work interesting to the masses." The resulting book, Queer Twin Cities, was not well-received by the media or the intended target audience. Murphy admitted that not even the local Minneapolis gay press reviewed the book after its 2011 release. He said that it was "heartening to see the localized interest in GLBT history" but that, ultimately, the work seemed to alienate readers. Professor John D'Emilio, with the University of Illinois-Chicago, brought more problems with LGBTQ public history to the table. He is co-director of a website called OutHistory.org that was originally envisioned to be "Wiki-like" in that anyone could submit entries with constant updating from others. "The problem," said D'Emilio, "is that almost nobody submitted any content. Ultimately, there just was never going to be enough interest and enough content to build up steam." D'Emilio believed the upcoming re-design of the website would help: "We want to abandon the 'Wiki' concept and make the content more transparent for the user." D'Emilio's solution for making LGBTQ public history more accessible through the web involved the use of individuals and more popular features that were user-friendly. He admitted that this was absolutely imperative that academics learned to speak in a language that made what they had to teach and say more accessible. Professor Don Romesburg—an assistant professor at Sonoma State University and a curator for the recently opened GLBT History Museum (the first full-scale, stand-alone facility of its kind in the United States) in San Francisco—reported on a definite success in the LGBTQ-history scene. Worldwide attention focused on the opening of the facility, prompting Romesburg to joke, "Britney Spears was at our museum." Tens of thousands of individuals have visited the museum since its opening last January. "We've had 2,000 new Facebook 'Likes' and 100 new members in our first year alone," said Romesburg. The museum is unique in that it resisted a chronologically linear model in its layout. "The arrangement was about demonstrating belonging and making power present," said Romesburg about the museum's success. The museum's success, seen in light of the failure of other queer-history initiatives, certainly begs the question, "What did the GLBT History Museum do differently?" Romesburg theorized, "We tried to welcome everybody. The construction of a museum means that we matter. It's relevant, important and meaningful." The discussion ended with Joey Plaster, a graduate student at Yale, and Rev. Megan Rohrer, a Lutheran minister who works with at-risk and impoverished LGBT youth of the Castro and Tenderloin neighborhoods in San Francisco. Their work with the queer youth is not unlike Boystown's unprecedented problems this past summer. The gentrified Castro wanted the gay youth out of the neighborhood. A concerted effort among the residents, shop owners, bar owners and politicians began to form. Ultimately, Plaster and Rohrer used history as a way of mobilizing the disenfranchised queer youth. They used the imagery of the 1960s to propel the voices of the neighborhood queer youth. Rohrer said that "the use of tactile GLBT historical artifacts was more than enough motivation for the queer youth to spring into action." She added, "When an individual gets to see and touch something historical, something from the past, this alone is transformative."

Chicago youth poi dancing

2012-01-10T06:29:00.001-08:00

Seeking to remain anonymous, one of the occupants of the LGBTQ homeless youth shelter, in the artistic spirit of Vanguard, told their story through dance. See it below:

Location:Chicago: The Crib

In Their Own Words: Taylor

2012-01-02T20:17:00.001-08:00

Every LGBTQ homeless youth has their own story to tell. Taylor's story is just one of them. Together with the stories of other youth around the country, we can begin to learn more about the struggles LGBTQ Homeless youth face. But remember, no one person can represent an entire population. Nor, can a few videos tell the entire story of one individual. This was Taylor's story on 12/29/2011.

Video 1: Excerpts
Brief highlights from Taylor's interviews. Longer clips of the interviews can be found by topic below.

Video 2: How I Became Homeless
This is Taylor's story about leaving home in order to get hormones, living in unsafe conditions and ending up homeless in San Francisco. I included some information below the video that you may need to know to understand Taylor's story:

blood tests- before getting hormones, you have to undergo blood tests

master/slave relationship- a sexual relationship where two individuals have negotiated to role play a master and slave fantasy.

meal night- a program for LGBTQ youth at the San Francisco LGBT center

Lark-Inn - the city of San Francisco's only emergency shelter, run by the Larkin Street Youth Program

MSC South - a shelter in San Francisco's mission district that has a 24 hour drop in waiting room. It is rumored to be the roughest shelter in town.

SRO- a single room occupancy hotel room. This is San Francisco's method of getting homeless folk off the streets, that according to the Federal government is still considered homelessness. Most individuals in SRO's don't get their own tenants rights because the SRO's are leased by other organizations.

Video 2: Stereotypes of LGBTQ Homeless Youth
Taylor talks about: 1) runaways and throwaways; 2) suicide; 3) sex work; 4) bathrooms; 5) hate crimes; 6) police relations.

clockable - when someone can tell that you are trans it's sometimes called being "clocked"

Video 3: Message and Political Issues Important to LGBTQ Homeless Youth
Taylor talks about the main political needs for LGBTQ homeless youth and Taylor's message for other youth who may be watching.

Video 4: Vanguard Project
Taylor was one of the youth published in the first issue of Vanguard Revisited. Taylor reflects on the weekly Monday gatherings, how it helped the youth stay in touch and how it felt to work with pastors.

New Horizons

2011-08-07T17:34:00.000-07:00

"Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world."
-- GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

Hey there people! This is Willow, back from stasis. Well, some cool updates: first, the 23rd was my birthday! Yay me! I'm 22 now, and fully annoyed with all the teenagers in my life. Laughs. But anyways, secondly, this coming week I get to go shopping! YAYS! It will be my first time shopping for female clothes, and Jennifer, my case manager from an awesome program called OusideIn, is going to take me to get fitted for a brassiere. I'm a little nervous about that, seeing as I've never done it before. Some of my female friends tell me that it's super uncomfortable until you get used to wearing them, but my back will apparently feel better for having done it. Meh, I'm not sure, but it's another step on the road! Hopefully I'll find some super cute clothes that'll actually fit me. But thirdly, and most importantly, I have an appointment set with the Trans Clinic here in Portland for December 6th. It's official and nothing short of death or disfigurement is going to stop me from attending, damnit.

On a completely different note, my surrogate sister from Roseburg is coming up to take me to the Vans Warped Tour. The tickets are like $32, and I get to go with her after not seeing her for like 6 months. I'm so excited I could bounce around crazily, fluttering my arms like a high school girl thinking about her long-time crush. But I won't, mostly because it would make me feel like an idiot. Anyway. Super excited about that.

Now, oddly enough in my opinion, I was asked out last night by a boy. I say oddly enough, because I don't very well see myself as dating material. He's kinda cute, but in a really, REALLY nerdy way, and he's Wiccan, which while it doesn't bother me, doesn't set me at ease either. He's kind of annoying, but has a sweet innocence around him that kind of endears him to me. I'm not sure what I should do about it, but I don't just want to deny him. He was super sweet about asking, and even though he couldn't stop laughing, I'm considering his proposition. It was really great though, I was sitting there with a serious look on my face telling him to stop laughing, because I knew exactly what he was trying to ask me. He was too nervous sounding to be trying to ask anything else. I told him that I wasn't going to make it easy for him to ask, because, well, it's a damn serious question to ask. Honestly, do you want a guy coming up to you and cracking up while he's asking you to be his girlfriend? No, you wouldn't. It's demeaning, and it seems like they aren't taking it seriously. But anyway, I'm thinking about it, and I'm thinking about saying yes. Please leave a comment with your opinion. Not that your opinions will be the deciding factors, but it'd be nice to hear from at least a person or two who've been in maybe a similar situation. But I digress.

I picked today's quote because it's great. It's just telling you in a roundabout way that if you take care of yourself, you'll see the world better. It's true, at least from what I've seen so far. As soon as I took the time to get myself taken care of, I became happier and less hopeless about my situations. Just remember that you are the world's representative to yourself, and if you make a bad impression, things could go horribly horribly wrong for you.

Sincerely until next time,

Willow D. Frost

2011-07-05T09:17:00.000-07:00

Check-in Time

Quote of the day: "Focus on the journey, not the destination; for joy is found not in finishing an activity, but in doing it." - Greg Anderson

07.05.2011

Hello again Vanguard, this is my second attempt at a blog, and hopefully I'll do some good. Now, some exciting news, I have officially changed my name to Willow Danielle Frost, and am getting some momentum on the ball I've already set in motion.

Now on to less exciting news. Yesterday was Independance Day. I decided I was ging to tell my mother about my transition and my name change over dinner, because it's an important thing that the woman who gave birth to me should know about. It was a perfect setting, we were all laughing and talking while setting off fireworks, and were generally having a good time. I took my mother to the side and told her I had something really important to talk to her about, and it was very exciting for me. I then proceeded to tell her about everything.

It was the longest, saddest minute of my life while my mother stood there and looked at me like I was the most disgusting thing she'd ever seen. When she finally spoke, she said "Leave here now, you are no son of mine. It'll be a cold day in Hell when my family will ever accept this, or you. Now go." She then escorted me off her property roughly, and plastered a smile on her face when another guest that I didn't know came up. "Sorry, I was just getting rid of an unwelcome visitor." My mother said to the guest.

I left. It was the only thing I could do. My family didn't want me, none of them have called to comfort me or say they didn't agree with my mom. I'm holding out hope, but I have to expect the worst.

In a way though, I'm kind of happy this happened. Because now I can say with complete confidence - even though my family, those who I considered my closest supporters, don't agree with my decisions, and would stop me if they could - I am a woman. I no longer have to act like a man around my family, or speak in masculine tones on the phone, or hurriedly clean off my nail polish before going to brunch. I am completely unfettered.

I picked the quote of the day, not only because it's true, but because it applies to my last two weeks. To my who transition, really. I am very happy with my choice of name now (I'd have to be, or I wouldn't have chosen it.), but the funnest thing wasn't going to the DMV to get my ID changed, it was sitting down with my closest girl friends and choosing the names from the baby books. The pure sense of joy, it was the closest I'm going to be able to get to giving birth to a new life. In a way I did. Shawn Michael Bean has ceased to exist, and in his place, is this new woman: Willow Danielle Frost.

This last couple of weeks has been very emotional for me, but I'm looking forward to the journey ahead. Please, feel free to take your own journeys; be it just outside to get the mail, to the peak of Mount Everest, or to becoming the gender, race, or species you believe yourself to be. Don't let anyone get in the way of your dreams, and enjoy the journey you set yourself on, because like Mr. Anderson said: the joy is not in finishing an activity, but in doing it.

Sincerely,

Willow D. Frost

Introductions

2011-06-22T11:00:00.000-07:00

Quote of the Day: "Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast the Light travels, it finds that Darkness has always gotten there first, and is waiting for it." - Terry Pratchett

Hello, my name is Shawn Bean. I am 21 and hail from the streets of Portland, Oregon, and I am a pre-op transgender who prefers female pronouns. I'm also new at blogging, so bear with me. My general blog topic is going to be about my transition from male to female, and how I'm affected by it. The posts won't be pretty (I see no real reason for it), but they might be informative and (I hope) useful for anyone here who decides they want to undergo this transition. I hope to get a few responses, maybe some input, and at least a little support, so I guess that's it. Now, onto the actual blogging.

06/22/2011 -
Ever since I started dressing in skirts and taking the time for the daily ritual that is makeup application, I've started feeling better about myself. Kind of like I'm bringing out a side of myself that allows me to be gentle and bitchy at the same time and have people look at me and think "Oh. that's just normal girl behavior."
You see, being a transgender on the streets of Portland, I'm something of an anomaly. There are Queers, Lesbians, Flamers, and Bisexuals everywhere, but noone really seems to know how to deal with me.

Males, even gay ones, on the streets here in P-town are expected to be harsh, brazen perverts, and are expected to have violent tendancies. When I dress in my comfortable male clothes, I am expected to do the same. But that's not me. When I dress as a male, everyone just assumes I'm gay from my voice and actions. That's not me. I am a female in mind and spirit, and I am kinder, and gentler than that. I can't bring myself to do violence unless there's no other option.

Well, back to the subject. When I dress as a female, it feels so liberating. I can walk up to my friends, and they don't expect me to act as a male does.

The only drawback I experience is pretty severe. When I walk down the street, people look at me like some kind of freak, or a carnival sideshow attraction. I hear mutters of 'faggot', 'creeper', and 'freak,' and it hurts. It really hurts me. So much that I just want to go hide and not come out again.

I've read the stories of people like Kate Bornstein, and they gave me hope that I'd be accepted in a time such as this, and in a place so liberal as Portland. Then Vanguard came to Portland, and I heard the struggles that transgenders go through on a daily basis in San Fransisco. A 12% employment rate? Having to do sex work just to scrape out a living? If that's how transgenders are doing employment-wise in the LGBT mecca of the US, how is a homeless girl like me supposed to even do that well up here?

I make no illusions toward myself; I'm not pretty, I'm not healthy. I am slightly feminine looking, and I and 100lbs overweight. Sex work would be a waste of time for me. I've found a couple of places that might hire me and be accepting of my transition, but I have to hope and pray that they'll even give me an interview first.

Now that my ranting is done, here are some fun things. As of Monday this last week, I have found a clinic that will put me on a waiting list for female hormones. The waiting list is about 4 months long, so that's a downer, but with patience and dedication to my goal, I will wait it out and get that ball rolling.

I have also gotten my first appointment with a gender therapist, set for July 15th, and because of Oregon's stupid law, I will have to see her for 2-4 months to detemine whether or not I will be allowed to go through with the gender reassignment surgery.

I hope this hasn't sounded like too much complaining, and I would love some feedback from anyone who wants to do so. Thank you for bearing with me, and I will be here again in 2 weeks time.

With all respect,

Shawn Michael Bean.

Lessons Learned in Holywood

2011-06-12T14:36:00.001-07:00

This weekend Joey, Mia and I travelled to Los Angeles to speak with the LGBT young adults staying in the LA Gay and Lesbian Center's shelter.

The facilities are very beautiful, house 24 youth for up to 16 months and an additional 7 emergency beds. Styled a bit like college dorms and following the basic model created by psychologists and social workers (as opposed to Larkin Street Youth Services that operates off the pastoral model of ethics for working with youth) to create a safe, space for a group that seems to be very different from the youth we've meet with in New York and San Francisco.

While they struggle with the same loss of family and issues and hate crimes, these youth seem to also wrestle with the rarely realized dream of making it big as a star in Hollywood.

While the center has some amazing programming and has been able to create some amazing opportunities for individuals to go after their dreams, my favorite example is the trans women from the shelter who were able to become interns on the set of America's Next Top Model. The staff clearly goes above and beyond their job duties in providing support and trauma aware care for these young adults.

My gratitude or these programs means I will refrain from talking about the growth areas I saw her, for fear that it will damage relationships I'm building with these programs or discourage folk from supporting this amazingly vital work.

The lesson I'm left with from Hollywood is the exuding cost of chasing your dreams. The ways bullying of trans individuals continues to be a pervasive part of gay culture, and the damage that secrets and the need to perform straight in order to get work affects lives of the most vulnerable the most of all.

While we were in town, we were able to visit the ONE archive and learn more about Bishop Mikael Itkin. Thanks to everyone at ONE for your help!

Join us next week in Portland!

Location:Hollywood, CA

Traveling Exhibit: Feedback

2011-06-03T16:51:00.000-07:00

The first Vanguard handout read:

The time is here to bring together the youth of the TENDERLOIN to form a more unified community among ourselves. We find that no one has room for us in their society, therefore we must work together to form our own society to meet our OWN needs. Our needs and goals are:

1) Coffee House and meeting center

2) Emergency Housing

3) Medical aid, area VD clinic, etc.

4) Employment counseling.

5) Police cooperation

6) Financial aid (if possible)

We are willing to work with interested groups, but, who can be more trusted and relied upon than ourselves. To find satisfaction we found one another. [1]

Which of these causes that the Vanguard youth of the 60's were fighting for do you think are still needed today? The youth in San Francisco think they're all needed. Publish your comments below to let us know what you think.

Lessons Learned in New York

2011-05-31T11:36:00.001-07:00

The first leg of the Vanguard Speaking tour kicked off in New York City this weekend. Mia Tu Mutch, Joey Plaster and myself (Pastor Megan Rohrer) shared stories, video and experiences from more than two years of research about the Vanguard youth of the 60's and a year of working with and listening to the queer homeless young adults in San Francisco.

Our first presentation kicked off at Trinity Lutheran Church in Manhattan. Home of Trinity Place a shelter for queer youth, despite the locale the audience was almost entirely young adults.

Honoring the sacredness of the stories shared through the multimedia presentation, images were projected onto the altar. See the video being projected here.

Following the talk we celebrated with a Lady Gaga Mass , whose offering went to benefit Trinity Place.
On Sunday morning, I preached at Trinity and learned more from the church members about the origin of their shelter and their commitment to serve vulnerable youth and provide a much needed transition space from the streets to a real home and stable life.
The congregation shared that they would soon be renovating their bathrooms because of a fundraiser that raised $25,000 and was sponsored by the Emperors. Though much of the conversations that I heard from the young adults on this trip is that they felt disconnected to the middle class, mostly white gay community whose primary focus was on spending millions and putting energy into issues they felt were less important than their emergent needs for food, shelter and safety from hate crimes, it was great to hear that the drag and camp that helped a generation live through the darkest moments of the AIDS crisis were still working for justice and raising funds for those most in need.
Our third talk was a youth only event at Sylvia's Place at MCCNY. Here our talk was more of a conversation that compared and contrasted the situation for queer homeless youth in New York and San Francisco.
Given copies of The latest edition of Vanguard Magazine that puts the Vanguard youth of the 60's and today in conversation, we hope to begin the conversation with the youth in New York about how they can identify themselves, their needs and begin to claim their own safe spaces. (see video of Mia reading an excerpt from the magazine)

As young adults connected to Sylvia's Place it wasn't surprising that the New York youth expressed that they felt connected to health services and drop in centers. Yet, one of the biggest concerns they raised was their need for safety in the streets, protection from hate crimes and to feel like they could be welcome somewhere. Just as the youth in San Francisco felt there was no place for them in the Castro, the youth in New York expressed feeling disconnected from a rapidly gentrifying Village.

Kristine and Mia shared some additional thoughts about the difference between trans experiences in New York and San Francisco. Check out the video here.
After the talk we went to have dinner near Times Square and I was struck by the consumeristic culture, the vanity and over the top campiness. It reminded me of all the romantic ideals that cause young adults to flee to the cities after running away or getting thrownaway from their homes. Just one of the stops on our journey through the cities of what the youth describe as the underground queer railroad where they search for acceptance and a sense of home, I learned a lot from this city and the fabulous youth.
One that may last the longest are the ways the caricatures of homeless queer youth, transfolk, and the big city can be all at once beautiful and like the piles and piles of hot smelly trash found in even the ritziest districts of New York. The problems and stories seem so similar in cities so far away and of those who are being remembered from nearly fifty years ago. In this world of social connectedness and through this journey, I sincerely hope that sharing stories and encouraging young adults to speak out, sleep out and act up can rewrite this story.
Location:Times Square, New York

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2011-05-18T22:32:00.000-07:00

'Encampment' brings attention to homeless LGBT youth

NEWS

Published 05/19/2011

by Matt Baume



	Homeless youth and their allies staged a "street sweep" in the Castro last Saturday to bring attention to budget cuts for social service programs. Photo: Matt Baume

The May 14 encampment was part of a nationwide demonstration to raise awareness of homelessness among a demographic known as transition-age youth. Homeless and foster youth between 16 and 24 years old can face unique housing challenges, particularly as they age out of the foster care system and learn to navigate services for adults.

"We're here to engage the community on homelessness, and specifically queer homeless youth issues," said organizer Beck, who uses only one name. "We're in kind of a state of emergency, saying, 'hey community, wake up.'"

Saturday's action started at Civic Center with games, an unveiling of protest banners, and hot meals served by Food Not Bombs. A march proceeded to Harvey Milk Plaza, where speakers read poetry and called for improved access to services to get off the street.

Their requests included housing with kitchens, rather than single room occupancy hotels with no facilities for food preparation; employment opportunities for youth who are unable to complete school; and an end to the sit-lie ordinance.

According to local organizers Trans Youth Rise Above, there are 5,700 homeless youth in San Francisco, of which at least 1,000 are queer.

Operation Shine America, which coordinated similar rallies in other cities, estimates that there are 2 million homeless youth in the country. Queers for Economic Equality Now also organized the San Francisco event.

Beck explained that organizations like the Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center and Larkin Street Youth Services' Castro Youth Housing Initiative have faced repeated budget cuts, reducing services that can prevent youth from living on the street.

Jodi Schwartz, executive director of LYRIC, agreed that times are tight. "There has been a sizable decrease in investments in LGBTQ youth services," she told the Bay Area Reporter. "Just for LYRIC, if we were to lose the last piece of dollars for transition-age youth workforce, our decrease in funding would be 72 percent over the last four years."

Larkin Street Executive Director Sherilyn Adams told the B.A.R. that the extent of cuts won't be known until Mayor Ed Lee releases a budget later this month.

"There's no proposed cuts to the Castro Youth program," she said, but added, "it does not begin to meet the need."

To address the potential consequences of such cuts, Lee recently convened a stakeholder group consisting of representatives from organizations that advocate for homeless youth. Based on feedback from that group, the mayor asked that the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families prioritize funding for LGBT and undocumented youth.

While organizations hope to turn around the recent budget cuts, local organizers are seeking ways to demonstrate how the city's rate of youth homelessness could worsen.

After Saturday's protest concluded, about three dozen homeless youth spent parts of the night camped out around the Muni station, according to organizer the Reverend Megan Rohrer, director of the Welcome Ministry, a coalition of 12 churches that seek to provide a faithful response to poverty.

Rohrer is currently working with the GLBT Historical Society to raise visibility by drawing inspiration from past struggles. She incorporated a "street sweep" into Saturday's protest, in which participants swept Castro Street sidewalks with brooms to evoke a similar 1960s-era protest.

In that action, LGBTs protested the city's negligent sanitation and police roundups by pushing brooms through the Tenderloin.

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2011-05-12T08:26:00.000-07:00

Shining a light on homeless LGBTQ youth

Guest Opinion

Published 05/12/2011

by Beck, Adele Carpenter, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca


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ADVERTISMENT

It is estimated that nearly 2,300 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth in San Francisco are homeless.

In 2007, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Coalition on Homelessness concluded in their joint study, "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Youth: An Epidemic of Homelessness," that 40 percent of homeless youth in this country identify as LGBT. One would have expected a tremendous outcry in the queer community when that study was released. Especially here in San Francisco.

Where was that outcry?

You'd think that a community such as ours, which is capable of raising millions to promote gay marriage and to fight "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," would have poured a lot of effort and money into housing young people by now. But, where are those resources?

Programs that support transitional age homeless youth are usually left out of local and national fundraising strategies that allocate millions of dollars for lobbying efforts in the name of our families and the safety of our community. What about the homeless queer youth who reside on the streets and who are looking for family and safety, but instead often encounter exploitation, violence, and criminalization under laws which make it illegal to sit or lie in public?

They need services, but where are the queer youth services in San Francisco?

An activist group spearheaded three emergency winter shelters, a food program, and a shower project for homeless youth and others in the Castro in the late 1990s after the dot-com boom caused a sharp spike in rents throughout the city, making it impossible to afford an apartment. Those services opened despite unbelievable opposition from merchants, landlords, and residents. When the last of the shelters folded, the Youth Empowerment Team secured $750,000 in city funds for 29 beds for LGBT homeless youth under Larkin Street's Castro Youth program. That program is now down to 22 beds and looking at more cuts this year. Not to mention the devastating cuts to the LGBT Community Center's Transitional Youth program, which packs in over 300 youth a year for food and resources.

Meanwhile, the LGBTQ youth space at the Eureka Valley Recreation Center was shut down in 2010. Advocates have been negotiating with the Recreation and Park Department for nearly a year to have it re-opened, but it is clear that consistent staffing, hours, and overall youth access to the space, will continue to be compromised. The Lavender Youth Recreation and Information Center has been forced to reduce its open-door programming for transitional age youth due to lack of city support, and its internship program, which was cut last year, is facing a possible total elimination in the budget of the Department of Children, Youth and Families.

The closure of New Leaf: Services for Our Community's youth substance abuse treatment program was a hard hit for those attempting to access LGBTQ friendly substance abuse counseling and mental health treatment. While the clinicians at Dimensions Clinic do an excellent job, services meant to engage youth in treatment have not been fully restored.

Clearly, the community needs to speak out.

This Saturday, May 14, queer youth and allies are taking part in a national effort to shine a light on homelessness among queer youth. Hosted by Operation Shine America and the AJ Fund, youth organizers will provide makeovers, video and photo booths, art workshops, freeze tag, and a free dinner donated by Food not Bombs. This begins at 6 p.m. at the Civic Center. At 7:30 p.m., youth art from the AJ Fund will be used to decorate a march that will make its way toward Harvey Milk Plaza. Marchers will remember AJ Trasvina, a local youth who spent his last years providing support to homeless queer youth.

At Harvey Milk Plaza, we will illuminate our lanterns and shine a light for a homeless youth open mic. Participants are encouraged to wear purple and bring candles. The event will culminate with a sleep-in at the plaza that is a separate event organized by Welcome Ministry. Later, some plan to perform a peaceful street sweep with handmade brooms and signs, symbolizing the poor being displaced by lack of access to space and support.

Through stories and information, we will illuminate the local and national issues of homelessness among queer youth, much of which is caused by rejection by family and community, the high cost of rent, criminalization, and a lack of employment opportunities and training.

It's time for all LGBT organizations and our community to make homeless queer youth a priority by allocating resources to these vital services. Not from year to year, but for many years to come.

Beck, Adele Carpenter, and Tommi Avicolli Mecca are all members of the newly formed coalition, QUEEN, or Queers for Economic Equality Now.

Join us May 14th!

2011-05-07T11:05:00.001-07:00

Get Event Details Here

Gaga Mass & Vanguard Tour

2011-04-21T15:14:00.001-07:00

I'm excited to announce that the Lady Gaga Mass will be traveling to select locations along with the Vanguard Traveling Exhibit and Speaking Tour. With the Vanguard Talk at 7pm (featuring Joey Plaster Oral History Chair at the GLBT Historical Society and Mia Tu Mutch trans youth activist) and the Gaga Mass, arranged by Pastor Megan Rohrer (Executive Director of Welcome and co-pastor of the Community of Travelers) at 8 pm. The Gaga Mass offering will raise money for local LGBTQ youth ministries and shelters in the area of our tour.

We'll be adding tour dates, times and locations to this site soon. Start getting excited!

Copyright permission for the Lady Gaga Mass obtained through PERFORMmusic License#6400
Mad love to the Gaga!

Tour: The El Rosa Hotel

2011-02-23T22:45:00.000-08:00

Home of the Screaming Queens who create the Compton's Cafeteria riot and one of the locations reported to be the origin of Vanguard.

Oral History Excerpt from the Original Vanguard, Adrian Ravarou. Interview by Joey Plaster 2010:

“Billy Garrison described himself as a hair fairy—which meant that the clothing he wore was heterosexual, you know, guys clothes—jeans and a shirt—but then he had his hair ratted up and hair sprayed so it was stacked like a beehive almost. And he then had on make-up eye, brow pencil, rouge, some lipstick, foundation, he did his nails. And one of the things that happened in the community was that, because people were looking different and didn’t pass as women, they would often get snide and rude comments, being called names and so-forth— and so Billy was talking about well—how can we overcome this? And I think it was over a period of about a couple weeks that we were talking [in the El Rosa hotel] that he pointed out that he had come from Seattle, and when he had been in Seattle he said he was a straight male—he was heterosexual—and he had been a member of a gang, he said he had been a leader in a gang. He said there were problems within a particular Seattle neighborhood between the community and the gang and that a particular minister had reached out to both communities, brought them together and created a dialogue and actually had some of the members helping each other so that it mitigated the friction and people began to understand one another and create tolerance, and to—programs around that. And Billy was wondering, is this something that we could do in the Tenderloin?”

Vanguard Magazine Reading: Vol. 1, Issue 9, 1967 [reading from video #2] This document was republished in our Vanguard Revisited Magazine in 2011. (click on the image to see it in a larger size)

Contemporary Question:
How do we have systems of support and community like at the El Rosa hotel today?

The answers of the young adults participating on 2/21/2011on were intentionally left out of the online tour, in order to protect their confidentiality. We encourage virtual participants of the Vanguard Tour to answer the contemporary questions in the comment section. You can post anonymously if you would like to protect your confidentiality.

[continue to the next stop in the tour: The Compton's Cafeteria Riot]

* Tour materials collected by Joey Plaster with Mia Tu Mutch, Completed 2/21/2011 with the new Vanguard as a part of the LGBT Center's Youth Program. Vanguard Magazine appears here courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society.

Tour: The Central City Hospitality House

2011-02-23T22:07:00.000-08:00

The first Vanguard handout read:

The time is here to bring together the youth of the TENDERLOIN to form a more unified community among ourselves. We find that no one has room for us in their society, therefore we must work together to form our own society to meet our OWN needs. Our needs and goals are:

1) Coffee House and meeting center

2) Emergency Housing

3) Medical aid, area VD clinic, etc.

4) Employment counseling.

5) Police cooperation

6) Financial aid (if possible)

We are willing to work with interested groups, but, who can be more trusted and relied upon than ourselves. To find satisfaction we found one another.^{^[1]}

Citizens News Volume 3 #9 (2/10/1964) The Undesirables -- calls Jesus the ultimate undesirable. Talks about a move to enforce vice laws. “VICE should be defined as anything that does not fit into the picture of those that are too old to engage in such things; or activities that seem to be too much fun for those who in engage in them; or anything that does not add to the economic wealth of the ‘civic-minded citizens.’” “There is always a group of persons who have undesirable practices, beliefs or traits. These are the people who indulge in VICE. Now those in the Establishment may do the same things as the undesirables, but since they are responsible members of the Community it is never thought of as VICE. There is a difference.” He goes on to call Jesus, Ben Franklin, and others undesirables. “We, the undesirables of 1964, are prone to forgive the people who would deprive us of our freedom. We remember that the most famous undesirable of all time also had forgiveness in his heart, for did He not say: ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’”

Citizen News Volume 4, #4 (Jan 1965???)

You Fellahs Should be Discreet

San Francisco News Call-Bulletin, Guy Wright, article on hair faeries. Quoting from article: “Today’s column is addressed to the homosexuals of our city. Its message is simple: Please, gentlemen, try to be a bit more discreet. The other day at a magazine stand on Market Street I encountered a young male wearing women’s ski pants and a woman’s car coat. His hair was tinted a pinkish blonde unknown to nature….it seems to be that this unfortunate was taking a delicious pleasure in the distaste which he caused among the other customers.” “It has become almost common-place to see young men holding hands as they stroll down the street. One section of the Tenderloin has been taken over by homosexuals.”

* Tour materials collected by Joey Plaster with Mia Tu Much, Completed 2/21/2011 with the new Vanguard as a part of the LGBT Center's Youth Program.

[1] “Exiles of Sin, Incorporated,” By Laurence Tate, Berkeley Barb, November 11, 1966

Tour: Compton's Cafeteria

2011-02-23T21:34:00.000-08:00

Rev. Ray Broshears text

Young homos Picket Compton’s Restaurant

VANGUARD, the organization whose membership is drawn from ‘kids on the street,’ tested out its muscle on one of the worst offenders against human dignity in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco.
Compton’s at Turk and Taylor has long treated the younger residents as if they were not at all human.

On various occasions, according to spokesmen of VANGUARD, the Rent-A-Cop (Pinkerton Men) have manhandled innocent customers because they did not drink their coffee fast enough to suit the Rent-A-Cop.

On the 18^th of July VANGUARD had bout 25 persons carrying picket signs from 10 pm til 12 pm. The action was televised by ABC and a fair presentation of the cause of VANGUARD was telecast.

Specifically VANGUARD was protesting:
We of the Tenderloin are picketing and boycotting this Gene Compton Restaurant for the following reasons:

1. We of the Tenderloin are continuously subjected to physical and verbal abuse by both the management and the Pinkerton Special Officers assigned there.

2. We feel that the 25 cent “Service” charge was put into effect to keep out those of us who have little or no money.
THEREFORE:

Until the management of this restaurant changes its policies of harassment and discrimination of the homosexuals, hustlers, etc., of the Tenderloin Area, we will boycott and picket this restaurant.”

Tour: Chuckers Coffee House

2011-02-23T21:11:00.000-08:00

In March of 1965, The Chuckkers coffeehouse was raided, charged with municipal ordinance 440 (wearing apparel of opposite sex with intent to deceive) and California penal code 650 (openly outrages public decency). …..”[1]

Citizen News Volume 4 No. 12 " And then Sgt Ludlow, of past fame decided the cut of the hair was still not sufficient at the Chukker. The Chukker is an after hours coffee shop in San Francisco's infamous Tenderloin operated by on of San Francisco's most colorful characters, Carlo. Carlo was one of the participants in the recent Chanel 4 film on homosexuality. Anyhow Sgt. Ludlow let the word drift down that if the hair faeries did not cut their hair by Good Friday that they would be hauled in for impersonation. Promplty at 3:30AM, the good sergeant with banners flying arrived at the Chukker to check out the hair-do's. He arrested about 19 people for various sundry things, all as valid as a LBJ half-dollar, and took them to the Jail.... This raid apparently is tied into the current police drive to gain control of the after-hours places and the statistics of this raid will be apart of the reasons cited for such control."

The owner, Carlos Lara, or Carlo, Raids had become so commonplace by early 1966 that in February of 1966 Carlos posted a signs in the over-the-top style of carnie show announcements in front of the business[2] In 1965, a letter about SIR activities mentions the The Chuckkers, likely written by Forrester. A SIR document, likely from 1965, read:

“I suspect that the element represented by C. Laura represents an element from which we can learn much and for which we can do much. After all, in truth, they are free to fight through the courts and do, while so many of the other more respectable people, can’t or won’t. Mr. Laura is much freerer [sic] than most of us and can indeed show some the example of courage in living up to and being true to ‘his nature.’ Carlos Laura is responsible. He is also free, brave, and true to what he feels he is. And he is willing to fight to prove it.”[3]

Forrester gave the talk on the immediate eve of the sensational press coverage that followed the release of the Tenderloin Report and noted that the publicity and campaign “has become a matter of some controversy in the homophile movement.” Many felt it was an “undesirable image,” he said. He said that the publicity decisions were his, in consultation with Ed Hansen, because it “cannot be swept under the rug.” At a March 1966 CRH meeting, “Mr. Forrester announced that in the future it was likely that homosexuals from the Tenderloin would be publicly demonstrating for their rights under the law and that unfortunately that might undermine the image of the so-called respectable homosexual the organizations are trying so fervently to propagandize.”[4]

Oral History Excerpt of original Vanguard Member Joel Roberts:

by Joey Plaster, 2010

JOEL: You had the butches and the femmes, [00:33:57] and the queens like Dixie and you had the butch ones and then you had the rough trade, those kids were probably juvenile delinquents or just young criminals and they were hot, I mean no doubt about it and [00:34:15] you had to be a little bit S&M to make it with them you had to understand that when you’re giving a rough trade guy a blowjob, he’s using a little verbal abuse but which is music to your ears, he’s going, suck it really good whatever [00:34:23] you little bastard, and so it’s wow, as far as the fairies, and that is one of the words people used for us, chuckers were fairies, [00:35:07] but there, mostly were service, soldiers and sailors going there to make it with the queens. [00:35:11] So you definitely had a butch femme thing

* Tour materials collected by Joey Plaster with Mia Tu Much, Completed 2/21/2011 with the new Vanguard as a part of the LGBT Center's Youth Program.

[1] Citizen News Volume 4 No. 12

[2] Citizen News Volume V No. 4 (Feb 1966). We had heard of the raids that have become commonplace there and that Carlos intended to supplement his signs ibn front. So we went over with camera and flash unit to get pictures for our readers.

[3] Report to the President and Board of SIR. [date unknown, before community house opens] -- 1965?

[4] Don Lucas papers, Box 9 of 21, Folder 9/10, Minutes of Board of meeting of CRH held on March 29, 1966 at 870 Market Street

Tour: the Meat Rack (Street Sweep)

2011-02-23T20:48:00.001-08:00

Street Sweep action text

Tonight a ‘clean sweep’ will be made on Market St; not by the POLICE, but by the street people who are often the object of police harassment,” read a press release. “The drug addicts, pillheads, teenage hustlers, lesbians, and homosexuals who make San Francisco’s ‘MEAT RACK’ their home are tired of living in the midst of the filth thrown out onto the sidewalks and into the streets by nearby businessmen….This VANGUARD demonstration indicates the willingness of societies [sic] outcasts to work openly for an improvement in their own socio-economic power. WE HAVE HEARD TO [sic] MUCH ABOUT “WHITE POWER” AND ‘BLACK POWER’ SO GET READY TO HEAR ABOUT ‘STREET POWER.’” AP and KGO radio: JP MARAT said “we’re considered trash by much of society, and we wanted to show the rest of society that we want to work and can work.^{^[1]}

* Tour materials collected by Joey Plaster with Mia Tu Much, Completed 2/21/2011 with the new Vanguard as a part of the LGBT Center's Youth Program.

[1] Vanguard Vol. 1, No. 2, October 1966

Tour: Glide Memorial Methodist Church

2011-02-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

also the Glide Foundation

"spiritual home" of SF homophile movement, urban ministers operated out of site, Vanguard held first meetings here, held office space here, Vanguard dances in basement.

SF Chron and Examiner, 1/23/66
Church’s New Approach to Religion in Cities
Intersection Coffee House, at 150 Ellis. Comprises “one dimension of the City’s life with which Bay Area churches are now attempting to communicate on the theory that if religion fails to meet the realities of urban civilization it is bound to be weakened. To cope with these realities, a new ‘Urban ministry’ is developing, and with it a new style of clergyman who leaps in where once angels feared to tread – into the dens of the Tendelroin area, the coffee-houses of North Beach, homosexual hangouts, racial ghettos – wherever there are people.”

“In the City, Issues, Not Symptoms” 1966?
“In every big city, bars, taverns, night clubs, ‘adult’ movie theaters flash neon and photographic come-ons to the young—the footloose, the bored, the confused, the lonely, the thrill-seeker. Glide has its own come-on: an interdenominational coffee house called Intersection.” “improvisational theater, painting, and other creative arts.”

“we are concerned with people and enabling them to live humanly in a culture which makes humanness a difficult goal to attain.”

“In every big city, bars, taverns, night clubs, ‘adult’ movie theaters flash neon and photographic come-ons to the young – the footloose, the bored, the confused, the lonely, the thrill-seeker. Glide has its own come-on: an interdenominational coffee house called Intersection.” Coffeehouse with theater, painting, and other creative arts.

“For such ‘city issues’ – police brutality, homosexuality, mental illness, human relations, loneliness, alienation, civil rights – Glide seeks solutions, exerting pressure here, speaking out there (‘when Glide Foundation speaks, people usually listen’), lending moral, other support (‘it helps people and groups to make responsible decisions’)—a catalyst in the city’s hard-set mix.”

HAPPENSTANCE
By Jerry Wood
Feb 25, 2:05 AM, Glide Memorial Church
Even the drags were there. Food for anyone in the basement. I saw pornographic movies in a room while a political discussion was in progress. We moved to Indian Chanting in the Sanctuary. The neo-American church. Jazz or free expression in the primary room. A real free expression press and we kissed over typewriters….Vaughn Marlow in the sanctuary has called for…volunteer medics to assist in the Vietnamese conflict. A girl doing one topless in the typing room. Everyone turning on. People with coats still on who checked on people turning on in the basement. People to people halls. Color people. Orange and red and green and different people. The church as a live building….The Community Police Relations Officer was there. Gentlemen from the Chronicle wandered from floor to floor in some dazed condition…Playroom for kids…No one uniformity of opinion. Hot people checking on people screwing in the basement, in the bell tower, and in the men’s’ rooms….Lights and colors and people. A man searched for homosexuals to interview…I.W.W. people from New York played recorders…Excited long hair belles, hunchbacked animation kids in creation….A good fuck-for-peace argument was given. I felt more like I did now than before I came in!...I saw a nude man on the alter….Things carried out into the street and Claude’s bustable barn versus unbustable Glide. We, the people wanted to do our thing there. A masturbation type of thing. But wax on cushions, heel cuts and shit blew the Church’s mind. 548 Commercial up and off. Dispersing persons gloom.

* Tour materials collected by Joey Plaster with Mia Tu Much, Completed 2/21/2011 with the new Vanguard as a part of the LGBT Center's Youth Program.

30 Types of Cereal: Clay Johnson 2011

2011-02-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

Sex and consumerism should have a parade of their own. After all it does seem like they’ve tied the knot in the states.

“Captain crunch is living the Life and counting his Frosted Flakes with none other than the Count himself, Chocula. They’re after me Lucky Charms he’d always yell at the Trix bunny who was busy getting Kix from the Honeycomb.” Walking towards the grocery store we would often play this verbal story game. It’s just to pass time or uncertainty, whichever is less in demand.

Approaching the buildings automated sliding gateway we both look at each other…knowing what was to come. We had only talked about doing it in the past but now we had taken the first faithful step on a staircase of which we couldn’t quite make out the end.

Inside the speaker box voice from above is blaring/glaring a mush soup of warbled words and either broken or muddled sentiments lost in the haze of suburban hub. It sounds like Charlie Brown’s teacher saying, “Important message for all shoppers; Wiggly womp fruit buried in sun blasted raw profiles of strained optimism and feigned relativism.” We laugh as we walk past the detergent and barbed wire.

The magazines say the word so much and yet avoid it directly. Proper posture and the crass laughs of class stringing deep, line the magazine racks just covered in it. They seemingly scream, SEX!

“This week on sale; a new product called Visa that lets YOU consume virtually and with a brush less guilt.”

Love is a verb that implies doing. The act of love being communicated through various forms of language. In aisle 14 the making of this particular verb includes us naked. You (the reader) and me (the writer). After all what are love and reading both if not communion? So we are in the store, on the floor sprawled out in sublime ecstasy. People pass like ships in the night. They never glance directly down the aisle and through their blinders that both lead and bewilder. It’s cozy to put up defense mechanisms I suppose.

Gender lost in an androgynous gel that heats the scene. Approaching the arc of an eternal climax we look up and notice 30 different types of cereal. I think to myself, “that’s a fairly absurd number of cereal choices” then shrug as we’re putting our pants back on.

All of a sudden I can for the first time clearly discern what is playing on the loudspeaker. It’s “Lost in the Supermarket” by the Clash. You just gotta love that voice from about right? We walk away whistling.

In the News: Bay Area Reporter

2011-02-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

Political Notebook: Queer youth revive 1960s magazine

Published 02/03/2011

by Matthew S. Bajko

m.bajko@ebar.com

San Francisco in the 1960s was a beacon for LGBT youth from across the country. Yet it was far from being a safe haven for those young adults who were runaways and landed on the streets of the city's Polk and Tenderloin neighborhoods.

Back then that area of town was the Castro of its day, with numerous gay bars and residents. It was also a magnet for the queer youth moving to the city.

Once there, some turned to prostitution as a way to earn money, while others became addicted to drugs. Homosexuality was still considered a criminal act, and a sense of community was lacking for many of the youth.

The increasing numbers of queer kids on the streets soon caught the attention of both community organizers and local religious leaders. They formed some of the first gay liberation organizations as a way to provide support and services to the youth.

One such group that emerged in 1964 was the Council for Religion and the Homosexual. A collaboration between the early homophile organizations and urban ministers, its leaders secured federal War on Poverty funding that was used to start several programs for Tenderloin youth.

One of the first projects was Vanguard, the nation's first GLBT youth organization, which debuted in 1966. The following year saw the launch of Conversion Our Goal, an early transgender group, and the social services nonprofit Hospitality House, which remains in operation today.

"Vanguard was a street gang that was established. When I came the church adopted Vanguard as its youth group," recalled former Glide church pastor Larry Mamiya, who was 24 years old at the time. "We hosted dances and socials Friday and Saturday nights in the church basement. It was a mixture of straight, gay, lesbian. There were also transvestites and some transsexuals."

Looking for an outlet to express their feelings of isolation, abandonment and rage at the society at large, the Vanguard youth published their own magazine. The zine-like publication was a mixture of artwork, essays, and news reports. It sold for 25 cents.

It covered everything from opposition to the Vietnam War and the emergent hippie culture to the struggles and challenges the youth faced. Many, using pseudonyms, wrote first person accounts of their lives.

"I think Vanguard was one of the groups in the forefront of the gay movement that helped to push society to re-examine its views of gay people," said Mamiya, who is straight.

Copies of Vanguard from 1966 through 1969 remain in the archives of the GLBT Historical Society. They had been mostly overlooked, until now.

A new project has unearthed this important period of LGBT history, and a group of youth has revived Vanguard . They produced a new version of the publication called Vanguard Revisited that mixes vintage artwork and writings from the 1960s editions with their own contemporary pieces.

It will be officially released at a launch party tonight (Thursday, February 3). The 1,000 copies of the new 60-page edition will then be handed out to young adults from across the city for free.

"These aren't scripts from movies. It is real life. This is how some of these young adults are feeling about this," said Sergio Sandoval, 21, who moved to San Francisco five months ago from Atlanta.

While Sandoval, who is gay, doesn't have housing, he said he is "sheltered," meaning he relies on "nice friends" who offer him a place to stay.

He is also an artist, and created several artworks for Vanguard Revisited, including the cover art. He also interviewed a fellow youth and penned an "Open Letter to the Fags" using the alias Gotti.

The project was a way for him to express both his frustrations with the larger LGBT community and his hopefulness for the future.

"The whole project it has been super emotional," he said. "Being the transformer that I am, I just think people really need to realize that everything is not just how it seems. They really need to open their minds. People are so shallow; I need them to be a little deeper."

The genesis for the Vanguard Revisited project grew out of the Polk Street Oral History project spearheaded by Joey Plaster , 32, a consultant to the LGBT historical society and the volunteer director of its oral history program. His research led him to the archived Vanguards .

"I was immediately struck by their beauty and bluntness, and by the ways they combine themes of poverty, sex, and religion. I was also struck by how familiar the people were: I could imagine a modern-day Polk Street equivalent of each 1960s Tenderloin figure I read about in the archive," wrote Plaster in an e-mailed response to questions.

Plaster approached Megan Rohrer , 30, a transgender dyke and pastor in the Lutheran Church, about exploring the Tenderloin's queer history. They then decided to revive the Vanguard magazine and worked with Larkin Street Youth Services to find young adults interested in being part of the project.

The youth, assisted by Rohrer and Plaster, spent three months to "create a magazine that spoke to their expressed desire to enlighten youth, celebrate the queer history of the Tenderloin, and create a voice for the unheard," explained Rohrer.

They raised $23,500 from various foundations and LGBT agencies to fund their work. And the LGBT Community Center, through its youth program, signed on and provided space for the youth to meet each week.

The center and the Faithful Fools Street Ministry will continue to work with the youth Monday nights through June to determine how to move forward. One possibility is creating a second issue of Vanguard Revisited.

"If San Francisco's LGBT community knew what it was really like to be homeless queer youth, they would get motivated to fund organizations and to protest unjust laws and to give voices to those who are the most vulnerable in our community," said Rohrer, who with Plaster will bring a traveling exhibit about the Vanguard project to other cities this summer. "We were able to do that during the AIDS crisis. There are still problems happening in our community and we can do something positive about it."

Tonight's magazine release party will take place from 7 to 9 p.m. at St. Francis Lutheran Church, 152 Church Street across from Safeway. It is free and open to the public.

For more information about the Vanguard project, including PDF versions of the original publications and the 2011 edition as well as recorded interviews with the youth involved, visit http://www.glbthistory.org/Vanguard/.

Project Outline

2011-01-28T21:20:00.000-08:00

The First Oral History Project To Interview Members of Vanguard: Cited as the first gay liberation organization by historians, our project interviewed some of the original members of Vanguard and the pastors who made their work possible. This stage of the project will help us to put together a multimedia presentation about the history of Vanguard, that we've been able to present at Sonoma State University and as a part of the Queer Arts Festival. We will also be documenting the entirety of the project described below with audio recordings and oral histories. This part of the project is made possible by the support of Extraordinary Lutheran Ministries and the Horizon Foundation.

Happenings: During this stage of our project, we will have happenings in partnership with 7 organizations that work with populations similar to those who participated in the original Vanguard. These happenings will introduce the history of Vanguard to the community, encourage them to name the issues that currently exist within that community and inspire individuals to create a dialogue with the historical Vanguard by responding in writing to articles and images from the original Vanguard Magazine. Some of the organizations we will work with during this stage of the project include: Road Dawgs; Larkin Street; Trans Thrive; Welcome; The Night Ministry and the Faithful Fools. This portion of the project is made possible by the support of the Human Right's Campaign's Religion and Faith Program and the San Francisco Foundation.

Empowering Individuals Living in Poverty to Become Politically Active: In this stage of our project we will be giving stipends to individuals living in poverty in San Francisco's Tenderloin. After listening to the conversations about the current experience of living in the Tenderloin, this team will design a creative political action/event/performance that will bring attention to the issues of Tenderloin residents and help individuals in poverty to become more politically engaged. This portion of the project is made possible by the support of the Human Right's Campaign's Religion and Faith Program and the San Francisco Foundation.

Creating a Zine: From the written reflections created at the happenings, individuals living in poverty will receive commissions for writings that are selected for publication in a zine and for work creating and editing the zine. This portion of the project is made possible by the support of The St. Francis Endowment of St. Francis Lutheran Church.

Writing a Book: We will be compiling a book of essays, photos and writings about the history of the original vanguard and describing our work in this project. Proceeds from the book will benefit the Oral History Program at the GLBT Historical Society. This portion of the project is made possible by the support of The St. Francis Endowment of St. Francis Lutheran Church.

Exhibits: We will be creating a physical exhibit at the GLBT Historical Society, an online multimedia exhibit, a high quality exhibit available for download for congregations and organizations to create and a traveling exhibit that will feature talks by Joey Plaster and Megan Rohrer that will travel the country to share information about the Vanguard project with congregation, organizations and institutions. This portion of the project is made possible by the support of the Carpenter Foundation.

Figure me out!: Devyn Pleasants

2011-01-21T19:30:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

12/27/10

Figure me out!
It's not that hard
To remove the bandages
covering those scars

Now ask about!
Even if it's not clear
Where they came from
And why they're still here

Get into my head!
You know you want to
so don't play around
Or I will taunt you

Don't hesitate!
Can't you see?
I want you to understand
What I really need

Don't fight the urge!
I won't mind
The questions you ask
Or the answers you'll find

Break the skin!
Keep probing till you get
What you're looking for
Or til I forget

Give a push!
Don't stop in your tracks
You're on a roll
So don't look back

Open my mouth!
If it won't budge
To find out how
In the past I've loved

Follow me!
And I'll show you a way
To my darkest room
Down decaying hallways

Push me harder!
If I try to resist
When you ask me questions
That just get me pissed

Don't leave me alone!
'Cause you'll never hear
How I came so close
To living in fear

Rape my seanses!
I will oblige
Now it's up to you
To figure out why

Gypsy Magic: Clay Johnson

2011-01-21T19:06:00.000-08:00

unpublished writing by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

From the depths of an alley out bursts and old and gray gypsy man weary with the tempered sunshine dripping from his wilted eyes. An officer sees and meets him at the alleys opening before he has a chance to run. "Stop gypsy!" he cries. The gypsy knowing he could run sees something like intrigue in the angle of the officer's eyes and decides to obey.

"Gypsy we have the same enemy and I seek your magic." "Nonsense" says the gypsy, "there is no such thing as magic". While speaking and with a wave of his hand he is simultaneously allowed a moment to hide in his pocket a jewel that he had bartered (tricked) out of the possession of a local townsmen.

"I've seen you move with the forces of the unknown. I believe not in witches but I know what I've seen of you gypsy. As well, that old farmer on the hill who I know would have you breathing dirt under stone if he could, has lately born an offense upon my family".

Sensing now an opportunity springing through their rift the gypsy ruminates on this statement for a moment. then out of the corner of his eye he sees the townsman searching for revenge in his periphery and so responds, "walk with me long arm of order and I shall show you the ways to deal with our commonalities." Together they walk towards the outskirts of town.

Upon reaching the farthest limits of the small dusty town the gypsy motioned for the officer to sit. "For a small price I will teach you to stop time itself just long enough to conjurewhatever tools you may need in any situation." "Yes gypsy pleaaaaase I will do anything. The farmer refuses to sell my wife and I vegetables because he believe me not to be fit for her hand in marriage. I fear our starvation! Here is some gold and silver I had saved for just such and occasion". The gypsy's eyes glowed and lowered for nearly an indiscernible instant before he response, "you prepare for strange situations officer". The officer tries to bargain some more by saying, with this can you not pay off your debt to the farmer?" The gypsy had no intention of paying off anyone but he quickly agreed, accepted the payment, and motioned for the officer to close his eyes.

Escape within his reach, the gypsy felt surprisingly torn. He would usually be halfway to the next nowhere with a new bag of tricks and money by now but something about the officers demeanor strangely affected him. Usually people falling for his tricks was to him, a sign of naivety but for the first time he saw something different, trust, and it stirred him.

In this moment time itself did stop and a sort of magic did bubble up from the situational instance. for a moment he could have sworn that he could literally perceive a great intangivle force emanating from the officers still body. He had always known of this spring of fluidity but had for some reason never thought to use it this way.

He picked up the most unique looking rock he could find in his periphery and handed it to the officer and enclosed the officers hand around it.

"Now without opening your eyes" said the gypsy, "place this magic stone in your coat pocket and never look at it until you need it. Then in that moment gaze upon it and know that it is you and that your strength and magic spring from within it."

Nearly crying the officer thanked him and did as he was told. As he was leaving he also added, "now that I think about it my wife and I hardly need this rolling dried tumble weed of a town. We shall now go west as we have always dreamed of doing and just as you would do. Oh thank you gypsy. Thank you."

As the officer left the gypsy began to reflect. He knew of no other life than that of rambling momentum as a seed to his alchemy but of the deep-seated and knowing trust the officer possessed he had little. Thoughts filled his ebbing mind and spilled out of his periphery like tears the earth itself did cry to wash away the dirt. he decided it was time he lived out the rest of his days in one place and this town to him seemed perfect.

His eyes wandered autonomously to rock of a similar deep red hue as the one he had given the officer. He picked it up as if just to feel its energy but in that moment, as soon as the rock felt settled in his palm, he closed his eyes as tightly as they could allow. He felt then his entire sense of self dissolve away. Somehow out of his body and into that of the rock. With a smile his body fell limp to the ground as he passed away.

His last thought coupled with a chuckle was whispered from his lips as he relaxed into eternity, "magic is..." The end

That..........Tranny boy!?: Gotti

2011-01-21T18:24:00.000-08:00

unpublished writing by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

11/2010

I would say after three years of becoming acquainted with the "gay world" I found myself becoming one of those "over-relationships-gays" because of the past three unsuccessful relationships I'd had. I wish I could give more of an explanation other than all three of them cheated on me and cared nothing of my interests except my interest and weakness for sex......so I put intimate romance on the bottom of the totem pole.

After a year I managed to shun men completely because it was obvious to me there were no men around who could provoke and stir feelings of magnetism. So one day after having a very stressful thirty minutes of "job searching".........I spent the rest of that day smoking weed and writing in my sketchbooks at Glen Park and just like a "pot-head" who gets too high...I passed out... into a coma. When I finally opened my eyes there was this red-headed boy with a red beard sitting on the bench next to me reading through my sketch-books!?! I jumped up irate and purely pissed demanding to know why he was reading my "shit". "your very hard to miss passed out on a beach with hot pink vans on during the middle of the day" he said, and at that point I couldn't even respond just look at him in complete surreal awe, but as I was transfixed I relaized just how handsome he was.....his eyes were so angelic with their green glow and his lips were pink as BUBBLE GUM. "anyway" he continued...."since you decide to be a sitting duck from some of San Francisco's not-so gentleman like characters. I took it upon myself to be your body guard and watch out for your dumb-ass....no payment requirement just a look into your soul...which by the way is so beautifully tortured" he was talking about my sketchbooks and as soon as he said it..my heart did something it had not done in an entire year....it was pounding immensely. Hist personality was scary to me because it reeked of empathy. And his cool way of expressing himself so elegant I thought I was on some new "trip" off weed. "It takes someone with a special kind of heart to write about the things you do" I couldn't believe what I was heard and I was falling so hard in love right there on that Glen park bench. He got up and said "my name is Ashton" Isaac" I say a little dryly." well Isaac I'll be on my way...try not to pass out on benches in parks, you're not in Kansas anymore they will think your some tweaked out little Twinkie who can't stay sober for longer than three minutes". I couldn't stop thinking to myself..."what the fuck kind of movie scene shit is this" as he was walking away I couldn't let my new found preince go without at least getting his number... this guy who had me swooning like a little bitch "DUDE!!!...ASHTON.....CAN I GET YOUR NUMBER!?" as he walked away he said "my cell number is on the napkin inside your book" he winked and kept walking. I pulled out a Starbucks napkin and on the piece of napkin it read

TO: The streange "Emo" boy I watched sleep on the Bench at Glen Park......Because he looked so damn cute with his face shoved in a sketchbook"

FROM: The Red-Head "tyranny" boy

I looked up and my mouth dropped....that sexy ass, green eyed Spartan was...............a tyranny boy!? All of that what I was feeling that day was sparked by.."That tranny Boy!!!!???"

I mean I was thinking how significant is a dick anyway? It gets in the way when you try to sleep on your stomach, it has a mind of its own when you can't control your hormones any longer, and too much emphasis is placed on its size and girth.....all I knew was Ashton the red-head tranny boy opened my eyes to an entirely different realm of feeling....I was excited and it was because of Ashton I accepted all tranny boys as real boys and why i love them so much. Because of ................................."That Tranny Boy"

-Isaac

-Gotti

My New Years Resolution: Camea Davis

2011-01-21T17:59:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

12-28-10

Its finally here 2011, last year was rough some family members now IN heaven, but next year is my year plenty of dreams & goals to reach, but I made a promise to myself to live life & be stressfree. I no longer want to struggle got a spot but not the "green," In like a month Im 24, Im no longer 23, Its funny we never know the different things that life is gonna bring but yet to life Im still committed and real soon I'll reach my dreams.

Some People Say I Have a Gift: Devyn Pleasants

2011-01-21T17:39:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Some people say I have a gift
that makes them sit down in front of me
To listen intently to my poetry
In order to know the whole of me
the chance to look at me critically
Or to find a rhyming soliloquy
Will not come like this
But, however, they persist

In time they find
My soul to exist
As thoughts and ideas
I put on a list

Then hide away in a secret place
Away from even God's grace
I take it out when no one's around
And use it to write my feelings down

Sometimes it's gone, at times too scared
To let me keep exposing the mind's affairs

But if I stop writing it yells at me
It gets angry with me and tells me to leave
And then I'm left with an undone piece
No chance to finally release

Never asking why it screamed at me
Do I write of its insecurities?
That's probably why it's mean to me
For revealing every impurity

But alas with efforts
I've finished my poem
And what has it shown
Has it shown that unkown

Deep, dark hidden space
Hid from even God's grace
Hid forever, hidden from time
Hid where the stars try not to shine

Hidden even as the planets shift
In my heart
Is this poetic gift

You're Princess: Samone Marshalek

2011-01-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Define me as your princess.
divined in a novel of non-fiction.
I struggle with our battle fields
but your grasp on my glass slipper prevents me from escaping you.
You wont have to take a bite of the poison apple for me to kiss your lips.
My carriage is big enough for your mind to fondle with mine.
Your body is my cloak and my arms are your tower.
but when there's a distance, my heart converges in tangled knots.
Lost in thought of your touch.
For I await for you in a castle as your sleeping beauty.
To kiss me with loves first kiss.
To break the fall from a deep sleep.
But would you climb the million stair cases to reach to me?
Or would you slip rose pedals into my dream?
then it's your eyes that get to me.
Your my candle in the dark that makes me shine from the bottom of my heart.
I urge to take you on adventurous rides
to make the rhythm of your heart beat throb on many fast rollercoaster's.
Skimming my fingers over your chocolate layers.
Wondering with my evasive lips and my slippery hands.
Mirror mirror on the wall who loves you more than all.
I'll make sure I don't take a bite out of the poison apple
But take a bit out of all your love with a kiss to your frozen lips.
You found your Cinderella. You found the shoe that fits.
Still, I'm enchanting to explore and to fine all your weaknesses.
Now define me as your humming bird
Singing beautiful disaster softly, into your delicate ears.
As I'm snuggled and wrapped around you
Playing the melody that you endure me to sing.
When the clock hits at the stroke of 12, the spell is broken.
I'm bound to ask who my heart belongs to.
Is it you?

A Melody: Samone Marshalek

2011-01-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

You kept returning to me
like a melody.
When clueless strained my eyes
your love would eclipse mine.
Thin rashes on my skin slowly broke my purity
but then your anchor saved me
from a long line in the sea.
You're my element of abundance
unthreading the bad.
I accuse you from stealing my heart
from all thoughts tainted rushes.
Like that melody
there's elegance with you singing
of a finer place.
You know how to make me angry
for your hands.
Its almost as if you casted a spell
grasping my mind through your world.
It's your power of the rapid sea
floating over my ambitions
that I can't control.
I detected the salt in the ocean
like I detected how open you are for me.
I thought I was polluted
with false eternities
but you found the nuthing and made it into somthing.
When I start to gravitate with the fears tucked under the blanket
you always pull me from under the water.
Your waves are so hard to resist
that every castle I build
calaspes into a sandy pile of laughs.
what a melody you play.

My Bromo Called Me: Vinnie

2011-01-21T17:14:00.000-08:00

11/10/10

My BRoMo CaLLed Me
She Put on HER Canclled TwitteR
Account A Lie of CouRse!
-My Mind Is A Rubkis Cube that HAs
BEEN Passed aRound, kicked, DRopped AND Had
The stickers pulled, peeld, mismatched
And EveEN HAD A FEW Just DissapearR!
HowEVER ThRu The ConFusioN, FRustRAtion,
IRtation, Even BetteR oF my ENDAMETic SELf!
I Go Back To Basics, I Rip oFF the stickers
And Get the Solution To Make
aLL The Sides ThE SamE CoLoR! BLANK!
I WRITE!
WhEN you ARE Ready To Have what I
ahve BROMo ComE Join ME!
CLEAN Sinc Day ONE Plus ALive Equals OnEself.
How Can You Ask ME wheRE IMAT? wheN I have
BeeN HOME This whole Time, How EasilLy you
FoRGet, You LiE!
I wiLL READ This shout Out Loud
FOR You, Much LovE!
Only Content... only Forgivness
Only CLean and conTent HearT Just FoR you!
IM Just Me, Im Just Vinnie
And Now I Let My Hands Be my
Painting of writing Poems
In My Spoken WoRd
Against you My BRoMo!

Im Starting to Give up, Give In: Vinnie

2011-01-21T17:08:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Im STARting To Give up, Give In
Im starting To Give up ON
A Reality that CaME about Oct 17.
The DAy I Met My RacheL!
She Seemed To ComE AT Me
FRom BEhind and my cLosed eyes oF mind!

And UnCoveR Them To Something Real
and Overwhelming, To Good To Be TRue
she Once Said.
Those Words Seem To Be The Reality at this Point!

Looks Like I HAve No other
choice But To GiVE up, LEt Go!
Give up An Emotion Not
Wanted By HER..
But StiLL HERE And SAy
I LoVe you RacHeL
But Why Do I LoVE You?

Been Seven Long Days: Vinnie

2011-01-21T17:01:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

3/10/10

Seven Long Days Since I Saw That Face
Look Back at me with that
ExpressioN oF AnGeR
No SmiLE Anywhere To Be Found..
No Love To Be Seen Anywhere IN Sight..
Seven Days Since I FeLt The Warmth
of you RacheL!
Only To Be Swept away In a MatteR of Moments!
Swept Away by your UncallEd FoR
YET Confusing ReactioN!
Seven Days Since Those WoRds escaped
FROM your LiPS!
Those UnTruthFuL WoRDS
I Now what I BeLievE
SEven Days IN The DARK
With No ANsweRs To BE HEARD
SEven Long DAys!

I am a sad poet: Devyn Pleasants

2011-01-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

"I am a sad poet
My words are bleeding
Who cares, you poets
Are forever teething

I am sad in here
You only need one eye to see
Tears are found here
And the edge is steep

I have cried and hoped
Death would be release
But that is far from
The rest I need

And each time it ends
In a lover's bout
Adds scars visible
To you, no doubt

But are invisible to me
Are shielded and concealed
Like wounded soldiers minds
Are falsely healed

San Francisco: Zack Smith

2011-01-21T15:15:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Doses everywhere
People without a care
There's nothing to do
Except to melt away without a clue

A flashing light
Lies not to far from my campsite
Listening to Beirut
Is my favorite thing to do

Yesterday a fog settled
I just got my notebook and meddled
Darkness always comes when I write
It's so hard to stay in the light

Looking in San Francisco
Tripping on LSD
Nowhere to go
Candles are all I can see

Smoking another cigarette
The satisfaction still hasn't reached me yet
Thirteen days away
Oh how I miss this holiday

Old friends with coke habits: Zack Smith

2011-01-21T15:11:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Old friends with coke habits

This person is fucked
This person just told me what happened
This person walked into my backyard
This person just finished crying after four hours before he left
This person ran into his house bleeding
This person got out of a car
This person got into the car while it was moving
This person got up as soon as he could
This person got pummeled
This person tried to explain why he didn't have the money
This person spent 2 weeks bumping his life away
This idiot got it fronted to him

Food is Delicious: Vaughnjareya Falkner

2011-01-21T14:19:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Food is delicious
Food makes me fat
Food is good
or evil.
Some have too much
Others have too little
I've even met those who have the perfect amount.
Food.
It's there
In the cabinets
slimmering on stove
raw in plastic packaging
moldering under the couch.
Food. Hey, you guys want some food?!
How do you like yours?
And you?
Out of the can.
How about you?
I like it free, my man.
Holocaust victims were deprived of it.
Mardi Gras revelers in France indulged in it.
Spilled it on the ground,
while children cried to be fed
seeing cakes and sweet meats trampled
beneath the rich people's feet.
I hate using cash to get it,
Food Stamps are preferred.
People love it during Christmas
and shun it after New Year.
"Lose those holiday pounds!" Magazines skriek post-Thanksgiving.
"Feed the children!"
"There's starving people in Africa!"
Not ALL, parts, dummy. Africa is a continent.
Binging, purging,. Tasting, dining. Salvia glands prepare you.
Hot or cold, my dear? Ice cram man in the summer, soup man in the winter.
Food.
Pick your poison, baby.

Seeing I 2 I: Warren Ross

2011-01-21T14:09:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

Seeing I 2 I
to know, think about, and tolerate is one thing
to contemplate, understand, and accept is
Another entirely.

Let me put this out there right from the start.
I am me.
Warren
Edward
Ross
No one Else, got it?
Good.
And now I just wanna say I am really
starting to get annoyed with this whole
label, label stereotype thing every
one And their Mammas seem
to be rolling with these days.
Do you think what if the whole world went
blind, people would really know who's standing
beside them. Maybe we'd finally look past
appearance, and actually get to know
the people behind the cover
or maybe

I'm just
crazy
could
be.

I don't know
I just don't understand
why the world is so fucking judgmental,
Can I just be me?
Can we just be humans together?

Dear Body: Vinnie

2011-01-20T20:46:00.000-08:00

unpublished poem by a youth from Larkin Street Youth Services
*typos and capitalization are [sic]

10/28/10

DEAR BODY!
You See There Is A Problem HeRE!
Im In PAiN!
Not Just Any Pain, The Kind of Pain That
makes you Feel as though There are Little GrimLings
chewing away at my muscles & Joints Causing them
To Constrict a Thousands Knives
Pressing Hard, pressing Deep!
But you See, Its Not youR Fault!
Its MinE!! For Iam The One who
Consumed all those what I call
Lines on FLat MiRRoR TabeL!

I was the OnE who ConSumed
Those Now Living On what I Call a Side Effect
On a Once 89LB METH HEAD!!

But Its Not YouR FAULt Body!
I Now CaRRy The Pain!
But you See Body! I teLL You this
I Need you To CARRy Now This Healthy
Fagboi, cLean Since DAY One ON This New JouRNEY
I NEEd you To CARRY Me
ALL The Way
FoR I am STRong, I SuRRender!

Freedom: Samone Marshalek

2011-01-20T19:23:00.000-08:00

unpublished submission from the youth at Larkin Street Youth Services

Sometimes it's hard to listen to the rain
When its [sic] clarity isn't clear enough.
The rashes off my skin tell a person im [sic] not well enough
for a day without innocence.
Inch by inch I'm loosing my own
with every tear leaking from the corner of my eye lids.
No one seems to claim the stranger inside me
so i [sic] walk along my torn pieces.
voices keep winding through my soul
speaking love appearance but i [sic] cluster under my clothes
that makes me invisible to glance at.
I'm opposed to the volume of the crowd
that makes me want to shout out my rough edge
but no one seems to know that.
Bleeding but no fear of fighting
the tall waves from above my head
sometimes makes the freedom comes [sic] out again.

Questioning: Shanya Nicole

2011-01-20T18:59:00.000-08:00

unpublished submission from the youth at Larkin Street Youth Services

Where do I want to be? I don't know I don't feel
like I have a choice it's up to me. Some days I feel
the need for a woman, some days the need for a
man. But I am comfortable where I am. I don't
need a label, I love, love, love, depending on the
day, the time, is it the right place?

Both are beautiful to me. Both are choices.
Both are my eye of Desire.
I can have one or the other
or Both
or None
But I know what I like the most
choices
confused of my attraction
And men are always available
women shy away
Megan are hurtful
women soft, loving
But it's hard to want
What doesn't want me
and I'm not too sure

Introduction to the Online Exhibit

2010-11-18T11:14:00.001-08:00

This exhibit is designed to inspire creativity and an active response to the issues presented in this project. It intends to be interactive and to leave visitors feeling like they have a valuable voice that can continue the conversation begun in the exhibit.

To this aim, this exhibit lifts up the voices (through Magazine excerpts, oral history and additional historical reference materials) that seek to provoke, uncover lost or forgotten voices or are particularly creative.

The materials in this exhibit come from the original Vanguard participants (1969-1971) and a contemporary group of queer street youth (2010-2011) who live in the same Tenderloin District of San Francisco. The third component of this exhibit is your voice. This exhibit will continue to add the thoughts, voices, art work and comments of visitors as is appropriate.

We believe that history is alive, that it is not only about capturing sights, sounds and tales of the past, but it is also the story and effect that it has on the lives of those who are inspired, repulsed or bored by it. Thank you for being a part of this history.

Since the exhibit is based around themes, rather than a chronological history, you may want to read A (Brief) History of Vanguard by Joey Plaster (2011) before viewing the exhibit.

Loneliness & Community
Poverty & Social Stigma
Drug Use & Sex Work
Sexuality & Gender
Mental Health
Queer Theology

Loneliness & Community

2010-11-16T18:25:00.001-08:00

Excerpts From Vanguard Magazine (1966-1971)

Poverty & Social Stigma

2010-11-16T18:24:00.001-08:00

Drug Use & Sex Work

2010-11-16T18:21:00.001-08:00

Excerpts From Vanguard Magazine (1966-1971)

Sexuality & Gender

2010-11-16T18:20:00.001-08:00

Excerpts from Vanguard Magazine (1966-1971)

Mental Health

2010-11-16T18:16:00.001-08:00

Excerpts From Vanguard Magazine (1966-1971)

Queer Theology

2010-11-16T18:15:00.001-08:00

Featured Sermons and Writings from Pastors (1964-1971):

Sept. 1968 Letter from Rev. Keith to Bishop Ray Broshears on Being a Gay Pastor. Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Ray Broshears Papers.

An Ecumenical Eucharist Liturgy to Celebrate the Presence of Homosexuals (pdf), April 1969. [Bishop Michael Itkin, Courtesy of the GLBT Historicial Society, Ray Broshears Papers]

Bishop Michael Itkin - Bishop of the Holy Catholic Synod of the Syro-Chaldean Rite doing missionary work in the Tenderloin who ordained several of the Vanguard youth as missionaries.
Sermon: Christ and the Homosexual [Christmas 1969]

Excerpts From Vanguard Magazine (1966-71):

Screaming Queen Meets Vanguard Youth

2010-10-28T15:43:00.001-07:00

Today Felicia Flame, a screaming queen who was a part of the Compton Cafeteria Riots, meet with the youth who are gathering to create their own version of Vanguard in the Tenderloin. She shared about her story, her encounter with the Vanguard youth and her reflections about why preserving the history of the Tenderloin and the transgender activists is so important.

Felicia talked with the youth for two hours on topics ranging from surgeries and hormones to the problems with classism and politics.

Near the end of her visit, one of the youth remarked: "to hear what you've been through makes me feel satisfied because it means we're not invisible."

Felicia challenged the youth to preserve the history of the Tenderloin that, in her view, is in danger of being forgotten because the individuals whom it is important to are too poor to buy plaques or statues to remember it.

Her final words to the youth were: "You are all leaders, I expect much from you!"

This was the third gathering of the Larkin youth, who are working towards creating a contemporary volume of the Vanguard Magazine, creating their own group and hope to create some sort of political action to draw attention to the issues that are important to them.

If you are interested in submitting something to their magazine, click the submission tab above.

Location:Larkin Street Youth Center, Tenderloin, San Francisco

Call For Submissions

2010-10-14T17:11:00.000-07:00

In an effort to offer hands-on, community-based engagement with this history, today’s Tenderloin residents will produce a free, screen-printed publication in the style of the original Vanguard Magazine, pairing new writings and artwork “in conversation” with originals.

We will print at least 1000 copies of a 60-80-page publication (8 1/2 X 14) with roughly 45 entries: about 15 pieces from the original magazine and 30 new pieces. We are looking for art, writing, poetry, etc. Youth can submit in any format they would like.

Mirroring the original Vanguard Magazine, the magazine will also include material from urban ministers, anti-poverty activists, and Tenderloin organizers; interviews and oral histories; short historical writings contextualizing Vanguard; and relevant snippets from the GLBTHS archives.

Possible themes include: faith and queer theology; loneliness and community; poverty and social stigma; drug use and sex work; sexuality and gender.

Send to: GLBT Historical Society, 657 Mission Street #300, San Francisco, CA 94105.

Questions? Call Joey Plaster at 415.777.5455 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 415.777.5455 end_of_the_skype_highlighting X2 or write at joey@glbthistory.org.

2010-09-05T11:19:00.000-07:00

Introducing Joey Plaster

2010-09-05T09:17:00.001-07:00


Joey Plaster is an independent public historian, radio producer, and freelance journalist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Joey is the recipient of the 2010 Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history, awarded by the American Historical Association’s Committee on LGBT History. He was a 2009 fellow at the Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Joey's public history projects have explored San Francisco's Polk Street, pre-gay liberation Oberlin College, and anti-poverty organizing in San Francisco's Tenderloin. He has worked with KALW radio, the Peabody award-winning transom.org, The Nation, and the SF Bay Guardian. He is Director of the GLBT Historical Society's Oral History Program and curator of the San Francisco LGBT Pride Committee's forthcoming fortieth anniversary exhibit. A graduate of Oberlin College, Joey has received funding from the California Council for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the San Francisco Foundation, the Rainbow Endowment, the Hermes Foundation, and the Human Rights Campaign’s Religion and Faith Program. You may contact Joey at joey@glbthistory.org. Download CV (PDF) Work samples: Polk Street Stories, hour-long radio documentary created for the Peabody-award winning transom.org and distributed nationally through NPR's Hearing Voices. Polk Street Oral History Project, recipient of the American Historical Association's 2010 Allan Bérubé Prize for outstanding work in public GLBT history. Behind the Masks, 90-page essay charting Oberlin College LGBT life from the 1920s to the early 1970s.

Sermon: Christ and the Homosexual

2010-05-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

[Excerpts from: Itkin, Michael, “Christ and the Homosexual,” sermon preached at Midnight Holy Eucharist, Christmas 1969 at the Community of Jesus our Brother, San Francisco and repeated at the Free Particle All-Gay Symposium – West Coast Gay Liberation Conference, Wesley Center, Berkeley CA 26 December 1966, Gay Clergy, 96-3 Carton 2, Papers of Raymond Broshears, Courtesy of the Gay Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Historical Society.]

“It is time we come up out of the land of the living dead, up out of the tombs of our oppression. We must admit that half of Homosexual life in the oppressive society, the half that includes hiding in ‘closets,’ furtive meetings and the dehumanized hunt for sex without human encounter, is life in the tombs. But we have before us now the prospect of coming up out of the tombs.”

...

“The Church of Christ must recover its mission to enable these kinds of person-affirming relationships to occur.”

...

Itkin continues by sharing the ancient Serbian Liturgy for “Pobratimstvo,” which in the words of Mary Edith Durham “’was as follows: The two parties went together to church. The priest read a prayer. The two then took a large goblet of wine, and both, setting their lips to it, sipped at once. They then broke bread and each ate a piece. They sipped and ate together thus three times, and then kissed the Cross, the Gospels and the ikon (sic), and lastly, each other.’”

...

“The Gospel calls us to become a ‘New Being,’ a new humanity in serving the people even to the Cross, as Jesus did, if need be. This new humanity has been described in such terms as the ‘city of God’. Yet if you walk down the streets of the city today and see the desolate, alienated and oppressed people, you cannot help but wonder at how the city can reflect the new humanity. Take a moment out to talk to adolescent runaways and so-called ‘hippies,’ to youth without homes an d street-people, to Black-people, Latin Americans & Indian-Americans, to draft-resisters demonstrators for peace & radicals who rightly feel that the institutional church has betrayed the revolutionary message of the Gospel; know in your gut the feeling of many Homosexuals and others seeking to know Love in any of its diverse forms, who have been rejected by the institutional church which has refused to admit that Love, any kind of Love, is the reflection of the Love of God shown in Jesus – and realize the alienation of an entire cross-section of our population.

“In the midst of this desperation there also lies our most creative hope. For here the new situation of urban man, with his rebellion against the cultural poverty, economic oppression and bureaucratic dehumanization by the State is now coming to a head: shaping new structures, new patterns, alternative forms of human life.

“It is precisely in this place and at this time that we are called to participate in the revolutionary lifestyle of Jesus as the man for others. Now our survival may well depend on our ability to overcome past inadequacies and introduce anew His revolution of nonviolent and transforming Love.

…

“While the institutional church condemns that Love which differs from society’s norm, an alternative community has the possibility of recognizing that whatever is done with Love is done in the Spirit of Jesus. While the institutional church takes itself so seriously that it dies, an alternative community has the possibility of learning how to play and celebrate and, therefore how to truly worship. While the institutional church is safe, an alternative community has the possibility of persecution, martyrdom, prison, sainthood and also of victory and the transformation o f the world into a loving and creative Community of Man in the Spirit of Jesus.

“The Community of Jesus needs to acknowledge every man’s and woman’s need for intimacy and, if there is a choice between intimacy in the sex act alone or no intimacy at all, the sex act alone has to be recognized as an authentic moment of human and eternal encounter.”

…

“Jesus, Whom we follow, is not a Lord of withdrawl from the sphere of social action: but He is our Brother and Liberator, and He is the Leader of rebellion against all vested bureaucracy and oppression, the Leader of challenge and nonviolent revolution, reconciling Love incarnate among us as the Centre (sic) of history and the Centre of our lives."

Special Thanks: St. Francis Foundation

2009-12-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

Special thanks to the St. Francis Foundation for their support of $2,000 to underwrite our publishing costs to create new issues of Vanguard Magazine and a gallery quality book to document the history we are uncovering.

The Vanguard youth were ahead of their time!

2009-11-07T09:54:00.001-08:00

I say that the Vanguard youth were ahead of their time, even though the age of their members ranged from 15 to 35. The Rev. Ray Broshears was the oldest member of the organization. Larry Mamiya who was a Glide intern from Union Seminary and worked with the Vanguard youth,describes Ray as seemingly jealous that the youth did not choose him as their president. Instead it was the extremely intelligent youth or the really good dancers that were chosen to be the leaders.

Perhaps the reason the 35 year old Broshears was not elected to the leadership of the groups, was because he was behind the times. The Gay Liberation spirit that Vanguard was pioneering supported the more aggressive tactics of liberation, such as those employed by the Black Panthers.

This letter from Broshears to the Rt. Rev. Michael Itkin, about Itkin's recent visit to a Vanguard meeting can show the difference between the youth and Broshears:

[courtesy the GLBT Historical Society Archives, Ray Broshears Papers, 96-3 Carton 4, Bishop Michael Francis Itkin] Learn more about David Hilliard (whose trial in Oakland is discussed in this letter).

It takes Broshears another 4 years before he begins to embrace the direction that the Vanguard youth were going in 1969. However, by the time Broshears gets to this space, Vanguard has already moved to a more transcendental space at a new location in the Haight Ashbury and disbanded completely.

This not only shows that the Vanguard youth are ahead of their time, but begs the question: What happens in Broshears life and ministry that moves him from opposed to organizations like the Black Panthers to recreating their organization? This Examiner article argues that it is attacks on Broshears (seemingly by youth) that pushes him over the edge.

[courtesy the GLBT Historical Society Archives, Ray Broshears Papers, 96-3 Carton 2, News Clippings]

If this is true, it would suggest that the catalyst for Broshears is the same as the Vanguard youth: vulnerability. The vulnerability of someone is a huslter, a runaway, throwaway, homeless, transgender in 1969 is very different then that of the pastors who attend their meetings. As Broshears begins to experience more vulnerability in his personal life, he seems to come to some of the same conclusions as the Vanguard youth.

As a pastor studying and hoping to possibly create the work done around Vanguard this is a call for me to see the ways that my power, privilege and ever changing vulnerability will limit what I can understand or be a catalyst moving me forward.

Youth: The Runaways

2009-11-06T12:49:00.000-08:00

Time, Friday, Sep. 15, 1967

Time was when parents took it almost for granted that any red-blooded boy would sooner or later run away from home on a summertime Tom Sawyer adventure. It was part of growing up, a way to gain experience and nothing to be alarmed about. Sometimes the boy would be gone for a week or so, but generally his plans to join the circus ended about nightfall, when his empty stomach and the animal sounds near his woodsy hideout quickly convinced him that daddy's razorstrop was not so bad after all.

The phenomenon is still seasonal—thousands of teen-agers who ran away in June for a summer-long taste of the hippie life were wending their way back home last week for the beginning of school. But for an increasing number of tormented teenagers, running away is not a lark but a desperately serious act for which returning home is an all but unthinkable conclusion.

School & the Draft. Runaways are a grave problem in every major city, and the problem is growing, partly due to the sharp rise of the teen-age population. Chicago police handled 7,904 runaways last year, up 50% from five years ago; and so far this year the rate has been running 10% higher than 1966. More than 2,000 juveniles were reported missing from the San Francisco Bay Area last year, and 3,000 ran away from their homes in affluent Houston. Overall, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. law-enforcement officers arrested 90,246 juvenile runaways last year—almost half of them girls—an increase of almost 10% from the previous year.

What makes them run? "Something inside that was always denied," sigh the Beatles in She's Leaving Home, one of the most popular cuts from their latest Sgt. Pepper album. "They're running away from a system and not just maladjusted homes," insists Dick Chandler, 37, whose first play, The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake, is about a teen-age runaway, and is scheduled to open on Broadway next month starring Jean Arthur as a sympathetic aunt. "Some of them come from very good homes and are given everything," says Chandler, "but it's what the parents stand for, the whole system—the competition, the lack of human values, of humanity in their life." For older teen-age boys, running away is often an escape from the pressures of school and the threat of the draft.

"If you have 20 different runaways, you will have 20 different reasons," says an Atlanta Juvenile Court officer. Kim, 13, ran away to Boston from her Los Angeles home because she could not get along with her new stepfather. "My parents didn't understand me or something," mumbles Paul, 15, who first left his Virginia home two years ago, and prowls the streets of Manhattan's East Village every day looking for the next place to stay.

No Hang-Ups. Dutch is 14, wears braces on his teeth and still speaks in a boyish treble, but all it took to send him scampering from Columbus to Chicago's bohemian Old Town district was the prospect of military school. Joe, 17, blames his run from Tampa, Fla. to Atlanta on parental neglect. "I'm the happiest I've ever been in my life," says Joe, the youngest member of Atlanta's small hippie colony. "This is more like a family than you could find, really, because there are no hang-ups."

Though not all teen-agers run away with the intention of joining the hippies, that is often where they wind up. "It's simply because the hippies will take them in when nobody else will," says Rabbi Samuel Schrage of the New York City Youth Board.

For teen-agers who do run away to the hippies, it is increasingly becoming a bad trip that is not only degrading but also dangerous. After the money runs out, they often turn to begging in order to eat. "There is a lot of panhandling. They are like parasites," says Allan Katzman, 30, editor of Manhattan's underground hippie newspaper, The East Village Other. To a juvenile who is already disturbed, the easy combination of drugs and sex is hardly good medicine; one 13-year-old runaway who began "dropping acid" nine months ago has tried to kill herself three times since.

Summer in the Park. For a place to stay, some runaways roam the streets looking for vacant houses to break into. "Most of them just sleep in the park; after a few nights of that you will go home with anyone—you don't even look," says Manhattan Hippie Jim Fouratt. "They are exploited by all kinds of people," says Fouratt, "and what's going to happen when winter comes and they can't sleep in the park?" Not that sleeping in the park is any too healthy in summer: last week a 15-year-old runaway from upstate New York was raped by two young Negroes and her 17-year-old "flower husband" (known to her only as "the Poet") was beaten unconscious in Central Park where they were sleeping.

Scarcely more salubrious are the "crash pads"—communal sleeping quarters rented by older hippies, who run them as free hotels. They are largely responsible for an alarming increase in venereal disease—up 1,000% in West Hollywood in the past five years. As an alternative to the crash pads, San Francisco's church-financed Huckleberry's for Runaways provides "fugitives" with food and shelter while setting up channels through which they can re-establish relationships with their parents. Operating out of a Victorian house at 1 Broderick Street in the Haight-Ashbury district, Huckleberry's has handled 190 runaways since it was set up two months ago. Most of them, after counseling by four staff psychologists and 13 other volunteers, have gone home.

The Bulletin Board. In tracing their children, parents usually begin by contacting the Missing Persons Bureau and metropolitan newspapers, which, in recent months, have been running increasing numbers of pictures of runaways. More likely sources exist within the hippie communities themselves. In San Francisco, for example, the hippie-run, Haight-Ashbury Switchboard (3873575) not only helps hippies with information and advice about food, lodging and the draft, but also passes dozens of messages from distraught parents along the grapevine every day. Poignant parental pleas appear in the classified ads of underground newspapers, and major hippie hangouts sport bulletin boards crammed with personal messages.

As a last resort, some desperate parents invade hippie country in personal searches for their wayward kids. One New Yorker finally located his 20-year-old son after days of scouring the Hashbury on foot. "Barry came down looking stunned," the father recalls. "It was touching and painful, harder for him, I guess, than for me. It took him ten or 15 minutes just to get back into his face." The reunion lasted only long enough for a short trip to Big Sur. Then Barry went back to Hashbury.

[Electronically Recovered 11/6/2009: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,941149,00.html]

Missions: A Bridge to the Non-Church

2009-11-06T12:41:00.000-08:00

Time Magazine , Friday, Oct. 20, 1967

Before Michigan Governor George Romney undertook a tour of the San Francisco slums recently, he first stopped for an indoctrination lecture at the Glide Memorial Methodist Church. When a much-liked cop in the city resigned, it was the Glide Foundation that gave him a farewell party—and more than 6,000 persons, ranging from the mayor to a motorcycle gang, showed up to celebrate. Almost any time a San Francisco derelict needs a handout, a prostitute needs an encouraging word, a busted hippie needs a pad, they can count on help from Glide.

Now 38 years old, the Glide Foundation is probably the nation's most successful and adventurous mission church. Part of its success stems from the fact that it has the money to make its missions work: the church has an annual income of $350,000, the bulk of it from the estate of Lizzie Glide, a devout widow of an oil tycoon, who left $1,000,000 to the church in 1936. Once a sedate, middle-class parish, Glide gradually lost much of its original white membership with the coincidental decay of its surrounding neighborhood. Four years ago, when the Rev. Lewis Durham of Los Angeles was named head of the foundation, Glide turned its energies full time toward service in the slums and dedicated itself to becoming "a bridge between church and non-church."

Merry Christmas. Working under Durham as pastor of the church is the Rev. Cecil Williams, 38, a dynamic, Texas-born Negro with a flair for imaginative preaching. At a jazz worship service this month attended by several hippies, Williams began his sermon by wishing everyone "Merry Christmas," explaining, "It's Christmas today because life comes as a gift." Picking up a dazzlingly colored paper sack, which he called "my psychedelic bag," he pulled out of it a framed portrait of himself, hung it around his neck and announced: "I'm too concerned with myself. So I carry my hang-up with me, baby. Two thousand years ago, a man said, 'Look, man, you can be free—you don't have to have that hang-up.' " Glide is equally freewheeling in structure. It has no formal church committees, instead gets things done through a series of ad hoc "task forces." Every other Sunday after the morning service, the church holds a meeting, open to anyone in town, at which new programs are decided upon and new task forces selected. "We're like a boxer on his toes," says Durham. Among Glide's more successful projects: a "Black People's Store" that supplies needy Negroes with free food, clothing and furniture; a "Citizens Alert" legal-aid group to guard against police brutality; two halfway houses for released mental patients. Glide was instrumental in organizing San Francisco's "Huckleberry House" for runaway youths (TIME, Sept. 15), has steered untold down-and-outers to rehabilitation and jobs.

Hippies & Homosexuals. Unlike most churches, Glide welcomes hippies to church functions, and its ministers are blithely indifferent to their unorthodox mating habits. "We don't give a damn who people go to bed with," says Durham. Last spring Glide sponsored a three-day retreat for homosexuals and clergymen at which the deviates discussed their problems. As a result, Glide formed a citywide Council on Religion and the Homosexual.

Understandably, Glide's unconventional ways have brought the church a large measure of criticism, but its activities are strongly backed by Methodist Bishop Donald Tippett, a member of the foundation's board, and by community leaders such as Willie Brown, San Francisco's first Negro representative in the California state assembly. Durham's main defense of Glide's missionary ways is that they work, and that the church is loved and respected by thousands of deviates and dropouts who otherwise have nothing but contempt for organized religion. "God says 'yes' to man," he says. "So we want to help the disenfranchised, the alienated. The church must say 'yes' to all people because God cares about all people."

[Electronically recovered 11/6/2009: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,902145,00.html]

Rev. Robert "Bob" Cromey

2009-11-01T20:30:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from GLHS OHP 97-27, Shedding a Straight Jacket Robert Cromey

VOICES of the Oral History Project of GLHSNC 2 Theater.

Interview with Rev. Robert Cromey

By Interviewer: Paul Gabriel

Date: 9/16/96 and 8/7/97

(photo from the photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965)

Raised in New York, Robert “Bob” Cromey’s father was an independent pastor who worked in big churches with small congregations and little money in the ‘30s that would set up soup kitchens and worked with the homeless. “Incredible, you know, I think to myself I’m doing the same thing now with the ‘90s where we have the most fabulous and wealthy country in the world that my father was doing in the ‘30s when you know, there were what? Thirty-five, forty percent people unemployed, the soup kitchen.”

Bob learned social awareness and about diversity from his father, who “made it very clear in our household, you didn’t talk about niggers or fags, that these were human beings that were friends of ours, and we had black people, they were acquaintances that my father would help out in the days of the ‘30s and the ‘40s of homeless people in Brooklyn where I was born and raised and Manhattan, in churches they had in these areas. And they would be around the house, mostly ordinary people, mostly particularly black people. But even then my father was interested or even knew a lot of gay people and they were around, this was part of our life. And you just didn’t say the N word or the Fag word or, you know, you didn’t put people down. So I had a kind of sharpening of social conscience, if you will in the ‘40s and ‘50s.”

A student of a prep school in Long Island, called St. Paul’s School. Bob was told he could have gone to Harvard, but he “never thought of it.” So he went to Colgate University in Amherst and hated it: “It was all male, I didn’t have a lot of money, my father didn’t want me to hitchhike – he was terrified that I’d be killed on the road or hurt. I was very lonely and I also was shocked again at the fraternity system, the way they talked about kikes and niggers openly.” After deciding not to be part of a fraternity system, Bob became a social outcast. Though he was a jock playing football and basketball, he didn’t make the top level team, so he transferred to New York University (NYU).

Bob was also exposed to diversity as a student of NYU (1949-53): “In those days it was called N.Y.Jew because practically eighty percent of the students at NYU in those days were Jewish and bright and smart and aggressive….” The most important organization on campus at the time he attended was the Young Communist League in the ‘50s. Bob was a member of the Canterbury Club for Episcopal students at NYU. “It was a small group but the priests who led that were very avant-garde, very concerned about social issues and that what they were trying to get us to see is that the Christian gospel had something to do with slums, bad housing, race relations and I was awakened by these particular clergy to the responsibility of a Christian person to the disadvantaged. And social justice issues as being something that we’ve got to connect to all this, all this Jesus stuff, you see. And it wasn’t just pie in the sky, it wasn’t just simple piety. It was if you’re going to be involved in what’s going on in the world, not out of the world.”

He went to seminary at General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1953 and graduated in 1956 and was ordained an Episcopal priest in December 1956. With his ordination Bob gained social status. Bob wanted to be a brighter star than his father, he strived to be the rector of a large parish and become a “bishop with a fancy, fancy hat.”

In 1956, Bob was curate (associate rector) at Christ ‘s Church in Bronxville, New York. It was a nice church, “but they were very racist and very anti-Semitic and I was shocked by the kind of attitudes that these wonderful people were expressing. They were wonderful towards us, but then they’d talk about niggers and kikes and Jews and this and that.” After a couple of years, Bob became a rector of a church in the Bronx. In this congregation, he heard prejudice about the Catholics (in reaction to the Kennedy election). Bob names this as the time he started to gain class consciousness.

Bob moved to San Francisco, in part because it was the ‘60s and what he called the “greatest trek in the history of humanity.” With a desire to live in another metropolitan area outside of New York, Bob wrote to Bishop Pike (pictured on the left with the Rev. Martin Lutheran King Jr at the Selma march - Photo courtesy of the Bishop Pike Papers at Syracuse University), whom he knew when Bp Pike was the Dean of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. When a job came open, Bp Pike invited Bob out and paid his expenses in order to get a talented pastor from New York who could handle the inner city. So in 1962, he came to San Francisco, which “helped radicalize me a good deal. I worked for a very famous man, the very famous James Alan Pike, who was the Bishop of California then in San Francisco, and I was his assistant for three years.”

Bob participated in two major sit-ins that protested all-white work places (GM and the Sheraton) in 1965, the same year that he participated in the march in Selma with the Glide Memorial contingent. During the time the civil disobedience sit-ins were practically choreographed. The protesters would refuse to leave a space then they would be arrested by the policy. Radical protesters would go limp and also resist arrest, but the clergy would just walk to the paddy wagon and have lawyers and others waiting to bail them out so they would be released within a few hours.

The Selma march, lead by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr (MLK), went to Montgomery, Alabama: “the police waded into them and beat the people in the march, beat them up with clubs, you know, there was blood and it was to stop the march, you know. And they beat people up mercifully, mercilessly.” They also released dogs, so MLK asked clergy to come to Selma “and thousands of us went, rabbis, priests, ministers descended on Selma, Alabama. It was just incredible.” During the event, a Unitarian minister name James Reba was beaten up and killed and the march didn’t go through. Later the clergy came back and they were able to successfully complete the march. During the second march, Bob was the stringer who fed the local media reports of what was happening in Selma.

“It was very exciting, and I just felt this is what I want to do with my life. One way or the other, this is the side I want to be on. I don’t want to be in the middle, I don’t want to be on the right, I don’t want to be a negotiator, I want to be on the right, I don’t want to be a negotiator, I want to be a demonstrator, I want to be a person that will just make the noise and let the chips fall where they may. I’m not interested in worrying about what this, that or the other one is going to think about it. So, yes, it was very exciting, and life-changing, I mean, no question about it, it change my life, happily. “

Bob continued to use his contacts with the media to benefit CRH. He says it was because he was uninterested in meetings: “I wanted to be in more direct action things, more things where I was in direct relationship with people and activities and the media, where I could say something specifically. And so that the role I took, and took a step back, and then became a parish minister, which meant I had liturgy and my parishioners to worry about more than the larger issues.”

Bob participated in many anti-Vietnam war marches “One, I think I carried a sign that said “Fuck War” on it. “ Bob and other clergy members went down to Hunters Point in their vestments during a riot and talked to individuals and also supported a lot of picket lines. Bob attended the meetings of the NAACP from ’64-66 on behalf of Bishop Pike as part of his work as “a kind of urban work specialist.”

Bob became involved in gay issues when Bishop Pike didn’t want to go to the Folsom Retreat Center where the Glide Foundation gathered clergy and gay and lesbians (where the Council for Religion and the Homosexual or CRH was formed) and he asked Bob to go. “So I went to that long weekend where I met Phyllis and Del and Don Lucas and Hal Call and, you know, a lot of people who are leaders of that… And so I came back and I told him that, you know, this gay rights stuff is really important. Homosexuals are human beings and we can’t just have this anti-gay attitude. And he read all this stuff I brought back and he changed. And just said you’re right, you’re right! We got to support gay rights. And it was incredible, I mean, I’ll take credit for having made the conversion. Anyway, the great thing that he did was he went out and found four or five of the clergy that he had gotten out of their jobs because they were gay, got them to post – that means they couldn’t function as a priest anymore, and he got them reinstated. He got them jobs in the church.”

After participating in the CRH Dance that was raided by the police, Bob became very active in the gay community speaking at the Daughters of Bilitis Conference and Chairing the 1968 North American Coalition of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) conference in Chicago. Bob talked about learning about issues he had never thought about before. Bob continued to work with the gay groups until he was no longer needed proclaiming: “I’m not involved anymore very much in the larger community’s efforts. I would be if I were asked. But again, now a days gay people are leading those organizations, lesbians are leading, and should be.”

Some say one of the first picket actions by a gay group happened when gay picketers protested the fact that Bob’s salary was cut in half for supporting gay issues. “there was an attempt on the part of the bishop and myself to change my job description a little bit because he was going to be away and there was a lot of criticisms of me as the bishop’s assistant because I had been arrested in the civil rights movement and I had besmirched the name of the Episcopal Church by being pro-gay, you see. And I had a huge amount of criticism. So in this attempt to shift the job, the Counsel of the Diocese of California cut off the job. Said we really don’t need it. That meant I only had half a salary because by then I was going half time in the church up in Diamond Heights and it didn’t have much of a population so the diocese was supporting me. But suddenly here I was a married man with 3 young children and they just squeezed, you see, this committee squeezed. And half my salary was gone. So I forget how the picketing came about, but I was quite delighted and surprised. I was at St. Aidan’s that Sunday because I was taking the services there, but because the Cathedral was the focal point of diocese and where the bishop’s throne is, a group of the gay people got together and picketed. I heard about it, the Dean of the Cathedral called me, “did you know about this,” “I heard about it.” I was delighted. It appeared in the church papers all over the country carried stories about it. And it was their protest saying that because Cromey was involved in the gay rights stuff obviously he lost his job because of that. And of course the Counsel of the Diocese people would say, oh no, no, we didn’t have enough money for this job and this job. The usual corporate dance around why you get rid of someone who is a noisemaker, a troublemaker.”

Bob divorced in 1969, and with his marriage family counselor’s license he set up a practice and made a lot of money. Bob was much less of an activist in the ‘70s, moved to Europe for a year and “spent a lot of time nursing my wounds after the divorce and spending a lot of time traveling and seeing my children… And so the ‘70s, that was more quiescent. Although I kept a high media profile. I was doing interviews in the newspapers and lots of radio and television stuff. I was on all the talk shows with some regularity in the ‘70s. And in those days, you had local talk shows on television.”

Looking back:

The ‘60s was a time when religion was very public and appeared in the media. Bob believes this change didn’t happen because the newspapers changed, but “it disappeared because churches weren’t saying anything anymore. They weren’t on the cutting edge. They’ve gone back to saying the same old things and as newspapers say or TV, oh we heard that before; that’s not news. Bob believes that religion became public because America needed it . “The average lay person who goes to church, they don’t give a damn about you or I believe about the Trinity or that incarnation of Jesus or resurrection, you know, they go to church because it somehow connects them to God or some sense that there’s something beyond themselves.” Bob believed that only a small percentage of the church cared about the traditional tenants of the church and that pastors were being lazy or “glued in their mind” who didn’t want to be bothered by social issues.

Bishop Pike helped Bob to open up theologically, “But I feel free to say I have a lot of trouble with the notion of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. I really think there’s some kind of after life but, you know, people are getting quite used to me saying that; they don’t care, you know. ‘Cause I’m not telling them what they have to believe. I’m saying these are options for us to believe.”

Bob’s theology can be seen in his participation of the sit-in at the Cadillac dealership on Van Ness with the NAACP, where six white male clergy members (three Presbyterians: Bill Grace and three Episcopalians: Donald “Don” Gedamey, Lane E. Barton and Bob) participated as followers rather than leaders. The blacks lead the march and then invited the clergy to participate in the sit-in, where they were arrested with about 300 others. “The motivation was if were clergy in The City and we were trying to support the blacks and Hispanic people, we had to identify. We had to be part of them; we couldn’t be aloof.”

Another dynamic during the 60’s was that the denominations worked together and had Urban Specialist pastors who had the financial freedom to be radical and respond to the real needs of Urban life. The Presbyterians and Episcopalians met regularly to talk about strategy: “The idea was to identify, that the church has got to be involved with what’s going on with the people in the street. And it had to deal with the jobs and it had to deal with employment.”

Bob believes the denominations decision to stop supporting the Urban Specialist pastors caused them to become out of touch with the needs of the world. “The churches on the denominational level since the ‘60s have pulled out and no longer finance people like the independent clergy that they had in The City in doing social service and social activism. Our diocese has nobody like that now, nobody. I don’t think the Presbyterians, Methodists or Lutherans do either. Probably the Night Ministry is one of the few programs left from those days when the clergy were actively involved… Most of the young clergy think I’m some kind of a nut when I raise issues connecting the Gospel to these issues. I’m regarded as an old fart, you know, ‘cause this is past.”

Change Comes to the North Beach - Rev. Guy A. Lizzi

2009-10-20T22:08:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Guy A. Lizzi

Information compiled from: Lizzi, Guy A., “Brief outlines of my Education, Theological Training, Chruches and Missionary field served. Also my Doctrinal conviction and Beliefs,” April 19,1963 (courtesy of the ELCA Region 2 Archive, North Beach Mission, SPS, SF CA, 1964 Founding)

The Rev. Guy A. Lizzi was born in Italy and arrived in San Francisco in 1910. Guy established the Evangelical Missions for Italians in California, Oregon, Washington and Nevada for the American Bible Society. While a student in seminary in 1912, Guy was asked to organize St. John Italian Methodist Church in San Francisco. After he graduated, he received a call from the Presbyterian Board of National Missions to become a pioneer missionary in Duluth Presbytery in April of 1915 where he remained for five years. Guy then transferred to Chicago in 1919 and served Indiana, Cleveland and Akron, Ohio. Then from 1924-34 he spent ten years in Italy as a general missionary. Guy then worked in Des Moines, IA to run the Evangelistic Center, until his wife passed away in 1938 and he returned to San Francisco. In 1940 Guy was called by the Presbyterian Church to be a Missionary in San Francisco, Costal Area and Reno, Nevada. Guy resigned in 1960 when the Board of National Missions asked him to “stress more the preaching of the Social Gospel,” and he refused.

Guy joined the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod (LCMS) after hearing a radio program of “the sound doctrinal bible sermons, broadcasted by the late Dr. Meyer.” Guy then was confirmed and received as a member of St. Paulus Lutheran Church. After corresponding with Concordia Seminary, Guy became commissioned as a Missionary. Guy became a Lutheran because he was convinced that the Lutheran church would not be swayed by tradition or human reason, but that only the Bible is the source of authority. A fan of the Lutheran understanding of justification, the centrality of Jesus and the Lutheran Catechism, Guy expressed his faith in the words of the Apostle’s Creed and found God’s grace bestowed through Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. “The most vital meaning of ‘Church’ is found in the phrase ‘Communion of saints’ – the fellowship of Christian believers whose lives are committed to Jesus Christ.”

Guy established the North Beach Mission (NBM) in 1956 as part of the LCMS. Three years later he lost funding and with the backing of Lewis J. Julienel of the First Baptist Church, the Mission became an Interracial Evangelical Church. When the Lewis’ successor decided not to continue supporting NBM, the mission was then taken over by The Miraloma Reformed Church who subsequently gave it up do to “lack of financial means.” Finally, NBM gets support by the Lutheran Church in America (LCA).

---

So imagine what happens when the 72 year old Pastor Guy Lizzi meets Pastor Chuck H. Lewis. Guy had resigned previous calls when he was asked to begin preaching the social gospel. So, what would he do when a young pastor came to town charged by the LCA to create an outreach to the homosexual community?

In a letter dated September 23, 1964, Guy describes an inner voice that answered his ten days of prostrated prayers: “WHY QUIT? Remain, continue to work faithfully, as in the past, and I shall give you the victory to overcome the points on those things you disagree with Pastor Lewis.” Guy calls his ten days of discernment the “greatest spiritual crisis I ever faced in my years in the Missionary work,” and asked for forgiveness for the hurt he caused “do to my disagreement.” Guy vows “co-operate 100 percent with Pastor Lewis in all his endeavors. Even use the power of persuasion to bring back into our fold the alienated ones.” Lizzi, Guy A., "Letter to The Rev. Orval C. Hartman," (courtesy of the ELCA Region 2 Archive, North Beach Mission, SPS, SF CA, 1964 Founding).

And so it was, that the pioneer missionary pastor from Italy became a part of an open and affirming congregation in 1964. Guy worked in partnership with Chuck and Joanne "Jo" Chadwick to provide ministry primarily to those living in the Federal Housing Project, gay youth, conscientious objectors and others who signed the NBM covenant.

Urban Specialist Pastors and Their Supporters

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Pastors from the Council on Religion and the Homosexual

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965

Rev. Charles "Chuck" Lewis, Board Missionary for the Lutheran Church in America (LCA), and pastor of the North Beach Mission (NBM), Chuck lead youth urban experiences, trainings for pastors and other professionals to learn about the issues of gay people and saw himself as a pastor to the gay social groups. In the late 60's Chuck became the president of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual (CRH) in 1968. Learn More - Oral History

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965

Rev. Clay Caldwell from the United Church of Christ

Rev. William “Bill “ Black an Urban Specialist from from LCA and Pastor of Sunset Lutheran, Bill also served on the NBM committee.

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965

Rev. Ted McIlvenna The founder of the Council of Religion and the Homosexual, Ted became the Young Adult Minister at Glide after the National Council of Churches interviewed hitchikers to find out that they were all headed to San Francisco. Ted secured the foundational support to provide the funds for the Vanguard project and other work with young adults in San Francisco. Learn More

Rev. Bill Grace from the Presbyterian Church

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965

Rev. Robert "Bob" Cromey – As an assistant to Bishop Pike, Bob was encouraged to work on civil rights issues. Bishop Pike sent Bob to the first meeting of CRH (which Bob ended up becoming a member of), in return Bob helped Bishop Pike change his mind about homosexuality, so much so that the Bishop actually tracked down the gay pastors he had pushed out of the ministry and found them ministerial jobs. Oral History -- Learn More

Glide Memorial Pastors

Rev. Ed Hansen, was an intern at Glide Memorial from Claremont Seminary. He served as Vanguard's initial contact at Glide. His return to school is lamented in the first issue of Vanguard. He went on to write his thesis on homosexuality and religion.

Rev. Ed Pete organized the older folk in the Tenderloin to protest to help the Tenderloin to become recognized as a poverty district.

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Armed Forces Protest 1966

Rev. Cecil Williams became the pastor of Glide Memorial Church in 1964. He encouraged the gay organizations to use Civil Rights organizing and nonviolence to organize and empower members of the Tenderloin, Bayview, Filmore and Haight Ashbury. Cecil was

Rev. Ted McIlvenna Ted was recruited by the National Council of Churches to serve run the Young Adult Program at Glide. Ted is the founder of CRH.

Rev. John Moore Was the pastor of Glide Church before Cecil Williams.His sermons on Homosexuality appeared on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965

Rev. Lewis "Lewie" Durham worked for Glide Foundation. Lewie was in charge of educating the board of directors so that they would be support the work that the Glide pastors were doing. At one point Lewie even had to respond to angry letters that were sent to Bishop Pike after a story was run about the Vanguard youth. Oral History

Rev. Lawrence "Larry" Mamiya was an intern from Union Theological Seminary in New York from the UCC tradition to Glide to replace the Rev. Ed Hansen. Called to ministry to the youth of San Francisco, Larry worked directly with Vanguard and also spent significant time with the psychedelic community in the Haight Ashbury. Larry helped to open the Haight Asbury clinic, Free Concerts and started both the Vanguard dances and the food programs at Glide.

Members of Vanguard

Mentioned Previously: Ed Hansen, Ted McIlvenna, Lewis Durham, Larry Mamiya

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Ray Broshears Papers, Carton 3

Rev. Ray Broshears Described as the oldest member of Vanguard, Ray writes an article on loneliness for the 4th issue, before moving to Contra Costa County. A pastor in a non-mainline denomination, Ray moves back to the city and becomes famous for being a key part of conspiracy theories about the death of JFK, creating the Lavender Panthers (an armed group to protect gay people from bashers), and for helping to start the San Francisco's Gay Pride Parade (though some people claim he was originally organizing a counter protest in hopes of stopping it).

Rev Keith A member of the Vanguard youth whom also seems to have been ordained in a non-mainline denomination (Universal Life Church).

Rev. Adrian Ravarour A founding member of Vanguard, On December 21, 1966, Bishop Mikhail Itkin ordained Ravarour as a priest in the Holy Catholic Synod of the Syro-Chaldean Rite, and to his Eucharistic Catholic Orders. Bishop Itkin consecrated Ravarour to the episcopate in the winter of 1967 to help with the founding and administration of San Francisco mission ministries.Learn more

Other Gay Friendly Pastors

Episcopal Bishop James Alan Pike (Diocese of California) Bishop Pike sent Bob Cromey to the first meeting of CRH (which Bob ended up becoming a member of), in return Bob helped Bishop Pike change his mind about homosexuality, so much so that the Bishop actually tracked down the gay pastors he had pushed out of the ministry and found them ministerial jobs.Bishop Pike recreated the recipe for oil that was given to Noah. After giving it to a group of conformation students he put it on his own head and discovered that the high it created was similar to marijuana use. Resigned as Bishop in ’68 and died after getting lost in the desert and falling off a cliff. Learn more about Bishop Pike

Methodist Bishop Tippett (as described by Lewis Durham): “I knew the Bishop would back me as long as I kept him informed. He didn’t like to be surprised. He didn’t want somebody calling up with something .. so I’d call him in the middle of the night mainly to let him know, you know, there’s going to be something happening. And he was an old war horse. He’d lost an eye and he lost it picketing in New York when they were shipping scrap iron to Japan and some union people who wanted jobs, you know, they wanted the shipping of scrap iron to Japan, beat him up. He lost an eye. So he was a fighter and he… I remember once. This was after, some guy, some conservative columnist did a story about our … we had Vanguard which was the gay prostitutes and they had a dance (p9) and this guy his four hundred newspapers, you know, with his column, you know, talking bout this awful thing that had happened in Glide where young men were dancing cheek to cheek and all that kind of … he really went into great detail. And by God, here came some telegrams from the Southern bishops, two or three from the Southern bishops and conferences in Texas and Alabama and all, asking Bishop Tippett to defrock us. And he just picked up the telegrams and the letters and said ‘Lewie, you answer them’ (laughs). ‘I haven’t got time.’ So he was a great support."

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Seven Angry Ministers CRH 1965

Rev. Fred Bird: A pastor who served as the chairman of the Central City Citizens Committee and fought for recreational spaces for the youth, seniors and other members of the neighborhood. In this role Fred regularly lobbied San Francisco politicians and created opportunities for members of the Tenderloin to share their concerns directly with their elected officials.

Rev Don Stuart: The first Night Minister, Don spent his time on the streets at night with whomever needed him. Regularly visiting the bars, Don lived the idea that wherever two or more are gathered, there Christ is.

Bishop Michael Francis Itkin was a Bishop of the Holy Catholic Synod of the Syro-Chaldean Rite doing missionary work in the Tenderloin who ordained several of the Vanguard youth as missionaries. Learn More

Rev. Laird Sutton: - A part-time sculptor, poet and film maker, Laird helped to create the sexually explicit movies that were used to help pastors and other professions to become desensitized to homosexuality.

Lay Leaders

Dr. Cliffard "Cliff" Crummey: President of the Northern California Council of Churches and a member of the Glide Foundation Board. Cliff was instrumental in supporting the Urban Specialist Pastors. When people tied to stop their work by withdrawing funding from local or national offices, Cliff would help to replace their donations. At one point when Chevron and several bank ceos threaten to take away their funds from the National Council of Churches unless the stop the pastors of Glide (whom that had no authority over), Crummey was able to replace their donations.

Joanne "Jo" Chadwick: From the Happy Dane tradition, Jo, was a member of the LCA and worked with Chuck at the North Beach Mission. In charge of young adult Christian education and ministry to single young adults, Jo was known among y the other pastors as "whats-her-name." Jo also served as a ghost letter writer for Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon to help them answer all the letters they recieved from across the country.

Mark Forrester: Hired as staff for the poverty program, Mark Forrester was an instrumental part of Vanguard and work to write articles and provide information through Federal Poverty Funds.

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon Papers, Box 192, Armed Forces Protest 1966

Del Martin: Founder of the Daughters of Billitis, Del Martin was a member of CRH.

Phyllis Lyon: Founder of the Daughters of Billitis, Phyllis was a member of CRH. Phyllis also served as Ted McIlvenna's secretary at Glide.

Photo Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society, Don Lucas Papers, Box 21-4, Portraits

Don Lucas: Member of the Mattachine Society, Don Lucas was a member of the CRH Board, who also participated in the conversations in the Episcopal Diocese about homosexuality.

*Photos Courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive

Loneliness

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"Finally, if the literature regarding homosexuality is to be believed, the inevitable mark of the homosexual is loneliness. It is not without significance that the first great novel on lesbianism was called The Well of Loneliness and it would seem that much of the frantic seeking of companionship in which the homosexual indulges (including the frequent changing of partners) is a recognition of this state... this loneliness seems to be a part of the cross of the homosexual who must, by nature of his inversion, bear. One hopes that the homosexual "societies" help, to some degree, to meet this problem, one tends to doubt it."

Richard Byfiels, "A Pastoral View of Homosexuality," Pacific Coast Theological Group, November 1965, p. 5-6, [courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Diocesan Committee Documents, 1965 folder 19/22].

While this comment is found in the midst of a long essay about how pastors should work with gay people in 1965, it is admittedly a product of the media's portrayal of gay people at the time. The image above is from the article "The Sad 'Gay' Life: The Homosexual Man" [Star, Jack, Look, January 10, 1967 (courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Mattachine Document Clippings folder 19/16)]

While it is surely true that some of the rhetoric about sad lonely gay men was designed to make homosexuality a less desirable lifestyle for youth, it is not completely missing the mark. The nature of the closet and the loss of social and familial support that many gay individuals experienced, would naturally lead to loneliness. It should also be said that the dynamics of urban life also create a sense of loneliness for many (regardless of their sexuality or gender identities).

It is particularly this loneliness that the pastors working with the Vanguard youth sought to address. This article, published in the original Vanguard , written by the Rev. Ray Broshears (picture courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Ray Broshears Papers; News Clippings; 96-3 Carton 2) seeks to address the loneliness he witnessed in the Tenderloin.

Volume 1, Number 4, February 1967, p. 7 [courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Vanguard]

The next issue of Vanguard featured comments about loneliness from youth member, Keith St. Clare:

"The more chronically one is lonely, the more selfish he becomes... Read More. ‘I just want someone to love me!’ you cry. Do you? Usually not. Are you waiting for Prince Charming or Snow White to carry on with? Give up, Mary. The secret, the power to overthrow your loneliness, is within. Put self aside and learn to love others! Paradoxically, concern will breed concern and (Sorry ‘bout that) you’ll lose your loneliness. One way to learn concern is through uninhibited enthusiasm. Don’t hide your feelings too well...Applaud and praise at the least honest provocation. True appreciation never alienates anyone. Affectionate companions and amiable friends are rare, but if you become one you will have more than your share.”

Volume 1, Number 5, 1967, p. 7 [courtesy of the GLBT Historical Society Archive, Don Lucas Papers; Vanguard]

Working with many of the individuals in the Tenderloin who are a part of the Vanguard generation and/or who are addicted, homeless, queer, transgender, mentally ill, addicted, etc, I know that loneliness is still one of the biggest issues those living in poverty or on the margins in San Francisco. In fact, I think it is such a pervasive problem in our city that it should be considered emotional poverty.

The more I research the history of the pastors that worked with and around the Vanguard youth, the more I see how my current ministry is a direct result of the advocacy, theology and law breaking of the Urban Specialist Pastors. My work along with that of the Night Ministry, the Faithful Fools and the many programs created by Glide Memorial Church and Foundation continue to work with the lonely souls of the Tenderloin.

Vanguard Revisited will create the opportunity for contemporary individuals to use their own words, art and writings to express how they experience loneliness.