# Gay Liberation Front Founded in **New York City in late July 1969**, weeks after the [[Stonewall Riots]], the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the **first explicitly radical American gay-rights organization** — a decisive break from the gradualist homophile tradition that had dominated American LGBTQ organizing since the 1950 [[Mattachine Society]]. ## The Radical Posture GLF took its name from the **Vietnamese National Liberation Front** (the Viet Cong), a deliberate signal of the organization's alignment with: - **Anti-imperialism and anti-war organizing** (Vietnam, U.S. interventions) - **Black Power, Brown Power, and Asian American movement organizations** (GLF made explicit coalitional commitments to the [[Black Panther Party]] in particular) - **The New Left and women's liberation** - **Anti-capitalism** — many GLF founding members were also active in left-socialist and Marxist organizations This was a radical departure from Mattachine and [[Daughters of Bilitis]], whose strategy depended on demonstrating that gay people were ordinary, respectable, indistinguishable-but-for-the-private-fact citizens. GLF instead argued that gay liberation required overturning the social, economic, and political structures that produced repression in the first place — a position closer to what would now be called **intersectional politics**. ## Split and Legacy GLF lasted only about a year before fracturing. The single-issue-focused **Gay Activists Alliance** split off in December 1969, frustrated by GLF's broad coalitional commitments. **Marsha P. Johnson** and **Sylvia Rivera** — both GLF founding members — went on to found **STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries)** in 1970 to address the specific needs of homeless transgender and gender-nonconforming people, who GLF's increasingly middle-class membership was failing. GLF's significance is durable despite its short life: it organized the first New York Pride march on the one-year anniversary of Stonewall (June 28, 1970), established the post-Stonewall radical-left genealogy that later flowed into [[ACT UP]] and [[Queer Nation]], and modeled the coalitional politics that contemporary queer organizing still draws from. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[Stonewall Riots]]