TO WASHINGTON D.C.
I don’t know when Kameny’s meeting with Lawton took place in Washington. But there, an agreement was reached. If Stonewall had been an armed uprising, the energy of the movement would pass to Washington D.C.
The University of Maryland always looked to the federal capital and not to its own big city (Baltimore) as its cultural axis. On the other hand, unlike the universities in the capital like Georgetown or the American University, Maryland was full of middle-class and poor people, and not to be left out, Jews.
The problem was that the Student Government was in the hands of Marxists and hippies. The common goal was to end the Vietnam War. The communists, influenced by the Soviet Union and Cuba, were sending homosexuals to concentration camps. We were bourgeois worms to them. At our meeting, the action plan was outlined: First, the University. Then, the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
If homosexuality was classified as a mental illness, we would not have anyone’s support. In 1971, the APA would have its annual meeting in the Regency Room of the Shoreham Hotel, and we had to disrupt it. The Mattachine Society, the Gay Liberation Front, 102
and the Gay Student Alliance of Maryland entered to prevent the meeting. The gays caused chaos.
The fight at the university was not easy. Protests were held in front of the newspaper, psychology classes were invaded, stones were thrown at the Council’s offices, protests were held in front of the Rector’s house, and now, hippies, communists, and homosexuals were fighting on campus. The university left had to make a 90-degree turn: either stop supporting Cuba and its concentration camps for homosexuals or face hell on campus.
There would be no peace. To everyone’s surprise, this time, the national police did not intervene.
Apparently, if the faggots and the communists fought at the university, the American right would not intervene. There were rumors that the FBI, this time, preferred to be on the side of homosexuals. Others said that closeted gays in Congress were providing support behind the scenes.
Finally, the Student Government’s Board of Directors recognized our association, granted it a bud-get, and invited it to the big anti-Vietnam marches in Washington.