ABSTRACT
For many younger lesbians and gay men today, I suspect that the heady days of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) movement must seem remote and rather peculiar-hairy hippies in frocks, ardent Maoists summoning up visions of Cultural Revolution, dour feminists criticizing other women for wearing bras or make-up, and so on. They were all certainly there, but that hardly exhausts what Gay Liberation meant to the thousands of women and men who flocked to early meetings, dances, and ‘Gay Days’ in the parks of London and around the country. GLF was a great melting-pot of ideas, from anarchism to the self-styled ‘revolutionary’ political parties of the old far left. What matters most in retrospect, however, was the shared insistence that lesbians and gay men constitute an authentic social constituency, both like and unlike others, defined in relation to shared oppressions, but also by shared pleasures.
