history" george washington university perfection chad heap talks about the origins of the gay-rights movement, finding commonplace with communists, the black power movement, and others fighting this is quote of american cold war society. also specific issues like removing the ban on lesbians and gays from holding governmental jobs. his classes about one hour. class.elcome back to beay our topic is going to gay and lesbian liberation. i want to spend a bit of time setting that up for you and we will move into discussion of the issues. for the last couple weeks we have been talking about the ways that cold war conformity gave rise to new forms of sexual and

social order in the first decade or two after the second world war. we talked about how the cold war conformity established a white suburban heterosexuality as the domestic ideal and norm in america, and how nuclear ofilies came to be the kind central calling card of american normalcy. that in turn of course, as we have discussed before, left a lot of other people outside that norm, especially those left behind in american cities, including people of color, and those who are choosing not to get married in what was the most marrying generation in american history. namely lesbians and gay men, but not exclusively so. those groups came to be seen as socially and sexually deviant, as friends to the american

family -- threats to american family and democracy, and should be excluded from society and the postwar economic order. into the lateing 1960's and early 1970's to look at some of the rebuttals to those notions of cold war conformity and norman timothy -- and normativity. there are an array of social and cultural movements that arise in the 1960's and 1970's to challenge this notion that white middle-class suburban heterosexuality is the ideal american identity. those included the civil rights and later a more radicalized lack power movement, the antiwar movement and protests against vietnam, the counterculture, women's liberation and the feminist movement.

today we are to start out by looking at the emergence of the gay liberation movement and the challenges that it offered to the established cold war order. by the end of class, i hope we have figured out four major things -- one that we have a pretty good idea what the gay liberation movement was. although i am calling it gay and lesbian liberation, it was originally called the gay liberation movement and was believed to encompass both gay men and women's ideas and wishes. we will also have a better sense of when the gay liberation movement began, how we might position it in american history. to liberated, and what-- to liberate, and

shortcomings it had. those are going to be our main focal points for today. i want to start by asking, if you had to take a moment in history based on your ratings or from your understanding -- your readings or from your understanding of gay and lesbian politics, when would you say the gay and lesbian liberation movement began? movement. to pick one in the late 1960's, early 1970's. is there some particular moment in time you would attach the movement to? to the stonewall riots? so the stonewall riots are seen as a kind of mythical beginning of the gay and lesbian liberation movement.

1972, is riots occurred in 1969, beginning on friday, june 27 in 1969 as a whenof uprising that arose the new york police department gay nightclub in greenwich village known as the stonewall inn. they were ostensibly cracking down on nightclubs in the city that didn't have the proper licenses to sell liquor to their audiences. and for some reason on this particular night in june 19 to patrons- june 1967, do did not want their establishment to be raided. although the customers were not

being arrested in any large numbers, they were being turned out of the club. they began to fight back. the stonewall uprising encompassed three nights of uprisings in greenwich village. the first night of the initial rest of the crackdown, and then people reassembled on two subsequent evenings to protest the actions of the police and to make a stand about oppression against gay and lesbians consumers in american cities. at the time as occurred, it wasn't a very notable activity. it happened at about 2:00 a.m. or 3:00 a.m. on saturday night. it was too late to appear in the saturday's newspaper, but made its way into the sunday newspaper. the new york times thought it was so important they buried it on page 33. and ignore your daily news put

it on page 30. -- the new york daily news put it on page 30. only if you began to read what happened did you learn that hundreds of young men went on a rampage in greenwich village shortly after 3:00 a.m. yesterday after 4 playing close placement raided a bar that was well known for its homosexual clientele. the times reported that after they were turned out of the club, the young men threw bricks, potholes, and a parking meter at the officer, who had a search warrant to investigate report of illegal liquor sales. they estimated that about 200 young men were termed out of the bar. as the uprising went on, the crowd grew close to 400, in a me lee that the times reported

lasted about 45 minutes. the new york daily news reported similarly and briefly about the events and noted also that the same bar had been raided the week before and had not provoked any controversy, but for some reason the second time people had fought back. the daily new provides us with one of our few images of what happened at the stonewall inn, and who was rioting. i apologize, this is not as quite as clear as it might be. it suggests that the audience was a little bit different, for those participating were different than of those portrayed by the new york times. just a in this image not picture of hundreds of young men, although there are not

hundreds in this photo. unlike the characterization in the times, in this image from the new york daily news, we see young men of color who have been completely written out of "the times'" account. in the background you can see a group of african-american men. in between the two policemen we see the face of what appears to be a latino young men. and in the image that appears in the more extensive coverage that the village voice offered in its july 3 issue, we see the presence of transgender or cross-dressing individuals and young street hustlers and a variety of other people who had been written out of the accounts. what is not visible is the kind of legendary lesbian who supposedly through the first

punch at stonewall, according to the myths that circulated and begin eminent in the 1980's as it began to be realized as a way of uniting lesbian and gay politics as a political movement again. here was fighting back against police dissemination and harassment, and an attempt to parlay it into a broader and social political movement. rioting continued further into the night that first night. by the next day, when the windows of stonewall had been boarded up, graffiti begin to appear proclaiming gay power, and marking this is a place that would come to have a substantial place in gay and lesbian

political memory as a kind of origin point for the gay liberation movement. on what -- but what isn't recognized when people talk about stonewall is that this was not the first revolutionary movement in gay and lesbian politics. it was not the first time that anybody called for a revolution, as the gay liberation activists would do in the subsequent weeks. of 1969, andrch activist in san francisco named leo lawrence, the editor of a magazine published by the society for individual rights, have called for the homosexual revolution of 1969, which he said would be a chance for a gay

men and lesbians to join the black panthers and other radical groups to come out in large numbers and challenge the broader social order. nor was it the first time that day men and lesbians fought back against the police and perceived harassment. we know of at least two other times that this happened on the west coast. in 1959 in los angeles historians tell us that drag queens and street hustlers that hung out at cooper's doughnuts and were frequently harassed by lapd fought back after police arrested 3 people, helping them themdonuts and -- pelting with donuts and coffee cups. in august of 1966 at san francisco's, cafeteria, when the management called the san francisco police to crack down

on what they perceived to be raucously craving --behaving transgender individuals in the cafeteria, that the transgender individuals fall back when police arrived -- fought back whe policen arrived to arrest them. even before those events we have other street protests against discrimination against lesbians and gay men. we have talked before about the emergence of what historian david johnson has categorized as "the left under scare, -- "the scare," the verge of gay men and lesbians from the federal workforce. -- purge of gay men and those means any federal workforce. an activist group in washington

the can to assemble to combat this dissemination and lobby for for access to jobs in the federal workforce. began -- bye they 1965 they began to stage a series of pickets. andfirst in april of 1965, was prompted somewhat unusually by a new york times article that had announced the establishment of labor camps for men convicted of homosexual crimes in cuba. so you might ask yourself, why is this society going to protest these labor camps in cuba? and why do they think a good way to protest them is holding a picket in front of the white house? which they did on saturday, april 17, 1965, the first

organized picket of the federal government, attended by 7 men and 3 women. it is not large, but the first time to take up signs and picket in front of the white house. this movement was led against the cuban government by calling on the same cold war anti-communist rhetoric that had often been used against gay men or lesbian who were thought to be similar to to american democracy. and they picketed with signs for instant that said "russia, cuba, and the united states persecute, sexual's --unite to persecute homosexuals." what they call the exclusion and men from they federal civil service. over time they begin to picket

more widely in washington. they begin to pick it in from the pentagon, in front of the civil service commission. to call attention to the federal government's attacks on gay men and lesbians. protest version of gay is a little bit different from aye visual representation of g that would come in the post stonewall period. if we look at the cover over "the ladder" and compare it to the gate liberation front poster from 1970 -- gay liberation poster from 1970, what are the

differences in how they are representing themselves? in the very back. >> [indiscernible] it wasn't aggressive, but not powerful-- chad: the gay liberation front image gives you a sense of more ve fists outrage? we ha instead of picket signs. you say this is a bigger and more boisterous movement. which might be the case. as historian richard meyer tells

us, there are only 17 people who showed up to take the photograph for this image. the gay liberation front, which had emerged as a self-proclaimed revolutionary organization after stonewall, had a membership of ple at the time and only managed to get about 17 to show up to take the picture for this image. there are probably a few left out of this image on "the ladder." so the number is not all that different, but we have a different display of them. they are filling the frame more fully in the image for the gay liberation front. moreugh there are not that many people there, there seem to be a larger amount. is there anything that you

notice that is similar or different? >> in the reading, it talked ladder," the woman was wearing a skirt and the men were wearing suits, and they were conforming to gender identity to make it seem like they were with society. that they were the same and that they were not different, not like a crazy group. chad: what about the gay liberation front image? >> i don't remember exactly what it said, that they adopt more to the hippie lifestyle. they are not really conforming to the gender identity they are supposed to be. chad: we see a generational divide in the gay-rights movement. in the image from the latter,

because these are only separated for about five years. only see older professional men and women -- we see older professional men and women who are testing gender conforming attire. the society had a rule that women to wear skirts or dresses when they appeared in public protest. wear coat and tie. it was about resenting themselves as respecting gender conforming individuals to claim a sense of responsibility and not call attention to them being different, to call attention to their similarities. were as the young crowd in the gay liberation front, we have less gender specific clothing. the men and women are just much more similar fashion. they are much more casual in attire.

and they seem to be refuting the notion that they have to be -- that they have to conform to certain gender norms or expectations. what about the wording on the cover in the poster? what is similar or different about that? then the second poster, wording and also the image invokes a sense of community. it talks about sisters and brothers, they are happy to be there. it looks like a tight knit community with more of a family vibe. the other one is much more professional which lines with alignsfessional -- which wish the professional way they were told to act. chad: we have people asking them to join their sisters and brothers, this is a family.

there are several different companies image. richard meyer points out that this is an idealized notion of what people wanted the movement to look like. and that the movement is an incredibly male-dominated movement, both in the numbers of membership and leadership at the time. it is a kind of utopian idea of what gay liberation might look like. image talksn this about home a file groups picket. we have a difference in any. they are calling themselves homo phile groups, which many societies developed to sort of distance themselves from the sexual connotations of

homosexuality and the medicalized ideas that characterize them as deviants. rms, have taken the greek te homo meaning same, and philia -- anyone goes with it means? love. they are focused on love of people of the same sex. homosexualather than -- calling attention to the same kind of love you note is being displayed by the gay liberation front. but they are doing it as a way of distancing themselves from accusations of abnormality. whereas the gay liberation front is embracing those accusations of abnormality and finding the kind of revolutionary possibility for overturning broader social orders.

again, we have this notion of the homophile groups picketing in a nation's capital. we have invited properly conforming activists who are playing a particular role, primarily rebutting the kind of discrimination that gay activists saw coming to them from the federal government. in the gay liberation front poster, we have a call to action. and gay men and lesbians are being heralded to make themselves known visibly, to make their identities known. and to see that as a kind of political tactic. we talked about how in the early 20th this century, gay men and lesbians came out then as well, but they were coming out into the gay community in the same way that a debutante came into

society. 1970's, they have taken that formulation and have said compound, but the main, to out, butc -- said come they mean, come out to the public. turn this coming out of the public into a self affirmation and building the community and challenge a wide array of social inequities that the gay liberation front is recognizing. in fact, the gay liberation front is playing and building on all of the lessons the other array of social and cultural movements from this period are developing. the antiwar movement, the civil rights and black power movement, for women's liberation movement

-- they are taking the best aspects of those and building upon them. they are situating themselves in alliance and are transforming american society not simply as claims to help lesbians and gay men avoid discrimination and oppression, but an opportunity to transform american society more broadly. within the organization begin to conceive ff their activism as a way o overturning traditional american social structures. carla j, and activist who edited an important collection of deliberation documents called "out of the closet" wrote in her introduction that "we perceive our oppression as a class

struggle, and our oppressor as white middle-class male dominated heterosexual society, which has relentlessly persecuted and murdered homosexuals and lesbians is the oppressor has had power. -- sense the oppressor has had power." conceiving it in the way that many left movements did as an anti-capitalist movement. here we see a lesbian liberation but in that says "we will never get it under capitalism." gay liberation and lesbian liberation, like upper leftist movements at the time -- other leftist movements at the time, saw capitalism as what it was that held people in their place. that required the kind of cold war conformity, the traditional stay-at-home mom and nuclear family as a way of supporting the booming american economy.

that limited some people from dissipating in the economy in order to shore up the social and cultural and political power of white male heterosexuals. so lesbian ration is saying, --liberation is saying, the only way to achieve liberation is to escape from capitalism. lesbian feminists would offer a variety of ways of doing that, including developing their own cultural products that they marketed to each other through lisp and periodicals -- through lesbian periodicals, that they are willing to give away rather than make money in order to refute the norms of capitalism. and finding freedom for sexual self-expression through eight anti-capitalist enterprise. gaygroups like the

liberation front teamed up with the antiwar movement and saw themselves as part in parcel of that movement, and saw that adding to the liberation of gay men and lesbians. rather than fighting to end the ban on gay men in the military, which has been a more recent focal point of the gay-rights movement, the gay liberation front decided to capitalize on the fact that gay men were excluded from the military, and saw in that a kind of political strategy for fighting the war. they offered slogans such as "send the troops to bed makeher," or "soldiers, each other, not war."

kind of urging the soldiers to make out with each other, not war. or in something that will be , you could beget. that was the best strategy of getting out of the vietnam war. they also built on the developments of the counterculture, which were nbe-ins.n's -- the gay liberation front started staging gay-ins in america, gathering in new york central park and los angeles' griffith park where tens of thousands it -- of men and women gathered just for the day to be publicly , to claim public space and to express affection in the spring of 1970 and in subsequent years. they also built upon the black

power movement and feminism. here we see the raised fist of black power, recast as a gay liberation emblem. and the gay liberation front very often marched in solidarity with groups like the black panther party and saw themselves as part -- as an integral part of a larger movement of oppressed minorities seeking to overthrow what they saw as a destructive social order. following black power's assertion that black is beautiful, the gay liberation front increasingly insisted that gay is good. so they are adopting the same kind of rhetoric, black power says "black is beautiful," gay power and the gay liberation front says that "gay is good."

and they began to think of themselves as a revolutionary group that sought gay and sexual liberation more generally. we can see sort of on the right in this image from new york university and student activism there that gay power is being linked exclusively to black power -- to women power, to student power, all power to the people. right? it is thought of as part of this kind of broad movement of social groups who are not endeavoring just to get rights for gay men and lesbians, but are endeavoring to transform american society more broadly. carla jay said that ultimately our struggle reflects the struggle of other revolutionary groups and of other oppressed people, such as blacks, chicanos, american indians and women. and in fact the women's liberation movement and radical feminism probably played one of the most central roles in the early years of gay liberation by providing them with some of their clearest targets for social and structural reform.

martha shelly, a lesbian activist, wrote in a 1970 essay, "gay is good," that "we are women and men who, from the earliest time of our earliest memories, have been in revolt against the sex role structure and nuclear family structure." so they then begin to say that it is the nuclear family and traditional gender roles that are actually holding down social progress and sexual progress and that gay and lesbian liberation offers a unique opportunity to work with women's liberation and feminism to overturn this social order. she went on to say, "it is difficult for me to understand --" it is really interesting, pay attention to the kind of "groovy" language here. it is difficult for me to understand how you can dig each other as human beings in a

man/woman relationship, how you can relate to each other in spite of your sex roles. it must be awful difficult to talk to each other when the woman is trained to repress what the man is trained to express, and visa versa. do straight men and women talk to each other? or does the man talk and the woman nod approvingly. is love possible between heterosexuals? or is it all a case of women posing as nymphs, early mothers, -- earth mothers, sex objects, what have you, and men writing the poetry of romantic illusions to these walking stereotypes." she is taking the notion -- the popularly held notion that homosexuality is deviant and abnormal. it is instead calling into question the norms of heterosexuality, and it is suggesting that it may be heterosexuality that is ultimately more oppressive and abnormal than homosexuality and she even questions is it

possible for men and women to truly love each other when society requires these kind of traditional gender norms that privilege men over women and encourage women to sort of submit to men or at least to downplay their own emotions and needs and desires in the face of male desire. this kind of attack on gender conformity carried over as well into the embracing of alternative gender markers within the gay liberation movement, so that we have this brief moment in the late '60s and early '70s where a kind of androgynous male and in some cases female gay figures began to be used to market the movement to a wider variety of people and to challenge the notion of gender conformity and the social order so that here in

this photo on the right, from life magazine, and an expose that life did on gay culture in 1971, we see sort of boufant rockd, bearded men in glam attire. we have the gay liberation fist that is also drawing upon black power, and suggesting that this is the kind of epitome of gay power in the image on the left, which is from the publication gay power, which is advertised by this psychedelic gay male butterfly, right or probably playing on stereo types of homosexuality. but it is embracing these kind of nonconforming, nongender conforming images as the kind of place where power can be found

within the movement and where this social and sexual order can be overthrown. and it is not just sort of gender conformity and heterosexuality that is under attack, gay liberation also believes that marriage should be done away with and that marriage is a problematic activity, right. again, this is very much counter to recent trends in lesbian and gay politics which embraced the call for legalizing same sex marriage during this kind of revolutionary movement of gay politics in the late '60s and early '70s. carl whitman, an activist in san francisco, wrote in his gay men -- manifesto that marriage is a prime example of a straight institution fraught with role playing. traditional marriage is a rotten oppressive institution, a contract which smothers both people, denies needs and places impossible demands on both

people. gay people must stop gauging their self-respect by how well they mimic straight marriages. and he goes on to suggest, right, that gay liberation can offer new ways of thinking about relationships. he says we're all looking for security, a flow of love, and a feeling of belonging and being needed, but these needs can be met through a variety of social relationships and living conditions. themes we need to get away from, he says, are, one, exclusiveness, property attitudes toward each other, a mutual pact against the rest of the world, right, so he's sort of rebelling against the notion of monogamy and lifetime exclusivity or thinking about your spouse as somehow your property, right, someone you have control over or own. he says we need to get away from

promise about the future, which we have no right to make and which prevents us from or makes us feel guilty about growing, right, so this is more of the kind of groovy language of the day, right, we shouldn't promise relationships into the future, because we're going to grow, we're going to expand, we're going to explore new horizons and so let's not make these promises that we can't keep, they're just going to make us feel bad about ourselves. and then he also says that marriage, one of the problems with marriage is the inflexible roles, roles which do not reflect us at the moment, but are inherited through mimicry and inability to define equalitarian relationships. he sees gay and lesbian relationships as an opportunity to redefine the relationship between two individuals as more egalitarian or what he calls equalitarian relationships as relationships that don't exist

within more structured, bi narized, male-female, masculine-feminine roles. and also challenging the notion of the nuclear family, arguing that homosexuality is not an abnormality, but a natural capacity in everyone that has been suppressed by the nuclear family and by society. alan young and other gay activists proclaim gay is good for all of us, the artificial categories of heterosexual and homosexual have been laid on us by a sexist society, the family is the primary means by which this restricted sexuality is created and enforced. our understanding of sexism, this is the gay activist understanding of sexism, is premised on the idea that in a free society everybody will be gay. but he's differentiating here

between gay and homosexual, right. he's saying that the categories of heterosexual and homosexual have been created by society and placed upon all of us and reinforced by traditional family structures and that the family is the mechanism that reinforces the notion that there is something different about heterosexuality and homosexuality and that values heterosexuality over homosexuality, and instead he suggests that gay is good for all of us, he says, so that gayness becomes a sign of the sexually -- of sexuality freed from hierarchical assumptions of male supremacy and from the nuclear family. that gayness becomes in his figuration the way to move beyond heterosexual and homosexual binary. we have this kind of radical challenge to the social

structure that is similar to those that were being enacted by black power, by feminism, by the counterculture and other movements. but so far all we have really seen, right, is the way that those play out philosophically or ideologically and the manifestos and ideas that people are lobbying and, in fact, we have already talked about how some of the themes that these revolutionary groups are looking for in the late '60s and early 1970s, refusal to go to war, a refusal to marry, have become -- have been sort of undone by more recent gay and lesbian political movements where the right to serve in the military and the right to get married have become valorized conceptions. so it is pretty clear, right, that gay liberation failed to overturn the social structure in the same way that lots of other movements failed to have major impacts. but what i want to do is spend a

little bit of time talking about some of the early achievements that gay liberation did manage to achieve in the early 1970s. and some of the shortcomings of the movement that were already becoming clear in that period. so that among other things, right, this call to come out and make one's self visible and to take a public and political role in american society had the effect of transforming gay visibility in the united states, and of energizing the political activism that continues up to this day. by 1973, there were over 800 gay and lesbian organizations that had been formed in the united states and just a four-year period or so, and by the end of the decade, by the end of the

1970s, their numbers reached into the thousands. these included a variety of political organizations, but also community organizations, and businesses that sprang up alongside gay bars, gay churches, synagogues, health clinics, community centers, travel agencies, newspapers, a whole array of services that emerged to build a sense of community and to fulfill roles within that community. in a more concrete example, by 1973, gay activists managed to convince the american psychological association to remove homosexuality from the diagnostic and statistical manual where it previously had been listed as a mental disorder. so they're challenging this notion that we talked about a -- arising in the earlier cold war period of homosexuality as a mental illness, that psychiatrists and psychologists could be called in to treat, right.

gay activists are rebutting that notion and are successful in getting the american psychological association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. by the mid-1970s, gay and lesbian -- openly gay and lesbian political activists begin to be elected to public offices, most famously in 1977, harvey milk is elected to the board of supervisors in san francisco. the equivalent of their city council. but even before him, lane noble had been elected as the first -- elaine noble had been elected as the first open lesbian state representative in the state of massachusetts, in 1974. and kathy kuzichenko to the ann arbor, michigan, city council. we see publicly endorsed gay and lesbian officials. and by 1975, activists in

washington and elsewhere are able to convince the u.s. civil service commission to lift its ban on the employment of gay men and lesbians in the federal government. so those are all very concrete outgrowths of gay liberation, gay and lesbian liberation, although they have become more sort of mainstream activities. other developments that we can see arising from gay liberation also give us some hint of the shortcomings of the movement. so here we see, in these two images, one from life magazine, and another from an unknown photographer, of the gay liberation parade from -- on the left, from 1971, the gay liberation week parade in new york. these parades and they continue today, we used to call them gay

liberation day or gay freedom day, i think san francisco still referred to it as gay freedom day. most people now call them gay pride day. we had a slight change in the nomenclature and the meaning of these movements. they were originally held, right, first one held in 1970, the fact that they're held in late june is no accident. they're intended to be commemorations of the stone wall uprising. and the first one is held in new york, but they quickly spread throughout the rest of the country. and they are meant to symbolize freedom and serve as political marches initially and so the gay freedom day parade in new york, the first ones start in greenwich village near the site of the stone wall inn, and at the hub of gay life at that point. and they marched into the city, ending up in central park. so there are political events

that march through the streets with people yelling out as they went, come out, come out, and people leaving their homes and joining the march as they moved into the heart of the core of new york, and into central park where they held political rallies. these were sort of political rallying points. if we think about what may become today, the gay pride movement, or the gay pride parades now in new york, right, they start somewhere up near central park, on fifth avenue and they march down the city, and into the gay neighborhoods and gay night life districts and have become less sort of political rallying points, they usually still hold a political rally on the day preceding the march, and more sort of mass consumer events that embrace gay pride, but have done away with the kind of political valance of

the earliest marches and have certainly done away with gay liberation fronts sort of attack on capitalism, because they have become all about sort of capitalizing on lesbian-gay identity and building up that kind of aspect of the economic power of the lesbian and gay community. but we also see in the lower image, right, the development of the lesbian liberation front or the lesbian feminist liberation movement which signals some of the other problems with gay liberation, right, that it didn't always address the needs of everyone in its midst. karla j. noted that the movement also included struggles within it because we are by no means a homogenous group, karla j. wrote, the movement reflects our struggles with each other. gay men oppress gay women, white

gays oppress black gays and straight looking gays oppress transvestites. and so she signaled, right, this need for gay liberation to combat what she called our own chauvinism, our own sexism, our own racism, as well as our oppression by straight society. and groups like the lesbian feminist liberation movement begin to separate out from gay liberation because they do not feel that their needs are being addressed and feel that the men in the movement are oppressing them and are not paying attention to women's needs within the movement. activists of color also begin to separate out from the movement as do activists that we would consider to be transgender today, who feel that they are not being properly represented. and the gay liberation front itself basically dissipates and falls away in the early 1970s,

and is replaced not just by lesbian feminist movements and other sort of splinter groups, but is replaced by organizations like in new york, the gay activist alliance, which is an exclusively male organization, which no longer sees itself being involved in sort of transforming the social order, but rather is focused primarily on discrimination against gay men for their sexuality. and is not seeing themselves engaged in broader social struggles, and we see this here in one of their most famous activities from 1971, again, reported in life magazine, as the gay activist alliance, pioneers a new political movement or practice called the zap where they sort of descend upon public officials or media

officials to harass them into doing what they want them to do. and here, though, the first and most famous zap that they called a protest at city hall in new york city for marriage rights. in 1971. so that already by 1971 this kind of radical attempt to transform america culture and society and to challenge the normalcy and predominance of marriage is being embraced -- is being undermined and gay activists are now embracing heterosexual marriage or marriage in general as a kind of model for their inclusion into society and are moving away from the kind of radical revolutionary movement that they had pioneered in earlier years. so we'll leave off there, and we will begin again next week, talking about some of the other radical political movements that challenged the social order in the 1960s and '70s.

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immigration institute senior fellow. >> not having your parents with you and only seeing them every few months -- first of all you feel like they're a little bit of strangers to you, because when i would see my parents, they would come during lots of presents. them come ito is was summer vacation. it was a very different experience and having parents were with you every single day. >> afterwards, sunday night at 9:00 p.m. eastern on book tv. go to book tv.org to see the complete schedule. >> american history tv, author of the epic story of the indian wars for the request. he arguesbout what are three big myths of the war that have been perpetuated in popular culture. the buffalo bills center of the west hosted this hour-long program. this is a remarkable

opportunity for us here at the center of the west tonight, because what we know -- or what we think we know -- about the indian wars of the american west, is mostly wrong. for more than a century, movies and novels, comics books and serious art, pseudo-scholarly studies and popular culture, have spun clouds of myth around the violent collision between native americans and the ongoing , irrepressible, unstoppable westward march of the new american nation. this is for and will set the record straight. the earth is weeping is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and a darn good read. amazon has declared it to be one of the top 10 nonfiction works of 2016.

at sitting bull, and general sherman and howard, but also the story of standing bear, the chief who rode out of his village to talk with the soldiers who had come to completely surround him, and he is holding forth the piece metal that he had been given a short while before by president lincoln in washington. standing there, he was shot dead in his saddled by trooper. also, the telling of custer's attack on the village and a rally. this was years before little bighorn. he led his troops to attack on a cold winter night. running behind him was a capable young captain, the grandson of alexander hamilton. hamilton was shot in the chest and died on the spot. howeverthese stories, compelling, however much pay

those, timely stories into a master narrative of the american west requires the best work of a skilled historian, and he rises to the challenge. peter is the author of 16 books on american history, notably on the civil war and now the indian wars. his books have been featured as book of the month club selections, and he is one numerous prestigious awards. remarkably, peter is not a professional historian. he was a distinguished career foreign service officer until his retirement recently. writing a claimed history even as he's earned best served his country and trouble spots around the world. peter and his wife have come to cody for this presentation, the very first public event for "the earth is weeping." it is with great pleasure that we welcome one of america's

great tellers of stories, peter cozzens. [applause] >> i would like to thank you very much for that introduction. here, andviting me all that went into making this presentation a possibility. i would like to bash before it begin, two years ago, i was still struggling to put this book together. i was thinking about places that i would like to see, places that i thought would be appropriate venues for presenting this book.

the first venue that came to mind was the buffalo bills center of the american west. i have not yet had the pleasure of kim's friendship, but it was a place i most wanted to talk. it is particularly gratifying for me this afternoon to be here. i would like to start my presentation with a moment from the movies. tell me what this scene is, and from what movie? allow that was great. is where you see dustin hoffman in one of his many incarnations in little big man. in this incarnation, he is a reluctant and perplexed army scout watching george armstrong custer, a clearly self-satisfied, self important

custer, preening himself before writing off to the battle of little bighorn. began work: when i on my book, i had many questions , more questions than answers, of course. such questions was george armstrong custer seen here if custer was a reckless glory hunter. was geronimo and indian hero?