"Not to Produce Newspapers, but Committed Radicals": The Underground Press, the New Left, and the Gay Liberation Counterpublic in the United States, 1965–1976

In late 1973, aletter from a prisoner named Eddie Koopman appeared in the Gay Alternative, a gay liberation magazine published in Philadelphia. In his message, the twenty-two-year-old explained that he was serving a ten-year sentence in the Maryland Correctional Institution at Hagerstown for "unnatural and perverted sex acts" and that he needed a job and a place to stay so that he could qualify for parole. Koopman did not know who might read his words, but he addressed them to a community to which he felt he belonged—and from which he could, therefore, expect help. "Not one of you know me as a person," he wrote, "[but] I feel I'm your Brother." Concluding with a stirring appeal to gay solidarity, he insisted: "I'm not writing to an organization, but to every person who took part in the Gay Pride March, to every person sitting now in a Gay Bar, to every person who believes they are right in themselves being Gay."¹

Throughout his letter, Koopman distinguished between gay political organizations and the gay liberation print culture. After receiving no response from activists ("my stamps to different GAA and GLF organizations were wasted"), he turned instead to readers of the "Gay Publications" that he "read and receive[d]" in prison. Koopman credited those publications for rescuing him from "self-hatred" and demonstrating that "being Gay means more than getting fucked. … [It] means feeling and loving."² The stories, letters, essays, poetry, and images that he saw in them allowed him to embrace a gay identity and feel connected to other gay readers beyond his prison walls. By no means was he alone: as I show in this article, in the absence of a national organizing infrastructure, these symbolic connections, forged in text, were critical to the coalescence and growth of gay liberation after Stonewall.

What is striking about Koopman's letter is not only its author and its content but also its intended audience—and where it appeared. Although he subscribed to The Advocate—the authoritative gay publication at the time—he sent his letter to the Gay Alternative, which reached fewer readers, because he felt that he could trust those readers to come to his aid. Koopman was impressed by the frankness with which intimate matters were discussed in its pages. "I've seen things [in the Gay Alternative] which blew my mind," he wrote, "for I'd not seen material like this voicing opinions … right out as it does." Even more importantly, the editors had proven responsive to his letters, displaying a "sincerity" and a willingness to help that he had not found anywhere else.³ This was due less to their personal qualities than to their understanding of the magazine's role. Along with hundreds of other underground publications that went to press in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Gay Alternative was intended to unite and politicize an "imagined community" of gays and lesbians. Unlike their counterparts in the commercial press, underground editors did not wish to simply convey information; instead, they prioritized accessibility, transparency, and participation, blurring the boundaries between readers and writers while opening up a democratic public sphere in which even those with the least social power, including the incarcerated, could stake a claim to be recognized as equals. Their goal, as one of them put it, was "not to produce newspapers, but committed radicals."⁴

The editors of gay and lesbian underground publications challenged a preexisting commercial press and a homophile movement that they regarded as politically and culturally conservative.⁵ Heeding one journalist's call for a two-front "homosexual revolution" against both a repressive heterosexual culture and "the Gay Establishment," they sought to reorient gay and lesbian politics and offer readers a participatory venue for discussion.⁶ By providing an alternative to both a hegemonic public sphere that constructed homosexuals as grotesque objects of fear and derision and a commercial gay and lesbian press that reified them as...