The Events of Gay Mayday

The weekend weather was perfect for protests: partly cloudy and temperatures in the 60s.  By Monday, it was cloudy and in the 50s: still good weather for demonstrations.

SATURDAY May 1, 1971 The first protests came on Saturday May 1st at the Department of Justice.  Police arrested 339 demonstrators.  That evening, Peace Park was alive with music, pre-protest briefings, and a festive atmosphere.  An all-day all-night music fest added to the party atmosphere.

SUNDAY May 2, 1971.  Sunday morning, the government struck.  During the night the US Park Police had revoked the Mayday Tribe's permit for camping in West Potomac Park, ending ten days of the counterculture's occupation.  Before dawn, park and local police ringed the encampment and as day broke announced the permit's revocation and began moving in to roust out the protesters.  The move wasn't unexpected.  As Perry Brass recorded in his first person account of Gay May Day in New York GLF's Come Out! (Volume 2 Number 7b, Spring-Summer 1971, pages 6, 14, and 15)

"Word got around that the permit for the park had been revoked.  By 6 o'clock an alternative plan for the Tribe had been devised ... I couldn't belive how well the whole thing had been planned.  An alternative camp for each region had been planned days ago in the expectation that the permit would be revoked.  A truck had been rented by Gay Mayday Tribe to take all the heavy equipment over.  We were to move in small groups over to Georgetown University.  The only question was when to move."

As the protesters, nearly 50,000 of them, began to clear out of Peace Park, it began raining and turned chillier.  Many of those who had partied the night before simply packed up and left.  The others dispersed.  Because of the heavy police presence, moving in large groups was not advisable.  Michael Ferri and others from GLF-DC ended up in Silver Spring at a deli before regrouping and heading back towards Georgetown.  Warren Blumenfeld of GLF-DC recalls that some of the local GLF protesters had spent Saturday night at Grace Church rather than at the tent in Peace Park.

Grace Church and the Georgetown University campus were the backup staging sites for the Gay Mayday tribe.  Sunday night, Gay Mayday convened to discuss the day's events and prepare for the next day's disruption of the morning commute.

MONDAY May 3, 1971.  At a chilly 4:30 am, the GayMayDay tribe roused itself and got ready to head, in small groups of four or five, for their target on the Rock Creek parkway and the bridge connecting Georgetown to Washington Circle.  In Georgetown itself, the battle for Key Bridge and Canal Road was beginning with a truck overturned in the road at 28th and M Streets and some of Scagliotti's junk cars abandoned on the bridge.

The gay protesters assembled in the woods along the parkway and waited until police left the area to crowd onto the road to block traffic.  The GLF-DC group included David Aiken, Warren Blumenfeld, Donald Button, Tim Corbett, David Duty, Michael Ferri, Theodore Kirkland, Jim Lawrence, Bruce Pennington, John Scagliotti, and Tim Tomassi.  Perry Brass was with an affinity group from New York.

Warren Blumenfeld recalled that someone from outside of DC had wanted to roll a log onto the roadway.  GLF-DC members, who were pledged to non-violence, protested that the log could cause an accident and hurt commuters and dissuaded their comrade.  The disruption to traffic probably didn't last more than ten minutes before police helicopters sent word to troops and police who descended on the area.  The gay groups headed into the woods to wait for another chance to block the road but decided, when the police and troops showed no signs of leaving, to head elsewhere.  Some went back towards Georgetown where tear gas and police chasing protesters filled streets.

Others headed toward Dupont Circle.  Along the way, Perry Brass reported, they rolled park cars into the streets to block traffic.  Dupont Circle was occupied by police and National Guardsmen.  Nails had been strewn in the road to puncture tires of anyone trying to negotiate the streets.  Brass wrote

"There was a ring of gas around the Circle and anyone walking near the Circle, looking less straight than Shirley Temple, was arrested.  Arrests were already starting to pile up.  We [saw] several buses filled with demonstrators and there were Hertz Renta Vans parked along the Circle to fill in when the buses became filled."

As the day wore on, demonstrators and police clashed off and on around the city but commuters did get to work.  Because of police and National Guard patrols, many of the GayMayDay group were unable to get back to Georgetown and Grace church and ended up in various houses, collectives, and apartments in the Dupont Circle area.  Warren Blumenfeld slept under his desk at the National Students Association office where he worked.

No one from GLF-DC or other local gay and lesbian groups was reported arrested on Monday.  Perry Brass recalls that three New York GLF men were arrested, two of whom he knew personally.  Rennie Davis, leading the MayDay Tribe organization conceded,

"We want to make clear that we failed this morning to stop the US government."

TUESDAY May 4, 1971.  Tuesday continued the cool weather.  There were attempts to restart Monday's failed street disruptions but the local authorities were clearly in control.  Tuesday's targets were Dupont, Scott, and Thomas Circles and Mount Vernon Square.  The press reported that Dupont Cirlce was cordoned off by a ring of 360 Marines.  There were also one company (up to 200 soldiers) of Marines each at Washington Circle and Scott Circle.

So many people had been arrested that day before that the city's own procedures were being violated and those arrested were penned up in makeshift jails at the stadium and other places.

A demonstration at the South Vietnamese embassy was scheduled for Tuesday.  As a group of GLF-DC members walked to the demonstration, they were arrested.  Warren Blumenfeld, Tim Corbett, Don Button, Michael Ferri, Kent Jarrett, Theodore Kirkland, and Tim Tomassi were initially held at 23rd and L until they transported to the jail.  At the jail they were put in cells, designed for two people, that were so crowded that the occupants had to take turns sitting down.  For gay men locked up with straights, the situation was, as Michael Ferri commented, "very intense."  The tension was finally relieved when those in jail started singing.

WEDNESDAY May 5, 1971.   A follow-up rally was held at the University of Maryland, closing local roads.  Demonstrators were reported by the Washington Post to number 3,000.

Deacon Maccubbin recalls:

I spent May Day more involved in support efforts than in demonstrating, but I did participate for about 2 hours in attempts to block 14th St at Pennsylvania Ave. There were about 3 dozen of us - some gay, mostly straight - who blocked traffic sporadically, dodging police, scattering over to 15th or the Ellipse, then swinging back around to 14th. I got yoked (billy club under the chin) and dragged off a couple of times, but managed to slip away and come back for more until the tear gas started to take its toll. But I didn't get arrested. Later in the afternoon, I went back to the Switchboard (1724 20th) to help with raising bail for arrestees and to assist with communication. The Switchboard staff had been kept busy in the days leading up to May Day arranging for crash pads for out-of-town demonstrators and directing people to various resources and information centers (and talking people down off the occasional bad trip).

And, by the way, I have always maintained that Renie Davis was wrong -- any time our government has to abandon its rule of law and resort to military control, illegal arrests and detentions, it has, in fact, ceased to function. May Day was a success because it stopped the government from business as usual, if only for a brief time.

The Afterthoughts

However much it was desired, gay activism's support was not reciprocated by straight new left groups.  In Gay Mayday's wake, gay and lesbian activists began turning away.  In Washington, DC the Gay Liberation Front endured for another three or four years but the focus of gay activism turned increasingly to building community institutions.  That same first week of May in DC saw both a major protest of the 'sickness' policy of the American Psychiatric Association led by the fledgling (two week old) Gay Activists Alliance/DC and the organization of DC's first Metropolitan Community Church.  As the year progressed, gay DC began to form as more and more organizations were born to give a separate community of gay men and lesbians institutions and services separate from heterosexual society.

The post Gay Mayday disappointment resonated through the local underground press.  In Quicksilver Times' first issue (May 15, 1971) following the tumult of early May, Chuck Hall, one of the founders of the Gay Liberation Front - DC, wrote about his disappointment at not finding gay liberation included in leftist literature listing current causes

"It is not possible that our radical brothers and sisters don't know that Gay People exist.  The only thing that I can conclude is that most of the New Left is as unwilling as the Old Left or the bourgeoisie to champion the rights of Gay People ... Perhaps a real test of sincerity may be the willingness of people to struggle for the rights of Gay People since there is a high risk of being considered gay and thereby becoming an object of that persecution oneself.  My question to brothers and sisters of the left: Are you really willing to strugglle with us or will you too just pay lip service?"

Following Hall's letter is one from [Mike] Lally lamenting the People's Coalition for Peace and Justice's unwillingness to carry on the Mayday demonstrations.

John Scagliotti summarized the experience as

"It became clear we needed to go our own way.  We were just an auxiliary.  We were always marginal to straight people."

Sources/Resources

One of the most complete accounts of MayDay is LA Kaufman's artical in Radical Society (December 2002), "Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971" online at http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4053/is_200212/ai_n9149052.

Perry Brass's dramatic first person account of Gay May Day in Come Out!, Vol. 2 No. 7b, Spring-Summer 1971 is on this website at http://www.rainbowhistory.org/gaymayday1.pdf and is used by permission of Mr. Brass.  The article captures the flavor of events during the first week of May 1971 as well as the zap of the American Psychiatric Association meeting that same week.

Interviews with Perry Brass, Warren Blumenfeld, Michael Ferri, Donald Button, and John Scagliotti contributed much of the accounts of personal experiences of Gay Mayday.
 
 
 

Back to 1971
 
 

Home