Iowa State University Daily
December 14, 1971
Text 
Gay Liberation Front Organizes
The First Public "Meeting"
(The Personal is the Political)
The tension was very high inside and outside the building the night of this first publicized GLF meeting. I lived nearby in Helser Hall, walked over, saw the janitor in Carver Hall standing in a window, his head resting on a broom, staring at the YWCA where the meeting was to take place. I didn't know him then, but later, as it turned out, I found out he was also in the Ames Counterculture (a discussion of janitors and their connections to Counterculture happens later on). He was simply being curious. No threatening angry people were waiting outside to kill us. I was relieved.
I was convinced by going to this meeting that the next day everybody would know I'd gone and then they would inevitably beat the living shit out of me over and over again. I played a lot of basketball the day of the meeting; it took away as much fear as possible, being immersed in something that required mind and body to push aside all worry.
When I first went into the YWCA, I was one of the last people to arrive for the meeting. We were sitting there in a big room on the main floor. It was set up as a living room with comfortable couches and chairs, but, as I felt it, our tense silence was almost unbearable. In fact I felt like the whole meeting was very strained. Any words spoken were almost knives cutting through thick air that then could be served up with a little powdered sugar and fed to the participants. (Of course it may be I, being pretty young and naive, was feeling more paranoid than most everybody else who were there.)
The required ISU Daily reporter was in the room; I can't remember her or much about her or where she was sitting relative to the rest of us. At least four or five members of the "Gay Liberation Front" I knew from the meeting(s) at Pammel Court were there; Joey Franko, Billy Swan, me, and a woman named Barb ?. One or maybe two people I'd never seen anywhere were there including Pat Gibson, who joined that evening; one other guy who comes to mind ran in after I did, dressed in sweat clothes, he looked to have been playing basketball or some sport, I think, and he sat and listened and left when the meeting was over. Not only had I never seen him before, I believe none of us ever saw him again after this first meeting. We might have been social and friendly in other circumstances and maybe it was more social than I remember it; but because of the terrible unknowns and real or imagined risks we were taking I think between the moments of talking to the reporter we sat mostly silent. This was not a "meeting" in the sense of any other meeting that ever happened during my years in the gay movement in Ames. It was special and horrible and wonderful all mixed into one setting. It's hard to even think of it as a meeting; it was a political statement mixed in with a viewing: we were being viewed because we were at something that had never happened on campus or Ames before and even if we were an unknown, yet rumored, minority group, the humans came out of curiosity to see what else we might be.
There was no meeting with a planned agenda otherwise, and I don't think we could have pulled it off anyway if we'd voted on officers or decided was going to make cookies for the next week's bake sale. No, we were there, and we were no longer willing to hide as much as we had in the past in the ugly recesses the rest of the world might have been wishing we'd stay in.
Soon the Daily reporter talked, and we answered. I shouldn't say "we," because some people, myself included, just sat at this meeting, silent. I was much too afraid to do anything else, and I deferred to people who knew more than I, which encompassed everybody else. As one can tell by reading the article above, the assumptions of the day were probably quite different than a reporter would make interviewing a gay group today. This was a raw time in unexplored space for everybody.
This night was part of the history for the University and for all of Ames.
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