How do you spell fashion?

"RITZ

Larimer Square 959 Walnut (Boulder)

HOME MADE ICE CREAM-MADE FRESH DAILY

2031 E. 13th Ave.

13th & Vine

Denver

321-1492

KET

ICE CREAM STORE

OPEN

11:00-10:30,

10:00-10:30, Sat., Sun.

Super Splits, Shakes & Sundaes Try our Strawberry Shortcake

THERE IS STILL TIME!

TO BUY

Interest rates are down yet property prices have not increased!

TO SELL

The new lower interest rate is increasing demand for property and also allows more people to qualify for financing on your property.

LET'S DISCUSS YOUR REAL ESTATE NEEDS NOW NO OBLIGATION

CALL BOB KYLE, 825-7767

Pro Service

MT SAUCE

MLS

Realty

1050 Yuma, #308 Denver, Colo. 80204 825-7767

INTERVIEW...

cont. from p. 7

In a sense, the ideas being advanced now around the spiritual movement of radical fairies coalesced in your mind in answer to a need you perceived in your discussions with members of the gay community in Denver and several other places.

Hay: Let me put it this way. In 1951 and 1952 when the first movement was beginning to get underway, one of the early things we recognized was that three questions had to be answered. And those questions were: Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we for? When we were able to answer these questions, we would be able to take our place wherever we were supposed to on the periphery of society. When the movement split in May of 1953 and opted for respectability, the three questions got laid on the shelf and there they lay until we began asking questions around these spiritual-radical ideas in the past couple of years.

So it has been some 25 years that these questions have laid on the shelf as the movement sort of petered out in the Fifties and did very little in the Sixties and then took on a very political mode in the late Sixties...

Hay: No, Phil, that's not quite the way it was. It did peter out in the Fifties. It opted for respectability and with respectability, you've got the same kind of assimilation that you see going on now, where people are rushing into a sort of right wing closet. But in the Sixties, we began to come out of the closet and by 1965 in Los Angeles and in San Francisco, there was quite a bit of activity going on in the name of the gay community by people who were openly gay. We felt at that time we had to have an umbrella group and the one that covered us was the Conference on Religion and the Homophile. There was one in San Francisco and another in Los Angeles and here we were dealing with progressive and forward looking ministers who realized that the gay community was something that had to be reckoned with and couldn't be swept under the rug any more. Consequently, it had to be looked at and dealt with.

At what point did you begin to use and help define the word, gay, and at what point did this evolve into the language of the mainstream?

Harry Hay and John Burnside

Hay: Well, actually in the Fifties, we had used the word homophile. When I began organizing in 1950, we were not persons-we were an act. A homosexual act that is all that defined us and we were an illegal act at that. So in order to change that image and begin to define ourselves as persons, we began to call ourselves homophiles-the media had no idea what it meant, so they had to ask us and we could then define it ourselves. Now in this way, we move from being an act to being a person. During the Fifties, this was our greatest accomplishment. From 1950 to 1957, we moved from being a criminal act to being merely sick but we were persons.

I want to know how, in your view, the history of gay liberation in the last ten years has evolved once again to the quest by gay men to spiritually re-define themselves.

Hay: When we first began to talk about subject to subject thinking in our discussions, I used to say that we have known for a long time that the language of the hetero world did not speak us-, did not serve us, that we were always attempting to live their patterns and fill their definitions, and they did not suit. When they talked about sexuality, it was always loaded in favor of their values, but not ours. When we talked about loving relationships, we were not talking about a subject-object relationship which is precisely what heterosexual marriage vows require. When we try to imitate heteros, we imitate them badly. We either overdo or underdo, but we don't seem to know when to stop. I feel

that they probably have a built in mechanism to know how far to go and when to stop. That mechanism we don't have. On the other hand, we have ways and means of testing out subject to subject relationships which they don't have, so we have things which are simply our ways of doing. The trouble is we haven't been appreciating or loving or respecting our particular ways of doing things until quite recently.

By what means did we begin to realize that we were perhaps moving in the wrong direction-towards assimilation into straight society and not toward the concerns that we really needed to address?

Hay: Let's put it this way. Most people think 1969 and Stonewall was the begin-ning of gay liberation, but we have to realize that what actually happened was that a powder train had been carefully laid all this time and all of a sudden, a series of explosions occurred all over the country. There had been marches, there had been demonstrations. There were openly gay contingents in other demonstrations and marches around issues prevalent in the Sixties. We had already been talking to high schools by 66 and 67. My point is that when Stonewall comes, all of a sudden, this defiance comes. All of a sudden a few queens defy the cops and then, there are kids all over ready to defy the cops. You have to realize that faggotry is born in the period when all of a sudden, in defying, they will find support from the counterculture.

To us, gay liberation was really nocont. on p. 10

WE'RE LOOKING FOR A FEW GOOD MEN.

...Men with pride in who they are. Men with a sense of responsibility and a determination to make our community a better and safer place in which to live.

If you have what it takes, call Roberts Lambda Security for an interview.

BUSINESS & PROPERTY OWNERS

Protect your valuable investments call us today for information on our complete line of security services.

ROBERTS LAMBDA

SECURITY Gay men serving the gay community.

832-6793