The 1950s and ’60s saw local chapters of two national organizations, the lesbian Daughters of Bilitis and the gay Mattachine Society. Its official mission was “to promote and to protect the interests of people who by reasons of mental and physical abnormalities are abused and hindered in the legal pursuit of happiness.” It was fairly short-lived: after publishing two issues of its newletter, Friendship and Freedom, the society was shut down by police and its founder, Henry Gerber, arrested. The first one, the Chicago Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924 and thought to be the earliest documented “homosexual emancipation organization” in the United States, was almost apologetic in its quest for fair treatment of gays. The Chicago GLF was much more militant than any of the city’s previous gay activist groups. The man who’d placed it was former student Henry Weimhoff-and the responses he received would end up inspiring him to place another, seeking activists to help him form a local chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, an organization that had started in New York in response to Stonewall. Sommelier Series (paid sponsored content)Ī few months after Stonewall-the 1969 riots in New York incited by a police raid on a gay bar-an ad for a gay roommate appeared in the University of Chicago Maroon.
