After the 70s began, there was a split between the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Effeminists, the short-lived, anti-imperialist groups created by People’s Alternative host Nick Benton, who believed GLF was “so-called militant.” The article’s text is copied below, detailing the build-up of tension over the previous few years. I italicized the sentences I think encapsulate their arguments.

ANTI-EFFEM

Editor Barb

I was delighted to read that the effeminists (Elijah, Nick Benton and company) have finally come out of their closet and declared that “Gay Liberation must be offed”. For a year the effeminists have tried to coopt Gay Lib. Now they realize they have failed and are telling the refreshing truth for a change.

The hundred or so fathers of Gay Lib have one thing in common; all were open homosexuals from childhood. Although Gay Lib always advocated the exodus from the closet, it was always somewhat shocking to view the creatures that answered the call. Open homosexuals never completely understood or trusted people like Elijah, who until recently lived 1 in the super closet of a puritanical sex hating seminary, or Benton, who until recently had a wife and family to conceal his homosexuality. It is these partially liberated people who are the real “false queens of Gay Liberation”.

Many males, both Gay and het are naturally effeminate. Natural ferns have always been welcome in Gay Lib. But most of the effeminacy in Gay males is role playing arising from guilt feelings. The mentality of the cultural fern is this: they feel it is wrong for a man to have sex with another man, yet they have the desire for Gay sex—so they try to escape from masculinity, adopting pseudo-effeminate gestures, walk, pose and dress. In their minds they have become pseudo-females, therefore they rationalize, it is all right for them to have sex with males. Gay Liberation means liberation from guilt, fear and shame. It attempts to liberate the cultural ferns from their role-playing which results from their guilt feelings. Many former cultural ferns have been liberated from the guilt that produced their effeminacy by Gay Lib, and the number of ferns has been greatly reduced in spite of the insane rantings of a couple of guilt ridden ministers who wish to perpetuate this unfortunate role playing. The medievalism that holds that one can compensate for sin by wallowing in guilt still has a firm hold on their minds. Gay Liberation has struggled against the effeminate stereotype of the homosexual, both because most of it is unhealthy role playing and because effeminacy in males turns off the public and so has held back the Gay cause. Gay Lib opposes all role-playing—not only effeminacy but also the ultramasculine role playing of the Gay bike crowd. Permit a redundancy to make one point perfectly clear. Gay Liberation does not discriminate against any type of homosexual. It maintains that the naturally effeminate Gays should be their natural selves. It is the roleplaying effeminacy (and butchness) that we oppose.

We shall overcome, Don Jackson

ANTI-GLF

Last November, at the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention in Washington, D.C., the Gay Liberation Front movement was fatally wounded when a chapel full of young, white middle class faggots discovered much to their dismay that they weren’t revolutionary at all.

Faced for the first time with a collective “moment of truth’’ when told that they may be called to participate with the Black Panthers in an armed takeover of Howard University, everyone, myself included, fell apart. The Panthers decided against such action, but not before Gay Liberation exposed itself to itself, a frightened, confused bunch of kids who really came to Washington for other reasons than revolution . . .

Since then, every time a revolutionary dies, Gay Liberation dies a little more . . . every George Jackson, every Attica drives us farther back from our revolutionary call, back into the bars, into the suburbs, into strange fantasies about uranian mysteries, into paranoia about false enemies that we can fight, into revolution in the form of shoplifting, into male bonding, the reactionary last resort of male supremacy.

“This time we are going all the way . . .’’ So says the Redstockings Manifesto written by women. So no one in Gay Liberation dares to say because we’ll all know him to be a liar. The only one who go all the way are the ones who are pushed there. Being faggots doesn’t mean we are pushed. It only means we can be bought off easier . . . and we still have our white skins and our cocks . . . We still have our bars and baths, too, and isn’t it terrible? No. We can AFFORD to drink ourselves into oblivion. We can afford to keep paying the $5 for the baths … the money for the seductive clothes, the cozy apartment, the big date, the orgies, the tricks. But we’re so miserable . . . No. No, baby, we’ve been bought off by the MAN and our weakness is killing the George Jacksons and the bleeding women everywhere.

We’re too oppressed to be pigs . . . but we’re too oppressed to be revolutionary.

We gay men need to begin to take seriously the struggle to overcome our oppression or else we have no business calling ourselves anything but pigs to the real revolutionary forces moving to free the peoples of the world.

We need to destroy the reactionary remnants of a necessary but false start called Gay Liberation that can only impede our revolutionary struggle for liberation. Our liberation is our liberation from the control of the man over our lives — from his capacity to buy us off and turn us into the prison guards of an imprisoned world. Our liberation is the abolition of male supremacy on every level — and the continuing Gay Liberation Front movement in its reactionary refusal to recognize its death last November must be exposed as a male supremacist movement moving toward bonding of powerful males. It must be destroyed.

— Nick Benton (The Effeminist)

This split raises many topics within the politics of gender and sexuality, one of which is the disagreement between the role of feminine men. GLF’s Don Jackson characterizes effeminate men as unhealthy and only partially liberated, blaming them for misrepresenting the gay community. He employs the rhetoric of liberation to argue that gender performance, ranging from effeminate to butch, is invalid and harmful to both the individual and the community. But yet, he claims that his group does not discriminate.

Benton, on the other hand, calls for a radicalization beyond GLF, which, for him, was necessary but now outdated. He identifies male supremacy as the root issue why GLF has remained reactionary instead of revolutionary. He exposes the reality of the Gay Lib movement being dominated by men, namely white gay men. This demographic was to blame; Benton wanted a more diverse organization that was not limited to a designated gender performance or presentation.