People’s Alternative was a party space and coffeehouse for gay radicals in the Bay Area in fall of 1970, serving as a radical meeting place and liberated zone in opposition to the gay bars. While gay radicals were picketing the White Horse, The People’s Alternative Free Coffeehouse served as a radical reimagining of gay space, offering people an opportunity to touch each other, organize politically, and form connections, outside of a capitalistic business and without fear of police raids. An excerpt from Gay Sunshine, reads,

People’s alternative. The People’s Alternative Free Coffeehouse, across Telegraph Ave. from the White Horse is open Friday and Saturday nights from 11 pm to 3 am. The house, in Nick Benton’s apartment at 6356A Telegraph opened las weekend in conjunction with the picketing at the White Horse. Set up as an alternative to the Gay bar syndrome, the People’s Alternative is a “liberated zone” where gays are free to dance, rap and relate as they choose. There were real good vibrations last weekend, with continued support, the possibility of pulling off a genuine alternative to the Gay ghetto will be realized. 

Nick Benton, a gay radical involved with Gay Sunshine, the underground press, and homosexual religious organizing created the space out of his apartment across the street from the White Horse. Nick Benton wrote an account of the People’s Alternative in a collection of histories from members of radical gay organizations Smash the Church, Smash the State!. 

That fall, a surprise financial gift from an aunt enabled me to rent an apartment directly across Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue from the White Horse Inn, which was the only gay bar in Berkeley, and was very low key. A picket line had been thrown up in front of the bar by some gay radical brothers and sisters, protesting the fact that long-haired, hippie-type gays were not welcome in the bar and that touching was, naturally in that day, also prohibited. With help from friends, I had the idea to turn my $130-a-month apartment into what I called “The People’s Alternative,” and it became just that. Demonstrators in the picket line across the street were invited in. There was virtually no furniture but lots of cheap wine and a boom box. For over two months in the fall of 1970, my “People’s Alternative” became a magnet for fun gay organizing activities of all types. Often it was filled far beyond capacity, including one night when everyone who’d attended the first-ever officially sanctioned gay dance at the university a half mile away, poured in after the dance ended. Gay religious services were held there. I was ordained into an obscure sect there. Famous older gay icons held forth there. It was no Studio 54, but pretty damn lively. In mid-November, the landlord found out about all this, and I was swiftly and unceremoniously evicted. (1)

Also from Gay Sunshine, this shoutout to People’s Alternative advertises its $1 communal meals. It directly positions People’s Alternative in opposition to the White Horse, as a “testimony to the new self-affirming gay identity’s capacity to break out of traditional oppressed gay bar patterns.” Spaghetti feeds were one way that the Alternative nourished the community in an accessible, safe way. Its conjunction with other resources, like coffeehouses and hotlines, is what made it the most affective.

(1)  Nick Benton, “Berkeley and the Fight for an Effeminist, Socially Transformative Gay Identity,” in Smash the Church, Smash the State!, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2009). See a version of Nick Benton’s essay on his blog, ““Berkeley and the Fight for an Effeminist, Socially Transformative Gay Identity,” July 7 1017, Nicholas Benton, http://nfbenton.com/?p=5024.