Before Stonewall, 1950s Kansas City Was a Hot Bed of Gay Activism in America
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Long before Stonewall, for a brief period in the 1950s, Kansas City, Missouri was the center of gay activism in America. They even had a gay magazine.
“I’m not sure that it would have happened here without someone taking the leadership role and it happened to be Drew Shafer,” said UMKC Curator of Special Collections & Archives Stuart Hinds. “Frankly, I attribute his confidence as a leader to his parents because like I said, they were really supportive of him as far back as the mid 1950s.”
Hinds is responsible for the Gay and Lesbian Archive of MId-America (GLAMA) at UMKC. It’s one of the best places to find information about the group Shafer formed: The Phoenix Society for Individual Freedom.
It was part of the “homophile” movement, adopting a name that was created to avoid attention. The Phoenix Society’s publication, The Phoenix, helped connect a population of gay and lesbian people who often lived their lives in secret under the threat of being harassed, arrested, or worse.
“What we have to remember is they’re doing all this printing and they’re doing all these mailing lists, they’re doing all this distribution before computers,” said Hinds. “Everything was done with a piece of paper and a phone.”
“With the success of stone wall and the demonstration that a militant approach could actually work, that’s when everything changed,” said Hinds.
Hinds said the Stonewall Riots was an incredibly public instance of the gay community fighting back against harassment and oppression and being successful. It marked a departure from the approach older gay rights activists had been advocating for, where they attempted to avoid creating too much controversy. The new movement would be much more aggressive, radical, and overt.
“That is exemplified in the name itself,” said Hinds. “It becomes ‘Gay Liberation’ after Stonewall where it was the ‘Homophile movement’ prior to it.”
At first glance, a lot of the magazines just look like art. Poetry. Short stories. Drawings.
But then you flip the page, and suddenly there’s a politely-worded argument about why gay people shouldn’t be kicked out of the military. Or a letter from Shafer warning readers about Kansas City cops practicing entrapment.
“It advertises bars, it advertises parties,” says Scharlau, “but then it also has some sort of hard-hitting, ‘What’s going on in the country is wrong. Here’s why you should fight back.’”
The approach worked. Originally created for a Kansas City audience, the magazine started cropping up in places like Iowa and Nebraska, connecting LGBTQ folks all over the Midwest to a community they had never had before.
“It was a lifeline to so many people,” says Hinds. “It told them they weren’t alone.”
But Shafer didn’t stop there. In August 1966, the Phoenix agreed to be a publishing clearinghouse for the newly formed North American Conference of Homophile Organizations.
Shafer and his friends were now responsible for printing and mailing everyone’s magazines, newsletters and pamphlets — all from a basement in Shafer’s house.
By 1968, the Phoenix Society had grown into a gay rights hub. That summer, Shafer met Mickey Ray, the man who would be his partner for 21 years.
It was an exciting time — but it eventually became too much. Tensions within the local and national homophile movement were starting to come to a head. And all of the work Shafer signed himself up for nationally and locally started to catch up with him.
“It was a busy time and things were going well until we began getting frequent media attention. Many within the gay community became afraid of the attention drawn to it and feared reprisals from their heterosexual counterparts,” writes Mickey Ray of the Phoenix Society in the spring of 1969. “A sharp division was drawn between those who believed we had the right to be open and be ourselves, and those who wanted to keep the protected status quo.”
On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village. But what started out as a routine police raid turned into six nights of clashes, and led to an explosion in gay rights groups across the country. While the U.S. had already seen several well-documented confrontations between LGBTQ folks and the police, it was this raid that sparked a nationwide grassroots movement.
For that, we can partly thank Drew Shafer and members of the Phoenix Society for the work they had been doing for years out of Kansas City.
“I would argue that that is one of the reasons that the folks who started the groups after Stonewall were so successful,” says Hinds. “Because that network had already been established as a result of these homophile organizations and their publications.”
But Stonewall also signified the end of the homophile movement. The renewed energy behind gay rights in 1969 attracted a younger crowd and resulted in a new, more radical approach, now known as the gay liberation movement.
“Stonewall is basically the beginning of the end for the Phoenix, too,” says Scharlau. “They had bit off so much with the clearinghouse. This event happens. It’s like a true like flashpoint, right? They’re flooded.”
Shafer continued to fight for LGBTQ rights around Kansas City before he lost high fight with AIDS in 1989.
