In this episode, Shirley talks about a late 1940s meeting with Pearl Hart, a Chicago attorney, regarding the formation of an organization for gay people. Shirley Willer’s oral history can be found in Eric Marcus’s book Making Gay History. Watch a Jinterview with Shirley Willer from the Lesbian Herstory Archives Daughters of Bilitis Video Project. To have it explode in your face was not a successful ending to a career.” As she told Eric Marcus, “I felt that I had really failed. The conflicts came to a head in 1968 at a meeting of the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO) and soon after, Shirley quit the movement. Credit: Kay Tobin Lahusen, Courtesy New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.īut the Daughters of Bilitis proved to be an all-too-tight fit for Shirley, whose instincts for activism were more closely aligned with Frank Kameny and the Mattachine Society of Washington, DC, rather than the more low key and cautious Daughters of Bilitis. of New York Terry (last name unknown), Mattachine Midwest John Marshall, Mattachine Society of Washington, DC. of New York Dick Leitsch, Vice-President, Mattachine Society, Inc. Front row kneeling, from left to right: Julian Hodges, President, Mattachine Society, Inc. The theme of the conference was “The Homosexual Citizen in the Great Society.” From far left standing: Marjorie McCann, Secretary, Daughters of Bilitis Clark Pollack, Publisher, DRUM, President, Janus Society, Philadelphia Evander Smith, Tavern Guild, San Francisco Shirley Willer, President, Daughters of Bilitis Jack Nichols, Vice-President, Mattachine Society of Washington, DC Carole LeHane (aka Carol Randall), Daughters of Bilitis William Beardemphl, President, Society for Individual Rights, San Francisco Robert Sloane Basker, President, Mattachine Midwest Neale Secor, Council on Religion and the Homosexual Frank Kameny, President, Mattachine Society of Washington, DC Joan Fleischmann (aka Joan Fraser), Daughters of Bilitis.
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ECHO (East Coast Homophile Organizations) conference in New York City, September 25-26, 1965. But by 1962, when Shirley moved to New York City, the nascent LGBTQ civil rights movement (then called the homophile movement) gave her the outlet she’d been searching for-first as president of the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and then as national president.
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And, to put it the way Frank Kameny might (and did in Episode 05 ), Shirley was also radicalized and decided that she had to “do something” because, as she says in the 1990 interview featured in this episode, “it had to stop.”įor someone who wanted to do something to make the world a better place for gay people in the 1940s (which is when Shirley got hit by a policeman and her friend was left to die) there were virtually no options. What do you do when you’ve been slapped around by a policeman simply because the way you look and the way you’re dressed leads him to believe you’re a lesbian? Or when your friend-your gay brother-is left to die in a hospital because he’s a “flaming queen”? Shirley Willer got angry. The donor went by the codename “Pennsylvania.” Do you know who she was? Please help us find her! If you have any information, write to us: Episode Notes Her work was financed by a wealthy lesbian who chose to remain anonymous. Shirley Willer traveled the country in the 1960s, spreading the word about the homophile movement, and sharing information about both the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society.
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Credit: © Lesbian Herstory Archives Help Us Find “Pennsylvania”! Shirley Willer in the mid-1960s at the beach in Atlantic City, where she and her partner, Marion Glass, had gone to scout a location for a Daughters of Bilitis outing.