Panthers in a Pride: How the Black Panther Party Defined the Early Gay Struggle While Dissecting Its Own Relationship to Homophobia

The topic I was researching in my Senior Seminar, which I wish to present, is the Black Panther Party (BPP)’s interaction with early gay liberation movements. During my Senior Sem., I discovered what I believe to be a gap in academic literature concerning the BPP’s interaction with other civil rights organizations/causes, specifically their work with (as it was referred to at the time) the homosexual civil rights movement. We would now recognize this as basically the post-Stonewall LGBTQ+ rights movement. What I found from primary source documents (ranging from LGBTQ+ magazines at the time, testimonials from members of several activist organizations, old FBI files/reports that circulated within Hoover’s FBI, and from BBP newspaper articles) was that the Black Panthers played a large part in not only assisting the queer movement in taking shape post-Stonewall, but helped legitimize the fight for LGBTQ+ rights in the eyes of (many) counterculture youth who would have otherwise ignored the struggle. This is contradictory to what has largely been written about the BPP, which states that the party were hardliners against gay liberation, or that their support was purely vocal. The nuance to both of these conclusions is that they were true to a certain extent at early points of the party’s history, BUT that they changed to the point that by the mid-70s, the party was declared, by some gay liberation groups, to be the “vanguard” party leading civil rights in the country.

My position is not to affirm the fact that the Black Panther Party did support gay rights (as that has been written about), but rather to say that the BPP was a defining force in the post-Stonewall gay liberation movement. This research is being expanded into an honors project back at Illinois Wesleyan, as I both want to examine more evidence, as well as delve into why this narrative is one that has been largely forgotten. At the moment, I am working with a hypothesis that once the gay liberation struggle had been legitimized in major cities, conservative splitter groups formed from more radical dominant groups. These splinter groups then advocated solely for gay rights within the political system, as opposed to the radical groups which advocated for intersectional revolution. The narrative of these splinter groups seems to have become the understanding of gay history in this time. This hypothesis is supported with some FBI files, and some testimonials from gay activists of the time (however, I will be looking more into this during my honors research).

This information will be present on the poster with snapshots of primary source documents that have highlighted phrases and detailed descriptions below. They will be arranged with arrows to show the chronological progression of the BPP’s interactions with gay liberation groups. The primary source documents will range from Black Panther newspapers, FBI documents and homosexual magazines of the time. Portraits of figures such as Huey P. Newton will be in the bottom corner with quotations or testimonials they gave.