In the wake of the Stonewall uprising many alliances sprouted up around the gay community in New York City, with the goal of protecting LGBTQ people and organizing to fight for a better future. LGBTQ people, especially teenagers who had been kicked out of their family homes and were losing themselves on the streets, needed a place to feel safe, and the alliances needed a place where they could share ideas, commune, and become the political activist groups the community desperately needed.
New York City had no such place. Members of the gay community lived under constant threat of violence and abuse from both the police and other citizens who had been raised to hate them. They needed somewhere to convene and take refuge from the world outside, somewhere where they could be their true selves. The Firehouse on Wooster Street in SoHo served such a purpose. An old firehouse no longer in use by the city, the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) opened it up as a gay community center in 1971 and operated out of the building.
The GAA devoted its energy entirely to working to further the rights of members of the LGBTQ community. They used tactics like the “zap” to draw attention to their causes, which essentially consisted of drawing a political figure into confrontation over an issue affecting the community. This strategic move not only got politicians talking about a segment of the population they typically either vilified or did their best to ignore, but also got the media’s attention.
The Firehouse was not just a home for full-blown activists, but also a sanctuary for young LGBTQ people who needed a place to hide from the persecution of the outside world. Dr. Joyce Hunter is an icon of the gay rights movement, having spent the past five decades fighting on behalf of the community. She has served as Human Rights Commissioner of New York City, co-founded the Harvey Milk School in the East Village, the first LGBT high school in the country, and founded the Hendrit Martin Institute. Before all that, however, she was one of the young people who finally found refuge in the form of the Firehouse on Wooster Street.
“It was very personal,” she says of the first time she walked through the doors as a teenager after spending her whole life wondering if she was the only gay person on the planet. “It was my introduction to the community and the movement. I really liked what I saw. It felt like it was…in a lot of respects like coming home.”
Dr. Hunter says her life truly began when she started going to the Firehouse and getting involved in the movement, “It was like being born again, in a way. I went back to school.” She says young people who feel outcasted (sic) from society need an incubator like the Firehouse. She credits the building and the atmosphere inside with fostering some of the great minds and ideas that fueled the future of the gay civil rights movement.
“The Firehouse was a catalyst. That was its legacy to the movement. How many people came out of the Firehouse and went on to create other groups, other organizations?”
The Firehouse in SoHo served as the center of LGBTQ culture and political activity from 1971-1974, hosting social functions and its famous Saturday night dances. In addition to serving as headquarters for the Gay Activist Alliance, the space was also used by the Lesbian Feminist Liberation, the Gay Men’s Health Project, and Gay Youth, and Dignity.
That all came to an end in October 1974. In an act of brutality that GAA president Morty Manford called “part of a wave of harassment against gays,” an arson fire destroyed the interior of the building and the Gay Activist Alliance was kicked out. The GAA continued operating until 1981, but Dr. Hunter recalls the destruction of the movement’s home as devastating. Still, she says it served its purpose in the sense that it gave members of the persecuted gay community a place to be safe and plot the next moves of resistance and forward progress.
Dr. Hunter is worried about what lies ahead for American politics and government, but says today’s youth and activists give her hope, saying they’re “getting much wiser.” However, she thinks any movement that wants to enact real, consequential change would benefit from a space like the Firehouse in which to grow and operate.
“They can organize. Once they have the safe space they will feel much more comfortable, and they will have time to think as a group about: ‘what do we do to change?’”