inferior-mirage:captainfunkpunkandroll:Lesbian activist Martha Shelley inside the Oscar Wilde Memori

inferior-mirage:captainfunkpunkandroll:Lesbian activist Martha Shelley inside the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, c. 1969Shelley was born Martha Altman and was raised in Brooklyn, New York to Russian-Polish Jewish parents in December 1943. After graduating from college in the mid-1960s, Shelley began her activism, first in the anti-war movement during the time many Americans were drafted to the Vietnam War. In 1967, Shelley joined the New York City chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis, where she later became president. Because of FBI surveillance at the time, many DOB members went under aliases. She used “Shelley” as her alias.While working at Barnard College, she worked with bisexual activist Stephen Donaldson and joined the Student Homophile League. She was in Greenwich Village the night of the Stonewall uprising and was one of the first to propose a protest march after recognizing the political awareness of that event. Her proposal led to the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society to sponsor a demonstration. When the Gay Liberation Front started, Shelley was one of the first to join the organization. She also wrote for the LGBT publication, Come Out!In 1970, Shelley was instrumental in the Lavender Menace zap of the Second Congress to Unite Women and later wrote articles such as Notes of a radical lesbian and Terror to the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings From The Women’s Liberation Movement. After relocating to Oakland, California, in October 1974, she was involved with the Women’s Press Collective where she worked with Judy Grahn to produce Crossing the DMZ, In other words, Lesbians speak out and other books.Unlike some lesbian activists of her time (like Jean O'Leary), Shelley didn’t advocate for lesbian separatism from the gay rights movement, and argued that the splintering of the Gay Liberation Front “weakened the movement as a whole”. A socialist, Shelley was allied to other leftist groups such as The Young Lords and the Black Panthers and the pro-choice movement groups. Prior to homosexuality being removed as a “mental illness” in 1973, Shelley was one of the outspoken critics against homosexuality being deemed so during the 1960s, arguing that the stigmatization of homosexuality as a mental illness was a major contributing factor to psychological issues within the gay and lesbian community. She later appeared in the PBS documentary, Stonewall Uprising, in 2010.She was in Greenwich Village the night of the Stonewall uprising and was one of the first to propose a protest march after recognizing the political awareness of that event. Her proposal led to the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society to sponsor a demonstration. Look who else we need to thank :)As Martha recalls:“I had a date with Allison to come over to her place and take a busout there to New Jersey later in the evening, but what I was doing, I wasgiving these two women from Boston a tour of Greenwich Village andthe bars and stuff because they wanted to form a Boston chapter [of Daughters of Bilitis]… and we walked past Christopher Street and there were these kids, youngpeople, throwing things at cops, and the people I was escorting werevery startled, and I said, Oh that’s just a riot. We have them in NewYork all the time. And I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t find out, like,for 24 hours later…There was some discussion of some kind, andfinding out from the newspapers what had happened, and then the nextday, still not having gotten enough sleep, lying on my couch, thinking,We have to do something. We have to have a protest march. And then Ithought, Great, we’re going to march in the street and I’m going to getshot like Martin Luther King. Again I thought, I’ve got to do it anyway.” -- source link

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