The Friday Of The Purple Hand
On the morning of Halloween 1969 a group of activists from three gay rights organisations met in Fifth St, San Francisco. Their goal was not to celebrate the Halloween festivities, but to demonstrate against the homophobia of one of the city’s biggest newspapers. What happened next would go down in queer history, and become known as The Friday of the Purple Hand.
Background to the Purple Hand Protest
In the months since those hot June nights when The Stonewall Riots had ignited New York, a quiet revolution had happened across the country, as a radical new LGBTQ+ movement had been born. Young people who were inspired by the NY uprising and eager to fight back against the systematic homophobia they faced.
The traditional gay rights organisations like The Mattachine Society and Society of Individual Rights (S.I.R.) had been focused on integration and acceptance within society. While Mattachine New York and S.I.R. San Francisco had been successful at overturning some of their city’s anti-gay and trans laws, the new groups, made up of younger activists, felt the old guard were too conservative, and wanted to distance themselves from what they saw as an outdated assimilatory attitude.
They were hellbent on a wider set of demands. Inspired by the direct actio nof the civil rights movement they wanted to change society. Which began with changing the negative and hostile way gay men and lesbians were portrayed in the media.
One activist who'd had enough, well before Stonewall, was Leo E. Laurence, editor of Vector, the official publication of S.I.R., which was the largest organisation for gay men in the US.
Laurence had posted an editorial in the March edition that he knew would be incendiary. “Timid, uptight, conservative and afraid to act for the good of the whole homosexual community. That’s what the gay establishment is like,” he wrote. “If the uptightness of the present leaders breaks the revolution, then they must go”.
In an interview shortly afterwards with popular counterculture newspaper Berkley Barb he said he knew it put his job on the line, but that many young gay people felt as he did. “I’ve dedicated my life to this revolution,” he said. “Somebody had to make the first move.”
Shortly after the publication, the Vector editorial board did indeed demand his resignation. He refused. His friend Gale Whittington, who he was pictured with in the Berkley Barb interview, was fired from his job. They decided to found a new organisation called the Committee for Homosexual Freedom, CHF which adopted a policy of confrontation.
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The San Francisco Examiner
For years, San Francisco authorities had been particularly hostile to the LGBTQ+ community. Beatings by police were a regular occurrence if they found men cruising, or not dressed in what they saw as clothing that matched their gender.
It had also been standard practice for some American newspapers to publish the names and addresses of any gay men who had been arrested by the police cruising or in gay bars. With homosexuality illegal, the fallout of having your name published was that you'd almost certainly lose your job, in many cases becoming unemployable. Especially if you were in any professional career. You could also find yourself evicted from your home.
The San Francisco Examiner was one of the newspapers that published these names and addresses. But on October 25th 1969 it went a lot further, when it published a homophobic hit piece about gay nightlife by Robert Patterson, which enraged the community.
In it he called Folsom Street gay bars, clubs and restaurants, known locally as gay breakfast clubs, “deviant establishments” amongst other things. And he branded the patrons of the clubs: sick “semi-males with flexible wrists,” ““members of the pseudo fair sex,” and “women who aren’t exactly women.”
The article enraged the community. CHF wrote a piece in Berkley Barb saying Committee for Homosexual Freedom (CHF) wrote in a Berkeley Barb. “The entire gay community and all those actively working for true liberation must mobilize to confront the brutal suppression of freedom that the Examiner consistently exemplifies and encourages.”
The Friday Of The Purple Hand Protest
Efforts were made to meet with the editors of the Examiner, but they refused. On Monday 27th activists who entered The Examiner building were assaulted and abused by Patterson.
On Wednesday another small attempted protest inside the building ended when an activist was reportedly thrown down some stairs.
Their patience ran out.
CHF, together with newly formed radical gay liberation groups Gay Guerilla Theatre and Gay Liberation Front decided to escalate to a big demo, and planned to picket the Examiner on the Friday.
And so, on October 31st about 60 to 100 people arrived at noon, with placards and some eggs, for a peaceful protest. Not long after they began chanting “Say it loud, we’re gay and we’re proud”, they were showered in ink. Some employees of The Examiner had emptied two bags of purple printers ink on the demonstrators.
In response demonstrators dipped their hands in the pools of ink on the pavement and started to make purple hand marks and write slogans including ‘Gay Power’ and ‘Fuck The Examiner’ all over the front of The Examiner building.
It has been reported that some of the protesters tried to enter the building to find those who had thrown the ink.
At that point the Police Tactical Squad moved in. But instead of acting against the people who had thrown the ink, they started beating up protesters and dragging them into police vans. The aggression was extraordinary, with broken ribs and smashed teeth among the injuries.
Leo Laurence was dragged away, but threw his camera to Larry LittleJohn, who was President of S.I.R. “Somebody could have been hurt if that ink had gotten into their eyes,” said LittleJohn, “but the police came racing in with their clubs swinging. Knocking people to the ground. It was unbelievable.”
Police arrested around 15 demonstrators, and the rest escaped, but purple hand marks were left all across buildings in the downtown area. And a symbol of gay rebellion and liberation was born.
Many of the activists regrouped at city hall to protest police brutality directly to Mayor Joseph Alioto. Three of them refused to leave and were arrested.
After The Purple Hand Protest
Unsurprisingly The Examiner responded by publishing the names, ages, and occupations of all those arrested in an attempt to get them fired.
The heavy handed and aggressive response of the police towards the demonstrators had the unexpected effect of uniting the entire SF gay rights movement, with the traditional organisations horrified by the treatment of peaceful protesters.
Many of the leaders of old guard groups, such as LittleJohn and Del Martin, of Daughters of Bilitis, stepped up to assist those who were arrested, find legal council, raise money to cover costs and speak out in support of them. In fact it unified the Bay Area groups in a way that would never have happened otherwise and set them up as a much stronger gay rights movement.
Eventually charges against all but one of the protesters (who had bitten a police officer) were dropped.
News of the Purple Hand protest began to spread, as gay publications and counterculture newspapers started to report it. It inspired other radical gay liberation groups to take action against newspapers in their city.
Just five days after the Purple Hand protest, activists in L.A. demonstrated against the Los Angeles Times, and then more and more protests happened against other papers such as The Village Voice in NY. They forced editors to engage with them. And soon the attitude of the media started to change.
