Allen Young | |
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| Born | June 30, 1941 Liberty, New York |
| Occupation | Journalist, author, editor |
| Education | Columbia College Stanford University Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism |
| Subject | Anti-war movement LGBT issues in Cuba |
| Literary movement | Counterculture of the 1960s |
Allen Young (born June 30, 1941) is an American journalist, author, editor and publisher who is also a social, political and environmental activist.
Allen Young, born in Liberty, New York, on June 30, 1941, to Rae (Goldfarb) Young and Louis Young. His parents, both secular Jews, spent their youth in New York City, then relocated to the hamlet of Glen Wild (estimated pop. 100) in Fallsburg in the foothills of the Catskills, and started a poultry farm, also providing accommodations for summer tourists in this region known as the Borscht Belt. He was a red diaper baby. [1] [2] He graduated from Fallsburg Central High School and received his undergraduate degree in 1962 from Columbia College, Columbia University. Following an M.A. in 1963 from Stanford University in Hispanic American and Luso-Brazilian Studies, he earned an M.S. in 1964 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. After receiving a Fulbright Award in 1964, Young spent three years in Brazil, Chile and other Latin American countries, contributing numerous articles to The New York Times , [3] The Christian Science Monitor and other periodicals.
Young returned to the United States in June 1967 and worked briefly for The Washington Post before resigning in the fall of that year to become a full-time anti-Vietnam War movement activist and staff member of the Liberation News Service. [4] [5] [6] [7] Young, Marshall Bloom, Ray Mungo and others worked in the office at 3 Thomas Circle producing the news packets that were sent to the hundreds of underground newspapers bi-weekly or tri-weekly. [8] A member of the Students for a Democratic Society [9] [10] he was part of the Columbia University protests of 1968 [11] and was among more than 700 arrested. [12] When the Liberation News Service split in two in August 1968 Young became a recognized leader of the New York office. [1] [9] [13]
In February and March 1969 Young went to Cuba, where he was instrumental in the organization of the Venceremos Brigade. [10] [14] Young became disillusioned with the Castro regime after observing the lack of civil liberties and other freedoms, and especially the government's anti-gay policies. [12] [15] After the Mariel Boatlift he wrote Gays Under the Cuban Revolution, [16] breaking with those New Leftists who continued to defend the Cuban Revolution.
After the Stonewall riots in New York City, Young became involved in the Gay Liberation Front. [17] During the second half of 1970 he lived in the Seventeenth Street collective with Carl Miller, Jim Fouratt, and Giles Kotcher [12] [18] [19] where he was involved in producing Gay flames. [14] Young wrote frequently for the gay press, including The Advocate , Come Out! , [20] Fag Rag , and Gay Community News among others. His 1972 interview with Allen Ginsberg, which first appeared in Gay Sunshine [21] [22] is often reprinted and translated.
Young has edited four books with Karla Jay including the ground breaking anthology Out of the Closets. [23] [24]
Young moved to rural Massachusetts in 1973 to an 'intentional community'. Carrying a sign which read Royalston, Mass. population 973 he attended the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. [25] He was a reporter and assistant editor for the Athol Daily News from 1979 to 1989, and Director of Community Relations for the Athol, Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, 1989 to 1999. He joined the Montague Nuclear Power Plant protests shortly after Sam Lovejoy's toppling of the weather tower in 1974. He has served on the board of directors of the Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, and in 2004 received the Writing and Society Award from the University of Massachusetts Amherst English Department "honoring a distinguished career of commitment to the work of writing in the world." Since 2009, he has been writing a weekly column, entitled Inside/Outside, for the Athol Daily News. [26]
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
The Stonewall riots, also known as the Stonewall uprising, Stonewall rebellion, or simply Stonewall, were a series of spontaneous protests by members of the gay community in response to a police raid that began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Patrons of the Stonewall, other Village lesbian and gay bars, and neighborhood street people fought back when the police became violent. The riots are widely considered the watershed event that transformed the gay liberation movement and the twentieth-century fight for LGBT rights in the United States.
Urvashi Vaid was an Indian-born American LGBT rights activist, lawyer, and writer. An expert in gender and sexuality law, she was a consultant in attaining specific goals of social justice. She held a series of roles at the National LGBTQ Task Force. She is the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995) and Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics (2012).
Leslie Feinberg was an American butch lesbian, transgender activist, communist, and author. Feinberg authored Stone Butch Blues in 1993. Her writing, notably Stone Butch Blues and her pioneering non-fiction book Transgender Warriors (1996), laid the groundwork for much of the terminology and awareness around gender studies and was instrumental in bringing these issues to a more mainstream audience.
Gay Liberation Front (GLF) was the name of several gay liberation groups, the first of which was formed in New York City in 1969, immediately after the Stonewall riots. Similar organizations also formed in the UK, Australia and Canada. The GLF provided a voice for the newly-out and newly-radicalized gay community, and a meeting place for a number of activists who would go on to form other groups, such as the Gay Activists Alliance and Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) in the US. In the UK and Canada, activists also developed a platform for gay liberation and demonstrated for gay rights. Activists from both the US and UK groups would later go on to found or be active in groups including ACT UP, the Lesbian Avengers, Queer Nation, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and Stonewall.
The gay liberation movement was a social and political movement of the late 1960s through the mid-1980s in the Western world, that urged lesbians and gay men to engage in radical direct action, and to counter societal shame with gay pride. In the feminist spirit of the personal being political, the most basic form of activism was an emphasis on coming out to family, friends, and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.
Karla Jay is a distinguished professor emerita at Pace University, where she taught English and directed the women's and gender studies program between 1974 and 2009. A pioneer in the field of lesbian and gay studies, she is widely published.
The Lavender Menace was an informal group of lesbian radical feminists formed to protest the exclusion of lesbians and their issues from the feminist movement at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City on May 1, 1970. Members included Karla Jay, Martha Shelley, Rita Mae Brown, Lois Hart, Barbara Love, Ellen Shumsky, Artemis March, Cynthia Funk, Linda Rhodes, Arlene Kushner, Ellen Broidy, and Michela Griffo, and were mostly members of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the National Organization for Women (NOW).
The North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is a pedophilia and pederasty advocacy organization in the United States. It works to abolish age-of-consent laws criminalizing adult sexual involvement with minors and campaigns for the release of men who have been jailed for sexual contacts with minors that did not involve what it considers coercion.
N. A. Diaman was an American novelist, Queer activist, and photo artist. He was a pioneer within in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and he was gay.
Craig L. Rodwell was an American gay rights activist known for founding the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop on November 24, 1967 - the first bookstore devoted to gay and lesbian authors - and as the prime mover for the creation of the New York City gay pride demonstration. Rodwell, who was already an activist when he participated in the 1969 Stonewall uprising, is considered by some to be the leading gay rights activist in the early, pre-Stonewall, homophile movement of the 1960s.
Liberation was a 20th-century pacifist journal published 1956 through 1977 in the United States. A bimonthly and later a monthly, the magazine identified in the 1960s with the New Left.
The Gay Academic Union (GAU) was a group of LGBT academics who aimed at making the academia more amenable to the LGBT community in the United States. It was formed in April 1973, just four years after the Stonewall riots, held 4 yearly conferences and conducted other scholarly activities. It disbanded some time after that.
Jim Fouratt is a gay rights activist, actor, and former nightclub impresario. He is best known for his involvement with the Stonewall riots and as co-founder of the Danceteria.
Martha Shelley is an American activist, writer, and poet best known for her involvement in lesbian feminist activism.
Barbara Joan Love was an American feminist writer and the editor of Feminists who Changed America, 1963–1975. With the National Organization for Women, Love organized and participated in demonstrations, and she also worked within the organization to improve its acceptance of lesbian feminists. She helped to found consciousness-raising groups for lesbian feminists and was active in the gay liberation movement.
Fag Rag was an American gay men's newspaper, published from 1971 until circa 1987, with issue #44 being the last known edition. The publishers were the Boston-based Fag Rag Collective, which consisted of radical writers, artists and activists. Notable members were Larry Martin, Charley Shively, Michael Bronski, Thom Nickels, and John Mitzel. In its early years the subscription list was between 400 and 500, with an additional 4,500 copies sold on newsstands and bookstores or given away.
Diego Viñales was a former Argentinian student who was swept up in a police raid on the Snake Pit gay bar in New York's Greenwich Village in March 1970. The raid at the Stonewall Inn that had sparked rioting and gay activism had occurred the previous summer, but such raids were still common. Taken to the police station, Viñales, who was on an expired student visa and fearful of deportation, tried to escape by jumping out a second floor window. He landed on a spiked fence. Viñales suffered grave injuries, but survived and was arrested. Protest marches in response to the day's events were led by gay activist groups formed in the wake of Stonewall, and helped spark greater community awareness and interest in the upcoming Christopher Street Liberation Day events scheduled for 28 June to commemorate the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots.
John Paul Hudson was an American gay activist, writer, and actor. He was one of the organizers of the first gay pride march in New York City and is recognized as one of the first gay activists and preservers of American gay history. He was also known by the pseudonym John Francis Hunter, a name under which Hudson wrote early gay travel guides for the United States.
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