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enoughtohold:

Don Mager and his two children on the cover of the Gay Liberator (Detroit), 1973.

Early expressions of gay fatherhood in gay liberationist communities in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York were based on a feminist reconceptualization of masculinity that saw the raising of children by gay men, and sometimes feminist heterosexual men, as a part of a revolutionary transformation of patriarchal systems of domination. Like lesbian mothers in lesbian feminist communities, radical gay fathers actively sought to raise their children outside of traditional heteronormative sex roles. They developed political critiques of the nuclear family, organized experimental feminist childcare projects, and called for increased support for childrearing in gay male communities as part of a larger political project.

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By the late 1960s, influenced by other social movements of the era — including the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements — young gay men and lesbians were organizing for their own rights in cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. These new activists often took a more militant stance than earlier homophile groups, such as the Mattachine Society or the Daughters of Bilitis. […] Amid this radical, counterculture spirit was a vision of gay fatherhood that understood gay fathers as a vanguard in the struggle to transform sexist and homophobic gender roles and challenge male supremacy and the patriarchal nuclear family. Activists in New York, Detroit, and San Francisco argued that gay men helping to raise children offered a new revolutionary sense of fatherhood in which men could be nurturers and help develop nonsexist childrearing practices. These men also criticized what they saw as a commodification of sexuality in gay male communities and the alienation felt by gay fathers in these spaces.

This vision of gay fatherhood was present in the earliest days of gay liberation. It took shape as a central tenet of the politics of effeminism, a radical feminist movement in gay liberation that grew out of the original Gay Liberation Front in New York in the months after the Stonewall riots. The effeminist movement had its roots in an anti–male supremacist discussion group of gay and heterosexual men that met in the winter of 1969. Two members of the group, Kenneth Pitchford and Steven Dansky, were also members of Gay Liberation Front New York. Although the men’s group was short-lived, it allowed Dansky and Pitchford to develop the principles of a politics of a gay male feminism that formed the foundation for a second group, the Flaming Faggots, a “consciousness-raising group of revolutionary homosexuals” that they and other gay liberationists from GLF founded in the spring of 1970.

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In 1973, Steven Dansky, Kenneth Pitchford, and John Knoebel wrote the “Effeminist Manifesto,” a document that outlined the basic principles of the effeminist movement. The final point in the thirteen that made up the manifesto declared that “our first and most important step” was to “take upon ourselves at least our own share of the day-to-day life sustaining drudgery that is usually consigned to women alone.” Through taking responsibility for the labor of childrearing and housework, the effeminists believed they could “release women to do other work of their own choosing” and “begin to redefine gender for the next generation.” Childrearing by feminist gay men was seen by the effeminists as the most important element of a movement that would transform masculinity, patriarchal society, and the narrow gender and sex roles proscribed by the heterosexual nuclear family.

Similar reconfigurations of gayness, fatherhood, and masculinity appeared in other gay liberationist communities as well. Don Mager became involved with radical gay activism in Detroit in the summer of 1972. Mager was the father of two small children and was in the process of separating from his spouse. The couple had lived in communal households in Syracuse, New York, and Detroit, and shared commitments to nonnuclear, egalitarian, feminist childrearing ideals. After Mager began identifying as a gay man, he joined the Detroit chapter of Gay Liberation Front and became part of an activist community that included the Gay Liberator, a newspaper published by a collective of the same name that had emerged from Detroit GLF and the Gay Community Center.

In the spring of 1973, Mager wrote an article for Gay Liberator entitled, “Faggot Fathers.” In the article he articulated gay fatherhood as a specific experience characterized by isolation from both mainstream heterosexual culture as well as gay liberationist communities that failed to understand the particular issues faced by gay fathers. Working from his politics as a feminist, anticapitalist father he suggested that gay fathers held the potential to destabilize repressive gender and sex roles that supported the nuclear family and that their choice to be openly gay and foster loving relationships could contribute to a “breakdown of the patriarchal family structure” and offer “new alternative models of fatherhood” centered on nurturing, caretaking roles for men. Mager argued that gay communities should embrace the radical potential of gay fathers and lesbian mothers raising children and support them through the development of communal, nonnuclear childrearing arrangements.

In the mid-1970s, Mager worked to put these political ideas into practice. He organized a workshop on gay parents for the 1973 Detroit gay pride festival. […] Mager remembered that he conceived of the workshop “just to see who would show up,” but that to his amazement thirty people came to the discussion. Out of the workshop a gay parents social group formed. […]

It was out of ideas and political commitments such as these that the gay father movement initially emerged. The first gay fathers group in the United States came together at the San Francisco gay pride parade in 1975, the largest such event in the country up to that date, with an estimated attendance of 82,000. The theme that year was “join us, the more visible we are, the stronger we become,” a statement that testified to the groundswell of gay and lesbian activism at the time. Several months before the parade, Jack Latham had published an article entitled “A Faggot Father Speaks Out” in Gay Sunshine, a widely read gay liberation newspaper. Latham’s article struck a nerve: the number of letters in response exceeded that of any other single article published in the newspaper. Latham invited all of the responding gay fathers who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area to march together at the 1975 pride parade. As the men walked in the procession, other gay fathers came out of the crowd to join them. Allen Klein later remembered, “I saw a couple of men walking and one of them was Jack, with his sign that said ‘Gay Father.’ … I ran up to them and said, ‘You’re a gay father, I’m a gay father too!” It was from this group that San Francisco Bay Area Gay Fathers (SFBAGF) was born.

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The radical roots of organizing by gay fathers […] are an unexplored part of the larger history of gay liberation. They show that like lesbian motherhood, gay fatherhood in the early 1970s was conceived of as a potentially radical experience that could undermine sexism and homophobia and contribute to a revolutionary new social order. This history complicates the critique of the family and sex/gender roles in early gay liberation political materials, showing that it was a complex challenge to the normative concept of the family — one that we have seen was in conflict since the Second World War. It illustrates the ways that the family — intertwined with sexuality — has been one of the central sites of struggle and change since the late 1960s. And like the lesbian mothers groups, this genealogy of gay father organizing helps clarify the emergence of the struggle in the late twentieth century over LGBT domestic and parental rights.

— Daniel Winunwe Rivers, Radical Relations: Lesbian Mothers, Gay Fathers, and Their Children in the United States since World War II (2013), Ch. 5.