Debating our origins.

So gay historians and activists are arguing over where and when the U.S. gay tights movement originated [At Issue, April 12]. Was it in 1950, when, as The Advocate states, "eight men gathered in a Los Angeles apartment and founded the nation's first gay rights group, what would later be known as the Mattachine Society"? Was it July 4, 1965, when 40 gay demonstrators rallied on file steps of Philadelphia's Independence Hall? Was it in 1969, when the Stonewall riots raged in Greenwich Village?

How about 1924? That's when Chicago postal worker Henry Gerber established the Society for Human Rights to protect the rights of gays and lesbians. The organization was later incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation ill the state of Illinois, where it held meetings and published a newsletter, "Friendship and Freedom," which was distributed to its small membership.

Alas, in July 1925 the society came to an abrupt end. Following a police raid, Gerber and several others were arrested and prosecuted for deviancy. After three costly trials, the case against Gerber was dismissed, but he lost his life savings defending himself and was fired from his job.

Afterward Gerber moved to New York City, where he reenlisted in the U.S. Army and served for 17 years. On December 31, 1972, he died at the Soldier's Home in Washington, D.C., at age 80. He lived to hear about all of the events that historians and activists now claim to be the start of the U.S. gay rights movement.

Michael Hemmes, Chicago, Ill.

As one of the "gay pioneers" along with Barbara Gittings in the PBS documentary by that name, I agree with her that the gay rights movement in America was well under way well before the July 4, 1965, demonstration at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. In 1951, during the McCarthy witch-hunt, Donald Webster Cory's hardcover book The Homosexual in America appeared, the first in America with that word in its title, "so people will have to say it to purchase a copy or check it out at a library," he once told me. Small clandestine gatherings of gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York City met a bit earlier, but it was Cow's book that put the issue before the public for the first time.

Then came One, the Mattachine Society, and the Daughters of Bilitis and their magazine, The Ladder. In February 1960 my hardcover book Christ in the Homosexual was published--that was 45 years ago! It was Barbara's and my generation of gay activists who stormed the doors of prejudice so that the Stonewall generation could push them open!

The Reverend Robert W. Wood 

Concord, N.H.