“Nothing disgusts me more than a f**got on the sideline.”
So said the Rev. Ray Broshears, the collar-clad leader of the Lavender Panthers, a gay vigilante group enlisted by Broshears to combat attacks on gay and trans people in San Francisco during the 1970s.
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Broshears aggressive tactics and publicity-seeking gained the group some mainstream headlines and probably account for its prominent place in the history of the “Gay Liberation” movement today, when other community-based responses to police harassment and gay-bashing have been lost.
The controversial and self-styled gay “reverend” was a master at provocation.
“I believe in confrontation politics,” Broshears once said. “I’d work with the muthaf**kin’ devil to bring about gay rights.”
The Lavender Panthers were organized not long after the brutal murder of 19-year-old gay activist David Hart Winters, who was beaten unconscious and left to be run over on train tracks by a streetcar, Rolling Stone reported in 1973. San Francisco police ignored the case, another in a long line of attacks by “thugs” targeting LGBTQ+ people as their numbers grew in the city. It was one year after San Francisco’s first Pride march.
Broshears, who ran a community center for queer youth in the city’s rough Tenderloin neighborhood, told Time magazine then that LGBTQ+ people didn’t trust the cops, so they didn’t call the police when they were assaulted.
Victims believed “police are likely to accuse them of having invited the beating by propositioning someone,” Time reported Broshears saying. He’d logged 300 muggings and beatings of gay people in the city over a six-month period, while police cited “only a couple.”
Broshears himself became a victim of “thug” violence on July 4th that year, when he was ambushed and beaten unconscious by teenagers angry that he called the cops after they set off fireworks in the area.
Lying in a hospital bed, Broshears decided to take on the wave of violence himself.
“Next thing he does is show up at a press conference with guns,” said the Reverend Troy Perry, founder of the Metropolitan Community Church in San Francisco, in the 2019 documentary That Was Ray.
“And the gay community in San Francisco went absolutely bonkers,” Perry added.
Brandishing a .410-gauge shotgun, Reverend Ray, as he liked to be called, announced the formation of the Lavender Panthers. He credited the militant Black Panther Party’s patrols, which countered police harassment, for the new group’s strategy to frighten “all those young punks who have been beating up my f**gots,” Broshears later told a reporter.
“We are now forced to act,” he said to the assembled press. “The police look the other way when a gay is beaten. The beaten person is threatened as if he were the criminal, not the victim. We shall retaliate. Never again will we just sit by!”
Loaded into a beat-up Volkswagen van, the Lavender Panthers patrolled the Tenderloin, the South of Market neighborhood, and the Castro District in San Francisco, wielding their advertised weapons of choice: sawed-off pool cues, spray paint, chains, and — as portrayed on at least one magazine cover documenting the group’s patrols, with the headline “Gays Fight Back!” — that shotgun.
Absent support from the police — whose inaction made them complicit in the violence, by Broshears’ account — Reverend Ray set up a hotline for people to call as an alternative to calling the cops. He also offered free self-defense training (while schooling his “vigilantes” in karate and judo), and encouraged victims of gay bashing to self-report hate crimes for his growing log of violent incidents directed at the community.
Broshears shared one example of the group in action with Time in 1973.
One night that fall, four teenagers started harassing two gay men outside a gay bar called the Naked Grape, Broshears recounted. The Lavender Panthers drove up in their van and “pounced.”
“We didn’t even ask questions,” Broshears recalled. “We just took out our pool cues and started flailing a**.”
Broshears’ novel tactics, however, were at odds with a different strain of Gay Liberation orthodoxy: respectability politics.
Just a day after the preacher introduced the Lavender Panthers, a gay group called the Society for Individual Rights held their own news conference to counter Broshears’ call to fight back.
“The Reverend Ray Broshears does not represent the gay community,” said Frank Fitch, a spokesperson for the group.
“While we recognize that there does exist a climate of hate, fear and ignorance against gay people in this country, and that that climate often results in violent acts perpetrated against us, we feel that the use of violence to respond to violence solves nothing,” Fitch added.
It wasn’t long before the “respectable” gays got their wish.
Just about nine months after Broshears’ headline-catching call to action, the Lavender Panthers beat up a group of teenagers who’d jumped a bartender at a gay bar.
Their parents complained to police, and just like that, the Lavender Panthers were forced to disband.
At a final press conference in May 1974, Broshears defended the group with a stack of hundreds of letters in support, and a claim that the Lavender Panthers “contributed much in the way of personal safety awareness.”
It was a rare show of modesty for Broshears, who’d worked hard to cultivate his tough guy media persona.
He left behind a mixed legacy.
Jailed as a teenager after he was accused of groping another boy at a civil rights demonstration (he “learned all about homosexuality” while he was locked up, he later said), and derided after he died alone and paranoid in his San Francisco apartment at age 46 for his violent tactics, a member of the Stonewall Gay Democratic Club called Broshears “treacherous” and said he was “glad he is dead,” adding, “It is safer now.” The collar-clad gay vigilante was a study in contrasts.
Over years of community activism, Broshears helped shepherd hundreds of gay and trans youth, while at the same time perpetrating violence on other young people not blessed “by the grace of God” to go down a different path. They could probably have benefited from his ministering too.
“I came to San Francisco, the gay mecca, to become a f**got,” Broshears once said, later adding, “Drag queens, old folk, hustlers, ex-cons, transsexuals and queers see me as their last hope.”
In a battle of good versus evil on the streets of San Francisco, Reverend Ray sided with his own.
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