Carl Wittman wrote the influential essay ‘A Gay Manifesto’
Carl Wittman was an American gay rights activist and author of the influential essay A Gay Manifesto which was first published in 1970. He died on this day in 1986.
Whittman was a member of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance and was involved in several LGBTQ+ rights organisations and movements in the 1970s.
Wittman’s manifesto, written in early 1969, called for the creation of a “gay community” and advocated for the use of direct action and political organizing to achieve LGBTQ+ rights. Wittman’s work has been credited with helping to shape the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.
Born in 1943, he self-identified as being gay when he was a 14-year-old, but he remained in the closet until the late 1960s when he came out in an article that he wrote for the anti-war magazine Liberation. At the time Wittman was living in San Franacisco.
His coming out article sparked a wave of homophobic reactions within the left-wing political groups he was involved in, and this in turn inspired him to write his landmark essay. Wittman wrote the piece before the Stonewall Riots of 1969, but it was not published until the following year.
By the mid 1970’s Wittman had relocated to Oregon where he and his partner Allan Troxler set up a commune. They published a zine called RFD (Radical Faerie Digest) which promoted ideals of sexual freedom and celebrating nature.
In the early 1980s, Wittman created the North Carolina Lesbian and Gay Health Project (LGHP) with David Jolly, Timmer McBride, and Aida Wakil to address the health needs of sexual minorities in that state.
He died on this day in 1986. He was living with AIDS and had been denied hospital treatment. Surrounded by his friends, he took his own life.
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