The Mattachine Society was founded by Harry Hay and others (mostly former Communists). Its original organization followed the pattern of Communist cells. Mattachine was fairly polite in its approach pushing for acceptance within the existing social structure. Their demonstrations followed strict dress codes, for example. Ties were required for the men and skirts for the women.
Among the principle goals were an end to police raids, ending the exclusion of gays from government employment, and removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses. All of those goals have been pretty much accomplished. One could also credit polite action with the gradual, state-by-state repeal of sodomy laws beginning with Illinois in 1961.
I think, with those "principle goals" you are unintentionally mischaracterizing what Mattachine was about, which I think is important in understanding the context of the time, the way attitudes have changed and what changed them.
Mattachine was a pre-Stonewall group, and the only thing today's gays would recognize as radical that Mattachine fought for was an end to police entrapment, but that was only because one of its founders (not Harry Hay) was arrested for lewd behavior in a public park. From everything I've heard and read, ending police raids or fighting for the inclusion of out gays in government employment was not even on their radar. The context of the time is really important in understanding how far we've come, how we got here and how relatively quickly since Stonewall. The main thing Mattachine wanted to accomplish was the creation of a gay community, to give homosexuals across the country a way to feel like they
belonged somewhere, that there were others like them and they weren't alone. The old gay references like "friend of Dorothy" come from the pre-Stonewall kind of isolation that many gays today don't understand. And even though it doesn't seem radical by today's world, I think Mattachine achieving its goal of helping gays across America know they weren't alone was proved by, and instumental in, the gay liberation movement that followed Stonewall. Drag queens and street gays sparked gay liberation but it never would have spread the way it did if so many gays across the country weren't poised for the moment.
The Gay Liberation Front adopted New Left approaches from such organizations as SDS and NOW. Gone were the old dress codes and the assimilationist goals.
This just is not right. Mattachine did not have "assimilationist goals." In fact the group, and in particular Harry Hay, were decidedly anti-assimilationist.
I met Harry Hay in 1978 when I spent a weekend at his home and he railed unrelentingly about how wrong it was for gays to assimilate, and how the Mattachine goal had been about unifying isolated gays rather than leading them into assimilation. He was unqualifiably opposed to it, and insisted Mattachine had been as well. I disagreed with him on some points about assimilation but even so I remained a friend of Hay's, or at least a correspondent (I still have his letters up in my attic) and he never changed his opinion about that. In fact when I talked to him about ActUp, over which I was initially conflicted, he was angry about the group because he said they were trying to behave like straight men. Ultimately Harry Hay was rejected by the post-Stonewall gay activist community because he spoke out against assimilation and scolded gays of my generation for excluding groups like NAMBLA from Gay Pride and, later, for marginalizing more flamboyant gays like drag queens, saying we were behaving as badly as straights had towards us.
The GLF offered a radical critique of conventional structures. It replaced the polite picketing with marches, disruptions, and zaps. It also actively sought more or less successfully to build bridges with other New Left organizations such as the Black Panther Party. It integrated gay liberation with an ideology of general human liberation.
This also is inaccurate.
The GLF, which came into being right after the Stonewall riots but didn't even last a year, did not successfully (more
or less) build a bridge with the Black Panthers. GLF, as I recall, joined in Black Panther activist events and pursued an alliance with the Black Pathers, and to that end gave cash to the Panthers, after which Huey Newton (leader of the Black Panthers) publicly announced his support of gay liberation, and it ended there with nobody in the Panthers, or any other black organiztion that I know of, following Newton's lead. The Black Panthers never aligned themselves with gay liberation or rights. There was no bridge built; there was support and cash from gays, some nice words from the leader and then we were tossed aside. Sound familiar?
Since the demise of the GLF, the gay movement has largely narrowed its goals to specifically gay rights issues, but it kept the confrontational attitude of the GLF. We have seen that spirit in organization such as the Gay Activist Alliance, ACT-UP, and Queer Nation.
It can be said the GLF was influential, but it was not GLF that informed the change in gay activist organizations from "homophile" to "gay liberation," it was the Stonewall riots. Stonewall and the coverage it received in the midst of black demonstrations and antiwar demonstrations and women's liberation demonstrations is what changed everything.
The defeat of the Briggs Initiative in California back in the late 1970s put an end to Anita Bryant's Save the Children campaign. The end of bar raids in the 1980s can be chalked up to liberationist efforts. Increased federal funding for AIDS was accomplished by disruptions and zaps as was some of the movement toward acceptance of gays in Christian denominations.
I know you intended this only as a short-hand kind of description but all of this is more complex than you're making it seem. And I think it's important to recognize that. The fight for the end of discrimination and for equal rights is not as simple as gays today, defending Obama, want to believe. And oversimplifying the history of gay liberation and gay rights doesn't help. For instance, an essential element of ending the bar raids was dealing with the fact that in NYC gay bars like Stonewall were not gay owned but were owned by the Mafia, who paid off police to control the number of raids and so the owners would be notified of the raids beforehand; the owners of gay bars were not on our side, they just wanted to make money off us, treated gay patrons very badly and were in cahoots with police against us. Gays who have effectively prevailed over the various elements of discrimination have been those who take nothing at face value and trust those who've earned it over those who talk a good game.
These are just a few of the accomplishments of the older generation.
