When Ray Broshears, a gay preacher in San Francisco, started a street vigilante group to protect the LGBTQ+ people in the Tenderloin neighborhood, he told a reporter he wanted to frighten "all those young punks who have been beating up my f*****s."
This was back in 1973, but even then, "Reverend Ray" was a problematic, controversial figure, and not just for his militant tactics. The group he founded, however, was an example of how the queer community filled in the gaps of care and safety, which existed in a homophobic society. It was also an important predecessor to similar mutual aid movements over the coming decades.
The Lavender Panthers are still a relatively obscure piece of queer history. The 2018 Newsweek article "The Most Dangerous Gay Man in America Fought Violence With Violence," one of the most comprehensive write-ups of the Lavender Panthers in a nonacademic publication, noted that at that point neither the Lavender Panthers nor Raymond Broshears had a Wikipedia page. (Both pages have since been created.)
And yet, even this amount of documentation is rare for queer mutual aid and defense organizations of the time. Reverend Ray actively courted publicity. He wrote articles for local papers. He set up outrageous publicity stunts, including staging a fake crucifixion outside a company alleged to discriminate against gays. These hijinks did not make him popular with the mainstream gay rights crowd at the time, but they may be the reason that information about the Lavender Panthers lives on in the archives.
Other queer defense groups — groups specific to lesbians, to trans people, to people of color — often operated quietly in the shadows so as not to attract dangerous attention. Many of them have likely been lost to time entirely.
To learn more about the Lavender Panthers, read Sonja Anderson's "The Controversial Gay Priest Who Brought Vigilante Justice to San Francisco's Streets" in Smithsonian Magazine and Eric Markowitz's "The Most Dangerous Gay Man in America Fought Violence With Violence" in Newsweek. Both articles were consulted extensively for this reporting.
Abi Inman is a a comic artist and animator who works on the Visuals team at NPR. Find more of her work online on her instagram, @abiinman, or abiinman.com.
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