Militant LGBTQ+ rights group 'the Lavender Panthers' was founded on this day in 1973

The Picture Show Militant LGBTQ+ rights group 'the Lavender Panthers' was founded on this day in 1973 July 6, 202610:25 AM ET By  Abi Inman Abi Inman / NPR 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. San Francisco Examiner GLBT History Center; That Was Ray Roger Ressmeyer/Getty Images; John Storey / The Chronicle San Francisco Chronicle/Hearst Newspapers Richard Carson/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images; Gary Fong/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images; Jerry Telfer/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images 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.) Sponsor Message 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 Pant...