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Editor's Note: The brilliant Arthur Evans passed away last year, a polymath activist-intellectual whose published works spanned from 1978's Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture to 1997 s Critique of Patriarchal Reason and beyond. The former was based on lectures he delivered on Page Street in San Francisco in 1974, which is in keeping with his Socrates-like persona as a public thinker who was a familiar figure around the stoa of Haight-Ashbury for over 35 years.
The latter book, based on materials produced over a nineyear period, was published shortly before this article appeared in the HGLR (Summer 2000). This piece can be seen as a special case of what Evans saw as the central tendency of Western philosophy since the Greeks, the elevation of formal logic to the stature of Truth and the identification of this method with the masculine, thereby establishing an "objective" basis for male dominance and homophobia. What's more, this form of "patriarchal reason " was boosted in the 20th century by two closeted gay philosophers, Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
IN 1969 I helped found a new group in New York City called the Gay Activists Alliance (G A A) . One of G AA's favorite tactics was the "zap"- a form of militant but nonviolent confrontation with anti-gay oppressors that combined high camp, political savvy, and chutzpah. In those days there was almost no serious coverage of gay/lesbian issues in the mass media. The zap was designed to shred the media's cloak of silence. It had been conceived for this purpose by the late Marty Robinson, a brilliant Stonewall-era tactician.
Hauppauge, Long Island, provides an example of how the zap worked. In 1971 , the Long Island police had trashed a lesbian bar in the little town of Coram and beat up the women who went there. The cops also repeatedly harassed gay people who vacationed at nearby Fire Island. GAA called on George Aspland, the Long Island district attorney, to investigate the police for their continuing violation of our civil rights, but he refused. So we conducted a loud but peaceful takeover of Aspland's office in the fall, intending to make a citizen's arrest of him for malfeasance in office. Without warning, however, Aspland's deputies surged into the office...