Free Healthcare for the Gays!
Em Smith
The Stonewall rebellion in 1969 set off a wave of gay rights struggle, including the establishment of free gay clinics around the country. Fifty years later, some of these clinics are still around. But gay, lesbian, and transgender people still need free healthcare.
Like with the Black Panther health clinics established in the same decade, free gay clinics were a response to systematic discrimination against LGBTQ people in the healthcare industry. Homosexuality was treated like a disease, and gay people were sometimes refused treatment entirely. Not to mention, many gay people were poor and just couldn’t afford basic healthcare.
Just six months after the Stonewall rebellion, doctors in New York City founded St. Mark’s Clinic. It was a free clinic just a 20-minute walk from Stonewall Inn, with a mission to serve the “freaks” and “queers” of the West and East Village. Within three years, two other clinics had been formed: the lesbian-focused Women’s Health Collective and the Gay Men’s Health Project.
Free clinics sprang up around the country. Many of them are still around today: Fenway Health in Boston, Whitman-Walker Health in DC, the Los Angeles LGBT Center, and Howard Brown Health in Chicago. The clinics in New York became the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center.
In Seattle, free gay clinics came late, but they came. The Seattle Gay Clinic was founded in 1979 to serve the very gay Capitol Hill neighborhood. Seattle Gay Clinic quickly teamed up with Country Doctor, another free clinic established by antiwar activists in 1971. They operated together out of the abandoned Firestation 7 on 15th & Harrison.
Just two years after the founding of the Seattle Gay Clinic, the AIDS crisis began to spiral. Free gay health clinics were on the front lines of treating the disease. They were overwhelmed by the need, but they were crucial lifelines for gay patients.
The free health clinic movement was important, but mutual aid can never keep up with the misery created by capitalism. There is no way to build the society we need without a political fight against the for-profit system.
Like the Black Panther clinics, most remaining gay clinics are no longer free. They operate on a sliding scale.
We need to revive the fight for free healthcare for all, including hormone therapy, STI testing and treatment, and funding to make every gay clinic free again.
Where to get the money? Take it from the cops and the rich.