Meko, Jim

Jim sent me this information on Feb. 16, 2015, in response to my query about his gay activism at the University of Minnesota: Oh yes, we spent a lot of time with Jack [Baker] and Michael [McConnell] (or was it Jim … I could never keep that straight because they both went by alternative names for gay and straight purposes). The conflict was the sort of ideological dispute [within FREE] that get pursued in exquisite detail when you’re in college. [Jim] Chesebro [an activist in FREE and critic of Jack Baker's leadership] probably wrote the letter since argumentation was his strong suit. Jack was the kind of guy who probably ironed his blue jeans. Very image oriented. Fashioned his hairdo after JFK too. He considered us a bunch of crazy radicals (I still have a “freaking fag revolutionary” button on my wall) although we probably came down just about dead center in the politics of that group. There were radical fairies and drag queens, young socialists and a lot of hippies and very few of the button-down types that Jack appealed to. He was accepted as one of the three because of all the press he could attract. Chesebro was another of them, clearly the most articulate of us, and I don’t remember the third. Maybe Ed. Real bright guy, philosophy major. We scared Jack by how pushy we sometimes got yet were surprised by how much he adopted our own rhetoric after we moved on. It never sounded the same coming from him but to his credit he was an effective civil rights advocate. Jack’s focus on marriage was considered a distraction to many of us, compared to life and death issues like police violence, suicide and the war, but my smart-alek attitude about it came crashing down in flames as I sat in SF City Hall surrounded by long lines of lovers and their families waiting to obtain a marriage license during Gavin Newsom’s original summer of love. To be continued ...

This is a continuation of the previous submission based on Jim's email to me, dated Feb. 16, 2015: [Jim] Chesebro got a professorship at Temple in Philadelphia in 1971 and I went along as spouse. We lasted about four years and I eventually arrived in San Francisco in 1977. I remember the last of our demands, apart from the legalistic ones, was the right to establish gay lifestyle communities and San Francisco is the closest thing to that I can imagine. The rest of the country has taken great strides in that direction too.