Special Collection #0008:
The Randolfe Hayden Wicker Videotapes
1970-1973, 4 hours

This collection preserves black-and-white documentary videotape of Gay Liberation events in New York City in the early 1970s, and recordings of gay-relevant talk show segments and newscasts from commercial television during the same era.  The recordings were made by Randy Wicker and other members of the New York-based Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) Video Committee.

Approximately 1-1/2 hours of the collection is original footage of GAA protests against the New York Marriage License Bureau and Bell Telephone; a rally in favor of Intro 475 (New York City's Clingan-Burden Fair Employment Bill); and interviews with people at the second annual Christopher Street Liberation Day rally in Central Park.  Featured in these documentary tapes are: Father Robert Clement, Arthur Evans, Pete Fisher, Jim Owles, Marc Rubin, Rosa von Praunheim and Randy Wicker, plus numerous unidentified gay men, lesbians, and heterosexual bystanders.

The remaining 2-1/2 hours are recordings from TV talk shows and newscasts.  On-air lesbian and gay speakers include Lige Clark, Ronald Gold, Franklin Kameny, Arnie Kantrowitz, Kate Millett, Jack Nichols, Peter Ogren, Jim Owles, Rev. Troy Perry, Nathalie Rockhill, Lily Vincenz, Bruce Voeller and Randy Wicker.  The tapes include network news stories and local news reports from New York, among them coverage of GAA's takeover of the offices of Harpers magazine.  Talk shows include excerpts from national broadcasts (Jack Paar Tonite, The Phil Donahue Show, The Virginia Graham Show) as well as local programs from Baltimore and Pittsburgh.

Randy Wicker was born Charles Hayden, Jr.  On a summer vacation from college in 1958, he became active in the Mattachine Society of New York, where he unsuccessfully tried to convince the organization's leaders to use more aggressive civil rights tactics.  In the early 1960s, since he could not use the Mattachine name for his brand of activism, Wicker printed business cards proclaiming himself president of the "Homosexual League of New York."  He gathered friends to help him stuff envelopes and lobby local media outlets.  His early achievements include the country's first all-gay talk show panel about homosexuality, which aired on Pacifica radio stations in 1962 and 1963.  Wicker was a frequent guest on radio and TV talk shows in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been interviewed in more recent gay history documentaries.  For several decades starting in the 1960s, he contributed articles to gay periodicals in New York City and Washington, D.C.  In 1971, Wicker co-founded the GAA-NY Video Committee.  First using borrowed equipment, then Wicker's own camera and "portable" reel-to-reel machine, they documented GAA's celebrations and protests.  Much of the footage was for GAA's public access cable TV show, generally considered the first gay-issues TV series anywhere.  At his father's request, he used a pseudonym in the gay movement.  In 1967, he legally changed his name to Randolfe Hayden Wicker, the name he had been using for years. Since the mid 1970s, he has owned a lamp store in New York's Greenwich Village.

In 1991, Randy Wicker lent the Library/Archives his original half-inch reel-to-reel tapes.  Copying them proved too expensive at that time, so the Library/Archives returned them.  Two years later, the Testing The Limits video collective copied some of Wicker's tapes for use in a documentary.  Testing The Limits sent viz-coded copies of these to the Library/Archives in 1996, with the understanding that the collective and Wicker would be listed as co-donors.  Under the terms of donation, we cannot lend or copy these recordings, but researchers may consult them in the Library/Archives.

PHOTOS:  Frame shots from GAA-NY's public-access cable documentary about their festive, raucus one-day "takeover" of the New York Marriage License Bureau in 1971 -- complete with singing, dancing, chanting, and serving wedding cake to the office workers.