Liberation House

History

Liberation House (or “Lib House”) was an early post-Stonewall health services center for the LGBT community. Run by the Liberation House Gay Collective, a self-described “work, education, and growth commune,” it was co-founded by Leonard Ebreo and novelist Alice Bloch in 1972. (At the time, Bloch also served as an editor for The Lesbian Tide, the first national lesbian newspaper.) Ebreo and Bloch signed a cheap lease for the central storage area in the basement of this tenement at 247 West 11th Street and furnished it with folding chairs and a card table. The Collective’s activities included crisis and drug counseling and organizing gay groups in the outer boroughs.

Liberation House hosted women’s and men’s groups, a coming out group, and an S & M group. Ebreo, together with Marc Rabinowitz and Perry Brass, established the Gay Men’s Health Project here after holding an open community forum on gay men’s health at Washington Square United Methodist Church in 1972. According to Brass, it was the first clinic for gay men on the East Coast and the first group of any kind to use the words “gay men” in its name. The clinic educated men about their bodies and the importance of using condoms (only previously associated with preventing pregnancy) to protect against sexually-transmitted diseases.

By February 1976, GMHP moved its office to 74 Grove Street, off Sheridan Square. In 1983, it merged with the St. Marks Gay Men’s Health Center and became the Community Health Project at the LGBT Community Center. Fourteen years later, in 1997, it moved to 356 West 18th Street in Chelsea and became Callen-Lorde, which still operates.

Beginning in January 1972, the Gay Switchboard of New York rented space in the basement from Liberation House. Gay male members of the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), the recently defunct Gay Liberation Front (GLF), and others helped foster its creation. Volunteers gave information, referrals, and advice over the phone and soon handled over 400 calls per week. According to one of its pamphlets, the Switchboard received a large percentage of calls for information on local and out-of-town bars, discos, organizations, and dances, but also had listings for gay or “straight but sympathetic” doctors, therapists, lawyers, dentists, travel agents, and businesses. The Switchboard later moved to a number of locations before incorporating in October 1977 and leasing a suite of offices at 110 East 23rd Street, which became the Gay and Lesbian Services Center. In the mid-1980s, the Switchboard was renamed the Gay and Lesbian Switchboard and today is part of the GLBT National Help Center.

Liberation House was also the first location of the Lesbian Switchboard, which shared space with the Gay Switchboard for approximately six months beginning in January 1972. The volunteer-staffed telephone service gave peer counseling, referrals, and information about local events and groups to lesbians. According to activist Kathy Wakeham, a volunteer at the time, the Lesbian Switchboard and the Gay Switchboard, which was operated by gay men, had separate rooms in the basement, with a wide doorway between them that was left open. The intent behind having the two switchboards in the same space was to promote solidarity. However, after men at the Gay Switchboard were having sex with the door open, Wakeham and her Switchboard partner brought this up at the organization’s next meeting. The decision was unanimous to move the Lesbian Switchboard to the newly founded Women’s Liberation Center in Chelsea in the summer of 1972, which operated there until 1987.

Entry by Amanda Davis, project manager (March 2017; last revised January 2023).

NOTE: Names above in bold indicate LGBT people.