Vanguard Magazine

Throughout the 1960s, the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco was the epicenter of LGBT life. Because this low-income neighborhood was a destination for particularly LGBT runaway teens, many important youth organizations, including Vanguard, emerged from here.

http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/QIY/Vanguard.html
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/san-francisco-tenderloin_n_1856021

In the fall of 1965, Vanguard, an LGBT liberation organization for youth was founded in San Francisco by Adrian Ravarour and Billy Garrison. It began as a way to organize and ask LGBT youth if they were willing to rally for equal rights. In order to make it less dangerous, one founder proposed a peaceful coexistence as well.

https://www.augustnation.com/adrian-ravarour

In order to best create unity, Raravour, the founder of Vanguard, taught LGBT youth their rights through examples set by Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He wanted these mostly teenage kids to know that being gay was fine, and that they should not feel downtrodden.

https://www.augustnation.com/adrian-ravarour
https://lgbtqreligiousarchives.org/profiles/adrian-ravarour-ph-d

In April 1966, Raravour led demonstrations in front of small businesses that had refused to serve the LGBT youth. They continued to protest through May, sparking an interview on the radio with Raravour and his partner, stating homosexuality as "normal human emotions motivated by love, and that Vanguard had been demonstrating to end discrimination."

http://www.vanguard1965.com/
https://jmellison.net/if-we-knew-trans-history/teachable-trans-history-vanguard-and-the-comptons-cafeteria-riot/

After Raravour stepped down as president, Glide, which had been Vanguard's meeting venue since almost the beginning, began to sponsor the organization, expanding its focus into helping more than just LGBT youth. While remaining a primarily LGBT focused group, it now was open to anyone.

http://www.vanguard1965.com/footnotes.html

The Doggie Diner sit-in happened spontaneously one August morning, when the clerk of the diner refused to serve a member of Vanguard. Police in riot gear surrounding this member, as well as half a dozen others. When they finally withdrew, Vanguard felt as if they had won new freedom. Later that same evening, after word had spread through the neighborhood of this stand-off, a Tenderloin street queen was insulted inside Compton's Cafeteria, sparking the Compton's Riot.

https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2018/8/02/dont-let-history-forget-about-comptons-cafeteria-riot
http://www.vanguard1965.com/

The magazines were initially created as a part of the organization, written and edited by J.P. Marat, to be "open to the gay, the straight, the hip and the black community." However, in 1967, when the organization began to dissolve, the magazine, now edited by Keith Oliver St. Claire, took on a life of it's own. It no longer wanted to be associated with the organization, going as far as saying in one of its issues that "six months ago, Vanguard: The Youth Organization, Inc., which this magazine was loosely affiliated with, ceased to exist, in the popular sense of the word. At that time, Vanguard’s hierarchy of officers and tiers of members dissolved the community…Vanguard: The Youth Organization, Inc. has now one member: a president."

https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/cz30ps69r
image: https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth-oai:2z10xg61c
http://www.vanguard1965.com/footnotes.html

In the February issue of 1967, Vanguard magazine states January 24 as the date that the organization received its non-profit status. However, by this point Vanguard had lost most of their previous leaders, such as Raravour and Marat, who had given the organization its direction and maintaining its mission for equal rights for LGBT youth. It was now solely a service agency and its focus had changed drastically. Despite Glide's efforts to keep the organization running smoothly, the magazine announced that it was no longer affiliated with the organization. Vanguard dissolved shortly afterwards.

http://www.vanguard1965.com/

In 2011, another issue of the Vanguard Magazine was published. The project, as stated in this issue, "resuscitates the history of the 1960s queer youth organization Vanguard and explores the ways in which its history is embodied in the present." The magazine now presents the history of Vanguard to today's LGBT youth by publishing stories, poetry, and art "in conversation" with the original magazines.

http://www.insidestoriesonline.com/2011/03/making-history-vanguard-revisited-has.html
http://vanguardrevisited.blogspot.com/p/call-for-submissions.html
https://www.amazon.com/Vanguard-Revisited-Politics-Franciscos-Tenderloin-ebook/dp/B01L0TWVGU