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It was the 4th of July, 1973, in San Francisco's gritty Tenderloin neighborhood, to celebrate Independence Day, a group of teens set off fireworks in a parking lot near the Helping Hands Community Center. Reverend Ray Brochures had founded that center just a few years earlier, in 1969, primarily to help young members of the gay community who had been driven to unsafe conditions.
Brochures himself was kind of a brash character, and he had no problem rubbing people the wrong way. So when this happened, he was frustrated with the rowdy teens and he called the cops. But when the police arrived, instead of helping, they told the kids who had ratted them out. Later that night, when 38-year-old Brochures was closing up shop, the teens took their revenge. As Brochures walked down the sidewalk, he was surrounded by a group of about a dozen teens.
And they attacked. Brochures was punched in the back of the head and then hit in the groin. He fell to the ground, but they didn't stop. They were still punching him and kicking him as they dragged him off the sidewalk and into the street. When a bus driver saw what was happening, the kids finally cleared out. Brochures was left injured. He'd been pummeled until he'd lost consciousness. He was covered in bruises. He had a badly injured arm and he had blood coming from his nose.
While he is recovering from his beating, Brochures gets an idea. He was tired of living in fear of violence as a gay man walking down the street. And he knew he wasn't alone. There were hundreds of similar attacks on gay men in that area. He made the decision that he wasn't going to take it anymore. And he wasn't going to go to the police. There were anti-gay laws still in the books. So he would be treated like he was committing a crime.
He felt like he had to take justice into his own hands. This is Vigilante, an original podcast by Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Reverend Ray Brochures, Militant Gay Priest. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. Brochures was a bombastic religious figure and community organizer. In 1973, he formed a militant patrol called the Lavender Panthers to protect the gay community in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood.
We're going to talk about his rise to prominence and the controversial tactics that eventually led to this group's downfall. Raymond Brochures took a long and winding path to the Tenderloin on that fateful Independence Day in 1973. He was born in February 1935 in the small Illinois town of Centerville Station.
You could say that his life was characterized by contradiction from a young age. Here's Sonja Andersen, a correspondent for the Smithsonian and author of the article, "The Controversial Gay Priest Who Brought Vigilante Justice to San Francisco's Streets." Raymond Brochures grew up in Illinois as a religious teenager, and he knew somewhat early on that he was gay.
In the 1930s and 40s, homosexuality was shrouded in secrecy and pretty much universally frowned upon. In Brochure's home state of Illinois and, well, virtually all of the country, homosexual activity was against the law. And it certainly went against the teachings of the Christian church in which Brochure's was raised. But it seems like Brochure's really didn't let that apparent contradiction undermine his faith.
By the age of 14, he was teaching Bible classes in his community. In the early 1950s, when Brochures was a teen, he joined the Navy. According to the 2019 documentary, That Was Ray, while serving in the military, Brochures was sexually assaulted.
This attack drastically changed his worldview, which is not uncommon for survivors of sexual violence. A 2023 literature review by researchers John C. Thomas and Jonathan Kopel found that male survivors of sexual violence experienced, quote, higher rates of mood disturbances, anxiety, increased changes in self-perception, social dysfunction, hostility, vanities,
fantasies about revenge, and an increase in a sense of vulnerability, unquote. So it's understandable that this attack could have had far-reaching consequences. Now a changed man, Brochures leaves the Navy not too long after the assault. He got a medical discharge in 1955, officially for a head injury. After leaving the military, Brochures returns to his religious roots. He studied at several Christian institutions, including Lee Bible College in Tennessee.
He graduated in the late 1950s, and one of his mentors was the evangelist Billy James Hargis. Brochure's flair for the dramatic was influenced by Hargis' emotionally charged style of revivalist preaching. That being said, the two men differed completely as far as the stances they took in their sermons. Hargis was staunchly anti-gay and pro-segregation, while Brochure's was the opposite.
After spending some time as a traveling preacher, Brochures went on to join the Congress of Racial Equality. As part of that organization, he campaigned against segregation on the front lines of the civil rights movement. In 1965, Brochures is now 30, he's joined a sit-in held in Bellevue, Illinois to protest mistreatment and discrimination against Black people in America.
At some point during the demonstration, Brochures is arrested for groping a 17-year-old boy, and he's sentenced to six months in jail. After his release, word had spread about the incident, and Brochures found himself at the center of quite a scandal. So at the end of 1965, Brochures left his home in Illinois and set out looking for a fresh start. For a gay man and a budding activist, there was one clear destination, San Francisco. Here's Sonia again.
it sort of became a self-fulfilling prophecy that San Francisco attracted some of the community. And then once other people around the country started
Figured out that more of their own of the gay community were moving to San Francisco than they joined. And over a couple of decades, it became this sort of haven for LGBTQ people. So yeah, Brochures, when he got to San Francisco, he pretty much landed right in the tenderloin.
Rochers arrives in San Francisco with his tall, heavyset build. He's got dark curls, a thick mustache, and these stark blue eyes. And he didn't waste any time throwing himself into local religious life or gay activism. Because within a couple of years, he was ordained in the Universal Life Church, as well as the Orthodox Episcopal Catholic Church. He also worked with Vanguard, which was a group for LGBT youth in the Tenderloin.
In a lot of ways, the Tenderloin was ground zero for the early gay rights movement. The neighborhood got its name because police officers were said to be so well paid off they could afford to eat choice Tenderloin steak. The Tenderloin was generally an area of lawlessness where anything goes. It was also a cheaper place to live than the surrounding areas. And because of this, many gay people found themselves there trying to carve out a living.
Here's historian Jim Van Buskirk, author of the book Gay by the Bay, a history of queer culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. There were bar raids, there was harassment, gang violence, you know, but there was a lot of separateness and closetedness, a lot of secrecy. One could still lose one's job, one's apartment, one's family. So I think fear was...
a big component and there was a lot of police antagonism. So fear of the police, if you got robbed or beat up or whatever, one did not go to the police because that would be re-traumatizing, re-triggering. So the victim would be re-victimized.
But the Tenderloin wasn't the only predominantly gay neighborhood in San Francisco. Uptown, there was Castro, which emerged as a kind of a twin city, but with a very different makeup and feel as far as race and class. Here's Van Buskirk again. Castro was mostly white, mostly male, mostly...
self-absorbed. I don't know quite how to describe it. I would say the Tenderloin was much more rough and tumble, more sex workers, more youth, more, probably more drugs. Now, being gay in any part of San Francisco wasn't exactly a walk in the park, but being gay or trans and poor and a person of color in the Tenderloin came with even more dangers and less protection.
If you imagine that gay people are not going to be protected in the Castro, they're certainly not going to be protected in the Tenderloin. And there, I mean, in the Tenderloin also tended to be, you know, the other parts of the LGBT community protected.
who weren't so widely popularized in the wider liberation movement. And people were still getting arrested for the crime of so-called female impersonation. So obviously transgender women and drag queens were definitely at risk for confrontations with the cops.
Brochures made the Tenderloin his home base, where he felt he was the most needed and could do the most good. In 1969, he started Helping Hands Community Service Center. He offered free legal counsel, he delivered meals to elderly citizens, and he opened his doors to queer youth who had nowhere else to turn. This was the community center that Brochures was leaving on July 4th when he was attacked in 1973 by a group of teens.
You could say that that evening proved to be a turning point in Brochure's life because after the attack, he decided that providing food and legal advice just wasn't enough. He needed to take more drastic steps to make the streets safe for himself and his LGBT community. Coming up, Brochure's channels his rage and activism into starting the militant gay group, the Lavender Panthers. Now, back to the story.
On July 5th, 1973, now 38-year-old Reverend Raymond Brochures found himself in a hospital bed with a lot of time to think. The night before, he'd been savagely attacked by a group of teens who left him in critical condition. Brochures was laying in his bed recuperating and maybe he was looking down at his bruised body and replaying the events of the attack in his mind. The events he could remember before he was knocked out. And maybe he felt helpless
angry, vengeful, and maybe he even felt a sense of dark irony. He started this helping hands community center to protect the vulnerable gay residents of San Francisco's Tenderloin, and now he's the victim of the very violence he's trying to prevent? And it wasn't just like he could go to the cops with all the anti-gay laws in the books. It meant that he would either be ignored or worse. And just when it felt like there was no one that brochures could turn to for help,
he got an idea. He was inspired to create a group that could help people who were in danger, just like he had been. And he didn't waste any time sharing his idea with the world because the very next morning, Brochures made a bold announcement. Here's journalist Sonia Anderson.
And the next day he comes out and holds a press conference at his community center. And he's wearing his clerical collar and he's holding a shotgun and he's flanked by two members of this group that he has formed pretty quickly. And he sort of pitches it as this militant defense group called the Lavender Panthers. Brochures drew heavily on the example of the Black Panthers.
the political organization started by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale just seven years prior and right across the bay in Oakland. The Black Panthers focused on Black power via armed resistance against discrimination. Rochers co-opted the name but changed the titular color to one related to the gay rights movement. He also adopted the same belief in armed resistance, quote, by any means necessary, unquote.
It was important for Brochures to reject the idea that gay people could defend themselves. He was adamant about changing the perception that gay people were easy targets, that they were in some way weak or wouldn't fight back. He wanted people to think twice before beating up anyone in his community. Brochures used slightly more colorful language to describe his mission statement. He said he wanted to scare, quote, all those young punks who've been beating up my faggots.
For his announcement speech, brochures may have drawn on the years he spent in the pews and at Bible college, studying the dramatic sermons of Southern preachers. He issued a powerful call to action, at one point saying, quote, We are now forced to act. The police look the other way when a gay is beaten. The beaten person is threatened as if he were the criminal, not the victim. We shall retaliate. Never again will we just sit by, end quote.
The mission, as he put it, was to kind of just protect his community and especially the youth and the queer people in the Tenderloin. So the plan was that they were going to patrol the streets and be on call to defend people with, you know,
armed resistance. I think he wanted, he really wanted to contradict the idea that gay people in general are, you know, quote pansies or quote sissies. And so to do that, he sort of took it to the other extreme. Rochers was very intentional about the way he presented himself. He cultivated a tough guy image that contrasted with his religious garb for maximum impact.
It was definitely like a sense of, it was like building a character. And it is really striking that just, you know, if you were to make like an action figure of Ray Brochures, this would be a man in a clerical collar, sometimes wearing prayer beads, holding a shotgun, saying the things that he's saying. Brochures sure wasn't shy about getting in front of the camera.
An issue of the now defunct Coast Magazine from 1974 features Brochures on the cover raising a shotgun over his head with a young man hiding behind him, arms wrapped around Brochures' legs. The picture sends a clear message of strength and power, of Brochures as a protector and as a fighter. He seemed like just the type of person, the type of personality that recognition was really important to him.
because he was so public with his efforts, because he had this newspaper. I mean, I think it, I don't know, I'm kind of speculating, but I think it just takes like a very specific personality to start some kind of vigilante effort. But as it turns out, all of the focus on appearing strong, like someone who shouldn't be messed with, might have been an effort to compensate for something.
Brochures was considered by some to be a bit of a coward. One afternoon in early 1974, a local bar owner came into Reverend Ray's office with a gripe about the Lavender Panthers. When Brochures defended his group, saying they were necessary to protect gay and transgender people, the bar owner laughed. He said, quote, unquote.
According to the reporter who was in the room, Brochure's only response was a sheepish grin. It seemed like, at least in this moment, he was in on the joke about himself. The fiery leader of a militant gay protection group was actually a bit of a softie. Brochure's may have embellished things a bit and used a shotgun as a prop to make himself look tougher, but the Lavender Panthers really did arm themselves and put up a fight when they felt it was called for.
Many of the Panthers knew how to hold their own, whether with formal training or just some street fighting. They even had a karate expert and a judo brown belt on hand to teach any potential Panthers who didn't already have combat training. The Lavender Panthers set up a hotline that people could call if they needed help. They also drove around the streets of the Tenderloin on weeknights on patrol for any trouble they could break up or to step in if any gay men were being threatened or harassed.
On the weekends, they doubled a car patrol and added a group on foot. And though Brochures made a big deal about waving a shotgun around during his announcement speech, he and his members didn't carry any firearms on their patrols. This was part of an arrangement that Reverend Ray and the Panthers had with their local police community relations officer. Because of this, the Panthers made do with billy clubs, sawed-off pool cues, chains, red spray paint, whatever non-lethal weapons they could find.
The Lavender Panthers would improvise with whatever they had to get the job done. It was one night in the fall of 1973 that Reverend Ray and the Panthers were driving on their standard nighttime patrol when they noticed four teenagers who were pushing around two gay men outside of a well-known gay bar called the Naked Grape. Brochures and the Lavender Panthers jumped out of their gray Volkswagen bus and immediately started towards the fight. Reverend Ray said, quote,
We didn't even ask questions. We just took out our pool cues and started flailing ass. End quote. Before long, the teens ran off. Brochures had successfully flipped the script on the attack that put him in the hospital. And the Panthers saved the two gay men who were being harassed and sent the teenage punks running scared. At least on a small scale, Reverend Ray and the Lavender Panthers were making a difference.
He carved out this place for himself in the Tenderloin. And that was where he could see himself being immediately effective with a smaller group of people. If you are patrolling the streets, if you are, at least in a couple of instances, actively saving one person, two people from a harmful encounter, then you're seeing your effect increase.
firsthand and you're seeing it on like a more visceral scale. So he probably had that experience and then, you know, was pretty much unable to transfer that to a larger movement. While Reverend Ray made the Lavender Panthers a force to be reckoned with in the media and on the streets, the group still wasn't very big and it wasn't active for very long. Here's Sonny Anderson comparing the Black and the Lavender Panthers.
It just as a comparison, the Black Panther Party was active for 16 years and it had 2,000 members at its peak. And the Lavender Panthers lasted less than a year and it had 21 members in October of 73. While it seemed like Reverend Ray's Panthers were going pretty strong in the fall of 1973, in just a couple months there would be another violent run-in with some local teens that would ultimately seal their fate.
Up next, we'll cover the demise of the Lavender Panthers and of Reverend Ray Broshears. Now, back to the story. On a Saturday night in late April of 1974, yet another group of teens was causing some trouble. This time, they were launching water balloons at a known gay hangout near the Castro. When the bartender came outside to try to get them to stop, they responded by jumping him instead.
And someone must have called the Lavender Panther hotline because pretty soon Reverend Ray and his crew were on the scene. It wasn't really their style to waste time asking questions, so they just dove right in, just got right into the fight part. The Lavender Panthers apparently did a number on these kids because their parents were not happy. In fact, they reached out to the police to complain about the vigilante mob that had beaten up their children.
And as you can imagine, beating up teenagers is not great PR. Or a good way to endear yourself to the local law enforcement. Essentially, the police gave Reverend Ray and the Lavender Panthers an ultimatum. Either they could disband, or they could all go to jail. And while it wasn't an easy decision, it was a clear one. So on May 22nd in 1974, Reverend Ray gave another press conference, saying,
This was less than a year after his first announcement that he was starting the Lavender Panthers. Now he was having to tell the group that the Lavender Panthers were winding down their operations. Even though he was trying to save face, it was very clearly a different kind of press conference. Things were not going his way, and this trend was only going to continue. Perhaps, in an effort to stay in the spotlight, brochures made a last-ditch effort to run for office.
In 1974, he launched a campaign in California's 5th congressional district, running with the Peace and Freedom Party. But he lost the election badly, and only collected 2% of the vote. After this loss, Brochures became sort of a hermit. He spent more and more time alone in his Tenderloin apartment, allegedly struggling with his mental health. Here's journalist Sonia Anderson.
In the latter part of his life, after the Panthers, people said that he was suffering a lot of trauma from earlier parts of his life, from the ostracization, even before San Francisco, and therefore dealt with a lot of mental health issues. All throughout his life, Brochure said to deal with rejection, with violence, and with living in fear that he could attack just for being in public.
And he was viciously attacked, and sexually assaulted, and brutally beaten. In her article, Anderson quotes Joseph Plaster, author of Kids on the Street, Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin. He said, quote, That kind of trauma can leave a mark on people and sometimes makes it difficult for them to interact with other people. Unquote.
Without the Lavender Panthers as a platform and a way to channel his righteous anger, brochures turned to other, less formal means. Here's Sonia again. He became really bitter.
about people who were succeeding in the larger gay rights movement, and especially in the Bay Area. And he had this newspaper called the Gay Crusader. If people refused to take out ads in the paper, he would sort of call them and harass them. He was suing other members of the gay community, like owners of local businesses. He was calling the police on gay bars. Brochure seemed to become a shadow of his former self.
No longer the man who posed for magazine covers waving a shotgun. No longer the man who took up the streets to beat up the toughs who were coming after him and his community. And his physical health faded along with his notoriety. In 1982, Brochure set a stroke at home in his apartment. He died when he was just 46 years old. It took authorities three days to find Brochure's remains, after some of his friends realized they hadn't heard from him in a while.
After Brochure's death, an obituary was published in the Bay Area Reporter. Its author, George Mendenhall, included comments from community figures who shared wildly different opinions on Brochure's and his legacy. Elliot Blackstone, a friend of Reverend Ray and the police liaison for the Tenderloin said, quote,
Partly, I think he was saying, I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right. He always wanted you to know he was there, unquote. A friend and fellow activist Randy Johnson said, quote, he meant well. He did all the right things in the wrong way. There are better ways of dealing with people you do not like, unquote. Meanwhile, Ben Gardner, president of the Stonewall Democrats, said, quote, he did some good things, but the bad more than canceled him out.
I am glad he is dead. It is safer now." Brochers left a complicated legacy in his wake. While some people praised the work he did, there were others, like Gardner, who were eager to minimize his impact on the gay community and to see his name fade into obscurity. And, for the most part, they got their wish. Not many have heard about Reverend Ray Brochers or the Lavender Panthers.
Compare that to the legacy of, say, Harvey Milk, a contemporary of brochures and the first openly gay affected official in California. Milk had a movie made about his life starring Sean Penn. He also had an airport terminal named after him and a place in the history books. Sonny Anderson spoke to us about this dynamic. One of the historians that I talked to actually...
called Harvey Milk the direct foil of Ray Brochures, and Harvey Milk being the first openly gay man to be elected to public office, and Brochures being this figure who was largely shunted to the sidelines in the Tenderloin. Harvey Milk sort of represented the Castro in that he was really embraced by the gay community that was
very sort of, I guess for lack of a better word, like civil and pacifist in their type of activism. The dichotomy of a pacifistic approach to civil rights versus a more militant one kind of feels reminiscent of Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr.,
Both men advocated for civil rights for Black people, but they went about it in very different ways and had very different responses. Like Malcolm X, Brochure's was the radical one, the one on the fringe, the one that people in the more mainstream movement felt was working against their goals. But maybe when it comes to motivating people to acknowledge the rights of the marginalized, you need the stick and not just the carrot.
Historian Jim Van Buskirk shared his perspective. He's controversial. I mean, I'm sure some people would embrace him and others absolutely reject him. I think mostly he's largely unknown and dismissed.
But I think he is an important piece in the timeline of queer leadership, queer activism. So not any one individual is responsible, but I think they all build on each other's accomplishments. So who's to say that without Ray Brochure's
Harvey Milk would not have accomplished what he did. So it's kind of interesting who gets embraced. Love him or hate him, there's no denying that Reverend Raymond Brochures risked life and limb on the front lines of the gay rights movement. He wasn't content to just sit back and wait for someone else to fight his battles. And this made him the ultimate vigilante.
Thank you for tuning in to Vigilante. We'll be back next week with a new story about people taking justice into their own hands. For more information on this rampage, among the many sources we used, we found Sonja Anderson's article in the Smithsonian Magazine very helpful, along with Jim Van Buskirk's book, Gay by the Bay, A History of Queer Culture in the San Francisco Bay Area. Until next time.
