C. John Knoebel papers

For over 45 years, Knoebel made significant contributions to LGBT history, first as a pioneer gay activist in New York City from 1969 to 1976 and then during his 33-year career as a senior executive with the publishers of the national gay and lesbian newsmagazine, The Advocate, OUT, and other LGBT magazines from 1979 to 2012.

Born in Waukesha, Wisconsin in October 1947, Knoebel attended the University of Wisconsin/Madison when that campus was a nationally-recognized hotbed of anti-Vietnam war protests. After graduating in June 1969, he moved to New York City to attend graduate school in comparative literature at New York University.

As a young gay man in New York during the politically charged post-Stonewall era, Knoebel quickly became an early member of New York’s pioneering Gay Liberation Front. From November 1969 onwards, Knoebel participated in many GLF protest demonstrations as well as the first Gay Pride March in June 1970. As a member of the GLF 95th Street Gay Men’s Living Collective from June 1970 through January 1971, Knoebel worked with this close-knit housing commune on many GLF projects, helped form numerous gay men’s consciousness-raising groups and spoke at colleges and other venues with the GLF speaker’s bureau. The collective also helped to organize the August 1970 Times Square demonstration that ended with several days of riots in the Village, participated in the week-long protest occupation of NYU’s Weinstein Hall, and helped to establish GLF’s first community center on West 3rd Street.

Along with many other GLF groups from around the county, the 95th Street Collective also attended both sessions of the 1970 Black Panther’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Conventions in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Knoebel was one of three GLF members who met with Huey Newton following the release of his important essay, “A Letter to Revolutionary Brothers and Sister about the Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements,” which is considered the first pro-gay, pro-woman proclamation to come out of the radical black civil rights movement.

As a member of the cells, “Femmes against Sexism” and “Gay Male Group,” Knoebel advocated a close affinity between gay liberation and radical feminism. He subsequently joined Steven Dansky and Kenneth Pitchford in founding the Effeminists, a group of gay men who opposed sexism, and co-authored the group's influential statement of purpose, “The Effeminist Manifesto” which has been widely reprinted. The group published its own magazine, Double F: a Magazine of Effeminism, from 1972 to 1976 which gave voice to the group’s often controversial politics about gay men in support of feminism.

During this period, Knoebel had worked in magazine circulation and marketing jobs for a succession of small New York publishing companies. Moving to San Francisco in 1978, Knoebel was at work in the city at another publishing job on the day that Harvey Milk was assassinated and he attended numerous marches and protests that followed.

In 1979, Knoebel was hired as marketing director of The Advocate by its high-profile publisher, David Goodstein, and tasked with expanding the magazine’s fledgling 7,000 member subscriber base. Starting from scratch, Knoebel wrote and mailed The Advocate’s first national direct mail campaigns. For many LGBT Americans, their first experience of receiving a piece of gay-oriented direct mail was from ones that Knoebel mailed for The Advocate. Within the next decade, subscribers increased to over 70,000. In his eventual 30+ years with the publishing firm, Knoebel produced and sent out over fifty million pieces of direct mail promoting the firm’s gay magazines, books, mail order catalogs and other products.

In 1984, Knoebel started a new gay men’s erotic-focused magazine line for the company, including Men, Freshmen and Male Pictorial magazines and served as their publisher for several years. These titles proved to be an important profit source for the company and supported the money-losing Advocate during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic. After David Goodstein’s death, Knoebel served as the president and was part-owner of The Advocate from 1987 to 1992.

Following another ownership change, Knoebel returned to New York continuing with The Advocate as VP Consumer Marketing and was instrumental in The Advocate’s purchase of its New York-based rival, OUT magazine. Knoebel also served as president of The Advocate’s subsidiary, Triangle Marketing Services (TMS), a New York-based mailing list management and brokerage firm that worked with a wide range of LGBT business and non-profit organizations in their direct mail efforts and helped raise sizeable money for many clients including major AIDS charities, as well as LGBT arts and political action groups. Knoebel ended his long career with The Advocate in 2012 after 33 years and six-ownership changes.

Knoebel’s writings from the GLF era appeared in GLF’s newspaper, Come Out!, and in early gay liberation anthologies, including “Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation” edited by Karla Jay and Allen Young. Over the years, Knoebel has given many interviews and spoken on numerous panels concerned with gay history and politics. See: http://stonewallrebels.wordpress.com/2009/07/02/40-years-after-stonewall-part-3-john-knoebel

Post Advocate, Knoebel continued to help document gay history as an editor of Christopher Street Press, an e-Book publishing venture founded in 2011 by Steven Dansky to preserve and re-issue important LGBT historical documents from the early gay liberation movement. Among Christopher Street Press’s first publications were “Hot August Night/1970, The Forgotten LGBT Riot,” and “The Come Out! Reader,” a facsimile edition of all of the issues of GLF’s pioneering newspaper, Come Out! , which Knoebel co-edited.

In 2013, Knoebel and Dansky partnered again to found a new project, OUTSpoken: Oral History from LGBTQ Pioneers. Initially focused on preserving the stories of the pioneers who gave birth to the modern LGBTQ movement in the decade following the 1969 New York City Stonewall Rebellion, OUTSpoken has now collected many dozens of important first-person LGBT oral histories posted on its dedicated website: www.outspoken.org

A life-long choral singer, Knoebel was a member of LGBT choruses in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York from 1980 through 2012 singing first tenor. He now lives in Palm Springs, California with Ira Helf, his partner since 1977 whom he married in 2013.