The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance was the organization of lesbian and gay mental health workers at The Tenderloin Clinic in downtown San Francisco that lobbied to get the Gay Mental Health Task Force established.
The acronym stood for Dykes and Faggots Organized to Defeat Institutionalized Liberalism. We obviously loved the reference to the flower, daffodil. We were a group of slightly wiser and older flower children, a daffodil alliance indeed.
Gay mental health workers complained that we were hired for a "gay-specific clinic" but then were given so many chronic psychiatric cases we didn't have time to see the gay clients. So "institutionalized liberalism" meant the institution would claim to be gay-sensitive, but in fact didn't give a hoot about gay people's real issues.
(Ah, where's any kind of liberalism today?)
Part of the story of the DAFODIL Alliance was that its first action was a march/demonstration that started at the Tenderloin Mental Health Clinic in the old YMCA building on Golden Gate Street off Market and marched to City Hall and then to the offices of the community mental health services that funded our agency. We got a Lesbian Brass Marching Band to lead the demonstration.
It attracted so much attention that a HUGE crowd formed and followed us down the street. When this throng arrived at the mental health offices the openly gay but professionally discreet Director, Dr. Bill Goldman, climbed out and stood on a balcony outside his office window and agreed to give us everything we wanted. (Which was $60,000 for our clinic and a job in the Health Dept for a black lesbian mother named Pat Norman who was then working as a paraprofessional at the City's mental health unit called The Center for Special Problems--who has since become a major S.F. politician and social servant.)
Dr. Goldman also set up a Gay Mental Task Force to study and make recommendations for implementation of gay sensitive policies in the City's mental health services. The Task Force recommendations resulted in the adoption of a Gay Client's Bill of Rights, guaranteeing access to gay or gay-sensitive health care providers--a notion that, subsequently, had major effects in AIDS-related services.
For another two years, DAFODIL "oversaw" the implementation of the gay mental health task force recommendations. The irony of it all was that after that first demonstration, DAFODIL literally fell apart (we were all so P.C. we couldn't stand each other), but four of us kept meeting and sending official sounding letters. So by giving the illusion we were some sort of large and powerful group, we influenced city government significantly, but there were really only four people: two dykes and two faggots.
Mervyn Silverman who later became director of AmFAR and buddies with Liz Taylor replaced Goldman as supervisor of community mental health soon after his predecessor gave us all our demands. So it was mainly Silverman we pulled the wool over the eyes of.
But with good benefits all around!
The "backstory" --from Toby Johnson's perspective--of how The Tenderloin Clinic and San Francisco's gays-for-gays policy evolved out of early gay liberation activism.
One of the major characters in The D.A.F.O.D.I.L. Alliance was S.F. lesbian psychotherapist Phern Hunt. Phern has a blog at huntkassoff.blogspot.com
Phern comments about D.A.F.O.D.I.L., "But the most important point was made through Dafodil, and that is that out gay therapists, heretofore, only held their positions as individuals... what we demanded was gay-identified mental health services... and of course we won. Dafodil was like a gay therapists union in those days."
The original members of D.A.F.O.D.I.L. were: Ricki Boden, Phern Hunt, JoAnn Lovejoy, Toby Johnson, Rachel Wahba, Karin Wandrei, Becky Sharp, Reuven Closter, Daniel Ostrow, Nancy Feinstein, Karen Cagan, Maggie Hochfelder, Marge, Loon, Taj Tellalian, Russ Zellers, Larry Goldfarb, Sue Saperstein, Joanie Becker, Jeff Moulton. (back)
