Gay Peoples Union (GPU)

The Gay Peoples Union (GPU) was founded in Milwaukee in 1971 as a social-service and educational organization dedicated to the needs of gay and lesbian people and to teaching the wider community about their lives. It became one of Wisconsin’s earliest durable LGBTQ organizations, combining counseling referrals, political advocacy, public education, and a sense of community that earlier informal networks could not always sustain.

GPU’s newspaper, GPU News, carried local and national reporting, opinion, and resource listings that remain a primary research trail for Wisconsin queer history in the 1970s. The organization hosted events, staffed public booths, and helped normalize LGBTQ civic presence in Milwaukee years before statewide nondiscrimination law. GPU’s intensity of activity has varied over the decades, but its early work still anchors many of the people, bars, and campaigns documented in this archive.

See related entries for publications, activists, and venues that intersected with GPU’s orbit, and read the Milwaukee LGBTQ history primer for broader context.