Stonewall (36 page)

The organizers asked Randy Wicker to speak at the meeting in his capacity as a “premature” gay militant. Bounding to the mike in an American flag shirt and striped blue-and-white bell-bottoms, he looked for all the world like the gay equivalent of a militant Yippie. But what he said to the packed crowd of long-haired, mustachioed, hip young men and blue-jeaned, tie-dyed young women, was in a far different vein. He told them that he was appalled at what had happened at Stonewall, that “rocks through windows don't open doors,”
that the way to find public acceptance was not to “behave disorderly” in the streets.

But he had barely begun his windup when a heterosexual customer—apparently realizing for the first time that the Electric Circus had inexplicably been overrun by queers—began swinging wildly at anyone within reach, yelling “Faggots! Goddamn faggots!” He was subdued long enough for Wicker to say a few more words and for Dick Leitsch to get up and ask for donations from homosexuals to help replant the trees recently uprooted in a Queens public park by vigilantes trying to discourage gay cruising there. But fighting soon erupted again, and the meeting—along with the experiment in gay-straight nightlife integration—was adjourned.
³

Dick Leitsch had no intention of ceding the foreground either to straight rowdies or to gay lefties. He blamed Craig above all others (as perhaps only an ex-lover can) for the rioting at Stonewall, and yet he wanted to harness the youthful energies of the emergent gay radicals to Mattachine's own cart. When a twenty-eight-year-old New Left gay man named Michael Brown came to see him one day, Leitsch hit upon what he felt was the ideal plan. Brown was one of those numerous radicals who were gay but had remained in the closet while working in left-wing organizations. Once a staff member in Hubert Humphrey's 1968 presidential campaign, Brown now considered himself countercultural and socialist in sympathies.
⁴

He told Leitsch that the events at Stonewall had opened up the opportunity for an alliance between gays, blacks, and antiwar activists that could work to restructure American society. Leitsch told him that such expectations were unrealistic, that the maintenance of good relations—as pioneered and exemplified by Mattachine—between the homosexual community and the powers-that-be had to take priority above all other considerations. As an individual, Leitsch argued, he might feel sympathy for, say, the Black Panthers, but any overt association with them could “endanger the liaisons we have made with civil-rights organizations who disagree” with the Panthers' philosophy. In the privacy of a letter, Leitsch was blunter still: “Panthers … are none of our damned business, as homosexuals.”
⁵

But as a compromise to accommodate the young gay radicals, Leitsch set up the Mattachine Action Committee and offered Michael Brown the job of heading it. Brown warily accepted, and for a brief period did try to work within the Mattachine traces. He brought in some of his activist friends, including “Stephen Donaldson” (Bob Martin) and Martha Shelley (née Altman; she had legally changed her
last name to Shelley, the nickname her first lover had given her because of the romantic poetry she wrote). Donaldson had been one of the founders in 1967 of the Student Homophile League at Columbia University and was currently involved in organizing a youth caucus bent on radicalizing NACHO—Foster Gunnison's chief base of operations—at its forthcoming August meeting.
⁶

Martha Shelley had had an affair with Donaldson, had already, at age twenty-six, been president for a brief period (she decided she wasn't good at organizational work) of New York Daughters of Bilitis, and on the second night of rioting at Stonewall had stumbled on the uproar while giving two women from Boston DOB a tour of the Village. Shelley had also taken part in the antiwar protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, had represented DOB at NACHO conferences, and had just come back from participating in the Annual Reminder in Philadelphia on July 4 (where the injunction to wear a skirt and be “ladylike” had seemed to her annoying and absurd).
⁷

The Mattachine Action Committee sponsored two open meetings to discuss the implications of the Stonewall riots. The first, on July 9 at Freedom House at 20 West Fortieth Street, where Mattachine held its monthly lecture series, was attended by some 125 people (as well as by two police informers). Leitsch chaired the meeting, made a few introductory remarks acknowledging “the importance” of the riots, and then opened up the floor for general discussion. It proved much too tame for Brown and his friends, focusing as it did on future plans for a silent vigil in Washington Square Park—
with
the permission of the proper authorities.
⁸

In the interim before the second meeting, Brown, Shelley, Jim Fouratt, and others posted notices for a demonstration in support of the Black Panther party members currently jailed in the Women's House of Detention (the huge stone prison in the heart of the West Village). Leitsch had been insistent that Mattachine
not
be associated with any action that might prove offensive to the authorities, so in order to be able to list a sponsor for the demonstration, Brown and his friends came up—in what Jim remembers as “a spontaneous eruption”—with the name Gay Liberation Front, as a way of paying homage to the liberation struggles in Algeria and Vietnam.
⁹

At the Mattachine Action Committee's second meeting, Leitsch spoke against the planned rally at the Women's House of Detention, arguing instead for his own earlier suggestion of a silent vigil in Washington Square to protest continuing police harassment. Still keyed up
from his earlier confrontation with Leitsch at the Mattachine gathering of June 29, Jim was in no mood for further counsels of moderation. He again jumped to his feet, heatedly insisted that gays ought to stop asking and start demanding, and challenged Leitsch to “get with the revolution.” But Leitsch was unmoved, and young radicals like Jim, Michael Brown, and Martha Shelley realized that it was time to give up on Mattachine and put their energies into the nascent Gay Liberation Front.
¹⁰

Leitsch's concern with continuing police harassment may have been narrowly conceived, but was nonetheless warranted. In the aftermath of the Stonewall riots, the police had instituted a widespread, sometimes savage crackdown. Sascha L., who had once worked briefly at Stonewall and was now on the door at the Washington Square bar, remembers walking by the Tele-Star bar about a week after the riots and telling Ed Murphy, who had gone to work there, about rumors of a pending series of raids. Murphy told him not to worry; those rumors were always in the air (perhaps secretly confident that if they had any real substance, his police buddies would tip him off in advance).
¹¹

Sascha shrugged and went off to work at Washington Square—not failing, on his way inside the bar, to smile coquettishly at the handsome Con Edison workers who had been digging up the street all week. (On one recent hot day, he had even jokingly plopped on the lap of another employee seated in a chair out front, and nervily waved to the Con Ed boys.)

Early that same evening, with no more than a dozen customers on the premises, Sascha spotted some forty men dressed in suits and ties coming down Third Street toward the Washington Square bar. He dashed back inside to warn the others; they barely had time to pick up the liquor and throw it into the yard behind the bar when the federal agents marched in. Brisk and businesslike, the feds used a bullhorn to tell the customers that they would all be let go, that no one would be harmed, that they were interested only in arresting employees of the bar. They then read a list of the employees' names and brandished photographs—taken, Sascha later learned, by those cute “Con Edison” boys working in the street.

A queen named Michelle saved Sascha by hugging him close and yelling at the cops, “No one—
no one!
—is going to separate me and my husband! My husband
has
to come with me!” When a cop asked Sascha his name, he gave a false one, and since he had quickly disposed of his trademark cap and eyeglasses, he got through the gauntlet
without being recognized as the campy employee who had waved seductively at the Con Edison crew. Sascha hid out for the weekend and then on Monday decided to turn himself in, figuring he had to be able to work and couldn't spend his life hiding. Enid Gerling, the well-paid specialist in “springing” entrapped gay men, took Sascha's case.

When he arrived in court, he ran smack into Ed Murphy, who was covered with cuts and welts; he had bandages all over his face, his arm was fractured, and he seemed barely able to walk. It turned out Murphy had refused to let the cops into Tele-Star and they had beaten him up badly—at the instigation, Sascha later heard, of Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine, the same officer who had led the raid against Stonewall. In jail, Murphy was subsequently (so he later told Sascha) raped by a black man—again, perhaps, at the behest of the police, who had heard that he “liked niggers” and that he hung out with and protected black teenagers. When Murphy was released, he forswore (again, according to Sascha) any further cooperation with the police, and never again gave them tips or did their bidding.
¹²

YVONNE, KARLA

Y
vonne had been upstate at the country house she shared in Rowe, Massachusetts, when the events at Stonewall began to unfold, and it was two days before she had any news of the rioting. Her initial reaction was a mix of exhilaration and fear. “Uh-oh,” she thought, “here comes the Gestapo, beating people up. And winning. Being able to just crush people …” Her style, as always, was to stay aloof, to warily reconnoiter just a little longer—not primarily out of fear of the police, but from uncertainty about whether and where, in the ranks of the protesters, a hard-drinking black lesbian would find a genuine welcome.

Karla had been initially disdainful of the “little penny-ante thing” going on at Stonewall; to her it was just another all-male squabble with the prize nothing more than the right to lead an unhampered bar life—a life she scorned. But then she got wind of the effort afoot to form a Gay Liberation Front—men
and
women working together to produce broad social change. Now that
did
interest her. When she heard that a series of open meetings were scheduled for late July at
Alternate U.—with which she was already familiar from her radical-feminist work—she decided to attend.

What she found were a number of suddenly visible young gays and lesbians who, like herself, had had experience in prior radical struggles. Martha Shelley, Jim Fouratt, and Michael Brown had marched for black rights and against the Vietnam War; Susan “Silverwoman” had been active in various feminist groups; Lois Hart had been involved with Timothy Leary and was a follower of the mystic Meher Baba; Ron Ballard was an avowed Marxist, John O'Brien a sometime member of the Young Socialist Alliance, and Pete Wilson an adherent of the League for Sexual Freedom. Though they had come out for all these causes, few of these radical gays had revealed their sexuality to their co-activists.
¹³

Jim Fouratt, it is true, had made his way in the political left without ever explicitly
denying
that he was a gay man. But he had never explicitly affirmed it, either; and so the possibility could be ignored or disbelieved. And Jim, if anything, had gained his left-wing credentials
less
anonymously than most radical young gays, who had often made a point of dating the opposite gender and had steered carefully clear of tipping their actual sexual preference. They had had little choice—that is, if they wanted to join forces with others who shared their passionate concern for social change. The straight men who dominated the antiwar and black civil rights struggles had persistently condescended to heterosexual women, treating them essentially as bed partners or coffee-makers. Gay men and lesbians had been beyond the pale.

When these young gay and lesbian radicals now flocked to join the Gay Liberation Front, they brought with them a rich set of insights from their prior involvements: from the black civil rights movement came an awareness of the inequities of American life; from the women's movement, consciousness of sexism and the profoundly important idea that the personal is the political, that one's experience
mattered;
from the antiwar struggle, the revelation that the government operated as a bulwark of conformity and privilege; from the countercultural revolution, the injunction to reject all received authority, to “do it now, to be what you want to be.” They had learned much in making everybody else's revolution; now they would apply that learning to making their own.

Karla responded to the Gay Liberation Front with immediate enthusiasm. The message articulated in the first issue of
Come Out!
, the GLF paper, that “we are going to transform the society at large
through the open realization of our own consciousness,” was something she had learned in her Redstockings group—but this time around, the message was devoid of any overtones of homophobia. Consciousness-raising was, from nearly the beginning, a central feature of GLF, and Karla, familiar with the process, joined with Lois Hart and others in explaining—for not everyone in GLF had been a left-wing activist—that the process of self-realization that would emerge from speaking freely and honestly to other gays in the protected atmosphere of a consciousness-raising session would ramify outward, that speaking truth would end by cleansing and reconstituting the society at large.

Karla felt “like the religious fanatic who constantly searches for just the ‘right' spiritual base—and is astounded to actually find it.” Redstockings had come close, but GLF seemed to have the same devotion to substantive social change, and without any attendant nervousness over lesbianism. The women who turned up for the early GLF meetings—only some half dozen in a sea of fifty men—were no more into butch or femme self-presentations (which Karla deplored) than had been the women in Redstockings; but Karla had never been a separatist, had never felt the need for women to struggle apart from men—and in GLF radical women and men seemed determined on struggling
together
.