Stonewall (40 page)

When attacked by a GAA man—who, in trying to liberate himself from traditional ridicule about being a surrogate woman, could be impatiently moralistic about cross-dressing “stereotypes”—Sylvia
would
attack back; she would remind him how tough you had to be to survive as a street queen, how you had to fight, cheat, and steal to get from one day to the next. Most impressive of all to Jim was that Sylvia never stole from or physically attacked anyone within the movement; she treated people in GAA and GLF as comrades, exempt from the treacheries of the street. Jim may have been romanticizing what
he chose to call Sylvia's “lumpen morality,” but if so, not by much. Like so many others in the movement, Sylvia felt she had found a home. And she would defend it with ferocious loyalty.

JIM

J
im was himself strongly committed to a movement that welcomed diversity. He had long identified with countercultural hippies and Third World revolutionaries, and he believed passionately in the need for multi-issue—not simply gay—politics. He also had an impressive track record of putting his beliefs into practice, of “making revolution in our lifetime” (as the New Left liked to put it). And so, during 1969–1970, he went to live for a time in the GLF Seventeenth Street commune—three white and two black men—out of which came a collective that traveled around the country trying to organize Gay Liberation Fronts.
⁴⁸

Their first stop was Minnesota, where one of their group, Richard, invited them to stay on his family farm. Having grown up there, Richard knew how to handle a gun and he offered to teach the others. To heighten the experience, they got high on LSD before trooping off to the nearby woods to shoot at cans and trees and bull's-eyes. The acid didn't fully kick in until they had returned to the farm, where Richard's mother had prepared a huge meal for them. As Jim, a vegetarian, later described it, “there was all this red meat which she had cooked for us. And I'm tripping my brains out and I'm seeing this meat looming on the table and talking to me and crying. And also we're trying not to let his parents know that we're gay, and not to let his parents know that we're on acid. And I'm taking this meat, putting it into my mouth, chewing it a little bit, taking a napkin and surreptitiously spitting into it, and holding it under the table while in my hand the meat is crying out.”

Following that epiphany, the group went south for another. The two black men in their commune had lived (just like Sylvia, whom they knew) as transvestite hookers, and (again like Sylvia) were not afraid to speak their minds to whites, not afraid to express their anger at
and
their attraction to the oppressor. A great deal of consciousnessraising—always an emblematic activity for GLFers—got done on that trip south; and also a fair amount of organizational work. “A correct
idea,” Jim believed, “catches the imagination of people everywhere,” and “even in a small town in Alabama, we would find people who wanted what we had. And it wasn't about one supergroup in New York leading everybody else; it was about forming a network together, dealing with the needs of the local communities.”

In late 1969, Jim also helped organize the first Venceremos Brigade, a group of some two hundred volunteers who went to Cuba by way of Mexico—in open defiance of a State Department ban on travel to Cuba—to cut sugar cane in support of Castro's revolution. Jim fully intended to go with the Brigade and, expecting to be in Cuba for two months, went ahead and sublet his apartment. But then he was told that he had not been accepted. Why? Because it was felt that his chief purpose in going to Cuba would be to organize gays and lesbians there, and that would not sit well with the revolutionary comrades. Furious that straight radicals were once again refusing to take his own cause (and his nature) seriously, Jim tried arguing against the decision. He pointed out that he didn't speak Spanish and added, with acid sarcasm, that it would be exceedingly difficult to organize Cuban gays on the basis of blow jobs alone. But the decision held.

Bitter at being rejected, and with no apartment to return to, Jim took his savings (and his sublet money), bought himself a VW van, and drove down to Texas to visit his friend Kit Carson, a screenwriter, and to attend a gay liberation conference in Austin. On the way back, he ran into some serious trouble. Dressed in black leather pants, a cowboy hat, and a brightly colored shirt, and with his long blond hair flowing loosely down his back, he was “a rather startling sight.” So, at least, thought the police officers who stopped him. It seemed his license plates were out of date, and he had failed to get a new sticker. But that was the least of it: After searching his van, the police charged him with possession of heroin and dynamite.

Neither was in the van, but a hefty collection of New Left, Black Panther, and gay liberation literature was—and Jim was arrested and put in the Dallas County jail. He managed to get a call out to Kit Carson, who arranged for a lawyer and worked to get Jim released on bail. It took three months. In the interim, Jim sent a letter to his friend Howard Smith, the
Village Voice
columnist, asking him to raise some money for him, and Smith put a notice in the
Voice
announcing the Jim Fouratt Defense Fund.

The three-month wait was hellish. On first arriving in the Dallas jail, Jim was paraded in front of the holding tanks while a loudspeaker blared, “Who wants her? Who wants her?” He was then given a
uniform and put in an overcrowded cell. Remarkably, he was not raped. As he remembers it—though his actor's attraction to dramatic emphasis sometimes heightens that memory—he had read enough books about jail to come up with a successful strategy for avoiding rape. When another prisoner threatened him with a knife, Jim, though “scared to death,” grabbed the man's wrist—and the cell broke up with laughter: The “pussy” had proven himself. But just to be sure, Jim later found a protector. Not a “husband,” but a friend—“a huge, tough, redneck hippie,” arrested for drug smuggling, who took Jim under his wing when he found out he was in jail for political reasons.

Possibly the worst moment came with the arrival of another gay man, a porn-theater projectionist in his forties. He acted—so Jim saw it—“flamboyantly, as if arriving in heaven,” and, with no complaint on his part, “proceeded to get fucked by anybody who wanted to fuck him.” Jim felt he should reach out to the man, “felt a comradeship on some level, even though really disgusted by his behavior”; but he didn't know how to do it without blowing his own cover. In the end he did nothing, preferring to believe that the man “was having a great time.”

Kit Carson's lawyer finally got the charges against Jim reduced to possession of marijuana—though Jim rarely smoked pot and swears none was in the car. To pay the legal fees and have money to eventually get back to New York, Jim intended to sell his car. But he emerged from jail to discover that—in accordance with Texas law, which allowed the property of a drug dealer to be auctioned off—his car had been sold for fifty dollars to a police officer's wife. And there was nothing he could do about it; if he had gotten the car on credit, instead of paying cash for it, he could have relied on the finance company to contest the seizure.

Out on bail, Jim was restricted to the Fort Worth area and, as he tells it, an interlude of surreal luxury followed. Jim Meeker, a friend of Carson's and a well-known art patron, took him under his wing. He stayed at Meeker's Fort Worth mansion and did his bit as “the interesting hippie kid from New York” to entertain the likes of Kris Kristofferson and Samantha Eggar at dinner parties; as Jim put it years later, “it was more like my Warhol than my gay liberation phase.”

After Jim went back into court, he was allowed to shift his residence to Dallas, where he lived with June Josie, a friend of Meeker's. She was “a Tennessee Williams lady,” complete with flaming red hair, five Cadillac convertibles (to match her changing outfits), and a dead
gay husband who had been killed by her father when he found him in bed with another man—all of which appealed hugely to Jim's penchant for dramatic amplitude. For further amplitude still, he helped form the Dallas Purple Star Tribe collective, headquartered in Gene Leggett's house. Leggett was a pompous, charming Methodist minister who had left his wife and three children and founded a mission for homosexuals, drug addicts, and the homeless. Through him, Jim managed to get connected as well to the Dallas Theater Center, for which he quickly developed a New York actor's predictable disdain.
⁴⁹

Put on four years' probation at a third court hearing and finally allowed to leave Texas, Jim was in short order rearrested on his way to a New Left meeting. His probation officer, it turned out, had sent word ahead of his “gay liberationist” activities and, since homosexuality was against the law in Texas, he was picked up by marshals and once again remanded to jail. All that was bad enough—he was soon released again—but what was worse, what he could
not
shake and what bothered him infinitely more than his assorted jail stays, were the rumors he began to hear that he was himself a federal agent.

Those rumors pursued him for the next twenty years, and have persisted down to the present day. From the outside, Jim's glamorous life (or rather, his multiple lives)—his travels, his expensive wardrobe, his fancy friends—invited both envious speculation and, among political purists, considerable disapproval. How did a self-declared radical become personal assistant to Clive Davis, president of CBS? What was a Yippie leader doing consorting with the likes of Andy Warhol? How could someone who never seemed to have much money or, until the CBS job, any visible means of support, manage to fly off, at the drop of a hat, for mysterious meetings in distant parts?

If Jim had not been so articulate and opinionated for so long, had not so persistently engaged during political meetings in “disruptive shenanigans” (as one GAA member put it), had not sometimes acted holier(more Left)-than-thou (jumping over the subway turnstile, he once mocked an activist friend for paying his token, for “playing the capitalist game”)—had he not done and been all these things, Jim might have made fewer enemies and created less resentment. But his detractors were—and remain—legion, and they proved determined to believe the worst about him.

In Jim's view, the rumors of his FBI/CIA connections arose when they did—in the period immediately following the November 1969 ERCHO meeting—because he had deeply offended many of the old-line
homophile leaders there. Several of them had noisily speculated about his being a provocateur of one kind or another; in Jim's scenario, Foster Gunnison became so convinced that he was a Communist, that he actually reported Jim to the FBI—which Foster, however, denies.

It was generally accepted in both GLF and GAA that one or several undercover agents
had
infiltrated the organizations. And those suspicions were well founded. The FBI had been attending gay political meetings in New York since the heyday of Mattachine, and would continue to cover movement events right through the seventies (“Wendy Wonderful,” for example, was drummed out of the feminist
RAT
collective in 1970 for being an agent—though Karla, for one, was never convinced of Wendy's guilt). The FBI didn't always get their facts right: Initially they rendered “gay” as “gaye,” and “Alternate U.” as “Ultimate You”; they defined the Transvestites as “a militant group of women,” and characterized the GLF Marxist study group, Red Butterfly, as prototypically anarchist (they “do not recognize authority of any kind”). But usually the FBI got it right, and no wonder, since the Bureau could rely (as one of its agent reports puts it) on “highly placed, sensitive source[s]” serving as informers from within the gay movement. Those sources have never been identified.
⁵⁰

Jim thinks it's possible that the FBI might itself have deliberately planted the false rumor that he was one of them in order to destroy his credibility within the New Left—just as it had done earlier in the case of the Communist party leader Bill Albertson. Years before, the FBI had floated the false rumor that Albertson was one of its agents; he had been expelled from the party—and broken in spirit. Only after his premature death was it revealed that the FBI had wholly invented the purported evidence of Albertson's connection to them.
⁵¹

Jim wanted more immediate vindication and, as the rumors mounted, he finally demanded a formal hearing at GAA, where an ex-lover, Marty Robinson, had, in Jim's view, been leading the effort to discredit him. Jim relished the prospect of rising dramatically to his own defense, and at the GAA gathering he did eloquently represent himself, telling the assembled group how, as an actor and a hippie, he had learned to live resourcefully, with little money, and how angry and deeply hurt he was at the false accusation that he was a paid FBI informant. The proceeding may have been exhilarating theater, but Jim also found it “incredibly painful.” In the upshot, the GAA meeting did exonerate him of all charges. That was a sweet victory indeed, but as it turned out, an incomplete one. Not even a
formal vote in GAA proved capable of laying the rumors permanently to rest.

KARLA

I
n January 1970, the feminist staff members of the countercultural paper
RAT
, dissatified with the lack of space devoted to women's issues, physically seized the Fourteenth Street premises and sent out a call to other feminists to join them. Karla Jay was one of those who responded. She had remained a committed feminist after leaving Red-stockings, and had recently begun to write. To her multiple other activities, she now added attendance at
RAT
editorial meetings and writing up movement-oriented material for publication in it.

One of her major efforts was a participant-observer piece about the March 1970 occupation of the
Ladies' Home Journal
. To Karla, that action was “the most successful ever done in the early women's movement”—though not many other feminists agreed with her estimate.