Stonewall (42 page)

But though gender issues were real in GLF, Jim and Karla shared the view that the organization was honest in its determination to confront sexism
and
racism, that the consciousness-raising groups which were a GLF feature provided the mechanism for doing so, and that to dilute GLF's strength through separatism would be to weaken one of the few organizations willing to challenge the basic sexist and racist assumptions of American life. For both of them, unity was the key, keeping all disparate elements under one political umbrella.

But on the issue of allying with other oppressed minorities, Karla was more ambivalent than Jim, and though she believed a revolution was coming, she recoiled from any glib talk of armed struggle. She agreed completely with Jim that GAA was misguided in its emphasis on single-issue politics, but she also felt strongly that groups like the Panthers, whom Jim tended to champion uncritically, were uncertain allies. She deeply sympathized with the Panthers' militancy but worried about their blatant chauvinism; they may have been the “vanguard,” but they were “incredible pigs about women.” She thought the group's politics had to be supported, but resisted the wholehearted embrace endorsed by Jim and others. And she resisted, too, the call to get behind Fidel's revolution in Cuba, to excuse Cuban homophobia by citing their Catholic heritage—since politically, after all, they were “way ahead of the rest of us.” Karla wasn't buying it. She refused to
dissolve her conflicted feelings about the Panthers or the Cubans into
self
-denying apologetics.

As a Hispanic, Sylvia strongly identified with those righteous revolutionaries of the Third World, the Black Panthers and their Hispanic counterpart, the Young Lords. She marched occasionally with both groups, though often in a stoned-out state, and later, in 1971, she would attend the People's Revolutionary Convention, and would count her five-minute meeting with Panther leader Huey Newton among the highlights of her life. Though Sylvia concluded that GAA wasn't “radical enough,” she never left the organization, and her friend Bebe Scarpi always made sure that Sylvia's dues were paid up. But her primary allegiance, like Karla's and Jim's, came to center on GLF.

And it was primarily to GLF that she turned for help when her dream of creating a refuge for underage street queens began to stir. Sylvia was still only nineteen herself, yet she had begun to worry about “the youngsters,” the kids who started to hustle on the streets, as she had, at age ten or eleven and, within a few years, were dead from a stabbing or an overdose or were locked into dead-end lives. She wanted to somehow set up a place where these young queens not only could find emotional comfort but could maybe even learn enough skills to start another kind of life.

The first person she talked all this over with was her old street-hustling buddy, Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha always had a problem staying focused in conversation; she would wander, start off talking about one thing and end up miles away; people said that drugs had ruined her mind, that she was a permanent space cadet. But when Sylvia started talking to her about “getting a place” for the young sisters, Marsha's mind concentrated wonderfully. She was instantly excited, eager to help. Sylvia had decided that she would make Marsha president of any group they formed, but Marsha, wisely, wouldn't hear of it. “You stay on one thought when you speak,” she told Sylvia. “I go off in all directions. You'll be president. I'll be vice president.”

They quickly hit on a name for their as-yet-nonexistent group: Street Transvestites Actual Revolutionaries (STAR), then changed “Actual” to “Action.” Their first home was the back of a trailer truck seemingly abandoned in a Greenwich Village outdoor parking area; it was primitive, but a step up from sleeping in doorways, and Sylvia and Marsha were quickly able to gather together some two dozen young street transvestites. The ground rule in the trailer was that nobody
had
to go out and hustle her body, but that when they did,
they had to kick back a percentage to help keep “STAR House” going. Marsha and Sylvia took it upon themselves to hustle on a regular basis and to return to the truck each morning with breakfast food for everybody.

Rounding Christopher Street on the way back to the trailer at daybreak one morning, their arms loaded with groceries, Sylvia and Marsha stopped dead in their tracks. The trailer was moving! Apparently somebody had reclaimed it and was driving it off—not realizing that some twenty queens were asleep inside. As Sylvia and Marsha watched, dumbstruck, the young queens, apparently awakened by the start-up noise, started to jump out of the back of the truck. But was anyone still inside? “We're standing there like two
yentas,”
Sylvia later recalled. “I mean, we're talking about two crazy women: ‘Oh, my God, the kids, the kids! Oh Lord Jesus, please don't take the children!' Two crazy women, hysterical. And in full drag.” As it turned out, only one queen was still in the van. Stoned out on downers, she woke up several days later—on her way to California.

It was time for a new plan. Bubbles Rose Marie, one of the queens who had lived in the truck, airily suggested that she go talk to her “friend” Michael Umbers, a well-known Mafia figure in the Village. (The following year Umbers opened the gay after-hours club Christopher's End on the ground floor of the Christopher Street Hotel; still later, he employed Dick Leitsch as a bartender.) “He's got a building on Second Street,” Bubbles added casually. Sylvia and Marsha looked at each other and shrugged, as if to say, “Why not let the crazy bitch do it? If anything goes wrong, they'll kill
her.”
For a small amount of money up front, and a firm deadline on payments, Umbers let Bubbles have the building at 213 East Second Street. And why not? It was standing empty, little more than a shell.

Elated, Sylvia and Marsha sent all the queens out to panhandle and to “hustle their asses off” to raise the needed money, while they, Bambi Lamour (whom Sylvia had first met in jail at Rikers) and Andorra (“a heavyset, high-yaller black queen”) set about making the building livable. There was no electricity or plumbing, and not even the boiler worked; there they sat, “four queens that don't know shit about nothing, we're looking at the tools, we're looking at each other. We just started taking things apart, putting them back together, and the next thing we knew, the motherfucker was working!” Grateful that they hadn't blown each other sky-high, they celebrated by shooting up.

People in both GLF and GAA had promised Sylvia that they
would come by and help fix up STAR House. And she had gotten some of the gay teachers in GAA to swear they would turn the top floor of the building into a kind of school, teaching some of the illiterate young runaways how to read and write. But in fact few showed up, and only Bob Kohler of GLF came by with any regularity, helping them to paint, clean up the yard, and get some primitive plumbing installed. When Sylvia decided to throw a benefit dance for STAR House at Alternate U., GLF did front her enough money to buy beer and setups. But when she went to GAA and asked that she be allowed to rent their stereo equipment, she was turned down. Arthur Bell and a few others spoke out in favor of the rental, but the dominant view was that “when we started GAA, we hadn't a thing either.… We're not in the rental business.”
⁵⁷

The experience further embittered Sylvia toward GAA, but the benefit dance did come off in style. Sylvia and what she called her “STAR House Kids” decorated the hall with flashing Christmas bulbs and necklaces of spangled reflectors; and the costumes were extravagant—Bob Kohler appeared in a white T-shirt covered with thousands of beads and with an Indian sash draped across one hip. But Sylvia herself was not a pretty sight. Not having slept or washed for days, she settled for a simple outfit of pants and blouse and, giving off a decided odor and a lot of attitude, sat resolutely at the door collecting money. Shortly after midnight she stopped the gyrating dancers and gave a little speech: “This dance is for the people of the streets who are part of our gay community. Let's give them a better chance than I had when I came out. I don't know if any of you ever lived on the streets. Many transvestites who make up STAR do. We are asking you for money tonight. Winter is coming and we need money for clothes and rent. Please dig into your pockets and help STAR.…” Then some of the queens surprised Sylvia by presenting her with a huge bouquet of red roses. She wept buckets.
⁵⁸

The dance did bring in a fair amount of money, and STAR House seemed to have gotten a foothold. Sylvia started to cook big dinners at night, sternly telling “the children” that they “don't have to live off that candy shit.” And before everyone went out in the evening, she “worked with the saints.” Devoted from childhood to Santería, and convinced that St. Barbara was the patron saint of gay Hispanics, Sylvia set up an altar, complete with incense and candles, around which everyone would gather and “pay tribute” before they left the house.

Nobody was forced to participate, but Sylvia made it clear that
they would be better protected on the streets if they showed a little respect for the saints, and especially for St. Michael. To him, her prayer would be, “I know we're doing wrong, but we gotta survive, so please help us.” And she believed he did: “We
were
watched over—though Marsha came close to getting killed by tricks a number of times, and I looked down the barrel of many a gun and would say, ‘Shoot me. You'll be doin' me a favor. I won't have to pay no rent.' But my saints protected me.”

Then one day on Christopher Street, Sylvia found Mike Umbers blocking her path. He glowered at her and said he hadn't gotten rent money for three months and wanted the nine hundred bucks
now
. Sylvia raced home and confronted Bubbles, who had been handling the payments. Bubbles mumbled something about the cost of repairs, and Sylvia was about to light into her when Umbers himself showed up. He told Bubbles that unless he got his money, she was as good as dead. At that, Sylvia changed sides. If anything happened to Bubbles, she screamed at Umbers, she would go to the police and tell them she had heard Umbers threaten her.

“For chrissake,” she yelled, “it's only money! Don't kill somebody over it! The bitch fucked up. Fine. So kick her ass. But don't kill her. You can take her outside right now and I won't stop you. Or make the bitch get out on the corner.” “That bitch can't make no money,” Umbers grunted. “That bitch is fat.” “Well,” Sylvia shot back, “if you kill her, I'll be the first one to speak up.” Umbers told Sylvia she'd always been “a fucking bitch” and left.

The next thing Sylvia knew, Bubbles had skipped town (“like she always does when she gets in hot water”). Sylvia decided to make a last-ditch appeal to GAA for a loan, but her request was turned down on the grounds that it would be a dangerous precedent for GAA to get into the business of lending money. But if Sylvia wanted to, they added, she could leave a box at the front table soliciting donations. Desperate, Sylvia left the box, but the donations amounted to only a few dollars. She wasn't close to paying off what she owed Umbers.

And there were other problems. Bambi and Andorra had taken to beating each other up when they got high, and though they were soon kissing again, the dream of sisterhood was getting a little frayed. Then Marsha had a serious attack of “nerves.” Her fifth husband, Candy, who was heavily into drugs, got his head blown off right on Second Street and First Avenue when he made the mistake of trying to rob a plainclothesman. Sylvia went with Marsha to the funeral in New Jersey, but no sooner had they gotten back than Marsha's beloved
dog died. Marsha said she “couldn't hardly stand it,” two deaths in a row, and she had to consult a doctor for her “bad nerves.”
⁵⁹

Before things could get back on an even keel at STAR House, Mike Umbers evicted them. Apparently deciding against violence, he simply called the city marshals and had Sylvia and her brood put out on the street for nonpayment of rent. Knowing that they were “in no position to mess with Umbers,” Sylvia threw in the towel. But before she and her “kids” left STAR House, they destroyed all the work they had put into the place and threw the refrigerator out the back window. “That's the type of people we are: You fuck us over, we fuck you over right back.”

FOSTER, JIM, SYLVIA

F
oster was by temperament an optimist. In the early months of 1970, as ERCHO and NACHO faltered and the future of the old homophile movement seemed in doubt, Foster preferred to emphasize its ongoing activities and potential staying power. Yet simultaneously, this complex man was able, in some moods, not only to accept that the homophile movement might have had its day, but even to urge his old comrades to jettison the past and “get with it.” And Foster was impressively capable of following his own advice: Even as he worked hard to preserve the older homophile organizations, he joined hands with Craig Rodwell and others in the new gay liberation movement to prepare for the Stonewall commemorative march, scheduled for June 27, 1970.
⁶⁰

There was reason to believe that ERCHO and NACHO might survive into the new era. Some of NACHO's committees continued to show vitality, even if most of their work was being done by lone individuals. Louis Crompton, a professor of English at the University of Nebraska, kept the Religious Committee going largely through his own diligence, and in late December 1969 single-handedly produced a survey of religious attitudes toward homosexuality. And both Arthur Warner, head of NACHO's Legal Committee, and Frank Kameny, guiding force behind the effort to change federal policies toward homosexuals, continued to produce significant bodies of work.
⁶¹

Foster himself kept up a steady bombardment of exhortatory memos and letters, quick to encourage and praise any signs of life in
the old organizations. He rushed to congratulate a NACHO member for starting a newsletter early in 1970 (it lasted for exactly two issues), rejoiced when the NACHO clearinghouse for publications seemed back in regular operation (it quickly became irregular again), and continued to put an enormous amount of time and energy into drawing up agendas and sending out “bulletins” in preparation for the forthcoming NACHO convention (as it would turn out, the last). Even as he worked at maximum pitch, Foster sensed, as he wrote NACHO chair Bill Wynne, that “we may be fighting a losing battle even under the best of circumstances.”
⁶²