Stonewall (22 page)

The visit went downhill from there. Viejita told Sylvia that she
had to change. “Change what?” Sylvia answered, as if mystified (while wondering, in her stoned state, if Viejita was encouraging her to go back on hormones). “You have to get
married
!” Viejita shouted. “Married? Married? I
am
married—you met Gary. And I ain't gettin' married again.” Another ten minutes of shouting at each other and Sylvia slammed the door behind her and took a cab back to Times Square.

But Viejita wasn't finished with her. One night in the “Hostro” (as the Hispanic prostitutes called the Times Square area), Sylvia was talking on the street with one of her steady customers (“a good trick—fifty dollars just to give him a lousy blow job!”) and getting ready to clinch the deal when a woman behind her shouted, “Don't you know that's a man?” Sylvia, in an instant rage, whirled around ready to pop what she assumed was a competing hooker in the face—and came flat up against Viejita. “That's a man! That's my grandson!” Viejita repeated, screaming at the potential customer. When Sylvia tried to calm her down, Viejita accused her (falsely) of no longer sending money home and (accurately) of rarely coming to see her. By this time, the potential customer had fled into the night, never to return.

The running battle with Viejita went on for years, but six months after their confrontation in Times Square, Sylvia was able to use drag to save herself from a much larger battlefront. Approaching the ripe old age of eighteen, and with the country, in 1967, exploding in militant resistance to the escalating war in Vietnam, Sylvia abruptly got notice to report to the local draft board in Jersey City (where she was living at the time).

She made an instant decision: She was not, under any circumstances, going to war. She considered herself a patriotic American, and swore that if anybody ever tried to invade this country, she would pick up a gun—“and I know how to use a gun, honey”—and “blow them away off the continent.” But she was
“not
going over there to fight for something that I don't know really what we're going for.” The only question was how to get out of it.

Sylvia made up her mind to appear at the draft board in full drag: high heels, miniskirt, long red nails, the works. But she nervously wondered if that would do it; she had heard rumors that even queens had been drafted, to do clerical work. When she arrived at the draft board on the scheduled morning, in full regalia, she was directed to a desk at which sat two sergeants, one male, one female. The female sergeant assumed the new arrival was in her jurisdiction: “Women
who are enlisting,” she said, smiling and pointing, “go to
that
side of the room.”

“But I'm one of the boys,” Sylvia said. “My name is Ray. Ray Rivera.”

Now it was the turn of the male sergeant. Gruffly, unsmilingly, he repeated—whether because of nearsightedness or incomprehension—that Sylvia should join the ladies on
that
side of the room. And next thing Sylvia knew, she was on a bus with a bunch of women headed for the induction center in Newark. “All of these bitches got no nails and short cropped hair. They looked butcher than I do at my best.” Halfway into the trip, Sylvia noticed one of the tougher-looking women giving her the eye. Sylvia wheeled on her indignantly. “I am
not
a woman!” she yelled. “I
happen
to be one of the boys!”

At the induction center they took Sylvia straight to the psychiatrist's office.

“What's your name?” the psychiatrist asked.

“Which one, darling?”

“Your male Christian name.”

“Oh. That's Ray José Christian Rivera. Alias Miss Sylvia Lee Rivera.”

“Is there a problem with your sexuality?”

“Is there? I don't know,” said Sylvia, arching her eyebrows in feigned innocence. “I know I like men. I know I like to wear dresses. But I don't know what any
problem
is.”

The psychiatrist frowned, so Sylvia knew she was on the right track and plunged ahead. “I got papers here from when I was in the hospital. A doctor signed them. The papers state that I am a homosexual. Is that what you mean by a ‘problem'?”

Without another word, the psychiatrist stamped “HOMOSEXUAL” in three-inch-high red letters on Sylvia's induction notice, then told her that she could go home.

Knowing she had gotten off, Sylvia giddily opted for one last bit of grandstanding camp. “I ain't got no money to go home,” she announced with maximum petulance. “You all brought me here, now you all got to get me home. Somebody's
got to take me home!”

And damned if they didn't drive her all the way back to Jersey City.

JIM

J
im Fouratt was finding his own ways to resist the draft—to resist what he had come to view as entrenched and irresponsible American power. After his first, almost inadvertent antiwar demonstration in Times Square in 1964, he rapidly became politicized. A crucial turning point for him was getting to know Abbie Hoffman in 1966. As an offshoot of his involvement in the black civil rights struggle, Hoffman had come to New York to open Liberty House—a store devoted to selling handmade goods produced in Mississippi—on the Lower East Side. Impressed with Jim's work in helping to organize New York's first “be-in”—a gathering and display of the countercultural hippie tribes at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park—Abbie sought him out.
²⁹

Jim's guess is that Abbie was also drawn to him as that intriguing Other, the blond, blue-eyed and—Jim encouraging the notion—purportedly upper-class WASP. Whatever the source of the initial attraction, the two men became increasingly involved in political work together and between 1967 and 1969, Jim became one of the most prominent figures in the “Yippie!” wing of the movement. (“Yippie” was the name given to politicized hippies.) Abbie defined the Yippie group with his characteristically stylish blend of humor and high purpose: The Yippies, he wrote, represented a “blending of pot and politics into a political grass leaves movement—a cross-fertilization of the hippie and New Left philosophies.” The group's aim—though in true Yippie fashion it would have disavowed so linear a goal and the planning and leadership implied—was to “tie together as much of the underground as was willing into some gigantic national get-together” whose purpose would be to develop “a model for an alternate society.”
³⁰

Jim grew to love Abbie “in a way that one loves a comrade,” even though he felt early on that Abbie, and even more, his fellow Yippie leader, Jerry Rubin, were deeply, almost reflexively homophobic—which Abbie himself acknowledged late in life. Jim remained indifferent to Rubin, dismissing him as a manipulative careerist, but emotionally, he invested heavily in Abbie—and would end up feeling that Abbie had misused and betrayed him. There were
early signs, signs that for the most part Jim chose to ignore. On a television program he and Abbie did in the spring of 1967, Abbie declared, with a big grin, “I'm not a hippie. Hippies are fags. Sorry about that. I don't think they know how to love.” Jim said nothing, either during the show or after (though he would later, on the Susskind show, come out publicly), preferring to chalk up Abbie's remarks to his fondness for playing the macho, gay-bashing street hood in public, even though he seemed comfortable in private with people he knew to be gay.
³¹

But the trouble with this theory was that in private Abbie
wasn't
always comfortable. In 1968, when Jim was living with his then lover, Howie Weinstein, in a loft on Bond Street, Abbie would frequently drop by. But he would look through Howie as if he weren't there and sometimes, right in front of him, make some clunky remark about a woman he wanted to fix Jim up with. Afterward, Howie would be angry and would berate Jim for not having spoken up. “But what was there to say?” Jim would lamely respond, “You're here. This is our house. You sleep in this bed with me. Everybody knows that. What is there to say?” “But he can't even
look
at me!” Howie would howl, “How can you trust a man like that?”

For several years Jim buried his own doubts about Abbie. He closely identified with the values Abbie espoused, and preferred to believe that the espousal and the practice were essentially one, give or take the usual human discrepancies. Jim had found a political home and didn't want to lose it, a prominent identity and didn't want to jeopardize it. He was so immersed for a time in the Yippie cause that he actually called himself Jimmy Digger in tribute to the parent group in California, the Diggers, whose philosophy had centrally inspired the Yippies.

The Diggers took their name from the seventeenth-century English revolutionaries who denounced private property and heralded the reign of love. The Californians regarded all forms of authority (and especially that of the state) as illegitimate, felt a romantic solidarity with the underclasses, denied the morality of a money economy, distributed surplus goods free for the asking, and were devoted to spontaneous forms of expression, pleasure, and resistance. They were more serious-minded and theoretically coherent than the Yippies, who popularized the Digger views and won, with their bowdlerized version, far more publicity than the parent group ever had or wanted.

With his keen analytic intelligence and philosophical seriousness, Jim probably felt more closely identified with the Diggers than did
any of the other Yippie leaders. His androgynous look, his flowing blond hair and delicate features, belied the intense, committed person within. Jim
looked
the part of a boundaryless hippie more than most of those who claimed the label, but if one was foolish enough to equate that look with a limp, passive personality, one was in for a rude shock.

For—except with Abbie—Jim rarely pulled his punches or hesitated about speaking his mind. And rather than behaving like a docile follower, he was quick to initiate a line of action. He had been impressed in San Francisco with Chester Anderson's “Communications Company,” which periodically published leaflets to disseminate news of interest to the hip left community. When Jim's friend Howard Smith, a
Village Voice
writer, offered him a Gestetner duplicating machine that the
Voice
was discarding, Jim suddenly had the means to start a comparable operation in New York. He single-handedly wrote and distributed a street newspaper which, in homage to the San Francisco operation, he called
The Communications Company
. And on his travels in and out of various worlds, Jim was always careful to bring along copies of his paper to distribute.

The preeminent gathering place of the influential avant-garde in the late sixties was Max's Kansas City—or simply “Max's,” to those in the know—the favorite late-night hangout for Andy Warhol and friends (and those who wanted to be). Warhol himself often occupied the corner table in the back room, the silent puppeteer, expertly working the strings, delighting in the manipulated dance—a fake Zen master who rationalized his indifference to other people's pain as a “necessary” offshoot of his artistic self-absorption. Jim first met Warhol in 1965, and found him charming, if maddeningly passive-aggressive; he also saw clearly that Warhol was a control freak who goaded people to perform for him while rejecting all responsibility for the behavior he had elicited.

Jim's friend from Caffè Cino days, Bob Heide, could personally testify to Warhol's ice-cold exploitations. Though he had given Warhol the idea (at a time when Warhol was lamenting his artistic bankruptcy) of changing around the colors and doing repetitions on his Campbell's Soup and Marilyn Monroe series, Warhol neither credited him nor subsequently showed him a tinge of gratitude. To the contrary, he mistreated him. Warhol filmed Heide's play
The Bed
, but when the film's financial backer tried to get it shown, Warhol hid it and denied its existence, and then later spliced a sequence from it into his movie
Chelsea Girls
—without crediting Heide's play as the source.
³²

Much as he sometimes found Warhol repellent, Jim was willing
to put up with him. He enjoyed being part of whatever the red-hot scene of the moment was—especially if he could juggle it with several other scenes bidding for attention—and that meant hanging out in Max's. Warhol's holding court there was not a compelling reason for staying away, and Jim made a point of ending nearly every evening by dropping into Max's. He distributed the latest edition of
The Communications Company
, picked up information for the next one, and congratulated himself on being in the scene without being in Warhol's orbit.

Like Yvonne Flowers, Jim loved the simultaneous life, loved a multiplicity of actions—perhaps not least because he could never quite find the
one
channel that could maximally focus his gifts, could not stay quiet long enough to allow that channel to emerge. At the same time that he was doing a turn at personal journalism, he was continuing his acting classes with Lee Strasberg and periodically landing a part in a play. In 1967 he acted in
The Peace Creeps
, performed in the theater above the trendy nightclub Arthur's, with James Earl Jones and a shy, promising newcomer named Al Pacino (Jim thought Pacino's chief talent onstage was an ability to get believably angry).

Next came a Broadway production,
The Freaking Out of Stephanie Blake
, with Jean Arthur—a play about hippies that became legendary for its three months of previews and its failure ever to open. Jean Arthur was a notoriously difficult person to work with, a demanding perfectionist who had previously walked out on
St. Joan of the Stockyards
. But Jim developed enormous respect for her hard work and her magical abilities (though he was considerably less enamored of her lesbian lover/nurse, an ex-marine who always hovered threateningly at Jean's side). After changing directors three times, Jean walked off the stage during a preview performance of
Stephanie Blake
in the middle of her one scene with Jim, leaving him the nightmarish job of having to ad-lib until the curtain finally came down. She never returned to the play, and the producers closed it.