Stonewall (24 page)

She went straight to work at Hillside Psychiatric Hospital. She had done some of her undergraduate field work there (indeed, she had worked in psychiatric facilities, off and on, since she was eighteen), and the hospital administrators, impressed with her abilities and experience, had offered her a staff job in occupational therapy as soon as she graduated.

Hillside specialized in young adults and drug abusers—meaning, in those years, mostly acidheads and potheads. Yvonne, of course—along with others on the staff—herself qualified in both categories. When she became a supervisor a few years later, she would often, come three o'clock on a Friday afternoon, push the furniture in her office to one side, put on some music, turn the lights down low, get the booze out of the filing-cabinet drawer—and party. From that point on in the weekend, Yvonne was off and running. Her hangovers would be so intense by Monday that she made sure not to schedule anything before one o'clock. (She made up the time by working late one night a week.)

Yet her work performance remained superior, and before long she was promoted to director of vocational rehabilitation. In addition—remarkably, given the fact that undiagnosed lupus was already sapping her energy—she managed to find time, between work and partying, for participation in a variety of political actions. Those ranged from occasional antiwar protests to demonstrations for community control in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district to joining a lie-in at the Downstate Medical Center building site to protest the lack of black construction workers.

The 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville controversy particularly engaged her. The conflict was essentially between poor black parents and the mostly white, Jewish teachers who taught their children. Claiming that the teachers were doing a lousy job of it, the parents fought for control of the school board. But the conflict took on broader dimensions still: It seemed to pit the social vision of decentralization and “participatory democracy” against those who believed in centralized authority and the transmission of knowledge and services
down
to the client. Citywide battle lines were drawn accordingly.

Yvonne's sympathies were with the black parents, and she took vigorous part in the assorted marches and meetings that attempted to rally support for them. But as the strike dragged interminably on, Yvonne's activism gradually weakened. Resisting any consistent, prolonged organizational affiliation had become something of a pattern with her. And she had some good reasons for resisting (along with some unexamined private ones). Above all, she was reluctant to deal with the endemic homophobia of the left, and felt she could not pass as straight even if she had wanted to participate in that kind of subterfuge. She had heard that there were
some
out lesbians working with the Black Panthers—but had also heard that the brothers had been giving them a hard time. But if she steered clear of any sustained organizational ties, she made it a point of honor to turn the lights up at a party—often to indignant shouts—in order to pass the hat for this group or that action.

Hers was a sharply compartmentalized life, with few overlaps in her professional-partying-political activities. The closest she came to bridging the divisions, to bringing the different parts of her life together, happened almost against her will. “Ellen,” a white, heterosexual woman with whom Yvonne worked, inherited a good deal of money from her parents (a well-known actress and a famous playwright), bought a house with it in Rowe, Massachusetts, and kept inviting Yvonne to come up for a weekend.

Yvonne resisted. She didn't want to spend time “with these straight white people,” and especially not with Ellen's husband, a Vietnam War vet with decidedly unpredictable moods. Finally Ellen walked into Yvonne's office one day, threw the keys to the house on her desk, and said, “Look: This is a
nice
house. I love this house and I love you, and I want you to enjoy it. So you take whoever you want and you go up there.”

It proved to be a nice house indeed—spacious, set on a lake, with a sun deck, a large front porch, and a huge kitchen that invited freeflowing
, intimate talk. It also had a backyard filled with wildflowers in the spring, and a creek with beaver dams. Yvonne loved the house and the setting immediately, and over the years would come to think of Rowe, Massachusetts, as a cherished second home. But on her first visit, she took along Audre Lorde's ten-year-old daughter, as well as her then lover Yolanda's three-year-old child—as a kind of protection during this incursion into foreign territory.

After the initial few visits, Yvonne would go up to Rowe with various combinations of people, including even Ellen and her husband. She loved to walk in the woods, to have her own sense of solitude comfortably confirmed by the serene surroundings, and she eventually grew to love the place so much that she bought a formal share in it. The house had a piano, which Yvonne constantly played, reliving the childhood days when her mother's musicality and her own would, more or less harmoniously, blend. In Rowe, Yvonne would play, as she later put it, “this very weird music—now it would be called New Age music, but at that time it was just the music I heard in my head.”

Yvonne and her friends brought their city drugs with them—including LSD. They were enchanted with the effects of seeming to see the fish at the bottom of the lake or the trees literally dancing in the breeze. But once, unexpectedly, Yvonne had a terrible trip, and it so frightened her that she thereafter swore off LSD. Ellen, on the other hand, became so entranced with her mystical experiences that in the early seventies she left on a pilgrimage to India and ultimately ended up in Oregon with Rajneesh, to whom she reportedly gave all her money.

But for the five to six years before the household in Rowe broke up, Yvonne was able to find there a needed respite from her frantic, disjunctive life in the city. The comfort of the place, in combination with the solidity of her professional life, provided ballast for a life otherwise unbalanced by late hours, too much booze and too many drugs, and a frantic sexual pace that kept any sustained emotional connection at arm's length. The balance would hold well into the seventies, and then, in a simultaneous double blow, she would lose both the house and her job.

By then she had gained a reputation at Hillside for being not only a skillful occupational therapist and supervisor, but a superb grant writer. Influenced by her own political activism in behalf of community control in Brownsville, she decided to write a grant for outpatient drug treatment that, through the device of advisory boards, would involve the local community in Queens Village in the decisionmaking
process. She wrote the grant proposal with two male psychologists on the Hillside staff with whom she had worked earlier, and ended up liking it so much that when the National Institute of Mental Health funded it, she decided to direct the program herself.

That meant leaving her post as director of vocational rehabilitation and, though she didn't realize it at the time, putting herself in a position where she could be fired. As it turned out, the two psychologists were more interested in the funding than in the project. After Yvonne had been heading the program for nine months, and enjoying it enormously, she was called into the office of her immediate boss, the director of activities therapy, and told that she was being let go. The news took her utterly by surprise, and it was years before she could piece together what had happened. Even then, she managed only an incomplete, unsatisfying version.

The project had received funding for a full four years, and the two psychologists apparently decided that they wanted to control the funds for their own purposes, which only peripherally included the outpatient drug program. One of the woman volunteers in the program was also involved in the move to get Yvonne fired; she wanted to direct the activities-therapy program herself, and since (as Yvonne later discovered) her uncle was on the Hillside board of directors, she had the needed clout behind her ambition.

The sense of personal betrayal was the most painful part of the firing. Yvonne had gone to school at NYU with the activities director, and considered him a close friend. Her intuition had told her that he was a closeted gay, but Yvonne, figuring that it was none of her business, had never attempted an alliance on those grounds. Nor did she think that in turning on her, he was projecting outward his own unacknowledged self-hatred. More likely, she believed, he had become seriously addicted and needed to secure his own job by doing the unquestioned bidding of the higher-ups at Hillside.

As is usually the case with black lesbians, Yvonne found it difficult to tell which of the “isms”—racism, heterosexism, sexism—was most operative against her at Hillside. Though she
was
the only black person in the activities-therapy department at Hillside, she had experienced little overt racism there, and had been given regular promotions and salary increases. Because Yvonne was too scrupulous to assign blame without solid proof, and was further hamstrung by the fact that concrete evidence is always difficult to obtain in discrimination cases of any kind, the suit she finally did bring against the hospital was dismissed for lack of specificity. Yvonne was left with a
festering sense of failure—she was unable to convert unease into righteous anger—coupled with the debilitating feeling that people she had trusted had turned on her for no apparent reason.

What she did have to fall back on was a substantial severance payment. That allowed her not to work for a year, and the respite, in turn, had two decidedly positive results. The day before the firing, Theo, Yvonne's widowed mother, who had been living with her, became ill (terminally, as it turned out), and not having to go to work every day gave Yvonne the precious opportunity to spend the last three months of her mother's life entirely by her side. Theo, too ill to get around much, would often watch television from her bed, exclaiming in disbelief at this or that retrograde or racist development. A born optimist, she had actually believed the whole issue of race was going to be resolved in her lifetime. Yvonne would shake her head in amazement at her mother's rosy expectations, never having believed herself in anything more than the necessity for ongoing struggle. Today, she “thanks God that Mother isn't alive to see the backwardness that's going on here now.”

The severance from Hillside also led to a career change. It began with Yvonne being invited to give guest lectures at this or that college and ended with the staff at CUNY's York campus being so impressed with her presentation that she was offered a permanent faculty appointment. Becoming a teacher was about the last thing Yvonne—who had never even liked school, much as she had always loved learning—had dreamed of. Yet it would open up a new and satisfying world to her.

FOSTER

A
t age forty-one, Foster Gunnison was, along with Frank Kameny, the oldest delegate to the homophile planning conference. In all, some forty people (only eight of them women) from fourteen organizations gathered at the State Hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, from February 18 to 21, 1966, to discuss whether and how cooperation between local homophile groups could be increased.
²

New York Mattachine was not among them. Dick Leitsch had acidly expressed the hope that the gathering would accomplish something “besides the breast-beating, navel-contemplating and smugness
that characterized ECHO meetings”—but had then refused to pay expenses for MSNY members whose presence might have helped to make that hope a reality.

The militants associated with Kameny and Gittings came to Kansas City hoping to win approval for the formation of a national organization, and one with an activist philosophy. But it rapidly became clear that they would have to settle for an arrangement considerably short of that.

At the very first session of the conference, spokespeople for each organization gave brief descriptions of their group's activities, staking out, with pardonable pride, what they took to be their special accomplishments. Phyllis Lyon emphasized the importance of the Daughters of Bilitis in providing a place for women in what was a predominantly male homophile movement; Bill Beardemphl emphasized the success San Francisco's SIR had had in inducing homosexuals to become politically involved by first offering them an array of social activities; Chuck Thompson outlined the essential educational and research programs at ONE, Inc., of Los Angeles; Mark Forrester underscored the unique mission of San Francisco's Council on Religion and the Homosexual in acting as a bridge between homosexuals and heterosexuals; Robert Walker talked of Mattachine–San Francisco's work in counseling individuals; Guy Strait pitched his own crusade to persuade the homosexual that “salvation lay within himself and not in society's acceptance of him,” while Kameny, oppositely, spoke of the importance of getting people to see that “all the problems of the homosexuals are questions of [social] prejudice and discrimination.”

It was clear from the initial presentations that any movement toward merger would likely fall victim to entrenched local devotions. Indeed, only four of the fourteen organizations had authorized their representatives to commit to policies or programs that the conference might recommend; and it sometimes proved necessary, before a given matter could be brought to a vote, to state explicitly that it would be “in principle only” and would carry no mandate for action. Under that formula, such noncontroversial goals as “the right of homosexuals to equality of opportunity” could be affirmed—but not specific programs designed to make that goal a reality.

Indeed, it even proved difficult getting consensus for a resolution that declared homosexuality irrelevant for security clearance and. employment by the government. When Clark Polak pressed for a statement that homosexuality “must be considered as neither a sickness, disturbance [nor] neurosis,” some delegates thought the matter best
left to “experts” in mental health and some wanted to go
beyond
the resolution to argue that “a more definite assertion of the nonpatho-logical nature of homosexuality should be made.” In the upshot the Polak resolution failed to carry, but the conference did issue a statement that “objective research projects undertaken thus far have indicated that findings of homosexual undesirability are based on opinion, value judgments or emotional reaction rather than on scientific evidence or fact.”