Stonewall (35 page)

The Mattachine Society had still another view. With its headquarters right down the street from the Stonewall Inn, Mattachine was in 1969 pretty much the creature of Dick Leitsch, who had considerable sympathy for New Left causes but none for challenges to his leadership. Randy Wicker, himself a pioneer activist and lately a critic of Leitsch, now joined forces with him to pronounce the events at Stonewall “horrible.” Wicker's earlier activism had been fueled by the notion that gays were “jes' folks”—just like straights except for their sexual orientation—and the sight (in his words) “of screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals … that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.” On Sunday those wandering by Stonewall saw a new sign on its boarded-up façade, this one printed in neat block letters:
⁶¹

WE HOMOSEXUALS PLEAD WITH

OUR PEOPLE TO PLEASE HELP

MAINTAIN PEACEFUL AND QUIET

CONDUCT ON THE STREETS OF

THE VILLAGE—MATTACHINE

The streets that Sunday evening stayed comparatively quiet, dominated by what one observer called a “tense watchfulness.” Knots of the curious continued to congregate in front of Stonewall, and some of the primping and posing of the previous two nights was still in evidence. By Sunday, Karla Jay had heard about the riots, and she tried to get Redstockings to issue some sort of sympathetic statement. But just as Jim had failed to rally his left-wing male friends, so Karla was unable to get any gesture of support from straight radical feminists.

She went down to the Village herself for a quick look at the riot scene. But she didn't linger. She had learned during the Columbia
upheaval that uninvolved bystanders could be routinely arrested and, headed for a career in academia, she didn't want that on her record. She would wait to see where the riots would lead. She had never been taken with the bar crowd, gay or lesbian, and this unsavory bunch seemed to have inadvertently
stumbled
into rebellion. She wanted to save herself for the
big
arrest, for the
real
revolution. She was sure that was coming, but not at all sure the Stonewall riots represented its imminent arrival.

The police on Sunday night seemed spoiling for trouble. “Start something, faggot, just start something,” one cop repeated over and over. “I'd like to break your ass wide open.” (A brave young man purportedly yelled, “What a Freudian comment, officer!”—and then-scampered to safety.) Two other cops, cruising in a police car, kept yelling obscenities at passersby, trying to start a fight, and a third, standing on the corner of Christopher Street and Waverly Place, kept swinging his nightstick and making nasty remarks about “faggots.”

At one
A.M.
the TPF made a largely uncontested sweep of the area and the crowds melted away. Allen Ginsberg strolled by, flashed the peace sign and, after seeing “Gay Power!” scratched on the front of the Stonewall, expressed satisfaction to a
Village Voice
reporter: “We're one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It's about time we did something to assert ourselves.”
⁶²

By Sunday some of the wreckage inside the bar had been cleaned up, and employees had been stationed out on the street to coax patrons back in: “We're honest businessmen here. We're American-born boys. We run a legitimate joint here. There ain't nuttin' bein' done wrong in dis place. Everybody come and see.” Never having been inside the Stonewall, Ginsberg went in and briefly joined the handful of dancers. After emerging, he described the patrons as “beautiful—they've lost that wounded look that fags all had 10 years ago.” Deputy Inspector Pine later echoed Ginsberg: “For those of us in public morals, things were completely changed … suddenly they were not submissive anymore.”
⁶³

In part because of rain, Monday and Tuesday nights continued quiet, with only occasional, random confrontations; the most notable probably came when a queen stuck a lit firecracker under a strutting, wisecracking cop, the impact causing him to land on what the queen called his “moneymaker.” But Wednesday evening saw a return to something like the large-scale protest of the previous weekend. Perhaps as a result of the appearance that day of two front-page
Village Voice
articles about the initial rioting, a crowd of some thousand people
gathered in the area. Trash baskets were again set on fire, and bottles and beer cans were tossed in the direction of the cops (sometimes hitting protesters instead); the action was accompanied by militant shouts of “Pig motherfuckers!” “Fag rapists!” and “Gestapo!” The TPF wielded their nightsticks indiscriminately, openly beat people up, left them bleeding on the street, and carted off four to jail on the usual charge of “harassment.”
⁶⁴

That proved the last of the Stonewall riots, but when it came time only two days later for the fifth annual picket of Independence Hall, the repercussions could be clearly measured. As the originator of the Annual Reminder, Craig was again centrally involved in organizing it. But when he placed ads in
The Village Voice
to drum up interest, he got, along with some fifty recruits (half of whom were women, including two who brought along their young children), a series of ugly, threatening phone calls. The callers warned Craig that the bus he had rented to go to Philadelphia would be followed and capsized, and its occupants beaten to a pulp.

Sure enough, when the participants gathered at eight
A.M.
on July 4 to board the bus in front of Craig's bookstore on Mercer Street, a convertible with four “white rednecks in it brandishing baseball bats” pulled up and parked across the street. The four men simply sat there, glaring at the group in front of Craig's shop, apparently waiting for them to set off. But Craig was a step ahead of them. After he had gotten three or four of the threatening calls, he had contacted the police and had somehow convinced them to put an officer on the bus with them up to the Holland Tunnel. Then, on the other side of the tunnel, Craig managed to arrange for a New Jersey state trooper to board the bus and accompany it halfway down to Philadelphia.

The men in the convertible never followed the bus beyond Craig's bookstore. This was not, in Craig's view, because the sight of a policeman frightened them off, but because the presence of women and children took them by surprise; they had expected to see “just faggots,” and as well-indoctrinated macho men felt they had to desist from a physical attack on “innocents.” In any case, the bus arrived in Philadelphia without incident.

The demonstration in front of Independence Hall began in much the way it had in previous years: the group of some seventy-five people—men in suits and ties, women in dresses, despite the ninety-five-degree heat—walked silently in a circle, radiating respectability, eschewing any outward sign of anger. (Craig even kept his temper when a mean-looking man on the sidelines hissed “Suck!” in his face
every time he passed by.) But the events at Stonewall had had their effect. After a half hour of marching quietly in single file, two of the women suddenly broke ranks and started to walk together, holding hands. Seeing them, Craig thought elatedly, “O-oh—that's
wonderful
!”

But Frank Kameny, the Washington, D.C., leader who had long considered himself to be in charge of the demonstration, had a quite different reaction. Back in 1966 Kameny hadn't hesitated in pulling a man from the line who had dared to appear without a jacket and wearing sneakers, and Kameny was not about to tolerate this latest infraction of his rule that the demonstration be “lawful, orderly, dignified.” His face puffy with indignation and yelling, “None of that! None of that!” Kameny came up behind the two women and angrily broke their hands apart.
⁶⁵

Craig instantly hit the ceiling. When Kameny went over to talk to the two reporters who had turned up for the event (one from a Philadelphia paper and one from Reuters), Craig barged up to them and blurted out, “I've got a few things to say!” And what he said—in his own description, “ranting and raving”—was that the events in New York the previous week had shown that the current gay leadership was bankrupt, that gays were entitled to do whatever straights did in public—yes, wearing cool clothes in the heat, and, if they felt like it, holding hands too.

Kameny was furious at this unprecedented challenge to his authority, and, on different grounds, the veteran activists Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin chided Craig for calling so much “personal attention” to himself. But, as had not been the case in previous years, many of those who had come down on the bus from New York were young people personally recruited by Craig at his bookstore. Some of them were students at NYU and, being much younger than Kameny or Gittings, had no prior movement affiliation (and no respect for what the homophile movement had accomplished). They had been energized by Stonewall, were impatient for further direct confrontation with oppressive traditions and habits—and vigorously applauded Craig's initiative.

All the way back on the bus, they argued with their recalcitrant elders for a new impetus, a new departure that would embody the defiant spirit of Stonewall. As the contention continued, it became clear to Craig that this would be the final Reminder—that a new day had dawned, which required different tactics, a different format. Yet it saddened him to think that a common enterprise of five years standing would pass from the scene without any immediate replacement
in sight. And then it came to him. Why shouldn't there be an immediate replacement? Didn't the events at Stonewall themselves require commemoration? Maybe the Annual Reminder simply ought to be moved to New York—but, unlike the Reminder, be designed not as a silent plea for rights but as an overt demand for them. Craig thought of a name right then and there: Christopher Street Liberation Day.

That same July Fourth evening, New York Mattachine called a public meeting at St. John's Church on Waverly Place, designed to derail precisely the kind of rumored plans for new demonstrations and organizations that Craig had in mind. Dick Leitsch, described by one reporter as wearing a “staid brown suit” and looking like “a dependable fortyish Cartier salesclerk,” told the packed crowd of two hundred (mostly male, mostly young) that it was indeed important to protest police brutality, but it was also important to remember that “the gay world must retain the favor of the Establishment, especially those who make and change the laws.” Acceptance, Leitsch cautioned, “would come slowly by educating the straight community with grace and good humor and—”
⁶⁶

Leitsch was interrupted by an angry young man who stood up and yelled, “We don't want acceptance, goddamn it! We want respect!”—and he was seconded by shouts from others. Leitsch's loyal lieutenant at Mattachine, Madolin Cervantes (who was heterosexual) took the mike to call for a candlelight vigil, saying, “We should be firm, but just as amicable and sweet as—” She, too, was interrupted—this time by Jim Fouratt, who had been sitting agitatedly in the audience and had held his peace up to that point.

“Sweet
?” Jim hollered, “Sweet!
Bullshit!
There's the stereotype homo again … soft, weak, sensitive! … That's the role society has been forcing these queens to play.… We have got to radicalize.… Be proud of what you are.… And if it takes riots or even guns to show them what we are, well, that's the only language that the pigs understand!”

His impassioned speech led to a wild burst of applause. Leitsch tried to reply, but Jim shouted him down: “All the oppressed have got to unite! … Not one straight radical group showed up at Stonewall! If it'd been a black demonstration they'd have been there.… We've got to work together with
all
the New Left!” By then a dozen people were on their feet, shouting encouragement. Leitsch tried to regain control of the meeting, but to no avail. “This meeting is over!”
Jim yelled, and invited all those who shared his views to follow him over to Alternate University, a loft space on Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue that was home to a variety of radical enterprises. (It was known to the cognoscenti as “Alternate U.”) By Jim's recollection, some thirty-five or forty people followed him out of St. John's. In the reconstituted meeting at Alternate U., they began to talk about forming a new activist gay organization—talk that would soon culminate in the Gay Liberation Front.

As for “Fat Tony” Lauria, he was quick to see the handwriting on the wall. He and his partners, Mario and Zucchi, decided that with the pending investigation of corruption within the police department by a special commission, and with Stonewall now notorious, the bar could never again operate profitably. Fat Tony soon sold the Stonewall lease to Nicky de Martino, the owner of the Tenth of Always, and had the satisfaction of watching him fail quickly—even though, with the help of Ed Murphy, de Martino got some street queens to parade around in front of Stonewall with balloons for a week or two.
⁶⁷

PART SEVEN

POST-STONEWALL:

1969–70

CRAIG, JIM

J
im and Craig were not the only ones with new ideas. True, in the immediate aftermath of Stonewall,
Time
magazine went right on referring to homosexuality as “a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment” and to the homosexual subculture as “without question shallow and unstable.” And U.S. attorney Thomas Foran (who had prosecuted the Chicago Seven) gravely announced that “We've lost our kids to the freaking fag revolution.”
¹

But homosexuals themselves, in a rush of suddenly released energy, and in unprecedented numbers, were newly determined to challenge those hoary stereotypes. Two days after Craig returned from the Annual Reminder, a meeting was called at the Electric Circus, the popular (and straight) night spot on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. “If you are tired of raids, Mafia control, and checks at the front door,” the flyer advertising the meeting read, “join us for a beautiful evening on Sunday night, July 6th.”
²