Stonewall (9 page)

There was even a coffee shop on the corner of Division and State, called Marx's, that was a hangout for gay high school kids. Craig, and the friends he soon made at Marx's, would sit in booths drinking Coca-Cola while eyeing the older guys walking by to cruise them. If the eyes connected, that could lead to renting a room at the Lawson YMCA or in one of the cheap hotels dotting the Loop, or to hours of driving around and parking in the older men's cars.

Craig loved the cruising and loved the sex, but even at that age would never go with anyone he didn't feel drawn to in other ways; he was always “hot to fall in love, to form an attachment.” And to make himself look older—he usually claimed to be seventeen—he wore a leather jacket and engineer boots and chain-smoked cigarettes. But at least once, Craig badly miscalculated. One night on Howard Street he met Dave, a Loyola University student in his early twenties, and started to see him with some regularity in the afternoon, when Craig's mother was at work. Dave always wanted to fuck Craig, and Craig always said no. Finally one afternoon Dave grabbed and raped him, hurting him badly. But Craig couldn't scream for fear the neighbors would discover what was going on. He told Dave he would never see him again.

A few weeks later, when reading the
Chicago Daily News
, Craig came across Dave's picture along with an article describing how the police had come to his room after a thirteen-year-old had reported him, and had found pictures of young boys—at which point Dave had gone to the dresser, pulled out a gun, and shot himself in the
mouth, dying instantly. Craig was terrified that his mother would see the article; he had told her Dave's name and address and had made up some story—that Dave was the high school track coach, or some such—to explain his visits to the apartment. Craig cut the article out of the paper and when Marion asked why, he said, “I needed it for biology class.”

Sometimes Craig walked the streets till one o'clock in the morning; when he got home his mother was usually waiting up for him, and furious. He'd make up long stories about losing track of the time while playing chess, or about the subway breaking down, or about being caught up in a bowling competition. Since he was usually out three nights a week, the stories wore a bit thin, but if Marion suspected anything, she kept her own counsel, probably out of the realization that Craig's will was too strong and he had been living by it for too long to brook interference now.

And if Hank had any plans to rein the boy in, those soon came to a halt. Afraid that Hank might physically hurt his mother during one of their shouting matches, Craig bought himself a knife, “just in case.” Sure enough, one night he heard glass breaking and his mother screaming. Craig burst through the door brandishing the knife, yelling “I'll kill you!”—but was stopped by his mother grabbing hold of his wrist. But that was the end of the marriage; Marion asked Hank to leave.

Since Marion couldn't control Craig, she gave him the silent treatment when he did something that displeased her. At one point she didn't speak to him for months, and even Craig acknowledged that in that instance she had reason. It all began with one of his casual pickups. Frank, a dishwasher in his thirties and a gentle, sweet man, took Craig back to his tiny slum apartment one night, gave him a blow job, and then kindly offered to walk him to the subway. In the 1950s Chicago had a ten o'clock curfew for those under seventeen; Craig had always kept an eye peeled for the cops but had never had any run-ins with them.

This night was different. As Craig and Frank reached the corner of Clark and Schiller, two blocks from the subway station, three or four police cars suddenly roared up from different directions. They quickly separated Craig and Frank and questioned them individually on the sidewalk. The first thing they asked Craig was how old he was, and he said seventeen. Then they asked him for his mother's name and phone number and Craig—having been trained to tell the truth—gave both. Marion was allowed to take him back home, but that was hardly the end of it.

Both Craig and Frank had to stand trial. The prosecutor tried to coax Craig into testifying that Frank had given him money for sex but Craig resolutely refused to embellish the truth. Though the prosecutor was furious, he still managed to put Frank away for five years on the charge of committing “a crime against nature.” He then tried to get Craig sent to a reformatory, but Marion cried and begged so piteously that the prosecutor relented; Craig was put on probation for two years on condition that he see a psychiatrist for six months.

Once again Craig's luck held. In the fifties, psychiatry was united behind the notion that homosexuality was diseased, pathological behavior that—this was supposed to be the good news—could be cured. In those years there were very few dissenters from that view, yet Craig, almost miraculously, found himself in treatment with one of them, Calvin Fentress. Instead of trying to change Craig's sexual orientation, Fentress told him about the ancient Greeks and their acceptance of same-gender love as natural; and he told the probation officer that Craig was dating girls and progressing well. Fentress tried telling Marion the same thing, but since she had been forced by the court to foot the psychiatric bills on her meager salary, she remained obdurately angry with Craig and for months subjected him to the silent treatment. As for Frank, Craig never saw him again, though many years later he thought he caught a glimpse of him washing dishes in a cafeteria.

Craig continued, of course, to cruise. Within a few months, still only fifteen and still too young to get into the bars, he met a man named Harry at the Oak Street Beach. Harry proved to be different in several critical ways. He was in his forties. He never seemed to want to do anything more with Craig than kiss. And he had an intriguing stack of magazines on his coffee table, including issues of
ONE
and
The Mattachine Review
. Craig didn't know either publication, and Harry explained that they were put out by an organization of homosexuals.

Craig had never heard of homosexuals organizing, let alone to promote their rights, and was instantly “thrilled” at the news. Harry told him where he could buy
ONE
—only a single newsstand in all of Chicago carried it—and also showed him a listing in
The Mattachine Review
of local chapters of the parent organization. To Craig's delight, there was a branch listed for Chicago, and the very next day, with typical assertiveness, he went down to the building on Dearborn Street to sign up. But when he got there, he could find no reference to a Mattachine Society on the directory, and he realized with a sinking
heart that the Chicago listing was a mailing address only—and one he could not write to, since the mail would come to his mother's apartment and he
was
still on probation.

But Craig made up his mind right then and there that he would save up his money and go to New York to live. He had heard for years that more queers lived in New York City than anyplace else on earth, and Harry told him that Mattachine had a large branch there. To help save money, he worked in the mail room of a Chicago law firm, took a summer job with Kaiser Aluminum as an office boy, walked to school every day to avoid the expense of carfare, and when anybody asked him what he wanted for Christmas or Easter, always said “cash.” By the time he graduated from high school, Craig had saved nearly six hundred dollars.

But then Marion refused to let him move to New York. So Craig hit on a subterfuge. He had been studying ballet, in a desultory sort of way, since he was six years old and now announced that he intended to become a ballet dancer. Marion, who had apparently silently accepted by this point that Craig was gay, agreed to his career choice—but thought it could be best pursued in Boston. And so, in late summer of 1958, she went with Craig to enroll him in the Boston School of Ballet, and saw to it that he would live in a rooming house specializing in genteel old ladies.

Craig hated ballet school from the beginning, but solaced himself with exploring the gay scene in Boston. In the late fifties it was just as furtive and small-scale as Chicago's, but at least had the advantage of being unfamiliar. On the very day Marion left to go back to Chicago, Craig went out cruising on Commonwealth Avenue and the Boston Common—then notorious meeting spots, and dangerous ones (within weeks, Craig had to flee from a gang of toughs throwing rocks and screaming “Faggot!” at him). That first night, he met three different guys, gave each of them his phone number, and before long had discovered the few gay bars that then existed: the piss-elegant Napoleon Club and the two rougher bars, the Punch Bowl and Jacques.

But the drinking age in Boston was then twenty-one, and Craig had trouble getting into the bars, though he sometimes managed to ease his way in with a crowd. One way or another he quickly succeeded in meeting people, and one of his new friends soon got him a furnished apartment, springing him from the genteel boarding house. He also managed a mini-affair with a Native American who lived in Salem and had a morning radio show devoted to local news and obituaries.

None of this was enough to hold Craig's interest, and after a few months he decided to get out of Boston. He told his mother that if he was ever going to make it in ballet, he would have to go to New York to study. Reluctantly, she gave permission, and Craig packed his suitcase and took the next bus out. He arrived in New York not knowing a soul, but having somehow heard that the Thirty-fourth Street Sloane House YMCA was “simpatico.” He immediately checked in there.

KARLA

K
arla was astonished when, years later, she found out that most of her classmates at the Bromley Institute had bitter memories of the place. There were reasons enough, as even Karla—who felt Bromley had saved her life—acknowledged. The school was not merely strict, but hawklike in its scrutiny of the girls' behavior. Only certain kinds of clothing, preeminently white blouses and skirts decidedly below the knee, were deemed appropriate for young ladies being “finished.” If a girl was caught teasing her hair, or smoking, or playing Beatles records, she was likely to be expelled. When Richard Burton came to Broadway in
Hamlet
, the school forbade the girls to see it: “Richard Burton is a divorced man.” Karla went anyway, and got away with it.

The curriculum was entirely prescribed, with no electives to allow for individual tastes (when one teacher overstepped the bounds and encouraged the girls to read Updike's
Rabbit, Run
, she was promptly fired). Chapel was mandatory twice a week (the school was Protestant, though most of the girls were Catholic or Jewish). All the girls were required to play sports, and even their diets were closely supervised. When the Good Humor ice cream truck came by Bromley's iron fence, the girls were refused permission to buy—not for nutritional reasons but rather, as headmistress Mrs. Moore explained, because the school was in a Hispanic area of Brooklyn and the man selling the Good Humor bars was undoubtedly slipping drugs into them. Karla wondered what drug you could buy for fifteen cents and decided Mrs. Moore meant aspirin.

None of these rigors and deprivations much bothered Karla. Though Bromley restricted her body, the school opened up her mind,
and she would always be passionately grateful to it for showing her how smart she was and for fostering her intellectual development. Thanks to small classes, every student at Bromley got close individual supervision—which Karla (if not many of the others) welcomed. Her English teacher told her she had talent as a writer, her French teacher praised her skill with languages; and her math teacher was so impressed with her gifts (her father Abraham was also a wiz at numbers) that Karla was sent to NYU to take an advanced course (she got a 98).

Bromley was intellectually nurturing not least because all the teachers were women (the only man at the school was the janitor), and a girl was
always
the smartest person in class and
always
editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. And the students, all of whom were white, got on well with each other. From Karla's perspective anyway, “there were no outcasts.… It didn't seem to me on looking back that anyone was particularly mean to anybody else.… There was no one who was ostracized for any reason, either because a kid was fat or a kid was unattractive. Everybody seemed to be friendly.”

If that smacks of a rose-colored retrospective, it suggests that for Karla, anyway, Bromley was indeed “wonderful.” And although she “still didn't have any words for what I was feeling,” being at Bromley also gave her at least a rudimentary start at understanding her own sexuality. A lot of the girls had boys' nicknames for each other, sometimes those of well-known male actors. Only two of her classmates, Karla later learned, openly identified as lesbians, but labeled or not, there seems to have been a fair amount of homoerotic activity at Bromley, with necking and petting something of a commonplace.

Karla never developed any sense that such activity was “wrong.” But two of the Bromley girls did overstep an ill-defined line. They were among the school's wealthy contingent; they lived in fancy houses and were driven to school in chauffeured cars. The two had been inseparable friends since elementary school, but by junior year at Bromley their behavior became notably more “eccentric”—to the point where even Karla felt confused and embarrassed by it. During lunch hour, when everyone else ate together at long tables, the two girls would sit ostentatiously apart, constantly touching, loudly calling each other “dearest” and “darling.” They even appeared in ties now and then.

Finally, Headmistress Moore called the mother of one of the girls and pointedly asked whether her daughter came home for the night or spent it at the other girl's house. The mother's purported answer
—“None of your fucking business”—spread like gleeful wildfire throughout the school, giving the girls enormous pleasure. (Mrs. Moore was not well liked.) But the daring twosome's blatancy continued to make Karla nervous: “I felt sort of threatened by them because I felt they might endanger all of us, could cause the school to crack down on all of us.” She learned later in life that both girls had married men—and had gone right on seeing each other and spending nights alone together. Perhaps, Karla mused, the relationship represented a special category of “upper-class lesbianism”—no labels, no apologies, no guilt, no remorse.