The Gay Metropolis (38 page)

The Stonewall Inn at 53 Christopher Street was not an elegant establishment; it didn't even have running water behind the bar. But the crowd was unusually eclectic for a gay place in this era, and sixties types like
Jack Nichols enjoyed the feeling of “free-wheeling anarchy” inside. Like nearly all gay bars in 1969, its existence depended on two groups that younger gay people despised: the Mob, which owned it; and the local police, who took weekly payoffs from it. Because the “inn” was without a liquor license, it pretended to be a “bottle club,” which meant that everyone had to sign in at the door. “Judy Garland” and “Elizabeth Taylor” were two of the most popular pseudonyms. On weekends, admission cost $3, in return for which one got two tickets, good for two drinks. According to the historian Martin Duberman, this obscure venue was an unlikely gold mine: the weekend take often approached $12,000, the weekly payoff to the precinct was always $2,000 and the rent was just $300 a month.

The bar had often been raided before, but this raid was different because it occurred without a prior warning to the owners.
^*
Shortly after midnight, about a dozen policemen arrived at the front door.

Inside, the fifties tradition of flashing white lights to warn of incoming undercover men had been maintained, and the dancing stopped before the raiding party entered. After checking for attire “appropriate” to gender—a requirement of New York state law—the police released most of the two hundred patrons. Only a couple of employees and some of the most outrageous drag queens were arrested. Outdoors in the summer heat, the mood was festive, but many eyewitnesses also remember a febrile feeling in the air. Several spectators agreed that it was the action of a cross-dressing lesbian—possibly Stormé DeLarverie—which would change everyone's attitude forever. DeLarverie denied that she was the catalyst, but her own recollection matched others' descriptions of the defining moment. “The cop hit me, and I hit him back,” DeLarverie explained.

For the first time in history, “The cops got what they gave.”

This had never happened before.

There was instant pandemonium. The police were pelted with pennies, dimes, and insults, as shouts of “Pigs,” “Faggot cops,” and “This is your payoff!” filled the night. Morty Manford remembered a rock shattering a second-floor window above the bar's entrance, which produced a collective “Ooh!” from the crowd. The raiders quickly retreated inside and bolted the heavy door behind them. But one of the demonstrators had pulled a loose parking meter out of the ground and started to use it as a
battering ram. Jeremiah Newton saw inmates of the Women's House of Detention throwing flaming pieces of toilet paper out their cells. “They fell down very delicately, very gracefully, extinguishing before they hit the bottom,” he said. Sheridan Square Park was directly across the street, and it provided excellent ammunition: “It was full of bottles and bricks,” said Newton. “It just happened to be the right place at the right time. If the Stonewall had been further down the block, where nobody could stand across from it, perhaps nothing would have happened.”

Believing he could intimidate the crowd, Inspector Pine raced outside and grabbed one of the demonstrators around the waist. When Pine pulled him back in, Howard Smith, a
Village Voice
reporter who had accompanied the raiding party, quickly recognized the policeman's quarry: it was Dave Van Ronk, a well-known
heterosexual
folksinger (and a good friend of Bob Dylan) who had wandered over from the Lion's Head next door to investigate the disturbance. Once inside, Van Ronk was badly beaten by the furious policemen. Then the cops grabbed a fire hose to try to keep the screaming demonstrators away, but it produced only a feeble spray—and more ridicule from their attackers. “Grab it, grab his cock!” someone yelled from the crowd, and Craig Rodwell shouted, “Gay Power!”

Now one of the attackers was spraying lighter fluid through the Stonewall's shattered windows and throwing in matches to try to ignite it. Suddenly there was a whoosh of flame inside the bar. The cops pulled their guns from their holsters and trained them on the entrance. Inspector Pine was afraid: he thought he might have to kill some of the kids, and he really didn't want to.

“The homosexuals were usually very docile, quiet people,” said the policeman.

“But this night was different.”

At the very moment that the cops were preparing to shoot the next demonstrator who came through the door, the policemen finally heard the distant sirens of the Tactical Patrol Force, the helmeted veterans of countless antiwar demonstrations who had finally arrived to rescue them.

“It was that close,” the witness from the
Voice
reported.

“We were completely relieved,” said Pine.

As the TPF waded into the crowd of protesters in the street, the cops inside put their guns away. But the newly formed lavender brigade continued to confound them: instead of running from the TPF, they kept on throwing bricks and bottles and setting fires in trash cans. Randy Wicker remembered bonfires in the street and barrels going through windows: “All I could think was, Oh my God, they're going to burn up a little old
Italian lady or some child is going to be killed and we're going to be the bogey-man of the seventies.”

Randy Bourscheidt saw a “black guy, a queen, running in a mincing way up Christopher Street, screaming in falsetto,
'Let my people go!'
—as gay people were being shoved in paddy-wagons.”

“This was in the time of Martin Luther King. It was both funny and touching.”

Stormé DeLarverie remembered, “Stonewall was just the flip side of the black revolt when Rosa Parks took a stand. Finally, the kids down there took a stand. But it was peaceful. I mean, they said it was a riot; it was more like a civil disobedience. Noses got broken, there were bruises and banged-up knuckles and things like that, but no one was seriously injured. The police got the shock of their lives when those queens came out of that bar and pulled off their wigs and went after them. I knew sooner or later people were going to get the same attitude that I had. They had just pushed once too often.”

William Wynkoop, who had first been radicalized a quarter century earlier, was awakened by the noise: “I got up and I looked out the window and really, it was amazing. They were coming from east of here, from Sixth Avenue. In
droves!
Not only on the sidewalk, but on the street. They were coming down Gay Street—large numbers of people—some running. They were coming down Waverly Place. I stuck my head out and I saw a big crowd over on Christopher Street. It was two o'clock in the morning. I had to get out and see what was going on. They were all ages, and I was overjoyed. The more I heard about this, the more
exalted
I felt. I remember walking over to Sheridan Square, and everybody was talking about what had happened. It was amazing! And I think it's wonderful that the ones who started it were drag queens. Young, young, tender drag queens. Flaming faggot types. They were the ones who started the rebellion. And I think maybe this is ordained because those who had been most oppressed were they.

“No doubt: Oppressed, despised, laughed at, scorned.”

But suddenly, the scorn and contempt were all flowing in the opposite direction. When the TPF challenged the protesters from behind their shielded helmets and bulletproof vests, they were greeted by an astonishing, impromptu performance. The drag queens kicked up their heels and sang at the top of their lungs:

We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls

We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair
We wear our dungarees
Above our nelly knees!

It was “totally spontaneous” theater, the underground paper
Rat
reported.

Lucien Truscott IV wrote in the
Voice
that “the generation gap existed even here. Older boys had strained looks on their faces and talked in concerned whispers as they watched the up-and-coming generation take being gay and flaunt it before the masses.”

By four
A.M
., the first night's riot was finally over, with four policemen injured and thirteen demonstrators under arrest. But twenty-four hours later, both sides were back in the streets, and Allen Ginsberg had arrived to investigate. “Gay Power! Isn't that great!” he exclaimed. He was delighted by the scene inside the Stonewall, which had already reopened. “The guys there were so beautiful. They've lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

When the
Voice
hit the street three days later, some people thought the tone of Truscott's story sparked the riots all over again. “Sheridan Square this weekend looked like something from a William Burroughs novel as the sudden specter of ‘gay power' erected its brazen head and spat out a fairy tale the likes of which the area has never seen,” Truscott wrote. Once again, a crowd of at least five hundred roamed the streets, and four more demonstrators were arrested.

The
Daily News
returned to the scene to investigate the following week. On July 6, the largest-selling newspaper in the country proclaimed to its millions of readers, “Homo Nest Raided, Queen Bees Are Stinging Mad.”
News
reporter Jerry Lisker wrote, “The whole proceedings took on the aura of a homosexual Academy Awards Night. The Queens pranced out to the street blowing kisses and waving to the crowd. … The War of the Roses lasted about two hours from about midnight to 2
A.M
.”

The very first gay-authored account of the uprising appeared in
Screw
magazine, the almost entirely heterosexual pornographic tabloid founded by Al Goldstein. Within it, there was a regular column cowritten by Lige Clarke and his lover Jack Nichols, who was now
Screw's
managing editor. The column reported Ginsberg's visit to the Stonewall, as well as a peace offering from the Electric Circus, a famously hip nightclub on St. Marks Place, which had taken the unprecedented step of inviting openly gay people to mingle with heterosexuals on the dance floor. “If you are tired of raids, Mafia control, and checks at the door,” said the Circus, “join us for a
beautiful evening on Sunday night, July 6th.” Clarke and Nichols reported that “for the first time in New York's history, a huge club was experimenting with social integration between heterosexuals and homosexuals.” The evening was a huge success, except for a single “uncool creep” who suddenly started shouting “Goddamn faggots!” He was quickly hustled out of the premises.

The columnists concluded their report with a rousing call to arms:

The revolution in Sheridan Square must step beyond its present boundaries. The homosexual revolution is only a part of a larger revolution sweeping through all segments of society. We hope that “Gay Power” will not become a call for separation, but for sexual integration, and that the young activists will read, study, and make themselves acquainted with all of the facts that will help them carry the sexual revolt triumphantly into the councils of the U.S. Government, into the anti-homosexual churches, into the offices of anti-homosexual psychiatrists, into the city government, and into the state legislatures which make our manner of love-making a crime. It is time to push the homosexual revolution to its logical conclusion. We must crush tyranny wherever it exists and join forces with those who would assist in the utter destruction of the puritanical, repressive, anti-sexual Establishment.

All their dreams were about to come true.

“The ‘homosexual problem'… is the problem of condemning
variety
in human existence,”

—
DR. GEORGE W. WEINBERG
, 1971

“It is one thing to confess to political unorthodoxy but quite another to admit to sexual unorthodoxy.”

—
MERLE MILLER
, 1971

“This was a very idealistic era, when young people felt they could change the world. We truly felt we were part of history. We were doing something new. We were doing something righteous. We were part of the generation of committed youths.”

—
MORTY MANFORD
, gay activist

“To Victory!”

—
CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD
, 1974

N
O OTHER CIVIL RIGHTS
movement in America ever had such an improbable unveiling: an urban riot sparked by drag queens. But while many gay people remained ignorant of Stonewall and others reacted to it with discomfort, this 1960s version of the Boston Tea Party would do more than any other event to transform gay life in America. The thick bottle that had contained an entire culture was uncorked in 1969; within a few years it would be shattered into a thousand pieces.

Stonewall's impact on gay men and lesbians would eventually be comparable to the effect of the Six Day War on Jews around the world: for the first time, thousands of members of each tribe finally thought of themselves as warriors. But because gay people started with so much less
self-esteem in 1969 than most Jews had before 1967, the consequences of Stonewall were much more dramatic. Although millions would remain in the closet, within a year after Stonewall, thousands of men and women would find the courage to declare themselves for the first time: to march and lobby and “zap”
^*
—and even to be identified as gay in their local newspapers.

Never again would American children baffled by this mystery within themselves grow up without seeing any manifestation of it in the world around them. The ancient conspiracy of cultural invisibility was finally over.

In 1969, the only gay organizations with any significant public identity were the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis. Just four years later, one could join a radical Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians, a more mainstream Gay Activists Alliance, the National Gay Task Force,
^†
the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, and hundreds of other groups in New York, across the country, and around the world. “It was like fire, you know,” said Jim Fouratt, a founder of the Gay Liberation Front in New York. “Like a prairie fire: let it roar.… People were ready.” Fouratt joined a group that traveled around the country to create other GLFs. “I think we set up about forty chapters, most of them on university campuses,” he recalled. Even at Catholic Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, gay students decided in 1971 to start their own organization. “I am a great believer in nonviolence,” one of them wrote, “but if any of the football jocks or whoever starts to give me a hard time … well, I don't like to brag about my karate, but …”