The Stonewall Reader

by New York Public Library

Because of the Stonewall uprising, people saw homosexuals no longer as criminals or sinners or mentally ill, but as something like members of a minority group. It was an oceanic change in thinking.

Stonewall is often marked as the beginning of the LGBTQ civil rights movement, but that is of course not true. LGBTQ people had been organizing politically since at least the 1950s, with the emergence of organizations such as the Mattachine Society, the Daughters of Bilitis, the Janus Society, the Society for Individual Rights, and the Erickson Educational Foundation.

The stories of the participants make it clear that it marked the convergence of homophile-era activism with the energy and vision of the civil rights, antiwar, and counterculture movements that were transforming the country.

The 1970s became a gay and lesbian renaissance with its own literature, music, politics, and erotic presence.

During the fifties in the Village, I didn’t know the few other Black women who were visibly gay at all well. Too often we found ourselves sleeping with the same white women. We recognized ourselves as exotic sister-outsiders who might gain little from banding together.

Downtown in the gay bars I was a closet student and an invisible Black. Uptown at Hunter I was a closet dyke and a general intruder.

Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other; we learned lessons from each other, the values of which were not lessened by what we did not learn.

besides the bouncer was always asking me for my ID to prove I was twenty-one, even though I was older than the other women with me. Of course “you can never tell with Colored people.” And we would all rather die than have to discuss the fact that it was because I was Black, since, of course, gay people weren’t racists. After all, didn’t they know what it was like to be oppressed?

In a paradoxical sense, once I accepted my position as different from the larger society as well as from any single sub-society—Black or gay—I felt I didn’t have to try so hard. To be accepted. To look femme. To be straight. To look straight. To be proper. To look “nice.” To be liked. To be loved. To be approved. What I didn’t realize was how much harder I had to try merely to stay alive, or rather, to stay human. How much stronger a person I became in that trying.

I went around telling that story for a while, although a lot of my friends couldn’t see why I thought it was funny. But this is all about how very difficult it is at times for people to see who or what they are looking at, particularly when they don’t want to. Or maybe it does take one to know one.

But as the summer days proceed in sweltering intensity, the cops relent, as if themselves bogged down by the heat. Then they merely walk up and down the streets telling you to move on, move on. Inevitably you’re back in the same spot.

To reciprocate in any way for the money would have violated the craving for the manifestation of desire toward me.

With this youngman just now, there had been the indication that he felt he could attract me to him as clearly as he had been attracted to me. . . .

These were the only times that I, born in the Bronx, loved Brooklyn. I knew that at the end of that residential hegemony was the ocean I loved to dive into, that I watched turn purple in the late afternoon sun, that made me feel clean and young and strong, ready for a night of loving, my skin living with salt, clean enough for my lover’s tongue, my body reaching to give to my lover’s hands the fullness I had been given by the sea.

Even the cops deciding to clean up the beach by arresting men whose suits were judged too minimal, hauling them over the sand into paddy wagons, did not destroy our sun.

Del’s explanation was followed by a hoot. “I wouldn’t want to carry a DOB membership card in my wallet! What if someone saw it? It’s too obvious.” This remark completely astounded us. The speaker, dressed as she was in men’s clothes right down to the shoes on her feet, was to us a walking advertisement. She couldn’t have been more obvious if she was wearing a sign on her back.

The arguments eventually led to an ultimate rift.

When Phyllis assumed the editorship of The Ladder she also assumed the alias of “Ann Ferguson.” About the same time we started the public lecture series, at which meetings we, of course, publicized the magazine. When someone requested an introduction to the editor, members found themselves calling, “Ann . . . Ann! . . . Ann! . . . ANN!” But it finally took “Phyllis!” to get her attention. From that point on we cautioned those who intended to use aliases to at least keep their first names or nicknames.

In World War II, I willingly fought the Germans, with bullets, in order to preserve and secure my rights, freedoms, and liberties, and those of my fellow citizens. In 1961, it has, ironically, become necessary for me to fight my own government, with words, in order to achieve some of the very same rights, freedoms, and liberties for which I placed my life in jeopardy in 1945. This letter is part of that fight.

May I suggest that the homosexual is as deserving of his government’s protection and assistance in these areas as is the Negro, and needs that protection at least as much—actually much more?

Action by the government, on this question, is needed in four specific areas (listed here in no particular order) and a fifth general one. These are: (1) the law, and the mode and practices of its administration and enforcement, and the abuses thereof; (2) federal employment policies; (3) the policies, practices, and official attitudes of the military; (4) security-clearance policies and practices in government employment, in the military, and in private industry under government contract; and (5) the education of the public and the changing of their primitive attitudes.

I am not an advocate for frequent changes in laws and constitutions. But laws and constitutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths discovered, and manners and opinions change, with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also to keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.

You have proposed, and are indeed working vigorously and successfully toward what you have felicitously termed “The Great Society.” Mr. President—NO society can be truly great which excludes from full participation and contribution, or relegates to a secondary role, ANY minority of its citizenry.

My wife had gone on a trip and while away had consulted a psychiatrist, who, on the basis of what she alone had said to him, told her that I was undoubtedly a homosexual and that she should get a divorce. This was hard to take, 1) I didn’t want the divorce, 2) I was not a homosexual, 3) she took my son, house, and everything else, and 4) she was unwilling to even try to work things out with professional help.

And somehow, by the time I was nineteen and married, I had decided—from Herman and several other gay black men I’d seen or met—that some blacks were more open about their homosexuality than many whites. My own explanation was, I suppose, that because we had less to begin with, in the end we had less to lose.

Barbara reviews the evolution of the gay movement during the late 50’s and 60’s. “At first we told ourselves we were getting together to learn more about the nature of homosexuality and to let other people know. We looked for ‘sympathetic’ psychiatrists and lawyers and clergymen who would say things that made us feel a bit better about ourselves. In retrospect, I think this was a very necessary stage to go through. The movement we have today could not have developed if there hadn’t been this earlier effort to get over the really severe feelings of inadequacy about being gay that most of our people had.

There was still a strong feeling that if we spoke nicely and reasonably and played by the rules of the game, we could persuade heterosexuals that homosexuals were all right as human beings.

At the time there was still a lurking feeling in the movement that homosexuals as persons should be accepted and have their rights but that homosexuality itself need not be valued as highly as heterosexuality.

In her Ladder interview, Eckstein discusses the importance of political demonstrations and relations between the African American civil rights movement and lesbian and gay activism.

There are some white people who have the impression that there is so much sexual freedom among Negroes that they naturally know all about homosexuality, that they try everything! What do you say to this notion? A. When people talk about sexual freedom among Negroes, I think what they may mean is that Negroes have less inhibition generally, also that they have fewer other outlets. But I don’t agree that there are any sexual differences between Negroes and whites. There may be more freedom for Negroes to participate in sex—but not a variety of sex.

I feel so strongly that an organization should be formulated with a definite aim in mind and then the membership should fall in line with this aim.

A. I think the best therapy for a homosexual is reinforcement of his way of life, by associating with people who are like him. I think the whole anxiety business comes in when he is constantly pitted against a different way of life—you know, where he’s the odd-ball. I believe homosexuals need this sort of reinforcement that comes from being with their own kind. And if they don’t have it, then they have to be awfully strong to create their own image. Most people are not that strong.

We scientists know of course that it’s a highly pleasurable experience to take someone’s penis or vagina into your mouth—it’s pleasurable and enjoyable. Everyone knows that. But after you’ve taken a thousand pleasurable penises or vaginas into your mouth and had a thousand people take your pleasurable penis or vagina into their mouth, what have you accomplished? What have you got to show for it? Do you have a wife or children or a husband or a home or a trip to Europe? Do you have a bridge club to show for it? No! You have only a thousand pleasurable experiences to show for it.

We’d waited a lifetime, it seemed to us, and we hoped we’d be happy ever after. Could we measure up to the fairy tales? Well, since ours was a world of reality, we’d have to work at happiness.

“We only did it occasionally, and not because we were driven to it, but because it was just the thing to do. We were going along with societal expectations.”

moving!” The refurbishment of New York Mattachine also hinged on a reexamination of the sickness theory, with the old guard wanting to take no stand on the matter or actually believing homosexuality to be an illness, and the new guard wanting to adopt a statement similar to the one framed by Mattachine of Washington: “In the absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense, but is merely a preference, orientation, or propensity, on par with and not different in kind from heterosexuality.”

gay slogan buttons. He also offered free coffee and cookies. “Opening weekend, I sold out many of the better titles, which pleased me: That was the kind of shop I wanted to have!” He was referring to books such as The Homosexual in America by Donald Webster Cory, Quatrefoil by James Barr, and the renowned Wolfenden Report out of England. The next week he added Richard Amory’s Song of the Loon, a book that “almost glamorizes homosexuality” and has always sold well, according to Craig.

The stock in the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop breaks down about this way: 10 percent primarily for gay women, 70 percent for gay men, and 20 percent of equal interest to women and men. “This is admittedly disproportionate, but I don’t accept the blame for that,” says Craig. “There’s just a lot more published for gay men than for gay women. It’s part of male chauvinism in our society.

is A Place for Us by Isabel Miller,

Such marches, he feels, are important primarily because they change people’s attitudes about homosexuality. “I don’t really believe in law reform as a goal. . . . First you have to change what people basically think of themselves.”

Christopher Street, from Greenwich to Seventh Avenues, had become an almost solid mass of people—most of them gay. No traffic could pass, and even walking the few blocks on foot was next to impossible. One little old lady tried to get through, and many members of the crowd tried to help her. She brushed them away and continued her determined walk, trembling with fear and murmuring, “It must be the full moon, it must be the full moon.”

(It was an interesting sidelight on the demonstrations that those usually put down as “sissies” or “swishes” showed the most courage and sense during the action. Their bravery and daring saved many people from being hurt, and their sense of humour and camp helped keep the crowds from getting nasty or too violent.)

All you had to do was find an empty beer can, so the waiter would think you’d bought a drink, and the night was yours.

This place was the “ART” that gave form to the feelings of our heartbeats.

The total charisma of a revolution in our CONSCIOUSNESS rising from the gutter to the gut to the heart and the mind was here.

Hindsight: my fear on the verge of being trampled by a mob fills the same dimensions as my fear on the verge of being clubbed by the TPF.

Later, Pine tells me he didn’t shoot because he had heard the sirens in time and felt no need to kill someone if help was arriving. It was that close.

The police are scrutinizing all unlicensed places, and most of the bars that are in that category happen to cater to homosexuals.

It was explained to me that generally men dressed as men, even if wearing extensive makeup, are always released; men dressed as women are sometimes arrested; and “men” fully dressed as women, but who upon inspection by a policewoman prove to have undergone the sex-change operation, are always let go.

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.