The Stonewall Reader

by New York Public Library

Community of Interest: We are in total opposition to America’s white racism, to poverty, hunger, the systematic destruction of our patrimony; we oppose the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and are in total opposition to wars of aggression and imperialism, whoever pursues them. We support the demands of Blacks, Chicanos, Orientals, Women, Youth, Senior Citizens, and others demanding their full rights as human beings. We join in their struggle, and shall actively seek coalition to pursue these goals.

We seek and find love, and approach love, as a feeling of loving mutuality.

No gay group or conglomeration of gay groups had ever gotten this far before.

one fellow had a big white husky dog on a leash. He had a sign on his dog reading, “All of us don’t walk poodles.”

Pat Rocco’s group, SPREE (Society of Pat Rocco Enlightened Enthusiasts),

Signs carried in the parade were slogans that we now see with increasing frequency. Here are some samples: “Homosexuality Is Natural Birth Control”; “More Deviation, Less Population”; “America: In God We Trust . . . Love It But Change It”; “Nazis Burned Jews, Churches Burned Homosexuals”; “Hickory, Dickory, Dock, They’ll Pick Our Bedroom Lock, They’ll Haul Us In and Call It Sin, Unless We Stop Their Clock.”

Two women sat down with me. They insisted on joining me for the prayer-vigil and the fast. They said they would stick it out to the end. Willie provided them with water, blankets, and air mattresses, too. One of the women was from the Daughters of Bilitis. The other was from an organization called HELP, Incorporated. DOB is a nonviolent, but militant organization to aid lesbians in their fight for equal rights. HELP is the “Homophile Effort for Legal Protection.”

The thing that was so horrible about it is that no one went to help him. The police just ignored him. It was the kind of indirect brutality that really galls me.

As soon as I refused that first meal, I was taken out of the cell and photographed again. I was taken to the front desk, and they put a new arm band on me. They took mine off, and I saw that the new one had the name of an individual I had never heard of. They also gave me a new booking number. That really scared me. I was sure that some strange game had started, and that I would be lost somewhere in the jail system of Los Angeles County or Los Angeles City, or traded back and forth.

But for many people the whole week had been one of the busiest, most fruitful weeks of their lives and that was that. It had been a week of gay pride. It had been a week of saying “Do you know what week this is?” And answering, “Yes, it’s gay pride week.” It had been a time of walking up to people you didn’t know and watching their faces when they read things handed to them that said THIS IS GAY PRIDE WEEK and that was that. It was a fact.

Myself and other organizers had only convinced about half of the attendees that marching in a gay parade was also a lesbian issue. To many of these women Stonewall and the Christopher Street West annual march was a gay male birthday.

The rumors of LAPD files were true—they were taking photos of every monitor and anyone who looked like they were organizers including myself.

An aging Ford stopped in front of me, and out of it emerged a bearded, blond guy in overalls, who screamed, “The only good fag is a dead fag! Get the fuck out of my way!” “Ladies!” I screamed at a group of feathered drag queens waiting on the corner. “Come here, I need you!” The frenzied fags ran devotedly into battle. “What’s the matter, honey?” the group’s leader asked. I pointed toward my Aryan. “Go kiss him. Get him back into his car so our people can cross the intersection!” The gaggle of queens descended upon the tall, now speechless blond. One stroked his arm, another pinched his butt. The muscled straight guy shrank from the queens. The only safe place was in his car. Quickly, he jumped back in, slammed the door, raised the windows, and locked himself in. Drag-phobia had saved the day!

Once inside the Rampart Station a media-savvy Commander Wise announced, “I will not take custody of these people. We did not see the crime in action.” So it was off to the District Attorney’s Office, where our straight lawyer (there were no out gay lawyers in ’74) insisted to the DA that he didn’t need to see our crime in person because there was nothing in the law exempting private or consensual oral copulation.

Was the situation in jail bad? Yes, it was. A lot of transvestites were fighting amongst each other. They have a lot of problems, you know. They can’t go to court; they can’t get a court date. Some of them are waiting for years.

We don’t want to see gay people picked up on the streets for things like loitering or having sex or anything like that.

We believe in picking up the gun, starting a revolution if necessary.

Well, when you’re picked up for loitering and you don’t have a police record, a lot of times they let you go, and they let your police record build up, and then they’ll go back there and look at it—and then they give you a lot of time.

Like before you even go before the judge, they try to make an agreement with you, so that they can get your case out of court, you know.

Many transvestites take jobs as boys in the beginning, and then after a while they go into their female attire and keep on working. It’s easier for a transsexual than a transvestite.

They buy you a drink, but of course they don’t know you’re a boy. You just don’t go out with any of them. Like my friend; she gets paid for entertaining customers, talking to them, getting them to buy a drink. I’m just learning about this field; I’ve never been in it before. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been getting a lot of dollar bills without even doing anything. I tell them I need money for dinner.

There’s a lot of transvestites who are very lonely, and they just go to bars to look for husbands and lovers, just like gay men do.

A drag queen is one that usually goes to a ball, and that’s the only time she gets dressed up. Transvestites live in drag. A transsexual spends most of her life in drag. I never come out of drag to go anywhere. Everywhere I go I get all dressed up. A transvestite is still like a boy, very manly looking, a feminine boy. You wear drag here and there. When you’re a transsexual, you have hormone treatments and you’re on your way to a sex change, and you never come out of female clothes.

Did you ever have to use it? Not yet, but I’m patient.

I was used to civil rights activists—and I thought, “These are the activists and they’re really courageous and everything, but they were accountants and librarians.” It was a little bit of a surprise. There were no flaming radicals. It was a pretty staid group of people. Very meeting-like.

They won’t throw us out because this is a Continental Trailways official stop and they would lose their license.” They would lose their franchise if they threw us out, so they’re just letting us sit. But we found they got some good music on the jukebox. And so “God Bless America,” we played it over and over. They finally unplugged the jukebox. The New York Times reporter gave me half of his grilled cheese sandwich. I broke it into little pieces and passed it down. And we were all eating these grilled cheese sandwiches.

I thought it was absurd, Frank Kameny telling us we couldn’t hold hands in the picket line. That we couldn’t loosen our ties or take off coats. There were women in there. You couldn’t wear slacks if you were a woman. He had made up this set of rules. It was purely for the press. It was the idea that this is the first event of its kind and we want the press to concentrate on the fact that we look and act like everybody else, not like a caricature—whatever that meant to him—of what people thought we were.

And I had my own views. I don’t want to define the women’s movement, but it was almost the idea that gay liberation had to do with men’s consciousness raising.

KUROMIYA: I think in the early days of a movement, this may be quite appropriate. Because there’s a level of life and death camaraderie that’s got to be in there. Because we’re talking about affinity groups, O.K. An affinity group, I think you have to share certain kinds of perspective. And it’s easier to deal with that, I think, if you share on all levels, including gender. It would be hard for me to discuss, let’s say, what it means to be a woman-identified woman. In fact I would be thrown out of the meeting if I tried to do that.

This is something that I guess came out of the drug culture of the mid-’60s, when people really intensely looked into their psyches and began to deal with the most primordial aspects of sex and race and being a human being versus a rock or something else.

I was in Sheridan the second time for a year, and I was in the hole ten months out of that year. The hole was a small cell with just a light box and a slot underneath where your food came in. And I was let out once every other day for a shower. I’d get a milk pill and a vitamin pill for breakfast, a full lunch, and then a milk pill and a vitamin pill again for dinner. The hole is where they put murderers and rapists, people they feel they can’t handle. I was apparently a murderer and a rapist all combined, with my homosexuality, so they put me in the hole.

he used to really give us a lot of hell, you know, beat us up—and this was a grown-ass man, and we were fourteen, fifteen years old.

There’s a lot of that; I think institutions encourage things like gang rapes by keeping the tension between homosexuals and straight people there.

lot of them had intentions of being caught and going back to jail because of relationships there.

What school did for me was put me in the same type of oppressive situation, but in a more bourgeois sense, so I’d be able to get a half-assed job after I graduated, supporting the system. But in fact I wouldn’t be able to get a job, because the record I had was tremendous. I was so oppressed I couldn’t even see that I’d never be able to teach, I’d never be able to go through school and teach high school students or children or adults or anybody because of my criminal record. But all I was concerned with at the time was getting that diploma because that made me a part of the system, could make me some money.

now that I’m conscious of my oppression I could not consider any other

I think the people I still have the most difficulty understanding are white people. I still feel a lot of negative things about white people because of their basic racism and the extreme racism which they bring down on the black community and on black people.

I hope I will, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to understand straight white people. I feel that they’ve created all this shit—straight white MEN in particular.

It was illegal in many states, including Pennsylvania, to serve alcohol to a homosexual. Police raided gay bars when the owners didn’t come through with their payoffs or around election time, so that politicians could prove they were “cleaning up” so-called vice.

Women, drag queens, and blacks were usually asked to show multiple pieces of identification or were refused admission outright—as in, “Sorry, no women allowed.”

When you got arrested in a bar raid, your name and address ended up in the local newspaper. Many men had their lives and careers ruined by bar raids, even though the charges were eventually dropped.

While tearooms were the antithesis of the spirit of the sexual revolution, which advocated free love out in the open, they served the practical function of giving married and closeted men a place to indulge their hidden desires. Not to mention members of the faculty.

Vice squad officers went undercover to entrap men making passes at them, then led them away in handcuffs.

Many of the gay liberationists I met were into radical drag (also known as genderfuck), a form of political dress that mocked traditional gender roles. Its purposes were to show people how arbitrary gender-specific dress and behavior were and to free up men and women to be themselves.

for many years, starting in the dark ages of the late ’50s, queens marched on Halloween night in a defiant display of pride. They assembled at a certain bar (I don’t know the name of it) and strutted through the streets of the center of town, putting on a show for the straights who would gather from as far away as the surrounding suburbs.

I didn’t quite fit into the scene along the drag strip. Many of the other queens considered me a freak because I didn’t want to pass as a woman, nor did I want a sex change.

I was the ’70s version of a nerd. And I wasn’t a prostitute. Many times, guys offered me money to go home with them. I usually refused. I was working at a record store run by hippies who accepted my unconventional looks (they thought I was trying to be David Bowie),

They described sexual favors they were forced to perform for some of the officers.

They also used a state law that prohibited “impersonating the opposite sex,” which meant that if you weren’t wearing two articles of clothing of your “appropriate” gender, you could be hauled off to prison.

“I should take you in.” He paused. “But your uncle’s a good guy. He don’t deserve this.”