GAY PRIDE

Gay in the 1960s — the time was ripe for revolution

By Warren Allen Smith

It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.

Gay life in the 1960s was, for sure, an entirely different time, a time in which falling in love monthly, or even weekly, was neither impossible nor improbable.

It was a dangerous time, however, to be openly gay. Physicians who cured our venereal diseases scolded us for having done what we did to get sick. Psychiatrists ruled that we were mentally sick. Neighbors maliciously gossiped about who was visiting late last night. Landlords asked gay couples, hoping to rent, if they were related. Monotheists called us sinners, threatening that if we didn’t choose to be heterosexual we would not get to Heaven (making that theological invention all the more undesirable). If we were slightly on the fey side, we could get a black eye, a bloody lip or worse. Sometimes, in self-defense, we related antigay jokes to throw people off.

Even if we carefully stayed in the closet, it was difficult to play The Majority’s game. When I was an acting first sergeant in charge of a company that landed on Omaha Beach in 1944, I did play the game, difficult as it was. Although I preferred music, art, poetry and ballet to sports, I guarded against expressing myself. Whenever I got a leave during the time I was in the Army, I chose to travel alone. Who better than gays to understand Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”!

In 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew would have become president if Richard Nixon had died. Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand tied as best actresses for an Oscar. “1776” and “The Great White Hope” won Antoinette Perry awards. Billie Jean King was one of the top tennis players. If treated, gonorrhea, syphilis and other venereal diseases were not life threatening. It cost 20 cents to ride the subway.

Sex in New York City was readily available, night and day. The Rambles in Central Park was one place where openly gay male sex occurred and allegedly had ever since the William Cullen Bryant-inspired area first opened. All that shrubbery, all those dark places in which to hide and to meet….

Many small parks had gay meeting spots, and all large parks had cruising areas. Brooklyn’s Prospect Park had several busy sites. Riverside Drive’s area stretched from the Soldiers and Sailors Monument to General Grant’s Tomb and on up past Harlem. Parks along the East River and areas near the Battery were places to hook up. The park at Washington Sq. was appealing, particularly the northwest corner where guys leaned suggestively on the railings. If anyone asked the time, he really was inviting you to his nearby apartment. Rendezvous were followed by an exchange of names and phone numbers — wrong numbers, of course, if either thought he might do better falling in love after a one-night stand with someone else tomorrow.

The subway during rush hour could be particularly erotic. Today, eyes that focus on your midsection are searching out your billfold, but since 1948 as soon as I arrived in the city I understood that any such glance was being made for another reason.

Park and subway toilets were busy places. In some, a noisy door when opened alerted everyone inside to stop for a moment to make sure the newcomer was not a cop in uniform. Cops not in uniform were the problem, for they enjoyed being the bait, then handing out a ticket (and maybe upon arriving at court receiving $400 to forget details so that the judge would throw the case out).


Brando and Mr. Peepers

Coffee houses, museums, department stores, the opera, the ballet, the symphony, bathhouses like the Everard, bars like Mary’s on Eighth St. or the Cork Club on W. 72nd, nightclubs like the Bon Soir on Eighth St. (where Marlon Brando could be seen applauding Mr. Peepers, his boyfriend Wally Cox), a bookstore such as the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop: all were places one might fall in love, whether for a short time or, in my case, for four memorable, truly love-filled decades.

Favorites for many gays were the movie houses on The Deuce: the Victory, Lyric, Times Square, Apollo, Selwyn, New Amsterdam, Liberty, Empire and the Harris. But away from 42nd St. were many other houses where people came to see people, not the movie: the huge Adonis near Eighth Ave. and 55th; the smallish Roxy in Greenwich Village; the crumbling Metropolitan on W. 14th; and the busiest place in Manhattan, Variety Photoplays on Third Ave. south of 14th. Drawn to such places by word-of-mouth — no guidebooks were available — were many who had escaped from homophobic small towns across the country, people eager to meet, to be met and dependent upon the kindness of strangers.

At the western end of Christopher St., it was not easy to be rejected, particularly if someone liked your physique, your manner or simply your attitude. During the evenings, dark areas in the Village tended to attract numbers of people. A few blocks uptown from Christopher, unlocked and parked semi-trailer containers became known as “the trucks,” and dozens of all sizes and varieties of men desperately fought to get packed into the relatively small wooden containers’ darkness, where anonymous sex was commonplace.

The gay bar in the 1960s that became known around the world as a human rights symbol was the Stonewall Inn. On a Friday night, 27 June 1969, a major struggle that had been developing internationally for years and has been described in Vern Bullough’s “Before Stonewall,” erupted here. My recollection of the bar itself was that it was dingy. Upon entering, you signed a book with a name (seldom your own), paid $3 to cover two $1 drinks (allegedly watered down) and found a place to stand or someone who wanted to dance. It was illegal for men to dance with men, although women could dance with women. To gay teenagers, the place was like a refuge, a site where they could choose the music and could dance with those they chose. Stories abounded that violence was always present in the allegedly Mafia-owned and operated bars. However, one reliable source told me he knew the two who rented the place, saying they were simply young Italian entrepreneurs, that not all Italians are connected with the Mafia. At least the bar was there for all of us to enjoy with our fellow outlaws.


The rebellion begins...

Because of the underage customers, the prevalence of drugs, and the possibility of illegal dancing or other acts, the police went openly to gay bars, including for payoffs. On this Friday night, however, some of the employees began to be arrested. Some customers were told to leave but others were detained. The raid turned ugly around 2 a.m. Although perhaps a hundred or so were involved that night, many more hundreds of contradictory “Rashomon”-like versions can be found as to what actually happened. Angry patrons, both inside and outside, are said to have started yelling “Gay Power,” throwing stones, coins and bottles. Not all onlookers were pleased with seeing such civil disobedience, and some are said to have thrown bottles at the gays. On one of the nights, the cops barricaded themselves inside because the place was attacked from outside by several hundred. Trapped, the cops called for reinforcements. But when the media reported the escalating and eye-catching happening, the word got around fast, and hundreds returned the following nights.

As the past treasurer of two different Stonewall veterans’ groups, both now extinct, I conducted many person-to-person interviews with individuals I trusted to honestly express their experiences. One, Danny (who now is a corporate suit and would not want his last name included) was among the most credible. He had no vested interest in exaggerating or lying. In fact, he stopped paying dues, like others who became critical of some of the egomaniacal leaders of the several fissiparous Stonewall veterans’ groups.

When I interviewed Danny five years ago and posted his memories on the Web, he recalled to me that in 1967 he was amazed to find guys dancing with guys at the Stonewall. In any of the bars, you could not stand at the bar with your back to it, or it would be considered soliciting and the bar could be shut down. Also, you could not touch when dancing.

“Back in 1969,” Danny said, “I was a hippie on my way to the Stonewall to go dancing with my friend Keith (who was home from college for summer break). Keith and I were talking about the revolution that would be coming along some day. We thought that the Young Lords, or the Black Panthers, would start it. We had no idea of gay rights. We were both 20 and the world was changing so fast. There was now a women’s movement, and Vietnam was still going on. Early that year in March there was the first “be-in” at Grand Central Station, with about 400 to 500 young people smoking pot and singing folk songs and antiwar songs. The police raided the be-in and hit many a young person with their clubs, pulling us by our long hair into the paddy wagons. Many of the people there were gay. Because of the times and the antiwar movement, most young gay people had experiences with demonstrations. The only gay movement that I knew of at the time was the Mattachine Society, and those people were over 30 . . . and most of us didn’t trust anyone over 30!

“As Keith and I arrived, the police cars and paddy wagon were already at the bar. It was not uncommon for gay bars to be raided. The people started yelling at the cops and throwing pennies at them. Around the corner on Seventh Ave. was a new building being constructed, and someone ran and got bricks from there and started throwing them at the police. The cops went wild! There was no way to contain the crowd because of the location of the bar. You could run down W. Fourth, Seventh Ave., Waverly Pl. or Christopher St., and still end up back at the bar.”

Danny’s recollections were identical to my own, for I was present the second night (Sat., June 28). Many of us did not know about the raid the night before. We were simply part of a happening, not participants in what turned out to be an important historic event. Nevertheless, a larger crowd showed up. According to Danny, “We decided to liberate the bar and reopen it so we could dance. I really don’t think any of us thought that this was the start of the gay rights movement. Someone got a parking meter and smashed open the bar doors. More cops were called in. The riot started again and garbage cans were set on fire, Molotov cocktails were thrown and it was like a war zone! The thing was that because of the night before we as gay people discovered that we would stand up and fight together, something we never knew before. We were so fragmented when it came to our own rights.” I had been one of those across the street who had thrown a garbage container, then had run like hell to escape from a cop who came after me.

Danny’s other recollections jibe with my own: “The Stonewall was a great place if you were young and gay. Many nights I did the Jerk or the Boston Monkey or some latest line-dance craze till the bar closed. I hung out with a lot of people who worked there. Barbara Eden who worked the coat check was a good friend of mine, and I dated Frankie who worked the front door and was sometimes a bartender there. The Stonewall changed with the times. As the ’60s progressed they put in black lights and Day-Glo posters. The lover I had at the time, George, sold acid there. Let’s face it: the place was Mafia-owned!

“One myth that seems to have grown about the riot was that drag queens started it,” Danny continued. “That’s not true. There were what we called a lot of Flame Queens there. A Flame Queen wore hip huggers, Tom Jones shirts and maybe eye makeup. They would tease up their hair and were very effeminate, like Emory in “Boys in the Band.” Most young people’s clothes at the time had become pretty asexual. You could not be in full drag at the time. You had to have three articles of men’s clothing on or you would be arrested for impersonating a woman. Most people were into dressing the new style, unisex.

“We Stonewall vets were just a bunch of kids, not heroes,” Danny continued. “We simply wanted to dance and not be harassed. No one knew that that night would be thought of as the start of the gay movement. My own heroes are people like you who started G.L.F. [Gay Liberation Front] and G.A.A. [Gay Activists Alliance]. You people were the real movers and shakers.”


No one took any photos

The trouble continued through Thurs., July 3. At Fedora’s, another refuge, drinkers at the bar and diners in what is one of Manhattan’s oldest family-owned restaurants (owned and operated 51 years now by Fedora Dorato) have traded for decades the various versions of what happened. Unfortunately, the rebellion was neither photographed nor professionally documented. Some versions of what happened, however, can be found in Martin Duberman’s “Stonewall” (1994), which became the basis for a 1996 movie with the same title. Randy Wicker, the “atheist priest,” co-authored with Kay Tobin “The Gay Crusaders,” which contains interviews with other Stonewallers. Stormé DeLarverie was the subject of a 1987 film, “Stormé: The Lady of the Jewel Box.” Look for a forthcoming book about Stonewall by the historian David Carter.

Warren Allen Smith is author of “Who’s Who in Hell” (Barricade Books) and “Celebrities in Hell” (Barricade Books).