The Martin Duberman Reader (12 page)

Most professors are interested only in students who are themselves potential scholars; they're concerned with training future colleagues, not with helping the individual young person grow in his own directions. The lack of interest taken by most professors in
most students, their refusal to reveal or engage more than a small share of their own selves, has made many of the best students cynical about knowledge and about those who purvey it. They hoped to find in their professors models on whom they might pattern their lives; instead they find narrow specialists busy with careers, with government contracts, with the augmentation of status and income.

Most of the powers within the academic community won't even acknowledge the right of students to complain, let alone the cogency of those complaints. To the request that they be allowed a voice in planning the curriculum, Jacques Barzun replies that they have done nothing to “earn” a voice. To the lament that their studies seem outmoded or irrelevant, Barzun retorts that “relevance is a relationship in the mind and not a property of things,” which apparently means that although students might want to study urban affairs, if they will instead study cockle shells
in the right way
, they will discover all there is to know about life in the ghettos. And to the students' suggestion that they have some formal power in such matters as choosing faculty, passing on applications for admission, or helping to decide on the expansion of the physical plant, Barzun responds with hoots of derision and George Kennan with cold anger.

Both gentlemen remind the undergraduates that the university is not, and was never meant to be, a democracy. Kennan, in this instance, is the more peremptory of the two. “Even if university trustees and administrators had a right to shift a portion of their responsibilities for university affairs to the student, which they do not,” he writes, the student would in any case “be unqualified to receive it.” The very suggestion, he warns, is part of the current tendency of American society “to press upon the child a premature external adulthood.”

The other argument most often heard for denying students any say in university affairs is that they are “mere transients.” True, but so are many professors, and so (to change the context) are members of the House of Representatives, who are elected for only two years. Besides, the
interests
of the student population do not shift as often as the population itself. But even if the interests of the undergraduates
did continually change (and they probably should), life does, after all, belong to the living, or, in the case of the universities, a campus to its
present
constituents.

In addition to student grievances over what happens in the classroom and on the campus, there is another major source of disaffection: the university's relationship to the world around it—its role as landlord of neighboring property, and, on the broader canvas, its role as the recipient of government largesse and provider of government expertise.

The upheavals of last spring at Columbia brought to focus the problem of the university's relationship to the society at large. One of two key issues during that upheaval was Columbia's pending construction of a gym in a public park used by Harlem residents. This issue by itself might be thought of minor importance (if, that is, one is not a resident of Harlem), but in fact it was the latest of a long series of encroachments by Columbia into the surrounding ghetto, an encroachment that usually involved evicting tenants with little concern for their wishes and welfare. (Columbia is still secretly extending its real estate holdings in Harlem, and its “relocation office” is still forcing families out of buildings it wants to tear down.)

Barzun goes so far as to deny the reality of issues like the gym construction. Universities must expand, he argues, and expansion inevitably brings conflict with the university's immediate neighbors. But shall the needs of several hundred citizens, he rhetorically asks, “prevail over the needs of . . . a national university?” Besides, the area around a university is usually a “deteriorating” one (as regards Columbia, Barzun has elsewhere referred to its surrounding neighborhood as “uninviting, abnormal, sinister, dangerous”), so it is a matter of simple “self-protection” for the university to take “steps.” The “steps,” as Barzun defines them, include “bringing in the police against crime and vice, hiring special patrols, and buying real estate as fast as funds and the market will permit.” In his long book, Barzun has almost no discussion of Columbia's relations with Harlem; when I came to a chapter entitled “Poverty in the Midst of Plenty,” I thought I had finally come to a detailed review of those
relations, but the chapter turned out instead to be about the financial problems of the university.

It's one thing to defend the university theoretically as a research center and quite another to ask specifically “research in what and for what?” The multiple and tangled relationships that have developed between our leading universities and the large corporations and the federal government raise doubts about the proper boundaries of “research.” More than two-thirds of university research funds come from agencies of the federal government closely connected with defense matters, and about one quarter of the two hundred largest industrial corporations in the country have university officials on their boards of directors. It is certainly an open question these days whether the university is engaged in research in order to pursue “truth” or to acquire status, power, and profit. Columbia's own farcical involvement with the Strickman cigarette filter is but one of many examples of the university's placing greed ahead of integrity.

Only rarely do we have a generation—or at least a minority of one—that engages itself so earnestly on the side of principled action; that values people so dearly and possessions so little; that cares enough about our country to jeopardize their own careers within it; that wants so desperately to lead open, honest lives and to have institutions and a society that would make such lives possible. For such a generation [and for the current Occupy Wall Street one as well], we should be immensely grateful and immensely proud. Instead, we tell them that they are frenzied children; that we will try to be patient with them but that they should not push us too far; that they too in time will grow to understand the
real
ways of the world. To say that this condescension or blindness on the part of the older generation is a pity does not fit the dimensions of the case. It is a crime.

—from the
Atlantic Monthly
, November 1968

The Stonewall Riots

C
raig Rodwell, founder of New York City's first gay bookstore (the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop), wanted militant activism to be the touchstone of New York's homophile movement. He wanted gays to empower themselves through confrontational action to build a proud, assertive movement. Craig was also fed up with the gay bar scene in New York, with the Mafia controlling the only public space most gays could claim, with the contempt shown the gay clientele, with the speakeasy, clandestine atmosphere, the watered-down, overpriced drinks, the police payoffs and raids. His anger was compounded by tales he heard from his friend Dawn Hampton, a torch singer who, between engagements, worked the hatcheck at a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Because Dawn was straight, the Mafia men who ran the Stonewall talked freely in front of her—talked about their hatred for the “faggot scumbags” who made their fortunes.

Indeed, the Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher Street, epitomized for Craig everything that was wrong with the bar scene. When a hepatitis epidemic broke out among gay men early in 1969, Craig printed an angry article in his newsletter,
New York Hymnal
, blaming the epidemic on the unsterile drinking glasses at Stonewall. And he was probably right. Stonewall had no running water behind
the bar; a returned glass was simply run through one of two vats of stagnant water kept underneath the bar, refilled, and then served to the next customer. By the end of an evening the water was murky and multicolored. Craig thought Stonewall was a dive, an awful, sleazy place personified by the figure of Ed Murphy, one of the bouncer-doormen who dealt drugs, made “introductions” (for which he accepted “tips”), and was involved in corruption, simultaneously taking payoffs from the Mafia and the New York Police Department.

Yet the Stonewall Inn had, in the course of its two-and-a-half-year existence, become the most popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. Many saw it as an oasis, a safe retreat from the harassments of everyday life, a place less susceptible to police raids than other gay bars, and one that drew a magical mix of patrons ranging from tweedy East Siders to street queens. It was also the only gay male bar in New York in 1969 where dancing was permitted.

The Genovese family operated Stonewall, the Tenth of Always (an after-after-hours place that catered to all possible variations of illicit life and stayed open so late it converted by 9:00
A.M.
into a regular working-class bar), the Bon Soir on Eighth Street, and—run by Anna Genovese—the Eighty-Two Club in the East Village, which featured drag shows for an audience largely composed of straight tourists. The Washington Square bar (which opened at three in the morning and catered primarily—rather than incidentally, as was the case with Stonewall—to transvestites) was owned by the Joe Gallo family; it also controlled Tony Pastor's and the Purple Onion.

The Mob usually provided only a limited amount of money to Family members interested in opening a club; thereafter it became the individual's responsibility to turn a profit. That meant, among other things, not investing too heavily in liquor. When Washington Square first opened, the Mafia members who ran the place lost twelve cases of liquor and fifty cases of beer during the first police raid. Thereafter, only a few bottles were kept in the club and the rest of the liquor was stored in a nearby car; when the bartender was about to run out, someone would go around the corner to the
parked car, put a few bottles under his arm, and return to the club. (Other bars had different strategies, such as keeping the liquor hidden behind a panel in the wall.) By thus preventing the police from confiscating large amounts of liquor during any one of their commonplace raids, it was possible—and also commonplace—to open up again for business the next day.

The Stonewall Inn had, in its varied incarnations during the fifties, been a straight restaurant and a straight nightclub. In 1966 it was taken over by three Mafia figures in Little Italy: “Mario” (the best-liked of the three), Zookie Zarfas, who also dealt in firecrackers, and “Fat Tony” Lauria, who weighed in at 420 pounds. Together they put up $3,500 to reopen Stonewall as a gay club; Fat Tony put up $2,000, which made him the controlling partner, but Mario served as Stonewall's manager and ran the place on a day-today basis. Tony Lauria was the best-connected of the three.

Fat Tony lived from 1966 to 1971 with Chuck Shaheen, an openly gay man in his midtwenties of Italian descent. The relationship was secretarial, not erotic. Shaheen acted as a man Friday, serving at different times as everything from a Stonewall bartender to the trusted go-between who “picked up the banks”—the accumulated cash—at the bar several times a night and carried the money home to his boss. According to Shaheen, Tony developed a heavy methamphetamine habit, shooting the crystal several times a day into his veins. Under the drug's influence, Tony lost about two hundred pounds, stayed up all night at clubs (at Stonewall, his favorite hangout, he'd embarrass his partners by insistently doing parlor tricks, like twirling cigarettes in the air), and began, for the first time in his life, to go to bed with men—though, to Shaheen's relief, not with him. Tony's father stopped speaking to him altogether and Shaheen had to carry messages between them. Increasingly shunned, Tony, so the rumor mill had it, was later killed by the Family.

Tony and his partners, Mario and Zookie, had opened the Stonewall as a private “bottle club.” That was a common ruse for getting around the lack of a liquor license; bottles would be labeled with fictitious names and the bar would then—contrary to a law
forbidding bottle clubs from selling drinks—proceed to do cash business just like any other bar. The three partners spent less than $1,000 in fixing up the club's interior. They settled for a third-rate sound system, hired a local electrician and his assistant to build a bar and raise the dance-floor stage, and got their jukebox and cigarette machines—had to get them—from the local don, Matty “the Horse” Ianello.

As the man who controlled the district in which the Stonewall was located, Ianello was automatically entitled to a cut in the operation. Shaheen never once saw Ianello in Stonewall, nor did he ever meet him, but Matty the Horse got his percentage like clockwork. The Stonewall partners also had to pay off the notoriously corrupt Sixth Precinct. A patrolman would stop by Stonewall once a week to pick up the envelopes filled with cash—including those for the captains and desk sergeants, who never collected their payoffs in person. The total cash dispensed to the police each week came to about $2,000. Despite the assorted payoffs, Stonewall turned a huge weekly profit for its owners. With rent at only $300 a month, and with the take (all in cash) typically running to $5,000 on a Friday night and $6,500 on a Saturday, Stonewall quickly became a money machine.

Some of the Mob members who worked gay clubs were themselves gay—and terrified of being found out. “Big Bobby,” who was on the door at Tony Pastor's, a Mafia-run place on Third Street between Sixth Avenue and MacDougal Street, almost blew his cover when he became indiscreet about his passion for a Chinese drag queen named Tony Lee (who, though going lamentably to fat, was famed for her ballerina act). The Stonewall Inn seems to have had more than the usual number of gay mobsters. “Petey,” who hung out at Stonewall as a kind of freelance, circulating bouncer, had a thick Italian street accent, acted “dumb,” and favored black shirts and ties; he was the very picture of a Mafia mobster—except for his habit of falling for patrons and co-workers.