The Martin Duberman Reader (15 page)

Word of the confrontation spread through the gay grapevine on Saturday. The
New York Times
buried a short piece that headlined police injuries and characterized the event as a “rampage” by “hundreds of young men,” but the
Daily News
put the story on page one and local television and radio reported it as well. The
Voice
ran two separate articles: Lucian Truscott's smacked of homophobia but Howard Smith's mentioned police vandalism. The
New York Post
, then a liberal paper, did a follow-up piece headlined “The Gay Anger Behind the Riots,” which responsibly discussed resentment over Mafia control of Stonewall (and most other gay bars), over the huge profits that never went back into the gay community, and over the huge payoffs that went to the police. And both
RAT
and the
East Village Other
, organs of the counterculture, also carried sympathetic accounts.

But those were marginal voices in coverage that overall reflected all too accurately the dominant bias of the culture.
Time
magazine summarized the majoritarian view when, some four months later and in response to the publicity generated, it published a lengthy “analysis” of gay life. The article characterized “the homosexual subculture [as] . . . without question, shallow and unstable,” and warned its possibly wavering readership yet again that “homosexuality is a serious and sometimes crippling maladjustment.” There was the authentic voice of mainstream America, circa 1969.

Coverage in the dailies the next day helped bring out the crowds that milled around the Stonewall Inn all day Saturday; curious knots of people gathered to gape at the damage and warily celebrate the implausible fact that, for once, cops, not gays, had been routed.

The police had left the Stonewall a shambles. Jukeboxes, mirrors, and cigarette machines lay smashed; phones were ripped out; toilets were plugged up and overflowing; and shards of glass and debris littered the floors. (According to at least one account, moreover, the police had simply pocketed all the money from the jukeboxes, cigarette machines, cash register, and safe.) On the boarded-up front window that faced the street, anonymous protesters had
scrawled signs and slogans:
THEY INVADED OUR RIGHTS; THERE IS ALL COLLEGE BOYS AND GIRLS IN HERE; LEGALIZE GAY BARS; SUPPORT GAY POWER
, and newly emboldened same-gender couples were seen holding hands as they anxiously conferred about the meaning of these uncommon new assertions.

Something like a carnival, an outsized block party, got going by evening in front of Stonewall. While older, conservative chinos-and-sweater gays watched warily, and some disapprovingly, from the sidelines, “stars” from the previous night's confrontation reappeared to pose campily for photographs; handholding and kissing became endemic; cheerleaders led the crowd in shouts of “Gay Power”; and chorus lines repeatedly belted out the refrain of “We are the Stonewall girls.” But the cops, including TPF units, were out in force, weren't amused at the antics, and seemed grimly determined not to have a repeat of Friday night's humiliation. The TPF lined up across the street from Stonewall, visors in place, batons and shields at the ready. When the fearless chorus line of queens insisted on yet another refrain, kicking their heels high in the air, as if in direct defiance, the TPF moved forward, ferociously pushing their nightsticks into the ribs of anyone who didn't jump immediately out of their path.

But the crowd had grown too large to be easily cowed or controlled. Thousands of people were by now spilling over the sidewalks, including an indeterminate but sizable number of curious straights and a sprinkling of street people gleefully poised to join any kind of developing rampage. When the TPF tried to sweep people away from the front of Stonewall, the crowd simply repeated the previous night's strategy of temporarily retreating down a side street and then doubling back on the police. In Craig's part of the crowd, the idea took hold of blocking off Christopher Street, preventing any vehicular traffic from coming through. When an occasional car did try to bulldoze its way in, the crowd quickly surrounded it, rocking it back and forth so vigorously that the occupants soon proved more than happy to be allowed to retreat.

The cops had been determined from the beginning to quell the demonstration, and at whatever cost in bashed heads and shattered
bones. Twice the police broke ranks and charged into the crowd, flailing wildly with their nightsticks; at least two men were clubbed to the ground. The sporadic skirmishing went on until 4:00
A.M.
, when the police finally withdrew their units from the area. The next day, the
New York Times
insisted that Saturday night was “less violent” than Friday (even while describing the crowd as “angrier”). Sylvia, too, considered the first night “the worst.” But a number of others, including Craig, thought the second night was the more violent one; that it marked “a public assertion of real anger by gay people that was just electric.”

Not all gays were pleased about the eruption at Stonewall. Those satisfied by, or at least habituated to, the status quo preferred to minimize or dismiss what was happening. Many wealthier gays, sunning at Fire Island or in the Hamptons for the weekend, either heard about the rioting and ignored it (as one of them later put it: “No one [at Fire Island Pines] mentioned Stonewall”), or caught up with the news belatedly. When they did, they tended to characterize the events at Stonewall as “regrettable,” as the demented carryings-on of “stoned, tacky queens”—precisely those elements in the gay world from whom they had long since dissociated themselves. Coming back into the city on Sunday night, the beach set might have hastened off to see the nude stage show
Oh, Calcutta!
or the film
Midnight Cowboy
(in which Jon Voight played a Forty-Second Street hustler)—titillated by such mainstream daring while oblivious or scornful of the real-life counterparts being acted out before their averted eyes.

Indeed some older gays, and not just the wealthy ones, even sided with the police, praising them for the “restraint” they had shown in not employing more violence against the protesters. As one of the leaders of the West Side Discussion Group reportedly said, “How can we expect the police to allow us to congregate? Let's face it, we're criminals. You can't allow criminals to congregate.” Others applauded what they called the “long-overdue” closing of what for years had been an unsightly “sleaze joint.” There have even been tales that some of the customers at Julius's, the bar down the street from Stonewall which had long been favored by older gays (“the
good girls from the fifties,” as one queen put it) actually held three of the rioters for the police.

The Mattachine Society had still another view. Mattachine, the homophile group that had been started as a radical oppositional force in California in the early fifties, but had since turned more conservative and middle class, had its New York chapter headquarters right down the street from the Stonewall Inn. In 1969 Dick Leitsch was its leading figure—he'd shown considerable sympathy for New Left causes but none for challenges to his leadership. Randy Wicker, himself a pioneer activist and lately a critic of Leitsch, now joined forces with him to pronounce the events at Stonewall “horrible.” Wicker's earlier activism had been fueled by the notion that gays were “jes' folks”—just like straights except for their sexual orientation—and the sight (in his words) “of screaming queens forming chorus lines and kicking went against everything that I wanted people to think about homosexuals . . . that we were a bunch of drag queens in the Village acting disorderly and tacky and cheap.” On Sunday those wandering by the Stonewall saw a new sign on its boarded-up façade, this one printed in neat block letters:

The streets that Sunday evening stayed comparatively quiet, dominated by what one observer called a “tense watchfulness.” Knots of the curious continued to congregate in front of Stonewall, and some of the primping and posing of the previous two nights were still in evidence.

The police on Sunday night seemed spoiling for trouble. “Start something, faggot, just start something,” one cop repeated over and over. “I'd like to break your ass wide open.” (A brave young man purportedly yelled, “What a Freudian comment, officer!”—and then
scampered to safety.) Two other cops, cruising in a police car, kept trying to start a fight by yelling obscenities at passersby, and a third, standing on the corner of Christopher Street and Waverly Place, kept swinging his nightstick and making nasty remarks about “faggots.”

At 1:00
A.M.
the TPF made a largely uncontested sweep of the area and the crowds melted away. Allen Ginsberg strolled by, flashed the peace sign, and, after seeing “Gay Power!” scratched on the front of Stonewall, expressed satisfaction to a
Village Voice
reporter: “We're one of the largest minorities in the country—10 percent, you know. It's about time we did something to assert ourselves.” Deputy Inspector Pine later echoed Ginsberg: “For those of us in public morals, things were completely changed . . . suddenly they were not submissive anymore.”

In part because of rain, Monday and Tuesday nights continued to be quiet, with only occasional random confrontations; the most notable probably came when a queen stuck a lit firecracker under a strutting, wisecracking cop, the impact causing him to land on what the queen called his “moneymaker.” But Wednesday evening saw a return to something like the large-scale protest of the previous weekend. Perhaps as a result of the appearance that day of the two front-page
Village Voice
articles about the initial rioting, a crowd of some thousand people gathered in the area. Trash baskets were again set on fire, and bottles and beer cans were tossed in the direction of the cops (sometimes hitting protesters instead); the action was accompanied by militant shouts of “Pig motherfuckers!” “Fag rapists!” and “Gestapo!” The TPF wielded their nightsticks indiscriminately, openly beat people up, left them bleeding in the street, and carted four off to jail on the usual charge of “harassment.”

The Stonewall Riots had come to end. But their consequences would be far-reaching.

—from
Stonewall
(1993)

F
eminism had begun “erupting” in Barbara Deming when she first read Kate Millett's
Sexual Politics
in 1970. During her year of recovery from a car accident, Barbara had focused her limited ability to read on the radical feminist literature that had recently been coming off the presses. The two books she ranked highest in importance were Shulamith Firestone's
The Dialectic of Sex
, published in 1970, and the philosopher/theologian Mary Daly's
The Church and the Second Sex
(soon followed by her still more influential
Beyond God the Father
in 1973). Firestone was only twenty-five when she published
Dialectic
—a daring, brilliant book that called for the abolition of the nuclear family, a postpatriarchal society, and the use of cybernetics to free women from pregnancy and child rearing. Earlier, she had helped to found New York Radical Women and then, in 1969, along with Ellen Willis, the radical feminist group Redstockings. Daly, more than fifteen years older and something of a disciple of the existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, was, especially with the publication of
Beyond God the Father
, a foundational figure in feminist theology.

The books had a profound impact on Barbara, and led to her personal friendships with Daly, the poet Adrienne Rich, the feminist leader Robin Morgan, and, somewhat later, Ti-Grace Atkinson,
Karla Jay, and Andrea Dworkin as well. The initial contact was with Adrienne Rich, who'd read two of Barbara's recent articles, “Two Perspectives on Women's Struggles” and “On Anger,” and had written to tell her that “your work has meant a great deal to me over years of my life.”

“Two Perspectives” opened with a brief rereading of various women writers whom Barbara, over the years, had found most meaningful to her; she wanted to see what they might have in common, though the authors and their books were very different one from the other. Her conclusion was that all the books shared at least one theme: “The danger in which the Self within stands if one is a woman—the danger that it will be blighted, because of the authority of men.” From that point in the essay, Barbara proceeded to argue that it had for too long been assumed that the human race was “naturally” split between men and women, as epitomized by the popular saying “
Vive la difference!
”