by Dwight Cathcart

by Dwight Cathcart

Saturday, May 28, 2011

How was it there?

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I intended that the three novels of the Stonewall Triptych be gay novels. When I was writing them, I imagined writing for men and women who had experienced what I was writing about, or something similar. I was going to tell the story of what was happening to the gay people in the small town of Cardiff or to the gay man who grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, or to the gay men and women in the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, in New York. And when it came time to choose the plot of the novel, I formulated it this way: Given the murder of my friend Bernie Mallett, what am I to do? Or, Given a homophobic culture in America in the 1940s and 1950s, how am I to learn to live? Or, Given brutal policemen in a homophobic city in 1969, how am I to behave now that the cops have come to Sheridan Square? I thought that most gay men and women would find all three of these novels familiar—and fertile—ground.

I wanted to write these three novels without reference to heterosexual persons, insofar as that was possible. My characters, for the most part, live inside a gay community or else they live alone. When a gay person picks up these books, I hoped he or she would feel that the world of each of these novels would seem familiar, and he would be acquainted with the issues the characters face and would recognize the outcomes at the end of each of these novels. I wanted Ceremonies, and Race Point Light, and Adam in the Morning to be about the lives of gay men and women who live today. And I wanted gay people to be able to say, That’s the way it was.
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Thursday, May 19, 2011

"We lost that wounded look."

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What’s important is how hard we had to fight to get where we are now. There was fighting on Christopher Street very early—from one A.M. to about four A.M.—on Saturday morning, June 28, 1969. And then again that night, and then light skirmishes Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights. On Wednesday night the Village Voice published a couple of homophobic articles about the first night’s riotings. Gay men and women were out on the street, fighting the cops again.

Up to the moment of the riots on Christopher Street, what seemed to have defined gay men and women was that terrible things were said about us and we never fought back. We never answered the terrible things that were being said about us. We allowed a whole range of psychiatric treatments on ourselves, and that included torture, and we almost never said, “Stop.”

There were individual voices. Walt Whitman was one, and Gore Vidal was one, and Allen Ginsberg, particularly in Howl, was one. There were a few small organizations, such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society. But what is clear now, looking back, is that there was nobody speaking for our community.

And then, starting with Stonewall, we fought back. We got into the street, we jumped on the backs of cops, we threw bricks and paving stones. The men and women on the street seem to have all worked together, even without a leader. Within a month, the Gay Liberation Front was formed, which was big enough and strong enough, and it attracted enough participants to be able to speak for gay New York. Six months later, the Gay Activist Alliance was formed which began solidifying the power of the gay community. Within a year, both the Village Voice and the New York Times came around to treating the gay movement seriously and respectfully. Later, the GLF and the GAA led the drive to force the American Psychology Association and the American Psychiatric Association to change their diagnostic manuals by removing the definition of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

These changes were not the result of gentle persuasion. They were the result of the gay community having made of itself a power to be reckoned with. On Sunday, Allen Ginsberg went into the wrecked Stonewall Inn. He was quoted in the Village Voice in the article by Lucian Truscott IV saying, “The guys there were so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”

What had happened? How had they lost the “wounded look” they had ten years ago?

They fought back.
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Friday, May 13, 2011

More on the hours when everything changed and how that began

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Around 2:00 AM, on June 28, 1969, the crowd in front of the Stonewall became a mob. They threw things at the cops and at the Stonewall—rocks, paving stones, bricks, empty cans, glass, full cans, trash can lids. There were only ten cops now, facing a mob of five or six hundred very angry men, and gradually the cops retreated toward the door of the Stonewall Inn. Gay people followed them closely, throwing rocks and breaking all the windows facing on Christopher Street. Four gay men managed to pull up a parking meter to use as a battering ram against the Stonewall’s main door. Inside, the cops heard the screams of the mob and the shuddering thuds of the parking meter driven into the door. Now the cops trapped inside realized that the enraged gay people on the other side of the door were trying to burn the building down. They were using lighter fluid at first, and then they were trying some kind of fuel—those inside the Stonewall didn’t know which kind—in bottles that they tossed inside whenever the cops tried to open the door. The police didn’t have enough gunpower to defeat 600 men. They had visions of being burned alive or of being battered to death by a mob that vastly outnumbered them.

The cops were led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine. During World War II, Lt Pine had written the US Army manual on hand-to-hand combat (p. 101) and said later of the riots that he had never been as scared in his life (p. 160). Danny Garvin, one of the rioters, said, “It was like a war” (p. 171). Out in Sheridan Square, the rioters weren’t led by anybody. They were the street people, homeless, transsexual, and transgender kids, and they were also what David Carter calls, “conventionally masculine men” (p. 192)—political agitators, troublemakers, and students. They were not the gay people Lt. Pine usually confronted who were so frightened of being exposed as gay people that the cops could do whatever they wanted with them. These gay people were way out, way sick of the way the cops treated them—why were they raiding their bar twice in one week, when everyone knew the cops were paid off? They were determined to terrorize Lt. Pine and his men. Michael Fader, one of the rioters said, “We felt we had freedom at last….The bottom line was, we weren’t going to go away. And we didn’t” (p. 160).

What happened at Stonewall is that gay people, who had never before been demanding and who had always been meek, suddenly turned nasty. Just about all of gay liberation came out of their determination to try to hurt the cops. Before there was a theory of gay liberation, or a gay political movement, there were men in the street fighting cops to be free.

This account was based on David Carter's Stonewall, St Martins Griffin, New York, 2004. Page numbers in parentheses are to this edition.
See also my novel, Adam in the Morning, about the six nights of the Stonewall Riots. See the Stonewall Triptych for a full presentation of Adam in the Morning. 
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Monday, May 9, 2011

When everything changed, and how that began

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At about one o’clock in the morning, June 28, 1969, the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn, a seedy gay bar on Christopher Street, which was run by the Mafia, the second time this week. The cops checked the ID of everyone in the bar, and those who had proper identification were released. Each person had to be wearing clothes proper to his or her gender. Those not wearing gender-correct clothes were arrested.

The Stonewall was one of the few bars in all of New York that allowed dancing between same-sex couples. It was a gay bar, right in the middle of the gay neighborhood, and gay people in the Village thought of it as their bar even though it was owned by the Mafia. What the cops were doing was taking away from a disadvantaged population one of the few places where they could be themselves.

At first, as each person was released, she went to the door of the bar and greeted friends already on the street with posing and some camp witticism. Most of the patrons of the bar had been through this before, but tonight the patrons didn’t go home. They gathered around the door of the bar and cheered and clapped as each new one came out. Tension was rising.

Then cops dragged out a large woman who resisted the harsh treatment from the cops—they beat her with their billyclubs—and wouldn’t go quietly. She fought the cops all the way from the door of the bar to the police car across Christopher Street. When they got her to the door of the car, she put her feet on each side of the door and pushed hard, and the cops couldn’t get her in. She broke loose. They recaptured her, beat her, got her into the car again, and she slid through the car to freedom on the other side. The whole large crowd in front of the door of the bar watched silently, tensely. They could hear the sounds of breaking glass as cops used sledgehammers to break up the cash registers, the glass ware, and liquor bottles. Then one voice spoke up, “Why don’t you guys help her!” (p. 151). The crowd went insane. The cops got the large woman into the car and drove away, tires slashed.

This is just the beginning of the first riot on Saturday morning. I’ll pick it up at this point—just as things get insane—in my next post. Hang in there. This is the most important thing that has happened to gay people in a hundred years, or maybe forever.

This account was based on David Carter's Stonewall, St Martins Griffin, New York, 2004. Page numbers in parentheses are to this edition.
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Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Hearts and minds and buckets of blood

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The Stonewall Riots have been in the news. PBS ran the documentary, “Stonewall Uprising,” on American Experience last week. I got out my copy of David Carter’s Stonewall, originally published in 2004, to compare notes. It’s cool seeing gray-haired men, talking about the riots, and then realizing that this gray-haired man is the one in that picture in Carter’s book. Forty years ago he was a street kid screaming at the cops. The most powerful memory many of the participants have is of gay people on Christopher Street chasing the cops into the Stonewall and scaring the shit out of them. What came out of the riots was the zap, which was not so much a way to persuade as it was a way to terrorize. Gay liberation also came out of the riots.

On the web, I found a story about Larry Kramer and the revival of The Normal Heart on Towleroad. I found an interview with him on Salon. Larry is pissed, as usual, and it’s us he’s pissed at. Present-day gay people are not on the front lines, fighting AIDS or creating new paradigms for community medicine or new ways to take down the establishment. Larry was never one to make his points by persuasion. ACT UP made its points by pouring buckets of blood on the Harvard Medical School front steps and humiliating the Dean. They changed public health as a result.

Then there is the Atlanta law firm, King and Spaulding, who quit the defense of DOMA last week. In a posting by Ari Ezra Waldman, the legal commentator for Towleroad, we are told: “This hiccup in the House's defense of DOMA illustrates the progress we have made in the court of public opinion and the reason why persuading hearts and minds is the real battle.”

Well, maybe. I suspect that, in all these cases, “persuading heart and minds” has worked only after the gay community has used force on its opponents. In the case of King and Spaulding, “persuading hearts and minds” worked only after the very powerful gay lobbying organizations called in all their chips from other big corporations that were clients of King and Spaulding.

The point here is that persuading our opponents to change their hearts and mind is sweet, but in these cases, our opponents didn’t actually change their behavior until the gay community got tough.
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