Stonewall (12 page)

A favorite cure for drug excess was a visit to the Lemon Guru—Dr. Soltonoff, a chiropractor with offices on Houston Street who developed a devoted following that included Bob Dylan and Joe Louis. Soltonoff insisted that lemon juice in a glass of hot water three times a day, in combination with fasting, would cure just about anything. But should it not, there was the still-sanctified path of psychotherapy. Dr. Robert Akeret was a particular favorite with theater people. Working closely with Rollo May, Akeret developed his own special technique of “photoanalysis” in which he would analyze old family pictures in order to diagnose interfamily tensions and relationships.

Also much consulted was the gay psychoanalyst Dr. Karl Goldman, who had survived internment in a concentration camp during the war. Goldman's apartment on Waverly Place became a drop-in
salon; of an evening you could ring his bell and usually find a congenial group gathered in the living room. He sometimes cooked for the more “interesting” gay men he collected—including, occasionally, Jim Fouratt and Bob Heide—discoursing at length after dinner on existentialism or the meaning of paranoid psychosis. A genuine intellectual, Goldman was also tight and aloof, literally hunched over with tension and incapable of looking anyone directly in the eye. He could be archly patronizing, effectively using his wide-ranging knowledge to cow those who were younger or more impressionable (but really to establish his own right to exist). Goldman was later found handcuffed and dead in his bathtub, drowned by an ex-con he had been treating as a patient.

Lee Strasberg told Jim that his success in the theater would depend not on his abundant talent—which by itself could prove an obstacle—but on the extent of his ambition and his perseverance. Though Jim became addicted to neither drugs nor sex, he did become something of an excitement junkie, always wanting to be where the action was, and preferably at the center of it. His early years in New York coincided with the fading influence of one oppositional culture, the Beats, and the gradual emergence of a new one, with several strands—from hippie to New Left—that would coalesce by the middle of the decade around the issue of the Vietnam War. Jim, barely twenty, managed to meet some of the luminaries of the older protest movement and to participate in some of the earliest manifestations of the newest one.

In 1963, the IRS seized the Living Theater's Fourteenth Street space for failure to pay taxes, and rather than bow to pressure from the state, the company decamped for Europe. Saul Gottlieb, variously connected to the Living Theater as writer, director, and fund-raiser, and his lover, Dale Evans, who would later become a significant figure at the SDS publication
New Left Notes
, decided to drive cross-country to San Francisco; they invited Jim to go along with them.

Though the car broke down in Montana and they had to pull an elaborate airline scam to afford a flight the rest of the way, the trio did manage to arrive in San Francisco. Gottlieb had ties to the beatnik enclave there, and during their two-month stay Jim had dinner at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's house, and met everyone from the poet/playwright Michael McClure, to the poet John Wieners, to the avant-garde jazz musician Cecil Taylor, to then-beatnik Phyllis Diller (who had gotten her start at the Purple Onion, a beat hangout).

When he returned to New York, Jim soon found himself, almost inadvertently, involved in the incipient antiwar movement. In 1962 the radical Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had issued its touchstone “Port Huron Statement,” a searching critique of American life that indicted as well the country's colonialist posture on the world scene and its willingness to go to war in the name of countering a bogusly inflated Communist “threat.” By 1963, moreover, the black civil-rights struggle was in high gear, with hundreds of demonstrations that year in dozens of cities. And after Lyndon Johnson's ascension to the presidency in late 1963, American involvement in Vietnam seemed poised on the verge of escalation.

Marketta Kimball, a fellow student at Actors Studio with whom Jim was preparing a scene for class presentation, asked him one day to meet her in Times Square before starting to rehearse. Jim agreed without giving the matter any thought. He arrived to find himself in the middle of one of the first demonstrations in New York against U.S. participation in the escalating Vietnam War. About sixty people had gathered, and all of them were arrested.

In the weeks before the case came up, Jim gathered a variety of letters, including one from Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island, testifying to his “good character.” Nonetheless, he was found guilty, and given-a suspended sentence. He felt “a little had” by Marketta, but the entire experience proved a milestone for him. Up to that point Jim's only real politics had been a kind of moral imperative, derived from his Catholic training, to “tell the truth.” But now he had discovered—just as had Craig Rodwell, with his own brand of Christian Science truth-telling—that if you spoke truth, everything did
not
come out all right. He had been pulled off the street by FBI agents and branded explicitly a criminal and implicitly a traitor. That infuriated him—and would soon propel him into a radical activism that would push
stage
acting to the periphery.

RAY

G
ay hustling had been centered in the Times Square area for a long time. In 1948, the popular pulp
Salute
published an article entitled “Nightmare, USA” that lamented the “sad decline” of what, until the 1920s, had been the glamorous heart of New York's theater district.
Of late, the article contended, the Times Square area had become the scene of a well-entrenched, “horrifying” spectacle in which “dozens of twisted, money-mad kids, aged ten to eighteen, daily offer themselves to homosexuals.”
Salute
insisted that “none of the lads is homosexual” (“possibly excepting a few of the older youths”); they were hustling out of dire necessity, disgusted at their “grisly profession, revolted at what they do.”
¹⁰

When Ray Rivera, eleven years old, scrawny but beautifully proportioned, with high, dramatic cheekbones and almond-shaped, languid eyes, arrived at “Forty-two” in 1962, he was decidedly one of the younger hustlers—but he was hardly heterosexual and hardly felt “disgusted.” “Elated” was closer to the mark. When a man offered him ten dollars to have sex his very first night on the street, Ray was ecstatic: “Ten dollars?! Wow! Ten dollars of my own! Great! Let's go!” Needless to say, his grandmother, Viejita, didn't share his enthusiasm; when a neighbor reported spotting Ray on Forty-second Street, Viejita threatened him so violently—at that point he hadn't yet left her house for good—that the next day, after she had gone to work, he swallowed a whole bottle of her medication.

Someone called an ambulance, and Ray spent the next two months on a ward in Bellevue Hospital. Convinced that he was going to die, Viejita tried to take the cross that had belonged to her daughter (Ray's mother) from around his neck. When Ray fiercely held on to it, Viejita yelled, “But you're going to die!” “So I guess,” Ray shot back, “I'm going to need it”—and refused to relinquish his grip.

As soon as he got out, he was back on Forty-second Street, more euphoric than ever at discovering that so many queens hung out and hustled there, determined this time to move out of Viejita's apartment for good. She tried to stop him by getting him recommitted to Bellevue, and from there sent to a foster home in Central Islip on Long Island. But after a few months Ray ran away, ran back to Forty-second and back to “Gary,” an eighteen-year-old hustler he had fallen in love with. He and Gary took an apartment together on Seventy-third Street and Columbus Avenue and, against all the odds, stayed together for seven years, both of them hustling, both of them getting high on black beauties and bennies, both of them becoming well known and well connected in the Times Square world of queens, pimps, hustlers, and addicts.

Before long, Ray even had a new name. All the queens on the street renamed themselves; it was part of assuming a new life and a new identity. After Ray decided that he belonged among them, that
he had finally found his real family, one of the old-timers told him, “Well, there's no Sylvia. There's no Sylvia right around at this realm. If there is, we don't know about it. You'll be Sylvia. What's that other name you like?” “Lee,” Sylvia answered.

So Ray became Sylvia Lee Rivera. And she was formally re-christened. The ritual took place in someone's apartment uptown, with fifty friends from the street in attendance, most of them Hispanic and black but with a sprinkling of white queens. Sylvia was decked out in a white gown, a preacher from one of the Pentecostal Hispanic churches performed the christening ceremony, and afterward everyone partied. “It was just like being reborn,” Sylvia later remembered. “You knew you were going into a different life. And I remember the preacher saying when he put the water on my head, ‘Don't forget: This is going to be a hard life.'”

Among those present for the rechristening was “Miss Marsha P. Johnson” (Malcolm Michaels, Jr.), one of the very first people Ray had met on the street. Marsha was a black queen some five years older than Sylvia, who had started out as a boy hustler and now mostly worked in “full face” makeup. In Sylvia's words, “Marsha plugged in the light for me.” On the day Sylvia first spotted her, Marsha was panhandling on the corner of Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, still dressed in the waitress pants and white shirt she wore on her job in Childs' restaurant. Ray felt immediately drawn to her and went right up to Marsha and started talking.

Marsha explained that yes, she did work Forty-second Street, but right now was just trying to get some spare change so she could get herself a dinner over at Romeo's—a special deal: spaghetti and meatballs for ninety-nine cents. “Mind you,” she told Sylvia, jiggling a pocketful of money, “I made out good on tips today at Childs', but you never can be too sure. Besides, I might get lucky standing here, and pick up a trick.”

“What
is
this queen talking about?!” Sylvia thought to herself, simultaneously confused and mesmerized. “What's your name, chile?” Marsha demanded. “Ray,” the not yet rechristened Sylvia said. “Oh Miss Ray, you so
young
! How old are you?” “Eleven and a half,” Ray answered. “Chile, you should be home with your mama!” “Well, how old are you?” Ray shot back, even at eleven not easily silenced. “Oh honey, don't worry about it,” said seventeen-year-old Marsha with a yawn. “They call me the old queen, I've been around for so long. Did you eat today, chile?”

When Ray said he wasn't hungry, Marsha briskly took him in
hand. “Come on, I'm going to buy you somethin' to eat. I made tips. I made a few dollars. We'll go sit down and eat at Romeo's.” And down they went to Forty-second and Seventh, every queen and most of the boy hustlers on the way calling out greetings to “Miss Marsha.” At Romeo's, too, everybody seemed to know her. “Hey Marsha girl, how ya doin'?” the cashier called out. “How ya doin', girl?” the straight counterman repeated. Marsha nodded regally and gave her commands: “The usual, the ninety-nine-cent special. We'll have two of those. And make sure the plate's clean. We don't want no greasy plates.”

For much of the next decade, Sylvia and Marsha were there at the important events in each other's lives, and toward the end of that decade were together at many of the central events in the early days of the gay liberation movement. In the beginning, Marsha was a guide for Sylvia, showing her the ropes, counseling her to “show a happy face all the time, not to give a fuck about nothing, not to let nothing stop you.” Later on, politically, it Would be Sylvia who took the lead and in fact far outdistanced Marsha in energy and commitment, who, applying Marsha's early advice literally, “refuse[d] to let anything stop her, refuse[d] to take any shit from anybody.”

But in the early sixties, Marsha played the big-sister role, teaching Sylvia how to apply face makeup skillfully (in those years full drag was only for special occasions, not for hustling); getting her a part-time job as a messenger for Childs' restaurant (Sylvia later won promotion to billing clerk and then, working in suit and tie and full face makeup, to the accounts payable department); showing her how to rap to potential clients; and instilling the rules of the street: “Don't mess with anyone's lover; don't rip off anyone's dope or money.” And that went for wigs, too. When Luisa, a Spanish queen, grabbed Marsha's wig off her head one night, Marsha ran screaming after her, finally catching up with her in Bryant Park, where she read her the riot act.

And it was Marsha who tried to prevent Sylvia's first arrest. One night, Marsha was stationed on Eighth Avenue by the Blarney Stone (the boy hustlers tended to stay on Forty-second Street proper; the queens usually hustled around the corner on Eighth), when Sylvia came down the avenue on her way to see some friends on Forty-second. “Don't go down there, girl,” Marsha warned. “They're going to arrest people tonight; I feel it in my bones. Stay up here with me.” But Sylvia, just turned twelve, insisted she
had
to “see some people” and down she went to Forty-second.

Thirty years ago, as Sylvia remembers it, the Times Square scene
wasn't nearly as dangerous as it later became. “The street actually belonged to gay people back then. If anything jumped off, it jumped off with us knowing about it.” To some extent that included police harassment. The paddy wagon would back up with such predictable regularity to Bickford's, in the middle of Forty-second Street, to take on a load of arrested queens (“Aw right, ladies, let's go!”) that the event took on mixed overtones of boredom and mirth (“It was almost like something you look forward to”). The police would hold the queens overnight in the Tombs, near the Centre Street Courthouse, and then release them the next morning to return again to Times Square.