Stonewall (13 page)

But the police were not
that
predictable. As Sylvia sauntered onto Forty-second that night, she saw a whole slew of hustlers and queens being crammed by the police into a narrow space in the middle of the street between one of the movie theaters and a hot dog stand; a few of the queens were busily tearing up their parole cards and sticking the pieces between the grates. Undaunted, Sylvia went right up to the crowd—and was promptly scooped up along with the rest into a waiting paddy wagon.

At the station, Sylvia told them she was sixteen and gave her name as “Robert Soya” (“I couldn't even spell it!”). Never having been arrested before, Sylvia found the whole thing vastly amusing. When the arraigning judge looked down on the crowd of some fifty queens and hustlers in front of him and said out loud to the assistant D.A., “The names you read are all male names, but I see quite a few females here,” Sylvia burst out laughing, thinking the judge had made a deliberate joke.

He hadn't. “Oh, so you think that's funny?” the judge said, glaring at Sylvia. “Then I suppose you'll also think it's funny that I'm locking the whole lot of you up till Monday morning.” That meant three days in the Brooklyn House of Detention, and the other queens were no more amused than the judge. They came down hard on Sylvia, and at the end of the three days, with all those “noisy and tacky queens on my case, I was glad to get out of there.” Sylvia told Marsha that “the next time you tell me not to go anywhere, I will not go anywhere.”

By this time, Sylvia and her eighteen-year-old-lover, Gary, had moved to the Aristo Hotel on Sixth Avenue in the Forties. For twenty-five dollars a week, they got a big room with private bath, and Sylvia, who had learned to cook as a child, hooked up a hot plate. It was “something like having a home,” and their many friends from the
street used it as headquarters. To complete the sense of family, Sylvia would often go with Gary to visit his mother and father in Flushing (“his parents were very accommodating”), and would take in Gary's brother for a few days when he was out on a pass from reform school.

But when Viejita met Gary, the reception was quite different. Sylvia had been visiting Viejita regularly every few weeks, and had also been sending her money (though Viejita never spent it and later returned it all to Sylvia—by then a tidy sum—denouncing it as “blood money”). When Sylvia told her about Gary, Viejita at first refused to meet him, convinced that Gary had talked Sylvia into hustling. When Sylvia protested that Gary was “a nice boy and hadn't made me do nothing,” Viejita yelled, “You can't love another man!” After she belatedly accepted that Sylvia could and did, Viejita shifted to a new complaint: that Gary was white. “Why can't you have a Spanish boy?” she would yell at Sylvia, and Sylvia would shout back, “Oh, sure, sure—so I can go kill myself like my mother did?” When Viejita finally agreed to come to dinner one night, she sat stony-faced through the meal.

Sylvia did love Gary—more than any other man she would ever meet—and felt he “really did help my mind; he was there when I really needed him.” They would sometimes “beat the shit out of each other,” but they also had a great sex life—“I remember one time it got so good that we bent the rods on the fucking bed, the metal bars.” They began to turn tricks together, too—for more money, not pleasure. Stoned on black beauties, they were willing.to perform almost any scene, if the price was right.

But whether with Gary or alone, Sylvia tried to keep an eye out for danger. “I didn't want no problems. I just wanted to turn a trick, make my money, and go on about my business.” Nor did she ever have much trouble. Gifted with a voluble, forceful personality (even at age twelve), and the ability to make quick, shrewd judgments of people, Sylvia never went with a client or climbed into a car until she had a chance to size the person up for at least a couple of minutes.

But after she started to wear more drag, at about age fifteen, the odds got somewhat worse. People did pull guns on her several times and did try to rip her off, though she outsmarted them by keeping only twenty or so dollars in her purse and putting the rest into a slit she had made in the hem of her miniskirt. And when hustling as a woman rather than as a boy, she managed to get over on almost all of her Johns. If a trick got suspicious and asked her right out if she was a man, Sylvia, pretending indignation, would say, “Oh, so you
think I'm a man, huh? So here, so go ahead and stick your hand in my crotch—c'mon, put it down here!—and tell me if I'm a man!” She'd be wearing a G-string that brought her balls up on her stomach and her dick halfway up her ass—“in the beginning it was painful”—and, to fool the client further, had sewn wig hair onto the G-string; to the touch, the wig hair was indistinguishable from pubic hair.

Almost
everyone bought it. But one night when she was in drag she agreed to go home with an unusually young and attractive John. When they started to make out, Sylvia got turned on; the force of her erection popped the G-string, and her dick fell out. The John jumped out of bed, screaming “You fucking faggot!” at the top of his lungs, and started to hit her. One blow was so powerful it sent Sylvia flying across the room. She reached for her purse—friends had given her a gun to carry “just in case”—thinking the sight of it would slow the guy down. But when Sylvia pointed the gun at him, instead of backing off he lunged at her in a rage—and she fired. Not waiting to find out how badly he was wounded, she grabbed her clothes and ran.

That was not the end of it. Recovered, and determined on revenge, the man toured the Times Square area night after night, with two policemen in tow. When he finally spotted Sylvia, the cops arrested her. In the station, she got on the phone to Viejita, who came down to the precinct and did a tearful-grandmother bit, getting Sylvia released to her custody. On the advice of their Spanish lawyer, Sylvia washed off the makeup, cut her hair, enrolled in school, and on the day of the trial appeared in court as a model clean-cut teenage boy. “I ask you, your honor,” Sylvia's lawyer intoned, “does this look like a street hustler or a transvestite?” The judge agreed it did not, and Sylvia beat the case.

PART THREE

THE EARLY SIXTIES

R
esistance to oppression takes on the confident form of political organizing only after a certain critical mass of collective awareness of oppression, and a determination to end it, has been reached. There are always isolated individuals who prefigure that awareness, who openly rebel before the oppressed community of which they are a part can offer them significant support and sustenance. These individuals—the Nat Turners of the world—are in some sense trans-historical: They have somehow never been fully socialized into the dominant ideology, into its prescriptions and limitations; they exist apart, a form of genius.

Resistance, of course, can take many forms short of open defiance. The day-to-day resistance of African-American slaves who deliberately broke their hoes, feigned illness, slowed their, work pace, or ran away—and the development of vehicles, especially religion and music, to express their unique experience—may never have reached Nat Turner's level of dramatic visibility, but did nonetheless provide outlets for “refusal.”

In the years before World War II, gay men and lesbians, too, developed subcultural forms of daily resistance—from Walt Whitman's encoded language of “adhesiveness,” to the female “support networks” that emerged with the settlement-house movement, to distinctive forms of dress, body language, and “camp” argot. Now and then an individual voice would be raised publicly—Edward Carpenter's in England, Magnus Hirschfeld's in Germany—to argue for the
“naturalness” of homosexuality or to make an overt plea for greater public acceptance. In the United States, there is at least one documented instance of an individual in these years openly protesting homosexual oppression.

His name was Henry Gerber. He had emigrated to Chicago from Bavaria when he was twenty-one, and as an American soldier during World War I had returned to Germany. There he discovered Hirschfeld's homosexual-emancipation movement and decided to attempt a similar organization in Chicago. But Gerber's Society for Human Rights, founded in 1924, lasted less than a year. Although Chicago in the 1920s had a well-developed gay male subculture centered in “Tower-town,” few came forward to join the Society. Gerber, as well as those who signed the Society's articles of incorporation, were arrested, and Gerber spent his life savings of two hundred dollars to cover their trial expenses. The “scandal” subsequently cost him his job with the post office. He then reenlisted, served several years on Governors Island in New York, and continued his sporadic, often lonely, protest.
¹

But if the United States lagged behind Weimar Germany or Edwardian England in the pre-World War II period, the experiences of gay men and lesbians during that war went a long way toward creating the needed critical mass of consciousness in this country that could eventuate in an organized political movement. During World War II many men and women who had grown up in rural areas or small towns and had regarded themselves as singular freaks, discovered in military service legions of others who shared their sexual orientation. The experiences and bonding that followed led many gay men and lesbians to decide, after the war, against returning to their hometowns and in favor of settling down in one of the subcultural enclaves that existed in the large cities, and particularly on the two coasts. Their presence helped to fuel a proliferation of gay and lesbian bars in the postwar period; several mid-sized cities like Richmond, Kansas City, and San José opened their very first ones. And the bars, in turn, became primary social institutions for gay men in general and for working-class lesbians, allowing for increased contact and cooperation.

And then, in 1950, the Mattachine Society (the name taken from a medieval secret fraternity) came into existence in Los Angeles. A small group of left-wing gay men (including Rudi Gernreich, later famous as a fashion designer), some of whom were self-described Communists, formed around the early leadership of Harry Hay. They
put together an elaborate, hush-hush skeleton organization that in its hierarchical, cell-like structure reflected the order of the Freemasons, and in its secrecy reflected the realities of a Cold War climate that had made deviance of any kind subject to swift repression.
²

The Mattachine analysis of homosexuality was, at its inception, startlingly radical. This small group of some dozen men pioneered the notion—which from mid-1953 to 1969 fell out of favor in homophile circles, only to be picked up again by gay activists after 1969—that gays were a legitimate minority living within a hostile mainstream culture. They further argued that most gays had internalized the society's negative judgment of them as “sick,” that such “false consciousness” had to be challenged, and that political struggle was the best vehicle for doing so.
³

Someone in Mattachine suggested that they needed a magazine to get their message out, and to create such a publication, a committee began meeting independently of Mattachine. In January 1953 it put out the first issue of
ONE, a
small monthly that would last until 1968 (with a brief revival in 1972). Several women were active in publishing
ONE
, especially, in the early years, Ann Carrl Reid and Joan Corbin, but Mattachine itself remained overwhelmingly male (and white).
⁴

In 1955 a group of women, led by Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, decided to launch Daughters of Bilitis (DOB), the first lesbian organization. DOB initially put heavy emphasis on meeting social needs—on ending the profound isolation and invisibility of lesbians—but it did gradually involve itself in education and law reform. Throughout the fifties, the Big Three—Mattachine, DOB, and
ONE
—maintained sometimes strained but essentially friendly relations, even though
ONE
periodically attacked Mattachine for being too conformist and assimilationist.

And indeed Mattachine had quickly shed its initial radicalism. Most of those who joined in the two years after its founding were far more conservative than the originators and by 1953 had wrested control of the organization from them. The newcomers were primarily interested in winning acceptance on the mainstream's own terms, not in challenging mainstream values; they regarded themselves as patriots and good Americans; and they preferred to rely on “experts” rather than on political organizing to plead their cause—having internalized the view of that era's prime experts, the psychiatrists, that their “condition” was pathological. Mattachine's original organizers had soon found themselves isolated; Harry Hay resigned and the conservative newcomers took over the organization.

CRAIG

B
y the time Craig Rodwell arrived in New York City in the late fifties, Mattachine had long since ceased to be a radical voice. Its dominant message to other gays had become an assimilationist one: Reform your own image so that it comports with respectable, middle-class sensibilities. But if Mattachine had become too conservative for its radical founders, it remained too radical for the vast majority of gays and lesbians, who had been cowed by the experts into a negative self-image, and were fearful that membership (even though pseudonyms were used) could threaten the loss of jobs, friends, and community status.

Only the most intrepid would consider joining Mattachine or DOB in these years. In 1960 Mattachine had only 230 members, and DOB had enrolled less than half that number.
⁵
But the spirited, mettlesome Craig Rodwell, though just eighteen when he arrived in New York from Boston in the summer of 1958, could hardly wait to join up—though he reluctantly accepted the fact that he would first have to find a place to live and get a job.