Stonewall (38 page)

The student left had recently divided into antagonistic splinter groups, and the 1969 SDS national convention would be its last. Several of the new factions employed revolutionary rhetoric and talked increasingly of armed struggle, and the Weatherman faction had, just three weeks before the ERCHO convention, embarked on its Days of Rage action in Chicago, smashing through the streets of the Loop and the Gold Coast and confronting the police, who shot six, beat dozens and arrested 250. Less than five months later, a Weatherman cell in Greenwich Village would blow itself sky-high in its Eleventh Street townhouse bomb factory.

It was in this riven, overheated national climate that the ERCHO convention opened on November 1, 1969. The GLF contingent was in no mood for moderation, convinced more than ever that to compromise with evil was to collaborate with it. On their side, many of the older homophile delegates were more inclined than ever to view anything other than moderation as destructive extremism. The confrontation between the two began when some of the conference participants decided to question the legitimacy of the GLF accreditation, and to pose a few pointed questions to their delegation. Did they regard themselves as revolutionaries? Were they prepared to work for their ideas within the frame of parliamentary procedures? Did they
consider themselves Good Americans, or were they bent on destroying the country's basic institutions? Jim Fouratt, experienced in politics and trained as an actor, took on the role of chief spokesperson for the group. He characterized the questions as “too insulting” to merit a direct response, and substituted instead a forceful argument in behalf of the GLF agenda. His antagonists promptly dubbed him “Goldilocks,” yet to his critics' surprise—and Jim's—his remarks generated considerable applause.
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Indeed, Jim and the other GLFers managed to dominate the ERCHO convention to an unexpected degree. They did so with the help of Student Homophile League delegates from Columbia, Cornell, and NYU, and a scattering of radicals (like Martha Shelley of DOB) who were serving as representatives from older homophile organizations. Together they convened a “radical caucus,” drew up a set of resolutions calling, among other things, for support of the Black Panthers, the striking West Coast grape pickers, and the Chicago Eight (one of whom was Abbie Hoffman), then under indictment for conspiracy. Debate on those resolutions took up so much convention time that Arthur Warner of New York Mattachine, one of many outraged oldguarders, accused the GLF delegates of foisting “by questionable parliamentary tactics” a platform involving matters “not even remotely pertinent to the homophile movement.”

Warner focused his anger as much on Craig as on Jim, characterizing Craig as the owner of a bookstore which “already serves as general field headquarters for every revolutionary gay in the New York area,” and denouncing his proposal for a demonstration on the last Sunday in June to commemorate the Stonewall riots as itself “revolutionary,” as little more than a call for
new
riots. Yet Warner and the other delegates from New York Mattachine found themselves in a minority in their opposition to the commemorative march; and to their horror, several other resolutions presented by Jim and his friends (including a call to homosexuals to participate in protests against the Vietnam War, and a denial of the right of educational, religious, and governmental institutions to “define and limit sexuality”) found, in diluted form, some favor with the convention—leading a majority of the delegates to dissociate themselves from the resolutions.
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Foster was if anything even more horrified than Arthur Warner at the “unbelievable crudeness, rudeness, and vulgarity” of the GLF delegates. A few days after the convention, he wrote Bill Kelley, the
NACHO activist in Chicago, that the ERCHO meeting had been a “disaster”; it had been “invaded,” he wrote, by “radical, revolutionary, anarchistic (& I think communist) GLF.” He thought Lois Hart “was the most insidious of the lot” (“an intellectual shyster if I ever saw one”), but he also condemned as a “brawl” (“Wild. Chaotic. Awful”) Jim Fouratt's “up in your face” confrontation with Madolin Cervantes (during which Jim had yelled that she, a heterosexual MSNY delegate, was not qualified to comment in any way on homosexuality).
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Jim acknowledges that he and the other GLFers were so strident that the old-timers felt as if they had been literally assaulted. He and his friends had no patience with counsels of moderation and no appreciation for the work previously done, against great odds, to bring the gay movement to its current level of visibility. “We wanted to
end
the homophile movement” is how Jim later put it. “We wanted
them
to join
us
in making a gay revolution.” And he adds, with retrospective compassion, that “we were a nightmare to them. They were committed to being nice, acceptable status quo Americans, and we were not; we had no interest at all in being acceptable.”

Bill Kelley, himself sympathetic to at least part of the GLF agenda, apparently admonished Foster for his vehemence against the young radicals. In reply, Foster reassured Kelley that he was not “a ‘reactionary.' … I fear you may suspect I'm something of a fascist. NO—I'm just as liberal as you are on most of these social issues. A few (like the Vietnam war) I am ‘on the fence' about (i.e. undecided). But I do object strongly to injection of these other issues (eg. Black Panthers … grape pickers … and so on into our homophile cause—especially when I know that they are being injected less for a sincere belief in them than for an attempt to overthrow the establishment & the government lock-stock-&-barrel, as well as for ulterior purposes such as anarchy & communism. But even without these ulterior motives I still object to involving us in external issues. We have
enough
problems just finding agreement among ourselves on strictly homosexual'issues.”
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In claiming to “know” that the motives of Jim and the other GLFers were “insincere,” Foster was substituting personal distrust for proof—even though Jim would have agreed with Foster's contention that he and his friends were intent on doing away with current institutional arrangements and their established inequities. But Foster, too, felt misunderstood. He insisted that he was not the knee-jerk reactionary GLF claimed he was, and he tried to salvage his middle-
of-the-road credentials by drawing a distinction between militancy, which he said he favored, and “subversion,” which he declared he would “forever oppose.” He had been “thrilled,” he asserted, with the Stonewall “uprising,” but that didn't mean he felt the social order was so rotted with inequities that it deserved the wholesale attack GLF and other “revolutionary” groups had launched on it.
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After attending a few GLF meetings at the Church of the Holy Apostles in New York City, Foster was honest enough to admit that GLF members were
not
united behind a single revolutionary program. This discovery, he subsequently wrote in a report on GLF to various homophile leaders, was “a pleasant surprise”—but not pleasant enough to negate his fears.
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He continued to disapprove of GLF's lack of structure, continued to conspiratorially suspect that behind the loose leadership arrangements lay “a cohesive manipulating force,” a subversive, not merely militant, direction. And (like Craig) he found the free-flowing discussion during the GLF meetings “chaotic,” an obstacle to making unified decisions. So if Foster had discovered “some normal people” in GLF whose presence held out “some faint hope for the group as a worthy addition to ERCHO or NACHO,” on the whole he thought the odds were stacked against such a positive outcome. For one thing, he had heard ERCHO denounced during GLF meetings as “a meaningless, non-existent, non-entity … where people got together and did nothing.” For another, he simply saw what in his mind were too many “Marxian theorists, assorted crackpots and obvious headcases.”
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Foster's “report” somehow got leaked to GLF, and he got two blistering letters from Bob Kohler (a GLF mainstay, and the friend and protector of Sylvia Rivera and other street queens). In reply, Foster retreated somewhat, claiming that his hostility had really been aimed at the “shocking” behavior of the GLF contingent at the recent ERCHO conference. He insisted to Kohler that he and other homophile leaders did feel sympathy for many of the causes GLF championed (“though I may not be actively involved in them”), but didn't like “being told what causes I am going to support,” and felt strongly, moreover, that the homophile movement needed to focus exclusively on homophile issues. (Which was precisely the ground on which a significant number of members would themselves defect from GLF a few months later in order to found the Gay Activists Alliance, an organization devoted solely to achieving gay rights.)
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Bending over
backwards to be (or to appear) fair, Foster concluded his letter to Kohler by “urging that there is no one right road to heaven—let a hundred flowers bloom.… Only time will tell” whether the ERCHO or the GLF strategy was the more valuable.

Unlike most of his adversaries, Foster could indeed be open-minded on many subjects. But in fact he had long since concluded that the emergence of GLF would prove destructive to the moderate homophile organizations to which he had devoted his energies. And in the months following the 1969 ERCHO conference, signs began to proliferate that the homophile movement was indeed succumbing to a combination of attack from without and discontent within. Arthur Warner, for one, continued to wage his longstanding war against Frank Kameny's leadership in NACHO and ERCHO. Foster characterized Warner's attacks as a “personal vendetta,” but a serious disagreement about how to change the law did underlie the antipathy. Kameny wanted to bring discrimination suits at every level and to pursue them all with utmost vigor, whereas Warner argued that “bad cases make bad law”—insisting that
his
legal committee had to pass on the viability of all pending suits. Though Kameny, especially in the heat of argument, outstripped Warner in abrasive omniscience, Warner's outsized tantrums were legendary.
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Warner, in the past, had often denounced ERCHO for “wallowing” in “sterile mediocrity,” but now he found others echoing that view—if not for his reasons. A number of ERCHO delegates had, after all, supported the GLF resolutions presented at the recent convention (albeit in modified form), and homophile activists like Scoop Phillips of Kansas City raised their voices in the postconvention period to insist that NACHO “does need some radicalization” and that it was “better to die swiftly in the quicksand than starve to death in the bush.”

But attrition was in fact to be NACHO and ERCHO's fate. And as the homophile movement began to fall apart, Foster's own health declined in tandem. It started with a series of episodes in which his heart pounded and his body spasmed; then one night he felt suddenly short of breath, started to tremble, and went to the Hartford hospital, convinced he was having a heart attack. But the doctors' verdict was “cumulative nervous tension.” They put Foster on medication and advised him to reduce stress in his life.

That was easier said than done. Foster felt his “heart was breaking.” Here were these “wild-eyed kids” in GLF thinking “they are
going to take over America and the world,” when in fact, Foster was convinced, they “will trigger a right-wing reaction in this country that will sink all of our ships together.”
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On December 21, 1969, nineteen people gathered in writer Arthur Bell's Greenwich Village apartment to put the finishing touches on the constitution for a new organization, the Gay Activists Alliance. Dissent from GLF's philosophy and tactics had been present almost from that group's inception, but now, with the birth of GAA, it took on institutional form. In the constitution GAA drew up that day, it declared itself “completely and solely dedicated”—unlike GLF, with its concern for minority oppression of all kinds—to securing basic rights for homosexuals. To achieve those rights, GAA would prove entirely willing to take to the streets and employ militant, confrontational tactics, but would do so in order to win acceptance for gays within the country's institutional structure—not to topple or transform that structure, as was GLF's intent.
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Jim Fouratt thought GAA mistaken in its one-issue politics, Karla Jay denounced it as “a cop-out—as much too interested in mainstream establishment stuff,” and Craig Rodwell saw the organization—at least in comparison with GLF—as “rather conservative.” But Foster Gunnison, not surprisingly, thought better of GAA than he had of GLF. And as GAA grew in strength over the next two years, he expressed pleasure that it (and not GLF) was “top dog”; in Foster's view GAA had “earned its position—and well deserves it.” The new organization, after all, did share the older homophile view, which Foster exemplified, that gay groups must focus on gay rights to the exclusion of all else, and must conduct their affairs in orderly, Robert's-Rules fashion. But that is not to say that the reformers of GAA merely continued the policies of the homophile movement, elbowing to the sidelines, to their mutual relief, the “dangerous” radicals of GLF.
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GAA was much more assertive than NACHO or ERCHO had been in affirming the validity (and health) of the gay life-style, even as it denied that homosexuals were, except for the little matter of sexual orientation, carbon-copy heterosexuals. Where the homophile movement had stressed the importance of gays acting “responsibly” in order to win mainstream acceptance, GAA emphasized building pride in subcultural
difference
and organizing a political bloc to
demand
equal rights.
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