Stonewall (43 page)

ERCHO was the first of the two organizations to disintegrate. It had never really recovered from the disruptive 1969 convention, voting soon afterward to “suspend” itself for a year—“a curious move,” Foster had written at the time, “akin to shooting yourself in the head before the next guy does it for you.” All that he could think to say in defense of the suspension was that it probably “prevented a takeover by the extremists” and sped the day when “the homophile cause can be resurrected as a sane and rational movement.”
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For a few months in early 1970, Forster refused to accept that ERCHO was no more. He feared (along with losing his own ballast) that the East would “be in the same boat with the Midwest and the Far West—with no effective regional conference,” and for a time he struggled “with all my heart to try and save our ERCHO.” He even rebuked Steve Donaldson for describing the organization as “defunct,” admonishing him to remember that “the proper way to refer to the ERCHO at present is to say that ‘most of the ERCHO administrative machinery has been suspended for a period of one year.'”
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But the ERCHO game was decidedly up, and Foster soon faced that fact. He of course couldn't resist, in a few postmortems, putting most of the blame (“75%”) squarely on GLF, on what he called “the insurgency of leftist and communist oriented new radical elements.” But he didn't let the older homophile leadership entirely off the hook. He chastised Frank Kameny and others for “lack of will” in putting the radicals down and, even more, blamed the corrosive jealousies that had developed among some of the old-timers themselves—above all, the long-standing, venomous rivalry between Kameny and Arthur Warner of New York Mattachine (for which Foster mostly blamed Warner's “indiscretions” of speech, even while acknowledging that Kameny could be “curt and abrasive”).
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But NACHO seemed a much more viable and necessary organization, and Foster still hoped that hard work might save it. He
described himself as “incurably an optimist, so I'll be the last to drop out or throw in the sponge.” And in that spirit, he sent off a mound of proposals to various correspondents in the spring of 1970 outlining the direction that he felt the upcoming NACHO conference in San Francisco should take. He advocated doing
less
in terms of setting up committees and projects that in the past had ended up undone or half done, and concentrating instead on doing a few things well. He urged that communications—“not good throughout the movement”—be improved, starting with a functioning newsletter, and that most business matters be kept off the floor of the convention and delegated to a separate, representative body.
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He felt strongly that NACHO's integrity as an organization could be preserved only if the new gay liberation groups which had proliferated over the past year were kept from “inundating” the convention. Foster regarded himself “as militant in the movement as anyone you will find,” but rejected what he called “a fawning and demeaning effort to suck ass with every other minority cause.” He insisted that the left-wing slogans of GLF—“Power to the People!” and so on—were the essence not of liberation but of doctrinaire conformity. “Indeed,” he wrote, “I have encountered few more rigid examples of conformity—in dress, thought, and action, than in some of these professional non-conformists.”
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Foster's vehemence reflected his long-standing views, but also some very recent experience. In late April 1970, he witnessed a rally for the Black Panthers—and the police reaction to it—at Yale University. During 1968–1969, the police had raided Panther offices across the nation thirty-one times, culminating in the. slaying of Chicago leader Fred Hampton; the New Haven rally was in support of the jailed “Panther Twenty-one.” Foster, in his conscientious way, had gone to Yale as part of his continuing education. And he got one. The tear gas and pepper gas used by the police to break up a demonstration were so thick that he had to vacate his eighth-floor hotel room for several hours.

Later that same evening, he went to a meeting called by all the New York political groups to plan campus strikes in protest against the continued bombing of Cambodia. Foster managed to last an hour, even though it was only a matter of minutes before “inquisitive eyes” began staring at his three-piece Brooks Brothers suit. A student finally came up to him and asked him point-blank to leave—apparently on the suspicion that he was an FBI agent. Foster quickly obliged. Writing about the episode soon after to NACHO chair Bill Wynne, he
played it deadpan: “I don't think these people trust me.” This was Foster's version of playfulness, which never failed to startle people who preferred to see him as a one-dimensional, pontificating heavy.
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While in New Haven, Foster did not get to hear the speech Jim Fouratt gave at the Panther rally. If he had, it might have softened Foster's attitude toward his old antagonist. Though still a staunch supporter of the Panthers, Jim had decided that the time had come to publicly criticize their negative, patronizing view of homosexuality. “The homosexual sisters and brothers who are in this crowd,” Jim told the New Haven rally, “have a complaint to make.” He went on to say that the very oppression that had made so many gay people identify with the Panthers was being reproduced within the Panther movement. He called upon “every radical here today to Off the word faggot,” and also “to Off the sexism which pervades this place and to begin to deal” with their hostility to “the homosexual brothers and sisters.” It took considerable courage for Jim to stand up before a crowd uncritically adoring of the Panthers and bring it a message that few were yet ready to hear.
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Jim's own attitude had undergone considerable evolution. When Eldridge Cleaver had published his best-selling
Soul on Ice
in 1968, in which he had expressed the view that “homosexuality is a sickness, just as are baby-rape or wanting to be head of General Motors,”
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Jim had defended Cleaver, and by implication all heterosexual left-wing men who casually disparaged “faggots.” The term “faggot,” Jim tried artfully to explain, had emerged from prison jargon, where it had been a metaphor for “any castrated male made impotent by society.”

As he himself later said, he would “rue the day” that he leaped to Cleaver's defense, pretending to a knowledge of ghetto language he didn't have and letting his enthusiasm for the black struggle blot out the realities of black homophobia. In the two years after the publication of
Soul on Ice
, the Panthers' unwillingness to open any kind of dialogue with GLF had produced some raucous debates within GLF between those wanting to commit money to the Panthers' bail fund and those enraged at the Panthers' knee-jerk homophobia. Jim always argued for giving the bail money, but over those two years he also came to conclude that the Panthers had to be publicly confronted on their homophobia. And it was at the New Haven rally on May 1, 1970, that he chose to issue his challenge to them.
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It was one of “the greatest thrills” of Jim's life when Huey Newton, a short time later, published a statement in the
Black Panther
that admonished militant blacks to face up to their “insecurities” about
homosexuality and expressed the view that “we should try to unite with them in revolutionary fashion,” welcoming them to all future conferences and rallies. In accordance with Huey Newton's advice, the Panthers soon after extended an invitation to GLF to send a delegation to the Revolutionary People's Constitutional Convention at Temple University in Philadelphia. Not only was Jim Fouratt part of that delegation, but so was Sylvia Rivera.
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The Philadelphia convention—which drew upwards of ten thousand people—had been called to draft a new constitution, one that would “represent all oppressed people.” Each participating group was to have its own workshop, from which would issue statements of needed rights. But the only workshop the female delegates were allowed to have was one controlled by committed Panther women—with the result that most of the female delegates, and almost all of the two dozen lesbians present, angrily bolted the convention.
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But for Sylvia, it was “a great moving moment to be there.” When she first got off the bus and saw that she was surrounded by straights, she “panicked,” sure that she wouldn't be accepted. She resolved—“completely stoned out” and carrying a knife—that “if anybody fucks with me, I'm going to cut their dick off or cut their throat.” But everything came miraculously right for her when she ran into Huey Newton himself coming down a corridor and he said that he remembered meeting her (“Yeah—you're the queen from New York”) at one of the earlier Panther demonstrations she'd been at. Sylvia's soaring spirits came back to earth only after she returned to New York and an angry Marsha P. Johnson accused her of having stolen STAR funds to make the trip to Philadelphia. Well yes, Sylvia acknowledged, she
had
“borrowed” the money—“and why the fuck not? I wanted to see Huey, and I'll pay the money back!” And she did—by putting in a few more hours each week hustling on the street.

Unlike the women, the gay men did get to present their statement to the convention, and consequently had a more positive reaction to the proceedings. “The Statement of the Male Homosexual Workshop” was greeted with some snickering, but it also got some applause. If it was clear that the Panthers had not been converted overnight to a more positive view of homosexuality, Jim and most of the other GLF men felt that it was only a matter of time before additional Panther leaders—probably David Hilliard and Erika Huggins—followed Huey's lead in advocating a stronger alliance with gay liberation.
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But Jim remained uncomfortable with Panther attitudes, and his ambivalence was captured in a single incident during the convention.
He had on a sterling silver bracelet that was not only very beautiful, but had been given to him by someone he had deeply cared about. At one point during the convention, while sitting outside on the grass talking to some of the Panthers and trying to explain why gay liberation was a legitimate movement, Jim heard one of the Panther women ask if she could try his bracelet on. “Of course,” he said, nervously sensing some potential unpleasantness.

After she had worn the bracelet for a while, the woman, looking him straight in the eye, abruptly asked, “Can I have this?” Jim felt “caught in my white guilt. I knew that I didn't want to give it to her and I knew it would be inappropriate to say no.” Wanting to be a “good gay,” he resolved his ambivalence with an offhanded “sure.” Later he berated himself both for having been taken in by “a revolutionary con”
and
for not being “truly egoless and nonmaterial.” Jim was not so liberated that—like most gay people at most times—he was ever at a loss in finding multiple ways to berate himself.

As the 1970 NACHO conference approached, Foster's excitement mounted. He chose to see the preregistration figures (some twenty organizations and nearly a hundred individuals) as “amazing” proof that NACHO had a viable future. But as it turned out, the conference proved more a nightmare than a triumph for him. The very first motion from the floor after the convention had been called to order was in support of the Black Panther party. It narrowly squeaked by in an initial ballot and then was sustained when a later motion to reconsider was soundly defeated. Capitalizing on that victory, the Radical Caucus, claiming to speak in the name of “the entire West Coast,” next objected to the conference's “restrictive membership policy” (Foster had sweated over the elaborate formula for long hours) and successfully pushed through the principle of one person, one vote.
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A second humiliation soon followed. The delegates decided to hold another NACHO convention in 1971 and proceeded to elect a Conference Committee to prepare for it. Foster was one of sixteen people nominated, but he got the third-lowest number of votes and failed to be elected. On the other hand, Dick Leitsch—who was attending a NACHO convention for the first time (outflanked by the rising tide of Gay Power, he had become interested in NACHO as a possible countervailing force)—
was
elected to the committee. And when the 1971 convention failed to come off, Foster would directly blame Leitsch's “eratic, unreliable” behavior, rightly seeing that
Leitsch, at bottom, was “anti-NACHO”—or rather, “anti-anything that he's not top dog in.”
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Not only did NACHO never again hold a convention, but by 1972 the organization would cease to exist. The times had changed. Radical young lesbians and gays were in the saddle; they generally considered the older homophile generation irrelevant, and their accomplishments nil. Yet homophile accomplishments had been real, however necessary it may have been for a newly assertive generation to scorn them in order to establish its own hegemony. When Bill Wynne, chair of the 1970 NACHO convention, rose to address the delegates, he gave a succinct valedictory accounting of those accomplishments.

Wynne began by acknowledging that the goals NACHO had originally set at its founding in 1966 may have been “mostly grandiose and naive,” and that the proliferating committees set up to accomplish those goals in the years since had mostly been nonfunctional. But nonetheless “some things of a positive nature,” as Wynne put it,
had
been done and deserved enumeration. Above all, communication had been opened up between individuals and groups previously isolated from each other. That, in turn, had served to stimulate local organizing, even as it had clarified the fact that “our problems” were not merely local but national in scope. And NACHO gatherings over the years had helped to develop confidence among those attending them that a national gay response could become a reality. “Develop[ing] confidence”—that was probably the subsuming accomplishment. In Wynne's words, the homophile movement had “given courage to people to open up the whole subject.”
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