Stonewall (44 page)

Fortunately for Foster's peace of mind, he had already, by the time of NACHO's final convention in 1970, become deeply involved in several new projects that would amply fill the vacuum in his life. Earlier on, in Foster's hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, Canon Clinton R. Jones of Christ Church Cathedral had started a counseling group for gays that by mid-1968 had helped give birth to an activist organization called the Kalos Society. Foster had been involved with Kalos from the beginning, though in early 1970 it still had only fifteen or twenty members and in Foster's view hadn't really “‘gelled' yet.” But he had hopes it might eventually become “a high-powered organization for New England:” It never did; but it lasted well into the seventies and left behind a news bulletin,
The Griffin
, later transformed into
Metroline
, a regional gay publication that in 1993 continues to publish.
⁷⁸

Through his own one-man organization, the Institute of Social Ethics, Foster also started work in 1970 on some elaborate publishing ventures. In order to “promote and facilitate communication,” he planned to put out a “comprehensive directory of organizations, publications, events, and projects associated with the homophile movement.” Initially, he entitled the pending publication
Homophile Organizations of the World
, but later chose the shorter
The Directory
. Setting to work with his usual enthusiasm and zeal, Foster tossed off memos, mailed out press releases, gathered far-flung data. After nearly a decade of work, he would ultimately abandon the project, convinced that the emergence by then of the New York City-based
Gayellow Pages
, with its national coverage, had made
The Directory
redundant. But over the years he gathered a remarkable body of material, creating an archive that is today an indispensable resource on the homophile movement.
⁷⁹

Foster was also, by 1970, deeply involved in helping Craig Rod-well plan a commemorative celebration of the first anniversary of the Stonewall riots. Long since convinced that “the main problem holding us back from where we want to get to is that of secrecy or fear, and the failure of homosexuals to get out of the closet,” Foster hoped that Craig's Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee might prove an ideal vehicle for encouraging greater openness and broader movement participation.
⁸⁰

SYLVIA

C
arol Greitzer of the New York City Council represented a district that included Greenwich Village and its large gay and lesbian population. Yet in the past Greitzer had more than once worked against the needs of that constituency. In 1964 she had joined Councilman Ed Koch in calling for more plainclothesmen to control the “perverts” in Washington Square Park and, in 1966, had urged that the Village be included in Operation New Broom, a police campaign to get rid of “undesirables.” Nor did Greitzer's attitude seem to change after the emergence of gay liberation; when GAA leaders Jim Owles and Marty Robinson asked her in 1970 to support a fair-employment-practices bill, she tartly replied that it wasn't a proper area for legislation. GAA decided it was time to increase the pressure on Greitzer
and started circulating a petition that demanded she introduce a City Council bill barring antigay discrimination and repealing existing sodomy laws.
⁸¹

Sylvia Rivera had previously taken part in several GAA “zaps,” including one against Mayor John V. Lindsay for refusing to speak out on gay rights, but somehow the petition drive caught her fancy and she decided to give it her full, formidable energy. Since she was still working Forty-second Street on a part-time basis, Sylvia decided to do her petition work right there. She parked herself in the middle of Forty-second between Seventh and Eighth Avenues and, dressed in partial drag, her auburn hair flying, raucously called out to passersby, “Sign this petition! Please sign this petition to help change the laws against homosexuals!” Some people did stop and sign. Others moved nervously on, eyes straight ahead. A few asked questions in a friendly way, but wouldn't sign. And a few others shouted slurs about “faggots.”
⁸²

Sylvia's street-hustling friends stood around and gaped with amazement at the sister's audacity (“This be the butchest thing you ever done, girl!”), and several warned her that she was asking for trouble. But for several nights in a row Sylvia managed to gather her signatures with no interference. Then, at about seven-thirty on the night of April 15, she suddenly saw a crowd of people running toward her. She was startled and frightened—until someone explained that the Tactical Patrol Force had just broken up an antiwar demonstration in nearby Bryant Park. And right behind the fleeing crowd, of course, came a number of TPF police dressed in full riot gear.

“Move on,” one of them yelled at Sylvia, “and make it snappy.” Sylvia held her ground. “I'm only getting signatures to stop the discrimination against homosexuals,” she said. “You have to move,” the cop repeated. “Well, I'm not moving,” said Sylvia, a little surprised and more than a little alarmed at her own firmness. “I got my constitutional rights, just like everybody else. I got the right to stand here and petition to change the laws just like anybody else.”

“Not without an American flag, you don't,” the cop said, surprisingly patient. “You can't set up a stand without an American flag—that's the law.” Sylvia still wouldn't budge. “Now don't give me that,” she said, her voice rising. “Number One, I'm not out here preaching the gospel like Rosy down the street. I been to jail with Rosy many a time because you don't let her preach even though she
has
the American flag.” By now a police cruiser had pulled up behind Sylvia and she started to feel “a little shaky,” afraid they would beat
her up. Instead they arrested her on charges of “disorderly conduct” and “incitement to riot,” threw her into the cruiser, and took her to the Fourteenth Precinct station.

Now she was worried she might lose her job at the A & P warehouse in Jersey if she didn't show up for the start of her eleven
P.M.
shift. She wanted to call her boss, but a Legal Aid lawyer told her she would have to plead guilty before they'd let her use the phone. Sylvia refused: “I'm not pleading guilty to nothing! I'm not pleading guilty to a charge that's unjust!” The lawyer finally got her out on fifty dollars bail. Fortunately she had just been paid from her ware-house job and was able to put up the money.

By now it was midnight. She called her sympathetic boss, who told her it was too late to bother to come to work, so she decided to head back up to Forty-second Street and try for a few more signatures—“and I wasn't even high on black beauties.” This time nobody bothered her, and later she went to her friend Josie's apartment to sleep. The next evening she and Josie went down to the GAA meeting in the Village, and the reporter Arthur Bell overheard her tearfully telling someone about her escapade the previous night. Knowing a good story when he heard one, Bell took Sylvia and Josie back to his own apartment to get the full account. Soon after, he published it as an article in
Gay Power
, and Sylvia was made as a movement celebrity. Thereafter, as she puts it, “I could just snap my fingers and everyone would come running.” A couple of people in GAA wanted to nominate her for office, but Sylvia said she “couldn't be bothered”—she wanted to “argue with the hierarchy, not be the hierarchy.”
⁸³

But she did have to go back to court. Again accompanied by Josie (who died the following year of a drug overdose), Sylvia arrived at 100 Centre Street in a lavender pantsuit she had sewn herself; it had wide bell-bottoms and a tunic top, and across the blouse she had embroidered “GAA.” She didn't have a lawyer and was scared to death, but when she pushed open the door into the courtroom, she let out a gasp. Dozens of gay men and lesbians from both GAA and GLF filled the seats, and they jumped to their feet and started to applaud as soon as Sylvia appeared. The case dragged on over a four-month period, and was eventually thrown out of court when the arresting officer failed to show up. In all likelihood, his superiors had told him not to, since the incident had already gotten more publicity than they wanted. But Sylvia, in a twist of illogic, prefers to believe that the no-show cop was the same one—“a Jewish cop, very good-looking,
from Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn”—who she later discovered had signed her petition.
⁸⁴

Sylvia was part of the thirty-five-person gay activist delegation that went to the May 13 meeting of the Village Independent Democrats in order to confront Greitzer with the accumulated petition signatures. Jim Owles stood up at the meeting and declared it an outrage that homosexuals could not petition their own representative for a redress of grievances. Greitzer tried to get the VID chairman to explain that she had a bad cold and couldn't talk, but he insisted that she state her views. So she reluctantly took the microphone and said that the state attorney general was the person to introduce gay rights legislation, that she wouldn't be able to get such a measure through the City Council. And then she bumblingly added that she had no room to store the petitions in her desk.
⁸⁵

Owles asked her at least to make a public statement declaring herself on the side of gay rights—just as she had made statements in favor of women's rights and black rights. Greitzer responded obliquely, suggesting that the activists gather documentation for their claims of job discrimination. Asked point-blank by Marty Robinson if she would cosponsor an antidiscrimination bill, Greitzer said yes—in a tone Arthur Bell later described as one of “exasperated defeat.” She also agreed in the end to accept the petitions—though when a GAA member later asked her to affix her own signature, Greitzer purportedly answered, “I really don't have your problem,” and walked away.

Sylvia claims—though the incident is not reported in any of the other existing accounts—that at some point in the proceedings, she lost patience with. Greitzer, rolled up the petitions she had herself collected and “bopped Greitzer upside the head” with them, yelling “Well, you're going to take them now, bitch!” A few weeks later, again according to Sylvia, she spotted Greitzer walking with two men on Forty-second Street, rushed up to her, called her “a fucking whore,” and screamed, “Whatsa matter? You don't make enough money in the City Council, you have to come up here and steal the money from your queens, huh? You fuckin' bitch!” Greitzer, as Sylvia tells it, looked terrified, told one of the men to get the car and, pointing at Sylvia, said to the other man, “That's the one. The mean one. Because he's out.” “You betcha life, bitch!” Sylvia purportedly shouted at Greitzer as she got in the car, “Don't forget—the name is Ray Sylvia Rivera, honey. And I will bop you upside your head again!”
⁸⁶

YVONN

Y
vonne and her black lesbian friends decided to try again. Their earlier attempts to meet together on a regular basis had dissolved after a few months, and they thought that might have been because they had held their meetings at, the Firehouse, headquarters of the overwhelmingly white GAA. So this time around they started meeting in the gym of a church, a space gotten for them by one of their own group, a minister. A few Hispanic women joined them, and occasionally an Asian woman would show up as well.

By early 1970, the feeling was well advanced that it was necessary for like-categorized people to meet apart from others (however dissimilar the individuals thus categorized might turn out to be). The “Black Power” concept had by then weakened integrationist civil rights organizations, and within the gay movement not only were women of color separating themselves from white women, but also the feeling that lesbians should meet separately from gay men had become common.

Many men in GLF supported the women's movement, and some of them gave it a good deal more than lip service. Still, they had been socialized as men and despite good intentions and vigorous efforts at self-examination in consciousness-raising groups, many proved unable to rid themselves of the assumption that their male insights were superior, their male leadership essential, their male issues paramount. Nor did the lesbians in GLF feel any greater understanding from their straight sisters in the women's movement. Lesbians were tolerated rather than welcomed even in most of the radical feminist groups, and had frequently felt misunderstood and patronized.
⁸⁷

And so GLF lesbians inaugurated a Women's Caucus, which met every Wednesday night and, in April of 1970, held the first all-women's dance. Though Karla Jay continued to feel some uneasiness that the separation of women from men might sap the overall strength of the gay movement, she helped to organize the lesbian GLF action that marked the opening session of the second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970. While three hundred women were sitting quietly in the auditorium waiting for the Congress to come to order, the lights suddenly went out. When they came back on, thirty or so
women wearing
LAVENDER MENACE
T-shirts had taken over the stage. They held the convention floor for two hours, trying to explain to their straight sisters what it was like to be lesbian in a heterosexist culture, and succeeded in getting a set of pro-lesbian resolutions passed.

Dramatic as that action was (and huge fun for those who planned and executed it), lesbianism hardly swept the feminist field. Betty Friedan, for one, was furious at the “Lavender Menace” action and continued to do her considerable best to keep lesbians from holding office in NOW's New York chapter. Running into Karla at a meeting more than a decade later, Friedan
still
seemed to be fuming over what had happened in 1970. Pointing an angry finger at Karla, she hissed,
“You
caused me a lot of trouble.” Karla told her to lighten up, that that had been a long time ago.
⁸⁸