Stonewall (45 page)

The separation of women from men in gay organizations was paralleled by the separation of women of color from white women in the feminist movement. Indeed, with a few exceptions, most black women had never participated in the women's movement, dismissing it as irrelevant to their primary needs and preferring to put their energies into black causes—a situation that was not to change significantly until the 1980s. But in Yvonne's case, the black movement had proven no solution either. Whenever she had joined a black-oriented march, demonstration, or sit-in, she had come away angry and disappointed at the black male's macho insistence on running the show and on relegating women to an “appropriately” subordinate role.

Yvonne
was
black
and
lesbian, but the black movement recoiled from both her strength and her sexuality, while the white gay movement had an incomplete understanding of issues relating to her color (and gay men, of issues relating to gender). She rejected the bifurcations that her committed membership in either movement would have demanded of her; sanity—wholeness—seemed to dictate that she confine her allegiance to those who would accept all aspects of her being: namely, her own black lesbian sisters.

Despite the abortive effort to form an organization at the Fire-house, and then a second brief attempt at cohesion that also failed to survive, the black lesbian women were determined on a third try. Most of those who attended the new round of meetings came in couples (including Yvonne, who brought Yolanda, a black-Puerto Rican woman she had been seeing a lot of). As they had in their previous attempts, the women opted for an unstructured organization based on the principle of rotating leadership and devoted to grass-roots initiatives.
They named the new group The Black Lesbian Counseling Collective.

But despite the name, the women were not in agreement about the group's purpose. Many of them were looking for a support group and a social alternative to the bars. But a minority, Yvonne among them, wanted to do “more outreach, more direct service to other lesbians, more political stuff.” The division was between those who felt they had to get
themselves
together before they could do work in the world, and those, like Yvonne, who felt that doing work in the world was
how
people got themselves together.

Establishing a stable core of members also became a problem. The number present at each meeting varied widely. Sometimes only three or four people would show up; sometimes there would be forty. The Reverend Delores Berry, the minister who had earlier found church space for the group, was herself soon reassigned to Washington, D.C. Some of the Hispanic sisters, moreover, seemed restive in a setting dominated by black women (and indeed would later form the separate organization Las Buenas Amigas). And finally, what Yvonne calls “intrigue and seduction” also began to take a toll. Even in so self-selected and marginal an enterprise, struggles for control developed—bids to be powerful
somewhere
. Romantic infatuations, moreover, began to wreak havoc with the stability of the couples involved—people “started messing with each other's friends and whatnot.”

Yvonne herself began to resent the special aura that, in the broader community of black lesbians, had begun to settle over the writers and artists among them. To her mind, there should be no special status among equals, no elite group that was somehow considered better than everyone else. She would argue angrily that lesbians were inventing “a new class”—a phenomenon she considered absurd, since they were already “on the bottom rung—as women, as people of color, and as lesbians.” To elevate a few women in their midst, to suggest that those few were worthy of special privilege or had a special place, seemed to Yvonne a contradiction of the group's egalitarian, grass-roots orientation.

And she put special blame for this development on some of the artists themselves. She felt they “were there on an ego trip”; they would do a reading from their work, enjoy the attention and adulation—but then not come back on any regular basis, “were not really committed to the women there or to the organization.” Yvonne herself wrote poetry now and then, good poetry:

…
Now you can't always tell a black goddess

by how she looks
.

She may laugh too loud or

stand in the middle of a silence

like my Grandma at the kitchen table

mixing cornmeal and egg
.

But you can't always tell a black goddess

by what she cooks
.

She may not
,

or burns it
,

or cooks only your flesh.…
⁸⁹

And a few years later, she would join the black lesbian Jamima Collective, started by Georgia Brooks. But Yvonne was determined not to let her literary efforts overshadow her political ones. And she did feel that a choice between them was necessary: “Was I going to write or was I going to do?” She made a fierce resolution that henceforth she would write maybe one piece a year, and for the rest of the time, “would live my politics rather than write about them.”

Her chief work, Yvonne decided, was “to empower black lesbians to come out and to organize.” A few years hence, when her longstanding physical problems had finally been diagnosed as lupus, she added health issues to her political agenda. She wanted to share with others what that disease—what any serious illness—can do to a woman's sense of herself. “So this is the work,” she concluded. “I'd rather do that than write a
piece
about the poor women who are suffering from lupus. Or my personal suffering with lupus.”

The third effort to form a black and Hispanic lesbian organization, beset by tensions, also failed to sustain itself. But many of the women had not only made contact, but had formed lasting bonds with each other. From those bonds, Salsa Soul Sisters would soon emerge. And this fourth time around, the glue would hold. Though Salsa Soul, too, would go through many transformations and some disaffection, it continues down to the present day; it is now called African Ancestral Lesbians United for Societal Change. And Yvonne, the last of the original founders, is still consistently active in its councils.

CRAIG, FOSTER, JIM, SYLVIA, KARLA, YVONNE

T
he first thing Craig did, after the final ERCHO convention in November 1969 gave its blessing to the formation of a Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee, was to diplomatically send out notices to all of ERCHO's constituent groups that such a committee had indeed come into existence. The niceties performed, Craig then had to find people to do the actual work. He began by notifying all the New York gay groups of the committee's formation and—making clear (more niceties) that the planned celebration was not owned by any one organization—asked that they send representatives.

GAA delayed until some six weeks before the celebration, and Mattachine was overtly negative until the last minute, when DOB also decided to join in. But GLF responded immediately, and from that group Brenda Howard, Marty Nixon, and Michael Brown became mainstays. To fill out the committee, Craig buttonholed some of his regular customers at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, and managed to bag Judy Miller, recently arrived in New York from Denver, and a pair of lovers, Jack Waluska and Steve Gerrie. All three turned out to be hard workers, and stayed the course.

Foster Gunnison was part of the organizing committee from the beginning. He and Craig were in some ways at opposite ends of the political spectrum—“conservative” and “radical,” in common usage. Yet those ends do meet ideologically in conservatives and radicals who identify as “libertarians” (“anarchists” is the preferred term on the left); what they share is a distrust of authority, a distrust that on the right (Foster) focuses primarily on the state, and on the left (Craig) becomes a more encompassing rejection of all established pieties handed down by church, state, law, and family.

The two men came from sharply different class backgrounds, yet took to each other as human beings, recognizing, beneath their contrasting styles, the same basic warmth and decency—which both were too modest to acknowledge about themselves. Craig was fascinated by the anomalous Foster, the only dedicated gay activist he had ever met who smoked cigars, wore three-piece Brooks Brothers suits, sported a crew cut, and spoke in an accent vaguely redolent of some upper-crust private school—“the house dick,” Craig used to call him.

Foster was well aware that in both appearance and opinion he “stood out like a sore thumb” in the countercultural sixties, and that made him grateful for Craig's recognition that beneath the starchy exterior, Foster was in fact “a puppy.” He, in turn, thought Craig was “a swell fellow,” honest, reliable, and, by Foster's lights, also something of an anomaly—the hardworking, no-nonsense type, willing day after day to do laborious detail work, that Foster thought did not exist among the radical young. Craig was now thirty, considerably older than most of the new activists, and not closely identified either with GLF or GAA—but he was still a “kid” to forty-five-year-old Foster.
⁹⁰

Foster sometimes lamented Craig's “dislike of structure,” his individualistic insistence on “doing his own thing,” and his determination that the CSLDC (Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee) be a grass-roots project uncontaminated by any connection to commercial interests (such as gay bars) and uncorrupted by prior organizational loyalties (Foster confessed to harboring some hope that ERCHO could be rebuilt on CSLDC's activities). But despite these minor disagreements and annoyances—inevitable, in any ongoing, close-quarters organizational work—Foster fully credited Craig with being the heartbeat of the committee: He was “like a guru,” Foster later said, “everything revolved around him, and yet he was very unassuming. It was almost like a spirit sitting in the room.”
⁹¹

In February 1970, the small group of eight or so people began to meet monthly in Craig's apartment on Bleecker Street; in April, as deadlines approached, they met weekly. Foster came down faithfully from Hartford for every meeting, serving as the group's official treasurer and helping Marty Nixon keep track of assorted financial transactions. The group had hoped to add a two-day block festival in Greenwich Village to the planned march, but that fell by the wayside when they discovered that city ordinances required the posting of a million dollars worth of bonds to “protect against damage.” By April 1970, the committee had firmly focused on a “march for freedom” through midtown Manhattan up to Central Park, where “a variety of activities and events, planned or spontaneous,” would follow in Sheep Meadow. In its bulletins and press releases, the committee continuously announced its hope that other gay and lesbian organizations across the land would sponsor comparable efforts in their own localities.
⁹²

The first anniversary of the onset of the Stonewall riots would have fallen on June 27, 1970, but the committee decided to hold the
celebration on Sunday, June 28. They believed that more people would be free to participate on a Sunday and that it would be easier to obtain permits and in general to cut through red tape. To raise operating funds for the planned event, the committee tried various strategies. Foster sent out notices to “All East Coast Homophile Organizations” asking for $10 donations, and he also sent an “appeal” to individuals, along with a rather peremptory pitch: “I have often thought,” Foster wrote, “that the least a homosexual can do—if he doesn't want to get involved in public demonstrations or action-oriented programs—is to contribute cash to enable programs to be conducted by others on his behalf. Will you agree with that?” Not much resulted from either effort. Two months before the scheduled march, seven organizations had sent in a measly total of a hundred dollars—and Dick Leitsch, speaking for the New York Mattachine Society, had declared himself against the notion of a march entirely.
⁹³

But in 1970 it took only about a thousand dollars to put on the Christopher Street Liberation Day March, and Craig brought in additional money by asking his bookstore customers for donations. (He also found a twenty-dollar bill on the street and, deciding that “God has sent it for the march,” added it to the treasury.) It helped, in making ends meet, that Michael Sabanosh, a graphic designer, did all of CSLDC's announcements, posters, and buttons free of charge, and that Marty Nixon, who had a job with the Arthritis Foundation, stayed late after work to surreptitiously grind out thousands of pages of CSLDC material on the Foundation's photocopy machine.
⁹⁴

In the spring of 1970, Karla was thrown so hard to the mat during a judo match that she broke several ribs. Stoic about physical pain, she hobbled along for a week. But then, when she was on her way to a GLF meeting one night, the pain grew so severe that her friend Alan Sample finally persuaded her to go to nearby St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village. The doctors there were convinced that she had been battered and they called in the police. Feeling mischievious, Karla gave Alan—who had long blond hair and looked like Greta Garbo—a glance as if to say, “What if I tell them you did it? Wouldn't that be a hoot, the idea of
you
beating up
me
?” Knowing Karla's penchant for practical jokes, Alan gave her a beseeching look back, as if to say “Don't do this to me!” So Karla bit her lip in restraint, and the police let them go.

It was clear she wouldn't be able to work for a while, which was no great blow to her. She hated the new job she had taken at Collier's
Encyclopedia: “It was very right-wing. We all hated it there. It was like the Gestapo. They had dress rules and I was in constant battles with them to wear pants.” Besides, her boss had seen her picture in the paper as part of the
Ladies' Home Journal
action, and Karla was sure the reaction would be “So
that's
what she does with her day off—she seizes magazines.” She thought maybe she ought to quit before being fired.