Stonewall (46 page)

The urge was part and parcel of her growing ambivalence about graduate school. She had made some good gay male and lesbian friends at NYU, including Rita Mae Brown and Alan Sample, and she enjoyed reading for her courses. But she had been increasingly treated in class as The Feminist, and being mechanically turned to (“And what does Karla, The Feminist, think?”) had angered her. She had told the professors to try finding out what some of the other women in class felt, but they had gone right on patronizing her as their token revolutionary.

Karla decided the time had come for a break from a hateful job and a conflicted academic career. It seemed an ideal time to take disability and to go sit in California for a while. She waited until early June so that she could participate in a big antiwar march. And then she headed out to the West Coast.

Jim Fouratt's lover in 1970 was Peter Hujar, who had been one of Richard Avedon's prize pupils and was in his own right already a well-known fashion photographer. Jim thought Hujar was “the most handsome man I had ever seen in my life; he looked exactly like Gary Cooper.” But Hujar was notoriously difficult, too—which was perhaps understandable for a man whose mother had twice tried to kill him after discovering that he was gay.

Hujar was interested in Jim's political activities but, after going along to a few GLF meetings, had decided he wasn't
that
interested. Still, he wanted to do “something.” About a month before the Christopher Street March was due to take place, Jim came up with a “something” that caught Hujar's fancy: take a photograph of a group of gay liberationists running joyously through the streets, fists clenched on high, á la the Paris Commune, that could be used as a poster to advertise the coming march.

Hujar took to the idea immediately. But bringing it to fruition proved difficult. Jim set up a telephone chain call asking all GLF members willing to be photographed to show up for the shoot at the designated time, day, and street (a semi-deserted area in the West
Twenties). The response was less than overwhelming. Appearing on the poster would be tantamount to publicly coming out, and in 1970 that was still a terrifying prospect for most people. Many of the phone messages went unanswered, and many others called back to stammer invented regrets or to express real fears.

Ultimately, some fifteen people showed up to be photographed. Hujar had them run back and forth, back and forth, down the deserted street, shouting and laughing in triumph. Dressed in the pseudo-shabby workers' drag then fashionable, they looked as if they had been recently liberated from the Bastille—and had somehow emerged singing.

In the final poster, the fifteen marchers crowd the center, and it only gradually becomes clear that the sidewalks behind them are empty; these ebullient troops seem to have no backup forces. What also becomes apparent is the nearly equal number of women and men—though in GLF itself the women were far outnumbered. That ratio seemed proud confirmation to some that the women were more willing to put up than the men were to shut up.
⁹⁵

Some of the participants had nervously hoped that the photo would take its place in the revolutionary pantheon alongside Black Panther posters and those from the 1968 French student uprising. They had expected to see it on every wall of every building—a rallying cry to come out and march in the Liberation Day Parade. But the poster was a good deal less omnipresent than that. Its real visibility came only later, when it was widely and continuously displayed on the walls of movement organizations, bookstores, and offices. Still, enough people saw it at the time to give those who had participated some strange turns. Being recognized from the poster meant being subjected to strained, worried looks from friends and even strangers, looks that seemed to say “You realize, of course, that your life is finished.”

That could make the participants momentarily catch their breath, fear suddenly surging back. And they had to quickly remind themselves that their lives felt much more like they were just beginning.

The night before the march, GLF held an open house at the Washington Square Methodist Church on West Fourth Street in the Village; they offered food, housing information, literature, and around-the-clock talk. At the Church of the Holy Apostles, at Twenty-eighth Street and Ninth Avenue, a comparable set of events for women
featured a bring-your-own communal supper, a “dance-party-rap session,” and the promise that for the entire weekend, “there will always be sisters around with literature or time to talk. Women with no place to go or no spirit to get there can crash at the church.”
⁹⁶

And over at Alternate U., a two-person team from the Quaker Project on Community Conflict was giving a crash course on crowd control to a hundred hastily gathered marshals. Many of them were still feeling skittish about having decided to march, to say nothing of taking on the responsibility of a marshal's role. As one of them later put it, “I decided I would march, but I left little clauses in my mind.… If I didn't feel good, I wouldn't go. If there was any violence, I would drop out.… If the march was going to include too many effeminate men or butch women, I would drop out.…”
⁹⁷

The Quaker team warned the marshals about what everybody already knew: No one had any idea how many people would show up in the morning or how much violence to expect. Nor could anyone predict whether the cops would contain or abet hostility among the spectators toward the marchers. “Be prepared for anything,” the Quakers warned. Then, for several hours, they helped the novice marshals simulate pugnacious situations of all sorts. “Cocksucker!” one man was told to shout angrily at another as he lunged toward him, while the others were shown how to surround and “smother” the two combatants.
⁹⁸

Karla had arrived in Los Angeles some three weeks before the scheduled march and, though ostensibly resting, had quickly gotten involved with the local GLF. She found the same divisions that had characterized the New York group: The women and men had begun to tangle and some of the more radical men, like Sandy Blixton, were at odds strategically with moderates like Morris Kight. But the worst of the antagonisms were put on (temporary) hold in order to plan the first Christopher Street West Parade.

As it was, arrangements were begun belatedly; the request for a parade permit was submitted just four days before the deadline—and then the Police Commission insisted on security bonds totaling a million and a quarter dollars. Police Chief Ed Davis said publicly that giving the marchers a permit would be like “discommoding the citizens by permitting a parade of thieves and burglars”; he further predicted that should such a march take place, it would be mobbed by hard hats. The ACLU brought suit on behalf of Christopher Street West
—and in a photo finish, the presiding judge ruled, just hours before the march was due to begin, that the amount of money demanded in bonds was unprecedented and therefore excessive.

In New York, Sunday, June 28, dawned cloudless and cool—“An omen, an omen!
She's
on our side!” was the nervous chorus in a thousand apartments across the city. Craig had barely slept, and Foster, arriving the night before from Hartford, had been up late talking with friends and reviewing his chronometer calculations for measuring crowd size.

Sylvia was itching to get going; after facing the random violence of the streets for most of her life, she viewed a daytime march up Sixth Avenue, surrounded by friends, as a piece of cake. One of her street-queen buddies announced she would be wearing her hair in a bun—“suffragette-serious”—out of respect for the solemnity of the occasion, and would do her best not to “pluck people's nerves.”

Jim, uncharacteristically, had recently taken something of a backseat; in the last weeks, as GAA had rapidly accelerated its involvement in the march, leafleting the Village, hosting a big dance at NYU, he had grown concerned that the GAA “reformers” would somehow dull the cutting edge. Jim would march, of course, but would stay close to the GLF banner.

As for Yvonne, so long on the organizational sidelines, she thought she just
might
join the march; she set her alarm, anyway, putting off a final decision until the morning.

Craig anxiously paced his apartment early Sunday. Half a dozen meetings over the preceding months with the Sixth Precinct had—just as in Los Angeles—failed to win a permit, and though the promise of one had finally been made, the permit had
still
not arrived. He was determined to go ahead regardless, especially since a second permit, to congregate in Central Park's Sheep Meadow after the march,
had
been obtained (though, again, only after half a dozen meetings). Just as Craig was about to give up and leave his apartment, the Sixth Precinct permit was delivered.

He raced up to the assembly point, on Washington Place between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. The police were already there—lots of them. They had set up sawhorses for crowd control, and dozens of cops lined the march perimeter. Most of them looked indifferent, even bored, as if this were just another parade, water off a duck's back. No more than a handful of cops seemed openly hostile, and even they,
unwilling to acknowledge that such a gathering was
worth
their anger, opted for the snickering, offhanded joke. All of which was expected. The one real surprise was when a couple of the cops accepted leaflets being passed out—and when one or two were seen actually reading them.

The march wasn't scheduled to kick off until two
P.M.,
but by late morning the marshals, with their orange armbands, were already in place, and knots of people had begun to mill around. It was impossible to tell how many had come to gape and how many to march, and Craig, now joined by Foster, nervously agreed that “not that many were going to end up marching”; Craig thought
maybe
a thousand. Had they overestimated political awareness in the community? Were people too frightened to show up—or too lazy to get out of bed on Sunday? By one
P.M.,
an hour before the official starting time, there were still only enough apparent marchers to spread out for about two thirds of a block.

Craig held down any feelings of disappointment, reminding himself that he had successfully argued for making the march a reasonably long one, from the Village up Sixth Avenue into Central Park, on the assumption that many of the older or less committed gays and lesbians would be afraid to start out with the marchers, but might later yield to impulse and fall in somewhere along the line. He cheered up still more when balloons and signs began to appear.
BETTER BLATANT THAN LATENT
made him laugh out loud.

At two-ten, the march was still being held in place; some of the organizers apparently felt that a short delay might help to swell the ranks with latecomers. But the day had grown considerably warmer, and as people anxiously waited for the kickoff signal, with marchers and onlookers eyeing each other warily, with members of the news media dashing in and out of the crowd in search of the still-more-flamboyant queen, the still-angrier militant, and with marshals warning people to remove their glasses and loose jewelry “just in case,” discomfort steadily grew. Word of an incident that had happened the previous night snaked its way insidiously through the crowd: At one
A.M.
five young gay men had been set upon in the Village by a group of toughs and beaten up; a cruising police car had finally rescued them, but at the station house the gay men had been urged to walk away from the incident and warned that if they pressed charges they would in all likelihood themselves be found guilty of “disorderly conduct.”

By the time the kickoff came, at about two-fifteen, everyone, as
Foster put it, was “scared to death.” As they fell in under their organizational banners—the GAAers notably resplendent in blue T-shirts with gold lambda crests, the GLFers crowded under a banner adorned with same-sex symbols—they shouted encouragement at each other, hugged their neighbors fiercely, raised clenched fists in the air, and spread their fingers wide in the V sign—for many, less a gesture of absolute defiance than a cover for embarrassment, an antidote for fear.

Confined to the far left lane of Sixth Avenue, they hoisted their signs high
(HOMOSEXUAL IS NOT A FOUR–LETTER WORD; SAPPHO WAS A RIGHT–ON WOMAN),
shouted their transgressive slogans—“Two, four, six, eight / Gay is just as good as straight”; “Ho-ho-homosexual / The ruling class is ineffectual.” And right up front, leading the cheers all along the sixty-block route, was Sylvia. “Gimme a G!” she screamed over and over. “Gimme an A … a Y … a P … an O … a W … an E … an R … Whadda we want?
Gay Power!
When do we want it?
Now!”

The kickoff in Los Angeles was just as fervent, a splash of color and sound down Hollywood Boulevard that had all the panache of what one reporter called “a political Mardi Gras.” Some thirty organizations were represented, with GLF/LA and Troy Perry's Metropolitan Community Church among the largest. GLF members took turns portraying Jesus tied to a cross, being continuously prodded by a cop—with a nearby sign reading
KILLED BY LAPD
and listing the names of four homosexuals purportedly beaten to death by the L.A. police.

Transsexual Connie Vaughan, over six feet tall, rode proudly in an open convertible, and underground gay porn stars from Pat Rocco's films rode in other cars. Lesbian separatists did an intermittent group can-can. Banners and signs (some of which had caused controversy within the organizing committee) declared that
FUCKING IS BETTER THAN KILLING
and advocated
MAKE LOVE, NOT BABIES.
And a pickup truck exhibited an eight-foot-tall plaster-of-Paris Vaseline jar with “Gay Petroleum Jelly” on the label and an accompanying sign declaring
AIN'T NOTHIN' NO GOOD WITHOUT THE GREASE.
New Yorker Karla Jay found it all
“so
Hollywood!”