Stonewall (8 page)

But Seattle lagged far behind. Yvonne did locate a few places
rumored
to be gay, but she had scant success in meeting other lesbians or getting connected to a gay network. Not that she felt at all desperate; she was “having a ball” exploring a variety of worlds, and felt content in not committing to any of them.

During the summer vacation following her second year at Seattle, when she was back in her family's house in New Rochelle, Yvonne suddenly broke out in an acute case of acne. She had never had so much as a pimple before; now her face was a mass of bumps and
sores. Her mother took her to a well-known dermatologist, who promptly prescribed a series of X-rays—the then-touted experimental treatment. The X-rays literally burned the face, leaving patches of black skin that slowly peeled off. Yvonne felt so disfigured after the treatments that she decided not to return to Seattle, and indeed rarely left the house for a year. The experimental X-ray treatment for acne soon fell out of favor with dermatologists, but not before, in Yvonne's view, it had inflicted hidden internal damage that may well have contributed to the string of physical problems, and especially lupus, that would subsequently plague her.

Even before the X-ray treatments, she had seemed unusually susceptible to physical ailments. At twelve she had had a mild form of polio, which thereafter made her tire easily whenever she tried to play sports—though her tight, wiry body made her look like a natural athlete. Then at fourteen she had developed dysmenorrhea—painful cramps accompanying menstruation—later followed by endometriosis, which predisposed her to vaginal cysts and tumors.

None of this had kept her from being her mother's daughter—a high-energy, can-do person who could party till dawn. But two or three days a month, when the cramping and medications got her down, Yvonne took to her bed; the only up side was that her physical problems turned her into a lifelong reader. She was especially drawn to Faulkner, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Hesse. Ibsen's
A Doll's House
excited her incipient feminism, and Orwell's
Down and Out in London and Paris
her wanderlust (though his descriptions of rat-infested pantries kept her from eating in restaurants for years).

When the acne finally receded, and Yvonne was willing to venture out of the house, she enrolled at New York University in Greenwich Village to complete her B.A. Billy, a gay male friend, took her on a tour of the Village clubs, and she quickly became a regular. She went occasionally to a few places on Eighth Street, including the famed Bon Soir, but soon developed a special fondness for Lenny's Hideaway and, somewhat later, the Grapevine, an interracial, upscale bar, just off Seventh Avenue, that had dancing and catered to both men and women. But there weren't many such places in the Village; the barriers of race, class, and gender that centrally characterized mainstream American culture in the fifties were also decidedly in place, though perhaps marginally less noticeable, in the gay subculture.

As Yvonne became increasingly comfortable with a lesbian identity, she continued to travel—much more than most—between several worlds that straddled racial and class divides. She spent at least as
much time in the working-class bars and after-hours places of Harlem and Brooklyn as in the middle-class Greenwich Village clubs. A lesbian subculture seems to have developed earlier in Harlem than elsewhere, probably because blacks, knowing the pain of being treated as outsiders, had developed an attitude toward homosexuality relatively more tolerant than was characteristic of white heterosexual circles, with their unrelieved insistence on “sickness” and “degradation.” Harlemites might ridicule stereotypic bulldaggers or drag queens, but in the twenties especially, bisexuality had a certain cachet in sophisticated circles, and in the world of show biz the rumored lesbianism of such favored entertainers as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and Ethel Waters tended to be ignored as irrelevant.
²

Given this complex set of attitudes, heterosexual Harlem was sometimes willing to share nightclub and bar space with gays and lesbians. That included, in the 1920s, such well-known hangouts as Lulu Belle's, Connie's Inn, and the Clam House (which featured the 250-pound, tuxedo-clad singer Gladys Bentley belting out her raucous double-entendre lyrics), as well as the drag balls that attracted thousands to the huge arenas, like Rockland Palace, in which they were staged. Subsequently, Harlem clubs like Snooky's, the Purple Manor, and the Dug-out continued to mix straight and gay, thereby providing homosexuals with a proportionately greater number of gathering spots than were available in the more uptight downtown white world. When Yvonne arrived on the scene in the early fifties, these traditions, though diluted, were still intact. One of her favorite Harlem hangouts, the Wellsworth, on 126th Street and Seventh Avenue (just behind the Apollo Theater), was in fact two bars: a straight bar in front, and then behind it, with a separate side entrance, a black lesbian bar.

Harlem became a retreat from the endemic racism of the Village scene. Going into one of the few lesbian bars in the Village—the Seven Steps, Bagatelle, Swing Rendezvous, Pony Stable, Page Three, Laurel's (famed for its free Chinese food on Sunday afternoons)—meant essentially going into a white women's bar and finding herself ignored or treated like an oddity. That is, if in the first place she got by the Mafia thugs at the door, who often turned away, and sometimes insulted, anyone with black skin. The male bouncers were supposedly there to keep out straight men keen to convert a “lezzie,” but it was also their job to keep out “undesirable” women.
³

One night in the Bagatelle, Yvonne and her friends Tootsie and Debby were talking together at the bar when a white woman sitting nearby tried to flirt with them. When they ignored her, she went up
to the thug on the door and said the three women had been bothering her. He, in turn, told them that they would have to leave the club, but Yvonne and her friends were so outraged at the injustice that they refused. The thug then tried to evict them forcibly, a furious fight ensued, and Yvonne had to threaten him with a broken beer bottle before they could edge their way out of the place.

The tough, divey Swing Rendezvous, and the Seven Steps on Hudson Street, were more likely to admit black lesbians than was the upscale Bagatelle, which, with its tiny dance floor, was the most popular mid-fifties lesbian bar in the Village. But even in the Swing, the scene was essentially the same: a few black women in a sea of white faces. Nor did black lesbians necessarily form bonds of solidarity. The writer Audre Lorde, Yvonne's contemporary and later her friend, thought for a time that she was the
only
black lesbian living in the Village, and even after she met more black lesbians in the bars, they formed few friendships among themselves. In Lorde's words, “We recognized ourselves as exotic sister-outsiders who might gain little from banding together. Perhaps our strength might lay in our fewness, our rarity.”

For Lorde, part of the trouble was the tendency of black lesbians, even more than white, to get into heavy butch/femme roles. As a “kiki” (or “Ky-Ky,” as Lorde spells it)—that is, someone who refused to label herself in an either/or way—Lorde was considered unacceptably “AC/DC,” a confused “bluff” (a combination of “butch” and “fluff”), unwilling or unable to find a suitably clearcut identity.

Yvonne was more comfortable than Lorde with the strict roles lesbian bar culture enforced, and herself leaned toward the butch side (her butch name was Vonne, short for Vaughan). As she put it years later, “I cross-dressed primarily to take on the power of the other gender; and also to make a clear statement to women what my preference was and a clear statement to men that I was not available to them.” Yet she shared Lorde's misgivings, if not her vehemence, about the bar scene being a “reflect[ion of] all the deprecating attitudes toward women which we loathed in straight society. It was a rejection of these roles that had drawn us to ‘the life' in the first place … we recognized oppression as oppression, no matter where it came from.”

In the fifties and sixties, middle-class and upper-class lesbians relied less on the bars for a social life than working-class women did—just as they were less invested in butch/femme role dichotomies. Yvonne was again atypical in the way she socialized across class lines. She would sometimes be invited as a token black to an otherwise all-white
cocktail party of professional women, or to Fire Island, a summer playground that only wealthier lesbians could afford. And Yvonne would go, pleased to be part of so many different worlds. But she would deliberately dress down in sneakers and jeans, in those years decidedly déclassé, eschewing “respectable” Bermuda shorts.

Nor did she often date across racial lines. Only once in these years did she get seriously involved with a white woman, and then it was with someone who traveled almost entirely in the black lesbian world. Not that Yvonne was much interested in settling down with
anyone
; though intensely romantic, she was also intensely wary—a trait that often comes as second nature to those brought up in an alcoholic environment of erratic or excessive emotion that needs to be defended against. Yvonne would later describe herself as “frightened of intimacy,” unable to handle closeness, afraid of being smothered—or abandoned. And she would herself increasingly use alcohol and drugs as a way of holding those fears at bay.

In 1956, following a protracted argument with her mother, Yvonne decided to get her own apartment in New Rochelle. After moving in, she supported herself by doing everything from babysitting to running numbers to driving factory workers back and forth to their jobs in Mamaroneck and Pelham. She was now in her mid-twenties, still hell-bent on catching every jazz set, on closing every club, on burning every candle at every end. The relentlessness of her partying naturally put a crimp in her studying, and it was not until 1959 that she was able to complete her B.A. at NYU.

CRAIG

I
n 1954, when fourteen-year-old Craig graduated from the Junior School, he went back to live with his still-struggling mother, Marion, in Chicago and enrolled as a freshman in Sullivan High School. That alone proved traumatic. The intimate, rural, all-boy atmosphere of the Junior School abruptly gave way to the urban anonymity of a big-city high school with twelve hundred students, male and female, mostly Jewish—a bewildering kaleidoscope of shifting faces. To compound Craig's feelings of dislocation, he had to contend with a new surrogate father, his mother having recently remarried.

Hank, an ex-Golden Gloves champion who worked in a print
shop, was “the sweetest guy in the world” when sober, but one of the nastiest when drunk, which was often. He and Craig's mother would get into shouting matches, but he interfered very little in Craig's own life. On the rare occasions when he tried to, Craig, though pint-sized, quickly put him right. One night after dinner, when Craig was about to leave the house, Hank abruptly said, “Where do you think you're going?” Craig said he was going out; Hank said he was not; Craig repeated that he was. Then Hank pointedly said, “When I was your age we used to go down to Diversey [a gay area in a then rough neighborhood] and beat up queers.” Craig may have been surprised, but he wasn't intimidated. “You big, brave man,” he said, glaring at Hank—and walked out of the house.

Hank
had
been on to something. Craig had been leaving home after dinner nearly every night for exactly the reason Hank had guessed: to cruise the gay areas. It had all begun, and quite accidentally, soon after he had come to live in his mother's apartment.

Craig had been interested in politics from an early age; at the Chicago Junior School he had avidly pored over the
Christian Science Monitor
, the only newspaper the boys had been allowed to read, and at thirteen he was subscribing to the
Democratic Digest
, a publication of the Democratic National Committee. For Craig, the daily newspaper was an absolute necessity—both to follow politics and to see how his beloved Cubs had done.

One night, after he had been living with his mother for about a month, he went out to Howard Street to get the evening paper. It was raining lightly; as Craig headed back home, a man suddenly started to walk next to him and then said something about how it was too wet out even for the ducks. Craig instinctively knew the guy was coming on to him, and he wanted him to, but he was scared—he guessed the man was at least twenty-three years old. Yet he gave him his home phone number and told him to call from three to six in the afternoon, when his mother would still be at work.

The man did, and Craig agreed to go for a ride in what turned out to be a yellow MG convertible. They drove out to the cornfields near Skokie, had sex in the car, and started to head home—only to discover that the car was stuck in the mud. They tried putting corn husks under the wheels, but to no effect, and the man had to walk to a gas station and hire mechanics to haul them out. “I'll never forget the look on their faces,” Craig said years later, with a laugh—“a mixture of amazement and disgust.”

But for Craig it was high adventure—the first time he had ever
had sex with someone older than himself. That is, give or take some furtive experiences at Comiskey Park, which to Craig, a fanatical Chicago Cubs fan, had become a kind of second home. He would let men pick him up in Comiskey and then, apparently fearless, would either give out a phone number or go directly with the pickup to one of the bathrooms in a deserted area of the stadium. From one of the men he learned the technique of avoiding detection while getting a blow job in a stall by standing in two shopping bags.

But it was from the man who owned the MG that Craig first heard the word “gay” and first learned that there were gay cruising areas all around Chicago—around Clark and Division streets, Bughouse Square, Wilson Avenue, Howard Street, Rush Street, the Clark Theater (in the top two balconies one could even have sex), department-store bathrooms (especially at Marshall Field's, Carson Pirie Scott, and Goldblatt's), and, in summertime, the gay beach at Oak Street.