Stonewall (14 page)

The Sloane House YMCA, on Thirty-fourth Street, provided a good, inexpensive start (along with a fair amount of action in the shower room), and Craig soon met someone there, Collin, with whom he became friendly. Like Craig, who had gotten a scholarship to the School of American Ballet, Collin was a dance student, hopeful of becoming a chorus boy on Broadway. Along with a friend of Craig's from Chicago, the teenagers took an apartment together—two tiny rooms—on Sixteenth Street and Seventh Avenue. It soon became a camping (in both senses) ground for the raft of street strays they began to meet; on some nights eight or nine people would be sleeping on every available inch of floor space.

Next came the problem of getting a job. All Craig had was a high school diploma and a few clerical skills. So he did what generations of the young have always done to survive in the big city: took a restaurant job. In a sense he was lucky; he was hired (even if only as a lowly salad boy) at Aldo's, the popular gay restaurant in Greenwich Village. His job was to stock up the two-tiered salad cart—local mythology insisted it had been donated by Christine Jorgensen—with
a big bowl of lettuce, assorted dressings, and smaller bowls of condiments such as olives, tomatoes, and watermelon rinds, and move from table to table, serving the mixture of choice.

As befitted the camp atmosphere, Craig would sing out on arrival at each table, “Roquefort, garlic, or gasoline?” but in fact he hated the job from the start. Stanley, the man who ran Aldo's, was clearly Mafia, and the line of division between the straight, homophobic bartending and managerial staff, and the gay waiters and salad boys, was sharp. Having grown up in an all-boy atmosphere where same-gender affection was part of the natural flow of everyday life, Craig, unlike so many gays in these years, hadn't internalized his full share of homophobia. The condescension of the staff, in combination with the self-deprecation of some of the waiters and the uppity airs of some of the customers, put him in a state of simmering rage.

One night he decided he'd had it—and also decided that he was going to leave in style. He went to the kitchen, got some packing straw from the melon crate, and substituted it for the lettuce on the salad cart. After the customer made his choice of dressing, Craig obligingly put it over the salad/straw and served it. This went on for nearly an hour, with Craig serving almost the entire restaurant before anyone complained—intimidated either by Craig or by lifetime gay training in swallowing abuse without complaint. It was finally Stanley who caught wind of something being wrong and confronted Craig. He, in turn, called Stanley a “Mafia pig”—and stormed out.

That meant job-hunting again. Fortunately, Craig had taken typing in high school and had gotten good at it. Even so, he had to tip the man doing the hiring before he could get a clerical job in a plastic-flower factory, where he mostly did shipping work and typed invoices. About the only good thing that could be said for the job—aside from the fact that it paid the rent—was that the factory was located off Union Square on Sixteenth Street, near Craig's apartment.

By that point, Craig had already made his first trip to the Mattachine Society of New York at 1133 Broadway. In the tiny third-floor office he found one person at work—the president, “Al de Dion” (almost everyone in those years' used a pseudonym). De Dion was cordial and pleasant, but when he found out that Craig was only eighteen, informed him that he had to be twenty-one before he could officially join Mattachine. Craig had never anticipated such a barrier and was crushed. But de Dion cheered him up by saying he
could
subscribe to the newsletter, volunteer to help out in the office, and also attend Mattachine's West Side Discussion Group, which met
once a month in the basement room at Freedom House on Fortieth Street.

Attending his first meeting of the West Side Discussion Group soon after, Craig had mixed feelings of elation and dismay. He was thrilled to be in a room with several dozen people willing to attend a public meeting on the subject of homosexuality, but was alarmed to find that almost all of them were men over forty in business suits, and paying what to him was far too much deferential attention to the speaker of the evening—a stodgy psychiatric “expert” who pontificated at length about the entitlement of homosexuals to civil rights
even though
their sexual development might have been distorted by a “faulty” family configuration.

The more meetings Craig attended, the more his dismay grew. He discovered that New York Mattachine had decided to confine its operations to two areas, education and research, and had disclaimed political agitation as counterproductive. Yet as Craig got to know more and more of the individuals involved, he found many whom he liked personally and even a few who shared his view that Mattachine should become more activist and visible. “George Desmannes,” editor of the newsletter, was among the people Craig grew fondest of—“a warm and wonderful” man who quickly and gratefully put Craig to work doing pasteup, editing, and production of the newsletter.

Craig turned out to be an ideal volunteer. Not only was he an enthusiast with seemingly limitless energy, but he could actually type on the massive old IBM which had defeated everyone else. Craig even insisted on justifying right-hand margins; he would spend days counting up the number of letters by which each line was too long or too short, assigning pluses and minuses, and then laboriously retyping copy. He loved doing it, and George loved having him do it. Over time, Craig got more and more involved on the editorial side and by 1961, when he reached twenty-one and became an official Mattachine member, he had pretty much taken over the newsletter—though, typically, he never cared about being listed as its editor and getting credit for his work.

As Craig became increasingly active, George advised him to use a pseudonym to avoid having the FBI come snooping around his apartment. Craig dismissed that as paranoia, but bowed to his fondness for George and let him put “Craig Phillips” among the other names on the masthead. But he felt awful about giving in to what he viewed as cowardice and for hiding what he was in fact proud of. So within a few months, he started using his real name, scandalizing the
many conservatives in Mattachine who lived in constant fear of police reprisals.

They were even more frightened when Craig and several others decided to join a gay picket line in front of the draft board on Whitehall Street in protest against its policy of releasing information on sexual orientation to employers. The night Craig “casually” mentioned the plans, the two other volunteers working in the office at the time looked as if they “were both going to have heart attacks.” “You can't do that!” one of them yelled, “Mattachine will lose its incorporation. Our charter forbids
any kind
of political activity—you'll ruin us if you do anything militant like that!”

Others later warned Craig that the last thing Mattachine wanted was press coverage, that publicity of any kind would lead not to additional recruits (as Craig claimed) but to the police shutting down the office. But they had no power to
forbid
Craig from acting in an individual capacity, and besides, they were a little intimidated by this seemingly fearless young dynamo. In the upshot, only half a dozen people joined Craig, and only one other (Renée Cafiero) was affiliated with Mattachine.

The small band included two young firebrands of the day, one of whom was straight. Jefferson Fuck Poland (he insisted the name was on his birth certificate) was the founder and head of the League for Sexual Freedom, and he brought along his girlfriend of the moment, who in turn brought along a baby. The other (who had been the chief organizer of the event) was “Randy Wicker” (Charles Hayden), who had joined Mattachine on arriving in New York in 1958 but had found its tone so tepid that he had formed his own one-man organization, the Homosexual League of New York, and had been using it to achieve some breakthrough coverage on homosexuality in the previously indifferent radio and print media.

Randy's lover, Peter, and Renée Cafiero's lover, the children's-book writer Nancy Garden, brought the group up to seven (not counting the baby). They may have been brave, but they were also scared. In the early sixties, the climate of Cold War conformity had lifted, but countercultural protest and challenge did not yet rend the air. People simply did not picket draft boards—let alone a mere handful of people acting in defense of a despised sexual minority. There seemed a fair chance that they would be summarily arrested, carted off to jail, and possibly beaten.

What in fact happened was that they walked back and forth in front of the draft board, and tried to hand passersby a flyer they had
made up. But it was a rainy Saturday and only a few people were on the streets. The sergeant stationed in front of the building glared at them from time to time, but nobody else seemed to notice them much. It was something of an anticlimax, and yet they felt euphoric. They had done something different and daring, made a beginning. And they believed bigger and better actions would soon follow.

Craig was hardly all work and no play. In his early years in New York, his friends were mostly street queens, although—unlike Sylvia Rivera and her friends up on Forty-second Street—few of them hustled for a living; the only coinage in Craig's crowd was fantasy talk of meeting a rich sugar daddy. Their circle consisted of a rotating dozen or so late-teenagers, half of them black, with a smattering of Puerto Ricans and whites. In those years being a queen meant wearing eyeliner and mascara, and sometimes “doe eyes,” with dark black lines on the top, and bottom lids filled in to a point. Anything more—that is, jewelry, teased hair, or drag—not only would have invited arrest, but would have meant debarment from many of the gay clubs. Even in modest mascara, Craig's friends were often either denied entrance or (as happened in the Club Fifty) marched straight into the bathroom to wash their faces.

Not that bars were their chief hangout. Craig and his friends might stop in on Sundays at the Wishbone on West Fifty-eighth Street to get free hot dogs and macaroni salad, but generally they were too poor to afford the inflated prices of gay clubs. And besides, in the early sixties, the outdoor scene was much more in vogue than the bars. The three most popular downtown places were Greenwich Avenue, Eighth Street, and Washington Square Park (the railing along MacDougal was known as the meat rack). On Greenwich Avenue on a given night, hundreds of gay men would sit on doorsteps or car hoods watching the promenaders move back and forth. An eye always had to be kept out, of course, for the cops. They never let anyone stay still for long; “Keep moving, faggot, keep moving,” they would growl, poking their nightsticks into the men's ribs. At one point, the city cut down all the bushes in Washington. Square Park and imposed a curfew in order to rid the area of “undesirables.”

It was in Washington Square Park, when Craig was out cruising alone one night, that three plainclothes cops jumped him. Acting as if he were an escaped serial murderer, they screamed epithets, slapped him in handcuffs, and took him down to the old Sixth Precinct on Charles Street. Sitting in the squad room, surrounded by cops, the
teenage terror of Mattachine let them know that he was no ordinary frightened faggot. Furious at the way he'd been treated, he started to harangue the cops, demanding to know by what right they had dragged a citizen off the streets. Indignant at having a “pervert” talk back to them, the cops took Craig into a side room and beat the shit out of him. The next day, his roommate Collin got him out, but Craig then had to appear at FBI headquarters on Sixty-ninth Street with his draft card to prove he was properly registered.

When Craig and his friends went out together, it was not primarily to cruise but to have fun. Part of that fun was “going wrecking”—taunting straights. That was pretty easily accomplished; the mere sight of two men holding hands on the street was enough to produce instant apoplexy in most heterosexuals. But if any of them made the mistake of trying to rough the faggots up, they were in for a rude surprise; some of the doe-eyed sissies were in fact tough street kids who didn't let anybody mess with them. The powerfully built Johnny Italiano was notorious for his quick fists; a straight who came at Johnny rarely walked away under his own power.

Sometimes, daringly, Craig and his friends went “wrecking” outside the gay areas. On one romp (thirty years before Queer Nation supposedly invented such noisy escapades) they went to a live broadcast of
The Carol Burnett Show
. Arriving at the studio in full face makeup, they created a deliberate stir in the balcony and—to nobody's surprise—got thrown out. They were also fond of spending an entire evening riding the subways (bargain entertainment at a fifteen-cent fare). Poured into blue jeans or chino pants made deliberately too tight by endless soakings in hot water, singing in loud falsetto the saccharine popular tunes of the day, they would, when feeling particularly exuberant, form a chorus line, kick their legs in the air and, to the tune of “It's Howdy Doody Time,” perform their own special lyric:

We are the Village queens
,

We always wear blue jeans
,

We wear our hair in curls
,

Because we think we're girls
.

Perhaps because they seemed fearless, or perhaps because people thought they were lunatics, they rarely got hassled. On the contrary, a few fascinated young guys would usually end up tagging along during the evening.

Craig's daring caught up with him one day at Riis Park, the beach in Queens that was popular with gays. A local ordinance banned “suggestive” bathing suits on the beach, but the police, using the ordinance as a means of harassment, enforced it only against gay men. The cops would appear on a Sunday or a major holiday and station themselves near the refreshment area on the boardwalk above the beach. When word spread that they were there, a gay man going up on the boardwalk for a hot dog or a trip to the bathroom would dutifully cover his bikini with a towel—often making a major camp production out of the compliance.