Stonewall (18 page)

He also believed that a new organization should take its cue from the successful West Coast group, SIR, and provide its members with social outlets (which some Mattachine old-timers frowned on); but at the same time he wanted to keep social activities to a modest level. Foster worried that too much emphasis on in-group activities might encourage the further development of the kind of gay subculture he disapproved: “affected mannerisms, special shops for the Homo tastes and styles, various other group interests and ways of life.” He did not believe that homosexuals and heterosexuals were identical, but did feel “reluctant to see ourselves committing ourselves to differences that have not been thoroughly established as valid and as good. I believe that a subculture will always be readier prey for discrimination and pogroms than an integrated variation in behavior.”

None of which meant that Foster blamed homosexuals themselves for aspects of a life-style he disapproved of, or for their current lack of acceptance. He did see much in homosexual life that he found “maladaptive,” but he believed “any unhappiness or difficulties” were “principally due to the destructive consequences of prejudice.” On the other hand, he questioned neither psychotherapeutic claims (since disproved) of successful “conversion” from gay to straight, nor even the advisability of some individuals' undergoing such “therapy.” He believed that homosexuality was not always “ego-syntonic with the basic personality pattern”—just as he also believed that “a repressed homo seeking compulsive hetero adjustment might do better to come to terms with his H instincts.” Individuals, according to Foster's libertarian philosophy, had the right to make those decisions for themselves, had the right to opt out of a life-style that gave so little pleasure and so much pain.

Yet Foster was firm in his belief that homosexuality was not an
illness—and in those years, when the psychoanalytic equation of homosexuality with pathology was all but universally accepted, his view automatically put him in the avant-garde. In speculating about etiology, moreover, Foster daringly (for those years) suggested that “there was no reason to believe the causes [of homosexuality] are any different from heterosexuality.” In both instances, he argued, “the drives behind sexual orientation are very profound and quite the opposite of simple matters of choice.” Which did not mean to him, in turn, that orientation was simply a product of biological factors. On that question, he threw up his hands—as even the best informed have continued to do since.

Foster, like most people, was imprisoned by the assumptions of his time. Unlike most, he had managed to transcend at least some of them.

After Craig returned to New York from Los Angeles in January 1964, he plunged deeper than ever into movement work. And on several fronts. To try to draw younger (and, Craig assumed, more militant) people into Mattachine, he started Mattachine Young Adults. To advertise their meetings, Craig took out “Bulletin Board” ads in
The Village Voice
, and that involved a running battle with the paper, the
Voice
objecting, at various points, to the use of the words “homophile” and “homosexual” in the ads. After much arguing, Craig ultimately got the okay for both—but it would take a full-scale Gay Liberation Front action in 1969 before the
Voice
would sanction the use of the word “gay.”

To further attract recruits for Mattachine Young Adults, Craig organized two-person (one male, one female whenever possible) leafleting teams in the Village. Expecting some hostile reactions, the teams developed strategy for forestalling actual physical attack: “If someone calls you a fag or a dyke, don't respond to them verbally. Be dignified. Don't get on their level. That will only encourage them to do something further, possibly worse. And it will put you in a state of mind where you can't really think about what's going on. Try to stay calm and centered.”

The tactics worked most of the time. And as often as not, the teams got a positive response. On one snowy night when Craig was leafleting at the Sheridan Square subway entrance, a woman who had taken a flyer and read it came back and told Craig she didn't know anything about homosexuals, but their cause had to be good if he was willing to stand outside in such terrible weather.

He was willing to do a lot more. One of his ideas, which came to him in a fit of anger and which he never pushed, was that every time there was a gay-bashing, gays should announce that they were going to randomly beat up a straight. Something else he wanted to do—twenty-five years before the controversy over “outing”—was to place an ad announcing that all gay people would have five years to come out, and then on January 1, 1970, the name of every gay person would be published.

In Craig's mind visibility
was
the key to ending oppression, and he kept searching for ways to swell the ranks of the openly gay. To that end, he willingly appeared in the public media, doing a number of radio shows with his cohort Randy Wicker, who had already proven himself something of a genius in media manipulation. Wicker could be arch and self-aggrandizing, which grated on Craig, but he was grateful to find somebody who shared his belief that Mattachine should act as if it were a movement, not a hospital ward; and in tribute, Craig gave a featured place in the Mattachine newsletter to Randy's regular column of political tidbits, “The Wicker Basket.”

When
The Alan Burke Show
—a Saturday night TV talk show that for a time rivaled David Susskind's in popularity—called Mattachine for “a homosexual” to interview, Craig volunteered to go. By that time, he had become well aware that the media were primarily interested in sensationalistic “entertainment,” and he did his considerable best to forestall such exploitation. When he was told to appear a full hour before airtime to be made up for the Burke show, Craig got a straight actress friend of his who knew all about stage makeup to come with him. She stood over him while the makeup man went to work, and made sure that nothing more than a little powder and cheek coloring was used.

Craig also dressed for the occasion, donning a rare tie and jacket, looking for all the world like Joe College. And when he got the usual hostile questions from the audience about “sickness” and “child molestation,” he fielded them expertly. One macho young man stood up in the audience to describe the “sick” experience he had had when staying overnight at a YMCA—how “a coupla homo-sexuals tried to come on to me, they're
always
tryin' to come on to me.” Craig waited a beat, and then said quietly, “You flatter yourself.” The audience broke up.

Craig's efforts to bring more young people into Mattachine, and in general to swell its membership rolls, paid off handsomely. The person actually in charge of the membership committee in 1964 was
Alfred Sawahata, a Japanese-American architect who was one of Craig's favorite people at Mattachine. Sawahata taught Craig how to color-code the membership list in order to tell at a glance who needed to renew his or her dues, and how to send out discreet reminders to mail them in.

Craig went several steps further. He printed up a membership form urging people to join Mattachine, and then aggressively distributed it throughout the Village. And to create the impression that Mattachine was awash in activity, he also made sure that the newsletter came out on time. Thanks largely to these efforts, Mattachine's monthly meeting at Freedom House was, by 1965, often playing to full houses, and the rolls showed some three hundred paid-up members. By mid-1966, the number had gone to five hundred.

Craig personally recruited some of the people who would shortly become prominent in the struggle to steer New York Mattachine into more militant waters. Through Mattachine Young Adults he brought in Renée Cafiero, Bobby Gonzalez, and Michael Belser. And through a love affair, he brought in Dick Leitsch, who would become the dominant figure in Mattachine for the next half-dozen years.
⁸

Craig and Dick met in a doorway while both were cruising Greenwich Avenue one night, and they started to see each other fairly often. Leitsch was working at the time in the paint department at Gimbel's department store, and had never attended a Mattachine meeting. But it quickly became apparent to him that Mattachine was Craig's passion and that if he wanted to see more of Craig he would have to start going to meetings, since that was where Craig seemed to spend all his spare time.

Leitsch soon became interested in the proceedings and from the first, he (like Craig) eschewed the use of a pseudonym. And he soon began to think of himself and Craig as lovers—though Craig never did. Craig enjoyed sex with Leitsch, but rejected his possessive attempts to control his every breath. Growing up with an alcoholic mother, and a father who worked long hours, Leitsch from an early age had felt “in charge.” He was an articulate, persuasive man, and could be an exceedingly charming one. But when he wasn't getting his way, he could become explosively dictatorial.

One night when the two men were sitting at a restaurant counter having coffee, Craig said he didn't want Dick to come back with him to his apartment on Horatio Street; he felt like being alone that night. Leitsch, without a word, threw his coffee cup to the floor with such violence that the owner of the restaurant came running—and Craig,
frightened, beat a hasty retreat out the back door. But ten minutes after he got home, the doorbell rang downstairs. Knowing it was Leitsch, Craig ignored the ring. Then he heard Leitsch screaming out his name in the street. Again he ignored it. But somehow Leitsch got into the building and tried to break down Craig's door. Terrified, Craig was about to go down the fire escape, when he heard a neighbor (who knew both men) calming Leitsch down, and ultimately persuading him to leave.

Craig's affair with Leitsch, not surprisingly, lasted less than a year. But by then Leitsch was thoroughly hooked on Mattachine and he and Craig, despite residual anger at each other, became staunch political allies. In 1964–1965, New York Mattachine was still controlled by the conservatives. They believed in gradualism and quietism, in modifying
gay
comportment so that it would better coincide with middle-class notions of proper behavior, in concentrating on education, in allying with and relying on whatever sympathetic experts they could find in straight religious, legal, and psychiatric circles.

Where the conservatives emphasized the need for the homosexual to adjust to society, the militants, taking their cue from the black civil rights struggle, insisted that society had to do the adjusting, had to stop belittling and persecuting gay people. Frank Kameny summed up the militant view succinctly in a speech he gave to New York Mattachine in July 1964. Assailing the unproven assumptions and sloppy research that lay behind the psychoanalytic view of homosexuality as a disorder, Kameny threw out this challenge to the conservatives: “The entire movement is going to stand or fall upon the question of whether homosexuality is a sickness, and upon our taking a firm stand on it.”

Kameny's speech helped to shift the views of Julian Hodges, another man Craig had gotten interested in Mattachine. Hodges was from a prominent North Carolina family (a close relative, Luther Hodges, was Kennedy's secretary of commerce), and after he joined New York Mattachine in 1964 he, like Leitsch, had quickly assumed a leading role in the organization. Craig, Hodges, Leitsch, and sometimes Randy Wicker took to having dinner together after Mattachine meetings to talk about how they could wrest control of the organization from the conservatives. They finally decided to run an opposing slate in the upcoming May 1965 election, with Julian Hodges standing for president against the conservatives' candidate, David Goldberger (who headed Mattachine's West Side Discussion Group).

Mattachine elections were formal and secret. Ballots went out in
the mail, within a doubly sealed return envelope. Then, at the annual meeting, the ballots were opened in front of the entire membership present. In the May 1965 election, Leitsch and Hodges were entrusted with the responsibility of bringing to the annual meeting all the ballots that had been received in the mail.

Leitsch later confessed to Craig that he and Hodges had steamed open the envelopes the night before the meeting and changed some of the ballots to make sure that Hodges would be declared the winner. As indeed he was, by a three-to-two margin. Not realizing that the election may have been stolen from them, many conservatives left Mattachine immediately afterward. And their creature, the West Side Discussion Group, was cut loose from Mattachine by the Board of Directors. But despite, or—in a national climate that was increasingly confrontational—perhaps because of those conservative defections, the membership rolls of New York Mattachine continued to climb toward five hundred. “See what action does?” Leitsch wrote exultantly to Frank Kameny.
⁹

New York Mattachine now joined Washington Mattachine, led by Kameny, in the militant column. Yet Leitsch and Kameny, two strong-willed, ambitious, authoritarian men, were soon at odds. Leitsch complained that Washington Mattachine was out “to dominate,” presenting itself as “the conscience of the movement.” In Leitsch's view, the Kameny group was in fact “a thorn in the side of the Eastern organizations,” given to excommunicating individuals and groups not abiding by its own “puritanical” standards. After Kameny “chastised” the Philadelphia Janus Society and its leader, Clark Polak (known to be as testy and egocentric as most of the other East Coast leaders), for including “titillating” pictures in its magazine,
DRUM
, and helped to get Janus kicked out of ECHO, Leitsch scornfully pointed out that
DRUM
had a circulation of ten thousand whereas Washington Mattachine's
Eastern Mattachine Review
had a mere 2,500 readers.
¹⁰

Not that Leitsch had much use for Polak,
DRUM
, Janus—or, for that matter, ECHO. When some of his associates in the movement sent him glowing reports of an ECHO conference in the fall of 1965, Leitsch sent enthusiastic congratulations even as he was expressing to other correspondents his disdain (“ECHO is a trifle silly … and possibly ridiculous”), and simultaneously attempting to undercut ECHO by forming a separate alliance with the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis. “ECHO no longer provides our two organizations,” Leitsch wrote a DOB officer, “with a real means of coopera
tion,” and he suggested dates for a get-together “to explore means and methods of working together.”
¹¹