Stonewall (19 page)

After he succeeded Hodges as president of Mattachine New York in November 1965, Leitsch seemed to take every criticism of MSNY as a personal affront, and to take every opportunity to vilify other movement leaders and groups. He roundly denounced Polak, Inman, Shirley Willer of DOB and Dorr Legg of Los Angeles's ONE as “obstructionists,” and ascribed their motives to jealousy of MSNY's prominence and accomplishments; they were, in Leitsch's view, hankering to “get in on the headlines.”
¹²

What
was
unequivocally true was that Leitsch and Hodges had embarked on an aggressive series of actions and could point to an impressive set of working relationships with New York City officials. Among other moves, Leitsch had kept after the State Liquor Authority to clarify its policies regarding gay bars and, when its replies proved evasive, had denounced the SLA chairman for his “uncooperative and … non-committal” response. Leitsch had also held the
Suffolk County News
to point when it continued to print the names, occupations, and addresses of men arrested in police sweeps of the gay Fire Island resorts, excoriating the paper for conducting “a witch-hunt” that encouraged blackmail, crimes of violence, and police harassment.
¹³

And when the New York mayoral election in 1965 was won by John Lindsay, a liberal Republican thought to be more of a genuine reformer than his Democratic predecessors, Leitsch was quick to hail his victory as marking “hope for New York City to become a free and open society in which the rights of minority groups and the rights of those who are different will be protected and respected.” Yet when Lindsay, a few months later, authorized a “cleanup” of Times Square and Greenwich Village, Leitsch was equally quick to protest the infringement on civil liberties. That led to a meeting between Lindsay, Leitsch, and others which later culminated in the mayor ordering the police to end all efforts to entrap homosexuals.
¹⁴

In San Francisco, too, the successful fight against an attempted police crackdown on the bars in 1964–1965 slowly swelled homophile ranks. Matters culminated in 1966 with three major events: the appearance of Democratic party powerhouses John Burton and Willie Brown at SIR meetings to appeal for gay votes; a series of demonstrations in several California cities (and elsewhere as well) to protest the exclusion of homosexuals from the armed forces; and a battle between gays and the police in San Francisco that lasted for three
nights following a police attempt to raid Compton's Cafeteria, a gay hangout at Turk and Taylor streets.
¹⁵

Within ECHO, the strategy of picketing produced a considerable uproar, and Craig became centrally involved in the issue. Inspired by the direct-action tactics that black college students and Freedom Riders had employed in their confrontations with segregated facilities, Craig was eager to take a comparable stand against the institutional structures that perpetuated gay oppression. Through his involyement with ECHO, he got to know Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, Kay “Tobin” (Lahusen), and other militants well; at Kameny's suggestion, they had started to meet together regularly to talk about organizing a series of public demonstrations. (At Craig's first encounter with Barbara and Kay, he watched them carefully, lovingly, set up tape recorders and microphones for an ECHO conference, and was moved to tears—moved at the absence of the kind of egotistical, aggressive power-tripping he had been witnessing in New York Mattachine.)

The group decided that to protest the exclusion of homosexuals from federal employment and the armed services, it would picket in front of the Pentagon, the Civil Service Commission, the State Department, and—to culminate the series—the White House. Kameny, based in Washington, did most of the legwork in getting permits and picket signs readied (and the American flags that by law had to be carried at all demonstrations). Most of the troops, a hard core of twenty to forty people, came down from New York and Philadelphia, with smaller contingents from Boston and Washington. They were joined for the climactic White House demonstration by Foster Gunnison, Jr., from Hartford.

At Kameny's insistence, a strict dress code was enforced on all participants. “If we want to be employed by the Federal Government,” Kameny intoned, “we have to look employable to the Federal Government.” Craig protested that the focus on federal employment was Kameny's own hobbyhorse (Kameny had been fired from government work in the late fifties when it was discovered that he had been arrested in 1956 on the catch-all charge of “lewd and indecent acts”), and was
not
the sole or even primary purpose of the demonstrations. But Kameny and his allies replied that whatever the purpose, it was important to look ordinary, to get bystanders to hear the message rather than be prematurely turned off by appearances.
¹⁶

Refusing at first to yield, Craig stubbornly insisted that “the only thing we have in common with heterosexuals is what we do in bed”
(a radical notion indeed in 1965), and he grumbled about the need to let people make their own personal statements, and about not wanting to look like a church group on a Sunday picnic. But—for the time being—he finally decided to defer to Kameny's activist record and to his authority (though he disliked the iron way. Kameny wielded it). Craig joined the other men in dutifully donning suit and tie. The women wore dresses.

Dick Leitsch shared Craig's contempt for Kameny's dress code—but went beyond it to descry the demonstrations in their entirety as tactically ill-conceived.
Numbers
were what mattered, Leitsch insisted. “The difference between us,” he wrote Kameny, “is that I believe we must impress authority and the power-structure with our strength; you seem to believe we must impress Everyman with our decency. (Whatever that is.)” Far better, in Leitsch's view, to mobilize two hundred people in casual, neat clothing than fifty suited and dressed to look like super-respectable citizens. Government officials
might
respond to the presence of significant numbers of demonstrators, but would remain indifferent to being picketed by a small group of “quality” folks—especially since the picketing would be focused not on one site but, consecutively, on three or four.
¹⁷

But Kameny, who prided himself on being “practical,” continued to insist that “clean-scrubbed demonstrations will get us ahead … FAR, FAR faster than court cases.… [T]he man in a suit is STILL the overwhelming norm in this country.” “Hundreds of beatnik types in front of the Civil Service Commission,” he wrote Leitsch, would be not only a tactical mistake but a misrepresentation of the homosexual community. “Grubbiness has never, to my knowledge,” he huffily asserted, “been a stereotype of a homosexual. Do our pickets
your
way, and it will soon become so.”
¹⁸

Kameny had his way. Marching quietly in single file, carrying their signs
(SEXUAL PREFERENCE IS IRRELEVANT TO FEDERAL EMPLOYMENT; CIVIL SERVICE COMMISSION IS UN-AMERICAN),
wearing their “Equality for Homosexuals” buttons, kept in constant motion by the police, his intrepid group of demonstrators—no gay protest had ever been seen in the nation's capital, and precious few anywhere else—carried out their picketing without serious incident. The demonstration in front of the White House in April 1965 was to Craig the most thrilling. More than seventy marchers participated, and more media showed up than previously (though the biggest press notice came from the sensationalistic rag
Confidential
, which in its October 1965 issue ran an article under the heading “Homos on the March”).

Craig thought it was “the most wonderful day of my life,” and sitting afterward in a coffee shop with Kameny, Jack Nichols, and a few others, he felt too excited to eat. As people shared their sadness that the whole series of demonstrations had now wound down, with no plans for anything further, Craig suddenly had a brainstorm. “It doesn't
have
to be over!” he fairly shouted. “I couldn't bear for it to be over!” And then he presented his idea: to demonstrate every Fourth of July in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia—“create like a gay holiday. We can call it the Annual Reminder—the Reminder that a group of Americans still don't have their basic rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Everybody was instantly entranced (though Kameny seemed a little annoyed that someone else had seized the initiative), and enthusiasm proved so high that the first Annual Reminder, sponsored by the New York, Washington, and Philadelphia Mattachine societies, took place that very July, only three months after Craig had come up with the idea. Thirty-nine people (including several from Midwest Mattachine) picketed in front of Independence Hall from three-thirty to five
P.M.,
and the demonstration got mentioned on the local TV news and on the front page of
The Philadelphia Inquirer
. Kameny had taken pains to notify the appropriate authorities in advance, and he was pleased that police behavior was “proper and cordial” and the demonstrators “dignified and orderly.”
¹⁹

For the next five years, an indefatigable band of thirty to a hundred people, always including Craig, Frank Kameny, Barbara Gittings, and Kay Tobin, would appear with their placards and buttons (
BILL OF RIGHTS FOR HOMOSEXUALS
; 15,000,000
HOMOSEXUAL AMERICANS ASK FOR EQUALITY, OPPORTUNITY, DIGNITY
) in front of Independence Hall, earnestly asserting what then seemed the far distant and possibly utopian demand for “gay rights.” As Barbara Gittings later recalled, those who participated in the Annual Reminders would “smile and smile,” would hand out leaflets to anyone who passed by (though many refused to take them), and would try to swallow their own discomfort at “not knowing what the consequences would be,” whether their names would be printed in the paper and their jobs lost, or whether they might even be arrested.

By the time of the Second Annual Reminder, in 1966, the event had attracted enough attention to warrant the presence of agents from the Bureau of Special Services. Their reports dutifully quoted from Craig's advertisement for the picket (“this annual demonstration is held to call to the attention of the American people discriminatory
laws and regulations by the government directed against its homosexual citizens”), as if uncovering a monstrous conspiracy against the Constitution. Following the event, moreover, BOSS agents also sat in on New York Mattachine meetings, and earnestly reported the momentous news that a guest speaker had “spent 30 years handling Immigration and Deportation cases,” and that a doctoral candidate in psychology had requested volunteers to fill out a questionnaire.

More ominously, three men dressed in dark business suits knocked on the door of Craig's apartment one night and then barged in, flashing FBI badges. They said they were looking for Michael Levy (a man Craig had recently had a brief affair with), who was wanted for passing bad checks. Then they searched the apartment—Craig was too stunned to ask to see a warrant—and left. But that was not the end of it. One of the agents continued to call Craig every few months for years, blandly asking him each time “if everything was okay.” Then, in 1970, the same agent relayed a suggestion from his boss, John Caufield (as head of White House security, Caufield would later testify at the Watergate hearings), that Craig attend Gay Liberation Front meetings and report back to them what had taken place. Craig turned the offer down.

Instead of sating Craig's appetite for activism, the successful launching of the Annual Reminder further stimulated it. He, Leitsch, and Leitsch's current lover, John Timmons, decided to combine forces for an action they dubbed “the sip-in.” The point was to challenge the State Liquor Authority regulation that prohibited bars and restaurants from selling drinks to homosexuals, on penalty of having their licenses revoked. Leitsch sent out press releases and telegrams announcing their impending defiance of the regulation.
²⁰

On April 21, 1966, the trio, dressed immaculately in suits and ties (“the picture of a Madison Avenue executive,” the
Voice
later reported), rendezvoused as planned and found reporters from
The New York Times, The Village Voice
, and the
New York Post
waiting for them—which promised greater media coverage than had attended any previous movement event. Activists and reporters moved off together to the Ukrainian-American Village Bar on St. Mark's Place, which had long had a hand-lettered sign above the bar reading, “If you are gay, please stay away.” But the bar must have gotten wind of the pending invasion: When the group arrived there, they found the place locked.

They decided to shift the action to the Howard Johnson's on
Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street (which had a famously cruisy men's room in the basement, even if the restaurant supposedly didn't sell drinks to faggots). Sitting down in a booth, the trio called over the manager and handed him their pre-prepared statement: “We, the undersigned, are homosexuals. We believe that a place of public accommodation has an obligation to serve an orderly person, and that we are entitled to service as long as we are orderly. We therefore ask to be served on your premises. Should you refuse to serve us, we will be obligated to file a complaint against you with the State Liquor Authority.”

“How do I know you're homosexuals?” the manager genially responded—and then, to the trio's astonishment, broke out laughing. “Why shouldn't they be served a drink?” he asked the reporters. “They look like perfect gentlemen to me. I drink. Who knows if I'm a homosexual or not?” He then went on to declare that he had problems, too, what with two children and three grandchildren, and whose business was it anyway what a person's sex life happened to be. He ordered the waiter to “bring the boys a drink”—and the reporters, too. Clearly Howard Johnson's was not going to play the part assigned it in the activist drama.