Stonewall (20 page)

So on they went to the Waikiki, a bar on Sixth Avenue between Ninth and Tenth streets. Once again, the manager foiled the protest. “I serve anybody,” he said, “so long as he doesn't annoy anybody.” And once more drinks appeared for all hands. By now John Timmons was feeling a little woozy from the liquor, but the trio, still trailed by the expectant reporters, decided to press on. They next entered Julius' on West Tenth Street, confidently telling the reporters that they
would
be denied service there: Though long a gay hangout, Julius' had recently been the scene of several plainclothes-police entrapments, and Craig had himself been thrown out of there for wearing an “Equality for Homosexuals” button.

When they entered Julius', several gay men were having drinks at the bar. “We, are homosexuals and we would like a drink,” Dick Leitsch said to the bartender. “I don't know what you're trying to prove,” the bartender answered. “You can't serve us if we are homosexuals?” Leitsch asked hopefully. “No,” came the long-desired answer. John Timmons sighed contentedly. “Another bourbon and water and I would have been under the table.”

The point had been made, the action completed. New York Mattachine immediately announced that it was filing a complaint with the State Liquor Authority against Julius' for unconstitutionally discriminating
against homosexuals in violation of the First and Fourteenth amendments. And it announced further that it would pay any legal expenses Julius' incurred.

But it was unclear for some time longer whether a victory could be claimed. The State Liquor Authority quickly announced that it would take no action against bars that refused service to homosexuals. And there the matter might have ended, the Mattachine action thwarted, had it not been for William H. Booth, the black chairman of the Commission on Human Rights. Booth responded to the SLA statement by saying publicly that the Human Rights Commission had jurisdiction over discrimination based on sex, and he
would
try to put an end to SLA policy on serving homosexuals if a complaint against Julius was filed with his office. Mattachine immediately complied.

By then, several newspapers had run editorials against the SLA's discriminatory policies, and a committee of prominent heterosexuals, including the Episcopal bishop of New York, had formed in support of Commissioner Booth's position. Still, the case had to go to court, and it wasn't until the following year that the state's Appellate Division ruled that serving a homosexual was not (as the SLA had previously held) the equivalent of running “a disorderly house” and that a bar's license could be revoked only if “substantial evidence” of indecent behavior had been demonstrated.

The ruling was well worth having, but it hardly put an end to police harassment of gay bars or to the police practice of sending out comely young cops, carefully attired in up-to-date chinos and tennis shoes, to entrap gay men on the street. Given Commissioner Booth's stance in the Julius case, Dick Leitsch turned to him for help against entrapment. Booth discussed the issue with Chief Inspector Sanford D. Garelick, who assured him that the police department gave no official encouragement to entrapment, and solemnly promised to investigate any such incidents that came to his attention.

Needless to say, none did. Instead, Mattachine continued to get calls from desperate gay men who had been arrested for “soliciting” a police officer. Mattachine kept a list of those few lawyers willing to handle such “distasteful” cases, but the field had pretty much become the monopoly of two of them, Gertrude Gottlieb (“Dirty Gertie,” to the boys) and Enid Gerling. As the mythology of the day had it, even before family or friends had heard the news, Gottlieb and Gerling would appear at the police station, apparently tipped off by the cops—for a piece of the standard two-thousand-dollar action, of course.

This double-dealing game of collusion and blackmail enraged Craig, and he helped to persuade Mattachine's officers to remove the two women's names from the referral list. Enid Gerling was not one to take that lying down. She came storming into the Mattachine office, her voice already at full volume, screaming that they couldn't do this to her, that they would rue the day they had crossed her path, that she would have the place closed down if her name wasn't put back on the referral list
at once
. But Mattachine held its ground. And Gerling never followed through on her threats.
²¹

But police entrapment and bar raids continued. Indeed, in 1966, “liberal” Mayor John Lindsay (who would subsequently put an end to entrapment) endorsed a sweeping police campaign to rid both Times Square and Washington Square Park of “undesirables.” On the night the police poured from their vans into Times Square, Sylvia Rivera was standing at her usual spot on Ninth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street, trying to turn just one more trick before calling it a night—but ended in jail instead.

KARLA

D
uring Karla's first week as a Barnard freshman in 1964, she heard about the two women who had been expelled the previous year. A male student at Columbia (directly across the street from Barnard) had peered into the women's dormitory room with a pair of binoculars and seen them making love. The Peeping Tom was allowed to stay and, by some, was praised; the women were kicked out. Hearing the story, Karla “realized for the first time that there was something wrong with being a lesbian,” and decided she “had better cover up.”

She started dating a young man from Yale whom she had met at one of the freshman dances. He was from Louisiana and had never seen a Jew. Karla tried a joke to relieve his astonishment, saying something about how Jews nowadays clipped off the infant's horns at birth. But he took the statement at face value and solemnly replied that he “hadn't known that.” The relationship was never romantic and never sexual; yet it persisted throughout Karla's undergraduate years. The two would see each other every few weeks, talk superficially about events of the day, peck each other on the lips—and make
another date. Karla is convinced, in retrospect, that her Yalie was gay and that they were using each other as cover.

But Karla soon had a steady female date as well, and that relationship quickly became sexual. Not that
they
ever talked about it, either. The woman, an undergraduate at City College, had a boyfriend on the side and treated her relationship with Karla in the spirit of the rising counterculture: something she did because it felt good—no guilt, no attachments. But Karla was looking for some other kind of connection, though she had trouble defining it even to herself. It had something to do with wanting to find out more about herself by meeting women who already shared her emotional space, including its confusions.

In a subculture that could not yet claim many social or institutional structures, let alone a political voice, bars were among the few places where lesbians felt they could congregate and be themselves in relative safety. This was especially true for working-class women, who, much more than their middle-class and upper-class sisters, were given to strict “butch” and “femme” role divisions. Karla's family background was a mix of working-class status and middle-class income, and her own high educational level had un-classed her still further.

In appearance, too, Karla failed to fit neatly into either of the dichotomous butch-femme roles that the lesbian bar world encouraged in these years. She was athletic and compact in build, but her self-presentation was “muddied” (in the eyes of the bar world) by long hair and dangling earrings. All at once strong and feminine (even glamorous), Karla invited instant disapproval from those who insisted on a choice between one or the other. But Karla refused to choose. She regarded strict role divisions as destructive mimicry of rigid heterosexual norms; in her view, they narrowed and pigeonholed the wide actual range of human impulses and identifications.
²²

Not surprisingly, then, the first time Karla walked into the Sea Colony, a popular lesbian bar during the mid-sixties, her immediate reaction was that she didn't belong there. The smoke and noise confused her; she felt upset watching women consume alcohol as if it were soda pop, and annoyed at the alternatively demure or belligerent patrons. She didn't meet any women who went to college (or who admitted they did), and. in fact had trouble meeting anybody at all. Her self-presentation was apparently experienced as threatening; she evoked distrust without meaning or wanting to. When asked—which always happened quickly—whether she was butch or femme, Karla
wouldn't know what to say, and the other woman would soon walk away. If these women were lesbians, Karla thought, then maybe she wasn't. Far from giving Karla the feeling that she had come home at last, the Sea Colony made her think that she might have made a terrible mistake. She went back not more than three or four times during her entire undergraduate life.

Even if she had not found the bar scene uncongenial, Karla would have had little time for it. She was kept busy simply trying to make ends meet Through a ruse, she managed to live illegally in one of the Barnard dorms. Since she had no meal card, she would simply pick up a plate and join the cafeteria line, pretending she was going back for seconds on the main course (which was allowed). Almost every night of the week she baby-sat, for $1.25 an hour
and
—this was more urgent than the money—permission to raid the refrigerator. When she and friends compared notes on clients, it wasn't about whether the child was difficult or easy but about how much and what kind of food the family had.

She picked up other kinds of work as well. During the summers, she would hold down both day and evening jobs—everything from camp counseling, to sales work in a department store, to punching and cataloging material for a Columbia professor's encyclopedia-in-progress. During the school year she was able to use her two years of Latin and five of French at Bromley to get a job at the Barnard language laboratory; it paid well (four dollars an hour) and allowed her time, in between signing out tapes and explaining how the machines worked, to get some studying done.

It was about the only time she did have for schoolwork, and as a result she got mostly B's. She gave some thought to a premed major, but realized she would never be able to afford medical school; besides, she turned off to the profession after experiencing firsthand—one of her part-time jobs was as an operating-room clerk—its routine malpractices. Karla's main interest continued to be languages. She was especially drawn to French and Russian, and ended up majoring in French.

She had as little time for a social life as for studying. In her junior year she moved into a seventy-five-dollar-a-month apartment at 107th Street and Broadway, which she shared with several roommates; they became her main social outlet. They ate spaghetti together every night (managing to find a powdered sauce that cost nine cents a serving), and her roommates introduced Karla first to pot and then to a variety of other drugs. Being poor, they tried smoking anything they heard
produced a high, including peppers and banana skins, and inhaling the gas from Reddi-Wip cans (which did work). Karla believes that taking drugs “really did expand my mind and loosened me up in many ways.”

But becoming more countercultural did not immediately make her more political. Nothing in her background predisposed her to activism. She describes her parents as “slightly to the right of Archie Bunker”; they had no politics but plenty of prejudices, especially about Christians and blacks. Nene, they insisted, was different from other blacks, and they treated her like one of the family. As for Nene, she understandably never spoke of the black civil rights struggle around the Jays, and simply said that she “accepted people as people.” (She had left when Karla was twelve and no longer needed her, going to work as a nurse's aide in the Brooklyn Eye and Ear Hospital.) And Karla's years at the Bromley Institute, with its unbroken expanse of privileged white faces, did nothing to raise her consciousness about injustice.

Yet she did think of herself as a liberal, and. ascribes that mostly to Nene, whose presence, not preachments, in her life had kept her from growing up with clearcut notions about race or gender. It never occurred to Karla as a child that her lighter skin color made her different from Nene in any significant way; the closeness and identification were complete. As to gender, when she and Nene were rooting for Pee Wee Reese at Ebbets Field, Nene never hinted that Karla couldn't duplicate his feats or that the game of baseball was reserved for boys.

Like almost everyone else at Barnard, Karla was against the war in Vietnam and for the civil rights movement. But as late as her senior year in 1968, she had not joined any of the proliferating marches or protests in support of those positions. And then came the upheaval at Columbia University in April of her senior year, an event that would change Karla irrevocably, moving her from abstract sympathy to emotional identification with the outsiders of the world.

There were two key issues during the Columbia disruptions. The first was the university's pending construction of a gym in a park used by Harlem residents—the latest of a long series of encroachments by Columbia that, with little or no concern for the wishes and well-being of poor tenants, had forced them out. The second issue concerned the university's affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), an affiliation symbolic of academia's widespread involvement with government-sponsored weapons research (at Columbia the research
focused on antisubmarine warfare), and on complicity with what was aptly being called the military-industrial complex. In 1968 more than two thirds of university research funds came from agencies of the federal government connected with defense matters, and about a quarter of the two hundred largest industrial corporations in the country had university officials on their boards of directors.
²³