Stonewall (21 page)

Columbia's insensitivity to its black neighbors seemed to many on the left of a piece with its willingness to create instruments of death for use against Asians. But when student representatives tried to open up a dialogue with the Columbia administration, they were swiftly rebuffed—and on top of that, had to listen to faculty mandarins like Jacques Barzun smugly reprimand them for operating on the false assumption that the university did or should function as a democracy, for having failed to “earn” a voice in policy deliberations—and for being “mere transients,” ill equipped and ill prepared to participate in the higher councils of higher education.

The student radicals thought otherwise, and on April 23, 1968, a group of them seized a building on the Columbia campus and issued a set of demands denouncing the planned gym and the university's complicity with weapons research. In the following days, more buildings were occupied. Live-in “communes” and round-the-clock speak-outs were set up within them, and Columbia found itself faced with a full-scale insurrection. Karla went in and out of the buildings all week long, astounded by the audacity of her fellow students, electrified by their compelling arguments. Talking to the radicals, hearing for the first time the dismaying details of Columbia's callousness toward its black neighbors and of America's brutality toward the Vietnamese, changed her life. “I had just never had time before to think about it all,” she later said, “but now I felt the injustice in a very personal and deep way.”

She was also present when, in the early morning hours of April 30, the Columbia administration called in the police. She witnessed the cops dragging students out of the buildings and—though most of them offered only passive resistance—beating them indiscriminately. She also watched, terrified, as mounted police charged through the campus, striking out at any student in their path and, before the rampage was over, injuring more than two hundred. That barbarous police attack brought the faculty (though not, of course, its Jacques Barzuns) over to the side of the students, and the next day a campus-wide strike shut the university down.

Karla's education had taken a giant leap forward. She had been
radicalized in several directions at once. The viciousness of entrenched authority—whether embodied in university administrators or in uniformed police—was no longer a rhetorical abstraction; nor were bleeding protesters any longer a distant image on some front page or television screen. She had now seen it all for herself.

And what she had also seen—and this was perhaps the least expected and therefore the most revelatory—was that many of the radical male students fully matched their antagonists in strident, strutting machismo. “I was appalled by the behavior of the men,” Karla later said. “I could see that left-wing men were not any different.” They, like their right-wing brothers, felt that women were made to be auxiliaries, secondary backups for their own frontline heroics. During the building takeover, some of them had actually told Karla and other female students to take off for the local stores to buy food supplies. They even had a little rap about it, about how everyone who wanted to help the revolution should do the job they were best qualified to do. The men didn't know how to make coffee and the women did, so the women should do it—for the “greater cause”—and should do it cheerfully.

Karla thought all that was self-justifying crap—even if she didn't say so at the moment. But she did think it. And that alone, as she would soon discover, put her straight on the road to feminism. The family trait of stubbornness was about to find a new channel.

RAY

O
n the day Sylvia went to jail at Rikers Island, she weighed a strapping 140 pounds. When she came out two and a half months later, she was down to 115. It wasn't jail food, bad though that was, that caused the drop. It was heroin.

Sylvia was turned on in jail by a “nice queen” named Penny—“pure peer pressure” is how Sylvia later described it. When Penny asked her one day, “Do you shoot drugs?” Sylvia answered with her customary bravado: “Well, of course I do. I love them.” It was easy to get dope in jail. True to her word, Penny came up with both heroin and a needle. Afterward, Sylvia was as sick as a dog' for three days. It was the start of a habit that would grip her for five years.

She had a huge tolerance for heroin. When everyone else was nodding out, kissing their toes, Sylvia would be wide awake and more than a little annoyed that she hadn't gotten off. So one night (this was later, after she got out of jail) when their connection warned Sylvia and her friends that the dope they had just bought was super-strong, Sylvia ignored him and shot up a full dose. She went out like a light and woke up in a snowbank on the street. Her friends had dragged her down three flights, afraid she was dead. But she came out of it, and within seconds was cursing them out for “fucking up my coat” by dumping her in the snowbank.

Due to the police crackdown in 1966, the cellblock in the Rikers Island prison reserved for gay-related “crimes” was filled to overflowing. Most of the queens welcomed the separate unit as a refuge from rape and harassment and as a place where, with a little ingenuity, they could recreate some semblance of their life on the outside. They saved pats of butter from meals to use as grease for sex, and they used Kool-Aid to dye the dreary blue prison garb more becoming shades. To prepare for the Christmas party, they pieced together outfits, converting work clothes into dresses and using bars of soap to press them. It was even rumored that a few of the queens got themselves rearrested in order to take part in the Christmas party.
²⁴

Yet conditions were harsh on the block. While other prisoners on Rikers were allowed to shower every day, the queens got to shower once a week, even during the steamy summer months. They were also denied library privileges, could receive visits only from family members, not from friends, were offered no prison jobs (like working in the bakery or the kitchen) to break the monotony of the day, and indeed were let out of their cells only for twenty minutes every evening to wash up.

Sylvia made at least one good friend while in jail, a beautiful black queen named Bambi Lamour. On their way to breakfast one morning, Bambi looked over disdainfully at the newly arrived Sylvia and demanded, “Who are you, bitch? Since when did they let dykes in the block?” Sylvia knew it was her cue to be haughty. “I'm no dyke, bitch,” she sniffed back. “I'm more boy than you. But
you
can call me Sylvia.” That did it. They became fast friends on the spot and for the next few months gloried in their reputation as “crazy, abnormal bitches.” They'd walk down the corridor snapping their fingers and calling out “Taxi! Taxi! Take us to Forty-second and Ninth. We got to make us some money!” Or they'd refuse to sit with
anyone else at meals, once upending a table and dragging it into a corner for privacy. “Nobody ever fucked with us,” Sylvia recalls with satisfaction.

Soon after she got out of jail, Sylvia teamed up with a straight hooker named Kim as her hustling partner. They figured—correctly, it turned out—that they could make more money that way, play into a greater range of fantasies, open up more opportunities to steal. One standard variation went this way:

CUSTOMER
(
approaching Kim and Sylvia on the corner
): Are you two dykes?

KIM:
Yeah. (
pointing to Sylvia
) That's my butch over there. You want to party?

CUSTOMER:
How much is standard?

SYLVIA:
If you ain't spending enough money, we ain't going. You want to have a freebie trip, or you want to have a good trip?

Usually, the customer would opt for the “good trip.” Once they had him back in the hotel room, Sylvia—who had started to take hormone shots—would pop off her bra and jiggle her breasts for the customer to play with. But she always kept her G-string on, and the customer at a safe distance. In another variation, Kim and Sylvia would take turns sucking on each other's breasts or feeling each other up on the bed. That usually drove the customer crazy—at which point Sylvia would announce that it was “time for him to pop his nut.” According to the game plan, Kim would then screw him while Sylvia rifled his wallet. Sylvia would snap her fingers—“Time's up!”—to signal that she had secured the guy's money; they would then quickly end the scene.

They made a lot of money, enough to finance Sylvia's heroin habit—at one point she was shooting up two hundred dollars' worth a day—as well as the white fox coat she took to hustling in. And enough money to pay for her hormone treatments as well. She had started the treatments thinking she wanted to have a sex-change operation, and had trooped along with her friends to a doctor on the Lower East Side—that is, until she started to get a discharge from her right breast, and discovered that she was being given monkey hormones. She then shifted to a Dr. Stern on Fifth Avenue, who, “if you let him play with you for a little while, he'd give you anything for free.” (Craig Rodwell also had his experiences with Dr. Stern
when sent to him, under suspicion of having gonorrhea, by Harvey Milk. Stern told Craig to “lie down on the examination table, take out your penis and get it hard.” Stern then discreetly left the room, returning to masturbate Craig while explaining that he needed the semen to test for gonorrhea. Afterward, he invited Craig into his office and showed him a photo album filled with attractive male models, every now and then exclaiming, “Oh, this one is from Chicago, too.” Craig never got a bill.)

Initially, Sylvia liked what Dr. Stern's hormones did to her body, reducing facial hair and making her more curvaceous. But she soon decided to stop the injections. “I came to the conclusion,” she later recalled, “that I don't want to be a woman. I just want to be me. I want to be Sylvia Rivera. I like pretending. I like to have the role. I like to dress up and pretend, and let the world think about what I am. Is he, or isn't he? That's what I enjoy. I don't want to be a woman. Why? That means I can't fuck nobody up the ass. Two holes? No, no, no. That ain't going to get it. No, no, no.”

She did love drag, though. But like so many others in the life, she disliked the actual term. As one of her friends, Ivan Valentin (who later headlined the “Leading Ladies of New York” show), explained, “A drag or transvestite is somebody who always dresses as a woman. A female impersonator is somebody who claims to actually
be
a woman. I'm just a man who likes to dress up.” Sylvia felt more or less the same way (less, in her hormone-taking phase). In part, Ivan and Sylvia were accepting the inescapable: they tended to look like boys or butch dykes even when dressed in full drag. (Many of Sylvia's customers would have disagreed, perhaps to avoid the realization that their cocks were getting hard in reaction to a boy.) In any case, neither Sylvia nor Ivan was interested in having cosmetic surgery to burnish the illusion.
²⁵

And that helps to explain why Sylvia never attempted to work as a performer, though by the mid-sixties there were many more such opportunities opening up in New York than had recently been the case. In an earlier era, the drag performer Julian Eltinge had been so hugely popular that he had had a Broadway theater named after him, and in the forties and fifties Phil Black's drag shows in Harlem, Frankie Quinn's in midtown Manhattan, and Dazee Dee's in Brooklyn—reputedly the classiest of them all—were major events.
²⁶

It was still possible in the 1950s for T. C. Jones to bring in a crowd for his Broadway revue,
Mask and Gown
(and to do his impersonations of Bette Davis and Tallulah in Leonard Sillman's
New Faces
of 1956)
. But the great drag star Minette recalls that by the late fifties only two drag clubs existed in New York City—fewer than in some small Southern cities (though those were subject to sudden closings and arrests). The opening of the 82 Club on East Fourth Street, which became something of a tourist attraction in the sixties, helped to spark a revival, and by the end of that decade, drag had been featured in several off-off-Broadway productions (including H. M. Koutoukas's
Medea in the Laundromat
at Caffè Cino).
²⁷

By the early seventies, drag had very nearly gone mainstream, with Jackie Curtis, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn all becoming Warhol-made celebrities, though the
term
“drag” continued to be variously regarded. Individual definitions ranged from “dress-up artist” and “performer” to, in Holly Woodlawn's case, a simple “fabulous.” (“It's not a man or a woman, it's
fabulous
. When men's fashions start to be more fabulous, I'll use
them
to dress up.”) Holly further insisted, contradicting Ivan Valentin, that a “true” drag was not someone who “always dresses as a woman,” but rather someone who “only gets it on for the stage.” Since prostitution might be regarded as a form of dramatic presentation, Sylvia would have qualified under Holly Woodlawn's definition, as she surely did under Holly's more encompassing “fabulous.”
²⁸

But Sylvia didn't care much about definitions, which was precisely why she would emerge as a radical figure. She disliked any attempt to categorize her random, sometimes contradictory impulses, to make them seem more uniform and predictable than they were. That was precisely why she decided against a sex change. She didn't want to be cast in
any
one mold. Her own description of her cross-dressing best captures the spontaneity at its core: “I like to pull some shit out of the closet, throw on some female attire, a blouse or whatever—not complete drag—paint on a little makeup—and hit the streets.”

Sylvia's grandmother did not share her enthusiasm for drag. One night on Ninth Avenue, a queen who lived in Viejita's building yelled over to Sylvia that her grandmother wasn't feeling well and wanted to see her. “Oh sure,” Sylvia yelled back, “she pulls that one on me all the time.” But she hailed a cab immediately, though stoned and in drag—and though it was two o'clock in the morning. The first thing Viejita said when she opened the door was “Oh my God, you look just like your mother!” “Well, who am I supposed to look like?” Sylvia shot back.