Stonewall (27 page)

But there were too few women connected with it, and too few of that limited number who thought of themselves as what would soon be called feminists, for the dominant divisions within the planning conference to take on a specifically male-female cast—just as the contentiousness during the 1967 convention cannot be ascribed to a falling-out between men sympathetic to New Left views and men to the right of them. In fact, few of the men active in the conference had—or would ever have—strong connections to Left protest movements of the day (though some did derive inspiration from those movements). Such divisions as developed seem to have been contests more for turf than for principles—though principles were assuredly involved. On both sides of a given dispute; politically centrist men—marginalized only because of their deviant sexuality, not because they were in any other sense radical—battled over which individuals, ideas, and organizations would control a movement which was itself something of a Robert's Rules replica of mainstream political groupings (just as the very idea of battling for turf was very much a mainstream male phenomenon).

The battle was comparatively muted and polite in 1967. It focused on what kind of national organization should be attempted, what degree of unity was both desirable and feasible. Not much had yet been done among affiliates to explicate, let alone resolve, existing ideological differences between local and regional homophile organizations. Nor had much been accomplished by way of joint participation in public projects designed to improve the lot of homosexuals. Of the nationally conceived activities that
had
won sanction at the two previous conventions in 1966, few had actually materialized. Only the idea of a national legal defense fund had seen any significant implementation, and even that was still in a preliminary, formative stage.

What was needed at the 1967 national convention, in Foster's view, was the adoption of at least a rudimentary constitution and statement of purpose, as well as some sort of governing council to make decisions between conventions. But Foster understood that “the extreme fear on the part of the [local] organizations to a national structuring, and jealousy of their own individual sovereignty” required
that the convention proceed with “extreme caution” lest the fragile coalition be rent asunder.
²²

What came out of the convention was a good deal less than Foster had envisioned, and more caution than even he had thought necessary. The statement of purpose on which the convention finally agreed was vague enough to put it beyond dispute: The delegates merely pledged themselves to “the improvement of the status of the homosexual.” To further that end, “intergroup projects and cooperation” were “encouraged,” but lest that be taken as a mandate, the national conference was specifically described as merely “consultative in nature and function.” At least the organization's future life had been assured: the delegates did vote that the planning conference be regarded as “a duly constituted continuing body.” They even proved willing to hold out the “ultimate goal of establishing a legitimate homophile movement on a national scale.”
²³

*
About which more on p. 164.

CRAIG

C
raig wanted Mattachine to get out of its fifth-floor office, which was only open in the evenings, and into a location more accessible to the gay community. He thought a storefront office would be just the thing—especially if it could double as a bookstore and thereby help to augment the lack of available movement materials. The San Francisco homophile organization, SIR, put out an attractive monthly magazine called
Vector
, but
The Mattachine Review
had trailed off, and two versions of
ONE
magazine competed uncertainly in the aftermath of the punishing 1965 internecine struggle in the Los Angeles movement. Craig felt strongly that if Mattachine would open a storefront-cum-bookstore in New York, it could all at once do a public service, increase awareness of the organization's existence, and help pay the rent.

He persuaded Dick Leitsch to look at possible sites with him, and they found a place on Hudson Street that seemed ideal. Leitsch expressed interest and said he would take the matter up with the Mattachine board. But in retrospect, Craig doubts that he ever did. Leitsch had never been really enthusiastic about moving Mattachine out into the community, and he soon reported back to Craig that the board's decision had been negative.

Craig was furious at what he took to be Mattachine's endemic fear of risk-taking. The conservatives had supposedly been routed in the 1965 election, and Leitsch had himself recently led a successful protest against discriminatory practices by the New York Civil Service Commission. But Craig had increasingly come to distrust the quality of Leitsch's militancy, and to fear that he had become an accommodationist in order to maintain his control over New York Mattachine's councils. Besides, Craig had become uneasy over renewed rumors that Leitsch was involved in financial impropriety. Back in 1965—and as a direct result of Craig's suspicions and prodding—Mattachine treasurer Jack Weeden had discovered that Leitsch and Hodges had used a $5,000 gift to Mattachine to cover their own expenses, including a house rental on Fire Island. Hodges had been forced to resign from the presidency, but Leitsch had been given a second chance. Within a year, rumors of impropriety were again circulating—though it wouldn't be for another two or three years that Leitsch would be, discovered diverting Mattachine funds to a secret bank account in Albany.

In April 1966, Craig decided that the time had come to resign from Mattachine and to pursue on his own the idea of opening a bookstore. But how to raise the needed money? Casting around for ideas, he hit on the notion of working summers at Fire Island Pines as a way of accumulating capital. The Pines was a relatively recent gay community, which had developed as an alternative for upscale homosexuals disenchanted with the “plebeian” atmosphere of Cherry Grove, the gay Fire Island community that dated back to the 1920s. Following a disastrous fire in the Pines, Yetta Cohen and her partner, John Whyte—both grandes dames—had built the Boatel, which sat at the Pines's harborside dock and served as a focal point for the new community.

In joining the Boatel staff in the summer of 1966, Craig knew in advance that the job would not be easy. He had heard the rumors of Mafia control and the tales of John Whyte's demanding ways (Whyte was secretly known as the Queen of Romania, or Snow—as in “Snow Whyte”). He worked his staff long hours, treated them like subjects, and played them off against each other to ensure maximum competition for his favor—just as Mr. Kilburn had back when Craig was at the Chicago Junior School. Whyte was especially fond of his “gold whale” ceremony, the Pines version of being knighted. Whyte would gather the Boatel staff to watch him award a particularly trustworthy employee with a gold pendant in the shape of a whale—which Whyte
would himself place around the honoree's presumably grateful neck. Most of the staff regarded the whale as a brand and would thereafter refrain from saying or doing anything around the honoree that they were unwilling to have reported immediately to Whyte.

Each staff member was given one day off a week, and a half-hour every afternoon to go to the beach. Those breaks aside, they worked away steadily at making beds, cleaning toilets, ensuring that each room met Whyte's standards of spotlessness. “John thought he was running the Plaza” is how Craig later put it; “he would personally inspect each room.” And with good reason, since rates were (for the mid-sixties) high: about $70 a weekend for a small double without private bath, and $175 for two rooms facing the ocean. The staff was housed in a long barrackslike structure referred to as Steerage.

The occupants of the Boatel rooms were almost all gay, but an occasional straight couple, devotees of the magnificent Pines beach, would arrive for a few days at a time. (The actress Monique van Vooren was a weekend regular; all Craig can recall is an “overpowering trail of perfume wherever she went.”) Occasionally a high-priced female prostitute would take a room in the Boatel to service the heterosexual men from the yachts tied up in the basin. Since the “yacht people” paid high fees for dockside rights, John Whyte instructed the staff to ignore their antics.

The staff was also told to treat the police as honored guests—to give them free meals and drinks—just in case the Mafia go-betweens hadn't made their payments on time. These were the years in which gay people, even in their secluded vacation resorts, survived on sufferance. Plainclothesmen would come over from the Long Island town of Sayville, across the bay from Fire Island, and conduct spot raids at the Meat Rack (then located in front of the co-op apartments on the beach) or entrap unsuspecting singles along the cruisy boardwalks.

The cops would take the arrested men to the telephone pole that used to sit in the middle of the Pines dock and chain them together to the pole. Then the cops would return to the Meat Rack and boardwalks for another series of arrests, and repeat the process until they had some thirty to forty men chained at the dock. By now it would be two or three
A.M.
A special police launch would take the men over to Long Island, where a kind of kangaroo court, held in the back of a drugstore, would collect steep fines and then release the arrested men with thirty-day suspended sentences. Terrified, none of the men dared report what was in fact organized theft.

When Craig saw what was going on, he was livid. One night he
tried to find a hacksaw to free the chained men from the pole while the cops were temporarily away from the dock, but he couldn't get any of the other employees to join him. He himself had to participate directly in another of the more humiliating rites that characterized the supposedly carefree Fire Island atmosphere of those years.

On Saturday nights, when the dance floor was packed with people, Boatel employees had to take turns sitting on top of a huge ladder, ten rungs high, and be ready to shine a flashlight as rudely as possible into the eyes of anyone engaging in “illegal” behavior. That was defined as two men even
facing
each other; actually dancing together was beyond the pale. All male eyes on the dance floor were supposed to be aimed exclusively at the occasional female—somebody's lesbian friend or one of the straight women from the yachts—who had been persuaded to participate. Sometimes there would be four or five circles of men on the dance floor, all facing the sole woman in the middle.

Craig only had to do ladder duty occasionally, to relieve another staffer, but even so, he had to psych himself up for it—had to keep reminding himself “that it was worth putting up with anything for the sake of the future bookstore.” Some of the bolder dancers would push against the ladder, or even shake it, and Craig had to restrain himself from egging them on. He learned that marijuana was a big help in cooling himself out, and by the second summer, 1967, he had learned about “little greenies,” amphetamine tablets that did wonders to replenish exhausted energy.

Hard work and humiliations aside, the two summers at Fire Island accomplished what Craig had intended. With free room and board, he had no expenses except cigarettes, and he managed to bank a fair portion of the $125 he made each week. By the fall of 1967, he had saved a little more than a thousand dollars and felt ready to make his move. The cheapest storefront he could find in the Village, at 291 Mercer Street, went for $115 a month. He also had to plunk down two months' security—which meant a third of his nest egg was gone before he could start buying stock. But he did quickly come up with a name: the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. He wanted the store named after someone who was readily identifiable as a homosexual, and Wilde seemed the most obvious candidate. (A few years later, Craig felt some regret at not having named the store after “a more militant and upfront” figure, but being “a rather sentimental person,” he decided to stick with the original name.)
²⁴

As the day of the opening approached, and with a thousand things still undone, Craig asked his mother to fly in from Chicago to help
out with last-minute preparations. He met Marion at the airport on Thanksgiving Day, 1967, and took her straight to his shop. They stayed up all night finishing the dozen bookshelves (with about twenty-five titles total), then opened up on schedule the next day for business, serving free coffee and cookies to all comers.

In those years a “gay” bookstore had meant only one thing: pornography. But Craig had a straitlaced, proper side, and he had decided early on that the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop would carry only “the better titles” and no pornography of any kind. Though hardly a puritan sexually, he regarded the sex magazines as exploitative—“a ten-dollar price on something that makes sex look dirty and furtive.” He was determined to have a store where gay people did not feel manipulated or used. There was no
ADULT READING
sign in the window, and no peep show in the back room. And the ad Craig later took out in
The Village Voice
was headlined
GAY IS GOOD.

Craig was determined to carry that message to his customers. True activist that he was, he viewed the Oscar Wilde shop as a vehicle for promoting a more positive view of homosexuality. And toward that goal, he invited none other than Foster Gunnison to sit in the bookstore on opening day and autograph copies of his recently completed booklet, “An Introduction to the Homophile Movement.” “There Foster sat,” Craig later recalled, “in his bow tie and his crew cut and his cigar. To look at Foster physically, he'd be the last person in the world you'd think would write that booklet.”

Along with books and pamphlets, the shop carried buttons and cards relating to the homophile movement, and it had a community bulletin board that listed announcements of interest. Moreover, as Craig put it in his first press release, the bookshop “will also act as a clearing house for individuals and organizations supporting homosexual law reform in New York State.” He also used Oscar Wilde as the storefront headquarters for a new group he now started: the Homophile Youth Movement. (He then added “in Neighborhoods” to the name, so that the acronym could be HYMN instead of the sexist HYM.) In the first issue of the group's
The New York Hymnal
, Craig wrote a blazing article denouncing Mafia control of gay bars. During the bookshop's first year of existence, it served as a counseling agency for more than a thousand young homosexual men and women, “helping them to gain a sense of identity and pride as young homosexuals.”
²⁵