Stonewall (28 page)

The Oscar Wilde shop was a pioneering enterprise, and customers were happily startled to find a “real” bookstore devoted solely to gay and lesbian titles. Craig's earlier lover Harvey Milk dropped by frequently
, his fascination marking (in Craig's estimate) “the beginnings of an interest on Harvey's part in the movement.” Indeed, when Milk moved to San Francisco soon after, he told Craig that he intended to open a similar bookstore as a way of getting involved in community work. He settled for a camera store instead, but it did serve the same function as a community center.

Jim Fouratt also came by the bookstore often. He and Craig would stand in the crowded little store arguing each other to a standstill about political strategy. Jim was contemptuous of the Annual Reminders as misguided efforts to win acceptance from a mainstream America that was itself in desperate need of renovation, and he thought of Craig and other “earnest” reformers as “not real radicals”—not, like the Yippies, involved in any fundamental challenge to a sick society. But he admired Craig, even while discounting him, aware that he was someone who “always tried to tell the truth.” Years later, Jim would come to have much more respect for the courage of those who, like Craig and Foster, had stood with their “Equality for Homosexuals” signs, unprotected, outside those symbolic citadels of American power, the White House and Independence Hall.

Though Craig put in seventy-hour weeks and for the first eighteen months ran the store entirely himself, the verdict on Oscar Wilde was not unanimously favorable. Those who missed porn on the shelves denounced Craig as an antisex puritan. And lesbian customers complained from the beginning that the store was too heavily weighted toward gay male titles. Karla Jay would occasionally drop in and was among those who felt uncomfortable there. It wasn't so much Craig himself that she objected to, but some of the other men; more intent on browsing for pickups than for books, they would give her nasty looks, as if to say “What
are you
doing in
our
store?”

Craig stiff-armed the pro-pornography crowd, but tried to be responsive to lesbian discontent. He felt that his Christian Science upbringing, which had included the teaching that God is a Father-Mother, had made him nonsexist, and he wanted to create a better balance in his store between gay male and lesbian titles. The problem was that he had no respect for what he called the “trashy” lesbian pulp novels of the day, and those aside, he felt the pickings were slim.

But he did increase his stock of lesbian titles as much as he felt he could, and Karla was able to find
The Ladder
there (“which I would have been afraid of subscribing to on my own”), as well as two books she would always cherish: Violette Leduc's
La Bâtarde
and Jane Rule's
Desert of the Heart
. To further signal his concern, Craig hired two
lesbian architects to remodel the store in 1969. But even by then, no more than 30 percent of the titles in Oscar Wilde were lesbian-oriented, and it was only later, with the expansion of lesbian publishing, that he achieved the parity he had always wanted.

The straight reaction to Oscar Wilde ranged from oblivious to venomous. The
New York Post
columnist Harriet Van Horne, listing aspects of the New Permissiveness that disgusted her, included—along with see-through dresses, topless dancers, and “skin-flicks”—the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop (little dreaming or, apparently, caring that Craig shared her antipathy to porn).
²⁶
But Van Horne was politeness itself compared to the anonymous harassment that plagued Craig from the day he opened the doors. Phone threats were a constant, with the most frequent callers insisting that they would burn the store down or carve Craig up. At first the threats frightened him, and, ever the activist, he would try to reason with the callers. But—perhaps to preserve his own sanity—he soon decided that venting on the phone was itself enough to sate the callers' anger. Still, it was hard not to feel unnerved when arriving at the shop in the morning to find swastikas or “Kill Fags” scrawled on the outside.

Besides, the landlord was hardly cordial. He had asked Craig, when they were drawing up a lease, what the store was going to be, and Craig had simply said it would be a bookshop—the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop. The landlord allowed as how he had heard of Oscar Wilde, said nothing beyond that—and did sign the lease. Then came opening day, with the sign in the front of the store announcing
BOOKSHOP OF THE HOMOPHILE MOVEMENT,
and the sign in the window reading
GAY IS GOOD.
Livid, the landlord threatened Craig with eviction. Craig consulted a lawyer, and learned that his lease was airtight. But the lawyer warned him never to be late with the rent and never to pay less than the full amount—never, in other words, to give the landlord an out. It was a timely warning since Craig, always more interested in helping the movement than in fattening his bank account, usually lived close to the edge.

Some years later, in 1973, when Craig decided to relocate, his old landlord came by the new store to wish Craig well and to tell him that he had “learned a lot.” He had always thought gay people were a “sick bunch,” he told Craig, but over the years he had seen all the “nice people” who came into the store, and had been impressed with how “well behaved” they were. Craig was not one to downplay differentness or to encourage polite behavior, but he thanked the landlord for his good wishes—and went back to plotting the revolution.

PART SIX

1969

A
s the sixties came to a close, the United States was a notably different country from what it had been a mere decade before. The image of the fifties as a period
merely
of conformity and consensus has probably been overdrawn; after all, there was
Mad
magazine, rock and roll, the Beats, and that much imitated, sloe-eyed soul of alienation, James Dean. But compared with what came after, the fifties were decidedly a time of quiescence. The Bomb did indeed cause foreboding, and the Cold War a tangible sense of pending disaster. But left-wing agitation no longer marked the national scene, and the country remained secure in its self-image as the repository of Rectitude in a world beset by (Communist) Evil.

By the close of the sixties, that smugness had come undone. Within a six-month period from late 1967 to early 1968, the maverick Eugene McCarthy announced for the presidency; the Tet offensive in Vietnam blew apart the. claims of an inevitable American victory; the police in Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired on black demonstrators, killing three and wounding dozens; Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and enraged black Americans rioted in dozens of cities; college students across the country took over campus buildings to protest war-related research; and the assassination of Robert Kennedy seemed to many to spell the end of hope for peaceful domestic reform.

When the police rioted at the Democratic National Convention that summer in Chicago, the drift toward militancy became a
stampede. By the fall of 1968, there were at least a third again as many SDS chapters as before the convention; black students took over administration buildings at Cornell while boldly brandishing their rifles in front of the television cameras; the Black Panthers and the Oakland police had a shoot-out; a contingent of feminists invaded the hitherto sacrosanct Miss America pageant; and incidents of arson and bombings became commonplace.

This fevered escalation gave heart to those on the left who believed that confrontation was a necessary precursor to substantive change: Out of polarization, the argument went, would come realignment; out of realignment, shifts in power—and out of widespread disruption, the first seedlings of a new and better world. The forces of repression, exemplified by the state, seemed in this scenario, to play their part to perfection. The Justice Department, as if on cue, duly indicted the “Chicago 8” on conspiracy charges. And then, in Berkeley, California, in May 1969, the whole repressive might of state power seemed epitomized when the police sealed off People's Park, bulldozed its gardens, and, in a major confrontation with protesters, wounded some hundred people.

Governor Ronald Reagan promptly sent in the National Guard—and growing legions of the young promptly decided that all the rules were off, their allegiance to established institutions severed, the cement of loyalty dissolved. By early 1969, circulation figures for the counterculture press shot upward; the readership of the weekly
Berkeley Barb
rose from a mere five thousand four years earlier to nearly 100,000, while New York's
East Village Other
soared to 65,000. And a Yankelovich poll found that 20 percent of American college students identified more with Che Guevara than with presidential candidates Nixon and Humphrey.
¹

Arbitrary authority, in all areas of national life, was now decidedly under siege. (Indeed, not only in the United States: Rebellions were spreading throughout Western Europe as well.) The Black Panthers demanded “Power to the People,” and the students in SDS insisted on “participatory democracy,” the right of those affected by a decision to set its parameters. Over and over, the question was being raised: “Who makes the rules—and by what right?”

In this confrontational context of anger and defiance, the assimilationist civil rights goals of NACHO, the national homophile planning conference, and NACHO's characteristic tactic of petitioning for the redress of grievances, seemed old-fashioned—just as their longstanding insistence that homosexuals
were
an oppressed minority and
had
legitimate grievances suddenly seemed in harmony with the newly widespread resistance to traditional authority. Most younger gays and lesbians who sympathized with the New Left's broad agenda for ending inequality at home and interventionism abroad, joined not NACHO—which struck them as hopelessly bourgeois—but Students for a Democratic Society, or one of several organizations enlisted in the struggle for black empowerment.

But that is not the whole story, either. A fair percentage of the radical young who were gay or lesbian had not yet come to terms with their own sexuality. Some of them steered clear of NACHO not—or not simply—because of its centrist political views, but because they felt unready and threatened in the one area where NACHO did take a radical stance: namely, in its insistence that homosexuality was neither abnormal nor unnatural. Here was irony aplenty. The members of NACHO, centrist in all else, were raising one radical standard under which the nonconforming young did not dare to rally.

Leo Laurence, a reporter for radio station KGO in San Francisco, covered the confrontations between antiwar demonstrators and the police at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, and the experience changed his life. A thirty-six-year-old gay man who had previously toed the polite homophile line, Laurence now decided that gays, too, needed to adopt a militant posture. He began to write articles for the
Berkeley Barb
and for SIR's
Vector
, calling for an alliance with Black Panthers and antiwar radicals. After he became editor of
Vector
, Laurence denounced the guilty, apologetic style that he felt was favored by “timid” homophile leaders—whom he characterized as “a bunch of middle-class, uptight, bitchy old queens”—and called for the same “proud” affirmation that characterized other radical groups.
²

Laurence and his lover, Gale Whittington, posed together barechested for a picture accompanying a
Berkeley Barb
article in which Whittington openly proclaimed his homosexuality, saying it was time for gays to declare themselves. When, as a result, he lost his job as an accounting clerk with the States Steamship Company, he, Laurence, and a half-dozen other gay men demonstrated, in early April 1969, in front of the company's offices in San Francisco's financial district. They carried signs reading
FREEDOM FOR HOMOS NOW
and
LET GAYS LIVE,
Laurence wore a button proclaiming “Gay Is Good,” and he and Whittington told reporters that they were beginning a “vigorous and public” progay campaign that was being opposed by the gay world's own “square” establishment. “They are scared,” Laurence
asserted. But, as he soon found out, not
that
scared. In May, Laurence was fired from
Vector
and kicked out of SIR—perhaps for his belligerence as much as his militance.

A similar scenario developed within the Daughters of Bilitis. When Rita Laporte and Barbara Grier tried to convert the organization and its publication,
The Ladder
, to a feminist perspective, urging DOB to leave NACHO and join forces instead with heterosexual feminists, a serious split developed among lesbian activists. The ensuing fight for control would end, by 1970, in both the demise of
The Ladder
and the dissolution of DOB's national structure.
³

New York City was also astir. The Student Homophile League at Columbia had come into being in 1967 on a campus where, only two years before, the famous classicist Gilbert Highet had canceled a lecture in protest over a representative of New York Mattachine having been allowed to speak in Ferris Booth Hall. The foundation of the League led to a deluge of outraged letters, but the handful of courageous students who signed up as members proceeded with their work of education and counseling. (They also formed a largely figurehead alumni committee, headed by Foster Gunnison, Jr.) By the fall of 1967 several other New York campuses had followed Columbia's example and had formed Student Homophile League chapters (Rita Mae Brown was a member of the New York University group).

In 1968, the Columbia Student Homophile League initiated a notable assault on the psychiatric establishment. When the medical school staffed a panel discussion on homosexuality with a group of “experts” known (except for the Kinsey Institute's Paul Gebhard) to regard it as a pathological adjustment, SHL representatives invaded the meeting and publicly demanded that in the future the discussion of homosexuality be placed “in its proper setting as a sociological problem of deeply entrenched prejudice and discrimination against a minority group.”
⁴
That very evening, the Columbia campus exploded in student protests over U.S. incursions overseas and the university's incursions against its black neighbors—and many members of the Student Homophile League joined in the occupation of campus buildings that accompanied the protests.