Stonewall (30 page)

Jim went straight over to Abbie's place and confronted him. Abbie didn't even bother to deny the theft. Instead he acted as if the Gestetner was legitimately his by right of his superior understanding of the requirements of political organizing. Deeply wounded—“I
would have died for Abbie”—Jim gave up the contest in despair, reluctantly concluding that he could never again trust Abbie, could never believe in his ability to put loyalty to a friend above the presumed exigencies of politics.

Ever the moralist, Jim decided there was a lesson to be learned: “not to endow people with what I want them to be, but to try to see them as they are so that I'm not set up to be disappointed or destroyed.” But like anyone with a good heart and a large capacity for trust, Jim would have to learn that lesson over and over. Fortunately, he never learned it for long—fortunately, because an optimistic sense of the “goodness” of human nature is always the essential fuel for activism.

But for the moment, hurt and confused, Jim retreated from the movement. He went out to San Francisco for three months with his lover, Howie, and took up weaving—the hippie alternative to confrontational politics. But weaving turned out not to be “it” after all—“I was bored out of my mind”—and early in 1969 Jim was back in New York, where he dabbled for a time in that other hippie alternative, drugs. Give or take an occasional puff, Jim had previously avoided drugs, but now he started going regularly to the Sutton Place office of “Dr. Feelgood” (John Bishop). There, assorted celebrities crowded the waiting room for their “vitamin” shots (“Amphetamines? Well, of course not!” Dr. Feelgood would reassure those patients determined to be gullible). But after overdosing one day—and being peremptorily put out on the street by Dr. Feelgood—Jim at first cut down on and then kicked the shots.

Within a few months, Jim landed a paying job in the music world. Music had always been an important ingredient in his life, and his contacts with musicians had proliferated over the years. One day his friend Al Kooper, who had started the group Blood, Sweat & Tears, asked him. if he was interested in a job with CBS as a staff producer. Jim grabbed it. Not only had his life lost its political focus, but his bills had mounted, and the notion of steady, well-paying work seemed the perfect simultaneous cure for ennui and indebtedness.

CBS hired Jim as the “house freak” with its corporate eyes wide open. Its recent “hip” ad campaign—“The Man Can't Bust Our Music”—had backfired.
Rolling Stone
had made fun of CBS's sudden countercultural conversion, and the underground press had reacted indignantly to what it branded a slick, commercial exploitation of the reality of police brutality. Jim Fouratt was hired to repair all that damage, to serve as liaison among the music executives, the cutting-edge
artists CBS represented—Joplin, Chicago, Santana—and the radical communities from which they had emerged.
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Jim took to his job with gusto and proved a superlative liaison (the personal dividends included a weeklong affair with Jim Morrison). Before long, he had worked himself up to be an assistant to CBS president Clive Davis, who was not then known to be gay. And he had also discovered an unexpected knack for writing advertising copy. Developing a whole new campaign of his own around the slogan “Know Who Your Friends Are,” he featured countercultural images of long-haired hippies, blacks, and Native Americans. And he deflected any negative reaction from the underground press for this latest appropriation of its imagery by persuading CBS to invest hefty advertising sums in left-wing and hippie publications. The infusion of revenue helped to keep the underground newspaper consortium, Liberation News Service, alive, and it gave Jim enormous satisfaction to know that he was making a significant political contribution through his job.

But if criticism from the underground press was defused, the response from elsewhere was inflamed. An FBI memo sent from San Francisco to Washington in January 1969 assailed CBS's infusion of money into left-wing publications as “giving active aid and comfort to enemies of the United States,” and “suggested that the FBI should use its contacts to persuade” CBS to stop. Within three months, that wish had come to pass: CBS withdrew all advertising from the underground press. Jim blamed the turnabout on the avalanche of negative mail, apparently orchestrated by right-wing groups, that had poured into the network. At the least, the mail confirmed a shift in policy that conservative CBS bigwigs Frank Stanton and William S. Paley, who had their own cherished network of ties to D.C. bigwigs and the CIA, had already determined on. Whatever the reasons, CBS ceased to place ads in any but mainstream publications, even as they cynically began a new campaign—which Jim opposed and argued against—featuring the proclamation that “the Revolutionaries” were on the CBS label.
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STONEWALL

C
raig Rodwell—like Leo Laurence in San Francisco—wanted militant activism to be the touchstone of New York's homophile movement. He was thoroughly fed up with Dick Leitsch's controlling influence over Mattachine, for if Leitsch had once been a militant, he was now, in Craig's view, interested solely in the advancement of Leitsch. He had become a mere politician, concerned more with protecting and inflating his own role as the broker between gays and the city administration than with empowering gays themselves, through confrontational action, to build a proud, assertive movement.
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Craig was also fed up with the gay bar scene in New York—with Mafia control over the only public space most gays could claim, with the contempt shown the gay clientele, with the speakeasy, clandestine atmosphere, the watered, overpriced drinks, the police payoffs and raids. His anger was compounded by tales he heard from his friend Dawn Hampton, a torch singer who, between engagements, worked the hatcheck at a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Because Dawn was straight, the Mafia men who ran Stonewall talked freely in front of her—talked about their hatred for the “faggot scumbags” who made their fortunes.

Indeed, the Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher Street, epitomized for Craig everything that was wrong with the bar scene. When a hepatitis epidemic broke out among gay men early in 1969, Craig printed an angry article in his newsletter,
New York Hymnal
, blaming the epidemic on the unsterile drinking glasses at the Stonewall Inn. And he was probably right. Stonewall had no running water behind the bar; a returned glass was simply run through one of two stagnant vats of water kept underneath the bar, refilled, and then served to the next customer. By the end of an evening the water was murky and multicolored.
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Craig also thought. Stonewall was a haven for “chicken hawks”—adult males who coveted underage boys. Jim Fouratt shared that view. He characterized Stonewall as “a real dive, an awful, sleazy place set up by the Mob for hustlers, chickens to be bought by older people.” But this was, at most, a partial view. One segment of Stonewall's varied clientele did consist of street queens who hustled; but
even for that contingent, Stonewall was primarily a social, not a business place. Some sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds did frequent Stonewall, and were admitted with the friendly complicity of somebody at the door (the drinking age was then eighteen)—but not for purposes of prostitution. As in any club, of course, the occasional cash transaction undoubtedly took place.

Figuring prominently in Craig and Jim's scenario is the figure of Ed Murphy, one of the bouncer-doormen at the Stonewall Inn, whom they accuse of purveying drugs and young flesh there. The indictment, though overdrawn, has some substance. Murphy did deal drugs, did lech after teenagers, did make “introductions” (for which he accepted “tips”), and was involved in corruption, simultaneously taking payoffs from the Mafia and the New York Police Department. (That is, until the police badly beat him up one night, and he stopped informing for them.)
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Sascha L., who in 1969 briefly worked the door at Stonewall alongside Murphy, began by thinking of him as a father figure—posing as a cop, Murphy had once rescued Sascha from an angry John wanting more than Sascha had been willing to give—but finally decided that Murphy was a run-of-the-mill crook. Sascha was eyewitness one night to an underage boy named Tommy turning over to Murphy, in the Stonewall basement, a bag of wallets stolen during the evening.
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But Murphy and the Stonewall Inn had many defenders. Murphy had been employed in gay bars and after-hours places since 1946 and in the course of that long career had made—along with detractors and enemies—some staunch friends. (Indeed, in later years the Christopher Street Heritage of Pride Committee would canonize Murphy as an originating saint of the gay movement.) And as for the Stonewall Inn, it had, in the course of its two-and-a-half-year existence, become the most popular gay bar in Greenwich Village. Many saw it as an oasis, a safe retreat from the harassment of everyday life, a place less susceptible to police raids than other gay bars and one that drew a magical mix of patrons ranging from tweedy East Siders to street queens. It was also the only gay male bar in New York where dancing was permitted.
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Sylvia Rivera was among the staunchest defenders of Stonewall, and of its omnipresent bouncer Ed Murphy. When down on their luck, which was often, Sylvia and her street-queen friends always knew they could turn to Murphy for a handout. Some of them called him Papa Murphy, and Sylvia's friend Ivan Valentin seems to have been his special favorite. “To me,” Ivan says, “Ed Murphy never did
anything wrong.” Murphy had a soft spot in general for Hispanics like Ivan, and also for blacks; indeed, later gay bar owners who employed Murphy would worry that he would “turn the club black” and—since racism has always been alive and well in the gay world—frighten off the white clientele.
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But though Sylvia and her friends enjoyed going to Stonewall, their bars of choice were in fact Washington Square, on Broadway and Third Street and, to a lesser extent, the Gold Bug and the Tenth of Always (an after-after-hours place that catered to all possible variations of illicit life and stayed open so late it converted by nine
A.M.
into a regular working-class bar). The Washington Square was owned by the Joe Gallo family, which also controlled Tony Pastor's and the Purple Onion (whereas the Genovese family operated Stonewall, Tele-Star, the Tenth of Always, the Bon Soir on Eighth Street, and—run by Anna Genovese—the Eighty-Two Club in the East Village, which featured drag shows for an audience largely composed of straight tourists). Washington Square was Sylvia's special favorite. It
opened
at three in the morning and catered primarily (rather than incidentally, as was the case with Stonewall) to transvestites; the more upscale ones would arrive in limos with their wealthy johns and spend the evening ostentatiously drinking champagne. But others, like Sylvia, went there for relaxing nightcaps and gossip after a hard evening of hustling on the streets.
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The Mob usually provided only a limited amount of money to Family members interested in opening a club; it thereafter became the individual's responsibility to turn a profit. That meant, among other things, not investing too heavily in liquor. When Washington Square first opened, the Mafia members who ran the place lost twelve cases of liquor and fifty cases of beer during the first police raid. Thereafter, only a few bottles were kept in the club and the rest of the liquor was stored in a nearby car; when the bartender was about to run out, someone would go around the corner to the parked car, put a few bottles under his arm, and return to the club. (Other bars had different strategies, such as keeping the liquor hidden behind a panel in the wall.) By thus preventing the police from confiscating large amounts of liquor during any one of their commonplace raids, it was possible—and also commonplace—to open up again for business the next day.
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The Stonewall Inn had, in its varied incarnations during the fifties, been a straight restaurant and a straight nightclub. In 1966 it was taken over by three Mafia figures who had grown up together on
Mulberry Street in Little Italy: “Mario” (the best-liked of the three), Zucchi, who also dealt in firecrackers, and “Fat Tony” Lauria, who weighed in at 420 pounds. Together they put up $3,500 to reopen the Stonewall as a gay club; Fat Tony put up $2,000, which made him the controlling partner, but Mario served as Stonewall's manager and ran the place on a day-to-day basis.
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Tony Lauria was the best-connected of the three. He had gotten a B.A. at Xavier, had married and divorced, and lived at 136 Waverly Place, a Mob-owned apartment building. It was home to a host of related Mafia figures involved in assorted rackets: vending machines, carting companies, and sanitation. Tony's two uncles and his father also lived in the building; the latter (whose other son was a stockbroker) was high up in Mob circles and sat on the board of the Bank of Commerce on Delancey Street, a bank that laundered a fair share of Mafia money. Lauria Senior did not approve of his wayward son's penchant for hanging around street mobsters and getting involved in the “fag bar” scene.
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Fat Tony lived from 1966 to 1971 with Chuck Shaheen, an openly gay man in his mid-twenties of Italian descent. The relationship was secretarial, not erotic. Shaheen acted as a man Friday, serving at different times as everything from a Stonewall bartender to the trusted go-between who “picked up the banks”—the accumulated cash—at the bar several times a night and carried the money home to his boss. According to Shaheen, Tony developed a heavy methamphetamine habit, shooting the crystal several times a day into his veins. Under the drug's influence, Tony lost about two hundred pounds, stayed up all night at clubs (at Stonewall, his favorite hangout, he would embarrass his partners by insistently doing parlor tricks, like twirling cigarettes in the air), and began, for the first time in his life, to go to bed with men—though, to Shaheen's relief, not with him. Tony's father stopped speaking to him altogether and Shaheen had to carry messages between them. Increasingly shunned, Tony, so the rumor mill had it, was later killed by the Family.
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