Stonewall (41 page)

The move against the
Journal
resulted from months of planning by women from various New York liberation groups (including Red-stockings). On the day of the action, between a hundred and two hundred women invaded the
Journal
and “liberated” the office of its editor-in-chief, John Mack Carter. They denounced a magazine purportedly for women that was run and written by men and that catered to consumerism; instead of selling detergent, as Karla put it in her subsequent
RAT
article, “the magazine should in fact be telling their consumers how detergents pollute water.” The protestors also pointed out that the few women who did work for the
Journal
were underpaid and that black women were notable by their absence. They then read Carter a set of demands that included his own resignation in favor of a woman editor.

When the reading was over, Carter, known to be imperious, said flatly, “I will not negotiate under siege!” Karla yelled, “You have no choice!” But Carter thought he did, and the stalemated sit-in went on for a number of hours. Tempers began to fray and at one point Karla, thinking Shulamith Firestone was about to lunge at Carter and wanting to save her from injury or jail, grabbed Firestone's arm and restrained her. Carter finally deigned to negotiate with the women's
demands, but announced that he would do so not with the group as a whole, but with a delegation—to be no larger than twelve.

The offer produced considerable dissension among the women, some of whom were fearful that it was a divisive tactic designed to appeal to some of the more prominent, career-minded among them. After another lengthy stalemate, a delegation was chosen and did meet with Carter—but emerged with only a single demand met:
The Journal
agreed to put up ten thousand dollars for a separate issue of the magazine devoted solely to the women's movement; the issue would be written collectively by the protestors themselves (though with Carter maintaining final editorial control). The women were ultimately able to use the bulk of the money to support feminist work—providing bail money, for example, for women in prison—but the compromise was angrily denounced both at the time, and later in print, by some of the protesters.

Karla was herself at first inclined to view the result as “elitist.” As she wrote in
RAT
, “What good had we done? Aside from the publicity, which might awaken Middle Amerika [a spelling commonplace among 1970 radicals] to its hypocrisy and lies, we had succeeded only in getting Vassar girls higher paying jobs in publishing.” But on reconsideration, Karla decided the action had succeeded in several important ways. Five of the largest—and in the past, squabbling—women's groups had managed to work together with reasonable harmony. The number of women participating in the action had sent “a firm warning” to the media to mend their ways in reporting on women's lives. And finally, the protesters had gotten an issue of the
Journal
all to themselves, and that promised to reach large numbers of women across the country with the message of liberation.

Other feminists thought the negatives outweighed—some thought
far
outweighed—the positives. The special “women'sliberation issue” of the
Journal
, they argued, would probably prove a commercial bonanza for its male owners. (The “issue” became a centerfold insert and appeared a year later.) And what of all the other demands which had been shunted to the side? The same issue of
RAT
that carried Karla's description of the protest carried a second article (by “Verna Tomasson”) lamenting that nothing had been done about the just call for child-care facilities, for more black employees, for a training program to enable secretaries to move into editorial work, for an end to insulting ads, and for an increase in wages. “Somewhere in the night,” Tomasson wrote, “the action came down with a severe case of anemia.” It may have produced some effective publicity, but
measured by the standards of a
radical
action—“one which effects changes in the existing structure”—it had in Tomasson's view proven a failure.
⁵²

SYLVIA, JIM, KARLA

S
ylvia was worried about her sisters. Worrying about something other than survival was one of the wondrous new luxuries attendant on the birth of GLF and GAA. Suddenly new possibilities and expectations were in the air. People began to dream about something other than getting from one day to the next with a minimum of discomfort. Sylvia's new dream was to have a place that underage street queens could call home.

At first she thought that place might be the new gay organizations themselves: “I thought that night in 1969 was going to be our unity for the rest of our lives.” But as Sylvia and everyone else in GLF and GAA soon learned, the diversity of gay and lesbian life would require multiple, sometimes conflicting, expression, just as the traditional dominance of educated, middle-class white men would require constant challenge.

It did not seem, initially, that diversity had to generate disagreement, or disagreement, in turn, division. Many besides Sylvia harbored a vision of unbroken, harmonious solidarity, a determined linking of arms to march into a mistily tender-hearted future. And in the hope of containing differences, GLF had from the first organized around affinity cells, encouraging people, in accord with good anarchist tradition, to congregate around work of mutual interest. It had also opted for one large weekly meeting every Sunday night, run without the formal structure of permanent leaders or parliamentary procedures. Anyone who wanted to could attend and vote, though consensus was considered the ideal—and achievable—form of reaching resolution.

It wasn't long before the Sunday night meetings became forums of excited antagonism—revolutionaries advocated armed struggle, socialists called for an end to capitalism, moderates defended the reliability of American institutions and the basic decency of American life. Debates often became protracted, resolution difficult, bedlam the
norm. Some of the men, newly alive to the possibility that although gay they could reclaim their male prerogatives, did what their socialization had trained them to do—interrupt, monopolize discussion, insist on the correctness of their own views, belittle and denounce those who disagreed. And some of the women, true to
their
socialization, deferred to male authority and kept a low profile. But certainly not all of the women.

Rita Mae Brown, for one, had worked hard to raise consciousness within the feminist movement about lesbianism; in GLF, she, Lois Hart, Martha Shelley, and others encouraged lesbians to form feminist consciousness-raising groups—not solely to resist “male chauvinism,” but also to end personal feelings of alienation. Lois Hart argued that the women in GLF were better off than heterosexual women “on the outside” because many gay men in the organization
did
believe in feminist principles of gender parity and did applaud all-women consciousness-raising groups that would further encourage independence and equality. “We are in a really tough situation,” Hart wrote. “We want to be able to call each other brother and sister, yet we are still in some ways in the roles of oppressor and oppressed. Women are going to feel anger and men will feel fear and resentment.”
⁵³

Many of those feelings surfaced over the issue of separate women's dances. GLF women, including Karla, had worked hard (even chopping ice and sweeping floors) to make the GLF dances at Alternate U. a success. But they grew to resent the “pack 'em in” attitude of the GLF men. Outnumbered by at least five to one, the women had trouble even finding each other at the overwhelmingly male dances, which to them seemed increasingly to resemble nothing so much as a standard gay male bar, overcrowded and dimly lit, with human contact “limited to groping and dryfucking.”
⁵⁴

Deciding that they wanted a space of their own for dances, the GLF women (never more than ten to twenty percent of the organization) demanded that one of the large rooms at Alternate U. be declared off-limits to men and that a portion of the GLF treasury be set aside to finance separate women's dances. Some of the GLF men denounced the plan as divisive, others denied that there was a male-female problem significant enough to require so “drastic” a solution, and still others instantly supported the women's demands. After a great deal of discussion, which was the GLF way, funds for the separate dances were somewhat reluctantly voted.

The GLF women wanted a social space that would not only be
free of male domination, but would also serve as an alternative to the lesbian bars then in existence. The famous Sea Colony having closed in 1968, there were only two lesbian bars in Manhattan in 1970: Kooky's, on West Fourteenth Street, and Gianni's, on West Nineteenth; both served watered-down, overpriced drinks in an atmosphere less than congenial. Kooky's was named after the fearsome woman who was herself always on the premises. A heterosexual, and purportedly an ex-prostitute, Kooky had dyed, lacquered blond hair and was given to wearing pink crinoline dresses. Karla has described Kooky as looking “more like a poorly put-together transvestite than a woman.”
⁵⁵

And she ran her bar like a tyrannical man, ordering the lesbian patrons around as if they were scum, beneath contempt. She would think nothing of coming up to a woman sitting at the bar, grabbing her glass, and shoving it up to her mouth. “Drink up, drink up,” she would growl in her Brooklynese accent. “This ain't a church, y'know. You wanna spend all your time talkin', go to a church and talk in the pew.” Then Kooky would turn to the bartender and bark, “She's buying another drink.” The women were afraid of her, sensing her violence, guessing at her Mafia connections. The occasional patron who resisted Kooky's commands could be sure that Kooky would take the lit cigarette always dangling from her mouth, put it right under the woman's chin, and then signal the two bouncers to throw her out.
⁵⁶

When Karla and some other GLF women tried to leaflet Kooky's one night with announcements of the forthcoming lesbian dance at Alternate U., Kooky had her male bouncers toss them outside into the snow. It was clear Kooky would not look kindly on the prospect of business being taken away by “some goddamned liberation group.” The women then tried leafleting near the bar, but when Kooky saw the flyers in some of her customers' hands, she sent her bouncers outside to threaten retaliation.

Karla and the other GLF women were understandably on edge when the night of the first lesbian dance, April 3, 1970, arrived. Would Kooky try something to disrupt the evening? Would enough women show up to justify all the planning effort? The answer on both counts proved to be a decided yes. A number of straight women showed up in response to a plea from their lesbian friends for support (though one woman Karla phoned—a woman who came out a year later—accused Karla of trying to force her into lesbianism). Even without
straight sympathizers, the dance was mobbed and was declared by all hands a huge success; from then on, it became a regular event. But at three
A.M.,
as a group of GLF women, including Karla, were cleaning up, the expected trouble finally arrived.

According to Karla, several large men wearing unholstered guns in their belts suddenly appeared in the Alternate U. doorway. They claimed to be police and said they were investigating charges that liquor was being sold without a license (the dance had adopted the legal ruse of requesting a “donation” at the door). The women were pretty sure at a glance that these men were not cops, but just in case, some of them ran in panic to flush their drugs down the toilet or to stash them under a couch.

It wasn't long before the goons started to push some of the women around; at that, Karla and a friend of hers ran out the back exit. Having expected trouble, they had earlier gotten the black lesbian lawyer Flo Kennedy (who was also a friend of Yvonne's) to promise to stay by her phone, and they now ran to a booth a block away—and directly in front of Kooky's—to call her. Kennedy advised them to notify the police (that is, the real police) and the media immediately, which they did. But just as Karla hung up from making the last call, two drunken men reeled out of Kooky's, where they had apparently wandered inadvertently and been thrown out. Furious, and seeing the two women in the phone booth, they started harassing them, calling them “pussy suckers” and threatening to kill them. Karla insisted she had not been in Kooky's, as the men claimed. “So then what the fuck are you doing here?” one of the men demanded. Thinking fast, Karla said, “Fixing the phone. We're from the phone company”—and to make her point, she ripped out the receiver. “See. It's broken.” Grumbling, the men staggered off.

When the two women got back to Alternate U., the police and press had arrived and the goons had fled. The GLF women felt certain that Kooky had sent them, but couldn't prove it, even though the police confirmed that the men had not been officers. As for Kooky (and many of the other bar owners as well), she continued to denounce and harass the gay liberationists—that is, until it eventually became clear that the GLF dances, despite their ongoing success, did not present any significant threat to her own bar business.

Karla shared the view that gay male sexism was an impediment to gender equality and cooperation within GLF. And she thought Jim
Fouratt was among the occasional offenders—though hardly the worst. On the whole she liked and admired Jim. And she was fascinated by the disparity between the way he looked and the way he sometimes sounded. (And fascinated, too, by the same pair of tight black leather pants that he seemed always to wear; she secretly wondered how—or if—he washed them.) In looks Jim seemed androgynous, ethereal, fragile—yet as soon as he opened his mouth he became one more powerfully assured male.

Karla and some of the other GLF women complained about the aggressive way Jim and other GLF men simply stood up, interrupted, and talked whenever they felt like it. Jim took the complaints to heart. Priding himself on having a feminist consciousness, he didn't want his own aggressive behavior to become part of the problem. And so he
tried
to modulate his tone and monitor his interruptions, realizing that among other things, he had to learn the difference between standing up at a GLF meeting and shouting, “Let the women speak!” and simply saying nothing, letting a space develop in which women
could
speak—and without his patronizing intervention in their behalf.