Stonewall (47 page)

Karla had donned a lavender T-shirt for the march; she laughed out loud at her sartorial modesty when she ran into two male gender-fuck friends, Mother Boats and Jefferson Fuck Poland: Jeff was wearing a woman's bikini bottom, long hair—and nothing else. As in New York, a lot of closeted gays and lesbians watched from the sidewalk,
but unlike New York, L.A. seems to have had a fair number of hecklers. Though the L.A. newspapers reported a relatively noncommittal crowd—without outbursts of either violence or spontaneous applause—veteran activist Jim Kepner heard a lot more cheers than that, and Karla ran into a fair amount of hostility. Whenever she tried to rest—her ribs still bothering her—people would gather around and shout nasty remarks. And at several different points, she saw bystanders angrily throwing things at the marchers.

Yvonne had awakened late with a hangover and had taken additional hours to make up her mind. It was nearly two when she finally got disgusted with her own ambivalence, jumped in her car, and headed in from Brooklyn to the Village. By the time she got to Washington Place a half hour later, the marchers had already set off. Now determined to take part, Yvonne hurried uptown to find and join them. Just as she rounded the corner approaching Macy's department store at Thirty-fourth Street, there they were—placards and banners waving bravely in the sun, voices raised on high.

She fell into the march—was
pulled
in by the sounds and sights, like so many others who had initially watched from the sidewalks, nervously calculating the risks. The exhilaration of the moment overwhelmed most calculations, just as Craig had hoped. Joining in was a major turning point for Yvonne: “It was clear to me from then on that it could no longer be just about partying. I had to save and protect myself by committing to my own liberation. It was like work time.…”

Foster, running back and forth through the line of marchers with his chronometer, sampling the numbers, realized with a thrill that the size of the march had more than doubled, that at least two thousand people were now taking part. Though later estimates would go as high as five thousand to ten thousand, the two FBI agents present at the march sent a teletype to J. Edgar Hoover that agreed with Foster's count: “approximately two thousand individuals.” That made it twice the size of the four or five other Stonewall commemorative marches that came off across the country. Chicago managed to put fewer than a hundred people on the streets, while Los Angeles, with twelve hundred marchers, had the second-biggest turnout. By the following year, there were public celebrations in London and Paris.
⁹⁹

The marshals, fearing hostility from the onlookers and prodded by the cops, had kept the march moving at a rapid clip. But little overt anger was seen along the route. Many of those watching from the sidelines seemed to be gay; sometimes silently, and sometimes
noisily, they urged the marchers on. “You're doing it for us” seemed to be their message, even as they themselves ricocheted between exhilaration and fear.

Aside from a few predictable
SODOM AND GOMORRAH
signs, and a Black Panther newspaper hawker shouting, “Get the Panther paper and stop all this foolishness!” the reaction of the spectators ranged from frozen to benign to overtly encouraging. The only persistent pests were tourists snapping photographs. They would rush up—“Oh look, Jane, that lesbian is eating
an ice cream cone!”
—and stick a camera in the startled lesbian's face, determined to immortalize the sight of one of the depraved licking away like the innocent child she wasn't.

It took only a little more than an hour to reach Central Park. Foster, forty-five years old and overweight, staggered in, huffing and puffing, but elated. Craig was so excited he could hardly stop smiling—at the size of the crowd, the good feeling and courage everywhere manifest. Karla, in L.A., let out a whoop when she crossed the finish line, her back killing her, her spirit soaring. Sylvia arrived yelling, Yvonne in exhausted tears. Jim, too, had tears pouring down his face as he stood on a rise in the ground and looked back at the line of people stretching some fifteen blocks into the distance: “I saw what we had done. It was remarkable. There we were in all of our diversity.”

They were all, in their own ways, euphoric, just as, in their own ways, they had all somehow come through, had managed to arrive at this unimaginable coming together, this testimony to a difficult past surmounted and a potentially better future in view.

EPILOGUE: 1993

YVONNE FLOWERS continues to teach occupational therapy at York College, CUNY. During the seventies she was politically active with a wide variety of groups, including Black Women for Wages for Housework, the National Black Feminist Organization, and the Center for Women's Development at Medgar Evers College. She also founded “Sweet Sensations,” a group that organized erotic “Tupperware parties as a means for increasing women's right to sexuality.” In the mid-seventies, she got a second master's degree and, as part of an ongoing process of reclaiming her African-American heritage, changed her first name to Maua (“Flowers” in Swahili). She has long since given up drugs and alcohol, but is still afflicted with lupus.

JIM FOURATT has never ceased to be a political activist, of recent years dividing his time between New York City and Los Angeles. He was a founding board member of the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York and of Wipe Out AIDS (now known as H.E.A.L.), as well as a cofounder of ACT UP. In addition, he has been a contributing editor of
SPIN
magazine and writes a cultural column, “Ear Candy,” syndicated in the gay press. He recently worked as the director of national publicity for Rhino Records.

FOSTER GUNNISON remained active in the CSLDC through 1973, but by the mid-seventies had phased himself out of the gay liberation movement—except for his archival work, which continues to this day.
Thereafter, he spent a decade cofounding several conservative political organizations in Connecticut, wrote for business magazines, and did research for the
National Conservative Digest
. In recent years he has taken growing offense (as a devoted cigar smoker) at what he calls “the neo-prohibitionary” antismoking crusade, and has helped to found a national smokers' liberation movement, which occupies most of his time today.

KARLA JAY spent the early seventies doing movement work and wandering between New York and California. She preferred the latter, but could never find any literary work there; so she lived on food stamps, hung out at Venice Beach, and wrote. She finally got a teaching assistantship in the French department at NYU (Bronx campus) and returned East for good. She began teaching English at Pace University in 1974, completed her doctorate in Comparative Literature in 1984 and then rose to the rank of full professor at Pace. She has published a number of books, including (with Allen Young) the path-breaking
Out of the Closets
, and is currently the editor of NYU Press's series
The Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life and Literature
.

SYLVIA RIVERA quit the gay movement in 1973. Her departure was precipitated by the bruising struggle on Gay Pride Day that year over her right to speak; the more encompassing reason was the general lack of visibility and acceptance in the movement of transvestites. But in honor of her own past, she has continued to march in the yearly Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade, missing only twice in twenty years. After a close friend died from an overdose, Sylvia decided to kick drugs (but not alcohol) cold turkey. Some ten years ago, she moved to Tarrytown, New York, where she has held a variety of jobs in food services.

CRAIG RODWELL is still the proprietor of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and still maintains deep respect for the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy. He has begun an autobiographical and theoretical work based on his experiences in the gay movement. Of recent years he has been particularly concerned with the lack of outreach and services for gay and lesbian youth.

NOTES

GROWING UP

1
. The description in the following pages of Foster Gunnison, Sr.'s career and marriage is drawn from material in the Gunnison Papers, kindly made available to me by Foster Gunnison, Jr. The following items have been of particular importance: Foster Gunnison, Sr., to William Adams Delano, Dec. 14, 1954;
St. Petersburg
(Florida)
Independent
, Oct. 20, 1961 (Gunnison obit); “A Keystone for a Nickel,”
Forbes
, April 15, 1940;
The Prefabricated House
, #1: “A Movement Emerges,”
Architectural Forum
, Dec. 1942; “Where Is Prefabrication?”
Fortune
, April 1946; “The Viceroys,”
Life
, Nov. 11, 1946. Three towns in the United States—in Colorado, Utah, and Mississippi—carry the name Gunnison. For more information on the Gunnison family, see Russ Gammon, “Who Was John Gunnison?”
The Gunnison Country Times
, Dec. 28, 1988; George W. Gunnison,
A Genealogy of the Descendants of Hugh Gunnison … 1610–1876
(George A. Foxcroft, 1880); Foster N. Gunnison and Herbert Foster Gunnison, eds.,
An Autobiography of the Reverend Nathaniel Gunnison
(Herbert Foster Gunnison, publisher, 1910); and Dwayne Vandenbusche,
The Gunnison Country
(B & B Printers, 1980).

2
. The following letters in the Gunnison Papers have been the sources for reconstructing Foster Gunnison, Jr.'s college career: Gunnison Sr. to Gunnison Jr., Feb. 8, 21, 1945, Oct. 29, 1946; Thomas C. Gibb (Acting Dean) to Gunnison Sr., Feb. 6, 1945; Gunnison Jr. to Gunnison Sr., Feb. 1945; Evans to Gunnison Sr., June 14, 1945.

YOUNG ADULTHOOD

1
. John D'Emilio,
Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities
(University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 98–99; Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers
(Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 107–108, 127, 164–66.

2
.
 For the information in this and the following paragraph: Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr.,
Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past
(NAL, 1989; Meridian, 1990), pp. 318–31; and Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls
, pp. 72–79.

3
. The following description of lesbian life in the fifties and sixties draws especially on: Audre Lorde,
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
(The Crossing Press, 1982), pp. 177–78 (“our rarity,” the quotation in the next paragraph), 220–21, 224; “Audre Lorde & Maua Adele Ajanaku [Yvonne Flowers]: An Interview,” in Andrea Weiss and Greta Schiller,
Before Stonewall: The Making of a Gay and Lesbian Community
(Naiad Press, 1988), pp. 54–55; Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls
, chapter 7 (for “bluff,” see p. 168).

4
. For appreciations, however qualified, of lesbian pulp fiction, see Fran Koski and Maida Tilchen, “Some Pulp Sappho,” in Karla Jay and Allen Young, eds.,
Lavender Culture
(Jove/HBJ, 1978), pp. 262–74; Kate Brandt, “The Lifelines Still Hold,”
Visibilities
, Jan.-Feb. 1991;-Roberta Yusba, “Strange Sister: Literature of the Lurid,”
Windy City Times
, June 22, 1989; and Diane Hamer, “‘I am a Woman': Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s,” in Mark Lilly, ed.,
Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays
(Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 47–75.

For Claire Morgan, see Barbara Grier,
The Lesbian in Literature
, 3rd ed. (Naiad Press, 1981). Grier awards
The Price of Salt
an A***, which she gives only to “those few titles that stand out above all the rest and must properly belong in any collection of Lesbian literature.” Bonnie Zimmerman's comprehensive study of lesbian fiction from 1969 to 1989,
The Safe Sea of Women
(Beacon, 1990), has a chapter dealing with pre-1969 work. There, Zimmerman agrees that most of the pulp fiction of the fifties contained “dreary portrayals of self-hating ‘inverts'” (p. xi). But she singles out
The Price of Salt
, along with Jane Rule's
Desert of the Heart
(1964), as “sensitive and dignified … freed from stereotypes … [and containing characters] who make choices …” (p. 10) and who project “a positive and empowering image of lesbians” (p. xi).

5
. This section draws on the following material in the Gunnison Papers, as well as on my interviews with Foster Gunnison, Jr.: press release by U.S. Steel, May 2, 1944; a “Confidential Report” on Gunnison Junior's test scores; Robert M. Vogel to Gunnison Sr., Oct. 29, 1954 (“such excellence”), Gunnison Jr. to Langhorn, May 23, 1960 (mathematical formula).

6
. Little has been written about Joe Cino and his theater, but two articles do contain much useful detail: Michael Feingold, “Caffè Cino, 20 Years After Magic Time,”
The Village Voice
, May 14, 1985; and Robert Heide, “Magic Time at the Caffè Cino,”
New York Native
, May 6–19, 1985.

7
. Arthur Bell, “The Sixties,” in
The Christopher Street Reader
, eds. Michael Denneny, Charles Ortleb, and Thomas Steele (Coward-McCann, 1983), p. 28.

8
. Much of the information and all of the quotes in this section come from my three interviews with Heide in 1990 and 1991.

Heide had become connected with the Caffè Cino when Joe Cino offered him encouragement, and a home, after the critics had brutalized Heide's 1961 play,
West of the Moon
, one of the very first gay-themed plays ever done in New
York. (It had been preceded by Edward Albee's
The Zoo Story
, but the sexuality of the characters in that play was far more disguised than in Heide's; during the late fifties and early sixties, Albee and Heide were … good friends.)

Heide subsequently had two gay-themed plays produced at the Cino:
The Bed
(with sets and lights by Ron Link, and directed by Robert Dahdah), which ran for 150 performances in 1965; and
Moon
, which opened in 1967 and was performed widely in the late sixties. But in 1967, even so avant-garde a figure as Ellen Stewart, whose Café La Mama was an offshoot of Caffè Cino, was not cordial—though she later did provide a refuge for gay plays and playwrights (including Harvey Fierstein). In 1967, she told Heide, after seeing
The Bed
, that he should stop writing plays about homosexuals.