Stonewall (52 page)

61
. Scherker interview with Wicker, Aug 8, 1988. As a sample of Leitsch's sometime sympathy with the New Left: Leitsch to Mayor Richard Daley, Sept. 5, 1968 (expressing his “horror” at the use of police force during the Chicago Democratic Convention). Leitsch also expressed pleasure at MSNY beginning to draw “a much younger, ‘hipper' crowd” (Leitsch to Paul Speier, Feb. 5, 1969), and displeasure at the Annual Reminder's conservative dress code (Leitsch to Barbara Gittings, June 24, 1969; also Leitsch to James K. Mazurek, Nov. 18, 1967). All four letters are in IGIC Papers, NYPL.

The tape of Isay's
Remembering Stonewall
has Wicker heatedly arguing against mob tactics that “violated everything we thought of as responsible behavior.” Wicker later repented; “I had fallen behind the times by 1969 … I was a
numbnut
” (Wicker to Duberman, Oct. 10, 1993). Indeed, in 1992 he was back raising public hell at profits from the Christopher Street Festival not going back into the gay community.
(N.Y. Times
, June 26, 1992).

62
. Robert Amsel, “Back to Our Future? A Walk on the Wild Side of Stonewall,”
The Advocate
, Sept. 15, 1987; Teal,
Gay Militants
, p. 27; Truscott, “Gay Power” (quotation).

63
. Truscott, “Gay Power”; Isay show,
Remembering Stonewall
(Pine's comment); phone interview with Nick Browne (at the time a bartender at the nearby Lion's Head), Sept. 12, 1990.

64
. Ronnie Di Brienza, “Stonewall Incident,”
The East Village Other
, July 1969 (shouts, beatings—though
EVO
erroneously states that July 2 was a Monday, it was a Wednesday);
New York times
, July 3, 1969 (typically, the
Times
underestimated the crowd at about five hundred people).

65
.
The quotation (“lawful”) is from a packet of material relating to the 1969 Annual Reminder in IGIC Papers, NYPL. It also contains instructions regarding dress that stress the need for a “conservative appearance,” and authorizes a three-person committee to “rule off the line those not meeting standards.”

66
. The quotations from and description of the St. John's meeting are from Tom Burke, “The New Homosexual,”
Esquire
, December 1969.

67
. Interview with Chuck Shaheen, Nov. 20, 1991. De Martino did make some money by converting the space above the Stonewall into additional apartments. Tommy Lanigan-Schmidt put the Stonewall's closing in heroic terms: “Stonewall died giving birth!” (interview, May 2, 1992). Soon after the closing, Blond Frankie became the doorman at Dr. Feelgood's, the new Mafia-controlled gay bar in the Hotel Earle. But Dr. Feelgood's never caught on (interview with Ryder Fitzgerald, May 5, 1992).

POST-STONEWALL: 1969–70

1
.
Timé
, Oct 31, 1969; Jim Kepner,
Our Movement Since Stonewall
(IGLA, 1992), p. 2 (Foran).

2
. The quotes in this and the following paragraph are from “Pampered Perverts,” Lige Clarke and Jack Nichols's “Homosexual Citizen” column in
Screw
, July 25, 1969; and their article “N.Y. Gays: Will the Spark Dim?”
The Advocate
, Sept. 1969.

3
. “Pampered Perverts,”
Screw
, July 25, 1969; Madolin Cervantes (MSNY) to David Bird (
N.V. Times
), July 13, 1969 (IGIC Papers, NYPL); Scherker interview with Wicker, Aug. 8, 1988 (courtesy Scherker Estate). The Queens vigilante incident is described fully in John Gabree, “Homosexuals Harassed in New York,”
Guardian
, July 12, 1969. The tree-cutting had come about after ordinary harassment techniques had failed and, as Gabree put it, “had every Freudian in New York chuckling over his morning paper.” The Mattachine announcement that it was starting a fund to replace the trees—a cost the Parks Department estimated at $15,000—had led left-leaning gays to mutter about so humble-spirited a response.

4
. Toby Marotta,
The Politics of Homosexuality
(Houghton Mifflin, 1981), p. 77.

5
. Leitsch to Philip Parris, Sept. 22, 1966 (expressing sympathy for Stokely Carmichael's views but rejecting any association with the Panthers); Leitsch to William Wynne, Feb. 4, 1970 (“none of our damned business”). Both letters are in IGIC Papers, NYPL.

6
. Donaldson and Leitsch had recently been at loggerheads. Leitsch accused Donaldson of a gratuitous “personal attack” in the
Clearing House Newsletter
(vol. 1., no. 7); Donaldson accused Leitsch of threatening to walk out of a meeting simply because he (Donaldson) was supposed to say a few words; and the two squabbled angrily over whether the Columbia student homophile group should be allowed to use the name “Mattachine,” Donaldson accusing Leitsch of “snobbery” and Leitsch attacking the Columbia group as “apologists” because its members used pseudonyms. (Leitsch to
Clearing House Newsletter
, Sept. 12, Nov. 3, 1967; Donaldson to Herman Slater, March 9, 1968; Leitsch to Gunnison, Oct. 8, 1968; Leitsch to Neil Donovan, Jan 24, 1969—all in IGIC Papers, NYPL).

7
. Marotta,
Politics of Homosexuality
, pp. 78–79; Scherker interview with Shelley, June 5, 1989 (tape courtesy Scherker Estate).

8
. Two Special Services police reports, dated July 9, 10, 1969 (courtesy Scherker Estate).

9
. Marotta,
Politics of Homosexuality
, pp. 78–79.

10
. Marotta,
Politics of Homosexuality
, p. 79; Michael Bronski, “Stonewall Stories, Part I,”
Gay Community News
, June 11–17, 1989.

11
. Interview with Sascha L., Aug. 26, 1991.

12
. Interview with Sascha L., Aug. 26, 1991. According to Sascha, the payoffs also stopped—at least for a while—after the Stonewall riots. A number of cops (including, about a year later, Seymour Pine) were transferred.

The police sweep through the Village gay bars that night was general; at about the same time Tele-Star was raided, Stonewall, too, was hit. Martin Boyce (interview, May 19, 1992) was among the seven or eight people sitting one afternoon, about a week after the riots, at the Stonewall bar (which had not yet closed, but had little business) when the police marched through; it was, as Boyce remembers it, “just a show of muscle; no arrests were made.”

It was a raid more than six months later that would fan the most indignation, and temporarily take on some of the symbolic importance of the Stonewall riots.
The Snake Pit was an after-hours basement bar on the corner of West Tenth Street, operated, like so many others, without a liquor license. When the police (again led by Seymour Pine) raided it at five one morning, they atypically arrested, along with the employees, all 167 patrons, on charges of “disorderly conduct.” Among those patrons was an Argentine national named Diego Vinales, who had never before gone to a gay bar in New York. Brought with the others to the Charles Street police station, Vinales panicked. Terrified that his parents would be notified and that he would be deported, he made a desperate effort to escape by jumping from the second-floor window. He impaled himself on six fourteen-inch iron spikes on the fence directly below, and had to endure agonizing delays while rescue workers, using blowtorches, tried to extricate him. When they finally succeeded, he was rushed into surgery with one piece of the fence still piercing his body. Vinales survived, but barely. Craig was among the many thousands who joined a vigil at the hospital and then marched to the Charles Street police station to protest the Snake Pit raid. The fullest account of the whole affair is in Arthur Bell,
Dancing the Gay Lib Blues: A Year in the Homosexual Liberation Movement
(Simon and Schuster, 1971), pp. 39–49. The
Daily News
put the incident on its front page (March 9, 1970). “Any way you look at it—that boy was PUSHED!!” read a Gay Activists Alliance flyer announcing the protest march (the flyer is included in the Special Services police report of the Vinales incident, dated March 9, 1970, courtesy Scherker Estate).

13
. Marotta,
Politics of Homosexuality
, pp. 80–91.

14
. Gunnison to Kelley, May 11, 1968, Kelley Papers.

15
. Douglas Sanders (the only Canadian delegate), 10 typed pages of Minutes plus Appendices for the August 1968 Chicago NACHO Conference, Kelley Papers. The Homosexual Bill of Rights had been proposed by SIR; in essence, it called for an end to all forms of harassment and discrimination. Beardemphl of SIR had suggested the name “American Conference of. Homosexual Organizations” (IGIC Papers, Box 5, NYPL).

16
. Fourteen of the twenty-three accredited organizations sent a total of twenty-three delegates to Chicago; and some eighty-five additional people participated as accredited “observers.” Of the six organizations turned down by Foster's Credentials Committee on assorted grounds of late fees or recent formation, all six were admitted to the conference by vote of the delegates—a direct slap at Foster, who defended his criteria as “tough—yes, even rigid,” but applied with “absolute fairness” (Gunnison to Cromey, May 17, 1968; also Gunnison to Southern California Council on Religion and the Homosexual, June 7, 1968, Gunnison Papers). Shirley Willer on DOB is in Eric Marcus,
Making History
(HarperCollins, 1992), p. 129. On the issue of Mattachine New York's participation, Foster wrote Bill Kelley, soon after the close of the conference, that he was “working with MSNY to bring them into the NACHO, with some success thus far. HOWEVER—my belief is that no organization is God Almighty, and we should not go down on bended knee.… And that goes for SIR or any of the others. We are all in this together, and no one organization is going to be the ‘hero of the movement' …” (Gunnison to Kelley, Nov. 12, 1968, Kelley Papers). In an exchange of letters during 1967–1968, Leitsch vented his anger at the lack of appreciation for MSNY's accomplishments under his leadership, and Foster diplomatically
encouraged him not to be “concerned about what anyone else in the movement thinks”—even as he warned Leitsch that “there is a tendency to resent MSNY's being kept out of the general movement,” and urged him to join NACHO (Gunnison to Leitsch, Jan. 22, 1967, and Jan. 26, Feb. 9, Oct. 7, 1968; Leitsch to Gunnison, Jan. 23, Feb. 6, 14, Oct. 8, 1968—all in IGIC Papers, NYPL). Privately, Leitsch was writing that “Foster Gunnison himself is responsible for much of the hostility to … [the Credentials] Committee … his rules, by-laws, whatever they were called, [were] much too authoritarian and exclusionary,” and urging that he be replaced with Leitsch's recent ally Jack Campbell, of Cleveland Mattachine (Leitsch to William Wynne, June 5, 1970, IGIC Papers, NYPL). Wynne had been encouraging Leitsch to take over NACHO, writing that he was tired of NACHO being in the grip for so long of those “who do not really represent anyone except themselves” (Wynne to Leitsch, n.d. [1970], IGIC Papers, NYPL).

17
. Eight Credentials Committee “Bulletins,” March 12, 1969-June 24, 1969, Gunnison Papers; “Marc Jeffers,” “Chairman's Interim Report,” March 1969; “Jeffers” to Robert Cromey, June 14, 1969 (travel); “Jeffers,” “To All NACHO Organizations,” n.d., Houston. (The Promethean Society soon reorganized as the Texas Homophile Educational Movement: THEM—all in the Kelley Papers.)

18
. “Report of the Committee on Credentials,” July 24, 1969, and “Post-Conference Report of the Committee on Credentials,” Dec. 10, 1969, Gunnison Papers. “Austin Wade” (Arthur Warner) and Madolin Cervantes, “Report to the Board of MSNY Delegates to ERCHO,” n.d., Gunnison Papers. Dick Leitsch had been prepared, this time around, to attend the NACHO conference, but MSNY had refused to vote expense money for him and other potential delegates on the grounds that “the Gay Power movement is on and we're shoveling out dollars like kindling for mimeograph paper.” Leitsch had been of two minds about going anyway, and professed not to be disappointed (Leitsch to “Frank,” Aug. 19, 1969, IGIC Papers, NYPL).

The Council on Equality for Homosexuals was an organization Gunnison put together with a few members of the West Side Discussion Group; it included David Goldberger, “Sandy Penn,” and Barbara Silverglate. (“A little discussion group we had going in New York for a couple of years” was Gunnison's own description during our interviews.) Part of CEH's history is in Credentials Committee “Bulletin #5,” May 31, 1969 (Gunnison Papers). Arthur Warner and Madolin Cervantes were among those who attacked CEH as having “no plausible reason for its existence”—other than to garner voting privileges at the NACHO and ERCHO conventions and thereby help to perpetuate the control of the “Kamenyites” (Warner and Cervantes, “Report to the Board of MSNY Delegates to ERCHO.” Gunnison Papers).

19
. Donaldson to “Young Turks,” March 20, 1968; Gunnison to Jeffers, Nov. 13, 1969, to Donaldson, Nov. 22, 1969, and to Kameny, Nov. 22, 1969—all in Kelley Papers.

20
. “A Radical Manifesto,” dated August 28, 1969 (Kelley Papers), is signed by Scoop Phillips, chair of the 1969 NACHO Arrangements Committee and a Kansas City activist, as well as by Stephen Donaldson. One accompanying document suggests that the age limit for membership on the Youth Committee be
set at twenty-five, and another set forth a “Bill of Rights” for homosexual studentson college campuses—both in Kelley Papers.

21
. Gunnison to Kelley, Sept. 15, 1969; Gunnison to Jeffers, Nov. 13, 1969; Gunnison to Gittings, Nov. 15, 1969; Gunnison to Kameny, Nov. 22, 1969; Gunnison to William Wynne, Dec. 27, 1969—all in Kelley Papers.

22
. Gunnison, “Subject: Gay Liberation Front,” Nov. 12, 1969, Kelley Papers.

23
. Gunnison to Robert Kohler, Dec. 21, 1969 (“rudeness,” etc.); Gunnison to Jeffers, Nov. 13, 1969 (most dangerous), Kelley Papers.