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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Stonewall Legacy: Activism and Identity - Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stonewall Rebellion and the Emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement
Description
An account of the resource
The Stonewall "Activism and Identity" oral history interviews were undertaken to document and archive the voices of those involved in the LGBT rights movement and to engage the public in the history of the movement.
Those who would like to contribute to the conversation should submit a contributor form with your thoughts and indicate whether you would like to be interviewed, send a written response or submit an image or document supporting the topic. All of the above may be published on the site in the future pending review.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Christopher Gioia
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NA
Publisher
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Christopher Gioia
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016
Contributor
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Michael Bettinger, John D'Emilio, Bruce Monroe, Felice Picano, Mark Segal, Martha Shelley,Wendell Walker, Rich Wandel
Rights
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Copyright, Christopher Gioia, 2016
Format
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Digital Recordings
Language
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English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Oral History
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
NA
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
NA
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Christopher Gioia
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
John D'Emilio
Location
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Via Telephone, Chicago and New York
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
CG: To begin tell us about your background and what you do.
JD: I grew up in New York City, born in 1948, a big extended Italian family - all of my grandparents were immigrants. I grew up in the Bronx actually; I went to this very special boys high school in Manhattan starting in 1962. It’s a Jesuit school that you got into by competitive exams only, Catholic boys from the whole metropolitan area of New York, and it was probably one of the most profound things that ever happened to me because we got treated like serious intellectual kids by teachers who really cared about us and it got me in Manhattan as a teenager where I had barely left the Bronx before that, barely left my neighborhood. And it was in my years at Regis high school where I, in the mid sixties, started feeling gay things so that it initiated, you might say, a pre Stonewall, pre gay liberation coming out. And in terms of my life, I went to graduate school in the 70s to do history and at a certain point early on got involved in gay activism and at a point the doing history and the gay activism became entwined with each other and that’s what I’ve done for the last 40 years; I move back and forth between teaching and doing research and publishing LGBT history and also being involved in the movement, in activist advocacy organizations of one sort or another.
CG: As a historian, what role do you think personal stories play as part of the construction of historical record?
JD: They’re really important and in a lot of ways vital and in some ways even more so now than fifty or sixty years ago. Printed records are most likely to be produced by people of privilege, whether it be primarily economic and class privilege which also is closely related to racial privilege, and if you’re wanting to write about ordinary folks and community life and what it was like to be this or that or the other thing, the only way you’re going to do it and succeed with an on the ground social history and community history is if you have stories to supplement the documents that you find and then it takes thoughtfulness how one evaluates the stories that people tell. Memory is unreliable in some cases but, but if we didn’t collect personal stories and take them seriously there are all kinds of history that would never get written. It’s very important and it has to be used smartly and critically and thoughtfully.
CG: Concerning the Village and the Stonewall Inn, tell me what you remember about the place prior to the rebellion? What was it like?
JD: My first discoveries of gay life came in the form of street cruising on the Upper East Side because that was a part of Manhattan that I knew, that’s where movie theaters were, in the 50’s, the east 50’s, and as a teenager I began to notice that there were guys who, something told me, were what I was. The first time I went to the Village was in the fall of 1967. A guy I had met on the waiting line for tickets to the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center, which was kind of like an outdoor gay community center in and of itself in those days because there were so many gay men who were waiting to get standing room tickets to the Opera, anyway this guy Jim, who was a bit older, he was in his late twenties, I was 19 - a sophomore in college, he took me under wing for a little bit. He brought me to the Village for the first time and it was the first time I ever went into a gay bar, and the gay bar of all things was Julius, which is a famous gay bar in New York where (I didn’t know this in 1967) activists the year before had challenged state laws around serving gay people in bars. So that’s when I first experienced the Village and then in the spring of ‘68 I met somebody, a guy named Billy who was a graduate student at Columbia and about ten years older than me - I was still 19 - and he lived in the village, he lived at a building at the corner of West 10th Street and Greenwich Ave. which was literally one block from where Christopher Street started, and Billy introduced me to life in the Village. Today it would seem like nothing but in 1968 it seemed to me like a whole gay world. We would literally sit, lean on park cars on the corner by his apartment building and sit there and watch gay men go by for hours and it was the most exciting thing I had ever seen! And one of the bits of discovery in the Village in ‘68 and ‘69 through Billy is that he did take me to the Stonewall, a couple of times. This was before the Stonewall riots occurred so it would have been sometime between the fall of 68 and the spring of 69 and the drinking age in NY was 18 at that time so it was totally legal for me to go into a bar and be served, and the thing is - (laughter) at this point I have only been in Julius’ once, still hadn’t been to any other gay bar - I’m a person who never liked gay bars because I always felt completely awkward in them. It’s like, how do you approach a person who you don’t know and half the people there are drunk. Anyway we go to Stonewall and of course the thing that was immediately apparent to me - besides the fact that it was, unlike Julius where there were a lot of people but it was conversation, and it was kind of quiet, Stonewall was wildly noisy and they have go-go boys who were dancing up on a platform wearing kind of nothing, you know a g-string, or just underpants, and it seemed very exciting to see and experience something like that! (laughs) As I say, we went twice and that was my experience of Stonewall, of the bar.
CG: It is funny because when I read some historical accounts that talk about Stonewall and they mention rather matter of factly that there were gogo boys because it doesn’t seem that outlandish, since the forty years that have transpired, but it must have been at the time…
JD: For me in 1968, I had never seen anything like it, or even imagined anything like it, so it was like oh my god! What’s going on here?! And yeah, it created, it helped create and sustain this atmosphere with noise and people were dancing. There were two rooms in the Stonewall. You walked in and you were in the bar and then you got to the back of the bar and you turned left and you were in this other room where there was also dancing.
CG: And um do you have any specific recollections about the first night of the riots?
JD: Well I wasn’t in New York City when they happened, I was with Billy, we were travelling in Europe that summer - one of these Europe on five dollar a day summer trips. We rented a car and were driving all around and this is really so ironic really, I learned about the Stonewall riots toward the end of the summer, when we were in Paris, so this might have been late August, maybe late August 69 and we stumbled upon, total coincidence and accident, we stumbled upon a copy of the Village Voice in Paris and it was the copy of the Village Voice, that - I can’t remember now if they covered it for one week or two - but it was a copy of the Village Voice that had a big story about the Stonewall riot and the fighting back and I can remember Billy and I reading this and thinking “oh my god, that is amazing.” Who could believe that this is happening? “I wonder what it will mean?” But it’s sort of funny I learned about the Stonewall riots about 4000 miles away from where the Stonewall riots occurred.
CG: And what do you think about the sources you cited when you wrote about Stonewall do you feel like they that the Times and Voice, that their overage, I mean they were obviously limited but how would you characterize them?
JD: Well, you know, I haven’t looked at them in a while. I mean, talk about memory - like who knows whether what I am saying now is accurate – but my memory is that the Times reporting was more detached than the Village Voice reporting. The Voice reporting was, well, it was the Village Voice. It was almost like it was on the scene. It was more dramatic, it was more in the middle of it, it was a more radical paper, it was more exciting. The Times, my memory of it was they were reporting on this very unusual incident that occurred in the Village but they are not necessarily reading a lot into it.
CG: Do you think that Stonewall and the mythology that has evolved around the uprising could have happened anywhere else in the country or is it a particularly New York phenomenon?
JD: Well it is certainly not a New York phenomenon in the sense of a bar raid and at that period in time people starting to respond to police action, because in San Francisco especially there were lots of responses in the 1960s from clergy, responses from homeless youth and street queens responding and stuff like that, so in some ways that kind of event is not unique. But I think what made it a particularly New York phenomenon and a unique phenomenon, and those two things are not necessarily the same, is that unlike today, in this world of electronic media, New York was the media capital of the United States in a way that it’s really hard to appreciate almost fifty years later. And so New York stories and New York press carried more weight and got paid more attention to.
An example of this which goes back to before Stonewall is in 1963 the New York Times had this major cover story on homosexuality and this new gay world or new gay life and over the next two to four years newspapers around the country imitate that article by doing their own expose of their gay community. You know if Denver had written the article in 1963 it would not have meant anything beyond Denver.
CG: Right
JD: And so Stonewall, I mean New York is significant because of that. It just gave it a sort of media significance - it would be noticed. But the other thing that was significant about New York is that in the context of the sixties and the escalating protests and all that is that New York is a very important center of protest in the late sixties.
It’s not just Washington D.C., but Washington D.C. and New York in terms of big protests and as a result these new radical gay activists that are responding to Stonewall in New York are more likely to be seen and encountered by other gay people at black power demonstrations and anti war demonstrations of one kind or another in New York and in other Northeastern cities. It was a place and a time.
CG: Right
JD: …and I think those two things go together. It was a place and a time that made it more likely that Stonewall would become symbolic and what it meant, what it could mean, spread.
CG: Yeah it’s interesting in another interview they discussed kind of a gay network -so not only were there kind of um media networks and counter culture network but he describes also a gay communication network where people would spread the word -there was word of mouth and it was organized in a sense and I wonder if you feel like that was going on too in other cities…
JD: Well, well I mean there’s a very developed gay world in large American cities in the late sixties. It’s true in Chicago, which doesn’t get written about as much as other places,
CG: That’s true
JD: …a really well developed network and I am talking here primarily gay male social network but one of the things that isn’t appreciated in the writing about Stonewall is that there is a very big gap in the years after Stonewall and into the seventies between that traditional gay social world and the world of gay liberation and gay and lesbian activism. They are not really the same. There is some overlap of course. There are some people who are bar folks who somehow become activist but they are a different world so they don’t actually overlap that much, because as you move into the seventies, the public face, the public figure is the gay clone.
The gay clone is almost never a gay activist. He’s just a different version of the gay guy who went to bars in the sixties. It’s just now he doesn’t have to worry as much about being gay and about being arrested because those crazy gay liberationists, which he is not, have actually succeeded in limiting police harassment. So yes there are great gay networks but they are social networks, and those social networks and the gay liberation movement are not intertwined.
CG: Um that leads a little bit to this other question that I had. Which was um the impact of Stonewall on the creation of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), do you think that it was the defining moment or part of an equation…
JD: It’s the response of individuals who were either there or who heard about it in succeeding nights to come together and create something called GLF. There were also more militant groups forming in Los Angeles and San Francisco as well, independently of Stonewall and the Gay Liberation front. The very name of it takes on significant new connotations and meaning and it spreads, awareness of it starts to spread fairly quickly through networks of activists, not so much networks of gay people. Networks of activists in which some of those activists are gay people, and now they are becoming gay liberationist because of Stonewall and what Stonewall means to them. Of course what’s really the thing that makes Stonewall so significant is less the Stonewall uprising, the Stonewall riots, the Stonewall rebellion, than the fact that a decision was made to commemorate Stonewall with a march the following year. Otherwise Stonewall could have ended up being one event among many. But it’s the fact that it becomes this excuse for a march that becomes then, you know, it’s like an historical equivalent of St. Patrick’s Day marches, and it creates visibility and community and politicization in a way such that nothing else compares with it.
CG: And as a side note did the other cities sort of push back about that or did it catch on-
JD: Well there are marches held in three cities in 1970 and after that there are more marches held every year. Every year the number of cities that commemorate Stonewall, or you don’t even have to say commemorate Stonewall, that have gay pride marches grows and actually one of the interesting things, especially as time moves on, about the gay marches - they’re not called gay or marches any more but pride parades by and large - but an amazing number of people don’t know what the parade is about. They just come out for it but they are very unaware of Stonewall.
CG: That’s interesting because I wanted to ask about LGBT identity, I wonder then if formation of an LGBT identity that reaches beyond individual communities to the whole- how does the initial uprising factor in if they are not event remembered?
Is there something else that they create, I mean it created a movement but the individual acts get lost …
JD: What Stonewall does, what Stonewall precipitates or provokes, even if Stonewall is not remembered by all of the people who are affected by it, is that it creates, it launches really what becomes a militant grassroots mass movement which hadn’t existed before, there had been activism for almost a generation before but you could hardly claim that there was in any way mass activism, like the biggest pre-Stonewall demonstration might have had several dozen people. They didn’t involve a thousand or two thousand people.
So Stonewall provoked, became the spark, that helps create the mass movement that then grows in different ways and takes lots of different directions…So even though change is in the offing, something was needed to make the jump, to make the leap and Stonewall is the thing that did it.
CG: You describe in some of the things you have written the earlier groups such as the Mattachine Society or the Daughters of Bilitis um that were active for fifteen years before, or more, before Stonewall. Do you think, maybe you can just tell me a bit of what role you feel they played in the overall movement.
JD: The earlier efforts created more visibility, they helped to create the environment for some additional media coverage even if the coverage remained within the framework of illness and deviance and stuff like that. It was by the mid sixties - the voices of gay people are actually starting to appear in important media outlets, not with any regularity or frequency but they are starting to appear. The dialogue with the medical profession began before Stonewall so I think that it is no accident that the first really big victory in the post Stonewall era, the elimination of homosexuality from the DSM as a form of mental illness in 1973, it’s no accident that that’s the first big victory because there was work being done on that beforehand. So, yes, it was important. Movements aren’t magical, they evolve and they grow under different circumstances. So that activism made a difference, but what that activism was never able to do was to create a mass movement. It always remained a relatively small number of people who were fairly isolated from the larger community.
CG: I have this overarching question about um subcultures that become mainstream -do you think it was just a matter of time for it to become accepted or was it a confluence of all these things?
JD: No, it’s not just a matter of time because that makes it sound like it’s inevitably going to happen but it only happens because people make decisions to act and because circumstances or a larger set of conditions come together that increase the likelihood that people are going to act. In the case of the US, the emergence of gay liberation and a radical lesbian feminism is so, so bound up with the larger trajectory of the 1960s in which the norm, for a significant part of the younger generation - not everybody because the sixties also created the Reaganite movement and the conservatism that we are living with today - but for a significant part of that generation of young people, young adults in the 1960’s, there was a deep, deep questioning of authority and of the way things were and at a certain point that extends to questioning the received common wisdom about homosexuality and about what it is and what it means. And then it took people making the decision and taking the risk. It’s interesting because the people by and large taking the risk are young people who feel alienated from the mainstream values of the society. They don’t care if they get arrested on demonstrations because that’s what you do, they don’t care if they get rejected by the military for being gay because they are against the war in Vietnam. Who wants to go into the military? They have a freedom to show their gayness that an older generation and many in their own generation don’t feel like they have.
Original Format
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MP3 Digital Recording
Duration
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35 minutes
Bit Rate/Frequency
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16bit/ 44.1kHz
Time Summary
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NA
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
John D'Emilio Interview
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stonewall Rebellion and the Gay Liberation movement.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Christopher Gioia
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
March 2016
Contributor
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John D'Emilio
Format
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MP3 Digital Recording
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Oral History
Description
An account of the resource
Historian John D’Emilio shares his memories of growing up in New York City in the 1960’s and being introduced to the “gay world” of the Village, including visits to The Stonewall Inn in 1968. John’s experiences reflect his upbringing and his background from an immigrant family that lived in the Bronx. His thoughts and insights are shaped by his education and study of history. John sees the significance of the Stonewall riots as wrapped up in the specific place and time, that is New York City in the late 1960’s- the media and culture capital of the world and an important locus of the protest movements and anti-establishment culture of the era. The event itself, the actual uprising has less impact in the creation of the movement than the decision by activists to commemorate the event in a protest march the following year. The Stonewall uprising is characterized as the spark that ignites a grass roots movement that builds upon the limited efforts of previous gay rights activism in the early sixties and succeeds in creating lasting victories in the quest for equality.
Source
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NA
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Christopher Gioia
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
This recording and transcript is provided for education and research purposes and should not be altered in any way. All Rights reserved, Christopher Gioia (interviewer) with permission from subject.
Relation
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NA
Identifier
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John D'Emilio 2 MP3
Coverage
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NA
GAA
Gay Activists Alliance
Gay bars
Gay Liberation
Gay Liberation Front
Gay nightlife
Stonewall
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Rebellion
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f4e4a34d4f5e0a40f644d41edf7ec5a0
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Stonewall Legacy: Activism and Identity - Oral Histories
Subject
The topic of the resource
Stonewall Rebellion and the Emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement
Description
An account of the resource
The Stonewall "Activism and Identity" oral history interviews were undertaken to document and archive the voices of those involved in the LGBT rights movement and to engage the public in the history of the movement.
Those who would like to contribute to the conversation should submit a contributor form with your thoughts and indicate whether you would like to be interviewed, send a written response or submit an image or document supporting the topic. All of the above may be published on the site in the future pending review.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Christopher Gioia
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
NA
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Christopher Gioia
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2016
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Michael Bettinger, John D'Emilio, Bruce Monroe, Felice Picano, Mark Segal, Martha Shelley,Wendell Walker, Rich Wandel
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
Copyright, Christopher Gioia, 2016
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
Digital Recordings
Language
A language of the resource
English
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Oral History
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
NA
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
NA
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
The person(s) performing the interview
Christopher Gioia
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Mark Segal
Location
The location of the interview
Via telephone: New York and Philadelphia
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Mark Segal Interview
CG: So, I’m talking with Mark Segal today and to begin with, Mark well, just to let you know, I have about five questions so you can spend as little or as much as you like on each of them, but to begin, if you can just tell me a little bit about yourself… your background.
MS: Background-- let’s see, I was brought up in Philadelphia-- at 18 moved to New York. That was May 10th 1969. When in New York I happened to meet Marty Robinson who was a member or was involved in some way shape or form in Mattachine. But his feeling was that the organization was too slow and too old, using old techniques and we had to become more radicalized in some sections. So therefore he felt that for gay liberation to uh fight and get more people empowered he created a group called the gay action group or the action group. Um I became a member of that along with Jim Owles um and Michael, who’s name I can’t remember right now who still… Michael Laverty.
CG: Right.
MS: Who later went on to find be one of the founders of Lambda legal. Um and we as the action group did one laughter we-- according to Michael and I don’t have a memory of this we had one or two meetings which accomplished nothing ah but were known for one very small action which was the night of Stonewall Marty somehow showed up with chalk later during the evening uh and had us writing on the walls and along the streets “tomorrow night Stonewall” which resulted of course in the following three nights of protest and speeches outside of stonewall which brought the birth of Gay Liberation Front.
CG: Wow, great. So when you created the gay action group that was earlier in 1969?
MS: Not me. That was Marty! I was just a member I didn’t…
CG: No I’m saying…
MS: know what I was doing. I was 18 years old um…
CG: but that was 1969 though right? That he began that…
MS: Correct.
CG: Ok interesting yeah. So um so you kind of dove right in but if you can step back a few steps and tell me what you remember about the stonewall Inn or what it was like if you had actually been to the bar before the event.
MS: Oh yeah well as an 18 year old, when you moved to, many people like myself who were living outside of New York um thought there were no gay people living anywhere else because in 1969 basically we were invisible. You didn’t see us on TV, you didn’t see us on the radio, you didn’t see us in magazines. You basically didn’t see us in books if you saw us in books, those books might have been maybe in your public library. Remember there was no internet, there were no cell phones. If you wanted information you had to go to your library or read your local newspaper, radio station or TV and we were absent from all of the above. Any books you might have found in the library usually would have been very negative about us. Um therefore people like me weren’t, as we were growing up were very deeply in the closet and people like me who went to New York did so because we didn’t want to be. We didn’t understand the reasoning behind that. I can speak for me and for me only; I didn’t think there was something wrong with me and I didn’t understand why the rest of the world thought there was something wrong with me!
So meeting Marty ah and him -- him explaining to me how we needed to fight back against oppression rang a bell! And also rang a bell in me because I come from a family that has deep roots in fighting back from my grandmother who ah basically
left Ukraine because of the pogroms, to becoming a suffragette, to joining the civil rights movement. She took me to my first civil rights demonstration when I was 13 years old so I had an affinity for the idea of fighting back and understanding oppression. So when Marty talked to me it rang true to me immediately. And You got to to remember it was the counterculture 1960s and what was happening then was women’s liberation, black liberation, um it was the high benchmark for the civil rights movements all at one time, plus the counterculture hippie influence so uh – and the people in Mattachine were people who wore dresses and suits and ties and we were the type of people who wore ripped jeans and ripped tee shirts so they didn’t speak to us. And Marty said we need ted to do something new and we weren’t sure what that was but we were -- and the idea of the action group was to discover and find what that was. Later that became… or thanks to the Stonewall and thanks to those actions GLF answered those questions. GLF probably… as I’ve said on a a number of occasions and I mentioned in my memoirs, was probably the most important LGBT organization in the history of the gay rights struggle because it did two things. First, it said we were going to define ourselves and no longer allow society to define us. And when we defined ourselves we were going to tell the masses (society) who we were rather than allow them to put their images on us. Whereas the military and police thought of us as criminals, the medical industry thought of us as psychologically damaged, churches thought of us as immoral. We fought against every single bit of that and we did it from the beginning. Um and at the same time we would during our meetings, discuss who we were, and try to figure it out we were discussing what was masculine what was feminine what were we like as men and women who just happened to be LGBT. That was the first thing we did which was extremely revolutionary. The Second thing that we did was create what we now call the LGBT community.
CG: Right
MS: That’s sort of a surprising thing that I don’t think anyone’s put into context before. Um LGBT community didn’t exist before Gay Liberation Front founded it. And what I mean by that is if you take a look at what LGBT community what LGBT life was like before GLF what you had was several gay organizations in major cities around the country being run by two or three people. And maybe they would have meetings where 10 or 20 people would show up. Um then there were the few gay bars that existed then there was maybe a newsletter and public places where gay people met. That was the extent of it. What GLF did which was totally revolutionary was we brought our community out in the streets. There was not a weeknight or a weekend night that we, meaning myself and others, were not out on Christopher street handing out leaflets. Those leaflets said come to meetings, those leaflets were medical alerts, they were alerts of the police, they were legal alerts and when we found there was a problem, when the police acted up we demonstrated against the police. We demonstrated against Village Voice. We were organized and we were public, we were no longer going to be in the closet. This was an almost a daily activity and so creating that -- on top of that we also realized there were other parts of our community that weren’t being served and we were going to serve them. So we created the nation’s first trans organization. Everyone knows the names of Sylvia and Marsha but they might no know the name of STAR, which was Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries, which was a cell or committee inside Gay Liberation Front. And some people might not realize we created the first gay youth organization gay youth NY was part of GLF We also created the first gay community center in America which was on Fourth street in NY Um and at the end of all of that we joined with Craig Rodwell who created the Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee and held what now is considered the first Gay Pride March. And that’s where you find where the culmination of everything comes together. Which as I mentioned to you earlier up until 1969, the most public organization or --demonstrations were those marches in Philadelphia held by Mattachine every July fourth from 65-69.
CG: Right July Fourth.
MS: If you look at those photos you will note that there’s not more than 100 people in those photos, mostly forty is what I counted. Most of those photos were taken by Kay Lahusen by the way um, Hah, that was a premiere demonstration once a year so you take that and then you look at the first gay pride which we helped create, Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee and you look at the New York Times reporting of that and it states that that the crowd was anywhere from between five and fifteen thousand.
CG: Yup yeah.
(Laughter)
MS: Not bad for one year! Um we took a community that literally had a gay rights struggle out of 100 gay people -- I use that figure from either that march or the two or three people in each major city around the country who were parts of Daughters of Bilitis, Mattachine -- or incorporator of all those organizations.
Of all those brave people that existed before GLF and realized that we took it and made a huge advancement in one year and not only were we one of those important organizations because we were trying to figure out who we were and what we were doing and not having any road map we were also probably the most dysfunctional organization that ever existed in the gay community. And by the away I’m very proud of that dysfunction because the results it brought were magnificent.
CG: Yeah, yeah. No, definitely and I would say that you know, there continues to be dysfunction in various organizations. But you’re right. I mean that…
MS: It worked at that time.
CG: …that sort of um – you might want to call it a zeitgeist or something like that -- an immediate and powerful, right, um, reaction? So I did want to see some or hear some specifics…
MS: How about your first question?!
(Laughs)
CG: Yeah, yeah, some specifics, I mean just briefly if you can tell me about your memories of the Stonewall Inn before that night, if you’d been inside and what kind of place was it ?
MS: Oh ok, as an 18 year old being in New York trying to escape being in the closet, I wanted to, like everybody else, immerse myself in my community and other people like me. I had no idea there was a complete group of people who got together who were just like me. So what I discovered was that they hung out basically on Christopher Street. And there were several clubs, bars around that area and if you were eighteen the way you socialized was every night you walked up and down Christopher Street and you slowly picked up friends and you got to know them and you’d sit on a step here or there and you’d talk and you’d joke and then your friends would walk up and down the street with you and then you would pop into a club and of course one of the clubs you always popped into was Stonewall. Especially if you were young, if you were a runaway, if you were trans, if you were new to the city and if you were an older man looking for a younger man to be very honest, that’s where you went. And you went there to party and you would go in there two or three times a night. I mean you would pop in and out of there literally.
CG: Yeah, yeah interesting.
MS: I mean I often hear people talk about the doorman and pol… it wasn’t as tight as people say. (laughter) I read about it and it sounds like a speakeasy from the nineteen twenties. It was a lot more open than that.
CG: Yeah so, so I know you were there that evening either inside or at Christopher Park, do you have any specific recollections about that night before, you know…
MS: Yes, yes, I do… uh …first you gotta remember I had only been in New York for about six weeks. And so I was new to all of that. I mean within six weeks I really immersed myself in it. I was on Christopher Street every night if not in Stonewall every night. So -- I don’t even remember if they were open every night. But I am sixty-six now and the memories are what they are for a sixty-six year old, but that night is very clear for anybody who was there I remember being in the bar. I remember the lights flashing. I remember asking somebody [I don’t remember who] “what does that mean?” And someone said “Oh were just going to be raided!” And everybody who was a regular there took that very nonchalant. They were just used to it cause that was part of what life was like for gay people at that point. Me on the other hand had never been through a raid. I tried to look nonchalant but I gotta tell you its not --[laughs] I was very nervous. Now I look like the guy next door. So the first thing the police did when they came through the door was they harassed the queens as much as they could. They extorted money from the people who looked like they had decent jobs and then they started carding people to let people out. I look like the, as I said, I look like the boy next door. They had no use for me. They couldn’t get money out of me. They didn’t care about people like me. So I was one of the first to be let out. Um and I was curious of course so I went across the street to watch all this. And at one point Marty came up and said, “what’s going on?” And I said, “Oh, it’s a raid.” Trying to act nonchalant again. Uh and he said oh basically, “Oh another raid this has to end.” He went and got chalk and came back and made a suggestion but that was later in the evening. As people were coming out they started forming a semi circle around the door and that eventually and as the police let out more and more people at one point the only people left in the bar or most of the people left in the bar were the people that worked there and the police. At which point people just started throwing things at the door. Um, ah [sigh] that’s basically when people started breaking things, running up and down the street. Some windows were broken. People took things out of the windows. My funniest recollection of it is someone put a dress on the Sheridan statue in Sheridan Square.
[Laughs]
MS: Um and personally the best recollection, somewhere during the middle of this… [sigh] this circus of amazing colors and lights and people running I’m just looking at the door and saying to myself somewhere thanks to my grandmother who taught me this, um “African Americans can fight for their rights, Latinos can fight for their rights, women can fight for their rights, what about us?” And I think it was -- and all of that was in a second an instant maybe-- I decided at that point um that’s
what I’d be doing the rest of my life -- and there wasn’t anything, any job description, or I didn’t even know what that meant. I just thought I’d end up being poor, um you know-- a vagrant fighting for gay liberation whatever that might be. I had no idea even what that meant. I don’t think any of us did. But thanks to people like Martha Shelley thanks to people who, in the next four nights helped to create Gay Liberation Front, we began to build that. And I was lucky enough to be a part of that. Um, so when people today ask me what University I went to my stock answer is I went to GLF. It taught me what I needed to know to further what I believed in my whole life.
CG: Yeah uh so then I mean it really was a sort of self-actualization, self-realization moment in your life. Yeah, yeah.
MS: Oh absolutely, absolutely.
CG: So I’m gonna segue, yeah go ahead…
MS: My, my total action was lock stock and barrel, was writing on the walls and streets. I didn’t throw anything I didn’t fight anybody. I think I would have been too frightened to do something like that to be honest.
CG: Right.
MS: I think of myself as a simple, if there is such a thing, soldier that night
CG: Yeah.
MS: Doing what I was told to do by people who seemed to know what they were doing.
CG: Right, right, um so I want to segue a little bit just to, since you’re on that topic almost already… of what does it-- you know overall, obviously you just explained what it means to you in terms of like, it was that birth of consciousness around the liberation-- that concept of liberation. But if you can, try to put into words what the Stonewall event means to you now, in retrospect.
MS: [Sigh] Its very difficult. I find myself in a unique position um because unlike other people that were there that evening I’ve had a constant involvement in the gay community which has never ceased from that day forward. Where others might have taken a break now and then I’ve been doing it now for forty seven years. On top of that I moved back to Philadelphia eventually in 1971 and I didn’t get involved with all the squabbles in the NY community about stonewall and I kept silent about a lot for many years, with the exception of talking to my friends Jerry Hoose, Jim Fourratt or Perry Brass. Um I didn’t make my views public because I didn’t want to get in the squabble that they were all in. I didn’t live in New York. I didn’t think it was fair of me to be involved and I didn’t want to take sides.
CG: Mhmm.
MS: And what I would like to say now very (laughs) clearly… it was a riot.
MS: Nobody was taking notes on what was happening nobody was doing attendance records. And that seems to be what everybody seems to be fighting about. Um and I think everybody’s memories are different and I accept practically or I think that everybody should accept all those memories and put them all together and you’ll get a picture of what it was really like because we each have our own perspective.
CG:Exactly, exactly.
MS: But Jerry, do you know who Jerry Hoose is?
CG: No, no I don’t. I think I’ve heard the name…
MS: Again one of the founders of Gay Liberation Front he lived on Christopher Street. Um I knew Jerry before Stonewall he had become one of my good friends. He and Doug Carver were probably the closest people I –they’re both gone now-- closest to at that point and uh Jerry and I through the years talked about it uh, he’s one of the few people in New York I would talk to about it . But interestingly enough he and I would disagree on it. Bob Kohler and I and jerry would all disagree on it. Everybody who had some involvement had a different view of it and I find that not surprising to say the least especially since we’re all, since the rest of the world has made it an image that none of us seem to-- can agree matches what we saw. I think when you’re involved in something you loose a little objectivity so that’s why -- and being a journalist I understand that to some extent uh, so I try to be as unbiased as possible. And that’s why I give what happened to me and what my feelings were and I don’t want to give other peoples feelings because that’s stealing from them and their views and I think their just as valid as mine are.
CG: Yeah, yeah absolutely. Yeah no, and I love hearing the different viewpoints and the different accounts too because its, its to me it just, I recognize that everyone, like you said everyone’s perspective is going to be different and everyone’s memory is going to focus on -- your memory focuses on a different aspect --everyone has a personal… what were you going to say?
MS: And we’re clouded by time.
CG: Exactly.
MS: Um, What I can tell you is the most interesting aspect to me right now is I’m coming to terms and still attempting to come to terms with its historical significance that story of to know that I was part of something that was historic. To know that I was part of something historic was very difficult to contemplate um and I remember when the most important part of that for me was of course President Obama making it, making that point in his second inauguration speech.
And almost like magic, the moment I saw that I Skype’d Jerry Hoose and he and I looked at each other through our computers and just started crying. And the way I described that in the book was that cry was washing away both our years of feeling we were the bastard children of civil rights struggles round the world. And that’s what Obama said. He said that our movement was equal to the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement and we had always felt like the bastard step child.
CG: Yea, yeah
MS: And that’s what that meant to me and that is a total separate thing from the way the LGBT community looks at Stonewall. I mean that way is the way the rest of society looks at Stonewall. How our community looks at Stonewall is totally different. So there’s different perspectives of how the world sees it and how the LGBT community sees it. And therefore each of us who were there are dealing with all those emotions and we’re dealing with how other people view it and how we view it and so when someone asks us about it-- we try [at least I do] to give them the best concept I can and no matter what I say its not going to match what their feelings or their image of it is. Um…
CG: Yeah
MS: I hope that answers your question!
CG: Yeah no, it does it actually even begins to answer what usually is my last question which is: what does Stonewall represent to the community in terms of identity. And I think you hit on something there too that it – there’s sort of a sense of people’s hopes, you know are tied up in it too, you know? So the idea that someone like Marsha Johnson or someone um like Sylvia Rivera were um you know such, such important factors in what took place or in what took place after or in the creation of GLF or their participation becomes…
MS: Can I touch that for a minute?
CG: Yeah.
MS: Cause that’s very important.
So, some of my fellow GLF people have stated uh that Marsha and Sylvia were not there. Umm, now as I said to you, no one was taking attendance. Now, and I cannot remember whether or not they were there or not. But I don’t think it really matters.
For one very simple reason um regardless of if they were there or not what they did in Gay liberation Front and what everybody did in Gay Liberation Front…
CG: Right, right.
MS: throughout the next year and a half is probably more important than Stonewall…
CG: Right.
MS: …and I know that might shock people to hear that but that’s where self identity came from…
CG: Yes.
MS: That’s where community came from…
CG: Yes
MS: That’s where the first trans organization came from and it was Sylvia and Marsha who did that as part of GLF.
CG: Right.
MS: And if they had, I mean there was no organizing done at that first night of Stonewall…
CG: Right.
MS: It was all after that and that evolved into GLF and that created everything that we have today.
CG: Exactly, yeah so right I mean it wasn’t like…
MS: I don’t need to…
CG: People mis-under…
MS: Argue whether they were there or not, yes they were there. Absolutely.
[Laughter]
CG: Exactly, yeah um you know cause they became-- whether they were there or not, its kind of almost irrelevant. Right?
Because as you’re saying, I mean its interesting to hear too it was a little-- it was chaos. It’s hard…
MS: It was a riot! You’re not taking attendance!
[Laughter]
CG: Its hard to get a pin-- to get a handle though on what really transpired and I don’t think I’m gonna have any allusions that I’m gonna-- that any body can do that.
MS: People ask me, because I was in the gay militants, there was all this factual stuff that I was there and people keep saying to me,“ok who was there? You tell me, was that person there?” and my reaction to that is: I had only been in New York for six weeks I was just beginning to know people. How would I know?
CG: Yeah, yeah and also in a crowd….
MS: I mean Jerry Hoose-- you might-- although he’s not here anymore, Jerry might have been able to answer that.
CG: And also, standing in a crowd of 300 people, you know, what’s your vantage point going to be? Its going to be your immediate…
MS: And that’s a myth.
CG: Oh?
MS: Ok, There you go.
CG: What?
MS: That’s a perfect example of why any of us who were there, when we tell our story it doesn’t always meet the expectation of the audience we speak before.
CG: Ok.
MS: So let’s take a look at the bar and by the numbers…
CG: Yes.
MS: This is kind of important. So if you take a look at the numbers of people that could -- could fit in the bar if it was absolutely packed that night --what somewhere between 3 and 500 I would guess at the most? Ok, so a lot of those people were what I would call suit and tie guys. They weren’t wearing suits and ties inside the bar but those kinds of guys that had a good job during the day. So any time-- the minute they got out of the bar they ran. The only people who stayed on the streets were people like me who didn’t have jobs, a place to live, the people who were the bottom of the LGBT community basically um and that wasn’t three hundred.
CG: Right, right. Ok.
MS: It was a lot…
CG: Less.
MS: Lower than that. My assumption of it would be 1 to 150 but that’s an old, old memory. And I wouldn’t even take my guess at that.
CG: Ok yeah, I mean its still a big, a sizeable crowd nevertheless.
MS: Yeah
CG: So um if you want to um just wrap up if -- I don’t know if there any remarks you want to make about the legacy of you know the movement, maybe really just talk a little bit about the legacy of GLF, although you did talk about it initially. It um…
MS: I think one of the issues that rings home for me very true-- as GLF became very successful in motivating our community for change and liberation or revolution (whatever word you want to use) other people thought, “oh this is going to be popular maybe I’ll get involved.” And then those people at one point decided we in GLF were going a little too far by trying to include ourselves with --and this goes back to what today is. We wanted to include all other movements as part of our movement and be interlocked with the women’s movement, the black movement the Latino movement, so we started to be supportive and work with black and brown people, with women’s groups and eventually that got to be a little too much for the people I call… the people that wear those shirts with the polo players and the alligator on them.
[Laughter]
MS: Uh they didn’t want us to be involved. They wanted to show the part of our community that wasn’t trans, that wasn’t young people, wasn’t working class. They wanted to show an image of middle class men and women who were just like the guy next door and hence came Gay Activists Alliance and later to be succeeded by the Human Rights Campaign… I’m sorry the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force which was founded by Bruce Voeller. Um and they were going to be the most professional and they were the first uh, pay for gay in the country.
CG: But I…
MS: And so, where are we at today? Today we are again fighting that same exact thing. When I spoke at the committee that was organizing the Democratic National Committee here a bunch of young gay people who are part of the organizing (literally putting the Democratic National Convention together here in Philadelphia) and for Gay Pride I spoke to that whole group-- and it wasn’t just gay people-- it was that whole Democratic National Committee, um but a gay woman, using the question and answer section, an African American out woman said, “you know I’m sort of torn. I want to work with Black Lives Matter yet I want to be a gay activist.” And I looked at her and I said, “why cant you do both?”
CG: Do both. Yeah.
MS: I think that would be great. You can bring liberation to both groups of people. To non people of color in the gay rights struggle you can show them how important you are and how empowering that would be if we had African Americans-- a larger portion in that struggle, and in the Black Lives Matter you can make them realize how important inclusion is of LGBT people.
CG: Exactly.
MS: It’s a wonder-- the cross over is wonderful!
CG: Exact… yeah we really need to focus on this one word…
MS: Inclusion.
CG: No I was thinking…
MS: Diversity and inclusion are two of the most powerful words.
They existed from 1969 to 1971 and then our community once again reverted.
CG: I was also thinking of solidarity.
MS: Yes.
CG: I sent an email to my professor and he always closes with, each email with “Solidarity”. You know?
MS: And he’s right, one of -- one of the funnier things for me and -- and writing the memoirs brought back a lot of memories and the research was sort of a surprise, and one of the things that amazes me to this date, uh is people in my area think of me as an establishment business type. That delights me to no end because my positions have never changed. They-- my political positions are still the same. Um but, so when someone does that and I look at them and I go do you realize I marched with The Black Panthers? And they’re like totally perplexed. It’s like the dog who hears a sound and doesn’t understand and tilts its head.
[Laughs ]
CG: Yes, don’t judge a book by the cover right?
MS: Correct.
CG: Well Mark, thank you, I know you are a busy man and I actually have something as well…
MS: Do I get to see a sample of this thing that you’re doing some time?
CG: Yes absolutely!
Original Format
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Digital Recording
Duration
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35 minutes
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16 bit/44.1 kHz
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NA
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Mark Segal Interview
Subject
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First hand account of the night of the Stonewall rebellion and the genesis of the Gay Liberation Front.
Description
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Mark Segal, journalist and the founder of Philadelphia Gay News discusses the night of the Stonewall riot and the creation of the Gay Liberation Front as it relates to the broader gay rights movement.
Creator
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Christopher Gioia
Source
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NA
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Christopher Gioia
Date
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February 2017
Contributor
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Mark Segal
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This recording and transcript is provided for education and research purposes and should not be altered in any way. All Rights reserved, Christopher Gioia (interviewer) with permission from subject.
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NA
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MP3 Digital Recording
Language
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English
Type
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Oral History
Coverage
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NA
GAA
Gay Activists Alliance
Gay bars
Gay Liberation Front
Mark Segal
Stonewall
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Rebellion
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d0b6dec5d34a82cd4516d3b4529ff914
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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The Stonewall Legacy: Activism and Identity - Oral Histories
Subject
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Stonewall Rebellion and the Emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement
Description
An account of the resource
The Stonewall "Activism and Identity" oral history interviews were undertaken to document and archive the voices of those involved in the LGBT rights movement and to engage the public in the history of the movement.
Those who would like to contribute to the conversation should submit a contributor form with your thoughts and indicate whether you would like to be interviewed, send a written response or submit an image or document supporting the topic. All of the above may be published on the site in the future pending review.
Creator
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Christopher Gioia
Source
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NA
Publisher
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Christopher Gioia
Date
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2016
Contributor
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Michael Bettinger, John D'Emilio, Bruce Monroe, Felice Picano, Mark Segal, Martha Shelley,Wendell Walker, Rich Wandel
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Copyright, Christopher Gioia, 2016
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Digital Recordings
Language
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English
Type
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Oral History
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NA
Coverage
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NA
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Christopher Gioia
Interviewee
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Michael Bettinger
Location
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Via Telephone: New York and San Francisco
Transcription
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Michael Bettinger Interview
CG: Michael first of all can you just tell me a little about yourself?
MB: Uh let’s see, I’m now seventy years almost seventy-one. I lived in New York City the first thirty years of my life and San Francisco the last forty years of my life. I’ve been a psychotherapist, a marriage and family therapist actually. I’m probably one of the pioneers of what’s known as queer family therapy. Which basically is just being able to include the reality of LGBT people in what is thought of as family and such. There was incredible ignorance when I started this back over forty years ago. And about twelve years ago I retired. I decided I had enough. I’ve been enjoying myself since having an active retirement doing a bunch of things that I enjoy. And uh, what else would you like to know?
CG: Well I mean, we are going to talk about the past of course, we’re going to talk about the late sixties and seventies in New York, um so maybe you can also tell me a little bit about what New York, the Village, was like in the late sixties and if you remember anything about the Stonewall Inn, as a bar, in particular.
MB: Well I’ve never been a bar person. I’ve never actually been in the Stonewall bar. But I have a wonderful story about the weekend -- the night and the weekend of the Stonewall Riots. Probably a story I haven’t seen anywhere else. I actually listened to it on the radio both on Friday night and Saturday night. Friday night Saturday morning and Saturday night Sunday morning, so here’s the story:
Well, lets see, I’m about uh, how old am I at the time? This is June 69 so I’m 23 years old. I’m living in Brooklyn. I’m still living in my parents home and I’ve gone out on Friday night as I often do uh, came back and was listening to the radio. There’s a radio station in New York you’re probably familiar with it, WBAI. It’s a Pacifica Station, Pacifica Foundation station, uh very left leaning and this is 1969 the height of the Vietnam war, everything else is going on. It’s a very difficult time. So I’ve been listening to WBAI regularly for a few years at this point. There were two late night talk show hosts, uh Steve Post and Bob Fass. Both of them had a midnight to six AM talk show where people would call up and ya know, talk about various topics. One of them had Monday through Friday; the other had Saturday and Sunday night. I forget which had which. I think Steve Post was Monday through Friday and Bob Fass was Saturday night and Sunday night but it could have been reversed. So it’s about one thirty in the morning and I’m listening to I think it was Steve Post but it could’ve been the other one. Maybe a little later, maybe about 2 o’clock in the morning and someone calls who identifies himself as someone living across Sheridan Square from the Stonewall Inn. And he basically starts the uh, the call in thing, “you’ll never guess what’s going on here right now.” And he has a direct view form his window of the Stonewall Inn and starts describing in detail exactly what’s going on. Now I don’t remember all the exact words he said but he was on the phone for hours and I was listening for hours. I stayed up way, way, way later than I normally would have. It, I was just fascinated by this. I was in the process I guess you would say, of still coming out. I still had not fully owned my gay identity although I had played with guys since I was teenager. I also had a girlfriend at that time. Still a little bit confused, let’s say trying to figure this all out. I was very, very aware of all the developments in the mid sixties and the late sixties with the gay rights movement. I was aware of the Mattachine Society, I was aware of the gay people at Columbia, they had made news in the late sixties before Stonewall, they had started organizing. So when I started hearing on the radio just what was happening that night and the guy described it, you know a gay bar. I don’t remember all the exact detail that he said; uh I was locked to the radio. Now I’ve always been a lifelong motorcyclist. I had a motorcycle at that time in the garage I was in Brooklyn. Uh … I thought to myself, uh do I want to go and take a look and see what was going on? I could simply, cause it was a nice night, I could simply go out and just get on the motorcycle and ride to the Village which would be about half an hour’s ride from my house. And then I thought about it and thought, no this is a riot going on.
I personally don’t like riots. By the way I will tell you a story later about the Dan White -the Dan White night riots in San Francisco, which is a very similar story. But I decide not to attend there personally, that riots are dangerous places. But I was utterly fascinated by this so I listened for several hours and went to sleep. The next morning I got up and thought it would be all over the news. We got the New York Times delivered at that point. I didn’t find anything in the Times. I didn’t really find anything on TV about it. I understand there was something in the Daily News or New York Post at that time, but I’m not really sure of that. So I went about my day on Saturday, normal, and then on Saturday night again, back home, turn on the radio listen to WBAI. Again, after midnight and this fellow calls in again and for hours afterwards, again describes all the activities; the masses of people, the cops moving here and there and just what is going on. And again I make the decision not to go into, into Manhattan, not to take a look at it, but I was just fascinated by it.
Of course on Sunday was the first Gay rights march and that did make the news on Sunday evening and there was a small article in the Times about it. But that’s basically my Stonewall Riots story that. I listened to most of it on the radio. Which WBAI, which I’ve not seen anywhere else noted or whatever so you may have a little bit of information there that seems to have slipped by historians.
CG: Yeah, yeah, no, this is fantastic I was just looking up as you were talking to see that WBAI does, well, have a digital archive but I’m sure its all for just the last ten years or so, but I’m definitely gonna have to reach out to them and try to find a maybe a transcript or something of that show. That would be amazing…
MB: There were two shows, both, well one was actually very early on Saturday morning it was a midnight to six am show and the other was very early on Sunday morning so you can figure out what the dates were uh regarding Friday night Saturday morning Sunday morning.
CG: Yeah, absolutely, now you talk about, you mentioned that Sunday was more of a march. I’m just curious why you characterize it as a march cause I’ve never um, how was it described?
MB: It was a protest march uh it was a lot of people massing and I think they walked up either 5th, 6th or Seventh Avenue. I’m not sure. Just protesting what had been happening in the Village. I mean you know the history of the- at the time of the Stonewall Riots there were only four gay bars left in all of Manhattan, it was all corrupt it was all being paid off by the police, all this, the police were being paid off. This is documented elsewhere and a lot of the people were just totally fed up so there was this first march up, protest march up I think it was Fifth Avenue but I could be wrong on that part.
CG: I think it was more, I think it was Seventh. If, cause I’ve heard about protest organizing, but around um, in the West Village between, Seventh Avenue between Bleeker up. So maybe that’s the…
MB: That sounds, it probably was up Seventh Avenue given where the Stonewall is and given the heart of the Village and everything it was probably up Seventh Avenue but that did make the news on Sunday evening and there was a small article in the Times I think on Monday morning about it.
CG: Mhmm, yeah that I can also hopefully find, although the only thing I’ve found so far is a tiny little blurb (in the Times) about Friday night Saturday morning or really Saturday morning, um the um the next question really for you specifically is um Id like to hear a little more about how then you got involved with the gay liberation organizations.
MB: Ok well out of Stonewall came the Gay Liberation Front, which was a multi issued organization. They were against the Vietnam War, pro feminism, against racism, for gay rights and like most multi issue organizations it was very chaotic. I was never involved with them but I was following this, all the news that I could possibly gather you know continuously. About six months later I saw that a group had broken away and formed the Gay Activists Alliance, which was going to be a single issue organization. Only one issue mattered and that was what they called gay rights at the time. Again I followed that for several years this is over the course of my fully accepting my gayness and lets see in the Spring of 1972 is the first time that I went to a GAA meeting, uh it was at the Firehouse which I think the address was 99 Wooster Street in Manhattan just a little south of Houston, Soho district. And uh Rich Wandel, who you interviewed recently was the president at the time. And I was hooked. I was immediately hooked. Suddenly there was a place for my activism. Now by this time also my career had started taking form. I had been, I graduated college in 1967, the height of the Vietnam War. I was still not really ready to come out publicly to deal with my gayness, although that would have given me a military exemption but I was also interested in teaching and I decided to become a teacher mostly- not mostly but really specifically, teachers got a draft deferment. And there was no way that I was gong to take part in the Vietnam war. I though it was a disaster from the beginning. History has later shown that to be true. Vietnam is now one of our major trading partners which is always, you know, like a joke to me. Uh, so I went back then, in late 69 they switched from the regular draft system to a lottery system and I got an extremely high draft number. I think it was 271 so I gave up my teaching deferment and went into the draft pool for the first year and of course didn’t get drafted which put me like on the bottom of the list. It was a complicated system I don’t want to get into all the details here but it meant basically that I would never get drafted. So at that point I quit my job as a teacher in NYC uh, applied for graduate school in counseling and started attending NYU uh in June, July of 1970… July of 1970 to get my masters in counseling. Uh this put me in the heart of Greenwich Village you know, the time of great activism in the LGBT community and so, ah there were always stories and I was pretty aware of what was happening at NYU and in the Village in general. I’m still living in Brooklyn at this time although I now have my own apartment in Brooklyn. I graduate in June of 71, I get my masters degree and I go back to work for the New York City school system first as a substitute teacher and then I get a full time teaching position which was also, which was a teaching guidance counselor position. The reason I’m saying all this is I started what really became a lot of my life’s work and that is straightening out the small part of the mental health profession to which I was most attached on the issues of homosexuality, gay relationships etc. So when I joined GAA in the spring of 1972 I had already been doing uh as far as classmates and fellow professionals, some work -at that time homosexuality was still listed as a mental illness in the diagnostic and statistical manual of uh mental- DSM whatever it is. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness or something or other- it was still listed as a mental illness, it was horrendous. And point was that most of my colleagues at that time in the mental health profession really didn’t know that it wasn’t a mental illness.
So most of my first work as a psychotherapist, was, aside from my clients, but my work with my colleagues for most of the 1970 ‘s was trying to straighten them out on the idea that homosexuality is not a mental illness. The next year after Rich Wandel served as president, Bruce Voeller, Dr. Bruce Voeller, he’s a biologist, became the president of the organization and there were other mental health professionals involved in GAA at the time trying to get the American-- there are two organizations-- one the American Psychiatric Association, they’re the one’s that control the DSM and the other one was the American Psychological Association. They’re both called APA and I think the first one we tried to or that actually was successful, I think it was the American Psychiatric Association was holding their meeting in Hawaii and there was already a movement to declassify mental illness, homosexuality as a mental illness and GAA sent a representative to them. I remember contributing some money to the pool cause we had to raise money in order to send the person there but there were already a lot of other people involved in this. Well the APA did change it form being a mental illness but they still left in something called ego dystonic homosexuality, which allowed mental health professionals to continue to treat gay people as if they were sick. It was a compromise. It had to be done at the time. It was later changed. It was removed but for most of the 1970s most of my work was in trying to really educate my peers, my colleagues, homosexuality was not a mental illness. That’s the 1970’s. In 1980 I decided to go back to school to get my doctorate in clinical psychology and at this time homosexuality is well established as, you know, not being a mental illness. It was finally delisted, ego dystonic homosexuality, I think it was DSM 3 that was removed as a- or 3R, one of the two, as a classification. So, but by the 1980’s I’m going back to get my doctorate in clinical psychology but its with a specialization in family clinical psychology. I’ve been a family therapist all my life, which is the whole spectrum of mental health, uh there’s a number of sub groupings even among psychotherapists. There are the Freudians, although they did not call themselves that at the time, but the ones that came out for the psychoanalytic, psycho-dynamic tradition, that still had extremely negative views on homosexuality. I couldn’t imagine going to school back with them and having them deal with all that. A lot of psychoanalytic institutions at this time would never allow a person who was gay to train to be a psychoanalyst.
CG: Yeah I was going to ask you.
MB: I don’t need to go into all the details but they were really nuts about this. So I found a school called the California Graduate School of Marital and Family Therapy, its now part of Argosy University, who had a, what’s known as a family therapy approach to mental health. Its based on something called the growth model rather than the medical model which was what most of mental health was using. So as I’m going back and studying family therapy I realize most of my colleagues have absolutely no idea as to what homosexuals, they had no idea that homosexuals were not mentally ill, but that they also formed stable healthy affirmative relationships. So, uh into a number of the classes in which I was studying I kept inviting guest speakers, ya know mostly friends people I knew who were not only in one on one relationships, there was one class I invited this one fellow he was a social worker, a colleague of mine but he had been in a triad relationship. These other two fellas had a relationship for 12 years. He joined them. He was twelve years later, eventually 12 years after that, one of the fellas died and then he died of aids so it all- but for 12 year at a time these three functioned as a family unit. So most of the 1980s for me was devoted to just trying to get my colleagues to understand that gay people not only weren’t mentally ill, but formed stable, long term, healthy, affirmative relationships.
Edited -
CG: A curiosity I have about Stonewall and the phenomenon that grew out of it is about how previous events happened in San Francisco and Los Angeles and other places where there were, you know, altercations with police that led to disruptions and- of different gay establishments, um but I’m always, I’m always curious to hear from my interviewees what was different about New York that really pushed the Stonewall incident in the direction that it went to become this turning point?
MB: Alright, my belief and view it was only serendipity. It was a very hot night a very warm night that June night. For what its worth Judy Garland was buried that afternoon. Uh, she was very popular in the community and I think it was just serendipity that the police uh, decided to raid Stonewall that night. You can read all about the history, the payoffs and exactly how it happened. It could just as easily have happened in San Francisco I think. In San Francisco we had several events, the Compton Cafeteria riots and there was another riot that happened a few years before. There was a lot of activity going on, you know just below the surface level of you know what happened with Stonewall. The fact that it happened in New York and Stonewall, was a seminal moment -- it ‘s like Rosa Parks or a lot of other things. It just changed forever the nature of how everyone was looking on this and everyone knew it was time. And the movement picked up allover the country and all over the world really started, but it could have happened in San Francisco just as easily. There was a lot of activism going on here around the same issue too. So my belief, it was just serendipity.
CG: Mhmm, now… yeah, yeah.
MB: But it was the Vietnam War, it was what was called women’s liberation it was the racism going on, the civil rights movement. It was uh, you know, gay people decided, hey we have the exact same issues.
CG: Yeah, it was a critical mass of things that all converged. Uh, when you were talking earlier you mentioned briefly, earlier something that happened in San Francisco uh…
MB: Yeah, that’s my aversion to riots uh the night of the Dan White decision there were riots at City Hall. Several cop cars were burned, an ex boyfriend calls me up “hey look, come on down, look what’s going on here… cop cars are burning, there’s rioting going on in the Castro.” The cops did riot in the Castro and again I have the motorcycle downstairs in the garage and I ask myself “do I want to go see this?” I can get on the bike, I can just stay on the periphery. No, I do not like riots, is what I thought. I’ll pass on this. I’ll read about tomorrow morning in the newspaper.
CG: Tell us more about, what was the Dan White decision?
MB: Ok you don’t know about Dan White. Let’s see, what exact year was it, the year before Dan White was a supervisor on the San Francisco city council, which is called the board of supervisors. He represented a working class district. He was a very troubled guy he ran for supervisor, which was a part time job and paid very little but had a lot of political prestige and then he was Diane Feinstein’s sort of protégé. She was out of the country visiting China on some trade mission. She was the president of the board of supervisors at the time and while she was out of the country he decided he couldn’t take it anymore, the financial situation, so he resigned from the board of supervisors. And mayor George Moscone, uh it was up to him to appoint somebody else to be the new supervisor. Ah, Diane comes back, he tries to withdraw his resignation. George Moscone says, no you can’t withdraw your resignation. You resigned, you’re no longer a member here, I’m going to appoint somebody else. This is the politics part. There were two factions and Moscone was --didn’t agree with White on a lot of issues. Dan White’s main opposition on the board of supervisors was Harvey Milk. And Harvey was very good with words and everything and sort of made a fool of Dan White on a number of occasions. Not really in a bad way, not like Donald trump does or anything but like subtle twists of words and anything. So Dan White decides since he cant be supervisor he went a little crazy, snuck into City Hall through an open window, hidden through the metal detectors with a gun, came and assassinated George Moscone, walked across the hall a few doors down, walked in on Harvey Milk and assassinated him, then leaves.
CG: I had no idea. His name [laughs] has kind of been lost in history. I had no idea he was the assassin. Sorry, go ahead.
MB: Yeah so Dan White was caught, he was thrown into jail. He was charged with murder. He was only convicted I think of manslaughter. He had what was called a Twinkie defense, saying that he had been eating only Twinkies and Coca Cola for days before and that had driven him mad.
CG: That’s…
MB: Eventually Dan White commits suicide-- gets out of jail and commits suicide but that’s how Diane Feinstein gets to become mayor, by George Moscone being assassinated. Uh and Harvey Milk was also assassinated and the night that the conviction just of manslaughter came down there was at first a demonstration in front of City Hall which turned into a riot in which seven police cars were set on fire and the police as a revenge got in other cars, drove a mile and a half to the Castro and basically rioted in the Castro destroying a bar called the Elephant Walk attacking a lot of patrons there. It was really one of the ugliest chapters in San Francisco police history. This was very intentional on their part. Not one of them was ever prosecuted for this. A whole bunch of them should have been thrown in jail for assault-- for whatever the charges were but none of that was ever done.
CG: Wow, unbelievable. Yeah, I mean I knew about that, you know the aftermath, but I never realized that the police had actually targeted pretty much basically, they weren’t even really seeking retribution against those who were protesting at- by City Hall.
MB: Yeah, there was nothing going on in the Castro that night. The police got in their cars and drove to the Castro and rioted there.
CG: Wow, unbelievable, um yes, so you have good reason for aversion to riots. (Laughs)
MB: Yes, yes, I avoided that riot. I’ve had several minor situations roughly similar to that. No, my mother did not raise a fool. She was a bit paranoid in a lot of ways, which was her problem, but uh she said basically, avoid riots and situations like that and wars and situations in -- where people do crazy things.
CG: Now, but I know that you did participate in, well not really in crazy things, but activism that uh -- I think you had mentioned to me once before in an email about Zaps. Can you tell me what a, what…
MB: Uh for a short time, well in GAA we had these things called zaps which you can probably read about.
CG: Yes, yes…
MB: They were basically, were quick spontaneous demonstrations with some sort of little twists to them. When Bruce Voeller was the president of the organization, GAA uh, they zapped the taxi commissioner. The taxi commissioner had decide that it was ok for gay people to drive uh, drive taxi cabs, but they had to be interviewed by a psychiatrist at least once a year and to get a note from the psychiatrist to say that they were mentally stable enough to drive a taxi cab. This was the rules at this time, this was 71, 72 -- no maybe it was 72. Now, Dr. Bruce Voeller was a biologist. He has a lab coat, white. Oh one of the early things that made GAA successful was they spent $2000 on a Sony reel to reel video recorder. This was brand new. No one, you know videotape was brand new for television. Sony had come out with what was essentially a portable (but it was a luggable). It was about eighteen or twenty pounds. And it was reel to reel but you could record things. So a zap was something like this: at a certain moment Bruce Voeller and several others including the ones with the video equipment just walked into the outer office of the taxi commissioner and said we’re here to interview the taxi commission to see if the stress of being a taxi, the stress of being a heterosexual is harm… interfering with his ability to be a taxi commissioner and just walked into his office. Now what normally would have happened at this time was that everyone would have gotten beaten up except that the videotape was running. And everyone was already on it. You can see the people they’re about to attack and then they see this and they freeze. And they stop. At the exact same time a news conference is being held downstairs on the street with all the news agencies (and they buy up anything LGBT related at this time). They’re just looking for these stories they are sensational. So there’s a news conference going on downstairs explaining what is going on upstairs. That’s a zap. For a short time in 1974 I became what was known as the Zap Meister. Uh which the women later criticized as it was a male term, Meister. Changed the term to ah, political action coordinator, I think, or something like that. I really didn’t get to do-- organize a lot at that time because that was also about the time that GAA was falling apart. Eventually there was a fire at the firehouse- oh before that Bruce Voeller had resigned as president to form the National Gay Task Force, which later became the National Lesbian Gay Task Force. So, and this was going to be a federal, countrywide organization so that left a vacuum in GAA. I don’t think they ever recovered from that and the organization started to go into a decline and then there was the fire at the firehouse eventually, which was the organization’s headquarters. That ended that. So GAA went on for a few more years but they really were ineffective and other organizations took their place: The National Gay Task Force later the National Lesbian Gay Task Force. But there were also other local organizations, so I didn’t have a lot to do as a Zap Meister. But I did have the title for a while. We raised a couple of small things. Nothing of a big nature, like the taxi commissioner. That was just absolute beauty. And those tapes by the way would be run again and again. GAA made its money on the Saturday night dances
at the firehouse. It only cost two bucks to get in but over the course of the evening they would have a thousand people in and out. So we had an income of about $2000 a week, which was a hundred thousand a year. In these dollars today that would probably be about seven, eight hundred thousand dollars a year, something like that, to play with. So we were flush. The video equipment kept getting stolen so we kept buying more, uh some of those tapes probably exist. Someone has them in storage somewhere, but videotape like that also doesn’t hold up too well so maybe they don’t exist. But there was enough money to do a lot of organization like that.
CG: Yeah that’s amazing… Uh Michael, you’re still there?
MB: Yeah I’m here.
CG: Ah yeah, that’s amazing that you had, yeah, that equipment, which was state of the art at the time. But if no one transferred it, you know, it wouldn’t be readable or viewable maybe, even if the actual physical tapes survived, you know?
MB: Well if anyone has the tapes someone has an old Sony video recorder player. I’m sure they can get it transferred to digital but who knows what exists and where it is.
CG: Um, so I do have to wrap up because I have to be somewhere else. Earlier you mentioned your take on Stonewall in terms of -- as it relates to being a New York-- or as something that could have happened anywhere in the US, but just to sum up if you can just try to articulate a little bit about what you think Stonewall means and represents to the community.
MB: Well it’s become larger than life. Its like Rosa Parks, you now her refusing to walk to the back of the bus was just one little small thing but you look back now and you can see that is where it all changed. The whole course of history changed at that point. Everyone sort of realized the time for this had come. And I think it was the same thing with Stonewall. There’s a number of you know, small incidents, that in and of them selves shouldn’t have been very important but for some reason galvanized everyone and it clearly became an issue.
CG: Exactly. And you were saying that you felt that it reached throughout the country, so, not just the coasts and not just the big gay centers. When you moved to San Francisco you felt like it had already, you know, there was whole other level of activism going on there. Right?
MB: There already was. In 1969 you had the first march in New York City. The next June on the equivalent Sunday you had the first march in San Francisco and probably other cities. San Francisco, uh for a long time called it the gay freedom march or -not the gay rights march for some reason it was -they came up with, but that was 1970 and I was travelling back and forth to San Francisco in those years, my brother lived here, still lives here, so I was aware of what was going on here. It was a vibrant scene both sexually and people-- it was the 1970’s. I’ve had younger people now come up to me, you know with the understanding that New York and San Francisco were like Berlin or Paris in the twenties and ask me what was it like both politically, and the sexual scene and the party scene. It was a very special decade. It was a special place and time, both San Francisco and New York.
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36.46 minutes
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Michael Bettinger Interview
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Discussion of the early gay rights movement and the legacy of Stonewall.
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Michael Bettinger, a pioneer in queer family therapy, discusses his experience with the Stonewall rebellion and the Gay Liberation movement as well as his memories of activism and milestones in gay history in both New York and San Francisco.
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Christopher Gioia
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Christopher Gioia
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September 2016
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Michael Bettinger
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This recording and transcript is provided for education and research purposes and should not be altered in any way. All Rights reserved, Christopher Gioia (interviewer) with permission from subject.
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MP3 Digital Recording
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English
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Oral History
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Michael Bettinger MP3.mp3
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Dan White Night Riot
GAA
Gay Activists Alliance
Gay Liberation
Queer Family Therapy
Stonewall
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Rebellion
Zaps