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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
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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
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Oral History
Identifier
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NA
Coverage
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NA
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Interviewer
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Christopher Gioia
Interviewee
The person(s) being interviewed
Mark Segal
Location
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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
Bit Rate/Frequency
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16 bit/44.1 kHz
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
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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
Publisher
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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
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English
Type
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Oral History
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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
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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
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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
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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
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English
Type
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Oral History
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NA
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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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MP3 Digital Recording
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36.46 minutes
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16 bit/ 44.1 kHz
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NA
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Title
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Michael Bettinger Interview
Subject
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Discussion of the early gay rights movement and the legacy of Stonewall.
Description
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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.
Creator
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Christopher Gioia
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NA
Publisher
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Christopher Gioia
Date
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September 2016
Contributor
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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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NA
Format
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MP3 Digital Recording
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English
Type
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Oral History
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Michael Bettinger MP3.mp3
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NA
Dan White Night Riot
GAA
Gay Activists Alliance
Gay Liberation
Queer Family Therapy
Stonewall
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Rebellion
Zaps
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25703/archive/files/cb8946a7febd8d7fcc2688a74262de7e.mp3?Expires=1712793600&Signature=EzdJxVTrJ7vSaJr4eqI5-cdtKDSE%7ELAB4rY7bnoUTNqlucwHzP1W9o30A-EyljOyGHK2f5Q0ZYMzKKNB%7E%7EAzxFQJI1Dz%7EkHCR3j5HyQA1iXlxHN3iTLiPu6eF8CDlEF9uRlODVivHU5GrytDoI3AmFDqnhj2615Rz8Ga1KaUhMsAgZc8rhajSTqniwdYfcNohWEcHb8JADho9aD-iemuURlEyMd5OqfdxZ6sRoH3VO6qGOYqIEh7%7EkZ-A69CfYab2EE0pexD5mDwJaWf%7EmLTLE3psOVfGfTXkyxXu-xHPCs3spLi7s38XdzSqp9bApv8XWusKPJ0A-MFI589fKn8rA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
0b404b5491c53e97541667b2b09621b2
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
Rights
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Copyright, Christopher Gioia, 2016
Format
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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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Christpher Gioia
Interviewee
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Rich Wandel
Location
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The LGBT Community Center National History Archive, New York City.
Transcription
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Rich Wandel Interview
CG: To begin I just want to ask you about some details about yourself, your background…
RW: Uh I was born? No, for the purposes of what we are talking about here, probably, I was not at Stonewall. I came out and came into the movement the following year. I am the second president of the Gay Activists Alliance in New York- for the past, well starting in 1989, planning and opening in 1990, I am the founder and archivist of the LGBT Community Center National History Archive. What else do you want to know?
CG: Uh, that’s sounds good. Uhm, well just for, out of curiosity you moved here in 1970?
RW: Oh no, I was raised in Queens.
CG: Oh you were.
RW: I was not born here; we came back here when I was one year old or something like that. I went away to college came back. I returned back from college, which in my case was a monastery, uh in 19…
CG: See there’s more interesting things under the surface.
RW: Uh, yeah 1970.
CG: Ok, native New Yorker, so that’s good, that always pleases me. So tell me a little bit about what you remember --if you remember the Stonewall Inn prior to the rebellion.
RW: I was never there until after it was closed, till after the rebellion.
CG: Ok
RW: I was there once afterwards when the GAA circa 1970 was looking for a place to make a headquarters. One of the places we looked at was the now closed Stonewall.
Stonewall of course had two sides to it right? Physically, which were still intact as one piece at that time (since then they’ve been divided) at that time one of the most interesting things we found was, we found a piece of stationery on the floor among the debris, as it were, which had a list of advisors or something like that --a board or list of advisory board, I forget the exact title which included the name of the then current state assemblyman from that area by the name of Anthony Passanante. I don’t know exactly what that means but I found it interesting.
GAA did not use it- it was not sufficient size we wouldn’t pursue it further.
CG: Right and then they did find the space- was it in Soho?
RW: The firehouse in Soho on Wooster Street. 99 Wooster Street.
CG: I think the Stonewall actually became a Chinese restaurant didn’t it in the 70’s?
RW: I Think its been a couple of things, um I don’t remember the Chinese restaurant I remember the board-- bed and -- not bed and board, selling wood things like wood bowls and stuff like that. I forget the exact name of it again by- at this time it was half. It was split up into two stores very quickly I think.
CG: Well that covers my second little question but I’ll move on to the third and more important question: If you have any recollections about the riots or when you heard about them?
RW: When did I hear about them? That’s a very good question. I did not hear about them at the time. I was still in, my last monastery place was in Union City New Jersey. I’d gone away for the summer however so at the time they happened I may I was either still in new Jersey or possibly just shortly arrived in Philadelphia which I only spent a month and then I quit the monastery and left and so I came back here, it took my uh, I came out to myself roughly in march of 1970. I quickly discovered the Gay Activists Alliance after that and very quickly joined it so that’s when I would have heard about it I had no knowledge of it at all prior to that it wasn’t really unless you were reading the rat or village voice which I was not you would not have heard about it.
CG: So, um yeah, I mean there’s some stories that talk about military personnel in Viet Nam hearing about it on Armed Forces radio and I wonder if that’s credible.
In your…
RW: Really?! I’m surprised. That would surprise me. I don’t know the answer to that, but I would be pretty surprised because it was pretty poorly covered
It was covered with a sneer in the Village Voice. It was covered in at least one, what was referred to at the time as the underground newspaper, called the Rat. I don’t know if you have you run across that?
CG: No.
RW: They have copies of it at NYU at Robert Wagner Archive.
RW: Even in the Advocate, the advocate predates the Stonewall at that time being called the Los Angeles Advocate. It rated about an inch and then a couple of weeks later maybe rated about 6 inches in the Advocate. So it was not widely known. Apparently there was some Daily News coverage of the riots which I did not see. I know all about this, all of this I know from later, not from the time.
CG: Right, and the Times just had a little, the New York Times had a little square.
RW: The Times did have, a week before Stonewall, there was an incident in Queens which produced a Times editorial.
CG: In the park…
RW: Yeah, in the park, which produced the Times Editorial, so you know about that.
CG: Well yes, but you can tell us about it…
RW: Well the coverage I’ve seen of it, which I’ve seen in an archive not at the time, was in local newspapers, which you can find at the Queens Public Library’s archive, which told the story about that. A cruising area in or around Forest Park and the locals in an attempt to stop that actually cut down trees apparently with the tacit approval of the local precinct.
And then, of course, and indeed Mattachine and or others had called for a meeting here in the East Village at the Electric Circus to decide what to do about it and in the meantime Stonewall happens so that meeting still took place but it came to be more about Stonewall rather than that Queens incident.
CG: So when you did learn about it, at GAA, um I mean was it still fresh in people’s minds? What was the, um significance or was it just something that was just talked about in passing?
RW: Well it was spoken about in terms of its time to do something in general not “I was there and this is what happened” kind of talk, about but now is the time to stop taking this shit and to organize and to move forward. So in that sense it was spoken about a great deal but not in the sense of telling the story of the riots themselves.
CG: But it definitely was -would you characterize it as the –- well tell me a little bit-- I’m sure you were involved in the planning for the Christopher Street Liberation Day parade.
RW: Not really. I was a member of the organization by then, the early ones of course were CSLDC. Ciseldik: Christopher Street Liberation Day Committee. Committee because it was a coalition of representatives from various, the handful I guess, of now we would call LGBT, but in those days we just said “gay” organizations in the city. So certainly GAA had their representatives there, I think probably notably our Paul Martin, probably. But I was just new in the organization. I wasn’t rising up in its ranks by any means at that point. So no, I’m not being much help I know, but heyyy!
But unlike some other people I can think of I don’t make it up.
CG: Um, well just if you can, go back to that time when you first joined GAA and if you did hear stories about Stonewall what was your initial reaction? Did you…
RW: Well they were usually referred to as riots as opposed to rebellion. Either way is fine by me that’s not an attempt to tell you or me how it should be referred to. They were referred to as riots. The images I have, probably at the time, came at the time was we would refer to the TPF, the Tactical Patrol Force and their baby blue helmets. I’m sure very early on I heard the “we are the Stonewall girls” story. But we were concentrating on what we were doing now.
CG: Yeah, the action. Um, well in that regard maybe you can tell me about this idea um, some have suggested that Stonewall is or was a particularly New York phenomenon. That it becoming this galvanizing event was really something that only, maybe, could have happened in New York.
RW: Well I can talk about why it happened here. I don’t know if I would say only necessarily. That is a really wild speculation in either direction
CG: Right, well it’s just a good way to introduce the concept.
RW: Alright, of course as you undoubtedly know it was not the first gay riot so the question indeed does arise, well what is it different about this? Why did this become the event rather than just you know, okay, and certainly the early press coverage to the extent that is was assumed it would be, a flash in the pan event.
Well you had already had some organizing been done both nationally in terms of Mattachine starting in the 1950s and the Daughters of Bilitis. You had already had picket lines in Philadelphia the annual picket line.
CG: The Annual Reminder.
RW: Yes, at Independence Hall. You already had, with Mattachine, you had already had a picket line at Whitehall Street, the draft place. The issue being not that gays should be allowed in the military but that they should not be given dishonorable discharges. Which is perhaps a subtle but important difference.
And you had already had the sip in or whatever they were calling it at Julius’ uh which Mattachine, Dick Leitsch and others did -fighting back against the liquor authority and control of gay bars. In addition to that you had -- by 1969 you had a consciousness of rebellion if you will, of having had enough. Whether you’re talking about, I mean somebody of my generation --and I was at the time of Stonewall, what? I would be 23 or something like that. Well, what was I raised on? Well I was raised on images of the civil rights movement in the south I was raised on very importantly I think, the police riot in the 1968 Chicago convention. Uh, so there was that consciousness. There were at least the beginnings if not more of the anti Viet Nam, of the anti war movement and in New York itself you had people, you had an existing organization in Mattachine and Daughters of Bilitis. You had people like Craig Rodwell and Martha Shelley who were (especially Martha) probably kinda on the left to begin with-- who could, recognized this as an event that should be taken advantage of and continued on. And they did. So the reason why it didn’t evaporate in my opinion is indeed because of people like Martha Shelly, Michael Brown, Craig Rodwell who uh, I’m gonna say the next day, that’s probably literally true but its at least figuratively true, had flyers on the street about not letting this end about taking this forward and then very quickly founding the GLF here in NY.
CG: Yeah and that critical mass as well, I mean it seems like NY at the time --there were many other groups. Do you think that those outside groups, not gay and lesbian groups contributed to the movement?
RW: They were problematic. The left in general was still very problematic. They weren’t our friends with rare exceptions. I mean a year or so later Huey Newton of the Black Panthers was an exception to that but a notable exception. Really underline exception. The left were traditionally and at that time as much against us as anybody else. And the early, in my opinion, the early people of the left -gay people of the left were overly concerned about being accepted by the left, which they were not --again with the notable exception being Huey Newton. So that…
CG: So you don’t think that the early demonstrations or the parade --you don’t think that it engaged a larger activist community?
RW: By the time of the parade perhaps, but GLF, no, the GLF was a decidedly left organization and seen as that. They literally spent more time and money on defending the Black Panthers than they did on LGBT rights. Ok, now, there is a real distinction at that time between the men and the women of GLF they, as illustrated by, when the Black Panthers had their People’s Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, which is probably 1970? (But you could check that, alright?). Both the GLF men and GLF women went down to that. They were treated like shit all right? The women walked out. They said enough of this crap. The men did not because there was such a concern about being accepted by the left, which was not happening at all. GLF was very much, as it had to be-- it’s a beginning organization-- you don’t walk into the door of an organization and suddenly drop all your internalized homophobia etc. It doesn’t happen that way. It’s a process and GLF is extremely important in getting it all started alright?
And in beginning to see actually the different parts of the community who were very divided within our own community, now GLF saw itself as more, as a coalition. There was very little structure so that a sub group could form their own cell or caucus and still think of themselves as part of the whole but in fact they’re already very separate, such as gay youth, such as radical lesbians at that time, such as people of color cell etc. But, so that it had the sense, the overall sense of being one organization but wasn’t. This is not a criticism. This is what had to be at that time. Alright, which is why when GAA came along, GAA came along from two points of view. It came along from the point of view that you had to have structure to get anything done. And GLF had very, very few demonstrations of any kind. They weren’t together enough to do that, they didn’t have -what was voted up today could be voted down tomorrow. The women of GLF were complaining that consensus was a nice idea but the male voice, partially because of its tone, partially because that’s what we’ve been trained, always overwhelmed the women, all right? So you had all those kinds of problems. So GAA-- Marty Robinson, Arthur Evans, Jim Owles uh Arthur Bell and I think Phil Rhea, anyway, the first group of them, members of GLF, but they said a structure is needed to get anything done and the second thing they said was we have to be a single issue because we have to gather our forces together. So if you look at the first leadership members of GAA, even within the leadership, never mind the membership: Arthur Evans is an avowed socialist, Jim Owles is a fan of Ayn Rand, I mean literally, literally this is true. If you look even lower than that into the general membership, very quickly, uh you have again, you don’t walk into the door and suddenly drop your racism, your classism, your misogyny it just doesn’t happen that way. Alright, so most were racist or misogynist in kind of the general liberal level- in other words unconscious, not knowing kind of thing but we had one or two who were out and out misogynist or out and out racist. I mean that’s what it was, alright, at the time. On the other hand the people who stayed a while began very quickly to see the connection to re-learn, recognize first and then re-learn their attitude about such things. So at the time the one issue really worked -it would be very wrong today. Alright? But at the time it really was necessary to get everything together. And then they were very, very active, loud disruptive, non-violent, but loud and disruptive. More than that if you look at the GAA preamble it doesn’t say please give us our rights, or you ought to be nice to us or don’t pick on us. It says, it declared that we had these rights (written mostly by Arthur Evans) it declared that we had these rights. Now, that doesn’t sound so radical to us today but the Mattachine Society in earlier years certainly would have rather -- were much more of an attitude of “Ok we’re sick but you shouldn’t pick on us.” Really. Really quite quite literally.
CG: They were…
RW: I’m getting way - largely away form Stonewall.
CG: They were more concerned about tolerance than equality.
RW: Right and believed themselves to be damaged.
CG: Yeah- here, I’ll pause.
CG: Jumping off from where we left off. Tell me a little about… I know you were not only involved in GAA but also, was it Mattachine too?
RW: Very Slightly after I left GAA for a full year maybe, but at any rate, for a short time the President of Mattachine, Mattachine of course, Mattachine NY was on its last days.
CG: Because…
RW: I was not the last president of Mattachine but probably the second to last. And it wasn’t doing much at that time. We were still doing peer counseling. There was still their library that they have and this is next door to Stonewall above the Lions Head was their offices at that time.
CG: Oh yeah, and who was um, I forget, is it Leitsch?
RW: Dick Leitsch?
CG: Was he still involved?
RW: No he was still in NY and around. He still is now,
But no, he was the President at the time of Stonewall.
CG: So Ok , I didn’t know if he was still active at the time you were there.
Um, well I did have… my general closing question is about “what does Stonewall mean?’ And I see like right behind you on your computer it says Stonewall 2016. I’m assuming that’s about the National…
RW:The National Parks.
CG: The parks yeah.
So, just tell me how, what impact do you think…
RW: To me, To me Stonewall of course as probably everybody would agree, its a turning point, its symbolic of the whole LGBT movement and that’s certainly true but in addition to that when I read the story of Stonewall, notably by David Carter which I think is to date and probably for a long time is the definitive (no history book is ever eternally definitive) but I think will be for a long time.
CG: Right
RW: When I read through that, one of the things that I notice immediately is how many different parts of our community were involved with it. Now there are different parts of our community who want to say it was all them, alright and each of these people saying that were… their communities were an important part of it but not all that. If you look inside the bar it is largely what we would call possibly a yuppie bar (I guess we don’t use that term anymore) but the ah twenty something middle class, white. But within the bar, although that was the majority of the bar, there was also a handful of drag queens and also a handful of women. In fact the first to be arrested apparently was a woman who fought back. Well, ok but that’s the bar. Extremely important to what’s going on in terms of the riots are also the street people, many of whom are homeless or close to homeless. Some of them drag queens some of them not. Some of them drag hookers you know, some of them not and then as you go on other people coming in… people like Craig Rodwell or Martha Shelley, the left taking advantage of it -- its really a wide spectrum of our various parts of the community that are involved and important in Stonewall. And that’s the part I like to emphasize right now because it’s true.
CG: Mhmm, right, it was not just a catalyst for, for you know, one segment. It sort of did engage anyone that was walking by that night.
RW: And an important… each of these segments are important in what happened. Right?
CG: Right. It couldn’t have achieved its significance without, without that.
Original Format
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Digital Recording
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23.53 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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Rich Wandel Interview
Subject
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Oral History concerning the early years of the gay liberation movement.
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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September 2016
Contributor
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Rich Wandel
Rights
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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.
Relation
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NA
Format
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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
Identifier
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RichWandel MP3
Description
An account of the resource
Rich Wandel, the founder of the LGBT Community Center National History Archive, discusses his coming out, his role in the Gay Activists Alliance and Mattachine Society and the legacy of Stonewall and the Gay Liberation movement.
Gay Activists Alliance
Gay Liberation
Gay Liberation Front
Stonewall
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Rebellion
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25703/archive/files/d0dfb27aa036becbe671c5a9f34eef0e.mp3?Expires=1712793600&Signature=COHRYT%7E3AZtW4cWg82lMqA%7E3%7EIv4tNUPfjrcdlKg1kU3U144ORHDeQ8VjBb0LCKdRhNB32SVklw7mfsNdQLPcDVe1oxcry3Sk59Ba14QCK7vhsUVzE1js-%7E8IOOHcJFAgvlui-liZVcUZGDptd9DksIy1yp2RAbEw5b1K7TB6HNJcqylEsYdpUceEtrovl%7EUmg8ouQXcOGVw9Rq-Ty6n5jMzJpvjL0VFfqBc-hSuuh%7ET9nB80X9iYxTf80b7q5Ukbsv6uPAzVXAdBL12t4OuSgk974DLxc3wTDjfWCNAnZXRRE2KrabxppUIqQW1m6-Q6jVgHZxP2gAk2u1Kqjnk%7EA__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
a4a2ef8b9d2c99095995723a12919f92
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
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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
Wendell Walker
Location
The location of the interview
New York City
Transcription
Any written text transcribed from a sound
Wendell Walker Interview
CG: I’m talking with Wendell Walker on November 17, 2016. Wendell can you tell me just a little bit about yourself to introduce yourself?
WW: My name is Wendell Walker. I’m originally from Mississippi--rural Mississippi, and I grew up there -- got into some issues --racial issues, in Mississippi. (This) doesn't directly relate to this (our topic) --but I was actually evacuated from Mississippi for having a relationship with an African American girl, and had to leave Mississippi overnight to protect my life -- and then went to Indiana for Univer -- DePauw University in Indiana -- to college and that is really when I started thinking about myself as a gay person, at that time.
CG: And what do you do now?
WW: Now I’m a Deputy Director at the Museum of the Moving Image here in New York.
CG: So of course we’re here to talk about New York post Stonewall. Tell me about your relationship-- to your coming to New York and what it was like.
WW: Well I graduated in 1977; actually I technically graduated n August of 1977 in Brattleboro, VT. My final credit was language (he, he), and then right after that I moved to New York. It was actually Labor Day in September that I arrived here. I… and I came here thinking I had an internship at a gallery called Tribal Arts gallery. My intent was to do an internship there. I had studied – I -- my major was studio art, my minor was traditional African art, and I intended to do graduate work in traditional African art, and back in those days traditional African art was considered anthropology. It was not part of art history yet -- but, so, I was an anthropology person -- sort of art and anthropology -- and I had come here for this internship and I had intended to be here for a year working with the Tribal Arts gallery and then do graduate work -- and came here and the internship fell apart and I ended up getting a job at another gallery, and that got me involved -- that gallery was a traditional African art gallery but also showed contemporary art along with the traditional African art… and that got me involved in contemporary art, and one thing led to another and I never left. [Laughter]
And… (um), series of different jobs -- literally one leading to the next and here I am today. But alongside all that was the --I won’t say the birth of the gay rights movement but the -- the manifestation of it in the city here.
CG: What year was that?
WW: Well '77 was the year that I moved here, September of 77 -- and as I mentioned to you before that -- in the University, really in the University is really when I guess I sort of acknowledged to myself and people around me that I was a gay person -- and co-founded along with two other individuals-- a discussion group at DePauw University. Nothing like that had ever been done before. And it was called the Androgyny Discussion Group and we got together and talked about gender, and gender roles and what they meant, and and we talked about gay issues and what it meant to be in the -- a relationship of same sex couple, same sex couples and all that sort of stuff. Then we also -- that was sort of when I became more aware -- and sort of thinking about in the political sense -- and I had heard about Stonewall at that point but I didn’t really know very much about it. I just had heard that there was this event that had happened in New York. It was really when I moved to New York and got to know people here and… ya know, New York was a very different place then, 1977. It was severe economic problems, very high crime rate and living in the East Village back then -- it was a very different world than it is now and -- but there was a, you know, there was a very active gay scene back, in the city back then. Many bars and after hours clubs and all that. Of course I dove into all that. And then there -- it was through that time there -- I learned more about Stonewall and the buildup.
CG: I’m kinda curious, when people, when people brought that topic up what was it --how was it perceived?
WW: Well it was, it was -- was more like storytelling, you know? It was just like… you know, there were all -- there were many different stories about it -- and most of them exaggerated, you know, what actually happened -- and you know there’s a lot of hearsay about it. Nothing -- it hadn’t really been documented at that point. It was a lot of people’s memories and of course there were a lot of people around then who had been a part of it.
CG: Right.
WW: I used to hangout at Julius’ at 10th Street and Waverly in the West Village, which was right around the corner from where it happened, and there were a lot of older people there that, you know, the old guys -- and you'd hear stories from them about it. I never thought about -- and maybe that’s just me, but I don’t think people thought of it as a political thing at all then. It was more like, (um)… something people were really proud of-- that it that it happened. It was, it had a certain bit of… (um) like, ya know “and we showed them” or something. There was a little attitude with it. I don’t think it… I don’t remember anybody talking about it as an agenda or something about laws being passed or any -- and it just wasn’t involved…
CG: Or symbolic of anything yet?
WW: It was more like we’d had enough and the queens got up and came back at em. You know? And there was lots of jokes about it and you know at the same time -- you know the people that took part in it were considered brave, notorious people but they, but they -- it was a different context. I think the (um)… when the tenth anniversary march on Washington happened I went to that with Leon, my partner, and that was, that was a whole different awakening because suddenly it was um… Stonewall became a landmark event after that in a way -- cause it was the idea of marking it with a tenth year anniversary. But that was the first big, I don’t know, I think there were other marches and things in Washington before that, but that was the first sort of national thing that was organized in that way.
CG: What year was that? In -- oh 69, 79…
WW: 69, 79 yeah, yeah…
CG: So, but when you came here in 77-- just curious -- or maybe in 78, cause you came in August. Was there a pride march? Do you remember a pride march?
WW: I don’t remember a pride march. I don’t know if there was -- well I came in September, so my first pride march would have been…
CG: The next year.
WW: In June of '78, I guess. I don’t remember one if there was, and it may have just--I mean the city was a very different place then of course we…
CG: You may not have…
WW: Didn’t have text messaging and Facebook and it may have happened and I didn’t even know about it.
CG; Right, but the next year you did, so how did that, how did you become aware of the march on Washington?
WW: Well I mean when that happened-- the bars put up -- there was an effort to make that happen you know? Also the layout of the-- the layout wasn’t different, but you know the East Village was a high crime area. There wasn’t any nightlife here or anything, it was all on the --the gay nightlife was all in the West Village. There were clubs allover the city back then but it was mostly the West Village. And like I said I used to hangout at Julius’. I live on Tenth Street. I’d walk down Tenth Street and go there. I think that was probably where I first heard about the march on Washington.
CG: I’m just curious, had you ever been to the Oscar Wilde Memorial bookstore?
WW: Yeah absolutely!
CG: You did, really?
WW: Yeah, I loved it. Yeah, you know, I would go there and look around even if I didn’t buy anything because it was just so cool that that existed.
[Laughs]
CG: So tell me about the march. Something, anything you remember about it.
WW: Well, I remember going there and being there -- and amazed by the number of people there -- and the fact that we were all in Washington--that we were all visible, publicly visible, identifying ourselves openly in the public with you know --with press and pictures being taken-- as gay people marching and I remember that was a big deal. I mean for me it really changed my perspective on it, brought -- it brought the political element into my way of thinking about it cause I -- it made me aware of -- it wasn’t that I wasn’t aware of the legal issues, I mean obviously this group that I had been -- was involved in in college was that—we, we touched on those issues. But I think it was what made me a little more politically motivated in a way too… realizing that the importance of electing the right people and what those people could do in -- and of course back then nothing was talked about openly in the way that it is done now, so you had to sort of read between the lines about who, who would be supportive. And you know the --they didn’t come out. Politicians didn’t come out publicly and announce that they were in favor of gay rights issues. But you could sort of read between the lines. I remember Pat Schroder from Colorado. I think she was around in that era, she was someone you knew who was a supporter even though she didn’t come out and say things about it. But all that changed, I think -- or started changing after that march.
CG: What about Koch? Do you remember?
WW: Yeah
CG: His, I mean there were some controversies.
WW: And rumors.
I mean he-- he, he was very adamant publicly: I’m not gay!
And he --he didn’t -- I don’t remember him doing anything as mayor that went one way or the other.
CG: I think he did -- he did sign something into law, but I’d have to look it up to tell you exactly what and when, what year. It may not have been until later (Clears throat).
WW: I mean -- I remember David Dinkins as being the first mayor I thought of as really -- I thought of as really supportive of me as a gay citizen of New York. Its not that he did anything, but he talked about it.
CG: Right, he was more open-- yeah, he was more accepting in my memory and I remember it too because I was here then -- he had raised a very diverse, you know…
WW: And then of course there was Elizabeth Holtzman who ran for the senate and everybody thought, assumed she was a lesbian. To my knowledge she’s never come out. I don’t know if she is or not. She ran for the senate in 1980 and I got very, very involved in that. We were in her campaign headquarters, like daily. Like (haha) doing mailings for her. Stuffin envelopes and I was a poll watcher during 1980 also… But that kind of activism came out of that march. That was what got me motivated about stuff, when I did that march in '79.
CG: Now the march in '79 was actually -- was probably after Harvey Milk was assassinated too, right?
WW: Yeah, I don’t remember -- what was the date? I don’t remember. I’m not remembering the sequence of that…
CG: But that might have actually fueled that that march, you know? That large effort.
WW: Maybe, yeah, but it was -- but it was before then -- when was he assassinated?
CG: It was 79 and I think it was May of 79? But I’m not good with dates either.
[laughs]
WW: You know its funny, I never though about that.
I wonder…
CG: I mean, that could have really had an impact on that, on the -- the effort to really…
WW: Yeah.
CG: I mean you were mentioning that they actually organized a train? Tell me about the train?
WW: Yeah! They had a train. There was an Amtrak train that was chartered that was for the march so we -- and it was like a gay train!
[Laughter]
WW: And like I mentioned before, Al Franken was on it. But, yeah it was -- everybody was very serious to go down and it was a party coming back. You could not get into a bathroom anywhere on the train!
[Laughter]
WW: But that was also a big deal-- having this train that was --I think it had a sign that was on the side of it. I think so. It was it was a big deal.
CG: So, but the West Village -- I mean you mentioned that the East Village was kind of like a, you know, it was the ghetto-- well it was like a dead zone in a way…
WW: Yeah, yeah.
CG: I mean-- but the West Village by then was already like the center of gay life. So what was it like in the late seventies? I mean…
WW: Oh it was bars everywhere, nightlife, after-hours clubs and of course there was the piers down on the water -- you know the dilapidated piers --that was the back room for the neighborhood, basically. And you know, again, the city was very different then, you know, it sort of felt like no rules applied.
CG: Did you have fear of the police though at that point?
WW: It was more fear of mugging and being robbed.
You didn’t…
CG: So there really wasn’t any longer any organized effort to raid bars?
WW: I don’t remember being aware of police even back then, you know? Police were in cars, you know? They-- you never saw police on the streets. You know, all that changed with David Dinkins. David Dinkins created community policing --and Guiliani came in and took credit for it, but its actually David Dinkins that did that. And that was really, from my perspective -- that’s what brought police out on the street and got them involved in their community and the neighborhood and really changed the way it all functions. But back in those days I don’t remember being aware of police officers in New York. You could kinda do what you wanted and others could do to you what they wanted and that was a part of the whole crime thing cause, you know, it was -- and that whole thing changed, there was always a risque element to nightlife back then whatever you did-- whatever club you went to -- getting there was some risk -- the meat packing district was, was not at all what it is now with the Whitney there. It was a very different world and the Mine Shaft and all those sort of places and -- but you know the streets were dangerous. But that was -- I guess in a way, I mean -- I didn't think about it back then, but that was part of the thrill of it. It was all risqué. Getting there was risky and what you did when you got here was risky, so there was this whole flavor to all of that that I think was very present throughout the city. I mean not-- you know what I’m saying? Not just in the gay community -- but in general our society was more -- I mean you know, there was not only the gay bath houses but there was the straight one -- the straight bath house on the Upper West Side. Plato’s Retreat, I think…
CG: Yeah, Plato’s retreat…
WW: And I remember when my sister came to visit once and went there. She couldn’t resist. She had to see it, ya know?
[Laughter]
WW: So it was very different in many ways. I mean we’ve become so much more controlled in a way, ya know? And I think there are good and bad things in that but -- I think when you are thinking about all of this, its important to think about that context, right? Cause it…
CG: Yeah its interesting that …
WW: While there were more -- while we have laws now that protect us against certain things --and there were laws that prevented other things back then, but they didn’t really enforce them.
[Laughs]
CG: Exactly.
WW: Of course I think it's also important to think about what was going on with the women’s issues in the seventies and how much that played in to this --ya know-- I used to work at the First Women’s Bank, which was on 57th street between Park and Lexington. The First Women’s Bank was the first institution in this country to offer equal credit to women. That was in the mid-seventies I think -- that the laws changed. In the period of Jimmy Carter’s presidency the laws changed. But a woman, you know, who… her husband died, she didn’t have any credit. The credit was all with the men -- and you know there’s not a direct connection to the mindset then --but that’s part of the environment that all of this is happening in -- and I think that’s very important-- to think about that context of it.
CG: Yup.
WW: Yeah.
CG: But overall when you think about -- think about, after your involvement in the march and -- (um) so what, what -- if you can articulate a meaning or how you feel about what, what you feel Stonewall represents to the Gay rights movement –- the LGBT liberation movement.
WW: I think what’s happened is -- we’ve used it in a very good way to make us aware of our situation over the years. And I think that started with that -- for me it started with that march in '79. But I think that started with a lot of people then -- and there was something about that landmark -- ten years and here we are. I mean Jimmy Carter was president then and -- Jimmy Carter was a fairly progressive person for that era in many ways. I mean he’s not thought of as that now -- that much looking back on him but -- you know, he was very unpopular of course, at the same time he did among certain people…
CG: I found that he was more unpopular than I realized because of his southern Baptist kind of -- you know, people thought of him kind of in a way I never thought of because I wasn’t old enough at the time. But, yeah.
WW: But I don’t know if he ever said anything? I don’t remember him even saying anything about gay issues or anything.
CG: One way or the other, right?
WW: But I was confident that he was a supporter. I somehow knew that, and I think -- you know, his four years, you know it was after Watergate and he comes into office -- he makes… he brought a different tone in. I think that was also instrumental somehow -- and the things that happened during that period -- and you know when Reagan came in it was such a graphic contrast to him. I think that also was a big motivating factor in this. You know, suddenly there was… I mean Stonewall happened then there’s Reagan. I mean Stonewall, the tenth anniversary, that gathering happened, and then Reagan. I don’t know, a lot happened then and then AIDS came into the picture and the way Reagan didn’t handle it and denied it. And I feel like it started with that tenth anniversary up until the end of the Reagan term -- that’s when all of this --the movement was born really --but it was-- was fed, it was fed on that legend…
CG: Well it was a different movement -- was born in the eighties I think, right? Completely different agenda I think.
WW: But it was all fed out of that energy that came out of Stonewall. I think… I think that was the landmark that was already referred back to. What happened that night, what happened with the raid on that bar and everything. That was always the reference point --that was what you always looked back to and the fact that our community fought back that night. And that’s what gave the energy to deal with these things -- and yeah they all took different turns and obviously they’re going to take different turns now [laughs] because we have different issues now. We’re gonna have different issues. We have the right to marry but what are they going to do to that right now that we have this crazy person in as president?
So I mean the --whatever the movement is -- the group that you are a part of has to adapt to that, but Stonewall was that moment that we can all look back to when it came to life, when it came -- when it came to --to people actually taking action and I think that’s what’s so amazing about it.
CG: And its interesting the -- well bringing it up to the current election I see so many people activated in a way that I’ve never seen before. And it -- when I started this project I had no idea the correlations or the similarities that would develop, you know, to the period that I’m studying. It's kind of remarkable to see the turning point happening again. Well anyway… thank you so much for sharing your stories.
WW: I just remembered the other amazing thing about this. I had a great aunt. Her name was Helen Tippy -- and she was --she graduated --she’s said to have been the first women to graduate at the top of the class -- of the class (not just the women but of the class) from Stanford University law school in the teens. She was one of the few women that was there, even. She became-- she was very interested in the labor movement and at that time, the women’s right to vote, of course. And she got involved with the Mother Jones movement. Mother Jones had basically retired at that point, but Mother Jones was still alive and somehow she got to know Mother Jones a little bit, and became the lawyer for the movement and met another woman named Frieda Ryker. Frieda was an activist who was Russian -- a Russian Jew who had left Russia after the revolution and had come to this country and gotten involved in the labor movement. They [Helen and Frieda] met at a demonstration in Chicago in the twenties and became lovers --and were together throughout their lives. And so growing up, Helen and Frieda were my aunts. And --in the seventies, when I moved to New York, they -- and Frieda had a -- I think she was a niece -- and they used to come to New York [and stay with Frieda's niece]. And they, they -- after their activities in the twenties, Helen had become a lawyer in the labor department and they lived in Washington most of their lives, but when they retired they lived in Florida -- but they used to come to New York once a year. And -- I think it was around the same -- I don’t remember the exact year, you know -- this visit when they came here -- it was after the Stonewall (march) and… they came to New York and met Leon and I -- and Leon is African American –so, we were, we got together with them and went to the Guggenheim --and we were walking around, walking down the ramp to -- [in] the Guggenheim and Leon and Freida were in front and Helen and I were walking together -- and she was just telling how amazing it was for her to be standing here with me, her openly gay, you know, nephew -- great nephew with his African American partner -- openly walking through the Guggenheim talking about it. And also she talked about Stonewall and what that meant for her and you know that through their lives -- what they had gone through -- their relationship in the twenties -- and here they are in New York City with this gay couple and that they could now be an open couple and that this was now a political issue and it was -- that was just so amazing for them. Just -- you know --for what they had been through with their lives. So, so, amazing.
CG: Yeah.
WW: Anyway…
CG: Yeah, no its -- incredible to think about the difference -- how everyone lived just below the surface…
WW: Yeah, yeah, yeah…
CG: …probably until just about 1967 or 8, there really was no way to acknowledge or be open about it.
WW: Yeah, but think about what that meant for somebody like them who, since the 1920’s had had this relationship that was secret and that they had to hide and then something like that happens. What that, I mean --the perspective on that -- I mean, I don’t know how you even go there, how you grasp what that meant for them.
CG: Right, but I think --this is the thing I’ve come to realize in the last month --its that, think about -- think about it Wendell -- think about how much we hide still…
WW: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, you’re right
CG: I mean just to make it easier…
WW: Just like that little Facebook conversation the other day. Yeah, yeah…
CG: …just to make it easier for everybody else we hide just below the surface.
WW: That’s right, that’s right.
CG: And it’s not even acknowledged. We make accommodations every single day.
Anyway…
[Laughter]
CG: Thank you.
WW: I think that’s all for now!
Original Format
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27 minutes
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16 bit/ 44.1 kHz
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NA
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Wendell Walker Interview
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Oral history concerning gay life in NYC in the late seventies.
Description
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An interview with Wendell Walker concerning the gay liberation movement, the 10 year anniversary of Stonewall, march on Washington and other topics related to the experience of being gay in New York City.
Creator
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Christopher Gioia
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Christopher Gioia
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November 17, 2016
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MP3 digital recording
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English
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Oral History Interview
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NA
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Wendell Walker
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Walker MP3
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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.
Gay bars
Gay Liberation
Gay nightlife
Julius'
Stonewall
Stonewall Rebellion
Stonewall Tenth Anniversary march
-
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dc519088b6b99cc0a139ef63f03a57c6
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/.
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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
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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
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English
Type
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Oral History
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NA
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NA
Oral History
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Interviewer
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Christopher Gioia
Interviewee
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John D'Emilio
Location
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Via Telephone, Chicago and New York
Transcription
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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
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35 minutes
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16bit/ 44.1kHz
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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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John D'Emilio Interview
Subject
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Stonewall Rebellion and the Gay Liberation movement.
Creator
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Christopher Gioia
Date
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March 2016
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John D'Emilio
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MP3 Digital Recording
Language
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English
Type
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Oral History
Description
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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.
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NA
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Christopher Gioia
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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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John D'Emilio 2 MP3
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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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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
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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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Felice Picano
Location
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Via Telephone: Los Angeles and New York
Original Format
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MP3 Digital Recording
Transcription
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CG: To begin with Felice, maybe you can tell me about where you grew up your background and what you do.
FP: Living in the West Village, from 1967, the fall of 1967 until the fall of 1995 when I moved to California, I was a long time Villager. Before that I was living for about seven years in the East Village while I went to college. I went to the City University of New York, Queens College while it was still a very small school. There were fewer people in my college than in my high school, a very small college. And I was living on the east side at that point and spending time in the old Greenwich Village south of Washington Square, and I was quite familiar with the area. It was my home. I grew up on Long Island and spent most of my summers in New England. Both of my parents are from Rhode Island, rural Rhode Island. My father came to New York City when he was a very young child. My mother remained in Providence Rhode Island where she was a professional and pro-am sportswoman.
CG: Oh interesting.
FP: So those are my links, by the time I was a child we were living in Hollis, Queens and after that, just before I moved into Manhattan we lived in sort of suburban New York in an area called Twin Ponds right next door to Valley Stream.
CG: And what did you study at Queens College?
FP: I actually studied art. (Chuckles) I was supposed to be an artist.
CG: Oh really?!
FP: And friends of mine were in the literature department and they all wanted to be filmmakers.
CG: Mmhmm
FP: And so to hang out with them I took literature as a minor. Never had a writing course aside from English 101.
CG: And you do identify now, mainly as an author so maybe talk a little bit about your work…
FP: I started writing in the 1960’s. I’m self taught and my many journals and notebooks are at the Beinecke Library at Yale University and also my journals from 1968 to 1988, so when I need to refresh my memory I go to my journals, although you know sometimes one lies to one self in one’s journals at least about personal stuff. About public events it’s usually pretty accurate.
Because I’m not emotionally invested then, for the most part.
My first three books were mainstream psychological thrillers. My third book was a book of gay poetry. I had been publishing gay poetry and even doing readings around New York and San Francisco including one with Allen Ginsberg at Hunter College. He had invited me. Then my fourth novel was a gay thriller, extremely controversial and sensational at the time, which uh turned into a best seller and was the first gay themed book to be picked up by the book of the month club and it became an international bestseller. Shortly after that I felt I was a gay author. I wanted to just write about gay life.
Shortly after that I joined with Andrew Holleran, George Whitmore, Edmund White, Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro and Michael Grumley and we formed a group, the first openly gay writing group in the world called the Violet Quill Club. Robert Ferro named us.
We existed for about four or five years and had a large influence on Christopher Street Magazine, The Advocate, various magazines and we pressured a lot of mainstream magazines and newspapers to cover gay and lesbian literature.
I started my own press, an openly gay press, the Seahorse Press. It’s named after the seahorse because the seahorse is one the few creatures in nature where the male actually gives birth. And so I wanted it to reflect gay men being artistic and creative.
Several years later I joined forces with several other small gay presses to form the Gay Presses of New York which existed from 1981 to 1994. Our first title in that press was Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy,
CG: Oh really!
FP: …so we were in the black from literally our very first day. And from Gay Presses of New York we ended up publishing writers from all over the country, and actually from Europe too. Also we ended up publishing lesbian writers in some number also.
CG: Thanks, that’s a great overview.
As an author, a storyteller, what role do you think personal stories play as part of the construction of historical record?
FP: Well I think personal stories are very important and one of the things I have been doing over the last ten years is that I have been editing and encouraging and getting published works of mainly non- fiction, but also some fictionalized accounts, by people my age or older who are not actually writers, from all over the country but who had stories to tell which are otherwise going to vanish because there’s no kind of mechanism for getting their stories told.
CG: I’ll just interject that your age group is mid sixties?
FP: I’m 72, Oh yeah, I’m an old guy even though people tell me I don’t look it but yeah I’m actually 72 years old so I’m dealing with people from 65- 85. So yeah, people are dying. My idea is to get their material out and whenever I talk in front of a group I especially try to exhort some of the women to get their history down because that’s vanishing much more quickly than some of the men’s history and there is a lot that’s not being done. I mean the whole history of the women’s music movement in the 70’s? Nobody’s written about that. The heavy dyke bars of the 50’s and 60’s are just being mentioned, but nobody’s written about that. There’s just so much material that is still out there.
When I wrote one book, the connection between storytelling and history was interesting. In 1995 I published a novel titled “Like People in History” and I chose that title very specifically because it was the story of two gay cousins over a period of thirty years. And one of the things I was trying to show was that in fact gay men and women were in American history and world history. Especially American history throughout our lives and that we were active and influential. People asked me after that, well how much of this book is true and how much of it is fiction and what I told them is 100% of it is true and about 80% is autobiographical. I had taken a lot of stories of people who are no longer alive by 1995, stories, anecdotes, jokes that they had told me and I put it in the book. So there’s some sort of a mixture back and forth between fiction and nonfiction.
CG: Concerning Stonewall Inn and the Village, tell me what you remember about the place prior to the rebellion? What was it like?
FP: Ok it was not a major bar by any means and it was not a particularly popular bar and it was a bar that was often changing personnel. Right around the corner was Julius’ which is still there, which was the post collegiate bar um and that was the most popular gay bar in the ah Greenwich Village and New York for a long time. Most people associated there but it was so crowded and so social um and so filled with your friends that if you found somebody interesting and you sorta wanted to feel them up and feel them out before you took them home you’d take them around the corner to the Stonewall and slow dance in the dark and figure out what you wanted. Right?
CG: Interesting, yeah so…
FP: Yeah really!
So you were, it was a place that was part of the mainstream bar scene in a way…
It was a part of the mainstream but it wasn’t that much … it wasn’t anything.
CG: Yeah
FP: It was also known to be a bar that was operated by some combination of the police and the Mafia which is what I wrote about when I wrote “The Lure” in 1979-- that they would open up their own bars, Julius’ and even the 9th Circle had been opened up …
CG: Since you mention you had been to Stonewall, any particular story you would like to share?
FP: No, I have no particular story about Stonewall at all.
CG: Ok,
FP: I really don’t, before it happened, it was not a place I went in, except like I said to slow dancing, figure it out… It was a very, very mixed club. There were um lesbians in it who didn’t go to the Duchess -- which was a very heavy dyke bar on the south side of Sheridan Square. So it was nearby, so you know younger women that didn’t want to go there um would go to this one. And there were, it became by the time the incident happened, a place for trannies and for people who were not quite street people but almost, and sometimes the hustler boys who would hang out in front of it in the park in Sheridan Square would go in too. So it had this very, very mixed vibe and, and I was always hearing that it was closing down, that it was going bankrupt.
CG: Perpetually in danger.
FP: Right. Exactly.
CG: Regarding the first night of the riots. Do you have any specific recollections?
FP: Yeah I was across the street at a party and went to the party and there was nothing happening…
It was a warm very balmy June night in New York. It was a Saturday night, there were a lot of people out and about. It was an ordinary night.
And I went to this party and I left the party extra late because I picked up the bartender and so I had to leave when he left (laughs) which was at the end of the party when everybody else was either gone or under the table (laughs) When we walked out, we saw the result of the whole . . . of the riot, and we were quite astounded I must say. And we were immediately ushered by police outside of the area.
CG: So it really was already cordoned off.
FP: It was already cordoned off and there were these black marias, I guess they were expecting more arrests, there were two or three big black buses. There were two cars on fire. There was one johnny pump completely broken off, there was a Volkswagen upside down, the johnny pump had a taxi cab smashed against it, it was spouting water into the air. There were all these black hoses running all over Sheridan Square itself and there were saw-horses and a lot of police.
CG: Do you think those hoses were used to control the crowd?
FP: I think they were fire hoses, they were for the fires. And it looked like a bomb had gone off or a meteor hit. We had no idea. And as we got to the edge of the crowd -- and this had to be like 2:30 or 3 in the morning -- people started telling us there had been a riot at Stonewall and we went through the crowd and picked up whatever it was, all the information that we could get, which was already then half true or half not. And the bar itself was boarded up at that time, you know there is this great big picture window in the front which was completely boarded up and the door was gone and completely boarded up already by that point.
CG: And so, did you think that was going to be the end of it or that it wasn’t going to be that consequential? What was the feeling?
FP: It took us a few, you know we were stoned and high (laughs) obviously! You know it took us a while to figure out what the hell was going on.
CG: Right right,
FP: So we went home, fucked, went to sleep, but here’s the thing, I was awakened the next morning by a friend of mine, Douglas Brashears, the least political person I know and he was the one that said it, he knew we had been at that party and he asked if I had been involved in it, if I had been arrested. When I told him what I saw he said “the queens are revolting.” And you know the guy I was with, we went to a very late brunch in the Village, and all of the stuff was up and people were gathering already.
CG: Really?
FP: So that was, and then I saw Marty Robinson and Vito Russo and some other friends of mine who were hanging around and they said “We’re protesting, will you sign this, and will you do that?” and I guess that was the foundation of Gay Liberation Front.
CG: Really, so it really did have consequences almost over night.
FP: Ya know, the next day. The next day already there was activity on the street. There were people yelling at the cops who were still there, and there were a lot of people gathering. A lot of people had heard about it you know a lot of people would come down to the Village to hang around on a summer Sunday anyway. All of those people were there and they were pissed off. And the mood was really angry and pissed off. Let’s organize now.
CG: I guess there was- a lot of it was the timing over a summer weekend and then word of mouth…
FP: I mean I got a call from Doug, really I mean of all people, so the word had gotten around by 10 o’clock Sunday morning because he woke me up.
CG: Yeah yeah
FP: So there was that and I think that the other thing that’s really hard to explain to people is that there was an established gay community there, when I came back from Europe in 1967. When I left the year before that there really wasn’t a gay community but when I came back there was.
CG: Yeah.
FP: So there really was a gay community there. There was one in San Francisco. There was one in LA. There was one in Boston and in other cities. So it already, in that time frame, was I think very important, because there already was a community.
So it wasn’t a spark happening where there wasn’t any tinder. There was plenty of tinder to go up.
CG: As you mentioned that San Francisco and LA already had communities that were already developed. Do you think that Stonewall and the mythology that evolved around the uprising was a particularly New York phenomenon?
FP: No I don’t think it was a particularly New York phenomenon, I think it could have happened in San Francisco just as easily.
CG: Mhmm
FP: I think it could have happened in West Hollywood just as easily.
CG: I just wondered if that network, that network that reached everyone by 10 am the next morning, that connectivity was somehow stronger in New York?
FP: Maybe -- my friend George called it “Queen Control.
(Laughter)
Something would happen and the queens would get on the phone and it would go all around. So he called it queen control and people would call up and say this is queen control calling and you didn’t even ask who it was and they would start giving you information, right?
Right?
So queen control definitely existed in New York City and I think it might have existed elsewhere in San Francisco and in LA too but people were not as pissed off.
CG: So you would say perhaps the police were more abusive in New York?
FP: Well you know the World’s Fair had a lot to do with it. The 1963 World’s Fair because it meant that the mayor at the time, Mayor Wagner, wanted to clean up the city which was the stupidest idea anybody ever had. So all of the gay bar closings began in that period, 1963 and just continued. So they had been going on most of that decade.
CG: Right
FP: In an organized fashion, where I don’t think it had been happening in an organized fashion in other cities.
CG: You have pretty clearly stated this already, but can you characterize for me the impact you think Stonewall had on the Gay Liberation Front.
CG: Direct, direct, you know, the next day you had people doing that and on Monday there were already protests and lines of people marching with signs at every subway station in the Village.
CG: Wow.
FP: “ What do we want, Gay rights, when do we want ‘em now.”
People with fog horns, sign up here, Gay Liberation Front, oppose the man, blah blah blah, and that happened all the next week.
CG: And so this term Gay Liberation Front, was that newly coined? Or was that…
It was named after the Viet Cong Liberation Front. And one of the reasons why that group ended and was superseded by the Gay Activists Alliance was that it was really a very sixties hippie movement. You know they wanted in their by-laws that we would support the people of North Viet Nam, and that we would legalize drugs and every other god damned thing. And so people said let’s get more focused. And then Gay Activist Alliance began.
CG: So had the Gay Liberation Front existed before that summer…
FP: No, no, it happened right there at those subway stations. There were 3 lines that converge in that area and all of them had protests that week. So there were seven or eight subway stations. And I know that I went to several of them that week. My friends asked us to take signs to make sure people had signs. Me and my friends went with signs to give protesters.
CG: I was going to ask you, I have this sense that there were other um gay liberation groups that weren’t quite as, they weren’t protesting in the streets. So how do you see their influence if any on the growth of this…
FP: The other thing we haven’t talked about is the fact that there were at least two generations involved in all of this and the Stonewall movement and the Gay Liberation Front were all done by people my age for the most part, with very few older people and that the older gay people who were established in the community were all closeted, really opposed us and fought us for many years.
So but there really was a big generational gap, so but we came from a generation that had fought for women’s rights, and against the war in Viet Nam, many of us had been involved in the marches on Washington and the marches down in the south for Civil Rights so we were already used to all this stuff and they, that generation which has been called the silent generation, weren’t. They were afraid. They were a fearful group. And ya know and it was the few voices from that period the very, very brave voices from that period, people like Frank Kameny and um Harry Hay, the founder of the Mattachine Society, they were very, very brave people but they were very few and they got no support from their generation.
CG: Mm, yeah,
FP: So I really do think you have to see this as part of the baby boom or post war generation which was already very adept and active in political action and the fact that we, many of us were um the majority of us were college educated and had been in all these actions before meant that we were able to organize very quickly and very efficiently.
CG: Right I see that.
FP: People say to me, you know, especially this was during the 25th anniversary- well you know Stonewall was a diverse and colorful rainbow thing. I told them no, it wasn’t. I said maybe the original riot was, but all the organizing was 90% men, 95% white, 95% college educated and if they weren’t, the movement wouldn’t have gotten started as quickly or organized as well as it did.
Unfortunately that’s the truth, that’s how it happened, and the fact that soon they were backed up by white gay men with money made it even more important. These are factors that a lot of the Queer community doesn’t want to accept but they happen to be historical facts, the way I remember it.
CG: Yes I mean,
FP: You know you would go to a fundraiser, plunk down your $25, and next week there would be an action somewhere. It was really very simple it was very simple cause and effect. Laughs.
CG: So do you feel like there was this subculture that existed in the sixties, do you feel that it grew out of those earlier movements, that previous generation, did the growth of that group help build the foundation…
FP: I know exactly what you’re saying, I’m trying to explain it. The scene used to be, before I went to Europe, I’m using that as a point because as I say when I went there was gay people in the Village when I came back there was a community. And one way I can explain that is by geography. Greenwich Ave. from St Vincent’s Hospital down to Jefferson Square Library and Sixth Avenue, that was the hangout of the gay and lesbian community before I left and that was the entire reach of it, pretty much, right?
CG: Right?
FP: When I came back not only were gays there, but further north and all along Christopher Street and south and along the west side was the gay hangout. Also before I went, a year before I went there were a couple of articles in Life magazine or Look magazine about gay the homosexual life which was mostly in Greenwich Village along Greenwich Ave. and there were people who called themselves “Third-Sexers.” Now these were not transgender or T.V. or any thing like that. They were men in their twenties and thirties who dressed and looked almost like women but never like women. They would wear Capri pants and pedal pushers and maybe ballet slippers, they wore their hair in a kind of Gina Lolabrigida cut, fluffy sweaters. We called them mohair sweater queens. (Laughs)
CG: Mmhmmm
FP: In pastel colors right? They weren’t guys, none of the gays or most of us wouldn’t go near them and they mostly had straight or bisexual boyfriends or closeted boyfriends. That was what that era was like and when I took a look at that, I said I will have nothing to do with this. No interest in this whatsoever. Went to Europe, came out there, did a bunch of stuff there, came back and the scene was different, much more to my liking and those sweater boys were gone, they were in one bar. They hung out in one bar after that.
So that’s the difference. There really was an entire, I think presenting it style wise I think I can give you an idea of what the actual thinking was that was taking place
CG: Yeah, well…
FP: You know there might have been people sitting in their apartments saying this bullshit has got to stop we don’t want to be like these guy-girls over here.
CG: So it sounds like you’re saying that this reflects a general movement within mainstream culture of the sixties to be more open, free, all those concepts that were coming out, so by the time you returned in 1967 it was a different world already.
FP: Yes it was significantly different.
CG: So you would definitely see it as a- that the ability of the community to organize and to mobilize and all those things are interrelated with the broader social movements of the time.
FP: Absolutely, without a doubt, I think without a doubt. I mean um that’s the people who rioted, the people who protested, the people who knew about or read about or said I want to be part of it.
CG: So back to the actual riots, you mentioned the first night but the story is that it continued for a couple of nights that even that Sunday night there was more…
FP: There was a lot of activity there. Well you know it attracted angry people.
CG: Right
FP: You know it was no doubt that was going to happen.
CG: Did you start to see...
FP: You know the bar raid thing had been simmering for years
CG: Uhuh
FP: Now it happened to be in a central place and it attracted all the people who wanted to have a say.
CG: And did you see over the course of those few nights that the media paid attention…
FP: You’ve seen the articles that were written right?
CG: Some of them
FP: Well it was “Queens Throw Hissy Fit”
CG: What?
FP: That was the headline for the Daily Mirror, “Queens Throw Hissy fit”
CG: (Laughs) Oh I haven’t seen that one.
FP: It was completely disparaging. You know it wasn’t the media reporting.
CG: It was tabloid.
FP: It was totally tabloid. (But it was also one of New York three biggest newspapers) When it was reported -so the media was not interested in it at all. Once they got their tabloid stuff they had no interest whatsoever and you know when GLF or GAA started doing media events we had to contact gay people within the media. You know, people we knew, dated, fucked with, to cover it and often they covered it without the consent of their papers.
CG: Right
FP: But came back with interesting stories and so they got published.
Right and then as the movement-I think there were two great moments. One was the mock marriage down at city hall, do you know about that? (Laughs)
CG: No please tell…
FP: I can’t remember the year maybe 1970 or 1971, I don’t know whose idea it was it was probably Marty’s idea.
He arranged for us to go down to City Hall. It was somebody’s very funny idea to dress a guy as a girl and girl as a guy and get them down to city hall and to get them married. (Laughter)
So they got out their licenses and got down to city hall and the marriage clerk was completely nonplussed and did not know what to do, right? And so the media attended that and it was in all the papers and it was a funny idea. The next thing that happened was maybe five or six months after that. I remember spending two nights stamping all these dollar bills with these pink stamps we had made that said “gay money.”
(Chuckles)
And they had somebody who went down there to the American, no the New York, Stock Exchange and in the middle of this whole thing, got up on the podium and starting throwing this money.
CG: What does gay money buy you?
FP: It was a couple hundred dollars of dollar bills. With pink lips and inside it said “gay money.”
And they just threw all this money and that sure made all the papers, even the Wall Street Journal, and so they got the idea that gay money was being spent and they better be aware of it. So there were a series of actions that grew out of this and then there was the first gay march which went up Fifth Avenue which was completely illegal. There was no permit for it.
CG: And when was that? 1970?
FP: 1970, yeah June of 1970 a year to the day. And there were about 150 to 200 marchers. There weren’t a lot of us! (Laughter)
There were not a lot of us I can tell you that!
CG: But that’s pretty significant for the first year.
FP: Yeah, yeah it was a big deal, but one of the things was that people had talked about it a lot and there were people along the parade route. So spottily along the route people who were in windows or on balconies hanging out signs saying “gay rights now”. There was a lot of spotty support and also the police were completely nonplussed. (Laughs) They had no idea what to do, ya know, um so it was really kind a curious. But these actions started gaining more and more velocity and the other thing was they got more and more publicity within the community, “Where were you?” “I was at the first gay march.” Stuff like that so it started gain traction.
CG: And people were probably hungry for that, to have that collective goal or experience. It was social.
FP: Very social.
And I think it was one of the ideas, I don’t remember who expressed it I think it was Karla Jay. We don’t want to lose our identity as gay people, this is Karla, a friend of mine who was in the GLF, GAA -we don’t want to lose our identity by becoming political we want to be both.
And I think we kept true to that.
Duration
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55 minutes
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16bit/44.1kHz
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NA
Dublin Core
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Title
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Felice Picano Interview
Subject
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Stonewall Rebellion and the Gay Liberation Movement
Creator
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Christopher Gioia
Date
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March 2016
Contributor
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Felice Picano
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MP3 Digital Recording
Language
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English
Type
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Oral History
Description
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Felice Picano, a gay author and memoirist who lived through and participated in the early gay liberation movement, shares his memories about Stonewall Inn, the West Village and Gay culture in the sixties. He provides insights into the riots and their impact as the spark for a protest movement that would become a national gay liberation movement. We discuss the changes that occurred and the evolution of the gay community and the enduring influence these early events have on the development of LGBT identity.
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NA
Publisher
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Christopher Gioia
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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
Identifier
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Felice Picano 2 MP3
Coverage
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NA
Christopher Street
Felice Picano
Gay Activists Alliance
Gay bars
Gay Liberation
Gay Liberation Front
Gay nightlife
Sheridan Square
Stonewall
Stonewall Inn
Stonewall Rebellion
West Village