And Then I Danced Read online

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  The bright light of those dark years was my grandmother, Fannie Weinstein. Grandmom, all four feet seven inches of her, was a smart-dressing former suffragette. In the winter she vacationed in Miami but in the summer she stayed in Atlantic City, and each year I was her guest for two magical weeks. Grandmom was sort of the queen bee of the Jewish ladies’ circuit of Atlantic City. And she was proud of her grandson. She made sure that when I was with her I was dressed properly. Each night we’d walk the boardwalk going from one rolling chair to another. She’d delight in bragging about me. How bright, how handsome, and how oh so charming I was. Each year, the two weeks were topped off with a dinner party. Never were the same guests present twice.

  Grandmom celebrated diversity before it was fashionable, and the aim of those parties was to introduce me to a variety of people. So avant-garde it all was, it reminded me of one of the first books I had read, Auntie Mame, about a boy growing up with his eccentric aunt and her madcap adventures. Her zest for life was captured by her saying, Live, live, live, and the famous line, Life is a banquet, and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death! It became my motto in life. When Rosalind Russell struts across the screen in the film version, I saw my grandmother, my very own Auntie Mame.

  Those parties, as I look back at them, were attended only by women, except for my Uncle Stan, who lived with my grandmother and me. It was not unusual for there to be African American or Latino women among these eclectic folks, but one year I was introduced to Mrs. Goldman and her friend. When I looked at Mrs. Goldman, I thought that something was different about her. She was dressed in a skirt and wore a man’s jacket and even walked like a man. Her friend, on the other hand, was dressed in a stylish woman’s outfit. I remember that they sat very close together on the sofa. Grandmom asked Mrs. Goldman to tell me about her job. She was a prison warden. How stereotypical that job would be for a lesbian, but back then the only question I had for Grandmom after everyone else left was, “Why were they so strange?” Grandmom smiled and told me that there are all types of people in the world, and one should never judge a person on what they look like on the outside. Mrs. Goldman was a good person, and that was all that counted.

  To my delight it wasn’t just in the summer that I’d see Grandmom. Sometimes she’d show up out of nowhere and take me to a movie, a speech, the art museum, or, as I remember most fondly, my first civil rights demonstration.

  That day when she picked me up, she looked at my mother and said, “I have a very important place to take Mark—we’ll be back by dinner.” She grabbed my hand and we began to walk. When I asked her where we were going, she said to City Hall.

  When we got to City Hall, we saw hundreds of people gathered, mostly black men and women. Grandmom walked up to someone and he handed her a stick with a sign on it. With the picket sign in one hand and me in the other, she marched us around City Hall, alongside everyone else. It all seemed to be some sort of game to me, but Grandmom explained it was about the issue of fairness.

  After the march she introduced me to the man who had organized it. His name was Cecil B. Moore, a Philadelphia attorney, president of the local NAACP and a civil rights activist who, along with the Reverend Leon Sullivan and Sam Evans, were the major organizers for the African American community in Philadelphia at that time. He chatted with Grandmom, and it was obvious that they had known each other. At some point he leaned down and looked at me but said to her: “Your grandson certainly is skinny!” Then he laughed and walked away. Some twelve years later, the Democratic Party of Philadelphia honored Cecil B. Moore by nominating and electing him to the city council.

  On my return to Philadelphia in the early seventies, one of my first tasks was to lobby for the introduction of nondiscrimination legislation into the city council to protect gay men and lesbian women. It was my job to go to each councilmember and ask if they would cosponsor the legislation or vote for it. At that point Cecil B. Moore was an elder statesman, having led the fight to integrate Girard College and the trade unions; he was always known to be outspoken and confrontational and was clearly unfazed by what people thought of his opinions. He often said whatever he wanted, sometimes just to get a reaction.

  When I walked into his office for our designated appointment, he had his feet propped up on his desk and was smoking a cigar. He looked at me and said, “What do you want?” I went into a speech I had put together on why gays and lesbians needed protection from discrimination. About halfway through, he stopped me and said, “Just wait there.” And, with what looked like an angry face, he added, “Are you asking me to support a bill for fags and dykes?” I was staring at him in disbelief, wondering if this was the same man my grandmother had asked me to march with, and then he broke into a big laugh and said, “You can count on me.”

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  By the time I was nine years old, I knew that being poor sucked and that I had to get out. That desire to lift myself out of poverty’s debilitating grasp led me to me my first newspaper job. There was a company contracted by the Philadelphia Inquirer to sell subscriptions to suburbanites. Their plan was simple: take inner-city schoolkids to the suburbs, have them go door to door and read a prepared text. “Hi, ma’am, my name is Mark Segal. I’m in a school contest to win a trip to Cape Canaveral to further my science education. You can help me win by subscribing to the Philadelphia Inquirer.” Who would not buy from a poor, skinny, yet charming nine-year-old at their door?

  Stereotypical as it is for a Jew (though believe me, I didn’t care an ounce about stereotypes), I was the best salesman on our team. Those trips to the suburbs gave me my first view of how the other half lived, and put some money in my pocket. The car would pick us up in the projects around six p.m. each weekday.

  We’d head to a fast food place for dinner with our team leader (we paid our own way), then spend about an hour or so going from door to door before returning home by eight or nine p.m. Often we’d go to a New Jersey development, mostly single-family homes with a bit of land around them. Those yards! Each house was similar but, to me, large with very nice furniture, and the swimming pools made me realize what my family didn’t have. That experience taught me to dream. The money I made allowed me to buy some of the things I wanted; and brought the realization that there must be even better jobs out there for me. The job also taught me about anti-Semitism, from incidents with my coworkers. At that young age I knew life was going to be a fight if I wanted to succeed, but it was one in which I was willing to engage since my parents had promised me it was worth the effort, no matter how hard it might be. My parents never lied.

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  In my teens, Dad’s luck turned a little. He had been driving a cab and made enough so we could move to Mount Airy, a much better neighborhood, well away from the projects. It was a middle-class community, the model of an integrated neighborhood, populated by Jews, Christians, and African Americans. At Germantown High School, I simultaneously got my first taste of organizing and learned an important lesson.

  One teacher in my senior year had never taught high school before, and couldn’t handle the students. Most of us were a bit unruly, and even when we weren’t misbehaving, we simply found it impossible to understand his teaching. His last resort at keeping control was to tell us that we were all going to fail his class. His class was a requirement to graduate, so I took up a petition. It was the first time I had ever done anything like that. This was the middle of the counterculture era, 1969. The inspiration for my campaign came from the rancor of the antiwar and civil rights movements that I watched nightly on the television news. One of the many items I listed in the petition as a reason for our lobbying was that he was teaching Communism. All the white kids signed, but the black kids refused and were angered by the focus on Communism. Finally, one of the black kids explained it to me. In the South, when the police were pushing around the civil rights workers, they justified it by claiming they were Communists. So I took that item off the petition and even today I still think abo
ut what an unfair and cheap shot it was. Once we did it, however, everyone signed. We all passed the class and graduated. It was my first organizing success, and I learned a valuable lesson in compromise and listening.

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  While other kids were collecting eight-millimeter stag films, my collection was of old J.C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, and Sears, Roebuck catalogs. I didn’t think there were any stag films or porn for people like me. One day at a farmers market in Berlin, New Jersey, I stumbled upon an old magazine stall and began flipping through various periodicals. I found a magazine with men modeling in what today would be called Speedos, and in jock straps, some wearing strategically placed loincloths, attempting to emulate the look of a Greek god. Ashamed to take it to the cashier, I put the periodical inside another magazine and purchased that one instead. Telling the clerk that I didn’t need a bag and holding it tight like my freedom depended on it, I exited the store posthaste.

  I didn’t want to kiss the girls. I’d look at the guys in my class and feel far more attracted to them. There was no doubt in my mind about this, but I didn’t know the word for who I was or what I was feeling. I knew, however, that I was okay with it. Now, I wasn’t going to tell anybody, not in the 1960s.

  I did have a few friends in Mount Airy. Randy Miller became my closest friend and my first real crush, which was an obstacle in our friendship, since he wasn’t gay. I never told him how I felt about him. This experience taught me that there is more to a relationship than physicality . . . The way I felt about him, the way I desired him, wasn’t just for sex because I wouldn’t trade the emotional connection of our friendship for that alone. I realized that any real relationship had to include emotional connection.

  When I was younger, maybe five or six years old, my cousin Norman was sixteen. His father discovered that he was gay, gave him a major beating, and threw him out of the house. Cousin Norman was the family member whom nobody mentioned. One day, I was in the backseat of my parents’ Studebaker while they were discussing him and I somehow picked up on the fact that he was a guy who liked guys—a fegeleh. It was rarely brought up in the family and this clued me in to the dynamic that silence was preferred on this topic. Talk or no talk, I knew that whatever it all meant, I too was a fegeleh. And I knew never to speak about it.

  As a teenager, I read in TV Guide one afternoon that on his PBS talk show, David Susskind was going to interview “real live homosexuals.” A new word different from fegeleh, somehow I knew it also referred to me. I just knew it. In the fifties and sixties, those words were rarely used, but if you were found to be a homosexual, you were a sinner in religious circles; you were a criminal in legal situations; you were insane in the psychiatric community; and you were unemployable by city, state, and federal governments. Pretty much a life of condemnation awaited you. If people found out the word homosexual applied to you, chances were you would lose your job, your family, be subjected to electrical shocks, and lose everything else you valued, so most remained inside a closet within a closet. I didn’t know all of this as a kid, but I knew it was a dangerous subject to discuss. This would all change later on, but in the early sixties there weren’t many places to turn if such a life was yours.

  My parents had given me a nine-inch portable black-and-white television set for my bar mitzvah. It was all the rage back then, an itty-bitty set with big round batteries. The David Susskind show came on at late at night and I remember taking my TV up to my room, making my bedcovers into a tent, and watching the show. There was a man from the Mattachine Society in New York talking about gay people. I thought to myself, There are homosexuals in New York. There are people like me. Then and there I knew I would move to New York.

  It was awhile before I took action, but that night a plan began to form in my head. I was going to be with people like me. For a long while I had no idea how I’d do it, but it eventually came to me. Radio Corporation of America (RCA) had a technical institute that taught high school students how to be television cameramen. That was my ticket. It broke my father’s heart since he really wanted me to go to college, and Mom always said I’d make a great lawyer. But the only thing that mattered to me then was to be with my own kind and there were none of us in Philadelphia, at least none that I knew. In New York I would become part of a new breed of gay men who didn’t slide easily into the popular and unfortunate stereotypes of the times—and that would work to my advantage.

  On May 10, 1969, the day after grades were finalized, I moved to New York on the pretense that I would start technical school in September. My parents drove me up, dropped me off, and I got a room at the YMCA. I dressed up in my best clothes and set off for a gay evening, probably expecting that my gay brothers and sisters would line up to embrace me and welcome me into their community. The problem was, I had no idea where to go. There were certainly no neon signs pointing to the gay area. It seemed the place to start my search was Greenwich Village, which according to the network news was the countercultural hub of the 1960s. Getting off the subway in the Village, I had an unhappy, lonely feeling. Leaving the security of home, finding myself in a strange place with no prospects of a job and little money, was a bit daunting. Yet my search was on. It didn’t begin very well, though, and that first night I returned to my tiny four-dollar sweatbox room, exhausted and unsuccessful in finding my people.

  After a few days of looking around, I came across a Village dance bar, the Stonewall, a mob-owned dive. The search was over. As it turned out, two boys who I’d met at the YMCA from Saint Cloud, Minnesota, were there that night as well.

  That first week, remembering the Susskind show with real live homosexuals, I also looked up Mattachine Society in the telephone book and went to their office. I had no idea what to expect. All I knew about them from the television show was that they worked on keeping gay people from getting fired. I walked out of the office about fifteen minutes later with a guy named Marty Robinson, who would later become one of the most unsung heroes of the gay movement. Marty was young and evidently frustrated in his dealings with Mattachine. He said, “You don’t want to be involved with these old people. They don’t understand gay rights as it’s happening today. Look what’s happening in the black community. Look at the fight for women’s rights. Look at the fight against the Vietnam War.”

  It was 1969 and Mattachine had become old. They were men in suits. We were men in jeans and T-shirts. So he told me that he and others were going to start a new gay rights movement, one more in tune with the times. Marty was creating an organization called the Action Group and I became an inaugural member. We didn’t know exactly what we were going to do or what actions we might pursue, but none of that mattered. Others at that time were also creating gay groups to spark public consciousness, similar to the groups feminists were establishing. It deserves to be said right here and right now that the feminist movement was pivotal in helping to shape the new movement for gay rights.

  Groups across New York worked independently of each other, but all with the same goal of defining ourselves rather than accepting the labels that society had branded us with. We were on the ground floor of the struggle for equality, and though some might have seen it as a sexual revolution, we saw it as defining ourselves. Years later a friend would remark, “Mark was so involved with the sexual revolution that he didn’t have time to participate.” The Action Group would hold meetings walking down Christopher Street—our outdoor office, so to speak. We didn’t have a headquarters.

  Then, just a little over a month after I arrived, on June 28, 1969, Stonewall happened.

  Chapter 2

  Stonewall

  Many in the LGBT community think of the Stonewall vets, as some call us, like heroes. For me it started out as a frightening event.

  I was in the back of the bar near the dance floor, where the younger people usually hung out. The lights in the room blinked—a signal that there would be a raid—then turned all the way up. Stonewall was filled that night with the usual clientele: drag queens, hustlers,
older men who liked younger guys, and stragglers like me—the boy next door who didn’t know what he was searching for and felt he had little to offer. That all changed when the police raided the bar. As they always did, they walked in like they owned the place, cocky, assured that they could do and say whatever they wanted and push people around with impunity. We had no idea why they came in, whether or not they’d been paid, wanted more payoffs, or simply wanted to harass the fags that night. One of the policemen came up to me and asked for my ID. I was eighteen, which was the legal drinking age in New York in those days. I rustled through my wallet, very frightened, and quickly handed him my ID. I was no help in their search for underage drinkers. I was relieved to be among the first to get out of the bar.

  As a crowd began to assemble, I ran into Marty Robinson and he asked what was going on.

  “It’s just another raid,” I told him, full of nonchalant sophistication. We walked up and down Christopher Street, and fifteen minutes later we heard loud banging and screaming. The screams were not of fear, but resistance. That was the beginning of the Stonewall riots. It was not the biggest riot ever—it has been tremendously blown out of proportion—but it was still a riot, although one pretty much contained to across the street on Sheridan Square and Seventh Avenue. There were probably only a couple hundred participants; anyone with a decent job or family ran away from that bar as fast as they could to avoid being arrested. Those who remained were the drag queens, hustlers, and runaways.

  People had begun to congregate at the door after they left the bar. One of the cops had said something derogatory under his breath and the mood shifted. The crowd began taunting the police. Every time someone came out of the bar, the crowd yelled. A drag queen shouted at the cops: “What’s the matter, aren’t you getting any at home? I can give you something you’d really love.” The cops started to get rough, pushing and shoving. In response the crowd got angry. The cops took refuge inside. The drag queens, loud and boisterous, were throwing everything that wasn’t fastened down to the street and a few things that were, like parking meters. Whoever assumes that a swishy queen can’t fight should have seen them, makeup dripping and gowns askew, fighting for their home and fiercely proving that no one would take it away from them.