And Then I Danced Read online

  More and more police cars arrived. Some rioters began firebombing the place while others fanned out, breaking shop windows on Christopher Street and looting the displays; somebody put a dress on the statue of General Phil Sheridan. There was an odd, celebratory feel to it, the notion that we were finally fighting back and that it felt good. Bodies ricocheted off one another, but there was no fighting in the street. All the anger was directed at the policemen inside the bar. People were actually laughing and dancing out there. According to some accounts, though I did not actually see this, drag queens formed a Rockettes-style chorus line singing, “We are the Stonewall girls / We wear our hair in curls / We wear no underwear / To show our pubic hair.” That song and dance later became popular with a gay youth group I was part of, and months after Stonewall, Mark Horn, Jeff Hochhauser, Michael Knowles, Tony Russomanno, and I would dance our way to the Silver Dollar restaurant at the bottom of Christopher Street. We were going to be the first graduating class of gay activists in this country—indeed, most of us are still involved, and we’re in touch with each other to this day.

  Marty Robinson, after seeing what was happening, disappeared and then reappeared with chalk. Most people don’t realize that Stonewall was not simply a one-night occurrence. Marty immediately understood that the Stonewall raid presented a “moment” that could be the catalyst to organize the movement and bring together all the separate groups. He was the one person who saw it then and there as a pivotal point in history. At his direction several of us wrote on walls and on the ground up and down Christopher Street: Meet at Stonewall tomorrow night. How did Marty know that this night could create something that would change our community forever?

  The nights following the Stonewall raid consisted primarily of loosely organized speeches. Various LGBT factions were coming together publicly for the first time, protesting the oppressive treatment of the community. Up until that moment, LGBT people had simply accepted oppression and inequality as their lot in life. That all changed. There was a spirit of rebellion in the air. More than just merely begging to be treated equally, it was time to stand up, stand out, and demand an end to fearful deference.

  Stonewall would become a four-night event and the most visible symbol of a movement. We united for the first time: lesbian separatists, gay men in fairy communes, people who had been part of other civil rights movements but never thought about one of their own, young gay radicals, hustlers, drag queens, and many like me who knew there was something out there for us, but didn’t know what it was. It found us. So, to the NYPD, thank you. Thank you for creating a unified LGBT community and thank you for becoming the focal point for years of oppression that many of us had to suffer growing up. You represented all those groups and individuals that wanted to keep us in our place.

  The Action Group eventually joined with other organizations to become the Gay Liberation Front, or GLF. In that first year Marty helped create the new gay movement, along with people like Martha Shelley, Allen Young, Karla Jay, Jim Fouratt, Barbara Love, John O’Brien, Lois Hart, Ralph Hall, Jim Owles, Perry Brass, Bob Kohler, Susan Silverman, Jerry Hoose, Steven Dansky, John Lauritsen, Dan Smith, Ron Auerbacher, Nikos Diaman, Suzanne Bevier, Carl Miller, Earl Galvin, Michael Brown, Arthur Evans, and of course Sylvia Rivera.

  I’d like to believe that the GLF put us gay youth in a good position to succeed, since many of us have done so in different ways. Mark Horn has had an incredible career in advertising and public relations at top firms; Jeff Hochhauser went on to his dream of becoming a playwright and teaching theater; Michael Knowles is in theater management; and Tony Russomanno, who for a while in those early days was my partner, continued on his path in broadcasting, winning multiple Emmy and Peabody awards as a news reporter and television anchor.

  * * *

  Over the last few years, LGBT history has become a passion of mine, and sometimes it seems that the younger generation doesn’t really care about it. The Gay Liberation Front has mostly been ignored in the history books, even though it helped forge the foundation upon which our community is built.

  Stonewall was a fire in the belly of the equality movement. Even so, accounts of it are full of myth and misinformation, and much of that will inevitably remain so, since there are differing accounts from those active in the movement. That’s the nature of memory, I suppose. Regardless of the diverging stories, and no matter how intense the fighting was, Stonewall represented, absolutely, the first time that the LGBT community successfully fought back and forged an organized movement and community. All of us at Stonewall had one thing in common: the oppression of growing up in a world which demanded our silence about who we were and insisted that we simply accept the punishment that society levied for our choices. That silence ended with Stonewall, and those who created the Gay Liberation Front organized and launched a sustainable movement.

  But Stonewall was not the first uprising. LGBT history is written, like most history, by the victors, those with the means and those with connections or power. Two similar uprisings before Stonewall have almost been written out of our history: San Francisco’s Compton Cafeteria riot in 1966 and the Dewey’s sit-in in Philadelphia in 1965. Drag queens and street kids who played a huge role in both events never documented those riots, thus they have been widely eliminated by the white upper middle class, many of whom were ashamed of those elements of our community. But Stonewall, Compton, and Dewey’s all have one thing in common: drag queens and street kids. For some historians, drag queens are not the ideal representatives of the LGBT community. Oppression within oppression was and is still of concern. Even recently, with the transgender issue finally being taken seriously, there is still a backlash from the community about including them in the general gay movement.

  It has been over forty years since the Gay Liberation Front first took trans seriously, but the gay men who wore those shirts with the polo players or alligator emblems didn’t want trans people as the representation of their community. Their revisionist history has been accepted into popular culture because they were the ones with connections to publishers, the influence, as well as the money and time to sit back and write about what “really” happened.

  The riot of 1966 in San Francisco grew out of police harassment of drag queens at Compton’s Cafeteria. It all started with the staff at Compton’s telling the drag queens to settle down. It was the drag queens who, night after night, went there and bought drinks, sustaining the business. It was, in a sense, their home. The management’s job, according to their deal with the police, was to keep the queens in order. One night, like Stonewall, the queens decided they didn’t want to be controlled any longer.

  And even before Compton’s there were the Dewey’s restaurant sit-ins in Philadelphia in April 1965. The restaurant management decided not to serve people who demonstrated “improper behavior.” The reality was that they didn’t want to serve homosexuals, especially those who didn’t wear the acceptable clothing. Meaning drag queens. A spontaneous sit-in occurred and over the next week the Janus Society, an early gay rights organization, had picketers on site handing out flyers. Most were people who had little to lose, the street kids and drag queens once again. Those LGBT people with the little animals on their polo shirts were in short supply.

  Both Compton’s and Dewey’s point to the fact that in the mid-1960s the fight for black civil rights was beginning to influence the more disenfranchised in the gay community. The major difference with those two early events is that from the Stonewall riots grew a new movement, one that still lives today. Nonetheless, they deserve to be remembered.

  * * *

  The biggest fallacy of Stonewall is when people say, “Of course they were upset, Judy Garland was being buried that day.” That trivializes what happened and our years of oppression, and is just culturally wrong. Many of us in Stonewall who stayed on Christopher Street and didn’t run from the riot that day were people my age. Judy Garland was from the past generation, an old star. Diana Ross, the Beatles, even Barbra St
reisand were the icons of our generation. Garland meant a little something to us, as she did for many groups—“Somewhere Over the Rainbow”—but that was it. And, honestly, that song was wishful thinking, an anthem for the older generation. In that bar, we were going to smash that rainbow. We didn’t have to go over anything or travel anywhere to get what we wanted. The riot was about the police doing what they constantly did: indiscriminately harassing us. The police represented every institution of America that night: religion, media, medical, legal, and even our families, most of whom had been keeping us in our place. We were tired of it. And as far as we knew, Judy Garland had nothing to do with it.

  While I didn’t know it at that moment, I was fighting back against feelings that had been suppressed for so many years. No more J.C. Penney catalogs for me. It was time for the real thing. As the riot was happening all around me, the idea of a circus came to mind, and then it hit me: we can shout who we are and not be ashamed, we can demand respect. It was at that point that Marty Robinson’s words hit a chord. We were fighting for our rights just as women, African Americans, and others had done throughout history.

  * * *

  After my Grandmom had taken me to my first civil rights demonstration at thirteen, I’d watch the news every night, waiting to see the latest update on what was happening. My television viewing and newspaper reading included following the Freedom Riders in the South. The sit-ins and marches had a big impact on me. The images of Birmingham, of Bull Connor with his German shepherds snapping, of the fire hoses blasting people marching for desegregation moved me. They led me to ask how one human could possibly treat another in that manner. I realized, too, the brilliance of Martin Luther King Jr., the Atlanta pastor and face of the movement, in his strategic use of Bull Connor and Birmingham to showcase the hatred behind segregation. What’s more, Bayard Rustin, MLK’s contemporary in the fight for equality and his chief of staff for the March on Washington, was a gay man, vocal on the rights of gay people. The FBI and others tried to use Rustin’s “homosexuality” against him, and some of the organizers of the march wanted to drop him, but MLK stood tall in supporting him. It wouldn’t be until I interviewed Coretta Scott King in 1986 and she reaffirmed her husband’s support of “gay rights” that I got to personally offer my gratitude. It was an unknown fact to many, including those of us in Gay Liberation Front, which would become the only university I ever attended.

  Gay Liberation Front, in all likelihood, was the most dysfunctional LGBT organization that ever existed, which shouldn’t be very surprising. Born from the ashes of the Stonewall riots, it brought together for the first time the various elements and fractions of the community, to organize, to strategize, and to fight back. Before Stonewall we were polite; after Stonewall we demanded our equality. To that point we had no understanding of who we were as a people, we only had what society told us we were, and at that time a lot of us in New York were attempting to redefine ourselves. There were many individuals who began to set up collectives, lesbian separatist groups, discussion groups, even communes, and everything in between.

  In addition to redefining ourselves, we also realized from the beginning that we were focused on building a community, since we couldn’t count on any part of society to provide the basic services we needed. We had to create those institutions where they had never existed before. We were trying to establish our goals and figure out what kind of organization we would be. Since we were oppressed by the system, we didn’t want to use any of their old tools in our meetings.

  Therefore, there was no leadership at GLF, no permanent chair, only the occasional use of Robert’s Rules of Order. Decisions were made by consensus, and in order to reach that point some meetings went late into the evening. It was total chaos. It worked, but at times it was almost comedic.

  At one meeting a woman spoke about how men were trying to control women in the organization. Her example was that the men with beards in the group did not understand how through the ages facial hair had been used to symbolize the dominant male of a community, i.e., the leader. So men with beards at Gay Liberation Front were supporting the oppression of women. The following week several men, in order to show solidarity, came to the meeting with their beards shaved. That upset some of the other men, who saw beards as fashion or a symbol of who they were, accepting their masculinity. That in turn upset the fairies who wanted men to accept their feminine side. And around it went.

  We debated everything, with the exception of creating community—we were all agreed on that goal, and worked to form groups to help us achieve it. There was no debate when I advocated for a gay youth group and little debate when Sylvia Rivera created Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), one of the first-ever trans organizations. There was no debate on health alerts, and the only conflict about opening a community center related to money, not the idea. This is part of why 1969 is often cited as the start of the new gay rights movement. Gay Liberation Front led our struggle from a mere movement trying to change laws into one of harvesting community.

  We were so radical that even Harvey Milk, the “Mayor of Castro Street” who lived in New York before he became the first elected openly gay member of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977 and was assassinated in 1978, stayed clear of us.

  Little known fact about Harvey: His former partner and later a friend of mine was Craig Rodwell, founder of the Oscar Wilde Bookshop. He was also the founder of what today is Gay Pride Day, but what Craig then called the Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day. Milk was so closeted in 1970 that he wouldn’t involve himself with the event or any other gay movement. He only did so after moving away from his New York family to San Francisco in 1972. It says something about San Francisco circa 1978 that an openly gay man would be assassinated in what was considered the nation’s most gay-friendly city. (For those who appreciate LGBT history, the first openly gay or lesbian elected official anywhere in the country was Nancy Wechsler, voted to the city council in Ann Arbor in 1972, then Elaine Noble to the state house in Massachusetts in 1974. It would not be until 1987, when Barney Frank came out, that we would have an out member of Congress, and 2012 when we finally had an out member of the US Senate, Tammy Baldwin.)

  Like all caucuses, committees, cells, or communes, each group within the Gay Liberation Front had its mission. While I didn’t form the first youth group, I organized the first one intended to be a foundation on which a community could then be built. We were going to reach out beyond the areas where LGBT youth were thought to be. We took on the serious issues of bullied, battered, homeless, and suicidal gay youth. We created safe spaces and safe activities. And not only were we there to offer our support to one of the most endangered segments of our community, we were there to nurture future activists. We were in some ways the first graduating class of gay liberation. Donn Teal wrote in The Gay Militants: “As GLF had given birth to organizations for transvestites and transsexuals and for Third World people, so did it sire Gay Youth.” Published in 1971, this was the first LGBT history of those early years.

  Our flyers clearly stated that our goals were both political and social. We even surprised our older comrades in the Gay Liberation Front with our media outreach directed at gay youth. We went on radio talk shows and even TV shows. We spoke at high schools. One of my favorite items of that time was a copy of the Spider Press, the newspaper of Oceanside High School, and there on the cover is a picture of Gay Youth members Tony Russomanno and Mark Segal with the headline, “Gay Activist Lecture; They Are Not Neurotic.” This was October 23, 1970.

  At one time or another I was chairman, president, or sometimes just the leader. My steadfast vice president, Mark Horn, whose title never changed, would smirk at my various titles. Tony Russomanno helped us in our goal of becoming the first national gay youth organization by starting our Detroit chapter—and we called ourselves, simply, Gay Youth. We soon had chapters in San Francisco, Chicago, Tampa, Ann Arbor, and even my hometown of Philadelphia. Our Philly chapter started b
y Tommi Avicolli Mecca, now a housing activist in San Francisco, intended “to act as a basic introduction to Gay Liberation Front.” In Stephan L. Cohen’s book The Gay Liberation Youth Movement in New York, our “demands” in various national LGBT organizational meetings, to summarize, were: ending ageism in all its forms, ending age-of-consent laws, ending abuse by parents, ending repression by schools and religious institutions, and, most importantly, an equal voice at the table for LGBT organizations.

  I hosted movie nights in my five-story walk-up apartment on 12th Street and Avenue C, which was a three-room tenement decorated with donations and furnishings from the street; the bathtub was in the kitchen. It had a nice living room where we would plug in the borrowed projector and show films on the wall, before leaving to take a walk across town to Christopher Street. These movie nights grew too popular for the apartment so we moved them to Alternate U, where we held our dances. Gay Youth did all of this with no real funding, with the exception of what came from our pockets or what we received from the small Gay Liberation Front treasury.

  As Marc Stein writes in his book Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement, “Interest was so great among young people that in 1970 GLF-NY established a Gay Youth caucus . . . Led by Mark Segal, Gay Youth soon was functioning as an autonomous organization with affiliated groups elsewhere in the United States and Canada.” For me, Gay Youth was a lesson in both creating lifelong friendships and leadership. It also helped me prove to myself that my career as an activist was real­—as long as I had no expectations of a salary.