And Then I Danced Page 4

  The most contested topic at any Gay Liberation Front meeting was sexism, but we debated many subjects. At times the debates became personal and it was not unusual to hear people being labeled capitalist pigs, fascist, racist, sexist, and for good measure I’d even toss in the label ageist on occasion.

  Somehow even the simple act of a kiss took on political overtones. Perry Brass tells this story: “Someone explained to me that these were ‘political kisses,’ to show that we were out and proud, especially at a GLF meeting. At my first meeting we broke into discussion groups after the ‘business’ part of the meeting was over. My discussion group of six people included Pete Wilson, a good-looking young man who also had a program on WBAI radio. Pete had a wonderful voice, and a remarkably sparkling, outgoing personality. I was drawn to him, and I remembered a lot of what he said, talking about how important it was for us to throw off old habits and fears. I certainly had enough of the old habits and fears, growing up in an extremely repressive atmosphere. I noticed, though, there was a distinct coolness to Pete. He was not someone to hug and smooch with other people. But he was very political and could talk an excellent political line.

  “Several weeks after this first meeting, I went to Carnegie Hall for an afternoon concert. After it was over, while walking down from the balcony, I spotted Pete in the stairway. He approached me in the midst of a throng of people, and kissed me. He had never kissed me before at a meeting, or any place. I was embarrassed for a second; I was not used to kissing outside. We talked a bit, and I hid any concerns I had about being kissed in the stairway of Carnegie Hall. At the next GLF meeting, on seeing him, I walked up to Pete and kissed him.

  “‘Why did you do that?’ he asked.

  “I shrugged. It seemed the right thing to do. ‘You kissed me at Carnegie Hall,’ I said.

  “‘Oh, that was a political kiss,’ he explained. ‘You don’t have to do that here.’”

  Some topics weren’t discussed, such as gays in the military or marriage, but we still had members who went off by themselves and dealt with those issues without the endorsement of the organization. Working with elected officials became a major effort of Marty Robinson and Jim Owles. Gay Liberation Front’s support for the Black Panthers, and our numerous demonstrations outside the Women’s House of Detention which then was in our neighborhood on Greenwich off Christopher, caused a rift. We’d often join the demonstrations and march and shout, “Hey hey, ho ho, the house of D has to go!” And our contingent would then shout, “Ho ho, hey hey, gay is just as good as straight!” Ultimately, these types of issues caused Jim and Marty and a few others to break away from Gay Liberation Front and create Gay Activist Alliance. The last straw for them was the support given to the Black Panthers.

  Many of us felt religion was a fundamental element in our repression. When Reverend Troy Perry held a meeting in New York at the Summit Hotel on Lexington Avenue to organize a branch of his fledgling LGBT church, Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), we picketed. Yes, one gay organization picketing another. After his meeting, however, Troy came out to speak to us. He took me aside and explained that while we were effective at reaching some members of the community, we had little possibility of reaching those who were religious. His church gave people a place to go where they could be both religious and a member of the LGBT community. His point was pragmatic and started a friendship between us that lasts to this day.

  The same holds true for my sisters and brothers in Gay Liberation Front. Being one of the youngest in the group, I was allowed certain liberties, and for that reason I was and am on good terms with most of our surviving members. They were my teachers, and all that I have accomplished has its roots in what I learned in GLF.

  * * *

  After GLF’s incredible first year, many thought we should celebrate Stonewall and our achievements. Chief among them was Craig Rodwell, so he organized what is now commonly known as a gay pride parade. As I’ve already mentioned, its name then was Christopher Street Gay Liberation Day. I was one of the many who volunteered to be a marshal those first few years. One of the original posters from the event hangs in a place of honor in my den.

  It was Sunday, June 28, 1970. No one knew what would happen since we intended to march up to Central Park without a permit. We held self-defense/martial arts classes at Alternate U where we learned how to protect ourselves, since we had no idea who or what would greet us. After all, we were going to march through the middle of Manhattan from the Village to Central Park. That march was one of the great products of Stonewall.

  GLF changed the world in one year. Think that’s an overstatement? Here are the facts: before Stonewall, the movement for LGBT equality consisted of one large national public demonstration each year on July 4 in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, and of course the Compton’s and Dewey’s events and a couple of small regional pickets. But the picket line at Independence Hall lasted from 1965 till 1969. No more than fifty to one hundred people attended. That was the preeminent LGBT demonstration of its day, and the picketers came from across the nation, though mostly from the East Coast. In a few major cities there were organizations like One Inc. (Los Angeles), Mattachine (Washington and New York), Daughters of Bilitis and Janus Society (Philadelphia), and a handful of others. That was it.

  But Gay Liberation Front, along with its brother and sister organizations, wanted to create something more than just a march for equality. Before Stonewall, these few brave organizations, and the people on those picket lines outside Independence Hall each July 4, all that existed were bars, secret gay hook-up venues, and private parties.

  In 1969, the Mattachine Society in New York would not allow anyone under eighteen into their offices, afraid that the police would raid them. So we organized our youth, welcomed them to our meetings, set up a suicide hot line, a speakers’ bureau that went to high schools, and, when the Village Voice would not publish the word “gay,” we marched on them. The laws were wrong; we were not!

  That Sunday morning we gathered on Christopher Street. By the time we reached 23rd Street, the crowd still reached all the way back to Christopher Street. Estimates were everywhere from 5,000 to 15,000 people. We had taken the movement from a brave crew of a hundred people willing to march in public at those Independence Hall pickets to what was now a march of many thousands. That first year of Gay Liberation Front was one of the most pivotal years in the struggle for LGBT equality. As my friend Jerry Hoose used to say about that year, “We went from the shadows to sunlight.”

  And in 1972, when the gay pride march was officially launched, the New York Times reported on June 26, “The message of the march, according to Mark Segal, the grand marshal, was simply, ‘We’re proud to be gay.’” Well, I wasn’t the grand marshal, and I wouldn’t return to that march again until Stonewall 25—and then again in 2004, when Frank Kameny, Jim Kepner, Jack Nichols, some of my brothers and sisters from Gay Liberation Front, and I, among others, were put on two giant floats and recognized as pioneers of the struggle for LGBT equality.

  * * *

  New York City was for me the center of everything, especially the East Village, where I lived. At that time, it was not the trendy neighborhood it is today; rather, it was one of the most dangerous in the city and therefore affordable to me. Many of my new friends were connected to the outer fringes of show business: James, a dancer from Ohio, and his sister Kelly, who was dating one of the doormen at Stonewall. Mark “10 1/2” Stevens, who found a career in straight porn films even though he was gay and, as my parents might say, a nice Jewish boy. And then there was my roommate, Rosemary Gimple, and her friend Jeff Hochhauser.

  Rosemary and Jeff had written a musical called Graduation that was being performed at New York Theater Ensemble. They enlisted me as their stage manager despite knowing that my only previous theatrical experience was in high school where I had one line in our school version of The Man Who Came to Dinner. (I was to appear at a pivotal point in the plot and shout, “Stop, I’m the FBI and this is
a raid!” When I walked onstage my friends in the audience applauded and I froze.)

  Graduation was the story of a teenage boy coming of age and accepting himself. It was, I believe, the first gay-themed musical on the New York stage and it led to my second and last job in the theater, managing a show down the street for Andy Warhol “superstar” Jackie Curtis. All I can remember is a song titled “White Shoulders” and what we would today call a transgender actress, Holly Woodlawn, whom everyone adored. Nearby was La Mama, which seemed to always have a show featuring a drag queen. Sometimes that drag queen was Harvey Fierstein, who went on to win many Tonys on Broadway and be inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

  The off-off-Broadway community was flourishing. On nights when you weren’t working, you could get yourself invited to see these other offerings. One night for me it was a reading of an unfinished show titled Small Craft Warnings, which I knew nothing about. As I watched the first act, I grew increasingly agitated and annoyed. The self-pity of the gay character was precisely what my activism was trying to end. At that point, gays in the media had only three variations: pitiful, villainous, or suicidal, and this was going down that same old path. So with my newfound activism and left-leaning language, I stood up and shouted, “Bullshit! This is oppressive to gay men!” As I continued to go on about gay liberation, a small man made his way down the aisle to my row. He told me he was the playwright and that I should get the hell out of the theater. He was Tennessee Williams, who claimed fame following his blockbusters The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire. The show, when it officially opened, received poor reviews and closed quickly.

  On another night Jackie Curtis invited me to a party at Andy Warhol’s Factory right off of Union Square. The Factory was the hip hangout for socialites, drag queens, bohemians, intellectuals, and Hollywood types. I remember walking upstairs and winding up in a large, dimly lit loft with lots of people and not much food or drink. By the time we got there Jackie was already stoned. My fifteen minutes with Warhol were spent watching him walk aimlessly around the loft holding a jar of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Warhol, who lived as an openly gay man even before the gay rights movement, said a few unmemorable, indecipherable words and was off. Later on at the party, someone speculated about what he used the mayonnaise for; I’ll spare you the details. There were many solitary people who ambled around without agenda, as well as groups of people who huddled tightly together like pickles.

  The off-Broadway theater crowd hung out at Phebe’s, which served the best burgers in the city. One night I met a guy who claimed to be a Broadway producer. Why would a Broadway producer be slumming on East 4th Street with the off-off-Broadway crowd? He invited me to stand with him in the wings and see his latest show in previews. The show was called The Love Suicide at Schofield Barracks and it closed after five performances. My friend Rosemary told me that the guy then tried the movie business. His name was Robert Weinstein. He made the right move.

  Another friend, Charlie Briggs, was the assistant stage manager for the Broadway musical production of Purlie, starring Cleavon Little, Melba Moore, and a former Philadelphian named Sherman Helmsley whose TV audiences would get to know him as George Jefferson on the TV sitcom The Jeffersons. Little and Moore, who went on to have a major music career, won Tony Awards for their performances in Purlie. On my visits to the show, Helmsley and I would often compare notes on our home city. There has been much speculation about his sexuality since his death in 2012. While he certainly took a keen interest in our talks and my gay activism, there is nothing more that I can add to that discussion.

  On another occasion Rosemary wanted to go to the theater to see a revival of an old musical, No, No, Nanette. She got us orchestra tickets in the next-to-last row for the final preview before its opening night at the 46th Street Theater. While I was reading the playbill before the show, Rosemary tapped me on my shoulder. She pointed across the aisle at two of our fellow theatergoers, Senator Ted Kennedy and his wife.

  Rosemary, always a little amused at my dealings in activism, said with a smirk, “Why don’t you ask him about gay rights?”

  I smiled, got up from my seat, and made my way to Senator Kennedy. He was sitting up front in an aisle seat. I tapped him on the back, which startled him. A life lesson: never sneak up on a man who has seen two of his brothers assassinated. He turned in surprise and I introduced myself, after which I asked him his position on gay rights. He looked a little bewildered—after all, the gay movement was still relatively new at this point. I watched each word as it tiptoed off his tongue.

  “What?” he said.

  I asked again, this time using the h-word instead of gay, and he replied, “I’ve never been asked that before, but I’m for all civil rights.” I thanked him and made my way back up the aisle to my seat.

  Along with No, No, Nanette, I got to see the original productions of Company and Follies, which resulted in a passion for the words and music of Stephen Sondheim, one of the only sophisticated elements of my quite makeshift life.

  A few days later Rosemary’s friend Keely Stahl somehow arranged tickets and backstage passes for us to attend a Beach Boys concert in Central Park. Rosemary suggested that I ask them to do a gay rights fundraising concert, but I only got blank stares from them when I explained what I wanted. Keely said they were too stoned to understand me. We left in utter amusement and wonderment of how they performed in such a state.

  There was also a new and unusual kind of performance space called the Continental Baths in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, which was actually a men’s bathhouse. I had heard about this crazy lady called Bette Midler who sang up a storm there, so I decided to check it out. The bathhouse was a place for gay men to meet discreetly, but this was the early seventies and gay life was starting to bloom and smash out of the closets and businesses wanted to cater to this crowd, so they added entertainment to the mix of faux exercise, swimming pool, and anonymous sex. When I first saw the divine Miss M., she was singing by the pool accompanied by her pianist, Barry Manilow. Bette did indeed sing her heart out and she drew a much larger crowd than the space could hold. Crammed to the gills, people actually fell into the pool trying to watch her perform.

  Bette glorified the camp humor in the gay community. In the middle of her performance she’d look down a hallway and call out, “Hey, boys, there’s a girl out here working,” or, “Come out, come out, wherever you are . . . I know you’re in those damn rooms doing who knows what.” She was so good that I had to have a recording of her performance, and I did the unspeakable: I took a tape recorder to the baths.

  Not everyone walked around in towels, although most did, and it has been reported that even Manilow sometimes did so, though I don’t believe that was the case. But Bette certainly brought in people who were there only to see her and who were not necessarily gay at all. Ah well.

  * * *

  After the success of the first two gay pride marches, it was decided that we needed something more than just speeches. We needed a feel-good moment as reprieve from all our internal fights; a moment to identify ourselves beyond turmoil. So Bette Midler’s friend Vito Russo approached her and she agreed to sing at our third gay pride event. Susan Silverman, an early Gay Liberation Front member, recently reminded me that someone suggested that Gay Youth be in charge of Bette’s security—and I got to be her bodyguard. What the hell did we know about security for a woman who at the time was becoming a national show-biz wonder? I vividly recall how she greeted us on the stairway to the stage that day. She looked up at me, since she was so short, and said: “Yeah, this is my security.” She laughed, walked up the steps, and added, “Okay, boys, let’s get this show on the road.”

  * * *

  I was still young and poor, with no prospects but hope for the future, and New York was a wonderland; it allowed me to grow. From an emotionally battered kid I morphed quickly into a person with his own identity. The excitement never ended, and there was something new hap
pening almost every day. While worrying about the police or FBI listening in on our phone conversations or planting someone in our meetings (we learned later that J. Edgar Hoover and his FBI actually did this), my group of friends expanded to include porn stars, drag queens, actors, playwrights, musicians, and even the prince of a small country. Then there were the eclectic spiritual beings of various varieties. I helped a friend open a short-lived witchcraft store at 119 Christopher Street. I wanted to explore every aspect of what I didn’t have growing up. And thanks to Grandmom I was open to diversity.

  My favorite book and movie growing up, as I’ve said, was Auntie Mame. It always reminded me of my grandmother Fannie. Somehow I discovered that Auntie Mame was based on a real-life woman named Marion Tanner who lived in New York. It became my mission to find her, and I did. She lived on the West Side and was running a boarding house. When I rang her bell, she invited me in and we sat at her kitchen table. She wasn’t at all glamorous. She looked like she had been cleaning the house, which was exactly what I’d interrupted. When I asked her about the book, she delivered a cryptic line: “The book is like a plane: sometimes it’s on the ground and other times it’s in midair.” She gave no details and wouldn’t talk about her nephew Patrick Dennis, who wrote the book. I left that house realizing that I already knew Auntie Mame and she wasn’t the lady I had just met. Her name was Fannie Weinstein and she was my grandmother.

  * * *

  Most evenings had me picking up my friend Doug Carver at his place at 11th Street between avenues A and B and walking over to Christopher Street in the West Village to attend meetings, hand out flyers, or just hang out at the Silver Dollar near the pier. We’d walk up and down that street all night meeting our friends and popping into bar after bar like the reopened Stonewall or the 9th Circle to see who was there. The scene was now very sociable, like when Grandmom would take me chair to chair on the Atlantic City boardwalk each summer.