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Loading ...The Stonewall generation looks back
It’s been a grueling journey from the deep closet to the equal-marriage battles of today. But it’s also remarkable that that journey has taken place within the space of typical American’s lifetime.
Older LGBT people have seen—and created—enormous changes in our society. A timeline produced by SAGE for the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion points out that a lesbian who is 75 years old today “would have been 39 before the American Psychiatric Association finally removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders,” and an 80-year-old transgender woman would have been 23 the year the Daily News reported on Christine Jorgensen’s successful sex-reassignment surgery with a headline that read ‘Ex-GI Becomes Blond Beauty.”This June, SAGE is sponsoring a reunion of Stonewall-era activists who are continuing the struggle for LGBT rights, giving them an opportunity to reflect not just on how far we’ve come as a community but the critical roles they played in the struggle.
As anyone who has ever been involved in a political movement can guess, there are some friendly—and not so friendly—disagreements about what happened in the past: whether to call what happened at the Stonewall Inn a “riot” or a “rebellion;” whether enough was done to integrate the needs and leadership of women and people of color; who was being too accommodating to the expectations of the straight world.
But when talking with these activists about what they want the next generation of LGBT activists to understand, one quickly begins to hear agreement on common themes: Don’t forget what—and who—it took to get here. Don’t let the politicians define what’s possible. Celebrate the victories and demand more. And if you’re still in the closet, by all means, come out.
Another universal theme is the sense of amazement that within the course of their lifetimes the LGBT community has made such enormous strides toward equality.
As Martha Shelley, one of the central figures in the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a seminal group that emerged in New York in the aftermath of Stonewall, notes, “I really didn’t expect gay marriage to become legal—when I was younger I didn’t even dare to dream of it.” Everyday acceptance is just as surprising: “I can walk down the streets of Portland holding my partner’s hand and nobody even looks at us,” Shelley says.
The younger generation amazes them, too.
“They expect everything,” laughs Mark Segal, one of the youngest members of this elite group who in the early 1970s was a member of the Gay Youth wing of GLF.
Among those expectations is the right to define one’s sexual orientation and gender early. “So many young people assume sexual and gender fluidity,” observes Ellen Shumsky, a founding member of Radicalesbians and a photographer who helped document the early gay rights movement. Adds Perry Brass, founding editor of GLF’s first newspaper, Come Out: “Real gay kids are now coming out in their early teens—some as young as 12!”
NEXT PAGE: Struggles of the past.
I am a New Yorker living in Ca. and and very proud to have been there for Stonewall. It was amazing. Right now I can feel the energy and see the growing crowds of angry brothers and sisters and their freinds and families pouring out of the subway station at Sheridan Square, getting off buses, out of taxi cabs to join in to put a stop to the supression and to begin the LBGT movement.
And today the momentum of the movement has picked up at a pace that reminds me of Stonewall days.
What ever we do now we cannot loose momentum. We must keep moving and get louder and louder and not ask for but demand what is rightfully ours. Nothing more and nothing less.
A march on Washingto is on the horizon.
I will be there. Peace and Equality…Gyzmo
Excellent reporting on this story! I was a youyng, teenage lad of 15 when I read about what was happening in New York. Fast forward to yesterday when I called my 83 year old father and he “mentioned” as an aside that he knew I was gay before I even started school! That would explain why he was so kind to me when I brought my life partner to meet him for the first time. He lives in a conservative retirement community and introduces me and my other half by saying “and this is Jerry’s partner (or life partner. I NEVER advised him on what to say and do and yes, EVERYONE, parents are not as dumb as you think! My mother passed away a few months ago and she and I always discussed gay issues and adopted my honey as just another son. So, you see, coming out is worth the time and effort—take it from me!
I grew up in South Texas. We didn’t mention gay and lesbian bars, so I had no idea such places even existed. When I came back from UCLA for visits in the late 60s and early 70s, I was shocked to find that in the few local gay bars we did have by then, the local police would come in nightly, shine their flashlights in patrons’ faces, and ask them for I.D.’s. They wrote the driver’s license information down in little notebooks they kept.
Nowdays, they only go into gay bars when the management calls them to break up a fight or whatever. Tell me we haven’t come a long way!
I missed Stonewall by hours; I went to a party in Flatbush where food and drink were guaranteed to be plentiful. I even remember having my palm read at that party.
But I do vividly remember all of the harassment that so many of us endured on the streets of the West Village; that’s where I met Sylvia Rivera, sitting on one of the stoops of Christopher street. I can still remember what she was wearing that night; it was a turquoise chiffon pants-suit and low-heeled shoes. There were plenty of queens living by their wits on the street, and few were more familiar with the strong-arm tactics of the “man” than she. What struck me about Sylvia was her anger and her determination to stick it to the man, because as she said: “What else can they do to me?”
We were shoved from Sheridan Square to the Silver Dollar Café, and it was a daily occurrence. We knew what was going on: The mob controlled the bars and clubs; the police were on the take; there was no protection from the “hitters” who came into the neighborhood to gay-bash. We were caught in the middle. It was OK for people to come from el Barrio, Harlem, Bed-Stuy, etc., and stand on the sidewalk outside the Women’s House of Detention, and shout out the names of their incarcerated pals, but the cops wouldn’t leave us alone, and we didn’t have the clout with them that the mob-owned clubs did, so we were the easy target.
You had to even be street-smart to walk the gauntlet home. I lived in a top floor crash pad on East 7th, between C&D – East Village to those of you who aren’t familiar with the area. We had to walk thru the “straight” park of 8th Street, across to St. Marks Place, past Thompson Square Park – where anything and everything could happen, all the way to Avenue D. Our ceiling came down on us once – too many junkies at one time up there. We kept peace with them by handing out old spoons and matches on their way to the roof. It was better than risking a falling out with them.
I was with the group who held a sit-in at NYU’s Weinstein Hall.
I guess my disappoint is that 40 years ago we felt the change in the air, and I thought that disparate groups were forming alliances that would benefit us through solidarity. The truth is that they threw us under the bus when they felt their cause had more merit than ours.
I was later one of the 162 who got hauled off to jail in the infamous Snakepit Raid, a night, rather a dawn that saw one of us get impaled on six fourteen inch spikes. I stood there and watch the entire process of cutting those bars and taking him away, still impaled. I’ll never forget that.
It’s 40 long years later, and I live in San Francisco, but if I talk about any of this I can feel the curtain come down over the listener.
It’s a small part of our history, but we should never forget.
Oh, and one more thing; you can try all you want, but you’re never going to get a Colt model type Stonewall hero out of the likes of Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, plus the names of the women and men whom I’ve forgotten; they were mainstream lesbians and gays trying to survive the mean streets.