Writer Djuna Barnes walks along Greenwich Avenue, August 14, 1959. She was a Village icon, best known for her novel Nightwood, a classic of lesbian fiction and modernist literature.
Poet and Museum of Modern Art curator Frank O’Hara in his apartment on September 26, 1959. Because he wrote openly gay love poems, O’Hara was revered by the gay political movement of the 1970s.
From left, artists William Giles, Anna Moreska, Robert Rauschenberg, dancer-choreographer Merce Cunningham, and composer John Cage watch artist Jasper Johns play Skee-Ball at Dillon’s Bar, 80 University Place, November 10, 1969. Cunningham and Cage were lovers for nearly half a century, as were Rauschenberg and Johns during the fifties. Along with the Cedar Tavern, Dillon’s was a major artists’ hangout of the era. In the 1970s, the building housed the offices of the Village Voice.
The Caffe Cino, at 31 Cornelia Street, was widely recognized as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway theater from 1958 to 1968. It was also highly significant as a pioneer in the development of gay theater, at a time when it was still illegal to depict homosexuality on stage.
W. H. Auden in his apartment on St. Marks Place, January 15, 1966.
Caffe Cino interior, March 19, 1966. The coffeehouse served as a significant meeting spot for gay men. At R: Proprietor Joe Cino. His partner Jon Torrey worked as the electrician and lighting designer. It closed in 1968, a year after Cino’s suicide following Torrey’s accidental death.
Edie Sedgwick dancing onstage with Gerard Malanga as the Velvet Underground (Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Maureen Tucker) perform at the Film-makers’ Cinematheque, 125 West 41st St., February 8, 1966.
“Rocks through windows don’t open doors.”
—Randy Wicker, Mattachine Society
Dick Leitsch, Craig Rodwell, and John Timmins of the Mattachine Society, an early gay advocacy group, at a Howard Johnson’s at 6th Avenue and 8th Street, where they tried to order alcoholic beverages in defiance of New York State liquor laws that prohibited serving “deviants.” This act of protest was called a “Sip-In”: a tipsy tip of the hat to the lunch counter sit-ins then being held at restaurants that segregated black patrons. The Sip-In was a pivotal moment for the gay rights movement, predating Stonewall by more than three years.
Leitsch, Rodwell, and Timmins in front of the Ukrainian-American Village Hall, a bar on St. Marks Place, where they announced their planned “Sip-In.” April 21, 1966.
The Stonewall Inn was a quiet, little-known restaurant located near the Village Voice when this photo was taken on May 1, 1966; a two story building on the corner, the Duplex Cabaret, now covers the sign painted on the brick wall.
The Miss All-American Camp Beauty Pageant held at New York’s Town Hall, February 20, 1967. Miss Philadelphia won first place. The judges included Terry Southern, Larry Rivers, Rona Jaffe, Jim Dine, Baby Jane Holzer, Paul Krassner, and Andy Warhol.
James Baldwin at the Village Theater, August 25, 1967.
“A black gay person . . . is already, long before the question of sexuality comes into it, menaced and marked because he’s black or she’s black. The sexual question comes after the question of color; it’s simply one more aspect of the danger all black people live.”
—James Baldwin
“I came to New York in the early ’60s to be a bohemian/beatnik artist. I found the Actors Studio, Lee Strasberg, Greenwich Village, jazz, mary jane, gay bars, drag queens, Andy Warhol, the Judson Church performers, the Living Theater, the Caffe Cino and La Mama, civil rights marches and sit-ins, the Open Theater, Communist, poetry, dirty old men, Lenny Bruce, rich people, and my first real boyfriend (Franklin Spodak). The decade moved fast. I went from a Max’s Kansas City scenester, Hearst Eye Magazine columnist, and Broadway and TV actor to Hippie Leader (“Jimmy Digger”), to anti-Vietnam war protester, and underground courier for making revolution in my lifetime.
“In 1967, I came out on national television on the David Susskind Show featuring me and Abbie Hoffman. My professional acting career was pretty much killed by that one moment of truth, but it took me years to figure that out. Happenstance put me on Christopher Street as the police began to raid the Stonewall. This event changed my life forever . . . I have remained an active political person in the building of a visible lesbian and gay culture for all our kids . . . never wanting to be just like heterosexual society, hell-bent on transforming the world into a place that respects the individual, understands diversity, and defines humanity not by a series of checkoff points but by life practice . . . Love is our weapon and our strength: physical, sexual, and spiritual love. My tribe still wants: to smash patriarchy that attempts to define and limit our desire, to discover our true gay and lesbian spirit and throw off the ugly, self-loathing roles defined for us (Stonewall patrons were the epitome of the oppressed nightmare . . . without identity but united in some unconscious bond of defiance and a will to live). We are still here, hidden in the ‘90s marketing creation of who gays and lesbians are. . . .
“The message of that spontaneous revolutionary moment in a most tacky bar has not changed. Do not be afraid to love yourself. Hate is a straight man’s tool. Don’t be seduced by a straight man’s weapons. Hate and greed will only perpetuate the divisions that exist within our gay and lesbian society as it does to divide women and men, different colors of people, and rich and poor in the dominant society.
“Be positive and build a brave new world. And never, ever let anyone tell you not to have fun.”
—Jim Fouratt
Jim Fouratt on St. Marks Place, October 16, 1967. A street hippie, Fourett was later a gay activist and organizer of the Gay Liberation Front as well as the Gay Activists Alliance.
Mr. Gina from Costa Rica wearing a Henri Lissaver designer dress at a Mattachine Society Ball, October 27, 1967, held at the famous, very seedy Hotel Diplomat on West 44th Street.
Novelist and essayist Edmund White distinctly remembers a bar he used to frequent, pre-Stonewall, called the Blue Bunny. “It was a typical joint with a bar in the front, which was sort of innocuous. Then there was a wrought-iron grille. Behind that grille there was a dance floor. And on the grille there were Christmas tree lights that would be turned on by the bartender whenever a suspicious plainclothesman would come in. When that happened, we would all instantly break apart and stop dancing.”
Spacemen, Mattachine Society Ball, October 27, 1967.
British fashion photographer Cecil Beaton (L) talks with Andy Warhol and twin brothers Jed and Jay Johnson at the Factory (then on the sixth floor of the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West, near the corner of East 16th Street) April 24, 1969. Initially hired by Warhol to sweep floors at the Factory, Jed Johnson subsequently moved in with Warhol and for twelve years was his lover.