Los Angeles, May 1959: Almost ten years before the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York, John Rechy, a muscular hustler who hung out between tricks at Cooper’s Donuts, an all-night coffee shop in shabby downtown Los Angeles, sparked a gay rights brush fire. Cooper’s was a home away from home to transients like Rechy, who earned their living on the streets, and to “queens”:1 mostly black and Latino, dressed in semidrag, their faces made up with lipstick and eye shadow. Cooper’s patrons were regularly harassed by policemen who would walk through the coffee shop, stop in front of a random customer, and demand to see identification for no reason except for how the person looked. Every once in a while, the police would haul a few customers out of the restaurant and drive them down to the Sixth Street police station.
That May night, three men, including Rechy (who would immortalize his drag-queen and street-hustler friends four years later in his autobiographical City of Night), were ordered into the squad car. Perhaps it had happened one time too many, or perhaps it was because the good-looking, affable Rechy was so admired among Cooper’s patrons—whatever the reasons, they staged a mini-riot, with drag queens and hustlers assaulting the police, turning donuts into flying missiles, flinging cups, sugar cubes, anything hurl-able, lobbing them at the heads of the offending officers. That had never happened before. The police ran to their cars to summon help. More squad cars, sirens blaring, hurried to the scene. In the confusion, Rechy managed to escape. The street was cordoned off for the rest of the night; several rioters were arrested.2
In the following year, 1960, television’s nightly news brought into America’s living rooms multiple stories of the Woolworth’s sit-ins by “Negroes”: black people protesting segregation by taking seats at all-white lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Nashville, Tennessee; and a half dozen other southern cities. The black sit-ins resonated with some homosexuals because, like blacks, they too had to struggle for turf. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, and the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in March 1965, were further dramatic reminders of what needed to be done in a serious fight for civil rights. But homosexuals, who had no Martin Luther King to bring huge numbers of them together, started small.
• • •
Downtown Philadelphia, around Rittenhouse Square, April 1965: Dewey’s coffee shop was a favorite hangout for gay teens who were too young to get into the bars. But when the manager decided that the campy boys and butchy girls were driving away straight business, he ordered the staff not to serve them. That wasn’t the first time gays were eighty-sixed from a favorite hangout, but the Woolworth’s protests and Martin Luther King’s Selma march were inspiration for two boys and a girl. When they were refused service, they sat; they wouldn’t leave the coffee shop. The manager called the police, who dragged the three teens out. They were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The Janus Society, Philadelphia’s homophile organization, sprang to life as it never had before.3 Members mimeographed 1,500 leaflets about the discrimination at Dewey’s and the arrest of the teens. Parading up and down in front of the coffee shop for the next five days, they handed out the leaflets to anyone about to go through Dewey’s doors.
Dewey’s manager, seeing how gay ire could really mess up business, reversed his policy. Drum, Janus’s monthly magazine, called the gay teens’ protest “the first sit-in of its kind in the history of the United States.”4
But, unlike the black sit-ins and other black protests, the Cooper’s revolt went unrecorded, and the Philadelphia story was noticed only by a couple of low-circulation gay magazines. The media blackout about gay protests permitted straight people to continue in their head-in-the-sand ignorance of gay grievances, Clark Polak, the frustrated chair of the Janus Society, complained. “We must make our protests unavoidable as news,” Polak, himself a journalist, told a conference of homophiles in 1966. “How?” he asked. He answered his own question: “By civil disobedience and encouraging not so civil protests!” Gays needed to riot, to tear things up a bit, like black people were doing. Then the media would have to take notice.“In newspaper terms, no news is bad news; good news is no news; and bad news is good news. How about the movement becoming bad news?” Polak suggested.5
• • •
New York City, 1966: Dick Leitsch was a thirty-one-year-old Kentuckian, scion of tobacco planters. He was also the very serious-minded president of Mattachine Society New York. If potential members asked why his organization didn’t have social events, he answered somberly that there were enough homosexual social clubs already; Mattachine’s purpose was not entertainment but reform. Leitsch was so sincere about his reform work that he organized a “sip-in” through which he hoped to force the New York State Liquor Authority to stop harassing establishments that served homosexuals. He notified all the major New York City newspapers. “Send a reporter,” he told city editors. “This will be an event of historic importance.” The homosexual twist to the black sit-ins was novel enough so that several editors did send reporters. The Times, surprisingly, assigned one who seemed a promising choice: Thomas A. Johnson, the first black journalist in what had then been the New York Times’s hundred-year history.
Leitsch and two other Mattachine officers, John Timmons and Craig Rodwell,6 planned their noontime sip-in at the Ukrainian American Village Restaurant in the East Village. They chose the place because of the sign displayed in the window: “If You’re Gay, Please Go Away.”7 The three men showed up at the restaurant respectably dressed, just as the black Woolworth’s protestors always were: conservative somber suits, starched shirts, tasteful ties. Leitsch even carried a black attaché case—“the picture of a Madison Avenue executive,” as the Village Voice reporter described him.8 They were ready to ask for service and be refused. But one of the newspaper reporters arrived at the restaurant before the three men and announced he was there to cover a homosexual demonstration. The restaurant’s manager cleared everyone out and closed down the place for the day.
Leitsch moved on to plan B. At a second bar, Howard Johnson’s, he and his posse sat down, ordered, and then informed the bartender they were homosexuals. “I don’t see you doing nothing homosexual,” the bartender said and placed three bourbon-and-sodas down in front of them.9
Success finally came at Julius’, which had been raided a week earlier after a minister was accused of soliciting sex there from an undercover officer.10 Dick Leitsch and his friends knew they’d come to the right place when they saw that Julius’ window even displayed the requisite shaming sign that warned the public that there’d recently been a raid of the premises. The young Mattachine members sat down at the bar and ordered. The bartender had already placed two of their drinks in front of them when Leitsch handed him a note on Mattachine stationery. It said, “We are homosexuals. We are orderly. We intend to remain orderly, and we are asking for service.” Just as Leitsch had hoped, the bartender told the men that the State Liquor Authority forbade him from serving homosexuals, and he covered their glasses with his hand to prevent them from taking a drink. A Village Voice photographer obligingly captured the moment in a picture that Mattachine used in court.11
Thomas Johnson, writing the story for the New York Times, was just as snide about the homosexuals’ efforts as white Times reporters had always been when writing about homosexuals. Johnson had made his name reporting on black civil rights protests. He abhorred the insinuation that a homosexual sip-in was as serious as a black sit-in. The headline of Johnson’s back-page story announced his contempt: “3 Deviates Invite Exclusion by Bars.” His article mocked the gay men for having to visit several bars before they succeeded in being turned down for service.12
But to Dick Leitsch, the sip-ins were no different from the black lunch-counter sit-ins. Both were about a First Amendment right, freedom of assembly. The right was supposed to be granted to all American citizens. He brought his complaint against the State Liquor Authority to both the New York Commission on Human Rights and the New York State Appellate Court. And to everyone’s astonishment, he won. The commission declared that city ordinances against sex discrimination meant that homosexuals had a right to be served in any licensed bar in the city. The judge of the New York State Appellate Court said that the Constitution supported even the homosexual’s right to peaceful assembly, and the State Liquor Authority can’t prohibit homosexuals from congregating in bars.13 Leitsch’s sit-in-inspired sip-in thus cleared the way for openly gay bars in New York to obtain state liquor licenses—though police harassment and gay bar raids didn’t stop.14
• • •
San Francisco, summer 1966: Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin district was, like Cooper’s Donuts in LA, beloved turf to black and Latino “queens” who considered the place, in the words of one of them, “fabulous—like the Wizard of Oz.” With coffee at five cents a cup and a big bowl of oatmeal at twenty-five cents, Compton’s was also a practical place for those who were down on their luck. Compton’s management had been ignoring earlier police orders to shut down by midnight in order to discourage homosexuals and other “seedy types” from gathering after the bars closed at two in the morning.
Many of the Tenderloin queens who frequented Compton’s had been at one time or another busted for violating the “masquerading” law, though not many of them tried to pass. They wore men’s garb mostly, except perhaps for shirts that buttoned like blouses and lipstick and eye shadow. They’d long accepted harassment as the price of being who they were; but the night SFPD officers burst in and tried to evacuate them from Compton’s, something changed. As a policeman approached a queen to demand identification, she threw hot coffee in his face. It sparked California’s second homosexual brush fire—fifty young homosexuals hurling dishes, breaking windows, vandalizing a police car parked outside the cafeteria, setting a nearby newsstand on fire.
The next day, gay street teens staged a picket in front of Compton’s to tell the police that harassment must stop. Most of the picketers had learned the idea of civil rights in a gay youth group called Vanguard, which had been meeting since 1965 at the ultraprogressive Glide Memorial Methodist Church.15 Like the later rioters at the Stonewall Inn, the teens were demanding their sliver of space to be together for camaraderie, amusement, or sexual connection. Whether or not they articulated it, their protest against police harassment at Compton’s was an important step toward a larger struggle for civil rights. If people can’t congregate in public, they can’t organize into a public movement.
• • •
Los Angeles again, New Year’s Day, 1967: In 1966, landscape gardener and early leather man, twenty-seven-year-old Steve Ginsberg, had started a gay group called PRIDE (Personal Rights in Defense and Education). After a dozen policemen burst into the Black Cat, a Silver Lake district gay bar, swinging billy clubs and brandishing guns at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 1967, PRIDE organized a protest. Hundreds of PRIDE supporters overflowed the street on which the Black Cat was located. They marched and carried signs that said “Abolish Arbitrary Arrests” and “No More Abuse of Our Rights and Dignity.” Ginsberg had mimeographed three thousand leaflets detailing police brutality, and the demonstrators handed them out to pedestrians and passing drivers. “The time has come when the love that dared not speak its name will never again be silenced,” Jim Kepner of ONE announced hopefully.16
Policemen stationed themselves across the street from the Black Cat and quietly watched. They didn’t dare interfere because Steve Ginsberg had invited lawyers and clergymen not only to address the demonstrators but also to bear witness to police brutality. The lawyers encouraged some of the gays who’d been arrested in the Black Cat raid to sue, and they even presented briefs to the US Supreme Court that asserted the rights of homosexuals to equal protection under the law.17 SCOTUS was far from ready to consider such rights in 1967.
Los Angeles yet again, August 1968: Wilmington police raided the Patch, a gay bar in an LA suburb. Patrons who weren’t arrested staged a gutsy flower-power demonstration, marching on the Harbor Division police station to bail the men out, carrying in their arms enormous bouquets of gladioli, mums, carnations, roses, daisies (but pointedly no pansies), and scattering flowers on the station floor.18 The pioneering gay paper, The Los Angeles Advocate, speculated about the significance of the Patch demonstration, “If the reaction of the customers there that night is any indication, a new era of determined resistance may be dawning.”19
Threats to gay people’s sliver of space sometimes did set in motion larger claims. Philadelphia, 1968: Rusty’s was the favorite hangout of bar-going lesbians, but you wouldn’t know it was there unless you knew it was there. Even the sign that identified the place didn’t: it said “Barone’s Variety Room.” You got to Rusty’s by going down Quince, an alley-like street, to a back door of a two-story building, then up a flight of wooden stairs and down a long hallway. At the door you paid $2 for a strip of drink tickets, and you could dance all evening or just sit with your lover or friends at one of the little tables that surrounded the floor.20 You had to time your entrances and exits: Rusty’s was right next to the rear door of the Forrest Theater, and you’d better be careful not to show yourself when a performance was letting out, or you might run into a straight theatergoing acquaintance. Rusty Parisi—eponymous to those in the know—was the bar’s manager, a tough, handsome Italian butch with cropped bleach blond hair, who often showed up for work dressed in a button-down man’s shirt and a dark man’s suit. The femmes were thrilled by her panache and the butches strove to emulate it.21
Though Rusty’s was not easy to find, one Friday night in March 1968 the police found it. Six or seven plainclothesmen burst into the dimly lit bar and ordered Rusty to turn on the lights. They unplugged the jukebox and fanned out around the room, checking IDs, accusing several women of being drunk and disorderly. Byrna Aronson, a twenty-two-year-old woman with cropped hair and keys on a chain hanging visibly at her side,22 had leaned over to kiss her girlfriend on the cheek just as the police arrived. A man came over to Aronson and tapped her on the shoulder. Because he was wearing a suit and a porkpie hat, she didn’t realize he was a policeman—and, anyway, all the Rusty’s habitués were sure there’d never be a raid because the Mob that owned the place paid off the police.23 “You’re under arrest,” the man said. “What for?” she asked. “Sodomy,” he told her. She laughed until she saw he was serious.24 Aronson, ten other lesbians, and Billy Schaefer, Rusty’s gay male bartender, were rushed down the stairs and into a waiting paddy wagon.
Almost always it had been men’s bars that the notoriously antihomosexual police commissioner, Frank Rizzo, had ordered raided; but Rusty’s was the target on this night because Rizzo had supposedly gotten word that the bar was serving minors. None of the arrested women were minors—they weren’t even asked to show their IDs to prove their age25—but they were taken to the police station anyway and locked up overnight. In the morning they appeared before a judge who dismissed the charges against them, as was usual in such arrests whose true purpose was to discourage homosexual establishments by hassling the patrons. The women were free to go; but no one apologized to them for the fear and humiliation they’d suffered because they’d been at a bar where lesbians congregated.
A Philadelphia branch of Daughters of Bilitis had begun meeting just the year before the raid at Rusty’s. It was mostly a social group, though it made occasional small efforts to be political, such as writing letters of protest to the newspapers whenever articles characterized homosexuals as deviates and lowlifes.26 Founding DOB member Ada Bello had left Havana in 1958 after President Fulgencio Batista’s police quelled student unrest by killing the leaders at her university and shutting the university down. She’d wanted to make DOB more militant from the start. Her lover, Carole Friedman, who’d participated in black civil rights demonstrations, shared her ambitions; but they’d floundered around looking for a compelling cause.27
Byrna Aronson had coincidentally visited the DOB office for the first time on the day of the raid at Rusty’s. When she and the other Rusty’s lesbians were let out of jail, she brought them back with her. They told angry stories of being bullied and humiliated at the police station. “Are you gonna help us fight?” Aronson asked. “Yes!” Ada Bello said. She thought the Philadelphia police had just handed DOB a red-ribboned gift. Now the group had its compelling cause.
Carole Friedman, a recent Oberlin College graduate who’d done social work in a North Philadelphia slum-area settlement house, was chosen to compose an irate letter to the Philadelphia police inspector, demanding that he meet immediately with DOB. Once the letter was in the mailbox, DOB members felt a bit wacky: lesbians requesting to meet with the Philadelphia police, who had a long record of antihomosexual brutality? They calmed one another by saying their letter would probably get no answer anyway.28 But it did: from the officer in charge of public relations for the Philadelphia Police Department. He would meet with two or three representatives of Daughters of Bilitis.
Carole Friedman went, and DOB president Edna Winans went, despite her terror that she might lose her job at IBM if the police informed her supervisor she was a lesbian. Ada Bello was afraid to go because she had not yet received her naturalization papers, and immigrants who were known to be homosexual were routinely denied citizenship; but she drove the others to the meeting. Friedman and Winans brought a representative from the ACLU with them—just in case there was trouble.
The officer in charge of public relations jotted notes on what the women said but offered no apology for the raid at Rusty’s, nor for the arrest of a dozen patrons. Yet he took seriously their threat that they would make a public protest about police harassment of lesbians. On behalf of the Philadelphia police he went on the defensive, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer that “Homosexuals have been, are now, and will be treated equally with heterosexuals.” It was a sign that the police department understood it was under scrutiny and that there were homosexuals willing to fight its abuse openly. Daughters of Bilitis had achieved a unique victory.
But the women couldn’t continue to fight under the rubric of Daughters of Bilitis. Local chapters had to clear any intended action with national DOB president, Shirley Willer, and she was “a little nervous” that the Philadelphia group wasn’t following protocol.29 She was hard to get hold of, too. Plus, Bello and Friedman pointed out to other Philadelphia DOB members, if they wanted to fight for homosexual civil rights, why shouldn’t they swell their numbers by working with gay men? That August, Philadelphia Daughters of Bilitis morphed into an independent, cogender organization, Homophile Action League. It was a name that satisfied everyone: “Action,” its “middle name,” was its reason for being; “Homophile,” its first name, signaled there wouldn’t be a complete rupture with past decorum.
The statement of purpose Friedman and Bello wrote for the Homophile Action League was ambitious and feisty. They made it clear that HAL had no interest in Daughters of Bilitis’s goal to “uplift” the homosexual community: “It is our firm conviction that it is the heterosexual community which is sadly in need of uplifting,” Bello and Friedman jibed. The league would “change society’s legal, social, and scientific attitudes toward the homosexual in order to achieve justified recognition of the homosexual as a first-class citizen and a first-class human being.” The league would assist homosexuals “in their battle to secure their constitutional rights and to deal effectively with all manner of publicly sanctioned discrimination against them.” The league would use an arsenal of tools such as had never been used before in the fight for homosexual rights, like boycotts of businesses that discriminated against homosexuals.30
The Homophile Action League was one of the few homosexual action organizations founded by lesbians that succeeded in attracting gay men, though their numbers were never large.31 The League’s presidents were always lesbians, and—unusual for the times—two of the presidents, Ada Bello and Lourdes Alvarez, were Latinas. They helped tackle politicians such as gubernatorial candidate Milton Shapp and make them pay attention. Though Shapp had initially refused to speak at their community forum,32 HAL’s persistence got to him. As governor, he made Pennsylvania the first state to establish a Governor’s Commission on Sexual Minorities, to recommend ways to end antigay discrimination. Shapp couldn’t get his legislature to vote in favor of gay rights laws that he supported, but Pennsylvania became the first state to have any sort of pro-gay decree when he issued an executive order that ended discrimination against gays and lesbians in state employment. He was also the first governor to proclaim a Gay Pride Week, in 1976, though he had to battle the Pennsylvania Legislature again in order to do it.33
The Homophile Action League’s other forays into fighting for lesbian and gay civil rights weren’t as fruitful as their appeal to Shapp had been. The group had no real political expertise, no budget, no one who could devote themselves full-time to the battle. They tried to get Pennsylvania to repeal its sodomy law and Philadelphia to pass a gay rights ordinance. But by the time the city finally did pass an ordinance, in the 1980s, the organization was defunct.
• • •
In 1957 Randy Wicker, blue eyed and boyish looking, had a lover who was kicked out of the University of Texas for being homosexual. Wicker struggled with guilt because he was too scared to say anything that would get him kicked out, too. But he went to New York the next summer and looked for ways to be political. He saw through the example of the black civil rights movement that times were changing. Homosexuals, too, could be bolder and braver. To join Mattachine—which was the only game in town—Wicker had to lie about his age because he was a year short of the requisite twenty-one.34
Though he was the youngest member of Mattachine, he wouldn’t keep his convictions to himself; and he didn’t hesitate to lecture the older members, telling them that Mattachine needed to become aggressive. The more staid members were happy to see him go back to Texas when that summer was over. It had been prudence and hiding that let them survive in an era of witch hunts and entrapments. They had no doubt that their underground organization needed to stay underground.
But Wicker graduated from the University of Texas and returned to New York where he kept trying to light fires under Mattachine. Pre-Wicker, whenever Mattachine had guest speakers, the handful of members called a few friends and together they made up an audience of about twenty. But when a lawyer, Irwin Strauss, agreed to talk to the group about homosexuals and the law, Wicker couldn’t bear to let a lecture on such a critical subject be wasted on an audience of twenty. He paid to have three hundred bright yellow signs printed at ten cents apiece announcing “Citizens: A Lawyer Discusses Homosexuality And The Law! Free Admission! Everyone Welcome!,” and he went around Greenwich Village convincing people to hang the signs in their windows. An elderly lady who agreed to hang a sign told him, “It’s about time those boys stood up for themselves.” But the signs were as ambiguous as a Rorschach. A retired vice squad officer who agreed to hang a sign told him, “It’s about time we really cracked down on those perverts.”35
The lecture had to be moved from the tiny Mattachine headquarters on Forty-Eighth Street and Sixth Avenue to an auditorium at Freedom House, the majestic old Willkie Memorial Building on Fortieth Street, because more than three hundred people showed up. Most of Mattachine, and the closeted speaker, too, weren’t charmed. Wicker had dragged the secret organization into the spotlight. When Mattachine was evicted from its offices shortly after the event, the members blamed him.
He finally gave up on pushing Mattachine to be bolder and in 1962 formed a side group, the Homosexual League of New York. Under its name, he could carry out more daring activities, like arranging for eight homosexuals to appear on a New York radio station to talk about homosexuality from their own perspective. That had never happened before. A New York Times headline announced with consternation, “Homosexuals Air Their Views Here: Radio Station Lets 8 Appear in Panel Discussion.”36 Jack O’Brian of the New York Journal-American declared, “We’ve heard of silly situations in broadcasting but FM station WBAI wins our top prize for scraping the sickly barrel-bottom.” O’Brian was certain his readers would share his disgust that the station had caved in to Wicker, whom he described as an “arrogant card-carrying swish” who’d convinced a program producer that homosexuals “have a right to be heard.”37
Wicker wasn’t intimidated. There’d be no progress until the subject of homosexuality was brought out from the closet. In 1963 he called for the first homosexual picket in America: a picket of the White House.38 He could see no reason for homophile organizations if not to agitate for gay rights. But he couldn’t get anyone to join him. In 1964 he again called for a picket: against the army’s policy of informing employers and prospective employers when a homosexual was booted out of the military or rejected as 4-F. This time he was determined to see the protest through. But his Homosexual League never had more than a half dozen members, and he wanted a decent showing. He approached Mattachine, but the members would have nothing to do with a picket.
In 1964 there weren’t many places to go in order to find people who would participate in a picket supporting homosexuals. Wicker asked the founder of the recently established Sexual Freedom League (who went by the name of Jefferson Fuck Poland) if his group would send bodies. The Sexual Freedom League was mostly heterosexual and fought for causes such as the legalization of prostitution and conjugal visits for prisoners. No ostensibly straight group had ever before supported homosexual rights, but Mr. Fuck Poland, who clearly enjoyed turning heads, promised to encourage members of the Sexual Freedom League to swell the picket line.
During a drizzly afternoon in September, a motley crew congregated in front of the Whitehall Induction Center near the East River and then marched up and down the street. The irrepressible Randy Wicker led; followed by twenty-four-year-old Craig Rodwell, who was elated that finally a group of homosexuals was making a serious public statement. Fuck Poland and his girlfriend and her baby, which she pushed along in its stroller, were there, too, as was one of Mattachine’s few women members, Renée Cafiero, a newly minted twenty-year-old lesbian who brought along her lover, Nancy Garden. Both were modestly dressed in skirts.39 Garden would go on to write the first young adult lesbian novel, the classic Annie on my Mind (1982), whose eponymous character bore some similarities to Cafiero; but now she and the other picketers were carrying picket signs: “Keep Draft Records Confidential!” “Homosexuals Died for the U.S. Too.” “Love and Let Love.” Two or three other gay protestors stood at the curb clutching flyers they hoped to distribute. The flyers were titled “The Army Invades Sexual Privacy” and explained that the army’s policy made the men and women on whom they tattled permanently unemployable.
Wicker and the others wouldn’t have been surprised if passersby shouted, “Commie freaks!” at them, or if toughs offered to beat them up. But no one did. Of course, it was a Saturday (the picketers chose the weekend because most of them worked during the week), and they were on a street where there was little foot traffic when offices were closed, and the weather was forbidding—so almost no one saw them. (“Too bad hardly anybody saw us,” Cafiero thought—alternately with “Whew, I’m glad hardly anybody saw us.”40) The media didn’t deign to come see them, either, though Wicker alerted newspapers and TV. Nor did the Whitehall Induction Center change its policy of ruining homosexual lives.41 Nevertheless, this was the first time that picketing was used as a tactic to demand a sliver of justice from the government on behalf of homosexuals.
These early battles for slivers of rights were limited by the political innocence and impotence of the participants. They didn’t have a lot of time and resources; paid gay lobbyists or multimillion-dollar gay rights organizations were the stuff of fantasy. What an inchoate gay and lesbian civil rights movement sorely needed in order to wage war against the forces that defined them as criminals, crazies, sinners, and subversives was someone to dream big and to make others share the dream: if not a Martin Luther King at least a Bayard Rustin, King’s chief strategist. The movement needed someone to persist single-mindedly and obsessively, until the enemy admitted, “You are right and we were wrong.”42