How Long Has This Been Going On (52 page)

Frank laughed. "I'm not sure, Larky. Maybe that once you get deep into gay life, you become so changed that you lose all contact with the way you used to live?"

"You sound so proud, Frank. The last few times we've spoken, you've been kind of down."

"I've been down for a while, maybe."

"Anything wrong? Something specific?"

"Not that I'm aware of. But nothing's very right, either."

"Frank, did you ever think of moving out here?"

"No..."

"I bet you'd really like it. So many of the guys I know say their whole way of looking at themselves is different because of this place."

"Tell me one thing, Lark. Who was in the theatre when you saw my movie?"

"A bunch of guys, I guess."

"Old guys? Cruising around?"

"No. Younger guys. And they were pretty wrapped up in what they were seeing. Why?"

"Just wondering, pal."

Frank had to go to work; but all the way to Hero's he was thinking about a San Francisco Frank, and what
he
might be like. He was thinking that nothing held him in New York, no great friendships, no responsibility. He was thinking that a new sphere of operations could invigorate his life. It was partly, I'd love to get used to a new neighborhood, and partly, I've had everybody in this town. Years before, Frank had walked out of California with a bus ticket and an overnight bag, and he could walk back in the same way.

So it was a distracted Frank who oversaw Hero's that evening. He even brought Henry the wrong drink—a bar-vodka Collins instead of Stoli on the rocks—and forgot Jim's beer altogether.

"Sorry, guys," said Frank.

"If all I have to worry about is the wrong drink," said Henry, "I'll be over the rainbow for the rest of my life."

"Oh, now, that was some
powerful
demonstration against the
police,"
said Jezebel, a hand balancing on each head as he eyed Henry and Jim. "That was true liberation, wasn't it?"

"I'm doing my best, Jez," said Henry. "What do you want?"

"I want gays to stand forth and cry, We are the thing that is
just
as good as
you!"

"I felt that power at the dance," said Jim.

"Maybe we should have dances," Henry suggested, "instead of demonstrations."

"We should," said promiscuous Martin, poking his nose in. "I took Robert Horneck and Ian Decker home for a threesome and, boy, did they—"

"You ain't gay," said Jezebel. "You just some jism machine. Why wasn't you at the demonstration?"

"Oh, please, these pathetic political games," said Martin. "As if anything—"

"You want the sex," Jezebel observed, "but you don't want the rights. You don't belong in this bar, in fact, because you some sly cheat taking advantage of the work that other folks do. And I sense I should throw your ass the hell out of the place. What you think of that, candy-butt?"

"Jez—" Henry began.

"No, Henry. No, no, and Jezebel say no. We had enough of these opportunists who want to enjoy the secret benefits but not fight for the legitimization."

"I don't owe you anything," said Martin.

"You owe
yourself,
clownhead."

"Get your hands off me!"

"Get your
self
out of this bar!"

"Henry—"

"Stay 'way!
I'm throwing this piece of scum out of my—"

"Hey!"
said Frank.

"Jez, you can't—"

"Let go of me, you loony—"

"They're rioting at the Stonewall!"
someone shouted in the doorway. "The police raided it and everyone fought back! Sheridan Square's a war zone!"

Jezebel, who had Martin by the hair and bent in two, pulled him up and released him.

Martin shook himself, feeling for broken pieces of ego.

"They're what?" Jim asked. "Rioting?"

The guy who had shouted in the doorway was gone, off to spread the word to other bars.

"Sure, the Stonewall," said Jezebel. "My, yes, the Stonewall. Isn't the drag queens of this world on the barricades twenty-four hours a time? Who better to make a demonstration—you listening, Henry? Ain't this the political event we been—"

"Don't get happy yet," said Henry, rising from the bar. "It could be just a—"

"It
could
be a statement striving to be made!"

"Call the bar," Jim urged Frank.

"What?"

"Call them and ask if—"

"Call the bar?" said Jezebel, advancing on Jim. "What they supposed to answer? Yes, we're resisting a police raid, no Pink Ladies served for the foreseeable—-"

"Get your asses down to the Stonewall!" someone called into the bar from outside.
"It's happening!"

Jezebel said, "That's about twelve blocks, which is, what?, seven, eight minutes at the rate I propose to travel at." He was already moving as he began to speak, and by the time he had finished he was gone.

Jim told Henry, "Hadn't we better..." They were starting to move, too, out the door and down the street in Jezebel's stormy wake.

"Big deal, a riot," said Martin, still smoothing himself out from Jezebel's assault. "So there's a raid. So there's a demonstration. So there's porn movies. So instead of 'homo' we call it 'gay.' So we all wear bomber jackets in winter. Does it change anything?
Really?"

Frank was just looking at him, not speaking, not moving, just looking.

Years later, people would ask, Where were you when you heard about it?—as they also did for the assassinations of the decade, of the two Kennedys and King, comparably epic moments in our cultural history. In fact, most gay people took little notice of the riots at the Stonewall Inn bar in Sheridan Square on June 27, 28, and 29, 1969. They seemed isolated from The Life, so out, so aggressive, a drag-queen thing, a one-off. Let's take an informal poll of our friends and find out how they felt at the time.

* * *

Paul says, "Truth to tell, there had been
plenty
of bar riots in response to police raids. All through the sixties, if you knew anybody in another city, you'd hear about them. Chicago, New Orleans, Kansas City. But the newspapers never reported them. It was gossip, don't you see, not news. The public had no idea. Of course, the public had no idea we were there in the first place. There was a wonderful symmetry to it.

"So when the Stonewall Inn crowd fought back instead of letting the cops cart them away, I simply thought, So New York has had a riot, too, now. I had no idea it would be in the papers—and not only here but internationally!

"Where was I when I heard? Well, I remember that a friend, Kent Abrams, called to tell me, and it was so
very
late that I was quite peeved at him. He said he'd been calling people all night to talk about it, so there I was again, at the bottom of the list. And I must admit I rather chided him for waking me up and told him he could go right on with his calling. So I didn't hear about the riot till the next day, reading in the paper about "queen bees" defending their "nest." That's how they saw us in those days. If we weren't Commie spies, we were Joan Crawford."

"I just got this call from Jim," says Eric. "He says, 'Hey, something big's brewing, get your bod down here.' Oh, man, I was all settled in with the Yankees-Red Sox game and a giant bowl of popcorn that I had even gone and buttered by hand. And I knew that Jim could throw me out on the street if he got mad at me, and that would be zip for Eric, yet I kept saying, Come on, man, I don't want to, and like that. And Jim kept telling me I had to see this, it's history, and I'm saying, Look, I saw all the history I need in school. I was getting pissed off.

"Except, you know how most guys say things to make you feel bad? Like, it's supposedly your best friend, but sometimes he's harping on the one thing he
knows
you can't handle? Like your mom's a drunk or you had to do fifth grade twice? Well, Jim's the opposite. As soon as he knows your sore spots, he leaves them alone.

"So when he said, You come down here, I came."

Chris says, "The thing that hit me right up front was that it was the drag queens who pulled it off. Because the Stonewall was a red-drag spot, probably the most famous one in town. I don't know how I knew so much about it. Thompson and Chase make a point of being very conversant with the details of gay life, but even they were pretty confused about what happened. But, oh, were they quick to rise above it! Chase called it 'vulgar,' and I called him 'smug,' and Thompson said, 'Apologize to Chase!,' and I got kind of fierce with them, and I
think
I may have called them 'a pair of high-hat faggots,' and we never had much to do with each other after that."

Andy hardly knew of the riot. He was never a great reader of newspaper; he followed the events of the great world by scanning headlines when he passed a newsstand.

He says, "I didn't hear about that Stonewall thing till after the first night. The rioting continued for several days, and at something like the third night I was having family dinner, and while we were watching TV the news came on. The newsman said something about it, and everybody in the room made, you know, disgusted noises and groans. My mother was looking at me as if she would tear me to shreds if I said anything.

"But what was I going to say? Those people who fought the police in that bar weren't anything to me. It was Henry that I was connected to, just him. I had never wanted to be political, even when I was handing out flyers with him for some rally. I just wanted Henry to be my friend and help me put a quiet life of my own together.

"I spent a lot of time walking streets that Henry might turn up on, near his apartment and down by Hero's. I guess I could just have dropped into the bar some night, but I was afraid he might hate me right in front of everybody.

"I never did bump into Henry, and I never met anyone else like him. Some days, someone would come into the store, and I'd try to signal him in some way. But I guess I don't know what the signals are."

When Lois heard about it, all she said was "Good!" Elaine was more rhapsodic: "It's historical. It is the Thing That Had to Happen, and I find it touching and bizarre—one of my favorite combinations—that it was our own outlaws who pulled it off, the drag queens we so love to disdain. For they are the men-women of our days, the combiners. We needed that, to remind us that we are not merely straights with different bed partners. Idistinctly remember putting down the realty ads that I had clipped from several New England papers to make a note to myself to write more about men in my fiction."

Louis says, "Do I remember where I was when I heard of it? Honey, I didn't
hear
of it, I was
in the bar\
But let me tell this for the record. Some folks started passing around this legend that the whole thing happened because Judy Garland had died a few days before, the picture being something like, The police troop into the Stonewall and we're muttering, First they take Miss Judy away, and now
this!
Well, that's a cute story, but, let's face it, some of us don't think the universe revolves around Judy Garland. The riots were about what the whole decade had been about, people's rights. I always preferred Rosemary Clooney myself.

"Tell you, if anyone was muttering when the cops pulled in, it was more like, Fuck these stupid police, and I'm not going to take this rough-up and getting called 'shitpacker' and loaded in that paddy wagon.
Not! This! Time!

"Those cops were so stupid. Man, I've been in as many raids as they have, and I know what a raid's supposed to look like, the whole bar resentful and in despair. Well,
this
bar was
angry.
And there were just a few cops in the first place, like maybe they were getting overconfident. Didn't they
see
the whole of us staring at them and failing to give the usual pathetic cooperation?

"I mean, right away, the whole thing's wrong. One of the more flamboyant queens—no, let's face it, it was that obnoxious Puerto Rican bitch from the back alleys of San Juan, Chiquita La Mamba. Anyway, she starts screaming at one of the bartenders. She says, 'What is this, the Mafia short-cutting the cops again? With all you charge for a drink around here?' Then she turns to the cops and says—she's still shouting, you understand—'I guess you didn't get your bribes this week, so here's a little something on Miss Chiquita.' And she grabs a hunk of change from out of the tip bowl and throws it all right at some cop. I don't mean near him, I mean
at
him.

"Now, ordinarily, the cops would be on top of her with their nightsticks and she would be in the hospital. Because you know cops. Their third favorite thing's taking a freebie off a hooker. Their second favorite's pocketing Mafia hush-mouth money. Their favorite thing is beating up a fag. But, like I say, the mood of the bar was ugly, and, looking around, you could see everybody thinking, The cops are outnumbered, so if we all move
right now and together...
You see?

"Well, one cop caught on, and he grabbed the arm of the cop Miss Chiquita had offended—because he was going for her, of course—and said, 'Let's line 'em up outside.' You know, the Cool It, Man thing. Except now other guys were throwing change at the blues, and two of them made the fatal mistake of deciding that this was the ideal time to particularly arrest a pair of dykes and wrestle them out of the bar—because now there were only three cops left with all of us. You could hear the dykes screaming outside, trying to attract public attention—like in Russia, when the K.G.B. is trying to arrest you in Red Square and you holler so much that they melt away, because no one in Russia's supposed to know that there is a K.G.B. So, back in the Free World here, there's about forty of us and three fascists—and we're going to let
them
arrest
us?

"Suddenly, everybody's moving. Not out of the bar, just around in it. There's kind of a melee around one cop and sort of a real fight with another, and unbeknownst to both of them one of the queens just took out the third with a bottle of something, simply grabbed it from behind the bar and smashed it on the cop's head and down he goes. So now all the queens are grabbing bottles and trying to brain the cops. I saw one guy trying to set the first cop on fire with his lighter. And what's funny is, for some reason I looked at the bartenders then, and they had these incredible expressions, like...
What the fuck is going on?