Stonewall (16 page)

Drugs were not then kept under careful lock and key, nor guardedly counted out pill by pill, and Yvonne and her friends had fairly open access to the stockroom. Doriden (a hypnotic similar to that later popular favorite, Quaalude) was especially in vogue, and usually taken with wine. Dexamyl was also available. But as casual as Yvonne's attitude toward drugs was, she drew the line at anything experimental. In the early sixties, some research on LSD was being done at St. Vincent's, in conjunction with the U.S. Army; the LSD was given to psychiatric patients as an alternative to electric-shock treatment. Some of them flipped out and stayed out, so when the hospital employees were asked to serve as a control group, Yvonne firmly declined.

On weekends when she wasn't working or in class, Yvonne went to lesbian softball games—that defining institution of working-class lesbian life. These were the years in which lesbian softball teams and leagues (and to a lesser degree, the winter substitute, basketball) were all the rage. Yvonne didn't actually play—her assorted physical ailments made her tire too easily—but she enjoyed the scene. She loved cheering on the Montereys or the New York Aces, and loved the partying that followed the games (the teams were usually sponsored by bars). She especially liked watching the New York Aces' eighteen-year-old first basewoman in action; a fierce ball player who hooked her mitt onto her trousers “like the last little butch,” she later became a celebrated newscaster (though not the sports commentator she had dreamed of becoming).

As an alternative to the bars, a number of black women specialized in throwing house parties. Yvonne herself gave one every few months, going in with friends who had a big loft on Second Street and Second Avenue. Dozens of people (mainly women) would pay a dollar each to get in to dance, drink, eat, and gamble, and Yvonne made a tidy profit. House parties were a venerable Harlem tradition, going back at least to the 1920s, when they were called rent parties. They were raucous, merry affairs that managed all at once to pay the landlord and keep the participants dancing till dawn.

Yvonne's friend Audre Lorde later contrasted on several levels
the parties black and white women gave. The latter never had enough food (they offered a little bowl of sour cream and onion dip rather than hearty cornbread or fried chicken wings and potato salad); they never had music that could be danced to, or hard liquor (they preferred “sophisticated” wine), or laughter. The subdued tone at white lesbian parties always put Lorde off: “Mostly, women sat around in little groups and talked quietly, the sound of moderation … thick and heavy as smoke in the air … I always thought parties were supposed to be fun.”

Yvonne, too, much preferred black lesbian gatherings, but being a party animal, she didn't turn down many invitations of any kind. And neither finding God nor falling in love slowed Yvonne's pace. The spiritual revelation came first—swiftly and suddenly. She had always wanted to believe that there was a God who made the world, that somebody was in charge, and her search had included, for a time, attendance at Zen Buddhist gatherings. But for years she “couldn't get it.” Then one day, walking along Ninth Street from the Lower East Side to the Village, talking to God as she frequently did, she said, “I want to believe. I really
want
to believe.” And just like that, she did. She quite suddenly “understood,” finally believed in her heart “that there was a creator and this world was not a joke, not an accident.”

Talking about God was not a hip thing at that time in Yvonne's circles, so she kept her revelation to herself. Nor did she take her newfound conviction into the fold of the black church. She found the level of homophobia there too high—about equal to the level of hypocrisy. It was perfectly clear that the black church was filled with gays and lesbians, yet their presence was either denied or denounced.
That
kind of Christianity, Yvonne felt she could do without. She had found God, and would not contaminate His loving presence in her life with the prejudices of those who purported to speak in His name.

She felt something similar about black civil rights organizations. Part of the dissonance was temperamental: Yvonne was a loner, most comfortable when
not
attempting to involve herself with others. But whenever she did make a feint in the direction of joining up, she ran smack up against the endemic homophobia that characterized the black political movement in these years. The case of Bayard Rustin—the man who organized the 1963 March on Washington and had been a close associate of Martin Luther King, but was shunted to the background once it had been publicly revealed that he was gay—was merely the most famous example of how the religiously oriented civil
rights movement tried to distance itself from the “taint” of homosexuality.
⁷

Yvonne thought of herself as inclined toward socialism, toward the vision of a classless society in which, as a black person, a woman, and a lesbian, she would no longer be excluded and forced to choose among her several identities. Much of her struggle during the sixties—juggling, not committing, observing—was at bottom an attempt to work out for herselfthe possibility of freeing all three of the identities she embodied, and to learn how, when they sometimes seemed to conflict, to establish appropriate priorities among them.

She did go to a fair number of rallies and meetings, including the 1963 March on Washington. Her stepfather had died just a week before the march, but Yvonne and her mother felt they
had
to be there. Saddened with grief, they barely talked during the trip, but they were both glad they had gone. “It made me
very
proud,” Yvonne later said. “I
knew
it was a historic moment. And it gave me a lot of hope—it showed things
could
happen.”

And although she continued to be wary about committing to organizational work, at parties she would frequently go around the room and collect money for a particular cause—for the Patrice Lumumba Collective, say, or for almost
anybody's
defense fund. Among the groups she felt closest to was Women Strike for Peace, which began late in 1961 with a call for disarmament and a protest against the resumption of nuclear-bomb testing. Yvonne would, in a nearly anonymous way, without knowing anybody else involved, simply get on one of the WSP buses loading up in Union Square to go down to Washington, and add her body to the rally count.

Then, in 1963, came the death of one of her coworkers at St. Vincent's. He was a Haitian immigrant named Bernie, who had joined the army as the only way he could think of to save up enough money for medical school. He was among the first American soldiers killed in Vietnam, and when Yvonne saw his name listed on the TV nightly news she was enraged that such a sweet, gentle man had been wasted in so inexplicable a war. She vowed to enlist more actively in the antiwar movement that was beginning to gather strength, and went down to Washington for one of the earliest demonstrations.

It proved a frightening experience. Tear-gassed and chased by police, she tried to climb a lamppost to take photos and discovered she barely had the strength to shinny up. During subsequent winter demonstrations, she had trouble getting her hands and feet warm, no matter how stout her boots or heavy her gloves. Years later she realized
that these episodes marked the beginning of the physical problems that would eventually be diagnosed as lupus. But at the time, she simply put her puzzling symptoms out of her head, determined to continue living life at full tilt.

But full tilt was not the equivalent of full commitment—may, indeed, have been a substitute for it. There were only so many hours in the day, and Yvonne's devotion to partying left little time over to pursue her degree, to work steadily in a political movement, or to get deeply involved with another human being. Even when she found herself in love, she did her considerable best to sabotage the relationship, telling herself that she was too highly sexed ever to settle into monogamy.

She first saw Anne from a car window, saw a beautiful, pregnant black woman “strutting down the street.” Who is
that
? Yvonne thought, never dreaming that within days she would be meeting her. Anne, it turned out, was the next-door neighbor of one of Yvonne's good friends. She had recently left her husband, was raising their son on her own, and would soon give birth to a daughter. She didn't see herself as lesbian, but decidedly did respond to Yvonne. It wasn't long before the two became lovers; soon after that, they decided to live together. And they would stay together for seven years.

But they were not easy years. Anne smoked a little pot and drank a little wine, but didn't consume nearly the amounts that Yvonne did—perhaps because she didn't have the same level of pain. Nor did Anne share Yvonne's passion for jazz and nightlife; she much preferred quiet domesticity. Yvonne might have, too—she deeply loved Anne—but her demons kept her on the go, kept her away from the apartment they had taken together in Brooklyn, away from the threatening closeness of the relationship, away from sharing herself in any consistent way.

Anne never fought with Yvonne about her late hours, her drugs, her affairs, her seeming preference for hearing jazz above anything else. She took Yvonne as she found her, knowing any alteration would have to come from within. But Yvonne, at least in retrospect, bitterly blames herself, and carries to this day considerable guilt and regret over what she insistently labels her “destructive” behavior. She
wanted
to do it differently, had clear values about what was the right way to live, and knew that she wasn't measuring up to her own view of what a relationship should be.

She felt certain that she wanted to live with Anne for the rest of her life and help raise Anne's two children, yet she couldn't get a grip
on her own fear of being “trapped,” her panic at the prospect of being “captured and smothered, or rejected and abandoned.” And so she persisted in staying out all night, in pretending she could handle her escalating drinking and drugging, in juggling several simultaneous affairs on the side. She hated her own dishonesty. She knew she was hurting herself and hurting Anne.

Finally, in 1963, when one of Yvonne's side affairs looked as if it was getting serious, Anne picked herself and her children up and left. Yvonne was crushed, but well aware that she had pushed Anne to the breaking point. She missed the two children desperately, and on top of that, she worried about the subsequent effect on them of being raised around so much pot and alcohol. (Years later, Anne's son did develop a drug problem.) Yvonne.knew that she had repeated her own parents' pattern, had let the need to get high prevent her from being consistently present emotionally.

Later, Yvonne and Anne would try—unsuccessfully—to reconstitute their relationship. But in 1963, filled with regret, Yvonne got an apartment of her own in Brooklyn and decided to try and get her life in order. She was thirty-one years old, still unsettled in a career, still “ripping and running” through several worlds without getting much succor from any of them. Within a year she had made the decision to pursue occupational therapy as a career and to go back to school to get a master's degree.

PART FOUR

THE MID-SIXTIES

A
t the close of 1963,
The New York Times
published a lengthy article entitled “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern.” The title said it all: The “concern” was that of psychiatrists, religious leaders, and law-enforcement officials; the “growth” was in visibility, in the perception that homosexuals were emerging from “the shadows” (the
Times's
term), with a small number of militants openly agitating for increased acceptance. Predictably, the
Times
gave over the bulk of its article to the dominant psychoanalytic view of the day, preeminently associated with the theories of Irving Bieber and Charles Socarides, that homosexuality was a pathological disorder. The article even allowed Socarides the closing quote: “The homosexual is ill, and anything that tends to hide that fact reduces his chances of seeking and obtaining treatment.” The “good news,” according to the article (and the psychoanalytic profession), was that through psychotherapy the homosexual could be cured.
¹

The
Times
piece, despite being weighted toward a traditional, negative view, was a marker in ending public silence. In various media, the years 1962 to 1965 saw a sharp increase in the amount of public discussion and representation of homosexuality. Lesbian pulp novels appeared in far greater numbers than previously; male pornography, thanks to a Supreme Court decision clearing physique magazines of obscenity charges, proliferated; both best-selling fiction (such as James Baldwin's
Another Country)
and popular films (
The L-Shaped Room, Lilith, Darling
)
continued to emphasize negative images but, at least peripherally, began to offer some sympathetic portraits.

The new frankness about homosexuality was part and parcel of a much larger cultural upheaval. The conformity and dutiful deference to authority that had held sway during the fifties were giving way under the hammer blows of the black civil rights struggle, the escalating war in Vietnam, and the emerging ethos of a counterculture that mocked traditional pieties and valorized “doing your own thing.” A rapid-fire succession of events from 1963 to 1965 marked a seismic shift in national consciousness. The number of civil rights demonstrations in 1963 alone reached 930; they were highlighted by “Bull” Connor turning his police dogs loose on demonstrators, the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which took the lives of four little black girls, and the massive civil rights march on Washington (in which Yvonne and her mother, Theo Flowers, participated). And the year closed with the assassination of President Kennedy.

During 1964, local insurgencies continued to spread. And riots in Harlem; the murder of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney; and the refusal of the Democratic National Convention to seat the Mississippi Fteedom Democratic Party delegation further dramatized the national upheaval. When, in August of that year, President Johnson used a series of episodes in the Gulf of Tonkin to win a free hand from Congress to “take all necessary measures” for the protection of American forces in Vietnam, the stage was set for a greater upheaval still.