Stonewall (17 page)

Then in rapid succession in 1965 came the dramatic civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, the bombing of North Vietnam, the rioting in Watts, and the emergence of black nationalism as symbolized in the “black power” slogan. Compared to these large-scale events and the substantial number of people enrolling in one or another national protest, the budding homophile movement remained minuscule—even when adding to the earlier Mattachine, ONE, and Daughters of Bilitis organizations the prominent new (mostly West Coast) Council on Religion and the Homosexual, the Tavern Guild, and the Society for Individual Rights.

Yet the homophile movement did both reflect and further contribute to the general assault on traditional values and, with respect to homosexuals themselves, represented the first glimmers of a possible improvement in status. To a greater extent than is usually credited, the homophile movement in the early sixties did challenge the dominant
psychiatric view of homosexuality by arguing—contra Bieber and Socarides—that sexual orientation was inborn, was only
possibly
a disorder (the matter was much debated
within
homophile organizations), and in any case was
not
susceptible to “cure” and not deserving of the severe social and legal strictures imposed on it.

Resistance to oppression did not begin in 1969 at Stonewall. The West Coast had given birth both to Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis in the 1950s and, in the 1959 mayoral election in San Francisco, candidate Russ Wolden had made a political issue of homosexuality for the first time by accusing his opponent, the incumbent George Christopher, of making the Bay Area national headquarters for sexual deviates. All three dailies condemned Wolden for “stigmatizing” the city, and Christopher easily defeated him in the election.

In 1961, openly gay José Sarria, a charming, inventive drag performer at the venerable Black Cat bar, ran for city supervisor in San Francisco and polled more than three thousand votes—a decade before Jim Owles attempted a comparable run in New York. In 1964, police harassment of San Francisco's gay bars led to the formation of the Society for Individual Rights (SIR) which, thanks to its willingness to meet the social as well as political needs of gay men, had enrolled a thousand members by 1966, thus becoming the largest homophile organization in the country.

An important turning point for the movement in San Francisco came on New Year's Eve, 1964. A four-day conference between gay activists and progressive Protestant ministers in May of that year had led to the formation of the Council on Religion and the Homosexual. To spread word of the new organization and raise funds for it, a New Year's Eve dance had been announced at California Hall on Polk Street. The police had agreed to let the dance proceed on the stipulation that anyone appearing in drag be instantly whisked inside the hall, out of public view.

But on the night of the dance, five hundred gay men and lesbians arrived in their formal clothes to find that they had to walk through a gauntlet of police photographers. Thereafter, at roughly twenty-minute intervals, police inspectors entered California Hall on the pretext of needing to make a fire inspection or check the liquor license. When, after an hour or so, their right to enter the hall was challenged (“Where's your invitation?” one man demanded of the police), a scuffle ensued and arrests were made. The next day, the outraged ministers held a press conference to denounce the police—and the
San Francisco Chronicle
featured it on page one. When the case came to court, the
presiding judge threw out all charges against the gay defendants and lectured the police on their dereliction of duty.

In several senses the California Hall incident marked a turning point: Heterosexual ministers had spoken up not to denounce gays but to defend their humanity; the courts had sided with homosexuals; the police, previously behaving as if invested with a natural right to harass gays, had been reprimanded and curtailed; and gay activists had learned the precious lesson that open, organized defiance could yield positive results. Ted Mcllvenna, the minister who had spearheaded the Council on Religion and the Homosexual, was perhaps justified in his later assertion—after nearly all the credit for gay liberation had gone to the 1969 Stonewallers and those who followed—that “the Harvey Milks and those people were Johnny-come-latelies.”

In New York City, too, resistance was mounting. Randy Wicker, main organizer of the protest in front of the Whitehall Street draft board, had continued—as had Craig—to resist the frightened conservatism of New York Mattachine's leaders; Wicker also served as a media gadfly, calling public attention to the harassment and discrimination under which gays suffered. The old guard, both in Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis, was to retain control in New York for several more years, but in Washington, D.C., Franklin Kameny's leadership of the local Mattachine Society had led in the early sixties to a series of radically aggressive statements and actions that had all at once reflected the confrontational strategy of the black civil rights movement and heralded the rejection of apologetics that would subsequently typify the gay movement.

CRAIG FOSTER

O
ne day in June 1964, Craig Rodwell was sitting at the Mattachine reception desk in New York when a man in his late thirties, sporting a crew cut, bow tie, and cigar, with a broad smile and a prematurely spreading waistline, entered the office. Craig was immediately on guard, thinking this might well be one of those fakely affable government agents rumored to be poking into “subversive” organizations of all kinds. (Though proof was not available at the time, definitive evidence has since surfaced that agents from BOSS—the Bureau of Special Services—did indeed have homophile activities in New York
under surveillance as early as the 1950s. And in 1963, an agent covering Randy Wicker's speech “The Homosexual in Our Society,” given at City College, revealed in his report to superiors that postal inspectors had also been “conducting an investigation” of Wicker's mail.)
²

Craig, with a decided edge to his voice, asked the smiling man who stood above his desk just who he was and what he wanted. The man introduced himself as Foster Gunnison, Jr., said he lived in Hartford, Connecticut, had read about the existence of Mattachine in Donald Webster Cory's book,
The Homosexual in America
, and had come looking for more information. Craig was a quick study, his bullshit detector always on alert, and he decided Foster was telling the truth. He invited him to have a seat and the two men talked for some time.
³

Foster explained that he had recently completed a second master's degree, this time in philosophy, at Trinity College; that he had known for some time that he was “not developing into a heterosexual”; and that he had read about New York Mattachine and had been thinking about doing some sort of organizational work—which, he told Craig, he thoroughly enjoyed and was rather good at.

Craig was delighted at the prospect of another volunteer, and especially one who seemed affable and prosperous. (Since Foster had not mentioned holding down a job, Craig had assumed, rightly, that he was financially independent.) Foster made it clear that he was unlikely to get much involved in New York Mattachine, other than in some distantly supportive way, since he did, after all, live in Connecticut. But he signed up for formal membership, took some Mattachine literature home with him, and agreed to Craig's suggestion that they stay in touch.

The activist seed had been planted. Foster had taken a crucial first step in aligning himself with the homophile movement (as it was increasingly calling itself)
⁴
—a step surprising for a man who had all his life behaved dutifully. The successful completion of his second master's degree had given Foster a new burst of confidence. He had earned the degree in half the time he had taken to complete his first master's, and had done so with real distinction: his thesis on “Soft Determinism, Responsibility and the Idea of Control” was highly praised, and he compiled an outstanding academic record.

All of which did wonders for Foster's self-esteem, and for a time he contemplated going on for a doctorate. Yet ultimately he would decide against a life in academia. Enough self-doubt remained to make
him wonder whether his gifts would really prove competitive in the university world, and besides, he felt no particular affinity for either research or teaching. What he
had
always been drawn to was organizational work, preferably in a behind-the-scenes capacity, and once he had discovered the homophile movement, his involvement quickly accelerated.

The Mattachine Society was no longer national in scope. As a result of internal divisions that included charges of malfeasance and competitive bickering between the San Francisco and the New York chapters (New York having become the largest by 1960), Mattachine had dissolved as a national organization in March 1961, leaving local chapters to chart their own course. That had led, in short order, to a duplication of effort and a decrease in effectiveness. So in late 1962, Franklin Kameny, the guiding (and militant) spirit of the Mattachine Society of Washington, had suggested that East Coast homophile groups form at least some loose affiliation.

Accordingly, four organizations—New York DOB and the former Mattachine chapters of New York, Washington, and Philadelphia (the latter having renamed itself the Janus Society after the national organization disintegrated)—met in Philadelphia in January 1963 and formed the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO). Craig Rod-well became an ECHO member soon after, and over the next two years he and others in the movement who were inclined toward greater militancy got to know each other and began to plan strategy for securing more aggressive homophile leadership.
⁵

“Militancy” in these early years of the homophile movement was not synonymous with across-the-board defiance. Even Frank Kameny himself—though more responsible than any other individual for the newly aggressive tone in the movement—put decided boundaries on protest. He insisted that “you are not going to cure the effects of the impact upon the homosexual of society's prejudices by leading the homosexual into a rejection of society's values.” He felt nonconforming students, especially, needed to be kept in line by older, wiser heads. As an individual, Kameny sympathized with nonconformity of all kinds, but he felt certain (about almost everything, Kameny felt
certain)
that homosexuals would “never gain acceptance by assuming the appearance of unacceptability.”
⁶

Foster Gunnison read about ECHO in the literature he had brought home with him from New York Mattachine, and began to go to their meetings. There he met, among others, Jack Nichols (“Warren D. Adkins”), a friend and ally of Kameny's, and Richard Inman,
who had started Mattachine of Florida, an ECHO affiliate. Foster and Inman were both prodigious letter writers, and the two men started a lengthy correspondence, which Foster later credited with having helped him sharpen his understanding of the homophile movement and the role he might play in it. When the correspondence began, late in 1965, Foster was still feeling (as he wrote Inman) “brand new to, and not a little overwhelmed by, this movement.” Within six months, he was gratefully writing Inman that “anything I am able to do eventually to assist the movement will owe a good deal of credit to you.”
⁷

Foster recognized that Inman was a difficult man, a “lone wolf” who chafed against organizational restraints (he would later describe Inman as “halfway between a drifter and a taxi driver”). But Foster also came to see him as “an unsung hero of the movement,” an outspoken, one-man crusade in Florida, and he felt indebted to Inman for helping him to clarify a number of his own views. When Foster, for example, expressed concern to Inman over proliferating antidraft and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that seemed to him “badly lacking in rational justification” and in danger of giving protest of all sorts “a bad name,” Inman wrote back that for homosexuals to affiliate with other groups or issues was “a VERY dangerous course.” Homophile goals, he insisted, should never be “contaminated” with the agenda of any other movement—be it pro-black or anti-war.

He also buttressed Foster's sense that the breakup of Mattachine as a national organization in 1961 had been a lamentable mistake and that a new, unifying central body was urgently needed. Not that either man was keen about resuscitating Mattachine itself. Foster had started to come down frequently from Hartford to attend Mattachine meetings in New York, but what he saw and heard left him with mixed feelings. “I might just as well visit a brickyard,” he wrote Inman after one Mattachine meeting. “The room can be full of fifty people and no one seems to know you or anyone else or anything that's going on.”

Foster was heartened to hear various people at the ECHO meetings speak of the need to form a new national coalition. But he was less pleased that much of the interest seemed to center on some sort of informal federation. That would not, in Foster's view, be adequate; he instinctively leaned toward a more centralized organization that could encourage the development of a powerful, militant movement. He believed (presciently) that the movement
would
gain in militancy (“someday this movement is going to break out into the open and hit
the headlines”), would push with “reasonable aggressiveness” the view that homosexuality was “a fully acceptable and rewarding way of life.”

His emphasis
was
on “reasonable.” If Foster wanted to get the homophile house in order, he wanted it to be a house cleansed of “fringe elements.” He deplored the possibility that the movement might get identified with “beatniks and other professional nonconformists”; their presence would prevent homosexuals from establishing a “decent” reputation and “gaining acceptance.” He was therefore “strictly against” an “open door policy”: in Foster's view, any emerging national organization would have to “keep as tight a rein as possible” over admissions, selecting its membership with an eye to “a certain degree of reasonable conformity.”