Stonewall (39 page)

The demands were imaginatively packaged in the form of “zaps”—lightning-quick confrontations with offending institutions,
organizations or individuals. Mayor Lindsay got his at a Metropolitan Museum of Art reception; dressed in appropriate dinner jackets, GAA members joined the reception line to greet the mayor and when he extended his hand, grasped—and held—it long enough to insistently ask, “What are you going to do about civil rights for homosexuals, Mr. Mayor?” Within the year, GAA had, among other actions, infiltrated the
Dick Cavett Show
; carried off a series of disruptions at the various branch offices of Household Finance for refusing loans to known homosexuals; demonstrated at the county clerk's office to demand the right to marry; and traveled to Long Island, Hartford, and Albany to protest gay-bashing and employment discrimination and to lobby for a statewide gay-rights bill.
⁴¹

A little more than a year after its inception, GAA decided to lease an abandoned firehouse in the SoHo district of Manhattan, south of Greenwich Village. The Firehouse quickly became the political and cultural headquarters for the gay movement in New York, its spacious quarters a beehive of assorted activities. On Saturday nights, the large meeting hall would be converted into a dance floor and the packed revels (an average crowd of fifteen hundred per dance) become a cherished alternative to the bar scene, drawing the apolitical as well as the committed, and attracting both men and women (though men were always in a decided majority).

YVONN

Y
vonne Flowers was among the many venturing down to the Firehouse who had never previously belonged to a liberationist organization (though she had participated in any number of black and left-oriented demonstrations). For her, the experience proved both confirmatory and surprising. The absence of black faces confirmed her earlier sense that the gay movement had not succeeded in drawing—or perhaps had not even tried to draw—people of color. Yet at the same time, she was surprised to see at least a scattering of blacks present.

The numbers were small, yet marked some advance over the homophile movement. With the exception of “Ernestine Eppinger,” who had participated in the Washington, D.C., picketing during the mid-sixties, no black person had played a prominent role in Mattachine,
DOB, NACHO, or ERCHO, though many white members of those groups had been sympathetic to the black civil rights struggle, and Frank Kameny, for one, had always credited it with centrally shaping his own ideas. Ernestine Eppinger herself believed that “the homophile movement [was] more open to Negroes than, say, a lot of churches,” but she acknowledged that few blacks had felt comfortable enough actually to join. Once, in the early sixties, Yvonne had gone with another black woman to a DOB meeting on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and had been repelled by it. The white women reacted to the black women's presence first with shock, then with a supercilious casualness that was at least as offensive. Yvonne never returned; “I can't be here,” she decided, “with all these white girls.”
⁴²

With the advent of GLF and GAA, the gay world became
somewhat
more integrated (sexually, gay men had long crossed racial and class lines). Even so, gay blacks within the movement felt sufficiently at odds with it—perceiving their needs to be distinct enough, their perspectives ignored enough—to form their own Third World Caucus. Of course, in the feminist movement in these years as well, women of color were few and the issue of racism was muted. Yvonne Flowers was hardly alone in the late sixties or early seventies in feeling caught between the endemic sexism and homophobia of the black struggle and the pervasive racism in the feminist and gay ones.
⁴³

Yvonne found just enough black faces to keep her coming back to the Firehouse with some frequency. Before long, she and a few other black lesbians, including Luvinia Pinson (whom she had known before) and Donna Allegra, were getting together every Sunday as the Black Lesbian Caucus. “There were never enough people to really get a structure,” Yvonne recalls, “to have officers or dues, but it was good in that we could at least talk to each other without being in a bar scene, and talk about racism within the gay community.” None of them, it turned out, felt comfortable being in the Firehouse—which they called “a white boy's playhouse”—and since few of the women showed up on a regular basis, the group soon stopped meeting. Still, they
had
formed a loose network and within a year, they would again try to form an organization.

SYLVIA

G
iven how fully Sylvia had involved herself in the Stonewall riots, she was by comparison detached in the months following. The reasons were mostly circumstantial, the result of living and working in New Jersey. Cut off from her usual contacts, she had heard nothing about the sudden emergence of GLF, or the subsequent formation of GAA. Bumping into Marsha P. Johnson on the street one day, she listened in amazement to Marsha's excited talk of the GLF meetings she had started to attend. Then, soon after, Sylvia spotted a copy of
Gay Power
on a newsstand (the biweekly had started publishing on September 15, 1969, about six weeks before
Gay
and GLF's
Come Out!
also hit the stands), and realized something really
had
happened following the riots, and that she had to find out exactly what.

Sylvia and another queen, Josie, both of them in full face makeup, descended on a GAA meeting. Sylvia was given some static at the door, but managed to get inside, where she and Josie decided to sit in the back of the meeting on the unlikely chance they would be inconspicuous. Looking around the room, Sylvia “didn't see a queen in there,” and she and Josie started talking loudly in Spanish about how this didn't seem like exactly the place for them. A head turned around in the row directly in front: “I understand some of what you girls are saying, because I'm Italian.” “Ooh my,” thought Sylvia to herself, “I do think this chile is one of ours.” She was. Her name was Bebe Scarpi, she was an undergraduate at Queens College (which she denied choosing for its name), and she assured Sylvia and Josie that they
were
in the right place, that “the sisters were welcome.” Bebe was to become a fast friend of Sylvia's (and later, as a transvestite, would sit on the first board of the National Gay Task Force).
⁴⁴

But Bebe wasn't entirely right about “the sisters being welcome.” They were and they weren't, depending on whom you asked and which night you asked them. Arthur Bell, one of the founders of GAA, observed that “the general membership is frightened of Sylvia and thinks she's a troublemaker. They're frightened by street people.” A Hispanic street queen's transgressive being produced automatic alarm: Sylvia was from the wrong ethnic group, from the wrong side of the tracks, wearing the wrong clothes—managing single-handedly
and simultaneously to embody several frightening, overlapping categories of Otherness. By her mere presence, she was likely to trespass against
some
encoded middle-class white script, and could count on being constantly patronized when not being summarily excluded. If someone was not shunning her darker skin or sniggering at her passionate, fractured English, they were deploring her rude anarchism as inimical to order or denouncing her sashaying ways as offensive to womanhood. Sylvia's ability to represent herself in unconventional form had enabled her to have a life, but it had also made her a haunting affront to those inhabiting standardized shapes.
⁴⁵

In the years ahead, Sylvia would often feel rejected and only occasionally welcome. But she stuck it out. Taking immediately to confrontational politics, she jumped into “actions” full blast, feeling hurt when the chino set tried to shunt her to the sidelines, but rarely feeling discouraged.
No one
, she quickly decided, was going to prevent her from fighting for her own cause.

And just like Yvonne Flowers, Sylvia found enough friends and allies to keep her coming back, at least for a few years. In GAA Arthur Evans could always be counted on to defend her (“many times Arthur and me sat down and talked heart-to-heart”), and in both GLF and GAA she met some lesbians (like Kay Tobin and Judy Rathill) who accepted and respected her. Never known for being tactful, Sylvia told Judy Rathill on their first meeting, “You look like one of those tough old dykes I used to hang out with up at the Hilltop in Harlem.” Judy laughed, assured her that she was “not a dyke, but a woman,” and opened up her apartment to Sylvia and her friends whenever they had no other place to stay. Sylvia affectionately remembers how she and Judy “raised each other's consciousness.”

But the angry denunciation of Sylvia by GAA's Jean O'Leary (subsequently cochair of the National Gay Task Force) for “parodying” womanhood was more typical of how movement women responded to her. Later, at the 1973 Gay Pride Rally, O'Leary would attempt to keep Sylvia from speaking, and the angry public confrontation that resulted would lead Sylvia, as an aftermath, to attempt suicide and to drop out of the movement. And many years after that, O'Leary would express deep regret at her attitude: “Looking back, I find this so embarrassing because my views have changed so much since then. I would never pick on a transvestite now.”
⁴⁶

O'Leary's denunciation of Sylvia was atypically heated. A more standard exchange between Sylvia and a GLF woman went (according to Sylvia) something like this:

WOMAN:
Why do you like to wear women's clothing?

SYLVIA:
Because I feel very comfortable. Do you like wearing pants?

WOMAN:
Yeah.

SYLVIA:
Well, I like wearing a skirt. What can I tell you? I like to feel flowing. You like to be confined. That's your problem.

Karla Jay was one of the GLF women who liked Sylvia personally. But even Karla felt ambivalent about her. She, Sylvia, and Marsha often had fun together; they would be part of a group that piled into a car after a GLF meeting to go “liberate” an all-gay male or all-lesbian bar. And in transit, Sylvia and Marsha would feel Karla up in the backseat; it wasn't sexual—it was comparative shopping. They would feel themselves up at the same time, judging how they measured up against “the real thing.” Karla remembers that after Marsha had felt her breasts one time, she distractedly lamented, “I've worked really hard and all's I got is lemons; she's got watermelons.”

Despite the fun they had together, Karla would tell Sylvia and Marsha, that their jewelry, makeup, and tight clothes were exactly what women were trying to get rid of; she resented the way they were “copying and flaunting some of the worst aspects of female oppression.” Besides, Karla would say, “you are
not
really women, you are biological men and can reclaim that privilege at any time.
We
are females forever.” Sylvia, more than Marsha, would sometimes get offended, and Sylvia offended was not some trifle. “She was as tough as nails,” Karla remembers, “I could see her getting a crew cut and going out and joining the marines.”

In GLF, Bob Kohler often made a pitch for the queens: “These people started the riot, they're starving,
do
something for them!” That would usually be greeted by more boos than applause—heavy roleplaying, whether by effeminate queens or by bulldykes, was viewed by many as a residue of the bad old days of trying to win acceptance from heterosexuals by mimicking their dichotomous role-playing. But the influential Lois Hart strongly supported Kohler's position, and indeed urged him to try to get more queens to attend the GLF meetings. Kohler at various times brought along Li'l Orphan Annie (red curls and big eyes), Lola Montez, Hormona, Boom-Boom Santiago, Black Bambi, Nova, and a host of other queens. But only a few had Sylvia's commitment and staying power—were willing, as Kohler puts it, to “tough it through.”
⁴⁷

Kohler was a member of the Aquarius Cell, the GLF affinity group that organized the dances. He put Sylvia on door duty, where she would sit, usually stoned on speed and brandishing a large butcher knife, fiercely collecting and guarding the money. “Fierce” became the operative word in describing Sylvia. She would throw herself into every meeting, party, or action with such passion that those who insisted on remaining her detractors had to shift their vocabularies: She was no longer Sylvia, the flighty, unreliable queen, but rather Sylvia, the fierce harridan, ready to run any risk and run through any obstacle in order to achieve her frequently shrieked goal of FREEDOM.

Jim Fouratt was one of Sylvia's defenders. In his view, “her instincts were always correct.” Even when she was screwed up on drugs or booze and being abrasively loud, Sylvia had, to Jim's mind, a gut-level understanding of oppression and a willingness to speak her mind that more than made up for her “incorrect” vocabulary, her brazen, bullhorn voice, her inability to shut up. Jim, in general, saw himself as favoring “a revolution that transformed not only society, but roles,” and he could witheringly enunciate a position not far from Jean O'Leary's: “Men dressing up as women to play out roles that men have created to entice and seduce men, has nothing to do with being female.” Yet he felt he understood Sylvia's need for “narcissistic visibility,” for flamboyantly asserting, over and over, a right to exist that she herself had trouble accepting.

Jim was especially impressed with the way Sylvia handled her critics. When attacked by a GLF woman for “showing off” or for “denying her male privilege by pretending to be a woman,” Sylvia would only rarely attack back, would not (like some of the other GLF queens) try stridently to put the woman down as “a jealous bitch.” Instead, Sylvia would try to explain that she was simply being “Sylvia,” a man with a penis who liked to dress up as a woman—it was as untheoretical as that.