Most of the gay men he met “lived a dual life. They were not so open to their straight friends as they are today.” Or at work. He knew one man who “had worked for AT and T for something like twenty years. He got a little tipsy at an office party and it became obvious that he was gay. His promotion was dependent on his immediate boss, and his immediate boss he knew was homophobic. He said, ‘I can’t quit. I have twenty years invested in this. In ten years I’ll have a pension. But I know my career is doomed because my boss knows I’m gay. I have no chance of ever being promoted.’ ” At the first Mattachine meeting Wicker attended, “there were only eighteen, twenty members. Middle-aged men, not firebrand people at all. A couple of midlevel executives who would print the newsletter on the mimeograph machine at work without anyone knowing, things like that.”
Wicker “became kind of a proselytizer.” Promoting the society’s monthly lectures, he got the attendance up from thirty to three hundred—and got the group evicted, because there was a bar on the ground floor and the landlord worried it would be busted for serving homosexuals. They wound up renting space above the Lion’s Head and were still there when the Stonewall Uprising took place on the street below. Meanwhile Wicker’s involvement in the organization led to an uneasy agreement with his father. “My father had read my diary. He’d told me he wanted me to be the best-adjusted homosexual I could be. He didn’t tell my mother because she’d never accept it.” When Wicker showed him some Mattachine literature, “He said, ‘I don’t think you’re going to get very far with this. Just do me one favor, don’t involve my good name.’ ” In corporate America at the time, having a homosexual activist son would not have been good for a manager’s career. “So my father gave me his name on the one hand and took it away on the other.” Wicker invented a new name for himself. Randolfe was for the handsome, rumored-to-be-gay actor Randolph Scott. A girl he worked with told him that if she had a son she’d name him Wicker and he borrowed it. He kept Hayden as his middle name. He’d make it legal in 1967.
In 1962 Wicker went public in a big way. He was angered by a program on WBAI-FM, the city’s public affairs radio station, on which a panel of psychiatrists claimed they could “cure” homosexuals through therapy. He marched to the station and harangued the manager. “I said, ‘How can you put those morons, those frauds, on the air? We homosexuals are the experts on homosexuality. You should have us talking about our own situation.’ ” At the station manager’s invitation, he put together a group of eight gay men willing to talk, anonymously, about their lives. Before the show even aired a columnist for the conservative Journal-American railed against the station for “scraping the sickly barrel-bottom,” called Wicker an “arrogant and card-carrying swish,” and suggested the station change its call letters to WSICK. When the program—the first such show on American radio—aired, conservatives called on the FCC to revoke the station’s license. The agency ruled instead that homosexuality was a legitimate topic for discussion. Newsweek and the Times agreed. Although it would be another decade before the American Psychiatric Association took homosexuality off its list of mental illnesses, Wicker had forced the first step in that direction.
“Once that ruling was made, the phone was ringing off the hook at Mattachine,” he says. He was, as it happens, editing the men’s magazines Jaguar and Photo-Rama and others like them at the time. Without an uptight corporate job to lose, like most other Mattachine members had, he became a spokesman. In 1964 he appeared on The Les Crane Show, a regional TV talk show, taking calls from viewers, another first.
Wicker joined the New York League for Sexual Freedom, founded in 1963, whose members were male and female, gay, straight, and bi. Ginsberg and Julian Beck were early members. They advocated legalizing abortion and abolishing censorship and argued for the rights of homosexuals and nudists. In September 1964 Wicker and maybe a dozen other league members picketed outside the U.S. Army induction center at 39 Whitehall Street downtown to protest the military’s ban on homosexuals. The men wore jackets and ties, the women looked prim and proper as librarians. They weren’t rebelling against American society, Wicker says, they just wanted to fit in and be treated as equals. The following spring there’d be larger, also peaceful demonstrations outside the White House and the UN.
In 1966 Mattachine turned its attention to the state liquor authority and the difficulties gay men had getting served in bars, even bars in the gay Village like the venerable Julius’, the former speakeasy at the corner of West Tenth Street and Waverly Place. Since the 1950s it had been “known as a gay subculture bar because a lot of gays went there, but it was mixed,” Wicker says. “Julius’ didn’t want to have any trouble with the police. They weren’t paying them off. They were a legitimate bar. But they didn’t want to become a gay bar either. So they had a doorman who stood there. If it got over a certain percentage of men to women, you couldn’t go in unless you had a woman with you. That’s the way they kept Julius’ from becoming a gay bar.” Once gay men got inside, Edmund White recalls, “Julius’ had weird rules imposed on it.” To prevent gay drinkers from cruising each other on the premises, “you’d have to be facing out. You couldn’t look into the bar, but you’d have to look out through these big plate-glass windows that are still there, facing the street. It was so crazy.” “It was the kind of gay bar that didn’t want a certain element,” Agosto Machado says. “It was khaki, loafer, button-down shirt. Or you could get away with an angora sweater.”
Mattachine staged a demonstration the Times dubbed the Sip-in. After sending a press release to the local news, Wicker and three other members went around to bars, identified themselves as homosexuals, and asked to be served. They were hoping to be denied. The first bar they went to, informed by reporters that they were coming, simply closed down for the day to avoid the publicity. They proceeded to the Howard Johnson’s on West Eighth Street at Sixth Avenue, where they were served, and a Sixth Avenue bar called the Waikiki, where they were served, and finally to Julius’, where one of them, Craig Rodwell, had recently been 86’ed for wearing a button Wicker made that declared “Equality for Homosexuals.” There were gay men drinking inside when they arrived. Desperate, they appealed to Julius’ manager, who played along and pretended to refuse them drinks. It got them the press they’d hoped for and was another first step, this one in a long march to legalizing gay bars. In 1967 Rodwell opened the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, said to be the first bookstore in the country dedicated to gay and lesbian literature. It started on Mercer Street and later moved to Christopher Street, where it would remain until 2009.
BY THE 1960S THE MAFIA INVOLVEMENT IN GAY BARS AND CLUBS that had started in the 1930s amounted to a nationwide strangehold. In New York, Vito Genovese backed such mainstays of Greenwich Village gay socializing as the Bon Soir, which gave the teenage Barbra Streisand her first big push, and the Moroccan Village. Several other gay-friendly bars and restaurants in the Village of the 1960s allegedly had mob backing.
In the spring of 1967 mob owners took over the Stonewall Inn. In his book Stonewall, David Carter explains that the place already had a long history. In 1930 Mary Casal’s lesbian autobiography The Stone Wall was published. The following year, two former stables at 51 and 53 Christopher Street were joined and opened as the tearoom Bonnie’s Stone Wall, the name probably “a coded message to lesbians that they would be welcomed there.” In the 1940s it “lost its rebellious edge” and became the Stonewall Inn, a popular restaurant for wedding receptions. In the 1960s, gutted by a fire, it stood boarded up and rotting for several years. Then the Genovese mobster Fat Tony Salerno and some partners, including Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello, occupied the abandoned space. They laid black paint over the charred wood and painted the windows black too, common practice in gay and lesbian places. They also boarded and barricaded them and installed heavy steel doors with speakeasy-style peepholes. They brought in a few tables and chairs, a jukebox and cigarette machine, hung a few lights, and left the big, rusting sign hanging out
front. Later they’d add black lights and go-go boys in cages.
In March 1967 they reopened the Stonewall as a “bottle club,” an old mob ruse to get around serving liquor without a license. Ostensibly they were members-only clubs, where the members brought and drank from their own bottles. As practiced at the Stonewall and other mob joints, it just meant that a bouncer sat inside the door with a sign-up book; you handed him a dollar to buy your “membership,” signed a fake name, and you were in. The doormen also used a “Sorry, members only” pretense to keep out straight-looking people and, they hoped, undercover cops. The liquor was all hijacked swag, which didn’t prevent the owners from watering it down and overcharging for it. Staff also peddled uppers and downers. Because the mobsters despised their gay clients they made no effort to keep the joints clean. Robert Heide and his friends dubbed the Stonewall the Cesspool. The bathrooms were dark and the glasses so dirty that activists blamed the joint for an outbreak of hepatitis.
Despite it all, the Stonewall was a huge hit from the night it opened. Its location just off Sheridan Square made it a destination. And there was dancing to the jukebox in the large back room, virtually unheard of at a time when gay men at Julius’, only about a block away, couldn’t even look each other in the eye. Carter reports that the mobsters made back their minimal initial investment on the very first night, and after that “it was essentially pure profit every day for nearly two and a half years.”
“Stonewall was a sleazy lowlife bar that any self-respecting gay would not go to,” Agosto Machado says. He proudly adds that he went there often.
ALONG WITH THE STREET KIDS AND RUNAWAYS WHO FLOODED THE Village in the 1960s were a number of effeminate gay youth who dressed in partial or full drag. They came from places where dressing that way in public would get them arrested or institutionalized, if they weren’t beaten to death first. Some came to stay. Arriving with no money, contacts, or prospects, many of them soon fell to hustling, dealing dope, rolling bums, and shoplifting. Others were New York or New Jersey kids who came to dress up and party on the weekend, often changing into their drag clothes in the car or subway, and changing back into male clothing on the way home.
Agosto was born in Hell’s Kitchen of Chinese and Spanish parents, orphaned, and lived in foster homes around the city. Interviewed in the 2010s he declined to state his age—“just say thirty-nine,” he suggested. He began hanging around the Village in the late 1950s and was in early audiences at the Cino, Judson, and La MaMa. Jackie Curtis “dragged me across the footlights.” Curtis knocked on Agosto’s door in his East Village tenement building one day looking for Agosto’s neighbor, a Broadway actor. Eyeing Agosto, Jackie asked, “ ‘Can you sing?’ And I said, ‘No.’ ‘Well, can you dance?’ I said, ‘No.’ ‘Can you act?’ ‘No.’ ‘You wanna be in a show?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ ” Curtis cast Agosto in her farcical drag musical Vain Victory, where he shared the stage with Warhol superstar Candy Darling. He also performed with John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous, Koutoukas’s Gargoyles, the San Francisco–based gender-bending troupe the Cockettes, and the Cockettes’ New York counterparts the Hot Peaches and Angels of Light. “So I always say opportunity didn’t knock, Jackie Curtis did.”
In the mid-1960s Agosto joined the contingent of street queens who had become a large and increasingly visible presence on Christopher Street, along the waterfront, and in the meatpacking district. Officially Gansevoort Market, the meatpacking district is tucked in the northwest corner of the neighborhood, from Fourteenth Street down to around Gansevoort Street and the waterfront to around Hudson Street. What started out a produce market in the 1800s had grown by the 1960s into the country’s third-largest slaughterhouse and packing zone, with as many as two hundred and fifty meat companies lining its streets. During business hours its extrawide cobblestone streets were filled with trucks, racks of hanging beef, the smell of offal, and the sight of butchers in bloody aprons taking smoke breaks on the loading docks. At night it turned dark and deserted, as did the waterfront that ran the length of the Village. West Street lay desolate under the crumbling hulk of the elevated West Side Highway. (A death trap from its start in the 1920s, the highway would be closed to traffic below Eighteenth Street in 1973 when a large section collapsed. Most of it was taken down in the 1980s.) Among the dark warehouses stood a few once respectable hotels including the Keller, by the 1960s a decrepit flophouse inhabited by drug addicts, winos, and gay hustlers. The hotel’s bar, opened in 1956, is said to have been the first gay leather bar in New York City. The Village People got publicity photos taken there in the 1970s. Other tough waterfront bars had long served a mixed clientele—dockworkers and truckers by day, sailors and gay men at night. West Street was also lined with parking lots for tractor trailers that stood empty and unlocked all night. And as the shipping companies fled the West Side for New Jersey through the 1960s, one by one the shedded piers stood dark and abandoned as well.
In the 1960s and ’70s gay men turned this area into a public sex zone. Men from the era explain that much of their romantic and sexual activity happened in public places because it was so hard for them to go out on dates like other young couples. Before Stonewall, a gay man couldn’t be seen out in most places with another man. Two young men or women couldn’t hold hands across a table in most restaurants or slow-dance in most clubs (even though a New York court of appeals judge ruled in 1968 that “close dancing” by same-sex couples was not in itself illegal). Even in many bars like Julius’ they risked being kicked out by watchful management or entrapped by undercover cops if they made or responded to obvious advances. If they met someone they liked and were feeling sexy, they couldn’t get a room in most hotels like hetero couples could. Many of them lived with one, two, three roommates, which made bringing a date home difficult.
So they took it to the streets. “I cruised the streets constantly,” Jean-Claude van Itallie recalls. “You didn’t have to be circumspect about cruising. They couldn’t arrest you for eyeing somebody.” And they headed for the dark and desolate waterfront to have sex in the dingy flophouses and even in those parked trucks. Walking over to the waterfront late at night for some quick, anonymous sex in a dark and usually stinky truck was nicknamed “taking the express.” Often multiple partners would cluster in the dark for orgies lit only by the glow of an occasional cigarette or joint. By 1968 the trucks scene was well known enough to be included in the mainstream Sinatra movie The Detective, which has a gay subplot. It was also well known to the NYPD, whom gays called Lilly Law. Officers would stop by a few times a night to chase the gays out and make a few arrests. And it was familiar territory to gay-bashing thugs who’d have sex with the locals and then rob them, beat them, or push them off the edge into the filthy river, which usually meant they drowned. These thugs included gangs of what were known as “banjee boys,” ultra-macho black or Latino gay or bi youth who came to the waterfront to prey on more effeminate men. Gay bathhouses represented a safer alternative to the waterfront, but there weren’t any in the Village. The nearest were the St. Marks Baths in the East Village and the Everard Baths on Twenty-eighth Street. The swanky new Continental Baths, where Bette Midler would get her start with Barry Manilow on the piano, was on the Upper West Side.
Dark and out of the way, the meatpacking district and waterfront were prime strolls for hustlers—female, male, and in between. Agosto did some hustling in drag but says he was never very good at it. “I was a little timid, and I didn’t feel that I was that attractive. When it got dark, I could roll up my pants, put on a skirt and what have you, stroll Christopher” and the waterfront. Like a lot of other younger, inexperienced drag hustlers, he was taken under wing by Marsha P. Johnson. Marsha was born Malcolm Michaels in Elizabeth, New Jersey, in 1944, and said she started dressing as a girl by age five but had to give it up when a neighbor boy raped her. In the Village of the mid-1960s she became one of the most outrageous and flamboyant queens on the streets and piers, “the ultimate and original low-budget dra
g queen,” her friend Randy Wicker says. A tall, muscular black man, clearly male, clearly at least half mad, she wore cheap wigs, often with things like a stuffed bunny or a Valentine chocolate box as a hat, and ensembles pulled together from thrift shops and trash bins, draped in plastic beads and flowers, Christmas ornaments and lights, sometimes in big sneakers, sometimes on roller skates. She impressed people less as a typical drag queen than as a gender-bending, mind-bending sport of nature. A number of people, not all of them gay, treated her as a holy madman, or madwoman, and called her Saint Marsha. Agosto calls her “a bodhisattva.” She amended her given name from Michael to Marsha, took Johnson from the Times Square Howard Johnson’s, and said the P stood for “Pay It No Mind.”
She panhandled, hustled, sometimes waited tables, slept on the streets and in fleabags like the hotel Keller until Wicker took her in in 1980. She was arrested often, beaten several times, at least once pushed into the river, and once shot in the back by a cabdriver on the West Side Highway after giving him oral sex. She was also periodically in and out of mental institutions. Once, after Wicker took her in, he left her in his apartment while he went on vacation. She had an episode, spray-painted the walls and kitchen cabinets with silver graffiti and pulled the fire alarm. When firemen arrived she said God had told her to do it. On the Village waterfront, she would sometimes strip and throw her clothes into the Hudson as offerings to Neptune, then stroll naked up Christopher Street until the cops grabbed her. She would tear other people’s clothes off and throw them in the river too. “I may be crazy, but that don’t make me wrong,” she used to say.
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