Through it all she remained a kind of half-crazed den mother to younger queens like Agosto and Sylvia Rae Rivera, born Ray Rivera in 1951, also a New York native and orphan, of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent. He began wearing drag in grade school and was on the streets hanging with the transvestite hustlers by adolescence.
“Marsha did try to help me get into the business, but it was really, really too tough,” Agosto says. “She said that you don’t drink and you don’t do drugs when you’re working the street. If a car drives by and stops you don’t lean in. Because often for kicks the people will have a brick in their hand and smash you in the face. Or you could get robbed. Marsha was trying to teach me. And after a while she said, ‘I’ve got to make a living too.’ I’m not the smartest person, I’ll admit that. I blew a guy, and at the time, what did I get, like twenty dollars or something. And he said, ‘Oh, do you have change for a fifty?’ And I said no. He said, ‘Why don’t I let you off, I’ll go up to the store, buy something and come back.’ And of course he never came back. But it’s not like really being beat up and so forth. Many of the girls were knifed. Or you sort of wait for the money, and he’d say, ‘Get out of my car, faggot,’ and you got out of the car. We were all flexible to the game. We were outsiders, we were gay, we were underage or a little over. The law wasn’t going to work for us. And so if we were victims of anything, there was no one to go to.”
He also worked the “tearooms,” gay slang for the public men’s rooms in the subway stations and parks. “You’d say, ‘Oh, I did the BMT today.’ And your friend would say, ‘The whole line? Or just express stops?’ ” The tearoom in the Christopher Street station at Sheridan Square was extremely popular. Late on weekday afternoons men heading home from downtown offices, in suits and carrying briefcases, many with wives and kids waiting for them, would stop off “for a little entertainment.” Agosto once took an innocent lady friend down there to catch a train and the platform was mobbed with men. “She said, ‘Gee whiz, are they only running express trains?’ She didn’t know that it was so crowded because they had to wait to get into the tearoom.” For years NYPD vice cops routinely raided tearooms and shook down these businessmen for payoffs in return for not arresting them on morals charges. Mayor Lindsay put an end to that.
When the Stonewall opened, drag queens and hustlers became regulars, in full or partial drag. Skull Murphy and the other doorkeepers kept a limit on how many full-on drag queens they’d let in at any one time; the Washington Square Bar, at West Third Street and Broadway, was more amenable to them but not as much fun. Nevertheless, by 1969 the Stonewall had developed a reputation, and older white gay men rarely went there. The Stonewall was for a clientele not welcome in the more mainstream gay bars. The crowd was young, many below drinking age and flashing fake IDs, many of them black or Latino. “It was not a bar I went to any longer,” Edmund White recalls. “It had become pretty much a black-and-tan drag queen bar. We called them A-trainers because they came down from Harlem.”
It was common knowledge in the neighborhood that cops from the local Sixth Precinct took payoffs from mob-owned bars and clubs in return for turning a blind eye to numerous infractions, ranging from selling liquor without a license to providing entertainment without a cabaret license to operating a “disorderly” establishment because they allowed gays and lesbians in. Gay men called crooked cops “the Mafia in blue.” At some places in the Village, Friday was known as “brown bag” day because the cops often made the rounds for their cash on Friday. According to one of David Carter’s sources, the Stonewall handed cops twelve hundred dollars a week. Still, they had to make periodic raids to keep up appearances; they also did it when they needed to beef up their arrest numbers, because gay men tended to be easy collars who rarely put up a fight. When they were planning to raid a place they’d usually let the mob owners know in advance. The owners would make themselves scarce and wouldn’t leave much cash or illegal liquor on hand for the cops to confiscate. At the Stonewall, there was no cash register for the cops to haul out; cash, as well as drugs, were kept in cigar boxes the staff could try to hide when a raid was on. The cops obligingly scheduled raids for early in the evening, when the place wasn’t filled, so that business could resume later at night when the crowds showed up. It worked out for everybody except the staffers on duty during the raid, who had to take a collar for their bosses, and any patrons who were underage, in drag, or holding drugs, who’d get hauled off as well.
“You must remember, everybody was doing drugs back then,” Sylvia Rae Rivera later explained. “Everybody was selling drugs, and everybody was buying drugs to take to other bars.”
Sylvia described a typical raid at the Stonewall. The lights would come on, the jukebox was turned off, and the cops would stride in to divvy up the patrons. “Routine was, ‘Faggots over here, dykes over there, and freaks over there,’ referring to my side of the community. If you did not have three pieces of male attire on you, you were going to jail.” Cops would arrest the staff and a few patrons who weren’t observing the dress code or didn’t have valid ID and push the rest out to the street. Those among them who were closeted in daily life would quickly slip away into the darkness, greatly relieved not to have been arrested and revealed as homosexuals. Others would go to one of the Sheridan Square coffee shops for a while. The cops would padlock the door and depart with the cash and liquor—which rarely made it to the precinct house—and their collars. An hour later, “You come back, the Mafia was there cutting the padlock off, bringing in more liquor, and back to business as usual.”
The Friday night of June 27, 1969, nothing was business as usual.
31
Stonewall
DEPUTY INSPECTOR SEYMOUR PINE WAS A GOOD COP AND A NICE guy, a Jewish veteran of World War II who after joining the NYPD had done exemplary work against the mob in Brooklyn. In 1969 he was transferred to lower Manhattan’s morals unit, where he was told to continue to harry the Mafia, including Mafia-owned porn shops and gay clubs. That year Interpol asked the NYPD to look into large numbers of negotiable bonds flowing illegally into Europe. The investigation indicated that the mob was blackmailing closeted gay men in the financial industry into stealing the bonds. One focus of the investigation fell on the Stonewall, where the known blackmailer Skull Murphy worked.
The NYPD executed a rash of raids on mob-run places in the weeks preceding the Stonewall flare-up, hitting the popular Checkerboard and a couple of after-hours clubs, the Snake Pit and the Sewer. Pine’s unit, operating independently of the Sixth Precinct, raided the Stonewall on Tuesday, June 24, confiscating the liquor and arresting staff. When it reopened the next night, Pine got a search warrant authorizing him not only to toss the place again and remove any liquor but to chop up the wooden bars and confiscate the cigarette machine and jukeboxes.
The mood in the Village was unsettled that week. The weather was oppressively hot and muggy, fouling tempers. A lot of the older gay men escaped the city that Friday for Fire Island or up the Hudson. The recent raids had left the street kids sick of being ripped off in the clubs run by the mob only to be rousted out of those clubs by crooked cops.
After midnight that Friday night Pine sent four plainclothes officers, two male and two female, into the crowded club. Their job was to case the goings-on and identify the staffers. When they hadn’t emerged after an hour he grew concerned. With two uniformed patrolmen and another detective he burst in. The lights went up, the music shut off, and cops barred the exit. Now eight cops had to deal with a very large and unhappy crowd. They separated the staffers and the more obvious drag queens from the pack, then had everyone else line up and produce identification. Rivera was there, under eighteen and carrying a fake ID. The crowd was surlier than usual, talking back, resisting. Pine called the Sixth Precinct for backup. A few uniformed patrolmen arrived outside on foot and in a couple of patrol cars. Pine requested paddy wagons to haul off the arrested staff and drag queens, along with the cases of liquor and vending machines. The
precinct took its time sending only one, leading later to speculation that the cops at the Sixth were unhappy about Pine’s independent unit messing with their turf.
As Pine let patrons file out the door they didn’t slink away into the night as usual. They gathered on the sidewalk and in the little park, waiting for friends, watching. That crowd and the added spectacle of the police vehicles soon attracted a larger crowd as word flashed through the Village that something unusual was happening on Christopher Street.
“I had done an early session in the trucks,” Agosto says with a bit of a wink. He was heading toward Sheridan Square when he ran into Marsha. She’d heard something was going on at the Stonewall. “Timid person that I am,” he tended to avoid cops and think “they’re right, we’re wrong.” But curiosity drew him into the growing throng.
Looking out a window on the west side of Sheridan Square, Howard Smith saw the crowd metastasizing by the minute. He put on a press badge and headed over. He met up with Lucian Truscott, who’d come out of the Lion’s Head. At first, they would both write, it was like a street party. “Cheers would go up as favorites would emerge from the door, strike a pose, and swish by the detective with a ‘Hello there, fella,’ ” Truscott observed. “The stars were in their element. Wrists were limp, hair was primped, and reactions to the applause were classic.” When the paddy wagon arrived, “three of the more blatant queens—in full drag—were loaded inside.” When the handcuffed Mafia staff, including Skull Murphy, were led out, the crowd jeered. (At some point in all the ensuing tumult Murphy would manage to slip away, elusive as ever.)
The mood started to sour when a cop shoved a queen, the queen hit him with her purse, and the cop used his club to get her into the paddy wagon. But the real turning point, everyone agrees, was when a butch lesbian in men’s clothing gave several cops a wild ten-minute fight before they could wrestle her into a patrol car. Watching her fight back, the crowd’s mood grew angry and violent. The identity of this legendary “Stonewall lesbian,” an Unknown Soldier of Stonewall, has been debated ever since. A candidate favored by many is Stormé DeLarverie, of the Jewel Box Revue. She had a reputation for being tough and was reputedly at the Stonewall that night. Later she marched in every Gay Pride parade until 2010, when at age eighty-nine she was moved to a Brooklyn nursing home. In an interview that year she seemed to confirm that she was the so-called Stonewall lesbian but her mental state at that point left the question open.
Seeing the Stonewall lesbian’s heroic fight with the cops emboldened the crowd. They began to throw pennies at the cops—“coppers”—shouting, “Here’s your payoff, you pigs!” Agosto, who’d found himself surrounded by the crowd, joined in. “That isn’t so brave. You lob pennies at the police from a little distance. At a certain point I said, ‘Oh my God, I’m out of pennies. I’m not going to throw quarters.’ ” Then the first beer bottle was hurled.
Folksinger Dave Van Ronk was celebrating his birthday in the back room of the Lion’s Head when he heard shouts and a siren outside and went to investigate. He told David Carter that he’d never thought much about gay rights before, but he’d seen cops rough up enough antiwar protesters to know he didn’t like it. He joined the crowd in throwing change and apparently hit one cop just under the eye. Seymour Pine rushed out of the Stonewall and tackled him around the waist. Van Ronk was a very big man, well over six feet and beefy. It took a few other cops to knock the singer to the street. They dragged him into the Stonewall, handcuffed him to the radiator, and barricaded the door.
The party was over. Truscott reported the crowd began throwing bottles and paving stones; someone pulled a parking meter out of the sidewalk and used it to batter the Stonewall door. Others tried to set the place on fire. Howard Smith, who had flashed his press card to get in, was now locked inside with Pine and his small contingent of cops. He reported that they were very frightened and edgy, fingering their weapons, as the crowd outside roared and battered at the door and barricaded windows. “It was terrifying,” Pine later said. Slowly, reinforcements from the Sixth and other precincts arrived in patrol cars, sirens wailing and red lights spinning. They pushed the crowd away from the front of the building so those inside could get out. Pine hustled Van Ronk and others into waiting vehicles that sped away. The crowd dispersed. The sun rose soon over a Christopher Street that looked like a full-scale battle had been waged. It was strewn with broken glass and bottles, twisted trash cans, stones, and that uprooted parking meter.
Nobody had ever seen anything like it before. Edmund White, who’d been passing by when it all erupted, credits the “A-trainers.” “They were the ones who actually fought the police,” he says. “I don’t think the white middle-class queens like me would have ever done anything.”
SATURDAY WORD FLASHED THROUGH THE GAY COMMUNITY THAT the revolution was on. The Stonewall’s owners reboarded the smashed windows and chalked messages on them, including We are open and There is all college boys and girls in here. Gay men added their own messages: Support Gay Power and Gay Prohibition Corrupt$ Cop$ Feed$ Mafia. The Stonewall did in fact reopen that night but, as Truscott wrote, the “real action . . . was in the street.” A much larger crowd than the previous night’s, some two or three thousand, choked the street and held a demonstration. They chanted “Gay power!” and other slogans. “Hand-holding, kissing, and posing accented each of the cheers with a homosexual liberation that had appeared only fleetingly on the street before,” Truscott wrote. The street queens were out in force. A group of them formed a chorus line, kicking and chanting to the tune of the Howdy Doody song:
We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We have no underwear
We show our pubic hairs!
Despite the hilarity of such “gay tomfoolery,” as Truscott called it, the mood was angry and rebellious. The crowd blocked Christopher Street to traffic, attacking one taxi that innocently turned onto the block, rocking it back and forth, scaring the wits out of the passengers.
The NYPD showed up in full force as well, busloads of helmeted, baton-carrying Tactical Patrol Forces, sore about the previous night’s rout and ready to crack some heads. Another full-fledged riot, actually larger and more violent than the first, ensued. The crowd threw barrages of bottles at the cops, lit trash can fires, smashed car windows, and slit tires. Phalanxes of TPF rushed into them, smashing heads. The crowd retreated down Christopher Street, only to race around the block and reenter the street “behind the cops,” Truscott recalls. “So every time the cops were ready to catch a guy, suddenly there’s fifty, sixty guys behind them going, ‘Woo hoo!’ And they turn around and head in that direction. They just kept them running.” The battle surged up and down Christopher and adjacent streets for hours. Cops fired tear gas into the crowd; Truscott wrapped a wet towel borrowed from the Lion’s Head around his face so he could keep reporting. It finally died down around 3.30 a.m., once again leaving Christopher Street looking like a war zone.
Sunday was quieter. Many felt they’d made their point and it was time for the next steps. A group called the Homophile Youth Movement, founded by Mattachine’s Rodwell, distributed a typed, mimeographed leaflet, “Get the Mafia and Cops Out of Gay Bars,” calling for a boycott of all mob-run establishments, including the Stonewall. The older men who’d missed it all came home from their weekend away. A lot of people had to get up for work the next day. The NYPD, exhausted from two nights of chasing rioters around and around, used a new tactic, quietly flooding the area with a large enough force to dissuade a third night of mayhem. Their actions Sunday night were “controlled and very cool,” Truscott reported. After 1 a.m. he ran into Allen Ginsberg and the diminutive Warhol star Taylor Mead. “It was a relief and a kind of joy to see [Ginsberg] on the street.” The trio went into the Stonewall, a first for both Ginsberg and Truscott. The mood there was a peaceful victory party. After Ginsberg danced for a while, he and Truscott walked toward Ginsberg’s East Village home. “You know, the guys there were
so beautiful—they’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago,” Truscott reported Ginsberg saying. He ended his long piece with “Watch out. The liberation is under way.”
The Village was quiet the Monday and Tuesday that followed. Then, Wednesday evening, the Voice hit the streets with Truscott’s and Smith’s articles running off the front page. Their liberal use of terms like “the forces of faggotry” and “dancing faggots,” and Truscott’s descriptions of limp wrists and primped hair, stirred everyone up again. It’s an indication of how marginal homosexuals still were in 1969, even in the Village, that even hip and generally sympathetic writers like Truscott and Smith blithely used such language. As did Allen Ginsberg, and Larry Kramer, who titled his first novel Faggots. “I was utterly clueless,” Truscott says now. “Nobody [at the Voice] had any prejudice against any gay people. The Voice was fifty percent gay.” It’s worth remembering that politically correct speech codes were not yet in effect. Rock critics at the time referred to Jimi Hendrix as “Super-Spade” and meant it as a compliment. And the Voice’s Stonewall coverage was far less outrageous than the daily papers’. On July 6 the Daily News ran a story headlined “HOMO NEST RAIDED, QUEEN BEES ARE STINGING MAD.”
Then again, the Daily News offices weren’t right on Sheridan Square. By ten o’clock Wednesday night several hundred younger men were battling cops on and around Christopher Street again, hurling bottles, smashing windows, lighting trash can fires, and threatening to burn down the Voice’s offices as well. The cops swung their clubs freely this time, leaving streets all around Sheridan Square strewn with young people bleeding from head and face gashes. It was the most intense night of fighting yet, and the last.
The Village Page 52