The League advocated a more aggressive stand, more fighting on the front lines, more face-to-face challenges.10 But there were still only a few homosexuals who would take up that program. Something dramatic needed to happen to convince more of them that despite concerted efforts for years on the part of the medical establishment, the churches, and the law to let them know that they were nothing but sick or sinful or lawbreakers, they were an aggrieved minority with as much right to demand fairness as other minorities and that if they would show themselves, others would join them.
The Gay Revolution: Explosion
On June 28, 1969, in the midst of a New York mayoral campaign—a time when the incumbent often sicced the police on homosexuals to bolster his record as a vice fighter—police officers descended on the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall was a gay bar in Greenwich Village that called itself a private club, open to members only. The police came with a search warrant, authorizing them to investigate reports that liquor was being sold there without a license. The raid had been the third staged by police on Greenwich Village gay bars in recent nights, but this time the response was different. Instead of scampering off in relief when the police booted them out on the street after questioning them, the two hundred working-class patrons—drag queens, third world gay men, and a handful of butch lesbians—congregated in front of the Stonewall and, as blacks and other oppressed groups had done before them in the course of the decade, commenced to stage a riot. Their numbers quickly doubled, and soon—according to some sources—increased tenfold. Before the night was over four policemen were hurt as rioters bombarded them with cobblestone bricks from the Village streets, as well as bottles, garbage, pennies, and an uprooted parking meter.
The riots continued the following night. Fires were started all over the neighborhood, condemnations of the police were read aloud and graffiti appeared on the boarded up windows of the Stonewall Inn exhorting everyone to “support gay power” and to “legalize gay bars.” These occurences, which came to be known as the Stonewall Rebellion, marked the first gay riots in history. While the establishment media generally missed their significance—the New York Times relegated the story to five inches on page 33, with the obtuse heading, “Four Policemen Hurt in Village Raid”—to many homosexuals, male and female alike, the Stonewall Rebellion was the shot heard round the world.11
The complaints of blacks, students, and poor people, which had been raging through much of the 1960s, had finally ignited masses of homosexuals to articulate their own complaints. It is unlikely that a gay and lesbian riot could have occurred at any previous time in history. But if by some chance it had occurred earlier, it is unlikely that it would have come to have as much significance as it did in 1969. The gay liberation movement was an idea whose time had come. The Stonewall Rebellion was crucial because it sounded the rally for that movement. It became an emblem of gay and lesbian power. By calling on the dramatic tactic of violent protest that was being used by other oppressed groups, the events at the Stonewall implied that homosexuals had as much reason to be disaffected as they. It reminded homosexuals at just the right moment, during this era of general rebellion, that now their voices might be heard among the cries for liberation.
Although violent protest had been unimaginable to the largely conservative middleclass men and women who made up the homosexual movement during the two preceding decades, a handful of activists, made militant by the general militance of the ’60s, had the foresight and imagination immediately to seize upon the riots, which had been started by more flamboyant and working-class homosexuals, and present them as an event that heralded a new gay militant movement of justified fury. They understood the importance of drawing parallels between the sufferings of other minorities and those of homosexuals. As one speaker cogently remarked at a demonstration a few days after the riots, “Gay Liberation is a realization of our innocence.”12
There were only a small number of lesbians actually present at the riots, apparently women of the working class. Along with their gay male counterparts they had had no articulated political vision when the police that summer night tried to put them out of their bar. They reacted only with the anger that had accumulated through years of raids and abuse, much like other angry minorities who had rioted in the decade that was coming to a close. But many young lesbians and gays of all classes quickly came to accept Stonewall as an icon for their own battle for justice and to formulate a gay power movement around it.
The media had been largely deaf to the polite protests of homosexual organizations in the 1950s and ’60s. But once angry homosexuals stood up for themselves through violent protest, the media and institutional response was much like that toward blacks. Finally there was an attempt to understand the position of homosexuals as an aggrieved minority. While some slight liberalization of attitudes had been slowly building in the media throughout the ’60s, suddenly it boomed. In astonishing contrast to a 1966 pronouncement that homosexuality should be given “no fake status as minority martyrdom,” Time magazine announced only four months after Stonewall, in an article titled, “The Homosexual: Newly Visible, Newly Understood”:
Undue discrimination wastes talents that might be working for society. Police harassment, which still lingers in many cities and more small towns, despite the growing live-and-let-live attitude, wastes manpower and creates unnecessary suffering. The laws against homosexual acts also suggest that the nation cares more about enforcing private morality than it does about preventing violent crimes.
At the same time, the National Institute of Mental Health issued a report urging legalization of private homosexual acts between consenting adults.13
Frequently the new public view, at least in some cosmopolitan areas, was more than tolerant—it was truly affirming. For example, only days after Stonewall, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an article, “The Lesbians’ Story: How Does Girl Meet Girl?,” that described Bonnie, an attractive, successful young woman who showed the writer a picture of herself taken two years earlier, before she became a lesbian. In the picture she was a different personage: “drab, unflattering hairdo, matronly clothes, none of Bonnie’s animation.” Bonnie explained that the metamorphosis was due to her newfound lesbianism: it was a psychologist who had directed her to Daughters of Bilitis, and once she came out through that group she was able to discover “the kind of love that’s encouraging rather than demanding and controlling.” Such a depiction of lesbianism would probably have been inconceivable in the mass media only months earlier.14
But the new gay movement did not wait upon the mass media for affirmation. Within a year of Stonewall, hundreds of gay publications and organizations sprang up, many of them lesbian, and those publications and organizations helped to bring more and more lesbians into the new movement. The spread of the slogan “Gay Is Good” and later slogans that came out of the gay pride parades that commemorated the Stonewall Rebellion in the early 1970s (for example, “2, 4, 6, 8, gay is just as good as straight”) also had a tremendous consciousness-raising effect. The movement spread with astonishing rapidity.
The new movement lesbians tended to be a different breed from either working-class or middleclass lesbians of the previous generation. They were often young, college-educated, and politically aware, whatever the socioeconomic background of their parents had been. For those who were born into the working class, the democratization of higher education in the 1960s meant that they might get an education (and the verbal and analytical skills that went along with it) such as only women of middleclass background might have had earlier. Many of those who were born into the middle class purposely declassed themselves in that decade that valued egalitarianism. Thus these young movement lesbians of all classes were able to come together. They were generally comfortable with language and ideas and knew how to organize as working-class lesbians of the previous generation did not, and they were confident that they should have rights no less than any other Americans, as middleclass lesbians of the previous generation were not.
Their militance often outstripped the capacities and understanding of both older working-class lesbians and middleclass lesbians, and difficulties emerged between the generations.
There had been no existing groups that represented the ideals of these young activist lesbians. Despite their relatively militant rhetoric of the late 1960s, DOB and The Ladder could not recover from their conservative image, and they were seen as too poky for the new activists. Although some young women joined DOB for a while, honoring it as the oldest existing lesbian organization, many of them soon broke away. For example, the Lesbian Tide, which had been the journal of the Los Angeles branch of DOB, severed from its mother organization in 1973 because it felt the need to take a more radical stance. The Ladder, which had been the national DOB magazine, stopped publishing in 1972, not only because of internal difficulties with the publishing staff but also because they had failed to appeal to younger women, who were more interested in the numerous militant gay and lesbian-feminist magazines that were now available.
The young activist lesbians were not willing to accept the shabby treatment that other lesbians, regardless of class, had seen as “coming with the territory” for decades. In 1970 when Leonardo’s, a woman’s gay bar in Oakland, California, refused to let women post a notice of a “gay women’s liberation” meeting, the young lesbians who frequented the place organized a protest and a boycott, which was costly for the bar owner. The call to boycott explained:
The time has come today for gay people to stand up, come out of the closets, and assert their rights as citizens and human beings. We must begin to question the system that takes gay money and funnels it into the pockets of a few individuals and the police…. We are coming into our own, and we are thousands, and we will be heard.15
Such an example served to make even the older organizations somewhat more militant. When police raided a DOB dance in New York in 1971, charging that the organizers were selling liquor without a license, far from hoping to get off with a small fine as they might have in the past, a large contingent of DOB members, in coalition with Gay Activist Alliance members, staged a demonstration and met with the mayor’s aides to protest harassment. The charges against DOB were dropped.16
This new lesbian boldness was not confined to large coastal cities. In Minneapolis in 1972 when two lesbians were evicted for dancing together in a straight bar, the gay community staged a dance-in at the bar and was able to get the commissioner of human rights to mediate in their complaints. In Milwaukee two black lesbians were married in a large wedding ceremony at an Eastern Orthodox Catholic church. When the Milwaukee county clerk refused to issue a marriage license, the women swore to continue a public battle until the license could be obtained. In Boise (where homosexual witchhunts had been especially rampant during the 1950s), when seven women police officers were discharged because phone tapping on a police dispatch telephone designated for nonofficial use revealed they were lesbians, the women sued for $16.5 million. The chief justice district judge declared that the women had been deprived of due process and that their discharge was “an abysmal operation.” He stated he could not understand a city Boise’s size lowering itself to such shenanigans in the 1970s.17
Activist gay women were not happy to settle for tolerance: they demanded equality and full citizenship, and they were willing to be confrontational to get their rights. They were often joined in those confrontations by gay men who were, like them, young, college-educated, and politically aware, and together they became effective lobbyists. They succeeded in getting boards of education in various cities to adopt plans that allowed gay lifestyles to be a part of the family studies curriculum. They were responsible for the passage of gay rights ordinances in over fifty American cities. Their formation of organizations such as the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club in the early 1970s, in the interest of pulling more political weight for the gay community, actually led Democratic contenders for that year’s national election—Shirley Chisholm, George McGovern, and Eugene McCarthy—to make astonishing policy statements about equal rights for homosexuals. In 1976 joint efforts between lesbians and gay men resulted in the election of the coordinator of the National Gay Task Force, Jean O’Leary, as the first openly lesbian delegate to the Democratic National Convention. O’Leary declared, with perhaps more optimism than was yet warranted, “It’s proven that contrary to being a liability, the appearance of an openly gay person on the ticket is an asset.”18 In the following election the Democrats actually included a gay rights plank on the party platform.
Unlike in the McCarthy era, when the more homosexuals were attacked, the more they felt compelled to hide, young radical gay men and lesbians in the 1970s understood that the temper of the times allowed support for diversity in America, so that rather than hiding they could use attacks on them to further politicize their cause and publicize their just grievances. The campaigns against Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative are prime examples. In 1977, entertainer and fundamentalist Anita Bryant, who established the antigay Save Our Children organization, attacked the Dade County, Florida, Gay Liberation Alliance in her book The Anita Bryant Story: The Survival of Our Nation’s Families and the Threat of Militant Homosexuality. She succeeded in getting the citizens of Dade County to repeal a new ordinance that prohibited discrimination against homosexuals in housing and employment. At that point many lesbians pulled together with gay men in the campaign against Bryant, even boycotting orange juice until the entertainer’s contract with Florida orange growers was canceled. When they heard of Bryant’s intention to open counseling centers across the nation to turn homosexuals into heterosexuals, they advocated resurrecting the radical antiwar tactics of the 1960s: “Just as we helped put the brake on the war through incessant disruption and agitation, we’ll employ those same methods against this new oppression,” one lesbian magazine declared. They even devised plans for using overground political processes for retaliation against Bryant, such as challenging the expected tax exempt status of the counseling centers through the courts. While Bryant’s chief object of attack may have been gay males, clearly many lesbians also saw themselves as embattled and chose to work with gay men against a common enemy.19
In the same way, lesbians pulled together with gay men in the 1978 campaign against a proposed California constitutional amendment by State congressman John Briggs, who succeeded, by riding on the hysteria of Bryant’s Save Our Children campaign, in qualifying his antigay initiative for the California ballot. The initiative proposed “to fire or refuse to hire … any teacher, counsellor, aide, or administrator in the public school system … who advocates, solicits, imposes, encourages, or promotes private or public homosexual activity … that is likely to come to the attention of students or parents.” Lesbians working with gay men in the New Alliance for Gay Equality canvased houses and raised enough money to wage an impressive battle against the initiative, which almost 60 percent of the voters rejected. As one lesbian participant described those pre-election days in 1978, “It was wonderful. The gay movement came of age through that cooperation [as] we went door to door together, saying we were gay, asking people to vote against the amendment.” As a result of the campaigning against the initiative, a flourishing underground political network was established. Gay males and lesbians made similar political coalitions all over the country in the late 1970s, such as the one that led the successful 1978 fight in Seattle against an initiative sponsored by a group called Save Our Moral Ethics, which wanted to repeal a 1974 ordinance that made it illegal for Seattle employers and landlords to discriminate on the basis of sexual preference.20
As the successes of the gay movement multiplied, some older middleclass women who would not have dreamed of leaving their closets earlier and some working-class women who had given up on society and hidden out in gay bars now felt safe in working for gay liberation. But neither the older middleclass lesbians nor their working-class bar dyke counterparts made up the bulk of the movement. Many of them continued to live exactly as they had in
the years before Stonewall. The recruits who swelled the numbers most were those young men and women who knew the McCarthy era only through history books and who had come of age listening to the demands of the oppressed on nightly television. To demand their own rights seemed entirely natural to them, as it would not have been to most of their predecessors. They were a new species of homosexual who adamantly refused the burden of guilt and fear that had once been successfully foisted on many older lesbians and gay men.
Love Between Women in a New Light
The young people’s refusal was made easier by the times that were open to experimentation of all sorts, unlike those years that had shaped most older homosexuals. In this milieu of liberality and in reaction to the authoritarian years that had preceded, same-sex love was becoming far less stigmatized. Among certain radicals it even took on an aura of chic, and women whose sexual histories had been heterosexual now felt much freer to explore love between women. Not all of those who experimented with lesbianism were committed to gay rights, of course. Some saw it as simply sexual exploration, which the times seemed to encourage, and they continued to define themselves as heterosexual. But others, even among those who had earlier considered themselves exclusively heterosexual, did come to regard lesbianism in a political context, especially if they were introduced to it through militant feminism.
The decade of the ’60s had ushered in an unprecedented sexual permissiveness, characterized by mini skirts, the pill, group sex, mate swapping, a skyrocketing divorce rate, and acceptance of premarital sex. The rigidity of the 1950s was turned on its head. Heterosexuality began to look somewhat like homosexuality, as nonreproductive sex and cohabitation without marriage came to be commonplace. While some women may have been pressured under the guise of sexual revolution into having sex primarily for a man’s delectation, others were motivated by the desire to explore their own erotic potential and to please themselves, and they were encouraged in that pursuit by popular literature such as Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl and Cosmopolitan Magazine. An end-of-the-decade study by the Institute for Sex Research showed that the number of women engaging in premarital sexual intercourse had doubled in the 1960s.21 Because nonreproductive sex outside of marriage had become more and more acceptable, it made less social sense than it had earlier to condemn lesbianism on the grounds that lesbian sexual pleasure did not lead to reproduction.
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers Page 26