Source of book: I own this
For the last few years, I have been intentionally reading for Pride Month - and writing as well. I don’t have an index for either, but you can check out my index of books by LGBTQ+ authors here, and my Pride Month posts are in my Miscellaneous Posts page.
For the most part, my Pride Month reads have been fiction written by LGBTQ+ authors, but this year I decided to read some non-fiction.
The Stonewall Reader was edited by the New York Public Library - which was instrumental in collecting primary sources about LGBTQ+ issues in an era when most publications were some combination of obscure, underground, and limited numbers. While the book itself is a basic Penguin paperback, it comes with this lovely pinkish slip cover. Naturally, I had to use my NYPL bookmark while reading it.
The book contains a variety of material, from excerpts from books to interviews to essays. It is divided into three roughly equal parts. The first is “before Stonewall” - accounts of what life was like for LGBTQ+ people, particularly in New York City. The second is first-hand accounts of the Stonewall uprising from LGBTQ+ people who were there or participated or both. The final section is “after Stonewall,” and is all about what changed because of Stonewall.
The voices are quite diverse. Men and women, cisgender and transgender, white, black, hispanic, Asian, Jewish, and more. The editors clearly went out of their way to ensure that there was representation, particularly for the more marginalized people within the community - something that many of the authors discuss in the book.
The result is 44 unique writings. I will admit, that as a cishet guy who grew up Fundie, the perspectives in the book were often unfamiliar. Gay culture isn’t something I grew up around - although I have always had LGBTQ+ people in my life. There is a difference between knowing people, and being an insider, for sure.
When my wife and I recently visited New York City (my first visit, her second), we visited the Stonewall memorial. And also the nearby Marie’s Crisis Cafe - where Thomas Paine died, and later became a gay bar. Now, it is a piano bar for sing-along Broadway tunes. (Hence why my wife loves it.) It remains gay friendly. If you want a cheap drink, a historical basement bar, and show tunes…check it out.
There is far too much in this book to even summarize. As I said, it is really broad, even if it does center around the Stonewall uprising. I’ll just hit some highlights.
Edmund White wrote an introduction, in which he puts the uprising in context - it wasn’t the first, it wasn’t the only, but it did mark a sea change in the gay rights movement. Just like Rosa Parks wasn’t the first bus protester, she was the one who became the face of the movement.
I just want to finish with one observation: Because of the Stonewall uprising, people saw homosexuals no longer as criminals or sinners or mentally ill, but as something like members of a minority group. It was an oceanic change in thinking.
The collection opens with a bit from Audre Lorde, which is wonderful - she is such an incredible writer. As far as literary writing goes, this is the best bit in the book. I don’t have any quotes, but her story of being black and gay is compelling and well told.
Another incredible part of the book is Franklin Kameny’s letter to President Kennedy, advocating for gay rights. He opens his argument with his assertion that gay people are a minority group, and notes that, just like African Americans, he - a gay man - fought for his country during World War Two.
He goes on to note that, unlike most people in America, gay people are specifically targeted for what amounts to extermination - deprivation of jobs, housing, safety. And this doesn’t just hurt gay people, but it hamstrings the government itself. He was a Harvard trained astronomer who was fired by the government for being gay.
Under present policies, upon no discernable rational ground, the government is deprived of the services of large numbers of competent, capable citizens - often skilled, highly trained, and talented - and others are forced to contribute to society at far less than their full capacity, simply because in their personal, out-of-working-hours lives they do not conform to narrow, archaic, puritan prejudice and taboo.
I also liked the story of Barbara Gittings, written by her partner Kay Tobin Lahusen. Gittings was active in the early gay rights movement, and was instrumental in lifting the classification of homosexuality as a mental illness. This line particularly stood out, about the internal disagreement about how to proceed with activism. Should they stick to decriminalization, or assert positive rights?
Also we talked about doing something, such as getting laws changed, to ease things a little. Later we began to claim we were entitled to some rights. I recall that a homosexual bill of rights was the subject of an early gay group conference on the West Coast, and the bill of rights proved to be so controversial the delegates from one group walked out of the meeting. There was still a strong feeling that if we spoke nicely and reasonably and played by the rules of the game, we could persuade heterosexuals that homosexuals were all right as human beings.
She goes on:
Later yet we came to the position that the ‘problem’ of homosexuality isn’t ours at all - it’s society’s, and society should change to accommodate us, not try to change us. This was the era of ‘Gay Is Good.’ Now we were no longer merely responding to the initiatives of others and hoping to be accepted. We were demanding our rights and insisting that society respond to us and deal with us on our own terms.
Gittings and Lahusen in turn interviewed African American activist Ernestine Eckstein. A fascinating part of the discussion is about the problem of treating homosexuality as a disease.
Eckstein: “So far as I’m concerned, homosexuality is not a sickness. When our groups seek out the therapists and psychologists, to me this is admitting we are ill by the very nature of our preference. And this disturbs me very much.”
Gittings & Lahusen: “What do you think of as a sickness?
Eckstein: “To me, a sickness represents a maladjustment. That would include Negroes who can’t adjust to being Negroes, and homosexuals who can’t adjust to being homosexuals. Such people may fail to adapt or to function properly in a society.”
It isn’t being gay or black that is problematic, it is suppressing those identities.
Another one I want to mention is Mario Martino’s story. He is transgender and medically transitioned before it was easy to do so. Unfortunately, his work to change his legal identity did not go smoothly at all. Sadly, his experience with lawyers was very negative - unprofessional, insulting, and they took his money without doing the work. Totally embarrassing to me as a lawyer.
By the way, here in California, the procedure isn’t difficult, and I am happy to assist with the process.
One bit of history I was not aware of but learned in this book (there are a lot of others) was that in many places, it was literally against the law to serve alcohol to homosexuals. Say what? But if you think about it, it was also illegal in many places to sell alcohol to Native Americans or African Americans.
Just like the Lunch Counter Protests, gay people did “sip-ins” where they would demand service. What was amusing is that despite the New York State regulation forbidding it, bars disregarded the law all the time. So one time, a sip-in failed when the manager just laughed and served them the cocktails of their choice.
Craig Rodwell, who described the sip-ins, was quite a character. He organized the first Pride march, and ran a non-pornographic LGBTQ bookstore in NYC. He also had some interesting advice to young gay people.
In counseling, he says, “I tell gay people, ‘Be firm with your family. Insist that they come to an understanding of you, that they read certain things, that they meet your friends. Insist that they love you as their son or daughter - which means that they know you!’”
This is good advice, and not just for LGBTQ+ people. Honestly, I wish I had heard it when I was a young man. Before I married and had kids, I really should have sat my parents down and laid down the law. We were not going to live like them, we did not want their advice on personal matters, or their interference in the way we raised our kids. These days, I have a whole list of books I would force them to read if they wanted to be in our lives. (Unfortunately, their minds and hearts are not open to me or my family at this time, or I would pass books their way.)
The accounts of the Stonewall uprising are fascinating too. I didn’t really know that much about the details - history books tend to mention it, but not get into the specifics.
For one thing, Stonewall was a mafia-owned joint that watered the drinks, and paid off the cops. One way or another, outside police got involved rather than bought-off locals, which led to the issues in the first place. The “riot” started with customers throwing coins at the cops. Why? It was a mocking derision of their being on the take. “Here’s your bribe, pigs!” was one of the epithets used. And, of course, when the cops broke in, they stole all the cash they could find, including the tips for the waiters.
Mark Segal also recounts that a drag queen shouted at the cops, “What’s the matter, aren’t you getting any at home?”
Another important fact about Stonewall is that, unlike the popular consciousness about it, it wasn’t primarily white people involved. As Edmund White puts it:
Then everything changed with the Stonewall uprising toward the end of June 1969. And it wasn’t all those crewneck white boys in the Hamptons and the Pines who changed things, but the black kids and Puerto Rican transvestites who came down to the Village on the subway (the “trainers”), and who were jumpy because of the extreme heat and who’d imagined the police persecutions of the preceding years had finally wound down. The new attacks made them feel angry and betrayed.
As the gay rights movement gained steam, it drew from the civil rights movement - the experience, the strategy, and in many cases, the same people marched in both.
White also makes an important observation, one that I think needs to be said more often.
Just remember that at Stonewall we were defending our right to have fun, to meet each other, and to have sex.
My former pastor used to make the joke that the Puritans were terrified, lest someone somewhere manage to commit a pleasure. American religion still has a lot of the Puritan in it - they are still terrified that somewhere, someone is going to manage to experience sexual pleasure without their express permission. I believe White is correct. There is nothing wrong with us humans wanting to have fun, to be with each other, and to have sex. The key is that we do not harm others in that quest.
To conclude the accounts of Stonewall, I found an interview of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a transgender woman, to be an interesting insight into an unfortunate dynamic in society that bled into the gay rights movement.
And I think one of the things that was interesting is the way that the gay man treats us as transexual women, when the queens were in their attire to be feminine. When they were in their male attire, that same kind of bullshit wouldn’t happen. Like grabbing your ass as you’re walking through the crowd to get to the stage or pulling your jockstrap or digging in your gab to pull your dick out, you know what I mean or reach into your bra and pinch your nipples or take your head and push it down like they’re going to make you suck their dick. When that drag queen is not in her female attire, they don’t do that shit to them. You know, so it’s this whole misogyny thing that they’re doing as guys that guys felt, even to this day, that they felt they could do as guys. With what’s happening in the world now with women are taking their power back, that shit ain’t gonna be happening anymore, you know.
Moving on to the post-Stonewall section, many of these were written close to our own time, as both a retrospective as to what changed after Stonewall and commentary and philosophy about gay rights and society.
Martha Shelley’s contribution to “Gay Is Good” is excellent. She argues that tolerance isn’t enough. Full acceptance into society is the goal - and indeed is demanded as a basic human right.
Liberalism isn’t good enough for us. And we are just beginning to discover it. Your friendly smile of acceptance - from the safe position of heterosexuality - isn’t enough. As long as you cherish that secret belief that you are a little bit better because you sleep with the opposite sex, you are still asleep in your cradle and we will be the nightmare that awakens you.
We are women and men who, from the time of our earliest memories, have been in revolt against the sex-role structure and nuclear family structure. The roles we have played amongst ourselves, the self-deceit, the compromises and the subterfuges - these have never totally obscured the fact that we exist outside the traditional structure - and our existence threatens it.
Hey, I think I wrote about that idea - that the root of anti-LGBTQ prejudice is misogyny and the enforcement of gender roles and hierarchies. I love her way of pinpointing the issue as well: bigots want to think they are better than LGBTQ people by virtue of what they do with their genitals for pleasure.
Another passage points out another vital truth: “Straight roles stink.”
They really do. The idea of saddling a male with the sole responsibility of breadwinning, and telling him his manhood is all about his paycheck stinks. Relegating women to domestic duties stinks. Telling everyone that you have to have a pen!s to be a leader in the church, the home, or society stinks. It hurts everyone. Heterosexuality - in the sense of gender essentialism - just straight up stinks. And it’s fake as hell!
But the really important thing about being gay is that you are forced to notice how much sex-role differentiation is pure artifice, is nothing but a game.
And this passage, addressed to heterosexuals, which resonates so much for me.
It’s difficult for me to understand how you can dig each other as human beings - in a man-woman relationship - how you can relate to each other in spite of your sex roles. It must be awfully difficult to talk to each other, when the woman is trained to repress what the man is trained to express, and vice-versa. Do straight men and women talk to each other? Or does the man talk and the woman nod approvingly? Is love possible between heterosexuals; or is it all a case of women posing as nymphs, earth-mothers, sex-objects, what-have-you; and men writing the poetry of romantic illusions to these walking stereotypes?
The answer to the first question is definitely yes….for a few of us. There are some of us in egalitarian relationships where we actually talk to each other as equals. There are some of us who have rejected sex roles.
But, she has a point about an awful lot of heterosexual marriages. Particularly the ones where sex roles are worshiped. There are a lot of terrible heterosexual marriages in our world, and gender roles are a significant reason why they are terrible. (Seriously, just read Evangelical books on marriage and sex, and it is easy to see that these bros are having terrible marriages, and their wives worse ones.)
Steven Dansky, in a later essay, advocates for the abolition of toxic masculinity, which he sees in both the heterosexual world, and the gay world.
Every man growing up in this culture is programmed to systematically oppress, dehumanize, objectify and rape women. A man’s cock, a biological accident, becomes the modus operandi by which a male child is bestowed with power by this culture. A mere couple of inches of flesh places this male child in a position above half the human race and there is no man who does not benefit and glorify in the power inherent in this birth right. Every expression of manhood is a reassertion of this cock privilege. All men are male supremacists. Gay men are no exception to the maxim.
The reason that male homosexuality is such a threat to masculinity (in a way that female homosexuality is not) is that it highlights the inability men have to express love for each other in our society. And also the way that we project our emotions into mistreatment of women. While I don’t agree with every bit of Dansky’s analysis, I think there is a lot of truth in what he says. Toxic masculinity is indeed foundational in our culture, as is violence against women.
Unfortunately, this is also part of the attraction Trump has to men - he embodies cock privilege. Grab ‘em by the pussy! Every time you hear some bro talking about how men can’t be men anymore, listen carefully, because it is usually cock privilege they are wanting to get back.
Another one from this section that I loved was the Statement of Purpose for the Gay Liberation Front, written by Harry Hay. Here is a particularly great section:
Community of Interest: We are in total opposition to America’s white racism, to poverty, hunger, the systematic destruction of our patrimony; we oppose the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, and are in total opposition to wars of aggression and imperialism, whoever pursues them. We support the demands of Blacks, Chicanos, Orientals, Women, Youth, Senior Citizens, and others demanding their full rights as human beings. We join in their struggle, and shall actively seek coalition to pursue these goals.
I’m cishet, and I could totally sign on to such a statement.
Next up is an excerpt from When We Were Outlaws by Jeanne Cordova. At a protest in Los Angeles, an aging bearded douchebro starts screaming at the protesters. (The more things change…) She enlists some friends to assist.
I pointed toward my Aryan. “Go kiss him. Get him back into his car so our people can cross the intersection.”
The gaggle of queens descended upon the tall, now speechless blond. One stroked his arm, another pinched his butt. The muscled straight guy shrank from the queens. The only safe place was in his car. Quickly, he jumped back in, slammed the door, raised the windows, and locked himself in. Drag-phobia had saved the day!
That one made me laugh. Fuck around and find out.
Also in this story was another interesting thing most people do not know or understand about the law.
What is the meaning of “sodomy”?
As that great philosopher Inigo Montoya said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
In the various laws throughout history in the United States and elsewhere, “sodomy” was defined as oral or anal copulation.
By anyone.
So, if you gave your husband a bl@wjob, you committed sodomy. If your husband went down on you, you committed sodomy. Gender didn’t matter.
Well, mostly. In practice, sodomy laws were only enforced in certain cases. For much of history, it was only applied to non-consensual acts. It was a way to get a rape prosecution without requiring a pen!s in a vagina.
But in some places, it was also used to persecute gay couples. That was the case in the Lawrence v. Texas case that decriminalized gay sex back in the 1980s. And is also one of the cases that “Uncle” Clarence Thomas thinks should be reversed.
So, as part of the activism described in this essay, three couples challenged the California law by confessing to “sodomy” - one gay couple, one lesbian couple, and one heterosexual couple. A few months later, Governor Jerry Brown signed an order overturning the laws.
Another great story is one by Tommi Mecca, about the time that he got arrested for being gay, but was let go because the cop knew his homophobic uncle. In that story is an observation that really rings true today.
Police raided gay bars when the owners didn’t come through with their payoffs or around election time, so that politicians could prove they were “cleaning up” so-called vice. In big cities today, politicians go after the homeless in the same way whenever they need to win points with their base.
Mic drop. Just scapegoat the down and out, the marginalized. I mean, it’s literally the Republican platform at this point.
I also loved the story of John Fryer, a gay psychiatrist who put his career on the line to lobby for the removal of homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses. He did so in disguise, but there was still a chance his identity could have been discovered. He talked about how living in the closet was like “N----r Syndrome” - where a black person with lighter skin will try to “pass” as white, all the while living in terror of being discovered. As he notes, the change needs to come from society, in both cases. Neither black people nor gay people should be treated as less than fully equal.
I’ll end with the final essay in the book, by African American lesbian Chirlane McCray. It is both heart-rending and hopeful. Her parents struggled to accept her identity for years, with her mother finally coming around. Her father was polite, but still clearly bigoted. (For example, unmarried children couldn’t share a room with a partner while visiting - and since this was before gay marriage, she was forever excluded from that.) Her rejection by her father resonates with me, as a child rejected by his parents.
Although I love and respect my father, I can’t live the life he wants me to, nor will I seek his approval. His attitude is not just conservative or old fashioned, but closed.
At the heart of my own estrangement is my refusal (and my wife’s refusal) to live the live my parents want me to. I have given up on ever having their approval. And the attitude at issue isn’t just conservative or old fashioned - it is completely closed to anything outside their narrow cultural preferences as dictated by the religious and political charlatans they follow.
I haven’t given up on bringing my father around, since I have seen him changing his attitudes toward others who haven’t met his standards previously. But I am still torn between wanting to spend time with my mother and not wanting to see him….I am optimistic about my relationship with both my parents. I may not have turned out exactly as they dreamed, but I do have what they seemed to want most for their children - love and happiness.
I wish I could say the same, but I can’t. I am not optimistic, and I have come to realize that my parents never really wanted love and happiness for me. They wanted my life to validate them and their choices and preferences - they wanted a clone who never talked back, never made them uncomfortable. I could never be that person. It is sad, but it is what it is.
I didn’t mean to talk that much about myself in this post - and I realize that I would have had it FAR worse if I had been gay or transgender. That is the sadness of this book, is that despite the progress that has been made, there is an ongoing hateful backlash against LGBTQ+ people, intent on forcing them from society, and even exterminating them.
But Stonewall is a reminder that every oppressed group can find a way toward a better society - but they have to make the mainstream very uncomfortable, to stand up and demand equality and acceptance. It is possible, and all of us who want to live in a better world - whether we are gay, trans, or a mediocre cishet white guy like men - have a responsibility to do what we can to make that happen.
