American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Lucian Truscott, IV, 1 of 3

out for those roads out there. Who paid for those bridges? Yeah. Oh, exactly. If you want people to be close, you don't want to be forced. No. But once they have it, they like going to take Medicare. I said, why don't we just do away with all those bridges that communist Roosevelt built for us? You want to tell your just, let's just blow them up. Then we'll try to get to the supermarket. Try to get your kids to school. How about your kids going to these socialist schools? So there's the police department, the socialist keynotes. Having a conversation with those people, says you can't have a conversation. Cannot do it.

With that? Yeah. Oh, I might have bought it. OK. Yeah, you feel a little slightly smaller. No, it's more confidential. So I prefer to use it. Yes. I'm going to be like this much. No, I do it because I feel like I don't. No, I don't. I don't know how to do it. There you go. Oh, no, I prefer to sit like this. It's great. All right. We'll roll. Keep buddies working on my posture. All right. Let's just start back in June of 1969. You want to tell me what you were doing at the voice back then? Well, I had just graduated from West Point. And I had two months leave during June and July. And my parents lived in Hawaii. And it cost like $1,000 when I'm tripped and fly to Hawaii or something like that. And I had no interest in going to Hawaii. I didn't know anybody there or anything. And so I rented a loft down on Broom Street from a friend of mine. It was an artist. And just spent my leave in New York. And I had started writing for the Village of Voice when I was a cadet at West Point, believe it or not. So I wrote, like, rock and roll stuff.

And that's a long story how I started writing for the Village Voice. But nevertheless, I was already writing for him. And so I think that at the time that the Stonewell riots have been, I had already written one cover story in the voice that month about Billy Graham wrote his crusade to Madison Square Garden. And I went to the Billy Graham crusade to sort of see what the whole Billy Graham thing was about. So what was the range of stuff you'd write about for the voice back then? Anything. Writers at the Voice, whether they're staff writers or freelance writers, you just went around and looked at something and wrote a story about it. And there are very few assignments given. The only assignments that were given out at the Voice were given out by the city editors, and the name was Mary Nichols. And she would say, go and cover the local planning board meeting motion, or go find out why that guy that's one of the six precincts has corrupt or go interview kind of swim, so-and-so.

I hear he's on the take, or she was always coming. She was obsessed by the mafia and corrupt politicians. All the things you ought to be obsessed by. But other than that, though, you just did stories on whatever you wanted to do stories on. I mean, I was walking this morning and I had to go to the subway, and I walked past a store front down on 6th Avenue Blaker Street. That was a fried chicken joint. And I liked to eat fried chicken, and I got to know the guy that ran a place. And he had this incredible wrap. And I wrote a story on this guy, frying chicken, and selling it in this little shop, and giving away chicken like the homeless people and stuff. And just I wrote a story. They ran it on the front page in a lower left corner. I mean, the village voice was back in those days. It was really an extraordinary paper. I mean, it was this community of writers and intellectuals and political people that the collection of whatever their obsessions and interests were

was what was in the paper. Part of the village voice was obsessed with theater, so the off-Broadway theater came into existence, really, because of that paper. They named the obese. They put on the obese. And the off-off-Broadway theater was especially born on the voice. The tenor of the times in 69. Because it sounds like the voice was a great way to get a feeling for what was going on. What was the city of light? Things like civil rights, or women's rights, and people. What was in it? Well, let's just look at it from the point of view of the voice. There was no such people magazine didn't exist back then. You know, there was Time Magazine. There was Newsweek. There was The New York Times. There was the newspapers. There was Life Magazine, I think, was on hiatus right then. And then it came back, but then it went away again. But there was nothing that sort of promoted the latest trend as a commercial enterprise. You know what I'm saying?

I mean, if people magazine comes out, on the cover is going to be whoever has a movie coming out that week. All of that system of public relations and promotion. Even beside what the voice is rolling, I'm just curious what you can describe. What you sense, like the city was like in terms of people's rights and protest marches and the civil rights movement. What was going on in New York and the village? Well, right. There was a mayor election going on for one thing. So there was a lot of election hearing going on. Norman Mahler and Jimmy Brezzler were running for mayor and president of the city council. So that was pretty interesting. And they were all over the place. And they were all over the news and in the newspaper and coming off what they were coming off with. But there weren't any, I don't remember that there were any riots while in June of that year until the Stonewall riot came along. But there was a lot of crime in New York in 1969. And it was not a, the Lori side, for example, was a very unsafe place to go.

And Harlem was not a nice place to be living or to visit at that time. And parts of Brooklyn were really, really not good places to go. In fact, the only time I went to Harlem or Brooklyn was following the mayor campaign. Well, Christopher Street was a major thoroughfare in the village, and it wasn't what it is now. It wasn't the fifth avenue of gay life as it is now. But the Stonewall was in the block by Sharon Square the way it is now. And there were some other gay bars further down Christopher Street. And Christopher Street was known as a gay cruising street further down, but it wasn't a cruising street during daylight hours to my recollection. But nothing that even barely approximates what goes on now on the streets of New York with gay people

and holding hands or whatever existed back then, mean nothing. Although, Christopher Street was a place that gay people felt free to walk around and weren't going to be harassed just for being gay. I mean. And that would happen in the same way. What would you, how come people weren't holding hands even on Christopher Street? K-pop. Well, I think that they would have to interview gay people, I guess. I mean, I never asked them. But I guess that gay people were an oppressed minority. I mean, nobody would, coming out of the closet was, I mean, in fact, I was trying to think of out of the closet gay people that I knew back then. There were gay people at the Village Voice that were out of the closet. And people knew they were gay and so forth. But it wasn't, but they were out of the closet because the Village Voice was friendly to gay rights, I mean, and to gay people in general.

I mean, you could work for the Village Voice and be out of the closet. But I had gay friends that worked for Fawcett, the Big Magazine publisher, Uptown. They were totally in the closet. They couldn't go to work and say, I'm going to a gay bar after work today to their compatriots because, you know, they were in the closet if you worked in Big Uptown, America. Down in the Village, if you worked for, I guess, probably the eight-street bookshop, you could probably be out of the closet because that was a nice liberal bookshop. But, you know, the gay world was in the closet, 1969, on the whole, you know. How about you, here's a look. Do you want to say something about gay rights? I'm not getting any of that right, David. I mean, you know, I mean, I didn't really, you know, I wouldn't, you know, for the purposes of that article, I certainly didn't walk around and ask people, are you in the closet or out of the closet?

I mean, that wasn't, that didn't sort of come up, you know. But, you know, you know, the one thing that did amaze me was, you need to sneeze hold on one second. Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, just hang tight because it's, especially if it's something that amaze me. Okay, everybody's still? It's Katana's hanging back. Katana, are you staying back here? Hi, you've got a few of those. Oh, well, I guess we were talking about the whole issue of, you know, what the streets were like and people being in the closet and out of the closet or whatever. One of the things that amaze me that, when the second day of the riot was, when these older gay people started showing up, they heard, it had gotten into the daily news or something, that there was a gay riot or a riot in the Christopher Street

on Friday. And people came back from Fire Island and from vacation places wherever they were, like in the Berkshire's or wherever. And older gay people were standing around and, you know, button down shirts and preppy looking clothes and, you know, straight looking clothes. And they were horrified that these young gay kids, these out of the closet, drag queens and young gay kids that were pretty flamboyant. Word, running around on the street saying, I'm gay and I'm proud and we're the Stonewall girls. And because, you know, I guess their theory was, I mean, you know, I overheard, I didn't walk up and interview them, but I overheard them talking about, well, if this goes on, there's going to be a crackdown. They're not going to put up with this. They were, you know, they were, you know, the lives that they were leading being gay and living in Greenwich Village that were about as free as I would imagine a gay life could be in America. They had places they could go out and socialize that were friendly to them, restaurants that they went to

that were friendly, they could go in as a gay couple and nobody was going to, you know, think, we don't want to see you because you're gay or whatever. And all of that, the system was all set up so everybody could be sort of quietly gay in Greenwich Village and everything was fine. All of a sudden now on the streets are flamboyant queens and drag queens and people running around and I'm gay and I'm proud and they thought the system's going to come down and clamp down and that something horrible is going to happen. And, you know, that's what amazed me was that there was a generational difference between the young gay people that were riding on the streets and basically not riding, just celebrating who they were. That's what they were doing. I mean, it was called a ride, but it was really a celebration of being gay. And being proud of who they were. And then this generation that may have been proud to be gay but they had been schooled by the system

if they were proud to keep that quiet, keep that part of yourself in the closet. And there was a range of gay people in New York, right? Because the Stonewall patrons, a lot of them were young kids. But was that everybody who was gay, just the youngest three kids? No, no, it wasn't. The Stonewall was known, first of all, it was a club where there was dancing. And so, in the back room or whatever, I can't remember exactly how that was set up there. But there was music and people danced and, and because they were paying the cops off, the cops weren't going in a bus that I'm for dancing and so forth. And it attracted a crowd that would later become known in New York as club kids. You know, when the disco boom hit in mid-70s, they became a class of people that was referred to in the media and the voice and Rolling Stone and People magazine as club kids. And they were young, you know, not kids, but people in their late teens and early 20s that would get dressed up and go out

to discos and night clubs and so forth. Well, this was the sort of club kid generation of gay people. And what they were doing was getting dressed up and putting on makeup or putting on drag or just wearing kind of wild dance clothes and so forth and going to the Stone Laud dancing. But now, tell me about like other, like who's the fire island set? Who are the people who are older sitting around and the conservative clothes? Well, you know, that friend of mine that worked for Fossett Publications was one of them. I saw him on the street on Saturday. And he worked in advertising. He sold ads for Fossett owned true magazine and all, I think, good housekeeping, all series of magazines. He was one of the straight gay men. You know, he worked in straight America. He wore a suit to work in the morning, you know? And when he got off work, he walked around in a button-down blue chambray suit and khakis or whatever. So can you tell me to step pull back a little bit from your friend?

Like, can you tell me about New York City generally, like, you know, because there's a perception of some people looking back that, oh, you know, the Stone Wall ride, that's who gets who gay New Yorkers were. Just be street kids or, you know, flamboyant drag queen. But it would get gay culture. It would weigh more complicated than that, wouldn't it? Yeah, it was, you know, gay culture was what it is now except in the closet. I mean, there are gay people working in every corporation or gay people in the army. There are gay people everywhere. And everybody was in the closet. So unless you knew they were gay, you know, unless they, unless somebody walked up to you and said, hey, lotion, I'm gay, you wouldn't know it. You know, you could have the gay person working on the desk next to you at the New York Times. You would know that person was gay unless they said, I'm gay. And the only reason that they would say I'm gay to you is if they trusted you. I mean, I'll give you a good example. I went to West Point, okay? I wrote for the Village Voice while I was at West Point about rock and roll and stuff. I have about, out of 800 people in my class, I have about 23 people who are gay.

About three-fourths of them came out of the closet to me as a cadet because they wanted they, being gay was bottled up in them. You know, maybe they discovered they were gay while they're at West Point or maybe they knew before. I don't know, I never really talked to them about it. But they had to tell somebody, GM gay and so who among their classmates at West Point in this square military academy could they trust to keep the secret? Me, I wrote for the Village Voice. Gee, if the guy writes for the Village Voice, he's got to be liberal and he's got to be able to trust him. And I mean, one of the funniest ones was just before I graduated, I was sitting on my room one night and there was a knock on the door and this guy came to the door that, look, I had that I knew, you know, sort of vaguely, but not very well. And he comes in and he closes the door behind and that was kind of odd. And he said, Lucien, can we talk? And I said, yeah, sure. And I was seeing, he said, I have something I want to tell you. And I said, don't tell me you're gay. And he looks at me and he said, how did you know? And I said, well, you're having an affair with Michael Smith,

the theater critic for the Village Voice, and he did lights at Lamama during your summer leave last year. I said, are you gay? You're gay. If you do lights at Lamama and you're having an affair with the theater critic, you're gay. And he laughs. Here you are, a West Point cadet of grad. I mean, you're from a military family was your like, was the whole gay culture like, how did you, I mean, really how did you feel about it? I know everybody's politically correct now to go back and say, oh, it's great, it was fine. Did you feel like you could have cared less if you could have bought your own good? I could have cared less, I mean, but except that the way I was brought up, I wasn't brought up in a family of raging liberals or, you know, I wasn't a red diaper baby from the Greenwich Village, you know, I was brought up in a square army family, but I was brought up and it was drilled into my head from the time that I was old enough to, you know, walk around outside by myself, that I wasn't any better than anybody else and everybody was the same.

And just because my daddy was a captain or a major didn't make me better than a kid who's daddy was a sergeant or a private. And just because my grandfather was a four star general didn't make me better than somebody whose grandfather owned a filling station in Leavenworth, Kansas, it was drilled into me that who I was was, I was just the same as everybody else and that the only things that you should be proud of in your life were things that you accomplished in your life. Not who you were because of who your family was or what your family's standing was or what your family's social class was. So that by the time I got to West Point, that was who I was. And so when I encountered, I mean, you could look at my nose and see how many fights I've been in and a lot of fights that I got at growing up were because somebody used the N word in my presence and I told them not to use it. And what are you gonna make me? And there was a fight about it. I mean, that was the way I was brought up. So that when at the time I got out of West Point and I got to, you know, living in New York

and gay people were walking around, what am I gonna do? Walk around and think, oh boy, I'm better than those people, you know, and I mean, I didn't think that. And the fact that these gay classmates in line came up and said, I'm gay, what was that gonna make me feel? I was supposed to, I mean, my idea was, what's wrong with being gay? I mean, this, the guy that came and told me, you know, the guy that did lights at Lamama, right? He's got two Emmys. He was one of the creators of a really famous television show. He wrote the 100th Night Show, a big play and musical that's put on every year at West Point, 100 nights before graduation. That's who he was. Not, he wasn't like gay. He was this other, he was this guy, you know, that I liked because he wrote a great 100th Night Show. Went to a left my ass off, you know? That's who he was. Yeah, exactly. So, when you want, when you, let's go, Jack, back to June. Before the riots happened, did you, did you know, what do you know about the Stonewall Inn? That it was a gay bar down a street from the lion's head.

Can you, can you say the word? The Stonewall, the Stonewall was a gay bar down the street from the lion's head, the lion's head. I mean, there are three bars there, you have to, let's set the scene. On the corner was the Village Voice Office. There was a, there was an entrance. On the corner of Christopher Street in 7th Avenue was the Village Voice Office. And it was a triangle shape building. And you entered through the right at the point of the triangle. Then next storefront down from there was the lion's head. The next storefront down from there was the 55, which is still a fairly famous jazz bar. And the next storefront from there was the Stonewall. The only thing that's changed in that little lineup is that that that corner is now a restaurant, I think instead of the Village Voice Office. But the lion's head was where all the Village Voice people went to have drinks, you know, because it was downstairs from their office. And then it became known and became a place that lots and lots of writers hung out there. Me and Pete Hamill hung out there and Joe Flarity and David Markson.

I mean, all these people that were writers and some of them were fairly well known. Some of them weren't. And you were there the night of the riot, the first night of the riot, isn't that how you were doing? Yeah, I was walking along, coming from the, I don't know, I think I've been writing something at my loft. What was that kind of thing? It just made me get close to that. Was that night that Friday night? Sure, I did. Yes. If you're going to get into that. Let's start with just, give me like a hold on one. OK, hold a string, or something. Is Illinois's pollution five in the background? Do you pick any of that thing? Do she be quiet back there? I don't think so. No, I don't think so. Yeah, give me feel like you've been setting up a magazine because you've been on Friday night, June 27th. On Friday, it was June 27th, it was like any other Friday night. I was writing something and I got finished and I walked up. You know, what's now very fancy, what's Broadway was just

a whole string of like paper box places and rag businesses and stuff and walked up and walked across and came up. I think a way really plays or something. And as I came up, way really plays, I saw a big commotion on the street and I just walked right into it. I mean, as I walked up, the Paddy wagon had not pulled up but they had cop cars parked in front of the stone wall and they were arresting people in the stone wall and hauling them out and throwing them in cop cars. So what I was looking at was a bust of a gay bar. Now, a bust of a gay bar was something that you would hear in conversation with somebody, like somebody that went to the Alliance and would say, oh yeah, I was like walking over here last night and they were a bust of a gay bar down at the end of my block. It was just something that happened, you know. And so I stopped and what a bust of a gay bar was, at that time, I didn't have it in my head, I didn't know. But what they would do on their bust of the gay bar was

arrest the patrons and that's what they were doing. They weren't hauling people that ran the gay bar out that I could see. They weren't hauling out the Mafia guy at the door that checked IDs or whatever or took a cover charge. They were bust in the people that were in the gay bar. And in a whole bunch of gay people were on the street across the street on the sidewalk and then eventually pushing out onto the street, watching this bust take place and hooting and hollering. And that was what was known. When I normally went a gay bar was busted, as I've come to understand, although I never witnessed one before that night, when they started hauling people out and throwing on the back of patrol cars, people came out of the bar, got in the patrol car and the patrol car drove away. And then they padlocked the gay bar or whatever they did and the whole thing ended. This time, people were standing there and saying no. And the people were getting busted, and were coming out and waving to friends and saying,

come on over to the precinct after a while. I'll be out pretty soon, blah, blah, blah. And then they roughed up a couple of people as they busted them out. And people started yelling at the cops and saying, stop that. And the cops took their night sticks and started prodding people in the crowd. And the crowd got mad at that. And the first things I saw fly were coins and then bottles and cans and then paving stones. And so it went from bustling, just taking people out and throwing on the backs of patrol cars, right, upwards or downwards from there. And that's how the riots started. So let's take that part a little bit because I think getting some detail there would be nice. Like when you walked up, the first thing you saw was things going like, what if the people looked like we were being taken out, what would it be? Well, the people that I saw that were being taken out right at that point where the people I just described to it as club kids, people that had gotten dressed up to go out dancing, young gay patrons of this bar.

And because this bar was unlicensed, a lot of people were under age. I mean, nobody was in their 20s that I saw or very few people, somewhere a little older, but a lot of them were teenagers. And they would also become known as bridge and tunnel people. These were not Manhattan residents. There were people from New Jersey or Queens or Brooklyn, they'd come in to Manhattan to go to a place where they could dance and they were gay, you know. And I mean, what was different here was for the, I guess this was the first time that they said, no, this was Rosa Parks moment. Go to the back of the bus, no, I'm going to sit here. What they were saying, what the cops were saying was, come out of this gay bar, getting back of that car, no. And the crowd was saying, no. I mean, this was the Rosa Parks moment, the time that gay people stood up and said, no. And once that happened, the whole house of cards

that was the system of oppression of gay people started to crumble. And it started to crumble right then. I mean, looking back, what's extraordinary to me, I didn't know it at the time. I had no idea of all this stuff we're talking about. All these things that I'm saying are things that have come into my mind since, you know. I was at that time, 22 years old right out of West Point. I think I was thinking any of this stuff. No, but what I was witnessing was Rosa Parks saying, no, I'm not moving to the back of the bus. And that, I mean, that's a real piece of history. I mean, that was the moment that gay people said, no, to the oppression. And then in the next moment said, you know what? I'm gay and I'm proud of it. And you're not going to stand here and say to me, there's something wrong with me, that there's something wrong with being gay, or I should be ashamed of it. I'm proud of it. And it was the next day that you saw the first signs that said, gay power and gay pride.

And those two things came right out of that moment that we're describing on Friday. So I think we could avoid the next one. Could you bring that up? Speed food for time? Well said, man. You want me to say it again when that garbage truck ends? No, we caught it beautifully. I'm going to get back and get a tick-tock of it. I hope you're able to keep the part where I'm saying that, I didn't have this stuff in my head at 22. But what I'm interested in, what you do have in your head, I remember reading your article, something did click for you where you didn't feel it was just one where right. Could you just talk to David about how that made you feel? What do you personally work sensing in terms of that? Well, I had not that moment when I walked up on the street. But this went on for Friday night, then Saturday night, and then kind of tapered off on Sunday.

I mean, that my part of it. I filed the story on Monday. And so as the week went on, I got a sense that something big was happening here, that something historical was taking place because the other perspective that I got on Saturday came from the older gay people that were saying, wait a minute, this shouldn't be happening. They're going to crack down if this continues and goes on, the system's not going to allow this to happen. So I got a sense of the importance of it when I started seeing that it wasn't conservative Republicans standing there protesting this. It was conservative gay people that were saying there was something wrong. And the reason that they were saying it was because they were afraid that their lives had been carefully set up and they were living happily, as happily as they could. We're going to be disrupted by this disruption that was on the street. I mean, what they didn't know at that time was, and I didn't know, was, this disruption on the street was going to make their lives better and freer.

But that was hard to see in the middle of a riot. And it was hard to see when people were saying, I'm gay and I'm proud. And I'm not going to do this anymore. They're doing it in front of a line of riot cops, not in front of a line of adoring crowd on Fifth Avenue for a gay pride march. But in front of a line of helmet that riot police they're saying this. And so I mean, that's when I started to see that there was more here than met the eye, than just sort of a riot. I mean, this was, you know, it was an extraordinary, you know, I mean, looking back on it, it really was an extraordinary moment. I mean, it was bravery there was, and also, it was there unbelievably brave. And I mean, you know, I don't know whether we want to get it into this now. But I mean, there were so brave that when I got me army, they assigned me to teach the class on riot control. So if the army was called up because there

was a Newark riot or whatever, and you were an infantry company, you were supposed to take a four hour segment on riot control. So you learned to line up and, you know, line and approach the rioters and all this kind of stuff. And they had a book and they had a lesson plan on riot control. So it was a boring class and everybody slept and so forth. But when I was giving the assignment to teach riot control thing, I got this big blackboard and drew Sheridan Square on the blackboard from memory and taught the Stonewall riot as the way not to do riot control in the army. And because I had watched the tactical patrol force in the New York City Police Department, screw up that riot as bad as anything could be screwed up. I mean, it wasn't a riot until the police riot. I mean, you remember what they said about Chicago in 1968? It wasn't a riot of protesters. And it was a police riot. And finally, the commission that was formed to investigate what happened in Chicago in 1968,

coined the term police riot. Well, here it was, 1969. And the police were rioting on the streets of New York because a bunch of young gay people were standing up and saying, we are the Stonewall girls. We wear our hair and girls, you know. And every time they would do that, the police would wheel around and get a night sticks and chase them and try to crack their heads for being gay and being proud. What's the worst thing they've gotten in terms of time? OK. Right now, let's go.