American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Eric Marcus, 2 of 2

Okay, so I'm going to make a part of our stone. What's up? It makes perfect sense that gay people would have used this moment in which to grab their own rights. Woodstock, summer of love, sexual freedom, sexual revolution. Would you think that gay people would leave themselves out of this revolution? And if you look at the people who are leading the gay revolution in the late 60s or early 70s, they were all young people. They were deeply affected by the era. So they weren't going to pass up this moment and sit on the sidelines while the rest of the world was liberating itself. And you're talking about what is sexual liberation? What's it really about? For gay people, sexual liberation meant being themselves.

To the rest of the world, it was something perverse or something extreme. You can always portray heterosexuality in advertising, for example, in fairly extreme ways. And it's not considered extreme or perverse. When it comes to homosexuality, when you express it in any way, it's considered extreme. So what kind of images do we have from Woodstock, of sexual liberation in the early 60s? How strange that gay people would be like that? The key images in my mind, from the late 60s, all come from Woodstock, where straight people were very free to express themselves. Topless women, naked guys, rolling around in the mud. Everybody having sex. So why would gay people be left out of that equation, especially gay young people? When the fact of our sexuality is the essence of who we are and defines at least a huge aspect of who we are, how could we be left out of the sexual revolution? In fact, we should have been central to it and with stone wall we were.

In looking back at how the mainstream press talked about gay people, the most stunning thing I read was a 1961 essay in Time magazine, which in the end, after talking about needing compassion for gay people, said that homosexuality was nothing but a pernicious sickness. I think about a 16-year-old or 17-year-old reading that then, and how they must have felt about themselves, and then reading other articles that came out throughout the 60s. When you have the mainstream press, like Time magazine, writing about you in a way that makes you sound like a monster, how can you grow up with any kind of idea of a life that resembles anything that you would want? There's another, I actually want to talk about another book.

Everything you want to know about sex, was that 69 or was that later? It was later. Did the media, apart from the occasional article that castigated homosexuals, did the media cover gay issues at all? It's fun to look at the headlines from the 1960s when the mainstream press wrote about gay people. They didn't use the word gay, they didn't use the word homosexual, it was always about nest of perverts rated. Any kind of word that they could use to suggest that homosexuals were sick was what you saw in the headline. There was nothing positive from one end of the 1960s to the other. Do you know about the village voice article that you went out? Right after Stonewall? Yeah. It's definitely a field for you. The next day, please. Right after the Stonewall riots, there was an article published in the village voice, which used the kind of language you'd normally see about gay people, fairies, nances, fags, you know, call them what you will, the daily news in New York wrote in the same way.

And reporters were accustomed to writing like that without getting any reaction from gay people. And that day was over because there was a protest immediately after the village voice article protesting what they had done. Are you, let's see, I don't know about the riots themselves, anything you want to say about, you know, I mean, it's nasty. People put their lives on the lines, these kids report like muscle builders. Yeah, kids who had nothing to lose, though. That's my point. Is it kind of an irony here? This is a massive compute of the cops. You look at the pictures from the riot. And what strikes me is how young these kids were and how slight most of them were. These were the kinds of kids who you would never expect to confront the police. But it also makes sense that they were the ones who did. They weren't the older guys.

They were the kids. They had nothing to lose. They were often street kids. So they weren't going to lose the job. They weren't going to get kicked out of college. And they were mad. You look at teenagers and teenagers are the ones who will take risks that those of us who have grown up won. These kids took the risk and they changed the world for all of us. What do you think the market, what came out of Stonewall shortly after? And you might want to, you can mention Craig Rodwell if you feel like it. No. What came after Andrew was a little bit, Christopher Street, Liberation Day 3, and the ones that important. What came immediately out of the Stonewall riots was the formation of new organizations and plans for an annual protest to mark the occasion. I think if anything fixed Stonewall in the minds of people all over the world, it was this annual parade at the end of June. So all over the world today, in 80 countries around the world, 25 million people mark Stonewall in one way or another. If those marches hadn't been held, the initial marches, we probably wouldn't remember.

Okay. Walking in. Can we ask you, okay, so, oh, I know, before we get to the bars, first you have to get to New York City. What was the draw? What did it feel like to be some kid in the small town in the Midwest? What would you hope for? What would you search for? If you thought you were the only one in the entire world of whatever, or whatever it was you were, you would do whatever you had to do to find other people like yourself. So kids all over the country were drawn to places like New York City where they could find others like themselves. That was my experience even in the 1970s. I thought I was the only one in the entire world. And so the first time I walked into a gay bar, which is where gay people traditionally have gathered, I saw this room filled with, I don't know, 100 men. And I had two reactions. One was, oh, my God, this is the most fantastic thing in the world. And the other was, I'm going to throw up and I've got to run out of here as fast as I can.

Because I recognized that this is where I wanted to be. But these were homosexuals. Homosexuals were bad. I was one of them. Historically, bars, gay bars were where gay people gathered. It was virtually the only place where gay people could socialize. So when people say, well, why couldn't you meet gay people elsewhere? There was no elsewhere. You couldn't gather elsewhere. You could find sex elsewhere. But to socialize, the bars were the only place for gay people. From what I know of the stone wall, it was pretty typical of bars of the era. Run by the mafia, smoke-filled, all bars were smoke-filled, water-down drinks. What made it a little different was you could dance there. But like all bars, it was in danger of being raided.

What is that relationship between the mafia and the cops and the gays? The mafia had control of the bars in New York and elsewhere because there were laws against serving gay people, alcohol, in different places. And the laws were all state-based laws. So if you're going to do something criminal, it helps to be run by a criminal organization. So I'm not explaining that well. I mean, were they like working hand in hand? Did they respect each other? Because the only people who could serve gay people, now I'll start again. So wait a minute, a straight guy who's going bar, you get a drink. What about a gay guy? In New York City, it was illegal to serve homosexuals. Homosexuals were served all the time. It made it a little difficult when some of the early gay rights activists in the 1960s tried to do protests, sit in protests like the Black Civil Rights Movement, and say, I'm a homosexual, I want to be served.

Well, they went to places where they'd always been served, so they were served. But because it was against the law, the mafia got involved in running the bars because if you were a businessman who wanted to make money and not have problems with the police, you didn't run a gay bar. So it was left to the mafia. The mafia had a symbiotic relationship with the police. The gay people had contempt for the mafia, but gay people went where there were other gay people, so they went to the bars. So what were the rates? What was the symbiotic cop mafia relationship? It was a complicated symbiotic relationship between the cops, the mafia, and the politicians. Every time the elections rolled around, wanted to clean up the city, one way of doing that was to shut down the gay bars. You have raids who rescue people. It's one way of showing that you're doing something. The mafia around the bars, they made money on the gay people. The police took bribes from the mafia. They made money on the mafia. So it worked very well for everyone except for the gay people, although it provided a place where gay people could gather. So everyone benefited in a certain way, but it was a very sick relationship. That couldn't last, and it didn't, and it all blew up in 1969 at Stonewall.

It could have been any other bar, and it could have happened sooner. It could have happened later. It just happened to have happened that night. I can break for a second. The night of June 27th, 1968, 1969, was like a lot of nights in New York City in the summer. Happened to be a full moon that night. What made it a little different was that Judy Garland had been buried that Friday. May or may not have been a factor, but there was a full moon. It was a very hot night, and on this night it turned out to be a perfect storm for the police. It was the worst. You can almost cut out on that. The night of June 27th, 1969, was the perfect night on which to have arrived.

Full moon, incredibly hot, 1969, Woodstock, protests, Vietnam War. You throw into that that the Stonewall was raided the previous Tuesday night, gay people are pissed off. And whether or not that played a role it may have. So it was a perfect storm for the police. They didn't know what they were walking into. They thought this was just going to be another raid, another night, a rest some gay people go home, do it again the next day. But the people who were there that night had something else in mind.

The people who went to Stonewall that night were looking to see their friends, have a drink, celebrate. The last thing that they wanted to do was have a riot or see the police break up their evening. Maybe instead of wanted to do, it's not what they expected. They were walking out for one more night on the town in the summer, hot summer. If you think about what motivated people to go to Stonewall that night, it was to see friends, have a party, have a few drinks, dress up. It was not a night that they planned to confront the police. No one going to the bar that night had any idea that this was a night that would go down in history. And why do you think it went down in history? That's bad news. Stonewall was not the first time that gay people fought back.

Gay people had fought back in big and small ways over the years. 1965 in San Francisco was a major event. It wasn't reported beyond San Francisco. What made Stonewall different was that it was in New York City. It got reported here. It was where some of the major gay organizations were, so that the riot didn't end with the riot itself. It continued in the press. It continued with organizing. And then it was set down in history because the gay organizations decided to mark the Stonewall riot each year at the end of June and encouraged organizations all over the country to mark the Stonewall riot in the same way at the same time. So now in 80 countries around the world, 25 million people every year mark the Stonewall riots. What is our mythology? What's the political glow? What I find astonishing about Stonewall is the mythology around Stonewall.

That they were high-kicking transvestites and stiletto heels and full drag, doing kick marches to the police line. It's almost cinematic or operatic in its scale. Much of it isn't true. I think the real story, the real essence of what happened is a wonderful story. We don't need to embellish it. But what comes out of Stonewall beyond the specifics of the event is simply this idea that gay people fought back. I don't think we need much more than that. And that idea continues to inspire young people all over the world. What was the rage those people called? People have a hard time understanding why gay people were so angry or why we are so angry. And I've been accused of being angry on many occasions. Angry gay man. There's plenty to be angry about. You feel like your childhood was robbed. You were robbed of your childhood. You were teased. You were told that you were less than, that you were deficient.

And then you come to understand that you're actually just like everyone else and a normal human being. And how can you not be angry about that? So in my generation, we didn't grow up with raids. We didn't grow up with the kind of oppression that people did in the 1960s. So that leading up to that riot at Stonewall that night, it's very easy to imagine why these kids would want the police dead, why they would want to bring the system down. Their lives were being destroyed by the people in power. So all they could do was destroy the people in power. And what kind of relationship and the explosive nature of the riot said about revolutions of change? I don't believe in violence. But if I had been there that night and I were 19 years old, it's very easy to imagine picking up a brick. I think sometimes social changes only brought about through violence. The people who founded the gay rights movement did not want a violent revolution. But in the end, it took violence for people to take notice and also for gay people to challenge how people thought about us.

Good. Really good. How do you think class played into the riots? Who fought back? Where did they fit in the spectrum? Because gay people aren't just 19-year-old transvestites. They range from Wall Street bankers with a lot to lose to, you know, Rock Hudson. It's not just, I think it's important to set this back. It's pushed back in socially, like a broader social context of who gay people were and are. Looking at the pictures from the riots, you see that the people who were fighting back were very young. They were at the bottom of the social rung. Today they'd be the black and Hispanic kids who've been kicked out of their houses who are on Christopher Street and other streets in this country who are homeless. They're mostly white kids. These people are at the bottom of society.

They were the ones who fought back in no small part because they had the least to lose. For someone like me with a college degree and a job and a mortgage in 1969, the last thing you would do is throw a rock. The most you would do is be on the sidelines or you'd follow up in the days after and go to some of the meetings. A revolution led by young people, or at least initiated by young people who had nothing to lose. Once they broke through, then people like me, at least people when I was younger, people like me could then organize around that. I'm not being very good about that. You could make any more points. If we look at social change in this country, it's almost always led by young people. Young people have less to lose. It was the same at Stonewall. If anything, it was kids farther down the rung who led the charge at Stonewall because there was all the more to lose.

They just didn't care anymore. They had had enough. These kids had been abused and they were sick of being abused. Just a quick condition. If Stonewall released energy, just as it had been in San Francisco, is it possible that one of the things that make Stonewall different is that people were ready to take that energy and shine on it and organize it? Can you riff on that idea? The right at Stonewall happened at the Stonewall happened at the best possible time, at least in terms of an outcome that would bring about change. It could have happened a year before. Nothing might have happened. Nothing might have come out of it. There was a riot in San Francisco in 1965. It led to big changes in that city but not sweeping changes across the country. It was the confluence of all sorts of things that led to the riot and because it happened at that moment, July 27th, 1968, 1969, what came out of it led to a transformation in this country.

But it could have happened elsewhere. It could have happened at a different time. How do you feel when you're in, if you've been to the march to the San Francisco and you have the marches to annual marches? And how does it feel? I don't even know if it's important to go to march in a big flock of people. I stopped going to march as a long time ago. Marches are generally for young people or people who are just coming out. I go at the Millennium March in 2000. I wasn't going to go. My 13-year-old niece called me up and said, Uncle Eric, will you take me to the march? My niece who is not gay. And I said, why do you want to go to the march? And she said, this is my civil rights issue. This is the issue of my generation and I want you to take me. So I went and it was thrilling. It was absolutely thrilling to see thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of gay people gathered in one place. That was thrilling.

What is thrilling to watch? Any march, any march? Like how? When you're gay, even in the world today, you're in a minority of a minority. There aren't that many of us. So when you go to a march where you are one of thousands and you can simply be yourself and it's that rare occasion when the straight people are the ones who look like they're in the minority, it's great. You get a sense of what it's like to be truly normal in the world where you don't have to think about who you are or check the temperature of the room or look who's on the street or think about, well, will they stare at me? Will they hit me? You can just be yourself. Just be yourself. What does it do for you to dig me or your extent yourself? It's a little crazy to think that just being yourself would be thrilling. But when you grow up gay, you're taught not to be yourself. So when I'm in a march, when I'm in a large group of gay people at a protest, I can be myself.

I am surrounded by people who are like me who know what my experience and life is like. I know that I won't be judged. I might be judged for what I'm wearing, but I won't be judged for who I am. Did I get your point? No. No. Okay, what do you want me to do? I mean, it wasn't just this release of energy. What made Stonewall different is that there were people who were willing and eager to take that explosive energy that was released that night and channel it into something positive, into a march, into new organizations, into a new way of doing things. And even though one of those early organizations that came out of that quickly disintegrated, there were many organizations that followed up behind them. So you can see this direct link from Stonewall to the early organizations, to new organizations, and it grew like wildfire.

But it required enormous effort. People went out all across the country to start new organizations out of Stonewall. Amazing. I know one thing we forgot. What were your role models in the media? Growing up, my role models were role models for people I didn't want to be. They were the butler in the movie who was the faggy guy who made everyone laugh, or Liberacci, or the hairdresser, because we saw those people being laughed at. That's not who we wanted to be. And at that time, in the 1960s, there were no role models for a positive image of who we would be in life. So that leads to, you know, feeling different. If you imagined your future, could it be positive? Could it be you really believe it was there? When I was growing up, or when these people are growing up in the 60s?

What does it mean to not have those any positive role models? I think it doesn't matter when the 60s are 70s. Gay people have long been criticized for being promiscuous, for having lives that were ruinous to themselves and to those around them. But you look at the role models, or lack of role models, or the lack of any way, I'll start again. Without positive role models in the 1960s, these kids who were at Stonewall, the young people who went to the bars, had no way to see a future for themselves. They had nothing to lose because they had no lives ahead of them as far as they could tell.

That's good. That's a really important one. What would lose start then? But no, one thing to know, which is, as well, that not only did the facts fight back, they actually beat the cops. It was unprecedented that the police would be bested by these guys for a date. This is two different classes. I think that what he's getting at is, you think of the big riots in the 60s, interesting to sort of put Stonewall in with... Lots of Cleveland, you know, Chicago's neighborhood's burning, about a billion dollars with the property damage. People are getting killed if they flash that. How does the stack up, and yet how does it stack up in terms of importance? That's a big question. Well, you know, I'll help you answer it because I don't think it has to be huge. Like, you know, all you might have seen in these other organizations, made you realize that those are big moments.

In contrast to what was going on in the 1960s, burning of the inner cities. Kids getting their heads bashed in Chicago, Penn State, kids being shot by the police. Stonewall was a little riot. It wasn't as big a deal. But for the gay rights movement, for people like me, it was our Penn State. It was Chicago's 68. It was a much smaller scale, but it set things in motion. It was a pivotal event. I'm sorry, what did I say, Penn State? Yeah, I'll start again. And you might even throw in Selma Mark. I mean, there were big, big issues, and it wasn't violent, but... Well, yeah, I think it was. Yes, there was. Yeah. That's true. You could throw in some of his other martyrs and mention that during many times. Compared to what else was going on in the 1960s. Selma.

Penn State, Chicago, 1968. The riots after Martin Luther King's assassination. The inner cities were burning. You compare Stonewall to that? Stonewall was pretty small. But for gay people, Stonewall was pivotal. Because of its moment in time, because of where it happened. It changed the course of history for gay people in the United States. And now I have what they were saying, not only did they, like, cops... They didn't get smeared by God, but they didn't. Right. And it went on for days. Yeah. Stonewall was a little riot. But the remarkable thing about it is that it went on for days. And the police couldn't get these kids. So here you had fags. Young fags. Young homeless fags. Femi. Young homeless fags. And the police in their riot here couldn't subdue them. And I just love that image to this day. Even though I have friends who were cops. I love the idea of these kids fighting back so ferociously.

And the police didn't know what to do. They were totally flummoxed. One of my friends who was there that night, one of my friends who was there during one of the nights, said that the cops had a look in their eyes. It was the look of someone who had a pet. They had been bitten by their favorite pet. Let me say that one more time because actually I want to be one more. Okay. I would love with them. A friend of mine drove through the village during the second night of the riots. And he said what struck him wasn't the right itself, but it was the look on the faces of the cops. He said it reminded him of someone who had just been bitten by their favorite pet. Okay. We don't usually do that, but we do it in memory of Stonewall.

We do it in memory of Stonewall.