American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Seymour Pine, 2 of 2

I'm 50, and I'm not sure my memory is as good as yours. Well, you weren't, men weren't supposed to wear women's clothes, but you weren't supposed to wear women's clothes. It got to the point, though, that women began to wear men's clothes as part of their regular dress. But I mean, there was a law about masquerading, because you did your- Yes. There was a law forbidding masquerade, and they considered wearing a dress for a male masquerade. If a woman wore men's pants, it wasn't necessarily a masquerade, because you could go out on the street, you can go to any department store, and it was available.

In a typical raid, how do you enforce a masquerade law? A few cops, hand-fold, will take a room of 50, 60 people, and it was expected. And nobody argued with you or fought with you, they went along. And they knew that they would be out that night, and they didn't give their right names, and we didn't care. How about the masquerade law, were there women who took people into the bathroom to check on their- Yes. Can you tell me about that? But if someone was dressed as a woman, you had to have a female go in with her. You couldn't send a male in, because that just isn't done.

And the same with the other side. When you said they went going in, you told me, how did that work? Where would they go in? They'd go into the bathroom or to the office or to any place that was private, that they could either feel them or check them visually, or when they went into a private room of some kind, these people usually said, OK, I'm a male or I'm a female. And that was it, but the stone wall changed that. Let's talk about the stone wall, one of the things. Do you know who ran the stone wall? Was it a legitimate park? No, it wasn't. It was, well, it was a legitimate to the extent that the mafia was a legitimate or illegitimate. We considered them as illegitimate, they didn't.

It was run by the mafia. How did that, wouldn't that mean to the other? Well, it means that those people who control the mafia crimes, garbage and laundry and things of that kind, they enforced those laws, their own laws. And then you knew who the culprits were because they came back every month for their money. Let's talk about why raid gay bars in the first place. Did the mayor of a policy, did the New York City police department have a policy about gay bars?

Well, if he had a policy, it never came through to us. We took our orders strictly from the police department. The orders that I received was from a chief by the name of Valentine Fathman. And I know Valentine because we were in the same classes together. And he was just a little smarter than I. And that was the way we got orders, where he got them from. We know that they had meetings with Interpol, with the international police force. And... What did Valentine tell you about gay bars? Nothing. Nothing except that information has been received, that stocks and bonds were filling the European

areas with illegal bonds. Find out about it. So how did that tie in with the Stonewall? Pardon? How did that connect to the Stonewall? Well, it connected because of the people who went there. I mean, when you rose roses and Cadillacs and Lincoln's show up at a place that's a dive, you looked for it. And was there blackmail behind this female? But how did that... There were blacks in there. There were blacks in there. I mean, blackmail. You know... Oh, yes, sure. I mean, how did the bonds connect because of the... Well, that's the way we feel they were connected, but we didn't know the echelons. That would be in a class above us.

If we failed, they would supposedly take over. And it was our job not to fail. I have a big different question, a different subject. How did you feel about homosexuals at the time when you were conducting gay rape? It didn't make any difference to me. I had no empathy for them, and I didn't object to them. There was none of my affair. I didn't care how many times my neighbor had sex with his wife or his girlfriend. Didn't make any difference to me. I didn't have a rabbi or a priest blowing down my neck, put him out of business, put him out of business. Didn't have any of that. Although, it was going on. I mean, they were dealing with headquarters. They weren't dealing with us.

So you felt there was a privacy or... Why? I mean, did you think homosexuals were sick or geeky? When you met, because you must have had lots of gay people when you were doing raids. There were a lot of gay people, but they weren't open. They very few have admitted it till after the Stonewall. And then it was proud to be a gay, and that's the way it is today. If you could ask, if his view on his looking back on that raid change, when he saw the effects of Stonewall on the world, can you look at his looking back when he looked back at the raid? How do you feel about it in terms of how it affected the world? Well, I'm sorry for anybody that got hurt.

And there were people who got hurt. But beyond that, it wouldn't have been anybody if he stole a fruit of his hand. I mean, he was a criminal. And the degree of the crime depended upon the efforts that you put into it. And it wasn't that serious. It was never that serious a crime until they began to flaunt it, the gay people. And that took place after the Stonewall. Did you hear things like people screaming at the police? Oh, sure. Let me talk about the police.

Okay, let's go back. You're inside the bar. The doors are barricaded. You've got your men, their nervous. Yeah. What did you hear going on? You didn't hear anything except that Saviourone S. I mean, you were in jeopardy and you knew it. And you were waiting for help. How much from outside? Did you hear people yelling things outside? Well, if you've ever been in a real crowd, you would have understood that you don't hear individual voices, it's a crowd voice. Well, the biggest fear was people getting killed. You knew that you had killing material in your arms with your guns, and you also knew

that they had gasoline and other volatile material. And so you had to worry about that. Did you feel when you were inside in the crowd with outside, did you feel like you could walk out of there? No. Couldn't walk out. You knew that the moment you stepped out that door, there would be hundreds facing you. You knew it. I mean, they were there. It wasn't as if it was a very close spot. It was wide open in front of the stone wall. So you had to retreat in there? Yes.

Did you feel trapped inside or how did that... Sure you felt trapped inside. You knew you couldn't get out unless somebody helped you from the outside. Did you...how did you feel when the radio didn't work and was it not weird? Of course, it was horrible because it never happened before. Can you tell me about that with the radio? Well, they just canceled that last message. That's all it said, and the messages were canceled until we were able to get this girl, this police officer through the window, and that was when things changed. Did you have a sense of why all these people were so angry and throwing things in the room? No. We knew that it was going to happen one day.

I mean, whenever you have crowds like that, they're going to break out. You just knew it. This is like a war. Did you sense that this was going to happen some day? You said, when you read bars and you're doing it once or twice a night on the weekends, did you sense, oh boy, you know, one day these guys are going to fight, did you feel that? No. Otherwise, I don't think people would be looking for the job, and they were. But once this happened, it became a different matter. Did you have a search warrant going in? Did you need a search warrant to this raid? Well, we had people in there watching the sales. So you didn't need, once you made the arrest, you didn't need a search warrant.

I wasn't clear about the bar. What did you want to do physically with the bar inside, once you got, what was the plan anyway? The planning was to stop people from coming in to buy the drinks that were mixed. But what I meant was, with the actual physical bar itself, did you tell me about selling it, cut it up and take it in pieces? Yes. Can you just explain that to me? Well, we had an emergency service, and they came in and started to cut it up with sores and we were putting Matt a business. Did it work? Yes. It worked for a short time, and then other places opened. David, do you have something? What kind of switch places?

Switch places? I'm not sure. You can make it more quickly if you can't. You're going to want to retire. You don't know. Is it law? I just have several quarters. I think it was around 23rd Street on the east side. Could you talk about the conference plan? About the what? Planning the raid and the conference? I think it was on headquarters on 23rd Street on the east side. Yes. Well, that's where our headquarters was, it was on 23rd Street, between 2nd and 3rd Avenue. We had a regular headquarters there with our vehicles and whatever equipment we needed. But it wasn't used specifically for this. And wasn't there a planning conference before the raid? Oh, yes.

You would have your meetings. You would discuss the possibilities and probabilities, and that's how you went about it. Could you tell us who was there that night or what was said planned the raid? I can't tell you what was said at this point. It was just a few yesterdays ago. All I know is that we assigned from our previous knowledge of a place where the police should be when they entered the place, what their position should be. Did you talk about certain people going first and someone would come later? We have to cover this. Okay. Were you aware of corruption in the New York Police Department at the time?

And you want me to say yes, and I'm part of it. If I say no, I'm not telling the truth. So I don't think we need to have a part of our own. I imagine that where money is involved, there is a certain amount of corruption. What about the six precincts that night? How did they come into the story of the six precinct? The who? The six precinct? Oh, the six precinct was the precinct of residents. That's where the men worked out of the six precincts. How did they respond that night? They didn't until we asked for them. And then they were being canceled through the radio.

I don't know if there's a bathroom around, but I could use one. Oh, but let's for sure give you a relief. So yeah, you were saying before, you know, it's sort of sad, but serious thought. Do you tell me what was on your mind? Well, it was always on my mind about homosexuals. The first day I was sent out as a transit policeman because of the strike that had just started. And I walked into the men's room and I went to one of the urinals and there was somebody standing next to me and he looked at me and he said, do you want to have a good time?

And I became so flustered. I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what to do. So I buttoned up because we didn't have zippers, I buttoned up and fled the scene. And then after I left, I said, what the hell am I running from? You know, I'm supposed to do something about it. And then, but that was my first contact with a homosexual. And then you spoke to the other officers and they would tell you what you asked them. They didn't tell you anything you didn't know, it was a rule. So how did you feel about it, you know, you come home to this bar and people are drinking and having a nice time? And your job is to show, how did you feel about that? Well, I didn't care about it.

You know what you might want to do is actually what he said. I don't know what I said. You know what you said? You were talking a little bit about the difficulty of it, that it's an awful feeling sometimes to have to shut down people for sex. Yes, people were there for a good time. People would come into these bars for their proms. I'm sorry, one second, you have somebody with Katala? Yes, I think. The question is, are they going to have sex anyway? It's going to be bad sex. It's not going to be what a young married couple around that age would have in mind. But how did you feel when it's your job, you know, to break this up? And here's this bar, people are just there to have a good time and how does that make you feel comfortable?

It made you feel lousy, really. It made you feel that you were spoiling them, you were spoiling what fun they had, but it was what you chose as your profession. And you knew that you weren't going to stay where you were, that this was just the beginning to a career. And I felt badly for those people that were being arrested and who foolishly gave their right names because we really didn't care. I mean, there was no money involved, these were not really big games. I later had bigger games in Brooklyn on the boats when they went on the offshore boating and they had their gambling on there.

So looking back on Stonewall raid, how do you feel about what you did, I mean, you did your job professionally, but don't you feel so proud about it? No, I didn't feel badly at all about it. I would have felt badly going into the crowd and grabbing one individual who later turned out to be an actor of some kind, David Ronk. But I saw him do something that actually injured a police officer. And so I just couldn't stand and turn my head the other way. Can you tell me what you saw? I saw them throw money, they were throwing anything from pennies to 50 cent pieces at the police officers.

They would, there was like a firing line and no man's land and then the police. And the civilians would run up with coins and flip them at the police officers. And this one guy hit this police officer right in the eye and I was standing right there. So I went into the crowd and grabbed him, eventually he pleaded guilty to something and not assault on a police officer, which was a serious thing. But that became a technique of throwing the coins. Why did they throw coins, you know, the coins were supposed to mean nothing, just flipping if they had anything else, they would have flipped them.

But that's what they had. Did you, what other force did you get, were there tactical police brought in, were there other force? Tactical police hadn't come yet. By the time the police had come, we had pushed them back, but you could only push them so far because there were houses and there was a park with a big fence around it. And it was difficult to push beyond that because you didn't have the manpower. And the manpower for the other side was coming like there was a real war. And that's what it was. It was a war. Did you know what they were fighting about? Did you know what the war was about? Well, the war was that we were interfering with their good time. And they were kids.

As I said, they weren't much older than my son who was in his last year in high school. And I knew they were in the crowd somewhere. And you knew you could ruin them for life. These kids had no idea that if they got arrested for this, that they couldn't pass the bar and that they couldn't be in other professions because they had a criminal record. And you felt bad that you were part of this when you knew they broke the law, but what kind of law was that? That's hard when you were fleeing them. And I think that was the era when most of the policemen began to look at scants

at some of the things they were doing. And you asked about corruption before. It's hard to say. You know that there was more bottles of liquor that stayed out of the station house than went in. So somebody else had to have them. So it was... No, it was... It's hard. You've got your job to do, you know, and you're not the chief of police, you're taking orders. And sometimes it doesn't feel hard to enforce orders when you don't always like that. Well, you have to enforce orders that are not proper for you, for you as an individual. But you have to do it because that's what you took the job for.

I never thought that I would remain in a uniform job of being a police officer. I thought I would become an FBI man, and probably would have, if I hadn't been blown up in the war. How does it feel to be a part of history now in the Stonewall? Well, I'm kind of fed up on it. I think that it's such a small thing in such a large pond. I mean, the homosexual idea has grown to such degrees that you can look at it as not being a crime. I mean, a thing becomes normal or natural if enough people believe in it. And that's what's been happening.

After all, it's become legal in certain states and imagine going from one state you're married and going to another state you're a criminal. But that's the way it is, that's the game you chose. We're in a different world now, aren't we? However, that's what I chose. And I think that if I had to say in writing some of the laws, I think these social, some of these social laws, I mean, look, they can be bad too. They can take a family's money and eat it up for playing cards or playing crap or going to the track.

But those are so small that it doesn't call for so many police officers being assigned to something which is not a real crime as such. But that's what you do if you're a soldier or a police officer. You take that oath and you have to follow it. How many bars were there around the city? Oh, thousands. Do you tell me that in the 1960s? Oh, I would say downtown there were two, three, every block. All of different degrees, I mean, those that allowed touching, those that allowed kissing, those that allowed dancing, I mean, there were so many different degrees of bars that it would be difficult to estimate.