American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Dick Leitsch, 3 of 3

When you were packing your bag, you go to Europe, and you're going to hear about it. Right. Right. Right. Okay. David wanted me to tell you about Suffolk West. Well, I came to New York. Well, I don't think you know, I really think we'll skip it. We'll skip it. Okay. Let's go to Stonewall. Let's go to Stonewall. I think we better go to Stonewall. There's just a couple little details, really small things to touch on before I forget them. In the management society, did you use what you need to do to use and why? Well, the management society, in the management society, used my own name. It just never occurred to me not to. I believe you're standing up for something. Then you've got to say who you are. And I come from a family that stood up for things. My whole family was involved in various causes and stuff.

And they used their own name and it never occurred to me when I'm standing up for something not to use my own name. I was surprised when people used pseudonyms. And a lot of them, I was so naive. At first I thought they were doing it because their names were ugly or hard to spell. Because my last name was hard to spell. And very often I've thought about changing it or using a pseudonym. And then I thought they were just being quaint. Somebody called them self. Something gazed out of Dorian. They changed their first name to Dorian. I thought, oh, try to be Dorian Gray. They never occurred to me. They were doing it to hide. But then I realized they were. I found out they were, of course. What kind of role is that? It made me feel like, what's wrong with you? Do you really believe in the cause? You're not a man enough to use your own name when you're standing up for something? Yeah. When you were in the bar, like the Stonewall, like Barney's? I was told, well, they ask you to write down a name. Of course people write down Donald Duck or John Lindsay or Governor Rockefeller or something. Nobody cared.

It's just a formality. Yeah. What kind of role is that? It's a time to rise. It's a time to rise. Well, the night the Stonewall riots happened. I was home. I was packing to go to Europe. My lover was taking me to Europe. I hadn't had a vacation from medicine in like five years. He's going to take me to Europe. I was packing my suitcases. We turned on the radio on WINS and they said there was trouble in front of the gay bar in the village. I looked at Bob and I guess I have to go to the village and put on my shoes and got a cab and went to the village and got there and the riot was what the riot. The things were in progress already and leading up to the riot and had really turned to a riot. The first night really wasn't. The first night wasn't really a riot. It was more of, we were having a good time and like goofing on the cops and at first, and people did throw things and stuff like that. I think on the gay side it was almost completely good to have spirited and kind of fun. Then the cops came and they sent the tactical police force down.

The cops got a little nasty and kept chasing us around the block. After a while, I got tired of it and left. I went down to the trucks, most of them. I remember Christopher Street being quiet and not ever seen it before. I remember being a clear evening with a big black sky and the biggest white moon I ever saw because there was a full moon that night. It was so quiet and I walked down to the trucks and everybody in the world was down there. Then the next night everybody came to see what had happened and then all these other people started turning up. What did I sector a little bit first the first night? What were the cops doing and were they effective in terms of chasing you? New York City had because there had been a lot of riots in town and peace demonstrations and other super-rights demonstrations and other demonstrations. There was a lot of police trouble and someone turned into riots and stuff. The city government has set up what they called the tactical police force, which is basically a riot squad.

They had never been news before and the first time they turned out was the night of Stonewall. What they did, Christopher Street is bounded by Sheridan Square on one side and Greenwich Avenue on the other. The cops came with all these buses, like five buses, and they all were full of tactical police force and the tactical cops got out and they were dark police uniforms and riot helmets and they had building clubs and they had big plastic shields like Roman Army and they actually farmed the felonks and they went from building line to building line at Greenwich Avenue and just marched down Christopher Street and kind of pushed us in front of them and people would go off into the side streets and then go past and then we'd come back in behind them. So when they got down to Sheridan Square they'd turn around and they'd come back and we'd roll back out again so we'd all gone to the side streets and it kept going on for a while until they got tiresome and after they got tiresome then people started leaving and going home and stuff. But the cops were there for a long time just walking back from one end to the other one end and they were chasing it out of the streets.

You don't remember anybody hearing anybody? Oh yeah, I mean between the time the tactical police got there and the time that riot started when the other cops came along and stuff and they were building building clubs and hitting people and all kinds of things were happening. I wrote a lot about that. I mean somebody stole the cops' badge and the cops got these buildings so they started hitting everybody in the side because they couldn't find his badge and they get in serious trouble producing badges and a cop came along in a car all by himself and he had one of those, he was a sergeant or a president or something and he had the bill on his hat was all covered with gold scrambled eggs and he was actually somebody really important and he was caught in traffic jam because Christopher Sheiss Only two lanes wide and it all these people and the cars were like stopped and they couldn't move and so people got in his car and they would jump up and down like I see. These people would jump and then these people would jump and the car was rocking back and forth

and this cop was sitting and they were like, oh, pal, oh, this is funny. A lot of it was just so funny at the first night and after that the other couple of nights that were driving nasty, but the first night it was like funny most of the time I thought. What do you think about why you thought it was funny? What's so funny about it? I thought it was funny, it's funny that the cops all these years have been picking on us and all of a sudden it was our turn and we're getting our own back. We didn't have guns and billy clubs and stuff like that, we really couldn't beat them up. So it was mostly goofing, basically goofing on them, getting them in a car, blocking them back and forth, calling them names, telling them how good looking they were, grabbing their butts doing things like that, just making their loudest miserable for once, it was our turn. You know, you put up a few long enough, now it's our turn, getting ours back. It turns a few more, okay, you remember any funny chance, you remember dancing? I don't remember much dancing.

Why don't you turn on the cops, remember that, it is a big crowd turned back, that story is welcome to catch them? No, I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. I don't remember that. What about it? It was a kid crying. Well, that wasn't on, that wasn't it still, well, that was still, that just happened on a long time since I thought about this. You know, it's been a long time, and I, and I went to read David's book this week, but I didn't get around to it, so I really, really needed to refresh my memory. Well, do you remember it was hot or cold? Well, it was a lovely night, it's just gorgeous night, yeah, as I say, I remember it was all over the sky, it was just so black and the moon was so full, and it was just nice and warm. See, that was the whole thing about it was, still, it was very controversial at the time, even gay people didn't, you know, most gay people didn't like it, didn't approve of it.

And the thing was that a lot of people say, and books have been written, let's say the 1968 was the first year, the worst year of the 20th century, because that's the year that Nixon won the election, that Pat Buchanan and Philistiaff, all these people came out of the woodwork, that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Dr. King was assassinated, cities were torched from coast to coast, it was the long hot summer, and everybody really thought it was the end of American civilization, and then cold weather came, and everything quieted down, and people thought, well, what's going to happen next summer? And the first warm day of spring, the queers ride, and so it was at the end of the world, my god, now it's the queers, it's all over. You know? It was perfect timing, you know, it was just great. Did you ever feel like, oh, well, the first one, let's talk about the second night, what was the difference?

Did you go back? Oh, yes, sure. Oh, yeah, I was back the next night, so next afternoon, we all went down, you know, excuse me. Well, first of all, the cops came to Inspector Pine, and Inspector Seymour came to the Madison Society and said that Mayor Lindsay had sent them, and he wanted us to go out and stop the rioting. He said, excuse me? How can I stop rioting, you know? You guys got the police clubs, and you got the guns, you want rioting stuff, you stop rioting. And besides, I approve of it, and so I went back down, and you know, made ourselves available. We talked to people, and had not leaflets and stuff like that. And then evening came, and all these people turned up a couple of months before that I had been invited to speak to a group called the Workingman Circle, down the Lower East Side, and they were all old Jewish radicals left from the 30s, from the garment rising, the garment industry rising, and stuff like that. And they were still waiting for the revolution to come. And then the second night of Stonewall, I walked on Christopher Street, and there they were, they were still waiting for the revolution to come, and they thought, mad as she just

started it. And there were black panthers, and there were hippies, and there were anti-war people, and all these people, because they all tried to start the revolution, and that, well, maybe it was the queers that started it instead of us. And they were all down there, and a lot of people were picking, looking to pick a fight. And everybody started harassing the cops, and it wasn't necessarily the gay people doing it, but a few gay people were harassing the cops, and the other people were harassing the cops. And the cops started harassing back, and all of a sudden it turned nasty, and it just started flying, and rocks were being thrown, and names were being called, and all of a sudden the tactical police force were back again. And this time it was much more unpleasant than it was the first night. And that's when you started seeing bodies laying on the sidewalk, people bleeding from the head, or here and there laying on the sidewalk, or on the Sheridan Square. I mean, there were like two or three cops down, and five or six or ten civilians down in the sidewalk were coming in various places, and most of them, nothing really serious, most of them got to walk up the streets of St. Vincent to their emergency room, but it was like

it was like a warfare, and it wasn't nice. And you had a person scared how they'd do it? Oh yeah, I wasn't too happy about being around there, no. And I made sure I stayed out of the cops away, because they were flailing building clubs right and left, and not anyone apart, but there again, they had a problem, the geography was against them. If they had done that, if still won't have been on 42nd Street, and the cops made their findings and chased everybody from, say, 7th Avenue to 8th Avenue, it would take us forever to get around the block again, but the blocks in the village are very short, and so the cops would come down, and you could be around this block and back by the time they got to the next corner, and so they had a terrible time to get an order down there. Yeah. The geography and the village was against the cops, because their findings would come down the street and try to chase us away, and the blocks were narrow or small enough that

we could run around a block and come in behind them before they got to the next corner. If this had happened uptown, or the blocks are longer, by the time they got from one corner to the other, it would take us forever to get around to the back again, but the village is so small that we were able to sneak in behind them, and then they have to turn around and come back, and about how they back again, and this went on for hours. I mean, it's a nice metaphor that in terms of the streets being really actually kind of owned by people who knew a while. Exactly. The streets were owned by the people who knew them well. We knew them better than the cops did, and they were set up to our advantage rather than the police advantage. Did you ever think, oh, well, I mean, during all of this, okay, it's second night, it's getting more and more serious, there's more people, how did work get out, what happened? I don't know, we're just spread, you know, word of mouth, because there was nothing really basically in the newspapers until the village voice came out on Wednesday, and there were two radicals in the village voice, and then I wrote a piece for the magazine Newsletter

of our circulation, it's only like 600, so we didn't do much about getting that out, besides that being mailed out, where the village voice was on the streets. Wait, this is New York City with a whole lot of, you know, major newspapers and television networks, why don't they know? The television radio didn't cover it, and the Times tried to bury it, because the same weekend, the Times tried to bury what happened at Stonewall, the same weekend, the same, you know, the same weekend, the Stonewall happened, some vandals and queens, there was this park out there where gay guys hung out and maybe had sex in the bushes, and so some of the neighbors went out and chopped down all the bushes, and so the Times gave that great big play and had just a little like two thing about Stonewall happening, they played it down because the Times were here, I guess the Times like everybody else didn't like the idea of gay people right, taking the streets, you know, it was more than they could deal with, and this is something that never happened before, you know, it was all first, and people were not ready for it, gay people didn't like it, I mean, a lot of gay people in the buildings

is going to ruin our neighborhood, nobody's going to come here anymore, they're gay merchants who rent shops and so they broke windows, next thing you know they'd be looting our shops like they're doing in Harlem, we can't have this going on, we can't have rioting, this is terrible, and then there's all the best little boys in the world, you know, oh, we're gay people, we don't riot, that's what poor people do and white trash do, and black people do, we don't do that, you know. Well, you know, you know, you've been working with them, you've been managing society that certainly had never organized riots before, but why was this in front of you? It was important to me because it's the first time gay people stood up for themselves, I mean, that's what I've been working for for the seven years I was in Manishing, trying to get gay people to stop taking this crap from public officials and anybody to priest and anybody else who wanted to kick us around, no, we're not taking this anymore, you know, why do we have to put up with this? We're American citizens, and we have as much right as anybody else to be what we want to be, and so I was so pleased when I was stood up and started taking care of themselves, and until then, you know, Manishing was the only venue doing that, and I was one of the

few people who were standing up and speaking off for it, and then the day before Stonewall, everybody was in the closet, the day after Stonewall, everybody thought themselves as a gay leader, and I was glad, you know, because I was burned out, and I'd been doing it for seven years, and felt no thanks at all, and felt like I was just exhausted, and then all of a sudden, everybody wanted to do it, I said, fine, you all do it, it's your turn, I've put in my time, now you put in your turn, my best friend of a schoolteacher, and he wasn't in New York, and Stonewall happened, and he wasn't able to get to New York for the annual reminders of their Christian street demonstrations, whatever they call it now, and in the end of June, and so finally, after about Stonewall 12 or something, he finally got to New York for the Gay Liberation Day Parade, and we stood on the street, and I said, you got really got to see this on the top of the Empire State Building, so we went to the top of the Empire State Building, and we looked down, and in those days, the parade went from Central Park to the village, and we looked down, and there was this endless stream of people

wandering down the middle of the street, and on both curves, and people waving rainbow flags, and he had looked over the edge of the Empire State Building like that for a while, and he looked at me, he said, God, Dick, do you remember when you were the only queer in New York? And like I was, because whenever they needed somebody to be spokesman, to go on radio or television, or they get their picture taken for the paper, nobody wanted to do it, and it's, oh, Dick, you do it, you do it, and so I did, you know. So how did you personally feel that birthspraining when you were looking down at a sea of animals? I still feel when I go to the gay parade parade, I think, well, you know, I kind of did this. It's kind of mouthful, in a way, and you know, a lot of us did it. I mean, so many people that talk about the movement, it's all about me and my friends, and we did it. Well, it wasn't about me, you know, because I said earlier, I met a machine had all these committees, and there were all these people, and they all worked very hard, and none of us did it by ourselves, and it was, well, not only just the people in Madison, there

were people outside of Madison, like, the Episcopal Bishop of New York loaned us his lobbyist in Albany. What about the role of the street kids who were willing to do that? Right, exactly, and there were the street kids, and I'd fight different, you know, I've taken the chances on their own, and everybody was doing it, you know, but even in Madison, like, everybody thinks I was managing, I wasn't managing, I was just the executive director of Madison. I had a lot of support, and a lot of people doing things, and then there were all these people out elsewhere doing things, you know, and a lot of times I coordinated it, and a lot of times people in the organization coordinated it, and a lot of times it just happened, but then all of a sudden, the stone wall, everybody came out, and it was a community thing for the first time, and I was so pleased, you know. Did you feel, how did you feel that the tensile for the game movement might change at the stone wall?

Well, I knew it would change. I can see that right away, and it went in directions that were particularly my interest, you know. To me, it was just, to me, the whole movement was like a civil rights thing. We have a right to be gay, and we can have a right to be gay anywhere we want to be, and however we want to be. Personally, I'm a bit more radical than I'm given credit for. There were people who were so concerned about getting gays in the military. I'm against the military. I thought one of the advantages to being gay was being able to opt out of that war machine. A lot of people are very concerned that you can't get government jobs. I don't like government. I wouldn't want a government job. If you want one, I want you to be able to have one, but it's not anything I'm really interested in. What do you want personally affected by the medical standard of being gay in the city? Well, the whole thing about homosexuality being a sickness and a psychologist and all that. I've never much concerned me because I never had a lot of faith in psychology anyway.

No, it's not something I take very seriously. At some point, you have the inner strength that you want to be. Well, no, I was raised from a Catholic. When you've got a problem, you don't go to a shrink, you go to confession. I had the church making deal. I had 14 cousins, aunts and uncles, who were priest and nuns, and I knew the church and backstage. So church and backstage is like show business and backstage. This is about a magic, a little cynical about churches, even not working anyone now. To make you ever question whether you were one of God's, or you know, a sinner? No, I don't want to worry about that. You know, I was raised from only Catholic. If you were a sinner, you go to confession. You're not a sinner anymore. I don't know. What do you think is orders where and why did you go? What was his role when he was raised? I don't know. Seymour Pine, his since then, said that it was all about that black male ring and he was protecting us and black male ring.

And I've always taken that with a grain of salt. That's not what he told me when he came to medicine the day after the raid. He came to medicine and he was in trouble because he had caused a lot of trouble. And just about six months before then, Sanford Gerala, who was his boss, had tried to close down the coffee houses on McDougal Street and people lay down in the street and started. It could have been another stone wall and Seymour, Gerala. It could have been another stone wall, but Gerala had enough sense to take down the barricades he'd put up and told the police to go away and let her by alone. And he defused the situation. And I've always been in the opinion that Pine was on the carpet because he didn't have enough sense to do pretty much the same thing and he'd better get out of hand. But now he says that he was protecting us from the gay black male ring and maybe he's right. I don't know, but I doubt it. Frank. But do you know that he was actually like trapped inside, you know, he was trapped inside? Yeah, I knew that because he must have been scared.

He must have been terrified. Yeah, I would have been. You know, there again, you know, this is a stone wall, it was a sleazy place, it had no back entrance. So the back entrance, if there was one that was closed or barricaded or something and they were trapped in there and people did put lighter fluid on the plywood over the front window and try to set it on fire. And he had a reason to be scared, you know. You could have only guns for the cops. You could have, they could have shot somebody, yeah. And it's the one that they didn't do in New York City cops, it's the one that they didn't shoot somebody. And those days, when the cops were there, cops were really out at one point, managing gun involved in this fight to get a civilian review board. And one of the first things we tried to do was make cops wear a name plates because whenever they would go like to a peace demonstration or riot and Harlem or something, they take the badges off or they'll say, but cover them with a piece of cloth. And so we fought for six months or a year to get cops to wear our name tags and the police union was so against it because cops were beating people up at the building clubs and

shooting people right and left and doing anything they wanted to do and they didn't want to be responsible. They didn't want to buy a new who they were. That's why they covered the numbers on their badges. This was a police state in the 60s and the 50s is probably worse than what I understand. Maybe you could ask, you just went on from anywhere. The riots in the street on Christopher Street went on for several nights, but the longer they went on, the weaker they got and they finally just faded out, it was over, over and over and then all the confusion started because after every revolution, there's a shake-out and so all of a sudden, there have been two gay organizations in New York, the Madison Society and the daughters of religions for the women, for lesbians, and- Sorry, I think, but we're just being so badly interrupted by the siren and I don't want

to make the accident happen twice. I can hear the siren. Go ahead. Okay. Okay. So tell me when, okay, so after the riots quieted down and the street action quieted down, then the real trouble started because before Stonewall, there have been two organizations for gay people in New York, the Madison Society for men and the daughters of the Beletus for women. And then the day after Stonewall, everybody was a gay leader, everybody knew where the movement should go and all of a sudden where there have been two organizations, there were 2,000 organizations and some people believe we should all go out and learn gay judo and Earthquake's Goonmaker or somebody wanted to start to advocate a gay homeland like the Israelis were, like Israel was being a homeland for the Jews and there were people wanted to be gay panthers and everybody had this idea of how the organization should go and then slowly they kind of settled down and sort of shook out into it for a little while.

There was a gay liberation front and that didn't last long and then it kind of shook down and became the gay activist alliance but they were just the big ones that were still like after Stonewall and since Stonewall, there have always been dozens and dozens of gay organizations which I think is a great thing because Madison was trying to be an umbrella group for all gay people and you can't be an umbrella group for all gay people. And so all of a sudden now there are organizations for people who have special interest and we're all, when we do this, we want to do that gay business men, gay church people, gay therapists and I think it's great, you know, I think it's great that there's some minguing gay groups and there should be more. Do you think it took a violent revolution to take it start with? It took, yes of course because something had to be kickstarted. You know, we used to fantasize about how we get this thing off the ground and then you used to say dream about, well we have a day where every gay person in America calls in sick and we watched the economy collapse because we're not there, are the national day of coming out where we are, we'll tell our mother and father, but of course these things never

took off because, you know, people wouldn't support them or it wasn't possible or you couldn't communicate it after the people or something but then a ride in the street happened and that didn't. It wasn't what we expected, that's not the way we expected for it to happen and nobody was prepared for it and nobody knew what to do. We all was like still around the week after stone, we all stood around and said, what happened, what do we do now, where are we and it's like a long time to figure it out. But it wasn't what we expected to happen but thank God it did happen, something had to happen and sooner or later something would have and I'm glad that it happened in my time. You mean that you were there at the time when you were there to just feel something different to you? Well I knew the minute it was going on, I knew what was going on. The first thing I did was I ran back to the Madison office and I typed an article and I called it the hairpin. It used to be this phrase, when somebody was pretending not to be gay and they'd let something slip, you say that they dropped a pearl, they dropped a hairpin and so my head line, my thing, the hairpin dropped, heard around the world.

The gay revolution has come, this is it and I got such flak from that. So many people, oh it's just awful, you can't do that, gay people don't ride and in Madison, out of Madison, all these people were so opposed to it, which is a bunch of scruffy kids riding in the street, had nothing to do with us, we're not that kind of people. Of course I knew it was, I knew this was it and you may say no now but well one person whom you're going to interview and I won't mention his name, he gave me such grief about having set that article out about this being the gay revolution, this is what it happened and he gave me such grief about it and said you shouldn't have done that, this is awful, I'm a gay business man, I don't like this stuff going on, and I said to him someday you got to be on the other side of this and of course now he is, now he's out there, I was right there, I was in the middle of all of it, well you know you were a baby but you were against it. What did you think of the other voice pieces that came out when you did? Oh well, we loved them, the village voice articles, when they came out a lot of people reminded them because they did have kind of like put down phrases like squishy and

queens and stuff like that but I was glad they came out, you know some publicity is better than no publicity and at least the word was getting out, the New York Times, the New York Post and the other news, they weren't talking about it, the village voice talked about it and you may not like what they said and it may have been controversial but damn it, they talked about it and they publicized it and as I said there's no such thing as bad publicity, you know, as long as they spell your name right it's good publicity. Even with a couple of stories, because then you can feel outraged, you know, that you should, the advantage of being able to sit there and feel morally superior. Do you think now that we have the luxury of using Stonewall as an example back in time and history that that event is comparable to other events in history? Oh sure. You know, Stonewall is to gay people what, you know, many success, you know, it's what I can't think of an analogy, give me an analogy.

David, give me an analogy. What are the best deals? Oh yeah. Okay, the best deal is wonderful. Sorry. You know, in gay history, you know, Stonewall was the strumming of the best deal, it was Rosa Parks that the lunch counter, it's the defining principle, the defining moment in gay history. Yes, when, for the first time, gay people said, ah, no more, you've gone far enough, we're stopping now. Just if you want to use that line, it's Rosa Parks in the bus. Oh, the bus, oh, I'm sorry, okay, how nice to have an editor. I'm sorry, this is live too. No, all right. Okay. So anyway, gay history, what happened to Stonewall was the strumming of the best deal. It was Rosa Parks on the bus. It was the defining moment, the moment that things happened. And for the first time, everybody said, you know, this is, we're not taking any more. From now on, this is the way it's going to be, we're not going to take your crap any

longer. Is it important for that, yeah, do you need to predict, should this be a high school textbook something, or does it rate along the board? Well, this should be a high school textbook, so this should be well known as everybody should know about Stonewall, just as everybody knows about, you know, the American Revolution or the strumming of the best deal, you know, it's, it's when the world changed. It's the moment that the world changed, you know, in one way. I mean, there are many moments where the world changes, but this is the way the world changed for gay people. Yeah, it's part of the American history, it's in the books, and I was there, and I saw it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know.