American Experience; Stonewall Uprising; Interview with Doric Wilson, 1 of 2

I'm supposed to say Stonewall. That's right. What's that? What's that? Yes. I think one thing that the Spong can do is really educate people who know nothing about it. No, nothing, but it can't imagine being gay in the 60s because it seems like a few years ago and what was so different to you. What was different about going on gay? First of all, when I was very young, one of the terms for gay people was twilight people, meaning that we never came out until twilight totally got dark. Gay bars were always on side streets out of the way and neighborhoods that nobody would go into. The windows were always cloaked. On the east coast, they used to be what was called the bird's circuit. They all had names like the red canary, the peacock, what have you, or kind of a code to let

you know. The people in them were tended to be very extravagant, very feminine, what are called queens now. Most gays that could pass the straight were passing the straight. They were married. Their wives didn't know it was one of the ugliest things of pre-liberation, was the number of women who were badly treated inadvertently by a guy who was trying to hide his gain as my marrying. It's a long list of people. I used to, for years, I wouldn't go out with a guy if he was married because I thought it was so ugly when he was doing. But on the other hand, there was not much choices. There were jobs where if you were not married, you would not go forward on the job. So gays came to big cities. They were famous for getting jobs like the term was ribbon clerks.

They would work in apartment stores as clerks. They would have that kind of, you know, and of course, headwaters and waiters and restaurants. Jobs that the fact that they were singled and not, you know, but the real world, the business world, and what have you, it was very hard to get a job if you were not married. How about your conduct in the streets, where there's a whole lot of things in your case? Yeah, I mean, were you free? Were you in the principal, the hand of a boyhand? No, there was no, even, to be honest, even at home, with the lights off in your room, you had to tend to see not to be a very affectionate, it tended to go straight to the sex and, you know. And like all times, going clear back to the 1700s, there were people that were very open and fought this. Women, particularly in the 18th century, what were called Boston Marriages, of course, women could be a lot more affectionate to each other in public and nobody would pay

any attention to it. But for general and particularly in America, you have to always remember the 60s followed the McCarthy era, and when something people don't remember much about the McCarthy era, there was a huge, huge streak of homophobia in the center of the whole McCarthy thing. There was a belief that homosexuals were traitors by nature. Chamberlain was, in fact, homosexual, the guy that worked for the right of the work for a time magazine, and that was, it was whispered, you had Walter Winchell outing people, all, it was synonymous for Communists or anti-American. So it added a whole, another realm to it. The West Coast was a little easier than the East Coast. Seattle, San Francisco worked much more friendly and therefore had much larger and healthier gay populations than New York did at the time.

New York was fine if you were living in the village. That's a question I have about what, even before you did the village, what does it mean how do you think McCarthy is effective in the tone and how to make you feel? Well, it didn't affect me that much because I was, I like was in maybe 10 or 11 when it was going on. But it did because it tied homosexual with, it gave good reason for the police to come down on establishments. In fact, I think I'm not sure of this, but I have a feeling some of the early gay organizations were a response to the politics of anti-homosexuality more than the social phenomenon of anti-homosexuality. I don't know because I'm, I'm, I don't, having gotten into it that far. But it just, it made everybody paranoid to begin with. The end of the, the end of the Eisenhower era, people were terribly paranoid. We had, you know, we've got to remember that when Kennedy was first elected, people believed

that the Russians were about to put nuclear weapons off our coast. I never, oddly enough, never got to me, I never, never affected that at all, sorry. What did the Cold War, what is it, what the hell, how could they pin that, or, so say, that, what the hell? You have to ask them. No, but what do you think the idea was to equate gayness with communism? I have no idea, I have no idea, but it, but in fact, it happened. It was one of the, it was, you were always a pinko-homo, whatever. It, I'm not even terribly sure that when they used those terms, they even in their minds really knew what they were saying, or what the, what they were saying, what it meant. But that was there. And certainly, what, how people like, you know, confirmed people's prejudice as a, yeah. But the gay world also was, you had certain areas where I would imagine gay, gay hairdressers and gay costume designers were more or less as fine-point than as they are now, certainly

in Hollywood they were, and certainly in the big cities they were. Did you have role models in the 50s and 60s or 60s in terms of, like, gay people in public? No, I didn't have role models, but I'm, I mean, I'm rather unique. I came out in a small wheat ranch town in the Eastern Washington state, and I started having sex by the time I was 15. And when I found out what it was that I was doing was supposed to be bad, I thought, well, that's your problem, it's not mine. I've never, but anybody that knew me well knew I was not heterosexual. I didn't have the terms for it. I was practicing it a lot longer than I, before I ever heard the word gay, or homosexual or queer. When did you, what terms were there? There weren't so many terms. It was just that I did, I snuck out and did things. Well, I kind of knew that you weren't supposed to rhyme up and down the street yelling about

it. But the person I did it with and I just kept our mouth shut, or, wow, figuratively speaking and do not put that on this real. Of course, I had no idea what you're talking about. And then, okay, so what, for somebody who's, you know, grown up in a small town, a rural town, what did the village stand for you? What was attractive about the village? Oh, it wasn't the village, in fact. I got involved with theater, and I got involved with theater locally. The three towns together were called the Tri-Cities. And one of them was the dormitory for the Hanford Atomic Energy Works. And they had, so there was mainly physicists and the people that ran Hanford. So it was very high educational. They had an almost professional amateur theater and an orchestra, legitimate classical orchestra and a musical theater company.

So I started doing, I was supposed to be an artist initially, that was what I was supposed to be. So I got involved with them as a painter, set painter and designer, and stage manager. But I also, I'm sorry, I blanked, but also because I was six foot and a half, six foot and a half inch. In a time when there weren't a lot of young men available for them for actors, I immediately went on stage. And I did a lot of acting in my early years. I was a rotten actor. I did play opposite, lover, opposite, Marianne from Gilligan's Island. She, the Don Wells, was opposite me in Tartouf, by Mollierre, as lovers. When did you get to, when did you come here? My thing, University of Washington, my first semester I got involved with an actual gay action and kind of got thrown out. And so I came to New York, and then when I came to New York, I had come to New York once

on a, I'd won a speaking contest that took me to DC and I came up to New York. So I knew about the gay bars. I was already going to gay bars. When I would go to Seattle, I'd go to the gay bars, weren't I? There weren't any in my hometown. So I would, I was very elegant, I would dress up with a suit and tie. And I always passed, even when I was like 16, 17, I always passed for 2021. I always passed, Washington was an ID state, and a state liquor license thing. And then I never got a card in it, ever. When you came here and what was the bar scene like, the gay bar? Well, I avoided it because it was really rather nasty, it was queens. They were, unless you wore a pinkie ring and had makeup and not makeup like drag. Drag was terribly illegal. So what are called transvestites now, warm, male clothes, but female versions of them,

like a suit that made out of chiffon. Sorry. Did you, did you, did you, were you wearing their laws that they had to follow in the year? Yeah, we knew about the law. You did, I don't think any of us really knew the different laws, different states. And they were very varied. I don't know what the laws were in New York State at that time, but in a lot of the states, it was punishable by death. Nobody had done it in years, but those laws were still on the books. I can't remind, I don't remember which ones. I'm not sure that New York State might not have been one of them, but I don't remember. Being a homosexual act, particularly a pedistry, anal intercourse, it was punishable by some states. I'm not sure whether New York was or wasn't, depending on the act. It's very funny. American laws come, the laws are very simple. Gorbidol was my mentor many years ago.

I found that the origin in Anglo-Saxon law, against homosexuality, goes back to the emperor Justinian. His sous-sayers told him that pedistry caused earthquakes, and therefore he wrote the first known law against it. It goes, ends up in British common law, an early Victorian era, they decided to redo their laws. Our laws are based on them. So they brought Queen Victoria, the new statues, included men and women. Victoria did not believe women could do it, and she cut off the women out of the law. That became the U.S. law. That's the origin. So, Catapult, towards the, you know, forwards to the 1960s, where you run it again or you go around the different, where did you hang it, where you from? Well I, parties, private parties, you cruise the park, you cruise the balconies, the 42nd Street movies were much nicer than they were at the end of their era.

The upper balconies or movie houses were always easy cruising. There was a lot of toilet cruising. But if you, if you could pass this straight, you probably didn't go into the gay bars. Well the trucks are later, the trucks are after Stonewall. As far as I know, I don't think they were, I lived down in the village, a pre-stone wall, and I don't remember that the trucks were active. No. Yeah. Okay. I don't know how early. I don't remember them around. It's like the late 60s. Yeah, but we're talking about early 60s, but that's still. Well, I can be into the 60s, but how about, let's go over the, let's go over the, okay. Well then, through the 60s, there was a whole series of, particularly under Wagner, of every other year, all the bars would be closed, and then they would reopen again, and then they'd be closed, and then they'd be reopened again. Which started, oddly enough, was part of the, it started the, this has got to stop attitude

which ultimately means to Stonewall. Do you remember the ever encountering the bar in the shadowing area? Oh, yeah. Always. Well, it never bothered me because I didn't care whether they took my ID. What they would do is they would close the bar, the bartender and the manager would be arrested. The people in the bar would be told to go away. They used to be signals. The light would go on behind the bar. I thought was the plane closed, the bar, the bar, the liquor license in the window would be moved to one side of the other to warn people there's a raid on tonight. There were all sorts of little things. When my first play was done, it was a huge hit off of Broadway, Richard Bar moved it to the Chari Lane Theater for a special series, and the night before it opened, I came in to see a dress rehearsal, and what had been a wonderful play at the Capuchino was

horrendous. Richard had taken over directing it. He had turned a comedy into a dirge in what, how many rehearsals, and I knew it was going to be a disaster. So Chari Lane Theater, next door to it was the gay bar, the Chari Lane Bar. I went into the bar, I said, this guy came up and wanted to buy me a drink. I said, no, no, no, my whole career is over. I've just seen, I've just come from rehearsal over play, it's the end of my life, I don't have a career anymore. I'll come on, let me, I said, no, and I walked out, went over to the Delis bar, which was across from the theater delis, which was also a gay bar, and it was hard that he came in again to offer to buy me a drink, no, no, no, so I went to the third bar, he came in and I finally said, look, just to get rid of you, you can buy me a drink, but I'm not going to talk to you. I have a play opening, it's going to be a disaster, we have a reality, you'll leave me buying you a drink, and I said, yes, you said you're under arrest.

All you had to do was accept a drink from a plane closed con. So Richard Bar, somebody in the bar knew who I was and the Richard was doing in my play. Contacted Richard. Richard came down to the tombs, got me out the next morning so I could go, and I think that's when I became, I became really politicized. I had already been politicized in Seattle, but I was so angry. Do you remember how you were treated when you were in prison? I was so stunned by it all, I was actually, I spent the first night in the precinct in the village, so I went to the tombs the next morning for my arrangement, and they didn't tell anybody in the cell what I was in there for, and since I didn't particularly look like anything, you know, but I also was so stunned. Or I grew up, my people were pioneer founders of nobody touched me, you know what I mean? I had that arrogance of youth where, particularly in those days, things like this didn't happen

to me, you know, especially when I didn't do anything. What was the crime? Soliciting. What was the crime? The charge was Soliciting. We went through a court off and on with the postponements on having you for about three. Actually, by the time it became crime, they had somebody else, they had arrested, they claimed we were together. But, Soliciting, were you, were you, were you, were you, were you, were you, were you, No, accepting a drink was Soliciting. It's a lot over from right after prohibition, to keep prostitutes from working bars, accepting a drink in a bar was Soliciting. How did you feel about policeman in general in the wait system? Well, exactly like anybody that was left dead. My voice won't be in the soap cops. Tell me about your feelings. I didn't, except for this, I had very little dealings with cops. We did use one and we had a, the cafeteria kept getting busted in the early days because you weren't allowed to do plays in coffee houses.

And my second play, I wrote a cop coming in from the outside, closing the production. And my leading lady had a, there was strippers on Forest Street that would come over to the Chino. They destroyed poor Rick when he came through the door as a cop in my play, because they thought he was actually raiding. Were you aware of what, okay, in trapments, were you aware of the cops for what could be? Oh, yes, yes. But I, but I, since I wasn't doing anything, I didn't consider it in trapments. My focus that day was not on who was talking to me, but my focus that day was on my life is over. And in general, life in the village, I mean, as a gay person, it was pretty safe. You were too careful of it. You, I don't know that I had to be that careful because I, I probably should have been more careful than I was. I've tended all my life to just stumble through and do it. You know, I've stumbled into and done more things that I, that had, I known, had, I had the least intelligence I wouldn't have gotten near.

Well, what, what politicized did you think, did you see other people get screwed? Well, no. Yes. I think from the very beginning, even when I was a kid in school, I was very aware of segregation and the McCarthy are oddly enough politicized me to the left. And so I've always been, my play has always had a touch of touch of politics in them. You know. Speaking of politics, okay, right, say that. I'm not terribly sure because I literally sailed past it. But what they did do, you couldn't loiter, but, but come and go. It depended on, it was through the 60s, you'd have a year or two with nothing really, maybe in the village. I didn't hang around the other parts of the city where it was a lot worse. Just because it was a lot worse, I didn't hang around there. I tended to go to bars that I knew would probably would not get rated.

I did most of my cruising in parties or up in the movie houses, particularly the movie houses were popular with me, and you never got much trouble. Sometimes the security guards would try to block me on you. But then when they ever came anywhere near me, I would make them, sorry, they had. But you could, there was one period, a very heavy period, where Gunn and Shabin was one of the main street cruising areas, and they would, the way you used to cruise is you would walk around and around and around the block, pretending to shop, winter shop. And after like to make sure, and the person will follow you and what have you, and after you've done it eight or nine, and I'm exaggerating, but after you've done it a number of times, you might get up the nerve to say, do you have the time or do you have a light for a cigarette, and that would initiate the contact.

That was, you know, I didn't do, I tended to be a little bit more straightforward than that. There were funny, there were funny clues that you had in the sixties. When you went home with something, you still weren't sure they were gay always. You're quickly looking at the record collection, if they had a copy of Ken D, you know you were home safe, because only Gays had copies of Ken D, that was the, you know. And if they weren't gay? Well, actually, you wouldn't have been there, you know, you're thinking, the reality isn't straight man doesn't invite you back to lose apartment. But you didn't think that way, do you know what I mean? You're doing now, I'm looking back, it was obvious, but we want your 20. What did the bars mean to you? Well, the bars until after Stonewall didn't mean anything to me because I was very uncomfortable in them. I wasn't Queenie enough to be in them. I would be put down for not being Queenie.

I used occasionally, when I first came to New York on A3, it was a very famous gay bar called Mary's, and I would go in there every now and then. But I was never popular there because I wasn't bad a feminine, you know. So the bar scene didn't mean anything to me to really post Stonewall, which I was central to it for the next decade, for the 70s. Well, then was there, what happened the night Friday, June 27th? Okay, by then I was hanging in leather bars which almost never were rated bars for the S&Ms or leather scene. And I was on my way down to the friend, to a bar down at Hudson Street, quite a ways down called the Harbor Bar. And we saw there was this big crowd on Christopher Street, and it was just starting. They were just starting to have the people coming out. There was a crowd across the sidewalk, but it wasn't the mob it later became. And as we were walking by this Queen, and when I say Queen, I don't mean drying queens

like they look now. He had makeup on, he was a feminine, and lots of chiffon, but he was not technically dressed as a woman. As we walked by, he said to me, it might have been Marsha Johnson, I don't know. So he said to me, he was a black guy, you're so much, why aren't you here with us? And we laughed because we didn't know what was going on. And we got all the way to Sheridan Square. And I turned to my friend and I said, you know I'm going to go back and see what's going on. And he said, I'll see you at the bar. He went on, and I went back, and I sent, so there I was there, more or less from the very beginning. The first night. And I mainly watched, there wasn't really too much to participate in. I did throw near the end when they were so much harder, the typical case trials were going on more or less at the same time, and a few weeks before the New York Times had published

a list of the payoffs that the gay bars were giving to the cops. And so we were all laughing at which of our bar, which bar we went to paid off the most. And so you were totally aware of the payoffs from that? Oh yes. Yeah, but that's, but I lived in the village, you see. I don't know that somebody, somebody that lived in the east side paid that much attention. I knew bartenders. You know, somehow when you're in the village on the inside, you know. But I know you'd know bar people, and they would tell you, you know the bartender and what have you. It would come up in conversation. But anyway, one of the first things happened is they started chanting at the cops, who take the payoffs, you take the payoffs, and they started throwing coins. Now, from this point on, the order of events I am not reliable on, I just know what happened

that I saw. I've been around this for so long that I'm convinced I saw things that I, in fact, know I did not see. But I heard them told so often, they'd become my memories. They weren't. I know I didn't. There was a famous kick line. And I did see it years later, or not years later, but months later, but I did not see it the night of Stonewall or the other two, nine, two or three nights. But in my mind, I did. So it's, it gets tricky now. It just, they were, they threw matches, almost as a joke. I think they upended them, VW, although somebody told me they didn't, I'm sure they did, to pour gas out on the front. When they were throwing matches, and somebody said, well, you need gasoline to start a fire and some queens ended a VW, as I recall, opened the gas tank and tried to splash some gas. The voice, I think, or some newspaper person made a big thing about the damage we did

to the car. And about a month later, the woman who lived in Sheridan Square, whose car it was, fired back with. There was no damage from my car. And what is more, three days later, there was a knock at my door, and these very, very strange-looking young men, with lots of makeup on handed me a paper bag with about $300 and nickels, dimes, and quarters to take care of any damage. And it was the drag queens that collected money, in case it was damage to her car. Do you remember the feeling of the, and you said you observed, what did you do? Well, you can also remember, we're right in the middle of the, I'm very involved with the anti-war movement already, and I've actually been involved in the, when the women's right movement, and the, and definitely in the civil rights movement. So I'm already an activist. So it was so bound to come, it didn't surprise me. It surprised me maybe how it started. It didn't really gel, I don't think, until the next raid, which was the snake pit raid. But that's from my point of view, I'm, other people will have other points of view on

that. I was also very busy in the theater at the time, so I was preoccupied with other places. What was the, how do you think these other movements going on, including the anti-war movement? How did that affect you? Well, the people that helped start the gay lib movement, we were all veterans of the other movements. And in fact, the very first gay organization that started after Stonewall, which was the gay liberation front, was not there particularly to fight for gay causes, but to have a gay presence in the more, in the radical demonstrations, like the Panthers and what have you, to show that Gays are here also, which is why GAA, the second organization, spun off and was only to deal with gay and lesbian issues. Because the rest of us were doing that other stuff anyway, in other organizations. Okay, so imagine you're in the 60s and you're, what kind of, were you in other riots or the demonstration?

I was in demonstrations, I wasn't in a riot, and it's very weird. I'm always not quite sure that Stonewall was actually a riot. I don't know what to describe it was, it certainly was active, and there was, I guess, a certain amount of violent incidents in it. But to me, a riot is what happened up in Harlem, where people are running in the streets and things are burning, and, you know, and that didn't happen as far as I know at Stonewall, or at least I never saw it. I have never known what to actually call it, how to have that echo at the Stonewall riots. It certainly was the beginning of something, even if they hadn't not been to Stonewall, it would have burst anyway. Anything could have started it off. It was ready for it, we had all been educated in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. In fact, in the beginning, that was one of the reasons that a lot of mainstream homosexuals who are not that politically to the left stayed away from the movement, not the only reason

because they were also heavily closeted, and that's the main reason they stayed away. But they all stayed away from political reasons, also stayed away from political reasons. Were you involved in the Nazis? No, I went to one or two meetings and they were so pathetic, it was sort of like us, we may be sick, but we're nice people, you know, kind of, you know, we're not criminals, we're just ill, or I don't know, it was, it just was very distasteful. I was first a member of GLF and then went to GAA, the minute GAA form because I wanted to concentrate on gay causes. Did you know that the Nazis, did you ever go to the Filet Marches, the Filet of the Army? No, I knew about them, but- Can you tell me what we're talking about, sorry, because my door- Oh. What did you know about them? There were some, I'm sorry, I had to frame it. There were some marches down in Philadelphia, which I didn't know that much about at the time.

I probably wouldn't have gone down because I was too poor to afford to go down. I think, I did know that there were some also demonstrations in Washington, D.C. They were very small, they were, they were half a dozen to a dozen people marching with placards. What was it, can you talk a little bit about the Madison and why do you- I don't, I can't talk about the Madison, like, I'm sorry, I can't talk about the Madison because I was only there for one or two meetings and I think, both times, I left before the meeting was over, it just had nothing to do with me. It was very middle class, it was very, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know how to describe it. It just had nothing to do, I don't know, my mind can't come to the upper of the right word. You're relevant? Thank you, thank you, that is, I'm not saying what to me was irrelevant, it was what they were talking about, they were talking about religion, I'm not Christian, I'm not, I'm atheist. They were talking about psychiatry, I've never particularly believed in psychiatry.

So what they were into, were totally relevant to my life, they, the managing meant nothing to me. Did you feel as a, what, that was with Dick here.